Giorgio Bassani’s grave, in the Jewish cemetery, Ferrara, supposedly just over the wall from the Garden of the Finzi-Contini
Christopher Logue on books
And, of course, we loved books. Books were the thing. Portable, durable, inexpensive—a marvel of technology, needing no intermediary save spectacles; that can be exceptionally beautiful, and may become valuable. Above all—free spirited, subversive, difficult to police.
Christopher Logue, Prince Charming.
Why I ride
[Written for another purpose and not used. May as well blog it.]
According to the relevant chronicles, a thousand years ago Irish monks used to have themselves set adrift in a boat with no sail or rudder, that God might choose where they would end up. You might think that only a devotion to some higher calling would induce anyone to throw themselves at the mercy of fortune’s good graces with no reliable means of setting a heading and such eejits are not to be found nowadays.
In 1932, one Robert Edison Fulton Jr., trying to impress an attractive woman in London, said that he intended to ride home to the United States on a motorcycle. The president of the Douglas motorcycle company was present, and offered him a bike for the trip. When Fulton later regained consciousness in Turkey, he examined the evidence and concluded that the bridge he had been crossing was unfinished. Examining his motorcycle, he found that “the only damage I could find was a slightly bent front fork which thereafter tended to turn the machine in circles to the right.”
A mathematician writes …
From the preface to Introduction to the Theory of Fourier Integrals, Titchmarsh:
A great variety of applications of Fourier integrals are to be found in the literature, often in the form of `operators’, and often in the works of authors who are evidently not specially interested in analysis. As exercises in the theory I have written out a few of these applications as it seemed to me that an analyst should. I have retained, as having a certain picturesqueness, some references to `heat’, `radiation’, and so forth; but the interest is purely analytical, and the reader need not know whether such things exist.
Keep an eye out for the red dot
Today’s Guardian asks if laser spying is really practical. As any student who has taken my acoustics course will know, it has probably been in use for at least twenty five years, as described in this Time magazine article from 1987.
How to write a high impact paper
Academics, in the UK at least, are being encouraged to write papers with `impact’. There is some discussion about what exactly `impact’ means, but these seem to be two papers which can reasonably claim to have had some:
- a paper in one of the world’s leading journals, cited 1730 times in fifteen years (according to Google Scholar), which described a previously unknown phenomenon, and led to a massive change in public behaviour.
- a paper cited 543 times in three years, which led to changes in government policy world-wide, with far-reaching societal effects.
Paper 1 is Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent Lancet work which found that the MMR vaccine can cause autism. As a result, vaccination rates fell as low as 80% in the UK, with predictable results.
Paper 2 is Reinhart and Rogoff’s paper claiming that government debt above 90% of GDP slows economic growth. The authors made an error in Excel (using it was their first mistake) which led to them leaving out data which contradicted their conclusion. Governments have used this paper to justify their cutting of public services, on which many people depend, with predictable results.
Tante lobby
Nick Cohen would have it that the Pope has `signalled his fealty to the deep strain of reaction in European history’, because, in a statement on prejudice against gays, he made reference to `masonic lobbies’ (`lobby dei massoni). Cohen explains:
Few Anglo-Saxon readers understand that prejudice against freemasons is the founding conspiracy theory of the far right. It saw the machinations of a society that began among harmless Scottish craftsmen in the 15th century as responsible for liberalism, the enlightenment, the rights of man… everything it hated.
Quite apart from the use of the term `Anglo-Saxon’ (does that include the Celtic fringe, or non-white Britons), Cohen seems to have missed the point.
To anyone paying attention to post-war Italian history, the first thing which comes to mind when someone says `freemasons’ is not some harmless old buffers with their trouser legs rolled up, but the Propaganda Due lodge, which, as part of the strategy of tension, perverted the course of justice during the investigation into the Bologna railway station bombing, and was involved in the corruption of the Banco Ambrosiano, the Vatican’s piggy bank.
It is not impossible that the Pope is a bit reactionary, but his use of the term `masonic lobbies’ is a feeble hook to hang the argument on.
What do they know of education, who only education know?
Scot L. Newstok has proposed the term `close learning’ to refer to university education as we presently understand it:
“Close learning” evokes the laborious, time-consuming, and costly but irreplaceable proximity between teacher and student. “Close learning” exposes the stark deficiencies of mass distance learning such as MOOCs, and its haste to reduce dynamism, responsiveness, presence.
Or, in summary, “to what are they being given access?”
The argument about access to higher education, the ground on which much of the mooc stooshie is being fought out, is based on ideas about social mobility, and meritocracy: in short, going to university will let you make more money and escape the harsh grinding poverty (intellectual and financial) of whatever benighted hole spawned you.
Continue reading “What do they know of education, who only education know?”
How do you mooc a project?
`Technology’, pace the scuttering gobsheens of hipsterismo eroico, snug and smug in their rolled-up jeans and heavy-rimmed spectacles, is not the collective noun for the latest beeping, whistling gewgaw from some fruit-monikered design house. It is all of the objects that let us be human. Rejecting technology means eating worms and in-season plants dug from the ground with your bare hands, your naked hairy body kept warm only by a layer of filth. R. R. Wilson famously said of Fermilab that it had “nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.” Technology does not make our society worth defending; it makes our society.
Continue reading “How do you mooc a project?”
Unexpected idea in the packing area
When a public service is to be `improved’, evidence be damned, make it more like private business. Empower consumers with choice; free staff through casualization; motivate the boss with money. The apotheosis of this trend is the mooc, or, as we know it in supermarkets, the self checkout (a euphemism for suicide whose time has come).
Continue reading “Unexpected idea in the packing area”