For posterity, here is the text, not precisely as delivered of course. In fact it probably reads better than how I delivered it, since I did not have time to commit it to memory or work on the presentation.

Good evening,

Traditionally the Immortal Memory is a reflection on Burns’ life, combining scholarship with wit and anecdote. Unfortunately I’m a not very knowledgeable about Burns, and Wikipedia was down mid-week, so I’ve had to make some stuff up. Hopefully you won’t notice.

But maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t know much about Burns. I’ve been to loads of Burns suppers, so I should know his story quite well by now, but before this week, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you very much about him at all. So consider this the cliff-notes version in case you weren’t paying attention before either. Instead of The Immortal Memory, this is an Immortal Crash Course / Refresher.

So:

Born in 1759 into hard work and poverty on a farm in Alloway near Ayr.

Burns got a pretty good education, from his father (1721–1784), from his own reading as a child, and at an ‘adventure school’ between about the ages of 6 and 9. An ‘adventure school’ is not nearly as exciting as it sounds. It’s worth saying that the Victorians downplayed his education, because it made the story of a poor ploughman producing sublime poetry so much more romantic. But, really, he was a smart lad who did well in what schooling he got.

When their old landlord died, the new factor, who was an asshole, made dreadful demands of Burns’ family. Burns writes:

My indignation yet boils at the recollection of the scoundrel tyrant’s insolent, threatening epistles, which used to set us all in tears.— This kind of life, the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing moil of a galley-slave, brought me to my sixteenth year; a little before which period I first committed the sin of RHYME.

He joined a Country Dancing School at age 20, primarily to meet girls. At 21 he founded the Bachelor’s Club of Tarbolton with his brother Gilbert (1760–1827). Rule 10 of the Bachelor’s Club of Tarbolton: “Every man proper for a member of this Society must be a professed lover of ONE OR MORE of the female sex.” (The first rule of the Bachelor’s Club of Tarbolton was You do not talk about the Bachelor’s Club of Tarbolton.)

He wasn’t just a lover, though, he was an enthusiastic—in the parlance of the time—‘wing man’. He boasted of “curiosity, zeal, and intrepid dexterity”.

When he was 25, his father died. His mother (1732–1820) on the other hand outlived him by 24 years.

Age 25 he met Jean Armour. I never really paid attention to this bit before, and had it in my mind that she was Burns’ great love. But it seems that Burns had a habit of falling in love quite a lot—or convincing himself that he was falling in love. (It’s worth pointing out that while he was trying to woo Jean, he got his mother’s servant pregnant and she bore his first child.) Jean and Rabbie’s eyes met when his dog walked on her laundry, and he wooed her, got her pregnant, she was sent to Paisley in disgrace. He wrote a letter promising to marry her, thinking it was the honourable thing to do—but Jean’s father was an outraged wealthy stone-mason and ripped up the letter. In later years they did eventually marry. He describes her as “a delicious armful” and admires her singing range—up to B-natural, apparently—but that’s no basis for a relationship. “I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure her,” he wrote to a friend— but then married her a couple of months later. Jean herself said that Burns really should have had ‘twa wives.’

Anyway, that wasn’t for a few years. Back to 1786 when Burns was 27:

While he was out of favour with Jean and her family, he fell in love with Mary Campbell—Highland Mary (1763–1786): They pledged their troth; they romantically exchanged bibles— and he offered to take her away from all this, to a new job managing a slave plantation in Jamaica.

He released a book of poetry to raise money for the voyage, but the book (“The Kilmarnock Volume”) was a lot more successful than he’d hoped, and he was flattered by praise from Edinburgh’s rich, literary set.

So he went to Edinburgh instead.

But before that, Jean Armour gave birth to twins, and Highland Mary died of typhus aged 23.

In Edinburgh he met Walter Scott (1771–1832), who was 16 years old at the time. Walter Scott was… not known for understatement:

His person was strong and robust; his manners rustic, not clownish, a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity which received part of its effect perhaps from knowledge of his extraordinary talents.

And:

[His eye] literally glowed when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time.

Not just a talented poet, but he had glowing eyes too.

