'Nother Solent

Mugabe wins!

Ha-ha, April Fool. Hope someone tells him the pranks have to stop on April 2.

Norm hath spoken. Squander Two hath spoken.

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be? Farenheit 451 so I can convince all the guys who want to burn me that they are themselves inside a book, then they will repent.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character? I know it's kind of kooky to name both a father and son, but both Aral and Miles Vorkosigan are cute in their separate ways. And books. That's separate books separated by twenty years, OK?

The last book you bought is: The Oxford German Grammar, partly for my daughter and partly for me. It's too advanced for either of us.

The last book you read: Changeover by Diana Wynne Jones.

What are you currently reading? Pandora's Star by Peter F Hamilton.

Five books you would take to a deserted island: The Bible, Shakespeare, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (to my shame the nearest I've come to reading it is when I skimmed the whole thing for a quote that appears on the last page), any Boys' Own Annual from early in the twentieth century (they all featured practical projects of almost unbelievable sophistication and dangerousness of construction, very useful for a castaway) and Norton's Star Atlas - because no one is completely imprisoned who can see the stars.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why? Oh, gosh, this is the sort of social situation that hits all my inadequacy buttons. I think this sort of thing is fun, but some people hate anything like a chain letter. What if a person I choose is offended? What if a person I don't choose is offended? What if a meteor hits the planet? Let me think for a bit. Anyone want to volunteer?

Why

has it taken me so long to discover this nice man?

(Via Blithering Bunny)

Robin Cook

, writing in the Guardian, reminds me why I must oppose the UN even if it is reformed.

No one is asking for Kofi Annan to be given a veto over whether Wolfowitz gets the job, but it does not seem unreasonable to demand stronger coordination at the centre to stop the World Bank pursuing neo-liberal policies that are in flat conflict with the development agendas of other UN agencies.

You heard the man. He wants the UN to be one centre of power, following a unified development agenda that is not neo-liberal. His vision is entirely realistic and achievable. When and if it is achieved the great gains of the past three decades in average wealth, life expectancy, access to water, access to education, and freedom will slowly, slowly, slowly stop being so spectacular ... then stop altogether ... then imperceptibly slip into reverse ... and no one will be able to see it because there will nowhere left in the world outside the Unified Development Agenda. As I said here (one of the most deeply felt posts I have ever written) we might see "not the end of history, but its asymptote." And as I also said there, that scenario, a sort of permanent Imperial China sleeping safe from all outside influence (because there is no outside) under a fairly benevolent civil service, is the optimistic one. A pessimistic scenario might also hark back to Chinese history. The death toll in the Taiping "Great Peace" rebellion against the Manchus was second only to that of World War II. Under a unified government all wars are civil wars and civil wars are ugly.

Later on in the article Cook says that:

The suspicion must be that they would rather have a creaking, ineffective UN to treat as a coconut shy than a modern, representative forum that would oblige them to respect collective decisions.

Since I fear very much being obliged to respect the collective decisions of the world's various regimes, I have considered, very seriously, taking up exactly that opinion, rather in the way that revolutionary socialists sometimes hope that capitalism will be as cruel as possible, the better to speed the revolution against it. ("Let it bleed", as Tariq Ali used to say.) But in the end I cannot go that far. It may well be better for the long term happiness of the world that the UN should cease to exist, or, my preferred option, should be a co-ordinating body and forum for negotiation with no power of its own, but I see scarce prospect of that happening. What we have in the real world, a powerful but badly dysfunctional UN, will exacerbate famines and wars, particularly in Africa. So I hope it is reformed. Then let us fight it.

"This morning, the Holy Father's health condition is very grave." - statement from the Vatican. It says that he is "conscious, lucid and tranquil." May he have a good death.

Zimbabwe votes. Some of it, anyway. Whether this translates into "Zimbabwe decides" is another question.

Knitting. The truth is out there.

