Monthly Archives: December 2005

Buy this!, Cool things

Good Gifts

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Now here’s a website that lives up to its name:

Good Gifts

Perhaps you won’t personally benefit from any of the things on there, but it’s a compilation of some very nice things to buy, ranging from decommisioned tanks that get turned into farm tools (£1000) to bikes to help midwives travel more easily in developing countries (£35). Or you can buy an elderly person a pair of slippers (£15) which might be a nice idea if you’ve lost someone this year and fancy doing something in their memory.

I think my personal favourite so far is paying £750 to get a book translated into braille:

The plot so far: the children’s section at the National Library for the Blind is under pressure. The huge demand from blind and partially sighted children and from blind and partially sighted adults to read to children outstrips supply. Please help: £25 buys a Braille book, £100 buys a book with giant print. And £725 actually provides transcription and master copying of a new title. And the name of the Good Giver (or receiver) is entered on the flyleaf. What a nice place to be.

How’s that for spreading Christmas cheer?

Cool things, Stuff

The JCB song

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You might have seen this already, you might not, but it’s truly lovely, and they want to get to number one in the UK charts this Christmas. Good luck to ’em:

The JCB song

The video is a great piece of animation and the song is adorable. Do you get the impression that I like this?

World events

ID cards video

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The government has made a little video to explain about why ID cards are the way ‘to answer why identity cards are necessary and how the scheme will work’.

Download available here.

The amusing thing is that it doesn’t actually answer why ID cards are necessary. Surely a little bit more data in a passport would do exactly the same thing? We’ll end up with biometric data in those anyway, so why do we need a massively expensive new scheme that actually produces extremely little?

Stuff

Goth poems

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Goth poetry is easy: all you need is rhyming couplets and the words ‘dark’, ‘soul’, ‘night’, and ‘black’. Past that you get bonus points for the inclusion of ‘abyss’ and any classical mythology reference you can think of. Bear in mind that the classical reference doesn’t actually have to make sense, only to fit in the rhyming scheme. Let’s try this:

Oh my soul,
Lost in a hole,
Of darkness and melancholy,
Like the dress on a depressed dolly,
Raging in the abyss,
My anger I miss,
Like Eve’s first kiss,
That is my heart’s wish.

Hurrah for Goth poems!

PhD

Organising your ideas when writing

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I had a meeting with my tutor yesterday to discuss the first draft of my conclusion chapter of my thesis, and he liked it! This is a big thing for me because it’s the first time that I have ever submitted a first-draft of a chapter and he’s come back saying it’s fine.

Writing a PhD thesis is about many things. You have to be saying something new about your material, but that was never the problem for me. I tend to come out with a torrent of ideas that put new spins on things, the issue is organising them into a form that other people can follow. Usually this process of organisation takes several drafts before it finally coheres into something that is well-structured. For me, writing a thesis is about learning how to structure your ideas.

This time, when writing my chapter I went back to an old method I used back when I was doing my degree. I wrote my ideas out in my usual fashion, moving between topics in a way that felt natural to me, until I had reached a little below my target word count for the chapter (ten thousand words in this case). I printed it out, sat down with a pencil, and read through the whole thing, numbering the paragraphs and writing a few-word summary of what each paragraph was about. I then turned this information into a list of topics.

By looking at the summary of each paragraph it became far easier to see what overall points and patterns I was making in my writing. I then reorganised the paragraph-summary list until it was neatly grouped by subject. I then cut-and-pasted the paragraphs into their new order using the numbers that I had previously written on the hard copy. All that was then left to do was to ensure that they followed together by adding linking sentences and occasionally editing references to previously earlier points that were then made later in the chapter. The result of this process is a long piece of writing that has been organised quite quickly and efficiently into sub-headings that build into a coherent whole.

Sometimes it’s hard to get a grip on all of your ideas, but any task can be achieved if you just break it down into smaller pieces.