Herbert Fortnightly

On the Way Out

2007-04-07T13:47:00.000+01:00

Don't think I'm leaving you here without a kiss goodbye.
- Bob Dylan

After six months, I've decided to bring this blog to an end. At the beginning I was bursting with things to say, but now one idea per fortnight seems an awful lot to expect. So I'll stop before it becomes a chore. Thanks for reading.

Oh, and before you go, have a look at Answer Me This: but don't feel too bad for Martin the Sound Man - they love him really.

On Language

2007-03-24T11:22:00.000Z

Those things, that all languages have in common, or that are necessary to every language, are treated of in a science, which some have called Universal or Philosophical grammar

- James Beattie, 1788

Every language in the world has a finite number of words in its vocabulary - it can't help it, since the speakers have to know them all, and they only live so long. But every language makes possible an infinite number of sentences, thanks to the recursive way those words can be combined, and so allows humans to express an infinite number of thoughts. We don't know of any animals that can do this. There was a chimpanzee called Nim Chimpsky who was taught about a hundred words of sign language - but he didn't have the infinitely creative ability that we have, because he had no notion of syntax. He could use words on their own and even sometimes in pairs, but his communications had to remain at that basic level. We're having similar trouble teaching language to computers. Some researchers believe that computers will never have human levels of competence - partly because we don't really know what we have to teach them. Even humans find it very hard to learn if they tackle the task as adults - second languages come with effort, and natives almost always identify a foreigner.

So if language is so complicated and so hard to learn for animals, computers and adult humans, why are children so good at it? Except in a few cases of pathological disability, they do it without fail, and incredibly fast at that. And they don't need explicit teaching: in some cultures, it's considered inappropriate to address children directly until they can speak like adults, but they learn anyway from overhearing the conversations of others.

Noam Chomsky (the chimp's namesake) suggested that this could be because we're born already knowing how language works. I have an uncle who told me this idea was ridiculous: whoever heard of people inheriting ideas in their genetic code? But if you remember that the knowledge is supposed to be subconscious, I think the idea becomes more plausible. Babies are born knowing all sorts of things: they have an idea of number constancy, for example. If a single ball disappears for a moment behind a screen and, a moment later, re-emerges on the other side, babies remain pretty relaxed about life. You can tell this by putting a dummy in their mouths that has sensors in it to measure how much sucking they're doing - sucking levels stay fairly similar when the ball comes out from behind the screen. But if one ball goes in and two balls come out, their eyes go wide and their sucking gets harder as they try and deal with this affront to their world-view.

So we're born with simple number theory in our heads. But are we really born with simple grammatical theory too? Well, my favourite piece of evidence that we are is the question of the tall man: in 1975, Chomsky imagined a Martian learning English. At the moment we come into the story, the Martian has the hang of statements, but is trying to work out how to turn them into questions. He makes some observations and finds that the statement "The man is tall" can become the question "Is the man tall?" Fine, thinks the Martian. The rule must be to move "is" to the beginning. At first this seems to generalise well: the Martian comes across the sentence "My hovercraft is full of eels" and, although he's never seen the sentence before, his rule serves him well and he finds he can correctly form the question "Is my hovercraft full of eels?" But here's where the fun starts. Suppose he's faced with "The man who is tall is in the room", and he wants to turn it into a question. Which "is" should he move to the front? He might come up with any number of theories for which one to move, all of them logically possible - perhaps the rule is: when you have two choices, always pick the first one. Then he'd mistakenly produce "Is the man who tall is in the room?" Now, this is the clincher. Children never make that kind of mistake. They know without having to be told that all rules depend on the structure of the sentence, not on any of the other logical possibilities like the order of the words. I think they're born knowing.

On Facts

2007-03-10T21:20:00.000Z

Facts are stupid things.
- Ronald Reagan

My brother and I collect little-known facts. Some of the below we discovered ourselves, others we lifted from comedy shows and similar serious investigative organisations, others were suggested by our friends. You're all invited to contribute more in the comments page. If one of them's yours and you object to it being here, or if you think any of them may be untrue, let me know.

