Friday, 9 August 2013
Security alert in Arab lands
The great palaver about anticipated attacks by Islamic militants, accompanied by the closure of embassies etc., is presented as a triumph for intelligent gathering via snooping on electronic communications. This is very convenient and timely for security agencies that have been attacked as the result of Snowden's disclosures. Let's set aside extreme scepticism and accept that the alert is not a contrived false alarm, we can still wonder if the trumpeting of the intelligence would have been the same at another time. The security agencies can't loose. If there are attacks, they can say, we told you so. If there are not, they can seek our acclaim for heading off the threats.
Leonardo and modern anatomy
I was hoping that we had passed beyond the "brownie-point" accounts of Leonardo's anatomical studies; that is to say valuing his work in terms of how far he was correct in terms of our present knowledge.
The item on Leonardo's anatomical drawings on the Today programme on BBC radio 4 was cast entirely in terms of how "modern" Leonardo's anatomies are. Once this has been accepted as the framework for judgements, the inevitable question follows. "What did Leonardo contribute to modern medicine?" "Ah.... actually nothing, since his work was not published, but it would have been the greatest had it been". Not direct quotes, but basically what was said. We can do better than this.
We are told, for instance, that Leonardo's use of sections anticipated CT and fMFRI scans. He did produce one early image of a leg cut into chunks like gigot chops, but the series of successive, very fine layers in modern scanning techniques actually grow of of 19th-century techniques of sectional anatomy presented on card or paper as extensive series of parallel slices. Leonardos use of sections (favouring solid over pure sections) can best be understood in terms of his use of innovatory use of sections in architectural studies and engineering - the sectioned dome of the human skull as the the sectioned dome of a temple - and his quest for three-dimensional visualizations that would present a total picture of the forms and functions of the body as a microcosm or "lesser world".
Leonardo's anatomies were not designed to perform the same function as the legions of sober illustrations in Henry Gray's Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical. Leonardo's representations, like those in the great anatomical picture books that followed, were elaborate exercises in natural philosophy, displaying the magnificence of god's supreme creation, and the anatomist's mastery of it, rather than directly serving the standard needs of practicing physicians or even of operational surgeons. The grand and lavishly illustrated books of anatomy, from Vesalius's Fabrica (1543) onwards were not text books for general medical training but were aimed at patrons and wealthy academic and medical elites. The levels of knowledge of internal structures and functions displayed by Leonardo and Vesalius could not for the most part be directly exploited by medical techniques in the 16th century. Their demonstrations of the "fabric" of the body were directed towards quite another end than medical practice.
It is of course of interest and relevance to Leonardo's own aspirations to see what he "got right" and what he "got wrong". We can better understand Leonardo's studies when we know what he was looking at and how his kind of looking and representation resulted in the drawings and notes that have survived. But if our modern judgements of rightness and wrongness steer the system of values though which he look at his drawings, we are misunderstanding both the magnificent totality of his vision (in and beyond anatomy) and the historical context in which it was vibrant.
A good example of how we may approach Leonardo through contemporary medical eyes without asserting that such eyes present us with the way to understand his science is in Francis Well's recent book, The Heart of Leonardo. In my preface to his book I wrote that:
The item on Leonardo's anatomical drawings on the Today programme on BBC radio 4 was cast entirely in terms of how "modern" Leonardo's anatomies are. Once this has been accepted as the framework for judgements, the inevitable question follows. "What did Leonardo contribute to modern medicine?" "Ah.... actually nothing, since his work was not published, but it would have been the greatest had it been". Not direct quotes, but basically what was said. We can do better than this.
We are told, for instance, that Leonardo's use of sections anticipated CT and fMFRI scans. He did produce one early image of a leg cut into chunks like gigot chops, but the series of successive, very fine layers in modern scanning techniques actually grow of of 19th-century techniques of sectional anatomy presented on card or paper as extensive series of parallel slices. Leonardos use of sections (favouring solid over pure sections) can best be understood in terms of his use of innovatory use of sections in architectural studies and engineering - the sectioned dome of the human skull as the the sectioned dome of a temple - and his quest for three-dimensional visualizations that would present a total picture of the forms and functions of the body as a microcosm or "lesser world".
