The World is Lovely

If it's legal, why aren't you doing it?

MarkSTaylor — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 19:15:27 +0000

Liberal Conspiracy, taking their cue from the Scotsman, pulled one of the rhetorical moves that particularly irritates me today. It's the one where someone advocates that something should be legal, and you pretend that they're advocating for everybody to actually do it.

It's a fun and easy game to play, because very few things forbidden by law are things that everybody ought to be doing. "'Smoke crack,' says drug policy expert." "'Marry someone of the same sex,' says Peter Tatchell." "'Never vote', says Australian." (Some of these may be genuine Daily Mail headlines.)

And I'm sorry, Scotsman, but LibCon have done a far better job on this than you. The real trick is to invent a quote from the person you're misrepresenting – like paraphrasing, but instead of summarising what they said you just make up something that will attract a lot of retweets. That way, you don't actually have to say they did the thing you've made up, or at least not in an obvious subject-verb-object way.

If you're thinking of trying this technique yourself, don't worry about how incredibly transparent it seems. A quick glance at the Twitter responses beneath the LibCon post shows an overwhelming majority of people parroting the implication in the headline. As I'm writing this, the most recent declares: "Someone actually said this." As Richard Littlejohn would say, you couldn't make it up.

Criss-Crossword

MarkSTaylor — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 17:05:50 +0000

Criss-Crossword is a themed crossword created for my brother's birthday, in collaboration with my other brother.

Most solvers who are not my siblings will find some elements completely inscrutable – in particular, the "password" and the "next person in the chain". You should at least be able to complete the grid, although with more difficulty than Paul did.

I'm pretty pleased with how this turned out, and I'm tempted to re-use the concept for future puzzles.

Download Criss-Crossword as a PDF for printing.

The Birthday Crossword no. 2211

Criss-Crossword by Apis and Pinkerian

The clues record a contest of wits between Apis and Pinkerian, and are given in chronological order. Wordplay indicates only letters newly added to the grid, and all grid entries thus created are defined consecutively and in an arbitrary order. Numbers in brackets indicate the value of each new placement. The first grid entry is placed horizontally.

The grid is not provided, but is available in original, Travel, Deluxe and Anniversary editions. Solvers must determine the correct placement of each entry.

Letters in pale blue cells must be arranged to obtain the obfuscated password, which solvers must decode in a manner hinted at by the top row. Those letters which do not directly yield a score must be arranged to identify the next person in the chain.

978-0007259083 is the primary reference.

The Chambers Dictionary (2008) is the secondary reference.

	Apis		Pinkerian
1	Died in ship’s prison, leading to initial enquiry in which East and West form partnership (26)	2	Lie, perhaps from Republicans, taking in union (16)
3	Continue tediously without reaching conclusion, like Peter Jones (8)	4	Constant hesitation, gripped by Shakespeare in MPhil degree (33)
5	Smack half-cut child (8)	6	Select losing party leader, such as Clegg or Griffin (11)
7	Cinnabar found at the centre of the earth (6)	8	He lives in a windmill making cider, lacking ID to hit the east end of Trumptonshire (13)
9	Sound on computer provides a means of getting attention (20)	10	1000 subtracted from dx term on the right hand side (32)
11	Part of scale, as practised by Wright (6)	12	Head of institute is after Urbis Centre for three clubs, say (6)
13	Charge iron (6)	14	Katie thus offers one heart (11)
15	Dicky, 9, taken in by French one for 5 centimes, as Richard might do with Rainbow (104)	16	Enjoy game, starting halfway through where one might blast to the stone pillar, perhaps (12)
17	Will’s shaft is unwell – the end has fallen off (6)	18	Chill when jacket is removed for Harry (21)
19	Before scan no-one ordered, House’s number 2 storms out to find a source of illicit drugs (27)	20	Matrix divided by two in this class (12)
21	Newspaper has top items in an arbitrary order: this person must dash about catching runaway slips (16)	22	Primate would require surgery to become Pope (10)
23	Early condensation of War and Peace cut out everything but the ending (7)	24	Cereal first and last thing for Obama (5)
25	Animal attraction to very short 31st century doctor? (12)	26	Jupitus’s second in panel show where points are given for correct answers (44)
27	Beginning to take to it (4)	28	Article 1 in Scotland leaves Scully without District Attorney (4)
29	Just once, ignore European certification, yes? (33)	30	Initially just unconscious? Mad? Sam Tyler and his final act (34)
31	6’s boss turned around what he had before riches? (7)
	Final score: 300		Final score: 260

Is capital punishment especially irreversible?

