Category: Writing

Anything on the process or results of writing as an activity and a passion

Science and replicability

The basic claim made in published science is that something about the nature of the universe has been uncovered. That makes it distressing when other researchers attempting to isolate the same phenomenon are unable to do so:

For social ‘scientists’ with aspirations of matching the rigour of their peers in the ‘pure’ or ‘natural’ sciences. If different groups of scientists using true double-blind controlled experiments can’t reach compatible conclusions about the world, what hope is there for people trying to deduce causality from historical data?

Graveyard of blogs

Either because people are moving away from blogging in general or because I haven’t been seeking out new blogs, many of the sites in my blogroll haven’t been updated for long spans of time.

I feel the time to pull them from the list has come – at least in the case of blogs not updated in the past six months.

For reference, here they are:

I hope all the authors have moved on to stimulating new projects.

The next comp countdown

The official date hasn’t yet been set, but my comprehensive exam in public policy is now about a month away. Whereas the other members of my study group rattle off the authors, titles, and years of books and articles with disarming rapidity, I find myself unable to remember anything more than the haziest outlines of most sources. I have a great deal of work to do, especially if I am to avoid wasting the summer with re-preparation after a failed first attempt.

First, however, I have a stack of papers to finish grading (for tomorrow). I also have one last paper of my own to write for the 30th, along with twice-a-week comp prep meetings, for which I am meant to write draft outlines to past questions.

Essays, grading, etc

This week involves one of my last pre-comp spurts of academic work for this term.

For tomorrow, I need to write a draft comp answer on policy failure, inequality, and political economy v. institutionalist v. agent-centred theories.

On Wednesday, my interview assignment for my qualitative methods course is due. I need to finish the astonishingly time consuming task of writing the verbatim transcript, then produce about 2500 words of analysis.

Sometime between Friday and next Tuesday, I am meant to grade the papers for the U.S. government and politics class where I am a TA.

After this, there is just one more qualitative methods assignment, along with terrifying masses of work and revision for the public policy comp. I am hoping the danger of having my entire summer ruined by the need to re-prepare in the event of failure will produce the desperation necessary to force myself to do comp adequate reading and preparation over the next month.

From Kitty Fisher to Rasputin

This website is highly entertaining. Here are a few Quite Interesting nuggets:

  • “A famous 18th century courtesan named Kitty Fisher used to distribute pictures of herself small enough to be concealed in the lid of a snuffbox… Fisher led a sensationally dissolute life; Casanova relates that she once ate a thousand-guinea bank note on bread-and-butter.”
  • “Another famous kidnap victim who did not display Stockholm Syndrome was Julius Caesar. Kidnapped by pirates and then ransomed, he raised a fleet, pursued and captured the pirates, and then crucified them, as he had told them he would while in captivity – a promise the pirates had taken as a joke.”
  • “Normal healthy sleepers wake up between 15 and 35 times every night.”
  • “The only other animal with a clear-cut menopause followed by many more years of life is the killer whale.”
  • “Each individual part of a Saturn V rocket had a 99.9 per cent reliability rate, which means that on a good flight, roughly 6,000 of the 6,000,000 parts were expected to fail.”
  • “Buzz Aldrin was the second man to walk on the moon, but was the first human being to celebrate Holy Communion away from the Earth, and the first to urinate on another world. He still keeps his Apollo 11 travel expenses receipt framed on his living-room wall: ‘Cape Kennedy, Fla. – Moon – Pacific Ocean. Amount claimed 33 dollars and 31 cents.’ Buzz had jokingly tried to claim for 880,000 miles at 8 cents a mile. NASA replied with an invoice for one Saturn V rocket, ready for travel, at $185,000,000.”
  • “The best-selling work of fiction of the 15th century was The Tale of the Two Lovers, an erotic novel by the man who later became Pope Pius II.”
  • “The US ban [on subliminal messaging] is a Federal Communications Commission rule rather than a law, and in 1978 they waived it so that police in Wichita could send a subliminal message to a serial murderer called ‘the BTK Killer’ to turn himself in, hidden in a news broadcast. It didn’t work; he was eventually caught in 2005 by other means (irritated that the police had failed to link one of his murders to him, the Killer called them to ask whether it was possible to trace someone from a floppy disc. The police said ‘Er – no’, so he sent the disc, and they tracked him down by Googling the metadata it carried).”
  • “Vitamin A is really toxic; we use it in anti-wrinkle creams because it actually kills the top layer of skin, making it look fresher. Too much, however, can be fatal.”
  • “In general, the only members of the UK armed forces who can wear a full beard are the Royal Navy. A sailor who wants to do so must submit a form requesting ‘permission to stop shaving’. He is then allowed up to two weeks to ‘grow a full set’. At this point he must present himself to the Master at Arms (the senior Service policeman in any ship or unit) who will decide if his beard looks stupid or is respectably full enough to be permitted.”
  • “Professor Con Slobodchikoff of Northern Arizona University has spent 30 years studying prairie dog behaviour… The result was the first dictionary of Prairiedogese, in which the different calls could be decoded – first by computer but eventually by ear. Not only could the prairie dogs differentiate between hawks, coyotes, badgers and humans, they could also differentiate between short and tall humans and even what colour shirt they were wearing. (Interestingly, they couldn’t tell male from female). Not only is Professor Slobodichikoff’s work the first successful attempt to decode a rodent language, it is probably unique among mammals.”
  • “In some countries, being a criminal doesn’t exclude you from having to pay tax… Of course, if you have to pay tax on an illegal action, you can theoretically claim expenses against it. In 2005, a bank robber in the southern Dutch town of Chaam was able to subtract the cost of his gun from his fine. The judge accordingly reduced the fine from $8,750, the amount stolen from the bank, to $6,500.”
  • “In fact, the autopsy didn’t show any poison in Rasputin’s stomach at all and what seems likeliest is that Rasputin was beaten and stabbed and then shot twice. Then, upon finding that he still had a pulse, a third man shot him in the head. What killed Rasputin was being shot through the forehead, which would kill anyone… Another interesting facet to the affair is the suggestion that it may have been an MI6 officer that killed him; the only man present with the sort of revolver which would have fired the fatal bullet was a British Intelligence officer called Oswald Rayner. MI6 had been involved in planning Rasputin’s death, worried that he was going to persuade the Tsar to pull Russia out of World War I and probably lose it for Britain. It is possible that British Intelligence actively ordered Rasputin’s death. Unfortunately, there’s no way of knowing for sure because Rayner burnt all of his papers before his death in 1961.”

