A Fishy Mystery

John Moss. Still Waters (2008) “A Quin and Morgan Mystery”, it says on the cover. The first of a five-book (so far) series, a moody mystery, heavy on ambience and history, with minimal sketches of police procedures.
     The victim, found in one of his fish ponds, turns out to be a psychopath. There’s a tangled back-story which eventually accounts for the death. But Quin and Morgan’s interior lives interest Moss more than their detecting. Minor characters are also well conceived. Koi fish figure in creating ambience and character, a lot of by-the-way fish lore is scattered throughout. There’s almost no gore, a refreshing change from the current fashion of splashing blood about.
     Moss can write, his story draws you in. Until the last act, it moves in plausible grooves. But the last act felt contrived and over-drawn. More of a Ruth Rendell than a P D James crime novel. Nevertheless recommended. ***

Difficult Essays by George Steiner.

George Steiner. On Difficulty and Other Essays (1972-78) Steiner is one of my heroes: his insights into how we use language have I think not been surpassed. They have certainly helped stimulate modern linguistics, which has widened its focus from the comparison of available texts to include the study of actual speech. Herewith some stray thoughts responding to and prompted by these essays.
     The study of spoken pre-literate languages has produced some unexpected results, such as that not only the lexicon but the grammar of a dialect can change radically within a speaker’s lifetime. (McWhorter, The Power of Babel). Writing slows down the rate of language change. It also, eventually, spawns two forms of the language, written and spoken, each with its own conventions and usages missing from the other.
     Steiner’s critiques of Whorf’s and Chomsky’s stances on the nature of language (Whorf, Chomsky, and the Student of Literature) feed into experiments by Pinker and others that have shown that grammatical gender, for example, affects how people feel about the world around them. That supports Whorf’s hypothesis that language shapes our experience. But Bickerton’s researches into pidgins and creoles suggest that pidgins reveal the essential features of all human languages, and the creoles show how languages acquire first the regularities that we label “grammar”, and then the idiosyncrasies that differentiate them, and eventually make them new languages. Those findings support Chomsky’s hypothesis that language is innate.

     Steiner’s stance is that neither Whorfian nor Chomskyian hypotheses can account for actual language. This reminds me of the surprising success of computerised translation, which depends not only on dictionaries, but also on statistical features such as the most likely adjective-noun combinations. “Style” also can be statistically defined, and so can some genres. Combine these ideas with AI pattern-matching systems, and an AI algorithm can write a credible sports news report when given a handful of facts about the game.
     Steiner wrote these essays before ubiquitous personal computers, which limited his speculations and predictions about the future of reading and books (After the Book?). He correctly predicted that audio-books (cassettes) would gain market share, and that hard-cover books would lose out to other formats. What would he make of e-books and texts preserved in the electronic web? I think his judgement would stand. What he calls “deep reading” would continue to decline. The kind of awareness of other texts, past and present, which characterises serious literature, would become the preserve of a literate elite. The rest of us would be semi-literate: able to decode text, but unable (and increasingly unwilling) to take the time to relate texts to each other and to the present moment. Which is exactly what has happened. Since serious literature is historical in its very essence, the awareness of history, especially of its messiness, its ethical ambiguities and contradictions, has also declined. I haven’t read more recent essays by him, so I don’t know whether my speculations about his opinions are accurate.
     I think semi-literacy tends to simplistic literalness, a resistance to and intolerance of ambiguity, an inability to recognise irony or handle metaphor, and a suspicion of any text that assumes familiarity with allusions to the past. The digital world is an eternal present, with yesterday already receding into the mist-obscured ancient past.
     I read several of these essays twice. A book that’s difficult in Steiner’s sense, but well worth the effort. His language is ornate, laced with Latinisms, but so appositely that even unfamiliar words yield their meaning(s) transparently, and enrich the reader's understanding. ****

George Steiner 1929-2020

[British Council]