MarkSTaylor — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 15:34:31 +0000

According to Jack of Kent (and thousands of other people through history):

...the most significant practical argument against capital punishment is that it is irreversible.

The point he's making is true, and important, and it's one of the reasons that I am – irreversibly – against the death penalty. But I do find it strange that "irreversible" is so often the word of choice for this argument. When you let an innocent man out of prison after twenty years, the sense in which his punishment has been "reversed" is rather limited. You can't give him back those two decades of freedom, and the man you're releasing isn't the same man you locked up, or the man he could have been. You can stop punishing him when you find out he's innocent, but you can't reverse the punishment you've already handed out. The best you can do is to try to compensate for it.

Capital punishment isn't uniquely irreversible; it's just that when you do screw up it's really, really bad and you can't do anything to make up for it. It's at the extreme of a spectrum that all punishments can be placed on. I think perhaps that's worth keeping in mind, because "it's irreversible" is actually quite a good argument against retributive justice in general.

Ics-nay on the inguistics-lay

MarkSTaylor — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 21:04:58 +0000

I came across a brief exchange about language on my brother's Twitter the other day. @MeetTheSkeptics asked "Can anyone explain to me why Math is plural in England? Or is it only singular in the US?", and my brother @Andrew_Taylor replied "Mathematics is plural everywhere".

Of course, they're both wrong: mathematics is singular everywhere. Otherwise, Andrew would have said "Mathematics are singular everywhere".¹ But I've always wondered quite why we have some words – mathematics, physics, athletics – are plural in form but behave as singulars, while others are all plural or all singular.

Luckily, these days the online OED is available to any fool with a library card. This, along with my gloriously shallow research, means that you don't really need me to tell you what follows. But who can be bothered to dig out their library card? It's not as though you'll be able to go to the library with it for much longer.

Back in the day – roughly, before 1500 – these words were all singular and looked a bit French. So we talked about mathematique, magike, musike and ethyque. As you can see, some of these haven't changed – magic, music – and others have – mathematics, ethics.

Those that changed began to appear in the names of treatises: you might write your Ethics or your Economics, just as the Greeks used to. As the years rolled on, these words were applied to the subjects of those treatises – your Ethics was about ethics, not about ethic – and this spread to be the accepted way of talking about sciences and areas of practice. And there, it seemed, is the basic difference: areas of study, like physics or mathematics, are singular, while areas of practice, like tactics, are plural. So politics is awful, but Ann Widdecombe's politics are awful.

Of course, these areas are vague and overlapping, and you might have to think for a bit when you write about gymnastics; this is just the best I can do with the morsel of research it took to sate my own curiosity. If I decide to look into it further I'll let you know. In the mean time, it does throw up intriguing questions about words like musician, physicist, mathematician and mechanic...

[1] The use-mention distinction makes this a little spurious, but you know what I mean.

Cameron admits he has terrible comprehension skills

MarkSTaylor — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 13:09:48 +0000

From David Cameron's speech against AV this morning:

Here's a passage from a book detailing how the Alternative Vote system works:
"As the process continues the preferences allocated to the remaining candidates may not be the second choices of those electors whose first-choice candidates have been eliminated. It may be that after three candidates have been eliminated, say, when a fourth candidate is removed from the contest one of the electors who gave her first preference to him gave her second, third and fourth preferences to the three other candidates who have already been eliminated, so her fifth preference is then allocated to one of the remaining candidates."
Do you understand that?
I didn't. And I've read it many times.

