This is not an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user to whom this page belongs may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia itself. The original page is located at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bduke.
I do not edit or otherwise contribute to any Wikimedia article or project on behalf of any employer, client, or affiliated person, organization, or other entity; nor do I receive or solicit any compensation for any edits or other contributions.
Don't worry about making an article perfect. Just make it better.
The goal of an Encyclopaedia is to assemble all the knowledge scattered across the surface of the earth, to demonstrate the known ways of things to those who share our times, and to transmit it to the people who will come after us, so that the work of centuries past is not useless to the centuries which follow, that our descendants, by becoming more learned, may become more virtuous and happier, and that we do not die without having merited being part of the human race - Denis Diderot.
I acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which I live and edit, and pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging.
The English Wikipedia has got 6,913,980 articles and 48,297,376 registered users.
This editor has been identified as anAwesome Wikipedianon 23 October 2018.
The red-lored whistler (Pachycephala rufogularis) is one of nine species of whistler occurring in Australia and a member of the family Pachycephalidae. It resides in the low mallee, spinifex, cypress pine and broombush woodland in the desert of central New South Wales, north-western Victoria and adjacent south-eastern South Australia, preferring low mallee woodlands or shrublands with open canopy, above a moderately dense but patchy scrub layer. The male bird has an orange or buff face and throat, a grey breastband extending around the neck and over the head, and rufous underparts with pale yellow or olive edging to primaries. The female is similar but with a paler throat and underparts. While it is often seen perched in trees and shrubs, the red-lored whistler feeds, for the most part, on the ground. Little is known about the movement of this species, although it is thought to be sedentary, with some movement possibly after breeding. It builds a substantial, cup-shaped nest made mostly of coarse bark and mallee leaves, neatly woven around the rim in low shrubs and lays two or three eggs. The species's limited range has seen it listed nationally as a vulnerable species. This red-lored whistler was photographed in the Nombinnie Nature Reserve in New South Wales.Photograph credit: John Harrison
County College, Lancaster UniversityWhy do we, in Australia, or indeed in the United Kingdom (I am a citizen of both), put up with the totally utter complete nonsense of the monarchy? If we were starting from scratch, would we even get close to the idea of a hereditary monarchy? Answer, clearly, No! We would not touch it with a barge pole, as they said where I was brought up in Yorkshire. The King celebrates his official birthday in June when he was born in December. It is clearly totally utterly insane. Let me add that earlier in my life, as Principal of County College at Lancaster University in the UK, I welcomed Queen Elizabeth from her car and lead her into the College, where she officially opened the building, in her role as Duke of Lancaster. I found her to be charming and intelligent, but the role should just not exist. I assume Charles is also charming and intelligent, but his role should just not exist. If we in Australia or indeed in the United Kingdom got rid of the King and became a republic, nothing really would change. The Commonwealth would continue - it already has republics. Each country would have an elected President.
I am not as active as I used to be, but I still look at my watchlist several times almost every day. However, I have not written a new article for a long while.
Bduke is a Yorkshireman, but now lives in Melbourne, Australia
Bduke has edited Wikipedia since 2005 and has been a quality administrator for many, many years. He has created 157 articles and has about 34,500 edits in that time. When he recently requested his mop be retired, he displayed the type of rare integrity and mentorship that other members of the admin corps might take a lesson from.
Born in Sheffield, England in 1939 and lived there until aged 18, and partly there while at Oxford University until aged 24.
Has lived in Sheffield, Oxford, Reading, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Lancaster: United Kingdom,
Kano: Nigeria, Port Moresby: Papua New Guinea, Darwin and now Melbourne: Australia,
and briefly on sabbatical leave in Birmingham, Alabama, USA, and Canberra, Australia.
Retired.
Oxford M A in Chemistry.
Oxford D Phil in Chemistry.
Open University B A in Mathematics.
Loves taking ideas like this from other users.
Wikipedia
Welcome to Bduke's user page
Wikimedia Foundation
This is a Wikipedia user page. This is not an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user to whom this page belongs may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia itself. The original page is located at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bduke.
