Let's Talk About Squirrels

I stirred up some controversy by posting a photograph of a grey squirrel on a nature forum.  Suppose we lay aside the emotion and look at the facts.

All squirrels, correctly, have been described as "rats with good PR". I used to use that phrase when teaching PR, because it made students think about the difference between reality and presentation. Since the grey was introduced to the UK in 1870, it can hardly be classed as a recent immigrant. The present generation may be regarded as "invasive", but equally obviously, all its members were born here, as were their progenitors for a couple of dozen generations. We should perhaps consider that.

Greys do not directly harm red squirrels and are thus not in the same category as feral mink, unwisely released by people who mistakenly thought they were doing good. Among its several advantages, the grey is hardier and more efficient at storing fat through hard winters than the red, and is immune to the squirrel pox virus, which it may however carry.

But, like American Indians, the red squirrel can, over time, develop immunity to initially fatal imported diseases which decimated their numbers. (The date is not still 1870). The red will nevertheless not out-compete the grey, because it is simply less efficient in most habitats. It is however possible to take action to preserve reds in the areas where they remain dominant.

The Eternal Cycle

Sheffield (South Yorkshire) Council electrified their tramway system in 1899. After an enquiry, they decided to go straight from horse power to electric power. Electric trams were designed to be driven from either end, to avoid the need for turntables, and originally had open platforms at each end for passengers to board and alight.

Already, before the First World War, double-decker designs had replaced single, and after The Second War, the streamlined Roberts Tram, seen below on the left, was introduced, though the older models, such as the Standard, introduced in 1927, continued to run on the network because they had been built to last. Notice that the Roberts had folding doors, air-brakes, and upholstered seating for 62 passengers. I rode on both these designs in my youth.

Roberts Tram (left)

In 1951 the Council decided motor buses were the future, and they cost less than trams, although they didn't last nearly as long. The last Sheffield Tram (so everyone thought at the time) ran in 1960, and the one in the picture took part in the final parade. The tracks were dug up or covered over, and the overhead electrics taken down.

The moral of this story is that the Council of 1899 were more forward-thinking than the Council of 1951. By 1994 it was realised that the combustion engine was not the future of public transport, and what the city really needed was electric propulsion. Of course, you could just call the vehicles you needed trams. Nah. Bring on the Super-tram.

Only, if number 513 and her sisters had been just allowed to continue back in 1960, I wouldn't be surprised if she'd been still running today. In fact, I travelled on her myself when I visited Beamish open air museum, where I took this picture, although I gather she's now in a museum near Lowestoft.

 
And it would have saved the public purse a fortune.

And it would have been environmentally-friendly.

But, hey! Who knew, eh? Only a century to get back to Square One, give or take a few technical improvements. What odds am I offered on the return of the motor bus in the middle of this century? Running on environmentally-friendly fuel, of course. 

I think we should call the prototype The Hindenburg.

The Baby's Skin Colour

To save time, why don’t we compile a list of people who don’t think it’s perfectly normal to speculate about which of its parents a baby might resemble more?

Hesketh Pearson’s biography of George Bernard Shaw relates that a strange lady from Zurich once wrote to the playwright, suggesting that with her looks and his brain they should produce the most perfect child. Shaw is said to have replied that the risk would be of the child having his looks and her brain.

The same story is told about Anatole France and Isadora Duncan, Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, and Albert Einstein and an unnamed chorus girl.

It is entirely within the bounds of possibility that all these stories are apocryphal, or perhaps cases of reporters inserting contemporary famous names into an old, anonymous piece of repartee.

Now, we should not let the mere fact that nobody ever said it get in the way of a good story, should we?

On the other hand, in the current case, perhaps we should let this non-story drop because it wouldn’t have been of the slightest significance even if somebody had said it.

What was the most significant influence on the outcome of the American Revolution?

The most significant, if inadvertent, aid received by the revolutionary Americans was supplied by Admiral Rodney’s lack of success at cards. 

If he’d been a better card player, he’d have had fewer debts. 

If he’d had fewer debts, he’d not have needed to spend so long plundering St Eustatius.

If he’d not been looking the other way so long at St Eustatius he’d have stationed Hood’s fleet to intercept de Grasse’s French fleet before they got to America, rather than after they were safely ensconced in Chesapeake Bay. 

