For cat fanciers.

     [Quantum Books] Cats: A Pocket Companion (1998) A nice little reference book illustrating many breed of cats, with data about origin, conformation, colours, personality, etc. Useful in a limited way, well produced and printed, no typos. A “gift book”, found in a secondhand shop. It confirms my feeling that mixed-breed cats (for which we don’t have a word) will make the best pets. The effects of cat fanciers’ tastes on breed looks and conformation is looking to be as bad as on dogs. As near as I can figure out, our Alex was an American Shorthair and Siamese cross, mostly. He was a good cat. **

Talks about Shakespeare in 1960

     B. A. W. Jackson, ed. Stratford Papers on Shakespeare (1960) Given at the Shakespeare Seminar organised by McMaster University’s Extension Department. I don’t know if the experiment was repeated. The participants are listed, almost all of them are women. Teachers mostly, I would guess. I think they got their money’s worth.
     C. J. Sisson (in his day a noted Shakespearean) discussed King John as an Elizabethan history play, outlining Shakespeare’s selections from Holinshed’s Chronicles and arguing that the play amounted to propaganda for the Tudors. Of course. King John has always, I think, mattered more as propaganda than as history. Sisson reminds us that the modern veneration of Magna Carta would have made no sense to Elizabeth. I’d go a step further. I think that anyone suggesting the typical modern interpretation of it would have risked losing his head.
     John Cook gives some apposite and cogent remarks on music in Shakespeare, using his experience as a theatre composer to explain how Elizabethan players used music, and to argue that modern productions need modern music. Agreed. His slighting references to movie music betray a blind spot. Movies aren’t theatre in another medium, so music plays a somewhat different role.
     RCMP Sgt R. A. Huber, an expert in forensic handwriting analysis, gives a cautious “probably Shakespeare” as his verdict on who wrote the extant manuscript pages of The Boke of Sir Thomas More. Sisson’s afterword adduces content and style as support for what he regards as a clinching argument that we do indeed see Shakespeare at work here. I don’t know enough to either agree or disagree with his conclusions, so will stick with Huber’s “probably”.
    In Shakespeare the Writer, Sisson presents a rather too bardolatrous study of Shakespeare’s lost years, arguing that he must have been writing scripts for quite some time before envious rivals bothered noticing him as an upstart shakescene, a valid and important point. He traces Shakespeare’s development as a writer and dramatist, arguing that Shakespeare’s plays increasingly were about character: Hamlet is about Hamlet, he says. True enough, but that’s not enough. Hamlet’s despairing The time is out of joint, O cursed spite that ever I was born to put it right announces the theme of the play. It’s the disconnect between Hamlet’s sense of himself and his times that’s kept the play relevant for four hundred years. It is indeed “about” something, the alienation caused by an increasingly human-constructed world.
     I’ve seen many Shakespeare plays more than once (Hamlet at least 12 times on stage and screen), so I found Robertson Davies’s after-dinner talk the most congenial. He says that he’s enjoyed Shakespeare more the more plays he’s seen and the more often he’s seen them. Exactly. Sisson’s treatment of the plays as literature tends to misses the point. They’re scripts, and a script must be acted just as a score must be played.
     An uneven but interesting collection. Out of print, but if you like Shakespeare, it’s worth looking for. ** to ****

The Life And Times of Agatha Christie

     Martin Fido. The World of Agatha Christie (1999) I bought this book because the photos in it looked good. Now that I’ve read it, I’d recommend it to any Christie fan as a very good summary of her life and work.
     Fido uses the coffee-table book format to present carefully constructed snippets of information that add up to a complete picture of Christie’s life, and a fairly good summary of her work.  He’s a fan, but not a blindly idolising one, and reminds us that Christie was capable of producing duds. He notices her political naivete and casual racism, which contrast with her basic kindness and decency, suggesting that she didn’t reflect much on some aspects of life. We learn that she was an accomplished musician, that she took her work seriously, that she aspired to serious fiction as Mary Westmacott, that she and Max Mallowan had a happy life together, and that religion for her was a matter of faith, not rules and rituals.
       Well selected photos, but not enough of them. The date means that more recent adaptations aren’t treated. Too many typos, the kind perpetrated by over-reliance on spellcheck. There’s a more thorough Life of Christie hiding in this slim book. Recommended. ***

