Graeme's Personal Home Page
http://www.makepovertyhistory.org
Information
This is my personal homepage. All of the opinions stated herein and purely my own and do not have anything whatsoever to do with anyone else mentioned on this page. This web page was coded with EMACS.
My Links
One of the things I love in life is recording and mixing music.
Click
here
to see a photo of yours truly at the mixing desk. The photo was taken by
Simone Welsh, one of Scotland's greatest violin players, during a recording
session... I
run a small project studio where I do recordings of musicians, edit and mix
audio, remixes, digital video work and I design covers and flyers. If
anyone is interested in this, email
Click
Here to see photographs from some
of my musical projects. Some of them are from recording projects I've
worked on, some are from the band I am in (called "Mead") and some are
just drunken karaoke nights. Click
Here to see some of the pioneers
of Sound Recording. This
is a picture of myself and Gordo
(another engineer / guitarist) taken during the recording sessions for a CD
accompanied Drum Tutorial Book. We are in the Control Room at the Yamaha
02R 96 in Ayr College Studio. This is a great piece of machinery. As
well as the routing potential of a 24 Channel Digital Desk, it also incorporates
Compressors, Gates, Limiters and EQ on each channel. These can be accessed
through a number of digital menus, making this an incredibly versatile piece of
kit with a very concise footprint. Used in conjunction with Pro Tools on a
Mac G5, this was a very powerful studio setup. One thing that you do have
to watch with this desk is that the Talkback has two settings, One is a Push To
Talk setting, where you have to hold down the Talkback switch to speak, and the
other is VOX setting that can be toggled on and off. When the desk was
first installed, this dichotomy led to some potentially explosive situations
when engineers left the Talkback toggled on in the VOX setting and then gave an
impromptu critique of the musician in the recording booth!!! Southbeach I
have recently mastered three demo tracks for a Glasgow band called
Southbeach. They are a four piece band who play a pretty unique blend of
pop and Scottish folk music. Recently they have played some large outdoor
festivals in Scotland, including a headlining slot at the Kirkmichael guitar
festival, the Special Olympics opening ceremony in Celtic Park, Glasgow and an
outdoor festival in Falkirk. Their guitarist, Alan Frew, and violin /
vocalist, Simone Welsh, are two of the most talented and astute musicians I have
ever had the honour to have worked with. Diane (vocals) is the sister of
Jill from Speedway, and is also a fantastic singer and very beautiful.
Giana (vocals / guitar) is a great creative force with a prodigious song writing
talent. Unfortunately, the band has now split up. The Popping Cherries Project
Throughout 2006 I have been working with singer and songwriter Gwen Smith in
composing and producing music for a heavy rock album. This has been a return to
form for me after a project I walked away from at the end of 2005 following the emergence insurmountable creative differences.
As far as I'm aware that project is still in developement hell at the moment, and for six months I didn't so
much as switch on a mixing desk because I felt I needed a well earned break. The
project I am working on with Gwen has been very exciting for me in exploring very harsh and raw production, very dramatic music and the
use of way out spot-foley effects in the recordings. Our my space site can be accessed here. WestCoast MMA Project Working with my brother and Mixed Martial Arts instructor Andy Wilson, in January 2006 we created a video of mixed martial arts footage shot at Bannatyne's gymnasium in Ayr. This was then edited and spliced together with a soundtrack and crunched down to a reasonable size for streaming from the web. This project was a lot of fun to work on and anyone interested in mixed martial arts should check out The WestCoast MMA Website for more information. This was a great project to work on. One for the books. Chris Palazzi Working with musician and song writer Chris Palazzi, we had a brainwave involving the incorporation of a recording made on location at Saturn's Magnetosphere by the Cassini probe into a mix on one of his songs. I wrote to NASA to check this could be used without copyright restriction, and as far as I know, this is the first time in the history of recorded music that a recording made on location at another planetary system has been used in a recorded song. That project was a blast for both of us, something we are both very proud of, and is particularly close to my heart as it combines music and space exploration, which are two of the great passsions in my life. Mr Mark Another of my favourite projects was recording a four track demo for one of the greatest songwriters I've ever heard, singer, writer, musician Mark Rafferty (Nephew of Gerry Rafferty) in the Summer of 2005. We created a very unique sound on this demo, experimenting with an old analogue synth, textured layers of Spector panned vocal harmonies, a chorus of finger snaps recorded around a blumlein pair, textured layers of blues harp and great lyrics. These were recorded for a publishing deal Mark had secured for his work. Computers Space
Exploration Click
Here to see a collage of The
Skylab Space Station. The Skylab living area was spacious even compared to
modern Space Stations with the living area being 14.7 meters long and 6.7 meters
in diameter, making it somewhat larger than an up and down stairs two bedroom
house. It was built out of a Saturn IV B booster that was left over from
the Lunar Missions that was fitted and launched into orbit on a Saturn V
rocket. The Skylab missions really were science fiction becoming
reality. They proved that men could live and work (and by the looks of
things have a lot of fun) in micro gravity environments without suffering any
long term ill-effects. Click
Here to see surface pictures taken
by probes on Mars, Venus and Titan. Click
Here to see some pictures from the Apollo Missions to the Moon.
