Today is November 5th, so tonight is Guy Fawkes’ Night (or Bonfire Night). This is not celebrated in the Republic of Ireland, not least because of its anti-Catholic origins, but is a big thing in the United Kingdom. In Ireland the bonfires and fireworks happen on Halloween. Bonfire Night commemorates the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, which was intended to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Guy Fawkes was supposed to light the blue touchpaper on that occasion and it has been a tradition to burn his effigy on the bonfire on the anniversary of the attempt, every November 5th, while letting off fireworks.
When I was young, Guy Fawkes’ Night was the thing we celebrated rather than Halloween. Although we didn’t put on anything elaborat, most families held their own bonfire in their garden and fireworks could easily be bought from local shops who stocked up at this time of year. Since we had open ground right in front of our house, we had very big bonfires where I grew up in Benwell which lots of other kids came to. Once, I remember, my uncle Richard brought some thunderflashes (essentially stun grenades) her had purloined when he was in the Army. They were so loud the police paid us a visit, but there were no arrests. The number of private bonfire parties has decreased markedly since then, owing to safety concerns, and they have largely been replaced by large scale organized celebrations.
Another tradition associated with November 5th also seems to have died completely. When I was a kid the thing to do was to make an effigy of Guy Fawkes (called a “Guy”) and parade him from door to door in the days before Bonfire Night – usually in a pram – asking for “Penny for the Guy”. The idea was if you had an impressive Guy, people would give you money which you used to buy fireworks for the forthcoming party. Of course you were hoping for a lot more than a penny.
Two young lads and a Guy
I suppose that this tradition has been displaced by the American import “Trick-or-Treat”, which I think is a shame. Next thing you know, there won’t be Guy Fawkes’ Night at all; it will be called 5/11 – or would it be 11/5?
Anyway, I remember one year spending ages making a really good Guy with a head of papier mâché and plasticine for his eyes, nose and mouth. My mum knitted him a hairpiece. I was really proud of my Guy, especially when he sat on top of the huge pile of wood that was going to form the bonfire.
When it was lit – which happened before the fireworks started – the heat from the flames started to melt the plasticine features of the Guy. The other kids rushed around in excitement as the adults sorted out the Roman Candles, Catherine Wheels and the rest of the soon-to-be-ignited pyrotechnics that would go bang and whizz though not necessarily in that order. But I stood traumatised, staring at the Guy. After a few minutes I started sobbing and ran to my mum in anguish as molten plasticine dripped down his face from his eyes.
There’s a very important paper on arXiv by P.K.G. Williams (of the Harvard-Smithsoninan Center for Astrophysics) with title AI and the Enclosure of the Scientific Commons and abstract:
The scientific literature can be viewed as an “information commons”: an intangible resource that “no one owns and is shared by everyone.” There are well-established economic and political frameworks for understanding such commons, emerging from the history of agricultural common lands found in places like preindustrial England. This article provides a primer on the history and these frameworks, and considers a key difference between the information commons and the fields of yore: while information commons are robust and immensely valuable — some can be said to rank among humanity’s greatest achievements — the English agricultural commons no longer meaningfully exist. The latter are gone not because of the well-known “tragedy of the commons,” but rather a phenomenon known as the enclosure movement (~1600–1800) that transformed the common lands into private property. Many observers, then and now, judge enclosure to have been theft at a societal scale. This article argues that artificial intelligence (AI) provides precisely the tools needed to enable a previously-infeasible enclosure of the information commons. Although AI-enabled enclosure does not operate identically to physical enclosure, it shares the key features of turning the commons into private wealth and undermining the social systems that support them (via “slop spam”). The concepts presented in this article can provide a scholarly basis for interrogating the foreboding feeling that AI may represent not just a smash-and-grab, but an attack upon a whole way of life.
arXiv:2610.27251
The phrase “Enclosure of the Scientific Commons” is wonderfully apt. I wish I’d thought of it. The rest of the article is very good too and I urge you to read it.
P.S. I remember this little poem from school history lessons when we learnt about the enclosure of the common land in18th century England
The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common, But lets the greater felon loose Who steals the common from the goose.
A post on Bluesky got me thinking about the origin of the word “oyster”, which I shall bore you with shortly, but the post asks an interesting question about the well-known phrase “The World’s Mine Oyster”. This comes from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and is spoken to Falstaff by Pistol, a swaggering soldier, in the line:
Why, then the world’s mine oyster, Which I with sword will open.
