Preoccupations

Ted Nelson @ St Paul's II

The Bush years have not been kind to those Americans living abroad and dependent on the dollar exchange rate. Out of necessity, then, Ted and Marlene, who first came to St Paul's in July 2007 (see here), are soon to return to the States — but, before leaving, they revisited St Paul's. Today, Ted spoke about his work, his current book-in-progress (Geeks Bearing Gifts) and Xanadu.

Farhan's blogged Ted's talk so well that there's little left for me to add. Thanks!

There were some lovely glimpses into Ted's childhood — a boy who loved reading and words and knew, by ten, who had coined tintinnabulate … chortle … serendipity; growing up in Greenwich Village without realising it, then reading about it and longing to see this Bohemian paradise; experiencing Mrs Roosevelt as a near neighbour. He was (as expected) both amusing and savage about the blackhole which is the clipboard. His father had taught him that writing is mostly re-writing, and re-writing is mostly rearrangement — so why devise writing tools that are so bad they hide the very material you're cutting? (CTRL+C, CTRL+V: cram and vomit.) By the time he went to college, he'd written a lot by linking cut and pasted pieces of writing.

Graduate school in 1960 and a computing course saw him suddenly quite sure that personal computers would come and that his job was to design the documents of the future: make it possible to see the parts and compare the versions, to visualise the origins of quotations, to expose deep rearrangements. Hypertext was first used by Ted in 1963, but it was 1986 before it was used outside his immediate circle.

It was great to have Ted and Marlene here again. I was particularly pleased that a number of our 13/14 year-old students came along: Ted has been a name to them in their ICT course — and here he was.

Technorati tags: Ted Nelson, Xanadu, ZigZag

if the algorithm holds ...

Doug Rushkoff's Edge formula entry:

Edge's Formulae for the 21st Century ('What is your formula? Your equation? Your algorithm?'). More about Doug Rushkoff, on Edge, here.

Technorati tags: Edge, Doug Rushkoff

Satire under the Nazis

Via the excellent Smashing Telly, Laughing With Hitler, originally on BBC Four and now on Google Video. It has its weaknesses, but if you're interested in satire you'll surely get a lot out of watching it. Much struck home — some of it amusing, plenty that was simply shocking:

 

• Werner Finck ('The bad times are over, we now have a thousand year Reich to get through'; 'How odd: it's spring, but everything is turning brown') and his club, Die Katakombe — look around the 8 minute mark.

 

• Traubert Petter and his performing chimps (c 28 minutes). The chimps were taught to give the Hitler salute (to the initial, stupid acclaim of party members — 'Even the monkeys greet us'), but then a party decree was issued banning apes from saluting the Führer. Traubert Petter was sent to serve on the Russian front (and survived).

   

• Fritz Muliar (c 32 minutes) who at 21 wrote his last will and testament, thinking he would be sentenced to death for making jokes about Hitler. Instead, he endured five years of hard labour in a penal battalion in Russia: 'I thought I would never laugh again'.
  
  
• Robert Dorsay (c 48 minutes): opponent of the Nazis, he was betrayed by a fellow actor and was executed on 29 October, 1943, for telling jokes and making defeatist remarks.

 

• Dieter Hildebrandt (c 51/52 minutes): 'In those days you took a tiny hammer and hit a small bell and it went [loud, reverberating noise]. Today, you hit a huge bell with a huge hammer and it goes 'ping'.'
  
  
• Fr Joseph Müller (c 52 minutes): parish priest of Groß Düngen, he was arrested (11 May, 1944) by the Gestapo. Appearing in the People's Court before Roland Freisler, he was found guilty, sentenced to the guillotine and was executed on 11 September, 1944 — for preaching Christian values and telling a joke about a dying soldier: 'Show me the people that I'm dying for', says the dying solider. A picture of Hitler and a picture of Göring are placed by him, one on each side. The soldier dies, saying, 'Now I shall die like Jesus Christ, between two criminals'.

Technorati tags: comedy, parody, Nazis, Werner Finck, Traubert Petter, Fritz Muliar, Robert Dorsay, Dieter Hildebrandt, Joseph Müller

Ted Nelson

Ted came to speak at St Paul's last Tuesday. He was on great form. Just turned 70, he spoke with few notes and to the theme of his book-in-progress, Geeks Bearing Gifts — a look at how technology advances not by deep intent and precise planning but through accident and politics ('the clash and resolution of agendas'): nineteenth century rail track development (Brunel's broad gauge vs standard gauge), space travel (the science was developed by the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, but Goddard gets the credit), the invention of radio — Tesla ('the man who invented the twentieth century') vs Marconi, the American space programme (V-2 rockets, von Braun — Operation Paperclip — and the course of NASA's development) …

Including von Braun allowed Ted to mention the 1960 film about his work, I Aim at the Stars — subtitled by wits, 'But Sometimes I Hit London'. This was a talk peppered with good jokes. (Photos left and right by Frode Hegland.)

Then on to computing technology, software and hardware, and the erratic, kludgy nature of its development. The highly partisan Apple/Microsoft war-of-loyalty is wholly beside the point when the angle of approach is the one Ted takes, but he still had a great line on Windows: you can tell that it was designed from the ground up 'because there's a lot of … ground still up there'. In a Nelson world, the clipboard of either OS would have been fundamentally overhauled and made useful, not reduced to a feeble echo of the real-life clipboard on which it was modelled.

