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The LSE SU is embarking on a fairly radical programme whereby it will share some staff with SUARTS, the SU for the University of the Arts, London. Details of the proposals can be found on the LSE SU website and a brief comment from me is at the end of this post.

LSE SU General Secretary Aled Dilwyn Fisher, who also contested the North-East constituency for the Green Party at last year’s GLA elections, kindly agreed to be interviewed. My questions are in bold.
Continue reading “Interview with Aled Dilwyn Fisher: the future of LSE Students’ Union” →

The excellent Nosemonkey has a look.

xD.

Donald Rumsfeld attracted unfair opprobrium over his ‘known unknowns’ speech – which is not to say that much of the opprobrium he attracted elsewhere was unjustified.

There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know.
But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know.

Emphases added by me.

It strikes me that there is a fourth category – unknown knowns*. I am increasingly aware that people in one part of an organisation can know something – and not just know it, but have a developed view on it and how it affects other things – but that other parts of the organisation, particularly towards the top, don’t know that another part of the organisation knows.

xD.

* – That is not Zizek’s definition:

the “unknown knowns” – the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to known about, even though they form the background of our public values

These are ‘rejected knowns’ and I’m taking the semantic route out as I would say that people still know about these things, even if they ignore them

I never thought I’d say that. Her execrable blog has been taken down.

However, I think the Telegraph were wrong to file papers against Acidity, Dorries’ web hosts, rather than her, and to do it late on a Friday evening. I am concerned about almost any instance of restricting an MP’s freedom of speech, no matter how much I disagree with them, even if they can use Parliamentary privilege. While I think that the Telegraph were acting in the public interest, primarily albeit not exclusively, I feel that Dorries’ remarks, however wrong, were fair comment.

And now, with bad grace, holding a red rose behind my back and typing this with my gloved right hand, I’m going to link to Phil ‘Dizzy’ Hendren, who makes some good points here. There is some independent confirmation courtesy of the Guardian.

A few other remarks. Firstly, did the Telegraph not expect a Streisand effect, or do they really think Dorries and her blog carry that much influence, or did they not think at all? Secondly, I think there should be some libel laws; I just think that, at the moment, they are written, interpreted and enforced so widely that I find it difficult to tell which enforcements are fair and which not.

If you want further comment of mine on Nadine Dorries’ antics, follow this link.

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

– Evelyn Beatrice Hall summarising Voltaire’s attitude towards Helvétius.

xD.

From the Facebook group:

Simon Singh, the highly respected science writer (Fermat’s Last Theorem, etc), is being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association. Chiropractic is an alternative/complementary therapy which purports to treat various ailments by manipulation of the spine.) The BCA are promoting Chiropractic as treatment for children with (potentially serious) ailments such as asthma and frequent ear infections. Simon Singh criticised this in a Guardian “comment” piece. In particular, he criticised the BCA for doing this without appropriate clinical evidence.

He is now being sued for libel.

The BCA want damages and an injunction against him saying such things in future. Fundamentally this is about free speech and the use of evidence. An informed and responsible science writer should be able to write about genuine concerns on an important public health issue (the correct treatment for children) without the threat and expense of High Court libel claims. Even if he was wrong, it would surely be enough for the BCA to simply show their supporting evidence. But they are suing him instead.

In the words of Frank Frizelle: “Let’s hear your evidence, not your legal muscle.”

I found out about this at a recent meeting of Skeptics in the Pub and there is good background from the excellent Jack of Kent blog, covering the BCA’s claim, Simon Singh’s defence and a very useful guide to English libel law. The original piece from the BCA is here, courtesy of the Internet Archive and Singh’s response that has precipitated all this is here. A good summary of things is over at the Quack-o-meter. A not so good summary follows below courtesy of, er, me.

The BCA’s claim specifically refers to Singh’s statement that there is “not a jot of evidence”for the eficacy of chiropractic interventions for colic; sleeping problems; feeding problems; frequent ear infections; asthma; and prolonged crying, mentioned in that original doc from the BCA. The upshot is that the case could revolve (as I understand it) around one of two things; whether an organisation like the BCA has a reputation in this case to be protected (which has all sorts of positive implications for free speech) and an actual look at the evidence for the said eficacy. In other words, the BCA may just have put chiropractic on trial.

