stuff 'n other stuff

Recently there’s been a trickle of articles about people who don’t engage with social media – about not using facebook, about the need disconnect from the twitterverse, and how smartphone use stimulates obsessive compulsive behaviour.

The subtext is of course ‘this stuff rules our lives, how do we deal with it’ and of course because it’s new people ascribe it more importance. For example, we recently had some rather breathless coverage because a security guard at a detention centre for illegal immigrants posted some racist comments on his Facebook page. In fact the behaviour is no reprehensible that if he said it in the bar, or took to wearing offensive t-shirts out of hours. It’s the message, not the medium.

Certainly all this social stuff is ideal for giving the idea of useful activity and engagement, just as in the old days exhaustively reading usenet news postings and listserv digests was classed as ‘work’.

There’s certainly a component in surfing RSS feeds and twitter to keep up with what’s going on that’s definitely work related but there’s no need to be obsessive about it. Once, perhaps twice a day is enough. Life doesn’t run at warp speed

Now, maybe I’m odd. I’m more than happy when the phone doesn’t ring. I don’t use facebook – yes, I have an account ,but that’s not the same as using it. Yes I use email, but I don’t deal with work email at weekends, and yes I use twitter to track what’s going on, just as I use RSS feeds.

The only problem I have is that, living in Australia, we’re 10h ahead of Europe and 19h ahead of California, which means that there’s sometimes stuff to catch up on on a Saturday, but in practice most of it can be ignored. If it’s important, you can guarantee that at least one person will ask you ‘did you see X?’ on Monday and send you a link. Same way, as if you’re back from vacation you can safely just skim the subject lines and mark 95% of the content of your mailbox as read without looking at it. If they need you to do something you’ll find out soon enough

If it wasn’t for the Calfornia problem I’d invariably make my weekends social media free. It could of course be argued that I am an antisocial introvert that would be happy living in a cave in the bush, and to an extent that’s true. While I enjoy talking and working with people I’ve never been a highly social person.

And this perhaps has given me a sense of reality about this. For example, salespeople and account managers are not your friends, but you build a working relationship with them during any procurement and contract management exercise, purely because a bit of chat makes life more pleasant, but at the end of the day it’s just business. Same with Facebook ‘friends’, or work colleagues or whatever. You are pleasant with them because you share some goals or interests.

Now of course you may genuinely be friends with some people in these categories, but they’re definitely in the minority.

Twitter, RSS, even email is different. Basically you actively select sources of information that may be valuable (or interesting).  There are people who might be funny and engaging in real life but whose twitter postings are the equivalent of “I’m on the train” and truly uninteresting to 99.9999% of humanity. They’re broadcast mechanisms. If you want to tell someone you’re on the train use a point to point service (text message, IM, email).

In no way however am I saying ‘a pox on your social media’. Over the years I’ve found Skype, email, and microsoft messenger invaluable for maintaining relationships when you are away from home, in just the same way that in the pre electronic communication days a postcard or two, or a letter was invaluable.

And in fact, being part of a family spread about several continents they make it better because it’s more immediate.

However, social media is a tool. Only a tool. It can be used for good or bad, it can enhance your life or you can let it rule your life, but whatever it is it’s not a substitute for real life.

And you can prove it for yourself next Sunday. Sleep late. Read the papers or a book, go to a cafe and meet up with some real people, go to a gallery or walk in the park. Do some stuff. ride your bike or whatever.  Sure, if you want to make a cake and don’t have a recipe, google for it, but otherwise, no phones, no email, no twitter, no facebook.

And on Monday ask yourself ‘did I have a good time, and did I miss anything really really building burning down important?’

Elsewhere I’ve written that the US is a meat eater’s paradise – this article in the NYT kind of confirms it …

A Vegetarian’s Struggle for Sustenance in the Midwest – NYTimes.com.

Broccoli anyone ?

