craven.fr

Home movies galore

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0200

In honour of St. James' Day, and thus my son's name day, I'm happy to announce that, after considerable delay, I have finally gotten around to updating the movies on his picture page (password required). These include:

His friend Ines' 2nd Birthday Party
18 months old (discovering his new trike)
22 months old (playing with his godmother)
23 months old (goofing around on a sick day)
26 months old (at the petting zoo)
James in a bunny suit (for Mardi Gras)
Opening a present from Grandma
Hunting for Easter Eggs
Running and yelling "Tummy!" (there's an explanation that goes with that one!)
His 2nd Birthday party with his friends
His main 2nd Birthday party

The British Isles, Day Twelve, Part II: Craven

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 21:26:20 +0200

This is the final article in my running series about our trip through the British Isles. Earlier articles include the Introduction,Stonehenge, Oxford, Driving to Wales, Anglesey, Crossing the Irish Sea, Dublin, Northern Ireland, Ferry to Scotland, Falkirk & Bo'ness, Edinburgh, Loch Ness, Driving to Cumbria, and Hadrian's Wall.

I broke day twelve into two articles not only because I had a lot to say about both halves of the day, but because while the stop at Hadrian's Wall was probably for me personally the high point of the trip, the visit to Craven was unquestionably the most heartbreakingly disappointing. Not that it was in any way catastrophic, but it was simply a let-down instead of the triumphant grand finale I had planned for.

The whole purpose of this trip, for me, was to get better acquainted with the land of my English and Irish ancestors. True, I enlarged this basic theme into a comprehensive tour of the British Isles, but visiting Craven, the location where I know my direct paternal ancestors lived, probably for centuries, was always at the centre of my plans. And Craven is a beautiful place to visit: at the heart of the Yorkshire dales, our French guide book described it as le paradis vu par un Anglais: the English vision of heaven. I made plans to visit the county archives in Leeds and trace my family tree, but today was to be the big day in which we visited the Craven museum, which traced the history of the region.

Finding out about the local history of Craven was something I was very eager to do: in all likelihood my ancestors lived there for many centuries, so knowing the exact history of the region would help me to get a much better picture of who they were: Celtic Britons, Anglo-Saxons, Danes? The early archæological and ethnographic evidence around Skipton would probably provide important clues, but I had found nothing on the internet. (It is a pretty specific topic, after all.) But here was a museum dedicated to the local history of the area—exactly what I wanted to know about.

Well, long story short, we got to the Craven museum about two minutes after it closed. The attendant was actually still there, but despite my begging he wouldn't open it back up for us, saying that he had already turned on the alarm and everything. I was extremely disappointed; the worst of it was that we would have made it on time if we had not stopped to take so many pictures on the way, and mail our post cards, but neither we—nor, apparently the lady at the tourist information office—had any inkling that they closed so early.

Just so I can keep my bad news all in one article, I will say now that I missed my appointment at the archives in Leeds the next day, too. Our GPS system was no match for Leeds' incomprehensible roads, where being in the wrong lane at the wrong moment sends you right back out of downtown. We never found our hotel, and it took us three hours once we reached Leeds to eventually find a hotel with vacancy where we could stay. The lane directions change too fast for the GPS to keep up, and so although we were probably within 500 yards of our hotel multiple times in those three hours, we never found it. (Despite, in three hours, having tried endless permutations of "how about if when I get to this intersection I go in this lane", and asking for directions.) What I should have done is reserve a hotel outside the city as I had done elsewhere on the trip, but I had not expected that things could go so badly. Especially by this point in the trip when I was quite used to British driving, and had been through much larger cities including Dublin and Glasgow. But I just could not find my way in Leeds. I joked afterward that I understood why my great³-grandfather (who was born in Leeds) left to go to America—clearly this city has a curse on our family!

The bright side was that Skipton is certainly worth visiting again, so someday I will make it to the Craven museum. (And kill that attendant!) We did get a lot of good pictures (password required); practically everything has Craven in the name, which is a treat. Leeds on the other hand I will never try to visit in a car again—if I ever go there again it will be by rail!

So, that was the real low point of our trip, but except for not being able to find the hotel, it was more a problem of being disappointed than of anything bad actually happening to us. I missed the two things that had the most personal importance for me to visit on the trip, true, but I did get to see Craven, which for someone who grew up over 4,000 miles away, was still pretty special.

The disappointment also came from the fact that this was supposed to have been the grand finale of the trip, since from then the rest of our trip was just going to be heading back south in order to make it home on time. So we could not re-arrange our schedule: the car had to be returned the next day in Oxford, and we had a ticket to cross the chunnel at 4:00 pm. So there was no room to fit in a return to the Craven museum the next morning. For a trip where everything else went pretty much perfectly, it was a let-down to end on a less than perfect note. The 2007 Patriots know what I mean.

So ends my series of articles on our trip to the British Isles. I am as sorry that they couldn't end on a high note as I am that the actual trip didn't end that way. That doesn't change the fact that, overall, it was a hugely successful trip, and one of the best vacations of my life. This may not be my last article about our trip, however. At some point I think it will be useful to do one on how driving on the left worked out, and provide some other tips that may be of use to anyone else who plans a motoring vacation in Britain or Ireland. But I will close by saying that it was a wonderful trip, one that I thought was crazy to try to pull off—fitting so much into so short a time (five countries in two weeks), and driving on the left to boot. I'm proud of myself, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, and I'm so glad we took the chance to do it before James got old enough to say "are we there yet?"

Ebooks: The Anecdotal Evidence

Fri, 2 Jul 2010 18:58:54 +0200

Recently I received a pre-course reading list for my upcoming studies at Oxford University. Since I don't have access to the Bodleian Library yet, and since I don't live in a city where it's easy to get academic books in English, I immediately turned to my iPad to see how far I could get with electronic books alone. As the results below show, all I can say is that it's a darn good thing that there's a Kindle app on the iPad!

