The Wayback Machine - http://web.archive.org/web/20040402041228/http://www.nataliesolent.blogspot.com:80/

Natalie Solent

Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing. You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.

E-mail: nataliesolent-at-aol-dot-com (I assume it's OK to quote senders by name.)

Kids, cats, rabbit and goldfish to support. More instructions here.


Jane's Blogosphere: blogtrack for Natalie Solent.



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(I sometimes write for Samizdata and Biased BBC.)

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visitors since 21st Nov 2001
["X" was chugging towards eighty thousand until 26th August, when BeSeen pulled the plug on their free counters. I just know I've had zillions of visitors since then. I just know.]


visitors since 5th September 2002. This is my nice new Bravenet counter. It counts unique visits.

This one counts every hit.



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Thursday, April 01, 2004
 
Oh, how nice. Some entrepreneurial roving photographer has sent me a picture of my car. It's a neat idea, but is it really going to "take off" (pardon the pun) the way that selling people aerial photos of their houses did? Although this unposed action shot has a certain undeniable freshness and spontaneity, besides bringing back happy driving memories, I have to say that the picture quality is not good, and I don't think a black and white rear three-quarter view shows her to her best advantage. There also seems to be a lot of paperwork to fill in before you get your framed glossy photo.

 
Sorry for the lack of posts - we've had a guest staying in the computer room. How times change. When we first got the computer we put it in the guest room.

Tuesday, March 30, 2004
 
Cand X. Jim writes:

Dear Natalie Solent-or-whatever-is-your-real-name-is,

On this blog, honey, I tingle with evil Solentoid Nataliness in every nerve and sinew!
Over 30 years ago undergraduate physics labs in Glasgow University were run on very similar lines to the Oxford system you describe.

Of course I never cheated and so have known for certain ever since that the true value of c is 231.4 mph, which means the Sun is only about 31 miles above our heads. You see, the Universe is so much smaller than these so-called experts keep trying to tell us. It all makes perfect sense.

But really I’m concerned about your apparent defection from cat to dog. How can you overlook the only alien species that lives among us, and clearly so intelligent too? Dogs may look up to us, but cats employ us as their servants. And you don’t have to take a cat for a walk. After all, they made it the full nine million miles from Alpha Centura by themselves.

My cat has allowed me to publish this laughable human delusion as part of her psyops strategy.



Friday, March 26, 2004
 
The House of War. Some people in Maryland really do live in the Darb al-Jihad.

 
There are dead rabbits everywhere. Dog-ownership reveals more joys each day. Our teeny dog Laptop is best pals with an enormous, friendly, enormous, bouncy, adorable, seriously enormous Retriever puppymonster who, in line with this blog's strict policy of total anonymity for companion animals, we shall call Dog X (not his real name). Dog X is the very soul of benevolence and charitable endeavour: he knows you want dead rabbits and he does his best to bring you them.

He doesn't hunt them; Mr Fox already did that. He just thinks his human deserves to be given a little extra-special snack for being such a good human. (And if he has a little something himself while he's at it, where's the harm?) What is astonishing is how many good deeds he can pack into a single walk. Did you know that every single field you see has dismembered bits of bunny somewhere in it?

If an aerial view of the average field were to be marked with two points, A, where Laptop and Dog X are let off the lead, and B, the last resting place of Mr Bun, then Dog X's path would be a geometrically perfect A-B straight line. Click goes the lead-clip, pazoom goes the dog, "Blank!" goes his owner. "Oh blank, he's seen a dead rabbit again. Oi! Come! Dog X (not your real name), you blanky dog, come!"

Alas for her hopes. In solidarity I add my voice to hers.

"Hee-ere Exey, Exey, Exey! C'mon boy, come..."

Totally bleeding useless thing to do. If he wouldn't come to her he's scarcely likely to come to me, is he? He ain't coming to no one until he gone done got that coney. Or as Herodotus might have said, neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays this courier from the swift completion of his appointed rabbit.

