Good stuff

1. I love how cutting-edge technology keeps getting used for quite trivial things. First there were those many odd gadgets in the Innovations catalogue which claimed to have been developed by NASA, as if the point of the moon missions had been to develop pens that worked upside down and really comfortable pillows. Total surveillance became possible, and the concept of Big Brother turned from a government controlling its people for sinister ends to a low-brow TV game show used to sell gossip magazines. Complex motion sensors and accelerometers were developed, and people use them to play tennis with someone in another city, or to pretend to be drinking beer from their iphone. It hadn't occurred to me that the Artificial Intelligence and the Turing test have gone the same way until I saw this excellent conversation between a bloke and a chatbot who wanted to get his credit card by pretending to be a young lady. This is really the Turing test in action, with real stakes. As a species, we're pretty slobbish. But I like that about us.

2. But this vision of books as places where you hang out to chat with random people about the book, rather than just reading it, and where the poor author never gets to finish the thing sounds pretty hellish to me. Interesting, but if it happens I don't think I'll be taking part. And a lot of readers are unsociable types like me. I think that digital books should instead develop things along the lines of the dictionary that's built into the kindle, things that help you read without getting in the way. The dictionary needs more words in it, since one only looks up obscure things anyway and there are so many old books for free on the Kindle, and it should have a lot more in the way of proper names, so that you can get a reminder of obscure references to mythical or historical figures. At the moment the endnotes of good editions of classics can be even harder to use than in the actual book, and that's just the sort of thing where an ebook reader ought to be able to give you instant info without breaking your reading. I have an edition (paperback) of Beowulf which has enough marginal vocabulary and notes about cruxes that it's possible to read Beowulf in the bath, and it makes so much difference to be able to read it as a poem rather than just translating it as a text. I think ebooks should go the route of unobtrusive help.

3. Talking of books and technology, I do rather like this new "book trailer" thing. At the time I missed the one Gary Shteyngart made for the release of Super Sad True Love Story in hardback, but it's great. He's made a sequel for the release of the paperback which is also quite funny, if not as good. Basically, if you've read any Shteyngart these will assure you that Super Sad True Love Story is the same sort of thing, and remind you why you like him. Well done Shteyngart.

Various internet things

1. Fans of Manchester United or some other football team are trying to get Paul Hardcastle's 19 to number one to celebrate their 19th title or something. But this is an angry song about the slaughter of young men in Vietnam and the terrible time the survivors had when trying to return to normal life. It's not really a victory anthem. I think this summarises my problem with sport.

2. Here is a Japanese robot baby. In this instance they have eschewed the uncanny valley but it's still startlingly spooky.

3. But this picture of Starbuck and Starbuck in Starbucks is great.

4. In Barcelona recently they set up a few Kinects and a 3D printer so that people could take home a little figurine of themselves in their choice of pose. The coverage went for the idea that this was some groundbreaking artistic endeavour instead of just great fun. That's something that annoys me about art -- it often seems ashamed to admit it's for fun.

5. These cat ears are controlled by the power of thought.

6. These people claim that in-born patterns in neurons are evidence for innate knowledge. This sort of thing really frustrates me. I'd need to know all about the possibilities of innate knowledge vs tabula rasa as explored by philosophy as well as about neuroscience and how brains are supposed to work in order to read this properly, with an informed and critical mind. And is "knowledge" the right word? My ignorance irritates me.

7. XKCD's zombie Marie Curie comic is fantastic. It should be put up in science labs in schools. Every time I go to the BL I get annoyed by the thing outside that says something like "Nothing in this world is to be feared, it is only to be understood -- Marie Curie", which may be a good sentiment, but seems to me to be seriously undercut by the fact that the thing she got her Nobel prizes for killed her in an unpleasant manner.

Parenting Lady Gaga

As she gets into the territory of the difficult second (if you don't count Monster and Remix), whether you still like Lady Gaga probably depends on whether you liked her wholeheartedly or reluctantly to start off with. I love mainstream pop, and I still think she's great. She has a new album out on Monday, and on the last two Mondays she has released tracks from it as teasers. I quite liked Edge of Glory, but Hair is excellent. It's about her teenage self saying to her parents "I want you to love me for who I am... I am my hair", and the refrain goes "This is my prayer, that I'll die living just as free as my hair". Spare a moment to sympathise with those two people trying to parent a teenage Lady Gaga.


Amazon.com's automated e-mails suggesting things that I might like to buy have just tried to tempt me with a digital watch, specifically a Casio F91-W. Well done amazon.com! I read boing boing, I'm anti-Guatanamo and a fan of the law of unintended consequences, so I did very briefly consider getting hold of one. Or, is it a trick? If I buy one will I end up on some register? It could backfire next time I try to get into Israel. Modern life is quite complicated.

Les neiges d'antan

When lecturing on codicology, or digitisation, or both, I have occasionally pointed out that the new Domesday survey done by schools in 1986, the nine-hundredth anniversary of the original, was unreadable within a decade or two, while the original manuscripts sit safely in the Public Record Office (OK, the National Archives), just as legible as ever. But they did a big project to get the 1986 data off the BBC microcomputer disks it was stored on, and now it's available online, searchable by place. There's a little BBC video about it here -- I don't know how to embed it. This one is less serious and has people from Tomorrow's World on it.

And it looks like the 1980s were actually as grey and brown as I remember them. This description of the village where I grew up says:

The main land cover is houses but some of it is small undeveloped grassy areas where children play after school.

That's exactly what it was like -- we all hung around playing in the bits of ground no one else had yet found a use for. Also, I remember this underpass! And this supermarket carpark too! (There was some reason why it was special to go to Carrefour, I forget what.) And Telegraph Wood Hill Fort, which now "only looks like an ordinary hill". We moved away when I was eleven so I feel very nostalgic about the place.

But I'm sorry to say that for the big 900-years since Domesday celebrations at my primary school we looked up the derivation of the name North Baddesley, found out that it meant North Bede's Lea, and decided this was insufficiently interesting. Instead we pretended it was called after someone known as Bad Desley, and we made him into a cowboy, and did an assembly about him, all in mime to the theme from Dynasty. I was one of the people who came on at the end and shot dead the few survivors from the raging gun fight which Bad Desley had provoked. I had a sheriff's badge.

I am fond of

1) My nephew! He's coming up for two and a half now, but he still thinks I'm funny, which is good. The other day I met up with him and his parents by the canal in Exeter. He saw me from quite a way away and ran up to me so I picked him up, and then he looked at me all seriously and said "Rat gone", with the air of one stating a regrettable fact. I'm pretty impressed he still remembers about the absence of rat. Today one of our neighbours' cats came out onto our decking, and my nephew went up and stroked her very gently. I was quite proud of him, all the more so when he saw how I put my hand out so the cat could decide for herself whether she wanted to rub her head on it, and copied me, luring the cat to him instead of approaching her. It's a good tactic with cats, especially if you're a toddler. So I am proud of having tutored him in the ways of pet righteousness.

2) The British Museum! It's like a refuge, with its huge light spaces and ancient stones. I went to see the Afghanistan exhibition, which is very good. Each of the sections is about a different important site, and is introduced by a placard that says something like "In 1961 the king was hunting with his courtiers when a local peasant presented him an intricately carved stone. He alerted French archaeologists, and they found the legendary lost city of Ay Khanum..." or whatnot. There's some fantastic stuff there from several different cultures.

3) Python! I am learning to program in Python, using some online resources I found. It makes me happy. It's quite a straightforward language.
print('Hello world!')

24-hour news

Here is a TV phone-interview with the man who inadvertently live-tweeted the Bin Laden raid. Slick CNN lady irritates tweeter by asking if he knew Osama bin Laden was living near his town, a question that is somewhere on the spectrum from very stupid to very insulting. Polite tweeterman later gets his revenge by explaining that he never watches TV and gets all his news from the Internet. Booyakasha! Your insensitive question asking days are numbered, smiley TV interview woman.

A German robot

Hurray for the Germans, who have made this sensible ball-catching and coffee-making robot.

This makes a nice contrast with Japanese robots, which seem mostly designed to freak people out. Here is a new thing where you can snog a device controlled by someone else's tongue, possibly the recorded tongue of a celebrity! The designers are hoping in the future to extend the simulation with real tongue moistness.

Calvin Harris

Here's the new Calvin Harris single. I really like it -- popjustice pointed out that the breakdown sounds like someone actually having a breakdown. But why is Calvin Harris, who presumably has access to the original, uploading to YouTube a rough rip from Annie Mac's radio show? Is it because he's really really cool?

