When all else fails, read the instructions

Captain Rumpelstoss: But… how will I learn to fly, Herr Colonel?

Colonel Manfred von Holstein: The way we do everything in the German army: from the book of instructions.

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines

 ______

The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient analogue computer with a series of 37 interlocking dials that was used to calculate astronomical positions. It was crafted with the precision and complexity of a Swiss clock, but it was actually made in 150 BC. Such craftsmanship would not be seen for another 1,000 years. Recovered in 1900, from a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, the mechanism had initially baffled scientists, who had no idea what it was used for. They tried reverse engineering it. Fortunately they were helped by script etched on the Antikythera mechanism’s wooden housing. This could be considered the world’s first instruction manual. Deciphering it must have been a complex task, and I certainly don’t want to take anything away from these experts. But today’s manuals also present a massive challenge. Modern-day instructionese sometimes feels like Ancient Greek to me. Trying to understand it is one of life’s more frustrating experiences. Indeed for some it can lead to read rage. Today I will be looking at instruction manuals and why they can be so exasperating.

Why are instruction manuals so hard to understand? There are linguistic challenges. Languages deal with and describe reality but this is so complex that any individual attempt to represent it comes up against an important obstacle – actions are, by their very nature, indescribable in words. We can only ever approximate reality.

A typical manual will include instructions for the setup, normal usage, programming maintenance and troubleshooting of your device. In the past manuals would include detailed repair information. However, with the increase in products’ complexity and functions, this information has been disappearing. The fact is that many devices are so cheap it’s just not worth repairing them.

We need to analyse the manufacturers and their products. Many companies seem to assume that the user will know all the technical terms about their product, and do not bother explaining them. I think many of the problems originate in the design. Good design of the products and the user interface is not prioritised. They have lots of engineers, but few or no human factors designers. Designs seem to be feature-oriented rather than task-oriented. The attitude is one of adding more and more features rather than trying to think what the customer will want to do with the device. I have noticed this with DVD players, especially the cheap ones. They tend to have lots of buttons making them really hard to use. On the other I have a Phillips which has fewer buttons. I am not a big Apple fan, but they do make many of their interfaces intuitive. A really well designed product wouldn’t need an instruction manual.

The quality of documentation can also leave a lot to be desired. Many manufacturers do not hire enough technical writers. To save money they will create a single manual for all international markets. So you end a massive booklet, but only a few of those pages are in your language. They will also use one manual for many different models, which can make it more difficult to find the information relating to the particular model we have bought. They want to keep these manuals as compact as possible and so the type-size of the text is a problem for those of us who are in our late 40s.

You get the feeling that many of the writers did not have the product to hand when preparing the manual. However I wouldn’t want the actual designers writing the manuals. They are too close to their creations and tend to make assumptions about what the users will know.

And when it comes to texts originally written in another tongue the problems multiply. Products can now be made all over the world and the meaning can be lost in translation. Many firms evidently do not bother to get their translations checked by a competent English speaker. In instructions this is especially problematic. As precision is so important poor language can make it difficult or impossible to understand what is meant. Do they consumer test new instructions?

We are also partly to blame. We can be lazy. I often think that life is too short to wade through these manuals – they are not exactly compelling reading. If I can get by, I tend to avoid the instructions at all costs. It also depends on our motivation. When I am interested in something, I will make that extra effort. I suppose the people in tech support will come at this from a different perspective. Indeed they have an acronym RTFM, which stands for “Read The Fucking Manual”. There is even a website, http://www.readthefuckingmanual.com, where they dish out some practical advice:

If you believe that you may be one of those who, for some strange reason cannot get your product to work, then this is the site for you. Each time you experience a problem installing or using a product, please come to this site to read the following advice, and what do you know… IT’S FREE OF CHARGE! And another thing… It may even work!:

READ THE F***ING MANUAL!

If you follow this advice, probability is that up to 8 times out of 10, you can solve your own problem right there and then, without any hassle and frustration, and without having to call the manufacturer. The manufacturer will tell you to RTFM anyway!

I think that today many product manuals are generally much better than they were in the past I particularly like the quickstart guides, which are so useful for getting quickly accustomed to the basic operations of the product. But there is still room for improvement. It would be nice if companies stuck with simpler designs. I remember a Sony Television I used to have. It had a reversible remote control – one side was for dummies with just the most common buttons, while the other was for the more sophisticated users. The internet is a wonderful tool if you have a problem with a product that the manual can’t solve. You can search the company’s website and look online for solutions from other users of the item that’s giving you trouble. Those how-to videos are especially useful. I like the amateur stuff. It is written by people like us who understand our difficulties. Maybe there really is light at the end of this particular technological tunnel.

Martin’s quirky movies # 2 Waking Life

Who needs Class B drugs when you’ve got this film?

This is the question The Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw posed in his review of Waking Life, one of the most thought provoking films I’ve ever seen. I first saw it on DVD seven or eight years ago, and since then I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind. The film’s unidentified hero, played by Wiley Wiggins, wanders from one and place to another, meeting people who espouse their theories about the nature of existence and reality. Wiley seems to be in a dream, and complains that although he knows it’s a dream, he just can’t wake up. This complaint alludes to a phenomenon known as “lucid dreaming”, where you dream while being aware that you are dreaming. Its practitioners seek to control and guide their dreams, discovering things beyond their capacity to understand in their awake state. For some New Agers it is an essential tool for self-improvement and personal growth.

Distinguishing between dream and reality has engaged writers, philosophers and filmmakers. The dream argument posits that we have no way of determining conclusively at any moment whether or not we are dreaming. For Descartes this mere possibility was sufficient to undermine knowledge. This has been a popular subject for popular entertainment. Open Your Eyes and Inception are two examples. And we shouldn’t forget the ninth season of Dallas, which was revealed to have all been a dream of Pam.

The director of Waking Life, Richard Stuart Linklater, was born in Houston, Texas. He attended the Sam Houston State University but dropped out midway through the course to work on an off-shore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. While working on the rig he did a lot of reading and on land he loved going to theatre and cinema. He realized he wanted to be a filmmaker. Using the money he had saved, he bought a Super-8 camera, a projector, and some editing equipment, and moved to Austin, where he enrolled in the community college to study film in the autumn of 1984. Since making It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books in 1988, Linklater has made another 18 films including Slacker (1991), Dazed and Confused (1993), Before Sunrise (1995) School of Rock (2003), Before Sunset (2004), Bad News Bears (2005) A Scanner Darkly (2006) Fast Food Nation (2006) and Me and Orson Welles (2008).

Waking Life took just three weeks to shoot cameras and another three to edit. But that was not the end of the process. It took a team of 30 animation artists 15 months to animate the film; they spent up to 250 hours to make one minute of animation. They used a technique called rotoscoping, in which animators trace over footage, frame by frame. The animators’ initial brief had been to interpret the scenes literally, but they went beyond this – painting pictures of what the people were saying. The result is beautiful, unlike anything I have seen before or since; the rotoscope effect lends each shot an ethereal and unreal touch. Though it was a very labour-intensive, the film was a bargain compared to a typical Disney or Pixar production, which might cost ten or fifteen times more. This enabled Linklater to take more risks. He ended up making a surreal cartoon that explores adult subject matter, something that Hollywood seems to shy away from these days. And that’s what I want to look at now – the ideas that Wiley Wiggins, encounters on his journey. There are so many it is impossible to do justice to them all. I can only give you a flavour of the film.

Wiley attends a philosophy lecture by philosophy professor Robert Solomon, at the University of Texas at Austin. Solomon wants to challenge our preconceptions about existentialism, presenting it as a philosophy of freedom. After class Solomon explains his rejection of postmodernist philosophy. The view that humans are merely social constructions is a cop-out; we are ultimately responsible for who we are and what we do.

Kim Krizan, a screenwriter discusses the nature of language as a system of signs. What she finds incredible is not that we are capable of creating words for tangible things such as trees, but how words convey abstract concepts such as love or frustration. For Krizan when we create them we have a kind of spiritual communion. This feeling might be transient, but it is what makes life worth living.

Eamonn Healy, a chemistry professor at Austin states that we are beginning a new kind of evolution, which is much faster. Healy is a cyber-optimist whose ideas seem similar to the concept of technological transcendence known as the singularity that has been proposed by Ray Kurzweil among others. Some suggest that we will be able to upload our minds into cyberspace.

