The Severn Valley Railway (book)

     Roger Siviter The Severn Valley Railway (1995) A Then & Now book, consisting almost entirely of paired photos. A brief history and a typically uninformative map are included. The map shows no topographical features, is not scaled, and omits other connections between cities, so that references to through trains are hard to follow. The photos range from mildly interesting to fascinating, as one might expect.
     For the SVR enthusiast, and the GWR modeller, there is a great deal of useful information. For the industrial archeologist, there is an overwhelming impression of the transience of engineering works. A few hours or days with earth moving equipment eliminates even embankments and cuts. The vast loco maintenance works at Worcester have disappeared, and only tracts of wasteland remain to show where they once stood. Track alignments however are remarkably stable, showing major changes only where former junctions have obviated the need for crossovers and sidings. The outlines of railway property are also traceable where housing developments (“estates” in UK parlance) haven’t redrawn the lot lines. Many of the photos show no traces of the railway, or pathways and roads that betray nothing of their railway origin. But it is heartening to see how well the station buildings adapt to purely domestic use. They make splendid homes, and I would love to live in one. Most new owners have eliminated platform edges and have modernised windows, but have kept the old canopies, which make lovely coverings for patios.
     The captions are a bit twee in places, and perforce somewhat repetitive. Siviter has done his best to get a similar perspective on the sites in the “now” photos, and almost always succeeds. The rolling stock is shown mostly in 3/4 front views, and of course we see mostly locomotives. All in all, a excellent book of its kind. *** (2000)

Great Model Railroads 2000 (Magazine)

Great Model Railroads 2000 (1999) Kalmbach’s annual compendium of layout visits. Heavy on pictures, light on text. A few sidebars on technique (eg, tree making.)  Brief bios of builders. As usual, the photos are spectacular, the trackplans contain errors, and the text is too skimpy. Layout comments:
     Leigh Creek Lumber Co. Geoff Nott. HO, 27x37. Many alternate routes and branches.  Spectacular in the John Allen tradition, romantic and wild scenery. Focused on NW US logging. Geoff Nott has an eye for the overall scene. He builds to photograph, but the trackplan permits intensive operation. Light on actual lumbering (which has rarely been modelled convincingly by anyone), heavy on scenery and structures. ****
     The Great Northwest Railroad. Bob Roach. O, 39x25. (22x16 in HO). Folded loop with terminal. A train-watcher’s layout. Long runs, wide curves. The builder likes pristine models, and doesn’t care about prototypical time frame, etc, so the layout does not look realistic, but does have a unified style. It has well-done scenery of the Frank Ellison stage-set type, is nicely finished, and looks good. Also, the rail is code 100, a great plus for O scale.***
     B&O and WM. Bob Bales. HO, 25x44. Hidden-loop to loop, short branch. Good balance between operation and train-watching. One half of the layout is huge yards (plus staging), the other half good-looking mountainous scenery. Double track main with passing tracks. Scenes based on prototype, but not exact reproductions. Some good examples of crowded track/structures/scenery. ***
     NYO&W’s Kingston Branch. Mike Bourke. N, 3.5x5 portable. (6.5x9 in HO) Oval with terminal. A little bit of everything: a town, a yard, a tunnel, etc. Streetcar is operable by viewers. The whole thing very much a display layout, with lots of detail, and fudging of prototype for sake of interest, but fun. ***
     Winged Foot & Western. Charles Patti. On3, 10x2. (5.5x15.5 in HO) Point to loop with continuous run cutoff. Old-time logging. Train-watching plus some operation. Lots of scratchbuilt structures and well done scenery. Good balance of RR and scene, enhanced by use of structures to separate lines. ***
     Clark Fork. John Flann. HO 13x15 shelf layout. Point to point switching with staging. Flann describes a neat way to use playing cards to determine consists and switching schedule. Good balance of scenery and track. Good use of structures to justify trackage. Neat and somewhat too clean, but unified appearance. ***
     White River & Northern. David K. Smith. N 7x10 (13x19 in HO.) Oval with staging and branch to reverse loop. Urban, Conrail era. Good individual scenes, good use of structures and urban landscape to justify dense trackage. Operation friendly but also good for train watching. **1/2
     Spiral Hill Railroad. Frank Titman. S 19x20. (14x15 in HO). Oval with branches, one of which climbs up and over on a spiral (helix.) Crowded, with good individual scenes, but unrealistic if more than one scene within view, and some unrealistic patches; I’d have used fewer structures in several places. The main yard crosses the room on a diagonal - good idea. Operation friendly, but good for train-watching, too. No staging, although there is room for it under upper terminal. Good concept for small space, even better for slightly larger space. Min R is 30" (=22" in HO.). **1/2.
     New Haven Shore Line. Bill Aldrich. HO 21x28. Double track oval with large yard set diagonally inside oval. A train-watcher’s layout, historically accurate (summer 1948.)  Aldrich scratchbuilt most of the locomotives and over half the rolling stock. *** (2000)

