stuff 'n other stuff

Over on my other blog I detailed my admittedly sketchy go publishing a book with Amazon Kindle publishing. At the end of the post I also included a link to an article from the Australian on the near death experience currently being undergone by scholarly monographs in Australia. (A subscription may be required to read the article in question)

Today brings a similar article in the THES:

Times Higher Education – Farewell, obscure objects of desire.

in which it’s argued that the costs of production will kill off the scholarly monograph. I don’t actually buy this scenario, principally because of the changes in technology.

The monograph is fundamentally a product of nineteenth century scholarship. Just as scholarly journals produced by learned societies were. Gentlemen were scholars and gentlemen could afford the publications and journals.

Life is of course a little different now. Gentlemen may still be scholars and scholars may still be gentlemen and gentlewomen, but the costs of subscriptions are no longer affordable for both individuals and institutions.

In the case of monographs the costs of production play a role. To print, store, and warehouse a book that will sell 300 copies costs almost as much as one that will sell 30,000 copies . Moving to e-publication – as ANU’s e-press has done – allows the electronic copies to be downloadable (either for a modest fee to defray infrastructure costs and setup costs or for no cost) or printed on demand saving the costs of storage and warehousing.

Academic publication is an excellent testbed for the changes in publication wrought by technology. The publications have in the main authors happy to slave for hours to format text and proof read for no reward than the glory of seeing their name in print, and no expensive advertising budget is required – most of the people likely to be interested in the topic either all know each other or know someone who knows the author – I’m reminded of Irving Finkel’s remark that all the Assyriologists competent in cuneiform could probably squeeze into a phone box.

So I don’ t see the scholarly monograph going away any time soon – I see it living on in electronic form, peer reviewed and suitably endorsed. It’s university libraries and presses that need to change to reflect the changes in technology

It’s not really funny to mock other people’s mistakes, but this one is kind of irresistable:

Japanese Department Store May Want to Look Up the Word ‘Fucking’.

I love travelling by train – I havn’t travelled on an overnight sleeper train in the UK since the mid-eighties, but they’re still running …

The overnight train to London isn’t perfect but it’s still magical | Herald Scotland.

Following on from my previous post on withdrawing from social media, this popped up about twenty minutes later

Email after hours? It’s overtime by law for some.

And for those of us without fixed hours what it means is that i’s ok to be offline, so yes, go for that walk in the park …

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 …