(From an article in today’s European Voice.)

A: All states are artificial, my dears. They are all human constructs.

If you look around Europe for international frontiers that “make sense” on historical, geographical, ethnic and linguistic grounds, you will find that pretty much the only one satisfying those criteria is the border between England and France.

Most European borders are tidemarks in the ebb and flow of empires, and the borders of Belgium are not unusual in that respect.

9) Starling of the White House, by Colonel Edmund W. Starling (as told to Thomas Sugrue)

Starling was recruited to the Secret Service in 1914, and guarded in turn Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt. There is little here about the last two, but his portrayal of work at very close quarters with the first three is vivid, entertaining and at times moving; Starling was obviously much more than a guard, and seems to have had a genuine and deep friendship with both Wilson and Coolidge. (I was moved to tears by the death of Calvin Coolidge – and that’s a sentence I never dreamed I would write.) One can’t, of course, be sure how much of this is Starling himself and how much is his ghost-writer; in the first few chapters, describing Starling’s early life and pre-White House career, you can almost hear the Kentucky twang in his voice, but that seems to fall off as the book goes on. One of the glades at the foot of Mount Rushmore is named after Starling, which seems a fitting tribute.

Thanks to

wwhyte

 for the loan of the book.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8Zf8oKuPYo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY6TdIMu5Qo

Locals fall sick after meteorite lands in Peru

What peculiarity links these more or less obscure Vice-Presidents of the United States? (And no sneaky Googling!)

• Henry Wilson, VP 1873-1875
• Spiro Agnew, VP 1969-73
• Gerald Ford, VP 1973-74

Agnew’s inclusion on the list is less clear-cut than the other two.

Over at Librarything, they are adding Thomas Jefferson‘s catalogue to their stock, along with all his notes on books read. Here is his review of Plato’s Republic, from a letter to John Adams written on 5 July 1814 (two years after their reconciliation, almost exactly twelve years before they both died). He was not impressed:

I am just returned from one of my long absences, having been at my other home for five weeks past. Having more leisure than than here for reading, I amused myself with reading seriously Plato’s republic. I am wrong however in calling it amusement, for it was the heaviest task work I ever went through. I had occasionally before taken up some of his other works, but scarcely ever had patience to go through a whole dialogue. While wading thro’ the whimsies, the puerilities, & unintelligible jargon of this work, I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this? How the soi-disant Christian world indeed should have done it, is a piece of historical curiosity. But how could the Roman good sense do it? And particularly how could Cicero bestow such eulogies on Plato? Altho’ Cicero did not wield the dense logic of Demosthenes, yet he was able, learned, laborious, practised in the business of the world, & honest. He could not be the dupe of mere style, of which he was himself the first master in the world. with the Moderns, I think it is rather a matter of fashion and authority. Education is chiefly in the hands of persons who, from their profession, have an interest in the reputation and dreams of Plato. They give the tone while at school, and few in their after-years have occasion to revise their college opinions. But fashion and authority apart, and bringing Plato to the test of reason, take from him his sophisms, futilites, & incomprehensibilities, and what remains? In truth he is one of the race of genuine Sophists, who has escaped the oblivion of his brethren, first by the elegance of his diction, but chiefly by the adoption & incorporation of his whimsies into the body of artificial Christianity. His foggy mind, is for ever presenting the semblances of objects which, half seen thro’ a mist, can be defined neither in form or dimension. Yet this which should have consigned him to early oblivion really procured him immortality of fame & reverence. The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from it’s indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power & pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them; and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained. Their purposes however, are answered. Plato is canonised; and it is now deemed as impious to question his merits as those of an Apostle of Jesus. He is peculiarly appealed to as an advocate of the immortality of the soul; and yet I will venture to say that were there no better arguments than his in proof of it, not a man in the world would believe it. It is fortunate for us that Platonic republicanism has not obtained the same favor as Platonic Christianity; or we should now have been all living, men, women and children, pell mell together, like the beasts of the field or forest … (TJ to John Adams, 5 July 1814)

