Strange continuity: why don't our brains explode at movie cuts? - article by Jeffrey M. Zacks in Aeon online magazine, referenced in MindHacks blog. "Movies are, for the most part, made up of short runs of continuous action, calledshots, spliced together with cuts. With a cut, a filmmaker can instantaneously replace most of what is available in your visual field with completely different stuff. This is something that never happened in the 3.5 billion years or so that it took our visual systems to develop. You might think, then, that cutting might cause something of a disturbance when it first appeared. And yet nothing in contemporary reports suggests that it did.... the first cinemagoers seem to have taken little note of cuts. Something that, on the face of it, ought to seem discontinuous with ordinary experience in the most literal sense possible slipped into the popular imagination quite seamlessly. How could that be?"
Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris – review by Gilda Williams in The Guardian. "Her first book is both an English-usage manual and a memoir; but Norris’s unending patience is not required of her readers, who are repeatedly rewarded with gems of wit and wisdom. '"Whom" may indeed be on the way out', she writes, 'but so is Venice, and we still like to go there.' The title refers to her top-rated grammatical offence, 'between you and I' – ranked second in David Foster Wallace’s catalogue of blunders in his essay 'Authority and American Usage'. It rankles with her not because of offenders’ ignorance, but because they foolishly imagine that 'between you and I' sounds grand. Down-to-earth Norris dislikes pretentiousness even more than crummy grammar, but she is no stickler."
VE Day: what the end of the war was like for those who were there - compilation by Walter Kempowski in The Guardian, extracted from his book Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary from Hitler’s Last Birthday to VE Day. "Martin Hauser, sergeant in the British army, near Trieste. 'I hold a glass of beer in my hand, look into the transparent yellow liquid, and my thoughts wander. So this is the end. Is this what peace looks like? Is this what it feels like? Here we sit, a group of men who left their homes and families a long time ago, who freed themselves from the routine of daily life in the past to assure their lives in the future. Here we sit, happy to have got through these years full of danger and horror sound of limb and mind. But where is the joy, the enthusiasm that can be expected of us? Not a bit of it – a smile here, a chuckle there, a joke as we drink our beer. Time passes with an exchange of memories – memories of past times, serious struggles, friends who have fallen. The past weighs heavily on everyone.'"
Eve Online: how a virtual world went to the edge of apocalypse and back - article by Simon Parkin in The Guardian, related to his forthcoming
(August 2015) book Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession from the
Virtual Frontline. "In 2011 CCP [the Icelandic company which runs Eve Online] introduced a new feature that had been 18 months in the making: a digital store where in-game items (clothing, accessories and so on) could be purchased for real money. It was a disaster that brought New Eden close to its second catastrophic event.... The leak of an internal memo from the company’s CEO, Hilmar Pétursson, that denounced the complaints as 'noise' further enraged the player base. Thousands gathered within the game and began to stage symbolic riots, firing their ships’ weapons on a giant monument stationed outside a major trading hub. The protest ... was effective. In an unprecedented move, Pétursson wrote an open letter to the game’s players admitting that he had made a mistake. 'We made a mess and someone had to own it,' he explained to me. 'It was mine to own.' After the letter of apology, CCP acknowledged the protest by switching the 3D model of the in-game monument to one that was broken and damaged, a lasting memorial to the time when the players made their collective voice heard and the game’s makers responded. Few video games accommodate their player base in this way.... Eve’s creators have learned that the future of their world depends not only on the happiness of the game’s players, but also their feeling that the players, ultimately, own the world which they inhabit."
Top of the list of student demands: not lower fees, but more counselling - article by Becky Gardiner in The Guardian. "Ruth Caleb, who runs the counselling service at Brunel University in west London, has been listening to students’ problems for 25 years. Since 2005, the number of students seeking her help has more than doubled. When she started, the most talked about subjects were 'homesickness, first boyfriends, learning to live with new people'. Now, the problems are: depression, eating disorders, self-harm. At the same time, many universities have cut back spending on counselling services for students with mental health problems."
The professor who thinks video games will be the downfall of men - article by Pete Etchells in The Guardian. "Central to their ideas, Zimbardo and Coulombe are worried that these are issues solely for men. But again, the data don’t seem to reinforce this idea. For example, they suggest that 'for the ordinary gamer a sixteen-hour stretch would be just another typical weekend, and few parents would even bat an eyelid.' Given that they provide no definition of the "ordinary gamer", all we can do is to look to data that tell us something useful about age and sex. 'We do have some pretty good research that suggest that ordinary gamers are middle aged women who play social games on facebook, and that the median age of gamers is probably in the mid-30s and less than a quarter are under 18, and of them, roughly half are female' says [Andrew] Przybylski [of the Oxford Internet Institute].... In the UK,... 52 percent of all people who played some form of video game in the first half of 2014 were women. For most ‘average’ gamers then, these data just don’t seem to play into the idea that anyone would simply have time to spend 16 hours playing games on an average weekend. That Zimbardo and Coulombe suggest that parents wouldn’t care about the amount of time spent perhaps belies the perception of the typical gamer that they hold – lone boys, below the age of 18."
Tomorrowland: how Walt Disney’s strange utopia shaped the world of tomorrow - article by Steve Rose in The Guardian. "Welcome to the future. Or is it the past? In Tomorrowland, Disney’s new adventure movie, George Clooney and friends risk life and limb to reach the utopian realm of the title, and it looks pretty much like we expected the future to look, at least back in the 1960s: a pristine, shopping-mall sort of place with soaring glass spires and flying trains and happy people of all nations wearing coloured boiler suits. But here in the real world (a relative term, admittedly) you can visit Tomorrowland today. As many millions of visitors know, it is already an area of Disney’s theme parks, devoted to the same type of optimistic techno-futurism Tomorrowland the movie espouses.... For better or worse, Epcot [the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow] never came to pass. Disney’s utopianism died with its master in 1966, and no one else had the stomach to build his dream city. Rather than the city of the future, Epcot became another theme park, more like a corporate-sponsored World’s Fair.... In the theme parks, too, Tomorrowland ceased to anticipate the real future and instead focused on futuristic attractions... Tomorrowland the movie is a sincere attempt to address this lack of belief in the future, without which humanity could be doomed, it suggests."