There were six manned landings made on the moon. The first manned landing
was Apollo 11, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the sea of
Tranquility in July 1969 while Michael Collins monitored in the Command
Module. Armstrong had to take manual control as the computer guidance
system was taking the "Eagle" straight towards a the rocky, football
field sized West Crater. Armstrong had to take the Eagle over several hundred
yards of rocky terrain and landed the Lunar Module near the Little West Crater
with only seconds of fuel left. There were another six missions after this
where the boundaries of exploration were pushed forward, with each mission
expanding on the one before. On
Apollo 12, Charles "Pete" Conrad and Alan Bean landed the
"Intrepid" 200 yards away from the Surveyor 3 probe on the Ocean of
Storms, proving that precision landings were possible. The Apollo 14 to
the Fra Mauro Highlands proved
that the Astronauts could cover long distances on foot, and showed that they
could do long EVA's (that is Extra Vehicular Activities) further afield from the
LEM. Al Shepherd also became the first man to play golf on the moon.
By Apollo 15, Dave Scott and Jim Irwin had a motorized vehicle, the Lunar Rover
available to them, which let them cover far more ground on their mission to Rima
Hadley than in previous
missions. By Apollo 16 and 17, to the Descartes Highlands and the Tauras
Littrow Valley, the Equipment used for Lunar Exploration
had been evaluated pretty thoroughly, allowing the last two missions to be
dedicated to scientific research, mainly in geology. The moon has a crust
which has been relatively undisturbed for the last 3 billion years, allowing
scientists to look back in time to near the beginning of the solar system, and
the last two missions were focused on visiting areas with material that had not
yet been examined. Apollo
13 never made it to the moon due to an explosion in a cryogenic oxygen
tank. This left the Command Module, Odyssey, so power stricken that
the astronauts, Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise could not even gimbal
the SPS engine to do an about face and come straight home to earth.
Fortunately, as a failsafe procedure, the Spacecraft was on a "free
return" orbital trajectory so that left to it's own devices it would be
slung around by the Moons gravitational field and return to Earth. The
Astronauts were forced to use the Lunar Module, Aquarius, as a lifeboat for the
return journey, with Jack Swigert and Fred Haise building machines developed at
mission control to adapt the square carbon dioxide scrubbers of the Command
Module to the round fittings for the scrubbers in the LEM. The LEM Descent
stage was ignited to pick up the appropriate Delta V for the return journey, and
the LEM was used to perform the Corridor Control Burn, which put the ship on the
correct heading for Re-entry Interface with the Earth's
atmosphere. Politics Many
politicians in the modern age seem to have lost sight of the fact that they are
in a very privileged position that demands humility, intellect and
discipline. They are supposed to serve and represent the interests of the
people who have elected them, not to use every which method of deceit, deception
and double standards they can think of to disregard democracy, the law and fair
play so they can feather their own nests at the public's expense. Please
check out some of the links below... New
Labour Spinning to A New Low Sign
Liberties
Petition against the mandatory ID
card scheme being sponsored by the British Government. The "reasons
why these cards are essential" has changed from tackling terrorism to
controlling immigration, to stopping identity theft and fighting misuse of
public services. In short, Tony Blair and his New Tory Party are up to
their old tricks again. Click
Here to sign a petition calling
for the resignation of Tony Blair over his support for George Bush's illegal and
immoral invasion of Iraq, and for deliberately misleading the British Public in
making the case for war. While we must now support our troops over there
and hope for the hostilities to be brought to as swift and painless a conclusion
as possible, that does not mean supporting the reasons for being there in the
first place. First,
we were told that it was a matter of enforcing UN resolutions, until the UN
refused to play ball. Then it was about Weapons of Mass Destruction (or
when we use them Peace Keeping Devices), until none turned up. Then it was
about freeing people from a dictator, whilst we prop up many another tyrannical
regime that we happen to be allied with. For Example, Saudi Arabia springs
to mind, another oil rich nation. Sweatshop
Labour Check
out This
Site for a list of companies that
use Sweatshop Labour in the Far East and a number of links to organizations
campaigning against them. Given the way the textile industry operates it
is actually harder to find a multinational that does not use sweatshop labour,
however, we can but try. New Labour,
New Lies Click
Here to see the Secret Downing