Ho, ho, ho.

The preliminary hearing starts tomorrow, 7th May, at 1000 at the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand.

xD.

Via Tiberius Gracchus, I read a despondent post from Ashok Karra; do read both the original and the reply.

Ashok’s lament is based on Mark Bauerlein’s book, The Dumbest Generation:

“that our unparalleled access to knowledge is coeval with a culture of decadence which allows the construction of entire worlds around our purely adolescent selves”

Our time is not uniquely stupid, or, if it is, we have no way of showing it to be so. In this, I largely agree with Tiberius. However, Ashok’s post picks up on something of a theme I’ve seen of late in books like Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur, Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and how to Stop it. Essentially, it argues that the combination of easy access to information through the internet and, crucially, easy means of putting information on the internet¹ means that our culture is degraded because our population does not think critically. This affects everything – politics, music, literature, the arts, everything. I think that those authors and Ashok are missing the point.

Let us take one of the supposed high-points in the intellectual life of our species; classical Athens. Aristotle believed that part of the human condition was to be a zoon politikon. This is often rendered as ‘political animal’ but such a translation loses some of the meaning of ‘political’; it means ‘of the polis, or Greek city-state. The good life was achieved by living in, and taking an active part in, the city-state as this fulfilled man’s (and it is man’s – women had very little status in ancient Greece) various needs and potentials. That option isn’t open to us now; even engagement in the municipality isn’t the same because national identification has primacy for most people. Since that high point, we have gone downhill, according to Ashok and others’ argument, and thought less and thought less critically.

Unfortunately, that’s a load of rubbish.

It’s often nice to think that the Athenian agora was full of people wandering around, alternately philosophising and politicising. I rather think it more likely that it was a mixture of something that student politicians in the UK would recognise – scandal, rumour and faction – and people just trying to get on with their lives.

Socrates was in the habit of accosting people in the agora in Athens to discuss whatever was on his mind; not necessarily philosophers, but whoever was going about their business there. In response to a pronouncement from the oracle at Delphi that he, Socrates, was indeed the wisest in Greece, Socrates decided that his wisdom came in recognising that he didn’t know much and was prepared to analyse things critically and honestly. His compatriots gave unthinking, uncritical answers – dumb answers – to his questions, asserting knowledge when what they had was prejudice (in the sense of having pre-judged based on existing personal and societal biases and received wisdom).

We might take another moment of great conflict and change – the foment around the time of the North American War of Independence. At the same time as Tom Paine was proseltysing his radical messages, one retort ran

So you, great Common Sense, did surely come
From out the crack in grisly Pluto’s bum

(Tom Paine – A Political Life by John Keane)

As Mark Steel commented – what is that, magical realism?.

I will not deny for a moment that there were some interesting, eye-catching developments from those periods – and those are just two in history – I will deny that those periods were awash with it. Yes, perhaps more people were aware of great debates. I wonder how many read much more into them that they did into the arguments between two feudal lords in other times and places.

If I may borrow, via Ed Murrow, a phrase from Shakespeare:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves

Trivia, rumour and gossip are as much a part of the human condition now as they ever have been; it is part of our social nature. I am prepared to accept that our liberal-capitalist-democratic order is fragile and requires a more active and informed citizenry to survive, which in turn requires a long, hard look at the nature of politics, education and the media in the west, but that doesn’t mean the material we have to work with is qualitatively worse or that it has been made so by the internet.

xD.

1 – This is an interesting effect, deserving of study. It is principally the ease by which it can be done. Once upon a time, you either had to code directly in HTML (and CSS and the rest) or use a WYSIWIG editor like MS FrontPage. You still had to sort out how to upload your files and storage space was frequently limited. The Web 2.0 phenomenon is not so much about social media as faster internet speeds, cheap storage and user-friendly interfaces (hard and soft) so that you don’t have to know anything about computers beyond standard office skills to have a blog, edit Wikipedia or post something to YouTube.