David Cameron has a first class honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford. How he managed it when he can't follow a passage that simple is a mystery; do they just give firsts away at Oxford?

I'm really not sure that a man with such poor comprehension skills is fit to run the country.

Not A Book Review: David Eagleman, Sum

MarkSTaylor — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 13:21:15 +0000

My friend Rachel recently recommended David Eagleman's Sum to me. It's a collection of very short stories imagining afterlives – not dissimilar to my current project, although dissimilar enough that I don't feel I've been beaten to the punch, for which I'm very grateful. Apparently it made quite a stir when it was published; I was doing a terrible job of reading anything not related to my degree at the time, so it passed me by entirely. It's an interesting and enjoyable little book, well worth reading, but something about its tone irritated me (and I think we can all agree that online irritation is more enjoyable than online fawning).

Eagleman often seems to be writing with the assumption that our ideas of what an afterlife or a deity could be are hopelessly staid. He tells us what God isn't: "He is not something outside and above us"; "there is not a single God but many". He sticks by the convention of capitalising "God" and "He" (although he does, on occasion, go with "She" instead) as if his readers need something familiar to cling to. One story begins "The debate about God's gender is misdirected", although it is not clear what debate he is referring to. (This is despite the fact that the god he is imagining - a heterosexual couple - is better addressed by a question about gender than a more conventional unknowable and mysterious God). All of this is exacerbated by his use of the second person. "To your surprise and delight," he writes of God in one story, "She is like no god that humans have conceived". Now, I will admit that I would be surprised to meet God, but once that had passed I would, if anything, rather expect them to be like no god humans have ever conceived. There are a number of ways to read that "you", but one thing is certain: it can't include the author because, clever man that he is, he's thought of all this already. Eagleman writes as though everybody else in the world is an unthinking dogmatist.

That attitude seems to extend beyond this book. Eagleman has coined the word "possibilean" to describe himself, saying that this philosophy "rejects both the idiosyncratic claims of traditional theism and the positions of certainty in atheism in favor of a middle, exploratory ground". At times he seems to recognise that atheism isn't about "certainty". (Subtler theists can expect no such concessions, so far as I can tell.) For the most part, however, he looks at the "god debate" and sees a failure to explore the many possibilities it doesn't cover. But he is looking in the wrong place: the reason the "new atheists" concentrate on traditional beliefs isn't because they are too narrow minded to conceive of any other possibility. It's because nobody is oppressing women and homosexuals, murdering strangers, undermining science teaching or sitting in the House of Lords because of the idea they had about God being a spotty kid who built the universe from a kit one Saturday afternoon.

To me, it seems there are two really useful things about Eagleman's philosophy. First, it sidesteps the need to engage with how beliefs affect the world outside the believer's mind: it makes them a plaything, an idea which I find quite appealing but which is hopelessly naïve given the context into which he has introduced the idea. Second, it lets him be smug about having invented a "new philosophy" without having to say anything at all challenging, and to play more-intellectually-humble-than-thou without robustly evaluating his own belief system. I'm sure neither of those are what he was going for, but without them I really can't see what his "possibileanism" is for.

Nonetheless, there's plenty to enjoy in Sum, particularly when Eagleman leaves behind speculation about creators and sin and imagines after-death experiences that say something about our life before death. And let's not forget – because I don't want to give up my own bit of delicious intellectual humility – it's not at all unlikely my gripes are all my own.

Three books I love (but have never actually read)

MarkSTaylor — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 14:45:35 +0000

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince

This is one of my wife's favourite books; she read it with her mum as a child and, later, on her own. And, later still, she read it to me.

My French is dreadful, but it would be a gross oversimplification to say that I didn't understand a word of it. I understood at least "le", "petit", "prince" and "mouton". Luckily, Chrissy had to be patient with me as it was her idea, so I also got a careful chapter-by-chapter translation.

