the gravel in your guts and the steel in your eye

I like when the moral of the story is a bit off

an underappreciated tution fees argument

Rortybomb draws our attention to a point that I think was implicit in one side's argument in the tuition fees hoohah about a year ago, but which for one reason or another didn't really get across.

The idea is that although it might in some sense be fairer for those who personally benefit from higher education to pay for it, it may not be beneficial to society as a whole, because

Debt puts contraints on what people are capable of doing, and one way out of that constraint is to work in the fields that pay the most.  For those who want to see our best working in schools, government, nonprofits, taking chances starting entrepreneurial work or simply not working to replicate already existing power structures, this is a terrible arrangement.

This argument is a bit like the impossible-to-kill Laffer curve argument that has been in the news lately. It might be a nice idea for those who benefit from university to pay society back for the privilege, but it's not going to happen just because the government wants it to: if you try to claw back the nominal cost, the little fuckers will just take their pounds of flesh/public benefit in a different way, by working in the city rather than doing useful welfare-improving things.

The anti-fees people who use this argument, and I think it captures what a lot of them meant when they warned about young people being 'saddled with debt', differ from the tax-cuts-for-the-rich brigade in that they have academic evidence on their side. The paper is called Constrained After College: Student Loans and Early Career Occupational Choices, and the money quote is

We find that debt causes graduates to choose substantially higher-salary jobs and reduces the probability that students choose low-paid “public interest” jobs…Specifically, in our preferred specifications in columns 6 and 7, we estimate that an extra $10,000 in student debt reduces the likelihood that an individual will take a job in nonprofits, government, or education by about 5 to 6 percentage points.

The study was done in America, where student loans are bigger, aren't always income-contingent and generally have less favourable terms than UK ones, but in the other direction the effects on entrepreneurial work and political activism were left out. Even without taking these into account, though, this one paper provides way more evidence for lowering UK tuition fees than there has ever been for increasing revenue by decreasing income tax.

DIY thunderbolt

Got a guitar, a picture rail, a spare belt and a slight shortage of space? Not any more...

the mcgurk effect

my reaction

Tourism in North Korea

A crazy selection of photos. Brought to you by Marginal Revolution

hairsplitting

Here is a stunning and close to the bone Phil Nugent post, reminding us how naturally the art of turning substantive arguments into arcane 'to me, the word 'terrorism' is about...' hairsplitting contests over buzzwords comes to people with entrenched ideological views.


Here are some nuggets, but you really need to read it:

It's always interesting when someone, in a tone of righteous indignation, says something that's obviously the exact opposite of the truth, whether it's "My kid isn't stupid" or "FDR's New Deal programs prolonged the Great Depression." It's not necessarily the case that you're listening to the single dumbest person who's ever lived; often, someone is revealing their most fucked-up personal issues or exposing their tenderest spot...

...They think they're brave because they set off bombs and set fires, but they have no stomach for the kind of fight that tries to roll back simpleminded propaganda and heightens clarity, and they're definitely not going to take the bullet of saying "Okay, I'm a terrorist, now what does that really mean?" any more than Dick Cheney, for all his supposed indifference to the verdict of history, is ever going to just say, "Screw this shit about 'heightened interrogation techniques', I obviously support torture, T-O-R-T-U-R-E, and I'm not ashamed of it."

Also fantastic is this contemporary review, which Nugent links to, of ex-terrorist Bill Ayers's narrowly pre-9/11 'look at me I'm proud of and profitting financially from having been so into being radical in the 1970s that I set off bombs and robbed people' masterwork. 

The question is, it it worth totally avoiding emotionally laden, hairsplitting-vulnerable words like 'terrorist', 'freedom', 'racism', 'power', 'resistance', 'solidarity' etc when talking about politics?

From an aesthetic point of view the answer is certainly yes, as these words are pretty bad anyway. There is something really ugly and inelegant about the way they brazenly but sneakily put an opinion where there ought to be a fact. They are graceless in the same way as a policemen's use of 'utilised' instead of 'used' or an acquaintance who doesn't remember your name but says 'hi buddy how've you been!' before selling you something. There are far less clumsy ways of being manipulative.

There are also 'doing the right thing' reasons not to use these words, but I'm not sure they are decisive. There is the intrinsic admirableness of the straight talking the avoidance might encourage, the clearer thinking that might ensue and the pernickety arguments that would be avoided. I also think there is something about avoiding semantic arguments that makes people respect others' opinions more, at least to the extent of sometimes seeing genuine disagreement rather than misunderstanding or maliciousness.