I hope Geeks Bearing Gifts sees the light to day: listening to Ted talk about the history of computing you appreciate how deeply he has lived and known its history over the last 45+ years. He understands Doug Engelbart's vision from the inside (the mouse was a detail — 'the work of a weekend', so to speak) and he had so much to communicate in the hour he had with us he only had 15 minutes in which to demo Xanadu (beginning with the Cosmic Book) and ZigZag.

Lunch came and discussion went on. Several of our students followed up next day, emailing Ted to maintain the link he'd established so well with them. Ted and Marlene (Mallicoat) made great guests.

Ted left us with working versions of both Xanadu and ZigZag. The latter can be downloaded from here and Xanadu is now available here. There's an excellent video available of Adam Moore (Nottingham University), working with ZigZag and biological and chemical data:

Further ZigZag resources are available online here.

All in all, we had a really good few hours together. What's more, a chance discovery by Ted of some mint first editions of Computer Lib meant we could buy a copy for departmental use (student and staff), as well as one for our main reference library. It was published in 1974 and you only have to dip into it to see it was way ahead of its time.

   

Technorati tags: Ted Nelson, talks, Xanadu, ZigZag

Ice Age art

Something beautiful …

Archaeologists at the University of Tübingen have recovered the first entirely intact woolly mammoth figurine from the Swabian Jura, a plateau in the state of Baden-Württemberg, thought to have been made by the first modern humans some 35,000 years ago. It is believed to be the oldest ivory carving ever found. "You can be sure," Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas J. Conard told SPIEGEL ONLINE, "that there has been art in Swabia for over 35,000 years." Spiegel Online

Universität Tübingen 

The figure of the woolly mammoth is tiny, measuring just 3.7 cm long and weighing a mere 7.5 grams, and displays skilfully detailed carvings. It is unique in its slim form, pointed tail, powerful legs and dynamically arched trunk. It is decorated with six short incisions, and the soles of the pachyderm's feet show a crosshatch pattern. …

The geological context of the discoveries and radiocarbon dating indicate that the figurines belong to the Aurignacian culture, which refers to an area of southern France and is associated with the arrival of the first modern humans in Europe. Multiple radiocarbon dates from sediment in the Vogelherd Cave yielded ages between 30,000 and 36,000 years ago, the University of Tübingen reports. Some methods give an even older date. Spiegel Online

Universität Tübingen 

These tiny artworks, recently unearthed, are among the oldest examples of figurative art ever found. (For comparison, the oldest known cave/rock paintings go back to 32,000-40,000 years ago. The paintings at Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain are somewhere around 15,000 years old.) Thinking Meat

via 3 Quarks Daily

Technorati tags: Ice Age, Swabia, Homo sapiens, Man

Privacy

Wanting to look into 'privacy' some more I asked a few friends about the long roots of the modern idea. Where does it come from and what conceptions of privacy did previous ages entertain? Of course, this is a vast subject and the very term even as used today is complicated. The OED's definitions run (I've put the first cited date of usage in square brackets after each definition):

The state or quality of being private.
1. a. The state or condition of being withdrawn from the society of others, or from public interest; seclusion. [c 1450]
b. The state or condition of being alone, undisturbed, or free from public attention, as a matter of choice or right; freedom from interference or intrusion. Also attrib., designating that which affords a privacy of this kind. [1814]

2. a. pl. Private or retired places; private apartments; places of retreat. Now rare. [1678]
b. A secret place, a place of concealment. Obs. [1686]

3. a. Absence or avoidance of publicity or display; a condition approaching to secrecy or concealment. [1598]
b. Keeping of a secret, reticence. Obs. [1736]

4. a. A private matter, a secret; pl. private or personal matters or relations. Now rare. [1591]
b. pl. The private parts. Obs. [1656]

5. Intimacy, confidential relations. Obs. [1638]

6. The state of being privy to some act; = PRIVITY. rare. [1719]

For the etymology, we go to private (a.) — and this immediately tells us so much:

ad. L. prvt-us withdrawn from public life, deprived of office, peculiar to oneself, private; as n. a man in private life; prop. pa. pple. of prv-re to bereave, deprive

A friend who's a medievalist recommended A History of Private Life and a classicist friend recommended the same ('though it only starts from Rome'). I've been meaning to make a start on those volumes (five?) for some time.

Another classicist friend, a Latin specialist, came straight back with: Andrew M. Riggsby, " 'Public' and 'private' in Roman culture: the case of the cubiculum," Journal of Roman Archaeology 10 (1997), 36–56. I'm going to have to go the Bodleian for that, but I did find Riggsby's university homepage and also this:

Riggsby describes the Roman conception of privacy as “not so much a right as a mandate: ‘If you are going to behave that way, you must do it in a certain restricted area. Keep it out of our view.’” … Keeping Riggsby’s interpretation of the Roman “right to privacy” in mind, the obligation to sequester morally questionable behavior outweighs any right to unmonitored freedom of action within the confines of “private space.” … Citing the anti-democratic tendencies of Roman society, Riggsby points out that, “The state does not permit a protected private sphere to go unwatched and allow it to become a potential source of disruption.” … According to Riggsby, “[Roman] Aristocratic moral tradition dictated that any act…is subject to the moral evaluation of the community. In one sense, then, there was no generally accepted norm of privacy, no legitimate moral claim to freedom from judgment of certain kinds of activity or activity within certain social or physical regions.”

