Downloading My Brain

Brain drain

2012-01-29T14:54:00.002Z

This from a famous Trinidad calypso of 1968.

There are at least two sides to every argument about migration – it is not just those on the receiving end of inward migration who feel the need to protest.

And Stockport is one of those places which has benefited from having its own steel band.

from Brain Drain

So many good technicians away,
So many good doctors & engineers don’t stay,
But on teachers & nurses they put a strain,
And when they leave, people bawl ‘Brain Drain!’
Look, CLR James, that great writer,
He should be at UWI teaching literature.
Cricketers like Legall & Ramdeen
Still teaching the English to bat & spin.

Foreign artists coming here & getting jobs,
And Andrew Beddoe can’t make some bobs!
Why not put in every school a steelbandsman
To train children to beat pan?
Our children don’t know what’s B-flat on pan,
While the US Army & all have steelband!
That is what I call Brain Drain.

Hollis Liverpool (Mighty Chalkdust)

Links
Calypso Archives of Trinidad & Tobago and the Caribbean

Best of Trinidad: Mighty Chalkdust

Vintage Calypso Contest: Chalkdust
Hollis Liverpool (the Mighty Chalkdust) and his Calypsoes

Sunday Guardian interview 2009

Dr. Hollis “Chalkdust” Liverpool Lectures on the Influence of Music in Caribbean Society

THE UWI – SIXTY-FIVE YEARS ON
Panatonic Steelband

Diabetes coincidence

2012-01-28T23:06:00.001Z

This morning’s Saturday Live on Radio 4 included an interview with Sheila Thorn who is believed to be the world’s oldest surviving insulin-dependent diabetic. An inspiring story.

One small coincidence intrigued me. She was treated as a baby by Frederick Banting, who won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work with insulin.

This is an unusual surname, & I don’t think I had heard of Frederick Banting before, but I have heard of William Banting, the corpulent Victorian cabinet maker who is generally credited with having written the first modern book describing a weight-loss (low-carb) diet, thus setting off a whole modern industry.

Given the current concern about obesity & diabetes I think that counts as a coincidence of note.

Links
Saturday Live BBC Radio 4 28 Jan 2012

Sheila Thorn: 80 years of insulin

Frederick G. Banting: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1923

The Discovery of Insulin

Letter on Corpulence By William Banting

Surname database: Banting

Related post
Does weight matter?

Snow record

2012-01-28T18:16:00.001Z

Google is today celebrating the 125th anniversary of the largest snow flake.

I haven’t followed it up – I prefer just imagining the circumstances which led to this claim.

And it takes my mind off thinking about the real snow.

Today was the first of this winter when the high roads have been closed for snow, but so far we have got off very lightly in that department.

Any snow however must be better than all the wind & relentless rain

Windows on cassava

2012-01-27T19:36:00.001Z

Bill Gates (following the example of Michelle Obama?) gave a talk to students at a school in South London this week.

I was heartened to read that, in addition to fighting childhood mortality, the Gates Foundation also supports agricultural research – & that he especially mentioned cassava.

Another interesting snippet – the visit was arranged by Speakers for Schools, a charity set up by the BBC’s Robert Peston. With this kind of clout, no wonder he gets so many scoops.

Links
Bill Gates at DG!

[PDF]Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: Agricultural Development Strategy

Speakers for Schools

Related posts
Burger mystery

Before science

Cassava beer

Casareep - a neat philological circle

Fit enough to survive

2012-01-26T19:54:00.001Z

Doctors have discovered, just this week, that a neighbour has survived for 86 years with just one kidney.

Even more disconcertingly, they are saying that this lack of a second kidney was probably due to his having been born to a mother who was in the change. It’s the sort of thing that can happen at that time, they say.

I haven’t been able to find any mention of this ‘fact’ on the modern web, but we are talking here of a woman who must have been born c1880, old enough to be my great grandmother; things were no doubt very different then.

And her son has had the great benefit of having been born a member of the Golden Cohort, to experience unprecedented improvements in health & longevity.

Link
Kidney Dysplasia

Related posts
Family planning, maiden aunts & Hoovers

Genes & generations

Peace & awe

2012-01-25T19:07:00.001Z

Vikram Seth chose, as the one of his Desert Island Discs that he would save from the waves, a BBC sound recording from 1942. Intended to capture just the sound of nightingales, it also picked up the sound of Lancaster bombers on their way to raid Mannheim.

It is hard to describe the effect of this juxtaposition – both pleasure & disbelief – plus, for me & I guess for others of my age, intense feelings of childhood nostalgia. Listening leaves one transfixed, almost forgetting to breathe.

We were just too young to have memories of the war but we grew up when it was normal to walk down unlit streets or to be driven along rural roads where headlights provided the only illumination on moonless nights; we were told lots of stories about the blackout & we saw all those 1950s war films at a very impressionable age. We knew that the sound of bombers was scary, but these sound almost as if they were themselves part of nature.

Coincidentally BBC tv is broadcasting a 2-part filmed adaptation of Sebastian Faulk’s Birdsong – a novel about the First World War.

I have never read this book; by the time it came out in 1993 I felt I had had enough of such futility & emotion.

I once had the privilege of being lent a copy of a privately published ‘life’ of the great uncle of a friend; he had recently died, full of years, & this was his widow’s way of keeping his memory alive.

He had gone to Flanders as a subaltern straight from school. His diary described his experiences, including one passage which gave an account of how he had had to walk over newly-dead bodies packed deeply in the trench from which they had been fighting.

I was just thirty at the time & I just sat there thinking: He was seventeen years old.

That was enough; don’t need to keep being told.

Links
Desert Island Discs: Vikram Seth

RAF BOMBER COMMAND AT WAR 1939-45 (Vol 2)

[PDF] The Object of Nightingales: design values for a meaningful material culture

BBC: Birdsong
Hunt for the Nightingale's Song

Related post
Work & freedom

Trees make wood

2012-01-24T19:50:00.001Z

Can’t see the wood for the trees – such a well-worn phrase, hackneyed if not clichéd.

Almost universally understood to mean that the detail is getting in the way of seeing the bigger picture. You cannot see the shape of the woodland, only trunks, leaves, branches & bark.

Few stop to think that it can also go the other way.

Trees are made of wood – or at least that is what you get when you chop them down (or chop bits off) & leave them to season.

An expert – timber merchant, logger, cabinet maker or wood carver – can look at a tree & see the wood. See the colour difference between oak & ash, the grain, the knots formed by the branches. See the table, chair, floor or carved mouse into which it can be transformed.

Another kind of expert - forester, woodsman,tree surgeon - can control the kind of wood the tree will produce by judicious planting, pruning, thinning, watering & breeding.

For all I know a new breed of genetic arborists are on the verge of being able to produce a plank or block of wood to your speification, starting with just a single cell in a test tube.

It always depends on what you already know through learning & experience & which way round you are looking at it.

Killing in numbers

2012-01-23T19:30:00.000Z

29 murderers killed again in past decade said the headline.

Pardon?

No, it cannot mean that the murderers were killed for a second time – we don’t even hang them once these days.

Does it mean that the number of murderers who were killed, or who killed on more than one occasion, was the same as it was in the preceding decade?

No. Read the article & you will find that it means that, over the last 10 years, 29 murderers who had been let out of prison on licence took advantage of their freedom to kill again.

We hear quite a lot about killings by people who have been discharged from psychiatric care (or not even admitted when they say they need to be) but I don’t think that all these prison-release cases make it to the national news agenda. Makes me wonder how many of the repeats were regarded as merely ‘routine murders.’ On the other hand, at only three a year perhaps we don’t remember them even when they are reported, precisely because they are rare, even though rare usually equals newsworth.

Since the total number of murder victims is only about a dozen a week on average in the whole of England & Wales, you might expect that all would be newsworthy. But most of them are men, as are their murderers. Probably many of the circumstances bear a depressing familiarity, perhaps falling into the category of ‘six of one, half dozen of the other’ or ‘will not be greatly missed’. It would be interesting to see comparable figures of reported crimes based on national media rather than police sources.

Media reports tend to produce a different perception of the risks we face as individuals in other important ways. Women may think they are less safe when out alone, but home may in fact be the most dangerous place, since if you are murdered it is fifty/fifty that it is at the hands of a current or former partner. Not that this fact conclusively proves the contention. What is much more likely to be true is that the murder of a ‘respectable’ woman by a stranger is much more likely to attract lurid headlines.

Since the way that the word killed is used was on my mind, I noticed the way in which Roger McGough told us on this week’s Poetry Please that Randall Jarrell was 'killed by a car' in 1965 & that there was speculation that 'he took his own life'. Here there is real confusion about agency; although it is quite common - & perfectly allowable – to speak of someone being killed by an inanimate object which is incapable of forming an intention to inflict such damage, we may suspect that human negligence or even intent lies behind the event. Someone failed to maintain the wall that collapsed, or took their eyes off the road or, in the case of the depressed poet, deliberately walked in front of the car.

In this country there seems to be a growing belief that the driver should be prosecuted or held to account in every case where someone is killed ‘by a car’. In one sense this is odd, because deaths in road accidents are now much rarer than they used to be. This is not an uncommon trajectory however; at first we are excited by the new technology, envious of those who can afford it, anxious to experience its benefits for ourselves. Deaths are regrettable, but part of the price of progress: collateral damage.

Lessons are learned from the accidents, new safety measures introduced. We all learn, gradually & collectively, how to behave in the midst of traffic, whether our role is that of driver, passenger, pedestrian or cyclist. And society starts to make plain its disapproval of drivers who are careless or cavalier – punishment is inflicted, there is less tolerance of ‘human error.’

The more I think of it however, the more I think that road vehicles powered by the internal combustion engine have probably, on balance, done more to save lives than to end them prematurely, not least by ensuring that those who are sick or injured (whatever the cause), get appropriate medical help as quickly as possible, within the magic hour.

So now – because we’re never happy unless we have something to complain about – we can worry about what we are doing to the climate with our cars instead.

Links
Killers who go on to kill again under spotlight
Randall Jarrell 1914–1965
Related posts
Bad news can be no news
Highway locomotion
Keeping alive
What do people NOT die of?
Power to the People

Orion always comes up sideways

2012-01-22T14:58:00.003Z

Robert Frost’s Star Splitter featured on Poetry Please the other week.

It features so many images & metaphors which resonate with me – Orion, arson, infinity.

One day this terrible run of weather will change & Orion will once more be a regular & visible companion in our lives – no telescope that we could hope to obtain would be able to penetrate the murk & mist & cloud of this winter's sky at night.

But best of all the poem contains the line ‘For to be social is to be forgiving’.

The Star Splitter

‘You know Orion always comes up sideways.
Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,
And rising on his hands, he looks in on me
Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something
I should have done by daylight, and indeed,
After the ground is frozen, I should have done
Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful
Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney
To make fun of my way of doing things,
Or else fun of Orion’s having caught me.

Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights
These forces are obliged to pay respect to?’
So Brad McLaughlin mingled reckless talk
Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming,
Till having failed at hugger-mugger farming
He burned his house down for the fire insurance
And spent the proceeds on a telescope
To satisfy a lifelong curiosity
About our place among the infinities.

‘What do you want with one of those blame things?’
I asked him well beforehand. ‘Don’t you get one!’

‘Don’t call it blamed; there isn’t anything
More blameless in the sense of being less
A weapon in our human fight,’ he said.
‘I’ll have one if I sell my farm to buy it.’
There where he moved the rocks to plow the ground
And plowed between the rocks he couldn’t move,
Few farms changed hands; so rather than spend years
Trying to sell his farm and then not selling,
He burned his house down for the fire insurance
And bought the telescope with what it came to.

He had been heard to say by several:
‘The best thing that we’re put here for’s to see;
The strongest thing that’s given us to see with’s
A telescope. Someone in every town
Seems to me owes it to the town to keep one.
In Littleton it might as well be me.’
After such loose talk it was no surprise
When he did what he did and burned his house down.

Mean laughter went about the town that day
To let him know we weren’t the least imposed on,
And he could wait—we’d see to him tomorrow.
But the first thing next morning we reflected
If one by one we counted people out
For the least sin, it wouldn’t take us long
To get so we had no one left to live with.

For to be social is to be forgiving.
Our thief, the one who does our stealing from us,
We don’t cut off from coming to church suppers,
But what we miss we go to him and ask for.
He promptly gives it back, that is if still
Uneaten, unworn out, or undisposed of.
It wouldn’t do to be too hard on Brad
About his telescope. Beyond the age
Of being given one for Christmas gift,
He had to take the best way he knew how
To find himself in one. Well, all we said was
He took a strange thing to be roguish over.
Some sympathy was wasted on the house,
A good old-timer dating back along;
But a house isn’t sentient; the house
Didn’t feel anything. And if it did,
Why not regard it as a sacrifice,
And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire,
Instead of a new-fashioned one at auction?

Out of a house and so out of a farm
At one stroke (of a match), Brad had to turn
To earn a living on the Concord railroad,
As under-ticket-agent at a station
Where his job, when he wasn’t selling tickets,
Was setting out, up track and down, not plants
As on a farm, but planets, evening stars
That varied in their hue from red to green.

He got a good glass for six hundred dollars.
His new job gave him leisure for stargazing.
Often he bid me come and have a look
Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside,
At a star quaking in the other end.
I recollect a night of broken clouds
And underfoot snow melted down to ice,
And melting further in the wind to mud.
Bradford and I had out the telescope.
We spread our two legs as we spread its three,
Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it,
And standing at our leisure till the day broke,
Said some of the best things we ever said.
That telescope was christened the Star-Splitter,
Because it didn’t do a thing but split
A star in two or three, the way you split
A globule of quicksilver in your hand
With one stroke of your finger in the middle.
It’s a star-splitter if there ever was one,
And ought to do some good if splitting stars
‘Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood.

We’ve looked and looked, but after all where are we?
Do we know any better where we are,
And how it stands between the night tonight
And a man with a smoky lantern chimney?
How different from the way it ever stood?

Robert Frost

Link
Poetry Please: Winter, star-gazing and time
Orion Publishing Group: Illustrated More Poetry Please!

Related posts
Starstruck
Burning desire
The fascination of dust

Unsafe at night

2012-01-21T17:26:00.000Z

No woman in Norway has to work after 5pm, said the newspaper article strapline.

Reminds me of the good old days in the UK, before the Sex Discrimination Act, when women were often not allowed to work after 5pm.

For example Post Office telephone operators. The night shift was a male preserve – it was considered either indecorous or unsafe for women to be out on their own at night.

Not long after the SDA came into force I ran into a problem with the Building Society & my application for a mortgage – the (very old-fashioned looking) form demanded details of my husband’s occupation & income. I was not sure that this was in fact illegal, & so tried to get the phone number for the newly established Equal Opportunities Commission in Manchester in order to ask their advice. I waited until I got home in the evening, being a good girl who did not waste my employer’s money on private phone calls at work.

The operator manning Directory Enquiries could not find the number, asked me to repeat the name again & then asked what the organisation was for. When I told him, he responded with ‘Oh, you’re one of those are you’ & put the phone down.

When I did go back to the Building Society & queried the form the man dealing with my application was desperately embarrassed & said, Terribly sorry, that’s an old form, it should have been changed.

But the assertion about the working hours of women in Norway can be true only if night work is restricted to men – no women nurses, policemen, power station operatives, train drivers ...

I expect they were taliking about nice office jobs where one works only nine to five.

