Inside/outside (revisited)

Unreal Nature's Julie Heywood (from whom I borrow my post title) commented, last month, that “Felix Grant often includes people and surroundings in his photographs of other people's art.” That was an entirely valid observation in the context, but it was a different viewpoint from my own and, therefore, made me think (always a good thing).

Jim Putnam of TTMF has, on more than one occasion, described himself as an “inveterate people watcher”. I would describe myself in the same way. Though my online showing doesn't suggest it, if I had to identify one aspect of my photographic work that is key and core, it would be "people watching" (which was, as it happens, the title of my physical joint summer show with Kevin Jones in 2004).

(As an irrelevant aside: finding those two links made me aware that Jim, Julie and I place different weights on the importance and placing of search facilities)

Since reading Unreal Nature's comment, I've been more than usually observant of my own photographic practice, psychology and habits. Julie made specific reference to a Growlery post about a student show and, looking back at it, I have to conceded that on balance they show art rather than people dominant. To me, nevertheless, seen from within my own head looking out, the first two examples are pictures of people in an art environment rather than of art accompanied by people. To other viewers, I concede, it probably looks different – and the text of my post shifted the balance still further.

Whereas Julie sees me including people and surroundings in my photographs of art, I would describe myself as including art as part of the surroundings in my photographs of people. Neither is wrong; neither is right; they are simply views of the same thing from different places. Radically different views, from radically different places, but only because through the eyes of radically different people. seeing both viewpoints expands my understanding of both ... a bit like looking at a Picasso portrait.

With that in mind I went though a new set of photographs [slideshow here], taken earlier this week during my third visit to a Banksy show. To me, they are people watcher photographs, pure and simple. But I do, now, also see them overlaid with an external view a photographs of art with people in them.

Interesting. And I'd be interested in anyone else's perceptions.

Analysis is the mother of invention

Invention isn't what it used to be. When I made the decision (at age 11, or thereabouts) to be freelance scientist, I had a lot of role models in mind but prominent among them was the anarchic spirit of absent-minded inventor Professor Branestawm^[1]. It was still easy to find real inventors like him, then; I knew one, and was taught by a couple more as an undergraduate. Nowadays, while part of him still lurks in many outwardly staid scientists, they would never acknowledge him. His demise was inevitable, but was finally assured by the arrival of computerised data analysis.

Invention comes in two basic types: ‘let’s try this and see what we get’, and ‘this is what we want, so how are we going to get it?’ Branestawm, surprisingly for a scatterbrained professor archetype, was of the second kind: he started from an idea for an invention, and pursued likely paths to its realisation. Modern equivalents are easy to find, from James Dyson who envisaged a better way of picking up dust and made it happen, to Altair moon lander architect John Connelly. Shifting from physics to pharma, the search for an H1N1 vaccine (proceeding apace as I write this) is in the same category, but there are also many examples of the first type: batteries of agents tried in combination and in various situations until a therapeutic effect is identified. For the most part, of course, invention programmes are mixtures of the two approaches, especially when seeking a nonpatented way to compete with an existing solution. Regardless of approach, invention is (like all post-Branestawm science) highly dependent upon data analysis. [more...]

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This one benefited in different but equally significant ways from conversations with Julie Heywood, Jim Putnam and (as always) Ray Girvan. They may well disagree with me about the use I have made of their input, but it is no less valuable for that. There was no mechanism or opportunity for acknowledging this benefit in the article itself, so I do it here.

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1. Norman Hunter (ill: W Heath Robinson), The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm. 1933, London: John Lane.

Healthcare

With a lot going on (the new academic year looms, and all the other commitments which get packed into the summer break are, of course, still incomplete!) I seem to have posted very little recently. And to have even been remiss in responding to interesting posts by others. This will have to be a very quick token effort over a rushed breakfast...

That doesn't mean I'm not reading and listening to the world. In my immediate blog circle, see "Slow pleasures", for instance. I've enjoyed Ray Girvan's piece on fossil ink (in both JSBlog ad The apothecary's drawer), Julie Heywood's prolific and always thought provoking (too prolific and thought provoking to keep up with even in quiet times!) output at Unreal nature, and Dr C.

