Ubiquitous computing

Andrew Leonard interviews William Gibson at Rolling Stone. (Link courtesy of Brent via Instapundit.)

Sent to me

by Nico with the apt heading "stupid but funny" (hmmm, from here to the end of the semester sleep deprivation leaches away common sense): an encounter between the world's tallest and smallest dogs.

Polishing his name-plate unobserved

At the TLS, Dinah Birch considers the life and writings of Conan Doyle.

Toms and hens

At the Times, Kim Severson has a delightful story about heritage turkeys:

Mr. Reese moved into a farmhouse on his turkey ranch 20 years ago, after a tour in the Army in the 1970s and a career as a nurse anesthetist, a job he still does part time to help pay for his turkeys.

The century-old house is a showplace for things turkey, including hundreds of old turkey publications, turkey platters and rare framed drawings of turkeys. Somewhere among the papers, he thinks, there might still be a little essay he wrote when he was 5, titled “Me and My Turkey.”

“I don’t know why, but my love of turkeys has always been there,” he said during a late summer walk through a flock of thousands.

Mr. Reese is trying to save both the vintage breeds and a culture of turkey-rearing once so popular that breeders numbered over a thousand and enthusiasts filled the old Madison Square Garden to watch turkeys the way people today flock to the Westminster dog show. The five breeds he raises descend directly from the birds raised by Mr. Kardosh and by other heavyweight breeders, many of them women.

His Bourbon Reds come from flocks raised by Sadie Caldwell in Kansas and Gladys Hanssinger from Missouri. Other turkeys come from a line bred by Martha Walker, who in the 1930s advertised her “short-legged, thick-meated” Walker Bronzes in Turkey World magazine.

Diverted Question, Russian Doll, Sugar Lumps

A quite irresistible bit in Malcolm Gladwell's new piece on criminal profiling:

A few years ago, Alison went back to the case of the teacher who was murdered on the roof of her building in the Bronx. He wanted to know why, if the F.B.I.’s approach to criminal profiling was based on such simplistic psychology, it continues to have such a sterling reputation. The answer, he suspected, lay in the way the profiles were written, and, sure enough, when he broke down the rooftop-killer analysis, sentence by sentence, he found that it was so full of unverifiable and contradictory and ambiguous language that it could support virtually any interpretation.

Astrologers and psychics have known these tricks for years. The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic “The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading,” itemizes them one by one, in what could easily serve as a manual for the beginner profiler. First is the Rainbow Ruse—the “statement which credits the client with both a personality trait and its opposite.” (“I would say that on the whole you can be rather a quiet, self effacing type, but when the circumstances are right, you can be quite the life and soul of the party if the mood strikes you.”) The Jacques Statement, named for the character in “As You Like It” who gives the Seven Ages of Man speech, tailors the prediction to the age of the subject. To someone in his late thirties or early forties, for example, the psychic says, “If you are honest about it, you often get to wondering what happened to all those dreams you had when you were younger.” There is the Barnum Statement, the assertion so general that anyone would agree, and the Fuzzy Fact, the seemingly factual statement couched in a way that “leaves plenty of scope to be developed into something more specific.” (“I can see a connection with Europe, possibly Britain, or it could be the warmer, Mediterranean part?”) And that’s only the start: there is the Greener Grass technique, the Diverted Question, the Russian Doll, Sugar Lumps, not to mention Forking and the Good Chance Guess—all of which, when put together in skillful combination, can convince even the most skeptical observer that he or she is in the presence of real insight.

“Moving on to career matters, you don’t work with children, do you?” Rowland will ask his subjects, in an example of what he dubs the “Vanishing Negative.”

No, I don’t.

“No, I thought not. That’s not really your role.”

Of course, if the subject answers differently, there’s another way to play the question: “Moving on to career matters, you don’t work with children, do you?”

I do, actually, part time.

“Yes, I thought so.”

A single sound whack

Ed Park at the Dizzies gives an excellent passage from Leland de la Durantaye's Cabinet Magazine piece on readymades:

When Pierre Pinoncelli walked into a white room in Nîmes in 1993, he knew he was not in the bathroom; he knew the urinal in front of him was marked as Duchamp’s Fountain, and he also knew it was not the Fountain refused by the Independents in 1917. Pinoncelli was not only a seed merchant; he was also an artist. He revered Duchamp and his reverence fueled his disappointment with Duchamp’s decision to replicate the original readymade. For him, in reissuing and reproducing Fountain—in merchandising and franchising it—Duchamp had betrayed it. Feeling that the punishment should fit the crime, Pinoncelli took matters into his own hands. He peed into the false idol, and before the guards could overpower him, he produced a small hammer from his pocket and gave the urinal a single sound whack.

