Chris Bertram

The BBC “tells us”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6956867.stm

bq. Tyrannosaurus rex would have been able to outrun a footballer, according to computer models used to estimate running speeds of dinosaurs.

But which one? Outrunning some footballers would be no great achievement. More to the point, would T. rex have been able to control the ball and get a decent cross into the box? Those who have followed the career of the Danish winger Dennis Rommedahl know that speed isn’t everything.

My colleague Susan Hurley died last Thursday night. She had been ill for some time, but many of us still held on to the hope that someone as energetic and determined as Susan was would survive. Susan had only joined us at Bristol fairly recently, but she had had a tremendous impact on the Department of Philosophy. She was a great inspiration for graduate students and a formidable interlocutor for her colleagues. Susan is well known to the wider philosophical community for her books _Natural Reasons_ and _Justice, Luck and Knowledge_ as well as for an impressive array of “papers”:http://eis.bris.ac.uk/~plslh/ . Her interests were very broad, ranging from decision theory and political philosophy, through philosophy of mind, psychology and neuroscience. Lately it had been neuroscience that had engaged her, and she was keen to articulate a distinctively naturalistic view of what philosophy is that makes it very much continuous with the natural sciences. Many of us didn’t agree with Susan about that, but she was pretty good at forcing us to reexamine our own lazy assumptions in thinking through why. She’s a real loss to the profession and to the academic community more widely: someone who was committed to the discipline, who was generous with her time and person, and whom many students at Bristol, Warwick, Oxford and elsewhere will remember for having got them really excited about philosophy. We will all miss her.

Our new prime minister recently declared that the function of universities is to equip people with the skills necessary for the modern economy. The Guardian’s “higher education” section “reports today”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,2147814,00.html that

bq. A degree is being launched to meet the rising demand for skilled crew to work on billionaires’ luxury vessels. …. On sailing and motor vessels whose lengths range from 24 metres up to destroyer-size mega-boats owned by the world’s richest billionaires, it seems you simply cannot get the staff these days.

No doubt some enterprising new university will soon be offering degree courses in being a butler or in being some other kind of lackey or flunkey (indeed, I expect commenters will point out that they already are!).

I saw “Tom Russell”:http://www.tomrussell.com last night, for the third time in the last two years, and he was simply marvellous. Funny, crotchety, gritty, and (this hadn’t struck me so much before) with a wonderfully strong and clear voice. He played some new material, together with stuff from recent albums and some of his songs that others have covered on an album he’s reluctant to call a “tribute”: Wounded Heart of America. Like the old stuff, the new featured the usual cast of characters: cowboys, Mexicans, Welsh sailors etc, all superbly observed and changed to suit audience and place. And there were the usual anecdotes about Bukowski, Rambling Jack Elliot, etc., together with some reminiscences I hadn’t heard before (on his experiences in Nigeria during the Biafran war).

(Sometimes when going along to hear an act with others, I feel slightly unsure of their reaction: I like this but maybe they won’t, and I can see why and I might feel the urge to explain or say that X was better last time. No such worries with Russell: if someone doesn’t like him then there’s something wrong with _them_ .)

Russell is on tour in the UK at the moment, and you can catch him in Newcastle tonight, in Edinburgh on Saturday and in London next Monday (along with a bunch of other places in between and afterwards).

The British pro-war “left” and its hangers-on (such as the crypto-neocon Oliver Kamm) are busy screaming abuse at traitors to the cause in the aftermath of “apostate-from-decency” Johann Hari’s _Dissent_ review of Nick Cohen (see “Chris Brooke for links”:http://virtualstoa.net/2007/07/30/hari-cohen-cage-match/ ). The contrast between the current scene and the “heroic” early phase of “decency” (the early days of the Iraq war) reminds me of some lines from Auden’s _Letter to Lord Byron_:

bq. Today, alas, that happy crowded floor
Looks very different: many are in tears:
Some have retired to bed and locked the door;
And some swing madly from the chandeliers;
Some have passed out entirely in the rears;
Some have been sick in corners; the sobering few
Are trying hard to think of something new.

