1. My course! My MSc course is immensely cool. I am so enjoying being right at the edge of what I can do. I have found two people older than me now, a 36-year-old and a 40-year-old, so we can occasionally catch up and talk about ZX81s and such. A lot of the kids were still in primary school when I got my first degree. But actually they're a really nice bunch, and some of the ones who were annoying me at first by flaunting their understanding turn out just to be a bit socially challenged, and pleasant at heart. I have discovered that I have uncannily accurate gaydar: show me a young man, and if I find it easy to talk to him, he's gay. I think there may be other factors at work here though and not just my perception. For example, I give pretty good conversation about which is Britney's best song. (Just fyi, Toy Soldier has to be in the running.)
2. If you're looking for a mouse to use with a laptop this one is great:
Swiftpoint mouse review
It's designed to be used on the wrist rest part of the laptop, below the keys, so even if you don't have any other flat surface to hand you still don't have to use the trackpad. This is a relief for my RSI, which has been giving me twinges when I use the trackpad for six hours of lectures in one day.
3. I've been putting my ipod on shuffle a lot recently and rediscovering lots of brilliant songs I'd forgotten. Like this Cloetta Paris song, Broken Heart Tango. This is the sort of song you should only listen to when you're happy.
4. Victorians! I'm revising my opinion about the Victorians, but I need to post about this separately some time.
5. Plus I'm off to the Occupy London camp this afternoon to hear an old friend preach from the steps of St Paul's. He was the chaplain at Corpus when I was a fellow there, and I'm hoping he still holds the anti-capitalist views he had then, or it's going to be rather embarrassing... Go social justice! Not being more involved in social justice is just one of the many ways in which I am a bad Christian.
Saturday, 29 October 2011
Tuesday, 18 October 2011
Expectations; morals
1. I am making a small hostage to fortune here by stating that I am really looking forward to starting Logic Programming this afternoon. I enjoyed the logic I did over the summer, and Prolog is something I've been vaguely interested in for a while. However, everyone in the department speaks of logic in fearful tones so it may turn out that I'm being naive.
2. Looking instead to the past, this spring I wrote an anonymous reader's report for a publisher on a book which I felt had interesting potential but needed a lot of work. I found it extra difficult because I have respect for the work of this academic, had heard this book was in the pipeline, and had looked forward to reading it -- which perhaps made it more of a disappointment to me than if I had come to it with a blank slate. Now I have just had an e-mail from a different publisher asking me to write an anonymous reader's report for a book with the same title. The author is not given, but the abstract makes it clear to me that it's the same book. So either the first publisher rejected the book, or asked for the changes I thought were necessary and the author refused to make them. I'm going to e-mail to say that I have already written on the book and therefore think I'm not the right person to do so again. Whether or not it's been altered, I think the book deserves a new reader at this stage. It's a moral question for me whether I should just refuse without giving reasons. Interestingly my housemate feels that my moral duty lies in a different direction, towards the libraries which would have to buy this book, the librarians who would have to process and shelve it, the academics who would have to read it, the students who would have to learn to read it critically. But I can't help feeling just how big a thing a book is to write, and what a personal thing it is for the author -- not to mention that this author has always been kind to me. On the plus side, this book is not a start-of-career work, it's an end-of-career thing by a retired or near-retired academic of serious standing. And I like to think that probably the first publisher commissioned two readers' reports.
2. Looking instead to the past, this spring I wrote an anonymous reader's report for a publisher on a book which I felt had interesting potential but needed a lot of work. I found it extra difficult because I have respect for the work of this academic, had heard this book was in the pipeline, and had looked forward to reading it -- which perhaps made it more of a disappointment to me than if I had come to it with a blank slate. Now I have just had an e-mail from a different publisher asking me to write an anonymous reader's report for a book with the same title. The author is not given, but the abstract makes it clear to me that it's the same book. So either the first publisher rejected the book, or asked for the changes I thought were necessary and the author refused to make them. I'm going to e-mail to say that I have already written on the book and therefore think I'm not the right person to do so again. Whether or not it's been altered, I think the book deserves a new reader at this stage. It's a moral question for me whether I should just refuse without giving reasons. Interestingly my housemate feels that my moral duty lies in a different direction, towards the libraries which would have to buy this book, the librarians who would have to process and shelve it, the academics who would have to read it, the students who would have to learn to read it critically. But I can't help feeling just how big a thing a book is to write, and what a personal thing it is for the author -- not to mention that this author has always been kind to me. On the plus side, this book is not a start-of-career work, it's an end-of-career thing by a retired or near-retired academic of serious standing. And I like to think that probably the first publisher commissioned two readers' reports.
Saturday, 15 October 2011
Fantastic
I feel very guilty for not going to help occupy The City today -- especially since Imperial is so cosy with big business. (It's like the Daily Telegraph to Cambridge's Graun.) @heardinlondon posted this brilliant picture from the steps of St Paul's:
On the steps on St Paul's Outside St Paul's #OccupyLSX on Twitpic
On the steps on St Paul's Outside St Paul's #OccupyLSX on Twitpic
Thursday, 13 October 2011
First deadline
Tomorrow is the last day of our intensive 2-week C++ course, and next week we start on systems architecture, logic programming, and such, as well as continuing C++ at a slightly slower pace. To mark the end of intensive C++ we will be given our first formal assignment. We get two weeks to complete it, and there are three lab sessions (when there will be TAs available to answer questions while we work on the lab computers) in that time. This sounds OK. But at the same time tomorrow they will give us another six equivalent problems. We don't have to hand them in at all! Instead they're for practicing on. Because as soon as we get back after Christmas we will be set an eighth problem, this time to be completed not in two weeks, but in two hours under exam conditions. This amuses me because it's so obviously ludicrously ambitious. Our assignment and the six practice questions are all just exam papers from previous years of the course.
I'm really looking forward to the logic programming. And I have met a few more humanities people on the course, which is good. We had some interesting discussions which I'd like to post about if only I hadn't used up all my energy on trying to manipulate linked lists of nodes.
I'm really looking forward to the logic programming. And I have met a few more humanities people on the course, which is good. We had some interesting discussions which I'd like to post about if only I hadn't used up all my energy on trying to manipulate linked lists of nodes.
Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Course stuff
My course is really hard work. I'd like to say "in other news" but that's all the news there is. Luckily I'm still getting the endorphin rush when I get things to work, and I'm getting through it at a steady pace -- not quickly but not getting stuck either. In this I'm reminding myself of every mature student I have ever taught. Earlier this week I was finding some of the other students a bit irritating -- basically cocky young men who like to talk loudly about how easy they're finding it. Which is great for them, but since some of them have spent several years earning their living as software engineers it's not entirely something for them to boast about. Also some of them have money and have loud conversations about which local nightclubs Prince Harry goes to. But I've decided to find this amusing rather than annoying, because I am in serious danger of becoming a bigot about young men. And they're OK really, just young.
Anyway, onwards: I've got to learn about using pointers to create dynamic arrays.
Anyway, onwards: I've got to learn about using pointers to create dynamic arrays.
Thursday, 6 October 2011
Me++
I'm a student again! I used to enjoy teaching a lot, but somehow it just feels right to be back on this side of the lectern. It seems like such a tremendous luxury to have intelligent knowledgeable people telling me things. On the first proper day of teaching I felt more completely out of my depth than at any time since the start of my undergraduate degree, but both times in a really pleasurable way. There's the same air of people throwing you in at the deep end but with every confidence that you can swim. And I can! I can swim! If by swim you mean write C++ code in emacs and compile it in g++ using a makefile.
So it's going well so far, if exhaustingly, although I think it speeds up once we've done the introductory course and start the full range of languages and courses. (We're going to write in Assembler!) Thankfully Welcome Week is truncated for us masters students, because I don't need all that awkward acclimatisation stuff. All the new postgrads together had a welcome from some senior people on the first day, and it was a bit odd to be exhorted to look after each other and make lifelong friendships. I found myself thinking, "But haven't I already got some friends? I'm sure I've got their names written down somewhere". But I think I felt pretty similarly the first time round. The Freshers' Fair was really horrible, and that's just how I remember it too. (Incidentally, my brother who works at Exeter University was complaining about having to call it Welcome Week not Freshers' Week for no reason he'd been told, and Imperial seems to have gone the same route. Maybe it's clearer for overseas students, who make up a large proportion at Imperial, something like 40%.)
The lecturer who does our introductory course told us that they've recently had a rebranding exercise, and although you can call it "Imperial" or "Imperial College London", it is now forbidden to call it "Imperial College". I found that rather pleasing, not least because it's reminiscent of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, who could be called Princess Diana but never Princess Diana of Wales, and I like to spot similarities to her in everyday life.
The other students seem like a nice bunch. I've not found anyone older than me yet, but I have found one other person with a humanities PhD. There are seven or so women from about seventy students, and between a third and half of the students are from China. Most people have degrees in Maths or Engineering, and some have been earning their living for years as software engineers, which is pretty daunting of them. Some of them seem so young they make me want to take up knitting and start calling people "dearie". But oddly there are only two or three other people who take notes on their laptops. And everything is done on paper. All the departmental registering was done by post, even my ID photo which I had to print out so that they could scan it into their system, and all the lectures come with massive wodges of notes printed off the internet (which at least saves me the trouble of having to scan them in again).
Also much as I love Devon I think it's going to suit me very well to be back in a city for a bit. Hurray! Even the District Line can't get me down.
PS That post title is actually quite clever you know.
So it's going well so far, if exhaustingly, although I think it speeds up once we've done the introductory course and start the full range of languages and courses. (We're going to write in Assembler!) Thankfully Welcome Week is truncated for us masters students, because I don't need all that awkward acclimatisation stuff. All the new postgrads together had a welcome from some senior people on the first day, and it was a bit odd to be exhorted to look after each other and make lifelong friendships. I found myself thinking, "But haven't I already got some friends? I'm sure I've got their names written down somewhere". But I think I felt pretty similarly the first time round. The Freshers' Fair was really horrible, and that's just how I remember it too. (Incidentally, my brother who works at Exeter University was complaining about having to call it Welcome Week not Freshers' Week for no reason he'd been told, and Imperial seems to have gone the same route. Maybe it's clearer for overseas students, who make up a large proportion at Imperial, something like 40%.)
The lecturer who does our introductory course told us that they've recently had a rebranding exercise, and although you can call it "Imperial" or "Imperial College London", it is now forbidden to call it "Imperial College". I found that rather pleasing, not least because it's reminiscent of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, who could be called Princess Diana but never Princess Diana of Wales, and I like to spot similarities to her in everyday life.
The other students seem like a nice bunch. I've not found anyone older than me yet, but I have found one other person with a humanities PhD. There are seven or so women from about seventy students, and between a third and half of the students are from China. Most people have degrees in Maths or Engineering, and some have been earning their living for years as software engineers, which is pretty daunting of them. Some of them seem so young they make me want to take up knitting and start calling people "dearie". But oddly there are only two or three other people who take notes on their laptops. And everything is done on paper. All the departmental registering was done by post, even my ID photo which I had to print out so that they could scan it into their system, and all the lectures come with massive wodges of notes printed off the internet (which at least saves me the trouble of having to scan them in again).
Also much as I love Devon I think it's going to suit me very well to be back in a city for a bit. Hurray! Even the District Line can't get me down.
PS That post title is actually quite clever you know.
Sunday, 2 October 2011
Musik
This Frankmusik song has the catchiest chorus ever. I also really like the video. (This is not how I think of Frankmusik.)
Also Nicola Roberts' My Lucky Day has really grown on me.
And I have completely changed my mind about Gary Barlow. Back after Take That split up I used to think of him as the epitome of talented but unappealing. But seeing him and Robbie reminiscing at Judge's Houses on X Factor was brilliant. I'm sending this out there into the ether because I don't actually know anyone in this country who would understand what I mean, except maybe my sister-in-law, and I'm too ashamed to phone her up just to talk about Gary Barlow.
Also Nicola Roberts' My Lucky Day has really grown on me.
And I have completely changed my mind about Gary Barlow. Back after Take That split up I used to think of him as the epitome of talented but unappealing. But seeing him and Robbie reminiscing at Judge's Houses on X Factor was brilliant. I'm sending this out there into the ether because I don't actually know anyone in this country who would understand what I mean, except maybe my sister-in-law, and I'm too ashamed to phone her up just to talk about Gary Barlow.
Friday, 30 September 2011
Sad news
Mark Blackburn, super-excellent coin man, intelligent conversationalist, one of the best sort of scholars, has died at 58. I only just heard.
Reamde and other September books
It's the last day of September and I am fretting about some electrical works the details of which I will not bore you with here. So I thought I'd take some time out to blog about some of the more noteworthy books I've read in September.