The Queen's College, Oxford. Howard Florey was Provost in my last year. Jack Linnett was my main tutor for Physical and Inorganic Chemistry, and my supervisor for Chemistry Part II and my D. Phil. R. M. Acheson was my tutor for Organic Chemistry.
I think this image explains Wikipedia more than any other image I have seen.
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." — Jimbo Wales, 2004[1]
My editing philosophy: Our readers do not care one whit who adds information to articles; they care only that the information is correct.
At Reading, I was an Assistant Lecturer in Chemistry at Reading University. In 1963, my fondest memory is of computerizing the results of the Reading University Head of the River rowing race on the only computer at the university, which I had totally to myself on the appropriate Saturday afternoon. I was filling in for a year for someone who was on sabbatical leave and he had done this for the Reading Head for several years. As a rowing man earlier as a member of the Queen's College Boat Club at the Queen's College, Oxford, who had rowed in the Reading Head, I was delighted to do it.
At Newcastle upon Tyne I worked in Computers Services at what is now Newcastle University intending to move into computer science, but it turned out that most of my work was supporting users from the Chemistry Department which lead to collaborative work with them so I continued to do computational chemistry research, and then decided to return fully to chemistry. While there I walked Hadrian's Wall,
At Lancaster, I was a Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in Chemistry at Lancaster University. I had a term as the first Principal of County College after the building opened. Earlier, I was the first Senior Tutor in the two years when the College had students but no building. While there I added to the walks in the Lake District that I had previously done from Ennerdale Water with the Oxford University Rover Crew every Easter and every September while at Oxford University.
When I moved to Victoria, I lived in Spotswood, later I lived at the edge of Carnegie close to Glenhuntly, but now live in Arcare Carnegie, 47 Rosanna St, Carnegie, VIC, 3163 a care home in Carnegie. This means that others could be using the same internet access as I am.
I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the lands upon which I have lived, worked and shared knowledge.
Although now 85, I still take an interest in a very minor way in research in the fields of computational chemistry, theoretical chemistry, and quantum chemistry. I first started computing on a Ferranti Mercury in 1960 at Oxford University, where I gained a D. Phil., supervised by Jack Linnett, partly in computational chemistry. I had two very successful sabbatical leaves, the first with Henry F. Schaefer III at the Center for Computational Chemistry at the University of Georgia at Athens, Georgia, and the second with Charles Coulson at Oxford University, both highly successful computational chemists. I am an author of the Valence Bond program, VB2000. I continue to contribute in a minor way to Wikipedia in these areas of computational, theoretical, and quantum chemistry, along with other areas such as general chemistry topics, including chemistry journals, and chemist biographies, Australian topics, and Scouting topics. Scattered about are many userboxes, which show where I am coming from and what I am doing on Wikipedia.
I have made over 34,500 edits, including over 10,000 edits in the main article space, 156 new articles and a bunch of other stuff. For my edit count, see here. I have been less active in the last year or so, but I still check my very long watchlist usually several times every day, and make a few minor edits. This paragraph is now quite a bit out of date, so let me say, as they would in the Northern Territory of Australia where I used to live, that I have made "big mobs" of articles.
As of 29 May 2024, The English Wikipedia has over 47 million registered users, 120,065 active editors in the last month, and 859 administrators. All of these figures are lower that a few years ago. Together we have made more than 1,000,000,000 edits, created more than 55,000,000 pages of all kinds, and created more than 6,500,000 articles. That is more than 14 million edits per month (about 5.2 edits per second on average).
I became an administrator on 16 August, 2007. I am over 80 and resigned as an admin on 5 October, 2020. I intend to keep on editing WP. I am not certain that the data below is correct, as I am no longer an admin.
Admin statistics
Action
Count
Edits
26439
Edits+Deleted
27450
Pages deleted
281
Pages restored
19
Pages protected
41
Pages unprotected
11
Protections modified
3
Users blocked
42
Users reblocked
1
Users created
1
★ What happens when a Wikipedian dies? He or she just doesn't show up to edit anymore! Does anybody notice? Does anybody really even care? To all those Wikipedians, who may have died and been forgotten here — thank you — for your tireless contributions.