When raising awareness backfires - article by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "The Petrified Forest National Park, in the desert wilderness of Arizona, is famous for its fossilised wood, the remains of trees millions of years old. It’s also famous for people carting off chunks of that wood as souvenirs... So when a team of psychologists were exploring ways to halt the plundering, they put up signs telling people not to steal, along with a note: 'Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the state of the Petrified Forest.' But that sentence led to three times as much theft as no sign at all. The intended message was drowned out by the implicit
one: everyone’s doing it, so what difference could one more chunk make? I
was reminded of the Petrified Forest ... by a new study on the power of stereotypes... Since everyone’s a little bit racist and sexist,
it’s become a popular tactic in fighting prejudice not to shame people
for it – that makes them defensive – but instead to remind them that
everyone’s susceptible to thinking in stereotyped ways. Yet this
'everyone stereotypes' message, the study found, worked just like the
signs in the Petrified Forest: it made people more relaxed about
engaging in stereotyping themselves."
My hopes for the Occupy St Paul's drama that puts me on the stage - article by Giles Fraser in The Guardian. "On the afternoon of 26 October 2011, the cathedral chapter of St Paul’s came together for a hastily convened meeting. Some were absent, but there were enough of us to make a decision. And there was only one item on the agenda: the eviction of Occupy. Everyone was tired. Everyone was emotional. The previous weeks had taken their toll. And we all dealt with it differently. During the meeting, I felt almost unable to speak, perhaps overwhelmed by the gravity of the moment. The dean reached across the baize table to hold my hand and break my silence. It was a simple act of kindness in an impossible situation. He, too, was tired and angry. I don’t remember what I said, but it wasn’t enough. The vote was close but it didn’t go my way. A few hours later, I rang the dean’s doorbell and handed him the letter. I couldn’t just pop it through his letterbox. He knew what it was....
Though I find it uncomfortable – painful even – to have these events revisited, there is an issue here that extends far beyond the personalities involved. Perhaps that’s why it makes a good subject for a play. The St Paul’s/Occupy thing was not just a little bit of local difficulty. What was at stake, for all involved, was a theological question that takes us back to the very foundations of the Christian faith...."
The tablet explodes: over-50s and three-year-olds join the charge towards tech - article by Mark Sweney in The Guardian. "In the space of just five years, tablets have become a must-have device, with more than half of UK households and one in 10 three to four-year-olds owning one.... An interesting trend has been the rise of tablets among those aged over 55, a generation not traditionally considered to be particularly keen on new technology, from 1% ownership in 2011 to 37% in 2015....Tablets remain popular for that lean-back experience at home, where 37% of people use them to go online, and almost 60% of those doing so watching video clips. More than a third use tablets to catch up with their favourite TV shows and films on services such as the BBC’s iPlayer and the ITV player. Outside the home the mobile phone remains the most popular device for browsing the internet. More than half of adults regularly use one to do so."
What was the first pre-existing popular song to be used in a film? - Notes and Queries, in The Guardian. Q: " What was the first pre-existing popular song to be used on the soundtrack of a motion picture? I’m referring to original versions only, not songs composed or re-recorded especially for a film." A: "Quite obviously .... it was 'Sumer Is Icumen In' (also called the Summer Canon and the Cuckoo Song), a medieval English rota of the mid-13th century.... In the 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood, Little John (Alan Hale, Sr.) whistles the melody just before he meets Robin Hood. Quite a popular tune in its time so I hear."
How the compact disc lost its shine - article by Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian. "Thirty years ago this month, Dire Straits released their fifth album, Brothers in Arms. En route to becoming one of the best-selling albums of all time, it revolutionised the music industry. For the first time, an album sold more on compact disc than on vinyl and passed the 1m mark. Three years after the first silver discs had appeared in record shops, Brothers in Arms was the symbolic milestone that marked the true beginning of the CD era.... 'Brothers in Arms was an iconic release,' says Gennaro Castaldo [of the BPI]. 'The CD came to symbolise the so-called yuppie generation, representing new material success and aspiration. If you owned a CD player it showed you were upwardly mobile. Its significance seemed to go beyond music to a lifestyle statement.' ... It was the 2001 launch of the iPod, an aspirational premium product which made MP3s portable, that turned the tide. 'Before that the MP3 was an inferior good,' Witt says [Stephen Witt, author of How Music Got Free about the industry's relationship with the MP3]. 'Once you had the iPod, the CD was an inferior good. It could get cracked or lost, whereas MP3 files lasted.' Not pure, not perfect, but sound for ever."
When society isn’t judging, women’s sex drive rivals men’s - article by Tom Stafford in MindHacks blog, also in The Conversation. "In 1978 two psychologists, Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield,... had students at Florida State University approach people on campus and deliver a pick-up line ... according to one of three randomly chosen options. Either 'would you go out tonight?', or 'will you come over to my apartment?', or 'would you go to bed with me?'... None of the women approached took up the offer of sex with a complete stranger. Three-quarters of the men did... [In research published this month,] two German researchers, Andreas Baranowski and Heiko Hecht, replicated the original Clark and Hatfield study, but with some vital changes.... The pair reasoned that one factor in how women respond to invitations to sex may be fear – fear of reputational damage in a culture which judges women’s sexual activity differently from men’s, and fear of physical harm from an encounter with a male stranger.... They designed an elaborate cover scenario designed to make the participants believe they could accept offers of sex without fear of anyone finding out, or of physical danger. ... The results were dramatic. ... The women who thought they had the chance to meet up with men for sex, chose an average of slightly less than three men who they would like to have an encounter with. The men chose an average of slightly more than three women who they would like to have an encounter with."
Derek Walker obituary in The Guardian. "Taking the master plan for the new town [of Milton Keynes] conceived by the architect Richard Llewelyn-Davies, Derek and his team introduced a well-defined city centre and a tightened grid that the city centre team leader, Stuart Mosscrop, noticed was almost aligned with the rising sun on the summer solstice. Nudged into precise alignment, the modern town centre connected back to the ancient British landscapes that so fascinated the team.... To test their work, the team sat on the muddy field of the yet to be built town with the central street pegged, to watch the solstice sunrise. Stories about the sewage works being placed on a ley line might be mythical embellishments, but the names of Midsummer Boulevard and Avebury Boulevard still recall ancient links."
