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Life, Death and Tolkien

Posted on 17 November 2024 by Henry Gee

My recent post on Tolkien got me thinking about some more current issues. There are others who are better guides to Tolkien’s moral philosophy than I. However, the person who finally convinced me, many years ago, that capital punishment was wrong, was not a politician or religious leader, but a fictional character — Gandalf.

In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo declares to Gandalf that it was a pity that Bilbo had not killed the treacherous creature Gollum when he’d had the chance. ‘He deserves death’, Frodo says. ‘Deserves it!’ I daresay he does,’ replies Gandalf:

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

That was then.

More recently, the British Parliament has been asked to consider a bill that would legalise assisted dying. It has this debate every few years. However,  an increasing number of people are in favour of the idea that people who are terminally ill should be allowed to end their own lives at a time of their choice. The current bill introduces safeguards that are meant to prevent terminally ill people being subject to coercion. Safeguards include independent reviews by two clinicians and a high-court judge. Whatever the safeguards, however, there is an argument that people should be allowed to die with dignity.

Tolkien puts it very well in The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, a kind of coda to The Lord of the Rings in which the hero, Aragorn, now more than two hundred years old, decides that the time has come for him to die. As a Númenórean — that is, a human, but of exalted lineage — he has been granted the grace to be able to do this. His wife, Arwen, is full of regret. She is an immortal elf who has traded her immortality for a mortal life, if a long one. ‘Take counsel with yourself, beloved’, Aragorn says,

and ask whether you would indeed have me wait until I wither and fall from my high seat unmanned and witless.

Aragorn knows he will have to die, someday, but it will be at a time of his choosing, when he still has the capacity to do so. The passage also highlights the grief of those left behind, suggesting that although such grief is inevitable, it might be made worse when friends and relations are forced to watch a person die slowly and possibly in agony, losing first one facility and then another, and the greatest loss is dignity.

Aragorn’s words seem to me very wise and, in the end, compassionate. It is notable, though, that Tolkien puts such a speech in the mouth of the hero of his epic tale. Tolkien was a Catholic, and as such would probably be horrified by the idea of assisted suicide. Aragorn, though, has a kind of special license. As a Númenórean, he is also, in a sense, prelapsarian, the descendant of people who were never corrupted by the forces of evil in the world.

My own personal view is that we should not accept our fallen condition. Instead we should strive to regain that prelapsarian state. To that end, it should be a fundamental human right — perhaps the most fundamental — that a person has absolute and final governance over their own body. To be sure, we cannot choose whether to be born, or when. However, as if in compensation, we should have the absolute right to, say, have an abortion, change gender, or indeed, die, without the interference of religious leaders, judges or politicians.

I accept that you might not agree with me. And that’s your right, too.

Posted in assisted suicide, human rights, J R R Tolkien, Politicrox, Writing & Reading | Comments Off on Life, Death and Tolkien

The Importance of Technicians

Posted on 17 November 2024 by Athene Donald

My last post discussed the ecosystem for those who consider themselves researchers and where it can go wrong if the incentives turn out to be perverse, however logical they seem on the surface. Today I turn to consider the technicians, who make many a lab run smoothly, keep the equipment running and often are the primary source of pastoral care for students who may be struggling. They frequently fall beneath the radar of decision-makers in a university yet can be the people who ensure the undergraduate teaching laboratories function and that the equipment gets fixed when a heavy-handed student has broken something vital. Their funding may be insecure: one fixed term contract followed by another, totally grant-dependent. Relatively few are supported centrally any more.

When I was a PhD student, the group I was in – not particularly large, but with several electron microscopes as their core research tool – there were three technicians, each looking after a different microscope, and a fourth overseeing the equipment needed for sample preparation. There was a workshop technician and a photographer (these were the days when slides were needed for talks and expert wet processing to produce high enough quality photographs for papers; in other words, long before digital processing, Photoshop and the like). All these technicians were there to help and several of them were an integral part of our evenings down the pub. As far as I recall none of them had degrees, although I don’t know what their qualifications were.

I interacted with all of them. One in particular stood out for me, not because he was the most sociable or outgoing, but because he was the one who kindly and patiently fixed the delicate piece of apparatus I kept breaking. I was embarrassed by my clumsiness, whereas he never seemed to express any criticism of my failure as an experimentalist. I have no idea what his background was, what his formal qualifications were, but he was an absolute wizard at putting things back together in his workshop. Some years ago, I went to his funeral.

Many years later, by which time I was running my own research group and had put behind me the dangers of actually touching equipment most of the time, I was interviewing for a mechanical technician to join our group. When I came to appoint the successful candidate, I realised he had the same surname as the hero from my PhD days. Sure enough, he turned out to be the son of the technician who’d looked after me so well all those years before. Subsequently, the son’s son also turned up in the department, although in a less skilled role. Three generations all skilled, all feeling this was a worthwhile career and that the work environment in the Cavendish Laboratory was somewhere they were comfortable.

However, technician posts like these can be hard to fill. It’s not a route that schools particularly highlight when discussing options (the paucity of school careers’ advisors is a problem in its own right). Historically, just as teaching was seen as an aspirational career for a woman who wasn’t going to go to university but could go to a teacher training college, so acquiring HND and HNC (higher national diplomas and certificates if the acronyms are unfamiliar) from your local technical college or polytechnic was seen as a good career move for men for whom university wasn’t an option (and I fear those are the correct gender stereotypes for, say, the 1950s).

That was back when perhaps only 10% or less of the population could get a university place. Times have changed, but the need for technicians has not. Some people will enter the technical workforce with a degree, sometimes even a PhD under their belt. This is not necessarily a satisfactory solution, as Paul Lewis highlighted in his 2019 report. He concluded that often a graduate does not have the correct skillset to complete a job, having too often got good at passing exams rather than ‘doing’ stuff. Additionally, a graduate may rapidly become dissatisfied with the role, feeling that the undoubted skills they do have are being underutilised. Career progression may be limited, which is also a disincentive to stay in the role.

