More than knoweing

Not long ago I suggested we need a new word - knowe - for people we have met electronically, but never face-to-face. What surprises me when I think about it, is how big a chunk of my life involves electronically supported relationships. Let's take a few examples:

My editor at St Martin's Press in New York, Michael Homler. We've never met. I think we've spoken on the phone once. That apart, all our contact has been by email (if you don't count proofs coming by snail mail) - but I'd say we have a great working relationship.
I follow Stephen Fry on Twitter. Yes, I'm one of the half million or so sad people. Yet I feel a strange closeness from those bon mots he flings out into the e-sphere.
I've just helped someone with a proposal for a major training contract. We've met twice - one of the times to work together successfully, but almost our entire working interaction has been electronic.
I'm going to Swindon Festival of Literature tonight to see Emma Darwin in action. I've never been in the same room as her before, but because we're on the same writers' forum (and, yes, friends on Facebook), I feel I know her.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, one of my websites sells CDs of organ accompaniments for church music. The organist and his producer live in Nottingham, 140 miles away. We've never met and only spoken on the phone a few times. Our whole working relationship has been built electronically.
I do, I admit, meet my agent two or three times a year in the real world, but our working relationship is mostly driven by email and Skype.

... and I could go on at even greater length.

There are those who would moan and groan and gnash their teeth at this. The breakdown of society, with relationships replaced by pale electronic equivalents, they would say. Rubbish. This is an enhancement, building on the real world stuff. And as someone whose working life inevitably involves being shut away in a room on my own quite a lot, I can only say I'm very grateful for it.

To finish with a bit of culture, although I've never met the organist I work with, I've seen him at work, and you can too:

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...

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