Natalie Solent |
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Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing.
You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.
E-mail: nataliesolent-at-aol-dot-com (I assume it's OK to quote senders by name.) Back to main blog RSS thingy 
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Saturday, April 17, 2004
The smooth new concrete by the side of the house was much admired. Nobody connected it to the mysterious absence of blog posts. Nobody except the annoying old guy who made it his business to look into such things... I am going to be very busy in the next week, so there may be few or no posts. Make of that what you will.
The Joy of Knitting. "It begins with a simple thread onto a needle...but it ends in no holds barred diatribes against the pathetic left, weakness in the face of terrorism and capitulation to the new Eurabia."My kind of gal. Except I can't knit. (Via Tim Blair.)
Mind you, the non-pathetic left, as represented by the likes of Normblog and the boys at Harry's Place can stitch up an anti-appeasement storm themselves.
Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.) Gary Farber of Amygdala writes in Whitmanesque fashion comparing: "Some of you may be under the misapprehension, which I concede I have not striven to correct, that I like sewing." to "You got a problem, bud? I like sewing" [in the sidebar] What are you talking about Gary me old china? I love sewing. Adore it. Especially really challenging projects that make full use of my skills; the cream dress in slinky fabric I am just completing for my daughter, for instance. There is little in this harsh world so satisfying as finally reaching the stage when you can sew in one of the "Made by Natalie" nametapes so vaingloriously ordered from Cash's the other day. Wednesday, April 14, 2004
Some of you may be under the misapprehension, which I concede I have not striven to correct, that I like sewing. In fact I loathe it and perform the hateful act only as a spiritual discipline. Of all the sects of this peculiar practice the most contorted, maddening and repugnant to a free spirit is that branch of self-flagellation known as dressmaking.
I am currently making a dress. But that's not the worst.
If it were for me I could have quietly left the half-made thing out for the recycling van by now, like Dr Moreau deciding that the result of crossing man and lobster was an idea whose time had not yet come. But once parental guilt enters the arena such easy tactics are unthinkable. My imagination instantly supplies a scene from a therapist's consulting room, circa 2030 and Offspring saying, "It all started to go wrong when my mother promised to make me a dress..." So I'm stuck with it till it's done. But that's not the worst.
It's made of utterly unforgiving monocoloured light cream fabric. No matter how carefully you match the thread to the fabric, every stitch shows and has to be perfectly placed, and every wobble in the line has to be unpicked, and then the frickin' holes show. But that's not the worst.
It's all smooth and shiny. Every possible misjudgement of tension shows, and every possible misjudgement of tension happens because it's so slippery. But that's not the worst.
I have just enough. There is no more of that fabric in the shop.
That's the worst.
Tomorrow's excuse for not blogging is that I will be mixing concrete. Strange but true. Tuesday, April 13, 2004
"Natalie would go beyond the non-throat-slitting definition of good, and say that making money is actively a good thing." Hmmm. Would I? Definitely the first bit, not sure about the second.
Anne Cunningham has written a post in response to one of mine. In a snatched moment I'm posting it here. Read the comments, too, which include a second post-within-a-comment by Anne herself.
Forgive me, amigos, I have to go away and do lots of non-blogging stuff. I also have to think of a response which is somewhere close to the level of thoughtfulness I am credited with.
UPDATE: First draft: making money, like the public exercise of any other talent, is good thing but not a duty. Saturday, April 10, 2004
World Conquest the nice way. "Dr Johnson is endlessly quoted here, because he is so incontestably right. A man is seldom so innocently employed as when he is making money. Just think what benefits Hitler or Stalin might have brought the human race if their vast energies had been devoted to making profits. " IKEA boss Ingvar Kamprad has overtaken Bill Gates as the world's richest man. As a young man Kamprad went to several pro-Nazi meetings in Sweden in the three years after the war ended. Isn't it nice that he turned to taking over the world via flat-pack furniture instead? Friday, April 09, 2004
Iraqi gunmen of the Mujahideen Brigades, a previously unknown group, have taken three Japanese citizens captive and say that Japan must pull out its troops or the prisoners will be burned alive. Well, it worked in Spain. It worked in Somalia. The question is, do we keep it working?
