Fodder

The internet was so much fun in its early days, sort of a wild west of the mind; social media too in due course. But anything that humans value becomes a resource, like oil in the ground or fish in the sea, to be dug up and sold; and ideally controlled, synthesised, reshaped to this end.

There have been LOTS of reads of this blog recently but zero interaction. I guess most of my readers are not human. Don't really want my efforts hoovered up for AI purposes so most of it will disappear from sight. Posts have become rare anyway but from now on they'll be restricted to my own wee feelings: nothing factual, nothing that's taken time to find out, no more Michael Scot; just grumbles or eulogies. Feel free to say hello on BlueSky (@alecmackinnon.bsky.social) or at my Glasgow University email address (easily discoverable) if you're a human who cares.

Time to go cycling.

'A lot went out with the horse'

I've been reading Poacher's Pilgrimage, Alastair McIntosh's reflective account of a walk through Lewis and Harris. I enjoyed a voice rooted in the Hebrides that also references Fromm, Fanon and Freire. Lots to think about! In particular I was reminded again of our tiny moment of COP26 cycling activism.

For many people, mention of the Outer Hebrides conjures up visions of seascapes, beaches and mountains, possibly all the more so in the age of Instagram. Alastair McIntosh enjoys these vistas, of course, but finds the deepest value in the people who live there. As he makes his way across the island he has many conversations, sometimes lengthy meetings with old friends and comrades, other times just a few, telling words exchanged with strangers. During one of the former he unearths an island saying: A lot went out with the horse. His friend expands on this theme: 'People thought they'd just exchange the horse for the tractor. They never realised all the linkages they'd lose. They'd get a loan to buy the tractor. Then a job to pay the loan. And now we're wondering why we've no longer got the same time for each other.' The tractor is a trojan horse - so to speak! - in the life of the islander. It lets something alien sneak into his life, something that undermines his autonomy, supplants his relation with his neighbours, enveigles him into a state of dependency; dependency on a machine he could not construct himself, and on the global supply chains that keep it working. He just wants a machine that will lighten his load and, maybe, enhance his productivity, but the price he pays is subtle and far-reaching.

No surprise to see the same sorts of agent lean in to government in the matter of climate change, doing their best to keep dependency central in whatever ways forward are adopted. A lot went out with the horse indeed; but a lot can come back with the bicycle.

Untethered

I enjoyed this blog post from Athene Donald: Where's your place in the world? Professor Donald addresses some of the human side of lockdown, the disruption, the damage to the sense of self, that must go hand in hand with the abandonment of normal practises; the psychological consequences of situations when "we are untethered from our moorings and face periods of confusion or loss".

I've felt "untethered" for a few years now. I spent most of my career in academia working on an activity few universities now value; possibly even an unforgiveable sin. Ten years ago I was proud of staying REF-returnable while engaged in the labour-intensive - human-centred, transformative! - project of Access and the rest of the continuing education work. A decade later most of that is dismantled. I don't have full-time employment and I'm employed at all only until the end of this month. Don't worry, I'm fine, I won't starve or even have to forego anything much.

"Happiness is a by-product of function," said William S Burroughs. When professional identity leaves, function skips off down the road hand in hand with it and with them, sense of a place in the world. This will be still more of a problem if professional identity has involved some sense of "mission". One can no doubt find other things to do, and in time reassemble a sense of self. How to persist in the meantime?

This professional sense of self is of course an illusion. Events - a pandemic for instance - could strip it away unexpectedly at any moment. There can be situations where it is irrelevant, for instance in a deserted, unlit lane facing somebody bigger, strong and angry who has a knife. More benignly, it may mean little or nothing in a group of adults gathered together for some non-professional reason like skiing lessons, volunteer park clean-up, parents' evenings... Maybe it wasn't really that central after all? Possibly even a distraction from something that should have been more important?

If we're lucky there are people who care about us, for reasons mostly disconnected from professional standing. What's left that they care about? Must be something. Anyway we might make some awful political or aesthetic judgement that would turn them against us. They might head down some road where we could not follow. You never know what's going on inside somebody else's head. What happens then?

