starcourse

Atheists and meaningful lives

2012-01-22T15:01:00.000Z

Interesting article in Think by someone called Tim Miles which puts forward and discusses "the argument from absurdity"

If God does not exist then the World and human life are meaningless and absurd
the World and human life are not meaningless and absurd.
Therefore God exists

This is clearly a formally valid argument and so atheists have to deny either (1) or (2). Interesting to read in conjunction with this review in the FT of three books:

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton
The Importance of Religion: Meaning and Action in our Strange World, by Gavin Flood
The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions, by Alex Rosenberg

The reviewer (Steven Cave who seems to be an atheist himself) accepts the (ridiculous) idea that science has disproved religion but seems to recognise that the idiotic reductionism espoused by Alex Rosenberg leaves a lot to be desired. Only someone who had no real understanding of physics or mathematics could come up with a statement like "the physical facts fix all the facts" and it seems that Rosenberg is a philosopher of economics and biology and evidently lacks a hard-science background. He (or the reviewer) even seems to imagine that the world is made of "electrons and protons". The poor man did his undergrad in the 1960s and seems to be stuck in the 1920s as far as physics is concerned. How such ignorant stuff gets published in really depressing. Rosenberg seems to cheerfully admit to nihilism, but it's "nice nihilism" (presumably because he is tenured faculty and hasn't yet faced any real crises). And if nihilism starts to get you down, Rosenberg suggests you simply “take two of whatever neuropharmacology prescribes”.

Cave accepts that Rosenberg is absurdly OTT (he is of course espousing the extreme Left Brain fallacy) but thinks that Flood goes to far in claiming internal coherence for religions in the face of eg the problem of evil. Again this fails to grasp the fundamental point that any deep understanding of reality has to be paradoxical: and of course modern physics which Rosenberg & al claim to espouse is deeply paradoxical, with no agreed solution to almost all the fundamental problems (eg interpretation of QM, reconciliation of GR and QM, nature of dark matter/energy).

Cave is very sympathetic to de Botton who realises that religions provide much necessary food for the soul, and that de Botton "desperately misses its comforts and consolations." Cave describes the book as "a timely and perceptive appreciation of how much wisdom is embodied in religious traditions and how we godless moderns might learn from it."

Of course atheists don't have meaningless lives because everyone is made in God's image and is of such infinite value that the Son of God was willing to die in agony for them. But I think it is very hard indeed for atheists to find a real meaning for their lives within their sadly misguided atheistic worldview. Indeed the deep human need for meaning tends to result in many atheists being over-committed to disastrous political ideologies because they desperately need something to Believe In. And by a rather poignant irony, atheists generally have very small numbers of children and so the very people who consider (supposedly) Evolution to be the supreme principle of life are condemned to evolutionary oblivion.

Paris

2012-01-09T09:28:00.000Z

Back from a lovely weekend in Paris.

On Saturday we arrived on Eurostar, started with the astonishing Sainte Chapelle, then the Fra Angelico exhibition and finally a concert at the Opera Comique. This began with the Haydn Trumpet concerto, with the highly talented young soloist Alexandre Baty. Then the Radio France Philharmonic gave a fine performance of Mozart's Prague Symphony. After the interval - a rarity: Il Maestro di Capella by Cimarosa. This is a comic scena with a Baritone and Orchestra, where the singer in the conductor and the Orchestra increasingly recalcitrant, twice throwing their music all over the stage and once walking off until the conductor pays them. Great fun!

Sunday we had a guided tour of the Opera which was most enjoyable and informative: really bringing out the "theatre" of the front of house which was, from an economic point of view, the main purpose of the building. Indeed the guide made the point that until the 20th century the lights were up in the auditorium the whole time and there was much talking and (in the boxes, all of which had private curtained-off areas) other activities that must have put the performers off no end. Ironic that the Opera was built for Napoleon III but he never attended since he was deposed before it was completed. Finally Vespers at the Sacre Coeur and then home.

Paris is of course a city of Art in a way that London isn't quite - although we have more wonderful music and tremendous collections. This is I think partly because London has always had dual centres, of commerce (the City proper) and politics/monarchy, and personal aggrandisement by the rulers was not at all in fashion since at latest Charles II. It seems oddly fitting that Napoleon III was (in that order) the first elected President and the last Monarch of France.

The way the unknown masters of the Sainte Chapelle and Fra Angelico and his colleagues communicated the bible and other "sacred" stories in visual terms is a never-ending source of fascination. In Fra Angelico's paintings some of the colours have sadly faded, but the transcendent beauty speaks through the centuries.

Masterly Meistersinger

2012-01-05T10:21:00.000Z

Took God-daughter to the wonderful production of Meistersinger at Covent Garden, where our friends Simon and Toby were Walter and David. This is the classic production which we saw before the house closed for rebuilding and where the end of the 2nd act was used for the final closing gala concert.

Although it's quite long (5pm-10:40 including intervals) it really doesn't seem long. The melodies and action flow beautifully, thanks to superb singing and acting by all the cast (bar two) and very sensitive conducting. It is, after all, an extended meditation on art, music, love and human nature - subjects very dear to Wagner's heart and about which many people (including me of course!) care passionately. The staging is also a visual feast, with the substantial forces and scale of the house used to summon up early an renaissance Nuremberg.

Simon and Toby were terrific - Simon somewhat reducing the force of his tremendous Heldentenor to reflect Walter's character as a somewhat bemused outsider and Toby being a very credible naughty apprentice despite being of course much much older! Wolfgang Koch as Hans Sachs is definitely one to watch, and of course Sir John Tomlinson adds immense depth and musicianship to any production, here as a very wise Pogner. Emma Bell was a suitably radiant Eva.

Bar two did I say - well Peter Coleman-Wright was sadly indisposed with a bad cold and at the last moment they found a very good singer (whose name at present I can't find but I'll rectify this ASAP) who sang from the sidelines whilst Peter C-W acted the part. It was a remarkable tribute to the acting (but not singing) of PCW and the singing (but not acting) of Mr X that the audience in a sense barely noticed this, and both PCW and Mr X got enthusiastic applause at the curtain call.

Afterwards we popped backstage to see Simon who very kindly showed us the stage (God-daughter had never been) and then had a bite to eat with Toby joining us at the end for a drink since he had been meeting up with other friends.

I remember the final Gala before the house closing for rebuilding which was also Haitink's last appearance as Music Director. Someone (I think it was Geriant Evans) said that they had had a whip-round with the cast: they wanted to buy him a plane so that he could become the Flying Dutchman but they couldn't afford this so decided to make him the "putt putt Dutchman" and then John Tomlinson (I think) drove on the stage on a motor-scooter! Haitink was dumbfounded - "I know who will like this ... contraption ... my wife"

It turns out that Toby was singing David on that occasion, and indeed it was Haitink's (4th) wife who had suggested this present. However it wasn't to Haitink's taste at all - quite understandably - and they had to substitute a painting.

What is the role of illusion in art, and human behaviour? How much of our lives are based, to a greater or lesser extent, on illusion? When is illusion a good thing? What is the distinction between illusion and metaphor? What are the functions of rules in art and society and when and how should they be broken and acknowledged? What is our debt to tradition, and our duty to it? And, unavoidably since the 1940s for this piece, to what extent can a work of art be tainted by its subsequent history and how can the taint be washed away? All of these profound issues are raised, an illuminated, by this great and joyous production of this great and joyous work.

Honours for Science, non-linear beliefs, and Noises Off

2012-01-01T13:18:00.000Z

Happy New Year to all readers!

Went yesterday to see our friend Janie in the wonderful Noises Off at the Old Vic. It's a gloriously funny play and production and the laughter was side-splitting. Our Daughter hadn't seen it before which was an extra treat. Festive glass of Champagne backstage with Janie and then off home for a quiet evening - we'd had a delighful dinner party here the previous evening and just felt like relaxing.

Very pleased that two business friends received richly deserved knighthoods. Also delighted about the knighthoods for Venki Ramakrishnan, Simon Donaldson, Andre Greim and Konstantin Novoselov. It is really a scandal that the first two were overlooked by Brown - and I suspect that David Willetts had a hand in this. Brian Cox is urging the PM to set a goal of the UK being the best place in the world to do science which seems a great idea.

It will be very interesting to see what the New Year brings. My suspicion is that the UK economy will not do as badly as people fear, but we shall see. It's also interesting that the PM and the Queen are very audibly "doing God". Let's hope that becomes a major trend as well.

I've been reflecting on a point that came up in discussion with Martin Rees on Christmas Eve. We're working on the (vector) equation:

y = X.v + L.f
where f is some non-linear function of y, such as H(y-z)

Now if L and X are non-trivial then there will be values of v for which y (and f) have many possible solutions. Even in 1-dimension if X, L and z are 1 then for values of v between 0 and 1 f can have either value. The situation in higher dimensions is of course much more interesting.

But the point I want to make is that systems of fundamental beliefs have similar characteristics. How we evaluate evidence depends on what we believe and vice versa. So for example if people are disposed not to believe in God then they may be able to evaluate much or possibly all the evidence in ways that are satisfactory to them, and vice versa.

Responses on Export Innovation Credits

2011-12-30T08:51:00.000Z

A well informed respondent has rasied some concerns about Export Innovation Credits.

Let's start by reminding ourselves of the economic context. With consumer spending necessarily restrained as consumers pay down debt, and given the need to constrain government expenditure, the only way to achieve growth is through business investment and improving our balance of payments. Businesses are currently hoarding cash (about £617bn I believe) because we are uncertain about the future and don’t trust the banks. The latest export figures are very encouraging and the consumer slowdown should reduce imports, but it is unlikely that the 1-month trends in Oct can be maintained and much more needs to be done to encourage exports especially to China, India and other Emerging Markets. This is not a matter of a few £00M here and there but tens of £bn over the course of the next couple of years.

Meanwhile the banks are required to hold extra capital and are simply not transmitting the cash they are receiving from central banks to the real economy – indeed their funding costs are going up and they are seen as very expensive and unreliable sources of funds. This recent ONS survey paints a depressing picture in this respect.

Now let’s look at the points my respondent raised:

Adding extra tasks to the VAT system could reduce the flexibility to make future improvements. The proposed adjustments are wholly orthogonal to any changes in the underlying VAT mechanism. And the problems of recession, cash hoarding and insufficient export innovation are much more serious than hypothetical VAT improvements.
Contrary to VAT Directive. Given the serious economic situation I’m sure HMG would live with this. The fact that it would as a side-effect reduce the amount we paid to the EU from “own resources” in 2012 would not necessarily be seen as a disadvantage either.
Extra Admin. Certainly there would have to be a very simple supplementary declaration. However this scheme would only be open to exporters so only a small fraction of VAT-registered business would be eligible. It would be reasonable at least in the first instance to limit the scheme to firms whose exports over the last 12 months exceeded £100k and to claims of over £20k. I cannot find published data about how many businesses are in this category, but probably fewer than 50,000.
Extra Training and Systems. I appreciate that outsiders will always tend to underestimate these requirements. But HMRC staff are financially literate and have reasonable common sense. Because these are loans and not grants the incentive for false claims is greatly reduced. And except in the most egregious cases (which could be caught by simple safeguards) it should be sufficient to take claims made in the first 2 quarters at face value, allowing time for training. The fact that false claims can be caught retrospectively would provide sufficient deterrent for almost all businesses, and frankly it is more important to get credit to the companies that need it than to avoid any possibility of VAT fraud – which is already sadly fairly easy.
Definitions. This certainly needs some further work, but in principle it should be something like: “any expenditure which in the reasonable opinion of the Directors is intended to lead to innovation in the firm’s products, services or markets for export” This would include but would not be limited to R&D, Engineering, Market Research, market and customer visits, preparation of marketing materials, specialist staff, training or consultancy for the development of new markets (eg hiring native Chinese speakers). I think the only major relevant expenditure that would be disallowed would be sales and marketing activity that was wholly or mainly in the UK and commissions paid to agents. If a company was exporting its goods/services then all the R&D and Engineering on those good/services would be allowed.

It’s a loan. Within reason the more they borrow the better the UK Public Finances will be in 2015.
Anything that encourages business investment in 2012 will be helpful to the UK economy. These things all have positive externalities.
Allowing a wide definition ensures that the scheme is non-distortive. Essentially firms can make their own plans secure in the knowledge that HMG will lend them 50% of the cost at essentially zero real interest. This essentially doubles the expected return and thus greatly encourages extra profitable investment.

Some of the effect might simply be to bring forward investment that would otherwise occur in 2013/14. This would in my view be a good effect of this scheme. The sooner investments are made the sooner there will be a return in terms of increased exports. And as noted any effect on the public finances in 2012-13 will be more than compensated for in repayments by April 2015. Furthermore although they may increase gross public borrowing they will not increase net public borrowing, and should if anything have a positive effect on market sentiment.
Other government schemes already support R&D and Exports. R&D Tax Credits are a very good thing and should certainly be continued and probably increased. But of course R&D is a very small proportion of total innovation spend. UKTI does great work but these schemes are pretty small beer, and won’t make a measurable difference if we are faced with a recession next year. I fully accept that HMG can’t afford to spend much more in the way of grants, but these loans are eminently affordable (Gilt yields have dropped even more since my initial suggestion).

I can see no other way of getting a substantial stimulus into the economy in Q2 in a way that improves the public finances and the UK’s productive potential. At the very least it should be held in readiness as a contingency plan if it looks as though we are faced with recession in 2012, of which I fear the probability is roughly 40%.

Any other comments would be very much welcomed.

Blairism and "enlightenment" - but signs of economic hope

2011-12-28T08:40:00.001Z

Filling in a survey about the future direction of the RSA. The RSA is too smug about "enlightenment" and Blairism and should reflect much more deeply about the serious downsides of these ideas. It is not an accident that the "enlightenment" launched the reign of terror and that Blairism lead to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and a vast increase in government expenditure coupled with a deterioration in the UK's standing in almost every international league table. In both cases the fundamental problems are intellectual arrogance coupled with such a strong belief that "we stand for PROGRESS" that evidence-based policymaking is suspended.

There is a serious problem with long term unemployment and I still think we need something like Opportunity Credit Vouchers. The economic outlook is highly uncertain and could be a bit dire over the next 6 months, but I'm not entirely sure it's as bad as people think.

The US economy seems to be growing nicely, and US Consumer Confidence has shot up. The US is our largest export market so growth there will boost UK business.
The German economy also seems to be defying the Eurozone gloom. Again Germany is a very big export market for us.
The FTSE 250, which is more reflective of the UK than the FTSE 100, is somewhat (2.4%) up from it's 2011 low (Oct 4th).

We shall see...

PS Interesting quote from this post on Labourlist:

The upper echelons of the Labour party is dominated by brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, and friends. They are a group and tribe of their own and they don’t speak to or for modern Britain.

Boxing Day

2011-12-27T07:23:00.000Z

Stayed near Banbury with C's sister for Christmas, also joined by her parents. Travelled back via Oxford where we stopped to go up the oldest tower there - that of St Michael at the North Gate. This Church does an excellent job of making visitors aware of the Gospel, and indeed has a splendid panorama of Oxford from the tower.

We then travelled down to Alton Abbey. Alas we couldn't stay for a service but we were able to spend some time in the grounds and the Church. I bought a new Benedictine Breviary and this entailed summoning one of the monks. Dom Anselm the Iconographer came and it was great to hear their news. They have a Novice (Brother John) and a Postulant which is great!

The office is closed but I will be working a bit - a good time to think and not be interrupted by phone calls. Had one v god work idea which I need to develop and write up.

I have never known the economic outlook for the next 6 months to be so uncertain. On the one hand we have the Eurozone mess. On the other, the US economy seems to be recovering rather well. Becasue of our big push into China last year the prospects for us as a firm seem good, but much needs to be done to help the UK economy move forward. One thing I have to do this week is respond to the Treasury about one of my ideas to help this happen.

Merry Christmas, snakes and ropes

2011-12-25T20:41:00.001Z

Got back from Harvard on Tues morning - straight into conference call with Chairman of our collaborators in Beijing, then meeting someone from Harvard in London, then Hong Kong Association Christmas Lunch, meeting with another Chairman, staff drinks and finally went with Daughter and Grandson to Comedy of Errors at the National. An excellent production starring Lenny Henry.

Following day set off with Daughter to Cornwall to be with my mother for the anniversary of my father's death. We stopped off for the night in Salisbury - staying in the Red Lion which traces its history back to a hotel built in 1220 for the workers on the (third) cathedral there. They think it may be the oldest purpose built hotel continuosly in use in the UK, and perhaps in the world(?) On the way down we were listening to wonderful choral evensong from Portsmouth Cathedral and watching the most amazing sunset in the clouds.

Thurs we went to 730 communion in Salisbury Cathedral and then looked in on the great JR Lucas en route to Cornwall. John was as ususal fascinating, discussing philosophy, theology and life. He points out that the Woman of Samaria says "we worship on that mountain" whereas a redactor/inventor would presumably have had her say "Mount Gerizim." We stopped for lunch at Exeter and saw the Cathedral, getting to our family house at a reasonable time.

Friday evening we had the customary party with my sister and all her descendants (9) as well as a friend on my sister's who is also a violinist and inherited an Amati (I think Nicolo although slightly patched but still sounding great). Played some old favourites (arrival of Queen of Sheba, slow movement of Bach Double Violin Concerto) and loads of carols.

Back to Cambridge via Sherbourne Abbey which was also really beautiful. And had tea with Martin Rees before celebrating son's birthday. This morning 8am 1662 communion in the church of King Edward Saint and Martyr.

As a Christmas offering I offer this fable from Questions of Truth:

A philosopher, an engineer, and a simpleton—none of whomcould swim—were trapped in a cove with sheer cliff faces. They split up, butthe tide kept coming in. Rescuers lowered a rope with a safety harness. Thephilosopher said, “Ah, this looks just like a rope, but I might be mistaken—itcould be wishful thinking or an illusion.” So he didn’t attach himself, and hewas drowned. The engineer said, “Ah, this is an 11 mm polyester rope with abreaking strain of 2800 kg. It conforms to the MR 10-81 standard,” and thenproceeded to give an exhaustive, and entirely correct, analysis of the rope’sphysical and chemical properties. But he didn’t attach himself and was drowned.The simpleton said, “Ah, a python! I’ll attach myself to its tail.”

A merry Christmas to all!

Three pianos

2011-12-18T22:18:00.001Z

Went last night to the brilliant Three Pianos at the Loeb Theatre in Harvard.This is a show based around Schubert's Winterreise done by three gifted writer/composers - who can also sing and act - - called Rick Burkhardt, Alec Duffy and Dave Malloy.

It was apparently inspired by a party they had in which they played though the Winterreise rather in the style of a Schubertiade and they play three friends meeting up but also Schubert (played by Rick) and his various friends (played by the others). There are, as the title suggests, three pianos on stage and these are wheeled around to create props as well as pianistic mayhem. They all play and sing, sometimes all at once.

The most impressive piece of pianistic clowning is when Dave is playing an annoying guest so Alec says "let's barricade him in with the pianos" and he proceeds to play the accompaniment of Auf Dem Fluse rotating each bar between a different piano.

In Addison to being good fun it raises some pretty profound points about music and life. It's on for another threeweeks in Harvard and well worth a visit.

Export Innovation Credits

2011-12-17T13:03:00.002Z

We urgently need business investment in innovation leading to higher exports. HMG can’t afford large grants but has excellent credit. 2012 will be a crunch year. So in 2012/13 HMG could offer loans of up to 50% of companies costs of export innovation, repayable in 2013-15. This can be done simply and efficiently through the VAT system.

Exporters who wished to claim Export Innovation Credits (EICs) would send a supplement to their VAT Return which gave their EIC claim and their expenditure on Export Innovation (investment of labour, overheads, materials and expenses in product or market innovation in goods or services intended for export), and their Total Exports over the last 4 quarters. They would have added their EIC claim to box 4 of their Return (The EU might not like this, too bad: it’s an emergency measure) and thus would automatically get the money with no extra admin or systems required by HMRC.

Safeguards would include limiting the cumulative EIC claim to 50% of expenditure on Export Innovation or 25% of the last 4 Qtrs pro-rata Export Value Added (Total Sales less Total Purchases times Total Exports/Total Sales), to ensure the money goes to genuine value-adding exporters. Spot checks would ensure that the Export Innovation claims were genuine, but this is no worse than policing other VAT claims. Total Exports can be checked for plausibility from past VAT returns.

The EICs are a loan: at the end of 2012/13 the cumulative EIC plus 5% interest is divided into 8 quarterly instalments and paid back (by deductions from Box 4) over the following 2 years. So HMG makes roughly 4% pa on a 2½ year loan, and since 3-year Gilt yields are under 0.5% and the VAT writeoff rate is c.2% this will result in lower total public borrowing by April 2015 even in the absence of any stimulus to the economy.
But the stimulus would be considerable. Especially for SMEs, a guaranteed 2 ½ year unsecured loan with no fees at 4% pa interest is much cheaper than any other form of finance. This roughly doubles the RoI of investment in Export Innovation. During 2012/13 this scheme could stimulate/protect £5-20bn of business expenditure, and total public sector debt by April 2015 could be reduced by c. £4-30bn.*
This would also increase the productive capacity of the economy and our long term growth rate. Thus the fall in the structural deficit would be even greater than the debt reduction.

* The total EICs (say £2.5-10bn) would underpin expenditure of £5-10bn but perhaps half would have happened anyway. Still the total tax take from biz expenditure is c 30-50% so this is worth £1-5bn. Expected payback of these investments would probably be under 2 years so assuming 20% margins the total increase in exports over the 3-year period would be about 5x the extra investment (£12-50bn) or a further £3.6-25bn to HMG.