Laptop, in contrast, is not fully on-mission. His path from A to B would resemble a stretched out Slinky. He spirals round the singleminded Dog X loudly offering support and assistance, like a bit part saying "You go, champ!" to a Samurai girding himself to avenge his slain lord in single combat. Laptop thinks that running three times round a shrub shouting at it is a significant contribution.

While Laptop fights his rearguard action with the shrub, Dog X usually decides that safe carriage of the rabbit would be more efficiently achieved by swallowing it in one gulp. I thought only anacondas could do that. I guess there were a lot of things I didn't know about country life - but there you go, I really hadn't appreciated the melancholy abundance of dead rabbit until Dog X brought it home to me.

And regurgitated it at my feet. Thank you, Dog X.


 
Zimbabwe has started paying off the IMF. Whether this is a good or bad move for Zimbabwe I can't tell you. I don't know that sort of economics. However it gives the impression that things are not so desperate there as I thought.

Of course the 600% inflation isn't so hot.


Thursday, March 25, 2004
 
Why I love Nintendo Official Magazine UK: "There's this guy and he's called Mr Driller. He drills. That's what he does. He doesn't muck about with other, non-drill-related things. He drops into a deep well filled with blocks which look like sweets and he drills. Down and down he goes, until he reaches the bottom or is crushed by falling blocks. The end."

- From a review of a game called, surprisingly, Mr Driller Drill Land.


 
Just how bad was it in Saddam's Iraq? Black Triangle links (scroll right down) to two surveys that give you some idea. These are separate from the BBC/ABC poll that everyone's heard about. The first samples the extent of human rights violations:
Overall, 47% of those interviewed reported 1 or more of the following abuses among themselves and household members since 1991: torture, killings, disappearance, forced conscription, beating, gunshot wounds, kidnappings, being held hostage, and ear amputation, among others.
The second survey asked how many doctors participated in human rights abuses:
The survey found that physicians had falsified medical-legal reports in cases of alleged torture, performed physical mutilation as a form of punishment, and falsified death certificates
A few of the doctors admitted doing these things themselves.


 
He didn't want to die. This report from the Guardian tells how a Palestinian boy loaded with explosives surrendered to Israeli troops.

It seems that Hassam Mohammed Hufni (also called Hussam Abdo in some reports) is somewhat "simple" as country people used to say. No doubt his limited intelligence made him easy to manipulate - but when the time came, perhaps it saved him and others: the poisonous rhetoric that convinces most suicide bombers to override pity for their victims and their own desire for life could not get a grip in his more innocent mind.

Although the reigning ideology of Palestinian jihad loudly states that the best possible end for any Palestinian is to die while killing and the purpose of Palestinian existence is to be fuel for the fire, it is clear that the bomb-masters feel certain categories of Palestinian are more disposable than others. There was another case a few weeks ago where a woman caught in adultery was directed to "redeem" herself by carrying out a suicide bombing.

I can't help wondering what this boy's future will be - now that he has one. It is not clear whether the Hufni family knew or approved of his being used as a suicide bomber. They may well have. Present day Palestinian family life admits of many forms. Perhaps it seemed a profitable way to offload a liability, since even though Saddam Hussein's cash payments to the families of suicide bombers have ceased other payments continue. Any doubts could be assuaged by the thought that they wouldn't have to worry about the boy any more because he'd go straight to heaven.

But I don't know that is the case at all. Some family members of suicide bombers have dared in their grief to speak out, despite the pervasive fear. They have said they didn't know and that if they had known they would have begged their son or daughter not to do it. We won't know whether those Palestinians who shared ordinary human values were the vast majority or a bare majority or a minority or a tiny minority until, in some future time scarcely imaginable now, Palestinians have a free society. (Note I do not specify under what political arrangement this happy state might occur. You might be surprised how vague my opinions on the matter are. )

If Hassam's family did know, surely he cannot be returned to them. In any case I do not know what the the famous "Palestinian Street" does to suicide bombers who change their mind, but I doubt it's anything good.

Despite all this, we can still say "where there's life there's hope." Hassam Mohammed Hufni has life and may yet hope to make something good of it. Already he has turned aside from making something very bad of it, which is more than many manage.