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy reprise their role in Before Sunrise. Jesse and Celine talk about recent studies of the brain activity of sleeping or dying people which show that a lifetime of experiences can be condensed into a few actual minutes of activity. They also discuss the notion of collective memory, a view articulated by Rupert Sheldrake, which involves a large pool of knowledge that we all draw from. Jesse states that this would explain seemingly spontaneous world-wide innovative leaps in science and the arts, prompted by people working independently of each other.

UT Austin philosophy professor David Sosa doesn’t allow much room for free will.  His deterministic view posits that there is no place for free action in a world governed by physical laws. Since human beings are physical entities they must be subject to these same laws.

Talk show host Alex Jones is one of America’s most famous conspiracy theorists. Recently he claimed that the Boston Marathon bombing had been staged. Here he is driving through the city and ranting through a PA system mounted on his car. He urges us to reclaim our freedom. It is up to us.

English professor Lisa Moore sits in a restaurant with author Carole Dawson discussing the problem of human identity over time. They discuss a theory by Benedict Anderson that we need to construct a story in order to connect, for example, a photograph of ourselves as an infant with who we are now.

The monkey in the classroom expresses the views of Steve Fitch, a photographer and musician. According to Fitch, art is the language that humans created to distance ourselves from our empty and degraded human past and reach for a new world.

UT Austin philosophy professor Louis Mackey argues that the gap between the average person and Plato is greater than the gap between the average person and chimpanzees. Due to our inherent laziness true genius is rarely achieved, largely because of human laziness.

Poet Timothy “Speed” Levitch states that self-awareness consists of discovering that you are a protagonist in someone else’s dream.

 The last encounter in the film is with a man playing pinball, played by Linklater himself. He discusses a theory by the great science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, from a speech called “How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”, that time is just a distraction.  It’s really 50 AD, but there’s an evil spiritual force is trying to make us forget that the kingdom of God is around us .

Waking Life asks fundamental questions about life. It does not provide definitive answers. Some ideas are outlandish. I love the way the film blends such differing views of the world. I am a sceptic, but I have always been fascinated by how we can come to such startlingly different interpretations of how the world works. I devour conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. I don’t buy Rupert Sheldrake’s collective memory or the singularity. I am fascinated by the border between science and pseudoscience. Alfred Wegener was ridiculed for his theory of continental drift. I don’t know what to make of superstring theory. It can be difficult for a layman yo distinguish the two but there is a nice maxim in science: extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. As usual Carl Sagan has an apposite quote:

“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”

Many of the problems raised in Waking Life haven’t been solved in more than three and a half millennia of philosophical investigation. If there were any real answers, someone would surely come up with them by now. I have no difficulty embracing doubt and uncertainty.   And I can recommend the journey.

Will Bitcoin make the world go round?

The Bitcoin tribe is still a small one, and consists mainly of computer geeks, drug-dealers, gold bugs and libertarians. From the Economist Apr 13th 2013

Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without a government, something necessary and imperative. But I am not familiar with the specific product to assert whether it is the best potential setup. And we need a long time to establish confidence. I only talk from skin-in-the-game. If I had money in Bitcoin, I would have reported it. But I don’t yet. I am waiting to understand it better, not with my brain, but with my experience… Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Money is:

1. A unit of account

2. A store of value

3. A medium of exchange

Right now, Bitcoin is none of those things (in any serious sense).  From a tweet

______

A couple of years ago I heard An EconTalk podcast about a new electronic currency called Bitcoin. To be honest I found it all rather baffling and didn’t really think much about it until recently. However the Cypriot banking crisis has put Bitcoin in vogue. On Saturday March 16th Nicos Anastasiades, the Cypriot President announced a rescue strategy for the country’s banks that involved confiscating money directly from every single bank account in the country. The following Monday, the price of the Bitcoin rose from $45 to $55 on the major exchanges, and by Wednesday it had reached $65 dollars. There does seem to be a link between the events on the Mediterranean island and the performance of Bitcoin. In Spain the number of Google searches for Bitcoin has been increasing. Although the plan for Cyprus was eventually modified, the interest for Bitcoin remains. I was just looking at the exchange rate online one Bitcoin is now worth nearly 117 dollars. Has its time come?

Bitcoin is virtual currency that was introduced on January 3^rd 2009. It is a cryptocurrency, a type of digital currency that is based on cryptography, making it difficult to counterfeit. Bitcoin is not the only virtual currency around – gamers on Second Life, a virtual world, pay with Linden Dollars. Their emergence shows that the creation of money is not, nor has ever been, a government monopoly. I have always found money and its creation one of the most challenging areas in the study of economics. Anything people come to view as money can serve some of money’s functions without any governmental authorisation. The classic example is the use of cigarettes in prisons as a medium of exchange.

Paper currencies have been accepted as money even when they no longer had government backing. When the first Gulf War concluded in 1991, dinars that had been withdrawn by the government of Saddam Hussein were used in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. They became known as “Swiss dinars” because they were printed with plates from Switzerland. Curiously, this illicit currency was soon worth far more than the government-backed dinars that Saddam was printing like there was no tomorrow. Swiss dinars would serve as northern Iraq’s fiat money for some ten years until a new national currency was brought in.

There is a strange mystery at the heart of Bitcoin. Who is John Galt? In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged that was the question. With the cryptocurrency we have a new question: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Bitcoin’s creator was a hacker(s) going under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. From now on I will refer to him in the singular. Nakamoto no longer seems to be actively involved in the project but at the beginning he was behind much of the innovation. In 2008 he posted Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System on the internet, the foundational text of this virtual currency.

There have been a number of journalists seeking to unmask Nakamoto. The New Yorker named Michael Clear, a graduate student at Trinity College, Dublin, who is knowledgeable about economics, cryptography and peer-to-peer networks. Nakamoto’s. He is allegedly said to have said this to a journalist: “I’m not [Nakamoto], but even if I was I wouldn’t tell you.”

Fast Company’s investigation brought up circumstantial evidence that indicated a link between an encryption patent application filed by Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry. CNBC’s Rick Santelli says that many believe that it is Grigory Perelman, the eccentric Russian mathematician, who famously turned down the million-dollar Millennium Prize 4 he had won for resolving the Poincaré conjecture. Business Insider believes that it is “a small group of quants from New York or London, who are all experienced software developers. Whatever the truth may be, Nakamoto does not appear to be actively involved in the project. In April 2011, he told a Bitcoin contributor he had “moved on to other things.”

Gavin Andresen, the Chief Scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, has described it as an attempt to bring back a decentralized currency of the people. It is not administered by a single authority and the currency is not subject to inflationary moves by a central bank. It enables instant peer-to-peer transactions all around the world, bypassing banks altogether. Unlike our beloved banks, there are low or zero processing fees. As it is stateless it is hard to tax, freeze or trace this money.

Bitcoin fluctuates like any other currency – its value is determined by supply and demand in the market. One Bitcoin can be divided to eight decimal places. 50 Bitcoins are created every 10 minutes. As such, this currency behaves much like gold and other precious metals. With Bitcoin, miners use special software to solve mathematical problems and are issued a certain number of Bitcoins in exchange. This is how one Bitcoin one website describes the system:

“Mining is an important and integral part of Bitcoin that ensures fairness while keeping the Bitcoin network stable, safe and secure.” The idea is to mimic digging gold out of the ground. In the beginning you find a lot, but then you work harder and harder, and go farther and farther, less and less to find. The rate of growth will gradually be scaled down, with a final limit of 21 million Bitcoins.

There are a number of problems that I can see with this cryptocurency. The number of people who accept Bitcoins for products or services is fairly small. It is growing every day as the system becomes more popular, but getting enough people to trust it is complicated. They are in a catch-22 situation. Merchants don’t want to accept Bitcoins till more people are using them, and people don’t want to use Bitcoins until more merchants and other people are accepting them.

The currency has been criticised as a tool of speculators and money-laundering.  Could it be another Ponzi scheme or a speculative bubble, like the mania for tulip bulbs in 17th Century Holland? There are also important security issues with the ever-present danger of hacking. I am suspicious of central government. There are many examples of governments debasing their currency or deliberately provoking inflation. However, are the alternatives going to turn out worse? I am not sure I would want to trust in the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto,

According to philosopher John Gray Bitcoin represents a kind of cyber-anarchism.   Its proponents hope that internet will help them free themselves from government. Bitcoin’s users put their faith in the laws of mathematics. However, a virtual currency will never be able to escape the dangers of the real world. It is not difficult to envisage a number of negative scenarios. Bitcoin may crash and burn, be replaced by rival virtual currencies or be banned by governments because it is actually doing too well. For Gray, the freedom Bitcoin promises is illusory – the dream of finding some kind of technofix that can shelter us from power and crime and protect us from each other.

