a fine lady

Following the instructions of the nursery rhyme:

Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
And she shall have music wherever she goes

I went to Banbury and found this fine lady:



And I thought she really did look like a fine lady. And she had the bells on her toes all right, though one couldn't move the bells, so she couldn't have any music. But the horse is looking very nice too:



The sculpture isn't historic, by the way, it was put up 5 or 6 years ago, probably in an attempt to attract more tourists to Banbury, which is in fact a charming market town with a shopping area that's probably larger than Oxford's.

new roof

My little study now has a new roof which keeps the rain out and lets the sunlight in - which is very good news, as the old roof used to do it the other way round.

Still plenty of work to do on the interior decoration (old plasterboard ceiling and woodwork will go out to create an extra 2.5 cubic metres of space) not to mention on the tidying up front, as you can see on the picture below. But I already love the fact that I have now daylight in the space that used to be dark and gloomy even on nice days.

a house and a family

The trend this summer seems to be to publish a book about the house you live in. Bill Bryson tried it, but I’ve read mostly bad reviews about his attempt to make the history of the world revolve around his Norfolk rectory.

Now Charlotte Moore, known to people in the UK interested in autism as the author of the Guardian column “Mind the gap” and the book George and Sam about her two eponymous sons with autism (she also has a son without), has a new book coming out on Thursday (1.7.):



Hancox: A house and a family. (Viking / Penguin 2010)

Judging by the snippet that appeared in the Guardian this weekend (All under one roof), I find it a lot more promising than the Bryson book. Her house has been in the family since 1888, and its inhabitants seem to have the genetic disposition to keep things, especially everything that has any kind of writing on it. (At that point I was beginning to wonder whether that phenotype is actually linked to the autism genes, or whether the author is a long-lost relative of ours.)

So using the documents and other memorabilia that her relatives have stashed away in the house for 120+ years, she traced the history of both house and family. I’m really looking forward to reading it. Maybe I can get a review copy ?

PS just discovered, there's also an appreciation of the place by her brother in the Observer: Hancox: so much more than just my home and a photo gallery.

magnificent maps

On my last visit to London, I had a few hours spare and went to the Magnificent Maps exhibition at the British Library, just because it happened to be on my way. Found it really interesting in the way it shows the different ways in which maps have been used in different contexts - each represented by a room of the venue, e.g. the audience chamber, the bedchamber, the merchant's house, etc.

I actually tend to put maps on my walls as well, have a huge pseudo-realistic view of Europe on display, and an aerial photograph of Oxford (kind of a map as well). Sad though that satnavs and google maps will drive all map makers out of business, so I'm not sure whether there will be any maps from the 21st century to feature in future exhibitions.

Magnificent Maps continues until Sept.19

... and the winner is ...

seeing I posted on the shortlist for the Diagram Prize for the oddest book title of 2009, I have to report the final result as well.

So the winner, revealed in Horace Bent's blog this week is:

Daina Taimina: Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes (A K Peters)



I actually voted for this one, if only on the grounds that it represents an interesting way to popularise mathematics. Although I was also tempted by Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots, which didn't reach the medal ranks.

PS: if you do want to take your needlework into non-euclidian realms, amazon.co.uk has the book, but you'll need some patience: Usually dispatched within 1 to 3 weeks. Looks like they're not monitoring this prize.

benign delusions, useful compulsions

I really love this quote which I found on twitter yesterday:

The best you can hope for in this life
is that your delusions are benign
and your compulsions have utility.

It comes from an equally insightful blog post from the creator of the dilbert cartoons, Scott Adams, and was posted by @lmg, whom I follow because he's the hero of this story.

If I ever write up "my philosophy", this quote will have its own chapter. And maybe I can print my own greeting cards with an edited version, such as:

May all your delusions be benign
and your compulsions useful ones.

I am, of course, a compulsive writer and under the delusion that people want to read what I have to say, and I am very grateful that my delusion is relatively harmless and my compulsion just about useful enough to pay the bills.

the oddest vote

At last, the shortlist for the most important of all literary prizes has been reveiled. In the running for the Diagram Prize, which honours the oddest book title of the past year, are:

The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Collectible Spoons of the 3rd Reich

Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes

Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots

What Kind of Bean is this Chihuahua?

Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter

More details about these titles are here, and you can vote for your favourite at http://www.thebookseller.com/. Once you've voted, you'll be shown the current percentages of votes. I was very surprised to see that my favourite title was in the lead, though my second favourite was only in 5th place.

Sadly, I had no luck with the titles I proposed this time round, but will keep trying ...

A book collecting timeless jewels from the first 30 years of the prize has been published in 2008, it's called "How to avoid huge ships".

time for quinces

It's the season for picking quinces and doing something with them -- my infant quince tree has had 8 of them this year, so I made my notorious baked quince dessert the last two weekends. Here's one of the 8 before it got eaten:



Alternatively, people in the UK can also get all things quincy from this company set up by a fellow quince maniac as a retirement project.