The motto of the AIW is conservata veritate, which translates to "with the preserved truth".
This motto reflects the inclusionist desire to change Wikipedia only when no knowledge would be lost as a result.
I have been editing Wikipedia since late 2005, and have averaged about 5 edits per day since then. I have edited over 9500 pages. It seems I am about the 3500th most active Wikipedian! It varies of course from day to day. Is it worthwhile? Yes, Wikipedia is one of the wonders of the modern world, and has made all other encyclopedia`s irrelevant. I am proud to have been a very small part of it. I have been awarded my own day, October 23!! I think I have started about 159 articles on Wikipedia.
"The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice". "In theory, it can never work".
I came across the poem below, which strongly resonated with me because from 1945 to 1960 as a child and later a university student, the rooks passed over my house in Sheffield in the morning to feed in the fields and then return to their rookery in the evening. I walked on a path through their rookery on the way to church and Sunday school.
Thaw Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at their nests cawed
And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flowers of grass,
What we below could not see, Winter pass.
— Edward Thomas
I have used an alternative account, User:Bduke second account, when I was on a less secure computer, but not recently and I doubt that I will ever use it again. Note that Bduke2 is not me. I confirm I am Bduke on IRC. I have an account on Scoutwiki, where I am also User:Bduke, and I have moved some material from here that is more appropriate there. I have not been active there recently and, indeed, Scoutwiki seems to have been almost dead for many years, but there has been some edits in 2024. It was always bound to be fairly unreliable, while Scouting topics on Wikipedia will just have very many more readers and editors and be more reliable.
Committed identity: afda3c5a53d9e1d2ee0a66920ca33d29553f811ee96738102216f147363a55607e1ef4667d5e479098f34a768bb434be0bf436675bab39acd4b8fb278724dd2e is a SHA-512commitment to this user's real-life identity.
As you see some of these are "former", and it is highly likely that the others are also former as I rarely go into the city, and when I do it is with my son.
This user was brought up in a Methodist family, with an uncle who was a Methodist Minister. At Oxford University, I became an Anglican and worshipped at the Queen's College Chapel and Pusey House, but shortly after I moved to Lancaster in 1963 I came to the conclusion that religion is just nonsense. There is just no real evidence for any of it, in spite of many excellent people at the University of Oxford who argued otherwise. There was so much religious activity at Oxford, when I was there, that people were tempted to believe it is important, but none of it is really important. I have not altered my view for more than 60 years. I broadly agree with Peter Atkins:-
"Give me your views on the existence, or otherwise, of God." Peter Atkins replied: "Well, it's fairly straightforward: There isn't one. And there's no evidence for one, no reason to believe that there is one, and so I don't believe that there is one. And I think that it is rather foolish that people do think that there is one."[2]
"Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us. Above us, only sky." So, I am an atheist, not an agnostic.
This user has just wasted both their time and yours placing this userbox on their profile, because it says absolutely nothing important, interesting or relevant to anything.
This user is a preservationist who believes Wikipedians should avoid agressive non-notability deletion and advocates that the notability rule be amended to specify that any subject with some historical value can merit an article. Details here.
" A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.” — Mark Twain
"One can't be angry when one looks at a penguin.” — John Ruskin
"The problem with quotes on the Internet is that they are often not true." – Abraham Lincoln
"Neutrality is not the average between bollocks and reality. In science, any compromise between a correct statement and an incorrect statement, is an incorrect statement." User:JzG, November 2019, on Talk:Craniosacral therapy.
"A reader is someone who simply visits Wikipedia to read articles, not to edit or create them. They are the sole reason for which Wikipedia exists".
"There are people who have good sense. There are idiots. A consensus of idiots does not override good sense. Wikipedia is not a democracy." Jimbo Wales[3]
"Wikipedia is first and foremost an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language.”