Nearer our own times, there's masses of material, but I liked this for its broad sweep — suggestive as a springboard to more reading and research, and for its focus on how space described possibilities for privacy:

English 792X: Seminar: The Invention of Privacy in the Renaissance    Prof. Elsky    T 6:20-8:00
The premise of this course is that the modern imagination of everyday life began in the Renaissance. This interdisciplinary course examines how a social and intellectual revolution led to the invention of privacy as a cherished and sometimes feared value. We will look at new methods of analyzing literature based on an understanding of material culture, particularly the everyday life of the times. Our starting point will be a look at the way people lived in their homes and houses, and the way people's living spaces were completely redesigned in this period to include a variety of private withdrawing rooms. We will consider examples of new spaces designed for men, women, and families, and how these spaces affected family relations and relations between men and women. We will then turn to an exploration of how these new spatial structures actually altered the structure of the imagination as reflected in the major writers of the period. Literary works will include lyric, drama, and prose, as well as personal diaries written by both men and women. We will emphasize how the great writers of the period used the settings of privacy to reveal deep personal and spiritual fulfillment, on the one hand, but also the threat of social subversion, betrayal, illicitness, revenge, and murder.

Technorati tags: privacy, cubiculum, private life

Historic Quotes

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarised with the ideas from the beginning. — Max Planck

Found here — a great source of quotations, some just plain "historic", others forecasting the future, greeting new discoveries/ideas, etc, and getting things badly wrong:

"What use could this company make of an electrical toy?" — The President of Western Union responding to Alexander Graham Bell's offer to Western Union of the exclusive rights to the telephone for $100,000 in 1876.

Technorati tags: quotations, future, forecasting

Alan Kay's & Doug Engelbart's vision

Alan Kay, interviewed in CIO Insight (another link via Martin's del.icio.us links): 

A great thinker in our field is Doug Engelbart, who is mostly remembered for inventing the computer mouse. If you search Google you will find Doug's Web page, where there are 75 essays about what personal computing should be about. And on one of the early hits you can watch the demo he gave in 1968 to 3,000 people in San Francisco, showing them what the world of the future would be like. 

Engelbart, right from his very first proposal to ARPA [Advanced Research Projects Agency], said that when adults accomplish something that's important, they almost always do it through some sort of group activity. If computing was going to amount to anything, it should be an amplifier of the collective intelligence of groups. But Engelbart pointed out that most organizations don't really know what they know, and are poor at transmitting new ideas and new plans in a way that's understandable. Organizations are mostly organized around their current goals. Some organizations have a part that tries to improve the process for attaining current goals. But very few organizations improve the process of figuring out what the goals should be. 

Most of the ideas in that sphere, good ideas that would apply to business, were written down 40 years ago by Engelbart. But in the last few years I've been asking computer scientists and programmers whether they've ever typed E-N-G-E-L-B-A-R-T into Google-and none of them have. I don't think you could find a physicist who has not gone back and tried to find out what Newton actually did. It's unimaginable. Yet the computing profession acts as if there isn't anything to learn from the past, so most people haven't gone back and referenced what Engelbart thought. 

The things that are wrong with the Web today are due to this lack of curiosity in the computing profession. And it's very characteristic of a pop culture. Pop culture lives in the present; it doesn't really live in the future or want to know about great ideas from the past. I'm saying there's a lot of useful knowledge and wisdom out there for anybody who is curious, and who takes the time to do something other than just executing on some current plan. Cicero said, "Who knows only his own generation remains always a child." People who live in the present often wind up exploiting the present to an extent that it starts removing the possibility of having a future.

Lots more besides to enjoy: on the way operating systems have been written as 'layered architecture … even though layered systems don't scale very well' — 'This is an example of the invisibility of normality. We're not even aware that we're accepting most things we accept. Any creative person has to try and force their brain to reconsider things that are accepted so widely they seem like laws of the universe. Very often they aren't laws of the universe; they're just conventions'. On the Viewpoints Research Institute, of which he is President: 

The Viewpoints Research Institute is actually involved in three new projects. One is the $100 laptop project that Nicholas Negroponte is doing. That is coming along very well. The first 1,000 factory-built machines were built in the last few weeks. The plan is to build 5 million to 8 million laptops this summer, and perhaps as many as 50 million in 2008. We're very involved in that. The other thing is a recently funded NSF project that will take a couple of giant steps, we hope, toward reinventing programming. The plan is to take the entire personal-computing experience from the end user down to the silicon and make a system from scratch that recapitulates everything people are used to—desktop publishing, Internet experiences, etc.—in less than 20,000 lines of code. It would be kind of like a Moore's Law step in software. It's going to be quite difficult to do this work in five years, but it will be exciting. 

