The Grand Budapest Hotel: a terrific confection

It's set in Eastern Europe before the wars, it's beautiful to look at and it becomes very funny. It made me long to go to E. Europe again, even though it isn't really in an E. European country; it's a kind of fictional composite. Here is nostalgia within nostalgia: nostalgia for Communist bloc tacky, with its own streaks of integrity - maybe artistic integrity in the face of state oppression - and nostalgia for Imperial grandeur and the old nobility with its unapologetically eccentric characters. Also nostalgia for a filmstyle we have lost and the 1930's wacky comedies - I kept thinking of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin but this is just because my knowledge of films of this period is very slight. I liked the Jeff Goldblum character, who ran away from danger to a Kunstmuseum, but was followed by Willem Dafoe's ghastly ruthless assassin with his trousers at half mast.   You don't need it to be deep. It's just fun and lovely and beautifully made - like a cake from Mendl's.

The life scientific: Mark Miodownik

This is a very interesting person. He thinks we should have making libraries instead of libraries of books. I find myself seeing the point entirely. Most humans really do need to make things. this programme is available for a year.

Mark Miodownik's chronic interest in materials began in rather unhappy circumstances. He was stabbed in the back, with a razor, on his way to school. When he saw the tiny piece of steel that had caused him so much harm, he became obsessed with how it could it be so sharp and so strong. And he's been materials-mad ever since.

Working at a nuclear weapons laboratory in the US, he enjoyed huge budgets and the freedom to make the most amazing materials. But he gave that up to work with artists and designers because he believes that if you ignore the sensual aspects of materials, you end up with materials that people don't want.

For Mark, making is as important as reading and writing. It's an expression of who we are, like music or literature, and 'everyone should be doing it'. To this end, he wants our public libraries to be converted into public workshops, with laser cutters and 3 D printers in place of books

this is the link

The influence of Daniel Kahneman

This was in the Observer last month so I thought I would write a quick precis:

Daniel Kahneman

Steven Pinker:

 DK's central message could not be more important, namely, that human reason left to its own devices, is apt to engage in a number of fallacies and systematic errors, so if we want to make better decisions in our personal lives and as a society, we ought to be aware of these biases and seek workarounds. That's a powerful and important discovery.

My most recent book, The Better Angels of our Nature, is about the historic decline of violence, a fact that I argue is under-appreciated precisely because the human mind words the way Kahneman says it words, namely, that our sense of risk and danger is influenced by salient events that are available from memory. Our minds do not naturally process statistics on incidents of violence, and so Kahneman helps explain why my claim is news or why it's hard for people to believe. ....

We have our differences. I think he is a pessimist, whereas I am an optimist. I do think he's right that human nature saddles us with some unfortunate limitations, but I also think - and  - actually he himself shows in the "slow thinking" part of his book - that we have the means to overcome some of our limitations, through education, through institutions, through enlightenment. It will always be a flaw, human nature will always push back, but gradually, bit by bit, with two steps forward one step back, I think that our better angels can push back against our limitations and flaws. 

Thinking, Fast and Slow us an interesting capstone to his career, but his accomplishments were solidified well in advance of writing it and they'd have been just as significant without the book. His work really is monumental in the history of thought.

Richard Thaler

Richard Thaler is a behavioural economist and co-author of the bestseller Nudge, which explores how individuals and governments can influence people to make choices.

Danny is warm and moderate but also, inside himself, highly volatile,. He quit writing this book at least a dozen times. And I had to convince him not to quit, n+1 times. He genuinely didn't think anybody would buy it. It was a biased forecast - he prides himself of being a pessimist. He was shocked that it did so well and he's still in shock. He didn't think it would sell more than a million copies worldwide.

Certainly his work has to be viewed as one of the most important accomplishments of 20th century science. it's hard to think of any psychologist whose work has influenced so many different fields.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Risk engineering professor and author of he bestselling book The Black Swan, about the problems created by rare events.

The first idea Danny gave me in Rome is that people do not perceive stand-alone objects, rather differences away from an anchor point. He said that it was not cultural: even the vision of babies was based on identifying variations. It was simply more economical for the brain to do so. Investors are more effected by changes in wealth than by wealth itself and they are very sensitive to the way information is presented to them; ... They just take a benchmark and react to variations from it. So one could make them react more rationally by modifying the anchor.

Salley Vickers

Former psychotherapist and novelist.

Daniel Kahneman's lucid and witty accounts (backed by thorough research)  of our apparently innate tendency to risk-aversion reveals the crucial link between economics and psychology.

it also underlines our problem with rationality. We are no less keen, it seems, on abandoning hopeless endeavours than we are at taking risks. [She means we are reluctant to do both, because we think of the time/money invested in our hopeless endeavour and cannot bring ourselves to write it off.] Ultimately, Kahneman demonstrates, we are not rational creatures but instinctive ones and any attempt to make us act rationally must take that inbuilt bias into account or fail. 