Over the past twelve or so months my obsessions have changed, it used to be classical and early modern history as can be seen in the Sighelm obsession, but more recently I’ve returned to an earlier interest, that of the Russian Revolution, and also to events in Manchuria – as evidenced by my recent blog posts, in part because of a renewed interest in my family’s history and connections with what used to be known as the far east, and in part because, having learned Russian many years ago I still retain a fascination, similar to a nostalgic affection for one’s first girlfriend, for the drama of the end of the tsars and birth of the Soviet regime.

So recently I’ve been reading and writing a lot about Russia, the Allied Intervention, Manchuria, and the foreign concessions in China. And buried in among this is another topic – the birth of the modern world.

If, for example, one looks at life at that start of the nineteenth century as represented by the books of Jane Austen, it is quite different from life today, circumscribed, cut off, and incredibly fixated on marriage and status.

Travel and communication was difficult, you had to make do with what was available locally, and anything from far away, teas, silks etc were impossibly exotic. People were also limited to their social circle – it has been suggested for example that Wordsworth possibly had an incestuous relationship with his sister purely because she was the only female of the right class of his acquaintance in Grasmere. Likewise Darwin, despite being a well travelled man, married his first cousin in part due to the smallness of his social circle.

By the late nineteenth century things are quite modern – there are electric lights and trams, and not just in the cities of Europe and America, but in east Asia as well, an efficient postal service, railways and steamships ensure efficient communication and advances such as the telegraph meant that news could be sent from London to Sydney in a few hours. When Burn-Murdoch travelled to Burma, he did it by a combination of steamship, train, and riverboat.

And again this is reflected in the literature of the time – for example in Erskine Childers’ ‘Riddle of the Sands’ one of the protagonists not only orders bits of boat gear by telegraph, but executes a complicated ruse by dint of the railway timetable.

It is world that is recognisable to us. Yes, details are different, but not that different. For example in Burn-Murdoch’s day there were no airlines but his asides on the merits of travelling on various shipping lines uncannily echo our debates over the merits of Etihad versus Qantas.

Even the lack of electronic technology does not make that much of a difference. For example when, at the end of the seventies, I was a research student, you were treated as an embryonic academic by Blackwell’s bookstore.

You went in, opened an account, they discreetly checked that you were who you said you were and in a couple of days sent you a nice letter with your account number. They sent you information about books they thought you might be interested in, and when you ordered a book you simply sent them a note quoting its ISBN and your account code. The book would arrive in due course, as would your monthly bill.

In terms of business analysis no different than purchasing a book from Amazon or Abe.

Likewise journal articles, one filled in a postcard and sent it to the library, and again it appeared in a day or two if they held the journal, or if not in a couple of weeks if they had to get it from elsewhere – a situation not too different from today with electronic journal delivery.

So, the world may have been slower, but all technology has done is improve the speed of execution of business processes. Just as the advent of the typewriter freed people from the need to write legibly, and the word processor from the tedium of revision, the world of the late nineteenth/early twentieth was not that different from our own, but very different from that of the early nineteenth century.

Some years ago I blogged (the actual blog server has long since turned up its toes):

C19 changes – how modern world 1.0 came about

posted Fri, 13 Oct 2006 18:07:42 -0700

1) Cheap universal postal service

coupled with literacy postal service made it easy to order and send items to remote locations including overseas.

Additional functions such as post office savings bank, postal orders and (perhaps) telgraphic transfers made it easy to send money for payments etc.

Allowed mail order catalog shopping – p commerce. Particularly important in US and Canada – Sears Roebuck etc.

2) Railways & steamships

pervasive enough in many countries (Europe, US, Australia, NZ, India etc) that they provided easy access to transport. Allowed goods to be moved from one location to another, allowed easy and quick distribution of postal material including mail order items

Allowed distribution more widely of newspapers making it economic to print in large quantities and sell cheaply, hence also making them attractive for advertisers to advertise and sell their goods

Allowed cities to grow by providing commuter services – cf Metroland and growth of certain London suburbs with expansion of Metropolitan railway line.