PS A well informed commentator has raised some issues about EICs, and my responses are posted here.

La Traviata

2011-12-10T21:18:00.000Z

To La Traviata with Elder Daughter - an opera which despite having gone to opera for over 30 years I had never seen. This was the classic Richard Eyre production of 1995 with Ailyn Perez singing an excellent Violetta, Piotr Beczala as Alfredo, and the ever wonderful Simon Keenlyside as an outstanding Giorgio Germont. Ji Hyun Kim made a fine début as Gastone de Letorieres,

It was a fine set of performances and a very good production, and there is much to admire in the opera. But I confess I find it underwhelming. This is partly because it takes itself so seriously, whereas the great Mozart de Pontes, like Shakespeare, mingle comedy in the seriousness.But perhaps I was a little tired and ill.

The programme notes point out that the "inside outside" duet (where Violetta is debating whether to fall in love with Alfredo, whilst Alfredo is singing his love-ballad outside) is one of the things that only Opera can do. In general Opera allows the characters to speak simultaneously in a way that the Theatre cannot.

Kids for Kids Christmas Concert

2011-12-07T06:23:00.003Z

Last night to the Kids for Kids Christmas Concert. This delightful and moving event was held this year in All Saints Margaret Street which has just been restored to its full glory as the prototype of Victorian Gothic and the masterpiece of William Butterfield.

Alastair Stewart was a masterful compère and we had readings by Timothy West, Prunella Scales, Diana Quick and others. The choir of Danes Hill School and their associated St Andrew's Singers provided the bulk of the music, and as usual the absolute highlight musically was a performance by the great Ruth Palmer. This year she played the very moving Meditation from Thais by Massenet.

Patricia Parker gave her usual speech updating us on the situation in Darfur. It is pretty desperate but since Westerners are strongly advised not to travel there because it is considered too dangerous there is not much reporting. Kids for Kids have done amazing things in the 59 villages they have helped, and because they have their own (local) staff on the ground they can continue to operate. Do support them if you can! Until the 9th the big give will match your donation.

On Sunday we had an amazing day where we had all my descendants and ancestor(s) together. Hence not blogging much.

Onegin, Beijing and Li Yundi

2011-12-02T02:17:00.001Z

Back from a fascinating trip to Beijing with many interesting but unbloggable meetings.

However I can mention a delightful evening at a remarkable Classical Music Club where we were taken by a friend who is a long-standing member. It's run by Beijing's foremost Classical Music fan, who has signed photos from many of the world's major musicians and an enormous collection of Callas memorabilia.

What made the evening so special was that just after we came in Li Yundi arrived to practice in one of the practice rooms. As we were being given a tour of the building we heard this astonishing playing of Beethoven Concerto No 1, and listened outside the closed door transfixed. His manager came out to make a phone call and after the 3rd movement had finished he very kindly introduced us to Yundi who signed some CDs for us. He really is an outstanding pianist and seems exceptionally nice as well. There is some talk of a London concert and I really hope to hear him again soon.

Had breakfast meeting in Beijing on Weds am and, since the flight was delayed, had to go straight to dinner meeting in London off the plane. Don't want to do that too often.

Just before leaving for Beijing we took some friends to the ENO Eugene Onegin which was simply a delight. Toby Spence was a tremendous Lensky and Catherine Wyn Rogers as always on excellent form as Filipievna. Ed Gardener conducted superbly, the production was wonderful and everyone sang really well. Catch the last performance on Sat if you can. Or catch the production when it comes to the Met (2014 I think alas).

The Zacchaeus Principle

2011-11-22T22:28:00.000Z

There is widespread public concern about the high remuneration of Directors of major listed companies. I think we should encourage people to adopt a Zacchaeus Principle. People who receive more than £1M pa should be encouraged to donate 50% of their earnings to charities of their choice.

There is strong scientific evidence that giving away extra money makes you happier than keeping it for yourself. So why not require Annual Reports to disclose who has signed up to (and is abiding by) this Zacchaeus Principle and that RemCos should link bonuses to whether the EDs are willing to follow this principle.

Lest we imagine that the high earnings are truly earned, we should reflect that remuneration of CEOs has gone from 47-88x the Median earnings in last 10 years, whilst the FTSE 100 index has gone down by about 1%.

PS (7 Dec) Maybe £1Mpa should be replaced by 20x Average earnings. This would be "only" £520k but there is at least a feel in the management literature that a gap of more than 20x from top to bottom in a firm is problematic.

Thinking, and non-thinking, atheists

2011-11-22T07:50:00.002Z

It's understandable that atheists should have a problem with the "supernatural" but it's remarkable how had some of them seem to find it to think straight when this is mentioned.

The Faraday Institute publicised a blog post in Scientific American which claims:

"To the extent we can be certain about anything, we can rest assured that all supernatural claims are false"

This is such arrogant nonsense that it is hard to know where to begin. Not only is no reasonable argument presented for this claim, it is very hard to see how a reasonable argument could be presented for this claim. Certainly there is no conceivable set of scientific observations that could substantiate it. Even if there were a known set of deterministic scientific laws whose predictions agreed completely with every experiment that had ever been performed (which is certainly not the case) that would not and could not demonstrate that “all supernatural claims are false”.

But in a gushing eulogy for Lisa Randall's Knocking on Heaven's Door in Science Michael Shermer comes out with this:

if divine providence were on the offing, “it is inconceivable from a scientific perspective that God could continue to intervene without introducing some material trace of his actions.” In other words, if God did act in the world scientists would want to know how he did it. “Did He apply a force or transfer energy?” Randall asks rhetorically. “Is God manipulating electrical processes in our brains? … On a larger level, if God gives purpose to the universe, how does He apply His will?” Inquiring minds want to know. Religion has no answer. I know because I have asked many times.

He (and Randall?) seem to be "arguing" that unless we have a clear scientific explanation of how X happens then X cannot occur. Now firstly if we are talking about God interacting with the Universe there is no reason at all to demand that this occurs through "normal" physical processes. The relationship of the Ulimate Creator to the universe is analagous in many respects to that of a programmer and a simulation. Even if in the simulation a physical law applies programmers can and do interact with the simulation in ways that are completely different from the internal physics. This is so blindingly obvious in this age of CGI that it is amazing that people can overlook the point with a straight face. Even if Shermer doesn't do much/any real science Randall surely runs simulations and certainly knows people who does.

But secondly if the doctrine were to be taken seriously it would rule out doing any real scientific research. The whole point of research is that we look for things that do occur for which we don't have a current scientific explanation and try to find one.

This brings me to Julian Baggini (who I rather like) and his attempt at "Articles of 21-st century faith". He also wants to rule out:

"claims about the nature and origin of the natural universe...belief that any supernatural events have occurred here on Earth, including miracles that bend or break natural laws, the resurrection of the dead, or visits by gods or angelic messengers... the thoughts of a divine or supernatural mind that exists independently of humanity"

and asserts blythely that

"if a religion makes a claim that is incompatible with our best science, the scientific claim, not the religious one, should prevail"

There are many confusions here but one of the most fundamental seems to me to the implicit assumptions about the nature of science. It assumes that there is something called "our best science" which is an essentially ~~complete and~~ definitive ~~description of everything~~ set of 'facts' {I've revised this following Julian's comment} about "the nature and origin of the natural universe". Now let's assume for a moment that there is such a thing as the complete physical laws of the universe (this is a metaphysical assumption historically rooted in theism and could be false, BTW). Call this set L*. Clearly we don't have L* but some approximation Ln say, and it is very hard to know how we could ever verify that we had L*. But even if we had L* and knew that we did, L* cannot possibly explain the origin of L* and we would have to appeal to metaphysical/theological principles to do so.

Furthermore to return to the reality of Ln, there is hot debate and rightly so about whether some of the ideas of our "best science" are right at all. Most cosmologists currently believe in something like string theory and our "best science" certainly contains multiverses etc.. although much of this is driven, as Martin Rees admits, by a desire to avoid the otherwise compelling arguments for creation. But the empirical evidence for this is inadequate and it is perfectly reasonable to put forward alternative hypotheses. The motivation for alternative hypothesis is basically irrelevant to their scientific validity. Attempts to discredit "Big Bang" on atheological grounds should give people like Julian some pause for thought.

Science is not fundamentally a collection of 'facts' but a set of theories and observations. Some of the observations turn out to be wrong (see eg this paper in Science) and the relationship between theory and observation is highly complex and intertwined. I am not suggesting that the concept of scientific fact is vacuous or that anything goes in the domain of claims made by religions. But religious claims and scientfic claims are almost invariably different kinds of claim and notions of "incompatability with our best science" are highly problematic.

Indeed it is interesting to reflect that in many respects 20th century science has moved quite a long way in a "Christian" direction. As far as all empirical science knows, there was a big bang which is suspiciously like creation, but in addition it is now quite clear that "dead" people sometimes come back to life and that in extreme cases the "placebo" effect is very strong indeed, with very strong interactions between the nervous and immune systems. Indeed I don't think any of the healing miracles in the Gospels can now be considered as impossible. And of course, as John Polkinghorne and others have pointed out, we really don't seem to live in a mechanical, deterministic universe.

We must try to retain our humility

2011-11-20T21:10:00.000Z

Continuing to enjoy and profit from The Master and his Emissary - now on romanticism.
McGilchrist quotes a very perceptive remark by RH Brady:

An extremely odd demand is often set forth but never met, even by those who make it: i.e. that empirical data should be presented without any theoretical context, leaving the reader, the student, to his own devices in judging it [1]

He also draws attention to the importance of "depth" and "longing" as categories of romantic, and indeed human thought. The romantics understood that one can feel pleasure and pain at once, it's not an either/or (c/f the recent paper in Science which makes this point).

He points out that "we half create and half perceive the world we inhabit... Further...the sublime is more truly present when only partially visible than when explicit...[like] the erotic, or... the divine... limited information is less limiting, more capable of permitting them to presence to us... The Romantics perceived that one might learn more from half-light than light" and quotes Blake

This Life's dim Windows of the Soul
Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole
And leads you to Believe a Lie
When you see with, not thro', the Eye

He debunks some of the myths of materialism, such as:

"The myth of the unity of science - the left hemisphere's view that there is one logical path to knowledge regardless of context; whereas in reality science is...'a loose grouping of disciplines with different subject matters, tied in various ways each of which work for some purposes but not for others'...
The myth of the sovereignty of the scientific method - of the left hemisphere's planed, relentless progress following a sequential path to knowledge. In fact... the greatest advances in science are often the result of chance observations, the obsessions of particular personalities, and intuitions that can be positively inhibited by too rigid a structure, method or worldview....
The myth of science as above morality, oddly coupled with an uncritical acceptance of the idea that science is the only sure foundation for decency and morality...
The myth of its brave stand against the forces of dogma"

He also quotes Heisenberg's highly perceptive observation that technology no longer appears

as the product of a conscious human effort to enlarge material power, but rather like a biological development of mankind in which the innate structures of the human organism are transplanted in an ever-increasing measure into the environment of man [2 - but the translation is that of Hannah Arendt]

All fascinating stuff. We must try to retain our humility in the face of the techno-hubris that is tending to envelop modern culture, and getting if anything worse in the last few years.

Westminster Abbey celebration of King James Bible

2011-11-16T18:57:00.000Z

To Westminster Abbey for the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, as a guest of my friend Geoffrey Rowell who had written the opening hymn. I didn't realise until the day before quite how high-powered the congregation would be: The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles, the Archbishops of Canterbury, York, Westminster, Thyateira and Great Britain and many other prominent figures.

The Hymn is terrific. Full text is here but let me give a flavour:

Lord God in high thanksgiving
    we come to praise your Word
creating and sustaining
    the Being of our world,
dividing light from darkness,
   and calling us in love
to grow into your likeness
    the life of heaven above

In Christ’s own new creation
    the tongues of flame and fire
kindle imagination
    creatively inspire
Words setting forth salvation,
    discernment right and meet,
a light upon our pathway,
   a lantern for our feet.

note the creative use of resonant phrases from the KJV and the Prayer Book.

...the 4th verse is particularly good...

Words to the Word still pointing
    Word in these words expressed
words of prophetic longing,
    of mercy, hope, and rest
Words that can speak in silence.
    your presence, dearest Lord,
in prayer and praise and worship
    eternally adored

Rowan Williams gave a characteristically thoughtful and poetically deep sermon, which is here, emphasising the way in which the KJV is true to the original in not being tidy and simplifying since "they sought to find in our language words that would pass on to us hearers and readers in the English tongue the almost unbearable weight of divine intelligence and love pressing down on those who first encountered it and tried to embody it in writing; those who like Moses and Ezekiel found themselves overwhelmed by the sheer ‘density’ of divine presence, those who like St Paul found themselves dizzy with the number of connections and interrelations between God’s acts over the ages and unable to put it all into a theory, only into a hymn."

Interesting and rather wonderful to note that the stained glass windows in the north nave commemorate ... engineers! Sir Henry Royce, Charles Parsons, and Sir Benjamin Baker were the three I could read.

A wonderful and uplifting occasion.

Opportunity Credit vouchers

2011-11-14T17:50:00.001Z

I've made further progress on how to deal with long term unemployment (see earlier posts). This is much more damaging than short-term. I think we should give everyone who has been unemployed and claiming benefits for 6 months or more a £6k voucher which they could take to an employer and which would cover:

£1k/month or 100% of their first two month’s wages (whichever is lower)
£500/month or 50% of their wages for the next 4 months, and
up to £1,800 of training costs.

The money would be deducted from Employers NI so it would be in effect a tax cut. Note that:

The net cost to the exchequer would be much less than £6k per person, allowing for benefits savings, taxes paid and (sadly) less than 100% takeup.
The psychological impact for someone getting such a voucher would be a great plus.
By restricting it to people on benefits for 6 months or more it would avoid the problem that most new jobs in the UK go to people born outside the UK. Employment can go up without unemployment coming down.
Even if some of the jobs created were “at the expense” of not hiring someone who had only been unemployed for say 3 months it would still be well worth doing economically. After more than 6 months people tend to become unemployable.
This will reduce the output gap and hence the structural deficit.
This is simple and straightforward and big enough for small business owners to act. There are 4.5M small businesses and if even 20% of them use the opportunity to take someone on risk free for a couple of months you would eliminate long-term unemployment.
Obviously there need to be some safeguards but almost anything is better than the present situation of people being left to rot.
You will have spotted that there is £200 left over from the £6k voucher. This will pay for two entries for the employer in an Opportunity Credit Award Draw, one after month 2 and one after month 6. This would give them a chance to win £1M at fair odds (1 winner per 10k entries) with 50% going to charities of the employer’s choice and the other 50% tax free to the employer. This means that a business owner would be “mad” not to take someone on: it costs them nothing and they have a chance of winning £1M which is vastly better than the National Lottery.

The cost of this to the exchequer should ideally be met by freezing all the other benefits except the State Pension. However since the net cost would be vastly less than the £5bn pa that would be saved by such a freeze it might be possible to temper this, or even to cover the cost by freezing benefits the following year.

McGilchrist on the Enlightenment

2011-11-13T16:12:00.001Z

I'm continuing to read Ian McGilchrist's wonderful The Master and his Emissary with great profit. He is masterly in skewering "the hubristic movement which came to be known as the Enlightenment". In contrast to "Bacon's careful recognition that, while observing Nature attentively is essential, she is many times subtler than our senses or understanding" Descartes "made the fatal mistake of believing 'that I could take it as a general rule that the things we conceive very distinctly and clearly are all true'. That was the fallacy that was to derail the next three centuries of Western thought"
He notes that "the pursuit of happiness has not generally led to happiness. Such valuable things can come only as a side-effect of something else. The left hemisphere misunderstands the importance of implicitness... The French Revolution famously championed liberty, equality and fraternity ...[but] going for them explicitly, left-hemisphere fashion, rather than allowing them to emerge as the necessary accompaniment to a certain tolerant disposition about the world, right-hemisphere fashion, is that they can only become negative concepts once they become the province of the left hemisphere...the ideals... led to the illiberal, unjust and far from fraternal guillotine"

He rightly praises Pascal for recognising that "the ultimate achievement of reason...is to recognise that there are an infinity of things which surpass it" and draws attention to the vital role of "the rediscovery of Shakespeare... not just ...in England, but in Germany and France. It yielded evidence of something so powerful that is simply swept away Enlightenment principles before it, as inauthentic, untenable in the face of experience."

He also skewers Descartes description of laughter: "as that which 'results when the blood coming from the right-hand cavity of the heart...causes the lungs to swell up...forcing the air they contain to rush out through the windpipe...[and] causing movement in the facial muscles... And it is just this facial expression, together with the...sound, that we call laughter'" Pointing out that Descartes "had no idea what he was talking about. His anatomy is a complete work of fantasy. But laughter was to be put in its place because it was spontaneous, intuitive and un-willed, and represented the triumph of the body."

On the subject of Shakespeare, this wonderful Hamlet cartoon makes me chuckle repeatedly. (For those who don't know, Hamlet and his friends are all actors - in the shape of animals - and usually meet in a bar. Hamlet is, of course, the pig.):

Growth through infrastructure, R&D and Negative Employers NI

2011-11-11T23:24:00.003Z

It is an amazing tribute to the credibility of the coalition in international bond markets that long term interest rates are so low in the UK. In the medium term the reduction from about 3.7% before the election to 2.1% now will save us about £16bn pa.

We should re-invest all of this saving is really substantial investments in infrastructure and R&D that will increase our productive capacity and long-term growth rate and stimulate the economy. These will actually reduce the structural deficit and improve our projected Debt:GDP ratio. With the right mix of direct investment (sat £4bn pa), challenge funding (say £4bn pa) and tax incentives (say £8bn pa) the total additional investment would be £30-40bn pa.

We do not need measures that will increase consumer demand which largely goes into imports. But really should do something about long term unemployment. The best thing would be to freeze benefits (saving about £5bn pa) and use the whole amount to encourage employers to hire people who are long-term unemployed, ideally through Negative Employers National Insurance.

If every employer who hired someone who had been out of work and claiming benefits for 6 months or more could deduct (say) £1,000 from their Employers NI bill in month 1, £750 in month 2, £500 in month 3 and £250 in months 4,5 and 6 there would be a big incentive to give people a chance. The gross cost would be £4k per job created but the net cost would be much less, taking people off benefits and into tax. Of course there would need to be some safeguards, but with this kind of incentive almost everyone employable would find a job at least for a few months.

There are probably about 1.5M people who have been unemployed for 6 months or more (it's about 800k for 12 months) so even with an 80% take-up rate this would be affordable - and actuially the claimant count for people on JSA is only 1.6M so probably only 1M have been claiming for 6 months or more. So this is easily affordable. It's surely better to pay people to work than increase people's pay for doing nothing. And equally it's better that people who haven't had a job for 6 months or more should get 1-2 months experience of paid work even if they then have to go back to looking.

The Lion in Winter

2011-11-06T18:41:00.000Z

Last night to a preview of The Lion in Winter with Robert Lindsay and Joanna Lumley.

It's a very good production and a strong cast. Robert Lindsay is an outstanding actor (his performance as Pellew in Hornblower is an absolute classic) and Joanna Lumley is one of the few people who can do that role really convincingly. Strong supporting cast - look out especially for Rory Fleck-Byrne (in the role of King Philip - Timothy Dalton made his film début in that role).

The play is a tiny bit frustrating - can't quite decide whether it is Lear or Much Ado or a non-musical Kiss me Kate. The fact that it can be compared at all with them shows why the play won a Tony and the film 3 Oscars. It is of course full of anachronisms of which the most glaring is the complete absence of any retainers - understandable of course in a play but makes for really silly scenes like the King and Eleanor doing Christmas Decorations themselves. But it's a fascinating period in history.

Interesting that all the major plays in which Henry II is a key feature are by foreigners - Becket, this and Murder in the Cathedral (I don't think Henry II actually appears in that play though FWIW he did in the filmed version).

Very good news that Richard Chartres has taken charge

2011-11-02T21:08:00.000Z

Very good news that Richard Chartres has taken charge of the St Paul's/Protesters saga. As George Pitcher says, Richard "is a man that most organisations under bombardment would want in their trench" and it is very good that he is initiating a serious discussion about the ethical and spiritual aspects of all this, with a real grownup (Ken Costa) leading. Anti-capitalism is not the right idea at all, what we need is anti-immoral-capitalism and it is often forgotten that Adam Smith was a moral philosopher whose Theory of Moral Sentiments was more important than The Wealth of Nations.

Big bang, eschatology, Colin Howson and anticapitalism

2011-10-30T21:03:00.001Z

Great sermon this morning from Associate Vicar about eschatology.

I sometimes reflect that we now know that it’s about 14bn years since the Big Bang. So if we consider the 2000 years since the incarnation in that context it’s 0.0000014% of the age of the universe. To put it another way, if we map 14bn years onto a normal lifespan of about 70 years we have about 2bn years per decade. So 1M years corresponds to 1.8 days and 2000 years corresponds to 5 minutes.

Went last night with C to Catholics and for first time had the new liturgy. In many respects it is an improvement except that they have "peace on earth to men of goodwill" which may be a good translation of pax hominibus bonae voluntatis but it is far from clear that this is what Luke 2:14 means. Eudokias comes from eudokew which is what God says at the baptism "in whom I am well-pleased" In Romans 10:1 Paul speaks of the eudokia of his own heart towards the Jews. It seems clear here that eudokia/s is about God's relationship to others, not the relationship of men to each other or God. JB has "men who enjoy his favour".

They also have "after supper he took the chalice" when the word is the ordinary word for cup - though since it was in the form of a passover meal it would probably have been a special cup.

