Felix Grant : The Growlery

mathStatica 2.5

2012-01-28T17:23:00.002Z

Last reviewed by me in version 2, mathStatica sees impressive developments with this upgrade – both in its own right and in its utilisation of new features in Wolfram Mathematica 8 (which it requires). According to the documentation, these are built on a 60 per cent expansion in the code base; I have to take that on trust, but the resulting benefits are empirically verifiable without any special effort.

[more]

Puck amongst the pollen

2012-01-28T15:28:00.001Z

I've spent the past couple of hours chuckling over Julie Heyward's delightfully pin point comment to yesterday's "Cross-pollinations" post:

“Cross-pollination is interesting because there are actually two evolutionarily diverse, equally important components to the process: first the male/female thing has to happen, but then the seed has to be moved, usually by being eaten and then shat out by some cooperative creature at a suitable distance. We thank you.”

As always, she knows exactly how to deflate the pomposity of my self agrandisement.

When I used the cross pollination metaphor, I had in mind the literal, restricted meaning of the term: where a transmission vector (the cross pollinator) intervenes in "the male/female thing", transferring pollen from one location “to fertilize ... another flower or plant” (OED). A sort of Puck figure, a "shrewd and knavish sprite" scrambling the DNA before the formation of the gamete, in other words, rather than a sort of nature's own FedEx truck distributing the gamete to a new geographic location after it has become.

Secretly, I had a more specifically cuddly image of myself. Not just any old transmission vector, me: not just biotic, but apis mellifera, a cheery if somewhat dim honey bee. There I am, in the photograph (courtesy of Judith Acland) above left: entomophilously bumbling through the stamens of one flower to emerge disreputably covered in pollen. Moving on to another where I lurch carelessly against the stigma. Usually leaving a mess behind me but, just sometimes, every now and then, accidentally producing the circumstances in which a new flower can be born...

A self image which, of course, thoroughly deserved to be punctured by laughter.

If you haven't looked since yesterday, by the way, Julie has since put up another two Euclid propositions.

A wordle in your ear

2012-01-28T10:52:00.009Z

These days, it seems, everyone who is anyone must have a Wordle (especially if they are to any extent involved in education) and some of my readers have been pointedly commenting on my lack of this essential accessory.

So, here is a wordle based on a recent atom feed from The Growlery (as always, click it you want to see a larger view).

Interestingly, "Ray" of JSB fame appears prominently but not "Girvan" ... the queen of Unreal Nature, on the other hand, reverses this with "Heyward" immediately spottable but not "Julie". why that should be, I've been too lazy to investigate ... Dr C (but without the "C") nestles between the "T" and the "o" of the word "Toss".

Update, 2012/01/29: Just to show what an exciting life I lead ... this is a Wordle compiled not from text but from the first ten thousand digits of π.

Tomorrow, the heady delights of the exponential function, e... [only joking]

Cross-pollinations

2012-01-27T19:43:00.002Z

As a self declared generalist* I am always delighted to find transgressions of the (po faced, spurious and entirely imaginary) boundaries between fields of human endeavour. For two different perforations of the membrane between mathematics and the visual/plastic arts, thank you to...

...my youngest brother, for sending me to The Institute of Figuring.
...Julie Heyward, for creating and sharing interpretations of propositions from Euclid's Elements.

*My own metaphor for the generalist in a specialist world is "cross pollinator". I also, however, wear with pride two descriptions bestowed on me by others: "busking academic" (thank you, Martin-Peter, wherever you now are) and "academic odd job man" (my sister in law, B, who is wise and perceptive in so many ways).

A bestiary (2)

2012-01-26T14:05:00.004Z

[by special request from Julie Heyward...]

In my early childhood, before either of my brothers, was a blue and green budgerigar called Toss.

My mother hated cages, so Toss could often be seen trilling from chair backs and picture rails or swooping between them. If I stayed motionless for long enough Toss would sometimes alight on my head, claws latching into hair. The sudden scratching at my scalp was alarming at first, but I soon got used to it.

Usually very fastidious about returning to his cage and conducting personal hygiene needs from the dowel perch onto his sandpaper floor, Toss made one mistake. On a parabolic transit from one picture rail to another, he whirred between us across the dinner table. My father sat, frozen with fork halfway to mouth, staring at the black and white puddle which had blossomed in his plate of stew.

Some years later, in Australia, I was agog with excitement. It was from here that Toss's ancestors had come; here, budgerigars flew wild! I roamed the countryside at the abrupt edge or our town, looking for them, without success. Eventually I discovered, to my disappointment, that here they were not in the brilliant colours of Toss; those I found in the wild wore a quieter camouflage livery, reminiscent of the European sparrow.

There were, however, plenty of other brilliantly coloured birds to compensate. Out in the bush they were everywhere: large, small, flying jewels. Parakeets, in particular, flaunted their riotous plumage openly across the bush. In a valley where we sometimes went to picnic at weekends, wild kilometres out into the bush, they filled the sky with their raucous chatter. One of this flock, obviously escaped from captivity back to the wild, repeatedly called in an unmistakable Yorkshire accent: “Eeeee ... who's a silly bugger?”

Today

2012-01-22T23:59:00.000Z

More foe furren

2012-01-22T22:45:00.005Z

Following yesterday's "Foe furren" post and its updates, I saw the following today:

It's not the same (Metrolox) font. It uses the same capital Sigma for an "E", but replaces "U" with V and "I" with capital Phi, neither of which Metrolox does.

Despite the V/U replacement (which suggests Latin) the obvious intent is to look Greek ... despite the reference to Turkey ... both my Greek and Turkish friends will be equally horrified...

There is, of course, a lot of overlap in archaeological terms; many of the Greek islands are, though under Greek soverignty, logically Turkish in geography.

Foe Furren

2012-01-21T23:19:00.009Z

I've just chanced to see the opening credits of the film Enemy of the state. They employ a variation on the "faux Cyrillic" (or more generally, "faux foreign") theme ... but, unlike Ray Girvan's examples or mine, I'm not sure what the point is.

The letter "E" is replaced by "Σ" (Greek capital sigma), "A" by " Λ" (Greek capital lambda). So, for instance, the credit for Gene Hackman is rendered:

I've seen the E/Σ substitution before, as a ham fisted over-egging (excuse the accidental food theme...) of faux Cyrillic, but here it becomes faux Greek. Which might make sense if there was any Greek connection in the film ... but there isn't ... Enemy of the state is set in the US, with Will Smith's African American lawyer pitted primarily against a US intelligence agency and secondarily against Italian American mobsters.

To further confuse matters, "Y" is replaced with something that resembles the currency symbol for the Japanese yen ( ¥). What's that all about?

Most odd...

Update: in a comment to this post, Ray has identified the font as Metrolox, which is available as a TTF font download (thanks for that, Ray). What its pseudo Greek references have to do with anything in the film is still a mystery.

However, there turns out to be another twist to this story. Having downloaded the font to look at, I opened the author's documentation file, the open sentences of which are:

“Metrolox is loosely based on the titling of the Enemy of the State movie. I say "loosely" because the movie titling showed only so many letters, and the lab's final version turned out so big.”

So Metrolox was born of Enemy of the state, rather than the other way around, which is interesting.

Apart from the specifics of relevance in the case of this film and font, I also wonder about the reasoning behind uses to which typography is put.

The role of "fancy" fonts is, generally, to capture attention; they are suited to signage, labels, short headlines (the examples Ray offered are perfect). They are not well suited to conveying textual information, since the very quality which makes them effective eye catchers (the fact that reading is momentarily interrupted, the eye tripping up, so to speak, over unexpected elements) becomes a barrier to extended reading.

It could be argued, perhaps, that the names of actors in a film, superimposed one at a time over its opening scenes, are not continuous textual information but a form of bulleted headline. I also concede that I probably paid more attention to the names depicted than I might otherwise have done ... so perhaps that's the point.

Yet another update: in a second comment to this post, Ray has made a good suggestion about the rationale for the use of the font, which I find convincing:

“Could the allusion be to the villains of the film being in the NSA: in the field of cryptography, security and surveillance of foreign communications? That could explain the mixed foriegn characters; and the "O" looks very like the keyhole of a 180 degree toolbox cylinder key.”

A bestiary (1)

2012-01-20T23:09:00.003Z

Olly the tawny owl was rescued by Karen, elder sister of my schoolfriend Dave when I was fourteen. Finding him unfledged and half dead on the road in daylight, she took him home and weaned him from milk to household scraps. By the time I met him, he was a young adult with an established place in the household.

Olly had, despite Karen's best educative efforts, never learnt to fly. The nearest he got to it was a frantic fluttering as he descended from his favourite perch atop the stairpost just inside the front door. Getting to this perch was a laborious matter of climbing first the stairs (gripping the carpet with claws and beak, falling back often), then an ottoman and the back of an upholstered chair on the landing. By this process he reached the top stairpost, from which a scrabbled slipsliding descent of the bannister led (barring frequent accidents) back down to the lower one. Watching this process, I understood how Robert the Bruce felt about his never-say-die spider. When Karen came into the house, Olly would fling himself off the post in a tumble of feathers. As long as she was at home, he would waddle about the house in faithful pursuit of her. When she left the house he started the long trek up the stairs and down the bannister, back to his perch.

Karen fed Olly on raw meat scraps. Since Olly had never learned how to stand on one claw and eat with the other, as owls are supposed to do, these scraps had to be placed at just below beak level; a modified shoe rack sat in the kitchen, for this purpose.

At some level, Olly knew that he was a bird. If Karen was in the downstairs living room during daylight hours he would scrabble his way up onto the window seat, then the sill. Through the window he watched the starlings pecking industriously at the lawn. On fine evenings the family took him out into the garden where he waddled about, taking the air and fluffing his wings. After a while, on these outings, he invariably stopped and examined the ground fixedly for several minutes. Then he tried to peck at it like a starling, fell on his face, couldn't get up, and had to be rescued.

Yesterday

2012-01-15T11:59:00.007Z

Today photos go out to an email list, only occasionally appearing here as well.

Some of them get a lot of response from recipients, some none at all, most of them somewhere in between.

I've been taken unawares by a record flood of reactions to yesterday's Today (if you see what I mean...). So, I'm retrospectively putting it up here.

To answer Emmy Green's accusing query: no, I didn't set it up.

It was a lucky break fluke: the figure just happening to wear red and just happening to sit in exactly the right spot in the advertising model's sightline...

Double delight

2012-01-11T23:25:00.005Z

I've just been looking with unrestrained admiration through the work of musician David Adams (which I only discovered today), on YouTube and elsewhere, orbiting back to his own company website Bozarts.

Prominent at Bozarts is coverage of his new play, Dmitri and Uncle Joe, which “...explores an imagined meeting in 1950 between the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and the great Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich – both unexpectedly stranded and forced to share a bedroom together in a snow-bound dacha.”

Over the years, JSB's Ray Girvan and I have several times discussed in passing the use of "faux Cyrillic" text, where Cyrillic characters are substituted (as a typographic design device) for Latin ones* with which they share a visual resemblance. Ray recently noted a current example in the posters for The Darkest Hour (Chris Gorak, 2011; released as Phantom in Russia) and, a few months back, a more subtle example on a bar. The promotional material for Dmitri and Uncle Joe offers me the chance to post (on the left, here) two faux Cyrillic examples in reply.

*I feel a slight feeling of irritation whenever this device is used ... thoroughly unreasonable irritation, I hasten add: the problem is entirely mine, not the designer's. Having a slight, but only slight, familiarity with Cyrillic I find myself trying to read the substituted characters, falling over them, and feeling foolish...

LightZone resurgent

2012-01-09T14:16:00.007Z

My "LightZone, RIP" whinge at the end of last month has brought a comment which, after checking it out, I felt was worth promoting to a post of its own.

Doug Pardee wrote:

Light Crafts ceased operation in September, but the LightZombie Project is a volunteer group that is providing on-going support for LightZone.
We've collected links to re-download the installation files, instructions on recovering lost license keys, and links to help files and various tutorials and such.
We're providing updated Raw file support for recent cameras. We've added support for all recent Canon, Nikon, and Sony DSLRs, plus others as requested. We just added Raw file support for the Canon S100, Nikon 1, Fuji X10, and Sony NEX-7, among others.
We're also doing what we can to provide general support. We've provided a workaround/fix for a problem on Macs when non-ASCII characters appear in a folder or file name.
Communication is another big push. We've got forums, a blog, an open-source project on github including a tech wiki, and a Twitter feed. So far we've got somewhere around 100 registered members and probably a couple hundred more people who follow the activity and/or download files but haven't registered yet.
Drop by our site and check it out.

I've dropped by, myself, and registered too. Although registration isn't a requirement, I urge you to sign up if you make use of the site: these people are doing a good thing, and the least we can do in return is spend a few seconds on recognising the fact.

Conversation overheard

2012-01-07T12:04:00.001Z

Man on bicycle, talking into cellphone:

“Well, she says it's stress, but ... what can you do in a bedroom, that's stressful?”

Today

2012-01-02T23:59:00.000Z

When is education not education...?

2012-01-01T23:29:00.001Z

I had a conversation with my nephew, the day before yesterday, which has left me thoughtful.

For as long as anyone can remember, he has had a passion for archæology.

In October, he started a degree course which included archæology.

He has now lost all his interest in archæology.

This is a sad story, but not unique. How often do we kill rather than nourish the passion for our subjects? I've experienced versions of it myself, in my own life when younger; I fear I've also, inadvertently, done it to others.

Talking to my nephew, asking questions born of living on this side of the education fence and listening for the subtexts below his replies, what I heard was a tale not of the subject itself letting him down but of the delivery extinguishing his passion. Which gives me much to think about, as I get ready to return from the winter break.

LightZone, RIP

2011-12-30T19:03:00.002Z

Four years back, I muttered into my beard about the tendency for good tools to be bought up and killed off by the big beasts of the computer software jungle.

I have long ago had to abandon Onfolio Academic, one of the programs I mentioned in that post. With no maintenance, never mind development, by its new owners (Microsoft) it eventually failed to work under updated versions of Windows ... and then Microsoft themselves abandoned their own poor, half sucked version. Nowadays I use LinkCommander which, whilst not at all the same thing, takes over some of Onfolio's functions and can be persuaded to support some others. PaintShop Pro, however, remains well supported by Corel and I'm still happily using it despite the presence of Adobe PhotoShop on the same machines. In fact, as part of the future proofing preparations mentioned below, I just updated to the latest (X4) version, even though I'm happiest with X2.

Still in the image processing department, back then in 2007 I mentioned that I was on the cusp of decisions about LightZone. Shortly thereafter, I took the plunge and committed to it. LightZone was a program designed to work the way a Zone System attuned photographer thinks, and was superb. I developed a two part workflow in which initial development (in darkroom terms, the stage roughly analogous to film processing) to TIFF was done in LightZone while finalisation (the fine printing stage) continued in PaintShop. It was a partnership made in heaven, reflected in the credit at the top right of this blog.

Three months ago, however, the web page of Light Crafts (developer and publisher of LightZone) went off line. And has stayed that way. There had been no development for some time before that. There is prima facie indications that the prime mover behind Light Crafts has abandoned it to work for yet another of those big beasts (actually a big fruit, in this case) of the computing world – but, unlike the progenitors of Onfolio and RawShooter, without providing a migration path or even any warning to the program's user base. When I recently had an industrial scale computer crash and had to reinstall Windows 7, LightZone was distinctly reluctant to coöperate ... which put the writing on the wall.

So ... I'm now phasing in a new image handling régime so that I don't have to do it all in a rush when the sad day comes for LightZone to go. I am trying out numerous RAW conversion tools at present, in search of a preferred replacement, using Adobe's Camera Raw (via Bridge) as a temporary stop gap.

And that is why (to answer several email queries) the "Imaging via LightZone and PaintShop" credit at the top of this blog has become "Imaging via PaintShop Pro.

Difference of opinion

2011-12-26T23:59:00.005Z

Today, as Ray Girvan notes at JSB, is Charles Babbage's 220th birthday. By a coincidence, I have just built a portal to a set of Babbage and Lovelace diary pages which Ray and I jointly wrote some years ago and with which I am still pleased ... a coincidence which seems like a flimsy enough excuse to shamelessly remind my readers of its existence.

Today

2011-12-26T23:58:00.000Z

Cars, cows and carbon sinks

2011-12-21T21:35:00.005Z

An externality, to an economist, is^[1] "a side-effect or consequence ... which affects other parties without this being reflected in the cost of the goods or services involved". Externalities take all sorts of forms, and can be positive or negative, but over the past half century industrial pollution of the environment has become the primary exemplar.

More recently still, the focus has narrowed down to carbon based compounds whose costs are paid in a number of ways. The crudest direct health effects are usually localised, and become a matter for local legislation or lack of it; the atmospheric greenhouse effect is a global issue with no respect for human jurisdictional boundaries.

Attempts to deal with pollution almost always come down to mechanisms designed to convert an externality into a direct cost paid by the polluter, and carbon is no exception. A number of schemes exist to license carbon emission, with a market in which those who emit least sell permissions to those who emit most, thus exerting a direct proportional cost pressure on producers.

Whether this method is effective, and if so to what degree, is a subject of considerable political argument; but it remains the principle approach. Its use depends on quantification of emissions, which is neither simple nor straightforward. In practice, output is usually simplified from the full gamut of emitted substances (not all of them carbon based) to a single carbon dioxide equivalence figure, the product of mass and a radiative forcing factor which varies from substance to substance. But that still leaves an impractically large data acquisition and monitoring task.

