There was a certain amount of internet crossness over the shipwrecked Tongan boys story. It focused pretty extensively on the white guy who rescued them, and didn't say a whole lot about the actual teenagers who kept themselves alive and healthy for fifteen months on a tiny island, which seems like missing the point.
And talking about it as revealing some kind of truth about human nature generally, rather than about the skills and knowledge you'd expect a bunch of teenagers in that demographic to have, is also kind of off. That is, surviving was an amazing accomplishment, but it was an accomplishment that those specific teens, as (I am speculating but the odds of it are quite strong) traditionally raised Tongan kids, had a whole lot of training and expertise for.
Fair point! It's an excerpt from a book, I think, so the focus on the captain may be the editor and not the author's choice.
But it's likely that the Tongan boys are problematically overshadowed by the white boys in the larger account.
I don't think there were any white boys. There's a picture and they're all Tongan, as far as I can tell. Some traditional names and some English names, but none of them were white.
Here they are, although I'm not sure when. Might be a few years later, but they don't look older than early 20s.
I am speculating but the odds of it are quite strong
This. There's still a lot of fishing and living off the land on the island right now. 55 years ago? Absolutely would have been raised learning to survive in that exact environment. And probably all raised together in the same village and likely a bunch of them related to each other. Very different from a bunch of European boarding school types getting marooned in a strange environment.
My favorite comment re: the story in 1 (can't remember where I read it):
"In contrast the control group, which consisted of literature professors, was dead within a week."
6: Yeah, I was in Samoa thirty years later than that story, and while you could have found the occasional kid who wasn't raised with traditional skills (this is an understatement. Not "with traditional skills" as a preserving heritage thing, but as a normal 24-7 way of life), you would have had to look really hard for a kid like that.
I haven't listened to the Supreme Court argument, and am not likely to. I've attended several, and there's some theatricality to it that's worth the experience. First time I had a dog in the fight, Justice Thomas asked a question drawn from my amicus brief. I don't remember the answer. I do remember Justice Scalia belittling the lawyer for one of the parties, a guy from the municipal law department of an Ohio city, who was surely experiencing a career highlight standing there at the podium.
Not being Ohio is an honor in itself.
And talking about it as revealing some kind of truth about human nature generally, rather than about the skills and knowledge you'd expect a bunch of teenagers in that demographic to have, is also kind of off.
Well, if you're talking about it in the context of Lord of the Flies, it isn't off. The kids in Lord of the Flies don't get into trouble because they lack survival skills; they're perfectly able to find food and build shelters and light fires and so on. They get into trouble because their essential human wickedness or whatever takes over.
(I think that's right. It's a long time since I read it and it's not a good book. Particularly bad choice to give to a bunch of schoolkids to read, because they know what schoolkids are like and they know Lord of the Flies isn't it.)
gswift, you posted a bunch of links to compact workout equipment you can use at home. Do you know what thread? I'm hoping to pick up some gear next week to supplement my regular morning walks.
Deciding you want to run away from school because you don't like the food, stealing a boat you have no idea how to navigate, and screwing up to the point where you almost get yourselves all killed, on the other hand, is precisely the sort of thing that teenage kids do.
11: Trap bar and some bands I believe is what I mentioned.
https://www.amazon.com/HulkFit-Olympic-Lifting-1000-Pound-Capacity/dp/B07FCD59MC
I have some of McNamara bands. He's out of stock, there's similar stuff at Rogue. Worth watching McNamara's videos on his page for instruction. Rogue also has plates for the trap bar.
https://patmcnamara.myshopify.com/products/gitchusum-resistance-bands
https://www.roguefitness.com/rogue-tube-bands
The internet crossness, and its conclusion surprised me: "Look, some boys of color did this amazing thing--shows you, old white guy." But I'm on the same page as gswift: in the story, they were white boys raised in a highly shitty hierarchical society. The elite British public schools were the worst. The proper woke take isn't that the old white man is a fool, it's that he's right but it's Western society that is uniquely fucked up, any half-normal society wouldn't have had an issue.
Also, I must be misremembering because it's been almost twenty years, but I thought part of the point of the novel was the cruelty and inhumanity that you get at state-level interactions. Even if humans have inherent worth, when we make states it all falls apart. He exaggerated the scale at which state-like dynamics occurred, but, like, it's just a metaphor, man.
I object to the conflation of Western society with elite British public schools.