Some things on the web

I've been avoiding the coverage of the Bin Laden thing on the whole, but this Boing Boing story about how many American teenagers have no idea who Bin Laden was is quite compelling. I suppose you're lucky with teenagers if they notice someone who's walking on the same pavement as them, let alone someone who's declared war on their country.

You can vote here for your favourite American Civil War facial hair. I rather like how John Haskell King has incorporated his hair into the overall design, and George Crook has gone for an interesting two-triangle beard. And Burnside's are the original sideburns, supposedly.

This cartoon shows the recipe for an instant bestseller, in this case "Dark Angel Architect Boyfriend".

I would quite want this Lady Gaga/Bronzino mashup if Beyonce didn't look so rough.

Here is some great tidying up music:

April: some things I read in it

March and April have both been dominated by Lent reading, which is slow, though I actually didn't manage to get through as much of Augustine on the Psalms as I had hoped. Also some of what I read this month was a bit meh. But books I really enjoyed in April include:

Jo Walton's Small Change trilogy: Farthing, Ha'penny, and Half A Crown.
If you think of the 1930s country house set two things come to mind: golden age murder mysteries; and an unfortunate fondness for fascism. Walton combines the two in Farthing, which is set in an alternate England where one such group managed to bypass Churchill in 1941 and agree a "peace with honour" with Hitler. Ever since they have been riding on a wave of popularity with the people, who are understandably quite glad to be done with the bombing and fighting. The novel takes place eight years later at Farthing, the country house where this particular set meets, over the course of a long weekend when a prominent politician is found stabbed in his dressing room. The narration alternates between Carmichael, a police inspector who struggles to solve the case while the aristocrats close ranks, and the daughter of the house, who has disgraced herself in their eyes by marrying a Jew. It's very well done, scarily believable. The next two books continue the story, though with different ingenues each time. The ongoing compromises made by Carmichael, a good man in a hard position, are particularly compelling. I think Jo Walton is great.

Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
Classy.

Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White, The Apple
I reread The Crimson Petal on watching the brilliant BBC adaptation. This is a really extremely good book, and currently available on Kindle for a ridiculously low price. I hadn't read the Apple before. It's also very good, but more like a series of footnotes to the longer novel, to help you cope with the novel's famously abrupt ending.

Garbage in garbage out

All small children are strange, and I wasn't less strange than most. When I was about eight I went through a phase of worrying that, if God woke me up in the night and asked me what I most wanted, like he did with Solomon, I would be too confused to say "wisdom" and would instead say "chocolate... no, no, wisdom!" but it would be too late and God would give me loads of chocolate but very little respect.

I told a friend about this childhood yearning for wisdom one evening as we sat at Combination on a Sunday night, after High Table in college. I can't remember what in the conversation led up to this, but I assume that the wines served with dinner might have had something to do with it. "Well," he said, "here you are." And gestured round at our surroundings. I laughed, and then had to stop myself quickly when I realised that he did actually mean it. We were sat around the table which doubles for use in governing body meetings, lit only by a couple of candelabra; not one but two port decanters were circulating to the left and the atmosphere was pretty convivial. High Table attracts a certain type of College Fellow, especially on Sunday nights after Evensong -- not religious, often very anti-religious, but traditional. I was usually the only woman there, unless the president or one of the guests had brought in a wife, and on the whole I was not much more than half the average age. At the time the college was engaged in a horrible and incomprensible dispute triggered by a newcomer taking up a senior position. One of the men around that table had recently told me that the incomer's (unspecified) behaviour could only be explained if he was truly evil; another was using the split to try to settle a long-standing score with an old rival, startlingly ineptly; the fellow who had started the whole thing with a formal complaint was someone whom I would still on the whole describe as sensible. It was very nasty at the time, and in retrospect I see it as a learning experience about human nature, like watching Big Brother. But that's why I laughed when my friend suggested that I had, by winning a place in that company, visibly achieved wisdom.

Nonetheless there was certainly a lot of intelligence in that room. (Especially if you define intelligence as a propensity to a certain sort of stupidity.) It would be fascinating to know how many of those middle-aged men would have agreed with my friend in equating the college's fellowship with wisdom, and how many would have found the concept intrinsically risible like I did. I've been reading up on artificial intelligence a bit recently, and what has startled me about it is the willingness of physicists to put forwards definitive theoretical pronouncements about the nature of human intelligence. I think I may now need to read up on ideas of what "intelligence" is, as a way of strengthening my mind against blind acceptance of their assumptions. But it's interesting, and a bit of a relief, that no one seems to be talking about artificial wisdom. What would it take to build a computer that could say comforting things to the bereaved? Could it be taught to do that, or would it have to learn, and would it first have to be itself capable of suffering?

Some things from the internet

Look, if you've robbed a liquor store and shot the cashier and the police are stumped, you're a fool to yourself if you then get a detailed picture of the crime scene tattoo'd on your chest.

The difference between city life and country life.

Look at the young elk!

This was filmed by David Neils, and he has more on his website, http://www.offthepavement.org.

Aunt-presenting dilemmas solved!

Have you got an excellent aunt in your life? I mean one of those sensible, intelligent, practical aunts, more of a Dahlia than an Agatha? Perhaps said aunt is coming up for a birthday, or you'd like to express your appreciation of her qualities in some tangible, easily postable form? Perhaps recovery from a minor operation is forcing her to slow down her usual activities and convalescence is hanging heavy on her hands? Luckily for you the solution is only a few clicks away! My aunt-targetted book Saint Margaret's Gospel-book is currently on sale at ten pounds instead of twenty-five, which was already a bargain considering the combination of hand-crafted text and lots of extremely excellent pictures.

'a gem of a book - it sparkles with interest' -- Henrietta Leyser, serious historian whom I don't even know
'if you liked Harry Potter you'll like this' -- a boy I used to babysit

Written by an aunt for aunts -- actually I wasn't an aunt at the time, but I did write it with my Aunt Cynthia in mind -- it's the solution to all your aunt-presenting needs. [Pdf of sale catalogue here.]

Also works on great-aunts, mothers (I dedicated it to mine), god-parents, friends of the family, and anyone who's interested in eleventh-century Scotland, Anglo-Saxon England, medieval manuscripts, royalty, saints, libraries, books, or women. Caution: has not been tested on uncles.

An affordable trebuchet

I do love Kickstarter. If you haven't come across it yet, it's basically a way for people who have a cool idea to ask for people to invest in it. They make a video explaining what they're proposing to do, and give a list of options for investing, ranging from cheap to expensive. (The expensive one very often includes a meal out "if you're in the Bay area".) Usually your pledge equates to preordering a various amount of their proposed product. There's a funding target and a deadline. If there have been enough pledges by the deadline to meet the funding target then the project goes into production, and the people pay their money and get their reward. If the target isn't met then no one pays any money and that's that. I think the new version of Hucklebury Finn where they replace every instance of the n-word with "robot" was a Kickstarter thing, and the Robocop statue for Detroit. People also raise funding for short films and such, especially documentaries.

I've never actually invested in any of their projects yet but I'm very tempted by this desk-top trebuchet. It needs no glue or nails to put together. They're also going to subsidise ones for schools -- they're thinking of science classes but I think history classes might like them too. If my nephew were only a few years older I would definitely get one for him.

Another good project is this one for things which keep your coffee hot for longer. And this one for 360 degree video for the iphone 4 is pretty cool.

Everybody in the house of love

I really like this:

The real thing is not going to top it.

Eurovision

I might even watch Eurovision this year, which makes me suspect that people who usually watch it won't like it so much. The UK has finally decided to make some sort of effort by getting our song sung by an actual pop group, though admittedly one that split up six years ago. Here's Sweden's entry, which is great. It's not actually by Bodies Without Organs (BWO) but it sounds quite like them, which is a good thing. (I got it off of popjustice, as ever.)

I decided to give up irony in 1994, because I noticed that even the Pet Shop Boys had moved on in favour of fun. They felt like taking all their clothes off and dancing to the Rite of Spring:

I told a friend of mine who I didn't know very well back then that I had given up irony, and he thought I was being sarcastic. If I ever write the sort of deathbed novel/memoir where you look back on the defining points of your life (like Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively, which is brilliant) then that moment will definitely be included. Every now and then something happens to remind you that it's actually impossible to communicate properly with any other human being. But it matters less than you'd think, because we bridge the gap with kindness and goodwill.

