President Kennedy famously said "I am a jam doughnut" at the height of the Cold War, to express solidarity with the people of Berlin.
Except that "Ich bin Berliner" and "Ich bin ein Berliner" both mean the same thing, apparently, which is "I am a native of Berlin".
The myth arose because it's more usual in German to say "Ich bin Berliner". The use of the indefinite article ein is somehow supposed to make it mean doughnut. Even though Berliners don't call jam doughnuts Berliners, any more than the English call custard "Crème Anglaise"
But of course it's more usual in English to say "I am English" rather than "I am an Englishman".
That doesn't mean that there wouldn't be places in speeches where the second would be better.
According to German speakers, Kennedy's speechwriters got it right.
What I find interesting is whether "Ich bin Berliner" and "Ich bin ein Berliner" have the same relative value as "I am English" and "I am an Englishman"? Is it even possible to answer this question?
If you ask a German, how does he know what the difference sounds like in English? If you ask an Englishman, how does he know what the difference sounds like in German?
If you have a truly bilingual person, who has spoken both languages fluently since infancy, how do you know that their conception of the differences between the four phrases isn't being influenced by the knowledge of the other language?
Are there "mistakes" commonly made by true bilinguals in their languages which aren't commonly made by monolingual speakers?
There are, as far as I know, two theories of how language influences the way we think:
One theory is that language is a serialization of something more complicated:
Cat, Mat, and Sitting stand in a certain relationship in the mind. When you try to convert that set of objects and relations into a stream of sounds, you can do it in many ways. In English the word order matters, so "The cat sat on the mat" is different to "The mat sat on the cat". In Latin it's the word endings that matter, so "Catus matum satit" is the same as "Matum catus satit", but different from "Catum matus satit".
Another theory is that one literally conducts an internal dialogue in one's native language. In this theory, there are thoughts that one can think in Latin that one can't think in English. Sunt lacrimae rerum might be a candidate. The closest English can get to that thought is "There are tears for things". But I don't think that captures what Virgil/Aeneas meant.
It's more like the famous "The world is a world of tears". But you can tell by the fact that the English repeats a word that that's not the real meaning of the original either.
And of course what I'm thinking when I read "Sunt lacrimae rerum", through the lens of several other Latin phrases, and my terrible schoolboy Latin, is probably not what it meant to Virgil, for whom Latin was just his native language.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
But I bet that wasn't true for the Romans, who used it for grocery shopping. When they wanted to sound profound, they used Greek.
The internal dialogue theory explains these untranslatable thoughts. There have been experiments where pictures have been read from the visual cortex of cats. Maybe one day it will be possible to overhear the internal dialogue of a human mind. Can you imagine how spooky it would be to have your inner thoughts played out on a loudspeaker as you thought? Even if the only person listening was you? I bet that that would tell us a lot about consciousness.
On the other hand, imagine the shape of a crankshaft in a car engine. Picture it.
OK, what words did you use? I'm pretty sure I didn't use any. Just saw a picture in my head.
I think that means it's possible to think without using words.
How do blind people imagine a crankshaft shape? Are there words? Are there pictures? Do they use some other faculty of imagination to do with feeling and shape?
I wonder if John Kennedy's famous error that was not an error could shed some light on these matters.
Do bilinguals think that the corresponding phrases in the two languages sound the same? Stand in the same relation to one another? Do bilinguals make systematic errors in one language according to their other language?
What about bilinguals between a language like English and a language like Latin? Can they definitively say that they can't express Aeneas' thought in English? Can they translate it into another "scrambling" language and be confident that it does mean the same there?
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Thursday, June 17, 2010
What gets measured gets improved
There's a well known concept in cricket of 'playing for your average'.
It's generally considered a pretty despicable thing to do.
The reputation of my childhood hero, Geoffrey Boycott, is marred by a suspicion that he cared more about his average than about the success of the teams he played for.
And yet I'd be surprised if it wasn't a fair bit more widespread than people think.
At the end of the season, how many games your team has won is one statistic, which is shared between all the members of the team.
Your own performance, your position in the averages table which every cricket club calculates, is another statistic, but it gives you local bragging rights.
Lording it over your friends is an excellent feeling. Lording it over people you don't know isn't nearly as good, even on the rare occasions when it's possible. Bragging to third parties is pretty much impossible unless you're playing for the national side.
But if you are playing for the national side, everyone is looking very carefully at your average. If it's not good, you get the blame for defeats. If it is good, then you get credit for playing well in a team full of losers.
These are classic circumstances for hypocrisy. I predict that everyone is playing for their average as much as they can get away with, whilst loudly telling everyone who will listen that playing for your average is a selfish thing to do, and getting very offended indeed if anyone accuses them of doing it.
Of course, anyone who is caught playing for their average to the obvious disadvantage of their team gets severely told off. Anyone caught repeatedly doing it is thought to be a traitor, and even if, at the end of the season, they can point to the best batting average in the side, they won't be given much credit for it.
Of course, I never play for my average. How dare you even think it? But the hypocritic urge is so strong that I feel quite brave writing this post, because I know that a lot of my cricketing friends will read it and assume that it means that I do, and worse, that my attitude gives them licence to do so.
If a team were to adopt the attitude that playing for your average was acceptable, that team would do badly.
So writing a blog post like this when you're captain of a cricket team is a really stupid thing to do.
To clarify, I'm talking about batting averages. I haven't thought about bowling yet. I think it's much less of a problem there, although I did detect a certain amount of jealousy when I topped our bowling averages a few years back, by virtue of not being very good, and therefore only being asked to bowl against the other team's tail-enders.
Anyway, one of the fundamental ideas of running things is:
It's a double edged maxim:
If you want something to get better, measure it.
Be careful what you measure. That is what's going to get improved, not the thing you really want.
Once upon a time, I think batting average was a sensible thing to measure. You calculate it by the number of runs scored, divided by the number of times you're out.
In the ancestral days of timeless games, this was pretty much exactly what you wanted. How many runs will a batsman, on average, give his wicket away for? You have ten wickets to spend, how many runs will you get back for them?
In this form of the game, it's a good thing to 'play for your average'. Your average-incentive and the team's success-incentive are usually perfectly aligned. In fact I can't think of a situation where a batsman should do one thing for the team, but a different thing for the record books.
However no-one plays timeless games any more. They go on forever.
The last timeless test was in 1939, when England abandoned a test match they were probably going to win against South Africa, which had been going on for twelve days.
They abandoned it because they were about to miss their boat home.
Once you start putting a time limit on games, it's less appropriate to calculate batting averages. With a short time limit, it's vastly less appropriate.
The most extreme form of timed cricket is 20 overs a side. Both sides get 120 balls, and the winner is the team who can score the most runs.
Suppose we have two batsmen.
Algy scores 30 runs from 80 balls and is not out
Ben scores 30 runs from 10 balls and is out.
Who is the better batsman?
In a timeless game, your money is on Algy. He's not out. He will probably score more runs. If the game is over because everyone else is out, then in the next game you want to put him up the order, so that he can score more. Whatever his average is, it has just gone up.
In a 20 over game, Algy is a disaster. He has just single handedly lost you the match. Your other ten batsmen have 40 balls to share between them. Even if they do really well, your final score is only going to be about 70. You'd have to be very lucky to win.
Ben, on the other hand, is pretty rubbish in a timeless game. He has thrown his wicket away. If everyone on your team plays like Ben, you're going to end up with 315 runs and get murdered. Ben had better be a bowler if he wants to stay in the team. His average is now closer to 30 than it was before.
In a 20 over game, Ben is awesome. He may well be your top scorer. He's contributed a handsome thirty to your total, and he's left 110 balls for your other 10 batsmen, who if they play really well will probably leave you with a total of 140, which is pretty comfy.
This shows that we've got a perverse incentive.
In a 20/20 game, a man who plays for his team aspires to play like Ben.
A man who plays for his average aspires to play as much like Algy as possible, whilst still staying friends with his captain and his team.
In case you think I'm overstating the case, what should happen on the last ball of the first innings in a limited overs game?
Firstly, the batsman should try to score as many runs as possible. He should either loft the ball for a six (which might be caught for no run), or try to swing madly at it to get a more certain four. He should completely ignore where his wicket is. It no longer matters.
Then, whether he hits or misses, he should immediately start running, and not stop running until the opposition have run him or his batting partner out.
From a team point of view, there's no other sensible thing to do.
How many times, if you watch limited overs cricket, do you see the last ball played defensively for no run?
That is someone playing for their average. There is no other reason for it.
Even worse, they're often playing for their partner's average. You wouldn't be at all popular if you called a suicidal run on the last ball that was suicidal for the man at the other end. You've just spoiled his batting average. You don't do that to friends.
I did it accidentally in the last game we played (sorry Joe). Everyone realises that it's the right thing to do. I feel guilty. Joe feels annoyed. I had to buy him a beer and say sorry.
My conclusion is that calculating batting averages in a team which plays mainly limited-overs cricket is stupid, counterproductive, and must stop.
But how do we stop it?
We can't just not calculate them. Batting averages are part of the game. People calculate them in their heads. I'm playing for several different teams occasionally, and keeping a careful record of my scores so I can work out my overall average at the end of the season even though it's completely meaningless, I know it's completely meaningless, and even if it made any statistical sense to add up scores for different teams like that it would be the wrong thing to calculate anyway.
But very few people have the statistical sense to realise that. So, as with all numbers calculated ever, they are taken to be the Word of the Lord by those who don't understand them, and they are so important as a result that it's totally unrealistic to expect people to forget about them.
Go look at the Wikipedia article about Boycott. To me it paints a picture of a very gifted man, tortured by a selfishness and a fear of failure and bad luck that was completely understandable given what happened to him as a child, and to his father when he was on the verge of adulthood.
He could have been a real cartoon hero without too much trouble. Random events twisted him into a tragic hero. He is in fact, even more my hero after reading that than he was when I was a boy.
But my point is that this article is absolutely littered with references to his batting average! He's been heavily criticised for trying to improve it at all costs, and at the same time lauded for having one of the best averages ever.
This is a bit like the man who burned down the temple at Ephesus so that his name would be remembered forever. I forget his name.
So should you. Never speak it. Never write it down. Tipp-ex it out of books.
We need a better measure of a batsman's usefulness to replace batting average with.
Scoring rate won't do.
Someone who scores 4 off 1 ball and then gets run out on the next has been next to useless unless he's gone in in the last over. Someone with the same scoring rate of 4 runs per ball who's got 80 off 20 balls in a 20/20 game is an impossible god who will be man of the match.
The first thing to do is not to worry about whether a batsman's out or not. If you're the eleventh wicket, you're still out for averaging purposes. This disadvantages the lower order batsmen, but it gives everyone better incentives. The lower order probably don't worry about their batting averages so much anyway. That's not what they're for.
I wonder if we should quote something like total runs scored and total balls faced, both divided by the number of matches played.
So you might get something like
'Algy has scored an average of 15 runs off an average of 25 balls per game'
'Ben has scored an average of 15 runs off an average of 10 balls per game'
I'm sure that's not perfect. It doesn't account for the situation where you're running out of wickets, and a batsman who can just not get out becomes really valuable even though he's scoring slowly, because you're going to pick up extra byes and wides and no balls just by virtue of him being there.
Maybe we should count byes, wides and no-balls as runs to the batsman, even though they're nothing to do with him, just in order to get the incentives aligned properly.
Another problem is that if you've got two numbers, like 15/25 or 15/10, it's not obvious what order you want to put your table of best batsmen in.
15 off 15 is better than 15 off 16, and worse than 16 off 15, clearly.
16 of 16 is slightly better than 15 off 15.
But what about 16 off 17? That probably depends on the match situation.
But actually that doesn't matter.
We can work with a partial ordering. It's just that there'll be ties in the rankings.
I don't think that's a problem. If it is, then we can use something irrelevant as a tie breaker, like average catches. That probably correlates nicely with batting prowess anyway, and although you don't really need any extra incentive to take catches, it might be an extra incentive to practice catching.
It's generally considered a pretty despicable thing to do.
The reputation of my childhood hero, Geoffrey Boycott, is marred by a suspicion that he cared more about his average than about the success of the teams he played for.
T'Great Man
And yet I'd be surprised if it wasn't a fair bit more widespread than people think.
At the end of the season, how many games your team has won is one statistic, which is shared between all the members of the team.
Your own performance, your position in the averages table which every cricket club calculates, is another statistic, but it gives you local bragging rights.
Lording it over your friends is an excellent feeling. Lording it over people you don't know isn't nearly as good, even on the rare occasions when it's possible. Bragging to third parties is pretty much impossible unless you're playing for the national side.
But if you are playing for the national side, everyone is looking very carefully at your average. If it's not good, you get the blame for defeats. If it is good, then you get credit for playing well in a team full of losers.
These are classic circumstances for hypocrisy. I predict that everyone is playing for their average as much as they can get away with, whilst loudly telling everyone who will listen that playing for your average is a selfish thing to do, and getting very offended indeed if anyone accuses them of doing it.
Of course, anyone who is caught playing for their average to the obvious disadvantage of their team gets severely told off. Anyone caught repeatedly doing it is thought to be a traitor, and even if, at the end of the season, they can point to the best batting average in the side, they won't be given much credit for it.
Of course, I never play for my average. How dare you even think it? But the hypocritic urge is so strong that I feel quite brave writing this post, because I know that a lot of my cricketing friends will read it and assume that it means that I do, and worse, that my attitude gives them licence to do so.
If a team were to adopt the attitude that playing for your average was acceptable, that team would do badly.
So writing a blog post like this when you're captain of a cricket team is a really stupid thing to do.
To clarify, I'm talking about batting averages. I haven't thought about bowling yet. I think it's much less of a problem there, although I did detect a certain amount of jealousy when I topped our bowling averages a few years back, by virtue of not being very good, and therefore only being asked to bowl against the other team's tail-enders.
Anyway, one of the fundamental ideas of running things is:
What gets measured gets improved.
It's a double edged maxim:
If you want something to get better, measure it.
Be careful what you measure. That is what's going to get improved, not the thing you really want.
Once upon a time, I think batting average was a sensible thing to measure. You calculate it by the number of runs scored, divided by the number of times you're out.
In the ancestral days of timeless games, this was pretty much exactly what you wanted. How many runs will a batsman, on average, give his wicket away for? You have ten wickets to spend, how many runs will you get back for them?
In this form of the game, it's a good thing to 'play for your average'. Your average-incentive and the team's success-incentive are usually perfectly aligned. In fact I can't think of a situation where a batsman should do one thing for the team, but a different thing for the record books.
However no-one plays timeless games any more. They go on forever.