Colin Howson has kindly sent a response to my critique of the first parts of his Objecting to God. It's outselling QoT in the UK although not (by a very long way) in the US. He'd be keen to publish some of our debates and so would I - but even keener to publish the article about what we agree on which we wrote for Prospect years ago.

I'm deeply unimpressed by the "anti-capitalists" at St Paul's. It's ridiculous of them, with no mandate at all, to call for the abolition of the Corporation of London and the City of London Police. Other local councils have hardly covered themselves in glory, and the City of London Police are the lead force on fraud - so the effect of these loon's "demands" would be to encourage fraud and malfeasance in the City.

Jumpy, and Positive Psychology

2011-10-29T07:51:00.001Z

To the Royal Court for Jumpy a new play by April De Angelis starring the wonderful Tamsin Greig. Extremely funny and very well written, in an excellent production with a strong cast who work together really well. Decidedly cringe-making in places and I'm somewhat glad to be seeing it when our younger daughter is 20 and not 16.

Look out for Michael Marcus - who on his first professional engagement gave a very good little talk at the end appealing for Acting for Others.

In some ways it's an optimistic play - the basic stability and resilience of family life re-asserts itself - but in other ways it really brings into focus the meaninglessness of modern secular living. I'm reading Charlotte Style's excellent book Brilliant Positive Psychology and it really emphasises how hope, purpose and faith make a difference to people's lives. Lives without hope are indeed, hopeless.

Lights of the world - Philippians 2:18-30

2011-10-25T21:17:00.000Z

^{I hope readers will forgive me if I post the notes I prepared on this passage - which is really interesting (at least to me). The translation I give is NIV with corrections.}
¹² Therefore, my dear friends^a, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—work out^b your salvation with fear and trembling, ¹³ for it is God who works in you to will and to work in order to fulfill his good purpose^c.

¹⁴ Do everything without grumbling or arguing, ¹⁵ so that you may become blameless and pure, “children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation.” Then you will shine among them like lights in the world^d ¹⁶ as you hold firmly^e to the word of life. And then I will be able to boast on the day of Christ that I did not run or labour in vain. ¹⁷ But even if I am poured out like a drink offering on the sacrifice and service of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with all of you^f. ¹⁸ So you too should be glad and rejoice with me.

¹⁹ I hope in the Lord Jesus to send Timothy to you soon, that I also may be cheered when I receive news about you. ²⁰ I have no one else like him, who will show genuine concern for your welfare^g. ²¹ For everyone looks out for their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ. ²² But you know that Timothy has proved himself, because as a son with his father he has served with me in the work of the gospel. ²³ I hope, therefore, to send him as soon as I see how things go with me. ²⁴ And I am confident in the Lord that I myself will come soon.

²⁵ But I think it is necessary to send back to you Epaphroditus, my brother, co-worker and fellow soldier, who is also your messenger, whom you sent to take care of my needs. ²⁶ For he longs for all of you and is distressed because you heard he was ill. ²⁷ Indeed he was ill, and almost died. But God had mercy on him, and not on him only but also on me, to spare me sorrow upon sorrow^h. ²⁸ Therefore I am all the more eager to send him, so that when you see him again you may be glad and I may have less anxiety. ²⁹ So then, welcome him in the Lord with great joy, and honour people like him, ³⁰ because he almost died for the work of Christ, risking his life to complete your service to meⁱ.

Notes

BTW I use w for omega since

a) (v12) “my dear friends” is literally “beloved”.

b) (v12) “work out” the word is katergazesthe – kata means through and ergo means work. Of course out salvation is not our doing but as Tom Wright says (in Paul for Everyone: the Prison Letters, which is superb) Paul “wants the Philippians to work out for themselves what this business of being saved will mean in practice. The phrase ‘your own salvation’ isn’t meant to contrast this work of theirs with any work of God in salvation. It is contrasting their own responsibility for their spiritual welfare with the responsibility that Paul would take if he were with them. He isn’t there, and for all either of them know he may never be again. They therefore need to be obedient – to him, but much more to God – in Paul’s absence even more than in is presence”. (BTW “continue to” isn’t really in the Greek, it’s reading a bit too much into the tense of the word).

c) (v13) RSV has “for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his own good pleasure”. Wright has “After all, God himself is the one who’s at work among you, who provides both the will and the energy to enable you to do what pleases him”. The Greek is theos gar estin ho energywn en humin kai to tehlein kai to energein huper tes eudokias literally “God therefore is the [one] operating in you [plural] both the to will and the to operate on behalf of the goodwill”. Motyer (in The Message of Philippians) says “energw … characteristically describes work which achieves its purpose… [God] does it because He wants to. It is of free divine choice: for his good pleasure. Nothing then can stop the ongoing divine work”

d) (v15) the quote is from Deut. 32:5. But “stars in the sky” isn’t right. The Greek is phwsteeres en kosmw which means “lights in the world” (thus RSV and Wright – Motyer uses the RSV throughout). phwsteeres is the normal Greek word for lights (eg LXX Gen 1:14) and it comes from phws (light) – the word for star (aster) is completely different in Greek (and Hebrew). Now this is said to be a reference to Daniel 12.3 and indeed this will have been at the back of Paul’s mind with the references to resurrection and persecution; but the LXX has lamprotees tou sterewmatos… hws hoi asteres (brightness of the firmament… like the stars) and of course what will have been at the front of Paul’s mind is Jesus’ many sayings about light such as Mat 5:14 “you are the light of the world” phws tou kosmou.

e) (v16) holding firm (epechontes) – the word has connotations of paying attention to (Lk 14:7, Ac 35, 1 Tim 4:16)

f) (v17 & 18) The RSV has “Even if I am to be poured out as a libation upon the sacrificial offering of your faith” and Wright “Yes: even if I am to be poured out like a drink-offering on the sacrifice and service of your faith” The NIV is being over-rigid about the tense of spendomai (I am poured out) and “coming from” is really stretching the Greek which just has tees which is the normal word for "of". In 17-18 The Greek is chairw kai sugchairw… chairete kai sugchairete. “rejoice and together-rejoice” What a wonderful language to have a single word meaning “rejoice together” !

g) (v20) Wright is very good indeed here: “It is interesting that he doesn’t say ‘Timothy is a wonderful teacher’ or ‘Timothy is a very devout and holy man’ but ‘Timothy will genuinely care about you’… [being] a good pastor…has more to do with sheer unselfish love than anything to do with the person themselves…Notice, particularly, how ‘looking after King Jesus’ interests’ and ‘being genuinely concerned for your welfare rather than his own’ are, for Paul, two ways of saying the same thing. For Paul the communities that gave allegiance to Jesus and king and Lord were not as it were distantly related to their master. He and they were bound up together, he was present with them, his own spirit lived in them individually and corporately. Thus, to serve Jesus and to serve his people are one and the same. To care for the church is to care for the Messiah’s body. And doing this, clearly, is part of what Paul means by ‘working like a slave alongside me for the gospel’.”

h) (v 27) Wright again: “The present passage enables us … to see… what this joy really is – and what it isn’t…. [Paul] was truly glad to have Epaphroditus with him, and was truly horrified at the thought that he might die. Verse 27 is most revealing: God took pity not only on Epahrodius…but also on Paul, so that he wouldn’t have one sorrow piled on top of another. ‘Well Paul’ we want to say, ‘What was the sorrow you already had?’ Presumably he would reply ‘ being in prison…’
     ‘Why couldn’t you let go of the sorrow and simply rejoice, as you’re telling us to do?…And …if Epahroditus had died…Wouldn’t you have wanted to rejoice that he had gone to the Lord?’
     Again he might reply, ‘I do rejoice…but at the same time I love my friends…I don’t believe that our emotions are silly surface noise and we should get down beneath them to a calm untroubled state…The joy I’m talking about …doesn’t mean that everything is already as it should be, only that with Jesus enthroned as Lord we know it will eventually get there. But if, while we’re waiting for that day, we pretend that we don’t have human emotions…then we are denying part of what God has given us.’
    After all, part of Jesus’ own path of humble obedience (2:6-8) was his weeping in agony both at his friend’s graveside (Jn 11.35) and in Gethsemane (Heb 5.7)”

i) (v 30) again the NIV isn’t right. Wright gives “He came close to death through risking his life for the king’s work, so that he could complete the service to me that you hadn’t been able to perform” and the RSV has ‘for he nearly died for the work of Christ, risking his life to complete your service to me’. The Greek is Hoti dia to ergon Christou mechri thanatou eeggusen paraboleusamenos tee psuchee, hina anapleerwseeto humown husetrema tees pros me leitourgias which is literally “because on account of the work of Christ as far as death he drew near, exposing the(his) life in order that he might fill up the of you lack [the] toward me of service” anapleerwseeto comes from pleerwma which means fullness or completion, husetrema means lack/want (eg 2 Cor 8:14) or absence (1 Cor 16:17). Paul isn’t whingeing or blaming the Philippians, he’s saying that they couldn’t all come and give him help personally so they sent E. to fulfil the part of the service they were unable to perform (ie giving him the money/help personally) and E. risked his life in Christ’s service doing this.

So finally here is a ‘corrected’ version of the NIV translation

Joyful opening at St Pauls Hammersmith, but we must do more on unemployment

2011-10-16T14:04:00.001Z

Far too busy to blog - sadly. But many events of note.
Last Sunday the Bishop of London opened the extension of St Paul's Hammersmith. When other churches are sadly cutting back and selling off property to pay running costs, SPH has built a wonderful extension which will really help the Church's amazing work in the service of the community. Richard Chartres was in characteristically sparkling form and the whole event was very inspiring.

Work has been extremely busy and sadly unbloggable!

On Friday Ruth Palmer came round to play through Beethoven's 6th Violin Sonata. Despite 3 lessons from Kathron there is still a lot more to do before I can play it in company, though we did play the 2nd movement. Ruth's playing of this was a revelation and I'm still trying to digest and internalise the remarkable mood she conjored up.
I wish I could have persuaded the government last year to introduce Negative Employers NI. It's perfectly clear that the NI Holiday scheme they introduced was inadequate, and that long term unemployment is going to be a major problem in the developed world for a long while.

The fundamental thing that is happening in the world economy is globalization. 10 years ago your earnings were a function of what you did and where you did it, and unskilled westerners receieved (I shall not say earned) a lot more than many skilled Chinese and other Asians. But now real PPP-adjuste earnings at given skill/activity levels are converging globally.

This means that inequality, although falling dramatically on a worldwide basis, will grown in almost every country and that middle and lower incomes in the developed world will have to fall sharply to converge with global middle and lower incomes.

Nominal incomes are very sticky in the developed world and so this can only be accomplished by a combination of inflation and currency depreciation. But anything that we can do to move people up the skills ladder and in particular to reduce as far as possible the number of people who are essentially unemployable is really important.

Colin Howson's Objecting to God

2011-10-02T21:38:00.000Z

Mother's 80th party in Cornwall was a joyful event. We went to the Headland Hotel because although a marquee at my mother's house would have been much more fun for the guests it would have been very stressful for her. 38 people so we had 4 tables of 9 or 10 and my mother and her 3 children switched at each course so she sat on every table.

The great John Lucas was one of the guests: he was of course delighted to hear about Tom Nagel, and also enquired about the 2nd article that Colin Howson and I had written for Prospect - about what we agree on - which was never published.

I'm delighted to find that Colin has now written a book called Objecting to God whose Acknowledgements page contains the following: "I would like to give special thanks to Nicholas Beale. he and I were going to write a joint book about God and science...Nicholas did provide me with a great deal of insight into the questions addressed in this book, and at all points where I have gained from it I have, I hope, given him full acknowledgement".

I've ordered the book and look forward to reading it with great interest.

Seminars at Tsinghua, Conference at Columbia

2011-09-26T02:38:00.001Z

Been amazingly busy so no time to blog.

Flew to Beijing on the 12th for an intense series of meetings including giving a seminar at Tsinghua School of Economics and Management on the 15th. Mike Spence was giving the seminar the day before me and kindly invited me to his, so I was able to benefit from his tremendous wisdom and meet some exceptionally interesting people at the little dinner afterwards. His latest book The Next Convergence is truly outstanding and I cannot recommend it too strongly.

The meetings were mostly business and hence un-bloggable but we did call on Prof Fan Dian whom we had met in London and he very kindly had one of his curators give us a private tour of his museum, which was closed early pending the visit of a VVIP.

Meetings in Beijing concluded with a breakfast meeting on Weds, following which we flew to London. I spent one night at home, had a breakfast meeting in London on Thurs and then afternoon and dinner meetings in Harvard. Breakfast in Boston on Fri and then the Acela express to NY where I had been invited to Ned Phelps' conference at Columbia.

Arrived in the pouring rain so a long queue for taxis. I guessed correctly that the lady behind me in the queue was a writer and indeed she turned out to be Prof Emma Rothschild who was speaking at the conference, so we shared a cab which was delightful. The conference was immensely stimulating, exploring the philosophical bases of economics. Enormously insightful contributions from many people including Amartya Sen, Joe Stiglitz, Tom Nagel, Emma Rothschild and Esa Saarinen as well of course as Ned. At one point I found myself at lunch sitting next to Nagel who was next to Sen who was next to Phelps, with Esa on my right and Martin Seligman on his right. I said little and learned much!

It turns out that Nagel is an admirer of John Polkinghorne and is about to publish a book called Mind and the Cosmos which builds in part on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. Esa is an admirer of Denis Noble and I hope to introduce them when Esa is next in the UK.

Stunning Missa Solemnis

2011-09-04T22:15:00.000Z

Back from a stunning Missa Solemnis at the Proms, with Sir Colin Davis conducting the LSO, LS Chorus, Philharmonia Chorus and four excellent soloists: Helena Juntunen, Sarah Connolly, Paul Groves and Matthew Rose. I was Paul's guest this time, and sat next to his charming European agent. This is in my view much the greatest of the large scale Beethoven works, and the performance was utterly brilliant, reducing me to tears at one point.

Paul has a wonderful voice, and of course the Tenor is the most prominent soloist: essentially the Priest. From his first note - the opening Kyrie to the last it was beautifully judged and beautifully sung. I was too overcome with the music to make any notes on the programme. The In Gloria fugue reduced me to tears and the Et Vitam would have as well were I not by then pretty spent! Interesting interview with Colin Davis in the programme in which he says that "it is far in advance of the Ninth Symphony in many ways." and "you human beings, you cry for peace, but what do you do about it? You just go on making war."

There is a scan of the original published score online: interesting that the original subscribers include the Tsar and the Kings of Prussia, France, Denmark and Saxony. In 1827 these were Nicholas I, Fredrick William III (grandson of Frederick the Great and I hadn't realised that they were also the Electors of Branderberg), Charles X, and Frederick Augustus I (or possibly his brother Anton who came to the throne in May 1827)

Great to see Paul and Matthew backstage afterwards. They are doing this in Bonn, Paris and New York over the next few weeks, and in the meantime Paul is opening the Beijing Music Festival with Mahler 8 on Oct 6th. I just might be able to be there!

the great Alan Mulally on Teachers, and Rowan on God

2011-09-04T15:00:00.000Z

To a dear friend's wedding on Sat in the Sussex countryside. Wonderful day, delightful service (led by thoroughly competent lady vicar) and a most enjoyable reception at their polo club.

The bride's brilliant and beautiful sister gave up a bio-science post-doc at Harvard to come back to the UK get married and has become a secondary school teacher. I applaud this, and told her the story of the great Alan Mulally when he gave a lecture at the Royal Society while he was still President of Boeing Commercial Airplanes. During the Q&A a somewhat elderly gent stood up and began, somewhat falteringly "Well I'm only a teacher but.." Mulally bowed to him, and said "Sir, you are doing God's work. What is your question?"

At the church I read the parish magazine which had the wonderful story of Archbishop Rowan's reply to a 6-year-old who wrote a letter to God asking "how did you get invented?" If you haven't seen it before, or even if you have, do take a look.

Chinese Seal Cutting and Mahler 1

2011-09-02T20:38:00.001Z

Tremendous performance of Mahler 1 at the Proms by the Budapest Phil under Ivan Fischer. I caught it on the radio which at least allowed me to conduct with the score.

The details of Mahler's orchestration are amazing. Just one tiny example, from Bars 273-280 in the 2nd (Frere Jacques) movement there is a ppp quaver figure which starts in the 1st violins on a B who hand over to the 2nds who hand it to the violas and cellos, each overlapping for 1 (or cellos 2) quavers finally ending almost 4 octaves down on the C. The Double Bass come in just for that C, but whereas the cellos have the note ppp for a quaver, the Bass has it pp for a crotchet!

BTW I'm sure it's not just my English ears that find the triumphal theme in the 4th movement to be inspired by "And He shall reign for ever and ever" - indeed not as a quick google shows. Would be fascinating to establish the connection. Beethoven of course described Handel as "Master of us all".

Work going really well and I managed to prove a lovely and quite important theorem.

Last night my colleague took me to the Chinese Embassy for a "pre-launch" of the exhibition of seal cutting by Li Langquin that is coming to London next year. Li was a Vice-Premier for 10 years but is now and artist and scholar. All fascinating. I've been invited to give a seminar at Tsinghua later this month and am trying to learn as much as I can about Chinese culture. Met many interesting people including Prof Fan Di’an - charming and very knowledgeable and I hope we'll meet him again in Beijing.

Choral Symphony with Toby Spence

2011-09-01T22:02:00.000Z

Prom last night with a new cello concerto for YoYo Ma and the Choral Symphony with Toby Spence.

The concerto was reasonably interesting and striking, and it's great that it was composed by a Cornish composer. To do it justice I'd need to hear it again but I'm not entirely sure that it's worth doing so. Ma was clearly enraptured but the conductor was rather disengaged. And a refusal to give it "movements" for the benefit of the programme notes was either pretentious or stupid or both.

The Choral was terrific, the conductor really came alive and you could see why my fellow guest, Paul Groves, spoke so highly of him. But (please forgive me) I really felt that the interpretation of the Choral part was fundamentally wrong. Every note of "freude, schoner gotterfunken (etc)" seemed to be sung marcato with a very foursquare beat (not as far as I can see in the score at all, though there is some clear 4-in-a-bar phrasing in the flute parts) and thus the effect was not so much "joy" as a somewhat robotic marching frenzy. This is not of course to detract from the individual performances, and both Toby and Iain Paterson sung wonderfully.

We all went to the pub afterwards - a terrific evening. I'll go on Sun to hear Paul in the Missa Solemnis - Matthew Rose and Sarah Connolly are also soloists.

Elijah with Rosy

2011-08-29T06:14:00.000Z

To the Proms last night for excellent performance of Elijah. Simon Keenlyside, Sarah Connolly and Rosy Joshua were outstanding soloists with a large combined choir and a greatly expanded Gabrielli consort and players conducted by Paul McCreech, in a performance which aimed to recreate the forces of the first performances conducted by Mendelssohn himself. This included a very large string ensemble with doubled woodwinds, trumpets, drums and ophicleides but single horns and trombones, and serpents doubling the choral bass line. I had never heard of ophicleides, which are a predecessor to the tuba, and they also had the one and only existing playable version of a contrabass or monstre ophicleide (lindly lent by Ron Johnson from Albany NY) and of course the Albert Hall organ.

Although it was a fine performance Elijah is in my view a very disappointing work. Part of the problem is the libretto. Part I has the contest with the Prophets of Baal as its centre, Part II the exile and the "sill small voice" mentioning the taking up to heaven in a whirlwind en passant. Mendelsohnn and his librettist had a poor instinct for drama. This is no-where more evident than when the prophets of Baal are slain: just think how a really great composer like Handel, Brahms of Mahler would have done this with an amazing contrapuntal chorus (I say nothing of Bach because it is no critcism to have fallen short of the greatest composer of all time!) and compare the pedestrian treatment followed by two worthy arias for Elijah and the Mezzo.

Rosy was of course terrific, especially when she was singing the Angel in Part II. Great to see her afterwards and we went out to supper, with her son and some friends including a v nice Cambridge-based mezzo called Lucy Taylor.

Rosy will be singing Helen of Troy in the world premiere of a new opera called Orest by Manfred Trojhan for the Netherlands Opera and then doing Despina in Cosi (with Thomas Allen as Alfoso) at Covent Garden in Jan/Feb. Not to be missed.

DC and Harvard

2011-08-28T09:29:00.000Z

Back yesterday from excellent visit to Washington and Harvard. Arrived just after and earthquake, left just before a hurricane!

Stayed at the Hay Adams - "where nothing is overlooked ... except the White House". At Harvard we made great progress and it was also excellent to see Erez Liebermann Aiden.

Still madly busy I'm afraid ...

Cornwall, CP Snow, Edith Sitwell and Lucy Diamond

2011-08-22T20:36:00.000Z

Delightful holiday with Son and Grandchildren at family house in Cornwall. Kayaking, running, a big sandcastle, surfing but alas no sailing. Came back with filthy cold and have to travel to DC and Harvard soon so again no time to blog.

Met "Lucy Diamond" at the launch of her latest novel The Beach Cafe which I finished on the train on my way back. Glad it's doing well. Read CP Snow's The New Men which is about the UK experience of the development of the Atomic Bomb, and started Victoria Glendenning's excellent biography of Edith Sitwell, a poet whom I greatly admire.

Addressing UK Unemployment

2011-08-18T06:04:00.001Z

The rise in unemployment is clearly bad news, although as always you have to be very cautious about one month's statistics.

I have been urging the govenment to cut Employers NHI (= payroll tax) for employers to employ people who have been claiming benefits. What's really needed is negative NI because most people who have been unemployed for over 6 months face grave difficulties in getting (back) into work and employers will generally prefer to offer people already in jobs or recent. But this would require legislation and have to wait until April.

