the greycat blog

The world’s best web-based PDF magazine, All The Rage, has reached issue number 24 and to celebrate this event has adopted, for that issue, the theme ‘the number 24′. For anyone familiar with London, ‘number 24′ can mean only one thing: the bus route that runs between Pimlico and Hampstead. Accordingly, that’s what I’ve written about, in collaboration with All The Rage’s editor Leila Johnston, who has produced a wealth of wonderful photographs taken on the route.

From the beginning it was one of the most busy of London bus routes, and found its way rapidly into the fabric of the capital’s life. By the 1920s, when well-appointed residences from Hampstead to Victoria were put on the market, the advertisements in The Times would list (among such attractions as ‘constant hot water’ and ‘excellent maid will remain if desired’) their situation ‘on the 24 bus route’ or ‘near the bus 24 terminus’. The landlords of 99 Grosvenor Road, Westminster, boasted in 1925 that ‘the 24 bus from Victoria to Embankment passes the door’ - as, over eighty years later, it still does.

Read on: ‘The romance of Route 24′ in All The Rage, March 2009 issue (PDF).

There’s an interesting story on the BBC News website today:

‘More bad news’ on climate change

Well, actually the story is far from interesting in itself. It has no substantive news content whatever, being just a calendar story - i.e., it tells us simply that an event that was going to happen on a particular date is indeed happening on that date. The event in question is the Climate Change Congress taking place this week at the University of Copenhagen. The interesting thing about this story is the headline: ‘More bad news’ on climate change.

Notice the quotation marks around ‘More bad news’? They appear in a headline when someone or something is being quoted (surprisingly enough). A short quoted phrase like that is a very good way of compressing information into a headline and giving it the immediacy journalists like - the important point being that the presence of the quotation marks makes it clear that someone involved in the story has said whatever it may be, so whatever value judgement or asssertion is contained within the quotes is the responsibility of whoever said it, not the new organization or the journalist. Here’s an example from elsewhere on today’s BBC News front page: Tibetans’ lives ‘hell on earth’. That’s the Dalai Lama being quoted there. So, you read the story to find where the Dalai Lama said what the headline says he said, and sure enough here it is:

Successive Chinese campaigns - class struggle, the Cultural Revolution and ‘patriotic re-education’ - had ‘thrust Tibetans into such depths of suffering and hardship that they literally experienced hell on earth’, he [the Dalai Lama] said from his seat in exile in India’s Dharamsala.

Looking at the headline on the climate change story, then, leads you to think that someone - a scientist, perhaps, an activist, or a politician - who will be quoted in the story said there would be ‘more bad news’ from the conference. So, you read the story, and there’s absolutely no sign that anyone said any such thing (for a screen grab of the entire story as it appeared this morning, click here). In fact, the story has no quotes from anyone about anything, just as it offers no new developments, no new data, no actual news content whatsoever. And certainly no-one says anything about ‘more bad news’ - except the journalist writing the story.

That’s right. The person who used the ‘more bad news’ quote that is picked up and used in the headline is the BBC reporter who wrote the story, Matt McGrath. It’s from the first line: ‘More bad news on climate change is expected as more than 2,000 climate scientists gather in Copenhagen’.

The BBC is thus quoting itself, and doing it in a way that makes it appear that it is quoting someone else. In that headline, the BBC is telling us what to think and telling us that we should think it because it tells us so. This conference will produce more bad news on climate change. You can be sure it will because the BBC has quoted the phrase in the headline. And its source for that headline is … itself. A neat encapsulation of the corruption of news values which underlies the Corporation’s whole attitude to furthering the climate change dogma they have taken to their hearts.

The headlines that go on BBC News website stories are generally not produced by the journalists writing the stories, so Mr McGrath is probably not to blame for this piece of twisted presentation. He is, however, responsible for the non-story itself, which contains no news value whatever and appears to have been written and published with the sole purpose of skewing public perceptions in advance of the Copenhagen conference.

The conference probably will produce ‘more bad news’ on climate change - that’s what it is there for. If it does, the BBC’s job is to report that that is what has happened, and perhaps even to quote someone else (as opposed to themselves) who says as much. It certainly is not the BBC’s job to announce in advance that such will be the outcome, on the basis of no sounder authority than its own opinion - and under a corrupted and misleading headline.

Two new issues of All The Rage since we last conversed in these pages, and therefore two articles from me to plug.

January 2009: the theme is ’secrets and lies’, and my article is about that English Renaissance statesman and plolymath, Sir Francis Bacon, a connoisseur of the well-judged lie and expert in dissimulation:

As for … ouright lying, it has its uses, and Bacon does not regard it as inherently morally reprehensible.: ‘I hold [it] more culpable and less politicke’, he writes, ‘except in be in great and rare Matters’. The judgement of when and how far to lie is a pragmatic issue, not a moral one; not for nothing is Bacon known as an empirical rather than an idealist philosopher. A man must maintain a reputation for honesty and fairness, but ultimately that too can be a lie. The best balance is ‘Opennesse in Fame and Opinion; Secrecy in Habit; Dissimulation in seasonable use; And a Power to Faigne, if there be no Remedy’.

