Getting Rid of Things

I've been throwing things away at work today. In a couple of months, we move to new offices and all we are allowed to take are five boxes - things that will fit into one bookshelf.

When I started in my job, getting on for twenty years ago, I was employed as a maths lecturer. My university had a School of Mathematical Sciences and an undergraduate maths degree. Around the year 2000, recruitment to the degree was low and the Powers-that-Be decided to close the degree so that the department could concentrate on Computer Science. At the same time, there was what I believe was called (without any trace of irony) a "rationalisation" in the School of Applied Sciences which meant a closure in their Physics course. The university Library, which was moving premises at the time, saw an opportunity to reclaim some shelf space from books in areas that obviously were dead subjects, and decided to sell off the maths and physics stock for something ridiculous like 25 pence per book. I think in the end, they started selling off even cheaper than that in lots of two or three. Despite my relatively impecunious state as a lecturer, I decided that this was a bargain and bought most of them - they even threw in the History and Philosophy of Science books into the sale as well, which were clearly never going to be needed again. So I ended up with about 600 books on pure and applied maths, statistics, physics, the history of mathematics, and the history and philosophy of science. Some were classics - Dirac's "Quantum Mechanics", a full set of the Landau-Lifschitz series on theoretical physics, or Rene Taton's "General History of the Sciences" - others were purchased just because of the title - I wanted to be able to say I had read a book called "Jewels of Formal Language Theory". Some were bought because I thought they were too important to be scrapped - reasonable copies of Newton's "Opticks" or Boole's "Laws of Thought" - while yet others were investments in futures that didn't arrive for me - Weinberg's "Quantum Theory of Fields" or  Conway's "On Numbers and Games".

So they have stayed on the shelves of my office over the past decade, occasionally dipped into in the rare times when there was space to appreciate them but mostly just being there as a reminder that I was part of a tradition of learning that was over a thousand years old, going back to Bologna and Paris and Oxford. And I imagined the mindset of monks, both the black monks of 6th century Europe, and the Albertian Order of Liebowitz.

So now the School (now, of Computing Science and Digital Media) is moving to new premises. No longer will academic staff have individual rooms in which to meet students and discuss their progress. Instead we will have a shiny, new, open-planned office with card-controlled entry which stops students coming near us, and access to "Open-Learning spaces" and coffee shops. And lecturers will have a small desk, and one bookshelf each. One bookshelf - five shelves holding four linear metres. My own home is already cluttered with books and my kids are growing up and need their own space. Not much room there. So I have to decide what stuff from my office will come with me and what will go. Some of the books have already been put on a table outside the School office labelled "Free Books for Keen Students!" but these are mostly new programming books. Besides our Computer Science student would have to be quite keen indeed to pick up Birkhoff and MacLane's "A Survey of Modern Algebra" or Cartan's "Theory of Spinors".

But if I can take one bookshelf's worth, what about the other stuff. Photocopies of papers from my time as a physicist... PhD work... that I spent years trying to get to grips... the mathematical intricacies of quantum groups, the physical characteristics of quantum optical states. Most of these have gone today. It's difficult to explain to someone who hasn't spent an extended period of their time focussed on a problem, such as that required for a PhD, just why this was so difficult. Just saying that you become attached to papers seems silly, and of course, they can always be ordered again in dire emergencies. But it still felt bad. It, did however, put off the time when harder choices about books need to be made.

So does it matter? Does it matter that I will no longer have access to resources from fields in which I no longer teach? Why should the university provide me with space to keep my private library on their premises?

Well I suppose I could cite short-sightedness. As well as the maths and physics, the Library also sold off much of its statistics collection. Given our current academic predilection for "Big Data", that now seems a little premature. The books in my room were never really mine. They could be used by anybody who wanted them. Now, it seems, we will rely on the web and more modern texts that contain more modern maths and stats. I don't anticipate that the mathematics of quasitriangular Hopf algebras will be making a big impact in computer science any time soon, but you can never tell. It's in the nature of mathematics to be productive, and to be productive in ways that we don't understand before it happens.

But in a way, I am less upset about the technical books than the loss of books on the history and philosophy of science. I seem to recall that it was once considered something of a virtue to be well-read in these subjects. The notion that being able to have a broad overview of the role and impact of the sciences in the context of the humanities was a "good thing". I'm not sure that university decision-makers - who may not even be academics - think that anymore. And that makes me sad.

Shooting Fish

Feser on Krause.

It's getting a bit monotonous now but the earlier posts mentioned at the bottom of the post are very interesting as is Feser's defence of the Cosmological Argument.

More Modern Myths about Galileo

Thony Christie takes apart the recent paean to Galileo by Adam Gopnik that was published in the New Yorker.

Siris on Magic

Interesting article on Magic in Fiction and Alchemy in historical reality from Brandon Watson at his Siris blog. This is one of the best and most wide-ranging of the blogs I follow. It is good to read thought-provoking prose.