Inconstant Star (book)

     Poul Anderson Inconstant Star (1991) A space opera in two parts. Robert and Dorcas Saxtorph have managed to buy a hyperdrive ship, and are hired to fly to a dull red star. There, they discover a Kzin base, which they eventually destroy. In the second novella, they are hired to search for an anomaly that a Wunderlander may have helped some Kzin to find. They find it and the man (who is flying in a sub-light ship), and have a brief encounter with a Kzin ship, which they destroy.
     These stories have the few virtues and many vices of their genre: plots well constructed, characters wooden, politics simplistic (to put it charitably), social milieu marked by adolescent fantasies of willing females and unbelievable fighting skills, relationship problems treated with laughable solemnity and minimal insight, and so on. Anderson usually does much better than this. I guess he wrote these to put bread on the table. Or maybe it's an unpublished early work refurbished for a quick sale.* (2000)

Voices in Summer (book)

Rosamunde Pilcher Voices in Summer (1984) An old-fashioned, discreet, and nice romance. Nothing much happens. The flyleaf blurb says Pilcher creates fine wholesome characters, but the fact is they’re so bland that they’re not very interesting. There’s a mild mystery, which is resolved when Silvia, a widow,  admits to having written poison pen letters in order to capture her childhood sweetheart Alec by turning him against his young wife, Laura. But even that revelation lacks tension, in part because Silvia’s bundled off decently and discreetly to a mental hospital.
     Laura supposed to be devastated by the death of her dog, but you can’t persuade a reader by telling him she’s depressed, you have to show it. Also, she’s recovering from some mysterious operation that is supposed to fix her womb so she can have a long-desired baby, but I for one don’t believe it matters all that much to her. The divorced Alec’s child by his first wife shows up (and conveniently falls in love with Alec’s uncle’s stepson Ivan, and he with her), the old nanny is going senile, and so on.
     All potentially very interesting stuff, with lots of scope for tensions, unresolved conflicts, and ancient hurts, but Pilcher glides over the surface of these matters like one of those water-striding insects over a pond. Scarcely a ripple disturbs the placid surface of the charmed upper-middle-class life of these people. It’s all too nice to be true. It’s frustrating when one can see ways of improving the story, both in style and substance. Pilcher apparently has achieved some fame since the 80s as a minor Maeve Binchy, but I won’t be reading another one. I will sample Binchy, though. Well-written soap-opera can have great interest. * (2000)

Reflections on Language (Chomsky, 1975) With two updates

     Noam Chomsky Reflections on Language (1975) Chomsky’s famous book defending his

view that there is some innate language-learning capability, and that details of its nature are at least in part accessible to empirical research. A dense text, made more so by NC’s irritating habit of using letters where fictitious names would do just as well, or words would do better. Also, several of his examples purportedly showing some universal grammatical rule don’t in fact do so, but merely demonstrate some of the quirks of English grammar.
     His general thesis is IMO valid enough. He points out that it’s a specific example of the general rule that theories are under-determined by evidence, in that language as experienced by the child does not offer any transparent clues to its nature, content, and form. Clearly, children must have some sort of decoding capacity built in, else they could not arrive at language competence (which they do).
     The maxim of indeterminacy of theories is one that critics and supporters of science would do well to remember. Many people believe, falsely, that science deals in certainties, that if something is scientifically proven, it’s certain. It’s not. It’s just proven. OTOH, non-scientific beliefs aren’t proven. At best, there are grounds for belief, a phrase that means that supporting evidence in the speaker’s opinion outweighs refuting evidence.
     This is not the best book to give a person who wants to find out something about why the preponderant opinion is that children have an instinct to learn language and will do so with a minimal amount of environmental input (and often in despite of it!) ** (2000)

     Update 2012: On reflection, I think that Chomsky has made a number of errors because he focuses on written rather than on spoken language. His famous distinction between surface and deep structure IMO demonstrates that he has a tin ear for speech. Intonation differentiates what he calls surface and deep structure very nicely. Intonation is in fact essential. Chomsky should have asked himself, Why do English speakers agree pretty well 100% on which bits of sound form a word?

     Update 20250502: I discovered a few weeks ago that NC was unilingual. I think that's the reason for the erroneous claim of the surface/deep structure of  language. Any multilingual knows that intonation is an essential aspect of every language spoken by humans. Intonation defines both the structure (syntax) of an utterance, and defines the semantics of what would otherwise be identical utterances.  For example, in English a rising inflection signals a question, or incompleteness, or an invitation to agree, etc, depending on context and dialect.

     For an example of intonational semantics, say the following sentence 5 times, stressing a different word in it each time: "He arrived here this morning." Then do the same with a  rising inflection.

     One of the problems in every stage production is the right or best intonation for every speech. Consider also the semantic role of intonation in Mandarin and related languages.

