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Really must get out on my bike soon...
(This post is just an excuse for testing out something with oddmuse)
Ted Ernst is mystified by cricket.
Ted, you are not alone. But we can work this out - it'll be worth it. At least you're not French or German - they _really_ don't get it.
I found this explanation of cricket, it's quite good. You need proper illustrations not ASCII art though.
I have a fantastic book on cricket with really good pictures and very clear explanation; I wish I could scan it in and put it on the web for you.
But I'd be happy to chat cricket through with you any time.
Are you on IM? Email me!
: I'm maybe 20% through that page you linked and it's awesome! I'll report back again when I've read more. Thanks much! --Ted Ernst
: Okay, I've read the whole thing. Excellent. Is there anywhere I can see some video? I still just can't get my mind around what bowling or striking look like. Thanks! --Ted Ernst
I'll look for some video for you!
http://www.channeldosti.com/cricket-videos.php is all right, lots of short-ish videos. I haven't checked them all out.
Look for Malcolm Marshall, Joel Garner, Frank Tyson and Dennis Lillee among the bowlers on page 4. David Gower and Viv Richards among the batsmen. Jonty Rhodes is a great fielder - look at his video for examples of great catches. Shoaib Akhtar is among the fastest bowlers in the world at the moment. Anil Kumble for a fine example of the art of "slow" (spin) bowling. Look for Ian Botham and Shahid Afridi for some big hits. The guys in white jackets waving their arms about are the umpires.
Also the BBC have some tutorials in their cricket section: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/default.stm
Skills videos and animations are here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/skills/default.stm
HTH --FrancisBarton
Lovely anecdote about the famously absent-minded Norbert Wiener:
"After several years teaching at MIT, the Wieners moved to a larger house. Knowing it would be in her husband's nature to forget where he now lived after work, Mrs. Wiener wrote down the address of the new house on a piece of paper and made him put it in his shirt pocket.
"At lunchtime, an inspiring idea came to the professor, who proceeded to pull out the paper and scribble down calculations, and to subsequently proceed to find a flaw, and to subsequently proceed to throw the paper away in disgust. At the end of the day, it occurred to Wiener that he had thrown away his address. He now had no idea where his home was.
"Putting his mind to work, he concocted a plan: go to his old home and wait to be rescued. Surely Margaret would realize he was lost and come to pick him up. When he arrived at the house, there was a little girl standing out front.
"'Excuse me, little girl,' he asked, 'would you happen to know where the people who used to live here moved to?' 'It's okay, Daddy,' the girl replied, 'Mommy sent me to get you.'"
(Decades later, Norbert Wiener's daughter was tracked down by a mathematics newsletter. She denied he forgot who she was.)
(from Wikipedia)
File under: Apocrypha ;-)
Another quote (a long one) from Gregory Bateson’s Notion of the Sacred - What Can it Tell Us about Living Constructively? by Vincent Kenny, section 6.
This is the sort of stuff that I usually consider to be nonsense, but actually I thought it was really lovely. Here it is:
This summer I was on an almost deserted beach in Sardinia. In front of me there was a little baby girl who had just realised that she could ‘walk’ if, having got up onto her feet, she threw herself forward she could stumble four or five paces before losing momentum and falling down again. She was totally absorbed with this new discovery of free movement. She continued with this cycle of rising, lunging forward, taking some steps and falling again for several minutes. At a certain point her attention was taken by the marks left in the sand by her hands as she fell. She had made another discovery! She realised that by hitting the sand with her hands, she could make all kinds of fascinating holes and indentations. As she was busy with this new discovery, the waves swept in reaching just to where she was sitting and washed the sand smooth and clear of any marks at all. Another discovery!!
What was it that she had witnessed? She then repeated the whole sequence - running, falling, making hand-marks in the sand - then watching the water come in and erase everything. Amazing!!! Next she ran a few steps and made more holes. Again the tide wiped all her markings on the world away. She ran back to the previous spot, making holes, watching the water erase everything. Now she ran back and forth between the two points where she was making marks - as if trying to conserve some marks against the erasing of the water. She continued this experiment for several minutes. Then again something new! A single piece of seaweed was left behind by the waves. She picked it up, gazing at its glistening, shining, colours - waving it back and forth, catching the sunlight’s reflections. This was too exciting! She ran and fell back down the beach to where her parents were.