I say, no. Kill the Muhajideen brigades. God willing the hostages might be saved, but if they are killed too, better a bullet than being burned alive and better a world where they die thus than one where the tactic of threatening hostages with death by torture works. As I said in January when Israel more-than-foolishly released many terrorists in exchange for an Israeli hostage, "Yes, of course I'd feel and speak very differently if it was my relative held hostage. Do you think I'm made of stone? But what is that to the purpose?" Think not only of the hostage we see now but of the next, and the next, and the next - because unless war is waged and won on this tactic, that is what there will be.
I've changed my mind on something. With the example of the wrong and unwinnable War on Drugs before me I used to be very scornful of wars on phenomena rather than on nations or groupings of men. I didn't like the name "War on Terror." However, as Mark Steyn has pointed out the Royal Navy fought a War on Slavery, and won it, too - if not for all time then at least for many generations.
During that "War On" it would often happen that the crew of a slave ship, seeing that they were about to be overhauled, would throw the slaves overboard to destroy the evidence that they had been slave trading. This dreadful and predictable result of the War on Slavery did not stop it from being worthwhile.
So much - save them if possible but do not bargain for them - for the victims of the Mujahideen Brigades. What of their audience? I think that Iraqi public revulsion at such tactics (one of the hostages is a woman, two of them are aid workers) will work against the hostage-takers. My impression that the majority of Iraqis, and Arabs generally, would indeed be repelled is backed up by this post by Iraqi blogger Zeyad. Zeyad writes: I found it particularly interesting that while Al-Jazeera displayed most of the tape, it did not display the part where the masked men held knives to the neck of the wailing Japanese woman while screaming "Allahu Akbar!". What? too hard for Arab feelings?That very significant omission reflects slightly better on Al-Jazeera's audience than on Al-Jazeera itself. The station evidently thought that even its hardened audience might sympathise with the wrong people. For others, sadly, contemplation of any situation where Arabs are the active agents and non-Arabs the victims gives pleasure.
This is one effect of the glorification of suicide bombers. Once you have glorified people who target civilians in buses or pizza parlours you are fairly safe from feeling the unpleasantness of ethical revulsion ever again. Many Westerners, too, have extended their obsessive quest for safety to include safety from ever having to condemn anything. The self-loather amours himself against rejection by forestalling it. Unlike the Arabs these people do not have the excuse that they have been brought up in a culture of fanaticism or that they would face violence if they ever said, "this is wrong."
Thursday, April 08, 2004
The world turned upside down. While His Worship Comrade Mayor Livingstone warms every neocon's heart, a former Blair-appointed Cabinet minister enthuses over appeasement. Wait a minute... No. Surely not. AOL News, from whom I took this link, are famously liberal in the US sense. Furthermore it would be in appalling taste, but, but... there couldn't possibly be an implied comment in the last line, could there?
"Some people couldn't conceive of Gerry Adams or Martin McGuinness getting to the table but they did." Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira / Les aristocrates à la lanterne! Dear old Red Ken says he wants to see the Saudi Royals strung up. I assume he doesn't mean it literally. I mean, not all of them. There's thousands of 'em. Can't have that. Just the one or two who hired Bin Laden would be fine. Scarcely a week into the holidays and I'm whacked. Exhausting stuff, this here leisure. Maybe that's a good thing. I'm slightly depressed about the situation in Iraq and I'm pretty sure that I'd be more than slightly depressed if I had the slightest energy left to be depressed with. John Weidner and Andrew Sullivan both stress the need for resolve. Listen to them, not me. Wednesday, April 07, 2004
My internet connection has been acting coy. After playing hard to get for half the evening it has finally decided to allow me in on sufferance. Naturally, my mind has gone blank and I can think of nothing to say. Er, hello, Internet Connection, do you come here often? Here's something I posted earlier to White Rose, Samizdata's sister blog concentrating on civil liberties. It quotes from a couple of letters to the Times written during World War II on the subject of identity cards.
