Some love and deeper understanding from the internet

Read these and you will be happier than you are now:

A treasure trove of information about lighting

A letter from Keynes to FDR featuring the following wise words about dealing with people:

Business men [aka people in general] ... are ... allured and terrified by the glare of publicity, easily persuaded to be 'patriots', perplexed, bemused, indeed terrified, yet only too anxious to take a cheerful view, vain perhaps but very unsure of themselves, pathetically responsive to a kind word. You could do anything you liked with them, if you would treat them (even the big ones), not as wolves and tigers, but as domestic animals by nature, even though they have been badly brought up and not trained as you would wish...

A Persian Poetry resource

Robert Paul Wolff's brilliant descriptions of Weber, the study of society, Hume, Marx, Afro-American Studies and violence

Pigs might fry

Ha the Sun is hilarious:

SHOCKED Dave Johnson thought he'd made one of his rasher decisions...

how to cover a song well

maths without paper

A wonderful reminder that most things people think about - even differential equations - aren't really very complicated:


Interactive Exploration of a Dynamical System from Bret Victor on Vimeo.

For more stuff like this check out the video maker's "kill math" project, which begins with the following stirring manifesto:

The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols. 

When most people speak of Math, what they have in mind is more its mechanism than its essence. This "Math" consists of assigning meaning to a set of symbols, blindly shuffling around these symbols according to arcane rules, and then interpreting a meaning from the shuffled result. The process is not unlike casting lots. 

This mechanism of math evolved for a reason: it was the most efficient means of modeling quantitative systems given the constraints of pencil and paper. Unfortunately, most people are not comfortable with bundling up meaning into abstract symbols and making them dance. Thus, the power of math beyond arithmetic is generally reserved for a clergy of scientists and engineers (many of whom struggle with symbolic abstractions more than they'll actually admit). 

We are no longer constrained by pencil and paper. The symbolic shuffle should no longer be taken for granted as the fundamental mechanism for understanding quantity and change. Math needs a new interface.

I found it on the computational legal studies blog, which sounds dry but is actually an awesome collection of visualisations.

I'll have none at all

The radio said that someone has recorded Sandy Denny's narrowly pre-suicide lyrics, which I find slightly weird. Nice to get a reminder to listen to her more though.

Also, I would like to encourage you to eat oranges: it is both fun and tasty.

well I never

 From wikipedia (my bold):

In 1948 the Board of Governors of the BBC asked the head of the Variety Department, Michael Standing, to devise a guiding set of moral standards and protocols for the production of all BBC radio and television programmes ... Standing took to implementing his guidance with eccentric zeal. In June 1949 he issued a memo to all staff in which he forbade BBC employees to illuminate any room with an Anglepoise lamp unless the main ceiling or wall light was also illuminated: Standing held a firm belief that a man working at a desk in a confined space with only the light from a low-wattage lamp would nurture furtive ideas and produce degenerate programme material. 

Are you sure you are the 99%?

Catchy and socially beneficial as it might be, I have a bit of a problem with this slogan.

It certainly seems that society benefits a tiny minority far more than the rest, though the real situation is probably a bit more complicated than harming 99% of people while benefitting 1%. Still, this lack of detail is forgivable: almost by definition you can't expect slogans to be nuanced, and it is probably doing enough movement-galvanising good to offset its misleadingness.

My issue is with student activists who identify as members of the harmed group rather than the benefitters: by and large I think they are wrong. It seems to me that, if you are a student at a high-prestige university, either in the UK or in America, then you are probably not in the bottom 99% for society's impact on your overall life prospects.

For one thing, you have the option of quite easily joining the financial benefitters by following some fairly simple and googleable steps. Most of the activists I know are clever, sociable and non-disabled etc enough that, with the help of their pieces of paper, they could (and who knows, maybe will) secure top-income-percentile jobs if they really wanted. In my opinion, possessing this option puts you in the top 1% whatever your actual lifetime earnings: most people don't get the luxury of choosing between tremendous incomes and fulfilling lives.

On a global level, the idea that a significant number of top-university students in the UK/USA are in the losing 99% is just silly, and when you think about countries with wars and famines, or where large numbers of people can't even afford running water or mosquito nets, it is actually a bit perverse.

More generally, I think there is a quite deep effectiveness vs beauty issue here. It is far more effective sales tactics for the spokespeople for an oppressed group to be members of it themselves, but often it just isn't the case. Being a spokesperson and a genuinely oppressed person at the same time is quite difficult as it requires lots of free time, education, charisma-development opportunities, powerful friends and other things that tend not to be available to the genuinely oppressed. This problem can be overcome by pretending to be oppressed in the style of Gandhi, but there is something really ugly about doing that I think.

Then there is the whole animal rights thing...

Some of the best bits from a wacky film

Three more things to like about Venus in Furs (which aren't obvious from the video)

1) Lines like "I was really diggin' this chick"
2) Klaus Kinski in a turban
3) Some riveting musical-sexual-paranormal revenge scenes

Also the singer is Barbara Mcnair.

If this seems like your kind of thing, then as well as watching the whole film you should also go to the portobello pop-up cinema, where you can watch more like it on a massive screen, under a bridge, while eating/drinking. In my opinion it is way cool.