A quick warning re: scam

Some months ago my mother was scammed over the phone. She sort-of knew she'd been scammed immediately, and was immediately repentant, and we stopped her credit card and sorted it all out. It upset me quite a lot at the time for two reasons: 1) I'm not ready for my parents to need protection from scammers other than their own common sense; 2) I wasn't quite sure at first what the scammers were up to. I just had a phonecall from the same people, who have phoned back quite a lot since then, and amused myself by keeping them on the phone for as long as possible, as an outlet for my annoyed feelings. I thought I'd post about this quickly just in case anyone who reads this blog finds themselves, like me, in the position of default IT support for their parents, and would like to warn them to be cautious.

The caller says that they're from "Windows Service Department" or something similar. They do their best to make you think that they're from Microsoft and are official Windows people without actually stating it. They say they have a report indicating that there are problems with your computer, and that it may be running slowly. (This is as far as they got today because I asked them why they were spying on my computer and they hung up.) From what happened with my mother, it seems that when you express concern they tell you to go to your computer, and talk you through running a diagnostic on it. This is where I was really worried at first because my mother couldn't describe to me quite what had happened, but it seems that what they tell you to do is a genuine inbuilt Windows diagnostic which lists all the issues your computer has had. They're relying on the almost certainty that your computer has at some point returned an error message, or even crashed. You tell them that there are error reports, and they persuade you to pay them money for software which is supposed to make it all OK.

I would never have expected my mother to fall for this. I would have expected her to stop at the point where they asked for money. When she told me about it I was really concerned that they might have already got spyware on her computer somehow before they called, but in fact it's just an aggressive selling technique, and they count on most of the people they call having a Windows computer. I uninstalled what they had got her to put on, and did some really long and thorough virus checks, so I hope her computer's OK now. At least she didn't give them remote access.

Links to other people being scammed:
http://www.digitaltoast.co.uk/supportonclick-systemrecure-scam
http://money-watch.co.uk/7118/beware-of-the-windows-phone-scam
http://money-watch.co.uk/8183/windows-support-scam-worsens
If you read the comments to the middle article you'll see that my mother is far from being alone in being caught out. Worse than the sixty quid (which she did get back by telling the credit card people) was that she felt really stupid and worried about whether she's going doolally. Cue me spending lots of time googling the symptons of early onset dementia and worrying about her. It was all very unpleasant.

On the other hand if you do get a phonecall from them, here is an opportunity to be really rude to someone without feeling even a glimmer of guilt afterwards. So it's not all bad. I actually quite like it when they call now.

Wow I made it work

I mentioned in the last post a problem I had using a Javascript button to import a book into LibraryThing from its amazon.co.uk page. I have fixed it! Hurray for me! I don't know any Javascript, I just hacked it around a bit and compared the output with the input until it did the right thing. The button which you get from this LibraryThing page has this javascript:

javascript:var%20rx%20=%20/amazon\.(.*?)\/.*?\/(.{10})\//;%20var%20rs%20=%20new%20Array();%20var%20rs%20=%20document.URL.match(rx);%20if(rs==null)%20{%20alert('Use%20this%20on%20an%20Amazon%20book%20page.');%20}%20else%20{%20pt%20=%20prompt('Tags?%20(or%20leave%20blank)');%20location.href='http://www.librarything.com/addbooks.php?bm=1&isbn='+rs[2]+'&vs='+rs[1]+'&pt='+encodeURI(pt);%20}

I saw that there is a quick URL-based import using ISBN described on this LibraryThing page, so I altered it to this:

javascript:var%20rx%20=%20/amazon\.(.*?)\/.*?\/(.{10})\//;%20var%20rs%20=%20new%20Array();%20var%20rs%20=%20document.URL.match(rx);%20if(rs==null)%20{%20alert('Use%20this%20on%20an%20Amazon%20book%20page.');%20}%20else%20{%20pt%20=%20prompt('Tags?%20(or%20leave%20blank)');%20location.href='http://www.librarything.com/addbook/'+rs[2]}

and it now works for me. I feel so good about this it's ridiculous.

So if you use LibraryThing and drag this link: Add to LibraryThing to your bookmark toolbar then you should now be able to use the bookmarklet. Wow I am so smug right now.

LibraryThing thoughts so far

Anna asked me how I find using LibraryThing, and I found my answer getting rather too long for a comment, so here it is as a separate blog post.

Basically I'm really enjoying using LibraryThing, and I love keeping track of what I've been reading, with the option of writing brief reviews to help me remember it later. Also it has a lot of side benefits I wasn't expecting, like being able to pull up a list of all an author's books very quickly. But this is with a big proviso, that I'm only using it for leisure books, not for academic ones.

When it comes to cataloguing, if you're dealing like I am with predominantly leisure books then you can get hold of a cheap barcode scanner and use that to input ISBNs. That's quite a quick way to proceed. Most of my novels and such have barcodes, and ones that have ISBNs but no barcodes are still pretty quick to input. It's the sort of thing you can do while listening to the radio or watching TV. LibraryThing sells the CueCat scanner very cheaply, just fifteen dollars even including UK postage. This is a scanner which was made in huge numbers and given out free some time ago by record stores and magazines, and although it's not made any more and the systems it was made for collapsed, there are vast numbers floating around for which people are finding other uses. It works with LibraryThing straight off, or you can easily install software to make it work with anything that can cope with text input. (I installed some software called CatNip to make it give me plain input and then used it to sell CDs on the MusicMagpie website.) Or apparently you can get your webcam or phone to work as a barcode scanner, but that's much fiddlier than you'd think, because the image has to be just right. Here's someone talking about doing this with an iPhone.

I have tried out the exporting feature but only out of curiosity, I haven't really done things with it. It doesn't have a lot of flexibility -- you choose between comma- and tab- separated and that's that -- but I think it should be adequate for most purposes. I can see the data going into Endnote without much fiddling, for example, and I have a lot of experience of fiddling with data to get it to go into Endnote. (Ever since I finished my PhD I have been employed to fiddle with the machine-readability of bibliographic data, which is such a depressing thought.) I have imported successfully, from a database I made using Collectorz.com book cataloguing software some years ago. I had a barcode scanner then too but it was more expensive than the CueCat and it broke. The collectorz.com software was good; I suppose it's really LibraryThing's widgets that sold it to me, and it is interesting to see which of your books are rare. You can theoretically have private books, or make your whole library private, neither of which routes I have as yet taken, though I did feel a terrible pang when I started cataloguing the books in my parents' library which I have read and some of the first were by Jeffrey Archer.

LibraryThing's big competitor is GoodReads, and I read up on them both before choosing. LibraryThing is supposedly aimed more at librarians while GoodReads is more about social-networking, which is what decided me. Also lots of book bloggers I read, like Stuck in a Book, use LibraryThing.

I think there are basically two issues with LibraryThing. One is that it's a cheap system, and things like the Help literature are a bit ad hoc. It's basically someone's pet project continued. When dealing with commercial software you often think "I ought to be able to do this in this way" while with this sort of software you just have to adapt yourself to the way in which things have been set up to be done. There's a bookmarklet which is supposed to let you add books directly from their amazon page but I can't get it to work (I think because I'm going for .co.uk not .com). It's not a problem, instead I just import books using the way they expect you to do it. And because there's an API maybe someone with actual programming knowledge will sort this out at some point -- like with Firefox, it's open for knowledgeable users to improve it themselves with browser addons and such and then share their work with others. There are some GreaseMonkey scripts, for example. I would love to be the sort of person who could write scripts for GreaseMonkey.

The second and bigger issue is to do with multiple authors. It lets you put in one author, and then add a further author or translator or editor or whatever as part of the additional information a long way down the book-description page. This is fine as a way of dealing with a collection of novels. Of course it won't do at all for my academic books, many of which have two or more authors who need to share equal billing. So I don't know if I'll ever move my academic books onto it. I need a proper catalogue of them, but I expect I'll do it in Endnote, where it would only involve adding keywords to existing entries.

There is no entirely adequate bibliographical software out there. Endnote is the nearest I can get, with advantages like widespread support and very flexible exports. I think maybe that if we could get at just why there is no OK bibliographic software when it seems like a reasonably straightforward thing to do, then we might at the same time solve the problem of what is wrong with academia.