1. Reamde, Neal Stephenson.
I'm a big fan of Stephenson, and I loved this book. But I was a bit wierded-out by the way it didn't seem to be about anything. Cryptonomicon, for example, is a great adventure story but also about security in various different forms. It has lots of big ideas in it. The Baroque Trilogy, which I adore, is about a big shift in ways of thinking, an attempt to remake the world in terms of intellectual productivity instead of inherited landed status, and it's about the big flaw in the remade world (slavery), and at the same time it's extremely rollicking. Anathem is just amazingly crammed full of ideas, far too many to summarise. I loved the bit linking the oddities of consciousness to quantum physics, I loved the alternate worlds stuff -- it's just amazing. In fact when friends of mine complain about Stephenson it's the crammed-full-of-ideas-ness of it that bugs them. I like this, myself -- I can't imagine anyone else who could make you feel how truly amazing it would be to be around when Newton invented calculus. So Reamde is a brilliant adventure story, reminiscent of some of the bits in the Baroque trilogy where Half-Cocked Jack is careering picaresquely around the South Pacific. But it doesn't have a theme or idea. It has baddies -- crazy Russians and international jihadists -- and a heroine, and it's very hard to put down. But even though it's immensely long (the Kindle was invented for books like this) it still feels like one episode in a much larger canvas which would bring out what it's all actually about. (The bits in the MMORPG are neither here nor there -- they're just another setting, like the bits that are set in mountains, or the bits in docks in China.) So maybe this is a Neal Stephenson book for people who aren't fans of Neal Stephenson. It's a great read, but it never made me feel the thing where it's like he's opened up a big dizzying vista of ideas, and that's my favourite Neal Stephenson thing.
2. The Cookbook Collector and Intuition, Allegra Goodman.
I hadn't heard of Allegra Goodman until an article which received quite a bit of notice in book-related blogs, especially American ones, claiming that the ignoring of Goodman while Franzen was surrounded by "Great American Novel" plaudits was due to the sexist nature of the modern literary world. This was specifically about The Cookbook Collector, which came out at the same time as Freedom. That's why I read The Cookbook Collector, and I really enjoyed it. It's about two sisters who are particularly close because they lost their mother as children. It starts in the late 90s when they are both living in the San Francisco area: sensible elder Emily is the CEO of a highly-revered internet startup; idealistic Jessamine is a post-grad who works part-time in a rare-book shop (where she encounters the eponymous Cookbook Collector). There's more than a hint of Sense and Sensibility in their relationship. After this I read Intuition, which is an excellent examination of the scientific method and its intersection with the reality of humans with their complicated motives and ability to self-deceive. I really enjoyed this one too, and I recommend it highly. (As for Franzen, I just couldn't get caring about The Corrections, but I'll give Freedom a try sometime.)
3. The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins.
A much plaudited trilogy set in a nearish-future post-Apocalyptic North America where poor children chosen by lot fight to the death in a complicated arena for the amusement of the rich and powerful. It's very well done, and quite realistic about the psychological toll of killing. This does not make it a cheerful read. -- in fact it's a bit oppressive. Probably best for intense teenagers to write book reports on.
1. Reamde, Neal Stephenson.
I'm a big fan of Stephenson, and I loved this book. But I was a bit wierded-out by the way it didn't seem to be about anything. Cryptonomicon, for example, is a great adventure story but also about security in various different forms. It has lots of big ideas in it. The Baroque Trilogy, which I adore, is about a big shift in ways of thinking, an attempt to remake the world in terms of intellectual productivity instead of inherited landed status, and it's about the big flaw in the remade world (slavery), and at the same time it's extremely rollicking. Anathem is just amazingly crammed full of ideas, far too many to summarise. I loved the bit linking the oddities of consciousness to quantum physics, I loved the alternate worlds stuff -- it's just amazing. In fact when friends of mine complain about Stephenson it's the crammed-full-of-ideas-ness of it that bugs them. I like this, myself -- I can't imagine anyone else who could make you feel how truly amazing it would be to be around when Newton invented calculus. So Reamde is a brilliant adventure story, reminiscent of some of the bits in the Baroque trilogy where Half-Cocked Jack is careering picaresquely around the South Pacific. But it doesn't have a theme or idea. It has baddies -- crazy Russians and international jihadists -- and a heroine, and it's very hard to put down. But even though it's immensely long (the Kindle was invented for books like this) it still feels like one episode in a much larger canvas which would bring out what it's all actually about. (The bits in the MMORPG are neither here nor there -- they're just another setting, like the bits that are set in mountains, or the bits in docks in China.) So maybe this is a Neal Stephenson book for people who aren't fans of Neal Stephenson. It's a great read, but it never made me feel the thing where it's like he's opened up a big dizzying vista of ideas, and that's my favourite Neal Stephenson thing.
2. The Cookbook Collector and Intuition, Allegra Goodman.
I hadn't heard of Allegra Goodman until an article which received quite a bit of notice in book-related blogs, especially American ones, claiming that the ignoring of Goodman while Franzen was surrounded by "Great American Novel" plaudits was due to the sexist nature of the modern literary world. This was specifically about The Cookbook Collector, which came out at the same time as Freedom. That's why I read The Cookbook Collector, and I really enjoyed it. It's about two sisters who are particularly close because they lost their mother as children. It starts in the late 90s when they are both living in the San Francisco area: sensible elder Emily is the CEO of a highly-revered internet startup; idealistic Jessamine is a post-grad who works part-time in a rare-book shop (where she encounters the eponymous Cookbook Collector). There's more than a hint of Sense and Sensibility in their relationship. After this I read Intuition, which is an excellent examination of the scientific method and its intersection with the reality of humans with their complicated motives and ability to self-deceive. I really enjoyed this one too, and I recommend it highly. (As for Franzen, I just couldn't get caring about The Corrections, but I'll give Freedom a try sometime.)
3. The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins.
A much plaudited trilogy set in a nearish-future post-Apocalyptic North America where poor children chosen by lot fight to the death in a complicated arena for the amusement of the rich and powerful. It's very well done, and quite realistic about the psychological toll of killing. This does not make it a cheerful read. -- in fact it's a bit oppressive. Probably best for intense teenagers to write book reports on.
Wednesday, 28 September 2011
Town
1. I moved to London! This was despite the best efforts of a nasty cough which my Dad picked up in China. He was lured at short notice to an international conference on biodiversity, the organisers having suddenly noticed that their international conference had only one overseas participant. So they panicked and asked my Dad and a few other people including a Norwegian who is one of his oldest friends. Together they climbed a mountain to look at a particularly rare species of birch. (There are only eleven specimens known apparently, and they were taken to see just one of them.) He came back laden with souvenir gifts -- I think it was in the interests of the organisers to make much of their overseas guests in order to emphasise their importance. I have no idea whatsoever how scholarship works in Communist China but in this regard it sounds just like western academia, in that you have to have a big conference with lots of overseas visitors to demonstrate to your funders that you're doing international collaboration, and interoperability, and all that liaising stuff. They gave him a commemorative pot laser-engraved with the date and title of the conference in both Chinese and English, and a lavishly produced book about the region containing at its centre a gold medal commemorating the 150th anniversary of the independence of Mexico, for reasons none of us understand, being Mandarin-illiterate. I think he had a whale of a time. But he brought back a nasty virus which I caught off him and which, among other things, made me come out in hives on contact with sunshine. The doctor thought this so interesting he called in another doctor to have a look. So at least someone got something out of it. Anyway it seems to be under control now. Hurray!
2. I'll miss my excellent nephew. I'm sure he'll remember me, but I hope he won't miss me in a sad way. Apparently the other day he came across a big spider, and said to his mother "Very big spider scare Rebecca" so maybe I'm not always the best influence.
3. Oh how beautiful Devon is. I am going to miss the countryside very much. But on the other hand London has some big advantages. I have never lived here before but for the nine or so months when I worked at the British Library manuscripts department felicis memoriae I spent quite a bit of time here with people who were not well paid, and I know that it is possible to amuse one's self without huge expenditure. For example, the V&A does excellent free evenings like this one. And when I hear about interesting talks it will now be much easier to consider going to them.
4. On the other hand everything else in London is horribly expensive, and I am not living near any cheap shops. There's a little Sainsbury's but it essentially serves people passing through Waterloo station so it's hardly a good place to buy things regularly. I am going to be oh so very skint this year. But skint in the pursuit of knowledge!
5. In other news, the Amazon Kindle website suggests that the new Neal Stephenson is for people who are fans of Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross. This is wrong. Stephenson could eat Stross and Doctorow as a pre-breakfast snack. It's like saying Tolstoy is for fans of Henry James. I am loving Reamde so far. I had serious trouble putting it down and going to sleep last night.
2. I'll miss my excellent nephew. I'm sure he'll remember me, but I hope he won't miss me in a sad way. Apparently the other day he came across a big spider, and said to his mother "Very big spider scare Rebecca" so maybe I'm not always the best influence.
3. Oh how beautiful Devon is. I am going to miss the countryside very much. But on the other hand London has some big advantages. I have never lived here before but for the nine or so months when I worked at the British Library manuscripts department felicis memoriae I spent quite a bit of time here with people who were not well paid, and I know that it is possible to amuse one's self without huge expenditure. For example, the V&A does excellent free evenings like this one. And when I hear about interesting talks it will now be much easier to consider going to them.
4. On the other hand everything else in London is horribly expensive, and I am not living near any cheap shops. There's a little Sainsbury's but it essentially serves people passing through Waterloo station so it's hardly a good place to buy things regularly. I am going to be oh so very skint this year. But skint in the pursuit of knowledge!
5. In other news, the Amazon Kindle website suggests that the new Neal Stephenson is for people who are fans of Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross. This is wrong. Stephenson could eat Stross and Doctorow as a pre-breakfast snack. It's like saying Tolstoy is for fans of Henry James. I am loving Reamde so far. I had serious trouble putting it down and going to sleep last night.
Thursday, 22 September 2011
It's the guilt
After a couple of difficult weeks when I removed at least one massive spider from my room most nights, I now haven't seen any for several days. Last night I was bitten twice on my arm by insects. I do know I deserve this.
Thursday, 15 September 2011
The bigger person
Last night I evicted a massive spider from my bedroom in my parents' house. Just now I removed four -- four! -- from the collar of a coat that lives in the same room. I spent most of the day ignoring them, trying to be the bigger person, like Uncle Toby and his philosophy that there's enough room in this world for us and invetebrates. But I couldn't do it. I couldn't stop thinking about them behind me. I know I'm a fool, but they were massive! A good three inches across each, and the big hairy kind with large mandibles. Although Wikipedia tells me that the giant house spider is one of the few UK spiders capable of biting through human skin, I'm not at all afraid of one biting me. I fear the guilt of squashing one by accident, and I fear the fear itself. There must be more around too...
Wednesday, 14 September 2011
Books I enjoyed in August
This week I have been missing a) the internet b) my mum. My mother has gone on holiday for the first time in something like fifteen years, and is only rarely reachable by phone. At my little Exeter house, where I'm trying to get things up to scratch so I can let it out when I move to London, I'm double stymied by not being able to ask either google or my mother questions about basic DIY.
Anyway, I'm back in wifi range at the moment so I thought I'd blog briefly about some of the books I read last month.
1. The Old Man and His Sons by Heðin Bru. An interesting picture of the old Faroese way of life at a time when it was dying out. This novel starts with a great whale hunt in Seyrvags fjord. Everyone hurries down from nearby villages to take part, and in the excitement afterwards 70-year-old Ketil bids too much at the whale meat auction. The novel follows Ketil, his wife, and his dim-witted son, as they try to get some money to pay the bill despite their self-sufficient lifestyle. They clash with Ketil's other sons, who have married and try to live a less unsophisticated life. Very Scandinavian in being both funny and grim, often at the same time.
2. Stories edited by Al Sarrantonio and Neil Gaiman. A great short story collection. There are no duds and some are brilliant.
3. The Dervish House by Ian McDonald. Excellent near-future sci-fi set in Istanbul, queen of cities. It starts with a terrorist attack on a tram, and goes on to mix the ultra modern with history and lots of different cultures in a way which I think of as typical of Istanbul (though it's not a city I know well and I've only been there once, so perhaps it's a romantic vision of the city).
4. Booky-Wook 2 by Russell Brand. Entertaining, but he's got too much brain to keep on like this. Is it good to be self-aware when you're aware of being a tool? Or is it just reprehensible?
5. Jump! by Jilly Cooper. Oh Jilly Cooper, I love you! Read this if you're a fan, if not then don't. Some of it is preposterous but I still enjoyed it immensely.
Also I reread some Georgette Heyer on Kindle. My favourite Heyers are Venetia, Frederica, and The Grand Sophy. Venetia still makes me cry.
