Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Because of its great sales volume General motors has an immense impact in framing consumer attitudes toward style changes" - because people want to conform to majority taste?

"Deliberate practice requires concentration, and someone (either the student, or a teacher, or a coach) monitoring and providing feedback during the practice. The task or activity is typically outside the realm of current performance, invokes a challenge for the student, and it greatly helps if the student both is aware of the purpose for the practice and has a vision of what success looks like."

"A major role of schools is to teach students the value of deliberate practise, such that students can see how practice leads to competence." - Hooray! We're a long way from the happy clappy stuff this book started with.

"In short it is wasteful to make any component more durable than the weakest link, and ideally a product should fall apart all at once...." - as a consumer I would certainly be less frustrated, but it is the irreplaceability of the 'weakest links' that annoys more.

"Ending is better than mending" - Huxley's mistake was to think that this mantra would require indoctrination. As the 50s showed, all that was required was rising incomes, and falling prices.

"The greatest toll of the large and complex motorcar, however was in the way that the land yacht guzzled gasoline and oil." - 60 years later all car manfacturers are aiming for the post-oil automobile. The problem so me is the 'auto': it's so inefficient to move people one at a time.

"Russia simply has a different set of national priorities" - For Russia, it is still hard to tell, because it hasn't really achieved a free society. But in the ex-Warsaw Pact countries or China and Vietnam in 2020 it seems obvious now that people living under Communist regimes in 1989 didn't a free society, they wanted more consumer goods. Regimes that provided that survived or were reestablished.

"Today [1960] about nine out of ten American homes contain at least one refrigerator, one television, and one electric or gas oven" - 60 years later my home still has one refrigerator, one oven (though I would like two), but 11 televisual devices (including computers and smartphones).

"...even the long impoverished and slow starting Soviet Union may someday find itself trying to deal with an overflowing of goods." - Nope, didn't happen: China, maybe?

"One fourth of the factories City will be located on the edge of a cliff...When demand is slack...the output...will drop out of sight and go directly to their graveyard without first overwhelming the consumer market." - when you consider scrap, packaging and early obsolescence, it doesn't too high a figure.

"The end of the Scandanavian Kingdom of York and the final Unification of Kingdom that might be called England seems a reasonable place to draw a line under the Viking Age. But...that narrative does not end in 954." - Perhaps the political history of 'England' doesn't actually start until 1066

"The Kings of the tenth century conceived of a set of unifying, centralizing ideals...But it was not an illusionary prize...Britain remained resolutely regional in identity and affinities.

"The Danelaw territories of Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk were the most prosperousin lowland Britin, a function not just of entrepreneurial savvy and proximity to Continental markets but also, perhaps, because of the earlier fragmentation of great estates which allowed smaller, more enterprising landowers to exploit rural resources and adopt new tecgnologies."

"When they are excavated, some of these minster establishments look for all the world like small towns" - there is an history of urbanisation in England buried in this book. The Anglo-Saxons never took over Roman towns. Later towns were founded around Church establishments. The Vikings tooks to urban living immediately. Finally Anglo-Saxon towns were formed around the burhs that were built to push the Vikings back.

"The implication is that assimilated Danes, settled north and east of Watling Street since the days of the 'mycel here', now Christianized and perhaps, Like Urm, married into native families, resented the overt heathenism of the two Irish Norse kings..." - why did Danes in England assimilated so much quicker than the Norse in Ireland?

"Some place names seem to reflect a revival of paganism in the North" - obviously, Christianity was the religion of the elite, but how Christian were the ordinary Anglo-Saxons? The ease of Danish assimilation suggests that their not that much difference between the two populations.

"REX TOTIUS BRITANNIAE" - King of England wasn't Athelstan's aim

"From the seventh century it had been the practice of the earliest Christian kings of Northumbria to gift daughters (and sisters) to the church and to endow them with large estates from which they could implement dynastic policy via extensive networks of patronage." - following the example of the mother church in Rome.

"The grandsons of Ivarr had reconquered Dublin and wrested control of its sister city, York, after 918. Dublin now underwent rapid urban expansion..." - he hasn't really explained why the Vikings were able to do this, and why they were unable to do this in their homelands, geography, demographics? English urbanisation, however, seems to be a defensive reaction to the Vikings, rather something persued for its self.

"There is no hint that Lincoln offered any provision for the veneration of the pagan idols of its conquerors" ... what is there in Scandinavia?

"It may be significant that both Oswold and Eadmund seem to have been the focus of head cults, a deeply ancient, pre-Christian Insular phenomenon" - and right hand cults?

"...some of the shield wood survived, with its colours remarkably intact: black and white striped bands with red dots - the insignia of his war band or family." - Heraldry is obviously older than our records of it.

"The urban experiment ultimately failed in Roman Britain: the toga-wearing elite retired to their country villas, then to their ancient hillforts and left the towns to fall into ruin." - not just in Britain, I was shocked when I realised how much smaller Boroque Rome was compared to Classical Rome.

"For a modern analogy [of Alfred's conception of overlordship] one thinks of Britain's post war relationship with the United States in which Britain is expected to represent American interests in Europe and fight in its wars in order to enjoy the benefits of protection, economic favouritism and a 'special' status"

"....The first two bona fide Scandanavian kings of English states...both seem to have adopted Insular Christian values, at least nominally" - they wanted in

"...Alfred failure to earn the status of a Christian saint (by virtue of avoiding matyrdom in battle against the heathen)" - I thought Kingly conversion was the requirement, should check across European saintly royalty.

"...much of the North was bilingual during the late ninth and centuries and that, crucially, there seems to have been no social prejudice between the two groups, as there was later between Old English and Norman French." - pagan Vikings good, Christian Normans bad?

[The Vikings] set no precedent for their Northern descendant, William, whose Harrying of the North on 1069-70 laid waste great swathes of territory, inducing famine and economic destruction. Like earlier (and later) would-be invaders, much of their interest in the insular kingdoms was fostered by their wealth, their administrative administration and cultural confidence. - summarized as 'the Church'?

"[In 864...Charles the Bald followed] in the footsteps of the late Roman Codices, to impose universal military burdens, to revalue and reform coinage, to recognize the army and create a rapid response cavalry unit..." - Alfred likewise?

"[The minsters] unique advantages, in privileges and international connections to a European-wide web of Latinate, educated, capital-intensive centres of social and economic excellence, loaded trade in their favour, and they exploited it to the full." - Adams gives the impression that independently of the spiritual and biological benefits of Christianity, it would acheive hegemony through economics alone.