In Which I Shudder at Change

I've always disliked the Duckworth-Lewis handicap system for one-day cricket, partly because of its quite unnecessary complexity, and partly for the related reason that, being rather opaque, it is not obviously fair. This may not make it unfair, but when it produces an impossibly high target after a few lost overs for a side that was going along quite nicely, or every ball, run or especially wicket causes the DL figure to lurch and bounce about like a drunk in a dark alley, or there is a rush to shorten the innings and calculate a target at the first sign of a drop of rain, even though there is plenty of time left to finish the game, it is hard to avoid the impression that it was bought up after a gleaming pitching session at HQ by men in shiny suits and sunglasses with cybernetic blackboards and laser pointers, and promises of free merchandising products if they got the nod, rather than for what it might actually add to the beauty of the game. It was too clever, and too pretty, to refuse, but what problem was is it intended to solve? Something much, much simpler had always been used. Everyone knew where they were all the time, you could easily change your tactics if there was a chance of rain, and it was both transparent and intuitively fair.

Mind you, being, in all the important things in life, as entrenched a conservative as ever wore tights and walked backwards at the State Opening of Parliament, I never liked this new-fangled limited overs stuff in the first place (even though it's older than I am). So I may well be missing something.

In any case this post is not about cricket, but ski-jumping. Mrs Hickory and I are both fans. They do it mostly at Sunday lunchtime, and there are few better ways of digesting your roast than watching people throwing themselves over cliffs in the frozen wastes of northern Scandinavia (watching the Addis Ababa marathon is up there with it, perhaps). Suddenly, someone has come up with a way of compensating for differences in the starting gate (which had never existed before, everyone jumped from the same gate) and for variations in the wind, which have always been thought of as part of the sport, the rub of the green.

There are two major problems with this that I can see (three if you include the aforesaid conservatism). The first is the same as with DL, that is, although there is a reassuringly complex procedure for coming up with a reassuringly precise figure to add to or subtract from the points total, there is no obvious way of checking that it is fair. The figure is not intuitively meaningful, and so it looks like an arbitrary correcting factor. The second problem is that it diminishes the spectacle enormously. Until now you knew what each jumper had to do to go ahead of the current leader, you could see what he had done, and you could see whether there were any clear technical defects which would cause the judges to mark it down. Suddenly the jump itself is not that important; you have to wait for the machine to spit out the number before you know what's happened. And this is every time, every jump, not just a bad solution to what is in cricket at least a real problem, the rain, but a solution to nothing at all which has made the whole thing much less fun to watch. For that reason I suspect it will not survive. I hope not, anyway.

This may not be important in the great scheme of things, but it got me wondering about how these decisions are arrived at, and I suspect dark plottings, money spinning, and stupidity.

Miguel Delibes, Man

Miguel Delibes died on Friday. He has been the grand old man of Spanish letters for as long as I've lived here, which is over twenty years. His first novels, recognised as good, were written in the 1940's and he continued to publish until a few years before his death.

He had competition as the great Spanish writer, particularly from Camilo José Cela, but Cela, though undoubtedly a writer of genius, was also an irrascible old s***e, whereas Delibes wrote, then went off for a pint, or to the football, or to pot a few rabbits in the woods.

His place in the hearts and minds of Spain as a whole, and particularly Valladolid, which is in a genuine and unaffected state of mourning, was won largely by being an agreeable, intelligent man who liked people, was aware of those around him, placed enormous value on his family and friends, and told very good stories very well. He wrote because he enjoyed it and was good at it, not to publicise his sense of his own importance or to express simplistic political opinion. He rarely gave interviews, and he never got involved in the great self-appreciation movement that for many seems to be the main purpose of literature and the arts in general. His great loves were hunting and Real Valladolid football club. I should imagine the former gave him more unmixed pleasure than the latter.

A great man, has left us. And part of his greatness was that he himself would never have imagined that he was more than a normal chap.

Broadly on the same subject, Óscar Pujol is a Sanskrit scholar who spent 13 years preparing a Sanskrit-Catalán dictionary, said to be the first in a Peninsular language. This may well be true, I certainly know no other, not even in Spanish. I use Monier-Williams in theory, though in practice, Theodore Benfey's dictionary is easier to handle. (There's an on-line Monier-Williams, by the way, which is fiddly and often unhelpful, but can be a lot quicker. This one's useful, too.)

