Today

Picture at left (click for larger view) shows Midge and three friends enjoying a certain wedding which has dominated the news today.

Midge, though an anti-monarchist, bears the couple no ill will and wishes them all happiness as human beings.

Midge's three friends say they liked Kate's frock.

Midge would nevertheless have liked to see occasional news coverage relating to other, less urgent matters. Such as, for example, carnage in Misrata, lethal repression in Deraa, loss of life in the storm stuck south eastern US states, a café bomb in Marakech, an imminent referendum in the UK, the Irish economy...

Eletelephony

Continuing my occasional habit of inflicting childhood poetic memories on innocent readers, here is one which I remember with particular affection. It was introduced to my class by Ian Murray, grade 6 teacher at Elizabeth Grove Primary School in 1964.

Whatever else may have been good or bad about Australian primary education at that time, the teachers I encountered at Elizabeth Grove Primary had a knack for choosing poetry which would arouse my love of the form. There is a direct line (an elephone line, perhaps) of development from poems like this (and these) in my late primary years to my later embracing of Milton's Paradise lost, Dante's Divina commedia, T S Eliot's Four quartets, Muriel Rukayser's Speed of darkness, Elizabeth Browning's Aurora Leigh, Frank Jones' Everything is like fire...

Here you go ... Laura E Richards' Eletelephony

Once there was an elephant,
Who tried to use the telephant -
No! No! I mean an elephone
Who tried to use the telephone -
(Dear me! I am not certain quite
That even now I've got it right.)
Howe'er it was, he got his trunk
Entangled in the telephunk;
The more he tried to get it free,
The louder buzzed the telephee -
(I think I'd better drop the song
Of elephop and telephong!)

It's possible that the last two lines are apocryphal. The version shown at The literature network lacks them. Other on line versions include them, or something like them, though some omit other lines. Ray Girvan would get to the bottom of it and track down the definitive version; so, if I were the respectable academic I pretend to be, would I; but my affection is for the version I remember, so let it stand.

(The spell checker has had a ball with this post, let me tell you.)

Highlights

Highlight of the day: discovering the "highlight of the day" taglines in email sigs from Clarissa Vincent (author of The voyage of Storm Petrel).

For example:

“Highlight of the day: A pair of orange tip butterflies enjoying the new herb growth along the path.”

“Highlight of the day: Butter bean and tuna with fried garlic, onion and ginger, with rice.”

“Highlight of the day: Using the fan heater, on cold setting, for a change.”

“Highlight of the day: River path walk with Loba.”

“I wanted something with the shortness of Twitter”, she says, by way of explanation, “but without the crassness.”

I've seen (and used) many variations on the sig tagline, from the utilitarian to the surreal, but I like the upbeat simplicity of this one.

Heart to heart, for better or worse

A couple of days ago my brother referred me to a British Psychological Society Research Digest blog post, which in turn sent me to the full paper. The essence is that very low level social connectedness cues between individuals, such as being told of a shared interest, trigger physical empathy. (I ripped off the connected hearts image here from the BPS post.)

At one level, it shouldn't be a surprise. We've all experienced the feeling of loyalty to someone recently met in the face of conflict with a stranger. I once had a neighbour whom I disliked, and who went out of her way to be unpleasant to me, but to whose aid I unquestioningly went when I saw her being harassed by a third party. Every group, however temporary, exhibits ésprit de corps. And yet ... it's set me thinking since.

On the one hand, it seems hopeful that we so readily make connection with another. In a world where conflicts with the other are so devastating, the more readily connectedness with the other can happen the better. On the other hand, in a world where tribalism, factionalism, schismatic conflict are based on gut level "me and mine" alliances (and prominent figures associated with a Scottish football club identified with religious sectarianism has just received letter bombs), perhaps it's worrying that they can cohere around such tangential associations.

As so often in life, both are probably true ... a binary Manicheism that just has to be lived with.

Fascinating, though.

