Amazingly revolting google project video

I am officially just too old now, and should probably be put out of my misery before I hold the rest of you up. Someone just posted this video on my M.Sc. course's facebook group. Maybe it's theoretically cool but it's also so nauseating I literally want to go ack ack and cough up a hairball:

From now on Buying Tickets for Monsieur Gayno is a euphemism, even if it wasn't before.

Books of March, and format

Nothing I read in March really enthused me. The Help by Kathryn Stockett is quite good, and doesn't deserve the complications of the hype that has grown up around it. Debra Hamel's Mutilation of the Herms is a specialist book for a non-specialist reader -- it's nice to be treated as intelligent. And Maria McCann's The Wilding is worth reading too. I can't think of anyone else who writes historical fiction in which the different attitudes of the past are so well conveyed.

I've been reading a lot on kindle because it's easy to take on the tube or bus, and I've got quite a few unread things on it because of the Kindle Daily Deal and the occasional sales they have. At the moment the truth about ebooks is that I want everything in both formats. I yearn for some shelves I can put books on and just know they're there. It would be really luxurious to have all my favourite books physically present somewhere accessible. I also want them on my kindle so that if I suddenly want to look something up I can do that too.

If you do have a Kindle I would strongly recommend using Calibre to set things up so you're less likely to lose what you've bought through some spasm on Amazon's part. Enough of us trusting them, let's force them to trust us for a change.

Hair

I miss my Cambridge hairdresser. He knew roughly how I like my hair to be cut, and he talked to me interestingly while he did it, and he is a nice person. He cut it with a razor, which made the most amazing "crrrrup" noise, and he would change the CD from jazz to Kraftwerk for me even though I didn't ask. My current policy in haircuts is to buy Groupon vouchers when they come up and use them when I need them. So yesterday I went to a really posh place on High Holborn. They had big screens everywhere with models walking up and down catwalks. I've watched too much reality TV so girls on catwalks make me feel quite sad. When I indicated with a gesture what length I wanted my hair, the hairdresser (or more probably, stylist) said "Really?" as if I had genuinely shocked her. With an obvious (and unsuccessful) attempt to keep her voice neutral she said "Hair that length makes people's faces look rounder -- is that something you would want?" So I told her just to do what she felt like. I remember caring so much about haircuts when I was about fifteen, and every haircut was a terrible emotional rollercoaster because I knew that my unreasonable mother probably wouldn't let me stay in my room for a month or two until my hair grew out. These days I seem to be substantially less invested in my hair style than the person cutting it. And in those stylized surroundings I didn't feel up to explaining that one of the main things I want from a hair cut is for my hair to be shorter so that I don't have to give any money to a hairdresser for a while. Anyway, she did cut it quite nicely at the back, but by drying it straight she amazingly managed to make it look longer than when I'd gone in. Sometimes I worry that I'm not meeting life's most simple challenges.

A groupon haircut voucher has come up for Exeter but it's at a place called "Wag's". So I think I might give that one a miss.

On the plus side I have pre-ordered a Raspberry Pi. And I have found a place which sells dog-poo composting wormeries for my new dog-owning Exeter life when I finally manage to arrange it. So it's not all bad. And here is Lady Gaga's brilliant song about Hair:

I looked at some art

Over the last few days I have looked at some art.

The National Portrait Gallery has revived an exhibition I saw a while ago at Montacute House in Somerset. It consists of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pictures which were bought as being a particular person, but were then realised not to be that person, and left marooned as anonymous in the storage vaults of an institution that's all to do with the named. They got a few authors to write stories inspired by the pictures, though I didn't actually read those this time. It's the sort of exhibition that's good for the imagination, though it does suffer a little from being on a landing. There's also a little exhibition about Charlotte, Princess of Wales, and her cousin who later became Queen Victoria, and how Charlotte laid the way for Victoria's image.

