Year: 2014

Reading Terry Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God (2014)

Only read the first chapter The Limits of Enlightenment, but already finding lots of interest. In fact the style despite his usual sardonic wit is more academic paper (based on what was originally a lecture) with lots of referenced quotes to make his arguments. A couple of things to note for now:

For me, Gibbon’s “celebrated sentence”:

“The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosophers as equally false; and by the magistrates as equally useful.” (Quoted previously).

For the MoQists:

“The two camps, rational and experiential, are for the most part speaking past each other”

“In one sense, feeling is the most incontrovertible of grounds, while in another sense it is a notoriously slippery one.”

Well – decided to go for a standard theme, so the formatting bugs seem resolved, as do the social media links, but still cannot find 13 years worth of uploaded images and media anywhere on the server.

Only solution looks like progressively re-finding and re-uploading each important image – quite a time-consuming chore – ho hum. [Update – on a first 80/20 pass I’ve re-attached the top 20% with 80% of the value. That will have to do for now – if you find any interesting images missing, let me know.]

Other minor item is to organise the page links in the header, since the standard theme simply defaults the top level pages, whereas I had manually linked pages beyond the WordPress-managed blog pages previously.

Sometimes the young are too creditably laid back. I still can hardly believe Loudon was under 30 when he wrote this:

I am a full fledged, grown-up adult
I’m tryin’ make a dent, tryin’ to get a result
I’m holed up in a Hollywood hotel suite
Tequila to drink and avocado to eat

They got all kinds of victories and lots of downfalls
They got drugs in the rugs and ghosts in the walls
Starlets in the lobby that can make a man drool
Blood on the curtains and a phone by the pool

Well I never did see so many TV stars
And I never did see so many rented cars
I never did see so many desperate eyes
And never did I hear so many bold faced lies

When I was ten years old, I was alive
In Benedict Canyon down on Hutton Drive
Well now I’m right back in my old backyward
And I’m tryin’ to get a billboard on the boulevard
I’m tryin’ to get a billboard on _ the _ bou _ le _ vard

Well I never thought I’d see the age of twenty-five
And it’s been twenty-eight years now that I’ve been alive
And in a matter of months I will be thirty years old
And the apprehension that I feel can hardly be told

I am a full fledged, grown-up adult
I’m tryin’ make a dent, tryin’ to get a result
I’m hold up in a Hollywood hotel suite
Tequila to drink and avocado to eat
Tequila to drink and avocado to eat

“Hollywood Hopeful”
Loudon Wainwright III  (1975)

Everyone must have ambition to make a dent,
by whatever means they choose to measure it.
We live in hope, otherwise, why bother?

I empathise with Jeremy Paxman squirming at the explanation of the value of a “year of code”. I support the year of code wholeheartedly, but let’s understand why it’s valuable, and recognise the bullshit in “create your own web-page as a business“.

As far back as 1972/73 I recorded schoolteacher / form-master Ester Pearson teaching us to code – Basic and early Fortran via teletype and punch-tape – he having switched to maths and computing from French and modern languages for the purpose. Bar a few weeks at university first year, I’ve never written a line of code, but I’ve published thousands of web-pages. I’m not proud of that particularly, but it’s a fact. [Not quite true, I did write script-based technical analysis and calculation routines and high-level simulation language code in my early engineering years too.]

The point is, I mentioned my old maths teacher last when I reviewed Dan Dennett’s “Intuition Pumps” – where Dennett presents his laws of computing and registry programming exercise – the very same exercise Pearson had taught us 40 years ago. As I said (and meant) then, it should be compulsory primary school education [See Note *].

I could also have mentioned ex-colleague Siobhan from back around 96/97 – on a project where we’d employed a developer to create an information management solution, not entirely successfully, when Siobhan announced she’d researched some programming courses and would we support her in doing one or more. I wasn’t sure of the direct applicability to our current job, but supported the educational initiative – what the hell, go for it. Sadly our immediate management at the time was explicitly against it – even rather scornful of the idea.

More recently my own younger son, working in a not specifically IT related business, spotted some opportunities to extend the functionality of basic geographic layout and design tools with some information linking and data driven functions – and it turned out he had an aptitude to execute the idea in scripted code. Useful functionally, and naturally I’m encouraging him to develop it further but not necessarily, at least not exclusively, for the immediate application value.

Coding – can represent a skill at some given situation in time, but the core point is not to be a skill !! “Apps” didn’t exist x years ago, in x years time they’ll be superseded by Gocs (or whatever) – something we’ve never heard of or predicted. Programming languages and tools are evolving as fast as technological possibilities. It’s not a skill that can necessarily be applied to employment at the end of a course, or at the end of 7 years education. It’s knowledge about what computation is, a transferrable concept like understanding how humans function.

So what is computation? It’s a fundamental concept about how the world works.

