Saturday 20 December 2014

I might be turning Green



I have a friend who lives far away. He's fond of putting political things on Facebook and, perhaps as a happy echo of arguments in student flats, I always try to pick holes in these posts. Recently, he claimed that if he still lived in the UK, he would "definitely vote Green". "Aye, right," I thought, "the Greens are..."



Tumbleweeds. I am struggling to argue.




Fast-rewind to the eighties. A TV sketch that shows some hippy-dippy environmental activists climbing into a clapped out bus that belches smoke as it pulls away fits my world view perfectly. Whatever messages on equality and local control that the Greens have are swamped to this immature physics student by an anti nuclear power stance he perceives as ill-informed. Actually, it probably was ill-informed. Whatever I think of their stance on nuclear energy now, I don't think it will be ill-informed and I'll come to that later. The thing is, you're never going to agree with everything a political party stands for and the nuclear issue isn't the big one for me anymore, nor should it ever have been.
The Greens seem to be the only genuine alternative out there. I don't think I'll be better off under them and nor should I be. The big smokescreen about "We're all in this together" is not that the 1% are the only people untouched by austerity but that people like me are too, in that we can still afford food, fuel, housing and plenty of treats, so we may be tempted to keep things going as they are. (That's me as an individual - go to my wider family where some are on zero hours contracts and it's a different story).
Many people, and I am probably one of them, need to pay more tax. I don't avoid it, I'm just not asked for enough for some things.
I like the internationalism of the Greens. They were pro independence but have been the most positive of the pro independence groups when it comes to working with what we've got. I suspect they were only in favour of independence because it was the best way to get social justice. That's a lot better than being in favour of social justice because it's the best way to get independence (and that is most definitely not a dig at our new FM).
In my current job, I sometimes get to hear politicians speak. Most are competent but unchallenging. Two have impressed. One was Gordon Brown, no longer PM and talking, with passion and sincerity, about international education rather than UK politics. The other was Patrick Harvie, co-convenor of the Scottish Greens. I was probably rather rude to him because I bounded towards him when the talk was over to shake his hand despite the fact that he was speaking to someone else at the time. He came across as compassionate and scientifically literate, hence the remark about the Greens not being ill-informed.
So, I'm not definitely Green, but I might become so. I didn't know where to go after the referendum, being hugely reluctant to call myself a 45. Feel free to argue. It does me good.

Tuesday 28 October 2014

Little quanta of delight

I heard a comedian tell a joke that went along the lines of, "What I want to know is, with all these wind farms around, what's to prevent the whole country just taking off?" Now, I know why this supposed to be funny, but the physicist part of my brain gets in the way of me finding it so. You just couldn't make a wind-driven propeller that generated lift... I know that this is the sort of thinking that leads to people commenting that physical scientists are "on the spectrum" but that phrase, like the term OCD, is one that shouldn't really be splashed about.
I had a problem, initially, with Andy Scott's sculpture Arria, which stands at the side of the M80 motorway near Cumbernauld. I thought that Arria was beautiful in parts, but something about her disturbed me. After a time, I realised it was her four arms. Not only did Arria apparently have four arms, they were arranged in such a way that it would be biologically impossible for them to move independently. (It's OK to be thinking "FFS get a grip, Gregor!" at this point.) Physics came to the rescue. Arria doesn't have four arms. She has two. We see her at two instants in time, one when her arms are behind her, the other when she has swept them towards us. This gesture is, in itself, quite lovely.
Roadside art gives me a little quantum of delight every time I pass it. Since most of it is beside busy roads, hopefully lots of people get a little ping of pleasure out of it every day. Just as a single photon can't do much illuminating but a laserload can be pretty intense, all the pings surely add up, giving the country more of a lift than a fast-birling wind turbine ever could.

Photo - from Wikipedia, taken by "Bikeparks", Creative Commons License.