Jimmy Wales, March 2005
"Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after death? No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no. One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?" "Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be." Isaac Asimov
"It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance." -Thomas Sowell
"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong". - H. L. Mencken
"You’re entitled to your own opinions. You’re not entitled to your own facts." Daniel Patrick Moynihan
"Someone asked my maths professor why numbers exist and she said "One day, for whatever reason, someone decided they wanted to count things and it's been a major inconvenience for everybody ever since".
"Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment."
"You'd be amazed at the number of times I've been with top professors in the field and I've asked them a question and they've said, 'I'm not too sure about that, let me check', and gone straight to Wikipedia." Brady Haran
"This thing we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down." Mary Pickford
"The chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost maniacal impulse to seek their pleasures amongst smoke and vapour, soot and flames, poisons and poverty – yet amongst all these evils I seem to live so sweetly that I would rather die than change places with the King of Persia." Johann Joachim Becher, Physica Subterranea (1667), translated by Paul Strathern in Mendeleyev's Dream (2001).
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil." Hannah Arendt
"Wikipedia editor (n.) Someone who will not leave a burning building until you show them the newspaper article documenting how many people were killed by the fire."
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Phillip K. Dick
"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer." - Paul R. Ehrlich
"Never spend 6 minutes doing something by hand when you can spend 6 hours failing to automate it." - Zhuowei Zhang
"A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view of their past and hostility toward their neighbors." - Karl Deutsch
"It's important to realise that our mission is not to make a website, but to share knowledge, freely available for reuse". Posted by User:Pigsonthewing and retweeted by Jimmy Wales; quoted at Wikimania 2014 by Bill Thompson.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity".
"We make the internet not suck", Jimbo Wales.
"There's nowt so queer as folk." - Yorkshire saying.
"It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most sceptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas … If you are only sceptical, then no new ideas make it through to you … On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of sceptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful ideas from the worthless ones". Carl Sagan, "The Burden of Skepticism".
"The human eye is a wonderful device. With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice." User:Gog the Mild.
"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." - An African Proverb.
"We are not the internet, we are an encyclopaedia. The difference being: we select, organise, and explain." User:SilkTork
"Wikipedia: Don't call it 'Wiki' - People who do are usually trouble".
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted” - Ralph Waldo Emerson.
"I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there" - Richard Feynman.
"Mr. Rnddude: What is Wikipedia? Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, if we define encyclopaedia as a compendium of all significant subjects, and most insignificant ones, authored collectively by vicious typewriter bashing primates of moderate intellect and little direction."
"We're not out to write a mediocre encyclopaedia here. This is a resource the whole world employs, and it is not merely our duty, but our privilege to get it right. We should all be "elitists" on Wikipedia, and we should be proud to use the appellation." - User:Ravenswing
An old man lived alone in a village. He wanted to spade his potato garden, but it was very hard work. His only son, who would have helped him, was in prison.
The old man wrote a letter to his son and mentioned his situation:
Dear Son,
I am feeling pretty bad because it looks like I won’t be able to plant my potato garden this year. I hate to miss doing the garden, because your mother always loved planting time. I’m just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. If you were here, all my troubles would be over. I know you would dig the plot for me, if you weren’t in prison.
Love,
Dad.
Shortly, the old man received this telegram: ‘For Heaven’s sake, Dad, don’t dig up the garden!! That’s where I buried the GUNS!!’ At 4 a.m. the next morning, a dozen FBI agents and local police officers showed up and dug up the entire garden without finding any guns.
Confused, the old man wrote another note to his son telling him what happened, and asked him what to do next.
His son’s reply was: ‘Go ahead and plant your potatoes, Dad.. It’s the best I could do for you from here.’
