amusements, pleasures, science, thoughts

Mapping the Cat Brain

Oh, yes. Cat’s certainly do have brains. They have very well developed, subtle and devious brains. In fact it has been shown recently that Cats Adore and Manipulate Women. They do it to men as well, but either they don’t like men as much or we’re more immune to it.

The bond between cats and their owners turns out to be far more intense than imagined, especially for cat aficionado women and their affection reciprocating felines, suggests a new study.
[…]
The researchers determined that cats and their owners strongly influenced each other, such that they were each often controlling the other’s behaviors. Extroverted women with young, active cats enjoyed the greatest synchronicity, with cats in these relationships only having to use subtle cues, such as a single upright tail move, to signal desire for friendly contact.

And then today I came across this mapping of the cat’s brain at CatStuff.

In the light of this latest research the diagram clearly ought to contain a tiny gland for sniffing out male humans and a much larger gland for detecting females.

Oh come on lads, you already knew we stood no chance!

books, current affairs, history, science

And the Managers are Still in Charge of the Loony Bin …

This is a long quote and deserves a post all of it’s own.

Sir Hartley Shawcross, after the Labour victory [1945], had announced: ‘We are the masters at the moment.’ But who were the ‘we’ in this sentence?

The most eloquent answer to this question in art is found in Anthony Powell’s comic masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time, the first volume of which, A Question of Upbringing, was published in 1951. The story begins in the year 1911 at an unnamed boarding school, obviously Eton, as the hero, Nick Jenkins, ambles idly through the winter mist to have tea with his chums. As he makes his way back to the house he passes a very different sort of boy – it is Widmerpool, who forces himself to have a run each afternoon. Widmerpool appears to be no more than a figure of fun in the school section of the book, but even in this early glimpse of him, the narrator and his readers become aware that he is a figure who lives by the will, in some mysterious sense more in tune with his times than the languid, bohemian Nick, who wishes to live by the imagination.

Powell was a close friend of Malcolm Muggeridge at this date, and the two men would often walk round Regent’s Park together discussing the fundamental clash on which the emergent novel was to feed, namely the war between the will and the imagination. Power mania had been an obsession of Muggeridge’s since his Marxist days: what draws men and women to power, how they become addicted to it, how it takes over from other appetites. One of Muggeridge’s beliefs was that power addicts were often dyspeptic, and he rather cruelly attributed Stafford Cripps’s dyspepsia to power addiction. When Widmerpool grows up, he too is a dyspeptic. There is a memorably funny Sunday lunch when Widmerpool gives the narrator a meal in his club, washing down cold tongue with a glass of water. By the time the narrative has reached the postwar period, it is no surprise to find that Widmerpool, a fellow-traveller with the Communists, who has rather dubious associations in Eastern Europe, is an MP in the Labour interest. He has achieved what he wanted from the very beginning, on that run through the winter mists in the Thames Valley: the free exercise of power. Widmerpool is a manager, a wheeler-dealer. He judges people by how they have got on; he has no sense of England’s past, no feeling for people (at quite a late stage of the sequence, he forgets the narrator’s Christian name). Much of Powell’s somewhat peppery Toryism goes into the creation, no doubt, but the novel contains a really acute perception of what had happened to England during the war. It had not been taken over by Bolsheviks or by the working class. Widmerpool is an efficient, ruthless staff officer, a paper pusher. He could easily have said, after the 1945 election: ‘We are the masters.’ He would have meant that the managerial class, previously all but non-existent, had taken over. The growth of bureaucracy in Britain in the postwar years, the filling up of political, Civil Service and professional posts with colourless, pushing people controlling others for the sake of control, was to be a feature of life from then onwards. Widmerpool was a man of his time, and a man of the future.

[AN Wilson, After the Victorians]

Well, no change there then!