On the other hand, maybe sometimes it's worth using these words, or even engaging in tactical hairsplitting oneself, just to be more convincing. Hmm...

Burn with fury, oh poets of the Valley!

If you haven't been following, formerly swaggering computer blog TechCrunch has been a sad but faintly amusing car crash for the past few weeks. This post by someone else has the relevant links and captures how silly all the puffed up grandstanding is:

Anyway it’s probably just as well that AOL didn’t call M.G. because those backstabbing stiffs and corporate mofos at AOL sure as hell could not handle the truth that M.G. would be firing down the line at them, all loud and upper case and shit, just bam-bam-bam oh-no-you-di’n't-oh-yes-I-did. Or maybe M.G. wouldn’t even pick up that call at all. He’d see “Tim Armstrong” in the caller ID on his swagger-ass iPhone 4 and just say, Fuck it, that corporate motherfucker can go through to voice mail and kiss my white ass on the way. Because really — think about it. Why would a bad-ass renegade writer of the Truth even pick up the phone and say hello to some suit from AOL who doesn’t know jack shit about being a bad-ass swaggering tech journalist, amiright? 

For completeness here is editor Mike Arrington's ultimatum/resignation post, and here is TC tetris, which is infuriating.

While the saga must be pretty distressing for those involved, it's a massive time-saver for those of us who unsubscribe. Time to take up knitting or something.

rage management

Mettallica have a song on this topic:

Is it a pun about cheese? Probably too soft to go round someone's neck. Maybe it's cold though? That would explain the anger as well...

Also Peter Schaeffer, whoever he/she is, uses the comments of a Marginal Revolution post to tell us a sage parable about dealing with other peoples' rage:

Once upon a time in China, there lived an Emperor who owned a majestic white stallion, the finest beast in all his Kingdom. One night, a thief tried to slip in and steal the horse, but was captured by the palace guards and thrown into the dungeon.

The next morning, he was dragged before the Emperor’s court. “How dare you,” bellowed the Emperor, “lay hand on my royal steed! Jailor, put this thief to death!” 

Immediately, the thief bowed deeply. “Your judgement is peerless and wise, O Emperor,” he calmly replied, “but my life is of little value. I should offer you a gift before I depart. Your mount is quite a fine one, but if your eminence would spare my life for just a year and a day, I swear to you I can teach that horse to sing hymns!”

The court burst in to laughter at that, but the Emperor was intrigued. After all, you didn’t get to his high position by turning down freely offered gifts, no matter how far-fetched they seem. To the surprise of all, the Emperor quickly accepted the offer.

As they were leaving the chambers, the jailor whispered to the thief, “You are a fool!”

“I am a fool?” replied the thief, smiling broadly. “Much can happen in a year and a day. The King may die. The horse may die. I may die… and maybe the horse will learn how to sing.”

Anywhere out of this world

Kind of by way of Brian Leiter, here is Baudelaire's wonderful collection of prose poems called 'Spleen'.

If you like beautiful, rich and mesmerising descriptions of things and feelings that are disgusting, scary and sad, these will be right up your carcass-strewn street. (the nightmare in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man also lives there: you should meet up!).

For a taster of Baudelaire's general MO, here is a typical poem from another collection, set to an inexplicable (or maybe I'm missing something obvious?) but atmospheric video:


THE CARCASS from koustoz on Vimeo.

Here are the words in French and English:

Une Charogne

A Carcass

Rappelez-vous l'objet que nous vîmes, mon âme,
Ce beau matin d'été si doux:
Au détour d'un sentier une charogne infâme
Sur un lit semé de cailloux,

My love, do you recall the object which we saw, 

That fair, sweet, summer morn!

At a turn in the path a foul carcass

On a gravel strewn bed,

Les jambes en l'air, comme une femme lubrique,
Brûlante et suant les poisons,
Ouvrait d'une façon nonchalante et cynique
Son ventre plein d'exhalaisons.

Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman, 

Burning and dripping with poisons,

Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way 

Its belly, swollen with gases.