Having said that, I think that it is a worthy experiment. Anything that challenges the banks is a good thing. We do need new forms of money for the 21^st century. However, I don’t think I’ll be putting my millions in there just yet. I can’t really get my head around it. I tend to be a late adopter with a lot of technologies. Indeed, I have never used PayPal. But I will be following this experiment closely. It’s going to be a fascinating ride.

The story behind the song #2: Strange Fruit

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

 

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

 

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,

Here is a strange and bitter crop.

These 90 words are arguably the most chilling in any song ever recorded. Strange Fruit, a song about a lynching in 1930s America, reached a modest #16 on the U.S. Billboard Charts in 1939. At the time Roosevelt was in power and America was still in the throes of the Great Depression. This was the same year as Over the Rainbow, Moonlight Serenade and Begin the Beguine. Today I want to look at this incredible song and the fascinating story behind it. It wasn’t written for her and has been covered by artists as varied as Nina Simone, Sting, Robert Wyatt, UB40, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Tori Amos, but the song really belongs to one woman – Billie Holiday. As they say on The X Factor, she really owned that song.

This is such a graphic song, painting a picture of bucolic simplicity. This image, however, is shattered by the bulging eyes and twisted mouth. The tree, normally a symbol of life, here bears a terrible fruit. When she sang it you could see the black body hanging from the Southern tree, its blood feeding the roots. This is indeed a bitter crop. At one performance Holiday was asked what a pastoral scene was:

“It means when the crackers are killing the niggers. It means when they take a little nigger like you and snatch off his nuts and shove them down his goddam throat. That’s what it means. That’s what they do. That’s a goddamn pastoral scene.”

One of the most surprising aspects of this song is that it was not written by an African-American, but by a white Jewish schoolteacher with communist leanings from New York, Abel Meeropol, who taught in the Bronx, wrote thousands of songs poems libretti, plays, scripts, but he will undoubtedly be remembered for this song. His pen name, Lewis Allan, was in memory of two stillborn sons.

In 1937 Meeropol saw this shocking photograph of a lynching in a magazine:

The photo, which was taken on August 7, 1930, captures the double lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana in 1930. Lynchings were meant to be a public spectacle. This was a brutal form of social control; the bodies would be left hanging as a warning to others. By the time of the Marion incident, lynching was less prevalent than it had been at the turn of the century. But there were still five or six a year, and they were still very present in black consciousness. Despite attempts to outlaw it, no legislation was ever passed – it was always filibustered away by southern congressman.

Shipp and Smith had been arrested the night before, and charged with robbing and murdering a white factory worker, Claude Deeter, and raping his white girlfriend, Mary Ball. A large crowd, armed with sledgehammers, broke into the jail, beat the two men and then hanged them. Police officers among the posse cooperated in the lynching. A third person, 16-year-old James Cameron was luckier, narrowly escaping Shipp and Smith’s fate thanks to an unidentified member of the mob who announced that he had nothing to do with the rape or murder. Cameron later stated in interviews that Shipp and Smith were, in fact, guilty of shooting and killing Deeter, but Mary Ball later testified that she had not been raped.

The photo had been taken by the photographer Lawrence Beitler. Meeropol said that it had haunted him for days. The revulsion it provoked led him to write the poem, which was published in 1937 in a union magazine, The New York Teacher. He later set the poem music and it became quite a popular protest song in the New York area.

We need to put Strange Fruit in its musical context. There was before the song, and indeed after it, a tradition of white audiences enjoying forms of black music that had been filtered to appeal more to mainstream tastes. Swing, the most popular musical genre of the 1930s had its origins in African-American jazz and composers like Irving Berlin and George Gershwin liked to incorporate elements of the “black sound” into their work. We can see this later on with The Stones, The Beatles and Eric Clapton who made artists like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf Chuck Berry and Screaming Jay Hawkins “safe” for white audiences.

But in Strange Fruit Meeropol chose to send an uncompromising message. This was a militant, angry song. There had been songs that had alluded to racism. The Gershwin musical Porgy and Bess, or the Fats Waller song Black and Blue come to mind. However, none were so in-your-face as Strange Fruit.

Billie Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915, in Baltimore, Maryland. Her father, Clarence Holiday never married her mother, Sadie Fagan, and he would eventually abandon the family altogether. Holiday grew up in grinding poverty. At the age of ten, she was raped by a neighbour, and ended up at The House of the Good Shepherd, a facility for wayward black girls.  She began working at the age of twelve, scrubbing the floors of a local brothel. It was here that she heard the music of Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith. At the age of 14 she was jailed for prostitution. Holiday vowed not to back to this way of life and sought work in local nightclubs as a dancer or a singer. She soon discovered that her melancholy singing style could bring customers to tears. Despite the power of her voice to move an audience Holiday’s chaotic lifestyle meant that she was unable to hold down a job and she moved from one nightclub to another. Holiday was no stranger to racism. She was singing with Artie Shaw’s band at the swanky Lincoln Hotel in New York. Given that the hotel was named after the president who emancipated the slaves, it is ironic that owner of the hotel objected to Billie sitting at the bar or mixing with customers, and demanded that a  she only use the tradesmen’s entrance and the freight elevator.

In 1939 Holiday left the group and began to perform regularly at Café Society, a haven for liberal intellectuals, college students, music aficionados, and the political left in general. The club, which was located in a basement in Greenwich Village, was owned by Barney Josephson and had been inaugurated in December 1938. The main room held about 220 people. Josephson wanted an American version of the political cabarets he had seen in Europe. Cafe Society was the first nightclub in a white neighbourhood to welcome customers of all races.  Even the legendary Cotton Club in Harlem, where Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Bessie Smith, Lena Horne and Cab Calloway all performed, was a segregated place. Occasionally a black celebrity would be admitted but even then they would generally be given the worst tables. Josephson, by contrast, had a clear vision:

“I wanted a club where blacks and whites worked together behind the footlights and sat together out front. There wasn’t, so far as I know, a place like it in New York or in the whole country.”

It was a transgressive place. Josephson wanted to showcase African American talent. But he also wanted to satirise café society; black customers were given the best seats, while the waiters greeted patrons while dressed in rags. Their advertising slogan was: “Café Society: the wrong place for Right people.”

Josephson heard the song and suggested that Holiday sing it. Given the nature of the lyrics Holiday was a bit reticent about performing it in public, but she finally agreed to do it. It was January 1939. It would be the song that she would close her set with. From the very first time that she sang it she established a ritual. As she prepared to sing the finale, service in the club stopped completely – the waiters stopped bringing drinks to the tables and the cash registers fell silent. The room went black except for a single spotlight trained on the singer. When she was done, Holiday would walk off the stage without giving an encore. How could you top that song? In Lady Sings the Blues, her autobiography, Holiday later recalled the audience’s stunned reaction the first time: “There wasn’t even a patter of applause when I finished. Then a lone person began clapping nervously. Then suddenly everyone was clapping.“

Holiday’s record company, Columbia, refused to record the song, fearing a racist backlash. Eventually she managed to record it with Commodore and it became her biggest selling record. It got little exposure on the airwaves, so the #16 position is really an achievement. The song was denounced by Time Magazine as “a prime piece of musical propaganda” for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP).

What about the two protagonists of our story? By the 1950s Holiday’s voice had deteriorated tremendously due to years of abuse and she continued even faster down her destructive path of drugs, abusive relationships, and alcohol. In 1959, Holiday collapsed and was hospitalized; while on her deathbed, she was arrested once again for possession of narcotics. She died on July 17, 1959, of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 44. Meeropol left the teaching profession in 1945 and went to Hollywood his other claim to fame is the adoption of the orphaned children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the married couple of American communists executed after being found guilty of espionage against the United States in 1953.

The song now has iconic status. Holiday’s version was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1978. It was also included in the list of Songs of the Century, by the Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts. Time magazine had a change of heart and named it the song of the century in 1999. It was, in the words of jazz writer Leonard Feather, “the first significant protest in words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism.” Less than two decades later America would be immersed in a civil rights war. Strange Fruit had been one of the opening salvoes. In October 1939, Samuel Grafton, writing in The New York Post described Strange Fruit thus: “If the anger of the exploited ever mounts high enough in the South, it now has its ‘Marseillaise’.” I don’t think Grafton was right; this was a political song but not a rousing hymn. Many protest songs are little more than propaganda, but “Strange Fruit” proved they could be art.