As so often in his two books, The Victorians and After the Victorians, AN Wilson gets his rapier right to the heart of the matter. Although both books are chunky paperbacks (both weigh in at some 500 pages) they are well worth reading – and eminently readable. AN Wilson gives a rather more perceptive, and admittedly slightly jaundiced, view of the history of Britain between the 1830s and 1950s than one finds in the standard texts. He delves under the political and economic covers, especially around the underlying reasons for both world wars and (at least for me) puts a completely new spin on modern British history.

amusements, books, history, quotes, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

OK, here’s this week’s selection of oddities encounter in the last few days …

‘Look at the bird.’ It was perched on a branch by a fork in the tree, next to what looked like a birdhouse, and nibbling at a piece of roughly round wood it held in one claw.
‘Must be an old nest they’re repairing,’ said Lu-Tze. ‘Can’t have got that advanced this early in the season.’
‘Looks like some kind of old box to me,’ said Lobsang. He squinted to see better. ‘Is it an old … clock?’ he added.
‘Look at what the bird is nibbling,’ suggested Lu-Tze.
‘Well, it looks like … a crude gearwheel? But why —’
‘Well spotted. That, lad, is a clock cuckoo.’
[Terry Pratchett; Thief of Time]

Hindsight, the historians’ parlour-game, can lead from false premise to false conclusion. Because we see the fateful consequences of our forebears’ actions, we can wrongly suppose that, had they done differently, things would have been better.
[AN Wilson, After the Victorians]

The clergy were seldom rich, but they were treated as if they were gentlemen: very often they were. Nearly all of them had degrees. High Church, Low Church, Broad Church, they were disseminated throughout the land. If they were even half good at their jobs, they and their wives and families mixed with everyone in their parish. They were extraordinary agents of social communication. It meant that almost everyone in England was within five miles of a man who could read ancient Greek.
[AN Wilson, After the Victorians]

Snow fell, east winds blew, pipes froze, the water main (located next door in a house bombed out and long deserted) passed beyond insulation or control. The public supply of electricity broke down. Baths became a fabled luxury of the past. Humps and cavities of frozen snow, superimposed on the pavement, formed an almost impassable barrier of sooty heaps at the gutters of every crossing, in the network of arctic rails.
[Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room]

In the highbrow world you “get on”, if you “get on” at all, not so much by your literary ability as by being the life and soul of cocktail parties and kissing the bums of verminous little lions.
[George Orwell]

In a mad world only the mad are sane.
[Akira Kurosawa]

amusements

More Auction Oddities

Another small collection of oddities from the recent catalogue of another of our local auction houses …

A collection of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs ceramic figures including the “Lenox Treasure box collection” (that has gold plated charms within), also “Brooks & Bentley” salt and pepper collection.

A full size zebra skin rug, and an antelope rug.

A continental porcelain figure of a Grecian maiden holding aloft a twin-handled urn, together with a Coalport porcelain shouldered ovoid urn and cover, the cover having a pineapple finial raised on a socle supported plinth, the cream and midnight blue ground having gilt enrichments and gilt goat head masks, the cartouche painted with a ruined castle, signed: JH Plant
[I just cannot picture what sort of mess this is]

A Chinese porcelain garden seat formed as an elephant.

A miscellaneous selection of items, to include a pair of French First World War bayonets, a pair of African antelope horns and bison horns.

A large and interesting miscellaneous collection of tribal items to include various swords, an Eskimo arrow holder, a Burmese bird cage, a North African gunpowder flask, a Russian gilded sword and many more.

Two Zulu shields, an old African tribal paddle and various spears (bearing ‘Spink & Son Ltd’ labels).
[Why would Spinks be selling spears?]

A North West Persian tribal runner with a line of medallions alternating between hooked diamond and cruciform designs and contained within three borders.
[As well as having rather ornate body art I trust the runner comes with cleft stick.]

A boxed cherub table lamp.
[You mean there is a type of cherub I never knew about – the boxed cherub?]

In amongst this collection there is though the usual selection of really nice schmutter.

beliefs, science

Conspiracy Theories

1 Comment

Like many of you, I have a soft spot for conspiracy theories. Although I wouldn’t claim to be an out-and-out believer in such theories I’m a natural skeptic, I’ve worked in business and I’ve been around long enough to know that there is more goes on under the surface than often meets the eye – and that sometimes, just occasionally, that may amount to a conspiracy. But I also know that all organisations, managers, politicians, governments spin (to use the current euphemism for “lie”) everything to their (hoped for) advantage. Often they don’t actually realise they’re doing it – I know; I’ve done it myself. And seldom is there any attempt at conspiracy. But just sometimes there is.