I also went next door to the National Gallery, where they are showing the Titian Diana and Callisto. I do like the little free exhibitions which the National Gallery does showing one picture, or one main picture with a few related things, just in one room, and with interesting directed captions. In this case the Titian is alone and the room has lots of information about the collection it's from, the subject of the painting, and some translated Ovid. There's also a bench in front of it so you can sit and look at it properly. This is in striking contrast to the over-crowded, over-priced and under-captioned exhibitions which the National Gallery puts on in its basement blockbuster exhibition space.

Somerset House has a "contemporary graphic art fair" called Pick Me Up on in the Embankment Galleries. I'm not quite clear what "graphic art" is as opposed to just "art", but I think it implies lower pretensions, and more interest in the concept of illustration. I really liked some of the stuff there, particularly a watercolour by Rikka Sormunen of a tired woman being hugged by a monster under her bed. I also liked Jon McNaught's wildlife charts, and Paul X. Johnson's Rachael picture. Because I got lost on the way out I stumbled across a free exhibition of art by one of Japan's leading traditional tattooists, which was also good.

Then I went to the late night opening at the V&A. I foolishly took a friend who is not fond of loud crowds; the V&A late nights are very popular. I'm never quite sure what to make of the V&A. Sometimes it seems a bit like the nation's attic, full of high-class tat, and sometimes I stumble across cool things in there. For the late night opening they had a lot of music, and story-telling, etc. They had put a brightly-lit disco ball in one of the big dark sculpture galleries; I was quite enjoying this until I found out it was art. Apparently it was called "Mechanisms of Disorientation: Towards a Fragmented Understanding". According to the bumph, it "reflects on and distorts notions of space and cultural reflexivity. ... Reflecting on past histories vis-a-vis contemporary objects, [the artist] draws a parallel between how we observe history in relation to affairs in contemporary culture". I think that the phrase "I was quite enjoying it until I found out it was art" would probably describe my relationship with modern art in general.

The drought of march

It's surely spring, and even in London the sun is shining on grass, birds are singing, and all that. I'm recovering from the last few weeks, and in the meantime, I think this is brilliant summer pop. I had previously decided that Nicki Minaj is better in other people's songs than her own, but this one is great:

The Most Reverend and Right Honorable Dr

So Rowan Williams gets to stop being Archbishop of Canterbury.  I wonder whether that will free him up to talk more, or whether he will have to be quiet for the sake of his successor?  His talk called The Body's Grace given to a Lesbian and Gay Alliance church back when he was mere Professor Williams is remarkable for taking as its starting point the idea that to think about sexuality you have first to address the question of what it is about sex that matters.  And I do like this aside:

(Incidentally, if this suggests that, in a great many cultural settings, the socially licensed norm of heterosexual intercourse is a "perversion" - well, that is a perfectly serious suggestion.. .)

Requiescat

I've just heard that Ray Page has died. He was Emeritus Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, the one before the one who was there when I was an undergraduate, and a brilliant scholar of things Norse and Anglo-Saxon, especially runes -- he was the runemeister. He taught people who taught me, but I didn't know him until he was retired. He was also the Librarian of the Parker Library back when this was not a full-time job but something people did as well as being heads of departments, etc. If the two great early modern manuscript librarians were Parker and Cotton, Ray Page lived up to the Parkerian rather than Cottonian attitude, with a bias towards not letting people handle the manuscripts... Consequently he was not loved by art-historians. He was the man behind the setting up of the Conservation Studio at Corpus -- his concern was always for the manuscripts' survival more than for the vanity of scholars.

But I'll mostly remember him as tremendously good company. I first met him properly soon after I finished my PhD. I was working at the Wren Library putting some scanned manuscript-catalogue text into XML, and finishing off a book on calendars. One of my calendar-manuscripts had a runic inscription in it, and in some trepidation I wrote to Professor Page, asking him for his help. At this point all I really knew about him was his reputation as a scary beer-monster -- there were hard drinkers among our lecturers, one in particular, but even he prepared himself seriously for a drinking session with Ray Page. Ray wrote back pointing me at a French publication which dealt with the runic inscription in question (a bizarre invocation of Thor to deal with blood-pus demons, not at all the sort of text you'd expect to find at the monastery of Christ Church Canterbury in the late eleventh century). He also invited me to dine with him at Corpus Christi.