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• David Cwir, et al., Your heart makes my heart move: cues of social connectedness cause shared emotions and physiological states among strangers. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2011. 47(3): p. 661-664. Abstract available here [ prepublication manuscript available here at time of writing]

Photograph: memento mori

“All those photographs broke Jackson's heart. Holiday snaps, birthdays, and Christmases, all the highlights of family life. Jackson found photographs unsettling enough at the best of times. There was a lie at the heart of the camera, it implied that the past was tangible when the very opposite was true.”

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• Kate Atkinson, Started early, took my dog. 2010, London: Doubleday. 9780385616997 (tpbk). ["Arcadia", §10:4e, p.261]

Unistat 6.0

Every scientist has to be a statistician these days, but not every scientist wants to be. The ideal data analysis tool, for many, is one that does what is required whilst demanding the least possible diversion of mental energy from core concerns, the fewest possible changes to working habits and the least possible investment in reskilling. Unistat is a well-established occupant of this market segment with a proven track record, particularly in the life sciences.

As with previous releases, installation of 6.0 provides two short cut icons: one to start up Unistat as a free standing window with its own worksheet, the other to open Excel with an additional ribbon toolbar accessing Unistat’s tool set (other spreadsheet and database files can also be opened, and Unistat offers developer tools allowing add-in facility to virtually any other suitable product if required). There is remarkably little to choose, operationally, between the two options. The most demanding user will always find that the freestanding option has the edge, but those more comfortable within Excel are unlikely to notice any significant disadvantage. [more]

infinity and limitation

Science Fiction (note the capitalisation!), often in Gollancz yellow jackets, played a significant part* in shaping me, culturally and intellectually, during my teens. A prominent name was Arthur C Clarke whose particular rôle, like Jules Verne, was to point the way into a technological future.

The trouble with future gazing is that it is inevitably overtaken by the future itself. Clarke, like Verne, got some things very right but others, inevitably, he got wrong; it's an occupational hazard. The more precisely the writer defines a future, the less future proof the fiction becomes.

I've just been rereading some of Clarke's short stories. Some of them are as fresh as the day they were written; others show how unimaginatively bound we humans are to the temporally and spatially parochial.

Writers, and Clarke is not immune, often see the future in terms of current cutting edge. Looking back from a few decades on, it's noticeable how much science fiction is dominated by the splitting of the atom: no further fundamental development in either physics or military science seems to occur over fictional history subsequent to 1945. A technological point reached after ten thousand years of human development is not expected to change noticeably over the next million.

Clarke's story Superiority, set in a future when whole stellar systems are gained or lost in a military engagement, describes problems with a computer which contains "just short of a million vaccuum tubes". Few people now know what a vacuum tube was; many have never even heard of a transistor, the vacuum tube's replacement before large scale integration of gates on a chip supplanted it in turn.

More startling, though, in its illustration of both imaginative power and limitation, is his Second dawn. This story is remarkable in imagining a ace of creatures (a sort of cross between cow and rabbit, but unable to swim) which have developed powerful intellects but have no hands. Unable to affect the physical world, they have nevertheless achieved a great deal in philosophy, mathematics, certain conceptual arts, through pure power of mind. These creatures, despite their advanced culture, can only hypothesise the existence of other continents on their own world, never mind worlds beyond it. This creation is, for me, a remarkable feat. And yet, the imagination which called forth this thought experiment of a race is unable to transcend 1950s social structure. It is a patriarchal and hierarchic society. All serious thinking and organisation is done by males; the only female in the story is there to offer emotional empathy alone, and her support for ideas is bought with a string of beads for adornment.

To be clear: I'm not criticising Clarke, whom I consider to be an exceptional figure. On the contrary; I'm simply musing on the fact that even an exceptional figure has such closely constraining limitations, and what that says about us all.

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*Several significant parts, in fact; but that distinction can wait for another time.

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• Arthur C Clarke, Superiority, in The magazine of fantasy & science fiction. August 1951, Fantasy House.
• Arthur C Clarke, Second dawn, in Science fiction quarterly. August 1951, Columbia Publications.

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Today

Counting on peace and war

Just under a century ago, a Quaker conscientious objector served during the first world war as a civilian volunteer ambulanceman. By this decision he ended his academic career, but nevertheless managed to leave behind numerous instances of his name in the academic fossil record. He become a primary figure in the origination of several new areas which later became fertile ground for scientific computing.