Le soleil rayonnait sur cette pourriture,
Comme afin de la cuire à point,
Et de rendre au centuple à la grande Nature
Tout ce qu'ensemble elle avait joint;

The sun shone down upon that putrescence, 

As if to roast it to a turn,

And to give back a hundredfold to great Nature 

The elements she had combined;

Et le ciel regardait la carcasse superbe
Comme une fleur s'épanouir.
La puanteur était si forte, que sur l'herbe
Vous crûtes vous évanouir.

And the sky was watching that superb cadaver 

Blossom like a flower.

So frightful was the stench that you believed 

You'd faint away upon the grass.

Les mouches bourdonnaient sur ce ventre putride,
D'où sortaient de noirs bataillons
De larves, qui coulaient comme un épais liquide
Le long de ces vivants haillons.

The blow-flies were buzzing round that putrid belly,

From which came forth black battalions

Of maggots, which oozed out like a heavy liquid 

All along those living tatters.

Tout cela descendait, montait comme une vague
Ou s'élançait en pétillant;
On eût dit que le corps, enflé d'un souffle vague,
Vivait en se multipliant.

All this was descending and rising like a wave, 

Or poured out with a crackling sound;

One would have said the body, swollen with a vague breath, 

Lived by multiplication.

Et ce monde rendait une étrange musique,
Comme l'eau courante et le vent,
Ou le grain qu'un vanneur d'un mouvement rythmique
Agite et tourne dans son van.

And this world gave forth singular music, 

Like running water or the wind,

Or the grain that winnowers with a rhythmic motion 

Shake in their winnowing baskets.

Les formes s'effaçaient et n'étaient plus qu'un rêve,
Une ébauche lente à venir
Sur la toile oubliée, et que l'artiste achève
Seulement par le souvenir.

The forms disappeared and were no more than a dream, 

A sketch that slowly falls

Upon the forgotten canvas, that the artist 

Completes from memory alone.

Derrière les rochers une chienne inquiète
Nous regardait d'un oeil fâché,
Epiant le moment de reprendre au squelette
Le morceau qu'elle avait lâché.

Crouched behind the boulders, an anxious dog 

Watched us with angry eye,

Waiting for the moment to take back from the carcass 

The morsel he had left.

— Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure,
À cette horrible infection,
Etoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature,
Vous, mon ange et ma passion!

— And yet you will be like this corruption,

Like this horrible infection,

Star of my eyes, sunlight of my being, 

You, my angel and my passion!

Oui! telle vous serez, ô la reine des grâces,
Apres les derniers sacrements,
Quand vous irez, sous l'herbe et les floraisons grasses,
Moisir parmi les ossements.

Yes! thus will you be, queen of the Graces,

After the last sacraments,

When you go beneath grass and luxuriant flowers, 

To molder among the bones of the dead.

Alors, ô ma beauté! dites à la vermine
Qui vous mangera de baisers,
Que j'ai gardé la forme et l'essence divine
De mes amours décomposés!

Then, O my beauty! say to the worms who will

Devour you with kisses,

That I have kept the form and the divine essence 

Of my decomposed love!

— Charles Baudelaire

William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

Some awesome Celtic harp playing

This is what the Guinness logo sounds like.

my sister designs stuff good

Click here for more, plus music reviews, free playlists and good fonts.

Pylons!

Thousands of them are about to be built as new wind farms etc. get hooked up. The question is, how should they look? An expert panel is currently choosing from a shortlist of six possibilities.

My favourite is the lattice at the bottom: pretty unobtrusive and kind of cool.

Comment on your favourite and you may influence the decision: so far there are only 50 or so for each entry and I imagine the judges probably read at least some of them. It could actually be the most important thing you do in your life.

Rinse your mouth with listerine

Can't seem to find the right way to write it like she says it. LIsterine? liSTerine? LISTeRINE? Also here is Poly Styrene talking to a nobby interviewer.

time tough

But on the other hand, from our own correspondent is on tomorrow at 11am

Afternoon radio delight

Unhappy South London decorator Detes Grodvy tells me his sorrows: (skip to the bold for the useful information)

Dear Aunt Teddy, 

As a young South London decorator, I can't get enough of Radio 4 in the morning. From the moment I start sandpapering to the sound of Andrew Marr's comforting 'plom plom plom I'm in an Oxford college and going on about something plom plom plom', through the fascinating Woman's Hour interviews that brighten my caulking, past the teabreak documentary and noontime earnestness of You and Yours which fill the cracks in my moth and gas-provider knowledge, right through to 1:30 when Martha Kearney bounces out of earshot, all is well with the world and life is as smooth as eggshell. But when she is gone and I start munching on tuna and cucumber a cloud greyer than elephant's breath seems to drift over the airwaves. 

