Links - 8th June 2020 (2)

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Locust Swarm Chasers - "Disaster struck in 1492 when Fernando of Aragon and Isabella of Castille completed the reconquest of Spain from the Moors. They then promulgated an edict. Any Jews who resisted conversion would be expelled. With only 4 months to leave, around 100,000 of them fled to Portugal. This enormous influx caused resentment amongst the local population. However, all might still have been well, if the king, who was inclined to be tolerant, had not decided on a strategic alliance with his larger, more powerful neighbor. Needing a wife he petitioned for the hand of Isabella of Aragon, the daughter of the Spanish Catholic Kings. They forced his hand. The marriage contract obliged him to carry out the same persecution of the Jews as already existed in Spain. The majority having no means of leaving were forcibly converted, becoming known variously as New Christians, or *something*. Yet in one remote settlement on the eastern flank of the Estrela mountains, a practising Jewish community clung on. They severed links with all other Jews and in secret throughout 500 years, hid from prying eyes by worshipping in their cellars on the Sabbath. Women in particular passed down Jewish prayers and customs by word of mouth. They foxed their neighbors by attending church, but only mouthing the surface. They married only amongst themselves. Some even confected sausages from bread and chicken made to look like pork. Over the centuries, unsurprisingly, the Belmonte Jews lost their language and as in the children's game often called Chinese whispers, their customs and prayers became garbled. In 1917 Samuel Schwartz, a Jewish Polish mining engineer, who was working in the local tungsten mines, heard rumors of hidden Jews and went looking for them, eventually finding the community in Belmonte. However they, believing themselves to be the only Jews left in the world, distrusted him. Mutual confidence came only when he recited prayers, and they recognized the word Adonai. God. Though they'd forgotten about most Jewish festivals, Schwartz  believed they were genuine Jews. He told the community to their amazement that the Inquisition had been abolished a century before. Yet it still took them another 50 years to pluck up courage to admit their faith openly"

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, A Family Fenced In - "The Radio 4 programme, Front Row, where much time is devoted to whether Britain still needs public libraries. Visitor numbers in the UK have plummeted over the past decade, and local authorities, strapped for cash, stopped investing. As a nation, we talked ourselves into believing that our children don't read anymore. And that library should be seen as community centres providing digital access, that physical books were somehow passe. This has not happened in the US. When the city of Los Angeles cut library funding by 30% in the wake of the financial crash, there was public uproar, resulting in a referendum in 2011. 90% of the money for LA’s public libraries comes from property taxes, and when voters were asked if they wanted that money reassigned back to books, the answer was an overwhelming yes. I think it's because lifelong learning is seen as a fundamental cog in the American dream"
It's strange how British people value their libraries so much they protest to keep them - but don't visit them

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Malta and the Mafia - "‘There's a saying in this hot Mediterranean country, we drive on the left, or wherever the shade is. And it seems that their traffic police have been following suit. Some distinctly shady practices around overtime expenses have led to the arrest of three quarters of the nation's traffic cops. This may sound scandalous, but it seems like small fry besides the broader baroque goings on amongst Malta’s bigger fish in the last few years’...
During my interview about the fighting in Abidjan, I'd managed - to split an infinitive. It was a mistake the gentleman wrote that fundamentally undermined the credibility of everything else I'd been saying. When I finally got around to replying, I acknowledged my error, but forgive me, it'd been a rough few weeks. I also, pointed out the half dozen minor grammatical errors he'd made in his own email. I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that words, language matter to all of us and sometimes they matter to a petty or ludicrous degree. And maybe, maybe they matter more than usual on radio, their structure, their pronunciation, that voice delivering some grammatical atrocity directly into your ear. A few years before the Cote D’Ivoire split infinitive outrage, I'd been in the Philippines reporting on a devastating cyclone. Weeks later, I received a long and eloquent handwritten letter from a geography teacher in Scotland, who objected to my use of the word epicentre in a TV report to refer to the heart of the cyclone’s destruction. The term could only be used for earthquakes, she wrote. My careless phrasing had undermined years of classroom work. I disagreed. I wrote back saying, surely language was fluid, that scientific words and phrases could be borrowed and used in other contexts. We left the argument there. But the truth surely is that language, magpie English, perhaps more than many, is fluid. It evolves. That's one of its great strengths, its joys. And radio news evolves with it. Take the word, evacuate. If you're inclined towards pedantry - guilty as charged - you may know that if you evacuate a building, you're taking the people or contents out of it. But if you evacuated a person or a crowd, then well, in theory, you're giving them an enema. Or at least, you used to be. These days, the rules are changing to reflect the way our speech is changing... You know what? It no longer bothers me. In fact, I think it's an improvement. There. I've said it. The trouble, of course, is that we all adapt to change at different speeds. None of us are perfect. Or rather, none of us is perfect… At least here, on your radio, these changes, improvements and outrages, do not scaffold past unnoticed. At least not always. There is still a pronunciation unit at the BBC. There's still an exhaustive and evolving style guide and a team responsible for deciding whether it's, say Burma or Myanmar. It's part of a shared and pleasingly cantankerous commitment to the notion of good writing. I often go back to George Orwell's rules, rules, he frequently broke himself, of course, but that's the beauty of them. If it is possible to cut a word out, he advised, always cut it out. Never use a long word where a short one will do and so on. These days, I get less emails about grammar. Okay, I did that deliberately I get fewer emails about grammar. People seem to reserve most of their outrage for politics now"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Battle of Talas - "[On the Arab conquests] ‘How did they manage to do it so quickly and so effectively? What was their, were they technologically ahead of everybody else, were they more numerous, what was going on?’
