Today marks a pivot in my life. Yesterday I retired from the Open University, after a long and productive career there. Today I become Vice-President of Wolfson College, where I’ve been a Fellow for many years and now become part of The Management (as it were).

The worst thing about leaving an institution, I discovered, is having to clear out one’s office. I’ve spent the last week shredding a mountain of stuff — the accumulated paperwork of a 40-year academic career. (So much for the paperless office. Abi Sellen and Richard Harper were right.) It’s said that if you fall from a high cliff, your life flashes before your eyes before you hit the ground. Well, much the same thing happens when you shred the documentary evidence of a long time in an organisation — all those committee papers, project reports, task-force agendas, visits and visitors, background for research papers, letters and memoranda from The Management, and so on.

One thing that struck me as I shredded was how much energy I had expended on so many different things; many of them fizzled out, as you’d expect, but a few of them yielded real benefits. With my colleague Nigel Cross, for example, I changed the way the university approached the teaching of technology, for example, from an approach that focussed mainly on machinery and the environment, to one that was centred on issues and values as well on technical subjects. With Jake Chapman and others I persuaded the university to embrace the PC revolution and to require our students to have access to a PC for many courses; with Martin Weller I launched the institution into teaching online: our first course attracted 12,000 students in its first year, and the OU now has upwards of a quarter of a million students online; and with Tony Hirst, Ray Corrigan, Andy Lane, Jeff Johnson and others launched the OU’s Relevant Knowledge Programme of short, online courses on fast-moving technological subjects.

What also struck me as I looked back was how lucky I have been. I’m a baby-boomer, born in 1946, and what looking back over the record of references and job applications and further particulars and promotions brought home to me is the extent to which I belong to a truly blessed generation. When I graduated (with a First) in 1968 I had about thirty job offers (as an experiment, I had gone to all the ‘milk-round’ interviews then run by large corporations). All of my engineering classmates in 1968 got ‘professional’ jobs, and some went on to have very successful careers in large companies. One of my sons is now the same age as I was when I got that lectureship and he tells me that of his cohort of friends and contemporaries, only he and one of his friends have what one might describe as meaningful work. When I got my university lectureship the first thing I did was to go out and buy a house in Cambridge. None of my son’s contemporaries has been able to buy a house, and for some it looks like being an unattainable dream. And nobody on a junior lecturer’s salary could nowadays afford to buy even a simple terraced house in Cambridge. I’ve had a secure, tenured job doing interesting work for four decades, something that already seems implausible in the modern economy. And, to cap it all, I get to retire on a decent pension, linked to my final salary. If that isn’t luck, then I don’t know what is.

All of which makes it ever more frustrating to see how my generation and the ones immediately succeeding it have comprehensively screwed up the prospects for my children and grandchildren.

As I shredded, most of the time memories whizzed by in an interesting but untroubling blur. But then I came on a document that brought me to a shuddering halt. It was the minutes of the first committee meeting at which I came face to face with Sue, the woman who transformed my life. She was then a rising star in the University Administration, a talented, sassy, ambitious girl who was clearly destined for greater things. And as I read this anodyne record of discussions held and decisions reached I was transported back to the moment in 1986 when I sat in that Committee Room stunned by her beauty and easy grace and wondered if such creatures ever talked to mere academics. As it turned out, she did. I fell for her — hook, line and sinker — and to my astonishment she fell for me. We had twelve blissful years together, and two lovely children, before fate (as PG Wodehouse would say) slipped the lead into the boxing glove. She died from cancer nine years ago. Meeting her was the most wonderful unexpected benefit of working at the OU, and if I had got nothing else out of my career, that would have been enough to justify it.

I’m the last cohort of employees to whom compulsory retirement age applies. From today, employers will have to make a case for making people stop at the statutory retirement age. I could have made a case to stay on, but decided against it: I had too many other things that I wanted to do. As a father of two children of university age, the idea of having a useful lump sum was attractive. And to have stayed on might also have blighted the prospects of younger colleagues, or — in a time of budget cuts — necessitated staffing reductions elsewhere.