After my lunch hour Radio 4 is as boring as an off-white bedroom. I don't want to be too hard on the quiz shows, Archers repeats, George Galloway vanity slots and half-baked comedies, but they certainly don't go with my wallpaper, so to speak. None of the other channels are any better. The bbc music stations are full of irritating self-important DJs who won't stop telling 13 year olds how important the Kooks are or reminding mid-30s PRs how cool watching Huskadoo used to be. Radio 3 is lovely but doesn't agree with my electric sander. The non-BBC frequencies have too many repeated songs, jingles for no-win-no-fee lawyers and rants about how being nasty to poor people is definitely the best thing to do for my tastes, and playing my own music just doesn't cut it somehow. Sometimes it feels like I spend my afternoons watching paint dry. 

I'm worried that this problem may start to affect my work: the other afternoon, in desperation, I turned to Smooth Radio for half an hour. They repeated so many Rolling Stones songs that now whenever I see a red door I get a subliminal urge to paint it black. It's getting serious and I need your help, otherwise woe betide me! 

Yours,
Detes Grodvy 

P.S. I may not be real.

My Reply:

Dear Detes,
Thanks very much for reading my blog, and thanks doubly for your heartfelt email. I am very sorry to hear about your problem, which I'm afraid is not uncommon: Radio 4 in the afternoon is in fact a pile of balls. I am also a young South London decorator and used to suffer from it dreadfully. Fortunately I have discovered a simple remedy.

In South London if you twist the dial very delicately in the Radio 4 zone, at around 93.8 you will find Vibes FM. All afternoon they play eclectic and possibly new (certainly new to me) but highly chilled out reggae, with few ads and almost no DJing. It's just the right sound to roller ceilings to. At four o'clock, Commander B comes on and plays slightly livelier and more recognisable songs - by Gyptian for example - giving the perfect signal to pick up the tempo and start finishing off and tidying. If you are not in South London, you can always listen online (maybe in the future this will work?) or on your smart phone. Alternatively, magic FM is generally ok. 

You also seem to have a problem with scepticism, a difficulty that is not so easily solved. If you want to be persuaded that at least your hands are real, you might benefit from looking up G.E. Moore's 'proof of an external world', though even this partial cure is said to be unreliable. The Internet has some suggestions that might be helpful, as do Arthur and Ziggy Marley.  

In any case, with luck you will enjoy decorating to the sound of Vibes FM so much that such negative thoughts will simply vanish. 

Yours,

Aunt Teddy  

another awesome film intro

It's honestly worth watching the whole thing just for the trousers, which, ahem, like the film itself, are meticulously cut, and subtly use texture, tension and shades of grey to express personality.

The female characters are also excellent: this is probably about as feminist a 1950s western as you will find.

how to talk about films and tv with and without sounding like a nob

Find out here, where you will discover definitve examples of both.

First Bill Wyman goes on about 9/11, drops a few stock journalisty truisms, happens to mention what cool parties he used to go to, gets all mystical and generally writes badly in the course of bigging up films everyone likes and has seen anyway with sentences such as

In each of these signal works, a sense of humanity, of the great worth of every life—and a shuddering appreciation of the apocalypse that accompanies every individual death—is palpable.

and

These movies haunt my own personal and inadequate understanding of the events of that day. Our understanding of the movies, too, is inadequate...

Next, our hero Phil Nugent arrives to segue from this boringness to retrospect amazingly on 'basic cable's big attempt to come to terms with' 9/11, the mediocre TV fireman drama Rescue Me. It is seriously good to read, and a great introduction to the Phil Nugent Experience, full of his trademark long sentences and descriptions which begin matter of factly but before you notice blossom into hilarious sardonic putdowns of someone you didn't think was being talked about.

It's rare to get a direct opportunity to compare someone who knows how to write about film/TV with someone who doesn't, so when you're done reading, humour me while I talk about out two things that I think contribute to the difference.

