Two steps of decency

A couple of months ago, I sent A Conversation With … Emily Wilson PhD, Contemporary Interpreter of the Iliad, on Listening, Hearing, and Communicating to a couple of friends-for-fifty-years who were uniquely appropriate for the article: she read Classics and he read medicine in college and they got married.  A few weeks later they were in Ireland for a Class Reunion and we got to meet in Tramore. They gave me a copy of Emily Wilson's 2018 translation of The Odyssey . . . and some rather fancy Canadian tea.

I had a very expensive education with access to a pretty good library: top-heavy with Thackeray, light on thrillers. As a teenager, I read E.V. Rieu's 1946 translation of The Odyssey, which was the 1st volume published as a [eventually black-covered] Penguin Classic.Teenagers are frankly Scarlett about the niceties of translation: so long as the story rips along. I know the story in some detail but have no Greek. At about the same time I also read HDF Kitto's The Greeks in its Pelican edition. The Greeks was a key text for Robert Pirsig [Blobit 2017] in the writing of ZAMM Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. 

Kitto: "Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send, and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Phaeacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all rounder; he has surpassing aretê.” That should resonate with Heinlein's Specialization is for insects analysis of what a piece of work is a man [Withnail]; and also with O'Grady & Pyke's I could read the sky. We are all, even the dullest of us, complex creatures: so it is invidious to label /summarize anyone as dull or narcissist or scientist. 

Wilson devotes the first 91/583 pages to setting out her stall with as much baggage as she is aware of. It is also helpful to have a classicist's explanatory insight on how Archaic Greek life and certainties differ from those of our own time. "Odysseus is a migrant, but he is also a political and military leader, a strategist, a poet, a loving husband and father, an adulterer, a homeless person, an athlete, a disabled cripple, a soldier with a traumatic past, a pirate, thief and liar, a fugitive, a colonial invader, a home owner, a sailor, a construction worker, a mass-murderer, and a war hero". Some of those descriptors [migrant homeless disabled] have a particular charge for our modern selves in contrast to the inhabitants of EV Rieu's immediate post-WWII world of 80 years ago.

As we see above Kitto is keen to lay out the nuance of aretê ἀρετή = virtue / excellence. Wilson spends as much effort on xenia ξενία = hospitality: the rights and obligations of hosts and guests. Perhaps in these troubled, othering, times we all need to reflect more on xenia than aretê ?? When somebody, anybody, rocked up to the door Greeks were obliged to give the stranger bath, bites, bevvies and bed.  An integral part of the process is pompḗ Πομπη = safe escort to the next destination. After the fall of Troy, Odysseus' son Telemachus goes off to glean some intel from his father's fellow warriors who have, like, actually returned home. Nestor provides the chap with a chariot and his own son Pisistratus as guide for the onward journey to Menelaus and Helen's palace in Mycenae. Hypnopompic same root.

They say that, when B&B's became A Thing in Ireland in the 1950s there was some [presumably bitch behind the back] outrage that people would charge money for accommodating wayfaring strangers [♪Riannon Giddens♪] who needed a bed for the night. In that world Two steps of decency required a host to see their departing guest to the door - to the gate - to the bus-stop . . .

Caedite Piceas

I said we happy few yomped up our hill for reasons. Those reasons being that The Common was to be scored a second time for its [ecological] quality. Quality here bears only a faint resemblance to the Metaphysics of Quality in a Robert Pirsig / Phaedrus / ZAMM sense. We, The Commoners, have been incentivized over the last 5 years to recognise Value in The Common . . . beyond sending a certified copy of our entry in the Land Registry on to the EU and thereby drawing down whatever subsidy, headage or grant was currently applicable. 

Our hill, you see, is an increasingly rare example of Dry Heath: an intermediate ecological stage where full succession to dark forest is checked by the activities of shepherds and their sheep. Winter on the hill is not a place to fatten sheep: the pickings are slim and the weather can kill even without the drama of a three week blizzard. But during a long Irish Summer, the sheep can chomp through the heather while the in-bye fields are left ungrazed for hay. They also relish tree saplings and so these 'climax' species never get tall enough to shade out the under-storey . . . so Dry Heath.

The score for each Common in the currently favoured scheme for transferring money to farmers has been devised and revised by ecologists employed by The Department of Ag. They have devised an algorithm which identifies Good Things [heather, tormentil, larks] and Bad Things [erosion, bracken, invasive trees]. Things which are useless for sheep-farming, like bogs, might nevertheless score well in the Algorithm. All the features, appropriately weighted, are tallied up into a Score out of 10. Some elements of the scoring can be abstracted from a pass of The Satellite but most of them require boots on the ground. 

Incentives must be seen to have worked (or what's the point?) and that means at least two trips by The Man to each commonage in the country: once for baseline and once after the interventions. Because Ireland is a leaky place, word came down from on high that our Common would be scored on such-a-date and that the score might be improved if a) we cleared trash and b) extirpated any and all Sitka spruce Picea sitchensis which have seeded downwind of the recently felled 40 year old Sitka plantation. That might was carrying a lot of water and only 6 of us heeded the call to do something about it.