7) The Prophet Muhammad: A Biography, by Barnaby Rogerson
8) The Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad and the Roots of the Sunni-Shia Schism, by Barnaby Rogerson

I picked up the second of these remaindered in Belfast last month, and realised that I had better read the first one as well so ordered t from Amazon. These are two breezily written, enthusiastic books about the early decades of Islam. In both cases, Rogerson spends a good third of the book getting to the starting point – the first gives us a detailed description of Arabia’s geographical and political surroundings in the sixth century, before we get onto the meat of the Prophet’s life, and the second recapitulates the narrative of the first book, though I felt it was still worth having bought both.

Rogerson is clearly a sympathiser, and this means that neither book can be considered particularly neutral. But that’s perhaps not such a bad thing; I am more interested in finding out what the Prophet’s followers believe than in getting the historical “facts”, whatever they are. His narrative is complete enough that I did find myself taken aback at some points. Rogerson appears to expect us to be shocked that one of Muhammad’s wives had previously been married to the Prophet’s adopted son, but in fact while the circumstances are a bit murky this is a process that appears to have been consensual on both sides; I was much more taken aback by the fact that his marriage to Aisha took place when the latter was only nine. And whatever the record of later Muslim regimes for inter-religious tolerance (generally not bad, at least, alas, compared to many of their Christian contemporaries) the ethnic cleansing of the Jews from Medina was surely not a good start.

My biggest disappointment, however, is that we don’t really get under Muhammad’s skin; Rogerson is too much in awe of him to make him seem like a human being. This may be unfair of me. The thing Muhammad is best known for, his experience of divine revelation, is a long way outside the range of experience for most of us, and it may well be impossible for a biographer – especially, I suspect, a sympathetic biographer – to make it comprehensible for the general reader. But I actually I felt I had got a better idea of his character from Gibbon.

In the second book, Rogerson’s enthusiasm in the face of the facts is almost endearing. While the first two caliphs, Abu Bakr and Omar, seem to have indeed been gifted leaders – it was under Omar that the really big military conquests took place, culminating with Persia, the Holy Land and Egypt – the caliphate collapsed under the leadership of Uthman and Ali, and Rogerson’s attempts to exalt Ali’s reputation (as indeed it is exalted in both Shia and Sunni tradition) are difficult to sustain given his failure to keep his own regime together.

However. This was a very interesting pair of books for me, filling in a significant gap in my knowledge which I had previously only really read in much detail in chapters L and LI of Gibbon

Everyone’s been doing this, and with my interest in careers advice generally, I thiought I should give it a whirl.

1. Go to http://www.careercruising.com/
2. Put in Username: nycareers, Password: landmark.
3. Take their “Career Matchmaker” questions.
4. Post the top ten results.

And they are:

1. Anthropologist
2. Historian
3. Lobbyist
4. Criminologist
5. Professor
6. Curator
7. Activist
8. Writer
9. Public Policy Analyst
10. Communications Specialist

Oddly enough, I studied for my history PhD in an anthropology department, and my current job combines elements of #3, #7, #9 and #10 (though not really in that order). Also it requires a fair bit of writing (#8). And my Visiting Fellowship in Belfast puts me a part of the way along to #5. But I have never taken any career steps leading me in the direction of #4 and #6.

I remember that back in my student days I tried the Cambridge Careers Service’s GRADSCOPE software, which recommended I go for “non-technical research”, which is essentially what I have done for all but three of the years since I graduated (though usually with a fair bit of political activism, either on the side or integrated into the work).

The best possible careers advice I can give is still to read What Color is Your Parachute?, by Richard Nelson Bolles.

Second week of school is always bug week, and both F and U went down with colds on Wednesday, which was also the day I went to London for two days of work meetings – thanks very much to and for your hospitality!