I do like books

Book culture is quite interesting. In the US you can now get a cheaper Kindle if you don't mind having special offer adverts on the home page and screensavers. Since you can't customise the home page and screensavers anyway, so it's not like you can make them all nice like you want them, I don't think I'd mind having adverts for Visa instead. The crucial thing is that your reading is not interrupted.

I would guess that I now read about a third of my books on the kindle. I spend too much money on books, especially for someone with very little income, but not much of that spending goes to authors or publishers. A lot of what I read is old material, things I've seen recommended on blogs or want to read because I'm interested in their subject matter, and I can usually get hold of these for something between three and five pounds secondhand including postage. If there is a kindle edition available for a similar price I prefer that; but basically, there isn't. I'm hoping that publishers will catch up a bit with the idea of availability of the backlist, because I'd much rather that a proportion of the money I pay for a book goes to the publisher and author rather than a secondhand book seller. I'm currently reading Katie Whitaker's biography of Margaret Cavendish, Mad Madge, and enjoying it very much. I spent three pounds ninety-seven pence on it, including postage. If there were an ebook version available then Vintage, who presumably took the initial risk of paying an advance for the book and publishing it, and Whitaker, who actually wrote the thing, could continue to get a little trickle of income from its sale long after the actual physical copies have gone off to be remaindered or whatever. The book is out of print, but it was actually only published in 2004, which doesn't seem so very long ago to me.

Sedgemoor

I went to help my parents set up at an alpaca show about an hour away up the M5. On the way back, as we drove over the Sedgemoor Drain, my father sighed miserably. My mother, who was driving, patted his knee, and asked what the matter was. She rarely asks that sort of thing, but then he had sounded quite depressed. "I was thinking what a shame it was that Monmouth didn't press on to London in 1685", he replied. My dad's a bit of a loony, but I do like that he's unexpected.

I don't think he's so much pro-Monmouth, by the way, as anti-Judge Jefferys.

QED nearly

Chickens, when they run, are funny. I've been trying to prove this recently using the video function on my cheap digital camera. Here's the best I've done so far, with the kind help of my mother, whom they love, or at least yearn to be near. But for the full effect you need to have them running towards you madly, with a glint in their eye that says "bacon rind?"

The Masters

One of the few things likely to make me feel proud of having been to Trinity is their Masters. Amartya Sen, who is just obviously great, was Master for most of the time while I was there. Now it's Martin Rees, who has just won some prize awarded to scientists by Christians and therefore controversial blah blah blah. Here is his comment on the "Hawking says there's no God" story that ran a while ago:

I know Stephen Hawking well enough to know that he has read little philosophy and less theology, so I don't think his views should be taken with any special weight.

I just love the idea of "little philosophy and less theology" as the modern equivalent of Shakespeare's small Latin and less Greek. And I love it when people talk like it's obvious that there's meaning in the humanities. Go Martin Rees!

I love you, Devon

Mystery object brings town to standstill. The people of Bridgwater aren't sure if it was a pig's head, a turtle, or just a stone. When the reporter returned to the scene the next day it had gone.

The world into which I was born

This clip was posted on boing boing but I only watched it because it's from the BBC news on the day I was born. It makes me feel illogically nostalgic.

We've had a similar slightly crazy posh old lady staying with us this weekend, an old friend of my grandparents from Kensington. When my nephew dropped his toy phone and the batteries fell out, she picked it up for him saying in cut-glass tones "Oh, it's absolutely maddening, I quite agree", and my brother and sister-in-law got the giggles.

Winter is coming

HBO have released twelve Sean-Bean-heavy minutes of their new adaptation of A Game of Thrones, the first book of A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin, which I read in February. I really want to see this. Watch out for the white-haired man with the impressive facial hair arrangement. Also, if you see the whole thing at some point watch out for no character being safe from a sudden violent death, even the main characters and the ones you really like.

Things I have read in March

Because it's Lent I am currently reading Augustine's Enarrationes in Psalmos, in a very good English translation by a hermit called Maria Boulding. It's not a quick read -- many of the Psalms have more than one commentary, and I've only just got onto the third volume, Psalms 51-72, even though I started the work last Lent. I'm not rushing through it because I'm enjoying it. It includes expected things and also unexpected things that make me stop and think, and jolt me out of an easy reading -- if it were an exam script I would give it a first. I love the feeling you get sometimes when you're reading something centuries old, either in the original or in a very fluent translation, that the author and the original audience are both totally alien and remarkably recognisable. The sermons were preached in North Africa, often in Carthage, to a people who were occasionally tempted away to the chariot races instead. I have never skived off church to go to see my favourite chariot racer. But in other ways it's strikingly germane. If I muster the energy I'll blog about the specifics of this at some point.

Lent means I have read less in March than in February and January, which is a good thing. I read the first two of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander books with enjoyment, and marvelled at the way the series completely crashes and burns in book three. I enjoyed Marilynne Robinson's Absence of Mind, but had trouble quite understanding at whom it was aimed. Most of what she was saying seemed utterly self-evident to me, and a lot of my enjoyment came from a sense of relief that someone is actually saying it. But with her formidable mind and her extremely wide reading comes a tendency to rather opaque language which I'm not convinced is completely necessary. I suppose it's a dichotomy in the sources she criticises: some of them are aggressively aimed at everyperson, while others are couched in the polysyllabic sociolect of post-Theory academia. But her most telling points are against the former, but written in the style of the latter, which I'm not sure is going to do anyone much good. [Edit: in the middle of the night I suddenly remembered that this book was first given as lectures to just such an audience. Which accounts for the tone.]

I read two books with thoroughly depressing premises, Emma Donaghue's Room and Kazuo Ishuguro's Never Let Me Go. The first one transcends the horribleness by being through the eyes of a small child who loves his mother, while the second was just bloody depressing, though technically good, I suppose.

And I read Jenny Uglow's book about the first ten years of Charles II's reign. Bloody Charles II. Here's my review off LibraryThing:
This was quite good. I'm not totally convinced by it, though. The idea of Charles as a gambling king is a little forced, because surely no statesman has any choice other than to take the occasional risk. Also this only covers the first ten years of his twenty-five-year reign. It's hard not to suspect that this has something to do with Pepys' abandonment of his diary in 1669, though Uglow implies that it's because of Charles' last meeting with Minette in 1670, and his successful completion of his secret treaty with Louis XIV (*spits*). The way that this book splits things up into categories means it doesn't have a strong narrative, although this is more a problem in the first than the second half. And I have read a lot of other books covering the same ground. This book just didn't seem that engaged with the period, and although disengagement is a deliberate way of writing history, it's not very human. She's clearly on Charles's side, but failed to make me understand why. The King Charles who spent tens of thousands on his mistresses and laughed when his foully-behaved gallants tricked lower-class women into fake marriages and then abandoned them was the same Charles whose navy didn't pay its sailors, and who was offended when he found that one of his servants had stopped laying out paper for council meetings because he had not once been paid and could not afford to keep running up personal debts to provide the king with paper. Charles could not stand being dependent on the English parliament for his money to such an extent that he preferred to be dependent on Louis XIV for his money, making a secret treaty with the most dangerous despot of the time, and agreeing to convert to Catholicism for two hundred thousand pounds cash. We should have stuck with the kingless commonwealth, says I. Roll on the Glorious Revolution!
But I liked the Duchess of Newcastle's poem inspired by Lucretius on atoms:

For millions of these atoms may be in
The head of one small, little, single pin.
And if this small, then ladies well may wear
A world of worlds as pendents in each ear.

Also I didn't know that Charles' widow, Catherine of Braganza, went back to Portugal and was regent for her brother for a while.

Also this is cool

From Letters of Note: a 9-year-old kid writes to Blue Peter with a slightly disturbing request, but it all turned out well in the end.

The honey badger

I think the internet is at its best when it makes you feel like part of a hive mind, like with the whole Bronx Zoo cobra on twitter thing and the way it's taken in the "honey badger don't give a shit" video. We're a pretty wierd species. Other animals don't develop complex global systems of information processing and sharing, and then mostly use them for pissing about. Oh what a piece of work is man! (In a good way.)

Things

1. I've just had an e-mail from the US government to tell me that my ETSA permission to travel there thingy is about to expire. I'm not welcome in their country until I have filled out the form again. And maybe not even then. I've usually liked America more than I was expecting, but then there's the jet lag and hours on planes and in airports, so all those horror stories on boing boing about the pornoscanners have just tipped things the other way and I don't intend to return. Maybe I should reply to the US government's email explaining about that, but I fear they might be petty enough to keep it on my record. Like the underwear you can buy that has the fourth amendment in silver so that they show up on the body scanners. It's a good point, but is it a good idea, practically speaking, to rile them?