The Holy Year Cross (1950) was restored by The Faithful in 2017. For years after, the Cross was surrounded by elements familiar on any building site: a disintegrating bag of builder's sand, several ditto plastic buckets, baulks of timberr and containers for water. When four of us arrived, with trash-bags, at the summit, we found that The Faithful had been, sometime over the last tuthree years, to tidy up the job. We turned away, not too disappointed, intending to cut Sitka on the way downhill to meet the rest of Team Clean as they worked their slash-hooks up and away from the road. 

But 40m from the Cross I stumbled over two fence-posts and a raffle of rebar, electrical-wire and chain-link fence. The only thing for it was to pick it all up and de-Calvary (I was still clearly in ✞ mode) it to the waiting 4x4s. I did not break a leg or sustain significant damage on this potentially dangerous, un-stewarded handicapped cross-county yomp but I didn't pause to cut Sitka either.

The following Saturday, I went back up the hill on me ownio to make a final 🪓Sitka🪓pass. I'd rather hug trees than fell them but there is a place for selective management; like when Kiwi Sean came through our micro-forest in 2022 for some judicious thinning. I delighted to see several [native to Ireland] mountain ash Sorbus aucuparia and even some willow Salix spp getting their heads up through the heather. That's a consequence of running a limited number of sheep on the hill . . . and keeping Bob the Axe on a tight leash.

Post title references: Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. From the chilling instructions by Papal Legate Arnaud Amaury at the massacre of Béziers 22 July 1209.

woodworder

It was a surprise, though it shouldn't have been, when it was revealed that our latest plumber is also a certified electrician. You really have to be, he said, otherwise how would immersion heaters get installed?. The thing with tradesppl is that they often have to work together all hugger-mugger and sometimes the 'prentice calls in sick. Who's going to hold the far end of the carpenters snap-line? The sparkie! Soon enough, if they pay attention, are respectfully curious and make really strong tea, youngsters can learn how to cut a 2 x 4 into 3 equal parts; lay a row of bricks not too shabby; snake a wire and connect the socket. All building contractors started in one trade and became competent in the others. At least so that they could recognise crap workmanship.

One of the most important things I learned in University was how to hold a handsaw: use your index finger to point, you'll cut straighter. I was helping make flats for the lunchtime theatre club and the college carpenter kindly came to lend a hand supervise the gilded youth. I've made tables, chairs, boxes from unlikely materials but my standards are low on aesthetics if adequate on engineering.

I've given up browsing in the library. My reading list works heavily on recommendation, so my library trips are confined to when books I've reserved come in. That and Borrowbox which delivers [earbooks] to the sofa. The Beloved operates more old-style and throws herself on the mercy of the shelves. Last week she took a punt on a book for me, by and about a philosophical carpenter from NYC. I romped through this memoir of a life dealing with flawed [aren't we all] people and the  material world. It's like Lewis "LOTC" Thomas and Robert "ZAMM" Pirsig mentored Ernest "Fighty" Hemingway.

The book = How to Build Impossible Things: Lessons in Life and Carpentry. A carpenter's notes on life and the art of good work (2023) by Mark Ellison The title subtitle subsubtitle is quite meta because, like the interminable The End of the LOTR film, there is Final Chapter, then an Epilogue, then a Further Thoughts before we get to the Acknowledgments . . . there is no index. Random House produced a Editor for the book who might have been tighter, hmmm? Ellison produced the illustrator - his son Martin Ellison.

Typical of the f[l]ights found in the book is this: "One and a half trillion dollars [for the F-35 fighter plane program] is coincidentally enough money to send every high school senior in the country to MIT for four years. Now, MIT wouldn't take them: it's highly selective, and most seniors wouldn't go anyway, having lost interest in education way back in grade school when the teachers couldn't even come up with serviceable blackboard erasers. But it's interesting to imagine what might occur if we lived in a country that put as much value in educating its populace as it did on eliminating the perceived threat that foreign populations represent".

Ellison is a skilled carpenter and is no more qualified to opine about government spending than my cat any other chippy from the Rust Belt. Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man. That paragraph in a book about design, materials and shitty clients smacks of Dunning-Kruger and poor editorial control. But then again, Nobel Prize winners do this alll the time [looking at you Vitamin Linus], so why not master carpenters? . . . and my cat says miaaow. I can't resist having a snipe at another unintentionally funny editorial lapse. One of Ellison's perfectly designed spaces is "The Knave of Chartres Cathedral" - you can see his foot [R].

If you've ever been in the midst of a renovation project [like us for 8 months 1996-1997] you know that the chaos mounts as the deadline approaches. A week out and the client sees wires blurfing out of the walls, the kitchen sink still in its packing, a hole where the stairs should be and believes their agree move-in date is shot. But six days later at tea-time the lads are sweeping the last of the wood-shavings and wire-strippings into a dustbin as they knock off for their final day on site. Proper craftsmen work fast and well: figuring it's easier to do it right as make a weeping hames of it.

