Category Archives: history

beliefs, history, people, personal, science, sexuality, thoughts

Infinitely Boggling Science

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Time to catch up on some Scientific American articles I’ve read over the last few weeks.

Remembrance of Things Future
An interesting article on how a writer in December 1900 thought things would be a century later. As expected some right:

  • ready cooked meals will be bought from the equivalent of bakeries
  • no street cars (ie. trams) in large cities

but mostly wrong:

  • mosquitoes, flies, rats and mice will have been exterminated
  • the alphabet will not longer contain C, X and Q
  • all traffic will be below ground, consequently
  • cities will be free of noise
  • Nicaragua and Mexico would be part of the USA

Full article
Complete list of original predictions

Infinity
Hard question of the year: Does infinity come in different sizes?
Hard answer: Yes.

This back-page “Fact or Fiction” article from January’s Scientific American contains some interesting insights, and some interesting mathematical sleights of hand. We probably all accept that there are an infinite number of integers (the natural numbers 1, 2, 3 …). And between each pair of adjacent integers there are an infinite number of fractional numbers (2.1, 2.11, 2.111, 2.112112 …). That means there are infinity to the power infinity real numbers (natural numbers and fractions) – which is an infinitely different ball-game in terms of defining the size of infinity.

Full article

Love, Sex and Robots
Finally an item from the March Scientific American which considers the proposition that we might one day (soon) be able to have a relationship with, marry and even have sex with, a robot of the opposite sex. Scary? Probably for most of us. Fantasy? Probably not. After all go back 100 years and the idea of male homosexual marriage was absurd. Apparently there is a lot to be said for allowing the socially inept [my phrase] to gain some mutual comfort from a relationship with a robot. And there are already experiments showing that children (at least) will spontaneously treat a robot as (almost) sentient, for example by putting it to bed when its batteries run flat. I see the arguments, but I remain firmly skeptical.

Full article
beliefs, current affairs, freedom of speech, history

Assassination of Benazir Bhutto

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Jilly, writing over at jillysheep has prompted me to write something about the assassination today of Benazir Bhutto, although I was not intending to do so as I don’t usually descend into international politics.

Sadly I have to agree with Jilly’s sentiments of being “shocked … but hardly surprised” and hoping “this does not make the situation in Pakistan worse than it already is, though I can’t help feeling it will do”.

This was a disaster waiting to happen, entirely predictable and IMO should have been avoidable without Ms Bhutto having to return to exile. But of course her presence was unwelcome by the existing dictatorship who could well have had some part in the affair (not that we will likely ever know if they did) and she is less of a problem dead than waiting in exile.

I fear that Imran Khan may well be the next martyr (sorry, victim) on the list. I also fear that Pakistan is likely to descend into a blood-bath before the situation gets sorted out – and that the sorting out could well be at the hands of the Taliban. I also reckon South Africa won’t be far behind once Nelson Mandela dies – I think he still wields a controlling influence over many of the factions. Similar internecine warfare seems quite likely in Zimbabwe too when Mugabe goes. And countries like Russia, while paying lip-service to democracy, seem still to be ruled by old-style dictators.

But should we really be surprised? I don’t think so. We must remember that these people have no tradition of democracy; they’ve always had tribal, monarchical and/or feudal rulers of one form or another. We started on the road to democracy some 700 years ago with Magna Carta and to get to meaningful and stable democracy took us two civil wars, an interregnum, numerous petty squabbles and over 500 years. And we expect to be able to impose our view of democracy on these countries effectively overnight. I ask you: what chance do Pakistan, South Africa, Zimbabwe or even Russia stand? Absolutely none!

Another Afghanistan or Iraq anyone?

books, history, quotes, thoughts, topographical

Not really so unlike today …

… England’s burgeoning prosperity, carried on a tide of coal and woollens and overseas ventures, and London’s unassailable claim to be England’s only city worth a fart, … with a boom that drew thousands of new dwellers to the capital each year, from across the land and from across the seas. And so the monasteries had at last been cleared, or their better halls kept and taken over for use by the city’s wealthy … grand town houses of the nobility now stretched along the Strand, each with its private stairs down to the Thames, for boats were the fastest and least troublesome way to travel about the crowded city, … and Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange, with its great open piazza and arcaded colonnade and hundred shops for goldsmiths and armourers and financiers, had opened on the east end of Cheapside, heralding London’s arrival as the great centre of European trade and finance it had become.

And with the grandeur of prosperity came the squalor of prosperity, for each year the city burst a bit more to accommodate the destitute and the adventurers and the ambitious and the refugees drawn by hope or impelled by need. Within the city, hovels and tenements jostled with grand houses and merchants’ stalls; just beyond the gates, beyond the reach of the law of the good bourgeois aldermen, the filthy cottages of the poor crowded along the main roads to the north and the east, colonizing the fields where cattle had grazed but a few years before. Farther out, the brick kilns of Islington attracted the more desperate, the homeless unemployed looking for a warm place to sleep while they scrounged for work. And across the river, to the south, the suburb of Southwark teemed with shipwrights and sailors and semi-skilled craftsmen and foreigners and prostitutes, and with the crowds who frequented prostitutes and the bull-baitings and bear-baitings nearby.

The watermen who jammed the Thames calling “Westward ho!” and “Eastward ho!” for fares, and the carriers who carted in water to all who could afford to save themselves from the sickness and death of drinking right from the foul river; and the speculators who divided up some of the old decaying palaces of the wealthy into rude tenements, and the prostitutes, and the bull-baiters, and the butchers, and the tavern keepers, and the prison wardens, all saw little to choose between grandeur and squalor: demand was demand, and prosperity was prosperity.