Occasionally Corpus has wine-tastings before the evening meal, and this was one of those times. We tasted 16 wines before dinner. After dinner we went to Combination. When the port came round I poured myself a glass with perhaps a centimetre of clear air at the top. "Half a glass, half a glass", Ray growled at me, explaining that it wasn't really a full glass until you could see the miniscus protruding slightly above the rim. (I noticed later that although his hands sometimes shook a little with age, this did not affect him when raising a full glass of port to his mouth -- then they were rock-steady.) I had three glasses of port. Good port is so delicious, and so different from bad port, and I've only ever drunk good port after Cambridge dinners.

(Also on this occasion I met a man called Geoffrey Styler, who told me about a recent party he'd had for the eightieth anniversary of his first ever piano lesson.)

As combination drew to a close, Ray asked me if I liked beer. I said that although I like beer I find the sheer volume of it hard to handle, and prefer whiskey. "Ah, whiskey!" he said, and invited me to the room, I forget its name, dedicated to the use of retired fellows. In the cupboard there he had some silver quaichs, and a large box of the sort used to conserve medieval manuscripts. It had been made for him by one of the great conservator-binders, maybe Nicholas Pickwoad, and inside it was fitted out in velvet to hold a bottle of Jura whiskey. On the spine where the title should be it had "The Runes of Jura" in stamped lettering. "Let us consult the runes of Jura", said Ray Page, and so we did.

By this point my mind was a little hazy. It was not at its sharpest. We talked about books mostly, I think, and he tested me on quotations, something which I didn't mind in the least because I caught them all, except one from Hamlet. You don't often meet people who have read the same sort of things as you, even the obscure things like The Wallet of Kai Lung and Lavengro. He was much better read than me; he was of the type of scholar for whom being well-read in general was part of having an active mind. I'm not well-read in an abstract sense, but I've read more than most people I meet, and being able to discuss books like that seemed like the most tremendous luxury to me. It still does.

I was tired after finishing my PhD, tremendously tired, and it took me a good few months to recover. That evening was the most I had enjoyed myself for ages, and a sort of illustration of old-style Cambridge at its best. Working out, as I stumbled home in an alcoholic haze, that Ray was exactly three times my age (26 to 78) I found myself wondering if he had any available grandsons... I made it into work the next morning despite my tremendous hangover.

A couple of years later when I was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Corpus Ray sent me a note saying how rare it was for the fellowship to make such a good decision, and at one of my first evenings dining in caused tremendous offence to a visiting manuscript scholar by introducing me to her as "A real manuscript scholar". I think he had been pretty fearsome in his younger years, but he was always very kind to me. He occasionally asked me to read some article he was writing on Parker's manuscripts, and they were tremendously refreshing, the best sort of scholarship, the kind that eschews academicy nonsense for clear, erudite commonsense. He had a great sense of humour, a very dry Scandinavian sense, the sort that does not involves laughing or smiling. "You might call that a beautifully rounded argument", he would say with exaggerated politeness -- meaning that it was circular. He got testy if the port stopped at combination, and would talk loudly about the Bishop of Norwich until it moved again. He insisted that the correct loyal toast was not "The Queen" but "The Church and Queen". And one of my favourite stories about him I am not going to put here, even though very few people read this blog, because of its potential to cause an international incident.

It's not a hundred percent accurate to say that I'll miss him, because he hadn't been quite himself for the last few years as old age caught up with him, and I missed him then. But from a selfish point of view, I do wish there were other people like him. But there just aren't; he was more than usually unique.

Some internet things mostly about brains

I just spoke to my little nephew on the phone. "Do you want to come home in a minute?" he asked me. Which is very sweet and has made me feel a bit sad. I told him I'd like to but I can't come home til Easter. Heigh ho. At least the internet remains to amuse us.