And if de Grasse had been defeated in 1781 rather than 1782, Yorktown could not have been blockaded and Cornwallis would not have been forced to surrender. 

On such tiny matters does history so often hinge.

Lay and Lie

Ladies and gentlemen, 

On your left, a transitive verb (one that takes a direct object, as in "I'm going to lay my burden down," or "We laid a trap for him.") 

On your right, an intransitive verb (which does not take a direct object, as in "Please lie on the couch," or "At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay").

I have never understood what seems to me an exclusively US tendency to substitute the transitive for the intransitive, as in "Come and lay by my side". I always find myself asking, "Come and lay what by my side? An egg?"

On the subject of overwhelming evidence

 

I am resolutely unpersuaded by any argument that includes “all the experts say x.” A little research invariably unearths experts who don’t say x, or even deny x, while anyone who knows the pressure academics are now under to conform to modern orthodoxy or risk losing their reputations / jobs has already learned to discount the agreement of all but the leading lights in support of any cause.

My point is not that the cause itself is necessarily wrong, just that the “all experts” argument has been so inexpertly over-used as to invite dissent from anyone with an inquiring mind.

Do British people know that the Irish people living in Boston support a United Ireland completely free of British rule? (Quora)

I should not be surprised to find a few Irish people living in Boston, Lincolnshire, since there are Irish people living happily all over the UK. So long as their opinions do not involve harming other people, what they think about the desirability of a united Ireland is their own business. Like everyone else in the UK, they are free to choose any peaceful political point of view.

The same applies to Irish people living in Ireland. If and when the people of Northern Ireland and the people of the Irish Republic both desire a united Ireland, and each group expresses that desire in a referendum, then a united Ireland will come about. This has been guaranteed in law.

Northern Ireland is no more under British rule than Yorkshire is under British rule. Neither are colonies. Both are part of the UK, and both elect representatives directly to the UK parliament on the same basis as anywhere else in the country. The UK government is made up of members of parliament.

I should be quite surprised to find there are more than a few Irish people living in Boston, USA. By US law, people born in the USA are US citizens. The person currently occupying the White House erroneously believes himself to be Irish. If he were Irish, he could not be President of the United States. Being descended from nineteenth century Irish immigrants does not make you Irish, any more than being descended from Vikings makes me Danish.

The opinions of US citizens on what should happen in either part of Ireland are of no great importance, since they are not Irish voters. The people who live in Ireland are the voices that matter.

Quite often, the way US views are expressed suggest they still view Irish affairs through the prism of nineteenth century politics handed down from immigrants. History did not stop when their ancestors left Ireland. The problems they may think they are helping to solve were actually solved years ago, and no sane person wishes to be dragged back to the bad old days. Ireland has moved on, and they should move on with it.

I am quite sure that if US citizens wanted to come and live, work and invest in Ireland, the people there would make them welcome. Failing that desire, however, they should not seek to impose their views on those who do live there.

Is 'cisgender' a word?

 

Even the great Julius Caesar, when interrogated by the Senate, famously could not tell the difference between Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul. 

As I recall, the opening line of his history book Gender Wars reads thus: “Omnia genera in tres partes divisa est. Genus masculinum, genus femininum, et genus quodcumque aliquis male se esse credit.”

Happy Medium

In my teaching career, I had two colleagues who embodied opposite viewpoints on education: one would reproach me for using words that pupils did not know, saying "How can they learn if they don’t understand you?"; the other would dissent, arguing, "How can they learn anything if they’re never exposed to things they don’t already understand?"

One of the best compliments I ever received was when one of a group of former pupils wrote to me from university, saying that their economics lecturer was unintelligible, but after every lecture they would get together and ask themselves, “How would Mr Hall have explained this?”

I was reassured, reckoning I must have come close to an Aristotelian happy medium.

The Good, The Bad, and ....

I have been fascinated by recent comments on Quora, which have, knowingly or not, rehearsed Catharism (two gods) and Leibniz (the problem of evil), without ever mentioning Tom Paine and the arguments put forward in his book “The Age of Reason”.

