Just back from Bill Thompson’s talk on the ’10 cultures problem’: a restatement of CP Snow’s famous divide between the arts and the sciences, but this time between those who understand computer code and those who don’t. (That’s ’10’ in binary or ‘2’ in decimal; I understand this because Daryl taught me about binary numbers whilst sitting around the dinner table many years ago, all of which rather pays tribute my parents’ ability to persuade clever people to talk to us.) Anyway – the point is that without an understanding of how systems work, people are powerless to make informed decisions about how those systems should be applied within society. And with computing very much at the heart of what we all do, this matters.
I don’t disagree, but I think it’s just one manifestation of a much wider and long-running phenomenon: the tension between specialisation and universality in a world where the former promises great power and the later may be the only real safeguard against its abuse. You can, after all, set up a similar ‘two cultures’ paradigm about many things – between those who understand the process of experimentation and those who don’t, between those who can use rhetoric and those who can’t, between those with mechanical engineering prowess (building, plumbing – the things I tend to call ‘real skills’ 
) and those with none whatsoever. I understand that the challenge is not to turn everyone into an expert on everything but merely to be able to understand what the experts are doing, and how they are thinking, but experience doesn’t seem too encouraging.
Nevertheless, life is not binary and we don’t have to accept a straight choice between ‘expert’ and ‘know nothing’. CP Snow bemoaned the fact that an ignorance of the Second Law of Thermodynamics would not prove embarrassing to members of the literary elite, and I assume that today many people still wouldn’t have much of an idea. (Including me: I ‘know’ what entropy is in a very general sense, but I couldn’t go into many details.) But, thinking about it, perhaps there are a fair few non-scientists who would have some inkling. And in the networked age it is phenomenally easy to learn just a little bit more. Perhaps the best we can hope for is the mass curiosity, will and means to research new areas of knowledge over a lifetime: it won’t lead to everyone understanding code, but maybe just enough to discuss it at dinner parties.
Here’s a fun fact for you all: it’s hot. Indeed, this may not have escaped your attention. Perhaps you’re already taking full advantage, sauntering down our sun-baked streets, all a-splendour in your sultry short shorts (or skirts yet shorter still). Or, perchance, you’re not because you have things to do other than sit around dehydrating all day. This post is dedicated to those in the later category, because with my first exam on Thursday I would be quite happy for nuclear winter to descend right around now.
Nonetheless, I must wish my mum a very happy birthday for today, even if she – along with everyone else in my family aside from me – is presently livin’ it up in Dorset. (I’m ‘there’ too, in the ‘pre-recorded footage’ sense. Soon, this trend will accelerate and you’ll be able to send an avatar of yourself to a party imbued with artificial intelligence, all in order for you to be told the next morning about all the ‘crazy shit’ that ‘you’ got up to last night and what a shame it was that you couldn’t be there to see it.) Anyway, whilst we’re on the subject, I should mention the lovely Sunday I had two weekends back in which mum and I saw State of Play, replayed several times the video of babyDominic falling over and dined at Strada. Hurrah.
Crawling over Thatcher
That video really is a goldmine, by the way. There’s one moment where I have clearly perfected the art of distracting attention from the issue at hand by undermining its seriousness in a flurry of exaggeration and smiles. And, several years previously, I managed to crawl over Thatcher’s face on the front page of a newspaper without even stopping to read it. (Something I regret now, because it could provide great contextual material for Paper 6.)
Finally: Lucy’s visit over the weekend afforded opportunities for a collective pub dinner gathering, the hunting out of milkshakes in Cambridge and a second helping of Star Trek. Following which, great discussions were held concerning the heavily armed nature of Romulan ‘mining’ ships. Which is, ultimately, in a fate-of-the-universe way, a far more important subject than the History Tripos. So, there 
Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update (credit: GQ)
Via Daylight Atheism and corroborated by the BBC, I just wanted to share the news that high level briefings circulated in George W. Bush’s administration during the beginning of the Iraq war were emblazoned with Bible quotations.
I won’t even bother with the rest of the spiel, because we all know the litany of excuses. Religion isn’t meant to be mixed with politics, check. Christianity teaches peace and love, check. People need faith, check. Churches are pretty, check check check. And just look at all the good it inspires!
But these people just don’t get it. The point is not whether faith inspires good or bad, or whether it makes you feel all nice and fluffy, the point is that faith itself is fundamentally broken. Yes, you can use faith to justify the most wonderful things in the world, but that’s because you can use faith to justify absolutely anything at all. Faith is simply belief that is impervious to evidence, and only evidence can anchor belief in the real world. And to use faith – even for good – is to perpetuate the myth that faith itself is an intrinsically good thing and worthy of respect. And then stuff like this happens.