11: I can really recommend the deck-of-cards workout. Pick four exercises, assign each to a suit, then go through the deck - so 9 of hearts means doing 9 pull-ups, and 5 of spades means 5 crunches, or whatever. We've been doing that for a few weeks, changing the exercises every so often. Good ones are pull ups, sit ups, press ups, dips, squats, lunges, dorsal lifts, and burpees. The random element makes it more interesting and less monotonous. You could combine that with resistance bands or whatever.
13 Thanks! Though given the circumstances I'm going to have to see if I can source them locally. Hopefully at a Carrefour since I doubt sporting goods stores are open here.
My house is especially colorful and after twenty years, I've adjusted to that as the default. My main reaction to seeing into people's houses is 'so much white. Why is it all white?'.
I think I've almost always been an uncritical reader; I believed whatever I was reading until I read the contradictory thing, which I then believed. I don't think it occurred to me to doubt the LotF, or wonder whether it was telling on the author more than making a general statement. But as soon as I read the article, I was all, 'of course. Kids could act in any kind of way when stranded on an island.' I don't think I started doubting what I read until my thirties (although I recognized the problem of believing contradictory things after reading contradictory essays in law school). Even now I'm more likely to stop reading something because I can't agree than I am to doubt it.
I was also annoyed that the article was about the captain instead of the boys who did the interesting thing.
Also, LOTF is set in a *global war*, the "WW2 with more jets and bigger bangs" people expected in the early 50s rather than MAD, but a global war still, and it's fairly obviously meant to be a microcosm of that?
Deciding you want to run away from school because you don't like the food, stealing a boat you have no idea how to navigate, and screwing up to the point where you almost get yourselves all killed, on the other hand, is precisely the sort of thing that teenage kids do.
I once found a four and a half year old boy two miles from his school, walking to his grandmother's house. When I asked him why he said, "they wanted me to take a nap and I didn't want to so I left."
When his teacher arrived, her first words were "I only turned my back for a second!" Her second words were "How did you cross the freeway?!" The adults who fetched him said "Anything could have happened to you." but my assessment (after walking with him for half a mile, because he wasn't waiting for anything) was that what would have happened to him is that he would have knocked on his grandma's door.
(I have just remembered this - they're not a boarding school - they're evacuees rounded up from their homes by men with megaphones and thrown together aboard an airliner heading away from the doomed UK. Golding was mining the experience of for-reals evacuation at the beginning of WW2. One of them's memory of the times before is a bus station. They might have been rather like the first day at school/in the army/in jail/whatever, a whole lot of strangers thrown together by fate...)
14: a lot of the internet crossness seemed to be based on the assumption that Lord of the Flies was true or at least an accurate representation of what would have happened, and that, as you say, the true lesson of Lord of the Flies should be not "kids are shits" but "white English schoolkids are shits" as demonstrated by the better conduct of the members of the superior culture.
This betrays muddled thinking. Lord of the Flies is made up! Nothing like it has ever happened, anywhere, to schoolchildren of any colour. But what we can say is that people who are in similar situations - teenagers or adults - tend to behave with remarkably high levels of decency and cooperation. Even the ones who've been to public schools.
Incidentally, we've no idea what sort of schools the kids in Lord of the Flies were supposed to have attended. They don't talk like public school pupils of the 1950s would have talked. They also weren't all at the same school; you can tell because none of them know each other in advance except the choir members. But, yeah, sure, everyone thinks it's about public school boys, so I suppose that must be right.
20:
Presumably everyone here is already familiar with the story of the 5 year old freeway driver.
10: I guess I'm counting "actually knowing how to work together productively when it's important for survival rather than getting distracted by the occasional impulse to murder each other" as a learned skill. The boys in Lord of the Flies did okay with finding food and so on when they were focusing, they were just bad at holding focus. And being distracted from surviving by ones fundamental human evil isn't exactly about being evil or not evil, it's about not having the good sense and knowledge to understand that it's a bad idea.
Generalizing madly about Tongan teenagers in the sixties from Samoan teenagers in the nineties, they weren't any more or less evil than you'd expect anyone else to be (and as you point out, as prone to teenage bad judgment now and again as you'd expect), but a whole lot better prepared to stay sensibly productive under the circumstances of a shipwreck than the kids in Lord of the Flies were.
Mostly, I'd agree that Lord of the Flies is a silly book.
19: Yes, definitely a microcosm, but the message of the book is that the horribleness of the world emanates from the innate essential horribleness of humans - or maybe just male humans.
At least that's what I remember from when I studied it in 10th grade.