First, there's a really telling contrast in the way the two writers use references. Wyman's lame ones, ie

 like more than one of the characters in the movies I've been talking about, they were already dead.

and

Each features a shock, a wrenching sideways, whether from that plane engine falling on a suburban house to the revelation that something is very, very wrong with poor Betty.

are selfish: if you have seen the films already, they give you very little that you don't already have . Maybe if you are the kind of person who likes to know that your opinions about films are official - 'the bit where the main character turned out to have been dead all along, I knew that was the important bit' - you might have gotten something. If you hadn't seen the films before, then you are even worse off as you probably won't get anything at all out of the whole article. I suppose you at least gain the knowledge that Wyman thought they were good, but in the course of gaining it you have at least two of the stories ruined! Clearly the references (and really the whole thing) are not there for the reader's benefit, but for him to show off.

Phil Nugent's references, on the other hand, are there to serve. I've no idea how Bette Davis went to Louis B. Mayer's funeral, but now I kind of want to look up the story and find out. I know the general kind of thing to look for - some kind of cynical satisfaction I guess - but it will doubtless be fun to learn more. Phil Nugent gave me an Easter egg, basically. Even if I had known what was being talked about, I think I would have gained: the image sounds one that you smile when you are reminded of it. Who smiles when they think about the engine bit in Donnie Darko? Not me! The reference that I did get - the twist at the end, had precisely the right effect, not to mention being a genius piece of twistery.

The second thing is also about selfishness: the two passages differ massively in the information that they give you. Granted, he had more space, but thanks to Phil Nugent I now know pretty much all I'll ever need to about Rescue Me. In fact I found out more about it from the review than I would have done if I'd watched the series! On the other hand, Bill Wyman told me almost nothing: Donnie Darko and Mulholland drive are dark and contain shocks, almost like... 9/11! The thing about artistic antennae picking up the general zeitgeist or doing some Newcomb's problem thing (see what I did there?) so that films made before 9/11 could still kind of be about it is cool in a way, but I think I've heard it before, and it is also total bollocks.

So, when writing always namedrop unselfishly and tell people stuff that makes them smile.

Anyway make sure to read Phil Nugent's other stuff. His profiles of various Republican politicians and presidential candidates are similarly wonderful to his reviews of crap TV programmes, and he has done more reading and viewing than you can possibly imagine.

I learned something today

• The difference between significant and insignificant is not necessarily significant
• There were 58399 allegations of police misconduct in England and Wales in 2009/10 (this and more data here)
• St James' Park is good for cycling
• Algebraic Topology (via Zachary Baran)
• BBC football commentator Alistair Magowan has some interesting opinions about Theo Walcott

rrrabadoobadimbabumbadimrrrumbabado...

It's such an intricate sequence I don't think it could have been improvised, in which case how do you go about thinking through your rrrabadoobadims in such detail? My mind is boggling.

This track should definitely be used to teach children how to roll their 'r's.

Apparently Fu Manchu is the main villain in a racist series of 1930s novels. Not sure that will help anyone to interpret the song's lyrics, though it could be that they make no sense at all...

what do your function words say about you?

Thanks be to Robin Hanson, here is an article about a psychologist who draws conclusions about people from how they use what he calls 'function words': prepositions, pronouns, articles and the like. Apparently function words and content words are controlled by separate brain areas:

If a person with damage to their Broca's area were asked to describe a picture of, say, a girl and an old woman, he or she might say, "girl… ummm… woman… ahh… picture, uhhh… old." Someone with a damaged Wernicke's area might say, "Well, right here is one of them and I think she's next to that one. So if I see over there you'll see her too." To say that Broca's area controls style words and Wernicke's controls content words is a gross oversimplification. 

Nevertheless, it is one he seems to be prepared to go with, cutting style at the joints by separating writers into formalists, analysers and storytellers based on their function word distributions. I'm not sure that there is such a clear distinction between style words and content words as Pennebaker thinks, but that doesn't stop this general topic being interesting, and it certainly hasn't stopped me from furiously analysing my own word use. As a result I can now dramatically reveal this blog's top 20 words:

the (84 occurrences), and (67), to (63), a (61), of (55), is (46), it (35), I (30), in (30), that (24), this (20), on (17), you (17), about (15), are (15), as (14), he (13), with (13), being (13), by (12)

And he seemed like such a nice boy...

If you're intrigued, here are some online tests, a website that will find the most common words in some text and a  more academic seeming article on the topic by the same psychologist, with some more claims, such as that saying 'I' a lot is a sign of depression.

organised labour good, freedom fetishism bad

Here is a typically fascinating historical post by Rortybomb about an excellent thing that organised labour has caused but which due to some historical optical illusion it has not really received credit for: the ability to quit a job without being sent to prison or losing pay for work already done.