Pujol is now at the Casa Asia, and collaborates with the University of Valladolid, and I mention him here because he seems to have a deep love and knowledge of Sanskrit literature and the culture that created it, and to some extent still does. Also, a man who can spend 13 years of his life writing a dictionary to help speakers of one small minority language (nearly all of whom are bilingual in Spanish, so it reduces his possible readership very dramatically and quite unnecessarity) understand another language which, despite its beauty, and its historical, cultural and literary richness, is of interest to very few people indeed outside of India, has my respect and regard. (The only Sanskrit department I know of in Spain is at Salamanca.)

And so I raise my glass this evening to these two men. Without pretending to compare anything about them, I merely recognise that they have both made the world, as I understand it, a better place by being in it.

I Feel it in my Bones

The damp, that is.




I spoke a while back of our attitude to rain over here. Good stuff, is how we think of it, wish there were more of it. You'll need an umbrella, about time, is our reaction. Filling the reservoirs, wetting the soil. These things matter here, and we are always glad to see the rain.

However...

It started raining in late November, and hasn't really stopped. The reservoirs are overflowing, the rivers are bursting their banks, whole estates built on dried up riverbeds are being all but swept away, the soil is so damp you can sink into it up to your knees and we are all, fickle types that we are, thoroughly sick of the sight of rain. We don't need any more, not for a year or so.

It is rather pretty, though. Compare these before and after photos of the river below the old town (basically an abandoned fortress compound from the 12thC, recently re-excavated. The more modern city is several miles from the river, for reasons not unconnected to some serious smiting at the hands of the conquering Arabs in 1195).

The whole effect is remarkable to see, if you are used to the browns and yellows that we have here nearly all the year, including winter, outside of the field that are irrigated one way or another, and we don't do much irrigation here, you need water for that. The yellows and browns are light and bright, and have character and beauty, but it is good to see green from time to time. The lakes this year in Ruidera will be spectacular. I look forward to seeing them soon.

The bridge is called Roman, because of the style it is perceived to have, rather than its origins. It's 19thC and not of any special interest. The second photo is taken from it, looking towards what is the foreground in the first photo.

It is very rare indeed to have so much rain, and so much cold. It snowed again on Monday. I don't know whether this is global warming, incipient Armageddon or just time to move to the Bahamas. Or perhaps it's no more than an excuse to post some photographs.

In Praise of Ignorance

"Dear Mr Delibes,

It is always a pleasure to hear from someone who’s read the blog. I don’t think many people do, to be honest, and only about half a dozen have ever written proper emails, rather than quick comments. Not all of them said anything relevant to what I’d written, either, but there you are. It’s nice to know you have some kind of public, so I thank you for being mine.

You may, however, not have quite understood the point of my recent posts, which were, I admit, out of tenor with the stated purpose of the blog, and with most of the usual content. But why not, it’s my blog, and I’ll digress if I want to. (That’s quite snappy in its way.)

I wasn’t suggesting that I aspire to ignorance. I don’t. I’ve been fairly well-educated for far too long to really want to change that much. I like knowing things, and I wish I understood more of them...

Old habits etc. And better the devil you know, you know. We invest much of our security and happiness, and probably our sanity, in our own ideas about what we are, and I can’t imagine not knowing at least what I know, because I would be someone else, or I might just not exist at all. It’s a frightening idea isn’t it, not being who you are? And I’m not trying to force ignorance on anybody else, either. Don’t think I’m being hypocritical. I am not suggesting we should stop trying to educate the young nor that we should expose foetuses to neat alcohol, merely that there may be some advantages to be found in total, or almost total, ignorance.

I suppose it can never be considered a goal in life, partly because no one who is not ignorant would ever wish to be, and those who are are, I should think, incapable of conceiving the difference between themselves and others clearly enough to articulate a meaningful desire to remain as they are. I hope that makes sense. I just mean that I don’t think anyone would consciously wish to be ignorant, and ignorant people probably don’t realize that it’s not all bad- or that it’s not all good, either.

...