There’s a town called Rickmansworth in every continent.
The moon can be seen from the Great Wall of China.
The EU allows cows to contain as much as 5% pork meat.
Seahorses are born inside out.
The English words “food poisoning” are a direct derivative of the Turkish words “donner kebab”.
The average grapefruit contains 11 immigrants.
The Portuguese for Turkey is Peru.
The human brain has fewer than six moving parts.
Nostrodamus predicted that Angus Deayton would be called Keith Chegwin.
In 1925, scientists discovered the world’s youngest ever person.
The penguin is so called because of its temperament.
Shakespeare knew over two hundred words for eskimo, ten percent of which were lost through his head.
During the 1920s, three out of four American men had invented the telephone.
The koala bear isn’t in fact a bear at all, but a type of nut.
“Brunettes” is the only word in the English language with all the vowels in the correct order.
Owls are the only animal capable of love.
17% of the USA has been illegal for over 2,000 years.
Whales were invented in Milton Keynes and were originally used as musical instruments.
In portugal, cats say “miajito”.
If you took all the little round pieces of paper that hole punches produce in a year and put them end to end, they would blow away before you could do anything useful with them.
Squirrels are the densest of all land mammals.
Fats Domino went through his whole life unaware that his name was Onimod Staf backwards. This is the equivalent of four football pitches.
Tea has no smell.

On Iraq

2007-02-24T14:44:00.000Z

Bush announces Iraq exit strategy: 'We'll go through Iran'
- The Onion

I wish I hadn't supported the war in Iraq. I wasn't in favour of it because I was duped on weapons of mass destruction, but because I assumed that the opportunity to depose a murderous dictator was worth taking. If I'd known how much al-Qaeda would be able to do to prevent the coalition from restoring order, and how bitter the rivalry was between the Sunni and Shia factions, I would have argued against. I would have said that deposing him was a good idea, but that America and Britain, with their terrible reputation among Arabs and with their electorates' fickle support for long-term military operations, weren't the ones for the job. It wouldn't have made any difference of course, but I still feel guilty.

On Wednesday, Tony Blair announced the withdrawal of about a quarter of the British troops. Given that the security situation doesn't seem to have changed, it's reasonable to assume that the decision is political. My country is fed up with Iraq, and soon the other three-quarters of the soldiers are going to come home too. Ann Treneman, writing in The Times, makes this assumption, and she's pleased as punch: "It was the best news on Iraq in ages". Is she right?

If she is, it's not because of the number of military casualties. Soldiers do have a right to object to some levels of pointless risk: if I'd been in Siegfried Sassoon's shoes, I would have written a letter to Parliament as well, complaining about the World War I strategy of condemning millions of men to "walking very slowly towards the enemy machine guns". Or was that Blackadder? Anyway, 100 deaths out of 7,000 soldiers over four years in southern Iraq isn't a massacre; especially not compared to the number of Iraqi dead. If Ann Treneman's going to convince me, she'd better prove the case that Iraq would be better off if the British armed forces left now. And the American ones too, unless anyone can see a reason for one lot staying and the other lot going.

At the moment there's no Iraqi government to speak of. There's a lot of sectarian violence, but I bet the American forces are keeping that down, at least in some areas. Is this positive effect outweighed by the target effect - as Malcolm Rifkind puts it, "the ability of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organisations to use Iraq as a battleground"? That's the golden question. The head of the British Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, has answered it yes, and that's got a lot of weight. But there are people in Basra who don't want the British to leave because stability might disintegrate when rival Shia militias try to take advantage of the power vacuum. This is Basra, right next to Iran and away from all the Sunnis - if the threat of the insurgency outweighs that of the civil war anywhere, it's here. So if even Basra values the coalition's presence, that has weight too.