The interesting thing is that we have this ability because of a ban on certain types of contracts: by state decree you cannot agree to be punished for quitting, no matter how clear-headed and un-coerced you feel or are. As mr. Konczal explains, it was a bit illiberal, both conceptually and historically:

You may think that the sweeping away of feudal policies of detention, criminality and pecuniary punishments against workers were part of a 19th century movement of laissez-faire liberalism reworking the marketplace.  But you’d be wrong – the rhetoric of free contracts actually reinforced these arrangements.  For if a contract that has these punishment features are voluntarily entered into how can the state get in the way?  Judges and intellectuals emphasizing laissez-faire markets and free contracts couldn’t see a problem with these arrangements, as long as they were entered into freely.  Anything entered into freely and without coercion couldn’t be unfree.

Here's what that paragraph made me slightly tangentially think about:

It is complicated at best to explain why the post-ban situation was so much better if you restrict yourself to talking about 'freedom'. You need some way to explain how removing things people can legally do can make the same people freer. Maybe you need to distinguish freedoms from abilities somehow, or legal freedoms from other kinds. I'm not saying it can't be done - in fact I'm sure it has been tried and I'd love to see how - but it is definitely going to be complicated.

If, on the other hand, you talk in a 'better off' kind of way, the situation is incredibly simple: obviously the post-ban situation was better because loads of people had been made better off. There is perhaps the issue of saying why exactly the bosses being made worse off didn't matter as much, and that of saying why we can be so confident before factoring in the unforeseen butterfly-effect consequences of the ban in the year 4000, but those problems seem easier to ignore than the previous ones.

P.S I generally quite like coming at morality issues from this (ergh 'case-based') point of view, starting with 'everyone knows...' and then trying to make sense of that, because it allows you to have an opinion about moral issues as far as practical matters are concerned while quietly being a closet moral skeptic.

a bird or a big cow's eyes

The whole concert is here

university administration

I found this article by Ben Ginsberg (via Brain Leiter) quite thought provoking. I don't like the polemical style - it is a fairly scattergun rant against the evil kulak class of university administrators - and some of the facts seem a bit selective or anecdotal, but it's helpful to have it pointed out that the way universities spend their money might sometimes be wrong.

This passage prompted some looking up:

Until recent years, colleges engaged in little formal planning. Today, however, virtually every college and university in the nation has an elaborate strategic plan ... The typical plan takes six months to two years to write and requires countless hours of work from senior administrators and their staffs. 

A plan that was really designed to guide an organization’s efforts to achieve future objectives, as it might be promulgated by a corporation or a military agency, would typically present concrete objectives, a timetable for their realization, an outline of the tactics that will be employed, a precise assignment of staff responsibilities, and a budget. Some university plans approach this model. Most, however, are simply expanded “vision statements” that are often forgotten soon after they are promulgated. 

It turns out LSE has its own strategic plan, full of words like 'portfolio', vague plurals like 'audiences' and clumsy mistakes like saying 'restraints' instead of 'constraints'. The length, pictures and irrelevant vox pops are pretty grinding for anyone actually looking for a clear specification of goals, tactics and responsibilities, and noone says much about specific timetables or budgets. However I don't think it is purposeless like the 'vision statements' Ginsberg describes. To me the strategic plan sounds, looks and feels like a prospectus or sales brochure: a kind of document which definitely has a purpose. I'm intrigued to find out what is being sold and to whom.

Maybe the administrators are selling LSE to HEFCE in exchange for money or something, in which case fair enough. The other option (Ginsberg alludes to this) is that they are selling their own existence to the 5-hours-a-year trustees who are the only people who could fire them, in which case I guess that's bad. How to find out?

If you are interested in this question, you might find LSE's accounts, workforce information, staff numbers and salary scales useful.

retrospective electioneering: vote yes to AV!

Really neat way of expressing quite a complicated point. Can't seem to find who made it but I found it here. Here are mathematician Tim Gowers and philosopher Antony Eagle discussing the issue at (considerably in Gowers's case) greater length.