Street Memo published in the Sunday Times. This document proves that Bush
and Blair had already decided to invade Iraq before Hans Blix and
his team of United Nations weapons inspectors had completed their search for
Weapons Of Mass Destruction (or when Western powers use them Peace Keeping
Devices) in Iraq. Hyperlinks The Johnson Space Center Digital Image Collection Contains
Thousands of NASA press release photographs from the beginning of Space Flight
to the present day. Eagle
Lander 3d Lunar Module Simulator This Really
is just like the real thing. It has been tested by astronaut Gene Cernan
who said anyone who can fly this simulator could fly the real lem. The
reproductions of the Landing sites are graphically stunning. Alan Bean was
the only professional artist ever to visit another Planet. Check out His
Stunning Paintings. Richard Stallman
and Starhawk are two of my political heroes. Check out their sites. darksites
- Loads of Goth Sites phrack
- A Hacker / Anarchist site Julie Christie and Brian Eno Socialist Worker 1969, 24 September 2005 Council of churches condemns U.S.
It criticizes policies on war, environment, poverty, and asks for forgiveness of the world THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Who wants the Abolition of Parliament Bill?
David Howarth He Wishes For
Cloths of Heaven
By W B Yeats RANGER, Ga. - Legendary test pilot Scott Crossfield, the first man to fly at twice the speed of sound, was found dead Thursday in the wreckage of a single-engine plane in the mountains of northern Georgia, authorities said.
Check out some of my work that has been uploaded to Song Planet
And more music at MySpace My Space
Check Out Gwen and my Popping Cherries project here.
Sound
Recordings & Music
Another
of my great loves in life are computers. I operate in my spare time as a
system administrator. My first computer was a Commodore Vic 20, on which I
learned to program in basic. I then had a Commodore Plus 4, a Commodore 64
and a BBC Micro. After this, I went on to using 16 Bit computers, with the
Purchase of an Amiga 500. This taught me how to use DOS and write
Scripts. From there I had an Amiga 1200, and then moved over to PC's and
learned HTML and how to adapt a PC for use in a Sound And Recording and Video
Editing Studio. Click
Here to see a picture of Colossus, the
World's first Digital Computer. This was used to break the German Enigma
Codes during World War II. It was the Brainchild of Alan Turing and Thomas
Flowers.
Another
thing I wanted to dedicate a part of my page to is Space Exploration, a
subject that has captured my imagination from a very young age. I
always felt that the Lunar Landings and the Skylab Experiments were NASA's
finest hour, the most aggressive period of Space Exploration so far. That
said, the automated Probes sent to the outer planets have sent back some
particularly stunning data and photographs of some of the outer planets and
their moons.
"You assist an evil system most effectively by
obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance.
Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil
system with his or her whole soul."
Socialist Worker
News & Reports
Stop the War
Actress Julie Christie and musician Brian Eno last week handed in a letter, signed by almost 100 celebrities, academics, musicians, MPs and activists to 10 Downing Street calling for British troops to be brought home from Iraq by the end of the year.
Personally addressed to Tony Blair, the letter said the war had been an "unmitigated disaster".
It added, The United Nations mandate for the occupation of Iraq expires this December.
We call on you to initiate the first steps to end this carnage by announcing that British troops will be brought home by the end of this year.
Among those signing the letter were poet Benjamin Zephaniah, professor Richard Dawkins, guitarist John Williams, actor/director Mark Rylance, singer Billy Bragg, trade union leader Tony Woodley and director Ken Loach.
Brian Eno said, Personally, Im saying I do not want to be associated with a bunch of rednecks with big guns and small minds.
Link To Article
PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil
A coalition of American churches sharply denounced the U.S.-led war in Iraq yesterday, accusing Washington of "raining down terror," and apologizing to other nations for "the violence, degradation and poverty our nation has sown."
The statement, issued at the largest gathering of Christian churches in nearly 10 years, also warned that the United States is pushing the world toward environmental catastrophe with a "culture ofHe Wishes For consumption" and its refusal to back international accords to battle global warming.
"We lament with special anguish the war in Iraq, launched in deception and violating global norms of justice and human rights," said the statement from representatives of the 34 U.S. members of the World Council of Churches. "We mourn all who have died or been injured in this war. We acknowledge with shame abuses carried out in our name."
