Lovely NYTimes column by Frank Rich. Sample:

BARACK OBAMA’S most devilish political move since the 2008 campaign was to appoint a Republican congressman from upstate New York as secretary of the Army. This week’s election to fill that vacant seat has set off nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war. No matter what the results in that race on Tuesday, the Republicans are the sure losers. This could be a gift that keeps on giving to the Democrats through 2010, and perhaps beyond.

The governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia were once billed as the marquee events of Election Day 2009 — a referendum on the Obama presidency and a possible Republican “comeback.” But preposterous as it sounds, the real action migrated to New York’s 23rd, a rural Congressional district abutting Canada. That this pastoral setting could become a G.O.P. killing field, attracting an all-star cast of combatants led by Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, William Kristol and Newt Gingrich, is a premise out of a Depression-era screwball comedy. But such farces have become the norm for the conservative movement — whether the participants are dressing up in full “tea party” drag or not.

The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement’s undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck, neither of whom has what Palin once called the “actual responsibilities” of public office, would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity. Over the short term, at least, their wish could come true…

Yippee!

Eh? George Monbiot’s supporting Blair’s candidacy for the EU Presidency? Well, here’s what he says:

Tony Blair’s bid to become president of the European Union has united the left in revulsion. His enemies argue that he divided Europe by launching an illegal war; he kept the UK out of the eurozone and the Schengen agreement; he is contemptuous of democracy (surely a qualification?); greases up to wealth and power and lets the poor go to hell; he is ruthless, mendacious, slippery and shameless. But never mind all that. I’m backing Blair….

Read on, my friends, read on. George has a Cunning Plan.

Pondering the strange paradox that Cambridge is currently ranked second (after Harvard) in the world ranking of universities, despite the fact that its income is probably only a fifth of Harvard’s, I came on this terrific blog post by Mary Beard, who is Professor of Classics at Cambridge. Excerpt:

I still have a terrible sinking feeling about the new Research Excellence Framework, and its stress on the ‘impact’ of research. I took a good hard look at the recent consultation document produced by HEFCE … and at the “indicators” which might demonstrate “impact”. There are almost forty indicators, of which only four or five could possible ever apply to an arts and humanities subject. Most refer to income from industry, increased turnover for particular businesses, improved health outcome, better drugs (medicinal rather than recreational I imagine) and changes in public opinion (eg reductions in smoking). One of my colleagues ruefully observed that humanities research probably had a track record of encouraging smoking, at least among researchers… all that angst in the library.

Even the indicators which looked as if they might apply to us. Try “enriched appreciation of heritage or culture, for example as measured through surveys.” How on earth would a survey show the impact of, lets say, Wittgenstein? Even HEFCE seems to have given up at the end. Under the category “Other quality of life benefits” there were no indicators. Someone had just written “Please suggest what might be included”. A generous appeal to the academic community, or desperation?

[…]

British research punches far above its weight — unlike British sport (which is no more “useful”). If our middle distance runners did half as well as our universities (four out of the top six in the recent world ranking are British), there would be a national celebration and a triumphal procession in an open topped bus.

And look at the money the government is pouring into sport, on the correct principle … that you have to support generously a wide range of activities and people, in order to produce a very few medallists. Why dont they use that argument for academic research too?

Saturday dawned damp and overcast, as if November had arrived early. The wind had begun to strip the trees, carpeting the footpath with leaves. It seemed like a day for hunkering down with the newspapers and a good book. But then I remembered that it’s Cambridge’s annual ‘Festival of Ideas’ (the Humanities’ counterpart to the Science Festival of which I’m a Patron). The philosopher Hugh Mellor was billed to give a talk on Frank Ramsey in the University Library at 11am. So I got up and went to hear him.

Frank Ramsey is a Cambridge legend — a wunderkind who died tragically young at the age of 26, and yet made an indelible impression on those who had known him.

I first heard of him when I came to Emmanuel in 1968 and bought a battered copy of Keynes’s Essays in Biography in which there’s an essay on this prodigious mathematican-cum-philosopher-cum-economist. In it, Keynes laments the passing of his young protege and remembers

“His bulky Johnsonian frame, his spontaneous gurgling laugh, the simplicity of his feelings and reactions, half-alarming sometimes and occasionally almost cruel in their directness and literalness, his honesty of mind and heart, his modesty, and the amazing, easy efficiency of the intellectual machine which ground away behind his wide temples and broad, smiling face, have been taken from us at the height of their excellence and before their harvest of work and life could be gathered in.”