He was Lewis Fry Richardson, who died just as the computers began to appear which would make his theoretical work feasible in practice. His works on fractals was greeted with indifference at the time, but Benoit Mandelbrot would later^[1] acknowledge it. And his Statistics of Deadly Quarrels^[2,3] is a keystone for modern scientific study of peace and conflict. One of the world’s first Peace Studies research centres is named after him: the Richardson Institute within Lancaster University, host of this year’s Conflict Research Society annual conference.

Moving up to the present day, my writing of this article was overtaken in topicality by a flood of emails and data streaming in from the laptops of individuals handling rapidly changing analyses from the Maghreb and Persian Gulf. [more]

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1. Mandelbrot, B., How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension. Science, 1967. 156(3775): p.636-638.

2. Richardson, L.F., Statistics of Deadly Quarrels ... Part one of a comprehensive work on the Instability of Peace, etc. [With a bibliography. Typescript, with MS. and printed additions.]: pp. 421. The Author: [Kilmun,] 1950.

3. Richardson, L.F., Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. 1966, Stevens and Sons Limited.

Today

Mirror, mirror, on the wall...

Seven months back, I said (in relation to the iPod Touch): “I won't forget my promise to discuss the Apple thing. Later. Watch this space.” Well ... I did forget ... despite being reminded at intervals by readers with irritatingly long memories. Today, several different currents have come together and persuaded me that I really ought to keep my promise and thereby eradicate my conscience pangs. So...
I'm not, to be honest, an Apple fan. There are a lot of reasons for that, but I won't rehearse them here ... other people love Apple, and I am happy for them. But I have the Touch because one particular institution had a fit of enthusiasm for them, dished them out to the world and its live in friendperson (I happened to be in the room at the time) and then did nothing whatsoever to follow up.
I heard an industry commentator say, at around the same time when I was writing that previous post, that “Apple doesn't innovate; it takes what is already there and shows how it can be made better”. I'd agree with most of that sentence, but would change the last word: Apple takes what is already there and shows how it can be made more beautiful. The Apple Lisa made Xerox PARC's desktop metaphor WIMP* beautiful but other products made it better. (Windows, at first, made it neither good nor beautiful.) The iPod was a more beautiful, not better, MP3 player. The iPhone is a more beautiful phone, the iPad a more beautiful tablet computer, and the iPod Touch a cross between the two. None of them is (in my personal opinion; other opinions are available) the best example of its genre ... but each of them is the most beautiful.
So ... given that I have so little enthusiasm the Touch as a computer, and the institution which supplied it seems unable to think of any actual use for it, why do I keep it and even carry it?
The answer is: Janos Barkai's Symbolic Calculator app.
It's not Maple or Mathematica, but it's the closest that a slim, pocketable handheld device currently gets to that idea. It costs 99¢, which makes the economics a little bizarre ... I have a $400 platform running a 99¢ program. Would I actually buy a Touch on this basis? no, I wouldn't ... if the device dies, or is broken, or is lost, I shan't replace it. But having been given one, I happily carry it as a convenient symbolic algebra calculator.
Only close to a power supply, though ... out in the wilds, the battery life is too short (lasting less than two of days under intensive use, even with all communications switched off) so then it's back to pen and paper.

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*Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer

Lapping and misting the underground

I was the sort of child who was always making lists and maps. Looking back, I realise that lists and maps were not, really, different things to me: both were ways of constructing imagined worlds, and (simultaneously) of imagining real or constructed worlds. I lost myself in published maps, the larger the scale the better. When I discovered card indexes, I was thrilled. (Remind to show you, some time, how to apply AND, OR, XOR filters to a card index using a hole punch and a set of knitting needles ... but I digress.) I card indexed features from maps, and mapped details from card indexes. I drew maps on which to follow the action of stories, and loved those story books in which a map was provided. Then, in adulthood, came databases and digitised mapping...

When Ray Girvan recently posted a link to text source visualisations, I was lost for a long time in the joy of following other people's imagined voyages through informational seas (have you, by the way, read the wonderful The raw shark texts where those informational seas are populated by information organisms including a lethal informational predator?)