Eat the Rich (book)

     P. J. O’Rourke Eat the Rich (1998) PJ is influenced by Friedman, and it shows. He makes the same mistakes Friedman makes: a) he confuses wealth and money; b) he assumes the market is honest; and c) he ignores the environment ("externals"). Apart from that, he makes many useful points about economics, even if he doesn’t follow through on them, and draws inconsistent conclusions from them/
     He’s right that the market is, despite its messiness, the best way to allocate economic resources. But he (like his mentor Friedman) has several blind spots. The worst is his assumption that prices are efficient when they reflect the intersection between the desire of the seller to get the highest price and the buyer’s desire to pay the lowest. He sees no necessary connection between price and costs; he doesn’t even mention this relationship. Yet he believes that subsidies for businesses are bad, and doesn’t see why: It’s because subsidies cause misstatement of the cost of goods, false prices, if you will.. So, he doesn’t see that government-built infrastructure is a subsidy; he thinks infrastructure one of the functions of government. For example, government-built highways allow truckers to operate at less than the true cost of trucking, and so underprice their services. This means that railroads can’t compete on short haul, small shipments (they could when their competition was horse-drawn transport, remember.) It seems to me that if government is to supply infrastructure, it must somehow price such goods so that each user pays a correct share of the cost. Variable license fees and taxes are the only way to do this. However, trucking companies are successful in keeping their licence fees and taxes below their share of the cost of highways. PJ would approve of this. He believes in as little (and as inexpensive) government as possible. He doesn't see less cost for government means higher costs elsewhere in the economy.
     He’s wrong about government’s redistribution function, which he thinks is evil. All economies are engines of redistribution, and the question must always be, what’s redistributed for whose benefit and under whose control.. He doesn’t ask this question, and in fact trashes the idea that government should bring some sort of fairness into the redistribution. He’s right about that, but for the wrong reason. Government must redistribute the demand for wealth (ie, money) so that the suppliers have a reasonably stable customer base. To put it another way: when the economy produces large quantities of wealth, as ours does, the problem is no longer scarcity but surplus. That means that the problem becomes one of consumption, not of production.
     PJ seems to have some inkling of this in his brief attack on military spending (done as a throw-away comment, by the way.) But, as usual, he doesn’t follow through, because he can’t conceive of any common, ie public, interest that supervenes individual desire. (He has misread Adam Smith, as so many Friedmanites do). He doesn’t in other words draw the obvious (to me ) conclusion that government spending on military hardware etc is a misallocation of resources, and a profound distortion of the market. If the money so spent were distributed more or less evenly to everyone, it would quickly find its way into the pockets of those who supply what most people want, which is neither war nor the preparation for war.
     But most of all PJ is wrong about the desirability of getting rich, in part because he has such an infantile notion of wealth. He’s quite right to say that free market capitalism (however badly implemented) is a fabulous engine of wealth creation. He doesn’t ask whether the prices paid for wealth reflect their true costs. He twits the Swedes for borrowing their prosperity, but he doesn’t ask the obvious question whether environmental degradation isn’t a more serious form of borrowing wealth.
     Part of the reason PJ doesn’t ask this question is that he doesn’t really understand money. He says it’s a symbol, and a medium of exchange, yet he still thinks of being wealthy as having lots of money. This confusion of wealth and money is a fundamental error, and leads to the insane notion that the function of an economy is to create money. Or rather, that the more money is made, the richer people are. Yet at the same time, PJ uses money correctly in a number of cases, such as in measuring relative levels of consumption (GDP per person). It’ exasperating to see someone staring at a bunch of trees and and unable to see a forest.
     The book is irritating because PJ insinuates a lot of wrong-headed notions even as he criticises equally wrong-headed ones. **

The W Heath Robinson Story Book (book)

     Anonymous. The W Heath Robinson Story Book (1979) A compilation of stories first published in Playbox Annual (1916-25), republished to show off Robinson’s drawings. They are in the same graphic style as Beardsley's flowing curlicued lines and large black areas. Very nice to look at. Robinson of course had a less louche sensibility than Beardsley, but both were fascinated by the bizarre and the fantastic. Robinson introduces all kinds of odd and endearing details: for example, when the frogs answer the Frog King’s summons, they bring their families - tadpoles, of course! The illustrations suit the stories very well: they provide a lovely dream-like, funny but also edgy quality to the book.
     The stories themselves are told in a clear, straightforward style, well adapted to young readers, who mostly want to know what happens next. Most of the tales are quests, in which the hero (often a younger, foolish brother) encounters a variety of magical helpers, and has the wit to both accept and use them. If there is a message in them, it’s that you should listen to whatever advice  you get, no matter how weird it sounds. Names and other details indicate that the stories are adapted from folk-lore  collections (at the time folk lore was major academic industry).  The number of magical, black-box-like devices that assist the heroes is astonishing, as is the general mundaneness of the rewards: the Princess, of course, but mostly jewellery and food. I suppose these witness to the hard and dreary life of the original tellers of these tales. A good read, and worth looking at carefully. ***