the greycat blog

Apologies for the recent lack of activity around here: I’ve been unwell. Things should be back to normal shortly.

‘Why the West is best’ by Ibn Warraq, City Journal, winter 2008:

A culture that gave the world the novel; the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert; and the paintings of Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Rembrandt does not need lessons from societies whose idea of heaven, peopled with female virgins, resembles a cosmic brothel. Nor does the West need lectures on the superior virtue of societies in which women are kept in subjection under sharia, endure genital mutilation, are stoned to death for alleged adultery, and are married off against their will at the age of nine; societies that deny the rights of supposedly lower castes; societies that execute homosexuals and apostates. The West has no use for sanctimonious homilies from societies that cannot provide clean drinking water or sewage systems, that make no provisions for the handicapped, and that leave 40 to 50 percent of their citizens illiterate.

(Found via Campus Watch.)

From the ‘has the world gone mad?’ department:

Pantomime gun must be registered 

A Cornish village drama group has had to register a toy gun with the police to comply with health and safety rules. Carnon Downs drama group in Cornwall have also had to keep their plastic cutlasses and wooden swords locked up for the pantomime, Robinson Crusoe. Producers of the show called the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) rules ‘farcical’. A spokesman for the HSE said the rules were designed to make risks ’sensibly managed’.

The gun produces a flag with the word ‘bang’ written on it.

Admirers of Gene Wolfe’s epic fantasy of the far future The Book of the New Sun will recall the guild cloak worn by the central character and narrator, the torturer Severian: not black but fuligin, the colour darker than black. ‘I’ve never seen such black - so dark you can’t see folds in it. It makes my hand look as though it’s disappeared’. Then there’s Spinal Tap’s Smell the Glove album with its all-black cover: ‘How much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black’. And we musn’t forget what Father Ted taught us about the special blackness of priest’s socks, which are blacker than any other type of socks. ‘Sometimes you see lay people wear what look like black socks but if you look closely you’ll see they’re very, very, very, very, very, very, very dark blue’.

Anyway, the point of this is that fuligin has now been invented; a substance of which ‘none more black’ can honestly be said has arrived; the truly, perfectly black priest’s sock is now possible at last. Researchers from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, have used carbon nanotubes to create ‘the darkest man-made material ever’. According to Imperial College theoretical physicist Sir John Pendry, ‘they’ve made the blackest material known to science’.  Next stop: superdark materials. Which are apparently even darker.

Marks and Spencer, colossus of the UK underwear market and home of the £4 bag of carrots, is having a hard time, and is discounting prices so that people will go back to buying things they don’t need with money they don’t have, just like in the good old days. Just-knighted M&S chief executive Stuart Rose was interviewed (audio clip here, .ram format) about all this on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme this morning, where he explained to Sarah Montague that M&S doesn’t engage in low retail tricks like using discounts to increase sales:

ROSE: … we reduced our opening prices by 6 percent … you have to run very hard to pick up the 6 percent deflation …

MONTAGUE: If you have to discount by 6 percent to get this fall -

ROSE (interrupting): It’s not discounting, Sarah, it’s positioning yourself in the market as a retailer that offers value.

So there we are. The likes of Tesco and Sainsbury’s may cut prices, but Marks & Spencer positions itself in the market as a retailer that offers value.

Speaking of value, much was added to the interview by the fluent and incisive commentary of business editor Robert Peston: ‘Well I think, this is, you know, an important moment, Marks & Spencer is the market leader in clothing, this is, you know, a a a a disappointing performance, and what you have to decide if you’re looking at it from from from from my perspective is, is this because Marks & Spencer itself has made a mess of it or is it because the market is really difficult. … Well, I think, you know, the the the the the the big question er for Marks & Spencer is really whether or not, you know, the the the the the the the the business is strong enough to weather this.’

Sir Stuart’s words did M&S no end of good: their shares plunged 18% in the first two hours of trading this morning.

There’s an interesting article by Guy Kewney at The Register today: ‘Who’s archiving IT’s history?’. Kewney points out the difficulty of finding accurate archiving on the web. Many sites hardly archive at all, or only started recently; even where content is archived, context and presentation has often changed completely. Add to this the difficulties of documents disappearing, links going bad and images vanishing and you have a very unreliable, partial and perhaps even misleading record.

This isn’t some failing of the web, but a result of its inherent nature. It is a slippery, unstable, unreliable thing. Yet the received wisdom is that once something is out there on the web, it’s out there for ever. And the converse is also widely held to be true, i.e. that if you can’t find it on the web, it doesn’t exist. A remarkable instance of this is discussed in an article by academic Mark LeVine in the Orange County Weekly for 19 March 2003 (and safely archived on the OC Weekly site). LeVine was being interviewed by talk-show host Dennis Prager; LeVine said, in answer to a question, that a particular thing had happened in 1996. Prager, however, accused LeVine of lying. The reason? He’d looked on Google and found no trace of the event LeVine had cited. ‘I was stunned by Prager’s remark’, says LeVine, ’more specifically by the idea that a minute-long Internet search would provide sufficient evidence to pass judgment on a historical claim’. Yet is it surprising that such a delusional view of the web persists when the gods of Google themselves have proclaimed their mission as ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’? Short of sending their robots to crawl the contents of all human souls it is very difficult to see how Google can make the world’s information ‘universally accessible’ (even if that were desirable), and as for compelling it to be ‘useful’, I simply don’t understand what they mean. But such megalomaniacal nonsense helps sustain the misconception that the web is itself ‘the information’, rather than (like all other media) a means of accessing a limited amount of information, in certain limited ways.

The problem isn’t that the web’s record of things, like every other archive, is incomplete and misleading. The problem is that it is believed not to be.

The BBC have a reporter on the Greenpeace ship Esperanza, tracking the Japanese whaling fleet as it hunts Humpback and Minke whales across the Southern Ocean. His name is Jonah.

‘I am still not sure whether or not sending me on this trip is a big in-joke by BBC editors back in London.’

Rachel Toor, a US professor of creative writing, has written a column in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the difficulties (a rather tame word) of writing. It’s a great piece of writing in its own right, and it rings very true, at least for this reader and writer. This paragraph caught my eye:

It’s a daunting thing - to believe that you have something to say (that others will want to hear); to convey information in a way that is pellucid and intriguing; to find the mot juste, to avoid the tired and the clichéd; to create scaffolding to support the ideas you are juggling; and then to have the confidence to put it out there in the world, where it will surely be picked apart, kicked around, and perhaps even trampled.

It is very daunting, which I suppose is one of the reasons blogs were invented. For most bloggers only the last point applies.

This train of thought leads me to wonder which great writers of the past would have relished the blog as a form of expression, even of literary art. I’m sure Charles Dickens would have loved to blog. Anthony Burgess would have filled pages every day with every topic under the sun. Perhaps Jane Austen would have run hers as a society gossip column. I can see Virginia Woolf, her blog an elegant exemplar of minimalist design, tapping away each day at a new stream-of-consciousness entry. Émile Zola would have run several angry political blogs, I suspect. And Henry James, dictating to a drooping keyboard amanuensis, would have gone tirelessly on, and on, and on…

Once again the most-read paper on greycat.org over the past seven days is ‘Aristotle and citizenship: the responsibilities of citizenship in the Politics‘.

Picture: Alexander the Great and Aristotle. [Source]

Still at The Times, one wonders if those who think up the headlines there ever actually read the results:

UN chief Ban Ki Moon skates over Antarctica row