Cajo Snudehygel

Yesterday I had two visits from roofers. The first one I had to prompt to show up (promised to come Tuesday afternoon, coaxed into coming Wednesday afternoon). But I understand: things happen and plans change. This first guy was a waterproofing expert and couldn’t really help with my problem, and so he referred me to the second who showed up exactly as promised.

My problem is that my gutters are loose. When the wind blows (as it does a lot here in Somerset West; we are (1) in the windy Cape, (2) by the coast, and (3) by a mountain), they make a terrible sound as if they are coming off. The reason for this is that they are coming off. The second roofer explained that they were not attached correctly to the fascia board. He also claimed that the company who installed the gutters are now out of business, something that did not surprise me much.

So next week roofer two is coming to fix the gutters properly, to clean them up, and also to fix one of my downspouts which pours the water directly into the ground. I believe that the regulations are that they must be a couple of centimeters above the ground, but — once again — the company that installed them when the house was build were not too keen on regulations.

At least, I hope that roofer two is coming next week to do all those things. It may be that he comes to replace my gutters if the wind blows them off! I just hope another company installed the roof. Usually the builder does this himself, but usually he also installs the gutters himself! My only consolation is that somebody else’s roof will probably blow off first, giving me a little warning. If that happens, I won’t be paying for the repairs of the roof; my landlord will. But I will probably pay for the property damage inside the house! Ugh.

Long ago my piano teacher (or maybe a succession of piano teachers) tried to explain cantabile to me. It refers to a singing quality of a tnote. (Or a phrase really, but it can also apply to a single note.) You are suppose to rotate your hand in a certain way after you have struck the key. I was able to produce it, but I didn’t fully understand how your hand movement could influence the sound once the hammer has hit the strings. To be honest, I still do not understand it — it is still magic to me.

[I should note that my primary piano teacher was an ancient lady. Some or all of what she taught me during the early eighties is probably interdit nowadays. This may very well include cantabile wrist rotation.]

Somehow the human ear is able to discern the pianist intention. The complex co-mingling of frequencies signal a “cold” or a “warm” attitude. My sister and I used to play a duet together. I was not very good, but — to my mind — her playing was mechanical while mine was (only) slightly more confident and conversational. I think I can say this with modesty, since I could also detect how primitive my playing was compared to that of people who could really play well. It is like climbing a mountain. My sister and I are on the foothills, where the technique is still important, while others have progressed to the lower slopes where playing well is a given and where interpretation starts to matter. And of course there are others at higher elevations; for them it is a whole other philosophical ball game, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphors.

Listening to a few recordings reminded me of this strange ability to detect the underlying emotion in even a short phrase. In particular, listening to someone like Mario Lanza singing “Drink! Drink! Drink!” from Romberg’s The Student Prince gives me chills down my spine. Even just those long notes he holds toward the end are enough. Or a good rendition of the William Tell overture. There are countless other examples, not only opera/operetta or classical music, but I’m a little too tired to list them now.

I suspect that piano cantabile is a myth, except insofar as it exists in the mind of the pianist. Lyrical quality is probably conveyed by tiny amounts of rubato.

Long day at work. I accomplish so little, but I think I’m starting to zoom in on (one of) the problems. I think my biggest mistake is going to work at all. Interruptions account for most of my lost time. Richard Hamming gave a famous talk that discusses how to be a great scientist. One of the things he said, is:

Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.

This may all be very true, but I think that in the short term (say the next six months) I need to get the work done. My open-door policy will have to change. No more impromptu visits by students without appointments. In fact, I think I shall set up a strict Mondays & Fridays routine, staying at home Tuesday through Thursday.

This afternoon we also held our quarterly faculty council meeting. Surprisingly, the dean was quite quick. I think he realizes that it is mostly a waste of time. Having said that, tradition is not always a bad thing, and it would probably be a mistake to relinquish the final stamp of approval to unseen committees. However tedious the council meeting may be, I actually look forward to it.

So, after an honest day’s labour, the day held two treats. First, I said goodbye to Pieter and Eva. The chances that I will travel to Europe later in the year is about 50/50, but that I will also have the opportunity to visit Switzerland is very low. But my intention is to go to Finland next year if I can wangle it at the local university (and I’m pretty sure I know how), and on the Finnish side (the whole country have had cutbacks so this may not be as easy), and then I will definitely include Zurich on my itinerary. Of course, it is always a little sad to say goodbye to friends, and especially for me. I tend to see all of my friends about once a year, if I’m lucky!