A man has a house. It's a beautiful house, big, unique, spectacularly sited, tastefully furnished, with a fine garden creatively stocked and laid out. The man has worked very hard over many years so that he could buy this house and get it exactly to the style he wanted. He is so proud of his house. Everybody admires him for the house, for the effort that led to it and the thought invested in it. Every moment he spends in this house or the garden is a happy one.

One day he has to make a long journey by car. Crossing a high, empty moorland his car breaks down. The battery of his mobile phone is dead. He sets off on foot, trudging along an unfrequented road through dull, featureless country. Some miles further on there is no relief in the landscape but a track, like a farm road, runs across the moor. Hoping to find a house with a phone he starts following it. He crosses a barely perceptible rise. There is some mist, still no sign of any human habitation. He stops walking, looks round, sees nothing familiar. Where is he? How did he get here? Is it safe? For a moment he's in his sitting room, feet up, gin and tonic in hand, basking in a little glowing cloud of wellbeing. But the air's getting cold and the mist is thickening to fog. The house is another world, far away and no help at all; family too. He sits down on a tuft of heather, a little damp but not uncomfortable. A breeze whistles across the moor. Across the track a funny little bird is hopping about, black and dark brown, with a cream-coloured patch at its neck. At his feet he notices a kaleidoscope of colour in a patch of moss: greens, yellows, reds, browns...

Will he ever see his house again? Family, friends? Maybe. No doubt there will be a future of renewed function. But for now maybe this is enough, to be the thing that, during some finite interval of time, hears the wind, sees the birds and the clouds and watches the light change.

A special embrace to the people who usually see these. If I don't advertise a post on social media you're very few in number. Not sure if I'll advertise this one.

Blog bots?

Here's a wee impromptu blog post. My last few posts have been read much more than previous ones. Colonised in particular has been read much more than any other of my posts, by a factor of about three. I don't know who is reading, if they find the posts useful or ludicrous. I wonder if my blog is attracting non-human traffic for some reason I haven't quite been able to imagine yet. Most come from the USA. None of them leave comments or contact me.

Owners of other blogs will know that some of their views appear to come from a link in another blog which usually turns out to be advertising porn or some other 21st century service - I, the blog owner am the target. Seems an elaborate way of sticking adverts under the noses of just a few people, of uncertain customer potential, when it's cheap and easy to buy lists of email addresses. Anyway I don't think these constitute most of this recent traffic.

I can imagine that people googling "Fanon, colonization, MacKinnon" (the last for the feminist academic Catharine MacKinnon) might find my blog by accident, look briefly and decide it's a complete red herring for the topics they're interested in. That might explain the viewing figures, at least for Colonised - albeit in a way that's disappointing for me. It doesn't explain the upsurge of interest in my other, recent, rather random musings.

So here's a wee blog posting with almost no content, certainly little that will be interesting to very many other people. I wonder if bots are attracted to anything that gets mentioned on social media so no tweets, etc. Will it be seen?

East Ayrshire

Giffnock - Newton Mearns - Neilston - Dunlop - Stewarton - A77 and home. I spent a couple of hours on my bike in the countryside south of Glasgow, in East Renfrewshire and East Ayrshire. Lots of hills! - 2000 feet of ascent in total and I could easily have added several hundred more. The reward for climbing a hill is of course the roll down the other side, for instance once you've passed the highest point of the road from Neilston to Dunlop - a very small town for a name found so widely. I passed through green fields, some cut for hay or silage making a patchwork of green and yellow. Bright sun and dark clouds, rain showers not far away - typical Scottish June. In the distance, hazy blue on the horizon, lay the mountains of Arran.

I stopped a couple of times on this run to take photos.

But these are from before and after my roll through the Dunlop farmland. You don't get to share that. You weren't there. For a few minutes I thought, "wow, great photo there" over and over again but I didn't want to stop. Well, I was on a bike ride and I wanted to keep going. But even more, sheer motion was a large part of the pleasure of those moments; not just the sights but the moving through them, at some speed, under my own steam, by my own volition. If I'd stopped the sequence of those moments would have been lost, and their significance; they'd have been extracted from their place in the passage from birth to death.

Consume Red

As a young fellow I formed a rather definite view of university. One went there to learn from people who had worked over many years at understanding their chosen subjects, at developing their own sophisticated understanding and, in most cases, going beyond the books to contribute new ideas and knowledge. Often these people were strong, distinctive characters with broad interests. They WERE the university - not the buildings or the history - and one learnt so much from them, not just about their subjects but about being a person.