The essence of statistical data analysis, always and everywhere, is generalisation from sample to population with a quantified level of confidence. Sometimes, as with extraterrestrial exploration in the last issue, this is because only tiny amounts of data can be captured and the maximum information must be squeezed from it. In the case of planetary emission levels the opposite is true: the available data volume is huge, and only a small fraction of it can be manageably handled. [more]

1. Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press.

The quick'n'dirty approach to puzzles

2011-12-18T17:38:00.003Z

Ray Girvan, in his JSB blog today, considers a mathematical puzzle which, in essence, involves finding a number which is one less than a given multiple of its own digit sum. (I won't be more detailed or specific; see Ray's original post.)

From here on, things get a bit nerdy ... you have been warned!

My "brute force and ignorance" approach to a solution was considerably less elegant that Ray's (which he provides on a link from the main post). Implementing my method, however, did prompt me to think how tasks which would once have been both tedious and Herculean have been rendered trivial by off the peg computing tools.

Making an assumption that the number (n) has no more than 4 digits, and writing it as dcba, the teaser boils down to the following algebraic statement:

1000d + 100c + 10b + a = 17(d+c+b+a) + 1

If the four digit assumption had proven to be false, then extension to five, six, etc, digits would involve adding e, f, and so on to the equation. In the event, that wasn't necessary as the solution turned out to be a three digit one.

Setting up a spreadsheet containing an array of one hundred numbers (initially 0000 to 0099), which would test each of them against the above condition and then move on to the next array, took slightly under a minute. From there to a solution, through two updates of the array, took perhaps two seconds. (The three versions of the array are shown in the image on the left; click it if you want a larger view. The solution, flagged "YES", can be seen at the bottom of the third frame.)

Like Ray, I then wondered whether this was a unique solution. My spreadsheet couldn't answer that question, but it did (in less that a minute) confirm that there is no other two, three or four digit alternative.

As I say, this is (to put it kindly) not a very cerebral approach ... but it is quick. Writing this description has taken me much longer than the entire design, implementation and use cycle for what was a one time throwaway tool.

Of course, every extra digit would increase the time by an order of magnitude ... but then, I was using visual inspection of the array (watching for the word "YES" to occur on screen). At five digits or more, it would have been worth investing a few minutes in automating that aspect. In fact, having written that, I have just tried a copy, paste and filter approach which took me to the limit of five digits (even without automation) in less time than the original four digit check.

It's very easy to take things for granted and forget how far we've come in a short while. Trying this trick in the days before spreadsheets, even using a calculator, would have taken about twenty to reach the solution (being prepared to go on for over an hour if the solution had been close to a thousand); testing to 9999 would have taken roughly two standard working days. Go to my teens, when calculators hadn't happened yet, and you can multiply those times by a factor of four or five.

The best of times...

2011-12-11T23:19:00.003Z

How, exactly, publishing is to cope with the tectonic shift which the web has produced in information dissemination is not a new topic; it's been grumbling on for years. It is, however, an ever fresh and ever shifting one.

Steve Wheeler, of Learning with E's, nailed his colours to the mast a couple of months ago by declaring publicly that he would no longer write or review for closed publications: a courageous stance, but not one which addresses the question of how the open access journals which he prefers (a preference, let me be clear, which I firmly share) are to be funded.

Some journals can be run on various combinations of marginal overhead and dispersed good will. They will usually come from within academic institutions or the coöperative intellectual metaspaces between them, though some companies (large and small) are in there as well. Others are subsidised as overhead for some species of commercial payoff – from public relations through to early research access. Then there are those, of course, which run on advertising pure and simple. And there is the public call for donations. One of my regular open access reads, Etudes Photographiques, made the decision earlier this year to fund the economics of research through differential publication calendars (online open access appearing six months after paid for print), which is yet another approach.

Whichever model they adopt (and I operate within most of the above), there is no escaping the difficult balancing act between existence and principle. Nor will there be, when things eventually settle down ... but I really haven't the faintest idea what that day will bring. As Thierry Gervais (author of the Etudes Photographiques editorial linked in the last paragraph) wryly observes, “A historian by training, I am once again reminded that it is easier to analyze the past than to predict the future.” I have an uncomfortable feeling, though, that when we look back on this revolution we may find that now, in the intermission between old and new, was the peak of the trajectory: that, as in so many revolutions, the new world (however different from the old) is not so much better as we hoped in the heady days of bringing it about.

We live in exciting times of change; best to make the most of them.

Ungrudging admiration

2011-12-09T20:12:00.010Z

I've just been feeding on some of my personal favourite fine photographs, as I often do, marvelling at what others have done.

This portrait (Abshiro Aden Mohammed, Women's leader, Somali refugee camp, Dagahaley, Kenya. 2000) by Fazal Sheikh is one of them.

I love its uncompromising, confrontational honesty, calm dignity, assured assertion of equality. The photographer's visually courageous decision to slice depth of field right down to a narrow zone embracing those indomitable eyes and cheekbones (allowing nose and lips to blur) moves the image up a level from merely wonderful to superb.

Quotation of the day

2011-12-09T18:51:00.003Z

“I think one does best, in life as well as in art, to focus on one’s own likes and loves, enjoying the pursuit of idiosyncratic experimentation. My own new goal is to live as much as I can in the work I do when I’m in love with what I’m doing for its own sake.”

Well said, Christopher Volpe.

Today

2011-12-08T23:59:00.000Z

Joining up the dismal dots

2011-12-04T22:42:00.001Z

In view of the recent raised temperature in diplomatic relations between the west (particularly Britain) and Iran, I'm suddenly less certain of my belief that there is no appetite for yet another disastrous war. Not just any old war, either, but one which will geographically connect up the existing errors of arrogant misjudgment in Iraq and Afghanistan into one continuous mess.

In view of which, I've just been back to re-read Paul Rogers' ORG briefing last month, The long-term consequences of an Israeli attack on Iran, well worth reading in full, which concludes in part that...

“... an Israeli attack on Iran would be the start of a protracted conflict that would be unlikely to prevent the eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran and might even encourage it. This would be in addition to the extensive instability and unpredictable security consequences for the region and the wider world. ... ... ... the consequences of a military attack on Iran are so serious that ... ... ... war is not an option in responding to the difficult issue of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”

Paul Rogers, The long-term consequences of an Israeli attack on Iran. ORG International Security Briefings, 2011(2011-11).

Today

2011-12-02T16:24:00.003Z

History fatigue

2011-12-02T00:02:00.002Z

I've just watched an episode of Anthony Horowitz's second world war police drama sequence Foyle's War, in which the eponymous Foyle tells his son that he (the son) is suffering from "combat fatigue".

My immediate assumption was that this was an anachronism. At a guess, I'd have fairly confidently said that the term dated from the 1960s. Not that I am viscerally opposed to anachronisms; it just surprised me in a fiction known for its diligent research.

Looking up combat fatigue, however, I discover that I couldn't be more wrong.

The OED seems to locate "combat fatigue" (“n. a nervous disorder resulting from prolonged or severe battle experience”) 1943 – firmly in Foyle's time. There are references to it in US medical journals from the mid to late 1940s, even though the earliest PubMed hits are from 1945.

Google Labs' Ngram shows a peak frequency at 1948. It also shows occurrences from as early as 1860, but a quick sampling suggests that this is a red herring – a dozen spot checks all yield either usage such as “At present we have no drugs that combat fatigue of the central nervous system directly”* or retrospective reference from later dates.

On a lazy search, then, it seems that this description dates from about twenty years earlier than I had assumed.

* Psychiatric bulletin of the New York State hospitals: Volume 2, Page 311, 1917)

To day, the world ... tomorrow, Basingstoke.

2011-11-26T12:21:00.001Z

I've just seen two luxury tour coaches in the same company livery. There is a stylised globe as a logo, above the proud strapline:

“The future of travel in Basingstoke!”

Just imagine it ... starting, perhaps, with a grand air conditioned tour of the roundabouts...

In two minds

2011-11-26T09:01:00.000Z

I've just spent some time jointly preparing a history of art lecture. The other person involved chose the subject, decided the direction and thrust of the message to be carried, and will be doing the delivery, but is new to teaching. My responsibility, therefore, was to provide nuts and bolts experience in the construction and management of somebody else's vision, without getting in its way.

It was a richly, surprisingly, and thought provokingly educational experience for me. The approach and material selection differed, in several respects, from those which I would myself have followed. Both from this difference in itself and from my own necessary introspection in ensuring that I didn't pollute it, came a continuous and multidimensional process of self examination. Some of my own views changed, some were reaffirmed, others broadened or refined.

Immensely valuable.

Bryant and May, light

2011-11-24T22:42:00.003Z

In my "Prostho plus" post, a couple of days ago, I focused on humour – not difficult, in what was, in one of its many dimensions, an openly comic novel.

I wouldn't describe the Bryant and May novels of Christopher Fowler (which I discovered, as with so much else, through JSB) as comic, but they certainly contain immensely comic lines and passages. Here are two of my own favourite examples...

From Seventy senen clocks:

“The coven has a resident numerologist called Nigel. He's very good at Chaos Theory, which is just as well because his maths is terrible...”

and from The water room:

“The last time Bryant had accessed police files via the Internet, he had somehow hacked into the Moscow State Weather Bureau and put it on red alert for an incoming high-pressure weather system. The Politburo had been mobilized and seven flights re-routed before the error was spotted and rectified.”

Christopher Fowler, Seventy-seven clocks. 2005, London: Doubleday. 0385608853 (hbk).
Christopher Fowler, The water room. 2004, London: Doubleday. 0385605544 (hbk).

Prostho Plus

2011-11-22T23:15:00.003Z

In his JSB post "The roots of fiction", yesterday, Ray Girvan mentioned Prostho Plus, a novel by Piers Anthony. The protagonist is Dillingham, a dentist kidnapped by aliens, who tries to buy his freedom by practising his profession on a variety of worlds and life forms.

As I said in a spur of the moment comment to the post, “I loved Piers Anthony at a certain age ... but I went on loving Prostho Plus after I left that age...”

I hadn't reread it in forty years, but still vividly remembered parts of it. I was particularly fond of a scene in which the protagonist attempts to solve the oral hygiene problems of Trach, a vegetarian dinosaur diplomat. He tries cleaning Trach's teeth of food debris by filling his mouth with a quick setting foam. I couldn't remember exact words, but even in paraphrase memory it remained hilarious. At Ray's suggestion, I obtained and read a copy of the novel today and refreshed my memory. Here is the foam tooth cleaning snippet; it still makes me laugh just as much at fifty nine as it did when I was nineteen:

The cast seemed to have set somewhat more securely than anticipated. Dillingham took his little prosthodontic mallet and tapped at the mass, finally dislodging it. "See all that green stuff embedded in it?" he asked the dinosaur, pointing. "That's the left-over greenchomp, all yanked out at once."

Trach pointed in turn. "See those little white bits also embedded? Those are teeth."

Piers Anthony, Prostho plus. 1971, London: Gollancz. 0575006463.

Red, white ... and sung blue

2011-11-13T10:17:00.010Z

Ray Girvan, in a comment to my "Remembrance Day" post on Friday, made several good points with which I agreed, whilst arriving at slightly different behavioural results.

I am, in principle, a pacifist. It's a principle which i believe must always and everywhere be continuously striven for. At the same time, in world where war remains a regrettable reality, I acknowledge that we must decide how to act in the immediate present. I rarely support (indeed, usually vociferously oppose) foreign wars, but back in April I reluctantly supported NATO military operations in the face of threatened genocide in Libya. Three and a bit years ago, I described military forces as being like bacteria: simultaneously both essential to life and the source of many of its problems. Nevertheless, I do not waver from the view that pacifism is the ideal towards which we should always try to steer.

This year, for the first time in a quarter century or so of wearing a white poppy, I encountered aggression because of it. I have always had people disagree with me, sometimes criticise me, but always in a civilised manner – which is fine, and almost always valuable besides. Four days ago, I encountered the first person to tell be that I am "a fucking faggot" and threaten to stuff the white poppy down my throat. While this wasn't a pleasant encounter, I regard the uniqueness of its occurrence as a generally positive aspect of the society within which I live.

There is another side, though ... what my friend Maureen (a one time European Union administrator) yesterday called “poppy fundamentalism”. I like her term better than “poppy fascism” which, in my opinion, devalues language. Whatever we call it, however, the phenomenon is the same: treatment of a (red) poppy on one's lapel as a shibboleth. Either you wear it or you are somehow suspect.

I agree with the British Legion's expressed viewpoint, three years back, that it doesn't have a problem "whether you wear a red one or a white one, both or none at all".

Joan Smith, writing in her Independent on Sunday column today, sums up my view of this: “The dead we honour won our freedom to disagree”.

Today

2011-11-12T18:39:00.002Z

And the next day

2011-11-12T10:48:00.001Z

With thanks to Jim Putnam, who sent me there: I was held by this post of poem and comment upon it from Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic site.

Remembrance day

2011-11-11T19:39:00.000Z

I wear a white poppy myself, at this time, but was moved by Slinkachu's post today.

OriginPro 8.6

2011-11-10T10:20:00.000Z

With release 8.6, OriginLab’s data flagship visualisation and analysis product goes 64 bit ... [more]

More acid drops

2011-10-25T23:26:00.003Z

It seems to be a drug fuelled (textually, that is; not literally unless you count caffeine) week at the Growlery.

The day before yesterday, I wrote in passing of Aldous Huxley's experiments with perception alteration through use of mescaline and other substances. Today, entirely without connection to my last two posts, of which she was unaware, my friend Agnieszka has (in an entirely separate cultural research context) just sent me an email full of information on similar experiments by the artist and philosopher Witkacy. Using everything from coffee to peyote (the principle psychoactive compound in which is mescaline), Witkacy documented his explorations partly in visual art marked with coded notation.

Acid drop echoes

2011-10-23T21:44:00.003Z

In commenting on Friday's "Acid drop" post, Geoff Powell mentions Aldous Huxley's Doors to perception and Dr C quotes from T S Eliot's The love song of J Alfred Prufrock. Both are curiously appropriate.

At the time of "acid drop" I was in the middle of my A-levels (for non British readers: a two year examination course usually taken from aged 16-18) – specifically, A-level English Literature. Prominent amongst the texts on the course were Huxley's Brave new world (which necessitated reading of other Huxley in general, including The island in particular and therefore, by extension, Doors to perception) and Eliot's poetry (explicitly including Prufrock).

Prufrock affected me deeply; not only in its own right, but in its unifying echoes down the halls of wider literature from Dante to Joyce. The particular phrase quoted by Dr C ("I should have been a pair of ragged claws...") caught in my imagination with especial force; in 1968 and 1969 I worked on a whole series of photomontages which sought to express what those words moved in me. And I have (not surprisingly, within my own psychology, though I am surprised to hear Dr C echoing it) often heard them clattering around my memories of the acid drop.

I had read Huxley's Island and Doors before that night on the beach and, being a teenager, drew from both a romantic view of chemically altered perception. Having a bad trip put an end to that rose tinted romantic view – perhaps unfairly, perhaps equally unrealistically, but certainly and definitively – for a long time. As an adult, I've often considered the issue with an intellectually open mind (and realised that a good trip would have had the opposite effect) but never remotely approached willingness to experiment with it in practice.

Literature never goes away; it's one of those graces which entwine with the roots of being, enriching and nourishing and informing, for life. Part of its ongoing wonder, though, is the fact that it goes on delivering slow burn surprises for ever. Though both Huxley and Eliot have both been linked to the acid drop incident in my mental attic, they have never connected through it to each other – until, courtesy of Geoff and Dr C, now.

Aldous Huxley,
- Doors to perception, 1954, London: Chatto and Windus [current: 2004, London: Vintage. 9780099458203 (pbk)]
- Brave new world, 1932, London: Chatto and Windus. [current: 2007, London: Vintage. 9780099518471 (pbk)]
- The island, 1962, New York: Harper Brothers [current: 2008, London; Vintage. 9780099477778 (pbk)]
T S Eliot, Prufrock, and other observations. 1917, London: The Egoist. [current: several versions including complete and selected poems collections and also as The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 2008, Warwick: Greville Press. 9780955915123 (pbk)]

Acid drop (...and Friday crab blogging...)

2011-10-21T23:59:00.008Z

Personal nostalgia alert ... and an apology to Dr C for dragging his Friday Crab Blogging series into disrepute.

A chance combination of circumstances have, over the past two weeks, involved me in an unusually intensive and prolonged series of conversations around the analysis of data on substance abuse. I've found myself thinking how strange it is that someone who has so little experience of the issue should be so involved in making pronouncements about it.

Many years ago, for reasons which now escape me, I found myself explaining to an elderly woman in a small rural village that I had just returned from Israel. "Oh", she said, to my bafflement, "they do like their LSD there, don't they?" Such was my naïvety at the time that I recognised neither the antisemitism (which would have horrified me if I had realised what it was) nor the meaning in context of LSD (an abbreviation for Britain's pre-decimalisation currency). I stood there, hiding my puzzlement at why she should think that Israelis were particularly fond of lysergic acid diethylamide.

I've never felt any inclination to do drugs. There was one accident a long time ago, at school; there have been some supervised official trials later in life; I got mildly stoned on other people's smoke, from time to time in the early 70s; but no actual use. Some of my friends, yes; me, no. Not from virtue; my sense of rebellious adventure just couldn't overcome my reluctance to surrender self control. In other words, I'm boring.