Comparisons are made [during an interview in Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research, no less]  between carpentry and orthopedic surgery: each trade works with organic material and requires microscopic tolerance but not perfection. Because organic, finishing the project can be dynamic - doors warp, joints go osteoporotic after the fix has been signed off. I've cited this article because it gives a flavor of Ellison's voice, without having to buy the book.

The most disturbing aspect of this memoir is that, for decades, Ellison's clients were comically wealthy dot-com billionaires and hedge-fund managers with a sprinkling of pop and film stars. The material waste is colossal. Mistakes are made and fashions change and perfectly serviceable kit is ripped out and sent to the dump. The apparatchiks of power [architects, project managers, designers, decorators] are [not all] lazy and incompetent make-weights. It's unfair to be finding a wall for the super-rich when the revolution comes without making room for their enablers and parasites.

Merit or gratitude

Our girls educated themselves at home and left just before they became eligible to vote. After Dau.I left home and country her younger sister was home alone for nearly two years before she, in turn, made tracks. In retrospect a large part of those years was taken up sitting on the sofa watching boxed sets [Desperate Housewives; House; Masterchef] dreadful stuff if you tend the least bit towards judgmental. Two positive notes: a) this binge-watching was in the centre of the family space rather than up in her room b) it was eclectic - didn't seem to matter what she watched or with whom so long as she didn't have to run around in the cold rounding up sheep.

That's how we got to watch all 20 episodes of Harvard professor Michael Sandel's [L,L; Mr Burns, Homer Simpson's devious and ethically-challenged boss L,R] freshman Philosophy Course. Sandel is quite dismissive of Utilitarianism - probably because he's smarter than me - and thinks that there is something to be said for <me: aaaaargh!> Kant. But he is also a great rhetorician and could persuade most normal people to his way of thinking if they were the least bit open to change. His course is heavily over-subscribed year after year and is a prime example of the quality of the education students have the opportunity to embrace if they can overcome the 1 : 20 odds by successfully applying to Harvard.

I wasn't averse to watching Sandel talking for 10 minutes about The Tyranny of Merit. Like Utilitarianism, Meritocracy looks okay at first glance: if everyone has the same chance in life's tests, then the winners can bask in their success while the losers have only their lack of application or native talent to blame. Except, despite the rhetoric, you don't have the same equality of opportunity as I did with my expensive education. In Ivy League America, families from the top $1% contribute more students than the bottom $50% - and that discrepancy is a) self-perpetuating b) "corrosive of the common good". Academic success breeds hubris in the winners who make invisible the role of fortune [both sen$es!] in their ad astra ambitions. A sense of humiliation is to be expected of the hordes milling outside the Groves of Academe. And justifiable anger if they have heaped debt on their shoulders to meet the eye-blinking costs of 21stC higher education.

Sandel wants to stop "college, the best you can buy" being the only arbiter of opportunity. Where opportunity is defined by loadsa cash and the stuff which goes with it. College is not the only avenue for money and accolades: sports and entertainment are other channels for achieving millions and an early retirement. But heck-it your odds in those games are far, far longer than getting into Harvard. And another thing: it's not only about the money [even under today's corrupted values] it is also about recognition that, whatever your métier, your labour contributes positively to the common good. If you look down on your child-minder, your plumber, your garbage-collector you have only yourself to blame when the revolution comes.  

The next day, I started in on All Things Shining: reading the Western classics to find meaning in a secular age by philosophers Hubert Dreyfus [ UC Berkeley] and Sean Kelly [Harvard]. Philosophy, insofar as it has any utility, seeks to understand the meaning of A Good Life and maybe sketch us a road map towards that desirable goal. My pal P sent me the book, for which much thanks, from Boston by UnAmazon. 

There's an intriguing chapter there on trying to figure out what Homer meant by Ἀρετή areté = excellence, virtue. Robert "ZAMM" Pirsig [prev] travelled that same road on his motorcycle. Homer was writing reciting 2,800 years ago and in many significant ways that past is a foreign country. William "Home Rule" Gladstone was so weirded out by Homers kennings [wine-dark sea etc.] that he seriously suggested ancient Greeks might have been colour-blind! Here's Dreyfus and Kelly "Excellence in the Greek sense involves neither the Christian notion of humility nor the Roman ideal of stoic adherence to one's duty. Instead, excellence in the Homeric world depends crucially on one's sense of wonder and gratitude" Note the wine dark text! " . . . the basic Homeric sense of the sacred: that it is the highest form of human excellence to recognise, be amazed by, and be grateful for whatever it is that draws you to act at your best". Plumbers, student nurses, Martin "Ich kann nicht anders" Luther - we see you!

Nimo Patel is grateful.

