Looking Out To Sea

I’ve had less time to read since we moved house. I’m now within walking distance of work so I don’t have the chance to read on the bus while commuting. But I have managed to finish A Life Stripped Bare: Tiptoeing Through The Ethical Minefield by Leo Hickman.

He’s a writer for the Guardian who wrote about his attempts at living the “ethical” lifestyle. The difference being that he was not a green activist or eco-warrior type. It’s interesting to see how the changes he tried to put in place conflicted with his pragmatic needs and his usual way of doing things.

Ethical Audit

The story starts with a trio of “ethical auditors” coming to his house to interrogate the family and show them all the ways in which their lifestyle was unethical. I admit to disagreeing violently with most of what the auditors said, and being in violent agreement with the rest.

At the time it was just a dislike of their claims. For instance, suggesting that the contents of the medicine cupboard (painkillers and cold remedies, I suppose) “only treat the symptoms”. As if that wasn’t the point! Then they had the gall to suggest homeopathy as an alternative (slogan: “it doesn’t even treat the symptoms”?).

The auditors were not above implying imminent danger for the couple and their young daughter — toxins in the cleaning products, in the baby’s bedroom, in the food and so on. And I began to wonder what was supposed to be ethical about the “ethical auditors” — it was surely not their behaviour. I don’t consider it ethical to exaggerate or lie about the risks of whatever chemicals we are exposed to.

The unexamined life is not worth living. —Socrates

So with time I realised it wasn’t just that I disliked the specific claims they made, but that I rejected the auditors’ whole idea of an ethical life. It was unjustified and vague, and seemed to be just as uncritical as the author’s own lifestyle before they arrived.

The advice given was a mixture of typical pro-recycling, waste reduction advice, using public transport and walking more, etc, combined with more reactionary ideas about Big Pharma, GM, chemicalz!!1 and nuclear power. I feel quite content in my view that the auditors had little real idea what they were talking about, extrapolating from their demonstration of ignorance in the wide range of areas they did cover.

The idea of the book was interesting, in the same way that life-swapping reality shows are interesting: watching people living by other people’s rules. But there’s no way we can tell if what they are doing makes any difference. Everything was incredibly important/ dangerous/ relevant without qualifiers.

Good shopping, Good living

I have a copy of the Good Shopping Guide around here somewhere, from a few years ago. It also suffers from the same problem. Each company is given a score for its ethics, but they aren’t effectively weighted to take account of things that matter. Running nuclear power stations is just as liable to affect a company’s rating as having slave workers. That’s not really equivalent in my mind.

At least the Guide gives a breakdown for the different categories, so choosing things which matter to you is easier. I would rather be given real information, and valid reasons, to make up my own mind than the approach shown by the auditors of Leo Hickman’s book.

Last Christmas, when I went home to see my parents we found a cookery book I used to like as a child, though I never made much from it: A Young Cook’s Calendar by Katie Stewart (Piccolo, 1976). A bargain at 40 pence!

One of the recipes I do remember making a lot was flapjack. (I’m still very scathing about the flapjack available in shops. They’re never right.) This is the charming little introduction it gives before the recipe:

Flapjacks are everybody’s favourites. If you are going out for the morning wrap up a few pieces to put in your pocket. Take an apple too and you should last until lunchtime.

Hmm, tempting…

We spent last weekend painting the front room in our new flat. It’s the first time I’ve painted a room and it shows. Well, it’s not that bad but it could be more evenly coloured.

It was easy to get all the painting done last weekend because we don’t have any furniture yet. This could become quite awkward as we’ll be moving in this weekend. We have no dining table or chairs (though there is a window seat…) and no sofa either.

We haven’t really made any firm decisions about dining tables. I don’t really like formal or “modern” tables — I want something that has character and feels friendly. A farmhouse feel to it, rather than a silver-service restaurant aesthetic. What can I say about my romantic notions that is not apparent? ;-)

I’m looking forward to the new flat with an almost silly amount of excitement. Despite not even having any furniture to eat at, I’m excited about baking. I bought the book Lawrence recommended a few months ago¹ — Dough: Simple Contemporary Bread by Richard Bertinet. I just watched the included DVD and now have to resist the urge to just not bother going to work and baking bread all day instead. The Amazon reader reviews for the book are similarly effusive/evangelical/ominous: buy this book and you will become dangerously addicted to bread-making.

The other cooking we’re doing, the Nigella Express Challenge, is a bit neglected at the moment. We are the furthest behind schedule we have been since we started. By my reckoning that’s about 13 recipes behind schedule, assuming a regular timetable. Moving house will may impact us in either way:

• An excuse to eat a lot of easy food or takeaway pizza. Having La Favorita across the road is a dangerous temptation.
• Lots of food-laden gatherings. Dozens of flat-warming parties!

