I feel seen.
University maths teacher (failed academic); very amateur local history; slightly worse photography. Uaireannan beagan Gàidhlig cuideachd. Same handle on the elephant site. Web: http://www.dominie.scot.
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I feel seen.
Has this exchange just invented a new discipline: the historichoreography of science?
All other traces of this late-1960s Doctor Who episode have been lost.
The course spec shows every sign of having been designed by a committee who didn't like each other very much, and possibly who communicated solely by means of passive-aggressive notes tied to the legs of pigeons that were not in fact homing pigeons. That, at least, is my current working model.
Somewhere on a different computer I have some photos taken at a very amateur flyball event a few years ago, and if there is a more joyous experience than a very amateur flyball event I am not sure my little battered soul could cope with it.
A sincere thank you to the person who is currently standing within sight of my office window and repeatedly throwing a ball for a small wet tireless dog who believes that having a ball thrown for it is the BEST THING EVER.
🎶 Evri day And my package seems so far away Though tomorrow comes before today And yesterday was Evri Day...
* Iguanobel, shurely?
I have had conversations like that about visa law, in which the placeholder assumption seemed to be "I am not a bad person and the Home Office will know that and everything will be easy". This did not coincide with my own placeholder assumptions.
"There is an inevitable tension between developing the subject in logical sequence and motivating it through applications. We have chosen to compromise by doing neither."
Mathematicians seem particularly prone to "I have axiomatised the regulations inside my own head and deduced from this what they ought to say and this is now the truth." I sometimes feel that my basic error is paying attention to anything that happens round here, ever.
"But there are always lots of grade-C marks on the murder of Duncan and the witchy bits are only worth about 5% and that's all grade-A marks and the ghost of Banquo is too difficult to do sooner because the Course Spec doesn't say whether it's real or not."
(For non-maths people: this is like teaching Macbeth by starting with the murder of Duncan, then doing the Long Boring Scene in England, then skipping back to the Bloody Captain, then the ghost of Banquo, and finishing with all the witchy bits. The coherence of the original might not come across.)
Contemplating a school maths textbook that is organised as follows. 1. Algebra 2. Differentiation 3. Functions 4. Integration 5. Equations 6. Matrices 7. Complex numbers 8. Sequences and series 9. Vectors 10. Differential equations 11. Proof Some of my students' difficulties now make more sense.
AAAAARGH.
It might save time if every university regulation carried a Clause 0: "Yes, this applies to very special clever people too."
Time to determine that the Thing my correspondent wants to do is very much Not A Thing: 5 mins. Time to write a carefully phrased email which contains all the relevant evidence and will require real creativity to misinterpret: 30 mins. I should bill them for this.
Nice try, pal, but I have a copy of the General Academic Regulations and I can use ctrl-F with the best of them.
If you've been living happily out of earshot of me and your immediate question is "what scale experiments on high-speed canal navigation?", never fear. For all your high-speed canal navigation needs, see the following blatant attempt to inflate my altmetrics: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
The Long Room in the National Gallery of Practical Science, London, in 1832. That's Jacob Perkins' steam gun to the right, and I'm pretty sure the tank in the middle was used for John Macneill's scale experiments on high-speed canal navigation in 1832-3. (www.britishmuseum.org/collection/o...)
The site contains a reading of "Elegy on the Death of Mr. David Gregory", which is probably the best set of Habbie stanzas ever written about a recently deceased mathematician. (The mathematician David Gregory is not, I find, to be confused with the mathematician David Gregory. Happy to help.)
Lichtlie this gin ye daur: here Robert Burns knelt and kissed the mool.
Not so much one anti-fascist badass as at least three anti-fascist badasses in a big coat.
FAO the presumably self-loathing person who once wanted to be a journalist and is now paid to launder fascist talking points through the headlines on the BBC News website. There is still time to save your soul.
I now wonder whether there are people building genuinely nice and socially useful things and giving them names like Sauron or Cthulhu.
In torment-nexus news, I have just learned that there is an AI outfit, partnered with the US Department of Defense and specialising in "foreign policy, national security, and geopolitical risk", and it is called Omelas, and they explain that this is in tribute to Le Guin, and no. Just no.
The kids just don't appreciate comedy gold.
I'm convinced different drivers have different braking styles, mind. Give me another twenty years commuting on this line and I'll probably start believing I know them personally.
I think we've felt that thirst for cruelty growing over the last ten year or so, but it feels suddenly very open, and very few politicians of any stripe seem to have the moral ballast to resist.
Just hang a big sign in the Level 3 foyer: "Welcome to STS".
I still shudder when I recall the year they re-numbered all the floors before the open day but after they had sent out all the invitation letters...
(Confess: who else hadn't really noticed before today that writing "base 10" doesn't actually tell you what the number system is?)
There are signs in the lift foyer directing prospective computer science students to Level 11. So far I've resisted the temptation to get out a biro and append the words "(base ten)".
The absolute firehose of far-right propaganda right now, and form a government that if it wanted to could just turn round and say "we've got a big Parliamentary majority; we don't need to panic as if the election were six months away; piss off and shut up".
The pernicious thing here is not so much the headline (Home Office officiously pestering students to restate a currently enforced policy) but the link in the second para to asylum. It's yet another insinuation that asylum is somehow an abuse of the immigration system. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
"You over there with the camera. I SEE YOU."
👏
Never let it be said that a mathematical education doesn't prepare you for real life.
Days since the train spent an interminable time decelerating on its approach to Central and someone (me) was heard muttering "Who's driving this? Zeno of f*cking Elea?": 0.
I'm glad you found it interesting! Respect to your great-uncle: a life cut far too short.
Amos would preach fantastic rambling sermons about the wrath of Roko's Bailisk.
I imagine that the steering mechanism was quite a challenge for designers. "What do we put in the bit where the horse goes when there isn't a horse to go there?"
I suspect that "the version of events one's parents picked up and solidified into family lore" is a highly influential genre, and not just in political biography.
I've been doing PG admissions for two years and this seems quite plausible to me. Never underestimate the ability of bright ambitious people to misread _anything_ they're told through layers of wishful thinking and then entrench themselves around a flattering misunderstanding.
And the one in the middle knows it.
Trying to remember what this band were called. [Former County Buildings, Wilson Street]
I was going to suggest that the latest flaggy image of Mr Starmer was probably photoshopped by someone who is hostile to Mr Starmer, but tbh you could say that about any image of Mr Starmer. It seems quite possible that the man only exists as a collage of hostile Photoshopped images of himself.
I think I've seen the trail of this elusive agency before. They seem to have been active as early as the 1930s, though possibly trading at that address as "Blythswood Studios"; here they are in a 1952 trade directory. It looks as if they'd moved to Helensburgh by the 1970s.
Remember the bad old days when logging in to a website logged you in to that website and only that website, and logging out again logged you out of the same website? Sometimes we would just stay logged in to that website until we had finished using it, then log out. How primitive we were.
Quite a few USians on social media don't seem to grasp the idea that other countries exist as actual places, rather than as genealogical identities for Americans. It shows up in the tedious Food Discourse, but I think it's much more pervasive (e.g. the idea that Europeans = white Americans, etc.)
(The same goes for the shouty railway man whom some of you still seem to idolise. They held open a door for the worst people in UK politics and have shown zero ability to engage with the consequences of their actions. I am not interested in their further opinions.)
I see that the vain old man who whipped his party to give unconditional support to the massive xenophobic enabling project is now upset about the inevitable consequences of the massive xenophobic enabling project that he whipped his party to support. A period of silence, etc.
Nearly August, huh? The summer just flies by.
When you are a very elderly hound indeed, but since yesterday morning you have bounded vaguely in the direction of two foxes, three cats and various squirrels, made innumerable* new human friends, and eaten sprats. * by my count, seven.
Last call for boarding for the GLASGOW to PAISLEY STEAM-COACH departing George-square for Gauze-street via Parkhouse Toll and Three-Mile House The WORLD'S FIRST REGULAR almost commercially viable and very nearly non-exploding STEAM ROAD PASSENGER SERVICE new-cleckit.dominie.scot/how-to-hype-...
Babbage *crashes through door waving a fistful of punch cards* LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THIS I HAVE SO MANY IDEAS
We can but hope.
Technologies that either didn't work, or worked for a while but then were superseded and abandoned, are always interesting. A good corrective to the linear models of inevitable progress that we all too readily believe.
Re-upping this because given the subject, shameless self-promotion is _entirely_ appropriate. (Look, I've seen the TV listings. I know there are some of you out there with nothing better to do on a Saturday night.)
Just to add to the oddity, Russell and Hamilton had almost certainly met; indeed, Emmerson's bio says that H was one of R's references for the Edinburgh job. I have turned this fact around in my head, but I think it is indeed pure coincidence.
One of the lecturers I had in my first term later published a pedagogical paper called "The Naked* Lecturer". I remember reading it and thinking "ah, so _that's_ what he was up to..." * No. And it is not an image I wish to contemplate.
I have been told that I am not allowed to get a tiny brass footnote plaque made and append it to the bridge in the dead of night...
Bring back traditional pedagogy.
I'm fair chuffed myself. There is something very satisfying about getting away with a piece of intellectual truancy.
Thank you to @jdagg.bsky.social and @dodgyvictorians.bsky.social, who provided very helpful comments on an earlier draft (and who bear no responsibility, obviously, for anything I managed to get wrong despite their help).
For a flavour of one of the episodes in Russell's... interesting... early career, here's a blog for you. new-cleckit.dominie.scot/how-to-hype-...
In the process I unearthed some long-forgotten skulduggery, and learned quite a lot about what Russell was doing on the Canal and how he managed to present a neatly edited version of events to posterity.