The original conception of this blog involved several authors, colleagues in the old DACE. Our several disciplines would bump up against each other and all sorts of conversations would take place, a virtual mirror of those that happened spontaneously in the corridors, or especially in some of the day schools when we took pleasure in mixing up different academic disciplines. That hasn't worked out so instead you get just me. If you're looking for a blog purely on astronomy, adult education, politics or whatever, you'll be disappointed. What's here is my own, personal jumble of interests. "How to build your blog" websites will tell you this is not how to build an audience. Sorry. Me is what's here.

There's been Astronomy, adult education and universities but the promised "clattery atonal music" has been gravely lacking. I've let the reader down badly - no Henry Cow, Derek Bailey, John Zorn. So here in seriously belated recompense is a link to Ground Zero's Consume Red. It starts with the shrill, piercing sound of the Korean hojok, played by Kim Suk Chul, 82nd valuable intangible cultural asset of the Republic of Korea; "brilliant music sacred enough to blow away any puny ideas about copyright." Over the next minutes the musicians of Ground Zero start to join in, scratchy, electric improvisation over the keening cry of the hojok, getting more coherent and louder until a huge, monolithic noise develops over a brutal, thumping rhythm section. It's intense, claustrophobic but fantastically invigorating; I know of few other recordings quite so crushing. I love it!

I don't think it should be freely available on YouTube like this but you wouldn't get to hear it if it wasn't. I bought a legit copy from ReR Megacorp - it's only £5.00 at the moment.

If you meet me in Glasgow University it may be in the hope of learning something about Maths, Physics or Astronomy. Perhaps there will be some illustration or remark based on a book, a film, music I've enjoyed; maybe less overwhelming than Consume Red but I hope they add to the experience anyway.

I embrace my "strange kind of streak"

There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today - I don't know how to explain it but it sort of makes you crawl.

Skip this post if you're still planning to read H P Lovecraft's Shadow Over Innsmouth. Otherwise, stand by for another horror story.

I joined DACE in 1991. It was an exciting move for me: a new role, of a sort that seemed intrinsically valuable, but one that would make real use of the sort of expertise I represented. I would still be a research-active astronomer, but with a job that looked out from the university, that aimed to provide something useful to people in the wider community. The Access course in particular seemed like - and is! - something that could make an enormous difference to its students' lives.

It was more of a change than I'd realised. Not the teaching, but the conversations that take place in the academic discussion of Education. The nature of those discussions, the sort of questions that are asked and the sorts of answers offered, are very different from physical science. It took me ten years to begin to appreciate some of those conversations. I still remember the precise meeting in which I found myself thinking, "Good grief, I understand what (person X) is talking about."

It seemed to me that many of those conversations would make little use of my talents, and that I lacked other talents needed to contribute to them. For almost all of that time I thought of myself as an astronomer working in adult education. I thought it was important that I kept my research life alive, that I kept working at being a proper university expert in my subject. I went only rarely to meetings on the subject of adult education. Nonetheless the years rolled on and I became something different from a Physics department academic.

The narrator of The Shadow Over Innsmouth has laid eyes on creatures that nobody should see and live. An atmosphere of decay and unease grows to a climactic parade of horrors. But it's the twist at the end that makes that story something special: the narrator himself is one of the creatures, and he begins to perceive the inevitability of a future rather different from the one he imagined. Initially only madness and degeneration lie ahead but at last he is reconciled to the only possible course of action: embrace his true nature, evil to men possibly but authentic to him. Flee the sanatorium! Plunge into the ocean! Live with your fellows among the Cyclopean wonders of the sunken city! "Perhaps it is madness that is overtaking me — yet perhaps a greater horror — or a greater marvel — is reaching out."

Three redundancy situations in six years have taught me: I cannot escape my true nature. Perhaps once I could have been like other university academics but the streak of adult education runs too deep now. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror.

Jack Bruce

I was sad to hear of Jack Bruce's passing. In Cream he was one of the creators of psychedelic and heavy rock. Every kid that picks up a bass guitar learns the riff for Sunshine of Your Love. Those sounds are all around us now, part of the everyday sonic environment.

