The Restraint Of Beasts ~ Magnus Mills

This is a funny novel about three fence-builders in rural Scotland.

Tam, Ritchie and the unnamed narrator work for a small fence-construction company, run by the tyrannical Donald. As “Gang No. 3” their fates are inextricably linked – they work, they drink, they work again. Tam and Ritchie are Scottish – both dour, monosyllabic heavy-metal enthusiasts. Early on we are informed they look like Vikings. The narrator is English, from the off an outsider, and at the start of the novel is made foreman of the crew. We follow them at their work in the vicinity, before getting sent to England on a special fencing project. Here they drink, work and drink again – all the while living on site in a squalid company caravan. They somehow manage to kill three people. On this assignment the work-drink cycle goes to extremes – each payday merely clears the debt they have accumulated at that point on drink. The English town is inhospitable, and everywhere they are aware of the sinister presence of the mysterious Hall Brothers – fencers, butchers and local heroes.

The style is deadpan. The comedy derives from the repetition of ridiculous acts and tics. Tam and Ritchie abound with idiosyncrasies. Tam always screws on the lid of his empty Irn-Bru bottle before throwing it out the window. Ritchie keeps his cigarettes in his shirt pocket, but his lighter in the back of his too-tight-jeans, requiring contortions and squirming to liberate it. Both are comically lethargic, sullen and unmotivated.  The squalor in the caravan is horrific and hilarious – all three are painfully unprepared for working in the rain. The work is tedious and monotonous and the three have their spirits slowly ground down by it. It is, along with Flann O’Brien and Catch-22, among the funniest novels I have ever read.

However, and I may be the only person ever to subject the novel to this level of scrutiny, I believe the novel is deeper than the mere farce that it appears on the surface. Like “The Wizard of Oz”, I believe this book is actually an allegory of economics and, in particular, capitalism and Marxism.

Here we have the stark contrast between those with “Capital” (Donald, the Hall Brothers) and those that, lacking Capital, are the “Labour” (Tam, Ritchie, the narrator). The lot of the Labour is to work their lives away in tedious work for the owners of the Capital – their wages merely cover the debts of their vices (the booze). It is a life of circularity – work, drink, work. Never have the Labour any chance to break from this vicious circle. The owners of the Capital put the Labour to work, to further their ownership of the Capital. It is not an accidental metaphor that the niche of Labour in which the three unfortunates ply their trade is the building of high tensile fences. They are constructing their own cage – they are told it is for “the restraint of beasts” that they are to build, and it is no lie. Even the narrator, getting a promotion to foreman, is really no better than the lowest rung. The whole life is a farce, there is no real power in this world, except for the owners of the Capital. The novel is a description of the Author’s view of how the world works. It is not so much a call to arms to change the system, but an honest appraisal. It offers no solutions to the unfairness of this system, but a cynic would certainly draw from it the suggestion that one should make every effort to be an owner of Capital, than a labouring drone. It is in a sense a nihilistic message. The portrayals of the Labour are affectionate, but there is no hope for them in this system. It is a Beckettian view of the world – hopelessness laced with humour.

I could be reading too much into it, but having read the rest of Magnus Mills’ novels, I believe that I am correct.  His other notable novel is “All Quiet on the Orient Express” and the themes and metaphors are so similar that it is hard to believe that the author does not have a grand design and message. In this novel, the (again) unnamed narrator goes to a Cumbrian campsite for a week’s holidays. He does some oddjobs for the campsite owner and, by a bizarre serious of events, ends up practically indentured as the campsite owner’s serf. The narrator has his dreams, but they recede by the work-day. This novel is as grim and humorous as “The Restraint of Beasts”, but it is the lesser novel. In some ways it is more successful at conveying the Author’s pessimistic take on the human condition – the conclusions are more obvious – but is suffers in the comedy compartment, as it lacks the comedic interplay between the opposite characters of Tam, Richie and the narrator.

I really enjoyed this novel and have been back to it many times, for entertainment and education both.

Accordion Crimes ~ Annie Proulx

Proulx is more famous for her short stories, the form in which the majority of her output takes. She is a recognised master of the form – her stories are funny and shocking, and laced always with her unique western vernacular. However she also has a number of novels under her belt – I’ve read all four. Only two could be said to be true “novels” in the sense that they concern a handful of characters and their fates for all their pages – the enjoyable “Shipping News” and the disappointing “That Old Ace In The Hole”. The other two novels, “Postcards” and “Accordion Crimes” are more akin to an extended set of short stories, each chapter related only by the underlying theme.
 
I am re-reading “Accordion Crimes”, her biggest novel, enjoying it immensely. I believe that with its scale and ambition, and astonishing breadth of characters, locations, history, timeframes, humanity – it must be a candidate for the Great American Novel, whatever that is. Eschewing metaphor, it is quite simply an examination of the American immigrant experience from every angle, and thus an examination of America itself.
 
The thread relating all the chapters is a green accordion, made by a Sicilian emigrant to America, and its various owners throughout about two hundred and fifty years of American history. It accompanies the Sicilian and his son to their new life in New Orleans, circuitously comes into the ownership of Protestant German immigrants somewhere in Pennsylvania, winds up in the hands of a French-Canadian orphan in the borderlands, Mexican-American cotton-pickers, becomes possession of a series of African-Americans (formerly slaves)…
 
It sounds twee – a collection of immigrants of all backgrounds, languages and skin-colours, united in their humanity and common cause by their shared love of, and possession of, a green accordion! It sounds equally contrived – how could such an object manage to traverse such geographies and peoples plausibly!
 
But like all Proulx’s writing, it is not at all sentimental. She writes like a man, a colourful Hemmingway – coincidence, chance, serendipity are shorn to a minimum – most of the characters have ugly ends, struggle to get by, live in a violent, racist and sexist places, are violent, racist or sexist themselves; most have loveless existences, are cruelly crushed by circumstance or by history or by ignorance. Most have painful ends, most fail to fulfil even the most basic of human potentials – fleeting happiness. Time and again you have to marvel at Proulx’s propensity for inflicting the most savage of fates on her lovingly constructed characters… And always the accordion passes through hands in a plausible manner – hocked in pawn shops, sold for food, or passed on unwanted in junkpiles on someone’s death. For the most of its life it sits gathering dust, and the characters briefly orbit around it. (Indeed, Proulx employs an idiosyncratic device to tell of the character’s fates once the accordion has left their possession – she tells the rest of their (usually short and painful, always quirky) existences in paragraphs in brackets – like this).
 
It is slow-moving, the text is knarled and requires slow-reading. But the characters are vivid and real; you care for their fortunes, are sympathetic to their flaws, are shocked by their inevitable downfall. It is clearly painstakingly researched – all the pogroms and heaves have the ring of authenticity.
 
My favourite episode is of the orphan immigrant of French-Canadian parents, Dolor – who has a childhood of such misery that Oliver Twist would wince. He somehow claws out a passable existence for himself, consoled by bluegrass music and the accordion, until afflicted by a mysterious illness. His demise is horrific (and only revealed for what it is in a subsequent chapter). He is a real character, his travails desperate and heart-rending. The brief happiness he achieves before his death, was merely a mirage, a self-delusion… I also enjoyed the Mexican-American chapter.
 
In fact, the abiding memory of the novel is the wonder at how badly Proulx treats her characters – she invents them, creates their characters, backstories, loves, losses, makes them real, and then destroys them without mercy. Each demise is more shocking than the last.
 
Finally, although I loved the novel, I wondered why there was no Irish-American owner, nor Jewish-American owner. I suppose that these two experiences have been well chronicled, and these two tribes didn’t venture as far west as others, and it is the wild west that Proulx is concerned with.
 
A wonderful novel – original and weird.

Retiring at fifty, you must be mad!

A roadmap.

To retire at fifty requires an income for the remainder of your life.

Income can be provided by one, or a combination of, the four main asset classes, or other asset classes not under these brackets.

So, to amass the requisite portfolio, it requires an intelligently (and perhaps fortuitously) acquired set of investments at age fifty.

The four main asset classes are equities, property, fixed interest and cash. To supplement these are the non-standard asset classes – hedge funds, private equity, art, antiques, commodities, the lotto, venture capital, or organic businesses (there may be more of these).

I will consider these in turn.

We need to talk about investment.

Conor said something a while back that struck home. He said that as individuals we can achieve more than we can possibly imagine, but we can’t achieve what we set out to do unless we clearly define at the outset what exactly that something is.

Some may think my worldview is depressing, but I don’t. I believe there is so much beauty in the world, and so much joy, if you care to find it. But I also believe that the world is indifferent to each of our fates as individuals. We are, tragically (but equally amazingly), carbon-based receptacles for our genes. As far as our knowledge goes, there is nothing particularly significant about genes. They are a random bunch of proteins, themselves a random bunch of atoms that gained self-replicating traction in the primordial Irish stew.

Without beating about the bush, what I wish to achieve in my life is this: I wish to value friends and family. I wish to find fun in everything I do. I wish to eat well. I wish to enjoy music. I wish to quest for truth, and reject falsity (knowing always that Truth is not a destination, but a direction). I wish to always enjoy respectful disagreements with friends (that’s the spice of life).

Them’s the ideals. But the flipside of the coin is realism. We are ants playing snakes and ladders on a board on a table on a joltery train. To achieve my ideals I need to keep one eye on reality. In the modern world we exchange money for goods and services. Therefore to achieve most of my goals, honestly, requires some amount of money. Maybe less than most of us would imagine, maybe not. But some. To live, in this dog-eat-dog world, you need some sort of sustenance. Money can buy this.

