Books Do Furnish a Room

(First posted, 17.8.13)

About twenty years ago I made a decision not to buy anymore bookshelves. It occurred to me that if I was going to have enough time to read all the unread books and also re-read as often as I wished, then I’d already reached some kind of ‘tipping point’. I invented one rule for myself, if a new book was to be introduced then something inferior had to go. And I’ve stuck to it, though at times I’ve cheated like crazy!

It’s helped that I prefer paperbacks, that over time omnibus editions have appeared that take up less space than original volumes, that cassette tapes became CDs, that DVDs could replace videos – but when it came to judging worth, that was quite another matter.

Very occasionally one undergoes complete reversals of opinion, making it seem unacceptable to keep certain books. But such new space isn’t afforded when it comes to scholarly debate, where having certain authors to argue against is the only way to keep critical faculties awake. Another ‘problem’ is that the better your choice of book in the first instance, the less likely it is to date!

The Web has helped immeasurably, removing the need to keep many reference books although I haven’t acquired the habit of reading online for any length of time, or overcome the need to browse bookshops.

Emotion, sentiment and nostalgia play a large part in keeping certain books on the shelves, but even these would not remain unless I still believed there was something new to learn from them when read by the older me.

In the last year I’ve added just two books to the collection of about four hundred. I like to read several books in series, so many are half completed. My best guesstimate is, that about twenty per cent of the total are unread, whilst fifty per cent have been read twice or more.

But many might argue that by doing all of this I’ve constructed the very opposite of what a library should be – that an ever expanding collection, of even greater numbers of unread volumes, is some sort of guarantee against tunnel vision, some protection from ‘knowing more and more about less and less’ and the dangers of confirmation bias.

Well I like to think of myself as a practical man of limited resources, who knows his time is constrained and can focus on what’s important. I’m prepared to make judgements (the willingness to be wrong) at the same time as accepting that no author represents the last word on anything. To achieve clarity of thought requires selection and discrimination.

(I find I’ve written this using slightly ‘oldie worldie’ English as if I were writing from the library of an old country house, or the smoking room of a gentleman’s club – but then this room does have leather bound chairs and I do enjoy the occasional ‘gasper’!)

It may be a tougher path, but it leads straight to the hilltops

(Email 06.09.08, first posted on Facebook 15.10.11)

Kipling wrote ‘If’ in 1895 supposedly about someone else. But I can’t help thinking of how at the age of twenty-one in 1886, whilst writing for the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, he was ostracised by the English community for putting himself alongside, and being the first to write sympathetically about, the ‘native’ people of the city!

If -

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

The Only Way Out (updated 2019)

(First posted on Facebook, 19.7.11)

If society (parents, siblings, peers, school, work, community...) is to blame for the way you turned out, and it almost certainly is, then the chances of it helping you out of the mess, is practically zero! You don't have the answers otherwise you wouldn't have got into such a mess. Neither do your friends or partners, it was their similarity to you which attracted you to them. That's why the only way out, is to find the few people who represent excellence (who have the life you want) and model them.

1/ Note for scholarly readers; in any medical or social scientific enquiry, the actions of the observer always affect the outcome, just like the actions of the participants; with any social species, agency never lies just with the an individual. Agency is always on a positive feedback loop within any human group, just as social structures are only ever temporary pockets of order. So, it’s just the same for the distinguished research professor, as it is for the guy on the street trapped by the habitual influence of significant others!

2/ In pursuit of the life you want; observation is all about recognizing patterns in the actions of others – habits, in everything! If a habit no longer delivers the reward it once did it is a bad habit, the only way to break a bad habit is to replace it with a better one that delivers the same reward.

3/ Pleasure (this feels good, I want some more); happiness (this feels good, I don’t need anymore.)

4/ Whatever it is you do, do it because it is a worthwhile and purposeful activity in and of itself, here and now.

5/ Money; is this expenditure essential, important, or just everything else?! Will it make you richer (an investment) or poorer (waste)?

6/ Diet: drink; alcohol (really bad), caffeine (not good), water (all you actually need). Food; refined sugars (worst), grains (human invention), dairy (mother's milk of another species), roots/tubers (good in an emergency, but costly to get at), fresh meat cooked fast (best), ripe red fruit and fresh green leaves (best).