Approximately on topic, the last shot of All Is Lost is one of my favorite things in the world ever.
I'm excited for us to go to 1000 comments on deserted island strandings.
I do love the picture of the guys I linked above. The dude holding the guitar he made looks as if he's going to do an Elvis impersonation.
a whole lot better prepared to stay sensibly productive under the circumstances of a shipwreck than the kids in Lord of the Flies were.
I would say: the Tongan kids were realistic because they were real kids, and the kids in Lord of the Flies were unrealistic because they were made up by someone who didn't like kids very much (or, really, adults very much either).
30: I would read a novel about an aeroplane full of Elvis impersonators that crashes on a remote tropical island. "Colonel of the Flies."
29: 100 comments on whether it's desert island as in mostly dry sand or deserted as in no one is there. Several comments joking about dessert.
I will say that I think the Lord of the Flies kids were unrealistically practically successful, as well as being unrealistically interpersonally shitty. I hung around with a bunch of white twenty-somethings trying to pick up traditional Samoan skills for fun, and that stuff is really hard if you haven't been brought up to it. A bunch of British kids killing a pig with pointy sticks? Not literally impossible, but I would not bet on it.
"The cry went out, echoing across the island. The words we all feared. 'Elvis has left the building.' Blood was on Elvis's hands. Blood was on Elvises' hands."
By contrast, Robinson Crusoe was also a realistic adult: hardy, resourceful under pressure, infinitely capable of self-congratulation, and inventing slavery at the first opportunity.
As far as "internet crossness" goes, I suspect it's projection.
It goes without saying that if bunch of the sort of people who spend time getting angry on social media over stories like this one were stranded on a desert island, they would disintegrate into warring factions and murder each other inside of 10 minutes.
What about the Swiss Family Robinson? More or less realistic? Likeable? Would you have a beer with them?
Is Robinson even a Swiss name?
No, they were stranded on the island of Switzerland.
I should reread that. I loved it as a small child, and in retrospect it is so weird. Making not only pottery, but teacups so fine they were translucent, because how else could you have a civilized drink? Training wild asses by biting their ears (what kind of tropical island was this, with onagers running around?) Fermenting coconut water into wine, which simply would not work.
My younger co-workers seem to all have moved into new-construction rental apartments and not decorated them, which explains the boring white walls (or in one case, the exotic! unfinished concrete ceiling).
For my part, I had to do a little checking of my video quality and determine that the titles on the bookshelf off to the side are not legible, which is probably for the best for workplace meetings.
I liked the article about the Lord of the Flies in real life too. I thought the controversy over it was overblown, but hesitated to say so because who am I to judge, etc. To summarize, I'm not sure there's anything wrong with the book about the LOTFIRL kids (maybe there is but I wouldn't want to judge based on the article), or the Guardian article that's an excerpt of it (maybe it's racist, or maybe it accurately summarizes a book that's racist, or maybe neither), but it sucks that people have taken LOTF so seriously for the past 60 or so years. In addition to the main idea of the article, I found a couple factoids amusing: William Golding was apparently an abusive parent and a drunk, and the LOTFIRL kids were rescued on Sept. 11, 1966. I tried to get those three disparate details together, something like "the most uplifting story ever, about Lord of the Flies, an abusive drunk, and 9/11. Yes, that's punctuated correctly," but couldn't come up with a version that seemed funny enough and gave up.
As for zoom backgrounds, Cassandane mostly works at the dining room table and has let's say 3-5 zoom meetings a week, and her computer is oriented with a bookshelf behind her. Probably looks fairly erudite. I've had very few meetings with video support, and when I did I did it in the guest bedroom, a cramped space now that Atossa has it set up as a full-time play area.
I'm in my untidy bedroom, and am relying heavily on camera angles to not reveal more than a yellow wall with a painting. (By mcmc!)
The real question is, how many of these Tongans were elected PM?
The key thing that happened in Supreme Court oral arguments is that one of the justices flushed their toilet with the mic on. But who? For more, we go to Ashley Feinberg: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/toilet-flush-supreme-court-livestream.html
35 is a good point. I would think that 12 year old kid with pointy stick vs 300lb wild pig is generally going to go one way and it isn't the way that it goes in the book. Even 12 year old Tongan kid with pointy stick I would think would have a tough time of it.
Yeah, I'm not clear on pig handling techniques (traditional Samoan pig slaughtering was, as I understood it secondhand, strangling the pig by putting a heavy log on its neck and weighting the log down, but I'm not clear on how the pig was induced to cooperate), but from the amount of careful respect I saw pigs given, I wouldn't expect a Tongan kid to try the pointy stick business unless they were pretty clear on how to make it work.