Get drunk and try to break shit

There is a whole world of discussion about the nature of Quality - not least as the key theme in ZAMM (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) by the late, great and much lamented Robert Pirsig. It's one of those things that we all think we understand until we have to define it. Many of the graduates from The Institute go into Food or Pharma to try their good-pair-of-hands at QC - Quality Control. That's a vital job, which sounds ever so slightly boring to butterfly me, but requires persistence, reliability and technical competence. Quality Assurance QA is sort of the same: I gather that QC concentrates on keeping the product to standard while QA is about maintaining, streamlining and idiot-proofing the process. In the software industry QAs are paid to "Get drunk and try to break shit"

I was browsing through metafilter on Sunday last and came across a surreal insider joke which a lot of commenters were getting off on but which I failed to understand. I share it with you here:"QA Engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a sfdeljknesv". As always, check the comments for war-stories: "I took the latest build home for the weekend and tested it on one Mac and one PC (because those were the ones I owned). I came back on Monday with a list of over 400 bugs or other issues I’d found. The list was not happily received."

I should have got it because I was a software engineer back in the day although I didn't think of myself in those terms: not least because the software I wrote worked, was reasonably robust but the sky wasn't going to fall if it tripped out or went clunk. And I was my own QA insofar as I tried to think of the dopiest thing a user [almost always my later self or someone in the same lab] might try to do with my code and try to catch the problem before something blew up.

The one piece of software which I wrote for publication was, like all my code, was a kludge. Bits and pieces of code were clagged together into a menu-driven compendium to analyse a particular subset of DNA sequences. It was menu driven because clickable buttons weren't really a thing in 1992: certainly it was before the WWW. The version that worked (for me) presented a list of 9 options and paused after the instruction:
Enter a number between 1 and 9:
maybe the colon : blinked in anticipation. I had worked to ensure that an input of "2" fired up the 2nd lump of the program. But when I gave it to the students in the lab to see if it worked for them, one of them entered l "el" instead of 1 "one" and the whole thing stopped with deeply unhelpful

"SYSTEM STACK ERROR"
I had, lazily, innocently, assumed that if the program asked for a single digit, then no user would enter a letter. The solution was easy: I wrote a few lines of code to take any input and check if it was a digit 1 to 9. If not, I had the program repeat [resistance is useless]:
Enter a number between 1 and 9:
That program was The Thing for that sort of analysis for a couple of years and then superseded by better, faster, more comprehensive software for doing the same sort of analysis. I also moved on from writing [crap, slow, inefficient] code leaving that to people who  were properly trained and knew how to use an associative array. With that back-story bubbling up, I could begin to 'get' the purple joke above about large numbers, negative numbers and alphanumeric strings.

The responses were also informative. There is apparently a Big List of Naughty Strings, which wakes you up to how things can go wrong:

• strings which may be blocked by profanity filters 
• Scunthorpe General Hospital 
• magna cum laude 
• Super Bowl XXX 
• Dick van Dyke
• strings that can be interpreted as code
• undef
• null
• True
• $HOME
• %d
• simple ascii emoticons
• ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
• ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Then there is the Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names list.

• People’s names fit within a certain defined amount of space
• People’s names sometimes have prefixes or suffixes, but you can safely ignore those
• People’s names are written in ASCII
• My system will never have to deal with names from China, or Ireland

At The Institute, which is after all in Ireland, email names can't handle the ' in  O'Mahony and O'Sullivan, so these are stored as O Mahony and O Sullivan . . . and Mc Dermott is kept as two words. I've ranted about Garda Vetting and it's assumption that legitimate people have a First name; Middle initial; Last name. My friend from Malagasy was Rakotodramananana: no more no less no Mid.Init. And my pal from Kerala reversed the conventional naming order to Family-name first. And the poor Mr Echo, who couldn't order anything on-line.

The four knights of Eskdale

It's Lombard Street to a china orange that you have not heard of the four Brothers Malcolm who, each in his own foreign field, achieved a knighthood. I would never have heard of them either if I hadn't read The Marches [review] by Rory Stewart. I wouldn't have read that book if it hadn't been recently given to me as an unbirthday present but also if I hadn't read his earlier book The Places in Between about a solo trek through Afghanistan from Herat to Kabul in 2001-2002.  Catechism time:

• Wasn't that about the time when the US-led coalition were also tromping over Afgho looking for Osama Bin Liner? 
• Yes. 
• Were there a lot of yahoos about with loaded AK-47s? 
• Yes. 
• Did Mr Stewart complete his trek in midwinter? 
• Yes.  
• Is he well 'ard? 
• Yes. 
• Have I read better travel books? 
• Yes. 

One's Company or A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush [British sang froid] for walkers;  or ZAMM or Lost Continent if you prefer to drive your adventures rather than having your boots fill with blood from blisters and leeches. But that's a silly comparison, which book works for you is a matter of taste and whether you're happy in yourself at the time you start reading.

