'Nother Solent

About Spain...

sometimes you think about a thing a lot but really it's just the same thought going round and round.

In this post and the posts below it Normblog brings together some accounts of the victims of the train bombings.

What can I say? They sound like they were ordinary people. Like you and me and people we know. Except that their lives were cruelly cut short and ours continue.

"It's difficult to teach them physics, so let's teach them "about" physics."

Kevin Richardson writes.. er, actually wrote an embarrassingly long time ago:

I was interested to read your piece on physics education both as an ex physics teacher (I taught it for eight years, up to 1980) and as the father of an 11 year old son who is about to transfer to secondary school this year.

The A level syllabus you linked to makes interesting reading. Of course it's hard to get a real feeling for the academic standard just by looking at a syllabus, but it did strike me that much it was material I remember teaching for O level. It makes me wonder what the kids have actually been doing in their first five years of secondary education.

I used to teach the Nuffield Physics syllabus both at O and A level, and your post prompted me to dig up a couple of books I used to use.

Taking year 10 (as it wasn't called in those days) as an example, in mechanics we covered the equations of uniformly accelerated motion, Newton's Laws, Bernoulli's principle. momentum, explosions and collisions (including illustrations with cloud chamber tracks), rockets, jets, kinetic energy and power. These were illustrated with lots of demonstrations, class experiments and calculations.

We went on to look at the kinetic theory of gases and the derivation (using earlier work on momentum) of pV = Nmv^{2}/3 for an ideal gas. From a simulation of random walk, and observing the speed of diffusion of bromine through air, we arrived at an estimate of the mean free path in air and and hence a rough estimate of the size of a typical air molecule and atom.

I don't suppose this question from the end of the chapter would be allowed in one of today's text books:

"Trying to measure the diameter of an atom may not be unlike measuring the size of your waist with a tape measure, especially if you are one of the fair sex. Why?"

Also in year 10 we covered heat, including specific heat capacity and latent heat, and conservation of energy. Then there was electrical circuits, Ohm's law, and electrical power. This included the concept of internal resistance and the distinction between potential difference and EMF. It led onto electrons, the Cathode Ray Oscilloscope and Millikan's experiment to measure the charge on the election.

In the contemporary syllabus you linked to, I see that circular motion and centripetal force only appear in an A2 module, which I assume means the second year of the sixth form. We covered this in year 11, along with a substantial module on theories of the Solar System (from the ancient Greeks onward) and including Kepler's Laws.

In your post you mentioned Snell's Laws. The Nuffield O level syllabus covered this in year 9, along with lots of optics, including reflection, refraction, diffraction and telescopes. This was developed with ray diagrams and key formulae such as Snell's law and the lens equation.

In the Nuffield year 3 Guide to Experiments there is a demonstration of refraction using the "marching model". The requirements for the experiment are listed as

1. Asphalt road with area of soft grass adjoining.

2. Squad of boys

3. Discipline

"The boys are to be arranged in parallel rows of 6 and are to be marched at an angle, from the road into the grass. On entering the grass they are to maintain the same frequency of step but decrease their step length to half. Refraction of the lines of boys will be seen to occur."

The Guide even reckons that you can achieve total internal reflection by marching them from the grass towards the road. However it doesn't go so far as to claim that you can use the method to arrive at Snell's Law!

I did my teaching in grammar schools. Even there, the syllabus was regarded as quite difficult and academic, and some children struggled. But for the ones who could cope I think it was an excellent grounding in the subject.

I think the decline of proper physics teaching in the state sector over the past thirty years is so sad. It seems to me that the virtual abolition of the grammar schools has had a lot to do with it. Teaching a "hard" academic subject such as physics may not seem such an attractive proposition if you are faced with doing it across the ability range.

As a result it often gets taught by non-physicists whose conceptual grasp of the subject is superficial. Its difficulty leads to a temptation to dilute the hard academic material with non-physics elements, as you pointed out.

One other thing - and obviously a matter of far greater importance than the scientific education of the future generation - what is the plural of syllabus? I vaguely remembered that this depends on whether "syllabus" is second declension, in which case the plural would be "syllabi", or fourth declension, in which case it would be "syllabus". On looking around I found the following link:

link

This claims that "syllabus" originally occurred as a misprint of a Greek accusative plural in a fifteenth century edition of Cicero. Since it's not really a proper Latin word at all, the plural ought to be "syllabuses". (Or perhaps "specifications".)

