David Howarth. 1066: The Year of the Conquest (1977) Howarth wants us to understand how William the Bastard’s invasion of England came about, and how the pre-Conquest way of life was changed. The Conquest was not a sure thing: the odds were against William. He didn’t win the Battle of Hastings, Harold lost it, along with his life. What sources we have of the country’s mood after the battle suggests that it surrendered rather than resist William’s demands. Resistance might have worn William down.
     Howarth has read the sources, and the attempts by historians to tease out the facts from the contradictory and propagandist accounts of William’s life. He suggests that understanding the psychology of the antagonists is key to understanding why William succeeded despite the odds against him. He believes that Harold lost his will to fight when he saw that William was carrying the Pope’s banner, and learned that the Pope had ruled in favour of William’s claim. This is I think as plausible an explanation of Harold’s failure to rout William’s troops, despite several chances to do so.
     Horwath mourns th Anglo-Saxon polity that might have been, thus illustrating the persistent English nostalgia for an England that never was. Here it is 40 years later, and the same nostalgia, now crossed with a virulently anti-foreign strain, has given us the faux-memory of Empire that drives Brexit.
     Well done, and enjoyable, not least because of its non-academic tone. ***

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. (2015) When to Rob A Bank A collection of blog posts. If you liked Freakonomics, you’ll like this book. The posts cover a few of the same patches as that book and its successor Superfreakonomics, some new ones, and adds random personal musings. They also often ignore non-monetary incentives, even when the data makes it plain that money wasn’t the only or even the primary attractor. That is the only (and major) failing of this entertaining and enlightening collection.
     Oh, about bank robberies: Per FBI data, there are about 20% more bank robberies on Fridays than Mondays. Make of that what you will. And embezzlers don’t dare take vacations, because their scams would easily be discovered by whoever covered their job. So a zealous bank employee who never takes vacations is likely on the take.
     An index makes this a handy reference work when you want to refresh your memory of some oddity niggling away at the back of your memory. ***

Provocative entertainment: Hitchens arguing

Christopher Hitchens. Arguably: Essays (2011) Published the year before his death, the book is a compendium of pieces Hitchens wrote for Vanity Fair, Slate, Newsweek, and other periodicals. Hitchens doesn’t like humbug, stupidity, fraud, cruelty, and other evils. He likes compassion, art, sense, democracy, peace, food, friends, literature, and other good things. He rails against the evils done in the name of religion, distrusts and hates all ideology, despises weakness that arms itself with a gun, and the British royal family. The latter was surely the deciding reason to migrate ot the USA and become a citizen. His love for America gave him reason to point at and criticise its failures to live up to its ideals. He was a journalist, and saw many of the horrors of the 20th century firsthand. His education at Oxford (he read philosophy, politics, and economics) gave him the habit and skills of thorough reading. He was a lifelong socialist, and hated both left and right ideologies.    
Despite his rage at the cruelty and folly of humankind, most of his writing is witty and engaging. If you find this book, read it. ****

Some ruminations about school

People who find school easy (roughly the top 10%) often have trouble at college and university, even if they've had to do homework. I was one such (in high school, I did all my math homework between classes), and had to take a year off after my 2nd University year. That also gave me some time to reflect on what I really wanted to do. It would have been better to have taken that year immediately after high school.

School is easy for some people because (even when the program is "streamed" by ability) the curriculum has to be aimed at the average student. But there is huge variation in both age (hence cognitive development), and innate and acquired abilities. In addition, human development is not a nice steady progress. It's extremely variable, both over time and in physical, cognitive, and emotional qualities. What a kid cannot learn in February, they may well have been able to learn in September, and vice versa. Not to mention that family life, socioeconomic environment, random crises, etc increase already existing differences among students.

The surprising thing is that the schools do as good a job as they do. In my experience that has more to do with the student-teacher relationship than anything else. If you like kids, like teaching, and like your subject, the students will co-operate with you and learn as well as they can.