I caught the last few seconds of Newsnight Review to see a picture of Humphrey Lyttleton and my heart sank. It turned out that he died this evening at seven o’ clock. Humph and ISIHAC hold a special attraction for me.

I first discovered Humphrey Lyttelton where I would probably hear him most often; in my father’s car. He was chairing I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, one of the silliest and funniest radio programmes ever to be broadcast. It turned an obscure station on the Northern line – Mornington Crescent – into a monument to the character of the English, made familiar figures out of the lovely Samantha and the rippling Sven and, on more than one occasion, caused Dad to pull onto the hard shoulder because the risk of him causing an accident because he and I were laughing at Humph on the radio.

When I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue was commissioned, radio comedy was in a sorry state. Consisting almost entirely of panel games, it was bland and it was formulaic. The show was to be an unscripted version of I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again; if jazz was the antidote to scripted music, who better to lead the antidote to panel games than a famous jazz trumpter – ‘Humph’.

I suspect that for many people, Humphrey Lyttelton was first and foremost the chair of ISIHAC. He was, of course, a fantastic musicia; indeed, he was described by Louis Armstrong as ‘that cat in England who swings his ass off’. His dedication to music, I think, is without question. In September 1943, he landed at Salerno with a pistol in one hand and his trumpet in the other. I won’t say any more than that it is well worth listening to any one of his records. Incidentally, his own record label was Calligraph, named after one of his passions, calligraphy. He was the president of the Society for Italic Handwriting and was at one point a cartoonist of some note.

Humph was sent to a steel mill in Port Talbot as a young man to see if he had the makings of a captain of industry. The outcome was rather the opposite, as he became a lifelong socialist, albeit, as he described himself, ‘a romantic socialist.

Lyttelton was, despite his protestations to the contrary, modern to the last. His website, humphreylyttleton.com, carries a message that ends with Humph in introspective mode.

“As we journey through life, discarding baggage along the way, we should keep an iron grip, to the very end, on the capacity for silliness. It preserves the soul from dessication.”

I think it is fair to say that Lyttelton was silly – gloriously, wonderfully silly – throughout his life.

Humphrey Richard Adeane Lyttelton, cartoonist, calligrapher, columnist, jazz trumpeter and host of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. Born Eton, 23 May 1921, died London, 25 April 2008.

xD.

Congratulations on finding davecole.org. I will be migrating my blog from unoriginalname38.blogspot.com to this site in the near future. In the meantime, please visit unoriginalname38.blogspot.com

This might turn into rather a long post, but do please at least look at the photos. If you click on them, they’ll be larger and you can see more here.

Alice, my girlfriend, and I went to San Francisco last week on holiday, largely courtesy of some air miles from my father. San Francisco is a lovely city. Beyond the Golden Gate Bridge (of which more later) there is the TransAmerica pyramid as a landmark and Fisherman’s Wharf is fun to visit. With the possible exception of Pier 39, it’s not excessively touristy and there are parts that are just nice to walk along. Pier 39, though, does have sea lions. We didn’t make it to Alcatraz but here’s a gratuitous picture.

I’m afraid that this post will sound like I’m bitching. Alice and I had a lovely time in San Francisco. We were lucky with the weather and there’s a lot to see and do in a very pleasant and friendly city. The city somehow feels that it works (in a way that Dallas does not) and it’s easy to move around. The public transport works and, as an added bonus, there are cable cars. These run off a cable running underground and are a lot of fun to ride on. It’s a good city to be a flaneur in; lots to see, some decent coffee shops and restaurants and a general feeling of comfort and unhurriedness.

LA airport is bloody awful
The staff at LAX all wear name badges with ‘Dave 01421’ or ‘Alice 63920’; people are reduced to a number so that complaints may be easily made against them. This was probably an idea dreamed up by some exec in an office who’d never been near the shop floor as a means to facilitate praise and complaints. The human tendency is to notice the bad more than the good; the numbers would be used a lot for complaints, mostly because LAX, built for the 1976 Olympics, was never finished and it shows. Our first port of call was Los Angeles. Air pollution cannot escape LA as the city sits in a bowl. As we flew into LAX, adding to the pollution, coming back from San Francisco, we could see a grey haze floating beneath the cloud. LA is not an attractive city from the air.