PS my two citrus trees are also bearing fruit, but these are a little smaller than usual. lemons just one cm in diameter, oranges maybe 2 cm.

navigating the backwaters of Oxford

Here's George Monbiot navigating the backwaters of Oxford:

"I pushed through rush-choked channels scarcely wider than my boat. I found backwaters no one had navigated for years. I stumbled across cannabis gardens and camouflaged shelters where fugitives lived. ... Abandoned behind railway fences, on the edge of playing fields, anonymously skirting business units, I found places I had never imagined possible, a parallel world."

I have made very similar discoveries in the last 3 years, it's quite amazing how a city can turn its back to its rivers. Apart from the main punting highway, it really is a parallel Oxford that one gets to see from the waterways.

Unlike GM, however, I don't trouble the fish (the rest of the article in Saturday's Guardian is about fishing). I only watch the wildlife (and have seen a kingfisher too!)

Here's a recent photo of our family canoe, taken upstream at the sunnymeade recreation ground.

wikipedia slowing down ?

An article in last week's technology section of the Guardian claims Wikipedia approaches its limits and suggests that Wikipedia will stop growing because the "deletionists" won the war against the "inclusionists".

However, if you think about how an encyclopedia starting from scratch at time zero is likely to grow (given a huge and growing pool of enthusiastic contributors), it is obvious that there will be a very steep increase in the number of entries initially, as it has to "catch up" with the knowledge that was there before it started. Once all that (or at least the vaguely relevant parts of it) are included, it can slow down and only grow at the rate at which new knowledge is produced (e.g. in the scientific literature, and by current affairs). which is still significant growth rate (and probably exponential as well), but slower than the catching up phase.

So the observed slowdown is perfectly reasonable. Don't know what wars are going on behind the scenes at Wikipedia, but from the growth trend alone, there's no need to conclude that there are any.

the tweet goes on ...

Two weeks into the Twitter experience I need to sum up before I forget what life was like before twitter ...

I have to admit that I only joined a bit reluctantly, but it all turned out a lot better than I expected.

For instance, the asymmetric "following" tool, as opposed to the mutually agreed "friendship" on MySpace. I was kind of expecting this to produce a class society where celebreties broadcast what they had for breakfast and followers just follow. I was surprised to find that in practice it is a lot more democratic than that, as most people "follow back" as a matter of courtesy, and even celebrities occasionally answer to the tweets of common people.

I really like the power of the simple linking between people using the @username tool -- that must be the easiest networking tool ever invented. Also the automatic recognition and abbreviation of hyperlinks is a clever trick.

140 characters is a limit I can live with -- which in fact often requires the use of some creativity to fit the message in, so it's a bit like poetry. If I do have something much longer to say, I put it on the blog and post a summary with a link on twitter.

As a way of making new contacts, it turns out to be much more efficient than MySpace or FaceBook -- I have gained as many followers in 2 weeks as I have FaceBook friends after 2 years.

Finally, it is really intriguing to see how fast the Twitterverse is evolving its own specific culture, with new language (tweets, tweeps, twibes ...) and new traditions (e.g. #followfriday). Social scientists should scrap whatever they were doing before and just point all their telescopes at the twitterverse.

What I'm missing is the music and the detailed profile pages from MySpace. In a perfect social networking world, I would have MySpace as the platform with twitter replacing the messages, comments and bulletins. MySpace missed a trick here.

You can find my little island in the vast Twitterverse here: http://twitter.com/michaelgrr


PS here's Shakira tweeting from her blackberry:

guardian technology & the dead tail of blogging

Recently, I've been looking through a pile of Guardian technology sections which I had piled up for a rainy day, and found a comment by technology editor Charles Arthur (Blogging's long tail is dying), where he explains how he tracks blog entries that comment on content of his technology section. So I reckon he must find this -- hi Charles, *wave*.

Anyhow, to Charles's point about blogging, his conclusion is based on two observations: 1) the reported finding that 95 % of blogs out there haven't been updated for 120 days, so are presumed dead. I don't find that terribly surprising, as there are lots of people who try opening a blog, post two entries with their favourite song lyrics, and find it's not for them, leaving the ruin standing for eternity. In MySpace alone one finds thousands of ghost blogs like this.

Observation no. 2) is that the comment tracking device that Charles set up is giving fewer hits than it used to (and being the editor of the section, he hopes it hasn't become less inspiring over the years). So I'll make a point of regularly commenting on the section to buck this trend :)

At least where I'm standing, which is probably somewhere in the middle of the long tail of blogging, I still feel that blogging is alive.

PS: I forgot to mention that I'm now on twitter:

http://twitter.com/michaelgrr

Jacko's Simpsons appearance

I've been wondering since I saw the episode with the "big white guy who thinks he's the small black guy" whether this was really Michael Jackson doing the voiceover. Am glad to hear that it really was him:

Jackson's Simpsons episode to re-air as tribute

after all, who better to parody MJ than the man himself ?

Schrödinger's Jacko

I had a very weird media experience on my way back from Germany. Having been cut off from electronic media since Thu afternoon, I arrived at Paris Fri morning and looked through the newspapers, both French and international ones. Only one of them (it may have been Le Figaro) had Michael Jackson's death on the front page.