Links
Sex Discrimination Act 1975
The historical development of BT

Forecasting peril

2012-01-20T19:39:00.001Z

It has been reported that it could soon become an offence, punishable by a term in jail or a massive fine, to issue weather forecasts (including pollution forecasts) in South Africa without first getting permission from the national Weather Service. This has been variously interpreted as wishing to give the government–backed service a monopoly on commercial income available for forecasts or an attempt to punish those who issue false or alarmist predictions which frighten the people but turn out to be wrong.

Last September saw Italian seismologists put on trial for ‘failing to predict an earthquake’ – something which most scientists would agree is an impossible thing to do. The prosecutor denies however that he is mad: "I know they can't predict earthquakes. The basis of the charges is not that they didn't predict the earthquake. As functionaries of the state, they had certain duties imposed by law: to evaluate and characterize the risks that were present in L'Aquila’ Instead of giving clear advice about earthquake preparedness, as members of National Commission for Forecasting and Predicting Great Risks they simply tried to pacify the population, with the result that people died when the earthquake struck.

Meanwhile those who failed to predict the future of the US sub-prime mortgage market correctly, or used ill-understood mathematical models to predict the futures for them are still at large.

Links
Politicsweb: Why Weather Service Amendment Bill is necessary

Independent on line: Activists contest stormy weather bill amendment

Nature 14 September 2011: Scientists on trial: At fault?

Nature news blog: Italian seismology manslaughter hearing delayed again

Freakonomics: Italian Seismologists Charged with Manslaughter for Not Predicting Earthquake

Stanford News: Manslaughter trial of seismologists in Italy highlights need for 'systematic earthquake forecasting,' says Stanford geophysicist

Related posts
Met Office Matilda

We have been warned

Freemale

2012-01-19T19:45:00.000Z

This is one of those Google happenstances.

I was searching for a post about the Met Office getting their forecasts wrong, using the search terms Met Office Matilda & I got a classic article from the Daily Mail – Does every Miss secretly wish she were a Mrs?

The story starts with Abigail who doesn’t have a wedding ring on the third finger of her left hand and who loves curling up on the sofa with her cat MATILDA at the end of a busy day at work. The OFFICE for National Statistics recently produced figures which show that she is far from being alone - in the past 30 years the number of unmarried women in the UK has doubled.

Psychotherapist Paula Hall is quoted as saying that she has "MET several women recently who’ve told me they won’t wear their engagement ring to work because it might give out the message that they’re only really interested in marriage and babies"

Such an provocative story to get out of boring statistics.

The title of the piece says a lot however; surely only a Daily Mail sub editor could think that we have any misses over the age of 10 these days – aren't they are all Ms’s.

Another intriguing change in the language of relationships is in the use of the word single. This no longer denotes ‘never married’ but merely what we used to call breaking up with a boyfriend. Instead of serial monogamy, these days we have serial singledom – at the age of 27 Abigail has been single for only two years.

Personally I can’t wait for the 2011 Census results to find out if The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea is still the national capital for single women, or whether they have all been driven out by the massive increase in the price of property in the borough.

Links
Does every Miss secretly wish she was Mrs?

Population Estimates by Marital Status - Mid 2010
Related posts
Met Office Matilda

More on Ms
‎

Nesh nellies

2012-01-18T21:13:00.001Z

Preliminary results from the Met Office OPAL survey about what winter cold really feels like produced something of a surprise. There is no strong evidence to support the myth that northerners are hardier than softie southerners, but there is a big difference between how country folk respond to cold compared to city slickers.

Climate scientists speculate that this may be due to the warmer microclimates in areas which are densely packed with buildings & vibrating traffic.

A quick glance at the survey form reveals that they are not collecting any information about how people travel. Anyone who lives in a rural area& uses public transport will be much more exposed to the elements; bus stops & railway stations provide at best only minimal cover from wind & rain. In town you rarely have to be outside for very long as you scurry from one building to another.

Links
OPAL asks 'What does winter feel like?'

Urban dictionary: Nesh

Related post
Shoplifting again
Whatever the weather

Scptland & all that

2012-01-18T19:03:00.001Z

This Sunday afternoon’s tidying up unearthed an article from The Times from just before Christmas which cast an interesting light on the David Cameron & George Osborne’s sudden New Year stirring on the question of Scotland, independence, referendum, break up of the union …

Interestingly the article appeared in Times2, lifestyle & culture rather than politics: how, or if, the Scots are feeling independence in the air, the time is ripe …

And one very important aspect of the battle of which I at least had previously been totally unaware. Not only is Alex Salmond a formidable political operator but he is backed by a slick & effective campaigning machine. One which is very well funded.

Generous donors include, according to this article, the couple who won it big last year on the Euro lottery.

Unfortunately my housecleaning zeal got the better of me & I threw the article into recycling before making a proper note of the date or the author of the piece, so am unable to give due credit without getting behind the paywall. Of course I could ask the librarians to bring out the bundle of The Times for the likely dates for me to search through, but that seems too much like hard work these days.

Alternatively somebody could provide a modern online version of the invaluable Palmers Index to the contents of The Times.

Links

Cameron's referendum challenge to Salmond

Scottish couple win record 185-million-euro lottery

Palmer's Index to the Times 1790-1905

Related post
The psychology of getting & spending

Career choices

2012-01-17T19:11:00.000Z

Tony Blair vouchsafed an interview to The Times last Saturday to mark the 10th anniversary of Teach First, a charitable organisation which fast tracks top graduates into teaching in challenging schools.

Blair’s middle son did two years in the scheme which, his father said, ‘helped him to develop courage.’

But not to settle into teaching as a career. He is now a sports agent.

I could not help but wonder what kind of sports, what kind of agency. Olympics, perhaps?

But no; young Blair is registered as a FIFA football agent

Links
Football Officials – Agents

Blair's son to become a football agent

Cherie Blair turns football fixer to boost son's career as an agent

Related post
The Great I Am

Number 13

2012-01-16T19:12:00.000Z

According to a report from FindaProperty the number 13 knocks £6,511 off the value of a house – at least it has done so for those so numbered which have been sold in the last decade.

Now assuming we are comparing like with like (do we mean houses only, or are flats included?) this has implications for the recently reported finding that having the number 1 increases the value of your property, or indeed the comparison between the sale value of odd & even numbers. Thirteen is obviously a very special case, an outlier which should be removed from the comparisons

Cheer up

2012-01-15T16:16:00.002Z

Once more Hardy - who grows ever more of a comfort as I grow older.

Just now a week with no wind or rain, warm enough to go out without beng all trussed up in acrylic & down & waterproofing, would be paradise.

To Life

O life with the sad seared face,
I weary of seeing thee,
And thy draggled cloak, and thy hobbling pace,
And thy too-forced pleasantry!

I know what thou would'st tell
Of Death, Time, Destiny -
I have known it long, and know, too, well
What it all means for me.

But canst thou not array
Thyself in rare disguise,
And feign like truth, for one mad day,
That Earth is Paradise?

I'll tune me to the mood,
And mumm with thee till eve;
And maybe what as interlude
I feign, I shall believe!

Thomas Hardy

Related post
Down in the dumps

Open data

2012-01-14T22:32:00.000Z

On New Years Eve Tim Berners-Lee had an opinion piece in The Times about open data:

“All this data has been paid for by taxpayers. So the … mission will be to make sure that we can all make the best use of it”

The argument that the data is already paid for is interesting & used to form the basis of the pricing policy for Government publications; in the days when printed paper was the only option. marginal cost pricing meant covering the costs of printing & distribution only, content was free at that point to the user. As an undergraduates we could be expected to furnish ourselves with a copy of some relevant Government White Paper or statistical digest which, from memory, generally used to cost less than 2/-, cheap even in 1960s money.

As far as Government statistics were concerned however this came to an end with the publication of the Rayner review of 1981.

“There is no more reason for the government to act as universal provider in the statistical field than in any other”
Cmnd 8236: THE GOVERNMENTS STATISTICAL SERVICES.

And that wasn’t all: rather than provide data at marginal cost we were to start charging what the market would bear. Which of course posed a problem when the market may, in part, consist of students or members of the public keen to participate in debate as informed citizens of a democracy, & in other parts of businesses to whom information offers great potential for profit & who can therefore afford to price small none commercial users out of the market.

All out of kelter

2012-01-14T18:53:00.000Z

The ducks were in the stream right opposite our front gate on Friday morning – a whole group, both males & females. No ducklings, though it won’t be a surprise if they put in an appearance soon – everything is so topsy turvey with the weather.

The whole of the Christmas holiday period was marred by high wind & rain, made even worse in our case by continuing power cuts, of which we were getting sometimes two a day until, on the first Friday of the New Year, a lot of men & vans turned up & started to dig a hole in the road in the lane just this side of the bridge.

Although they have not yet completed the job, the temporary fix has at least meant no more interruptions to service. And with so much practice I have at last learned to reset the bedside radio without recourse to the sheet of instructions.

It may just have been ordinary wear & tear to something but I suspect that water must have been getting in to the underground cables. And that is probably a consequence of the strange weather too, since it meant that the usual timetable for sweeping up the leaves to keep them out of the drains finished well before they finally fell from the trees last year.

Join the club

2012-01-13T21:27:00.000Z

Earlier this afternoon I passed two young women on the street – one with a new baby – who were having a very animated discussion on the subject of ‘no money’.

Oh – you should join the Job Centre, advised one. They’ll pay you to go on a course.

A confusion of degrees

2012-01-13T19:46:00.000Z

Over on the Economix blog Catherine Rampell has been looking at the graduate premium in America.

Could some – even the majority - of the continuing benefit to lifetime earnings of a mere bachelor degree in fact be put down to the even greater rewards of higher degrees or professional qualifications for which a first degree is a prerequisite?

Well yes, maybe but a first degree is still worthwhile.

This does not quite seem to fit with the pessimism about the value of a PhD which was in The [British-based but internationally read] Economist just before Christmas.

I wonder if anyone has ever looked at UK figures in this way.

Link
Getting a Degree: Less Rigor, More Value

Related post
Doctored

Conservative class

2012-01-12T19:05:00.000Z

Another startling fact I learned from Supermac is that the Macmillan family sold Highgrove to the Prince of Wales, & that Rab Butler sold Gatcombe Park to the Queen, as a residence for Princess Anne. As author DR Thorpe remarked, it is some indication of the world in which the higher Tories lived at that time.

These days they socialise in the world of media moguls & tabloid editors, & despite moats & duck houses, their houses may not quite meet the degree of desirability demanded by the modern royalty of bankers & oligarchs. Our politicians are, at best, mere millionaires, not a single billion between them.

Thorpe also said that Macmillan’s demise marked the moment when it was no longer advisable or profitable for Etonians to wear their old school tie. I wonder if David Cameron even possesses such a thing? There are still 19 other Etonians among the current crop of MPs however.

On balance I suspect that, despite the disagreements over policy, the Conservative Party is really rather pleased to have their first proper gentleman leader since Sir Alec Douglas-Home: ‘The fact that Edward Heath did not hold back in his criticisms of Margaret Thatcher was proof to older Conservatives who often actually agreed with those criticisms that he was never really one of them, a gentleman’.

Links
Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan by D.R. Thorpe

The Prince of Wales: Highgrove

Royal Connections

Old Etonian Association

The Educational Backgrounds of Members of Parliament in 2010

Related post
That woman

One in a hundred million

2012-01-11T19:28:00.001Z

If you were to type the words downloading my brain into a search engine you might be offered, as I was with Google just now, one hundred and ten million results in 0.29 seconds.

Putting in the quotation marks to limit the search to exactly that phrase would reduce the number of results to a more manageable half million or so.

It makes me wish I had kept a record of the number of results I used to get when Googling my own blog was something I did most days. To the best of my recollection, when I started in late 2006 there was only one exact match other than this blog.

I would not claim any originality for the phrase, although I did not consciously copy it from anywhere. It is in fact a fairly obvious idea in this downloadable age – whether as metaphor or literal conceit – so it is not surprising that it should occur independently to so many.

In those long-ago days of 2006 it was quite easy to find quite commonly-used words as search terms which would produce no results at all. Google would be quite concerned & offer hints as to how you might change things in order to find something – anything.

No thank you, I meant precisely what I said, substitutes not accepted.

In reality the proliferation of downloaded brains must correlate highly with any other measure of the growth in the size of the web over the last five years. This phenomenal growth has the perverse effect of taking away some of the power or usefulness of search engines. No longer can you expect to find easily the most authoritative or original source; better, if you can, to go directly to the website of the originating organisation & hope that they have a user-friendly guide on their site.

Otherwise it teaches us the drawback of unlimited choice, & reminds us once again of the value of editors, indexers & those others who will be our guide as to what is worthwhile or at least meets our own peculiar* needs.

*In the sense of, as the OED explains, ‘Distinguished in nature, character, or attributes from others; unlike others, sui generis; special, remarkable; distinctive.’

Related posts
Translating public expenditure

Clear thinking

How very true

Googleisms

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And one that links to a site which no longer exists:
Well,well

Brotherhood

2012-01-10T19:44:00.002Z

In 1961 Harold Macmillan had to move his rising star, but turbulent priest, from the post of Colonial Secretary; Iain Macleod’s attitude towards the pace of decolonisation was anathema to the right wing of the Conservative Party. It may even have been too far to the left for Macmillan himself, with the proposals for the break up of the Central African Federation (the present Malawi, Zambia & Zimbabwe) in particular threatening to turn the wind of change into a damaging gale.

At the Conservative Party Conference, which took place in Brighton shortly after the reshuffle, Macleod made a farewell speech, which, according to DR Thorpe, was seen by his supporters as the greatest of his career. He ended by quoting Robert Burns’ A Man's A Man For A' That:

Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that,)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That Man to Man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that.

When Macleod’s successor at the Colonial Office, Reginald Maudling, first met his officials shortly afterwards, he said, “‘I suppose I’m looking at a lot of people who believe in the ‘brotherhood of man’”.

Obviously the idea of brotherhood, particularly between Black & White, between African & European, carried particular potency at the time.

In September 1962, as reported in NY Journal-American, Martin Luther King gave his reassurance that he wanted the white man to be his brother, not his brother-in-law, that civil rights were not the same thing as miscegenation.

No wonder that a quotation from a probably not-very-distinguished British political novel of the same era, in which a rising Conservative star puts a block on his career by remarking to a fellow dinner guest 'I said I wanted the African to be my brother, not my brother in law' sticks so firmly in my memory bank.

Links
Douglas Hurd on Iain Macleod

Cabinet papers: Rhodesia & the Central African Federation

Related posts
l'affaire Patrick Mercer

Brothers under the skin?

Interview priority

2012-01-09T21:41:00.000Z

The Times Saturday Review carried an interview by Valerie Grove with Gillian Slovo on the occasion of the publication of her latest novel about General Gordon of Khartoum.

William Stead, the campaigning journalist, is one of the characters in the novel.

This 2012 interview tells us that Stead had published what is ‘widely acknowledged as the first newspaper interview’ with Gordon in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1884.

The word British* should presumably be used to qualify that status as ‘first newspaper interview’, unless the information I gleaned recently in relation to Sir Arthur Sullivan is wrong.

I shall try to remember to check with Manchester Central Library’s superb collection of Victorian periodicals to get the full sense of how this interview was presented to readers, just as soon as the refurbished building is open again. Assuming of course that the periodicals have been thought worth the space they occupy, not thrown away to make room for superior modern digital methods of accessing our history.