There, in more detail than I could have hoped to provide, is backing for my most melancholy suspicions about physics teaching (and syllathingies).

Physics is difficult. (Confession: it was a bit too difficult for me in the end.) But there is scope for that very difficulty to be one of its selling points to both students and employers. I think what the subject needs is a little constructive macho. When you walk in to your first ever GCSE class the theme tune to "The Right Stuff" should be playing.

A libertarian argument not to force vaccines.

Alan M Robertson (who was "divorced from the web for two years" but is now reconciled) writes:

am now on day four of my blog. I didn't know what to write about. So I dredged up some old material inspired by one of your comments. In finding your comment, I read your most recent posts.

I stopped reading you? What was I thinking?

Anyway.

I saw your posts about vaccines. It seems to me that if I am one of the few to vaccinate myself, when the malady strikes, I will be one of the few to not catch it. While such wholesale sickness may be bad as a society as a whole, only people that chose to not vaccinate themselves will get sick. Vaccinations cause pain and risk further injury. No one should have the right to do that to me. If someone wants to avoid the flu, they should stick the needle in their arm, not mine.

Heh.

Instapundit posts on a Seattle Post Intelligencer headline so biased it's funny.

The story beneath the headline was by the Associated Press, and Jim Miller says the bias from the AP is worse than that of the Seattle P-I.

... and a (presumably Republican) reader of the Corner has a personal reason for objecting to being held responsible for the actions of one's second cousins.

There were no posts

on Wednesday because I was busy. Then on Thursday I got stuck in to quite a long post about Max Hastings... 80% of which was eaten by the computer, despite being (I could have sworn) safely posted-but-not-published in the bottom window. It seemed best to walk away from the computer rather than scream and curse any more than I already had. I have tried to reconstitute the post below from memory. If the original one reappears, why then I'll have two.

While I'm here let me say that if time permits today I'll try and post some of the interesting emails I have received.

Max Hastings' little joke.

Max Hastings is in the Guardian today, flattering its readers:

In this country, only the Guardian and Independent deal thoroughly with what is taking place, and display real sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians. Elsewhere a lot of space is given to apologias for Israeli conduct, some of which reveal a contempt for Palestinian human rights that invites the most baleful of historical comparisons.

"Invites." That carefully unattributed verb; how sweetly put. You are talking about the Holocaust, right? (That's the "most baleful of historical comparisons" that comes to my mind, certainly. It's a peculiarly indirect phrase to use if he means anything else and I don't for a moment think that he does mean anything else. ) The Holocaust, if you remember, regularly killed more Jews in an hour than the entire Palestinian death toll over many decades of conflict with Israel.

The thing about invitations is that you don't have to issue them and you don't have to accept them. Discretion in this respect keeps you out of bad company.

A similar point about responsibility runs through this post commenting on Hastings' article by Norman Geras. Here is an excerpt:

And there was I imagining that it is those who propagate, embrace and excuse anti-Semitism who are the real culprits.

Hastings is also a 'despair that finds its only outlet in terrorism' man. It's funny that way, despair: it does that when it does, but when it doesn't it doesn't; and none of Hastings' tribe ever says why.

In the unlikely event that Max Hastings ever reads this he will have an answer ready:

They make the cardinal error of identifying the Jewish people with the Israeli government, wilfully confusing anti-semitism and anti-Zionism. Often, they seem to demand that the behaviour of Israel should be judged by a special standard, that allows the likes of Sharon and Netanyahu a special quota of excesses, in compensation for past sufferings.

But Mr Hastings has erected a straw man. It is so commonplace as to be a cliché to begin an article condemning the modern Jew-hatred by making the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism - and by making the distinction between anti-Zionism and opposition to the current policies of the current Israeli government, a distinction that Mr Hastings blurs. I for one do not wish Israel to be judged by a special standard. I wish it to be judged by the same standard as other nations. And by that standard I see that Israel's retaliation for Palestinian terrorism is far less indiscriminate than Russia's retaliation for Chechen terrorism - yet it is Israel that academics boycott, not Russia. I see that for the last half century Arab regimes have slaughtered Arabs in their thousands (Anyone but me remember the way Syria crushed the uprising at Hama? There were estimates at the time of eighty thousand dead. At least some people do remember the crimes of Saddam Hussein!) - yet it is not these killer regimes that are denounced in the UN but Israel. I see that Israel has universal suffrage, a free press, an independent judiciary and Arab members sitting in the Knesset - yet it is regularly called an "apartheid state." I see that Western PC activists will hound people out of their jobs for scarcely discernible or even unconscious offences against racial ettiquette - yet the same activists shrug their shoulders at a tide of anti-Jew racist speech and writing the likes of which hasn't been seen since the Nazi era, and which in many instances literally is Nazi, being translated or recycled Nazi propaganda and conspiracy-mongering. Finally I see again and again Israel being called a Nazi country which displays... oh, I won't go on. Others have denounced the odiousness of this comparison better than I could. I shall content myself with saying that at the very least it displays an inability to count big numbers.

