Into the burrow

Home-walk-train-tube-work

Work-tube-train-walk-home

I sometimes feel that my journey in to work is a journey ever deeper underground. From the streets where I live to the moving tunnel of the train. Then into the real tunnels of the tube network. Then I’m disgorged at the other end almost seamlessly from underground into a building, from one capsule of chemical lighting to another.

Then, after the day’s work is done, back out and up, up, up to daylight.

I’m not talking about the bleakness of work or the clammy deadness of the city:

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

These are old and valid emotions, but not what I’m trying to capture. I toyed with that flippant phrase used of work: ‘another day at the coalface’ to express that sensation of going in underneath. However, although the modern workplace is characterised by repetition periodically interrupted by bouts of panic, this is unimaginably remote from the reality of coalmining, which consisted of long bouts of discomfort periodically interrupted by bouts of mortal danger.

No, I think what I’m aiming for is the sense of the city as a formic organism; an inverted ant colony. If you tracked the movements of an ant colony you would see daily pulses of movement out from the climate-controlled brood centre of the nest. The daily pulse of human movement into the air-conditioned, totally covered, city would look spookily similar.

The city as a nest, or a burrow. Perhaps we’ve got it the wrong way round. Perhaps we actually live in the offices, and we only venture out into the hinterland to hunt and gather the resources we need: food, leisure time, sleep. We’re nocturnal animals, greedily rampaging through the countryside in the evenings to slake our rapacious need for space, for entertainment, for ‘freedom’. Sated, refreshed, the next morning we are able to return to the burrow, sit at our alloted stations in the great organism, and get on with the real business of living.

The 67% likelihood of divine order

Battiest story for a long time:

A scientist has calculated that there is a 67% chance that God exists.

Dr Stephen Unwin’s jolly idea for the calculation starts with the assumption that there is a 50/50 chance of a divine being (but which one, may I ask?), and weighs the probabilities from there, taking into account everything from the existence of evil to miracles.

The attribution of such a precise number to a matter of faith should give a clue to what’s gone wrong here.

Theology will not submit to actuarial analysis.

Unwin is making, I think, a category mistake partly due to a hope that matters of belief can be quantified. The existence of evil in the world, for instance, is only proof of God’s non-existence if you think that there is no theologically adequate answer to the problem of evil, just as the existence of complex eyes is only proof of God’s existence if you happen to be a Creationist. Likewise miracles; if you believe that all alleged miracles have a natural explanation, this offers no weighting to the proof of God’s existence (or, perhaps, should weigh againstexistence).

This can make Unwin’s theological spreadsheet a good parlour-game fun if you fancy quantifying your own position on the scale. However, to pretend that it offers even the hope of an objective answer is hopeless. (To be fair, Unwin’s book is not yet out, and I would lay a fair bet that, unlike his publisher, he is careful to make exactly this distinction.)

The notion of making such a calculation is, I think, flawed from the start. Unwin is apparently making use of Bayes’ Theorem, which would allow him to calculate the probability of a contingent event, and a future one at that. Both of these are problematic, but it should suffice to explain the problem with contingency.

The calculation starts with an assumption that there is a 50/50 chance of God’s existence. In terms of the Bayes’ calculation, this means that there is a one in two chance that God ‘will happen’.

This, I’m afraid, is the category mistake. God is not a contingent event. God is, depending on your viewpoint, a necessary and permanent fixture, or a phantasm. In other words, God is either necessary or impossible. The only contingent is the amount of certainty you, as an individual, have in either direction.

Parsing prosecutions

It does seem amusingly as though the prime minister may have neglected to tell the Queen that ‘her’ Crown Prosecution Service is to be renamed the Public Prosecution Service.

This implies with, as Ogden Nash would have it, shoddy flim and flam*, that as the service’s job is to prosecute the members of the public, its job under the old title may have been to prosecute the Crown.

Ah, if only we’d realised before it was too late.

* I struggled to find a copy of the version of Nash’s poem to link to, so here it is:

In mortal combat I am joined
With monstrous words wherever coined.
‘Beefburger’ is a term worth hating,
Both fraudulent and infuriating,
Contrived to foster the belief
That only beefburgers are made of beef,
Implying with shoddy flim and flam
That hamburgers are made of ham.

Two and a half myths about Elephant and Castle

First myth about Elephant and Castle: it gets its name from the local mispronunciation of ‘Infanta de Castille’. The story goes that a Spanish princess (the infanta in question) stayed briefly in this part of Southwark. Some versions have it that she was on her way to marry Charles I in 1623.

It is more probable that this important crossroads in London was named after a local pub (not the current Elephant and Castle pub), which in turn would have taken its name from the device of an elephant and a castle (or a howdah). This could have been from a guild association. Two suggestions for the guild are the cutlers (who would use ivory for handles) and locksmiths (for whom both elephants and castles would symbolise security).

Second myth: the strange, illuminated aluminium box building in the centre of one of Elephant and Castle’s two roundabouts is owned by Richard D. James, AKA the Aphex Twin. Given James’ reputation as the most reclusive and eccentric of electronic musicians, it doesn’t feel improbable. The truth seems to be that he lives in a converted bank nearby.

Myth two and a half: cats can perch like howdah-riders on your shoulders while you type. It’s half a myth because they can, but you can’t, as I’m now discovering.