* The Spartacus website gives the author Henry M Hyndman as the source for this assertion. Hyndman does acknowledge Stead’s ‘ American instructors’.

Links
An Honourable Man: Gillian Slovo

William Stead
Chinese Gordon on the Soudan
Chinese Gordon for the Soudan

Manchester Central Library

Related post
Intrusive Victorian interviews

More bells

2012-01-08T16:10:00.002Z

After the friendly bells of Betjeman last week time for something a little darker.

Edgar Allen Poe’s ruminations on bells starts joyfully & optimistically enough with the sleigh bells:

Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

But Poe is not quite so sure about the joy of wedding bells:

Hear the mellow wedding bells -
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
…
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle - dove that listens, while she gloats
On the moon!

His thoughts about funeral bells are every bit as anguished as those of Donne but much darker, with nothing ameliorate the terror.

Hear the tolling of the bells -
Iron bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
In the silence of the night,
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone!
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.
And the people - ah, the people -
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone,
And who, tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone -
They are neither man nor woman -
They are neither brute nor human -
They are Ghouls: -
And their king it is who tolls: -
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A paean from the bells!
And his merry bosom swells
With the paean of the bells!
And he dances, and he yells;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the paean of the bells: -
Of the bells:
Keeping time, time, time
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells -
Of the bells, bells, bells: -
To the sobbing of the bells: -
Keeping time, time, time,
As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells -
Of the bells, bells, bells -
To the tolling of the bells -
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells, -
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

Link
Funeral bells ring

Insulting men

2012-01-07T18:37:00.002Z

On Friday Woman’s Hour addressed one very puzzling aspect of one of the latest rows about racism in football.

Liverpool’s Luis Suarez, has been handed a heavy penalty for racism against Manchester United's Patrice Evra.

This tale is complicated by the nationality of the players involved & by the fact that there is a long history of rivalry, even enmity & hatred, between the two teams.

We are told that Evra started the spat by saying something ‘disobliging’ about Suarez’ wife/mother/sister. Suarez responded with a volley of the n word in Spanish.

But Evra has received no sanction or punishment at all; his insult apparently breaks no rule of footballers’ code.

Womans Hour sought the advice of experienced commentator Alan Green (a man who can always be relied on for an opinion) and former player Pat Nevin

Pat Nevin’s contribution was illuminating. First that only Latins seem generally to regard the impugning of the honour of a female relative to be an insult to a man, & secondly that most British players would react to such an insult with ‘Don’t be ridiculous’ rather than with fists or verbal retaliation.

I am sure that that is an oversimplification but he has a point. Offence has to be accepted as well as offered.

Football still has to answer the question of why insults to women on the field of play are not considered unacceptable.

Links
Liverpool striker Luis Suarez handed eight-match FA ban

Woman’s Hour Friday 6 January 2012

Related posts
Taking offence

Mind your language

Darwinian, but politically incorrect

Criminal conversation

Still the word

2012-01-06T21:15:00.002Z

According to a Yougov poll over a million e-readers were sold over Christmas, making them more popular than the iPad for those living outside London, particularly among women & older folk. Most of them were Kindles,so my rcent first sighting of a Kindle on a rural bus was truly representative of a trend.

It is not really surprising that people prefer technology which provides them in a straightforward way with something they already love & understand.

Coincidentally, yesterday The Economist’s Babbage blog reported that, contrary to the received wisdom that we all (not just the young) have developed the attention span of a gnat now that we have the whizzy instant gratification of the web, there is a lot of enthusiasm out there for ‘long reads.’

This week, in a special series on Radio 4, The Written World (not Word, as the Times listings would have it), Melvyn Bragg has been looking at how writing, which, rather like computing, was originally developed for the rather boring functions of accountancy & record keeping, has shaped our intellectual history.

Although he stops short of the new worlds of computer words, concentrating on the book, there is no doubt that, far from damaging the spread of reading, these new electronic forms are bringing literacy & the joy of reading & learning to more people than have ever had that privilege in the past

Links
A Kindle Christmas

Technology 2012

Reading online: Words, words, words

The Written World

Related post
Reading on the bus

Previously in favourite quotations (15)

2012-01-05T21:15:00.001Z

Childhood memories have no order & no end - Dylan Thomas

The reader of popular scientific books is very likely to think that he understands the science itself, when he merely understands what some writers say about science - Maria Mitchell (1818-89)

Cheaper than anything

2012-01-05T19:09:00.001Z

A startling report in The Times on New Year’s Eve blamed a steep rise in sexually transmitted infections among teenagers on the fact that alcohol is cheaper than water.

According to the journalists, an ‘unprecedented alliance’ of public health experts, doctors & sexual health advisers, led by the Royal College of Physicians & the British Association of Sexual Health & HIV is demanding that Something Must Be Done. In particular supermarkets should stop ignoring calls for a more responsible approach to pricing.

My suspicions were aroused by the finger pointed at Asda where cider is on sale at 70p a litre, compared with £1.35 for a litre of one brand of sparkling water. This turns out to be based on a quite separate exercise by Times journalists, who presumably failed to notice that Asda sell their own version of fizzy water for less that 10p per litre, & that cola & other ordinary pop type drinks cost nearly £2 in the popular small size bottles.

The report about sexual health & alcohol in fact points out that “Young people are more likely to drink higher strength drinks such as spirits ... and flavoured spirit based ‘alcopops’ ... with girls being more likely to drink spirits and wines than boys” &, while concerned about the affordability of alcohol compared with 1980, makes no specific recommendations on what desirable price relatives might be.

The government might, not altogether wittingly, have already done something to address the problem. According to the medical experts report teenagers with a weekly income of £30 a week are twice as likely as those with £10 a week to drink frequently in public places; £30 a week was the means tested sum given, in the form of Education Maintenance Allowance, to those from poorer backgrounds who stayed on at school or college. This has now been abolished in England.

And the Times journalists should have turned their report into a complaint about the rip off prices of internationally branded non-alcoholic drinks.

Links
NHS missing key opportunities to tackle alcohol abuse

[PDF] Alcohol and sex: a cocktail for poor sexual health

Education Maintenance Allowance

Doctored

2012-01-04T21:54:00.001Z

An article in the Christmas double edition of The Economist - The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time
– has been attracting a lot of attention.

When I was an undergraduate it was not very common (outside the natural sciences) for anyone to do a PhD as a full time student. Those destined for an academic career could still graduate in July & start work as an assistant lecturer in October (with the prospect of acquiring tenure in two to three years time), something of which I remind myself when we hear complaints of modern students being taught by mere postgrads, not proper professors.

Of course research & publication were required, but formal theses, submitted for examination, were quite rare.

We knew they did things differently in America.

One story which was current in my day illustrates this.

Alan Stuart was assisting Maurice Kendall with the new, revised edition of The Advanced Theory of Statistics, which even today, (having gone through even more revisions & expansions & acquired even more authors) is the bible of the subject.

Kendall was then working at an American university & wanted Stuart to join him. In those more expansive days – no problem, we can find him post.

Except that when he arrived & was discovered to have no PhD – whoops, sorry, our rules don’t allow mere bachelors to hold proper jobs in the academy.

The laid back Brits solved that one easily enough.

The Senate of the University of London simply awarded Stuart a DSc, which was clearly merited by the quality of his work.

I have been unable to trace any mention of this, quite probably apocryphal, or at least embroidered, story on the public web via Google, nor any reference to Kendall and/or Stuart spending any time at an American university during the years of the preparation of the new edition the late 1950s, though it is possible that the obituary in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Vol. 48, No. 2, 1999 may provide some kind of confirmation.

Links
The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time

[PDF]Jeremy Garwood: How did we get into this mess and why has it been continuing for so long?

Kendall's advanced theory of statistics

George Udny Yule

Maurice George Kendall

Kendall's Advanced Theory of Statistics - Kendall's Library of Statistics by Alan Stuart, Keith Ord, Steven Arnold, Stuart Ord, Tony O'Hagan, Steven O'Hagen

Alan Stuart 1922-1998: Basic Ideas of Scientific Sampling

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Exam nerve

Married politics

2012-01-03T21:55:00.003Z

DR Thorpe’s biography of Supermac turned out to be an unexpectedly good read.

In truth there were chunks that I skipped over – Suez & Profumo, for example I have had more than enough of. But – unlike so many academic (& political) books these days - it is superbly written.

At 879 pages it is dauntingly long, but the main text takes up a mere 626, the is rest the academic furniture of bibliography, index etc. No less than pages are given over to footnotes which are, in may cases, worth a book of their own, & a tremendous way of deflecting the criticism that an author who cannot bear to leave all these tidbits out is not in control of his material. Of course for this one needs a generously indulgent publisher. One friend was told by her academic press that (for her much more modest effort) she could have a bibliography or an index, but not both.

I also have to own up to the fact that my main motive for borrowing the book from the library was to find out more about his marriage to Lady Dorothy Cavendish, on which the Times had carried an extract.

The book does not actually carry very much more about the details of their relationship after Macmillan refused to give his wife a divorce when she wanted to marry Bob Boothby; instead, on solicitors advice, he offered her the ‘East Wing/ West Wing’ solution to maintain appearances & complaisantly accepted the continuation of the affair.

At least one reviewer complains that Thorpe did not get to the bottom of this behaviour.

It does not surprise me that much.

First Macmillan loved her – as he told others, & her in a touching letter he wrote on her 60th birthday.

Secondly there were four small children involved.

It would also be interesting to know what her family (not exactly unused to irregular liaisons) thought of the prospects of divorce.

My interest in the Cavendish family is now much greater than it was before I read the Diaries of Lady Frederick Cavendish, & I was pleased to see that she gets a small mention here; when Macmillan & Dorothy got engaged, her father (the then Duke of Devonshire) wrote to Lady Frederick (his aunt) to say that they were pleased about it.

What came as more of a surprise to me than the unconventional side of the marriage was the way in which Lady Dorothy did more than merely provide minimal wifely support for the sake of appearances. She worked very hard & even nursed his Stockton constituency with assiduity while Macmillan was away in North Africa during WWII.

But then that sort of activity was probably bred into Cavendish women.

Link
Supermac: the Life of Harold Macmillan by D R Thorpe: review

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Lady Frederick Cavendish

Tricks of memory

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Reading on the bus

2012-01-02T14:46:00.000Z

One consequence of the introduction of free bus passes for pensioners is an increase in the number of people I see reading on the bus – reading books, (mainly novels), which round here is a mainly female occupation & one that is more common in older than younger women. Most other people, if they read at all, have their eyes fixed firmly on a tiny screen.

But this week I have spotted my first Kindle (or similar) on the bus, in the hands of a young woman.

If I see her often enough I may get cheeky enough to ask if I can take a look to see if it is legible to my eyes in the winter evening gloom.

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Mathematic bells

2012-01-01T16:12:00.001Z

This characeristaclly rhythmic poem by John Betjeman was included in Radio 3's Christmas Day edition of Words & Music.

Quite apart from its other qualities it earns a place in my haphazard anthology of poems which use the words 'mathematics' or 'statistics'.

Bristol

Green upon the flooded Avon shone the after-storm-wet-sky
Quick the struggling withy branches let the leaves of autumn fly
And a star shone over Bristol, wonderfully far and high.

Ringers in an oil-lit belfry - Bitton? Kelston? who shall say? -
Smoothly practicing a plain course, caverned out the dying day
As their melancholy music flooded up and ebbed away,

Then all Somerset was around me and I saw the clippers ride,
High above the moonlit houses, triple-masted on the tide,
By the tall embattled church-towers of Bristol waterside.

And an undersong to branches dripping into pools and wells
Out of multitudes of elm trees over leagues of hill and dells
Was the mathematic pattern of a plain course on the bells.

John Betjeman

Link
The Rhyming and the Chiming: Words & Music Xmas Day Radio 3

The great parsnip shortage, & other Christmas tales

2011-12-31T17:43:00.002Z

No butter, no parsnips.

The first was Norway’s problem this Christmas, the second afflicted at least some parts of England.

Although outright shortages have become rare in these past years of plenty, Christmas shopping has become something of a lottery, or a game of chicken. Should I buy presents in good time, or wait to see if desperate traders slash their prices without waiting for the January sales? Will fresh food – vegetables, cream, bread, meat – be available on the last shopping day before Christmas or will retailers not risk being left with unsold stock when they will then be closed for two days?

Decisions, decisions.

Although I am quite unreasonably proud of the fact that I have finally learned that you do not have to lay in as in for a siege (the close down lasts at most two days now), that there is a limit to how many treats one can stuff down, & that it really will not be a disaster without X or Y, the disappointment can be sharp & nobody likes to be forced into last minute changes to the menu.

And so Friday it had to be for fresh food, & best go to the big supermarket, which will be open on Boxing Day so will not be running down on everything.

Obviously just following the herd.

It is a long time since I have seen the place so crowded, so many trolleys loaded to the gunwales. The atmosphere was interesting: happy but not overexcited, more a sense of purpose than the wild abandonment of spend, spend, spend.

There was no-one else going through the self-checkout tills, though on leaving the store I noticed that the bank of docking stations for the hand-held self-scanners was empty, every last one in use by those well-laden trolley shoppers.

But – no parsnips! And there were only a few boxes of Basic eggs left, & of course no lemon/lime flavoured fizzy water. Probably other things had run out as well, but they were the only ones that I was looking for.

***

If memory serves, I have not cooked a turkey since I was twenty.

That was the year my mother had major surgery at the beginning of November. Even today one might be advised not to take on all that lifting of roasting tins in & out of the oven & large pans of sprouts off the top of the stove after only two months in which to recover, but in those days both surgery & anaesthesia were more brutal than they are now (or even when I underwent the same procedure twenty years later) & my mother was still spending much of her time in bed, & in pain, so I was summoned home to take charge of Christmas cooking & shopping. I think I coped – cannot remember any disasters, though if there had been any I suppose they would just be wiped from the memory bank by shame & embarrassment.

In truth I think turkey very overrated, certainly not worth it unless there are at least six (& preferably a lot more) of you sitting down to Christmas dinner. Small houses without larders also mean that it is much more difficult to know how to store, safely, the remains until finally there is only enough of the carcase left to make a big pan of reviving vegetable soup.

But years living in a country where turkey was just not on the menu, & then working in London, where you went to so many lunches, parties & do’s during December that you were sick of turkey by the time it got to Christmas, meant that we looked for alternatives. Especially as I was certain I could never reproduce turkey as deliciously moist & tender as it can be when cooked by experts, such as those in the carvery upstairs at The Albert on Victoria Street.

Over the years we have had duck, goose, standing ribs of beef & even, one year, bream, which was delicious but not really Christmassy in England. In truth though the favourite has always been roast chicken with all the trimmings – a good sized, well fed chicken (4lbs+) roasted according to the recipe in the Penguin Cordon Bleu, & deliciously thick creamy, clove scented bread sauce made from a recipe by Ruth Drew who, as the Happy Housewife, used to provide post-war listeners to Womans Hour with all sorts of tasty but economical ways of feeding a family.

Sadly this feast is no longer properly possible – giblet gravy is an absolute must & nobody, it seems, sells giblets any more.

This year we had decided lamb would be good. Yes, I know lamb is associated with Easter, but that is the very young membranous kind; at this time of year lamb is closer to mutton, real comfort food, especially if you can find it with enough fat left on. Half a shoulder, I thought, preferably a blade; I can cook that reliably.