This user, back in the 1950's and 1960's, was a regular visitor to the Ennerdale Scout Camp Site (https://www.ennerdalescoutcentre.org/) in Cumbria in the UK
This user, back in the 1950's and 1960's, was a member of the South Yorkshire Scout County Hesley Wood Scout Campsite Service Crew
This user, now in his 80s, has no idea what the Scout Movement is doing, either in the UK or here in Australia, but wishes it well
I was a keen Scout in my youth. At the age of 18 I became an Assistant Scout Leader of the 259th Sheffield Scout Group in Sheffield, where I had been a Cub Scout, not the 167th Sheffield (King Edward VII School) Group where I was a Rover Scout after being in their "B" Scout Troop for 6 years. In 1957, I attended the 6th World Rover Moot held at Sutton Park, West Midlands along with the 9th World Scout Jamboree, and the 2nd World Scout Indaba, the only time, I think, that these events have been held together, although they were in quite separate places in the park. I continued as a Rover Scout in Sheffield, and in the Oxford University Rover Scout Crew, where as a post-grad student I became Assistant Rover Scout Leader. The Oxford University Rover Crew, and later also the Oxford University Scout and Guide Club, every year went to the West Cumberland Ennerdale Scout Camp at Easter and then in September. At Easter they prepared the site for the forthcoming summer and in September they cleaned up the mess from the summer season. They also walked the fells and rock climbed on Pillar Rock. This started after the Second World War and continued every year until quite recently. I think I did 6 Easter trips and 6 September trips to Ennerdale. I walked past the site a few years ago and it was still much the same lovely place as it was way back. In the term we also spend a lot of time in the weekends at the Youlbury Scout Activity Centre which was just outside Oxford in Berkshire.
I think it has been a great mistake, first to have an upper age limit of 25 years and then to get rid of Rover Scouts in many countries. When I first became a Rover Scout there was no upper limit and we had a crew member in the Sheffield Crew in his 70s. He did not join us on outdoor events but his presence on Fridays in the Rover Den was of great help to the young Rovers like myself. His advice was always highly valuable. The sections that have replaced Rovers do not have the same great story and image. I was one of many Scouts and Guides in universities in the UK to campaign in the 1960s and 1970s for joint Scout/Guide activities, and a merger of Scouts and Guides. This was strongly supported by the Scout and Guide Graduate Association (SAGGA), of which I was an active member. In the end the Scouts admitted girls, and Guides carried on as a girls-only organisation. As a Senior Scout and then Rover Scout I was a member of one of the 4 South Yorkshire Scout County Hesley Wood Camp Site Service Crews, being there every 4th weekend of the month when not at university - see Scouting in Yorkshire and the Humber. In Lancaster, I became the Assistant District Commissioner for Leader Training, and was briefly on the UK National Leader Training Board. However I gave up being a christian, and became an atheist. I took the religious policy of Scouting seriously, although few others did, and resigned from all my Scouting positions. Perhaps I should just have continued and if ever pressed about my duty to god. I should have said that I did my duty which was nothing as god did not exist. I certainly knew many Scout Leaders who were not serious believers in any religion. However, here on Wikipedia, I have been very active improving Scouting articles. As a Scout I did a lot of fell walking, rock climbing, and caving. I once saw a discussion about people losing their lives in the Pennine Fells in England because they were hiking alone, and remember someone 60 or so years ago saying "If you want to hike alone in the Fells, take someone with you" - very Yorkshire. I have been around on WP for a long time. Let me know if you need help. I am getting old and in a care home, but I have plenty of time and will do my best to help you.
I have lived in the first of the boxes below earlier in Darwin and now in Melbourne, was born and lived for decades in the second, have lived for three years in the next two, for a few months in the fifth one, extensively visited the next two, and just visited all the others for a few days or weeks, or even a few hours, or less.
Est omnino difficile iudicare inclusionis meritum cuiusdam rei in encyclopædia cum ratio sciendi quid populi referat incerta sit, sed nihilominus aliquid encyclopædiam dedecet
It is generally difficult to judge the worthiness of a particular topic for inclusion in an encyclopedia considering that there is no certain way to know what interests people, but some topics nevertheless are not fit for an encyclopedia.
This motto reflects the desire of these Wikipedians to be reluctant, but not entirely unwilling, to remove articles from Wikipedia.