The Marches has the conceit that Rory, approaching 40, will go trekking in the borrrders between England and Scotland more or less (mostly less) accompanied by his father Brian Stewart, approaching 90. It's like a lot of travel books, some random chap is out minding his own business when he is relentlessly engaged in conversation and finishes up as three pages of some other guy's book. I hope they get a complimentary copy, if not a share in the royalties, because such encounters-in-the-landscape books are rather thin without the people padding. When such books are read a generation later, it is poignant to think of the people who have aged or died while the book has not.

When you read about people who have been dead for nearly 200 years that poignancy is barely diminished. Both Rory and his Dad were soldiers in The Black Watch, one of the quintessential Scots regiments of the British Army, so they are interested in military history and have informed theories about the how and why of garrisoning Hadrian's Wall which are somewhat at variance with the theories held by archaeologists and classicists who have not been in uniform. On the way back home after their Hadrian's Wall yompings they drive up Eskdale and pause in Langholm. The tourist office, and Wikipedia, talk large about the town for its connexions with the poet Hugh MacDiarmid [prev] which is fair enough although red MacDiarmid was polar opposite politically to the Tory Stewarts. The other local celeb is Thomas Telford the 18/19thC civil engineer aka The Colossus of Roads. Also mentioned is the fact that some ancestors of Neil "Moonboy" Armstrong [bloboprevs] lived in Eskdale. I've complained that old style print encyclopedias were strong on 19thC generals and woeful weak on everything else about which I wanted to find out. But the pendulum swings the other way and the internet privileges recent and trivial over older and substantive. So the tourist info in and about Langholm has not a word about the remarkable Malcolm family who were raised in very straitened circumstances and went to school at Westerkirk just North of Langholm. Circumstances were straiter than they needed to be because Mrs Malcolm spent her entire married life pregnant and/or suckling 17 childer - 10 boys and 7 girls; 16 of whom survived to adulthood.

The four knightly brothers were

• James 1767-1848 was the second son and he joined what became the Royal Marines serving with distinction in the War of 1812 against the neonatal USA. He was knighted at the close of hostilities in 1815.
• Pulteney 1768-1838 was a regular sea-captain who just missed the fight at Trafalgar but was able to render timely assistance when a desperate storm followed in immediately after the battle. He also served in the War of 1812 under the command of Admiral Alexander Cochrane, not to be confused with his more controversial nephew and contemporary Thomas Cochrane.
• John 1769-1833 joined the East India Company at the age of 13 and rose to be governor of Central India = Madhya Pradesh with an area about the size of Britain&Ireland with a population of 10 million.  The Indian Civil Service comprised not more than 1,000 people who formed the government and administration for the Subcontinent and its 300 million inhabitants. By contrast, in Ireland, there are about 300,000 people like me sucking at the public teat; that's about 15% of the working population. No wonder we can't balance the books. When he retired from India, John Malcolm was elected to the UK Parliament and continued to write books of history, politics and biography until he died. He was the first foreigner to be bestowed with the Royal Persian Order of the Lion and the Sun in 1810 and then Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath in 1815.
• Charles 1782-1851 was the youngest son and another naval officer. He was knighted by Richard Wellesley, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1823, for whose brother Arthur Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington) John Malcolm had been private secretary and confidante. So it's partly about whom you know, but it's also about a) being able and b) surviving. A bit like the Nobel Prize.

In addition to the knights there was another Malcolm naval officer, another one in the East India Company, two brothers who went out to India as merchants, one who became a vicar South of the borrrder . . . and this little one stayed at home.  Not bad for the boys of an impoverished tenant farmer from Eskdale

Zen and the Art of Going

Aieee! Robert M. Pirsig [R with bike] is dead. Guardian - B.Globe - WaPo. One of the truly original thinkers of the 20thC has passed on. I wrote about ZAMM Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on his birthday a few years ago. As I do, I sent a link to Anthony McWatt the curator of robertpirsig.org and we had a brief to-fro about Pirsig, ZAMM and MOQ. MOQ is the Metaphysics of Quality and those educated in the school of material things and hard knocks will assume that MOQ is irrelevant to them. Although not a particularly practical person, I don't have much time for metaphysics although it claims to deal with the fundamental nature of reality. You can build bridges that don't fall down and develop new drugs that work without drilling down into the mind-body problem or whether trees that fall in the forest make a sound if there is nobody to hear the crash.  There are levels of abstraction and detail that are appropriate for particular problems: chemistry is a subset of physics and biology is a subset of chemistry.