Anyway, I'm back in wifi range at the moment so I thought I'd blog briefly about some of the books I read last month.
1. The Old Man and His Sons by Heðin Bru. An interesting picture of the old Faroese way of life at a time when it was dying out. This novel starts with a great whale hunt in Seyrvags fjord. Everyone hurries down from nearby villages to take part, and in the excitement afterwards 70-year-old Ketil bids too much at the whale meat auction. The novel follows Ketil, his wife, and his dim-witted son, as they try to get some money to pay the bill despite their self-sufficient lifestyle. They clash with Ketil's other sons, who have married and try to live a less unsophisticated life. Very Scandinavian in being both funny and grim, often at the same time.
2. Stories edited by Al Sarrantonio and Neil Gaiman. A great short story collection. There are no duds and some are brilliant.
3. The Dervish House by Ian McDonald. Excellent near-future sci-fi set in Istanbul, queen of cities. It starts with a terrorist attack on a tram, and goes on to mix the ultra modern with history and lots of different cultures in a way which I think of as typical of Istanbul (though it's not a city I know well and I've only been there once, so perhaps it's a romantic vision of the city).
4. Booky-Wook 2 by Russell Brand. Entertaining, but he's got too much brain to keep on like this. Is it good to be self-aware when you're aware of being a tool? Or is it just reprehensible?
5. Jump! by Jilly Cooper. Oh Jilly Cooper, I love you! Read this if you're a fan, if not then don't. Some of it is preposterous but I still enjoyed it immensely.
Also I reread some Georgette Heyer on Kindle. My favourite Heyers are Venetia, Frederica, and The Grand Sophy. Venetia still makes me cry.
Friday, 2 September 2011
Message for Anna full of unsolicited advice...
I was writing a reply to a comment made by Anna (from Step by Step to the Classics) on my last post when two things happened. 1, for some reason blogger won't let me leave the comment and 2, the comment got ridiculously long (which may be the cause of 1). So I thought I'd post it as an actual blog entry. It's mostly completely unsolicited advice about PhD and post-doctoral work. Since some of it's personal to Anna's situation I do hope that she won't mind my posting it like this... But then again my blog has a very limited readership, and it occurred to me that of the few people who do read it some may have useful comments to add, or corrections to make. For an academic career to be sustainable in the long term you have to get a permanent post, and I never managed to do that, which I'm very aware rather undercuts any advice I may give...
Hi Anna
My experience is not everyone's, and I think the crucial problem for me was the lack of stability. Because I do love the subject, and I loved the teaching, and for a while even though I was doing far too much (at one point two half-time jobs, two days a week of 9-5 supervising, plus various committees in my capacity as a research (hah!) fellow) it was stuff I liked doing. It's so hard to say no to something when it's something you really want to do. And there are plenty of tenured academics working that hard, though not all of them by any means. Because what they are doing is part of their real job, they can work like crazy over the examining period (the only way to get through it) and then in the following week take things just a bit easier, even if they still have things on like Masters examining. Whereas for me the following week was when I had to stay late at work to make up for all the time I'd had to take off to get the examining and supervising done (and even then my boss was doing me a favour by being flexible). I would get endless invitations to May Week afternoon garden parties and want to send them all back with "I HAVE A JOB!" scrawled on them in some sort of crazy crayon. (Which of course would have been very unfair on the inviters, who were just being nice.) The situation was not sustainable in terms of my mental health. Also I never meant to be an academic, and the job I adored was at the British Library, but it was only temporary, and there was a Research Associate post just at the right time to lure me back to Cambridge. With the benefit of hindsight that may have been a mistake, though at the time I didn't have much option.
But it was the constant worry at the back of my mind about what I'd be doing in a couple of years' time that eventually overcame me. I'm 35 now and I've never had a contract for more than three years. When I'm 40 I'd like to be in a position to make a guess at what I'll be up to when I'm 45. When I was a teenager my ambition was to work three days a week and have a dog. You can't have a dog if you don't know whether you'll be in a position to give it a home in five years' time, it would be irresponsible. And it's annoying how some senior academics, who got long-term posts at a young age, don't realise how grindingly disheartening this lack of stability becomes over time. You say something about how you're really busy, they say they're really busy too, as if it were the same when they're an internationally-renowned tenured professor with no reputation to make and a secure and generous wage and pension package. (Not that I'm bitter...)
I do wonder whether if things had gone differently -- say I had done a Maths or Computing degree instead, or had become an Actuary after my BA which was my plan if I didn't get a first -- I would now be thinking that the money and stability was all very well but I wanted to go with my passion for learning. And perhaps I would be making a move in an opposite direction. That might well be the case, and I think there's really nothing wrong with that. Neither choice is the absolute right one and of course what you want from life is going to be affected by your experience of it so far. Like Jane Eyre we might not be able to find absolute freedom, but still yearn for a new servitude. (I love Jane Eyre. We also learn from her to assume that all men have madwomen in their attics unless proven otherwise.)
Anyway that's a long-winded way of saying that you shouldn't let my experience put you off, just be aware of the pitfalls. You're a sensible person, and I expect having a daughter, though making some things harder practically speaking, would help to keep you grounded. And among all the administrative palaver and petty egotism of academia, you will find some people who truly love learning.
I think I'm right that you've just done a Masters and now it's a question of whether or not to do a PhD and embark on the academic ladder? Don't do a PhD unless you love it, because Humanities PhDs are a weird experience, and the scholarship is only half of it. I think you will be able to dodge a lot of the neuroses by being a bit older and having an actual life, but you will be surrounded by neurotics. I've got some PhD tips:
1. The first thing to write is the contents page. Don't leave your first term without one. Of course you're bound to change it hugely, but having an overview of what you're planning to do is very useful, and makes you feel less helpless in the face of a huge task.
2. Work out what your PhD supervisor is like. There are a few very good PhD supervisors out there but most have at least one serious flaw which you'll need to learn to work around. My supervisor turned my PhD into a complex game of hide and seek, and made me feel like a stalker when all I wanted was a meeting once every two or three months. But he was always wonderfully helpful when I did catch him. Another supervisor I knew was brilliant if given work to look at on the spot but never found time to read it in advance, and was thus best approached in person with little things he could deal with immediately. If you have a sensible PhD supervisor then arrange a schedule with them, agreeing on meetings at particular intervals and on what work you'll produce. Some PhD supervisors do this automatically but you'd be surprised how many wouldn't, and you may have to take the lead in making this sort of arrangement. Some treat dealing with their supervisees as a chore which they will avoid like a small child who does not want a bath. Again, being a bit older and more grounded will probably help you here. But don't be surprised if you have to be the adult one in the supervisor--supervisee relationship. Decide what you want, double-check to assure yourself that it's reasonable, and work out how best to get it given your supervisor's character.
3. Don't get caught up in the "who is cleverer" game. Decide you're clever enough and then just get on with it. There's a lot of neurosis out there. It's not only postgrads either. Again you're a sensible person, I expect you'd be fine about this.
4. Something that was really useful for me, though it might not be for everyone, was having a side-project during my PhD. The main one was a book on Anglo-Saxon calendars which came out as a departmental publication and then more recently with the Henry Bradshaw Society. Its use as a publication is secondary to its usefulness in giving me something to escape into when the PhD was a bit much, something I could feel uncomplicatedly good about because it didn't have the PhD's pressures on it. But because you have a proper life you might not need that escape. A friend of mine played professional-level squash, and said that that different world helped to keep him sane.
5. Invest a little time in learning how to use Word (or whatever word processor you use). Word has features which I discovered a month or two after finishing my PhD which would have been so so useful. Outline view lets you outline things before writing them, and then later move whole paragraphs around without trouble. Styles are really helpful because you can set up a Heading style, a Sub-heading style, a Sub-sub-heading, etc, and then just get on with the writing, secure in the knowledge that your formatting will be consistent. Automatic cross-references will save you from having to fill in lots of "See below, pp. 000-000" footnotes at the last minute. If you've used Styles properly then Word can automatically produce a Table of Contents for you, complete with page references, to your own specifications. And Word also has automatic index-generating features, which can cope with headwords and sub-headwords. My PhD was very manuscript-based so only had a manuscript index, which I compiled laboriously by hand at the last minute, using a complete printout and several different colours of highlighter pen. Indexes, as opposed to styles, are something you can worry about at the end, but it would still be pretty useful to do it automatically: for example, you could search for all instances of the name "Boethius" and each time mark it up as a headword, instead of doing the searching with your eyes. (I don't personally use Endnote's Cite as You Write feature because I find it just a tad more hassle than it's worth, but I do use Endnote to store bibliography for future reference.) These Word features don't take much time to learn and are then really useful. Cambridge has free courses in using Word and I learnt all this stuff in two mornings (a Basic and an Advanced), and it has saved me so very much time since. It drives me crazy now when I have to deal with editors who don't know this stuff -- I send them a beautifully edited piece and they send it back for a few minor alterations with all the styles messed up. Or they can't even deal with tracked comments.
6. Relating to that last complaint, I think the thing which would most improve academia would be the introduction of this simple concept: "professionalism". Younger academics tend to be better at this, but there are so many academics who seem to think it's in some way OK not to be able to use the basic tools of their trade, or OK to act like divas or troubled geniuses. I'm sure you won't need to be exhorted to be professional, with your real-world experience, but you might be shocked to find those around you not being.
Anyway that was some unasked for advice, given rather more for my benefit (because it's nice to feel one has learnt something) than for yours. Here's some more about the post-PhD years:
1. Publish. Don't be neurotic about it, just be active. This was something I did right, because I have always loved writing.
2. Consider your options and be pro-active about creating options for yourself. This is something I did wrong, because I tended to take opportunities which were presented instead of making them for myself. The post-docs were things which were offered to me, and things which I took on the grounds of combined interest and needing a job. Probably I should have applied for money to do my own thing. I never once put in an application for Leverhulme or British Academy funding, because I always had too much on my plate to which I was already committed. I think that landing one of those big projects has its pitfalls -- personally I really like the daily routine of working with people from set hours, and too much working alone drives me a little crazy. But I got so fed up eventually with never getting to do my own thing, and also landing funding looks really good on your CV. (I was involved in lots of funding applications but always as part of a team.) I think that publications, teaching, and ability to procure funding are the three big things employers want to see.
3. If you can go to courses about teaching then that's probably a good thing. A friend of mine missed out on a big job because she didn't talk about Learning Outcomes. She would have been so much better at it than the person who got it. Academics moan about these bureaucratic requirements but I think they've usually got their good points as well as bad. I would have welcomed more opportunity to learn about standard thought on teaching practice, but I didn't realise it was an option until it was too late to take advantage. It comes down to a desire for professionalism.
4. How to be loved at conferences: never ever ever go over the time limit, and give them something to look at, either texts or images. And try to convey a reason why your audience should be interested. The worst papers are those given by people who think their paper is about how clever they are, and actually the more eminent the speaker the more likely they are to fall into this trap, and think that no-one will mind if they go over time. It's professionalism again -- a lot of academics seem to think that being frightfully clever excuses them from professionalism, or even act as though being professional would in some way imply that they didn't have frightfully clever brains, and then younger impressionable ones copy the older ones because they think that's the standard academic way to behave.
Anyway, this was a bit self-indulgent of me,and I hope you won't think it condescending -- I expect that you will effortlessly avoid the pitfalls that await green 22-year-olds when they start a PhD straight from a BA and Masters with no break. Whatever you decide, I sincerely wish you all the best with it.
Hi Anna
My experience is not everyone's, and I think the crucial problem for me was the lack of stability. Because I do love the subject, and I loved the teaching, and for a while even though I was doing far too much (at one point two half-time jobs, two days a week of 9-5 supervising, plus various committees in my capacity as a research (hah!) fellow) it was stuff I liked doing. It's so hard to say no to something when it's something you really want to do. And there are plenty of tenured academics working that hard, though not all of them by any means. Because what they are doing is part of their real job, they can work like crazy over the examining period (the only way to get through it) and then in the following week take things just a bit easier, even if they still have things on like Masters examining. Whereas for me the following week was when I had to stay late at work to make up for all the time I'd had to take off to get the examining and supervising done (and even then my boss was doing me a favour by being flexible). I would get endless invitations to May Week afternoon garden parties and want to send them all back with "I HAVE A JOB!" scrawled on them in some sort of crazy crayon. (Which of course would have been very unfair on the inviters, who were just being nice.) The situation was not sustainable in terms of my mental health. Also I never meant to be an academic, and the job I adored was at the British Library, but it was only temporary, and there was a Research Associate post just at the right time to lure me back to Cambridge. With the benefit of hindsight that may have been a mistake, though at the time I didn't have much option.