After that he was in Tony Williams Lifetime, the band that inspired Miles Davis to explore rock music. Jazz-rock also is all around us now, even for people who don't choose to listen to it: TV show themes, film music, even in bloody elevators and when your phone enquiry gets put on hold. Lifetime was pretty much the first jazz-rock band. Full-stop. So there's Jack Bruce helping to kickstart all of that, too. His place in either of his bands would have made him one of the chief architects of the sound of the modern world. To have been in both makes him something very special indeed. We could make a really strong case that he was "Scotland's greatest musician." And that's without mentioning the very many other records and bands he contributed to, many of these really interesting, experimental (like Carla Bley; Michael Mantler; amazing gigs you can find bits of on YouTube).

Recently I'd been listening a lot to Monkjack, one of his solo records. No band, just him singing, piano, one other musician playing Hammond organ; essence of Jack Bruce. It's beautiful - deeply felt, clever, classy classy music. Here he is, not so long ago, with a lovely performance of Weird of Hermiston.

I'm sorry he's gone, a wee bit earlier than many. Our thoughts have to be with his family and close friends. But what a legacy.

Positronium

Science continues to find that homeopathy doesn't work. I know homeopathy has sincere adherents who don't think about scientific evidence in the same way as the rest of us. I admire those people who are constantly in debate with them and I'm glad my own area of science is a long way away from this sort of topic. So I was quite taken aback to come across this account of positronium homeopathy.

Positronium is a sort of an atom but a very exotic one, with only a fleeting existence. Like an atom of hydrogen it consists of two elementary particles with equal and opposite electric charges. Like an atom of hydrogen one of these particles is an electron, familiar (as far as any subatomic particle is "familiar") as a constituent of the atoms around us. Unlike a hydrogen atom the positively charged particle is a positron. A positron has the same mass as an electron but a positive, rather than a negative charge. It is the electron's antimatter counterpart, a sort of evil twin. When an electron and a positron come together they cancel one another out (the word used is "annihilate") and the mass of both particles is converted into energy, in the form of light, according to Einstein's most famous relation E = mc².

Antimatter sounds like something out of science fiction (and one of its most famous occurrences must certainly be in the propulsion unit of the Starship Enterprise). Nonetheless it exists. The first discovery of a positively charged electron was in 1932 by the American scientist Carl Anderson. Now they are put to work every day in our hospitals (know somebody who's had a PET scan? Guess what the "P" in "PET" stands for).

Natural processes produce positrons, as do events in man-made particle accelerators. My own interest focuses on the energetic events of solar flares, in which positrons are sometimes produced. Once they exist, positrons don't hang around for very long. There's usually an electron for them to annihilate with. But before annihilating, for a ten-millionth of a second or less, the positron and the electron orbit one another as an atom of positronium. I like to think of them in a sort of dance, eyeball to eyeball, each recognising in the other its equal, its opposite and its imminent extinction. Finally they annihilate one another, producing a spectrum line in gamma-rays that we can detect and learn from.

Composed only of two very simple objects, the positronium atom gives very precise tests of the quantum theory of electromagnetism, so it has been studied in great detail in the laboratory. It lets us test very precisely elements of our basic understanding of the world.

Matter and anti-matter can both exist but there is more matter than anti-matter. If there were equal amounts of both, they would have annihilated each other very early in the history of the Universe. The Universe would be filled with light but there wouldn't be atoms and molecules i.e. ourselves. So the question, "why is there more matter than anti-matter" is a fundamental question about the Universe.

After all this I'm both sad and a bit cross to discover talk of "positronium homeopathy". In its yin-and-yang components, its brief existence, its annihilation, and the matter-antimatter asymmetry at which it hints, positronium is a very beautiful and exotic aspect of the physical world. There's more than enough real, deep beauty and weirdness there without making up a lazy, unsubstantiated fairy story.

An evil tree

Probably it is not evil. In Pollok Park it must see so many passers-by that any routine evil-doing would have become well-known. Of course it might choose shrewdly its victims and the moments to take them. A park in a big city will supply them fairly regularly: alone and melancholy, remote from or devoid of friends and family. Nobody will notice if they never return from some restless nocturnal stravaig. The end of unrest might even be a kindness.

