stuff 'n other stuff

Following on from my post on Vikings and cats I remembered a post of mine from 2008 about a genetic analysis of mice in the UK which showed that mice from Scotland Ireland and Wales have a more Scandanavian genome than those in the UK.

The hypothesis is that that in these areas it not until Viking times that grain farming was large scale enough to support a large mouse population that crowded out any earlier populations of mice.

The hypothesis is of course that the mice came with Viking settlers, who were perhaps more expert at farming grain in wet marginal climates than the more pastorally focused Pictish, Irish and Welsh populations.

If that was the case we would expect to see cats not far behind, and if the Viking settlers were expert grain farmers there’s a reasonable expectation that they would have brought cats with them – not as pets but as animal that were just around to do useful things.

Getting cats to travel in a knorr or a longboat might have been interesting though.

It would be possible to test this by doing a genetic analysis of the cat populations of Iceland and the Faeroes, where the Vikings were the first settlers to farm on any large scale …

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About three weeks ago, my watch strap broke. It was a fairly expensive watch, and I caught it in time so there was no need for any wailing.

The only problem is that being a moderately upmarket watch I probably should take it to a proper watch shop to get the pins put back in the strap. And of course, I havn’t had the time

That was problem one. Problem two was that my other decent watch had run out of battery. I could have worn the cheap fluoro yellow plastic watch I bought for biking, but that was distinctly lacking in style.

So I bought myself a cheap reasonable looking watch on ebay for seven bucks – after all watches all much the same today – a little bit of digital circuitry and a case, and you can find the same chips in a 100 dollar watch that you do in a $10 watch.

All you are paying for is style and brand name, not, as old mechanical watch days increased accuracy or added features.

The only problem about buying a watch from ebay is it took three weeks to arrive from Hong Kong. During that time I was without a watch.

Now everyone will say, you have your phone, your computer(s) and your car – all tell you the time more accurately than a thing on your wrist. Why, realistically do you need a watch?

And that’s true. It’s also true that wearing a wristwatch is habit. The first week I found myself feeling lopsided and looking at my wrist. After then I kind of broke the habit.

What broke me was the convenience. I thought my ebay watch would end up just sitting there, but no – it’s simply more convenient to have a watch on your wrist – saves diving in a pocket or a bag to find your phone, especially in a crowded bus.

So I guess I now understand why Samsung and Apple are racing to bring wristwatch style devices to market – looking at a thing on your wrist is simply simpler …

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After last week’s arty excursion to Goulburn, we thought we’d go to the Turner exhibition at the NGA.

It’s billed as the ‘making of a master’ and it’s exactly that – a collection of paintings that trace the development of his style from a fairly boring conventional painter of landscapes into a dramatic proto impressionist creating sea and skyscapes from wild twists and swirls of colour.

Don’t expect any big ticket pictures – the budget obviously didn’t run to that, but the collection of lesser known paintings and excerpts from his sketch books do build the story nicely and it’s definitely interesting to see his sketchbooks and cartoons (and the experiments that reappeared in other better known paintings).

NGA winter and summer exhibitions are always a bit of a scrum. We went at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon and it wasn’t too bad – although there was the usual mix of people with frightening haircuts and the inevitable coterie of ignorant men dragged along by their fat wives to ‘something cultural’.

That said, we did see everything we wanted to without too much backtracking and wiggling, and as it was towards the end of the exhibition’s run it was not ridiculously overcrowded.

My major annoyance was having to sign up with TicketTek to book tickets and pay their excessive booking fee, knowing full well we’ll probably get spammed into the bargain. Other than that the mechanics of the visit passed off without incident.

We’re NGA members, so after the exhibition we retreated to the members lounge for a cup of tea and a cake, and I was pleased to discover that tey now provide wifi for members – something to remember if I’m ever in search of a bolthole to write up some notes …

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I’ve been reading a biography of Henry Rawlinson, one of these larger than life nineteenth century characters who was one of the first to translate Cuneiform script, as well as incidentally being one of the people responsible for fomenting the mid nineteenth century British paranoia about the Russian expansion into Central Asia.

Like most people of his time Rawlinson’s world was based around scripture and an assumption that it constituted a historical narrative – it basically formed the underpinnings of his universe of discourse, and consequently Rawlinson was very interested in Mount Ararat and evidence of the ark – just as he found cuneiform inscriptions about the capture of Valerian and the accession of various Persian kings mentioned in the story of Alexander he expected to find similar information about Ararat and the Ark.