The problem is not going to go away. The Talent Commission was specifically set up to look at the position of technicians in universities and research establishments (disclosure, I was one of the commissioners). Their report, published in 2022, highlighted that the university technical workforce was substantially an ageing population: around half of the technician population in universities were over the age of 50. Of these, almost half had worked at the same institution for twenty years or more. This means that, as these take retirement, a very substantial amount of knowledge will be lost. People like the technicians I worked with are in danger of becoming a disappearing breed.

In order both to celebrate technicians and to encourage institutions to support, mentor and promote the technicians they do have, the Technician Commitment was introduced in 2017, with over 120 signatory and supporter organisations to date. Of the different actions they want to see organisations undertake, one was to give technicians due recognition and a voice in decision-making. When I look at these expectations placed on employers, I feel guilty in particular that almost never did the technicians who did so much to enable a piece of research to come to fruition get included in the author list of papers I wrote.

A notable exception was one electron microscope technician who joined us upon retiring from industry: he had a PhD. I don’t believe the mechanical technician I mentioned earlier (long retired) would have had any expectation of becoming an author, but perhaps he should have done. His contribution to many a paper – by making all the sample holders that were so vital for the synchrotron experiments we carried out – was invaluable and not something the students could do. Furthermore, he made his contribution with few complaints, despite the fact that students almost invariably left things to the last moment before we had X-ray beamtime, so he would suddenly be inundated with requests instead of being able to pace things appropriately.

I hope PIs reading this will think harder about the recognition angle regarding any technicians they employ, as well as the wider terms of the Technician Commitment their institutions may have signed up to. I suspect it is not widely enough disseminated across institutions, so that those who work most closely with the key individuals in a research group know what is implicitly placed on their shoulders. If the technical role is to attract a healthier supply of incoming workers, it is in everyone’s interest that the job is made attractive.

 

 

Posted in demographics, laboratory, pastoral care, Science Culture, Talent Commission, Technician Commitment | Comments Off on The Importance of Technicians

Tolkien and Loss

Posted on 16 November 2024 by Henry Gee

I’ve argued elsewhere that one of the most important themes in Tolkien’s work is loss. Loss of technological ability, loss of lifespan, loss of population, loss of — well, let’s not put too fine a point on it — grace, something that might have resonated with Tolkien’s Catholicism and (I think) inherent pessimism.

But there are more playful examples.

The most obvious is the scene in The Lord of the Rings in which Frodo stands up in a pub and recites a poem about the Man in the Moon, who decided one day to go to the pub (a favourite Tolkien pastime) where he discovers a sportive cow, a cat that plays the violin, a dog with a sense of humour, animated crockery and cutlery and so on … to which Tolkien adds a rare (and teasing) breaking-the-fourth-wall footnote, that only a few lines of this poem are now remembered. In The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford, 1973 reprint, page 203), Iona and Peter Opie write of Hey Diddle Diddle that it is probably the best-known nonsense verse in English, which might explain why  ‘a considerable amount of nonsense has been written about it’, before going on to list the various far-fetched theories as to its origin. Some things are, well, just nonsense.

There is a deeper theme here, though, and one that Tolkien, as a scholar of medieval literature, knew only too well — that the literature that survives from ancient times is a tiny fragment of what might once have been current, and that most tales were never written down. Take Beowulf, for example — a poem that Tolkien knew better than most. The only copy of Beowulf that survives is a late, written manuscript of what was in all likelihood a version of much older story, transmitted orally, whose origins are lost in the fog of the ancient North. The version we have contains hints of yet other stories, and quite a few words, that would have been well known to audiences at the time but of which no other record survives, speaking to a much larger, lost corpus of storytelling. Along with this is the tendency of tales, especially in an oral tradition, to get bowdlerised in each re-telling, progressively worn down until a nonsensical nubbin remains. After centuries of recitation, Hey Diddle Diddle was all that remained of The Man In The Moon. In the same way, Tolkien’s beautiful, powerful and sometimes frightening Elves, and tough, gritty Dwarves, if they were once real, survive only nowadays  as kitsch garden gnomes or filmy fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Tolkien loathed Disney — it is the merest coincidence that The Hobbit came out in the same year as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — yet you could read Snow White as the ultimate adulteration of The Lord of the Rings, with Arwen becoming Snow White; Aragorn, the Handsome Prince; Sauron (or Galadriel!) as the Wicked Queen; the poisoned apple as the Ring; The Wicked Queen’s magic mirror as the Mirror of Galadriel; with all the dwarfs and so on as the supporting cast. One must of course beware of reading too much into what is after all a kind of parlour game rather than serious literary criticism.

In that sportive vein, though, and for reasons I need not articulate here, I was reminded of another nursery rhyme.

I had a little nut tree

Nothing would it bear

But a silver nutmeg

And a golden pear.

The King of Spain’s daughter

Came to visit me

And all for the sake

of my little nut tree.

Anyone who likes me spends more time than is usual or healthy tolkien to themselves will immediately see in the silver nutmeg and golden pear an echo of the Two Trees of Valinor in The Silmarillion: silver Telperion and golden Laurelin, which, after their slaying by Melkor and the giant spider Ungoliant, produced, respectively, a silver flower (that became the Moon) and a golden fruit (the Sun). Nothing else would they bear.