The last timeless test was in 1939, when England abandoned a test match they were probably going to win against South Africa, which had been going on for twelve days.
They abandoned it because they were about to miss their boat home.
Once you start putting a time limit on games, it's less appropriate to calculate batting averages. With a short time limit, it's vastly less appropriate.
The most extreme form of timed cricket is 20 overs a side. Both sides get 120 balls, and the winner is the team who can score the most runs.
Suppose we have two batsmen.
Algy scores 30 runs from 80 balls and is not out
Ben scores 30 runs from 10 balls and is out.
Who is the better batsman?
In a timeless game, your money is on Algy. He's not out. He will probably score more runs. If the game is over because everyone else is out, then in the next game you want to put him up the order, so that he can score more. Whatever his average is, it has just gone up.
In a 20 over game, Algy is a disaster. He has just single handedly lost you the match. Your other ten batsmen have 40 balls to share between them. Even if they do really well, your final score is only going to be about 70. You'd have to be very lucky to win.
Ben, on the other hand, is pretty rubbish in a timeless game. He has thrown his wicket away. If everyone on your team plays like Ben, you're going to end up with 315 runs and get murdered. Ben had better be a bowler if he wants to stay in the team. His average is now closer to 30 than it was before.
In a 20 over game, Ben is awesome. He may well be your top scorer. He's contributed a handsome thirty to your total, and he's left 110 balls for your other 10 batsmen, who if they play really well will probably leave you with a total of 140, which is pretty comfy.
This shows that we've got a perverse incentive.
In a 20/20 game, a man who plays for his team aspires to play like Ben.
A man who plays for his average aspires to play as much like Algy as possible, whilst still staying friends with his captain and his team.
In case you think I'm overstating the case, what should happen on the last ball of the first innings in a limited overs game?
Firstly, the batsman should try to score as many runs as possible. He should either loft the ball for a six (which might be caught for no run), or try to swing madly at it to get a more certain four. He should completely ignore where his wicket is. It no longer matters.
Then, whether he hits or misses, he should immediately start running, and not stop running until the opposition have run him or his batting partner out.
From a team point of view, there's no other sensible thing to do.
How many times, if you watch limited overs cricket, do you see the last ball played defensively for no run?
That is someone playing for their average. There is no other reason for it.
Even worse, they're often playing for their partner's average. You wouldn't be at all popular if you called a suicidal run on the last ball that was suicidal for the man at the other end. You've just spoiled his batting average. You don't do that to friends.
I did it accidentally in the last game we played (sorry Joe). Everyone realises that it's the right thing to do. I feel guilty. Joe feels annoyed. I had to buy him a beer and say sorry.
My conclusion is that calculating batting averages in a team which plays mainly limited-overs cricket is stupid, counterproductive, and must stop.
But how do we stop it?
We can't just not calculate them. Batting averages are part of the game. People calculate them in their heads. I'm playing for several different teams occasionally, and keeping a careful record of my scores so I can work out my overall average at the end of the season even though it's completely meaningless, I know it's completely meaningless, and even if it made any statistical sense to add up scores for different teams like that it would be the wrong thing to calculate anyway.
But very few people have the statistical sense to realise that. So, as with all numbers calculated ever, they are taken to be the Word of the Lord by those who don't understand them, and they are so important as a result that it's totally unrealistic to expect people to forget about them.
Go look at the Wikipedia article about Boycott. To me it paints a picture of a very gifted man, tortured by a selfishness and a fear of failure and bad luck that was completely understandable given what happened to him as a child, and to his father when he was on the verge of adulthood.
He could have been a real cartoon hero without too much trouble. Random events twisted him into a tragic hero. He is in fact, even more my hero after reading that than he was when I was a boy.
But my point is that this article is absolutely littered with references to his batting average! He's been heavily criticised for trying to improve it at all costs, and at the same time lauded for having one of the best averages ever.
This is a bit like the man who burned down the temple at Ephesus so that his name would be remembered forever. I forget his name.
So should you. Never speak it. Never write it down. Tipp-ex it out of books.
We need a better measure of a batsman's usefulness to replace batting average with.
Scoring rate won't do.
Someone who scores 4 off 1 ball and then gets run out on the next has been next to useless unless he's gone in in the last over. Someone with the same scoring rate of 4 runs per ball who's got 80 off 20 balls in a 20/20 game is an impossible god who will be man of the match.
The first thing to do is not to worry about whether a batsman's out or not. If you're the eleventh wicket, you're still out for averaging purposes. This disadvantages the lower order batsmen, but it gives everyone better incentives. The lower order probably don't worry about their batting averages so much anyway. That's not what they're for.
I wonder if we should quote something like total runs scored and total balls faced, both divided by the number of matches played.
So you might get something like
'Algy has scored an average of 15 runs off an average of 25 balls per game'
'Ben has scored an average of 15 runs off an average of 10 balls per game'
I'm sure that's not perfect. It doesn't account for the situation where you're running out of wickets, and a batsman who can just not get out becomes really valuable even though he's scoring slowly, because you're going to pick up extra byes and wides and no balls just by virtue of him being there.
Maybe we should count byes, wides and no-balls as runs to the batsman, even though they're nothing to do with him, just in order to get the incentives aligned properly.
Another problem is that if you've got two numbers, like 15/25 or 15/10, it's not obvious what order you want to put your table of best batsmen in.
15 off 15 is better than 15 off 16, and worse than 16 off 15, clearly.
16 of 16 is slightly better than 15 off 15.
But what about 16 off 17? That probably depends on the match situation.
But actually that doesn't matter.
We can work with a partial ordering. It's just that there'll be ties in the rankings.
I don't think that's a problem. If it is, then we can use something irrelevant as a tie breaker, like average catches. That probably correlates nicely with batting prowess anyway, and although you don't really need any extra incentive to take catches, it might be an extra incentive to practice catching.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Zombies (Rambling Freak Out)
In a previous post I used the term "philosophical zombie", and received the following response:
Gareth McCaughan also kindly sent this link: http://lesswrong.com/lw/pn/zombies_the_movie/
Hmm. Zombies.....
I agree that every bit of science I know fits together perfectly. It comes close to explaining everything I see, including other people. There are occasional gaps, such as how the first self-replicating entity got started, but I can imagine what the answers might look like.
There are other gaps, such as "Why is there anything here at all?", which it doesn't attempt to address, but which I don't find interesting enough to worry about.
It doesn't even have a go at explaining who I am.
I found Zombies: the movie, the other day. It's very funny, but I don't see the point it's trying to make.
At the end, one of the characters seems to realize that he doesn't exist.
Here are some random disconnected thoughts about what I feel:
I don't necessarily believe that my past self was conscious, even though it wrote about being so. How would I know? I wasn't there.
I do believe that as I'm writing this there is something "behind my eyes", watching the process.
I'm not sure that that thing can even influence my brain. Maybe it just watches. The fact that my brain occasionally seems to write about it implies that it can influence the world.
But that's the thing I call "me". Not my body, and not my brain, both of which, it seems, could (and do) work perfectly well without me.
When people don't understand what I mean, or try to explain it as some sort of physical process in the world, then I think they must be different from me, and that's why I've always believed that not all (or possibly even not most) other people have this thing.
I've believed this since school. I remember the thought coming to me when I was in an art lesson in the second year, during a discussion with a girl about the inconceivability of death (which strikes me now as no more inconceivable than sleep, but which seemed an absolute impossibility then for some reason).
I have no idea how this thing can influence the world, or how a brain uninfluenced by this thing could have had this thought or written these words. The whole thing is mad.
There are two pieces of evidence in favour that I can see. One is that very few people seem to understand what I mean. The other is that I can't describe it. When I read what I write about it, it seems like the proverbial blind man trying to describe the colour blue.
When I read what other people write about consciousness, they don't seem to mean the same thing as me.
I'd love to know what's going on. If there's an explanation in terms of matter I'd be amazed, but really really happy.
I'm not yanking your chain. I don't know any philosophy. This is what it feels like to be me.
But when I heard the term 'philosophical zombie' a couple of years ago, it gave me hope, because it sounds like the sort of thing that someone who felt like me would think of, so maybe I am not alone.
Although, if other watchers can talk to me like that, that implies that they can influence the brain as well as being influenced by it. Which makes them a proper part of the universe, rather than something watching.
Oh God, can a philosophical zombie conceive of the idea of a philosophical zombie?
I know I'm flailing here. There's not even any attempt to construct an argument, just some random phrases.
Shoot me down. I will enjoy thinking about what you say.
Now I've gone back over what I've written and re-read it, and there doesn't seem to be any evidence in it at all that the writer was conscious. It's just the flailing of a human brain trying to understand itself.
But I'm conscious. I am here! Watching! Now!
There's no such thing as a philosophical zombie.
Get over your self, and maybe you'll start understanding how everything (neuroscience, science-based philosophy, reality) fits together perfectly.
Hint: it's all a bunch of patterns. Random signals are useless for survival.
Gareth McCaughan also kindly sent this link: http://lesswrong.com/lw/pn/zombies_the_movie/
Hmm. Zombies.....
I agree that every bit of science I know fits together perfectly. It comes close to explaining everything I see, including other people. There are occasional gaps, such as how the first self-replicating entity got started, but I can imagine what the answers might look like.
There are other gaps, such as "Why is there anything here at all?", which it doesn't attempt to address, but which I don't find interesting enough to worry about.
It doesn't even have a go at explaining who I am.
I found Zombies: the movie, the other day. It's very funny, but I don't see the point it's trying to make.
At the end, one of the characters seems to realize that he doesn't exist.
Here are some random disconnected thoughts about what I feel:
I don't necessarily believe that my past self was conscious, even though it wrote about being so. How would I know? I wasn't there.
I do believe that as I'm writing this there is something "behind my eyes", watching the process.
I'm not sure that that thing can even influence my brain. Maybe it just watches. The fact that my brain occasionally seems to write about it implies that it can influence the world.
But that's the thing I call "me". Not my body, and not my brain, both of which, it seems, could (and do) work perfectly well without me.
When people don't understand what I mean, or try to explain it as some sort of physical process in the world, then I think they must be different from me, and that's why I've always believed that not all (or possibly even not most) other people have this thing.
I've believed this since school. I remember the thought coming to me when I was in an art lesson in the second year, during a discussion with a girl about the inconceivability of death (which strikes me now as no more inconceivable than sleep, but which seemed an absolute impossibility then for some reason).
I have no idea how this thing can influence the world, or how a brain uninfluenced by this thing could have had this thought or written these words. The whole thing is mad.
There are two pieces of evidence in favour that I can see. One is that very few people seem to understand what I mean. The other is that I can't describe it. When I read what I write about it, it seems like the proverbial blind man trying to describe the colour blue.
When I read what other people write about consciousness, they don't seem to mean the same thing as me.
I'd love to know what's going on. If there's an explanation in terms of matter I'd be amazed, but really really happy.
I'm not yanking your chain. I don't know any philosophy. This is what it feels like to be me.
But when I heard the term 'philosophical zombie' a couple of years ago, it gave me hope, because it sounds like the sort of thing that someone who felt like me would think of, so maybe I am not alone.
Although, if other watchers can talk to me like that, that implies that they can influence the brain as well as being influenced by it. Which makes them a proper part of the universe, rather than something watching.
Oh God, can a philosophical zombie conceive of the idea of a philosophical zombie?
I know I'm flailing here. There's not even any attempt to construct an argument, just some random phrases.
Shoot me down. I will enjoy thinking about what you say.
Now I've gone back over what I've written and re-read it, and there doesn't seem to be any evidence in it at all that the writer was conscious. It's just the flailing of a human brain trying to understand itself.
But I'm conscious. I am here! Watching! Now!
Newcomb's Paradox
Behold, mortals, I am the superintelligence Omega.
I can, by examining you for just a few short minutes, form such a good model of your personality that I can predict your actions.
I have, out of your sight, two boxes. One is opaque, one is transparent.
I shall place in the transparent box £1000.
If I believe that you will not take the transparent box, then I shall place £1,000,000 in the opaque box.
But if I believe that you will take the transparent box, then I shall place nothing inside the opaque box.
After we talk, I shall place before you the two locked boxes.
Once I have done this, I will not interfere. You may take either or both with you.
Once you have left my domain and the door has closed forever behind you, the locks on the boxes will open. The contents, exactly as I placed them before you made your choice, will be my gift to you.
So spoke Omega, the godlike alien who sometimes appears to destitute travellers in their hour of need.
Many people have taken his test, and it seems that Omega is always right. Those who take only the opaque box find themselves rich. Those who take both find themselves with their expenses paid, but not nearly as happy as you'd expect people who've just been given £1000 by a generous alien god to be.
You have now had your interview, and Omega is gone. Before you are two boxes.
Omega has promised that it doesn't matter what you do. What he put in the boxes ten minutes ago is fixed and he won't change it or use any sleight of hand or trickery.
You'd be a fool not to take the opaque box, which may or may not contain a fortune.
But do you take the transparent one, which definitely does contain £1000 that you can see, the alien's gift to you?
Without it, you will not be able to pay your fare home, and you will die on this trackless desert planet, friendless and alone.
Everyone agrees that the answer to this question is obvious.
The problem is that some people say that it's obvious that you should take one box, and some people say that it's obvious that you should take both.
I actually seem to think that both answers are obvious, which really does make me wonder what I mean by obvious.
I can, by examining you for just a few short minutes, form such a good model of your personality that I can predict your actions.
I have, out of your sight, two boxes. One is opaque, one is transparent.
I shall place in the transparent box £1000.
If I believe that you will not take the transparent box, then I shall place £1,000,000 in the opaque box.
But if I believe that you will take the transparent box, then I shall place nothing inside the opaque box.
After we talk, I shall place before you the two locked boxes.
Once I have done this, I will not interfere. You may take either or both with you.
Once you have left my domain and the door has closed forever behind you, the locks on the boxes will open. The contents, exactly as I placed them before you made your choice, will be my gift to you.
So spoke Omega, the godlike alien who sometimes appears to destitute travellers in their hour of need.
Many people have taken his test, and it seems that Omega is always right. Those who take only the opaque box find themselves rich. Those who take both find themselves with their expenses paid, but not nearly as happy as you'd expect people who've just been given £1000 by a generous alien god to be.
You have now had your interview, and Omega is gone. Before you are two boxes.
Omega has promised that it doesn't matter what you do. What he put in the boxes ten minutes ago is fixed and he won't change it or use any sleight of hand or trickery.
You'd be a fool not to take the opaque box, which may or may not contain a fortune.
But do you take the transparent one, which definitely does contain £1000 that you can see, the alien's gift to you?
Without it, you will not be able to pay your fare home, and you will die on this trackless desert planet, friendless and alone.