Ramsey published only two papers in economics (which was not his main field). They were published in the Economic Journal (of which Keynes was the editor). The first (published in 1927) was “A Contribution to the Theory of Taxation”; the other was “A Mathematical Theory of Saving,” published in December 1928. It addressed the problem of how much should a nation save, and was, wrote Keynes,

“one of the most remarkable contributions to mathematical economics ever made, both in respect of the intrinsic importance and difficulty of its subject, the power and elegance of the technical methods employed, and the clear purity of illumination with which the writer’s mind is felt by the reader to play about its subject”.

Professor Mellor’s talk (largely based on this biographical essay) was fascinating, liberally illustrated with sound clips from a radio profile of Ramsey that he had made with the BBC many years ago (and which is available from the Cambridge Dspace archive if you’re interested). I loved this clip, in which I.A. Richards remembers an early encounter with Ramsey as a teenager:

“Well, my old friend C. K. Ogden had a very queer place called ‘Top Hole’ – named after a war cartoon – above MacFisheries in Petty Cury, and one afternoon there, a tap on the door and in came this tall, ungainly, rather gangling boy. We knew who he was instantly – he looked so like his mother – and in no time almost he was at home. He was from Winchester where he’d been for some time with no one doing much more than saying ‘The library is yours, just do what you want’. He was recognised clearly at Winchester as quite one of the wonders; and there he was, and we chatted along for some time, and then he turned to Ogden and said: ‘Do you know, I’ve been thinking I ought to learn German. How do you learn German?’. Ogden leaped up instantly, rushed to the shelf, got him a very thorough German grammar – and a dictionary, Anglo-German dictionary – and then hunted on the shelves and found a very abstruse work in German – Mach’s Analysis of Sensations – and said: ‘You’re obviously interested in this, and all you do is to read the book. Use the grammar and use the dictionary and come and tell us what you think’. Believe it or not, within ten days, Frank was back saying that Mach had misstated this and that he ought to have developed that argument more fully, it wasn’t satisfactory. He’d learned to read German – not to speak it, but to read it – in almost hardly over a week.”

Four things stand out in my memory from Professor Mellor’s talk.

I’m on my way.

Neat, eh?

This lovely photograph from the terrific Red Mum photoblog reminded me of a shameful episode from my childhood. Note the qualifications of the pharmacist on the shop-front, which signify that J.H. Bowden is a Member of the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland (MPSI). When we were kids, we had a more scabrous interpretation of the letters, and we would sometimes go into the local pharmacist’s and shout “Monkey’s Piss Sold Inside” before scarpering, closely pursued by a stout, irate proprietor.

Disgraceful, I know. I should be ashamed of myself. Well, of my younger self, anyway.

UPDATE: Red Mum has moved to WordPress. New blog here.

The New Yorker carried an elegant tribute to Irving Penn by Adam Gopnik.

In the postwar years, America was unduly blessed by its art dealers, who offered an open door to the avant-garde, and by its fashion magazines, in which a handful of photographers managed to turn fashion pictures into another kind of high art. Chief among them was Irving Penn, who died last week, at the age of ninety-two. There are many instinctive romantics among popular artists, the Gershwins and the Chaplins who, through force of spirit and originality of style, take by storm the balcony and the boxes alike. Penn was something rarer, an instinctive popular classicist, with a magical gift for visual rhythm, for making something insignificant—a pattern of cigarettes and ashes, each ash miraculously in its one best place—look as formally inevitable as an eighteenthcentury still-life. If Richard Avedon, his great rival and competitor, was a snapshot Delacroix, all fire and figures, Penn was Ingres with a Leica, all ravishing edges and perfect composition and a quality of deep color that was the envy of every other photographer.

Lisa Jardine lecturing against a backdrop of (I think) Feliks Topolski’s portrait of C.P. Snow

I went to the C.P. Snow Lecture in Christ’s last Wednesday with fairly low expectations generated by the title “The Two Cultures Revisited”. What more is there to be said about the famous Rede lecture, delivered 50 years ago just down the road in the Senate House? Were we going to be treated to yet another rehash of the row between Snow and another Cambridge figure of the time, F.R. Leavis? As it turned out, I needn’t have worried: the lecturer was Lisa Jardine, who is feisty, clever, courageous, multi-disciplinary and stimulating — and now Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. It’s a racing certainty that she will eventually wind up as a Dame of the non-pantomime variety.

The hall was packed with the Cambridge establishment. George Steiner was there and Martin Rees and a host of other grandees. Lisa was introduced by Frank Kelly, a near-contemporary of mine who is now Master of Christ’s and has done great work in the area of self-managed systems. He is also, as it happens, an experienced pacer of those Whitehall walkways memorably described by Snow as “corridors of power”. After a hesitant start she launched into an interesting take on the ‘two Cultures’ lecture in which she argued that while most people have regarded the Rede lecture as the starting point for a debate that has raged ever since, Snow himself saw it as a culminating formulation of a problem that had been bothering him for years, namely the hideously inadequate way our society goes about making decisions which require informed scientific advice.