Oh I did a Hamlet reference without noticing. GET ME.

activism vs autonomy

Here is the amazon link to 'The Making of Pro-Life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works', a book whose review I just found really insightful. It's by a sociologist who interviewed about 100 committed anti-abortion activists to try to find out about how they got involved and what keeps them going.

The gist is, activism is more often the cause of the pro-lifers' beliefs than the result:

their beliefs about abortion became solidified, important, and fully developed during interactions with other activists after initial activism.

 Three sub things:

1) There are surprising parallels between right wing religious pro-life activism and left wing secular anti-fees activism. For example:

 Activists are also not uniform about how to end abortion; these beliefs create what Munson calls “social movement streams” of mutually exclusive individuals and organizations demarcated by their focus on how to end abortion—whether through formal politics (e.g., lobbying elected officials), direct action (protesting outside abortion clinics), individual outreach (providing counseling through crisis pregnancy centers), or public outreach (trying to teach the general public why abortion is wrong)...These streams structure and cause conflict within the movement, and activists tend to belong to the streams where their initial activism began.

2) Whether or not people join a cause seems to depend less on their pre-activism beliefs than on accidents: happening to attend a meeting, being at a vulnerable point in their life etc:

Rather than being drawn to the movement by strong beliefs about the morality of abortion, many activists’ careers began through direct and often coincidental contact with movement participants at turning points in their lives, or times of transition such as geographical relocation or assuming new roles ... Many of Munson's participants actually held pro-choice beliefs or were indifferent to the issue of abortion before becoming activists ... Even activists who were initially sympathetic to the pro-life movement only had vague and undeveloped ideas about abortion before becoming highly involved in the movement

Activism is often a really good thing - it has caused and is currently causing lots of beneficial political changes, maybe even most of them - but it also predictably reduces your autonomy to such an extent that, whatever your prior views, it is a fair bet that if you turn up at a few pro-life protests you will end up believing abortion is wrong. This strikes me as quite a big issue for movements like anarchism that encourage both activism and autonomy. Also a reason not to demonise EDL members I think: it could have been you!

Anyway I'm fascinated by the whole topic and am now reading the book on google books. Surprisingly enough LSE library doesn't seem to have it...

Also I heard about the book via Rortybomb, which is an incredible blog

An easy way to tell that a book is good

It's How the laws of physics lie by Nancy Cartwright if you're interested

deformity chauvinism

Another distressed reader, Ed Strydevog, writes in:

Dear Aunt Teddy, 

I am sorry to say that a recent quote from Guillermo del Toro has alarmed me. Here it is: 

The first thing you love is monsters. I don't like psycho killers with potato peelers; I'm a monster guy or a creature guy. I love the creature and the creation of that. I love universal monsters*, I love freaks, and I love everything that is deformed because that is beautiful for me. I cultivate my body shape through that principle. Perfection is impossible, imperfection we can aspire to achieve, and I think monsters do that beautifully... 

Phil Nugent finds this sentiment great, but to me it is troublesome. It's not the general principle of finding deformed things beautiful which riles me - that's great and possibly even necessary. It's not even with the idea of artistic expression through beautiful deformed monsters: that's great too. The problem I have is that there are many non-physical deformities, like smooth-bastardness or love-sickness, which can be interesting and beautiful but for one reason or another are hard to show convincingly in monsters, and which del Toro seems to belittle.  

My unhappy feeling is that Mr. del Toro is expressing deformity chauvinism, the awful view that physically unusual monsters are the only show in town when it comes to beautiful deformity. Physically deformed eye-handed droopy-skinned monsters good, mentally deformed psycho-killers with potato peelers bad. Needless to say, deformity chauvinism is a view that sits most ill alongside del Toro's further claim to 'love everything that is deformed', and one I cannot share. 

I write to you now proposing a more through-going way of admiring deformity. Henceforth, let us not privilege the physical. Let us instead embrace the sublter ways of seeming weird, such as dressing un-deformedly so as better to be able to display your mental disfigurement. Let monsters be monsters and psychos be psychos, each with their own contorted, unique and beautiful way of being imperfect. Let it never again be said that a potato peeler is no deformity! 

If you would only lend my cause the boon of internet promotion which you lately lent to vibes fm, the poor beautiful psychos might just stand a a chance. 

Yours in hope,
Ed Strydevog 

My reply

Ed, you have expressed your heartfelt view so cogently and passionately that I have little to add. Here, though, is a video:  

 

A Correction: some readers may have taken from my previous agony column, which included phrases like 'radio 4 in the afternoon is ... a pile of balls', the mistaken impression that radio 4 was not a good channel to listen to in the afternoon. I would like to take this opportunity to correct this misinterpretation: what I meant to say was that radio 4 in the afternoon is actually sometimes quite good because it has some interesting documentaries. Many thanks to reader Olive Grymes for pointing out this unfortunate ambiguity.

Uh oh

This article features the following:

An incredible acronym
The British Association of Static Sound-systems
An astonishing fact
The head organisers of the Notting Hill carnival for the past four years have been two unpaid volunteers.
A worrying development
The carnival might not happen after 2012 because they both just quit.

I would quite like to hear the other side of the story - ie from whoever the organisers lost the support of - and maybe a bit naively think the lack of massive corporate sponsorship might be a good thing. If anyone has other information about this then please tell.