A Loony Hero: Spike Milligan's The Lonney

Spike Milligan. The Looney (1997). Milligan was one of the script-writers for the Goon Show, which changed sketch-comedy forever. His writings have the same crazy mix of puns, riffs, dead-pan literalism, absurdly valid logic, and unexpected but somehow fitting plot twists as the shows. They also contain occasional bits of painful self-revelation. Milligan’s humour was his armour, his shield against despair. His rage at the hypocrisy and selfishness of the human race, at indifference to suffering, at the despoliation of nature, is barely contained. The combination makes his books hard reading at times.
     Dick Looney believes his father’s claim that the family is not only descended from Irish royalty, but are the rightful rulers of the Isle. The story, such as it is, follows Looney’s attempts to confirm the rumour and claim his throne. The short chapters read like Goon-show sketches, but as in the Goon Show, they coalesce into a sufficiently coherent narrative that the ending satisfies. ****

The Dougnut: A sustainable economy is one that doesn't "grow".

Kate Raworth proposes a new economic model based on the ecological limits of the Earth. Sensible. Realistic. Humane. Therefore certain to be opposed by the pathetic "entrepreneurs" who believe that profit will somehow insulate them from the facts of biology and physics. Or the "libertarians" who believe that economic freedom mean being free to make as much money as possible.

Find a brief video here: The Doughnut Economy.

Wiki has an article, too: Doughnut (economic model).

Great photos

Great photos here.https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-suffolk-53819803
One sample:

Doing Science

John Brockman, ed. Doing Science (1991) Brockman founded “The Reality Club”, an invitation-only assembly of scientists and other thinkers, whose apparent purpose was to think big-picture thoughts about science. Etc
      Each of the essays in this collection is worth reading. A couple that impressed me:
     Big Trouble in Biology, Lynn Margulis’s attack on Neo-Darwinism, which she characterises as a religion, and which she opposes mostly because it’s reductive, and fails to account for the dynamics of ecosystems. In the 30 years since her essay, biology has begun to shift its focus to ecology. Increasingly, the governing stance is that organisms exist not only as individuals, and as members of genetically defined breeding groups, but also (and I think primarily) as members of a network of interlaced feedback loops.
     “A network of interlaced feedback loops” is one way of describing chaotic systems, the subject of an essay by Ralph H. Abraham, Chaos in Myth. and Science. Abraham posits that science is informed by the same myths that inform and regulate all other aspects of our social systems. In Western mythologies, “chaos” is bad. The recent discovery of chaos mathematics and its applicability to ecosystems, the weather, human societies, etc, as well as a  still incompletely catalogued slew of physical systems, requires a restructuring of the mythologies in which Chaos figures a source of disorder, strife, and evil. Chaos must be seen as the partner of order.
     How to Tell What Is Science and What Isn’t, by Richard Morris, concludes that pseudoscience is crazy in the sense that its truth would require denying large swaths of what we know to be true. However, Morris hasn’t noted the difference between science as knowledge of what’s real (an ontological enterprise), and science as way of acquiring reliable, if limited, knowledge (an epistemological enterprise). Thus, “what we know to be true” is always tentative, which guarantees that pseudoscience will sometimes include notions that will eventually turn out to be true enough to count as science.
     A keeper. ****

Setting the Stage: Scenery for Model Railroads

Carl Swanson, ed. Model Railroader: Best of Scenery. (2020) Collection of articles, some revised, all well done, most brief and to the point. Model Railroader staff and the contributors have perfected the art of combining pictures with text to help the reader learn. Three stories show layouts with impressively plausible scenery. Throughout, there is the explicit and implicit advice to observe the world around you. Recommended. ****

Winners (Short Story Contest finalists)

 Michael Blackburn, Jan Silkin, Lorna Tracy, eds. Stand One. Winners of the Stand Magazine Short Story Competition. (1984) Just what it says, 13 stories by unknown writers, all good to very good. The first-prize winner tells of a Vietnam vet suffering from what we now call PTSD, told by his sister. The satire on ignorant law enforcers, venal TV personalities, and the fear engendered in uncomprehending neighbours and family arise naturally from the narrator’s naive and loving story. It’s a well-constructed story, but also a well-told one.

