…for the first person to report a spam email purporting to come from the relatives of the late Boris Yeltsin and soliciting the recipient’s assistance in disposing of a large sum of money, in return for full details of, and access to, said recipient’s bank account.

If you want me to ask you about your interests and icons, comment here and I will. Also, feel free to ask me about any of mine.

asks about:

Interests

Molvanîa is a fictional eastern European country introduced to me by my former boss, via the book and the website. I blogged it here and here, and even Ken MacLeod got in on the act. Choice extracts:

The Vzintga Gorge was cut between precipitous cliffs by the powerful River Vzintga, which flows down numerous pools and waterfalls. There is a marked trail to the top of the gorge where the views are quite outstanding. Sadly, the spectacular cable-car that once carried visitors across the gorge no longer operates, but you can still see the old pylons and engine-house as well as view a memorial plaque dedicated to the service’s last 20 passengers.

The unofficial capital of the Great Central Valley region, Jzerbo may not look all that inviting to the first-time visitor, with its jumble of grim Soviet-era housing and concentration of heavy industry. But thanks to frequent, heavy smog, many of these visual eye-sores remain hidden from the average visitor.

Ted Chiang is a great but not very prolific science fiction writer, the youngest person to have won a Nebula award in one sense, and the second youngest to have won either a Hugo or a Nebula in another sense. His brilliant novelette “Tower of Babylon”, in which the builders of the tower succeed in breaking into the vault of heaven, was published in Omni when he was only 23 and won a Nebula. (The next youngest winner, Samuel R.Delany, published his novel Babel-17 when he was 24.) Chiang now has two more Nebulas and a Hugo, and (like me) was born in 1967; only one person born after either of us, Kelly Link (1969), has won either award (like Chiang she has three Nebulas and a Hugo). I have written up Chiang’s short story, “Hell Is The Absence of God”, which won both Hugo and nebula, here.

Roger Zelazny was very much my favourite sf writer as a teenager, and I retain a strong degree of affection for him. I did a brief piece on him here, and retain the ambition of doing something more substantive at some point. I particularly loved his earlier works, where his meditations on mythology and his gift for descriptive writing merged very effectively; I strongly recommend Lord of Light and This Immortal. I’m also a fan of some of his mid-period books, like Doorways in the Sand, whose eternal student hero has to deal with the theft of an alien artifact, and the late but effective pastiche A Night in the Lonesome October. Even the second set of Amber books were not as bad as I remembered when I reread them a few years back. (And the first five remain pretty good.) I have gone to the lengths of reading three books about Zelazny, more than for any other sf author bar Tolkien.

Icons

Keyword: Bodypaint

This is of course a cut down version of the famous Pink Floyd poster advertising the six best-known albums (variously referred to as the “Pink Floyd girls” or the “back catalogue”). Left to right: Atom Heart Mother, Relics, The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You were Here, The Wall, and Animals. I’m a man of unexciting musical tastes, so the three covers in my icon are the three albums I like most (ie The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You were Here, and The Wall).

I find the image very sexy, and use it to illustrate my occasional entries on topics relating to sex and sexuality. I would love to know more about its origins, though recent investigations have yet to bear fruit.

Keyword: Khinkali

These are a delicacy from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, whose cuisine I have come to love over the last few years while I was professionally engaged there. No longer as much involved professionally, but still very very interested in the cooking.

Khinkali are a sort of stuffed dumpling, mince (or, for non-carnivores, cheese) inside a pastry package, lightly boiled and served with ground pepper. Yummy.

Keyword: Lincoln

This is of the Gettysburg Address as reproduced in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, and the words highlighted are from the last sentence:

“that we here highly resolve that
these dead shall not have died in
vain, that this nation under God
shall have a new birth of freedom,
and that government of the people,
by the people, for the people shall
not perish from the earth. “

Lincoln is a great political figure, and the Gettysburg Address one of the great speeches of all time, and the Lincoln Memorial one of the great monuments of the world. However, I haven’t yet thought of a good use for the icon.

Also this was one of the first pictures I took and uploaded with my then new digital camera two years ago. Now the camera is dying on me, but I still have the pictures.

So I hope you feel better informed now.

OK, I’ve just finished reading this year’s Hugo nominees in the fiction categories, earlier in the year than I can remember managing it before, even though this was one year when I had read precisely none of the nominees before I saw the shortlist.

Now to write them up…

…I bring you my entire PhD thesis. (2 MB, M$ Word version.) An only slightly edited version is available for money in dead tree format here.