Kindle comes out way, way ahead on selection, and the shopping experience (just the act of searching out these books), was also much easier on Amazon than on the iPad, where you have to go through a rather laborious search process on the device itself just to find out that they don't carry the book you want.

On the other hand, iBooks offers a better, more attractive reading experience than the Kindle reader. And, importantly, it uses the open epub standard, as opposed to Kindle's proprietary format. This means that books can be bought in other places and imported onto iBooks, too. I have already purchased books from O'Reilly this way, and it's a big plus. Given the choice, I would rather read in iBooks.

That said, for a case like this where I had a dozen books to hunt down, there was no way I was going to take the time to individually identify each publisher and go to their site to see whether they had an e-book publishing deal with another vendor that sells in the epub format. That's almost as much work as patching a Linux kernel! For once, Apple has been beaten in the simplicity game, and Amazon's getting a lot more ebook sales from me because of it.

Poet and Contributor to the Daily Telegraph

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 07:05:05 +0200

It looks like I can now claim to have had my poetry published in the Daily Telegraph, Britain's leading newspaper.

Actually, the reality is somewhat less. For one, my verses only appeared on telegraph.co.uk, the paper's online site. (Although, since online is in the process of replacing print, that distinction means less than it used to. Still, the word "published" has to be considered an exaggeration.) It gets worse, though. The context of these lines was the World Cup live blog, which runs all day long and, to break the tedium, invited readers to send in their World Cup limericks. Somehow, for reasons I cannot explain, this "seemed like a good idea at the time", and the following contribution was submitted (you can see the lines in context here, at 13.20):

There once was a plastic vuvuzela
So loud it could deafen Methuselah.
How the players kept playing
Through its incessant braying
Took mental, not physical, stamina.

Perhaps I should put together a campaign to run for Professor of Poetry? :-)

Oriel's Library, circa 1329

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 19:22:22 +0200

In reading about Oriel I came across this interesting little anecdote about how the college library worked in the early 1300's—this was before even the heyday of chained libraries. (And obviously way before this picture of the Senior Library today was taken!)

Each year, at the Feast of All Souls, in presence of the Provost or his viceregent and of the whole college, an inspection of the college books was to be held; each Scholar was to choose a book most appropriate to his studies, which he might keep until the following All Souls' Day, when the process would be repeated. After the fashion of the Middle Age, it seemed to be assumed that the number of books and Scholars should correspond. In the event of there being more books than Scholars, it was provided that the excess should be disposed of in some way. Books in those days were too precious to be allowed to lie idle on shelves.
—"Oriel College" by David Watson Rannie, p. 14

Imagine that: studying at Oxford University—an even rarer privilege back then than it is today—and your resources are comprised of a single book for the whole year! The number of scholars, moreover, was actually determined on a one-to-one basis by the number of books they had!

I can't imagine studying with only one book for a whole year, but it is interesting to imagine what it must have been like back then.

Bizet: Carmen

Wed, 2 Jun 2010 19:40:20 +0200

Carmen is my favourite opera. It has pretty much always been my favourite opera (Don Giovanni being the only one to ever seriously threaten it in that position), and I have listened to it easily fifty or sixty times. (Callas' under-appreciated studio version being my favourite.)

Carmen also occupies a preponderant place in the pantheon of French-language opera. There are a lot of great French-language operas, but Carmen towers over them all—and unlike the way in which Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen towers over German-language operas, Carmen, being more accessible, also continues to be hugely popular with the general public, as well. (I think a good analogy would be The Nutcracker's broad popular appeal with audiences in the US, which transcends the usual ballet crowd.)

So, when a French opera company puts on Carmen, it is a big deal. The Opéra de Lille rose to the challenge with an extra-long run of ten shows, a recording, and a live retransmission on one of the public squares in order to bring this production to the largest possible audience. Even so, tickets were considered nearly impossible to get. People began queueing up before dawn on the day they went on sale, and they were sold out that very morning. I had many co-workers who had wanted to get tickets, but came away empty.

Fortunately, I was not one of the ones to go away empty-handed. (I got lucky on the online ticket counter.) So, last Tuesday, Emilie and I got to see the Lille production of Carmen, and wow, was it ever worth it!

In some respects, producing Carmen is like shooting fish in a barrel: there's enough material here to fill a whole "best of the opera" CD just with well-known songs from this one opera. The overture, Habanera, and toréador song are enough to send any crowd away happy. But to the cognoscenti, a real succesful production—one that brings out just how excellent this opera is, has to get a number of other elements right in order for everything to click the way it should:

I. The cuadrilla in Act IV. The whole opera leads up to this climactic moment, and done right, it is one of the most powerful moments in all of the fine arts. However, it is hard to do it right: not only do you need a full children's choir and an adult choir, but the staging must somehow come together in such a way that the size and excitement of the bullfighting festival are brought across. It requires big sound and big staging. Shamefully, some productions cut this scene out entirely. I suppose they reckon that it is better to remove it rather than do a poor job of it, but it really castrates the entire opera. Well, Lille not only did not cut it out, but executed it brilliantly. That alone made this Carmen better than the one I saw the Opéra de Montréal produce many years ago, which given the relative sizes of the two companies is really something.

II. Frasquita and Mercédès. These rôles are pivotal to a succesful Carmen. However, because they are not involved in any of the big, famous songs, they are too easily overlooked. Acts II and III depend on their rôles for characterisation and for the pure fun they bring to the whole opera. When they deliver, the opera becomes one masterful whole, and not a collection of classical "hits". The production we saw was completely sensitive to the importance of the smugglers to the opera, and not only were Frasquita and Mercédès brilliantly cast and performed, by Eduarda Melo and Sarah Jouffroy (more on them later), but Dancaïre and Remendado were too. Raphaël Brémard and Loïc Félix were so spot-on with their interpretation of these rôles that it really cemented Acts II and III.

