The number of things I'm failing to blog about gets larger and larger. The second week of term was worse than the first, and in third week I started to feel like I was getting some control back until my laptop died. My housemate/landlord has gone away for a month and it's wierd how much this is disconcerting me given that I lived alone in Cambridge for years. But then, I had pets there. I've put up a bird feeder in the garden but it's not yet getting many visitors.
Yesterday I went back to Occupy LSX, and the steps of St Paul's. I went to hear the same vicar friend talk as on my first visit. It's still a pretty cool place, but of course now they're just waiting for the eviction. It won't be there next Saturday. The talkers were more varied than last time, in that they weren't all talkers, but also singers, bands, and poets. There were a couple of good performance poets, like this man with his "Crazy Santas Occupy the World":
He also did a poem about Sampson over the top of the instrumental from Dr Dre's What's the Difference. That was great, and even I was sort of dancing a little bit. It's not on YouTube, maybe because of copyright issues.
I feel sad that the place is going; I hope the eviction goes both peacefully and mediafully.
Afterwards I talked to my vicar friend about something eucharistical in London that had disturbed me, and which didn't seem to bother him at all. But then by accident I profoundly shocked him by mentioning casually something else I had seen in Devon, and he wanted me to write and complain to a bishop about it. I'm afraid I may have just provided another waystation on his inexorable journey towards Rome. Oh dear. But he did teach me a great concept -- or rather, a great name for a concept I already had. This is "eschatological reserve". It's the idea that when it comes to the end, perhaps we'll look back and see the patterns of things differently, and it will be clear who was doing God's will and it won't be the people we expected -- not the Pharisee or the Levite but the Samaritan. Which was something I already thought but had no way to express except in something that Aslan says during the last battle, which didn't seem very respectable, intellectually. It's good to have two ways to say it -- even though now I think of it there's almost no one in the world to whom I could suitably say the phrase "eschatalogical reserve".
Sunday, 29 January 2012
Wednesday, 18 January 2012
It has realistic legs but no head
I am sitting in a Robotics lecture right now being simultaneously amazed and freaked out by this robot, "Big Dog". Watch when the man kicks it.
They're currently envisaged as pack animals for soldiers, but I doubt we civilians will escape on the day when packs of them tire of their servitude and trample us all to death.
There's also a Little Dog, if you're interested.
They're currently envisaged as pack animals for soldiers, but I doubt we civilians will escape on the day when packs of them tire of their servitude and trample us all to death.
There's also a Little Dog, if you're interested.
Tuesday, 17 January 2012
Intelligence
What is intelligence? I don't know. I think maybe we need as many words for it as the proverbial Eskimo has for snow. Remembering things is intelligent. Managing your life is intelligent. Being able to make people understand you is intelligent. Being able to train a dog, that's pretty intelligent. I'm intelligent if you count having a PhD as being intelligent (and I think that is true for a certain value of intelligent) but in some ways I'm very stupid -- I'm nowhere near as good as my brother is at being happy, I struggle to feed myself healthily and inexpensively, and I can't play chess or do cryptic crosswords. This is one of those philosophical problems that spills out into real life. The other day I was talking about atheism and the idea of "Oxbridge" intelligence came up, as a type of intelligence that often involves a certain type of stupidity. As someone who has sat in a gown at High Table and had my blouse's label politely tucked in by a member of the waiting staff, I can't claim not to be implicated in all that, though as a concept it does a disservice to the fact that there are plenty of people at Oxbridge who are actually fully functioning members of society. I can think of about five without even trying.
Yesterday I went to a lecture on Machine Learning, a sub-part of Artificial Intelligence. It was full of very complicated stuff which I couldn't follow. But the question "What is Intelligence?" was pretty quickly dealt with. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, so that "we do in life better". (Oh dear, that rules out my PhD as a sign of intelligence, let alone reading War and Peace.) I also went to an Introduction to Artificial Intelligence this morning, which sensibly did not define intelligence, but looked at the different ways people try to replicate it. Some people do AI in order to learn more about animal and human cognition, by modeling it and seeing what happens.
So the people who are shaping our practical idea of what intelligence is, and what intelligence should be, are essentially taking it for granted that what intelligence is is what they are, and using that as the unreflective basis of their research; and yet these people are, for a certain value of stupid, quite likely to be very stupid. I find that interesting, in a worrying sort of way. It's not great news for people from cultural backgrounds which are under-represented in scholarly circles, for example.
Yesterday I went to a lecture on Machine Learning, a sub-part of Artificial Intelligence. It was full of very complicated stuff which I couldn't follow. But the question "What is Intelligence?" was pretty quickly dealt with. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, so that "we do in life better". (Oh dear, that rules out my PhD as a sign of intelligence, let alone reading War and Peace.) I also went to an Introduction to Artificial Intelligence this morning, which sensibly did not define intelligence, but looked at the different ways people try to replicate it. Some people do AI in order to learn more about animal and human cognition, by modeling it and seeing what happens.
So the people who are shaping our practical idea of what intelligence is, and what intelligence should be, are essentially taking it for granted that what intelligence is is what they are, and using that as the unreflective basis of their research; and yet these people are, for a certain value of stupid, quite likely to be very stupid. I find that interesting, in a worrying sort of way. It's not great news for people from cultural backgrounds which are under-represented in scholarly circles, for example.
Saturday, 14 January 2012
A long post about my week
This week has been hectic for large reasons but also for small annoying ones:
1-- I bought some shampoo which turns out to smell of chicken coops. It's the smell that wafts out when you open the little coop door in the evening, and the chickens are all there fluffed up in the darkness, and they peer at you beadily as if to say "What? We're roosting", so you shut the door again and leave them alone. It's a sweet warm smell, partly hay or straw, a little sour, and not unpleasant, but it does have the undertone of chicken shit, and it's not therefore a smell I would choose for my hair. But I feel about shampoo bottles like William of Ockham felt about entities, so I'm stuck with it.
2-- Every now and then my mother hurts my brain by expressing an opinion so random and unexpected I just don't know what to do with it. She told me she disapproves of the high speed rail link plans, and I thought it would be because of the Chilterns or something, but she says that actually it's such a long time until it will be completed that by then we're pretty much bound to have developed high-quality hologram replicas of ourselves (like Rimmer in Red Dwarf, she said, helpfully) so we will no longer have any need to travel much in person. The problem is that when I was a teenager she used to drive me mad by going on and on about the imminence of robot-driven cars, and now google are doing it and she was right all along. And there are other annoying crazy things she's been right about too. Maybe she has a point that with the current rate of change we can't really predict what we'll need in 2026. But I would guess that being able to move our physical bodies is going to remain important for a long time. If you've ever done a video conference meeting you'll know just how unsatisfactory they are. We did some for the Parker project with our Stanford partners -- they would all be there clutching their morning coffees while we were packed up ready to go home. They were odd experiences. The University video suite (on the New Museums Site) videoed them all for posterity, I think, which is yet another reason to feel sorry for posterity.