This is ace

Jesse Houchens, philosopher, runner, cellist, politician and door-rider extraordinaire, just started a blog. If you want to know how someone who is strikingly clever and insanely industrious goes about things, I predict this will be a good place to find out. Example:

So far, my time has been spent fairly leisurely...I had my first cello lesson...I completed my proof for Adv. Calc, worked on a problem in Logic and read the first chapter, and finished outlining my Principles of Reasoning Course. I also ran 9 miles.During my run, I reflected on what I should do my thesis on. 

He also likes ecco shoes, which is no bad thing.

Sometimes revolutions are bad

Democide watcher Rudy Rummel disturbs (my square brackets): 

The total for the communist democide before and after Mao took over the mainland is thus 3,446,000 [Revolutionary wars] + 35,226,000 [miscellaneous] + 38,000,000 [knowingly induced famine] = 76,692,000, or to round off, 77,000,000 murdered...

This exceeds the 61,911,000 murdered by the Soviet Union 1917-1987, with Hitler far behind at 20,946,000 wiped out 1933-1945. 

For perspective on Mao’s most bloody rule, all wars 1900-1987 cost in combat dead 34,021,000 — including WWI and II, Vietnam, Korea, and the Mexican and Russian Revolutions. Mao alone murdered over twice as many as were killed in combat in all these wars.

super soaker related material from youtube

DON'T TEASE ME!


 
 Skip to 2:00: It has a detachable...buttstock.



 I remember watching this when I was 5

brain teaser

From the Independent, via psychosurgery:


The operation, which involved scooping lumps out of the brain, as if it were ice-cream, was subsequently popularised in the US by Walter Freeman who trundled round in his “lobotomobile”, demonstrating his “ice pick and hammer technique” to any hospital that would let him in, and knocking off 10 ops a day in hotel rooms. Nothing could stop his campaign to make America mentally “healthier”.


First, isn't 'scooping lumps out of the brain, as if it were ice cream' a wonderful piece of imagery? 


Second, is this an example of a bad person? I can't make up my mind. Maybe he sincerely believed that chopping depressed peoples' brains up was a good idea. I'm sure people have believed weirder things. Moral luck blablabla. On the other hand perhaps a higher than normal level of sincerity is needed to make profitting from activities that involve electric shock induced seizures and wiggling picks through eye sockets an ok thing to do. Or maybe the fact that Freeman was so keen on such a gruesome procedure makes it hard to believe that he could have been a good person for other reasons. Hmm...

autumn albums

 The new Laura Marling album is streaming here

 and the first new Tom Waits song is here

What do ya think? 

Ehts pess! Ahm cuvaired en pess!

watch this bit

If you are at a loose end tonight at 10:35 and didn't catch it the first time round in May, make sure to watch the second episode of the gritty drama Field of Blood. Episode one is still available here.

It's an adaptation of a novel about an aspiring journalist called Paddy on the trail of a child murderer in 1980s Glasgow. Through luck and hard work she discovers that the main suspect is a young relative, presenting her with a stark choice between alienating her  catholic family if she writes about it and missing a career-kindling scoop if she doesn't. On top of this dilemma, Paddy also has to deal with her sexist, sharp-elbowed colleagues, charming but doubtless up to no good strangers and everyone's low expectations. Fortunately she manages to do so brilliantly by being tough, sensitive and daring. This exchange with the suspiciously 'Life on Mars'-ish unreconstructed-but-good-at-heart northern editor is typical (stopping at 'no it's not alright' will prevent story-spoilage).

Everything happens at a good pace, the script is fantastic and the characters are believable. Paddy is a brilliant character, acted really well by Jayd Johnson. I liked it more than the Hour as it is way more realistic, not to mention that it has voices that come from the right time and place and a female lead who deals with the baddies by flushing their heads down the toilet rather than by feeling sorry for herself in her office waiting for Freddy to sort everything out.

My only gripe was with the music that Paddy atmospherically listens to on her tower-block surrounded commute. It felt a bit too much like what a middle aged producer might selectively remember - the Talking Heads, Gang of Four and Paul Weller songs that you still read about in the guardian - than what someone would actually have had on. It's not that they aren't good, and there is something kind of cool and Greek chorusy about having 'she said she was ambitious so she accepts the process' on when that is like the plot, but more realism would have been even cooler I think. Anyway in the global economy of British TV dramas that is definitely a first-world problem.

Some new music that I like!

A fairly rare happening. Thank you Wendy Roby!

on the topic of stylish simplicity...