The meaning it has there is that Pistol thinks he can get whatever he wants by force of arms. In more modern usage, however, it is taken to mean that the speaker has everything on a plate. In modern usage it sometimes appears as “the world is your oyster” which means something like “take your pick”. At some point, it is claimed in the 20th Century, this meaning of this phrase changed. There’s a podcast about this here. How, where and why this happened I don’t know, and I don’t know who does. My usual source for information about things like this is the wonderful Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable which has the phrase but sheds no light on its change of meaning. If you can shed light on this, please feel free to comment below through the box below.
Anyway, having had oysters in Ireland a few times – with Guinness, obviously- but not knowing the word in the Irish language, I looked it up: it is oisre. Interestingly close, I thought. So then I looked at the etymology of the English word oyster. This first appeared in Middle English via the Latin ostrea (and probably Norman French). The Latin word is derived from the Classical Greek ὄστρεον (ostreon), which is the origin of many words connected with bone, e.g. osteopath and ossuary. This is presumably because it was thought oyster shells were made of bone or at least bony in appearance.
Just for a laugh, here’s a mediaeval representation of an oyster from a Bestiary:
Incidentally, the Romans used ostrea for mussels as well as oysters. This reminds me of my first year at the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle when we had a history teacher whose name escapes me but whose initials – from and old school report I still have – were `BM’ and who possessed a strong Scottish accent. In the first year we learnt a little bit about the Roman invasion of Britain. BM explained that one of the reasons the Romans came to Britain was that they were looking for “perils”. Although confused, I wrote that down unquestioningly in my exercise book. After the lesson was over I asked a classmate about it and he told me the teacher had meant “pearls”. These were very prized in Rome, and there was a rumour circulating there that they were abundant in Britain. But not in oysters. Freshwater mussels were the source of the perils pearls. I guess the Romans used the same word anyway.
Meanwhile, back at the oysters, I find that the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) word is ostre. This might itself have been borrowed from the Latin, but we know that the ancient Britons were eating oysters long before the Romans arrived. In fact, there are shell middens dating back to the mesolithic period. It seemed to me quite possible, therefore, that the word oyster may predate Classical Latin, and even Greek. The similarity of the Gaelic and Anglo-Saxon words may be because they are both linked to Latin, but look at the word for oyster in other languages, German: Auster, Danish østers, Polish: ostryga, etc. Like words for many things with which Europeans have been familiar with for a very long time indeed, could this one have a proto-Indo-European root? I recently read a fascinating book about this and was captivated by the idea of some of our ancient ancestors, thousands of years ago, eating oysters and using a very similar word to describe them.
It seems it does, but the common ancestor is a word not meaning “oyster” directly but “bone”. The Sanskrit word for “bone” is अस्थि (ásthi), which convinces me of its Indo-European origins. It was perhaps the Greeks, or their ancestors, who first adapted this word to refer to an oyster as a “bony thing”.
Today, October 16th, is Hamilton day! It was on this day 183 years ago, in 1843, that William Rowan Hamilton first wrote down the fundamental result of quaternions. Apparently he was walking from his residence at Dunsink Observatory into Dublin when he had a sudden flash of inspiration, and wrote the result down on the spot, now marked by a plaque:
Picture Credit: Brian Dolan
This event is commemorated by an annual Hamilton Walk. Broombridge railway station (Droichead Broome), near the bridge (Broom Bridge), where Hamilton had his Eureka moment, is not far from Maynooth University the main commuter line from Maynooth into Dublin. This is ironic because Quaternion algebra does not commute. (Geddit?)
You may be interested that quaternions form the core mathematical framework used in the Euclid satellite’s telemetry system to represent and control its attitude (pointing direction and orientation). I also make extensive use of quaternions in preparing my tax return.
Although it is quite easy to reach Broombridge from Maynooth, I have never managed to attend the walk nor any of the other celebratory events because I’ve either been away or teaching. Perhaps one of these years, after I’ve retired, I’ll be able join the walk or attend one of the various ectures.
P.S. Maynooth University is also home to the Hamilton Institute which promotes and facilitates research links between mathematics and other fields.
The above picture shows fascist thug and career criminal Daniel Thomas (a.k.a. Danny Tommo) leading a “protest” of uniformed knuckleheads (those on the right of the picture, in short trousers) outside the Daily Mail offices in London.
Fans of P.G. Wodehouse will recall Roderick Spode, the 7th Earl of Sidcup, who leads a fascist group called the “Saviours of Britain” also known as the Black Shorts. He is of course a parody of Oswald Mosley and his group a parody of Mosley’s Black Shirts (aka the British Union of Fascists).