I thought that was really weird -- surely, if he had died he would be on all the front pages, and it would be very difficult for one paper to get the story exclusively? Might they have been caught out by a hoax?

Unable to resolve this in situ, I took the Eurostar to London with a kind of Schrödinger's Jacko thought on my mind, wondering how he could be dead and alive at the same time. By the time I arrived at London, though, all the British papers whose early, Jacko-alive editions I had seen in Paris had changed their front pages, and he was all over the place. On the Guardian front page, poor old Farah Fawcett had to be dropped to make space for him.

So if future generations start asking where were you when you heard ... I'll have a more interesting story than on similar occasions (there are at least two catastrophic events which I heard about while sitting on the toilet, having walked past the radio and switched it on for the morning news!).

Anyhow. I can live with or without him and don't have strong feelings about his music one way or the other.

More importantly, I'm very excited that the first single from Shakira's new album is now online at her Myspace site. It's called "loba" (as in female wolf) and features her howling like a wolf :) Check it out.

miscellaneous news

re-emerging from a phase where all my newspaper reading time was absorbed by trying to understand each day how the UK government survived the previous 24 hours, I'm rediscovering there is a world out there, though it hasn't changed all that much:

* the Miami 5 are still in jail

* Roman Abramovich is still obscenely rich, even with the financial crisis and all that. Btw, I completely missed that part of recent history after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when all those billions were handed out to those people we now call "Russian Oligarchs". Does anybody understand why and how that happened ?

* oh, and the heir to the throne is still making life hell for architects

very depressing all that. Maybe the recent political crisis with its duck houses and failed coup attempts was more entertaining after all.

what I found out this week

a few intriguing things I found out in the last few days:

* thanks to the new "algorithmic" search engine Wolfram alpha I can now check up where the space probe pioneer 10 is at the moment.

* also intrigued to find that Wolfram alpha gives the result in miles by default, although it generously offers metric conversion as an option.

* the oldest sculptures of human figures, such as the "Hohle Fels Venus" reported in the current issue of Nature, date from about the same time as the extinction of the Neanderthals. Now I wonder whether there is a causal connection, and if so, in which direction. Did Neanderthals die out because they weren't imaginative enough to compete in the arts scene? Or did Cro-Magnon relax from the stress of wiping out the competition by carving sexy figurines? We may never find out.

* on page 183 of the same issue, I discovered that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch appears to be a proper geographic name now, as Nature spells it with capitals. Previous generations got to name islands, volcanoes and ocean currents. All that's left on this planet for us to put geographic names to is garbage. Sign of the times ?

* What I still haven't found out but need to know, is whether Tycho Brahe was murdered, and who did it. Any clues, let me know.

OX1 3QT

From 1993 to 2001 I used to work at the New Chemistry Laboratory, South Parks Road, OX1 3QT, so I'm just a little bit irritated to see that the place has turned into a big muddy hole in the ground, which last week looked like this:





I understand that this hole will eventually be filled with a new building for Earth Sciences. I took this picture from the windows of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory, while I was there interviewing people for a feature about their work. The red brick building behind the hole is the Dyson Perrins Laboratory which used to house organic chemistry research until the new research building opened across the road.

Shakespeare and Company

I can't believe that I missed this, but according to Jeanette Winterson there is an intriguing independent bookshop in Paris where penniless writers like me can stay on condition that they read a book per day. It's called Shakespeare and Company. My only excuse is that it's an English language bookshop, and when I'm in Paris I look for French books, not English ones, so it would never have occurred to me to look for English language shops. Will check it out next time though.

strangers or friends

This week's edition of Der Spiegel has a cover story on how social networking changes life in general, the new aspects of friendship, privacy, public life, etc.:



The headline Fremde Freunde is absolutely untranslatable, unless you slot in an "or" or something similar: strangers/friends, unfamiliar friends ...

The article is kind of interesting as an overview, although tinged with a vague lack of understanding, and spiced with the usual offering of horror stories. I mean you can find mindless idiots in your local pub, and you can get murdered by somebody who first contacted you by telephone or by knocking on your door, so I don't quite see why the appearance of social networking sites in the context of crimes or other problems is supposed to mean they are a bad thing. They are just the way people communicate in this day and age, so they come with all the good and bad things that communication between people can lead to. (And I have a higher spam rate in the phone calls I receive than in the MySpace messages.)

Well, at least I am quite happy with the whole Web2.0 thing, strange friends and friendly strangers included ...

buy more books!

Back in the early days of worrying about the environment we looked at paper and pitied the poor trees that were sacrificed for it, hence the drive towards paper recycling and all that.

Now, however, with the urgent need to do something about CO2, there is an entirely new perspective: I can consider the 5000+ books in my household as a significant contribution to carbon sequestration. As long as our house doesn't go up in flames, there are tons of carbon safely locked away in our books, old magazines, papers, and all that.

People of the world, buy more books ! (Even if you don't read them, just keep them safe from fire and rot.)