I suggest therefore that the Employer NIC Holiday be extended for this year only to cover any case where a business has employed someone who has been unemployed and claiming benefits for 3 months or more. No new forms or systems would be needed for HMRC. It would be easy to count the number of people who have been helped into work this way. The net cost of this would be tiny since employed people pay taxes and of course would be off the dole.

Looking at the detailed statistics the following points are striking:

Private Sector Employment increased by 104k in the quarter to March 2011. Public sector decreased by 39k
Of the 240k increase in employment in the year to June 2011, 290k was accounted for by people born outside the UK: employment of people born in the UK went down by 50k.

Now some of that will be due to age profile: people who retire are much more likely to have been born in the UK and so are public sector workers. But it's hard to resist the conclusion that much of this is due to the generally poor quality of UK-born applicants. Indeed although we have doubled our staff in the last year 50% of the new hires are non-UK born and this ratio is likely to continue or increase. Now this is partly becasue we need to recruit some fluent Mandarin speakers who can work in China, but our lead statistician was born in South Africa and came over here to do his PhD and is keener, sharper, brigher and more entrepreneurial than the UK applicants.

I've been trying to create jobs by sponsoring a paid intern or two at our local Church, which does tremendous work in the community, but this is proving difficult as well.

Back from amazing trip to Beijing

2011-08-14T07:24:00.000Z

Back from amazing trip to Beijing - hence big gap in blogging.

This was mainly business (though with an important academic component) so I can't blog much about the content. An extraordinary place with people of great dynamism and kindness - I hope to return soon and frequently. But here at least is the obligatory picture on the Great Wall. More later if time!

PNAS, Nature, and look out for Simon O'Neill

2011-08-02T05:11:00.000Z

Again v busy so no time to blog properly. Grabbed 3 day holiday in Isle of Wight then back to fascinating work. Some highlights:

PNAS paper about to be published in print. Will be coverage in the FT Aug 6th - who knows where else.
Heard a great performance of Beethoven 1st Symphony at the Proms by National Orchestra of Wales (on the radio). On terrific form.
Our friend Simon O'Neill is singing Parsifal at Bayreuth. Sadly I can't get to it but I'm certain he will be brilliant.
V interesting paper in Nature about the role of glial cells in Rhett's syndrome caught my eye a while ago. It has long been a theme of mine that glial cells are much more important in the brain than people suppose.

Back to work...

PNAS paper now online

2011-07-19T05:28:00.000Z

Been incredibly busy so no time to blog. But the PNAS paper is now online before print. Apart from anything else it means I have an Erdos number of 4 :-)

RS, Stoppard, Richard III and Janie Dee

2011-07-09T22:29:00.000Z

Masses happening:

Weds to the Royal Society for their Summer reception. Finally met Paul Nurse. Introduced schoolgirl maths prodigy to Bela Bollobas and Michael Atyah also met Konstantin Novoselov and had an interesting discussion about the sate of UK universities and venture capital funding. Saw many old friends including Bob May and Martin Rees.
Thurs to Theatre Royal Haymarket for outstanding production of Rosencrantz and Guidenstern are Dead by Trevor Nunn. He explains in the programme notes that he was to have directed the world premiere but it was cancelled due to lack of funds.
Fri to Richard III at The Old Vic with Kevin Spacey. Although he is a wonderful actor this was a disappointing production. It's essential that the other characters are credible and that Richard should do charm as well as villany. Also many of the actors spoke poorly and in monotones. The women were good in the 2nd half though.
Sat to Cambridge to see younger grandson play in music school concert (from memory on Flute and Piano) and then back to London to see the wonderful Janie Dee in cabaret. She is such a great performer and gets better and better. Great favourites including QWERTYIOP as well as new material I hadn't heard her (or anyone else) sing.

Wonderful day sailing yesterday with Daughter

2011-07-04T06:12:00.000Z

A wonderful day sailing yesterday with Daughter. Sweet winds, calm and warm sea. Annoying problem with our Gennaker meant we didn't do well in the races, but we peaked at 14mph. Amazing how having to concentrate on helming a cat in a couple of races clears your mind!

Trying to decide on a suitable illustration for our PNAS paper. Two new people starting work today and lots of meetings so v limited blogging.

Also working on project to help disadvantaged children in London get a better education. May be able to blog about this later.

Peter Grimes

2011-07-02T07:14:00.000Z

To Covent Garden to see Catherine Wyn-Rogers in Peter Grimes. It's a superb production which really seems to catch the essence of this haunting opera. Ben Heppner really inhabits the title role, and there are fine performances all round including Matthew Best as Swallow, Jonathan Summers as Balstrode, and Rebecca Bottone and Anna Devlin as the two "nices". Catherine is, as always, terrific - she has some of the best music and her role as the person who doesn't take sides is morally and musically very interesting. Andrew Davis conducted superbly.

It might have been possible to see Peter Grimes as a simple tale of community hypocricy with the stuffy inhabitants of "the Borough" ganging up on Grimes and unfairly persecuting him: he didn't actually murder either of his apprentices, their deaths were accidents. But clearly he's morally guilty of both of their deaths, forcing his apprentices to work beyond their capacities and putting them, when dead tired, in extremely dangerous situations. As so often in great opera the main characters are far more multi-faceted than one might think.

Afterwards we joined some of Catherine's friends for a drink and a snack, among whom was the charming Elaine Kidd, recently appointed Director of Opera Planning at Scottish Opera. We spoke about the importance of diction in singing - too many singers (esp apparently tenors) get away with making sounds.

I'm delighted to find that Catherine and Toby Spence will be in the ENO Onegin in November - book now - and that Toby and Simon O'Neill will be in the Covent Garden Meistersinger in Dec/Jan, with John Tomlinson no less. Catherine is making her La Scala debut in Grimes though in the somewhat less attractive role of Mrs Sedley.

PNAS proof have come back - all looking very real!

Chinese Premier at Royal Society

2011-06-29T05:28:00.000Z

To the Royal Society on Monday for the presentation of the King Charles II Medal to Chinese Premier Wen Jaibao. He gave a fascinating speech which really empahsised his commitment to science, openeness, democracy. Few in the West would have expected this "Without freedom, there is no real democracy. Without guarantee of economic and political rights, there is no real freedom...To promote democracy, improve the legal system and strengthen effective oversight of power remains a long and arduous task for us. We need to create conditions for people to oversee and criticize the government to make the government live up to its responsibility and prevent corruption. With a keen sense of responsibility and democracy, people will spur social progress. The more the people participate in social management and public affairs, the greater the momentum there will be to sustain social progress."
He was very keen on promoting cooperation: "The Chinese government encourages large Chinese companies, research-oriented universities and research institutions to increase cooperation with their British counterparts. It also encourages more exchange of top-level talents and joint research between our two countries."

He also said something very wise at the beginning: "This is my fourth visit to the UK as China's premier. During this visit, I have a very different impression from my last visit two years ago, in early 2009. Back then, the UK was hit by both a rare heavy snow and the global financial crisis. Coming to London from Davos, I could sense anxiety and uneasiness in the air. I remember saying during that visit, "Confidence is more important than currency and gold." But now back in mid-summer London, I can see that people have regained confidence."

Of course I listened to the English translation but at least I understood one or two words of Chinese. Must make more progress in learning this fascinating language.

London Oxford Cambridge & Berlin

2011-06-27T09:12:00.000Z

What a week.

On Weds am the FT published my letter about reform of the House of Lords, which has already had positive feedback from some very senior people, and in the evening it was the WCIT banquet at the Guildhall, in the presence of the Lord Mayor, his designated successor David Wooton and their designated successor Fiona Woolf who will only be the 2nd female Lord Mayor in the illustrious history of the office. The present Lord Mayor is the 756?th holder of this office, which must be something of a record since the very few offices that go back further in history (Emperor of Japan, Pope, what else?) tend to have occupants that stay in office for more than 1 year! A highlight of the evening for us was meeting a delightful couple based in Cambridge who are heavily involved in the CofE at both a local and national level.

On Thurs I went with a colleague to meet with Bob May and brief him on our latest thinking, then back to London for a client meeting and then to Cambridge to meet with Bela Bollboas and his colleague, finishing up with dinner on High Table, where Amartya was again presiding.

Friday evening I was at an even higher table as I flew to Berlin to see Nicole in Don Giovanni. Came in from the airport by bus which is an interesting way to see a city, esp for the first time. Sat morning I ran from the hotel through the Tiergarten to the Bundestag and then to the Brandeberg Gate. Sadly I couldn’t go through it because there was some kind of pop concert. However I was able to stop in the Room of Silence by the gate, and pray for the victims of past divisions and for continued peace in Europe. Worked on Sat and then to the Deutsche Oper.

Musically this was good/very good with Nicole of course being truly outstanding: it was well worth travelling over 1,000 miles to hear her. The Don (Ildebrando d'Arcangelo) was very good, and Anna, Zerlina and Leporello were fine. Orchestra was OK though not remotely as good as the OAE at Glyndebourne. However the production was execrable: a prime example of a Director trampling all over the music and words with a Concept, or rather several, some even worse than others.

We start with a not-too-bad idea which is that the Don should have a substantial retinue which adds to the sense that he is indeed a powerful figure and leader of a “gang”. Of course this is conveyed quite effectively in the text by his being a nobleman with a sword, but since it is set in modern dress we can’t have that. So the entourage all sing Notti Giorni with Leporello – well OK though annoying for Leporello. But they stay on for the fight and all sing the male parts, which overbalances the trio and makes it dramatically absurd - and of course Giovanni isn’t masked or anything like that. Then the entourage clubs the Commendatore to death (with golf clubs – a leitmotif of the production) and stay on stage with Elvira, mocking her throughout her aria and the Catalogue song. So far a bit annoying but apart from the lack of a mask it has some effective moments. However it obviously creates problems later and greatly reduces Giovanni’s “heroism” since he’s hardly contra mundum. I was (mildly) interested to see how the Director would solve them.

For Zerlina they keep Mazetto and Elvira on stage while the Don is seducing her, Mazetto being bound and gagged by the Don’s entourage and Elivra being smooched by the Don throughout. So she doesn’t burst in to stop him, she simply pulls herself out from her “erotic obsession” with him.

At the beginning of the changing clothes with Leporello scene the Don strangles a beautiful young girl in white - played by a 12-year-old apparently! Then because the Director has dressed the Don and Leporello identically they have to produce Nobleman and Servant clothes and play the whole scene, which is really very deep and moving as well as being genuinely funny if played at all well, as a send up in commedia del arte style – further totally undermining Elivria’s character. For the Do Veni alla Fenestra the strangled girl comes back to life and dances about – trite, stupid and pointless.

The party scene is quite well done, with a rather orgiastic set of flourescent lights and a door with “abandon all hope” over it through which the masked guests have to enter (the trio was sung superbly BTW). The Don threatens to kill Leporello with a samauri sword but of course Ottavio doesn’t have a pistol – though he gets one later, sheer perversity. The sense of mayhem at the end is considerable but no-one who didn’t already know the plot would have any real idea of what is going on, or how/why Giovanni escapes.

I really don’t have time to dwell on all the absurdities and travesties of the production. Leporello, who is really quite an interesting and complex character as well as one of the funniest in opera, is made into a thug. Elviria, who in many ways is the best person in the opera – Ottavio wants justice but she wants to give redemption through love – is made into an obsessive maniac. Of course the final feast becomes a tableau for a diabolical “last supper” with a dozen slavering disciples, and the stone guest doesn’t appear at all. Massive special effects of 3 sections of the sage rocking up and down provide the “drama” and the opera stops abruptly with Giovanni’s death. The latter travesty is sadly quite common but musically inexcusable and also dramatically quite wrong – this is more like Shakepeare than Brecht and the finale leads us back into the quotidian world.

What made this all extra-annoying was that there were a good many people in the audience who had never seen Don Giovanni before. I spoke to 3 couples and they were all in that category – one couple appealed to me to tell them what was going on in the plot because they had no idea: surtitles notwithstanding.

Nicole and the Don had to sign records afterwards so after that we had a quick bite afterwards in the opera café, where Nicole was approached by the manager and asked to sign the famous wall. Sunday I ran again with a somewhat longer route through the Tiergarten, and indeed managed to run through the Brandenberg gate. Then to a local restaurant for a long leisurely lunch with Nicole, chewing over many ideas both musical and non-musical.

Look out for her Magic Flute in Cincinnati and Chicago later this year. In March she’s back in the UK for Child of our Time and also next year she’s doing Elvira in Japan. Please please someone cast her as Elvira at Covent Garden soon – preferably in a production which respects the music and the drama.

I don’t read German well enough to follow the programme notes in detail, but it was fascinating to see a list of all the Don Giovanni plays and operas known to the editors. This was an incredibly popular theme, indeed there were no fewer than four such operas in 1787 alone, and two in 1784:

Giacomo Tritto & Giovanni Battista Lorenzi: Il Convitato di Pietra (1784)
Gioacchino Albertini: Il Don Giovanni (1784)
Francesco Gardi: Il Nuovo Convitato di Pietra (1787)
Vincenzo Fabrizi Il Convitato di Pietra (1787)
Guiseppe Gazzaniga & Giovani Bertati: Don Giovanni ossia Il Convitato di Pietra (1787)
Mozart & da Ponte Il Dissoluto Punita ossia Don Giovanni (1784)

It would be very interesting to learn more about the others, and to understand why there was such a craze (there was the Gluck ballet in 1761 and then 2 operas in 1776 and 1777) but at least it explains the slightly odd proper title.

Ethical and Spiritual Implications of the Internet

2011-06-22T06:23:00.000Z

Last night we had the Colloquium on the Ethical and Spiritual Implications of the Internet at the House of Commons, 14 years after we had the first one at the House of Lords. We managed to get the two original speakers, Richard Chartres and Steve Shirley (now Dame Stephanie) and Warren East the CEO of ARM. The original event was purely WCIT but this one was jointly held with PITCOM who provided the Chair in the person of Alun Michael MP.

Steve spoke about the work of the Oxford Internet Institute which she had endowed as a result of the first colloquium. Richard noted that the WCIT was still prominent in google searches on the topic of Ethical and Spirtitual Implications of the Internet, and that not as much has been done in the intervening 14 years as one might hope, but he was thrilled by the prospects that the internet offers. Warren points out that we are still in the very early days of the net, and that society will over time address the problems.

The discussion from the floor was pretty interesting: our attention was drawn to the new Church of Scotland report which addresses many of these issues. I think PITCOM will make a formal report, it was great to work with them and excellent that we managed to bring these outstanding people together.

Music, quanta and job creation

2011-06-18T07:40:00.000Z

Delightful music lesson on Thurs evening: some Schumann and Brahms and a first look at Beethoven's 6th violin sonata - which I didn't know at all but is wonderful. Apparently the final movement was orginally intended for the Kreutzer but then Beethoven wrote another one. A major downside of trips to the US is not playing the piano - though I sometimes can play at the Algonquin. Richard Rodney Bennett is playing there at the moment, who is a friend of a friend, but annoyingly not on Monday which was the night we were there.

Possiblity floated by an Oxford Prof of co-authoring a scientific paper on quantum science with a Nobel Laureate. May not happen, but a delightful thought. Work going well, v v able new colleague (also ex Trinity) makes a big difference.

Good news about job creation in the UK. We're doing our bit: one new colleague this month and another starting next month and considering hiring 2-3 more. In addition we're planning to sponsor a paid intern at our Church, which is a highly cost-efficient way of creating jobs. Came back from the US with a useful export order and hope to raise our client base there considerably. This is what we need, not (of course) an idiotic VAT cut which would simply encourage imports. Any money to cut taxes should be focused on reducing Employers National Insurance esp for lower paid. I'm really sorry that my scheme for negative Employers NI to encourage hiring the longer term unemployed hasn't (yet) got any traction.

Boston, NY, Figaro and PNAS

2011-06-17T06:20:00.000Z

To Boston on Thurs for meetings with our Harvard collaborators and others. Spent weekend with Elder Daughter and her family - MJ getting cuter and cuter - and also managed two runs along the Charles. Then to NY for highly productive working session and more meetings. Back Weds am and went that evening to the Classical Opera Company's concert performance of Figaro. We'd gone because Rosy Joshua was singing Susanna but she'd emailed us the previous week saying she'd had to pull out.

Figaro was sung by Matthew Rose, the wonderful Baritone who we'd seen as Leporello in Glyndebourne. From his opening Cinque it was clear we were in for a real treat. He's a tremendous singer, tall and imposing and with a real gift for acting which in some ways is streched more in a concert performance where you have to show so much with so little. The stand-in Susanna did a fine job, though of course she wasn't Rosy. Mark Stone was an excellent Count, Clara Mouriz a winning Cherubino, and Katherine Watson a really sweet Barberina. The first bridesmaid was Anastasia Bevan who indeed turns out to be the sister Daisy and Mary.

As the performance continued the excellent got better and better. A great advantage of a concert performance is the lack of a Producer, Director and Designer. This avoids the now almost-obligatory "concept" so that we get Figaro set in a space station/garbage depot/office block or whatever and allows the singers to decide for themselves how they will act it. With notable exceptions (such as Peter Hall) opera directors tend to over-direct the singers.

Afterwards we met Matthew Rose and Katherine Watson and were able to congatulate them. Look out for Mathew at the ENO (Taggart), the ROH (Masetto) and the Met (Colline in Nov) and also Missa Solemnis with Colin Davis and the LSO (Proms Sept 4, NY Oct 21). And as we were drinking at the reception I heard that our PNAS paper has been formally accepted. What a week!

A reformed Lords that builds on best practice

2011-06-05T05:47:00.000Z

It is now widely accepted that good governance requires that 50% of the Board of a company should be Independent Directors. The same principle should be applied to reform of the House of Lords.

Rather than a complex and expensive new electoral system which creates hundreds of paid "full time parliamentarians" the Lords should consist of 200 Independent Peers and 200 Political Peers, with each party allowed 2 Peers for each % of the vote cast in the last General Election.

Peers should retire by lot so that there is a reasonable turnover - say 5-10% per annum. The Independent Peers should elect their own members, rather like the Royal Society, though I agree that the 12 Bishops should be kept as part of their number and I'd add the Presidents of the RS, the BA, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Vice-Chancellors of the top 8 Universities. Party Leaders should only be able to appoint Peers to fill vacancies in their allowances. Ministers who are not MPs or Peers should be allowed to attend the House of Lords and speak in the debates but not vote. There would also be much to be said for requiring the Board of each Ministry to contain two Independent Peers.

This reform would achieve all the desirable objectives of the proposed 175 page draft bill at a fraction of the cost, whilst retaining the outstanding quality and independence of the best Peers which makes the House of Lords so distinctively valuable. In particular under this scheme 94% of the Peers could be said to be elected and the balance of the political parties would be exactly represented.

Don Giovanni at Glyndebourne

2011-06-04T19:53:00.000Z

To Glyndebourne yesterday to see our friend Toby Spence as Ottavio in Don Giovanni. Arrived just in time for a quick tour backstage. Toby says it's a wonderful house to sing in, and also that the dynamics of the company are excellent - being together in the country helps people to be really friendly. The acoustics and simply excellent and you can practically whisper.

We then had a wander round the grounds - it was a wonderful summer's day (unlike many of the previous times we have been where it has been rather cold) and its amazing how one can unwind and begin to think more creatively in this environment.

Then the performance itself. The set is a massive Pandora's Box which opens out to provide the necessary interiors. The setting is 1960s Italy which makes for stylish images, But of course much of the actual and threatened violence of Giovanni depends on the fact that noblemen wear swords. The music was outstanding, a brilliant young conductor called Robin Ticciati (a protege of Simon Rattle's) an generally excellent cast and of course the most sublime music combined to provide stunning musical performances, especially the ensembles which Mozart took to a level never surpassed.

At the end Ticciati was presented with a Critics Circle award, and responded with a short speech emphasising that without the musicians he is nothing. We saw Toby afterwards and travelled back to London together so were able to reflect a bit on the amazing depths and transitions of what I (though its hardly an original opinion!) consider to be the greatest of all the operas.

The astounding way in which it switches from comedy to darkness is only made possible by the music. But there is a remarkable level of psychological depth in the characters. The "heros" are of course Elvira and Ottavio - Ottavio is the only really good person in the opera and his steadfast love, willingness to think things through ("Io di ua non vado via, se non so come' e l'affar" - I'm not going until I get to the bottom of this), and deferred gratification. The Romantics of course misread Don Giovanni in their own image - classical composers have to know about deferred gratification.

True uploads of minds are impossible for finite beings

2011-05-30T17:10:00.000Z

Elder Daughter, Son-in-Law and their daughter MJ were over for a week, including MJ's first birthday. Utterly delightful but lots of family visits, including going to Cornwall to see my mother so over the time we saw all our descendants and living ancestors. Hence no time to blog!

Very interesting e-correspondence continues about the ability to simulate/upload human minds. The idea is that sometime in the future we could upload our mind into a computer, and then (perhaps) download it again. The key points for me are as follows:

The brain is not a Turing machine: more generally organisms are not Turing Machines (Denis Noble has a great talk about this). So even if all the other obstacles could be overcome (impossibility of completely accurate measurement both for practical and Quantum reasons etc..) an “upload” is fundamentally and qualitatively different from a real human.