The January 2009 All The Rage is available as a pdf here. It’s a strong issue all round, but I’d have to pick out Emma Russell’s article on ‘the plight of the honest spy’ as the stand-out piece this month (or rather, last month).

February 2009:  ‘discoveries’ is the theme, and I had an opportunity to write about something I’d been reading a lot and writing about anyway. This, as any academic will tell you, is a chance you must never pass up. The something in question is the work of Edgar Allan Poe, and the result is an essay on discovery and detection in Poe’s works:

Poe was fascinated by the theme of discovery: the uncovering of hidden things and the reading of concealed meanings beneath deceptive or uncommunicative exteriors lies at the heart of many of his most efective and powerful narratives. T. S. Eliot ascribed to Poe the creation of the detective story as the embodiment of rationalism, ‘something as specialized and intellectual as a chess problem’, the construction and solution of a problem for its own sake in a story ‘which has a pure detective interest’. Yet Poe’s ambivalent attitude towards rationalism is expressed in the very irst sentence of The Murders in the Rue Morgue: ‘The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but littleusceptible of analysis’.

The February 2009 All The Rage can be downloaded in luscious pdf from this link.

You’re here reading this blog, but who are you? Quantcast knows, and although their information is ’sparse’ they declare that my site ‘reaches fewer than 2000 U.S. monthly people’. That’s monthly people, you understand. More meaningless nonsense here.

The latest All The Rage is devoted to biography. My own article focuses on biography and the art of the clerihew:

The Art of Biography
Is different from Geography.
Geography is about Maps,
But Biography is about Chaps.

But what does biography have to do with sneezing? Find out in the pages of All The Rage, December 2008 edition (PDF).

Yes, it’s called Bombay. That’s the established English name for the place, and no-one in India or anywhere else has the right to insist that it be dropped, particularly when their demand is rooted in chauvinistic religio-nationalism. Christopher Hitchens makes that point and many others in this excellent article in Slate: ‘Our friends in Bombay’.

… what’s at stake is the whole concept of a cosmopolitan city open to its own citizens and to the world—a city on the model of Sarajevo or London or Beirut or Manhattan. There is, of course, a reason they attract the ire and loathing of the religious fanatics. To the pure and godly, the very existence of such places is a profanity.

The importance of Bombay is more than symbolic, as is the importance of India. As Hitchens observes, ‘India is emerging in many ways as our most important ally. It is a strong regional counterweight to Russia and China. Not to romanticize it overmuch, it is a huge and officially secular federal democracy that is based, like the United States, on ethnic and confessional pluralism’.

India is indeed our natural ally in the fight against the jihadists, yet it has been sidelined by skewed Western geopolitics that rest on obsession with China, fear of Russia and faith in Pakistan. All three elements are disastrously misconceived: China is a mirage, Russia a paper tiger and Pakistan a terror cell masquerading, barely, as a state. India is a counterweight to all three and a firm foundation for a Western geostrategy that really is committed to the things the West says it cares about: democracy, freedom, economic and social progress. Hitchens is right, we must stand by our friends in Bombay.

Sad to see Wikipedia references in a serious piece of writing, though.

(Found via Alan Sullivan’s Fresh Bilge blog.)

The BBC does clearly think I am an idiot, as only an idiot would want the tide of mindless drivel, the murrain of talentless overpaid jerkwads, the torrent of shameless self-promotion and the flatulence of worthless non-news that now composes the promo-infested ego-stroking bias-spewing mess that is the Corporation’s output. And yes, I pay them £139.50 a year for this, but then I have no choice: it’s extorted out of me by the BBC’s money-with-menaces outfit, TV Licensing.

Anyway, what brought on these bitter reflections was a fascinating post at the Layscience Blog revealing the true depths of feeble-minded fatuity that lay behind Big Bang Day, the hysterically hyped-up coverage of the ’switching on’ (which was nothing of the kind) of the Large Hadron Collider with which the BBC bored the nation’s backside off in September, apparently under the impression that this represented serious science reporting. In a classic BBC beyond-parody moment, it turns out they even wanted the LHC team to fit a special Big Red Button that would be pressed at the crucial moment.

By the way, I have nothing against the Large Hadron Collider, which is a marvellous thing. And guess what, it didn’t destroy us all by creating a black hole capable of swallowing the universe (nor even one capable of swallowing the BBC, alas).