Probably it is not evil. Nothing happened to me. I was able to photograph it. But I was there in daylight; other people were around; I am not unloved.

Probably it is not evil. It is not after all an ill-favoured Ash Tree. Still, Let's hope they chop the thing down. Yes, Let's hope they chop the thing down.

Swans

Let's start in familiar territory. In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking dragged God into the popularisation of Physics. In what was probably only ever meant to be a throwaway comment he suggested that success with a unified theory of the fundamental forces and particles would be equivalent to "knowing the mind of God". The G-word was invoked by more than one of the scientists involved in the COBE experiment. COBE measured the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation, the ripples in the early universe that eventually developed into the clusters of galaxies we see today; no stars, no planets, no us without those ripples. One of its Principal Investigators, George Smoot was (probably mis-)quoted: this discovery was "like seeing the face of God".

What would the face of God look like? (Atheists, please don't stop reading) I'm not convinced that sight of it would be pleasant.

You've lived for a few months in a huge, ancient, rambling house bought with the substantial wealth your mysteriously absent father somehow accumulates. You don't go to school. In the mornings, impatiently but with some flair, your mother teaches you mathematics, philosophy, history, some sciences, a couple of foreign languages, all of which you gobble up effortlessly, unaware you're years ahead of your contemporaries in attainment. In the afternoons Mum drinks sweet wine and watches DVD's of Doris Day movies. You're left to roam the house, to speculate on the functions of the peculiarly shaped furniture left in the upstairs rooms and the significance of the sombre grotesques painted on the wood panels of the less well-lit corridors.

One day at the end of an upstairs corridor you open a door you've ignored until now. You're surprised to find a previously unsuspected staircase, steep, narrow, uncarpeted, leading to a previously unknown part of the house. At the bottom of the stairs a few doors open off a corridor, empty, musky rooms with little interest. Under the stairs there is a small cupboard door which you open. After some moments peering into darkness you're astonished to see two large eyes looking back at you, solemn and expressionless. As you stare the face gets easier to see and you realise that it is shining more and more brightly itself. Your eyes start to hurt and you're aware of awful danger but it's too late. Brilliant mind is unprepared and body inadequate to deal with what happens next. The last episode of intolerable pain combines with an impression of incandescent beauty and you're grateful for the sense of transcendence that fills your last moments.

Last night I saw the American band Swans play live at the Arches here in Glasgow. Swans' fearsome reputation is nicely summarised in this review of a gig in Boston a couple of months ago. I was vaguely aware of their music but didn't know it well and had never seen them live before. As friends know I enjoy music that pushes at the edges in some way, technically, sonically, just emotionally. Although slightly wary, particularly of the stories of extreme volume, I thought I'd give Swans a go.

The opening number started slowly and quietly, with a sort of slow, psychedelic music. This is OK, like space rock but better, I thought; and of course the lyrics were more interesting, straight to some existential statement. "There are millions and millions of stars in your eyes," sang Michael Gira, a couple of times. His arms were outstreched in messianic style. I knew some upsurge was imminent but I was still shocked by the huge blast of sound that erupted, a furiously strummed chord, crashing drums, sustained without change for maybe a minute. My trousers flapped, maybe also my jacket. For a moment I thought I might throw up. The noise stopped, the space rock sounds resumed briefly and then the noise started for another minute or so; tens of seconds at least. This pattern repeated five or six times and the song came to an end. It struck me that these enormous blasts of noise were not just kids making a racket - these guys are my age and they've been doing it for decades - but a very deliberate reaching for a transcendent state through sheer volume and a sort of heavy metal minimalist repetition: what would it feel like with "millions and millions of stars in your eyes"?

(I shouldn't even mention heavy metal. Entertainment for kids. Cartoon music compared to this.)

Just a few songs kept this incredible, overwhelming racket going for a couple of hours. Early on I felt I might just leave but I resisted that urge; the point was to take the noise, to learn from it. I didn't feel physically sick again after the first song. I did wonder more than once if the bones of my ribcage might be shaken loose. Once I put my finger in my ear to see if there was blood (there wasn't).