III. The opening of Act II. The song that opens Act II (Les tringles des sistres tintaient) is probably my favourite of the whole opera, and the most under-appreciated. A production that captures the magic of that piece of music is really a production that "gets it". This production exceeded my expectations by a mile, with the scene and choreography coming together with the music wonderfully. The most wonderful, though, were the bohémiennes: Eduarda Melo and Sarah Jouffroy, as I mentioned above, are beautiful women who really embodied their rôles to perfection. Stéphanie d’Oustrac, however, was born to play the rôle of Carmen. Somehow, this is her first time in the rôle, but I think it is a safe bet that it won't be the last. (And I'm not the only one who thinks so.) For starters, it is uncanny how much she looks the part. Beyond that, her acting on stage was excellent, of a higher level than one usually expects in opera, and her ability to dance and sing make her a natural leading lady.

Anyway, I don't want to get carried away in superlatives, but I am pretty discerning when it comes to this opera, and this production really did surprise me. It delivered on all the key points (such as not skimping on more difficult elements like Act IV or the children's choir—who were also great, by the way), and by showing a real sensitivity to the more subtle factors that make this opera great (namely, the smugglers' importance to the whole). Finally, Stéphanie d’Oustrac was a brilliant, brilliant Carmen, and from now on, when I listen to this opera and visualise it in my mind's eye, it is her face that will be Carmen's for me.

Best of iTunes U: Linear Algebra

Wed, 26 May 2010 07:01:05 +0200

Math is fun. It is inherently interesting, and the beauty and symmetry of mathematics reveal far more about our universe than something so purely abstract should ever be able to do. I enjoy learning more about mathematics.

And yet, when you lose the train of thought, mathematics immediately become incomprehensible, frustrating, and hard. I firmly believe that it is because most of us are not truly able to learn mathematics at our own pace that so many of us are turned off it. Once you get lost, in math, it becomes a very unpleasant place to be. Our eyes glaze over before a maze of incomprehensible squiggles, and what should be a simple, elegant proof becomes meaningless gobbledygook instead.

Two things result from this. One is, that following mathematics lectures on iTunes U is in many ways a godsend: you can stop and rewind the lecturer as many times as you want to, and it is simple and easy to go back and listen to any lecture that you haven't totally grasped again. You can have things explained to you at your own pace, and so make progress that you might not have been able to in a traditional school setting.

It also follows, though, that recommending a lecture is a very hard thing to do, since according to the reader's level of ability, the choices range from the the dull and oversimplified to the maddeningly advanced and incomprehensible. But one man's remedial refresher is another man's cutting edge, depending on where our mathematics education stopped, or how much we have forgotten since school.

Matrix operations were one of the areas of high school mathematics that I most enjoyed, back in the day. I remember being fascinated by the interesting properties of matrices and the surprising ways they interacted, and the simple patterns of operations one used in manipulating them. I have not touched them since high school, however, so I did not remember much of anything about them except what they looked like.

Linear algebra may be a topic in high school math (Algebra II, if I remember my high school curriculum correctly), but it is a topic that goes deep enough to merit a semester long course at MIT. There is some cachet to being able to follow a mathematics lecture at MIT, which makes following this course even more fun. What MIT really deserves recognition for, though, is what an incredible contribution they make, through iTunes U and OpenCourseWare, to desseminating knowledge and making so much of their world-class programme availible for free on the internet, to anyone in the world. This will not be the last time I recommend a course from MIT in "Best of iTunes U".

Linear Algebra is taught by Gilbert Strang, a former Rhodes scholar (Oxford represent!) and world-renowned mathematician. His lecturing style is well-suited to watching his recorded lectures: he is clear, his worked examples are not beset by implied steps or other obscuring factors, and he is able to keep us interested both in the material at hand, and in its larger implications.

The only criticism I have to this lecture series is that the video is optimised for the iPhone screen. Which is well and good, since I watch it on my phone and would not like to have unnecessarily large files on it. On the other hand, the video quality is too low to view on an iPad (the chalkboard becomes illegible), which is unfortunate since it would be nice to be able to have the option to view the lectures on a larger screen too. Still, it is amazing and fantastic to be able to view lectures from MIT from a renowned professor and teacher, absolutely free, and I am so thankful to have the opportunity. And it is enjoyable to flex those math muscles once again, after all these years.

The British Isles, Day Twelve, Part I: Hadrian's Wall

Mon, 17 May 2010 18:18:12 +0200

This is an article in my ongoing series about our trip through the British Isles. Earlier articles include the Introduction,Stonehenge, Oxford, Driving to Wales, Anglesey, Crossing the Irish Sea, Dublin, Northern Ireland, Ferry to Scotland, Falkirk & Bo'ness, Edinburgh, Loch Ness, and Driving to Cumbria.

Waking up in Carlisle heading south, we headed out to visit a site that naturally interests any English-speaking classicist: the ruins of Hadrian's wall. In fact, as a fan of George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire novels, which feature a fantasy version of a similar wall, my romantic notions about this wall actually had a double origin. Our original intent was to simply stop off at Brampton, only 30 minutes out of our way, but ultimately the guidebooks I was looking at the night before convinced me to head a little further out to Housesteads, and skip the Lake District, instead. (Hadrian's wall can be visited in many places, as it ran from one end of Great Britain to the other. Many sections of the wall are no longer around, but there are still plenty of spots you can potentially go to visit it—and the most ambitious can walk the Hadrian's wall trail.) In any event I am glad we ventured out to Housesteads, as it is a prime contender for my favourite part of our entire trip.

I had not expected to do much more than see the wall, ponder it for a few moments, and take some pictures to get an occidental equivalent to my brother's recent photos at the Great Wall of China. The whole drive was made a bit more confusing because the countryside is actually criss-crossed with stone walls, which the shepherds of the region use to separate their plots of land. So the whole time we were driving by stone walls, wondering, "is that the wall we're driving out to see?" In fact, the reason that there are so many places where the wall is now gone is that local shepherds often looted it for stones to build their own walls.