(Explanation: has proclaimed today to be International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, when anyone who feels so inclined should give away professional quality work online.)

Summary:

The social context of science in Ireland between 1890 and 1930 is examined against the social and political background of the time, which included the rise of Irish cultural nationalism, the troubled period of 1916-1923, and the granting of independence to most of the island in 1922. In particular, scientists are divided into three groups who reacted to and were affected by the events of the day in different ways.

Many Ascendancy scientists (including those based at Trinity College, Dublin; the Royal Dublin Society; the Royal Irish Academy; and many with private incomes, in particular astronomers) had practised science as a cultural rather than a practical activity, and some actively sought to exclude Catholics from positions of influence within the Irish scientific community. The social and political reforms of the period affected the financial ability of Ascendancy scientists and their institutions to carry out much scientific work, and after 1922 they were faced with a political settlement that many of them had opposed.

The State’s scientific employees were seldom of Irish origin but nonetheless took part in the discourse of Irish nationalism; their institutions were mostly of Irish foundation, taken over by the government in London during the 19th century, and returned to Irish administrative control in 1900. Although they were more inclined to make the most of the 1922 settlement, government spending and thus scientific activity declined after independence.

Scientists from a Nationalist or Catholic background had faced discrimination during the nineteenth century from their Protestant fellow-countrymen. There is little evidence to suggest that the Catholic church ever actively discouraged the practice of science in Ireland, and some to suggest that leading Irish nationalists positively favoured scientific activity as a tool of nation-building.

Extract 1 (astronomers):

The group of Irish astronomers who became active in the 1820s — Thomas Romney Robinson, Edward Cooper, the third Earl of Rosse and William Rowan Hamilton — had a common Ascendancy background. However they did not have identical political outlooks. Cooper and Rosse were both MPs during the 1830s, but sat on opposite sides of the House; while Rosse was a Whig, Cooper and Robinson were Tories, as was Hamilton when he turned his mind to such mundane matters. Michael Hoskin has shown that while Rosse was relatively cautious about claiming new discoveries made with the Leviathan, Robinson could barely be restrained from proclaiming the great Birr telescope’s success at rendering visible the component stars of various nebulæ as a triumph of the Irish national genius against the (liberal) nebular hypothesis.

[Norman] McMillan portrays the decline of the ‘Network’ as the result of the breaking down of a political consensus (whose existence is doubtful) among Ascendancy scientists into a ‘bitter internecine struggle’, with ‘a group of “Home Rulers” in the Royal Irish Academy’, including the Trinity Fellows J.A. Galbraith and Samuel Haughton, becoming estranged from their colleagues in the Unionist camp led by George Johnstone Stoney. He claims that, under pressure from Stoney, the fourth Earl of Rosse ‘abandoned his family’s long-held nationalist politics and moved into the Unionist camp’. He may be drawing from Webb and McDowell, who say of the fourth Earl around 1900 that ‘the events of the past twenty years had made him desert the liberal traditions of his family for a pessimistic and disillusioned Toryism’.

But the Parsons family’s aristocratic Whiggery cannot possibly be described as ‘nationalist’. As a young MP, the third Earl supported Catholic Emancipation and the Maynooth grant, and was a late convert to Reform; but he also wrote a pamphlet and spoke in Parliament opposing the repeal of the Corn Laws, and there is no evidence to suggest that he had any sympathy for O’Connell’s Repeal movement or for the Young Irelanders. Another pamphlet, written in the midst of the Famine, lumps together new-fangled political economists with the ‘profoundly ignorant’ opponents of Newtonian philosophy. Certainly by the time he had graduated to the House of Lords (as an Irish representative peer) he was to be found supporting the Irish policies of Peel’s Tory administration, although he favoured closer government supervision rather than local control of the state’s faltering efforts at famine relief. As for the fourth Earl, Webb and McDowell imply that his political conversion was a result of disenchantment with Balfourian Unionism and the weakening of the Ascendancy in the 1880s and 1890s, rather than moral pressure from Stoney in the 1870s. Rosse would not have been alone in this; the impact of ‘constructive Unionism’ on Unionist voters in Dublin was so negative that both their parliamentary seats were lost in the 1900 general election.