I went first to inspect the chiller shelves to see what was on offer there, while really hoping that the butchery counter might have something better to offer. But there – on the shelves – was a fine display of really nice looking lamb shanks & I had a sudden vision of a good heavy pot full, slow roasting in the oven, filling the house with delicious smells until the meat fell off the bone & could be eaten with a teaspoon if you felt so inclined.

I could not resist.

But what to do for that necessary touch of sweetness, without parsnips?

It seems rather astonishing that these wrinkly roots, which in my childhood were regarded as cattle food, should have achieved such very great popularity. Although I have loved them for years, roasted or in a well curried soup, they do not really seem to fit in with today’s preference for everything ready prepared, since they have to be peeled close to the time of cooking. But popular they are, & seem to be one of the few items for which the market has underestimated demand this Christmas.

I could try again on Saturday, but definitely not count on finding parsnips so, with roast potatoes, gravy & sprouts also off the menu without them, Plan B was definitely needed.

An unorthodox inspiration – a variation of a Madhur Jaffrey recipe, basmati rice with dried apricots, plumped up sultanas & shaved almonds. Served with a mound of buttery lemon-scented green vegetables (leek, courgette, broccoli & fine beans).

Worked a treat.

Filling but not stuffing.

***

The reward for enduring a very trying week of dark & miserable weather, albeit one ending with a pretty successful shopping trip, was a live relay of a truly perfect Messiah on Radio 3.

As a northern lass I can still appreciate a performance of The Messiah which gives it some real wellie – massed choirs, massive pipe organ and a brass band too – but these days I tend to prefer a style of performance of Handel which can really make the music dance with fewer resources thrown at it. The playing of Polyphony & a fine organist under conductor Stephen Layton, the flawless acoustic of St John’s Smith Square; lights down low, cup of hot chocolate; what more could one ask for to start the holiday.

Links
Butter no parsnips

The Incredible Norwegian Butter Shortage Is A Result Of 'Soviet Conditions' In The Industry

Sea bream with sherry
Homely hints by Ruth Drew
Messiah Radio 3 23 December

Related post
The daze of Christmas

Externalities

2011-12-30T22:58:00.000Z

The truth is that 97% of the British population is squashed on to 9% of the land. Our cities are bursting, & their infrastructures are bust. They are like medieval graveyards: hundreds of bodies piles on top of each other. We must build more homes … That doesn’t mean desecrating beautiful landscapes. It does mean ignoring the nimby yelps
Richard Morrison Times 18 November 2011

The price of property is attracting lots of foreign investors just now.

Our home grown Nimbys are like the Indians who sold Manhattan for beads – they use the economic arguments about external costs to argue for their right not to lose the external benefit of their space & beautiful views.

Leaving the costs to be borne by those who must live in overcrowded conditions. Just so long as no mean little boxes spoil the area around my Georgian rectory – I might have to drive past them on my way to the motorway to get to town.

Or I might, horror of horrors – have to live near something as distasteful as a factory or industrial unit which will only destroy OUR green & pleasant land & reduce the rate at which the value of MY house keeps on rising.

Criminal benefits

2011-12-30T19:48:00.001Z

I have been trying to trace the source of a report which was all over the news yesterday: according to official statistics, 33 per cent of Britons claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance have a criminal record.

No luck with the Department for Work & Pensions Corporate [sic] web site.

In fact the source seems to have been the Daily Telegraph, whose political editor Robert Winnett wrote the article, quoting minsters who are said to describe the figures as “truly alarming.”

Well, given that one third of all men in this country are said to have acquired at least one criminal conviction by the age of 30 (& that for an indictable offence), it does not seem as if the results of this new research (made possible by another data sharing agreement between the Department for Work and Pensions and the Ministry of Justice) should have come as all that much of a surprise.

Link
The Telegraph: Third of unemployed are convicted criminals

Related posts
D's and E's don't count

Riot studies

Economic intelligence

2011-12-29T19:59:00.002Z

Some pieces of intresting economic news or comment over the Christmas period.

Bank ratios
Under the headline ‘Why banks must think carefully before they shrink their assets’ Robert Jenkins (an external member of the interim Financial Policy Cttee of the Bank of England) provided (Times, 14 December) an admirably clear explanation of the potential dangers & difficulties posed by the new regulatory requirement that banks should increase their ‘capital ratios’. As he points out, a ratio involves both a numerator & a denominator; a ratio can therefore be increased by either shrinking the denominator or by making the numerator bigger (or by some combination of the two), with very different knock-on effects for the future health of the financial system.

And an apt quote: The technical phrase is ‘adverse feedback loop’. The less technical phrase is ‘shooting yourself in the foot’.

No link to online version available because of paywall

National wealth
On 20 December the Office for National Statistics published the latest report on the Wealth of Great Britain. Further investigation showed that this was solely about the real & physical property of private households only – the value of which has fallen because of the drop in house prices. The graph of House prices since 1953 on page 19 shows how much of an illusion the so-called increase in value must have been.

Does this include non-household wealth? - No

Or any details of financial holdings – including those of households? - No

Is there any indication of how much is owned by non-British nationals or non-residents? - No

We really do need GDW & GNW equivalents to the GDP/GNP in the national current accounts.

National debt
At the very end of an interview with Eddie Mair on the Christmas Day News Review of the Year on Radio 4, Robert Peston said that there is one thing at least for which we should all be very grateful to Gordon Brown, namely his decision to set up an independent debt management agency.

When considering questions of national solvency it is not enough just to look at the ratio of debt to GDP (or government revenues & expenditure); the repayment schedules matter a lot, & ours are a lot less onerous or immediately pressing than are those, for example, of Italy, thanks to the expertise of these agents. So perhaps that is one area where independence, even of democracy, is to be welcomed.

The magic of pricing
There are independent consultancies which specialise in advising companies on pricing strategy. One such is Simon-Kucher.

Sainsbury’s till receipts now carry the footnote: Based on price perception data, you can live well for less than you thought at Sainsbury’s. Those sound like good weasel words to me.

Links
Chancellor announces appointment of Robert Jenkins as an external member of the Interim Financial Policy Committee

Wealth in Great Britain - Main Results from the Wealth and Assets Survey 2008/10 (Part 1)

R4 Christmas Day News Review of the Year

UK Debt Management Office

SIMON-KUCHER & PARTNERS

Around the Sainsbiry’s aisles in 60 days

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The verb TO BE

Asset sales

Independent government

The illusion of income

Price fixing

Price psychology

Hedgehog identity crisis

2011-12-28T21:31:00.001Z

Hedgehog? Sea urchin? Or Plastic ball?

According to a news headline in The Times, giant hedgehogs are to be employed to protect fish from flying predators – not in some lush exotic rain forest populated by all sorts of strange forms of life, but in County Durham.

Weighted plastic balls, 1 metre in diameter, colour unspecified, are said, in the article below the headline, to resemble giant white sea urchins but are known as hedgehogs (grey/brown). They will be dropped into the River Wear in the hope that they will prevent herons or cormorants or other predators from catching fish.

How will the poor herons survive?

Can we look forward to seeing films of this made by the BBC Natural History Unit?

Links
Hedgehogs save fish in River Wear
Constructing & installing Hedgehogs at Rislip Farm

Related posts
Great fish need lesser fish
Nature walk

Tricks of memory

2011-12-28T19:13:00.001Z

One of the books I am reading at the moment is DR Thorpe’s biography of Harold Macmillan.

In this year when so many heads of state or dictators have died or been toppled, one startling fact really jumped out at me – Roosevelt, Mussolini & Hitler died within less than three weeks of each other in April 1945.

I suppose I must have known – read, or been told - those dates sometime, somehow, somewhere, but I had never before put them together at all. In fact I think I thought that Mussolini had died earlier, sometime around the time of the Allied invasion & the Italian armistice; the image of his hanging body & the fate of his mistress are certainly lodged firmly in my memory bank.

But then I faced another uncomfortable moment – I could not confidently say who had taken over from FDR as President.

Anyone who has ever, like me, been a student of methods of scientific sampling (especially in human populations) will be very well aware of the disaster that befell opinion pollsters in the 1948 US Presidential election, when the New York Times ran with the front page headline that Dewey had beaten Truman. The error was put down to the fact that the poll on which this was based had been conducted solely by phone & thus among a biased sample of those from the more prosperous sections of society, not at all representative of the population as a whole.

So I could remember that that was Dewey v Truman, but which, if either, was the incumbent & indeed was Truman a Democrat?

On any other day I should probably have felt confident that I knew the answer to these last two questions; it was the new intelligence about the events of April 1945 which made me suddenly doubt other things I thought I knew about the chronology of all other events around that time.

Another fact I learned for the first time from Thorpe makes it easier to understand why the idea that Dewey had won seemed - through wishful thinking - to make sense to those eagerly awaiting the outcome of the election.

Stocks on the NYSE had surged in value on the news of FDR death – which, at a time when we are all (including the London Times) very cross about the behaviour of our financial services industries today, will cause sharp intakes of breath & suckings of teeth.

On which point there is another apt quote from Thorpe: The events of 1931 & its aftermath had confirmed Macmillan in his deep distrust of the City & the Treasury – he dubbed them ‘banksters’.

Which is wittier than our modern w...... epithet.

Links
Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan: D. R. Thorpe
1948: The Great Truman Surprise
The 1948 election: Case Study II

Related post
Evil

Intrusive Victorian interviews

2011-12-27T16:29:00.004Z

It is strange to think that something which is now such a standard part of the journalistic repertoire was once regarded as foreign & therefore unBritish.

Towards the end of the C19th British journalists began to use impertinent & intrusive methods imported from America. They thought that prominent people, those in the public eye whose lives were of great interest to a mass readership, should make themselves willing & available to answer press enquiries. And if they happened to be out of town, why then reporters went importuning their families – even their elderly mothers - instead.

At least, I have come across one small piece of evidence for that assertion.

On 25 February 1874 (not yet Sir) Arthur Sullivan wrote to his mother from Manchester:

Dearest Mum: If you are bothered again by newspaper reporters, just say so far as I am concerned, I know nothing about the proposed knighthood beyond what I have seen in the newspapers. I don’t see why I should be ‘interviewed’ on everything that may be said about me. There is of course no foundation for such a thing & it only grows out of the good-natured fancy of the Hornet.
Arthur Sullivan 25 February 1874

To which quote Sullivan’s biographer Arthur Jacobs adds the gloss “‘Interview’ as a verb was in quotation marks as a foreign, ie American, usage.”

The OED confirms that Interview in this sense, namely To have an interview with (a person); spec. on the part of a representative of the press: to talk with or question so as to elicit statements or facts for publication; similarly, to talk with or question (a person) for a programme broadcast on radio or television, did indeed come from America, where it finds the first recorded usage in the New York Nation of 28 January 1866: ‘Interviewing’ is confined to American journalism.

The OED does find much earlier record uses of ‘interview’ as a verb, but only in the senses of To meet together in person (all dating back to 1548) or To catch a glimpse or get a view of (last recorded in 1624).

Not of course that British journalism had no bad habits of its own before it adopted bad ones from America.

Playing Haydn

2011-12-26T15:09:00.000Z

from Allegro

I play Haydn after a black day
and feel a simple warmth in my hands.

The keys are willing. Soft hammers strike.
The resonance green, lively, and calm.

The music says freedom exists
and someone doesn't pay the emperor tax.

I push down my hands in my Haydnpockets
and imitate a person looking on world calmly.

Tomas Transomer

A film by Pamela Robertson-Pearce and Neil Astley on the Blood Axe website includes footage of Tranströmer playing his piano.

The poem can be read in full here

Links
New Collected Poems: By Tomas Transtromer Translated by Robin Fulton

Tomas Tranströmer The Official Website

I want never gets

2011-12-25T16:20:00.002Z

I was listening to an item on RTÉ Radio 1 in which Victor Bartlem was telling the tale of how a letter which his mother wrote to Santa Claus 100 years ago had been found up a chimney.

It has quite a long list of 'I wants' & Victor said ‘We’re all like that, as children.’

And I suddenly remembered the standard adult riposte: I want never gets.

A sure way to introduce a foot stamping tantrum or a devastating retired hurt in the small child.

Links
100-year old letter to Santa

Society of Occupational Medicine: I want never gets

Poem Lovers: I want, never gets

Moving joke

2011-12-24T15:40:00.002Z

Werner Heisenberg was out, driving his car. He was stopped by the police.

‘Do you know how fast you were going, sir?’ asked the officer.

‘No. But I do know where I am.’

Answer too clever by half , but I hadn't realised what a clever question that is - until it happened (once & only once) to me.

In the days when such a thing was still possible I was enjoying a carefree drive down Maida Vale, the section with long curves, & tall trees to the right, just coming up to the turn for Lords cricket ground.

A Panda car overtook, signalled left. I assumed he (all police drivers were male in those days) was going to turn.

He was signalling me to stop - which I, fortunately, managed to do without crashing into him.

He addressed the Heisenberg question to the chastened young lady I had turned into.

Answer 'Yes' & you admit to speeding.

Answer 'No' & you admit to driving without due care & attention.

That the Heisenberg answer would not have occurred to me is not significant - I would not have dared to use it.

I decided it was preferable to admit to knowing what I was doing.

And the policeman let me off with a warning not to do it again.

Links
The Uncertainty Principle
Police car UK

Related post
A failure of legal argument

Sent to try us

2011-12-23T19:14:00.002Z

Weather foul – bursts of heavy rain, wind gusting & swirling unpredictably; it’s easier to get up a hill covered in ice & snow than to struggle against this.

The leaves stayed on the trees too long to be swept up & kept out of the drains by the regular autumn clearance programme, so surface water everywhere – even the bridge is flooded again.

And we had another power cut starting around noon. Fingers crossed it will be back on again when I get home.

Happy Christmas.

Related posts
Asset sales
Leaves down the drain

Shopping not dropped

2011-12-22T19:36:00.001Z

Children clearly matter more than ever this year when it comes to Christmas shopping.

All those people out shopping on the day of the public sector pension strike were mainly doing it to keep the children occupied on their day off school.

The town shopping centre has been opening late every Wednesday during December. Although not by any means deserted, you could not have called it busy - until last night. School officially out now, & so were the crowds, respectably, though not staggeringly, laden with carrier bags.

A relatively small but very impressive a capella choir provided arrangements of Christmas songs whose harmonies & intricately intertwined voices were a joy. They did not seem to be collecting money for anything – at least I could not see any boxes when I went over.

Shops seem to have been much more discreet altogether this year with their Christmas music. When it has been playing at all it has been much more quiet, often real old fashioned songs which were around even before I was born, rather than the more raucous, bounce around & spend, spend, spend we had grown used to.

This noontime, for the first time in a long time, the bus was held up by a tail back of traffic trying to get into Sainsbury’s car park.

The one big decision left is whether to finish the food shopping tomorrow, or take the risk of finding bare shelves on Saturday in shops unrestocked because they are going to be closed for the next two days.

Abdication calypso

2011-12-21T21:34:00.001Z

Thanks to LastFM for introducing me to The Caressser & his 1938 calypso about the abdication of Edward VIII

Links
You Tube: Lord Caresser - Edward VIII (entitled Love alone when Belafonte sings it)
Edward VIII calypso: Cecil Anderson (Duke of Iron)
The Political Calypso: True Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago, 1962-1987

Wild etymology

2011-12-21T19:22:00.001Z

I was listening to this morning’s episode of Radio 4’s Book of the Week – The Etymologicon, by Mark Forsyth.