But it was the constant worry at the back of my mind about what I'd be doing in a couple of years' time that eventually overcame me. I'm 35 now and I've never had a contract for more than three years. When I'm 40 I'd like to be in a position to make a guess at what I'll be up to when I'm 45. When I was a teenager my ambition was to work three days a week and have a dog. You can't have a dog if you don't know whether you'll be in a position to give it a home in five years' time, it would be irresponsible. And it's annoying how some senior academics, who got long-term posts at a young age, don't realise how grindingly disheartening this lack of stability becomes over time. You say something about how you're really busy, they say they're really busy too, as if it were the same when they're an internationally-renowned tenured professor with no reputation to make and a secure and generous wage and pension package. (Not that I'm bitter...)
I do wonder whether if things had gone differently -- say I had done a Maths or Computing degree instead, or had become an Actuary after my BA which was my plan if I didn't get a first -- I would now be thinking that the money and stability was all very well but I wanted to go with my passion for learning. And perhaps I would be making a move in an opposite direction. That might well be the case, and I think there's really nothing wrong with that. Neither choice is the absolute right one and of course what you want from life is going to be affected by your experience of it so far. Like Jane Eyre we might not be able to find absolute freedom, but still yearn for a new servitude. (I love Jane Eyre. We also learn from her to assume that all men have madwomen in their attics unless proven otherwise.)
Anyway that's a long-winded way of saying that you shouldn't let my experience put you off, just be aware of the pitfalls. You're a sensible person, and I expect having a daughter, though making some things harder practically speaking, would help to keep you grounded. And among all the administrative palaver and petty egotism of academia, you will find some people who truly love learning.
I think I'm right that you've just done a Masters and now it's a question of whether or not to do a PhD and embark on the academic ladder? Don't do a PhD unless you love it, because Humanities PhDs are a weird experience, and the scholarship is only half of it. I think you will be able to dodge a lot of the neuroses by being a bit older and having an actual life, but you will be surrounded by neurotics. I've got some PhD tips:
1. The first thing to write is the contents page. Don't leave your first term without one. Of course you're bound to change it hugely, but having an overview of what you're planning to do is very useful, and makes you feel less helpless in the face of a huge task.
2. Work out what your PhD supervisor is like. There are a few very good PhD supervisors out there but most have at least one serious flaw which you'll need to learn to work around. My supervisor turned my PhD into a complex game of hide and seek, and made me feel like a stalker when all I wanted was a meeting once every two or three months. But he was always wonderfully helpful when I did catch him. Another supervisor I knew was brilliant if given work to look at on the spot but never found time to read it in advance, and was thus best approached in person with little things he could deal with immediately. If you have a sensible PhD supervisor then arrange a schedule with them, agreeing on meetings at particular intervals and on what work you'll produce. Some PhD supervisors do this automatically but you'd be surprised how many wouldn't, and you may have to take the lead in making this sort of arrangement. Some treat dealing with their supervisees as a chore which they will avoid like a small child who does not want a bath. Again, being a bit older and more grounded will probably help you here. But don't be surprised if you have to be the adult one in the supervisor--supervisee relationship. Decide what you want, double-check to assure yourself that it's reasonable, and work out how best to get it given your supervisor's character.
3. Don't get caught up in the "who is cleverer" game. Decide you're clever enough and then just get on with it. There's a lot of neurosis out there. It's not only postgrads either. Again you're a sensible person, I expect you'd be fine about this.
4. Something that was really useful for me, though it might not be for everyone, was having a side-project during my PhD. The main one was a book on Anglo-Saxon calendars which came out as a departmental publication and then more recently with the Henry Bradshaw Society. Its use as a publication is secondary to its usefulness in giving me something to escape into when the PhD was a bit much, something I could feel uncomplicatedly good about because it didn't have the PhD's pressures on it. But because you have a proper life you might not need that escape. A friend of mine played professional-level squash, and said that that different world helped to keep him sane.
5. Invest a little time in learning how to use Word (or whatever word processor you use). Word has features which I discovered a month or two after finishing my PhD which would have been so so useful. Outline view lets you outline things before writing them, and then later move whole paragraphs around without trouble. Styles are really helpful because you can set up a Heading style, a Sub-heading style, a Sub-sub-heading, etc, and then just get on with the writing, secure in the knowledge that your formatting will be consistent. Automatic cross-references will save you from having to fill in lots of "See below, pp. 000-000" footnotes at the last minute. If you've used Styles properly then Word can automatically produce a Table of Contents for you, complete with page references, to your own specifications. And Word also has automatic index-generating features, which can cope with headwords and sub-headwords. My PhD was very manuscript-based so only had a manuscript index, which I compiled laboriously by hand at the last minute, using a complete printout and several different colours of highlighter pen. Indexes, as opposed to styles, are something you can worry about at the end, but it would still be pretty useful to do it automatically: for example, you could search for all instances of the name "Boethius" and each time mark it up as a headword, instead of doing the searching with your eyes. (I don't personally use Endnote's Cite as You Write feature because I find it just a tad more hassle than it's worth, but I do use Endnote to store bibliography for future reference.) These Word features don't take much time to learn and are then really useful. Cambridge has free courses in using Word and I learnt all this stuff in two mornings (a Basic and an Advanced), and it has saved me so very much time since. It drives me crazy now when I have to deal with editors who don't know this stuff -- I send them a beautifully edited piece and they send it back for a few minor alterations with all the styles messed up. Or they can't even deal with tracked comments.
6. Relating to that last complaint, I think the thing which would most improve academia would be the introduction of this simple concept: "professionalism". Younger academics tend to be better at this, but there are so many academics who seem to think it's in some way OK not to be able to use the basic tools of their trade, or OK to act like divas or troubled geniuses. I'm sure you won't need to be exhorted to be professional, with your real-world experience, but you might be shocked to find those around you not being.
Anyway that was some unasked for advice, given rather more for my benefit (because it's nice to feel one has learnt something) than for yours. Here's some more about the post-PhD years:
1. Publish. Don't be neurotic about it, just be active. This was something I did right, because I have always loved writing.
2. Consider your options and be pro-active about creating options for yourself. This is something I did wrong, because I tended to take opportunities which were presented instead of making them for myself. The post-docs were things which were offered to me, and things which I took on the grounds of combined interest and needing a job. Probably I should have applied for money to do my own thing. I never once put in an application for Leverhulme or British Academy funding, because I always had too much on my plate to which I was already committed. I think that landing one of those big projects has its pitfalls -- personally I really like the daily routine of working with people from set hours, and too much working alone drives me a little crazy. But I got so fed up eventually with never getting to do my own thing, and also landing funding looks really good on your CV. (I was involved in lots of funding applications but always as part of a team.) I think that publications, teaching, and ability to procure funding are the three big things employers want to see.
3. If you can go to courses about teaching then that's probably a good thing. A friend of mine missed out on a big job because she didn't talk about Learning Outcomes. She would have been so much better at it than the person who got it. Academics moan about these bureaucratic requirements but I think they've usually got their good points as well as bad. I would have welcomed more opportunity to learn about standard thought on teaching practice, but I didn't realise it was an option until it was too late to take advantage. It comes down to a desire for professionalism.
4. How to be loved at conferences: never ever ever go over the time limit, and give them something to look at, either texts or images. And try to convey a reason why your audience should be interested. The worst papers are those given by people who think their paper is about how clever they are, and actually the more eminent the speaker the more likely they are to fall into this trap, and think that no-one will mind if they go over time. It's professionalism again -- a lot of academics seem to think that being frightfully clever excuses them from professionalism, or even act as though being professional would in some way imply that they didn't have frightfully clever brains, and then younger impressionable ones copy the older ones because they think that's the standard academic way to behave.
Anyway, this was a bit self-indulgent of me,and I hope you won't think it condescending -- I expect that you will effortlessly avoid the pitfalls that await green 22-year-olds when they start a PhD straight from a BA and Masters with no break. Whatever you decide, I sincerely wish you all the best with it.
Thursday, 1 September 2011
Future things!
1. I've sold my little flat in Cambridge and am buying a little house in Exeter. I haven't let myself get excited about this hitherto because apparently at the moment roughly one in three house sales are collapsing without getting anywhere, but now we've exchanged and my buyer can't pull out. (Or at least he can, but he'd forfeit the deposit, which would be a consolation of sorts.) So now I'm getting all excited about it. I'm going to have a little garden! This is the first step towards being able to get a dog. If I told my eighteen-year-old self that I was thirty-five and didn't have a dog, she'd be utterly aghast.
2. The other thing one needs is a job. I don't know if it's inconsistent to feel strongly that the humanities should be funded, but also to feel strongly that there's no reason why they should fund me, and that anyone who feels entitled to funding would be hard to like. I love the scholarship I do, and I do it well. But trying to love academia is probably the closest insight I'll ever get into a being a follower of one of those football teams that are consistently crap. I'm tired of short-term jobs which are essentially glorified data-entry, and I'm tired of being presented by senior established academics with the opportunity to do punishingly hard extra work with little support or pay as if this were some sort of favour. The example which I'm still working towards being able to laugh at one day is when I set the Part II Anglo-Saxon History paper, one of the more popular options for that year's finalists. I tried very hard to say no to this because it was not part of my full-time paid job, I was already Director of Studies for about a sixth of the department (I had more students than any of the actual lecturers), and I had made it clear at the end of the previous year that I really could not fit examining in on top of all this, but they said there was no one else available who knew enough about the special subject, and I eventually agreed because I thought it important to do right by that year's students. (Of course it's important to do right by every year's students but they were a particularly bright and likeable bunch whom I knew quite well.) Setting it was very hard indeed, and included producing short texts in Latin and Old English (some of which I had to get not from printed editions but from original manuscripts) together with translations. I did all the proofing, turned up to start the exam (luckily the boss of my proper paid job was understanding), marked it, agreed marks with the second examiner, etc etc etc, and was paid a total of fifty-five pounds before tax. I'm not even going to try to work out how much that was per hour for a very highly skilled, highly stressful, important and responsible job. I used to earn more money that that in a Sunday afternoon on the tills at M&S. The thing is, arguably in some sense I consented to this by putting myself into the whole academic environment, and I can't really complain about it too much when I have a remedy in my hands. I'm not a nineteenth-century factory worker with no other prospects.
3. Anyway I'm middle-aged now and it's practically obligatory for me to do a Masters degree at some point (though it ought really to be with the OU). I've decided to rewind to the other great interest of my teenage years. A long time ago I was good at Maths and enjoyed trying to program computers. For a while I was determined to go into Artificial Intelligence. When I went up to the Open Day at St Johns as a sixth-former I hadn't decided between ASNC and Maths or Computer Science (which in retrospect I can see must have been annoying of me). I went for ASNC out of love for the subject, and a bit because the ASNC who showed me round St Johns got out the Lecture List and pointed out that CompSci had nine o'clock lectures on a Saturday. (He also showed me the glorious ASNC section, alas long gone, in Heffers basement.) But sometimes I've regretted leaving all that other stuff behind. (Not least in the Research Associate jobs I've done where, although I was ostensibly employed for my knowledge of Anglo-Saxon England, my actual value to the project was in being able to roll up my sleeves, buy an undergraduate textbook in Relational Database design or whatever (on expenses, I'm not a martyr), and implement a data-management system.)
4. I've got into Imperial College, London, to do an MSc in Computing Science! Yay!
5. This is going to kill two birds with one stone, I hope. For one thing the skills I get should make me able to find intelligent work. Let's hope so, because I do need a job. But also the Imperial MSc has lots of options in Machine Learning and Logic programming etc, which is something I still find really interesting.
6. The downside is that I can't live in my little Exeter house for a year, though I will be renting a room in a friend's house in London (I'm practicing being not too annoying in preparation). Another downside is that I will be surrounded by, I guess, 21-year-old male engineering graduates who find it all much easier than I do. I did ask at my interview whether they take many people from a humanities background, and the man said yes, last year they had a vet. I get the impression that for him "humanities" meant "neither maths nor engineering". One of the things that put me off Maths for an undergraduate degree was the knowledge that I would be learning with geniuses who found it daftly easy, and I think it was a reasonable concern because it's hard for an eighteen-year-old to cope with that sort of thing. But I don't care now, I have enough self-confidence to feel OK with being the slow one in the class. I've always liked mature students when I've taught them. I had one in his 70s during one of my most stressful years, and he always took the time to ask me how I was getting on and exhort me to make sure I wasn't overdoing things. He had been diagnosed with cancer and a limited time to live, and decided to spend his last few years getting a degree in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic. I think we can all applaud that.
