This page represents only my own views, and not those of any university or other body.
Posted Tuesday 3rd May 2011 at 4.48pm
Osama bin Laden
Why was bin Laden killed? There may be a good reason, but I haven't heard it. I think we deserve to know that, at least. This article is a good one.
Posted Monday 2nd May 2011 at 4.12pm
An apology (kind of)
I'm sorry if my post on Saturday wasn't well thought out. I was aware of that at the time, at least to some extent - hence the "the more I think about it the more complicated..." bit. But perhaps I wasn't fully aware of how ignorant I am of the situation. Hopefully you can forgive me my ignorance, as this is a blog written by a mathematician and not a political article in an important newspaper written by a hopeful MP. Of course that doesn't excuse me from being wrong, or saying things that might upset people - I try not to do either but no doubt manage both rather more frequently than I should.
Firstly I didn't mean to belittle the huge amounts of work that do go into finding people work. I certainly am aware that many very talented people put a lot of effort into finding jobs for people that need jobs, and I should have made that clearer. What I wasn't aware of is that, apparently, some of "my ideas" (again, I should perhaps have pointed out that they're not my ideas - I guess I thought they were so obvious that it was clear I wasn't claiming credit for them) are actually used by the government already.
So what was the point of my post, if it wasn't to claim that people aren't putting in effort to get people into jobs, and it wasn't to tell you all about my fabulous new ideas that no-one's thought of before? I'm not entirely sure. It was written off the top of my head, and sometimes (often?) the stuff on the top of my head is stupid. But let's see if we can't extract something from the wreckage. I suppose I was imagining a country where there is almost no unemployment. Like North Korea, where people go around cutting lawns with scissors, maybe. (Of course, again, this is all hyper-idealised and would never be possible in practice. But bear with me.) So if you don't have a job, and you want to claim unemployment benefit, you walk into a job centre... and they immediately give you something to do, starting the next week or something. This might be delivering leaflets or mowing lawns or cleaning the council house toilets. Yeah, it might be demeaning. If you're a skilled worker you might hope that something more suited to your talents is available. But it might not be. You always have the chance to say no, you don't want to do that job, you would rather not get any money for that week (or 2 weeks or whatever).
As usual I've gone off into some ridiculous example that doesn't really help my argument. Let's try a different simplification. Let's say there are three kinds of unemployed people. We've got type A, who are trying their hardest to get a job but there just aren't enough jobs out there. There's also type B, who are trying their hardest to get a job but they're not very employable - maybe they've been unemployed for too long, or they've committed a crime, or ... there are many possible reasons. Finally we have type C, who aren't trying their hardest to get a job - maybe they've only recently lost their job or finished school or university, and have enough money (or their parents / spouse have enough money) that they can afford to wait for a good job that they actually want.
For type A, I'm pretty sure we're doing everything we can already. For type B it's also possible we're doing everything we can - I'm not an expert on what options there are exactly for people in this situation but I'm sure we don't just shrug and tell them to get on with it. It's really type C that I want to discourage from claiming unemployment benefit. I don't want to make out that they're evil drains on society - probably a large proportion of the country is a type C person at some point, and the rules say we're entitled to some money each week as long as we're looking for work. But many type C people don't need the money. Then you have the problem of deciding who does and doesn't need the money - where do you draw the line? Well, if we could immediately make them do something vaguely useful (or even not useful - make them sew cross-stitch tapestries to hang in abandoned air-raid shelters) they might suddenly decide for themselves whether they need the money or not. And if forcing them to do something stops them falling into a rut, and motivates them to start looking a bit harder for a job that they actually want, then it's a bonus.
Once more: I'm simplifying. There aren't easy lines to draw between A, B and C, and there are other types of people. Everyone's situation is different. Even assuming there is a clearly-defined "type C", I don't know how many people are in it and for how long, and how much it costs the country. Perhaps the government is well aware that this would be ace but it's just impossible to do in reality, or maybe it would cost more money than it would save. Perhaps there are already crack teams of recent graduates sewing cross-stitch tapestries. Maybe the abandoned air-raid shelters are already full to bursting. If so then my time has been entirely wasted. Sorry. I was just talking.
Finally, a further apology for the fact that you only get to read my point of view here. This is the kind of situation in which a comments thingy would be useful.
EDIT: Having reread this I realise that I'm now being glib. Basically what I want to say is that I think, perhaps incorrectly, that we could get people into some kind of community work much quicker than we currently do. In fact I didn't know that people are given community work at all, but now I do! I also didn't mean to even touch on other benefits claimants, like those who are ill, or injured, or disabled, or carers.