2. Sometimes it's odd to live in a village. For example, they are actually going to celebrate the Royal Wedding here. The flyer asks people to arrive at the village hall at 11am to watch the wedding live, with Bucks Fizz and nibbles. Then when it's all over you eat a lunch of "good old fashioned" fish and chips, while watching the thing again on the BBC's highlights show. They need a substantial take-up to pay for a TV licence for the village hall.

3. It's interesting that even for the people who were really behind World Book Day/Night and the giving out of free books, it seems to have gone rather badly. This woman tried to give out 48 copies of Fingersmith in Peterhouse.

Academic ethics again

One of the important things about doing post-docs is not to be too invested in the work you are doing for other people. Work hard at it and do it to the highest possible standard during work hours: and then hand it over and don't consider it yours any more. It's really a sort of surrogacy service for other people's projects. This is a policy that I came up with when I started my first post-doc, not because I thought that post-docs shouldn't own what they do, but because the example of the last person who worked on that project showed me the pitfalls of being too attached to what you do in that sort of position. Essentially the work you do is for someone else's project, and if you care too much about it you're probably going to feel hurt at some point. You don't have any control over what will happen to the work, and very probably your name will not appear on it. Neither of my post-docs has resulted in anything published in my name, and I don't have a problem with that. I've managed to publish quite a bit of my own work, although it's been a struggle time-wise, and that's the stuff I care about. I prefer it that way -- I prefer only to have my name on things I have some control over.

The freelance work I'm doing at the moment will not be published under my name, and this raises an interesting ethical issue. I am writing about some manuscripts about which I also wrote for my last post-doc. My thoughts on, say, Corpus MS 153 pre-date my work on either of these projects, but have of course informed my work on both. How much do I need to be careful, in the second project, not to look like I'm plagiarising the first project, given that neither are published with my name? It's complicated by the fact that the first project is a website, and the second is not the sort of project that cites websites.

Watch this

Having failed in the last post to come up with anything good that wasn't utterly trivial, here is an advert from an AIDs charity showing a patient whose changing health was filmed over 90 days. Watch the whole thing.

Here's the charity's website if you want to donate: http://www.topsy.org.za/

Good things after too much haggis

My Grandma is staying, and while she's here we eat our main meal in the middle of the day, usually literally so, at noon.  I find this a trial.  For some reason the afternoon seems a bit more depressing after an octogenarian-appropriate meal, like steak and kidney pudding, or eggs and bacon, or, today, haggis, neeps, and chattered tatties, which my parents used to eat a lot when they were students in Scotland. 

Anyway I have felt moved to list some of the good things in this generally depressing world, in which you stop paying attention for a few days and suddenly we're bombing the Middle East again:
1.  True Blood.  I've got a bit addicted to this rather silly but dramatic Deep South vampire saga.  I like the way that each episode starts the same way the previous one ended, usually with someone screaming.  It's about a telepath called Sookie Stackhouse (the little girl from the Piano but grown up now and working in 18-rated drama) who's a waitress in a Lousiana diner.  When a vampire called Bill walks in she falls for him because she can't hear what he's thinking, but it's not a popular move among the population at large, who are anti-vampire.  There's a fantastic scene where she runs to him at dusk through a graveyard, wearing a big floaty white nightdress, to have emotionally meaningful sex in front of the fireplace at his Civil-War-era house.  I blame Mal from Firefly for the recent increase in men on TV wearing high-waisted button-fly trousers.

2.  Neal Stephenson has a new book out in the autumn.  That's a good thing.

3.  It's William Shatner's 80th birthday!  Here he is all covered in Tribbles.  Watch him give the camera a little bit of Shatner love at about 0:41


4.  You can do what you want with this man's textbook on Data Communications as long as you agree to be a nice person.  I think that's a pretty high price.

5.  Amazon.com now has an Android App store, and there is some speculation that they might launch a tablet.  That's interesting, at least.  And anything that keeps Apple down a bit is good.

Census question

I managed to start an argument between my parents when I saw that the census form had arrived.  What I had failed to do was read the religious belief question before commenting.  I said "Dad, you are going to put us down as Christian not Anglican, aren't you?"  I had some idea that Anglican would be an option on the form, and I felt strongly that it should not be ticked.  My mother misheard.  "Have you put us down as Anglican?" she shouted at my Dad.  "I'm really angry at you if you've done that."  It took me some time to calm down the subsequent row which was entirely my fault.  For one thing I really doubt that my father would ever treat "Anglican" as a religion.  For another the question actually doesn't go into such detail.  The options start with "No religion", include plain "Christian", and finish with a box for filling in anything not covered, for example if you really want to put yourself down as a Jedi, which is fantastically tedious of you.  I'm not entirely sure what all the fuss has been about with this question, which seems very fair to me.  The Guardian, which is often very boring about religion, reports that the Humanist Society has done a survey to show just how misleading the Census religion question is.  Apparently "61% of 1,896 adults in England and Wales said they belonged to a religious denomination or body. When asked in a subsequent question if they were religious, only 29% of the same people said yes."  I might possibly these days say I was religious when asked in a poll.  As a youth I would never have said I was religious, because I basically saw religion as the enemy of faith. According to the same poll, when asked "48% of the people interviewed who said they were Christian believed that Jesus was a person".  Well, asking a Christian if Jesus was a person is a trick question.  The orthodox answer, taking orthodoxy by the creed, is yes and also God.  Or no, not just a person, also God.  Even if 48% think he was just a person and not God, then that simply makes them Arians -- these are debates which have been raging within Christianity for centuries, and contributed to the early years of Islam, when some people thought Islam was just an Arian sect.  I really object to the British Humanist Society in some way implying that whether or not people say they are Christians, they're not if they respond as that 48% did.  The British Humanist Society don't get to decide what Christianity is.  I'm afraid that I don't either, and when it comes down to it faith, like race, is something where people get to self-define.  I may be practicing the hermeneutics of suspicion, but I feel that the British Humanist Society is trying to imply that people who say they're Christians are so stupid that they don't even realise that they're not.  So much of what is said against Christianity in the media or popular books is against a Christianity that I do not recognise.  For one thing it's an immensely stupid Christianity, because the people talking against Christianity in this way have already decided it's stupid.  So hurray for Augustine!  Because it's Lent I'm reading some more of his Expositions on the Psalms.  I'm still only on Psalm 37.  He was intelligent and humane.

Brief note about being patronised

I really hate CAM, the Cambridge Alumni Magazine.  Stop making assumptions about the sort of person I am just because I went to your University!  I might look into stopping them from sending it to me.  The Trinity Alumni Magazine is even worse, of course.  Oddly enough, the Trinity Annual Record is far less provoking, with its serious obituaries of proper academics, and its transcriptions of usually reasonably worthy speeches, and the section about the college's charity work in London.  Cambridge has appalling PR -- people are being paid by the university and colleges to represent the place as far more self-indulgent than it is.

The Only Way is Ethics

I have an ethical question.  Suppose someone were writing a book report for a publisher?  And that this someone knew and liked the author, and was broadly positive about the book but thought that there were a couple of major issues that needed fixing before it was published?  And felt that the author would probably work out who had written the report?  Given that everyone's first impulse on getting a report like that is to work out who wrote it, and this is not a massive field?  In that case would it be so very wrong, morally speaking, if that someone wrote the report in the distinctive voice of a well-known, some might say notorious, third person?  Would it?

It probably would.  *Sighs, morally.*

Profit from misery

This drug company has apparently hugely increased the cost of shots to help prevent premature labour in women who have had premature births before.  Instead of charging ten dollars they can charge fifteen hundred per shot because they have a monopoly.  Given that someone who has had a premature birth has gone through a truly horrendous experience even if the baby survived, let alone if the baby, as often happens, died, profiting from their despair and worry seems startlingly evil.  Really quite strikingly evil.

"If I were a practitioner of the hermeneutics of suspicion..."

...seems to me to be a great way to start a paragraph. I expect that practitioners of the hermeneutics of suspicion look worn and anxious, a bit like Cardinal Fang, the Terry Gilliam character in the Spanish Inquisition sketch.  I think it's my future ambition to become a crypto-practitioner of the hermeneutics of suspicion.