Without beating further about the bush, I can achieve my ideals (enunciated above), only with the support of some amount of money and real-world agitation. My real-world goals, buttressing the nebulous ideals, are to retire at fifty, with a portfolio of assets that yield an income that enables me to enjoy life as I understand this enjoyment. For the rest of my natural life.

To do so, we need to talk about investment.

How can I achieve this set of investments, and of what should it comprise?

I need to think about this!

Patrick Collins – 1910-1994 – Irish Artist

For all that it is dirty, and populated by hairy savages, Dublin is not a bad old place to live.

Everything is small, including the distances between places. On a good day, the place looks like the postcards on sale in Carrolls – all those multi-coloured buildings on Bachelor’s Walk crisp and quaint, the Liffey clean and full-tided, the Spire worrying the clouds if there were any…

On a bad day, the place looks like a dystopian nightmare – junkies congregating on the boardwalk, bellowing at each other across streets, litter everywhere, the street pocked and poxxed with puddles, the Liffey low-tided and shopping-trolleyed.

More than most places, Dublin is reflexive. Dublin seems as you feel.

If you are in a good mood, when the world seems full of possibility, then Dublin’s streets vibrate with the same energy. There is curiosity around every corner, places to explore. Quirky history abounds, there are always parks you’ve never been to, galleries you’ve never been to. New restaurants you’d like to eat in, free events on, new flicks in the IFI. The banter in the pubs is witty. The sun is shining. Or if not, then the fat raindrops playfully plop on your unfurrowed brow, the lines to the sky like spiderweb gossamer, resonating to your happy thoughts.

If you are in a bad mood, when the world seems inconsequential, then Dublin is not the place to be. Its dull, you see the worst, you suspect all. Its smallness begets paranoia, claustrophobia. The pubs are full of wastrels and down-and-outs. History is ended twenty years ago. Character is dead. The streets are leaden, sodden with rain, sopping with concrete despondency. All is bland. The title of the Jimmy Cake album, “Dublin gone, everybody dead”, seems like wishful thinking. There’s nowhere you can get a good coffee. Anywhere good is crowded anyway. Its all like a skank midland town, a giant Mullingar, all traffic fumes and mute desperation.

It is in this headspace that I imagine Patrick Collins painted “Liffey Quaysides”, one of my favourite paintings, if not my favourite painting. It is on permanent exhibition in the National Gallery.

   

It  depicts a view from O’Connell Bridge, taking in the quaysides and Halfpenny bridge. It is painted in iron gray colours. It is not flattering to Dublin. The quayside edifices seem to loom and crowd over the waters, the columns in the Halfpenny bridge seem like prison bars. The painting’s borders crowd in, crimping the view and emphasise the menace of the view.

To me, this is a psychological picture. Collins, with the grey hues, has literally painted the city with the same negative brush. There is no redemption here. The view is blurred, as if Collins came to the conclusion that he needn’t bother go into any further definition – it’d all be crap anyway. But more, it seems as if the view he depicts is that of one through weeping eyes. (Or maybe he was just very short-sighted?) Why weeping?

As I said, Dublin is reflexive. I can visualise Collins taking in the view, preoccupied with whatever was eating him, oblivious to the hoards of people crossing sides behind him, the hustle and bustle, in his moment of melancholy.

Collins was from Sligo, but went to school in Glasnevin. He worked for twenty years in an insurance company, studying at night and painting in his spare time (maybe there’s hope for me). He was inspired by Joyce’s Ulysses. He lived in a tower in Howth Castle for a time. He moved to Brittanny in his sixties, then Normandy and finally Nice. He returned to Dublin after 6 years and died in Monkstown in 1994.

I haven’t seen much else by Collins besides “Liffey Quaysides”, but for me, this painting is more powerful than any by Yeats or by Orpen. I keep finding new things to admire in it, new points of speculation. I’d recommend a trip next time you pass through Clare St. Depending on your frame of mind, of course.

Parkinson’s Law

I recently came across this Law and, like a myopic slapping on a pair of glasses first thing in the morning, it has done much to illuminate why the ludicrousness of office life are so patently ludicrous.

Parkinson’s First Law runs like this: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Or, to paraphrase; The amount of time you have to complete a task, is the amount of time it will take to complete said task.”

Parkinson developed this law in his studies of the British Empire. His original observation was of how bureaucracies expand over time – he observed the number of employees of the British Colonial Office, watched it expand, and noted that as the number of colonies fell, the number of employees increased. The number of employees actually peaked at the time the office was disbanded for lack of colonies to rule. Two corollaries are presented - (1) “An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals”, and - (2) “Officials make work for each other.

Like the best observations, it is both profound and ridiculously self-evident. Yet it is true, and truer in the office than anywhere else (where Parkinson had in mind when he formulated it). If a project must be completed in three months, it will take three months. If the same project is to be completed in two months, it will take two months. The Law lifts the rock clean off, leaving human procrastinations, laziness, sloth, ego, motivations – running around like headless woodlice.

I believe one of my colleagues independently came to the same conclusion. When a project deadline was fast approaching, and yours truly started pulling at his collar, my colleague’s response was pure Parkinson: “Don't be stressed Hairycakes – everything always gets done.” EVERYTHING ALWAYS GETS DONE! Precisely! We got it done, as Parkinson and my colleague said we would. Quality may decline, but the deadline will always be met. The means may be different to achieve the end, but the end will be met. If there is the prospect of a deadline extension, then this does not invalidate the law. People will factor in the existence of the extension into their (subconscious) plans and work to the extended deadline!

So the corollary is, deadlines shouldn’t stress you out, because they will always be met!

Some of the corollaries to Parkinson’s Law are even more interesting. His theory of how hierarchies develop is so hilarious it must have something to it. Read an abridged version here:

http://www.spreadsheetdetective.com/berglas/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf

Are we really so shallow and so foolish? Probably. It also goes to show that big organisations are, organically, less efficient than smaller operations.

I was put in mind of these office laws by a recent whimsical article in the FT .

The FT article modified Parkinson’s Law of bureaucracies to Head Offices – “Planning the perfect HQ is undertaken only by institutions on the verge of collapse”, citing the League of Nations in  the 30s and extending it, worryingly to the EU today – which just completed its new HQ in Brussels. We could add Anglo Irish Bank’s quays monstrosity to this list, or the Great Wall of China, or Hadrian’s Wall, or Easter Island.

A final corollary to Parkinson’s relativistic take on the world is applicable even to the non-Dilberts of the world: “Expenditures rise to meet income.”

Or, every time you get a raise, your expenditure will inexplicably jump to swallow it up.

Try to find fault with any of these Laws. Find them you will not. But dwelling on them may well make you wiser.

Derek Crozier – Irish Artist

Derek Crozier, cruciverbalist, died on 3rd April 2010. There have been warm tributes paid to his life and work.

Crozier composed the “Crosaire” cryptic crossword in the Irish Times for 67 years. The obituary tells a nice story of the column’s creation – his wife was a crossword fanatic and often complained about how easy she was finding her crosswords, how they no longer constituted a challenge. Nag, nag, nag.

So he set about designing a crossword that would cause her more trouble, a truly cryptic crossword. She was stumped (and impressed). A few days later, Christmas Eve in Emergency Dublin, Crozier met Big Bertie Smyllie, legendary editor of the Irish Times, in the Palace Bar on Westmoreland St. Crozier mentioned his crossword, Smylie had a look and was equally impressed and found him some space for a daily column. And so it began.

I won’t pretend I could solve these brain-teasers. If ever we had consecutive day’s newspapers lying around the house, I’d read the clues, have a superficial think, and then look at the solutions in the following day’s papers and marvel, for there is no other word, at the ingenuity of the clues and answers.

To celebrate his life, the Irish Times published a booklet with a selection of his most brilliant crosswords (with, thankfully, solutions), and it truly shows how talented, and original, was this man’s work. Try these:

• Country Rot, I See (6). (Rustic)
• May be in the form of arcs (4). (Scar)
• The buck still goes to the bad when he gets the girl (9). (Stagnancy)
• It’s ridiculous to have anything so light with nothing on the end (7). (Lampoon)
• Does Garry sound as if he needs a wig? That takes the biscuit! (9) (Garibaldi)
• With him you’re got to buy your own drinks (7). (Vintner)
• ETSETSETSETSETSETSETSETSETSETS ones holds (6). (Tenets) – To explain this one; there are ten “ETS” here, hence “tenets”, principles  one holds.

The booklet is good enough to list some Crosaire conventions:

• clues can usually be broken into three parts
• Clues often employ anagrams, synonyms, homophones, palindromes or letter plays.

An example of the reasoning given: “That miserable accountant is worth his weight in diamonds (5)” Solution: The solution is CARAT – miserable = RAT, accountant = CA (chartered accountant); RAT+CA (anagram) = CARAT (diamond weight).

Reading through these, you really have to marvel at the ingenuity of this man’s mind!

In all the acclaim following his death, there were suggestions that the column should be continued forever, starting over from column number one when the last one is published. I wonder has anyone considered whether this man’s work should not be studied as literature?

To me, he seems the natural successor to Joyce; think of the wordplay and classical learning of Finnegans Wake, the multi-lingual, multi-level puns, the use of words to transcend utilitarianism. And if he would be candidate to succeed Joyce, then he fits naturally in the same bracket as Flann O’Brien, playful and irreverent, a multi-generational Irish Times institution?