Everyone agrees that the answer to this question is obvious.
The problem is that some people say that it's obvious that you should take one box, and some people say that it's obvious that you should take both.
I actually seem to think that both answers are obvious, which really does make me wonder what I mean by obvious.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Cat and Mouse
Imagine what it must be like to be a cat, catching a mouse.
This is normal for cats. It's what they're designed for. I imagine that it must feel a bit like it does to a human to go to the fridge and get a pizza. Or to be a bit more ev. psych. about it, to pluck a fruit from a tree.
Perhaps it's a bit better than that, and has some of the joy that humans feel when hunting, or fishing, or doing sport.
Now imagine what it must be like to be a mouse, being caught by a cat.
Cats are the traditional predator. The thing that kills more mice than anything else. If you are a mouse, you are, although you do not know it, the descendant of an unbroken line of millions of ancestors all of whom managed to avoid being caught by cats long enough to breed. Probably by running very fast and hiding in deep holes.
Let's think about some things that killed our human ancestors. There aren't many. We are the top of all the food chains in which we're involved. The most successful killer there has ever been. The Death Ape. Even the animals that are potentially strong enough to kill and eat a lone human avoid us unless they're in a desperate situation because we're just too risky to attack. After all, even if they win nine times out of ten, that's not brilliant odds if you need to eat more than once or twice a lifetime.
Two of the very few animals that can be dangerous to humans are spiders and snakes, because of their poison. Very occasionally, an ancestral human being might have been killed by spider or snake venom. I suppose, very very occasionally, someone might have managed to get themselves killed by bees or wasps.
Probably as a result, most human beings find spiders and snakes loathsome, and many of us have a full blown phobia. Which is to say, irrational mind-destroying terror at the very sight. The buzzing of bees and wasps is a little disconcerting for most people too.
It has been pointed out that children in New York develop full blown spider and snake phobias even though the only real danger to New York children is the car.
I think that we can imagine with some degree of confidence that all mice have a full blown phobia of cats. In fact it's probably much worse than any human phobia can be.
You can keep mice out of a room by putting a picture of a cat in it.
So, anyway, if you're a mouse, being caught by a cat is almost certainly worse than the worst nightmare a human being can experience. The cat is a mythical demon out of nightmare. Except that it's not mythical.
Remember room 101? Where Winston, who has somehow managed to acquire a phobia of rats, has his head locked in a rat cage, where they can eat his eyes and cheeks and tongue.
The worst perversions of the Holy Inquisition probably inspired nothing like the terror felt by a mouse being eaten by a cat.
And let us not even think too hard about the cats' habit of 'playing' with their food. Christ knows what this is about. Having got the poor thing where they want it, instead of just eating it, they then torture it to death over a period of many minutes, even though this sometimes allows it to escape uneaten.
Presumably to the cat, this feels a bit like adding pepper to its pizza. Normal, natural, unremarkable.
To the mouse?
And yet, and this is my point, and why I have dwelt so on the magnitude of the horror, these are two consciousnesses experiencing exactly the same physical events.
Some people like mountains, and some people like lakes, and which you like is a matter of taste.
De gustibus non est disputandem.
There is no accounting for taste.
Chacun a son gout.
Every human culture has a phrase for this. It's one of the oldest truths that we know about ourselves. Different people have different reactions to the same things.
I've never really thought about it before. Is the colour blue the same for me as it is for you? What would that even mean?
-------------------------------------------------------------
This blog is part of the internet. Things on the internet need funny pictures of cats. Here is one:
By my arguments above, this should be massively more unlikely than a human being standing naked in front of a grizzly bear smearing herself in honey and threatening its cubs. Nevertheless, pictures on the internet do not lie. I conclude that my arguments are wrong.
No mice were harmed in the making of this blogpost. The pictures were stolen, without permission, from:
http://www.catspictures.net/2009/01/cat-and-mouse-pictures.html
This is normal for cats. It's what they're designed for. I imagine that it must feel a bit like it does to a human to go to the fridge and get a pizza. Or to be a bit more ev. psych. about it, to pluck a fruit from a tree.
Perhaps it's a bit better than that, and has some of the joy that humans feel when hunting, or fishing, or doing sport.
Now imagine what it must be like to be a mouse, being caught by a cat.
Cats are the traditional predator. The thing that kills more mice than anything else. If you are a mouse, you are, although you do not know it, the descendant of an unbroken line of millions of ancestors all of whom managed to avoid being caught by cats long enough to breed. Probably by running very fast and hiding in deep holes.
Let's think about some things that killed our human ancestors. There aren't many. We are the top of all the food chains in which we're involved. The most successful killer there has ever been. The Death Ape. Even the animals that are potentially strong enough to kill and eat a lone human avoid us unless they're in a desperate situation because we're just too risky to attack. After all, even if they win nine times out of ten, that's not brilliant odds if you need to eat more than once or twice a lifetime.
Two of the very few animals that can be dangerous to humans are spiders and snakes, because of their poison. Very occasionally, an ancestral human being might have been killed by spider or snake venom. I suppose, very very occasionally, someone might have managed to get themselves killed by bees or wasps.
Probably as a result, most human beings find spiders and snakes loathsome, and many of us have a full blown phobia. Which is to say, irrational mind-destroying terror at the very sight. The buzzing of bees and wasps is a little disconcerting for most people too.
It has been pointed out that children in New York develop full blown spider and snake phobias even though the only real danger to New York children is the car.
I think that we can imagine with some degree of confidence that all mice have a full blown phobia of cats. In fact it's probably much worse than any human phobia can be.
You can keep mice out of a room by putting a picture of a cat in it.
So, anyway, if you're a mouse, being caught by a cat is almost certainly worse than the worst nightmare a human being can experience. The cat is a mythical demon out of nightmare. Except that it's not mythical.
Remember room 101? Where Winston, who has somehow managed to acquire a phobia of rats, has his head locked in a rat cage, where they can eat his eyes and cheeks and tongue.
The worst perversions of the Holy Inquisition probably inspired nothing like the terror felt by a mouse being eaten by a cat.
And let us not even think too hard about the cats' habit of 'playing' with their food. Christ knows what this is about. Having got the poor thing where they want it, instead of just eating it, they then torture it to death over a period of many minutes, even though this sometimes allows it to escape uneaten.
Presumably to the cat, this feels a bit like adding pepper to its pizza. Normal, natural, unremarkable.
To the mouse?
And yet, and this is my point, and why I have dwelt so on the magnitude of the horror, these are two consciousnesses experiencing exactly the same physical events.
Some people like mountains, and some people like lakes, and which you like is a matter of taste.
De gustibus non est disputandem.
There is no accounting for taste.
Chacun a son gout.
Every human culture has a phrase for this. It's one of the oldest truths that we know about ourselves. Different people have different reactions to the same things.
I've never really thought about it before. Is the colour blue the same for me as it is for you? What would that even mean?
-------------------------------------------------------------
This blog is part of the internet. Things on the internet need funny pictures of cats. Here is one:
By my arguments above, this should be massively more unlikely than a human being standing naked in front of a grizzly bear smearing herself in honey and threatening its cubs. Nevertheless, pictures on the internet do not lie. I conclude that my arguments are wrong.
No mice were harmed in the making of this blogpost. The pictures were stolen, without permission, from:
http://www.catspictures.net/2009/01/cat-and-mouse-pictures.html
Monday, June 14, 2010
Mental Images
Can you imagine a tiger? (Look at it from the side rather than from in front)
Yes/No
If so, do it.
Do you see a mental image?
Yes/No
Does it have stripes?
Yes/No
Now, count the stripes.
How many are there?
Some people can count them. I can't. Some people can't see the tiger at all.
I can't even tell if I'm in the stripe-counting category or not. I can imagine tigers with 20 stripes. And I can count the stripes on those. But my initial tiger had stripes which I couldn't count. What the hell do I mean by 'mental image'? I can't imagine a physical image which has stripes that I can't count!!!
On the other hand, if I imagine a zebra crossing, that's got five stripes. But I can't tell you whether that's the real answer, or even if different zebra crossings have different numbers.
Apparently there was once a great philosophical debate about whether 'imagination' was just an over-extended metaphor. Some philosophers claimed that people couldn't see mental images, just that they had grown so attached to the idea as a metaphor for what actually happens that they couldn't let it go.
Other philosophers thought the first lot of philosophers were lunatics, or just pretending in order to be provocative.
The debate was settled when Francis Galton found out that it worked differently for different people.
I don't actually know whether that's true or not. I just read it on the internet at random. But the very idea that it might be true is blowing my mind. This is much more profound than the child's question 'Is the blue that you see the same as the blue that I see, or do we call different sensations by the same name?'.
To suddenly conceive, at the age of forty, that peoples' consciousnesses could be that different is really freaking me out.
I've never had the slightest trouble imagining that everyone except me is a 'philosophical zombie'. And, since there's no way to tell, I've an open mind on the idea that only some of us are conscious, and the rest are zombies.
But this is weird. It turns out that some of you are aliens!
Hmm, thinking about it, I just used the word 'imagining' for something I have no image of.
Panicking now. If you're reading this post, could you leave a comment with your answers to the tiger-questions?
And actually, on the zombie question, if you're reading this post and you're not conscious at all, could you leave a comment to that effect?
Yes/No
If so, do it.
Do you see a mental image?
Yes/No
Does it have stripes?
Yes/No
Now, count the stripes.
How many are there?
Some people can count them. I can't. Some people can't see the tiger at all.
I can't even tell if I'm in the stripe-counting category or not. I can imagine tigers with 20 stripes. And I can count the stripes on those. But my initial tiger had stripes which I couldn't count. What the hell do I mean by 'mental image'? I can't imagine a physical image which has stripes that I can't count!!!
On the other hand, if I imagine a zebra crossing, that's got five stripes. But I can't tell you whether that's the real answer, or even if different zebra crossings have different numbers.
Apparently there was once a great philosophical debate about whether 'imagination' was just an over-extended metaphor. Some philosophers claimed that people couldn't see mental images, just that they had grown so attached to the idea as a metaphor for what actually happens that they couldn't let it go.
Other philosophers thought the first lot of philosophers were lunatics, or just pretending in order to be provocative.
The debate was settled when Francis Galton found out that it worked differently for different people.
I don't actually know whether that's true or not. I just read it on the internet at random. But the very idea that it might be true is blowing my mind. This is much more profound than the child's question 'Is the blue that you see the same as the blue that I see, or do we call different sensations by the same name?'.
To suddenly conceive, at the age of forty, that peoples' consciousnesses could be that different is really freaking me out.
I've never had the slightest trouble imagining that everyone except me is a 'philosophical zombie'. And, since there's no way to tell, I've an open mind on the idea that only some of us are conscious, and the rest are zombies.
But this is weird. It turns out that some of you are aliens!
Hmm, thinking about it, I just used the word 'imagining' for something I have no image of.
Panicking now. If you're reading this post, could you leave a comment with your answers to the tiger-questions?
And actually, on the zombie question, if you're reading this post and you're not conscious at all, could you leave a comment to that effect?
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
The other day, someone wanting to make a point about a particular cognitive bias posted a link to this:
There is something about the phrase "Harry Potter Fan Fiction" that strikes terror into the heart. I didn't like the actual books much, even after making allowances for the fact that they're for children.
And yet... It is a work of genius.
The first book I have ever managed to read cover to cover on a computer screen.
I don't know how much of the real thing you'd need to have read to understand it. Not much, certainly. Probably the first half of the first book would do.
There is something about the phrase "Harry Potter Fan Fiction" that strikes terror into the heart. I didn't like the actual books much, even after making allowances for the fact that they're for children.
And yet... It is a work of genius.
The first book I have ever managed to read cover to cover on a computer screen.
I don't know how much of the real thing you'd need to have read to understand it. Not much, certainly. Probably the first half of the first book would do.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Fairness
There is a lot of talk, from time to time, about the fairness of various salaries.
Imagine what you'd like the distribution of wealth to be:
Now imagine that you've managed to elect a government which can enforce this distribution.
Now suppose that Kevin Pietersen is playing in a cricket match, and charges £1 to watch it.
Suppose 100 000 people turn up.
Everyone is happier as a result.
KP is £100 000 richer, and has presumably enjoyed his cricket match.
Those watching have had a nice day out. They chose to pay £1, and would presumably choose to do it again. They are unlikely to miss their £1.
So, since everyone is happier, how can this new distribution be less fair than the original?
This argument is known as the Wilt Chamberlain Argument, after a famous baseball player.
I'm not sure what it shows.
Things it might show are:
There is no optimal distribution of wealth, because given any distribution where 100 000 people are able to pay £1 to watch a day's cricket, we can think of a better one.
The optimal distribution of wealth is where KP has all the money, and no one else can afford £1 to watch him play.
I'm stuck.
Imagine what you'd like the distribution of wealth to be:
Now imagine that you've managed to elect a government which can enforce this distribution.
Now suppose that Kevin Pietersen is playing in a cricket match, and charges £1 to watch it.
Suppose 100 000 people turn up.
Everyone is happier as a result.
KP is £100 000 richer, and has presumably enjoyed his cricket match.
Those watching have had a nice day out. They chose to pay £1, and would presumably choose to do it again. They are unlikely to miss their £1.
So, since everyone is happier, how can this new distribution be less fair than the original?
This argument is known as the Wilt Chamberlain Argument, after a famous baseball player.
I'm not sure what it shows.
Things it might show are:
There is no optimal distribution of wealth, because given any distribution where 100 000 people are able to pay £1 to watch a day's cricket, we can think of a better one.
The optimal distribution of wealth is where KP has all the money, and no one else can afford £1 to watch him play.
I'm stuck.
The Mighty Rumsfeld
The Unknown
What is wrong with this, exactly? It strikes me as profound.
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
What is wrong with this, exactly? It strikes me as profound.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Cricket Kata
I'm trying to learn to play cricket. It's a very unnatural game, which is both quite dangerous, and quite difficult to practise.
The usual method is called a net, which involves say 6 people and a large, specially constructed pitch enclosed in strong netting.
If you do an hour's net, everyone gets an hour's bowling, but only ten minutes batting, and since most of the people there won't be bowlers, the batting is most unrealistic with a motley selection of full tosses and wides to play at. It's great for bowling, but doesn't seem to help as much for batting. In fact it teaches you some bad reflexes.
Catching practice is a separate thing, usually done with a proper cricket ball, which you either have to do at such low speeds that it's unrealistic, or you do at full speed by hitting the ball around with a bat or using a slip cradle, which is almost guaranteed to hurt someone, and seems mainly to teach the lesson that you don't want to get your hands anywhere near a fast-moving cricket ball.