Judging from his letter, I like the cut of Baron Quickswood's jib; I hope he doesn't turn out on further research to have been a loony, serial wife-murderer or Municipal Socialist. Not that that is likely - anyone called (even without the Baron bit) Lord Hugh Richard Heathcote Gascoyne-Cecil (a) has too many names for his sins or eccentricities to matter, and (b) is obviously related to him. Monday, April 05, 2004
An anti-anti-semitic Google bomb. Apparently the top site for the word "Jew" on Google has been coming up as some nutjob screed. Quite a few bloggers are linking to this straightforward, unpropagandistic Wikipedia entry for the word Jew so as to correct the situation. Good idea. (Via Normblog, Sporadic Chronicle and others.) David Gillies writes: It might be pertinent to point out to your readers that the WWII ID card did not even have a photo, merely the bearer's signature. It's a far cry from a flimsy bit of nondescript cardboard to the all-singing, all-dancing biometric database that Britons will be required to carry.It is pertinent indeed. Incidentally, David Gillies was the one mentioned at the bottom of my March 24 post who was writing his own account of discovering student cheating while I was writing my account of being a student cheat. I am relieved to see he is confident enough of my rehabilitation to keep writing to this blog! How I search through different mental libraries to remember things. Very busy today, so all you get is this quick meta-thought which doesn't require any links or reading. In this post from March 24 I wrote this: There was one particular experiment designed to teach us about statistics where you had to let a small ball drop out of a funnel and mark where it hit or something like that about a thousand times over.You can probably guess from the "or something like that" that I can't really remember what I did. When it came to the events of slightly later in the story my memories were locked in by sheer terror; however there was no reason for the nature of the run-of-the-mill experiment that started it all off to stick in my mind. I am always hitting "Post & Publish" when I mean to hit "Post" and then having to frantically correct the unformed version that is exposed too soon to public view. I did it this time. Early bird readers will have read a version of this that described the experiment thus: ...where you had to throw a ball and mark where it hit...I wrote that then I stopped. I knew it wasn't right but my visual memory was simply not giving me any more. What interests me is the way I tested my memory-hypothesis that I had thrown something: I mimed throwing something at the computer. After a second or two my kinetic memory library came up with "no matches found" for the active throwing motion + my visual memory of that experiment. I was quite confident in that negative, but less confident of the weak feeling I had that I might have let the ball drop. I still don't know what I did. But now I am more fully aware that the kinetic memory library and the visual memory library are in different locations in my mind and that the former, at least, can work by elimination rather than positive assertion. Friday, April 02, 2004
ID cards. This does not look good. In terms of permanently degrading Britain's liberties it seems that Al-Qaeda is set to succeed where Hitler failed. It's going to be a while before I see the funny side of this one. (Historical note: Identity cards were compulsory during WWII. They were tolerated as a necessity of war, although the intrusiveness of petty officialdom asking Britons their business was much resented. After the war government efforts to make them permanent were seen off by the courts. Until recently the view that this was a victory for common sense was uncontroversial.) A reader enquires if the invitation to buy a photo of my car mentioned below might have been sent by the Police Benevolent Fund. Come to think of it I do remember some mention of the Force on the letterhead, and now I'm feeling bad that I threw the letter away with scarcely a glance. After all, I did support the firemen when they did the sponsored car wash. I've decided to go back to the same place and hope that the nice man takes my picture again. Only this time I'll go a little bit faster in the hopes of getting that cool motion-blur effect. It's a totally empty stretch of road so I'm sure no one will mind. Thursday, April 01, 2004
Oh, how nice. Some entrepreneurial roving photographer has sent me a picture of my car. It's a neat idea, but is it really going to "take off" (pardon the pun) the way that selling people aerial photos of their houses did? Although this unposed action shot has a certain undeniable freshness and spontaneity, besides bringing back happy driving memories, I have to say that the picture quality is not good, and I don't think a black and white rear three-quarter view shows her to her best advantage. There also seems to be a lot of paperwork to fill in before you get your framed glossy photo. Sorry for the lack of posts - we've had a guest staying in the computer room. How times change. When we first got the computer we put it in the guest room. Tuesday, March 30, 2004
C and X. Jim writes: Dear Natalie Solent-or-whatever-is-your-real-name-is, On this blog, honey, I tingle with evil Solentoid Nataliness in every nerve and sinew! Over 30 years ago undergraduate physics labs in Glasgow University were run on very similar lines to the Oxford system you describe.My cat has allowed me to publish this laughable human delusion as part of her psyops strategy. Friday, March 26, 2004
There are dead rabbits everywhere. Dog-ownership reveals more joys each day. Our teeny dog Laptop is best pals with an enormous, friendly, enormous, bouncy, adorable, seriously enormous Retriever puppymonster who, in line with this blog's strict policy of total anonymity for companion animals, we shall call Dog X (not his real name). Dog X is the very soul of benevolence and charitable endeavour: he knows you want dead rabbits and he does his best to bring you them. He doesn't hunt them; Mr Fox already did that. He just thinks his human deserves to be given a little extra-special snack for being such a good human. (And if he has a little something himself while he's at it, where's the harm?) What is astonishing is how many good deeds he can pack into a single walk. Did you know that every single field you see has dismembered bits of bunny somewhere in it?