Naturally, my love for Le Petit Prince is bound up with my love for my wife. But in this case, it's particularly difficult to separate the literary qualities from the personal. There's always a third person involved when you read something in translation, but I didn't just read Saint-Exupéry through Chrissy. My whole experience of the book was filtered through our relationship and experiences: when we made silly jokes, or had to be quiet because we were on the bus, or Chrissy was uncertain of her translations so that she wouldn't have spoken them to anyone else, it changed the story I experienced.

Every reading is like that, in a way.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

And so, from my blissful marriage to an obsessive middle-aged pervert.

The trouble with audiobooks is that an awful lot hinges on the narrator. The War and Peace audiobook I downloaded – always an ambitious move – had the most impossibly posh reader I have ever encountered. There are, I think, other reasons I haven't listened that one through yet, but it certainly didn't help that I felt it would take more than the sixty hours' running time to get used to his remarkable tone. I suppose only the aristocracy can have enough time on their hands to record an unabridged audio version of War and Peace.

Other narrators seem to get themselves out of the way with more success than I would have thought possible. Steven Crossley took me through Flat Earth News and The Finkler Question – not a natural pairing – with elegant readings that set into every sentence like a silicon moulding. I have since instated his as the imaginary voice I use when reading through my own work.

The audiobook of Lolita is read by Jeremy Irons, which is all you need to know.

James Rodway, The Story of Forest and Stream

And so, from the Pride Lands to the forests of Guyana.

The Story of Forest and Stream is part of a collection called The Library of Useful Stories, which so far as I can tell was a sort of Very Short Introductions for the late nineteenth century. Other titles include The Story of the Mind, The Story of Euclid, The Story of Extinct Civilisations and The Story of British Coinage, so they're certainly varied. There's even a Christmas special for the naughty child in your life: The Story of a Piece of Coal.

This book was given to me by one of my university supervisors shortly before I graduated (a much less nerve-racking presentation than when he handed me a medieval manuscript to look over and then offered me a cup of tea.) My coursemates received other books in the series, including The Story of the Stars and The Story of King Alfred; a lovely set of parting gifts.

So I love The Story of Forest and Stream because it's a pretty little memento. Where does that leave its actual contents? Do they matter? So far as I can tell, it's an interesting book, a nice, quick introduction to fascinating subject by a writer who cares deeply about his subject. I haven't read it, but I'm sure that if and when I do, I'll enjoy it. In the meantime, though, its obvious functions could be fulfilled by any nicely-presented doggerel. But loving books is a bit more complicated than that, and knowing there's a good book between those covers seems to make all the difference. (Similarly, I always find notebooks made up to look like old Penguins a disappointing entry in an otherwise enticing range of merch.)

Oh, and according to Nature, "The twenty-seven illustrations are the best that have yet appeared in any of the volumes in the Library of Useful Stories". So I can feel smug about that.

Why I'm Not a Bibliophile

MarkSTaylor — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 09:19:45 +0000

People are sometimes surprised to learn that I do a great deal of reading using ebooks or audiobooks on my phone. As an English graduate, keen reader and hobbyist writer, I'm expected to love books. And I do love a few. My wife bought me the beautiful Tree of Codes this Christmas, and a lovely old Wordsworth on our first anniversary. My facsimile of "The Shephearde's Calender" is wonderfully evocative and there's always something satisfying about the sheer density of a Complete Works of Shakespeare or a Norton anthology.

But then again, there are lots of beautiful objects. My razor is shiny and heavy and balances well in the hand, but I don't think it's particularly important. I'd rather have a nice chrome kettle than the strange black plastic silo that sits on our countertop, but for the most part I only care about the tea.

A book is a device for passing words to the brain. If it's beautiful beyond that, it's just a beautiful object. It doesn't make the words themselves any more beautiful. I believe that quite firmly, even though I know it isn't entirely true.

Because of course the way those words are presented affects how you think of them. A leather-bound book with yellowing edges will con you into thinking it's a classic if you let it. But those are incidental matters. It's equally true that you'll enjoy a novel more if you read it in the sunshine with a refreshing cocktail, and that a poem will mean more to you if it was your late grandmother's favourite. Nobody would say that sitting inside and reading a poem your late grandmother was indifferent to is somehow an improper way of reading.