In the mainstream media, one of the strands is the US health care funding controversy. I am reluctant to get too involved in this one because it's an area where entrenched views, knee jerk responses and anecdote drown out reasoned argument. All my own experiences of the US medical system have been frightening, while those everywhere else have been good; that is, of course, anecdotal, and I know with my rational mind that it cannot possibly be representative. It's mainly on the nature of the argument that I feel competent to comment.

Somewhere in the past few weeks I heard a BBC Today programme discussion between US and UK individuals of the perceived differences between US and UK systems. Both tried hard to put aside their preconceptions and discuss it dispassionately. I noted that the US participant managed this slightly better than his UK counterpart – particularly interesting because he was from the Cato Institute, which tends to what is, in UK terms, a rightward libertarian outlook with which the British NHS (National Health Service) is, of course, at odds.

This is, of course, at heart, currently an internal US debate over proposed changes there. One of the more bizarre and shrill strands within that debate has been use of UK and Canadian system scare stories to suggest that national funding systems produce charnel houses where people die needlessly. One which I heard suggested that Edward Kennedy would not have been treated if he had been a Briton. The propagators of such stories seem entirely untroubled by the fact that private medicine exists in the UK just as it does in the US for those who can afford it. So do private and corporate medical insurance. The NHS is an addition, not a replacement.

To risk a personal comment ... I (for what it's worth) second Jim Putnam's TTMF plea that "Caring must become a human right. We are, every one of us, a part of one another."

That's it, folks ... breakfast is over, time to rush off ... busy, busy, busy...

Afghanistan, again

As noted by TTMF, the current Oxford Research Group briefing from Paul Rogers echoes the consensus view of history (and of Greg Parker, in his comment to "Musclebound" a couple of weeks ago) that Afghanistan is a sink into which effort and lives will be poured before we eventually walk away.

And, as always, most of the lives poured into that sink are not British or USAmerican, not even Taliban, but Aghanistani civilian. And, as always, the consequences will continue for those Afghani civilians will continue for many years after our departure.

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• Rogers, P., "The Afghanistan War: Origins and Consequences" in International Security Monthly Briefing 2009. 08(3).

Malleson: Prototype burglary simulation

Just a quick mention for the paper "Prototype burglary simulations for crime reduction and forecasting", written by Nicholas Malleson (see my "Patterns in crime" post of 12 June) and available online at the link provided in the reference below.

While you are there, if you are interested in either crime or data analysis, look at the other articles as well; it's a fascinating journal.

---

• Nicholas Malleson and Pat Brantingham, "Prototype burglary simulations for crime reduction and forecasting" in Crime patterns and analysis, 2009. 2(1): p. 47.

Slow pleasures

I'm standing in a long queue to enter an exhibition. We got here at 0815, we expect to get in there somewhere between 1030 and 1130. I don't mind the queuing; it's an opportunity to see the world closely as it alternatively shines and rains, to enjoy the people queuing amiably before, behind, alongside me.

I've just read the latest TTMF post on a handheld (and am posting this back, the same way) as I stand here, occasionally shuffling forward a few steps. It's another quilting post, which is not only a pleasant gift in itself but seems particularly appropriate as I enjoy my own different exercise in the joys of slow contemplative patience.

Racism

Through the surprising volume of email responses to "Lucy in the sky with violence" ran two particularly strong strands.

One is typified by regular correspondent Zainab Talu, who asks:

“In all the years over which you have nursed this memory, have you ever considered how it may have been for Lucy?”

To which my answer, I'm ashamed to say, has to be: yes, but not nearly enough – and especially not at the time when it mattered.

Lucy, of course, lived with racism while I simply encountered it. I was selfishly concerned with how it affected me, and my relation to a girl. How it affected her, and her relation to a boy, and her relation to the world at large, never occurred to me. That describes my view of many other things at that age. Not to make excuses for myself but simply recognising reality: I think that is probably a fairly typical fourteen year old failing. Bearing in mind recent discussion in TTMF's comments, in later life when it is too late I feel both regret and guilt over this. I can only hope that time has improved me.

