Love and Hate

I found this when culling some old notes:

From the Toronto Star, 5th April 2014:

“Intriguingly, this pattern [of brain activity when subjects felt hate] touched on brain regions “almost identical to the one activated by passionate, romantic love.” (1)

This finding confirms an insight long known to poets: that love and hate are close cousins. Both are an obsession with the well-being of another person. The lover wants the best, the hater wants the worst, for the object of their obsession. What’s intriguing is that the researchers found this discovery intriguing. For a literary scholar the discovery isn’t much of a surprise. We see here another example of C P Snow’s Two Cultures.

(1) Jennifer Young quoting Semir Zeki, British neuro-scientist at University College, London.

1950s Teachers' aids

     Velma MacKay, ed. Arts and Activities (March 1950, Vol.27 No.2) A magazine for elementary and middle school teachers, very interesting as a historical document. Most of the contributors are teachers describing activities and teaching aids. The magazine is clearly aimed at teachers with limited budgets and supplies. the publishers promote other titles aimed at other subject areas. The ads promote everything from hectograph masters of arithmetic and spelling exercise sheets, to film strips “centered around a new activity program” with and without recordings, and art supplies.
     I have no idea how the magazine was received, but the whole thing has the air of making do. There's an article about how to use papier mache, a discussion of sand paintings, instructions for making kites, and so on. This magazine is for teachers eager to widen and enrich their pupils’ school experience beyond the 3Rs, which in 1950 was still an ambition not so much discouraged as benignly disregarded. Nevertheless, the assumption motivating the magazine and its advertisers is that these teachers have a great deal of freedom in devising lessons and “activity programs” within the guidelines of the curricula. The horrors of objective testing and narrowly defined learning outcomes were still in the future.
    I found the contents variable. But as information about teaching and learning in mid-20th century America it was well worth the time spent reading it.

.... 1066 and all this?

    E. O. Parrott, ed. The Dogsbody Papers (1988) What’s a dogsbody, you ask? The guy who has to do the work that’s not glamourous or important enough for the glamorous and important people to do. A factotum. A drudge. The one without whom the house would turn into a garbage dump. The necessary worker that the important people don’t notice. Hence the one who can collect and preserve the evidence of what really happened, such as diaries, unpublished poems, drafts of speeches, fragments of joke books, etc. We see bits of history that the official record omits.
     The Dogsbody clan is found worldwide, in all social strata. The age of the lineage is uncertain,. However, palaeontology provides evidence that it originated before recorded history. We owe the record of the discovery of the wheel to the scratchings of one Ugg Dugg Budd, ca 15,000 B.C.E.
     This book is a compendium of such ephemera. Nicely decorated by W. F. N. Watson, including facsimiles of oddments such as broadsheets and manuscript illuminations. If you have a reasonable grasp of history, it will amuse you. If not, you may be puzzled why I rate it ****.

CNR picture book

     Keith MacKenzie, ed. The History of the Canadian National (1988) In the 1970s and 80s, printing technology improved and became cheaper. Hence a plethora of large picture books appeared, on all kinds of subjects. This is one such. The printing is excellent throughout. Pictures are generally large, clear, and nicely tweaked to improve shadows and highlights. The book is worth a look or two for this reason alone. The text is a mashup of adaptations of some primary and many secondary sources. We get a clear narrative, with very few hints of the skulduggery, political shenanigans, and outright fraud that make the history of railways such a fascinating human story.
     The impetus for the creation of the CNR was a mix of motives. Of course, a politically expedient desire to preserve competition withe the CPR played a role, and the transport demands of the first World War provided the excuse for conglomerating a mess of lines into a single national system. But the CNR was shaped as much by the effective lobbying of private investors to have the government take over their debt. The result was what eventually became a highly efficient operation saddled with enormous debt, which required regular infusions of public cash to prevent a net annual deficit.
     As a crown corporation, the CNR could be used as an instrument of public policy. The CBC and the Transcanada Airlines (later Air Canada) were originally set up as subsidiaries of the CNR. Both the CNR and the airline were eventually privatised, after it became clear that there was a private profit to be made. The book ends its story just before VIA Rail was spun off from the CNR. Since then, CNR has become CN, and has bought and merged with a number of railroads in the USA. It is now the only truly transcontinental railroad in North America, linking the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Gulf of Mexico by rail. Not a bad outcome for a cobbled-up jury rig of bankrupt and nearly bankrupt lines that spent its first decade harmonising a discordant chorus.
     As “the” history of the CNR, incomplete. As a picture book of Canadian railway history, very good. The kind of book one dips into from time to time to satisfy the need for a ferroequinological fix. **½