But do we have any better understanding of computing than the audiences who switched on to watch Ian McNaught-Davis in the 1980s? I somehow doubt it.

[* Note – The rules referred to are “The Seven Secrets of Computer Power” – six “laws” you can learn from the registry programming exercise, and a seventh that says there are no more laws to learn. On-line PDF version here, or here at Google Books, and subject to a few minor technical errata by Dennett.

[My most developed work-in-progress version as a teaching resource.]

• SECRET 1: Competence without Comprehension: Something – e.g., a register machine – can do perfect arithmetic without having to comprehend what it is doing.
• SECRET 2: What a number in a register stands for depends on the program that we have composed.
• SECRET 3: Since a number in a register can stand for anything, this means that the register machine can, in principle, be designed to “notice” anything, to “discriminate” any pattern or feature that can be associated with a number, or be different between any number of numbers.
• SECRET 4: Since a number can stand for anything, a number can stand for an instruction or an address.
• SECRET 5: All possible programs can be given a unique number as a name, which can then be treated as a list of instructions to be executed by a Universal machine.
• SECRET 6: All the improvements in computers since Turing invented his imaginary paper-tape machine are simply ways of making them faster.
• SECRET 7: There are no more secrets!

Note that these are the secret and incontrovertible conclusions, but the point is to learn (to believe and understand) them through the Registry Programming exercise. In practice of course, a real group of people in a practical time-scale for running the exercise will only actually learn the first couple directly empirically, but having got the simplicity of the principles, the rest follows inductively and can be demonstrated by progressively more elaborate computer-assisted simulation exercises – where interest is piqued.

Once interest is piqued, of course the student can go any number of ways into “hey, I get computing why don’t I learn to program what can be done with current tools and technologies?” to “hey, it’s intriguing how basic those rules are and independent of any clever 20th or 21st century technology; I wonder what that tells us about how information and knowledge works more generally in the world?” or “hey, if I put those two ideas together, maybe I could learn something about how information and computation (or knowledge and brains) are evolving?” or …. maybe, just think.

All of which presumes that wise education is at least partly aimed at learning to understand the workings of the world at large, the world of humans that is not some disembodied objective world, and not simply about knowledge, qualifications and skills directly aimed at only 1/3 of student’s future lives.

Enjoy.]

This is a retrospective blog on the beers I’ve experienced in the past 3 months, of weekly commuting to London.

Brewdog bars in Camden, Shoreditch and Shepherds Bush, all on the itinerary, after Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Aberdeen (x2) the summer / autumn before, and a couple more before that. (Shoreditch BTW is by far my favourite, if you’re interested.) I’m a “punk-equity” holder 3x over, and been active consumer of the craft beer revolution since 2006 in west coast & regional US, and 2008/9 is Oslo and Stavanger. There’s a lot of it about.

I like it. “Real Ale” and all the other campaigns to encourage (preserve) beer “from the wood” or “from the cask” are creditable, but essentially conservative or backward-looking. Stopping the corporate rot, nostalgia leading nowhere in particular – a holding pattern. In markets where entrepreneurship could flourish (Smallville, USA), or where state-regulated alcohol pricing disguised marginal costs (Scandinavian capitals) nostalgia was irrelevant. What mattered was differentiation, and people could choose what they liked at prices they wanted to afford to pay.

Brewdog deserve massive credit for breaking the mould. Massive, but cheap, social-media-based, marketing campaigns, focussing on the whacky dare to be different “punk” image, to sell novel (revived) products into the existing market at price-premiums. You get what you pay for, takes courage.

Interesting that in this last week – after massive success selling back to Scandinavia – that Brewdog should be opening their latest bar in Rio – ahead of the World Cup and Olympic years. At the bleeding edge of any market, your life-expectancy is slim. Fun, edgy, maybe even lucrative, but short.

In London, the revolution is established – if that’s not an oxymoron. The first mover has hundreds of whipper-snappers at their heels.

Camra were involved in spats with Brewdog over what constituted real ale and craft beer. Recipes, processes, “authentic” ingredients, the wooden casks and unpressurised “draw” pumps, pasteurisation, filtering, corporate ownership, you name it. In the UK (and elsewhere) lots of “real” ale brands are of course part of larger brewing concerns where production is a long way from the operations that originally created the value behind the brands. There are creditable exceptions everywhere of course, but that’s not the point here. (On the rules for brewing and marketing – gimme a break – the only rule is transparency. What are you selling me? I’ll tell you if I like it or not.)

The point is, the market here in London is well beyond the control of any one company’s campaign. There are so many pubs selling so many beers. From the tied-house chains with guest beers to the genuinely free houses, you could die of choice.

By way of example only, just two (or maybe a third).