Bad boys and other fun stuff (book review)

     Cornelia Ostabrauck, ed. Das Kleine Wilhelm Busch Album (n.d.) Includes Max und Moritz, those terrible boys whose pranks damage humans and kill animals. Their demise is not mourned. Plus a handful of other Busch faves, including Der Virtuoso: Ein Neujahrskonzert, which reminds me of Gerard Hoffnung’s music cartoons. It’s quite likely that Hoffnung knew Busch’s work and was influenced by it. Busch has fallen out of favour in some quarters because of his combination of physical fantasy and psychological realism. He know that humans are not only imperfect but often intentionally evil. A nice little gift-book, about 5cm square, I have no idea how I acquired it. If you haven’t encountered Busch, you can find his books on the Gutenberg Project.***

Goon for Lunch (book review)

     Harry Secombe. Goon for Lunch. (1975) Secombe played Neddy Seagoon on The Goon Show, his tag line was It’s all rather confusing, really. These pieces, written for Punch and other magazines, make up a glimpse of an autobiography. He grew up in Swansea at a time when children spent as much time as possible out of sight and hearing of grownups. He was in North Africa and Italy for most of the War, and didn’t like it. But he did meet Spike Milligan there, and they ended up doing skits together, which  helps explain the Goon Show.
     The pieces are mildly funny, they recount small injuries and large confusions. I enjoyed reading them, both for the reminders of post-war England and for Secombe’s company. He was a nice chap, on the evidence. His Neddy Seagoon is not far removed from himself. In Italy, he and a comrade were almost blown up removing an unexploded bomb from a house in a village that had been recently vacated by the Germans. His comrade believed the bomb was a dud. It sounds like a Goon Show incident. I suspect that the craziness of War fed into a lot of Milligan’s scripts.
     The book is out of print, but worth a search. ***

History of the World: Lots of pictures, no maps..

     National Geographic Society. Essential Visual History of the World (2007) A nice fat little book, well printed, reasonably well researched, lots and lots of standard illustrations. Arranged chronologically by “era”, with two pages per entry, which reduces history to unconnected chunks of events. And not a single map, which reduces its usefulness by about 80%. Pity. *

Stratford Mosaic

     Gerald Jaggard. Stratford Mosaic (1960) Jaggard owned The Shakespeare Press, an antiquarian book shop on Sheep Street which he inherited from his father Capt. William Jaggard, who compiled the first Shakespeare bibliography. Peter and I visited his shop at least once. Besides the books, there were many memorabilia; it had the air of a museum.
     This collection of memories is an odd mix. It focuses on the Shakespeare Club and its role in developing the Birthday Celebrations, as well as some remarks on the first Memorial Theatre, the fire, and the new Memorial Theatre. He tells of the Gower Memorial, the Fountain in Rother Street, and the Mop, an annual fair that I remember with affection. He ends the book with brief memoirs of Marie Corelli, Sir Archibald Flower and Capt. William Jaggard.
     Jaggard was himself a member and later the Secretary of the Club, which gave him access to the minute books. His selection of highlights shows how the Club’s focus shifted slowly from enjoying their common admiration for Shakespeare (and good food and cigars at the annual banquet) to promoting Stratford as tourist town. As a record of some of the behind the scenes events, it’s a valuable resource. I’m not so sure about it as a history or as an impression of Stratford. Jaggard meticulously and repeatedly records all the honorifics and professional qualifications of the people he mentions. His bardolatry several times drops over the edge into self-satire. He waxes romantically and lyrically clichéd when describing Stratford as a beauty-spot. According to him, Sir Archibald Flower was man of pure civic virtues, with no warts at all. And of course Shakespeare is the Immortal Bard of Immortal Memory, etc.
     An amazing performance. My grandmother gave it to me. It mentions two of my ancestors, John Morgan, stationer and book seller (my great-grandfather), and F. C. Morgan (Uncle Peter), who was briefly librarian at the Theatre, and later Librarian and Curator of the Hereford City Library. Jaggard's brother Geoffrey contributes nicely turned verses describing the streets of Stratford, most of them decorated with pleasant drawings by D. R. Mathews (uncredited). Published by Christopher Johnson (London), which I suspect was a vanity house. I found nothing about it online, but several copies of this book are available. If you are a fan of Shakespeare and Stratford, you could do worse than add it to your collection. **½