Of course I don't have anywhere near enough information to be sure about this, but I suspect a coalition withdrawal now would do more harm than good. I suppose what I'm saying is that we should stay in Iraq indefinitely: we'd be waiting for a strong, democratic central government to emerge. Or failing that, a strong central government. Or failing that, any kind of government at all. And we'd be waiting for the Iraqi army and police to weed out those people among their own members with divided loyalties. You can't do either of those things quickly. I realise my suggestion would have more weight if I'd been against the war, and that it's politically impossible to follow anyway. So that's two more reasons to regret the attitude I took in 2003.

On Francis Bacon (guest article by Joe Baker)

2007-02-10T13:24:00.000Z

The most important thing is to look at the painting... Not in order to understand or to know it, but to feel something.

- Francis Bacon

As a human, I am interested in humans. I can't help it. It's probably a survival trait. I am also interested in art and find humanity in art appealing. I prefer art that represents the human form as I find it the most resonant image – the one to which I repond the most strongly. It is a sure sign of bad sculpture if you find the horse more inspiring than the rider. At the beginning of the last century there was a move away from the human figure in painting. One exception to this was Francis Bacon.

Many of us have a romantic notion, almost an ideal, of the lonely artist struggling in his garret, tortured by inner demons and prone to passionate outbursts. Francis Bacon satisfied all of these criteria. He drank and he gambled. He destroyed many of his own paintings, often by putting his foot through the canvas. His tragic love life (in 1971 his lover, George Dyer, committed suicide the night before one of his exhibitions) fed into his work, although he always denied that his work was personal in nature.

Bacon was never formally taught art but he was widely read and visited art galleries regularly. For a couple of years he worked as a decorator and furniture designer but abandoned this in 1931. As an untrained painter he let his intuition guide his work and would move paint at random on the canvas until he found the forms that expressed his intangible ideas. He sometimes used house paints and worked on the 'wrong' side of the canvas. All of this gave him his unique style: twisted human figures that wiggle and seeth on the starkly coloured backgrounds.

The invention of photography was seen as a challenge by many painters. Why paint portraits and landscapes when there is a machine that can do the same thing cheaper, faster and more accurately? This helped fuel a move towards abstraction and a rejection of figurative art. Bacon was one of the first artists to embrace the photograph as an inspiration for his work. He collected photographs and images, which his mind fused together in his painting. Eadweard Muybridge's photographs of naked wrestlers became lovers entwined on a bed. In his 'Pope' paintings the head of Velazquez's pope is replaced by a screaming woman from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. At a time when modernism was leading many artists away from the human body and into stripped down forms, Bacon painted figures that were unquestionably human and richer for it.

Whether or not you like his work, Francis Bacon should be admired as an artist who embraced the age of photography and created his own unique style. By the 1960's he was hailed as the greatest living painter and, when he died in 1992, he left behind a body of work that reminds us that great art can still be both original and human.

On Religion

2007-01-26T16:51:00.000Z

Who the hell made wasting sperm a sin?
- Tim Minchin

I've hinted before that Richard Dawkins has done atheism no favours. He thinks religious faith is stupid and dangerous and he evangelises against it. I thought I'd start by distancing myself from that sort of thing. Religious people have access to reserves of selflessness, hope and determination that I'll never have. As philosophies, religions are also instructive to non-believers, although most of them try to dissuade you from seeing them that way. But they do sometimes make a mess, so I thought that, as a neutral bystander, I might be able to give some helpful observations. There aren't really any thornier issues that I can think of, so I promise I'll try to be tactful if you promise you'll try not to get upset.

When their religion is accused of being violent, Muslims often respond by saying that Islam means peace. I've been talking to an expert, and it sounds as though that's literally true. As I understand it, the word Islam corresponds to a state of mind where you're placid enough to submit yourself entirely to God's will. On the other hand, Mohammed personally led Muslims into battle to bring the towns around Medina under his control, describing this struggle as jihad. I know enough to see that terrorists who think they're following Mohammed's teachings are wrong (killing women and children was expressly forbidden, for a start), but it's also true that Islam is easier to pervert in this way than, say, Christianity. If Jesus had conducted the first crusade, the cases would be comparable. But Christianity has been perverted in exactly this way, nonetheless. I bet if you added up all the killing done in the names of the various religions and put them together in a grisly pie chart, Christianity would have the biggest slice.