The World Council of Churches includes more than 350 mainstream Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox churches; the Roman Catholic Church is not a member. The U.S. groups in the WCC include the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Methodist Church, several Orthodox churches and Baptist denominations, among others.
The statement is part of widening religious pressure on the Bush administration, which still counts on the support of evangelical churches and other conservative denominations but is widely unpopular with liberal-minded Protestant congregations.
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The Very Rev. Leonid Kishkovsky, the moderator for the U.S. group of WCC members, said that the letter was backed by the leaders of the churches but was not cleared by lower-level bodies. He predicted friction within congregations about the tone of the message.
"There is much internal anguish and there is division," said Kishkovsky, the ecumenical officer of the Orthodox Church of America. "I believe church leaders and communities are wrestling with the moral questions that this letter is addressing."
On Friday, the U.S. National Council of Churches - which includes many WCC members - released a letter appealing to Washington to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and saying that reports of suspected torture violate "the fundamental Christian belief in the dignity of the human person."
The two-page statement from the WCC group came at the midpoint of a 10-day meeting of more than 4,000 religious leaders, scholars and activists discussing trends and goals for major Christian denominations for the coming years. The WCC's last global assembly was in 1998 in Zimbabwe - just four months after al-Qaida staged twin bombings at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
The message also accused U.S. officials of ignoring warnings about climate change and treating the world's "finite resources as if they are private possessions." It went on to criticize U.S. domestic policies for refusing to confront racism and poverty.
"Hurricane Katrina revealed to the world those left behind in our own nation by the rupture of our social contract," the statement said.
The churches said they had "grown heavy with guilt" for not doing enough to speak out against the Iraq war and other issues. The statement asked forgiveness for a world that's "grown weary from the violence, degradation and poverty our nation has sown."
Link To Article
Hardly anyone has noticed, but British democracy is sleepwalking into a sinister world of ministerial power
LAST WEEK all eyes were on the House of Commons as it debated identity cards, smoking and terrorism. The media reported both what MPs said and how they voted. For one week at least, the Commons mattered.
All the more peculiar then that the previous Thursday, in an almost deserted chamber, the Government proposed an extraordinary Bill that will drastically reduce parliamentary discussion of future laws, a Bill some constitutional experts are already calling the Abolition of Parliament Bill.
A couple of journalists noticed, including Daniel Finkelstein of The Times, and a couple more pricked up their ears last week when I highlighted some biting academic criticism of the Bill on the letters page of this paper. But beyond those rarefied circles, that we are sleepwalking into a new and sinister world of ministerial power seems barely to have registered.
The boring title of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill hides an astonishing proposal. It gives ministers power to alter any law passed by Parliament. The only limitations are that new crimes cannot be created if the penalty is greater than two years in prison and that it cannot increase taxation. But any other law can be changed, no matter how important. All ministers will have to do is propose an order, wait a few weeks and, voil, the law is changed.
For ministers the advantages are obvious: no more tedious debates in which they have to answer awkward questions. Instead of a full days debate on the principle of the proposal, detailed line-by-line examination in committee, a second chance at specific amendment in the Commons and a final debate and vote, ministers will have to face at most a short debate in a committee and a one-and-a-half hour debate on the floor. Frequently the Government will face less than that. No amendments will be allowed. The legislative process will be reduced to a game of take-it-or-leave-it.
The Bill replaces an existing law that allows ministers to relieve regulatory burdens. Business was enthusiastic about that principle and the Government seems to have convinced the business lobby that the latest Bill is just a new, improved version. What makes the new law different, however, is not only that it allows the Government to create extra regulation, including new crimes, but also that it allows ministers to change the structure of government itself. There might be business people so attached to the notion of efficiency and so ignorant or scornful of the principles of democracy that they find such a proposition attractive. Ordinary citizens should find it alarming.
Any body created by statute, including local authorities, the courts and even companies, might find themselves reorganised or even abolished. Since the powers of the House of Lords are defined in Acts of Parliament, even they are subject to the Bill.
Looking back at last weeks business in the Commons, the Bill makes a mockery of the decisions MPs took. Carrying ID cards could be made compulsory, smoking in ones own home could be outlawed and the definition of terrorism altered to make ordinary political protest punishable by life imprisonment. Nor will the Human Rights Act save us since the Bill makes no exception for it.