This month, in honour of the London Games Festival Fringe (25 October to 2 November) the theme of All The Rage is ‘games’. In accordance with this splendid theme, I have written an article on that celebrated painting by Pieter Breugel the Elder, ‘Children’s Games’:

At first sight Bruegel’s Children’s Games might appear to represent a lost world of innocence, where children live out their days in endless play – a representation of the happy state that all must leave behind as they grow to adulthood and maturity. Yet its message is in reality quite the opposite. The games of children show us that the adult world is no more than a game itself, and that all the roles and activities which adults value are mere instances of play. Bruegel’s playful children teach their adult viewers a lesson, with their mimicry of the grown-up world: that all is folly, futility, and the chance of the game.

It’s a bumper issue, as they say, so hurry along and read the gamey October 2008 issue (PDF) of All The Rage.

To fit in with the September theme for All The Rage, which happens to be ‘heroes and villains’, I have written a short piece on a forgotten hero-martyr of the First World War: Captain Fryatt, master of the Great Eastern Railway steamer Brussels, shot by the Germans in July 1916. To find out more about Fryatt, the best place to start (apart from my article in All The Rage, obviously) is this National Archives page. There’s no doubt that this once celebrated figure has fallen sadly into obscurity. When the signs for Fryatt Road in Tottenham, named for the Captain, were replaced recently, no-one noticed that the council had spelt his name wrong.

Why was he shot? To the Germans the case was very simple: this was no hero, but a pirate, operating outside the rules of war. It was intolerable, they believed, for someone claiming the protection of civilian status to engage in acts of war such as attempting to sink a submarine. The court martial and firing squad were, Germany claimed, the instruments of justice. Britain, her Allies and much neutral opinion saw them as the instruments of murder. The execution of a civilian seaman who had done nothing more than acted in the justified self-defence of his ship and passengers was, they believed, an outrage, and the Allied propaganda machine sought to make all the capital it could out of Fryatt’s life and death.

If you want to know what this is all about, visit the new September 2008 issue (PDF) of All The Rage. Then you will be able to read the article, which will tell you.

There’s a review of Alan Sokal’s latest book on his infamous hoax by philosopher Simon Blackburn in a recent National Review which is freely available via the Powell’s Books website. It is an interesting article, for three two reasons (not including its gratuitous and reflexive anti-Americanism, which is not interesting).

First, he puts the case for the importance of a historical, cultural and social understanding of science very well: ‘the reality is that science is a human activity, not an abstract calculus, and this properly makes its great achievements a subject of pride and awe, not suspicion and skepticism. It should also make us aware of its desperate fragility, and the hostile cultural forces that it constantly has to overcome’. There are scientists who reject any notion that putting science in its historical context as a human activity is helpful at all. As Blackburn argues, they are wrong, not least because such framing is their ally in resisting science-hostile forces, not a fifth column seeking to undermine science from within.

Second, he does precisely what he argues many postmodern critics of science have done, and dodges the central issue of the evidence-based nature of scientific claims. As he says, science describes the world, and its descriptions correspond to reality: ‘Our lasers and our cell phones work, our materials have their calculated strengths, our predictions are borne out to extraordinary numbers of decimal places: what can explain this, except that we are getting things right, or very nearly right? Or in other words, that we are on the track of the truth? If we were not, it would be an inexplicable coincidence — a miracle — that we are so often so successful’. He then goes on to say that science doesn’t often talk about ‘truth’. There’s a reason for that: it doesn’t have to. It talks about evidence. Scientific predictions about the world are attested by evidence, over and over again. The status of scientific assertions about the world as ‘truth’ derives from their status as evidence-based. Blackburn’s failure to see this point devalues the rest of his argument, as he goes on to prove by producing the term ‘uniformities’. Light, or water, or carbon behaving in the same way under given conditions becomes a ‘uniformity’:

The word ‘faith’ raises its annoying head at this point. [No it doesn’t. Why would it? Faith exists outside of evidence, science depends entirely upon evidence.] Is the human reliance on uniformities just as much a matter of faith as the creationist’s reliance on whatever message tells him that the earth is six thousand years old? [Not if those ‘uniformities’ are tested against the evidence and pass the test every time.] A lot of modern writing in the theory of knowledge more or less throws in the towel and supposes that it is. Wittgenstein summed it up in his last book, On Certainty, arguing that what we would like are rock-solid foundations for our beliefs, but what we find are things that simply ’stand fast’ for us — and this raises the disturbing possibility of others for whom different and in our eyes deplorable things equally stand fast.

If those ‘different … things’ are in the realm of metaphysics then there is not much you can do to prove them right or wrong - which is precisely why they are unscientific and cannot be considered as equivalent in status to scientific claims about the world. If someone turns up on my doorstep arguing that God the Son has not existed through eternity and was created by God the Father as a separate being I could neither prove nor disprove his assertion; I would have to close the door, muttering ‘gosh, the Arian heresy’. If, however, he asserted that human beings can breathe water as effectively as air, I could bring him in and drown him in the bath. Blackburn’s ‘uniformities’ aren’t just out there in the realm of ultimately unverifiable assertion: they make a difference.

[Third point redacted. It was pedantic, snarky and worthless.]