He fits so neatly into the canon, that it would seem a shame not to light the fuse and at least see what sort of fanfare is loosed.

The only objections to such a course that I can think of  are:
Can crosswords be considered literature? In anguished voice: “But is it Art?” Would Crozier have called it Art himself? Was it ever meant as Art?

Had Crozier artistic purpose? Joyce embarked on his fiendish and unreadable masterpiece with an aim. I’ve read the first and the last paragraphs of Finnegans Wake, and this is enough to say with confidence that he had a schema, an outline of how it was to be and what it was to say. This is enough to qualify as a work of art. \it could be said that Crozier made crossword puzzles, clever granted, but mere diversion for Dublin’s polymath eggheads with too much time on their hands. I don’t doubt that Crozier, by all accounts a modest man with no pretensions to anything, would have himself considered his work Art.

But for something to be labelled Art, does it necessarily have to have been meant as Art by its creator? Obviously it usually is, but i can think of many examples where some work has been acclaimed as High Art and the original creator would have been both gobsmacked and tickled pink to know about it. For example, listed architectural structures like the Georgian redbricks in town. These were built for a utilitarian purpose – yet in time became a symbol of an era, and a mark of distinction to the venerable capital among European capitals, like a cragged face who claims with pride to his equally battered peers that he still has some of his original teeth in his head. Another example is of the original comic books, Spiderman or Batman, that now sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars – a genre that dubbed itself “pulp fiction” but is now recognised as, culturally, a major influence on the second half of the twentieth century. These originals now reside in private collections alongside Picassos and Van Goghs, or in serious museums worldwide. Their original creators had no such pretensions; they were paid by the box, and the emphasis was on quantity, not quality. Graphic novels being produced now are the most innovative advance in literature since Joyce. More: the prehistoric cave painters in Lascaux were just simple cavemen. Outsider art?

No, lack of artistic intent does not disqualify a work from being called Art. “All art is quite useless” said Wilde. On this count too, Crozier’s crosswords qualify. Really, Art is Art when someone, anyone, says it is Art and appreciates it so. It needn’t be the creator. Ivan Goncharov disowned “Oblomov” thinking it was a piece of twaddle, and, indeed, threw the only manuscript of it into the fire. His horrified friends dived in after it, saving most of it, at their own skin’s expense. Its now considered a classic of Russian literature.

I, personally, look forward to a time when Irish students have a choice of Shakespeare or Crozier to study for the Leaving.

Ethical Investment

I am interested in atheism; what it means, what it entails and what it is. If you are interested in atheism and actually engage with it as a subject, then you are automatically interested in religion. It is related to religion, in that it defines itself as a rejection of this mode of thinking. It is not a system of belief itself. There was a letter to the Irish Times recently (from Colm FitzPatrick - an actuary, I know him) that said that atheism was as much a structured system of belief as religion is and that prominent atheists were as much “religious fundamentalists” as the religious variety. A perceptive letter of reply contradicted this opinion elegantly, saying that you could not claim “darkness” as a “thing”, rather it has to be defined as an absence of light. It is a fine metaphor – except for the unfortunate association of “darkness” with atheism, and the Biblical light/darkness association with good/evil – which is exactly how religious folk will interpret the allusion, missing the main point of the statement… I’ve been racking my brains to think of another physical relationship in the universe whereby one thing exists because of the absence of another, but does not exist in itself… the only one I can think of is a minor re-statement – light/shade. Love/hate? Sight/blindness? Too subjective.

Anyway, in addition to thinking about things like this, I am also partial to spending Saturday mornings over a long, lingering breakfast of coffee, fruit and scones and reading the Irish Times and Financial Times. It is one of my chief pleasures in life. I enjoy the book reviews in both; Breda O’Brien’s columns which never fail to annoy me, but whom, and whose opinions, I respect; the “what’s hot, what’s not” column; the always hilarious restaurant review;  Ian O’Riordan’s athletics column; Tyler Brulée and Harry Eyres on the back page of he FT Weekend – often I suspect neither person actually exists: I think they may both be joke caricatures of a way of life, one impossibly racy and materialistic, the other impossibly virtuous and balanced; finally, I enjoy the FT Money section, as I can pretend to be super-rich and spend my times in fine cafés deciding where to invest my pile of money.

Anyways, pulling these themes together: the FT Money section reviews the universe of investment opportunities – half of the twenty page supplement is raw statistics, on fund performances, commodities, share prices, yield curves, currencies, exchange traded funds, investment trusts, unit trusts, venture capital funds… Its intoxicating, and a little overwhelming. The bones of the rest of the supplement are the pontifications of financial journalists on two things:

• What investments will perform in the future?
• What investments performed in the past?

As to the first question, no-one really knows and the fun is in reading the different, often contradictory, opinions.

The second touches upon the old adage about economists; an economist is someone who will tell you tomorrow exactly why the prediction he made today was wrong.

Reent issues of the FT Money have been pretty unanimous as to what has performed well in the last five years (“well” meaning least bad, in the context of a global meltdown): obviously gold, some currencies, some bond funds. In the mutual fund sector, the clear leader over five years are “ethical funds”.

These are a new phenomenon, so the data doesn’t go back too far, and we can’t say for certainty how they perform in the long-term, but it is clear that of these “ethical” funds, the funds that have done the best are the “religious ethical” funds. This is a Middle-East and American phenomenon – in Europe we have “ethical” funds, but they tend to screen investments on environmental or relativistic/secular moral grounds. In contrast, religious ethical investments screen the set of investment opportunities for those that are permissible by a set of religious codes – for instance, the most established religious ethical investing practice is the “Sharia compliant” investment, investing with reference to what is allowed by the “Sharia Law”, that prescribed by the Koran. This, for instance, bans the receipt of interest payments, or investing in alcohol companies, since alcohol is prohibited under Sharia Law. The American versions are along the same lines, except they tend to vary much more dramatically; there are Catholic funds, Lutheran funds, Methodist funds, Unitarian funds, Scientology funds, Mormon funds…more funds than you could shake a stick at.

They vary widely in what they can and can’t invest in, but they generally avoid the “vices”: gambling, pornography, prostitution, armaments, alcohol, tobacco, oil, mining, pharmaceutical companies making birth control etc. There may or may not be an environmental element within this.

It sounds inherently contradictory – does it make sense to piously avoid gambling stocks when, fundamentally, buying equities are a form of gambling?

But the statistics say that, incontrovertibly, these funds have performed creditably over the last five years, most of them well into the upper quartile of active managed mutual funds.

Should we atheists repent? Is God’s law actually profitable to follow? Is God guiding the markets in favour of his commandments? Should I sell short companies producing meat every Friday and buy them back on a Saturday?

Some theologians have claimed that it is, indeed, justification of their religious beliefs – that the performance of these funds somehow supports the view that we should live our lives according to the tenets of a particular faith (and investment). Maybe they are right. (But to be logically consistent with this viewpoint, should we not all pitch in our lot with the best performing religion – since these ones will have the most correct set of principles that God approves of? (Islam, say the league tables, followed by the Catholic funds). Or if an investment really tanks, should I abandon the religion altogether, since God clearly doesn’t approve of what it is saying? Theologians love taking credit where it is not due, and then not following through their lines of thinking.)

But I suggest not. One, these funds are new; there is about five year’s worth of creditable data, so the jury is still very much out. Two, the five year period in particular corresponds to the worst recession since 1929 – ethical funds, investing in primarily defensive sectors, will naturally do well in this climate. Sectors like oil, commodities, tobacco are much more cyclical – they rise as the global economy rises, and vice versa.

Rather than viewing the outperformance of religious funds as divine approval, I’d be more inclined to attribute he performances to human nature. In a contracting economy, people hoard money – they cut back on the smokes, they drink less (maybe more, but bootleg), they cycle instead of using the car, they don’t fly around the world on holidays twice a year. Some vices are more inelastic than others – consumption of tobacco, being highly addictive, inevitably does not fall as much as, say, oil. But all fall.

When the economy waxes again, and rashers again grease the pan, then, reassuringly, good old human failings roar to the fore again. Disposable income is wasted on the usual vices, and conventional stocks rise in valuation. As simple as. But maybe I’m wearing my economist’s hat here. Who knows?

I’ll keep my Sabbath ritual of the IT, FT, coffee, and avoidance of all semblance of work, and I will keep betting on the predictability of mankinds’ weaknesses; fear and greed, its what we all share.

That’s my two cents invested.

On the teaching of mathematics

I must be something of a geek. I’ve lately been reading popular maths books for no other reason than for enjoyment (and to look cool on the bus). In particular, the books of Ian Stewart – I just finished “Taming the Infinite: The Story of Mathematics from the first Numbers to Chaos Theory”, and can recommend it highly.

This book is exactly as it says on the tin; a roughly chronological history of the developments of mathematics, from ancient Arabia to frontiers of modern maths. What made the book so enjoyable is the way the history of each branch of mathematics is related. Stewart doesn't flit from one dry area to another, all equations and definitions – he tells of each development through the biographies of the people who developed them, the historical and geographical context in which the discoveries were made, and – crucially – relates these discoveries to how they are applied in the real world.

One of my chief issues with the way maths is taught in schools and universities is the “abstractness” of it all. I don’t refer to the maths itself – for instance, complex analysis or higher-dimensional topography, which is pretty abstract by nature. I refer instead to the lack of context provided along with the theory, at all levels, from primary school to third level.