Gun Control and Culture

I live in a culture in which the question of gun control has little or no meaning because societal norms, not to say enacted legislation, dictate that individuals shouldn't normally have access to firearms. It is difficult therefore for me to understand those in the US who advocate little change in gun control laws in the wake of the recent shootings of children in Newtown, Connecticut.

At the same time, however, there are commentators whose views I respect, who do try to explain the issues from an american perspective in which the right to carry firearms is a part of the sociopolitical culture. One of these is Darwin Catholic who does this in a series of articles on assault weapons here, here and here.

I can't say that I understand all of this - the desire to own a gun as an aesthetic item, for example - but I do recognise the that translated to swords. I think swords are very interesting and the best of them have an aesthetic quality that I understand very well.

I aim to misbehave...

I watched "Serenity" again tonight. Why on earth did they cancel "Firefly"?

Mal: "Y'all got on this boat for different reasons, but y'all are come to the same place. So now I'm asking more of you than I have before. Maybe all. 'Cause as sure as I know anything I know this: they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground, swept clean. A year from now, ten, they'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. 
And I do not hold to that. So no more running. I aim to misbehave."

The Galileo Farce

I despise Guardian writers even more than I despise Guardian readers who are a pretty moronic bunch (just see the comments here). I can't stand the smug, pseudo-intellectual, self-satisfaction that comes from the uncritical assumption that you are on "the right side of history" so that little things like facts and "the truth" don't matter.
A case in point is the lazy so-called journalism evident, this time, in the Science blog, which is torn to pieces with typical gusto by Thony Christie and Mike Flynn.

From "Local Hero"

Speaking of heroes, this from the film "Local Hero". I live about an hour and a half from Pennan which is where much of "Local Hero" was filmed. It has always been one of my favorite films because of the humour and understated sadness. And who couldn't like Mark Knopfler's haunting score...?

I've always thought that, ultimately, there was only one story worth telling, that of Redemption. In the end,  things work out, to a greater or lesser extent for everyone apart from Mac, but Mac is the one who is redeemed. He still has to leave, though. I want him to be the one ringing in the final scene - telling them that he has packed in the job and will be back - but maybe it doesn't work like that and we work out our redeemed state in the world from which we've been bought back.

John Weir Foote, VC

One of my heroes is Captain John Weir Foote, regimental chaplain of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, who served in the Dieppe Raid in 1942.

According to the Wikipedia article:
"On August 19, 1942 at Dieppe, France, Captain Foote coolly and calmly during the eight hours of the battle walked about collecting the wounded. His gallant actions saved many lives and inspired those around him by his example. At the end of this gruelling time he climbed from the landing craft that was to have taken him to safety and deliberately walked into the German position in order to be taken prisoner so that he could be of help to those men who would be in captivity until May 5, 1945."

The Long Defeat

This is almost excruciating in its poignancy. What we have lost...

Galadriel says “Through the ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.” 

And Tolkien, himself: “I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ — though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.”

March in E flat from Clavierbuchlein vor Anna Magdalena Bach

My son is playing this for his grade 4 piano exam. He sometimes practices in the office while I am doing my work. I would usually put on some Bach as background music but now I don't have to.

Hmm...

Norwegians...

Not sure what to make of this.

History Podcasts

I used to love listening to Mike Duncan's "The History of Rome" podcast until it finished last year. It was great to listen to someone, an amateur in the true sense of the word, speak about ancient history and I've been struggling to find something like this since its sad demise.
There's Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" of course, which is excellent, but this is thematic rather than episodic.
However, I've just discovered Kevin Stroud's "The History of English". The style is a bit different from THoR but the content is absolutely fascinating and a couple of times when I've been casually listening to it, I have just had to stop what I'm doing because the lights go on in my head and I can see the connections between the various Indo-European languages that he talks about.
Really fascinating.

The First US Computer Science Graduate

This at the CACM blog, via Mark Guzdial's blog:

Who Earned First Computer Science Ph.D.?

Who would have thought it?

From "The Quiet Man"

"Red Will" Danaher:    I'll count three, and if you're not out of the house by then, I'll loose the dogs on you. 
Thornton:    If you say "three," mister, you'll never hear the man count "ten." 

The relevant part starts at 0:45:30.

I remember me and my Dad having competitions to see who could remember quotes from our favorite films. This was always one we would use.

And while we are considering aphorisms...

This is the quote that appears above my desk. I like to think it is for the students but it's also for me.

"The will to be stupid is a very powerful force, but there are always alternatives."

Lois McMaster Bujold, Brothers in Arms

Surely written about Higher Education Management...

This quote from one of the comments on W.M. Briggs blog:

“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” Thomas Sowell

What is this all about?

For a while now, I have thought about getting a blog just to act as a repository for things I find interesting. This is it.