The more enthusiasm we get for option two the more likely it will happen that way!

But back to the move: we haven’t done any packing either. Our brave friends have volunteered to bring cars on Saturday and haul our various bits and bobs from one end of town to the other, through massive roadworks and diversions. If there are any lone bodies out there who are willing to lend a hand on Saturday or Sunday then get in touch. Getting all this stuff up to the third floor might be more trouble than we’ve anticipated.

Let this be a salutary lesson on the dangers of impulse buying. If you don’t spend a few minutes reading reviews on Amazon you might accidentally buy Amir Aczel’s The Artist and the Mathematician, the “story of Nicolas Bourbaki, the genius mathematician who never existed”. And that would be a mistake.

Nicolas Bourbaki was the pseudonym of a group of French mathematicians who attempted to formalise mathematical thinking in the early to mid-twentieth century. In the author’s opinion Bourbaki’s publications had important influences on the structuralist movement that would spread from linguistics and anthropology to many disparate areas of science.

Well, I wouldn’t know about that; and I still feel like I don’t know about it. The book is filled with tedious and trivial details where it should provide only impressions — and sketchy and vague where it should be exact and clear. In fact it exemplifies everything the Bourbaki group were pushing against. Aczel takes whole chapters to explain the minute detail surrounding the early life of one mathematician (including the life of his parents when they were young…) though this has no real relevance to the work he did. In fact, now I think on it I can’t even remember which mathematician gets all the boring backstory.

Whatever: the point is that the writer doesn’t bother telling you why any of this matters. He name-drops mathematical ideas without context or explanation. They have no more relevance to the reader than the endless litanies of people and parents’ occupations and meetings and so on. Amir Aczel insists that Bourbaki was incredibly influential in whatever it was they did, without bothering to reveal whatever it was they did. And that many other fields borrowed these ideas to do whatever it was that they did, again without explanation or detail. And then eventually we find that Bourbaki became less relevant — though again, without explanation.

It’s quite satisfying to say that an author who talks about abstract algebras and category theory is “over-generalising”. If only the book were as satisfying. Instead, I can heartily recommend Mario Livio’s The Equation That Couldn’t Be Solved — a proper tribute to genius mathematics.

The weather has been shockingly warm and sunny since the weekend. I’ve been leaving the flat in the morning without a dozen layers of clothes. I know people who have been sunburned. It gets quite stifling sometimes, though the sea breeze down at the shore makes up for that.

I’m still reading The Meme Machine but I should be finished reasonably soon. On Monday I went for a walk to look at furniture for the new flat, and popped into a bookshop on the way back. I bought The Artist and the Mathematician: The Story of Nicolas Bourbaki, the Genius Mathematician Who Never Existed. It’s quite a small book but seems like it will be quite interesting.

Also just heard that two of my old flatmates are making a brief visit (to Scotland, I guess, since they live in London) on the weekend of the 17th. We won’t be in to the new flat by that point — not until the 23rd — but will still probably be overcome with excitement.

Tomorrow night is a Café Scientifique Special at the Camera Obscura. It will involve lasers, so obviously we’re both right in there. Lasers! Don’t know when we’ll get a chance to eat. I would suggest grabbing a quick bite from Wannaburger but Helen’s been pretty late out of work lately and it starts at 7 o’clock. We may have to eat afterwards.

At the moment I’m reading The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore and quite enjoying it. It’s deeper and more thought-provoking than I had originally thought it would be.

The idea that seems most appealing is expansion on the notion of memes as parasitic replicators that Dawkins first uses in his description in The Selfish Gene. It’s certainly true that many ideas are both extremely common and dangerous to our survival. Genetic evolution on its own doesn’t seem to explain the popularity of these ideas.

To what genetic end, for example, do men and women lock themselves in big buildings away from the public and the opposite sex? And yet monks and nuns are a fairly common occurrence throughout history. There are many other examples — honour killings come to mind as being a particularly absurd one. Infanticide is fairly common in the wild if a parent can’t spare resources to keep a new-born alive. But killing your own offspring because they have the audacity to become independent?

And yet there are plenty of examples in biology where one life form can pervert the actions of another to its own end. We sneeze out the cold virus because that helps the virus spread. Ants can be infected by fungus and made to climb to the highest point around before dying. The fungus then bores its way out of the dead ant’s head and spores from this vantage point. Why did the ant climb? Because the fungus did something — I don’t know what — to make it.

It helps the genes of the parasite if the host can be controlled to do its bidding — and these actions may be dangerous to the host. And so the notion of memes as parasites seems all the more compelling — as replicators which don’t care about your survival or that of your line. It only matters that the meme spreads to the population.