Extract 2 (museums)

It is interesting to compare the experience of the Dublin museum with the case-studies of natural history museums in Christchurch, Melbourne, Montreal, Buenos Aires and La Plata described by Susan Sheets-Pyenson. She points to a general world-wide growth in interest in (and building of) museums up to 1890 (the year that the new Dublin buildings were opened), followed by a period of precarious funding in the era of increasing local autonomy and an eventual shift to a programme of local studies rather than international collecting. The Dublin museum’s funding and staff levels remained secure up to the change in the political situation in 1922; but Scharff was conscious of the political advantages to be gained for the museum as Irish autonomy became more and more likely. As we shall see, he was prepared to challenge other scientists on those grounds.

Sheets-Pyenson also notes that support staff in colonial museums tended to be either graduates, imported from the metropolis, or local unqualified recruits, often from the lower social classes, who might well eventually achieve relatively senior rank despite their humble beginnings. In this context it is remarkable that only a minority of the Natural History Museum’s staff (Halbert and the two women, Stephens and Knowles) were born in Ireland, and that they tended to start (and in the women’s cases to remain) at a lower level than their better-educated English colleagues. Sufficiently qualified Irish recruits were scarce; Robert Lloyd Praeger, perhaps the most outstanding amateur of his age in Ireland, remarked fifty years later that his failure to get the job which went to Carpenter after a competitive examination in 1888 was due to ‘inadequate time for reading, and a disbelief in examinations — which I still hold’. Praeger eventually used the security of a career with the National Library, on the far side of Leinster House, to support a passionate interest in natural history which enabled him to set the agenda for his professional colleagues.

Extract 3 (nationalism and science)

Another element in the scholarly consensus about the lack of science in Catholic Ireland has been the suggestion that Irish Nationalists generally were too much taken up with the ‘national struggle’ or with the revival of Gaelic culture to be interested in scientific activities. There can be no doubt that the Irish cultural revival, and the Gaelic League in particular, did indeed appeal to the growing Catholic urban middle class in the decade or so after its foundation in 1893. Tom Garvin has said of the period that ‘the cultural atmosphere in which the new leaders [of the 1920s] had grown up was suffused with a nationalist and anti-modernist romanticism’ , and John Wilson Foster has argued that the internationalism of science made it incompatible with nationalist political activity.

Here it will be argued that this difference of outlook was not, and need not have been, a fundamental incompatibility, and that in fact the perceived hostility of Irish nationalists to science is to a certain extent a misinterpretation. It is important to understand the shifts in Nationalist thinking over time. Around the end of the nineteenth century, a number of Nationalists were very interested in scientific matters; the interaction of the cultural revival with science should not be simply characterised as the vampiric relationship which some writers seem to favour. The undeniable decrease in enthusiasm for state funding of science after independence is probably to be better understood as yet another facet of a general reluctance on the part of the new government to part with taxpayers’ money for any purpose not perceived as essential.

The Irish Nationalist party under the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell was as influenced by the Victorian industrialising milieu as any other group in nineteenth-century Britain. Parnell himself was an amateur mineralogist in his spare time; this interest may have originated from his efforts to make his estate at Avondale, Co. Wicklow profitable, but he went to the lengths of equipping his lover’s house at Eltham with a small furnace so that he could carry out his own tests. For vivid scientific imagery at the heart of Irish politics, it is difficult to better Tim Healy, during the December 1890 meeting in Committee Room 15 which sealed Parnell’s fate, comparing the disgraced leader’s personal magnetism to that produced by an iron bar in an electrical coil: ‘This party was that electrical coil. There [indicating Parnell] stood the iron bar. The electricity is gone, and the magnetism with it, when our support has passed away.’

The ol’ digital camera is giving me grief. Specifically, I am getting the “low battery warning” and consequent shut down as soon as I put new batteries into it. It wasn’t such a battery hog when I first bought it (though still went through them pretty fast); but this is not supportable.

Is it worth buying rechargable NiMH batteries and trying them out? On the plus side, I get the impression from various websites that they are much better in digital cameras than standard alkaline batteries (which I’ve been using so far). Also I suppose they are better for the environment if I keep on using them. On the downside, if the camera is basically broken (which is a concern, given that it didn’t always have this problem so badly) perhaps I would just be throwing good monety after bad?

Advice gratefully received. (Especially from  or anyone else who also has the Fuji Finepix A340.)

The Book of Daniel.

17) Narn I Chîn Húrin: the Tale of the Children of Húrin, by J.R.R. Tolkien

It is clear to most readers of The Silmarillion (and those who then go on to The Book of Unfinished Tales) that the strongest part of the story is the tale of tragic hero Túrin Turambar, cursed to achieve glorious deeds in battle and yet disastrous in his private life and his effect on those around him. But the Silmarillion account is too brief, and the Unfinished Tales version has large gaps in it.