If an aerial view of the average field were to be marked with two points, A, where Laptop and Dog X are let off the lead, and B, the last resting place of Mr Bun, then Dog X's path would be a geometrically perfect A-B straight line. Click goes the lead-clip, pazoom goes the dog, "Blank!" goes his owner. "Oh blank, he's seen a dead rabbit again. Oi! Come! Dog X (not your real name), you blanky dog, come!"
Alas for her hopes. In solidarity I add my voice to hers.
Totally bleeding useless thing to do. If he wouldn't come to her he's scarcely likely to come to me, is he? He ain't coming to no one until he gone done got that coney. Or as Herodotus might have said, neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays this courier from the swift completion of his appointed rabbit.
Laptop, in contrast, is not fully on-mission. His path from A to B would resemble a stretched out Slinky. He spirals round the singleminded Dog X loudly offering support and assistance, like a bit part saying "You go, champ!" to a Samurai girding himself to avenge his slain lord in single combat. Laptop thinks that running three times round a shrub shouting at it is a significant contribution.
While Laptop fights his rearguard action with the shrub, Dog X usually decides that safe carriage of the rabbit would be more efficiently achieved by swallowing it in one gulp. I thought only anacondas could do that. I guess there were a lot of things I didn't know about country life - but there you go, I really hadn't appreciated the melancholy abundance of dead rabbit until Dog X brought it home to me.
And regurgitated it at my feet. Thank you, Dog X. Zimbabwe has started paying off the IMF. Whether this is a good or bad move for Zimbabwe I can't tell you. I don't know that sort of economics. However it gives the impression that things are not so desperate there as I thought. Of course the 600% inflation isn't so hot. Thursday, March 25, 2004
Why I love Nintendo Official Magazine UK: "There's this guy and he's called Mr Driller. He drills. That's what he does. He doesn't muck about with other, non-drill-related things. He drops into a deep well filled with blocks which look like sweets and he drills. Down and down he goes, until he reaches the bottom or is crushed by falling blocks. The end." - From a review of a game called, surprisingly, Mr Driller Drill Land. Just how bad was it in Saddam's Iraq? Black Triangle links (scroll right down) to two surveys that give you some idea. These are separate from the BBC/ABC poll that everyone's heard about. The first samples the extent of human rights violations: Overall, 47% of those interviewed reported 1 or more of the following abuses among themselves and household members since 1991: torture, killings, disappearance, forced conscription, beating, gunshot wounds, kidnappings, being held hostage, and ear amputation, among others.The second survey asked how many doctors participated in human rights abuses: The survey found that physicians had falsified medical-legal reports in cases of alleged torture, performed physical mutilation as a form of punishment, and falsified death certificatesA few of the doctors admitted doing these things themselves. He didn't want to die. This report from the Guardian tells how a Palestinian boy loaded with explosives surrendered to Israeli troops. It seems that Hassam Mohammed Hufni (also called Hussam Abdo in some reports) is somewhat "simple" as country people used to say. No doubt his limited intelligence made him easy to manipulate - but when the time came, perhaps it saved him and others: the poisonous rhetoric that convinces most suicide bombers to override pity for their victims and their own desire for life could not get a grip in his more innocent mind.
Although the reigning ideology of Palestinian jihad loudly states that the best possible end for any Palestinian is to die while killing and the purpose of Palestinian existence is to be fuel for the fire, it is clear that the bomb-masters feel certain categories of Palestinian are more disposable than others. There was another case a few weeks ago where a woman caught in adultery was directed to "redeem" herself by carrying out a suicide bombing.
I can't help wondering what this boy's future will be - now that he has one. It is not clear whether the Hufni family knew or approved of his being used as a suicide bomber. They may well have. Present day Palestinian family life admits of many forms. Perhaps it seemed a profitable way to offload a liability, since even though Saddam Hussein's cash payments to the families of suicide bombers have ceased other payments continue. Any doubts could be assuaged by the thought that they wouldn't have to worry about the boy any more because he'd go straight to heaven.
