City scapes

My strongest childhood stereotype of Switerland is from Asterix, where the Swiss diligently clean up behind the Roman orgies, where they decide to carry Obelix home after he drinks too much and passes out in the snow because he looks "messy" just lying there.




Going off stereotype, I was expecting Swiss city-scapes to be as pristine and pretty as the pictures on chocolate boxes. While some pristine and pretty cityscapes do exist, like the tourist friendly city center in Lucerne, there is also plenty of urban grit.

The graffiti along the train lines in Geneva and the tram lines in Bern can compete with London, Chicago or Bombay. There are practical but uninspired suburbs ringing the beautifully preserved city centres. There are also ugly American style strip malls sprouting neon advertising signs are being planted in chocolate box country side, despite some architects protesting.

Reality bites..even in Switzerland.

The Lions of Lanka

Swiss Nuggets: Observations about Switzerland following a long-weekend visit

The most visible minority in Switzerland are Sri Lankan Tamil refugees.

They include Giritharan Thiagarajan, the head chef at Vatter, an excellent vegetarian restaurant in Bern, who was delighted to meet fellow Tamils visiting his restaurant.

Wikipedia thinks 40,000 Tamils live in Switzerland. Giritharan thinks the number is 80,000…and he might be right. To put that in perspective, the sovereign nation of Liechtenstein, Switzerland’s eastern neighbour, is home to about 34,000 souls.

The Lions of Lucerne

Swiss Nuggets: Observations about Switzerland following a long-weekend visit

The cuckoo clock piece is untrue, so is the myth of brotherly love.

If anything, the Swiss myth of nationhood is martial: Switzerland is the only country in Western Europe that still has universal conscription. Hence the reputation for being excellent mercenaries, hence the Swiss Guards around the Pope resplendent in Michelangelo’s glorious metrosexual colours, hence the Swiss Army knives.

Hence the magnificient Lion of Lucerne, to remember the 700 Swiss Guards who fought to the last man against a bloodthirsty mob at Tuileries in 1792 while Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette escaped from the palace.




My wife and I were travelling with our six and three year old daughters. We chose not to inflict this story of futile heroism and cynical royalty on the kids, and decided the visit the Verkehrshaus, the Swiss transportation museum, instead.

Cuckoo

Swiss Nuggets: Observations about Switzerland following a long-weekend visit

In Italy under the Borgias they had warfare, terror and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

Since I had a great time in Switzerland, I must come to my gracious host's defence. The famous words quoted above are not true. The cuckoo clock was invented in Bavaria, in southern Germany.

Amateurs talk strategy. Real generals talk logistics

Here's the Economist on the last lap of the Obama-McCain campaign in Pennsylvania, a vital swing state.

...Obama has 81 field offices across the state, many in places where Democrats have never competed before, compared with Mr McCain’s three dozen...

...The McCain office only had a couple of people working the phones when The Economist visited. The young man who was in charge had no idea that Mr McCain was in the state that day. The Obama office, by contrast, was crammed to the brim and hyper-organised. There were plenty of older people sporting “Hillary sent me” badges as well as younger Obamaphiles. The walls were covered with charts telling people where they had to be and when. After dark, it was still buzzing with volunteers. The McCain office was closed...

There's the glimmer of an interesting theory here: winning elections is not about policy, performances, or even mud-slinging. All that is just noise that keeps the commentariat busy. The real business of winning elections is about logistics, keeping the show rolling on the ground. Politics is about Sales, not Marketing.

This may also be the real reason why the Congress, India's Grand Old Party, is now a shambles. It's not the failure of Nehruvian socialism or any such grand theory. It's probably about the about the slow tactical melting away of the grass-roots organization, of the Congressman in each village, of the great sales organization that was built up during the freedom struggle.

The Many Meanings of Moonballs

The word moonball has taken on an important new meaning: a type of squash serve.

This serve is played from the right-hander's forehand court, high and quite softly against the front wall (1). The balls descends steeply into the deep backhand corner (2), too high to comfortably play a backhand volley. It hits the back wall (3) and dies too quickly for a backhand drive (4). It's very effective, especially against average players like this blogger.

Click here for a demo of this serve on youtube, where it is unimaginatively described as a "lob serve".

Seeing the ball like a football

Cricket fans know that a batsman who has spent a lot of time at the crease is hard to dismiss, because he is “seeing the ball like a football”. A batsman who is new to the crease is always easier to dismiss. He struggles to sight the ball.

This is true regardless of the quality of the light. A batsman who is in can bat on comfortably through the gathering caliginosity, while a new man at the crease struggles to sight the ball even in glorious sunshine. This has always been true, something cricketers accept as natural.

The mechanism that makes this natural just became apparent me, from this article by Atul Gawande.

Gawande’s piece is about an emerging scientific understanding about the nature of perception. The new realization: perception is mostly memory. The inputs coming in from the senses are thin/ low fidelity/ low resolution/ highly pixellated compared to the richness with which the brain experiences the sensory input. The mind fills in the blanks.

Our centuries long assumption has been that the sensory data we receive from our eyes, ears, nose, fingers and so on contain all the information we need for perception…Yet, as scientists set about analyzing the sensory signals, they found them to be radically impoverished…The mind fills in most of the picture...Richard Gregory, a British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety percent memory and less than ten percent sensory nerve signals…

Gawande’s article talks a lot about phantom limbs, and intense itches felt on injured tissues which have no nerve endings. These extreme examples are useful because they make a powerful argument; perception of a phantom limb can’t be determined by objective sensory experience, because there is no sensory experience. But to me, this theory is more interesting because of the light it sheds on everyday experiences.

A batsman who is in is literally seeing the ball better than a batsman who has just come to the wicket. His memory has more readily accessible images of the moving ball. He is therefore better able to make meaning of the sketchy data that his eyes pick up.

This is the reason it is hard to listen to an unfamiliar genre of music. The mind simply doesn’t have enough stuff in memory to fill in the blanks and enrich the music.

This is the reason it is hard to drive on unfamiliar roads. The driver literally sees less of the road. The eyes pick up the same volume of information as on a familiar road. But the mind doesn’t have a stock of memories with which to enrich the image.

This is the reason I enjoy watching cricket on TV more than I enjoy watching football. My mind has a bigger bank of cricket memories to draw on, simply because I have watched more cricket over the years.

There is an elaborate academic literature on how Caucasian-Americans are not very good at recognizing Blacks, and to a slightly lesser extent, how Blacks are not very good at recognizing whites. This has sometimes been interpreted as racism, but sheer lack of familiarity seems a simpler and less incendiary explanation. Interestingly, the effects are smaller in racially integrated schools and among children who live in integrated neighbourhoods.

This might also be the reason for the cognitive biases that Greg Pye's blog (and Kahneman and Taversky), keep talking about. The confirmatory bias happens because people, literally, don’t see evidence which goes against their prior beliefs without making a pretty substantial effort.