The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting “Heil, Spode!” and you imagine it is the Voice of the People.
How prescient was that?
Incidentally, fans of historical trivia might be interested to know that the grandson of Oswald Mosley (founder of the British Union of Fascists) and Diane Mitford (a friend of Adolf Hitler, who married Oswald Mosley at the home of Joseph Goebbels) is Louis Mosley, CEO of Palantir UK.
Coincidentally, Nigel Farage went to the same school as P.G. Wodehouse, Dulwich College.
I’ve been listening to a radio programme about the centenary of RTÉ, it being a hundred years since the first radio broadcast by Raidió Éireann in 1926 (before television existed). One of the things included was a discussion of the fierce campaign against Jazz in Ireland during the 1930s. On New Year’s Day 1934, a Fr. Conefrey led a march through Mohill, County Leitrim, in which demonstrators shouted “down with jazz” and “out with paganism” and called on the government to close the dance halls and ban all foreign dances in Ireland. Jazz, the campaign argued, was “abominable” music that originated in central Africa and was exported to the West by “a gang of wealthy Bolshevists in the USSR to strike at church civilisation throughout the world.” Jazz was an “engine of hell” deployed to do the devil’s work. The Gaelic League weighed in on the day with an attack on then-Minister of Finance Seán MacEntee, who, in allowing jazz to be broadcast on Radio Eireann, was “selling the musical soul of the nation for the dividends of sponsored jazz programmes”.
It seems absurd nowadays that people could take such tripe seriously but it was a significant movement supported, amongst others, by Éamon de Valera. Here are some extracts of a speech which is both hilarious and sinister, not to mention deeply racist, by Fr. Conefrey, to give you an idea. Honestly. I know some people don’t like jazz, but this is just ridiculous!
–0–
Let me tell you why this campaign is the most important step taken by the Gaelic League for many years.
While the Irish music has died out it is being replaced by a foreign system of music introduced from savage Africa by people out to kill religion and destroy morality. This ‘jazz’ represents the sin of impurity and young people leave their homes every night to go to dances where jazz is practised.
All night jazz dancing is one of the greatest evils Ireland has ever seen. Jazz is an even greater evil than both intemperance and landlordism combined. It is a menace to religion and nationality and its objective is nothing less than to destroy virtue in the human soul.
The reason it has been tolerated and indulged in so far is because the public in Ireland do not understand its meaning and do not see the danger.
Now we still have some people asking what is jazz? Some have asked in good faith if it excludes waltzes and barn dances? My answer to that is that the ‘anti-jazz campaign’ excludes no dance that is in keeping with public Christian decency. But no-one could make anything out of the jazz dancing, and there was no music in the jazz tin squealing.
A professor in Oxford University tells us that the word ‘jazz’ is a Central African word and means the acting in public of something that St Paul says should not be so much as named amongst us.
The dance and the music with its abominable rhythm was borrowed from Central Africa by a gang of wealthy International Bolshevists in America. Their aim is to strike at Christian civilization throughout the world and to steer Roman civilization inro the dust: they employed this jazz – this engine of hell – to do this devil’s work.
They laid their plans carefully. They employed mass suggestion. In the music they knew they had something that would appeal to debased sexual instinct. Its superlative, savagely extreme use of syncopation, allied with the copulative beat, beat, beat of the drum, stirred up forces all over the world.
To counter this abomination, the only answer is to revive Irish dancing and music. I appeal to you to support Irish music and Irish dancing: as far as I’m concerned it is a question of defending Christian religion and faith while we have it.
No other nation has the same music as we have. The Irish nation was famous for its music, but all the old violinists and flautists are gone, and it is only amongst the peasantry of Ireland that the real traditional music and dance is to be found.
When I was at the Royal Dublin Society exhibition we had a great show of our local cottage traditions of spinning and weaving and all sorts of knitted goods. But we also had Irish music and dance at our stand. I was congratulated and told by many that never was such music played on the show grounds, and it was one of the greatest treats of the whole show.
Music and dancing are among the arts of the nation and if the nation is to be rebuilt then we must get all the constituent parts reconstructed. I’ve had an idea in my mind for a long time, that we should have a National Reconstruction League to take charge of the language, music, and dance, and for cottage industries and the arts. If we could organise competitions and concerts to play our old tunes on traditional instruments and bring on new pipe bands, we could stop the spread of immorality and irreligion.