This is wonderfully read by Hugh Dennis & right up my street but, like cassava pone, proves that you can have too much of a good thing.

It was during this morning's excursion into how the guinea pig got its name that I suddenly thought: Crikes! I think I’ve eaten guinea pig.

My brain, like so many others full of a heavy cotton wool cold right now, is unable to cope properly with sifting the information conveyed via Google one screen at a time to sort out whether or not this might be true.

Was it agouti or cavy? Or capybara?

But it makes me quite proud to find that, according to Kitchen Daily, I share my confusion with none other than Charles Darwin.

Charles Darwin and his shipmates, in S. America in the course of their voyage round the world aboard the Beagle, ate agouti, which Darwin described in his journal as ‘the very best meat I ever tasted’. (However, he thought agouti and cavy were interchangeable names, so he may have meant a guinea pig.)

Agouti: Kitchen Daily Food Encyclopaedia

Links
Guinea pig: Kitchen Daily Food Encyclopaedia

Icon Books: The Etymologicon

Mark Forsyth: Bookseller profile

Inky Fool

You Tube: Mark Forsyth

Radio 4 book of the Week: The Etymolgicon

Capybara

No more cutting

2011-12-20T21:11:00.001Z

Radio 4 recently carried a programme about the decline of consented post mortem in Britain, which is ascribed in part to the scandals at Alder Hey.

According to a recent posting on The Economist Babbage blog however, the problem may be even worse in America, so we may have to look for explanations elsewhere.

Perhaps it is all those grisly serial killer post mortem porn books, tv & films which have put everybody off the idea.

Blame Patricia Cornwell & Val Mc Dermid.

Links
Radio 4 Post Mortem
Babbage: Reviving autopsy

Related posts
They used to do what?
What do you want to be
Post mortem scandals

Midnight robbery

2011-12-20T19:33:00.000Z

The village newsagent was robbed last night – cigarettes of course.

Links
Federation of Wholesale Distributors warns of rise in tobacco theft

Related posts
Demand, theft, supply
Dopes
Smoke screen

Dry stone wall woman

2011-12-19T19:30:00.001Z

Back in October I caught the end of an item on the Today programme which I was sorry to have missed. At long last I have followed the instruction in my notebook to follow it up by Googling ‘dry stone wall woman.’

Now I know what I want for Christmas.

Links
Mariana Cook Photography

BBC Today: Your pictures: Dry stone walls

NYR: Slide Show: Stony Places

New York Times: There Can Be Beauty in Barriers

Thinking with my hands: Mariana Cook

Related posts
Dry stone walls
The walls of the Big Society

St Lucy

2011-12-18T15:00:00.001Z

Time for more Donne, this one appropriate for the time of year.

A NOCTURNAL UPON ST. LUCY'S DAY,
BEING THE SHORTEST DAY.
by John Donne

'TIS the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
The world's whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring ;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness ;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have ;
I, by Love's limbec, am the grave
Of all, that's nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown'd the whole world, us two ; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else ; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death—which word wrongs her—
Of the first nothing the elixir grown ;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know ; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means ; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love ; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

But I am none ; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all,
Since she enjoys her long night's festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's and the day's deep midnight is.

Links
Saint Lucy
Holidays, Equinoxes, Solstices & Cross Quarter Days

Number objects

2011-12-18T05:30:00.000Z

Britain is not the only western country concerned about the ability of its population to handle mathematics.

The French are looking to methods devised by an Iranian born woman who believes that the problems are down to the impenetrable language in which mathematics is taught, & insists on children being given a thorough grasp & understanding of the concept of number.

I am somewhat puzzled by the example of the teaching materials which I have seen. For example, in the lesson on ‘4’ children are asked whether that number can be applied to a picture of a table, & to give an explanation for their answer; both yes & no are acceptable, depending on whether that is because there is only one table, or because it has four legs. Similarly either answer is acceptable when asked of a picture of a dog. The four letters m-e-l-l also count as four.

But Yes is not an acceptable answer to the same question about a collection of 4 rubbers, pens & pencils because Mrs Baruk bans pupils from answering ‘four objects’.

The logic escapes me.

Links
[PDF] Les maths en kit
Related post
The twoness of two

Doomy Christmas

2011-12-17T19:08:00.001Z

Today might be the day that everyone has – finally – gone shopping; the library is remarkably quiet, though perhaps that is just because many people have not yet surfaced from what was supposed to be the biggest office party night of the year last night.

Thursday was a wash out for the shops. There were only six people on the 1 o’clock bus into town – something which hasn’t happened since bus passes went completely free. Coming home, the bus had to linger at timed bus stops at least twice, something else virtually unheard of these days, mostly because increasing congestion & growing numbers of passengers to load mean that buses are rarely running ahead of time.

Perhaps everybody had just decided to stay at home because of the dire warnings about the weather that were issued earlier in the week. Which means that the Met Office undid the good turn that the public sector strikers had done for the shopkeepers at the end of November.

It wouldn’t take very much to put people off & persuade them to hold their purses tight however. Yesterday evening I overheard one woman say to an acquaintance that ‘things are really dire’ in response to a question about her Christmas shopping.

Two new outlets have opened slap in the centre of town – one for Pay Day Loans, one offering to buy your gold.

The Pound Store is the only one which has queues all the time at the till.

And unsold Christmas Specials at bargain prices were piled high just inside the supermarket door last night.

Related posts
Who’d have thought it

Unreliable timetables

Star bosons

2011-12-16T21:00:00.003Z

William Waldegrave wrote a column in Wednesday’s Times in which he reminisced about the day he issued a challenge to physicists to provide him with an explanation of the Higgs Boson which would fit on one side of a sheet of A4 paper.

One fact new to me was that he had promised a bottle of vintage champagne to the winner, & in the event found himself having to fork out for five bottles when the panel of eminent physicists, who judged the entries, decided that that number were equally outstanding.

Waldegrave regarded as ‘the most fun’ the explanation which used the analogy of the effect a certain female prime minister would have when she entered a crowded room, gaining mass as others gathered round her.

Not so very coincidentally, at about the same time as The Times was hitting the streets or the ether, Radio 5 Live’s Up All Night was talking to a physicist in America about the latest news from CERN. Asked if he could provide a simple explanation of the Higgs Boson the physicist said there was one – regretfully he was unable to say who had first come up with it – which clearly impressed presenter Giles Dilnot mightily.

It was of course the same as William Waldegrave’s ‘fun’ version, except that in the American adaptation the person capable of having such an effect is a female rock star.

Which reminded me in turn of a studio discussion I heard some years ago – also probably on 5 Live. The subject was Hugh Grant, then going through one of his less than happy periods.

Somebody stuck up for him: Whatever you think, he is one of those special people – when he’s in the room everybody else wants to be near him, they all move in his direction.

I wondered if, subconsciously at least, the speaker was thinking of particle physics as they said that?

Links
CERN Press Release: ATLAS and CMS experiments present Higgs search status

Missing Higgs

Related post
Explain to me about everything

Met Office Matilda

2011-12-15T21:24:00.004Z

So what happened to this 20-year storm which was supposed to hit us today?

Newspaper meteorologists, the Met Office & climate change believers are way too fond of putting the wind up us.

Some of us have spent the days since Sunday in a state of very real anxiety.

When it doesn’t happen we just get cross & stop believing anything they tell us

Extract from Met Office forecast for today:

15 December 2011: dawn to dusk
Peak District mountain area forecast

Forecast issued: 0523 on Thursday, 15 December 2011
Overview for Thursday

Wintry showers early and late but some dry, bright weather in between. Lighter winds than recently but still a chilling breeze, especially later.

No risk of Blizzards; Storm force winds; Gales; Thunderstorms; Heavy persistent rain; Strong sunlight;

A cloudy start to the day, with showers, falling as snow above about 200 to 300m, but becoming mainly dry mid to late morning, with some bright or sunny intervals developing, before further cloud and showers arrive towards dusk, again wintry over the tops. Light winds at first but increasing somewhat later.

Maximum winds above 400m: Westerly to southwesterly 25 to 30mph during the afternoon.

Link
UK put on severe weather alert with forecast of TWO huge storms

Related posts
Fire, pestilence, now flood
Met Office Matildas
Wild life in the garden

Seeing the pattern

2011-12-15T19:51:00.001Z

In 2009 James Crook, emeritus professor of mathematics from South Dakota, published on the website of the American Mathematical Society a formula for solving every Su Doku grid. It runs to 9 pages & involves concepts & techniques such as pre-emptive sets, completion chromatic polynomials & hidden tuples.

Spoil sport.

When Su Doku first hit The Times in 2004 I thought: How boring – no laughs there, unlike the cryptic crossword.

But when I could no longer see to do the crossword on the bus going home I tried the numbers thing – larger print, more white space & greater contrast; easier to read in the dim light.

It was OK, but I thought it might be more interesting to look at the mathematics of it – simple permutations or combinations of a mere 9 digits – even though I used to hate all those problems in Feller about the probability of husbands & wives sitting next to each other at dinner.

I soon gave up on that idea – no wonder really in the light of the illumination provided by Professor Crook.

I did however persevere with the puzzles & a strange thing happened – I found it much easier to do those at the higher levels of difficulty as these were introduced. In fact I sometimes find Super Fiendish laughably easy, & certainly less tedious than the Easy ones.

This must in part be a simple case of practice & familiarity, of knowing what to expect &, perhaps subconsciously, remembering techniques & tricks which have worked on earlier occasions.

The techniques are tremendously difficult to describe in words – as the introductory explanations & instructions provided in some of the books of collected puzzles show only too well. I can only describe the method as ‘seeing the pattern.’

There are physical factors which make it much easier for me to successfully complete one of these problems – notably lots of white space around the puzzle & smooth paper which does not get scuffed up by the eraser; I especially like those books with a spiral binding which you can open out flat, a single puzzle per page of smooth white paper. I do not like a grid much larger than the size normally adopted by newspapers.

I also find it essential to use a Paper Mate non-stop 0.7mm HB pencil.

I never enter possible alternatives in an empty square, except occasionally just two – never (like at least one previous winner of The Times National Championship) all possible candidates, to be eliminated & erased one by one - & is essentially Professor Crook’s method.

I find it much harder to complete puzzles where the numbers already inserted form a zig zag pattern; the first step on the way to a solution is to fill in the cells which will straighten up the layout. The pattern is at least as important as the individual numbers – something which was made startlingly clear in a post by David Speigelhalter on Randomness in Art: he asked us to spot the fake piece of random art from a set of 4 Su Dokus-type grids with colours rather than numbers – in that case it was the pattern formed by squares coloured in a particular shade of acid green which immediately gave the game away.

All this solipsism has a wider point. Ultimately we, each of us, have only our own experience & reflective cogitation to go on, even if we have the resources & ability to design & conduct psychological or neurological experiments on a wide variety of ‘subjects’ under laboratory conditions.

The older I get, the more faculties begin to fade, the more we hear how brain scans show up ‘real’ differences between the way different brains perceive or respond to the world, the more I realise that the old idea, that the world simply IS, with ‘I’ its flawed observer & interpreter, is not true.

Each one of us inhabits a different world, one described & limited by our own perceptive abilities – mine are different from yours; that world out there is different.

We overlap enough however. Like a kind of multi-dimensional stereo vision bringing the parts together to make a whole.

The world is a kaleidoscope.

And Su Doku is only a pastime.

Links
James Crook

[PDF] A Pencil-and-Paper Algorithm for Solving Sudoku Puzzles

William Feller (1906-1970)

Pure Randomness in Art

Related post
The Universe as a bundle of thrums

Talking about music

2011-12-14T17:37:00.001Z

I don’t know if Desert Island Discs was, in 1942, the original radio programme where an interview is disguised as a discussion of the guest’s favourite music - that friendly format which allows the interviewee to show off, sometimes unashamedly & without challenge, its genius in making them choose the only eight records they could listen to, possibly for the rest of their life – we all like to play that game.

Private Passions has been going on Radio 3 for a mere 15 years. There is more musicology in the interplay between Michael Berkeley & his guests (who do not necessarily have any musical training) & the format produces some interesting exchanges about how music produces its effects on non- experts who nevertheless have an ‘ear.’ I am intrigued to learn from the website that the programme is recorded in Michael Berkeley’s own London home. The musical choices are played at greater length – whole tracks, if not actually whole works.

Classic FM has the Classic FM Interview on Saturday evenings where the bonhomous Nick Ferrari talks to ‘some of today’s best known personalities’ about their lives & favourite pieces of classical music.

Now Radio 3’s weekday mid-morning Essential Classics adopts the same format between 10.30 and 11, with the same guest stripped across the week. One newspaper reviewer finds this a bit too much – said that by the end of the week the interviewee seemed like a house guest who had outstayed their welcome.

I had a different concern – trying to work out if the item goes out live every day, with the guest having to trek to the studio, or whether the chat is recorded all in one go & the programme put together later.

Certainly some of the earlier guests sounded surprised by the interviewer’s Hello! on Tuesday , Wednesday …, but recently it has sounded less forced. Since 5 mornings for a whole week would be quite some undertaking for a guest with plenty of other commitments I suspect it must be pre-recorded (by the same company which produces Private Passions) & not necessarily in the studio at all.

The website says gnomically that “Their choices are spread across the week’s programmes.”

I recently heard a trail on RTÉ Radio 1 for a programme with what sounds like a very similar format, but unfortunately on one of their FM or digital stations which cannot be picked up over here by old-fashioned steam radio.

Links
The Classic FM Interview

Radio 3 Essential Classics

Michael Berkeley

Radio 3 Private Passions

Classic Arts: Private Passions

Making the best use of our time

2011-12-13T21:42:00.000Z

This time it was BBC radio which managed to disorient me in the late night/small hours of the morning.

At about the time I have still not got used to not hearing Bridget Kendall’s Forum, up popped Melvyn Bragg & guests, discussing Shinto.

Have they moved In Our Time onto the World Service?

Not exactly.

Just thriftiness in the face of BBC budget cuts perhaps.

An edition of In Our Time broadcast on Radio 4 on 22 September 2011 was being broadcast as part of a series called Heart & Soul on World Service.

Bridget Kendall’s Forum has been moved to the early hours of Saturday/Sunday night.

Cedric & Sid

2011-12-13T19:33:00.002Z

Tell Sid, the advertising slogan for sales of shares in the newly privatised British Gas, was a Treasury in-joke.
‘Sid’ was Sidney Webb, one of the earliest members of the Fabian Society (& founder of LSE), who wrote the original Clause IV for the Labour Party which called for the nationalisation of the gas & water industries.
Ian King Times Business Diary 22 November 2011

It is also either ironic or salutary to remember the fuss that was made about the pay of Cedric Brown when he got a 75% pay rise as Chief Executive of the by then privatised British Gas. I was always convinced that his name*, nowadays considered old fashioned & effeminate, only added to the contempt in which he was held during that media storm & fit of morality.

If only we had known how much more inflation there would be in the pay of senior managers.

* According to Wikipedia Cedric is a male given name invented by Walter Scott in the 1819 novel Ivanhoe, possibly misread for Cerdic, the name of a Saxon king, anglicized from Welsh caredig (‘beloved’).

Links
Sidney & Beatrice Webb in Westminster Abbey

LSE history

Derbyshire & the LSE

Why does everyone hate Fred the Shred?