The Ark of Studies

Anthony Grafton had an interesting piece in last week's New Yorker, of which this was certainly my favorite paragraph:

Fast, reliable methods of search and retrieval are sometimes identified as the hallmark of our information age; “Search is everything” has become a proverb. But scholars have had to deal with too much information for millennia, and in periods when information resources were multiplying especially fast they devised ingenious ways to control the floods. The Renaissance, during which the number of new texts threatened to become overwhelming, was the great age of systematic note-taking. Manuals such as Jeremias Drexel’s “Goldmine”—the frontispiece of which showed a scholar taking notes opposite miners digging for literal gold—taught students how to condense and arrange the contents of literature by headings. Scholars well grounded in this regime, like Isaac Casaubon, spun tough, efficient webs of notes around the texts of their books and in their notebooks—hundreds of Casaubon’s books survive—and used them to retrieve information about everything from the religion of Greek tragedy to Jewish burial practices. Jacques Cujas, a sixteenth-century legal scholar, astonished visitors to his study when he showed them the rotating barber’s chair and movable bookstand that enabled him to keep many open books in view at the same time. Thomas Harrison, a seventeenth-century English inventor, devised a cabinet that he called the Ark of Studies: readers could synopsize and excerpt books and then arrange their notes by subject on a series of labelled metal hooks, somewhat in the manner of a card index. The German philosopher Leibniz obtained one of Harrison’s cabinets and used it in his research.

Wrinkly tin

Adam Mornement's Corrugated Iron: Building on the Frontier is reviewed at the FT by Edwin Heathcote (oh, I must get this, it sounds quite excellent and just what I like):

Corrugated iron was developed to provide a rigid sheet material which could be used as both structure and cladding – a one-stop shop for industrial building. It was used in building London’s St Katherine Docks, as well as for the ships which berthed there. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was an early adopter, using it for the great spans of Paddington Station, but it was the US gold rush of 1849 and the subsequent Australian rush that filled the coffers of the still almost exclusively British manufacturers.

In those harsh, dry environments, rigid metal sheet proved ideal for temporary construction and was recycled ad infinitum as settlements grew. Corrugated sheet was used for buildings as diverse as the Brompton Boilers (the forerunner of London’s V&A) and a weird ballroom for Balmoral. It appeared in colonial churches and chapels around the world and at home. Mornement points out that these churches formed the spiritual home of the Labour party as those tin tabernacles housed audiences for Keir Hardie’s preaching.

Lying in wait for the Bobbitt worm

Miranda Green at the FT on the charms of marine life in the living-room:

t’s half past one in the morning and Jessica Cross, a top metals analyst in the City, is wired. But she’s not poring over the latest figures or sweating to get a report finalised.

Instead she is lying in wait for a Bobbitt worm, the nocturnal predator that has invaded the tropical marine ecosystem she spent the past two years creating in her central London apartment. The creature in her fish tank is only three feet long, but could grow up to 12ft, and Cross is worried that, although there are only a few crabs missing, the worm might start eating the rare fish.

“Sometimes in the middle of the night I do think, what have I done?” admits Cross, confessing she has become obsessed with the tank and its inhabitants. She gazes admiringly at the pulsing green and pink anemones. It is daylight when she shows me the collection: exotic clams shiver along frills like painted silk while striped and spotted fish swim by a red mantis shrimp, with the appearance of a tiny Chinese dragon, peering out from under the coral.

A lifelong interest in marine biology led Cross, originally from South Africa, to set up the tank, which now absorbs a sizeable chunk of her time and energy, day and night. She is one of what Nick Lloyd at the Aquatic Design Centre in Great Portland Street estimates to be several hundred individuals in the capital who have tried to painstakingly recreate “a little piece of the ocean in their living room”.

For these are no ordinary fish tanks. The water is mineralised to mimic the sea, and sand is added along with live rock containing the micro-organisms needed to generate an ecosystem. Temperature and lighting controls imitate conditions in the tropics and allow true enthusiasts to introduce not only colourful fish but corals, which are extremely difficult to look after.

The rising number of reef tank enthusiasts has been fuelled by improved technology and a growing awareness of environmental damage to the world’s coral reefs. Only in the past 10 years or so has it been possible for the home hobbyist to even try because coral will die unless the temperature is kept within a very narrow band – 26°-28°C – and the smaller the volume of water, the more difficult it is to keep the environment stable.

