Coeval sympathy

Wednesday’s Times carried, on its front page, a picture of Margaret Thatcher & Her Majesty the Queen taken at the CHOGM held in Lusaka in 1979.

Both women were then in their early 50s but I was astonished at how young – to my eye – they both now look. Another example of the strange way in which everybody else looks younger as you yourself grow older.

I have also only now realised how very close together they were in age – Thatcher the elder by about 6 months.

The death of someone your own age has a particular resonance & may play no small part in the Queen’s decision to attend the funeral. That, plus the fact that Margaret Thatcher remains our only female prime minister, plus (I like to think)  feelings of sisterly regard for another who had to put up with all those male political animals, rather than anything to do with her politics & policies as such, informs the decision.

The picture also shows how, at that early stage of her premiership, Mrs Thatcher had not yet learned to eschew fussy prints, or to impose an iron discipline on her hair.

Link
Lusaka Declaration on Racism and Racial Prejudice (Issued at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting,Lusaka, Zambia, 1979)
Related post
Looking your age

Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher has died at the age of 87.

I first heard the news from earwigging a discussion between two teenage girls on holiday from school – they were wondering whether they would get a day’s holiday to mark the occasion. After all, asserted one, we will get a holiday when the Queen dies.

I don’t remember getting a holiday to mark the death of Winston Churchill, whose funeral in any case took place on a Saturday.

Although her reputation for slashing public expenditure does not stand up to an examination of the evidence, the very real damage done by the slash & burn attitude to the old industries of the North was more deserved.

As ever, one’s attitude must remain You’ve got to admire her achievement, but …

Link
NY Times Economix: The Legend of Margaret Thatcher
Related post
The most important man in C20th British politics

Ruskin antidote

When I first came across this poem by Elma Mitchell it made me laugh out loud. Such earthiness, busyness, just plain mess, seemed the very antithesis of Ruskin. His vision seemed to be more one of life spent sitting on cushions, sewing a fine seam, rather than work never done.

But not for a working class woman, it seems, for in Fors Clavigera Ruskin wrote:

Then, for my meaning as to women's work, what should I mean, but scrubbing furniture, dusting walls, sweeping floors, making the beds, washing up the crockery, ditto the children, and whipping them when they want it, mending their clothes, cooking their dinners, and when there are cooks more than enough, helping with the farm work, or the garden, or the dairy ? Is that plain speaking enough ?

It is far to easy to mock Ruskin & his sensibilities, especially if you just unthinkingly put on your old feminist hat.

Thoughts After Ruskin
Women reminded him of lilies and roses.
Me they remind rather of blood and soap,
Armed with a warm rag, assaulting noses,
Ears, neck, mouth and all the secret places:

Armed with a sharp knife, cutting up liver,
Holding hearts to bleed under a running tap,
Gutting and stuffing, pickling and preserving,
Scalding, blanching, broiling, pulverising,
- All the terrible chemistry of their kitchens.
Their distant husbands lean across mahogany
And delicately manipulate the market,
While safe at home, the tender and the gentle
Are killing tiny mice, dead snap by the neck,
Asphyxiating flies, evicting spiders,
Scrubbing, scouring aloud, disturbing cupboards,
Committing things to dustbins, twisting, wringing,
Wrists red and knuckles white and fingers puckered,
Pulpy, tepid. Steering screaming cleaners
Around the snags of furniture, they straighten
And haul out sheets from under the incontinent
And heavy old, stoop to importunate young,
Tugging, folding, tucking, zipping, buttoning,
Spooning in food, encouraging excretion,
Mopping up vomit, stabbing cloth with needles,
Contorting wool around their knitting needles,
Creating snug and comfy on their needles.

Their huge hands! their everywhere eyes! their voices
Raised to convey across the hullabaloo,
Their massive thighs and breasts dispensing comfort,
Their bloody passages and hairy crannies,
Their wombs that pocket a man upside down!