3) Bicycle

Provides cheap reliable individual transport, providing autonomy and allowing people to live further than immediate walking distance from work

Allows people option to go to areas of their choice and visit recreational things of their choice

In rural areas allowed people to reach railheads if they did not live in immediate vicinity. Allowed rural farmworkers (eg in NE Scotland under the fermtoun system) to visit nearest local town rather than spend six months holed up on farm

to which could be added electric light, which allowed people to extend their day, and the advances in sanitation which meant that people could live longer lives with a significantly reduced risk of disease.

However, when did modern begin? I personally tend to date it to sometime around 1880 due to the rise of the advertising poster. Enough people increasingly had disposable wealth that manufacturers had to get the message out and could not simply rely on word of mouth to spread news of their products, which previously would only have been available in the local area. By the 1880’s there were trains or ships to most places and the advent of the safety bicycle in 1885 turned cycling from something for a few rich young sportsmen to a mass means of transport that anyone could learn to use.

Following on from my post six months ago about getting around Bangkok come news that  there’s now a plan to have integrated ticketing in Bangkok by 2015

Bangkok Post : Get a ticket to ride everywhere.

If it all goes to plan what it will mean that one ticket will cover the SkyTrain, the Metro and the river boats. Whether or not all the promised extra lines go ahead, having a single ticket will ease getting around Bangkok, and let you (as a tourist) get just about everywhere you want to go with a combination of SkyTrain, metro and riverboat …

The last few years we’ve hosted a Christmas party for friends and relations on Christmas Eve and then gone to some other family gathering for Christmas lunch.

This year was different, with Christmas falling on a Sunday and also being coincident with the start of the school holidays, a lot of people were out of town for Christmas weekend.

Instead of being downcast we took this as an opportunity to have some quality time to ourselves. Saturday saw us up bright and early to get fresh salad, bread and seafood, in fact we managed to get ourselves  a lobster. Served with brown bread, asparagus and salad, and a decent bottle of champagne, that was Christmas Eve sorted.

For Christmas day we’d originally planned on a picnic in the bush, but the weather was against us, threatening rain and storms, so plan B.

We cooked a brace of poussin on Saturday afternoon. Originally we’d planned to take them out on a picnic, with salads, but no. Instead we drove out to Yankee Hat in Namadgi national park and walked over to the aboriginal rock shelter.

While it had been raining the road was dry, the sky blue and a warm 29C, and we were the only vehicle in the car park. Off we went, across the grassland and over the bridge through the swampy bit, making sure we clapped our hands and sang to scare off any snakes lurking in the grass. We must have sounded like a pair of demented escapees from an evangelical Christmas service.

As we started climbing up through the the last wooded bit, the sky darkened, the birds ceased to sing, and the ‘roos started huddling under trees. A storm was coming.

At the shelter we took pictures of the rock art, undisturbed by any other visitors, and ate a fairly spartan lunch of oatcakes, cheese and bananas. All the time the sky grew darker and thunder rumbled around. We debated hunkering down at the rock shelter until the storm passed, especially as we’d stupidly left our waterproofs in the car, but in the end we decided to make a dash for it.

Two thirds of the way back while we were crossing an open bit it began to rain, slowly, big splashy drops like one dollar coins. However we made it to a clump of trees and rocks without incident and took shelter in the lee of a couple of big rocks that kept eighty per cent of the rain off us. After ten or so minutes the storm moved off further down the valley without really hitting us and we made a dash for the car.

On the way back it was clear how lucky we’d been – on the way in the fords on the road had been deeper than usual but nothing special. On the way back they were much the same, which we mistakenly took as a good omen,  but the road had turned to porridge in a couple of places meaning that the descent down one slope was more a controlled slide than anything else, water was running over the road in half a dozen places which had been dry. In a four wheel drive we were safe enough, but in an ordinary car it could have been challenging.