And so the meme for shutting yourself away from other people spreads for its own sake and not for yours (or your genes’). Or the meme for killing your daughters spreads (by imitation, by oppression, by proxy) even though it frustrates the efforts of your genes to propagate themselves.

Some memes, like some parasites or infections, can probably be too dangerous. They could kill off the host before spreading. Think about the shortest-lived but most violent infections which inspire books and movies — viruses like Ebola and Marburg. They tend to debilitate their hosts before the infection can spread very far (though not as quickly as in the movies, of course…). And so, I think, might some very powerful memes. Maybe a suicide cult could be considered in this category — a meme-infection with a predefined cut-off point. (Also note that the general concept of suicide cults outlives the active participants, by being recorded in books, films or oral history. Like Ebola has a reservoir of carriers outside the human population, waiting to reinfect at any opportunity, so might the right type of person start another suicide cult.)

The idea seems interesting — I’m keen to see how the idea can be applied to other concepts in the rest of the book. I will definitely see if such a memetic approach can reveal anything new about people.

Yesterday I got home from work and set to making some stock. I was unsure if there was a good way or bad way to do this, so I pulled out The River Cottage Meat Book from the shelf.

Fifteen minutes later I had almost completely lost track of what I had intended to do, as I was so engrossed in this great book. But I eventually got the stuff together and (after straining it all today) I confess it smells amazing. I’m now quite upset that we’re planning to spend this weekend away and I won’t get to use it immediately.

We’ve been concentrating on Nigella Express so much that I completely forgot that there were other recipes. The Meat book is so captivating, though, that I really must start to pay it closer attention. But Nigella’s making us eat a lot of meat anyway, so there’s not really room in our diet for more. Occasionally — in a period of meat overdose — we throw together a massive vat of lentil curry as some kind of penance, or maybe as a concession to economical cooking.

Three silly websites for you:

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks

I “think” you’ll be “amused” by these photos of signs, advertisements and “serious” notices with excess punctuation.

Photoshop Disasters

Photoshop can be made to do amazing things in hands of a skilled artist. But skilled artists are expensive and won’t hang around doing DVD covers for straight-to-video slasher flicks forever, so these people made do with what they had. I nearly shot Fanta out of my nose while reading these…

Judge A Book By Its Cover

Laughing at dodgy book covers is a hobby in itself.

This is a round-up of things that don’t deserve their own blog posts.

• My birthday seems to fall right in the middle of Homeopathy Awareness Week. The ignominy.

• Last week Rowan Williams appeared to have contracted Hovind’s disease, a condition common in the United State of America, with symptoms such as absurd mischaracterisation of biological theories. The speech took place on 17 March as the first of three lectures, Faith and Science, Faith and Politics and Faith and History. The official transcripts of these lectures have not appeared online yet. I still don’t know whether he’s merely a nutty man with bushy eyebrows or something even weirder.

• I’m re-reading Neuromancer for the Nth time and I’ve only just noticed that the Finn wears a tweed jacket. I don’t know how, but I always pictured him in a dishevelled wax jacket. Also, despite the nay-sayers, it’s still an awesome book.

• I’ve decided not to wait to get myself an Eee PC. The beefier one probably won’t appear until the end of the year and I can always upgrade if it seems worthwhile. Now I just need to find someone who has them in stock…

• If you’ve got some time to spare, and especially if you hated learning mathematics at school, you should read Lockhart’s Lament (PDF). It’s captivating, entertaining and educational — even funny! — not to mention an extremely accurate picture of what school maths was like. (Incidentally, if you search for lockhart's lament there is a lot of discussion, and in nearly all of them someone has pasted the same mini-critique about it being in a “historical vacuum”. It starts “As I see it, Paul Lockhart’s essay would be much more powerful if…”.)

• Our internet connection still seems well screwed up so I can’t access Delicious from home. So if anyone checks my saved links you’ll not find anything new. Sorry about that.

• Alien loves Predator has been updated for the first time in what feels like forever. Now when is Everybody Loves Eric Raymond going to take the hint and follow suit?

That’s all folks.

The full title of this little gem of a book is Don’t Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs: She Thinks I’m a Piano Player in a Whorehouse, written by Paul Carter. He’s a slightly jaded oil rig worker who’s been to a lot of terrifying and absurd places in the name of Big Oil.

There isn’t much in the book about the process of digging or the oil industry. Mostly it’s tales of derring-do and idiocy. For instance, you learn what happens if you sneak into a mosque at night and change the pre-recorded call to prayer for a recording of Ring of Fire. (The answer, in this case, is get thrown out the country as a religious undesirable.)

But you also get a picture of some of the scarier ends of the nearly civilised world — where you need a code word to exchange with your driver to ensure he’s not some random person who wants to rob and kill you.

I can’t pretend this is the best written book in the world. A somewhat scattergun approach to punctuation and the like. But it’s certainly entertaining.