‘No, neither of those explanations seems to hold much water. That there's no evidence that they were technologically more advanced or indeed, more numerous. It seems to have been a question of exhaustion, if you like, of the two great powers that had previously dominated this area, the Byzantines and the Sassanians. And also, I think leadership, an idea, skilled leadership in warfare, and an ideology that encouraged them to think of the whole world as their potential area of rule and so on, not to be confined by existing national borders or Imperial borders, or whatever. And very quick moving. This was an army that didn't have supply trains. It didn't have huge numbers of ox wagons to carry stuff and so on. They moved very quickly on their horses with their supplies around them, they took what they could from the surrounding countryside. And these were hardy, tough Bedouin people who were used to being brought up in the deserts of Arabia. They didn't need much to keep going’...
'Perhaps unlike later Chinese dynasties that were proud of being ethnically Han, that was not the case for the Lee family. Stories vary, but they were part of the Northern aristocracy, which had for generations intermarried with Turkic and Mongolic peoples. The reason why that matters is that it meant that they shared a political and military culture with those people. So and in cultural terms, the distance between the Tang rulers and Turkic and Mongolic rulers may not have been as far as it might seem to us today. They, military valor was important for that family just as it was across the border.'"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Rudyard Kipling - "‘He was born in British ruled India in 1865’...
‘Well, perhaps the best way of doing it is to read from the posthumously published memoir, Something of Myself, which begins with an invocation to Allah, the dispenser of events. And goes on:
‘My first impression is of daybreak, light and colour and golden and purple fruits at the level of my shoulder. This would be the memory of early morning walks to the Bombay fruit market with my ayah and later with my sister in her perambulator, and of our returns with our purchases piled high on the bows of it. Our ayah was a Portuguese Roman Catholic who would pray—I beside her—at a wayside Cross. Meeta, my Hindu bearer, would sometimes go into little Hindu temples where, being below the age of caste, I held his hand and looked at the dimly-seen, friendly Gods’
This memoir begins with invocations of Allah, the Roman Catholics and the Hindus, and Kipling came of Protestant Methodist stock. So that gives you some idea of the extraordinary multicultural origin of this writer who we think of as so associated with English nationalism. His first language as he grew up was not English. It was what he called the vernacular. Hindi. Another little passage from Something of Myself talks about the stories and nursery songs, all unforgotten, these are Hindu.
‘We were sent into the dining-room after we had been dressed, with the caution, ‘Speak English now to Papa and Mamma.’ So one spoke ‘English,’ haltingly, translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in.’’...
'Then he was wrenched... idyllic Bombay and sent to a boarding house in Southsea when he was just about six. So he spent the next six years there and from what he wrote about it later, it was hell’
‘Well, in something of myself he calls it the House of Desolation, which speaks for itself. He was not quite six when he left India and his and his sister, Alice, who was called Trix, was only three. And the three of them were there for yes, six years. And it was a very very, it was a traumatic experience. It certainly scarred them for life’
‘The man in the boarding house seems to have been a kindly chap from what we know. The woman was evangelical, bullying. She thought little boys were full of sin and told lies. And result of our treatment we’re told he suffered from hallucinations and even bouts of blindness’"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Haitian Revolution - "‘Wasn't the chief city in Saint-Domingue the richest, richest city in the New World, richer than Philadelphia at the time?’