Sunday 31 May 2015
Thursday 28 May 2015
The learning technologies of 1990
To celebrate a colleague’s clocking up 25 years on the staff of The Open University, I put together a slideshow to remind us all just how long ago 1990 was. Amongst other things, that was the year in which Margaret Thatcher was forced to resign, Germany was re-unified, and the first Gulf War began. Top films of the year included Ghost, Pretty Woman, Home Alone, and Back to the Future III.
But what was learning technology like in 1990? Three events from The Open University’s history remind us how things were back then.
First, there was a change to the transmission timings of the TV programmes made and broadcast by the BBC for OU students. From the time of the OU’s first course in 1970, when domestic video recorders were many years in the future, these programmes had been transmitted late at night or in the early morning, so that – as became a legendary British curiosity – not only OU students but insomniacs and early risers could study art history, theoretical physics or human psychology in the hours before or after regular programming. In 1990, the BBC moved all its educational broadcasting, including OU programmes, to an overnight “Learning Zone” (“zone” was very much a word of the period) on the basis that people who wanted them would record them and watch them later at a time of their convenience. This marked a technology milestone, in that for the first time the OU was working on the assumption that video recorder ownership was now so widespread that all of its students owned and (perhaps more crucially) were able to program it.
At that time at the OU, only students on certain courses were
required to have a computer, or at least access to one. The minimum
specification of that computer had been the subject of much debate,
being eventually fixed around the capabilities of the Amstrad 1512: an
IBM PC “clone” from the company of Alan Sugar, who was then famous not
for firing apprentices but for manufacturing cheap and sturdy computers
for the business market. In 1990 however, the argument erupted again
when the minimum specification was breached by a computing course which –
because of the requirements of a database package – demanded that
students have a computer with TWO floppy disk drives, instead of just
one. (Most personal computers at this time did not have a hard disk
drive, let alone a CD-ROM reader.)
In 1990 an internet connection was also a rarity for domestic computer users, though about two thousand OU students and lecturers were required to have one in order to use CoSy, an early computer conferencing system. Such things were new and unfamiliar to those outside academic science and the computer industry; CoSy had to be accompanied by a long and detailed manual, in which operations were explained through the analogy of working on a desktop with different files and folders which might be open or closed. (Few people other than users of the Apple Macintosh had experience of a windows-icon-menu-pointer system; Microsoft’s attempt to create a rival system called Windows had only reached version 3.0 in 1990, and was still vastly inferior to the Mac OS.)
These kinds of trips back into the past can be great fun. (So can seeing what kids of today make of the cutting-edge technologies of yesteryear.) But if we find the VCRs, floppy disk drives and dial-up internet connections of 1990 quaint, we should resist the temptation to imagine ourselves superior to the people we were back then or to congratulate ourselves on how much progress has been made. Rather we should be reminded of how many of the technologies which now seem so obvious and central to our lives will in fact prove transitory and doomed to ultimate obsolescence. William Gibson, the author of the 1984 SF novel Neuromancer and regarded as something of a prophet of the digital world, once commented on his attitude to new technologies:“whenever I’m shown something like Google Glass, … [I imagine] what it would look like in the display cabinet beside the cash register in a [charity] shop - I try to imagine how they'll look in ten years time. It's a very good exercise for putting it in perspective. In a charity shop you'll find all the once-new technology, gathering dust as all things do.”
That’s the great thing about history: it can give strip away our temporal chauvinism and give us perspective. How will the learning technologies of today look in 25 years time, I wonder?
But what was learning technology like in 1990? Three events from The Open University’s history remind us how things were back then.
At that time at the OU, only students on certain courses were
required to have a computer, or at least access to one. The minimum
specification of that computer had been the subject of much debate,
being eventually fixed around the capabilities of the Amstrad 1512: an
IBM PC “clone” from the company of Alan Sugar, who was then famous not
for firing apprentices but for manufacturing cheap and sturdy computers
for the business market. In 1990 however, the argument erupted again
when the minimum specification was breached by a computing course which –
because of the requirements of a database package – demanded that
students have a computer with TWO floppy disk drives, instead of just
one. (Most personal computers at this time did not have a hard disk
drive, let alone a CD-ROM reader.)These kinds of trips back into the past can be great fun. (So can seeing what kids of today make of the cutting-edge technologies of yesteryear.) But if we find the VCRs, floppy disk drives and dial-up internet connections of 1990 quaint, we should resist the temptation to imagine ourselves superior to the people we were back then or to congratulate ourselves on how much progress has been made. Rather we should be reminded of how many of the technologies which now seem so obvious and central to our lives will in fact prove transitory and doomed to ultimate obsolescence. William Gibson, the author of the 1984 SF novel Neuromancer and regarded as something of a prophet of the digital world, once commented on his attitude to new technologies:“whenever I’m shown something like Google Glass, … [I imagine] what it would look like in the display cabinet beside the cash register in a [charity] shop - I try to imagine how they'll look in ten years time. It's a very good exercise for putting it in perspective. In a charity shop you'll find all the once-new technology, gathering dust as all things do.”
That’s the great thing about history: it can give strip away our temporal chauvinism and give us perspective. How will the learning technologies of today look in 25 years time, I wonder?
Wednesday 6 May 2015
Why a tutorial is like Weightwatchers
Seeing an obituary of Jean Nidetch, the founder of Weightwatchers, reminded me of an Open University student whom I interviewed some years ago about her experience of study. She greatly valued contact with other students, but not for the reasons one might suppose, because she compared her tutorials to Weightwatchers meetings;
So though students may share information with each other and may build knowledge collaboratively, it’s not necessarily the only or the most important aspect of their relationship with each other. Nor is their sense of community, if they develop one, necessarily founded on shared goals; more powerful may be “the ritual humiliation”, “seeing everyone else looking so depressed about the [next assignment]”. As Ursula Le Guin wrote many years ago: “brotherhood begins in shared pain.”
