Hooray! Ross Anderson and David Mackay have been elected Fellows of the Royal Society. Cambridge press release here.

When clearing out some files I came on a reprint of one of my favourite essays — “On Intellectual Craftsmanship” by C. Wright Mills. It’s an Appendix to his book, The Sociological Imagination, which was published in 1959, and it’s something I often hand out to graduate students whom I’m supervising. Mills believed that “social science is the practice of a craft” and he decided that it might be useful to his students if he told them how he went about practising his craft.

The result is an amazingly insightful, thought-provoking essay which some of my students have found very helpful in the past. I hadn’t read it for a while, and so settled down with the battered photocopy when I should have been doing something useful (like writing that long course description that one of my colleagues has been despairingly requesting for weeks).

What I discovered was that I was seeing the paper in a new light, because I was now reading from the perspective of a blogger. And some of what Mills has to say rings bells for academics who find themselves reflecting on the relationship between blogging and intellectual work.

Mills opens with a reminder that “the most admirable thinkers within the scholarly community you have chosen to join [in this case sociology] do not split their work from their lives. They seem to take both too seriously to allow such dissociation, and they want to use each for the enrichment of the other”. Most of the best bloggers I know display this reluctance to separate their lives from their work. There are a few exceptions, of course — Ed Felten, say, or the Posner/Becker double-act — but, in the main, life and work are intertwined.

And for good reasons. As Mills says:

“Scholarship is a choice of how to live as well as a choice of career; whether aware of it or not, the intellectual worker forms his or her own self in working toward the perfection of craft; to realise personal potentialities, and any opportunities that come his or her way, such a person constructs a character which has as its core the qualities of the good workman… craftsmanship is the center of yourself and you are personally involved in every intellectual product upon which you may work. To say that you can ‘have experience,’ means, for one thing, that your past plays into and affects your present, and that it defines your capacity for future experience. As a social scientist, you have to control this rather elaborate interplay, to capture what you experience and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an intellectual craftsman.”

But how best to do this? One answer, writes Mills, is to

“set up a file, which is, I suppose, a sociologist’s way of saying: – keep a journal. Many creative writers keep journals; the sociologist’s need for systematic reflection demands it. In such a file as I am going to describe, there is joined personal experience and professional activities, studies under way and studies planned. In this file, you, as an intellectual craftsman, will try to get together what you are doing intellectually and what you are experiencing as a person. Here you will not be afraid to use your experience and relate it directly to various work in progress. By serving as a check on repetitious work, your file also enables you to conserve your energy. It also encourages you to capture “fringe-thoughts”: various ideas which may be by-products of everyday life, snatches of conversation overheard on the street, or, for that matter, dreams. Once noted, these may lead to more systematic thinking, as well as lend intellectual relevance to more directed experience.”

“By keeping an adequate file and thus developing self-reflective habits”, he continues,

“you learn how to keep your inner world awake. Whenever you feel strongly about events or ideas you must try not to let them pass from your mind, but instead to formulate them for your files and in so doing draw out their implications, show yourself either how foolish these feelings or ideas are, or how they might be articulated into productive shape. The file also helps you build up the habit of writing. You cannot “keep your hand in” if you do not write something at least every week. In developing the file, you can experiment as a writer and thus, as they say, develop your powers of expression. To maintain a file is to engage in the controlled experience.”

This sounds to me awfully like the best kind of blogging — the kind, say, practiced by Dave Winer, Martin Weller, Tony Hirst, Lorcan Dempsey or Nicholas Carr. And Mills’s essay is one of the the best arguments for blogging I’ve come across. Yet it was written in the late 1950s.

Jorge Colombo drew this week’s cover using Brushes, an application for the iPhone, while standing for an hour outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square.

“I got a phone in the beginning of February, and I immediately got the program so I could entertain myself,” says Colombo, who first published his drawings in The New Yorker in 1994. Colombo has been drawing since he was seven, but he discovered an advantage of digital drawing on a nighttime drive to Vermont. “Before, unless I had a flashlight or a miner’s hat, I could not draw in the dark.” (When the sun is up, it’s a bit harder, “because of the glare on the phone,” he says.) It also allows him to draw without being noticed; most pedestrians assume he’s checking his e-mail.

From this week’s New Yorker.

… in 1925, John T. Scopes was indicted in Tennessee for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution. Wikipedia suggests that the story of the so-called “monkey trial” is rather more complicated than one might have supposed from the headline, though.

… in 1927, Charles Lindbergh landed his Spirit of St. Louis near Paris, completing the first solo airplane flight across the Atlantic.