It turned out that our looking at all these other walls before we got to Hadrian's went a long way towards helping us appreciate the Roman wall, because it looked totally different. It really is just a small ruin of what it was in Roman times, so some imagination and background reading are necessary to appreciate it, but anyone can see that it is no shepherd's wall. Shepherd's walls, like the stone walls we have in New England, are pretty much just stacks of rocks. The Roman one was a wall—every stone was cut square, and the thing was solidly built: you could put a battering ram on a semi truck and drive into it at full steam and it would hold. The Scottish barbarians, or even a mediæval army, would have been powerless in the face of Roman power. Especially when you picture it at full height, with wooden stockades, and armed fortresses positioned at every mile on the mile. It really brought home to me how the Romans were operating at a completely different level of civilisation to their surronding peoples. And that they were a nation of engineers.

Anyway, what made Housesteads, or Vercovicium as it was then known, such a popular spot on the wall to visit is that it is the best preserved of one of these mile fortresses, so although only the foundations remain, you can get a sense of how things were laid out and what it was like under Roman administration. What was most unexpected, though, is that it had perhaps the best gift shop (for us) at a tourist site I've ever seen.

This was because it had three great finds, in addition to the usual postcards and coffee table books. One was the book Roman Britain, by Guy de la Bedoyère. Naturally I was very interested in this topic, not least because we were approaching the land my ancestors hailed from (although in all probability some of my ancestors came with the Anglo-Saxons, there are most probably others who lived in Roman Britain too). Having a meaty, academic history of all aspects of Roman Britain was exactly the kind of book I desired, to learn more about the topic. I would not usually expect such an academic book to be sitting in a giftshop—but I was glad it was!

If that book was still somewhat understandable in that it also had pictures, and was in English, the next book I found was truly out of place—and even more wonderful. Archæologists at Vindolanda, another nearby site on the wall, were able to uncover actual postcards and letters written by Roman soldiers at the wall! They had been thrown out, possibly in the unburnt portion of a trashpile, which later sunk into the ground and through some miraculous chemical processes, these thin pieces of paper, thrown out nearly 2000 years ago in the wet, cold climate of England, were in some way petrified, and through modern scans, classicists have been able to recover some of the writing. Of particular interest to me (as a shorthand writer), is that with these tablets we at last have a surviving example of Roman shorthand.

The result is some fascinating Latin reading material. Unlike Cæsar or Cicero's famous literature, these are the letters of ordinary Roman soldiers writing to friends and family about ordinary things. The weather in England is terrible. Please send me some sweaters from Germany. You are invited to my birthday party. The Vindolanda tablets bring Roman Britain to life in a way that I can only describe as miraculous. And with such a range of information. On the one hand they tell us that the Romans wore underpants, and on the other, there are actually parts of the Æneid on some of the tablets! It is amazing. They were actually reading Virgil in military camps at the furthest-flung reaches of the Empire! So, what I was able to find at the bookstore was Life and Letters on the Roman Frontier, a scholarly exposition of these tablets, including the texts in the original Latin. I was so thrilled to find out that these tablets existed, and to get an authoritative book discussing them and providing the Latin transcription was incredible. It is such a scholarly book, clearly aimed at specialists and with no pictures (other than a handful of plates)—the mere fact that it had found its way into the gift shop was a second miracle.

The third treasure was for James. Throughout the trip, in bookstores Emilie had been looking for a good CD of English children's songs, but we hadn't found anything good yet. Well, here in the gift shop was a CD of children's songs put out by English Heritage, that was just perfect: almost all were songs I grew up with ("The wheels on the bus", "This old man", "London Bridge is falling down", "Old MacDonald had a Farm", "Old King Cole"). It was exactly what we wanted, and because it was published by English Heritage, the CD booklet had a write-up of the origins of all the songs, which was interesting to Emilie and me.

So that is the tale of how we discovered treasure in the ruins of the Roman Empire. Pictures at the wall are posted here (password required). We then set out for Yorkshire, to spend the afternoon in Craven, the land of my ancestors.

Best of iTunes U: Introduction to Ancient Greek History

Sun, 9 May 2010 19:26:45 +0200

The explosion of content available on iTunes U has probably been the single biggest improvement to my quality of life in the last year. Whereas before podcasts were the main thing I listened to, I am now able to enjoy lectures from preeminent professors at Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, MIT, Stanford, and countless other great institutions of higher learning. This is fantastic, not only because it would not have been possible for all but a few to hear these great lectures before, but also because the subjects available are, in their variety and interest, just more informative to listen to than what one can find in the average podcast. I really love it.

iTunes U, however, really has a number of different kinds of content on it, ranging from simple promotional videos (not that informative, unless you are a prospective student), to one-off lectures, to interviews with faculty, and—my favourite by far—sometimes the lectures of an entire course are online. Finding the quality stuff is not always easy, though, so from time to time I want to highlight stuff that I found particularly good by writing about it here.

Donald Kagan's Introduction to Ancient Greek History deserves to be mentioned first of all. It is accessible, even to those who have not studied classics or ancient history. It is complete, with all twenty-four lectures online, giving you the full experience of sitting in on the course. It is coming from a top professor—Kagan is a Sterling professor at Yale and the world's preeminent living expert on the Peloponnesian war. And it is relevant—throughout Kagan is very good at explaining why Ancient Greek history matters to us today, and why we should care so much about the events he is describing.

That is high praise, and it is ironic to find myself writing it, since I nearly turned Kagan off ten minutes into the first lecture.

This is because that first lecture ventures into a political interpretation of history, and Kagan's own politics, and the interpretation of Greek history that he was propounding to support them, rubbed me the wrong way. Fortunately, this is only really present in the introduction to the course (and even then, perhaps I was hyper-sensitive to it), and frankly, by the end of the course it is abundantly clear that his views in no way impede his presentation of his actual subject matter.

It is an excellent presentation of ancient Greek history, an excellent experience to be able to follow the entire course of one of Yale's most famous humanities professors, and I think it would be easy to follow even for someone fairly new to the subject matter. A great place to start for anyone interested in learning more about Ancient Greece.