Sherlock Holmes Syndrome

(first written 2008, first posted on Facebook 4.5.11, updated 2012, 2016)

You see the problem is there’s this strange phenomenon of people liking mysteries and not wanting them explained.

In the world of mental health it often appears that someone in distress, does not want, nor responds to, either explicit explanation of their difficulties, or to training in techniques to relieve them. It’s even got to the point in our individualistic society where many will argue that there are no universal ways of understanding or helping - apart from the mysterious ‘love conquers all’!

(photo by Nick Hewling)

And the more knowledgeable person certainly doesn’t want to end up suffering the emotional isolation of what I call Sherlock Holmes Syndrome - of going to the trouble to explain (about inductive and deductive reasoning, how he built-up his library, apprenticed himself to learn about such things as horses and dogs, the logic of railway operations and timetabling, etc, etc) only for Watson to call it all inborn ‘talent’ and ‘genius‘, the police to call it ‘luck’, and the public ‘…well when you put it like Mr Holmes, I can see it really is so simple anyone could…’ It was others who set him apart. People fear something is lost in explanation when in fact the reverse is true - it only adds to the wonder of the world.

The wilful ignorance of those who see in others an inborn talent often drives those with such supposed abilities to distraction. The spectator at a golf tournament who said to Arnold Palmer - after he’d made a great shot - how lucky he was to have such a talent, got the reply: ‘Yes, it’s crazy, the more I practice the luckier I get! In traditional craftsmanship, ten thousand hours is the ‘rule of thumb’ for mastering a complex skill set - the point at which practice, becomes ‘seamless’ and the outsider cannot see ‘how it’s done’.

In the context of mental health, explanation leading to instruction, demonstration and practice meets additional resistance because the very subject is the inadequacy of early emotional learning from parents, other adults, siblings and peers. A large part of emotional learning is of course all about sexual intimacy, and here the Holmes analogy is useful again.

Dr Watson a believer in the mystery of love, as much as non-explainable 'genius', offers us this in, A Scandal in Bohemia: 'It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one in particular, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but reasonable balanced mind, but as a lover he would have put himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer - excellent for drawing a veil from men's motives and passions.'

Now we know that such a lack of emotion would have been impossible - modern opinion  divides two ways; either towards some effortful suppression or towards an autistic spectrum, even the sociopathic! It doesn't occur to Watson that Holmes might have applied the same methods to learning about sex and love as he did to everything else. If that were true, then his pursuit of excellence would have led to his rejection by almost all in Victorian society. (It is perhaps worth remembering that it is only points of similarity between people which attract.)

(All of the above refers to the character of Sherlock Holmes originally offered us by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.)

It is nice to see that some of the themes above have been highlighted by Elementary, the contemporary take on Holmes from CBS.

HOLMES:  It has its costs.
WATSON:  What does?
HOLMES:  Learning to see the puzzle in everything. They’re everywhere, once you start looking it’s impossible to stop. It just so happens that people and all the deceits and delusions which inform everything they do, tend to be the most fascinating puzzle of all. Of course they don’t always appreciate being seen as such.
WATSON:  Seems like a lonely way to live.
HOLMES:  As I said it has its costs.

(photo by Nick Hewling)

HOLMES:  ..the things that I do, the things that you care about, you think I do them because I’m a good person, I do them because it would hurt too much not to.
AGATHA:  Because you are a good person.
HOLMES:  No, it hurts Agatha. All of this, everything I see, everything I hear, touch and smell. The conclusions I’m able to draw, the things that are revealed to me, the ugliness. My work focuses me, it helps. You say I am using my gifts, I say I am just treating them…

(Elementary, created by Robert Doherty for CBS.)

What is cricket?

(Slightly edited since, 25.12.10)

'Unusual to see a right-hander coming round the wicket in rain..' said the commentator on TMS (Test Match Special 4.1.11) - but of course it is easy to 'see' on the radio!

So what is this game, and what are the rules? What follows are some short extracts from an academic paper on expertise which necessitated the authors attempt a technical description of cricket for a largely America readership.