Cells are computers, organisms are fractals

     Cells are computers, organisms are fractals

Some notes towards a concept. I’ve long thought that the notion that a neuron as an on-off switch was too simplistic. These notes represent an attempt to produce a better notion. 2016-06-03 & 05. WEK.

The metaphor of DNA as blueprint is misleading. Better: DNA is a program guiding the assembly of proteins. Better yet: It’s the operating system, since it’s RNA that produces the proteins. But if DNA is a program, then the question is, How does it execute? The answer: like any program, at any given time some part is running, the other parts are silent. A program can also trigger other programs. The operating system controls how multiple programs run, it allocates memory and CPU time, access to video and audio subsystems etc. A “call” from one program will stop or start some part of another program. An “interrupt” will cause (re-)allocation of memory, access to subsystems, etc. DNA starts and stops protein synthesis, turns genes on and off, analogous to OS controlling program execution. So the cell is a computer

Recent research shows that inputs to the cell “turn genes on and off”, analogous to calls and interrupts controlling how a program runs. The genes control the functioning of the cell. Exactly how is complicated, but the general pattern is chemical feedback loops. A substance increases, which triggers or stops gene expression, which results in a series of reactions, which cause that substance to decrease, which stops or triggers gene expression, and the cycle repeats.

A neuron responds to the chemical environment outside it by adjusting its internal processes. These processes control gene expression. The feedback loops within the neuron determine the types and quantity of neurotransmitters emitted at the synapse with the next neuron in the circuit. Since both type and quantity of neurotransmitter vary depending on the inputs to the neuron, the neuron is computing the output. The concept of a neuron as simple on-off switch is inadequate.

But a cell is an odd kind of computer. The relation between input and output depends on the internal feedback loops. A given substance may be implicated in two or more feedback loops, which means that the neuron is topologically a net. The computation of the output depends on the topology of the net of chemical reactions, which happen both simultaneously and in sequence. That makes the cell a parallel computer.

More precisely, the cell is a net whose topology varies over time as the chemical feedback loops cycle between limiting states and intersect with each other. Thus, the cell cycles through a series of topologies. It’s a self-modifying net.

The concept of a self-modifying net applies to assemblies of cells (tissues), to organs, and to the organism as whole. The organism too is a complex system of feedback loops. Mathematically it’s a chaotic system: it tends to maintain itself within an envelope of states (the attractors). Illness and disease move the system outside the envelope, and recuperation is a return of the system to the dynamically stable cycles within the envelope.

Conclusion: An organism is a multi-dimensional net of feedback loops. Its topology varies over time at many scales, which implies it’s a fractal system.

The Cavalier in White (mystery)

     Marcia Muller. The Cavalier in White (1988) Joanna Stark, partner in a security firm specialising in museums and art galleries, finds herself sucked back into the business when a client’s murder ties into the theft of a Frans Hals painting, Cavalier in White, stolen from a gallery owned by her friends. Much conversation, a second murder, family secrets and the past come together in a nice melange of entertaining characters and plots. The novel often reads more like a Harlequin romance than a mystery. Muller’s Sharon McCone tales are solidly in the PI tradition; this book dances on the borders of the two genres as if Muller couldn’t make up her mind which one she wanted to write. There was one more Joanna Stark novel which I haven’t read. This one is OK for a few hours pleasant entertainment, but only a diehard Muller fan would want to keep it. *½

Colin Dexter, The Jewel that was Ours (Chief Inspector Morse)

 