There is great musical-talent in Co. Leitrim and it is undeveloped.
We need to see that Irish music is fostered and not despised. But there are certain classes in this country who consider our Irish music is not genteel enough for them, and they look down on it and are out to destroy its spirit. Those Dublin people need to come down to the country where they’ll learn step dancing and how to distinguish one step from another and get the names of the steps. I would like to know what the Leinster School of Music was doing for Irish music: nothing; they are only teaching classical music. Even at the Sligo Feis Ceoil all the music was from Continental authors, and it was only the poor Irish farmers were left to play the Irish music.
Action is needed to be taken by the church and state. First, the government should compel the closing of dance halls at 11 o‘clock. Young teachers should be trained to teach Irish dancing and music, and they should have Irish dancing taught in the Depot amongst the members of the Guards.
One of the greatest offenders at the present time are the Civic Guards. The Minister for Justice should take action and have good Irish céilidh organised in every barracks every week or month, and not allow the Guards to be carrying on their pagan dances until hours in the morning. It is a well-known fact that in most cases there are bars open at these all-night dances, and people attending them are blinded with drink. This is a disgrace, and President de Valera should be ashamed of his face to stand by and allow this conduct to be carried on. It is time for the Government to open its eyes and see to it that this abuse should end.
I appeal to political parties to give up their disputes and unite on this question and put down this jazz.
While I speak to the Government I also speak to the Church, and say that the priests will want to waken up and see that this terrible and abusive jazz dancing ceases. I know that the majority of the priests know that jazz is wrong, but many of them will not speak out. There are others who don’t understand this monster and their idea is to let the people have what they want, which is the jazz.
I fear that if this is to continue and the generation of old people die out, we will have a different type of people in the future. It is up to the people to rise against this ]azz dance and music as it is necessary to save their traditions and faith. It is unworthy of Catholics to support jazz and no one is associated with jazz but shoneens. If people were worthy of their race and traditions they would blow up every hall, where jazz is practised.
More condemnation of jazz is worse than useless, as Henry Ford realised.
Young folk, will dance, but let them dance to rhythms of beauty and in a manner that will scatter morbidity and make for fun and jollity.
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Coincidentally, it was also in 1926 that Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five recorded “The Irish Black Bottom” which I here present to you in the hope of destroying the virtue in your soul.
The repeat examination period at Maynooth University has begun. In fact the first papers were sat yesterday (5th August); the period goes on for ten days or so, I will have four different papers to grade, though I’m expecting only one candidate each for three of them. My first is tomorrow (Friday 7th August).
A couple of years ago, Maynooth University produced this nice good luck message for those resitting so I’ll repeat it here:
Every year at this time I mention the difference between the system of repeats in Maynooth compared to other institutions with which I am familiar, especially in the UK. Elsewhere, students generally take resits when, because they have failed one or more examinations the previous May, they have not accumulated sufficient credits to proceed to the next year of their course. Passing the resit allows them to retrieve lost credit, but their mark is generally capped at a bare pass (usually 40%). That means the student gets the credit they need for their degree but their average (which determines whether they get 1st, 2nd or 3rd class Honours) is affected. This is the case unless a student has extenuating circumstances affecting the earlier examination, such as bad health or family emergency, in which case they take the resit as a `sit’, i.e. for the first time with an uncapped mark.
Here in Maynooth, however, the mark obtained in a repeat examination is usually not capped. Indeed, some students – though not many – elect to take the repeat examination even if they passed earlier in the summer, in order to increase their average mark.
Some people don’t like the idea of uncapped repeats because they feel that it would lead to many students playing games, i.e. deliberately not taking exams in May with the intention of spreading some of their examination load into August. For this reason the Institute of Physics has decided to impose capped resits as part of its accreditation requirements. Some people here seem to think IOP accreditation is worth having so we’re being pushed into that requirement. I find it heavy-handed and unhelpful. I also think it imposes a dreary uniformity on physics courses in the UK. In any case, IOP accreditation is unimportant unless you want to do postgraduate study in physics in the UK (and often not even then). It doesn’t matter at all anywhere else.
If you think students have an unfair advantage if they don’t take a full diet of examinations in May, then the logical conclusion is that part-time students have an unfair advantage as do students taking micro-credentials consisting of just one or two modules. It’s the essence of the modular system that each module result should be considered on its own merit, not in relation to other modules a student may or may not have taken at the same time. One can of course argue whether the modular system is good or not, but if you have it then you should act consistently in accordance with it. You wouldn’t penalize students who have to work to support their study relative to those who don’t, would you?