‘..Cricket is a complicated game. We must explain some of the rules here on the assumption that not every reader of this journal will know them. We will, however, assume that readers who are not familiar with cricket will know baseball. 

Cricket is like baseball in that it involves the equivalent of a pitcher and a batter, known, respectively, as the ‘bowler’ and the ‘batsman.’ The bowler ‘bowls’ the cricket ball to the batsman and, as in baseball, the batsman tries to hit it. Unlike baseball, there is no limit to the number of balls the batsman may receive - on a good day a batsman may face hundreds of balls before being out. In international matches, one game may continue for up to five days. 

As in baseball, there are a number of ways of being out, such as when one of the ‘fielders’ catches the ball before it hits the ground. In cricket the batsman stands in front of a ‘wicket’ (otherwise known as ‘the stumps’) that he has to defend with his bat. If the ball hits the wicket, the batsman is out – there is no equivalent in baseball. The wicket is a set of three vertical sticks or ‘stumps.’  The wicket is 28 inches high and 9 inches wide overall. The top of each stump has a shallow groove cut at right angles to the direction from which the ball is coming; two smaller sticks, known as ‘bails’, are carefully balanced in these grooves, the ends of the two bails touching each other where they meet in middle of the groove cut in the central stump. The working, and universally accepted, definition of ‘the ball hitting the wicket’ is that one or both of the delicately balanced bails fall to the ground - the wicket must be ‘broken’. On very rare occasions a ball grazes the stumps, or rolls very gently against them, but no bail falls; in such a case the batsman is not out because the wicket has not been broken. 

In cricket, the bowler nearly always directs the ball in such a way that it hits the ground before it reaches the batsman and it usually then bounces toward the batsman’s legs. The batsman wears a ‘pad’ to protect each leg. Each pad is an armoured sheath running from ankle to just above the knee. The ball is very hard, about as hard as wood at the beginning of the game, though it begins to soften slightly as the hours pass (the same ball is used for many hours before it is changed). The ball can sometimes be bowled at more than 90 mph.  Allowing the ball to hit the pads is an integral part of the game. Clearly, the batsman would never be out if he simply stood in front of the wicket, kept his bat out of the way, and allowed the ball to hit him or his pads. To make that impossible the notoriously complicated ‘lbw rule’ says that a batsman is out in certain restricted circumstances if the pads alone stop a ball that would otherwise hit the wicket - this counts as out in virtue of ‘leg before wicket’. In the normal way, the umpire, who stands at the point from which the bowler bowls the ball, is the sole judge of whether the ball (a) falls within the restrictions and (b) would have gone on to hit the wicket..

.. A cricket ball is not uniformly spherical. Around its ‘equator’ it has a raised seam and the two ‘hemispheres’ become more asymmetrical as the game goes on. The trajectory of the ball after it hits the ground can vary enormously. The bounce depends on the speed, the hardness and texture of the ball - which changes during the game, the state of the ground at the exact point of the bounce, the spin on the ball and the position of the seam. The ‘swing’ - which is the aerodynamically induced curve in the flight of the ball, which can be in any plane - depends on the ball’s speed, its spin, its state, its orientation, the orientation of the seam and the state of the atmosphere. As a result, what happens to the ball after it bounces is not going to be fully predictable from its pre-bounce trajectory

.. In the case of the human umpire making an lbw decision it is acknowledged that the accuracy of the judgment is affected by how close the batsman is to the wickets when the pads are struck by the ball. If the batsman whose pads are struck is well forward in his stance then he is rarely given out. In this way, human judges deliberately introduce a systematic error into their judgments that favours the batsman - the so-called ‘benefit of the doubt’ rule. The importance of this rule will become clear later…’

Extract from draft of Collins H.M and Evans R (2008) You cannot be serious!  Public Understanding of Technology with special reference to ‘Hawk-Eye.’

If the above is unclear, the best I (or anyone) can do is to refer you to the MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) located at, or otherwise known as Lord’s…

A Dance to the Music of Time

(photo by Nick Hewling)

(First posted, 17.11.10)

‘Gathered round the bucket of coke that burned in front of the shelter, several figures were swinging arms against bodies and rubbing hands together with large, pantomimic gestures: like comedians giving formal expression to the concept of extreme cold. ..something in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned to the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin’s scene

..[The dance to the music of time - painting  c.1640].. in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.’