By the time I was on Eurostar on Friday evening my throat was feeling pretty raw as well, and I got home to find Anne in pretty much the same state. And yesterday B (who returned home a week ago) started the morning by gently puking upstairs. By the late afternoon U was in misery, and her temperature had soared to 40.8 (105.8 in your antiquated counting) so we called the doctor, who prescribed antibiotics and suggested we take her to hospital for a lung X-ray if she hadn’t improved by today. (F has recovered fully.)

However; things have improved. I cooked a large chicken curry last night, and B, despite her earlier stomach complaints, dug into it gleefully, with no apparent ill effects (indeed, if anything, the reverse). That cheered me up as well; communicating with B is not easy and I feel that cooking her food she enjoys is one of the special things I can do for her. And by the end of the evening, U had also perked up, helping us watch classic music videos off YouTube; this one sent her into peals of laughter. Which is reassuring, at least on most levels.

My throat is still sore but improving. Why is it these bugs usually hit you at the weekend?

6) The Age of Chaos, by Colin Baker

Yes, it's a real rarity – the only full-length Doctor Who book written by one of the Doctor Who actors. Colin Baker had written three Sixth Doctor stories featuring his own character and Bonnie Langford's Mel, but here's a full 96-page graphic novel published by Marvel in 1994, taking the story of Peri further. I have not seen the series in which she gets married off to Brian Blessed (or killed, depending on the interpretation), but Colin Baker obviously feels as strongly about it as most fans do:

Anyway, it's a fun quest story, rather in the Conan the Barbarian genre of medieval romps, though with inevitable science fictional overtones; the Doctor, his penguin-shaped companion Frobisher, and a locally recruited warrior set off to save Peri's grandchildren and their kingdom, Peri herself having disappeared some time back. My only problem with it is that the artist who drew three quarters of the book, Barrie Mitchell, referred to so positively by Baker in the introduction, doesn't actually draw the Doctor to look very much like Baker at all! (Mitchell is apparently best known for having drawn "The Four Marys" in the girls' comic Bunty, though I doubt that he did it for the whole run from 1958 to 2001 as WikiPedia implies.) (Edited to add: see Mitchell's comment below.) The artist of the first quarter of the book, veteran John M Burns, seemed to me to catch him rather better.

Barrie Mitchell's depiction of the Sixth Doctor

John M. Burns' depiction of the Sixth Doctor

This books is something of a curio, admittedly, but quite fun. Edited to add: For more on it see here and here.

5) Preacher [#6]: War in the Sun, by Garth Ennis

Hmm. More in the series of the eponymous preacher, his girlfriend and his Irish vampire colleague; here we get the back-story to one of the villains, a sinister German, and a nuclear attack fails to take out any of our main characters. I am wondering if I will persevere with this series. I don’t like what appears to be a consistent tone of mocking people with disabilities. Arseface seems more and more presented as comic relief; but what is really very funny about having a disfigured face and brain damage? And there are several other characters in this volume who are also in a similar situation. By the end of the book, our main hero Jesse Custer appears to have lost an eye, but remains handsome and smart. I don’t really like the undertones.

Can anyone tell me anything about these people?

• Mark Wright, The Stage
• St John Donald, PFD (and what is PFD, anyway?)
• Peter Norris, Producer (and is that a job description, or a publication?)

I have a theory but I may be missing something obvious.

4) [In Search of Lost Time #3] The Guermantes Way, by Marcel Proust

I don’t think I will manage to finish all seven volumes of Proust this year, but I’m not doing badly. This took me several weeks of dipping in and out of it while reading other books, which I’m coming to realise may be the way to approach Proust. I have to say it is my favourite of the three volumes I have read so far. I felt that the descriptive passages near the beginning were, once again, beautiful reflections on memory and on how we see and remember other people, and felt almost a bit resentful when elements of actual plot began to intrude on the writing. But in fact, there isn’t a lot of plot, and what there is more or less frames two big set-piece social events organised by the Guermantes family, which together take up 250 of the 600 pages.