This reminds me of watching Castaway shortly after I got home from the Peace Corps, and being very dull by announcing the number of occasions on which Hanks had just definitely died.
I mean, this is basically boar hunting, a mediaeval sport that was considered really risky by people who jousted for fun. Except mediaeval boar hunters had hounds, and proper spears with 18-inch steel crossbarred heads.
The deep-fried peanut butter and banana sandwich, on the other hand, presents a far less formidable threat.
Did 51 change or did I read it wrong?
How many untrained 12 year olds would it take to reliably take down a 300lb boar? Without any of them sustaining serious injuries.
Pointy sticks assumed. This is a variant of the how many 5 year olds could I beat up exercise.
AFAICVeryDimlyR the boar was a lot less than 300lbs. Though the general point stands.
58: If you're requiring that none of them get hurt, there is no number. Pigs are scary.
62 Serious life-threatening injuries. I guess a broken leg or gash on same is ok. But no disembowelling.
Assume a supply of anti-biotics or knowledge of the deserted islands botanical pharmacopeia
And maybe a small cannon made from natural materials like Kirk used in that one episode.
I'll take that as a vote for one boy could take down the boar.
Did they? I don't actually remember. But I'd still call that unlikely to be successful by the unskilled, even if less dangerous than the straightforward pointy stick approach.
69 Why? Line the bottom with punji sticks.
Digging a hole big enough to trap a pig, without tools, is a non-trivial problem, as is concealing it well enough to fool an animal that successfully gets around in the wild without falling off cliffs, as is driving the pig into the hole. As is arranging the pointy sticks in the bottom of the hole well enough to incapacitate the pig, or else you just have a dangerous animal trapped in a hole, and you're back to trying to kill it with pointy sticks.
Throw large rocks at its head. All of those are less dangerous than sticking the pig on the open field of battle.
Think of the size of hole you need to do any good. I'd bet on a pig to get out of anything much under 5 foot deep. There's going to be tree roots, and big rocks, and you don't have shovels or saws.
Oh, if you have to kill the pig, sure, the pit is probably your best bet. But if you're just trying to eat, I'd focus on something smaller.
I suppose one could do the net springy tree thing but that requires much more skill than just digging a hole.
and you don't have shovels or saws.
Flint knapping. Is it a volcanic island? Lots of obsidian to be had. That pig is toast.
Someone I knew in the PC had brought with them a military surplus pack of cards (I don't think American, but English language) intended for downed pilots in Southeast Asia. Every card had a picture of a plant or animal on the front, and information on how to use it for survival on the back (was it poisonous, was it edible, where to find it). The best card had a picture of a tiger on the front, and three words on the back: "Large Mammals: Avoid".
Is it a volcanic island? Lots of obsidian to be had.
You'd think, but no.
Alright then, head down to the lagoon, kill a shark, pull its teeth, embed said teeth into some driftwood to make various saws, swords, clubs. Pig = toast.
I mean these are 12 year old boys we're talking about here. You see that shit they build in Minecraft. This pig doesn't stand a snowball's chance.
And what with those feral chickens they found on that island? These kids are feasting on bacon and eggs.
Apparently knapping is fucking murder.
I'm with heebie in 2.1, wait for the book before complaining too much about erasure. More specifically, the standard mode of non-fiction books is that you have to follow the writer through as they're learning about the thing. That way the writer serves as a kind of stand-in for the reader. (And not just non-fiction books, see Serial.) I kinda hate this mode, I don't want to read about your bumpy jeep ride out to the dig (just get to the dinosaurs!), but apparently most readers prefer it. Of course the writer is going to travel to Australia first on their way to Tonga (and then eventually to the island itself). So of course the first chapter is going to be learning about the story and going to talk to the guy who lives in Australia. And of course the newspaper article is going to be adapted from the first chapter of the book. Maybe the whole book is like this, but most likely talking to the kids themselves is the good part of the book that they don't want to spoil in the teaser.
I thought killing the pig with a spear meant conquering sex or something.
Although I'm sure elite English public schools are a special horror, it's not as though "strict Catholic boarding schools" in the developing world are exactly famous for their kindness and absence of abuse.
Lord Of The Flies discussion in media is painful because it's one of the most assigned books in school so everyone has their own idea of what it obviously signifies, derived from either what their teacher said or the opposite of what their teacher said because they hated the teacher or they hated the class.