The Bill, bizarrely, even applies to itself, so that ministers could propose orders to remove the limitations about two-year sentences and taxation. It also includes a few desultory questions (along the lines of am I satisfied that I am doing the right thing? Tthat ministers have to ask themselves before proceeding, all drafted subjectively so that court challenges will fail, no matter how preposterous the ministers answer. Even these questions can be removed using the Bills own procedure. Indeed, at its most extreme, in a manoeuvre akin to a legislative Indian rope trick, ministers could use it to transfer all legislative power permanently to themselves.
The Bill raises fundamental questions about the role of Parliament. Ministers, egged on, some suspect, by the Civil Service, treat Parliament as a voting machine. Its job, in their view, is merely to give legal cover to whatever ministers want to do. They treat debate and deliberation as mere chatter before the all-important vote. They see no great difference between full parliamentary procedure and a truncated procedure for statutory instruments because, for them, the result either way is the same, that ministers receive legal authority for their plans. Just as a perfect criminal statute for ministers appears to be one in which everything is illegal so that prosecutors have discretion to put anyone in front of a court, a perfect authorising statute is one that makes lawful any ministerial act or policy.
Some of us have a different view. We think that deliberation and debate matter, that they are part of what makes parliamentary democracy work and make the new laws we pass legitimate. Deliberation improves legislation but more importantly, it forces governments to give reasons for their proposals that go beyond their narrow self-interest. In private meetings of the governing party, or in the Cabinet, or above all in telephone calls between ministers and special advisers, purely partisan reasons can hold sway. But in public, especially where there is real debate, ministers have to offer reasons that might persuade others. If they cannot think of any such reasons, their embarrassment constrains them. As the political scientist Jon Elster says, even hypocrisy can have a civilising effect.
The Government claims that there is nothing to worry about. The powers in the Bill, it says, will not be used for controversial matters. But there is nothing in the Bill that restricts its use to uncontroversial issues. The minister is asking us to trust him, and, worse, to trust all his colleagues and all their successors. No one should be trusted with such power.
As James Madison gave warning in The Federalist Papers, we should remember when handing out political power that enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. This Bill should make one doubt whether they are at the helm now.
David Howarth is Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge and Reader in Law at Cambridge University.
Had I the heavens embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Test Pilot's Body Said Found in Wreckage
By DANIEL YEE, Associated Press Writer Thu Apr 20, 3:14 PM ET
Searchers discovered the wreckage about 1 p.m. near Ranger, 50 miles northwest of Atlanta. The Civil Air Patrol identified the body found inside as Crossfield.
There were thunderstorms in the area Wednesday morning when air traffic monitors lost radio and radar contact with the Crossfield's Cessna 210A, said Kathleen Bergen, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration. The plane had left Prattville, Ala., around 9 a.m. that day for his home near Manassas, Va.
Crossfield's son-in-law, Ed Fleming, told The Associated Press from Crossfield's home on Thursday that family had been notified his plane and body had been found. The airplane carrying the 84-year-old pilot crashed in a remote and heavily forested gully about 10 miles from Ranger. Oris Hendrix, who lives about a mile away, said she had heard the plane having trouble in the storm.
"He was trying to turn and he just went down," she said. "You could tell the motor was having trouble. You could tell the motor cut off."
Among the small community of test pilots, Crossfield was a legend, said veteran test pilot Fred Griffith of Shelter Bay, Wash.
"This guy was a gentleman and an aviator. That's the top of the line," said Griffith, a test pilot for 40 years. "There's pilots, there's drivers. An aviator is something else. That's the best I can say about anyone in this business.
"I don't know anybody who was more respectable than Scotty Crossfield."
In the early 1950s, Crossfield had been one of a group of civilian pilots assembled by the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, the forerunner of NASA. Air Force Capt. Chuck Yeager had already broken the speed of sound in his history-making flight in 1947. But Crossfield set the Mach 2 record twice the speed of sound in 1953, when he reached 1,300 mph in NACA's Douglas D-558-II Skyrocket.
In 1960, Crossfield reached Mach 2.97 in an X-15 rocket plane launched from a B-52 bomber. The plane reached an altitude of 81,000 feet. At the time, Crossfield was working as a pilot and design consultant for North American Aviation, which made the X-15. He later worked as an executivtexte for Eastern Airlines and Hawker Siddley Aviation.
More recently, Crossfield had a key role in preparations for the attempt to re-enact the Wright brothers' flight on the 100th anniversary of their feat near Kitty Hawk, N.C. He trained four pilots for the Dec. 17, 2003, flight attempt in a replica of the brothers' flyer, but poor weather prevented the take-off.
Among his many honors, Crossfield was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1983.
