Texan Cliché

Lay Down My Sword and Shield by James Lee Burke

My excuse now is that we’re in lock-down and my concentration is not great. So I found this on my bookshelf. The only recollections of how it got there is a recommended from the owner of Murder Ink alongside a vague memory that I enjoyed it back then (what was my excuse then?)! Otherwise I recognised nothing about the story.

It’s 1960’s Texas and everyone is hard-boiled. It’s an utterly different planet to the one I live on and nothing about it is attractive or, frankly, believable. Fisticuffs, booze, racism and whatever other Texan cliché you want. He writes well though, particularly in describing the desolate terrain.

One great line caught my fancy:

… my father asked [Woodie Guthrie] what the migrant farm workers thought of the movie Grapes of Wrath, and he said, “Most of the people I know ain’t going to pay a quarter to see no more grapes, and I don’t expect they need any more of this here wrath, either”

Baye’s Theorem

Medical testing is much in the news. I thought I’d do a little note to remove the mystique around the so-called false positives and false negatives which seem to be widely misunderstood.

A false positive is a test result which says you have the condition but actually don’t. It causes anguish but is arguably less dangerous than a false negative which says you don’t have the condition when actually you do.

So if you test for some condition and you get a positive result, just how worried should you be? Imagine the test is known to produce false positives 5% of the time and false negatives 10% of the time. The condition is know to affect 2% of the population.

When 100,000 people are tested,  the test will report as follows:

So the test proves very reliable for eliminating people without the condition but usually further more detailed testing is required to home in on those who have it.

Of course the test returns only positive or negative. It is the effectiveness of the test that provides a warning about how accurate the result is.

Simpson’s Paradox

With all the talk of anti-viral drug research in the news, I thought I’d amuse you with a little drug research paradox attributed to briton Edward Hugh Simpson, but noticed earlier by scotsman George Udny Yule.

Two drugs are being compared. In a trial in Hospital A, the results favour Drug 1 as follows:
In a further trial in Hospital B, the results the results also favour Drug 1 as follows:

Somebody has the idea of combining the two tables. Now it is Drug 2 that heads the effectiveness stakes!

As Mark Twain noted: There are lies, damned lies and statistics.

Bathing in Pre-EU Nostalgia

The Five Ripley Novels by Patricia Highsmith

• The Talented Mr.Ripley
• Ripley Underground
• Ripley’s Game
• The Boy Who Followed Ripley
• Ripley Under Water

When I was a teenager, I half-heartedly learned French in school. The truth is that in my insular 1960’s world, France may have existed, but it was, to my mind, some kind of theme-park where the real world didn’t happen. The non-English-speaking world rarely appeared on television and was only as real as a novel. Then, in 1975, I went there and it exploded in my face. I’ve never gotten over it. A romantic dream come true.

That’s what I like about the Ripley novel’s. Either Highsmith had the same experience with Western Europe generally or she saw into my heart; I think the former. She herself moved to the Europe of my dreamy 1960’s-70’s and lived and eventually she died there. Most importantly, her amazing psychopathic Tom Ripley had my experience. He is a wannabe European, mesmerised by acting European, gobbling up language and culture at every turn, floating effortlessly between France, Germany, West-Berlin and Italy.

This is not Scandinavian gore. Ripley is not evil; he’s just self-obsessed. He’s self-educated and many readers, I think, find him sympathetic and care what happens to him. Highsmith’s style is to record all the banale details of his day, while revealing his thoughts and doubts, letting the tension that you know is there build until something happens. When it does, he doesn’t have a plan, he just muddles through. It could be me (minus the psychopathic tendencies of course, he-he).

Of course I can now see the warts in Europe too but the truth is: I’d rather not. I quite yearn for the feelings which that early explosion of discovery afforded me and reading Ripley quite stirs them up. It’s like a bit of time-travel back to a period when we were less sophisticated and working very hard at becoming so. Vive les années 70!!

I’ve read the entire series three times now and there’ll be a fourth time in a few years.

Good Zoom meeting this morning attended by Richard, Brendan, Tony and Eugene – Michael didn’t succeed in sorting audio issues and Don indisposed.

So,  we decided to bring the next meeting forward to April 30th – invitation below.  You’ll need these details to join.  Hopefully Don will be fully recovered and bringing us the benefit of his reading during recovery.  Mentioned in this mornings meeting:

• by Brendan – The Quiche of Death is the first Agatha Raisin mystery novel by Marion Chesney under her pseudonym M. C. Beaton
• by Brendan – Malcolm Gladwell “Blink” – NLP relevance
• by Richard – the joys of BBC iPlayer and BBC Media Player and DW German based news source
• by Richard – Catherine II – and that Kindle has older stuff at reasonable prices
• by Richard – Bookseller of Kabul
• by Richard – Gratitude, a collection of poetry – and the joys of reading poetry aloud
• by Tony – Around the World in 80 Trees
• by Tony – The Third Pillar – 
  How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind 

  by Raghuram Rajan

• by Tony – the west of Ireland books of the late Tim Robinson
• by Eugene – Scum of the Earth by Arthur Koestler
• by Eugene – State of the Union by Dougles Kennedy

The suggestion of a poetry chain letter and a discussion on the various ways this pandemic might change the world – with some optimistic notions among the less hopeful ones.