The other treat was a night out with the boys. The “boys” being Jean and Erik. We went bowling…ahem. This was only my third time ever, and apparently it is not like riding a bicycle. Or perhaps it is, and I was lousy the time as well. I’m very sure I’ve been bowling in Switzerland (but I cannot recall the details), and I must have gone once here in ZA as well. Needless to say, it did not go well. Low scores: three games around the 50–60 mark and one game a little better. But never mind that: it was great fun, and also a little strange to meet the other twin. I’ll see Jean again next week, but I definitely also want to have another go at the bowling.

After a very dull weekend, I suddenly got a call Sunday afternoon from Pieter and Eva, who are visiting South Africa with their kids + the daughter of some friends. So Sunday afternoon we went along, first to Pieter’s cousin, and then to the beach. Amazingly, there was no wind, which is a rare occurrence. The water was nice and warm. The adults just waded but the kids went into the waves full blast. After that, we had some dinner in Stellenbosch, so it was a late night for me.

Monday was a long and exhausting day, so I feel into bed as soon as I got home and slept, slept, slept. And Tueday I met up with my Swiss friends again for another dinner, this time at Pieter’s parents’ house in Stellenbosch. A real South African braai. Also saw a couple of other old friends.

So all-in-all a busy week socially, and there is more coming. I’m not usually this outgoing (literally) in an entire month! I’m not complaining though. It is very, very nice to see old friends again, and especially when they live on another continent. I’m sure they told me that they were coming, but I had completely forgotten about it, and it was a very pleasant surprise.

Sometimes we can know something, without really knowing. See all of the trees, but miss the forest. The internet is a great and wonderful store of information. But it is also a medium for communication. Those two aspects are not exactly the same. An encyclopedia is also a communication by its authors to its readers, but it is primarily a store of information. A telephone is a communication device, but (these days) not a great source of general information.

And today I realized that the internet is also a source of inspiration, or perhaps it is better to say, stimulation. I thought of this, because for the n-th day in a row, I thought to myself: “there is nothing new under the sun”. I recently discovered www.prezi.com, and like many people I was quite impressed. Then I saw the 1994 Muriel Cooper video and, yes, well, it has all been done before.

Would it be possible to write an advanced AI program to scan the internet can discover something that is truly new? Probably. But I suspect that it will not come up with anything that is very good. Now, it won’t be just boring variations on other things. That would not be original. No, it is more likely to produce its own “computer art” that holds no appeal whatsoever for humans. Not everything is worth discovering. And I guess even this has been before.

Are you capable of murder? Perhaps not premeditated murder, but what about manslaughter? Picture a chance disagreement with a stranger that turns a little heated, more heated, everyone growing more agitated, slight pushing, then a scuffle, then blows exchanged. You pick up a metal bar to defend yourself and at some point you hit your opponent who dies. It is hard to imagine that things could go that far without some form of self-restraint kicking in. Some people can quickly lose control, but many, most can hold back their anger. Now imagine that in the argument just described, your opponent threatens your family, your children or partner, who happen to be nearby, with physical harm. Not verbally, but by making a “run” at them, perhaps hitting your child. You fully believe that they are going to injure or kill them, and the situation has escalated to the point where you cannot see how to back off, or calm the person down. Would you hit them in self-defense?

It is possible to lose control; our minds are programmed with those instincts. Most of us have some degree of control over our actions. Being threatened directly, as above, may place us in a situation where we have no alternative, but most of the time we can still make rational choices, even when agitated.

Almost the same kind of instinct leads to mob behaviour, but I find it more difficult to imagine myself in this scenario. this is why a story from Pakistan, or more precisely, the accompanying photo, disturbed me. It is reported in Asian news outlets (here and here, for example; both show the photo), but I can’t find the story in American or European newspapers. In essence, a prominent Pakistani lawyer (one-time president of some national lawyer’s union) employed a 12-year girl as a maid. She died — was murdered it appears — and he has been charged. A lawyers’ association has been harassing the girl’s family and the media, not verbally, but physically. The photo shows a mob composed of lawyers in their formal attire. According to some sources, they threatened to “burn alive” anyone who tries to prosecute the accused. Some sources say that the girl was tortured and possibly sexually assaulted. According to others, she suffered from a medical condition and that the lawyer was helping her to get to the right treatment. The lawyers claim that the accused is being victimized. The mob lawyers and the accused are Muslim, the girl and her family Christian.