Particularly, taking fifty or sixty catches leaves the hands bruised and damaged and makes catching painful and aversive. In a game you'd be lucky to get to take two catches.
There seems to be no way at all to practise running between the wickets.
Once upon a time I was quite good at Judo, a martial art. Judo, being a sanitized version of the extremely lethal Ju-Jitsu, can be practised 'full contact', without anyone getting hurt, so you just go at it like loonies until you get the hang of it.
Status in Judo is determined by the colour of your belt. You get a better colour belt if you can consistently win fights against people of your own colour. Eventually you get the coveted black belt, which means that you're good enough to be trusted to teach others.
I also tried, but was never very good at, Shotokan Karate, which, not being designed as a sport, can't be practised 'for real', since everyone would end up dead.
The solution that the Shotokan people have is not to practise fighting at all. Instead they have a set of ritualized dances, the Kata.
Kata are sequences of fighting moves that you have to learn to reproduce gracefully and in order. They get more complex as you get better.
In Shotokan Karate, the colour of your belt is to do with how many of the kata you can do, and how good you are at them. At the higher levels you also spar, but in a very ritualized and safe way, so that nobody dies.
The thing is, the high level Shotokan people are actually really good at fighting. In cross-disciplinary bouts they are quite competitive with adepts of other martial arts which involve a lot more actual practice fighting, and so a lot more injuries and pain.
The Shotokan people attribute this to a thing they call 'focus'. Focus is, apparently, a supernatural ability to react quickly and correctly that comes from learning all these (rather silly seeming) kata.
I've no idea whether this really works. Any studies anyone? But the Shotokan people must learn their fighting abilities somehow.
And it occurs to me that if this does work, then it would be a very good way to learn cricket.
So tonight I was trying to come up with batting kata.
My first try was to hold the ball under my chin, then drop it onto the ground and then hit it at the wall in the back garden. This got old quite quickly, although I did get better at it.
My second try was to put an old cricket ball in a pair of ladies stockings, and hang it from a tree branch so that it could swing freely and was a couple of inches off the ground at rest. You hit it with the bat, and then try to hit it again, returning always to stance, and then playing a correct drive every time.
The ball naturally swings around and bounces on the ground, so the point is to move from stance, into the line of the ball, and then play a correct drive, hitting the ball downwards just on the half volley.
At first, I found this quite difficult. The trick seems to be to get the eyes level and move both head and front foot simultaneously along the line of approach of the ball. It also makes it very obvious why the bat should be straight, since the bounce is much less predictable than the line.
If the ball goes very wide, then you can try to cut it instead. This requires watching the ball very carefully to see where it's going to bounce, and then hitting it square and always downwards. It never seemed to get into a good position to pull, which is a shame, because that's my favourite shot.
At one point some children turned up and wanted to try. I explained what to do, but none of them could hit the ball more than twice in a row.
After a couple of hours of this, I had got to the point where I could strike the ball reliably and hard one hundred times on the trot. I probably hit the ball something like 500 times in the two hours, which probably adds up to more times than I've hit it in our regular nets all season.
Of course, it's moving much more slowly than it would be when bowled. But if the Shotokan analogy holds, then learning to do it slowly should help when trying to do it at full speed.
Try three was the same set up, but trying to aim the ball. An on drive makes it loop away and come in from the other direction, so that you can off drive it. And vice versa, so that you can get in an alternating rhythm. After a bit, I tried hitting it towards the tree, in patterns like left of the trunk, right of the trunk, left, right .... You have to do this right, since if you hit it hard at the trunk it bounces nastily back at you. Makes you focus!
For fielding kata, we've been trying to learn to catch a real tennis ball, which is heavy like a cricket ball, but soft covered like a tennis ball, so that it doesn't hurt the hands. A few sessions of this seems to have improved my lamentable catching out of all recognition. I've taken three out of five in games this season, whereas previously my record in a season was two out of God knows how many.
Weirdly, I've taken the three difficult catches. The two I dropped were dollies that I had to take in front of me and that a schoolgirl should have had no trouble with.
We've worked out two drills for catching so far, one is to hit the ball way high over a group of people, who have to call for the catch and then get it. I can do this quite reliably now with the hands up, but I can't get the hang of it hands down. I don't know why.
The second is to all line up close to the guy with the racket and take slip catches, with the racket guy hitting it softly to each person in turn. This works a treat, and isn't at all scary.
Me and Joe came up with another one last week by accident. There were just two of us, and we were throwing a real cricket ball gently to each other. Then we tried throwing the ball hard at the ground between us, and catching it off the bounce, which is quite a bit more difficult since the bounce is random.
The revelation was when we decided to either throw it straight or bounce it at random. At first this was difficult, and we were using a real cricket ball, so it was actually quite dangerous.
But we simultaneously realised that the trick was to watch the ball carefully out of the other person's hand to see where it was going before it bounced, and we realised that previously, although we thought that we'd been watching it all the time, we hadn't been reacting until it had already bounced.
And suddenly I realised what batting coaches mean when they talk about 'watching the ball out of the bowler's hand', rather than 'picking it up off the pitch'. This had always seemed obvious before, but it's a completely different feeling when you're forced to do it because of this exercise, and actually feeling it happen and make a huge difference had a 'moment of enlightenment' feeling about it.
The usual method is called a net, which involves say 6 people and a large, specially constructed pitch enclosed in strong netting.
If you do an hour's net, everyone gets an hour's bowling, but only ten minutes batting, and since most of the people there won't be bowlers, the batting is most unrealistic with a motley selection of full tosses and wides to play at. It's great for bowling, but doesn't seem to help as much for batting. In fact it teaches you some bad reflexes.
Catching practice is a separate thing, usually done with a proper cricket ball, which you either have to do at such low speeds that it's unrealistic, or you do at full speed by hitting the ball around with a bat or using a slip cradle, which is almost guaranteed to hurt someone, and seems mainly to teach the lesson that you don't want to get your hands anywhere near a fast-moving cricket ball.
Particularly, taking fifty or sixty catches leaves the hands bruised and damaged and makes catching painful and aversive. In a game you'd be lucky to get to take two catches.
There seems to be no way at all to practise running between the wickets.
Once upon a time I was quite good at Judo, a martial art. Judo, being a sanitized version of the extremely lethal Ju-Jitsu, can be practised 'full contact', without anyone getting hurt, so you just go at it like loonies until you get the hang of it.
Status in Judo is determined by the colour of your belt. You get a better colour belt if you can consistently win fights against people of your own colour. Eventually you get the coveted black belt, which means that you're good enough to be trusted to teach others.
I also tried, but was never very good at, Shotokan Karate, which, not being designed as a sport, can't be practised 'for real', since everyone would end up dead.
The solution that the Shotokan people have is not to practise fighting at all. Instead they have a set of ritualized dances, the Kata.
Kata are sequences of fighting moves that you have to learn to reproduce gracefully and in order. They get more complex as you get better.
In Shotokan Karate, the colour of your belt is to do with how many of the kata you can do, and how good you are at them. At the higher levels you also spar, but in a very ritualized and safe way, so that nobody dies.
The thing is, the high level Shotokan people are actually really good at fighting. In cross-disciplinary bouts they are quite competitive with adepts of other martial arts which involve a lot more actual practice fighting, and so a lot more injuries and pain.
The Shotokan people attribute this to a thing they call 'focus'. Focus is, apparently, a supernatural ability to react quickly and correctly that comes from learning all these (rather silly seeming) kata.
I've no idea whether this really works. Any studies anyone? But the Shotokan people must learn their fighting abilities somehow.
And it occurs to me that if this does work, then it would be a very good way to learn cricket.
So tonight I was trying to come up with batting kata.
My first try was to hold the ball under my chin, then drop it onto the ground and then hit it at the wall in the back garden. This got old quite quickly, although I did get better at it.
My second try was to put an old cricket ball in a pair of ladies stockings, and hang it from a tree branch so that it could swing freely and was a couple of inches off the ground at rest. You hit it with the bat, and then try to hit it again, returning always to stance, and then playing a correct drive every time.
The ball naturally swings around and bounces on the ground, so the point is to move from stance, into the line of the ball, and then play a correct drive, hitting the ball downwards just on the half volley.
At first, I found this quite difficult. The trick seems to be to get the eyes level and move both head and front foot simultaneously along the line of approach of the ball. It also makes it very obvious why the bat should be straight, since the bounce is much less predictable than the line.
If the ball goes very wide, then you can try to cut it instead. This requires watching the ball very carefully to see where it's going to bounce, and then hitting it square and always downwards. It never seemed to get into a good position to pull, which is a shame, because that's my favourite shot.
At one point some children turned up and wanted to try. I explained what to do, but none of them could hit the ball more than twice in a row.
After a couple of hours of this, I had got to the point where I could strike the ball reliably and hard one hundred times on the trot. I probably hit the ball something like 500 times in the two hours, which probably adds up to more times than I've hit it in our regular nets all season.
Of course, it's moving much more slowly than it would be when bowled. But if the Shotokan analogy holds, then learning to do it slowly should help when trying to do it at full speed.
Try three was the same set up, but trying to aim the ball. An on drive makes it loop away and come in from the other direction, so that you can off drive it. And vice versa, so that you can get in an alternating rhythm. After a bit, I tried hitting it towards the tree, in patterns like left of the trunk, right of the trunk, left, right .... You have to do this right, since if you hit it hard at the trunk it bounces nastily back at you. Makes you focus!
For fielding kata, we've been trying to learn to catch a real tennis ball, which is heavy like a cricket ball, but soft covered like a tennis ball, so that it doesn't hurt the hands. A few sessions of this seems to have improved my lamentable catching out of all recognition. I've taken three out of five in games this season, whereas previously my record in a season was two out of God knows how many.
Weirdly, I've taken the three difficult catches. The two I dropped were dollies that I had to take in front of me and that a schoolgirl should have had no trouble with.
We've worked out two drills for catching so far, one is to hit the ball way high over a group of people, who have to call for the catch and then get it. I can do this quite reliably now with the hands up, but I can't get the hang of it hands down. I don't know why.
The second is to all line up close to the guy with the racket and take slip catches, with the racket guy hitting it softly to each person in turn. This works a treat, and isn't at all scary.
Me and Joe came up with another one last week by accident. There were just two of us, and we were throwing a real cricket ball gently to each other. Then we tried throwing the ball hard at the ground between us, and catching it off the bounce, which is quite a bit more difficult since the bounce is random.
The revelation was when we decided to either throw it straight or bounce it at random. At first this was difficult, and we were using a real cricket ball, so it was actually quite dangerous.
But we simultaneously realised that the trick was to watch the ball carefully out of the other person's hand to see where it was going before it bounced, and we realised that previously, although we thought that we'd been watching it all the time, we hadn't been reacting until it had already bounced.
And suddenly I realised what batting coaches mean when they talk about 'watching the ball out of the bowler's hand', rather than 'picking it up off the pitch'. This had always seemed obvious before, but it's a completely different feeling when you're forced to do it because of this exercise, and actually feeling it happen and make a huge difference had a 'moment of enlightenment' feeling about it.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Omnibenevolence
From the inspired 'Dinosaur Comics', an argument:
http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1604
http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1604
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Vincere (film)
Apparently, famous Italian git Benito Mussolini was also a git to his mistress. Three hours well spent.
It appears that the film doesn't make as strong a case for this as it might have done (see this article in the Times: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article411675.ece ).
But perhaps you're already supposed to know the story before you see the film. I imagine most Italians do.
It appears that the film doesn't make as strong a case for this as it might have done (see this article in the Times: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article411675.ece ).
But perhaps you're already supposed to know the story before you see the film. I imagine most Italians do.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Revanche (film)
Bleak, stunning, excellent. Not one for a first date.
You'll need an hour or so after to walk around staring sadly into the distance, smoking.
You'll need an hour or so after to walk around staring sadly into the distance, smoking.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
I wish I was Gay
Imagine what the world would be like if women's minds really were the same as men's.
Men have an absolutely omnivorous attitude to sex. A friend of mine the other day said, without trying to be provocative, offensive, or shocking, just in casual conversation: "I slept with a lot of biffas before I realised that pretty girls need sex too."
('Biffa' is British slang for an unattractive woman.)
This is the sort of comment that has women spitting feathers. It just doesn't make sense to them. Why would anyone act like that? Men are pigs.
Of course, any male not only instantly recognises the inner truth of the statement, but also catches the subtext, which is that the reason that the biffas are no longer being attended to is that the speaker has a lovely girlfriend who is likely to leave him if she suspects infidelity.
There is nothing as attractive as a woman you haven't slept with recently.
I'd imagine that most men's vision of paradise would be a place where they could have sex as many times a day as possible, with a different beautiful woman each time. If a balance needed to be struck between quantity and quality, I'm pretty sure that balance wouldn't be one very beautiful woman. The attitude of the women towards the man would not be a big consideration, although orgasms would be nice. There might also be cricket.
Whereas I'd imagine that most women's paradise would be a place where they could have sex as often as they wanted with one particular supremely attractive man who loved them. And if a compromise had to be struck, they'd take one man who loved them and one gorgeous lover who didn't particularly. And orgasms would be reserved for the second one. Cricket would be illegal.
Very different aims.
So if women's minds were the same as men's, the world would be one big clusterfuck. In warm countries every available surface would be covered in strangers fucking. In cold ones there'd be lots of warm places that could be rented by the hour.
After you'd shagged yourselves silly, you could go out and get drunk and talk about cricket. And have proper arguments where you argue for the fun of it without anyone taking it as a personal insult. No one would ever want to have a long complicated minefield of a conversation about feelings. Or shoes.
According to the excellent 'Tales of the City' novels of Armistead Maupin, this is a fair description of San Francisco in the days of gay liberation, but before AIDS put a stop to free love.
If you're a straight male, take a moment to imagine what it must be like to be gay. All you have to do is to imagine that everyone you know is a woman, and they all want to sleep with you.
Why would anyone not choose to be gay if they could?
It makes me worried for the sort of conservatives (always religious) who think there's some sort of choice involved in sexual orientation. That it's a temptation that can be resisted.
If it was any sort of temptation I wouldn't be resisting it for a minute.
But imagine that you were gay, and you were as attracted to all your friends as you now are to all your female friends. So you were surrounded by an infinite sea of willing partners.
But you had a magic book that told you that it was wrong to fuck boys, and that the little baby Jesus who loves you and watches everything you do and misses nothing would set fire to you if you did. And the fire would never go out and burn for all eternity. Because he loves you.
I imagine that your life might be a bit frustrating.