One accident a long time ago ... perhaps accident is the wrong word; but it was certainly unwitting on my part. It also played a crucial part in my subsequent reluctance to experiment further

I was in the last year of school. I'd been dancing with Maryjane Peterson (all names have, of course, have been changed beyond recognition) in Galli Mavri, a night club in the long wall. I had allowed myself to fantasise at an unrealistically hopeful level, and was now feeling tragic. I'd also drunk too much, and had a headache. Danny Whelan offered me an aspirin. It was a funny looking aspirin; much smaller than most, so I asked if he had two; he laughed, and gave me another. I went to find a glass of water.

Danny was with Maryjane's best friend, Brenda Williams. In retrospect, that was the first night of the rest of their lives together which is a romantic thought; but at the time it was just an uncomfortable coincidence – I probably had the dubious distinction of being Brenda's last fling before Danny. "Fling", on second thoughts, overdignifies our encounter. It was very short, taking place in the half hour break between Physics and Double Maths. It was conducted in some discomfort, amidst the disorganised clutter of the sports equipment storage hut. And it ended with Brenda observing, as she gazed out to sea and adjusted her clothing, “yes ... well ... I'd rather have eaten a carrot”.

That was Wednesday; on Saturday, she arrived at the dance with Danny. Most of us were only surprised that this had not happened earlier. On the mysterious scales of one to ten which preoccupied conversations in the boys' and girls' locker rooms, Brenda and Danny were both up around 99. They seemed an inevitable couple.

Dancing with Maryjane, I had plucked up my nerve as the music died between numbers. It had been a slow dance, Flowers in the Rain. She hadn't moved off to dance with anyone else in the last hour. We were both hot and sticky with the exercise and the summer night. We were right next to an open door, and nobody would notice our departure. "Would you like to get some fresh air?" I asked, hopefully. She stepped back a pace, pushed her hair back out of her face, and gave a foxy grin. "Why; do you have a carrot with you?"

I ran a glass of water, swallowed Danny's aspirins, and ambled morosely down to the beach.

Galli Mavri was built into a gatehouse and several adjoining chambers in the old Moorish defensive wall around the mediaeval east coast port. Off this coast, decisive or inconclusive sea battles had been fought in wars between Greek and Persian, Greek and Greek, Venetian and Turk, British and German, man and tempest. In the centuries since the wall was built, the old harbour which it defended had silted up and a new one established down the coast. By the summer of 1969, the looming stone overlooked nothing but the lazy shifting water of Citron Bay. The doors opened out onto the road outside the wall, along which very little traffic moved unless coming to Galli Mavri itself. Beyond the road, the ground fell away through a short band of low scrub and wild melons to the white coral sand beach. The wall behind the club, betwixt it and the city, was thick enough to protect residents from the noise; even in front, once you crossed the road and dropped below its level, there was almost nothing to be heard.

I wandered a little way northwards along the beach. In the distance, in the same direction, were the lights of Ayii Irini. Under the jetty at which the town's fishermen brought in their small boats and conned the tourists, I sat down on the sand. With my back against the wooden piles I watched the splintering dance of moonlight. While I waited for the aspirin and the gentle susurration of water against wood to do their work, I mentally rehearsed different versions of myself as Tragic Hero.

Something was terribly wrong.

I was sitting inside a huge dark temple of pillars. Between the pillars, the sky was on fire: a million blazing lights which burned silver holes into my eyes. There was a vast cosmic hissing sound all about me, as an ocean breathed up and down the sand. The sand itself had become immense and world devouring; I could feel every single grain as it swelled to a glass-sharp bolder and cut its own individual pit into my skin. The universe was embalmed in an overwhelming stench of salt, tar, decayed fish. I was clad in sheets of harsh fabric, its surface a moonscape of mountains, valleys, ridges deeply indented with potholes between its crisscross fibres, abrading my flesh like sandpaper.

My feet were being boiled. I looked down, and saw the obscenely monstrous saucer shape of the crab. I knew that the crab was seeking me. When it found me it would crunch me to pulp and powdered bones in those pitiless claws. I turned my head, scanning across the crab from left to right, getting an idea of its size; the whole scan took a thousand years, and through it all I could hear the click and grind of my moving neck.

Nearer than the crab, closer to me, something moved. I looked down. Two hugely loathsome pink slugs writhed in casings of leather straps on the sand. I threw up my hands in self defence, and two more horrors flew at my face: pink, again, long and fleshy, with bundles of swollen pink jointed sausages flapping and flexing at their ends. I stopped moving. Movement attracted the creatures. Stillness was hope. I sat still. I sat still for æons, as the sea breathed and the sky burned and eternity marched its way through my head in heavy boots. As I sat, frozen, the rest of the world hammered in. My head was swelling, and in another millennium or so would burst from within. The columns of the temple groaned like overhead thunder. The sand whispered and rustled, the crab ticked like a cosmic clock, and I listened to the mountain building movements of my heart. Through it all, the intolerable fire in the sky burned on and fractured into the blazing sea.

After many lifetimes of stillness, the giants came. I heard them first, their long slow voices booming vastly along the sand, but dare not turn my head. Then the crushing slithering echo of their footsteps. Finally, they came into view. Three of them, towering above me, their heads in the fire of the sky. The one in the middle had dark-rimmed pools where eyes should be; they flashed inky black, then flared with the same inferno as sea and sky. The two on either side were women; the oceanic rise and fall inside their clothing, as they moved, generated agonising waves of desire which would shatter me into a myriad glittering shards. One of these had the star fire in her hair, the other a swirling curtain of midnight. They saw me, their noises rising in pitch as they changed direction to swoop down on me.

The one with no eyes came first, loomed close. Discovered, I abandoned my stillness strategy and tried to fend him off. The jointed sausage-things appeared again. One of them collided with the eye pools, which shattered. The other fell against my mouth and I bit it; pain roared through me. The giant reached out a sausage-thing of its own: I opened my mouth, hearing the muscles and sinews grind, and bit that too. The giant made a world splitting trumpet sound and withdrew.

One of the others, the dark haired one, also reached out, but past me on either side, out of reach, closing behind my head, pulling me into the continental softness of her front. In the sudden darkness, free of flaming sky, the smell of salt and rot swept away by a musky living scent, surrounded by the rush of a torrential bloodstream and the two-stroke double thudding of a giant heart, I found an inner point of still quiet. I was bathed in low breathy twittering giant-voiced reassurances. I cried rivers which carved valleys down my face, across the endless desert and into the fiery sea.

I am told that Astrid, Richie and Megan sat with me, held me, reassured me, for more than an hour before any of them dared leave in search of help. Galli Mavri, with the only nearby telephone, had closed; only when the last customer had left, and they stood outside locked doors on a quiet road, did my absence worry them. While others drifted off towards Ayii Irini, Astrid insisted on looking for me.

I wouldn't move until the monstrous crab was despatched. Examining the sand carefully, Richie found it – about a centimetre across, long dead, its shell empty – and carried it down to the sea. The stars were bright enough to see by, but they could make no sense of my ravings about a burning sky. Richie's hand was bruised and bleeding where I had bitten him; so was mine, where I had bitten myself. His face was cut and bruised by his broken glasses. Since I panicked at any attempt to detach me from Megan's increasingly tear-soaked cleavage, she insisted on staying attached to me until I was safely through my bad trip.

Megan and I shared a bottle of orange Fanta, every school day; by pooling our resources, we saved money on the price of two separate cans. We had almost nothing else in common. One lunch time, without comment or explanation, she gave me an LP – the Bee Gees red-flocked album, Odessa. I wasn't a Bee Gees fan, but that particular album remained one of my most treasured possessions until, many years later, I lost it in a difficult move. I have a copy on CD, now; the title song, in which the singer floats lost on an iceberg in the North Atlantic, still reminds me oddly of white-hot stars over a white sand beach. Friendship is the strangest thing. I was moved and warmed and touched and humbled to discover how deep this Fanta friendship ran.

I stood on an iceberg once. Not alone; I was with a large group, though they seemed irrelevant in the terrible desolate beauty.

Richie bore me no ill will for his mangled hand and lacerated face. He and I invented some story or other for parental consumption. For weeks afterwards he would offer me sweets, pebbles, seeds, snails, anything small and round, insisting that they were aspirin, and I would find empty crab shells in my bag.

Astrid was my best friend; but her story is a separate one, for telling elsewhere.

Danny married Brenda, and they now run a small road haulage business.

Sic gloria transit Qaddafi

2011-10-20T15:24:00.000Z

So; it's over.

Ugly, sordid, shameful, unedifying; but over.

Except, of course, that it's not. The people of Libya still have to pick up the pieces and try to assemble some semblance of a life from the unimaginable wreckage.

Not quoting but clowning

2011-10-17T20:08:00.002Z

I've had a spatter of queries about the title of yesterday's post, "Not trawling but drowning", most of them suspecting that it's a quotation they ought to know.

It's not a quotation (or not so far as I know, anyway; one can never be sure) but a subversion of one: I twisted it from the title of Stevie Smith's most widely known poem.

Not waving but drowning
(Stevie Smith, 1953)
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

Not trawling but drowning

2011-10-16T21:47:00.009Z

[Having finished writing this, and just as I am about to post it, I look at the accretion at its end and realise that it is going to drive Julie Heyward, who views footnotes with disfavour, to distraction. Apologies in advance, Julie.]

My fascination with the idea of drowned geographies started (back in the prehistoric days of 1977) with a Richard Cowper¹: short story, Piper at the gates of dawn². It then took a quantum leap forward when I later heard a folk song about "the trawler fleets of Trowbridge"³.

Trowbridge is a smallish town in the British county of Wiltshire. It is a fair way inland, and not near any significant body of water. The lyrics were intended as a nonsensically humorous send up of traditional sea related folk song, but they latched into my imagination and stayed there vividly. I was writing a fair amount of short fiction at that time, and tried many times to do something Cowperesque with this image of trawler fleets sailing out of a once landlocked town. It never happened, but the idea never went away, either. I have, ever since, played with maps and tried out the idea of flooding different landscapes to different contour lines – first on paper and then, in later years, digitally. To be honest, in retrospect, the maps were probably of greater interest to me⁴ than the nominal objective for drawing them...

All of this floods (excuse the pun) back now because I have just read Ray Girvan's JSBlog post on Floodland, which I immediately went out and bought because (a) it plays to this drowned geography weakness of mine and (b) Ray's recommendations are usually good⁵; it's joined the end of the "to be read" queue.

More immediately, however, I was (given this fascination of mine) obviously unable to ignore Ray's mention of a global flooding visualiser at flood.firetree.net. Hardly had I finished reading his post than I was over there and (of course!) flooding Wiltshire to see the effect on (where else?) Trowbridge.

There is, alas (or perhaps, if you are an inhabitant of Wiltshire, fortunately) no way to flood the countryside around Trowbridge to such a depth that trawlers could realistically operate out of the town. At thirty metres rise in sea level, Trowbridge would remain landlocked. At thirty five metres (the site won't do this; I had to revert to manual inspection of Ordnance Survey maps) it would acquire a coastline on a shallow lake in a wetlands region.

Despite its inland location, Trowbridge has a "Bythesea Road". At a little less than forty metres rise in sea level, this would live up to its name by becoming the town's seaside promenade.

At forty metres it would become a town on one minor arm of an inland sea (as shown in my illustration here – click it for a larger view).

At fifty, most of the town itself would be submerged, leaving two small parts of it at north east and south west on a pair of islands. At sixty metres it would disappear almost entirely, apart from a few scattered islets at the mercy of the tides just off what would now be the coast of Steeple Ashton ... in a substantial sea which would certainly support a fishing industry but not trawler fleets.

No matter ... I enjoyed the adventure of vicarious post apocalyptic disaster. Tomorrow I shall almost certainly flood somewhere else...

I made no linkage then, and don't now, with J G Ballard's earlier Drowned world which, though it powerfully affected me in other ways, failed to evoke a concrete transformation of the world I know. Ballard's world was an obliterated world, not a transformed one.
To answer the obvious questions: there is a clear connection with Wind in the willows, but it isn't relevant here; possibly also with the Pink Floyd album released about eight years before, though I'm not aware of it and haven't checked. There can be no direct link to Van Morrison song written about twenty years later. Pink Floyd and Van Morrison also both drew their inspiration from Wind in the willows)
I can't, unfortunately, give any details of the song, as I'm unable to find any record of it ... I suspect that it was penned by the group who performed it, or by someone known to them personally, and never travelled widely enough to leave a permanent fossil record.
In Tesseract (no connection with the later Alex Garland novel of very similar title), a longer fiction which I never finished but which served as the spawning ground for several shorter ones, I also tried flooding various landscapes in South Wales not with water but with time ... the further the protagonists moved from modern infrastructures like motorways or centres of population, the further back they sank into the past ... it was fun to work on. I'm a dreamer at heart.
It was Ray who put me onto another superb novel in which drowned geography plays a major part: Ronald Wright's A scientific romance.

J G Ballard, The Drowned World. 1962, London: Victor Gollancz.
Richard Cowper The custodians, and other stories. 1976, London: Gollancz. 0575020962
Alex Garland, The tesseract. 1999, London: Penguin. 0140258426 (pbk.)

Mars and the asteroids...

2011-10-14T16:04:00.000Z

In the bizarrely nonsensical words from my schooldays, "Mary Voraciously Eats Mother's Jam Sandwiches Under No Protest". In case your own childhood did not include that particular mnemonic phrase, it represented the sequence of planets in order of distance outward from the sun.

Pluto has since been demoted, and new mnemonics have emerged, but that needn't trouble us here because the imaginative focus of interplanetary attention is now on Mother's Jam: that is, on Mars and Jupiter. Last year, US president Barack Obama envisaged a human landing on Mars in the mid 2030s and NASA's Ames Research Centre has jointly invested with DARPA in the idea of a one way Mars colonisation project. Russian plans over similar time frames include robotic exploration of Mars' moons. As you read this, NASA's Juno mission will be several weeks into its five year journey to Jupiter.

At a less romantic but perhaps more immediately practical level, there is also interest in the sweep of rocky space between them: the asteroid belt. On one level, it is a valuable scientific repository of "cosmological memory". At another, all exploration has, behind its heroic image, investment in the hope of economic return. The asteroids hold out the tantalising dreams of achieving that return well within a human lifetime; Mars within a century; Jupiter only in the much more distant future. Obama's vision for NASA includes not only the Mars mission but an asteroid ready heavy lift rocket design to be complete "no later than 2015", and the realities of returning from asteroid to earth orbit are trivial compared to Mars.

Mars has, of course, so far been subjected to more extensive examination than any other extraterrestrial target apart from Earth's own moon. A dozen or so programmes have, despite numerous failures, built up a knowledge base upon which projected US, European, Russian and Chinese successors plan to build over the next decade or so. The asteroids have mostly been studied remotely, usually in passing while on the way to somewhere else, but greater direct attention is now being paid to them. From an economic standpoint, they represent a potential resource for materials which would otherwise have to be lifted out of Earth's gravity well (and finite supply) at immense cost.

In all cases, however, before the economic return comes investment in study based upon huge programmes of data analysis. [More...]

Image: Orbital image of the Ma'adam Vallis flow channel, entering the Gusev crater at the top of the frame. [Source: NASA]

Conversation overheard

2011-10-12T10:03:00.001Z

1st woman: “So how's your Seamus, now?”
2nd woman: “Oh, he's sore bad, so he is. They say he could have died, God bless him. They're keeping him in the hospital, so they are.”
1st woman: “Sure and what is it that's wrong with him?”
2nd woman: “Oh, it's a food poisoning thing – it's chlamydia difficult, they're calling it. Well, it's difficult for him, I'm telling you...

JSB tag change

2011-10-04T22:05:00.003Z

For anyone who uses my sidebar to reach Ray Girvan's JSBlog, it has a new name on it's masthead and, therefore, on my list to the left: watch out, in future, for "Journal of a Southern Bookreader".

Today

2011-10-02T23:59:00.006Z

Act of god

2011-10-02T06:48:00.000Z

The dean of Christchurch Cathedral, New Zealand, this morning, made an observation which reminds me of the views expressed, from time to time, in Jim Putnam's former TTMF blog.

“The earthquake is not an act of God; it's the planet, doing what the planet does. The act of God is the response of people to the results of the earthquake.”

As a nonbeliever, it's probably arrogant of me to express an opinion about believer's views of the world ... but that is one which I can, even from my very different viewpoint, understand, accept, and admire.

He was commenting in the context of plans for a new cardboard cathedral, designed by Shigeru Ban to replace the one demolished by earthquake in February of this year.

Sunday, BBC Radio 4. Sunday 2nd October 2011.

Today

2011-09-29T23:59:00.004Z

OriginPro 8.5.1

2011-09-28T23:59:00.002Z

Software publishers vary in their approach to version numbering and frequency of issue. Some only issue major, full digit upgrades, and then at longish intervals. Others go for small but frequent issues. With some products, a third digit increment (as here between OriginPro 8.5 and 8.5.1) would signal a minor maintenance issue of interest to particular users; with OriginLab it indicates a useful general development, which will reward the effort of updating. So what has changed since release 8.5?

[More]

I'm just a molecule in a fullerene cage...

2011-09-27T05:32:00.005Z

Call me a sad git, but I find myself entranced by this: that Kurotobi and Murata (at Kyoto University) report successfully opening large job lots of buckyballs, stuffing a single molecule of water into each, then clicking the traps shut again.