But who was the King of Spain’s daughter, and why would she have gone to all that effort to visit one little nut tree? In The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, the Opies (this time on page 330) are much more specific than they were for Hey Diddle Diddle. They suggest that the rhyme may have celebrated a particular royal visit. The Opies write (page 331):

Edith Sitwell in Fanfare for Elizabeth (1946) pictures Lady Bryane, governess-in-ordinary to the young Princess Mary and then to Elizabeth, singing this song to her charges, and remembering a black and terrible shadow, the shadow of Juana of Castile the mad ‘King of Spain’s daughter’, who visited the court of Henry VII in 1506. [my emphasis]

Juana of Castile (daughter of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon) is known to have visited Prince Henry (later Henry VIII) in 1506. There was a family connection: Juana was the sister of Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Juana’s visit, however, was unscheduled. Her ship, sailing from Flanders to Castile, was wrecked on the English coast. As if matters couldn’t get any worse, relations between Juana’s husband Philip and father Ferdinand were at that time extremely strained. Civil war almost broke out to decide who would rule Castile. Although Philip and Ferdinand settled their differences, it suited them both to declare Juana, the legal heir to the throne, as mad, and have her confined. She remained locked up until her death in 1555, aged 75. Whether Juana really was mad, or her madness was a convenient fiction to get a meddlesome female out of the way, is in question. But the story of her madness had a wide currency, and one can see that a memory of her visit to England, combined with the shipwreck, would have cast a shadow.

One is tempted to wonder whether the whole story of Juana of Castile became infused in Tolkien’s mind while working on his legendarium, so that, perhaps, and knowing how his mind worked, the back-story to I Had A Little Nut Tree really relates to the dark, extremely dark, definitively dark visit of Melkor and Ungoliant, who came to Valinor specifically to seek out the Two Trees and kill them, and the story only became attached to Juana as a matter of Tudor historical revisionism.

I do like parlour games like this. Whether they have any literary merit is questionable.

Posted in J R R Tolkien, Writing & Reading | Comments Off on Tolkien and Loss

The Man In The White Suit

Posted on 11 November 2024 by Henry Gee

I had to write something down on my blog or I’d explode. It’s all about built-in obsolescence; the rate of technology increase; and how technology manufacturers use their customers as free beta-testers rather than taking time to release products that stand the test of time.

I have been through various iMacs, but my most reliable and trusty iMac was until recently a 24-inch machine that was made in 2009 and now runs OSX Lion 10.7.5, which is the tippiest toppiest OS that it can handle. It’s been the stalwart of my home music-making for years. Part of the reason was the profusion of USB-A ports on the back, and all — and this is vital — an audio input, and a CD burner. Thanks to this it’s been a breeze to make and produce music on this machine, including two albums released on Apple Music and other streaming platforms, using the inbuilt Garageband (that’s GB 2011, version 6.0.5).

I’ve always known that the day would come when I’d have to replace this machine. Lion 10.7.5 is as sophisticated as the poor thing can manage, and browsers don’t work properly any more. The CD burner has conked out.

THOUGHT#1 What have people got against burning one’s own CDs? Why do you have to upload music to the Cloud, which, as one IT professional told me, means Someone Else’s Server? (And I used to able to watch DVDs, too… that facility conked out years ago. Now you have to stream whatever Apple or Netflix or Amazon deign to make available).

I guess I could still spend £££ on an external CD burner if I really wanted to. But there’d be a learning curve and software and drivers and compatibility issues…

… but my old iMac still has that external audio input, which meant that I could record audio direct to Garageband without an interface. And I could save my projects to a USB stick. And, oh yes, burn a CD. The final knell fell a few days ago when I found I could no longer upload music to Soundcloud.

Luckily I have a second iMac, the one I use for social media and writing and other stuff. (For the day job at the Submerged Log Company, everything is kept separate, on yet a third computer, which is a PC). The second iMac is also 24-inch but was made in 2021. It also has Garageband, but I hadn’t used it, as the only physical way in to the machine is by a pair of Thunderbolt ports (equivalent to USB-C). There is still an audio out… but for how much longer, I wonder?

So this weekend I bit the bullet. I did a very necessary clear-up of my files on both computers. I then put everything I needed from the old computer on to a USB-stick. First hurdle — I had to get an adapter cable with USB-A on one end and USB-C on the other.

THOUGHT#2: what was so wrong with USB-A that they had to change it, necessitating my spending £ on adapter cables?

Second hurdle: I ported my existing Garageband projects over and opened the new Garageband. Amazingly enough they all worked… except for the inbuilt instruments, such as drums. This necessitated downloading lots of software. Which refused to work. Aargh.

That’s when I realised that the newness of my new Mac is relative. It is four years old, and so is its version of Garageband. So I upgraded the software to OSX Sequoia 15.1, and Garageband to version 10.4.1. After that I could download all the drums and so on and my existing projects sounded more or less OK.  However, there is a learning curve, as the new Garageband has a lot more features, and I have yet to find all the bits I’m used to.

I have yet to plug in my remote USB keyboard (using a new adapter cable, naturally) and fully expect that there will be much swearing and gnashing of teeth before it works properly.

There remains the issue of the lack of an audio input. My entire system has been assembled and indeed predicated on an audio input. I have an audio sound mixer. I have an audio monitoring mixer. I tend not to use software instruments — I have a rack of old-fashioned keyboards, and occasionally record voices and guitars and other stuff — so I need audio input.

The workaround here was the purchase of an audio-to-USB-C interface (one of these) supplied by my old friend Mr M. F. at PMT in Norwich. As an act of defiance I didn’t order this kit online but went into an actual shop and, you know, actually bought it, from an actual assistant (my friend Mr M. F. as above) and we had a Good Old Chat.

I haven’t plugged this interface in yet. I fully expect to have to download software and drivers and will have compatibility issues, because nothing, but nothing, ever works the way it is supposed to. And all this fuss because my iMac doesn’t have an audio input.

THOUGHT#3: what was so wrong with an audio input that they had to remove it, necessitating my spending £££££ on an audio-to-USB interface?

I guess kids these days make music on a laptop and use software plug-ins for most things. But what about most of us who aren’t kids-these-days, eh?

And anyway, what’s all this about The Man In The White Suit? It’s an old film. Starring Alec Guinness. All about how built-in obsolescence is necessary to make the world go round, or something. And yes, you can stream it. Because of course you can. But only so long as they let you.