 I’ll finish with the impressions of the actress Billie Allen Henderson of a performance of the song at New York’s Birdland in 1952:

“I was standing there with my date when she started singing this song. I was trying to be sophisticated and all of a sudden something stabs me in the solar plexus and I was gasping for air. It was so deeply felt. I understood it. I could smell the burning flesh; I felt it. She was . . . unrelenting is a good word for it. Some didn’t know how to react.     They weren’t quite sure. Nobody stirred. It was startling, and I’ll never forget it. I thought, ‘That’s what art can do.’”

Anything you Khan do: how a former hedge fund trader is trying to transform education

In 2004 Salman Khan, then a senior hedge fund analyst, began remotely tutoring his cousin Nadia in mathematics. Word got round and other relatives and friends sought his help too. Realizing that it would be more efficient to distribute the tutorials on YouTube, he created an account there in November 2006. The videos proved to be extremely popular and the organization was incorporated as a non-profit in 2008. A year later Khan quit the day job to focus exclusively on developing Khan Academy full-time. Its goal is to provide “a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.” Students can make use of their 4,000 video tutorials, as well as interactive challenges, and assessments.  It can be used by both individual students or in the classroom and the system provides you with personalized data about how you are doing and which areas you are struggling in.

Khan Academy is just one example of the educational resources available online. I have been interested in online learning for a number of years now. Here are a few examples of what you can find out there:

Open Yale This is one of my favourites. You have video, audio and even the mid-term and final exams. The lectures come with the transcript, No course credit, degree, or certificate is available, but it’s a great way to capture a bit of the flavour of this prestigious Ivy League institution. Here is a selection of some of the courses:

Death

Financial Markets

Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics

Fundamentals of Physics

Game Theory

Introduction to Ancient Greek History

Introduction to Political Philosophy

Introduction to Psychology

Listening to Music

The American Novel Since 1945

The Great Courses This company was founded by Thomas M. Rollins, began life as The Teaching Company in 1990. Videos got Rollins, who graduated from Harvard Law School, out of a tight jam when he was a student. He had skipped a number of classes and was facing a difficult exam on the federal rules of evidence. In desperation he sat through ten hours of videotaped lectures by Professor Irving Younger. The lectures were, in his words, “outrageously insightful, funny, and thorough“. He describes it as one of his best experiences as a student. What’s more he got an A. He had initially intended to create a government program to produce tapes for the public, but was unable to do so because of legal restrictions. After leaving his job as Chief Counsel of the United States Senate Committee on Labour and Human Resources, he went looking for top professors to create courses for sale to the public. The Great Courses offers hundreds of courses in such areas as economics, literature, fine arts, music, history, philosophy, religion, mathematics and the social sciences. There are more than 500 available via CD, DVD and Internet download.

Their current top ten shows the enormous range of what they offer:

1. The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World
2. The Science of Natural Healing
3. Physiology and Fitness
4. Practicing Mindfulness: An Introduction to Meditation
5. Trails of Evidence: How Forensic Science Works
6. Mysteries of Modern Physics: Time
7. Introduction to Nanotechnology: The New Science of Small
8. Physics and Our Universe: How It All Works
9. Great Tours: Greece and Turkey, from Athens to Istanbul
10. Writing Creative Nonfiction

Coursera This educational technology company was founded by computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University in October 2011. Coursera works with universities to make some of their courses available online, and offers courses in engineering, humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences, mathematics, business, computer science, and other areas. Each course includes short video lectures on different topics and assignments to be submitted, usually on a weekly basis. Coursera is able to cut costs by having students grade their peers’ homework and employing statistical methods to validate the assessment.

Coursera is following an approach popular among Silicon Valley start-ups – grow fast and worry about money later. Venture capitalists and even two universities have invested more than $22-million but even Coursera seems unsure how it will monetise its courses. Daphne Koller explained the rationale:

“Our VC’s keep telling us that if you build a Web site that is changing the lives of millions of people, then the money will follow“. Possible solutions include:

1. having companies sponsor courses
2. offering certification
3. the sale of information to potential employers

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 These online courses offer the possibility for great teachers to leverage their talent. This is just like what happened to singers when new technologies meant that records could be sold or concerts broadcast. Lecturers who could only be seen by those actually in their class can now be enjoyed by people all over the world.

The great advantage is the flexibility; you are not bound by timetables or location. You can listen to a lecture on MP3 or watch it on a smartphone. This is perfect for me. I’m a bit of a commitment-phobe when it comes to online learning. I like to flit from one topic to another. I don’t really want to do an exam – for me it’s just a bit of fun. But there are other models. What Coursera offers is much more like a traditional college class. Students have to do around ten hours of study per week. They can watch the videos any time you want during the week, but they have to finish your assignments by the end of the week. The advantage of this is that everyone is working on the same thing at the same time; if they then want to go onto a discussion forum, they can get immediate help from one of your peers.

Many of the courses, such as Open Yale involve just a lecturer standing up in front of a group of people. That is what inspired Thomas Rollins. I love this format. Listening to an engaging professor talking about a subject that he is passionate about is a guilty pleasure for me. However, some people argue that this is a bad use of this medium. Salman Khan has been critical of the lecture format. He sees it as relic from the past. 200 years ago there was no alternative – but now we have so many technological possibilities. I can see what Khan is getting at. Filming someone teaching is not visually compelling. The great insight of what Khan does is that you listen to the voice, you don’t watch the professor. The material you see on the screen is what engages you visually, not the teacher’s face, mouth, gestures etc. Khan has another criticism of a lot of the material online. He thinks that people can pay attention for ten or twenty minutes. Then they start to zone out. That’s why they have micro lectures, which last less than 20 minutes

For us the availability of this material has meant that we haven’t had to pay for a private tutor for our son. How many tutors would be happy to go over the same point twenty times? That is the beauty of video – it enables you to go at your own pace, pausing whenever necessary and reviewing the material as many times as you want.

What about the classroom? Khan Academy materials can be used for class teaching. Flip teaching is one of the key concepts. This involves students watching the videos on their own, and then coming together to discuss them. A teacher can spend more time interacting with and tutoring students instead of lecturing. In the classroom pupils can then try to apply this knowledge by solving problems and doing project-based learning with lots of peer-to-peer learning.

I hope you find this as inspiring as I do. We are living in exciting times for education. I like the fact that there are different models. Let a thousand flowers bloom. I don’t believe that the traditional university will disappear anytime soon. Some of these ideas will prove to be dead ends. But others will help to transform the way we learn. We don’t really know what the best mix is. We are at a very early stage in the application of these technologies, and I can already see massive benefits.  So, I salute you Mr. Khan.

The world is flatus

This Earle of Oxford, making of his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a Fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed, that he went to Travell 7 yeares. On his returne the Queen welcomed him home and sayd, ‘My Lord, I had forgott the Fart.  John Aubrey, Brief Lives.

… farts are a kind of language. They are inherently social in a way that defecation is not. They tend to take your companions by surprise. Furthermore, farts are an occasion for self-examination, for questioning the extent of our freedom and the nature of self-mastery. We can’t help farting; it is a question of need. So part of what the Middle Ages wrestled with when people were talking about farts was this constant reminder of the needs of the body. Farting carries this reminder that the body behaves on its own, and there is nothing you can do about it. It reminds us that our bodily freedom is limited.

Farts carry anxiety and humour and disgust. People see themselves in the reactions of others and are thus intensely aware of themselves in those moments when farts manifest themselves. When you smell somebody you are closer to them than when you are just looking at them, but you are farther away than when you are touching them. Farts can create these moments rich with insight. I think much of the humour of farting is located on this very ordinary, humble level. On Farting: Laughter and Language in the Middle Ages by Valerie Allen

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Joseph Pujol was a singular character. When he was twelve he discovered that he had a unique talent. While swimming near Marseilles – he found that by contracting his abdomen muscles he could take water into his bowels and expel it in a powerful stream at will. He then stated practising with air instead of water and was able to make tenor, baritone, and bass fart sounds.