On his website McWatt quotes an anecdote about Harry Kroto: "At a 1998 presentation in London for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Professor Harry Kroto unexpectedly spent his time elucidating the merits of meccano instead of discussing his recent Nobel award winning discovery of Carbon 60.  His argument being that students require tactile experience to know when to stop tightening a screw and computer use alone doesn’t teach this. When asked at the end of the lecture, whether he had read Robert Pirsig’s Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM), Kroto replied: ‘Yes, and that’s what it’s all about!’ " Because ZAMM is the story of a philosopher recovering from madness who needs to keep his motorcycle in trim during a road-trip with his young son. Kroto was making a plea for less book-l'arning and more hands-on in education. Books will teach you why bridges stay up but you have to build one to see how that miracle of engineering works. Because not all structures work as the specs (from a book of tolerances) suggest they should, often because some other factor hasn't been taken into account: resonance from people walking or the wind blowing; cavitation from flowing water; water [or air] hammer; fatigue in bridges; fatigue in planes and ships; expansion of iron oxide. That's why engineers add 50% to the thickness of every structural thing in case they've left something out of the equation.

Harry Kroto, who died exactly a year ago, shared the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for their work on fullerenes. Carbon60 cited about is a stable spherical structure with 60 vertices and 32 faces - 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons. It's a sort of uber-platonic solid - something like a 12-face dodecahedron and something like 20-face icosahedron. If you think it looks like a modern football, you are exactly on target. Kroto's interest in meta-stable chemical structures created Carbon 60 in the lab and its spectrographical signature was then detected in red giant stars where this enormous molecule forms naturally in the plasma.  Kroto named their molecule buckminsterfullerene in honour of Buckminster "Geodesic Dome" Fuller the guru architect and designer.

ZAMM was so important for me growing up because I lived in my head but also built bodged things. I wasn't very good at either of these two domains: I only built dwarf walls because my tall ones were dangerously unstable and my brilliant ideas often didn't stand up to external scrutiny.  I took from ZAMM the thought that I could find a niche between thinking and doing; between rigour and range. Eventually I found that I could contribute to the Scientific Endeavour so long as I kept out of the lab, where I was often a danger to myself and others. I was never very successful in science because I lacked finish - I went off the boil after I'd had the idea, thought it through and done the analysis but crucially before I wrote it up and published. The rigour vs range is meant to express my woeful record in scientific papers [requires rigour, peer-review and the bottle to keep going through the publication process] compared to The Blob where I can flit from one topic to another on a daily basis and don't get pulled up for being obscure or off-topic.

Here's one consequence of Pirsig's death: 3.5 years ago I said that you could buy ZAMM for $0.01, but the cheapest 2nd hand copy today is 300x more expensive, presumably to cash in on the blip in demand. The interest in Pirsig will wane over the next few weeks as the Next Big Thing seizes folks' imagination and booksellers will have a mountain of copies to shift. There are in excess of 5 million copies floating around, you should read it if you haven't it might change your life and so continue to validate Pirsig's assessment:

I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life. 

Robert M. Pirsig

Thelma and Louise

The road-trip has a revered place in literature. Maybe not in your literature: you may have read the entire works of Simenon or all the volumes of Proust’s à la recherché du temps perdu, which don’t seem to GO anywhere. Maybe it’s my peripatetic ‘navy-brat’ childhood or my long walks through Iberia, but I like travel books. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig [prev]; One’s Company by Peter Fleming; A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby and the Lost Continent by Bill Bryson are embedded in my head not least because the last three at least made me laugh out loud. ZAMM isn’t a laughing matter but is nevertheless profound.  Of course the quintessence of road-trip in book form is Jack Kerouac’s On The Road which more or less gave the name to the genre.  And the road movie crystalizes the concept in under two hours: think Easy Rider or Thelma and Louise. Forget Bored of the Rings, though: far too much filler not enough laughs.
It’s not every week that I get a chance to go road-trip with my offspring. In 2004, The Boy and I walked the 100km from Portugal to Santiago de Compostella and my feet took years to recover from the brutal pace of day 3: 24th July 2004. Two years ago, Dau.II and I went on a journey to The Edge while making puddles in the bottom of a small boat on Lough Derg. We’re still recovering from the shared terror. This winter [can’t say this year anymore because it’s a new one] both the girls came home for Christmas which was wonderful. But all things must pass; and Dau.II had to go back to work before the New Year rush.

One of the peculiarities of Christmas gift giving within families is that, because they all love each other very much, they can get too much on the same wave-length. On my 13th Christmas I got two (2!) chemistry sets because two different rellies had recognised a developing Bob the Scientist before the recipient had recognised it in himself. Another year at about the same time, the five members of my nuclear family received twenty (20!) mugs at Christmas, some from external sources but many gifted internally. For Xmas 2016, Dau.II got a new set of four (4!) pillows to replace the ratty, lumpy, mitey, wretched things she’s been sleeping with for the last 3 years. She also got a large pair of throw cushions for her living room and the usual clatter of books, cheese, and a hot-water bottle. It would have been possible to schlep all this stuff on to the bus and off at the other end but I offered to drive her back to Cork instead. She said thanks and offered to pay me in grocer’s crates, of which her restaurant has accumulated a large and inconvenient store. Sometimes the crate has travelled so far through so many handlers and suppliers that is isn’t clear who owns the damned things.