1986: British Gas privatisation and the search for Sid

Related post
Woolf report

Eight thousand bucks

2011-12-12T21:58:00.001Z

More evidence of what can happen when something is lurking at the front of your mind.

On BBC Radio 2 on Sunday night Russell Davies played a comedy song about a young man chasing girls.

The first verse ends with the line '$8000 bucks down the drain.'

Except that, because of the recent media preoccupation with when it may be permissible to swear in public, my mind completely misheard an F where there should be a B.

Of course it could not be an F - not on the BBC, not on Sunday evening.

Just to be sure, I checked the programme schedule on the website.

I wanted to get
Some new girlfriends,
So I went and bought
A Mercedes Benz.
A waste of money!
Eight thousand bucks down the drain.

Alan Sherman: A waste of money

Links
Russell Davies 11 December 2011

Related post
Evidence based law

Recorde of statistics

2011-12-12T19:43:00.000Z

Richard Hamblyn’s collection, The Art of Science: A Natural History of Ideas, introduced me to this wonderfully spirited paean to Arithmetick, extracted from Robert Recorde’s The Grounde of Artes, Teachying the Worke & Practise of Arithmetike, much necessary for all States of Men, which was published in 1543 during the reign of Henry VIII.

Doctors gather so great mysteries out of number & so much do write of it. And if I should go about to write of all the commodities of Arithmetick in civil acts, as in governance of Common-weales in times of peace, & in due provision & order of Armies, in time of war, for numbering the Host, summing of their wages, provision of victuals, viewing of Artillery, with other Armour; beside the cunningest point of all, for casting of ground, for encamping of men, with such other like: And how many ways also Arithmetick is conducible for all private Weales, of Lords & all Possessioners, of Merchants, & all other occupiers, & generally for all estates of men, besides Auditors, Treasurers, Receivers, Stewards, Bailiffs, & such like, whose Offices without Arithmetick are nothing: if I should particularly repeat all such commodities of the noble Science of Arithmetick, it were enough to make a very great book.
Robert Recorde c1510-58

Britain is (finally?) to develop a cutting edge workforce in everything from medicine & science to car manufacturing & digital technologies with the aid of a dozen maths colleges for 16 to 18 year olds, one in each major city in England (Which they? Surely London needs more than one?) Since we do not have enough maths teachers in schools they will be linked to universities & will be totally free in matters of pupil selection & curriculum.

We need them to ‘help make England an intellectual, cultural & economic leader in a field vital for our future’ said one official.

They will all be up & running by the time of the next election.

Fact: # of maths lessons currently taught by non-maths specialists??

Links
Robert Recorde biography

Robert Recorde of Tenby

The Robert Recorde Memorial

Richard Hamblyn

The Art of Science: A Natural History of Ideas

Give and take on schools funding

Autumn Statement: Maths schools

Mathematics and Computing College

[PDF] Autumn Statement

Related post
The first statistics of happiness

Construction statistics

2011-12-11T21:33:00.003Z

I have belatedly become aware of the Statement of the UK Statistics Authority on the error in the estimates of Construction Output which were released to the press last August.

Oh dear, oh dear.

This is a short story which tells (rather elliptically), of yet another part of the civil service experiencing problems of management & morale – problems that have been afflicting much of the civil service for some time.

A simple clerical mistake in a spreadsheet formula (which apparently needs to be updated for each new quarter) was not spotted in time.

The report tells a story of staff under a great deal of pressure, following changes in responsibilities, extra work making revisions to previous series, & outdated computer technology. Reorganisations & budget cuts have clearly played their part.

But, even more alarmingly, the report suggests that all this ‘raises a question about the role of senior managers … managers may have to accept less freedom to define their own roles on the basis of their personal understanding of what is needed and the prevailing culture of the office.’

Whatever is meant by ‘senior management’ in this context, the comment suggests a disturbing lack of grip & sense of collegiate responsibility at the highest levels.

Link
[PDF] Review of error in construction statistics
Related posts
Mistakes will happen
The servants done well

Strange sights

2011-12-11T14:39:00.002Z

This is another heart wrenchng poem about love & old age from Thomas Hardy

She Saw Him, She Said

“Why, I saw you with the sexton, outside the church-door,
So I did not hurry me home,
Thinking you'd not be come,
Having something to him to say.—
Yes: 'twas you, Dear, though you seemed sad, heart-sore;
How fast you've got therefrom!”

“I've not been out. I've watched the moon through the birch,
And heard the bell toll. Yes,
Like a passing soul in distress!”
“—But no bell's tolled to-day?” . . .
His face looked strange, like the face of him seen by the church,
And she sank to musefulness.

Thomas Hardy

Link
Thomas Hardy blog

Pronouncing Calcutta

2011-12-11T10:32:00.000Z

It was only with the reports of the appalling fire in Calcutta that I noticed that BBC radio news readers were pronouncing the name of the city as if it were spelled more like Culcutta.

The information on the web does not make it clear when this change was adopted – one site suggests 2001. Did I fail to notice because Calcutta does not often make it on to the domestic news bulletins?

The official variant adopted by the current BBC news website is actually spelled Kolkata, just to add to the confusion.

Links
BBC news in pictures: Calcutta hospital fire

How did the city get the name Calcutta ?

The politics of economic integration

2011-12-10T22:37:00.000Z

My gut instinct is that David Cameron was right to refuse to sign up to the latest woolly European proposals which could lead to heaven knows what. Signing up to yet more ‘Europe’ would probably have led to a political explosion at home, & one not led by,(contrary to what they like to think) gleeful told-you-so Euro sceptics.

It is unfortunate that Cameron should have done this to protect our so-called financial services ‘industry’, whose apparent size & importance is in large part an illusion & delusion, based on the continuing debt-fuelled inflation in asset prices.

Politics right, economics wrong.

A different kind of snow

2011-12-10T17:25:00.001Z

It seemed that we had escaped the worst of the winter storms which were battering much of northern Britain last week. We had heavy squally showers, intermittent high (but not gale force) winds, & no snow to speak of.

Friday morning’s local weather forecast foretold of showers, possibly falling as snow on the highest ground but dying out during the afternoon, with little wind. A cold night though, with temperatures dropping below freezing.

We were in for an unpleasant surprise.

Just before I left home the presenter on local radio warned of ice on the road the bus takes, but five miles further up. Take care, he said, cars are sliding all over the place.

Getting up the hill was more of a challenge than I had expected – the latest shower had been of that wet sleety stuff, which was still lying on the surface. For once I was happy to think that the bus might be a little late.

By the time I reached the road the sky had turned black & heavy sleet was falling again. I stood in the bus shelter reviewing my options for when it stopped; on the whole best to go & do the planned shopping, or else the Christmas timetable will be out of kilter, but then come straight home. Traffic was still moving (some much too fast for the conditions), the sky was brightening, even showing some patches of blue, a shaft of sunlight silvering the bottoms of some of the clouds.

But no bus came.

The major problem seems to have been in Buxton. Though high up (1000 ft above sea level) the town centre lies in a bowl – if you want to get out the only way is up, & in such slippery conditions it is all too easy to slip & slide or, if you are very big & heavy, to gain the necessary traction. So everything grinds too easily to a halt.

There was also mention of one road being closed by the construction of the new Nestle pipeline, but that may just be locals too ready to blame everyhting on a controversial issue.

Links
[PDF]Nestle Water Pipelines

EXCLUSIVE: Controversial pipeline plan to be withdrawn

New route hopes for Nestle water pipeline

Water

2011-12-08T21:13:00.001Z

After a long planning battle, Nestle is investing £35 million in a new bottling plant for Buxton water which will more than double the current capacity of 330 million bottles a year.

Increased demand has seen sales rise nearly 10% since 2007.

New technology will mean lighter bottles which use 25% less plastic.

There will be no significant increase in the number of jobs (currently 100). There will however be 300 new Nestle jobs in the south of the county, making posh coffee.

UK consumers drank over 2 billion litres of bottled water in 2010 – this is expected to rise to 2.3 billion by 2015 as mothers are expected to opt for water rather than sugary drinks for their children.

Nestle also owns Perrier, San Pellegrino & Vittel.

Buxton water is produced from 5,000 year old rainfall that has been forced up through 1,500 metres of bedrock before emerging at St Ann’s spring. It is possible to take your own bottles & fill them up for free at the Well in the centre of town – though you may have to join a long queue.

The taste of the bottled variety always puzzles me; I drank water from the well only once I think, when I was very young. It tasted sulphurous, but the grown ups said that meant it was doing you good.

There was also a petrifying well at Matlock so I think I was afraid I might be turned to stone if I ever drank well water again.

I liked the well dressing though

Links
New route hopes for Nestle water pipeline

Nestlé Waters builds new state-of-the-art factory in Buxton

Nestle brews up 300 new coffee jobs

Buxton Wells Dressing festival

St Ann's Well (Buxton)

St Anne's Well, Buxton From Speed's map of 1610

Matlock Bath: The Great Petrifying Well, 1932

Noteworthy but unmomentous coincidence

2011-12-08T19:11:00.001Z

I got one of those slightly spooky feelings when checking the radio listings yesterday evening to see if there was anything not to be missed.

The Radio 3 Essay at 10.45, the theme this week ‘Personal reflections on different aspects of the life, work and influence of WG Sebald.’ The translator’s view, to be given by – Andrea Bell. On the very day I had written my blog note.

Of course nothing really spooky, statistically significant, or even interesting to anyone but me, about that small co-incidence in time.

I may well have heard the name of such a distinguished translator, read of, even read, her work long before now, without the name lodging in the memory bank until I read that comment in the Bellos book.

When things do suddenly lodge in the front part of your brain you are often amazed to find how ubiquitous they are – indeed this is far from being the first time that Anthea Bell’s work has appeared on Radio 3.

Such small coincidences happen all the time. The really interesting question is why do a very few sometimes spark a new hypothesis, a really Big Idea.

Links
WG Sebald: A translator’s view
Prize collection
Next World Novella, By Matthias Politycki (trs Anthea Bell)

Yes - again

2011-12-07T21:11:00.001Z

I forgot to note that we had another power cut last Tuesday – this one during the afternoon or early evening while I was out of the house.

In fact it took me a few moments to realise that the radio was making a funny noise, not because I had pressed the wrong button but because the whole thing needed to be reset.

The winds were high & blustery again all day, just like they were when we had the previous cut.

A trying day all round really. A group of three teenage girls arrived at the bus stop, very overexcited, very noisy, talking at the tops of their voices, screaming with laughter. They broke into a dance routine to You’re The One That I Want, threatening once or twice to knock me over (not meaning to).

The f-word was used more than once. I fell to pondering what might be the reaction if I rang the police to complain that I was thereby feeling harassed & distressed though not, in truth, really alarmed.

Precisely.

Related posts
Evidence based law
Same old, same old

A family of words

2011-12-07T17:25:00.004Z

'How has Anthea Bell made Asterix even funnier in English than in French?' asked David Bellos in his book about translation, Is That A Fish In Your Ear? Praise indeed. I wanted to know more.

Anthea Bell is the daughter of Adrian Bell, the first cryptic crossword setter for The Times, who was described in an article to celebrate the publication of the 25,000th such crossword as ‘a farmer who wrote with a quill pen.’ Oliver Kamm, The Times current resident pedant, is Anthea Bell's son.

Adrian Bell was also the father of BBC journalist Martin Bell who won a famous victory as independent MP for Tatton in the wake of the cash for questions scandal & was himself featured in Radio 4's Archive on 4 on Saturday, which looked at the subject of reporters who cross the line, with special reference to Bell’s reporting from Bosnia.

Is a facility with, & deep interest in, language & words due to nature or nurture, one wonders.

That Times article I referred to also told us that Adrian Bell remains the most prolific setter in the newspaper’s history with 5,000 puzzles to his name.

I wonder if the man who was recently described, by the current crossword editor, in an article about the recent national competition as his best current setter, will match Bell’s record. He it is, I think, who is changing the nature of crossword clues to make them encrypted rather than cryptic.

Tatton is now the constituency of George Osborn, our besieged Chancellor of the Exchequer, who may have to look for a new seat because of his government’s own boundary change.

Links
Making Asterix funny in English
INTERVIEW: Anthea Bell, Part 1
Obituary: Antony Kamm, publisher, author, historian and cricketer
The Times Crossword Championship Unofficial information
Archive on 4 When Reporters Cross the Line
George Osborne MP for Tatton
Boundary review could see end of Tatton constituency

Related posts
A part of the whole
Onety-one
Hand to mouth intelligence
The Thunderer on the pull

Winter

2011-12-06T21:12:00.001Z

Winter arrived yesterday. The high roads were closed or passable only with care. One was blocked by a gritter wagon which got stuck.

We didn’t have such problems down below, just dark skies in the middle of the morning & lots of blustery squally showers, some of which counted as hail, though fortunately just the sleety slush puppy kind, not the pelting frozen marbles that really sting the skin, create a terrible noise on the roof of the bus or make you fear for the glass roof of your conservatory.

This morning the radio told me that things were bad in Buxton, but things seemed much better at home. By the time I came out it was cold but the ground was clear of all signs of ice or snow, though it was very cold & the stream was in near full spate. But I got a shock up the hill – ice & snow still on the pavement.

Still the bus arrived on time; the driver told me that, although he was on time, the bus itself was the one that should have arrived an hour earlier.

John McCarthy

2011-12-06T19:19:00.001Z

It is, I suppose, inevitable that 2011 should have seen the deaths of so many pioneers of computers & computing, since many would have been young men in the 1940s & 1950s. None of these has been met with the global outpouring of grief which we saw at the death of Steve Jobs.

One such was John McCarthy, who died on October 24. He invented the LISP programming language & is credited with coining the term Artificial Intelligence in 1955. He is said sometimes to have regretted not having come up instead with the term Computational Intelligence since AI came to be mixed up with the notion of making robots with human emotions – an idea which McCarthy rejected on the grounds that to simulate emotional behaviour is not at all the same thing as to experience it.

He also helped develop time-sharing, in the days when, rather than a kind of holiday home, the term referred to a way of making it possible for many users to have remote access to the same computer at the same time. Eventually this allowed users access via a phone line & a teletype machine &, with the development of satellite communications, regardless of the distance between them. For people of my generation this was every bit as exciting as the later developments of Apple & i; since few organisations could afford their own multimillion pound machine, pay-as you-go was our only hope of access.

But the benefits were considerable even if the machine was local. No longer did you have to write out your programs laboriously by hand on specially designed pads of green & white paper, deliver them to an office where someone had the equipment to transcribe them into a format which the computer could understand, then wait for a week to see if your program had worked. Now you could just type it in directly yourself & get the result straight away, printed out at the astonishing speed of 10 characters per second.

The Times obituarist described him as a rational humanist, optimistic about the role of science & technology in sustainable human development, an advocate of nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels, dismissive of the ‘superstitious’ belief in the benefits of organic food, despairing of media headlines about health & scientific research, & sceptical about the scale of the threat from global warming.

Sounds like a man I wish I had known.

Links
John McCarthy's Home Page

REMINISCENCES ON THE HISTORY OF TIME SHARING

John McCarthy — Father of AI and Lisp — Dies at 84

Apples

2011-12-05T21:13:00.000Z

As you grow old strength ebbs & even eating can start to become a bit of a trial, in subtle ways, long before you reach the stage of needing to be spoon fed like a baby.

Chewing becomes a chore, made worse if hand problems make it trickier to use a knife to cut things into bite size pieces.

Simple pleasures aren’t always so simple anymore.