In 1892 Pujol began a stellar career at The Moulin Rouge in Paris with the stage name Le Petomane (The “Fartiste”). His show was pure spectacle. As well as thunder and cannons, he would imitate the farts of a little girl, a mother-in-law and a bride on her wedding night. He would then go backstage to put one end of a rubber tube into his anus. He returned to the stage and smoked a cigarette from this tube, which he used to play a couple of tunes on a flute. After removing the rubber tube, he would blow out some of the gas-jet footlights, before leading the audience in a rousing sing-along for the grand finale. The piece de resistance was his anal version of La Marseillaise, which would bring tears to the eyes of those watching. The Moulin Rouge is said to have hired nurses to deal with audience members who had laughing fits. His artistic talent has recently been commemorated in the musical “The Fartiste“, an Off-Broadway production.

Today I am going to be looking at farting. Flatulence, breaking wind, cutting the cheese, backdoor breeze, letting one rip and airbrushing your boxers – the act of expelling intestinal gases has been a rich source of language. The word “fart” is one of the oldest in English. Its immediate origins are in the Middle English word feortan, which itself is kin to the Old High German word ferzan.

The American comedian Sarah Silverman once commented that fart jokes are “the sign language of comedy.” In South Park they have been making them for nearly two decades. But Parker and Stone are in pretty exalted company. In The City of God Augustine mentions men who “have such command of their bowels, that they can break wind continuously at will, so as to produce the effect of singing“. Flatulent demons in the eighth ring of Hell make “trumpets of their asses” in Dante’s Divine Comedy. One of the most celebrated incidents of flatulence humour in early English literature is in The Miller’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer. The character Nicholas sticks his buttocks out of a window at night and humiliates his rival Absolom by farting in his face. Absolom gets his revenge by thrusting a red-hot blacksmith’s poker between Nicholas’s cheeks. In 1776 Benjamin Franklin found the time to publish a book of bawdy essays called Fart Proudly. The British explorer, and an outstanding linguist in his right, Sir Richard Burton wrote about a tribe of Arabian Bedouins who employed a subtle system of farts to transmit codes and warnings.

We like to think we are more sophisticated now. But we still find this kind of lavatorial humour funny. I Who can forget the scene from Blazing Saddles? The insult “I fart in your general direction” from Monty Python and the Holy Grail has become a classic n 2008, a farting application for the iPhone raked in nearly $10,000 in just one day. There are over 60 fart apps for the iPhone and iPod touch alone. Here are 31 of them:

The technical term for a fart is flatus. Farts contain variable amounts of nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, methane, and oxygen in subtly distinct combinations and percentages, they blend to form the infinite olfactory variety of the human fart – in the words of Alan Kligerman a “gas smell is as characteristic of a person as a fingerprint.” Human flatus may contain hydrogen and/or methane, which are both flammable. If sufficient amounts of these gases are present, it’s possible to light the fart on fire. This is the stuff of YouTube videos and as far as I know there has not been any significant scientific research on the subject.

There are many possible reasons why some people fart more than others; two of the most important are swallowing air when you eat or eating a lot of carbohydrates. If the gas results from the former the chemical composition will approximate that of air. If the fart is produced by digestion or bacterial production, the chemistry will be more varied. Foods that contain a high amount of indigestible carbohydrates include many of the usual suspects:

apples

artichokes

beans

broccoli

brussels sprouts

cabbage

cauliflower

lentils

prunes

pulses

raisins

Health conditions that can cause symptoms of flatulence include constipation, lactose intolerance, irritable bowel syndrome and coeliac disease. This last one is a common digestive condition which involves intolerance to a protein called gluten, which is found in wheat, rye and barley.

The gastrointestinal tract works like a factory production line breaking everything down so that it can enter the bloodstream. Once food reaches the stomach, all nutrients are broken down into smaller components, amino acids, fatty acids and glucose, which are absorbed in the small intestine. Flatulence occurs when a food does not completely break down in the stomach and intestine. This undigested food arrives at the large intestine. When the bacteria break this material down, they produce a variety of gases in a process analogous to when yeast produces carbon dioxide to leaven bread. The principal culprit of the odour we associate with flatulence is hydrogen sulphide. Anyway, these gases have to go somewhere. And that’s when the problems begin.

In January 2011, the Malawi Minister of Justice, George Chaponda, said that air fouling legislation would make public flatulence illegal in the southern African country. After being subjected to media ridicule the minister withdrew his proposal. Chaponda obviously went too far, but there is no doubt that flatulence is a constant source of embarrassment. Walking away is not a good solution the odour follows us, pulled along in the farter’s direction by air currents. Moreover, the smell gets caught in the clothing, and diffuses out slowly. You can always blame the dog. But that doesn’t cut the mustard. Surely in the 21^st century there must be a solution.

This search for a cure has been joined by a number of unsung heroes. No article about farting is complete without a reference to Dr. Fart. Michael D. Levitt, of the VA Medical Center in Minneapolis, is the world’s leading authority on flatulence. He has produced 34 papers on flatus. He notes that if you have on average more than 22 separate flatulent occurrences a day. This contrasts with two male patients who farted more than 140 times a day. It turned out that they were both lactose-intolerant; once dairy products were cut out of their diets, they returned to the normal range.

Buck Weimer, a retired Colorado psychologist designed fart-proof underpants for his wife Arlene, who suffers from Crohn’s disease, which causes bad-smelling gas. “You’re lying in bed with your wife and suffering but you don’t want to divorce a lady for body gas – it doesn’t look good on your resume; – so you start looking for solutions,” said Weimer talking about what motivated him. After a number of failed prototypes, he would eventually perfect and patent a filtration system. And the rest is history. Arlene’s social life was transformed and everyone in her bowel disease support group was demanding a pair. The Weimers now sell their Under-ease anti-flatulence underwear online. The website proudly proclaims:

“revolutionary patented underwear recommended by doctors for offensive gas“. Their strapline is “wear them for the ones you love.” This consideration will set you back some $30. They have been a success and they are now on their second generation.

You also have this alternative, Check out this infomercial for a blanket:

This is high-tech stuff. According to the manufacturer its layer of activated carbon fabric is the same technology used by the U.S. army to protect against chemical weapons.

There are, however others for whom the farts are not a problem. Just like everything else there are fetishists. The infatuation is called flatulophilia. Flatulophiles are usually male, and there is an important niche market for porn to cater for this group. I normally do extensive research preparing for my blog. I am fascinated by all manifestations of human behaviour. But fart porn is too much even for me.

A small article about Big Data

The statistics about data boggle the mind. The world’s data is doubling every 1.2 years. 90% of it has been created in the last two years. In 2012 there were two trillion gigabytes; by 2020 it will be 35 trillion gigabytes. We are not just consumers of this stuff. We have become active data agents, who spew out over 2.5 quintillion bytes every day from consumer transactions, communication devices, online behaviour and streaming services. This is our digital footprint. Of the 7 billion people on our planet over five billion own a mobile phone. Every day we make five billion Google searches, watch 2.8 billion YouTube videos and send over 11 billion texts. To be honest, I think that the names -terabyte, petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte or yottabyte – are like a foreign language. I would also like to know who compiles all these factoids that abound in TED talks or YouTube videos. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that we do have access to ever-increasing amounts of data

Welcome to the world of Big Data, the next big thing in the world of tech. The term is said to have been coined by John Mashey, a computer scientist working for Silicon Graphics in the mid-1990s. We are not the only source of this deluge of information. Data is becoming more understandable to computers. We now have the capacity to analyse unstructured data – stuff like words, images videos and streams of sensor data – that were inaccessible for traditional databases. Here are some of the major sources:

Scientific research data At CERN alone they produce 40 TB every second.

Retailer databases As a result of e-commerce and loyalty card schemes, retailers have been able to build up vast databases of recorded customer activity.

Vision recognition As vision recognition improves, it is starting to become possible for computers to glean meaningful information and data relationships from photographs and videos.

Internet of things As more smart objects go online, Big Data is also being generated by an expanding Internet of Things. One example is the sensors used to gather climate information.

Big Data generates value from the storage and processing of humongous quantities of digital information. Rather than just to putting data into silos for data storage for relatively little return we will be able to analyse these enormous datasets. It’s a new kind of asset – like a vital new mineral. Big Data is best understood in terms of the three Vs: variety, velocity and volume, i.e. large quantities of data of all kinds generated in real time. Crunching big numbers can help us learn a lot about ourselves and our world; it is “humanity’s dashboard”. This data can’t be analyzed using traditional computing techniques. It requires new systems, software and computers. And then you have those incredible machine-learning algorithms – the more data, the more they learn.