About this time he started a relationship with Agnes Maclehose (1759–1841) aka Nancy Maclehose, alias ‘Clarinda’. She was the woman for whom he wrote “Ae Fond Kiss” when she left the country to try to patch things up with her estranged husband. Their relationship was passionate; it was firey; but it was all letters and nothing physical. He didn’t manage to get her into pants. Though he did manage to get her servant pregnant.

After his publishing success, he bought another farm. He took in Jean Armour, who was living in poverty and disgrace— and then he married her.

He got a job with the excise.

He continued to write poetry and also collected folk songs, and continued to drink hard and courted scandal by supporting the French Revolution, but in less than a decade his health was failing. After a some dental work in the winter of 1795 he died in the spring of 1796.

He lived hard, died young and left a good-looking portrait.

Burns won fame through his poetry and his songs, but I think the reason that he has stayed so relevant to us, and why we celebrate his life and not just his poetry, is because we do know so much about him. Our other national Bard, the one from Stratford upon Avon (1564–1616), is an enigma; we don’t know his birthday, we know very little about his life.

By contrast Burns is an open book; there are plenty of parish records, third-party reports; poems he’s dedicated to real people in his life, and we even have a lot of the letters he wrote—including love letters—and in some of these letters he writes about himself. We know that he was outgoing and popular—when he came late to an inn, the servants would get out of bed to hear him talk. We certainly know that he slept around a lot, that he married Jean Armour, probably for the wrong reasons, and kept getting her pregnant, whilst falling in love with other women.

To indulge in some national stereotyping, the English keep stiff upper lips, and Americans are loud and bombastic. At its best, the Scottish psyche favours directness. And as a nation we scorn pomposity and social climbers. Rabbie Burns embodied that tradition of plain speaking and egalitarianism, and more than a little bit of romantic idealism. I propose that this is part of the reason he has remained so popular in his own country, and has represented Scotland so well abroad.

As a nation, we love him because we feel we know him. He was a man who wore his heart on his sleeve. Or possibly on his trousers.

Rabbie Burns loved blindly; loved kindly, and spent a lot of his life broken hearted—in between the loving blindly bits.

Thomas Carlisle (1795–1881) summed up Burns’ life thus:

Granted the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and tackle damaged, the pilot is blameworthy … but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the Globe or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs.

Burns’ voyage in life was a grand one—and it is a testament to his life and talents that since his death, his standing around the globe has only increased. Also, all the evidence suggests that his tackle was in fine working order.

He is commemorated by statues and memorials from Kilmarnock to Canberra, Stirling to Nova Scotia and Mauchline to Massachusetts. (And lots of others, but these were the most alliterative ones.) In Russia he is known as the People’s Poet, or the ‘Socialist Poet’. Russia was in fact the first country to put him on a postage stamp.

He has inspired 20th Century greats, John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger and Bob Dylan. In 1996 he was even immortalised in a stage musical by John Barrowman.

After spending a couple of days mining the Internet for information about Robert Burns, it’s not difficult to see why Scotland, and the rest of the world, has installed him in the pantheon of great poets; why he is our national bard. Burns’ poetry still speaks to us. His life of course was romantic and scandal-ridden enough to be interesting, but he himself emerges as a kind and honest man, honest enough to speak to farm labourers and lords alike.

As the last lines of one of his most celebrated works—A Cotter’s Saturday Night—basically a paean to staying in—goes:

O never, never Scotia’s realm desert;
But still the patriot, and the patriot-bard
In bright succession raise, her ornament and guard!

“They [computers and digital media] just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”

His new album is available only on CD, and not iTunes, Amazon, eBay… and he’s closing (closed) down his own website (presumably because he doesn’t want to fill other people’s heads with numbers and thus contribute to the problem). So he’s promoting it on MTV? Ah, probably not, since MTV is ‘outdated’ the same way the Internets are.

So expect his ship-to-ship–semaphore–(or possibly telegram)–based marketing campaign to commence in 3… 2… 1…

(Good thing noone’s told him that CDs are digital.)

Incidentally, his cover of Radiohead’s Creep is brilliant.

Part of the design is to disallow things like "text" ÷ 11 or apples + oranges, and for that I need a type system.

So I’m investigating type systems, and rules for inferring types, and I’m looking at the algorithm they call Hindley-Milner type inference. I found an implementation of the algorithm in Perl by Nikita Borisov. This was in turn based on a Modula-2 implementation described in a paper by Luca Cardelli, Basic Polymorphic Typechecking (1987/’88). Given that I read maths only very painfully and slowly, it’s a very clear and readable paper.