“Water normally exists in hydrogen-bonded environments, but a single molecule of H₂O without any hydrogen bonds can be completely isolated within the confined subnano space inside fullerene C60. We isolated bulk quantities of such a molecule by first synthesizing an open-cage C₆₀ derivative whose opening can be enlarged in situ at 120°C that quantitatively encapsulated one water molecule under the high-pressure conditions. The relatively simple method was developed to close the cage and encapsulate water.”

My associated mental image is of an manically overpopulated PacMan screen...

Kei Kurotobi & Yasujiro Murata, "A Single Molecule of Water Encapsulated in Fullerene C60", Science 29 July 2011: Vol. 333 no. 6042 pp. 613-616DOI: 10.1126/science.1206376

Superglued

2011-09-24T23:57:00.004Z

I am standing in a shop, looking for superglue, when the ever present background music resolves itself into a song which I knew well when I was sixteen. As it happens, I recently saw the title in an internet jukebox listing sent to me by a friend, a couple of weeks ago; before that, I'd not thought of it for most of the 40 years since my teens ended.

I shall write more later, when I've time and space to think; for now, I'll just record the moment and then go back to finding that superglue.

[...time passes...]

And here we are again. It is later.

The song was by a group called Union Gap (which I always assumed, for no obvious reason that I can now justify, to be named after the place in Washington state, roughly equidistant from Seattle and Portland). Googling both song and group, now, I discover that memory is at fault: it was "The Union Gap, featuring Gary Puckett" (and, shortly after this one song which I remember, changed to "Gary Puckett and the Union Gap"). I have no memory whatsoever of Gary Puckett ... but then, I have rarely been good at knowing the names of individual members within a band.

Anyway ... to return to the subject ... the song itself was Young girl. In it, the first person voice is (to quote Wikipedia's delicately neutral wording) "a man distressed to find out his lover is under an acceptable age".

Perceptions change with time, age and experience. The reason I find it worthwhile to stop and think about this now is that, within the first few bars, I became aware of a sharp discontinuity in my own perceptions of this song between "then" and "now". What mix of time, age and experience, I am curious to know, accounts for that? What does it say about me, about the world, about the times?

When I was sixteen, we listened to Young girl often. In the youth club, on café jukeboxes, on the radio, on Dansette record players at home in our rooms... it wasn't in my usual line of musical preference (I was a folk rock sort of youngster) but it had a good, compelling tune and rhythm which got into my bloodstream and drove me along just as much as anyone else. The first two words, belted out loud but slow, guaranteed my attention ... and the next five, rattled off fast, held it:

YOUNG ... girl ... GetOutOfMyMind!

We (the teenagers around my age at the time ... or, more accurately, the teenaged boys around my age at the time), muttered to one another that the song was about Lindsey Cook*, a bubbly, vivacious and dramatically well developed fifteen year old in the class below me who spent all her free time with young soldiers (probably only a couple of years older than me) from the nearby military base. Looking back, I realise that this had less to do with moral judgment than with selfish envy: Lindsey, we felt, if truth be told, should be bestowing her attentions on us instead.

Now, four decades on, I find the song ... I can't think of a better word ... creepy.

Why is that?

Is it the result of working some of my time with vulnerable young people? Am I hearing echoes of two cases in which I saw young girls damaged by inappropriate relationships with older authority figures? Have I succumbed to that pernicious "bogeyman du jour", an obsession with fear of the pædophile behind every tree? Or have I just changed with the passing of time, become a boring old fart who has lost touch with his younger self?

Or all of the above, perhaps.

Whatever it is, I now feel my skin crawl when I hear the song (especially since discovering that Gary Puckett is still performing it today) – even as I find it impossible to eradicate the tune which, having been reheard, is now superglued into my neural pathways and won't ... “get out of my mind”.

* Not, I should mention, her real name.

Hand ’is heye full hof harrer

2011-09-24T06:51:00.012Z

Ray Girvan has just put up a JSBlog post entitled ’Arry and ’Arriet. It is, as always, fascinating (to me, anyway, since my interests and curiosities often run closely parallel to Ray's) ... but this post of mine has only the most tenuous connection with its substance. Instead, I found myself flicked back to childhood by the title itself.

My maternal grandfather played endless word games with me¹ and would often coach me through tongue twisters. One of my favourites, which he attributed to his friends ’Arry and ’Arriet (there you are – a connection at last!), was this evocation of an iconic moment from English mythology:

’Arold of Hengland
Sat hon ’is ’orse
With ’is ’awk hin ’is ’and
Hand ’is heye full hof harrer.

The specific memory which first slid into my mind when I read Ray's title was of walking along the lines of pea plants in my grandparents' huge garden², with my grandfather, when I was about four years old, trying to recite the whole thing with every deliberate error in place, whilst simultaneously scrumping peas straight from their pods...

And probably, in doing so, played a very large part in making me the person I am. He teased me unmercifully (but always affectionately; I loved it and him) with things I couldn't understand. One strand was recounting to me conversations with, and the doings of, his friends ’Arry and ’Arriet. They always sounded wonderful people, who lived wonderful and joyous lives, and I wished that I could meet them ... I realise, now, of course, that they were imaginary ... and that they represented his own childhood, before a fluke of history and war shunted him into the military officer class where he adopted protective colouration with which he was never really comfortable.
The same garden which, on another occasion, saw me burying chocolate buttons under its boundary hedge...

Dear Diary...

2011-09-16T05:38:00.000Z

The UK's BBC Radio 4 is currently airing a series in which various celebrities read from, and discuss, their teenage diaries. It's an amusing and sometimes insightful listen ... though my principal feeling is of astonishment at the fact of such teenaged journal keeping diligence.

I had a diary every year from as far back as I can remember, and was always very interested in the information which they contained, but contributed little to them of my own. None from my own teens survive, so far as I know, but if they did they would make for thin and unimpressive reading.

One diary, from a little earlier than my teens, did surface recently ... and illustrates the point. There are only four entries, all of them in the first two pages. Here is what one ten year old thought worth recording of his life, in early 1963, in the Pictorial Young Australian Chamber of Commerce Diary:

1st January : Stayed up to see new year in

2nd January : Overslept

6th January : Bad rash

8th January : Didn't feel well at first but OK now.

I don't, somehow, expect the BBC to call me any time soon...

A line back to my enemy

2011-09-14T06:48:00.002Z

Chance connections...

Just over a year ago, I enthused over N D Wilson's fantasy novel 100 Cupboards. I then read the sequel, Dandelion fire, and was disappointed; it was well told, but somehow more ordinary than the first novel. Why do fantasy novels so often default to epic battles? I left it until now to read the third and final book, The chestnut king – which was better, though still less than the first. But, to get back to point: in this novel, a frequent image was the child protagonist following a grey fibre (invisible to others) which connected a wound in his cheek to the villainous witch who had caused it.

Now (this minute) I listen to Jesca Hoop (thank you, David) singing Enemy:

Beautiful
alone with my enemy
and share a bitter cup
of poisoning
my countenance
to see his face in mine
and follow every line
back to my enemy

The tenth anniversary of 9/11, as Jim Putnam posted on the day, has just passed. Seven years ago, in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, I received an email from an Arab friend (which Jim, always perceptive and thoughtful, disseminated) reminding me that 9/11 itself was part of a violent cycle of tit for tat ... that there is always a “line back to my enemy”.

A shame that while we keep lines of that kind always alive (the child hero of The chestnut king, by the way, used his grey sickness line back to his enemy first to spy upon her and then to kill her ... she used hers in much the same way), we put much less time and effort into establishing lines of communication back to the same enemies.

N D Wilson,
- 100 cupboards. 2007, New York: Random House. 9780375838828 (pbk.).
- Dandelion fire. 2009, New York: Random House. 9780375838842.(pbk)
- The Chestnut King. 2010, New York: Random House. 9780375838866 (pbk)
Jesca Hoop, Kismet, "Enemy". 2007, New York: Red Int/Red Ink.

9/11 Thoughts

2011-09-11T00:01:00.004Z

Guest posted by Jim Putnam

All of radio, news magazines and papers, and TV seem to be focusing on the ten year anniversary of 9/11. I’ve listened and read several, and no one has put their thoughts any way near what I have been thinking. So, here I go.

It’s obviously true that 9/11 changed us all in many ways. I’m no different. I remember being at work in Raleigh when someone came in and said we needed to get to a TV. I watched and listened for a few minutes, and left the room before the second plane struck, very saddened. I knew that we would never be the same, individually or as a nation. I wasn’t, and am still not, smart enough to know how we would or still will change, but it seemed inevitable that we would.

9/11 stands foremost as a missed, a lost opportunity. I don’t think any of us could see the true opportunity available to stand atop a mountain and shine as a beacon of hope. Anger crowded reason aside, and we reacted, striking at those who hurt us. We struck at anyone who even looked like the image we built of a Muslim enemy. Because a few hundred, perhaps a thousand, Muslim extremists, perpetrated the terrible acts on 9/11, every one of a billion and a half Muslim people became our enemy. And no matter how much we say that they are not, our actions scream louder. We have become that which we feared the most.We have spent billions of dollars on our internal defenses, telling ourselves that we must be strong, and more billions on external war. I understand that we’ve spent well over a trillion dollars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A billion here, billion there, and pretty soon we have spent real money, to paraphrase Senator Everett Dirksen. We’ve practically bankrupted ourselves with wars and fear.

Hindsight is so much better than foresight. It’s not a good idea to play the “What if ..” game, and I don’t intend to do so now. What is, is, and no amount of what if can change it. But, perhaps it is good to consider what we could have done, along with those that we did. I’m not a political scientist, but it seems to me that there were certainly actions not taken that would have made an enormous, world changing difference.

Perhaps we could have said to the world that we have been grievously hurt, but that we know we are strong enough as a nation that we don’t feel the need to respond to death with anger but with a firm resolve that we are better than that. Can we build on our strengths rather than try to build walls of isolation based on fear?

It’s reasonably clear that there are those who wish us terrible harm. Yes, we must continue to protect ourselves, but isn’t it also clear that security needn’t be the enemy of freedom? To me it is. Very clear. We’ve always been a confident people, and yet we’ve allowed ourselves to relinquish our freedoms for what those who profit from “protecting” us. We’ve allowed our government to tell us that we need to be surrounded by walls, electronic and real. A million or so dollars spent to detect a bomb detection device could be better spent building bridges and infrastructure that make us stronger than any detection gizmo.

I don’t have any idea what to do now about Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention Somalia, Libya, the Mideast, etc. I read that Afghanistan and Iraq would likely be failed countries two years after we would leave, and therefore we cannot leave. Supposedly, as failed countries they would be a training, or to us a more heinously loaded word, breeding ground for terrorists after we leave. Isn’t there a better way to preclude that than by occupying, fighting, and losing our troops? I believe there must be, and surely someone smarter than me has an idea how.

I suppose the base question has to be, “What can be done now, after all these bodies, dollars, and mental, emotional, and physical strength of our country has already been committed?” What can we do NOW? I can’t answer that because I am not at all sure that there is anything that we can do. Nothing, nada, zilch, zero. But so long as words like these can still be written, in despair as well as hope, there may be time to do something, and there may be time for someone who is more capable than I to show us a plan.

Jim Putnam

Unscrambler X

2011-09-06T23:59:00.004Z

Since Unscrambler last passed this way, then in version 9, its Norwegian publisher Camo Software has launched a 'new generation' image. At its heart is Unscrambler X (currently 10.1, the third sub-version in numerical release terms; some limitations in the original 10.0.0 have been resolved at this point), with additional products to extend its reach and power in particular directions. My review is based a month’s use of the 64-bit option, although a quick run through on a one gigabyte Windows XP system showed the 32-bit alternative to be completely happy there. I’ll combine a quick overview, for those who’ve not encountered Unscrambler in its previous incarnations, with a skim of what’s new. [more...]

Today

2011-09-03T23:50:00.003Z

Good vibes down the time line

2011-08-27T07:28:00.015Z

In the middle of a conversation with Clarissa Vincent, she used the expression "good vibes" ... and I found myself wondering whether the Beach Boys invented "good vibrations", or whether we already had them?

Being a terminal nerd (not to mention terminally bad mannered), I wandered off to find out.

The first use of the phrase, in a book in English, according to Google Ngram, is from 1893: Law and the prophets: a scientific work on the relationship between physical bodies, vegetable, animal, human, and planetary by one Frank Earl Ormsby:

"You are embodied for the purpose of expressing your own spirit, see to it that no one robs you of the right. Receive all of the good vibrations that spirits can give you, but do something for yourself, if you expect results."

From then onwards, occurrence of the phrase in literature pootles along close to the bottom of the graph (though with a modestly significant increase from 1925) until 1966 ... after which it rises to a maximum in 1972 before dropping off again.

The Beach Boys released "Good vibrations" in 1966. So, it seems that the phrase had already been in existence for a century, but my generation (actually, probably the previous generation ... I was 14 in 1966, 20 in 1972, not yet writing books) picked it up from the Beach Boys and made it mainstream.

After 1972 it dropped back, but remained regularly used, until 1988 ... when it surged again, reaching a peak between 2004-2006 from which it now appears to be dropping off again.

(I've looked for Law and the prophets in the British Library catalogue, without success; the Library of Congress (probably a better bet, going by the author's name format) isn't responding at the moment ... perhaps later...)

[Later addition, 1611Z: Library of Congress still isn't talking to me ... but I've found Law and the prophets in the Library of Michigan. Published in Chicago by A.L. Fyfe]

[Later addition still, 1626Z: Thanks to Ray Girvan, voice of JSBlog, for an actual copy of Law and the prophets, from the cover page of which I note that Frank Earl Ormsby was "a magian mystic" whose book was "designed for the instruction and guidance of students in the occult sciences". It makes for fascinating reading.]

[And again, 1639Z: from Livia Passini, an MP3 copy of Good vibrations ... complete with authentic scratched vinyl 45rpm clicks and hisses...]

NaNO3

2011-08-27T05:44:00.000Z

NaNO₃ is a collaboration between Luis Bustamante and his son Sebastian: a magical, captivating exploration of marks ( natural and artificial, permanent, temporary, ephemeral and momentarily fleeting) on landscape.

With Luis's two previous books (Brief Encounter and Confluence 1974-1979) amongst the most valued on my shelves, this will have to be my next target ...

(I wrote about Confluence a while back.)

Bringing technology to life

2011-08-22T12:46:00.001Z

Biomimetic electromechanical prostheses are delivering the first generation of active replacement parts, but between biological inspiration and industrial delivery comes a lot of data analysis. [more]

Case in point

2011-08-22T12:43:00.001Z

A collection of case studies from recent science literature highlight the importance of statistics...

Beating the drought: using GenStat to investigate drought tolerance in chick peas.

Reading the future: multivariate data analysis of brain patterns using IDL gives improved prognosis for improved reading in dyslexia sufferers.

Committing fluicide: OriginPro analyses the viricidal potential of hydrophobic polycations.

Fishy business: Statistica analysis of otolith microchemistry data illuminates population relationships amongst Atlantic herring.

Wears the diamonds?: Multiple linear regression in SPSS offers a way to better prediction of wear rates in industrial cutting tools.

Learning from past mistakes: Pursuing future geopolitics through historical data with Wolfram Mathematica.

Tentative optimism and crossed fingers

2011-08-22T04:49:00.001Z

So ... bar the shouting, the game appears to be up for Colonel Qadaffi and his régime as I start my day.

Now to see what comes next.

I remember, nervously, how joyously my younger selves welcomed the success of rebel forces in (for example) Zimbabwe and Eritrea, and the corresponding fall of odious systems. Neither Zimbabwe nor Eritrea is today a good advertisement for such transitions.

The transitional governing committee in Benghazi looks promising; but its power depends upon an ad hoc coalition of many, very disparate, factions with wildly different agendas. If that alliance now flies apart in the centrifuge of victory, the model for the future may not be Zimbabwe or Eritrea (nor even the more hopeful ones which do exist) but fragmented and desperate Somalia.

My fingers are firmly crossed. As the Arab Awakening proceeds, it's not just Libya that badly needs a good outcome.

The "real" thing - the flip side

2011-08-18T14:41:00.004Z

It's high time, having talked often enough about my lack of æsthetic pleasure when reading from digital devices, that I redress the balance; and an inner city café conversation has given me the push to do so.

When Matt Revell commented on my "The real thing" post, regarding his change of feelings on this subject he emphasised “the convenience that the Kindle offers”, which I couldn't deny; I have never disputed the convenience of electronic readers, only their æsthetics. However, he also opened with one nuclear deterrent of a point which trumps everything: “I'm reading a lot more” ... and with that I cannot argue. It's the same argument which I've now encountered in a dramatic way.

P is the "alpha" in a group of young women whom I encounter within an education outreach programme: all of them intelligent, all of them educationally disconnected, all of them exploring, suspiciously, ways to escape the trap into which those two facts have led them. I mention her alpha status because it is crucial to my relationship with them. They are all there because P is there; if P lost interest and left, none of them would stay long without her.

P could not be more different from Matt. Whereas he was already a reader with an profound interest in literature, for whom the electronic reader has enabled continuance in a busy life, she is someone whom literacy let down at an early age: she found reading slow and difficult, something to be worked at if the payoff was worthwhile, but not in itself a source of any enjoyment. It's P's story which has, nevertheless, echoed Matt's.