Big Data has the potential to improve analytical insight. It really is an extraordinary time to be a researcher with so much internet data available. It is being mined in areas as diverse as astrophysics, biology, economics or linguistics.

Google, Amazon and Facebook have already shown how it is possible to deliver personalised search results, advertising, and product recommendations using the vast amounts of data they handle. One third of Amazon’s sales are said to come from its recommendation engine. In a previous post I talked about the company Epagogix, whose algorithm uses big data analysis to evaluate the potential profitability of movies and TV shows before they get made.  It is not just something that can be exploited by corporations. Big Data has the potential to be an intelligent tool that will enable us to:

Improve traffic management in cities, permitting the smarter operation of electricity generation infrastructures.

Help farmers to accurately forecast bad weather and crop failures.

Predict and plan for criminal activity or pandemics.

One exciting application is medicine. In the U.S. there is now an ambitious project to collect data on the care of hundreds of thousands of cancer patients and use it to help guide treatment of other patients across the health-care system. Cancer specialists would be able to consult the database, where they would be able to see how similar patients had fared on a particular regimen. The rationale is that information gleaned from huge clinical databases will give us a wealth of information about the benefits and harms of treatments. Ultimately it should lead to better quality healthcare and the development of new drugs.

Chris Anderson, an early fan of Big Data, foresees the end of theory and the demise of the expert:

There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough.” We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.

So are we about to enter a data utopia? I fear not.

There are important privacy issues, but those will have to wait for another post. I am going to concentrate on the methodological objections.  What is the value of having this amount of data? Nassim Taleb has branded it a nasty phenomenon, cherry picking on an industrial scale. It may mean more information, but it also means more false information. Trevor Hastie, a statistics professor at Stanford has warned about the danger of looking for a meaningful needle in massive haystacks of data; many bits of straw look like needles. We must be wary of lies, damned lies and Big Data. I am particularly nervous about its application in finance.

Nevertheless, I am a fan of Big Data. As an English teacher, I love the access to so much grammar and lexis in the wild. Of course we need to be aware of generating spurious correlations. However, we had spurious correlations before the invention of big data. The classic case of this comes from the late 1940s in the USA when it was thought that there was a relationship between polio and the consumption of ice cream and soft drinks. We always need to have a healthy dose of scepticism when it comes to statistics. But I feel that knowing more about the world is a good thing. In the past inventions like the microscope and the telescope opened our eyes to worlds we could never have imagined. Some people feel uneasy about human activity being quantified in this way. In his book about the calculation of risk, Against the Gods, Peter Bernstein talked about how the Catholic Church had been opposed to statistics because they believed they were incompatible with the notion of free will.

I don’t believe in panaceas, but I think that Big Data presents us with some important opportunities. Time, that incorruptible judge, will tell us how much was hype.

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*In this article I have used data with a singular verb. Though strictly speaking it should take a plural verb, as far as I am concerned data wants to be singular. This is like agenda – no one ever uses agendum.

The Czar of the Ritz: Nucky Johnson

If the people who came to town had wanted Bible readings, we’d have given ’em that. But nobody ever asked for Bible readings. They wanted booze, broads, and gambling, so that’s what we gave ’em.  Local Attorney Murray Fredericks on the success of Atlantic City

[Johnson] was born to rule: He had flair, flamboyance, was politically amoral and ruthless, and had an eidetic memory for faces and names, and a natural gift of command … [Johnson] had the reputation of being a trencherman, a hard drinker, a Herculean lover, an epicure, a sybaritic fancier of luxuries and all good things in life. Nucky Johnson’s obituary, Atlantic City Press, December 10, 1968

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A few weeks back I did a piece praising the HBO series Boardwalk Empire. In it I mentioned that the central character was based on a real historical figure Enoch “Nucky” Johnson. In the series they changed the surname to Thompson. This was probably a good idea as it gave them more artistic license. I love the TV series and I think Steve Buscemi is wonderful in the central role, but I wanted to know more about the real man.

To this end I recently read Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times and Corruption of Atlantic City by Nelson Johnson (no relation to Nucky). The book looks at Atlantic City from its foundation in the 1850s to the arrival of Donald Trump in the 1980s. The star of the book is undoubtedly Johnson, the man who ran the city for almost three decades. The Czar of the Ritz would stroll along the boardwalk a dapper figure in an elegant 3-piece suit, a red carnation in his lapel, spats on his feet and a walking stick in hand. He was chauffeured around town in a powder blue limousine. He lived in a luxury suite at the Ritz hotel, but also maintained several residences. His largesse was legendary. He was a party animal who loved to host lavish bashes. He had enough servants and people willing to do his bidding to make even Lord and Lady Grantham feel envious. Who was this charismatic leader and how he was able to remain in power for three decades?

Enoch Lewis Johnson was born on January 20, 1883, in Galloway Township, New Jersey. His nickname “Nucky” is a derivation of Enoch. Johnson, who had a booming voice, was a tall, bespectacled, physically imposing man, standing one metre ninety-three and weighing more than a hundred kilos. If you have seen the HBO series, you will realise that the two Nuckys are very different.

In 1906 Nucky married his teenage sweetheart, Mabel Jeffries. Two years later he was elected Sheriff of Atlantic County when his father’s term expired. During his term as sheriff he was indicted for election fraud, but was acquitted and became a local hero and a rising political star. Then tragedy struck in 1912 when Mabel died.

With Mabel’s death, Nucky focussed all his energies on politics. He went from the sheriff’s office to the Republican Party machine. In 1911, local political boss Louis “the Commodore” Kuehnle had been convicted of electoral fraud and imprisoned, and Nucky Johnson stepped up as leader of the Republican political organization that controlled Atlantic City. He became secretary to the Republican County Committee. He may not have a salary, but it was the secretary who called meetings, established the agenda, and made decided on who was eligible to participate in the organization. Nucky was then appointed county treasurer, which may not sound particularly glamorous, but it gave him access to a lot of dough. As well as the money, he was responsible for selecting of candidates. Nucky had inherited from the Commodore a system that was working. But he was able to perfect it. A brilliant organiser and a cunning strategist, he had an acute sense of what made humans tick.

Nucky would remain county treasurer for the next 30 years. Like the Commodore he never actually sought election while he was boss. He believed that a boss should never be a candidate – running for election was beneath their dignity. Instead he would be a power broker. The Republicans had dominated Atlantic City since the end of the Civil War. Its hierarchy was based on the four voting wards of Atlantic City, which were where the party was able to crank out the votes that kept the Republicans permanently in power.

Nucky learnt another lesson from the Commodore – the poor also voted, and if you took care of them, you could count on their votes. In a time when there were no welfare provisions, he was their benefactor. Just like today’s Republican Party really! During the long winter he would see to it that people were tided over until the tourist season. A generous tipper, he even courted children, future voters. He was also loved by Atlantic City’s black population, who lived in the Northside district. He “owned” the poor vote and he could count on their presence at the polling station, sometimes more than once.  Nucky was a master in providing the large turnouts needed to produce the “right” election results.

Nucky knew that it was necessary to control the flow of money to the candidates. If you had a continuous flow of cash, you could make sure that reformers wouldn’t win. Under Nucky protection money paid by Atlantic City’s racketeers became a major source of revenue for the business of politics. These payments weren’t voluntary. If you didn’t pay up, he would shut you down.

The defenestration of the Commodore had shown Nucky that it wasn’t sufficient to be a local boss – he needed to be a force in the state of New Jersey. In 1916 he was Republican Walter Edge’s campaign manager in the latter’s run for governor. As well as raising money for Edge, Nucky began an unofficial alliance with Democrat boss Frank Hague. They struck a deal in which Edge effectively ceded North Jersey to Hague in return for keeping South Jersey for himself. When Edge became governor he rewarded Nucky by appointing him clerk of the State Supreme Court.

The system in Atlantic City was all-encompassing. You had to be on the right side of the party if you wanted to work in local government. Under a practice known as “macing”, city and county workers had to pay between 1% and 7% of their salary to the local Republican Party, if they wanted to keep their jobs.  He took an interest in everyone on the public payroll, personally interviewing and approving every person hired. Thus he established a personal link with them and they felt loyalty towards him.  Nucky also controlled every contract for public construction jobs and other tenders. But above all he controlled the police. They were his own personal force, vital for the protection of Atlantic City’s rackets and the collection of the payoffs from bars, gambling rooms, and whorehouses.