Leonardo's anatomies were not designed to perform the same function as the legions of sober illustrations in Henry Gray's Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical. Leonardo's representations, like those in the great anatomical picture books that followed, were elaborate exercises in natural philosophy, displaying the magnificence of god's supreme creation, and the anatomist's mastery of it, rather than directly serving the standard needs of practicing physicians or even of operational surgeons. The grand and lavishly illustrated books of anatomy, from Vesalius's Fabrica (1543) onwards were not text books for general medical training but were aimed at patrons and wealthy academic and medical elites. The levels of knowledge of internal structures and functions displayed by Leonardo and Vesalius could not for the most part be directly exploited by medical techniques in the 16th century. Their demonstrations of the "fabric" of the body were directed towards quite another end than medical practice.
It is of course of interest and relevance to Leonardo's own aspirations to see what he "got right" and what he "got wrong". We can better understand Leonardo's studies when we know what he was looking at and how his kind of looking and representation resulted in the drawings and notes that have survived. But if our modern judgements of rightness and wrongness steer the system of values though which he look at his drawings, we are misunderstanding both the magnificent totality of his vision (in and beyond anatomy) and the historical context in which it was vibrant.
A good example of how we may approach Leonardo through contemporary medical eyes without asserting that such eyes present us with the way to understand his science is in Francis Well's recent book, The Heart of Leonardo. In my preface to his book I wrote that:
"Every drawing by Leonardo is simultaneously
act of analysis as well as description. He cannot draw a form without
intuitions about its function. To ascertain how a form works – with no deficiency
or redundancy – he brings his knowledge of dynamics to bear on his accounts of
structures in motion. He knows about weights, levers and pulleys, which he can
apply to the functioning of the body. The skeleton and muscles serve as a
compound machine, the mathematical trajectory of which enables humans to move
their limbs with complete freedom in space – across what he calls a “continuous
quality”. The complex motion of fluids, above all water, to which he devoted
minute and exhaustive attention, becomes vital to his reading of the actions of
the heart valves, which he shows to be miracles of geometrical engineering. He cannot see what blood does in the valves,
but he can transfer his knowledge of water vortices. He is a natural
bio-engineer. Indeed, his plan to make a glass model of the neck of an aorta to
test his notion of the internal currents of blood is entirely novel. He is
determined to invent means to determine the “impetus” and “percussion” of the
surging torrents of blood, even if he cannot see them first-hand within the
heart.
"We do not have to validate Leonardo’s science in terms of contemporary
knowledge, nor do we have to evaluate
it by adducing its influence on the history of medicine. His visions of the
human body and the body of the earth possess a beauty of insight that are
uplifting in their own right, to no lesser degree than his works of art. And
they stand as an enduring monument to an unconstrained quest for understanding across
disciplines. However, it is thrilling to find that he can still conduct a
creative dialogue with a major heart surgeon over the span of 500 years.
Francis Wells brings his clinical eye to bear upon drawings we have long admired,
and points out major features that we little understood and telling details
that we had entirely missed. He shows
that no organ had ever been subjected to such remorseless visual enquiry and
functional interrogation as Leonardo devoted to the heart."
I am sorry that I mentioned bio-engineering. But most of if seems OK.
Wednesday, 17 July 2013
cuts and efficiency - and acronyms
Another one before I leave for lunch (which I never normally have).
The cutting of funding (in this instance the National Health Service) is announced stereotypically as "efficiency savings". I first encountered this piece of lying jargon in 1981 when the Thatcher government introduced severe and abrupt cuts in university spending. Cutting money does not introduce efficiency. Is it efficient to reduce the number of nurses?
The kind of efficiency that is meant in this world of double-think is that is defined by more managers ticking more boxes. Efficiency should be defined in relation to the proportion of staff time devoted to doing the actual job (i.e. treating patients or teaching) and the reduction in the amount of managerial processes needed to achieve this. One reason why the National Health Service suffers disasters in care, of the kind just published, is because well-meaning people in the front line have been dragooned into believing that satisfying managerial imperatives is a higher priority to their continued employment than the simple, humane business of care. No-one goes into front-line care with the intention of neglecting patients.