So if you were going to found a religion and you wanted to give it the best chance of influencing people's behaviour for the good, how would you go about it? I've compiled a modest list of commandments, in case anybody feels like worshipping me:

1. I don't care whether or not you believe in me, so there's no sense looking down on non-believers. You're good if you act consistently with these commandments and you aren't if you don't, regardless of your beliefs.

2. The way these commandments are worded is unimportant. I discourage loopholery and encourage people who question my teachings and think for themselves. In particular, be clear on this: heresy is not a sin.

3. You may decide that sometimes killing is unavoidable. I have nothing to say on abortion, euthanasia and self-defence: you'll have to make your own minds up. But let's be clear on this, too: violence in my name is always wrong, without exception.

4. There's no holy land. People's right to live somewhere derives from a complicated mix of history, culture, language, local law, their feelings, family ties, whether or not they're living there now and how long they've been doing so. I'm not getting involved.

5. You have a duty to look after your own happiness and that of the people who love you. You also have a duty to look after everyone else's happiness, but keep a sense of proportion. And "happiness" here means "happiness in this life" - no burning witches on the grounds that they'll thank you for it in heaven.

6. You also have a duty to look after the happiness of animals, proportional to their capacity for suffering. Don't quibble: you know roughly how much suffering each species is capable of; it's to do with how clever they are. And don't compromise commandment 5 too much over this, either - that's more important.

7. Tolerate other people's beliefs and practices, but don't tolerate intolerance. Nobody has the right to run homophobic adoption agencies. Use commandment 5 to help decide what's tolerable.

8. That reminds me, bum sex is fine. I know this really belongs under commandment 7, but I feel you people have some kind of mental block on this one. Honestly, leave it.

9. You have the right to be rich and the duty to respect other people's property. Charging interest is okay, for heaven's sake. If you accept any monetary donations on my behalf, though, you'd better make damn sure your motives aren't selfish.

10. I'm not in charge of what's true. If scientific research or any other kind of investigation gives you reason to doubt what I say, do so. So commandment 6 might change. And 9, I suppose.

There we are. Feel free to suggest alterations: I haven't yet finalised the contract with the engravers. By the way, number 1 doesn't appear in any religion that I know of (am I wrong?), even though it seems a very plausible position for a god to hold. Make of that what you will.

On Randomness

2007-01-11T18:35:00.000Z

“What are you going to do today, Napoleon?”
“Whatever I feel like I want to do. Gosh.”
- Napoleon Dynamite

The word “random” has changed its meaning. It’s still got the “chosen by chance” definition, but that’s now been joined by something along the lines of “weird, arbitrary, unexpected or unknown” - at least among people my age in my country. For example, “Why did Jack call me Sarah when my name’s Melanie? I thought it was a bit random.” Saying this, Melanie wouldn’t be trying to imply that Jack chose the name Sarah at random, but that his behaviour was odd and difficult to explain. And then there’s the noun, as in “Jack brought a couple of randoms to the party.” This one doesn’t even imply that the extra guests were odd - just that the speaker didn’t know them.

So it’s much easier these days to behave randomly. I’m not sure anyone’s behaviour has ever been random in the old sense of the word. One person who claimed randomness was the title character in Luke Rhinehart’s novel The Dice Man, which I’ve just given up on after 150 pages. I enjoyed it until the dice bit started. The dice man would make decisions by writing down six options and then throwing a dice to choose between them. The flaw, of course, is that he’s the one choosing the options, so he never really writes down anything he doesn’t want to do. The author doesn’t seem to be unaware of this problem, but it doesn’t bother him too much either. He allows his narrator to spiel for tens of pages about the possibility of living our lives without personalities, and how attractive this possibility is. Anyone who’s read the book all the way through, feel free to chime in and defend it. I found that the sparkly writing was wasted on the premise.