Once back on the sealed road things were good enough but further down the mountain there had been hail and it was still piled thickly at the roadside, making the bush look as if there had been a snowfall.

Further down the hill, heading towards Tharwa we caught the storm up. By this stage the hail had stopped and all we had to contend with was heavy lashing rain.

Home, showers, fruitcake and tea, followed by Christmas dinner and blobbing out with a movie adaption of Noel Coward’s Easy Virtue on the the ABC , while listening to the rain patter down completed our day. Unplanned, relaxed and fun, exactly as Christmas should be.

It’s nearly Christmas, and I can’t resist being a grump, put it down to my calvinist upbringing which has left me thinking that Cromwell was a dangerous liberal when it came to Christmas festivities.

There’s a meme out there that Christmas was a Christian rebranding of Saturnalia, the Roman end of year festival known for its drunkeness debauchery and use of festive greenery.

Now its true the two overlap, but they don’t really have anything to do with each other except time of year.

No one of course really knows when Jesus was born, so when they were looking for a suitable date some Christian groups in the 300’s chose the winter solstice.

By the 300’s the Romans on the whole didn’t really believe in the old gods any more. Yes, peasants out the the fields might have still been leaving offerings at sacred wells and stones, but that’s really no different from what one sees in rural Ireland or Mexico. (And not just in Christianity, you see something similar in Thailand where various Confucian luminaries and Daoist gods, not to mention local deities get mixed up into Bhuddism)

Anyway by the 300’s the Roman empire was a multiethnic multicultural society. Lots of languages, lots of gods, lots of overlapping festivals – I often think it must have looked a bit like contemporary India with all its flavours of Hinduism, Bhuddism, Islam, specialist cults like Jainism, a bit of Zoroastrianism, a mix of different forms of Christianity introduced by the British and other colonialists, not to mention odd religions up in the hills that never quite assimilated to one of the dominant beliefs.

So, needing a birthdate for Jesus, some groups of Christians fastened on the Winter solstice. The winter solstice is of course significant to a whole swag of religions due to the birth/rebirth metaphor, but crucially, in the context of the Roman East, it was also sacred to Mithrasism which was giving a lot of other religions a run for its money, and was widely adopted by the Army.

Solar cults were definitely the thing in the 300’s Roman East so much so that Sol Invictus on the 25th of Decemberwas a well adopted holiday.

At this point people usually pull up short and say that 25 December isn’t the solstice.

True, it isn’t now, but it was then.

When Julius Caesar reformed the Roman Calendar back in 47 BC they decided that a year was roughly 365.25 days long so that you then added a leap year every fourth year. Now, it’s actually a bit less than that which is why we have the rule that if the year ends in 00 we only a leap year if its divisible by 400, not 4. This is why 1900 was 365 days long, but 2000 was 366 days long and why 2100 will only be 365 days long.

So buy the 300’s the effect of this was that the calendar was out of sync by three days so that the solstice, which was supposed to occur officially on December 25, actually occurred three days earlier. However the Romans quietey ignored this problem and continued to pretend it was on 25/12. (You see a similar effect today with the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches celebrating Christmas on January 7, simply because they’ve stuck with the Julian calendar and its gradual drift of 3 days every 400 years.

So Christmas really has very little to do with Saturnalia, but a lot to do with solstice celebrations, which as we’ve said are usually tied to death and rebirth. So think of Christmas on December 25 as some slick, opportunistic and very successful marketing by some of the early church fathers …

Russian is a beautifully constructed language, with simple near phonetic spelling and a logical grammar – yes there are exceptions and a whole swag of rules, but it’s simple – six cases, three genders, three tenses, the past and future tense having an imperfect and perfect view, the present always being imperfect (who couldn’t love that?).

Sure the rules for numbers are a little odd, and because the language is so inflected sentences can consist of words in almost any order one has to become sensitive to dramatic effect, but overall wonderful and simple. No more complex really than teaching yourself perl or python, if you want a computing analogy.