The third project we're just getting started on and don't have completely funded yet, is to make a new kind of user interface that can actually help people learn things, from very mundane things about how their computer system works to more interesting things like math, science, reading and writing. This project came about because of the $100 laptop. In order for the $100 laptop to be successful in the educational realm, it has to take on some mentoring processes itself. This is an old idea that goes all the way back to the sixties. Many people have worked on it. It just has never gotten above threshold.

On the possibilities for computers and computing experience in the future: 

How much learning is a person willing to do to really learn how to use a computer? The answer, over the last 25 years of the commercialization of personal computing, is almost none. Nobody really wants to put in any amount of effort. The things that people have been willing to learn have tended to be like the media they grew up with, which have really simple user interfaces. (The big exception is video games.) You don't see Doug Engelbart's approach to user interface, which was an incredibly efficient, two-handed interface that required training to learn how to use. 

One way of looking at personal computing is to focus on the kinds of things that computers can help people learn. There are a whole bunch of things that can be done if learning, rather than function, matters. If you were to change the approach to the user interface, as we thought we were doing at Xerox PARC, to a more learning-curve-oriented system, then you would be able to accelerate the acceptance of the newer ideas about what computers can do.

But perhaps most of all: 

… the reason I work with children and not adults is because adults are famously difficult to change in any significant way. They've made a commitment to the norms of the world they live in. Children are born not knowing what culture they've been born into, how the culture thinks, and what that culture thinks is important. Yet they are born with some built-in patterns of thinking that are universal. Since the late sixties, I've been interested in the extent to which you could cultivate the kind of thinking skills that only a few people use in the world today, by getting children to learn much more widely and much more fluently than most adults have. If you want to make a change, get the children to think differently.

Technorati tags: Alan Kay, Doug Engelbart, Viewpoints Research Institute, OLPC, computers, computing, collective intelligence, organsations

Rates of change

Last term I gave a short talk to English teachers of pre-13 year-olds who had come for the day to Radley (where I was then teaching). I promised them the slides of that talk — and my apologies for the inordinate delay: I had thought copyright issues were all straightforward, but some slides needed to be sifted or checked, and then I got caught up in finishing one job, moving and starting another. The slides are here (right-click and 'Save as', or click and open with PowerPoint).

After two initial slides which (I imagine) speak for themselves and set the context for what I wanted to say about the rate of technological change and education, I went on to draw a simple contrast between the rate of change when printing began and the rate of digital technological change now. Back in January of last year (2006), Professor Kevin Sharpe (Queen Mary College, London) appeared on In Our Time, 'Print Culture in Seventeenth Century England' (Radio 4, 29.1.06). He gave these estimates for the number of books (titles) appearing per year in England after the advent of printing (Gutenberg 1454, Caxton 1477):

During Henry VIII’s time, about 80 

By the end of the sixteenth century: 250 to 300 

In the 1630s: c 600 

Eve of Civil War: c 2000 (1641), 4000 (1642) 

Remainder of seventeenth century (particularly the 1680s): c 3000

(For an alternative view on the early days of printing and the number of titles in circulation throughout Europe just a short time after its invention, see John H Lienhard's essay, What people said about books in 1498. I tried to contact Professor Sharpe for his response to Lienhard's essay, but was unsuccessful. Now I'm in London I shall try again and hope to come back to this topic.) I then contrasted this with some of the history of digital change: I used some of the shots from the CNET News' piece on Making the first disk drive (eg, 'Bill Healy, executive vice president at Hitachi, holds up a platter from a 1-inch microdrive in his right hand. In his left is a 24-inch platter from IBM's RAMAC [Random Access Method of Accounting and Control], which came out 50 years ago'), the Moore's Law page from Intel, a BBC piece — Twenty-five years of the IBM PC, the posting of computer code for the WWW in August, 1991 and early 1992 … along with various statistics illustrating the rate of growth of some key sites (the usual suspects), a look at the impact on broadcasting, newspapers … the impact of mobile technology, ubiquitous computing … (All data relating to viewing/usage statistics stems from the middle of last year or thereabouts.)

Sandwiched in the middle of my talk are some slides I've had reason to use before: Tim Berners-Lee on how the web was always read/write;  Will Richardson's list of seven Web 2.0 "things" teachers and schools need to address; the now well-known Prensky digital natives/digital immigrants distinction; and a quotation that is thought to be from Howard Rheingold (but which we still cannot source). Towards the end, I wanted also to throw out some hooks to John Seely Brown's work and there was time to hint at some of the ways in which we are beginning to discover and use social media in education.

***

As the sorting out of my slides dragged on and I procrastinated, I collected two snippets from other blogs by way of illustrating more about the changes afoot and to come.

1) Last November, John Naughton posted The Rise of Freeconomics:

Lovely post by Chris Anderson (he of Long Tail fame)…

It’s a big day [26 November] for Moore’s Law. I’m not sure anyone else has noticed this, but by my calculations we have in the past few months reached the penny-per-MIPS* milestone. Intel’s Core Duo running at 2.13 GHz now costs around $200 at retail (it’s around $180 at volume), but can do about 20,000 MIPS. I remember my first 6 MHz 286 PC in 1982 that did 0.9 MIPS. I have no idea what the CPU cost then, but the PC it came in cost nearly $3,000 so it couldn’t have been cheap. Say it was around $1,000/MIPS back then. Now it’s $0.01/MIPS. I know I shouldn’t be astounded by Moore’s Law anymore, but that really is something.