Take apples. Maybe the idea of holding one in your hand while you take a bite through the skin & savour the wonderful scent & feel the juices run – well maybe best just leave it as a memory. Of course you can always cut it into slices, peel off that tricky skin – using a fruit knife was always the politely genteel way of eating an apple at table.

And you can still make apple sauce, apple pie, apple crumble, Eve’s pudding … Or buy a dish ready made.

On Saturday I had what I don’t suppose is an original idea, when the weather turned so cold, wet & blustery as to make the idea of crunching through crispy juicy apples for dessert less attractive than it had earlier seemed, but nor did I want to faff about cooking a pudding.

The brainwave was to cut the apples in slices, spread them on a sheet of foil & put them in the oven as the main course finished cooking, leaving them in there for about 15 minutes as the oven cooled.

It worked brilliantly; the slices were still juicy, but warm & just nicely soft (even the skins). And the perfume in the air just added to the pleasure.

Reminds me of another tip: should you ever need just a small amount of apple sauce, say to go with pork chops, visit the baby food shelf in the supermarket. Make sure you choose a pure apple puree, not something with added rice or thickener or flavour.

Woolf report

2011-12-05T19:03:00.000Z

I spent part of my weekend reading the report of the Woolf Inquiry into the LSE’s links with Libya & lessons to be learned.

I don’t expect that this particular sad & sorry chapter will earn much more than a footnote or passing reference when (not in my lifetime) the full & authoritative history of the West’s links with Libya, in the context of the need, or lust for, & dependence upon oil, & of the wars, violence & compromises (shabby or noble) which that entailed, comes to be written.

What the report did succeed in doing for me was to set into very sharp relief some of the consequences of British policies on higher education & the seemingly laudable aim of providing higher education for at least 50% of the population – an aim which was possibly necessary as a disguised way of coping with our inability to provide jobs for all those young people.

But without concomitant increases in public funding (or student fees), universities have been forced to seek alternative sources of finance from international students, donations & consultancy, competing in what is now a global business.

And in the particular case of LSE, declaring its independence from the federal University of London.

As such it had become a growing global business, but one which had not completely appreciated or understood the risks that that involved, nor taken care to make sure appropriate governance & management procedures were in place to cope with all those challenges.

Just keeping track of, & managing the learning of ‘ordinary’ students must be challenge enough; their number has grown from some 4,000 in 1980 to over 10,000 in 2010. (I think it was more like 3,000 in the 1960s), & in 1976 the entire University of London had only 40,000 internal students.

Links
The Woolf Inquiry

LSE response to the Woolf Inquiry

Related posts
It’s war

Academic address

Infinite regress

Nifty bin

2011-12-04T19:18:00.001Z

Last week I became the proud owner of a Nifty Bin.

It is about the size of a household waste paper bin – the sort you might have by your desk if you have one of those (not gone all wifi), & still work with paper.

But the one I bought has a well fitting lid & a foot pedal to open it with. Inside there is a sturdy rubberised plastic bucket with a wire handle to make it easy to empty the waste from inside.

I think it was the scarlet colour which caught my eye. There was a big display of these bins just next to the lift in TKMAXX – some silver, some brushed steel, some black, but the scarlet was an exact match for one I already have in my kitchen.

Most discombobulatingly, I realise that that one must be 25 years old now. Bought in Peter Jones kitchen department, Italian, stylish, a perfect match for the small amount of red in the handmade tiles we had splashed out on for the surrounds to the counter tops in the new kitchen.

If I saw it outside now on a sunny day it might look sad & tired - like its owner, looking its age - but to my eye it is not showing any signs of wear; not on the outside at least, the bucket is a bit battered. Regular wipe downs to keep the outside looking pristine & hot soapy bleach to swish out the bucket are all it has needed to keep it in good nick.

The Nifty Bin is not quite a match for its bigger, older sibling – it has a domed silver top (bit like a baby dalek) rather than a flat red one, but otherwise seems identical in quality.

Just what I need to solve the problem of food waste now we can no longer mix it with cardboard or newspaper. I have been trying a large plastic bowl with a well-fitting lid, but that needs two hands to open, not good when you're trying to get rid of egg shells.

I saw the Nifty Bin on Friday but couldn’t carry it then; got around to going back on Tuesday – just as well because by then there were only three left, only one of them red, & one of the silver ones had a dent in its dome.

It cost £5.99. Can’t remember how much the bigger one cost but it must have been quite a lot more than that even in 1986 £s; it seemed extravagant for such a mundane item – couldn’t you just make do with plastic?

I was surprised to see from the label that this one was made in China.

A Google search for “Nifty Bin” failed to produce any information about the manufacturer. It did however produce a lovely photo of what Linzie Hunter calls a nifty bin – a 1950s design by Lucienne Day which her mother found in a charity shop, bringing another little wallow in nostalgia.

And the Peter Jones/John Lewis site offers a bigger (20 litre) version of my domed bin for £30. Doesn't say where it was made.

In its way, a parable & a paradigm for our time.

Links
Buy kitchen bins from John Lewis

Lizzie Hunter’s nifty bin!

Robin + Lucienne Day

Classic textiles: Lucienne Day
Related posts
Newspapers struggle
Mess
Rubbish

Train travel

2011-12-04T15:26:00.002Z

This poem by Edna St Vincent Millay (how I used to envy that name!) has certainly changed its meaning for me since I was a child; then I thought it was just a poem about lovely lovely train journeys, written by someone who knew all about itchy feet.

Travel

The railroad track is miles away,
And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn't a train goes by all day
But I hear its whistle shrieking.

All night there isn't a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And hear its engine steaming.

My heart is warm with friends I make,
And better friends I'll not be knowing;
Yet there isn't a train I'd rather take,
No matter where it's going.

Edna St Vincent Millay

Links

Edna St. Vincent Millay 1892–1950

Modern American Poetry

!!*! Limerick

2011-12-03T21:10:00.001Z

I suspected some kind of wind up PR stunt when I heard on BBC World Service (no less) last night that residents of an Irish village had been banned from a social media site on the grounds of taste & decency.

Well there might be some exaggeration & misunderstanding, but there really is a place called Effin

And there are Effin Songs & a well known character called Effin Eddie.

All from Limerick.

You couldn’t make it up

Links
Effin parish

Effin Songs

Effin Eddie

Facebook finds town too Effin rude for site

Related post
Evidence based law

According to the OED an effiner is a rare & obsolete word for a refiner of silver or gold.

Normal service

2011-12-03T16:07:00.000Z

No posts yesterday – there was a fire alarm in the library before I got round to publishing anything. I didn’t hang around – it was much too cold to wait outside.

The fire engine was here for quite a while – I could see it from the bus stop, still there when the bus came.

Fortunately it turned out to be a false alarm.

Just 14

2011-12-01T21:17:00.000Z

In Our Time did Christina Rossetti this week.

I was rather startled to hear that she wrote Remember when she was just 14.

No wonder it so affected me when I was about that age!

Of course I had misheard. Listening more closely on the BBC iPlayer, I realise that Melvyn actually said that she achieved so much ‘in just 14 lines’.

Links
Remember

Christina Rossetti: Overview

In Our Time - Christina Rossetti

Related post
Christina Rossetti

Who’d have thought it

2011-12-01T19:16:00.000Z

My heart sank when I got off the bus in town yesterday – teenagers all over the place. Just like half term all over again.

It was the newsagent who gave me a different slant on things.

We’ve got so used to only “hearing” the bad news, we don’t stop to think there might be a good side to it.

He had mentally prepared for a bad day: during the week most of his custom comes from those who work in the government & council offices & facilities in the surrounding streets.

What he got was lots of people coming into town for the day.

Not so good of course for those who get most of their custom from a nearby school or college. Winners & losers.

I shouldn’t have been surprised when I went down to the shopping centre, but I was. Lots of younger children, mostly with just one adult rather than en famille as tends to be the case at weekends. Christmas shopping, with no sense of the frenzy of recent years, a more sober sense of purpose you might say – but the children were clearly happy. I don't think all the shoppers were strikers - just people who needed to find a way to keep the children amused on their unexpected holiday.

It was all hands to the till in Primark. McDonalds was having a bonanza.

Sometimes Dad or granddad in sole charge; one group – the two young adults in charge surely not old enough to be the parents - who were off to see a film after their meal; another which put me more in mind of a school group & made me think that perhaps those who were on strike might be providing supervision for the children of those who were not.

I haven’t overheard any negative comments about the strike (apart from those on the radio) – but then I would expect more of a sense of solidarity & fair treatment here oop north.

I wouldn’t expect yesterday’s spending to be in any way an addition to what people were planning to spend, more just making best use of the time available for doing all the extra work of Christmas. And, most important of all, to keep the children happy & not spread the anxiety on to them.

Even so retailers are probably grateful for the cash flow benefits.

The BBC did not seem to have heard of this good news.

Link
Public sector strikes: Business assesses cost
Related post
Caring fathers

Investing in breast cancer

2011-11-30T14:49:00.001Z

An item from The Times last September (found while doing the Sunday afternoon tidying up) announced that General Electric has joined with venture capitalists to form a $100m fund to finance the development of early detection, diagnosis & treatments for breast cancer.

Well what’s not good about that?

The worry is that the prospect of profits focuses on treatment of a disease which is becoming ever more prevalent, it seems – a news item the other week quoted a lifetime risk for women in this country which has now risen to 1 in 8 – the risk of getting cancer just by being a woman now the same as that of getting lung cancer for a smoker?

Shouldn’t we be putting more into finding out why – how much of this is down to methods of detection which find ‘cancers’ which do not need treatment?

Unit costs of cancer speciality drugs are rising by about 13% a year – that’s worth a $100m investment!

Links
GE Leads $100 Million Fund for Breast Cancer Challenge

GE launches new $100M open innovation project in cancer

Related post
Breast cancer

Behind the screen

2011-11-29T19:12:00.000Z

This weeks Sunday afternoon tidying up unearthed a clipping from The Times which I had set aside to form the basis for a blog post & then forgotten about.

This month should have seen the start of a pilot programme to teach schoolchildren how to program computers. Called Behind the Screen, supported by companies such as IBM, Google & Cisco (no mention of Microsoft in this report). From a modest start in twenty schools it will – ‘ultimately’ - develop GCSE & A level subjects.

It is not clear how long this scheme has been in the hatching – it is odd to start part way into the school year like this. David Willets made the announcement at the British Science Festival in Bradford on 15 September, just a month after the Edinburgh TV Festival at which Eric Schmidt had criticised the lack of any such teaching in this country. If this is really a direct response to that criticism then it seems dangerously rushed.

It is very odd that children have been learning about genes & DNA at school – Watson & Crick made their discovery in 1953 – but not higher-level programming which was being established at much the same time.

It was hard work finding the official details of the Behind the Scenes project on the web – until Thinq_ led me to e-skills UK after I had given up on the website for Business, Innovation & Skills (Willetts’ own department).

I have downloaded the details to read at home when the library is closed by industrial action tomorrow.

Links
Re-designing the IT curriculum for young people in England

Government details industry-backed IT GCSE pilot

BCS welcomes move by David Willetts to transform ICT school curriculum

Townley Grammar School in Bexleyheath will pilot the new scheme

EDINBURGH TV FESTIVAL: Eric Schmidt's MacTaggart Lecture in full

Children will get closer to IT in new curriculum initiative

Google - Behind The Screen

Evidence based law

2011-11-28T21:26:00.002Z

Can you remember what you were doing on 10 March 2009?

Or what was in the news? My own blog doesn’t show anything on which I felt compelled to comment.

I would be surprised if even the local press carried reports of one routine incident which took place on that day in Hackney, east London, a borough which saw a lot of action in last summer’s riots.

One group of people must remember all too clearly.

PC Challis and PCSO Mr Mcllvaney were looking for people who, the police had been informed, might be in possession of cannabis. They found one young woman and three young men … outside a block of flats. The officers decided to search the three men. One objected and said, "Fuck this man, I ain't been smoking nothing". PC Challis told him that if he continued to swear he would be arrested for an offence under section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986.

No cannabis was found. The young man went on to use the F-word twice more & was duly arrested for this; there was a “scuffle” & in due course he appeared before the magistrates charged both for the swearing & for assault on a police officer in the execution of his duty.

He was found Not Guilty of assault, but Guilty of swearing & fined £50.

There is a problem however: Parliament has not made it an offence to swear in public, as such, (something for which most of us must be grateful). The prosecution must show that ”the defendant used threatening, abusive or insulting words within the hearing of someone else who was caused or was likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress by hearing them.”

And so the case finally found its way to Appeal on Thursday, 17 November 2011, whereupon the rice pudding really hit the fan, & the events of that day in March 2009 suddenly became news.

Because, according to large sections of the press, the Judge declared that ‘It’s OK to swear at policemen because they’re used to it.’

That last quote comes from a piece by Robert Crampton (a journalist I normally admire) writing in The Times last Tuesday. He lives in Hackney & wrote of a hard core of fellow residents, young males who are ‘dangerous, occasionally lethally so … a potential menace to anyone who gets in their way … ultra-sensitive to perceived slights … anything that interferes with them behaving in any way they want.’

The job of keeping the rest of the population safe from such feral beasts falls to the police & the courts, so ‘it really isn’t sensible to do anything that undermines the authority of either.’ He ends with the words ‘You couldn’t make it up’, implying that that is exactly what the judge did with the law.

If however you read the judge’s written report it is clear that he not only could not, but did not, do that.

“Such language is familiar to most courts. A search on the legal database Lexis for cases in which either the word "fuck" or the word "fucking" appear produces 2,124 results. Even allowing for duplication in the way that cases are reported and transcribed, or for cases which appear in more than one report, the total is still very large.”

The judge must pay due regard to the decisions made in those cases; it has all been heard before..

Fortunately the two lawyers acting in this appeal had boiled these down, ”in their concise and helpful submissions”, to just six.

A number of cases establish that expletives such as "fuck" or "fucking" are potentially abusive words, whether uttered to a police officer or a member of the public.

But it is a question of fact, to be decided by the magistrates on the basis of the evidence presented to them, whether words and behaviour (with which police officers are indeed too wearily familiar) produced a reaction only of boredom or, in the circumstances (including the time, the place, who the police officers were), caused the harassment, alarm or distress, which are needed to turn use of such abhorrent language into a crime.

The lawyer who was in charge of the case at the magistrates court provided no such evidence – the police officers were not asked the question, nor was evidence presented to show that anybody else had complained.

Where witnesses have said nothing and been asked nothing about experiencing harassment, alarm or distress, there is no sound basis for the court to reach that conclusion for itself.

“This is particularly so in the case of police officers because … they hear such words all too frequently as part of their job.”

BUT, said the judge, this is not to say that such words can NEVER cause police officers to experience alarm, distress or harassment.

It depends … on the facts. And where a witness has been silent on the point it is wrong to draw inferences.

We can all draw our own inferences, based on such evidence as we have heard or read about in this case, together with our own experience & prejudice.

Perhaps he was one of the dangerous young males – why else would the police be searching him? In which case he should have been found guilty as an example to others of his kind.

Or perhaps it is a tale wearyingly familiar to anyone who numbers black males among their respectable friends & family, in which case he ought never to have been brought to court in the first place.

But these inferences are based on generalised belief, not evidence specific to this occasion.

We hear a lot these days about the need for ‘evidence’ in science, medicine & politics. Sometimes we may doubt the validity of such evidence & so doubt the need for anything more than ‘common sense’ in reaching decisions or taking action in those areas of life.