See also: baby cages

Regarding ‘exit’

When voice fails to convince the client to support the analyst’s policy choice, the issue advocate may be forced to turn to exit as his only means of influence. He may seek other, more receptive, clients in the bureaucracy or he may leave the bureaucracy in order to be able to promote his policies from outside provided, of course, that the exit option is not too expensive. In any case, for the issue advocate, keeping one’s bags packed may be an ethical imperative.

Jenkins-Smith, H. C. (1982). “Professional roles for policy analysts: A critical assessment.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2(1): 88-100.

Pushing back against internet surveillance

An international effort is being made today to fight back against internet surveillance.

If you wish to take part, I suggest doing so by downloading a version of the GNU Privacy Guard for your operating system, in order to encrypt your emails. Gpg4Win is for Windows, while GPGTools is for Mac OS.

Downloading the TOR Browser Bundle is also a good idea.

Lastly, you may want to learn how to use your operating system’s built-in disk encryption: BitLocker for Windows and FileVault for Mac OS.

None of this is likely to protect you from the NSA / CSEC / GCHQ, but it will make ubiquitous surveillance a bit harder to enforce.

Donald Smiley’s methodology

“The third edition of Canada in Question is somewhat shorter on self-indulgent polemic than was its immediate predecessor. This does not mean that I have become a convert to the cause of “value-free political science” for, despite prolonged and diligent efforts to do so, I have never been able to understand how the analysis of significant political events could be neutral about values. (xi)

What criterion do we use to judge the relative validity of two or more contradictory explanations of the same phenomenon? Where complex matters are involved – such as the influence of Government on Society, or whether political institutions have an independent effect in determining the pattern of political cleavages – the only defensible test is, I think, plausibility. This test is by scientific standards inadequate, but it is the best we have. Rigorously scientific knowledge proceeds by separating out variables… Students of politics can seldom use such devices. (6)

– Smiley, Donald. Canada in Question: Federalism in the Eighties. 1980.

Tolkien giving voice to all

During daily exercise, I have been listening to Tolkien books. Since childhood, I have remembered how he described the thoughts and speech of orcs, but I had forgotten that he did the same for a fox:

A fox passing through the wood on business of his own stopped several minutes and sniffed. “Hobbits!” he thought. “Well, what next? I have heard of strange doings in this land, but I have seldom heard of a hobbit sleeping out of doors under a tree. Three of them! There’s something mighty queer behind this.” He was quite right, but he never found out more about this.

Tolkien on real and legendary wars

Given when it was written, many people have interpreted J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series as an allegory about the first or second world war. In one introduction to the books, he addresses this matter directly, denying that they are in any way allegorical. He goes on to say:

The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the ring would have been seized and used against Sauron. He would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dûr would not have been destroyed, but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time, have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into ring lore, and before long he would have made a great ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled ruler of Middle Earth. In that conflict, both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt. They would not long have survived, even as slaves.