Sunday 21 September 2014

Jumpers for blogposts



Douglas Blane has accused me of being a poet again, despite the fact that I've only written one serious poem in my adult life. It was about the mild synaesthesia I experience now and again, associating each day of the week, month of the year and number from one to ten with a particular colour. I do it with physics quantities as well. When, at a writers' group I once attended, I intoned, "Volts are green, green as the sea-snakes rippling across my oscilloscope screen..." it was always going to end in, "I'll get me coat." I haven't tried another since then.
Read Douglas's blog yourself to see what he says about someone coming to his door asking him to play football. People didn't come to my door asking me to play football, not because I would  have shunned them in order to write an ode, but because I was rubbish at it. They did ask me to play at other things - I had, after all, invented the technique of punting our pram-wheeled bogies gondola-style with a brush handle - so I was by no means a recluse. But games of skill and coordination, well, forget it. Maybe school would help?
Let’s start at the primary, where once a week we had gym. Someone, somewhere in the universe, might have developed a programme of activities that could have improved the body control software of the puppet-operated-by-a- drunk wee boy, but that someone was nowhere to be seen around Carluke Primary from 1965 to 1972.
It may have done the wee boy the world of good to discover something in school that, along with singing, he was rubbish at. In secondary school, gym had been replaced by PE, which was sometimes physical and rarely educational. We played football rather a lot, save for a brief dalliance with gymnastics and another with basketball. If it was too wet, we went indoors and played crab football. The outdoor games, played on a once-grassy field, required little if any input from our track-suited pedagogue. Perhaps the kindest thing that could be said of our teacher was that he was “of his time”. In the years between attending school and becoming a teacher, I thought of plenty of unkind things, often involving the words “lazy” and, well, you can guess the other ones. Unfair, probably, as he doubtless stood at the side of a football pitch on many a rainswept Saturday, encouraging the boys who had distinguished themselves by not walking about with their arms folded as a 20-aside match went on around them during a scheduled lesson. The Scouts, Wishaw swimming baths, a succession of bicycles and, latterly, the school mountaineering club all played an infinitely more significant role in keeping me healthy than did anything formally timetabled.
I came late to watching football too. It happened round about the time that some of my non-serious poems were published. Actually, and I hope I'm not breaching some kind of professional code here by telling you this, it's a contractual obligation, as evidenced in the inside flyleaves of many Scottish authors' books. When he's not writing manky, mingin rhymes or popping out vanity-piece blog posts, Gregor Steele relaxes by watching Livingston FC, thus proving he's a regular guy and not some arty-farty jessie.

Monday 1 September 2014

Dual boot

A few weeks ago, a work friend's daughter had a bit of a disaster. She was writing up her final year dissertation on her laptop, saving it on a portable hard drive as she went along. The drive crashed and she had no backup. A number of us tried to recover the data without success. A commercial firm failed too, though they thought that they might be able to do it for £500.
As a last resort, I said I'd take it home to try it on my home PC. For reasons I can't quite remember, and which are probably best summarised by the geek catch-all "because we can", I'd made this machine dual boot. In other words, I could start it up in either Windows or the free alternative, Ubuntu Linux.
Trust me, Ubuntu is brilliant and proves that Linux is no longer the sole preserve of the computer enthusiast. There's software out there for almost everything, and it's all free. A bit of research pointed to some file recovery programs. Atypically for Ubuntu, the application I chose had a hilariously bad user interface but it did the job.
I quite like the idea of being a dual boot person. Certainly, when I spoke to 150 odd (make your own jokes) teachers at the Institute of Physics Meeting in Stirling a couple of months ago, I booted into an alternative version of myself, the one that wouldn't rather have been on a bicycle ten miles from the nearest other person.
I read 1984 in 1977. Aged 17, I still doodled motorbikes in the margins of my jotters, but I was greatly affected by the concept of Newspeak. This language was designed to be so restrictive as to prevent dissent by making it impossible to articulate such ideas. It stayed with me, so when the revival of the Scots language began, I was only too happy to be involved. Admittedly, this was by writing about vomiting budgies and dogs with bahookie faces, but I still held dear to the belief that if you restrict somebody's language, you restrict what they can think.
As my adventure in Mandarin continues, I wonder about the effect it is having on me. I don't know any bad words in Chinese, except perhaps "ugly", the most useless word in any language unless applied to an idea. Sarcasm, easily reached for in English or Scots, is outwith my reach in Mandarin.
Supposing I reboot into Chinese one day. What will life be like? That peach is ripe and soft and our neighbours have two cute dogs.