The full history of the Alsos Mission has not yet been told. The basics are well known: General Groves selected a team of civilian scientists and military personnel headed by Colonel Boris T Pash, and later joined by the discoverer of electron spin, Samuel Goudsmit, and set them to follow the Allied advance across Europe and uncover Nazi progress towards the atom bomb. Both Pash and Goudsmit wrote books about their experiences.

But did they tell the whole story? There is a tantalising hint in the chapter of Goudsmit's book called The Gestapo in Science. (Chapter available separately as one of the essays in Martin Gardner's The Sacred Beetle.) This chapter touches on Himmler's Ahnenerbe, or Academy of Ancestral Heritage. The administrative head of this body was SS Colonel Wolfram Sievers, a man who felt it meet always to write the initial and final S's of his name in runic style, thus making the SS emblem. In 1943 Sievers wrote to a woman minion in these terms:

Dear Fraulein Piffl:

There was a recent report in the press that there is an old woman living in Ribe in Jutland, who still possesses knowledge of the knitting methods of the Vikings.

The Reichsleader

[Himmler] desires that we send someone to Jutland immediately to visit the old woman and learn these knitting methods.

Heil Hitler!

Sievers

["Sievers" written with the runic sandwich]

"Unfortunately for the future of science," wrote Goudsmit, "the records fail to reveal if Miss Piffl's mission was successful."

I begin to wonder if the records are complete.

Some bloggers, myself among them, were inclined to jeer at those who sought to bring healing to a world sundered by the US War on Terror by knitting willies. We were unkind. (There must be many lonely Al-Qaeda servicemen out there who would be much comforted by a knitted willy. Ladies, can you help?) We may also have laughed too soon. It could be that the courageous woman who runs these risks for all of our sakes, "guerilla knitter" Rachael Matthews, has stumbled on a secret kept for nearly sixty years.

Consider. In 1943 as the slow crushing of the Third Reich began, Heinrich Himmler himself was willing to spend SS resources in searching out the knitting methods of the notoriously warlike Vikings. Was this merely a unique instance of harmless curiosity on the part of Himmler? Or was he searching for a Strickvergeltungswaffe or "Knitted-Vengeance-Weapon"? It's very odd that the trail goes suddenly cold at that point. Even more mysteriously, despite the fact that multiply cross-indexed records of the Nazi scientific war effort were kept by the compulsively efficient Osenberg, in no source that I can find does the word Strickpenisvergeltungwaffe even appear.

Consider. I have always known that there is something mysterious about knitting, just as it has always been plain to me that the way a sewing machine sews things from underneath even though the needle is on top is simply inexplicable without reference to the fourth dimension. Last time I mentioned this some CIA plant tried to fob me off with some explanation about a sewing machine really being a knotting machine. As if!

Could it be that the much-publicised way in which Werner Von Braun and other Nazi scientists were nabbed by the US or the USSR was nothing more than a "stitch up" to hide a much more ambitious project? Could the oft-heard advice to "stick to your knitting" actually be a coded exhortation to workers on this New Manhattan Project? Significantly, when I have tried to discuss my theory with scientists they have dared say only one word in reply: the last name of Fraulein Erna Piffl of the SS!

In an important post Angie Schultz pulls together some very suspicious strands. (Strands! hah!) What is the real reason behind these Crocheted Hyperbolic Models? What is the Vauban fortress in the same image trying to tell us? Are you asking me to believe that the University of Bristol's crocheted Lorentz Manifold was made without NATO funding?

By gum, there is evidence for the hyperspatial nature of knitting in my own home. We own a knitted Klein bottle. But I haven't seen it in years. It must be ... somewhere else.

The EU arrest warrant might cause governments to race to the bottom.

Ed Lud writes:

Natalie, I was interested in your post about this.

It called to mind an article I saw in the Solicitors Journal about two years ago, which argued that the Arrest Warrant would introduce a 'fifth freedom' by the back to door.