It starts well; in primary school we are taught the numbers, then addition and subtraction by relating them to physical things. “The number two represents two apples. If I receive another two apples, then I have four apples. Likewise, if I eat two of these apples, two are subtracted and I am back to two apples.” This is intuitive. Likewise, multiplication and division were related (to me anyway) by the concepts of lots of apples. “If a packet of apples contains four apples, and I buy four packets of these, then I now have sixteen apples.” Obviously, the simplistic storyline was soon abandoned and the theory of long multiplication and division introduced, but always in the background, what you were doing was manipulating apples. From the humble introduction you were aware of what this arcane manipulation of numbers could be used for in real life, in the real world.

It is only in secondary school that it all goes wrong really. The syllabus wades into trigonometry with nary an introduction. “If this triangle has an angle of 30 degrees, an adjacent side of length 10, what are the other two angles in the triangle if the hypotenuse has length twice the size of the opposite?” You’d be forgiven for answering: “Who cares?”

But given the three layers of context (historical, personal, applications) would, I suggest, make it much more interesting and relevant. On trigonometry, Stewart writes of the origins of this subject, Greek astronomers around 300BC used basic trigonometry to estimate, accurately enough, the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Ptolemy of Alexandria (of map-making fame), around 150AD, used trigonometry to develop a model of the planetary cycles in the night sky. The major advances in trigonometry were by Arabian and Hindu mathematicians in the first millennium AD – where they advanced trigonometric concepts to spherical geometry. These ideas came into their own around 1400AD when they were adapted for use in navigation – the Astrolabe was the principle tool by which ships set sail from Europe and were able to navigate their way to far-flung corners of the globe. Trade flourished, knowledge accumulated, slaves abducted, cultures met, and the world would never be the same again. In modern times, trigonometric principles are used in the engineering of buildings, in mobile communications technology, modern weaponry and GPS systems.

If such a brief prologue were given, by imaginative teachers, before every new topic was broached – before the nitty-gritty of the theory and the tools – then these subjects would be far easier to study. There is a joy in solving such problems, but I believe it is augmented further if the pupil is satisfied that the learning and exercises are not just for the sake of it - not just abstract logical walkabouts, like brain training - but can, and has been used in the great wide world to achieve amazing things, moral or not.

The list goes on. I’d suggest three contexts, the historical, the biographical and the applications, that should preface or underlie each branch of mathematics.

The historical:

The flourishing of maths in the Greek empire; the development of numbers and impact on commerce (without numbers there can be no economy worthy of the name – no debts, no fiat currencies, no credits); the use of maths to design Greek temples (think of the columns of the acropolis); the incredible strides made of Arabian empires in the first millennium and then the sudden stagnancy in the sciences in these regions as Islam closed the minds of its best and brightest (“algebra” is named after the Arabic phrase “Al-Jabr”);  the golden age of exploration and their trigonometric navigation aids; Galileo's heliocentric theory and victimisation by the Inquisition (the pinnacle of the European dark ages); the Enlightenment – when a broad flourishing of maths began, and hasn’t yet ended – when Newton, Gauss, Leibniz all threw light on light, gravity, the language of the physical world; where maths was subsumed into design, and the Industrial Revolution was brought into being; where this design was bought into the world of weaponry, where Colt mastered his designs using Newton’s calculus, where Alfred Nobel cracked the chemical compounds needed to cause explosions; where the two World Wars used maths as a tool for more ingenious and deadly advances – the fluid dynamics of submarines, the aerodynamics of spitfires, the Brownian motion of diffusing mustard gas, the development of nuclear weaponry, the development of ever more elaborate coding and encryption systems, and the means to crack them;  the twin forces of military might and economic girth heralding the era of the superpowers; Einstein’s relativity and the era of space exploration; the maths of medicine cracked polio, partial differential equations are used to model the spreads of epidemics, the world saw an unheralded advance in life expectancy, the use of statistics in evaluation effects of new drugs; with increased longevity came materialism, maths-based techniques raised efficiency in production to new levels, sustaining (most of) the word’s population in plenty and concurrent environmental destruction; the Information revolution, buttressed by the physical sciences, arguably making the world smaller, the end of the era of the nation…

The biography:

Talk of Pythagoras, the first expressed belief that numbers and maths are the language of the universe; the Pythagoreans who believed they had found a rigorous mathematical theory of the universe – one of these, Hippasus, discovered the existence of the square root of two which completely destroyed their theory – he announced is discovery to them on a boat sailing across the Mediterranean, they were so incensed they threw him overboard and he drowned; Archimedes, foiling the Roman army almost singlehandedly (using his “Law of the Lever” he invented the catapult, he also used the geometry of optical reflection to direct the suns rays onto Roman boats so that they caught fire); running through the streets naked shouting “Eureka!” when he discovered his method for determining the volume of irregular shaped objects in the bath; talk of Hypatia of Alexandria (~400AD), the first great female mathematician – depressingly she was inevitably accused of witchcraft and was murdered by a mob of Christians, wielding, strangely, oyster shells, with which they hacked her to death; Leonardo da Vinci, who introduced the base-10 Arabic numerical system to Europe (in use today*) and, among dozens of ingenious inventions, somehow invented the helicopter and contact lenses back in 1200; the intense unpleasantness of Isaac Newton, and his unsurpassed genius; the eight successive generations of the Swiss Bernoulli family, all mathematicians of note; Johann Kepler, who refined Copernicus's idea that the Earth revolves around the sun, and who’s mother was accused of being a witch, but was released because the authorities didn’t follow the correct procedures for torture; Galileo, who proved Copernicus's helio-centric theory, and who died under house arrest imposed by the Inquisition; Sofia Vasilyevna Kosalevskaya, another genius and female, whose father – in order to save money – wallpapered her nursery with pages from old calculus books, who taught herself calculus from her bedroom walls, who was never admitted to any university to study because of her gender, who entered an essay to a competition of the Academy of Sciences in 1886 and won, the jury finding the essay so brilliant that they increased the prize money; the artist Maurits Escher, who created astonishing art from his studies of hyperbolic geometry and studies of infinity, and was referenced by the Flight of the Conchords in a song “Inner City Pressure” - “Your perspective’s all messed up, like a painting by Escher”; Andrew Wiles, who proved the four hundred year old problem known as “Fermat’s Last Theorem”; the Irish mathematician, William Rowan Hamilton, who, walking with his wife along the Royal canal in Dublin in 1843, had the sudden inspiration for “Quaternions”, four dimensional complex numbers, and immediately carved the his profound equation into the stone of Brougham Bridge (still there today) – his inspiration (and tens years of subsequent perspiration) ultimately led to modern computer games, among other things; Godel, whose Incompleteness Theorem changed the philosophical discourse on maths, whose mentor Mortitz Schlick was murdered by a student for being Jewish (Germany, 1930s), who left Nazi Germany for the USA, who had two breakdowns, and in a terminal paranoia about being poisoned, starved himself to death…

Finally, the most interesting context, the applications:

Trigonometry – navigation, GPS, mobile phones.

Number theory – commerce, currency, debt, credit, trade, codes and cryptography (modular numbers).

Geometry – industrial design, astronomy, CGI graphics, 3-D cinema, art (the development of portraits in Renaissance Italy was founded upon a study of the geometries of the human body).

Logic – Boolean logic in internet search engines, computer programming languages, the scientific method

Algebra – everything! Apropos Stewart: “Algebra…is the mathematics of symbolic expressions…equations can be solved to represent unknown quantities in terms of known ones.” As such we use algebra in every facet of science, it is the fundamental tool in manipulating the world.

Calculus – the design of airplanes and spacecraft, design of bridges, meteorological predictions, design of formula one cars, studies of populations, construction of bridges, computer aided design, nuclear power and weapons.

Probability – winning at poker (game theory), avoiding nuclear holocausts (game theory again), medical trials of new drugs (statistics is a branch of probability), social sciences and anthropology (statistics again)

This is just the three contexts I'd suggest for teaching maths in secondary school. Maths is a human-invented tool, not unlike language, for manipulating the physical world and advancing our understanding of the universe and our place in it. We do not teach languages (say English) by focusing relentlessly on the tools of language – vowels, syllables, letters, syntax, verbal constructs – while important, we focus on studying great works in the various branches of language (drama, essays, novels, poetry) and are encouraged to use the tools of language to comment upon or create our own such works. While the tools are important, it is always in the penumbra of the great human achievements that we study these. Maths should be no different.

It should be more applied, with more context given (in the areas I suggest above – historical, biographical and areas of application). Having read Ian Stewart’s book and others like it, I am convinced that the development of mathematics is inextricably bound with the development of civilisation. To this student of maths, this was unfortunately never conveyed to me or my classmates.

Some links:

Scary stuff

www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/half-of-maths-teachers-unqualified-112420.html

Mind-bending paintings by Escher:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Escher%27s_Relativity.jpg

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_10#Alternative_bases

* The Base-10 Hindu-Arabic number system (representing all numbers with 10 numerals, 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) that Leonardo popularised seems very natural to us now, indeed it seems inevitable; but it wasn’t. Base-10 is thought to have developed, obviously enough, because we have ten fingers and used to count on our fingers. It is thought that the Maya civilisations used base-20, counting on fingers and toes. Other civilisations had different bases, 2, 4, 5 and 12 being prevalent. The Babylonians used base-60, and this is why 60 is such a prevalent number in mathematics today – 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute, 360 degrees in a circle… Indeed it is sheer coincidence that the base-10 prevailed, although it does seem the most efficient counting system but that might be wisdom after the event. I often wondered (as I said, I may be a geek) whether there were any patriarchal societies with base-21 counting systems, counting on fingers, toes and another appendage?