A subset of these map-cum-card-file delights consisted of networked systems. Rail networks, motorway networks, bus networks, telephone networks ... they are frequently presented both as lists of their nodes and also as visualised representation of their relationship arcs. One of the most famous examples is the London underground railway with its topographically (but not geographically) correct map and its textual manifestation in (for example) Bernard & Van Caenegem's Métro program.

The London underground also interested me intensely in other, noninformational ways (and still does). For one thing, it was an ideal place for my love of people watching. When I was fifteen I spent several hours travelling around and around the Circle Line, taking photographs of the people who sat opposite me, all for the price of a one stop ticket ... an activity repeated at various times in my life since, the image shown above left being taken only a few months ago. For another, it embodies whole atavistic bodies of human characteristic hopes and fears.
James Nicholls is a young acquaintance who delights in using CAD software (Google SketchUp in particular) to construct worlds, sometimes imagined and sometimes real, in a way which I recognise as being homologous with my map and list adventures. I have admired his airy high rise constructs for a couple of years now, but in recent months they have been joined by equally compelling subterranean structures. This development reflects his own growing fascination with the London Underground. (James, if you read this: I've gotten you your own copy of Ross's Tunnel visions – bring mine back, next time I see you, and we'll swap!)

As a happy byproduct of checking the exact number of London Underground stations, James recently produced a spreadsheet which warms the cockles of my heart (whatever the "cockles of my heart" might be!): it is simultaneously a list and a conceptual map which couldn't be more different from the usual one. A whole set of conceptual maps, in fact, because as you sort and filter the sheet it shifts and morphs to map the system in different ways.
The screenshot here on the right shows a fragmentary snapshot of the spreadsheet, but if you share my delight in this sort of thing, James has given me permission to post a copy of the full spreadsheet file itself.

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• Christopher Ross, Tunnel visions : journeys of an underground philosopher. 2001, London: Fourth Estate. 1841155667

And this I held the greatest wonder in the world...

A couple of days ago, Unreal nature quoted entrancing extracts from Color: a natural history of the palette by Victoria Finlay – a book new to me, but now ordered and eagerly awaited.

The love of materials for their own sake is common in artists (and everyone with a sense of wonder, for that matter, regardless of field); less so are those who can express that love poetically in words. One of my favourite examples is this one from Cennino Cennini's fourteenth (probably) century painters' manual Il libro dell'arte:

“A natural colour known as ochre is yellow. This colour is found in the earth in the mountains, where there are found certain seams resembling sulphur; and where these seams are, there is found sinoper, and terre-verte and other kinds of colour. I found this when I was guided one day be Andrea Cennini, my father, who led me through the territory of Colle di Val d'Elsa, close to the borders of Casole, at the beginning of the forest of the commune of Colle, above a township called Dometaria. And upon reaching a little valley, a very wild steep place, scraping the steep with a spade, I beheld seams of many kinds of colour: ochre, dark and light sinoper, blue, and white; and this I held the greatest wonder in the world – that white could exist in a seam of earth…”
[from chapter XLV, "On the character of a yellow color called ocher"]

Beautiful.

(I've used Daniel V Thompson's 1960 translation; there are others, including a modern Italian one which makes a halfway house; but Thompson's is the standard, best, and only currently in print, English reference.)

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• Victoria Finlay, Color : a natural history of the palette. 2003, New York: Ballantine Books. 0345444302
• Cennino d'Andrea Cennini (Trans: Daniel V. Thompson), The craftsman's handbook : the Italian "Il libro dell'arte". 1960, New York: Dover Publications. 048620054X.

There should be stars up there*

Geoff Powell comments , en passant in relation to urban lighting and power demand, that “It was lovely when I, once upon a time, turned my gaze upon the stars and saw them...”

I, too, remember with affection and regret the days when I could see the stars and count the Pleiades...

Night time in town feels lonely, these days. I often can't find the Pleiades, never mind count them. Even out in the countryside, there is enough light spill to make the sky much less clear and less vivid than it was fifty years ago.

