Happy Christmas 2012

Though I would rather be here...

... and in summer.

Bah! Humbug! Office Christmas Decorations

I have no idea what overcame the otherwise sensible, conservative people who work around me, but last week one of the senior managers decorated her sections with a few tinsels, a small tree and this gingerbread house...

and after a day, all hell broke loose.

Weight Train: You Won't Get Musclebound

Weight training separates the serious from the merely energetic gym attendee. Every athlete in any sport includes some carefully-designed weight training in their routines. It helps with core strength and maintains a good tone to your muscles. The only way to prevent chicken wings is by doing tricep curls, dips or similar. After you get the initial aches out of the way, you will like the way your body feels after it's pushed and pulled a bit of weight around. 

You don't have to heft big weights, but you may want to push yourself just a little more than you are. You don't have to develop a hard body: you can do arm curls and still have biceps that are "soft to the touch". Soft, not flabby. If you're a girl, remember that Jessica Ennis makes being well-toned look very hot. If you're a guy, remember that a lot of girls don't actually like a hard-bodied man. Hard bodies are like whisky: an acquired taste. If you want to feel a hard body, hold a female dancer. No spare flesh and not a soft muscle on her.

The first gym I went to was the locally legendary Riverside Gym in Hampton Court, run by the equally legendary Myles Irvine. Every now and then a potential lady customer would be shown round, take a look at the dumb-bell rack and make a remark like "I don't want to get muscle-bound". This would cause a quiet snort of "as if" from the male clients there, all of whom had been pushing heavy iron for many, many months without getting in the slightest over-muscled. If only we could even approach being muscle-bound.

Add some weights to your training. You won't get musclebound.

Don't Give Up Your Home

"This sense of being at home is important to everyone’s well-being. If you do not get enough of it, your happiness, resilience, energy, humor, and courage will decrease … Being at home feels safe; you have a sense of relief whenever you come home and close the door behind you … Home is the one place in the world … where you belong … Coming home is your major restorative in life. These are formidably good things, which you cannot get merely by finding true love or getting married or having children or landing the best job in the world—or even by moving into the house of your dreams." (Cheryl Mendelson, Home Comforts)

Many people have never known this feeling. They moved from the family house, to university hall or flat, to a flat/house share to a live-in to a marriage to having a child crying 24/7/52. 

To know the feeling of home-as-sanctuary, you need to have lived on your own for a couple of years and coped with the shopping, housework, cleaning, ironing and cooking, without resorting to take-away food, a cleaner and getting your shirts ironed at the dry cleaners. You need to have made wherever you're living your own, as much as the lease will let you, by painting, shelving, smaller items of furniture and decorations. Otherwise you're just living in someone else's space for a while. 

Once known, the feeling of home-as-sanctuary is not willingly given up. When you have a place of comfort and safety, why would you let in a terrorist who can at random make your life a mess and a misery?

Albert Bridge, Tuesday Evening

My activities on a Tuesday bring me, about 21:30, to the Albert Bridge bus stop for the 170 to Clapham Junction. It's one of the quiet, private, pleasant moments of my week, however cold and dark it may be.

iPhone again. Its reaction to light makes for the right atmosphere.

Don't Give Up Mathematics

A long time ago when I was an impressionable young lad doing my first industrial work experience at Pembroke Power Station, I asked one of the engineers there if doing a degree in electrical engineering meant he could understand the huge circuit diagram he was unfolding. He said that it didn't, but it gave him the confidence to believe he could understand it.

That's one reason to do an undergraduate degree: the other is that, as Karl Popper suggested, it should give you the confidence and background knowledge to distinguish a fraud from the real thing.

You need to choose your subject to get either of these benefits. Any of the hard subjects - the ones where there are answers or clear standards of rigorous argument - will do, and outside the law and philosophy, that means it has to have some mathematics in it. (The presence of mathematics is necessary but not sufficient, as witness economics.) Also, philosophers tend to get a dose of formal logic thrown at them, and that's a branch of mathematics.

The real benefit of doing undergraduate mathematics is so you can study some post-graduate maths in your spare time when you enter into what's laughably known as the "real world". Remember the jolt you had moving from GCSE maths to A-level? That's what moving from undergraduate to post-graduate is like. All the abstract subjects you studied - especially topology, group theory and commutative algebra - become taken-as-read background knowledge.

The other casual remark I'll never forget in this regard was from John Bell at the LSE, at the start of his Boolean Algebras / Model Theory course. A light smattering of topology is required to understand the Stone Representation Theorem. If you didn't know any, he suggested, "just read the first three chapters of Kelly for next week". That's a one-term undergraduate course in point-set topology - in a week. Along with the day job.

Come on! Get with the program! Step up your game!

This doesn't work so well with the arts. People read Ulysses for an English Literature degree fer Gawd's Sake. And besides, reading Musil isn't hard because he writes badly, but because you need a lot of experience of the Worldly World before you can really grok it. Same goes for C P Snow's Strangers and Brothers. The more you get about in the world, the easier some of its great literature becomes to read - except Clarissa. 

The other great advantage of keeping up your maths is that lots of subjects are much easier for mathematicians to pick up than regular mortals - because they already have much of the background knowledge anyway. A mathematician reads an exposition of, say, cluster analysis in a very different way than someone who's still struggling with root-mean-square distances. 

The Courtyard Inside Bishopsgate

I pass this view almost every lunchtime on my way to lunch in Hoxton or Shoreditch, since I can't abide the theme-park fakery of Spitalfields. That Friday the light was just darn right, so I finally shot the place. With the iPhone.

That's Liverpool Street station at lunchtime. It's the second-busiest in the UK, but compared to the constant madness that is Waterloo (the busiest by about another 60%), it looks like a midlands terminus. I have left out the awful kitsch sculture of a rounded fat woman lying on her side, though if you click on the bottom photo you may see it in the background.

It's all fake 1980's cookie-cutter imported-from-the-US design. That big building in the bottom photograph has pointless atriums on the outside walls, eight lifts which are always going in the other direction and the worst 3G reception inside any building I've ever not had.