‘It was certainly bigger than Philadelphia. And it was, and it was the richest colony in the new world. It was known as the pearl of the, Saint-Domingue was known as the pearl of the Antilles.’...
‘How common were such revolt in the New World around that time?’
‘Well, I think it's worth thinking through. What do we mean by revolt, right? The Haitian Revolution is fascinating in the sense that it's a long period of time. There are lots of series of engagements that occur. There's definitely brutality and there's definitely fires. But it's not necessarily where people are marshalling and getting arms and immediately coming out into the street and then and then fighting for a couple of days and it goes down, it keeps going, right, it keeps going for 12, long years. Many other sort of altercations and revolts that happen, typically were very, very small, very immediate. There are lots of indications and instances of very big ones. But there's a lot of things that people did to actually be disruptive, much more disruptive than necessarily violent. Slowing down the work that you might do, shuffling your feet, poisoning yourself, you can engage in all forms of types of resistance that doesn't necessarily have to go to this big blownout revolt. And that's been a big debate with amongst historians thinking about resistance, within the Caribbean and within the larger North America, which is, on the one hand, rumors would circulate that would say, you know, slaves are revolting everywhere and there and there's just resistance so that the fear needs to happen. And people would rally and try to control. But then there was also these other sorts of stories that were, went circulate that say, slaves’ nature is that they're docile. And they would never revolt. So we would never need to actually do anything because our slaves, this is their, this is their natural condition is to be enslaved’"
It is interesting that liberals blame Haiti's poor state on reparations, but these were paid off by 1947 and World Bank GDP data from 1961 on isn't great

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, George Sand - "‘There was a lot of speculation as to the identity of the person behind the G Sand’
‘How long did it take them to clock that it was a woman?’
‘I think that was pretty much known by the end of the year, if not before that. I mean one critic, for instance, Gustav Planche, really focuses in on this question in his review, because the narrator of the novel, the narrator of the novel is male. Speaks through this male voice and we know this because at various points he makes references to ‘We men’, for instance, and he uses generalizations about women, some of which are fairly misogynistic, you know referring to same, women is idiotic by nature. And Gustav Planche speculated that a man would never have dared to write that. So it had to be a woman behind the male voice.’...
‘It's fine if you, if she was interested in women as well as in men’...
‘Well, I don't think there was any great ambiguity about her sexuality… She enjoyed experimenting with everything… and she certainly experimented in terms of relationship. I mean, she had really some extraordinarily sadistic relationships with men, which she clearly enjoyed. In one instance, talking about the stigmata on her hands left by a violent sexual encounter. So she, she was a great experimenter’...
‘She didn’t press for votes for women.’
‘It's not quite as simple as that... she didn't advocate giving women the vote simpliciter unless they were also given education and freedom. And actually, this argument was made later by perfectly liberally minded people. If you give women the vote without education and freedom, they will find themselves pressured to vote the way their husbands want, and that would suit some political parties and not others. So I don't think Sand thought women shouldn't be full citizens. She thought that simply granting the vote wasn't the right way to go about it'"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, e - "‘What's important about e, there's two main things. The first is that it's a number that just pops up again and again and again… the way that a hot coal will cool if you put it in a cool environment, the way in which populations of rabbits and foxes grow and shrink because the foxes catch the rabbits and the rabbits breed. And in pure maths, we're going to see some applications during the show, including things like the number of prime numbers less than a given number. e appears everywhere. And the second thing that's really important about the number e and in terms of the way it was discovered, is that this very small number is infinitely bound up with infinity. All of the ways that we define e involve infinite processes, and so to understand what the number e is, mathematicians had to get to grips with infinity’
‘pi was a number known to the ancient Greeks. But e wasn't discovered until about the 17th century. Why did it take so long? And how was it discovered?’
‘Why it took so long is because the maths involved was considerably more advanced than was available to the Greeks. The maths involved was infinitely bound up with rates of change, and of movement and of shifts in direction. And we just didn't have the math to talk about those until quite a bit later... the Greeks were afraid of infinity in many ways. They were afraid by concepts such as Xeno’s paradox which says that to get from here to there, I first of all have to go half the distance from here to there. Then I have to go half the distance again, that makes me three quarters. Then I have to go half again. I'm now at seven eights. And then half again, and reasoning like that I'm never going to get to the other side of this table. So they effectively banished all notion of infinity from their mathematics, and would only consider finite processes which could be big but couldn't go on forever. The way in which e was first discovered was, in fact, the compound interest, which might disturb our listeners to know that infinity is bound up with compound interest.’"