You come home with a little book every week, and it tells you, ... “this is what we’re concentrating on this week, and this is how to do it, and this is what we’re going to help you with, and don’t let people distract you, and da, da, da. ... Don’t let people try and make you eat cakes. Tell people that you’re doing this.” Like, “I’m studying, please don’t come in. I need this hour, it’s,” you know.... People need sort of chivvying, … they need a bit of support. And, er, WeightWatchers is very good at that. Very good at that.... That’s why you go to WeightWatchers once a week, so that w–, apart from the ritual humiliation of being weighed. Um. But you go, and there’s other people there, and you all chat in a queue and, you know, ... all girls together, or whatever it may be, which is similar to the tutorials.... In part the reason you go along is the moral support of seeing everyone else looking so depressed about the [next assignment]. Or whatever.I think of this student whenever I hear colleagues getting pretentious about the importance of contact between students for collaborative knowledge construction. Weightwatchers meetings are not intended for collaborative knowledge construction, or even for sharing information, because the basic principle of dieting is brutally simple – you just eat fewer calories – and all the details of the proprietary system for calorie-counting and meal planning are contained in a handbook which comes with WeightWatchers membership. For this student, the most important aspect of her meetings was the group identity (“all girls together”) and the moral authority which it gave to resist social pressures.
So though students may share information with each other and may build knowledge collaboratively, it’s not necessarily the only or the most important aspect of their relationship with each other. Nor is their sense of community, if they develop one, necessarily founded on shared goals; more powerful may be “the ritual humiliation”, “seeing everyone else looking so depressed about the [next assignment]”. As Ursula Le Guin wrote many years ago: “brotherhood begins in shared pain.”
Monday 4 May 2015
Seen and heard April 2015
Messiah at the Foundling Hospital – BBC documentary. A familiar story, but nicely told, with Tom Service covering the music and Amanda Vickery the social history. In this telling at least, Handel rescued the Foundling Hospital, and the Foundling Hospital rescued Handel, whose career was in decline following the turn in fashion against Italian opera.
Monteverdi in Mantua: The Genius of the Vespers – BBC documentary, introduced by Simon Russell Beale, with The Sixteen performing extracts from the 1610 Vespers in the locations where Monteverdi’s early music was performed. Polymnia, the choir in which I sing, is planning a trip to Mantua next Spring, and hopefully we will sing in some of the same locations and pay homage to Monteverdi’s memory – even if he wasn’t really happy there; the Vespers was his portfolio piece in his efforts to land a better and more reliably-paying job elsewhere, and the world is so much the better for it. Ave Maris Stella!
Easter Vigil – at Turvey Abbey. Starting with a bonfire at 4:30 am and lighting each other’s tapers, and carrying the light into the chapel for Mass, finishing as the birds are singing and the sun is coming up. Something very primal about this; New Age is all very well, but the Catholics got there first.
Homage to Manet – exhibition at Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery. The exhibition was rather disappointing; very little actual Manet and rather a lot of his contemporaries, such as Walter Sickert, with decidedly dodgy (at best) attitudes to women. The Museum itself, though, is still as lovely as when I last visited it at least twenty years ago. It’s hugely child-friendly, with the soaring exhibition space of the castle keep and very impressive wildlife diaramas; my wife finds them creepy, but kids seem to love them, even in these days of easily-available digital resources – something about seeing a polar bear, even if stuffed, towering over you, or a wading bird scavanging in the mud an arm’s length away. One thing sums it up for me: the way the castle's well, instead of being treated as a hazard and roped and chained away, is turned into a feature, with a glass cover and illumination down the shaft – because of course what kids want to do is to climb up and sit on it and stare into the depths.
Polymnia concert in King’s Lynn Minster – a lovely accoustic in which to sing, though one of the coldest buildings in which I’ve ever performed (at every rehearsal break, we left the minster to stand outside, because it was several degrees warmer out there). We sang again (better, this time!) the Morten Lauridsen 'Les chansons des roses', to poems by Maria Raine Rilke, and (accompanied by cellist John Heley) Richard Rodney Bennett’s 'A Farewell to Arms', setting a rather moving poem by the sixteenth-century George Peele about growing old: “His helmet now shall make a hive for bees ... / A man-at-arms serves must now serve on his knees // Godess, allow this aged man his right / To be your beadsman now that was your knight.”
Did Douglas get it right – BBC Radio 4 programme, with Mitch Benn revisiting the technology predictions made by Douglas Adams in a 2001 programme recorded shortly before his death. The short answer: basically, he did, especially (3’20”) on the internet's effect on the music, publishing and broadcasting industries being like the effect of the Atlantic ocean on the Amazon, Missisippi and Congo rivers. Interesting discussions too on (6’30”) how Adams considered technology only working properly at the point where it doesn’t have an instruction manual, the way a chair doesn’t have an instruction manual, and (19’00”) how he correctly spotted that the word “interactivity” (all the rage in 2001) was only needed because of the dominance of non-interactive media (phonographs, cinema, radio, TV) during much of the twentieth century. The only odd note was (16’40”) the passage on Adams’ aphorism that anything invented before you were born being just stuff, anything invented before you’re 35 being new and revolutionary, and anything invented after you’re 35 being against the natural order of things. A commentator thought it didn’t apply now, because the current generation has grown up with constantly changing technology. Hmmm… more so than any previous generation? I wonder how today’s hipsters will cope with the new and transformative technologies which arrive when they’re in their seventies.
Ursula Le Guin at 85 – BBC Radio 4 programme, presented by Naomi Alderman, interviewing the much-loved and much-respected SF and Fantasy author, with contributions from literary fans David Mitchell and Neil Gaiman. No surprises for me, being thoroughly familiar with her work and views, but it was lovely to hear her talk, and give a deadpan rendition of “I am a man”.
AA: America’s Gift to the World – BBC Radio 4 programme, presented by A L Kennedy, marking 80 years of Alcoholics Anonymous. Interesting to hear the contemporary (or more contemporary) accounts of the founders Bill Wilson and Bob Smith, but the milestones were familiar: conceptualising alcoholism as a disease, so that the only realistic goal is to be an alcoholic who does not drink; the peer-support model of alcoholics talking to each other, the only entry requirement being the desire to stop drinking; the underlying ethos of spiritual renewal, borrowed from the earlier “Oxford Groups” but without the specifically Christian framework. But it’s still a mystery to me how and why the decentralised organisation and the 12-step formula have been so successful and so long-lasting.
Dance 'Til Dawn – new dance show from Flavia (Cacace) and Vincent (Simone) off Strictly. Not quite as stunning as their Midnight Tango, but great value all the same, with a greater variety of dance styles and more ensemble pieces, and a breath-taking stunt in which Flavia falls backwards from 10 foot up to be caught by the male troupe.