The second issue, well expressed by Matt Revell, concerns the validity and relevance of my assertion that "When we know what racism is, we become ipso facto racist ourselves". He wrote, amongst other things:

You say that once we know that racism exists, we become racist ourselves. My reading of that, particularly given your examples, is that those of us who hate racism might go out of our way to support those not of our own race and, so, we're still being racist but with a positive intention.

I'm not sure I agree that knowledge of racism automatically leads to racism. Here in Wolverhampton, we're a pretty mixed bunch: lots of Punjabi descended people, quite a few Caribbean descended people, lots of Polish people -- both from WWII and EU membership– and so on.

Looking round schools for [... my son], the teachers all said they made sure that the children knew that racism was unacceptable and so it seems fair to assume that the kids are aware of racism. However, having seen those children, and others in the city, all just getting on with life together, it seems as though racism is about as relevant to them as war-time rationing.

My responses to that one have changed over the time I've spent thinking about it. They've also gotten mixed up with the thinking through of other issues.

The first, simplest, easiest reply is to say that Matt is right in questioning my blanket assertion that once we know what racism is we become racist. Knowing what racism is will only make us racist if we experience racism too. Because I learned it in, and from, an environment where it was rampant, I had to pick a side: oppose or implicitly collaborate, with no room for manoeuvre between the two. Learning it as an academic abstraction, unconnected with life around me, would have been a very different thing.

Britain, like the US, has made great strides and seen great changes since the 1960s. (It also, like the US, has a long way to go – of which more below.) Racism is no longer as ingrained, as unconsciously reflexive, as unquestioned, as it was forty years ago. There is widespread (but geographically patchy) colour blindness now, and I am delighted by that. It's quite possible (I have no way to know, one way or t'other) that this new climate has penetrated the world of fee paying boys schools – and if so, I would be delighted by that as well.

It's not just racism, either. Other forms of prejudice, bigotry and intolerance are also in retreat. As I noted recently, in response to a query passed on by Ray Girvan from the The language log, at least one urban group of British teenagers sees homosexuality as being of so little relevance to them that they don't bother to have a word for it in their vocabulary. Once again, though, this is geographically and socially patchy – eight and nine year olds only a few miles away still snigger at the word "gay"..

I am deeply glad that Matt's son is (as I was at his age) blissfully unaware of superficial differences (I personally doubt that teachers' admonishments against racism mean that the children are really aware of it), can go to school in an environment where racism is irrelevant. The way things are going, I have hopes that his younger sister will, in this respect, find the world better still. But ... I find myself unable to go as far as Matt does when he says that racism is as irrelevant to the life of a child now as wartime rationing, or that that will be true for a long time.

Though I say that both UK and US have come a tremendously long way, there are still plenty of places in both countries where racism can be the death of you. In Matt's home town, within the last eighteen months, I've seen a fight begin with racist taunts (in both directions) and end with drawn knives (though not, thankfully, any fatalities). That town is on the edge of a conurbation where its children will in future years venture – and encounter some of Britain's most entrenched areas of racism. Across Britain, the racist BNP is gaining increasing support – and recently managed to get two representatives elected to the European Parliament.

Racism is in retreat is some respects, some places, some social groups. In others it is on the increase. How that will play out in the long run is anybody's guess. For now, racism remains painfully relevant in any but small local contexts.

LyX 1·6

This review began with the resolution of a need: to unify the efforts of several hundred volunteers into a single live, multilingual, frequently updated and heavily mathematical information flow from and within an ongoing study. LyX is a free, open-source document-processor system underpinned by LaTeX. No user knowledge of LaTeX is necessary (though it certainly does no harm). Once users have adjusted from word-processor habits, this greatly simplifies both content-editing and style conformity management, for both text and mathematics.

Compiled versions are currently available for Linux, MacOS and Windows, covering most users. [More...]

Woof you can keep your head when all about you...

Over at JSBlog, Ray Girvan mentions Kipling's If– and its many parodies. I was going to put the version below in a comment to the post ... but as it came to me from Matt Revell, and as I am overdue on writing a response here to a thought provoking emailed comment from Matt on "Lucy in the sky with violence", and since I suspect that it will appeal to Julie Heywood who has so often waited in vain for my responses, I thought I'd make it a separate post instead ... this is what we call "killing three turnips with one stone" (you may have heard a carnivorous parody, involving violence to feathered friends).