And when all's over, off with their overalls,
Quickly consulting clocks, they go upstairs,
Sit and sigh a little, brushing hair,
And somehow find, in mirrors, colours, odours,
Their essence of lilies and roses.

Elma Mitchell.

Links
Fors clavigera: Letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain (Volume 4)
Elma Mitchell: Obituary
Related post
Sesame & Lilies & Proust

Tickled my fancy

Recent links I liked:

Why Twitter Makes Us Want to Add Extra Letterssss & How long is a tweet string? - answering the important questions of our time.

Ageing and productivity: Economists and others. Given we are all going to have to work for longer it's good to know the older folk can keep up.

The evolution of Consciousness: Part 2

Alcohol consumption higher than reported in England. Here we go again. The report is behind a paywall so I cannot check whether they have addressed the questions of how much is consumed by visitors to Britain, how much by people who do not live in private households, & how much by those who are too drunk to co-operate with social survey interviewers.

A Closer Look at College Completion Rates for Full-Time Students: A new American study, for example, finds that men are less willing to tolerate loan debt than women are. Which may mean that girls in the majority at college may not be the all-round good thing we might like to take it for.

Multilingual dictionary keeps humans in the loop - At a (biggggg) price

Grammar school dames

Yesterday’s especially interesting guest on Radio 4’s Life Scientific was Sue Ions, nuclear engineer.

It was an unusually challenging interview by Jim Al-Khalili – probably better that way; Dame Sue was more than capable of giving a spirited & persuasive defence of the need for nuclear power, & the dangers of relying on wind for a supply reliable enough to keep our lights & computers ready to obey our commands.

The aspect of her career which especially intrigued me however was her education at a girls-only state school, where two inspirational male teachers – in chemistry & physics – motivated both her & her classmate & fellow Dame, Nancy Rothwell (Vice Chancellor of the University of Manchester) to take up careers in science.

Yet another example to set one pondering the part which luck plays in the life chances of us all.

Links
Penwortham Girls High School
Penwortham Girls High School Alumnae
President and Vice-Chancellor for The University of Manchester
Related post
Clever clogs

Richard Briers

Sad to hear of the death of Richard Briers at the age of 89.

Many of the obituaries & news reports nominated The Good Life as the tv comedy series for which he will be best remembered.

As often happens, these judgements often depend on how old you are. I was not a fan of that 1970s BBC comedy series – those for whom the show is a vivid childhood memory will be in their forties now & in a position to dominate the media comment.

My fondest memories are of Marriage Lines, a 1960s comedy in which he starred with Prunella Scales. The Times obituarist nominates this as the series which made Brier’s name. Showing, as it did, the ups & downs of early married life, including the wife’s frustration at being tied to home & babies, it seemed rather forward looking & rebellious, albeit in a gentle way.

Links
Richard Briers
YouTube: Marriage Lines
Marriage Lines
Related post
Children not wanted here

Huhne over

I have been rather taken aback by the journalistic response to the way Chris Huhne suddenly, & after a long period of vehement denials, pleaded guilty to the charge of perverting the course of justice. None of kind of howling that generally greets misdemeanours by politicians.

A tragedy, to see a good & able minister laid low at his age, they say. Almost too painful to have to read searing deatils of the breakdown in his family relationships.

Of course one shares the sympathy, up to a point. But perhaps we have had a lucky escape, in removing a man like him form power?

A man whose public statements come across as showing more irritation than contrition at being bound by pettifogging rules which limit his freedom to drive exactly as he wishes.

Who ended his marriage in sudden, ruthless & brutal fashion when the press got on to the story of an extra-marital affair. Perhaps that’s why the press are showing more contrition now, post-Leveson. Plus, of course, the fact that many may count as a friend one who was himself a journalist for two decades.