Anyway, you’re never going to receive a warm welcome at an airport but an efficient one works just as well. We were near the front of the immigration control queue – I felt sorry for those at the back who had a long wait – but were still standing around for a while and I felt like shouting that when to Jumbo Jets arrive around the same time, you need more than six immigration officials.
We then had to queue again to go past a point where someone looked at the customs declaration for a second time and, bizarrely, to queue to leave the building. Queuing is a generous description for the ensuing mess up a ramp and around a corner. A couple of LAX staff were trying to sort things out but after two long queues people were not in a charitable mood.

Then things became annoying. We went to the AA desk with our e-ticket number because we were flying AA to San Francisco. Logical, no? No. AA were codesharing that flight with Alaska Air but had neglected to tell us, anyone else or put it on the displays. A walk to another terminal and Alaska told us that we had to go back to AA as we should have had paper tickets. AA passed us onto BA, with whom we booked the flights, who swore blind that we had been sent paper tickets. $150 later, we were reissued our tickets on paper that must be worth its weight in gold at those prices. When we came back and handed over our tickets to the AA desk at SF airport, we were told it was an e-ticket and not a paper ticket. Anyway, we made the Alaska Air flight but had it not been delayed we would have missed it. It is worth looking at the TSA Pledge. There is one thing missing from this: ‘efficiency’.

Customer service
People were polite and so on, but were hamstrung in what they could do. The politeness, however, is the standard. Where a bartender in the US might say ‘what would you like, sir?’ their UK counterpart might plainly ask ‘what do you want?’; neither is ruder or more polite as it’s just the way things are done. I suppose it’s a bit like this blog; flowery language and subclauses don’t change the ideas beneath any more than the query of the US bartender. We booked to go on a bus tour of Muir Woods to see the redwoods and then go to some vineyards in the Sonoma valley. It ended up that the tour we wanted wasn’t on offer any more, and we ended up going on a (very good, as it happens) tour of the Napa and Sonoma valleys. People at the tour company’s office were polite but I would rather they’d been efficient.

Why is all cheese in America the same? We stopped at Sonoma town for lunch on the tour and ate at the Cheese Factory. Can anyone tell me why the half-a-dozen varieties of cheese they had on offer to sample all tasted the same? Has anyone ever really expressed a preference for Monterey Jack over American Sharp Cheddar? I can’t believe there’s not a market for something other than variously-packaged, slightly bland cheddar. Brie, perhaps, or even stilton. I don’t believe that the A
merican palette is averse to different cheeses but the invisible hand of the market seems to have banned all trace of camembert, wensleydale and roquefort.

Eating out
Talking of food, we had some great meals out, largely due to the strength of the pound against the dollar, and Plouf and John’s Grill come recommended. The seafood in San Francisco is great – lots of clams, mussels, sea bass and swordfish. I know American food is often knocked for being poor quality (as above) but there are some really good restaurants around. Plouf on Belden Place was a lot of fun. A French restaurant, it had a good menu and a wine list with new and old world wines and a cheery French waiter (the French for clams is ‘palourdes‘) who did seem very happy with his lot in life. Clams and mussels provencale were great – I forget what else we had, but the shellfish was very good. Belden Place is a side street with restaurants all along. It’s slogan is ‘Where the locals go’; I don’t know how true this is, but there were plenty of American accents and its location in the financial district makes me think that it’s aimed at the business community. Anyhow, a meal with wine and the works for two came to about fifty quid total. If anyone can tell me more about Belden Place (if any San Franciscans are reading this…), I’d love to know. We went back to Belden Place, to an Italian called Tiramisu. While it was fine, I was annoyed because the first waiter claimed there was no house white and was generally snotty; the second one (who appeared, I’m guessing, because the other didn’t want to deal with us) explained that there was a house chardonnay, pinot grigio and something else. Anyway, he brought a bottle and it was fine. Decorations a bit dodgy – supposedly Pompeii-esque murals with cracks added. The thing with the first waiter annoyed me – it made me feel ill at ease and that the restaurant didn’t want casually -dressed people in it. The pretention and, frankly, snobbishness wasn’t great. John’s Grill, which features in The Maltese Falcon, was great. It was what I’d call classic American cooking at its best – simple ingredients of good quality, well cooked. Steak, chips and creamed spinach, plenty of a good rose and definitely worth going to. Book ahead though – it was busy.