Politically, the biggest problem IMO is that people seem to think "teach" is a transitive verb, like "paint". It ain't. If you paint a wall, it's painted, and it stays painted. If you teach a kid, they may or may not learn, and will probably forget most of what they've learned anyhow.

IOW, "teach" is what a teacher does and "learn" is what a student does. These two verbs together describe a complementary, symbiotic almost, relationship. If that relationship fails in some way, you have a problem. However, the critics of schools apparently want some kind of people-proof method, that, if applied correctly, will turn out the widgets, er, sorry, _graduates_ they want.

Based on a Usenet post 20190908; edited 20190910 and 20191015

Gladwell on misunderstanding strangers

Recently, The Guardian and the CBC both had interviews wth Gladwell about our difficulty communicating with strangers. One of his theses is that we can’t reliably tell when someone is lying.

I think our inability to perceive lies comes with a matching skill: the ability to hide the truth. Gladwell points to our need to trust each other. It seems to me that this requires the ability to hide anything that might cause distrust. So we have evolved the ability to hide large swaths of ourselves.

All human societies operate on codes of courtesy. To be polite is to pretend that what we see is what we get. It's a mutual acceptance of privacy: I won't try to find out what you're hiding if you don't try to find out what I'm hiding. We wear masks, the masks of respectability and trustworthiness. Gladwell explores how those masks differ from one society to another, and the inevitable misunderstandings caused by those differences.

Politics as it Might Be: Political Science Fiction

     Martin Greenberg & Patricia Warrick. Political Science Fiction (1974) A college textbook, complete with introductory notes to each story, designed to guide the student through the difficulties of unfamiliar ideas. Ignore those bits, and you have an interesting and sometimes entertaining collection of short stories. The ideologies of the Cold War intrude on some of the stories, which makes them not only dated but silly.
     A handful of classics redeem the collection, such as Gordon Dickson’s Call Him Lord, in which the Emperor's eldest son visits Earth to be tested, and fails. Or Alfred Bester’s Disappearing Act, a nicely done satire on the futility of practical solutions. Or Isaac Asimov’s Franchise, in which a single, statistically normal, citizen is selected, whose answers to questions will determine who is elected President.
    All in all, an entertaining read. Out of print of course, but worth picking up if you find a copy. ** to ****

John Allen, the Genius of Monterey

     Linn Westcott. Model Railroading with John Allen (1981) The first few signs of Allen’s genius were few and hardly noticed: a few photos, and a couple of articles in the model railroad magazines in the 1940s. Then people took notice, and editors solicited more photos and manuscripts. By the early 1960s, John Allen was famous among model railroaders. His Gorre and Daphetid demonstrated what Frank Ellison had pioneered in America: that a well-designed layout was a combination of visual and operational concepts whose purpose was to provide the operator (and casual visitor) with the impression of a complete world. The goal was plausibility. Layout designers have taken this principle to heart ever since, whether the layout was based on the owner’s imagined fantasy or on some slice of actual railroad.
     The Gorre and Daphetid is a fictional bridge line across the Akinbak mountain range, somewhere in western America. It provides vital local transportation in an area with few and dangerously steep and winding roads. It’s not much of a money-maker, and its management has bought most of its rolling stock secondhand. Passenger traffic serves mostly tourists who appreciate the spectacular bridges and scenery.
     Westcott gives us a history of Allen’s layouts, an overview of the final version, information about rolling stock and operations, and a glimpse of Allen himself. Allen was friendly and enjoyed showing off his work, but he was an intensely private man. His work must represent the person.
     Allen died in 1973, and his house burnt down a few days later. Little of his work was salvageable. It lives on in his photographs and a short film. Westcott himself died in 1980 while editing the final version of his book. Bob Hayden led the editing team that put Westcott’s manuscript into print.
     The production standard is very high. Westcott’s style is clear and conversational. The book is out of print, but is worth a search. ****
    There are several websites devoted to John Allen and the Gorre and Daphetid. A search will find texts, pictures and the short video. George Sellios's Franklin and South Manchester was inspired by John Allen's work. Through his Fine Scale Miniatures company, Sellios offfered several kits based on the GD, beginning with a wood water tank.