So, why Friedrich Parrot?

Parrot was the first westerner to ascend Ararat, but also turns out to have been one of these larger than life characters. The English Wikipedia entry doesn’t really suggest this but the French Wikipedia has considerably more detail.

I’d first come across Parrot when I went cross country skiing in the Pyrenees twelve or so years ago, where he was credited with being the first (recorded) person to travel the mountain chain from end to end – and being blessed with a memorable name helped made sure I remembered him.

What is of course interesting is the extent to which Parrot’s career as a scientific explorer flourished as a result of Russian patronage and their interest in their newly acquired territories in the Caucasus, and that scientific expeditions were not just a British or French nineteenth century phenomenon …

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As I tweeted earlier today, I suddenly realised that it’s around 40 years since I wrote my first code – as part of a maths option in high school.

The programming language was Algol68 and the code was a hello world program – something like

BEGIN
print ("Hello World!");
END.

The code was written on punched cards. I can’t remember what machine it was run on, other than it was at the local technical college, so I’m guessing it was probably something like an ICL minicomputer given the choice of language.

Stood me in good stead too – in my first year of university we did some formal bnf stuff in mathematical methods and wrote some AlgolW to validate it …

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I’ve previously written about Alexander Burnes and his Scottish connections. Burnes was of course a participant in the ‘Great Game’, the jousting for power in Asia between Britain, through its Indian Empire, and Russia with it’s expansion East.

There is a tendency to focus on central Asia as a theatre for the Game, perhaps because of Kipling’s novels and perhaps because of the crucial importance of India to the British Empire – without India the Empire was unsustainable – look how quickly it dissolved after 1947.

However the Great Game was much more of a global phenomenon – for example, during the Crimean War, British and French ships attacked Petropavlovsk Kamchatsky in the far east of Siberia, later, during the US civil war, the Russian navy maintained a squadron in San Francisco, in part to protect shipping from confederate commerce raiders.

When the Russian warship Bogatyr visited Melbourne in 1863 it was partly a spying mission in case there was a need to intervene, given Britain’s tendencytolooktheotherway as a far as confederate commerce raiders went.

The interesting thing is that the Bogatyr went on to New Caledonia afterwards – the northern Pacific was of value to Russia, if only because of the whaling trade. In fact Russia’s engagement with the Pacific is a forgotten story with the one time establishment of a fort on Hawaii. We also tend to forget that in the nineteenth century Russia posessed a significant navy that was seen by both Britain and France as a credible threat.

At the same time Britain, the US and to a lesser extent Russia were jockeying for position in the pacific northwest of America (leading to the oddity of a Roman Brick in Portland Oregon), not to mention various struggles for influence in post Meiji Japan between Britain, Russia and the US, involving such interesting characters as Thomas Blake Glover, just as we saw similar battles for influence between the West and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

And of course Manchuria and Korea were of great strategic significance to Russia, just as Siberia and Manchuria offered Japan access to significant natural resources …

In the course of reading about nineteenth century travellers in Central Asia, I came across Alexander Burnes.

His story is well known, and I won’t repeat it here but the thing that piqued my interest is that he originally came from Montrose in Scotland.

My family also come from Montrose, so I decided to check out his family tree to see if I recognised the name as any of my antecedents. I didn’t, so I’m probably not related, at least in a formal sort of way.

I’m saying formal, as according to William Dalrymple, Burnes is described in one of the Persian epics describing the Afghan War as the fornicator Burnes, which at first sight could just be routine invective except for an unexplained bequest in his will and some evidence in his correspondence.

So, let’s just say he seems to have taken after his uncle Rabbie as afar as the ladies were concerned.

However that’s not my point. The interesting thing is that looking at his family tree, the number of his relations that were also in India, and consequently how India must have offered unrivalled opportunity to a lad o’ pairts like Burnes, due to the need of people working for the East India company to have raw ability with languages to be able to engage with the local populace.

I’ve written before about how you see the most unusual conjunctions in the history of the British Empire, but this is something that had not previously occurred to me – the needs of commerce allowed men of ability to step outside the straitjacket of aristocratic preferment and succeed on their own merits.

Visting Sri Lanka, I was struck at the number of Scottish names – Cargill’s groceries and Mackay’s wholesalers to name but two – that were still attached to businesses – and that this must have had a significant impact on nineteenth century Scotland …

I’ll research and write more on this.

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