No doubt you're aware of the so-called 'four freedoms' guaranteed by the European Union. Well, the argument in this article was that, whereas those freedoms essentially create a levelling-down effect as, for instance, labour or capital are capable of moving around the EU in response to market conditions, thereby (in theory) ensuring that unemployment stays low as workers move to find jobs, or that (again, in theory) capital can find its most efficient utilisation in the best market, the Arrest Warrant would create a levelling-up effect, where governments found themselves competing against one another to ensure that the criminal laws they passed were in no way 'surpassed' by those of other EU jurisdictions; which member state government, after all, would wish to defend the extradition of one of its citizens to another member state to face charges that they could not face in their country of origin?

In short, this fifth freedom would be the first to empower governments rather than private individuals or organisations. And, if I remember correctly, the article in the SJ claimed that this freedom of movement of criminal law - the process by which it would inevitably be levelled upwards as between member states - was explicitly foreseen and even encouraged by the framework treaty (Tampere, I think) which created it. So the problem will be not that, say, British subjects could be extradited to Greece to face charges of 'xenophobia' - which fear was being widely articulated a couple of years back - but that the British government would inevitably enact its own 'xenophobia' laws to prevent such extraditions.

Not good. Not good at all, in my humble.

With all best wotsits, Ed Lud

A synesthete couple.

Jim Bennett writes:

I always knew that Vladimir Nabokov had synesthesia, because he wrote about it in Speak, Memory. I liked the detail that Cyrillic letters had a different shade than Latin letters. However I only just found out that his wife Vera (Slonim) was synesthetic also.

[Link to Amazon page for Véra, a biography of Véra Nabokov née Slonim.]

See the review by "a reader".

Apparently the couple would have debates about the color of Monday and the taste of E-flat.

The Abode of Amritas

has a seriously cool blogroll. And a seriously cool linguistics and politics blog to go with it.

In an earlier post (OK, I admit it, an earlier post I can't find now) the author, Marc H. Miyake, argues that enthusiasts for the efforts to bring democracy to Iraq (like me) have set up an unfalsifiable argument. If there is a decline in terrorism we say, "This just shows that the Iraqis are rejecting terrorism. Democracy is working." If there is an increase in terrorism we say, "This just shows the terrorists are getting desperate. Democracy is working."

There is some truth in his argument about the arguments we make. I would respond that, despite the occasional lapses of our partisans, the experience of other societies suggests that the liberal democracy / rule of law package does eventually bring about a peaceful society. Spain once had traditions of vendetta as strong as those in Iraq now. Scotland also: Johnson wrote of the Western Islands:

This multifarious, and extensive obligation operated with force scarcely credible. Every duty, moral or political, was absorbed in affection and adherence to the Chief. Not many years have passed since the clans knew no law but the Laird's will. He told them to whom they should be friends or enemies, what King they should obey, and what religion they should profess.

It can also be true that a dying belief-system never looks more strongly held than on the eve of its fall. I find it reasonable to hope that this is true of the Islamofascists: those who begin to feel that the caravan has passed them by become more fanatical in order to extinguish the doubts in their own souls.

By the way, via the Abode of Amritas I found an essay on the new racism in education that I posted about at Samizdata.

Patrick Crozier liked the new Dr Who.

I’ve been trying to puzzle out how it was they got this so right. I imagine that the long break since the last series went out in 1989 was a factor. It gave a new generation the chance to re-invent it, to question every aspect of it and to give it a new feel. I also got the impression that after the (ahem) 1996 Dr Who movie there was an element of “we must not fail”. (Indeed, it’s funny to think how similar in many ways the two were - the difference between success and failure is slight indeed.) And I think there was also a deep desire to keep the tradition alive. To a large proportion of the people involved in producing, writing and directing the new series, Dr Who was something that they were brought up with, like Wimbledon and England World Cup exits. The ball was being thrown to them and they had to make damn sure they caught it. Fortunately, they did.