“Dog in the Sand” ~ Frank Black and the Catholics

There are two types of music album – those that immediately grab you by the balls with a hooky chorus or thumping intro, and then the “growers” – those you initially dismiss, but whom with time can become best friends. The ball-grabbers often just fade to obscurity in the cupboard of the head – fun for a while, but ultimately dispensable. The growers however are lasters, they softly insinuate themselves into your life – without you even noticing – until one day you realise with a burp – how “bleeding deadly” a piece of work it really is.

Amongst my growers, I must give pride of place to “Dog in the Sand” by Frank Black and the Catholics.

I first encountered this album when I was about 17 – and I was immediately underwhelmed. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was disappointed with the lack of big choruses and the presence of a country tinge, slide guitars to the fore in several songs. I didn’t like the pace – too slow – and the chord changes seemed odd to me. I rarely got past song one or two, before putting back in my dusty CD rack and putting on Weezer or Soundgarden, some easier sells.

But I kept coming back to it. Whenever the rest of my collection seemed stale, I’d give it a spin. Whenever I wanted background music for my studying, on it went. Often, I’d procure new albums and, again, it would be sent to CD purgatory, but like a loyal friend or a cat that keeps turning up no matter how many stones you toss at it, it would not be put off.

Only years later, I came to appreciate its craft – its fine, witty, surreal lyrics – the consummate musicianship of the Catholics – its cryptic subject matter – its passion and simultaneous cynicism – the coherence of the album, yet individuality of each song. Now I count it as one of my all-time favourites.

The first song, “Blast Off”, encapsulates everything about the genius of Frank Black as a songwriter. From the first line, he conjures up a slightly cracked narrator – the narrator’s motives seem clear, crack Hollywood:

“I’m going to make my mark. Maybe in showbiz.

Maybe on solid ground. I just don’t know.

But I’m thinking all the time,

and I’m saving all my dimes…”.

But this is no rags-to-riches Hollywood hero. He prefaces his mission statement with:

“I’m headed for the dark, take shit as shit is.

If you can take this town, I say “good show”.

Because city hall all are freaks,

and the coffee here’s getting weak…”

In the space of two verses, I’m seeing a disillusioned nut – in the vein of Lee Harvey Oswald or Mark David Chapman, desperate to be famous with this desperation capable of leading them to extreme acts of lunacy. And so it proves. The song shifts violently uptempo, and the lyrics shift alarmingly into the realms of the bizarre, as the narrator “blasts off” into probable insanity. “Blast off… I’m not leaving it to chance, I’m going to claim it for France,…, I’m wearing Beckett’s pants, FROM ALL THE CHEMICALS!”

Probably the last line in the chorus is the most relevant.

The second song is equally cryptic. It showcases Black’s talent for throwing his voice from the lovably cynical to the almost-sincere. But he never quite reaches sincere. The song opens with a slow piano intro, before erupting – accompanied by a Frank Black scream – and unfurling with the most deliciously laconic guitar solo. The song appears to be addressed to a famous actress – from the point of view of an acquaintance perhaps, or again, from an obsessive stalker… “I see your smile all over the place – heck all the billboards reserve you a space…” The lyrics again become garbled as the song progresses, and you have to question the mental stability of the narrator. Black starts a lyric, then cuts himself off mid-sentence, mid-word. Great stuff! I visualise the narrator in the vein of John Hinckley Jnr – he attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981 in order to impress Jodie Foster, with whom he was dangerously obsessed. The chorus only comes once, witty but gibberish slogans, before reverting back to the theme of obsession:

“I read the slogans of the sloganeers!

I smelled the engines of the engineers!

“I saw the prophet of the profiteers!

But still your smile in the stratosphere…”

The third song is a lament to a tragedy that took place in 1928 in San Francisco, the “St. Francis Dam Disaster”. This is less cryptic than its predecessors. Wikipedia has a good entry on the actual event: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Francis_Dam_Disaster 

Black writes first from the point of view of the dam keeper on the eve of the disaster, then from the point of view of the water itself, personifying it as a restless wanderer, pushing against the walls in a quest for freedom.

“Because that water sought to flow,

She had a desire to go,

She was looking for some place to go…”

It is an example of superlative balladry, and comes in stark contrast to the previous two whimsical numbers. Interestingly, the disgraced engineer of the dam was Irish…

The fourth song, “Robert Onion”, returns to the cracked whimsy of the majority of the album. It is the song most likely to be a “single” on the album – not that this album ever spawned singles… I used to think this song was perhaps about a historical character, perhaps an inspirational rustic philosopher, like Thoreau, perhaps a participant in the dusty American civil war. I envisioned another restless wanderer, light-feet in the universe, a traveller and opportunist.

“Robert leads me into thought,

Onion layers wait for you…”

I see a sailor, an explorer or a  Thoreau-type character, perspicacious and enduring, living nobly in a log cabin.

“Three cheers for Robert!

…One ponders layers and layers…”

But subsequent research suggests this song is actually a tribute to Robert Zubrin, a leading proponent of a manned trip to Mars! In fact, the lyrics spell out in acrostic the phrase:” Robert The Case for Mars Zubrin”. Shows what I know!

The fifth song, “Stupid Me”, is a delightful Dusty Springfield-esque song of gleeful regret for the “one who got away”.

“Stupid me, I deserve it now I’m standing here all alone.

Stupid me, I’m reserving all my thoughts for her now she’s gone.

She gave me her whole heart, and I threw it away.

I practiced a black art, oh why did I send her away?”

It sounds heartfelt, but Black sings in an outrageous falsetto that contrasts with the earnestness of the lyrics, and again, you feel you can never quite pin down what Frank Black actually means to convey. The song could be a showband number – “I don’t know what became of her, but I hope she finds true love, oh why did I send her away?!” – but you can’t get past the cheesy falsetto and infectious tune, entirely incongruent to the content of the lyrics. Another example of Black consciously messing with convention.

The sixth song, “Bullet” is a gem. It is probably the most country number on the album. When the slide guitar kicks in, you can nearly fell tobacco rolling around your mouth and the cowboy hat on your head. Lyrically, it bears repeat listens. It is ostentatiously a deathbed expression of love from a father to his only son. But the father is clearly unhinged, a trigger-happy gun nut in the vein of Hunter S Thompson, who declares he’s about to take his place in “Valhalla” and bequeaths his set of guns to his son for use in a coming revolution.

“Please tell my friends from outer space,

You are my son you’ll take my place.

And if the revolution comes,

Take my rifles, take my guns.

A single bullet loaded in each one…”

What the son thinks of this arrangement we are not told! Each verse is a garbled version of the last.

The seventh song is, lyrically, bizarre. It references chariots and old Grecian warriors, but, to be honest, it is impossible to even hazard a guess what it is about – good tune though.

The eighth, “Hermaphroditos” is an uptempo number, apparently and obviously enough, about an unhinged hermaphrodite lamenting his/her predicament. “How do you love me? I am a dog, I am a cipher, I’ve got a mouth full of suicidal drugs...” It’s a rockier number, with a big chorus – “HERMAPHRODITOS IS MY NAME! WHATS MY NAME?!”

The ninth is my current favourite - “I’ll Be Blue”. The song, in a minor key, seems to be addressed to an ex-girlfriend/lover, and is about that moment when he falls out of love, when he has the jarring realisation that she is not perfect, worse, he can’t actually stand her… after describing these moments, Frank drifts into a chorus expressing his bizarre self-pity – probably a self-parody;

“I will be blue!,

Like a hermit in its shell,

Life Jesus Christ on the hill,

Like the reign of mastadon,

Like the streets of Old Lyons…”

The chorus shifts into a major key and I think reflects Black’s conscious self-parody (evident in the lyrics – he compares himself to Jesus on the cross…). When he hit’s the high note in the coda, “I’ll be blue, IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII WILL BE BLUE”, wow, it makes me smile every time.

The tenth – nearly there! - “Llano Del Rio” is a tribute to a socialist micro-state set up in the Nevada desert in 1915, founded on idealist principles. He writes of it in its hey-day, when it apparently attracted the hippies of the time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llano_del_Rio

Its a nice song, intricate in its musicianship, with big key changes to beat the band (but not the Catholics).

“Going down to Llano, Llano Del Rio,

Try to find utopia, in the stucco grids and the tumbleweeds…”

The eleventh resumes the pop theme – “If It Takes All Night” – a song which is notable in the context of the album because it is one of the few that it is the first person and Frank Black has not assumed a different persona from whose point of view to represent. It seems a simple paean to those evenings that seem alive with possibilities – warm air and a buzz of anticipation:

“We heard some other fellers talking,

I think its going to be a good fight,

I’m going to hear my favourite song,

If it takes all night…”

The last song, “Dog In the Sand” is a curious closer – a somnolent and slow song, with a languorous and ponderous air. Frank seems to be addressing his own mood directly, talking himself into perspective:

“Where the moody flows,

I won’t go back…”

Overall it is a truly superlative album, full of expert musicianship and a sense of such utter competence that you feel totally in safe ahnds. Black is so in control of the sonic – how he wants to sound – and simultaneously so arrogant and cocky, that there is never a creative step taken on the album imbued with the slightest doubt (unlike the self-conscious sonic forays of, say, Radiohead or Elliott Smith). Black knows how it is to sound, and he doesn’t care if you like it or not. He’s been around the block so many times, that at this stage he’s doing it for himself, not for anyone else. This arrogance allows him to plaster his songs with the aforementioned delicious gibberish and it is not for Black troubling himself with things like narrative or meaning or coherence. The end product is like a miracle of outsider contemporary art – a million references abound, a million possible interpretations. It is rooted in folk, country and rock, yes – but goes off in wicked tangents from these lodestars – taking in science fiction, history, madness, sexuality, Aldous Huxley, idealism, disaster, autobiography, space exploration, spaghetti western. It has it all!