(M. Robinson, Absence of Mind, p. 39 -- this is the first Kindle book I've read which has given me real page numbers.)

I smash the castle

This game here allows one to smash castles.

Bees: they're clever little blighters.

The Tournament of Books has finished half of the first round. I'm really enjoying it so far. I had previously decided I didn't want to read Skippy Dies but I think I've changed my mind now, although it did lose to Jennifer Egan's much-hyped Good Squad.

Some book-related things

It's Lent, so I'm finally getting round to reading Marilynne Robinson's Absence of Mind. I have been fearing this, I fear having to use my brain.

In other book news, the Morning Post's annual Tournament of Books has started. So far Freedom and Room are through to the next round, so no big surprises there. As well as the judge's verdict there's a commentary on the verdict by the people who run the thing, I think.

Plus it seems that Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White has been dramatised by the BBC. Maybe I should reread it. I wonder if they've made up a proper ending?

Also

I do like Britney's new single too: Till the World Ends. They've released it in a wierdly un-fanfare-y way. Maybe they're experimenting with release timing.

NB do not read the YouTube comments which seem mostly to be about when the world will actually end. Though this is an endearingly literal way of taking the song -- yes, we'll keep on dancing til the world ends, but only if we can expect it within a reasonable timescale, we do have other things to do.

Also pop

I haven't posted anything about music for a while.  When I first saw that Lady Gaga's new video is seven minutes long I thought "not again" but actually I really like it.  Lady Gaga is just excellent.  The new song may be a bit Express Yourself-y, but if she wants to pay tribute to Madonna wouldn't you rather she did it through the medium of song instead of by snogging her at an awards ceremony a la Britney?  Go Lady Gaga! The video starts with a unicorn, but you might want to skip the next two and a half minutes if you don't fell like watching Gaga writhing around in stirrups with a vaguely gnostic voiceover about good and evil.

Plus I first came across her on popjustice, who likened her to Madonna back then.

February: what I read in it

A combination of short books and sleepless nights means I've read rather a lot this month.  Here are some of the things:

1. Penguin Mini Modern Classics.  I do like the idea of these little books which allow you to sample the works of authors you might not otherwise read.  Sometimes trying something new or something you'd normally avoid pays off and you make a wonderful discovery.  (E.g. Javier Marías.)  Unfortunately for Penguin's marketing people I always associate those silver-grey covers with work that's well written but mildly revolting.  That's how I feel about most of the stuff written in the first half of the twentieth century: it's theoretically quite good, yet somehow mildly revolting.  I suppose the period is just too unsympathetic, close enough to be shameful but far enough away to be incomprehensible, full of rich flappers and Bright Young Things, Bloomsburyites wearing nothing but embroidered sweaters indulging in orgies of self-regarding intellectualism, fascists who wanted someone to put the boot in, naive hubristic communists who thought communism was going to work, the masters upstairs and the servants downstairs, women smothered in domesticity, and endless young men shipped off to the slaughter.
Anyway, here are the ones I read:
F. Scott Fitzgerald (free with my dad's Telegraph): rich Americans drink a lot and feel sorry for themselves, often in Paris
Henry James (free with my dad's Sunday Telegraph): same sort of thing but with less drinking and more snobbery.  These James and Fitzgerald stories hold no surprises for anyone who has read any of the authors' other work, and I wouldn't have bought them.
Robert Musil: revoltingly vivid
Shirley Jackson: a bit predictable and insufficiently interesting though, again, well-written
Donald Barthelme: a bit revolting but I admit it's amusing and unusual.  So Barthelme wins.  Maybe one day I'll see a collection of his stories in an otherwise unappealing selection of second-hand books and buy it.

2. George R. R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire (1. A Game of Thrones; 2. A Clash of Kings; 3. A Storm of Swords (1. Steel and Snow, 2. Blood and Gold); 4. A Feast for Crows)
If you've never read any big fantasy and are wondering whether reading something in this genre would make you a more rounded individual, then I think these are the books I would recommend.  (Or maybe Robin Hobb's Assassin trilogy.)  They are very easy to read.  The quotation from the Graun on my copies says "Its ambition: to construct the Twelve Caesars of fantasy fiction, with characters so venomous they could eat the Borgias".  And there are also recognisable episodes from English medieval history mixed in.  Good reading. If you want something just a step more intelligent then go for K. J. Parker's Engineer trilogy.  The plus side with Hobb and Parker is that they have actually finished things off, while Martin, who found his fourth volume getting so large that he split it into two volumes based in the south and the north of his world and then only published the south one before getting massive writers' block, hasn't published any of this series since 2005.  He has three more volumes to write to finish off the story -- he does actually apparently have a whole story arc in his head, which is encouraging, it won't just go on for ever.

3. Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow Trilogy (1. Fever and Spear; 2. Dance and Dream; 3. Poison, Shadow and Farewell).
These are very good books, really very good books indeed.  They are about a Spanish man who moves to London after he splits up with his wife.  He goes to a party in Oxford hosted by a retired professor whom he had got to know when teaching at the University some years earlier.  This professor persuades him to work for another of his guests, a man called Bertram Tupra, who heads a small and very secret government agency which advises on people's characters and likely behaviour.  The books are very intelligently done, with an elegant but complex structure.  I can see myself returning to them in a few years.  A quotation on the back of my copies likens them to the work of Proust -- saying they are "as addictive as Proust" which is an interesting way to put it, though I suppose Proust is pretty compelling.  It's a good comparison, although Marías doesn't have Proust's toxic qualities, not so much the unpleasant unceasing snobbery as the foul treatment of Albertine, which made me spitting mad when I last read it.  (Not that I read Proust frequently, I've read the whole thing twice, in translation of course, and I don't think I ever will again.)  But Marías has the same aphoristic tendencies, the same long trains of thought, and the same ability to involve you in relatively small things.  And the same revisiting of something already covered in a way which makes you rethink it, like the bit (I think in the volume called Sodom and Gomorrah) where Proust suddenly retells the events he's just recounted but with lots of added lesbianism.  Or that sort of retelling is a bit like Lawrence Durrell too.  Anyway, in short, Your Face Tomorrow is very very good.  But I would not advise trying to read the volumes separately, they are three books in the same way that the three volumes of Pride and Prejudice are separate books, e.g. not at all, in fact I think it's really seven short volumes.

Alpaca weaning

Yesterday we weaned last year's baby alpacas.  The way we do this, generally, is to take the babies off to the paddock at the back of our house, while leaving their mothers with the main female herd.  The babies miss their mothers for a few days -- it's important that they can't see the field where the others are -- and then settle down.  The mothers seem if anything rather relieved to have them gone.

Here's my dad catching Jemima, about whose traumatic birth and frisky first day I blogged back in August.  She's actually a tad smaller than we'd like, and my parents were worried that her mother stopped feeding her too soon.  I don't know whether difficult births are linked to that.  She didn't seem very bothered to be caught.  The funny thing here is that Gertrude, who is not Jemima's mother, was in a very pugnacious mood that day, and kept sticking her head in my dad's face as if asking for a fight.

Gertrude wants to be boss -- look how she's treading over my dad's boot

Now we have the five babies running round in the paddock with three of the youngest, wimpiest males, whom we brought down from the male herd to keep them company.  Because alpacas are herd animals they seem to like having other alpacas or even other animals to keep an eye on.  Our last chickens were completely free-range, and the alpacas liked to herd them away from the edge of the paddock.  My parents caught the babies today to start halter training, and the three boys went with them and kept a close eye on everything.  I might put up some video of them all if it stays sunny.

Perspective, and animals again

The problem with science is that after school you only ever encounter it via journalists.  And I'm afraid that there are a lot of things wrong with journalism, for example that idea of an "angle".  But I'm not quite a good enough person to go out there and really try to learn things properly from scratch, journalism-free.

Not that science in school is that great either.  I used to get so annoyed in Physics lessons, which were potentially about the most interesting things ever, but where the lesson plans were basically ten minutes about something, forty-five minutes saying it again more slowly, and then twenty minutes saying it again just in case anyone still didn't get it.  It was another of those instances where you realise that school is at least as much for learning to sit still and listen politely as for learning about the supposed subjects of the lesson.  And it's true that sitting and listening politely is an important skill for adult life.  Nonetheless, what we were told was more or less true, even if Newtonian physics falls apart when you get to a small scale.