I felt I could relate to the structure of the book a lot better than the previous volumes, though again perhaps this is just me getting used to it; I found it much easier to sort out the characters in my mind and to be interested in them. The translation is very good too – especially dealing with the excruciating puns perpetrated by some of Proust’s characters, with discreet footnotes explaining them and subtly leaving you with the impression that, like Proust’s narrator, the translator (Mark Treharne) didn’t really think they were very funny.

Anyway, will keep it up. Bits of this will linger with me for a good while – not so much the two big set-pieces, but the disastrous lunch with Rachel, the grandmother’s death, the psychopathic M. de Charlus, the seduction of Albertine, the narrator’s unspoken love for Robert de Saint-Loup.

(Another Proust site here.)

Rapleaf Spams You Then Asks for More Addresses to Spam (see further here).

RapLeaf: Social Media’s Trojan Horse (also here).

Also thanks! to Andrew Sherman.

Your Score: The Second Doctor

You scored 46% intelligence, 15% compassion, 54% sense of humor, and 17% weirdness!

Ah, the comedian! But a *capable* clown. You like to come across as a lovable goof, but in reality you’re a genius who succumbs to occasional absent-mindedness. You know when to cut and run, and you know when you deny authority, no matter how laughable you sound. Your turn-ons include Charlie Chaplin, The Beatles, men in kilts, women in catsuits, flutists, and your giddy aunt. Your turn-offs include omnipotent beings who like to interfere with your affairs, the ever-persistent Cybermen (heck, you don’t even like cybersex!), and thinking about the lisping dandy you’ll eventually become.

Well, my doctorate is in history of science and I got it in an anthropology department… and my first degree was in physics…

As part of the aftermath of dealing with Rapleaf’s appalling behaviour, I’ve been looking into the whole social search engine thing a bit more. You may like to try this too, to see what they have got on you. All searches were carried out this evening on my real name but with no geographical or other details, using the very handy list given in this article.

Spock claims to be the leader in these matters. It pulls up both my active LinkedIn profile, and a dud for an old address; but it pulls up two MySpace profiles, one of which belongs to a namesake of mine who was killed in Iraq last year, the other I suspect also a dud Myspace of his (wrong age but right home town and star sign).

Wink also pulls up the two LinkedIn profiles; also someone else’s Bebo page (I have one too, but I hardly use it and anyway this appears to be someone else), and an Australian child’s largely empty Windows Live page. It also pulls up eight web links, five of which are in fact material written and published by me, one media interview with me, a page about the Iraq casualty and another about a nineteenth century artist of the same name.

Ziki pulls up a rather unimpressive list of 82 web links; it’s really not a lot different from what you’d get off Google, and the very first link given, to my home page, is now obsolete. There is a lot of repetition and news articles in foreign languages. About 85% of the results given are really me, with the Boorklyn marine in second place.

• Browsing through it, I did discover that this guy made me his website of the week last week, which I hadn’t known before. So that’s nice.

PeekYou found one MySpace page belonging to someone in Florida. I’m rather surprised not to have come up – I’m not exactly invisible on the web. Maybe it only does Americans.

ZoomInfo pulls up no less than 37 separate hits on my name or its most obvious variant, mostly from media reports, book reviews, academic websites. 23 of these are in fact me. (The second most frequent hit here is a Canadian political activist.) The casual user would have to spend some time working out which of these are really me and which are not; and I have to say I don’t mind the fact that it is not straightforward.

Pipl is rather impressive. It worked out (no doubt from my IP address) that I was probably interested in people from Belgium, and gave me the results of searches both with and without that restriction. With “Belgiunm” in the mix, pulls up my Amazon.com profile (but not my more frequently used amazon.co.uk profile), both LinkedIn profiles, and my rarely used MySpace page. Without “Belgium” it pulls up 20 “quick facts” of which no fewer than 19 are in fact about me (though mostly referring to out of date information). The 20th is about a nineteenth-century New York architect who I already knew about. Then there are another six links, including one to the ZoomInfo page I just reviewed, and finishes up with the standard Google searches.

ex.plode.us pulls up my rarely used Flickr page, and then a bunch of other people who share either my first name or my surname but not both.

