Here is a detail of a strange procession I saw today:
Some of the people appear twice; it’s because I took it in sections, and meanwhile they kept walking. Here is the whole thing, but to see anything at all I have to turn it sideways. Even then I can’t reproduce it with anything like the correct number of dots per square foot. I just hope you’re not looking at this with an iPhone.
Later on the dogs went into the lake. Topsy had a proper swim. She’s getting quite good, I think she had all her feet off the ground at some points.
And Jack had a paddle. I don’t think he’d go in at all if he didn’t see Topsy doing it.
A Bad Guide 
Does Topsy do that wonderful doggy “I’ll just do a high speed shake so that you share the joy of water too, Crown” business?
By the by, we are getting some sun here, and little rain, but you couldn’t call it summery – it’s still cool and breezy. Some of the farmers had ploughed up their winter wheat crop as being too feeble, and sowed spring barley instead: they must now be wondering whether they’ll even get a decent barley crop.
We’ve had our first strawberries but our spring/early summer crop of broccoli and broad beans is utterly pathetic. Still, the flowers have put on a wonderful display, the tatties seem in good heart, and we’ve had the first of our own lettuce.
Yes she does. She’s not the worst, but I too have noticed that all dogs seem to feel compelled to go and stand beside someone before they’ll shake the water off. I wonder why.
There was an article in the Guardian about the failed wheat crop. It said Weetabix had run out of weet. But it’s not just here & Britain. A friend of mine who lives in Umbria told me in an email that yesterday was their first summer weather.
Jack is not yet convinced, methinks
No. He’s a little bit afraid. I don’t think terriers are natural swimmers like labradors or the Portuguese water dog.
We’re having too much rain and too little sun here, too; the farmers are getting worried. A guy who has usually sold 4,500 bales of hay to farmers by this time of the year has only managed to cut a couple of hundred bales.
That will have repercussions for the animals too, I suppose. Still, maybe a few crop failures will be a catalyst to do something about global warming. I think US politicians need a mandate from voters before they’ll seriously cut CO2 emissions etc.
Ahoy, Crown.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/de-meuron-von-gerkan-and-ingenhoven-on-german-construction-headaches-a-905472.html
I too have noticed that all dogs seem to feel compelled to go and stand beside someone before they’ll shake the water off. I wonder why.
I don’t know whether all dogs act that way, but let’s assume many do. What you say is like a post hoc, propter hoc argument aspiring to become a causal one. Many dogs always shake the water off after going to stand beside someone, so in some way or other they must be shaking the water off because they are near someone. Perhaps they get something out of it, and so intend to stand by someone when they shake the water off. Or, as you put it, perhaps they feel compelled to do so, although they may have a bad conscience about it.
I wonder why “post hoc, propter hoc” considerations are supposed to be a Bad Thing. After all, nobody would bother to look for reasons or causality unless they had previously noticed some one-thing-happens-after-another-thing kind of thing. I guess it’s that “post hoc, propter hoc” considerations do not deserve to be called arguments, because they are only descriptions of one damned thing happening after another. Just because 2 comes after 1 when we start listing the positive integers, we are not entitled to claim that 2 occurs because 1 occurs.
It may be possible to explain the chronological sequence of first standing-by-someone, second shaking-the-water-off, in a way that resembles 2 coming after 1 but not because of 1. I think I have such an explanation. Suppose dogs, like humans, have priorities in the sense that they prefer to do certain things before doing other things. (I think that imputing preferences to animals is no more implausible than imputing rights to them).
We might suppose that one of the high-priority things of a dog is, if possible, to seek the proximity of a person after engaging in an exciting activity such as playing in the water. Perhaps this proximity helps the dog to recover its composure. In any case, once the dog has taken care of this high priority, it thinks “OK, now I can shake off this water, and then maybe look around for a bite to eat”.