On the town

Insane weekend of cultural stimulation! Some quite lovely things, too...

An altogether charming Korean comic martial arts-type theatrical extravaganza called Jump at the Union Square Theatre. (Hmmm, that reviewer is giving only the most backhanded compliments--I thought it was absolutely delightful!) A particularly pleasing combination of athletic feats, goofy humor and generally surreal atmosphere, including a large proportion of audience spots taken up, on the night I was there, by extraordinarily youthful Korean military cadets in uniform--the plot (a visitor courts the pretty daughter, then two robbers break into the house) is chiefly pretext for a series of increasingly outrageous gymnastic routines--I pretty much loved it, although I had to exercise my stony-faced-don't-let-performer-catch-your-eye skills to avoid getting roped in during various audience participation stunts.)

Then a seriously must-see production, I cannot remember when I last saw something better than this: The Brothers Size at the Public Theatre. Really altogether magical! Everything about it is great: the writing, the acting, the set and use of space, the integration of music and movement. A story about two brothers, narrated in a largely non-naturalistic idiom (including characters' uttering of stage directions--this is interesting to me, I've got an ongoing obsession with questions about first- and third-person narration and the respective underpinnings of novels and plays)--but the vividness of the language, the force of the acting and in particular the real emotional affect made this absolutely irresistibly good. Altogether most exactly what I enjoy and admire in a play--go and see it if you get a chance...

(The staging and set reminded me rather of my friend David Gammons' Titus Andronicus in Cambridge this past spring--Dave's production was literally in the round, with seating on all four sides, whereas this one was only three, but similarly situated in fairly raw space and using elemental materials--sand, stone, water--to conjure up a semi-magical physical setting that also contours the otherwise slightly unmanageable space of the theatre itself. The play's material and themes are in another sense very obviously reminiscent of some of those August Wilson plays I've been thinking about, twentieth-century American aftermath of African diaspora--only the idiom could NOT be more different, it is most interesting--a strikingly original and appealing mode, in any case...)

(Oh, this play really was wonderful ... a wonderfulness further accentuated by the contrast to a fill-in-time movie shortly beforehand, Dan in Real Life. The fact that Steve Carell's playing the lead gave me quite the wrong impression of what this would be like--it wasn't awful, fairly watchable on the whole--but the proportion of humor to sentiment is all wrong--sort of sub-Hannah and Her Sisters-type stuff--a generous viewer would give the film the benefit of the doubt and say it's slight but well-intentioned--a harder-hearted observer will be tempted to guess that the movie is the result of cynical and interested calculations of a remorseless but not very interesting kind...)

Also I saw very appealing live music and another performance of Nico's ballet, which struck me as even more lovely this time round--the orchestra was slightly less abysmally falling short of the expected standard, but also my eye was more appreciative of the visual nuance.

(I still think ballet has too much clapping and too many intermissions. And the third ballet this time round was utterly and comically awful, too--Agnes deMille's Fall River Legend, a rather long and not-Edward-Goreyish-enough- if-they're-going-to-have-her- whacking-an-axe-around ballet about Lizzie Borden killing her parents. We had contemplated leaving in the second intermission--I was sort of glad we hadn't if only to have witnessed this massive exercise in misguided sensibilities, it really was just what I do not like!)

Usefully this time round the ballet that preceded From Here On Out was Balanchine's Ballo Della Regina. I do not really enjoy the aspect of such things that involves listening to an undistinguished performance of a relatively hackneyed piece of classical music (Verdi in this case), it seems to me difficult to pull this off successfully, but the dancing seemed to me lovely (I am not equipped, really, to evaluate it, I am almost completely ignorant of ballet!) and it worked as a delicately instructive tool because of the ways Balanchine radically revises but also hews to a late-nineteenth-century Russian idiom--it made Benjamin Millepied's comparable adherence to but also departure from the very strong twentieth-century ballet tradition much more accessible to the casual viewer than when the piece was performed in the sequence I saw it in last weekend.

(Do they really just haphazardly allow them to come in random order?!? There was no discernible logic for ending with this Lizzie Borden one this afternoon, really it would have been a better and clearer and more coherent performance just with those first two...)

(Here was the Times review from earlier this week, which includes better description than I can give of the Millepied-Muhly collaboration. The only thing I really want to say about it, other than observing general loveliness, is that it happily reminded me of swimming--especially there is something particularly of the butterfly stroke in the arm motions Millepied gives to his dancers! This is an obtuse but heartfelt observation--really my main mode of access to ballet these days, other than through the music, is that yoga and swimming are the two things I do that make you think about muscles in interesting ways and attend to what can be done with them...)