Good Morning Silicon Valley picked up on this and added an interesting quote from Alec Saunders, who added some extra historical perspective:

In 1977, Digital Equipment’s Vax 11/780 was a 1 MIPS minicomputer, and the Cray-1 supercomputer delivered blindingly fast execution at 150 MIPS.

By 1982, 5 years later, a 6 MHz 286 had about the same equivalent processing power as the Vax.

Sometime in the mid 1990’s, Cray’s benchmark was finally passed on PowerPC processors, as PowerMac’s emerged benchmarked at 150 to 300 MIPS.

A 1999 era Pentium III/500 delivered 800 MIPS of processing power.

A year later, in 2000, the Playstation 2 pumped out an astounding 6000 MIPS.

My 2002 vintage Athlon XP clocks in at 4200 MIPS.

And today, for about $200, you can buy a 20,000 MIPS processor.

*Note for non-geeks: MIPS stands for “million instructions per second”, a standard measure of CPU power.

2) In the same month, Bruno Giussani: 

Running notes from the second European Futurists Conference in Lucerne (Switzerland).

Walter Hehl of IBM Research - he works at the Zürich/Rüschlikon lab - presents some of the results of IBM's Global Technology Outlook 2006, a "vision of the future" report that's updated annually. Charts and graphs and IBM lingo ("the power of modularity"). A few jots:

• Moore's Law will continue to be relevant (with some problems)
• Computer's power consumption and heat are key issues; IBM has a program to design "green data centers" - data centers with low-power consumption.
• Chips transitioning to nanotechnology and "self-assembly"
• Videogames are becoming technical drivers (chip development, etc)
• All objects will get IDs (and homepages). So what's the next step after everything is connected?
• That will create an "event-driven world", and we will need software to make sense of this huge mass of continuous events
• Software will increasingly structure work and organizations
• The evolution of software will accelerate. I don't see an end for the complexity of software
• Real and virtual worlds will overlap (Sam Palmisano, IBM's CEO, held a meeting in Second Life recently, and IBM announced a USD 10 million investment in SL and 3D intranet)

And now, long-suffering attendees of last autumn's short talk, I can offer some compensation by updating things yet again. For in the last few weeks and days has come news of some amazing, Moore's Law-extending/defeating developments:

2007 HP nanotech design could be leap forward for chips
Today, HP scientists intend to announce they have created a new computer-chip design enabling an eightfold increase in the number of transistors on a chip, without making the transistors smaller. The scientists said their advance would equal a leap of three generations of Moore's Law, a prediction formulated in 1964 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that forecast chip makers could double the number of transistors on a chip every couple of years. "This is three generations of Moore's Law, without having to do all the research and development to shrink the transistors,'' said Stan Williams, a senior fellow at HP in Palo Alto. "If in some sense we can leapfrog three generations, that is something like five years of R&D. That is the potential of this breakthrough.''

Moore's Law Seen Extended In Chip Breakthrough
Intel Corp. and IBM have announced one of the biggest advances in transistors in four decades, overcoming a frustrating obstacle by ensuring microchips can get even smaller and more powerful. The breakthrough, achieved via separate research efforts and announced Friday, involves using an exotic new material to make transistors … "At the transistor level, we haven't changed the basic materials since the 1960s. So it's a real big breakthrough," said Dan Hutcheson, head of VLSI Research, an industry consultancy. "Moore's Law was coming to a grinding halt," he added … The latest breakthrough means Intel, IBM and others can proceed with technology roadmaps that call for the next generation of chips to be made with circuitry as small as 45 nanometers, about 1/2000th the width of a human hair. Intel said it will use the technology, based on a silvery metal called hafnium, in new processors coming out later this year …

Teraflops chip points to future
A chip with 80 processing cores and capable of more than a trillion calculations per second (teraflops) has been unveiled by Intel. The Teraflops chip is not a commercial release but could point the way to more powerful processors, said the firm. The chip achieves performance on a piece of silicon no bigger than a fingernail that 11 years ago required a machine with 10,000 chips inside it. The challenge is to find a way to program the many cores simultaneously.

Ian provides a good overview of what this means, couched in the kind of time spans that make sense to schools, and I'm going to leave you with David Warlick: 

We must start talking about education from the perspective of digital citizens, our children, and the learning experiences that they need right now, to be ready to succeed and prosper in a world that is changing so fast …

Technorati tags: printing, books, Moore's Law, microchips, chips, teraflops

London (week two)

 

 

Celebrated this, the second week of living in London by dashing off to the Velázquez at the National and the British Library's London: A Life in Maps.

The painting shown above, An Old Woman Cooking Eggs (1618, oil, 100.5 x 119.5 cm, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh), is my favourite of those on show. I love its colours, its use of light and shadow — and its striking use of a double perspective: I didn't buy the catalogue, but I browsed it and recall it as talking quite excitedly about how we look down on the eggs, the bowl, the knife, the knife's shadow … and directly at the boy and old woman. Fascinating. The small, free exhibition guide takes a rather different view: 'he is not able to fuse the independently studied parts to create convincing space'. The boy-painter, just 19, may well have struggled, but I still find the painting utterly memorable and the two angles of vision are part of what makes it stay in my mind. That, the colours, light … and the humanity of the two figures.