With the benefit of hindsight, Jardine claimed, we can see how Snow’s thinking evolved. But he didn’t really expound it clearly until two years later, when he gave the Godkin lectures at Harvard which were eventually published under the title Science and Government. The inescapable logic of her argument was that if you want to appreciate the ‘Two Cultures’ lecture, then you have to read the Godkin lectures first.

As it happens, this isn’t an entirely original thought — it was the basis of an interesting essay last April by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum which was published in the magazine of the New York Academy of Sciences. “Snow cared a great deal about breakdowns between scientists and writers”, they wrote,

“but the reasons he cared are what ought to most concern us, because they still resonate across the 50-year remove that separates us from Snow’s immediate circumstances. Above all, Snow feared a world in which science could grow divorced from politics and culture. Science, he recognized, was becoming too powerful and too important; a society living disconnected from it couldn’t be healthy. You had cause to worry about that society’s future— about its handling of the future.

For this lament about two estranged cultures came from a man who had not only studied physics and written novels, but who had spent much of his life, including the terrifying period of World War II, working to ensure that the British government received the best scientific advice possible. That included the secret wartime recruitment of physicists and other scientists to work on weapons and defenses, activities which put Snow high up on the Gestapo’s Black List. So, no: Snow’s words weren’t merely about communication breakdowns between humanists and scientists. They were considerably more ambitious than that—and considerably more urgent, and poignant, and pained.”

Mooney and Kirschenbaum see Snow as an early theorist on “a critical modern problem: How can we best translate highly complex information, stored in the minds of often eccentric (if well meaning) scientists, into the process of political decision making at all levels and in all aspects of government, from military to medical?” Like Jardine, they see the Godkin lectures as the key to understanding what he was trying to get at in the Rede lecture.

“Snow illustrated the same dilemma through the example of radar. He argued that if a small group of British government science advisers, operating in conditions of high wartime secrecy, had not spearheaded the development and deployment of this technology in close conjunction with the Air Ministry, the pivotal 1940 Battle of Britain—fought in the skies over his nation—would have gone very differently. And Snow went further, identifying a bad guy in the story: Winston Churchill’s science adviser and ally F.A. Lindemann, who Snow described as having succumbed to the “euphoria of gadgets.” Rather than recognizing radar as the only hope to bolster British air defenses, Lindemann favored the fantastical idea of dropping parachute bombs and mines in front of enemy aircraft, and tried (unsuccessfully) to derail the other, pro-radar science advisers. Churchill’s rise to power was an extremely good thing for Britain and the world, but as Snow noted, it’s also fortunate that the radar decision came about before Churchill could empower Lindemann as his science czar.

So no wonder Snow opposed any force that might blunt the beneficial influence of science upon high-level decision-making. That force might be a “solitary scientific overlord”—Snow’s term for Lindemann—or it might be something more nebulous and diffuse, such as an overarching culture that disregards science on anything but the most superficial of levels, and so fails to comprehend how the advancement of knowledge and the progress of technology simultaneously threaten us and yet also offer great hope.”

To this, Jardine added another case-study: the conflict between Tizard and Lindemann about the merits of strategic bombing. In this case, Tizard lost the battle for Churchill’s ear, and the Allies embarked on a bombing campaign that killed at least half a million German civilians and 160,000 Allied aircrew. In retrospect, the strategic bombing campaign looks awfully like a war crime, and of course the fire-bombing of Dresden certainly was such a crime. To Snow — and to any sentient being — the story of the policy debate behind the campaign highlights the importance of having a political culture which can attend intelligently to scientific advice.

As befits a cultural historian, Jardine added her own twist to the story, by delving into the ideological underpinnings of the 1951 ‘Festival of Britain’, which was ostensibly a government-sponsored device for cheering up a public exhausted by war with a celebration of British scientific and manufacturing ingenuity, but which managed to avoid almost any reference to military hardware and conspiciously ignored the most compelling example of what happens when you combine scientific IQ with massive government resources, namely the atomic bombs which vapourised the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She showed some fascinating illustrations from the catalogues produced for the Festival (purchased in mint condition on ABE Books, btw), and closed with some scarifying examples of how scientifically — and mathematically — illiterate our mass media (and the public) have become. The Authority, for example, publishes statistics about the success rate of In-vitro Fertilisation (IVF) treatments — which is about 30%. “That means”, she said, “that if you go to an IVF clinic you have a one in three chance of conceiving”. But it seems that most people are exceedingly pissed off if they come out of an IVF clinic without a baby.

As for me, I went to the lecture thinking that I had a 30% chance of being surprised. And discovered that I had been 100% stimulated.