Last Friday I went to one of "Brian's last Fridays". Brian is Brian Micklethwait. I've mentioned him before, but this time is going to be different, because standards are going to improve all round in this blog from now on, and so I'm going to explain who he is. Brian is, of course, a giant of the mighty UK Libertarian Alliance. He regularly posts on Libertarian Samizdata, and he hosts meetings on the last Friday of each month.
At Friday's meeting, Perry De Havilland, the Samizdata meister, talked about blogging. And I learned that I'm going to have to sharpen my act up.
That's why this blog is link-rich. Bloggers link to everything, because it's etiquette, and it pays. Links mean hits, and hits mean ego-gratification. If Bill Gates had a blog, I'd link to it right now and say what a great job he's doing. But if he has got one, then he's hiding behind a pseudonym - HornyGeekInSeattle, or some such.
I had been planning to slip this blog's URL into my email sig and let people notice it in ones and twos. After all, if you can't be private and secluded on the Internet, where can you? But I understand now that the blogosphere is a hit jungle, and you have to be a hitslut if you're to be noticed at all.
Now this sort of link is dead easy to do. But the longer-lasting links that should be floating on the left of the screen are more difficult. That's why they're not floating right now. After poking around in my settings, I decided, in my ignorance, that it must be peculiarly hard to create these links, involving knowledge of HTML and radical interference with the template. A conversation with Patrick Crozier at Brian's meeting dispelled these cloudy fears, born of ignorance, and replaced them with hard certainty, born of knowledge. It is absurdly hard. Well, annoying and fiddly, anyway. But with the help of Patrick and others, even I can crack it.
I'm afraid Patrick might now find himself bombarded with requests for more help from thousands of blog dummies like me, who will see his name when they come flooding here because of all the links that I'm going to be posting from now on.
By the way, our monarchy, celebrated for its incomparable pageantry, has a fine Website. And look what Her Majesty is offering!
This is your chance to win a family ticket to the main events in London over the Golden Jubilee Weekend, 1-4 June 2002. Enter our free on-line competition by 10 May 2002. Click on the Golden Ticket to start.
Hurry over there right now!
I'm going to mail her right away with the news of my personal commendation. Once she's linked back, I expect a fair proportion of the UK tourist trade to be passing through here.
Apparently blogs can be broadly classified into journals and punditry. The distinction is that punditry is occasionally of interest to someone other than the author. One qualification: journal blogs written by hot babes describing their active sex lives can be interesting to others. These, of course, are liable to be fiction.
It's a far cry from hot babes to the Blessed Virgin Mary, celebrated for her incomparable immaculateness, but she too has a pretty cool site. I don't see any competitions up there at the moment, but it's still unmissable. Just skim through that list of all the people, places and things that she's patron saint of:
… Arizona, Arkansas, armies of Jalisco, Army of the Andes, diocese of Austin, Texas, Australia, Austria, aviators, … Chilean navy, China, clothworkers, coffee house keepers, coffee house owners, Colombia, Colorado, … fishermen, fishmongers, flooding, Florida, flyers, diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend Indiana, France, French air crews, … diocese of Monterey California, motherhood, motorcyclists, … storms, Switzerland, diocese of Syracuse New York … Tanzania (8 December 1964), tapestry workers, Tennessee, Teutonic Knights, Texas, tile makers, travellers,
I'm going to pray to her right away. If I can just get a link from her, I'll be getting a fair slice of those coffee-house keepers, French air crews and tapestry workers. I hope blogger.com is going to be up to this traffic.
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The other night, as we looked through this blog, I pointed out to Brian that he had a name-check (March 24). He thought to himself, "How the hell is anyone going to know who I am, you stupid bastard?" Out loud he said he was flattered that I hadn't felt it necessary to explain who he was. This shows you how courteous Brian can be. He's since said some more courteous things about me on Samizdata (April 28).
I'm in that same Woolworth's cafe again. You see that it's a haven for writers, artists and intellectuals, a Deux Magots of Bedford town centre. Though as far as I can judge from looking at my fellow customers, an undiscovered one.
Perhaps because they stop doing chips at 2:30.
More from Grayling's The Meaning of Things (see previous posts).
"... for liberty is not licence, it is something better: it is open-minded, tolerant and reasonable restraint." (p. 141)
Oh no it isn't!
If I wore tee-shirts with slogans on them, I'd have one reading: "Liberty is licence." And thanks to Grayling, I now think I'd put that on the back, so that people could see on the front: "Liberty is not open-minded, tolerant and reasonable restraint...."