     Most of the rest are well-constructed, but not well told. Reading them, I don’t feel that the narrator felt compelled to tell me the story. For example, Hakanono, a satire on colonial attitudes, achieves its aim of showing the stupidity of assumed superiority, but in the end we care neither about the colonial administrators nor about the natives they despise. Well, I didn’t. And the suggestion of supernatural intervention didn't supply the frisson apparently intended by the author.

     The stories are very much of their time, relentlessly well-intentioned in their depiction of life's shadows. Most of the authors (and I suspect the editors, too) haven’t forgiven life for not fulfilling the promises of childhood. They haven’t yet seen that the loss of illusion is necessary to gain what little wisdom we can bear. ** to ****

A Brief History of English

Beginning of Canterbury Tales

The history of English has two main themes: first, the words (lexicon) come from many sources, and second, the grammar is fundamentally a simplified Germanic one, marked by an almost complete absence of grammatical gender. English is essentially a multi-layered creole.

The prehistoric peoples (who settled the islands 5,000 years ago or earlier) as far as we know left no traces in the English language. Then there were the Britons, a motley crew of miscellaneous Celtic tribes. These were conquered by the Romans, whose language had some influence on the Celtic dialects, mostly in place names. They built forts and roads, and romanised the indigenous people. Many place names date back to the Roman occupation, for example London (from londinium), and names ending in -chester, -cester, or -caster (from L. castellum).

From about 450 AD, several northwest European peoples invaded the Island. First came the Angles and Saxons, followed by the Danes and the Norwegians. The Anglo-Saxons brought their languages with them, and adopted or adapted some words and place names from the Celts they displaced or enslaved. For example car (originally from Latin), the Avon, Salisbury (Salis- from Celtic Sorvio, a personal name, plus Anglo-Saxon burh, a fortified settlement), and many other place names in southwestern England. The Danish and Norwegian invasions affected the northern and eastern Anglo-Saxon dialects, which are still distinct from the southern and midland dialects that became the language of the court. Anglo-Saxon as written is a jumble of dialects that are mutually intelligible enough that they form a language.

In 1066, William the Bastard of Normandy conquered England and brought Norman French with him as the language of government and trade. Over the next couple of centuries, the existing Anglo-Saxon dialects and Norman French blended into what we now think of as Middle English. By 1400, it was not only a practical language but a literary one: Geoffrey Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales (1387-1400) in his Middle English, London-centric dialect. It became the source of modern English, which in vocabulary is basically Anglo-Saxon with an overlay of French, and a grammar regularised and simplified as Anglo-Saxon and French speakers mashed up their languages into a mutually intelligible creole. Hence cow, bull, cattle for the animals, beef for their meat. Anglo-Saxon houses and fields made up French real property. French and English shared a plural ending -s, which became the near-universal way of making plural nouns, and gender survived only in the third person pronouns and some feminine suffixes.

During the Roman era and throughout the Middle Ages, Latin and Greek words were adopted into the vernacular all over Europe. In English, that produced “church”, “bishop” and “bible”, for example. During the Renaissance, English speakers, like other Europeans, adopted many more Latin and Greek words. By the later Middle Ages, scholars had developed the habit of using Latin and Greek terms when writing in their local languages, and still do so today.

In 1473, Caxton brought printing to England. During the 1400s and 1500s, Middle English was evolving into Early Modern English (the language of Shakespeare). Printers wanted standard spelling (and to some extent also standard vocabulary) to widen the market for their books. Thus, English spelling became standardised at a time when its pronunciation changed rapidly. The result is the most inconsistent spelling system in the world: each of the main streams of language that make up the Modern English lexicon has its own spelling system.