“Success is the ability to move from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

Often attributed to Winston Churchill. What I hate most about British and offline culture is their aversion to failure. My mother used to say that the person who naver made a mistake never made anything, and she was right. The most striking difference between the UK and the US is that honest failure carries very little stigma over there, whereas here it’s an occasion for shame or embarrassment or worse. If you aren’t failing sometimes, then you aren’t trying hard enough. The key thing is to learn from the experience. [/rant]

My daughter needed to find out her National Insurance number — which, for reasons too tedious to relate but connected with her Dad’s failure to register for child benefit after her Mum’s death — had not been sent to her. I had made some telephone inquiries from which I learned that a number had indeed been allocated to her, but that she would need to attend an interview at the local JobCentre (to which she was to bring suitable forms of identification) before she could be given a number.

Last week she went by herself and was given the runaround by the staff — told to phone the national number, which told her that she didn;t have a number and would have to apply for it and that she needed to download the form, etc. etc. She came home rather dejected by this, so I arranged to go with her this morning.

It was the first time I’ve ever been inside a Job Centre. The clients present included a goodly number of people who looked as though life had dealt them a poor hand of cards. Some were badly dressed; a few looked miserable or confused or just depressed. The staff were professional in manner, but somewhat defensive in posture. Several burly security guards were very much in evidence. The atmosphere was one of watchful tension. And one can understand why: sometimes people turn up who are angry, confused, drunk, abusive or perhaps even psychologically disturbed. And they can lash out at an official who they see as the representative of an indifferent establishment.

The staff of the JobCentre have to tread a tightrope. On the one hand they have to help people who really need assistance from the state, and who are sometimes in really dire straits. On the other, they have to be watchful against benefit fraud, for perched on their shoulders like a vengeful parrot is the moralising, scolding Daily Mail.

It was an instructive moment to make my first visit to such an establishment. There I saw the front-line troops of the Welfare State, ever-vigilant to ensure that fraudsters don’t get benefits to which they are not entitled (and determined to crack down on them severely whenever they are detected). Meanwhile, over in the Mother of Parliaments, we have MPs who have been discovered conducting the most staggering kinds of ‘benefit’ fraud — and yet who seem to think that if they pay back their ill-gotten gains then everything will be all right.

As I stood waiting for my daughter to be interviewed for her NI number I fell to thinking about what would happen if someone who’d been caught over-claiming a state benefit in the JobCentre just shrugged his shoulders, reached into his wallet, and tried to hand over a sheaf of tenners to one of the officials behind the bullet-proof cubicle glass as atonement for his sins. You only have to do the thought-experiment to understand the rage that people feel about the MPs.

But of course the injustice is even worse in the case of bankers. At least MPs have had to endure some degree of personalised obloquoy. But, with the exception of a few named individuals like ‘Sir’ Fred Goodwin — most of the Savile-Row-suited non-execs who presided over the banking catastrophe have been bailed out without even having to endure the indignity of public exposure.

A worrying question is what will be the outcome of this public rage. It’s too profound to be bottled up. So it will be vented somewhere. Smashing the windows of the Goodwin mansion was just the opening salvo. My guess is that it will be vented in elections — first the upcoming European elections, and next year the UK general election. One opinion poll published at the weekend showed that currently 40% of the British electorate would vote for “none of the above” if an election were held tomorrow.

So what we might have is the kind of incoherent electoral chaos that occurred in Holland in the election after Pim Fortuyn was murdered — an election that returned to the Dutch Parliament a rag-bag collection of clowns and reduced Dutch governance to farcical levels for several years. Is this what lies ahead for us?

Marc Silber’s Photo Show with Ansel Adams’ son Michael from SilberStudios.Tv on Vimeo.

Just stumbled on this fascinating interview with Michael Adams, Ansel’s son, recorded at Glacier Point in Yosemite. It brought back lots of memories. Sue and I once spent a magical day in Yosemite in July 1990. The strange thing was that while I had, as usual, brought a camera with me, I found myself unable to take any pictures. The reason was that I felt that nothing I could do would ever be adequate because Ansel Adams had ‘done’ Yosemite. So, in the end, the camera stayed in the bag. But I did strip off and swam in the Merced river while Sue sat on the bank in the sunshine and wondered whether photographer’s block was a recognised medical condition.

From the Sun’s website. (Yes, it does have one.)

A MIRACLE new smart-bra that BOOSTS a woman’s cleavage when she feels sexy is being tested by lingerie designers.

The magic bra detects changes in body temperature brought on by sexual arousement and squeezes boobs together to create a bigger cleavage.

Then when things cool off again the bra’s built-in memory relaxes the fabric and the wearer’s bust returns to normal, say its Slovenian inventors.

(Upper case in original, btw.)

Thanks to Jack Schofield, from whom nothing is hidden, for the link.