Inspiration for Model Railroaders

    Mike Shafer, ed.  Railroads You Can Model (1976) and More Railroads You Can Model (1978) Out of print. Just what the titles say: Overviews of several railroads with suggested trackplans. These books are part of Model Railroader’s successful attempts to shift the hobby towards modelling prototypes, not only in appearance but also in operation. Each article describes the line, summarises the operations, and illustrates settings, rolling stock, and locomotives.
    As history of the lines covered, well above average. Anyone who wants to base his layout on, say, The Ontario and Western or a branch of the GM&O, would find the articles very useful. The modelling suggestions are track plans, most of them redolent of the spaghetti-bowl school: get as much track as possible into the (always insufficient) available space. But there are also signs of the coming revolution: “holding tracks”, now known as “staging”, figure in most of them, and track arrangements emulate the prototype. Several of the plans assume a garage-sized space, so that the track to scenery ratio is relatively low. Photos of structures and industries prompt the modeller to create prototype scenes.
     A nostalgia trip for the older modeller, a good source of information for the neophyte or railroad fan, and inspiration for anybody in the hobby. Worth looking for, I think. **½

Spies as self-deluded fools

     

     Phillip Knightley. The Second Oldest Profession (1986) The subtitle ”The spy as patriot, bureaucrat, fantasist, and whore” describes the thesis pretty accurately. Knightley surveys the history of security and intelligence agencies in Britain and the US, and to a lesser extent in Germany and Russia. The book is pre-glasnost, so it assumes the Cold War setting. There is varying detail about various operations, both regime-disruptive and intelligence-gathering. The net effect is to confirm whatever suspicions one may have about the price/payoff ratio of these services. Bottom line: failures are more common than successes, and the focus of these services has shifted from providing useful information (much of which can be gathered from open sources) to empire-building and "counter-intelligence." Spies spend most of their resources spying on each other.
     The most worrisome aspect is that paranoia and fantasy drive the world-views of these organisations. (They also drive the world-views of many people afraid of the enormous reach of computers, much greater than anything Knightley or his sources envisaged in 1986). The result is such a massive amount of data that no humans could sift through it all, let alone make sense of it. Thus the increasing reliance on AI algorithms. AI algorithms are inevitably biased, and will yield false positives as well as false negatives. The danger is that the merely human recipients of algorithm-supplied intelligence will trust it. As Pedro Domingos says,  People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world.
     An essential book IMO, still remarkably relevant after 30 years.  Considering the increasing paranoia and fantasy in online discourse, perhaps even more relevant. ***

So you want to show off your Latin

     Eugene Ehrlich. Amo, Amas, Amat and More (1985) A dictionary of Latin words and phrases in more or less common use. By the 1980s, Latin was removed from almost all high school curricula, even as an elective, but many people still used Latin tags and phrases. This book will help anyone who reads works from the 1980s and earlier.
     Ehrlich divagates often, adding wry and not so wry comments to his explanations. Such as this one:
     sit non doctissima coniunx
     A Roman formula for a happy marriage.
     One of Martial’s epigrams, Literally “may my wife not be very learned”, revealing more than we would like to know about one Roman’s attitude towards women.
    To which I would add, many men would agree with Martial. I don’t: I prefer sit doctissima coniunx.
      Ehrlich uses the English/American convention of Latin pronunciation. I learned a different one in Austria, but (as he points out) we don’t really know how Latin was pronounced. Nor, I think, do we know how the dialects varied. Pleasant introduction by William F. Buckley, Jr.  A well done reference book. ****