It apparently originated as one of those endlessly forwarded emails, but it reached me (several years ago) as a postcard from Matt which has been on the fridge door ever since. Here we go:

If you can always be cheerful
If you can sleep without drugs
If you can relax without alcohol
If you can start the day without caffeine
If you can take the blame without resentment
If you can resist complaining
If you can east the same food everyday and be grateful for it
If you can understand it if your loved ones are too busy to give you time
And if you can overlook it when those you love take it out on you when, through no fault of yours, something goes wrong
Then my friend you are almost as good as your dog.

I, of course, don't believe in keeping pets on principle...

Another Microsoft app bites the dust

Mutter mutter grump...

I use Microsoft Outlook for email. Curious, since I don't use anything else in Microsoft Office unless I have to. I have to have MS Word (two versions) professionally, because so much material is formatted in it, but I never use it. Ditto Excel. I used to use Outlook for contacts management, task management, and calendar, too, but those went elsewhere a long time ago. Email, though, stayed there ... probably out of inertia.

Then, last night, Outlook refused to start. It gave the message "cannot initialize Microsoft Office shared utilities", and that was that.

Searching the web, or ringing around friends and colleagues, I find thousands of cases of people who have encountered the same thing ... but none, as yet, with a solution that works.

After sixteen hours I did manage to get Outlook started, but couldn't make it collect or send mail from/to the server. The real killer, though, is that eleven years of vital email archive (not to mention vital current email) is locked up in Outlook PST files which nothing else seems to be able to read. The files are all backed up ... but the backups are useless. The restarted program won't export anything, either, and it rebuffs any other program attempting to read data from the files. I can manually shift emails out to separate individual files – but they are, again, not files which anything else can read. Shades of "a fistful of Rosetta stones"

Luckily, Outlook on the network server is still OK. So, I'm shifting everything out into files which are more generically accessible to other tools. Goodbye, Outlook. Hullo Thunderbird, which saves messages in a variety of useful ways ...and is efficiently importing those eleven years of archive material even as I type this...

Capturing the north west frontier on glass

In his comment to my "Musclebound" post of three days ago, Greg Parker mentions glass plate photographs taken by his father in the early 20th century CE while serving with the British army in what is now Afghanistan.

Those photographs are worth seeing, for anyone with an interest in photography or history, can be found on Greg's Flickr site.

Musclebound

TTMF's comment yesterday that "I understand that there must be a strong military, but surely we are so strong by now as to be musclebound, and the muscle that resides between our ears needs to be retrained" has stayed with me over the last twenty four hours. This morning it has been joined by the opinion of General David Richards (former head of ISAF, who in just under three weeks will be head of the British army) that NATO forces will be in Afghanistan for "thirty or forty years".

I agree that a military is necessary (in a previous post I said that soldiers are a necessary evil, with the word "necessary" precisely equal in weight to "evil"). The word "strong" is more difficult. In one sense, if a military is not strong enough to protect, then there is no point in its existence; if it is too strong, it becomes a threat in itself and its society becomes (in Jim's word) musclebound. Where lies the boundary between the two – the line between "strong enough" and "too strong"? To state the obvious, the military must be strong enough to fulfil its function; but what is that function?

The function on which most of us could agree is defence of people and territory against attack. Another, less commonly acknowledged but very widespread, is projection of power beyond one's own borders in support of economic self interest. In the grey area between comes projection of power beyond one's own borders as a way of providing "defence in depth" – striking at an enemy before that enemy can strike you.

Then there is another one, honoured far more in rhetoric than in reality: projection of force beyond one's own borders in defence, as a matter of moral principle, of the weak against an aggressor or oppressor. This one also opens a whole new can of worms, to which I'll return later.

I'm not going to bog myself down in attempts to define where "strong enough" becomes "too strong", nor in disentangling "defence in depth" from "economic self interest" and "defence of the weak". But I will suggest that the world might be a very different place if we all thought seriously about, and debated, these questions.