Rod's piece about the Velázquez is here, says many good things and makes many good links. More about the maps later — I've got Peter Barber's book to read and I want to get hold of Peter Whitfield's London: A Life in Maps.

Technorati tags: Velázquez, London, maps, National Gallery, British Library

Alchemy

Before I forget … Last Tuesday, passing en route Lincoln's Inn — looking beautiful on what we might soon come to call an unseasonably cold night, I went to the Royal College of Surgeons for a Royal Institution Lecture: 'Alchemy, the occult beginnings of science: Paracelsus, John Dee and Isaac Newton' — Dr Phillip Ball, freelance writer and consultant editor, Nature; Dr Peter Forshaw, British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of London; Professor William Newman, Chair of Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University, USA.

Alchemy first came across my path back in my teens (again), reading Jung and then discovering the bizarre Helios bookshop at Toddington in rural Gloucestershire. A chance to attend a Jungian therapists' informal conference quickly brought all this to a close: I was taken aback at their anti-scientific attitude, but I continued to be fascinated by alchemy, the origins of science … and, later, the NeoPlatonism of the Renaissance.

We arrived a tad late at the RCS, courtesy of the warmth and cheer of the Seven Stars, to find Philip Ball already in full spate, rushing through the life of Paracelsus, his extraordinary travels (Russia, the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, Scotland), his aspiration to devise the first "theory of everything", his rootedness in NeoPlatonism, the doctrine of signatures, chemical medicine, the tria prima (sulphur, mercury, salt), macrocosm and microcosm …

Cornelius Agrippa and Marsilius Ficino investigated occult (hidden) forces and Paracelsus brought alchemy to this table. Philip Ball suggests that Paracelsus is important in the history or development of science — he worked from one observation to explain others and made central to his work the very idea of explaining the observed. Philip Ball's book, The Devil's Doctor, appeared earlier this year. The man was clearly extraordinary. From the Guardian review:

His stay in Basle [1527] had started out well. Many students had attended his unofficial courses. He told them that doctors didn't need "eloquence or knowledge of language and books", but "profound knowledge of Nature and her works". His own wisdom was, he told them, based "upon the foundation of experience, the supreme teacher of all things". 

… medicine in the early Renaissance had advanced little since Roman times. For instance, physicians did not think it necessary to examine patients, relying instead on a urine sample for diagnosis. "All they can do is to gaze at piss," said Paracelsus scornfully. He accused them of "villainy and knavery" and said that if people realised how they were being deceived, medics would be stoned in the street. They, in turn, accused him of drunkenness, and it's true that Paracelsus did prefer to expound his wisdom in taverns than in university lecture halls.

His written works, most of which were only published posthumously, could be "paranoid, repetitive, vain and self-aggrandising". But beneath the bluster and posturing were genuine insights. Giordano Bruno said of him: "Seeing how much this inebriate knew, what should I think he might have discovered had he been sober?" Paracelsus turned his back on Aristotle and Galen and embraced experience as his mentor. He taught that "every land is a leaf of the Codex of Nature, and he who would explore her must tread her books with his feet". Paracelsus brought "a new, questing spirit" to natural philosophy. He investigated the plague at considerable risk to himself, devised a "chemical diagnosis of madness" and, although celibate, wrote about "the diseases of women" at a time when medics turned a blind eye to their suffering.

… For Paracelsus, alchemy was not merely about the creation of gold, but was a medical and mystical philosophy that explained the functioning of the body (the transformation of food into flesh, blood and excrement) as well as the more general principles that revealed the mysteries of the earth. "Alchemy becomes so powerful and so beautiful in Paracelsus's hands," writes Ball, "because it is a part of a greater system: a magical vision of the universe distilled in the overheated alembic of a feverishly imaginative mind." Paracelsus saw the "great art of transformation" - alchemy - as the key to understanding man and nature. It was "a reflection of the natural art that makes a flower grow, that stores up metals in the earth, and brings wind and rain. By taking alchemy out of the smoky laboratory and setting it free in wild nature, Paracelsus stakes his claim to genius."

… writers from Blake to Borges have been captivated by his words …

Peter Forshaw took over, to speak at an equally fast pace about John Dee, adviser to Elizabeth I on matters astrological and scientific, a mathematician and a 'converser with angels'. A keen advocate of colonisation, he was the first man to use the term 'the British Empire'. Through the Propaedeumata Aphoristica (1558) to Monas Hieroglyphica (1564; Dee's glyph, right, is "explained" in this work), alchemy figures. Owner of the largest private library in England at the time, his marginalia indicate he interrogated the alchemical texts he read, testing, checking weights, recording the time taken for experiments to run and results to be achieved. His reading of Pantheus' Voarchadumia, as revealed in his marginalia to that work, was mentioned, and this is the abstract to Hilde Norrgrén's article, 'Interpretation and the Hieroglyphic Monad: John Dee's Reading of Pantheus's Voarchadumia':