Conor Foley will no doubt add to their discomfort with “his own brilliant dissection of Cohen”:http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/conor_foley/2007/08/trotting_out_tired_cliches.html . The highlight of Foley’s piece is a hilarious quote from Nick Cohen himself in which he characterizes his opponents:

bq. Rather than accepting the psychological consequences of confessing error, people lose their bearings. They talk only to friends. They imagine conspiracies as they seek the worst possible motives for their critics. They retreat into coteries and speak in code … To cut a long story short, they go a little mad.

I’m a big fan of the “Lifehacker”:http://lifehacker.com/ site, especially for their software tips, but when you read them every day you get to see that their lifestyle advice is pretty much all over the place. Yesterday’s “roundup”:http://lifehacker.com/software/it-all-comes-together/communication-roundup-284437.php includes a link back to a “May entry”:http://lifehacker.com/software/personal-relationships/how-to-improve-your-body-language-256873.php on body language:

bq. Slow down a bit – this goes for many things. Walking slower not only makes you seem more calm and confident, it will also make you feel less stressed. If someone addresses you, don’t snap you’re neck in their direction, turn it a bit more slowly instead.

But as recently as last Sunday, they treated us to “Improve Your Self-Confidence”:http://lifehacker.com/software/self-improvement/improve-your-self+confidence-283450.php, which linked to “Ten Ways to Instantly Build Self-Confidence”:http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/10-ways-to-instantly-build-self-confidence/ :

bq. One of the easiest ways to tell how a person feels about herself is to examine her walk. Is it slow? tired? painful? Or is it energetic and purposeful? People with confidence walk quickly. They have places to go, people to see, and important work to do. Even if you aren’t in a hurry, you can increase your self confidence by putting some pep in your step. Walking 25% faster will make to you look and feel more important.

I think I’ll just sit where I am for now.

The Guardian has “a photo gallery”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/gallery/2007/jul/23/flooding?picture=330241388 of the floods. (And Chris Brooke “has some pictures of Oxford”:http://virtualstoa.net/2007/07/23/oxford-floods/ .) The excellent Bottle Rockets have their song “Get Down River” available for “download”:http://www.bottlerocketsmusic.com/2007/06/free-download-get-down-river.html from their website.

Johan Hari has “reviewed”:http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1157 Nick Cohen’s _What’s Left?_ for _Dissent_ . It is well worth a read.

Many years ago … it must have been ten years, I watched “Patrick Keiller”:http://www.rca.ac.uk/pages/research/patrick_keiller_234.html ‘s pseudo-documentary “Robinson in Space”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120028/ on TV. It stayed with me, though, frustratingly, I forgot the title and therefore from time to time rummaged around my collection of old videotapes trying to find “that film”. The other day I was visiting my son and it turned out that his flatmate had the DVD of Robinson together with its precursor “London”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110377/ (in “a set issued by the BFI”:http://www.bfi.org.uk/booksvideo/video/catalogue/index.php/page/item_view/code/425 ) , so I borrowed them and watched again. They are curious works: very quiet and somewhat mannered. Against a backdrop of national decline (how the Zeitgeist — though not the reality — has changed in ten years!) Charged with investigating the “Problem of England”, Robinson and his companion (the narrator) tour a combination of literary sites, docks, prisons and so forth whilst the viewer is treated to a deadpan recitation of facts about history, politics, import-export statistics and other trivia — including that England is the leading producer of rubber sheeting of the type necessary for S&M orgies. (The quietness combined with the sequence of images and literary allusions has a slightly Sebaldesque flavour.) The journey (or journeys) supposedly retrace the steps of Daniel Defoe’s _Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain_ .Keiller depicts a land without public space or political virtue but one where beauty and morality take second place to turning a profit. Recommended.