The motivation for NATO intervention in Afghanistan is relatively clearcut (in so far as such things ever are): it is primarily a projection (however ham fisted and dubiously judged) of US power beyond US borders in response to an attack (September 11th 2001) against US population and mainland territory, seeking to remove an enemy perceived to have mounted that attack and any threat of another. NATO is bound by treaty to support any one of its members which is attacked, so has become involved in the same exercise. Look too deeply, and you discover all sorts of other agendas; but that one is top of the list, and will do for a simplified picture.

The invasion of Iraq presents an altogether murkier picture. There was certainly a large element of power projection in support of (US geopetroleum) self interest. There was equally certainly a large element of wishing to kick somebody, anybody, after September 11th. There also seems to have been a personal wish on George W Bush's part to kick Saddam Hussein in particular, on general principle, as soon as an excuse presented itself. Tony Blair, in Britain, had simply decided to unconditionally support the US. The public justifications, however ludicrously skimpy, were framed in the same "defence through projection of power to the enemy" terms as Afghanistan: transparent fictions about weapons of mass destruction and links with al Qa'ida, presented as clear and present dangers. But there was also in the air a certain "defence of the weak" element. There was widespread liberal public disquiet about the way Shi'a populations in Iraq had been incited to rise up against Saddam in 1990/1991 but then abandoned to their fate. Many liberal commentators were willing to support a war to end genocide there; I was, myself. Governments specifically denied this motive in advance of the invasion, but hastily dug it up again and dusted it off afterwards as a retrospective justification..

The "protection of the weak" element was a genuinely stronger component (among others; nothing is simple) in the 1999 case of NATO's (probably illegal) action against Serbia, the threat to Kosovo's ethnic Albanians coming as it did after the string of 1990s Balkan "ethnic cleansings". The actual conduct of that action blurred the exact extent of the motivation, but it remained a significant factor.

Sometimes, self interest and protection of the weak can be the same thing. When Tanzania overthrew Idi Amin in Uganda, 1978/1979, the immediate casus belli was counterattack after Ugandan assault on Tanzania (defence of people and territory). There was also a long term motive to remove an unpredictable and unstable neighbour (projection of power for defence in depth). But there was also a tertiary wish to remove a dictator whose policies were destroying his own population – a population which crossed the border to become an economic drain on Tanzania. Similarly, protection of Kosovans deflected the risk of a refugee tide flowing onto NATO territory.

A major factor in the moral use of force abroad is capability. If I see a large ten year old kicking the shit out of a small and bespectacled five year old on the street, I will almost certainly intervene; if I see a dozen large thugs with knives attacking someone, I will probably stay clear and call the police instead. A country which arms itself with the capacity to project power beyond its borders (especially if it then uses that capacity) also, thereby, places itself in a position to help the weak – and, therefore, to be judged on whether or not it does so. With power comes responsibility ... or, at least, the need to pretend responsibility.

According to information from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), for every dollar of world military expenditure the US accounts for roughly forty cents. Next down is China with a shade under six cents. Britain weighs in at between four and five cents. Looking at it another way, each member of the world's whole population spends on average somewhere around $250 (mean) or $35 (median) a year on arms; for the US, the figure is over $2000; China roughly $65; the UK about $1000. Britain, China and the US have all demonstrated that they are in a position to project power beyond their borders; Britain and the US, albeit on very different scales, have done so with global reach. They have therefore demonstrated their ability to intervene in genocides by smaller states. (China, of course, exemplifies another use of military power which I've not mentioned: internal control.)

If British military capacity was used to intervene protectively in situations such as Bosnia in 1992-1995, Rwanda 1994, Darfur 2003 onwards, I would feel that its size and investment were justified. It would strong enough. Since it is not, it is too strong. The same goes with even greater weight for the US, which couldn't possibly intervene constructively on a scale to match its military investment with humane return. Both are, to use Jim's metaphor, overmuscled; the US certainly, Britain probably, is also musclebound. US use of power abroad creates enemies; British "right or wrong" support exacerbates that, and spreads it around besides. Terrorism is part of the hidden cost of apparently cheap fuel and food; so is much of the military budget.