But surely we are all agreed on the need for evidence-based law.

So I say three cheers for Mr Justice Bean, who kept this need firmly in the front of his mind. And for the system which puts it all down in writing & makes it available for us to read at a few clicks of a mouse.

It has taken approaching three years to get this conviction overturned – a long time in the life of a young man. If he was not known to the police before, he is now.

And if there is now a widespread belief that it is OK to swear at the police, well that comes from journalists, not the judges.

Thanks to Bystander & Beneath the Wig whose blogs pointed me to the evidence in this case.

Link
High Court (Queen's Bench Division) judgment

Related post
The F Word

Cultural gods

2011-11-27T19:09:00.000Z

I was having a look at the Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs in the supermarket on Friday evening. Just idle curiosity, passing the time until bus time. I can’t imagine, honestly, that I shall want to read the whole thing; Isaacson’s 700 or so pages on Einstein were a bit too-much-information for my taste, & I doubt Jobs is worth that many hours of my life.

I did learn one interesting thing however – Steve Jobs could not write computer programs.

But then neither can most people in this world, so I guess that was the secret of his appeal to all those who cannot imagine why anyone who is really artistic should want to do something so boringly uncreative, who believe that real inspiration lies with those who know how to use these hidden hieroglyphs & turn them into art.

Links
Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography

Einstein: His Life and Universe

Related posts
Is there an app for computer language?

Creativity

Bittersweet

2011-11-27T16:23:00.003Z

Farm yards, for all their muck & smells, form an important part of my childhood memory, so this poem by Edward Thomas has particular nostalgic resonance.

Tall Nettles

Tall nettles cover up, as they have done
These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough
Long worn out, and the roller made of stone:
Only the elm butt tops the nettles now.

This corner of the farmyard I like most:
As well as any bloom upon a flower
I like the dust on the nettles, never lost
Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.

Edward Thomas

And that poem in turn brings to mind Mary Oliver’s Milkweed, which, even when standing dry & leafless in the autumn, make it

… easy to believe
each one was once young & delicate, also
frightened; also capable
of a certain amount of rough joy.

Links
Autumn milkweed
About Mary Oliver

Housing statistics surprise

2011-11-26T21:12:00.000Z

I got a very pleasant surprise when I went to the web site of the Communities & Local Government Department: nice clean home page uncluttered with ministerial mugshots & boastings; clear simple links - three short steps brought me to the Housing Statistics page with more straightforward links (no mention of ‘products’) & - I need to sit down or I might faint – a downloadable Index of Data. It was nothing like so helpful last time I went there, probably a good couple of years ago.

I have not been able to bring myself to visit the new ONS website since about two weeks after its trumpeted re-launch back in August. I found the same old problem of going round in circles, with, just to add insult to the injury, messages to say that existing links had been broken.

Links
Housing statistics

New ONS website hits choppy water

Same old, same old

2011-11-26T16:12:00.000Z

We had another power outage last night. This one seemed quite localised – the street lights stayed lit on the main road up the hill & on the new(ish) housing estate down the lane.

It lasted about 90 minutes, from 10.30 to midnight. Not a bad response time for the reapirmen a Friday night, I suppose.

Private life

2011-11-25T16:08:00.000Z

At about 11 o’clock one night, about twenty years ago, I was walking back to the place I was staying in Covent Garden, up one of the side streets leading from The Strand.

Suddenly a flock of men on motorbikes & scooters drew noisily into the kerb a few feet in front of me. I was more startled than alarmed – What on earth?

A taxi drew up, & out stepped Jerry Hall & another woman; a brief, professional pose, lights flashed, cameras clicked; an anonymous metal door opened in the wall to reveal a dingy staircase leading down. Jerry & her friend disappeared inside, the flock departed, as noisily as they had come.

On all the occasions I had walked that way before I had never noticed the door in the wall, or had just thought it was there as an escape hatch or for taking deliveries of coal in the old days. Now I noticed, for the first time, a very discreet name plate proclaiming the name of a temporarily famous & fashionable London nite-spot which figured frequently in the gossip columns.

That was my one & only brush with the paparazzi, but it made me thankful that my daily life was of no interest to the press.

Link
The Leveson Inquiry

Is there an app for computer language?

2011-11-24T21:45:00.001Z

When I Googled Steve Henry yesterday I learned that he has set up a company called Decoded, which claims to teach anyone to code in a day.

I was left wondering what coding means in this context, & today I got round to checking whether it is what I would, in my old-fashioned way, call computer programming.

The short answer is Yes, but that still leaves open the question of what anyone means by either 'coding' or 'programming' these days.

When I began, 'coding' was the really heavy stuff, written in source code, assembly language, or even binary; 'programming' was simpler, for those who were not computer scientists, merely 'users' - it involved so called high level languages, supposedly much closer to how humans thought & spoke.

Later on when I talked of ‘programming’ in SPSS I was told, sniffily, that that wasn’t programming – only ‘languages’ such as Fortran required programming skills, SPSS was just a ‘package.’

And so it goes.

But I was surprised recently to see that there are calls for computer programming to be taught in schools – what on earth are all those ICT exams for, if they do not include at least the basics of programming?

In the days of the BBC micro lots of people (well, mainly boys & their fathers) used to program in BASIC, & you might even sometimes find a newspaper article explaining how, for example, to write a bit of code to tell your computer how to draw a circle, or find prime numbers.

Even before that I remember Logo, & very small children being taught to ‘program’ a computer with a turtle (which could be said to have evolved into a mouse).

It is a very long time since I gave up any attempt to keep up with the developments in coding or programming, & in truth I am in two minds whether teaching coding in schools would really offer any benefits. For starters there will be endless arguments over what kind of coding, which languages etc, etc.

On the other hand even my limited experience taught me a great deal, not least of the many ways in which human thinking departs from the strict, & restricted, logic of computers, (however wonderful the results which flow from the latter), the time it takes to unpick the logic of any problem.

Who knows, even a little, but more widespread, knowledge might save us from politicians & policy makers who are to easily seduced or bamboozled by those who can both make & break the code.

Links
Logo (programming language)

Programming a screen turtle

Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas

BBC microcomputer history

Steve Jobs: Tinker, Tailor, Tweaker?

The Pioneering New Company Changing How We Teach Children (and Adults) About Technology

The art of assembly language

Source code

Introduction to Fortran programming

Fortran IV self-taught

Who governs

2011-11-24T17:37:00.001Z

There has been plenty of criticism of the appointment of unelected technocrats to govern Italy & Greece – not to mention the failure of the Egyptian military to make good on their promise of more democracy.

But just how different are we, when the answer to every problem is to call for an independent enquiry, Office, Quango, Czar …

Links
BBC: Q&A: Monti's technocratic government for Italy

Mario Monti to the rescue? Saving Italy from itself will take more than number-crunching.

Eurozone crisis: To save Europe, topple the 'technocrats' - Paul Krugman

About the Office for Budget Responsibility

Related post
Independent government

Family silver

2011-11-23T21:38:00.001Z

When one sells the family silver, one does not usually continue to gain value from its use.

So said the Earl of Gowrie in a House of Lords Debate in 1984 soon after Harold Macmillan's famous attack on Mrs Thatcher's privatisation policies.

Now Who Owns Our City, a report by the University of Cambridge & Development Securities shows that more than half of all the buildings in the Square Mile that constitutes the City of London are in foreign hands – up from only 8% in 1980 just after Thatcher came to power.

London attracts more foreign investment than any other city in the world. Germans are the biggest foreign owners in The City proper. And they have not even had to fight a war for it – I think we are meant to be pleased & proud, because unlike migrant workers they don’t have to actually come & live here. Instead all this interest means that City offices (in the real estate sense) show ‘remarkable resilience’ in the face of global meltdown.

And that ‘traditional owners’ – institutions, charities, public sector bodies & livery companies – have been able to swap their equity for cash.

I await with interest (the metaphorical kind) the report which will tell us what that cash has all been spent on – investments which will produce an even better return or the equivalent of new cars & foreign holidays.

Debt problems are much harder to solve without a strong asset base - isn't that what we tell the banks?

Links
Who Owns London

HM Treasury: Public private partnerships

Related posts
Aliens desirable & undesirable
Kings ransom
Never mind the debt
Asset sales

Something or nothing

2011-11-23T18:37:00.001Z

Evan Davis talked to advertising man Steve Henry this week in his Radio 4 series about deception.

Anadin was mentioned. Henry maintained that they were allowed to get away with the 1950s slogan Nothing Acts Faster Than Anadin because it was, essentially, saying that all painkillers are really just the same, Anadin is no different – if the wording tended to make you think it was saying Anadin was better, that was your mistake.

The reaction of just about everybody I knew was that if nothing acts faster, then I’ll take nothing, thank you.

To this day I think it a waste of money to buy anything other than bog standard generics, though I wish I knew why chains such as Superdrug have an own brand version which is priced at nearly double an alternative branded version.

Links

One to one: Evan Davis with Steve Henry
Steve Henry: Advertising creative
Anadin
UK television adverts 1955–1990

Learning about space & time

2011-11-22T19:28:00.002Z

A small girl at the unselfconsciously chatty stage was sitting behind me on the bus the other day.

Conversation turned to a train trip she had recently taken.

Do you like travelling on the train? asked the young man with her – not her father, probably a brother or uncle I thought.

Yes, I liked the train. But it’s slow. Trains go very slowly.

The young man laughed: Noooo. Trains aren’t slow. Trains go very fast. You just think it was slow because it took a long time. You travelled a long way. You went far.

The little girl fell silent for a long time. I swear I could hear the wheels turning as she pondered this new thought.

Related posts
The enemy
Standing on the bus

Gambling future

2011-11-22T18:35:00.000Z

In the 6 months to September 24 national lottery sales rose 1/5th - by over £500m to more than £3¼ billion.

Good causes got a slightly smaller increase (17%) – up to £918.3m from £784.8m.

£1.69 billion was paid out in prize money.

Owners Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan have asked for a 5 year extension to their licence to 2019 to help their investment plan.

More than 2,700 people have become lottery millionaires since the launch in 1994.

The success of Euro-Millions has prompted Camelot to explore the possibilities for a Global Draw.

Camelot ‘admitted’ last Friday that the highest-grossing retail outlets for a Euro-Millions rollover were mostly in the City of London & Canary Wharf.

Once a gambler, always a gambler.

Links
Camelot UK Lotteries Limited: Half-year financial results

Ontario Teachers Pension Plan

Related posts
The psychology of getting & spending
Lottery logic
The relative risk of winning the lottery
Investing for the future
Is anything safe?

Ten Bob, Ted Bastin & the paranormal

2011-11-21T21:25:00.000Z

Norman Sanders of Ipswich wrote to The Times last week to point out that a picture of the wrong EDSAC had been used to illustrate their obituary of Ted Bastin: ‘The pictured EDSAC1 was taken away for ten shillings by a man with a horse & cart in mid-1958, by which time EDSAC2, a very different machine, was up & running & was that used by Mr Bastin in the early 1960s.’

I was left wondering about the direction of this transaction; did the carter pay for the scrap, or did the University have to pay to get rid of the unwanted contraption?

It was not much later than that that I was considered lucky to get £1 from a mother who wanted a piano for her daughter, instead of having to pay someone to take mine away because it was deemed to be one of the items which had to be disposed of as we were moving to a smaller house in the city, & pianos were no longer considered an essential or desirable feature of every home, or playing it a vital accomplishment for every young lady. And it is odd to think now that residential property was so much cheaper in a small country town in the days when anyone who even contemplated a long commute would have been thought to have taken leave of their senses.

Ted Bastin was a remarkable character whose interests extended beyond Combinatorial Physics to embrace the paranormal & religion. In 1972 he organized a small select meeting to observe Uri Geller in action – the audience included Arthur Koestler, Arthur C Clarke & (a young) Kwame Anthony Appiah – I think I remember reading reports in the press. Bastin recorded his mixed feelings about what he had witnessed, which would make interesting reading now (A copy is available on the web)

Links

REPORT ON A MEETING WITH URI GELLER AT THE ROYAL GARDEN HOTEL, LONDON, OCTOBER 30, 1972.

EDSAC 1 and after - a compilation of personal reminiscences

Early English computers

Arthur Koestler in Wonderland

Related post
Honour

Picture comes from Early English computers & shows the cabinet of the Cambridge University EDSAC II computer (1957), showing the microprogram control store

Salt

2011-11-21T15:34:00.000Z

Professor Graham MacGregor of the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine & chairman of CASH (Consensus Action on Salt & Health) is very cross about health claims made on packages of ‘gourmet salt’ which encourage (or should that be trick?) people into paying very high prices.

Ordinary nationally branded table salt costs 80p per kilo (own brand probably costs less).

Cornish sea salt is on sale for £7.50 per kilo.

Himalayan crystal salt will take your breath away at £13.46 per kilo.

You can buy a 10kg bag of ‘white salt’ in Asda for £3 – 30p per kilo - good for keeping your paths clear of winter ice.

Probably not recommended for human consumption but, if it were, enough to keep a family of two adults & two children going for about 16 months if they all stick to the Guideline Daily Amounts.

Link
Salt and Men's Health

Pangur Ban

2011-11-20T14:07:00.002Z

This deceptively simple poem, written over 1000 years ago by an Irish monk, says so much, & certainly makes me consider inviting a cat into the house.

No mice available there (I hope). Perhaps my Pangur Ban could get her practice & pleasure from chasing spiders instead.

I & Pangur Ban my cat,
‘Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
‘Tis to sit with book & pen:
Pangur bears me no ill-will,
He too plies his simple skill.

‘Tis a merry task to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit & find
Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur’s way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.

‘Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full & fierce & sharp & sly;
‘Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Ban, my cat & I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine & he has his.

Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day & night
Turning darkness into light.

Links
Pangur Ban: Poetry & Irish Culture

Pangur Bán (Gaelic version)

Pangur Bán Translated By Seamus Heaney

Related post
Ode on the death of a favourite cat

Memory lane

2011-11-19T23:07:00.001Z

29 July 1997
Parts & Wholes Daniel Lerner (ed) MIT
The Free Press of Glencoe NY 1963

I first came across this last year, but reread it with pleasure. It's the proceedings of a colloquium at MIT, the third in a series dealing with common problems of concept & method in fields of modern knowledge. For example, particle physics, magnetism which depends on all or nearly all the electrons pointing the same way, how this changes with temperature and how they decide to do it even though they are all the same & indistinguishable. Which raises the spooky idea that electrons are as individual as humans if we only looked at them in the right way.

There's a lovely piece by Kuznets on parts & wholes in economics which I really wish I could have read when I was at college; instead of pretending that there was nothing arbitrary about the level of analysis & the consequent derivation of theory I might have understood that struggling with this was part of the charm of the intellectual challenge of economics instead of coming away with the belief that it was deeply intellectually dishonest.

The final piece has the disarming title "How Does A Poem Know When It Is Finished?" by IA Richards, which unfortunately does not live up to expectations

Money in the mirror

2011-11-19T16:04:00.000Z

In her Point of View on Radio 4 on Friday night Mary Beard managed, in the space of ten minutes, to make the connection between coinage through the ages, Greece (Ancient & Modern), Empire, the Euro & the UK ID card (now available to those here on a visa but not to established citizens).

Brilliant.

Links
BBC iPlayer; Mary Beard

Reflections on Monetary Union