Two British Migratory Thrushes

Ornithology is much more interesting when seen through the eyes of Helen Macdonald (Pluvialis):

Two species of thrushes visit Britain in winter. The smaller of the two is the redwing, a jaguar-like, shy, and slightly deranged thrush with devilish eyestripes and a burst of dried-blood rouge on each side. Redwings skulk in hedges and disappear with a thin seeeeep alarm call, and they slink about in the periphery of your vision when they first arrive.

But my favourite arctic thrushes are fieldfares. They're big, bold, patterned and arch. Alternatively, they're grey, fierce and wolfish.They are splendid. You have to use the plural, when talking of fieldfares. They arrive in rattling flocks like gusts of spray or hail. They are noisy when they fly, and their chak-chak-chak call is like someone launching a handful of pebbles on an iced-over pond surface. Chack chack chack: echoey, dopplery, cold.

Programming with Warts

From a post by Bruce Eckel at Artima Forums:

One of the big reasons for my renewed interest in Ruby (besides the features it has that seem to make it a bit easier to create domain-specific languages) is because of Matz's decision to remove the Perlisms in Ruby. Any language (Python is the only other one I know of) that's willing to REMOVE warts (Java just seems to keep adding warts on existing warts) immediately becomes much more interesting in my perception.

Refactoring and simplification can be applied to programming languages as well as to programs.

Symmetry in Mathematics

Mark Dominus describes trying to convince some people that, while i (the square root of minus one) and -i are not equal to each other, they are mathematically indistinguishable:

...  1 has two square roots that are not interchangeable in this way. Suppose someone tells you that a and b are different square roots of 1, and you have to figure out which is which. You can do that, because of the two equations a² = a, b² = b, only one will be true. If it's the former, then a=1 and b=-1; if the latter, then it's the other way around. The point about the square roots of -1 is that there is no corresponding criterion for distinguishing the two roots. This is a theorem.  ...

What struck me about Mark's account was that failed to mention that this a symmetry and that symmetries such as this one are important in abstract algebra.

An Ice House in Reading University Grounds

On Sunday afternoon Zoe and I were taking a short cut through some bushes in the grounds of Reading University when we came across an overgrown entrance to an ice house.  Even though I have lived near Reading University for 15 years and go for walks in the grounds most weekends, I am still discovering things there.

More photos of the ice house and details of its location can be found here, here, here and here.

When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

A strange book.  It has a similar atmosphere to The Remains of the Day.  A stiff-upper-lipped Englishman is looking back on his childhood in Shanghai and the disappearance of his parents there.  Eventually he goes back to investigate.

There is a streak of insanity running through this book which I found rather unsettling.  It has to do with the connection between solving the mystery of the disappearance of his parents and preventing the impending world war.  This conflation of the personal and the global is a common symptom of some mental illnesses, but the thing I find really disturbing is that everyone the narrator talks to seems to unquestioningly accept this delusion.  Maybe this is the mental illness filtering his view of the world? 

In the last few chapters the madness seems to take over completely as he leaves everything to wander off through a battlefield.  I was tempted to give up the book at this point because it was getting depressing.  However, in the last chapter Ishiguro pulls things together rather nicely.