I’ve been trying to come up with methods that allow you to live more randomly than the dice man. Here’s one: you open the dictionary wherever you like and put your finger on the page without looking at it. You read on from that point on the page until you come to the first verb. This is your order. Some verbs need one or more objects; if so, you do the same trick with nouns until you have enough. Then you carry out the order as well as you can and repeat the process for the rest of your life. There’s a problem with this method too, though: working out what the command means in the context of your situation is often going to take a fair amount of interpretation on your part, and I suppose more interpretation means less randomness. Hang on, let me try it…

Oh dear. I seem to have found a chemistry term. To “desorb” something is to stop it from being adsorbed any longer. And something is adsorbed when it’s being held in the form of a thin film on the surface of something else, like dye on a fibre. This doesn’t look promising. Still, let’s find out what I’m required to desorb… “Prime cost” - the direct cost of a commodity in terms of materials and labour. Hmm. So my command is “desorb prime cost”. I guess I’ve already carried this one out as well as I can, since I can’t think of a way that a prime cost can be adsorbed, even metaphorically. I’ll try one more. “Linish chimichanga”, which apparently is a command to polish a kind of tortilla by holding it against an abrasive moving belt. Well, this one’s at least possible. I just have to cook up my first chimichanga and then find an appropriate belt. The dictionary has spoken.

On the Google Alphabet

2006-12-17T00:13:00.000Z

Isn't that interesting? I knew you would.
- Tom Lehrer

If you download the Google toolbar for your web browser and type a couple of letters into the search box, it comes up with "a list of useful suggestions based on popular Google searches". In other words, it gives the ten most popular search terms that start with the letters you've chosen. (At least, I think that's what's going on. If it isn't then you can probably ignore this article.) I tried A, and found that Amazon is, in a sense, the most popular thing on the internet beginning with that letter. Then I made 25 similar discoveries, which I'll list now to save you the bother.

A is for Amazon
B is for BBC
C is for currency converter
D is for dictionary
E is for eBay
F is for Firefox
G is for Gmail
H is for Hotmail
I is for Ikea
J is for jokes
K is for Kelly Blue Book
L is for lyrics
M is for Mapquest
N is for news
O is for Orbitz
P is for Paris Hilton
Q is for quotes
R is for Ryanair
S is for Spybot
T is for Target
U is for UPS
V is for Valentines Day
W is for weather
X is for Xbox
Y is for Yahoo
Z is for zip codes

Only five of them are directly to do with the internet or computers, unless you count Amazon and eBay, which are internet-only ways of getting general things. Three are big American companies that I hadn't heard of. If you're picking a brand name, you should maybe bear in mind that competition is stronger on some letters than others. iPods are unlucky to have landed a letter that also begins Ikea, the (US) Inland Revenue Service and the glorious Internet Movie Database. On the other hand, Yahoo has had a pretty easy ride. colonising eight of the ten top Y slots with Yahoo Games, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Maps and so on.

Maybe most interesting (you're as fascinated by all this as me, right?) are the eight words or phrases that aren't proper nouns. "Weather" and "jokes" have crept on despite not picking out any particular product or service, which I suppose helps paint a picture of what people think the internet is for. Apart from porn, obviously. Talking of which, I suspect Google may have made a decision not to confront Toolbar users with certain popular search terms. Though it must mean something that Paris Hilton has the supreme accolade of being the only human on the list, beating Oprah (the fifth O) and Harry Potter (the ninth H). Anyway, I think looking at only the ones without capital letters is fun because it starts to resemble a peculiar version of those children's books. I know, I know, you want to see what that does to the list. Well, I couldn't work out how to see more than the top ten for each letter (can anyone else?), so this is incomplete, but anyway:

A is for ---
B is for best buy
C is for currency converter
D is for dictionary
E is for exchange rates
F is for free games
G is for games
H is for horoscopes
I is for icons
J is for jokes
K is for ---
L is for lyrics
M is for maps
N is for news
O is for online dictionary
P is for prom dresses
Q is for quotes
R is for recipes
S is for song lyrics
T is for thesaurus
U is for used cars
V is for ---
W is for weather
X is for ---
Y is for ---
Z is for zodiac

Brings out the world's interest in astrology, games and lyrics, but still doesn't reveal (or explain) the odd fact that in second place for L is "lunar New Year 2005".