Link
Chris Huhne: A political career in ruins, and all for three penalty speeding points
Related post
The madness of politicians

Breast feeding & breast cancer

Valerie Beral made an interesting claim on this week’s Life Scientific, which I for one have not heard expressed in such clear & simple terms before.

We all know, pretty much, that breast cancer risk increases in line with the age at which a woman has her first child. International comparisons show quite clearly that breast cancer is rare in countries where women bear six or more children, each of which may each be breast fed for as long as two years; on the other hand rates of cancer have risen inexorably in countries like ours, where child birth is postponed & breast feeding quite widely regarded as optional.

Beral went on to translate this into an assertion that even one child, born to a twenty-year-old, conveys a lifetime benefit of a 10% reduction in the risk of breast cancer. This she thinks must be due to one of the hormones of pregnancy (rather than, for example, mere absence of menstruation).

If scientific research could identify that hormone, then we could envisage the development of something akin to inoculation* – perhaps a single injection or dose which could be given to girls in their late teens to convey a comparable benefit.

So why is the necessary research not done? Beral thinks it will need a committed, wealthy backer – just as the original research on The Pill & IVF was done in the private sector.

I am left wondering if the evidence is strong enough to support an estimate of the benefit which accrues even to an older mother who breastfeeds for six months. At least offer mothers some direct personal benefit for all those broken nights.

*On reflection, perhaps vaccination, the word Beral used, is truly more appropriate in this context

Link
Life Scientific: Valerie Beral

Radio active women

Archive on 4 looked at the history of women in radio – specifically BBC radio.

There were surprisingly large numbers of women working in the BBC from its earliest radio days – but in the back office. Some women did give Talks, of a suitably intellectual kind, & in the 1920s & 1930s this meant, almost by definition, that they were drawn from the Upper Middle Class & above. Which was just as well as it was soon decided that only RP was suitable for speaking to The Nation.

But the idea that a woman might read the news – or even report it – was plainly ridiculous. No woman had the requisite authority, their voices were too high, & they would lack the essential objectivity by, for example, sounding sad or even crying, when bringing bad tidings.

Apart from plain old sexist prejudice, the programme put forward the idea that people generally did find something rather disturbing about listening to the (literally) disembodied female voice.

In a curious way, television helped bring that to an end. Women’s bodies clearly had to appear on screen & their voices had to be broadcast. In fact BBC television was opened by a woman – Sylvia Peters (married Peter West?).

These days we are used to women fronting & contributing to all types of programme (except Today & most of Radio 1).

What was sad to hear was that Joan Bakewell & Bridget Kendall – both splendid women & splendid broadcasters – have each faced suggestions that their accents may now be just a bit too posh for C21st broadcasting. And yet, on tv at least, Clare Balding can become the nation’s favourite.

Links
Archive on 4: Spoken Like a Woman
Radio active women - Nepal
Related post
Taking the mic

Taking the mic

I cannot now remember when it was that I first noticed that something had changed about the sound of live broadcasts from the House of Commons. They seem to have installed new microphones in the Chamber – perhaps as part of the arrangements for publishing Hansard much more quickly on line. So far I have not had any success in finding the details of the changes via Google.

The unfortunate effect – at least via my low-tech old fashioned radios - is that these introduce a distinct hollowness & echo to the broadcast sound. Ed Milliband, especially, suffers from this effect, which makes him lose authority.

At first I thought it might have something to do with where the mics are sited, rather than something to do with the quality of his voice.

But - & it really does pain me to have to say this – it may have to do with register, pitch or timbre. Because it is hard on women too.

During Monday's session on High Speed Rail both Maria Eagle & Cheryl Gillan just sounded querulous & shrill – not how they sound at all outside the Chamber, & much of this was due to the echo & greater clarity in the higher registers.