On the last Thursday of 2016 we set off in the fore noon planning to get to Cork City by tea time. The great think about a long drive in the car is that there are no distractions (except for a bit of navigation, a bit of shopping and a bit of admiring how a crisp, sunny winter’s day impacts one’s mood) so we were able to talk round the houses about work, and life and balance; and food safety; and science and standard operating procedures SOPs; and of course the Universe and Everything.

We looked at the map and decided that rather than scudding past on the bus or being a hurry to get there in the car, we’d stop off in Ardmore, maybe the oldest ecclesiastical settlement in Ireland, and have a look at an invitingly sandy strand round the corner called Whiting Bay. And it was so. We paused in Ardmore long enough to hop widdershins on one leg round the medieval round tower [R]. Actually Not! That is a sure fire way to fall pregnant and neither of us wanted to have that happen at this time. The faded, eroded, medieval bas-relief sculptures that decorate the ruined ?cathedral? beside the tower are mournfully evocative of long, long ago. Although Ardmore is only a small village [pop about 300] we got hopelessly lost in a maze of narrow roads zig-zagging up the cliff-face but eventually escaped to Whiting Bay; which was worth seeing but not worth going to see.

As so we swept into Cork empty-handed: no buoys, no rope, no fish-boxes. But who needs fish-boxes when they are going to collect 25 fit-for-food-use grocery crates? An added bonus was that Young Bolivar, not seen since September, was working a shift in Dau.II’s restaurant and offered to help carry the crates out to the car. Just a perfick day, I’m glad I spent it with you. Damned glad we didn’t drive the car spectacularly off a cliff at the end, as well.

Wrong turn for the dragon

Hi Blogger/Google: I am confused /perplexed about the UnPosting. I have xxx-ed out the telephone numbers as personal data. If that's not the issue, I'll delete the whole post. 
Sorry 

For a while, I've been wanting to write about Don Knuth who wrote TAOCP The Art of Computer Programming which is for computer geeks what ZAMM Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is for philosophy geeks. TAOCP was conceived in 1962 as a finite book of 12 chapters and spawned into an infinite book that yielded volume 4A in 2011 having released Volume 1 in 1968.  Knuth is now 77 and doesn't seem to be stopping anytime soon.  He's an interesting version of nerd:
years ago he offered some advice about life-strategies Don't be a sheep - find your true self.  Part of his true self was being a Lutheran and one of his books was a systematic sampling of The Book: 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated abstracts, discusses and illustrates the sixteenth verse of the 3rd chapter of every book in the bible.

I like that; it reminds me of my 1980s project which never got beyond the concept.  Our phone number in Newcastle upon Tyne was 091-xxx-xxxx and I thought it would nifty to phone all the other xxx-xxxx #s in British telephone districts . . . and then?  ?Invite them to meet me at the geographic centre of Britain on Walpurgis Night?  Now really, was it kind inviting to folks to have a party in the middle of a peat hag in Lancashire when you could accept the assertion of the people of Haltwhistle in Northumberland that their town was the centre of of the world Britain, or anyone of a number of other claimants depending on how you define the parameters - the big island only, the whole archipelago, the bit that has Mrs Windsor as Head of State.  Haltwhistle, conveniently for the xxx-xxxx party, has a railway station but isn't named for that fact, as some believe.  The name antedates railways by a long stretch of time: Hautwesel (1240), Hautwysel (1254), Hawtewysill (1279), Haltwesell (1610) and probably indicates a hill [haw] near the divided [twy] stream [wella].

Knuth is famous for offering $2.56 for anybody finding a typo in one of his books. Why 256? because that is a hexadecimal dollar (16x16 rather than 'normal' 10x10). He claims to have written more than 2,000 checks under this project and would be $20,000 in the hole if everyone had cashed them. In fact, almost all of them are kept safely in a drawer for the grandchildren unless they are framed and stuck up on the wall of a basement machine room.  It's a bit like my claim to be in an exclusive club of people who have found errors in PHYLIP, Joe Felsenstein's software for calculating phylogenetic trees. That took time, attention to detail and a refusal to accept that what was delivered was true, and I am, accordingly, still dining out on it.  Occupying pride of place in Knuth's home [R] is a grook by the Danish scientist's poet Piet Hein:

The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain & simple to express

To err and err and err again, but less and less and less

I think a lot of scientists and engineers could sign up to that.