Next is RapLeaf, but we’re not using them.

Naymz doesn’t have me and frankly I think I’d rather keep it that way.

WikiYou has a blank page with my name on it, and again I think I’d rather keep it that way.

So, in summary: Pipl scores well, in that it clearly only uses public sources but seems to go a bit better than yer standard search engine; RapLeaf, Naymz and WikiYou encourage you to register yourself, which I’m certainly not going to do, and RapLeaf and Naymz do badly on the creepiness factor; Spock, Wink, Ziki, ZoomInfo and ex.plode.us are all a bit random and tend not to do any better than Google would; and PeekYou’s inability to find me is just strange. (Google pulls up 28,500 hits on my name as a string; scanning through them, about 90% seem to be really me.)

Now, I’m fairly prominent in a number of fields, having stood for election to public office in 1990 and 1996, not to mention my various other activist activities, so I basically shrug and accept this as long as (unlike RapLeaf) the information has been gathered fairly. Those of you who feel more threatened by this sort of thing may want to try other methods. I’m interested in the ClaimID concept, and am playing with that as a possible way of centralising my own control of information about me on the web. But I think I will settle for just updating my website some time soon.

I suddenly need accommodation in London for Wednesday and Thursday nights this week!

<small voice>Any offers of floor or sofa space very gratefully received!</small voice>

I promise I’m going to let this go, eventually, but some of you will be amused by Valleywag’s series of articles about RapLeaf’s founder Auren Hoffman, including the tale of how he tried to improve his own WikiPedia entry before it was deleted because he is not interesting enough.

Incidentally their information page about my main email address has been “selected for deletion”, which is not the same as “been deleted”.

OK, I’m going to do something else now.

This is the kind of thing Google Maps is really for:

View Larger Map
The Permanent Representations of the 27 member states to the European Union.

As you would expect, they are all fairly tightly clustered, with two very peculiar outliers to the south east: Poland and the Netherlands. The outlier in the other direction is France. My office is on the floor above Sweden.

(And though I’ve marked where they are now, the satellite pictures were taken when the German and Belgian missions were still being built.)

PS: So who’s going to work out an answer to the Travelling Salesman’s Problem for me?

3) The Nero Prediction, by Humphry Knipe

A couple of weeks ago Humphry Knipe got in touch to put me right about an astrological incident of the early Roman empire. He kindly sent me a copy of his novel, which concerns another Roman incident, the death of Nero and the involvement of his freedman Epaphroditus, in the context of an almost universal belief in astrology.

Knipe has done the technical research well; by use of the astrological techniques of the day he has worked out what precisely Nero and his contemporaries would have been concerned about, while making it clear (through Epaphroditus, the narrator) that he doesn’t believe a word of it himself. I’m particularly interested, because of my own long-ago researches around Eleanor of Aquitaine, that Knipe believes two horoscopes provided by the second-century astrologer Vettius Valens are in fact those cast for the times of Nero’s birth and death.

My knowledge of classical times, other than astrology, is sufficiently sketchy that I did not notice any errors of detail, and the scene-setting (starting in Alexandria, then mostly in and around Rome) is convincing. The characterisation of Nero and his mother Agrippina is pretty vivid. Though I was left a bit unsure about the role in events played by early Christians (Saints Peter and Mark make several personal appearances).

Anyway, if you want a bit more ancient science with your Roman fiction than you get from Lindsey Davis, Robert Graves or Suetonius, you’ll find it here.

Having calmed down a little, I did email RapLeaf several times, demanding that they remove everyone in my address book from their server. You will not be surprised to learn that they declined to do so, saying that they could only remove information about a person if that person requested it themselves. After all, having stolen the data from me, why should they be expected to do anything about it?