In fact, I think books as physical objects can assert themselves too strongly. The books that sit on your shelves are often worthless: they either wait unread, when there are certainly people out there who would love to crack their spines and delve in, or they lure you into endless rereading and distract you from the innumerable other works you could be reading for the first time. And the fact that we like our books physical – that we judge a book by its having covers – means that words and ideas are not created equal. It takes good luck and sales potential to have your words taken up by a company big enough to put them into print. Let's not forget, the people who make these objects which, unusually, we don't find it strange to revere are looking for profit, not beauty – and even where that is not the case, there is no good reason to make them arbiters of what is beautiful enough for us.

Ebooks might not change that; audiobooks certainly won't. But I do hope they'll help to take apart the strange idolatry we've made of wood pulp and carbon black, and more people will start to love writing instead of books.

The Scout Association: Basically just trolling atheists

MarkSTaylor — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 12:57:46 +0000

There's nothing new about the Scout Association's indefensible discrimination against the non-religious, but until I looked at it again recently I didn't realise they were actually trying to piss us off as much as they think they can get away with.

The kernel of the problem is a single line in the Policy, Organisation and Rules which reads: "With reference to religious belief, the avowed absence of religious belief is a bar to appointment to a Leadership position." If you didn't know about that already, do take a moment to facepalm.

(The standard justification for this, by the way, is that leaders are expected to assist young people in their spiritual development. I have yet to see the justification for not barring the disabled, dull-witted or unfriendly as unable to contribute to physical, intellectual and social development respectively.)

What I hadn't noticed before was just how absurdly this little bullshit bomb is placed. It is not mentioned, as you might expect, in what the Association calls its "Religious Policy". Instead, it's appended – with no apparent sense of irony – to the "Equal Opportunities Policy". I suppose it's at least to be welcomed that nobody can read the Equal Opportunities Policy and be left with the impression the the Scout Association actually offers equal opportunities, but if that's what they're going for they should probably have chosen a different title.

Instead, I'm forced to assume that the real reason for putting it here and only here is to wind up the non-religious, because there are two notes at the end of the policy. The other, just before the one about religion, reads: "Note: Paedophilia is a bar to any involvement in the Scout Movement."

There you have it. The only two things that absolutely and without further consideration keep you from being a Scout leader: molesting children and not being religious. They are, after all, roughly equivalent.

The World Is Still Lovely

MarkSTaylor — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 14:18:06 +0000

It's now around a year and a half since I last blogged at The World Is Lovely. I understand there's a tradition for this sort of situation.

A little more dramatic than the standard apology, and a lot more appropriate to the new year, is to tear the whole thing down and start from scratch. Accept that your blog had fallen fallow, and that it was unfocused, and that the cringeworthy bullshit your fourteen year old self put there should never have been allowed to pollute the material you wrote as an adult and haven't yet realised is cringeworthy bullshit.

That's a good approach if you've actually got a focused, quality blog in mind. That's what my wife is doing with her new blog, and provided my snoring and absurdity don't short out her brain I expect it will work as intended. I've gone for the slightly lower-pressure approach whereby you set up a broader site for your actual substance and stick the blog on the side like a fridge-mounted slop bucket. I think it's more me.

Making the blog a sideline also reduces the feeling that before you publish, you should be able to imagine someone actually wanting to read your post. For most people it's absurd to worry whether the internet wants to read what you're writing. I spend roughly five hours in every four reading reviews of films I've already seen, Wikipedia pages for condiments and details of strangers' tooth-brushing habits (or "tooth hacks"); I have direct evidence that people want to read any nonsense they can get their eyeballs on.

So, as before, the blog will be a repository for occasional (in both senses) bumph of all kinds, the only difference being a relief from the feeling that there ought to be something vaguely worthy about it. I think that's better for everyone.

blogging