We did things other than eating…
You can very easily see why Berkeley sustains a left-wing population. On a fine day, sitting on its lawns, walking through its woods or using its amazing facilities (the student union and centre are probably half the size of the entire LSE) makes you want to do more than just live to work. Seeing the privations of some in the Bay Area while you were a student at Berkeley would provide a spur to want to do something about it.

I did get a kick from thinking that Adelstein and Bloom would have walked on those paths at one point. Yes, many fine minds, but those two are important to me. I bought myself a homburg at a shop in Berkeley. Not, sadly, from Mars Vintage Thrift.

The richest country in the world
I mentioned the privations of some. There seem to be a relatively large number of homeless people in San Francisco. I hope this doesn’t come over as strange, but here goes. I wish I was both a better and more confident photographer of people, hopefully in the Steve McCurry style of rapid, unposed, intimate photos. You can’t do a huge amount individually, but I really felt that few people actually saw the homeless; everyone seemed so used to bypassing the homeless that it was automatic. Maybe some photos of people living on the streets of a wealthy city in abject poverty, with little or no healthcare or prospects of a job or housing, would move people a little.

You do sometimes see a lot in the features of people. A lot of the homeless in San Francisco had unkept, matted hair and weather-beaten faces that can give good, expressionful shots. Some, though, by their clothes and the style of their actions, unaccustomed to the streets, and a greater despair in their eyes, gave the impression of having recently lost their homes. Certainly, foreclosing and repossessions are increasing sufficiently in the US that the papers are predicting a subprime lending bubble collapse. Maybe it was an attempt to maintain dignity in a situation that many would consider to be impossible undignified that made it different.

Maybe it’s the nasty feeling that there, but for the grace of God, go I; a lot people on the streets have histories of mental health problems. There is a local version of the Big Issue, the Street Sheet, that has potential, particularly as mainstream newspapers aren’t great, to provide a distinctive coverage of news, perhaps including municipal news, that could make it a better seller; for now, it seemed to concentrate to much on homelessness issues. The idea is to give the homeless and former
ly homeless a voice; this could be done while making more money for the vendor. As an aside, I met a chugger who was collecting for a charity that did microfinance in Colombia, Ecuador, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh – and the US.

The Golden Gate Bridge
I went, with camera, to the recreational pier to take pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset. The Bridge is a fascinating structure. It has a definite beauty in the curve of the cables but it is the way in which it closes the Bay, adding a finality to the land before the Pacific, that has allowed it to become a loved piece of architecture. It was initially opposed as it would have spoilt the landscape. The way in which it connects to the land is interesting – it’s different at each end – and the girders in the supporting towers make fascinating patterns.

I managed, I think, some decent shots of the bridge with the sun setting behind; after all, it’s pretty straightforward to take a decent photo given the setting. I actually enjoyed taking pictures of the birds more. I think there must have been an updraft of air in front of the pier as a lot of birds were flying and gliding along just in front of me. It’s quite wonderful to have birds flying past a few feet in front of you. You start to see the attraction to prisoners of keeping birds; they give a sense of freedom and being able to ‘shake the surly bonds of earth’. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this will save you more of my prolix.

MoMA in SoMa
We went to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) which is in South of Market (SoMa). I wasn’t sure about some of the collection (Alice was sure that some of it was a wind-up) but they had a really interesting room on design of objects like typewriters, chairs and coffee makers. All very mundane items, but with the potential to be beautifully designed. The website for MOMA has a good interactive guide to various artists called Making Sense of Modern Art. It has given me a few ideas that, if I have time, I might work on.

I’ll sign off here. We had a great time. After a few weeks of work that were pretty soul-destroying, it was good to be able to spend some time with Alice and to rest. Unfortunately the lines under my eyes are returning already. I’d like to go to Muir, Sausalito and Yosemite and so may well pass through San Francisco again.

xD.