The flip side is that I reckon they are doomed. It’s not just the negative publicity from the last few days (just type in “Rapleaf” into Icerocket, Technorati or Google Blogsearch), it’s that the whole concept is flawed. Way back in April, Ian McAllister presciently predicted that RapLeaf would run into two problems: the fact that it’s not itself involved with transactions where users will rate each other based on their reputation, and the fact that it will not have a lot of users on its books to start with.

The theft of data from me and others obviously helps them with the second problem, but the first is still pretty insuperable. Valleywag’s article, The rap on Rapleaf, the “trust meter” you can’t trust has an article about RapLeaf’s inevitable descent into being a sleazy people-search site and a resource for internet marketers.

Anyway, the concept is even more flawed than that; it will never work. My reputation, and yours, are not going to be reducible to a number (or a set of numbers) in general, and RapLeaf’s ambition of doing precisely that for everyone on the Internet is impossible to achieve (and they can only approach it by resorting to dubious practices). The eBay seller reputation system works because at the time you are deciding whether or not to make a business transaction with someone you’ve never met, you really want to know the probability that they will come through on their side of the deal. But you don’t care about whether or not they are faithful to their partner, or have a tendency to tell obscene jokes in front of children, or have outrageous political views; and those things anyway are not reducible to numbers, and will be of varying importance to different people in terms of forming an idea of your reputation. Edited to add: Same point is made by Matt Blumberg.

In certain places and with certain people my reputation is, to put it mildly, very negative, because of my political views and activities. The RapLeaf model would enable those who disapprove of my politics to destroy my reputation for everything else simply by logging in and giving me a low rating for everything. It has no safeguards against that kind of victimisation.

Anyway, my hope and expectation is that the investors will spot this pretty soon and pull the plug.

2) Eminent Churchillians, by Andrew Roberts

Picked this up remaindered in Belfast last month; Roberts is of course a famous rightwing historian so I wanted to sample him without spending too much!

It’s a book of essays blaming “Britain’s postwar decline” [sic] on foolish decisions made by Conservatives themselves. Except it isn’t really; most of the essays are attacks on sacred cows. The first piece looks at the character flaws and foolish political views, including thorough-going anti-semitism, of King George VI, and while the evidence is marshalled very skilfully it feels like a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut; it’s not like the king ever actually did very much.

The second piece was on the King’s cousin, Lord Mountbatten, a lengthy and total attack on his reputation. While it’s difficult to prove that George VI was ever directly responsible for people dying, the death toll in Mountbatten’s biography just mounts: from the thousands who died in the Dieppe raid and other comprehensively botched operations in the second world war, for which he bore sole command responsibility, to the hundreds of thousands killed at the partition of India and Pakistan, with the evidence being pretty clear that Mountbatten ignored every chance he had to prevent or alleviate the looming catastrophe, and indeed made a some key decisions which made things worse. This habit of recklessness and irresponsibility with other people’s safety goes right to the end of his life, when he wilfully ignored security warnings from the Gardaí and duly got blown up by the IRA along with several members of his family and friends. As well as looking at the actual facts, Roberts is good at explaining why and how the myth of Mountbatten as a great man was constructed. The book was worth the £2.99 I paid for it for this essay alone.

The other rather good essay is on the difficulties Churchill had in consolidating support inside the Conservative Party in the months after he became Prime Minister in 1940, a reminder that the myth of the country uniting behind him is indeed a myth.

There’s a rather schizophrenic piece proving a) that Churchill was himself a racist and b) that he and the Conservative government did not know what they were doing when they started letting emigrants in from the Commonwealth. I was convinced on the first point but rather less so on the second.

And finally two shorter pieces on minor figures; Sir Walter Monckton, apparently, was single-handedly responsible for ensuring the strangle-hold of the unions on the post-war, pre-Thatcher British economy, and noted historian Sir Arthur Bryant was a fascist and a plagiarist. Convinced on the second point, not that it really matters, but less so on the first.

So, generally an interesting read, but as a non-reader of either the Daily Mail or the Daily Telegraph I am not the intended audience.