Links
High Speed Rail: House of Commons 28 January 2013
[PDF]The sound of democracy
HOUSE OF COMMONS PROCEEDINGS (SOUND BROADCASTING EXPERIMENT) 11 December 1967
[PDF] WHAT MAKES A FEMALE VOICE ATTRACTIVE?
Voters prefer candidates with a deeper voice, says study
BBC Radio 4: Vox project

Meme multiplied

By a piece of pure Google happenstance I came across a link to the famous Atlantic essay, As We May Think, by Vannevar Bush which was published in July 1945.

In it Bush considers what kind of work physicists, in particular, should concentrate on once the killing is over. In his opinion the most pressing need is to be able to control & have access to the world’s great mass of information which was threatening to overwhelm man’s capacity to find & absorb. To this end should be harnessed the latest inventions & methods of mass production, for “The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.”

One of his imagined devices is the memex:

A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions.

Although that sounds like the PC/work station we have come to know & love, it depends instead on punched cards, calculating machines, valves, microfilm, photo cells. The computer as we know it seems beyond his imaginings at that stage.

The insights are nevertheless breathtaking. The (by no means fatal) limitations of the great library are recognised: it is "nibbled at" by a only the privileged few who have access.

The way in which we write figures causes unnecessary complications: if “we recorded them positionally, simply by the configuration of a set of dots on a card, the automatic reading mechanism would become comparatively simple.” The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical (not electronic) in nature, and they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more.

“There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things.”

The old systems of indexing information made retrieval more difficult than it needed to be; in the new world  selection by association could be mechanized, so that it should be possible to beat the mind in the speed of resurrecting information from storage.

Wholly new forms of encyclopaedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them

But there will be a special class of people to be served in this new world: the users of advanced methods of manipulating data are a very small part of the population. And a mathematician is "not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot … He is primarily an individual who is skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane, and especially he is a man of intuitive judgment in the choice of the manipulative processes he employs." So he will need handmaidens.

For I think that, in his writings at least, for Bush the male did not embrace the female: 'he' most definitely represents a he. I deduce this from the references in the text which are specifically to the female of the species:

• A girl stroked its keys …
• A girl strokes its keys languidly …
• … a whole roomful of girls armed with simple key board punches
• The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear

 Still, it is good to live in the age of the new profession “of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.”

Links
Vannevar Bush: As We May Think
Vannevar Bush: Hypertext
The Man Behind The Scenes Of The Atomic Bomb
Vannevar Bush & Memex: the world’s first web published book
[PDF]Vannevar Bush By Jerome B. Wiesner
The Hedgehog asked the Fox
Related posts
Qwerty 1
Schrodinger’s other life
Bonny babies
Male embrace

Do act your age

Until I heard it on the radio the other day I had not realised that when The Graduate was made in 1967 Dustin Hoffman was 30 years old.

And the Older Woman, Mrs Robinson, that odious cradle snatcher, was 36 if she was a day.

Good that our children do not have to watch such hateful stuff today.

Links
The Graduate
Related posts
The 27 Club
Freudian symbols

Establishment News

Yet another piece of news to show that the British Establishment lives
The wife of the new Governor of the Bank of England was educated at Marlborough – though only in the Sixth Form, as one of the first girls to be subjected to the experiment of attending a Boys Public School. According to a report in The Times, this was entirely her own choice – she wanted to be educated alongside boys, having endured an all-girls school until that point.

Related post

Pretty girls win prizes

Bank of England Governor

Schrodinger's other life

I have just started to read Piergiorgio Odifreddi’s book The Mathematical Century: The 30 Greatest Problems of the Last 100 Years.

In one sense I suppose the subtitle proves that mathematicians live in a world of their own – others might think wars, & the gyrations of the economy presented greater problems to normal, ordinary people. But then across eternal time & space the problems of mathematics which have been solved, or which remain unsolved, will have more resonance than mere worldly concerns.

It is an encouragingly slim volume, with helpful diagrams but few unfamiliar symbols or equations.