9/10

So I be thinking…

Starting with big game. God and Ireland.

“He doesn’t exist! The bastard!”

Pithy as whatnot, Beckett crams again myriad meanings into a mere five words.

And like whatnot pithy, you can interpret these words many ways. They are at once paradoxical (“How can He be a bastard if He doesn’t exist?”), profound (“How can a bastard God exist – where was His absent father?”) and bawdily ludicrous (the second sentence contradicts the first, the first contradicts the second).

In the context of Endgame – Hamm is bemoaning his lot. Either God doesn’t exist, life has no meaning and Hamm is truly alone. Or God exists and is specifically fingering him in the eye out of spite, and Hamm is truly forsaken. His life’s experience tell him that both statements are true (he lives in an apocalyptic world, his parents live in dustbins), or one statement is true and the other false and it doesn’t really matter which to him.

Art seems to find ways to express this dichotomy again and again. In Conor McPherson’s amazing play, “The Seafarer”, similar sentiments from the character Mr Lockhart – “So God fathered himself in the form of man, got crucified, and then on the cross asked himself, on behalf of himself, to forgive mankind! It’s all a mess!” Another critique of Christianity, except for the trifling fact that Mr Lockhart is, in fact, the Devil, come to Baldoyle to play poker for the souls of a group of Dublin drunkards.

So my own personal take on the big question, and I will elaborate, is as such: He doesn’t exist, and yet, in another sense, he does… As to the first sentence; a God, to quote Dawkins, “almost certainly doesn’t exist”. (Note this phrasing). And to the second, this very same God who probably doesn’t exist and is such a presence in the world (particularly Ireland), is not a benign invention.

“He doesn’t exist.”

Two routes of thought lead me to this conclusion. One is a reducto ad absurdum argument that points at the inconsistencies of the religious basis, story and history. The second is an analysis of the religious reasoning, and a comparison to scientific reasoning; and the conclusion that scientific reasoning is the superior one for interpreting the world.

The first is less fun than it would appear on first look. It’s a gimme. It gets tedious. Its too easy to point out flaws from a two thousand year old book, of a time, written by man. Meat of a Friday! Subservient women! Contraception! Even the testaments, the purported basis of Christian thought, can be reduced to absurdity if you examine them closely enough. For instance, only two of the gospels actually state that Mary begot Jesus by immaculate conception, the other two don’t mention it at all (maybe Mark and John felt it was too trifling to bother mentioning, but it seems to me something worth comment(1)). One by one, the reasonable religious will eventually concede nearly every Biblical story as metaphor (Garden of Eden, Seven Day creation, four thousand year universe, etc etc).

Ultimately, when you nit-pick all the stories down to metaphor, what is left is the “kernel” of the religion-urge – that there is a life after death; that there is a god who looks down on us; that there is a god that created us and the universe; that if we do good we will be rewarded; that those who do bad will be punished. Nice ideas all.

These are the kernel – what is left when you render the fat from religious ceremony and pomp. I hold the Bible/Koran/what-have-you to be a version of Chinese whispers, the kernel being fluffed up over the years by pious bores till we have a religious popcorn, full of contradictions, rings for kissing and hilarious hats.

Even thinking of the kernel – god creation and all that; the argument buster is the question, if god made the universe, who made god? Darwin’s theory of evolution, as well as explaining pretty well our own natures, can explain pretty well how complex can unfurl – over thousands of iteration, and millions of years – from the simplest beginnings. I’d hazard the simplest beginnings were a fluke combination of mineral atoms. Aside from biology, cosmology tells us there was indeed a beginning to the universe, we can see no further than this. We can, and will, quest to find out more. It seems lazy to just ascribe this beginning to god.

Coming back to the human history of religion – on anthropological grounds, the arguments do not favour the chances of one true religion. Thousands have come and gone, with the only thing in common a claim that theirs is the one true faith.

I personally can’t understand how you could subscribe to a religion, knowing well that there are, and have been, thousands of different religions, all with different gods and different theories – sun gods, child gods, animal gods, Viking gods, Greek gods, Roman gods, moon gods - and only few of them can be right, if any.

I won’t even bother talk further about the contradictions of the religions – Richard Dawkins does it fairly hilariously in the God Delusion, David Hume does it fairly clinically in Dialogues.

I’ll discuss the kernel, that which religion holds and science and history cannot prove untrue.

“Me? Well I’m an atheist amn’t I? I believe in science. Ricky Gervais, Extras.

The second route is a comparison of religious and scientific reasoning:

Maths and science postulate – a scientific hypothesis (a truth) is never held to be absolute or eternal. Rather a hypothesis is true, until it is proved false. It fits with our observations of the world, it fits better than any other theories, so we hold it true until we meet evidence that proves it false. When we meet evidence that proves it false, we jettison it and search for a better theory.

Compare this to the religious method. Religion has received “wisdom”, such as the kernel and the popcorn, and the interpretation of the world is made to fit into this wisdom. This way of thinking is based on a collection of “fundamental truths”, that are held to be immutable for all eternity.

Note the requirements of a scientific theory:

• “Fits with observations” – this is important, otherwise you could just postulate any old MAD theories and hold them true because they haven’t yet been disproved, or can’t be disproved. For instance, I could postulate that the universe is a big turtle inside the belly of a shark – no one can disprove this statement – but likewise we have no good reason to postulate it in the first place – such a statement “does not fit with observations”.

• “…proved false, we jettison it” – this is crucial – all theories, if proved false, will be jettisoned!

The requirements of a religious belief:

• “Fits with observations” – Religion will fight tooth and nail to resist developing theories that contradict received wisdoms if they are inconvenient – apropos Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, Crick and Watson, Dr Kinsey, Malthus…

• “…proved false, we jettison it” – the received wisdom is not jettisonable, no matter what evidence is presented to the contrary.

Religion holds that certain facts are truths eternal, no matter what shift in the paradigm. Science holds truths to be relative and temporary.

Even mathematical truths are relative truths. You might say that surely maths is willing to assert that 1=1 for all eternity and that’s THAT, or the three angles of a triangle always add to 180°. These truths are self-evident, are they not? No, maths says 1=1 at the moment. If something comes along that suggests otherwise, science will re-evaluate.

Does this seem meek? Well, if you draw a triangle, the angles of the three sides – however drawn, will add to 180°. If you draw a triangle on a sphere, the angles add up to greater than 180°. We didn’t know this before Georges Riemann and the 17^th century. If we add 1 and 1 in twenty four dimensions, we don’t know if the answer will be 2. We might discover this in years to come. (In fact, at a quantum level, 1 is not even equal to 1 – in logical terms, this statement is equivalent to saying a particle is in two different places at the same time).

This is the relativity within the scientific method, a flexibility of thought. A scientist is not married to any idea, no matter how solid it would seem. Present proof to the contrary and she will reject it.

I hold that the religious kernel (universe intentionally created by a mono-deity, this mono-deity an interested party in our affairs, life after death), does not “fit with observations”. It fails the test of my bullet points for this reason:

Science cannot prove the kernel false, agreed; but we have no good reason to postulate such theories in the first place. So a god created the universe and since then takes a bizarre notion of interest in what’s going on. Fine – but we have no reason for supposing this. The foundations are suspect, its proponents now (the Church) are suspect also. If we want to be generous and allow people postulate theories with no objective basis to them, by this logic I can propose several more that have equal merit in the context of the religious reasoning, but have the added advantage of being less pompously po-faced. For example:

• We are all characters in a yet-unpublished Flann O’Brien novel.

This “theory” is facetious granted, but it stands on a logical par with the religious kernel. It cannot be disproved, and as science encroaches on it, I can keep shifting the goalposts anyway.

Science has no theory are to why we exist, and this is often criticised as a weakness versus religion – “Science has nothing to say on this subject. Religion does. Science should thus stay out of this realm and leave religion to the big questions.”

But science is not a body of knowledge per se – it is a way of thinking. I would hold that the fact that science modestly withholds comment on the big questions is actually commendable. Science says we don’t know for sure, and won’t presume to speculate aimlessly. Rather it quests for further knowledge. Religion says we KNOW for sure, and further quest is pointless, but what they KNOW for sure is actually aimless speculation.

So, now you know why I feel science is the superior method of thought.

“This is the word of the Lord.”

An argument I have often heard from the religious is this:

What underlines the religious worldview is the various interventions the god has made throughout history – for example, the god introduced himself to Moses (via a burning bush) and told him the 10 commandments. The same god who created the universe actually came to Earth in human form (but also the God’s own form – remember) and told us a bunch of stuff, later transcribed in the gospels. Various other prophets claim to have been in communion with the god, of which each religion believes some and ignores the others. Miracles are said to have occurred, apparitions of angels, seas parted, foes blinded, poxes delivered, skin diseases healed, peoples freed from slavery, races favoured, conceptions immaculated, people saltified. Tragically, we have no reason to believe any of this either.