P says that she had never in her life read a book beyond the first chapter or so, never mind all the way through. She would sometimes start one, always when there was nothing else to do, but “couln't be arsed with carrying it around”. The next time she was at a loose end, but only if she happened to be wherever she had left the book, she would pick it up again ... but couldn't remember where she'd gotten to, or what had happened, when she put it down days or even weeks before. After a while she would “get fucked off with it and give up”. Later she would try another, repeat the process, reinforce the negative feelings, give up again.

Christmas 2009, she was given an e-reader. She thought it “a rubbish present” and it sat on a shelf for months, plugged in but unused and ignored.

Then came the day when she was bored, it was raining, none of her friends answered the phone, and in desperation she picked up the reader. It was preloaded with a dozen books; the giver had obviously thought carefully about them, since they included Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga vampire quartet and P had enjoyed the first two films adapted from the first two novels in that sequence.

She started reading Twilight, the first novel but, as usual, put it aside as soon as another diversion offered itself. She forgot it again for a couple of weeks but, when she returned, the device remembered where she had stopped. She moved back one page to recover the thread and then took up where she had left off. After a couple of such returns, she stopped reading to go shopping. Encouraged by the new continuity and by the small size and weight of the reader, instead of putting it down she unplugged it from the wall for the first time and dropped it into her bag. On the bus, she pulled it out again and continued reading until she reached the shops. When she finished Twilight she went on to Eclipse.

To cut a long story short by leaping about a year to the present (you can, I'm sure, construct the intervening steps for yourself), P is now reading “about a book a week or ten days”. She has also investigated some surprising material, including a complete works of Shakespeare which was on her reader alongside Meyer: “Most of Shakespeare is crap”, she assures me, “don't waste your time on it. But a couple of his plays are cool, like The tempest is well wicked f'rinstance, and some of the sonnets are absolutely fucking amazing”.

She has moved beyond fiction, too. She has a number of reference guides related to things that interest her and that, it seems, was what brought her (and thus her group, too) to tentative reengagement with education through the outreach programme.

Lacking my moral squeamishness about copyright, P has recruited an unrequited technophile admirer to supply her new habit with free hacked copies of most titles she wants. But she does buy “about one new book ever six weeks or so, 'cos I can't be arsed with waiting for the crack”, so the writing and publishing industries are still benefitting from her to an extent. I'm turning over in my mind the philosophical relationships between this and public libraries, but haven't formulated any opinions as yet. Her local public library, in fact, plans an ebook loan service shortly, and perhaps that will be a hook to draw her deeper into what the system has to offer her intellect.

Stephenie Meyer, Twilight. 2005, New York: Little, Brown, 9780316160179 or 2006, London: Atom. 1904233805 (pbk.). Digital edition 2009, London: Hachette Digital. 1904233651
Stephenie Meyer, Eclipse. 2007, London: Atom. 9781904233893 (hbk.) and 9781904233909 (pbk.), or more recently 2010, London: Atom. 9781905654635 (pbk.). Digital edition 2009, London: Hachette Digital. 1907410505

Keep taking the tablets (2)

2011-08-13T06:08:00.007Z

OK ... continuing from my initial post in this thread ... Question 1 (from Clarissa Vincent, Frank Jones and Zuleika Ferris in particular): what contribution does a tablet, as such, make to my personal ICT ecosystem? This has to be the core of the thing; unless a tablet, in and of itself, does something which I need, it will be dead weight. So; here, in no particular order, are (to keep things short) four of the many praises I could sing:

I spend a fair amount of time in meetings. I tend to make meeting notes on paper and type them up afterwards, so a keyboard isn't a necessity here. I do, however, use a computer as a reference resource: everything from the agenda to retrieving statistics, reports, collateral information related to whatever is being discussed. A conventional clamshell, even a small netbook, sits between its user and the rest of the table like a barrier; it changes group dynamics. A tablet, lying flat on the table, however, has no such effect. Furthermore, mouse and keyboard have a distracting effect which fingers moving discretely across the surface of a flat tablet avoid.

I make a lot of use of visual material (maps, charts, plots, photographs), both on my own and in discussion with others. A tablet provides a far more intuitive way to interact with such material – especially when several people are interacting. Just before writing this, I was talking to a dive master, a fishing boat captain and a marine biologist about plans for a sea bed search; all four of us, as we talked, were interactively pinching and zooming and panning a composite satellite image and seabed chart to illustrate our own points or explore and understand each others. you can't do that on a conventional display. The same is true in discussing concepts with groups of students.

Despite my repeatedly aired æsthetic preference for paper books over digital, I do use e-readers for many practical purposes ... and unlike most people I talk to, I find the quality of reading experience on the tablet far superior to that on an e-ink device. There is also the advantage that I am not tied into any one format or content provider; I have a virtual Kindle, so can buy and Kindle texts, but can equally well move to any other alternative as required. Switching back and forth between books is quick and easy compared to any of the dedicated devices, too. Then there are the same advantages of quick and easy resizing as I mentioned in connection with maps and so on: reading a paper, I can enlarge a diagram to exactly the right size for close examination with a flick of finger and thumb, then return the page to normal reading size just as quickly. I have to admit that weight and size are greater (but I'm carrying it anyway, for the other reasons listed here), and battery life shorter (but still plenty long enough; I'll cover this later, in another section) than in a Kindle or equivalent reader, but find the trade offs more than worthwhile.

A tablet is a wonderful replacement for a photographic portfolio. I can carry as many sets and sequences of pictures as I like, without any weight penalty beyond the table itself – and the display quality is superb. When my niece asked to see a particular sequence a couple of days ago, in a pub, in the middle of a meal, it was no problem to do so. When an editor who asked for one set suddenly shows an interest in another, I have them to hand.

Heads up - Elvis has left the building!

2011-08-12T05:55:00.003Z

Steve Wheeler yesterday mused on the social implications of head up display (HUD) devices as a projected way of unifying all the various screens (TV, computer, games console, phone, eReader, etc) which we now use in our daily lives.

It’s an interesting question ... especially as such development seems very plausible. I wrote a quick comment at about half past ten last night ( in a nutshell: that technologies don’t cause processes of social cohesion or fragmentation, but are used by them), but went on thinking about it.

The application of HUDs, and of ICT carapaces in general, is a topic which has interested me for some time. Ray Girvan and I (in our Babbage and Lovelace alter egos), wearing science spectacles, visited it in a Difference of Opinion piece, twelve years or so ago. In his cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, William Gibson gives his cyborg mercenary character Molly the ultimate HUD by implanting it directly on the optic nerve. Some current thinkers, such as Kevin Warwick at the University of Reading, believe that this is a likely future. The implanting of technology raises a lot of issues of its own but, from the viewpoint of Steve Wheeler’s question, it makes little difference whether the technology is internally or externally worn.

In an unusual reversal, I found myself thinking about an issue which Steve hadn’t mentioned: not the broader social picture but the specific application to educational spaces.

The classroom now is, to state the blindingly obvious, a different place from the ones in which I was a child. The dominant information retrieval technology, then, was the book, backed up by collections of books in a library; now it is the web. The dominant medium for execution and recording of learners’ work, then, was paper; that’s still true to greater or lesser extent, depending on level of the education process, but digital media are rapidly replacing it across the board. Surreptitious interaction between students in my primary days was by notes passed from hand to hand or (more daringly) written on paper darts; now it is by SMS or Twitter. The most important educational discourse of all, between students outside the classroom, used to take place in small social huddles in a café or other gathering place; it still does, but is now also amplified by networked digital media.

In some rural African schools, however, I’ve also had the opportunity to see an earlier model still. With only one copy of a key book, or perhaps no books at all, information is delivered verbally from teacher to child. Slates provide a writing surface for working on, but not for storage of information, so the educational model is based very much on memorisation. There are no paper notes or darts, because there is no paper and because constant attention is essential in a single serial flow of unrecoverable information. Most interaction takes place outside, again in physical gatherings.

Between those rural African schools and my British, Irish and US students lie two distinct step changes. There have, of course, been processes constructed from numerous other changes, many of them radical ... from books as expensive investments to cheap mass publication, for instance; the arrival of radio and TV in schools ... but let’s keep it simple: from slate to book to networked digital information. Thanks to programmes such as One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), some children in the developing world are leapfrogging the middle step: from slate directly to the constructivist possibilities of WiFi global interaction. (I said children. Older students too, of course, but the process often starts at the root, with children learning to read and type rather than read and write, using laptops as primers and learning to maintain them as well.) This sudden leap really does produce social tensions: primary school age children suddenly have access to an informational world which is not just incrementally different from that of their parents (and teachers), as has always happened, but an inconceivable leap in paradigm. Grandparents (parents, for teenaged students) in Europe and the US talk of a disconnect from their children’s educational processes because of the ICT explosion since their own school days; magnify that a millionfold for a physically and culturally isolated rural developing world community into which comes an OLPC powered educator bearing clockwork or solar powered laptops.

We are, in the liberal democracies, already looking at an educational landscape which is detaching itself from physical location. How far that detachment will go, we cannot yet guess. I am inclined to think that human beings are strongly gregarious, and the desire for some components of education to be sited within a mutual physical space is likely to persist; but there is no longer any absolute need for it to do so. There is certainly no future for a model which restricts education to the classroom or lecture hall, nor probably even for one which focuses it primarily there. Already, more than half of my students come into a physical campus very rarely and a small but significant (and growing) proportion never do so at all. Some colleagues in the Scottish Highlands and Islands (or in Scandinavia, or the Australian outback, or other areas of scattered population) reverse my position: they only ever meet a small minority of their students. Increasing use is made of virtual worlds. In that sort of world, too, there is no necessary reason to tie faculty into a physical location which their students no longer inhabit.

We are perched on the cusp of a dispersion about which we can only hypothesise imaginatively. And replacement of multiple screens by personal HUDs could, I suspect, be a trigger for the next step change. What essential need will there be for a student sit in a computer centre to study material which is as easily available lying on a grassy bank in the sunshine, or sitting with a cup of coffee in the kitchen at home, or even walking around the neighborhood like (as my nephew pointed out to me recently) Aristotle’s peripatetics?

One of the things about which I agree with Steve Wheeler (there are many, despite areas of difference) is his conviction that the institutional Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is a dinosaur. It does have necessary functions. In the short term, it serves as a vehicle (admittedly very imperfect) by which old codgers of my own generation migrate from old ideas to new methods. More persistently, it is likely to remain an essential repository for some institution specific information for privacy and commercial sensitivity reasons. Those are, however, a very small rump of the functions which institutions, stuck well behind the rapidly expanding wavefront of socioeducational reality, presently try to cram into it. Ironically, though, I suspect that as education from the students’ point of view evaporates off into various mixes of physical location, the institutional VLE will gain a very modest second lease of life, as the management core for administrative interconnection of increasingly subdivided and diversified personal learning programmes.

William Gibson, Neuromancer. 1984, London: Gollancz. 057503470X. [more recently 2001, London: Voyager. 0007119585 (pbk.)]

A sink that drains goodness

2011-08-08T08:21:00.002Z

To my annual "Hiroshima Day" post on the 6th, Dr C made a comment which deserved to be a post in its own right. I wish that I had said “Nuclear weapons are a sink that drains goodness out of those who have them.”

He also quoted aptly from Auden's "Epitaph to a tyrant" (1940):

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

Nice one, Doc.

Dr C also refers to an editorial in Science last year. To save blog readers the necessity for looking it up, the full text is available here (you will need to sign in to read it – if you don't already have a subscription to the site, just ask: it's free).

Keep taking the tablets (1a)

2011-08-07T23:59:00.001Z

Since putting up Friday's post, I've had several queries about writing on the Asus TF101 (Transformer) – variations on the theme of “did you write this post on the tablet and, if so, using what software?”

Answer: it was shuffled back and forth across three machines, two of them Windows (laptop and netbook) and one of them the Asus/Android tablet/keyboard combination. Roughly half of it, altogether, was written on the Asus; final fiddling and subediting before upload was on the laptop.

On the Windows machines, writing was in WordPerfect though final prep was in OpenOffice Writer.

On the TF101, the office suite provided free with the machine was used: Polaris Office. I have tried several alternatives, and bought the two main market leading standards which I've used happily on other platforms, but Polaris, to be honest, knocks the socks off both.

I'm afraid that there is, if you are doing this sort of cross platform shuffling, no alternative to using Microsoft's file formats. Polaris reads/writes DOC and DOCX; so do the other main alternatives; nothing reads anything else. Even RTF is badly served. If you have a favourite word processor (like my WordPerfect), and prefer to stick with its own native file format, then ... tough. You can write in what you like, but use "save as" to store it in Microsoft's form.

Today

2011-08-07T13:35:00.003Z

Today is Hiroshima Day

2011-08-06T05:59:00.000Z

If you are new around here, you can find out why I think this worth mentioning in the equivalent post two years ago. There have been plenty of new examples since then, but the principles remain.

If you're not new around here, you will already have recognised my annual marker and moved on.

Keep taking the tablets (1)

2011-08-05T18:31:00.005Z

This is really a response to all those who have asked me, in greater or lesser degrees of puzzlement, why I have decided to use an Android tablet and what I plan to do with it. Or, rather (returning to this paragraph after finishing the post), it’s the first part of such a response.

I had watched the growth of tablet computing for a decade now, and stood back from it. I knew the value of such devices, employed them enthusiastically in certain educational and professional contexts, but could see no real place for one in my own personal ICT environment.

I had also seen, liked, and appreciated the potential of multitouch capacitative screen devices. These were, again, valuable in some educational and work niches but either too small or too large to be very useful to me as part of my own, personal kit. I do, as I’ve mentioned, use an iPod Touch ... but only because (a) it serves as a platform for the best pocket calculator I’ve yet found and (b) it is small enough to carry without noticing it.

Then came hybrid devices like the iPad. A cross between pocket and laptop computers, both of which are useful to me. Light and small enough to be carried as well as the netbook which is the cornerstone of my peripatetic life, but at the same time large enough to work on with both hands (rather than just the finger and thumb which a phone can accommodate). and to exploit the real potential of the technology, but small and light enough (unlike those superb one, two or four square metre laboratory and studio displays) to use on the road.

Not the iPad itself, however. Not for me, that is ... I know that it serves many people excellently well, and that’s great. For me, however, both of its manifestations so far are sitting around the place, truly beautiful things, but (thanks to the closed Apple business model) too annoyingly restrictive for my liking.

There are, of course, several alternatives to the Apple iPad. True tablet PCs, running Windows or Linux, are coming down in size and weight to challenge the iPad; I’ve tried out and seriously considered them. Those which use Windows have the very real advantage of running the same software as my other computing hardware ... and, in particular, allowing direct viewing and editing of files from my beloved WordPerfect (lack of which was drove me to abandon Linux as a netbook OS last year). But, there are other issues which caused me to turn away from that option. Battery life was one; the fact that I really can’t see myself making much use of my key Windows applications without a proper, physical keyboard is another. (That same point, by the way, has been made by several people with whom I've discussed this: “I prefer a physical keyboard” or “I have to do a lot of typing”.)

Android devices weren't a real alternative to the iPad until well into this year. There were Android tablets, but Android itself was strictly a phone sized OS and didn't scale up well to a larger screen, let alone the sorts of things for which it might be used. Then, towards the end of February, Android 3 (Honeycomb) arrived, and things started to look different. The OS was now ready to be considered usable for real work on large screens.

Even so, there were to start with almost no applications which yet made use of the improvements. There were only a couple of machines running it, too. I got hold of those devices which were available, and tried them out. After a while, I started asking around amongst friends who might have informed opinions, though most of them expressed interest in hearing, instead, what I might decide or discover.

Those early machines, though impressive in themselves, were not quite what I wanted. I've never been what the marketing people call an "early adopter"; I see no point in committing my life to what is available in the first days of a new idea when something better will almost certainly come along in time. And, after a few months, better did come along in several forms.

To cut a long story short, there were eventually two Android tablets between which I had to choose. Neither was perfect in every way, but both offered enough of what I needed to be worth settling on. They were a 180mm device (I won't identify it, since I ultimately decided against it for personal requirements and not on any fault of its own) and the Asus TF101 (aka Transformer).

From the start, I had taken it for granted that if I bought a tablet I would also end up using it with a BlueTooth keyboard (if that seems odd, I'll ask you to wait for a later section). But a keyboard of a useful size is bigger than a 180mm tablet, and a keyboard physically separate from its tablet is awkward to use compared to a laptop or netbook. The TF101 has a "dockable" keyboard: that is, one with physical attachment and support to present the tablet as if it were the screen on a conventional netbook, the two also folding flat together into a thin clamshell sandwich for storage or transit. This keyboard also houses a proper touchpad and buttons, two USB ports, and a full size SDHC card slot (in addition to a microSD slot on the tablet itself).

Furthermore, that TF101 keyboard contains an additional battery which extends usage considerably. It's intelligently wired, too. Plug the complete tablet and keyboard assembly into a power supply and the tablet charges first – so if only the tablet is required, it has all of the available charge. Use the complete assembly, and the power is drawn from the keyboard battery until it is drained, so the tablet retains its full charge for separate use. Use the tablet separately, and when its is reconnected t the keyboard it will draw power until again fully charged.

There are, of course, down sides to the TF101. The biggest is probably that it doesn't (at least in the version available to me) have its own 3G card for accessing cellular networks, as many of its competitors do. In an ideal world, I would have liked to have that option. However, I carry a portable WiFi hotspot router so when no open fixed network is available the TF101 can connect through that to a cellphone, 3G dongle, or satphone.

In the end, though, it wuz the TF101 wot won it.