I agree.

Spoiler alert! Bits I particularly liked:

• The way that the Doctor, gadget in hand to zap the Nestene Consciousness and save the day, very nearly muffed it by trying to negotiate. Perfectly in character. Remember Genesis of the Daleks? Tom Baker, who has but to bring two contacts together to destroy the Daleks before they have had a chance to exist and wreak havoc throughout the galaxy, is suddenly stricken by conscience and asks himself, in an agony of indecision, have I the right? Hands up who else was yelling from behind the sofa, "YES! GET ON WITH IT!"
  
• Having said that, it was also good that the viewer was made to feel just a little bit sorry for the Consciousness.
  
• There was a good helping of menace before anything happened. The dummies twitching ... could have been accidental. The noise of the wheelie bin moving ... something you could hear on any street. The skilful buildup of menace did a great deal to compensate for the cheap effects in the original series. It doesn't need money and it sticks in your mind clear across the decades. (Given that I was seven at the time it was shown, I don't actually remember the plot of Terror of the Autons at all well. But - gulp - the little troll doll on the back seat of the car coming to life in the warm, that I remember.)
  
• Talking of which, starting off with the Autons was a great idea. The sheer scariness of the original Autons, particularly the ones disguised as policemen, prompted complaints from the Viewers' and Listeners' Association and questions in Parliament.
  
• Plastic Mickey. Don't blame Billie Piper for burbling away all un-noticing: how conscientious are you in regularly checking up whether your nearest and dearest have been plasticised?
  
• Clive and his website. Yes, that's exactly what would happen. Kudos to the scriptwriters for thinking through what has changed in the Earth's response to the Doctor in the last thirty years. In a similar way, I did admire the way that, in the second Terminator film, the writers had thought through what would have happened to the heroine between films One and Two if she insisted on telling her story (sent to the loony bin) and how she would have brought up her child (as a survivalist).
  

  Poor Clive is gone, albeit with the comfort of knowing in his last moments that he was right all along, but another will spring up in his place. I hope the Doctor has set up a system of news alerts. Or perhaps not: Dr Who traditionally blurs the question of how much the Earth population and/or authorities know. In the U.N.I.T. timeline, where our co-inhabitors of the Earth the Sea Devils, once appeared on the six o'clock news, then everyone ought to say, oh another alien invasion, pass the mustard. But I don't think we are. Everyone acted too surprised.
  

There is one strange fact that I can exclusively reveal. The street, ostensibly in London, in which the scene with the wheelie bin took place was actually Inverness Place, Cardiff. What this portends for the future development of the plot I do not know.

Synesthesia.

Random Jottings linked to the post below, and in the comments Andrea Harris said,

Monday -- white, pale blue, gray -- three vertical stripes in that order from left to right
Tuesday -- dark blue, yellow, dark gray -- I see big lozenges of those colors sort of fitting into each other somehow, this is not very clear
Wednesday -- pale yellow, wheat, ochre -- in mingled brushstrokes kind of like a field of grain
Thursday -- red, dark red, dark blue -- these are in concentric squares
Friday -- red, purple, pink, in wavy lines or blobs
Saturday -- brown, green; a speckled pattern like leaves on water
Sunday -- white, silver, gold; tall leaping patterns like cirrus clouds or spires.

Wow. I said in the earlier post that I didn't "particularly" see colours for days of the week. In fact, the days do weakly suggest certain colours to me, but it's a straight transposition of the cycle of months/seasons onto the weekdays (Sunday is white and pale like January; Thursday is autumn colours) rather than synesthesia. In contrast I can't see any metaphor or association that should make seven green. (No other number has a comparable colour-identity. Four might be pale yellow - or am I making that up as I write? - I can't tell, it slips through my fingers as I pick it up) Judging from the various comments on Normblog and Jottings my perceptions of this are watery and vague compared to some.