Mrs Gee, who as you both know is a Fount of All Knowledge and Wisdom, says I should give it all up and take up knitting instead.

Posted in Apple, GarageBand, Music, obsolescence, PMT, Scarlett 2i2, technology, The Man In The White Suit | Comments Off on The Man In The White Suit

The Dangers of Brilliance

Posted on 10 November 2024 by Athene Donald

As the detailed criteria of REF2029 are being worked through, the issue over the research culture part remains unclear. There are those who think research culture is an irrelevance in the pursuit of excellence, that it is a touchy-feely kind of thing, that woke stuff the last Government didn’t like, and who believe it is obvious what excellence is. This, I believe, is a profound mistake. We need all hands to the pump, as it were, in solving the many global challenges we face, from climate change to the dangers of AI, from (un)healthy ageing to food security. If we assume that the only way to succeed is to continue on the same trajectory we have been, at least throughout my lifetime, we are limiting ourselves. An academic world where success is determined by funding pulled in or space occupied, or even (although less true now than it once was ) the citation index of where you’ve published or the sheer weight of – figurative – paperwork you have produced, then we will never change or become a truly inclusive academic world. Yet the evidence shows diversity matters, and hence replacing like with like in the academic pyramid is short-sighted. Although the business world may slowly be waking up to the benefits to the bottom line of a diverse board or employee base, academia continues to have pockets of resistance. PNAS may publish a paper spelling out that

‘underrepresented groups produce higher rates of scientific novelty.’

Yet this same paper depressingly goes on to say

‘However, their novel contributions are devalued and discounted….are taken up by other scholars at lower rates than novel contributions by gender and racial majorities…equally impactful contributions of gender and racial minorities are less likely to result in successful scientific careers than for majority groups’

In Physics (as in maths, computing or engineering, but less so in chemistry or the life sciences) there is a great imbalance of the sexes all the way through the system and almost universally around the world. Increasingly, researchers are exploring the belief that you have to be brilliant to be a physicist; and also the belief that brilliance is something that boys (males) have more of than girls (females), a belief that seems to set in really young. Or, as the title of a relatively recent paper puts it “You need to be super smart to do well in math!”, based on studying children in (US) grades 1-4, roughly five to nine year olds. What messages are we giving our children so early on that leads to this belief?

Any physicist, male or female, is likely to have been greeted at some social occasion, when having disclosed their profession with ‘oh you must be so clever/I never could do maths at school’ or some variant of those phrases. It’s boring and embarrassing and I have always felt wide of the mark. I couldn’t do biology at school, my French pronunciation was atrocious and geography left me cold. I admired people who could speak fluent French and easily took on board concepts of frog development or the principal exports of Marseilles (a topic that seemed to take an inordinate amount of time in my geography lessons). It never crossed my mind that I was ‘smarter’ because my abilities lay elsewhere. Yet, apparently, on average, that’s how children and adults alike seem to think.

And this is unhealthy and unhelpful, and it feeds into a research culture many years later that is also unhealthy and unhelpful. It means we have an academy that is weighted in favour of those allegedly (more) brilliant male physicists and, as another recent paper put it, a ‘dog-eat-dog’ environment in Physics departments.  They complain that

‘An emphasis on brilliance is harmful because assumptions about who has it are gendered and racialized: when we think of a brilliant person, we tend to think of men and white individuals, not women or people of colour’

And furthermore that this dog-eat-dog competitive culture arises because

‘brilliance is inherently comparative and hierarchical, so the more brilliant one person is perceived to be, the less others are.’

Interventions to alter our children’s attitudes towards the stereotyping of brilliance as a white male trait need to start early in our primary schools. These may be beyond the arena in which the typical academic is likely to get involved (I believe teacher training has a key role to play here, but children learn about cultural attitudes from far beyond the classroom.) Interventions to what and how we value being smart, at the expense of being supportive, generous, willing to do outreach and pastoral care as well as taking on a fair share of ‘departmental housework’ would all make for a better research environment and will be driven by attitudes around recruitment and promotion and, inevitably, REF2029. What incentives do we need to change the mindset we collectively currently inhabit and how can we avoid the perverse incentives that years of thinking about ‘excellence’ as a one-dimensional and easily recognizable criterion too often deliver?

Of course, it isn’t just Physics that has this ‘brilliance’ tag attached to it. In other areas, both Philosophy and Economics tend to get labelled this way too. These are also hugely male-dominated in unhealthy ways. In Philosophy a paper from last year stated that ‘people who identify as women internalize a gender stereotype and perceive themselves as less brilliant, but also share with others (i.e., men) the stereotypes of philosophy as for people who have brilliance and psychology as for people who do not have brilliance.’ The consequence, as they saw it, was that women were more likely to opt for Psychology as a discipline, where brilliance does not factor in in the same way and which ends up having a substantial female majority. As for Economics, my College colleague Diane Coyle has identified this major problem of gendering, both in her book Cogs and Monsters and in an article in the FT (so I hope many economists have read about the issue in one or other place). She highlights one version of the unfortunate ambience of what we value in the seminar room, stating

‘economics seminars are hostile occasions for point-scoring and aggressive challenge’

and in Economics journals where she says

‘Peer review rewards peers, and they are mainly men.’

So, how do we as a society, change our attitudes towards brilliance so that children do not believe that males are more brilliant than females which, in turn, could lead to both a more pleasant work culture and a more equitable gender split across the board? If anyone has any good answers….do let the world know.