If you're interested in apocalyptic sci-fi scenarios coming true right now, why not read about this woman's experience of attaching electrodes to her head to learn how to shoot better? She's a journalist who tried the US military's enhanced sniper training involving 9 volt batteries attached to the temples. She seems to think that all the big ethical questions are changed by the fact that she enjoyed it so much, when really they're just intensified. I already find it a bit frightening that we pay people to kill people for us, but the idea of switching off their self-doubt while they do so might just be a step too far. All the same, I did feel a momentary urge to try putting a current through my mind. (Also I saw it on Boing Boing, where Cory Doctorow pointed out that "If you can't open it, you don't own it", which is quite funny.)

This psychologist makes an interesting point about how the self-selecting personalities and long training of psychologists might make a serious difference to their view of what mental health is. I like this quote:

Having steered the higher-education terrain for a decade of my life, I know that degrees and credentials are primarily badges of compliance.

In other internet news, if you buy a copy of Pendulous Breasts Quarterly and put "Zing me!" in the comments they will hand-craft some insults just for you. It's mostly by Onion and Daily Show writers and others of that ilk. It's a bit hit and miss but there's something pretty cool about being able to buy random humour things from the other side of the world on a whim. I heard about it because it has some Kate Beaton cartoons in it. As the title suggests, though, it's mostly pretty boyish.

In contrast, you could celebrate International Woman's day, which I think is around here sometime, with this excellent Dragonette song. It's from a pink-covered album about being proud of being a woman. I'm not sure I think that's particularly admirable. I'd rather be a woman than a man, but shouldn't I try to suppress that feeling rather than exulting in it? Isn't it a bit like those playground arguments about whether boys or girls are better? Couldn't we grow up past that stage? Nonetheless it's a great song:

Bye bye AI

I'm a bit sad because today I hand in my Artificial Intelligence coursework, and this is probably the last time I get to use the logic programming language Prolog. It's a very cool language, essentially made of punctuation rather than words. I still have a few more AI lectures left though. We just had an interesting one about the problems with using Classical Logic for actual reasoning. In classical logic, if you have a set of things that are true, and another thing, let's call it P, follows from that set, then, whatsoever you may add to that set, P still has to be true. But we need a different sort of logic for practical reasoning, a defeasible or default logic. In this way of proceeding you have a default, e.g. birds can fly, and then you assume the default that if Tweety is a bird Tweety flies. When you find out that Tweety has a broken wing, or Tweety is a penguin, or Tweety is dead, you change that default. In classical logic you could only do that by stating that birds fly if they are not dead and don't have a broken wing, and aren't a penguin or an ostrich, and aren't glued to the ground, etc, etc, and then when you had Eddie (an eagle) you could only prove that he was able to fly if you could also prove that he wasn't dead, glued to the ground, unwell, an ostrich, etc, etc. Default reasoning is like the legal position where you assume that an accused is innocent until proven guilty. It's also known as the Closed World scenario, like in databases, where it's assumed that what is not recorded is not true. In Prolog it's called Negation By Failure. If you can't prove X then you act like for practical purposes you have proved not X.

This seems very interesting to me. It seems like the default reasoning method is a bit like the whole quantum, Schrodinger's cat thing, where only the observable is true. Does it make much difference to people's personalities and attitudes to spend their entire time in an environment where only the observable is true? This seems like almost the opposite of the Humanities approach, and I think this is what Imperial is lacking by having no Humanities here, just a loose association with the Royal College of Art and the Royal College of Music. Tomorrow I may or may not go to a talk by an anthropologist who works on people who work with mice, which seems like an interesting related thing.

Books of February 2012

I read a few very good books in February. Apart from a couple of poetry anthologies (I recommend Andrew Motion's From Here to Eternity) and an exhibition catalogue (for the brilliant Grayson Perry exhibition about which I have failed to blog) everything I read last month was on the Kindle, and most of it was stuff I'd got very cheap in various Kindle sales.