You might absolutely hate anyone who somehow hadn't got the message about the magic book, mightn't you? You might worry for their souls. You might think them weak and corrupt. You might want their activities illegal. You might want their temptations gone so that you wouldn't have to face up to denying yourself every day.
Men have an absolutely omnivorous attitude to sex. A friend of mine the other day said, without trying to be provocative, offensive, or shocking, just in casual conversation: "I slept with a lot of biffas before I realised that pretty girls need sex too."
('Biffa' is British slang for an unattractive woman.)
This is the sort of comment that has women spitting feathers. It just doesn't make sense to them. Why would anyone act like that? Men are pigs.
Of course, any male not only instantly recognises the inner truth of the statement, but also catches the subtext, which is that the reason that the biffas are no longer being attended to is that the speaker has a lovely girlfriend who is likely to leave him if she suspects infidelity.
There is nothing as attractive as a woman you haven't slept with recently.
I'd imagine that most men's vision of paradise would be a place where they could have sex as many times a day as possible, with a different beautiful woman each time. If a balance needed to be struck between quantity and quality, I'm pretty sure that balance wouldn't be one very beautiful woman. The attitude of the women towards the man would not be a big consideration, although orgasms would be nice. There might also be cricket.
Whereas I'd imagine that most women's paradise would be a place where they could have sex as often as they wanted with one particular supremely attractive man who loved them. And if a compromise had to be struck, they'd take one man who loved them and one gorgeous lover who didn't particularly. And orgasms would be reserved for the second one. Cricket would be illegal.
Very different aims.
So if women's minds were the same as men's, the world would be one big clusterfuck. In warm countries every available surface would be covered in strangers fucking. In cold ones there'd be lots of warm places that could be rented by the hour.
After you'd shagged yourselves silly, you could go out and get drunk and talk about cricket. And have proper arguments where you argue for the fun of it without anyone taking it as a personal insult. No one would ever want to have a long complicated minefield of a conversation about feelings. Or shoes.
According to the excellent 'Tales of the City' novels of Armistead Maupin, this is a fair description of San Francisco in the days of gay liberation, but before AIDS put a stop to free love.
If you're a straight male, take a moment to imagine what it must be like to be gay. All you have to do is to imagine that everyone you know is a woman, and they all want to sleep with you.
Why would anyone not choose to be gay if they could?
It makes me worried for the sort of conservatives (always religious) who think there's some sort of choice involved in sexual orientation. That it's a temptation that can be resisted.
If it was any sort of temptation I wouldn't be resisting it for a minute.
But imagine that you were gay, and you were as attracted to all your friends as you now are to all your female friends. So you were surrounded by an infinite sea of willing partners.
But you had a magic book that told you that it was wrong to fuck boys, and that the little baby Jesus who loves you and watches everything you do and misses nothing would set fire to you if you did. And the fire would never go out and burn for all eternity. Because he loves you.
I imagine that your life might be a bit frustrating.
You might absolutely hate anyone who somehow hadn't got the message about the magic book, mightn't you? You might worry for their souls. You might think them weak and corrupt. You might want their activities illegal. You might want their temptations gone so that you wouldn't have to face up to denying yourself every day.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Please, please, please let this be true
http://www.etelligent.uk.com/etelligent/mp-getEmail.asp?CID=3130933&SEID=755&CC=LIBDEMSFEDERAL
Civil Liberties
* Scrap the ID card scheme, the National Identity register, the next generation of biometric passports and the ContactPoint Database.
* Outlaw the finger-printing of children at school without parental permission.
* Extend the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency.
* Adopt the Scottish approach to stopping retention of innocent people’s DNA on the DNA database.
* Defend trial by jury.
* Restore rights to non-violent protest.
* A review of libel laws to protect freedom of speech.
* Safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation.
* Further regulation of CCTV.
* Ending of storage of internet and email records without good reason.
* A new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences.
* End the detention of children for immigration purposes.
I just find this extraordinary. Somehow over the last fifteen years I've got the impression that the business of government is to spy, snoop, deceive, thieve, and oppress.
Maybe that's not true.
Civil Liberties
* Scrap the ID card scheme, the National Identity register, the next generation of biometric passports and the ContactPoint Database.
* Outlaw the finger-printing of children at school without parental permission.
* Extend the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency.
* Adopt the Scottish approach to stopping retention of innocent people’s DNA on the DNA database.
* Defend trial by jury.
* Restore rights to non-violent protest.
* A review of libel laws to protect freedom of speech.
* Safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation.
* Further regulation of CCTV.
* Ending of storage of internet and email records without good reason.
* A new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences.
* End the detention of children for immigration purposes.
I just find this extraordinary. Somehow over the last fifteen years I've got the impression that the business of government is to spy, snoop, deceive, thieve, and oppress.
Maybe that's not true.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Four Lions (film)
I laughed so much during this film that I literally thought I was having some sort of heart attack. The rest of the audience seemed similarly amused. It's cruel, tragic, sympathetic, racist and Islamophobic, and all the better for all those things.
You kind of root for the heroes. Even though they're all morons. A bit like Inspector Clouseau, they live in a world where not everyone is an idiot, but they somehow make it through.
I wonder if it will be funny in ten years time? Slapstick and political humour date very quickly.
You kind of root for the heroes. Even though they're all morons. A bit like Inspector Clouseau, they live in a world where not everyone is an idiot, but they somehow make it through.
I wonder if it will be funny in ten years time? Slapstick and political humour date very quickly.
Oedipus Complex
Pretty much nicked from Steven Pinker's 'How the Mind Works'. Just trying to understand what he said by explaining it to myself:
One of the most important and influential memes of the twentieth century was Freud's idea of the Oedipal Complex.
This boils down to thinking that a lot of what we do as adults is down to the desire of a boy to fuck his mother, which is then repressed, leading to all sorts of weirdness.
Repression is a technical term meaning "If you deny you're feeling this, then that just proves you are. Nyahh, nyahh".
In the 'hydraulic theory of the mind', unreleased pressure can build up until it explodes. This theory is so deeply embedded in folk wisdom now that we use phrases like 'letting off steam', 'releasing the pressure', and 'throttling up to try to make Crewe by 16:53' almost without thinking.
One weird thing about this theory of the Oedipus Complex, that perhaps should have alerted people to difficulties, is that virtually all males find it ridiculous.
I trust that my mother will not be offended if I say that, although I can appreciate that she is a beautiful woman, and that in her thirties, when I was becoming a sexual being, she must have been hot indeed, I have never felt the slightest desire to knock her off.
Given my otherwise fairly omnivorous teenage lust, this is a strange datum that needs explaining all on its own.
The answer may be something called the Westermarck Effect. It's been suggested that people have an aversion to those they were reared with. Presumably the reason for this is somewhere in evolutionary biology.
If that's true, then it actually explains why Freud took his theory seriously.
Freud and his patients were wealthy Austrians. The custom of the time was for that class to have their children raised by wet-nurses and nannies. Without the childhood proximity to activate the Westermark effect, Freud and his patients would have found their own mothers as attractive as any other women.
One of the most important and influential memes of the twentieth century was Freud's idea of the Oedipal Complex.
This boils down to thinking that a lot of what we do as adults is down to the desire of a boy to fuck his mother, which is then repressed, leading to all sorts of weirdness.
Repression is a technical term meaning "If you deny you're feeling this, then that just proves you are. Nyahh, nyahh".
In the 'hydraulic theory of the mind', unreleased pressure can build up until it explodes. This theory is so deeply embedded in folk wisdom now that we use phrases like 'letting off steam', 'releasing the pressure', and 'throttling up to try to make Crewe by 16:53' almost without thinking.
One weird thing about this theory of the Oedipus Complex, that perhaps should have alerted people to difficulties, is that virtually all males find it ridiculous.
I trust that my mother will not be offended if I say that, although I can appreciate that she is a beautiful woman, and that in her thirties, when I was becoming a sexual being, she must have been hot indeed, I have never felt the slightest desire to knock her off.
Given my otherwise fairly omnivorous teenage lust, this is a strange datum that needs explaining all on its own.
The answer may be something called the Westermarck Effect. It's been suggested that people have an aversion to those they were reared with. Presumably the reason for this is somewhere in evolutionary biology.
If that's true, then it actually explains why Freud took his theory seriously.
Freud and his patients were wealthy Austrians. The custom of the time was for that class to have their children raised by wet-nurses and nannies. Without the childhood proximity to activate the Westermark effect, Freud and his patients would have found their own mothers as attractive as any other women.
Grammer
All human beings are obsessed with status. In England it's generally called class. Kate Fox has written extensively on the subject in her wonderful book, "Watching the English".
Status is defined differently in different places. Londoners are obsessed with money. It is polite in London to show a new visitor round your house, showing them every room. Nowhere else in England is this normal behaviour with a new visitor, and provincials find the ritual strangely embarrassing.
Houses in London are very expensive, and so house size is an honest signal of wealth there. One of the things a northerner notices in London is how poxy small the houses of wealthy Londoners are. The size of your house doesn't matter at all in Sheffield, where houses are cheap, and the size of your house mainly indicates how large a house you need, or even just how large a house you like.
People in Cambridge are interested in intelligence and learning. The subculture of the University has formal ranks, which were once marked by actual dress codes, remnants of which are still visible in the elaborate graduation ceremonies.
Academic status isn't what it used to be, and so these distinctions are dying out. Cambridge is a wealthy city these days, with an acute land shortage. I expect the London custom will make it here one day.
As a boy growing up in Sheffield, I remember that people seemed obsessed with accents. Wealthy and educated people spoke more like southerners.
People with the native accent of the place were thought less of, by everyone including themselves. My grandfather once tried to teach me how to speak the local dialect: 'Weerwatterrunsoerweirin(glottal stop)wicker' is a place. But my grandmother caught him at it, and they had a serious row, in their fury both lapsing into their stronger childhood accents.
But there was also a strong back-reaction. I remember phrases like 'doesn't he have a lovely voice', but also 'stuck-up cunt', 'talks like a fairy' and 'southern poof'.
It wasn't just accent, either. Whenever I go home I get caught out by the breakfast/dinner/tea of the North vs. breakfast/lunch/dinner of the South. Writing this just now I had trouble putting the six in order. Calling dinner lunch in the North is an horrific piece of pretension. Moi?
It all seemed to matter so much to people, even though I think that everyone would have agreed that the whole thing was silly, if they'd ever stopped to think about it.
If you don't believe me, or think Sheffielders are silly people, rather than people with a silly hobby, then consider: How much do you care about spelling, or correct grammar?
And lets not have any of this rubbish abowt cleer communicaytion. It's not very difficulte to reed misspelled wurds, as long as youre respekting the fonetics ov the language and its orthografy. And thats the only sort of missteaks that a native speeker is going to make. Aktually writing in this stile is very liberating. I now find. Try it! You will lern things you didn't know you allredy knew.
But it does make you think that the writer is an idiot. And actually, you're not thinking 'idiot'. You're thinking uneducated. And you're not really thinking 'uneducated', either. What you're thinking is 'Working-class parents'.
This is of course very hard on dyslexics, who have a brain deformity that fakes the symptoms of poor education. So little Elektra is going to write like her daddy worked down a pit, beheading turkeys or whatever.
'Correct' spelling is at least easy enough to define.
The whole idea of 'correct grammar' is very suspect. What sort of 'correct' is it that prescribes 'Jack and I went to the pictures' when almost every English speaker naturally says 'Me and Jack went'?
Me and Jack are so hard-wired into the structure of the language that even very educated people with very educated parents need to think about us when writing.
And one of the most comical mistakes you can make is to overcompensate and say 'Julie took Jack and I to the pictures'. People do this all the time. Other people sneer at them all the time. The crashing sound of self-betrayed pretension. You're copying what you've heard posher people say, but you haven't internalized the rule. Or you are posh, but you're also a bit dim.
Real grammar doesn't work like that. Foreign speakers make real grammar mistakes. Things like 'Will you take me to the pictures in your red big car?'.
No native speaker, however ill-educated, needs to be told that that's strange. It just is, for no reason that's ever taught at school. The feeling when you hear it is the same queasyness as you feel when trying to work out the 'Jack and I' vs 'Jack and me' thing. It's the grinding of brain-gears being misengaged.
This doesn't prevent English children wasting hours and hours and hours on stupidities like spelling tests. And their parents of all classes being horrified when they're not very good at them.
So what's the real point of spelling and grammar?
Well, it's like the Londoner's house tours, and the Sheffielder's accent neurosis. It's a status signal which is not explicitly recognised as anything so vulgar.
Why is it a good status signal? Because it's difficult to fake.
If you can't spell, you can't spell. If you don't know the artificial formal grammar of your language, you can't fake it. And even if you do know it, it takes practice to distort your speech and writing to fit the rules. In order to speak and write correctly you need an expensive education.
This explains the 'Jack and I' thing. It's not actually English grammar at all. It's just wrong from a linguist's point of view.
Once upon a time, scholars, who all spoke Latin as a foreign language that they had learned for professional reasons, wondered about the structure of English.
They knew that there are structures to languages, because Latin is a very different language to English, and in order to learn it, they had had to learn a lot of structural rules.
Of course the Romans didn't know anything about these rules. They just spoke their language. And almost certainly the structural rules that the Latin speaking scholars had learned must have failed to capture many details in the everyday speech of the Romans. But the rules were pretty good, if what you wanted to do was read the surviving Latin literature, and more importantly, communicate with other scholars in other countries, who knew the same rules.
So the scholars tried to make a formal system to capture how English was spoken. Of course they were guided by the rules they already knew. From that point of view, it's obvious why it has to be "Jack and I" rather than "Jack and me" in places where you'd say "I" rather than "me", and vice versa.
I wonder how the scholars explained to themselves that most English people got it wrong? Probably they told themselves that the people were not as clever as they were themselves.
So they ended up making up a set of rules to describe English, which actually describe a slightly Latinised version of English instead, and then blaming English speakers (including themselves) for not conforming to the rules.
So that's why we're taught to say "Jack and I". Remember how many times your mother, or your teacher, had to tell you this? Remember overcompensating, and using "Jack and I" when you should have been using object case? Maybe your mother or your teacher's knowledge stopped there and you always say "Jack and I", which is worse than the original mistake?
I was lucky. I learnt Latin. As a result I made the same mistake the scholars made. But that's the right mistake to make. It always feels a bit weird speaking like that, but I can think fast enough that if I'm concentrating, I can override "Me and Jack" in subject position, and say "Jack and I" instead.
Now, do you remember being corrected for saying 'red big car' when you meant 'big red car'? No? Somehow that rule is just there, and no native speaker ever gets it wrong, even though very few of us can say what the rule is.