Whether we are "strong enough" or "too strong" depends on what exactly we want to be strong for ... something we almost never discuss.

Lucy in the sky with violence

Since I posted "The South", three weeks ago, I've had a trickle of enquiries about one peripheral comment: “I didn't know what racism or race were ... until I was 14. ... I lost that innocence not in the US south but in a smallish UK market town”. Only a trickle, but a constant one which hasn't yet shown any sign of abating. So, here is a tidied up and recycled account lifted from an email to friends a few years back along.

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I know now, as an adult, that most of us grow up to a certain point without knowing what racism is. We just assume that our own attitudes and those of the world around us are normal – until such time as the two (our own and the surrounding world's) come to differ in some way. One of the oddities about my early upbringing was that I didn't know what race was. Fat, Buddhist, thin, Baptist, white, tall, Jewish, short, black, friendly, Hindu, antagonistic, dark brown, kind, Moslem, cruel, Taoist, light brown, open, Baha'ist, distant, English speaking, French speaking, Arabic speaking, Cantonese speaking, clever, Shintoist, clumsy, olive, young, Catholic, old, pagan, middle aged ... that was just the way people were ... it genuinely never occurred to me that any of these things were relevant to anything else at all until I was 14.

At that age I found myself listening to class mates at a British school talk and make jokes about "wogs". Like any 14 year old, I was reluctant to admit ignorance ... so, just as I had four years earlier when other boys talked about sex, I pretended I understood: I laughed when others did, but said little and tried to puzzle it out.

This unwitting collusion ended after about three months. I had had my first kiss. Well, first adult kiss; there had been snatched playground kisses but not the full real beautiful thing. Now that had changed. Lucy, who lived up the road and was a pupil at the Sec Mod school, (with whom I had for some weeks been taking long and unnecessary detours on the way home, talking earnestly about deeply meaningful issues which now escape me) suddenly dragged me off the road into a patch of bushes by the rec, put her arms round my neck, and ... well, the world was wonderfully changed.

The next day, at school, other boys were looking at me and sniggering. I didn't particularly notice; I was lost in my own selfish haze of eternal undying love for Lucy. At lunch break, though, I was rudely awakened by being thrown in the ornamental fish pond and held under.

My crime, apparently, was being seen "kissing a wog". I was at a loss. The only person I had kissed was Lucy. Was Lucy a wog? I didn't know; but obviously she must be. After that, I couldn't stay innocent for long. I found out what the word meant (for US readers, the approximate equivalent of "nigger") and with it the whole existence of race and racism.

And there's no closing the door once opened. It's like original sin. When we know what racism is, we become, ipso facto, racist ourselves. It's like original sin, Because it's not possible to be aware of something and not have it in mind when looking at the world. Similarly with sexism, or any other prejudicial ism. At thirteen I simply wouldn't have noticed a black/white couple; at fifteen, I would note it with approval – and that is racism. I became aware that race affected advancement ... so I would cheer a black footballer though I had no interest in football – and that is racism. Even my passionate following of the gradual, painful civil rights triumphs in the US and in Ulster (and gravitation to friendships with those who shared those politics) was racism. Heart in the right place racism perhaps; but racism nonetheless. As Jim Putnam has more than once commented over at TTMF, we will know that racism is no more when every race can have its scoundrels as well as its heroes – and without comment on their race, in either direction.

The balance of science

A good conversation in the comments to “The Crystal Clarity Of Great Scientific Prose”, over at Unreal Nature. Several aspects of it intrigue me, but I'll confine myself to one: the relation of "Bad science" to "good science". Read the full set of comments at the link given above for the full background; I'll begin at the point where Julie H says: “A wider tolerance for Bad Science, in my opinion, yields a larger crop of good science.”

I find myself torn on this one.

On the one hand, I do agree that wacky ideas in science are the flip side of creative thinking. Blue sky science needs freewheeling thinkers who are not trammelled by accepted positions – and it needs them to be safe outside the pages of science fiction. Without them it cannot make the imaginative leaps open the way for sober discovery. I do believe that science is at present too straight laced, too reluctant to think radically and say “just imagine if...” Clinging to orthodoxy is bad science, too; so is a stodgy insistence that imagination has no place and only critical thinking will do.