In other alphabet news, Kjell Sandved spent 26 years searching for butterflies with letters on their wings and taking pictures, so if you click here you can see your name spelt out in insect form. Just the thing for kooky homemade Christmas cards.

On Pan's Labyrinth

2006-12-03T17:17:00.000Z

Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing,
through the graves the wind is blowing,
freedom soon will come;
then we'll come from the shadows.

- Leonard Cohen

I don't know why the English title of this film is Pan's Labyrinth. The Spanish title translates as The Labyrinth of the Faun, and the faun character is actually asked his name in the film, replying that he has many names that only the trees can pronounce. From then on, he's just referred to as "the faun". If he'd added "And my name definitely isn't Pan, so don't go erroneously naming any English translations after Greek gods", it wouldn't have been much clearer. But go and see it anyway, because it's brilliant.

It's hard not to compare it with the 1986 film Labyrinth: a girl who's obsessed with fairy tales finds a way into a magical world, where she's given a quest. But Pan's Labyrinth is more complex than Jim Henson's one. The older film is a straight allegory on the lines of Alice in Wonderland. As Jennifer Connelly's character makes her way through the maze, solving puzzles and defeating monsters, she learns growing-up lessons like "Life isn't fair" and "Material possessions are junk". Ofelia, the central character in the Spanish film, is younger and more flawed, and so's the world she lives in (Spain in 1944). It's much harder with this film to sum up the relationship between the real world and the magical one. For a start, the focus is on the former, which is unusual. Sometimes, when Ofelia is in the fantasy, she does find analogues to her real-world problems as in Labyrinth, but that doesn't mean she ends up solving them. It may be that she shouldn't be hiding among imaginary shadows, but actively helping her ill mother or the freedom fighters who are hiding in the hills - but on the other hand, what can a little girl do? Where Jennifer Connelly makes lots of muppety friends, Ofelia's only ally is the faun himself, a towering, hissing creature who reminded me of the rabbit in Donnie Darko and whose motives are questioned throughout.

Is Pan's Labyrinth a children's film? Well, it's got Franco's soldiers torturing republicans, and a nasty bit where someone sews up a wound in his own cheek, but I'd say it is, yes. Spain's politics may be complex, but Ofelia's view of the adults around her is simple, and so that's how we see them too. When she timidly stretches out her left hand to greet her new stepfather for the first time, his own right one snaps up in its fascist black glove and grabs her arm. He whispers "It's the other hand, Ofelia," before walking smartly off. Ah, thinks the audience, fine: this must be a baddy. I'd put the film in the same sort of tradition as Philip Pulman's His Dark Materials novels: since Jim Henson's day, fiction's discovered that children can cope with darkness and pain so long as the morality is easy to understand. That doesn't mean they're preachy, mind. It just means the characters' decisions come in the form of stark moral dilemmas rather than shades of grey.

But watch the film for its atmosphere. There's this sad tune that returns throughout. I suppose it's in a minor key or something. Anyway, it's gorgeous, and it does the same kind of job as the Godfather theme. And the visuals are beautifully terrifying. Have you ever seen Goya's painting of Saturn eating his own son? Well, there's a version of that here, but it's much better.

Is there anything wrong with Pan's Labyrinth? Yes. Given Ofelia's character, there's no way she would have eaten the grapes.