Hey, but maybe I should be less uptight, relax a bit, have a laugh about it all... d'you know, I think I will. Max Hastings lecturing in the Guardian (the Guardian!) about racial prejudice is pretty funny really, and here's a little wee anecdote that explains why.

Until recently Mr Hastings hadn't made any striking impression on my mind. I knew his name, naturally. It first came to my notice when he reported from the Falklands War, which I think he did well. After that I knew he was editor of the Evening Standard and then the Telegraph. Also I knew he had written books of popular history about the Second World War. I knew I had read a good many of his columns but couldn't remember specific ones. That was about it Hastings-wise for me. All that changed, however, when my husband came back from the library with a book of light-hearted hunting and shooting memoirs by Hastings called "Scattered Shots". As I may have mentioned, I like target shooting but am far too soft-hearted to hunt. Nonetheless I am quite happy to read books about it, and Hastings' book is extremely entertainingly written. At times I wondered whether Hastings had come under a miasma similar to the one that hung over P.G. Wodehouse's Bludleigh Court (and had power to get the local representative of Our Dumb Brothers League of Mercy up for an impromptu badger-baiting party at three in the morning), so great is Hastings' enthusiasm for blasting the local wildlife.

But not all his jokes are funny. Somewhere in "Scattered Shots" he tells a golfing story. (The book has gone back to the library so you are going to have to do without page numbers.) It seems that one time a golf ball struck by Mr Hastings landed straight on some unfortunate man's head, knocking him out cold for a few minutes. Fortunately the victim was a forgiving sort and having come round he said dazedly that he was quite all right and Mr Hastings should think nothing of it. What amazed me was the term Mr Hastings used to describe the man's good sportsmanship: he called him a white man. There was no question of him meaning it in a purely factual sense. So far as I could tell everybody in the story was white. He clearly meant it in the way that Bulldog Drummond uses it. Then, just to rub in that this was not merely an unfortunate slip of the pen, Hastings once more described the man in the same way in the closing paragraphs of the chapter.

Just think about that. It wasn't written in 1930 when race was the Big Idea and the Coming Thing and that the use of the phrase "white man" as a shorthand to indicate sportsmanship, honour or trustworthiness, was, unfortunately, commonplace; it was written in a book published in 1999. It wasn't written by some superannuated rustic; it was written by Max Hastings, a man who has edited Britain's best-selling quality paper, an opinion-former, a man accustomed to mix in London political and literary circles.

And now he's the Guardian's pet conservative! Go on, laugh.

UPDATE: Here Stephen Pollard lays into the same article. And here's a good letter in Friday's Guardian. "I do not recall Hastings or anyone else telling Africans that they are obliged to speak out against Mugabe's dictatorship in Zimbabwe on pain of contributing to anti-African prejudice."

The blast in the Moscow Metro

that killed forty people in February seems to have inspired another bunch of murderers to follow suit.

Free trade.

I think this post from The Corner is on to something:

"[Employment is understated because] the internet has created a vast underground cash economy. The dozens of eBay sellers and independent retailers I did business with last year all got paid in cash and are not about to respond to a survey about any related activity....I just bought some things for the house [on the Internet]...and they wanted PayPal. I get computer parts the same way. It used to be that the only people that could benefit from a 'cash basis' were barbers and waitresses, but that is no longer the case.

"I spent more in an underground economy last year than on anything other than housing and food. How much of what I spent do you suppose the people who sold me goods and services actually reported?"

Once I would have been shocked. Now I shrug.

Herd immunity.