It also has a Foreword by Freeman Dyson which is complimentary even though he is inclined to regard Odifreddi as a European who is too Cartesian, not empirical enough, & therefore too serious, insufficiently appreciative of the illogical leaps which sometimes mark progress in the history of mathematics, what Dyson calls ‘the jokes of nature’.

One such joke is i, the entirely imaginary square root of -1. Schrodinger put i into his famous quantum equation of 1926, thus proving – to his & everyone else’s surprise – that nature works with complex, not real or natural numbers.

What brought me up short was that Dyson goes on to retail an anecdote about the reaction of Schrodinger’s then girlfriend: ‘Hey, you never even thought when you began that so much sensible stuff would come out of it’

Whether her comment shows a surprising mathematical ability, or simply emotional intelligence, must remain a matter for conjecture. The girl was 14 years old at the time.

14! With concern about historic child abuse (a very elastic term) being rife in this country at the moment one wonders how this relationship was regarded in 1926. Did he marry her?

The mathematical/scientific biographies seem silent on Scrodinger’s personal & emotional life, but I found a review on the Telegraph’s website of John Gribbin’s biography of Schrodinger which was published earlier this year, but which I don’t remember seeing anything about at the time.

According to the reviewer Nicholas Blincoe, ‘Gribbin does not shy away from Schrödinger’s sex life’, which was that of a serial seducer.

Schrodinger had an especially adventurous time in Dublin. He seduced one woman who packed Red Cross parcels alongside his existing mistress, (and mother of his illegitimate daughter); he also got a well-known actress pregnant and had to be warned off a friend’s 12-year-old niece.

He later described his 17 years in Dublin as the happiest of his life.

And it was of course, during this time that, at the height of WW2, he published What Is Life? with some help to put it into idiomatic English, suitable for delivery as public lectures to a general audience. A book which is cited by Maurice Wilkins & Francis Crick, among others, as having inspired them to switch, post WW2, from destructive physics to the more life-affirming world of genetics.

So, given that retrospective punishment is now being called for over incidents of child abuse which are now being exposed, is anyone going to propose that the name of Schrodinger be expunged from the records, that he be stripped of all honours, on grounds of his paedophile tendencies?

If so, who will inherit the cat?

Links

Erwin Schrödinger and the Quantum Revolution by John Gribbin

Piergiorgio Odifreddi

The Mathematical Century: The 30 Greatest Problems of the Last 100 Years

Freeman Dyson

Related post

et = square root (-1)
Complex ideas

Society of sisters

The other day The Times, of all newspapers, made the surprising claim that until recently London - renowned for its august men-only clubs, (the sort of place where men from the right sort of social class go to get away from their wives & eat nursery food) - had no comparable establishment which catered for  women only.

One would have thought that those who work on the former Top Peoples paper would be well-aware of the University Women’s Club, founded 1886 & still going strong.

But then the article in which the claim was made was giving a rather breathless plug to two new developments which are aimed at the modern fashionably health-conscious woman, regardless of her education or profession (though not her income).

Link

The University Women’s Club

Psychological mothers

One of the striking elements of the tsunami of commentary on the Savile affair is the eagerness to assert how different things were in the 1970s, & how much things have improved since.

But in the 1970s people were telling each other how much things were improving as bad old ideas got discredited.

One of the things that changed was the role of Mother. Back in the old days, mothers were responsible for autism (through being too cold or distant), homosexuality (by being over-devoted to her son, or domineering of his father), & schizophrenia through some other maternal style.

And – not surprisingly, in view of the above - teenage menstrual cramps used to be caused by a deep subconscious fear of getting married & having babies

Machicolation

OK, I concede, it was a clever (though slightly convoluted) clue. And conceded only after looking up the answer in the dictionary.
Times crossword #25,202: Mother Brown, for nothing I fix up gallery opening.

How is that a clue to machicolate, a word of which I had never heard? I get the ma bit, but was misled by thinking of what is these days a rather tired cliché of a clue where gallery = Tate, so I was thinking they had changed the T to an L, instead of analysing the clue properly according to the rules.