Only an omnipotent being, not limited by Heisenberg, could do an upload properly, into a new, non-digital body. Which is basically the Christian teaching about the resurrection.
The brain may indeed act statistically in some senses, but individual neron firings do matter, they are not a simple sum, and there is massive feedback and cascading. So it has chaotic dynamics and quite a large Lyapunov exponent (indeed not obviously bounded). This means (for anyone who may need reminding) that the error term in the hypothetical simulation will grow as exp(At) for a fairly large A. Therefore however small the error between the real and simulated brain starts at, after a relatively small t it will be binary in the sense that Brain 1 would have done X and Brain 2 would not.
The suggested exact imaging of the brain is also impossible. Even a nanobot in every neuron would be unable to observe every synapse in detail, and to understand exactly what is going in a synapse you have to "look at" the exact state of eg the Ca++ ions binding to the syapototagamin, which is beyond the capabilities of even the smallest nanobot. Furthermore any nanobot could only transmit a finite quantity of information to the supposed simulation in a given time, and since the brain state changes continuously it would never be possible to synchronise the two systems. Not to mention the problem of interactions between the nanobots and the brain, power dissipation, errors etc.. Neurons are highly complex wet analog systems, they are not logic devices at all, they only approximate to them.
Not only are there are fundamental physical and biological reasons why it won't work, I cannot see how any company could get ethical approval for the necessary clinical trials. And without this there wouldn't be enough of a market to develop the hypothetical sensors.
My attention was drawn to Deutsch's fascinating 1985 (!) paper which proves that any finite physically realisable system can be perfectly simulated by an (abstract) Quantum Computer. What he shows is that "every element of a certain countable dense subset of G {the set of physically realisable unitary quantum systems with finite numbers of degrees of freedom} can be computed {in the sense of there being in principle an abstract quantum computer that could compute that set}. But every point in any open region of a finite-dimensional vector space can be represented as a finite convex linear combination of elements of any dense subset of that space. It follows {since he has also shown that in principle if two sets can be Quantum-computed so can any linear combination of these sets} that Q can perfectly simulate any {unitary} physical system with a finite-dimensional state space."

Now this is an interesting result, but we have to understand that what Deutsch means by a physical system is one in which measurement/wavefunction collapse doesn't occur. So for Deutsch the brain never makes decisions: there is a "world" in which each neuron fires at a particular time and another one in which it doesn't. Whether or not one finds this ontology ridiculous what is very clear is that it is completely incompatible with the concepts needed to describe brains, thoughts, uploading or anything like that. The moment you can ask questions like "did I do this?" or "do I remember this?" then these Quantum Computers break down as "prefect simulators": they can only tell you probabilities.

The other secondary problems are that Deutsch needs infinite precision coefficients in his quantum computers for perfect simulation of another system, and that his computers are abstract and not necessarily physically realisable.
It was also pointed out that there is a contradiction between Chaos Theory and Quantum Mechnanics. This is a deep issue and probably relates both to Quantum Gravity and the Measurement Problem. QM is known to be incomplete because it can neither account for gravity nor measurement. The Copenhagen interpretation (followed by the great majority of physicists over 50) says there is a not-yet-understood process whereby the system decides which (eigen)state it's in when it is measured, and a QM system is only linear/unitary up to the point at which it is measured. Deutsch and the Everett crowd say that there is no decision, just n new parallel universes one for each eigenstate.
Finally my attention was drawn to the latest paper from Penrose and Hamerhoff. What I jokingly refer to "Beale's Law of Biological Systems" is the fundamental principle that "Biological systems are almost always more complex than you think - even when you allow for the fact that they are more complex than you think" Whether or not their ideas about OrchOR and Microtubules turn out to be correct in detail, the fundamental point is that the brain is much much more complex than AI types suggest. What is certainly true is that even tiny fluctuations in the behaviour of the microtubules can be enough to change the firing behaviour of neurons. And as Hava Siegelmann showed in 1995, you don't need special physics to get the brain beyond the Turing limit.

I did suggest in the same journal that the discoverability of scientific laws may place a strong constraint on them, and this offers a meta-explanation of why consciousness and the laws of physics might be connected.

Scientists beliefs in God and about Science/Religion

2011-05-25T16:31:00.000Z

Been incredibly busy so no time to blog.

PNAS paper has been accepted subject to some very minor amendments which we are making. Should be in final final form next week.

Fascinating long e-discussion with Nobel Laureate required a detailed response partly because he cc’d his last to a number of other world-class scientists. Eventually made a short email then a detailed response (4pp) which addressed all the points he made. That way the cc’s people could look if they wanted but were not burdened.

The basic points I made were:

Although they are in a minority, there are some outstanding scientists who are sincerely religious (Amongst Nobel Laureates I could name Hewish, Phillips and I believe Martin Evans)
There is a fundamental difference between (A) "I do not believe in God" and (B) "there is an irreconcilable conflict between science and religion."
Unless an organisation is explicitly committed to (B) it is unreasonable to complain if it takes actions that are incompatible with (B).
Any form of persecution for people’s views on religion should have no place in science.
Perhaps it would be constructive to focus on what we can agree about in this area, with respect to academic freedom and reasonable debate.

The data on scientists religious views are quite interesting.

The only scientific study of religious beliefs amongst scientists at elite universities in the US of which I am aware (Ecklund and Park 2009) found the following:

Reported Position	All Scientists	Excl. Social Science
I do not believe in God	34%	37%
I do not know if there is a God and there is no way to find out	30%	29%
I have some doubts but I believe in God	15%	13%
I have no doubts about God's existence	15%	13%
Other(Higher Power/believe in God sometimes	13%	14%
Source: Ecklund and Park 2009	rounded to	nearest 1%

When asked for their view on the statement “there is an irreconcilable conflict between religious knowledge and scientific knowledge.” 17% Strongly Agree, 19% Somewhat Agree, 7% have No Opinion, 24% Somewhat Disagree and 33% Strongly Disagree”.

So only 36% of scientists Agree with (B) vs 56% who Disagree. It would of course be very interesting to se how this correlated with atheism. Strongly no doubt, but probably not more than 50%.

Great talk by Onora, good news re Bela, and interesting mind/body links

2011-05-20T06:43:00.000Z

Excellent talk last night by Onora O'Neill at the RSA sponsored by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. She spoke of the need to broaden the focus of bioethics away from a very individualistic view of "the patient" and to address wider issues in say public health. She was clear that properly speaking public goods have to be non-contestable and non-excludable (so creating an environment where there is safe food is a public good, a plate of free food is not). We spoke briefly before the meeting and she is very critical of the quality of arguments used on both sides of the science and religion debate.

Delighted to see that Bela Bollobas has been elected an FRS. Of course this should have happened decades ago - I understand (not from Bela) that there were some personal animosities involved. Haven't seen the full list yet - there may be other friends.

I've been meaning to blog for a while about a fascinating paper in Science about how the nervous systems controls the innate immune system even in C. elegans. This is a further nail in the coffin of the idiotic idea that bodily ailments are "purely physical" and confirmation that mental and phyisical well-being are intimately interlinked. Naturally it will turn out that these links are infinitely more complex and deep in humans.

Exploring the negative correlation between science and religion

2011-05-17T05:32:00.000Z

Interesting dialogue continues with Nobel Laureate about the supposed incompatibility of science and religion. He cites Laureate colleagues hostile to religion, low levels of religious belief amongst top scientists, and positive reactions of young scientists "liberated from superstition."

The following facts seem indisputable:

Currently the great majority of top scientists do not believe in "a personal God"
Some top scientists (eg even amongst Nobel Laureates Hewish, Phillips and I think Martin Evans) do. And many of the all time greats (eg Newton, Faraday, Maxwell) certainly did. Indeed from about 1500-1900 almost all the world's top scientists were Judaeo-Christian, at a time when only about 20% of the world's population was.

So clearly theism is at present currently negatively correlated with outstanding scientific achievement although not incompatible with it. Why might this be? Some possible reasons spring to mind:

Broadly speaking we can distinguish between left-brain and right-brain thinking, with left-brain thinking tending to view the world mechanistically and right-brain tending to view the world relationally. Western science has over the last 100yrs or so become very left-brain whereas religion is a very right-brain activity.
If you believe that Science is The Most Important activity in the world you are much more likely to become a professional scientist.
Worldly success tends to give people a feeling of self-sufficiency. If you are at (or near) the top of your profession, financially secure etc. you may be less likely to believe in, and practice, a religion which emphasises that we are all equal in the sight of God, and have a duty of service to each other.

This is not, of course, to suggest that very smart people who are atheists are insincere: but to recognise that our beliefs and attitudes are shaped to a significant extent by the situations in which we find ourselves. We are social animals, not isolated idealised individual minds: on that surely both atheists and theists can agree.

PS amusing thwack of Dawkins from Archbishop Cranmer.

What a week

2011-05-14T23:17:00.001Z

What a week. On Friday watched grandson playing cricket. Sailed on Sun and then (just) caught the plane to Harvard. Great working session with Nowak and Rand on Monday and other project meetings in Boston and NY. Flew back overnight Thurs and up to Cambridge: celebrate birthday of Elder Grandson, watched Son playing cricket and dined on Trinity high table with some contemporaries, organised by Andrew Blake. Sat next to the great Béla Bollobás (my most inspiring mathematics teacher) and was also delighted to see Amartya Sen: we keep missing each other in Harvard but hopefully will catch up this side of the atlantic.

Four reasons for monarchy

2011-05-04T06:00:00.000Z

Three of the many reasons why I am a strong supporter of the monarchy are that:

It makes it clear that neither politicians nor plutocrats are the "top" of society.
It encourages long-termism at the pinnacle of government.
It makes real democracy more likely.
It allows national symolism to transcend party lines.

These are of course interconnected.

I admire and respect some of my friends who have gone into politics, and there are certainly politicians who do so out of a genuine sense of public service. Nevertheless no-one in their right mind would claim that politicians as a group represent the flower of the nation and all that is brightest, best and most admirable. Much of politics is a very grubby business and some at least go in to it with mixed motives to say the least. Keeping the very pinnacle of society free from politicians is highly desirable for that reason alone.

Politicians inevitably tend to think in terms of the next election (at least in a democracy) and this tends on average to be about 2 years away. But most serious social and economic problems take a decade or more to deal with. The Queen has been on the throne since 1952 and can reasonably hope that her grandson will be on the throne in 2052 - and maybe even 2082. She can thus bring a 130-year perspective when every week her Prime Minister meets her to discuss the affairs of state and listen to her advice and warnings.

As for real democracy, look at the 2010 Democracy Index. 26 out of 167 countries are "full democracies" and of those 26, 12 are "constitutional monarchies". There are only 24 constitutional monarchies in the list. By contrast there are 10 republics in the full democracies and 91/92 republics in the other category (the People's Repubilc of China is not listed as a republic, which seems perverse to say the least). Nevertheless we can say that constitutional monarchies are 5 times more likely to be full democracies than republics are.

Fourthly in the nature of things, politicians tend to be somewhat divisive figures, who very rarely have approval ratings much about 60% and often have strong political opponents. Constitutional monarchs tend to be "above" politics and although there are always republican intellectuals they tend to be in a very small minority, and respectful of the person of the monarch even if they (misguidedly) think the instiution should be abolished. It is right that politicians should be criticised and opposed - it's great that this does not get muddled with our Head of State.

Finally, it's noteworthy that 4 of the full democracies have the same monarch. God save the Queen!

Royal wedding and the sermon for 2 (billion)

2011-04-29T17:35:00.001Z

Watched the delightful Royal Wedding. We travelled in to the centre, joined the throng in the Mall (just getting through before the gates closed) but then retreated to Pall Mall. We were going to the IoD but since there was such an enormous queue we stopped at the Sofitel opposite for some tea and were able to watch the wedding there. Looking in at the IoD afterwards that seemed a good decision.

Everything went splendidly. The whole occasion was a wonderful sermon in the best possible sense, clearly composed by the couple with deep faith, hope and love. And the great Richard Chartres, who has been closely involved in William and Harry's upbringing and spiritual formation, gave a tremendous sermon. He was speaking to the two of them, very directly and clearly, but also to the probably more than two billion people worldwide who were watching: the largest live audience of any sermon in history. For comparison the total human population at the time of Christ is estimated at about 200M, and the world population didn't reach 2bn until about 1870.

I imagine it was a happy accident that it is St Catherine's day, but the ~~quote~~ saying* "Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire" is just perfect. And the prayer they composed at the end was lovely.

This wedding offers faith, hope and love - as all Christian weddings do. By contrast Dawkins and his miserable shrill atheists can offer none of these, and only discern that it is about sex, procreation and power. As Blake says:

Mock on, mock on Voltaire, Rousseau
Mock on, mock on, 'tis all in vain
You throw the sand against the wind
and the wind blows it back again.

* I cannot find a source for this and I think it is a paraphrase. My friend Gloriana has found something close in Catherine's Letter 368 (to Stefano di Corrado Maconi - "a Sienese noble distinguished by a character full of charm and purity" who who joined the Carthusians and ultimately became prior-general) and JPII closed World Youth Day 2000 by saying "the Pope follows you with affection and, paraphrasing Saint Catherine of Siena's words, reminds you: "If you are what you should be, you will set the whole world ablaze!"(cf. Letter 368)."

Beauty in Cornwall - and jobs

2011-04-27T21:43:00.001Z

Delightful time in Cornwall visiting my mother. Also had time for a sailing lesson at windsport near Falmouth. This is based in Mylor Harbour and Mylor church boasts that Christian worship has been offered on that site since 411.

Cornwall is exceptionally lovely at this time of year, with sea pinks and other very seasonal flowers.

Preliminary UK GDP figures are somewhat disappointing but the strong growth in Manufacturing and Services is very good news. UK Consumers have been on an unsustainable debt-fuelled binge for far too long, as has the public sector. Still I do hope that the remaining quarters of 2011 come in at or ahead of expectations. We all need to think about job creation: we're doing our bit in our company but perhaps we could do more in conjunction with our church?

A joyful eastertide

2011-04-25T09:33:00.000Z

Good Friday saw a Walk of Witness where we joined up with 9 other Churches in Hammersmith and marched from St Paul's to the local shopping centre where we had an ecumencial service. Police horses stopped the traffic so that we could march in silence, which was a powerful statement. After that there was a meditation at the Church led by the Bishop of Kensigton, with the immensely talented Rachel Chaplian (nee Baldock) and her sister and husband providing the music.

Saturday I ran with my delightful running club and I was going to go sailing but no wind, so hung out with C. Sunday we were at the 0830 communion, benefiting from a powerful sermon on the defeat of death by the Associate Vicar which drew heavily on Lorraine's amazing witness in her dying, when she was leading her friends and family in worship and speaking words of comfort over them as they said goodbye. Then to Cambridge to spend Easter Day with Son and family, Daughter joined us for lunch and Elder Daughter skyped in for a bit.

Martin Rees kindly booked us a guest room in Trinity and we had a nice chat this morning. I do very much agree with him about Mars colonists: within the next 20-50 years there should be a series of 1-way trips to Mars to establish a viable human colony. Many people would be happy to volunteer - yes they will die on Mars but they have to die somewhere. Certainly God's blessing and resurrection might can extend to Mars, and indeed to the furthest reaches of the Universe

Church Schools and spreading the Gospel

2011-04-22T07:49:00.001Z

I know press reports should be treated with scepticism. But I am concerned lest there be any truth in the idea that the Bishop of Oxford wants to de-emphasise the link between church attendance and places in CofE schools. Although this will win brownie points from the largely secular Educational Establishment, we have to face the facts that:

a. For many people in the UK it is only when they start a family that they really understand the prime importance of love, and the shallowness of secular individualim with pursuit of money, sex and self-indulgance.

b. Because church-going is in many respects deeply un-fashionable many families only start going to church when they have children because they think it will help them get into a decent school.

Reducing this link will therefore result in many families who would otherwise have come to church and been exposed to Chrisianity and God's redeeming love missing out. This will be bad for them and bad for the CofE.

He needs to consider the systemic implications of this policy, and not just look in the narrow context of the Educational Establishment.

An interesting light on the vital role of churches in the UK community is given in this report from the National Churches Trust - highlighted by an article by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian. The signatories of the report are Tony Hall, Richard Best, Professor Eamon Duffy, Dr David Kynaston, Ruth Lea, Kate Parminter, Dame Stella Rimington, and Sir Timothy Sainsbury

Fair bet therefore that they are all Christians - not widely known for some of them.

Meanwhile Justin Brieley emails me details of a conference he is hosting in London on May14 about sperading the gospel, with John Lennox and others. Details are here.

Alain Haines RIP

2011-04-20T08:54:00.001Z

Our friend Alan Haines died in Charing Cross Hospital on Sunday at about 8pm.

We had visited him at 5 and he was sinking rapidly but still chatting. When we had seen him on Sat he'd asked for some Whisky, so with the nurse's permission we bought him a small bottle. I gave him some with 1:4 dilution but he said it was too strong, so I diluted it another 50%. This just hit the spot! He had another sip on Sunday.

He is now in peace with his beloved wife Dorit. May they rest in peace and rise in glory - when they do they will be even more handsome/beautiful than ever.

Great trip to US

2011-04-16T01:47:00.000Z

Enjoyable and stimulating visit to the US. We flew in to NYC on Weds for a meeting with Joe Stiglitz, who was as usual great and full of teriffic insights. My colleague although a UK/US citizen had never been to NY so after we had written up the meeting I took him to The View on the 48th floor of the MAriott - but the very low cloud rather limited visibility.

Thurs travelled up by train to Boston, working on the train which is much more efficent and enjoyable than flying with its dead time. Meeting and dinner with Martin Nowak which was great. Also managed to consult another key Nobel Laureate adviser on the phone and again super advice and insight.

Friday was some client meetings and then gave a seminar at the Kennedy School - my old friend Malcolm Sparrow attened much to my surprise and delight. Caught up with Elder Daughter and Youngest Granddaughter and now just about to board flight back.

Useful dialogue with a critic of Martin's

2011-04-12T06:34:00.000Z

Quite a constructive e-correspondence with a very good scientist who has been reportedly quite critical of Martin's accepting the Templeton Prize. He says is sole concern is that ny individuals or organisations that interfere with the ability of our children or indeed adults to recognise truth are acting immorally.

I don't see how Martin or the Templeton Foundation can reasonably be placed in this category. But Dawkins certainly can.

Recognising (or perhaps better, discerning) truth is indeed vital. Not for nothing do John and I call our book Questions of Truth. There are certainly some very dogmatic religious people, but there are some very dogmatic atheists as well. My correspondent lists many benefits that (western) science and engineering have given us. Similarly I could say (western) religion has given us "schools, hospitals, universities, charity, government support for the less fortunate and the rule of law"

Equally we could both list some bad things that have been given to us by science/engineering and by religion, and we could both argue that these were not the "true" results of true science/engineering or true religion but deplorable aberrations. So both science/engineering and religion have had good and bad consequences. This is a truth that all religious people I know certainly recognise. But we can also say that, on almost any reasonable evaluation, overall the benefits of science/engineering have outweighed the costs.

However this is also true of Judaeo/Christian religion. Whether or not the core theological beliefs are true, the practical benefits for humanity of adopting Christianity have been enormous (The number of people who "adopt" Judaism is miniscule). Pretty much every serious historical or sociological study confirms this. And at the level of individuals the benefits to health, longevity and (in evolutionary terms) propagation of surviving children are very clear.

It may be that most of these benefits come from certain social behaviours rather than the theological beliefs, and that these behaviours may be beneficial whilst the theological beliefs are false. But beneficial actions to not require true beliefs, just beliefs that are "true enough" - Victorian sewers still work even though their ideas about "germs" are laughably inadequate, for example.

Dawkins and other shrill militant atheists are, in my view, firmly in the category of "individuals ... that interfere with the ability of our children or indeed adults to recognise truth" because they peddle the manifest lie that religion is "the root of all evil" (this was actually the title of Dawkins' TV series that led to The God Delusion) or even the weaker form of that manifest lie, that religious beliefs are clearly on balance harmful.

We'll be able to discuss this in person when we meet in a few weeks.

Meanwhile it is worth repeating that researches supported by the Templeton Foundation have produced more top-class scientifc research (as measured by papers in Nature, Science and PNAS) than all the "New Atheists" put together.

Some rather pathetic commentator on PZ Myers blog says that all these papers must be wrong because 'The "Templeton Taint" renders any produced publication fatally flawed'. Funny then that Steve Pinker is co-author of two of them.

Lemaitre Conference Pt 2

2011-04-10T21:02:00.000Z

Back from final day of this conference. The Gala Dinner last night was most enjoyable and I sat next to Bernard Carr which was great. An Oxford PhD student has offered to collaborate on E[HELP} which is great and we spent some time after the dinner thinking through some of the approaches. On Sun I began with a run along the backs, delightful spring weather, and then went to St Benet's Church where Angela Tilby preached with great insight.

The two talks today were:

Robin Collins who spoke very interestingly about fine-tuning, pointing out that observers could arise as Boltzmann Brains in non-anthropic universes and therefore the observer-selection counter-arguments to anthropic fine tuning are invalid. He also talked a lot about discoverability, pointing out that this depended on a ladder of successive approximations which is an even stronger constraint. He asked for a link to my Discoverability paper which I have sent him.
John Polkinghorne then gave some concluding reflections, including some anecdotes about Fred Hoyle. He made the point that God is more veiled than hidden in this universe. He also called for more engagement of theologians in the science/theology dialogue, noting that theologians tend to think about "the world" as Earth and "the future" as a century or so, compared to the cosmological scale of scientists.

Altogether a very interesting and successful conference.