Here's the Lord's Prayer in Anglo-Saxon:

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum; Si þin nama gehalgod to becume þin rice gewurþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofonum. urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg and forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge ac alys us of yfele soþlice (note: the old english "þ" is pronounced "th")

Read more at: https://www.lords-prayer-words.com/lord_old_english_medieval.html

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum;
Si þin nama gehalgod
to becume þin rice
gewurþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofonum
urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg
and forgyf us ure gylta
swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum
and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge
ac alys us of yfele soþlice 

Note on pronunciation:
There are no "silent letters".
Anglo-Saxon "þ" is pronounced "th" as in "thin";
Anglo-Saxon "ð" is pronounced "th" as in "this";
The vowels are pronounced as in "pat, pet, pit, pot, put";
"y" like "ee" in  "beet".
"æ" is a vowel about halfway between "pat" and "pet";
both vowels in double vowels are pronounced;
"c" before e and i is pronounced like "ch"  in "chin",
otherwise like "k"

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum; Si þin nama gehalgod to becume þin rice gewurþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofonum. urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg and forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge ac alys us of yfele soþlice (note: the old english "þ" is pronounced "th")

Read more at: https://www.lords-prayer-words.com/lord_old_english_medieval.html

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum; Si þin nama gehalgod to becume þin rice gewurþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofonum. urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg and forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge ac alys us of yfele soþlice (note: the old english "þ" is pronounced "th")

Read more at: https://www.lords-prayer-words.com/lord_old_english_medieval.html

 

Hong Kong should be independent

Hong Kong

From a NYT piece by Samuel Chu, who is a U.S. citizen, a pro-democracy activist and wanted by the Hong Kong police.

I had violated Article 38 of the new law, which states: “This Law shall apply to offenses under this Law committed against the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region from outside the Region by a person who is not a permanent resident of the Region.”

This law violates all standards of international law. No country may extend its jurisdiction beyond its borders without a treaty. (A treaty is a mutual recognition of some limited jurisdiction.)

I think the Chinese Government has over-reached. It has violated the treaty which granted it jurisdiction over Hong Kong. It has violated international law with this unilateral claim to jurisdiction outside its borders.

I think the citizens of Hong Kong have every right to protest this law, to agitate against it, and to advocate democratic freedoms for Hong Kong. If the Chinese Government is unwilling to accept these rights, then Hong Kong citizens have the right to secede.

I support the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. I oppose the Chinese Government’s attempt to reduce and eliminate Hong Kong citizens’ rights and freedoms. I advocate for the independence of Hong Kong as a sovereign state.

Oh dear, it seems I may have broken the law. So under article 38, the Chinese Government will have to issue an arrest warrant for me.

Financial Crimes

Arianna Huffington. Pigs at the Trough (2003). Here it is 17 years later, and the game continues. Some of the star players have been retired (some via criminal indictment), the rules have been tweaked to benefit the cheats more than ever, and the referees no longer pretend to control the game.
     Huffington’s book is a detailed overview of the financial scandals of the early 2000s, with names like Enron and Andersen showing up in several chapters. Lessons learned? Just keep on buying the most complaisant legislators available. Five years later, we saw the financial meltdown of 2008, in which the rescue money went to the perpetrators instead of their victims. Business as usual. If the bail-out money had been credited directly to the borrowers’ accounts, most of them would have become home-owners pretty quick, and the decade-long limping towards recovery would have lasted maybe three years.
     History doesn’t repeat itself exactly, but humans solve problems in much the way as their ancestors did. These solutions toss up the same problems as before, and the cycles continue. If you find a copy of this book, read it. It will help you recognise the players on the current teams of malefactors. ****

Mathematics and the News

 

 