The Mighty Angel by Jerzy Pilcher
This was a lucky find. It's a strange and compelling book which I consumed avidly on the tube, but it's going to be hard to describe it without making it sound awful. It's mostly about an alcoholic drinking. Here instead is the first paragraph:

Before the mafiosi appeared in my apartment in the company of the dark-complexioned poetess Alberta Lulaj, before they wrenched me from my drunken sleep and set about demanding — first with dissembling pleas, then with ruthless threats — that I arrange for Alberta Lulaj’s poetry to be published in the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, before there began the tempestuous events I wish to recount, there was the eve of those events, there was the morning and the evening of the preceding day, and I, from the morning to the evening of the preceding day, had been drinking peach vodka. Yes indeed, I had been drinking peach vodka, brutishly longing for one last love before death, and immersed up to my ears in a life of dissolution.

Tony and Susan by Austin Wright
Compelling and clever. Susan is more-or-less happily married to a brilliant surgeon and they have three children. But a long time ago she was briefly married to neurotic Edward, who was obsessed with what seemed an unrealistic need to be a writer. Out of the blue Edward sends Susan a novel he has written, with the double-edged comment that she was always his best critic. But it's not a pleasant novel and it's not clear what Edward's motive might be. If it's "about" something maybe it's about being a reader, or maybe it's about the creepiness of domesticity. It's very readable though, I stayed up late to finish it in one day.

Graven With Diamonds: the Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt, Courtier, Poet, Assassin, Spy by Nicola Shulman
This has been on my Amazon wishlist for ages. I'm quite fond of Wyatt's poetry, though I only really knew about the usual anthologised ones and the question of whether or not they were addressed to Anne Boleyn. Henry VIII was king for quite a long time, and most of this book is about the period when his court was very French-influenced, in the years between Henry falling in love with and marrying Anne Boleyn. Courtly love abounded:

Love was newly fashionable. In the previous reign, English continence in matters of love had greatly impressed a visiting Italian: ‘he had never noticed anyone, either at court or amongst the lower orders, to be in love’ he said, ‘… either the English were the most discreet lovers in the world, or they were incapable of love’. But now, in the 1520s, the young and chic of Henry’s court were all at it, tossing and pining on their pallets for love, or saying they did in lyric poetry.

Shulman is very good on the use that people made of the poems, how they got passed about and altered, and used in games which only later might look a little dangerous:

‘I write by this… I mean by that’ wrote one scribe at the bottom of his poem, just in case his surreptitiousness had gone unnoticed. Accordingly, they were often attracted to those works of Wyatt’s that could usurp their own apparent subject matter and turn into poems about the poems themselves. That may make Tudor courtiers sound like French doctoral students, which they were not; but they were young and self-involved and their poems were the vehicle for that most fascinating of all things, their own social drama.

I also really like her characterisations of the major figures, like Henry VIII:

A flash of this ribaldry comes down to us in a book that was doing the rounds of Wyatt’s circle in the early 1530s, in which someone has written ‘presto para servir’ (ready to serve) and others, beneath it, the doubtful coda ‘forse’ (perhaps). But the king would have no particle of sympathy for an ungallant sentiment like that. For him there could be no forse about his eagerness to serve. He was sincere in all his doings. If he were alive today, he’d be Canadian.

Anne Boleyn:

Anne was a bridge-burner by nature, not a conciliator, and a termagant to boot. As Henry’s companion, she had never been one to cut her cloth. Henry’s letters swim with mollification and – in response to some lost rebuff – the sort of shaken dignity one sees in a senior dog in retreat from an unexpected cat.

and Wyatt himself:

As for courtly skills, there was no shortage of these with Wyatt, one of the few Englishmen in history to be held suspiciously smooth by a senior French diplomat.

Also you have to love an author who, when discussing C. S. Lewis' interpretation of some poems, points out that "There is only one joke in the Narnia books" (and footnotes a reference to it -- it's in The Silver Chair, apparently).

A few small things

1. I saw this at Spitalfields in one of the dingy warehousey bits by the market where it stinks of piss.

They're spray-painted concrete blocks, the sort that get used as impromptu bollards.  I think they're quite good.