Along the way... I'm thinking of writing something in praise of (humane) inefficiency.
Also along the way... you might note that I have not written "NHS".
I am the founder and to date the only member of SAC; the Society for the Abolition of Acronyms. Like all forms of jargon, acronyms convey a spurious notion of special knowledge and serve to keep outsiders outside. Not good.
The cutting of funding (in this instance the National Health Service) is announced stereotypically as "efficiency savings". I first encountered this piece of lying jargon in 1981 when the Thatcher government introduced severe and abrupt cuts in university spending. Cutting money does not introduce efficiency. Is it efficient to reduce the number of nurses?
The kind of efficiency that is meant in this world of double-think is that is defined by more managers ticking more boxes. Efficiency should be defined in relation to the proportion of staff time devoted to doing the actual job (i.e. treating patients or teaching) and the reduction in the amount of managerial processes needed to achieve this. One reason why the National Health Service suffers disasters in care, of the kind just published, is because well-meaning people in the front line have been dragooned into believing that satisfying managerial imperatives is a higher priority to their continued employment than the simple, humane business of care. No-one goes into front-line care with the intention of neglecting patients.
Along the way... I'm thinking of writing something in praise of (humane) inefficiency.
Also along the way... you might note that I have not written "NHS".
I am the founder and to date the only member of SAC; the Society for the Abolition of Acronyms. Like all forms of jargon, acronyms convey a spurious notion of special knowledge and serve to keep outsiders outside. Not good.
mobiles, texts, emails, desperation, time
The story about the the check-out operator who refused to proceed until the customer ceased mobiling (if there is such a nasty word) is hardly new, but it carries a wider truth. It is extraordinary how an otherwise considerate and well-mannered person can sever a conversation mid-sentence to dive into their bag, pocket or pouch to take a call or intercept a text. Were someone to join 2 people who were already talking, basic courtesies would be observed - introductions or whatever. There is often a sense of near desperation to catch the latest incoming thing, seemingly stemming from some kind of anxiety or even a need to feel wanted.
Much the same is true of the constant need to check actively for messages, emails etc. There is clearly some basic psychological mechanism at work here. Whatever its nature, we see that minutes, hour, days become fragmented by incoming "stuff", much of it trivial and almost all of which can wait. Many of the the "urgent" things and "emergencies" are more cosmetic than real.
My own personal answer (as someone who loves the opportunities presented by the technologies) is to have my phone almost always on vibrate (which is less insistent that ringing), unless I know that I need to link at short notice with someone. I also have restricted the number of people, and especially organisations, that have access to my mobile number. I'm fortunate to have a separate office number at home. If I do need to answer an incoming call, I will say to the person(s) I am with, "will you excuse me", and move to somewhere quiet if possible.
I never use email on my phone. I can but don't. This is a way of saying that I will not deal with emails other than when I decide or have the opportunity to hook up my laptop. This is basically a way of organising time. It is a mechanism (entirely contrived) to package up my emailing, writing, conversations into reasonably sustained bouts of time and really focussing on those activities to which I dedicated those packages of time. I don't do it as well as I would like.
Otherwise there is so much desperate fragmentation. I have friends who are more or less addicted to to electronic communication at the expense of coherence in their daily lives.
I occasionally write bits of formatted prose. Not good enough to be called poems. I wrote this one some time ago, which seems relevant if a rather devoid of hope.
Much the same is true of the constant need to check actively for messages, emails etc. There is clearly some basic psychological mechanism at work here. Whatever its nature, we see that minutes, hour, days become fragmented by incoming "stuff", much of it trivial and almost all of which can wait. Many of the the "urgent" things and "emergencies" are more cosmetic than real.
My own personal answer (as someone who loves the opportunities presented by the technologies) is to have my phone almost always on vibrate (which is less insistent that ringing), unless I know that I need to link at short notice with someone. I also have restricted the number of people, and especially organisations, that have access to my mobile number. I'm fortunate to have a separate office number at home. If I do need to answer an incoming call, I will say to the person(s) I am with, "will you excuse me", and move to somewhere quiet if possible.