On Oliver Sacks

2006-11-19T10:43:00.000Z

I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception
- Groucho Marx

I’m terrible with faces. You hear that a lot, and it sounds like an excuse: someone has forgotten you because they were uninterested last time they met you. But I honestly am. I can’t, at this moment, mentally picture my girlfriend, my parents or anyone else I know. I’d recognise them instantly if I saw them, of course, but I know for a fact that other people can conjure a face up in their mind’s eye and describe it. As a kid, I’d infuriate my parents by asking questions throughout a film: I couldn’t follow the plot because I couldn’t tell the actors apart. Cartoons were fine. Even now, I sometimes have trouble with that. I got halfway through The Departed before I realised that the two main characters were actually played by different people - I’d mistaken Leonardo di Caprio for Matt Damon (still thought it was great, though).

I don’t need any sympathy for this: it’s a minor inconvenience. But it’s occurred to me that maybe other people’s parietal and occipital lobes work slightly better than mine. That would tie in with the fact that somebody who had a vastly more intense version of the same problem was the man we know only as Dr P, who had a tumour in the right hemisphere of his brain and who was immortalised by Oliver Sacks as one of the greatest ever book titles, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.

I’d need three popular science books on my desert island: Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (which is from before he became obsessed with God), Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, and this one. (I know you’re only allowed one book, but I’d have to come to some kind of arrangement with Kirsty Young.) It’s a collection of case studies - but written in a warmer style than you usually expect from case studies - of some peculiar neurological problems. It gives you the uncomfortable feeling that you’re reading it for the wrong reasons. Sacks writes in the hope that “others might learn and understand, and, one day, perhaps be able to cure”. But it’s a freak show, too. The man who’s believed it was 1945 ever since it really was 1945 is just as weird and wonderful as The Amazing Bearded Lady or The Man Who Eats Metal or whatever. And just as much of a draw: Sacks’s book has been made into a successful play and an operetta and has inspired other works of art as well, including - and of course this is the real accolade - an album by Travis.

But he achieves his aim, nonetheless. Maybe you start reading for the same reason you watch a TV programme called When Plastic Surgery Goes Wrong, but you can’t help thinking in a different way after you’ve come into contact with Sacks’s writing. For example, when he visits Dr P, he sees the man’s paintings: the early ones realistic and the late ones abstract. He realises that this progression is evidence for the advance of the disablity, but also sees the possibility of artistic merit:

Perhaps, in his cubist period, there might have been both artistic and pathological development, colluding to engender an original form; for as he lost the concrete, so he might have gained in the abstract, developing a greater sensitivity to all the structural elements of line, boundary, contour - an almost Picasso-like power to see, and equally depict, those abstract organisations embedded in, and normally lost in, the concrete…

I’m not a Picasso fan, but after reading that passage I find it possible to see some strange shapes in faces, which I can’t see when I’m looking at them as faces. Try doing it with pictures where the face is upside down or distorted, so that its faceness doesn’t jump out so much. Perhaps it’s even true that I’m better at it than you are. Which wouldn’t be as handy as remembering whether I’ve met you before, of course.

On Wikocracy

2006-11-05T14:56:00.000Z

Democracy is necessarily despotism, as it establishes an executive power contrary to the general will
- Immanuel Kant

My brother Mark invented the Maglev train while playing with magnets when he was little. Unfortunately for him, it later turned out that Maglev technology had already been invented and was in use in various parts of Europe and Japan, so Mark will never receive the credit he deserves. The reason I mention this is that there seems to be a family curse developing: the same thing happened to me the other day with an idea I'd decided to call WikiBill.

I'd been browsing Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that's written by everybody who wants to contribute, and I was surprised by how often people from opposing sides seemed able to reach a compromise. In case you don't know, Wikipedia works by allowing anyone who happens to be passing to press the “Edit” button and change the text, or even create a new article. You'd expect the entries in such a project to mainly cover topics like “Eric is a cock”, but apparently the vandals are outnumbered by the well-wishers and it stays on track. It's true that there are sometimes things like reversion wars, where someone stubbornly keeps undoing a change while someone else stubbornly keeps reinstating it, but most of the time it really works. Take a controversial topic like abortion: because disagreements are resolved democratically, and because the most active people tend to be the ones who follow the rules, the resulting article is balanced and fair. In my opinion.