3-- The most ostensibly stressful thing about this week was the two exams at the start. They were the first exams I've ever done by typing. The C++ one was tough but interesting -- it involved using supplied text files of some poems and a pronunciation dictionary to analyse the poems' rhyme schemes and identify what if any type of sonnet they were. (Distractingly the supplied Spenserian sonnet was the "One day I wrote her name upon the strand" poem which I love.) I didn't get it fully working but I made what I think was a reasonable attempt, so it depends on their marking attitudes. (Prolog was fine, I got that all working I think, though I didn't have time to test it properly.) It was so strange doing exams again after so long. Like anyone who's been through Oxbridge, at school exams used to be my thing, and in my case particularly the more mathsy ones. My mother always used to tell me that the important thing with exams was to enjoy them. And although I by no means got it all done I did really enjoy the C++ exam. There's something rather beautiful about going into a defined space and letting go of absolutely everything to do with life and its many complications, and distilling all your thoughts and concerns into one tiny thing, like whether your function can correctly pick out and return the last syllable of a line of poetry. (Of course that's not the sort of thing you can say to people who take the exam with you, it would be rude.)
4-- Then the exams end and life rushes back in on you. The post-exam bit of this week has been really hard. It's going to be a very tough term, mostly because of the group project which we need to get done over the next ten weeks. Ours involves writing an android app for elderly people which can help them to stay in their homes rather than in hospitals when they have ongoing health problems which need monitoring. It involves various input from wearable sensors, but thankfully the sensors are already set up and not our problem, we just have to deal with the data. I'm group leader and it's stressful. I really like everyone in my team but we're basically a bunch of lovable misfits who would be better suited to generating sitcom scenarios than an actual working product.
5-- We get a short (nine-hour) lecture course on project management, which is actually really interesting in a gruesome sort of way. The lecturer does make it sound like it's pretty much impossible to implement anything ever, but that sort of fits in with my real life experience. And to be able to put names to the reasons why various things I've worked on have had terrible problems, and to realise that anyone who knew anything about project management would have known these problems were coming way in advance, is a compelling and strange development for me.
6-- We've also done Java -- I love Java! -- and Matlab. I've had to think about eigenvectors and eigenvalues for the first time this millenium. But two hours of lectures and four hours of labs mean that we now know Java, apparently, and for Matlab we only had two hours of lectures and two hours of labs. It's so much new stuff all at once, and next week we start our proper courses. The idea of this MSc is that the first term gets us up to speed and is equivalent to the first year of the undergraduate computing course, and all our options this term are shared with second-, third-, and fourth-year Computing and Engineering students. The big question for me is whether to take on Maths-related courses. On the one hand I could do Maths back in 1994, when I did two A-levels in it. On the other hand 1994 was so long ago that I have a creeping suspicion that I'm not actually still the same person. I have next week to try out courses and decide, because the week after is the week for sorting out my individual project on which I will spend the entire summer.
7-- So that's my week. I'm writing this post mostly to get some thoughts out of my system, and also to remind myself of what it was like later. I need to mentally gird my loins for the task ahead. It's going to be a very tough term. But the good thing is that having done last term's courseworks, and this week's exams, I now know that I can hold my own with these young people, many of whom did Maths or Engineering degrees, many of whom have spent a few years working in the computing industry, and that is the most immensely massive relief.
1-- I bought some shampoo which turns out to smell of chicken coops. It's the smell that wafts out when you open the little coop door in the evening, and the chickens are all there fluffed up in the darkness, and they peer at you beadily as if to say "What? We're roosting", so you shut the door again and leave them alone. It's a sweet warm smell, partly hay or straw, a little sour, and not unpleasant, but it does have the undertone of chicken shit, and it's not therefore a smell I would choose for my hair. But I feel about shampoo bottles like William of Ockham felt about entities, so I'm stuck with it.
2-- Every now and then my mother hurts my brain by expressing an opinion so random and unexpected I just don't know what to do with it. She told me she disapproves of the high speed rail link plans, and I thought it would be because of the Chilterns or something, but she says that actually it's such a long time until it will be completed that by then we're pretty much bound to have developed high-quality hologram replicas of ourselves (like Rimmer in Red Dwarf, she said, helpfully) so we will no longer have any need to travel much in person. The problem is that when I was a teenager she used to drive me mad by going on and on about the imminence of robot-driven cars, and now google are doing it and she was right all along. And there are other annoying crazy things she's been right about too. Maybe she has a point that with the current rate of change we can't really predict what we'll need in 2026. But I would guess that being able to move our physical bodies is going to remain important for a long time. If you've ever done a video conference meeting you'll know just how unsatisfactory they are. We did some for the Parker project with our Stanford partners -- they would all be there clutching their morning coffees while we were packed up ready to go home. They were odd experiences. The University video suite (on the New Museums Site) videoed them all for posterity, I think, which is yet another reason to feel sorry for posterity.
3-- The most ostensibly stressful thing about this week was the two exams at the start. They were the first exams I've ever done by typing. The C++ one was tough but interesting -- it involved using supplied text files of some poems and a pronunciation dictionary to analyse the poems' rhyme schemes and identify what if any type of sonnet they were. (Distractingly the supplied Spenserian sonnet was the "One day I wrote her name upon the strand" poem which I love.) I didn't get it fully working but I made what I think was a reasonable attempt, so it depends on their marking attitudes. (Prolog was fine, I got that all working I think, though I didn't have time to test it properly.) It was so strange doing exams again after so long. Like anyone who's been through Oxbridge, at school exams used to be my thing, and in my case particularly the more mathsy ones. My mother always used to tell me that the important thing with exams was to enjoy them. And although I by no means got it all done I did really enjoy the C++ exam. There's something rather beautiful about going into a defined space and letting go of absolutely everything to do with life and its many complications, and distilling all your thoughts and concerns into one tiny thing, like whether your function can correctly pick out and return the last syllable of a line of poetry. (Of course that's not the sort of thing you can say to people who take the exam with you, it would be rude.)