My respects to the Israeli soldiers who showed him mercy at considerable risk to themselves.

UPDATE: It emerges that his family didn't know, and they are glad to have him back alive. However their objection was not to suicide bombings per se, but to their son doing them.


Wednesday, March 24, 2004
 
My career as an academic cheat and fraudulent examiner. Brian Micklethwait has up a few comments about cheating in academia. I thought it might benefit the common weal if I described my own experiences. And if you didn't know before that "Natalie Solent" was a pseudonym, you do now.

In the Oxford physics course of twenty-plus years ago practical work was done in pairs. You and your practical partner would work through a set course of well-known physics experiments, writing up your results in a file. Some experiments everyone had to do; others were optional but you had to complete a fixed number of them. The "kits" for each experiment had been around for donkey's years. It was common practice for the second year science students to sell their practical files to the freshers.

My main motive for cheating was lunch. When you and your partner had completed your experiment you went to get it signed off by a graduate student called a demonstrator, who was meant to discuss the experiment with you. If in the experiment just finished you discovered that the speed of light was what everyone thought it was then the demonstrator chatted about physics for ten minutes and then let you go. If, however, you had recorded a value for c of seventy-three miles per hour then the demonstrator would enthusiastically set out to dismantle the entire experiment until he either confirmed your result and discovered the hyperdrive or found out where you had gone wrong. Hungry undergraduates liked the first option better.

The difficulty about getting to lunch was that most physics experiments have to be thumped to make them work right. This fact is widely known, was true for acknowledged greats such as Millikan, but is not often admitted. That was why the second year students' files were so useful: knowing what the answers were meant to be helped enormously in getting them. (Remember that the second years themselves had almost certainly copied their results from earlier generations of students. ) Of course, you couldn't copy the earlier account word for word.

I never heard of anyone faking an experiment from beginning to end. Your absence from the lab would certainly have been noticed, you would not have had the minimum real-life experience of the experiment necessary to get past the demonstrator and, despite the prevailing dishonesty, that would have been regarded as going too far. My practical partner and I would work quite hard until the bloody thing started to go wrong. Even then we'd pummel the apparatus about for a while, hoping to convince it to yield the result in the book. But usually in the end we'd give up and go back to college to get to work producing a convincing fake.

A forgery is often true art. Sometimes I almost thought I learned more about physics in the process of constructing a plausible account of an experiment I had not completed than I would have learned in doing it. You had to ensure that the answer was off, but not too much off. You had to be ready to answer questions.

There was one particular experiment designed to teach us about statistics where you had to let a small ball drop out of a funnel and mark where it hit or something like that about a thousand times over. Then all the results for everyone were collected together and would, it was hoped, combine to display a nice bell curve. A rumour I heard said that one year the bell curve had a little subsidiary peak to one side of it. The authorities were very shocked. They thought the subsidiary peak represented all those who'd copied results from earlier years.

Wrong-o. The big peak showed that. The little peak belonged to the honest students.

Eventually, I became an honest student. For one thing, it was dawning on me that all the work involved in artistic fakery was actually more boring than being in the lab. So boring, in fact, that we got sloppy. One awful day found my partner and I seated in front of a demonstrator with a set of results in front of us which hadn't even been decently faked. We had not changed the final result from the whatever our particular pair of second year predecessors had put down. The demonstrator talked amiably about the experiment for a while then got out a big lined record book and wrote down our names and result at the foot a column of earlier results.

I forget which of us spotted our peril first, or by what desperate telepathy she communicated it to the other - but within half a second we were wordlessly conveying to each other that we were finished. Doomed. Dead meat. The only question was when the axe would fall.

Our result was only two lines below the one we'd copied it from. The two were identical to three decimal places, a physical impossiblity or damn nearly so.

Our demonstrator hadn't spotted it yet but eventually somebody would. There would be only one possible explanation.

Calling on the reserves of dramatic ability that come to the aid of the most indifferent of actors faced with a situation where they must lie to save their skins, we got through the remainder of the demonstrator's questions. He wanted his lunch, too.