7. I shan't miss Anglo-Saxon England because I shan't leave it completely alone. If I have time I may go to the occasional conference as an Independent Scholar -- I know quite a few Independent Scholars who go to conferences and give better papers than the full-timers, and it would be fun to try to join their ranks. As for teaching, I've given that up already, and I do miss it a bit. I particularly used to enjoy teaching those students whom one could enthuse about the subject, and who would go on to get 2.is in all their exams except for a first in the one I taught... that was a pleasant ego boost, and it's a thrill to know you've genuinely helped someone to understand things. But then again it is peculiarly draining work, especially for an introvert like me. The academic politics I really will not miss. And just imagine a life which never again involves the Times Higher Education Supplement! I think the THES bears much the same relationship to learning as the Church Times does to the love of God. I wonder if Computing Science has a depressing trade newspaper? I'd like to think it was all like Boing Boing.
2. The other thing one needs is a job. I don't know if it's inconsistent to feel strongly that the humanities should be funded, but also to feel strongly that there's no reason why they should fund me, and that anyone who feels entitled to funding would be hard to like. I love the scholarship I do, and I do it well. But trying to love academia is probably the closest insight I'll ever get into a being a follower of one of those football teams that are consistently crap. I'm tired of short-term jobs which are essentially glorified data-entry, and I'm tired of being presented by senior established academics with the opportunity to do punishingly hard extra work with little support or pay as if this were some sort of favour. The example which I'm still working towards being able to laugh at one day is when I set the Part II Anglo-Saxon History paper, one of the more popular options for that year's finalists. I tried very hard to say no to this because it was not part of my full-time paid job, I was already Director of Studies for about a sixth of the department (I had more students than any of the actual lecturers), and I had made it clear at the end of the previous year that I really could not fit examining in on top of all this, but they said there was no one else available who knew enough about the special subject, and I eventually agreed because I thought it important to do right by that year's students. (Of course it's important to do right by every year's students but they were a particularly bright and likeable bunch whom I knew quite well.) Setting it was very hard indeed, and included producing short texts in Latin and Old English (some of which I had to get not from printed editions but from original manuscripts) together with translations. I did all the proofing, turned up to start the exam (luckily the boss of my proper paid job was understanding), marked it, agreed marks with the second examiner, etc etc etc, and was paid a total of fifty-five pounds before tax. I'm not even going to try to work out how much that was per hour for a very highly skilled, highly stressful, important and responsible job. I used to earn more money that that in a Sunday afternoon on the tills at M&S. The thing is, arguably in some sense I consented to this by putting myself into the whole academic environment, and I can't really complain about it too much when I have a remedy in my hands. I'm not a nineteenth-century factory worker with no other prospects.
3. Anyway I'm middle-aged now and it's practically obligatory for me to do a Masters degree at some point (though it ought really to be with the OU). I've decided to rewind to the other great interest of my teenage years. A long time ago I was good at Maths and enjoyed trying to program computers. For a while I was determined to go into Artificial Intelligence. When I went up to the Open Day at St Johns as a sixth-former I hadn't decided between ASNC and Maths or Computer Science (which in retrospect I can see must have been annoying of me). I went for ASNC out of love for the subject, and a bit because the ASNC who showed me round St Johns got out the Lecture List and pointed out that CompSci had nine o'clock lectures on a Saturday. (He also showed me the glorious ASNC section, alas long gone, in Heffers basement.) But sometimes I've regretted leaving all that other stuff behind. (Not least in the Research Associate jobs I've done where, although I was ostensibly employed for my knowledge of Anglo-Saxon England, my actual value to the project was in being able to roll up my sleeves, buy an undergraduate textbook in Relational Database design or whatever (on expenses, I'm not a martyr), and implement a data-management system.)
4. I've got into Imperial College, London, to do an MSc in Computing Science! Yay!
5. This is going to kill two birds with one stone, I hope. For one thing the skills I get should make me able to find intelligent work. Let's hope so, because I do need a job. But also the Imperial MSc has lots of options in Machine Learning and Logic programming etc, which is something I still find really interesting.
6. The downside is that I can't live in my little Exeter house for a year, though I will be renting a room in a friend's house in London (I'm practicing being not too annoying in preparation). Another downside is that I will be surrounded by, I guess, 21-year-old male engineering graduates who find it all much easier than I do. I did ask at my interview whether they take many people from a humanities background, and the man said yes, last year they had a vet. I get the impression that for him "humanities" meant "neither maths nor engineering". One of the things that put me off Maths for an undergraduate degree was the knowledge that I would be learning with geniuses who found it daftly easy, and I think it was a reasonable concern because it's hard for an eighteen-year-old to cope with that sort of thing. But I don't care now, I have enough self-confidence to feel OK with being the slow one in the class. I've always liked mature students when I've taught them. I had one in his 70s during one of my most stressful years, and he always took the time to ask me how I was getting on and exhort me to make sure I wasn't overdoing things. He had been diagnosed with cancer and a limited time to live, and decided to spend his last few years getting a degree in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic. I think we can all applaud that.
7. I shan't miss Anglo-Saxon England because I shan't leave it completely alone. If I have time I may go to the occasional conference as an Independent Scholar -- I know quite a few Independent Scholars who go to conferences and give better papers than the full-timers, and it would be fun to try to join their ranks. As for teaching, I've given that up already, and I do miss it a bit. I particularly used to enjoy teaching those students whom one could enthuse about the subject, and who would go on to get 2.is in all their exams except for a first in the one I taught... that was a pleasant ego boost, and it's a thrill to know you've genuinely helped someone to understand things. But then again it is peculiarly draining work, especially for an introvert like me. The academic politics I really will not miss. And just imagine a life which never again involves the Times Higher Education Supplement! I think the THES bears much the same relationship to learning as the Church Times does to the love of God. I wonder if Computing Science has a depressing trade newspaper? I'd like to think it was all like Boing Boing.
Tuesday, 16 August 2011
Two things, one of them a recantation
1. When my PhD supervisor left Cambridge he was given a farewell party in the English Faculty (under the auspices of which the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic resides, in much the same way that Winnie-the-Pooh lived under the name of Sanders). At that occasion he gave a speech in which he was very rude indeed about the English Faculty. It was one of those speeches which is quite amusing unless you're actually there at the time. (So many Cambridge experiences are like that.) One of the accusations he made was that the English Faculty did not understand the excellent thing they had in the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics, and that the RCEAL should escape to MML if they could. So it's interesting to see that this has sort-of happened.
http://news.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/2011/08/08/creation-of-a-new-department-of-theoretical-and-applied-linguistics/
2. I have to take back everything I have said about the awfulness of estate agents, because my estate agent has just been extremely helpful indeed. And this despite the fact that he is good looking and has a certain amount of charm. I feel genuinely bad about my prejudices now.
http://news.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/2011/08/08/creation-of-a-new-department-of-theoretical-and-applied-linguistics/
2. I have to take back everything I have said about the awfulness of estate agents, because my estate agent has just been extremely helpful indeed. And this despite the fact that he is good looking and has a certain amount of charm. I feel genuinely bad about my prejudices now.
Tuesday, 9 August 2011
Monday, 1 August 2011
What truth is and how to act on it...
... is a sub-heading in a book I am reading about the programming language C++. It contains no philosophical insights as such. (Unless you think that treating 1 (or any other number) as true and 0 or null as false implies agreement with the Augustinian vision of evil as parasitic on the good, having no independent existence.)
Anyway I thought I'd comment on a few good books I read in July.
1. Cathleen Schine, The Three Weissmanns of Westport. This is a modern retelling of Sense and Sensibility, which sounds like it could be awful, but is actually deftly and lightly done. It's amiable enjoyable reading of the sort which doesn't insult your brain but doesn't make you stretch it either. I shall look for more things she's written.
2. George R. R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons. Aaaagh! I am so addicted to these novels that it is not funny. I used to have opinions on them and now I just want to know what's going to happen next. I would recommend them very strongly except for the fact that the series will be a good few more years in the finishing. Perhaps wait until the last one's out and then you can splurge on them all at once.
3. Rhoda Janzen, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. I already blogged about this. It's great. I want to be like her, only without marrying someone with BPD who leaves me for a man he met on gay.com.
4. Barbara Pym, A Glass of Blessings. So wry it almost hurts, like licking a cut lime. Even though her books are amusing and don't deal with anything too deep, somehow when I've finished reading them I feel like I've been lightly punched in the stomach. A brilliant author.
5. Chris Priestley, Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror, and The Teacher's Tales of Terror. These are very good. They're older child/young adult reading really, but sufficiently well done that they catch you out with little moments that are genuinely chilling. I shall read more in the series sometime when I want some spooky tales. Better than Susan Hill's ghost stories, as far as I'm concerned.
Anyway I thought I'd comment on a few good books I read in July.
1. Cathleen Schine, The Three Weissmanns of Westport. This is a modern retelling of Sense and Sensibility, which sounds like it could be awful, but is actually deftly and lightly done. It's amiable enjoyable reading of the sort which doesn't insult your brain but doesn't make you stretch it either. I shall look for more things she's written.
2. George R. R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons. Aaaagh! I am so addicted to these novels that it is not funny. I used to have opinions on them and now I just want to know what's going to happen next. I would recommend them very strongly except for the fact that the series will be a good few more years in the finishing. Perhaps wait until the last one's out and then you can splurge on them all at once.
3. Rhoda Janzen, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. I already blogged about this. It's great. I want to be like her, only without marrying someone with BPD who leaves me for a man he met on gay.com.
4. Barbara Pym, A Glass of Blessings. So wry it almost hurts, like licking a cut lime. Even though her books are amusing and don't deal with anything too deep, somehow when I've finished reading them I feel like I've been lightly punched in the stomach. A brilliant author.
5. Chris Priestley, Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror, and The Teacher's Tales of Terror. These are very good. They're older child/young adult reading really, but sufficiently well done that they catch you out with little moments that are genuinely chilling. I shall read more in the series sometime when I want some spooky tales. Better than Susan Hill's ghost stories, as far as I'm concerned.
Friday, 29 July 2011
Is there any good in the world?
I have a cold, and I'm at that early stage in the cold where the world seems overwhelmingly doomed by every kind of stupidity and nastiness. This morning I decided that all politicians, journalists, charming young men, and estate agents should for their own good be cryogenically frozen until such time as we come up with a cure for being a massive wanker. And I also cried about the US deficit. It's a typical cold mood. So I have been looking for proof that there are good things. I list some of them below:
1) Even though she gave me this cold, I have a truly excellent god-daughter, who is bright and funny, and loves books. Plus great friends from school with whom I am still in touch. This makes me very lucky.
2) Neal Stephenson has written a new book, Reamde. Hurray for Neal Stephenson!
It's out in September.
3) Even though almost every corporation in the world, probably every corporation in fact, is set up in such a way to allow and even encourage them to act evilly regardless of the people who run them, there are occasional fightbacks or fightsback if you prefer. Some people have made a firefox extension called ShareMeNot so that if you visit a webpage with the facebook like button on it, or one of those other social media buttons like the Google+ +1 or the twitter button, those social networking websites don't actually know that you've been to that website unless you choose to click on the button. Which is how it ought to be anyway. The fact that just looking at a page with such a button currently gives information to the button's home-site is creepy.
4) I like this installation of books bursting through a wall. Though it's true that the storage needs of books is an annoying problem.
Anyway a friend has just suggested some emergency Wodehouse, which seems like a good idea. That's a fifth good thing for the list, the existence of Wodehouse, even if his later life was blighted by his stupidity during WW2.
1) Even though she gave me this cold, I have a truly excellent god-daughter, who is bright and funny, and loves books. Plus great friends from school with whom I am still in touch. This makes me very lucky.
2) Neal Stephenson has written a new book, Reamde. Hurray for Neal Stephenson!
It's out in September.
3) Even though almost every corporation in the world, probably every corporation in fact, is set up in such a way to allow and even encourage them to act evilly regardless of the people who run them, there are occasional fightbacks or fightsback if you prefer. Some people have made a firefox extension called ShareMeNot so that if you visit a webpage with the facebook like button on it, or one of those other social media buttons like the Google+ +1 or the twitter button, those social networking websites don't actually know that you've been to that website unless you choose to click on the button. Which is how it ought to be anyway. The fact that just looking at a page with such a button currently gives information to the button's home-site is creepy.
4) I like this installation of books bursting through a wall. Though it's true that the storage needs of books is an annoying problem.
Anyway a friend has just suggested some emergency Wodehouse, which seems like a good idea. That's a fifth good thing for the list, the existence of Wodehouse, even if his later life was blighted by his stupidity during WW2.
Tuesday, 26 July 2011
Three mother alpacas with the babies
Here as promised is some video of the new baby alpacas. This afternoon all of them went up to the shade at the far end of the paddock by the pheasant pens. You'll see that my camera copes indifferently well with sudden changes from darkness to sunlight.
