If you’re interested in learning about wine, this will surely be a great course.
James Flewellen, one of the course organisers and tipped for great things by wine writer Jancis Robinson, writes at The Oxford Wine Blog which is also definitely worth checking out for a simple, no-nonsense approach to appreciating wine.
via Outre monde
Patrick Nagel - Isetan
This blog gets a varied readership at times, reflecting as it does my own interests which range from the philosophical on one hand to fashion on the other. I therefore couldn’t resist the somewhat cryptic title, though I must now disappoint the ethicists expecting a post about Thomas Nagel, and instead delight the sartorialists with a post about Patrick Nagel.
Nagel got his big break illustrating that venerable icon of men’s special interest literature (Playboy) but became more widely known in the 1980s partly through illustrating a famous Duran Duran album cover, and then because of his fashion illustrations. Famous for his bold, posterised depictions of beautiful women wearing elegant, if rather revealing, garments, his work has echoes of Art Deco but also a more timeless, almost Iconic quality. Though I suspect the Virgin Mary might balk at the idea of posing for a Nagel illustration.
Nagel passed away from a heart attack before he reached 40. Perhaps appropriately for a pop-art figure, he died of a heart attack after appearing in that most faddy of mid-1980s events, an aerobics-themed charity telethon. Now enough talk, and more Nagel pictures instead. And that’s the kind of altruistic yet self-serving generosity that those readers who expected a Thomas Nagel post should appreciate as well…
Patrick Nagel - Sunglasses
Patrick Nagel - Shannon
Patrick Nagel - Blue Sweater
Get into Medicine UK
After more than a year of enjoyable personal blogging on WordPress, I’m proud to announce a new blog: Get into Medicine UK.
Eagle-eyed readers will have noted the appearance of its link in my blogroll here this week, but I’d like to take a moment of your time to introduce it properly. As some of you know, I run a course helping prospective applicants Get into Medical School, explaining the complexities of the application process and the exams & interviews they face.
A key thing that students need to be able to demonstrate, both in their personal statements and interviews, is enthusiasm for the subject and an awareness of ongoing ethical & controversial issues in the field. Of course, you’d hope they’d be interested in keeping up to date for their own interest too, but it’s sometimes difficult to find time for this in addition to all the other work they’re doing.
Get into Medicine UK aims to help students maintain this awareness and enthusiasm by collecting some of the more interesting health & medicine stories from around the web into one easy-to-follow place. It also includes prompts for some of the ideas and questions the stories raise, which students might want to think about before their interviews. And best of all, the site is entirely free, with no restricted/pay content.
Of course, a lot of health news has relevance to a wider audience too, so even if you’re not in the health profession or trying to get into it, you should find something interesting to read there too.
Never fear, Beyond Anomie will remain my personal blog, but the great thing about WordPress is the flexibility of its platform and I’m excited about using it for Get into Medicine UK.
Thanks for your ongoing support, and do please spread the word to anyone you know who might be thinking about a career in Medicine!
FTSE stock market stagnation since 1998, data from Yahoo Finance
As world stock markets take another cold plunge again today, even the most rational and fundamental-focused investor takes a sharp intake of breath and wonders when a corner will be turned. Obviously, if the eurozone got a grip of its debt problem, things would begin to improve. But leaving such common sense to one side, this is precisely the kind of febrile climate that encourages one to explore stranger waters.
One step removed from goldbug hysteria and palmistry is economic wave theory. The more comprehensible end of the spectrum focuses on the logical and simple fact that businesses will leverage themselves more when things are going well, and then have to deleverage and contract when economic times sour. This is all sensible enough, and accounts for the basic cycle of boom and bust.
A more subtle variation of this is the Kitchin cycle, which is the manifestation of an information lag. It takes time for businesses to both recognise and act on fresh market information, for example by expanding & buying new stock or converselylaying workers off & restricting inventory. The Kitchen cycle is therefore thought to operate over about a 4 year term.
