Public Service Announcement: Howard Zinn

January 30th, 2010

Due to an article which appeared on this blog on Thursday, it appears that this site has become the top search result, on Google and other search engines, for queries relating to Howard Zinn’s funeral. For those looking for this information, please read the following in full:

At present, all reliable sources report that details of funeral arrangements for Howard Zinn are not yet available. Furthermore, there are a number of malicious sites purporting to possess these details but which in fact will attempt to infect your computer with viruses or other malicious software. Do not visit any site claiming to have details of the funeral arrangements for Howard Zinn – all reliable sources report that these are not yet available. You can see an example of one of these malicious search results in the image below.

Instead, please visit the official site of Howard Zinn, in particular this page, where you can sign up for a newsletter which will provide you with all available information on tributes and events related to the death of Howard Zinn. Please don’t visit any site other than Mr. Zinn’s own.

I myself have signed up for the newsletter and will amend the details here as and when I have more information – in the meantime, please don’t go looking for it on sites which may attempt to infect your computer.

Many thanks,

Matt Keefe

Howard Zinn is dead

January 28th, 2010

UPDATE: If you have reached this page looking for information on funeral arrangements for Howard Zinn, please click here for more information.

You Can’t Be Neutral on A Moving Train.

- Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn died yesterday. One less voice telling America it’s not the country it thought it was.

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

- Howard Zinn

Many of you may never have heard of him. Despite being an academic, Howard Zinn’s influence is mostly visible amongst musicians and actors, by a particular subset of whom he was lionised and venerated. He’s often been painted as a hippie, a lightweight, and a fringe figure because of it.

Scholars, who pride themselves on speaking their minds, often engage in a form of self-censorship which is called “realism.” To be “realistic” in dealing with a problem is to work only among the alternatives which the most powerful in society put forth.

- Howard Zinn

I for one only ever heard of Howard Zinn (and Noam Chomsky, for that matter) because of Pearl Jam and Tom Morello, but his was undoubtedly a voice eminently more thoughtful, considered and knowledgeable than any I might have encountered without such influences.

If it was a choice between going to class and going to the library, I went to the library, because I found that I learned more from one hour in the library than from one hour in class.

- Howard Zinn

It’s not an indictment of Zinn’s status as a historian that he was popularised by artists and figures from popular culture (many of them themselves successful enough to be derided as ‘celebrities’ by those intent on monopolising serious debate), it’s an indictment of the mainstreams of opinion-forming that they choose to marginalise such contributions.

If those in charge of our society — politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television — can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.

- Howard Zinn

If you have not heard of Howard Zinn, his biography on Wikipedia would be a good place to start. His most famous book, A People’s History of the United States, would be an excellent way in which to continue, perhaps the truest history of the most mythologised nation on earth.

While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not. A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle- or upper-class families. The Horatio Alger stories of “rags to riches” were true for a few men, but mostly a myth, and a useful myth for control.

- Howard Zinn

By coincidence, I have spent the last couple of days reading about Thomas Paine, a man not unlike Howard Zinn. Paine’s pamphlet, The American Crisis – famously beginning with the words, “These are the times that try men’s souls…” – was read aloud to the troops of the Continental army in the winter of 1776, and is popularly held to have inspired the ensuing American victory in the War of Independence. John Adams, the second President of the United States, wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson (the third President of the United States) that, “History is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine,” and also wrote that “Without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain.” The inventor Thomas Edison said “I consider Paine our greatest political thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles,” while Abraham Lincoln said of him, “I never tire of reading Tom Paine.”

In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli.

- Howard Zinn

Amongst those who have studied such things, including many of the Founding Fathers themselves, Thomas Paine is considered the architect of America and the author of her most important founding principles.

When he died, six people attended his funeral.

(Nationalism is) a set of beliefs taught to each generation in which the Motherland or the Fatherland is an object of veneration and becomes a burning cause for which one becomes willing to kill the children of other Motherlands or Fatherlands.

- Howard Zinn

Paine was arguably the first to describe almost every part of what later came to be known as the American Dream, but he contributed not one thing to the American Myth, and was thus obscured. Through critique, Zinn did much the same. His arguments demanded a refinement and continuation of the principles of liberty and freedom long characteristic of the United States of America while systematically countering the pervasive myths surrounding those same notions.

Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane.

- Howard Zinn

Even before his death, Paine came to be obscured by a prevalent myth of America; Zinn was marginalised by the same thing in his lifetime. In some ways, times have changed – there will be more people at Howard Zinn’s funeral than there were at Thomas Paine’s, I’m sure. Zinn’s death was announced only a few hours ago; I for one will be following the mainstream press to see what they have to say, but either way, what America at large notes of his death (and, far more importantly, of his life before it) says more about America and the value of its ideals and its notions than it does about Howard Zinn and his. Those speak handsomely for themselves.

Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.

- Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn, August 24, 1922 – January 27, 2010.

Why my English is rubbish and my Russian is worse

January 5th, 2010

Over the weekend, I read a couple of interesting articles about language – a piece from The Economist about the world’s hardest language, and David Mitchell on why pedantry is important. These I found interesting firstly because I’m a complete saddo, and secondly because I’ve recently been teaching myself to read and write the Arabic script, learning a little Arabic along the way, and also attempting to improve my Russian.

Something apparent in the first article is the relative difficulty in determining what exactly makes a language ‘hard’ or otherwise. All languages appear difficult to those who do not speak them, and may appear harder or easier to learn depending on their similarity or otherwise to the individual’s own language. Some languages which may present a relative difficulty in learning – because of an extensive set of grammatical rules, for instance – may thereafter be amongst the easiest to use and acquire skill in because of the language’s consistency in following those rules. Is that a hard language, or an easy one?

Take English. On the one hand, English has some very well-known inconsistencies – mostly in spelling and pronunciation – but on the other it has some very simple features indeed. English has very few irregular verbs (that is, the different forms of most verbs can be reliably predicted from a consistent pattern – scare, scares, scared; play, plays, played; pass, passes, passed), plurals are similarly easily to make, possession can be indicated by a simple apostrophe (usually followed by an es), and there is virtually no system of case. Does that make it easy or hard? Made easy by its lack of rules, or difficult by its apparent inconsistency? I’m not sure it’s one thing or the other.

I’m currently trying to learn Russian grammar, of which until recently my knowledge was basically nil. Russian has six cases, three tenses and three genders (and, just to prove the point, two aspects, three moods, two voices and four participle forms). Six cases is not unusual, nor are the rules that pertain to them particularly complex, but learning them is very difficult for me because case is not something I am used to considering when using language. Indeed, until relative recently – and until going out of my way to read up on it – I had almost no idea what case actually meant (or what aspect, or voice, or mood meant either).

My ignorance of grammar goes much further than that. I don’t naturally recognise – or even always know – which is the subject of a sentence and which is the object. If I’m brutally honest, even my understanding of what’s a verb, a noun, or an adjective is not as developed or as instinctive as it should be. I know what a verb is, what an adjective is, what a noun is, and of course I can identify them in a sentence, and if given a word I can tell you whether it’s a noun, a verb, or an adjective (or whether it can be used as more than one of them), but doing so is a conscious effort on my part. I don’t find it especially hard, I don’t find it especially difficult, but they aren’t instinctive terms of reference buried deep within my brain that I can use without thinking. I don’t recognise these kinds of properties or categories with the same immediate, unthinking speed I might spot a spelling mistake, or be able to identify which tense was being used, for example.

This might sound surprising coming from someone who has made his living from the English language since being 18 years old. This isn’t intended as a confession of guilt – this isn’t me throwing my hands up and saying, “I’m a fraud!” – I still think my English is very good. What I’m describing is a basis for comparison. The knowledge that I do have – of grammar, of word classes, of spelling and all the rest of it – limited or otherwise, is in large part the result of what I learned at school. What I’ve described will be true of many people: if your first language is English, the chances are you know virtually nothing of grammar.

That’s what makes learning the Russian case system so difficult. Not only am I having to learn words and suffixes in a language which I speak at only a very basic level (though admittedly I can read the alphabet well; a huge advantage in its own right, and another facet of the relative ‘difficulty’ or otherwise of any given language) but I’m having to learn the very concept of case and what it means. Now does that make Russian a hard language, or just one with a substantial difference to English in its grammar?

This, I think, is where the importance of pedantry comes in. Often the rules that we do have, few as they are, are representative of grammatical rules or other linguistic properties that occur in other languages as well. Take the example of case. English is not entirely bereft of case; almost, but not quite. We indicate possession by use of an apostrophe followed by an es. When it comes to pronouns, however, we use wholly different words – my instead of I, her instead of she, etc. This is an example of genitive case. Have you ever heard of genitive case? Did you learn about it at school? I certainly didn’t.

Perhaps the most famous example of schoolroom pedantry is the old chestnut about using John and I instead of John and me. As it happens, this is also one of the most frequently misunderstood rules of grammar, and one which is most frequently taught incorrectly. John and I went to the circus is correct, while John and me went to the circus is not. However, very often this is taught as a blanket rule of always …and I, never …and me.

In actual fact, She is coming to the circus with John and me is correct, while She is coming to the circus with John and I is not. It’s not the presence of John in the sentence that changes ‘I’ to ‘me’, it’s the change from subject to object for the speaker – that is, the change of case. ‘I’ is in the nominative case, used when the speaker is the subject of the sentence. The presence of John in the sentence is an irrelevance; you would say I went to the circus, hence you would also say John and I went to the circus. What you would not say is that She is coming to the circus with I, so why would you say She is coming to circus with John and I? You wouldn’t, you shouldn’t – it’s incorrect and based upon a misunderstanding of grammar. The word ‘me’ is the accusative case form of ‘I’, hence used when the speaker is the object of the sentence (in that sentence, She – whoever she might be – is the object of the sentence, thus the word ‘she’ is in the nominative case).

Again, did anyone going to an English comprehensive in the last thirty years learn any of this? Any mention of the subject and the object, the nominative and accusative cases? I certainly didn’t. All I got were variously correct or incorrect versions of the ‘…and I’ not ‘…and me’ rule. About as close as I got to a definitive version of it was one particular teacher’s advice to remove all other named people from the sentence and see if it still made sense, so, John and me went to the circus is wrong, because it would leave me went to the circus, which is clearly wrong, hence the correct version must be John and I went to the circus. That’s a perfectly good rule of thumb, but it still doesn’t tell me why I shouldn’t be saying me went to the circus in the first place – as convoluted as it might seem, only an explanation of case, subject and object really explains that.

Now, case might be all but extinct in English, and the distinctions made in the above example – nominative case, accusative case – may be relevant almost nowhere else in the English language, but the identification of the subject and the object certainly is. Apart from that, knowledge of the case system, and specifically the proper names for the different cases, is hugely useful in learning other languages, where such things may be more important. There are many other instances of English’s own grammar, or certain English words, evidencing linguistic properties not otherwise found in the language – take gender, for instance: blond and blonde can be learned by rote as two different spellings, one for a man, one for a woman, or a few extra moments could be taken to point out, as trivia if nothing else, that the difference is akin to the principle of gender used in many other languages. It’s a certain kind of pedantry that preserves these handful of insights into the way language – not just English, but all languages – work, and it makes that kind of pedantry important.

In fact, it’s not just pedantry – at least, not just in the sense of being rigidly correct. Sometimes it’s worth pointing out the obvious – pointing out the way our own language works, and why, even if we can get by using it quite happily without knowing. I’ll give another example: Russian demands consonant mutation. That is, in certain circumstances, certain consonants change – ‘mutate’ to other consonants – to prevent tricky combinations of letters creating words that are inordinately difficult to pronounce owing to unsympathetic sounds following one another. For instance, З (the Russian ‘z’) changes to Ж (a softer ‘zh’, like the ‘g’ in ‘rouge’) at the end of certain words when a suffix is to be added. Confusing? It was for me. The very idea of having to change letters within a word, and not just add them on to the end, baffled me. Until, of course, I realised that we do it in English.

Consider the words divide and division. ‘dividion’ would be hard to pronounce, and over time – given that we’ve all got roughly the same mouth parts to work with, Jamie Oliver excepted – the pronunciation of such a word will inevitably mutate to ‘division’, which the spelling reflects. In English, not all consonant mutations are reflected by a change in spelling. Consider the words fuse and fusion. In fuse, the es is pronounced like ‘z’; in fusion, the es is pronounced like ‘zh’ – the exact same mutation as occurs in Russian, it’s just that Russian has a rule that the actual spelling is changed to better reflect the changed pronunciation.

Consonant mutation baffled me because I’d never heard of it, and yet it occurs in English. True, I’d still have had to remember which consonants substitute for which others, but the principle of its occurrence, the reason why it happens, and, most importantly, the times when it might occur, became immediately clear to me when I became aware that the same thing occurs in English. Pointing out the features of our own language – however familiar and taken for granted they may be in some cases, or however pedantic it may appear to do so in others – can provide us with a terminology and help in understanding the things we’ll need to know when learning another language.

English was once taught to a rigid grammatical standard, often backed up by comparisons to Greek or Latin, which themselves possess much more extensive and much more rigid grammatical systems; I don’t think that’s helpful. There’s no point marking kids down or telling them they’re wrong when they’re using the English of common, accepted, modern usage. I’m not suggesting we hold people – least of all kids struggling to learn the language anyway – to a ridiculous grammatical standard that isn’t really borne out by usage anyway. What I’m suggesting is that it’s at least worthwhile pointing out that grammar does exist, and giving kids – where the opportunity exists to do so – the kind of terminology that can help to identify and describe the properties of language, and help to recall its meaning later on. Many of the difficult concepts encountered when learning other languages actually exist in English – they’re just difficult because we’re not familiar with the strange terms like ‘genitive case’ which are used to describe them, even if we’ve already learned instances in which they occur.

I’m not sold on the idea that teaching Latin as some kind of ‘template language’ really helps, but I certainly do think making kids aware of grammatical concepts (which is often the intent behind teaching Latin) is a good idea. I wish I had been introduced to such concepts, even if only as trivia mentioned in passing, and wasn’t struggling now as an adult to get my head around them. Maybe we need to think primarily in terms of teaching language, and not just the English language; take it as an opportunity to point out some of the properties that English and other languages have, even using what are relative oddities or seldom used aspects of English to give some idea of the kinds of things that might be encountered in other languages (teaching snippets of actual other languages alongside these wouldn’t be a bad idea either).

I don’t know why this doesn’t happen. I don’t know if the prevailing opinion is that it’s too complicated or too dull, or if it’s thought likely to take up too much precious teaching time. Maybe it’s a mixture of all three, maybe the reasons vary. I think they’re mistaken, though – that kind of additional informational and tangential learning seems to me like the kind of thing good teaching works precisely because of, not in spite of.

When I was at school, we used to endlessly frustrate the teachers by talking amongst ourselves in what we called Latin. It wasn’t Latin. It was English rearranged according to the rules of our game. From memory, that involved moving the first syllable to the end of the word, and then adding –et (pronounced ‘ay’ as in ‘day’). We’d often do this in slightly unconventional manner, breaking the first syllable at a vowel to leave words beginning with a consonant, though I don’t know if this was part of the rules, or just something that occurred through usage, or our ineptness at defining syllables anyway. The result would be a phrase like “Iet amet kingtaet kwardsbaet,” meaning “I am talking backwards.” (I’ve omitted the letters which fall silent as a result of breaking the syllables the way we did.)

We loved this game because it meant we could trade obscenities and vile rumours about the teachers with virtual impunity. The thing is, looking back, I think it’s also the perfect opportunity to teach kids a thing or two about language by deconstructing it without having to bore the arses of them with actual Latin. I’m pretty sure most kids in most schools played some variation of that game – why not let them do it over the course of a few lessons, but introduce certain rules that can be used later for more obviously educational purposes. Instead of adding –et to the end of each word, why not tell them to add –et to verbs, but –us to nouns and –ia to adjectives (or whatever endings seem appropriate, it doesn’t really matter). The kids can trade whatever obscenities they want for an hour or two but at the end of it I’m pretty sure they’d be left with a better understanding of the differences between certain kinds of words than they might have gained otherwise.

That isn’t quite the same thing as pedantry, admittedly. I do think it’s important for the same reason, though – sometimes it’s worth pointing out the obvious, the overlooked and the pedantic because as irrelevant as it may seem in one context (even in the context of the whole English language) such knowledge may very well be key to understanding something else, in some other context.

A language is only as hard as it is unfamiliar. In the case of most languages, the words will always be new but the concepts needn’t be. I find now that there are innumerable concepts with which I struggle badly only to find, by many turns and doublings, that I’m already aware of them, that I’ve encountered them before and that I do vaguely understand them, but that I have to learn them all over again just to attach a name to them, just to learn how to do the same thing in another language, because the fact that I was doing anything at all – that there was anything there to notice or to understand – passed me by so completely the first time. There’s a lot that isn’t taught, isn’t mentioned even though it’s there, because it seems needless. I for one am finding now that it’s not. And that’s why my English is rubbish and my Russian is worse.

Why…

January 5th, 2010

…when packaging includes ingredients or instructions in multiple languages, does the Russian text begin with ‘RUS’ in English? Who exactly is this supposed to help? The Russians who aren’t quite sure or the English folk who can’t read it anyway?

Lame Colts & Toothless Wolves

January 3rd, 2010

This will seem like a bit of a random post to regular readers of my blog – apologies if it’s irrelevant and a bit boring because of that; normal service will resume shortly, I’m sure. I’m just posting this here where it can be found by search engines and the potential readers who use them…

This post is about American football – specifically, about the Indianapolis Colts fielding a weakened team in last week’s game against the New York Jets, and its subsequent effect on the fortunes of other teams in the league. This post is about how this kind of situation can be avoided (no, really – I think, anyway).

Those who follow the NFL and are aware of the prevailing circumstances can skip straight to the part titled ‘Meaningless Games’.

For those who don’t follow the NFL, here’s the basics of the situation…

Regular Season vs. Play-Offs

In the NFL, teams play 16 games – eight of them at home, eight of them away – known as the ‘regular season’, after which the twelve best-placed teams progress to a series of play-off matches, culminating in the Superbowl. At stake during the regular season are not only places in the play-offs, but seedings within them. The best team in the regular season – the top seed – gains home advantage throughout the play-offs, and a bye, meaning they don’t have to play in the first week of the play-offs. The second best team in the regular season also gets a bye, and homefield advantage, unless and until they meet the top seed. The third and fourth best teams in the regular season get homefield advantage for the first week of the play-offs only. Other than that, it’s pretty much a straight knock-out – the details aren’t important; hopefully you get the vague idea.

Jets vs. Colts

So, last week, the Indianapolis Colts played the New York Jets. This was the fifteenth game of the regular season (i.e., the second to last) for both teams. The Colts having won all 14 of their games so far had already guaranteed themselves top seed in the play-offs. They had, quite simply, nothing whatsoever to play for. Accordingly, they rested several of their star players and unsurprisingly lost to the Jets, 29-15. No skin off the Colts’ noses – they’re still going to be top seed no matter what – but it moved the Jets to a position of 8 wins and 7 losses, with one game left to go. That gives the Jets every chance of making the play-offs, at the expense of several other teams in the league who may feel the Jets were gifted a win by a seriously weakened Colts team. For those teams affected by it, it has a bearing on their whole season – on whether or not they make the play-offs; if they don’t, their season ends next week – so is very much like those situations in football (soccer) where the fielding of a weakened team by one side or another is perceived to have affected major issues like promotion or relegation, or to have affected group standings in tournaments like the Champions League or the World Cup. It’s a big deal for those involved, and it’s the kind of thing no one really likes to see. Most people, if there were a way to avoid it, would rather not see situations like this occur at all. At the same time, a lot of people would probably say the Colts can’t be blamed for wanting to rest their key players and keep them safe from injury, knowing that they have important play-off games to play in the near future.

Meaningless Games

The NFL has a rule that teams must play to win. That rule isn’t broken by the fielding of second-string players – once those players are out on the field, as long as they’re actively trying, to the best of their ability, to win the game, then that’s as much as the rule demands. As the opening part of this article points out, “The calls for legislating against what the Colts did are futile. […] teams have a legitimate interest in resting players, in giving back-ups experience, and trying to avoid injury before the playoffs.” All true.

The Best Team

Several football (soccer) leagues, such as the English Premier League, do have rules stating that clubs must field their strongest possible team but these have proved virtually unenforceable – for one thing, does ‘best team’ equate to the best eleven players the club possesses, or does it mean the best combination of eleven players who in their own right might not be the standout players in their position? Combinations make teams as much as star individuals do. That being the case, judging what actually constitutes any side’s ‘best team’ is so incredibly arbitrary as to make the idea of ever finding them guilty of not doing so complete nonsense. Further, it demands very difficult judgments about when a player might or might not be fit enough to play, and potentially creates the unwelcome situation of league officials forcing a player to play. Imagine the results if a player did play under such compulsion and further exacerbated an injury the league had mistakenly ruled insufficient to keep him out.

There’s also the perverse consequence that you might be hampering a team’s best chances over the whole season by forcing them to play what is perceived to be their best team in any particular game – players in and players out according to the circumstances of the match is part of navigating your way through a whole season. Does the rule apply throughout a game, or only at the start of it? If a team is losing heavily at half-time and substitute their best players, are they in breach of the rule for the second half? Are they handing their opponents easy extra scores that might prove crucial in a tie-break at the end of the season? Trying to stop this happening through application of rules on which players must play is just farcical. A rule to force a team to field their best players – in any sport – is just a non-starter.

So, you can’t legislate against teams resting players, but in the case of the NFL you can eliminate the kind of meaningless games in which that typically occurs. Here’s how…

Seedings

Decide the seedings for the play-offs based on the last four games of the season only. Simple as that.

Decide who wins each division and who earns the wildcard spots using results from all 16 games as normal, but then seed those teams (and award homefield advantage and bye weeks) based solely on their results from the final four games of the regular season. Why? Because it would leave virtually no chance of a game being meaningless for any given team. Whilst a team might sow up a play-off spot by game 12, they would then still have seeding position to play four in the final four games.

It would mean that teams are seeded on recent form and momentum going into the play-offs and may actually be more representative, fairer and produce better match-ups than the system used at present. It’s often teams with the better form in the final few games of the season who perform well in the play-offs and make the Superbowl. The reverse is also true – teams who guarantee their play-off spot early often suffer a dip in form and perform poorly in the play-offs themselves. The only season in recent years in which the Colts have played no meaningless games was 2007 – the season in which they won the Superbowl. Every other season, they’ve played at least one meaningless game in the regular season (having generally been one of the strongest teams throughout the regular season) and then gone on to bomb in the play-offs. This is sometimes attributed to the rest vs. rust principle – that pulling star players out of meaningless games at the end of the season actually leaves them out of practice (especially combined with a bye week) when it comes to the actual play-offs. Deciding seedings on the last four games only would probably help these teams, too.

Isn’t it really unfair to have a whole season come down to the last four games? No, because that doesn’t happen. Whether or not a team makes the play-offs is still decided by their performance over all 16 games – it’s just their ranking compared to the other teams in the play-offs that’s decided by the final four games in isolation.

EDIT: With so few games used to determine seedings, it’s true you’ll probably get several teams tied on 4-0 – in which case use results over the whole season as a tie-breaker; best of both worlds.

Keeping the Balance

Fairness can be ensured under this system by arranging the schedule so that in their final four games of the season each team plays one game against a team who finished first in their respective division the previous season, one game against a team who finished second, one game against a team who finished third, and so on. This would mean all teams play against opposition of varying levels of ability – no team should find themselves disadvantaged by a final four games which are markedly harder than those faced by their rivals.

Needless to say, those final four games would break down into two games at home and two games on the road, and in fact you can further break it down into one divisional game, two conference games and one out-of-conference game (the same proportion of conference and out-of-conference games encountered across the full regular season) so it’s fair and even across the board, even in the space of just four games. In short, a microcosm of the whole season.

(EDIT: Also worth noting that this system can be used to offer incentive and reward to higher ranked teams, and to provide the fairest head-to-head match-ups in terms of determining likely top seeds. As you can see from the next part of this post, divisional champions in the previous season could be rewarded with a final-four game against their lowest ranked divisional opponents, arguably giving them both the best chance of clinching the division itself, or the best divisional record where needed for tie-break, and of clinching a high seeding beyond that. Likewise, it can guarantee that a top-ranked team’s game against another top-ranked team comes from within the conference, meaning that in the final four games they will probably face their direct rivals for top seed. In the AFC, for example, the formula would frequently produce final-four games between the Colts, Patriots and Chargers, who perennially compete amongst themselves for the top seed anyway. Having it more likely to be decided in a head-to-head manner in this way seems fair, and arguably preserves more interest in the end of the season than is the case at present.)

Working It Out

Isn’t all this hellishly complicated? Nope. This can all be easily achieved with a very simple amendment to the fixture grid, which doesn’t even change the opponents any given team is due to face in a season, only the order in which they meet them. All NFL fixtures are decided by a formula – there are 32 teams in the league, but each team only plays 16 games, and will only meet 13 of those 31 other teams. The formula decides which teams will meet which other teams, and a very simple formula on top of that can determine which games are reserved for the final four weeks of the season. Let’s take a look at a typical scheduling grid, taken from Wikipedia. This one is for the Cleveland Browns.

NFL_Schedule_Sample

Teams in blue are those teams the Browns will play home and away; teams in yellow are those teams they will play home or away only. Here’s that same fixture grid on which I have indicated the final four games of the season, marked in red:

grid_2

Simple. The Browns final four games are against the Pittsburgh Steelers (who finished top in their division last season), the Chicago Bears (who finished second in their division), the Oakland Raiders (who finished third in their division) and the Jacksonville Jaguars who, like the Browns, finished bottom of their division. Sure, those teams may have improved or declined between last season and this, but it’s about as good a basis for providing a mix of opposition as there is, and in fact it pretty well parallels the formula already used to decide the season’s schedule, in that a team’s position within a division is already used to decide two of their opponents in the regular season.

Two of those games will need to be home games, and two of them played away from home – that can be determined either by a formula comparing the conferences and divisions, or simply alternated. Either method is simple and can be easily tabulated – I haven’t done so yet, simply because it would be a lot of effort for what is ultimately just my hypothetical waffling on the internet. I may do so in due course, if anyone’s interested, or if I really feel the need to prove it would work.

More

If you want more examples of how this would work, you can download this PDF which shows the modified schedule for all the teams in the Browns’ division. Again, I could produce scheduling grids for all the teams in the league to provide a complete example of the system, but that seems more effort than it’s worth.

The formula that I’ve applied in determining each team’s fixtures is shown in this table. You can apply this to any team in the league to extrapolate their fixtures in turn:

grid_3

Each column represents one of the final four games of the season. The rows on the left are labelled for where the team whose schedule is being decided finished in their division last season (so the Browns, who finished fourth in their division, use the bottom row, labelled ‘4th place’). Each column is labelled for where that particular opponent is to be found – within the same division, in the division with which the team is paired for the season, another division in the conference, or outside of the conference. The ranking shown in each column is thus which of the teams within the specific division the team will meet. So, to take the example of the Browns, going from left to right, in the divisional column we have ‘1st place’, meaning they play the first placed team in their division – in this case, the Steelers. In the ‘Paired’ column, we see ‘3rd place’, so they face the third placed team in the division with which they are paired – in this case, the AFC West (shown all in yellow), and thus they face the Oakland Raiders.

This table doesn’t show the order the fixtures are to be planned it – all that would have to be planned in the normal way, of course, it just shows which of their 16 fixtures ought be held back for the final four weeks of the season.

There’s probably some errors in this formula. The examples I’ve provided have been put together quickly simply to illustrate my point. The formula might need to be tweaked, or it might need to be tabulated a little differently; there may need to be two tables, mirrors of each other, with each one applied to half of the league’s teams to make sure the fixtures all tie up. There’s all sorts of minor details in which I may be incorrect; whatever, the overall point stands.

I also haven’t specified which of the two possible conference opponents (using the example of the Browns again, either the Bills or the Jaguars) is to be chosen. Again, this is easily tabulated as an extension of the formula – I just haven’t bothered to do it because it’s detail that isn’t needed right now and work that probably isn’t worth the effort for the purpose of this post.

Like I say, there may be minor errors and adjustments that have to be made. The point is, it can be done. The symmetry of both the schedule and the league itself – 16 games, 8 home, 8 away; 32 teams, in two conferences of 16, each conference made up for 4 divisions of 4 teams – make me quite certain that a wholly foolproof formula to group the final four games in this way does exist, even if I’ve formulated or tabulated it incorrectly here, in the mere couple of hours I’ve bothered to spend doing this. If there’s logical or formulaic proof that this simply won’t work, please, go ahead, enlighten me.

Whether or not it’s desirable, of course, is another matter. I think it is – I think the seedings for the play-offs should be decided on the last four games of the season alone, and that something like the formula above could be used to do that in a fair and representative manner. Others may disagree – you can tell me what you think in the comments below.

On a New Year’s Day…

January 1st, 2010

Every official that comes in
Cripples us, leaves us maimed,
Silent and tamed,
And with our flesh and bones,
He builds his homes.

Southern fist
Rise through the jungle mist,
Clenched to smash power so cancerous.
A black flag and a red star,
A rising sun loomin over Los Angeles.
Yes for Raza livin’ in La La,
Like Gaza, on to the dawn Intifada.
Reach for the lessons the masked pass on,
Seize the metropolis – it’s you its built on.

Everything can change on a new year’s day.
Everything can change on a new year’s day.
Everything can change on a new year’s day.
Everything changed on a new year’s day.

War within a breath,
It’s land or death.

Their existence is a crime,
Their seat, their robe, their tie,
Their land deeds,
Their hired guns,
They’re the crime.

Shots heard underground round the rapture,
World’s eye captured,
At last it’s a Mexican pasture.
The masked screaming land or death:
A war from the depth of time.
Shot four puppet governors in a line,
Shook all the world bankers
Who think they can rhyme,
Shot the landlords who knew it was mine,
Yes, it’s a war from the depth of time.

Everything can change on a new year’s day.
Everything can change on a new year’s day.
Everything can change on a new year’s day.
Everything changed on a new year’s day.

War within a breath.
It’s land or death.

It’s land or death.

Rage Against the Machine: not just for Christmas.

Full-time

December 4th, 2009

I am posting this here now as a record of my intent, since events in South Africa in a few hours’ time may otherwise appear to have given me an easy get-out (they might still do that, of course, but the point being I am making clear my intent now, ahead of the possibility of knowing).

Let me say this: I am not currently planning on watching the 2010 World Cup. In fact, I am currently planning on not watching. Unless and until, that is, France are eliminated, or they encounter England.

I’ve watched every World Cup (in fact, almost every match of every World Cup) since 1990. I love football, and I love the World Cup, but this time I’m not going to bother. I am just sick of watching football overshadowed by its own tedious controversies and I don’t want to watch the results of it anymore; for me, I’m afraid, the World Cup has been spoiled by the endless sorry nonsense surrounding it.

I’m not even really bothered about France being there – well, I am, but if it was France’s participation that really bothered me, I’d watch each and every one of their games, hoping to see them get beaten. I don’t begrudge them their place – I don’t think they should be there, not without at least having replayed the second leg of their play-off with Ireland, but there’s nothing France could do any differently now, and hasn’t been since the ball was kicked-off again after the award of that goal. Picking France’s involvement as my criteria is symbolic – it’s just the straw that broke the camel’s back, and a now constant reminder of the endless avoidable injustices FIFA insist on miring football in.

I’m not bothered by rubbish refereeing, or refereeing of any standard for that matter – it wasn’t the referee’s fault he didn’t see Henry’s handball; it was right on the dead ball line, and any referee in the proper position to look for all of the likely events in that situation would not have been able to see that Henry handled the ball. What bothers me is the fact that FIFA allow these things to occur when they’re so utterly avoidable and then do nothing to rectify them when they do. They hide behind procedure; they loudly and proudly announce their inability to act where matters on the pitch are concerned while simultaneously meddling in any way they can everywhere else.

That’s a very large part of the problem. My distaste at endless dramas on the pitch is compounded by FIFA’s relentless malfeasance off it. Ireland and France met in a World Cup play-off as the result of a decision, taken by FIFA with just a couple of games of the qualifying round to go, to seed the play-offs. That’s right – everyone had been playing without FIFA bothering to tell them what the rules were. As if that wasn’t enough, I spent Tuesday morning listening to experienced BBC football reporters speculating on what the seeding procedure for the World Cup draw itself might be – that is, yet again, FIFA waited until knowing who the seeds would be under any given system before announcing which method would be used to determine them.

There’s an argument that says the controversy is all part of the fun. That argument’s almost sadistic in its logic. I saw a comment posted on the BBC site this week, some bright spark seeing fit to ask us all, “How boring would football be if the right decision was made every single time?”. See, what the person asking this means – though he might not even know it himself, poor lad; denial is a powerful thing – is that football’s boring and he just likes arguing. Fine, good; just piss off and have an argument with someone somewhere else: block next door’s drive with your car, take your packed trolley to the 5 items or less line at Sainsbury’s, push past the old ladies in the queue for the bus, anything you like – there’s lots of ways of starting enjoyable arguments. You don’t need football as grounds for it.

Sure, half the vicarious thrill of football is talking about it afterwards, but if I’m going to put myself in anybody’s shoes I want it to be the coaches’ or the players’, not the referee’s – what fun is there in that? If I’m going to talk about ‘wrong’ decisions, I want them to be the brave, foolish, but undoubtedly well-intentioned ones the coaches made; not the inept ones the officials did. If I’m going to have a conversation with someone about who ‘should’ have won, I want it to be a conversation about who shot when he should have crossed, not about the ball going four foot wide of the post and the whole world watching open-mouthed as a goal is given. Arguing’s only fun when it’s subjective.

When it comes right down to it, though, will I actually not watch it? Who knows. It’s the World Cup – it’ll be on just about everywhere and it seems unlikely I’ll manage to avoid it entirely. Chances are I’ll run into it in a pub, or at someone else’s house, or even just walking down the street. Point is I am not intending to watch it, and will try not to. Maybe I’ll change my mind – when that happens, you can all judge me a hypocrite, or a gobshite, or just someone who thinks differently having meant it at the time, whatever you want; I post this here now as much for that reason as any other – but I intend not to. I’ll do something else instead – what, I’m not sure. I might go and watch Sheffield Eagles, the rugby league team who have recently become the new summer residents of Bramall Lane (and whose sport embodies good sense and fairness in administration and officiating) if their fixtures coincide, or I might make the effort to go and watch some especially small sport somewhere else, if I can.

Will I look at the scores? Yes, once a given game is over. Not watching it live, I’m not sure how actively I’ll be following the results, but I’m not going to pretend the World Cup isn’t happening. I won’t be watching any highlights, though. Not having seen the games themselves, I’ll have entered the magic fantasy land that FIFA seem to believe exists where truth, right and justice are decided by what one fallible, unaided human being saw in a split-second, no matter what might actually have happened. I’ll be able to take the scores at face value and honestly congratulate the winner – even if it’s Germany or Argentina; even if it’s Italy, the score is 1-0. and the word ‘pen’ appears in brackets next to the scorer’s name. Even if it’s ‘France 2-1 (AET)’ and ‘Gallas 110′. I don’t mind those scores. It’s FIFA 1-0 Football I’m sick of.

It’s all he wrote…

December 3rd, 2009

An Arabic Diary, Part I

November 19th, 2009

My last post about the obvious difficulties in doing so notwithstanding, I have decided to attempt to teach myself to read and write Arabic. There are various reasons for doing this, which I’ll probably cover separately in later blog post, but suffice to say primary amongst them is ‘because I want to’. Aside from anything else, it gives me something vaguely useful and possibly even interesting to blog about, which may be of occasional and incidental use to others who are learning to read and write Arabic script. I’m not going to adopt any particularly strict format for my posts over the coming weeks – it’s a record of my learning, rather than advice to anyone else – other than to keep the things I did and the things I learned reasonably separate from whatever tangential waffling the endeavour might lead me to.

This first entry covers my initial experiences after a couple of days of learning (I began on Tuesday, 17th November, 2009) and since it tackles quite a lot of initial steps, I’ve decided to split it into two parts. This, the first, being ‘What I Did’. The second part – ‘What I Found Out’ – will follow later on today or tomorrow, with hopefully fairly frequent, but probably unpredictable and irregular, entries to follow after.

So, anyway, once I’d decided to learn to Arabic script, here’s…

What I did

1. I bought a book. Specifically, this book – Mastering the Arabic Script: A Guide to Handwriting by Jane Wightwick & Mahmoud Gaafar. So far it impresses me greatly. By ‘impresses me’, what I of course mean is that so far it hasn’t laughed at me too much for being a grown man with roughly the same competence as an Arab child of four or five years old. The book is mostly free of those embarrassing, childish cartoons of the kind that often accompany language learning: there are no drawings of boats, cats, hats, dogs, fish or eggs to help you remember how each letter is pronounced, and no bloody rhymes either.

I didn’t do a great deal of research before I chose this book – I just went to the local Waterstones and had a look through the shelves. There is quite an important point here, though – in perusing the available books on Arabic, I obviously had a choice to make. Several of the books were accompanied by CDs (or even were simply CDs with very short pamphlets attached) and focused on learning the language itself, some of them, presumably, without any recourse to reading or writing at all. The book I chose was specifically about mastering the Arabic script – that is, learning to read and write the alphabet and, subsequently, potentially, any of the numerous languages for which it is used, Arabic foremost amongst them, of course.

I do hope and expect to learn some Arabic – quite a bit, even – while teaching myself to read and write the Arabic script, but my focus is definitely on the script itself. Learning a spoken language brings with it a huge number of considerations, such as how much opportunity you might get to use it, and in what circumstances, and whether or not you have a native speaker to help correct your pronunciation, and so on. All of these can be quite serious impediments to someone trying to learn at home, on their own – that’s not an excuse (and since I set out with learning the alphabet as my primary aim anyway, I don’t really need one), it’s just an observation. Learning to speak a language and learning to read and write an alphabet are related, but they’re separate things, learned in different ways. Some people learn to speak a language fluently without ever learning to read or write it. To an extent, I’m doing the reverse. I want to be able to read and write Arabic, and in doing so acquire the ability to use Arabic dictionaries and read short passages of Arabic text for myself, all of which I fully expect will, in time, teach me a good deal of the language as well, but for now the script is my focus, and I chose a book accordingly.

The were actually books on learning the language as a whole from the same author, and a larger ‘complete’ book which seemed to combine the books on language and script. While the book on language did seem to cover the script to some extent, it wasn’t dedicated to it, and while the larger, complete book might arguably have saved me some money in the long run, it didn’t devote separate sections to language and script, or to the separate books from which it was compiled, but rather amalgamated them. This, I felt, would not be beneficial to me – slow progress in learning the language might slow or discourage me in learning the script, which I’m otherwise reasonably confident of doing fairly quickly. Knowing my aims, my means and my methods, I felt a book dedicated to the Arabic script itself was the best choice; time will tell if I chose wisely or not.

2. I bought a new notebook. I didn’t actually do this straightaway – not right away immediately anyway. I did try out a few lines of the first letter shown (actually just a letter shape, common to several letters which are specified later) but I already had in mind that starting an entirely new notebook would be a good idea and my first few quick scrawls confirmed this. I went and bought a brand new spiral notebook, with a black cover, from WHSmiths (when this site gets a million hits, you can send me some of these notebooks free, by way of a thank you for the advertising, Mr. Smiths, thank you).

Arabic is written from right to left. By starting a new notebook, I was able to start at the back, which I suspected would be more conducive to left-to-right writing (Arabic books are printed and read this way), and this proved to be the case. I chose a spiral notebook so that I could fold the cover right round and so that, no matter how far into the book I had gotten, I would be able to rest it on itself to provide a reasonably stable writing surface. I also wasn’t sure how easy it would be to write from right-to-left in a square-bound notebook with a conventional spine. The spiral on this notebook does actually foul my hand slightly when starting at the very right of the page but no more than is the case in reverse, and it doesn’t impede the pen or prevent me from opening the book up properly, or laying it out completely flat so that I can write from the right to the left easily. This is true even on those pages where the spine falls on the right. I don’t know if notebooks produced for Arabic-speaking countries actually have any differences in their design, or if there’s such a thing as an actual ‘right-to-left notebook’, but the notebook I bought serves well enough, and starting from the back, and being able to carry on interrupted in that fashion, is a big advantage.

3. I bought a new pen. Actually, I bought three pens, but just because they were cheaper that way and I fancied the idea of being able to leave identical pens in my bag and on my desk, for consistency when practicing. Since Arabic is a cursive script (that is, it always looks like handwriting and the letters are always joined up) the flow of the lines and the points at which they join is especially important, made all the more so by the fluid shape of the letters themselves. It is, I read in the introduction to my book, hard to write Arabic with a biro; an ink pen is much preferred, so I bought a pack of three black Signo uni-ball pens, made in Japan by the Mitsubish Pencil Co. (same for you, Mr. Mitsubishi san, thank you – I won’t mention any of the stuff your company built during the war, or who made them for you; I won’t, I promise, and since my pen wasn’t made in the war and wasn’t made by POWs, I feel entirely free of guilt). These are just very good pens all round and I actually use ones much like them anyway – I’d recommend these, particularly the red ones, to editors working in any language or script.

4. I started writing. Pretty much like it sounds, except that I decided to write the date wherever I began a new day’s work (you can see Tuesday’s date on the first page), and I also wrote the number of the ‘unit’, as given in the book, from which I was working (obviously enough, beginning from ‘1’, which you can see written and circled). This is a relatively minor feature of my practicing, but one I hope to make use of. Over time, as I learn enough letters of the Arabic script, and enough associated words, I hope to write the date and some of the numeric information in Arabic – in word form where it would otherwise be identical. This may or may not be practicable, since the Arab countries use a different calendar and at this point I’m not entirely sure whether or not there are Arabic names for our months of the year as such, but the principle of trying to make incidental notes in Arabic seems a good one and one I will work towards.

6. I didn’t sit up quite as straight as I should have. I know that this is exactly the kind of exercise where pretty much the first piece of advice is bound to be ‘find a place where you can sit properly, at a table, with plenty of space’ and so on. I did not follow this advice. I didn’t make a point of going against it, but I accepted that I would. I mention this only in the interests of being quite clear about how and what I did, for the sake of record. How necessary or true the advice is, I don’t honestly know, and I couldn’t tell you whether the fact that I’ve practiced writing, in a notebook, everywhere from in the pub, to at my desk, to sitting in an armchair and lying in bed has had any effect on the quality of my handwriting or the speed at which I am learning. The truth is that without making this kind of concession, I’d be a lot less likely to be able to spend the time learning at all. Sometimes I think setting too perfect a standard, or aiming for too perfect a set of conditions before trying to learn something new can itself be a barrier. We’ll see, I guess, but I felt it was worth mentioning – there’s no good advice that states the impossible.

7. I avoided any use of the English language or the Latin alphabet whatsoever. Originally, I envisaged perhaps having some note as to pronunciation and/or each letter’s Latin equivalent written alongside it as I learned. I have decided against this, and in fact made a point of avoiding it entirely. There is no point learning to read Arabic if all I am doing is transliterating the letters into English (or, that is, Latin characters) in my head. It will be particularly unhelpful in the case of the many Arabic letters which have no English equivalent. I need to be able to read each letter directly, recognising it for the sound it makes and not for its English equivalent.

Instead, as I wrote each letter, I spoke its sound aloud to myself (having listened to some examples I found on the internet, as it happens), over and over so that I could associate the letter and its sound in my head. This seems to be working. My novice advice is to do this and not use any other method of trying to learn each letter’s pronunciation, especially not to introduce any idea of equivalence with the English language or the Latin alphabet. I won’t even be writing the meaning of any Arabic words I learn later on in my little notebook – I’ll be forcing myself to read them each time and to try and recall the meaning. Of course, when talking about the Arabic alphabet here and elsewhere, I will inevitably be resorting to transliterations from time to time, but even that I’ll try to keep to a minimum.

8. I practiced. A lot. Exactly as you’d expect, and exactly like it says on the tin. Generally, I wrote out three lines of each letter, or wrote out a line of one letter, then a line of the next, repeating the whole exercise three times, as you can see variously throughout the pages shown here. I did this repeatedly, practicing the same letters over again in more blocks of three. As I learned the different forms of each letter (initial, medial, and final, as well as the basic ‘isolated’ form I first learned in each case) I would likewise write out either three lines, or groups of letters, one line for each, repeated three times. After five pages of this, and approximately 160 repetitions of each letter, counting all its forms, I felt sufficiently confident to begin joining letters together. (Bearing in mind that the first three letters I learned all have basically the same shape, differentiated by dots or lines, 160 repetitions of each is a lot.)

I started off by joining the letters together in the combinations shown in the book. This brought a slight change in my method, since from here on in rather than writing complete lines of the same letter, I’d write out a line with a different combination of letters on it (different ‘words’, if you like) and repeat the whole line, again generally three times. Since I was at this point only working with three letters (three virtually identical letters, in fact) I sensibly enough built my practice around all two-letter and three-letter combinations I could possibly make.

9. I learned another letter and did the same thing all over again. I learned the fourth letter – being found in ‘Unit 2’ of the book (for reaching which, I felt quite proud) – and repeated the process. I wrote out the letter on its own again (making a slight mistake in that I broke with my previous pattern of leaving a blank line in between each handwritten row, as you can see at the top of page 7), then wrote it out in its other forms, and then returned to writing out joined up ‘words’ made up from the letters I knew, this time incorporating the new one.

10. I did not cross out any mistakes. There are all sorts of competing theories about what effect crossing out mistakes, pointing them out or correcting them might have on the learner. I don’t know how, or even if, any of that relates to my little endeavour but for a number of reasons I decided not to mark or cross out my errors in any way. For one thing, I’m doing this entirely by myself and have only a limited understanding of what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’ anyway – it’s not like I’ve got an expert or native reader telling me which of my letters looks most like it should. The errors I’m aware of are those where I’ve simply written the wrong letter, or the wrong shape within a letter, put the dot in the wrong place and so on. There are many of these. I noticed them as I went along and cursed myself for making them, but I didn’t cross them out or try to correct them. For one thing, a book full of crossed out words quickly starts to look like a tatty old book; I think, for me at least, that would only encourage sloppiness later on and not be an incentive to continue. Instead I’ve decided to carry on, neatly, hopefully sufficiently aware of my mistakes to at least try avoiding them in future, but I’m not going to fret over past ones.

That’s all for now! Next, what I actually found out…

It’s as easy as, er, alif-baa-taa

November 12th, 2009

Yesterday, having contemplated it for the past couple of days, I decided to teach myself to read and write the Arabic alphabet – not necessarily to read or speak Arabic (though obviously I envisaged picking up a few basic words along the way), but rather just to be able to read the characters, to transliterate Arabic names and titles for myself, for instance, amongst other things. I can already read and write the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, even if I usually don’t know what the words mean (yes, yes, that includes English – very good, are you amusing yourselves at the back?) so I thought I might as well try to complete the set as it were. (I know there are more alphabets than just those four, but most of the others are either terribly obscure and limited in use, or not really alphabets at all and all but impossible to learn without learning the language at the same time; even Arabic is arguably not a true alphabet, but and abjad. But I digress…)

Preparing for the task, here is what I discovered about Arabic:

    It is always in the same form, having no upper or lower case, and hence no use of capital letters. (This is an advantage.)

    It is always cursive – that is, it has no specific printed form and hence always resembles handwriting (this would arguably be an advantage except that…).

    It is therefore always joined up. Further, to facilitate this, there are four different variants of each letter, used dependant upon whether the letter appears at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a word, or on its own. (This is not an advantage.)

    Vowels are optional. Well, Arabic’s three long vowels appear as letters, but its three short ones are indicated only by optional marks placed above or below consonants. Generally, only religious texts and books for children (is there a difference?) bother to indicate the vowels; otherwise, it’s assumed that context will differentiate a word from a similar one. (This is not an advantage. In fact, this is a liability. You’ll realise as quickly as I did the potential for comedy mishap inherent in this system.)

So, basically, learning to read and write the Arabic alphabet would not only afford me ample opportunity to mistake ‘caravan’ for ‘toilet’, but it would leave me beholden to learning four different ways of errantly writing ‘preputioplasty’ when really I just wanted one way of writing ‘hello’.

I have decided to teach myself to write with my left hand instead.

And you wonder why I don’t have time to play computer games or watch television.