When the young ones are a bit older they'll go with their mothers to the main female herd up the road.
When the young ones are a bit older they'll go with their mothers to the main female herd up the road.
Monday, 25 July 2011
Odd thrill
I am writing this while using the operating system Linux, specifically the "distro" (I think that's short for distribution) known as Ubuntu. It's hard to say why this is thrilling me. I've installed it alongside my Windows installation so I can choose which to use at start-up.
In the meantime, here is a bobcat sitting on a 40-foot cactus. He looks very cool, but also a lot like the little annoying cat thing in Thundercats, called Snarf or Snorf or something.
We have three alpaca babies now, and Kinetic has a Kylian and a Kittiwake to play with. Except that Kittiwake is brown with a white hood and white socks, and I idly remarked to my mother that it's a shame that Cappucino doesn't start with a K, so she's probably now called Kappucino. I think that was a '90s brand of Nestle coffee which included a sachet of fizzy white stuff to pour in it. But never mind, she's very sweet whatever her name and I'll try to get some video of them all before long. They enjoy herding chickens.
In the meantime, here is a bobcat sitting on a 40-foot cactus. He looks very cool, but also a lot like the little annoying cat thing in Thundercats, called Snarf or Snorf or something.
We have three alpaca babies now, and Kinetic has a Kylian and a Kittiwake to play with. Except that Kittiwake is brown with a white hood and white socks, and I idly remarked to my mother that it's a shame that Cappucino doesn't start with a K, so she's probably now called Kappucino. I think that was a '90s brand of Nestle coffee which included a sachet of fizzy white stuff to pour in it. But never mind, she's very sweet whatever her name and I'll try to get some video of them all before long. They enjoy herding chickens.
Friday, 22 July 2011
Parrots name their young, apparently
This makes me feel really really sad:
http://www.geekosystem.com/parrot-parents-name-babies/
http://www.geekosystem.com/parrot-parents-name-babies/
Friday, 15 July 2011
A few small things
I do so love xkcd. Today's is just brilliant.
All three winners of the inaugural Google Science Fair were girls.
It's just an Onion headline, alas: Vatican Reverses Stance On Gay Marriage After Meeting Tony And Craig
The other day I got an e-mail with quite a good subject line:
I made a popstars circle and I suppose they both automatically add whoever adds them.
What are the kids up to these days? Goodness knows. But these kids made this song which I quite like:
To be honest, I'm not really that bothered about what the kids are up to. I am sufficiently middle-aged now that not only do I always take slippers with me when I stay away overnight, but I no longer believe that the kids are likely to be up to anything particularly interesting.
All three winners of the inaugural Google Science Fair were girls.
It's just an Onion headline, alas: Vatican Reverses Stance On Gay Marriage After Meeting Tony And Craig
The other day I got an e-mail with quite a good subject line:
What are the kids up to these days? Goodness knows. But these kids made this song which I quite like:
To be honest, I'm not really that bothered about what the kids are up to. I am sufficiently middle-aged now that not only do I always take slippers with me when I stay away overnight, but I no longer believe that the kids are likely to be up to anything particularly interesting.
Wednesday, 13 July 2011
Bounce
Mum named this baby alpaca Kinetic because he doesn't often stop moving. Watch as he bounds up to me insouciantly and stops to smell a flower before wandering off again. Even if you set the bar very high for dorables he is certainly one of them.
Tuesday, 12 July 2011
Excellent book cheap now
Today on the train I read Rhoda Janzen's Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, a memoir about the author's return to stay with her family after a traumatic divorce and car accident. I enjoyed it very much -- I had to concentrate not to chuckle like a fool or get too teary and freak out the person sitting opposite me on the train. The author's voice reminds me of some of my friends', and it's really nice to read a family memoir with likeable parents. Anyway, it's only 99p in the current Amazon kindle sale so if you're interested you might want to buy it before the end of the month. A bonus of the Kindle edition is that it automatically turns gay.com into a link every time it appears, just in case you'd like to find out more.
Stereotypes
Most Cambridge fellows are not at all like the stereotype. One or two are, and they're either quite funny or utterly deplorable, depending on your mood and degree of involvement with them. But estate agents! I am fully prepared to start finding estate agents really really amusing just as soon as I have exchanged contracts. They are amazingly consistent at messing things up and then explaining to you why what they did (didn't do) was perfectly reasonable. It's impossible to tell them off -- my current policy when they do something stupid is to phone up and tell them about it in the manner of a kindly aunt. I'm hoping this really irritates them in their self-esteem. I'm mostly dealing with charming young men, and charming men of any age get on my nerves like a bluebottle buzzing round a light bulb.
Monday, 11 July 2011
Small newses
1. I joined Google+. It's mildly irritating in the same way as Facebook. Does this bode well for its future? I have no idea. I loved Google Wave, and look what happened to that.
2. There's a new Waitrose just down the road from my flat. Delicious microwave meals and patronising semi-assembled recipes in boxes ahoy! It's probably a good thing I don't live here any more. My Granny used to shop in Waitrose but she only ever bought discounted things. She didn't believe in sell-by dates, occasionally with spectacular results.
3. If you're in Cambridge at the weekend, buy a pork pie from the market on Saturday (from the butcher's opposite M&S) and on Sunday, cakes from Tom's cakes.
4. Tomorrow I go back to Devon. I'm looking forward to meeting Kinetic, who spends a lot of time chasing the chickens, apparently. I'll try to post some video to make up for the sad Kenelm news.
2. There's a new Waitrose just down the road from my flat. Delicious microwave meals and patronising semi-assembled recipes in boxes ahoy! It's probably a good thing I don't live here any more. My Granny used to shop in Waitrose but she only ever bought discounted things. She didn't believe in sell-by dates, occasionally with spectacular results.
3. If you're in Cambridge at the weekend, buy a pork pie from the market on Saturday (from the butcher's opposite M&S) and on Sunday, cakes from Tom's cakes.
4. Tomorrow I go back to Devon. I'm looking forward to meeting Kinetic, who spends a lot of time chasing the chickens, apparently. I'll try to post some video to make up for the sad Kenelm news.
Saturday, 9 July 2011
RIP Kenelm
I'm away for a few days, but I've had sad news from Devon: my mother tells me that Kenelm was not improving, and they had him put to sleep yesterday. I was sort of expecting this. Although he was very sweet, and tried hard, watching him struggle was only really justifiable if there was a chance his struggling would get him somewhere eventually. They've put Dorcas back into the main herd, where she can get back into the old routine.
But Chloe has had her baby now. My mother says that he was such a contrast to poor Kenelm, on his feet and suckling within the hour, and then dashing around the field crazily, that they have called him Kinetic. (All the alpacas this year will have K-names.) I'm looking forward to seeing him when I get back.
It's very strange camping out in my Cambridge flat, which is hopefully going to be sold soon. I lived here for thirteen years, almost twice as long as I have lived in any other home. I feel like it would be healthy to be a bit nostalgic, but I can't quite muster the energy. It's a nice flat, but owning somewhere you don't live is a bit of a worry.
The anti-English Defence League march went past here earlier today. I was a bit disappointed with it because it was rather hatey. Admittedly the EDL are pretty hateable, but I think a happy peaceful march would have made a better contrast. They were shouting "EDL, go to hell" as they went down here, and then singing, really badly, an anti-EDL song to the tune of She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain. I think there were clashes and a few arrests later at Silver Street.
In other news: a lovely never-released Rachel Stevens/Richard X song; Bill Bailey covers Metallica; and the Parisians have made what they describe as "une curieuse anamorphose végétale" outside L'Hotel de Ville, presumably so they can stand on it and pretend to be Le Petit Prince.
But Chloe has had her baby now. My mother says that he was such a contrast to poor Kenelm, on his feet and suckling within the hour, and then dashing around the field crazily, that they have called him Kinetic. (All the alpacas this year will have K-names.) I'm looking forward to seeing him when I get back.
It's very strange camping out in my Cambridge flat, which is hopefully going to be sold soon. I lived here for thirteen years, almost twice as long as I have lived in any other home. I feel like it would be healthy to be a bit nostalgic, but I can't quite muster the energy. It's a nice flat, but owning somewhere you don't live is a bit of a worry.
The anti-English Defence League march went past here earlier today. I was a bit disappointed with it because it was rather hatey. Admittedly the EDL are pretty hateable, but I think a happy peaceful march would have made a better contrast. They were shouting "EDL, go to hell" as they went down here, and then singing, really badly, an anti-EDL song to the tune of She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain. I think there were clashes and a few arrests later at Silver Street.
In other news: a lovely never-released Rachel Stevens/Richard X song; Bill Bailey covers Metallica; and the Parisians have made what they describe as "une curieuse anamorphose végétale" outside L'Hotel de Ville, presumably so they can stand on it and pretend to be Le Petit Prince.
Wednesday, 6 July 2011
Short video of Kenelm and Dorcas
Kenelm had got out into the rain so I went out to put him back in the shelter, and filmed him for a few moments with Dorcas. She wasn't quite sure what I was there for. Watch her check him over after he makes a little squeaky hum noise about 6 seconds in.
He's a sweetheart, I do hope he gets on OK.
He's a sweetheart, I do hope he gets on OK.
Kenelm update
Kenelm is still with us, and I'm beginning to hope that he perhaps might make it after all. He still can't quite stand up properly, but he does manage to lurch a few steps at a time, and he seems to be getting a little bit better over time. This morning my parents took him off to the vet for a consultation, rather expecting that they wouldn't bring him back. But the vet thinks it's worth persevering. At the moment he gets fed from a bottle every few hours, but we think he's probably also suckling a little by himself. And he does seem to be getting stronger. So, cautious optimism here...
Tuesday, 5 July 2011
Kenelm back with Dorcas
Dorcas has got her baby Kenelm back, and it was very touching to see. I don't suppose she'd been waiting by the gate all night, but she was there in the morning. He's still not able to stand up but otherwise he's quite perky. I don't give much for his chances, really, but at least he's still around now. The thing that speaks most for him is that my mother has not given up on him yet. She's really uncannily good at knowing when it's time to prepare yourself for animal death. She has a harness which we use for hanging baby alpacas from luggage scales to weigh them, and she's got Kenelm to suckle from Dorcas by holding him up in that. So now the plan is that we take it in turns to go out and hold him up to suckle every three hours. (This will really be so much easier than bottle-feeding.) And hope that his legs sort themselves out as he gains strength. We'll probably need to feed Dorcas too, who is staying with Kenelm instead of grazing.
Monday, 4 July 2011
It's not looking good
Unfortunately little Kenelm has not managed to stand up, let alone suckle. My mother thinks there's some problem with one of his hind legs. He's gone off to the vet's with a bottle of plasma (which is spun from alpaca blood, and is a sort of baby alpaca buck-you-uppo), but to be honest, it's not looking likely that he's going to thrive. It's very sad whenever a baby alpaca dies but the bit I find worst is the behaviour of the mother if we have to take the baby away. I think I've mentioned before that alpacas are on the whole a little wary of us, but are usually pretty cooperative when there's something wrong. They seem to get the idea that we are agents of change, and useful to have around in a crisis. When you take an alpaca baby away to the vet (and probably slightly fewer of these ever come back than don't) the mother makes concerned noises, but essentially doesn't stop you. And then she waits by the paddock gate, making enquiring sounds, and catching your eyes whenever you look out of the windows. If you go up to her she peers very intently into your eyes, as if trying to read some message there. I remember one alpaca whose baby died at the vet's stood for ages by the gate, bleating at us every time we went near. Maybe I'm reading too much into it; but it's the way that the noises they make at us aren't angry noises, but distressed or asking noises, that I find sad. I do hope that we'll be able to reunite Kenelm and Dorcas. She's standing at the gate right now, looking for him.
It's that time of year again
When I lived in Cambridge, the sun on the Cam always gave me a reflex stress reaction. Beautiful weather meant I should be revising, or marking things, or just that the year was ending sooner than it felt like it should, plus suddenly there would be irritating undergraduates wandering the streets in black tie without shame, and I had to put all that extra effort into not hating them. Devon has different stresses. In June my parents start fretting about getting the hay in (hay news: it's nearly all in now, and there isn't too much less than last year) and every day my mother says "I really think XXX is going to have her baby today". Whichever alpaca XXX might be, she laughs at this prediction for weeks on end, until I am alone in the house and then she goes into labour as quickly and incorrectly as possible. Here if you want it is video footage of me discovering this morning's problem. Caution! I swear in this video. I don't swear very often but when I do it's justified.
