Darkling Wood

Hot, hot, hot.

Did I mention it was hot in Austin? My car thermometer hit 118F just yesterday. Official temperatures are still three digits. I spent much of today visiting friends, where we simply read, and ate, and drank, and swam.

The pool temperature was 89F; so warm that the only difference between being in the water and out of it was that water feels thicker than air. As a result, it's getting hard to remember Scottish weather, where not every year even has a summer. Somehow my mind filters out the seemingly endless rain, and miserable greyness that covers a lot of the year. What stands out are good-weather times like the vacation I took with three pals (Johnny, Joe and John), youth hosteling up and down Loch Lomond-side when I was in high school, where we got burned by the sun and I first learned to "cook" baked beans; or halcyon summers spent with umpteen friends in an old church house in Stratherrick, near Loch Ness -- the heather was always purple, and then brown and red if we ever went back in the autumn; or two weeks in Skye with my mum and dad and wee sister, and my wee dug, "Bambi" (it was a Papillon - what an embarrassment of a name!).

And I do remember a particular good summer around the mid 1970s. I  was either in late Primary school or early Secondary (i.e. what they call Middle school in the US). It was so hot (by Scottish standards) that we could poke holes in the pavement (i.e. sidewalk) surface with sticks. It didn't get much better than that! I don't know what they made sidewalks out of back then, but it's clear they do it differently in Texas. Otherwise the sidewalk would be flowing down the street.

 

UK/US Differences #8 - The Weather

The weather in Glasgow for five days, from this coming Sunday:

The weather in Austin for the same period:

I rest my case. Point to Texas.

(P.S. 102^oF is 39^oC.)

UK/US Differences #24 - BBC Radio 4 versus NPR

The UK's BBC Radio 4. Or the US's National Public Radio.

There's really no competition.

One is a quirky and anachronistic, tax-funded and therefore I-don't-care-how-many-governors-they-appoint, Soviet-esque state-run radio station; the other, a genuinely listener-funded, of the people, by the people, for the people offering, with cool jazz musical overlay and mellow-voiced presenters, they being to radio what the gorgeous Rudi Bhaktiar (who buries Robin Meade, by the way) is to television.

As I say, no competition. Compared to Radio 4, NPR is quite simply shite. If I hear one more jazz riff to segue from one "All Things Considered" item (or is it "Morning Edition"?; who knows, they all sound the same) to the next, I'll be forced to switch to 1200 AM and listen to Rush. And what is with those sugar sweet voices? It's like listening to Saruman on Prozac.

Radio 4, on the other hand, demonstrates just why Britain was once a world empire. You have to start with the Today programme. Even the presenters' names tell you you're getting something heavy; Naughtie (pronounced "Naw-chh-tay", which is cool, rather than "Naw-tay" which is not), or Stourton which connotes "Stentor" in the Illiad. (That said, John Humphrys needs a slap. Regularly.) Then there's "Start The Week". It's necessary and sufficient if you want a simple list of books, plays, and lectures you should read, watch and listen to in order to stay abreast of what's important in the world (like, say, why "[Despite the] artwork of the Futurists [being] often overshadowed by the Cubists, ... their combination of salon and street art, with their visceral excitement for cities, has had much resonance over the last century.") Granted Andrew Marr's a bit damp compared with Jeremy "Mauler" Paxman, on whom Henry Kissinger walked out on the live show after Paxman asked him about being an alleged war criminal. But it's magic all the same.

And the comedy! There's "Friday Night Comedy". consisting of The Now Show and "The News Quiz". The latter is worth it simply to hear the lovable Sandy Toksvig take the rip out of her panel. (Sandy is to Rudi what I am to Brad Pitt, but she's a hoot nevertheless). And let's not forget the venerable, "Just A Minute". It works like this. They get a subject. They have to talk. Without "hesitation, deviation or repetition". For a minute! It doesn't get any better than that.

But the resisty bit (I'd say "pièce de résistance" but it's a bit too Frenchy for such a British institution) has got to be the inestimable Melvyn Bragg's (we are not worthy) "In Our TIme". Here's what I've been able to listen to over the past few weeks, via podcast, on my way to work: The Age of Caesar Augustus in Rome, The Trial of Charles I, The History Of The Whale (yes, the *whale*), Baconian Science, and a discussion of Huxley's "Brave New World".

There are only a few things I can say without fear of contradiction that Britain does better than the USA. The combination of chicken korma, pilau rice, and peshwari naan bread is one; grim and brooding rain-soaked, mist-covered mountains is another. But BBC Radio 4 is clearly a third.

Point to the Brits.

The Evolution of Outrage

So, a cop Tasers a granny (one of thousands of such reports). It happened only a few miles from where I live, and I found it interesting to observe my own reactions to the event, and to see them change over time.

First, there was the inevitable, "Disgusting! Ridiculous! We are clearly living in a Police State!" My first reaction was essentially that the USA had finally managed to shed its last remaining shred of a legitimate claim to the title of "Land of the Free".

I was also filled with "Outraged of Tunbridge Wells"-style contempt for a so-called "man" who had to resort to such a weapon to subdue an old lady.

Next came a slightly dampened, "But, why am I so surprised?" Isn't this precisely what we should expect given the result of the 1960s' Milgram Experiment in which subjects of the experiment were induced by "authority" to give what they believed were painful electric shocks to other subjects. Milgram is quoted in Wikipedia:

"Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not."

Read that after watching the video and listening to the li'l ol' lady screaming, and it's kinda chilling, no? But the point is, if Milgram is right, then the cop isn't necessarily a craven coward. Rather he's just one of the rest of us. Or maybe we're all craven cowards when it comes to it.

But finally, I attended to an increasingly loud alarm bell ringing in my head. One of my favourite cognitive biases (c'mon; everyone should have a favourite cognitive bias!) is the availability heuristic. This is simply a sciencey name for our tendency to overestimate the likelihood of something happening if we frequently hear about it happening. I alluded to it before in the context of bad economic news. And Dan Gilbert gave an entertaining Ted talk on the same subject. One of the points Gilbert makes is that the media (and I include in that all the rubbish we consume off the internet, like this blog wot u r reading) thrives on news that is big, and bad, and ideally both. And tasering -- especially of an old lady -- is, to most of us, bad. So we hear a lot about when it happens, and almost never when it doesn't. But the fact is, if the media is distorting our sense of reality when it comes to how often tasering happens, in the same way it distorts it when it comes to the threat of terrorism, then we really should work hard to maintain a sense of proportion.

Tasering old ladies is rarely going to be justifed. But I'll hazard a guess and say that most cops would agree; would share my initial outrage; would have kept their Tasers in their holsters and used common sense and some well-placed words instead; but as a result would never have made it into the news.