Jimmy Cliff is another person who has it

Internet Heroes: Andrew Gelman

Andrew Gelman is I think the person on the Internet whom I look up to the most, in the senses of being wowed by his cleverness, wanting to emulate how he writes and thinking he is a great human being.

Cleverness: Gelman was a major pioneer of Bayesian statistical methods, writing a fairly definitive textbook on the subject as well as intellectually championing it through a fairly vicious turf war in the 1980s and 90s. He does loads of really important research into stuff that makes a massive difference to lots of people. These include why it can be sensible to vote, the importance of distinguishing small but important effects from random variation (this is a massive one in my opinion, and features a bonus Kanazawa-bash) and how to display information well as well as reams of just as vital technical work on the theory and computer programmes that help people everywhere draw conclusions from data. It is not just the quantity of his cleverness that I think is look-up-to-able, but also the quality: he sees important problems and sets out to solve them, without falling into the trap of rushing to conclusions, ignoring the technical difficulty of actually finding important things out - loads of people in debates about politics and arguably the whole of economics suffer from this - or getting so into the technical stuff that it becomes it's own reward.

Not only is Andrew Gelman super smart, he also seriously stylish when it comes to writing. He has that knack of explaining a subtle point from first principles without it ever seeming complicated. He generally does this by pretending to go through his own thought process in a really funny and self-deprecating child's "Look! I found ten dollars!" kind of voice. Pretending to be simple allows him to explain things in the simplest way possible without seeming patronising, and also frequently lets him get away with delicious ironic caricatures when summarising other peoples' positions. I think writing in this purposefully unsophisticated common sense way must also help to push back against authority and received wisdom. It's such a key thing to understand that "putting it so simply a child could understand it" actually means "putting it so simply a child could say it"

Hearteningly, Gelman works, writes and thinks on style really hard. He recommends the book 'How to Talk so Children will listen and Listen so Children will Talk' as a how-to and often goes into thoughtful detail about his role models (generally Philip Roth, John Updike, Norman Mailer etc.) and the mechanics of their writing. He also gives us this enigmatic aphorism:

"Style is a subset of content, but the converse holds also: content is a subset of style"

Other than the no doubt wonderful effects of his academic and blogospheric work I don't have any direct evidence of Andrew Gelman being a fantastic human being. Maybe I've been duped by his style! On the other hand those things are pretty suggestive and, what's more, I saw him do a talk once and he sounds like John Malkovich.

Anyway the main thing you should do is READ THIS BLOG PLEASE.

An incredible start to a flim

The rest is awesome as well. Basically Richard Burton and friends being sad angry bastards and saying wise things, along with a healthily large amount of Humphrey Lyttletonish jazz. I think part of it made me cry when I was drunk once, and in my currently sober state I still find myself wanting to wear corduroys flannels and socks with diamonds on them.

I, Claudius, the TV series: it's good!

If you have 648 minutes to kill and £15 to burn then I suggest you buy I Claudius because it's really good. It's got incredible acting along with large amounts of rich dialogue, sex, double-crossing, violence and bizarrity. Best of all, it is long enough to do justice to its epicness but still taut and suspenseful, which is quite unusual.

The general idea is that Rome has just stopped being a republic and started being ruled by a rumbunctious Imperial family of RSC actors. While most of them busy themselves with debauchery, enunciation and murder, Claudius keeps his head down and acts the fool, quietly observing and judging and duly winding up sort of having the last laugh.

Highlights include John Hurt dancing, Brian Blessed raging and Patrick Stewart having hair.

One of the characters - Tiberius - is identical to Gordon Brown in his appearance, personality and story, being a dour dark-haired clunker ( 'his drills are bloodless battles and his battles bloody drills'), who seethes and plots in the background for most of his political life before becoming a paranoid emperor who lets himself be manipulated too easily. The only differences are accidents of history: as a pre New Labour Roman, Tiberius expresses his hate and insecurity through murder and sexual perversion rather than through negative press briefings.

Also, I Claudius is apparently massive in Bulgaria, so you get a bonus culture to learn about on top of the Roman and 1970s thespian ones.

you just picked up a hitcher...

This is my favourite song at the moment. The bit about looking a coyote right in the face is so cool: that edgy-but-unafraid look that surprised animals have is the most intriguing thing to play with in your head and try to put on humans. Apparently it's about Sam Shepard, who wrote the screenplay for the awesome and kind-of-similar-in-tone film Paris, Texas. Yay!