And there’s no real evidence of students in Maynooth actually playing the system in the way the IOP thinks they do anyway. For one thing, the results from the repeat examination period are not confirmed until early September so that students that deploy this strategy do not know whether they are going to be able to resume their course until just a couple of weeks before term. That could cause lots of problems securing accommodation, etc, so it doesn’t seem to me to be a good ploy. Finalists adopting this strategy will not be able to graduate with the rest of their cohort and may miss several months of potential employment. I think most of our students are smart enough to realize that it’s a risky strategy.
Anyway, I’d welcome comments for or against whether resits/repeats should be capped/uncapped and on what practice is adopted in your institution.
I’ve just finished reading The Fallen: The Magdalene Laundries & Ireland’s Legacy of Shame by Louise Brangan, which I bought a couple of months ago. This tells the shocking story of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, institutions run by a variety of religious orders designed to accommodate “fallen” women and girls. Also known as “Penitents”, the inmates of these institutions were a mixture of the poor and unwanted, orphans, disabled, those who had suffered familial abuse, and those who simply didn’t conform to Ireland’s self-image of a virtuous Roman Catholic state.
After Independence in 1922 these institutions, which had already been in existence for over a century, became a sort of dumping ground for inconvenient woman of all kinds. Once inside, the Penitents – most of whom hadn’t really done anything wrong – were stripped of what meagre possessions they had, had their hair shorn, their names were erased, and they were put to hard menial labour washing and drying clothes. They were fed and housed – after a fashion – but conditions were damp and unsanitary and they were forbidden to make friendships with their companions, or even talk to them. They were locked inside and forbidden to leave unless and until the nuns decided they could, which was often never. The Magdalene Laundries were prisons in which every inmate was serving an indefinite sentence of hard labour.
Not surprisingly, the result of this soul-destroying regime was that many of the Penitents became completely institutionalised, some living our their days in a man-made purgatory. Perhaps the most shocking thing of all is the last of these terrible places – which was on what is now Sean McDermott Street in North Dublin – didn’t close until 1996. This book was published to mark the 30th anniversary of this event.
The book is a scholarly work, woven around the oral testimonies of several women, measured in tone but with an unmistakeable undertone of righteous indignitation. It also sets the story of the Magdalene Laundries in the context of 20th Century Irish history, especially the rise of the Catholic theocracy under de Valera and it subsequent fall in the wake of major scandals, of which the Magdalene Laundries were one. As a relative newcomer to Ireland, I was unaware of the true nature of these places and found this book educational as well as deeply moving.
Some comments cut very much to the bone. Here is a paragraph concerning a woman known in the book as Carmel who had been taken to Sunday’s Well for reasons she was never told to find that many of the other women there were quite elderly and infirm:
Going to bed that first night, Carmel had thought that she had been sent to Sunday’s Well to care for the old women. Gradually, she had come to realise, like many others before her, that she had been sent to the Laundry not to look after these women but to become one of them.
Another passage that hit me hard was about the disinterment, in 1993, of 133 bodies from a mass grave when the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity decided to sell the land to a property developer. The graves of the women, who had died while incarcerated at a Magdalene Laundry, were unmarked; another 22 were found later. Shamefully, only 75 death certificates had ever been registered. It is against the law in Ireland to bury someone without registering their death so 80 crimes had been committed over the years. No action was ever taken.
In recent years there has been a redress scheme for the survivors of these institutions, but what financial compensation can possibly be adequate for a lifetime of penal servitude? The most important message of this book is that stories like this have to be told. Ireland must confront the dark side of its recent past. Silence can be the worst form of dishonesty.
Flaming June by Frederic Leighton (1895, Oil on Canvas, 120 ×120cm, Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico)
Since this June has seen a heatwave across Europe and even here in Ireland, I was reminded of the expression “Flaming June” which I thought until relatively recently was some sort of folk expression or quotation from a poem, but it is instead the title of this Pre-Raphaelite painting by Frederic Leighton of a lady wearing what looks like a dress made out of old curtains. Apparently the oleander branch seen in the upper right symbolizes the fragile link between sleep and death. It looks to me like she must be attending a seminar. You can read more about this painting here.
As well as a hugely popular artist in his lifetime (though his reputation has not endured), Leighton holds the record for the shortest ever peerage: he was made Baron Leighton just the day before he died. The title he had been given was to be hereditary but as he had no offspring the title became extinct at his death.
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