Nabokov

In Montreal we found a shop "overflowing with paper ephemera and found treasures" and bought a few yellowed paperbacks. In retrospect the blend of literary classics and out-and-out pulp may have been less random than it appeared but I was pleased to find a copy of Nabokov's autobiography, Speak, Memory. A 1967 edition, it has had at least two owners before me, "Alison Smith" (in pencil) and "Evelyn (1976)". Although aged, slightly musty, it is otherwise in good condition and shows few signs of its previous owners. In the whole book just a single sentence has been underlined, in pencil: "Sitting as stiffly as if he were stuffed, he was driven in our car to the university, remained there till dusk, came back in a sleigh, in a heap, in a snowstorm, and in silent despair went up to his room."

Mushrooms, mist, Montreal

We spent two very enjoyable weeks, last of summer, in Montreal. We were on holiday but our daughter will study there this coming year so some time was spent viewing apartments with her, helping with paperwork, etc. We arrived home last Sunday, dazed and disoriented from a sleepless overnight flight and jet lag.

By afternoon our bodies were aching for some unknown combination of fuel and analgesic. I walked down to the supermarket and bought the largest Swiss roll I could find, then headed home through Cathcart cemetery; not the shortest route but a lovely diversion, especially on this balmy summer afternoon (still about 10°C cooler than Montreal!). Often there are others - dog walkers, kids swigging cheap illicit booze, ordinary people out for a wee walk in ones or twos - but on this occasion I met nobody. I wondered how often a man carrying only a Swiss roll is to be found on his own in a cemetery.

Set among the leafy suburbs, a couple of hundred feet above the level of Glasgow city centre, Cathcart cemetery really does feel like a green hill far away, an idyllic spot in which to rot once animation has ceased. I enjoy the glimpses of the city through leafy rows of stones. Often the stones themselves and their stories catch my eye. On this particular afternoon I noticed the grave of someone killed in the Castlecary railway accident of 1937. The stone noted family members subsequently interred, the latest having found his way to Toronto before passing away in the 1970s.

I passed through the cemetery into Linn Park by a shady path among trees. In a dappled spot I came on these eye-catching mushrooms on a tree stump. It struck me that summer had ended while we were away and that we were entering the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.

Autumnal mists had caught my eye as we banked above the Campsies and made our final descent towards Glasgow, fine layers of cotton wool blanketing the fields around Lennoxtown, Torrance, Kilsyth. It was not yet 8.00 AM Glasgow time; few people not suffering from jet lag were around to relish this soft, misty, morning.

Why are we so miserable?

Academic staff in universities are getting more and more miserable. Earlier this year the Times Higher Education Supplement published their Best University Workplace Survey. Especially when compared with the last such exercise, it tells a worrying tale. In brief, unfairly crude summary: academic staff are getting more miserable and administrators are getting happier. Academics still mostly enjoy teaching and/or research but are less and less happy with the running of their institutions and the managerial demands placed on them. The Times Higher suggests this might be a temporary side-effect of the REF but the fact is that many academics have deep-seated anxieties over the long-term direction of higher education. Some of them have put these views in the public domain. Here's a small sample:

• Stefan Collini's is one of the leading voices. Here's an example in a book review; see also What Are Universities For?
• The Strange Death of the Liberal University, Michael Bailey
• The Slow Death of the University, Terry Eagleton
• How should universities be run to get the best out of people?, David Colquhoun - "...describes an effect of corporatisation in the medical school of Imperial College London, but the same trends are visible in universities throughout the world"
• Council for the Defence of British Universities
• The war against humanities at Britain's universities This Guardian article makes many forceful points about marketisation in British universities. It's a big shame it opposes sciences and humanities. As the comments show, that's not helpful; a distraction. In a response to a different article, here are some very good further comments on this "opposition".

People sign up to academia with definite ideas of the higher education project but they find a world evolving rapidly away from those basic principles. Of course they're miserable.

Open Studies;Pluto

No blogging for a while. Sorry, eager readers. Had other things to think about, part of the ongoing "DACE Memorial" story. Not much science adult education from now, with the honourable exception of the mature student Access programme.

So to shift the mood let me just mention how amazing I find the images from Pluto: a more geologically active world than expected. Why? My guess is something to do with the tidal interaction between Pluto and Charon. And why on earth (or "on Pluto") does it have huge mountains? Great stories to come, I'm sure.

Reminds me a wee bit of the many "first images from..." stories from the Voyager spacecraft, how many surprises there were, particularly among the moons of the outer planets. Every time we go somewhere new there are surprises - new questions to answer! The Pluto images are all over the media. You don't need to see them again here. Instead let me share this image of Saturn's moon Hyperion, taken by the NASA Cassini mission in 2005, surely one of the weirdest looking bodies of the solar system. A tiny world, roughly 300 km across, its spongy appearance is still unexplained.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI/Gordan Ugarkovic

Sitzfleisch

What a great word! Knowing a little German I was able to look at this word, unfamiliar though it was, and think "sit - flesh" - what the hell? A German borrowing in English, it means something like, The ability to endure or persist in an endeavor through sedentary determination. It's used in chess, apparently, for those people who can just sit staring and thinking until they work their way through to the winning move.