I have very clear memories of my last day of finals at Oxford in 1981. I was all set for my Moral Philosophy exam and was about to make my way down to the Examination Schools from the King’s Arms (where I had lunched) when I ran into occasional CT commenter Chris Y. When I told him I planned to celebrate afterwards in the traditional style (champagne sprayed across the pavement etc) he became very angry with me and lectured me sternly on the effect that I would have on “ordinary working people” on their way home. As it turned out, my then girlfriend met me outside with a multicoloured spliff (that’s my NuLab “confession”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=0KYEC0LHF5AGDQFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2007/07/20/nsmith120.xml out the way …) and I went off to celebrate more discreetly. These days it seems that the Proctors (university police) “are scanning the Facebook pages of Oxford students”:http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/story/0,,2128263,00.html and fining the offenders for their post-finals excesses. Students thus detected may be unable to graduate until they have paid up.

bq. Proctors emailed third-year mathematics and philosophy student Alex Hill with links to photographs of her on Facebook on Friday. “I have been charged by the proctors for breaching rules and being ‘disorderly’, on the basis of photographic evidence from Facebook,” she said. “Somehow the proctors have accessed my photos on Facebook and cited them as evidence of my misconduct, and I am being summoned to a disciplinary hearing.” “I don’t know how this happened, especially as my privacy settings were such that only my friends and students in my networks could view my photos. “It’s quite unbelievable and I am very pissed off, [I] just hope that no-one else gets ‘caught’ in this way.”

I am reduced to nicking stuff from “Harry Hutton”:http://chasemeladies.blogspot.com/2007/07/in-this-clip-michael-moore-is-yelling.html . Oh well. But I couldn’t resist the two quotes from Mark Steyn that he links to. The evils caused by socialized medicine have “limits”:http://www.nysun.com/article/58028 :

bq. Does government health care inevitably lead to homicidal doctors who can’t wait to leap into a flaming SUV and drive it through the check-in counter? No.

That’s a relief. But we shouldn’t get “complacent”:http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Y2Q0OTg2NGUyOGJlNjMwYmZhNWU4ZmFlY2UxNmY5YzI :

bq. … the unloveliness of any British city after six in the evening – the dolly birds staggering around paralytic, the pools of “pavement pizza”, the baying yobboes gagging for a shag and hurling bollards through the bus shelters to impress the crumpet – is a natural consequence of what happens when the state relieves the citizen of primal responsibilities.

Over the next five days, the Guardian is publishing “their list of the top 1000 films ever”:http://film.guardian.co.uk/1000films/0,,2108487,00.html , in alphabetical order. Naturally, being the Guardian, they manage to screw up before getting past “A” through the shocking omission of “All About Eve”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042192/ , without which no such list can be taken seriously. I’m sure our commenters will spot other similar outrages as the week unfolds.

I experience all kinds of odd reactions on reading Kate Brown’s “review of three books about the Gulag”:http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25340-2645702,00.html in the TLS. She writes about some horrific events (starving prisoners abandoned on a island) but the general impression is not of the Gulag as I’d come to imagine it. True, this is the early system, circa 1933, but what the books Brown is writing about depict is something that calls to mind the British transportation of their undesirables to Australia, or, perhaps, ethnic deportations like the Trail of Tears. Deportees sent to the frontier to build a new life, and issued with guns to protect themselves from polar bears! Escapees running riot and terrifying the locals. And deluded managers in Moscow issuing orders to well-meaning subordinates in the distant east and giving them problems to solve but not the resources to cope. Read the whole thing, as they say.

“Matt Turner”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2007/06/israel.html links to “an article on contemporary Israel and its future”:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=462445&in_page_id=1770 . It is a remarkably even-handed, interesting, and generally civilized piece of journalism. All the more surprising, then, that the author is Christopher Hitchens’s ultra-conservative brother Peter and that it appears in Britain’s most repulsive newspaper, the Daily Mail.