The whole Bible, the aforementioned “word of the Lord”, was written by human hand and is hence predictably and lamentably riddled with errors. I’ve already spoken of the Chinese Whispers effect – any time when accounts are passed a few times in the oral tradition, radical exaggerations are always introduced. I’m thinking of the old Fionn MacCuamhail legends (“such a giant of a man that he had a backside that would halt the march of men through a mountain pass” (3)). Most of the gospels were written in the 2^nd century, none of the authors were alive at the time of Jesus. Most of the Jesus stories make no sense – particularly the nativity story. While a historical character called Jesus did incontrovertibly exist – the idea that the Roman Empire, the most efficient and organisationally brilliant association that ever existed to that point, would compel every male in the empire to return to his father’s birth town for the purposes of a 7-yearly census, makes no sense whatsoever. This is the purported reason for Jesus being born in a shed in Jerusalem . I base this on my reading of A.N. Wilson’s biography of Jesus.

No, probability, history and commonsense tells us that the most of this, probably all of it, did not occur. Certainly the Old Testament is a joke of a text – full of god-sanctioned rapes, god-sanctioned genocide, god marching into battle with certain ethnic tribes, filial sacrifices – it reads like a Mills and Boon Lord Of The Rings. Its account of the creation of the universe is, shall we say, lacking something in the reality department.

So why do so many people believe this stuff so thoroughly? And I would say 95% of the world’s current population do. (Because so many people believe this stuff, is not and never will be an argument for anything).

I propose there are two reasons:

One, we have an innate tendency to believe in gods. Two, we are taught this stuff at an impressionable age and it is very difficult to entirely shake off.

Innate tendency:

One irony of my theory I find delicious – this innate tendency, this “god gene”, probably actually favours the survival prospects of its holders and evolution (which religion holds does not exist) perpetuates this. Religion should, and does, proliferate. Co-operative societies (like free markets) benefit the aggregate of society – religion promotes co-operation (at least among members of the same religion), its rituals have traditionally helped make a cohesive, structured society – marriage, birth, death are marked ceremonies in every major religion – suicide, euthanasia and abortion shunned. For the dark side of mankind, religion has historically provided justification for massacre and rape, forced marriage and subjugation – again, all these acts will probably serve to further your genes (along as you get your rape and pillage in first, as all good gods do).

Religion is waning in the West because stories about a psychotic god in the pre-medieval middle east are becoming less and less relevant in the space age. The amazing thing is that it is still so widely practiced in a technically advanced, scientific society – but again this should not surprise us. Less developed societies never had this enlightenment (indeed, an Enlightenment). But this does not negate the existence innate tendency to religion. Given something suitable, we will revert, no matter how advanced our technology. For instance, the cult surrounding dictators in totalitarian states could reasonably be described as religious. It is terrifying but not surprising, how readily it was embraced by the vast majority of some of the most advanced societies in the last century. A second reason religion wanes is because of the advance of science and the ready dissemination of information pertaining to this – in the age of uncensored Google and Wikipedia (a glorious age I would say), ideas that directly and indirectly challenge religion are easily accessed and shared. Again, should this tap be turned off – think of Hitler’s book pyres, or Mao’s de-intellectualisation pogroms – we will eventually revert to whatever we are taught and cannot unteach.

“Whatever we are taught” is my second reason for the persistence of religion. Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, defines a “meme” as ………. He likens it to something that is itself alive – I think it more a seductive idea that supplants whatever else it competes with in carriers’ heads. Either way, religious teaching is a meme, however you define it. Like Beckett’s Hamm or Conor McPherson’s Devil, alluded to above, we live in an essentially post-religious world in which everywhere are the trappings of religion – the religion meme is so powerful (It should be, the process of natural selection applies as much to ideas as to organisms – these ideas have survived maybe 50 generations of humans since Jesus Christ – they are powerful). Art grapples again and again with this fundamental dichotomy in the fabric of contemporary reality. Think of Francis Bacon’s popes on the jacks, James Joyce’s fire-and-brimstone pulpit scenes in a Portrait, Yossarian’s crush on the army chaplain in Catch-22, the genius that is Father Ted, the novels of John McGahern, the lock-out clashes in Plunkett’s Strumpet City, Hume’s Dialogues, Pullman’s Dark Materials, the poems of Phillip Larkin, the novels of Graham Greene… Even Beckett’s post-everything play, Waiting for Godot – Beckett could not be unaware of, at the very least, the correspondences between “Godot” and “God” – three letters, unknowable, male, hope-engendering, and…he never actually arrives?

There’s a jaw-dropping passage for me in Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion where Dawkins attempts to formulate a theory of the preponderance of religion throughout the ages. One, in particular appeals to me, because its so simple and logical. This theory states that there is an evolutionary advantage in children believing everything their parents and other elders tell them. The example Dawkins gives is: “Don’t swim in that lake children – there are crocodiles in that lake”. Children who are genetically predisposed to believing their parents won’t swim in the lake, won’t get killed, and therefore survive to adulthood and spreading these very same genes throughout the population. “Such trusting obedience is good for survival…But the flipside of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility… The child cannot know that “Don’t paddle in the crocodile-infected Limpodo” is good advice, while “You must sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, otherwise the rains will fail” is, at best, a waste of time and goats.” This theory holds that we are genetically predisposed to believing whatever our elders tell us, and are incapable of distinguishing good advice from bad. We grow up and are still incapable of telling apart the good from the bad/pointless. So we then pass it all onto our own children and the merry-go-round continues. This may or may not be true, but I think it sounds logical. I don’t think we should underestimate the impact of education on young children; moreso if you accept this point.

This brings me to my final point. Religion needs to be taken out of schools.

But this is what parents want, and parents have a right to school their children as they see fit.

Granted parents have a right to educate their children in what they perceive are their best interests. Regrettably this probably includes religious indoctrination. 90% of all primary schools are patronised by the Catholic Church. (2) So it would be reasonable to say that at least 90% of children receive a religious education in Ireland. But parents want their children to receive a religious education, right?

I’d actually question this.

Consider the thought experiment; overnight religion is, by inspired legislative decree, taken off the school syllabuses. Henceforth, if parents wish their children to receive a religious education they must take them to attend a Sunday morning school run by the religious institution of their choice. Ok? Now answer the question honestly – do you think, in this new scenario, that 90% of children would continue to receive a religious education?

They would not.

I’d propose it’d be closer to 5%.

Parents, by and large, will opt for the “path of least resistance” in this case. They don’t have strong views. You’ll accept this. The 5% of children who would be taken to Sunday schools would be the 5% of parents with strong religious beliefs. The rest combine the “I don’t care” brigade, and the “I received a religious education, and it did me no harm” brigade. There is much hypocrisy in this view, and indeed intellectual laziness.

Instead of asking themselves “what harm religion?”, and accepting the status quo – the lazy “religious” parents ought really to be asking themselves why the status quo is a default religious education, and not an optional extra for those parents who explicitly “opt in” for their children.

As I said, 90% of all primary schools are patronised by the Catholic Church. This in effect means the area bishop is automatically the Trustee, with the local parish priest his representative on the board of Trustees. This local parish priest is automatically the chairman of the schools board. This gives him the power to appoint/de-appoint other members, to set the agenda for the board, and the ability to hire and fire teachers. This is the case (also for hospitals). There are two teacher training centres in Ireland, both patronised by the Catholic Church.

I have been told on good authority that it would be impossible for anyone to graduate from these colleges without taking and passing the religious teaching modules. Even if this unfortunate young atheist faked his or her way through the modules, and somehow navigated the clerically-chaired-and-appointed interview panel and obtained a job, he or she would not last long in the job if – in a pang of guilt at the hypocrisy of it all – refused to teach intellectually-defenceless 5 year olds about the skygod and all the dubious, at best, religious tenets. Children, as above, will in fact believe anything we tell them! Santa, the tooth fairy, crocodiles, holy ghosts… That is a serious moral responsibility for anyone in the teaching vocation. Even if you harboured religious beliefs yourself – could you in good conscience pass on this method of thinking, if you even harboured a modicum of doubts yourself about any of it? And when even the most senior theologians (eg the Pope) declare that “faith” is just that – a blind leap into belief, whatever the real-world evidence… This I could not do in good conscience.

What is this then? This is called a pre-rigged game, a self-reinforcing loop of control maintenance. Having attained the privilege of control of all the State’s schools (granted in a different age and climate, granted) – the game has been set up so that control is maintained, and this control remains as strong to this day. Only those who are willing to pedal cosmic improbabilities to children will get to teach, dissenters need not apply.

My Ryanair analogy:

The Ryanair website is familiar to most. The EU is currently taking litigation proceedings against the company for its dubious policy of bundling up insurance with every flight booked, unless customers explicitly opt out. To opt out is harder to do than to opt in, in fact it requires unticking one box among many. This is the same model that used to apply to mail-order book clubs until made illegal – “To order these products, simply do nothing! We’ll send it out and, for your convenience, dock your credit card!”

The result of Ryanair’s sly and much hated trick:

• Many, many customers unwittingly purchase insurance when they never intended to…
• Most don’t even notice they have purchased it…
• Some, however, maybe 5% would have bought it anyway, because they believe in travel insurance
• And some are even glad they unwittingly purchased it…in retrospect it was required
• Most however simply loathe Ryanair for their devious model whereby one must go out of one’s way to “opt out” of a service

You can see where I’m going with this analogy. So I’ll make it explicit:

Ryanair’s model is intrinsically wrong – it is widely expected it will soon be found illegal and outlawed by the EU litigation in train. It goes against the principle of honest markets – the default option should not be to receive and pay for the product, unless one goes out of one’s way to decline it.