John Allen Paulos. A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (1995) I bought this book because I’d read Paulos’s Innumeracy, a seminal book that I think every teacher should read. This book extends one of his themes, that the media are a prime source of innumeracy, and so tend to distort and misinform. Each section corresponds to a section of the paper, News, Sports, the Arts, etc. The misuse or misreporting of statistics features in all sections, but the unwarranted surprise at coincidences, and confidence in economic and sports forecasts, together come a close second.
     Once again, Paulos muses on the vagaries of voting. Every voting system ever attempted has produced results that annoy a large section, sometimes even the majority, of voters. If he were to write today, he would note the vacuousness of political polling, which always produces more or less misleading results.
     But mathematics is about patterns and processes, so even the society section, with its reports about charity balls, the doings of famous people, etc, gives opportunity for mathematical musing about relationship networks, and the interconnectedness of our social circles, which Facebook et al have made more obvious than ever in the 25 years since Paulos wrote the book.
     This was a re-read, I enjoyed the book, but not as much as Innumeracy. ***

     Update 2020 08 13: Percentages are real problem.
     One of the most common errors is to report a percentage change without reporting the base rate. For example, "XYZ increases the cancer of some obscure organ  by 150%". True, it increases the rate from 1 per 100,000 per year to 3 per 100,000 per year.
     Another egregious error is to confuse percentage points with percentages. Thus, "Unemployment rate increases 2 %". Yup, it rose  from 5% to 7%, which is an increase of 2/5, or 40%.

   Update 2020 12 22: Raw numbers vs Rates: How to misreport covid-19

     Every day now we hear the number of new cases and deaths from covid-19. Almost never the rates. For example, Ontario reported some 2100 new cases the other day, while Alberta reported about 1800. But Ontario has roughly three times the population of Alberta, so the rate in Alberta is about three times higher.

     The mistake is to treat every jurisdiction equally, which hardly ever makes sense. The same error shows up when reporting miscellaneous numbers about cities and towns. Such as crime rates. Small towns naturally have fewer crimes, but related to population, the crime rates are usually higher than in the large cities.

     Related to time, the rates are of course lower. Hence the pained astonishment when a neighbour murders his family. This suggests that we pay more attention to events along our individual time-lines, and less to events within the communtiy at large. Our preception biases mislead us.

     Rule of thumb: Do The Arithmetic! Always calculate the rates.

     

Design in the 1960s

Alan Fletcher, Colin Forbes, Bob Gill. Graphic Design: Visual Comparisons (1963) One of a series published by Reinhold Studio Vista, pleasant to look at, useful for anyone interested in design, and collectively a good documentation of 1960s design theory and practice. The designs have worn well: the 60s have cast a long shadow, perhaps because designers explored the technical boundaries of their craft.
     Here, we see mostly advertising and related messaging in print. Notions of suitability and decorum gave way to the realisation that the design of messages succeeded when it drew attention and conveyed much meaning with the least possible means. The digital revolution has merely made it easier to do what these people did by hand. As with photography, reducing the craft skill for mastering the medium has shifted the focus to content and context. McLuhan claimed that the medium is the message. Contemplating how technology has made messaging easier, I’d say that the medium determines the message.
     I’ve looked through this book several times in the 40-odd years I’ve owned it, and each time I’ve seen things I did not notice before. But mostly, it’s reminded me, once again, that the world we inhabit is designed. The environment shapes us. The designers both make and are made by the environment they design. ***

Nancy Mitford Amuses

 Nancy Mitford Don’t Tell Alfred (1960) Mitford’s last novel, in which she revisits some of the characters of Love in a Cold Climate. Whitehall appoints Fanny Wincham’s husband Alfred Ambassador to France, first making him a Sir. Their children, her niece, assorted other relatives and friends, as well as a handful of French politicians, cause a variety of tangles, which Alfred and fate must unknot. Mostly fate. The result is a nicely done airport book, the kind that amuses and entertains, but requires no close attention to plot.
     The dialogue carries most of the story, which is really a long shaggy dog anecdote.  Mitford slings in some less-than-sly digs at the English and French, modern child-rearing, pop-culture, tabloids and their owners, and gormless idealism. The spice of satire enlivens what would otherwise be a rather bland dish. I enjoyed the book, not a page turner, more of a bowl of noshes to dip into. It did trigger a desire to reread Love in a Cold Climate and Cold Comfort Farm, which I’ve so far been able to resist. **½