Besides, there’s something absurd about the idea of ‘retirement’ for academics. Most of them continue to do what they do, regardless of whether they have an institutional perch or not. In my case, I’m simply moving to another corner of academia, but even if I weren’t, an observer would be hard put to notice any difference in my daily routine. I’ll still be blogging, for example. My Observer column goes on. I have a new book coming out in January, and am already incubating its successor. And a courier has just delivered Steven Pinker’s whopping new book, which I’ll have to read because the Observer wants me to do an email debate with him.

In other words: business as usual.

Politics is the art of making the inevitable seem like rational choice. Protest is the art of making the rational seem inevitable.

My Observer column about passwords has prompted some witty conversations and emails. Many of the latter pointed to this lovely xkcd cartoon. The punch line:

“Through 20 years of effort, we’ve successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess”.

Amen.

Vine Cerf and Nigel Shadbolt, originally uploaded by jjn1.

Vint Cerf explains something to Nigel Shadbolt, High Table, Balliol, September 22, 2011.

Deliciously savage Review by Andrew Ferguson of Tom Friedman’s new book. Samples:

‘That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back” is a landmark in American popular literature: It is the first book by Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times columnist and mega-best-selling author of “The World Is Flat,” “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” and so on, in which an alert reader can go whole paragraphs—whole pages, in a few instances—without fighting the impulse to chuck it across the room.

As a writer, Mr. Friedman is best known for his galloping assaults on Strunk and White’s Rule No. 9: “Do Not Affect a Breezy Manner.” “The World Is Flat” & Co. were cyclones of breeziness, mixing metaphors by the dozens and whipping up slang and clichés and jokey catchphrases of the author’s own invention. (The flattened world was just the beginning.)

And,

Mr. Friedman can turn a phrase into cliché faster than any Madison Avenue jingle writer. He announces that “America declared war on math and physics.” Three paragraphs later, we learn that we’re “waging war on math and physics.” Three sentences later: “We went to war against math and physics.” And onto the next page: “We need a systemic response to both our math and physics challenges, not a war on both.” Three sentences later: We must “reverse the damage we have done by making war on both math and physics,” because, we learn two sentences later, soon the war on terror “won’t seem nearly as important as the wars we waged against physics and math.” He must think we’re idiots.

As someone who’s on record as describing Friedman as a master of the catchy half-truth, I’m not his greatest fan. But I wonder if some of the asperity in Ferguson’s review has anything to do with the fact that it appears in the Wall Street Journal and Friedman is a star columnist on that paper’s deadly NYC rival, the New York Times?

Nicest Tweet of the morning came from Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147 on Twitter):

Favourite neutrino joke so far: To get to the other side. Why did the neutrino cross the road?

Backstory: Wired sums it up thus:

If it’s true, it will mark the biggest discovery in physics in the past half-century: Elusive, nearly massless subatomic particles called neutrinos appear to travel just faster than light, a team of physicists in Europe reports. If so, the observation would wreck Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which demands that nothing can travel faster than light.

In fact, the result would be so revolutionary that it’s sure to be met with skepticism all over the world. “I suspect that the bulk of the scientific community will not take this as a definitive result unless it can be reproduced by at least one and preferably several experiments,” says V. Alan Kostelecky, a theorist at Indiana University, Bloomington. He adds, however, “I’d be delighted if it were true.”

The data come from a 1,300-metric-ton particle detector named Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA). Lurking in Italy’s subterranean Gran Sasso National Laboratory, OPERA detects neutrinos that are fired through the Earth from the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. As the particles hardly interact at all with other matter, they stream right through the ground, with only a very few striking the material in the detector and making a noticeable shower of particles.