 

Posted in economics, education, environment, Equality, philosophy, Science Culture, smart | Comments Off on The Dangers of Brilliance

What I Read In October

Posted on 3 November 2024 by Henry Gee

Screenshot 2024-10-02 at 09.32.36Robert Harris: Precipice This exponent of the well-researched historical and occasionally alt-history thriller, often set in Nazi Germany (Fatherland) or Ancient Rome (Imperium, Pompeii, etcetera) sometimes steers very close to actual reality, dramatising  real events that happened to real people (An Officer and a Spy, Act of Oblivion). And that is the case here. The novel starts in July 1914, a few days after Franz Ferdinand had been shot, and describes, in agonising day-by-day detail, the machinations of Herbert Henry Asquith’s Liberal government as Britain was dragged into the ensuing conflict; and continues until May 1915, after the Gallipoli disaster, when Asquith had to enter into a coalition with Bonar Law’s Unionists. It is told largely through the medium of Asquith’s surviving letters to his muse,  Venetia Stanley, who was very much younger. Asquith discussed government business in his letters, some of it secret, and the letters are, in some cases, the only record that survives of cabinet meetings of the time — stuffed as they were with pointed pen-portraits of Winston Churchill, Lord Kitchener and their contemporaries. Stanley’s letters do not survive, but Harris makes a good stab at reconstructing the prose of an intelligent, well-bred and well-read woman from an unconventional family (her father was an atheist; her immediate relatives included a Muslim convert and a Catholic bishop, and she married a Jew, Edwin Montagu). Harris makes the argument that the downfall of Asquith’s government was linked to Stanley ceasing to write to him and announcing her engagement to Montagu — and also adds a clever subplot involving the nascent secret intelligence services. What struck me most about this novel (apart from the unbelievable privilege enjoyed by a very small group of people, set apart and insulated from the common herd, and all of whom knew one another) was that these were simpler times. The Prime Minister could afford to spend weekends away at house parties, and walk from Downing Street to go shopping without being recognised. And also that there were at least six deliveries of mail a day. As always with his novels, Harris wears his voluminous research very lightly. One does, however, get rather tired of the amatory declarations in the letters, my dearest darling, my only muse, light of my existence, &c &c. And I couldn’t help reading the title as ‘Prepuce’. Other than that it’s terrific.

IMG_8348Alice Thompson: The Book Collector Within the eldritch and be-tentacled genre that is horror fiction lurks a sub-genre, feminist horror, perhaps best exemplified by The Yellow Wallpaper, a story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in which the protagonist, a woman suffering what we’d now called postpartum depression, is locked by her husband, for her own good, so he says, in an upstairs room. The story charts the protagonist’s mental disintegration as she becomes obsessed with the patterns of the room’s yellow wallpaper. As it is told in the first person, the events are recounted by an unreliable narrator, so one is never sure whether they are real, or going on inside the narrator’s own head. The Book Collector is a short novel in much the same vein. A young woman called Violet marries the eponymous Bibliophile, and at first her life is idyllic. A fairy tale, in fact. Fairy tales feature very strongly in this story. Especially the old-fashioned kind. You know, the really gruesome ones that the Grimms and others told before they got cleaned up by Disney. But I digress. After Violet gives birth to Felix, her life falls apart and her husband confines her to a lunatic asylum for similarly ‘hysterical’ women. An asylum from which women are being abstracted, mutilated and killed. The novel has all the trappings of the Gothick: dark forests, secret caves, madness, grand houses, bookcases stuffed with dusty grimoires that one really, really shouldn’t look at, let alone read. The writing style, though, is clipped, well-trimmed to a degree and far from the edge of floridity, dissolution and decay that should match the locales. H. P. Lovecraft (very much at the florid end of the spectrum) wrote that the key feature of horror fiction should, above all, be atmosphere, something that stays with you once you’ve closed the book. Atmosphere doesn’t require that the writing is any more than good enough to drive you through the story. Lovecraft’s writing is so bad, it’s brilliant. Thompson’s writing, on the other hand, is perhaps too well-crafted for its subject. So, although parts of this tale are very gruesome, it doesn’t have quite the effect it perhaps should. Fun fact: connoisseurs of 1980s pop trivia will know Alice Thompson as the founding keyboard player in a combo called The Woodentops.

Screenshot 2024-10-19 at 11.25.01Richard Osman: We Solve Murders Yes, it’s him again, the Man on the Telly, and best-selling author of the deservedly acclaimed Thursday Murder Club series of thrillers that have re-invigorated that subgenre known as Cosy Crime. Osman, being a canny sort of chap, has realised that continuing a successful series can result in diminishing returns, so We Solve Murders is the opener to what promises to be a new series. Amy Wheeler is bodyguard, hired out to protect celebrities. Her current client is Rosy D’Antonio, high-living and bestselling author of raunchy crime thrillers. Amy’s father-in-law, Steve, is an ex-cop living in a sleepy village in the New Forest whose weekly highlight is the pub quiz. All three are involved in a twisty turny plot involving the serial deaths of internet influencers and international money smuggling. I have forgotten the plot already, but I did enjoy the ride, very much. Although the canvas is much broader than in the Thursday Murder Club series — inescapably so, as that was, as you’ll recall, an upscale retirement village in Sussex — Osman’s readers will be comforted that the tone is very much the same. Cool, crisp, deft and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.

IMG_8361Elsa Pancirolli: Beasts Before Us Readers with long memories will remember my review of Steve Brusatte’s book The Rise and Reign of Mammals, reviewed here. Pancirolli’s book covers the same ground, and was actually available before Brusatte’s, I believe, but like many things, the plans of mice and men gang aft agley, especially during a pandemic. It covers similar ground, too, concentrating on the oft-forgotten ‘first’ age of mammals that occurred before the ascendancy of the dinosaurs, when the world was dominated by what used to be called ‘mammal-like’ reptiles; before switching to the small, fierce and furry residents of the nocturnal forests when dinosaurs were ascendant in the daytime. It’s a fun and engaging read, especially the parts when the author talks of the often very uncomfortable conditions encountered while prospecting for fossils on windy and rainy Scottish coasts in winter. I didn’t always get the humour, and there was a mite too much political correctness for my taste, but that’s just me. A book done with brio — highly recommended.