Christopher Tolkien (now older than his father lived to be) has pulled together the various versions of his father’s tale of families and war, and made something really special out of it. I have read both previous versions, and of course the Beowulf and Kalevala texts which inspired some of it, and I still couldn’t put it down. Alan Lee’s beautiful illustrations don’t do any harm either. (Though I was slightly frustrated that the promised map of Beleriand doesn’t appear.) (Edited to add: Oh yes it does; and have found it for me.)

Those who have only read The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit may be a bit confused by the setting, as Beleriand has of course sunk below the waves millennia before Bilbo Baggins left Bag End; unfortunately Christopher Tolkien’s introduction to expain all this is rather tough going, more so than the main text itself. On the other hand, his appendix explaining how and why he compiled the story from his father’s manuscripts as he did (for three different publications, differently each time) was surprisingly interesting.

There’s lots to pull out from the text for those so inclined: it further illustrates what Tom Shippey has written about Tolkien and war and honour, but it’s also the only major Tolkien work I can think of where family relationships play a crucial role in the plot. Strongly recommended.

Reviewed for Internationale Politik here.

16) 800 Years of Women’s Letters, edited by Olga Kenyon

Bounced right off this, I’m afraid.

I liked the human interactions, and the strenuous efforts to show New York realistically as it would have been in the 1930s, though not sure that the Empire State Building is visible at that angle from the Statue of Liberty – and how did the Doctor and Martha get across the water to Manhattan?

Though I did like the nod to the scene on the Empire State Building in The Chase. (Steve Lyons picks up on this also in Salvation, where Steven “remembered standing on its observation deck, in what seemed like another lifetime”.)

Not convinced by the Daleks though. As eloquently puts it, “Guy with a Dalek on his head does not equal DALEKS.” The whole point of the Daleks is that they are not humanoid at all; they have tried to absorb bits of human-style information over the years (Evil of the Daleks, The Genocide Machine) but untilamtely failed. No doubt they will fail again, and of course this is only the cult of Skaro not the mainstream Daleks, but it goes against the basics.

This is the official Season 8 of Buffy, as officially sanctioned – indeed, written – by Joss Whedon, and published in comic form. Two of a projected twenty “episodes” have been published so far; I went and got them from the local comic shop this morning.

Hmm. Frankly I am disappointed.

First off, the art itself: Perhaps I was spoiled by reading the likes of the Alan Moore strips in the Doctor Who magazine, where he caught Tom Baker’s Doctor almost better than Baker himself did, but I like my comics characters to look like the people they are meant to represent. Most crucially, I don’t think Georges Jeanty as chief penciller has captured Buffy particularly well, nor does the first of Jo Chen’s two covers particularly resemble Buffy as played by SMG. (The second is better.) Andrew and Giles are too young (Andrew practically prepubescent); Xander is caught reasonably well though, as is Willow in the one glimpse we get of her. Dawn is not bad either, though has been physically transmogrified for plot purposes.

Ah, the plot. We seem to have i) Xander, Buffy and the wannabe slayerettes of Season 7 based in a high-tech castle in Scotland, overseeing the world struggle against vampires; and ii) the US military allying with the forces of evil (well, one character from established continuity anyway) out of a combination of ignorance and (it is strongly hinted) malice. I don’t mind the latter, which of course is the latest version of a recurrent theme in Whedon’s work, but the former seems to me out of whack; the whole charm of Buffy is that these people are saving the world with meagre resources from somewhere that looks like your front room, not from a control centre out of a James Bond film.

But what I really miss is the snappy dialogue which made Buffy, Angel and Frirely such a joy to watch. Maybe it’s just more difficult ot carry through to the page; maybe Whedon will find his swing in later issues; but I had no laugh-out-loud moments in the first two episodes and not a lot of smiles either. (The one thing that did make me laugh out loud this morning was Peter Weston’s explanation of why he sent me his latest issue of Prolapse.) I think that I will buy the rest of the series anyway, in hope that it improves, but if it doesn’t I’ll just flog the lot on eBay once I’ve finished with them.

15) A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson

As a lapsed scientist myself, not a huge amount of this book was new to me, but I can see why it is popular with people who have never had to crack open a science textbook since leaving school, or even with some who have. Bryson’s chatty style, which hasn’t always worked for me, carries us fairly effortlessly through the fundamentals of physics, geology and evolutionary biology, with a decent amount of reflection on the men and women behind the scientific theories (though without going very far into the sociology of knowledge).