To keep this down to a reasonable length, and to get it posted this side of doomsday, I'm going to break here. I'm aware that I've not answered most of the questions posed in the first paragraph, but they will follow under three headings (not necessarily three separate posts; we'll see how it goes):

Freestanding use as a tablet
Use alongside a netbook, as a supplement to it.
Occasional use as a netbook replacement.

(As I write and post each, I'll provide two way hyperlinks between them and this.)

Picture credit: that image on my Asus TF101 desktop, in the illustration above, is Lisa Milroy's haunting painting Searching Geisha. See the original, if you can.

Now playing...

2011-08-02T15:17:00.005Z

... "A church is burning", sung by Paul Simon.

It used to give me the shivers in my mid-to-late teens. It wasn't just the protest song nature of it (though that was the genre that most moved me at the time) or the fact that it came from one half of Simon & Garfunkel (which, I confess, also gave it a head start for me) or the rousing tune (which certainly helped). I was also deeply impressed, then, by its ecumenicalism: the identification of a Jewish singer/songwriter with a oppression of Christian victims. Christian imagery ran through other parts of Simon's repertoire too: not always to Christanity's credit, as in "Blessed" for example, but ecumenical nevertheless.

It gives me the shivers still.

Paul Simon, The Paul Simon songbook, "A church is burning". 1965, London: CBS.
Simon & Garfunkel, Sound of silence, "Blessed". 1966, New York: Columbia.

Never send to know for whom the warning bleep tolls...

2011-07-31T10:13:00.006Z

An embarrassing interlude.

We've all enjoyed, haven't we, those stories of people who go to technical support with a complete equipment failure ... only to discover that they haven't switched the equipment on.

I've encountered such cases myself. I've laughed with everyone else at those I heard recounted. Steve Wheeler recently recounted a satisfying example in which such a story provided well deserved come-uppance for arrogant behaviour.

But schadenfreude is a two edged sword.

Yesterday afternoon, when it was too late to visit my favourite computer workshop (or any other), the touchpad on my Lenovo N500 laptop (from which most of my writing is done) ceased to work. No response whatsoever.

I did all the obvious things. I rebooted. I went into the system manager, which told me that the touchpad was working. I went into the appropriate control panel settings. Etc, etc, and so forth. Eventually, I plugged in a wireless miniature mouse, and worked with that ... only slightly inconvenient in itself, but wearing over a long period of work.

This morning, I've done a web search and discovered that the problem is both well known and trivial. At the top right of my keyboard is a set of four indicators lights ... but, unbeknown to me, they are also touch sensitive buttons. Three of them have to do with sound volume or muting; since my sound is almost permanently off, I pay little attention to them. The fourth, apparently, is concerned with enabling or disabling the touchpad. Thinking back, I know what happened ... I brushed away some dust from the area behind the keyboar, as I have done a thousand times before ... and, for the first time apparently, chanced to brush over that little indicator.

A similar thing happened a couple of years ago. My wireless network link was dead. After a lot of investigation of abstruse software possibilities, I carted the machine down to that favourite computer workshop I mentioned. There, Mike looked at the problem, felt around the front of the machine, and flicked a switch ... restoring the wireless link instantly. “A good thing we found that before I started on billable work, isn't it?” he joked. here again, it was unfamiliarity ... I had turned off the wireless link for a good reason but, because that's something I very rarely do, I'd forgotten all about it.

Never send to know who the off switch mocks (to mangle John Donne's Meditation 17): it mocks thee.

Chocolate and moral philosophy in Stone Lane

2011-07-29T20:57:00.008Z

A general guiding rule, for me, is "never go back". If the place (or person, on context) holds bad memories, why revisit them; if good memories, why risk spoiling them? It's a good rule, on the whole ...when I forget to follow it, I usually wish I hadn't. However ... I'm human and I do, sometimes, forget. So, finding myself not far from a seaside town on the south coast of England, where I spent many happy fragments of my childhood, I have allowed myself to be tempted into a wander down memory lane ... or, more accurately, Stone Lane: a long rural road running out from the town's margins into open countryside.

The seven or eight kilometres of Stone Lane held only six houses, then, all in one cluster. There are eight now; still in one cluster, several carrying the same names as half a century ago though most of them are modern rebuilds on the sites of those I remember.

This one, for instance. It bears the same name, "Stonevale Cottage", as did the house where my maternal grandfather lived ... but it's a completely different building, perhaps twenty years old at most. And that builder's merchant (part of a large national chain) behind it: that occupies the quarter hectare of what was his garden and my adventure playground.

Next door to my grandfather, on his right, lived the Goldman family. Mrs Goldman was round faced and jolly; so was her husband, though he was crippled by some degenerative illness and moved slowly, painfully on crutches. Their daughter Julie, six or seven years older than I, good naturedly took me under her wing whenever we visited. Julie didn't even disown me when Simon, her first boyfriend, with motorcycle, leathers and Teddyboy haircut, hinted strongly that three was a crowd. Mr Goldman welcomed me into his shed; I watched as, leaning on his crutches, he worked a miniature lathe to produce tiny, working steam locomotives or aeroplanes. Mrs Goldman fed me scones, home made lemonade and raspberry jam, clotted cream.

Beyond the Goldmans were Mr and Mrs Villiers. I saw Mr Villiers rarely; he worked in London, leaving early and returning late. On rare occasions when I did meet him, he was tall, balding, and seemed ill at ease with me. He would frown, hop from foot to foot, say “well... hello ... old chap ... well...”, hop some more, say “well...” a few more times, then disappear. Mrs Villiers was a different matter; though quite severely arthritic, she moved continually if slowly about her house and her half hectare of garden, chatting with me the whole time about what she was doing. The Villiers, like the Goldmans, had a daughter; unlike Julie Goldman, though, Angela Villiers was probably twenty years older than I, lived elsewhere and visited only occasionally. I probably met Angela only three or four times in my life. On one of those occasions, though, she took me into her bedroom and showed me her complete childhood collection of Biggles books - the aviation adventure stories of W E Johns. So long as I took only one at a time, took great care of it, and returned it as soon as I finished it, I could borrow them whenever I liked. Over subsequent visits, through the years, I worked my way through them all.

Beyond the Villiers were the Kitsons. I sometimes played or went swimming with their son, Simon, if he wasn't at school. Mr Kitson drove a taxi, and was rarely seen unless he offered us a lift to the swimming pool. Mrs Kitson was simply a person who smiled and waved at Simon as we disappeared to play.

There was nobody beyond the Kitsons.

Opposite the front of my grandfather's house, on the other side of the lane, was the Birds' House. The birds were not a family; this was my grandfather's name for a strip of woodland, about fifty metres wide, which stretched the length of Stone Lane. To the right, southward past the Kitsons', it extended a couple of kilometres to the Top Road which I was not allowed to cross. Northward on the left it ran about five kilometres or so until stopped by the village of Five Elms, pausing only briefly after a few hundred metres to enfold a derelict brick works which could, according to an imaginative child's need, be anything from the Alamo through the lost city of the Incas to a Mars colony.

On the other side of my grandfather's house, to the left, were the Cotters. Mr Cotter was the archetypical caricature of a countryman: weatherbeaten, all brown leathery skin and sinew, grey hair, eyes that squinted into the sun, wind and rain even when he was indoors. He was retired (from what, I don't know) but still managed to work a full seven day week as part time game warden for several local farmers, jobbing gardener, repairer of bridges, stiles, culverts, fences and dry stone walls. He too, like Julie Goldman, good naturedly allowed me to trail around after him; from him I acquired portions of a lifetime's landcraft, learned how to track wildlife, discovered how to tickle a trout, saw fox cubs in their lair. Mrs Cotter was bed ridden (again, with what I do not know); the house was home to at least twenty cats, of which a dozen or so were always to be found on or around her bed. As a child I was afraid of her illness but enjoyed her company in the small snug bedroom. Mr Cotter would bring up a tray with a pot of tea or mugs of cocoa, a barrel of biscuits or a plate piled high with thick sliced dense grained home baked bread, toasted on the open fire and topped with fresh churned butter; Mrs Cotter called him Tom, and he called her Alice, and the three of us ate and talked surrounded by cats.

And beyond the Cotters to the left, the last dwelling to disturb the timeless arboreal solitude of Stone Lane, was the house of Miss Baines.

I am ashamed to say that, for no reason that I can now identify, I didn't like Miss Baines. So far as I can remember, she was never anything but kind and friendly to me; yet I maintained my dislike over the dozen years of our visits to Stone Lane. This thoroughly unjust feeling was so strong that, when I wanted to go down the lane beyond the Cotters' front gate, I crossed over and entered the Birds' House to a depth of ten metres or so, went left through the trees for a hundred metres until out of Miss Baines' line of sight, and only then emerge onto the road again.

When I was about seven years old, Miss Baines presented me with the first moral dilemma I consciously remember having to confront. She gave me a packet of chocolate buttons.

What should I do with these chocolate buttons? Of course, I wanted to eat them. Of course, I felt distrust of them. But, beyond those selfish considerations, I also felt the prickings of conscience and guilt. Was it hypocritical (not that I knew that word; was it wrong) to eat a gift knowing that I felt so much dislike for the giver? Was it ungrateful (I knew that word) not to eat them? Was it wrong to not eat, and thereby waste, food when some people had none? On a practical note: if I didn’t eat them, what was I to do with them? The best solution seemed to be to give them to someone else, who would want to eat them; but who, in the small world of Stone Lane, would accept and eat them without asking questions and (despite my feelings, I had no wish to hurt hers) without risk of Miss Baines hearing about it?

Eventually, I went down to the bottom of my grandfather's long, sloping garden, beyond the shed, beyond the tall lines of runner beans and sweet peas, below the deep bank held up by old railway sleepers, out of view of the house and its neighbours. I burrowed deep into the thick privet hedge which separated the garden from a grazing dairy herd. There I dug a deep hole. Into the hole I counted out exactly half of the chocolate buttons, put back the displaced earth, then concealed the spot with scattered leaves and twigs. The other half of the packet I ate. Back in the house, I placed the empty wrapper in the kitchen rubbish bin.

In 1959 Miss Baines was, I estimate, somewhere in her sixties. She must, by now, be long past caring about the ungenerous spirit of a child to whom she caused no harm and tried to be friendly; but I shamefacedly apologise for it, anyway, to her memory.

Connections

2011-07-29T13:07:00.003Z

“What has to be faced is that there is little international political motivation to effect any fundamental changes in the workings of the world economy, even in the aftermath of an extreme financial crisis in 2008-9, and in the context of current problems in the United States and Western Europe that could escalate rapidly in the coming months. Much of the street protest in the Middle East and North Africa has stemmed indirectly from the anger of the marginalised, and this has now spread to Western Europe. The violent street actions in Greece have attracted much attention, but the sustained, if less reported protests in Spain, may turn out to be much more important. They may even be the start of an awakening in western countries that turns out to be as significant as that in the Arab world.”

Paul Rogers, Awakening and famine in the global context. International Security Monthly Briefing 2011(2011-07).

FlexPro 9

2011-07-28T23:59:00.000Z

FlexPro has always been a data analysis product with notable differences from the market norm, deriving from a specific philosophy following purpose rather than fashion. This doesn’t change in release 9, which I have been evaluating in three live studies over the past couple of months. The most obvious difference remains, I am glad to say, as it has always been; the strongly database-oriented interface with clear data structuring and typing in defiance of the spreadsheet’s looser habits. [more...]

Return to the last waltz

2011-07-27T23:39:00.000Z

I have now, as I two weeks ago said I would, watched Harry Potter and the deathly hallows part 2, the final film in the franchise, a second time. Having done all the whizzy stuff last time I went to a one o'clock in the afternoon, and watched it in normal 2D. My opinion of it has gone up considerably, as a result.

I still wouldn't rate it (as so many are doing) as the best in the series. Nevertheless: forget the book, go along for the ride, and it's a thoroughly good two hours' entertainment.

My favourite bit was probably the escape of the dragon from Gringotts. The animation of the dragons has always been a high point of these films, and to see this one stumble and stagger its way up out of the vault and into the sky was no exception.

David Yates (dir), Harry Potter and the deathly hallows: part 2. 2011, London: Heyday films.

The picture within the picture...

2011-07-25T22:07:00.011Z

I very much liked this double portrait of Anita Dobson and Steven Berkoff (as always, click it for a larger view).

I also find myself puzzling over where I've seen that large black and white image (centrally behind them) before. I know I have seen it before ... but can't place it. Can anyone out there help jog my ailing recall?

Photograph reproduced by with the gratefully acknowledged permission of the photographer, Alan Powdrill. http://www.alanpowdrill.com/

I read that 97.63% of statistics are invented...

2011-07-24T11:57:00.003Z

I have just re-read Larry's Party. I don't know how long it took me to read on my first or second times, but I do know that it was on each occasion longer than is usual for me. This time, though, I can pin it down fairly precisely. I picked it up to track down a quotation which I wanted to use in a comment to an Unreal Nature post on the 9th of July, and immediately went on to read it through ... so, fifteen days then.

Why so long, when I would normally expect to finish a book of its length within the day? Because the book is structurally episodic, presented as discrete components drawn from (almost) each of twenty years in the protagonist's internal life. Each component is written in a way which makes it perfectly viable as a separate short story, though it is intended as part of a single narrative. I felt, this time through as on each of the others, compelled to put the book down, to stop, think, digest, after each component.

It's a remarkable book. Highly recommended.

Fifteen days ... at that rate, if it were replicated in serial reading habits (it isn't, in fact, since I read other books through the "pauses for thought" in Larry), would equate to 24.3 books a year. I'm prompted to that meaningless piece of calculation by a statistic in the final section of Larry's Party: that, apparently, an average man (perhaps Canadian; perhaps universally; perhaps in the developed industrial world; it doesn't say) reads 4.3 books a year ... so my Larry rate, taken alone, would put me an exact twenty above some kind of average. That exact twenty was what piqued my curiosity.

There are, of course, a lot of variables. Thick books or thin ones? Fiction or nonfiction? One participant in a discussion thread on Amazon.co.uk (where totals vary from five to two hundred) points out that page count is probably a more reliable measure than book count. Matthew Revell reminded me, during a recent email conversation about eReaders, that those devices change the situation: he is reading far more now that he has a Kindle than he did before, simply because it has become easier to have a book with him always.

Seeking the origin of the 4.3 figure, I asked Wolfram|Alpha for average books read per year. Unfortunately, Alpha is not good at this sort of thing ... it defined "per year" for me instead, as a unit. However, there are other sources of information.

UNESCO monitors number of books published, by country, but that's not the same thing.

According to an Ipsos poll for AP, in 2007 the average USAmerican read more than this 4.3 figure. The estimated mean is given as 20.4, while the median (probably the measure intended by Larry's 4.3) is 6.5. More meaningful, perhaps, are the modal group of four or five, a clear modal bulge (48%) reading between three and ten, and an interquartile range (that is, the "middle half" of the population) falling between four and about eighteen books per year.

In the same year (2007) an online straw poll by The Student Room showed a mean of more than thirty two (projection of the data curve suggests that it may actually be around fifty) and a median in the upper twenties. This is a British forum, but never mind ... gives us the unsurprising suggestion that students read more than the average citizen (though the 5.6% who claimed not to read at all is worrying in a student poll!) A similar straw poll on Yahoo answers, a month ago, gave answers (ranging from 0-120) with a median somewhere around ten or twelve.

Britain's Michael Gove, has expressed the opinion that a school student should read fifty books per year. I am not a fan of this sort of "should" target, myself, an cannot see how it could possibly be enforced, although I confess I would like to see the number rise of its own accord.

Carol Shields, Larry’s party, 1997, London: Fourth Estate. 1857027051

Grieve for the dead, but remember the living

2011-07-23T07:54:00.002Z

Whenever there is news coverage of a mass shooting such as Hungerford, Dunblane, Beslan, Columbine or, yesterday and today, the Utøya summer camp, I am struck by the way that everything focuses on number of deaths.

For those who were killed, it was dreadful – in the literal sense of that too easily used word. I cannot begin to imagine the terror they experienced. For those close to them it continues to be dreadful and will stay so for the rest of their lives.

But my thoughts go to those who are described as "lucky to be alive" – the survivors.

By what earthly measure does anyone imagine them to be "lucky"? Those who survive will have to live their lives with memory of that same terror which, for their dead peers, ended. And not just the terror either; there is survivor guilt. One survivor of Utøya spoke of being trapped in a toilet cubicle while one a boy was shot outside the door. Another of playing dead and feeling the heat of the barrel close to his face; yet another of watching class mates who had tried the same ploy being shot in the head. And on, and on... They will be traumatised for life. Use of the word "lucky" is disgustingly facile.

And I'm not forgetting that there are plenty of places where this sort of thing is so commonplace that it's never reported. What happens on such occasions is not a change in the world; simply that a brutal reality which is usually elsewhere has come to a venue near me.

Be careful what you wish for

2011-07-21T05:33:00.000Z

When I was very small, my father used to sing (at my own urgently repeated request) a little one stanza song when we were playing out in the open air. I render it here with an attempt to recapture the particular cadence of his delivery.

I'm a lit-tle prair-ie flow'r
Grow-ing wilder hour by hour.
No-one tries to cultivate me
So I'm as wild as wild can be!

This memory lies dormant for weeks, months, years at a time, then springs to front of stage for no obvious particular reason to dance in my conscious mind for a day or two before returning to the wings. Inconsequential though it may be, it embodies for me something very personally precious about my father, and his relationship with me. A conversation with my brother, a couple of days ago, somehow brought it out for a spin in the light and it is sparkling still at the edge of my day to day thoughts, son on the spur of the moment I just did a search for it.