"I think that Wikipedia is a wonderful project, which, however, has many weaknesses: It tends to entropy, as it is taken by many non-scrupulous contributors as a repository of anything one may find in the Internet, thus not as an encyclopedia but as a sort of "sandbox game"; well-written articles are rare, and most articles are instead filled with poorly written content, either without sources or sourced with chaotic webs of links which ultimately do not support the content itself; articles are constantly vandalised, and vandalism often remains unchecked. The Wikimedia organisation seems to be more concerned with changing the interface for improving "users' experience" than with establishing better methods aimed at improving the quality of the encyclopaedic contents."
"We're not out to write a mediocre encyclopaedia here. This is a resource the whole world employs, and it is not merely our duty, but our privilege to get it right ... We should all be "elitists" on Wikipedia, and we should be proud to use the appellation." -- User:Ravenswing
I understand that Wikipedia has essentially put all other encyclopaedia's out of business. That makes it all the more important that we get it right.
Wikipe-tan trifecta sign
This user has been editing Wikipedia for more than 15 years.
This user opposes the Wikimedia Foundation's arbitrary, opaque, and dictatorial office-banning of administrators when the community and ArbCom are more than capable of handling the issue themselves.
Wikimania 2014, the tenth Wikimania conference, was held from 8 to 10 August 2014[4] at the Barbican Centre in London. Bidding officially opened in December 2012. London was chosen in May 2013 as the host city[5] with the only other bid coming from Arusha (Tanzania).[6][7] The keynote address was given by Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International.[8] The event was the first Wikimania addressed by the Wikimedia Foundation's new executive director Lila Tretikov,[8] and was preceded by a two-day hackathon, and a series of fringe events.[8] The conference was documented by the television program 60 Minutes in a program titled 'Wikimania'.[9] I attended and was one of the big mob in the photo to the right!
I am less active on Wikipedia at the age of 85, but I would be happy to step up if you think I could help. I have been on WP for a long time and using computers for much longer. Just let me know. I am on Wikipedia for much of the day in an old people's home.
In 1950, in Sheffield, I passed the notorious "11 plus" examination in the United Kingdom gaining a place at King Edward VII School. By 1950, it was fully linked to the Eleven-plus examination. That is how I got in, but it still had the earlier reputation as a private school and when I first got there, the prefects were from the private school and it still had a strong ability to prepare students for the Oxford and Cambridge entrance examinations. It had three excellent Scout Troops and I was in the "B" troop until my final year when I moved up to the Rover Crew that took members from all three troops. It was considered to be the top school in Sheffield, but in hindsight I think it was rather narrow in some respects. For example, in English Literature "O" level, I studied "Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man", but it was studied in isolation with no acknowledgement that it was the first of three books by Siegfried Sassoon:-
and that it was written to contrast the easy life that the rich had prior to the first World War that is described in the second book, followed by how he recovered from the horrors of the war described in the third book. They satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's view, were responsible for a jingoism-fuelled war. Only later did I read all three books. I recommend that anyone who reads one of the books and enjoys it, reads all three to get the full picture.
The Queen's College, OxfordIn late 1956, I won a Hastings Scholarship to the Queen's College (pictured to the right from the entrance in 2020) at Oxford, and went there in September 1957. I owe a lot to my time at King Edward VII School and the Queen's College, Oxford. I was a Taberdar, to use the jargon, at the college. See King Edward VII School, Sheffield and List of Old Edwardians (Sheffield) to see why the Hastings Scholarship was so important to me and fellow students at that time.
At Oxford I made good use of my membership of the Oxford Union and the library there, but I attended hardly any debates. While in Oxford, I lived in College, then in Jericho, which is an interesting area, and then as a graduate student, I was the senior student in the Queen's College annex overlooking the university athletics ground where the first four minute mile was run a few years earlier in 1954 at Oxford University's Iffley Road Track, by Roger Bannister.
Oxford University Inorganic Chemistry building My degrees are mainly in Chemistry with my D. Phil., carried out in the Inorganic Chemistry Building (pictured to the right where I worked behind the ground floor window immediately to the left of the archway entrance) in two distinct parts of experimental reaction kinetics in the gas phase of diborane with alcohols, and quantum chemistry computational calculations on diborane. The latter was the basis for my research after my D. Phil. I have worked in University Chemistry Departments except for two years in the Computer Department at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. From there I moved to the Chemistry Department at the University of Lancaster from 1966 to 1977 initially based in St Leonard's Gate in the city centre before the university moved to Bailrigg. In the early days there, I was Senior Tutor and then Principal of County College.
My Open University degree is in mathematics. It is only a pass degree, but I moved to what is now Bayero University, Nigeria from 1977 to 1981 and could not progress to the honours year. I then briefly returned to Lancaster, and in 1983 I moved to be Professor of Chemistry at the University of Papua New Guinea. I was at the University College of the Northern Territory, later the Northern Territory University, then Charles Darwin University, from 1986 to 2004. I have a Graduate Certificate in Tertiary Teaching from the Northern Territory University. Since moving to Melbourne, I have had an adjunct position as Associate Professor at Monash University Faculty of Pharmacy, but I doubt that I still do, as I now do not have much interest in chemistry.
Some people may be surprised by my link to the Erdős number, but I am, or rather was, a theoretical chemist, who used a lot of mathematics. I once had leave from my university with Charles Coulson at Oxford University. He was a mathematician who had made some very interesting mathematical insights into chemistry. Publishing with Charles lead me to having an Erdős number. Quite odd really!
I have a box above saying I remember punch cards, but I actually did not meet punch cards for the first years of my computing in UK. The early UK computers used paper tape, but some used 5 hole tape, some used 7 hole tape, and some used 8 hole tape, so in the end they used cards like the US did! I think I used all three of them at different times.
I have programmed in Mercury Autocode, Elliot Autocode, ALGOL 60, Fortran, Perl, Python, C, C++, and probably others that I have now forgotten all about. The most beautiful was ALGOL 60, but it never really got going, so I was left to use Fortran, which is a mess, but there are lots of quantum chemistry Fortran programs, such as GAMESS (US), that I could build on (for example by incorporating VB2000), or just use. It is, however, about 20 years since I retired and I have done little programming since then and that little was closer to my retirement than to now.
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This user is a socialist, and is disgusted by this regressive societal system, that places corporate greed and profitability above collective well being of society.
This user is an empiricist who believes knowledge is subject to continued revision and falsification.
Rowing is the only sport that has ever really interested me, unless you consider Fell Walking, Peak bagging, Rock Climbing and Caving as sports, as I do. At school I hated soccer and cricket and attempted to do cross-country running whenever I could as an alternative, although I never considered it to be competitive, just good exercise. Nobody should be forced to do sport, or even pressured into doing it. At Oxford University, in 1959, I rowed in the Queen's College first Eight in the bumps races, Torpids and Eights, and in the Reading and Thames Head of the River Races. The crews that year were very lightweight, and we were not very successful. We started Head of the River in Torpids and second in Division 1 in Eights, but we went down 4 and 3 places respectively. Queen's has not been Head of the River in either Eights or Torpids since then. I had rowed in the second Torpid and second Eight in 1958, and in the 4 years after 1959 I rowed in various "gentlemen's eights", where if you had even practised once before Eights or Torpids started you were ahead of most of the other boats. I still have an interest in rowing, and have watched a few regattas in Melbourne, on the Tyne in Newcastle upon Tyne and on the Lune in Lancaster in UK. I have absolutely no interest in any code of football.
I was a strong supporter of CAMRA from shortly after it was founded and I am still a member, but now in Australia I am out of touch, and the CAMRA information goes to my daughters in UK. However, it is still real ale when in the UK, at least when there is a nearby pub that serves real ale, but wine when in Australia as Australian beer is nothing like real ale, although something like real ale can be found in a very few places, but not near where I now live. However, it is unlikely now that I will ever go back to UK.