Screenshot 2024-11-03 at 12.20.41Robert Harris: The Cicero Trilogy (Imperium/ Lustrum/ Dictator) You’ll have seen I’ve already read one of Harris’ closely-worked historical novels this month (Precipice, above). The Imperium trilogy is a fictionalised biography of the lawyer, orator, statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) during one of the most exciting periods of Roman history, when the old Republic gave way to the Empire. That we know Cicero existed is attested by a wealth of material. Perhaps less well-known is that much of it was recorded by his slave and personal secretary, Tiro, who devised a shorthand method of recording speech verbatim. Some of his shorthand survives today: the abbreviations ‘e.g. and NB’ were his, as well as the ampersand (&). It is also known from other sources that Tiro, who long outlived his master, wrote a biography of Cicero, though the biography itself is now lost. It is this that Harris recreates, with his usual attention to detail, sensitive characterisation and matchless readability. Imperium records Cicero’s early life and training, rising through the political ranks from the relatively junior quaestor, through aedile, praetor and finally consul, during which Cicero made his name by the high-profile prosecution of Gaius Verres, a corrupt governor of Sicily. Lustrum covers Cicero’s tumultuous year as consul and the years immediately following, in which he helped foil a conspiracy to destabilise the Republic, during which he condemned several men to death without trial, a circumstance that was to dog him ever afterwards. Dictator charts the rise and fall of Julius Caesar, the various civil wars, and Cicero’s eventual downfall by order of Mark Antony. I learned a great deal about the organisation of Roman life from these books, and grasped how much of modern society, especially the legal system, owes to Roman law: the idea of a constitution; debates in the Senate; the whole concept of prosecution and defence; and trial by jury. The whole courtroom drama scenario, in fact, which this series exploits beautifully. Characters from ancient history, too, shine out as real people. Not just Cicero, who is supremely clever, cunning and cultured — as well as crotchety, driven and vain — but the majestic if rather dopey Pompey; the fanatically stoic Cato; the vulpine Julius Caesar; Cicero’s ferocious and clever wife Terentia, and, in Dictator, the precocious Octavianus, who becomes the Emperor Augustus. It might not sound like it, but it’s a nail-biting thrill-ride as Cicero navigates the treacherous shoals and sometimes lethal hazards of Roman political life — especially as you just know it’ll all come to a sticky end. The dramatisation of Julius Caesar’s assassination is brilliant because, even though you know what’s about to happen, it’s so shocking. I had read Imperium before in dead-tree format but had forgotten much of it by the time I came across Lustrum and Dictator, so I listened to the whole thing as audiobooks.

Screenshot 2024-11-03 at 12.23.46Jonathan Strahan (ed.) New Adventures in Space Opera If you’ve enjoyed Star Wars, Star Trek, Dune,  or practically any popular SF that’s made it to popular cinema, you’ve experienced a sub-genre known as ‘space opera’.  Space Opera is fairly easily defined (by me) as westerns, but set in space. Some of them are really sword-and-sorcery fantasies dressed up with technology (Star Wars is very much in this vein). There is usually a lot of violence, high-tech macguffins (faster-than-light travel, light-sabers, photon torpedoes, matter transportation); what SF nerds call ‘sensawunda’ (fantastic locales, killer robots, Martian princesses, exotic aliens who unconventional word order when they speak, use they must); and plot trumps characterisation. Space Opera used to be the domain of pulp magazine SF from the 1920s to the 1960s, a period that saw the flowering of the careers of many exponents of the genre such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert and … er … L. Ron Hubbard. After an eclipse under the ‘New Wave’ of the 1960s (Michael Moorcock, J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss and so on) that used SF to explore more social and political themes, Space Opera enjoyed a resurgence with the works of Iain M. Banks. Justina Robson, Peter F. Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds, which, although they use all the props, tend to be more cerebral and sophisticated. But Space Opera moves on, finds new writers and audiences (such as Cixian Liu’s Three-Body Problem trilogy), and it moves on still, to find new means of expression, and, in particular, diversity. New Adventures in Space Opera is a collection of SF stories exploring the outer reaches of contemporary Space Opera. Many of the authors are female (welcome), and there were some creative uses of pronouns (understandable, if sometimes confusing). I have to say, though, I found them a bit disappointing. One of the features of Space Opera — like cheap music — is that it’s catchy. The images it evokes stay in the mind. Nobody who has ever seen The Day The Earth Stood Still will forget the giant robot Klaatu. No-one who has ever read Asimov’s Foundation will forget Gaal Dornick’s first experience of the planet-spanning city of Trantor. No reader of Dune will forget the sandworms. None of the stories in this collection stayed in my mind for more than a few moments after I had finished reading them. Okay, there was one by Alastair Reynolds, but it read like an inferior out-take from his full-length novel House of Suns. The story by Israeli author Lavie Tidhar, like many of his works, resonated with what I shall euphemistically call Current Events. But apart from that — nothing. I think the problem was that I found it hard to engage with the characters. Many of the stories started without context, and this was too hard (for my brain at least) to pick up from the narratives. Maybe I am rather past it, and the new audiences for Space Opera are, to me, like aliens, with philosophies and modes of thought that cannot interface successfully with my own neural structures.

