Year: 2014

Talking of enjoying success, here’s hoping the Geneva Ukraine / Russian talks prove fruitful.

If the Ukrainian “Ambassador at Large” Olexander Scherva is anything to go by, interviewed on Newsnight last night and the Today programme this morning, there is good reason for hope. A very impressive and credible representative putting things into both immediate and historical perspective.

Even when expressing hope, Putin still can’t resist the rhetoric of power and “rights” though. As I said before, turn down the rhetoric, please. If you have the rights (and the power) and hope not to use them, why say it?

[And that’s a two-way street of course Stop Poking the Bear – Engage with Putin, don’t castigate.]

Apropos nothing in particular,
great to see Gareth Bale enjoying success in the Champions League semi-final.

Pic courtesy the BBC (oh, and Getty Images of course). And an excuse to try out the new WordPress 3.9 image drag / drop / resize features in the post editor. Simples.

Despite the obvious direction of motion frozen in the sporting context, hard not to see him being drawn up to the heavenly light 😉 In fact, what with his foreground scale against the crowd, and the tiers in the stadium, not so much spot-the-ball as stairway-to-heaven.

[And success at the other end of the scale, well done to John Still and Luton Town for regaining their football league status.]

[Finally – you couldn’t write this stuff – Gareth’s season did have the fairy tale ending he deserved.]

I’m reading Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia, picked-up along with his much acclaimed new translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. More on the latter later.

The title resonated with a recent quote from Eagleton in Culture and the Death of God:

Like most avant-gardists,
[… when it comes to Christian culture …]
Nietzsche is a devout amnesiac.

Tend to forget, brought up on James’s quick fire TV and Magazine pieces, that he’s a seriously polyglot, well-read poet and cultural historian, pulling in references he’s clearly read in the original French, German, Russian and Italian, not to mention Spanish / Portuguese and classical Greek and Latin. You can hear his voice in the rhythmic prose delivery, but the content is both wide and deep.

I’m only up to the C’s but already loving it. It’s a series of essays, loosely-based on named individuals, triggered by contemporary marginal notes from his 20th century readings, then arranged (arbitrarily) in alphabetical order. Many recurring themes; popular culture naturally, the Jews, world-wars I & II, American cultural dominance from his antipodean perspective – but the common thread is the poetry, with Dante leading the field. The expression of culture in well crafted phrasing of the day, often borrowed, evolved by judicious selection (or typesetter’s error) and re-purposed from another day.

So many people and references new to me, but so far all excellent, absolutely wonderful. Exemplary piece on Gianfranco Contini analysing poetic criticism on “rules” of rhyme and rhythm, and the concept of “learning  by heart”. The latter we may pejoratively translate as almost robotic or mechanical – uh oh – don’t forget the heart. It’s a kind of imperfect recall compression skill that comes from real learning and near-perfect appreciation. Fascinating.

Another from Contini: You heard the idea of no such thing as problems, only opportunities ? Well try this

The departure point for inspiration is the obstacle.
[Varianti – essays 1938-68]

A cheaper, less inspiring idea for a book it’s hard to imagine, which means James’ imaginative content stands by itself. An immense and unexpected pleasure, and being in essay form, an easy piecemeal read, no rush.

Piece in The Spectator to read later. Tweeted by Andrew Neil.

Dreadful piece it turns out, too exclusively Christian, but the main point is true enough.

The new atheists may not like it,
but they’ve had their say.
It’s time for a serious discussion.

It’s a plug for a book that’s clearly been a long time in the writing, the Terry Eagleton reference is from 2009, as opposed to his 2014 book. (Which, ironically, I criticised for being written a decade too late. Better late than never I guess.)

Came across this Kent University page on presentation skills, which as well as including many common sense, tried an tested rules, also included some useful original key quotes and examples.

One for later.

In addition to the 2006 references below, there are more later even better observations.

For example, “Does the motion of the solar system affect the microwave sky?”

Rick Ryals adds on Facebook:

There have been a number of scientific papers written that derive the same results…
… yet look at them now, they act like they never saw any of it before…

Also, “Is the low-l microwave background cosmic?”

And, “Large-angle anomalies in the CMB”

And, “Why is the solar system cosmically aligned?“

Larry Krauss has been tweeting about clips of him being inserted into a “documentary” about geocentrism, and as a result has posted a robust rebuttal on the Future Tense blog at The Slate.

Obviously (as an atheist), I’m interested in this because I’ve quoted Krauss before remarking on a surprising apparent geocentrism in Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) correlating with earth’s orbit around the sun. (Hat tip to Island / Rick Ryals linked multiple times in the link above.) On a cosmic scale that’s a kind of geocentrism – an anthropocentrism – we, our earth, our solar system, our milky way, our local group …. “we” seem to occupy a “special” place in our “observed” universe. One to which you can react (at least) two ways. Both start with – that’s mad, there’s something wrong here. The question is what might be wrong; either the very idea of geocentrism is wrong (mad, ridiculous, worthy only of scorn), or maybe the underlying (standard) cosmology against which we’re judging the CMB correlation is itself flawed. The first is political prejudice, the second is science. Unless of course the correlation has already been explained away by valid follow-up analysis of the “apparent” observations. A question I’ve asked Larry a few times in the blogo-twitter-sphere, to no avail.

Of course if you’re a faith-based literal-nut-case theist (the third option), as per the makers of the film I’ve not actually seen, then you cite a respected, famous, authoritative scientist on the side of your geo-anthropo-centrist-creationist agenda. And you get the obvious reactionary knee-jerk response – shooting creationist fish in a barrel. Oh what sport. Whatever turns you on Larry.

Don’t be a jerk just because creationist nut-cases are jerks – why play their game – instead, why not try some science Larry. Answer the question (ATFQ).

Why might CMB observations correlate with the place of “our” planet in the cosmos ?

[Hint – there are plenty of serious scientists out there with suspected candidates for the flaw in our accepted “standard” model.]