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Reading to Understand The Past
When I read books i read to be transported back to a different time and a different way of thinking. That’s why i read James Bond books, among others. The books are old-fashioned but it is that obsolescence that makes them interesting.
They take us to a time before travel as we know it today. Imagine reading about being sun burned and sun oil. Imagine reading about speeding cars. Imagine reading about a time before road safety laws and speed limits. Imagine reading about when scuba diving was still exotic and more.
Recently people have been reading old books and destroying them by changing words and meanings. By editing books to be socially acceptable today we are behaving like the priest with a bell in Il Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. Do you remember the scene. Clang clang clang, insert a paper into the film reel where the kiss has to be spliced out.
The morality police isn’t splicing kisses or sex. It is neutralising gender, offensive terms and more. Words that make children giggle and laugh are being removed by grown ups.
They, the adults, see this as a social good but I don’t. In the age of Brexit, COVID denialism and a shift by political parties to the Far Right why are we worrying about books when the real social ill comes from what politicians are saying, of how populism is being used, to mislead people to vote against their own best interests?
A book is just a glimpse into the past and i am worried about the present.
My view on books is that we read them to understand how people saw the world before, whether from the 90s, the 50s or a century ago. We read Jane Austen A) because our English teacher told us to, but second to understand a different age and way of seeing the contemporary world. The world, contemporary to the writer, not to us.
I remember reading The Tiger that came to tea, thinking, “this is old fashioned and sexist” but that doesn’t stop me from reading it for a sibling’s offspring. Instead, it would be an opportunity for a well brought up child to say “but that tiger was not kind, that tiger was rude, and so was the dad when he came home.”
This brings me on to “All Creatures Great and Small”. “Oh I do wish you would pay attention” and more. Siegfried tells James off on a number of occassions for what he told James to do. James gets angry, but doesn’t say anything.
The issue with sensitivity readers is that they are moving on to adult books, with adult themes. James Bond is old fashioned, but if it is re-written then it loses some if its allure. I read James Bond while working in a humanitarian organisation. I knew that it was written in a different age, when people had different values and norms.
I worry about what contemporaries think, say and write, rather than what people wrote 60 to seventy years ago. The past is the past. Modern conversations, and modern books should reflect modern values. Will old films be re-edited to remove smoking? Will old films be edited for modern values?
Where will the line be drawn, on changing the past, to suit the views of people today?
And Finally
Roald Dahl was edited for modern audiences but the originals are still available, so you can have the “modern politically correct version” or the old fashioned historical version. Will you read the old fashioned version, and have a conversation about values, or read the sanitised version, and skip the conversation on morality and ethics?
Version Control, Engineering and Rocket Engines
Every Rocketdyne engine was fine tuned and perfected by hand, from plans, that were modified but not updated. This means that each engine was unique. It would take trial and error to build them again.
With GIT and other forms of version control the entire process could theoretically have been logged and preserved, not so, in this context. Interesting video.
Funerary Relief – Colourised
When we have seen hundreds of statues and other objects over the decades of our lives, it is easy to assume that statues and other objects are just statues, that they have no colour, but of course they did. What was just a relief becomes a 3d painting after colour is added. It brings sculptures and reliefs back to life.
With 3d modelling it is easy to reproduce an exact replica of a painting or sculpture and then imagine how it would have been colouried. Tweets are frequently shared, that show statues and other objects as they would have looked when new. With mosaics we see them dry and dull, but with water they come back to life.
I considered playing with colours in photo editing software to bring colours from a mosaic back to vivid life.
Twitter and SMS
Back in the good old days of Twitter the length of a tweet was limited to the length of an SMS. The aim was to make it possible for people to tweet and have conversations using GSM phones. With short messages we could leave the keyboard behind and read messages on our mobile phones.
Jaiku was similar except that it was more advanced, having an app that played well with Symbian devices. With time, and the advent of the iphone and ubiquitous data plans so platforms like Twitter and Jaiku could add images and more. With time Seesmic experimented with video and instagram with images. Instagram thrived because it made uploading and sharing images fast and easy, even in the days of limited bandwidth.
Over the years Twitter and other social media platforms have forgotten about their origins and now a single tweet can take an entire 27″ computer monitor, let alone a laptop screen. What was one short and succinct became long winded, and inefficient.
Twitter wants to extend the character limit to 4000 characters, but that’s absurd. The entire reason for Twitter being, is to have short messages, that are quick to read, a list of headlines, rather than full blown essays.
Remember that blogging platforms have snippets and sub-headings for a reason, to make them easy to skim.
Twitter has lost its bearings now. They are trying to be different products, at a high price, rather than highlight their unique selling point. I don’t want to read long tweets. I want short tweets. I even want to turn off images, to make the feed shorter and more succinct.
And Finally
I want to joke that the reason for “cargo pants” or cargo trousers as I prefer to call them is to store FFP2 masks during a pandemic. They are the ideal size for masks. It’s easy to store them during your outdoors walks, and pull them out once you are back indoors, or near people.
Perm 36 YouTube Video Visit
Last night I watched a video about a visit to Perm36 but it covered just the trip. The video below is far more complete and informative. I am currently reading Gulag by Anne Applebaum, rather than The Gulag Archipelago, like she mentions. I started reading it decades ago but never finished it. I read A day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch in a single day.
Reading Gulag, The Gulag Archipelago and other books helps give some context to what Soviet Russia was like. As I read Gulag by Applebaum I get the feeling that Soviet Russia was about enslaving people to make profit for some whilst everyone else suffers. From this perspective what the Soviet Union would morph into, at the end of the Soviet age would make more sense.
I recommend watching this video. It is informative.