Filed under: culture, science, society, spain, sport, travel | Tags: archeology, mining
I’m staying in a small town called Minas de Riotinto, a town like many in outback Australia that thrived through a mining boom (a gold star if you guess the name of the mining company that benefited), but is now atrophying quietly and sadly like a loveless elderly person. A big difference between Australian ex-mining towns and this though, is that Minas de Riotinto is on the side of a mountainous national park and is an hour from Seville, which makes it arguably a lot more exciting and accessible than Broken Hill, for example. The town is also home to the regional hospital and a few other places of employment, so the 15 or so restaurants and variety of local shops continue to scrape by.
Despite its current misfortune Minas is quite a popular tourist destination for Spaniards, who come via Aracena or Seville to visit the mining museum and look at the eerie alien landscapes worthy of NASA research, then look at the beautiful mountain sunsets while listening to goat bells and birds in the valley below.
The town has a mining heritage that dates back to before the Romans invaded, so with all the digging that’s gone on it’s an interesting archeological site. For me though Minas de Riotinto has been a unique cultural experience, because of the English Club.
Last century when the English came to make a lot of money from the mineral-rich land, the town overflowed so they built a new town next to it, to accommodate the extra workers. Hence now there’s the old town with typical Spanish architecture, adjacent to the English ‘new’ town. Here is the only place outside of the Commonwealth I’ve seen English architecture classed as culturally significant. The ‘new’ town is heritage listed and there are signs and plaques around the area, with little maps of how an English house looks, in contrast with your typical Spanish place. These cultural curiosities are just like the home where I grew up. I found it strange reading historical information describing my own culture. The coast of Spain has survived invasion after invasion over the centuries, resulting in beautiful Arab and Roman architecture. Though the English didn’t make Spain a colony they had their own form of invasion nonetheless. Surely a turn of the century English cottage doesn’t deserve recognition like the Alhambra? In Minas de Riotinto it does.
Then there’s the English Club. After a year in Cambridge where I had free access to lush grass courts as well as a plethora of surfaced ones, I’ve been feeling a little tennis deprived here. I discovered in the centre of the English village there is an expat social club, complete with a big swimming pool (only open in the summer), billiard room and 4 tennis courts. This is about a 5 minute walk from where I’m staying. It sounds ideal, but it’s been a long time since this town had a big expatriate community, so the club has been taken over by a faction of locals. Considering Spanish time frames, it took me almost two weeks to establish who could give us access to the tennis courts, and where we could borrow four rackets and some balls.
This achieved, we set out one sunny Autumn afternoon to play tennis. The courts are worse for wear after years of neglect. They’re so rarely used that when we started playing a group of Spanish boys abandoned their football game to come over and watch us through the fence. Unfortunately it was difficult to put on a good exhibition match because the rackets were also from the 80’s. The grip on the racket disintegrated a little more each time I hit the ball, leaving my palm black. After five minutes of his powerful serves Ian had blown strings on two of the rackets. He then resorted to using the two rackets more like a lacrosse stick, catching the ball in his basket of strings and flinging it back over the droopy net.
Shortly after we gave up on tennis and resolved to stick to sports that the locals know. I don’t want to be a cultural relic in Spain.
Filed under: africa, development, england, events, london, news, poverty, science, society
Karimba Primary School, by AP6.
Last week I was in London to report on the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene’s centenary conference, called, ‘Meeting the Millennium Development Goals’.
Professor Estambale from the University of Nairobi talked about whether preventing malaria in schoolchildren helped them learn better (you can read my story on it here).
He talked about the design of the study and his results. In explaining his figures for why not all the children recruited to receive treatment were tested afterwards, he said matter-of-factly, “three of them died”, and continued to explain why other children were not in the final figures.
I had one of those stop-life moments. Three of them died! Here was a man in London explaining his scientific results, just like so many other scientists, but he had to factor in that some of his study participants died. And this was in the group that received treatment! There were more in the placebo group. The deaths weren’t anything to do with his study – it’s just that in Africa, children die, for all sorts of reasons.
Of course we all know that children in Africa die all the time, but it was one of those moments that brought it home to me. I imagine all of the people I know working in science in developed countries who design studies, worrying about so many different factors, trying to recruit enough volunteers – imagine if some of them just died? Halfway through your study, they die for completely unrelated reasons, which you then factor into your results.
I guess it was also shocking because I associate African children dying as flyblown toddlers suffering from malnutrition, not school-age children, ready to sit tests at the end of the term so they can move on in life. I’ve never been a starving toddler (good work mum), but I have been a primary school kid cruising along through childhood, like the kids in the study.
It’s unimaginable that school kids could ever just die matter-of-factly in Western Europe. Needless to say, we have to stop it happening in other parts of the world.
Filed under: australia, climate change, england, environment, events, science, travel
I deliberately have separate professional and travel/personal sites, because I like to keep things separate. But they’re merging! I want to talk about something that will also appear on my professional site in a few days.
Last night I went to London for an event by Advance, who have been promoting themselves around Cambridge through the Cambridge University Australia and New Zealand Society.
I dragged Ian along, because I thought he would also be interested to hear Tim Flannery talk about climate change, and associated things. It was fantastic. Ian was equally as satisfied.
I got to interview Tim before his talk, outside the Great Hall at King’s College, London. We sat on a bench. He was jetlagged, but very amiable and inspiring still. The interview didn’t take long – we were done well before he had to go on stage. We got chatting about how Adelaide is going, how great the Central Market is, what we were both doing in London (he was there to launch his books in paperback in the UK). Talking about what I was doing there led to me telling Tim about my various career options and what I might be doing next year, and he gave me some great advice.
Like me, Tim did a degree in humanities (English in his case) before moving into science. That’s good to hear. Realising that great people like him have the same humble beginnings as me was very motivational. Getting career advice from someone so successful who started out in a similar way is invaluable.
I feel very privileged to have properly met our 2007 Australian of the Year, I think he well deserves the honour. Thanks Tim.
I spent a week in Melbourne for the World Conference of Science Journalists, which was fantastic. I met so many great people doing such fascinating things and learnt so much.
The conference was sponsored by all sorts of research institutes and governments, so we had great food and some great venues. I will definitely go again.
Thanks so much to Sarah (and her housemates) for letting me stay.
Filed under: australia, england, environment, events, science, security, travel
I’m flying again this month. A lot. My carbon footprint will go from a size 5 cycling around Cambridge to a size 12 flying between three continents (plus several domestic legs in Australia).
I’m not a fan of flying anymore. No inflight entertainment system or free beverages will cajole me. But I’m Australian, I live in the UK, taking three weeks off work is a stretch – how else am I supposed to visit home? I wish someone would hurry up and invent a teleporter. I don’t think having my atoms torn apart then reassembled would be that much worse than how I feel after a long distance flight, and it would save time.
My main problem is disease. Nearly every time I take an international flight I get a respiratory infection. There are many obvious reasons for this, from the horrible recirculated cabin air to the variety of people from all over breathing into this air. Yuck. That combined with jet lag is a recipe for sickness. I cope with it better than I used to due to wonderful ‘frequent flyer’ nasal sprays – but who wants the person sitting uncomfortably close to you on a plane snorting tea tree oil? It’s gross. I don’t want to inflict that on fellow passengers.
But I will, because now I have another reason to be apprehensive. I was reading in last week’s New Scientist about XDR-TB, an extremely drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis creeping around the world. In South Africa it’s almost certainly fatal. There’s a strain in Italy impervious to all known medicines. A few cases have now been reported in London. It’s an airborne disease, and New Scientist says “it is possible that simply sharing a long-haul flight may be enough” to catch it.
Governments should be putting as much money into avoiding biological threats as they are terrorism. I’m all for added security measures to prevent terrorism (well, most of them), but disease kills a lot more people! And it’s more preventable! Why haven’t we eliminated TB, let alone polio? It’s disgraceful.
In this century I think all weapons development should be stopped and money should be put into environmental security measures. What are we going to do, nuke the country that incubates the next pandemic? I don’t think so. That said, people with XDR-TB are being forcibly quarantined to prevent it spreading. At least with terrorism you have to do something bad to get detained (once again, mostly). If you innocently catch a disease while travelling you can get locked up indefinitely, without the political outrage associated with being in the position of David Hicks. Plus you have to deal with an agonising illness eating away at your lungs. It’s brutally unfair for victims.
These kind of worries are why it’s nice to live in places like Adelaide, Calgary or Cambridge, rather than Sydney, Toronto or London. Yes, Sydney’s been unscathed so far. Australia is a pretty remote island after all. Toronto or London are both tarred in my eyes due to security risks.
A few years ago I was due to move to Toronto, I had a partial scholarship to go to Ryerson University to pursue my broadcast journalism studies. Then SARS happened. I was meant to leave around the height of the epidemic, I decided to put off my exchange for another semester, to be on the safe side. There were other factors involved, but that was a big one. I got a full scholarship to Calgary the following semester, and I went having never heard of the city before – but it was fantastic, fuelled my love of snow sports and interest in development issues, so I’ve never looked back.
In 2005 I went to a conference in Scotland, flying via London. This was roughly two weeks after the first London bombings… I never considered cancelling my trip (would I have if London had been riddled with disease instead?) as lightning doesn’t strike twice, as the saying goes. I was wrong, kind of – I flew in just after the disrupted bomb attacks in which an innocent Brazilian guy was killed by police. The city’s public transport was shut down so I got a bus to Cambridge, deciding I shouldn’t tempt fate and hang around the capital.
It never occurred to me I’d be living in Cambridge a couple of years later – but here I am. Now London still spooks me a bit. I go there every couple of weeks. Whenever there’s a major delay on the tube and people are crammed in without explanation, I wonder, has something happened again?
I know it’s not that likely though. I know it’s much more likely I’ll get sick with the amount I travel. The funny thing is I don’t worry about getting sick in places like Vietnam or Samoa so much – I take some precautions, use mosquito nets where possible. What worries me more are these potential pandemics in population centres. I wonder how many other people have avoided huge cities for the same reasons? I wonder how many other young professional couples with high earning potential are shunning international hubs in favour of regional capitals?
The Times newspaper’s most prominent environmental story today is called “Why rap has become the music of choice for city high-flyers”.
The third sentence is “the study of great tits reveals that not only are they more raucous than their country cousins but will experiment with new sounds and arrangements.”
The story is about how bird calls differ in country and urban areas… of course.
I used to denigrate the the Adelaide Advertiser for its sexing up of science for publication.
But I take it back. Stories in the UK are much worse. I haven’t even read a copy of the Sun yet, Murdoch’s infamous London tabloid.