The things that have been really bugging me are to do with consciousness, intelligence, and the brain.  I don't blame Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian for this, but it is sort of his fault for raising my expectations.  Some of his columns in the series "This Column Will Change Your Life" are quite interesting examinations of what human brains are actually like.  And I've been thinking a lot about that for a variety of reasons, one of which has to do with faith, and the idea, constantly expressed, that it's faith versus reason.  I have this sense that faith and reason are both subsets of something much bigger, but I don't know what to call that bigger thing, and my thinking on this is really unfinished.  I still haven't read Marilynne Robinson's Absence of Mind, though I am definitely going to, perhaps for Lent, but maybe she'd call the bigger thing "mind", I don't know, and if she does I don't know if I'd agree with her.  I'm not sure that we really quite know what reason is, even though we talk about it a lot.  (This is another place where I'm being lazy because it occurs to me that philosophers might have some interesting debates going on about this.)  But the human brain is a really fascinating thing.  The easiest thing to ask a computer is something like what is 28 times 317.  But this is one of the hardest things to ask a human brain.  (It's 8876, by the way, I just worked that out completely in my brain without paper but it took me a minute and a half, three minutes if you count that I did it twice to make sure.)  Yet it's a huge feat for a computer to play a basic parlour game.  I have no choice but to use my brain to view the world.  Every single thing that seems to me to be out there is really in my head -- I think I'm looking at the dome of a blue spring sky right now, but it's really all inside the inner curve of my skull.  So I'd like to know more about how it works, especially since, basically, I am constantly being accused, openly or by implication, of misusing it by believing in God (often by people who think they, in contrast, are using theirs entirely correctly, with all the implications that involves about what a brain is for and what sorts of duties we might owe it).

But the problem is how fantastically naive all this stuff is.  I read 59 Seconds by Robert Wiseman, which sells itself as cutting-edge peer-reviewed scientifically-proven insights into the human mind.  And it was full of things "proving" that people are more likely to agree to your request if you touch them on the arm, and suchlike.  Now, I intensely dislike being touched on the arm, and although I try not to resent it because intentions are more important than deeds, deep down I feel that it's an attempt to dominate me by moving into the personal space that is mine.  If you touch me on the arm I will instantly forgive you -- it's a reflex action, I'm afraid, and that's your favour right there, not the one you were asking from me.  Now, of course that particular set of studies was done in America, perhaps in an area where cultural mores are different from here.  Throughout Wiseman's book studies done in vastly different cultures are merrily treated as equivalent.  But let's imagine that an English study got the same result.  Now imagine that you've met me.  (I know some people read this blog who have met me.)  "I could really do with getting Rebecca to help me out by doing a few supervisions", you're thinking, or some equivalent favour.  "I know what, I'll make sure that when I ask her I touch her on the arm, like Professor Wiseman advises."  If you've met me I expect you may have realised that I am not an arm-touching type.  Even if you hadn't noticed, I bet you've got a sense that different people react differently to arm-touching.  If you like, you can disregard this distinction, now that you know that Wiseman's advice about arm-touching is that you should just go for it.  This is the sort of science that makes people stupider, not more intelligent.  It decreases our understanding rather than broadening it, and it's all impeccable in terms of being based on peer-reviewed research conducted according to scientific methods.  It's the advice that Wiseman draws from the research that's at fault here, not the research itself, but it's still pretty disappointing stuff in terms of understanding the mind.

Another one that annoyed me had to do with Benjamin Franklin.  Franklin apparently had a political opponent.  Franklin asked as a favour to borrow a very rare book from this man's library, which was granted, and this made a friendly connection between them.  Wiseman interprets this as meaning that to get X on your side you should get X to do you a favour.  It may be that we do tend to feel warmer towards people we have helped or looked after in some way (haven't centuries of gender politics involved that idea?) but it seems like a terrible oversimplification of the Franklin episode.  It's a delicate compliment to ask to borrow a book, it flatters the book owner on their intelligence and taste, it implies that both parties know that knowledge is more important than politics.  But it seems a bit troublesome to draw from this the idea that asking to borrow a pen during a committee meeting will make the pen's owner feel all fuzzy towards you, instead of just thinking you're a disorganised nuisance.

I was driven to the conclusion that novels are probably the best answer we have at the moment.  Read War and Peace and you'll understand how Natasha comes to run away with Kuragin even though she's in love with Prince Andrei.  I'm not saying it's necessarily impossible for cognitive science to get at that particular problem, just that it's going to take a long time.  And any novelist or short story writer could get dozens of different possibilities out of that Franklin exchange.

The thing that reminded me of all this was this fascinating article about monkeys and self-doubt.  Whenever you read something like this it's hard not to see it as a sort of double-edged experiment -- the scientists test the monkeys on something, while the scientists are themselves tested on their ability to come up with experiments.  In this one monkeys were given a series of pictures to react to, and three different possible options to choose.  For two of those options the consequences varied according to the picture the monkey had been shown; the same response would produce either a treat or a pause depending on what the picture was.  However, the third option consistently produced neither, and if the monkey pressed it then he or she could move at once on to the next picture.  The fact that these monkeys sometimes chose the third option when they knew it definitely wouldn't get them a treat, but would move them more quickly into a situation where a treat would be available, does suggest that they were aware when they weren't sure what answer the monkey-researchers were looking for.  (Though it doesn't necessarily mean that this is *self* doubt, it could be monkey-researcher doubt -- "Ah," thinks the monkey, "this is one of those middle-of-the-range pictures, and I have noticed, oh bringer-of-food-to-monkeys, that you aren't very consistent when it comes to pictures like this, so let's skip on to get something where you'll find it easier to understand that it's time for me to have a treat".)  I think this is fascinating.  I think it gives an interesting insight into both humans and monkeys.  But I'm not so sure about the bit where a contrast is drawn between New World and Old World monkeys.  That two different groups of monkeys react differently in the same situations is interesting.  But there's so much evidence that lots of animals have rudimentary culture, in the sense of things that they learn from each other which lead to slight differences in behaviour between separate groups, that it seems like the previous experience of both sets of monkeys would be pretty relevant here.  How far are they from a wild existence?  A wild monkey, which probably knows hunger and glut, might have a different attitude to waiting from a monkey which has always been given a reasonable amount of food at the same time each day.  Maybe the New World monkeys were more trusting, or in less of a hurry -- maybe the scientists haven't yet come up with the test that provokes New World monkeys into expressing doubt.  Maybe the New World monkeys were more hopeful about training the researchers better -- "I keep telling you that pictures like this belong with the first set of pictures not the second, and even though you don't listen, and pictures like this still seem to confuse you, I'm not going to give up on you, oh bringer-of-treats-to-monkeys, I know you want to give me a treat, and if I persist I know you'll understand me eventually." I'm not being entirely facetious here -- I think there was a definite equivalence between the times when we would shout "wait" to Elly, thinking that the fool dog had forgotten what wait meant, and the times when she would, essentially, shout "give me some of that delicious cheese you're eating" and get increasingly frustrated by our inability to understand that she would like some delicious cheese, both of us forgetting that understanding and compliance are not the same thing.  Anyway, basically, I think the monkeys come out of this one looking pretty good as personages who know what they want and know how to get it, while I remain to be entirely convinced by the more extravagant claims of the researchers, especially the claim that this is a big leap forward for understanding human cognition.

Animals and attentiveness

I am animal-less at the moment, plus today I met my cousin's excellent puppy Buddy, and these things have been making me think about the soothingness of pets. A lot of the debate that goes on about animals, at least the debate I encounter, has to do with animal rights, and concentrates on ideas of damage. I wondered if anyone reading this blog has come across stuff written about domestic animals as a benefit to humanity beyond their production of food-stuffs, fibre, or crop-fertilising manure. I don't want to say animals as 'friends', because I think using the human term sounds a bit eugh, but I suppose that's not far off what I mean. Take the riding for the disabled programs that you find all over the country, or the PAT dog thing. Or that man who recently found that horses were incredibly good for his autistic son and wrote a book about it. I know there have been studies where people with pets have had better blood pressure, or such, but I'm assuming that the benefits of pets are essentially mental or spiritual or however you describe the non-physical you. I'd be really interested if anyone knows of something in the realms of theology, philosophy, or psychology that looks at this.

For one thing, it annoys me when people, both pet-owners and pet-sceptics, treat pets as replacements for people. People are complicated and spending time with them involves taking into account huge webs of obligations and connections which are totally absent with animals. Animals force you to be quiet and consistent, to be gentle and calm and to have a sort of honesty in your movements, and this feels refreshing. People are more challenging and make you use your brain differently.