A slightly slower wave is the Juglar cycle, which operates over about an 8 year cycle. This measures not how business use the resources they already have available to them, but how the invest in creating new resources, for example building a new factory or power plant. These things take longer, so the Juglar cycle is a longer than the Kitchen one.
Beyond this territory, we enter more speculative economic wave theory. At a 20 year cycle level, some believe a Kuznets cycle operates, reflecting world movements in migrant populations and the effects they have on GDP. Kuznets applied a mathematical filter to economic data to reveal his cycle. Unfortunately, application of the same filter on white noise (random data) also reveals this cycle, suggesting it is an artifact of the filter rather than a real event, although arguments continue to this day whether it is real.
If the Kuznets cycle is controversial, the Kondratieff (or Kondratiev) wave is in the realm of the fabulous. It suggest an even longer 40 year cycle and suggests that the economy has relatively quiescent (though possibly volatile) periods alternating with more steady booms in activity. The theoretical basis to the Kondratieff wave is that it reflects the emergence of revolutionary new technologies and their impact on the economy. Some have gone so far as to suggest that the period between about 1983 and 1999 was one of the booming phases (reflecting the microchip revolution), implying we’re now in the middle of one of those volatile but stagnant intervening times.
While it all sounds fantastical, if one projects backwards it’s tempting to selectively choose facts to fit the theory. For example, the period of 1965 – 1983 was equally stagnant and volatile as the past 12 years, in terms of stock market fluctuation. And before that, 1950 – 1965 showed marked increases in valuations. Further back in time, 1929 – 1945 coincided with the Great Depression and WWII, whereas before that were the Roaring Twenties. If Kondratieff wave theory has a kernel of truth, then the current volatile stagnation will stretch until about 2016, although the last two years before then should show signs of steady growth too. So only a few more years of trouble left…
To finish on a more optimistic (although probably even less well-founded) note, I must mention the Elliott Wave Supercycle (or Grand Supercycle Theory). This speculates that there is a 250+ year broader supercycle of oscillating economic activity. The most recent one is thought to have begun in the early part of the 19th century, beginning with the Industrial Revolution. If true, we still have another 50+ years of boom, before the world economy drifts into between two and three centuries of relative waning.
See, it’s not all bad!
Bond aficionados will already be quoting back the next lines in From Russia with Love,
“I use a lighter”
“That’s better still”
“Until they go wrong.”
However, in this case of Cold War spy shenanigans, the match may be better used to torch the outfits rather than as part of a coded exchange. The photo is of an East German Stasi agent demonstrating disguises for his superiors. It’s strange to think that the once-terrifying Stasi secret police are now kitsch internet humour fodder.
The full slideshow can be found at this link, and are from a Berlin exhibition of previously highly classified photographs, but here are a couple more, just for giggles:
I’ve previously talked a lot about how clothes can help define your identity, but let’s just say I didn’t have this sort of thing in mind…!
Mind you, I’m sure I’ve seen the guy on the right typing up a novel on an Mac in a coffee shop recently… 
Cover of Departures
In today’s world of TV on demand, there remains great value in having live television quietly on in the background of a room while busy doing something else. Just occasionally, it causes one to stumble upon something that captures the imagination and draws attention away from other tasks. Such was the happy case last night that led me to watch Departures.
The 2009 Foreign Language Oscar-winning film tells the story of a cellist, Daigo, who unexpectedly loses his orchestra job, is forced to return to his hometown, and almost accidentally finds work as a nokanshi, an “encoffiner” who is responsible for ritually preparing the body for burial.
The movie tells of his growing pride in his work as he masters the movements and techniques involved in the death ritual, and of his growing understanding of the emotional importance of his role in helping bereaved families reconnect the corpse with the living person for one last goodbye. The other threads of the movie – his relationships with his wife, his father and his neighbours – are woven beautifully together over the last 20 minutes into a poignant and uplifting climax.