It was interesting therefore to see, in the December 2010 edition of Scientific American, a short article by professional skeptic Michael Shermer under the title “The Conspiracy Theory Detector – How to tell the difference between true and false conspiracy theories”. Shermer ends the article with the following “rules”:

[W]e cannot just dismiss all such theories out of hand, because real conspiracies do sometimes happen. Instead we should look for signs that indicate a conspiracy theory is likely to be untrue. The more that it manifests the following characteristics, the less probable that the theory is grounded in reality:

  1. Proof of the conspiracy supposedly emerges from a pattern of “connecting the dots” between events that need not be causally connected. When no evidence supports these connections except the allegation of the conspiracy or when the evidence fits equally well to other causal connections – or to randomness – the conspiracy theory is likely to be false.
  2. The agents behind the pattern of the conspiracy would need nearly superhuman power to pull it off. People are usually not nearly so powerful as we think they are.
  3. The conspiracy is complex, and its successful completion demands a large number of elements.
  4. Similarly, the conspiracy involves large numbers of people who would all need to keep silent about their secrets. The more people involved, the less realistic it becomes.
  5. The conspiracy encompasses a grand ambition for control over a nation, economy or political system. If it suggests world domination, the theory is even less likely to be true.
  6. The conspiracy theory ratchets up from small events that might be true to much larger, much less probable events.
  7. The conspiracy theory assigns portentous, sinister meanings to what are most likely innocuous, insignificant events.
  8. The theory tends to commingle facts and speculations without distinguishing between the two and without assigning degrees of probability or of factuality.
  9. The theorist is indiscriminately suspicious of all government agencies or private groups, which suggests an inability to nuance differences between true and false conspiracies.
  10. The conspiracy theorist refuses to consider alternative explanations, rejecting all disconfirming evidence and blatantly seeking only confirmatory evidence to support what he or she has a priori determined to be the truth.

The fact that politicians sometimes lie or that corporations occasionally cheat does not mean that every event is the result of a tortuous conspiracy. Most of the time stuff just happens, and our brains connect the dots into meaningful patterns.

beliefs, quotes, sexuality, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

OK, guys & gals, here’s this week’s selection of wacky words …

Come on, Milhouse, there’s no such thing as a soul! It’s just something they made up to scare kids, like the Boogie Man or Michael Jackson.
[Bart Simpson]

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
[Philip K Dick]

Never let your sense of morals keep you from doing what’s right.
[Isaac Asimov]

I’ve come to believe quite strongly that monogamy is not at all the natural condition of human beings, despite what we’ve been told for so many years. For some people it comes effortlessly. For others it is absolutely impossible. I think for most of us it is possible, but extremely difficult. When I hear that someone has failed at it I am never shocked or surprised.
[Brad Warner; at http://www.elephantjournal.com/2011/02/disrobing-genpo–brad-warner/]

Like childhood, old age is irresponsible, reckless, and foolhardy. Children and old people have everything to gain and nothing much to lose. It’s middle-age which is cursed by the desperate need to cling to some finger-hold halfway up the mountain, to conform, not to cause trouble, to behave well.
[Sir John Mortimer, Murderers & Other Friends]

We will have to build … devices that will store and release time to where it is needed, because men cannot progress if they are carried like leaves on a stream. People need to be able to waste time, make time, lose time and buy time.
[Terry Pratchett; Thief Of Time]

Most people have some means of filling up the gap between perception and reality, and, after all, in those circumstances there are far worse things than gin.
[Terry Pratchett; Thief Of Time]

memes, natural history, personal, photography

[7/52] Crocuses


[7/52] Crocuses, originally uploaded by kcm76.

Week 7 entry for 52 weeks challenge.

Our lawn and fruit border are full of crocuses, mostly in shades of purple. I know we’ve planted some, but they must be spreading as I’m sure (like these in the fruit border) they’re in places we wouldn’t have planted them. And they seem to be doing well despite the waterlogged clay soil of the lawn.