I never use email on my phone. I can but don't. This is a way of saying that I will not deal with emails other than when I decide or have the opportunity to hook up my laptop. This is basically a way of organising time. It is a mechanism (entirely contrived) to package up my emailing, writing, conversations into reasonably sustained bouts of time and really focussing on those activities to which I dedicated those packages of time. I don't do it as well as I would like.
Otherwise there is so much desperate fragmentation. I have friends who are more or less addicted to to electronic communication at the expense of coherence in their daily lives.
I occasionally write bits of formatted prose. Not good enough to be called poems. I wrote this one some time ago, which seems relevant if a rather devoid of hope.
SPACE-TIME
I'm craving space, Leonardo's 'continuous quantity'.
Space to breathe the country air,
To hear the distant sounds of stirring nature,
To have no task to perform other than to feel time passing,
Transcendently calm in one of those moments of shared love,
Extending into the geometry of the eternally infinite.
But the jolting assault of the next thing, the next thing, the next thing.
The abrupt, broken discords of outer demands,
The fragmentation of days, hours, minutes, seconds
Into discontinuous shards of numbered events.
Cracked vessels seeping desperate hopes.
Were they ever whole?
Or were they made incomplete,
Mocking illusions of an intactness that never was?
intermittent
Again, a long gap. I fear that the blog does not have a high enough priority to lever aside set deadlines. It's really not a blog, which implies some regularity, but consists of intermittent pontifications. I'm waiting to have lunch with Colin Franklin (Rosalind's brother), and will see what I can do before I go.
More to come...
More to come...
Saturday, 16 March 2013
letter from America 2: democracy?
There is a serious question to be asked about every self-proclaimed democracy throughout the world. Nowhere is that question etched more sharply than in America. To be sure there are elections, but they essentially provide a thin gloss of democracy on a sea of vested interests, self-interest, prejudice and what can only be described as corruption. Every candidate, successful and unsuccessful, has effectively been "bought". So many many millions of dollars are needed to run viciously negative attack campaigns that large sums of money must be taken from huge entities of varied kinds. They are not bankrolling candidates (often opposed candidates) for no reason. The massive lobby groups bully politicians and promulgate skewed information on a massive scale. For every dollar that huge entities pour into lobbying, they should give two dollars to charity.
It would be conventional wisdom to identify this corruption with the right, especially the far right. But no faction is isolated from it. There is no "left" in the USA in this respect. Obama has decent instincts, but he a is at root a conservative Harvard lawyer not an out-and-out reformer. He rode on to office on a raft of other people's money and an enthusiasm for a level of change that was never his reality.
Only through the operation of severe caps on election expenditure can politicians and the media surface from the inundations of vested slogan-speak to highlight the actual issues.
Even considered as a political process the American system no longer works. It should be the right a party elected with a manifesto and a mandate to implement their policies. I do not support the Conservative / Liberal coalition in Britain, but I defend their right to govern and implement their policies during their term of office. Instead, here we witness endless exercises in political obstruction in which politics is the name of the game not policy. The so-called sequester - the general slashing of budgets across the board that was introduced as a political device and that was not expected to be realised - is a vivid illustration of the breakdown of sane governance. It seems that most significant measures are subject to so much politically driven compromise that it limps into being as an ineffectual runt of the original idea.
Again the constitution is in difficulty. It sates that "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years".
The internal dynamics and chronological disjunctions in elections to Senate and Congress, given two closely dominant parties, all too readily results in the kind of ponderous paralysis that we now witness in tackling the challenge of creating a fair society. The party with a majority should be able elect the chief executive and their policies should be operative for their due term. To have a president and two houses of varied political complexions may look as if it creates balance and safeguards. In reality it now allows a vacuum of incoherence into which vested interests rush.
It would be conventional wisdom to identify this corruption with the right, especially the far right. But no faction is isolated from it. There is no "left" in the USA in this respect. Obama has decent instincts, but he a is at root a conservative Harvard lawyer not an out-and-out reformer. He rode on to office on a raft of other people's money and an enthusiasm for a level of change that was never his reality.
Only through the operation of severe caps on election expenditure can politicians and the media surface from the inundations of vested slogan-speak to highlight the actual issues.