What the Jack and I rule is, is a rule which is difficult to remember, left over from an analysis of English grammar made a long time ago by Latin-speaking scholars who were trying their best with bad tools, that can be taught, amongst lots of other difficult rules.
Once upon a time, scholars, who all spoke Latin as a foreign language that they had learned for professional reasons, wondered about the structure of English.
They knew that there are structures to languages, because Latin is a very different language to English, and in order to learn it, they had had to learn a lot of structural rules.
Of course the Romans didn't know anything about these rules. They just spoke their language. And almost certainly the structural rules that the Latin speaking scholars had learned must have failed to capture many details in the everyday speech of the Romans. But the rules were pretty good, if what you wanted to do was read the surviving Latin literature, and more importantly, communicate with other scholars in other countries, who knew the same rules.
So the scholars tried to make a formal system to capture how English was spoken. Of course they were guided by the rules they already knew. From that point of view, it's obvious why it has to be "Jack and I" rather than "Jack and me" in places where you'd say "I" rather than "me", and vice versa.
I wonder how the scholars explained to themselves that most English people got it wrong? Probably they told themselves that the people were not as clever as they were themselves.
So they ended up making up a set of rules to describe English, which actually describe a slightly Latinised version of English instead, and then blaming English speakers (including themselves) for not conforming to the rules.
So that's why we're taught to say "Jack and I". Remember how many times your mother, or your teacher, had to tell you this? Remember overcompensating, and using "Jack and I" when you should have been using object case? Maybe your mother or your teacher's knowledge stopped there and you always say "Jack and I", which is worse than the original mistake?
I was lucky. I learnt Latin. As a result I made the same mistake the scholars made. But that's the right mistake to make. It always feels a bit weird speaking like that, but I can think fast enough that if I'm concentrating, I can override "Me and Jack" in subject position, and say "Jack and I" instead.
Now, do you remember being corrected for saying 'red big car' when you meant 'big red car'? No? Somehow that rule is just there, and no native speaker ever gets it wrong, even though very few of us can say what the rule is.
What the Jack and I rule is, is a rule which is difficult to remember, left over from an analysis of English grammar made a long time ago by Latin-speaking scholars who were trying their best with bad tools, that can be taught, amongst lots of other difficult rules.
Similarly with the famous split infinitive. In Latin the infinitive is one word, so it can't be split. In English, "To boldly go where no man has gone before" is the natural thing to say. Boldly to go? To go boldly? Piss off.
Another example is the canard about not ending a sentence with a preposition. As Churchill pointed out, the sort of rule up with which one refuses to put.
The fact that no native English speaker can ever internalize these rules in the effortless way that we know that red big cars don't exist, and never make that mistake, is a sign that the rules don't fit with how language works in the brain.
I also present for your consideration your/you're, it's/its, there/their/they're. If you've ever got one of these wrong, pity the poor French, with their complicated conjugation system. Easy for a foreign speaker to learn, quite hard for the Frogs, who are trying to learn strange rules to spell words that they thought were all the same when they were babies puzzling out how to hard-wire their brains to make sense of the funny sounds their parents made.
And if you still think there's some kind of rationality to it, why is 'It is I' correct English, when 'C'est je' is so utterly wrong in French? The Academie prides itself on its rationality and purity.
Or explain the mistake in the following sentence 'The doctor's practise was insufficiently diligent, so his practise shrank'. God forgive me, I notice that sort of thing from time to time. I doubt one Englishman in one hundred knows the rule that explains it. But nobody would ever give advise.
So what's the rational English speaker to do?
How can we give our language its natural grammar and a phonetic spelling system so that no-one ever needs to spend precious childhood hours memorizing and internalizing this rubbish?
Let's consider:
You could defect unilaterally. Just write everything as you'd say it without thinking, and spell everything tricky as it sounds.
No more professional jobs for you. Your CV is straight in the bin before anyone's even got to the section where you describe your linguistics research.
You could decide not to care. You could spell well yourself, so that you're not communicating 'not fit to be left alone with sharp objects' in every e-mail. But you could deliberately ignore errors as far as possible in other people's writing and speech.
You'd miss vital clues about intelligence, diligence, and background. You'd spend far too long talking to people before you decided that it wasn't worth the bother.
You'd give random offence to people from different backgrounds by making comments that are acceptable in your own circle but not in theirs. Consider 'bloody immigrants' against 'chav-mobile'. Both perfectly acceptable in the circles in which they're acceptable. Both exceedingly offensive in the wrong place.
If you were in a position to hand out jobs, you'd interview all the wrong people. You'd waste hours coming to conclusions that you could have come to very quickly. If you got your decisions right at all.
So it would be difficult as an individual, and most unlikely to catch on.
What about as a society?
We could abolish the teaching of spelling and grammar in schools. Just refuse to waste any more time on it.
Ha, ha, bloody ha. People would cheat. Educated parents would educate their children. A certain artificiality of style would mark the writing of the privately educated. Imagine the awe-inspiring lack of smugness with which this sentence might be spoken.
Spelling and grammar would become more reliable status indicators than they are now. At least it's now possible for a working class child to acquire the habits of his betters.
Here's another thought:
The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which although publicly funded are almost the ultimate bestowers of good education/intelligence/diligence markers in the form of their degrees, could mandate the use of 'Natural English' in exams. Points could be deducted for old-style 'Vulgar Spelling' and 'Bourgeois Grammatical Mistakes'.
Our brightest and cleverest youngsters would have to spend time unlearning their painfully acquired habits. In time, because they always do, they'd become our highest social class.
And people would start to cheat. To copy. Luckily it wouldn't be very hard! And I reckon that the problem would be gone in a generation.
I trust that the University Senates will leap happily upon my modest proposal in the holy names of Equality and Reason.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Democracy
Hopefully people noticed the tongue-in-cheek elements of my last post:
http://johnlawrenceaspden.blogspot.com/2010/04/politics.html
We also need to ask whether our current state is stable, and what sort of forces might destroy it.
Are there ways of making it even better, without somehow accidentally making the magic go away?
Very old British people will remember that their fathers did not have the right to vote. This didn't make them slaves, but it did mean that the country wasn't organised in their interests.
http://johnlawrenceaspden.blogspot.com/2010/04/politics.html
I was planning to follow it up with a rational argument for voting Green.
But actually, that's kind of wrong. It would be a rational argument for voting Green.
Not, note, a rational argument, which, when followed through to its logical conclusion would tell me how to vote. Which had maybe happened to come to the conclusion that Green would be good.
So, obviously, even though I haven't gone to the trouble of thinking about it from any kind of sane point of view, my mind is already made up.
And there's no point in thinking up rational justifications, because whatever arguments lead towards doing something dreadful like voting Labour, I'll just ignore. And any tiny little shred of reason to vote Green will be elevated out of all proportion in my mind.
Because let's face it, that's what we are. It's called 'confirmation bias', and it means that we ignore most evidence that contradicts our beliefs, whilst taking any further evidence in favour and filing it carefully under 'arguments for'.
I wonder if this how everyone decides how to vote?
In fact, given that I'm a clever and well read man who takes an interest in current affairs and reads a newspaper daily, could my retarded decision process actually be amongst the more rational and well considered ones?
And yet British democracy somehow consistently manages to produce a relatively uncorrupt state whose principal concern seems to be to do the best for its people.
Fairly remarkable, when you think about it.
The history of government in the world is not good. Usually it's a parasitic entity. Better than anarchy for the people that live under it, but only by accident.
It's probably worth asking how our society managed to get into its current rather paradisical democratic state.
Somehow the warring warlords and absolute monarchs of the middle ages managed to get their teeth drawn, and their powers usurped by an elected assembly of the people.
We also need to ask whether our current state is stable, and what sort of forces might destroy it.
Are there ways of making it even better, without somehow accidentally making the magic go away?
Does democracy work well in any sort of society? What about when you've got two distinct ethnic groups of comparable sizes? Are there any examples of it working in such a situation?
I guess South Africa might be one, but it doesn't look that stable to me.
Zimbabwe is more of a counterexample.
Zimbabwe is more of a counterexample.
Is a democracy stable? What can bring it down? Is it an inevitable final state of a society? Can a long term stable democracy be subverted by internal forces?
Does a dictatorship that achieves absolute control and stability become gentler in accordance with some law of nature, until it becomes a free state?
Does a democracy under internal or external threat become less free?
Is this even a reasonable way to think about it, or is the whole thing due to great men and butterflies, unpredictable and uncontrollable?
Does a dictatorship that achieves absolute control and stability become gentler in accordance with some law of nature, until it becomes a free state?
Does a democracy under internal or external threat become less free?
Is this even a reasonable way to think about it, or is the whole thing due to great men and butterflies, unpredictable and uncontrollable?
There's no way to know in abstract. We have to look for evidence. The problem is that democracy is a fairly recent phenomenon. An untried experiment.
Despite the fact that it seems to have been an English ideal, universal male suffrage in England dates only from 1918, and universal suffrage 1928. So it's lasted about eighty years so far. One lifetime.
Very old British people will remember that their fathers did not have the right to vote. This didn't make them slaves, but it did mean that the country wasn't organised in their interests.
The oldest existing democracies in the world are the American Colonies, which seem to have been founded as free democracies, but under English law and the Crown. Somehow they broke free of England and eventually united to form the United States.
Of course, some of the individual states then regretted surrendering their independence to a central authority, and their attempt at seccession was the bloodiest war that had ever happened. But it all got sorted out in the end.
Eventually the place became so benevolent that they extended the right to vote to their livestock. Of course I'm being deliberately offensive there, but that's what it must have felt like at the time.
Perhaps future generations will consider our refusal of the vote to young people, and the resulting oppression they suffer (you think compulsory schooling isn't a form of slavery?) to be equally obscene.
Of course, some of the individual states then regretted surrendering their independence to a central authority, and their attempt at seccession was the bloodiest war that had ever happened. But it all got sorted out in the end.
Eventually the place became so benevolent that they extended the right to vote to their livestock. Of course I'm being deliberately offensive there, but that's what it must have felt like at the time.
Perhaps future generations will consider our refusal of the vote to young people, and the resulting oppression they suffer (you think compulsory schooling isn't a form of slavery?) to be equally obscene.
France had universal adult male suffrage in 1792, but wasn't stable. Universal male suffrage was finally established in 1914, and has been stable since, apart from a period of occupation by a German dictatorship which itself arose from a democracy.
Spain introduced universal male suffrage in 1812, but its democracy fell into dictatorship in the 1930s and wasn't restored until 1970.
So we have many examples of democracy failing, and several where it is too early to tell.
The only persistent democracy in the world is America. Coincidentally the only place where socialism was never popular. Presumably its people have never felt oppressed.
The only persistent democracy in the world is America. Coincidentally the only place where socialism was never popular. Presumably its people have never felt oppressed.
Some of the ancient Greek city-states were democratic, although not in our sense. What happened to them? If conditions in the ancient world were in some sense not right for democracy, why did their systems arise. If conditions were right, what made their systems fall?
Would Athens without Rome have resurrected itself and carried on?
Why did Rome itself, given its stability and power, not follow the inevitable path to democracy, but instead go the other way, from the Republic into oppression, hereditary government and an eventual collapse which may well have felt like a liberation to its citizens? (Think 'liberation of Iraq' rather than 'liberation of France'.)
There are three systems I can think of that might be called democratic.
In one, the people as a whole get to vote on every law. This is so different from our current system as to be difficult to imagine. Let's call it demarchy. The internet may have made it feasible in a huge state like the United Kingdom.
There's the first-past-the-post system which we use, which pretty much guarantees a two party alternating dictatorship.
Before universal suffrage, we swapped between Tory and Liberal government, representing roughly aristocracy/landowners vs. bourgeois/free trade.
After the proles got the vote, the Liberal party declined and the Labour party rose, representing the interests of the proletariat.
The electoral system seems to have squeezed the Liberal party between the other two, so that it became a rump force. The Tory party then became the party representing both aristocracy and business, which left it unwilling to defend the aristocracy against the punitive taxes which destroyed it.
These days, with the death of socialism as an idea, and the disappearance of the industrial working class, the Labour party has been desperately trying to abandon its old ideas and become more representative of the more liberal instincts, while the Tories have stayed pretty much where they were.
However the Liberals seem to be picking up a lot of Labour votes this time. In the natural course of things I'd imagine that one of these two parties would cease to exist meaningfully, and become a rump party, a "protest vote".
But the Liberals, remembering their long wilderness years, want to change our electoral system to the third, proportional representation system. And it looks like they may get the chance.
I worry.
Even the relatively minor change to Alternative Vote, rather than first-past-the-post, seems to ensure permanent government by the central party.
Could it effectively lead to a one party state?
Does the occasional thrashing, the peaceful revolution of our periodic change of government, actually provide a needed cleansing effect on the system. Is that why our politics is uncorrupt? Governments always seem to fall amidst accusations of corruption.
What do we know? Are alternative vote and PR systems safe and fair, or are they a step on the road to dictatorship or oligarchy? Do they inexorably lead to corruption, or do they produce moderate government trying to make everyone happy?
Do we have any data?
Would Athens without Rome have resurrected itself and carried on?
Why did Rome itself, given its stability and power, not follow the inevitable path to democracy, but instead go the other way, from the Republic into oppression, hereditary government and an eventual collapse which may well have felt like a liberation to its citizens? (Think 'liberation of Iraq' rather than 'liberation of France'.)
There are three systems I can think of that might be called democratic.
In one, the people as a whole get to vote on every law. This is so different from our current system as to be difficult to imagine. Let's call it demarchy. The internet may have made it feasible in a huge state like the United Kingdom.
There's the first-past-the-post system which we use, which pretty much guarantees a two party alternating dictatorship.
Before universal suffrage, we swapped between Tory and Liberal government, representing roughly aristocracy/landowners vs. bourgeois/free trade.
After the proles got the vote, the Liberal party declined and the Labour party rose, representing the interests of the proletariat.
The electoral system seems to have squeezed the Liberal party between the other two, so that it became a rump force. The Tory party then became the party representing both aristocracy and business, which left it unwilling to defend the aristocracy against the punitive taxes which destroyed it.
These days, with the death of socialism as an idea, and the disappearance of the industrial working class, the Labour party has been desperately trying to abandon its old ideas and become more representative of the more liberal instincts, while the Tories have stayed pretty much where they were.
However the Liberals seem to be picking up a lot of Labour votes this time. In the natural course of things I'd imagine that one of these two parties would cease to exist meaningfully, and become a rump party, a "protest vote".
But the Liberals, remembering their long wilderness years, want to change our electoral system to the third, proportional representation system. And it looks like they may get the chance.
I worry.
Even the relatively minor change to Alternative Vote, rather than first-past-the-post, seems to ensure permanent government by the central party.