Next time I should do more research before spouting off.
Also, I've changed some of the youtube videos to links, as the page was getting a bit messy.
Posted Sunday 1st May 2011 at 5.55pm
Song of the week: Into Eternity
I have a love
I have a love for this world
A kind of love
That will break my heart
A kind of love that reconstructs and remodels the past
That adds the dryness to the dry autumn grass,
That adds the sunshine to the magnifying glass
And makes me fight
For something that just can't last...
It's Jens Lekman in a nutshell. Romantic, corny, brilliant. This isn't my favourite song of his, but it's still great. I don't know how he always manages to tread the line between sweet and cringeworthy. His fantastic voice and Swedish accent (I'm a prisoner of this moment widchoo in my arms) probably help.
Posted Saturday 30th April 2011 at 4.59pm
Why don't we require people to work?
I'm not sure whether things work the same in other countries, but in the UK if you don't have a job, and can convince the government that you're actively looking for a job, then you get given some money every week. So there are a load of people, especially at the moment when unemployment is relatively high, sitting around with nothing to do for most of the week. Surely we must be able to find something for them to do? You can call it "guaranteeing them a job" or "requiring them to work" depending on how you want to spin it, but there must be tasks around the country that we could get people to do.
To be fair, the more I think about it the more complicated I realise it would be. But nevertheless there are several things that could be tried. There must be companies who could use extra workers (whether skilled or unskilled) but can't afford to pay them. They could volunteer to take on suitably qualified unemployed people, subject to interview, who would be paid their usual unemployment allowance by the government. Unskilled government-funded employment (I don't know what exactly - rubbish collection, street cleaning, park mowing, ...?) could be offered to others, although obviously there would have to be permanent staff to oversee these tasks. The pay would be low and people would only work three or four days a week so that they have time to look for permanent employment. Anyone who caused problems at their temporary workplace would be "sacked", have their allowance slashed for perhaps three months, and then offered a new task to do after the three months is over.
At the moment there is apparently far too much long-term unemployment, and two major reasons are always cited: either the unemployed person's morale is so low from having no job, or they see no reason to actually put much effort into finding work as it will be only marginally more money than their unemployment allowance. Forcing them to do something worthwhile seems to offer a solution to both these problems.
There are clearly lots of obstacles to overcome in setting up something like this but the government would presumably save a bit of money in the long term (through the reduced number of claims from recent graduates and the like who sign on because they haven't found their ideal job yet even though they could happily survive without the government's help), and hopefully it would benefit the genuinely unemployed (through the opportunity to increase their employability and morale) as well as their communities.
Posted Sunday 24th April 2011 at 9.55am
Les Mystérieuses Cités D'Or
Much to my parents' chagrin, I was never very good at sleeping in in the mornings when I was a child. On Saturdays I would sneak downstairs at about 6.30am and sit there watching the test card until the programs started. (In the summer I would instead sometimes stand on my windowsill looking out on the empty street and listening to an owl that lived up the street hooting.) Weirdo. But I didn't have an alarm and I had to make sure I wouldn't miss my favourite cartoons - David the Gnome (which was always first on - no wonder I've never met anyone else who watched it), Thundercats, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, and - best of all - The Mysterious Cities of Gold.
Mysterious Cities of Gold - English theme (Youtube)
Recently I've been trying to get back into improving my French. I watched a film called La Cité des Enfants Perdus, which was pretty hard to understand - firstly the storyline was pretty warped, secondly everyone spoke very quickly, and thirdly the main character was mentally handicapped and didn't speak the kind of French that one ought to copy. That got me thinking - how do children learn to process their native language so well and so quickly? Well, there are no doubt several reasons but one of them is that they're surrounded by the language. So then I was thinking that maybe I should watch French programs for kids. And then it struck me. The Mysterious Cities of Gold was originally a Japanese/French production.
Mysterious Cities of Gold - French theme (Youtube)
Ah, I have so many great memories of that show. And I missed the finale when I was a kid. I remember being absolutely gutted at the time. Little did the 3-year-old me know that 24 years later I'd be sat in a flat in Germany watching the series again in French. I'm already looking forward to finally finding out what happens!