Except of course for the genitive plural – which is needlessly complex and which squats like an unreformed toad in Russian grammar books saying, so you thought this was easy, I’ve got news for you…

I’ve always had this fantasy that one night in 1918, at the People’s Commission for Enlightenment, in Petrograd, which of course was a building with colonnades, a group of grammarians had been assembled to reform the genitive plural.

– But Comrade Lunacharsky, the genitive plural, it will take weeks

– I want it done, if we are to teach the peasants and the minorities to read we must simplify, simplify

– Comrade, there is no tea, no vodka, not even tobacco, we cannot continue, we cannot start

– Very well, I will arrange supplies

And in the chaos of the Revolution,  the grammar committee never reconvened, for want of a packet of tea and a bottle of Stolichnaya …

Last month I was at a meeting in the University of Maryland Library, and for some reason, the meeting room was absolutely freezing, so during a coffee break I took a walk round the shelves to try and warm up.

For some reason my eye was caught by ‘Trinity Tales’, a set of stories cum reminiscences about life in Trinity College, Dublin, in the sixties. I have a weakness for tales of university life, perhaps because I’ve spent most of my working life in one, so I ended up ordering a second hand copy through AbeBooks.

I’ve never been to Trinity, and my knowledge of the place is confined to that gleaned from living for six months in a share house with two girls, one of whom I lusted after ineffectually, who had graduated from Trinity at the end of the seventies. In fact the nearest I’ve ever been to working at a university in Ireland was having a job interview at QUB in the early eighties, which was quite surreal. It looked sort of like Scotland, it sounded sort of like Scotland, but instead was this strange paranoid place with a constant background of armed police and armoured cars.

I digress. During the six months sharing a house in Hull Anne and Bridget told me tales of the English faculty, some strangely bizarre, and of  life at Trinity and in Dublin, making it sound a strange exotic and somewhat louche place. The place portrayed in Trinity Tales is not the same place in Anne and Bridget’s stories, which was most definitely an Irish place rather than an Anglo-Irish university, but the loucheness is definitely there.

Trinity in the sixties emerges as a sort of anglo bubble, populated by mildly pretentious arty people with a background chorus of hooray henries and other Oxbridge rejects. No real mention of scientists, medics, or students from the north of Ireland, or indeed many from the Republic, although to be fair the sixties was still a time in which Catholics needed a special dispensation to study at Trinity. Most of the stories also date from the earlier part of the sixties from a time before the Troubles, so perhaps they can be forgiven their political disconnection.

In short Trinity resembled St Andrews in the seventies, a small isolated bubble which provided a stage for various personalities to stride and posture and establish themselves. In a small community such things are marked, and in a larger one unnoticed in the main.
It’s also true that like St Andrews, Trinity appears to have attracted more than its fair share of personalities, because it wasn’t quite mainstream.

Did I like the book? Yes, for its portrait of a now vanished world of university oddness and eccentricity, but at the time and in the flesh I might have been irritated both by it and them, which in retrospect would have been unfair as, while life is not a dress rehearsal, university is …

In Evanston  (Illinois, greater Chicago, basically NorthWestern University and the Lake) for a project Bamboo meeting. Like all my visits to the States the whole experience is slightly weird and disorienting. If Australia is Life on Mars, America is most definitely a separate reality.

Australia is of course Life on Mars because it is a dry desert of a continent and far away from anywhere in terms of timezones and distance. While South East Asia is our nearest neighbour, we’re still talking about an eight or nine hour flight to one of the big south east Asian cities from the south east corner of Australia. The south east being where most of the people live – draw a line from slightly west of Adelaide to slightly north of Brisbane and you’ve got eighty five percent of the population in the triangle. Most of these eighty five percent live in three agglomerations – SEQ, aka Brisbane and the Gold Coast, the NSW sprawl from Newcastle down through Sydney to Woolongong, and the sprawl of Melbourne, the Mornington Peninsula and Geelong. Adelaide has more taste than to sprawl though I’m sure it would secretly like to.