In order to explain why I think there may be benefits in ignorance, we have to look at what it means to have learning, or at least a little knowledge. So let’s consider a few things:

The more you know, the more you realize there is to know. Socrates said it, more or less, and a lot of other people have discovered it to be true. Why is it that the people with the loudest, most unshakeable opinions on any subject are those who know least about it. It’s easy to oppose fanatically a law when you haven’t read it, or condemn a film you haven’t seen, or label a person you don’t know as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or some such thing...

...all we do is confuse ourselves, take away our certainty, and waste a lot of time, all for nothing. It’s much easier not to know, and better psychologically, surely.

...

So the first obvious reason to remain in ignorance is that it makes for greater intellectual comfort and avoids unnecessary complications. In other words, it makes for a quiet life, which most of us would consider an excellent thing..."

The photo shows our local river, the Guadiana, last Sunday. It is usually no more than a foul-smelling ditch, but this winter it is a genuine swirling torrent. it even smells like a river now.

Australians: The Observer Speaks

Via The Englishman I was pointed to this article in the Observer, which is a long, ignorant stream of nonsense about Australian aborigines. It's really not worth reading. Among other things, he asks this question, which led me to leave the following comment, and I thought it was worth making into a post.

It's difficult to believe that anything can pass down unchanged, though, for a thousand generations. Is that really possible?

No, it isn't.

These stories, fascinating as they undoubtedly are, are no more a description of anything real than the book of Genesis or the Works and Days or the Mahabharata. Over a very few generations the stories change out of all recognition, at least with regard to any useful details. They serve a religious function, justifying certain behaviours and outlawing others; an identifying function, giving people a sense of themselves and their history and importance; an entertainment function, the evenings can be very long and tedious there; a political function, giving a natural and unanswerable rightness to the customs of the group, which is very useful to those who want to control it.

Every change in the leadership, every battle won or lost, every time a part of the group fought with another and left to make it's own way, every migration, every alteration of the accepted circumstance, needs a new set of foundation myths, which some- call them shamans, call them politicians- will be happy to provide. No, these stories, myths, customs, laws etc have not survived intact through 1,000 generations.

I know it's a bit much to expect a journalist to consult someone who knows something about the subject before writing an article, but a bit of input from an anthropologist would have stopped him making an idiot of himself. Or, indeed, a bit of thought.

There have been humans in Australia for at least 40,000 years, that much is true, but linguistic and other evidence suggests very strongly that for much of that time they were concentrated in the northwest, close to the coast. A thousand generations ago the ancestors of 'John', who, despite being an adult Australian educated by missionaries speaks English like a Hollywood Indian of the 1950's (not the only example of casual racism in the article), certainly did not live anywhere near Alice Springs. It is highly unlikely that anyone did.

Why does he think that 'no other humans can claim this'? As I have said, 'John''s tribe can't claim it anyway, but people have lived in East Africa since there have been people, and in Southern Africa for far longer than they have lived in Australia.

Better told, it would have made a good story, but no more than that. There is nothing it can tell us.

Willy Toledo: We Have Them Over Here, Too

You won't have heard of Willy Toledo. I hadn't either until last week. He turns out to be both a B-list actor and a communist, so you would expect anything he says to be nasty narcissistic twaddle. And you would not be disappointed.

Following the death of the Cuban dissident Orlando Zapata after a hunger strike, this paragon of virtue and clear thinking declared that Zapata was just a common criminal, that the so-called political prisoners in that paradise island were nothing more than terrorists and traitors and that Cuba is a model to be followed by other countries (perhaps if N Korea were to follow the Cuban model the sum of human happiness might be increased slightly, but I would advise other countries to leave it well alone).

The press reported these ramblings (he's a celebrity, after all, so what he says is important) and he was, not surprisingly, criticised. Rather than reflect on the rightness of his words, or even defend them properly, he started whining about the press ganging up on him and denying him the right to free speech. Yes, indeed, a man who has the national media hanging on his every word complains that his right to free speech is being compromised because some people (including me) have dared to disagree with him and this in the context of a discussion about a country which uses brutal force against those try to speak freely, and a man who starved himself to death rather than recognise that Fidel could tell him what to think. Toledo also thinks that comparable human rights abuses take place in Spain every day, which I take to mean that not taking people like him seriously is broadly similar to murdering thousands, imprisoning many more for daring to stand up to you, and condemning your entire country to 50 years of poverty, misery and effective slavery. Given the egos these people have that is probably what he does mean.