...his insight that financial success has more to do with random chance than planning. The rise and fall of businesses has little to do with who runs them and much to do with a natural statistic - failure of any kind is usually, that is to say statistically, followed by success. ...his dismissal of financial advisers and insurance policies, confirming my ignorant but it turns out accurate prejudice, made me rejoice that I never buy into these. 

Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman again

I was reading the end of Thinking Fast and Slow see previous page and I'd got to the part where Prof K is considering an experiment which involves a questionnaire asking people to rate their happiness. I was rather disappointed that he had resorted to questionnaires as I don't think the results are reliable, and then he, quite brilliantly, analysed why questionnaires don't give the true picture. Because nothing matters all the time as much as it does when you are thinking about it. So if a questionnaire asks you how much happiness you get from your car, for example, it suddenly becomes an important issue, whilst most of the time it doesn't matter so much, or even, not at all.

Then I was pleased with him again and he popped up on Start the Week, which is well worth listening to as the topic was Making Decisions.

making decisions, radio prog available 1 year

Went skiffing - first time for 6 months

It was a lovely day - it was very like this, but more Springlike

We were able to see the damage done by the floods to the other bank. One landing stage was a ruin as the footings had been washed away. But there were euphorbia and alyssum in the gardens, and the weeping willows  were very bright. I felt much better after coming quite quickly downstream. aha, coming downstream was easy!

Home is the river, first, where one is not
anyone in particular, but part of the
whole picture, the nature of things. I am like
a duck, doing my thing, as they do theirs.
I’m at home in a boat, with a pair of oars, rhythmically
chonking my blades in the water, effortfully
pulling through and stretching forward, carefully
taking the catch and thinking about the skill;
pulling through evenly, using the feet to press
harder again through the stroke. Suddenly goes
the green flash of a parakeet, or the grey
angled outline of a heron, then I fail to think.
When the light falls on the water in the spring,
I hear my boatman voice, and the song that I can sing.

what makes my job hard

What makes my job hard is that I plan and teach 2 lessons on Monday which are both for mixed level groups, so I plan 2 lessons for each lesson. The first group is one with almost illiterate Bangladeshi ladies together with Upper Intermediates who want to take exams at Levels 1 and 2. So there is a lot of work in teaching them. I drive for 25 minutes breaking the speed limit in order to get to the next venue. The second group is the mums who come for the creche, and get a free 2 hour lesson once a week. They absolutely love it and are great students, but they are a large class and mixed levels (14 students between Pre-intermediate and Upper intermediate/Advanced); they take a lot of organising and the paperwork for them is absolutely irrelevant but has to be done in case we are inspected. And it is all worthwhile because I particularly enjoy that class, especially when even the shy ones open up and talk all about their experiences of childbirth (I have one man too, who takes his day off on Monday especially to come to the class, and he has to hear all about that and in return tells us about horrific accidents at work.) They all want grammar and vocabulary and are particularly keen on homework.

I sometimes feel rather happy after this has gone well, and go to work at college to do the registers, answer emails and think about lessons further on in the week. In the evening I do yoga. On Tuesday I have to be early at the college to get a parking space and I teach in the morning and in the afternoon. My class is made up of unemployed people, who are sent by the Jobcentre, but in spite of this they are usually co-operative students. There is only one who really seems to be wasting our time deliberately, but one is wasting our time accidentally, one has an addiction problem and is unreliable, one has a youth-related problem and seldom attends, and one is a full-time carer with children who is often called away. So they do have all kinds of problems but I teach them as well as I can and try to get some rigour into them. But I have them for 4 hours (used to be 5 hours twice a week) and I make it as interesting as I can. they also need some employability taught every week, which falls to me, and some of them are taking exams, and that's difficult to organise. Also new ones arrive all the time. We had 6 more in the last 2 weeks. But when it all goes well it does give me such a high! The unfortunate thing is that the teaching takes a lot of adrenaline and afterwards I am very tired. After 2 days of adrenaline my eyes are smarting and I am soooo tired, but I also teach from 9 am until 9 pm on Weds. Then I have a day off and then I teach on Friday a.m. - a different place. Then I have to start planning for the next Monday and Tuesday. The planning takes a long time usually because of the mixed levels.

 The unfortunate thing is that when I am observed the assessor always comes to the evening class, which is maddening, I am too tired for it really, but I have got something quite good planned for my next observation. Which was meant to be taking place tomorrow and now it isn't, so I have to plan something else, but I am frankly toooooo tiiiiiiired. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Indian Windows scam

Recently I have received three calls  from Indian gentlemen who tell me they work for Windows (not Microsoft, Windows) and they have found something wrong with my computer which they can fix, but they want me to co-operate by giving them my IP address, I suppose so they can go poking about in my laptop for all my details. I am not such an idiot as to co-operate. I am sorry for the elderly people who aren't so savvy and do get caught this way. I have found the quickest response is to say, "I have an Apple Mac". "Goodbye Mam" they say, sounding very tired, and then I feel sorry for the Indians who do this job and sound so defeated and are, I suppose, demoralised.