But I don't know that is the case at all. Some family members of suicide bombers have dared in their grief to speak out, despite the pervasive fear. They have said they didn't know and that if they had known they would have begged their son or daughter not to do it. We won't know whether those Palestinians who shared ordinary human values were the vast majority or a bare majority or a minority or a tiny minority until, in some future time scarcely imaginable now, Palestinians have a free society. (Note I do not specify under what political arrangement this happy state might occur. You might be surprised how vague my opinions on the matter are. )
If Hassam's family did know, surely he cannot be returned to them. In any case I do not know what the the famous "Palestinian Street" does to suicide bombers who change their mind, but I doubt it's anything good.
Despite all this, we can still say "where there's life there's hope." Hassam Mohammed Hufni has life and may yet hope to make something good of it. Already he has turned aside from making something very bad of it, which is more than many manage.
My respects to the Israeli soldiers who showed him mercy at considerable risk to themselves.
UPDATE: It emerges that his family didn't know, and they are glad to have him back alive. However their objection was not to suicide bombings per se, but to their son doing them. Wednesday, March 24, 2004
My career as an academic cheat and fraudulent examiner. Brian Micklethwait has up a few comments about cheating in academia. I thought it might benefit the common weal if I described my own experiences. And if you didn't know before that "Natalie Solent" was a pseudonym, you do now. In the Oxford physics course of twenty-plus years ago practical work was done in pairs. You and your practical partner would work through a set course of well-known physics experiments, writing up your results in a file. Some experiments everyone had to do; others were optional but you had to complete a fixed number of them. The "kits" for each experiment had been around for donkey's years. It was common practice for the second year science students to sell their practical files to the freshers.
My main motive for cheating was lunch. When you and your partner had completed your experiment you went to get it signed off by a graduate student called a demonstrator, who was meant to discuss the experiment with you. If in the experiment just finished you discovered that the speed of light was what everyone thought it was then the demonstrator chatted about physics for ten minutes and then let you go. If, however, you had recorded a value for c of seventy-three miles per hour then the demonstrator would enthusiastically set out to dismantle the entire experiment until he either confirmed your result and discovered the hyperdrive or found out where you had gone wrong. Hungry undergraduates liked the first option better.
The difficulty about getting to lunch was that most physics experiments have to be thumped to make them work right. This fact is widely known, was true for acknowledged greats such as Millikan, but is not often admitted. That was why the second year students' files were so useful: knowing what the answers were meant to be helped enormously in getting them. (Remember that the second years themselves had almost certainly copied their results from earlier generations of students. ) Of course, you couldn't copy the earlier account word for word.
I never heard of anyone faking an experiment from beginning to end. Your absence from the lab would certainly have been noticed, you would not have had the minimum real-life experience of the experiment necessary to get past the demonstrator and, despite the prevailing dishonesty, that would have been regarded as going too far. My practical partner and I would work quite hard until the bloody thing started to go wrong. Even then we'd pummel the apparatus about for a while, hoping to convince it to yield the result in the book. But usually in the end we'd give up and go back to college to get to work producing a convincing fake.
A forgery is often true art. Sometimes I almost thought I learned more about physics in the process of constructing a plausible account of an experiment I had not completed than I would have learned in doing it. You had to ensure that the answer was off, but not too much off. You had to be ready to answer questions.
There was one particular experiment designed to teach us about statistics where you had to let a small ball drop out of a funnel and mark where it hit or something like that about a thousand times over. Then all the results for everyone were collected together and would, it was hoped, combine to display a nice bell curve. A rumour I heard said that one year the bell curve had a little subsidiary peak to one side of it. The authorities were very shocked. They thought the subsidiary peak represented all those who'd copied results from earlier years.
Wrong-o. The big peak showed that. The little peak belonged to the honest students.
Eventually, I became an honest student. For one thing, it was dawning on me that all the work involved in artistic fakery was actually more boring than being in the lab. So boring, in fact, that we got sloppy. One awful day found my partner and I seated in front of a demonstrator with a set of results in front of us which hadn't even been decently faked. We had not changed the final result from the whatever our particular pair of second year predecessors had put down. The demonstrator talked amiably about the experiment for a while then got out a big lined record book and wrote down our names and result at the foot a column of earlier results.
I forget which of us spotted our peril first, or by what desperate telepathy she communicated it to the other - but within half a second we were wordlessly conveying to each other that we were finished. Doomed. Dead meat. The only question was when the axe would fall.
Our result was only two lines below the one we'd copied it from. The two were identical to three decimal places, a physical impossiblity or damn nearly so.