The baby's head and one front leg are out, but one leg isn't, and I know from last time that this means that the head and leg have to go back inside and come out again properly, with the other leg. Not only am I a little squeamish about greasing up and doing the Herriot thing, I also know that alpaca legs are long and twig-like, there's not much room for manouevre in there, and that if you break its leg you've pretty much killed it. Plus there's the possibility of suffocating the baby if it's already breathing. Anyway, I didn't even try to do it myself, I just called the vet. Two of them arrived about thirty minutes later and within seconds they had sorted everything out. Hurray for vets! The baby is a boy called Kenelm. As I type I can see him making vague attempts to stand up. But they both look in reasonably good shape, so as long as he's on his feet and suckling by nightfall hopefully this story will have a happy ending.
And, because nature is both great and disgusting at the same time, I have just seen my first ever Red Kite in Devon, circling above our paddock, presumably lured by the scent of fresh afterbirth. Buzzards have such a stronghold here that Kites are much more rare in Devon than they are in, say, Swindon. Exciting stuff. (Thankfully my mother is back now so it's up to her to go out with a bucket and spade or alternatively just leave the afterbirth out for a sky burial.)
The baby's head and one front leg are out, but one leg isn't, and I know from last time that this means that the head and leg have to go back inside and come out again properly, with the other leg. Not only am I a little squeamish about greasing up and doing the Herriot thing, I also know that alpaca legs are long and twig-like, there's not much room for manouevre in there, and that if you break its leg you've pretty much killed it. Plus there's the possibility of suffocating the baby if it's already breathing. Anyway, I didn't even try to do it myself, I just called the vet. Two of them arrived about thirty minutes later and within seconds they had sorted everything out. Hurray for vets! The baby is a boy called Kenelm. As I type I can see him making vague attempts to stand up. But they both look in reasonably good shape, so as long as he's on his feet and suckling by nightfall hopefully this story will have a happy ending.
And, because nature is both great and disgusting at the same time, I have just seen my first ever Red Kite in Devon, circling above our paddock, presumably lured by the scent of fresh afterbirth. Buzzards have such a stronghold here that Kites are much more rare in Devon than they are in, say, Swindon. Exciting stuff. (Thankfully my mother is back now so it's up to her to go out with a bucket and spade or alternatively just leave the afterbirth out for a sky burial.)
Thursday, 30 June 2011
Some things I read in May and June
I didn't post about what I'd read in May, mostly because I didn't read a lot in May, but also because I was too lazy. I've read rather more in June, though I am still only halfway through The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose. It's quite interesting but it moves quickly, so I only really get what he's talking about if it's something I've encountered before, and he makes some great things, for example imaginary numbers, sound much duller than they are.
1. I reread the first Flavia de Luce mystery and then read the next two. (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag, and A Red Herring Without Mustard, by Alan Bradley.) They're excellent unsentimental murder-mysteries about a precocious girl growing up in genteel deprivation after the war. Flavia is ten or eleven and a bit of a terror. She lost her mother as a baby and her father has been emotionally absent ever since, while her older sisters bully her to keep her down (at least partly in self-defence). She's intelligent and bratty and obsessed with poisons. It's a bit I Capture the Castle but without all that love stuff and with a lot more about fatal toxins. Go Flavia de Luce! I hope she escapes to a proper school, or at least eventually to Newnham.
2. I read two wry and quite funny books, Elinor Lipman's Dearly Departed, and Kate Christiansen's The Great Man. I think Lipman is excellent but I like some of her books more than others. This was definitely one of the good ones. Christiansen is a completely new one on me. It took me a while to get used to her style, but I ended up really enjoying it.
3. I worked through the whole of Wilfrid Hodge's Logic: an Introduction to Elementary Logic. I don't really feel like reviewing it so much as reviewing myself. My review reads: "Well done me!" It may seem conceited to review myself in that way but wouldn't it be more conceited to imply that textbooks on elementary logic are something I just crunch up casually? There are a few small errors in it. A list of most of them can be found in a pdf linked to from this page on the Oxford Philosophy website, but I think I found a few more. I made a note of them on this page.
1. I reread the first Flavia de Luce mystery and then read the next two. (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag, and A Red Herring Without Mustard, by Alan Bradley.) They're excellent unsentimental murder-mysteries about a precocious girl growing up in genteel deprivation after the war. Flavia is ten or eleven and a bit of a terror. She lost her mother as a baby and her father has been emotionally absent ever since, while her older sisters bully her to keep her down (at least partly in self-defence). She's intelligent and bratty and obsessed with poisons. It's a bit I Capture the Castle but without all that love stuff and with a lot more about fatal toxins. Go Flavia de Luce! I hope she escapes to a proper school, or at least eventually to Newnham.
2. I read two wry and quite funny books, Elinor Lipman's Dearly Departed, and Kate Christiansen's The Great Man. I think Lipman is excellent but I like some of her books more than others. This was definitely one of the good ones. Christiansen is a completely new one on me. It took me a while to get used to her style, but I ended up really enjoying it.
3. I worked through the whole of Wilfrid Hodge's Logic: an Introduction to Elementary Logic. I don't really feel like reviewing it so much as reviewing myself. My review reads: "Well done me!" It may seem conceited to review myself in that way but wouldn't it be more conceited to imply that textbooks on elementary logic are something I just crunch up casually? There are a few small errors in it. A list of most of them can be found in a pdf linked to from this page on the Oxford Philosophy website, but I think I found a few more. I made a note of them on this page.
Wednesday, 29 June 2011
Books as objects
Imagine a teenage girl without much money who has run out of things to read, browsing the shelves of the sort of charity shop where they sell paperbacks cheaply (not Oxfam). She spots a book called The Deptford Trilogy and likes the cover, or the blurb, or the fact that it's a lot of book for not much money. She buys it, reads it, and starts a life-long appreciation for Robertson Davies, an author who is underappreciated in the UK, and this brings her great pleasure.
It's a nice story. So why, when I spotted The Deptford Trilogy in a box of books I was taking to a charity shop for my brother and sister-in-law, did I pounce on it so avidly and remove it? I have my own copy. This is not sensible behaviour. I'm a big fan of Davies so I ought to want other people to get the chance to read his work. A book for sale in a cheap charity shop is almost a better way of promoting things than giving them out for free, because the small cost involved gives the buyer an investment in reading the thing. I could have helped some more poor kid marooned in Tiverton to discover one of the best writers of the twentieth century. There are some books which I even find myself compulsively buying whenever I see them in secondhand bookshops or charity shops. I find it almost impossible to pass by a copy of G. V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr, for example. But I would love nothing more than to meet someone who had read that and enjoyed it like I did, and when I remove a copy from circulation I make that less and less likely. I remember how great it was when I first met Ray Page, emeritus Bosworth and Toller Professor of Anglo-Saxon, to find that we had read many of the same obscure things, like The Wallet of Kai Lung. But I don't think I know anyone else who is a fan of G. V. Desani. Maybe I should dig out my spare copies and start distributing them.
I found Robertson Davies by accident as a sixth-former because I had a book token to spend and the shop was just about to close. I grabbed The Deptford Trilogy because at the time the word Deptford meant only one thing to me, the mysterious and sordid death of Christopher Marlowe. I had a big literary crush on Marlowe and was writing a long essay about him for my A-level English. Although I think The Cornish Trilogy is marginally better, I love The Deptford Trilogy because I found it so randomly, and because when I first read it I had no idea who the Bollandists were. The narrator Dunstan Ramsay is very proud of publishing with the Bollandists despite not being a Catholic priest. And six or seven years later, I too published something in Analecta Bollandiana, even though I am so far from being a Catholic priest that I am actually a Protestant woman. Hurray!
It's a nice story. So why, when I spotted The Deptford Trilogy in a box of books I was taking to a charity shop for my brother and sister-in-law, did I pounce on it so avidly and remove it? I have my own copy. This is not sensible behaviour. I'm a big fan of Davies so I ought to want other people to get the chance to read his work. A book for sale in a cheap charity shop is almost a better way of promoting things than giving them out for free, because the small cost involved gives the buyer an investment in reading the thing. I could have helped some more poor kid marooned in Tiverton to discover one of the best writers of the twentieth century. There are some books which I even find myself compulsively buying whenever I see them in secondhand bookshops or charity shops. I find it almost impossible to pass by a copy of G. V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr, for example. But I would love nothing more than to meet someone who had read that and enjoyed it like I did, and when I remove a copy from circulation I make that less and less likely. I remember how great it was when I first met Ray Page, emeritus Bosworth and Toller Professor of Anglo-Saxon, to find that we had read many of the same obscure things, like The Wallet of Kai Lung. But I don't think I know anyone else who is a fan of G. V. Desani. Maybe I should dig out my spare copies and start distributing them.
I found Robertson Davies by accident as a sixth-former because I had a book token to spend and the shop was just about to close. I grabbed The Deptford Trilogy because at the time the word Deptford meant only one thing to me, the mysterious and sordid death of Christopher Marlowe. I had a big literary crush on Marlowe and was writing a long essay about him for my A-level English. Although I think The Cornish Trilogy is marginally better, I love The Deptford Trilogy because I found it so randomly, and because when I first read it I had no idea who the Bollandists were. The narrator Dunstan Ramsay is very proud of publishing with the Bollandists despite not being a Catholic priest. And six or seven years later, I too published something in Analecta Bollandiana, even though I am so far from being a Catholic priest that I am actually a Protestant woman. Hurray!
Sunday, 26 June 2011
Some interesting stuff
This video (off of Boing Boing) shows a 3D printer which is entirely solar powered, and sits in the desert printing sand into glass.
This sixteenth-century mechanical monk is disturbing.
This song called Magic has quite a magical video (off of popjustice):
This sixteenth-century mechanical monk is disturbing.
This song called Magic has quite a magical video (off of popjustice):
Friday, 24 June 2011
PS re: Britney
Also does anyone know what's going on in the Britney video where the driver pours milk all over his head? Is that a thing now? If it's something rude please tell me euphemistically, or in Latin.
Thursday, 23 June 2011
Some videos and a thought
1. Maybe I should have a tumblr not a blog. If I had a tumblr not a blog then this paragraph could be an entire entry instead of needing bulking out with videos. But if I had a tumblr not a blog then this paragraph would not exist! Therefore I have no need of a tumblr. QED.
2. This person is going to tell us all about Plato's views on the holiness of objects... or is he? Watch the video, it's only 37 seconds long.
I bet this man has received at least one proposal of marriage as a direct result of that YouTube clip, like those cat engineers.
3. Britney is good at music and good at music videos, even if her decision to use her latest to reposition herself as a sex pest is in some ways an odd one:
I remember the first time I ever heard about her, before I heard any of her music, she was described as having a vocal range like Whitney and being a postergirl for all that supremely-creepy True-Love-Waits stuff. In some ways it's surprising that they don't still use her as a postergirl. "Look what happened to Britney when she discovered sex!" they could say, and scare young girls into going to parties with their fathers. If she'd had more of a normal teenagerhood I expect she'd be a bit better balanced now, poor thing.
2. This person is going to tell us all about Plato's views on the holiness of objects... or is he? Watch the video, it's only 37 seconds long.
I bet this man has received at least one proposal of marriage as a direct result of that YouTube clip, like those cat engineers.
3. Britney is good at music and good at music videos, even if her decision to use her latest to reposition herself as a sex pest is in some ways an odd one:
I remember the first time I ever heard about her, before I heard any of her music, she was described as having a vocal range like Whitney and being a postergirl for all that supremely-creepy True-Love-Waits stuff. In some ways it's surprising that they don't still use her as a postergirl. "Look what happened to Britney when she discovered sex!" they could say, and scare young girls into going to parties with their fathers. If she'd had more of a normal teenagerhood I expect she'd be a bit better balanced now, poor thing.