The most inaccurate part of the TV depiction of Atlantic City is the overplaying of the violence. Nucky never needed to be violent with adversaries. He worked by using the Republican Party machine to systematically destroy those that caused him trouble. The strength of the machine was so overwhelming that, if you crossed him, you would lose your government job, have your license revoked or see your business close because the customers would suddenly decide to go elsewhere.  Neither Nucky nor his followers are known to have ever had anyone killed or physically harmed. Not having to resort to violence, now that is real power. As Nelson Johnson put it – buck Nucky Johnson and you lost your livelihood, but not your life.

It was vice that made Nucky and Atlantic City so successful. The booze, broads, and gambling that the tourists demanded were what drove the local economy. Reformers or critics of the status quo were bad for business and couldn’t be allowed to prevail. There was only one ideology – economic success.  Nucky was a consummate politician who understood that what he had to deliver to maintain Republican Party hegemony. The way to achieve growth was through the protected violation of vice laws.

Early in his reign Nucky received a gift from heaven the nineteenth amendment and the Vorstead Act. Prohibition was good to Atlantic City – and to Nucky; it reduced the general availability of alcohol while greatly increasing the money available for political corruption and organized crime. It was party time and “America‘s favourite playground” knew how to give its visitors a good time. The liquor flowed and the party seemed as though it would go on forever. The real business of Atlantic City’s boss was protection money from the local rackets. He claimed a yearly salary of $36,000 – $6,000 as Republican county treasurer, and $30,000 a year in unspecified commissions. In fact, Nucky was raking in more than $500,000 a year as his share of the profits from Atlantic City’s vice industry. He got “tribute” of $6 per case on all alcohol brought into Atlantic City during Prohibition, “inspection fees” paid by brothel owners, “wire service charges” paid by horse race betting rooms, and a percentage of the profits from all the other gambling that was going on.

This was the period of the rise of the gangsters Lucky Luciano, Al Capone, Meyer Lansky, Arnold Rothstein, and Johnny Torrio. Indeed, Atlantic City was chosen as the venue for the first meeting of the first nationwide crime syndicate. It was the logical choice; Nucky’s town was the envy of other mobsters. Here the rackets were immune from the police and the courts. In May 1929 the meeting took place. Long, black limousines carrying mobsters arrived in town from all over the country. They knew they would not be hassled and they would be able to experience Nucky’s legendary hospitality. The meeting marked the creation of the first nationwide criminal syndicate.

But the golden age was coming to an end. Less than six months after the meeting the stock market crashed, setting off the Great Depression. Illicit businesses were still thriving, but the hotels, restaurants and shops suffered. Then in 1933 Prohibition was repealed, which eliminated a source of income for Nucky and his machine. The final blow for Nucky came on May 10, 1939 when he was indicted for evading taxes between 1935 and 1937. In July 1941, after a two-week trial, Nucky was found guilty, and sentenced to ten years in federal prison and fined $20,000. On August 1, 1941, Nucky, now 58, remarried. His second wife was 33-year old Florence “Flossie” Osbeck, a former showgirl from Philadelphia, who had been his fiancée for three years. Ten days after the wedding Nucky entered Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. Never again would Nucky reign over Atlantic City.

Nucky was paroled on August 15, 1945 and after his release lived with his wife and brother in Atlantic City. He did not seek public office instead working in sales for the Richfield Oil Company He continued to dress impeccably, including the trademark red carnation in his lapel. His popularity was undiminished and he used it to support his successor Frank S. Farley, who would also control the city for thirty years. Nucky’s health gradually deteriorated. His final days were spent drinking whiskey and talking about the glory days with his former cronies, who would pay him regular visits. On December 9, 1968, Nucky died at the age of 85; he is said to have had a smile on his face.

So there we have the singular life of Enoch Lewis Johnson. I have to admit I have an unhealthy fascination with the world of party machines, graft, gerrymandering, ballot-stuffing, kickbacks, bribes, extortion and the like. It would be comforting to see Nucky Johnson as a product of another time and place. And that is undoubtedly true. However, pick up any newspaper today and you will see that political corruption is still with us and is unlikely to go away any time soon.

Let those encyclopedias burn!

Indeed, the purpose of an encyclopaedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race in the future years to come. Denis Diderot

A certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge:

On those remote pages [of ‘‘a certain Chinese encyclopaedia’’] it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f ) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance. The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, Jorge Luis Borges

I’m not going to buy my kids an encyclopaedia. Let them walk to school like I did. Yogi Berra

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The philosopher Julian Baggini recently set light to his 32-volume Encyclopaedia Britanica. I imagine that many of you will be horrified by such barbarism. It has echoes of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian Fahrenheit 451. The German poet Heinrich Heine famously said: ‘Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.’ This remark was very prescient as it comes from a play written more than a hundred years before the rise of Nazism. Burning books is seen as a sacrilegious act; this quote from The Penultimate Peril, the sixth book in the Lemony Snicket series illustrates this taboo:

“The burning of a book is a sad, sad sight, for even though a book is nothing but ink and paper, it feels as if the ideas contained in the book are disappearing as the pages turn to ashes and the cover and binding–which is the term for the stitching and glue that holds the pages together–blacken and curl as the flames do their wicked work. When someone is burning a book, they are showing utter contempt for all of the thinking that produced its ideas, all of the labour that went into its words and sentences, and all of the trouble that befell the author . . .”

What motivated Baggini to engage in premeditated bibliocide? He makes an eloquent case for why the “mouldy, unread and long out of date” encyclopaedias had to go:

In my defence, this was more of a cremation than a burning at the stake. The books were already dead, terminally rotted after years of neglect. If I had committed a crime, it was to let them get into this sorry state, not finally to put them out of their misery.

Encyclopaedias have existed for some two millennia; the oldest still in existence, Naturalis Historia, was written in AD 77 by Pliny the Elder. The modern encyclopaedia evolved out of dictionaries around the 17th century. Some were one-volume works, but soon multi-volume encyclopedias would emerge. Indeed, the largest print encyclopedia in the world is the Spanish language Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada Europeo-Americana. It is made up of 116 books, 175,000 pages and 200 million words.

An important landmark in the history of the encyclopaedia was the French Encyclopédie, which has been dubbed “the European Enlightenment in book form.” The project attracted some of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment – Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu and Denis Diderot. Their goal was to bring together all that was known of the world in one comprehensive encyclopaedia.

It has to be said that the beginnings in 1743 were not too auspicious. The original idea was to translation Chambers’ Cyclopaedia from English into French. The Parisian book publisher André Le Breton was the man behind the project. John Mills, an Englishman living in France, was hired. However, due to Mills’s deficient knowledge of French, – he could barely read or write it – the translation was a disaster.  The publisher had Mills beaten up – he was punched in the stomach and hit over the head with a cane. Mills sued for assault, but the French court ruled that Le Breton’s actions had been justified and acquitted him.

The project was then taken on by Jean le Rond d’Alembert, one of Europe’s leading mathematicians. His partner in crime would be the Enlightenment polymath Diderot, who was born 300 years ago. It became a bestseller with 28 volumes which were published in a period of more than 20 years. A complete set of the first edition cost some 1,000 livres, and there were over 4,000 subscribers. The publishers made a fortune even though the work was quickly pirated and reprinted in cheaper editions. Plus ça change.

Louis XV banned Diderot’s encyclopedia in 1759 for “damage that results from it in regard to morality and religion“. It was banned a couple of times. There were decidedly anti-religious overtones to the work. Religion was categorised as a product of human reason and not an independent source of knowledge. A famous example was the cross-references provided for cannibalism, which directed readers to the entries for Eucharist, communion and altar.

There is no doubt that the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was first published between 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh, was conceived in part as a response to the Encyclopédie. The Britannica was primarily a Scottish enterprise. It is one of the most enduring legacies of the Scottish Enlightenment, the period between when Adam Smith, David Hume and others helped Scotland become an intellectual powerhouse. It began as a three-volume set; the final print version came with 32 volumes. Last year, after 244 years, the printed version of the Encyclopedia Britannica was finally killed off. If you want to consult it now, you have to go online. One man who will surely miss it is the journalist A.J. Jacobs, who spent nearly eighteen months reading the entire set, some 44 million words, for his entertaining memoir, The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World.