I'm writing this in the Old Market Inn, next to the Cathedral Close in Winchester. I'm here on a nostalgic day trip, leaving my wife and family carless in Bedford. I tried the Old Coach House, opposite the Guildhall, but walked out when I found it was dominated by a TV screen showing motor sport. When I came into this pub, I didn't notice the piped music. Wish I didn't notice it now.
I've just pocketed a sachet of vinegar from the bowl on the table. I've read that they can make good Cartesian divers. You drop one into a water-filled plastic bottle and screw on the lid. When you squeeze the bottle, the pressure increase compresses the air bubble in the sachet, it becomes denser overall, and sinks. Since I've just told my readers this in a kids' book I'm writing, I think I'd better confirm it.
[Later: it didn't work. But a large pen-top weighted with paper-clips performs spectacularly.]
When you're next in Winchester, I can recommend Flower's bitter.
A specific incident had told me that I needed a day visiting my birth-town alone. It was when I was here with my family a couple of years ago, and stopped the car near the house where I spent some of the later years of my childhood.
It was in a country road above the city, called Kilham Lane. On that visit I was bewildered by the houses that surrounded me. Some landmarks must have survived from the times when I had known it, but I was too embarrassed to ask for the five minutes I needed to get my bearings. The house that seemed most likely to be mine looked like nothing I could remember.
[5:24 pm On the motorway, returning.]
I took the wrong turning when I was trying to get into Kilham Lane,and drove into a hilltop suburb that has surrounded my old home. An ancient water tower that had been lost and inaccessible in the woods in my time is now an arts centre, forsooth.
Given the leisure to get my bearings, I could identify my house easily enough. Or rather, the site where it once stood. The new broad-fronted monster, covered with a yellow wash, could not be the modest house I lived in, no matter how much extended. It blocks off the view from the road of what had been a long garden behind. Ornate lamp standards stand at the entrance. Usually buildings from one's childhood seem to have shrunk when revisited in later life, but the houses along the lane seem to have grown in stature. Flanking one side of a narrow track, they are places for private people.
The large pastures opposite seem unchanged. The brick wall that bordered one side of the lane further along is still there, though this has shrunk - it's not the long, high canvas for chalk graffiti that I remember.
The house we lived in before this one was a council house in Cromwell Road, a mile down Stanmore Hill. I don't know whether the council or the occupiers now own it. But its exterior is as shabby and hopeless as I assume it was 50 years ago. It is still a place to be escaped rather than improved.
[Later I posted the following on the Peter Symonds, Winchester, Unofficial Nostalgia Corner site. Peter Symonds' was a boys' grammar school when I was there. In later years it was transformed into a sixth-form college for both sexes.]
Recent graduates of PSC will probably want to skip this post. It consists strictly of old-geezer reflections on how the place looked to me last Sunday, when I visited Winchester on a solitary nostalgic day trip. I was comparing it with my recollections from 1955–'63, so everything I say will be very old news indeed for anyone who's stayed in touch with the place. But it might be of interest to those who've stayed as cut off from Peter Symonds as I have over the years.
I wandered round the town first, which I've seen only fleetingly over the years. Well, guess what: some things are different after 40 years. In Southgate Street the hotel (I think it used to be called the Southgate Hotel) now calls itself the Hotel Du Vin, forsooth. I remember the window of Chaplin's the gunmaker as being filled with sports guns. Now it displays nothing more martial than Swiss army knives and Barbour jackets.
In Jewry St, there's now a Bottoms Up wine superstore where once I lusted after Hornby Dublo train sets (was it Curry's then?). In the High Street, God Begot House is now the home of a pizzeria.
In City Road there's surely some mistake with the bus stops. The signs claim that something called the 5c goes to Chandler's Ford, and there's no mention of the no. 47 that I caught every schoolday for years.
The stop is right next to the barber who must take the blame for most of the haircuts seen in school photos for decades. The shop-front doesn't seem to have been touched since I last went there. The name rings a bell: 'James H Marsh – Gentlemen's Hairdresser'.
The Theatre Royal has been revived for many years – as a theatre, not as the cinema I knew. The Odeon Cinema has vanished from North Walls, but the Reference Library that it housed is still nearby.
Back down in the town, I couldn't bear to go into the grotesque Brooks shopping centre (that campanile!). Instead I visited Debenham's. In the days when it was Sheriff and Ward's, my father was its display manager. His window-dressing skills won many prizes, including the first foreign holidays our family ever had. It's still a bit quaint, despite opening on a Sunday, but I was disappointed that cash isn't still whisked around the place by vacuum tubes.