Here’s a fun game: George W. Bush believes that the invasion of Iraq was carried out with the blessing of God, humanity’s divine creator. Is he right or wrong? And if you too believe as an act of faith that God is humanity’s divine creator, and that he has active plans for humanity, what possible intellectual tools do you have to argue that George W. Bush is incorrect? He has access to the same sense of faith as you. He feels that God is with him as much as you do. He can quote scripture as easily as you can. (Hey, he probably even thinks that churches are really pretty, too.) So, go on, genuinely, try arguing without being able to resort to the much-sneered-at concept of ‘evidence’ and see where it gets you.
Or think again.
I’ve been thinking about dreams in fiction. And, more specifically, why we accept them without puzzlement. After all, it should be obvious that fictional dreams tend to bear absolutely no resemblance to real dreams. Real dreams are not just surreal but incoherent – it’s not that your living room suddenly morphed into a spaceship, it’s that your living room inexplicably was a spaceship, at the same time, because it was your birthday. They are filled not with the profound but with the ‘whatever’s crossed your mind over the past few days’. And real dreams also tend to make terrible narratives: and then X happened, and then Y happened – no wait, maybe it didn’t, because the spaceship had exploded by then? – but then Z definitely happened, and then I woke up.
So it’s no surprise that writers don’t go down the tedious route of describing ‘realistic’ dreams for their characters any more than they would devote a chapter between ‘boy meets girl’ and ‘boy turns out to be vampire’ to the unremarkable weather which didn’t signify anything about their relationship because, y’know, it was just so unremarkable. Nor is it surprising that dreams provide a tempting convention through which to explore hidden desires, hint at broader themes or just blatantly overuse metaphors and ellipses. A little bit of consequence-free magic to further the plot. (In cinema, it’s also an excuse for cool visuals.)
No, my question is why we don’t find it jarring to substitute ‘reflective surreal interlude’ for ‘incoherent jumble’. Is this just a convention which endures through its continued use in fiction? Is it a legacy of Freud? Does it just reflect the fact that most things in fiction contribute to a message of some sort – unlike real life – and dreams shouldn’t be any different? The more you think about it, the weirder all of fiction becomes: we become so trained to explain in GCSE exams that the stormy weather mirrored the stormy relationship (and et al.) that we never wonder why on earth it should. Why is it satisfying? Is it the same runaway obsession with ‘purpose’ and ‘meaning’ which results in the mental train wrecks of final causes and Alpha courses?
(But this isn’t a complaint against fiction. Indeed, one of the beauties of fiction is that it can be demonstrably and wholeheartedly enjoyed without permanently overturning what we know to be true. If human beings sat stony-faced in cinemas, thinking about the mechanics of projection, that would be a shame. They don’t.)
In real life: Sophie, waffles; Irfan, man of letters; Owen, Space Munity!; Oliver, “Mr. Jones and Mr. Smith”. There you go – it’s blogging with all the speed and clarity of the shipping forecast
Blogging when I’m in a particularly good mood seems likes an excellent plan, so I shall do so! Yesterday, by contrast, was a little bit of a multi-faceted disaster. But we won’t talk about yesterday. Instead, I’ll talk about fun things like going to see Star Trek on Friday night. By the time that we arrived at the cinema, as it happens, we were already rather happily chilled out from thoughts of work after accidentally finding ourselves in the middle of a Caius pub quiz. (Naming counties is unreasonably hard – couldn’t we name cities instead?) The film itself, though, was great. I described it to my dad thusly: “you know how Star Trek Nemesis was rubbish and made no sense? Well this one was fantastic, although it still made no sense”. I stick by this, because the more I think about it the more illogical it seems. However, it was fun, which is something that Star Trek sometimes has distinct problems with. Success!
Cambridge is another institution which can struggle with the concept of fun during Easter Term, but we turned that all around on Saturday night with the help of Abi’s friend Kat. After some successful cooking and welcome wine drinking came the social device which is almost guaranteed to result in acrimony and bitterness. I speak, of course, of Monopoly. But due to a strange fluke, no-one got enough property to start developing and the result was the most pleasant game I have ever played. You travel around the board, paying paltry little sums to each other, with no fear of bankruptcy since everyone is getting progressively richer through passing Go anyway. In the end we just called it a day, everybody ending with over £1000 in cash and a new admiration for the middle class way of life.
This photo, incidentally, doesn’t quite capture that harmony. But it does instead rather nicely illustrate Oliver’s absolute pleasure at being photographed:
Oliver and Kat
And finally! The ex-editor of the Evening Standard, Veronica Wadley – she who took it downhill from ‘alright’ to ‘awful’, and couldn’t even make ‘awful’ profitable – is screeching today about the prospect of a marginally more positive approach under its new owner. [cackles] Good good! The dismantling of the Boris PR machine is rather overdue, and all that’s really left is for Andrew Gilligan to get on his bike and we could be halfway there.
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