Dreamfall Chapters: Book 2 – Rebels. At last, part two, and the plot’s picking up now, the first part having been largely devoted to exposition, and the choices made are starting to have consequences – some of them fatal. I’m warming to Kian, nicely and sardonically voice-acted by Nicholas Boulton. And the towns of Marcuria (medieval fantasy) and Europolis (futuristic dystopia) are beautiful to walk around, while you’re trying to work out how to solve the next puzzle.
The Blackwell Legacy – adventure game from 2006 (new edition 2011), which I started after reading a glowing review of the fifth and final game in the sequence, the advice to newcomers being to start at the beginning. I can see why the game has become celebrated: characterful scripting and great voice acting compensating for what now look like dated graphics, and a poignant theme. I’m looking forward to the further adventures of Rosa (young aspiring writer) and Joey (the ghost private eye who haunts her as he haunted her aunt and grandmother) as they help unhappy ghosts to spiritual resolution.
The Left Hand of Darkness - BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Ursula Le Guin’s classic 1969 novel. A lovely adaptation, by a writer who really respects the original, and understands how to go back to the essence and reconstruct the whole for a new medium, rather than trying to adapt it scene by scene. We start in the heart of the book, the still centre (though it occurs towards the end of the narrative sequence), with Genly Ai and Estraven in their tent on the ice: together, alone. He is the First Envoy, the ambassador sent to invite the people of the winter-planet Gethen to join the Ekumen; s/he (the people of Gethen are un-gendered, except for a few days each month when they become either male or female) is the exiled First Minister of feudal Karhide, and the one person on Gethen who trusted Ai from the start while also being the one person he refused to trust. This is the point in the story at which the breakages are mended and the world made whole again. Just writing about it now, I hear the sound of the wind blowing snow against the wall of the tent…
Vera - new season of the ITV crime drama. We like Vera, oh we do like Vera. Her new sergeant is working out nicely too.
Jazz, Blues and Moore - album by the Dudley Moore Trio. Reading a newspaper piece about Dudley Moore's piano playing reminded me how much I loved the Dudley Moore Trio back in the early seventies. This album is just as much fun as I remember it! Somehow very much of its period (the old jazz trio sound), but at this distance somehow timeless. Classy and cool
The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, by Hugh Lofting. An exercise at the Turvey Enneagram Group - choosing an animal to represent our Holy Virtue - made me think of the stormy petrel who finds Tommy Stubbins alone on his raft after the shipwreck: "To this petrel, a frail little thing of feathers, much smaller and weaker than I, the Sea could do anything she liked, it seemed, and his only answer was a lazy, saucy flip of the wing!... Come raging gale, come sunlit calm, this wilderness of water was his home." And then Tommy compares the Doctor himself to the petrel: "The vast strange knowledge which he had gained from his speech and friendship with animals had brought him the power to do things which no other human being would dare to try. Like the petrel, he could apparently play with the Sea in all her moods. It was no wonder that many of the ignorant savage peoples among whom he passed in his voyages made statues of him showing him as half a fish, half a bird, and half a man. And ridiculous though it was, I could quite understand what Miranda [the bird of paradise] meant when she said she firmly believed that he could never die."
Monteverdi in Mantua: The Genius of the Vespers – BBC documentary, introduced by Simon Russell Beale, with The Sixteen performing extracts from the 1610 Vespers in the locations where Monteverdi’s early music was performed. Polymnia, the choir in which I sing, is planning a trip to Mantua next Spring, and hopefully we will sing in some of the same locations and pay homage to Monteverdi’s memory – even if he wasn’t really happy there; the Vespers was his portfolio piece in his efforts to land a better and more reliably-paying job elsewhere, and the world is so much the better for it. Ave Maris Stella!
Easter Vigil – at Turvey Abbey. Starting with a bonfire at 4:30 am and lighting each other’s tapers, and carrying the light into the chapel for Mass, finishing as the birds are singing and the sun is coming up. Something very primal about this; New Age is all very well, but the Catholics got there first.
Homage to Manet – exhibition at Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery. The exhibition was rather disappointing; very little actual Manet and rather a lot of his contemporaries, such as Walter Sickert, with decidedly dodgy (at best) attitudes to women. The Museum itself, though, is still as lovely as when I last visited it at least twenty years ago. It’s hugely child-friendly, with the soaring exhibition space of the castle keep and very impressive wildlife diaramas; my wife finds them creepy, but kids seem to love them, even in these days of easily-available digital resources – something about seeing a polar bear, even if stuffed, towering over you, or a wading bird scavanging in the mud an arm’s length away. One thing sums it up for me: the way the castle's well, instead of being treated as a hazard and roped and chained away, is turned into a feature, with a glass cover and illumination down the shaft – because of course what kids want to do is to climb up and sit on it and stare into the depths.
Polymnia concert in King’s Lynn Minster – a lovely accoustic in which to sing, though one of the coldest buildings in which I’ve ever performed (at every rehearsal break, we left the minster to stand outside, because it was several degrees warmer out there). We sang again (better, this time!) the Morten Lauridsen 'Les chansons des roses', to poems by Maria Raine Rilke, and (accompanied by cellist John Heley) Richard Rodney Bennett’s 'A Farewell to Arms', setting a rather moving poem by the sixteenth-century George Peele about growing old: “His helmet now shall make a hive for bees ... / A man-at-arms serves must now serve on his knees // Godess, allow this aged man his right / To be your beadsman now that was your knight.”
Did Douglas get it right – BBC Radio 4 programme, with Mitch Benn revisiting the technology predictions made by Douglas Adams in a 2001 programme recorded shortly before his death. The short answer: basically, he did, especially (3’20”) on the internet's effect on the music, publishing and broadcasting industries being like the effect of the Atlantic ocean on the Amazon, Missisippi and Congo rivers. Interesting discussions too on (6’30”) how Adams considered technology only working properly at the point where it doesn’t have an instruction manual, the way a chair doesn’t have an instruction manual, and (19’00”) how he correctly spotted that the word “interactivity” (all the rage in 2001) was only needed because of the dominance of non-interactive media (phonographs, cinema, radio, TV) during much of the twentieth century. The only odd note was (16’40”) the passage on Adams’ aphorism that anything invented before you were born being just stuff, anything invented before you’re 35 being new and revolutionary, and anything invented after you’re 35 being against the natural order of things. A commentator thought it didn’t apply now, because the current generation has grown up with constantly changing technology. Hmmm… more so than any previous generation? I wonder how today’s hipsters will cope with the new and transformative technologies which arrive when they’re in their seventies.