Me (two years) and my puppy (two months)

On the other hand it seems that finding animals comforting is not the case for everyone. I grew up with pets -- our dog Peggy was partly my mother's twenty-seventh birthday present but also partly for my second birthday. I didn't have a brother yet, so Peggy and I used to share things. The point where my mother stopped making me lovely stuffed toys was when she sewed me a pretend polar-bear-skin rug, complete with carefully-made stuffed head, and I immediately swapped it with Peggy for something squeaky. And when I was a bit older Peggy was an excellent listener too, attentive and without the implications of talking to adults. I also rode a lot when I was young, which is great for realising that the human--animal relationship is not a master--slave thing but relies on mutual trust and kindness. So on the whole I find animal company rewarding. My sister-in-law, on the other hand, grew up with potentially life-threatening asthma, and her animal allergies trigger this. She hasn't spent much time around animals as a result, and of course cats being cats seek her out from great distances as if deliberately trying to make her wheeze. I hadn't realised quite what a difference this made until I told her the other day about my scheme for making shoppers slightly more relaxed by offering them the chance to pat donkeys, and she said that on the contrary this would make her agitated.

So if this is a subjective experience then maybe that would get in the way of its being written about by psychologists, theologians, and philosophers. But if, when I say that I think being around domestic animals makes me a slightly better person by training me to be calm and to concentrate on gentleness and consistency, that rings a bell with anyone in something they've read then I'd be interested to hear about it.

How to buy books cheaply

I went to London recently and did lots of good stuff. One of the things was visiting the Book and Comic exchange by Notting Hill Gate tube station, at 14 Pembridge Road. It's worth popping by if you're in the mood for paperbacks and are in the area -- actually I made a special trip out there from paperback yearning. If you have books to spare you can get credit for them, or even cash money I think. They have a policy of discounting stuff quite aggressively until it makes its way down to the basement, where everything is 50p. I spent the best part of an hour there and still didn't quite get round the whole of the basement, let alone the ground floor, which has rather more serious stuff in it. I bought 11 books, three of them from my amazon wishlist (which is the definition of a good rather than an impulse buy), for a total of five pounds fifty. Hurray! I had to smuggle them into the house past my mother, who thinks that people who want to keep lots of books ought to have their own house, and she does sort of have a point there.

At the moment I am reading George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. It's Big Fantasy, with a cast of thousands, and legends and back stories by the dozens, and it slips down very easy. It's a nice contrasting break from my Ismail Kadare and Javier Marías marathon.

Birds singing

Today is the day when the birds start to sing, and I wrote a guest post about it for the Parker Library blog.  I'm particularly pleased with the closing phrase, for which I channelled Jerry Springer's Final Thought mode.

Aunting: a hard bit

When my brother first told me that my sister-in-law was pregnant I was very excited.  "I'm going to be the mad aunt!" I said.  "Yes," he replied, "yes, you are."  (My nephew has two other aunts on his mother's side.)  Unfortunately it seems that today I am also the depressing aunt.  My little rat, Osith, died last week.  She was the last of my rats, and I have forsworn pets until I have sorted my life out.  I miss her; she had a cheerful character, and it was amusing to watch her impose her will on the humans around her despite the disparity in size.  One of her most endearing characteristics was how she treated my little nephew.  A lot of domestic animals (cats sometimes excepted) have this patience with babies and children.  My mother as a kid used to ride a horse renowned for its wildness.  She would get up on it bareback and fall off every time they went round a corner, and the horse would stop and wait for her to scramble back on, while the same horse with an adult, competent rider was almost impossible to manage.  And our dog Peggy, who was partly my second birthday present, was always immensely tolerant with me and my brother.  Anyway, Osith didn't mind if my nephew was a little unpredictable in his two-year-old way, but would sit waiting for him to stroke her, and then make happy teeth-chattering noises when he did.  My nephew likewise showed well in her company.  He understood that he had to be gentle with her.  He would stroke her and then look at me and laugh, and stroke her and then look at me and laugh again, and then perhaps do a little happy dance before stroking her again.  It was hard to persuade him that she had had enough treats, in the same way that it's often hard to persuade him that he's had enough treats.  We have him here every Monday because his nursery is full, and when he sees me he immediately puts out his arms to be picked up, and then says, with toddlerish imperiousness, "Rat!"

So today I have been showing him where she used to live, and telling him that the rat is gone.  He says "Rat gone.  Uhoh.  Bye bye rat."  But he isn't sure about it, so he keeps asking me again.  It's making me melancholy.  He won't remember her, of course, though I did get my brother to take some video of them together so maybe that will survive for him to watch later.

Medieval golgotha

This carved skull is part of the "golgotha" preserved in the church at St Andrews Cullompton.  This is the church where my parents go in the evenings -- I sometimes go with them but I usually leave it at one church service per Sunday these days.  The church in the sense of the people is very different from the church in the sense of the building: the former is lively, modern, concerned with spirituality rather than aesthetics; the latter is very old, full of memorials to past generations, truly beautiful in a number of styles which harmonise despite spreading over centuries.  Maybe what they have in common is a presence in the community.  The huge tower of St Andrews can be seen all over Cullompton, and the people of St Andrews do a lot of community work in this rather troubled and shabby mid-Devon town.  I think it's fair to say that I love them both, and it saddens me that the people don't love the building much.  In the evenings they often hold the service in the church hall, so as not to be distracted.

Anyway, maybe some time I'll post properly about the building, which is really very beautiful, but I just thought I'd put up this one striking picture.  It's the middle of a single massive oak trunk, carved in the late middle ages.  In medieval art Golgotha, the place of skulls, was often symbolically represented as the place where Adam's skull was buried, so making a link between humanity's fall and its redemption.  That's Adam's skull there, and you can see the socket where the cross would have gone.  There are also platforms on either side which presumably held statues of Mary and John the evangelist.  The statues are long gone, obviously, but the base remains.  It's held to be a unique survival.  It was placed above the rood screen, apparently, for the congregation to look at.  Now that only the rough ground survives, carved with skulls, pelvises, and other bones, it's quite a morbid object, but when it was entire those skulls would have both emphasised the terrible scene above and been a counterpoint to its meaning.

Another good thing I read last month

Another thing I really enjoyed last month was Henry Chadwick's Life of St Augustine. Because I read it on my kindle I can paste in here a few of the clippings I took as I read.

Augustine was still in process of discovering that ordinary churches are not places where half-educated fools imagine they worship God while the wise men are in a country villa studying oriental mysticism and Plotinus.
Loc. 624-25

But Augustine has no fear of the natural sciences. Rather his fear is of theologians, orthodox in intention, who try to treat the book of Genesis as a source-book for science without realizing the very different purpose of the sacred book. Like Mani, they merely end in writing bad science and bring discredit on their faith. By pursuing science our minds may grasp everything in heaven and earth, but still remain baffled at the problem of human nature and destiny (AO 4. 6. 7-9. 13).
Loc. 964-67

'Educated Christians like myself', he wrote to Simplician (DS 1. 2. 22), 'expect God's grace to prefer people of greater natural ability, higher standards of behaviour, and superior education in the liberal arts. In fact God mocks my expectations.'
Loc. 977-78

He felt it to be a characteristic of Christianity that the basic essentials of its gospel are plain to the simplest mind, yet that its ramifications are of such complexity that a lifetime is nothing like enough to master them, even for the most gifted intelligence (E 137. i. 3).
Loc. 1307-9

Demosthenes once replied to someone asking him the three first principles of oratory that they are first, Delivery, second, Delivery, and third, Delivery. The Christians say the same of Humility (E 118. 3. 22). The incarnation is rejected where it is offensive to that pride to which it is God's answer.
Loc. 1430-32

The Manichees thought the evils of this world too massive to be explicable by the free-will defence. They saw evil in conflicts of interest. They thought Neoplatonic talk about evil as non-being would quickly change if you put a scorpion into the philosopher's hand (an argument which Augustine thinks unfair to the interests of the scorpion, which has its due place in the beauty of a diverse world).
Loc. 1586-88

Let him have the last word: 'I should wish no one to embrace all my teaching except in those matters in which he has seen that I have made no mistake.... I have not followed myself in everything. I think that by God's mercy I have made progress in my writing, but not at all that I have reached perfection.... A man is of good hope if the last day of his life finds him still improving' (DP 21. ss)
Loc. 1772-75