4-- Then the exams end and life rushes back in on you. The post-exam bit of this week has been really hard. It's going to be a very tough term, mostly because of the group project which we need to get done over the next ten weeks. Ours involves writing an android app for elderly people which can help them to stay in their homes rather than in hospitals when they have ongoing health problems which need monitoring. It involves various input from wearable sensors, but thankfully the sensors are already set up and not our problem, we just have to deal with the data. I'm group leader and it's stressful. I really like everyone in my team but we're basically a bunch of lovable misfits who would be better suited to generating sitcom scenarios than an actual working product.
5-- We get a short (nine-hour) lecture course on project management, which is actually really interesting in a gruesome sort of way. The lecturer does make it sound like it's pretty much impossible to implement anything ever, but that sort of fits in with my real life experience. And to be able to put names to the reasons why various things I've worked on have had terrible problems, and to realise that anyone who knew anything about project management would have known these problems were coming way in advance, is a compelling and strange development for me.
6-- We've also done Java -- I love Java! -- and Matlab. I've had to think about eigenvectors and eigenvalues for the first time this millenium. But two hours of lectures and four hours of labs mean that we now know Java, apparently, and for Matlab we only had two hours of lectures and two hours of labs. It's so much new stuff all at once, and next week we start our proper courses. The idea of this MSc is that the first term gets us up to speed and is equivalent to the first year of the undergraduate computing course, and all our options this term are shared with second-, third-, and fourth-year Computing and Engineering students. The big question for me is whether to take on Maths-related courses. On the one hand I could do Maths back in 1994, when I did two A-levels in it. On the other hand 1994 was so long ago that I have a creeping suspicion that I'm not actually still the same person. I have next week to try out courses and decide, because the week after is the week for sorting out my individual project on which I will spend the entire summer.
7-- So that's my week. I'm writing this post mostly to get some thoughts out of my system, and also to remind myself of what it was like later. I need to mentally gird my loins for the task ahead. It's going to be a very tough term. But the good thing is that having done last term's courseworks, and this week's exams, I now know that I can hold my own with these young people, many of whom did Maths or Engineering degrees, many of whom have spent a few years working in the computing industry, and that is the most immensely massive relief.
Sunday, 8 January 2012
Studenthood: the downside
Aaaagh, I have an exam tomorrow, and another one the day after. I haven't done any exams since 1997, and no non-humanities exams since 1994, back when many of my classmates hadn't yet started school. C++ is tomorrow afternoon, and Prolog on Tuesday morning. Doing well in them is out of my reach -- my hope is to achieve a respectable pass.
Wednesday, 4 January 2012
New Year's Thoughts
1. Why has Amazon just recommended to me a book called Tater's Bear, in a series which seems to be entitled "Siren Everlasting Classic ManLove: Erotic Alternative Paranormal Romance"? When I went to "fix this recommendation" it turned out to be because I had previously purchased .... a Kindle. I've heard it said that rudery would flourish in ebook form in the same way that polaroid cameras will ever be associated with people wanting to photograph their bits without showing them to people who work in Boots. But if I wanted to read about Erotic Paranormal ManLove I would far far rather find some actual bookshop where I could go, hand over money, and take the book away in a one-time transaction, than buy it on Kindle and have Amazon recommending other Siren Everlasting Classic ManLove titles for the rest of my life. Of course I've probably achieved that anyway by clicking on the link.
2. I kept my last year's New Year's Resolutions all year, which is pretty rare in my life, and in general, I think. I deliberately didn't go for the predictable resolutions of an unfit, unemployed, overweight thirty-four-year-old living in her parents' house (which would probably be to take up smoking): instead I vowed to record what I read, rewatch all of Battlestar Galactica, and develop an opinion on East Coast vs West Coast rap. I didn't entirely manage that last, but I did listen to a lot of rap. Because quite a few tracks were depressingly violent or strangely filled with hatred for women I made a playlist called Hip-Hop for Devon Ladies which filtered out the ones which made me feel sad.
Anyway I was trying to come up with some good resolutions for this year, but it's the 4th January now and I may be defeated. I don't want them to be resolutions about things which need doing anyway.
3. One of the problems with growing older, and this relates to both points 1 and 2, is that with increasing self-knowledge it becomes less and less likely that taking the risk of trying something new will pay off. I find it easy to tell in advance whether or not to try foods, books, films, TV series, and all sorts of things, and it's a very long time since I tried something I didn't think I'd like and liked it, no matter how highly it was recommended by others. I think I do genuinely want to find new things to like more than I want to be proved right here. Against my better judgement I have been trying to read Deborah Harkness' A Discovery of Witches, about the forbidden love of a witch and a vampire, because it starts in Duke Humfrey (the Bodleian Library's erstwhile manuscripts reading room) and was written by an academic one of whose factual books is on my to-read list. But it's just not well enough written to be OK. I'm only five brief chapters in but the protagonist is perfect in a sub-Dan-Brown way -- when she calls friends they start the conversation by congratulating her on all the awards her books have recently won and then go on to describe her great beauty in detail. I'm going to have to give it up. How do I teach Amazon that I'm even more put off by Paranormal Romance than Classic ManLove?
4. So here are my final 2012 resolutions, in a more or less finished form:
a) to spend at least an hour every week in a museum or gallery with a notebook and pencil. I'm going to start tomorrow by catching the end of the Canadian Impressionists exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.
b) to find and satisfactorily test a recipe for almond macaroons (the old-style ones, not the pretty French ones with cream filling)
c) maybe something to do with animals? I admit this one still needs working on.
2. I kept my last year's New Year's Resolutions all year, which is pretty rare in my life, and in general, I think. I deliberately didn't go for the predictable resolutions of an unfit, unemployed, overweight thirty-four-year-old living in her parents' house (which would probably be to take up smoking): instead I vowed to record what I read, rewatch all of Battlestar Galactica, and develop an opinion on East Coast vs West Coast rap. I didn't entirely manage that last, but I did listen to a lot of rap. Because quite a few tracks were depressingly violent or strangely filled with hatred for women I made a playlist called Hip-Hop for Devon Ladies which filtered out the ones which made me feel sad.
Anyway I was trying to come up with some good resolutions for this year, but it's the 4th January now and I may be defeated. I don't want them to be resolutions about things which need doing anyway.
3. One of the problems with growing older, and this relates to both points 1 and 2, is that with increasing self-knowledge it becomes less and less likely that taking the risk of trying something new will pay off. I find it easy to tell in advance whether or not to try foods, books, films, TV series, and all sorts of things, and it's a very long time since I tried something I didn't think I'd like and liked it, no matter how highly it was recommended by others. I think I do genuinely want to find new things to like more than I want to be proved right here. Against my better judgement I have been trying to read Deborah Harkness' A Discovery of Witches, about the forbidden love of a witch and a vampire, because it starts in Duke Humfrey (the Bodleian Library's erstwhile manuscripts reading room) and was written by an academic one of whose factual books is on my to-read list. But it's just not well enough written to be OK. I'm only five brief chapters in but the protagonist is perfect in a sub-Dan-Brown way -- when she calls friends they start the conversation by congratulating her on all the awards her books have recently won and then go on to describe her great beauty in detail. I'm going to have to give it up. How do I teach Amazon that I'm even more put off by Paranormal Romance than Classic ManLove?
