The Grauniad reports on the death of adventurer and writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, aged 96. I recount a story about him and an ode by Horace, here.
Fermor attended Kit Marlowe’s old school, King’s School Canterbury, together with Alan Watts, who apparently wrote his first book about Zen Buddhism while still at school. Fermor famously was expelled from this school.
As part of the diverse mental attic that this blog is, this post simply lists live music I have heard, as best my memory serves, up until the pandemic. In some cases, I am also motivated to write about what I heard.
Other posts in this series are listed here.
I have remarked before that music is a form of thinking. It is a form of thinking for the composer and may also be for the listener. If the performers are to transmit its essence effectively and well, it will be a form of thinking for them also. Listening recently to the music of Prokofiev, I realize I don’t think in the way he does, and so I find his music alien.
But what is the nature of this musical thought?
Continue reading ‘Music as thought’
My father saw a young Melbourne comedian named Barry Humphries try out an act as an ordinary Moonee Ponds housewife in a Review at the Phillip Street Theatre in Sydney in about 1955. He and I saw undergraduate mathematician Adam Spencer winning theatre sports improv contests at The Harold Park Hotel in about 1988. As well as being so witty that I would remember his name all this time, he also still had a full head of blonde hair.
How little scientists know who only know science! Thanks again to Norm, I learn about some statements by a retired professor of chemistry, Peter Atkins, about how we know what we know. Atkins is quoted as saying:
The scientific method is the only reliable method of achieving knowledge.”
Well, first, it is worth saying that the scientific method does not produce reliable knowledge. One of the two defining features of science is that scientific claims are defeasible: they may be contested, questioned, challenged, and even overthrown, if the evidence warrants. There is nothing inherently reliable about any scientific claim or theory, since new evidence may be found at any time to overthrow it. The history of science is littered with examples. (The second key feature is that anyone may do this contesting; science is not, or rather should not be, a priesthood.)
Continue reading ‘Reliable Knowledge’
A reader of Andrew Sullivan’s blog notices that Bam is a post-industrial nomad:
I wish people would realize that we have a President that was born in the USA, raised in Asia and multi-cultural Hawaii, and who lived in Harlem, and went to uppity Harvard and then spent a lot of time in African-American ‘hoods. Oh, and he’s driven up and down the rural highways of Illinois hundreds of times. Furthermore, much of his life was spent in obscurity, so he had to live amongst us normal people paying back student loans. Even as a Senator he lived in a run-down apartment in D.C. This is why I never worried about Obama’s lack of experience. All he’s had is experience. Even Bill Clinton, who entered into the political upper-class networks by the time he was at Georgetown, looks provincial and cut-off from real America compared to this. Have we ever had a President who has lived in this many American worlds and cultures and succeeded in all of them?
Well, yes: Certainly TR and possibly also Herbert Hoover and JFK.
What are models for? Most developers and users of models, in my experience, seem to assume the answer to this question is obvious and thus never raise it. In fact, modeling has many potential purposes, and some of these conflict with one another. Some of the criticisms made of particular models arise from mis-understandings or mis-perceptions of the purposes of those models, and the modeling activities which led to them.
Liking cladistics as I do, I thought it useful to list all the potential purposes of models and modeling. The only discussion that considers this topic that I know is a brief discussion by game theorist Ariel Rubinstein in an appendix to a book on modeling rational behaviour (Rubinstein 1998). Rubinstein considers several alternative purposes for economic modeling, but ignores many others. My list is as follows (to be expanded and annotated in due course):
POSTSCRIPT (Added 2011-06-17): I have just seen Joshua Epstein’s 2008 discussion of the purposes of modeling in science and social science. Epstein lists 17 reasons to build explicit models (in his words, although I have added the label “0” to his first reason):
0. Prediction
1. Explain (very different from predict)
2. Guide data collection
3. Illuminate core dynamics
4. Suggest dynamical analogies
5. Discover new questions
6. Promote a scientific habit of mind
7. Bound (bracket) outcomes to plausible ranges
8. Illuminate core uncertainties
9. Offer crisis options in near-real time. [Presumably, Epstein means “crisis-response options” here.]
10. Demonstrate tradeoffe/ suggest efficiencies
11. Challenge the robustness of prevailing theory through peturbations
12. Expose prevailing wisdom as imcompatible with available data
13. Train practitioners
14. Discipline the policy dialog
15. Educate the general public
16. Reveal the apparently simple (complex) to be complex (simple).
These are at a lower level than my list, and I believe some of his items are the consequences of purposes rather than purposes themselves, at least for honest modelers (eg, #11, #12, #16).
References:
Joshua M Epstein [2008]: Why model? Keynote address to the Second World Congress on Social Simulation, George Mason University, USA. Available here (PDF).
Robert E Marks [2007]: Validating simulation models: a general framework and four applied examples. Computational Economics, 30 (3): 265-290.
David F Midgley, Robert E Marks and D Kunchamwar [2007]: The building and assurance of agent-based models: an example and challenge to the field. Journal of Business Research, 60 (8): 884-893.
Robert Rosen [1985]: Anticipatory Systems. Pergamon Press.
Ariel Rubinstein [1998]: Modeling Bounded Rationality. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press. Zeuthen Lecture Book Series.
Ariel Rubinstein [2006]: Dilemmas of an economic theorist. Econometrica, 74 (4): 865-883.
Belately, I want to record a play seen at the headquarters of The Royal Society in London last month, Let Newton Be, written by Craig Baxter, but using only Isaac Newton’s own words. The play was interesting although the energy of the play sagged at times, particularly in the first half. The story only barely mentioned Newton’s interest in alchemy, and seemed to overlook his brutal, deadly campaigns against money forgers later in life (or did I nap through that scene?)
The play comprised three actors, two men and a woman, who played Newton at different ages – as a child, as a young-ish Cambridge academic, and as an old man. As a work of drama, the conceit worked well, although it was best when one of the actors was playing another person interacting with Newton (eg, Halley, and later Leibniz, who spoke in an amusing cod-German accent). Perhaps the real Newton was not sufficiently schizoid for three actors to play him, at least not when constrained to only use the man’s written words. As I have remarked before, Newton’s personality was all of a piece: it is only modern westerners who cannot imagine a religious motivation for activities such as scientific research, for example, or who find alchemy and calculus incoherent.
The performance was followed by a panel discussion by the Great and the Good – two historians and two scientists. One of the scientists was the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, who has subsequently won this year’s Templeton Prize for Science and Religion. The discussion was interesting, so it is a pity it was not recorded for posterity.
A review of another play about a member of the matherati, Kurt Godel, is here.
Another concert caught in Bologna this past weekend was a short concert for Palm Sunday in the Crypt of the Basilica of San Pietro. The music was by Quartetto d’Archi G. B. Martini and Corale Convivium Musicum, playing the following programme:
The string quartet comprised Cesare Carretta (1st), Stefano Chiarotti (2nd), Margherita Fanton (viola), and Antonio Mostacci (‘cello).
The acoustics of the crypt were surprisingly good: despite the stone walls and columns, the low, curved ceilings bounced the sound around the chamber, and the crowd absorbed it well. Perhaps all the palm fronds being waved helped. The music was performed well, although the concert was over in under 30 minutes. We were left wanting more.