Lemaitre Conference Pt 1

2011-04-09T17:46:00.001Z

At conference organised in memory of Georges Lemaitre. I was only able to join from Sat am so missed the earlier talks, including (sadly) one by Martin Rees, but I was able to catch up with him and congratulate him in person. Key points for me:

Paul Shellard spoke on recent advances in "Big-Bang' cosmology. He is rightly very excited about the extent to which observational data are enabling rigorous scientific tests of cosmological models like inflation, constraining the many different flavours on offer. But there are plenty of enigmas remaining (he listed 9, many to do with fine-tuning) and he's understandably very sceptical of String/M-theory. He thinks it is essential to distinguish between cosmology and what he calls meta-cosmology, and that many popular accounts, even by eminent scientsts who should certainly know better, fail to do so.
John Barrow then addressed Lemaitre's legacy, (with a capital Lambda!) John's old colleague Bill McCrea had known him and thought he was the most brilliant of the old masters, with a deep physical intutiion that enabled him to use just the right amount of mathematics. Lemaitre discovered the Hubble Constant 2 years before Hubble, and could have predicted inflation. John also metioned his paper with Shaw that proposes that Lambda is in fact a slowly varying scalar field and which gives a very interesting an soon-testable prediction (Discussion in Nature here)
Don Page spoke up for the Multiverse view, and rather pleasingly gave a plug for QoT and for E[HELP]. It's increasingly clear to me that some variational principle is the best chance of "explaining" the value of the parameters, but Martin says that we are too far away from being able to do the calculations. I also think Don needs to take confidence intervals more seriously: prior probabilites and likelhoods cannot, ITRW, be given as single numbers.
George Ellis then warned hard against taking Mulitverse ideas too seriously. They were legitimate hypotheses but it is grossly misleading to suggest (as Martin certainly doesn't but Brian Greene and others do) that they or indeed string/M-theory are known reality. We go from Known Physics to Hypthetical Physics and only the latter requires any form of Multiverse. As for the idea that "we are all in a computer simulation" - this is completely ridiculous. No conceivable computer could do this, and anyway who built the computer etc.. I suggested that this was part of the extreme left-brain thinking that was so dysfunctional, plugging The Master and His Emmissary. George is in my view over-impressed with Lee Smolin's Cosmic Natural Selection and I'll send him my paper that debunks it.
Bernard Carr then emphasied the "cosmic omphalos" in which the largest scales (c10^33 cm) arise from the smallest scales (c 10^-30 cm) if a quantum fluctuation gives rise to the Big Bang. There are a whole wealth of anthropic coincidences and we seem to be at the centre of length scales. He is inclined towards the Multiverse view, but also is very clear that mind, consciousness and mind and spirit are fundamental realities in the universe.

An interesting panel discussion followed, and now for the drinks reception.

The fundamentalist atheists are mighty cross

2011-04-09T05:49:00.000Z

One of the world's greatest philosophers emails me about the ventings of Dawkins, Grayling and co re Martin Rees getting the Templeton Prize:

"Yes -- the fundamentalist atheists are mighty cross.. to the extent of sounding rather brittle"

Ineed Mark Vernon the The Guardian writes that "Martin Rees's Templeton prize may mark a turning point in the 'God wars' Awarding the Templeton prize to Rees suggests science is rejecting the advocacy of the likes of Richard Dawkins." This got a typically shrill and ill-considered response from Jerry Coyne.

Meanwhile I hear that the Veritas Forum at UCLA had over 1000 people and they had to turn over 200 away. Desipite the new atheist propaganda there is a great hunger for truth. I also see that the ludicrous Sam Harris has been panned (even by atheists like Simon Blackburn) for his absurd book The Moral Landscape: he describes Harris as "a knockabout atheist" who "joins the prodigious ranks of those whose claim to have transcended philosophy is just an instance of their doing it very badly", pointing out that "if Bentham’s hedonist is in one brain state and Aristotle’s active subject is in another, as no doubt they would be, it is a moral, not an empirical, problem to say which is to be preferred."

A review in the Evening Standard rightly describes Harris' idiotic hubris:"It's the most extraordinarily overweening claim and evidently flawed". It also knocks for six another idiotic mediocrity AC Grayling, for his "the Good Book", referring to "his fantastic hubris ... The Good Book is unreadable, not merely just because it is boring but because it is nauseating."

You suddenly realise that what you are reading is nothing other than a dud translation of a poem you know well - by Horace, Leopardi, Goethe or Li Po - as channelled by Grayling himself, far from an inspiring writer at the best of times.

The parts where he appears to have made up the gospel of AC all by himself are even worse, Genesis starts thus: "In the garden stands a tree. In springtime it bears flowers; in the autumn, fruit. Its fruit is knowledge, teaching the good gardener how to understand the world. From it he learns how the tree grows..." Even Chance the Gardener from Being There would have blushed.

And these are the mediocrities who criticise Martin Rees.

Congratulations to Matin Rees (+ wonderful Terrible performance)

2011-04-07T10:40:00.001Z

Warmest congratulations to Martin Rees on the Templeton Prize. There has been some carping from the usual suspects: Dawkins and Atkins whose contributions to science has been a tiny fraction of that of Martin's (or indeed of Martin Nowak's) and Harry Kroto - a great guy but a pretty militant atheist in his way.

Whatever one thinks of the Templeton Foundation there is do doubt that it funds some first-rate science. Here is a list of the papers published in Science and Nature that it has funded:

Positive Interactions Promote Public Cooperation Rand et al Science 4 September 2009 1272-1275 [DOI:10.1126/science.1177418]
The Right and the Good: Distributive Justice and Neural Encoding of Equity and Efficiency Hsu at al Science 23 May 2008: 1092-1095 [DOI:10.1126/science.1153651]
Via Freedom to Coercion: The Emergence of Costly Punishment Hauert et al Science 29 June 2007: 1905-1907. [DOI:10.1126/science.1141588]
Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation, Martin A. Nowak Science 8 December 2006: 1560-1563. [DOI:10.1126/science.1133755]
Stellar Production Rates of Carbon and Its Abundance in the Universe Oberhummer at al Science 7 July 2000: 88-90. [DOI:10.1126/science.289.5476.88]
Distant metastasis occurs late during the genetic evolution of pancreatic cancer Yachida et al. Nature 467, 1114-1117 (27 October 2010) doi:10.1038/nature09515
The evolution of eusociality Nowak, Tarnita and Wilson Nature 466, 1057-1062 (26 August 2010) doi:10.1038/nature09205
Mutational robustness can facilitate adaptation Draghi at al Nature 463, 353-355 (21 January 2010) doi:10.1038/nature08694
Indirect reciprocity provides only a narrow margin of efficiency for costly punishment Ohtsuki at al Nature 457, 79-82 (1 January 2009) doi:10.1038/nature07601
Pleiotropic scaling of gene effects and the ‘cost of complexity’ Wagner et al Nature 452, 470-472 (27 March 2008) doi:10.1038/nature06756
Winners don’t punish Dreber et al Nature 452, 348-351 (20 March 2008) doi:10.1038/nature06723
Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language Lieberman, et al Nature 449, 713-716 (11 October 2007) doi:10.1038/nature06137
A simple rule for the evolution of cooperation on graphs and social networks Ohtsuki et al Nature 441, 502-505 (25 May 2006) doi:10.1038/nature04605

PS: Also the following in PNAS:

Transcript origin analysis identifies antigen-presenting cells as primary targets of socially regulated gene expression in leukocytes Cole et al PNAS 2011 108 (7) 3080-3085; doi:10.1073/pnas.1014218108
Multiple strategies in structured populations Tarnita at al PNAS 2011 108 (6) 2334-2337; doi:10.1073/pnas.1016008108
From the Cover: Accumulation of driver and passenger mutations during tumor progression Bozic at al. PNAS 2010 107 (43) 18545-18550;doi:10.1073/pnas.1010978107
Infants consider both the sample and the sampling process in inductive generalization Gweon et al PNAS 2010 107 (20) 9066-9071; doi:10.1073/pnas.1003095107
Cooperative behavior cascades in human social networks Fowler and Christakis PNAS 2010 107 (12) 5334-5338; doi:10.1073/pnas.0913149107

Also went to a wonderful concert on Sunday with Martin Nowak - LSO at the Barbican. This was all Prokoviev: his first Violin Concerto with Leila Josefowicz and then the oratorio Ivan the Terrible with our friend Catherine Wyn-Rogers as mezzo soliost and a remarkable young Russian bass called Alexei Tanovitsky. The conductor was the extraordinary Xian Zhan. I'll try to add more about this later - far too busy to blog at present.

Birbalsingh, Willetts, Rolston and Nowak

2011-04-03T06:46:00.001Z

V busy so no time to blog. Much of this is working with Bob May and other colleagues on revising our PNAS submission in the light of referees comments.

Read Katharine Birbalsingh's wonderful To Miss with Love. She is setting up a Free School and people should pile in with support.

Just started, belatedly, David Willetts' The Pinch which is also fascinating about family structures: how the UK has always had relatively small nuclear families (except for a bit of a splurge in the 19th C). He also makes the point that family breakup directly leads to poverty and inequality (as man with wife and elderly mother go from one household to 3). He has a delicious turn of phrase, eg:

Sometimes we may regret that England does not enjoy the advantages of ... clan-style families, and look back to an earlier age when supposedly we did. The earliest recorded example of this sort of nostalga is a sermon given by Bishop Wulfstan in 1014, in which he expressed regret that vendettas were not what they used to be, as family members just would not join in*.
The demographic transition ... can be summarised very simply - first we stop dying like flies, then we stop breeding like rabbits.
A welfare system that was originally designed to compensate men for loss of earnings is slowly and messily redesigned to compensate women for the loss of men,

Piano lesson with Kathron Sturrock on the Brahms G Minor Rhapsody. She is amazing and it is such a privilege to learn from her.

Also got Holmes Rolston's new book Three Big Bangs which cites QoT, and looks very interesting. When I will get time to read it...

Martin Nowak is over to promote SuperCooperators - it will be great to catch up and go get the book, it's terrific!

* David quotes Wufstan as "too often a kinsman does not protect a kinsman any more than a stranger" though it can also be translated "Now very often a kinsman does not spare his kinsman any more than the foreigner" The Old English says "Ne bearh nu foroft gesib gesibban þe ma þe fremdan" and my daughter (not an expert but at least studying that period in History at Cambridge) says "she'd go for protect".

NTW vindicated against all comers

2011-03-23T19:27:00.003Z

Well the counterblasts to NTW are up and as expected they are pretty feeble.

Abbot et 136 als (lead-authored by Stewart West) boils down to saying that relatedness is often very important and can sometimes explain a lot (which no-one denies). The references are mainly 3 books, one by West himself. It's not clear how many of the co-authors has a strong mathematical background: there is at least one very good scientist (Tim Clutton-Brock FRS, but he is no mathematician, quite old school) and one very bad one (Jerry Coyne). It's also amazing that anyone can be so naive and dogmatic as to write "Natural selection explains the appearance of design in the living world, and inclusive fitness theory explains what this design is for" (! my italics)
Boomsma et al make the specific point that all hymenopteran clades that fit the standard definition of eusociality evolved from life-time monogamous ancestors (I blogged about this paper when it came out I think). Again this misses the point that NTW are not saying relatedness is irrelevant, merely that it is not all-important as inclusive fitness fanatics (eg Abbot et al!) claim.
Strassman et al again absurdly over-claims that "Organisms overwhelmingly direct costly assistance, and all true altruism, towards kin" - citing a paper in Science by Griffin and West which shows nothing of the kind - merely that there is a statistically significant correlation.

Fig 2 from Griffin and West - only a moderate correlation

Ferriere and Michod recognise the point that whereas inclusive fitness has generated many valuable insights it is a very incomplete description of evolutionary processes (esp it gives no insights into evolutionary dynamics) and suggest that it needs to be replaced by the concept of Invasion Fitness. They are thus effectively supporting the key point of NTW - Inclusive Fitness is a rule of thumb, it is not a fundamental principle (still less the dogmatic absurdity of "what this design is for"). It will be interesting to see how far and under what conditions "Invasion Fitness" tracks proper and careful Evolutionary Dynamic calculations.

NTW respond by saying that "The authors of the five comments offer the usual defence of inclusive fitness theory, but do not take into account our new results" and making some helpful detailed points - conceding only a minor re-wording of one claim. They don't discuss Ferriere and Michod who seem to me in fact to be largely agreeing with NTW.

PS Coyne comments on the fact that Dawkins wasn't asked to sign any of the letters. Coyne says "I think this was simply an oversight, because all of us simply assumed that Richard would be penning his own criticism" - nothing to do with the fact that Dawkins stopped contributing to the primary science literature in 1980 then! Coyne then posts Dawkin's attempt to rebut NTW which boils down to: "rB > C: ...If you think, as Nowak et al. do, that ‘Hamilton’s rule almost never holds’, that simply means you haven’t been measuring B and C carefully enough." A splendid example of blind faith. Basically, poor Dr Dawkins is stuck in a 1970s time-warp and new developments in science and mathematics in this area seem to have passed him by.

I also note that Coyne in his previous post permitted himself to "feel sorry for co-author Corina Tarita, a young scientist with splendid qualifications, for this paper will always cast a shadow over her career." This sounds really nasty - as though Coyne and his powerful friends, who cannot touch Nowak and Wilson, will try to block Corina's. Fortunately Corina is well beyond the reach of mediocrities like Coyne - elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows and publishing her first paper in Nature in her mid 20s - Coyne managed his at 43. Unless and until someone finds a major flaw in Corina's mathematics, her reputation is perfectly safe. No-one has, and Coyne and his motley crew are incapable of doing so.

Despairing, cursing rage, attends their rapid fall

Our lovely friend Q

2011-03-20T15:52:00.001Z

Our lovely friend Q died on Thurs - at home in her husband's arms surrounded by her family and her priest, with prayers and love. She was 33. God seems to have a soft spot for people who die at that age. She was a wonderful woman who touched many people's lives and hearts.

There is of course a deep paradox at the heart of a Christian attitude to death. Shakespeare puts it like this:

Clown: "Good madonna, give me leave to prove you a fool."
Olivia: "Can you do it?"
C: "Dexterously, good madonna."
O: "Make your proof."
C: "I must catechise you for it, madonna: good my mouse of virtue, answer me."
O: "Well, sir, for want of other idleness, I'll bide your proof."
C: "Good madonna, why mournest thou?"
O: "Good fool, for my brother's death."
C: "I think his soul is in hell, madonna."
O: "I know his soul is in heaven, fool."
C: "The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother's soul being in heaven. Take away the fool, gentlemen."

Yet Jesus wept at the death of Lazarus, even though he knew he would raise him back to life.

Mechanisms for evolution

2011-03-18T00:43:00.003Z

Good review of Supercooperators in Nature by Milinski. He discusses the NTW paper and says

“I anticipate that a better mathematical formulation of social evolution theory will be found that includes relatedness, is compatible with existing evidence and includes Hamilton’s rule as a rule of thumb.”

This seems reasonable, although we must bear in mind what Pauli used to say: “no credits for the future”and should be something around which NTW and their less unreasonable critics can unite.

Someone claims that "there is a big article coming out in Nature which firmly disagrees with [NTW]... jointly authored by more than 100 biologists, who have all signed on to the paper in order to show how firmly their field rejects the conclusions" (my italics). We'll see whether this is really an article/paper or just a normal piece of scientific correspondence with some reporting. And whether they have actually found any flaws in the mathematics or reasoning. I suspect not, and I doubt whether many of them are good mathematicians. But we shall see. Notable that the only other person I know of who is a Prof of Mathematics and Biology (Doebeli) has written:

“[NTW] makes it clear what inclusive fitness theory really is: an accounting method, not a biological mechanism.

Champions of inclusive fitness often refer to the underlying mechanism as kin selection, but this just restates the fact that the benefit a particular gene generates at a cost to its carrier must preferentially go to the gene's other carriers (kin). The real biological problem is to understand mechanisms that lead to such assortment between helper and help. For eusocial insects, [NTW] convincingly argue that the basic mechanism of assortment is the formation of groups owing to ecological pressures, such as the need for nest defence.

Despite the indignant response of the inclusive-fitness crowd, there can be no doubt about the fundamental tenet that, with or without the concept of inclusive fitness, in principle we have access to exactly the same amount of evolutionary knowledge. Personal modelling preferences may vary, but there is nothing magic about bookkeeping techniques.” Nature 467 661

Meanwhile my assiduous e-correspondent proposes a Thought experiment.

"Imagine an animal that slept soundly enough to be predated upon in the dark. The predators only kill the young. The adults can defend the young if they wake up. Now consider a point mutation with no effect in the young, but which made the adults easy to wake so they can defend the young. This mutation will spread through kin selection. The young who have the gene are more likely to survive if their parents have such a gene.

Such a gene would become universal (fixed) in a population if it made the survival of the young even a few percent more likely when their parents had the gene. If the young were much more likely to survive, it would spread rapidly and become fixed in a relatively small number of generations."

This is a nice illustration of what is wrong with inclusive fitness.

(as Noble points out) Genes and organisms simply don't work like that. No point mutation could have such a specific effect on behaviour without many other effects - apart from anything else there are only 23k genes and 10¹⁰ Neurons each with vastly complex interconnections to thousands of others. And if there were an heritable effect like that it would be more likely to be epigenetic or cultural/behavioural.
(per NTW) Even if such a mutation were possible, it would only spread if this contribution to fitness were separable from all others (weak selection), mating were randomised (so eg no sexual selection against insomniacs) and these environmental/selection conditions persisted for long enough with no ecological complications. In reality these assumptions would almost never happen ITRW.
(per NTW) Even if all these implausible conditions were met, this would be purely natural selection and not kin selection. Fitness is (roughly) the number of surviving grandchildren you have. So when kin selection works, it adds nothing. And it usually doesn't.

Undeterred by e-correspondent says: "There are many point mutations with specific effects on behavior known, and most of them cause no noticeable other effects. Dancing mice and rats are a specific example". But of course the dancing mice have genetic mutations that cause malformation of the inner ear and indeed they have played an important role in elucidating the mechanisms of human deafness (see this review for some details). It is also interesting that they are known to be poor breeders, and it's perfectly clear (at least to me) that there will be plenty of other subtle effects of this mutation. There always are.

Supercooperators

2011-03-13T21:44:00.001Z

Just back from another really useful session at Harvard. Martin gave me a copy of his new book Supercooperators and I'm now 75% of the way through it. Much of the matetrial is of course familiar to me but it's still fascinating, and for someone who doesn't know this extraordinary branch of science it would be entirely amazing.

There has been much email traffic on the Lifeboat foundation egroup - and I don't think I should blog about most of it, but there has been a sub-thread about the mechanisms for evolution.

An e-correspondent who has now retired and hasn't studied the latest literature asks "So the observed association of highly related haploid/diploid species with eusociality is just happenstance?" The answer is yes - to quote NTW

"the association between haplodiploidy and eusociality [is] below statistical significance...Vast numbers of living species, spread across the major taxonomic groups, use either haplodiploid sex determination or clonal reproduction, with the latter yielding the highest possible degree of pedigree relatedness, yet with only one major group, the gall-making aphids, known to have achieved eusociality. For example, among the 70,000 or so known parasitoid and other apocritan Hymenoptera, all of which are haplodiploid, no eusocial species has been found. Nor has a single example come to light from among the 4,000 known hymenopteran sawflies and horntails, even though their larvae often form dense, cooperative aggregations."

Another nail is driven in the kin selection nonsense by this perspective and paper in Science, which shows that the relatedness of human social groups is not particularly high, compared to chimanzees for example, and that "multilevel, nested structures of alliances" are the distinctive feature.

PS I see that on p286 Martin says "Over the years I was fortunate enough to cooperate with a great number of impressive scientists. Here I can only name a few of them ..." and then gives an alphabetical list. It is quite a long one, but I am humbled and honored to be included. To be mentioned even vaguely in the same breath as Yoh Iwasa, Simon Levin, Bob May, Peter Schuster, Karl Sigmund, Robert Trivers, Bert Vogelstein and EO Wilson is amazing.

Rosemary Joshua with the Aurora Orchestra

2011-03-12T09:16:00.000Z

On Weds saw Rosy Joshua in a Mozart concert at Kings Place, with the Aurora Orchestra. This was originally to have been conducted by Sir Colin Davis but he wasn't well enough so we had the young and dynamic Nicholas Collon. The orchestra, perhaps especially under Collon, is very exciting and makes the Mozart quite explosive at times. Always an interesting take though occasionally slightly perverse.

We started with the Figaro overture and then had 'Bella mia fiamma, addio... Resta, o cara', K528. This was composed in 1787 a few days after the first performance of Don Giovanni when Mozart was staying near Prague with his friends Franz and Josepha Duschek. Josepha, a noted Soprano, locked Mozart him in the pavilion of her garden with a supply of writing materials, refusing to release him until he had writed her an aria. Mozart produced this gem but said he would destroy the MS unless Josepha could sing it perfectly at sight. Ceres has decreed that Proserpina's mortal lover Titano must die and he sings this moving lamenting scena. The first half conluded with Symphony No. 27 in G, K199.

After the interval, another rarity, the Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K546. This was written after Mozart was studying the music of Bach and Handel. Being Mozart it's wonderful stuff, and the Aurora again played it in interesting ways, with much gusto. Though of course compared to Bach, Mozart doesn't really have a mastery of the fugue form - but then who does (Beethoven, in his own inimitable way, but very different).

Rosy was back for a wonderful rendition of 'Non più. Tutto ascoltai...', K490 which is a substitute aria in Idomineo - a dialogue between Idamante and his lover Ilia, in which she purports to release him to marry Electra but he replies with declarations of undying love. We concluded with an explosive performance of the Paris Symphony K297.

Saw Rosy backstage, and reflecting afterwards with another very musical friend of hers I realised the fundamental reason why the performances with Rosy were so much better than those without. Accompanying a great singer forces the orchestra to breathe and take a long view of the music, whereas without her the performances, though still exciting, were rather breathless. But a very fine evening I would not have missed for worlds, and the orchestra and conductor are well worth hearing and will go far. But especially go when they have a great and highly musical soliost.