The official press in Cuba quickly started planting articles like this one, which creates a criminal past for Zapata, and a touching tale of how he was given the best medical care in an attempt to save him from himself. That's probably what Toledo was quoting, but it's quite obviously made up, in the same way that the figures for longevity and literacy, which place Cuba among the top half-dozen countries in the world, are simply invented by Fidel. Who's going to question them?

For better reflections on Cuba, including comments on the life and death of Orlando Zapata, see this and this.

The Spanish Communist Party has defended Toledo, of course, and complained that he is quiet right and its very beastly and repressive of us to tell him he's wrong. Amazing how liberal these tyrants can become when it's their freedom that's in question (not that anyone is trying to stop him speaking, they are just pointing out that he talks cobblers).

The English Wikipedia page on Willy Toledo consists at the moment of a very brief biography, a filmography and this rather splendid paragraph, which I reproduce in full because I'm sure it'll soon be removed (rightly, as it's not encyclopaedic). I didn't write it, but I have said similar things before about people like him:

"Mr. Toledo is a supporter of the communist regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba, which he considers "a model to follow". Surprisingly he never considered moving to the politically oppressed and economically ruined island. Instead he enjoys the luxuries of capitalism and democracy in Spain, where he has become a wealthy actor and is free to express his opinions without fear of being imprisoned, tortured or killed.

According to some of his critics[,][1] he is just a vulgar example of a hypocritical scum, which would never accept living under the oppression of the communist Cuban regime he so outspokenly defends.

In March 2010, in a round table in support of Sahara independence groups, celebrated in Madrid Spain, Mr. Toledo declared that Orlando Zapata Tamayo was merely a common criminal and not a dissident. He added that "all political prisoners in Cuba were not dissidents but people who had committed terrorist acts against the Cuban Government, acts that constitute treason against the Homeland and a bunch of crimes". He also declared in the same meeting that "the Cuban Government is a victim of a sort of paranoid persecution" by the Western democracies and the international community.^[1] He then opined about the Castro regime by saying that «with its defects and virtues, it is a model to be followed in many aspects"."

Sorry most of the links are in Spanish, but those of you who can read them will find it very rewarding.

The Decay of Language Part 2

There are two main threads to the ‘language is decaying’ argument. One laments the fact that some people do not use the terms, meanings, pronunciations or structures that we learnt when we were young. The other suggests that the effectiveness of the language for communication will be impaired if a certain change or changes is ‘allowed’ to happen. Neither is a serious problem. Language use changes more or less randomly over time, and is widely different across regions, ages, classes and professions. This doesn't stop people understanding each other when they wish to. Differences in education, knowledge, cultural reference and interests are more likely to cause difficulties than differences in the way words and structures they have in common are used.

Meaning is constantly being negotiated, even during the course of a single conversation, and much more so across wider linguistic communities. But the young and the old, the British and the Nigerians, the Metropolitan professional and the rural worker, those with backgrounds in the sciences and those from the humanities, even left-wingers and right-wingers, may not belong to one linguistic community in any meaningful way, despite sharing a mother tongue and perhaps even a hometown. When they speak to each other, neither uses the language they would naturally use when speaking to those they instinctively feel are 'like them.' Each seeks a form of accommodation, a way of making the communication work, with greater or lesser effort depending on how much interest they have in it. Most of us are capable of speaking with a range of styles, registers, semantic fields and even accents, according to the communicative context, and we think nothing of it.

While there are enough people in constant communication with each other in sufficiently varying groups a language will not decay; it will only change. Those changes will leave some people mildly confused while others assimilate them completely without even realizing it. But language will decay if it ceases to be used for literary or academic purposes, or if it ceases to be written at all, or if those who use it do so for a very limited range of purposes, or or if it becomes solely a literary or academic language, no longer used for real communication at all, or if the groups who use it are too small or too isolated. Then it can lose plasticity, expressive power, or comprehensibilty between groups.

The problem with trying to impose standards in language is that nobody really listens to you. For most of human history it hasn't mattered and, except in certain specific forms of communication, they don't matter very much now. Communication in everyday life is as much about seeking ways of understanding each other as it is about exchanging information. We create standards as we go,for the times when we need them.