Most of the intense music I enjoy reaches for transcendence by very technical means, playing fast, loud certainly, achromatic, building tension with odd time signatures and additive rhythms, exploring the extended possibilities of the instruments; free jazz starting from John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman for instance, or the "avant" end of progressive rock. Swans' music is not hugely technical. It struck me that this is deliberate, part of its mechanism. It would be wrong to put guitar solos in this music, or polyrhythms or cleverness, it would rob it of its sheer weight. It would be dishonest. Nonetheless there is a subtlety and art in it, because they are able to increase tension slowly, over say ten minutes, from a state already almost overwhelming in its intensity.

Towards the end of the gig I'd stopped thinking, waiting for something different to happen. I simply felt the sound and its changes from one moment to the next, lived in the middle of it. I was a recalcitrant child brought to heel, led to the correct behaviour by insistent repetition. I understood the look of ecstacy on Michael Gira's face.

It struck me that the Arches had become an extreme place, somewhere with a strange and terrible beauty, with amazing rewards for those with the stomach to tolerate it but a place that many would choose to avoid; maybe back to Herzog territory. Pals know that I've enjoyed a lot of gigs that would make most peoples' hair stand on end but this was still a stand-out of extreme intensity. Did I enjoy that gig? I'm still not sure. I'm also not sure if I would go to see them again but I'm glad I've been once.

"Spirituality" and "transcendence" are words often used in connection with Swans' music. I think that fearsome, repetitive noise aims to look on the face of God (although they might not say it that way). I also think these transcendent experiences enrich life whether or not you consider yourself religious. Many of my fellow scientists have had interesting, thoughtful things to say on religion (a wee example). Before they drag God casually into science popularisation, however, I think they should experience Swans live.

Cells at war

suppose all the cells in your body were individually conscious and capable of analytical thought and moral judgements. They begin to realise that the entity they're all part of, yourself, wants to do things that harm many of them (for example, drink too much whisky). Why you want to do this is a mystery to them. They, especially the brain cells, are the medium for such emergent thoughts and desires but don't individually share in them.

They begin to glimpse what's going on and don't like it, even although they, in a sense, generate it. What could they do about this situation?

Wondering about wonders of the night sky

I said to my 5 year old son a few clear nights ago, "Get your coat and shoes on and come and see Jupiter through the telescope." This was met with some enthusiasm.

It was a cold, clear night and Jupiter and the Moon were to the south and I set the small scope up on my driveway with my son prancing around me happily. I found the Moon first so I could align the finderscope and then after a little fiddling with screws, I called him to have a look. He continued prancing for another minute or so and then came over.

"Oooh! That's very bright" he said. The moon is very bright through even a small telescope.

Then I swiveled it onto Jupiter. I could see the disk, faint banding and three of the four Galilean moons. I then called my son over again and he looked through the eyepiece.

"But that's rubbish!" he said.

Clearly he expected this

 

but got this

He listened quietly to my attempt at explaining what he was seeing, but seemed unconvinced. I hope my few words lodged somewhere in his mind.

The next night I was doing something similar with a telescope with an evening class at Glasgow University observatory. There was much less prancing around. They were very impressed by the Moon, pleased and interested at Jupiter but disappointed by the smudge that was the Andromeda galaxy. Of course, when you explain that the smudge is a galaxy of several hundred billion stars and that the light they just saw left those stars over 2 million years ago, then that smudge takes on a new significance.

We were also treated to a meteor, a couple of satellites and for a moment we were all perplexed by a strange, flickering orange "star" drifting across the sky to the north. After a bit of theorising, we concluded it was a chinese lantern, which we then confirmed with binoculars and a fleeting glimpse as it zipped across the telescope's field of view.

The night sky is beautiful to the naked eye, but it has an even deeper beauty that can only be appreciated with your mind.

More on Ancient Egypt in Glasgow

Since writing, I've run my hands-on session with my Art students (which went wonderfully well - lots of good photos taken of them looking at objects with such enthusiasm and reverence), and I've run another session where I took my students to the Hunterian Stores - a dark corner of Glasgow on Thurso Street - to look at facsimile paintings of scenes from Theban tombs made by the Rev Colin Campbell, a Glasgow University alumnus, at the turn of the 20th century.