The Old Fountain, where I am as I type (in the city, EC1), and The Harp (off Trafalgar Square, WC2 on the same block as Prior Guisborians’ favourite The Chandos – ‘cos it sells Sam Smiths Yorkshire beer, like Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese off Fleet Steet (rebuilt in 1642, LOL), and ….) and maybe …. a handful more actually.

Are a new phenomenon to me.

Independently, landlord owned bars, selling dozens of different cask, keg and bottled beers to packed houses. Real (cask) ales at £3.50 to £4.00 a pint to craft (keg) beers at £5 to £12 a pint up to 12/15% abv. And what is most interesting, despite wider UK, Europe and US brewed examples, 50 to 75% are from London and Greater London breweries I’d never heard of 3 months ago. Each with a huge range of beer styles.

You’ve unleashed a monster, with an independent life, Brewdog.

 

Attended the Intelligence Squared debate at the Royal Geographic Society yesterday evening – chaired by Jonathan Freedland, with Jesse Norman and Rachel Johnson for the motion and with Will Self and Rod Liddle against.

On the way in, the audience (full theatre of 350-ish?) were a little under 50% for and the rest more undecided than against. At the conclusion we were over 60% against with very few undecided.

But therein lay the snag for me with the debate – about winning an either-or argument. Apart from choosing which “we” was being debated – the sum total of UK Benthamite “good” divided by the population, or some more global humanity – clearly the for parties simply traded stats on every measure of progress from economics and income levels, healthcare, environmental quality, freedoms of (religious, and political and scientific) expression, etc to subjective surveys of happiness and well-being. Much debate of course about the material and spiritual aspects of good and evidence of lack of correlation between the two. Will in particular declined this debate – sticking firmly to the whole individual of multiple constituencies, rather than measurable choices for some monolithic average “we”. Rod reinforced the superfluity of choice as the measure of why we’ve never had it so bad.

Ultimately as a debate it was the usual gladiatorial rhetorical battle – easily won by the rhetoricians, whose main point ironically was that wining gladiatorial battles on such matters was pointless.

All my “wisdom” agenda items in one nice package – we (constituency), value (good) and governance (how). Will particularly emphasising that scientism and quantifiable stats are the problem not the solution. A man after my own.

(Interesting therefore in this post-Russell-Brand world, that the motion in the March 11th debate at the Cadogan Hall is “One size doesn’t fit all – Democracy is not always the best from of government”. Connects with yesterday’s debate through the superfluity of choice angle, the meme of our social-media-enabled times is that everyone has, and expects to express, an opinion for or against anything and everything. Whereas real life ain’t so simple. Democracy would work if we could lose the myth of popular – statistical – voting.)

[Post Notes: Good personally, to make contact with Rod Liddle, a fellow Prior Guisborian alumnus of Prior Pursglove College in Guisborough, North Yorkshire. And also good to exchange contact details with the young guy from a Muslim society trying to arrange a forum on Islamic contributions to progress – attending this event to pick up hints on how to not necessarily organise as a gladiatorial debate – some impressive names on his wish-list of guest speakers – watch this space.]

I mentioned Neil Gaiman’s American Gods back here in October. Having lived and travelled n the US over several years, and being a fan of all things Americana, I was looking forward to the read, though I can’t recall where I picked up the reference to the publication of the author’s preferred text of his 2011 original best-seller (possibly heard him talking about it on BBC R4 Start The Week or Saturday Live ?)

Weirdly, after reading the first couple of chapters and encountering the strangest sex scene somewhere around chapter 4, I found Iain Hislop’s words “bonkers, bizarre” preventing me continuing. So what started out as a promising US Road Trip / Buddy movie screen-play lay unread on the bedside cabinet for 3 months. However last two weeks, I restarted from the beginning and devoured it – and the bonus “novella” sequel(*) included.

No room for a full review, but for me it was Douglas Adams(*) meets Satanic Verses(*), with a mass of Americana myth, culture and familiar locations. Quite brilliant – puts “religion vs rationality” debates into real perspective. A book “I wish I’d written”, in fact to continue my own writing project I’m going to have to find some new plot components and angles. Where have American Gods been all my life?

[(*) The sequel adds the familiar Norse gods, Norway, Viking & Northern Isles & northern-most Scotland (Sutherland) context to the already familiar Americana. Think more zombie / fantasy sci-fi than time & space travel scenarios and North London / St Pancras station, and substitute Mr Wednesday for the angel Gabriel, and you get the general idea. Personally, spooky coincidence of locations, themes and subject matter.]

Didn’t spot this until pointed out by Marsha on MD, but in the Q&A session in the 4th Grayson Perry 2013 Reith Lecture, responding to a question around 35:50 about the need for non-judgemental playfulness in order to encourage new potentially creative ideas, he recalls a favourite quote from Robert Pirsig’s ZMM (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance).

The analogy of seeing new ideas and creative opportunities as small furry creatures emerging from the undergrowth. If you’re not friendly to the first one, the others are unlikely to come out to play.