The most common response to this story I've seen is "Lord Of The Flies was intended to be a literary riff on the Stanford Prison Experiment, depicting the brutality of all people once they are removed from the polite constraints of society. And now like the SPE, we now know (it's not true)/(it's only true of hierarchical white colonizing people)." Then you have Dalriata in 14 with the exact opposite: "I thought part of the point of the novel was the cruelty and inhumanity that you get at state-level interactions. Even if humans have inherent worth, when we make states it all falls apart. He exaggerated the scale at which state-like dynamics occurred, but, like, it's just a metaphor, man."
And then you have the approach that it was specifically about England and how the England of the time produced boys who were bad people, which is the one that my class definitely didn't approach, being quite distant from the England of that time except for the lovable stories of C.S. Lewis and a couple others.
the standard mode of non-fiction books is that you have to follow the writer through as they're learning about the thing
Too bad math books aren't done this way. The only example I can think of is Knuth's book about the surreal numbers.
88.last is also a facet of what I was trying to get at. I suppose I could look up some actual comment, but I wouldn't want to spoil hazy, ill-formed memories.
It would be pretty impressive if Golding had meant it to be about the SPE, though.
Looking at Wikipedia, the story of the depopulation of 'Ata by slavers is several times more horrifying than I expected.
87: again, worth noting that this school was apparently so bad that sailing 400 miles in an open boat none of them knew how to navigate seemed like an acceptable alternative.
Particularly bad choice to give to a bunch of schoolkids to read, because they know what schoolkids are like and they know Lord of the Flies isn't it.
I have spent a great deal of my adult life around people who are able to say things like this. It's nice. But I gotta tell you, the little fuckers I grew up with were straight out of the Lord of the Flies.
People in this country came damn close to picking Trump for president, and I promise you, I know where those people come from.
88: I like Ned's meta-analysis. My own view is that the book isn't particularly about kids. My gloss on the moral of the story: Given a chance to be, lots of people are spectacularly shitty.
Too bad math books aren't done this way. The only example I can think of is Knuth's book about the surreal numbers.
There are so many times in my classes where I have to give a little meta speech about something like, "Ok. You have to understand, this is being presented backwards. It's just a convention to present a proof the opposite way that you would ever scratch out the solution for yourself." and "They're kind of imagining that this is being read by a mathematician who is just dusting off an old topic that they learned long ago. So they're assuming the readers know the shape of these arguments and just want a pointer for working it out for themselves."
The other half of the truth is that lots of readers are precocious and can follow the arguments just fine, but it's more insulting to say that to my students, and it's true that the books are not written for anyone who finds mathematical writing strange or intimidating.
I wonder whether computer verified proofs will eventually lead to a revolution in mathematical exposition. It's tricky now that math proofs serve a dual purpose: trying to explain the ideas to the reader and trying to give a rigorous proof. If you split the exposition (in English, for people) and the formal proof (in Lean, for computers), then both only serve a single purpose and can be tailored better to that purpose. Furthermore rigorous "tactics" make it more clear what it means to leave verification of details to the reader, namely you say it follows mindlessly by using a specific technique (assuming you already understand that technique).
As a teacher I used to really try to teach by going in the order of how you would come up with it, and doing things like saying "here are the two key ideas and you can work out the rest from that." I've been moving a little away from that because I think it doesn't work with students who are taking notes and reading them later rather than focusing on listening during class, and because I think it doesn't work with students with weak verbal English skills. So especially in graduate classes it's failing a large portion of the students.
I have no idea how to write a computer-verified proof! Is that what mathematicians are doing these days?
There's a third purpose (which I think is meaningful different from explaining the ideas of the topic at hand), or at least there should be, which is what Heebie alluded to in her first quote: explaining to the reader how they might actually have gone about proving it themselves. Sometimes the proofs in textbooks are just how someone of the student's skill level would prove it themselves, but backwards with the scaffolding erased. Sometimes the proofs are obvious once they're seen, but are hiding the work of a ten year research program that struggled over what the relevant basic definitions should be. Sometimes it's just a straightforward application of previous lemmas. Sometimes they conjure up one crazy object with all the right properties and you have no idea where they got it from (months of trying small examples, heuristics, etc.). These are all presented identically.