Healing for our friend

2011-03-06T15:18:00.000Z

A lovely friend from church in her 30s is gravely ill with cancer. Humanly speaking she has only weeks to live. She was allowed out for 3 hours from the Marsden to go to church, with her husband, and we all prayed for her. In Christ we know that she will be healed, and the only area of uncertainty is whether she will be healed in this life as well as the next.

An impressive African pastor now working in Switzerland led some prayers afterwards. He said he had been "dead" for 3 days as a child and had been raised back to life, and now has a ministry of healing. Every time he had visited London for the last 9 years he felt God had called him to come to our church, sit at the back and pray, without making himself known. Then today he felt God telling him to come forward. He prayed in French and his wife translated to English. He was praying very powerfully that our friend should be resussicte - which of course can mean resurrected as well as simply healed. I opened the Bible at random (though I knew it was in the NT) and read this passage:

Jesus went out as usual to the Mount of Olives, and his disciples followed him. On reaching the place, he said to them, “Pray that you will not fall into temptation.” He withdrew about a stone’s throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.

When he rose from prayer and went back to the disciples, he found them asleep, exhausted from sorrow. “Why are you sleeping?” he asked them. “Get up and pray so that you will not fall into temptation.” (Lk 22:39-45 NIV)

Atatcks on Christians, and a dialogue re Abelard and the Multiverse

2011-03-02T09:24:00.000Z

Terrible goings on in Pakistan with the assassination of the Christian Minister for Minorities. And in the UK the scandalous attempt by unelected judges to change the constitution to make the clear and evident Christian basis of the law and the constitution into "mere rhetoric". The Queen is Queen "by the grace of God" and all acts of parliament are enacted "by the Queen's most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons" This travesty must be challenged.

Fascinating email exchange about the multiverse around the suggestion that 'Just having a single universe seems to run into the Abelard objection that "if God failed to create some things worthy of being created, who would not say that He was jealous or unjust?"'

This seems to me to be based on a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the creative process (we don't say Bach is a lesser composer because he didn't write opera) and an absurd idea that we can second-guess God. Also I don't think Abelard understood that Existence is not a predicate like other predicates, but we do. Philosophy does advance at least a bit!

It would be ridiculous to complain, of a Bach fugue, that Bach could have put more entries, counterpoint or notes in. Even if some pedantic theorist could "demonstrate" that there was another inversion available (or something) the answer would be "don't be ridiculous, this is Bach, you simply cannot hope to second guess his creative judgement". And what applies to Bach applies to an infinite degree to God.

Q4 GDP - and an unsolved question in fluid dynamics

2011-02-27T22:06:00.000Z

Very busy week and great progress on the scientific financial stability work.

Today managed to get the 50 most recent JCP Questions and Responses online -using a blog format because it's easier and easier to search. It's here if you'd like to look.

The ONS revised Q4 "growth" figures (minus 0.5%) were fractionally downwards, when I was expecting a big increase. But I note that at current market prices the growth was plus 0.4%. The relationship between this and the "chained volume measure" is complex. On average over the last 8 quarters GDP at current market prices has been 0.5% higher than GDP at chained volume (roughly corresponding to 2% inflation) but last Qtr it was apparently 1%.

Manufacturing growth continues to storm (+1.1% in Q4) and I'm still very dubious about the supposed 2.5% fall in construction - though this has been revised upwards from the frankly incredible earlier figure of 3.3%. This may also be behind the 2.5% fall in Gross Fixed Capital Formation. And although the trade deficit widened this was driven mainly by imports of aircraft to beat a change in the VAT rules on 1 Jan.

On a completely different note I was struck by this report in Nature showing that it was still unclear whether the motions in a typical astrophysical disk are stable or unstable. This could have a major influence on the rates of star formation - and of Habitable Earth-Like Planets.

21st Celebration at the Royal Society

2011-02-23T22:28:00.004Z

Amazing couple of days.

On Monday we had a celebration at the Royal Society to celebrate 21 years of Sciteb. This began with a panel discussion “Strategy and Beyond” where I was joined by three immensely distinguished friends: Bob May, John Parker and Ian Davis. After 4-5 minute opening remarks from each of us there was a very interesting interactive discussion. We’d told people the discussion would go from 6-76pm with a reception afterwards, and so with great reluctance I adjourned the discussion at 7:10 although it could easily have gone through to 7:30 or later.

The reception was fun and the opportunity for many lively discussions. It was great to see so many friends, clients and collaborators, and the RS is an excellent venue. We’re hoping to make a Harvard Business Review article or something similar from it.

Tuesday was also very busy with client meetings and then in the evening a rather impromptu supper party with a few friends including Ruth Palmer. For once we didn’t ask her to bring her violin, though we did listen to the last part of her iconic Shostakovich CD – she really should perform this in London!

Toby Spence and Das Lied

2011-02-20T06:55:00.004Z

Wonderful concert last night at the Festival Hall, with the LPO conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

The first half was the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante with Stefan Jackiw violin and Richard Yongjae O’Neill viola. Nézet-Séguin is a very enthusiastic and inspirational conductor, and the soloists are deeply accomplished. O'Neill in particular had a very profound sensibility. Although very fine performances, for some reason they didn't quite gel into the indefinable mystery of a great one: I wonder whether they had spent enough time together, and there seemed to be three subtly different conceptions of the piece.

Then Das Lied vob der Erde with Toby Spence and Sarah Connolly. This was really tremendous. Toby sang very much as the poet, as a large scale song cycle rather than in Operatic mode. You could really imagine him Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde holding up the drinking proceedings to reflect on mortality, "all the rotting trifles of the world" and the ape howling in the graveyard - Dunkel ist das Leben, ist des Tod! I'd just been listening to Sarah Connolly in her duets recording with Rosemary Joshua, so it was great to hear her in the flesh. Her magesterial Mezzo was well suited to the drama of Von der Schonheit. Toby was also very fine in Der Trunkene in Fruhling - although his voice of course is very different he reminds me of Ian Bostridge in the way he inhabits the words so intelligently. Maybe it's Oxford (and for that matter Jackiw studied at Harvard - a very Elite University concert!). Why I wonder didn't Mahler use both soloists in Der Abschied?

We saw Toby backstage afterwards but there was a delay since they decided to do some patches for the Mozart, and we both had to be up early today. We'll catch up over dinner later. He's doing Don Ottavio at Glyndebourne which we must see.

PS: Big article in the Mail by an author who has noticed what I and others have been saying for years. Scientifically, Christian belief and practice are very good for you. Scientific atheists can argue with integrity that the beliefs are untrue - wrongly in my view - but from a scientific PoV they are certainly not harmful!

V busy, but more gems from McGilchrist

2011-02-17T21:59:00.005Z

Madly busy - big event for us at the Royal Society next week with Bob May, Sir John Parker and Ian Davis as my fellow panellists. And a business friend has emailed that our work was mentioned on Radio 4 (I've now listened to the programme: it was, quite heavily, though we were not. However those in the know understand where it came from, and cite us in their papers).

Met David Trimble last night - v good guy. The first UK parliamentarian to win a Nobel Peace Prize since the now immensely obscure Philip Noel-Baker.

Iain McGilchrist's book continues to dazzle. He talks about Scheler's Pyramid of Values:

The holy
Values of the intellect
Values of vitality
Values of use and pleasure

and how for the right brain the lower ones are in service of the higher, but the left brain wants to reduce the higher ones to the lower.

He debunks the absurd idea that our eyes are like cameras, and emphasises that:

The focussed but detached attention of the surgeon, with intent to care.may easily mimic the focussed but detached attention of the torturer ... It is the detachment with which the detailed plans for the extermination camps were developed, often relying on the expertise of engineers, physicians and psychitrists, that make the Holocaust so particularly chilling.

This over-emphasis on the left brain is part of the reason behind the shocking reports of neglect of the elderly in NHS hospitals.

Gems from Ruzsa and McGilchrist

2011-02-13T10:38:00.005Z

Making some progress with Additive Combinatorics. It's fascinating stuff, though I'm not getting in really deep and attempting the exercises. However I came across this gem. They can prove that if A and B are additive sets:

|2B - 2B| <= 16 (|A + B|⁴ |A - A|)/|A|⁴

(in Additive Sets A+B is the set of all possible sums of an element of A and an element of B etc.. and 2B is B + B, so 2B - 2B will only be 0 if B has only one element)

However they can get rid of the factor of 16, by taking M to be a large integer, considering the M-fold cartesian product of A and B in the group Z^M, showing that:

|2B - 2B|^M <= 16 (|A + B|^4M |A - A|)/|A|^4M

and then taking Mth roots and letting M tend to infinity! Very elegant idea due to Ruzsa.

Also getting back to The Master and his Emissary. McGilchrist refers to an unpublished study he made of degree subjects undertaken by university students who then went on to be admitted to the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospital druring a psychotic episode. He found that subsequent diagnosis of schizophrenia was most closely associated with having studied Engineering, followed by Philosophy.

Also listen to this:

Neuropsychology is inextricable bound up with philosophy...this has been increasingly recognised, mre by philosophers than neuroscientists...[but]...what science is actualll doing when it delivers its revelations goes unexamined: the scientific process and the meaning of its findings is generally taken for granted. The model of the body, and therefore the brain, as a mechanism is exempted from the process of philosophical scepticism...As a result, in a spectacular hijack, instead of a mutually shaping process...the naive world view of science has tended by default to shape and direct what has been called 'neurophilosophy' (p135

and this:

The word 'true' suggests a realtionship between things: being true to someone or something, truth as loyalty, or something that fits....It is related to trust and is fundamentally a matter of what one believes to be the case. The Latin word verum (true) is congnate with a Sanskrit word [{ वॄ } {vRR} c/f वेद veda] meaning to choose or believe: the option one chooses, the situation in which one places one's trust. Such a situation is not absolute - it tells us not only about the chosen thing but about the chooser. It cannot be certain: it involves an act of faith, and it involves being faithful to one's intuitions. (p151)

Freedom of speech, freedom of worship

2011-02-08T09:47:00.004Z

V interesting an enjoyable large party last night with members of the government. Excellent short speech from David Cameron, in which he spoke of "Serving the country we love, together in the national interest" and the key British values of "Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy and the rule of law" (my italics)

He also thinks "Britain can be one of the great success stories of the next decade." Let's hope events prove him right.

Amsterdam and the Vixen

2011-02-06T21:42:00.005Z

Just back from 3 days in Amsterdam where we had gone to see The Cunning Little Vixen. Stayed at a v nice family-owned hotel called The Toren which was notable for the exceptionally helpful and positive attitude of the staff. On Friday we went to the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum.

The Van Gogh has 4 lovely Redons on display including Buddah (in his youth) and 2 outstanding paintings in the form of triptychs that I can’t find on the web.

The Rijksmusem is being refurbished (we can all come back in 2013) but they have a small section on display including of course The Nightwatchmen, The Milkmaid, two Rembrandt self-portraits (as a young man and as St Paul – when he was my age!) and this astonishing picture by Cornelis Claesz – “The explosion of the Spanish flagship during the battle of Gibraltar, 25 April 1607”. I’ve subsequently read the excellent Sea Battles and Naval Heroes in the 17th Century Dutch Republic by Peter Sigmond and Wouter Kloek which is absolutely fascinating, with an excellent combination of art-history and history, and outstanding illustrations. That evening we had dinner at the de Lewte which was a real gem, simple food simply cooked to perfection.

Saturday I joined a running group for two laps of Vondel Park, and what with running there from the Hotel and then to the swimming pool managed to get something approaching a normal Saturday quota. That evening with had dinner with the delightful Rosemary Joshua at a superb little restaurant called Zuid Zeeland. Rosemary had generously donated two tickets to her Vixen to the auction in memory of Anthony Leggate which we were fortunate enough to secure.

On Sunday we went to the Jesuit church where the Mass was mostly in Latin – though of course the sermon was in Dutch and thus a good opportunity for meditation. Then to the Rembrandt House which gives a remarkable feel for the conditions under which he worked. He paid 13,000 guilders for this house but alas fell behind on his mortgage and indeed was declared bankrupt* in 1656. The good news for posterity is that all his possessions had to be inventoried and sold so we have a great deal of evidence which has allowed the reconstruction. Though it does seem a terrible shame that arguably the greatest artist of his generation, and certainly of his country, should have suffered such an indignity. Although the average labourer’s income was only 300 guilders a year, leading artists could ask for 6,000 Guilders for a painting and get 2,400. However Rembrandt was also an art dealer and spent quite extravagantly, and it is a basic and sad fact of economics that whatever your income may be it is always possible to spend more.

There was a demonstration of how Rembrandt made his prints, in the actual room that he used, and I was able to turn the handle. I asked if I could buy the actual print but alas not, however I could buy another copy which I did. These are made from v careful reproductions of Rembrandt’s original plates – many of which still exist (and could in principle be used to make more Rembrandts). BTW it has often occurred to me that Museums could make a great deal of money by offering to sell reproductions of essentially any object either held or depicted in their collections. Just think of what people might pay for a milk jug identical, as far as possible, to the one in The Milkmaid for example.

Then to The Cunning Little Vixen or Het Sluwe Vosje. This was an absolute triumph, an astonishing production that really should tour to another great opera house. Rosemary is of course outstanding in the title role, which in the production involves a great deal of running around as well as some beautiful and very demanding singing. Her flirtations with the Forrester, her feral moments killing a rabbit and chickens , her disdain of the dog and other sub-standard specimens and her courtship with the fox were all superb. And her death from a shot from the Poacher was really moving. The whole cast was very strong, clearly enjoying themselves a lot and building on each others strengths. Dale Duesing at the Forrester was particularly fine, but there wasn’t a single performance below par.

* According to the Rembrandt House Museum. Wikipedia says there was a court arrangement to avoid bankruptcy, probably more accurate.

Did the UK economy really shrink last quarter??

2011-02-04T18:15:00.005Z

Had an excellent few days in Harvard, also seeing Elder Daughter and family. There had been lots of snow (although none fell when we were there) creating a rather surreal effect with piles 4-6 feet high by the sides of the streets: one turned out on closer inspection to have a car buried underneath it.

I've already blogged about the cosmology: we also made some pretty important steps forward in our scientific work on financial stability, but not bloggable.

I really doubt whether the UK Economy did shrink in Q4. Looking closely at the statistics of ONS revisons to their preliminary estimates, it's clear that there's a significant fat tail of upwards revisons. If the prior probability of the economy shrinking in Q4 was less than 10% then the posterior probability that the economy shrank is about 50%. I think it is less that that, but we shall see: the first revisons come out later this month. Some leading economics commentators in the UK didn't seem to understand this point, but are now at least thinking about it. Of course the brilliant Philippe Aghion, who I saw on Monday at Harvard, gets it immediately. The Economist poll of forecasters has only reduced its growth estimate for the UK by 0.1% so they don't believe it either.

Supermassive Black Holes

2011-01-30T12:27:00.005Z

Two v interesting papers in Nature by John Kormendy about the growth of super-massive black holes in galaxies.

Supermassive black holes do not correlate with dark matter haloes of galaxies shows that black holes do not correlate with dark matter or galaxy disks, and thus suggests that they co-evolve only with bulges.
Supermassive black holes do not correlate with galaxy disks or pseudobulges shows that the biggest black holes coevolve with bulges, but growth of small black holes in bulgeless galaxies and in galaxies with pseudobulges is driven locally and stochastically, and they do not coevolve with disks and pseudobulges.

Jim Peebles in a commentary says "I would not ignore the possibility that the cosmological model requires fine adjustment to account for a relatively small detail — the galaxies."

I'm particularly interested in supermassive black holes in the middle of galaxies because it seems to me that the dependence of E[HELP] on lambda may relate to them. It seems plausible that HELPs are only likely to exist in the arms of spiral galaxies, because there are far too many violent events at and near the galactic centre for the 5bn years or so of stability that appears to be required. It's intuitively clear that increasing lambda will increase the ratio of stars in arms to stars in the centre. Thus from

#HELP = (#HELP/#ArmStars)*(#ArmStars/#SpiralGalaxies)*#SpiralGalaxies

if (#HELP/#ArmStars) doesn't depend on lambda we could get at ∂log(#HELP)/∂Λ from ∂log(#armStarts/#SpiralGalaxies)/∂Λ and ∂log(#SpiralGalaxies)/∂Λ {I am of course including barred spiral galaxies in this category}.

Spiral Galaxies are also rare at the centres of galactic clusters but these probably have too many violent events as well.

not Evidence against fine-tuning for life

2011-01-29T11:19:00.003Z

After much interesting e-correspondence Don Page has sent a revised version of his paper, which he has posted on arXiv. It is now called, quite rightly, "Preliminary Inconclusive Hint of Evidence Against Optimal Fine Tuning of the Cosmological Constant for Maximizing the Fraction of Baryons Becoming Life" and not "Evidence Against Fine-Tuning for Life". This will of course disappoint the over-excitable atheists, who have been exulting in the blogosphere that "Evidence Emerges That Laws of Physics Are Not Fine-Tuned For Life: The value of the cosmological constant suggests that the laws of nature could not have been fine-tuned for life by an omnipotent being, says a cosmologist" Ah well.

I do entirely agree that "Maximum likelihood" hypotheses of the type we have been discussing are highly interesting (especially if we can start to explore ones which involve the interaction of multiple levels) and in principle testable, and if thereby we have introduced an interesting new idea into cosmology that will be great.

BUT:

These are not the same as "fine tuning" in the classic theological/apologetics sense. The point about fine tuning is "it is very unlikely that these constants would have these values by chance, and if the constants had been even slightly different intelligent life would not exist". To simplify, if L is the probability of intelligent life existing and y is the fundamental constant, which has the value 0.5 but which could in principle be uniformly distributed over the range [0,1], then L=A (y-0.5)^2 has y at MaxL, but is not fine tuned, and L= A exp(-100(y-0.501)^2) has y away from MaxL, but is fine-tuned.
Nothing much hangs on them theologically. The idea that we would know the objective function that God is trying to maximise is absurd. And as Don has rightly pointed out, God could well have chosen to so love the multiverse.
I'm not sure they tell us anything much about the universe vs multiverse debate. Any combination of fundamental constants by definition maximises some objective function. And unless there is some credible evidence of interaction between "pocket universes" in the multiverse, any story about an actually existing multiverse M can be re-written as one in which M is simply a set of possible universes.

Calling of Peter and Andrew - and well done Miranda

2011-01-23T16:22:00.005Z

Warmest congratulations to Miranda Hart who won two awards at the British Comedy Awards and whose brilliant series Miranda won a third.

Additive Combinatorics is a lovely book and so far I can understand it, though I'm only on Chapter One!

Sermon this morning was on the calling of Peter and Andrew. It's interesting that in Matthew Jesus says "I will make you fishers of men" and the Greek word haleeis is the ordinary word for fishermen, but Luke has "henceforth you will be catching men" and the word is zwgrwn which means "taking alive" or indeed taking into life (Mark is like Matthew but has "I will make you become fishers of men". Of course these are not "discrepencies" because the Gospels are portraits not transcripts, and anyway Jesus would have spoken in Aramaic). Life is a big theme of Luke's (he was after all a physician according to tradition) and his emphasis is clearly that the disciples are bringing people into true life.

Haldane and May Nature paper published

2011-01-21T06:46:00.003Z

The Haldane and May paper in Nature has been published - it is the cover paper and references our work twice. The FT interviewed me about it and used part of the quote. FWIW the full version of what I said (though I knew very well that only part would be used) was:

This is a really important paper which will help set the agenda for scientific work on banking ecosystems for some years. It also has significant messages for the financial community. It draws attention to the dangerously flimsy foundations of derivatives pricing, to the importance of network effects, and to the fundamental problem, which we call the Regulator’s Dilemma, that reducing risks for each individual bank can increase the risks to the system as a whole, a problem which is made even worse when you consider the effect of bank failures on the wider economy.

A lot of work is needed to develop the insights from these theoretical models into practical regulatory tools, and we’re working on this with leading investors, regulators and academics. But at least we’re now able to ask some of the right questions, which previously had been overlooked due to a lack of basic theoretical understanding.

As for making a detailed micro-foundations model of bank behaviour, this is a long way beyond the state of the art. Economists like Ned Phelps fully understand that
rational expectations models cannot really describe financial markets, but no-one yet really knows what to put in their place. And in reality banks are highly complex social systems, where people behave in accordance with complex incentives and belief systems that cannot be captured mathematically. The only certainty is that any explicit model of bank behaviour that became part of a regulatory system would then be gamed by the banks trying to circumvent it. We don’t prevent collisions in yacht races by making behavioural models of crew, but by having robust rules for the prevention of collisions at sea.

I met up with my Cambridge contemporary Robert MacKay and now I'm trying to learn a bit about Additive Combinatorics - which sounds fascinating though I'm sure the maths is way way beyond me. There is a book by Terence Tao whose review by Ben Green has been enough to get me to order it.

Cosmology, Lifeboat and McGilchrist

2011-01-19T05:40:00.003Z

Interesting discussion with Very Distinguished Cosmologist on Don's paper and the MaxHELP hypothesis. I rather hope a joint paper will emerge. Though it needs to be stressed that, while these explorations are interesting at a scientific level, nothing very much hangs on them theologically. God's idea of what constitutes a "better" universe will certainly be very different, and much better informed than ours! And there is no reason to suppose that we can order universes in some linear quality scale.

Lifeboat Foundation appointment has now been announced - it will be interesting to discuss these issues with my new colleagues. I know some of them, and most of them by reputation. Quite a wide divergence of views as well. Curiously none of them seem to be based in Boston, or I would visit them on my next trip.