2. Think it would be nice to encourage thoughtful long-form journalism?  There's something that looks good on Kickstarter.  It's already funded.  I hope they can make it work.  Go responsible media!

3. This blog account of a trip to CERN makes it sound amazing.

4.  Crazy philosopher Slavok Žižek has a great accent.  Here he is talking about (what else) The Wire.  I haven't listened to the whole thing but people who have say it's very interesting.

5. My ipod on shuffle just came up with this excellent Pet Shop Boys song:

I want a positive role model!

Culture fail?

Last night I went to see Noises Off at the Old Vic. I've seen the play before, back in the time long time ago when I used to go to the theatre a lot.  I think that it was Cambridge amateur theatre which irrevocably broke my enjoyment of the form, and now I go about once every five years, just to check if I'm missing something.

This revival of Frayn's classic farce has got impressively positive reviews.  I suppose it's just the sort of comfort food people want in this uncertain period.  It made me smile quite a few times, and even laugh once or twice.  This was a profoundly alienating experience given that the people around me were in the almost continuous throes of uncontrollable fits of laughter.

I would be prepared to accept that I'm lacking something about certain sorts of audio-visual entertainment.  I can't suspend disbelief in actors.  I can't watch them mess about without thinking, is this really a way for an adult to earn a living?  I'm very over-sensitive to people who love themselves too much while also needing constant, forceful validation from outside sources (a psychological condition not unknown in academic circles also).  I suppose it's an unfair assumption about what actors are like, but I can't quite get past it.

But anyway, in my experience, if you want to laugh out loud watch the episode of New Girl where she decides to have have sex with her boyfriend.  If you want to sit in a cramped hot space wondering what you're missing, the theatre as an art form is by no means dead.  And why not -- the exploration of alienation and cultural disjunction is a popular theme in modern art.  Hurray! (And it beats reading another Chuck Palahniuk novel.)

Jean de la Valette and the Anglicans

I went to visit the Museum of the Order of St John.  The Order of St John, aka the Knights of Malta, is about the only military order of the middle ages that it's sort of OK to like.  For one thing they mostly concentrated on running hospitals rather than killing people, and (in a way that seems unusual for a male order) they emphasised service to the sick.  I've heard it said, and I don't know how true it is, that they were open to the medical skills of people from other faiths, particularly Arab surgeons, who were relatively advanced at this point.  And apparently as part of their policy of honouring the poor and sick they fed them off silver rather than wooden platters, thus inadvertently stepping up the hygiene.  They are supposed to have done OK at helping people get better.

Also there's the semi-legendary Siege of Malta, when Jean de la Vallette and a handful of indomitable knights held out against tens of thousands of attackers, including the whole Ottoman fleet and the frightening Janisseries, at a time when the Turks seemed pretty invincible and a Turkish conquest of Europe was a serious threat.  The contemporary rhetoric was very xenophobic and anti-Islamic, but essentially no one wanted to be conquered by the Turks, and the Knights were prepared to sacrifice everything with little support to defend the vital strategic point of Malta.

Unfortunately the museum, which is in Clerkenwell, turned out to be a bit disappointing, or maybe just interesting in a different way.  It's essentially an illustration of what the Victorians could do with a good story, some old buildings, and an inflated sense of their own importance.  I joined on a guided tour, which I slightly regretted, because although the guide was lovely and very interesting, she said enough odd things that it was hard to know how seriously to take her.  These were only small things and hard to put one's finger on, though I remember her pointing at a picture and telling us it was given by the people of Malta when it had a big sign on it saying it was acquired for the museum by the Art Fund; and she said that Queen Mary Tudor reinstated the Order in England but it failed again when she came to a sticky end -- I wondered if she was thinking of Queen Mary Stuart (e.g. of Scots), but then again I think Mary Tudor did die of flu, which could be described as sticky in a way.  So generally, the sense was of a huge heap of history, rather confused, and it was hard to pick a way through it.