Ursula Le Guin at 85 – BBC Radio 4 programme, presented by Naomi Alderman, interviewing the much-loved and much-respected SF and Fantasy author, with contributions from literary fans David Mitchell and Neil Gaiman. No surprises for me, being thoroughly familiar with her work and views, but it was lovely to hear her talk, and give a deadpan rendition of “I am a man”.
AA: America’s Gift to the World – BBC Radio 4 programme, presented by A L Kennedy, marking 80 years of Alcoholics Anonymous. Interesting to hear the contemporary (or more contemporary) accounts of the founders Bill Wilson and Bob Smith, but the milestones were familiar: conceptualising alcoholism as a disease, so that the only realistic goal is to be an alcoholic who does not drink; the peer-support model of alcoholics talking to each other, the only entry requirement being the desire to stop drinking; the underlying ethos of spiritual renewal, borrowed from the earlier “Oxford Groups” but without the specifically Christian framework. But it’s still a mystery to me how and why the decentralised organisation and the 12-step formula have been so successful and so long-lasting.
Dance 'Til Dawn – new dance show from Flavia (Cacace) and Vincent (Simone) off Strictly. Not quite as stunning as their Midnight Tango, but great value all the same, with a greater variety of dance styles and more ensemble pieces, and a breath-taking stunt in which Flavia falls backwards from 10 foot up to be caught by the male troupe.
Dreamfall Chapters: Book 2 – Rebels. At last, part two, and the plot’s picking up now, the first part having been largely devoted to exposition, and the choices made are starting to have consequences – some of them fatal. I’m warming to Kian, nicely and sardonically voice-acted by Nicholas Boulton. And the towns of Marcuria (medieval fantasy) and Europolis (futuristic dystopia) are beautiful to walk around, while you’re trying to work out how to solve the next puzzle.
The Blackwell Legacy – adventure game from 2006 (new edition 2011), which I started after reading a glowing review of the fifth and final game in the sequence, the advice to newcomers being to start at the beginning. I can see why the game has become celebrated: characterful scripting and great voice acting compensating for what now look like dated graphics, and a poignant theme. I’m looking forward to the further adventures of Rosa (young aspiring writer) and Joey (the ghost private eye who haunts her as he haunted her aunt and grandmother) as they help unhappy ghosts to spiritual resolution.
The Left Hand of Darkness - BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Ursula Le Guin’s classic 1969 novel. A lovely adaptation, by a writer who really respects the original, and understands how to go back to the essence and reconstruct the whole for a new medium, rather than trying to adapt it scene by scene. We start in the heart of the book, the still centre (though it occurs towards the end of the narrative sequence), with Genly Ai and Estraven in their tent on the ice: together, alone. He is the First Envoy, the ambassador sent to invite the people of the winter-planet Gethen to join the Ekumen; s/he (the people of Gethen are un-gendered, except for a few days each month when they become either male or female) is the exiled First Minister of feudal Karhide, and the one person on Gethen who trusted Ai from the start while also being the one person he refused to trust. This is the point in the story at which the breakages are mended and the world made whole again. Just writing about it now, I hear the sound of the wind blowing snow against the wall of the tent…
Vera - new season of the ITV crime drama. We like Vera, oh we do like Vera. Her new sergeant is working out nicely too.
Jazz, Blues and Moore - album by the Dudley Moore Trio. Reading a newspaper piece about Dudley Moore's piano playing reminded me how much I loved the Dudley Moore Trio back in the early seventies. This album is just as much fun as I remember it! Somehow very much of its period (the old jazz trio sound), but at this distance somehow timeless. Classy and cool
The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, by Hugh Lofting. An exercise at the Turvey Enneagram Group - choosing an animal to represent our Holy Virtue - made me think of the stormy petrel who finds Tommy Stubbins alone on his raft after the shipwreck: "To this petrel, a frail little thing of feathers, much smaller and weaker than I, the Sea could do anything she liked, it seemed, and his only answer was a lazy, saucy flip of the wing!... Come raging gale, come sunlit calm, this wilderness of water was his home." And then Tommy compares the Doctor himself to the petrel: "The vast strange knowledge which he had gained from his speech and friendship with animals had brought him the power to do things which no other human being would dare to try. Like the petrel, he could apparently play with the Sea in all her moods. It was no wonder that many of the ignorant savage peoples among whom he passed in his voyages made statues of him showing him as half a fish, half a bird, and half a man. And ridiculous though it was, I could quite understand what Miranda [the bird of paradise] meant when she said she firmly believed that he could never die."
Cuttings April 2015
Monster Hunter 4: why some video game communities are friendlier than others - article by Jonathan Allford in The Guardian. "I’ve played Monster Hunter 4 for a week and I am dressed in Kecha Wacha (a playful monkey) armour with basic weaponry. I am clearly a new player warily looking across a horizon of terrifyingly difficult encounters – and yet I’ve had players in powerful Gore armour sign me up to quests against a Gore Magala (a giant shadow dragon). At first I protested 'not ready, look at gear' but they were insistent, they had faith. Obviously we all died as me and another participant were still new, but after we found ourselves back at the Gathering Hall, the experienced player didn’t say anything beyond 'that was fun!'. Contrast that with DOTA2, where if you mistime an ability or Doom the wrong target, you risk a torrent of abuse for the rest of the match.... What I have most enjoyed – and been pleasantly surprised by – is how friendly and helpful the community is. As an online moderator, I’ve spent years dealing with abusive, disruptive and aggressive individuals. I’ve noticed, however, that some games seem largely free of the griefing, anger and intolerance that sometimes feels ubiquitous. I started to wonder why that was. What makes certain games more likely to attract friendlier communities?"
Did Douglas get it right? - documentary by Mitch Benn on BBC Radio 4. "Best known for 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', Douglas Adams was a huge fan of new technology and predicted an exciting future for the 21st century. Sadly he did not live to see it, as he died aged 49 in 2001.... In the year 2000, at the turn of the new millennium, Douglas Adams made a radio series offering a vision of the future that new technology would offer. He looked at the fast changing music scene, the coming of e-books, the future for broadcasting and made his predictions for what he described as 'extreme evolution'. But did he get it right? Now Mitch Benn takes on the challenge of seeing what Douglas got right, and what he got wrong."