She demonstrated her exciting discovery, screeching with joy, waving it in the sunlight - but it seemed that her father had already seen seaweed. He took it from her and threw it down on the sand. Then lifted her up and placed her in her new brightly coloured rubber floating ring, and pushed her out into the water for some proper beach activity. As soon as he stopped pushing, she twisted around in the rubber ring, turning back towards the beach, striving forward with a great effort, she arrived back to the sand, threw herself out of the ring, and ran back to where the seaweed had been thrown. She picked it up again, and this time went to her mother to share her exciting discovery. This time her mother took her sharing seriously and engaged with her daughter in the immediacy of her astonishing discovery. I later asked them how old she was, and they told me she was just 13 months.
I tell you this story because I want to leave you with an image of the Sacred in action. This baby girl was in a state of Sacredness, being able to spontaneously live her amazement of being-in-the-world, discovering exciting connectedness between herself and everything around her. Each of us had this capability of living in the Sacred before language caught us and made us into humans-with-conscious-purposes. Thereafter we become blind to the operation of the Sacred within our own being. If we are lucky, we retain the ability to be occasionally amazed, astonished, in awe of the whole system within which our living is embedded.
The little girl, not yet having entered into languaging, is free to spontaneously be in the sacred. We, on the other side of the languaging barrier, are no longer free to do so - unless we are very lucky, and we find ourselves in astonishment before some phenomenon of nature. We must impossibly struggle to free ourselves of the grasp of language in order to be able to sense the systemic complexity of our living.
Our current cultural orientation to ‘creating a product’ blinds us to the here and now of our interactions with others. It is therefore difficult to be in the present in our relationships - including the mother-infant relationship in the play situation. To remain in ‘total mutual acceptance without expectations’ is very difficult for many people.
It is worth underlining the way in which this outlook helps to define what Kelly meant by the Psychology of Understandings - it is a way of living in relationships with others so that we are able to sustain our ‘personal presence’ in an ongoing ‘present moment’. Or, to put it differently, we are in a relationship of reciprocal presence together. What the Psychology of Understandings implies therefore is that we are in relation with the other person in a series of present moments in such a way that we do NOT operate under the explicit or tacit intention of ‘doing something’ to, with, or for the other person. We are simply, personally, present.
I conclude with a final quote from Wittgenstein -
"Man has to thrust against the limits of language. Think for instance about one's astonishment that anything exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question and there is no answer to it. Anything we say must, /a priori/, be only nonsense. Nevertheless we thrust against the limits of language. Kierkegaard, too, recognised this thrust and even described it in much the same way (as a thrust against paradox). This thrust against the limits of language is ethics. I regard it as very important to put an end to all the chatter about ethics - whether there is knowledge in ethics, whether there are values, whether the Good can be defined, etc. In ethics, one constantly tries to say something that does not concern and can never concern the essence of the matter. It is a priori certain that, whatever definition one may give of the Good, it is always a misunderstanding to suppose that the formulation corresponds to what one really means, (Moore). But the tendency, the thrust, points to something. (Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics. Philosophical Review, Vol. LXXIV. no. 1, 1929)"
<em>"The phenomena we call 'culture' arise as people pool and accumulate their discoveries, and as they institute conventions to co-ordinate their labours and adjudicate their conflicts. When groups of people separated by time and geography accumulate different discoveries and conventions, we use the plural and call them cultures."</em>
Quoted in /Sinister storytellers, magic flutes and spinning tops: the links between play and 'popular' culture/, Sandra Smidt, /Early Years/ Vol. 24 No 1, March 2004, p.79
Smidt writes about Paula Rego, disturbing surrealist painter, "the sinister storyteller."
She reflects on the cultural influences on her grandchildren's play, and how these can scaffold their learning and inspire them to learn in self-directed and novel ways. The popular cultural influences (cartoons, Harry Potter, Pokemon etc.) are important because they click with the interests and level of understanding that children have, and so they can make sense of and assimilate what they are exposed to, and hence learn from it.
What is popular culture? In order to answer this, Smidt has first to define culture. Hence the Pinker quote above.
"Learning is to do with the transmission of culture." The passing on of accumulated knowledge, adaptations, discoveries and traditions.
To be continued...
Am getting the OddHack wiki back up and running again after a few months of neglect. Am going to make a success of it!
Also, have revived the pygoscelis.org.uk domain name and added cuppa.org.uk as well! I now have a new email address have@cuppa.org.uk LOL !!!
Babies everywhere...
We have just 9 weeks left till the arrival of [FredBarton? Beta Barton].
But Mr & Mrs Jimmac have already made it.
And Tim Bray and Lauren are in on the act too. I *love* Tim's post on the subject.
Our NCT group that we have been part of for the last week or so is really nice. Trying to get everything ready for the Great Arrival. The thing is, as Everybody says, you just can't be ready for it.
Worked from home today, got lots of reading done on culture, play and shared meaning.
Notes on <i>Collaborative pretend play: From theory to therapy</i> by Susan Hendler Lederer (Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 2002 pp.233-255)
<b>Frameworks for collaborative pretend play in young children</b>
1. Shared script knowledge (references Schank and Abelson, 1977)
"A script is the underlying cognitive framework for an experience..."
<em>Transformations</em> between different scripts or agendas can be accomplished through <em>metacommunication</em> (Bateson, 1972)
2. Metacommunication
Metacommunication sets the 'frame' for interpretation (and thence communication)
A form of ongoing regulation of social interactions (specifically play transactions)
Check Giffin (1984) - quite old
Giffin - expressive (defining) metacomms ; and adaptive (refining/negotiating) metacomms.
Examples of metacommunication: Setting the stage for a game of doctors
Theatre metaphor - metacomms can be spoken in the voice of an off-stage director (a) or in the voice of an on-stage actor-director (b).
(a) "Let's pretend I'm the patient"
(b) "Oh doctor I'm feeling sick."
3. Rules knowledge
What are the rules? Giffin (1984):
a) Players must pretend
b) Players must collaborate * Surely "collude" would be a better verb ;-) *
<b>Relationship to language intervention</b>
Pretend play skills linked to language and literacy development, cognitive skills such as divergent thinking (what it is?) and social skills
<b>development of pretend play from solitary to collaborative</b>
Solitary pretend play begins at age 1
Piaget : decentration -> decontextualisation -> integration
Becomes increasingly complex 30 months -> 5 years
Analysis of metacommunication, script and rule observance in play can be used as a developmental diagnostic marker when assessing children's language and social development.
Example in paper.
NOTE TO SELF:
Need to read Hughes on Evolutionary Playwork and Bateson's Ecology of Mind book.
Try some Roger Schank?
FURTHER RESEARCH IDEAS
shared culture and meanings
labelling and naming
attitudes towards play, particularly the concept of free play.
research into the psychology and politics (Guardian, Ecologist) of free play rather than ... the lower politics of playwork and funding etc. However attitudes towards playwork are important in both (sorry for the dualism, maybe it's a spectrum not a division.)
=Some notes from Sarah James=
James, S. (1990) Is there a 'place' for children in geography? /Area/ 22, 378-83
Quote (p.379)
"Land use and facilities which involve children are often different to those used by adults. hence children's 'places' form a context for behaviour which is fundamentally different from the context of adult behaviour. Even when children share the same settings as adults, such as the home or public space, parks and shopping centres, what they expect and what they are expected to do there is likely to differ, and thus we see variations in ways in which children and adults experience the same environment. For example, in parks the children use the space for play; physical and emotional exploration and development of various kinds; whilst for the adults who accompany the children the space may perform a social function, a place to meet and talk to other parents and child-minders.
"The establishment and distribution of land uses of central importance to children are politically and economically determined, but children remain largely outside the decision-making systems..."
"...children may find nothing that is attractive to them in the school playground although the school and its surroundings are one of the few places which are actually designedspecirfically for them. And yet, there is ample evidence that many children's activities do not take place in these specialised settings, with many children making use of derelict land or simply playing in the street rather than the immaculate purpose-built playground."
"Attention is increasingly focussed on people (usually women) /with/ children..."
adults physically stronger
more experienced
more autonomous (freedom of use of motor transport etc, access to wider range of transport)
children's territory is more specified, homogenous and restricted.
children less able to escape (may lead to emotional problems, and frustrated desire to escape and be free?)
children's environments are "protected" and "managed", kept separate
bond between women and children can be seen as a bond of shared oppression.
"...this oppression is intertwined and mutually reinforcing in such complex ways that it is difficult to talk about the liberation of women without also including children."
children's interpretations of spaces differ from those of adults (Hugh Matthews' work)
different frames of reference
different goals (frames of interpretation in a pragmatist way of thinking)
"An immediate implication for a geography of children is that, while it may be necessary, it is not sufficient to examine adults' and children's geographical behavioour patternsand perceptions of spcae, find that they differ, and document the differences. We must also uunderstand how these differences come about. We must incorporate the fact that adult actions mediate the relationship between children and the environment in many circumstances, and vice versa. Furthermore, adults are ultimately responsible for forming the environments which influence both children's and adults' positions in the social and power structures..."
Finally put together some ResearchThoughts outlining my initial ideas for my research project.
Haven't posted my daily notes for ages - oops. Recently I have been reading Bateson's Steps To an Ecology of Mind; Sturrock & Else's Colorado Paper, and looking at lots of papers on children's geographies.
This is really interesting me at the moment. I hated geography at school! But this stuff is cool. It's going to be really interesting to look at children's use of space and to bring geographic and psychogeographic perspectives to my existing playwork background perspective on children's play.
I'm not sure about the psychoanalytic approach that Gordon Sturrock brings; I mean, I don't exactly disagree with it, it's just not helpful to me with my existing biases and prejudices. I'm sure there is a valuable healing role for playwork, and I really dig the theoretical approach Sturrock and Else bring with their analysis of the play frame, play drive, play cues and the role of the playworker, and the dangers of adulteration.
I really love the idea of a ludic ecology.
I'm just not so sure about all the primitive Freudian stuff, the mythic consciousness and the sort-of Buddhist take on consciousness. But actually most of the paper, in fact virtually all of it, is really rational and sensible when I actually read it! There's a load of stuff in psychotherapy that sounds like nonsense but Sturrock and Else have managed to make it really grounded and useful.
Edith Cobb on the other hand...
What else have I been doing? Yesterday I had a good meeting with WR about the 160 module which I will be helping to update. That will be a big job for me for the next month or so.
I have been ploughing through a load of Clifford Geertz' writings in ethnography. Pretty cool stuff, if occasionally hard to get your head around. But then I'm not trained in that field or anything like it. But I have been recommended to take an ethnographic line in my approach to my research. At the moment I prefer the biological and psycho-geographic approach. WR seemed to consider biological and ethnographic approaches to be non-complementary in some way - I didn't press her. I suppose in many ways, and in many people's opinions (not saying WR is one of them), biology and culture are pretty opposite ends of a spectrum. But of course I'm with Dennett and Pinker and see culture as a biological artefact.
So I'm happy to see ethnography as biology. What are the differences between ethnography and anthroplogy? Or does anth. subsume ethno.?
anthropology ethnography gregorybateson playwork psychotherapy
Whoa! A beautiful and really clever piece of writing by latest favourite brainbox Mark Jason Dominus.
Green gain in Over Stroud (where?) ward in the District Council elections yesterday, means we now have 5 councillors out of 51. Presumably a gain from Lib Dems? I'm not sure.
Our ward (Slade) wasn't voting this year.
Conservatives gained councillors in Wotton and Cainscross.
Bizarre situation in Cainscross, with 7 candidates standing for 2 seats, 2 from each of the 3 mainstream parties and 1 Green. One of the Labour candidates held their seat, and one of the Conservatives gained a seat from Labour. Now, I know you're voting for individuals, not the party /in theory/, but I would have thought that those who voted Labour would have voted for /both/ Labour candidates? And ditto for the Tories?
Perhaps some voters thought one cross was enough effort for one day. Or maybe lots of people put one vote for a Tory/Labour candidate and one vote for the Green? And the single votes were disproportionately for one candidate rather than another? Weird. Or maybe there are personality issues or clear policy differences between the two candidates? You would have thought in modern politics these things would be ironed out for public consumption.
Details from BBC Gloucestershire to help explain what I mean:
Sylvia Jean BRIDGLAND - Liberal Democrat - 254
Jason Owen BULLINGHAM - Conservative - 584
Laurence CARMICHAEL - Conservative - 664 *
Karon CROSS - Labour - 733 *
Andrew Bruce FISK - Liberal Democrat - 251
Helen ROYALL - Green Party - 375
Thomas Hugh WILLIAMS - Labour - 603
Conservative Gain
Labour Hold
Note – 2 seats up for election
Turn out: 35.33%
If I were Thomas Williams I'd be quite miffed, I think. If the 1336 Labour votes had been evenly split, Cross and Williams would each have had 668 votes, just enough to put Carmichael into third place. I am assuming that most Labour voters voted for both Lab candidates, but obviously a large number voted for just one of them, and then presumably either the Green candidate or nobody. I wonder if there are some people out there who voted (quite within their rights!) once for Labour and once for the Conservatives? Or once for Labour and once for the Lib Dems?
My old mate Miranda Williams stood for Labour in The Stanleys. I assume it's the same Miranda Williams.
Elsewhere, a good day for the Greens, picking up seats in Lewisham, Norwich (where we now have 9 councillors), Sheffield (gain from LD in Central ward!), Oxford, Bristol (for the first time) ... and a larger share of the vote than the Conservatives in Liverpool. Full details from BBC News.
In Cheltenham my mum's friend Martin Hale (Labour) lost his seat in Oakley ward after what must be donkey's years as a councillor, and the Tories gained Up Hatherley and Warden Hill.
PS According to Stroud District Council, Over Stroud is the bit between Stonehouse and Painswick including Randwick, Whiteshill, Cashes Green?, Pitchcombe etc.
"Even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the 'things' of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth. We give our children guns and computer games, /they/ give their children the land."
(unreferenced, quoted in Arthur Battram, Navigating Complexity p. 105)
My contrail:
Action_Research
Nappy_Valley
Patrick_Leigh_Fermor
Claude_Elwood_Shannon
Cybernetics
Constructivist_Epistemology
The_Moscow_Rules
Anechoic_chamber
Arianna_Huffington
Bruce_Chatwin
City_status_in_the_United_Kingdom
De_gustibus_non_est_disputandum
Pataphysics
Settlers_of_Catan
Boids
Double_bind
Gilles_Deleuze
Ozarks
"The [violent weather metaphor] crashes to the [Psalmy landscape metaphor]
Sometimes I wish I could [Biblical miracle metaphor]
Just like [Biblical patriarch name]
But I can’t because I’m only a [man / woman / sinner]
[Praying / crying / calling out] for [sunshine / silver lining image]
I want to see the [positive weather metaphor]
I want to see beyond the [negative weather metaphor]
[First line of chorus] + [song title]"
Partly to test something out with OddMuse...
...and partly to report that this morning I went down Witcombe hill really fast, in a tuck, hardly using the brakes, and my max speed was 77kph. That was cool. The joys of a dry road and no traffic.
Got to love this from Scott Adams:
"I think that the main reason there are so many wars is that most of the soldiers are adult males. If all wars had to be fought exclusively by second graders or contestants from the Special Olympics, no one would ever start a war because the results would be too tragic."
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2006/10/tragedy_ranking.html
Why oh why is the markup extension not working - I can't get bold text or headings to work at all. AAAaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!
