BoJo’s return to no-future

The [harebrained] proposal of Boris Johnson to return to so-called imperial measurements or units illustrates [beyond his usual flair for spinning out of yet-another-scandal] an all-too-common innumeracy of politicians (and possibly a lingering anti-French sentiment as metric units were introduced by the French Revolution), preferring to cater to their Brexit voters rather than realising the drawbacks and costs of a parallel system of measurements, as illustrated by the 1999 Orbiter crash. Does he plan to exit the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures as well?! Or does he expect an improvement in numeracy with the public using different bases (other than 10) at ounce once?!

sunset on the horizon…

“The window for association is closing fast, and we need to ensure that political issues do not get in the way of a sensible solution. We have always been very clear that association is the preferred outcome for protecting decades of collaborative research, and the benefits this has brought to people’s lives across the continent and beyond.” Adrian Smith

As reported in the Guardian of today a terrible impact of BoJo’s Vote Leave Brexit the UK Government failing to implement the Northern Ireland protocol is that this threatens ERC funding for UK scientists, as the associate membership of Horizon Europe was part of the Brexit negociations, whose “deal”  has been delayed because of this. About a hundred new ERC grant recipients who are currently located in the UK have to either relocate to (eager) EU universities or to give up this most prestigious funding…

Misera Carta Privationis

Read in The Guardian of 18 November that the UK Government was pushing for a new bill on nationality and borders that would

• open the possibility for said Government of stripping British citizens of their nationality without noticing them (and hence depriving them from appealing the decision)
• barring anyone arriving in the UK by an illegal route from claiming refugee status
• criminalising anyone trying save an illegal immigrant life
• giving UK Border Force staff immunity from prosecution if their operations result in death

which are failing basic human right principles in the country that established the Magna Carta as a basis for a lawful government… (From a cynic perspective, the 1253 charter was only giving right to a very small fraction of the English population, while serfdom lasted until 1574.) And another illustration of how Brexit is more easily used to cut rights than to establish new ones.

journal of the [second] plague year [deconf’d]

Read the third volume of Parker’s Engineer Trilogy, The Escapement. Which I found very slow-paced, with loads of mechanistic vocabulary I did not know, and it took me a while to read the book! Still, some sections are definitely worth reading, like the one on Necessary Evil, seen as the tolerance zone between exactitude and error, from and engineer viewpoint… And the final chapters are truly terrific, very dark and pessimistic, keeping me awake till the wee hours. Even though all pieces of the machinery fit too well in the end! But I also reflected on the ambivalent role of the very few women in this third novel, dooming the entire country while remaining stuck in the lover-wife-mother triangle, with no engineering or military role…

“He didn’t for one moment doubt the accuracy of the tables, but how on earth did the book’s author know these things? It could only be that, at some time in the past, so long ago that nobody remembered them any more, there had been sieges of great cities; so frequent and so commonplace that scholarly investigators had been able to collate the data-troop numbers, casualty figures-and work out these ratios, qualified by variables, verified by controls (…) to be inferred from the statistical analyses in a manual of best city-killing practice. Extraordinary thought (…) suppose the book was the only residue left by the death of thousands of cities, each one of them as huge and arrogant in its day as the Perpetual Republic—the Eternal City of this, the Everlasting Kingdom of that, squashed down by time and oblivion into a set of mathematical constants for predicting the deaths of men in battle.”

I also read La Saga des Écrins, by François Labande, in the iconic Guérin series, about the Écrins range in the French Alps, where we spent a fortnight last summer, a rather classical if enjoyable story of the climbers making firsts on the peaks of this “wild” area of the Alps. (As an aside, François Labande started Mountain Wilderness France, whose goal is to keep mountains as a place of wilderness and to clean them from artificial infrastructures.) The cover includes a very nice drawing of La Meige by Jean-Marc Rochette. I also read another delightful short story by P. Djèlí Clark, The Angel of Khan el Khalili. Obviously set in the same fantasy steampunk Cairo of the early 1900’s.

Still turning the crank of the new past machine, I made bigoli, the Venetian equivalent of soba noodles, with both an anchovies sauce and a clam sauce as well (if not from the Laguna!), a rhubarb clafoutis (not yet from our garden), Lebanese humus (without the skin!). Noticed a sharp rise in the price of BrewDog beers, thanks to the new taxes courtesy of Brexit! But still ordered a box of their Nanny State for the summer…

Watched the movie Jo-Phil: The Dawning Rage (!), which makes a great job of setting characters and installing a seedy atmosphere of violence and corruption but completely fails at delivering a convincing story, still gripping enough to watch till the end. And binge-watched a Korean TV series called Signal related to the stunning Memories of Murder (and a collection of real crimes in South Korea from the 1980’s to the last decade). While far from perfect, with a tendency to repeat some scenes twice, the usual theatrics of such series, and the paradoxes of temporal travel (!), the show is nonetheless one of the best Korean dramas I watched… Had  a quick look at the very Netflixy Shadow and Bones. To discover that the trilogy was merged with Six of Crows. Which is strange as the time lines completely differ. But logical if considering that Six of Crows is better written and paced than the earlier trilogy, albeit not outstanding. This is a 12⁺ YA read after all..!

 

no haggis for Burns night!