On the other hand, the fruitcake brand of "bad science" is usually accompanied by a dearth of (or, often, complete absence of) critical thinking. Without critical thinking, intuitive leaps are worthless. Worse than that, too many intuitive leaps with no critical thinking to either back them up or weed them out will clog the air to suffocate both thinking and imagination alike.

So we need both. We need the willingness and freedom to make and listen to completely off the wall assertions without rejecting them, but also the critical habit of then subjecting them to scrutiny. We also (perhaps the hardest part) need to abandon our love of definite certainties in both directions. Bad science is typified by certainty that an off the wall idea is definitely true, established science too willing to state that it is definitely untrue, rather than being satisfied with levels of likelihood or unlikelihood.

What is the best balance between the two components? The value of soaring imagination on one hand and analytic evaluation on the other? Acceptance of one kind of "bad science" against toleration of the other? Analytically this is a mixture problem, in which progress is the dependent variable against inputs of wackiness and conservatism in different proportions.

It's not, unfortunately, a mixture problem which it is realistically susceptible to analysis. It's too big, we're too much in the middle of it, and the variables are too hard to define. Nevertheless, I'd love to see Mark J Anderson of Stat-Ease, who regularly produces whimsically humorous mixture problem examples in his company's newsletter Stat-Teaser, have a go at it.

It was Anderson who, just a month ago, quoted Isaac Asimov in a vein relevant to this issue: “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka' but 'That's funny...'.” What we need is an atmosphere in which people can say “that's funny...” without fear of ridicule, even when they get things wildly wrong, but then retain the analytic frame of mind to critically examine what they have spotted. They are much rarer than they ought to be – on all sides.

Today is Hiroshima Day

Why do I insist on mentioning this, each year?

Not because I particularly wish to warn against nuclear weapons. That moment is long past.

Nor because I wish to continue emphasising a particular act of war (amongst many) from sixty four years ago.

Because it is an occasion to remember that we have gone on creating and using ever more effective ways to kill civilians. A good occasion to think about napalm, perhaps. Or the many Iraqi civilian deaths (something like a hundred thousand so far) which we ignore as we note on our television screens only the relatively tiny numbers of our own military losses. Or those in the ongoing mess which is Palestine.

And perhaps also the deaths by negligence while we pour funding into means of killing. Like the nearly ten million children under age five who die every year from causes which we could prevent by diverting just a small fraction of our military spending.

That's why I insist on mentioning Hiroshima Day.

The desire for blue

For Unreal Nature:

Fragmentary Blue

Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?

Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)--
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high,
It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

(Robert Frost)

Statistica 9

The most obvious and most radical changes in version 9 of Statistica are, respectively, to interface and to architecture. However, I'll put those off and look first at the core function developments. [more...]

A sequence in another place

Having put up something which was specifically not a sequence, last night, I find that AcerOne posted an image sequence at around the same time – and (I can never resist flattery!) claimed to have been "inspired" by my previous posts on sequences.

Eggstracts

Artists, mathematicians, scientists (whichever I happen to be masquerading as today) share a certain ... well ... tendency to obsessiveness. Those who live with them either get used to laughing at their oddities or escape, go bananas, murder them...

Every Saturday and Sunday morning, my partner has a boiled egg for breakfast. She then drops the fragments of cap into the empty shell.

Variation within a similar setting fascinate me so, to her amused resignation, I started photographing each egg shell before throwing it away. This is the result so far...

Unreal Nature has rightly commented on the importance of chronology in a sequence. These images could be (in fact, as it happens, have been) placed in chronological order but the chronology is not meaningful. This is not a sequence (though I intend physically exhibiting them as a matrix). It is a collection – which is, of course, a very different hannimal.

Love in the time of swine flu (2)

In my last post, I said that I expected to be deluged by angry knee jerk criticisms to my interest in a Simon Says item. I wasn't disappointed, but I also received some very thoughtful ones – two of which arrived as comments to the post.