Pugalgias

Brushes the dust off some stale writing

Gosh, has it really been a year? And how pompous was I back then? Jesus. Christ almighty...

So, hmmm, what's happened since then?

Dorking was driving me mad, so I moved. Thank fuck. But I did still manage to win £20 on the office fantasy football league, something about which I know slightly less than nothing.

Er... Um... I'm thinking I should reactivate this. On the sly like, and see if anybody notices.

Has it really been over a month? Gosh. Much as I'd like to plead pressures of work, I've just been a lazy sod indeed. Still, things I have discovered this month:-

Knowledge of Time Commanders is very useful in job interviews in the world of corporate tax, as is having read Russell Weigley's Age of Battles (the title belies its central thesis, incidentally.)

So, some fresh content. Dredged up from the politer recesses of 'My Documents', I present 'First Sentences of Abandoned Word Documents on my PC's hard drive'

Defenestrate the Man in the Moon,

A BATTLEFIELD. IT IS 1638. THE MIDDLE OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR, ALTHOUGH THE AUDIENCE DOESN’T (ASSUMING THAT THEY HAVEN’T SEEN THE TRAILERS, READ THE REVIEWS, OR SEEN THE ADS) KNOW THIS.

AN ANONYMOUS OPEN-PLAN OFFICE IN LONDON. THE CAMERA PANS ALONG ONE OF THE AISLES.

Last Tuesday I met one of the four men who ran the world.

Pylons rushed past the coach window, binding Earth, holding it down, suppressing it for the good of civilisation.

Until I reached the age of eight, I believed that John McEnroe was an android, designed and built specifically for the purposes of playing tennis.

Watching those with no knowledge of higher mathematics bandying about scientific principles is like watching naked female midgets mud-wrestling; highly enjoyable at the time, but an action that produces intense guilt on later reflection.

Under a slate-grey sky, the occasional dirty faded red roof poked out from the green foliage on the hill opposite my office window.

Garrison was a man with no first name, and that was the first thing you learnt about him.

The bloodlights slowly tracked the passage of the column through the woods, casting dark-red shadows as trees intervened.

I write in connection with your job advert in the most recent issue of ‘Oxford Today’.

“You’re talking arse, my friend,” said James, draining what was by that point a glass of mostly his own saliva. “But enough of that, for it’s your round.”

Outline of Novel. Which will be great. And for once in one of my works, get beyond page 10.

The last sentence of the above file reads, and I quote:-

I.E. FUCKING NEMESIS!!!!!!! AND HUBRIS. ETC. ETC.

"Nearer and nearer they came, as steadily as if they were on their own parade ground, in perfect silence. A creeping feeling came over me; this silence seemed so unnatural. [...] When we attack we begin firing our muskets and shouting our famous war cry; but these men, saying never a word, advanced in perfect silence. They appeared to me as demons, evil spirits bent on our destruction, and I could hardly refrain from firing.

At last the order came, 'Fire', and our whole battery as if from one gun fired into the advancing mass. The smoke was so great that for a few minutes I could not see the effect of our fire, but fully expected that we had destroyed the demons, so, what was my astonishment, when the smoke cleared away, to see them still advancing in perfect silence, but their numbers reduced to about one half. Loading my cannon, I fired again and again into them, making a gap or lane into their ranks; but on they came, in that awful silence, till they were within a short distance of our guns, when [they were] ordered to take breath, which they did under a heavy fire.

Then, with a shout, such as only angry demons could give and which is still ringing in my ears, they made a rush for our guns, [...]. In ten minutes it was all over; they leapt into the deep ditch or moat in our front, soon filling it, and then swarmed up the opposite side on the shoulders of their comrades, dashed for the guns, which were still bravely defended by a strong body of our infantry, who fought bravely. But who could withstand such fierce demons, with those awful bayonets, which they preferred to their guns - for not a shot did they fire the whole time - and then, with a ringing cheer, which was heard for miles, they announced their victory."




I remembered this passage, as usually happens whenever I come across similar statements, when Angus mentioned en passant " I've sat through so many unbelievably boring and sanctimonious seminar papers on postcolonialism, and how White Westerners just can't help exoticising anything and everything we come into contact with...".

Now the above quote may seem like a text-book example of the exoticising tendencies of the European colonial army officer class, what with the literal demonisation and homogenising of the opposing side, the back-handed romantic admiration of a valiant foe, playing up the primitive nature of the enemy etc. etc., so familiar from the cultural imagery of the Zulu war - Michael Caine holding Rorke's Drift against the Zulu horde and so on.

It might come as a surpise to some (definitely excluding Justin, who once borrowed the book I get if from) that the quote comes from one Hookhum Singh, who was part of the Sikh army soundly beaten by the British at the Battle of Sobraon in 1846.

This isn't to disagree with Angus (and most of post-colonial theory), of course, but to suggest that exoticisation is a fairly universal cultural response to alien cultures.

Quote taken from p.46-47 of Byron Farwell's Queen Victoria's Little Wars.

Long train journeys (by English standards of course - three hours or so), and my habit of choosing inappropriately dense reading material tend to send me into free-associating reveries spinning off into endless self-referential circles in which certain key mental images and threads keep on repeating rhythmically like the nonsense rhyme in The Demolished Man ('Tenser, said the Tensor/ Tension, Apprehension and Dissension have begun').