The Master and His Emissary is really good! I'm only on p125 but it fizzes with interesting ideas. The chapier is "language, truth and music" and Iain is suggesting, very plausibly, that language comes from music. After all many other species have music and even more can recognise it (he reports a fascinating experiment of carp who can distinguish Muddy Waters from The Trout Quintet). He also suggests that language is strongly connected with manipulation, both philosophically, biologically and from an evolutionary PoV.

Some quotes I have highlighted:

Music doesn't symbolise emotional meaning ... it metaphorises it.
Jung said that 'all cognition is akin to recognition'.... we come to know...(wissen) something only by recognisind (erkennen) something we already knew (kennen).
If we assume a purely mechanical universe and take the machine as our model we will uncover the view that - suprise, suprise - the body, and the brain with it, is a machine.
Despite the fact that there is no culture anywhere in the world that does not have music... we have relegated music to the sidelines of life
There are extant tribes ... such as the Piraha... whose language is effectively a kind of song.
Even 'theory of mind' ... which has become the shibboleth of complex, multilayered thought - since children are commonly said not to acquire it till about the age of four... is intact in human subjects who have lost language. {Iain will no doubt have been interested in this Science paper}

Polkinghorne #1,2 and 6 in Science & Religion

2011-01-16T22:55:00.005Z

John's radio appearance on Christa Tippett has caused sales to go through the roof in the US. QoT is #2 in Science and Religion and #3,654 in Books on Amazon.com, the Kindle Edition is #6 and #1 is John's Quarks, Chaos and Christianity, which is #655 in Books (ahead of The God Delusion which is #1,115. There are well over 5M titles on Amazon.com, so QoT is in the top 0.01% and QCC in the top 0.001%. And FWIW Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship is #16 so that's 4 in the top 20.

Maximising E[Habitable Earth-Like Planets]

2011-01-16T18:06:00.010Z

Fascinating e-correspondence (now about 23 emails) with Don Page and two other cosmologists, one immensely distinguished, around Don Page's paper suggested by the remark in Questions of Truth. I hope to discuss this with one of them tomorrow so things may become clearer.

Although Don’s paper is (of course) interesting I don't think it establishes the conclusion he seeks. Arguably the data he presents shows that the observed value of Λ is well within ε of the value that would be maximal for (the probability of intelligent) life developing, where ε is our margin of uncertainty about where such a maximal value might be. But the other hand I think that the idea could be developed into a potentially powerful, testable and tractable hypothesis.

We don’t remotely know enough about the overall possibilities of intelligent life. But we do know that life like ours requires the existence of what we might call a Habitable Earth-Like Planet (HELP). It’s hard to be sure exactly what characteristics of a HELP are vital, but we might try:

stable average temperatures* somewhere between say 280-350K
not too much ionising radiation or
bombardment by large meteors
M/M_Earth >0.1 and <>stability for at least (say) 2bnYr, and
an abundance of key elements (esp H,O,C,N) within a factor of 2 of their observed values.

We could then formulate an in-principle-testable hypothesis (MaxHELP) that the fundamental constants of nature locally maximise E[HELP] the expected number of HELPs in the universe. In particular that, within experimental error and the uncertainly of our calculations, ∂E[HELP]/∂y = 0 for any fundamental constant y. There is a weak statistical argument in favour of MaxHELP (if the only thing we can be sure about is that there exists at least one HELP, and we think all other astronomical observations may be corrigible in the long run) and a methodological argument that if it turned out to be true it would provide an interesting insight into why the fundamental constants had the values they do. It also seems to go with the grain of much of the work on exoplanets.
My basic problem with Don’s current paper is that, even assuming life is made of baryons, the quantity we are trying to maximise (let's call it L and work in logs) is presumably B + F + P where

B = ln(number of baryons produced during a time where the universe could form life)

F = ln(fraction of such baryons that become structures large enough for suitable living observers)

P = ln(average number of such living observers formed per baryon in such structures).

Don observes that in his ref [11] ∂F/∂Λ < 0 for the observed value of Λ and infers that ∂L/∂Λ < 0. But of course ∂L/∂y = ∂B/∂y + ∂F/∂y + ∂P/∂y, and without upper bounds on the other terms, the inference doesn’t follow. It seems most improbable that we can currently calculate an “optimal” value of Λ to better than 1E-121 so all that we can say is that the rough hypothesis Don derives from QoT is within Margin of Error.

However the more modelling there is of planetary formation, the easier it will be to test MaxHELP. At least this theist “would not be surprised” if it were true, though equally unsurprised if it turned out to be only approximate. But it seems worth discussing and then perhaps publishing in collaboration.

* by which of course I mean not just that the average of the temperatures over the surface of the planet is about this, but that for a large fraction of the planet's surface temperatures are in this range almost all the time. A situation like that of Mercury wouldn't do.

Two interesting citations

2011-01-13T20:58:00.003Z

Amazed and delighted to learn that the front cover paper of Nature for 20 Jan will be a paper that cites our work (as Beale & al, forthcoming).

Also amazed and delighted to be sent a draft paper by a cosmologist that is inspired by a remark in Questions of Truth. He claims that his paper is evidence against the hypothesis that is suggested by the remark, but in fact he shows that the hypothesis conforms to the evidence well within the margin of error, which in this case is about 10^-121.

Rochester Roundabout: What was happening?

2011-01-11T07:09:00.002Z

Saw The King's Speech on Sat - excellent. Though of course the story is greatly compressed in its timescale for dramatic purposes. Colin Firth is of course superb - so is Geoffrey Rush, a role curiously reminiscent of his brilliant Walsingham in Elizabeth.

Just finished Rochester Roundabout which is great fun and very illuminating. At the end, after Polkinghorne has recounted the key events of the 20 "Rochester" conferences he is covering, he has a very interesting chapter called "What Was Happening?" in which he engages with various philosophies of science. Points I have highlighted:

Imre Latakos: "Philosophy of science without history of science is empty: History of science without Philosophy of science is blind"
The development of a mature, well-winnowed scientific theory is comparable to our inspection of a figure approaching us across the moors: a dark blob - a matchstick man - a person in a kilt - Fergus.
Maxwell had described [the aether] as better confirmed than any other entity in natural philosophy. Now it is no more...but...Maxwell's equations [remain] fundamental to the description of the electromagnetic field [and] the aether was a mechanical way of thinking about the enduring concept of a field and...the quantum-mechanical vacuum is also an all-pervading medium of subtle property in which excitations of energy...occur.
Judgements of verismillitude require tacit skills, not specifiable in advance according to some success-counting algorithm {in the light of The Master and His Emissary I'd be tempted to say, right-brain skills as well as left-brain skills}
No-one believes that hadrons are really bags of quarks...but quantum chromodynamics is a serious candidate for providing a fundamental, widely applicable, understanding of quark dynamics.
Social influences play a part in scientific investigation...Yet...the stubborn facticity of nature imposes ineluctable constraint.
[Some] Philosophers of science ... are so obsessed with what is logically demonstrable that they fail to recognise what is philosophically interesting.
Philosophers of science seldom exhibit any understanding of how difficult it is to preduce even a passable shot at a credible explanation of a wide range of phenomena... In the actual scientific enterprise, the problem is not the embarassing riches of a superfluity of theories but the extraordinary difficulty of finding one that is at all believable.
the Popperian account... will not do... the emphasis on refutation...gives a curiously cockeyed view of the scientific endeavour....A further difficulty ... is to give a clear account, in realistic circumstances, of when refutation takes place. Very general and powerful principles are not to be discared at the first suggestion of an adverse result.
Science is an act of judgement, involving tacit skills. In Polanyi's oft-repeated phrase, 'we know more than we can tell'.
Dirac once said of himself and Schrodinger..."It was a sort of act of faith with us that the equations which describe fundamental laws of Nature must have great mathematical beauty in them. It was a very profitable religion to hold and can be considered the basis of much of our success."

He concludes with the following:

The universe is marvellously rationally transparent to our inquiry. The instinct of a scientist to seek an explanation through and through will not allow him to say 'that's just the way it is, and good luck for those of us who are mathematically able'. He will want to go beyond his science (with its assumption of cosmic intelligibility) to a wider setting in which that intelligibility will find its own explanation. In my view, that search will take him in the direction of theology. But that is another story.

Histories of Christianity and High Energy Physics

2011-01-08T06:53:00.003Z

Ferociously busy so no time to blog. Have been reading the History of Christianity with enjoyment and interest, although he takes a secular and sceptical line, but with acknowledgement that there may be forces as work which are beyond the ability of historians.

I've also obtained a copy of John Polkinghorne's wonderful Rochester Roundabout: The Story of High Energy Physics which I'm reading with great interest: lovely anecdotes about the development of particle physics from the heady days of the 50s to 1980. Gives an interesting additional perspective to the "unexpected kinship" he finds between quantum physics and theology.

Economics Editor of The Guardian has asked for a short piece, we'll see if they publish it!

Unusual experience yesterday of hearing two acquaintances on successive items in the Today programme: Shami Chakrabarti speaking on Control Orders and Ioanna Sitaridou on this fascinating Greek dialect.

Happy New Year!

2011-01-01T14:11:00.004Z

An amazing Christmas and New Year. Elder Daughter came over with husband and their daughter MJ. Son and entire family arrived on Christmas Eve and stayed until the 27th so we had the entire family (11 in total) together for 3 days. Then due to some happy mistakes ED & family just missed their flight on the 28th and stayed until the 1st, a wholly unexpected and delightful extension which gave us much more quality time together. The only sadness was that my mother was stuck in Cornwall, but in partial compensation the brilliant friend of ED whom I regard as an "honorary daughter" visited twice, together with a few other very close friends. MJ is now 7 months old and an utter delight. I can well believe this fascinating paper in Science showing that even children of 7 months have some understanding of other people's beliefs and a Theory of Mind.

Was given The Big Short, A History of Christianity: the first 3,000 years and Sisters of Sinai for Chrismas. Have devoured the first, and am in process with the 2nd.

Continuing violence against Christians because of their faith in Nigeria, Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere is extremely deplorable. Deeply unfortunate that the ghastly Polly Toynbee apparently merely laughed when Christina Odone suggested that persecution of Christians was a problem. How Toynbee (whose sole academic qualificiation is 1 A-level) gets away with pointificating so extensively is beyond me.

I've been invited (along with John Polkinghorne and Bob Pollack) to join the Religion/Spirituality Advisory Board of the Lifeboat Foundation which should be very interesting - this is a result of my paper with Bob for the USQR (which doesn't yet seem to have come out but there is an almost-final draft online on Bob's website here).

A very Happy New Year to all readers of this blog: visitors came from 96 countries in 2010 (top 10 countries: US, UK, Canada, Australia (G'day!), Philippines (Hola!), Germany (Hallo!), Finland (Hei!), Turkey (Merhaba!), Poland (Witam!) and S Africa)

Christmas

2010-12-25T09:31:00.002Z

A very merry and blessed Christmas to all.

The Pope was very good on Thought for the Day. Naturally The Guardian gave poor Dr Dawk a platform to moan, though the comments he got suggest that his hold over pop culture is indeed declining:

Hold the front page! Richard Dawkins isn't a catholic. In other news: Pope revealed to be a catholic.
Happy Christmas to you too Dawkins. Shame goodwill doesn't appear to be high on your agenda.
So The Guardian gets celeb-atheist Richard Dawkins to do a Christmas message. How unpredictable

A very good article in Prospect by Martin Rees discussing the possibility of intelligent life in the universe. He thinks that within 20 years we'll be able to see a lot more of the planets that we presently merely detect, but it rightly unsure whether there is intelligent life anywhere else. Scientifically, The Earth could be very special indeed in galactic terms.

Whether or not there are other intelligent life-forms in the Universe, it is clear that there is only one God, and that His love is infinite, and shown most perfectly in His Son. May we all grow in love and understanding over the coming year.

Encouraging young scientists

2010-12-23T16:59:00.003Z

Hats off to to Dr Beau Lotto who has encouraged a group of primary school children (one of whom shares his name and may be his son or daughter?) to do some lovely research on bees and published their results in Biology Letters. The first author is PS Blackawton, where PS stands for Primary School.

A delightful interview with Peter Plesch, now 90, the son of Dr Janos Plesch who was Einstein's physician, about the time when Einstein discussed his physics ideas as a teenager. My grandmother often spoke of Dr Plesch who had been her doctor in London before the War, but I had no idea of the Einstein connection.

A memorial to Gordon Squires, a Fellow of Trinity who died earlier this year, quotes the striking piece he wrote about Trinity physicists for the forthcoming Trinity, A Portrait.

By common consent, the four greatest physicists in history are Archimedes, Newton, Maxwell and Einstein - and two of these were at Trinity. No doubt Archimedes would have come here if Henry VIII lived before him, but Einstein was a late developer and would not have been admitted with the present admission standards.

Strategy Across the Spheres is almost finished, send a draft of the MS to the publisher and to the very distinguished Chairman who is writing the foreword.

Brembs on Freewill

2010-12-19T20:25:00.006Z

Reading Bjoern Brembs' v interesting paper "Towards a scientific concept of free will as a biological trait: spontaneous actions and decision-making in invertebrates" recently published in Proc Roy Soc B. This is an interesting mixture of some very good science (with which I wholly agree) and some rather poor philosophy - hardly suprising since Brembs is a scientist.

Scientifically, he argues that there are clear evolutionary advantages of freewill, that it is perfectly clear that the universe is not deterministic, that there is ample evidence that even in invertebrates there is a considerable level of unpredictability in behaviour which he attributes to nonlinearity in brains (even of fruitflies) "suggesting that fly brains operate at criticality, meaning that they are mathematically unstable, which, in turn, implies an evolved mechanism rendering brains highly susceptible to the smallest differences in initial conditions and amplifying them exponentially" (The reference he cites is a 2007 paper co-authored with him and George Sugihara) He correctly sees that:

The Humean dichotomy of chance and necessity is invalid for complex processes such as evolution or brain functioning. Such phenomena incorporate multiple components that are both lawful and indeterminate. This breakdown of the determinism/ indeterminism dichotomy has long been appreciated in evolution and it is surprising to observe the lack of such an appreciation with regard to brain function among some thinkers of today (e.g. [2] a paper I have always thought especially misguided NB). Stochasticity is not a nuisance, or a side effect of our reality. Evolution has shaped our brains to implement ‘stochasticity’ in a controlled way, injecting variability ‘at will’. Without such an implementation, we would not exist.
A scientific concept of free will cannot be a qualitative concept. The question is not any more ‘do we have free will?’; the questions is now: ‘how much free will do we have?’; ‘how much does this or that animal have?’. Free will becomes a quantitative trait.

He also makes a very interesting argument that: "in order to understand actions, it is necessary to introduce the term self" pointing out that even flies respond differently to stimuli (otherwise identical to external ones) that come from their own actions. And he points out that "The scientific understanding of common concepts enrich our lives, they do not impoverish them."

So a lot to agree with, and indeed FWIW Appendix B of Questions of Truth makes some similar arguments, and indeed suggests a possible mechanism for the amplification of small quantum-level changes and points out some of the evolutionary advantages of freewill. (including a point that Berms may have slighlty missed, that nondeterministic algorithsm can be much more efficient for solving complex problems.

My philosophical quibble is that he confidently states that "any metaphysical account of free will is rightfully rejected" What I think he means/may mean is "any account of free will which claims that it is a property which has no physical basis whatsoever"* but of course that is not what metaphysical really means at all. Metaphysics is like Prose or Interpretation: we do it whether we think we are or not. It is perfectly reasonable to ask: "what does free will mean, at a level beyond the physical?" and scientific understandings will inform, but cannot completely determine, the responses one gives.

Still a very interesting paper, with fascinating references (esp perhaps Heisenberg's essay in Nature) and well worth reading.

* PS Dr Brembs says that is indeed what he meant. I think maybe he needed to say these somewhat "unphilosophical" things in order to get past the strong prejudices of much of the modern scientific establishment.

Three dunks for Dr Dawk, and "God" is indeed back

2010-12-18T14:31:00.009Z

Denis Noble has sent me a link to the published version of his brilliant paper "Neo-Darwinism, the Modern Synthesis, and Selfish Genes: are they of use in physiology?" which is being published in The Journal of Physiology. This amounts to a comprehensive demolition of the "Selfish Gene" nonsense. As he rightly says:

"gene-centric interpretations of evolution, and more particularly the selfish gene expression of those interpretations, form barriers to the integration of physiological science with evolutionary theory...The selfish gene idea is not useful in the physiological sciences."

This is the third published blow to the dwindling credibility of Dawkins' absurd metaphor. The first of course is Nowak, Tarnita and Wilson, and it is interesting how quiet the enraged critics of this paper have gone. Quite soon I think the correspondence around this will be published in Nature and I suspect that it will be clear to everyone who is mathematically literate and scientifically competent to follow the arguments (does this include Dawkins I wonder? probably not) that the criticisms of the paper are misguided. By contrast there is an interesting profile of EO Wilson in Discover Magazine discussing these issues.

Mary Midgley's wonderful book The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene (which I am pleased to say is the #1 on Evolution in Amazon.co.uk) was the second blow. Basically the Selfish Gene can now be seen to be nonsense from every point of view: evolutionary dynamics, physiology and philosophy.

Martin Nowak has also sent me advance online version of "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books" which is coming out in Science. This allows one to explore the frequency of usage of words or pairs of words in millions of books. There is an online search tool and other fun stuff at http://www.culturomics.org/. My only quibble with this paper is that when they show a graph of the frequency of God from 1800 to 2000 as Fig 5H with the quip '"God" is not dead, but needs a new publicist' they ignore the fact that He seems to have obtained one in 1979, who really got into his/her stride in 2001.

Graph showing frequency of "God" in Google Books by year of publication.
In fact "God" is at highest level since 1889 and probably still increasing.

PS: God and Jesus are by miles the highest scoring proper names. Furthermore Jesus is rising rapidly, much faster than Mohammed.

The Rivals, and just avoiding a travel disaster

2010-12-16T22:53:00.002Z

Last night to The Rivals with Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles. A really fine Peter Hall production.

Today had a lucky escape when we had a meeting in Frankfurt and just as we had got on the plane we heard from my assistant that the person we were meeting had decided to fly to London early and would participate in the meeting by Videoconference. BA were very nice and let us off the plane (even though the doors were shut) so we had the meeting in London. The plane back was cancelled so it would have been a disaster.

PNAS Paper Submitted, and Gems from McGilchrist

2010-12-14T20:51:00.004Z

"Individual and systemic risk: the regulator’s dilemma" by Nicholas Beale, David G. Rand, Heather Battey, Karen Croxson, Robert M. May & Martin A. Nowak has just been submitted to PNAS, and Joe Stiglitz has kindly agreed to be the Prearranged Editor!

The Master and his Emissary is terrific (at least so far!) Listen to this:

"Is consciousness a product of the brain? The only certainty here is that anyone who thinks thay can answer this question with certainty has to be wrong...the one thing we do know for certain is that everything we know of the brain is the product of consciousness...we do not know if mind depends on matter, becasue everything we know about matter is itself a mental creation" (pp19-20)

or this:

"when we come to look at brain functions...We are not 'just' looking at things in the world - a lump of rock or even a person - but the processes whereby the world itself, together with the rock or the person, might be brought into being for us at all, the very foundations of the fact of our experience, including any idea we might have about the nature of the world, and the nature of the brain, and even the idea that this is so... What possible context is there in which to place the foundations of experience of all contexts whatsoever? And what kind of thing are we to see it 'as'? The answers are far from obvious, but in the absence of an attempt to addres the question we do not give no answer. We answer with the model we understand - the only kind of thing we can ever fully understand, for the simple reason that we made it: the machine" (p29)

Tremendous

Polkinghorne, Geim and McGilchrist

2010-12-12T17:38:00.004Z

Polkinghorne very kindly invited me as his guest to the Smith Feast which is the principal annual feast for Queens' College. The first part in in the modern Hall and met a number of fascinating people including Ioanna Sitaridou who has been exploring a hitherto unknown variant of Greek currently spoken by 10-15k people in Turkey, and Jackie Scott who has been a prime mover in the British Household Panel Study. We discussed the astonishingly un-scientific prejudice that used to exist against including information about religious practices and beliefs in European social science.

John also told me about one of his meetings with Heisenberg, who was very keen on a non-linear extension of QM. Pauli initially went along with this, but then decided it was wrong. John went to a conference at CERN chaired by Pauli at which Heisenberg presented his ideas, and Pauli would repeatedly interrupt from the chair ("this is not so - I told you this some months ago"). He thinks no-one will ever know whether Heisenberg deliberately miscalculated the critical mass required for an Atomic Bomb. But two things are clear. Heisenberg was no Nazi, though he was a German patriot. And even if they had understood the technology, the production facilities were so large and visible that they would have been bombed to pieces.

We also talked to some leading theoretical physicists/cosmologists, who were very sceptical indeed of the recent Penrose paper - saying that the concentric circles are almost certainly artefacts. I still think that the current ideas about Inflation (and M-theory) will prove to be mistaken, but that there will be some fascinating new concepts needed to understand what's going on.

Listening to the Nobel interview with Andre Geim. His comments on patenting (c 22:30 in) are interesting, with the arrogant multinational representative ("the whole of the GDP of your little island trying to sue us" - NB the largest multinational company in the world has a turnover of $300bn, the UK's GDP is about $2,200bn). His banquet speech is also interesting. And what he says about the fact that 2nd tier universities do have a chance of Nobel-winning research, but 3rd and 4th do not.

Also starting to read The Master and his Emissary which shows every sign of being as fascinating as I would expect, given the brilliance of the author.