98: It's not mainstream yet, but there's really been a big upswing of it in the past few years. We're maybe a decade away from all undergraduate math being formalized. We're already at the point where *definitions* (but not proofs!) in cutting edge research math has been formalized, but I expect we're still 20+ years away from proofs in research math being easily formalized. A fun place to start is: https://wwwf.imperial.ac.uk/~buzzard/xena/natural_number_game/
98: I think they're more popular in certain subfields. When I studied logic we used this to do our proofs in. It's very satisfying to be absolutely, completely sure you haven't made a mistake. But I don't think that system went anywhere outside of teaching purposes in that one department (and the guy who championed it is emeritus now). Coq is the theorem prover I hear the most about, but Lean looks very interesting.
We've seen with LaTeX and then with TikZ that you can have a quick shift to doing your own typesetting and doing your own diagrams, the question is when formalized proofs can become as user friendly as TikZ (which is not actually very user friendly!). I think we're still a long ways off, but we're getting there.
Coq is older and has more stuff done in it, but Lean is the first one that seems to really be building up momentum with (some) "normal mathematicians" (i.e. not logicians or computer science-adjacent).
100: Interesting! I can believe formalization will take a while: I did some undergraduate research trying to formalize Godel's second incompleteness theorem. I didn't get anywhere with it because it's really hard to get anywhere when your proof involves numbers that won't fit on a hard drive. (I probably should've pushed to find a more compact Church numbering.)
Here's the reference for "we can now do arbitrarily advanced mathematical definitions": https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.12320
(Ok that's a little overstating things. More algebraic things are easier than more analytic things. So they're much further in things that have the flavor of algebraic topology than things with the flavor of differential topology. So say giving the definition of say Ricci flow with surgery is probably harder than perfectoid spaces.)
I got into all this through "Homotopy Type Theory" which is a weird subject at the intersection of abstract homotopy theory (i.e. the kind of algebraic topology where the answer when you ask "what's an example of this" will be "K-theory" and not "a torus") and computer languages. HoTT is not really practical for formalizing most math, but it has also played a sociological role of getting some more mathematicians thinking about proof assistants in mathematics.
98: people have been researching this since the 60s, but I think the tools and popularity are growing in the last decade.
90: It would be *really* impressive if Golding had meant it to be about the SPE, which took place in 1971. The book was published in 1954. So you'd need an impressive amount of prophetic visions/time travel on Golding's part to pull it off.
39~42: Someone I follow on Twitter occasionally does in-depth liveread threads of SFR. What she comments on the most is how much it jams together animal and plant species from all four corners of the earth, and makes all animals domesticable, but there's much else odd.
109: LOTF doesn't have anything to do with the Stanford Prison Experiment anyway -- LOTF is about a return to the state of nature. Golding is taking Hobbes' position that the state of nature sucked. My vague theory is that this is what made it so appealing to whoever was responsible for assigning it to every high school student in the English-speaking world -- teach our children well that they need to be disciplined and punished by teachers, police officers, the National Guard, politicians or else they will all become savages and kill each other.
It is odd that the state of nature doesn't include any girls. Blue Lagoon corrects for that.
True story: It just occurred to me to distinguish William Golding and William Goldman, author of The Princess Bride.
I'm glad William Goldman isn't implicated as an abusive parent and a drunk.
Apparently the Guardian issued a correction saying Golding wasn't abusive after all, and that he hadn't written about beating his kids but only having a pillow fight with them?
The Princess Bride is a great book.
112: Don't feel bad, heebie. Several members of the Nobel Prize committee were victims of the same confusion.
114: Letter from William Golding's daughter.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/12/william-golding-did-not-smack-his-kids
112, 114: Another Guardian correction
A feature article about the filming of the television series Downton Abbey said: "William Golding was right. On screen, no one knows anything." It was the Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman who observed in his memoir, Adventures in the Screen Trade, that "nobody knows anything", not the British novelist William Golding
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2011/oct/03/corrections-and-clarifications
Now I want to go read stories about Andre the Giant's drinking.
I had a letter last week from a former inmate saying in all seriousness that Eton in the 1950s was tougher than Belmarsh prison in the 1990s. Also from the early fifties I know of a boy who came back from his public school with some form of hepatitis which infected his mother and killed her. His father (a doctor) remarried, had another son, and sent him to the same school. But by that time the older boys were no longer encouraged or even allowed to beat the young ones. This pleasure was reserved for the masters.
LOTF never struck me as terribly far-fetched.
Has anyone read "The Spire" by William Golding? I read "A Year In The Country" recently and it was suggested as something for those who like.
A month is barely time to appreciate a rural area.