I will not reveal more plot details, for fear of spoiling the movie for others who have not yet seen it, but it is a work that demonstrates something rather special about the Japanese attitude. Daigo’s developing emotions and conceptual understanding of the power of his work (despite its low social status in Japan) reveal an acceptance of death. But this is not a fatalistic outlook. Instead it is an acknowledgement of death as life. Death becomes a way of reconnecting with the living, making the dead person more alive in the memory than they were in actuality. If death is life, so too does the movie suggest that ugliness is beauty and tragedy is joy. These are not depicted as opposite sides of the same coin, which is about as close as many thoughtful Western attitudes to this topic would get, but rather that the coin has no sides.
The unity of these experiences – for Daigo, and the viewer – is what creates poignancy and hope. Death becomes not something to be overcome in a search for meaning and immortality, but something to be experienced and “done well”. This is an attitude I find both intellectually and emotionally very appealing, though it remains a harder challenge to fully live it on a deeper level.
As our societies struggle with various ethical difficulties associated with aging and dying (dementia, assisted suicide, euthanasia, etc.), Departures is brave enough to tell a different story: one of hope and fulfilment.
Living in Oxford, one is constantly surrounded by cultural and architectural marvels. It’s easy to become blasé about the opportunities this offers. Take the Ashmolean Museum, which recently underwent a major multimillion pound refurbishment. I have revisited it since it reopened (and keenly anticipate the re-opening of the Egyptian wing after further gallery modernisation work), but it took a visit from family to prompt me to look at the current Heracles to Alexander the Great exhibition.
The exhibition features some extraordinary finds from the ancient royal city of Aegae. The first capital of the Macedonians, Aegae was home to the Temenid dynasty which ruled over the land for centuries and included both Philip II and his even more famous son, Alexander the Great.
Aegae was excavated in the 1970s by Professor Manolis Andronikos, who discovered the tombs of King Philip II and other members of Alexander’s immediate family, and these excavations were continued more recently by Dr Angeliki Kottaridi. Many of the tombs were found in undisturbed condition, yielding beautiful artifacts.
The museum does not permit photography within the exhibition area, but these photos in this post are from their press release and reveal the beauty of some of the items. The golden Medusa at the top of the post is taken from tomb of Philip II – the workmanship is magnificently intricate. It is one of two found in the tomb, and would originally have adorned a linen cuirass (breastplate) as a device to avert evil, and so protect the wearer. The gold myrtle wreath below is from the tomb of Meda, his Thracian princess wife, and while pretty enough, the photo below does not reveal the spectacular detail of the wreath nor the delicacy of the work that is evident in real life.
The exhibition includes many other remarkable finds, including solid silver drinking sets, golden burial outfits and more. But what struck me even more forcefully than the bling were portions of the wall frescos found at Aegae.
Most people, if asked to describe Greek Art, would recall the typical black & red earthenware designs. Figures are painted in profile, in stylised poses and with minimal perspective/foreshortening. The frescos are entirely differently. They are painted in a naturalistic style, in glorious technicolour, and include three-quarter profile figures which demonstrate a clear grasp of foreshortening. It is probably my own fault for not being aware of this strand of Greek Art before, but I was blown away by how modern in style these paintings appeared:
Alexander on his favourite stallion, Bucephalus, image source embedded as link
The exhibition was tautly edited; almost every piece was revelatory, demonstrating how much depth there is to this period of history. If you have the opportunity to vist the Ashmolean before the 29th of August, I strongly recommend paying the small entry fee to the exhibition and seeing what fresh knowledge you take away from the impressive artifacts on display.
My good friend Dr Neel Burton recently announced the 2012 dates for his Meaning of Madness Summer School at Oxford. They are the 6th August 2012 through 10th August 2012.
More details can be found on his blog and on the dedicated course website. Knowing Neel well, and having read his book of the same name (upon which the course is based on & builds upon) I am confident in saying that attendees will find the course an entertaining and educational experience!
Do check it out if learning about the mind, and mental disorders, appeals to you.