Driving to Peter Symonds and parking in Boscobel Rd, I found that the tuck-shop had gone. ("What the hell is a tuck-shop?" Go read Bunter and Jennings... .)
I wandered around the grounds unbothered by anyone. There was some event going on in a lecture-room, and there were a couple of families with kids and dogs in the grounds, down by the old CCF hut.
Nearly every view from the old classrooms seemed to be blocked by a new building. The place is a construction site right now, with what looks like student accommodation going up, eating away at the top of the great field. I don't remember the Bronze Age burial mound right in front of the old classroom block. Perhaps all the masters (for thus we called them in those days of yore, children) were buried there when the school became a college. The old and new buildings are one almighty jumble, with no hint of planning or landscaping that I could discern.
I peered through the windows of the Freeman block, which was opened in my time at the school. I was looking for the long, narrow, raked desks on which we played a type of table football with coins propelled with rulers. In that classroom I was once unjustly humiliated when assisting Jock Shields with a science lecture. (He wasn't to blame – it was all the fault of ... but don't get me started on that… .)
And there I remember Jock once being overcome with grief when giving the Sixth Form a general studies talk on sex, of all things. (He'd given us a choice of that or some other subject, which I forget, and we'd made the predictable choice. We gazed in awe at what we'd unleashed.)
I couldn't recognize the room. It has somehow been shrunk into an ordinary classroom.
Down at the south-east corner of the field, that is surely the same building that was the canteen block where I avoided as much as I could of the detestable school meals. And that glorified Portacabin seems to be exactly the same temporary prefab that appeared in my time, housing four rooms. In one of them I undertook to learn Greek instead of a second modern language, because I was interested in Greek science and philosophy, as gleaned from Mentor paperbacks. Once I remember sitting there watching heavy snow falling silently and turning the twigs of the hedge outside into thick white branches of ice. Whether snow was falling or not, I didn't do a stroke of work, and Greek and I dropped each other after a couple of terms. In that time I managed to provoke the gentle Oink into hitting me, which must be some kind of record.
I wanted to get into the old main school buildings somehow, and ventured past a Staff Only sign to try doors, but everything seemed locked. As I started to walk away, a guy seeming to be a janitor called after me. When I told him I was taking a nostalgic wander round, he let me in without question and left me to my own devices.
The Hall was locked, and I passed through various offices up to the first floor. On a wall I saw something that didn't feel at all familiar, and yet should have been well known to me: a model in a glass case of a merchantman, the SS Pixie, "... presented by Col. Savage in 1936. The hull is hollow and contains engine bearers. It may be fitted with an engine at some future date and sailed in the swimming bath." The modern caption explains that the swimming bath was demolished in April 1993. I wonder if the Pixie was ever sailed in it.
Looking in from the south through the windows on the first floor, I found that the Hall doesn't really exist any more. It's been entirely taken over by a library. I could see nothing but book cabinets and tables. The classrooms leading off from the Hall, the lairs of John Cooksie, Ernie Gladwell, Oofy Priestland and the rest, have been turned into reading bays. I couldn't see what had happened to the stage on which Doc Freeman had led morning assemblies, coughing his heart out at the last.
It looks as if a new function has been forced on an unwelcome and ungainly old relic, the price exacted for permitting it to survive at all. That's rather what I feel about the whole 'campus'. The old and inconvenient part of it is there on sufferance, and will gradually be cut out as the years go by.
And even though I was never very happy at the school, and for years after leaving spent a lot of energy on detesting it, I shall be sorry about the school's death. Because the place is also an old and inconvenient part of my heart, but one that can't be cut out.
David Friedman's site is a gold-mine. David is the son of the better-known Milton, and carries his dad's freedom project to lengths that the old boy might find disconcerting.
My attention was caught by what he describes as his latest project (though I imagine he dreams up several new projects every week), The Journal of Interesting Economics:
" …. It consists of a page of links to webbed articles with recommendations by volunteer referees. Anyone can publish, anyone can referee. Whether people read what you publish will depend on your reputation and the reputations of the referees who recommend your article.... When deciding whether to publish an article in the journal, ask yourself whether it is something that readers, in particular economists, would read for pleasure or only for duty."