Ellie Kimmel writes regarding vaccination:

I strongly suspect that vaccination regulations are, in most US states, waived for parents who have religious objections. That's certainly the case in Florida. Although there are a few specific deomonations that forbid vaccines (Christian Science comes to mind), most parents who obtain the religious waiver do so due to fears of negative vaccination outcomes. When I was a private school teacher in Florida, we have several parents, Catholic, Protestant, atheist, and Jewish, who requested and routinely received waivers, which, as far as I know, were automatically granted to anyone who stated a religious objection.

Given modern anti-discrimination law I suspect that the power of liberal states to ensure herd immunity by making immunisation a condition of entry to schools is much reduced. If, for instance, the Nigerian rumour becomes common within Islam then we might eventually reach a stage where a requirement for immunisation will depress the number of Muslim children enrolled. That would make a school vulnerable to lawsuits in either the US or the UK. A cornerstone of modern anti-discrimination law is that things are judged by their effects, not their intentions.

Of course the same laws also make it hard for even private schools such as Ellie Kimmel's to enforce immunisation rules. Even in the absence of law I doubt whether many schools would consider it worth the trouble to argue with a request for a waiver. The whole spirit of the times is against such a move.

My scary scenario hasn't happened yet and may never happen. So far as I know non-Nigerian Muslims vaccinate their children as or more conscientiously than White Britons do; wasn't there some kerfuffle a few years ago when it was discovered that Pakistan had a higher vaccination rate for some diseases than Britain did? I seem to remember Imran Khan lent his name and face to an advertising campaign to bring Britain up to scratch.

Lord Chancelloverload?

It could be worse. I could talk about John Kerry.

The only relevance

of King Hillary and the Beggarman to current debates is that it has a Lord Chancellor in it.

That'll do.

Proud Lord Willoughby,
Lord High Chancellor
Laughed both loud and free:
"I've served Your Majesty, man to man,
Since first Your Majesty's reign began,
And I've often walked, but I never, never ran,
Never, never, never," quoth he.

I won't quote the whole thing having heard rumour of the long arm of the A A Milne estate. I might just casually mention that these guys run a useful website.

Mind you, for us Lord Chancellor fans the poem has all the wrong morals. A shocking example of the arbitrary and unrestrained exercise of power by fictional monarchs.

Getting tense

over your upcoming British Constitution paper? Read this authoritative text.

I loved the headline

of this Fisk² post from Contintelpro Tool. Personally, I doubt the Fiskoid exists in flesh and blood. Isn't the most economical explanation that we are now onto Fisk 3.0 after earlier versions crashed? (Via Insty.)

The Last Lord Chancellor.

In this article William Rees-Mogg writes against the haste with which the Government, supported by Lord Falconer the present Lord Chancellor, has gone about the abolition of that office. Rees-Mogg says,

Successful institutions grow like trees; they cannot simply be erected, like the Eiffel Tower. They acquire their authority over time. Take, for instance, the post of Lord Chancellor, which the Prime Minister has decided to abolish, as a matter of convenience arising from a bungled reshuffle of his Cabinet. No one knows when the office was first created. However, it certainly goes back to the period of Anglo-Saxon government.

and

The Constitutional Reform Bill proposes to abolish an office which has earned more than a thousand years of public confidence.

and

There have been only 26 amendments to the US Constitution in two centuries, of which the first ten were in 1791. The procedures required to carry an amendment, such as the amendment on marriage that President Bush is now proposing, are that it must be proposed either by two thirds of both Houses of Congress, or by two thirds of the states, and ratified by three fourths of the states. This means that any amendment is hard to carry. It has given the US Constitution unique stability. By the American standard, Mr Blair and Lord Falconer are acting with indecent and unconstitutional haste.

Rees-Mogg may get his slowdown, for now. The Lords have voted to send the Bill to a Select Committee, which in practice will probably mean that there is no time to make it law before the next election.

