Ted Smith died on the morning of 29 September 2003, leaving his lovely Peggy a widow. If you would like to share your memories or pictures of Ted, send them to rememberted@5jt.com.
I hear he collapsed suddenly a few weeks ago, just after you both returned from abroad, and while he was in hospital some weeks until his death yesterday, it seemed that he’d been gone since the collapse.
I hope I go as quickly when my time comes.
Although you’ve told me some of his final illness I’m glad not to know very much. It doesn’t sound like much of him was present during it, and I’m left instead with my memories of him enjoying a surprisingly lively old age.
He was an inspiration in that, with his daily hike and endless supply of surprisingly drinkable homebrews. Just the sort of lusty enjoyment one associates with the muscularly boorish, but Ted was never that. It was all too easy to underestimate the mild man with twinkly eyes and dry humour, who was usually content to step backward out of the limelight, but Ted could be quietly formidable.
I knew him of course only in these last few years, when he had already lived most of his life. It seemed to me from his face that he had had a good life, not in the sense of an easy one, but the kind of good life you get by being good to people. If there is one thing I shall remember about Ted it is his kindness and the endless care he took to be gentle with people. I don’t think anyone is born with that kind of gentleness, it has to be cultivated, marshalled. There are subtle ways of being formidable. Ted was a rock.
He loved you Peggy, everyone who knew him knew that, and knew you knew it too. While happy lifelong marriages are what everyone plans, almost nobody lives one. You two have been one of the rare, rare exceptions, and I can barely imagine how it must be to be left like this after a making such a life together. I have no advice, no wise words, no consolations, nothing to offer but: you lucky, lucky woman to have had him.
I have no idea how you will manage without him. If there is anything I can do for you, just ask. If you'd like to pass some time and talk about him, just call.
Beta release of MCMS (MikiY Content Management System) v1.09 generates picture galleries from folders of JPEGs, nested to arbitrary depth.
Then out to the NFT to see the haunting and evocative Spanish movie The Spirit of the Beehive, revived from 30 years ago, with Norman Fyans.
Cask sherries afterwards at Gordons Wine Bar in a duck-and-scuttle Victorian cellar near Charing Cross. The path back to our cars on Waterloo Bridge took us through tiny Lower Robert Street, which runs underneath buildings and past entrances to basement garages, and then behind the Savoy Hotel, where a white-shirted bouncer at a door marked Savoy Staff confirmed it was Members Only. Thai food in Tufnell Park, and home to bed.
What a weekend. Two days, and the MikiY Content Management System is finally in a usable state.
Miki buried deep in digital artwork, the desk sometimes littered with computers. Not to mention Miki’s ubiquitous dictionary, looking like my tablet’s «Mini-Me».
I put the blame squarely on IEE811.2b. Previously I used to keep newspapers in the loo.
Oh how we danced. Last night at the Barefoot Boogie with Miki and Jennifer Duck.
Last night, Zippo’s Circus on the Lower Heath at Hampstead. Classic. Go.
Within an hour of posting to the site yesterday I had emails from Rupert Sheldrake’s staff thanking me for the article. Publishing at Internet speed...
My daily quotation in yesterday’s inbox: Life must be lived as play. Plato
Art is saying what we have to say believing what we have to say is true even if it isn’t. Kevin Oxley
More Sheldrake. Turns out precognition is real as well.
So back to a conversation I haven’t made real progress with since Norman Crowder gave me J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment With Time to read in the 1960s. Speculation that our experience of subjective consciousness — the isolated ‘I’ travelling its time line, the ‘four-dimensional worm’ — is produced by the focusing to one time and place of something that is not inherently so restricted, and which in sleep relaxes its focus.
Where this conversation leads, I have no idea. But I note another unsolved mystery: why do we sleep? Or: what is so essential about sleep that we are unable to sustain consciousness and sanity without it? I remember reviewing candidate theories about 10-15 years ago without finding a tenable theory.
“This day winding down now at God-speeded summer’s end... (Dylan Thomas, «Author’s Prologue»)
Yesterday was the first day of autumn, according to the Alaskan calendar Jack & Janet Lyons send me each Christmas from Anchorage. The weather turned on cue. Sunday saw the last of the Indian summer, with Miki reading on the lawn and playing with a young kitten that has taken to visiting us. Tuesday brought wind and long-awaited rain onto the dried leaves. Suddenly lying on lawns is a memory.
Playing conga drums with Jennifer Duck at the annual Ealing Village Residents Association pool party
The Aerobie Squidgie (a soft plastic frisbee) turns out to be a little harder to throw, without the stiffness of an ordinary frisbee or the superb Aerobie we usually play with, but way easier to catch — just collapses into your hand. Package says dogs can play too, and we looked encouragingly at dogs passing on the Heath, but the assertion remains untested.
Turns out telepathy is real. This from Sheldrake’s The Sense of Being Stared at, in which he describes experimental work done in recent decades. Sheldrake is a reputable biologist and a Fellow of The Royal Society. His reports are reliable.
I’m astounded. Not that telepathy turns out to be real. That has long looked to be an empirical question that might be confirmed by experiment, but could be hard to disprove. Many people have claimed telepathy operates unreliably and only with certain people. That would make it hard for experimenters to get a grip. Not so: while some people do better than others, telepathy is widespread, statistically highly significant, and independent of distance. It’s susceptible to training. Moreover, it’s more easily demonstrated in (many species of) animals than in humans.
What astounds me is not that all this turns out to be true, but that the work was done, results reported and I didn’t know. (I got Sheldrake’s latest book as a birthday present.) This work has huge implications, and even in these days of information overload, I’d expect news of this to filter through from different directions. Nope. Zip. Not a whisper, not a passing reference. Which leaves me with What else this important don’t I know?
Consider the implications. Out intuitive psychology takes an intentional stance towards the world: we do well to be concerned with the intentions other humans and animals have, especially about us. It’s easy to see how adaptive such a psychology would be. Evolution trained us to pay attention to intentions.
From that it’s easy to see how inclined pre-scientific thinking was to explain things by imputing intentions to all sorts of phenomena — weather, for example. If you like, gods were explanatory hypotheses. Then five centuries of spectacular scientific advance rooted firmly in disavowing the intentional stance. No spells, no conjuring, no evil eye, no witchcraft. Just the physics, ma’m, just the physics.
Science investigates reliably repeatable phenomena. Since intentions are hard to measure, science has been methodologically committed to investigating what is independent of intention.
Thus the rationalist creed: intention has no effect, except through physics. As a methodological stance, this is admirable. Avoid explanations that involve intentions, explore only the physics. That has been unthinkably rewarding. Instead of prescriptions for placating deities, we got transistors. Good swap!
But it’s time now to notice that the commitment is methodological. It is unscientific to believe in spirits and ghosties if that leads you to accept intentional explanations instead of seeking physical cause-and-effect. Good scientists should prefer explanations from physics. But that doesn’t mean explanations from intention are false, just that scientists have been successful precisely by avoiding them. So they are understandably unenthusiastic about considering them now.
If Rationalism is the belief that (apart from us, dogs, chimps and a few other species) there is nothing intentional in the world to investigate, then notice that Rationalism is exactly that: a belief, a creed. It is not, and never could be, proved true by any amount of science. Think of it rather as an intellectual investment strategy. We tried intentional explanations. Look where they got us. We’re not having any of that. It’s not irrational to be a Rationalist, but that doesn’t mean Rationalists are right.
There may be a physics underlying telepathy, but it corresponds to almost nothing in the physics we have, barring the weird results of the ‘Paris experiments’. (From memory, experiments in Paris in the 1980s with high-energy particles demonstrated that — was it spin symmetry? — is preserved between particles even after separation. And instantaneously. It must have been the high-energy physics lab in Paris. Can anyone give me a reference to the work I’m thinking of?) Either our physics is about to become even stranger than it already is, or we’re investigating effects with no discernible underlying physics. It’s time to dust off and review what we used to think we knew about magic.
Oh, this is too good. Rereading this I thought warmly of my friend Nick Sowicz, who knows Sheldrake slightly. Immediately the phone rang: Nick, not knowing why he called, but just wanting to be in touch. I’ve always ascribed a coincidence like that to chance. Now I know it might not be.
Truly this is the most exciting time to be alive.
Happy Birthday to me. Yes, we’re back after a fortnight break: a week at the Dyalog conference, then a week buried in what emerged from it. Now that’s a conference!
Miki read my Amazon wish list and gave me Rupert Sheldrake’s The Sense of Being Stared at. Sheldrake is a biologist and a member of the Royal Society. He has gone out on a limb by researching paranormal phenomena such as telepathy. I like his generous view of the limits of scientific inquiry, and insistence that ground-breaking research remains possible outside the Big Science labs. He also appears to be a neighbour.
No one else thinks I’m in danger of growing up anytime soon. Presents today include a soft frisbee, a ‘helicopter toy’ with an elastic band claimed to toss it 300' in the air, and some kind of a kite that comes in a bag the size of a jeans pocket. Never too late to have a happy childhood. Reports later.
Apologies to “5Mb”, who wrote in complaining “… have a dinner party tomorrow and need something smart to swear.” Flattery will do it every time, but there never was any danger of going off the air. Still less of “5Mb” running out of cracks: with his plea came a list of reasons for electing George Bush. (About time someone did.)
Bush-Cheney Re-election Campaign Slogans
It seems the headquarters of the Republican National Committee is leaking like a sieve. Someone apparently got their hands on the slogans under consideration for the 2004 re-election campaign, and the list is making the rounds on the internet.