I came across this word in a journal article about Regiomontanus, the 15th century German astronomer and mathematician. He was a bit of a prodigy, at the age of fourteen producing his own table of planetary positions that was more accurate than the published ones of the time. In the time before calculators, Sitzfleisch was an essential attribute for such work. Probably it still is vital in research, although what you sit doing has changed.

Regiomontanus is a major figure in my wee talk at lunchtime today, one of the events for the Ingenious Impressions exhibition at the Hunterian Art Gallery. One of his books is included in this wonderful exhibition of incunabula. The talk's only ten minutes - no need for much Sitzfleisch.

Regiomontanus must have had Sitzfleisch in abundance, even as a boy. I find myself wondering what he looked like as a dancer.

Access Maths

I enjoy David Colquhoun's blog. As someone who often thinks too long before speaking up, I enjoy forthright people and I often - not quite always - agree with what he has to say. I started to look at his book, Lectures on Biostatistics; statistical ideas and methods, much of which I'm at least aware of, but deployed in different contexts for quite different purposes so I was curious to see how he'd present and discuss them. Even if there was nothing else useful in it, this book would be interesting for its discussion of the experimental estimation of Purity in Heart index.

Almost immediately I came across these words: "...most of us find arithmetic easier than thinking." This is so true! I'm going to stick these words under the noses of my Access Maths students. Mostly Access Maths is about mastering standard techniques: how to find the solutions of a quadratic equation, how to find unknown sides or angles in arbitrary triangles, how to calculate the area lying under the graph of a curve (well, not any curve, those defined by functions we've learned how to integrate). These are not "arithmetic" but the same point applies: one can learn how to carry out these exercises without really understanding the ideas behind them; without really thinking. In fact they can be systematised so completely that there is software to carry them out (try Wolfram Alpha for instance).

There is an irresistible pull of gravity towards the calculations you can do without thinking. You're learning something new for the first time, you're not quite sure why other people think you should learn it, you know you need to pass the exam to continue next year/get a job/avoid getting a job.... "Thinking" is hard so let's look for "arithmetic" ways through the course. So every now and again I stick the occasional non-standard question in, and over the year I try to encourage people to develop the general habits of thought that will help with these previously unseen kinds of problem. But there are always people who want to know "how do you do that problem?"

How interesting, then, to also come across another blog post about a book I haven't read which seems to be all about avoiding that pull of gravity right at the start of education; about making Maths interesting by emphasising concepts and ideas rather than memorising techniques and for standard sorts of problems. When I meet people they bring grown-up motivations. They meet me, and Maths, in the course of a greater project of making their way through life and they're looking for strategies to get them through the course. If involvement in what we might call the internal life of the subject turns out to be the best way to deal with the course, well, that's a pleasant surprise. As children they don't yet have those motivations; mere "arithmetic" holds no interest for them. But ideas, thinking, well, that'll drag you in every time,

Natural Philosophy

My Bachelors degree is in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. My sense is that the name, "Natural Philosophy" lingered on in Scotland particularly, well after the rest of the world had decided to call it "Physics". For instance, everybody who took high school Physics in Scotland in the 1970s used a textbook called, "Nat Phil 5". Must have been much-loved - you can still buy second-hand copies. "Natural Philosophy" was dropped in Glasgow University in the 1980s, maybe as a by-product of the mergers of the Astronomy and Natural Philosophy departments. I remember a slightly frivolous discussion about what a mouthful "Natural Philosophy and Astronomy" would have been for people answering the telephone, but also rather less frivolous discussions about pals at job interviews: "Natural Philosophy, that's nice. Have you studied any Physics?" Aberdeen nonetheless still retains the name for its Physics degree.

I also remember one distinguished, semi-retired member of staff, not in Physics but a closely associated department, lamenting the demise of true "Natural Philosophy", at the expense of what he called "unclear physics" (which probably included elementary particle physics at that time). In retrospect I'm really not sure why he said this; perhaps he felt that particle physicists, hypnotised by the dizzying array of "fundamental" particles they'd uncovered, had stopped thinking about what they were doing and got suckered into a sort of sub-atomic butterfly collecting. Anyway I guess he felt it was important to think about what you were doing and why you were doing it, as well as how to do it. Put like that, why would anybody argue?

I thought about all this again when I read this article in the Guardian. At first sight it's about a "war on the humanities" but really it's about the huge changes sweeping British universities.

The whole climate of higher education is changing. Like climate change in the natural world, some sections of the landscape are more vulnerable to these changes than others (look at the case of high-altitude glaciers, for example). Most of that article is about the changes in ideology in the universities, in thinking about which subjects should be taught and why, in who makes these decisions and how, in universities' relationship with the state and politicians. These changes have happened in a way that means their effects are more immediate and severe in the humanities but they are changes to the whole of the university system, not just the humanities.

I made the mistake of looking at the comments. An article about the changes sweeping higher education spawned a pathetic squabble between scientists and humanities types: "scientists are children," "humanities are a waste of time," etc. Oh dear. Scientists really don't profit, for more than a week or two at most, if free enquiry ("academic freedom") is stifled. And a surrender to short-term, utilitarian aims will come back to bite them. Worst of all, all those broad-thinking, articulate people from the humanities, who might have been able to come to their defence, will have been chased out of the universities completely - well, apart from the one or two institutions that can continue to purvey a sort of classical education to a tiny, privileged elite.

So ultimately I have no doubt that Natural Philosophers really need to have the other kind around.Just as people who live near sea level should be worried about those disappearing glaciers.