I try to describe to a European child, now, what the Milky Way used to look like (a great dreamy slash across the sky which clearly earned its name) and realise that they simply cannot begin to imagine it.

“When darkness hovers
And city lights take over
I am blinded to the words
"I am alone".
It's useless to cry
For a star in the sky,
For the city lights tell me
There's none.
But: what ... to ... do?”

What, indeed, to do. I agree with Geoff that it would “be nice and save so much energy if we stopped being paranoid and turned off street, shop and business lights at night”. I'm less convinced that we could instantly return to a golden age of safe dark city streets ... but it's probably an academic issue since both require persuading people to give up what they have come to regard as essential.

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• Melanie Safka, "In the hour" on Please love me, 1973, New York: Buddah Records. BDS 5132 or 2318 090.

* Post title also Melanie Safka: "(There should be) stars up there", on As I see it now, 1974, New York: Neighborhood Records. NRS 48001 or NH 3003

If there's a will, there's a way

I found this on the prompting of Jim Putnam (who no longer writes TTMF, where he might have posted this himself), who in turn picked it up from Juan Cole.

The world can be powered by alternative energy, using today's technology, in 20-40 years, says Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson

Thanks, Jim.

Today

I took this one (click for a larger view) because, for reasons with which I won't bother anyone (they would make no sense to anyone but myself), the scene brought to mind Rosalind Pulvertaft.

She was a London based polytechnic lecturer in photography, in the 1960s, and played a significant part in shaping how I see.

I can't, sadly, find any web references to her ... sic gloria transit mundi.

Still worrying about those shades of grey...

I've received a lot of mail about my declared "shades of grey" ambivalence over outside military intervention in the Libyan civil war.

Geoff Powell comments “not in my name” – an honourable cry, which I joined many others in voicing at the time of the Iraq invasion (though with the caveat that, like Salman Rushdie, I could support action to protect the Kurds and Marsh Arabs from genocide).

Pauline Laybourn pointed out to me the deaths inflicted by the initial cruise missile attack on Libyan government air defenses in preparation for air interdiction. Another moral conscience driven point which I take seriously. This aspect comes down to a variant on (yet again...) the Foot's Trolley dilemma: when forced to make a choice between actively killing a smaller number and thereby saving many, or allowing the much larger number to die by our inaction, which should we do? (I say "a variant on Foot's Trolley" because there is an added dimension here ... the few are aggressors against the many, and have thus made a moral choice of their own.)

Zainab Talu takes the opposite tack, upbraiding me for my "moral squeamishness" in not stating clearly (as Julie Heyward does in another comment) that I am in favour of the intervention.

Well ... I am in favour of the intervention to protect the civilian population from massacre. Elsewhere I was more vocal than here in my impatience over delays in that intervention when it looked like protection might come too late. I thoroughly approve of it on basis. That doesn't, however, mean that I have no worries about it. It's very difficult, in practice, to separate humanitarian actions from broader political agendas. Already, there are signs that the industrialised west is tempted to go beyond protection in search of future advantage.

In his March briefing for the Oxford Research Group, Paul Rogers says:

“Although there was substantial support for initial coalition actions against Gaddafi’s forces, especially when they threatened civilians in Benghazi, the Libyan War is now developing into a much wider operation. It also seems likely that the more it becomes a matter of attempted regime termination by NATO forces, the less support there will be across the Arab world. Furthermore, it has been paralleled by suppression of dissent in countries where autocratic regimes have strong support from those very countries now seeking regime termination in Libya, the most notable example being Bahrain. Above all, NATO has now embarked on its second major out-of-area operation since the end of the Cold War following Afghanistan. What began being seen as a narrow but essential humanitarian military intervention seems unlikely to end there, and this may have consequences right across the region and also for the future of NATO.”

I hope we will finally do the right thing without rushing on into the wrong one; but I do fear that we will, yet again, have failed to learn.

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• Paul Rogers, Libya, Bahrain and NATO. International Security Monthly Briefing 2011(2011-03).
• Salman Rushdie, A Liberal Argument For Regime Change, in Washington Post. 2002 Washington DC. p. A35.

Today