4. So here are my final 2012 resolutions, in a more or less finished form:
a) to spend at least an hour every week in a museum or gallery with a notebook and pencil. I'm going to start tomorrow by catching the end of the Canadian Impressionists exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.
b) to find and satisfactorily test a recipe for almond macaroons (the old-style ones, not the pretty French ones with cream filling)
c) maybe something to do with animals? I admit this one still needs working on.
Tuesday, 3 January 2012
The company you keep
It's definitely true that people change people. The characters of the people you are friends with make a difference to what you're like, especially the friends of your youth. When I think about how life would have been different if I had done Maths or CompSci as an undergraduate the thing that seems really crucial is that I wouldn't have met people who helped to shape my character. Also it seems to be the case that some company makes one feel more alive and alert than others. (The people on my course are young and often make me nostalgic for the dry humour of people with PhDs but no job prospects.)
I think that's also the case with animal company. I think spending time with horses, or dogs, or any animal, forces you to be calm and patient, and makes you a little less human in a good way, a bit more part of the immediate world, and a bit more focused on affection. I really miss having pets.
I like to think that this also has an effect on the animals too. At this point I may be moving into wishful thinking. Definitely my brother would say that keeping animals is a sort of slavery, and that because I like to do so I imagine that there is a positive side for them too. He says that if the pet loves you that makes it worse not better, because the pet has no choice in the matter -- it's just a form of Stockholm syndrome and sick. (Last time we talked about this I pointed out that he had done the same thing to my nephew, who has no choice but to love and utterly depend on his parents, but he says that's different because children grow up -- I'm not convinced, and to me it seems more of a big deal to create a human who is totally emotionally in your power than to do the same thing to an animal with less complex emotions and easier needs. I admire in both senses the chutzpah of people who decide to have children.)
But anyway, with the proviso that I really want to believe this, I think that animals are changed a little by human contact. The pets I've had have been dogs and rats, and they both love to communicate with humans. Am I reading too much into it because I loved to communicate with them? It seemed to me a bit like the good conversation which is about the only thing I miss about Cambridge -- it made me feel a similar sort of mental satisfaction, though of course it's a very different sort of communication. Sentimentally I like to imagine that spending time with humans made my pets also feel a sort of satisfying mental alertness, that it enlarged their world.
Anyway this is just a roundabout way of introducing a very interesting video of a bonobo ape called Kanzi who likes to light fires and toast marshmallows. The woman with him attributes this to a film he saw when younger, which is culture I suppose.
I think that's also the case with animal company. I think spending time with horses, or dogs, or any animal, forces you to be calm and patient, and makes you a little less human in a good way, a bit more part of the immediate world, and a bit more focused on affection. I really miss having pets.
I like to think that this also has an effect on the animals too. At this point I may be moving into wishful thinking. Definitely my brother would say that keeping animals is a sort of slavery, and that because I like to do so I imagine that there is a positive side for them too. He says that if the pet loves you that makes it worse not better, because the pet has no choice in the matter -- it's just a form of Stockholm syndrome and sick. (Last time we talked about this I pointed out that he had done the same thing to my nephew, who has no choice but to love and utterly depend on his parents, but he says that's different because children grow up -- I'm not convinced, and to me it seems more of a big deal to create a human who is totally emotionally in your power than to do the same thing to an animal with less complex emotions and easier needs. I admire in both senses the chutzpah of people who decide to have children.)
But anyway, with the proviso that I really want to believe this, I think that animals are changed a little by human contact. The pets I've had have been dogs and rats, and they both love to communicate with humans. Am I reading too much into it because I loved to communicate with them? It seemed to me a bit like the good conversation which is about the only thing I miss about Cambridge -- it made me feel a similar sort of mental satisfaction, though of course it's a very different sort of communication. Sentimentally I like to imagine that spending time with humans made my pets also feel a sort of satisfying mental alertness, that it enlarged their world.
Anyway this is just a roundabout way of introducing a very interesting video of a bonobo ape called Kanzi who likes to light fires and toast marshmallows. The woman with him attributes this to a film he saw when younger, which is culture I suppose.
Saturday, 31 December 2011
Reading in 2011
One of my three New Year's resolutions for 2011 was to keep track of what I read. I've done this using LibraryThing, which is quite a good system. So here is my personal set of book awards for 2011.
Favourite all-round book of the year:
A tie between these two, which are both humane, amusing, and intelligent:
Snidest and most subtly brilliant author:
Best light-hearted reads:
Favourite author discoveries
"I'm an Intellectual me" award for high-brow books I actually really enjoyed
Reliably cheering author award:
Brilliant memoir award:
You're A Bit of An Arse award for being entertaining but mostly a bit of an arse:
Very interesting history/biography award:
Ouch award for unpalatable truths:
Honourable mention to John Lanchester, Whoops!.
Best drawings:
And here is an analysis borrowed from how Stuck In A Book does it, though shortened.
Favourite all-round book of the year:
A tie between these two, which are both humane, amusing, and intelligent:
- Moo by Jane Smiley
- Rameau's Niece by Cathleen Schine
Wonderful, my favourite of hers so far. Margaret has a lovely husband, a terrible memory, and a surprise bestseller under her belt, an edition of a post-Revolutionary anatomical treatise by a Frenchwoman. Now she's editing an eighteenth-century philosophical dialogue which is really the story of the seduction of the eponymous niece of Rameau -- written by a philosopher at a time when "philosopher" had a secondary meaning of dirty, dirty man (e.g. Sade, Casanova). Unfortunately she gets rather caught up in her work, and rediscovers erotic yearnings. This novel is great fun, affectionately satirical, and pokes gentle fun at the idea of the search for knowledge as a form of sexual desire.
