With four exams down and only one left to go – next Tuesday – there’s been a bit of breathing space for those odd little fragments of life which don’t revolve around exams. We all had an especially good excuse yesterday, Abi’s birthday, and so went out for a (delicious) meal and drinks together with Abi’s friend Heather who is over here visiting from California. (It’s occasions like these where those bits of California knowledge suddenly become very important, such the desolate nature of Fresno – sorry, Fresno 
– or the fact that Maine is now, quite shockingly, officially cooler than California.) And I have to say, I do rather love this supremely well-posed group photo:
Out for Abi’s birthday
Today Owen, Abi, Heather and I went punting, although by some fluke of sheer charm (clearly) we persuaded Owen to do the actual punting whilst the rest of us relaxed. And drank cider. Cambridge really does veer between the extremes of work and relaxation, doesn’t it? Still, it’s becoming increasingly clear with every frantic zig-zag between the river bank why the punt never quite caught on in the rest of the world outside Oxford and Cambridge.
Owen punts us along (I don’t…)
Heather and Abi
Fun musical mix-up moments: a classical Dancing Queen, German Lion King and a punky Apologize. Spotify required.
Stormtroopers!
Clearly, Cambridge is being used as a pilot area for a tough new government policing project…
This is not a footnote:
Not a footnote
Acceptable examples of footnotes include ‘still up for Friday?’, ‘sorry for being so slow to reply’ or ‘and you were rubbish in bed too’. It’s not for grandiose claims: they at least deserve a paragraph or two in the main body of the text. Did Lincoln end the Gettysburg Address with ‘P.S. We should remember that all men are created equal’? I very much think not. Did Hitler end Mein Kampf with a quick ‘And you know who I blame for all of this? The Jews…’ in the afterword?
Talking of Hitler, after watching the reassuringly awful attempt by the BNP to appeal to children, I think I have found a worthy successor to Abbi’s urge to add ‘with the furrrr’ onto the end of things. Y’see, in the video, ‘Billy Brit’ (to which one should of course add ‘the racist shit’) recites an excruciating poem celebrating his ‘heroes’ and rounding off each stanza with ‘and he was white!‘. I now have a habit of appending this to everything. To use the top BBC News headline as an example: ‘Conservative MP Bill Cash has “very serious questions to answer” about his expenses, says David Cameron. And he was white!’
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 
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