Part of the opening passage of Anthony Powell’s 12 novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time in which he presents his own life, across 55 years of the 20^th century, through the fictional form of his narrator Nicholas Jenkins. Nick stands at the calm centre of a social world of two hundred characters as the observer and chronicler of their lives. Yet he remains also the central character, changing over time, offering different observations and explanations as he ages. His only conclusion, that he has exerted little influence over the direction his life has taken, drawn along by the rhythm of the dances of others.

It’s my favourite work of English literature and I’m currently in my 5^th cycle of reading.                                             

(As you can see from the first photo, I’m now on my 6^th cycle!)

From virtual reality to mirroring society

(First posted as a comment on a community blog discussion about Facebook, 13.6.10)

It's just three and a half years since I acquired a computer - before that it had been twenty years since I'd used one. I've found myself thinking of Facebook as a bit like a cafe or pub conversation - you are talking one-to-one or to a small group but with the tacit understanding that it is okay to be overheard. On Twitter it is more like short conversations with complete strangers in the bus queue, or any queue - gossip, which you are only too happy to broadcast to the world. With a community blog, it seems more like being allowed across someone’s door into a party where there is a host. Personal blogs are more 'broadcast yourself' - anything from a personal journal, to blatant self-promotion. Each application offers levels of privacy and intimacy.

However, what has become clear to me in the last couple of years is that it is probably a mistake (when trying to understand how the Web is evolving) to compare and categorize - rather one should think in terms of 'connectivity' (the ability to link one application to another) as the key to what's happening, and what you find yourself doing.

Facebook is important because of its size (400m +), personal blogs (approx. 200m), but Twitter (although about 150m) is ideal for gathering in, and pushing out (and filtering) information wherever you want it to go!

As the Internet becomes more important (as others insist on it as a means of communication) and it becomes less virtual (more an aspect of the 'real' world) then isolation in one preferred application, may come to mean ignorance, exclusion and vulnerability! Equally, when you find yourself distracted from work, surfing off to somewhere you never intended to be, ask who sent you there?!

(A few months later, I posted a link on the same community blog, 25.9.10)

Tim Skellett in yesterday's Guardian: 'Many people find a solace and acceptance online that they cannot find in person. ..As a bulletin board administrator, I know online friendships are no easy matter and neither is providing a safe place for them...’

(Then one of the site administrators commented, emphasising another quote from the article.)

‘..The protection of the private sphere of your online community will be the toughest part of your administration. It is precisely on this aspect that many fail, ending up closing down private sections of their bulletin boards, or even their entire forum when they cannot cope with the demands that the protection of confidentiality entails. Boards without such protection abound on the net, but are often marked by either aggressive cliques effectively in control, or by artificial and hard limits being placed on what may be discussed.'

(Three years on, although those new to the Web - particularly the young - may encounter similar problems, the idea of a ‘virtual reality’ has become even less sustainable. With the mobile devices we carry integrating so much data about us in real time, plus the sheer numbers of people connected by phone and Internet, the possibility of an anonymous, alternative or contrived online personality is rapidly disappearing. People are now made conspicuous by their lack of presence on social media. An avatar, in the computing sense, has become all about how authentic you can make it. Indeed, data capturing capabilities are now so sophisticated that they reveal sobering sociological truths that many had hoped had gone away – that within any age cohort and socio-economic group, the differences in educational attainment, health and wealth are as great as they were before the first computers were ever connected. By offering equal access to almost anyone, the Web reveals what appear to be the inherent inequalities of modern society. Just as computers and the Internet subvert traditional education and some forms of wealth creation, the data on the lives of millions show how much government’s interventions to aid social improvement have proved ineffective. NSA/GCHQ trawl for all those connected to wrongdoing, as neuroscience and network analysis use similar techniques to demonstrate that much of our behaviour is unconsciously viral and socially contagious, leaving anyone hoping to attribute cause, blame or responsibility going around and around in circles.)