Snidest and most subtly brilliant author:
- Muriel Spark, especially for The Abbess of Crewe
- Barbara Pym, especially for A Glass Full of Blessings
Best light-hearted reads:
- Alan Bradley's Flavia de Luce books
- Paul Magrs's Brenda books
Favourite author discoveries
- Jo Walton
- Javier Marías
- Ismail Kadare
"I'm an Intellectual me" award for high-brow books I actually really enjoyed
- Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow trilogy
Reliably cheering author award:
- Marian Keyes
- Jilly Cooper
Brilliant memoir award:
- Rhoda Janzen, Mennonite In A Little Black Dress
- runner up Caitlin Moran, How To Be A Woman
You're A Bit of An Arse award for being entertaining but mostly a bit of an arse:
- Russell Brand, Booky-Wook Two
Very interesting history/biography award:
- Bride of Science by Benjamin Woolley (about Ada, daughter of Byron)
- Mad Madge by Katie Whitaker (about Margaret Cavendish, another early female scientist)
- Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey
- Augustine of Hippo by Henry Chadwick (worthy but more likeable than you'd expect)
- As Good as God, as Clever as the Devil by Rodney Bolt (Mary Benson)
Ouch award for unpalatable truths:
- Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Honourable mention to John Lanchester, Whoops!.
Best drawings:
- Hark a Vagrant! by Kate Beaton
- The First In Line by Mattias Adolfson
And here is an analysis borrowed from how Stuck In A Book does it, though shortened.
- Total number of books read: 209
- Gender of authors (of each book): 107 male, 92 female, 5 not sure (they're all K. J. Parker), and 5 anthologies
- Fiction vs non-fiction: 181 to 28
- Number of re-reads: 23
Saturday, 24 December 2011
Catch-up
1. I forgot to post about things I read in November. I mostly enjoyed books by Elinor Lipman, who is gently funny, or sometimes not so gently in a Spark/Pym style. (E.g. The Ladies Man.) Caitlin Moran's How To Be A Woman was very enjoyable. Strictly speaking we ought to be further along in feminism than this by now, we shouldn't need someone to point out that equal treatment for men and women is a good thing and beneficial to both, but it seems that we do. I wanted to post about it properly but I doubt I'll ever get round to it. But it did make me think that given that a lot of women are prone to crazily analytical thoughts, and given that women are at least fifty percent of the population, does that really count as crazy after all? If a lot of people do it it could be argued that it's quite normal. Anyway, I recommend this book mostly because it's funny.
2. I meant to post about the Victorians. On my way into college I walk past either the Natural History Museum or the Royal Albert Hall and Albert Memorial, or sometimes past the V&A. In my childhood I was frequently told by both grandmothers that the Victorians would not have stood for my behaviour and would have taken away my food, beaten me, and probably clamped me to metal things to stop me slouching, and I got the impression that the Victorians were a very dull lot who hated children. But you can't go past those buildings without realising that actually the Victorians were completely crazy. I really meant to blog about the amazingness of the Natural History Museum building, and to read up on Victorian things, but I never got round to more than reading Strachey's Eminent Victorians, which I loved.
3. I never got round to writing a post about K. J. Parker. I still want to do this one day. In the meantime I'll just say that her (or possibly his) Engineer Trilogy is a really excellent work and one of my favourite discoveries of 2010. I reread it recently and I still think it's great.
2. I meant to post about the Victorians. On my way into college I walk past either the Natural History Museum or the Royal Albert Hall and Albert Memorial, or sometimes past the V&A. In my childhood I was frequently told by both grandmothers that the Victorians would not have stood for my behaviour and would have taken away my food, beaten me, and probably clamped me to metal things to stop me slouching, and I got the impression that the Victorians were a very dull lot who hated children. But you can't go past those buildings without realising that actually the Victorians were completely crazy. I really meant to blog about the amazingness of the Natural History Museum building, and to read up on Victorian things, but I never got round to more than reading Strachey's Eminent Victorians, which I loved.
3. I never got round to writing a post about K. J. Parker. I still want to do this one day. In the meantime I'll just say that her (or possibly his) Engineer Trilogy is a really excellent work and one of my favourite discoveries of 2010. I reread it recently and I still think it's great.
Friday, 23 December 2011
Brilliant music
Popjustice's list of the top 45 singles of 2011 is out. (Have I mentioned that popjustice is great?) There were two great songs on it which I had missed. Here's Donkeyboy (who did Ambitions before Joe McElderry), City Boy, with quite a watchable video:
And Selena Gomez, who deserves sympathy for being hated, did this excellent pop song, Love You Like a Love Song.
And Selena Gomez, who deserves sympathy for being hated, did this excellent pop song, Love You Like a Love Song.
Thursday, 22 December 2011
Siblings
I met my brother's baby girl, my little niece. I suppose in the normal run of things one just doesn't encounter little babies very often. I was struck, just like I was by my nephew when he was tiny, how wierd new babies are. I can't remember what philosopher it was who said that we can never know what it's like to be a bat, but I could make a much better go at imagining a world defined by clicks and twilight flying than imagining what it's like to a be a little weeks old baby. They look so alien, and they can't touch things or see much. They go dark and stiff when they're angry, and cry like small animals coughing, and they have freakily tiny necks. My nephew is clearly finding the adjustment a bit frustrating, though he's generally being good. My niece needs most of the attention of at least one of her parents at all times, and sometimes both, and she's too young yet to do anything which would engage my nephew's interest. He strokes her head very gently, but it annoys him if this doesn't stop her crying. I expect he'll find it easier once she starts smiling and sitting up, and generally being more human.
Tuesday, 20 December 2011
Bip-bop: a retraction
So it turns out that when I emended my mother's term "bip-bop" to hip-hop I was wrong and she really meant beat box. I think I might have guessed this if I had thought more carefully about the small likelihood of her substituting the labial plosive b for the glottal pseudo-fricative h, the fact that even Devon-dwelling grandmothers have probably heard the term hip-hop at some point, and the text-critical rule of lectio difficilior. But I know for sure because she made me first search for and then watch the rapping vicar on YouTube. So I am embedding it here. I'm not sure I'd recommend it but it has made my mother very happy. Go vicars! If you want to, be unusual.
Good stuff
Because my last post went all ecclesiastical I didn't quite feel up to posting at the end some other videos, especially this song, which I enjoy as music, but which is depressing if you listen too much to the lyrics, which seems to be just how things are these days (unless you're listening to a rapping vicar, in which case the other probably applies). I quite like Andre 3000 as a talking cat.
Ages ago I ordered Kate Beaton's Hark A Vagrant book, which was waiting when I came back, and is great. The first cartoon in it is this brilliant Bronte one. Go Anne!
I like this song too, and the video is quite good if not brilliant.
Ages ago I ordered Kate Beaton's Hark A Vagrant book, which was waiting when I came back, and is great. The first cartoon in it is this brilliant Bronte one. Go Anne!
I like this song too, and the video is quite good if not brilliant.