So then I decided that this system ought to replace parliament, or supplement it, or provide it with bills to vote on. I haven't worked out the piddling details yet. But you can see it might work: one person creates a new article on WikiBill, proposing to outlaw – ooh, I don't know – internet gambling. This person is no expert on jurisprudence, so a lawyer who happens to be browsing the site puts it into more conventional language and clears up ambiguities. The next person disagrees with some of the implications and makes a few tweaks or writes a new section. And so on. The thing grows. I suppose that, when the article is mature enough, there'd be a way for people to express generally positive or negative feelings towards it, to give an idea of how popular it would be as an Act of Parliament, and then someone would print it out and take it round to the House of Commons in a briefcase and the MPs could have a vote.

But as I was rushing to bring my new idea to the masses, I ran across Wikocracy, which allows you to choose an existing American law and edit it or create a new one. Of course, this has no effect on legislation, but if it gains weight perhaps Congress will one day pay attention to it – after all, politicians are always looking for ways to monitor public opinion. Then there's Wiki Democracy, which is almost the same idea. Here, the starting assumption is that there are no laws, so they're being created from scratch. These are young projects: Wiki Democracy only has seventy laws on it so far. There's a tiny UK section containing only two, one of which is a joke.

So the idea wasn't mine after all, which is sad – but happy too I suppose, because it means other people are thinking the same. Maybe one day people all over the world will have a say in how America is run. Imagine how Hotel Rwanda would have ended if Rwandans had had a vote in the American presidential election.

On Ron Mueck

2006-10-22T19:33:00.000+01:00

It’s never been this close before.
- Bob Dylan

Galleries and museums come with a dilemma attached: do you go alone so that you can linger on some things and skip past others as you like, or do you take someone with you in case you want to talk about the exhibits? Overall, I’m glad I went to see a recent Ron Mueck exhibition alone, because that way it was easier to appreciate his solitary subjects.

Mueck’s sculptures are all models of people, and he makes them as realistic as he can. They have that Madame Tussauds quality to them – you do a double-take when you realise it isn’t a real person standing next to you after all. What makes this double-take more surprising than in Madame Tussauds is the fact that each one is either larger or smaller than life. I suppose he does this to make it obvious he’s building the figures from scratch rather than just making waxworks from casts. But it also makes for some interesting effects: things you don’t get by looking at the photos in the catalogue. The initial surprise at being confronted by something massive is the most obvious of these, which I suppose is the reason Wild Man came first in the exhibition – a huge, naked man with unkempt beard, clutching his chair in fear. But the scale trick does more subtle things to you too. My favourite sculpture was Ghost, a slightly-too-big teenager in a swimsuit, looking distinctly uncomfortable at being made to lean against the wall in a gallery where people could criticise her.

And criticise her they did. Maybe if I hadn’t been alone I would have done the same thing. It’s one of the three things people seem to do when they’re confronted with Mueck’s models. Because the things are so lifelike, it feels like the artist needs putting in his place, and you’re compelled to look for flaws. The people around me were muttering sceptically about the realism of Ghost’s skin tone and the unwanted arm hair that they failed to remember from their own adolescence.

The second reaction people have is to try to imagine what the characters are thinking. Mueck and the curators who work with him are careful to leave this game open, making sure they give you nothing more than hints to get it going. This was what made Ghost so good for me. I felt a combination of sympathy for her crippling shyness (her face was pulled into a gawkily unusual expression that – well, you’d have to see it up close) and hope on her behalf, because it’s clear that she’ll be good-looking in a couple of years’ time.

The third thing you can do with these sculptures also treats them as real people – instead of putting yourself in their shoes, you sometimes find yourself imagining you’re someone else in the room. In Bed has a middle-aged woman propped up on the pillows, staring into the middle distance. I think she’s watching TV, personally. Anyway, the plaque suggested that her large scale put the viewer in the position of being one of her children. It seemed to me that I was more like a husband. The only time I see flesh in that much detail is when I’m very close to it, and even though it was a pretty unsexy portrait I couldn’t shake a sense of intimacy.