Our demonstrator hadn't spotted it yet but eventually somebody would. There would be only one possible explanation.
Calling on the reserves of dramatic ability that come to the aid of the most indifferent of actors faced with a situation where they must lie to save their skins, we got through the remainder of the demonstrator's questions. He wanted his lunch, too.
We weren't hungry any more. It's amazing how suddenly previously remote concepts like "cheating" and "being sent down" can come to life when your doom is written in a book lying on a desk waiting for any idly curious soul to read. A quick council of war in the corridor had revealed a shaft of hope: our result was written in pen, but the old result was written in pencil. If we could get hold of the book and alter the old result to something different, we'd be fairly safe.
Have you ever stolen anything? When it's not a game it's harder than you think it's going to be. But we managed to get the book and both of us into the privacy of a cubicle of the nearby ladies' lavatory about five minutes later. Our situation gave us several reasons to work as fast as we could before anyone came round. The old result was rubbed out - it is dreadfully difficult to do that neatly when working at speed on a lavatory seat - and a new one substituted. Done, done, but we weren't safe yet. We had to get the book back on the table. Before that we had to get out of the lavatory. This was getting harder by the minute. There were footsteps everywhere. The lab was filling up after lunch and, if caught, our reasons for leaving the same cubicle simultaneously might prove awkward to put into words. I hope you will not think ill of my tolerance if I say that the consequences of giving the most easily available false explanation seemed scarcely more appealing than those following on from giving the true one - and there was simply no explaining away the book. We had several false starts, but eventually we got out and walked the long five yards down the corridor and plonked the book back on the desk.
Outside, safe and free, I stated pretty firmly that I never, ever wanted to be in that situation again. My partner said likewise. I'd like to claim that shame as well as fear was involved, but I think that only came later. Anyway, I started really doing the experiments right through to the end. Most of the time I still couldn't make them work but the long post-mortems no longer seemed so bad.
By the time I left university I was quite proud of my practical file, with a particular shamefaced pride I could not admit. The assessment of the final year experiments counted towards the degree, if I've remembered right, and my hard- and by now honestly-earned practical grade was well above the unimpressive results of the rest of my degree. It still makes me sad to recall that I forgot to reclaim my file when I left, so that what may have been the first genuine Oxford undergraduate account of the Hanle Effect experiment in years is now part of a landfill site.
Someone told me that they cleaned out the Augean stables a few years after I left. Some unfortunate chemist got caught and made an example of, and the system of scrutiny for science practicals was tightened up til it squeaked.
I mustn't forget that I also promised to tell you how dishonest I was as an examiner. Actually, I was cheating a little when I said that. I really, truly, honestly can't remember if I actually did mark a candidate dishonestly or not. This is how it happened, if it did at all. I was a teacher invigilating the GCSE Physics practical for the class I taught. I had a check list for each child asking whether he or she had done and/or recorded a list of required actions. The marks I entered in my check list counted towards their final result. One of the girls, a really nice kid, hardworking and, if not of the first rank academically, certainly not thick, had made an initial error in setting up her experiment that was propagating itself through all she did.
Oh, the pity of it. She generally understood physics pretty well. She'd just messed up today. Still, today's result was what I was marking. There was nothing I could do...
... Or maybe there was. Perhaps the fact that this girl's home language was not English could come to her rescue. Because I knew her and knew how she talked I could tell that a key part of her account of her experiment was simply wrong and showed a basic misunderstanding. However all her English was sufficiently bad that I could just about make a case that she understood OK, she just had expressed it badly. In those days bad English wasn't marked down in a Physics exam. I could gain her a few marks anyway, maybe just above to inch her above a C.
It would be a shaky case but I was unlikely ever to have to make it. Only a certain proportion of the exam scripts were moderated by an external examiner.
Here my mind goes blank. Did I sell such of my academic soul as was left unsold from my previous activities? Or did I just think about it and then pull back? I can remember the sun slanting down onto the honey-coloured wood of the lab bench. I can remember the crumbly old red rubber of a three-prong clamp on a grey steel pole and the reflection of the window in the face of a stopwatch, although not, funnily enough, what the actual experiment was. I can't remember what sign my pen made.
Whatever I did, I wasn't motivated by fear or ambition, the usual motives that prompt teachers to up their pupils' results. By that time I was pretty sure that a teacher's life was not for me and next year I'd be off to pastures new. I was motivated by niceness.
The academic world has to be protected from nice people like me.