Educating Leaders for 800 Years

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 18:56:57 +0200

That is the current tagline on the website of our Saïd Business School at Oxford University. It is a good one. It cuts to the heart of what makes Oxford so special, as the oldest university in the English-speaking world, and one whose reputation and pedigree are unmatched in producing brilliant minds, great leaders, prominent authors—even saints. In fact, the exact age of the university is unknown, so that the school might have legitimately said "Educating Leaders for 1000 Years", but to their credit, they prefered to stick to what can be factually documented.

One of the things that most struck me, however, when I visited the Saïd Business School was its great modernity. Actually, no: the word "modern" does not do the school justice—rather, it exudes the confidence and success that make you immediately feel that you are someplace cutting edge. UK MP David Marquand has described the School as the "future of Oxford University", and once I visited the place I could easily see how one could arrive at such a conclusion. Since the MBA programme at Oxford is comparitively young, the push to build a world-class business school shows Oxford, not at rest on its prestige and past achievements, but actively deploying its wealth, energy, and expertise into establishing itself as a preeminent world leader in business education. Seeing such forces mustered is an exciting thing.

I had a lot of concrete reasons to choose Oxford for my MBA, and I could catalogue the list of them here, but I think it would make for boring reading. Instead, I hope that what I have said captures something of what the atmosphere and energy is like at Saïd Business School, which in itself says a great deal.

His Father's Son

Wed, 7 Apr 2010 21:08:00 +0200

There are a lot of bookshelves in our living room, so part of raising a toddler is keeping him from trying to climb them or pull all the books out of them. Since the books that are closest to his toy shelf (and therefore his most frequent targets) happen to be Greek and Latin poetry, I quickly devised a system of "punishment" whereby if he pulled one of these books off the shelf he would be subjected to listening to me read it to him.

It turns out that this is quite an effective deterrent.

On Easter Monday, however (a holiday in France), my adorable little son woke me up by climbing into bed and giving me a big hug. A few hours later, he actually deliberately pulled out a copy of Virgil's Eclogues and brought it over to me, then climbed up into my lap! (This is exactly what he does when he wants me to read him one of his picture books.) I duly read the discourse of Melibœus and Tityrus to a surprisingly attentive toddler for a good five minutes before he quietly whispered "all done", and climbed down. And to top it all off, later that day he also came over and sat with me to watch the Red Sox opener! I don't think there was any way possible that I could have been prouder of my son :-)

We may be embarking on the "terrible twos", but this age so far is by no means all bad.

The Boat Race

Fri, 2 Apr 2010 18:30:20 +0200

The Oxbridge rivalry is the oldest university sports rivalry in the world, and set the tone for such rivalries, not only in the UK, but in the US and Commonwealth as well. When these two great universities square off against each other, it is Harvard-Yale, Army-Navy, and Floyd of Rosedale all rolled in one. The most watched, most contested sport, and the one longest contested in competition, is the annual Boat Race, the men's eights rowing competition which takes place over four miles of the Thames in London, and is watched by hundreds of thousands of spectators live, and millions on television and worldwide. It is a very big deal. This Saturday will see the 156th running of this historic race, and I will be cheering for Oxford!

The participants are awarded "Blues", equivalent to varsity letters in the US, and so called because each university's team colour is blue—Dark Blue for Oxford, and pale blue for Cambridge (you know, "because it is a pale imitation of the real thing"). Blues are awarded in a number of sports (and half-blues in some of the less recognised sports), but the rowing Blues are the most prestigious of all. Many rowing Blues go on to row in the Olympic games. (An odd point of interest: Hugh Laurie, who now plays House on television, earned a Cambridge Blue rowing in the Boat Race in 1980!).

Of course, letterman jackets are not very Oxbridge, so instead Blues wear specially tailored blazers in their respective blue shade. At Oxford, they become members of the famous Vincent's Club, a private club with a clubhouse on the high street (and there's probably some similar thing at the other place).

As for the race itself, four miles is a very long distance for rowing. Added to this is the intense preasure to win, requiring that the Blues give every ounce of their ability to winning this race, the biggest of their lives. The contrasting need to row strongly and to have the endurance to cover this great distance makes it very exciting. The excitement is only increased by the fact that, since it is a four mile race down the Thames, there can be no straight lanes the way there are in the Olympic games. Steering, positioning on the river, and going into turns are all factors that can decide the race, just like in automobile racing. And like in car racing, in the worst case there is the risk of the boats' oars coming into contact—a dangerous situation indeed with the stakes of the race being so high.

It's all over in twenty minutes (but there are women's and other boats races as well to fill the entire day), but no matter what the outcome, all the participants' names will go down in history. The Boat Race provides a wonderful focal point (rivaled only by the Varsity Match in rugby) for both students and alumni of the two universities to get together and renew their pride in their alma mater.

The British Isles, Day Eleven: Driving to Cumbria

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 00:05:05 +0200

On the eleventh day of our trip we awoke at the northernmost point of our whole voyage: for ten days we had been heading north from France (albeit by a very circuitous route, with detours through Wales and Ireland!). This day would mark the point at which we turned back, and began heading for home. Because we wanted to visit as much as possible on our way back, this meant that this day, in which we were retreading ground already covered, was about hurrying up and getting past all that to reach the new stuff. So, it was a big driving day. That was fine by me, as the highlands were a beautiful place to drive, and I was enjoying the local flavour of talk radio on BBC Scotland on the way.

I mentioned before that the highlands are a vast, empty land. This is why Inverness was such a choke point for tourists: there's nowhere else to go! It's also why we had to retread ground we'd already covered: there were no alternative routes back south to take.

None of this was on my mind much as I listened to talk radio on the highway though. On the traffic report, they did keep reporting on a major accident on the highway we were on, so I kept a lookout for the detour, but nothing more.

Well, eventually we ran into the accident, and traffic backed up. In fact, traffic stopped. In fact, traffic stayed stopped. For ten minutes. Then twenty minutes. "I can't believe this, I was keeping my eyes pealed for a detour and never saw one," I thought to myself. Eventually people started getting out of their cars. One older Scotsman, clearly a highlander, shook his head at the few who tried to turn around their cars and head back up the highway, going the wrong way (this was a mountain highway and the lanes for cars going the opposite direction were about 150 yards below us). "We checked the atlas and there are no other roads south," he told another driver. That's when it dawned on me why there was no detour: this was the only road south, period. So, there was nothing to do but wait for the accident to get cleared up.