The handful of articles that are up at the moment are:
The Paradox of Choice: With an Application to Free Will Versus Predestination
by Douglas W. Allen
The Measurement of Inequality, Concentration and Diversification
by Fred Foldvary
"Economics and Evolutionary Psychology"
by David Friedman
"Contracts in Cyberspace"
by David Friedman
"Nuclear Proliferation : a Blessing or a Curse?"
by Bertrand Lemennicier
Other topics that appear on his home page give a flavour of the site:
· Living Paper: An Open Source Project to produce computer programs that teach economic ideas.
· My Books
· Work in Progress: My Recent Drafts
· My Courses
· My Kid's School
· Products I Would Like to See
· Me
· Miscellaneous
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My current writing project is Future Imperfect, a book about technological change in the near future and its consequences. A partial draft is webbed; comments welcome..
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My latest book is Law's Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters, published by Princeton University Press. It is accompanied by a book web page, which contains images of the entire book along with an extensive system of links--think of them as virtual footnotes--to additional material. An earlier draft is also webbed, in a somewhat more readable form, but without the links.
… and much more. A nice feature is that he posts up the entire draft of whatever book is in progress at the time. He has amenable publishers… .
> Does anyone seriously think that the imperial system
is easier to understand than the metric system?
I think 'ease of understanding' is mostly a matter of familiarity.
> If you were starting from scratch would you design a
system where sub-units were sometime 1/12,
sometimes 1/14 and sometimes 1/16 of a unit? Or
possibly a multiple of 144? Why is there some mad
number of yards in a mile?
If I were starting from scratch I would certainly want to be able to halve a quantity repeatedly, so I'd consider multiples of 2, 4, 8, 16 ...
I might also want to be able to divide evenly by 3, so that would suggest 12 = 3 x 4
But it's strange that the same multiple isn't used all the way up a chain of units: eg, 16 drams make an ounce, 16 ounces make a pound, but 14 pounds make a stone, 8 stones make a hundredweight, 20 hundredweights make a ton ... It suggests that the units originated as being of useful sizes in different trades (the ounce for grocers, the hundredweight for millers, etc), and were then standardized and connected with each other by some unsung rationalizers unknown to history.
Having 14 pounds in a stone is pretty hard to explain, I admit. 14 is as inconvenient as ... well, 10.
> Is it easy to remember how main grains in an ounce?
How many ounces in a ton, how many pounds in a stone,
how many fluid ounces in a gallon?
Once again: just a matter of familiarity...
The lesson I draw from the complexity of the traditional systems is that such complexity is largely irrelevant to their usefulness. As shown by how reluctantly people give them up.
And also that it's very hard for social engineers (such as designers of systems of weights and measures) to know everything that's going to be important to the users of their creations.
It's interesting to speculate how successful the metric system would be in everyday life given fair competition with traditional systems, rather than receiving massive state promotion and coercion. Not very, I suspect. (In scientific uses, the case is different.)
I'm reading A C Grayling 's The Meaning of Things (Weidenfeld, 2001). I was attracted by the title, and I knew his name from Radio 4's discouragingly titled weekly think-in The Moral Maze. I must have been more than usually somnolent during his contributions, because I had no clear picture of his attitudes. I got the book and found that it's a collection of articles based on contributions to The Guardian. But it was too late then.
The cover photo shows Grayling with flowing hair, cravat, tweedy jacket – every inch a Fifties Fabian intellectual. His feet are not visible, so we have to guess at the sandals.
They're very short pieces. I've just read the one on fear.
Talk about prissy! Of horror films, roller-coaster rides, drug trips and so on: "These internal and external stimuli are rather like the salt and pepper that some folk sprinkle on food; ... " Some folk, indeed! I read this while feasting on salt-sprinkled chips in a Woolworth cafeteria.
He writes:
"In addition to paralysing effective action, fear is the source of many social ills. It gives rise to superstitions and religions, to feelings of racial and tribal antipathies [sic], to hostility to the new or different, to rigidity and conservatism, to adherence to outworn practices and beliefs whose only recommendation is their familiarity. ..."
A Guardianesque recitation of pet evils.
Now, Grayling does not actually say that nothing other than fear can give rise to superstitions (for example, humanity's excessive talent for pattern-making); or to religions (for example, a sense of awe or humility); or racial and tribal antipathies (such as a well-founded sense of differences in sentiments and interests); or to hostility to the new or different, etc (such as an accurate perception of the virtues of the old and the harmfulness of the new). He does not say this, and he would claim not to believe it. But his words show what he thinks about those who do not love the Guardian view of the world. They must be scared. There can't be any other explanation.
I think Grayling could provide me with a fair few texts for sermons in the days to come.