But I think that what happened was this: at some point in the nineteenth-century someone bought up an old pub which occupied the gatehouse of the priory of Clerkenwell.  This was about the only monastic building left except for the Church, which was also bought up, though maybe later.  Clerkenwell had been the English headquarters of the Knights of St John, until the priory was dissolved in 1540.  I think the buildings were bought up and a supposedly "revived" English Order of St John was set up some time before it all kicked off in terms of what's visible there, but basically by the end of Victoria's reign the revived Order was in full swing and heavily associated with the royal family. (They were, to be fair, doing some pretty admirable stuff that resulted in the volunteer St John's Ambulance which we have today.) Queen Elizabeth II is titular head of it today, and one of her relatives is actual head. They have come up with enough ceremonial and busy-work to make Oxbridge colleges look like informal modern places.

But all the actual things you see there are Victorian and early Edwardian reconstructions.  They took the pub buildings and filled them with wooden panels and old paintings people bought up and gave to them.  They received quite a few donations from the 'people' of Malta.  (Was this a dig at Rome, where the actual continuing Order of St John was based?)  They painted up the coats of arms not just of the English priors before the Dissolution, but of post-Dissolution French or Italian heads of the Order of St John, which survived on the Continent untouched by Reformation, even though these heads would have abominated the English church as heretical, probably almost as bad as the Turks. They have nice things that enthusiastic Edwardians gave them which unfortunately turn out probably not to be as relevant as first thought, like the Weston Triptych (from the school of Rogier van der Weyden).  The church may have been quite nice but it was bombed flat in the second world war and rebuilt afterwards.  The twelfth-century crypt survives and is full of religious bits and pieces acquired in the early twentieth century, including two rather nice tomb effigies from completely different places, one of them actually from Spain, and a bit of stone from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, acquired during the British Mandate.

A lot of what we look at in the Middle Ages and think of as forgery can be more easily understood in the Victorians as over-enthusiastic reconstruction.  Sometimes I think we give the Middle Ages a hard time for their attitude to truth when we're so busy having fun with the past ourselves.  And I don't mind it -- it's just that I think that in the Museum of the Order of St John the story is not so much about the medieval Order but about what the Victorians got up to with it.  That would have been an interesting thing to learn about.

The Future is a Disappointment

says my AI lecturer, talking about how he read Isaac Asimov's I Robot as a kid, and now iRobot is a company that makes ... extremely limited robotic vacuum cleaners.  (They don't clean well but combined with cats they make a pretty good youtube meme.)  He's lecturing right now about whether computers can achieve consciousness.  I've got my fingers crossed for no.  I think the moral and legal ramifications would be tedious.

By the way writing this in the lecture isn't bad behaviour on my part, it's live-blogging.

If he allows questions at the end I will ask how on earth he thinks we'd identify machine consciousness given that people aren't agreed on how conscious animals are.  The tests for animal consciousness are terrible, and often turn out to be culturally-specific for humans, like the thing where you put a dot on a person or animal when they're not looking and see if they remove it when shown themselves in a mirror.

He just said "a real mouse is surely conscious in some sense".  Hmmm.  Oh scientists, you are just too vague.  That's how the future has disappointed me.  He says it's conscious because he doesn't want anyone to torture it.  But I used to feel like that about my teddy bear.  (I still do, a bit.)

Now he's talking about creating zombie mice.  This is pretty cool stuff really.  They're not going to bother to think too hard about what a mouse is, they're just going to try to make one anyway.  I think that's one of the things that's likeable about the sciences, the optimism.  But it is a bit wierd to find myself thinking of the humanities as the practical branch of knowledge, and the sciences as unrealistic, naive.

Unit testing coverage statistics...

...are getting me down, so I'm cheering myself up with more Pet Shop Boys.  Here's Sexy Northerner:

and here's How I Learned to Hate Rock and Roll, which starts:

Someone states the obvious
Someone sneers at all you love
Someone preaches ugly manners
excluding some, including me

which is great because I love the criticism that rock is basically insufficiently polite.  Hurray for politeness!