By lived in, I mean about 6 months for Alabama, 3 years in Nigeria and Papua New Guinea and many years in the United Kingdom (Sheffield, Oxford, Newcastle upon Tyne and Lancaster) and Australia (Darwin and Melbourne}. That is at least enough to get beyond initial impressions.
"Hawkeye: War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
Father Mulcahy: How do you figure that, Hawkeye?
Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them — little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander."
"England has been offered a choice between war and shame. She has chosen shame, and will get war." -- Winston Churchill on the Munich Agreement in 1938.
I was involved as an innocent bystander towards the end of the World War in 1944, aged 5. A bomb dropped just outside our house in Sheffield, but it did not go off. As a result we moved into a house in a much safer place in the country on the edge of the city.
The first is the Headington Shark before the refurbishment in 2009 - only in Oxford, England!! When I have visited Oxford, it is often been by getting the bus from London and getting off at Headington, and then walking down past this to my daughter's house in Wood Farm, but has been quite a while since I was in UK. There is a more recent and better image in the link above, but I can not get it to be on the left and smaller.
The second was one my favourite places as a boy in Sheffield, England, viewed from the crags above Bell Hagg. The road is the A57, which eventually becomes the Snake Pass running from Sheffield to Manchester. I often walked along the top of the crags which are off the photo to the left, continuing right to the hills in the distance or even further into Hathersage, via Stanage Edge a notable rock climbing area in Derbyshire, returning by bus.
The third is Wharfedale near Buckden, another of my favourite places in England. I have frequently stayed at the George Inn in Hubberholme which is about a mile up the dale from Buckden - a great British Pub. Much earlier I stayed with my parents in Buckden House, which was then a Cooperative Society Holiday Home and did the first serious fell walks in my life. The photo is not a great one as it shows looking back to Buckden as you slowly walk up the side of the dale going up the dale.
The forth shows houses near the river at Litton, in Littondale. As a Senior Scout I was the Senior Patrol Leader. One summer we cycled all the way from Sheffield with heavy packs to Litton. We camped on the lower slope of Pen-y-ghent. We did many walks and drank much beer in the pub in Grassington after cycling from the camp site. One evening the landlord said "You are all darn near too young to be served", as indeed we were, but he still served us, and we still managed to cycle back.
The fifth shows Pen-y-ghent which is one of the Yorkshire Three Peaks and we climbed all three while there. The other two are Whernside and Ingleborough. The tops of all three are really quite flat but you are constantly having to drop into a narrow channel (called a "peat hog", I think) and then get out of it.
The sixth shows an artist's impression of the Rosstown sugar beet mill and railway in Melbourne. In 1876, Ross, built a mill and a storage building, which he planned to link by a railway. However, he went broke. The railway was never fully built and his buildings were destroyed. What remains is a lovely walk, the Rosstown Railway Heritage Trail, which I still walk part of occasionally.
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Rowing is the only sport that has ever really interested me, unless you consider Fell Walking, Peak bagging, Rock Climbing and Caving as sports, as I do. At school I hated soccer and cricket and attempted to do cross-country running whenever I could as an alternative, although I never considered it to be competitive, just good exercise. Nobody should be forced to do sport, or even pressured into doing it. At Oxford University, in 1959, I rowed in the Queen's College first Eight in the bumps races, Torpids and Eights, and in the Reading and Thames Head of the River Races. The crews that year were very lightweight, and we were not very successful. We started Head of the River in Torpids and second in Division 1 in Eights, but we went down 4 and 3 places respectively. Queen's has not been Head of the River in either Eights or Torpids since then. I had rowed in the second Torpid and second Eight in 1958, and in the 4 years after 1959 I rowed in various "gentlemen's eights", where if you had even practised once before Eights or Torpids started you were ahead of most of the other boats. I still have an interest in rowing, and have watched a few regattas in Melbourne, on the Tyne in Newcastle upon Tyne and on the Lune in Lancaster in UK. I have absolutely no interest in any code of football.
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