Even considered as a political process the American system no longer works. It should be the right a party elected with a manifesto and a mandate to implement their policies. I do not support the Conservative / Liberal coalition in Britain, but I defend their right to govern and implement their policies during their term of office. Instead, here we witness endless exercises in political obstruction in which politics is the name of the game not policy. The so-called sequester - the general slashing of budgets across the board that was introduced as a political device and that was not expected to be realised - is a vivid illustration of the breakdown of sane governance. It seems that most significant measures are subject to so much politically driven compromise that it limps into being as an ineffectual runt of the original idea.
Again the constitution is in difficulty. It sates that "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years".
The internal dynamics and chronological disjunctions in elections to Senate and Congress, given two closely dominant parties, all too readily results in the kind of ponderous paralysis that we now witness in tackling the challenge of creating a fair society. The party with a majority should be able elect the chief executive and their policies should be operative for their due term. To have a president and two houses of varied political complexions may look as if it creates balance and safeguards. In reality it now allows a vacuum of incoherence into which vested interests rush.
letter from America 1: gun control.
I have now been in Princeton for well over a month (teaching a grad course on Leonardo until late May) and it's about time I resumed my ineffectually intermittent blog.
The title "letter from America" is a tribute to Alastair Cook (if you know about that it dates you) rather than a pretence that I could even come close to his excellence.
This first one picks up on gun control.
The situation is even more scary here than it is at a distance. The prime response to killings is to argue that even more people should have guns and to introduce armed guards into schools etc. The head of the National Rifle Association, LaPierre, sloganised that the only only way to combat a "bad guy with a gun" is by a "good guy with a gun". Here as elsewhere in American politics slogans act as a substitute for thinking. Who is a guaranteed "good guy? Is it a military veteran? Is it a policeman? Is it a hobby shooter with a large arsenal of weapons. Is it a young man with a loving mother? Is it me? Is it you? If only it were so easy, so facile. I believe, as I said before, that any private person owning a weapon whose only prime function is to inflict serious injury or death on living creatures is not in this respect a "good guy".
Then there is the holy cow of the constitution. A senator said that the second amendment is a "holy thing". This is what it actually says: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed". This is historically specific to the security of the early republic that was threatened by reconquest. Even it we only read the second part of the sentence, we cannot assume the the founding fathers (for whom I have huge admiration) foresaw its application to todays circumstances - both in terms of society as it has developed and the technology of weapons. Even if we claim that they were divinely motivated, they were human and subject to limits. Jefferson would be horrified by the NRA.
Even the pragmatic argument falls. The proliferation of weapons, including the routine arming of police, certainly had not been successful in reducing death from shooting, which run at a horrifyingly large rate compared to Britain. Ugh!
The title "letter from America" is a tribute to Alastair Cook (if you know about that it dates you) rather than a pretence that I could even come close to his excellence.
This first one picks up on gun control.
The situation is even more scary here than it is at a distance. The prime response to killings is to argue that even more people should have guns and to introduce armed guards into schools etc. The head of the National Rifle Association, LaPierre, sloganised that the only only way to combat a "bad guy with a gun" is by a "good guy with a gun". Here as elsewhere in American politics slogans act as a substitute for thinking. Who is a guaranteed "good guy? Is it a military veteran? Is it a policeman? Is it a hobby shooter with a large arsenal of weapons. Is it a young man with a loving mother? Is it me? Is it you? If only it were so easy, so facile. I believe, as I said before, that any private person owning a weapon whose only prime function is to inflict serious injury or death on living creatures is not in this respect a "good guy".
Then there is the holy cow of the constitution. A senator said that the second amendment is a "holy thing". This is what it actually says: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed". This is historically specific to the security of the early republic that was threatened by reconquest. Even it we only read the second part of the sentence, we cannot assume the the founding fathers (for whom I have huge admiration) foresaw its application to todays circumstances - both in terms of society as it has developed and the technology of weapons. Even if we claim that they were divinely motivated, they were human and subject to limits. Jefferson would be horrified by the NRA.
Even the pragmatic argument falls. The proliferation of weapons, including the routine arming of police, certainly had not been successful in reducing death from shooting, which run at a horrifyingly large rate compared to Britain. Ugh!
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