Monday, 19 December 2011
Bip-bop
I'm back in Devon. My mum collected me from Honiton and drove me back through the Blackdown Hills. She tells me that they had a rapping vicar at church yesterday morning. She said she was surprised at first but that when she listened she thought the lyrics were quite clever. "He didn't call it rapping, though," she told me, "but bip-bop." I asked if it was possible she meant hip-hop, and she said yes, if that's like rapping. I love Devon. I felt I ought to warn her that teenagers are unlikely to have been impressed by it, and I'm glad that I wasn't there, but still I do think vicars should be allowed to rap if they feel like it.
It is impossible to be unmoved by the Blackdown Hills AONB, but I have to say that enjoying living in London has slightly shaken my faith in my living-in-Devon life plan. London has so much going on that's good for the mind. And another thing is that even leaving rapping vicars aside, the church situation in London is so much easier to deal with. I think for the first time ever in my life I'm going to a church where my rather liberal views are in tune with those of many there. The vicar is the chairman of the Inclusive Church movement, which is mostly famous for its stance on LBGT issues, but which also campaigns about women's ministry, mental health, poverty, and other things that can make people feel excluded from the church. When I went to St Andrew the Great's in Cambridge, many years back, I couldn't avoid the feeling that that church was there for undamaged, successful people, and it made me feel out of place. Jesus' ministry was largely to people who had failed or been hurt in some way. (Though St Andrew the Great's is an excellent church and good at prodding the comfortable.)
Anyway (if it embeds properly, I'm not used to vimeo) here's the vicar of St John's Waterloo preaching about power and powerlessness as part of a sermon series he organised for advent.
Revd Giles Goddard from David Simoes-Brown on Vimeo.
It is impossible to be unmoved by the Blackdown Hills AONB, but I have to say that enjoying living in London has slightly shaken my faith in my living-in-Devon life plan. London has so much going on that's good for the mind. And another thing is that even leaving rapping vicars aside, the church situation in London is so much easier to deal with. I think for the first time ever in my life I'm going to a church where my rather liberal views are in tune with those of many there. The vicar is the chairman of the Inclusive Church movement, which is mostly famous for its stance on LBGT issues, but which also campaigns about women's ministry, mental health, poverty, and other things that can make people feel excluded from the church. When I went to St Andrew the Great's in Cambridge, many years back, I couldn't avoid the feeling that that church was there for undamaged, successful people, and it made me feel out of place. Jesus' ministry was largely to people who had failed or been hurt in some way. (Though St Andrew the Great's is an excellent church and good at prodding the comfortable.)
Anyway (if it embeds properly, I'm not used to vimeo) here's the vicar of St John's Waterloo preaching about power and powerlessness as part of a sermon series he organised for advent.
Revd Giles Goddard from David Simoes-Brown on Vimeo.
Thursday, 15 December 2011
Week Eleven
So here we are in the middle of week eleven, the last of term. It's been very hard work, and I feel simultaneously relieved at the thought of a break, and very anxious at the idea that we have almost finished with one of just two teaching terms for the whole course. I've been doing OK in coursework, but the courseworks are a tiny tiny piece of the total mark. I got one back yesterday that counts for one third of ten percent of three-quarters of a module, out of nine modules in total. (And there's an individual project too, the marks for which remain separate.)
A lot of the time I don't notice being older than the others but sometimes it really hits home, and then I feel like Louis CK in this coffee shop (it starts about a minute in):
A lot of the time I don't notice being older than the others but sometimes it really hits home, and then I feel like Louis CK in this coffee shop (it starts about a minute in):
Sunday, 4 December 2011
Females
When I was a student the first time round it was a relatively short time since most Cambridge colleges had started to admit women, a short enough time that no one in my year at Trinity was going to have a mother who also went to Trinity. The gender balance of colleges and courses was something people were aware of in the way that they were also aware of the need for a balance of social and economic backgrounds. In Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic we were proud of ourselves for being pretty much 50/50. (And by the time I left ASNC many years later I think the senior members were about 50/50 too.) So when I was first a student there was a feeling that gender imbalance was a problem that was slowly being overcome.
I don't know if it's just a natural part of moving from youth to middle age, which is famous for making you look back with rose-tinted spectacles, but it seems like in so many ways gender things have failed to get better, or even got worse. I first noticed it at about the time I became a research fellow. The fellowship was very male-dominated -- it was numerically more typical to be an out gay man than a woman -- and although no one was ever anti me as a woman, they certainly commented on it from time to time. One fellow told me that as a woman I had got second place in the lottery of life, which I laughed at uproariously because I thought he was making a joke, until I realised that whether joking or not he did actually think this was true. Anyway, it wasn't a problem, it was just odd because it seemed like a retrograde step.
Now I'm a student again things are even worse. I'm one of seven women out of 56 students on my course, and although we're a pretty vocal bunch -- our year's student rep is a woman -- we're vocal in that way that women are when they're surrounded by men. Imperial should be a bit ashamed of this imbalance, which is visible throughout the department. They should be even more ashamed of the examples used in our Object-Oriented Programming lectures. In object-oriented programming you model the scenario you want to program by thinking about different types of objects as classes. So if you were modelling a traffic junction you might have a TrafficLight class and a Vehicle class. You can have subclasses which share some behaviours and data with a superclass, e.g. Vehicle might be a superclass with subclasses Car, Bicycle, and Bus. Then you can make things behave differently according to which subclass they're part of. In our object-oriented design lectures we have all this demonstrated with repeated examples using a Human superclass which has a Female subclass. Humans enjoy walking and Females enjoy cooking. When a Human goes on holiday it spends its time walking, but when a Female goes on holiday she cooks. When a Human talks to a Human they talk about sport, but when a Human talks to a Female they talk about discos.
Clearly this is appalling. When I was younger I might have been actually genuinely hurt by it. By now I just find myself thinking that the men involved in it are all arseholes -- I think they realise it's not OK but they think it's funny not-OK not change-it-now not-OK. And because I too can be sexist I find it very hard for my contempt for these individuals not to leak out a little bit onto men in general, or at least the young men on my course who think it's funny too. I wish they'd just sort it out. The feminism I believe in is about ending not perpetuating the war of the sexes. I'm not just damaged by sexism because it might stop me doing things, but also damaged by it when it makes me a worse person by provoking a reactionary sexism in me.
So welcome to a difficult world, little niece. I promise never ever to buy you anything pink.
I don't know if it's just a natural part of moving from youth to middle age, which is famous for making you look back with rose-tinted spectacles, but it seems like in so many ways gender things have failed to get better, or even got worse. I first noticed it at about the time I became a research fellow. The fellowship was very male-dominated -- it was numerically more typical to be an out gay man than a woman -- and although no one was ever anti me as a woman, they certainly commented on it from time to time. One fellow told me that as a woman I had got second place in the lottery of life, which I laughed at uproariously because I thought he was making a joke, until I realised that whether joking or not he did actually think this was true. Anyway, it wasn't a problem, it was just odd because it seemed like a retrograde step.