There endeth my confession. I suppose that I ought to have entitled this piece "My career as a reformed cheat and possible fraudulent examiner only I can't remember whether I was or not." But attention-grabbing titles aren't cheating, they're art.
UPDATE: Want to see the view from the other side of the hill? The same post of Brian's that I linked to independently inspired David Gillies to recount his experience of being a demonstrator discovering massive cheating by students.
The comments to that post are also fascinating. Wobbly Guy offers a defence of the custom of passing on one's file to the next cohort. It's true that reading up on a previous account of the experiment and using it to structure your own procedure is not in itself bad - after all if a keen student reads up on how whatever pioneer of science first did the experiment in question then he should be praised. But file-sharing in the old-fashioned sense makes it perilously easy to lie about having done it at all and/or to copy blindly, as Wobbly Guy admits. Drat. Posting mixup. Much copying and deleting going on to cure it. Ignore the timestamps of the last few posts. I mean, in so far as you didn't ignore them anyway. Tuesday, March 23, 2004
De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Or, as Harold Laski once put it, De mortuis nil nisi bunkum. Scott Burgess compares two obituaries for Sheikh Yassin. The one by David Hirst in the Guardian ought to be preserved in formaldehyde, to stand in some future cabinet of curiosities beside all those adoring obituaries in the western press for J V Stalin. UPDATE: David Carr has more. Wipe away a tear as David mourns for the the Sheikh Yassin we knew and loved.
Heinlein. Glory Road. Can't remember the exact quote, but at the orders of the Empress this guy is taken outside and killed and Oscar says, "I was so upset that I had to have another cup of coffee." They got Yassin. Milk, no sugar. Instant will do fine.
True when you think about it. Before making a visit I thought it best to give my children a little briefing. I wanted to make sure they avoided a topic of conversation that might have been painful for our hosts. "So," I concluded, "we must all be very tactful." A sudden thought struck me: "You do know what the word 'tactful' means, don't you?" "Yes," said my son, a keen player of Age of Empires. "It means having good tactics." Monday, March 22, 2004
L'affaire Matt Cavanagh. In his latest post Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber gives the background to, and an unedited version of, his letter in today's Guardian. I agree with every word of his letter. Paticularly the bit about scavenging for soundbites that the Guardian edited out.
Judging from what I've read in blogs and the press about Cavanagh's unreconstructed views, he did not put forward the standard libertarian argument that to forbid racial discrimination is to violate the human right of free association. (The standard libertarian view is the view I hold. It is quite compatible with thinking that in all but a few special situations racial discrimination is morally wrong, a view I also hold.) According to Edward Lucas in a letter further down the page, "We invited Mr Cavanagh [to the ICA debate that started all the fuss] as a leftwing critic of equality of opportunity. He argued, for example, that it leads to an overemphasis on competition between individuals."
In other words the views I hold would be even more likely than Mr Cavanagh's to be described as pyschotic by David Winnick MP, a member of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee. As described by the Guardian this prominent Labour MP's own views appear close to totalitarian. He does not merely think it is pyschotic to oppose the discrimination laws he thinks it is psychotic even to question them.
That's us lot for the loony bin then.
Still, you never know with the Guardian. Tomorrow we might be treated to the amusing spectacle of Mr Winnick saying that he was quoted out of context, just like Mr Cavanagh before him.
(This whole affair seemed to me to bring out so well the intolerance of the Establishment view of tolerance that I've just cross-posted it to Samizdata.) Sunday, March 21, 2004
Our European future. A German investigative journalist, Hans-Martin Tillack, was arrested and held without access to a lawyer for ten hours by the Belgian police. What was he investigating? EU corruption, of course. He was the guy who broke the Eurostat story. Here's what the International Federation of Journalists had to say. Here's the EU Observer report on the story. Terrance Coyle knows Hans-Martin Tillack personally. He notes that the main Brussels paper didn't even mention the arrest. He says, speaking of the whole affair, that "this is scary." Now I don't want to contribute to a climate of hysteria. Herr Tillack has now been released. He wasn't roughed up. It seems that Belgian law permits or possibly even demands that suspects not be given access to a lawyer for the first day after arrest. True, all Herr Tillack's files have been scrutinized by the police and the names of his sources must have been noted, but there is talk of a law that is more protective of sources being passed soon. The authorities most likely were simply trying to stymie his investigation before the law was passed.
You're right. It's still scary. |