I love you Pet Shop Boys

Format, the Pet Shop Boys' new album of B-sides, came out on Monday, and my copy arrived from Amazon today.  So far I have listened to the first three songs, and they are all brilliant.  Here is one of them, a very simple sad love song.  I don't think anyone does simple sad love songs like the Pet Shop Boys.

M.I.A.

I like this new M.I.A. song, and the video involves stunts with not-flashy cars.

Callousness

The London Underground works by everyone on it acting as though there is no one else anywhere near them, even when (or especially when) they are jammed together so tightly that there's no need to hold on to the rails because there's nowhere to fall over into.  Every now and then what seems like a group of people just trying to get from one place to another suddenly displays some striking act of callousness.  It's not just the complete lack of sympathy for anyone who wants to kill themselves.  The other day someone was taken ill while I was on the District Line.  This was in the same carriage as me but at the other end.  I couldn't see very well but he looked in a bad way, collapsed on the floor and finding it hard to breathe.  The people near him pulled the emergency cord and asked around for a doctor.  The people near me were disgusted at this, furious at the delay to the journey, and kept asking why the man was not just moved onto the platform so that the rest of us could go on.  It was pretty revolting.

There's another sort of callousness in Devon.  A couple of weeks ago my mother mentioned to me that there were large numbers of baby rabbits around because of the unseasonably mild weather.  They won't have survived this cold snap.  I suppose that if they died above ground they will have been eaten by scavengers, a sort of windfall for the badgers, foxes and buzzards.  If they died below ground I expect they will be decomposed by smaller organisms, and the nutrients from their body might make it into plants and get back to the mother rabbits who put so much wasted biological effort into producing them.  People who live in the countryside are often far from sentimental about nature; when you spend a lot of time with nature you notice that nature is often pretty nasty.  In a way the human city callousness is almost preferable to this immense efficient use of death.

Retablos

I've definitely broken my resolution to spend an hour a week in a museum or other cultural institution.  But I'm not going to abandon it, just try to keep it when I can.  So this afternoon I went to the Wellcome Institute to see their exhibition Mexican Miracle Paintings.  These are little paintings given to churches in thanks for miracles or answered prayers: freedom from prison or an unjust accusation, restoration of a long-lost son or a herd of goats, rescue from bandits or from death in battle, preservation in a train accident or lightning strike, recovery from an almost fatal wound or a scorpion bite, escape from flooding or a collapsed mine.  There are a lot of pictures of operating theatres and lots involving mothers and babies; in one of them a mother gives thanks that her daughter's baby has been acknowledged by her son-in-law.  They were commissioned by ordinary people, or maybe even made by themselves, I'm not sure, and they have quite long inscriptions explaining what happened.  I particularly liked one that started:

In Matehuala on 7th January 1937, Juan Hernandez became so drunk that he completely lost his senses, to the point of walking into the mountains where he passed out all night.

This was put up by his wife in thanks that he didn't die from the subsequent illness, but stayed alive to support her and her son.  It sounds like the start of a short story.

It made me want to commission a small painting to say thanks for something.  I'm not sure what, since my life has been happily free of dramatic injuries, and I've never been kidnapped by bandits.  Maybe I should commission a small painting being thankful for that.  But if you do have a more striking tale, you can leave it on the Wellcome website and they might get an artist to do a retablo based on it.  I don't much like the ones they've had done so far, because they're not really in the tradition.  But it seems like an interesting thing to do in conjunction with the exhibition.

A few little things

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Summary of Lord Lyttleton's 'Advice to a Lady':
Be plain in Dress and sober in your Diet;
In short my Dearee, kiss me, and be quiet.

Stooshe have released a single called Love Me which is a de-ruded version of their song F*ck Me.  They start off with simple word substitutions like "Your play's fine but I ain't got the time" but towards the end they run out of invention and one of them just shouts "explicit" at particular points.  This quite a good way of dealing with rude words in songs, I think.

These break dancers are fantastic: