The Paine and the President

On the night in November when Barack Obama's victory was confirmed, he quoted Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, and most would see a clear line of descent from those great orators. But there was little of the soaring exultation of "Yes We Can" in Obama's first presidential speech on Tuesday. Instead, delightfully, he went back to the true founding fathers of his great nation.

In fact CNN reports that: if the speech could be said to have an animating spirit, it was that of Thomas Paine.

Ben McIntyre in the Times conveys the same message, albeit with a more informal tone: The words of a drunken, dishevelled Norfolk pamphleteer lay at the heart of the new President's message

That pamphleteer provided the title and inspiration for everything I write here.

He also provided the title and inspiration for the United States of America.

Common Sense is the way out of Crisis.

The Urban Village

I've been away. Top five reasons why a congested Kolkata suburb of 2008 is like a traditional English village of 1908

1. The same people have lived in the same houses for generations. Almost no geographical mobility. Everybody hangs out at the same local watering holes.

2. The local store owner lives above his shop just a couple of houses down the road from you. He stocks everything and knows the price of everything. You ask him for what you need to buy, he hands it to you. Open all hours.

3. The local bank manager lives in the same street too. New accounts and loan acceptance are based largely on personal recommendation.

4. Windows and doors are open all day, most people walk to work, kids play in the street.

5. The local rag'n'bone man comes round daily with his animal-drawn trailer to collect your reusable household waste

Sounds ideal, but there is a lot that was wrong with that world, and it is disappearing fast - because now is the age of the department store - tomorrow may be the age of the internet, that will be very different again.

Chicken Little

According to various kinds of splendid squid, a lizard is always a lizard.

However, recall how our image of dinosaurs has changed over just a single generation. The models of dinosaurs I saw as a child really did look like terrible lizards, roughly equal-sized legs splayed out from the side of the body.

But science works and opinion changes. Gradually increasing evidence suggests that they were more like birds than lizards, not just in general appearance (models of dinosaurs are very different now) but even possibly in internal warm-blooded physiology.

Now possibly the final straw. The T-Rex was basically just an overgrown chicken :)

The Elephant Siren

According to new research "an ancient ancestor of the elephant from 37 million years ago lived in water and had a similar lifestyle to a hippo"

There is further detail in analysis of the peer-reviewed research at Greg Laden's blog. And there is increasing evidence to support the claim - not just general observations about the hairless skin and long trunk being well suited for water, but specific and scientifically measurable features of the dental and renal systems have shown genuine evidence for the amphibious transition.

Elephants now live primarily on land, and the research talks about changes that happened tens of millions of years ago in Africa, it is a fair deduction that the region dried out considerably during that period. The modern human form also appeared tens of millions of years ago in Africa. You can see where I am going with this. Desmond Morris has been banging on for decades with the same suggestion.

Early humans may have evolved the ability to swim and lost the fur (unlike other chimpanzee groups) precisely because they lived in the water. The "aquatic ape" theory could be reborn.

The Voice of God Washes Whiter

The television is on, and I am watching television adverts. No, I have not lost the PVR, but it's the excellent BBC programme Washes Whiter about the advertising industry, and it is mixing work with pleasure to see something so entertaining.

Interesting that the voiceover was referred to within the advertising creative industry as "the voice of god", that disembodied prompt that triggered the wife to tell the world just how well her washing powder really worked. She often looked upwards to the camera before speaking.

But, apparently, this "voice of god" did not work when advertising men's products - a man needed a genuine source of authority, someone like James Bond, or Jimmy Hill. Men would not talk to a voice from the sky in the way that women would.

And of course, while watching these back and white stereotypes, the 21st century man just laughs at how outdated and sexist those advertisements seem. That evil "old white man elite" seeking to perpetuate its authority ...

... but there is a less discussed counterargument in there. Probably from the 1960s onwards, and certainly today, those who worked in creative advertising have actually been at the forefront of progressive values - but most attempts of their attempts to push the boundaries too far, to try to switch away from stereotypical roles, were met with either incomprehension or distaste by the mass market world, or at least by the focus groups which represented that world.

So yes conservatives, be afraid, the advertising industry really is out to keep changing society.

US UK Europe

In Thursday's post I listed some fairly lightweight trivial differences between the US and the UK. But at the end of Friday's post I hinted at a far more important difference.

Today Neil Perkins pointed us in the direction of a recent survey in the Economist that tried to substantiate these differences. Nothing there was very surprising, there have been plenty of other discussions but it is often worthwhile to update with the current state of opinion.

The article clearly highlights one fundamental difference, the religious majority in America compared with the secular majority in Europe. I may return to that subject another day.

But in answer to the more directly relevant question, "should UK social and economic policy be closer to an American or to a common European model?" there is a very simple answer. We need to look at the history and the geography.

The United States developed the wide open resources of the Native Americans, many settlers believed that they had a God-given right to fence off their own territories and do there as they pleased. The cities and infrastructure were largely built within the last two centuries.

By contrast, many major European cities have been in existence for thousands of years, and we cannot easily change them. The narrow winding streets and crowded "historic" neighbourhoods mean that US-type policies on car ownership and public services simply do not apply here.

If the gulf stream stops or changes, then we are hit in the same way. Many British are taught to fear or mock the French and Germans, but fundamentally our problems and opportunities are exactly the same. We are inescapably European.

Celebrities Get Stoned

Front page story today: Celebrity drug takers get off too lightly.

The United Nations drugs watchdog says the UK and other countries respond too leniently to the drug-taking antics of celebrities, and that this sends out the wrong message to young people.

"Celebrities are often involved in illicit drug trafficking or in illicit drug use and this is glamorised," said Philip Emafo, president of the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), which released the report.

Another story today, again quoting directly. From Yahoo News:

Moses was on psychedelic drugs when he heard God deliver the Ten Commandments, an Israeli researcher claimed in a study published this week.

Such mind-altering substances formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times, Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem wrote in the Time and Mind journal of philosophy.

Moses was probably also on drugs when he saw the "burning bush," suggested Shanon

Seems a reasonable suggestion to me. When Abraham claimed to hear the voice of God, perhaps he was similarly afflicted? And what about all those other prophets who followed him?

The King of Paine

Today, while the impoverished Indian sub-continent is taking steps to catch up with the modern world, even supposedly enlightened nations such as the United Kingdom are still trying to justify and encourage the caste system. I had thought a convincing argument for rejecting it was published way back in the 18th Century - that book was called Common Sense.

Today religious fundamentalists are still trying to justify selected brands of fascism by claiming that their policies have been inspired by divine revelations. I had thought a convincing argument for rejecting it was published way back in the 18th Century - that book was called The Age of Reason.

Just a couple of days I dropped in a comment that skyscrapers divide people, bridges connect people. Thomas Paine (b. 29 January 1727, d. 8 June 1809) wanted to build bridges. "Society in every state is a blessing, but government even its best state is but a necessary evil". Happy Birthday Tom.

Read or Dead

I will read your comments later. I read a few comments today.

Today's note will lead to a more generic point. Yesterday's note led to a more genetic point.

In both "I read" and "you read" the tense is ambiguous and it can be very misleading. You thought. You wrote. You read. Why can't that word follow where others have led?

There is a significant trend in English for irregular verbs to become more regular. Based on millions of words of historical text, an excellent academic article has calculated the actual rates very precisely.

New verbs entering the English language universally follow regular conjugation rules. The least frequently used irregular verbs changed, or regularized, fastest. The data predicts the half-lives of 'be' and 'have' are 38,800 years, making these two verbs the most resistant to regularization. The team also predicts that the next irregular verb that will regularize is wed/wed/wed, because it is the least frequently used modern irregular verb. In fact, this verb is already is being replaced by wed/wedded/wedded in the four major English-language dictionaries.

Unfortunately, read doesn't seem to register as an irregular verb. I wish it did.

Adam and Eve

Although I refrained from doing so last year, this year I will sometimes permit myself to showcase an outside article in which I think something was explained well. Of course it must still be an example of insight that makes common sense out of apparently difficult concepts, but it will not necessarily be my insight.

However to start, a different subject from the core marketing and economic subjects as we take a short diversion into genetics. This is not the place to develop the theme that evolution explains everything. But when I first heard that "all women have a latest common ancestor who lived about 120,000 years ago" and "all men have a latest common ancestor who lived about 60,000 years ago" then I was initially sceptical.

Then I read this note by Mike Dunford and it all made perfect sense.

The war on x

mas. On behalf of every true conservative in this land.

We have had enough of these foreigners. We have had a tradition in this country for hundreds, no thousands, of years.

But recently a bunch of immigrants have come in and hijacked those glorious ancient traditions. Bloody aliens, bringing their weird eastern practices. They have no real relevance to this island. They don't belong here.

I wouldn't mind if they were doing their own thing, keeping their own rituals and not interfering with our great traditions. But they won't rest with that. They want to hijack our ancient festival and gloss over the real meaning of it.

Enough is enough.

Another Knight's Tale

A couple of days ago I mentioned a splendid film. Apart from the great soundtrack, there was something else that ties that movie to this blog...

Totally unjustified in real history but somehow perfectly fit within that fictional story was the character of Geoffrey Chaucer. I had mentioned him before in my first note about language. And that was not even the first time that I mentioned A Knight's Tale...

Back one March many years ago, I went on a little day trip to Canterbury with a couple of friends from school days. At the time I was employed by a large management consultancy company, but I was contemplating an offer from a senior client to leave the corporation and do some independent consulting work.

A few days later I handed in my resignation letter to the company. This was the letter.

A Knight's Tale

I watched a film today. A film that got terrible reviews, a cheesy anachronistic corny Brit-flick. But I absolutely loved it.

Now I don't usually just post reviews here. But I think the amateur psycho-analysts of this world (including me) may wonder why this sort of film appeals to me.

Because I don't really like fantasies, other world stuff. Lord of the Rings was execrable. Even Star Wars was good but not great. And I don't really like real history stuff - educational but tedious. But when I recall my all-time favourites in fiction, they seem to involve the fantastical distortion of real history.

In film - Highlander. In television - Edmund Blackadder. In books - Dirk Gently.

On reflection, each features someone who is basically an alien, but in time not in space. On more reflection, that's surely just coincidence...

Should people be persecuted for what they write?

There have been riots in the city of my birth. According to the BBC, Wednesday's trouble in the state capital began after the predominantly Muslim All-India Minority Forum called for blockades on major roads in the city.

What triggered this? The Forum is angry about a "feminist writer". Critics say she called for the Koran to be changed to give women greater rights. Shocking isn't it.

The BBC seems to neither condemn nor condone the unruly behaviour. The article merely asks the question that titles this note.

I am not writing an answer. But if you suggest that certain thousand-year-old middle-eastern dictates should have no place in the modern world, then perhaps you should be persecuted too.

Life on Earth

The BBC have been looking for a successor to the legendary Sir David Attenborough as he gradually slides towards retirement, while one of the cable documentary channels has been playing his classic series back to back all weekend.

Now it would be sacrilege to criticise him, many feel that he is a national treasure and candidate for greatest living Englishman. And for once I agree with the many. But I never write here to echo them. For I have a criticism. Not of the man himself, of course.

However, I was struck by the tone of some of those early programmes. It was all done with courage, enthusiasm and knowledge. But they had little sense of history or of future - they seemed struck by the wonder of now. The tone often seemed to be to describe how "ideally" adapted all these amazing organisms seemed to be. The wing on a sycamore seed was "perfect" to carry it far from the tree. The teeth of carnivores were "perfect" for tearing flesh and bone.

But that is not quite true. All the evidence around us is of organisms that are barely better than competitors. There are some genetic patterns that are replicating well and others that are not. Within us, within nature, there are countless examples of things that do not work very well, that could work better. Some "species" are always doing a good job of dying out regardless of human intervention.

I still think diversity is good. But remember there is no "ideal" in nature.

Apples and Pairs

Within the last week, two friends have gone to New York from London, and each of them received a copy of my dual map.

The reaction of others to that little piece of artwork always seems really positive (unlike to much of the other material here). But although it is either obvious or perceptive to spot the similarities and it requires either local knowledge or research to match the particular areas, we should ask the same question for any disparate alignment - is each of the models just following a blind pattern based on simple evolutionary rules, or is it really a striking coincidence?

You know the answer. So the map was common sense. It has faults, but I'm still proud of it.

Si Paris

Michael Wood concluded his documentary about India yesterday. And it was refreshing, although perhaps neither "patriotic" nor "politically correct" to hear him refer to Bombay and Madras rather than their modern names. Because, obviously, he was speaking in English.

Every language, or more generally every related group of languages, has its own characteristic sound. I do not refer to the obviously different vocabulary in every language, but to the distinctive rhythm of each. It is the way that you can tell what language a foreigner is speaking even when you can't identify any single word. It is why you know the muppet show chef is Scandinavian even though he is unintelligible.

The English cannot pronounce correctly. Don't even try. The modern name Kolkata sounds a half-hearted mess. Stick to Calcutta.