    Colin Dexter. The Jewel that was Ours (1991) This novel began as a TV script, The Wolvercote Tongue, in which a Saxon artefact figures as the McGuffin. A gaggle of US tourists descends on Oxford, one of them dies, the Tongue disappears, then one of the presenters turns up naked and very dead at Parson’s Pleasure. Morse as usual hares off after the wrong solution until an unrelated datum noticed by Lewis as an odd coincidence triggers the re-arrangements of the facts, which are beautifully summed up in chapters 57-59, and explain the dual meaning of the title. Chapter 60, the last, ties up a loose thread, another amorous disappointment for Morse.
     The novel is easy to read. Short chapters allow interruptions without losing the threads, which are satisfyingly tangled. If you don’t know Morse, the book is a good intro. Still, the whole reads like a potboiler. Dexter has developed a set of tics and tropes that give the fan the comforting sense of a reliably familiar world. We can concentrate on the puzzle if we wish, or just let the TV-derived imagery carry us along. A well-done entertainment, but that’s all. **½

How to study Shakespeare and survive

     Richard Armour. Twisted Tales From Shakespeare (1957) A re-read. The introductions are nicely done parody of what the student reads in school editions of Shakespeare’s plays. Then Armour dissects the six school classics: Hamlet, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Othello. 

     The jokes are gentle. Armour likes puns, and he clearly has vivid memories of studying the plays, which inform his not-quite-fractured versions of the stories. Anybody who knows the plays will find amusement, those who don’t could do worse to read this book as a first intro to the canon. The best thing is Armour’s satire on the authorship question: It is a contemptible attack on higher education ... to suggest that a person who never went to college could have written poetry that is too difficult for most college students. Precisely so. 

     Recommended. ***

C S Lewis on Hell

C S Lewis wrote: "We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement and where everyone has a grievance."

Sounds like any large organisation, IOW, a bureaucracy.

Artificial Intelligence: a few musings

2005-06-20
“If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck” (Ancient wisdom)

Unless it’s a model of a duck.

Artificial Intelligence is model building – we want autonomous machines, but the best we can do is build models of autonomous machines.

Eg, an artificial ant – could be made to behave like an ant in many ways, but not as an ant in an anthill, or capable of making more ants.

2015-10-21
It’s probably possible to make an artificial ant that behaves like an ant in anthill. We may even be able to make an artificial ant that can reproduce in some way.

However, “behave like an ant” is not well defined. There are too many behaviours, and some are obviously easier to mimic than others. Nevertheless, it will soon be possible to make an ant-size robot that can navigate like an ant, climb vertical surfaces like an ant, etc.

But it will always be a model of ant, and therefore its behaviour will in some respect will not be antlike, and in other respects will be a bad imitation of ant behaviour. That’s simply the nature of models.

2016-05-15
Intelligence is even less well-defined than “ant behaviour”. We can mimic some intelligent behaviours, eg, sorting, learning correlations, recognising patterns, and so on, which are useful to augment human tasks such as diagnosis of a fault or illness, or finding the data we want. If a task is well enough defined, we can build a machine to do it.

But that’s the problem: “Intelligence” is simply not well enough defined. My notion of it is the ability to apply and adapt existing knowledge and insight to unanticipated problems. Every term in that definition is fuzzy and vague. Anyhow, some people (including me) would argue it’s more of a definition of creativity than intelligence.

Is consciousness part of  “intelligence”? Many people would say it is. A machine that merely solves problems isn’t intelligent, it’s just an algorithm. It’s not enough to know how to do long division, you have to be able to recognise when and why you should do it. And that you are doing it.

“Understanding” is another component of intelligence. Isn’t it? Well, it does have something to do with learning: an intelligent person is one who can make sense of new explanations. “I don’t get it” at one extreme means “I haven’t figured it out yet”, at the other it means “I can’t figure it out”. The latter is a measure of intelligence.

And that’s just three attempts to make sense of “intelligence”. We’re long way from knowing exactly what we mean by “artificial intelligence”. Far enough that we may not even recognise it when we see it.