Two things really jumped out at me, both of which I was vaguely aware of but which Bryson really brought to life: 1) the imminent and catastophic eruption of the Yellowstone caldera, which will wipe out a significantly large chunk of the continental United States; and 2) the catastrophic impact of human fishing on the fauna of our oceans. Definitely losing sleep about both of those now.

Top UnSuggestion for this book: The New Reformation Study Bible. Hmmm.

Three more Doctor Who audios from Big Finish.

Red Dawn: The Fifth Doctor and Peri (unusual choice – obviously only one gap in the established narrative where this can take place) land in what turns out to be an Ice Warrior mausoleum on Mars, at the same time as an Earth probe comes to explore. Needless to say, disaster ensues, but the real monsters turn out to be the humans behind the earth exploration ship. Earnestly done by everyone, with particularly good audio evocation of the Ice Warriors and the Martian landscape. Good but not great.

The Spectre of Lanyon Moor: I felt this was a different matter, nearly as good as The Genocide Machine (so far my high point of the Big Finish series). The Doctor and Evelyn Smythe are investigating ancient artifacts in Cornwall; the retired military officer cleaning the finds has in fact an agenda of his own, and recognises his old friend’s new face immediately. OK, the plot itself is a rip-off of any number of classic stories, including The Daemons and The Stones of Blood, but done with tremendous conviction by all.

Winter for the Adept: A rather peculiar tale of the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa dealing with poltergeists in a Swiss finishing school. The Doctor himself barely appears until the end of the first of the four short episodes, and almost everyone is putting on silly accents. Really not very convincing in the end.

While none of you (as far as I know) has actually applied for the internship in my office, a number of you expressed interest in this general line of work. You might like to know that there is a site called eurobrussels.com which is the key place for advertising jobs in European affairs generally. I’ve also advertised this particular position on w4mp.org which seems to be a similar clearing house for Westminster. I’ve also been contacted by a site called Electus Start which seems to be in the same game.

I do recommend that anyone who wants to dip their toe in this particular water consider signing up as an election observer, which basically requires proven interest in politics and international affairs and willingness to do it. (Just to review how you actually apply to be an election observer, US citizens go here, UK citizens here, Canadians here, Dutch citizens here, Belgians hier and ici. Irish opportunities are listed here.)

14) [Doctor Who:] Made of Steel, by Terrance Dicks

Yes, Terrance Dicks is still out there, still writing Doctor Who novels; this is in the BBC’s £1.99 “quick reads” series, picked up in Forbidden Planet last week. The Doctor and Martha get mixed up with a remnant cell of Cybermen (incidentally answering the question my wife asked me after we watched “Doomsday”) and also deal with thick and uncomprehending military types. Dicks makes a valiant effort to catch the Tenth Doctor’s character, and on the whole succeeds, with only a few passages which I thought too reminiscent of the Third Doctor of Dicks’ novelisations. A decent quick read.

13) Eifelheim, by Michael Flynn

Flynn’s The Wreck of the River of Stars was one of the best sf books I read last year, and I had high expectations of this Hugo nominee: a story of aliens landing in 14th century Germany, and the contemporary historian (and his physicist girlfriend) who works out what happened way back then. Flynn puts a lot of effort into creating a believable 14th-century world, with a relatively harmonious relationship between religion and science depicted; some of the best passages are where the central character (the village priest) and the aliens try to make sense of each others’ world-views in terms of their own. He has tried hard also (not always successfully) to catch the linguistic flavour of the period. I didn’t enjoy Eifelheim quite as much as River of Stars, though; I felt that Flynn’s occasional expositions of his characters’ motivations didn’t work so well here, and I found the shift from omniscient narrator to tight first-person at the end a bit jarring.

Job advert.

A kind person has pointed me (via a locked entry in her own lj) to the report discussed in my previous entry. It appears that I misread the key piece of information:

For both the [abstinence] program and control group youth, the reported mean age at first intercourse was identical, 14.9 years. This age is seemingly young, but recall that the outcome is defined only for youth who reported having had sex and the average age of the evaluation sample was less than 17.

Getting means and medians sorted out: The key statistic in most of the countries I quoted in my previous entry is (as I should have guessed) the median date for first sexual intercourse, since it is established once the 51st percentile have lost their virginity, no matter how long it takes the other 49% of your sample.

In the case of the American survey, 49% of the sample were still virgins at the end, and we are told that the mean and modal age of all surveyed was 16, so I guess that will make the median date for first sexual intercourse of the whole sample also around 16; which is low-ish by international standards, but not quite as unusually low as 14.9.