Ursula Le Guin at 85 - documentary on BBC Radio 4. "Naomi Alderman talks to leading novelist Ursula Le Guin about her life and work and hears from literary fans including David Mitchell and Neil Gaiman."
From Snow White to Cinderella, the story of fairytales on film - article by Michael Newton in The Guardian. "With the wonderful exceptions of Disney’s Tangled and Frozen, I feel most of these movies [the recent spate of revisionist fairytale films] to be disappointing failures. Their innovation and their mistake is to shunt 'real people' into the tales, thrusting psychological complexity into a form that never was meant to deal in rounded novelistic characters. Instead, the best stories gave us simplified figures, and the depths were explored through the evocation of images and the potentialities of plot.... After these films, it is something of a relief to watch Kenneth Branagh’s new Cinderella, a movie that trusts the original tale’s profound simplicities. Here’s a film that permits the stepmother (played by Cate Blanchett) to be wicked – while letting us see how she might have become so. Blanchett plays the role both with pantomime gusto and with subtlety; from the moment she blasts out her Sybil Fawlty machine-gun laugh, we know the movie’s going to be good. Branagh’s understanding of acting is what’s most strongly present. Everyone shines, and there are no (or very few) ironic winks over the heads of the children. As the Fairy Godmother, Helena Bonham Carter seems to be channelling Dolly Parton, and Derek Jacobi proves genuinely moving as the dying King. Yet above all, it is Lily James who makes the film work; it is a hard thing to play goodness convincingly, to let us feel that the film’s moral – 'have courage and be kind' – is not a platitude, but something affirming."
Alexei Sayle: it’s time for a Marxist Top Gear - article by Alexei Sayle in The Guardian. "My credentials to replace [Jeremy] Clarkson [as presenter of Top Gear] are I hope clear ... Roland Barthes, the French literary theorist, philosopher and critic, wrote in a 1957 essay about the new Citroën DS: 'Cars today are the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals.' During the medieval era, the finest minds and artists were dedicated to what was at the centre of society, namely God; today it is consumerism, the insatiable desire for new and better products, and just as those great medieval places of worship were objects of wonder and awe, so the car now fulfils that function, expressing where we are as a society in terms of design, technology and aspiration. In the Top Gear studio the cars are objects of blind veneration, just like the statues of the saints in those medieval cathedrals. So what better place to reintroduce Marxist ideas than on a show dedicated to cars? Every single thing in the world can be revealed through a proper study of cars – fashion, economics, environment and politics – and I am the man to do it. And don’t worry: the show will still be full of its trademark irreverence – though its targets will now be the rich, the powerful and the reactionary, rather than Mexicans, the safety conscious and Morris Marina owners. Because I am not a dry or didactic Marxist; I am one of the fun ones."
Waving or drowning? - article by Amy Jenkins in The Guardian on her debt to Stevie Smith. " 'I have something to say' was my somewhat fragile raison d’être. The problem with becoming a mother was that it gave me a raison d’etre so much more robust that it trampled on the old one and sent it scurrying away. ... The real truth was that I needed a new reason to write (beyond the obvious financial one). In fact, I found myself so creatively bereft that I was thinking of giving up writing altogether. One day, casting around for inspiration on my book shelf, I pulled down that same old laurel-green copy of Novel on Yellow Paper. ... I began to see that, having given me lessons on how to write, Smith’s life and work might also provide answers as to why to write. ... [Frances Spalding’s Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography] quotes her on writing as follows: 'I want to get something out that is working away at me inside. It gives proportion and eases the pressure, puts the feelings at one remove, brings the temperature down … ' Smith was writing to metamorphose her pain into something that she could live with."
AA: America's Gift to the World - documentary by AL Kennedy on BBC Radio 4 telling the story of Alcoholics Anonymous and its methods. "Eighty years ago, Bill Wilson and Doctor Bob Smith created a route to recovery from a fatal addiction along with an enduring organisation. With more than two million members worldwide, AA is still considered by the majority to be the most effective rehabilitation treatment available to alcoholics. In an age of heavily commercialised recovery programmes, 'The Fellowship' continues to work with no active promotion and a consciously anarchistic and non-commercial structure. But few of us really know what happens. Through conversations with AA members, their partners, parents and children in Al-Anon and Alateen, AL Kennedy explores the method and treatment of the organisation, along with the story of its foundation and survival."
Downsides of being a convincing liar - article by Tom Stafford in MindHacks blog. "[Zoe] Chance and colleagues [at Yale University] ran experiments which involved asking students to answer IQ and general knowledge questions. Half the participants were given a copy of the test paper which had – apparently in error – been printed with the answers listed at the bottom.... As you’d expect, some of these participants couldn’t help but cheat.... The crucial question for Chance’s research was this: did people in the 'cheater' group know that they’d been relying on the answers? Or did they attribute their success in the tests solely to their own intelligence?... Self-deception won the day. The people who’d had access to the answers predicted, on average, that they’d get higher scores on the follow-up – equivalent to giving them something like a 10-point IQ boost. When tested, of course, they scored far lower."
Radical embodied cognition: an interview with Andrew Wilson - article in MindHacks blog. "The computational approach is the orthodoxy in psychological science. We try and understand the mind using the metaphors of information processing and the storage and retrieval of representations. These ideas are so common that it is easy to forget that there is any alternative. Andrew Wilson is on a mission to remind us that there is an alternative – a radical, non-representational, non-information processing take on what cognition is...."
Why this sentence is hard to understand - online excerpt from MindHacks by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb. "The length of a sentence isn’t what makes it hard to understand— it’s how long you have to wait for a phrase to be completed.... We don’t treat every word individually as we hear it; we treat words as parts of phrases and have a buffer (a very short-term memory) that stores the words as they come in, until they can be allocated to a phrase. Sentences become cumbersome not if they’re long, but if they overrun the buffer required to parse them, and that depends on how long the individual phrases are." See also Why one of these puzzles is easy and the other is hard.