Over three years, OPERA researchers timed the roughly 16,000 neutrinos that started at CERN and registered a hit in the detector. They found that, on average, the neutrinos made the 730-kilometer, 2.43-millisecond trip roughly 60 nanoseconds faster than expected if they were traveling at light speed. “It’s a straightforward time-of-flight measurement,” says Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern and spokesperson for the 160-member OPERA collaboration. “We measure the distance and we measure the time, and we take the ratio to get the velocity, just as you learned to do in high school.” Ereditato says the uncertainty in the measurement is 10 nanoseconds.

Hmmm… I’ve always been fascinated by neutrinos, and often use physicists’ belief in them as evidence that religious fundamentalists aren’t the only people who believe implausible things. Just ponder this passage from the Wikipedia entry on the neutrino:

Most neutrinos passing through the Earth emanate from the Sun. About 65 billion (6.5×1010) solar neutrinos per second pass through every square centimeter perpendicular to the direction of the Sun in the region of the Earth.

What this implies, for example, is that a neutrino can pass right through the earth without noticing the obstacle in its path. Now I know (pace Rutherford’s famous experiment) that atoms are mostly empty space, but still… Makes you think, doesn’t it? It makes me think of JBS Haldane’s famous suspicion that “the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose”.

This morning’s Observer column.

Here’s my problem. My password has expired and I need to set a new one. So I think of something and type it in. The system rejects it as being insecure. That’s funny – it’s about the same level of complexity as its expired predecessor. Then I remember – the organisation has recently acquired a new chief information officer and he’s embarked on a root-and-branch overhaul of the system, which presumably includes upgrading security rules.

So I think of a really secure, incomprehensible password and type it in. The system rejects it as laughably inadequate. So I try another and another and another. Same result each time. At this point, I’m getting irritated. Since it’s a Microsoft network, I decide to see what advice Microsoft can give me. I go to the company’s “Safety and Security Center” where’s there’s a helpful page on how to create strong passwords in four easy steps.

The late, great Roger Needham was one of the wisest men it’s ever been my privilege to know. He was one of the world’s great computer scientists, utterly incorruptible, unimpressed by power and status, and always said what he thought, no matter what the social context. He and his wife Karen Sparck-Jones (who had many of the same qualities) built their first house in the village of Coton with their own hands and lived in it for the best part of four decades. He was a Labour County Councillor for years, owned about two sports jackets and two ties, and made a point of always wearing a red tie whenever a Tory came in to dine at his (and my) Cambridge college. In all the time I knew him he never once sat down at a meeting. Instead he would pace up and down while talking.

He also had a lovely, pithy way of summarising awkward truths. When my OU colleague, Martin Weller, and I launched You, your computer and the Net — the Open University’s first major online course — it attracted 12,000 students in its first presentation and nearly broke the university because our regional colleagues suddenly had to recruit, interview, train and mentor enough part-time tutors to meet the university’s 20-to-one tutorial ratio. When I told Roger about this he said: “Ah, I see. What you’ve created is a success disaster”.

He had a phrase to describe projects or products that were near completion and kind-of worked: “Good enough for government work”, he would say.

I’ve just been reading a terrific paper by Frank Stajano on his proposed solution to the growing problems of password-based authentication in which he quotes another of Roger’s famous aphorisms. “Optimisation”, he said, “is the process of taking something that works and replacing it with something that almost works, but costs less.”

LATER: This post prompted a nice email from a friend who also knew (and admired) Roger. It reminded him, he wrote,

“of a talk Roger gave (by video, because he wasn’t well) at a conference I was organising for the Cambridge Society in Lancaster on the Cambridge Phenomenon. There were all kinds of big-wigs there from Lancaster, and from Cambridge. Roger’s talk was on what made the Phenomenon work. It was a brilliant performance – greatly enhanced by his dry comment (speaking as a pro-Vice-Chancellor) that one of the things that made it work was the the University was friendly to it. He added: ‘It wasn’t friendly as a matter of policy; it was far too inefficient for that’ There aren’t many pro-V-Cs of any institution who would risk making a comment like that!”