So from the south east europe is twenty two hours, and the West coast of America a rather more modest fourteen. That fourteen hours of course gets you to LA, and LA is not America. The California/Oregon/Washington strip is separated from next really populous area by mountains prairie and pasture – and Chicago is that populous area, some four hours east of LA. Factor in immigration, plane changes and the general stuffing around that accompanies plane travel and basically you can say getting to Chicago is as tedious as getting to Europe.

So, Evanston.

When I got here I didn’t care. I was over travel – twenty five hours in cabs, airports and aircraft had removed any joy or excitement that was inherent in travel. And that’s not because it had been a bad trip. Admittedly going skiing the day before and falling and bruising my backside wasn’t in retrospect the best preparation for sitting in a plane, but United were as pleasant as ever, I just wish they’d put individual video screens like everyone else has on trans oceanic flights, and immigration at LA were again stunningly efficient and courteous, the connections worked, the cab I’d prebooked was ready when I got to Chicago, but even so, when I got to the hotel all I wanted was room service, a shower and sleep.

The next morning I was up early in an attempt to reset my body clock. After breakfast I walked round the town just to stretch my legs, go to the supermarket and pick up some teabags and the rest. And they had bookstores. And as we know I like bookstores. Market Fresh books was everything a second had bookstore should be. Interesting fascinating books, and slightly kooky in that the sold the books by the kilo (or being America, the pound). They weighed your books, and charged you by weight, not by what someone thought the book was worth.

And then to Barnes and Noble, where I played with a colour Nook and the new basic Nook – Nook being B&N’s e-reader. The new basic nook was smaller, lighter, and every bit as legible as my now venerable Cool-er and would certainly make a great lightweight reader.

The colour Nook was something else. before I saw it I’d doubted the value of colour in an e-reader, text after all is black and white, and things like screen sharpness and contrast are what counts.

All true, but reading the New York times on a colour nook changed my mind. Clear bright legible screen, and the moment one steps out side the appliance, it does just one thing model – colour definitely adds value. And of course, as an Android based device, the colour Nook is more open and can definitely do more than one thing. And of course, the other thing I did in B&N was look at books and not buy them, instead photographing their covers so that I can buy them later – and amazingly no one gave a damn and just acted like it was just normal to do this. Maybe everyone does, and it’s just me who thinks it’s odd.

The other thing I noticed about Evanston and the US in general is just how many people had iPads. Not tablets, iPads, even though the Samsung Galaxy and the upcoming HP tablet is being advertised heavily. Be it all the free wi-fi around or what but people are out there just using them, using them to watch movies, read books, magazines, tweet, email and the rest. In Australia, you’d call the iPad significant for its impact. In America you’d call it game changing.

So, Evanston. On the basis of the first few hours, unexpectedly pleasant.

Now we all know about the Pre Raphelites – mad sex crazed 1860’s loons who were instrumental in creating a lot of the faux medieval of the Victorian era. They were also damn good artists as the current exhibition of drawings at the Art Gallery of New South Wales shows.

In the main the drawings come from the collection of Birmingham Art Gallery – strange that all the time I lived in England and travelled to Birmingham for meetings I never thought to visit the gallery, but there you go.

The exhibition is cleverly put together, with sketches and preliminary drawings, including some of those for Ophelia, and a couple of finished paintings to show how the sketches translated into the finished works.

It shows that they were all good draughtsmen, with sometimes a little wit, and incredible attention to detail. What I found intriguing was a set of four doodles from a sketch book, which I’m sure were rough copies of illustrations from a medieval manuscript. Like a loon I can’t remember now who or what, should have written them down at the time. (actually it was from the Ladies and Animals sideboard by Edward Burne-Jones. Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery have done a sterling job by putting their collection online at www.preraphaelites.org)

However, all in all a nice little exhibition and worth the trip to Sydney (or Birmingham).