IMG_8389Eric Idle: The Spamalot Diaries I did not realise until recently that Spamalot is a stage musical based extremely loosely on my favourite film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It was largely the brainchild of Eric Idle, the Python who wrote a lot of the songs (most famously, ‘Always Look On The Bright Side of Life’). The Spamalot Diaries charts the story of how the musical was brought to life — the backstage drama, the egos, the constant re-writes, the songs written, the songs scrapped, and, poignantly, the wondering why anyone works hard on something they love, only to be frustrated when it never seems to achieve perfection. This could have been a tedious luvvie-fest, but is saved by the touches of darkness that evoke genuine emotion. Oh yes, and there are jokes. Which are funny. I liked the one in which Idle, riding a rickshaw in New York, pretends to be Michael Palin making one of his travel documentaries. You don’t have to know the music to read the book, but it helps, so after I read it I downloaded the musical soundtrack. Spamalot uses the already very thin plot of Holy Grail to send up the whole business of musical theatre itself. ‘The Song That Goes Like This‘ is a brilliant satire on the paint-by-numbers tedium of an Andrew Lloyd Webber score (I appreciate that some readers may disagree, but I’ve sat through Cats and Starlight Express and these are hours I shall never have again). ‘You Won’t Succeed On Broadway (If You Don’t Have Any Jews)‘ warmed the cockles of this Red-Sea Pedestrian.

Screenshot 2024-11-03 at 12.31.21Karen G. Lloyd: Intraterrestrials Before we start to search for life elsewhere in the Universe, there is much still to learn about the life beneath our feet. Deep beneath out feet.  Scientist Karen G. Lloyd tells us about organisms that live in boiling hot springs, inside volcanoes, in the driest deserts, on the highest mountains, in permafrost, and in mud in the deepest depths of the sea, and how they have metabolisms that allow them to survive — just about. To breathe, they don’t necessarily use oxygen, but iron, sulphur, even uranium. Though sometimes they grow so slowly that it might take them millions of years to reproduce. And this, of course, allows us to set some parameters about the necessities for life, not just on Earth, but anywhere in the Universe. So we come full circle. In a text that combines a rigorous work-out of the principles of thermodynamics (TRIGGER WARNING: there are equations) with breathtaking all-action adventure, our intrepid heroine ventures from the high Arctic to deep-sea hydrothermal vents in search of the limits of life. This is one of the most exciting pop-science books I’ve read in ages [DISCLAIMER: The proofs were sent to me so that I could consider writing a blurb].

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Climate Change and Seneca Falls

Posted on 3 November 2024 by Athene Donald

Those of you familiar with American women’s call for the vote will recognize the name Seneca Falls. It is situated in picturesque upstate New York, near the top of Lake Cayuga, at the bottom of which sit Ithaca and Cornell University. Its main claim to fame is as the site of the first female convention ‘to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman’ in 1848, well before Cornell (itself an early beacon for female education) was founded. The Seneca Falls Convention was largely initiated by Quakers in this corner of the state, and took place a year after the New York State Assembly had passed a married woman’s property act (40 years before the UK got its act together to allow married women to hold property in their own name once they got married). Although its immediate impact may have been small, it stands as a landmark in the history of women’s suffrage.

One of the attendees and signatories to the Declaration of Sentiments that was the convention’s output, was a woman in her late 20’s who had moved to the town from New York City where she had grown up upon her marriage to an attorney; hre name was Eunice Foote. Although not one of the instigators of the two-day meeting, she was one of the editors of the proceedings. However, it is not the history of the vote or women’s rights I want to discuss here, but some science. Because, although her name is not one I was familiar with a few weeks ago, she does have a real claim to fame, albeit as an amateur scientist – the amateur-ness being inevitable for a woman of her day.

To change tack briefly, one of the perks of having (previously) been Master of a Cambridge College is that occasionally an alumnus/a would present me with a copy of their book. In this way I acquired a somewhat random collection of perhaps ten books which, not least because of their randomness, were (and are) a pleasure to read. One such book was given to me by Peter Stott, a climate scientist from the Met Office who has led various parts of the work of the IPCC. His book, Hot  Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change, is a somewhat terrifying read of his experiences attending and presenting his work on climate change over the last 25 years at different fora, in the face of hostility, disbelief and outright contradiction. Early on he sets the scientific scene for what the Greenhouse Effect is and why human actions have led to such dire consequences for us all. And here I read about Eunice Foote for the first time.

The early recognition of the power of carbon dioxide to trap heat is usually attributed to the work of John Tyndall, dating back to 1859 (when he showed how carbon dioxide interacted with infrared radiation) and 1861 when he discussed the potential consequence of this. However, in 1857 Foote had already published a paper (“Circumstances affecting the heat of the Sun’s rays ” in the American Journal of Science), notable for demonstrating the absorption of heat by CO2 and water vapor and hypothesizing that changing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere would alter the climate. She was not able, or was unaware of, the role of infrared radiation. But she explicitly said

‘An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature… must have necessarily resulted’.

The paper had been read to the American Association in 1856 by (a man of course) another scientist from New York State, Joseph Henry of self-inductance fame. She had very limited resources with which to do these experiments – I assume she was someone, like Hertha Ayrton later, who carried out her work in the kitchen – but she did get this paper into print. I’m not sure this is precisely a case of the Matilda Effect, since Tyndall’s work was more rigorous and a better platform on which to build an idea of climate change because it understood the role of infrared radiation and reflectance, but nevertheless Foote identified the challenge and recognized the implications. Whether Tyndall was aware of the work or not, he certainly didn’t cite it in his own papers.

At the time of her work (as of course continues to this day), people were discussing whether women were capable of doing science. It does seem that the US was well ahead of England at that time, because at least the schooling Foote had received (at Troy Female Seminary and the Rensselaer School) had allowed her to study and gain a broad education in scientific theory and practice, before girls had been able to enter serious academic schools at all in England. Queen’s College in London was the first such, and it was only founded in 1848. The work of ‘Miss Buss and Miss Beale’ opening up schools (such as Cheltenham Ladies College, North London Collegiate School and my own school, Camden School) where subjects such as science could be taught to young women, really only got going a decade later.

I find it interested that what is still a small rural part of New York State produced, not only the seminal women’s convention, but a seminal piece of science too. Foote’s name is one I must add to my own mental list of ‘women who did early science which then got overlooked’.