Could it effectively lead to a one party state?
Does the occasional thrashing, the peaceful revolution of our periodic change of government, actually provide a needed cleansing effect on the system. Is that why our politics is uncorrupt? Governments always seem to fall amidst accusations of corruption.
What do we know? Are alternative vote and PR systems safe and fair, or are they a step on the road to dictatorship or oligarchy? Do they inexorably lead to corruption, or do they produce moderate government trying to make everyone happy?
Do we have any data?
Ghost (film)
Excellent, suspenseful thriller. Adapted from Robert Harris' Ghost.
Doesn't do justice to the excellent book, which is utterly and chillingly believable, simply because the (changed) conclusion doesn't really hold water, and the cuts to the details of the plot (made to compress the story) have left some of the scenes looking unlikely.
However, all that's only a problem after the film's over. While you're watching it, it's really rather good.
Doesn't do justice to the excellent book, which is utterly and chillingly believable, simply because the (changed) conclusion doesn't really hold water, and the cuts to the details of the plot (made to compress the story) have left some of the scenes looking unlikely.
However, all that's only a problem after the film's over. While you're watching it, it's really rather good.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Politics
Election time, and it seems necessary to examine my soul and choose who to vote for.
Emotionally I'm anti-government in any form. An anarchist must compromise, however. No-one would actually want to live in a place where there was no government. So let's call me a (fairly moderate) libertarian. I think we should have borders and armies and police and courts. I'm less convinced by the idea of the state running hospitals and schools and welfare systems, but still broadly in favour.
The only issue I really care about is the environment. Although saying that, I don't actually care that much about global warming, probably because I don't understand the implications.
But I hate cars and love trees, and if any major party was of that mind, they'd get my vote.
Over the last aeon, the Labour government has pissed me off.
Here are all the reasons I can think of off the top of my head. These are just the ones I can remember. I'm sure there were loads more that I've forgotten.
In order of how boilingly angry they make me:
Iraq war. Associated lies.
Lisbon treaty. Associated lies.
Lost control of immigration.
Vote rigging.
Boundary rigging.
Corruption.
Wrecking the House of Lords.
Ludicrous anti-terrorism laws in the face of the most laughable foreign threat in British history.
Trial without jury.
CCTV cameras.
Smoking ban.
ID Cards.
Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.
IR35.
Fox-hunting ban.
Foot and mouth slaughter.
Sold off our vast gold reserves for almost nothing.
Blew a vast hole in the budget whilst claiming to be prudent.
Pointless expansion of higher education.
Millenium Dome.
Also they're so stupid they thought they'd 'abolished boom and bust'. Or so dishonest that they claimed it knowing it was a lie.
In short I detest them and hold them in contempt. Tony Blair lied to the Parliament and to the People in order to start the Iraq war, and I would like to see him tried for treason and gutted at Tyburn in the traditional manner. I am not joking about this.
I grew up in Sheffield during the awful recession that Thatcher caused, and what I remember is not just the misery, but the hatred and the contempt and the sheer glee of the Tories as they smashed the social structure of my beloved home city. I cried in 'The Full Monty', because that's how I remember it, and funny though the film is, it's a story of utter desperation. And that's what it was like. And everywhere you looked the Tories were crowing with happiness about what they had done.
And I am going to have a very great deal of trouble ever voting for them as a result.
But even so, I prefer them to the Labour party, despite the despicable 'social right' wing of the Tory party, which is a home for racists and anti-abortionists and queer-bashers and 'christians' and hate-ridden old bastards who want to tell everyone else what to do, and whom I would very much like to die.
And then there's the Liberal Democrats. The old Liberal party was probably where my spiritual home was. But they allied with the Social Democratic phlegm that was spat out of old Labour and now they also believe in a vast state interfering with everything. And worse, they seem not to realise that the European Union is a hideous corrupt anti-democratic plot against the European peoples and want to ram their heads up its ass as speedily as humanly possible.
Also their local campaigning is frankly evil and dishonest. Did you hear the one about where they leave an old wheelie bin full of rotting stuff in your back alley and then come round with a questionnaire asking what you'd like to see changed in the neighbourhood? And if you say that you'd like someone to get rid of this eyesore they say they'll get on it. And then a bit later they come and take it away.
But on the other hand, they seem nice. And since they've never been in power and never had a chance to become corrupt, there's nothing I can actually hate them for.
Also the local Liberal candidate is the son of a don at my old college, and that is almost good enough for me on its own.
And finally the Greens. They hate cars and love trees. They are loonies, and I would die to prevent them forming a government, but they love trees and hate cars. So I would like to vote for them because then the other parties might think that there are votes in car-hating, and in tree-loving. And in their dishonest slimy calculating hypocritical way they might do some nice things for trees and maybe even some nasty things to cars. In the hope of siphoning some of those votes in their direction.
So, what to do in Cambridge?
As far as I know, it's a Liberal/Labour marginal, but it was pretty safe in the last election, and everyone seems to hate Labour much more now than they did then, for no reason I can fathom, because they don't seem any more vile than usual, and actually rather less slimy since they gave the psychopath a go instead of the oily lying one.
And Nick Clegg's debate performance has given the Liberals enough of a boost that I can risk voting for the Greens without worrying about letting the Labour filth-swine in by accident.
So that's what I'm doing.
Vote Green!
Emotionally I'm anti-government in any form. An anarchist must compromise, however. No-one would actually want to live in a place where there was no government. So let's call me a (fairly moderate) libertarian. I think we should have borders and armies and police and courts. I'm less convinced by the idea of the state running hospitals and schools and welfare systems, but still broadly in favour.
The only issue I really care about is the environment. Although saying that, I don't actually care that much about global warming, probably because I don't understand the implications.
But I hate cars and love trees, and if any major party was of that mind, they'd get my vote.
Over the last aeon, the Labour government has pissed me off.
Here are all the reasons I can think of off the top of my head. These are just the ones I can remember. I'm sure there were loads more that I've forgotten.
In order of how boilingly angry they make me:
Iraq war. Associated lies.
Lisbon treaty. Associated lies.
Lost control of immigration.
Vote rigging.
Boundary rigging.
Corruption.
Wrecking the House of Lords.
Ludicrous anti-terrorism laws in the face of the most laughable foreign threat in British history.
Lots of really stupid new laws. Did you know that it's now illegal to look at certain cartoons? To look at them.
New blasphemy laws!!
Raising the school leaving age to 18.
Trial without jury.
CCTV cameras.
Smoking ban.
ID Cards.
Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.
IR35.
Fox-hunting ban.
Foot and mouth slaughter.
Sold off our vast gold reserves for almost nothing.
Blew a vast hole in the budget whilst claiming to be prudent.
Pointless expansion of higher education.
Millenium Dome.
Also they're so stupid they thought they'd 'abolished boom and bust'. Or so dishonest that they claimed it knowing it was a lie.
In short I detest them and hold them in contempt. Tony Blair lied to the Parliament and to the People in order to start the Iraq war, and I would like to see him tried for treason and gutted at Tyburn in the traditional manner. I am not joking about this.
I grew up in Sheffield during the awful recession that Thatcher caused, and what I remember is not just the misery, but the hatred and the contempt and the sheer glee of the Tories as they smashed the social structure of my beloved home city. I cried in 'The Full Monty', because that's how I remember it, and funny though the film is, it's a story of utter desperation. And that's what it was like. And everywhere you looked the Tories were crowing with happiness about what they had done.
And I am going to have a very great deal of trouble ever voting for them as a result.
But even so, I prefer them to the Labour party, despite the despicable 'social right' wing of the Tory party, which is a home for racists and anti-abortionists and queer-bashers and 'christians' and hate-ridden old bastards who want to tell everyone else what to do, and whom I would very much like to die.
And then there's the Liberal Democrats. The old Liberal party was probably where my spiritual home was. But they allied with the Social Democratic phlegm that was spat out of old Labour and now they also believe in a vast state interfering with everything. And worse, they seem not to realise that the European Union is a hideous corrupt anti-democratic plot against the European peoples and want to ram their heads up its ass as speedily as humanly possible.
Also their local campaigning is frankly evil and dishonest. Did you hear the one about where they leave an old wheelie bin full of rotting stuff in your back alley and then come round with a questionnaire asking what you'd like to see changed in the neighbourhood? And if you say that you'd like someone to get rid of this eyesore they say they'll get on it. And then a bit later they come and take it away.
But on the other hand, they seem nice. And since they've never been in power and never had a chance to become corrupt, there's nothing I can actually hate them for.
Also the local Liberal candidate is the son of a don at my old college, and that is almost good enough for me on its own.
And finally the Greens. They hate cars and love trees. They are loonies, and I would die to prevent them forming a government, but they love trees and hate cars. So I would like to vote for them because then the other parties might think that there are votes in car-hating, and in tree-loving. And in their dishonest slimy calculating hypocritical way they might do some nice things for trees and maybe even some nasty things to cars. In the hope of siphoning some of those votes in their direction.
So, what to do in Cambridge?
As far as I know, it's a Liberal/Labour marginal, but it was pretty safe in the last election, and everyone seems to hate Labour much more now than they did then, for no reason I can fathom, because they don't seem any more vile than usual, and actually rather less slimy since they gave the psychopath a go instead of the oily lying one.
And Nick Clegg's debate performance has given the Liberals enough of a boost that I can risk voting for the Greens without worrying about letting the Labour filth-swine in by accident.
So that's what I'm doing.
Vote Green!
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson)
Whoever adapted this for the film did a stellar job. The plot in the book is almost the same, with a few details altered and minor characters who've been omitted in the film, but they're roughly the same story. The ending of the book seems rather unlikely and a bit far-fetched, whereas the same ending in the film just looks impossible.
But it's like reading the Financial Times. Part of that might be the fault of a rather pedestrian translation. Maybe it sparkles in Swedish.
Is all detective fiction like this? I haven't read much. Maybe it's one of the conventions of the genre that you're supposed to drown the reader in tedious details.
Save yourself the bother. See the film instead, which is short, sharp and sexy. If you'd like to read a novel about awful serial killing type stuff, try (my friend) Ruth Newman's wonderful Twisted Wing, just reissued in a new paperback version.
But it's like reading the Financial Times. Part of that might be the fault of a rather pedestrian translation. Maybe it sparkles in Swedish.
Is all detective fiction like this? I haven't read much. Maybe it's one of the conventions of the genre that you're supposed to drown the reader in tedious details.
Save yourself the bother. See the film instead, which is short, sharp and sexy. If you'd like to read a novel about awful serial killing type stuff, try (my friend) Ruth Newman's wonderful Twisted Wing, just reissued in a new paperback version.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Night Watching (film)
Self-consciously arty, dirty, repellent, prurient, cruel, crude, incomprehensible, and, unforgivably, boring.
The fifth film I have walked out of. The others were The Crow, Hellraiser III, Blue Velvet, and some god-awful French thing about domestic violence: Dont Je Ne Me Souviens Plus Du Titre.
The fifth film I have walked out of. The others were The Crow, Hellraiser III, Blue Velvet, and some god-awful French thing about domestic violence: Dont Je Ne Me Souviens Plus Du Titre.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (film)
Magnificently, beautifully, terrifyingly evil and sexy from start to finish.
Makes Silence of the Lambs look like a christmas movie.
May God forgive me for enjoying this quite as much as I did.
The denouement drives a coach and horses through the plot, but by that point I was so shell shocked that the film was over before I noticed.
This version is in Swedish with English subtitles. Apparently there's a Hollywood version in the pipes. I dread to think what it will be like.
Makes Silence of the Lambs look like a christmas movie.
May God forgive me for enjoying this quite as much as I did.
The denouement drives a coach and horses through the plot, but by that point I was so shell shocked that the film was over before I noticed.
This version is in Swedish with English subtitles. Apparently there's a Hollywood version in the pipes. I dread to think what it will be like.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Guernica (Dave Boling)
Mixed feelings about this workmanlike first novel.
It has a saga-ey feel to it, a bit like Edward Rutherfurd, and belongs somewhere in the intersection of 'Historical novels where the characters think and feel as if they were present day people' and 'Disaster movies where one lovingly establishes all the characters and then crashes the plane into a mountain'.
I read it in one sitting, without ever being bored, but at the end I felt sort of empty, and not as if I'd learned anything new about Guernica, The Spanish Civil War, Picasso, or the Basque people.
It has a saga-ey feel to it, a bit like Edward Rutherfurd, and belongs somewhere in the intersection of 'Historical novels where the characters think and feel as if they were present day people' and 'Disaster movies where one lovingly establishes all the characters and then crashes the plane into a mountain'.
I read it in one sitting, without ever being bored, but at the end I felt sort of empty, and not as if I'd learned anything new about Guernica, The Spanish Civil War, Picasso, or the Basque people.
The Puppet Masters (Robert Heinlein)
The old master in cheerful story-telling mode, with an imaginative version of 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'. Not philosopically interesting, but a good yarn.
Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel)
As good as everyone says it is. I usually finish good books in one sitting, but this is so richly written that you have to read it in short bites.
So effective is its re-imagining of the past that when they showed Holbein pictures on University Challenge recently, I found myself hissing at More (previously a hero of mine because of 'A Man for All Seasons') and cheering Cromwell (Henry's feared enforcer).
The Emperor Claudius tends to get a more sympathetic reading than he deserves because of 'I, Claudius', and I think that, in the same way, she'll have completely changed the view of Cromwell for future generations, just because history students will have this book's portraits already in the mind when they come to look at the evidence, and confirmation bias will do the rest.
Can't wait for 'Thomas Cromwell the God', although I can't imagine that things will end any better for our hero than they did for poor old Claudius.
So effective is its re-imagining of the past that when they showed Holbein pictures on University Challenge recently, I found myself hissing at More (previously a hero of mine because of 'A Man for All Seasons') and cheering Cromwell (Henry's feared enforcer).
The Emperor Claudius tends to get a more sympathetic reading than he deserves because of 'I, Claudius', and I think that, in the same way, she'll have completely changed the view of Cromwell for future generations, just because history students will have this book's portraits already in the mind when they come to look at the evidence, and confirmation bias will do the rest.
Can't wait for 'Thomas Cromwell the God', although I can't imagine that things will end any better for our hero than they did for poor old Claudius.
Synechdoche
This word (straight from greek: συνεκδοχή , simultaneous understanding) will never stick in my head.
It's a type of metaphor, in which parts stand for wholes, or vice versa.
Examples ripped from wikipedia
It's a type of metaphor, in which parts stand for wholes, or vice versa.
Examples ripped from wikipedia
- Fill him full of lead.