Too much monkey business

The detective yarn is one of the most formally defined modes of storytelling. There is a victim, or victims. There is a crime, or crimes. There is a criminal, or criminals. There are clues, which on first blush do not correspond in a meaningful way with the apparent series of events. In fact, the apparent series of events probably doesn’t hold together very well, giving the motivation for a deeper investigation by the detective.

Ah, the detective.

You see, for each story you have to change the criminal*, the victim, the clues and the details of the crime. In fact, the only thing you are really allowed to keep is the detective. So the detective becomes the hook, and authorial investment in this character becomes paramount.

At the same time, there isn’t really room in the average detective fable for detailed characterisation of the sort you would find in a serious novel. There is no opportunity for the fine brushwork found in Dostoevsky or George Eliot. Detectives have to be drawn boldly, more Rolf Harris with a roller than Rembrandt with a brush.

That, in brief, is why fictional detectives can mostly be described on the inside of a book of matches:

Sherlock Holmes - tall, aquiline, drug-addicted violinist
Father Brown - tubby Catholic cleric from Essex
Miss Marple - interfering rural granny
Hercule Poirot - snobbish moustachioed Belgian
Lord Peter Wimsey - A lord
Albert Campion - wrong side of the blanket, keeps dodgy company
Columbo - scruffy raincoat, not as scatty as he looks
Inspector Morse - Gruffly drinks beer and does crosswords in Oxford
Brother Cadfael - Medieval monk
Falco** - Roman
Inspector Rebus - Gruffly drinks beer and does crosswords in Edinburgh

It’s easy to add your own.

After a while, it becomes increasingly difficult to come up with original matchbook descriptions. Brother Cadfael starts to seem a little too similar to Brother William of Baskerville, Hetty Wainthrop to Miss Marple. So the pursuit is always on for distinctive detectives. The trouble being the fact that most of the good ones are taken.

So, lying on my sickbed, I’ve been idly working out the next great quirky detective.

It can’t be a spaceman (Outland and the short-lived Star Cops), or a politician (come on, detective stories are about uncovering the truth). We’ve had everything from gardeners to country singers to radio DJs. Borges and Bioy Casares (writing as Hilario Bustos Domeq) even wrote a collection of stories in which the detective was in prison. There are authors and ghosts, obsessive compulsives and shedloads of kids.

Look, when there’s even a chimp detective you know you’ve got to try harder.

My sheet of paper is full of crossings out. Only one idea hasn’t been struck through, so this is my offering to the world of the roman policier: the detective should be an Elvis impersonator. Call it ‘Suspicious Minds’, send me 10% of the royalties and we’ll all be happy.

* You think not? The most famous fictional criminal, Professor Moriarty, is first mentioned in ‘The Final Problem’, the story in which he is also killed off. He does appear repeatedly in the very influential Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce wartime films featuring Sherlock Holmes (where he stands as an analogue of the Nazi enemy), but these are more in the manner of thrillers and so play by different rules.

** No, not the late Austrian popster, this fellow

Angels in the branches

[Note: I used to play football most Sundays on Peckham Rye Common.]

The joys of this cannot easily be enumerated, but would certainly include, two Sundays ago, a certain rogue semiotician hammering, yes, hammering an equaliser late in a game that had until then seemed lost.

There is, however, one thing that, since it belatedly occurred to me the other week, will give me a tickling manner of glee regardless of who scores or wins.

There is on the common a venerable oak tree. There are a few dotted around, in fact, but I choose this one.

You will know the story of William Blake. How, well before he saw such things as the ghost of a flea, he was marked as a visionary sort of a chap by virtue of, as a child, seeing angels playing in the branches of a tree. An oak tree. On Peckham Rye Common.

Now, as I say, there are several candidate trees on the common, and it may even be that Blake’s oak is no longer standing, but I choose that it is. I choose that it is this one because it stands alone and central, because it feels right, because it is exactly the sort of oak under which an imaginative child might stand, gazing up, and translate the frankly huge flappy rooks into something altogether more angelic, and because, after all, it is the tree under which I play football on a Sunday.

One thing of which I’m sure. When young Wm Blake saw his angels playing, he certainly was not seeing some future echo of our Sunday afternoon kickarounds. Angelic would be entirely the wrong sort of a description, and I carry the bruises to prove it.

Orthogonal problems

I’ve just been through one of those random processions of discovery and loose understanding.

I was looking at the various meanings of orthogonal, which I increasingly see in the context of discussion of good design. I’d grasped that its meaning in design is an extension of its mathematical meaning of (loosely) perpendicular.

Then, on the evergrowing Wikipedia, I read this:

Orthogonality is a system design property which enables the making of complex designs feasible and compact. The aim of an orthogonal design is to achieve that operations within one of its components do not create nor propagate side-effects to other components. For example a car has orthogonal components and controls, e.g. accelerating the vehicle does not influence anything else but the components involved in the acceleration. It would be a non-orthogonal design were for example the acceleration to influence the radio tuning, or the display of time.

At which point I’d had enough of good design, and became entranced by the idea of a car where pressing the accelerator winds down the windows, pumps up the radio and tilts the seats back. Even better, it makes the clock go faster.

Then, more sensibly, why not use radio tuning as a speed control? Stray over the speed limit and you detune your radio. That’ll keep people at non-lethal speeds.

You could, I think, extend the principle to mark out certain radio stations for certain speeds. So, nudge up over 50mph, and your radio tunes from Radio 3 to Radio 4. 60-70mph, and you get Radio 1. Over 70, and it goes to Classic FM.

Edward de Bono would be proud.