But the hook on which I'm hanging Don Knuth now, is that I was in the pottery zone last Sunday and there's a lovely story about tiles and Knuth, called Wrong Turn on the Dragon on the Numberphile channel of youtube.  I'd leave it at that if I didn't know that virtually nobody follows through on the copious links which I shovel into The Blob.  The deal is that Knuth built a new house and had a geeky fractal design in mind for filling a central wall. His design showed a particular sequence of 2^9 = 512 folds/turns which could, according to the algorithm be either mountain or valley folds / left or right turns.  The size of the design and the size of the wall required about 1000 tiles [many blank] 2x2in (5cm x 5cm) in size.  They took their design up the coast to Sausalito where their favorite ceramicist had his studio, and were gutted to hear that they only made tiles 3.5 inches across.  But, said the potter brightly, they were going to close the place down for a week in June for vacation and the Knuths were welcome to use their clay, glazes and equipment to make their own tiles to whatever daft size they wanted and these custom tiles could be fired when the kiln had its first run later in the month. And it was so. The twist in the dragon's tail was that, years after the house was built and the tiles put up to intrigue all Knuth's mathy pals, he realised that he'd made one incorrect turn and back-flipped half of the design outwards. They say that Persian carpet weavers put in one deliberate error when making their 900 kpsi (knots per sq. inch about 135 k/sq.cm) carpets; lest they offend god with their hubris.

Doris Lessing - pricker of pricks

Doris Lessing struck out last night after a long innings having been born in 1919.  Along with a lot of women of her generation, Lessing was a favorite author of The Beloved.  I didn't devour the whole opus by any means but I read the first two of books in her Canopus in Argos series, as well as a couple of others.  When the first CinA book Shikasta came out she attracted several disapproving reviews from the Pundits of Literatureland.  They had her comfortably binned in leftist-feminist-lit, where she had been a luminary because she wrote so well that she was easy to read. She was also so open in her exposure of her own struggles for identity and a true life under her own terms that she elicited admiration, empathy and probably a little uneasiness in her readers.  Much later when she was asked which of her books should be saved from the fire, she claimed that CinA was her most significant work.  The response of The Critics was all too similar to celebrity wine-tasters who can identify, describe and critique the difference between Chateau Mouton Richfocker and LIDL Old Red Biddy when they have the bottles in front of them but are shown up as mere boozers when put to a blind tasting without the labels.

As a feminist and lefty Lessing deplored the cult of celebrity and the fact that unknown (women) writers, no matter how brilliant, were going to have a hard time getting their work out in the public domain because of the patriarchal complacency that pervaded English-language publishing. In 1982, to expose the hollow men she wrote a compelling new novel called The Good Neighbour and submitted it to her own publisher under the name Jane Somers.  He turned it down so her agent hawked it round a number of other publishers until Philippa Harrison at Michael Joseph said ''I read it and loved it, and rang him [the agent] up and said it reminded me of Doris Lessing. It has a lot in it that's consistent with Doris's ''Golden Notebook.''.  This is not anywhere near as bad as Robert Pirsig having ZAMM rejected by ten dozen publishers before becoming a best-selling cult classic; but it's not a great record for the publishing industry either. The facts of the matter were summed up recently by data culled from Amazon: "Diary of a Good Neighbor" by Jane Somers (sales rank 2,434,345) and "The Diaries of Jane Somers" by Doris Lessing (sales rank 23,323.).

Does it remind you of the review process in scientific publishing?  The referees are anonymous but the authors are not.  If you get a manuscript to review from the Top Gun in your field and you're really busy that week, there must be an awful temptation to give it a once over, jot down a few comments to show that you've done something and give it your imprimatur.  OTOH, if you get a manuscript from Ravishankar Nobodi from Bangalore Technical University, you might find in yourself a tendency to lean the other way.

A couple of months ago John Bohannon of Harvard, Science, Discover etc. published the results of his Lessing-like exposure of scientific publishers.  Being a scientist he would have regarded the trials of Jane Somers as almost an anecdote.  He wrote a little computer programme that generated dozens of more or less similar marginally interesting cure-cancer papers and submitted each one from a fictitious institution to 300 different on-line open-access journals.  He had read enough crap papers in his time that he was able to include such obvious flaws in the data presentation and reasoning of each manuscript that any competent reviewer would reject it.  The papers were, on the contrary, accepted by about 60% of the editors that were able to make a decision informed by peer-review.  But it's a little bit worse than just exposing incompetents.

Open-access was born as an antidote to a business model that existed through most of the 20th century: authors submit their manuscripts to journals which charge a subscription for access to the information.  (Over)-specialisation in science meant that there was a rather limited demand for the "Journal of Narrow Field Studies", so the fixed costs (the editor's limousine, the champagne-fuelled editorial meetings, the printer's set-up) were spread over a short print run.  Accordingly the subscriptions tended to the astronomical, and researchers at smaller under-endowed colleges were unable to access key findings in their field. The Institute where I work for example cannot afford Nature On-line. Open-access publishers aspired to make all the material available for free to everyone.  This policy is clearly only feasible since electrons have replaced paper as the publishing medium.  Even with electronic publishing, however, running a journal costs money and OA raised this by charging authors (or their grant-giving bodies or their institutions) for the privilege of getting their material into 'print'.  Bohannon's clever project has exposed the gross concordance of interest in this idea - everyone benefits if a paper is published, nobody benefits from its rejection.

Doris Lessing had been ill for a long time since suffering a stroke, but I feel sure she would have enjoyed and approved of Bohannon's cunning plan.