Now I'm a student again things are even worse. I'm one of seven women out of 56 students on my course, and although we're a pretty vocal bunch -- our year's student rep is a woman -- we're vocal in that way that women are when they're surrounded by men. Imperial should be a bit ashamed of this imbalance, which is visible throughout the department. They should be even more ashamed of the examples used in our Object-Oriented Programming lectures. In object-oriented programming you model the scenario you want to program by thinking about different types of objects as classes. So if you were modelling a traffic junction you might have a TrafficLight class and a Vehicle class. You can have subclasses which share some behaviours and data with a superclass, e.g. Vehicle might be a superclass with subclasses Car, Bicycle, and Bus. Then you can make things behave differently according to which subclass they're part of. In our object-oriented design lectures we have all this demonstrated with repeated examples using a Human superclass which has a Female subclass. Humans enjoy walking and Females enjoy cooking. When a Human goes on holiday it spends its time walking, but when a Female goes on holiday she cooks. When a Human talks to a Human they talk about sport, but when a Human talks to a Female they talk about discos.
Clearly this is appalling. When I was younger I might have been actually genuinely hurt by it. By now I just find myself thinking that the men involved in it are all arseholes -- I think they realise it's not OK but they think it's funny not-OK not change-it-now not-OK. And because I too can be sexist I find it very hard for my contempt for these individuals not to leak out a little bit onto men in general, or at least the young men on my course who think it's funny too. I wish they'd just sort it out. The feminism I believe in is about ending not perpetuating the war of the sexes. I'm not just damaged by sexism because it might stop me doing things, but also damaged by it when it makes me a worse person by provoking a reactionary sexism in me.
So welcome to a difficult world, little niece. I promise never ever to buy you anything pink.
Friday, 2 December 2011
Hurray!
My niece was born this morning. I am now twice the aunt I was! It's very exciting. I don't know how my little nephew will deal with being a big brother. He's usually quite a nice kid -- he has an endearing habit when playing of stopping and handing the toy over to you, saying "your turn now" -- but I think any child would be challenged by the sudden arrival of a smaller more demanding sibling. I can remember when my little brother was born even though I was a bit younger then than my nephew is now. I remember realising I wasn't going to get all the attention from now on, but I felt quite fatalistic about it. My Granny bought him a teddy bear and she didn't buy me anything, but then again it was a horrible knitted teddy bear and I didn't want it. Even at that age I felt that living up to people's attention could be hard work sometimes.
On the theme of its being pleasant not to be the only one, here's Chris Lowe singing One of the Crowd:
On the theme of its being pleasant not to be the only one, here's Chris Lowe singing One of the Crowd:
Friday, 25 November 2011
Plenteously
Here are some good things:
1. The 20th was stir-up Sunday. The full collect reads:
2. LibraryThing has introduced support for books with co-authors. I haven't tried it out yet, but this was my major problem with the system. So maybe I'll be able to put my academic books on too. (Although it occurs to me that unlike my novels some of them have value, and do I want to make my ownership of them public? LibraryThing does have a private book feature but I had assumed it was for porn.)
3. Prolog! Prolog is a computer language for doing logic. It's not like C++ where you tell the computer to do things. Instead you give the computer lots of facts and then ask it questions about them, along the lines is it possible to find a variable X which fulfils all these requirements. It's a lot more powerful than that sounds -- it's not just a database engine. We did some basic natural language processing the other day, where we made a system which could check and generate sentences from a basic list of vocabulary, doing elementary checks to see that the article, subject and verb all agreed in number, and with optional adverbs. Anyway it's not easy but it's cool. Part of me yearns to try to process some Latin. Part of me feels that would be a retrograde step.
4. London! London is great. I thought it would be hard work living here, but the tube is so much easier when you do it every day and know exactly where to stand and walk and you don't have a suitcase with you (or a box of rats), and there are many cool things going on, even if I don't make it to most of them cos I'm busy, and best of all I am catching up with lots of people I see only occasionally. Some time ago in Cambridge I used to have a party every year between Christmas and New Year, as the best time to catch my friends who were working abroad and came back to England at that period to see their parents. It worked pretty well for several years, but then they started marrying and having children, and if they come to England at all for Christmas they are very busy with family stuff. But living in London makes seeing people on fleeting visits just that bit easier.
5. Even though I'm a man-hating middle-aged spinster somehow most of my friends are men. When I spend time with women without men there we somehow often end up talking about men. I find listening to women talking about men absolutely fascinating in a sort of gruesome way, and some of my female friends are very witty, in a crazy self-deprecating style, on the subject. An evening spent listening to them slagging off a) men, b) their own stupid dependence on the opinions of men, is very amusing. But sometimes it depresses me that for much of the time my life would fail the Bechdel test. So hurray for the women on my course! There are only seven of us out of fifty-six, and I think that makes us feel automatically friendly towards each other. And when we talk we talk about all sorts of things, including memory allocation and virtual functions.
1. The 20th was stir-up Sunday. The full collect reads:
Stir up, O Lord, the wills of your faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may be by you plenteously rewarded through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.Most Anglican collects come from late Antique Latin via Thomas Cranmer or one of his ilk, and in the sixteenth century they could get away with writing English which sounded both Latinate and elegant. (E.g. that we by thee being defended from the fear of our enemies may pass our time in rest and quietness, etc.)
2. LibraryThing has introduced support for books with co-authors. I haven't tried it out yet, but this was my major problem with the system. So maybe I'll be able to put my academic books on too. (Although it occurs to me that unlike my novels some of them have value, and do I want to make my ownership of them public? LibraryThing does have a private book feature but I had assumed it was for porn.)
3. Prolog! Prolog is a computer language for doing logic. It's not like C++ where you tell the computer to do things. Instead you give the computer lots of facts and then ask it questions about them, along the lines is it possible to find a variable X which fulfils all these requirements. It's a lot more powerful than that sounds -- it's not just a database engine. We did some basic natural language processing the other day, where we made a system which could check and generate sentences from a basic list of vocabulary, doing elementary checks to see that the article, subject and verb all agreed in number, and with optional adverbs. Anyway it's not easy but it's cool. Part of me yearns to try to process some Latin. Part of me feels that would be a retrograde step.