John Dee's marginalia in his copy of Johannes Pantheus's Voarchadumia (now in the British Library) are an interesting source of information about the development of Dee's scientific ideas in the period between the Propaedeumata Aphoristica (1558) and the Monas Hieroglyphica (1564). In reading the book, Dee has systematically compared the text with Pantheus's earlier work, the Ars Metallicae, and noted any differences between the two largely identical works. Therefore, most of Dee's comments are not indications of his own interests, as has previously been assumed. Only the marginalia that are not concerned with comparing the two texts can be taken to express Dee's own views. These marginalia, probably written in 1559, provide evidence that Dee had already at this time a strong interest in cabbalistic methods as a means of gaining knowledge about natural substances. Cabbalistic speculation was to be central to Dee's thought in the Monas Hieroglyphica, and has previously been taken to indicate a dramatic change in Dee's scientific outlook, towards a spiritual quest. In his marginalia in the Voarchadumia, however, Dee appears to be using cabbalistic methods to gain information on wholly material, non-spiritual matters. The abundant use of the symbol of the hieroglyphic monad in the marginalia provides a further source of insight into the alchemical import of the symbol, five years before the publication of the Monas Hieroglyphica.

Finally, William Newman, author of Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution, and currently engaged in 'deciphering Isaac Newton's chymical laboratory notebooks and manuscripts' (read more at Newton's Alchemy, recreated). Boyle, Locke, Newton all believed in the possibility of transmutation. Professor Newman demonstrated some alchemical experiments performed by Newton: the "silica garden" (Newton's Alchemy, recreated: 'a 17th century version of a silica garden, made with potassium silicate and ferric chloride. In the 17th century, it was thought to confirm the fact that metals can be made to "vegetate"; 'Newton wrote an unpublished treatise about such metallic trees - for him they were an indication that metals had their own sort of life, and hence could, it was hoped, be made to multiply'); the apparent transmutation of silver into gold, as performed originally by Wenceslas Seiler (I think I have this name right) in 1677 at the Court of Leopold I; the "transmutation" of iron into copper, by immersing an iron nail in copper sulphate. (Inadequate cameraphone pics follow.)

 

 

Check out The Newton Project:

Although Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) is best known for his theory of universal gravitation and discovery of calculus, his interests were much broader than is usually appreciated. In addition to his celebrated natural philosophical writings and mathematical works, Newton also wrote many theological texts and alchemical tracts. We already have texts and images of many of these works on offer on our site and our goal is to make all Newton's writings freely available online.

And the RCS needs an early re-visit …

   

Technorati tags: alchemy, history of science, Newton, Paracelsus, John Dee, Royal College of Surgeons, Royal Institution, Philip Ball, Peter Forshaw, William Newman

A remembered future

Sometimes, posts just seem … right. This is Morgan Meis (3 Quarks Daily):

The twentieth century was insane. We forget to remember that. … Through it all, the challenge to the coherence and sustainability of human experience was relentless. If tradition was disrupted and broken down here and there in the 19th century, it was upended completely, remade from the insight (inside ?) out, and sometimes obliterated during the 20th. …

Czeslaw Milosz was as sensitive to these issues as anyone. This is a man who picked his way through the rubble of Warsaw when its ruins were still steaming, when the place was just an open wound. That experience, and the knowledge gained from it, is shot through everything that Milosz ever wrote. For Milosz, man is guaranteed nothing. That’s it. Nothing. And man can be reduced, or reduce himself, to nothing, at any moment. …

Gombrowicz too experienced such things. … But Gombrowicz chose flight, literally and metaphorically. … That is his particular freedom. It is the freedom of Socrates as Kierkegaard describes him in The Concept of Irony, the freedom that escapes from every possible determination.

Truth be told, this version of freedom annoys Milosz. Because for Milosz, the possibility of meaning in human affairs is dependent on commitment. If nothing else, it is founded on the capacity for human beings to hold experience together even as forces from within and without work to tear it apart. How one does this is not entirely clear but Milosz’s entire oeuvre is the sustained attempt to do so even as he lacks a blueprint. That is a pretty brave literary task to set in front of oneself. From Milosz’s standpoint, Gombrowicz has retreated into his own consciousness instead of forcing himself constantly to confront the problems of the world as it is encountered. …

But then the two come together again, in Milosz’s mind, because Gombrowicz never falls into the trap of those intellectuals who have lost track of the root problems of experience, actual experience, that have been thrown up by the 20th century. Milosz writes that, “A comparison of Gombrowicz with western writers, with Sartre, for example, would reveal, in the case of the latter, a deficiency of a certain type of experience connected with history and specific cultural traditions, a deficiency that is compensated for by theory.”

I think we’re still working this stuff through. And I’ll make one more rash claim. The future right now is in the past. Sometimes it is in the past, the immediate past, where things get clear again. For those of us whose lives stretch from the era of the 20th century into the next one, the most important thing for taking the future seriously is doing work on the things that have recently past. Only now is it becoming even vaguely possible to understand how important are the tentative thoughts put forward by people like Milosz and Gombrowicz. And there are others, back there, waiting for us. We simply have to take seriously the idea that turning our backs on the future is a way of renewing it.

We are, beyond question, 'still working this stuff through'. Spot on.