It was your use of the word “compelled” that put me onto this idea. I know someone whose wife always begins a conversation with him by nagging. It would drive me crazy, but the husband accepts it. He has arrived at the conclusion that she will never change, and in some sense is “compelled” to be that way. I have tried, but failed so far, to argue against this conclusion, saying that perhaps she just doesn’t know anything else to do, or just has different priorities – first nag, then do other things.
It may be controversial to argue that animals and humans have so much in common that animals must have rights, just like humans. But the controversy shouldn’t increase if we take this thinking one step further, to argue that animals might have obligations as well as rights. Since humans and animals have so much in common, we are entitled to enforce obligations by humane means.
I am slowly working my way towards the suggestion that the judicious application of a rolled-up newspaper might alter the wife’s priorities.
This is some German thing that I know nothing about. Gerkan is a big fish in Hamburg, elsewhere he’s unknown & rightly so. He is a pompous rich ass and a flashy, not very good, designer. Herzog & de Meuron are ok sometimes. They did the Tate Modern in London. The other guy I don’t know.
Just like the young Englishmen who got a first in Classics and went straight on to the Colonial Office to run India, architects who do this sort of work are doing it as amateurs. I can’t see it lasting. There are people today whose entire training & background is in construction management. I know of one unusual tradition in structural engineering that has worked well – certainly in the sense that the designs are great (I don’t know the details of the money side) – the Swiss & French have had a system of entrepreneur-designers for a long time. Eiffel’s work was done that way (i.e. he was the general contractor as well as the designer) and the same goes for the amazing concrete bridges designed & built in Switzerland by Robert Maillart and then more recently by Christian Menn (but don’t get me started on those two, they are my favourites).
they must be shaking the water off because they are near someone.
Yes. They go close to someone (anyone) before they will shake. This is what I strongly believe.
“OK, now I can shake off this water, and then maybe look around for a bite to eat”
Oh well, you could be right. They do kind of have that demeanor while it’s going on.
nagging. It would drive me crazy
It would drive me crazy. I know because I had a great aunt like that. I never tried a rolled-up newspaper, and now it’s too late.
But do rights automatically come with obligations?
Here’s a twofer (beauty & economy) from Mies, via someone called Keatinge-Clay, for dearie:
“Like Le Corbusier, Mies came to work after lunch. He was quiet. He liked to say, ‘The less talking, the better; the more looking, the better.’ It was best not to talk about beauty, he said, but to look for the most rational and economical solution to the design. He wasn’t talking about cost, but about paring the structure of a building to a minimum.”
Our present government is wedded to a ludicrous project it calls HS2, a high speed railway line that will cut – ooh, minutes – off the London to Birmingham rail journey. Allegedly it will eventually connect to northern cities. The cost admitted to is outrageous, the eventual cost would be more so, the cost-benefit analysis comes mighty close to being a pack of lies – what can one say?
Whatever is spent now will be utterly wasted because the next government will cancel it (unless, I suppose, it’s another coalition that includes the Lib Dems), and even if that weren’t true it would be a disaster to start up a new electric railway at about the time when electricity blackouts will become normal. As my dear old Dad used to say of so many government projects “It makes me want to spit”.
Thank God for cheerful wee pooches, say I, and mysterious crocodiles of middle-aged walkers.
I’m against spending any money on projects that won’t be finished until after I’ll be dead.
But do rights automatically come with obligations?
Instead of obligations, one could say duties or responsibilities. By claiming that a person (or animal) has certain rights, one unavoidably claims that other persons (or animals) have, at the very least, an obligation to respect those rights. Otherwise it makes no sense to talk of rights. Animal rights are matched by human responsibilities towards them. Human rights are matched by human responsibilities towards each others.
Of course one could claim that babies, say, have rights but no duties. Any duties they had would have to be matched by rights of adults towards them. But what rights could an adult claim to have towards babies ? Is it reasonable to demand something from a baby, given that it can’t even understand the demand, much less undertake to meet it ?