We weren't hungry any more. It's amazing how suddenly previously remote concepts like "cheating" and "being sent down" can come to life when your doom is written in a book lying on a desk waiting for any idly curious soul to read. A quick council of war in the corridor had revealed a shaft of hope: our result was written in pen, but the old result was written in pencil. If we could get hold of the book and alter the old result to something different, we'd be fairly safe.

Have you ever stolen anything? When it's not a game it's harder than you think it's going to be. But we managed to get the book and both of us into the privacy of a cubicle of the nearby ladies' lavatory about five minutes later. Our situation gave us several reasons to work as fast as we could before anyone came round. The old result was rubbed out - it is dreadfully difficult to do that neatly when working at speed on a lavatory seat - and a new one substituted. Done, done, but we weren't safe yet. We had to get the book back on the table. Before that we had to get out of the lavatory. This was getting harder by the minute. There were footsteps everywhere. The lab was filling up after lunch and, if caught, our reasons for leaving the same cubicle simultaneously might prove awkward to put into words. I hope you will not think ill of my tolerance if I say that the consequences of giving the most easily available false explanation seemed scarcely more appealing than those following on from giving the true one - and there was simply no explaining away the book. We had several false starts, but eventually we got out and walked the long five yards down the corridor and plonked the book back on the desk.

Outside, safe and free, I stated pretty firmly that I never, ever wanted to be in that situation again. My partner said likewise. I'd like to claim that shame as well as fear was involved, but I think that only came later. Anyway, I started really doing the experiments right through to the end. Most of the time I still couldn't make them work but the long post-mortems no longer seemed so bad.

One experiment I remember well (perhaps because it actually worked eventually) was intended to demonstrate the Hanle Effect. When I got past the initial stages of this one I found some crucial components were missing. I had to go to a lot of trouble to get what I needed and re-fit them in the bowels of the apparatus. The interior was very dusty. It was clear to me that no one had done the latter part of the experiment for years - yet people were on the books as having done it.

By the time I left university I was quite proud of my practical file, with a particular shamefaced pride I could not admit. The assessment of the final year experiments counted towards the degree, if I've remembered right, and my hard- and by now honestly-earned practical grade was well above the unimpressive results of the rest of my degree. It still makes me sad to recall that I forgot to reclaim my file when I left, so that what may have been the first genuine Oxford undergraduate account of the Hanle Effect experiment in years is now part of a landfill site.

Someone told me that they cleaned out the Augean stables a few years after I left. Some unfortunate chemist got caught and made an example of, and the system of scrutiny for science practicals was tightened up til it squeaked.

I mustn't forget that I also promised to tell you how dishonest I was as an examiner. Actually, I was cheating a little when I said that. I really, truly, honestly can't remember if I actually did mark a candidate dishonestly or not. This is how it happened, if it did at all. I was a teacher invigilating the GCSE Physics practical for the class I taught. I had a check list for each child asking whether he or she had done and/or recorded a list of required actions. The marks I entered in my check list counted towards their final result. One of the girls, a really nice kid, hardworking and, if not of the first rank academically, certainly not thick, had made an initial error in setting up her experiment that was propagating itself through all she did.

Oh, the pity of it. She generally understood physics pretty well. She'd just messed up today. Still, today's result was what I was marking. There was nothing I could do...

... Or maybe there was. Perhaps the fact that this girl's home language was not English could come to her rescue. Because I knew her and knew how she talked I could tell that a key part of her account of her experiment was simply wrong and showed a basic misunderstanding. However all her English was sufficiently bad that I could just about make a case that she understood OK, she just had expressed it badly. In those days bad English wasn't marked down in a Physics exam. I could gain her a few marks anyway, maybe just above to inch her above a C.

It would be a shaky case but I was unlikely ever to have to make it. Only a certain proportion of the exam scripts were moderated by an external examiner.