I do believe that, to a considerable extent, we are all products of our upbringing. Had it not been so, I would not have reached the age of sixty before becoming aware of the fact that so many of the questions I was left with had been asked, and answered, two hundred years ago. I considered myself an educated man, but all that meant was I had absorbed the things that western society wants us to think and not ventured into the Index of prohibited thought.

Having at long last become aware of my own shortcomings, I can hardly blame others who have accepted what society tells them, at face value, without adequate questioning.

When I did begin to think for myself, I decided that the existence of evil in the world was actually logical. A god who was perfect would be good, and capable of all types of goodness, except moral goodness.

Moral goodness is necessarily the prerogative of imperfect beings who are able, as a result of free will, to choose between good and evil.

A perfect being, by definition, cannot choose evil. An imperfect being, by contrast, can show moral goodness by choosing the right when he was able to choose the wrong.

A perfect (and omnipotent) god, seeking to maximise goodness, would therefore be obliged to create imperfect beings in order to allow moral goodness to exist.

An unfortunate side effect is that he also must allow moral badness to exist.

However, the total amount of goodness resulting, including moral goodness, minus the amount of moral badness, must exceed the amount of all goodness except moral goodness otherwise existing.

That’s my twopenn’orth.

My regards to Herr Leibniz.

Also, thank you, Tom. I couldn’t have got here without you.

And I have my tin hat on.

Is there any evidence that the word “God” means anything at all? (Quora)

I was asked this in a Quora comments column, in my capacity as a former teacher of philosophy. In that same capacity, I tried to answer it. Please note, I always made it my policy to try to teach students how to think, not what to think. 

There is evidence that theists use the term to refer to something, even if they are not able fully to describe what that something is. 

There is evidence that atheists use the term to refer to something, even if they consider that something to be non-existent. 

 We all use words to describe things of which we have no direct perceptual experience. Included amongst these are things that we do believe to exist and things that we do not believe to exist. For example, I have no direct experience of albatrosses, but I have no reason to suppose that people who claim such experience are lying. I also have no direct experience of wyverns, and yet I doubt the testimony of those who have claimed such experience, even though I am unable to prove the non-existence of wyverns. 

This is probably accounted for simply by my having been brought up in a “civilised” society disposed to accept the former but not the latter. My understanding is conditioned by my upbringing. Likewise, my education has enabled me to understand technicalities in my field which are deeper than common understanding, and that is why I considered myself able to teach. In other fields, I have no understanding beyond the fact that people who claim to know say that something exists. I choose to believe them or not based on a predisposition which is just part of my way of looking at things, nothing more. 

 In other words, the word ‘god’ has a meaning, just as the word ‘wyvern’ has a meaning. Both mean different things to different people, and some people will believe the word does not refer to an extant being while others will believe that it does, but there is sufficient mutual understanding of the thing referred to that we can use the word to communicate with each other.

How can you begin a short story without knowing how it ends? (Quora)

There is a long-standing division of practice between the planners (or plotters) and the pantsters (or improvisers) of the writing world.

The plotters are probably better placed to provide standard submissions to publishers who like specific types of story, written in ways that they know their customers are happy with. In other words, plotters can write consistent work to a consistent pattern which they know is going to sell. They are good at commercial writing.

I belong to the second group, which means I usually begin a story with no real idea of how it is going to end. Indeed, one of my main motivations to keep going is to find out how it ends. Sometimes I need to go back and adjust earlier bits of the story so as to foreshadow the end that I arrived at rather than the one I may have once thought I was working towards.

Not all original work is good. Sometimes different is worse. But every now and again, a pantster will come up with something innovatory, original, and good. And it won’t sell.

All too rarely, an original work will get past the publishers’ submissions filter system known as slush readers (or assistant editors), who are usually schooled in conformity and tend to reject submissions that don’t fit their employers’ known preferences.

If a pantster story reaches an editor who is willing to take risks, it has a chance of publication. That editor may even flag your work to ensure that future submissions also get through to him.

And very, very rarely, one of these stories will become so popular that it makes your name and a star is born.

In other words, if you shoot for the stars you probably won’t hit them, but you’ll have fun trying. If you need your writing to pay the bills, you should probably write what you already know is going to sell.