In the Dark

This scary picture is taken from an interactive exhibit in the Weller Galleries of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, which opened in 2007. The exhibit, I mean, not the Royal Observatory. I remember going down there to record the video segments, but had forgotten all about it until somebody found this image on the net and drew my attention to it.

The exhibit consists of a series of display screens with various astronomical and cosmological concepts and questions on them, along with appropriate images. Visitors touch the screens to bring up the video segments in which distinguished astronomers (or me) attempt to provide explanations.

The lady to the bottom right is probably providing a sign language translation of my contribution. Or she could simply be screaming and waving her hands in terror. Wouldn’t you?

PS. If you want an explanation of the title of this blog post, I’ll translate

Jo Cox murder: morbid symptoms but the new will be born

Gramsci wrote in the Prison Notebooks of the morbid symptoms that appear when the old order is dying but the new one cannot be born.

The murder of Jo Cox MP on Thursday was certainly a morbid symptom. The murderer had long term connections to violent hard core fascist groups something which some of the media rather predictably are trying to ignore. Instead they have emphasised mental health problems (quite possibly inadequately dealt with by an underfunded NHS) but there is no particular or obvious connection between that and murdering an MP.

There is no reason to despair.

Yes Farage, the Tory right and the gutter press have whipped up racism and division in society for their own ends. Farage in particular looks increasingly like someone playing to the fascist gallery.

There isn’t much evidence to be gathered that…

I want my country back. It’s a refrain we’ve heard a lot in the last 5-10 years. It’s generally a call to restore some sense of what being British really means, of what Britain should feel like, and the people Britain should be composed of.  What has made this refrain so commonplace is the sense that Britain has lost its sense of identity to an influx of immigrants from the EU and elsewhere.  If only we could get shot of that damned institution we’d be able to get our country back.

My father-in-law is an ex-pat who lives in France and drives around in a French car. Every once in a while he drives over to see us.  On one such occasion he drove it to a local supermarket in Strood, Kent.  At a set of traffic lights he stopped, and a man ventured towards his car, as if he…

A quote about Brexit supporters by a friend of mine last week attracted a lot of attention when I stuck it on Twitter yesterday.

This is the last ‘fuck you’ from the baby boomers. They took the secure corporate and government jobs with the guaranteed pay rises and final salary pension schemes and benefitted from property they bought cheap and sold dear. They burnt the bridges behind them by colluding with the dismantling of the very things that had brought them prosperity. Their last act will be to burn the economy before they die.

It even made the Independent. Some people were offended by it but, for the majority of those who commented, it seemed to strike a chord, suggesting there is at least a grain of truth in it.

It is certainly true that the pollsters are recording the highest support for Brexit among older voters. YouGov data

To the coast! And an abrupt change of mood as riverside North Shields turns 90 degrees north to seaside; business turns to pleasure, and production to consumption.

Just as the Victorians invented industrial life, and the discipline of the factory hooter and dockyard clock, so too did they conceive of leisure as a commodity that was consumed at certain times and in certain demarcated zones.  By 1911 Britain had over a hundred substantial seaside resorts, from the big boys Blackpool and Brighton to lower league Largs and Llandudno.  The Northumbrian Riviera fits somewhere in between these poles, more akin to the maritime resort suburbs of Penarth or Southsea; but like all of them it was a place of beaches, bathing and boarding houses – with a big slug of hedonism.

Here the eight miles of metal-bashing Tyneside – from Newcastle to the sea – transforms sharply into the ancestral coastal…

For several reasons, I am instinctively in favour — strongly so — of remaining in the EU: I have a French wife and two bilingual children, and I am an academic living in the age of the internet. The result is that my whole outlook is international, and leaving the EU would feel to me like a gigantic step in the wrong direction. But in this post I want to try to set those instincts aside and try to go back to first principles, which doesn’t make it a mathematical post, but does make it somewhat mathematical in spirit. That is why I have chosen as my title the mathematical symbol for “is a member of”, which can also be read (in some contexts) as “in”, and which conveniently looks like an E for Europe too.

I’ll consider three questions: why we need supranational organizations, to what extent we should…