Mega Consumer

Days by James Lovegrove

Days is a megastore owned and run by the 7 days brothers in a mega-consumerist world not unlike our own.  Everything that can be sold (from wild animals to prostitution passing via the more mundane is sold there). We follow a member of Strategic Security and a newly admitted store-card-holder through a single day.

The first three-quarters of the book is slow but mildly amusing as the scaffolding is put in place to administer a resounding dénouement. Store security begins its day with a Hills Street Blues style roll-call, warning plain-clothes store detectives the current scams to look out for. Customers are credit-rated and get card types reflecting their purchasing power. Even the trolleys have to be rented for use. A Days card is the ultimate status symbol and the author has great fun mocking consumerism, not least during flash-sales when customers have 5 minutes to obtain bargains in some department which lead to stampedes and fist fights.

Everything builds to quite a dramatic but unconvincing and rather silly climax. A grand disappointment.

Murder and Chess

The Flanders Panel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

I discovered Pérez-Reverte around 1990 and this book was the first of his that I read. I must certainly have enjoyed it because I followed it with The Dumas Club, The Fencing Master and The Seville Communion. Most recently I enjoyed Two Fine Men. So my loyalty to his work confirms that I think he writes well.

Sadly, this second reading of The Flanders Panel was disappointing at the level of storyline. The background story, that the woman restoring a XV^th century Dutch painting uncovers that the artist was sending a hidden message about a contemporary murder, was very well thought out and described. The message is concealed in a chess game being played out in the panel and he constructs a modern intrigue which parallels the line of play. Although a fun idea, this held much less attraction for me with clichéd characters, an implausible plot and a facile denouement.

Curiously several of the little epigrams that head up each chapter are drawn from books I have loved, notably Godel, Escher, Bach. It was easy to see that some of the philosophical thinking in his plot was based on ideas he’d absorbed from these books.

You won’t go wrong reading him, but try instead The Dumas Club which I think was more sure-footed and was in fact filmed as The Ninth Gate starring Johnny Depp.

Horrible Histories

Nero’s Killing Machine by Stephen Dando-Collins

I’d heard of the glory of Rome but after reading this I now understand that there was no such thing; only enough slaughter, slavery, greed, assassination and suicide to shake you to the core. Such a horrible people in such horrible times!

This is a history of Rome’s XIIII^th legion (take note, not XIV^th). Founded by no lesser celebrity than Julius Caesar in 58 BCE, we follow it through victory and defeat (but mostly terror and horror) for about 500 years until Rome finally gets its just desserts.

I found the book tedious at times, stuffed as it is with long lists of the bit players and the postings of the legions hither and thither across Europe. However, to contradict that assessment, I also found it fascinating that we know so much about them, right down to the bit players. The book is, I think, intended to entertain us, so we are not smothered in references but I expect that it is an honest rendering of what the sources say; of course the objectivity of the sources is probably suspect, many of them being Roman citizens. I found myself frequently disbelieving the metrics of how many participated in battles and how many were killed. I also couldn’t believe the constant assurances that the legionaries were keen to go to battle. One message I got from the suicides was that it was by far the least frightful way to die.

It engaged me enough to stick with it to the end and indeed to start me wondering what my next Roman history book will be.

Homework (formerly Ending Lockdown)

Published here by Don at Tony’s request.

I am looking at the Andrew Marr programme this morning, on the BBC1, where a guest is the statistician who wrote the article in the Guardian newspaper which went viral amongst politicians, and was used by Boris the Bad to explain that you cannot compare levels of infections and death rates across different countries. His name is Sir David Spiegelhalter and he is on  the Sage Committee, advising the U.K Government on Covid 19

Some of his learned observations are most illuminating, as follows:

• Estimated infection rate for UK min 3,500,000 … poor data and testing a problem.
• Death rate best indicator … but use stats for all deaths and compare with stats for same months across many years.

Using this basis he estimates U.K has about a further 27,000 unexplainable deaths so far.
He drew attention to the evidence across many countries that this illness is mainly a fatal illness for the over 75 age group … lockdown policy should perhaps now be focused on vulnerable groups .

Like many academics he feels his article was misrepresented. It is possible to compare mortality and infection rates across countries with caveats. On that basis we can compare the different policy responses.

Increasingly I am coming to the view that the Politicians handed over control on policy to medical and scientific advisors who had a very limited understanding of the enormous implications of their advice. Medical Advice is just that … Advice!! Policy Response  should go  far wider than that but factor it in.

I think future generations will wonder how creating mass unemployment and a global recession was an appropriate policy response.

Please Read the following articles. There will be an online exam on Thursday.

Sweden tames R
We know everything
ending_lockdown

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

I want to put down my thoughts on the 50% virus propagation rate now claimed by the Authorities.

First a teentsy weentsy bit of maths: Here’s how propagation works. A group of people have the virus and, on average, each passes it on to ρ more people. If ρ is less than one, we expect the virus to eventually run its course. (I’m assuming there are sufficient uninfected individuals to pass it on to or it will run its course even sooner). The average number of people affected by each initial carrier will eventually be ρ / (1 – ρ). (NB: this formula is only valid when ρ is strictly less that 1).

So, for instance, if ρ = 0.8, one initial carrier will affect 0.8 others, who will affect 0.64, who will affect 0.512, who will … and so on until ultimately a total of 4 people will be affected. And that’s all!  Finito!

So, if ρ = 0.5, as claimed, the total affected by one initial carrier will be one more!

0.5 + 0.25 + 0.125 + … = 1

Here’s a little diagram illustrating how the one person on the left eventually produces one further infected person on the right.

This means that of all the people currently infected, assuming they have not yet had the indelicacy to infect another, they will still only infect one more.

Do you believe the claim that the rate is only 50%? We can think of it an an iceberg where we don’t have all the information but we are making a prediction that in spite of what we don’t know, we don’t expect to have any more that twice as many cases in total as those already in existence. This is a very confident claim, suggesting that the pandemic is virtually over.

Westward Ho!

Warlock by Oakley Hall

Westerns are, I think, a rather despised genre. I can’t think what would possess me to read one but, in fact, I’ve read two from NYRB‘s Modern Classics listing. (The other, equally good, is Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams which I will write up when I refresh my memory of it).

Warlock is not pulp. It’s literature. Reading it is easy because we know the setting well, having seen it in countless films when westerns were the-thing. Now they were pulp, but somehow, Warlock seems to rise above it without changing it. The dialogue is marvellous with the archaic preacher-y kind of biblical phrases but it feels authentic. I especially liked the occasional first-person narrative in the form of a journal kept by a shopkeeper who is probably an honest God-fearing man. It’s revealing to see how his judgement and his take on events is a reflection of what he knows and doesn’t know about the motivations of the characters involved.Above all, however, it is the philosophical tone of the novel that lifts it above the ordinary.

It’s populated with uneducated men who are half-good, half-bad; who worry about what others think of them; who have their own code of honour; who have their personal ethics; who change their minds and their allegiances easily; who are simultaneously cowardly and brave. It is no place for the meek or the weak.

They live in the 1880’s just beyond the reach of civilisation where there are no laws to protect them. As I read, I thought a lot about how this very recent history might be what makes America so different to Europe. It’s just a few hundred years behind us but presumably we were just the same; only the weapons are different.

A very fine read which may just make you change any preconceptions about other genres. A masterpiece, IMHO.