- The smack of leather on willow
- The gray-beard and the long-hair
- The city posted a sign
- Put it on plastic
- A fresh pair of hands
- What sort of coke do you have?
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Wedding Speech
Last week I was best man at my friend Mike's wedding in Southport, near Liverpool. This was my speech. The titles were my outline. Luckily I was trying to be sincere rather than funny, because the groom's speech brought the house down, and I had to follow it. By the end of mine half the audience were in tears.
A wedding party is a fairly easy audience!
I found the speech-giving a lot less stressful than standing in the church with the rings hoping not to drop them, but someone said that my left hand was shaking throughout, so some part of me must have found the experience terrifying. As far as my conscious mind was concerned, I enjoyed showing off in front of all those people immensely.
Introduce yourself
Hi, I'm John. I'm a friend of Mike's from College and ever since. We shared a house in Cambridge for a while.
I think it's fair to say that Mike is the man who's left the most plates of half-eaten pizza in my life.
On the other hand, PG Wodehouse said that the friendship of David and Jonathan would have been tested had the one persistently dropped catches off the other's bowling.
And I think it's fair to say that we've met that test full on, and emerged unscathed.
I'm a Yorkshireman, having grown up just the other side of the Pennines, so I was a little worried about coming to Lancashire.
But luckily, by a terrible accident, I was actually born in Manchester, which I'm told is like a magic passport to friendship and goodwill in this part of the world.
Thank John Evans
Obviously it's a huge honour to be asked to be someone's best man, and also a tribute to one's organizational abilities.
And so from my point of view it's unfortunate that that honour went to John Evans, Mike's brother, who's done a fantastic amount of work behind the scenes, at one point driving, what was it, 350 miles?
To play Dungeons and Dragons. This being Mike's last request as a free man.
We made him pretend to be a pixie, or something...
So the first person I want to thank is John, for all the effort he's put in.
And for saving my ass when I was out of fireball spells and that werewolf sneaked round the back of the old temple.
Why am I giving speech then?
So you might ask why I'm giving this speech, in which it's traditional to let slip the odd secret.
For some reason, it was thought that it would be better if it were someone who hadn't known Mike at school.
I have no further information.
And my price is traditionally quite high.
Thank bridesmaids or respond to groom's thanks
I'm sure that Isabelle's wonderful bridesmaids would like to respond in person to Mike's kind words earlier, but tradition dictates that I should reply on their behalf.
(As camply as possible) Thanks!!!xxx!!!
And of course I think we'd all like to thank them for so gloriously decorating the occasion. Well done girls!
Thank whoever paid for the wedding for inviting everybody
Also on behalf of all of us, I'd like to thank Lucien and Christine for inviting us all to share this great party that they've organised to celebrate Isabelle and Mike's special day.
You have really pushed the boat out, on a scale I believe was last seen for Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the classical world.
An appropriate comparison for Isabelle, I think.
Hint at Stag Night Debauchery
It's traditional that at this point, I should say a few words about the stag night.
I'm afraid that I have little to report, since the Succubus-o-gram failed to turn up, despite our most earnest pentacles.
But on a personal note, is the gorgeous Swedish bird with the Errol Flynn moustache here?
(She was...)
See me later young lady.
Describe Groom
As I mentioned earlier, I first met Mike at college, an establishment founded in 1441, and dedicated to the spiritual life and the advancement of religion.
The full name of the place is the King's College of our Lady and St Nicholas, and it's famed throughout the world for its Santa Claus and Virgins parties.
Mike was always a true son of the place, a saintly figure in fact.
Ever since I first met him, when I tripped over his duvet.
In the college bar.
At three o'clock in the morning.
After that I don't think he ever put a foot out of place.
(pointing in vague direction of Cambridge contingent)
And it's at this point that it's traditional for people not to shout 'That's never a foot', because that joke always falls a bit flat.
Ironically.
As a scholar of the college, which means that in a haunt of very clever people he stood out as being particularly clever, and so they gave him a book token, Mike would have had to swear to 'devote himself to the studies of the university'.
A vow which I know he took just as seriously as everyone else.
Joking apart, Mike is a frighteningly clever and curious man.
I think in fifteen years, for at least two of which we shared a house and played almost every night, I've beaten him at chess what, three times?
(At this point, Mike shouted 'twice' in a stern sort of way, which got a huge laugh)
Quantum Mechanics, which baffled and confused Einstein and caused the great physicist Feynman to say 'If you think you understand this, then you really haven't understood the first thing about it', was Mike's specialist subject.
I once heard him say 'I never really got Shakespeare at school.' I said 'Well it's not all drivel', and read him the famous speech from Julius Caesar.
I must have done a fair job, because a couple of months later he told me he'd signed up to do a degree in English Literature.
He's a man with a desire to understand the world around him.
But actually his intelligence isn't the most important thing about Mike.
He has a gentleness, a kindness, and a tolerance that is very rare, and very precious.
Men like him are few and far between. Well found Isabelle.
Describe Bride
I haven't known Isabelle for nearly as long. In fact from my point of view it was a bit of a whirlwind romance.
One day Mike called to say 'Hi John. I'm coming to Cambridge for a few days. Is there any chance of a game of cricket, meet up with some old friends?'
In my innocence I suggested that we meet up at a favourite cafe in one of the few bits of town that, instead of having a statue of Isaac Newton or a fifteenth century gargoyle arrangement, has an excellent view of the dual carriageway and does a good lunch.
And it was at this point that he introduced his new girlfriend, who'd clearly been been enticed along with talk about punt trips and old colleges and a walk along the famous backs.
Now when I was a lad, girls hated cricket.
Of course nowadays, what with women's liberation and all that, it's all completely different.
These days women hate cricket.
So it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I mentioned that indeed the old friends were a man short for our Saturday game tomorrow, against the Pembury Arms, and that there might just be a few seats left on the train, as it happened.
Isabelle, bless her, pretended to be absolutely delighted to watch her new boyfriend demolishing a small pub in a park in North London. The city they'd left not twenty-four hours earlier.
At the after-cricket poker game she delightedly extracted all our money, to show there were no hard feelings.
As they used to say in the Old West, never cross a mathematician when she's in reach of a deck of cards.
Anyway I felt a teeny bit guilty about all this, until the second communication from Mike, which was a text saying. "We're in Venice and I asked Isabelle to marry me and she said yes!!!"
So maybe she really does like cricket.
Fortunately there's no game organised today.
At any rate I think she's displayed a tolerance, a good humour, and indeed a financial acumen that will serve her well in the days to come.
Describe their Relationship
An old piece of advice often said at weddings goes 'Find in your partner a lover, a friend and a teacher'.
I can't help thinking that what with Mike having done a PGCE and Isabelle actually being a teacher, this might be being taken a tad too literally here.
What I do know is that they seem ideally suited. They finish each other's sentences.
Apparently they fell in love at school, but they were both too shy to mention it.
By the time they met up again, some fifteen years later, obviously one of them had managed to pluck up the courage to say something!
Toast to Bride and Groom
They say that we bachelors know more about women than married men...
That's why we're still bachelors.
Be that as it may, I've been made very jealous by this beautiful ceremony that we've been privileged to witness today.
I'm jealous of the courage it takes to make such a commitment, before your friends and your family and God.
I'm jealous of Isabelle, for having found this clever, funny, kind, gentle man who loves her.
I'm jealous of Mike, for his beautiful, bright, tolerant, smiling wife.
I'm jealous of the years of contented happiness that stretch out before them. Of their shelter from the storm with each other.
I wish you long life, health, wealth, happiness and children, all those things.
But most of all I wish you... I wish all of us, love.
As Auden told us: We must love one another or die.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the bride and groom.
A wedding party is a fairly easy audience!
I found the speech-giving a lot less stressful than standing in the church with the rings hoping not to drop them, but someone said that my left hand was shaking throughout, so some part of me must have found the experience terrifying. As far as my conscious mind was concerned, I enjoyed showing off in front of all those people immensely.
Introduce yourself
Hi, I'm John. I'm a friend of Mike's from College and ever since. We shared a house in Cambridge for a while.
I think it's fair to say that Mike is the man who's left the most plates of half-eaten pizza in my life.
On the other hand, PG Wodehouse said that the friendship of David and Jonathan would have been tested had the one persistently dropped catches off the other's bowling.
And I think it's fair to say that we've met that test full on, and emerged unscathed.
I'm a Yorkshireman, having grown up just the other side of the Pennines, so I was a little worried about coming to Lancashire.
But luckily, by a terrible accident, I was actually born in Manchester, which I'm told is like a magic passport to friendship and goodwill in this part of the world.
Thank John Evans
Obviously it's a huge honour to be asked to be someone's best man, and also a tribute to one's organizational abilities.
And so from my point of view it's unfortunate that that honour went to John Evans, Mike's brother, who's done a fantastic amount of work behind the scenes, at one point driving, what was it, 350 miles?
To play Dungeons and Dragons. This being Mike's last request as a free man.
We made him pretend to be a pixie, or something...
So the first person I want to thank is John, for all the effort he's put in.
And for saving my ass when I was out of fireball spells and that werewolf sneaked round the back of the old temple.
Why am I giving speech then?
So you might ask why I'm giving this speech, in which it's traditional to let slip the odd secret.
For some reason, it was thought that it would be better if it were someone who hadn't known Mike at school.
I have no further information.
And my price is traditionally quite high.
Thank bridesmaids or respond to groom's thanks
I'm sure that Isabelle's wonderful bridesmaids would like to respond in person to Mike's kind words earlier, but tradition dictates that I should reply on their behalf.
(As camply as possible) Thanks!!!xxx!!!
And of course I think we'd all like to thank them for so gloriously decorating the occasion. Well done girls!
Thank whoever paid for the wedding for inviting everybody
Also on behalf of all of us, I'd like to thank Lucien and Christine for inviting us all to share this great party that they've organised to celebrate Isabelle and Mike's special day.
You have really pushed the boat out, on a scale I believe was last seen for Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the classical world.
An appropriate comparison for Isabelle, I think.
Hint at Stag Night Debauchery
It's traditional that at this point, I should say a few words about the stag night.
I'm afraid that I have little to report, since the Succubus-o-gram failed to turn up, despite our most earnest pentacles.
But on a personal note, is the gorgeous Swedish bird with the Errol Flynn moustache here?
(She was...)
See me later young lady.
Describe Groom
As I mentioned earlier, I first met Mike at college, an establishment founded in 1441, and dedicated to the spiritual life and the advancement of religion.
The full name of the place is the King's College of our Lady and St Nicholas, and it's famed throughout the world for its Santa Claus and Virgins parties.
Mike was always a true son of the place, a saintly figure in fact.
Ever since I first met him, when I tripped over his duvet.
In the college bar.
At three o'clock in the morning.
After that I don't think he ever put a foot out of place.
(pointing in vague direction of Cambridge contingent)
And it's at this point that it's traditional for people not to shout 'That's never a foot', because that joke always falls a bit flat.
Ironically.
As a scholar of the college, which means that in a haunt of very clever people he stood out as being particularly clever, and so they gave him a book token, Mike would have had to swear to 'devote himself to the studies of the university'.
A vow which I know he took just as seriously as everyone else.
Joking apart, Mike is a frighteningly clever and curious man.
I think in fifteen years, for at least two of which we shared a house and played almost every night, I've beaten him at chess what, three times?
(At this point, Mike shouted 'twice' in a stern sort of way, which got a huge laugh)
Quantum Mechanics, which baffled and confused Einstein and caused the great physicist Feynman to say 'If you think you understand this, then you really haven't understood the first thing about it', was Mike's specialist subject.
I once heard him say 'I never really got Shakespeare at school.' I said 'Well it's not all drivel', and read him the famous speech from Julius Caesar.
I must have done a fair job, because a couple of months later he told me he'd signed up to do a degree in English Literature.
He's a man with a desire to understand the world around him.
But actually his intelligence isn't the most important thing about Mike.
He has a gentleness, a kindness, and a tolerance that is very rare, and very precious.
Men like him are few and far between. Well found Isabelle.
Describe Bride
I haven't known Isabelle for nearly as long. In fact from my point of view it was a bit of a whirlwind romance.
One day Mike called to say 'Hi John. I'm coming to Cambridge for a few days. Is there any chance of a game of cricket, meet up with some old friends?'
In my innocence I suggested that we meet up at a favourite cafe in one of the few bits of town that, instead of having a statue of Isaac Newton or a fifteenth century gargoyle arrangement, has an excellent view of the dual carriageway and does a good lunch.
And it was at this point that he introduced his new girlfriend, who'd clearly been been enticed along with talk about punt trips and old colleges and a walk along the famous backs.
Now when I was a lad, girls hated cricket.
Of course nowadays, what with women's liberation and all that, it's all completely different.
These days women hate cricket.
So it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I mentioned that indeed the old friends were a man short for our Saturday game tomorrow, against the Pembury Arms, and that there might just be a few seats left on the train, as it happened.
Isabelle, bless her, pretended to be absolutely delighted to watch her new boyfriend demolishing a small pub in a park in North London. The city they'd left not twenty-four hours earlier.
At the after-cricket poker game she delightedly extracted all our money, to show there were no hard feelings.
As they used to say in the Old West, never cross a mathematician when she's in reach of a deck of cards.
Anyway I felt a teeny bit guilty about all this, until the second communication from Mike, which was a text saying. "We're in Venice and I asked Isabelle to marry me and she said yes!!!"
So maybe she really does like cricket.
Fortunately there's no game organised today.
At any rate I think she's displayed a tolerance, a good humour, and indeed a financial acumen that will serve her well in the days to come.
Describe their Relationship
An old piece of advice often said at weddings goes 'Find in your partner a lover, a friend and a teacher'.
I can't help thinking that what with Mike having done a PGCE and Isabelle actually being a teacher, this might be being taken a tad too literally here.
What I do know is that they seem ideally suited. They finish each other's sentences.
Apparently they fell in love at school, but they were both too shy to mention it.
By the time they met up again, some fifteen years later, obviously one of them had managed to pluck up the courage to say something!
Toast to Bride and Groom
They say that we bachelors know more about women than married men...
That's why we're still bachelors.
Be that as it may, I've been made very jealous by this beautiful ceremony that we've been privileged to witness today.
I'm jealous of the courage it takes to make such a commitment, before your friends and your family and God.
I'm jealous of Isabelle, for having found this clever, funny, kind, gentle man who loves her.
I'm jealous of Mike, for his beautiful, bright, tolerant, smiling wife.
I'm jealous of the years of contented happiness that stretch out before them. Of their shelter from the storm with each other.
I wish you long life, health, wealth, happiness and children, all those things.
But most of all I wish you... I wish all of us, love.
As Auden told us: We must love one another or die.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the bride and groom.
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