This is a paper that started with the thought "Hang on: John Scott Russell's steam carriage exploded a matter of weeks before he discovered the solitary wave on the Union Canal. Was that a coincidence?" The answer is "not exactly, but..."
Now published! For anyone with an interest in solitary waves, steam carriages, canals, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the contest for the Chair of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh in 1838, or late-Georgian shenanigans generally: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Enjoy! It's not without its problems (where is?) but it's a place with a lot going for it.
One can indeed!
I think the Waverley was one of the last paddle-steamers launched on the Clyde, so I guess in one sense she was already a creature from an earlier era...
I do love that steel-and-silver light.
Just west of it; from the PS Waverley last weekend.
I'm rather fond of the place, but then I don't have any inherited traumas associated with it (and I'm also the annoying person whom the midgies go for last).
Here is a nice soothing picture of Arran for anyone who's finding this website just a little too excitable right now.
I _think_ that's still today's cause celebre, but I took my eyes off the socials for a few minutes so who knows? It's very much What They Said About Our Sharon At Our Shaun's Wedding territory out there today.
I see the reaction to that silly French Revolution paper has now, inevitably, reached the "STEM people think they're better than us and that's why we're better than them" stage. People, please don't do this.
Only the ones who aren't on secondment to Trollope.
*stumbling out of time machine into practically any era and grabbing the nearest passer-by* "Look, just write down everything you do in the course of a normal day and why, and include _all_ the details that nobody is stupid enough to need explained. Trust me, this will make your name immortal."
Good heavens. A Nature journal _and_ a physics journal. Who would have thought it?
There is definitely some kind of historiographical sour spot at which a culture gives you just enough written material to be annoying and not quite enough to be helpful...
That must have certain advantages (says the bearer of a name so common in certain parts of Wales that genealogy gives up and goes home crying).
You will waste a great deal of time trying and failing to find a link between Æthelred Bumblesmith V and Æthelreds Bumblesmith I through IV. (There will also be stray references to an Æthelred William Bumblesmith, who may be any, all, or none of the above.)
Dominie's Law of Distinctive Victorian Names: if your enquiry turns up, say, an Æthelred Bumblesmith then subsequent enquiries will find at least four more of them. Three of these Æthelreds Bumblesmith will be closely related to the first, while the fourth is, seemingly, entirely unconnected.
But what is your biggest flex though?
As I recall it: Catastrophe Theory (1970s); Chaos Theory (1980s); Complexity Theory (1990s); and then for some reason we ran out of trendy Cs.
I obviously can't speak to your experience, though I think it very much depends on the scientists one works with and the contexts in which one works with them. I do think there is a very deep-seated problem, which is the pressure always to do the easy thing: bsky.app/profile/ncdo...
It is relatively easy to fund and write and publish these papers, and our own tribe will cheer us on and give us wee pats on the heid for doing it, and nobody will learn anything from them. I do not have an answer; if I did then I might still be in a job where I was paid to do research.
We see it when applied mathematicians build yet another Lotka-Volterra variation; when educational researchers run sophisticated statistical tests on yet another set of biased survey data; when sociologists problematise yet another field of science by measuring it against their latest trendy theory.
Banging my drum again, but: one reason this nonsense persists is that the academic reward structure encourages people to feed any keech they can find into their Big Methodology Machine rather than putting in the work to understand a phenomenon first. It is not a perversion restricted to STEM.
Looking forward, this is just after the Charlotte Dundas experiments on the canal, and eight years before Henry Bell's Comet. Telford's report in 1806 will lead to further deepening of the Clyde. It's already an industrial scene, but a few decades later it will look pastoral with hindsight...
It catches the area in the wake of one transformation and just before another. Deepening of that section of the Clyde had begun in the 1770s, and the Forth & Clyde opened in 1790, so this was now part of a cross-Scotland corridor for heavy goods.
An interesting wee view here of the Forth & Clyde Canal and the Clyde itself in 1804. I think the bridge and settlement in the foreground belong to Ferrydyke / Donald's Quay, which were then just to the west of Old Kilpatrick. www.capitalcollections.org.uk/view-item?i=...
Agreed: I think we all need to disown silly behaviour from our own sides — whether disciplinary, political, religious or whatever — more vocally. Tribalism isn't going to get us through this one.
10 things we can do in Scotland to stop anti-refugee sentiment www.thenational.scot/politics/254... @sabirzazai.bsky.social
(My own tinfoil-hatted theory is that the current Science Wars reenactment serves the bad guys by making it harder to build alliances between e.g. the scientists and historians who both agree that finding out stuff is difficult and respect each other's ways of doing it.)
My own take would be that this kind of nonsense is bad science as much as bad history. There's a whole data-bro industry whose USP is generating quantitative output without worrying about data quality or statistical rigour. (FWIW this pisses a _lot_ of STEM folk off.) bsky.app/profile/ncdo...
I might well take you up on that -- thank you! Wee survivals like that catch my imagination for some reason.