'A remembered future'? In July of last year, I wrote:

In 1984, Harold Fisch published A Remembered Future and wrote of how art can give us 'the unappeased memory of a future still to be fulfilled'. More recently, Heaney has written of how 'We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. The best it can do is to give us an experience that is like foreknowledge of certain things which we already seem to be remembering. What is at work … is the mind's capacity to conceive a new plane of regard for itself, a new scope for its own activity' ('Joy or Night', 1990, in The Redress of Poetry, 1995).

For me, reading Milosz is to remember the future.

Technorati tags: Czeslaw Milosz, Milosz, Gombrowicz

"The Google Generation"

The phrase Tony Blair used on Thursday in his conference speech is examined in today's Guardian:

"Google isn't actually something I associate with young people any more," says Andy Hobsbawm, the European chairman and co-founder of the digital marketing company Agency.com - and son of the decidedly non-digital Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. "To me, it's part of the fabric of everyday living. It's too universal." By way of better signifying the youthful flash the PM was presumably after, Hobsbawm would recommend a quick dip into the discourse of marketing and advertising. "There are lots of different versions of the same concept," he explains. "It usually refers to the people for whom the internet and communications technology were in the world when they were born. A few years ago, somebody [Marc Prensky] wrote an article, Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, about the people for whom the world had always been that way, as against the ones who had to adapt to it. Everything else is just versions of that."

The broadest label, he explains, is Generation Y - those "born between 1977 and 2001, or thereabouts". Those who have focused specifically on the impact of technology have also talked about the Internet Generation ("probably born from the late 80s onwards"), and the IM - as in instant messaging - Generation. Then, in recent years, there has been much talk about the MySpace Generation, and even the Mypod Generation, "which is meant to be a combination of MySpace and iPod, but I think that's probably getting a bit silly".

Running through all these terms is a loose set of common assumptions: first, that this generation is globally attuned, propelling all kinds of cultural product, from Japanese cartoons to American indie rock bands, around the planet at extraordinary speed. How they might digest particular aspects of the media defies the old rules. In the US, for instance, there has been a great fuss about the fact that Jon Stewart's Daily Show is the most popular news outlet among those between 18 and 25. And their habits of interacting with the new media means that, often by word of mouth, small-scale internet operations can suddenly flower into huge concerns. Just as Napster heralded the decline of the compact disc, now YouTube makes traditional TV look positively stone age.

Most significantly, though, given the traits Tony Blair implicitly ascribes to the Google Generation, today's under-25s turn out not to conform to their caricature as consumerist slaves to all things "aspirational", but to be much more complicated. "Young people are still defined by what they consume - it's still important to have the right badges - but I'm not sure that's about any display of purchasing power," says Hobsbawm. "It's more about knowledge: being up with what's cool and interesting, defining yourself by what you do than rather what you buy."

And there's this, which certainly squares with how my sons and my younger friends are experiencing things, here in the UK and in Europe:

… the prime minister seemed to imply, they are the lucky pioneers of life on demand. But in stark contrast to all this, another version of the Google Generation represents today's young people as the victims of a historical curse. Earlier this year, there was a great buzz in the US about a book entitled Generation Debt, written by a 24-year-old Yale graduate named Anya Kamenetz, and cheerily subtitled "Why now is a terrible time to be young".

"I was born into a broke generation," she wrote. "I look around and I see people who have borrowed more to go to college than they can repay, who can't find a good job, can't save, can't make solid plans. Their credit card bills mount every month, while their lives stall on the first uphill slope. Born into a century of unimaginable prosperity in the richest country in the world, those of us between 18 and 35 have somehow been cheated out of our inheritance."

In Britain, the picture seems little different. "Debt is the ever-present conversation among my friends," says a university student I spoke to. "When we talk about the future, it's always, 'Will we ever be able to afford a house? Will we be able to get a decent pension?' It's kind of simultaneously normal and quite shocking. And even when it's kept in the background, it's there with just about all the people I know."

According to a view crystallised in the title of a recent report by the centre-right thinktank Reform, the Google Generation might easily be rebranded as the Ipod generation - "Insecure, pressured, over-taxed and debt-ridden". "You would think this generation have never had it so good, to quote another prime minister," says Andrew Haldenby, Reform's director. "The opportunities for international travel, education, very liberated social mores - it's a great time to be young, you would think. But then you start to look at people's circumstances and talk to young people themselves, and they expect to have a difficult career and be in a difficult economic position well into their 30s. They're probably going to have a low disposable income, difficulty getting on the housing ladder and high levels of debt."

By 2010, he estimates, the average graduate will be paying half their income in tax, loan repayments and newly high pension contributions. The future Haldenby foresees is of a glaring disjunction between the supposed opportunities of a hi-tech society and the lack of cash to actually pursue them.

John Harris goes on to look at the way this B-side of life in the Google Generation is reflected in contemporary pop songs. He concludes:

Those who are seeking to snare the attention of a supposedly digital generation should take note: among these people, the idea that new technology is worthy of comment is almost pathetically old-fashioned. Once you've implied that using the web is remarkable, you've probably lost them.

Trying to be politically hip with technology is just embarrassing, but this of course doesn't mean that we should settle for taking technology for granted. Good teachers spend a great deal of their time reminding themselves and their students that the world (and more) is remarkable —'worthy of comment'.

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Talking of getting used to technology, I've just read Maciej Ceglowski's fine posting in his blog,