Sitting in the shelter on Platform 7 this morning waiting for the London train when a young woman came in and sat next to me. “Excuse me”, she said, “but can I ask you a question? What do you think of when you think of Jesus?” She seemed like a nice person, so I replied politely that I didn’t think of him at all. “What about God, then?” “Ditto”, I replied. “Are you a scientist?” she asked. I replied that I was an engineer. “Same thing”, she said, knowledgeably, “and the same cop-out”. I said, mildly, that some people might regard a belief in God as a cop-out. She gave me a pitying smile and then my train arrived.

Strange what people believe. But it’s not the strangest conversational opener I’ve experienced. Once, many years ago, I was seated at a magazine lunch next to the late Russell Harty, a very camp but charming TV chat-show host. His opening gambit was to say “What’s the first thing you do in the morning? Do you pee or brush your teeth?” Slightly miffed, I replied that sometimes I did one and sometimes the other but generally I started the day by reading the works of St Thomas Aquinas”. “Oooooh!” He exclaimed delightedly. “An intellectual!”

(Full Disclosure: I’ve never read the works of the aforementioned Aquinas. But I thought Harty’s impertinence ought not to go unpunished.)

Kite-surfing hurricane Sandy.

Lovely blog post by Sean French who — like me — spent far too much time thinking about the US Presidential election.

I’ve spent way too much of the last year checking up on the latest Ohio polls, debating inside my own head whether Florida has decisively switched into the Romney camp, whether Obama’s decisive victory in the foreign policy debate will have any effect in the battleground states. 

I sometimes wonder what I would think if I heard of someone roughly like me sitting in somewhere like New Zealand, constantly checking the UK opinion polls for the swing seats, wondering whether Ed Miliband was a plausible leadership candidate and what the effect of the improved employment figures was. I know what I’d think: that he should get a life.

Does anyone read Dr Johnson’s wonderful novel Rasselas any more? There’s a character, an early meteorologist, who has been observing the weather for so long that he believes he controls it. I suppose I’m a bit like that, except that I’m not even observing my own weather, I’m observing American weather.

Ouch! Just when I had decided that I must read this, I will have to postpone it to read Rasselas. Sigh. That’s the trouble with blogs: they give you ideas.

Religion, Marx famously observed, is “the opiate of the masses”. And Americans are pretty heavy users: at any rate they seem to have religion the way dogs have fleas. But, as Scott Shane points out in a terrific piece, they are also addicted to another opiate — exceptionalism, the notion that the US is, somehow, better than anywhere else on the planet.

Imagine, he writes, “a presidential candidate who spoke with blunt honesty about American problems, dwelling on measures by which the United States trails its economic peers”.

What might this mythical candidate talk about on the stump? He might vow to turn around the dismal statistics on child poverty, declaring it an outrage that of the 35 most economically advanced countries, the United States ranks 34th, edging out only Romania. He might take on educational achievement, noting that this country comes in only 28th in the percentage of 4-year-olds enrolled in preschool, and at the other end of the scale, 14th in the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds with a higher education. He might hammer on infant mortality, where the U.S. ranks worse than 48 other countries and territories, or point out that, contrary to fervent popular belief, the U.S. trails most of Europe, Australia and Canada in social mobility.

How far would this truth-telling candidate get? Answer: Nowhere.

Such a candidate is, in fact, all but unimaginable in our political culture. Of their serious presidential candidates, and even of their presidents, Americans demand constant reassurance that their country, their achievements and their values are extraordinary.

Candidates and presidents generally oblige them, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney included. It is permissible, in the political major leagues, for candidates to talk about big national problems — but only if they promise solutions in the next sentence: Unemployment is too high, so I will create millions of jobs. It is impermissible to dwell on chronic, painful problems, or on statistics that challenge the notion that the U.S. leads the world.

And that, my friends, explain why US Presidential elections seem so puerile to the rest of us. Or at any rate to those of us who think that the US is really just another country, with some good points and an awful lot of lunatic downsides.