There are several video clips and MP3 files in the Google listing. I stuck to text hits, though, and the first I found was a partial reference within a longer anecdote. There was a small discrepancy (shown here in red):

I'm a little prairie flower!
Growing wilder by the hour!

Then there is this version, from Mudcat, which provides a whole song of which mine is the first stanza. Again, there are minor differences:

I'm a little prairie flower,
Growing wilder every hour;
Nobody cares to cultivate me,
I'm as wild as wild can be.

The International Lions also give a whole song but shorter than and only partially resembling as Mudcat's. Subtitling it I'm a little lion cub, add a line repetition and a wordless twirl to the end of each stanza:

I'm a little prairie flower,
Growing wilder every hour;
Nobody cares to cultivate me,
I'm as wild as wild can be.
I'm as wild as wild can be,
Tu-ra-lu-ra, Tu-ra-le.

Wikipedia mentions the song only under its entry for Lesley Sarony, without attributing it to him, although there are a number of web pages which do make this attribution.

Courtesy of Google Books I find that The Rotarian, vol.13 #3 (September 1918) , gives exactly the same version as Mudcat but the previous month's issue (vol.13 #2, August 1918) adds the last line repeat (though not the wordless twirl) of the Lion's version. Exactly forty years later (vol.93 #3, September 1958), however, a couple of years after my father was singing it to me, has it as:

I'm a little prairie flower,
Growing wilder by the hour;
No one cares to cultivate me,
I'm as wild as I can be.

At this point, I realised that precious memory, whether accurate or flawed, was beginning to blur at the edges. So, I stopped looking. There can be such a thing as too much information, and there can be occasional limits to John's breezy (KJV 8:32) assertion that “the truth shall make you free”.

Last waltz

2011-07-15T07:24:00.002Z

Last night (or, more accurately, since it started just after midnight, this morning) we took three boys to see the last Harry Potter film. The oldest, now fifteen, went with me to see the first almost ten years ago, on his sixth birthday. That started a tradition which first his cousin, then his brother (now eleven), finally my partner, joined at intervals of a couple of years or so.

We have, in the past, gone to the earliest convenient showing. This time, however, as with the last book, it seemed important to take the last opportunity to experience a collective event ... so, school and work this morning not withstanding, there we were at CineWorld for the midnight première.

The boys, I'm glad to say, thought it was “definitely the best” in the series. Me, though of course I didn't say so (who wants to be the one who spoils the fun?), I am less sure.

Though the books come emphatically first for me, I have always regarded the films as an excellent separate stream which expands their world. This one, based on the second half of the seventh book, though very good in its own right, seemed to me the least of the franchise as a whole.

I can't, at the moment, be sure why that is. I probably won't really be able to start sorting out an answer to that until we have (as we intend to) seen it again on our own. It's possible that the very fact that I find Deathly hallows the best book in an always superb set (I've read it six times now) has, in my own mind, set an impossibly high bar for the film. Or perhaps wearing 3D spectacles (not my own preference; I'd prefer to watch the 2D version; but 3D was part of the experience for the three boys, who were the priority here) took the edge off it for me.

Or, perhaps I was disappointed to see two key moral foci from the book either skimmed over (the debate over what to do with the elder wand) or simply not included at all (Harry's gratuitous torture of Amycus Carrow, in a fit of thoroughly personal rage). But really, this is a perennial matter of judgment. A film maker cannot possibly include more than a small fraction of the content from any novel, never mind one as long and full as Deathly hallows. I could probably find similar omissions from every one of the films, if I was in the wrong mood.

Or perhaps I really, subconsciously, felt that the show was over already, with the final book, and the film was always on a losing streak because it came later and I unwittingly condemned it to anticlimax?

Or ... uncomfortable thought ... perhaps I'm just too old, these days, to cope with watching films which debouch me onto Capel Street in search of a five seat taxi at half past two in the morning.

One way and another, the evidence seems to suggest that I'm probably just a grumpy old sod, and the film deserves a second chance. So, some time in the next couple of weeks or so, I'll go to an afternoon 2D screening and settle down to watch it properly.

J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the deathly hallows. London, 2007, London: Bloomsbury. 9780747591054
David Yates (dir), Harry Potter and the deathly hallows: part 2. 2011, London: Heyday films.

Nasties under the bed

2011-07-13T06:27:00.006Z

Just found, in Games and culture...

“This paper explores the characterizations of enemies in military-themed video games, with special attention given to the games Conflict: Desert Storm and America's Army. I demonstrate how the public enemy of America's Army is one not confined to any nationality, ethnicity, or political agenda. This marks a significant departure from games such as Conflict: Desert Storm. I argue that the production of this abstract enemy--what I call the unreal enemy''--is significantly shaped by a biopolitical system that intertwines the military and electronic entertainment industries. This arrangement delocalizes power, distributing it through a network of institutions and subjects. Throughout, I use ethnographic examples that explore how this abstract enemy has been constructed and juxtaposed against more concrete and personal figures, such as the America's Army Real Heroes, individuals upheld as the embodiment of personal achievement in the U.S. Army. I conclude by asserting that the unreal enemy of America's Army is, ultimately, an enemy that is not exclusive to a video game, but one that exists as an anonymous specter, ever present in the militarized American cultural imaginary.”

Late addition, 2011-07-19. The following is a comment to this post, by Dr.C, but seems worth promotion to full visibility here.

“I am not sure I completely agree with this. At the present time the generic "enemy" seems to be more of mid-Eastern extract. There are examples where people will refuse to fly in an airplane next to anyone who is swarthy. The irony is, of course, that we invaded "them" and not the opposite.”

Robertson Allen, "The Unreal Enemy of America's Army". in Games and Culture, 2011. 6(1): p. 38-60. DOI 10.1177/1555412010377321

Breaking up is hard to do

2011-07-09T10:41:00.001Z

Different education systems in different liberal democracies tackle common problems in different ways. Broadly speaking, across the range of common objectives, they achieve comparable levels of success. If one system makes gains in a given area which is not managed by another, that is usually balanced by shortfall in another. I'm not inclined to believe that any one system is, overall, "better" or "worse" than another.

I am, however, inclined to believe that common shifts in philosophical bases for education systems across the liberal democracies can make a difference to long term educational drifts ... and have done so. Some of those drifts are (to my own mind, at least) good; some are unfortunate; some may be neutral; some may be mixed. Among those which are, in my own personal opinion, retrograde is the increasing trend towards earlier and earlier specialisation.

Children are natural sponges, programmed by biology to learn. They are also naturally inclined to make and pursue interconnections within that learning. Curiosity is a live and potent force within them, and acknowledges no boundaries. A boundary between specialisms, by interrupting their hot pursuit of a curiosity driven line of thought, damages their enthusiasm for knowledge. (As a new secondary student miserably told me, ten years ago, “last year, maths was real ... like designing an Olympic stadium ... but now it’s just A, B and C filling a bath with a teaspoon while D empties it with an egg-cup and nobody tries to stop him ...”)

Ruairí Quinn, Minister for Education in the republic of Eire, like his opposite numbers elsewhere, is faced with a need to improve literacy and numeracy. This is a real need; the only question is how to meet it. Like many others, his approach is to increase the amount of time focused on this particular need. His strategy of increasing daily teaching time allocations hypothecated to literacy and numeracy closely mirrors, just for example, that which has already been followed across the Irish Sea in the United Kingdom.

I have no disagreement with that, in principle. The problem, for me, lies in the fact that in systems which specialise, increase in time for one specialism inevitably reduces time available for breadth of study overall.

In Eire, post primary education is organised into Junior Certificate (Teastas Sóisearach) subjects, tested by examination (with a couple of exceptions) in the mid teens. Six subjects make up a mandatory core curriculum, additional subjects being selected from a menu of options. Despite many differences of detail, it's a system easily related to, for example, the British GCSE or US Junior High School models.

But here's the thing ... and I'm using Eire only as an example; the systemic principles would apply to most equivalent systems elsewhere. Given a fixed number of school hours per week, the extra time taken from the timetable for teaching discrete literacy and numeracy (roughly totalling between five and ten hours per school week, depending on how you count and calculate) means that one of three things must happen.

The time spent on each existing subject can be reduced, to make time for the new literacy and numeracy time.
Literacy and numeracy can be taught through integration with the existing subjects.
Existing subjects can be dropped to make way for the new literacy and numeracy time.

The first runs immediately into the brick wall of examination requirements. No administrator nor politician dares risk stealing time from an examination subject and perhaps being blamed for subsequent fall in success rates in that subject. It would also raise (amongst parents, voters, and employers) questions of comparability between new graduates from the system and those in the past.

The second would be in immediate opposition to the declared intention of visibly giving additional time "exclusively for the teaching of" basic skills.

And so Mr Quinn has, inevitably, taken the third course: removing subjects. From this coming September intake, secondary students will have their choice of subjects capped at a maximum of eight.

By the time mandatory subjects are allowed for, this means a reduction of between 11% and 33% in the total diversity of a typical student's academic encounter range. For options, once mandatory subjects are counted in, the reduction in real choice clocks in at between 33% and 67%. And, since the number of students estimated to be “experiencing serious [literacy and numeracy] problems” is one in ten, this reduction is being applied to a majority of students who will not gain from the intended benefits. (I do not argue that last point too strongly; I believe that all students, however able and brilliant, would benefit from increased focus on literacy and numeracy competence if it were delivered to them in an appropriate way.)

So what would I suggest as an alternative? Well ... realistically, I have to admit that Mr Quinn is caught between the well known rock and hard place for the reasons above; the harsh environment gives him no choices at all unless he is willing to throw away his career on a gamble. He is, like Eire itself, doing his best in an impossible world and I do not criticise him, nor his country, nor any of the others struggling with similar vicious circles elsewhere in the world. But my answer, from the safety of a seat where I have neither to implement my beliefs nor pay for them, is that numeracy and literacy needs would be far more effectively tackled by integrating the new emphasis into broader study. The chosen approach not only restricts the value of education in general, it undercuts the whole (valuable) intent behind the reform itself.

When I am dictator of the world, I will unify secondary study by abolishing boundaries between subjects. Students will learn through integrated "themes", as they did in primary school, allowing their interest to range (and their minds, and their skills, to grow) across the full gamut of human knowledge – or, at least, across that part of it which can realistically be encompassed by a school's day and resources. Literacy and numeracy will then become part of everything the student does, growing organically in most and nurtured in those who need it.

I will also abolish examinations altogether; but that's another story, and I don't want to frighten the voters who must make me dictator before any of this can happen, so best keep that bit quiet for now...

Irish Times, "Minister orders cap on exam subjects". Saturday, July 8th, 2011.

Temporary relief

2011-07-07T17:21:00.006Z

About the reasons for closure of the Murdoch newspaper (sic) News of the World, I have no illusions: they are cynical, designed to limit damage and protect larger News International revenue streams from contamination by continuing revelations of wrongdoing by the rag.

About the meaningfulness of the closure I have no illusions either: I confidently expect a distastefully similar replacement to appear in very short order.

About the closure itself, however, I nevertheless feel at least temporary satisfaction. An open sewer through British public life has, however temporarily, been blocked. Good.

Maple 15

2011-07-05T11:07:00.004Z

Having gone all out, over several releases, to develop a graphically ‘pencil and paper’ face for its CAS, Maple now has a polished smart worksheet interface which no longer changes in obvious ways between versions. Developments are now made behind the scenes, allowing an existing user to pick up the latest manifestation and use it without any pause to acclimatise.

A command line option remains available, and popular with many experienced Maple users. The ‘classic’ worksheet, however, has taken a back seat, documented as ‘a basic worksheet environment for older computers with limited memory’ and present in 32-bit, but not 64-bit, installations. The graphic calculator interface, so useful for quick scratchpad explorations, remains for all Windows users. Consideration has been given to making the best use of small netbook screens, and the whole package continues to run responsively and well on all systems. [more...]

The “real” thing...

2011-06-26T19:08:00.009Z

I have always had a strong æsthetic preference for physical rather than purely electronic media in my acquisition of information content. Practical considerations often outweigh that preference when the content is utilitarian; but they never eclipse it.

I've mentioned this before, in relation to text. If I am seeking facts, or must carry a lot of content at the same time, then one or another electronic reader makes more sense than paper and ink. The reader can give me a thousand documents, or more, for the same weight and bulk as one. But when it comes to reading for pleasure, I would rather carry the bulk of a novel in paperback than the weightless downloaded version. I value the electronic reader¹ (though I'm in the process of ditching it in favour of software on a tablet computer; more of which another time), but I can't love it.

So it is, too, with music. Except, of course, that I have no utilitarian reasons for choosing downloaded music over physically purchased media beyond cost and availability.

Matt Revell commented to my previous post that “The beauty of a book is, I believe, that I just need a little light and my specs to enjoy it. It's not like listening to music, where you do need some kind of equipment whether you're listening to an Ogg file or a vinyl record.” A good point, and one which reverses to the case that if one is listening to music on the move², it makes little difference how one came by it. I never have a need to consult Stockhausen's Helikopter-Streichquartett or Craig Davis playing Sister Sadie in the middle of a meeting, the way I might have to consult legislation or published papers ... but, if I did, I could do so just as effectively from digital copies of purchased CDs (or even shellac 78s, for that matter) as from digital downloads.

Some music is no longer available on physical media. Some new music never was. In either case, I am quite happy to download it as my primary means of procurement and store it not only on my hard disk and back it up on the cloud but also save it onto a CD of my own. Much music, however, is still (so far; it may well not always be so) available for physical purchase – and I prefer to buy it that way if I possibly can.

There are the obvious advantages and disadvantages. Electronic copies are usually at a quality level compromise which is good enough and small enough for a particular purpose, and if I have the original physical medium I can go back for a better conversion at any time (see note 2 below). On the other hand, two and a half thousand albums fit as neatly in my shirt pocket as one, on a hard disk, but represent an increasingly demanding storage problem in physical form.

None of that, however, whilst true, really has much to do with my real reasons for preferring physical ownership. When it comes right down to it, my real reasons are æsthetic. I love the complete artefact which an album (or book) represents, and that is the true basis for my preferences.

There is a process of fragmentation in cultural forms, at the moment, which for the first time seems capable of excising those forms from our cultural stock. I don't suggest that there is anything wrong with fragmentation, and certainly there is nothing new about it. From my earliest reading memories, I have returned to favourite passages in a novel without reading the whole; from my first LP purchase as a teenager, I often put a disk on the turntable to play just one favourite track from an album or one favourite passage from a long work. But there is now a broad tendency to only hear the fragment, rather than choosing it from the whole. Downloading did not start this ... radio stations which play tracks from albums, arias from operas, extracts from concertos, predate downloads by a long way ... now the process has moved to the point where it is legitimate to wonder whether production of long, structurally coherent cultural forms such as the novel and its musical equivalents might not face a future redundancy.

In music, the continued existence of the long form is often (not always) tied up with the physically æsthetic object. I bought The defamation of Strickland Banks, which is an exception: while I get real pleasure from the sleeve note booklet in general, and from two of the black and white photographs in general, this is a brave attempt to carry the concept album into the new nonphysical era. Defamation relies on its narrative continuity, and planned video form, to bind itself together as a single long entity.

At the other end of the scale from Defamation, I have recently been given Emily Barker's Almanac and Kate Bush's Director's cut, both of which, in different ways, play on my desire for a physical æsthetic.

Almanac, like several other albums in its genre (Joanna Newsom's Milk eyed mender, for instance), dispenses with the usual jewel CD case in favour of a fold out cardboard one. There's a thumbnail picture of it on the left; click it for a large view showing inside and outside, including slotted disk sleeve.

This sleeve, as I hold it, triggers in me all the responses which I usually feel towards a craft object ... including books, particularly hand made books. I am aware that I am being manipulated to respond in this way; but both art and crafts are, always, manipulating our responses. I'm so glad that I don't have a download version, even though I have stored the music itself on a music player from which I listen to it without any need to go into the sleeve.

Director's cut also abandons the jewel case, but instead of a handicrafts approach it takes the form of a hardback book of the same size – with the disk itself sleeved inside the front cover. The book contains the song lyrics, but also a set of intriguing, humorously linked, photographs reminiscent of Penny Slinger meets Duane Michals (for example, the one shown on right, linked to the song lyrics for "And so is love"; again, click the image for a larger view). Many of these images depict people wearing fish heads³.

Both of these I handle with tactile and visual delight which synergises with my enjoyment of the music to produce an æsthetic whole which is so much more than the sum of its parts. The download version of Director's cut includes, in PDF form, a copy of the booklet ... but that really wouldn't (excuse the pun) cut it, for me; I would value it highly, if that were all that was available, but I value the inclusion of the "real" thing, the physical, touchable thing, so very much more.

I say "electronic reader" rather than "Kindle" because the Kindle, being tied to one supplier, is both barely useful to me and philosophically less open than most of its competitors.
Listening to music at home, in high fidelity, may be a different matter. By way of experiment, I downloaded and bought copies of the same Bach choral recording from the same supplier. Played through good speakers, the difference was palpable: the download lacked depth and dynamic range compared to the CD.
Clearly a reference to the Fish Heads label on which Bush's holding companypublishes her music. This sort of play is not isolated. The holding company itself is "Noble and Brite"; Bush's son, around which much of her life and one explicit song title revolve, is "Bertie", short for "Albert"; and the name Albert means "bright, famous, noble..."