Perhaps a similar argument could be urged for animals: they have rights, but humans cannot demand anything of them, because they can’t even understand the demands. And yet we do try to influence their behavior. We just don’t use words to do so. Same with babies.
Rights, duties and litigation are not the only means to get what one wants. There are also rolled-up newspapers and pacifiers. Not to mention arguments about rights, which are intended to convince by being “internalized”. This cuts costs because people then do what they are supposed to do, without the police having to be called in.
That should be “… much less undertake to comply with it”. I confused supply and demand with compliance and demand. Although there are resemblances, I suppose.
Yes, this all sounds right, but:
Rights, duties and litigation are not the only means to get what one wants.
Perhaps it goes without saying that goodwill & voluntary cooperation are preferable, but surely litigation is an illusory option most of the time. It works as a threat, but that’s as far as it goes. And as for rolled-up newspapers etc., I’m not even sure if they should be used as a so-called ‘last resort’. Just look at Gezi Park & Taksim Square in Istanbul: tear gas and all sorts of other violence being used in the name of nice respectable properly elected government.
It’s hard to get babies to comply with anything. Animals are much more tolerant and much less emotional.
Yes, I’ve been wondering whether there is a kind of category mistake involved in the often-heard accusation that humans interpret the behavior of other animals in an “anthropomorphic” way. Various BBC documentaries on the behavior of animals encourage the idea that humans may have learned from certain animal species how to weave (spiders), build houses (beavers) etc. Could it be that humans learned from dogs how to be more tolerant and less emotional ?
That is, some humans from some dogs.
To explain the pyramids, the idea has been invoked that some alien civilization from outer space popped by to teach us a few techniques. Maybe that civilization was not a civilization after all, but animal species teaching us stuff over millions of years. The aliens might be still among us, gnawing down trees and barking.
If anything is anthropomorphic, it’s the idea that superior life forms must be good at maths and come from somewhere else.
By the way, at the top of page three of that Spiegel interview there is this:
SPIEGEL: Why did it take five years to recognize the need for restructuring?
De Meuron: We repeatedly warned that something was going wrong. All partners in the project were informed, both verbally and in writing, and I personally brought it to the attention of the then-mayor.
SPIEGEL: We have managed to identify a few structural problems. One of them is that projects are always put out to tender too early and with budgets that are too low.
The expression “a few structural problems” seems to mean structural problems in some building, but the context shows that something else is being talked about. Maybe I’m just not familiar with the word “structural” being used in the same way as the word Struktur, say in Strukturprobleme oder strukturelle Probleme.
Struktur rarely if ever refers to the structure of a building, strukturell only occasionally. For that you have words like Konstruktion or Bauweise. Strukturelle Probleme are kinds of infrastructure or “superstructure” problem, that is organizational or political problem.
Sorry, that last sentence should begin with “Strukturprobleme“.
I couldn’t agree more about most of what you wrote, Stu. My only quibble is about anthropomorphism. I think most people appreciate mostly only the qualities of birds & animals that they can translate into human terms, even unpleasant ones (eating their young or something like that), and therefore judge animals along those human lines. I think that’s the tricky part of animal rights: not seeing rights anthropomorphically – through human eyes, in other words.
I don’t know about German but in English I don’t like metaphorical usages of words like structure or architecture (in computers). In fact, I’ll go further: I don’t like the way almost everything in IT is metaphorical. They (the IT people) should pay some linguists to invent new words for their new concepts & technology. These words should be shortish & easy to pronounce, not like drug names and not words with too many vowels, like ‘arama’ or anything like that (too forgettable). They should be old English-sounding words like “blonk” or “brammelling”, words that seem like they’ve always been there.
(Woody sort of words).
Here, if we’re still wondering if symmetry is a requirement of Vogue-type beautiful faces, Kate Moss‘s doesn’t look very symmetrical.
But then I don’t find her attractive.
No. Neither do I. Scary-looking.