A phone conference in the Ndiyo office/lab this afternoon. Michael Dales (left) and Quentin are talking to Andy Fisher of Displaylink (whose disembodied voice is emerging from the handset held by Quentin). The conversation (about NIVO protocols, among other things) is largely incomprehensible to ordinary mortals. Fortunately, however, a representative of this latter category was present, and capable of operating a camera.
From A N Whitehead’s Autobiographical Notes, 1941.
For about eight years (1898-1906) we lived in the Old Mill House at Grantchester, about three miles from Cambridge. Our windows overlooked a mill pool, and at that time the mill was still working. It has all gone now. There are two mill pools there; the older one, about a couple of hundred yards higher up the river, was the one mentioned by Chaucer. Some parts of our house were very old, probably from the sixteenth century. The whole spot was intrinsically beautiful and was filled with reminiscences, from Chaucer to Byron and Wordsworth. Later on another poet, Rupert Brooke, lived in the neighbouring house, the Old Vicarage. But that was after our time and did not enter into our life. I must mention the Shuckburghs (translator of Cicero’s letters) and the William Batesons (the geneticist) who also lived in the village and were dear friends of ours. We owed our happy life at Grantchester to the Shuckburghs, who found the house for us. It had a lovely garden, with flowering creepers over the house, and with a yew tree which Chaucer might have planted. In the spring nightingales kept us awake, and kingfishers haunted the river.
Hmmm… for years I’d been convinced that this was where Bertrand Russell lived when he was working (with Whitehead) on Principia Mathematica. But it seems I was wrong; at the time (1905), Russell was primarily residing in a house he had built near Oxford. So, although he doubtless spent time in the Mill House, it wasn’t his home.
Whitehead was (unusually for a Cambridge don at the time) a supporter of the Labour party. He recalls:
During our residence at Grantchester, I did a considerable amount of political speaking in Grantchester and in the country villages of the district. The meetings were in the parish schoolrooms, during the evening. It was exciting work, as the whole village attended and expressed itself vigorously. English villages have no use for regular party agents. They require local residents to address them. I always found that a party agent was a nuisance, Rotten eggs and oranges were effective party weapons, and I have often been covered by them. But they were indications of vigour, rather than of bad feeling. Our worst experience was at a meeting in the Guildhall at Cambridge, addressed by Keir Hardie who was then the leading member of the new Labour Party. My wife and I were on the platform, sitting behind him, and there was a riotous undergraduate audience. The result was that any rotten oranges that missed Keir Hardie had a good chance of hitting one of us. When we lived in London my activities were wholly educational.
Malcolm Gladwell has fabulous piece in the New Yorker about intelligence, the difference between puzzles and mysteries and how journalists failed to spot what was happening at Enron.
Photoshopped!
Aluminium variety, shortly after doing sterling service in the oven.
Photographed in Borders.
The Mill Pool at Grantchester, this afternoon.
The National Portrait Gallery has a wonderful selection of postcards for sale. Here’s a selection of ones I bought the other day. Clockwise from top left: Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Oscar Wilde, John Taverner and J.K. Rowling.
Nice rant by Philip Dawdy.
This whole Web 2.0, social networking, virtual community business is essentially a pornography of the self—a projected, fictionalized self that is then worshipped by the slightly less-perfect self. Human existence has been this way to a degree once we became the leisure society (am I dabbling in Veblen here? I think so.), but with the Web 2.0 we are so much more willing to spread our selves and our self-infatuations around. If you don’t believe me, cruise through MySpace—a house of mirrors if there ever was one—where we are all rock stars, hotties, vampires and gangstas with flava.
This state of affairs cannot be especially healthy for our souls, our psychology and, hell, our brains because none of it is real. But it sure is a successful approach to getting us to spend more time on the computer (oh, how I miss being able to write on a computer pre-Net, you have no idea). That’s not good either. Because the way the Net is now with all of its “communities” and communes of information there are simply too many stimuli. And, I’ve seen so many instances of such stimuli winding people up in ways that result in human wreckage.
The computer, some of you may recall, was supposed to free us. We were supposed to have so many automated tasks and so on that we’d be done with work by 3 p.m. and off to the social club. Things haven’t worked out this way at all. Not only do we do more work for more hours than we used to before the computer age, but even when we are not working per se, we have become slaves to our fictional selves on Web 2.0. I worry about people younger than me who have no idea what human communication and hanging out were like before the PCs and Macs turned into these hyper-communication tools. The Net has become our social club. In Seattle, any popular coffeehouse is filled with people who just sit at tables on their laptops and communicate with other fictional selves on the Net instead of doing the least bit of the communication and interaction—positive or negative—with people sitting five feet away. All those people, all that weird isolation. Zombies.