The idea for the Campbell session was to unroll (in the manner of 19th century Egyptologists unwrapping mummies!) the paintings - some of which are over 3m long - and to re-create a tomb space for my students, with all its paintings intact in glorious colour. Of course, we only managed to look at 3 paintings - the time absolutely flew! We got so carried away picking out details and pondering the reasons behind them (e.g. why show a sleepy servant dozing under a tree when everyone around him is busily at work enduring provision for the tomb owner's afterlife?)!

I hope these kinds of sessions will just be the beginning. Sally-Anne Coupar, who curates the Egyptian collection in the Hunterian, has been absolutely wonderful. She firmly believes that the collection should be used to inspire students, which means giving them access rather than having objects hidden away. Another session on the Campbell paintings is planned for the Egyptology Scotland society, who've very generously contributed towards the Campbell paintings conservation fund.

Of course, nothing beats the experience of perusing scenes on tomb walls when you're actually in Egypt in the actual tomb... Although, there's something to be said for being able to get up close and personal with the scenes without feeling that you're slowly melting in the Egyptian dry heat (usually when I'm in the country, it's September, so it's in the mid to high thirties in Luxor...).

These sessions are supposed to inspire my students. They certainly do. Funny thing is - they inspire me too, which is especially important during these turbulent times for teachers.

Holding on to Ancient Egypt

Yesterday, after a (non-departmental) meeting, I introduced several colleagues (formerly of DACE) to a collection of ancient Egyptian objects very kindly loaned out to me for teaching by Sally-Anne Coupar at the Hunterian Museum. Everyone seemed to enjoy the experience of being able to hold something old and a little bit precious in their hands.

The pieces are mostly amulets that would have been worn around the neck or held in the hand both during life and then accompanied their owner into their tomb after death. They're not the grandest of ancient Egyptian objects to come down to us, but there's something special about holding onto something that meant a lot to a person who lived 3,000 years ago. Some of the amulets are worn almost smooth by the amount of handling they received from their ancient owners.

Today, I'm putting the objects to work again in my Ancient Egyptian Art class. I've been dropping tantalising hints about the surprise that I've planned for them this week, but I haven't told them exactly what they're in store for. I'm hoping that they'll enjoy it. They'll also have the chance to update the Hunterian records, which are patchy. Their observations about the objects will hopefully enrich the museum's catalogue and make it a little more accurate (one amulet with wonderfully rounded leonine ears is listed as a figure of the god Horus, who was falcon-headed!).

Thanks also to Mike Keen, who spent some time with me identifying the materials of some amuletic bracelets and necklaces among the collection. Only in a (insert inoffensive synonym for 'department') that brings together Egyptologists and geologists could such a confab happen easily!

I'll report back on what my students made of their chance to hold a bit of ancient Egypt in their hands...

DACE Memorial Blog

Since 1 August 2010, nothing in Glasgow University goes by the name of "Department". So DACE no longer exists and there is no named unit in the University that combines people from several disciplines to make academic ideas accessible outside the academy. But we're all still here (more or less), working on our various programmes, setting up and teaching courses for the public, having all sorts of conversations as we have in the past. For now, something like DACE still exists, within the School of Education, although it no longer corresponds to a structural unit post-restructuring.

I thought it would be nice to note our continued existence, albeit in the virtual, ghostly form of this blog, and celebrate the unique mix of individuals and disciplines that produces the programmes. From time to time any of us might share some ideas or facts that get us excited from our own disciplines, or comment on stories in the news. I always feel that when two of us get together we wind up having such interesting conversations, completely different from those we'd have with people from our own disciplines (in my own case, recently, on the Moon landings; climate change; environmental catastrophes and religious visions in history; the relationship between words and things). Now we'll do some of this online, in a public space where others can see and join in. We might muse on adult education, universities, education in society, our own disciplines in broader contexts. We've had such interesting experiences in the past few months, we've been forced to think about such topics. Or we might share non-professional interests, blunder into others' territories, generate generic, low-content internet verbiage, etc. 

There's no schedule; we'll add things as we feel like it. There are enough of us that it should be easy to keep alive and busy, without relying too much on any one of us. Quite possibly there's no single person who will enjoy all of it, but we can hope that you'll find most of it interesting and that we'll keep the spirit of DACE alive in this new form, alongside the continued Courses for Adults programmes, etc.. Hope to see you here!