A machicolation (with which the spellchecker is completely at home) is ‘a space between the corbels supporting a parapet, or an opening in the floor of a projecting gallery, for dropping missiles, molten lead, etc, on an attacking enemy’ & to machicolate (which the spellchecker does not recognise) is ‘to provide or build with machicolations’.

We learned about those in primary school – made visits to a Norman Castle even more thrilling! But I don’t remember ever learning the word. The dictionary says it’s a French word, so I guess we have the Normans to thank for that too.

Come to think about it we did learn the rudiments of Norman & Early English architecture – I remember drawing Norman arches, pointed Early English windows, columns & flying buttresses. There was also one of the I-Spy books where you could earn points by locating examples; but I still have no memory of the word machicolate.

While the dictionary was out I thought to check the origin of matriculation, that important & impressive- sounding thing a certificate of which we had to get if we wanted to go to university – basically just a confirmation that we had the right number & combination of GCE O & A levels & were old enough to cope with the undergraduate experience.

It is rather disappointing to learn that it means simply being entered on a register – nothing at all exciting to schoolchildren whose teachers checked them on the register every morning.

But I rather like the fact that it is a diminutive of matrix – some basic knowledge of mathematics required.
And I like even more the fact that matrix comes from the Latin for mother & was once used to mean the womb.

We could have had some real fun pointing that out to the boys who so outnumbered us in the matriculation stakes.

And I really like the idea of womb algebra – such a change from regimented rectangular arrays.

Links

Glossary: The Parts of a Castle

 I-Spy

Big Chief I-Spy

Cancer of the matrix is difficult to cure. Guglielmo da Saliceto ca. 1250

Impossible men

Perhaps this is a poem written by a man who really does like & admire women; or perhaps he is just describing the trap – to be truly admired a woman must always, always, behave well (& selflessly).
True liberation means being able to escape into equal impossibility.

A slice of wedding cake

Why have such scores of lovely, gifted girls
Married impossible men?
Simple self-sacrifice may be ruled out,
And missionary endeavour, nine times out of ten.

Repeat ‘impossible men’: not merely rustic,
Foul-tempered or depraved
(Dramatic foils chosen to show the world
How well women behave, & always have behaved).

Impossible men: idle, illiterate,
Self-pitying, dirty, sly,
For whose appearance even in city parks
Excuses must be made to casual passers-by.

Has God’s supply of tolerable husbands
Fallen, in fact, so low?
Or do I always over-value woman
At the expense of man?
                                   Do I?
                                          It might be so.

Robert Graves

Fathers wanted

In a very interesting development for Radio 5 on Bank Holiday Monday, Reggie Yates presented a documentary called Is Mum Enough? in which he explored the lifelong effects of living without a father in the house, followed by a phone-in.

Callers to the station’s late night show were also talking about the issues raised.

Mums, on their own can – and do - work wonders, but an absent father leaves a real hole. One man spoke of how he learned to shave properly only from a scene in a film.

The baby boom seems to be only one marker of the way in which attitudes towards parenthood, family, marriage & relationships seem to be undergoing some fundamental reassessments.

Link
Radio 5 Live: is mum enough?

Related post
Mothers do count

Dangerous wives

The three widows of Osama bin Laden have been held in detention in Pakistan since the day they were widowed.

Now they have been charged with entering & with staying in Pakistan without a visa & face a maximum of 5 years in prison. No further details are available.

Well they can’t just be let loose, can they, or they might become a threat to civilisation as we know it, just as has, allegedly, the White Widow now on the loose in Kenya.

Are any of their children with them, I wonder.

Links
Osama bin Laden's wife: 'I'll stand with you'
Kenyan Daily Post: White Widow
Doughty Street Chambers: Terrorist sentences slashed

Related posts
Caught on camera
Making the punishment fit the crime
From monks to millers
Deliberate prosecution