Did Douglas get it right? - documentary by Mitch Benn on BBC Radio 4. "Best known for 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', Douglas Adams was a huge fan of new technology and predicted an exciting future for the 21st century. Sadly he did not live to see it, as he died aged 49 in 2001.... In the year 2000, at the turn of the new millennium, Douglas Adams made a radio series offering a vision of the future that new technology would offer. He looked at the fast changing music scene, the coming of e-books, the future for broadcasting and made his predictions for what he described as 'extreme evolution'. But did he get it right? Now Mitch Benn takes on the challenge of seeing what Douglas got right, and what he got wrong."
Ursula Le Guin at 85 - documentary on BBC Radio 4. "Naomi Alderman talks to leading novelist Ursula Le Guin about her life and work and hears from literary fans including David Mitchell and Neil Gaiman."
From Snow White to Cinderella, the story of fairytales on film - article by Michael Newton in The Guardian. "With the wonderful exceptions of Disney’s Tangled and Frozen, I feel most of these movies [the recent spate of revisionist fairytale films] to be disappointing failures. Their innovation and their mistake is to shunt 'real people' into the tales, thrusting psychological complexity into a form that never was meant to deal in rounded novelistic characters. Instead, the best stories gave us simplified figures, and the depths were explored through the evocation of images and the potentialities of plot.... After these films, it is something of a relief to watch Kenneth Branagh’s new Cinderella, a movie that trusts the original tale’s profound simplicities. Here’s a film that permits the stepmother (played by Cate Blanchett) to be wicked – while letting us see how she might have become so. Blanchett plays the role both with pantomime gusto and with subtlety; from the moment she blasts out her Sybil Fawlty machine-gun laugh, we know the movie’s going to be good. Branagh’s understanding of acting is what’s most strongly present. Everyone shines, and there are no (or very few) ironic winks over the heads of the children. As the Fairy Godmother, Helena Bonham Carter seems to be channelling Dolly Parton, and Derek Jacobi proves genuinely moving as the dying King. Yet above all, it is Lily James who makes the film work; it is a hard thing to play goodness convincingly, to let us feel that the film’s moral – 'have courage and be kind' – is not a platitude, but something affirming."
Alexei Sayle: it’s time for a Marxist Top Gear - article by Alexei Sayle in The Guardian. "My credentials to replace [Jeremy] Clarkson [as presenter of Top Gear] are I hope clear ... Roland Barthes, the French literary theorist, philosopher and critic, wrote in a 1957 essay about the new Citroën DS: 'Cars today are the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals.' During the medieval era, the finest minds and artists were dedicated to what was at the centre of society, namely God; today it is consumerism, the insatiable desire for new and better products, and just as those great medieval places of worship were objects of wonder and awe, so the car now fulfils that function, expressing where we are as a society in terms of design, technology and aspiration. In the Top Gear studio the cars are objects of blind veneration, just like the statues of the saints in those medieval cathedrals. So what better place to reintroduce Marxist ideas than on a show dedicated to cars? Every single thing in the world can be revealed through a proper study of cars – fashion, economics, environment and politics – and I am the man to do it. And don’t worry: the show will still be full of its trademark irreverence – though its targets will now be the rich, the powerful and the reactionary, rather than Mexicans, the safety conscious and Morris Marina owners. Because I am not a dry or didactic Marxist; I am one of the fun ones."
Waving or drowning? - article by Amy Jenkins in The Guardian on her debt to Stevie Smith. " 'I have something to say' was my somewhat fragile raison d’être. The problem with becoming a mother was that it gave me a raison d’etre so much more robust that it trampled on the old one and sent it scurrying away. ... The real truth was that I needed a new reason to write (beyond the obvious financial one). In fact, I found myself so creatively bereft that I was thinking of giving up writing altogether. One day, casting around for inspiration on my book shelf, I pulled down that same old laurel-green copy of Novel on Yellow Paper. ... I began to see that, having given me lessons on how to write, Smith’s life and work might also provide answers as to why to write. ... [Frances Spalding’s Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography] quotes her on writing as follows: 'I want to get something out that is working away at me inside. It gives proportion and eases the pressure, puts the feelings at one remove, brings the temperature down … ' Smith was writing to metamorphose her pain into something that she could live with."
AA: America's Gift to the World - documentary by AL Kennedy on BBC Radio 4 telling the story of Alcoholics Anonymous and its methods. "Eighty years ago, Bill Wilson and Doctor Bob Smith created a route to recovery from a fatal addiction along with an enduring organisation. With more than two million members worldwide, AA is still considered by the majority to be the most effective rehabilitation treatment available to alcoholics. In an age of heavily commercialised recovery programmes, 'The Fellowship' continues to work with no active promotion and a consciously anarchistic and non-commercial structure. But few of us really know what happens. Through conversations with AA members, their partners, parents and children in Al-Anon and Alateen, AL Kennedy explores the method and treatment of the organisation, along with the story of its foundation and survival."
Downsides of being a convincing liar - article by Tom Stafford in MindHacks blog. "[Zoe] Chance and colleagues [at Yale University] ran experiments which involved asking students to answer IQ and general knowledge questions. Half the participants were given a copy of the test paper which had – apparently in error – been printed with the answers listed at the bottom.... As you’d expect, some of these participants couldn’t help but cheat.... The crucial question for Chance’s research was this: did people in the 'cheater' group know that they’d been relying on the answers? Or did they attribute their success in the tests solely to their own intelligence?... Self-deception won the day. The people who’d had access to the answers predicted, on average, that they’d get higher scores on the follow-up – equivalent to giving them something like a 10-point IQ boost. When tested, of course, they scored far lower."
Radical embodied cognition: an interview with Andrew Wilson - article in MindHacks blog. "The computational approach is the orthodoxy in psychological science. We try and understand the mind using the metaphors of information processing and the storage and retrieval of representations. These ideas are so common that it is easy to forget that there is any alternative. Andrew Wilson is on a mission to remind us that there is an alternative – a radical, non-representational, non-information processing take on what cognition is...."
Why this sentence is hard to understand - online excerpt from MindHacks by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb. "The length of a sentence isn’t what makes it hard to understand— it’s how long you have to wait for a phrase to be completed.... We don’t treat every word individually as we hear it; we treat words as parts of phrases and have a buffer (a very short-term memory) that stores the words as they come in, until they can be allocated to a phrase. Sentences become cumbersome not if they’re long, but if they overrun the buffer required to parse them, and that depends on how long the individual phrases are." See also Why one of these puzzles is easy and the other is hard.
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