All in all we were stopped for two hours, which put quite a damper on our time. Fortunately we had everything we needed to eat in the car and keep the baby happy, so we were better off than a lot of drivers. I joked to Emilie that something had to go wrong at some point, with such a complicated trip, so it was just as well to get our hiccup out of the way now. (I was too optimistic, however: the real low point of our trip comes later.)

Because we were travelling with a baby, though, I had planned huge margins into our itinerary, so we still rolled into Carlisle before it was too late. That was another interesting experience: the border between England and Scotland is empty. Compared to the dense population of the Lowlands, it seems odd to have such a wasteland dividing two countries that have been united for over 300 years—France and Germany have less desolate boarders, and they've been enemies since Roman times!

Anyway, had we not had our unscheduled delay we might have had time to visit Carlisle itself, but as it was we could only check into the hotel and then go out and scavange some Chinese food. Stay tuned for the next day, however, which was one of the best of the trip, beginning with an excursion into Northumbria to see Hadrian's wall!

Oxford's Collegiate System Explained—through Harry Potter

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 10:00:00 +0100

One of the most misunderstood and potentially confusing things about Oxford University, to those unfamiliar with it, is the college system. Like the tourists that constantly amuse students by asking "where is the university" (when they're in it!), the fact that Oxford University is "divided up" into many different colleges confuses people and often leads to humorous misunderstandings.

Fortunately, the wide popularity of Harry Potter now makes it possible to explain Oxford colleges in an easily understandable way, at least to those familiar with the universe of those books and movies: if you take Hogwarts as Oxford (not hard to do, since the movies were filmed there!), then the houses of Hogwarts (Gryffindor, Slytherin, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff) can be viewed as analogous to the colleges of Oxford.

The parallels work quite nicely: In Hogwarts, all students belong to a House, as do the faculty. They eat together, and have their own sports teams, and colours. Each house has its own look and reputation. But the houses are not tied to the education the students receive: all students take their classes, exams, and graduate as Hogwarts students. So there's nothing stopping a student at Ravenclaw from excelling in potions even though Snape is a professor at Slytherin. They just won't be rooting for the same quidditch team on weekends.

Oxford works the same way. Except, rather than four houses, there are 38 colleges and 6 permanent private halls (which are primarily houses of religious orders). Colleges have their own colours, sports teams, dining halls, chapels, and libraries. But the college system is completely separate from the university faculties and departments: there is not one college for history students, all history students are under the Faculty of History, whatever their college.

For undergraduate study, the picture is slightly complicated by the fact that it actually is common to receive tuition within the college. But this is only a convenience measure, because undergraduate studies, being more general, can be handled by the colleges themselves, while the more in-depth and specialised graduate work tends to require dedicated facilities. So while undergraduates in many subjects can find all they need with their college library and faculty, graduates will tend to spend their time in their departmental library instead (and everyone has access to the Bodleian). College life determines where you eat, sleep, and what sports team you play on (or root for), but all are students of Oxford University. At the same time all the colleges have their reputation and atmosphere, like the houses of Hogwarts do, and so a given student might be a much better fit for one college than another. If I get the chance later I may profile some of these in more detail, but for now I have nothing to go on but hearsay, so I shall hold my tongue.

As it concerns Oxford, the college system is one of the unique strengths about studying here, because it creates a community in which people from all sorts of academic backgrounds associate with each other. In the US, fraternities and sororities can provide something similar to undergraduates who take part in them, but the Oxford system is universal: all students, graduate students, and faculty belong to a college as a prerequisite to being a member of the university. This system allows for interesting exchanges outside of one's own specialty, and who knows whether what one hears over dinner in talking to a biologist describing his research in "how environmental competition operates in bacteria cultures" might not give an economist a new idea about something he observed in his own research into markets?

Oh, but there is one major difference between Oxford and Hogwarts: at Oxford it is rowing, not quidditch, that obsesses the entire student body :)

Bound for the City of Dreaming Spires

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 23:11:38 +0100

It is with great pride that, this autumn, I will embark on what is sure to be an intensive and memorable year, as I matriculate at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School, as a member of the MBA class of 2011.

I will certainly have occasion to write more about the MBA programme specifically in the future, and how it fits into my own career plans. But I am creating a new 'Oxford' category as well, which will be kept separate from those articles (they will go into the existing underused 'Work' section). Studying at the world's most prestigious university, the oldest in the English-speaking world, will also lead to more general articles about the Oxford experience, and those are what this new category is for. Like the 'France' category that exists already, I will put non-business related articles here about such traditions as formal halls, bops, sub-fusc, or punting on the Isis, as well as anything that may come up about living in England generally.

As I mentioned above, though, this is going to be an extremely intensive year, so I will apologise in advance for what is sure to be an erratic posting schedule!

Haydn's L'infedeltà Delusa

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 22:31:58 +0100

On Tuesday I returned to the Lille opera house to see a production of Haydn's L'infedeltà delusa. This little opera has a lot to recommend it: with only five vocal parts and a small orchestral score, and clocking in at under two hours long, it is an ideal size for smaller opera companies to stage, without seeming 'small'. (This is in contrast to Rameau's Dardanus, whose grand scale is the major thing keeping it from being better appreciated. And I don't know if I'll ever get to witness a full staging of William Tell.)

Composed of two acts, the unfolding of the plot was surprisingly excellent: what begins as a bog-standard tale of rural lovers having their lives turned upside down by the rich takes a surprising and original turn in the second act, so that the outcome of the opera is totally unlike what I had expected, and quite fun. It also gives a fascinating, versatile rôle to the soprano Vespina, who was played by a very good Claire Debono.