Thanks to Jon Crowcroft for the link to the chart.

A year after he died, a Dutch boatbuilder has launched Venus, the yacht he commissioned. More here.

Composing headlines that are both funny or striking AND accurate is a pretty difficult art. On the other hand, composing headlines that are funny and misleading is dead easy. This lead story from the Cambridge student newspaper is a textbook case of the latter. The peg for it is the fact that Cambridge University had a very successful 40-year bond issue yesterday to raise money for the next phase of the University’s development, which includes a massive new development in North-West Cambridge. The issue — which was for £350 million — was massively (four times) oversubscribed.

The Varsity story under the headline is actually reasonably accurate. But clearly the sub-editor who composed the headline hadn’t read it. A bond issue is not an asset sale, but a standard way used by governments, institutions and corporations to borrow money at favourable rates. The real story behind the bond issue is that the ratings agencies — and the pension funds that rely on them to assess creditworthiness — think that Cambridge University is a better bet than most of the governments in the Western world.

Still (to look on the bright side), the kid who wrote the headline may have a promising future — on the Daily Express, perhaps. Or perhaps the Star.

Fascinating piece by Freeman Dyson, who lived on the same staircase as Wittgenstein in Whewell’s Court across from Trinity Great Gate.

Wittgenstein’s intellectual asceticism had a great influence on the philosophers of the English-speaking world. It narrowed the scope of philosophy by excluding ethics and aesthetics. At the same time, his personal asceticism enhanced his credibility. During World War II, he wanted to serve his adopted country in a practical way. Being too old for military service, he took a leave of absence from his academic position in Cambridge and served in a menial job, as a hospital orderly taking care of patients. When I arrived at Cambridge University in 1946, Wittgenstein had just returned from his six years of duty at the hospital. I held him in the highest respect and was delighted to find him living in a room above mine on the same staircase. I frequently met him walking up or down the stairs, but I was too shy to start a conversation. Several times I heard him muttering to himself: “I get stupider and stupider every day.”

Finally, toward the end of my time in Cambridge, I ventured to speak to him. I told him I had enjoyed reading the Tractatus, and I asked him whether he still held the same views that he had expressed twenty-eight years earlier. He remained silent for a long time and then said, “Which newspaper do you represent?” I told him I was a student and not a journalist, but he never answered my question.

Wittgenstein’s response to me was humiliating, and his response to female students who tried to attend his lectures was even worse. If a woman appeared in the audience, he would remain standing silent until she left the room. I decided that he was a charlatan using outrageous behavior to attract attention. I hated him for his rudeness. Fifty years later, walking through a churchyard on the outskirts of Cambridge on a sunny morning in winter, I came by chance upon his tombstone, a massive block of stone lightly covered with fresh snow. On the stone was written the single word, “WITTGENSTEIN.” To my surprise, I found that the old hatred was gone, replaced by a deeper understanding. He was at peace, and I was at peace too, in the white silence. He was no longer an ill-tempered charlatan. He was a tortured soul, the last survivor of a family with a tragic history, living a lonely life among strangers, trying until the end to express the inexpressible.

The photograph shows Wittgenstein’s grave as it is now. Larger size here.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve carried one of these tiny Swiss Army knives, and scarcely a day goes by without it being called upon for some humdrum but vital purpose. It’s been such a constant companion that, on several occasions, I’ve had to sacrifice it to airport security when travelling with only cabin baggage (though on my last flight I asked the Airport Security if it was still verboten and they said “no” — so it travelled with me).

Its one drawback is that the scissors is too small for some tasks. So recently I looked for an alternative, and came up with this tiny Leatherman tool.

.

It’s slightly heavier and more bulky, but it has a terrific pair of scissors.

All that remains now is to find if I can take it with me when I fly. And — since you ask — it doesn’t have a tool for taking stones out of horses’ hooves. But then, I sold my horse ages ago and bought a Toyota.