You will find few better comments on all this than what Sean Gabb wrote in June 2003 giving cautious support to the change itself but expressing deep anger at the change of name. At first sight this objection might seem shallow. It is not. To explain why not, Sean Gabb briefly described the history of earlier judicial reforms and said,

... [nonetheless] the Victorian reformers did all they could to preserve the old associations. Even if the substance was entirely replaced, the names of Queen's Bench and Chancery were retained. The New Courts were built to look old. Within a generation, I doubt if anyone but a legal historian really noticed what had been done. The present set of reforms is quite different in its regard for old associations. A few years ago, writs became claim forms and plaintiffs became claimants. There are proposals to stop the Judges from wearing their horsehair wigs. Now, there is to be no Lord Chancellor. The office has existed in England for at least 800 years, and began as a sort of secretaryship to the King. It is older than Parliament. Thomas Beckett was Lord Chancellor to Henry II. Thomas More was Lord Chancellor for Henry VIII. The office was satirised in Iolanthe. It has always been around in English history, and its holders have been some of the great men of English history. Even before the proposed abolition, the cumulative effect of these reforms has been to advertise a break with the past. Let another generation go by, and only a legal historian will be able to understand the mass of obsolete words contained in law reports from before the present century. Threads of continuity will have been snapped. The past will seem more of a foreign country than is needed.

As I re-read this the stirred depths of my memory sent up a little bubble. I can't give you a reference or trace where this anecdote came from but I'm pretty sure of it and it makes me angry, despite the point at issue being purely nominal. After some previous reform of the law the authorities put out a press release boasting how they had updated and clarified obscure legal terminology, abolishing archaic terms and hence making the legal process more transparent to the citizen blah blah blah. This was reported in the press. Next day there was a letter to the editor in one of the quality dailies. (I think it was the Telegraph.) The writer said, and I had no trouble believing him, that what the authorities had actually done in their purging frenzy was replace Latin terms with...

... You think I'm going to say, "with English terms, clearly understandable to the man on the Clapham omnibus" don't you?

Nope. With numbers.

I can't remember the examples the writer cited, but in each case a Latin phrase was replaced with "a defence under Regulation 18c" or some such. In other words Latin phrases that would have been entirely comprehensible to those who did speak Latin and relatively easy to pick up and remember by those who (like me) do not were replaced by numbers that were utterly incomprehensible to lay people and even to lawyers outside that particular specialisation. In addition a little bit more of our living history was lost.

As Iain Murray put it in the comments to a Samizdata post introducing Sean Gabb's article, this is no more than the usual practice of a conqueror: to "destroy an icon of the conquered people."

UPDATE: Iain Murray comments on his own blog here.

"A sense of fairness touches deep intuitions in the human brain. So, alas, does ethnic identity..."

That's how Dennis Dutton begins a paragraph in this piece on equality under the law. He's talking about New Zealand, where Maori issues are particularly in the news as a Maori political party has just been started. Dutton continues: "...and successful modern societies have gone out of their way to defuse and redirect the demons of race."

Yes. But I hardly had time to think about that before my interest was grabbed by the little anecdote of school life that he used to illustrate the general principle:

Which is why reading a story such as Megan Church's is so disturbing. Megan is a 16-year-old whose parents have removed her from Marlborough Girls' College.

Megan has worn a necklace with an amethyst since she was 10. It was forcibly cut off her neck by a teacher, as a violation of the school's dress code.

This same dress code, however, allows Maori students to wear bone and greenstone necklaces as part of the school's "Treaty of Waitangi obligations". The school administrators justify their policy because of "improved outcomes" for Maori students.

Such actions decrease respect for authority in school, increase disdain for Maori culture among non-Maori, and in the country at large corrode respect for Government.

Yes again. Although the last gets little sympathy from me, I don't like the sound of the first two at all. Once upon a time I thought expressing fear of a white backlash was simply a clever way of delaying fair treatment to non-whites. Nowadays the fear seems real and urgent. I think I can imagine the outcome of this story as far as Megan is concerned. We know her necklace was precious to her or she would have taken it off "voluntarily" rather than ending up having it forcibly cut from her. So she gets the necklace fixed. She wears it for the next ten years, maybe for the rest of her life. Every now and then she tells its story and slags off her former school - and she mentions (how could she not?) the fact that Maori girls were allowed necklaces. Maybe she will be able to avoid unfairly projecting her resentment onto Maoris generally, but she would be no worse than millions of people if she did not avoid it. And her hearers would be no worse than millions of people if they did not avoid it either.

This story is tiny, but the cumulative result of many such stories might well be the rise of a white mirror image to the newly formed Maori ethnic party.

David Carr once said to me that "when the backlash comes, don't kid yourself that it'll be us who replace the tranzis."

Mercenaries seized in Zimbabwe.

This is interesting. There's sufficient detail to suggest they aren't a lost Duke of Edinburgh's Award class or anything like that.