This thread is why I love Unfogged. From a serious discussion of the pig hunting techniques of stranded boys to literary analysis (fiction and non-fiction!) to advanced pure math, all in the space of 40 comments. Nothing else like it on the internet.
I wondered if the impression arose from Golding being a product of the public schools, but it looks like a grammar school which, while old, was already co-educational by his childhood.
I heard she cheated on Ed Sheeran, so she must have learned something useful.
I kinda hate this mode, I don't want to read about your bumpy jeep ride out to the dig (just get to the dinosaurs!)
I also hate this kind of writing. Yes, Mr. Author, you are a fancy, glamorous adventurer. Now whats your point?
I'm wondering how many Star Trek actors are in this Columbo.
IMBD says just the two. It doesn't say when Shatner is wearing a rug.
121: I read a memoir by an old boy of one of Mossheimat's would-be Etons also from the 1950s, and he described it similarly. Bare-knuckle boxing, juniors forced to pull a plow, etc., culminating in a riot in which staff were thrown in the pool and the boys hid out in a forest for some time.* The writer adduced all this as possible cause for one of his classmate's mental problems and eventual suicide.
*Which definitely notable incident is strangely absent from the wiki.
It would be painfully stereotypical of mathematicians not to be intrigued by HoTT.
What are the implications of all this potential proof automation? Obviously mathematicians get different skillsets which make them even more likely to get hired away from the common good by our patent-producing silicon overlords. But let's suppose a slightly non-shitty-in-this-paticular-regard future. My totally uninformed understanding is mathematicians spin their wheels doing bizarre abstruse shit which turns out sooner or later to be massively useful. Does this whole cycle happen faster?
Probably the biggest short-term application (next decade or two) would be making the literature more searchable. Currently it's very hard to know if someone somewhere has proved the same thing you're trying to prove, and if all the statements were formalized it'd be easier to develop good search tools. See https://formalabstracts.github.io
Another interesting possibility is that it becomes more possible to formalize techniques in mathematics. That is, one often has an idea or trick that can be used in many different situations, but not in exactly the same way. Sometimes one can formulate a general theorem (say in category theory) which includes these instances, but often that's too restrictive, you need to use the trick slightly differently in different places. But even if you can't formalize it as a theorem, you might be able to formalize it as some kind of tactic in a proof assistant. For example, in Lean there's a tactic which is "do algebra to simplify until you see if it just works" (i.e. what a good high school student can do). It'd be really interesting to know something like "All of the standard undergraduate curriculum except for these seven theorems, can be proved only knowing the following 100 tactics." Now that doesn't mean you know exactly which tactics to use in which order, but it does tell you "if you only understand these 300 ideas, then if you put them together correctly you can answer all these problems."
Once you have a lot built up, you can then start trying to teach computers how to solve problems on their own. There's a somewhat serious project right now to try to teach a computer to solve IMO problems (https://imo-grand-challenge.github.io). You can't even start trying that until you have an infrastructure of computer understandable problems and proofs. In the very long run, of course, this means computers replace us.
111 rings true. And also, of course, Golding is saying that people who live in non-Western tribal societies are literally the equivalent of degenerate children.
I had a letter last week from a former inmate saying in all seriousness that Eton in the 1950s was tougher than Belmarsh prison in the 1990s.
AIMHMHB British officer POWs coped with the psychological burden of prison camp much better than other-rank POWs, and postwar studies found that this correlated very closely with whether or not they had attended boarding schools.
135: It's interesting to see this as an extension of the failure early in the 20th century to algorithmatize mathematics. We know it can't be done, but perhaps it can be done close enough for us mere mortals. And in the meantime: cool human/machine hybrid mathematicians! Very cyperbunk.
Stephen Fry also says prison wasn't much of a burden after boarding school.
122. Yes, I recommend The Spire. I think it may be my favourite book by Golding.
128: Do other members Unfoggetariat understand right away that Moby is pretending to confuse Elle Goulding and William Golding? Me -- I had to google "cheated on Ed Sheeran" to find out about Elle Goulding and even then it took me a while to grasp that the point was that her name is somewhat similar to William Golding. This required so much effort on my part that I had to share the experience with you.
I'm an so down with recent easy-listening music.
There's also the guy whose name sounds like "hoser," which reminds me of SCTV.
Hi understood not all, but no effort to illuminate my ignorance, thus demonstrating yet again my inferior moral character. I like Elle Goulding though. Liked her more before she was cool, but hey that's how it goes. She has a nose that could shatter icebergs.
As you can see, gimlet successfully assembled.