At the performance I saw, the role of Nennio was played by Thomas Tatzl, who was however too sick to sing his part, so he only acted on stage while his understudy Andreas Wolf sang from the orchestra pit. But it was Mari Eriksmoen as Sandrina who had me looking into the orchestra pit to try to see where that voice was coming from! Her small build and active role did not keep her from performing admirably vocally, and I only wish there was more of her character in the story so I could have heard more of her.

All in all it was a very well-put together opera, and the staging was also imaginative and well done. I was sceptical when the curtain first rose (it looked too abstract for my tastes), but the surprises that the stage revealed throughout the performance won me over, and by the second act (when the costumes got really outrageous) I was totally on board. Unfortunately I can't describe it well here, though, so I guess 'you had to be there'. (I could go on for paragraphs with vague descriptions, but none of that would make up for being there, or give a very clear picture of it all.) The pictures included in this review may help give you some idea of it, or they may only confuse you further!

In any event I enjoyed it quite a bit!

American Cooking in France: Vegetarian Food

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 23:50:59 +0100

If there is one thing that one quickly comes to realise in France, it is that food here is sacrosanct. Not only do the French attach a very high importance to food, and its quality, in their lives, but this obsession works its way into nearly every facet of French life, from traditions, to employment law (hello two hour lunch breaks!), to the day to day rhythm of life.

One of the most shocking things to me about first coming here as an exchange student was the way that this also translated to a fierce opposition to vegetarianism (and kosher diets, and teetotalers, and any other deviation from the normal (i.e. "correct") way of eating food). The same sentiment that has sitcom chefs tipping over tables when an uncouth American wants to put ketchup on a steak also comes through with other deviancies from accepted practice. Sometimes this makes for a humorous anecdote, like when my mom tried to order an omelette, from a Parisian café that had them on the menu, in the morning (omelettes are only for lunch and dinner in France). Even though they had the eggs and mom was saying that that was what she wanted, she had to insist two or three times before the waiter agreed to let her order one ("mais, c'est le matin!")—and even then he made it clear that what she was doing was definitely wrong, in his opinion. This is not a country where the customer is always right, especially when there's food at stake.

At other times, though, like when a vegetarian comes to the country, the French hostility to their diet makes me cringe a bit. Gay marriage and topless women on the beach are fine here, but they draw the line at not having meat with your main course.

That is the general backdrop of the situation here, although, especially in Paris, vegetarians can thrive just fine. But they do have to put up with a hostility that, coming from a North American context, can be quite shocking. (Lest the reader think I am exagerating, when I arrived as an exchange student my "Welcome to France" orientation book had a very short rubric on vegetarianism: "Vegetarianism is not practised in France. Adapt."

I am not a vegetarian and have no desire to ever become one, but I am trying to reduce my consumption of red meat to around once a week or so, and to eat more fresh vegetables, and now during Lent I am taking the time to put some extra effort into this. So this has led me to pursue some vegetarian recipes online, and (as one who likes to cook a lot on Sunday and live off leftovers during the week), this Roasted vegetable and grain gratin provides an excellent template for vegetarian casseroles that can be modified in all sorts of simple ways to give a great variety—by switching out the grain, vegetable mix, sauce, and/or cheese selections it has almost limitless possibilities! Since French supermarkets have such a wonderful selection of interesting vegetables, I'm going to enjoy experimenting with some of the variations in the months ahead.

The British Isles, Day Ten: Loch Ness

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 23:52:20 +0100

Up to this point, we were having a fantastic trip. Everything we'd seen had been great, the driving on the left was going well, and despite having set up an extremely complex itinerary and travelling with a baby, things were going swimingly. Not only were the places we were visiting interesting, but nothing felt too 'touristy' (in the negative sense), considering.

I say all this, not because Loch Ness and Inverness were bad, but just to show that, in the context of following on so many highs, it was not as good a part of our trip as I had expected it to be.

I should point out right away though that the Highlands and the Loch itself did not disappoint. All Loch Ness really is, is a beautiful lake, but it is indeed very beautiful, especially on a nice day like the one we had. And the Highlands were a sight to see. I was explaining in the car to Emilie about how Scotland has the "Highlands" and "Lowlands"—pronouncing them slowly so she could hear the etymology—but my pedantic explanation was completely unnecessary, because the contrast between the two countrysides could not have been more obvious. When you reach the highlands, you know it: hill after steep hill covered with heather and thistle, too inhospitable to grow anything or even pasture animals, the highlands are a vast, empty land. (I'll have more to say on how empty in the next article.)

The downside was that the Loch Ness visitor centre was the first real "touristy" feeling place we had run into on our whole trip. Tons of buses with foreign visitors, and a cafeteria with sub-par food (made worse by the fact that the people in line didn't speak English and were making a mess of things trying to get their food), made this a place that we would have been better advised to skip. There are actually little restaurants in a nearby town that would've been much nicer to eat at, but we didn't know this at the time, as the large visitor centre is the first place you see. So better planning on our part would've helped. On the upside, though, it was fun to watch James charm a tour bus full of Korean schoolgirls :-)

Inverness, the capital of the highlands, is a small city of about 50,000, but managed to have the worst traffic we'd seen since Glasgow. This crowd, obviously mostly of tourists like us, also contributed to the touristy feel of the day that up until then we had managed to avoid. (Inverness has also been seeing a lot of population growth, so the city's infrastructure is already taxed even without the summer tourists.) I'm sure that with fewer tourists it must be a great place to visit, but as it is there are too many in August, which is the only month the weather gets warm enough for anyone to want to travel there, so that's a pretty theoretical concession.

Still, it would have been inconceivable to do a driving tour of Scotland and not venture into the Highlands or visit Loch Ness, so I am certainly glad we did it. The visit itself was fine, and only 'marred' by the fact that there were so many other people visiting too—if we had somehow visited Inverness first, I'm sure that my impressions would have been quite different. As it is though, we were being spoiled by our trip, which meant that things were going pretty well indeed.

Click here to see our pictures (password required).

