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Culture Nature

Mutants and the Dutch

I recently read Mutants by Armand Marie Leroi, which is a book that uses mutation as a way of understanding the development of the body. It’s interesting but quite medical; I have a pretty high tolerance for stuff about chemical pathways, gene mutations, hormones and so on, but I still found all the polysyllabic chemical names tended to make my eyes glaze over.

Lots of interesting snippets along the way, though. For example, the chapter about growth mutations had to distinguish them from ‘normal’ variation, whether racial or environmental. Apparently, young Dutch men now have an *average* height of six foot – which makes them taller than famously genetically tall people like the Masai and the Dinka. Almost more strikingly, in Holland there is no longer any correlation between young people’s social class and their height. That is certainly not true in the UK, and I find it an incredibly impressive advertisment for Dutch social policy.

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Culture Nature Other

Flickr field guide

There’s a group on Flickr called Field Guide: Birds of the World. Pretty self-explanatory, really – they’re trying to form a collection of photos that can be used to help identify birds. It’s a great idea and they’ve already got a lot entries, though it’s weighted towards European and N American birds, not surprisingly. But it quickly exposes the failings of Flickr as a content-management system. Although it’s possible to search within the group pool for photos tagged with a particular name, it’s not obvious how to do it. More crucially for a field guide, it’s not easy enough to add information to a photo in an organised way – for example, to provide a link from a species to any confusion possibilities. Or to give distribution info.

In some ways, like most reference works, it’s a good candidate for a wiki; there’s a network of people who are very enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the subject, it’s naturally modular and so on. The internet would allow for many pictures attached to each species, as well as audio and even video. You could easily establish a standard template for an entry, to encourage people to include all the useful information – distribution, easily confused species, call, and so on. I suppose I could set it up – the Wikimedia software which Wikipedia runs on is open-source and I think I could set it up on my server space, although I suspect there would be a bit of a learning curve to cope with. More seriously, if it ever really caught on, especially with a lot of audio and video, it would be quite bandwidth-heavy.

With mobile broadband on the verge of becoming widespread, people might even start using it in the field to complement traditional field-guides.

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Culture Other

more folk wisdom

On the subject of folk wisdom:

I’m reading a book called Mutants which mentions a C17th book called Pseudodoxia Epidemica: or, enquiries into very many Received Tenents and commonly presumed Truths, in which Sir Thomas Browne investigated a lot of received ideas, like the fact that ‘a King-fisher hanged by the bill, sheweth in what quarter the wind is by an occult and secret propriety, converting the breast to that point of the Horizon from whence the wind doth blow’.

Ain’t th’internet marvellous?

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Culture

Movie remakes

When Hollywood makes a film based on another film, it’s called a ‘remake’ and is seen as proof that the industry is creatively bankrupt and incapable of producing original work.

When they make a movie based on a novel, it’s called an ‘adaptation’, and it’s seen as artistic, admirable, and prestigious.

I think the industry might have some self-worth issues.

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Culture

‘Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell’ by Susanna Clarke

I’ve just finished Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, which I found a bit disappointing. My problem, I realised after a while, was that I was expecting literary fiction and it was actually genre fiction.

Which is a slightly difficult statement to justify. It’s not literally true – there is no genre the book neatly fits into. It’s about people doing magic, so I guess you could call it fantasy, but the real-world setting (Regency London) means it would be just as fair to call it magic realism, in terms of subject matter. It doesn’t have a happy ending. It has some rather literary quirks – the whole thing is presented as a C19th text, complete with footnotes.* Certainly none of the (glowing) reviews quoted on the cover suggest it is anything but literary – though they’re only excerpts, of course, and may say more about the publisher’s marketing strategy than anything else.

It’s quite difficult to put my finger on why it reads the way it does. Prose style? Characterisation? It’s not straightforwardly a quality issue – there are plenty of bad books that are clearly literary in intent, and JS&MN is competently enough written. It’s something to do with the approach to storytelling, perhaps.

I should have checked Amazon; not the reviews, which are full of idiots comparing the novel to Austen and Thackeray, but the bit where it says:

Customers who bought books by Susanna Clarke also bought books by these authors:
J.K. Rowling
Terry Pratchett
Jonathan Stroud
Jasper Fforde

I might actually have enjoyed it more if I’d picked it up with different expectations – I do read plenty of non-literary fiction, including Pratchett and Rowling. Though I suspect JS&MN really needs to be cut down by a third, literary or not.

* I found the footnotes were pretty tedious, on the whole.

Categories
Culture Nature

The Egyptology Field Guide

My sister is going on holiday to Egypt in a few days to do a Nile cruise. Of which I am quite jealous. Anyway, I was looking through bookshops today for books that she might like to have with her, and I decided that what she really needed was a field guide. A good field guide is a reference book and identification aid in one, and that’s just what you might want, going round the Valley of the Kings.

The format would be like the best bird guides, i.e. pictures on the right-hand page and the corresponding text on the left. But instead of the book being divided up into ‘pipits’, ‘waders’, ‘hawks’ and so on, it would be split into ‘sarcophagi’, ‘deities’, ‘columns’ or whatever. You could use it either in a museum or a site, just to give you a starting point for making sense of what you see.

I wonder if there are any other areas where the field guide idea would work well? It feels like an idea with legs, but I suspect there are only a limited number of things which are sufficiently visual and sufficiently easily classifiable for it to be helpful.