Ed Sheeran is basically James Taylor with a loop pedal and no Quaaludes.
Maybe the ludes are not as good as they used to be? Like how you can't even hardly get high on cough syrup unless you have the help of a doctor.
141: Wait, I thought the one that cheated on Shearen played Trapper John in the movie.
I barely know any of Ed Sheeran's songs, and I don't like what I heard, but he was pretty funny playing himself as a smug douche in "Yesterday".
Elliot Gould? WTF, political football?
I don't like downers. I prefer to be down on life.
150: Because I'm super out of touch, I saw that movie and had no idea whether or not Sheeran was fictional.
Watch the movie. You will simultaneously down on life and up on happy chemicals.
154: Wow! And I thought I was out of touch!
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I am watching a narrated powerpoint for my bio lab and the TA at one point says that our transcribed amino acid sequence is that of "oxytocin, an important hormone for child labor."
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151: Oh, right. I get those two mixed up.
Yep. Keep the kids cheerful and content or they can hardly mine any coal.
I think the doubt really improved the movie. Also, he's not a terrible actor. A lot of celebs, it would have been absolutely clear that he must be a real famous person or they wouldn't have let him be in the movie, but I thought Sheeran passed pretty well.
I didn't watch it because I'd like to think that if the Beatles never existed, something that sucks less would have been popular enough to make them never missed.
162 defies everything humans have learned about popular culture
True, but maybe we could have skipped straight to The Cure.
160 is probably right.
It's a very stupid movie, but on an emotional level it worked for me.
Definitely not recommended for those who think the Beatles suck.
I just can't keep their early work separate from the Monkees.
It's misspelled animals all the way down.
Speaking of Elliot Gould, Robert Altman' s California Split is streaming on Amazon Prime and it's the real full version which has never been released before.
Getting back to the OP, on Zoom backgrounds. The Brattle Bookshop is curating bookshelf backgrounds:
In April, bookstore owner Ken Gloss and his team began offering to curate people's shelves with hand-picked selections of books to display during video meetings. The service, staff says, can help add a pop of character to the otherwise disorganized backdrops being scrutinized by people on the other side of the computer screen.
To Gloss, having some aesthetically-pleasing spines perfectly arranged at eye level, or even a few well-known titles neatly stacked up for show, "offers a lot of prestige."
"When you look at someone's books, you can tell a lot about them," he said. "Put back there the impression that you want to give."
I tried to email the email under the pseud in 169/171, because it wasn't clear to me if the pseud had already been fixed, or if the email address was the part that needed erasing. Anyway, it bounced back. LMK if there's anything more to do.
168: Barry, what are your thoughts on The Long Goodbye? (Also with Gould, also streaming on Amazon right now.)
173 Watch it! It's great, possibly my favorite Altman and my favorite Gould.
Still have not got around to watching California Split, I need to get on it.
173 I like it so much I have the Kino Lorber DVD
Barry - do you have Netflix, and if yes, do you have any recommendations of things to watch that I can stream? So many more things seem to be on Amazon these days.
I do have Netflix, though I'm watching more stuff on Prime, and more TV than movies since I've lost my concentration lately.
Checking my account (do they take stuff off your list when it leaves Netflix? I used to have more there) I see Happy as Lazzaro which I highly recommend. Also Under the Skin. Snowpiercer, Okja, The Irishman.
Oh I see Netflix has Burning, great film.
ALso, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Moonlight, There Will Be Blood, Ravenous, Roma...
Ravenous is a great and underappreciated and atypical Western. Very gory though.
Also Train to Busan, one of the best zombie films ever. Romero level social commentary.
Thank you. Not really a Zombie person but I'll try that others. Tim and I are trying to do at home movie dates, and movies are better for that than tv shows. I think I can use my work e-mail which ends in .edu to get a student Amazon prime account, so I might do that.
If you're not a zombie person because you're not a gore/horror person you should probably skip Ravenous too. Though it's great.
We're probably going to get Disney because of Hamilton and a desire to support monopoly capitalism. So I'll probably start watching the Simpsons from back before it sucked.
We tried to watch episode 4 of Devs last night, having much enjoyed the first three, and it opened with a torture scene I simply could not take. I shut my eyes. I squirmed. I felt a deep visceral reaction that this kind of thing should never be screened as entertainment. Ume found a wonderful Jane Austen adaptation and we watched that instead. You could argue there is just as much cruelty in Fanny Dashwood but it's not at all gratuitous and the victims are not broken by it.