These facts may or may not be true. What bothers me is that lawyers — who we expect to be somewhat rational people — can form a mob like this. That the mob can turn violent (this is beyond dispute; at the very least they appear to have damaged camera equipment). That they can threaten more violence, possibly illegal acts. It seems to go against the very picture of what a lawyer should do.

I don’t think their behaviour can be ascribed to the fact that they are lawyers! Nor to their religion, although perceived or actual persecution might escalate tensions in a situation like this. I suspect that the strongest contributing factors are (1) that Pakistan has a culture of…tempestuousness, and (2) that there are factions involved (rival bar associations, or different levels of the judiciary, or perhaps Muslim and Christian factions). Factions are “survival coalitions”. We have a natural tendency to form small, cohesive, insider/outsider, us-and-them groups, and when our group is threatened, mob behaviour is more likely to kick in.

And naturally this makes me wonder whether the same can happen to me? Or even to you, gentle reader? I find the prospect a little scary. But perhaps it is good to remember that “civilization” is just a word for a pattern of behaviour. It is not a tangible thing, or even a collection of tangible things that we can store somewhere in a museum. The products of civilization are very different from the thing itself. What scares me most about a mob is that the individual loses control and that makes him/her vulnerable. We like to be in control. On the other hand, mob behaviour is also a survival instinct. Perhaps it can even do some good?

(This is much too long for this forum. I promise to try to curtail my thoughts. Or at least to be a little briefer when expressing them.)

Things might just be looking a tiny little bit different.  I contemplated a major overhaul. Most importantly, I wanted to increase the font size. It’s not that my eyesight is bad or much worse than before. I just like things to be large and clear. Perhaps it doesn’t appear any different from where you are reading it. But I have particular trouble focusing on tiny text and this is my excuse for any and all mistakes in these posts. But then I decided just to return to the default WP theme.

And now for something completely different. This afternoon I visited my sister for her birthday. We (the whole family) were talking about kids and education, and remembered two of my favourite books:How Children Learn, and How Children Fail. Someone dismissed my advice because I have not had years of experience, but of course I have! We humans encode our experience in books. And though many books contain a lot of nonsense, these two were written by an honest and insightful educator. Of course there are many other books that I am sure are just as good (or better), but I happened to read these two long, long ago. For better or for worse I believe that children should be treated as mini-adults. This communicates the proper expectations we have of them and avoids (or at least tries to avoid) infantilism.

We also happened to talk about genetics a little and this reminded me of what I read in Matt Riddley’s “Genome” last night: that most of the brain is developed by expressing the mother’s genes. Only parts of the limbic system are constructed by the father’s genes.  As he puts it: we have our mothers’ thoughts and our fathers’ moods.

(The post title may or may not ring a bell. Perhaps you should google “Hallo, mein Schatz, ich liebe Dich!”.)

I rushed past an advertisement at the shopping mall this afternoon: it looked like a airport shuttle service using the name “League of Gentlemen”. There was also a car parked next to it (they love parking cars in the shopping mall, for some reason). So perhaps it was really an ad to sell the car? Not sure how the shuttle service plays into it.  Be that as it may, it seems strange to reference the TV show in such a context. Either the advertisers have never seen it, or they are marketing to a select audience.

This made me think of more creative advertising uses for the show’s title.  Try these out:

• The Atheneum’s vegetable show: The Leek of Gentlemen
• In a men’s bathroom: The Leak of Gentlemen
• Typography for connoisseurs: The Lig of Gentlemen
• Highbrow male brothel: The Lick of Gentlemen
• Belgian tourism targeted at bachelors: The Liège of Gentlemen (OK, that’s just visual; I could have used The Liek of Gentlemen, but how many people know the province of Luik that well? And Leke’s  pronunciation doesn’t fit.)

Any others I have missed? (Just to make sure that I have not neglected 134 other towns in Europe, I did a little checking. Of course there are others, and some probably qualify for the slogan, but the most interesting come from France.  I love the distinguishing features Wikipedia reports for the two towns Legé and Lège.)