Here my mind goes blank. Did I sell such of my academic soul as was left unsold from my previous activities? Or did I just think about it and then pull back? I can remember the sun slanting down onto the honey-coloured wood of the lab bench. I can remember the crumbly old red rubber of a three-prong clamp on a grey steel pole and the reflection of the window in the face of a stopwatch, although not, funnily enough, what the actual experiment was. I can't remember what sign my pen made.

Whatever I did, I wasn't motivated by fear or ambition, the usual motives that prompt teachers to up their pupils' results. By that time I was pretty sure that a teacher's life was not for me and next year I'd be off to pastures new. I was motivated by niceness.

The academic world has to be protected from nice people like me.

There endeth my confession. I suppose that I ought to have entitled this piece "My career as a reformed cheat and possible fraudulent examiner only I can't remember whether I was or not." But attention-grabbing titles aren't cheating, they're art.

UPDATE: Want to see the view from the other side of the hill? The same post of Brian's that I linked to independently inspired David Gillies to recount his experience of being a demonstrator discovering massive cheating by students.

The comments to that post are also fascinating. Wobbly Guy offers a defence of the custom of passing on one's file to the next cohort. It's true that reading up on a previous account of the experiment and using it to structure your own procedure is not in itself bad - after all if a keen student reads up on how whatever pioneer of science first did the experiment in question then he should be praised. But file-sharing in the old-fashioned sense makes it perilously easy to lie about having done it at all and/or to copy blindly, as Wobbly Guy admits.


 
Drat. Posting mixup. Much copying and deleting going on to cure it. Ignore the timestamps of the last few posts. I mean, in so far as you didn't ignore them anyway.

Tuesday, March 23, 2004
 
De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Or, as Harold Laski once put it, De mortuis nil nisi bunkum. Scott Burgess compares two obituaries for Sheikh Yassin. The one by David Hirst in the Guardian ought to be preserved in formaldehyde, to stand in some future cabinet of curiosities beside all those adoring obituaries in the western press for J V Stalin.

UPDATE: David Carr has more. Wipe away a tear as David mourns for the the Sheikh Yassin we knew and loved.



 
Heinlein. Glory Road. Can't remember the exact quote, but at the orders of the Empress this guy is taken outside and killed and Oscar says, "I was so upset that I had to have another cup of coffee."

They got Yassin. Milk, no sugar. Instant will do fine.


 
True when you think about it. Before making a visit I thought it best to give my children a little briefing. I wanted to make sure they avoided a topic of conversation that might have been painful for our hosts. "So," I concluded, "we must all be very tactful." A sudden thought struck me: "You do know what the word 'tactful' means, don't you?"

"Yes," said my son, a keen player of Age of Empires. "It means having good tactics."


Monday, March 22, 2004
 
L'affaire Matt Cavanagh. In his latest post Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber gives the background to, and an unedited version of, his letter in today's Guardian.

I agree with every word of his letter. Paticularly the bit about scavenging for soundbites that the Guardian edited out.

Judging from what I've read in blogs and the press about Cavanagh's unreconstructed views, he did not put forward the standard libertarian argument that to forbid racial discrimination is to violate the human right of free association. (The standard libertarian view is the view I hold. It is quite compatible with thinking that in all but a few special situations racial discrimination is morally wrong, a view I also hold.) According to Edward Lucas in a letter further down the page, "We invited Mr Cavanagh [to the ICA debate that started all the fuss] as a leftwing critic of equality of opportunity. He argued, for example, that it leads to an overemphasis on competition between individuals."

In other words the views I hold would be even more likely than Mr Cavanagh's to be described as pyschotic by David Winnick MP, a member of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee. As described by the Guardian this prominent Labour MP's own views appear close to totalitarian. He does not merely think it is pyschotic to oppose the discrimination laws he thinks it is psychotic even to question them.

That's us lot for the loony bin then.

Still, you never know with the Guardian. Tomorrow we might be treated to the amusing spectacle of Mr Winnick saying that he was quoted out of context, just like Mr Cavanagh before him.

(This whole affair seemed to me to bring out so well the intolerance of the Establishment view of tolerance that I've just cross-posted it to Samizdata.)