Now for some slightly more grown-up news. Cricket! Notts beat Yorkshire this week in one of the greatest comebacks I can ever remember seeing in the County Championship. Notts won the toss and batted first, only to collapse to Ryan Sidebottom (who won the title with Notts last year before moving back to his home county) and Rich Pyrah. Their bowlers put up a good effort and looked like restricting the Yorkies to a reasonable advantage until their captain Andrew Gale played a stupendous knock, putting Notts about 200 behind on the first innings. Then another top-order collapse let to Notts ending day two still 20 behind with just 4 wickets in hand. Apparently some of the Yorkshire fans were chuntering on the morning of day three that if Notts didn't pull their socks up the match might not last long enough for them to get value for money on their tickets. Well, pull their socks up they did - a partnership of 150 from Chris Read and Steven Mullaney meant that at least they would have something to bowl at, and then Yorkshire subsided (Jonny Bairstow apart - watch out for him) in dramatic fashion to a Notts bowling attack shorn of its best player by a groin injury. Fantastic stuff.
I actually had Yorkshire down as my favourites for the title before the season started. Pretty much everyone else in the world had Somerset, who have lost both their matches so far by an innings, so at least my prediction could have been worse! Of course this is only the start of the season, and the points system used in the Championship means that teams can make up ground very quickly. Either way the competition has been more exciting over the last year and a bit than probably ever before.
Someone drew my attention to The Drums this week. Here's "Book of Stories".
Posted Thursday 21st April 2011 at 8.39pm
WTF IS THE POST???
From one Fields medallist to another. I noticed yesterday that Tim Gowers had blogged about the rumour that the British Arts Council had been forced to spend some of its funding on work bigging up Dave Cameron's "Big Society". It seemed a little bit loose for Gowers, who - like many mathematicians - usually thinks long and hard before he speaks (or blogs). Then later a friend pointed out a new post on Gowers' blog, and again it's rather surprising, as well as very long. It's also funny and almost entirely relevant.
I never thought I'd hear Gowers say "WTF" or "duh"!
Posted Sunday 17th April 2011 at 4.57pm
1 2 3 4
"His father told the press that at the age of two, during a family gathering, Tao attempted to teach a 5-year-old child mathematics and English. When asked by his father how he knew numbers and letters, he said he learned them from Sesame Street."
Cool!
Posted Sunday 17th April 2011 at 11.46am
Chocolate black
My parents have an ancient brown recipe book that's falling apart. Just inside the back cover of the ancient brown recipe book is an even more ancient piece of paper that's also gone brown and faded and started to crumble. On one side of that piece of paper it says "To Daddy, We have gone to the park. Lots of love, Mummy and Matthew." It's dated 1986, when I was 2. On the other side is a typewritten(!) recipe for something that we always called "Chocolate black". I don't know where it came from - my mum doesn't cook much really - but I vividly remember crushing biscuits with a rolling pin, then the smell of the melting butter and sugar, then the excitement of getting to lick the spoon clean of golden syrup.
On Friday I rang my mum and got her to read out the recipe to me. It's about time it was digitized before the piece of paper completely gives up the ghost! One thing that I obviously didn't notice when I was 2 is quite how bad for you it is - so much butter it could be a Delia recipe.
For half a tin:
100g butter/marg
2tbsp golden syrup
1 dessertspoon sugar
50g sultanas
50g chopped glace cherries
50g chopped nuts (optional)
2 dessertspoons drinking chocolate
200g crumbled digestive biscuits
200g milk chocolate covering
Method:
Melt together golden syrup, sugar, butter, drinking chocolate in a saucepan. Add the sultanas, cherries and nuts followed by the biscuits. Mix well. Flatten down in a large tin. Cover with melted chocolate. Leave to set in the fridge then cut into squares.
Song of the week: Anytime by My Morning Jacket.
Posted Monday 11th April 2011 at 10.25pm
Paris encore une fois
Also: the arxiv should introduce a "Like" button.
Posted Thursday 7th April 2011 at 1.44pm
The Flying Club Cup
I moved flat on Monday. I've now lived in 13 different flats/houses in 9 years (14 if you include the month I spent in Brazil)! The guy who normally lives in my new flat is away on holiday for 3 months, and it's a bit odd living in his place. One advantage is that he has a giant TV and speakers. It took me a while to figure out how to fit everything together in the right way but I've managed to arrange things so that I can hook my laptop up to the TV via HDMI and use both the screens and the speakers.
I'm visiting some friends in Paris this weekend. Should be ace. This week's song of the week is Beirut's "The Flying Club Cup", which is based in Paris. (The album The Flying Club Cup had songs based in various different French cities, and it's great. There's a series of videos by La Blogotheque with Beirut and friends performing the songs in odd places, and some of those are good too - e.g. Nantes featuring Will Sheff of Okkervil River.)
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