Tuesday 19 August 2014

Salad Cream Days



Sitting having a tea and scone with my mum, she told me once again about how much I had hated going to primary school. Sadly, I can no longer be sure that her memories are accurate. I cried a few times when I started school - this is not in doubt- but apparently my teacher used to skelp me so that she knew I had something to cry about.
By the time I got to P5, I had come to a grudging acceptance that I had to go to school. At that stage, I would have described Mrs White as my favourite teacher when she wasn't firing off an ill-considered rant at some unfortunate wean, but on reflection that might have been the Stockholm Syndrome kicking in. I had her in primary five. She was based in a bright, airy annexe with normal-height ceilings and bitumen floors pock-marked by the stilleto heels of ladies younger than the nearing-retirement Mrs White. Mrs White was one of the most unfair teachers I ever had. She never relented in attempting to wring the best out of her pupils. This could involve storming theatrically around the class dispensing insults or shooting first and asking questions later. A wee boy had written "damny" on every page of his daily story book. If she'd thought about it before she hauled him off to the headmaster, Mrs White would have realised that he was not using profane language. Rather, he was failing to spell "diary".
I was the subject of Mrs White's displeasure several times. One day I brought in a crude electric light circuit I had constructed. Mrs White praised me and said that Mr White, her secondary science teacher husband, could show me how to build a small table lamp. "Oh.. eh... I might have a book that would show me that," I stammered. I was only nine and shy of meeting an unfamiliar adult. Mrs White failed to or chose not to appreciate this. On more than one occasion she berated me in front of the class or another teacher for preferring learning from a book to being shown how to do something by a real live person. She quoted the "I might have a book..." line back at me, clearly inferring that I must think myself very superior to Mr White since I would not condescend to be in his presence when a book was there as an alternative. If this was her way of persuading me not to be shy then it didn't work.
Another of my apparent faults was that I watched ITV. What pre-teen boy wouldn't when that broadcaster screened all the Gerry Anderson puppet series? Mrs White was immune to the virtues of Fireball XL5 and Thunderbirds and didn't like ITV because of the adverts. When the commercial channel produced Ivanhoe, she made an exception. Did I watch Ivanhoe? No? Why not? Did I find Sir Walter Scott a bit beneath me? Mr White didn't.
Some of Mrs White's insults seemed to predate Sir Walter. "Galloot" and "gomeril" were two of her best. She also had a tendency to announce that "someone in the class does not exactly smell like a sweet lily." Stupidly, she once told my pal he'd never be as bright as his sister. Does anybody still do that, and why didn't it seem like a bad idea, even then?
If a teacher had spoken to either of my own children like that I would have done something about it. But this was the sixties. Things were different then. Better? Only if you read the Daily Mail. As to Mrs White, she would have been horrific if that was all there was to her. To be fair, it was the vehemence of her put-downs rather than their frequency that was notable. She could be magic. She read to us with expression, humour and feeling. She was excellent at encouraging an interest in nature or science. It was in her class I wrote the "when I grow up" story which predicted that I would be a science teacher. I think Mrs White would be pleased that I actually did become one. She could certainly take some of the credit even if she did once suggest I should be a doctor, on the strength of my appalling prescription-style writing.
When it came down to it, Mrs White was a part-time lovely old lady who turned into a wolf every now and again. I thrived in her class on the days I didn't hate going there.
P7 teacher Mrs Glenmuir doubled as the school nurse. She had a cure for every ailment. It was bicarbonate of soda. I didn't do too badly in her class, despite a formative experience there that seemed to be designed to knock any tendency towards lateral thinking sideways. Run the tape:
The class are doing an interpretation exercise called "The Bottle of Salad Cream" It begins: "Regular customers at our restaurant are always amused when someone picks up the bottle of salad cream..." there follows an account of the amusing but flawed techniques employed by diners to dispense the glutinous liquid. The first of the questions asks: "Do you think the restaurant in the passage was a good one?" Of course it wasn't. They'd have a fresh bottle of salad cream on every table if it was. But wait... was there not another possible answer? I thought so.
When the exercise is complete, Mrs Glenmuir goes over it. Did we think the restaurant was a good one? A forest of hands goes up. "No," answers John Sculler, redeeming himself from the time he was overheard saying: "Shite!"
"And why not?"
            "They would have a fresh bottle of salad cream on every table if it was a good restaurant."
"Correct. Did anyone think it was a good restaurant?" Two hands go up. One belongs to a shilpit lassie with straw-coloured hair and clothes made of artificial fibres. The other belongs to me (doubtlessly also wearing artificial fibres). Mrs Glenmuir's skeletal frame re-arranges itself in light of this deviation.
"Why do you think that?" she asks the shilpit lassie in a tone of practised exasperation. The girl shakes her bowed head. Her eyes are turning pink, like a white rabbit's. Mrs Glenmuir turns to me. "And what about you?" she says, turning the practised exasperation up to gas mark 7.
            "Well, if it wasn't a good restaurant, they wouldn't have any regular customers," I venture.
            "That's a really interesting slant, Gregor. Overall, I disagree with you but I see where you're coming from," Mrs Glenmuir doesn't say. What she does say is: "Ooooorgh!" It is a noise like a steel pipe sliding off the back of a lorry.
So that was me tellt.
Mrs Glenmuir fancied herself as a linguist. Every morning, she greeted us with: "Bong sure maze ong-fongs! Commong tally vooz?" Dutifully we would reply: "Noose along bee hen mad  dam."
            "Aye, youse will be at an advantage when you get to the big school after all the French I've taught you," she once told us, though her exposition of the language never went beyond the daily greeting. It is easy to caricature teachers like Mrs Glenmuir by picking on their hobby horses or predilections for powdered alkalis. It's not very fair either. They taught us English and arithmetic, a little history and geography and not very much else unless they did have an interest in science or languages. It was all they had to do in those days. They taught us the way that they had been taught themselves. If you responded to that kind of teaching, you did well. If you didn’t, the problem was yours. My only problem was that I wanted to be somewhere else and often, mentally, I was.