Among many things, I tried to think about just what it was I think when I think maths (if you'll excuse the ugliness of that last sense - English is surprisingly weak in terms of words for cognition), in particular the intuitive leaps and shortcuts that anyone who studies the subject in any depth begins to make - the solution occasionally occupies what feels like a space in my head, without any verbalisable (gnnargh) thought, and the main challenge I have is then how to translate this instinctive solution into the formal language of mathematics. From reading Roger Penrose's
The Emperor's New Mind, I'm fairly sure this isn't an individual experience, but how most mathematicans work - the insightful leap comes often a very considerable time before the formal process of mathematics can obtain it (if you don't believe me, look at the rather extreme case of Fermat's Last Theorem...). One doesn't have to accept Penrose's resuscitation of the concept of the world of Platonic Forms (and the role of quantum microtubules in interacting with it), but his insight into the mathematical process is invaluable.

Reading Stephen Pinker recently makes me wonder whether one of the side-effects of mathematical training is that it presses people's non-verbal modules of thought* , which after all have evolved to handle certain practical issues of survival upon the savannah, into contemplating what is perhaps the most abstracted from reality (excluding modern literary criticism ;-) ) of all of humanity's cultural products, a sort of mental ballet training in which the trainee mathematician pumps up and develops his or her instincts into contemplating the abstract. Of course, this begins to make me wonder whether this is why we so notoriously have dreadful social skills...

(Though I suspect I'm confusing cause and effect here.)

The second random observation is that the only time I encountered the concept of a Socratic dialogue during my entire time in school was on the playground of Radstock County Primary School, aged seven, thanks to a nine-year old named Nicholas Drew. That's not normal, I'd suspect. In fact, it's very odd, come to think of it. Instead of telling me about sex, the bastard introduced me to one of the most deceptively powerful concepts in classical philosophy...

* As an example, I use the visual processing sense - I often imagine physically shifting (as it happens red) blobs of algebra from one side of the fuzzy shape of the idealised equation to another when rearranging to the various bits and pieces of our minds that lie considerably below the level of our inner monologue.

Aristotle 1 The Pop Group 0

We are all prostitutes
Everyone has their price.

All men have their price.

All prostitutes have their price.

Therefore, all men are prostitutes.

The two and a half thousand year-old technique of syllogisms has defeated the classic song of the early-80s post-punks before they're even two lines in. Hah.

(Some may not see what's wrong. Try this:

Democrites is mortal.

All goats are mortal.

Therefore, Democrites is a goat.)

I was reading Anne Applebaum's Gulag a few days back, my possession of which (along with Bernard Willams' excellent Truth and Truthfulness) is the legacy of being drunk late at night with the internet, a credit card and consequently easy access to Amazon.

Apart from the realising how accurate Solzhenitsyn actually was, years before the Iron Curtain was pulled down, the one thing that struck me from the book was the fundamental perversity shown by so many aspects of the Soviet Union. Although Anne Applebaum can offer nothing but circumstantial evidence, surprisingly many prominent geologists, engineers and the like were arrested in the early 30s before the Gulag decided to expand into the geographical, and commercial, areas where their expertise would have been useful. In the USSR, it appears that to be good at your job was a very serious crime.

So, right now, I'm reading Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works, and thanking God I've managed to avoid more than dabbling my toes into the maelstrom of the controversy over sociobiology.

On one of the pages is a diagram of the infamous Necker cube - you know, the wireframe cube which can be inverted such that one of two planes is in the foreground, and t'other behind it, and will power can make you flip between either image. Somehow, I managed to find a way of reliably tipping my interpretation from one viewpoint to the other. By gently getting closer and closer to this discontinuity, I think I managed to see both interpretations at once. Much as I'd like to describe what my visual cortex processed the resulting image as, all I can say right now is that it gave me a headache, made me feel slightly nauseous, and in desparate need of a drink...

Psuedo-random quotes from recent reading

If anyone in this shithole city gave two tugs of a dead dog's cock about Truth, this wouldn't be happening.

What was needed was something in which the effort was not abitrary, and in which the struggle was not one against another will. Science is, in game-theoretical terms, not a two-party game: what confronts the inquirer is not a rival will, and that is a key to the sense of freedom that it can offer[1]

We present results of numerical analysis of several simple models for the microstructure of a double auction market which were introduced in [10](D. Eliezer and I. I. Kogan, Scaling Laws for the market microstructure of the inter-dealer markets).

The First World War was a tragic conflict, but it was neither futile nor meaningless. Just as in the struggles against Napoleon and, later, Hitler, it was a war that Britain had to fight and had to win.

There was 'momentary awkwardness' during the visit of HRH the Duchess of Aryll: the Princess was 'so overcome by the sight of a tank climing a five-foot bank that she lapsed into her native tongue and exclaimed, 'Gott, wie Kolossal es ist'.

'Square old Rampole,' repeated Mr Benfleet fortunately as Adam went downstairs. It was fortunate, he reflected, that none of the authors ever came across the senior partner, a benign old gentleman, who once a week drove up to board mettings from the country, whose chief interest in the business was confined to the progress of a little book of his own about bee-keeping, which they had published twenty years ago and, though he did not know it, allowed long ago to drop out of print. He often wondered in his uneasy moments what he would find to say when Rampole died.

Failing, however, they lapse into a state of cynical hedonism, scoffing at the fogeys who believe there is more to sex than biology.


[1] Next to this, I have written in my copy, 'All too true - as I have, if not matured, aged, and my socialisation progressed, then this becomes less & less important.