 

 

 

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Leaving Imperial

Posted on 31 October 2024 by Stephen

Today is my last day at Imperial College London. It marks the completion of exactly 29 years as a member of staff.

Two pictures separated by about 30 years. On the left, young Stephen presented results at the IUCr conference in Beijing in 1993; on the right, older Stephen talking about research assessment reform to funder and university leaders in Tokyo in 2023.

Two talks, about 30 years apart.

I joined Imperial as a young lecturer in Physics on 1st November 1995 and have travelled a long road since then, moving to the Department of Life Sciences a few years later, reaching the rank of professor in 2007, and shifting from structural biology research to work on the management (and culture!) of universities and science when I began writing my Reciprocal Space blog in 2008. I took on new roles at the university: Director of Undergraduate Studies in my department from 2011-15; the university’s first Associate Provost for EDI from 2017-2023; and latterly a College Consul. Outside Imperial I helped to co-found the campaign group Science is Vital and served as vice-chair from 2010-18, joined the board of CaSE from 2012-18, and was chair of DORA from 2017-23.

Such skeletal lists reveal little of the story of my last 29 years. Nor do they have anything to say of the great number of friends and colleagues who provided such depth and colour to the tale.

One day perhaps I will be in the mood to add more meat to my story, but right now I can’t quite grasp how I feel. I’ve said my goodbyes and told people I am relaxed about the next chapter (which will be devoted to caring responsibilities and my part-time role at RoRI), but I in truth I don’t really know what it will be like to no longer be an integral part of an institution that has been such an integral part of my life.

All I know today is that I wanted to mark the occasion.

 

 

 

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The Shape of Life: An Educational Resource

Posted on 25 October 2024 by Henry Gee

I’ve long been a fan of Alaskan artist Ray Troll, so imagine my pleasure when I was asked to guest on his PaleoNerds podcast (which you can find here). And more than that — Ray asked me to script and narrate an animation called the Tree of Life, which is now online here. It’s part of an educational website called the Shape of Life, a new resource for students and teachers of evolutionary biology. Dig in!

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Mary Wollstonecraft’s Wisdom

Posted on 24 October 2024 by Athene Donald

I came to Mary Wollstonecraft late, as it were, not even having come across her name until relatively recently. Perhaps that is a shameful admission, but I think she has become much more visible of late, not least due to a variety of interesting books. For me, my first introduction was via Clare Tomalin’s biography (The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft), via Charlotte Gordon’s Romantic Outlaws (covering the lives both of Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley), through the relevant parts of Richard Holmes’ Sidetracks and just now concluding with Bee Rowlatt’s In Search of Mary.

This last is less a biography of Wollstonecraft, more an exploration of how her intentions and views back then might translate into the 21st century. Some of what was radical at the time (for instance, calling on a man without a chaperone) hasn’t stood the test of time as revolutionary, but other aspects of her life and her clarion call for equality are still highly relevant and as important as ever. How does one make a better society? Well, we’d all like the answer to that one and the answer is as elusive as ever. One central part of the answer Rowlatt comes up with, having talked to what felt at times during reading like a random selection of people ranging from witches to librarians, with many stops in between, is to ‘pick up the pieces of trash that land in your path’.

I’m sure readers of my blog all want to do their bit about making the world a better place, but it can feel an impossible challenge. Furthermore, it can also feel – to my mind at least – as if the bit one does do doesn’t compare with what your neighbour is doing (assuming you have a nice neighbour). By this I mean it’s all too easy to feel that you’re not doing enough because someone you know is doing more/bigger/better things/ in wider spheres, and you just feel inadequate. It’s important to remember, and I will do my best to do so when feeling low and as if I’m no longer (as a retired professor) making enough of a contribution, that all one can do is ‘pick up the pieces of trash that land in your path’. In other words, however many challenges or problems you know surround you, you can only do so much but doing that – whatever it may be – is still worth doing.

People ask me regularly what my post-retirement plans are. As yet, I don’t know the full answer, although pieces of the jigsaw may be coming together. Those who follow me on social media will know that I’ve recently been appointed as Chair of the Department for Education’s Science Advisory Council. The Council hasn’t met yet, so I can’t give away any secrets about what we’re going to be doing, but I’m sure bringing a more explicit science grouping within the ambit of DfE can only be a good thing. I thoroughly enjoyed my earlier stint as chair of the equivalent council for DCMS, where the challenge of bringing a diverse group of experts together to make progress on pressing problems I found intensely interesting and also satisfying. Now I’m no longer Master of a college, I can admit that I find such committees more appealing than those, however vital, more concerned with formal governance, of which I have chaired many over the past decade.

In the spirit of the earlier paragraphs, though, I will say that I was very touched by the colleague who responded to my tweet about taking on this role by saying ‘You never stop serving, never stop inspiring!’. I didn’t take up the role either to serve or inspire in any conscious way. I just felt this was a job that was worth doing and that I thought I had the experience to be good at. Sometimes one does things from a sense of duty, and sometimes for personal satisfaction. It is excellent when those two coincide.

I am surprised to find my diary getting quite full with different small tasks, conversations or visits. Not really roles as such, but actions that feel as if they might make a difference to someone or something and also keep my brain in gear. It is nice to feel I have time to read interesting reports that appear, it feels, on a daily basis, about education, skills or innovation (all of which come together in the recently published Industrial Strategy Green Paper, even if I feel that coming together and coherence isn’t always obvious in that document, which highlights skills early on, and then says little about them thereafter). But there is also still a lot of work to do settling into our newly refurbished house and I need to leave time for such domesticity. For the last ten years we’ve been spoiled by living in the equivalent of a ‘tied cottage’, with the College taking responsibility for the usual tedious issues of leaks or hot water systems failing. Now it’s down to us.

There is much to consider in this rebalancing of my life, but I need to hold on to that zest for living that Wollstonecraft showed during her sadly short life, and remember that each of us can only do so much to make the world a better place.

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