Orwell’s diary, entry for August 10, 1938.
Drizzly. Dense mist in evening. Yellow moon.
Nice to know that even the great, professional writers have bad writing days… Maybe it was a lazy Sunday or maybe post-summer vacation blues. Who knows…
writing
Back from Marrakech
So after returning from Marrakech I have been planning to write about it. Unfortunately writing about Marrakech is not the easiest thing since it is an amazing city. It’s all exotica, shopping and sunshine.
The exotic is everywhere! The great buildings, the marketplaces (souqs), the large squares, the call to prayers, the clothes, the carpets, the customs, the food and more…
The shopping was amazing. Unfortunately the merchants there are the most amazing bargainers – they could sell ice in Greenland! Every purchase made was coupled together with buyer’s remorse. When you bargain the end price to a third of the starting price – what was the real price of anything? Despite this nagging concern we ended up buying plenty of interior decorating stuff.
The sunshine! The all time high this week was 52 degrees! This was made bearable by air-conditioning and the pool. Actually the heat was not all that bad but the pool and air-conditioning did make the stay very nice.
I suppose this is a very crappy description of Marrakech but there are better ones online. I will let my pictures give you a glimpse of what I experienced.
The Science of Death
A new podcast from the University of Bath. This time it’s Professor Allan Kellehear from the Centre for Death & Society at the University of Bath talking about the point of death and organ retention in a lecture called The science of death. From the blurb:
The research literature about ‘brain death’ is characterised by biomedical, bioethical and legal writing. This has led to overlooking wider but no less pertinent social, historical and cultural understandings about death. By ignoring the work of other social and clinical colleagues in the study of dying, the literature on the determination of death has become unnecessarily abstract and socially disconnected from parallel concerns about death and dying. These circumstances foster incomplete suggestions and narrow discussions about the nature of death as well as an ongoing misunderstanding of general public and health care staff responses to brain death criteria. I outline these problems through a review of the key literature on the determination of death.
Are we secure yet?
Thankfully the term “war on terrorism” seems to have fallen out of fashion. Unfortunately the threat of terrorism is being used to systematically and creatively remove civil liberties. At some point a society must ask itself if the security needed to prevent terrorism is in itself an act of terrorism and repression.
Unfortunately all the silliness is not confined to high government (even though a lot of the silliness originates from there). In times of tension the wacko’s, weirdo’s and sociopaths step forward and fill the lower levels of the security system. These are the working stiffs in the security system. Heady with power and filled with self importance they are responsible for degrading ordinary people all in the name of terrorism and security. In reality it’s all for their own little ego’s.
You think I may be exaggerating? Then give me some better explanations for these:
A man trying to fly British Airways to Dusseldorf was told that he could not board the plane wearing the t-shirt he had on. The offending t-shirt had a picture of Megatron (a 40 foot tall cartoon robot with a gun as an arm).
In Canada (Kelowna Airport, British Columbia) a PhD student was not allowed to board the plane because she wore a necklace with a pendant in the shape of a gun (a silver classic Colt45, under two inches in length with no moving parts) story and photo here.
A classic example of misguided airport security in relation to clothes is Raed Jarrar’s experience at JFK where he was forced to take off a shirt with Arabic writing on it or miss his flight; new BBC article. The story upset many people but inspired some: You can now buy t-shirts from Casual Disobedience with text “I am not a terrorist” in Arabic. I bought one and it is among my favorites.
Another classic is when John Gilmore was refused carriage by British Airways recently for declining to take off a button that read “Suspected Terrorist”.
These are only examples relating to clothes or jewelry in relation to airport security – there are plenty of stories of offending clothing (political, not sexual) that have got people detained or arrested. I think I need to develop this into a full length article…
Ken Leee Tulibu dibu douchoo
Busy writing trying to catch a deadline that has way too much of a head start. Every time I need cheering up I listen to “Ken Leee” with the fantastic lyric “Tulibu dibu douchoo”. If you have not checked out this YouTube recording of the Bulgarian attempting to sing Mariah Cary do so now!!!
I think I am going to have to make a t-shirt with Ken Leee on the front and Tulibu dibu douchoo on the back…
Parallel Production Sucks
Despite being totally aware of the consequences I am now stuck (again) with the job of writing several things in parallel. In the next two weeks I need to finish my open access report for Lund, two book chapters and a licensing booklet. The actual content is not the problem – what is the problem is despite all efforts to the contrary deadlines have a tendency to expand and contract to finally collect themselves in nasty little clusters that force the whole writing process into an attempt to beat text from the dead mind of the writer.
So how does this happen and can it be avoided? To answer the last question first: Of course it can be avoided. The simple trick is to only do one thing at a time. The cost of this approach will be to radically diminish my writing output. So this does not feel like an option.
The first question (why?) is more complex. It can be attributed to bad planning but this is only part of the truth. For many years I would explain my deadline stress with the words bad planning but I have come to realize that this is not the whole truth. No matter how good my planning is life has a way of throwing small surprises (not all pleasant) dates change, new tasks are assigned and often unrealistic work loads lead to delays.
The results of these insights should maybe be to attempt to change – but how can you change the unforeseen? How much planning must be included for that which you cannot know? And in the end isn’t it all a waste of time? After all:
Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans – John Lennon
Travel Fraud & Plagiarism
Just because it’s plagiarism doesn’t mean that it has to be bad writing. A travel writer for Lonely Planet, my favorite travel series, has admitted to the Sunday Telegraph that he has not been in the countries he has written about. He wrote his book on Colombia from San Francisco and has admittedly never been in that country he has also admitted to plagiarising large sections of the book.
The Lonely Planet has fact checked his books but discovered no faults in them.
So what is the problem with a travel writer who has never been in the country? Well it is dishonest and fraudulent since the premise is that the writer is writing from personal experience. The fact that it is good writing is not the point. In fact, as most students are aware, a prerequisite for good plagiarism is good writing.
Hamster work
Spent the morning doing hamster work – it’s the handling of emails and administrative tasks each so small that they do not really require much thought but taken collectively they can destroy any attempt to carry out real work (writing, researching etc). It’s called hamster work because after a day carrying it out you go home without having produced anything. It feels much like a hamster must feel after running in the treadmill. Lots of movement but no distance.
Photo: Cholate Loving Hamster by Steve_C (CC BY-NC-ND)
After two hours of attempting to empty my inbox, it now contains 92 essential emails (from the original 224). It isn’t fun discovering things have been forgotten but now at least I am (almost) on top of my email again.
By the way have you read Knuth on email? Here is a short quote:
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.
The science thing
Defining science is never easy:
“If it squirms, it’s biology; if it stinks, it’s chemistry; if it doesn’t work, it’s physics; and if you can’t understand it, it’s mathematics.” Magnus Pyke
“Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics.” Peter Medawar (Pluto’s Republic, p. 116).
I needed to go back and look at the meaning of science for an article I am writing and besides the formal definition I came across two quotes that I like. The formal definition is something like this: Scientific knowledge is proven knowledge, arrived at in some rigorous manner, untouched by personal preferences and opinions. This rigor and lack of objective knowledge makes scientific knowledge more dependable than the alternatives.
Interior decoration frustration
Aaaah, right now with the move days away and I am struggling to figure out the furniture solutions needed for the new place. Writing a thesis seems easy compared to all the decisions needed to finish a home. Just take a look a these choices available for bookshelves. Some of them are nice but I still have not found anything I like. Bah, its easier to write a paper…