Plan B (aka Ben Drew), The defamation of Strickland Banks. 2010, New York: Atlantic Records (679 Artists).
Emily Barker and The Red Clay Halo, Almanac. 2011, London UK: Everyone Sang.
Kate Bush, Director's cut. 2011, London UK: Noble & Brite (Fish people).
Joanna Newsom, The Milk Eyed Mender. 2004 Chicago: Drag City. DC263CD.

Quote, unquote

2011-06-22T21:02:00.005Z

Today I sat in an audience and heard a speaker say, amongst many other things over a period of forty minutes, the following:

“Socialisation is a process which delivers benefits to all, even the least fortunate, which nobody in their right mind (least of all I) would give up. Unfortunately, part of the price for those benefits is to convert a significant proportion of a predominantly bright, intelligent, curious population of five year olds into dull, prefrontally lobotomised eighteen year olds. For some, too few, education serves to slow down, arrest, reverse or even prevent that conversion process. For a greater proportion, education is part of that process. For others, possibly the largest (and maybe the saddest) proportion, it has no obvious effect in either direction. We badly need to seek ways of increasing the size of the first group at the expense of the other two.”

The speaker was, ten years ago, a fourteen year old education system reject from a "sink estate", whom I met in an urban outreach scheme made possible by an enlightened and far sighted café owner. Today he is a graduate with a first class honours degree in hand, not much money in the bank, but five years of passionate dedication under his belt to helping a new generation of education system rejects to reconnect with their "bright, intelligent, curious" five year old selves.

Some people make me proud to be human; the speaker, and the café owner who was also in the audience, are two examples.

Grace

2011-06-11T17:44:00.003Z

No, it's not one of my own photographs this time.

It comes to me from Judith, who regularly sends me views into her world (see, for example, here).

I love this one.

It carries a different channel from the usual perceptions of several different realities, all at once, gently posing questions about all of them.

In particular, it proposes a better world than the one in which I am working today.

Since it arrived I've visited it several times, returning refreshed on each occasion.

A healthy approach to data analysis

2011-06-09T23:59:00.003Z

As this appears, by a happy piece of synchronicity from my point of view, the Wellcome Collection in the UK has on show an exhibition called Dirt: the filthy reality of everyday life. One exhibit in particular is of pivotal relevance to data analytic epidemiology: Dr John Snow’s so called "ghost map". In 1854, using what would today be described as data visualisation, Dr Snow plotted cases of cholera on a map of Soho, London. From the results he deduced that a water pump, was the source of infection. This was particularly impressive because water was not, at the time, suspected as a transmission vector and the pathogenic germ theory of disease had not become generally accepted. The local council decision to disable the pump was therefore, in the circumstances, a seminal act of faith in datacentric deduction over conventional wisdom.

Seemingly unlikely causation chains are often discovered by more sophisticated variations on Snow’s theme, emerging through statistical winnowing of gathered data. More than most data analytic areas, epidemiology can benefit from pooled work by numerous users at the sharp end of their practice as well as high level overviews, and data analysis is vital across that whole range. Those who have me in preparing this article include theatre nurses, general practice managers, country vets and hospital porters.

In a more recent high profile example, again involving cholera, an outbreak in Haiti after the devastating earthquake seems to have been traced¹ to a tragic “confluence of circumstances” arising from the aid effort itself. Identification of the apparent initial import vector didn’t require any sophisticated analysis in this case, but patterns of spatial spread within the country subsequent to that were a different matter. In an unfunded study of data from census and hospitalisation records (using Madonna software, widely used software from the University of California at Berkeley) Tuite and others² were able to model transmission in a way which “Despite limited surveillance data ... closely reproduces reported disease patterns”. [more]

Cravioto, A., et al. Final Report of the Independent Panel of Experts on the Cholera Outbreak in Haiti. 2011, New York: United Nations News Service Section.
Tuite, A.R., et al., Cholera Epidemic in Haiti, 2010: Using a Transmission Model to Explain Spatial Spread of Disease and Identify Optimal Control Interventions. Annals of internal medicine, 2011. 154(8).

I would like to thank Dr Brian Corden for invaluable help in assessing an item which, as a result of his advice, was not eventually used. He thus saved me from making a fool of myself through lack of confidence in my own judgment

Today

2011-06-05T23:53:00.003Z

California arsenic dreaming

2011-06-04T17:12:00.001Z

For at least as long as I've been reading it, speculative fiction has been proposing alternative biochemistries to the carbon based one which we know and love.

My first encounter with the idea was in one of Isaac Asimov's Wendell Urth mysteries, written when I was three years old though I didn't read it until I was ten. The talking stone, in which a race of "siliconies" live amongst the asteroids, posits a silicon based biochemical economy which, I later discovered, was popular with other writers and speculators too.

Another candidate is phosphorus which, like carbon, can (in combination with nitrogen) form a variety of complex molecules including long chains and phosphazene rings. But phosphorus also has a more conventional rôle in our own carbon based scheme of things, as one of the six main elements from which living matter is constructed. Amongst other things, phosphorus is a component in the cell's energy storage mechanisms, and in the binding together of DNA. Could phosphorus be replaced within our carbon ecology?

I am, as said recently, a mediocre chemist at best (and most chemists would describe me even less charitably than that), so I'm not in a position to have opinions on these speculations, but that doesn't stop me being interested. So, I was intrigued by an article in Science (organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) at the end of last year, positing a bacterium which had pulled exactly this trick: substituting arsenic for phosphorus.

As the authors point out, instances of biochemical substitution for trace elements are not unknown, examples being “tungsten for molybdenum and cadmium for zinc in some enzyme families and copper for iron as an oxygen-carrier in some arthropods and mollusks”. This would, however, be the first known example of substitution for one of the big six. Trace element substitutions rely on close similarity between the usual supects and their surrogates, and the authors argue for the same sort of similarity here:

“Arsenic ... is a chemical analog of phosphorus, which lies directly below [it] on the periodic table. Arsenic possesses a similar atomic radius, as well as near identical electronegativity to [phosphorus. The most common form of [phosphorus] in biology is phosphate ... which behaves similarly to arsenate over the range of biologically relevant pH and redox gradients. The physico-chemical similarity between [arsenate] and [phosphate] contributes to the biological toxicity of [arsenate] because metabolic pathways intended for [phosphate] cannot distinguish between the two molecules ... ... ... given the similarities of [arsenic] and [phosphorus] ... we hypothesized that [arsenate] could specifically substitute for [phosphate] in an organism possessing mechanisms to cope with the inherent instability of [arsenate] compounds.”

They then went on to identify a naturally occurring organism, a bacterium in a California lake, in which this substitution seemed in fact to have occurred.

My attraction to this is. of course, a potent amalgam of intellectual curiosity and childhood dreams. Alas, a number of comments in yesterday's issue (they are also available on the Science web site) dispute or question the findings. The authors respond; the debate continues...

As a nonchemist academic, I can only wait impartially for the final verdict. As a childhood dreamer, however, I surreptitiously cross my fingers and hope for that verdict to vindicate the original findings.

Isaac Asimov. "The talking stone" in Astounding science fiction. 1955, New York: Fantasy house.
Felisa Wolfe-Simon, et al. 2010. "A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus" in Science [Online]. Available: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2010/12/01/science.1197258.full.pdf [Accessed 2010-12-02].

How she brought the nightmare from Wasilla to DC

2011-06-03T13:45:00.007Z

Gayle Reynolds just flagged up for me (under the email subject line "When is her 15 minutes up?") Sarah Palin's confused notion of Paul Revere's midnight ride.

I have to confess a stab of sympathy (my first ever) for the increasingly bizarre Ms Palin since I always found it difficult, at school, to separate the rides of Paul Revere, Dick Turpin, John Gilpin, and the good news from Ghent to Aix. (Not to mention, much later in my life, deceased minuteman Mudsy Muddlemore, the Funky Phantom...)

Alas ... nowhere is it written that being confused and bizarre will prevent someone from attaining great political power.

How beautiful is the rain...

2011-05-30T09:01:00.006Z

Rain streams across a hotel window and breaks the street outside into a rippling impressionist geometry.

Rain on a window unfailingly triggers in my bed the recitation of a single stanza from a poem, in a classroom forty nine years ago.

The sick man from his chamber looks
At the twisted brooks;
He can feel the cool
Breath of each little pool;
His fevered brain
Grows calm again,
And he breathes a blessing on the rain.

The poem is Longfellow's How beautiful is the rain! and this is the fourth stanza of eleven.

Curious that an eleven year old should have felt such empathic pull from an image and an idea that meant nothing to him from his own experience ... and continue to feel it as a permanent and consistent association across the next five decades. I would have expected the opening line pairs from stanzas two and three to be the ones that stuck, because they are instantly recognisable – and stanza three ties very specifically to the visual image which I associate the poem:

How it clatters along the roofs,
Like the tramp of hoof
... ... ...
Across the window-pane
It pours and pours;

But the mind is its own master, and stanza four is what has stayed with me across the gulf between then and now.

(Possibly the fact that I learnt the poem in the classroom of the monstrous Mrs F has something to do with it. Mrs F was the class teacher from hell – literally, perhaps, to judge by her constant warnings of fire and torment in the afterlife. Maybe I sat in the whiff of sulphur and brimstone, imagining the release of cool rain? But no ... I suspect that this is a fancy constructed well after the event, a poetic rationalisation of the past from a psychologically aware adult future.)

The whole poem, to be honest, has little appeal for me as an adult ... I left it behind about five years after I first heard it ... but that single stanza remains mnemonically wedded to sight of rain flowing down window glass.

If you want the whole Longfellow poem...

How beautiful is the rain!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
How beautiful is the rain!
After the dust and heat,
In the broad and fiery street,
In the narrow lane,
How beautiful is the rain!

How it clatters along the roofs,
Like the tramp of hoofs
How it gushes and struggles out
From the throat of the overflowing spout!

Across the window-pane
It pours and pours;
And swift and wide,
With a muddy tide,
Like a river down the gutter roars
The rain, the welcome rain!

The sick man from his chamber looks
At the twisted brooks;
He can feel the cool
Breath of each little pool;
His fevered brain
Grows calm again,
And he breathes a blessing on the rain.

From the neighboring school
Come the boys,
With more than their wonted noise
And commotion;
And down the wet streets
Sail their mimic fleets,
Till the treacherous pool
Ingulfs them in its whirling
And turbulent ocean.

In the country, on every side,
Where far and wide,
Like a leopard's tawny and spotted hide,
Stretches the plain,
To the dry grass and the drier grain
How welcome is the rain!

In the furrowed land
The toilsome and patient oxen stand;
Lifting the yoke encumbered head,
With their dilated nostrils spread,
They silently inhale
The clover-scented gale,
And the vapors that arise
From the well-watered and smoking soil.
For this rest in the furrow after toil
Their large and lustrous eyes
Seem to thank the Lord,
More than man's spoken word.

Near at hand,
From under the sheltering trees,
The farmer sees
His pastures, and his fields of grain,
As they bend their tops
To the numberless beating drops
Of the incessant rain.
He counts it as no sin
That he sees therein
Only his own thrift and gain.

These, and far more than these,
The Poet sees!
He can behold
Aquarius old
Walking the fenceless fields of air;
And from each ample fold
Of the clouds about him rolled
Scattering everywhere
The showery rain,
As the farmer scatters his grain.

He can behold
Things manifold
That have not yet been wholly told,--
Have not been wholly sung nor said.
For his thought, that never stops,
Follows the water-drops
Down to the graves of the dead,
Down through chasms and gulfs profound,
To the dreary fountain-head
Of lakes and rivers under ground;
And sees them, when the rain is done,
On the bridge of colors seven
Climbing up once more to heaven,
Opposite the setting sun.

Thus the Seer,
With vision clear,
Sees forms appear and disappear,
In the perpetual round of strange,
Mysterious change
From birth to death, from death to birth,
From earth to heaven, from heaven to earth;
Till glimpses more sublime
Of things, unseen before,
Unto his wondering eyes reveal
The Universe, as an immeasurable wheel
Turning forevermore
In the rapid and rushing river of Time.

Move over, Tufty Fluffytail...

2011-05-27T15:11:00.003Z

Well ... I used to be quite pleased with the squirrel sequence below. But...

...now that I've seen Ray Girvan's Best ever squirrel photo ... well ... mine looks pretty feeble!

God is in the detail

2011-05-19T23:32:00.002Z

It's not at all unusual for images on the web (or in other modes of publication, for that matter) to be cropped. It puzzles me, however, that Edward Leighton's very long painting The Syracusan bride is in every case that I have seen cropped to exactly the same very specific extend: removal of the right hand end. Almost everything is there except half a tree, an adult woman, and two children. In the illustration below, I've replaced the missing section (not great quality, but...) with a separating white line to show what is happening.

Why on earth would you cut off just that little bit?

I find the crop even more inexplicable because it vandalises what seems to me the most interesting part of the painting: that group of four bystanders in the bottom right hand corner.

I'm not knocking the painting as a whole. Different pictures do different things for different people. This one holds the key to many people's hearts, and I am pleased for them, but it doesn't, as a whole, float my boat.

That foursome at bottom right, however, are a different matter. They hold three small visual miracles, which call me back to my "Ambushed by simplicity" post a couple of weeks ago. I can't render those miracles here in sufficient quality to be worth bothering; if you are within reach of the Victoria and Albert Museum, any time between now and 12th July, go to the Cult of beauty: the aesthetic movement 1860-1900 exhibition and look at the original. I was there today and took the opportunity of standing in front of that corner of the painting (it's not usually on public show) for an hour.

The miracles are, from left to right: the right hand of the little girl on the left of this group; the man with the beard; and the face of the child on the far right.

Hurrah – the crabs are back!

2011-05-14T07:09:00.005Z

Despite unavoidable absence from their natural habitat¹ on medical priority grounds, the crabs of Easton MD² are back.

The results of the 2011 Big Crab Contest have been announced. Congratulations to all participants on this year's magnificent crop of Pleocyematal artworks

*addendum, twelve hours later ... just to confound me, a new sighting in natural habitat waters has now been verified.
**that's MD Maryland and MD Medicinæ Doctor, both.

Weighting around

2011-05-09T08:05:00.000Z

“Please weight here until called for your wait check.”

Hearing the colours

2011-05-06T23:17:00.000Z

Synchronicity, again. Or just the ability of the mind to create connections from happenstance. One or t'other.

In her most recent Unreal nature posts, yesterday and today, Julie Heyward quotes respectively from Jean-Luc Nancy's fascinating Listening and Victoria Finlay's delightful Color (which I have only recently read, to which I keep returning, and for introduction to which I am, as in so much else, indebted to Unreal nature). Between the two postings, but before I had found either, I have also read Joanne Harris's Blueeyedboy – a book with synæsthesia entwined in its black heart.

Would the conjunction of posts drawing on music and colours have triggered thoughts of synæsthesia if I had not just read a book in which a character is cruelly punished for her childhood claim to “hear the colours”? To be honest, I don't know; it feels as though it would, but who can say. Either way, it did and the world is now one in which I see the posts that way. I see both books differently through the lens of Unreal nature's quotations, and differently again through their conjunction with Blueeyedboy.

I shall now have to go back and reread, for perhaps the dozenth time, Mondays are red which (excuse the pun) wrote the book on synæsthesia as metaphor for the agonising confusion of adolescence.

Jean-Luc Nancy (trans: Charlotte Mandell), Listening. 1st ed. 2007, New York: Fordham University Press. 9780823227730 or 0823227731 (pbk.)
Victoria Finlay, Color : a natural history of the palette. 2003, New York: Ballantine Books. 0345444302.
Joanne Harris, Blueeyedboy. 2010, London: Doubleday. 9780385609517 (pbk.).
Nicola Morgan, Mondays are red. 2002, London: Hodder. 0340855568.

In the heart of the storm

2011-05-06T20:04:00.004Z

In the heart of the storm seems an appropriate title for Ray Girvan's latest post, in which he covers the most recent step in his self-set Odyssey through the entire output of Maxwell Gray.

Not just to read, either; to track down, first. And all of this for an author who frequently (see, as one example, A plea for the silence of the novelist) manages to exasperate him. And then to document the journey in fascinating detail for armchair travellers like myself. He originally described this as a project for 2010 ... while the timescale has expanded in practice, it's still both intensive and impressive.

Oh, I have often enough read the entire output of an author ... but never with Ray's combination of intellectual discipline and tenacity. When I think of such a project, my heart quails and I am full of admiration.

Ambushed by simplicity

2011-05-05T21:13:00.012Z

Sometimes simplicity of line or shade or colour can reach past sophistication, touch something deep inside, and make you want to cry.

It's happened to me twice, recently: on both occasions, through depiction of a face.

The first, a week ago, was a drawing of a young woman, in graphite on silk, shown to me by my friend Eunice. It was by René David – therefore presumably, though there was no date, about a century ago. The photograph on the left (taken with a pocket compact camera, through glass, in a café) really doesn't begin to do it justice; you'll just have to take my word for the beautiful, soft, pitch perfect delicacy of line and tone in the original which completely undid me.

The second, also showing the face of a young woman, is a detail from a stained glass window (on the right). It depicts St Mary the Virgin, within a window in the cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral. I came there for another reason entirely, and was surprised by this face despite having passed it many times before. The rest of the window, including other faces (for instance, the infant Christ) had no particular effect on me ... but this one face stopped me in my tracks.

OK: I'm a softy. Unrepentantly so.

As usual, click (or double click) either image for a larger view.