It was not democracy; but London’s hugger-mugger jumbling together of rich and poor, merchants and seamen, aristocrats and tradesmen, cosmopolitans and vagabonds, foreigners and yokels, meant that all kinds of men crossed paths in London’s streets and alleys and churches. The parish register … lists them all in their succinct catalogue of baptisms, marriages, and burials: knight, parson, stranger; baker, cobbler, carpenter; gentleman, silkweaver, scrivener; merchant, blackamoor, vintner, broker, sugarmaker, porter. And so they all lived upon and walked upon the same streets, and rubbed elbows in the same taverns, and occasionally even the same prisons; and they heard things, and knew things, well outside the conventional stations that Elizabethan society assigned to men.

From: Stephen Budiansky, Her Majesty’s Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Franis Walsingham and the Birth of Modern Espionage; Plume/Penguin; 2006; ISBN 0452287472

amusements, books, history, thoughts

Zen Mischievous Moments #133

Today’s Daily Telegraph reports on Clive James interviewing himself at the Edinburgh International Books Festival. The article includes:

Did we know, he asked, that by decree, no rank below Major could wear make-up in the Romanian army during the war – a gem first divulged to him, incidentally, by Anthony Powell.

Full article here.

[With thanks to Julian Allason]

amusements, current affairs, history, science, thoughts, topographical

Zen Mischievous Moments #132

From “Feedback” in New Scientist, 04 August 2007

Calendar chaos

[X] was, sitting at his computer, when the calendar window of his Microsoft Outlook office program started scrolling uncontrollably back through time. He watched, helpless, as it zoomed back through two world wars, past the Great Reform Act of 1832, the French revolution and American independence – stopping only in the 1760s when, he guesses, a frantic IT worker somewhere in the bowels of the famous London building he works in must have fixed the network glitch.

Naturally, [X] was intrigued to see how far back in time he could personally make Outlook’s calendar go. Trying to view even earlier dates, he got stuck at All Fool’s day 1601. Putting this into a famous web search engine revealed no special event in history that day. It did, however, provide a link to a “rather weird” website devoted to the work of a genealogist named John Mayer at www.arapacana.com/glossary/mb_mn.html. This notes that “Outlook provides a series of perpetual calendars covering something less than 2898 years, from 1 April 1603 to 29 August 4500,” but that users can manually scroll back to 1601.

Feedback’s further searches suggest that 1 April 1601 was declared the beginning of time by the authors of the COBOL computer-programming language …

Oh and for the geeks amongst you, Outlook 2003 will also let you schedule meetings during the missing days, 3-13 September 1752, when British Empire changed to the Gregorian Calendar.

One is left with just one question: Why?

history, topographical

The Strange Things One Discovers …

Quite by chance I was earlier today reading the Transport for London webpage on the history of the Central Line, and came across this oddity about our local Underground station:

[…] Greenford station, the entrance hall was at ground level but the railway was on a viaduct, and thus became the first, and only, station on the London Underground to have escalators [actualy only one escalator these days] leading from street level UP to the trains.

arts, history

Exhibition Day

We really knackered ourselves today — somehow we did three London exhibitions. But it was worth it. In order we saw:

Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design at the V+A.
We got there at opening time (10 AM); good move because by the time we left there were long queues. I love Leonardo’s work, but this exhibition left me disappointed. It is just one room and consists entirely of Leonardo drawings and notebook pages – not surprising as it sets out to look at how Leonardo thought on paper. The drawings are stunning – and tiny! Many sheets are no bigger than A5/8vo. But the level of detail is amazing, as is Leonardo’s minute, but clear writing. I’m glad to have seen the Leonardo drawings “in the flesh”, but as I say I did come away somewhat disappointed.

At Home in Renaissance Italy, also at the V+A.
This exhibition is next door to the Leonardo – and what a contrast. Two large exhibition rooms which leave you with a sense of dazzling colour. To quote the V+A’s website “[The exhibition] reveals for the first time the Renaissance interior’s central role in the flourishing of Italian art and culture. The exhibition provides an innovative three-dimensional view of the Italian Renaissance home, presented as object-filled spaces that bring the period to life … [it] places outstanding art and domestic objects within their original contexts. Together they highlight the rhythms and rituals of Renaissance living.” And what objects! Magnificent paintings, furniture, textiles, pottery. You can just sit and admire them all day and still come away stunned. Brilliant. See it!

After lunch at the V+A (excellent café, by the way) it was on to Tate Britain.

Holbein in England at Tate Britain.
“Hans Holbein … effectively brought the Renaissance in painting from continental Europe to Britain. Through an outstanding collection of paintings [and drawings] brought together from around the world, this exhibition documents the thrill of the court and life in Tudor England, reflecting the unsettled history and politics of the time.” And what stupendous paintings! Many old favourites, known from reference works, but also some new ones. All interleaved with Holbein’s drawings which show how he worked a sketch into the finished portrait – the Tudor court’s equivalent of a portrait photograph. This is a huge exhibition – at 9 rooms it dwarfs the two V+A exhibitions combined. And each is filled with just the most stunning art. Another must see. But be prepared to queue; it is very popular. Tickets are timed; buy them in advance if you can.

Sadly all three exhibitions are on only until 7 January, so you’ll need to move quickly to get to them!

beliefs, history, quotes

Quote: Roman Worship

The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher; as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.

[Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire]