Cartoon Time.

Just Finished Reading: Blood Count by Robert Goddard (FP: 2011)

When surgeon Edward Hammond was offered a considerable amount of money to perform a straight forward transplant for a Serbian gangster he’d never heard of before he jumped at the chance. Going through a particularly messy divorce at the time he saw it as both an opportunity to get out of England for a while and to salt away a nest-egg his wife would never know about. Weeks later none of that mattered as his wife lay dead in a car park victim, so the police believed, to a random and as yet unsolved attack. Thirteen years later the same gangster is on trial for Human Rights violations and mass murder. Seeing the Serbs name in the press brings back unpleasant memories but nothing more until the daughter of his long ago patient comes to him with a proposition – help her recover millions in stolen money to finance her father’s defence or have it made public the Hammond arranged his wife’s death as part of his transplant fee. Even if he denied it, even if he was innocent his career and tidy life in London would be in tatters and his daughter’s love and respect would be jeopardised or lost forever. What can he do but submit? Little does Hammond know that his search for the money will take him half way across Europe, to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, to the coldly efficient banks of Switzerland and back to Serbia where it all started? But with millions at stake who can he really trust especially when he begins to see conspiracies all around him and even starts to question whether he was in fact responsible for the death of his ex-wife.      

    

Goddard seems to have two recurring themes in his books – or at least in those I’ve read so far – that uncovering past events is never a very good idea and that questionable actions in the past will inevitably either be uncovered or will return at some point to bite you in the ass – hard! Blood Count clearly falls into the second category. Hammond had almost forgotten about his little Serbian operation and few people where aware he’d even been out of country – until it all blew up in his face 13 years later. As always (with one modification) Goddard tells a very good story full of twists, turns and revelations which push the story forward at a fair clip. His characters are, on the whole, very believable and his main protagonists are usually very believable middle-class men clearly out of their depths and in danger of going under at any minute. Here Hammond is not a particularly pleasant man, a little too arrogant and a little too full of his own self-importance and blissfully unaware as to just how naïve he really is. His journey through Europe and his dealings with some very unpleasant characters is a real wake-up call. It’s interesting to see how he grows as a character and comes to appreciate what he had done all those years ago and what his operation had enabled to continue – the murder of hundreds of people who might otherwise have lived. The plot was dense and convoluted enough to keep me guessing right to the end – and throwing me off track more than once – without being too convoluted to follow or too fanciful to knock me out back into the real world, although he did sail pretty close to the edge from time to time. Overall this is a very competent thriller which raises some interesting moral questions about culpability and responsibility for our own actions. Oh, and the ending was so not what I expected. I almost turned the last page open-mouthed. Recommended.  

Cartoon Time.

Ah, there it is.........!

Selfish traits not favoured by evolution, study shows

By Melissa Hogenboom for BBC News

2 August 2013

Evolution does not favour selfish people, according to new research. This challenges a previous theory which suggested it was preferable to put yourself first. Instead, it pays to be co-operative, shown in a model of "the prisoner's dilemma", a scenario of game theory - the study of strategic decision-making. Published in Nature Communications, the team says their work shows that exhibiting only selfish traits would have made us become extinct.

Game theory involves devising "games" to simulate situations of conflict or co-operation. It allows researchers to unravel complex decision-making strategies and to establish why certain types of behaviour among individuals emerge.

A team from Michigan State University, US, used a model of the prisoner's dilemma game, where two suspects who are interrogated in separate prison cells must decide whether or not to inform on each other. In the model, each person is offered a deal for freedom if they inform on the other, putting their opponent in jail for six months. However, this scenario will only be played out if the opponent chooses not to inform. If both "prisoners" choose to inform (defection) they will both get three months in prison, but if they both stay silent (co-operation) they will both only get a jail term of one month. The eminent mathematician John Nash showed that the optimum strategy was not to co-operate in the prisoner's dilemma game. Co-operating is key for evolution "For many years, people have asked that if he [Nash] is right, then why do we see co-operation in the animal kingdom, in the microbial world and in humans," said lead author Christoph Adami of Michigan State University.

In 1974, Richard Dawkins published a gene-centred view of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. He argued that it was not groups or organisms that adapt and evolve, but individual genes and each living organism's body was a survival machine for its genes. Prof Andrew Coleman from Leicester University explains that this new work suggests that co-operation helps a group evolve, but does not argue against the selfish gene theory of evolution. Rather, he adds, it helps selfish genes survive as they reap the awards of inhabiting co-operative groups.

"The two prisoners that are interrogated are not allowed to talk to each other. If they did they would make a pact and be free within a month. But if they were not talking to each other, the temptation would be to rat the other out. Being mean can give you an advantage on a short timescale but certainly not in the long run - you would go extinct." These latest findings contradict a 2012 study where it was found that selfish people could get ahead of more co-operative partners, which would create a world full of selfish beings. This was dubbed a "mean and selfish" strategy and depended on a participant knowing their opponent's previous decision and adapting their strategy accordingly.

Crucially, in an evolutionary environment, knowing your opponent's decision would not be advantageous for long because your opponent would evolve the same recognition mechanism to also know you, Dr Adami explained. This is exactly what his team found, that any advantage from defecting was short-lived. They used a powerful computer model to run hundreds of thousands of games, simulating a simple exchange of actions that took previous communication into account. A previous study found that selfish strategies were favourable "What we modelled in the computer were very general things, namely decisions between two different behaviours. We call them co-operation and defection. But in the animal world there are all kinds of behaviours that are binary, for example to flee or to fight," Dr Adami told BBC News. "It's almost like what we had in the cold war, an arms race - but these arms races occur all the time in evolutionary biology." Prof Andrew Coleman of Leicester University, UK, said this new work "put a break on over-zealous interpretations" of the previous strategy, which proposed that manipulative, selfish strategies would evolve.

"Darwin himself was puzzled about the co-operation you observe in nature. He was particularly struck by social insects," he explained. "You might think that natural selection should favour individuals that are exploitative and selfish, but in fact we now know after decades of research that this is an oversimplified view of things, particularly if you take into account the selfish gene feature of evolution. "It's not individuals that have to survive, its genes, and genes just use individual organisms - animals or humans - as vehicles to propagate themselves. ‘Selfish genes’ therefore benefit from having co-operative organisms.

[Interesting, if rather obvious when you think about it……………… Co-operation is practically a win-win situation except in rather special circumstances. Over the long-haul (AKA life as we know it) co-operative beings will always win over selfish and manipulative beings.]

Just Finished Reading: A Brief History of British Sea Power – How Britain became Sovereign of the Seas by David Howarth (FP: 1974)

You might think that 450 pages really doesn’t constitute a brief history of anything. But when you consider that the British maritime adventures extend back arguably 1500 years you can start to realise just how brief some of this volume needs to be. Luckily for most of the first 1000 years or so the British impact on the naval world was fairly minimal with the odd early voyage of exploration by Irish monks and, of course, the regular invasions the islands suffered from the time the Romans left to the final true invasion in 1066. Even for centuries after this cataclysmic event British sailors tended to stay close to shore either fishing the abundant seas or attempting to defend the land against would-be aggressors. Only with the on-again off-again conflict with France did British sailors gradually come of age but even here the ships where, by and large, cargo ships either converted to ships of war or troop transports. Only with the advent of reliable cannon did true warships come into the picture and only with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 did the British navy in a recognisable form show its capabilities and finally arrive on a world stage.

But, as is right and proper, power does not always come from the point of a gun. British ships especially during and after the age of Elizabeth roamed the world looking for new sources of trade and new peoples to trade with. The also searched, in vain, for the fabled North-West Passage that was reputed to link the great Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Whilst much was discovered in the frozen north no passage worth its name was ever discovered and many sailors lost their lives in the search. Meanwhile as ships of trade fanned out across the globe increasingly accurate charts began to be developed assisted with the new clockwork technology which enabled the accurate determination of Longitude.

As British maritime power and confidence increased it was only a matter of time before the new kid on the block began to rub against the great naval powers of the day. Spain had already been humbled and was in terminal decline but first the Dutch and then the French had to be bested at sea. By the time of Trafalgar in 1805 this had become a reality and Britain became the pre-eminent maritime power and stayed there for the next hundred years ushering in the age of Pax Britannica. Not only did British warships effectively eliminate the scourge of piracy from most of the world’s oceans they also helped to remove the slave trade. But the greatest contribution endures in the millions of detailed charts produced during this time of unprecedented peace which are still in use today in many navies across the globe. Along with the scientific expeditions – including those undertaken by Charles Darwin – these are one of Britain’s lasting contributions to the world. It is here, in the exercise of soft power rather than the use of gunships to crush any opposition, that Britain truly became the sovereign of the seas.

Oddly the authors saves the height of British sea power for a single final chapter covering both the First and Second World Wars followed by seemingly terminal decline (originally published in 1974 it obviously makes no reference to the naval operation to retake the Falkland Islands and the growth of a new far more powerful navy since then). Well known highlights of both World Wars, Jutland, The Graf Spee, Bismark and Tirpitz are noted but where probably considered to be too well known (and too often written about elsewhere) to need much retelling. Yet this did not detract from the overall thrust and tone of this often fascinating book. The narrative was primarily about the journey of how Britain became, however briefly, not only a power to be reckoned with but the only power to beat across all of the oceans of the world. Such power inevitably comes at a price and it became one that could no longer be afforded after the costs of the Second World War.

This is a well written (if occasionally – and understandably – a little too patriotic or jingoistic for more modern cynical audiences), detailed and knowledgeable account of the rise of British dominance of the oceans. Despite the fact that this has become somewhat dated since its original publication it still provides a useful introduction and overview to a huge subject. Recommended.

Cartoon Time.

It seems that they do need roads after all.......

My Favourite Movies: Lilo & Stitch

Despite being a serious lover of animation and having grown up with Disney (I mean who didn’t?) I am not a great lover of Disney films. I most probably enjoyed the classics and even watching them today you can still see the quality – dated though it is. But at some point I just switched off the whole thing. For one thing it was, and probably always had been, sickly sweet in a completely over-the-top fashion and then there were the songs. Every Disney film was basically a musical and I for one never really liked musicals or even movies with musical numbers in them. The idea that someone might burst into song is one thing but the idea that the whole cast would join in, with the inevitable dance routine, left me cold and frankly embarrassed – maybe it was a teenage thing?

So why have I picked Lilo & Stitch as one of my favourite movies? It certainly ticks most if not all of the usual Disney boxes: dysfunctional family [check], misunderstood child [check], an unfeeling or unsympathetic ‘system’ [check], a need for outside (dare I say heavenly) assistance to put things right [check] and lots of music [check], oh, and of course, a happy ending with hugs all round [big check]. One thing in this movies favour is that the musical numbers hardly ever turn into dance numbers. There’s a bit of dancing but it’s very much in context. The music, mostly Elvis which is hardly ever a bad thing, is either background music or played on vinyl (again in context) inside the movie so-to-speak so none of it broke up any of the action. Of course what really sold it for me was the character of Stitch himself (or itself as ‘he’s’ an alien – actually an artificial alien made in a lab with one purpose – destruction!). Escaping from detention (and probable dissection) he crash-lands on Earth, Hawaii to be exact, only to be adopted as a ‘dog’ by Lilo – the child hero – and her elder sister. Prevented from giving vent to his inbuilt destructive tendencies Stitch is forced to adapt to new circumstances and slowly, very slowly, learn the values of family Hawaiian-style. Meanwhile his evil-genius inventor and incompetent side-kick attempt to steal Stitch back with various degrees of mayhem ensuing in the process.

Despite being basically a warm-hearted family-friendly film it’s still a lot of fun (especially if you like Elvis Presley) and has some serious laugh-out-loud moments from when Stitch said ‘something’ supposedly in his defence at his trail that caused several of his judges to faint and one robot to throw up, to the fact that he took the only red runabout from the alien flagship to escape in, to Stitch building a model of San Francisco (when told to do something constructive) only to destroy it in a more than fair rendition of countless 50’s alien invasion films and more moments I will let you enjoy without any pre-emption from me. It’s light, it’s fluffy and its fun – so it might come as a surprise to some of you, but not to worry my next movie is a classic vampire flick.