Living on cloud nine
QUESTION What is the story behind the House In The Clouds?
IN 1908, playwright and barrister Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie inherited an estate at Thorpeness, Suffolk, and decided to build a holiday village.
Work began in 1912 on an idiosyncratic, but sophisticated, fantasy land that combined nostalgia for Olde England with state-of-the-art facilities and building techniques.
A lake was created with dozens of follies on islands and creeks to explore, with whimsical notices such as ‘Beware of the crocodiles’ and ‘Peter Pan’s property’. Ogilvie was a friend of the author J. M. Barrie.
The House In The Clouds began life as a 50,000-gallon water tank, constructed by the Braithwaite Engineering Company of London, serving Thorpeness. The water was pumped by Aldringham windmill, an attractive corn mill converted to a pumping station.
The tank was disguised as a house by Ogilvie, with architect F. Forbes Glennie and works manager H. G. Keep. First called The Gazebo, the clapboard structure erected in 1923 appeared to be a cottage floating 70 ft above the ground.
In fact, the house at the top concealed the water tank and the body of the building was the living quarters.
The first occupant was children’s author Mrs Malcolm Mason, who dubbed it The House In The Clouds.
It was hit by gunfire from anti-aircraft guns chasing a low-flying V1 bomb in 1943. Despite extensive damage, the occupants were unhurt. After repairs had been carried out, the tank volume was reduced to 30,000 gallons.
In 1963, an area water supply was introduced and pumping from the mill ceased. The tank was removed in 1979.
Today, The House In The Clouds is a holiday home with five bedrooms, three bathrooms and that rather splendid room at the top.
Mary Leigh, Cromer, Norfolk.
QUESTION Who was the first fish farmer?
CHINESE expert S. Y. Lin dated fish farming to 2000 BC, utilising the common carp (Cyprinus carpio).
The first written record of aquaculture is Fan Lai’s The Classic Of Fish Culture in 475BC. Though it has fantastical and metaphysical aspects, it is the first to record and describe the structure of ponds, methods of propagation and of feeding fish with silk worm larvae.
From 1000 BC, Ancient Egyptians farmed mullet and tilapia in man-made pools filled by the flooding of the Nile.
In Europe, Roman landowners cultivated fish so they could enjoy a rich and varied diet. Mullet and trout were kept in ponds called stews.
These continued into the Middle Ages and were part of the agricultural traditions at monasteries, and later in castle moats.
The first attempts to farm Atlantic salmon in Scotland were driven by a desire to improve wild runs, with the earliest recorded effort to incubate and hatch fish eggs in 1838.
Sir James Ramsay-Gibson-Maitland is described as the father of modern aquaculture. His Howietoun Fishery specialised in the study of trout and salmon farming, and supplied live ova and fish around the world using an egg case he invented. By 1890, there were 18 fish hatcheries in Scotland.
The ability to rear Atlantic salmon to maturity took another 80 years. The first marine fish farm was established at Loch Ailort in Inverness-shire in 1965.
After initially stocking the farm with trout, the operators switched to salmon, with the first commercial harvest of 14 tonnes in 1971.
R. S. Murphy, Belfast.
QUESTION Were a series of fake scientific papers published to prove eroding standards in the peer review system?
IN MAY 2017, two researchers using the pseudonyms Jamie Lindsay and Peter Boyle published a hoax gender studies paper, The Conceptual Penis As A Social Construct, in the peer-reviewed social science journal Cogent Social Sciences.
The real authors were Professor Peter Boghossian, of the Department of Philosophy, Portland State University, and mathematician Dr James Lindsay.
They were joined by British author Helen Pluckrose, and the following year put forward 20 fake studies published under false identities to highlight what they saw as poor scholarship and eroding criteria in several academic fields.
This became the Grievance Studies Affair. The trio highlighted several academic fields — post-colonial theory, gender studies, queer theory, critical race theory, intersectional feminism and fat studies — as beginning from the assumption of a grievance and then bending the available theories to confirm it.
Four articles were published, five were rejected and the remainder were under review when the hoax was revealed.
Two of the studies that were published and then retracted were Who Are They To Judge? Overcoming Anthropometry And A Framework For Fat Bodybuilding (Fat Studies) and An Ethnography Of Breastaurant Masculinity: Themes Of Objectification, Sexual Conquest, Male Control And Masculine Toughness In A Sexually Objectifying Restaurant (Sex Roles).
Dr Peter Boghossian recently left his academic post, stating Portland State University had become a ‘dogma factory’ where free inquiry is no longer possible.
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