In the United States, the 1950s and 1960s several large popular encyclopaedias began to be sold on instalment plans. It is unfortunate that books that should be a celebration of human knowledge became associated with unscrupulous door-to-door salesmen. These shysters would use all the tricks of the trade as they preyed on hapless customers. They would often begin with the $10,000 limited edition. After that the $1,500 for the standard edition seemed like a bargain. Parents wanted their children to have the Britannia Advantage. I suppose you can interpret this in two ways. You could see it as a powerful example of how parents were prepared to make important sacrifices for their children’s future. On the other hand it shows how marketers were able to create a state of anxiety in their customers, playing on parents’ fears. It is an example of consumer culture driving unrealistic goals. As Baggini points out:

A child’s success does depend on school grades, but these depend more on the social background and the culture of the home than any purchased learning aids. A set of encyclopaedias that remains an item of furniture is not enough to give a child an edge; nor is it necessary if the household is one in which learning, inquiry and debate are all part of daily life.

Baggini believes that these would probably have been better off investing their money on real books that children might actually have read. Encyclopaedias may have been the most admired volumes on the bookshelves, but they were also the least read. I hardly remember ever consulting them. This is like when people have Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time on their bookshelves.

As the 20th century came to a close, encyclopedias were being published on CD-ROMs for use on home computers. I absolutely loved Encarta, which Microsoft launched in 1993. The encyclopaedia, which had no printed equivalent, had around 50,000 articles, with additional images, videos and sounds. Little did I know that the relentless march of creative destruction would do away with this wonderful tool – in 2009 Microsoft pulled the plug on Encarta. What killed it off were of course the online encyclopaedias, the most famous of which is Wikipedia. Microsoft just couldn’t compete with a product that apart from being free was much more dynamic, with it being possible to update articles in real time.

I celebrate the demise of the encyclopedia. We shouldn’t be taken in by its mystique – the smell of the leather binding and the intellectual authority that these weighty tomes embody. They may have been beautiful objects, but I prefer the freedom that an internet connection gives us. In Spain they like to invoke Saint Google.  Information has been democratised and I welcome it.

There is a deeper idea here. We need to forget the idea that knowledge, which is in a constant state of flux, can be set down in black and white. Encyclopaedias belong to a time when knowledge was owned by a handful of established authorities, who would decide not only what was true but what deserved to be included. How will we cope with a loss of faith in absolute knowledge?  I have no problem embracing uncertainty. The world is changing, and books, magazines and education will have to adapt to this. Baggini argues that we haven’t yet fully worked out what the demise of print encyclopaedias, and all they symbolise, means for truth and knowledge. We need to find a philosophically coherent position between absolute certainty and absolute relativism. Online encycopaedias better reflect the reality of human knowledge. The print encylopaedia is dead. Long live Saint Google!

The case for the defence

“A criminal defence attorney has to be as proud of his enemies as of his friends.”

The quote above is by the American defence lawyer Alan Dershowitz. He was once asked in an interview what he would have done if he had been asked to defend the infamous Nazi Dr. Mengele. Dershowitz, who is himself a Jew, replied that he would have represented him, got him acquitted, and then strangled him outside the courtroom.

Alan Morton Dershowitz, who was born in 1938, is an American lawyer, jurist, and political commentator. A distinguished academic, he has spent most of his career at Harvard Law School, where in 1967, at the tender age of 28, he became the youngest full professor of law in its illustrious history. He is in the American context a political liberal. However, he has courted controversy with his proposal that judges issue torture warrants, and his impassioned defence of Israel, a subject guaranteed to raise the hackles of the left.

As well as his teaching and research, Dershowitz takes on a limited number of high-profile cases in his role as an appellate criminal defence lawyer. As he is paid by HarvardLawSchool, he does not depend on his income as a lawyer. This means that he has the luxury of picking and choosing the clients he is going to defend. You may not have heard of Dershowitz, but I am sure you will be familiar with some of his clients:

Claus von Bülow

Jim Bakker

Mike Tyson

O.J. Simpson

Bill Clinton

Patty Hearst

WikiLeaks

I should add that Dershowitz does not just represent celebrities; he takes half of his cases on a pro bono (free) basis. He has been dubbed the “winningest defence lawyer in history.” In his career Dershowitz has won more than 100 cases. He has an impressive strike rate for a part-time advocate who specialises in criminal appeals, which are notoriously difficult to win. In total Dershowitz has represented 36 people charged with homicide, 30 of whom were acquitted.” He does concede that most of them were probably guilty, but he can not know be sure which ones. For Dershowitz the system of justice is only as good as it is toward the worst person. He is quite open about representing guilty defendants – that is reality of being a defence lawyer. We might like to console ourselves with the Perry Mason image of the heroic defender. In the famous series Mason’s clients were always hapless victims of frame-ups, and the fearless lawyer was always able to unmask the real culprit at the end of the episode. Alas, this is pure fiction. Dershowitz argues that any defence lawyer who tells you that most of his clients are not guilty is either bullshitting or deliberately choosing only to represent a few innocent defendants. Dershowitz intentionally shies away from this. Whether the defendant is guilty, or his personal opinion about them, is irrelevant.  He is a gadfly who likes nothing better than representing guilty and contemptible defendants, whose prospects of winning appear minimal – this is one of the key obligations of being a defence lawyer. He likes to integrate his teaching and lawyering, and the challenging cases that he likes to take provide material for classroom discussion. What he ultimately strives for are those cases and that set a legal precedent.

What are the responsibilities of defence lawyer? I will be focussing mainly on the United States because their legal culture is so familiar to us through books and films. But much of what I’m going to say applies to many other legal systems. I could have looked at the rich English tradition of common law, or the alternative favoured in Spain and France – the inquisitorial system.

It is not the function of a defence lawyer to decide if his client is guilty or not. They must instead determine if the laws were followed in relation to the charges against their client. The fundamental duty of a criminal defence lawyer is to vigorously defend their client within the bounds of the law. This is the principle of zealous representation. The duty of a defence lawyer is not to do justice, but to defend their client. Their role is not analogous with that of the prosecutor whose role is not to prosecute, but to do justice. To effectively represent their clients defence lawyers must have a good grasp of the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment protects against unlawful searches and seizures, while the Fifth Amendment governs the right to remain silent so you do not incriminate yourself. In the United States this is known as a Miranda warning, and it usually goes something like this:

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.

In Britain it was tweaked a bit a few years ago:

You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.

If there are no constitutional violations, the work of a criminal defence lawyer might be more about negotiation, arranging a deal or plea bargain that permits their client to admit guilt to a lesser offense or that results in a lower sentence than if the accused has pleaded guilty.

The most famous obligation of a lawyer is that of confidentiality. To be admitted to the bar a lawyer must vow to “maintain inviolate the confidences of a client.“  Even if a client confesses to committing a serious crime, their lawyer cannot divulge this information to anyone. The rationale is that by assuring confidentiality the privilege encourages clients to make “full and frank” disclosures to their lawyers, enabling the latter to provide frank advice and more effective representation. A lawyer who violates this confidentiality may be reprimanded or even disbarred for life.

This is the theory. In practice it must be very hard to represent some types of criminal. I can’t imagine how I would feel if I got a paedophile off on a technicality or I had to cross-examine the victim of abuse. The recent case of Frances Andrade is a cautionary one. Andrade, a 48-year-old professional violinist killed herself on January 24^th this year, three days after she had given evidence at the trial of choirmaster Michael Brewer, who was found guilty of five counts of indecent assault. The abuse took place when Andrade was a teenager. Could her suicide have been prevented? The case raises questions about the role of Kate Blackwell QC, the defence barrister who cross-examined her. After the trial Andrade texted a friend to say she felt like she had been “raped all over again” after appearing in the witness box at Manchester crown court. Blackwell had accused her of lying and being a fantasist. Does she bear some responsibility for Andrade’s death?

Technicalities are not trivial and the defence should be allowed to rigorously challenge evidence that could send someone to prison for many years. I found it a little unsettling when, after the recent Jimmy Saville case, the police were saying that victims “will be believed.” I always take issue with some feminists. When it comes to rape they seem to want to forget the rule of William Blackstone: It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.

Defence lawyers may be seen by some as ethical scumbags, but I don’t see it that way. We should only incarcerate people when there is overwhelming evidence to justify it. What emotions do they feel when their guilty clients go free? They know that the constitutional prohibition against “double jeopardy” means that their clients will go unpunished. But that is their job and it is one for which we should be grateful to them.