Thoughts on 3D

Wed, 3 Feb 2010 07:20:20 +0100

Hot on the heels of the movie Avatar, this year's CES was touting 3D as the "next big thing" in home theatre. Manufacturers, hoping to prolong the boost in sales they got following the conversion to digital flat-panel HDTVs, are hoping to convince consumers, in a few years, to go through buying a whole new TV in order to view things in 3D.

Obviously, it's going to be a hard sell: while football in 3D might be tempting, needing to buy a dozen pairs of glasses in order to have a super bowl party hardly seems around the corner, notwithstanding the fact that not many people want to be seen wearing 3D glasses when there are other people around. At least at the movie theatre everyone is in the dark!

Rather than tread the ground most commonly covered, though, I want to weigh in on the whole discussion with two things I recently saw, one from the distant past and one from the "future".

I'll start with the future, since I'm disregarding the conventions of chronology anyway! This is the technology that allows TVs to be in 3D without wearing glasses. This exists, I've seen it at tech conferences, and it works, although it can make you queasy. It also adresses the problem of wearing goofy glasses that I mentioned above. Is it the future, though? Maybe someday, but for now the costs put it much farther into the future than the technologies currently being touted by television manufacturers. And while it does work, it is nowhere near as impressive as 3D in a movie theatre, for the simple reason that the screen is smaller. The 3D image can only go as far as the screen frame, you see, so it is not possible to have things flying all around you the same way they do at the theatre: depth has to be reduced just like the height and width of the picture, with the result that the 3D effect is that much less impressive. (In other words, this picture is totally fake—it is impossible for the shark's fin to cover up the frame of the TV!) You don't have things flying all around the room; it's more like your TV becomes the frame of a diorama. This is just as true with the systems that use glasses as with those that don't.

The other thing I saw recently was a museum of World War I memorabilia. In addition to guns, uniforms, and gas masks, it also had a large collection of stereoscopes, which displayed slideshows in 3D of a number of fascinating pictures taken during the war. Seeing this made me realise two things. Firstly, that 3D is nothing new. The stereoscope has been around since 1840. But it hardly managed to dislodge the photograph to become the "next big thing". Second, while 3D images are fun to look at, they don't really look like reality does. In fact, the 3D we get from perspective in an ordinary photograph is just as true to what we see when we look around in the real world as a 3D image is. This may seem counterintuitive, but it is true: the reason is that in a 3D stereoscope or movie, you can't actually see around things: the 3D you see is what was filmed by the cameras. So when you tilt your head, things move in 3D, but in an odd way that is not like what happens when you move your head in a real room. In real life if I tilt my head while looking at a tree trunk, I can see behind what I was looking at before. In a 3D movie, the whole scene shifts so that I still see the same things as before. I can't see behind anything, because both the foreground and background re-arrange themselves to present the same picture again. It's a neat effect, but it's nothing like reality.

True "3D" in imitation of reality requires a hologram, which actually does record an image from multiple angles. I have seen, in a museum, holograms in which enough angles are recorded that you can walk all around them, and they are quite a feat, despite not being in full colour. But even a 5 second "animation" in a hologram takes a huge amount of time to create. Holographic movies are decades away, I have to think. Besides which, the "animation" is played by walking around the hologram. I am not aware of any way to play a holographic "movie" in the way we are used to thinking of movies today. Advancements are needed not only in technology but in science before we can seriously consider this as a future possibility.

So anyway, I thought those points were worth sharing on the topic. I do enjoy 3D movies and will continue to see them, but it is important to realise that they are nothing new, not as impressive on a small screen, and not actually more realistic than 2D movies. All of which leads me to believe that we will not be replacing our existing HDTVs any time soon.

The British Isles, Day Nine: Edinburgh

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:11:11 +0100

As I mentioned in the previous article, our decision to stay in Falkirk for three nights was a practical one. Originally that was the amount of time to be dedicated to Edinburgh. It happened, though, that our schedule coincided with the Edinburgh Festival, the absolute most exciting time of the year in what is considered one of the most beautiful cities in all of Europe, when the city comes alive with street performers, acrobats, and numerous concerts and shows, all centered around the Edinburgh Military Tattoo.

Paradoxically, this made me want to stay away from Edinburgh, so we went to Falkirk instead.

The issue was one of crowds and costs. For people getting around on a stroller, and people who (with a diaper-dirtying, bottle-demanding toddler in tow) aren't able to endure a day of long lines, the idea of facing massive crowds was not exciting: it meant that the visit would be much more unpleasant than if things were calmer. Worse yet, hotel prices skyrocket during the tattoo, with the cheapest motels costing triple their normal rates. Our three nights in Falkirk ended up costing what only one night in Edinburgh would have.

It turned out that staying in Falkirk was a great idea. Not only did we get to see the Falkirk wheel and the Bo'ness railroad, things we probably wouldn't have visited otherwise, but we did not miss out on Edinburgh either, and getting there by driving from Falkirk to the Park & Ride was totally practicable.

What we were wrong about, though, is being afraid to brave the Edinburgh Festival with a small child. It is actually a great time to visit the city, even with a baby. The crowd situation, which I had imagined being something like the Lille Braderie (which is a press of people no one should venture into with a small child), was nowhere near that bad. In fact we were able to get seating at restaurants and get tickets to visit the castle with no difficulty at all. And because of the festival, there were acrobats and magicians about, and kilt-wearing bagpipe players every hundred yards, so even walking from place to place was interesting. So it was great.

Edinburgh is considered by many to be the most beautiful city in all of Europe. So it probably did merit more than a day on our trip, but we still got to take in a lot and see that its reputation is well-deserved (I would qualify it only by saying "most beautiful large city", since otherwise the competition is pretty fierce). It is a very vertical city, dominated by an impressive castle and the seat of Arthur, with steep alleys cutting out from the Royal Mile. I think our pictures (password required) can do most of the talking, but it was certainly a good time. It would have been nice to stay longer, but we were eager to head north into the Highlands of Scotland the following day, so after our day in Edinburgh we continued on our way.