4. London! London is great. I thought it would be hard work living here, but the tube is so much easier when you do it every day and know exactly where to stand and walk and you don't have a suitcase with you (or a box of rats), and there are many cool things going on, even if I don't make it to most of them cos I'm busy, and best of all I am catching up with lots of people I see only occasionally. Some time ago in Cambridge I used to have a party every year between Christmas and New Year, as the best time to catch my friends who were working abroad and came back to England at that period to see their parents. It worked pretty well for several years, but then they started marrying and having children, and if they come to England at all for Christmas they are very busy with family stuff. But living in London makes seeing people on fleeting visits just that bit easier.
5. Even though I'm a man-hating middle-aged spinster somehow most of my friends are men. When I spend time with women without men there we somehow often end up talking about men. I find listening to women talking about men absolutely fascinating in a sort of gruesome way, and some of my female friends are very witty, in a crazy self-deprecating style, on the subject. An evening spent listening to them slagging off a) men, b) their own stupid dependence on the opinions of men, is very amusing. But sometimes it depresses me that for much of the time my life would fail the Bechdel test. So hurray for the women on my course! There are only seven of us out of fifty-six, and I think that makes us feel automatically friendly towards each other. And when we talk we talk about all sorts of things, including memory allocation and virtual functions.
Saturday, 12 November 2011
Computer systems panic!
I'm panicking a bit about how I don't really understand Systems Architecture. So I've got hold of the standard textbooks and am trying to get through them all this weekend. Obviously the other thing I need is good music to keep me going while I read up on pagefiles and commit charge. Here's Little Boots' new song, which I really like:
Also, if like me you're a Community fan, and I don't get why more people aren't, here's quite a nice little video, to which I am giving rather more screen-space than the previous:
Also, if like me you're a Community fan, and I don't get why more people aren't, here's quite a nice little video, to which I am giving rather more screen-space than the previous:
Tuesday, 8 November 2011
Elder
I'm living a bit of a double life at the moment, but for once in a good way. I got a bundle of offprints the other day and sent them out to the usual people. As a result I've been in touch with quite a few people to whom I only talk intermittently but of whom I am fond, and I have lots of nice postcards from professors on my corkboard.
In my other life as a computing student I am working very hard and enjoying myself though feeling tired. We are now in week six of eleven. I'm not used to such a long term, because Cambridge has an eight-week term that goes at a mad gallop. We're galloping too, and going very fast, but I do think that as a Cambridge undergraduate I had to produce rather more work for submission. For one thing then I did three languages from the off (Latin, Old English, and Middle Welsh) and here we've only just started our second (Prolog, in addition to C++), plus we've only handed in two sets of coursework so far, neither of which we've yet had back marked.
There are two big contrasts for me. The first is with being someone on the teaching end of the lectern. For example, the fact that we're only six weeks into an eleven-week term makes me feel really good about the time I've got left to learn things before the Christmas break, whereas for so long the end of term has felt like something to be desired with mythical intensity. And there's also a big contrast in the sort of hard work we're doing. For someone who is teaching and all that stuff, term-time is a big slog, but hard work without necessarily being of itself testingly difficult. I'm not working as hard as someone who's teaching, but the work I'm doing is right on the outside fringes of my brain and needs a lot of reaching as far as I can into concepts I hardly grasp. It's exhausting in a different way. I could work harder than this but I'm more or less at full capacity in my ability to think.
The second constrast is with being a humanities student. The great thing about trying to write a computer program is that you get instant feedback on what's wrong with it when it fails to compile or, having compiled, run properly. If you mistranslate some Latin or misunderstand something in a history essay you don't get an immediate error message. It's a very useful thing for learning to be told that something is wrong and only get a slight hint about what it is, so that you have to go back, work out what it is, and fix it for yourself. I don't know how you could reproduce that in humanities teaching.
I think the one thing I would change about my classmates is the quality of our conversations. I'm sure it's quite a lot my fault, and it's partly because so many of my fellow students are young -- the other day I was talking to someone about exams, and when I mentioned that I last did a non-humanities exam in 1994 he told me that he was four years old then. And it's partly because I think people who choose this sort of subject have a tendency to be quite straightforward, which is mostly a good thing. It's not that I want to spend lots of time bitching about things as such, but I miss the feeling that if bitching were to be going on it would be done amusingly and without being too predictable. Luckily I have interesting real friends to talk to about actual things and I can continue to relate to the young course people in a largely auntly manner. Go aunt Rebecca! I'm trying hard to stay on the right side of patronising...
In my other life as a computing student I am working very hard and enjoying myself though feeling tired. We are now in week six of eleven. I'm not used to such a long term, because Cambridge has an eight-week term that goes at a mad gallop. We're galloping too, and going very fast, but I do think that as a Cambridge undergraduate I had to produce rather more work for submission. For one thing then I did three languages from the off (Latin, Old English, and Middle Welsh) and here we've only just started our second (Prolog, in addition to C++), plus we've only handed in two sets of coursework so far, neither of which we've yet had back marked.
There are two big contrasts for me. The first is with being someone on the teaching end of the lectern. For example, the fact that we're only six weeks into an eleven-week term makes me feel really good about the time I've got left to learn things before the Christmas break, whereas for so long the end of term has felt like something to be desired with mythical intensity. And there's also a big contrast in the sort of hard work we're doing. For someone who is teaching and all that stuff, term-time is a big slog, but hard work without necessarily being of itself testingly difficult. I'm not working as hard as someone who's teaching, but the work I'm doing is right on the outside fringes of my brain and needs a lot of reaching as far as I can into concepts I hardly grasp. It's exhausting in a different way. I could work harder than this but I'm more or less at full capacity in my ability to think.
The second constrast is with being a humanities student. The great thing about trying to write a computer program is that you get instant feedback on what's wrong with it when it fails to compile or, having compiled, run properly. If you mistranslate some Latin or misunderstand something in a history essay you don't get an immediate error message. It's a very useful thing for learning to be told that something is wrong and only get a slight hint about what it is, so that you have to go back, work out what it is, and fix it for yourself. I don't know how you could reproduce that in humanities teaching.
I think the one thing I would change about my classmates is the quality of our conversations. I'm sure it's quite a lot my fault, and it's partly because so many of my fellow students are young -- the other day I was talking to someone about exams, and when I mentioned that I last did a non-humanities exam in 1994 he told me that he was four years old then. And it's partly because I think people who choose this sort of subject have a tendency to be quite straightforward, which is mostly a good thing. It's not that I want to spend lots of time bitching about things as such, but I miss the feeling that if bitching were to be going on it would be done amusingly and without being too predictable. Luckily I have interesting real friends to talk to about actual things and I can continue to relate to the young course people in a largely auntly manner. Go aunt Rebecca! I'm trying hard to stay on the right side of patronising...
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