Mark Haddon's Blog, page 25

in our time

why is there not a statue of this man on the fourth plinth...? i have just been listening to a backlog of podcasted editions of in our time (the samurai, the geological formation of britain, pythagoras, the silk road, sparta...). time and again a subject which seems unpromising in advance just comes alive. challenging, unpatronising, unashamedly intellectual, a little scruffy at the corners (i alway love hearing the chink of tea cups on the studio table).

the only sad thing is the lack of a...

logicomix 2

thinking about logicomix... perhaps my only criticism is that it perpetuates a myth that one finds more commonly in the arts, that engaging in these kinds of activities (especially ones as demanding and frustrating as the attempt to provide a sound logical foundation for mathematics) can drive its practitioners insane. i think the reverse is true, that whilst mathematics is obviously attractive both to those who are good at it, it is also attractive to those people who find in its clarity...

logicomix

this is brilliant and i'm not sure how i missed it. the story of the quest for a logical foundation to modern mathematics in the late 19th and 20th century (and the link between logic and the mental illness from which many of the protagonists suffered), all seen through the lens of bertrand russell's life.

but like all graphic novels (someone has to invent a new term), i can't help feeling sad that the vast amount work that has gone into its production will be read so quickly (i can't even...

photographs

(see digital prints) i'm not sure why it took me so long to work this out. they're photographs. i wander round taking photographs of things. i bin most of them. i work on some of the others in photoshop. i bin most of the results (the two prints in the previous entry both got binned in the end). i take them to brent at resolution creative and we decide how to print them. it's precisely what you do with photographs. mine just spend a little more time in photoshop.

the first of these (splitter) ...

darwin & teleology

there's a really good article in last edition of the london review of books: 'the darwin show' by steven shapin (sadly not online), a critical overview of last year's darwin anniversary mega-fest, which untangles the man, his various legacies and his adoption as a mascot for assorted - often inappropriate - causes (dawkins and darwin, for example, would not have sat comfortably down to tea with one another, though darwin would probably have made more of an effort).

the article contains a...

frozen

one of my favourite places in the world, this morning

  

  

colourful rubbish

it's not as fluid, there's no handwriting, it doesn't have that dog-eared, coffee-stained physicality real-ness but the great thing about using a mac as notebook is having a near-infinite wastebin for trawling through.

 

winter from the air

i could look at this picture for a long, long time...

photo: nasa/gsfc, modis rapid response

wrangham & jelinek

wonderful. an utterly convincing exposition of a brilliantly simple idea which seems somehow obvious in retrospect, about the central role of cooking in human development, dictating everything from brain size and bowel length to the domestication of the dog and our love of the banana. rather like jared diamond's thesis, in guns, germs and steel, that simple geography was central in shaping the nature, spread and inequalities of cultural and technological progress. i've always been fascinated ...

happy christmas