Friday, 17 June 2011
Bensons
I've just finished reading a very good book about E. F.'s mother, As Good as God, as Clever as the Devil: the Impossible Life of Mary Benson by Rodney Bolt. She had to deal with her many precocious offspring (they all wrote books constantly) at the same time as ministering to their father, Archbishop of Canterbury E. W. Benson, who creepily proposed to her when she was just twelve years old. She seems to have been quite a remarkable person. Let's admit that it wasn't so difficult in those days to be a lesbian, because no one batted an eyelid at two women sharing a bed, but nonetheless well done Mrs Benson, who juggled lots of different lives, none of them really her own, without falling into despair more than occasionally. Here is the first sentence:
On Sunday, 11 October 1896, Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, insufferable to the end, died on his knees in church saying the Confession, ending a life of relentless success.One of the interesting things about this book is that E. W., who was a sort of pious vampire, seems to have been tolerant of his wife's need for close female companionship, understanding that it allowed her to carry out her difficult role as Mrs Archbishop. (Maybe their friend Queen Victoria did know what lesbianism was, but didn't legislate against it having seen its positive side.) Mary Benson was said by Gladstone to be the cleverest woman in Europe, and held her own as a society hostess at Lambeth Palace. Her children were not always easier than her husband. There's a brilliant scene where Mrs Benson gets her three literary sons to parody each others' styles, which each of the parodees in turn fails to find very amusing. But I also like the way that this author intersperses quotations from contemporary writings by the Bensons and others into his text. This quotation from Ruskin's divorce proceedings, quoted in the chapter where young Mary Benson first tries to adapt to the duties of being Edward's wife, is fantastic:
I married her, thinking her so young and affectionate that I might influence her as I chose, and make of her just such a wife as I wanted. It appeared that she married me thinking she could make of me just the sort of husband she wanted. I was grieved and disappointed in finding I could not change her, and she was humiliated and irritated at finding she could not change me. . . I soon began to observe characteristics which gave me so much grief and anxiety that I wrote to her father saying that there was slight nervous affection of the brain. [The principal cause of which] was her always thinking that I ought to attend her, instead of herself attending me.Poor patient Ruskin, "grieved and disappointed", while his young wife is "humiliated and irritated"! And clearly teetering on the brink of insanity in expecting him to look after her.
Wednesday, 15 June 2011
Devon in June
There is nothing I know more like heaven than walking through Devon footpaths and country lanes on a warm breezy day in mid-June. I took some photos and videos this morning as I walked down to Uffculme.
My mother asked me to count the female alpaca herd on the way. They will soon number 23 and she wanted me to check that hadn't happened yet. Here they all are having come down to meet me in the race, a long thin field which provides access to a lot of other fields:
Beth is indicating pretty strongly that it would be a good idea if I opened the gate and let them all into the adjacent field, where the grass is long and plentiful, since they have been in the lower field at the far end of the race for a couple of weeks now. I saw Beth being born -- she was actually the first alpaca born at ours -- and she was bolshy from the start. Now she's herd matriarch. I told her she'd have to take it up with my mum.
These fields are badger territory, crossed with lots of badger tracks and full of little holes they've started digging and then abandoned. I took some video of one of the tracks:
Beth was not that impressed by my attitude concerning the field.
Here is the hidden cost of beer festivals:
This was the field my parents lent for the parking. It's not as bad as it could be, but it's still going to take some time to recover. And here's a view back down the hill. The field with the pinkish tinge is the one Beth's so keen to get into.
You can see her point. Actually I expect my mother will let them in there sometime this week.
The footpath to Uffculme goes through one of the fields my parents are keeping back for hay. Everyone's been moaning about the dry weather, and what will the animals eat this winter, etc, but actually it looks pretty good to my ignorant eyes. It was very beautiful waving in the wind so I tried to video it. I'm afraid you'll have to forgive the noises the wind makes on my camera's microphone, and also that Youtube doesn't always play these things back very well:
This is everyone's favourite tree. A lot of people consider sycamores to be weeds because they're hard to get rid of, but even those people love this tree. There's a photo of it in the pub. It's not unusual, it's just a really really good tree.
Sometimes I worry that we're all too fond of this tree.
Down Corks Hill the hedges on either side of the lane are even taller than in most places, about nine feet high instead of about six. Here's some cow parsley with bees, seen just as it looked as I walked underneath it.
The smell on Corks Hill was particularly ripe, a mixture of cow dung and meadowsweet, with a hint of a dead creature which I came across liquefying on the tarmac halfway down. That's the countryside for you -- everything's very alive except for the things that are dead and even those are alive just in an unpleasant way.
Here are some ducks napping by the side of the river Culm, just at the edge of Uffculme.
The Culm joins the Exe further down.
Actually today was my birthday so I made like the Culm and headed into Exeter (only by bus not by flowing). I had lunch at Strada because it's a place where sometimes it's a bit like eating in Italy. Every now and then I miss Italy quite intensely for a moment but I'm rather ashamed of this because it's always to do with food, and even when I try to think of something non-food-related that I might miss my thoughts end up wandering back to some amazing aperitivo or fantastic little biscuits.
My mother asked me to count the female alpaca herd on the way. They will soon number 23 and she wanted me to check that hadn't happened yet. Here they all are having come down to meet me in the race, a long thin field which provides access to a lot of other fields:
These fields are badger territory, crossed with lots of badger tracks and full of little holes they've started digging and then abandoned. I took some video of one of the tracks:
Beth was not that impressed by my attitude concerning the field.
Here is the hidden cost of beer festivals:
The footpath to Uffculme goes through one of the fields my parents are keeping back for hay. Everyone's been moaning about the dry weather, and what will the animals eat this winter, etc, but actually it looks pretty good to my ignorant eyes. It was very beautiful waving in the wind so I tried to video it. I'm afraid you'll have to forgive the noises the wind makes on my camera's microphone, and also that Youtube doesn't always play these things back very well:
This is everyone's favourite tree. A lot of people consider sycamores to be weeds because they're hard to get rid of, but even those people love this tree. There's a photo of it in the pub. It's not unusual, it's just a really really good tree.
Down Corks Hill the hedges on either side of the lane are even taller than in most places, about nine feet high instead of about six. Here's some cow parsley with bees, seen just as it looked as I walked underneath it.
Here are some ducks napping by the side of the river Culm, just at the edge of Uffculme.
Actually today was my birthday so I made like the Culm and headed into Exeter (only by bus not by flowing). I had lunch at Strada because it's a place where sometimes it's a bit like eating in Italy. Every now and then I miss Italy quite intensely for a moment but I'm rather ashamed of this because it's always to do with food, and even when I try to think of something non-food-related that I might miss my thoughts end up wandering back to some amazing aperitivo or fantastic little biscuits.
More about village life
The singer Joss Stone lives in our village, in the house where she grew up. It's at the other end of the village from us, a little way out on the road to Honiton. You may have seen this Guardian article saying that the police have arrested some people who are alleged to have been planning to attack or perhaps kidnap her. At first I thought Well done those alert neighbours! Then I read in the less-bashful Sun that both of the arrested men are black. Anyway, the neighbours seem to have been quite right, and now there are journalists in the village. Hopefully they will go away soon.
Tuesday, 14 June 2011
Brief news
1. I tasted all the beers at the Ashill Beer Festival except for those which had sold out by the time I got to them, fifteen out of the possible nineteen. My favourite was Forge Brewery's Litehouse. Now I am all beer-festivalled out.
2. I'm not in a position to get a dog but if I were I would ask for one from a litter of Labrador-Poodle crosses being born today in North Devon. The breeder's blog has a link to a webcam. She leaves the webcam up all through the puppies' youths and it's pretty addictive.
3. 3D printers now seem to be where laser printers were when I was a teenager, e.g. expensive for an individual but within reach of a small business or a serious hobbyist. I really want one, but not for any good reason. Just because it would be cool! In the meantime there are services which will print things for you from your designs.
2. I'm not in a position to get a dog but if I were I would ask for one from a litter of Labrador-Poodle crosses being born today in North Devon. The breeder's blog has a link to a webcam. She leaves the webcam up all through the puppies' youths and it's pretty addictive.
3. 3D printers now seem to be where laser printers were when I was a teenager, e.g. expensive for an individual but within reach of a small business or a serious hobbyist. I really want one, but not for any good reason. Just because it would be cool! In the meantime there are services which will print things for you from your designs.
Sunday, 12 June 2011
Nevermind the 80s, it's still acceptable in mid-Devon (and long may it remain so)
I went back to the beer festival with my brother and sister-in-law. Everybody seemed to be there, even the lady who won't say the Peace in church but just sits with her arms crossed staring at the floor while everyone else shakes hands. The Thorvertones showed us that you can get away with covers pretty well if you just go up there and do them with confidence in your own style, and they rocked the village with their guitary versions of Personal Jesus and Don't You Want Me Baby. People ranging in age from teenagers to the retired were walking like an Egyptian or doing the Timewarp -- it's been a while since I did the Timewarp, and I expect it will be a while before I do the Timewarp again. Lots of people were really throwing themselves into that one -- "great thrusting, Ashill!" as the singer shouted between choruses. It's one of those occasions when you think that perhaps you've lost something through the amount of choice on offer in ordinary life. I wouldn't go to an event like this in a city, but when it's next door in the middle of nowhere it seems foolish to miss it, and so everyone's there enjoying themselves together, while dogs scrounge bits of pork roast and children play complicated games of tag round the outside of the tents. And goodness there was some creative dance going on -- some people seemed to be just trying to get their limbs as far away from their bodies as possible in unusual ways. Hurray for mid-Devon!
What's more, I have now tasted all but two of the festival beers. There's no point my trying to remember which they are right now, though I've got marks for them all on my tasting sheet. Tomorrow's the last day so hopefully I'll finish them then and maybe put some notes up here.
What's more, I have now tasted all but two of the festival beers. There's no point my trying to remember which they are right now, though I've got marks for them all on my tasting sheet. Tomorrow's the last day so hopefully I'll finish them then and maybe put some notes up here.
Saturday, 11 June 2011
Beer festival part 2a
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| Butcombe Gold, 4.4% |
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| Eddystone, 4.3% |
On the beer front I have now tried Butcombe Gold, which I found just a tad disappointing, its summeriness overpowered by a strong bitter aftertaste, but only because I had high expectations; Forge Brewery's Dark Horse, which was a very good darker beer, though not quite what I was in the mood for; and South Ham's Brewery's Eddystone, which is a very good light fresh beer, but not as lovely as yesterday's Litehouse. Litehouse is currently my favourite. The beer certainly helps with tolerance for cover versions -- right now from my desk I can hear the mid-evening band thumping out Tainted Love.
The importance of being middle class
I have to get my signature on a document witnessed. The document specifies that the witness must have known me for at least two years, mustn't be retired or related to me, and must be in one of these professions: solicitor, bank manager, financial advisor, police officer, doctor or qualified nurse, head teacher, member of the clergy, accountant, vet, dentist, magistrate, or ranking officer in the armed forces. So if you're not a regular church-goer, and you and your pets have been blessed with good health, it must be necessary to be pretty middle class to sort this out -- after all you're asking for someone who actually knows who you are, not just someone who will check it's you signing, and not everyone is chums with bank managers and solicitors. I think I'll be able to get it done by asking the vicar of a neighbouring parish, if I can track her down. But then maybe only the middle class have life assurance policies relating to mortgages. The passport regulations are a little bit easier -- even teachers and lecturers can sign those.
I was mulling over this need to be middle class when I opened the next thing in my post, a book on logic from Amazon. I started reading it at once -- I think I'll enjoy it more once it gets onto the Maths and stops trying to do "real world" logical analysis of things people say at after-dinner speeches. Here's one of the little exercises at the end of the first chapter, which you have to inspect for internal consistency:
Whilst of course I'm familiar with that particular "he shaved others, himself he could not shave" paradox, I was bemused to read in the answers at the back that this statement is inconsistent because of the question of who paid for Walter's holiday. I had just assumed that Walter would avoid this excessive amount of self-definition by not going on holiday, especially if he has to work hard to pay for the holidays of others. Since when has it been assumed that everyone goes on holiday? Is that now an intrinsic part of human existence? The fact that I can't read something like this without being really annoyed and even stopping to blog about it makes me worry that I am just over-educated, and that the excellence of the teaching in my first degree has spoiled me for normal just-let-it-go life. But surely if one's allowed to pick pedantic holes in anything it's a textbook on logic.
I was mulling over this need to be middle class when I opened the next thing in my post, a book on logic from Amazon. I started reading it at once -- I think I'll enjoy it more once it gets onto the Maths and stops trying to do "real world" logical analysis of things people say at after-dinner speeches. Here's one of the little exercises at the end of the first chapter, which you have to inspect for internal consistency:
Walter joined the friendly club two years ago, and has been one of its most loyal members ever since. Last year he paid for the holidays of precisely those club members who didn't pay for their own holidays.
Whilst of course I'm familiar with that particular "he shaved others, himself he could not shave" paradox, I was bemused to read in the answers at the back that this statement is inconsistent because of the question of who paid for Walter's holiday. I had just assumed that Walter would avoid this excessive amount of self-definition by not going on holiday, especially if he has to work hard to pay for the holidays of others. Since when has it been assumed that everyone goes on holiday? Is that now an intrinsic part of human existence? The fact that I can't read something like this without being really annoyed and even stopping to blog about it makes me worry that I am just over-educated, and that the excellence of the teaching in my first degree has spoiled me for normal just-let-it-go life. But surely if one's allowed to pick pedantic holes in anything it's a textbook on logic.
Friday, 10 June 2011
Village life
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| Forge Litehouse, 4.3% |
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| Teignworthy Old Moggie, 4.4% |
Wednesday, 1 June 2011
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