Final ritual grumble: the weekend track work they're doing on the 1 line is going to tip me over into an utter nervous breakdown! I had three important things to be on time for on Saturday (well, to tell the truth, it is always important to be on time!), and I was late for all three, by progressively greater intervals. I had to wait more than forty minutes for a train the third time round! And before that I had already been obliged to take a ruinously expensive uptown cab to get to my swimming lesson on time when I realized (already cutting it rather close by that point) that the uptown entrance at 23rd St. was closed because there were no local trains running in that direction along that particular stretch....

Aside from the real inconvenience to those who have to wait at the other end, being late makes me more anxious than anything else I can think of, so for purely selfish reasons alone I am outraged!

(Addendum: I already know that swimming is basically the most extravagantly expensive enterprise I have undertaken in recent life, this is just another instance of the way it draws you in to unexpected layings-out of cash...)

(Silver lining of train delays: I had time to finish a really excellently enjoyable bit of light reading, Liz Williams' Snake Agent--perfect dystopian near-future supernatural police procedural, with demons--really of course a book like this is very enjoyable coming from the hands of anyone reasonably competent--but Williams is far more than competent, so the results are peculiarly enjoyable. Book recommendation courtesy of the proprietor of The Dizzies, whose encomium upon this series can be found here.)

A great weekend, but I must get back to work now!

The Night Climbers

Tom Whipple at the Sunday Times on a magical secret society:

For my first six months at university an antique book, battered and tattered, sat unopened on my bookshelf. The Night Climbers of Cambridge, published in 1937, has a lot to say about drainpipes.

“The drainpipe is the most urgent thing to be mastered by the beginner,” an opening section explains, before describing in detail how to achieve that mastery.

Seventy years on, the book that many regard as the forerunner of the urban sports of free-running and building climbing — not to mention one of the first climbing guidebooks published — has just been reissued by Oleander.

My copy was a present from my father. With a look of conspiratorial glee, he had thrust it into my hand on the day I left for university. Then I promptly forgot it.

But the Night Climbers is too much a part of Cambridge folklore to remain forgotten for long. When a friend in the mountaineering club breathlessly passed on rumours of a guidebook — long out of print — that described routes up every building in Cambridge, I returned to my bookshelf and began to read.

Written by the pseudonymous “Whipplesnaith” (no relation), Night Climbers is a lot more than a guide for climbing the colleges of Cambridge. It is also a ripping Boy's Own romp, with climbers pictured performing heroic feats of derring-do when “as furtively as the bats of twilight, they shun the eyes of the world, going on their mysterious journeys and retiring as quietly as they set out”. What 18-year-old would not want to be part of such a society?

With the Night Climbers as my guide, I headed into the Cambridge night. After drainpipes came the easier buildings — Fitzwilliam Museum, Caius College Old Library. I soon learnt to deal with college countermeasures, with revolving spikes on fences and downward-pointing spikes on popular routes.

Shades of Roofworld! Hmmm, I really do not want to master drainpipe climbing, but certain kinds of story give me an almost irresistible urge to cast aside all my worldly responsibilities and sit down to write a novel, and this is a good instance of such a story...

Develope, mentionned, checque

Blake Morrison at the Guardian on Christopher Reid's selection of the letters of Ted Hughes. I must say, this collection sounds quite wonderful...

A real shoe lady

An obituary for Washoe the chimpanzee, who died Tuesday after a short illness.

A head on a stick

Ian Sample at the Guardian on the New Scientist's top-ten list of peculiar scientific experiments:

One of the most gruesome experiments to make New Scientist's list was performed by the Soviet surgeon Vladimir Demikhov. In 1954 he unveiled a two-headed dog, created in the lab by grafting the head, shoulders and front legs of a puppy on to the neck of a German shepherd dog. Journalists brought in to examine the creature noted how milk dribbled from the stump of the puppy's head when it attempted to lap milk. Occasionally, the two would fight, with the German shepherd trying to shake the puppy off, and the puppy retaliating by biting back.

The unfortunate creation lived for six days, though Dr Demikhov repeated the experiment 19 more times over the next 15 years, with the longest-lived lasting a month. Although the work was dismissed as a publicity stunt outside the Soviet Union, Dr Demikhov was credited with developing intricate surgical techniques that paved the way for the first human heart transplant.

(Courtesy of Nico.)

Punnishness

Phil Nugent contemplates Helen Hill's films, Joe Strummer and what it means to be afflicted with a bad case of other people's nostalgia.