Sunday 11 May 2014

One small step for a Mandarin learner



Last week, I did something I've never done before, despite having studied a modern language for five years at secondary school (and if raw results are to be believed, proved to be better at it than physics at Higher level). I wrote to a native speaker in her own language.
It was fairly low level stuff - I avoided anything that I thought might be open to misinterpretation. My wife is a music teacher. My daughter is 24 years old. My son is called Andrew. My mum and I went to the mountains. Hopefully, nothing there is a euphemism for something awful when said in Chinese.
I wrote some time ago that the idea of learning a new language had seemed like acquiring a superpower when I went to secondary school (though the frostiness of many of my teachers turned it into a trial). I still feel that way. Perhaps I should offer this as a slogan to my opposite numbers in SCILT, Scotland's Centre for Languages - "Learning a new language: the superpower EVERYONE can acquire!"
All this has been done by independent, "teacher not present" "choose your own learning pathway" methods, though had I the time to go to classes, I'd much prefer to have done so. I feel that I've learned a lot about learning in the process, though I'm not sure how much that I think I've learned hasn't merely been the result of reinforcement of uninformed prejudices. So, before we go on, here are my uninformed prejudices, mostly around the topic of e-learning:
  • ·         You can't learn physics by playing Angry Birds (though you can learn physics by analysing Angry Birds as rigorously as you'd analyse a golf ball's motion);
  • ·         Using Guitar Hero in music lessons teaches you only that your music teacher likes to get down wid da kids.
  • ·         The internet is a marvellous library, but along with all the literary classics and well-crafted potboilers, it contains every piece of vanity-published mince that ever there was (e.g. blog posts that nobody other than the other has had made any editorial judgement upon prior to publication).
So here's how I went about learning a couple of hundred words of Mandarin.
Apps! I downloaded three. One was games-based. It taught me lots of phrases, which doesn't quite work for me as I'll explain later, but was useful. The downside was that I became expert at progressing through the games at the expense of rigorous learning. What do you think children would do? Also, one of the games was very difficult, so I avoided it, despite it being the one that would address my weakest area, tones. The second app was essentially just an electronic phrase book and was useful only to learn a few stock pleasantries, though this particular one had a few stock unpleasantaries available too. App 3 was designed to help with the official HSK language test. It epitomised bad software that could actually serve a useful purpose if you used it along with some other stuff. This programme would show you a Chinese word in characters, pinyin and English, where all the meanings were listed. If you were online, you could hear the word being pronounced, then hear a sentence containing an example of its use. The sentence was also written in Chinese characters. After a few words, you were given an instant multi-choice test. Very easy to wheech through for anyone with a better-than-goldfish memory. Unfortunately, whilst HSK Level 1 has 150 words, the examples seemed to draw from a bank of a thousand or so.
Enter Google Chinese input. I became determined to understand as many of these example sentences as I could. I installed Mandarin input onto my Nexus tablet. This lets you type in pinyin, and displays a selection of Chinese characters that might correspond to the Romanised version of the word you've entered. Alternatively, you can draw the character, which is BLOODY HARD. This app turned out to be quite effective in building my vocabulary and inspiring me to get into character recognition, but as a tool for learning words, I needed to run through it several times.
Books and CDs! I include in this a webpage that, but for audio links, was more like an online text book. My most significant progression came as a result of buying something called Dorling Kindersley's Easy-Peasy Chinese. Why? because it (as, later on did the aforementioned online text book) gave me the basic rules of grammar. Yes, it taught me phrases, but unlike the apps, each component of a phrase was explained. This word means "not". This is the verb "to be". Yes! Now it's like physics. I have the formulae and the principles. I can apply them to new situations, armed with the vocabulary I've picked up. Not only that, but when I go back to the apps, I can see why the phrase "where is the toilet?" is written the way it is, and I can use that knowledge to write "where is the restaurant?" or "where is my dinosaur?" Not only that, but in the privacy of my own car, I can take up the accompanying CD's offer to repeat the phrases it's saying, or to translate English phrases into Chinese or vice versa.
What's missing is quality control. I've learned other things under my own direction, such as new computer languages, and there you get feedback by seeing whether your script actually works. There are levels of feedback beyond that, such as efficiency and elegance of code that you don't get, but you get something.
With language learning, it's much harder. Google Translate can let you know if your written Chinese means what you intended, or so you'd think. I ran everything in my email to my Chinese friend through Google Translate and some of the bits I knew were correct didn't look so after translation. From initial feedback from my Shanghai pal, I know that some of the bits that looked right weren't. Speech recognition is even harder. You know when you're wrong, but you don't know how to make it right. Computers don't seem to be smart enough. Perhaps I should add "yet". For now, I need a real person.
Meantime, as a substitute, I asked Mandarin Siri where I could find a restaurant. I was pretty chuffed when she found six local ones, including Alfie's Chip Shop.