The model of education in Ireland is similarly intrinsically wrong.

The default option should not be to receive a religious education unless one goes out of one’s way to decline it.

The default option should not be “opt out” of a religious education, it should be “opt in”. This is the model in Europe and North America.

Where 90% of schools are Catholic controlled, the “opt out” option – depending on where you live – could conceivably mean a school three hundred miles away. Enter the lazy parents from above (and their children). We know why the default option is a religious education – because of the pre-rigged game outlined above, that self-reinforcing control loop. We know why parents maintain these nebulous religious ideas – they were children who believed adults who told them this. We loathe such a set-up in the Ryanair website – so why accept such an education model? In Ryanair’s defense, at least we are sure travel insurance actually exists! A nebulous religious education, side by side with subjects like history and logic is, at best confusing for children, at worst underhanded, intellectually spurious, and hypocritical.

The privilege of control of the education of the children of the Irish Nation was given to the Catholic church in another age, true – when the confused elite, like Eamon De Valera and his acolytes, conflated Irish identity with religion, and set up society accordingly. This was a mistake, Irish identity is not inextricably bound up with religion and never should have been. It may have been a facet, along with Protestantism and Quakerism and England – but to bound it up with the State was wrong, and had predictable results. The writer who did the most to forge the nation’s conscience in the “smithy of his soul”, wrote … “You speak to me of language, nationality, religion…I shall try to fly by those nets” (James Joyce). My contention is that language and religion were, at the inception of the state, bound up into Irish identity. Joyce recognised this. In the still-gestating nation-state, the Church was invited to fill the void, and they duly did so. So the game was thus rigged. With absolute power granted the church, and with the ludicrously repressed sexuality of the popcorn, came inevitably the sad litany of child abuse, subjugation and guilt.

If the sex abuse scandals and grotesque cover-ups were not enough to prompt a re-think of a default religious education, then – whatever the factuality of religion or no – the simple fact of the perverse set-up that requires taxpayer citizens to go out of their way and opt out of an optional extra, would all to me suggest the system needs immediate overhauling. If you must opt out of an optional extra, then it is not optional, it is the default. The game has been mendaciously rigged. When you bring in the extreme improbability of the religious message, and its concomitant promotion of extreme illogical thinking (God made us – but who made God?!), the argument for change is, to me, irrefutable.

To summarise:

I believe:

• The basis of all religions is fundamentally illogical
• Gods almost certainly don’t exist
• Irish identity does not, and should not, equal Catholicism
• The patronage of the school system in Ireland by the Catholic Church – or any church – is wrong and must be changed
• Religion should not be “taught” in schools, certainly not primary schools.
• Religious education should be an optional extra, not bundled up in the package unordered. This optional extra, if availed of, should not be on school time.

If I am wrong, please tell me why.

Footnotes:

(1) http://library.marcionite-scripture.info/CB-Was-Jesus-Virgin-Born.pdf

(2)http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0130/1224263431345.html

(3) Actually from At-Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien, but you get my drift.

Luka Bloom 26/03/2010

Went to see Luka Bloom last night with Dave and his friend John. Quite enjoyed it too.

Luka, younger brother of Christy Moore, is a cool customer, totally at ease on stage, prologuing each song with laconic and witty banter.

For instance, he preceded his best song, “The Hills of Donegal” with the gem: “Woody Guthrie once said songwriting was like casting your line repeatedly into the moving river, hoping something will bite. I’d agree with this. Although I’d add that you hope you are not downstream of Bob Dylan, because he doesn’t throw the good ones back…”

Probably not my typical music, it was laconic Irish folk, played on Spanish guitar, but it had a bit of wit to it, and, often, beauty. His paean to his Algerian asylum seeker friend Muhammad could have sounded mawkish, but it had a strange charm, and surprisingly deep lyrics - “Wherever you may go, you are there.”

Enjoyed this gig.

The Age Of Spiritual Machines ~ Ray Kurzweil

Reading this fascinating book at the moment.

Kurzweil is famous for making the prediction (in the 70s) that computers would be able to beat the best human chess players by 1998. This occured in 1997, when IBM's Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov. There is still some dispute about that game (Deep Blue apparently had a team of grandmasters "advising" it in real time), but Kurzweil's point was there would be an increasingly exponential growth in computing power from the 70s onwards, and that this event would signify merely a footnote in this inexorable growth.

In this book he makes further predictions about this growth. He makes startling claims at the outset - that by 2099, computing power will be at such a level that 99% of the intelligence in the world will be machine-based; that this progression is the next level of evolution; that this evolution is unstoppable - claims you'd be tempted to dismiss as speculation. But Kurzweil follows each claim up with thorough justification - he buttresses each claim with a helping of evolutionary biology, computer science, mathematics, philosophy - thought-provoking and all considered, hard to disagree with.

I was immediately dubious of the central claim - that machine intelligence will overtake human intelligence as the superior intelligence on Earth in the near future. I thought of creations like Deep Blue - incredible feats of programming - but not intelligent. I don't think you can program "intelligence" - that human attribute that we aren't intelligent enough ourselves to understand, let alone set out in code or algorithm.

Kurzweil comes from two angles - the first is an outline of possible paths that computing power will take to get to this superior "intelligence". He discusses the nature of intelligence, "neural net" computing, quantum computing. The concepts are amazing, but I'm still not convinced. As I understand it, the intelligence we possess arose through millions of years of blind evolution, with branches hither and thither, pruned constantly by chance - till we arrive here battered and bruised, intelligent, and to borrow Bonnie "Prince" Billy - "with a drive to live I won't let go". Can intelligence exist without the wiliness that the will to live bestows? Even if we program "intelligence", can we program the will to live that we possess in spades and that I would contend is the basis of intelligence? We are intelligent, in order to survive, to outwit nature, to impress the ladies. Where is the prerogative for machines? Are we to give them this prerogative? Do we (or can we) understand enough our own prerogative?

The second angle is, for me, much more convincing, if fantastical. This angle conjectures that over the next century we will become more dependent on ever-developing technology, and eventually subsume it.

This, for me, is an astonishing claim, and much more plausible than a programmed intelligence. This conjecture says that machine intelligence will emerge because we will become machines. This sounds nuts! But is it so far-fetched? Consider hearing aids - they have become the most normal apparatus - a little machine that sits on your ear and augments sound quality. These have developed over the decades and are now very sophisticated, having the ability to analyze patterns and detect and amplify sounds in certain frequency wavelengths (like human speech). I wouldn't claim that these machines are intelligent, but the intelligent human wearing it is. It is not inconceivable that more of these machines will be developed - like for instance the ability to see for the blind (these are actually at advanced prototypes - a camera is wired directly into the part of the brain that deals with sight giving rudimentary vision). So Kurzweil contends that these technologies will be developed first to correct disabilities - then, when their individual abilities exceed the human sense they are designed to mimic - healthy people will use them to augment their own (perfectly functioning) senses. This will become as normal as wearing clothes. Eventually we will be using machines to aid memory and critical thinking. Why not - a box like a hearing aid wired to the brain to expand your intelligence to previously unimaginable proportions? Who'd decline?

(A not uninteresting corollary to this thinking is that with parallel advances in medical technology - such as genetic engineering of organs - we could achieve immortality this way.)

I'd be much more inclined to believe that superior intelligence will emerge in this way. We use machines as tools, first externally, then internally. A world of cyborgs awaits.

A blind watchmaker spent hundreds of thousands of years honing the human mind - I don't believe it can be recreated in C++ any time soon. But to become machine, its not so far-fetched? Fascinating to consider in any case.

The strengths of the book are in the fascinating summaries of the frontiers of computer science. For the purposes of the argument, this is neccessarily related to questions of philosophy. Issues like this - while they seem at first questions of speculative science fiction - actually go straight to the meat of the deepest philosophical questions; what is intelligence? what is human? are they mutually exclusive? It reminds me of Phillip K Dick's unfortunately titled novel - "Do Andriods Dream of Electric Sheep?". A world where humans and machines are indistinguishable, a bounty hunter is tasked to track down and kill these imposters; but they feel pain and have thoughts and feelings - is it moral to kill them? Eventually the bounty hunter - in an existential crisis - begins to question whether he himself is human or machine? The big questions can be posed in exhilarating narrations and in popular form, make no mistake.

The weaknesses of the book are in the closing chapters where the author has imaginary conversations with an inhabitant of the distant future - ironically, they are just too far-fetched and in a narrative conceit that is just too false. Also, the book - published in the early 2000s - makes a number of claims about the year 2010 that are - as far as I know - well off; like a telephone that translates languages in real time.

Highly recommended - nourishing food for thought.

Mission Statement

So many times, in discussion with friends or wherever, I’ve found myself lost for words.

Not lost for words in the sense that I don’t know what to say on a subject. Lost in the sense that I either haven’t refined my opinions to myself and they remain nebulous in my head – or, I know exactly what I want to convey, but it can’t be expressed in a sound-bite. To express it would require me to speak in pages and paragraphs and punctuations – and this is not how people talk. (In fact, I wouldn’t want to talk to anyone who spoke in paragraphs.)

So I have resolved to start a blog where I expound on what I think about stuff.

Subjects will be eclectic – I am as much establishing what I think about things. Being as prone to error as anyone else – I’m always interested in other views. If I’m wrong, tell me why.

Hairycakes