I have reimplemented the algorithm in Scala (the language I’m using for my application).

Because Scala is itself a statically-typed language, some of the logic becomes clearer than the Perl version (for example, it is obvious where type variables are expected as opposed to type terms). Scala is also somewhat syntactically lighter than Perl, and a lot lighter and more expressive than Modula-2, so you may find it easier to read too.

The essential algorithm is elegant: given an expression in the form of an abstract syntax tree (AST), it recursively creates a tree of types in the expression, inserting placeholder ‘type variables’ for all the unknowns. It then ‘unifies’ sub-types, for example, ensuring that a function call’s result type is the same as the function definition’s result type. The final unification creates the most general type tree possible which accurately captures the expression type. The final unification may include still-unbound type variables, which would indicate that the expression is polymorphic in these type variables.

My code is available for download in the hope that others find it as useful as I found Luca Cardelli’s paper and Nikita Borisov’s Perl implementation:

http://dysphoria.net/code/hindley-milner/HindleyMilner.scala

You can run it as a script to see it analyse some example expressions: scala HindleyMilner.scala

Note: I believe that there was a mistake in the original Perl code; when unifying two variables, it tried to ensure that generic type variables were always bound to non-generic ones, not the other way about. This was in order to satisfy the requirement “In unifying a non-generic variable to a term, all the type variables contained in that term become non-generic.” However, it does not matter the order in which they are bound. Once the ‘bindee’ is further bound to a term, they both become bound to the same term. The original code omitted a call to prune in the method occursintype which (I believe) lead to a fault, for which the mistaken ‘fix’ was added.

Fuck.

What a stinking cheese platter of overripe dramatic stilton.

Personally I lay full blame at the feet of series godfather and cheesemonger in residence, Russell T. Davies. Gaping plot-holes, magical mobile phones which work across the Universe, a key plot-point straight out of Lawnmower Man, pretentious, overblown orchestration, and seemingly an attempt to jam every single character and monster from the last 4 seasons, into a bloated 45 minutes of Whovian fanboy masturbation.

I liked one bit: the bit near the end, when Rose and The Doctor see each other for the first time in ages. That was lovely. However almost immediately afterwards the spell was broken, when they ran toward each other in a comically overextended ‘lovers’ cinematic run’ sequence which seemed to go on for about 5 minutes, (before a clichéd fucking Dalek clichédly shoots The Doctor, then a just-in-the-nick-of-clichéd-time Captain Clichéd Jack appears and clichédly shoots the Dalek).

And the Daleks… Basically they keep coming back from the dead in increasingly creative ways, just in time to threaten the Earth at the end of each season of Doctor Who. They’ve turned from a sinister surprise into an expected, end of season Very Special Guest Star.

Ugh. There’s only one way to save the Universe: quick, everybody dial The Doctor’s mobile phone number (07700 900461*—you may want to take a note of it in case your planet is ever in danger), thus boosting the subspace frequencies, routing it through every telephone exchange in the UK (which has the effect of, erm, not completely clogging the network, apparently), and causing big RKO-style circles to propagate out through space, thus alerting The Doctor that The Earth has been ‘hidden’ 1 second back in time. (Oddly, given that the TARDIS routinely pops back and forth in time by millennia, going back in time by 1 second causes the camera to shake and things to go on fire in a very dramatic manner.)

I can understand that Russell T. wanted to go out with a bang (he’s retiring as head writer), but he really should have smoked less crack while knocking off this piece of trite, disjointed, nonsensical, overblown, masturbatory, illogical, incoherent bollocks.

* Actually, I just tried phoning it. “This number is not recognised.” Thanks Doctor. (He must have changed his provider and not bothered moving his number over. Bloody disorganised Timelord.)

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20080322/news_1m22gygax.html

He is survived by a wife, six children, and 8 million teenagers with funny-shaped dice.

Yay. Go, distributed citizen-journalism!

The replacement is a tiny, silent home server, about the size of a hard disk. I’m wondering if it’s up to the task now, since it doesn’t seem to be the fastest thing in the universe.

Anyway, I’m blogging again, and for that you can be thankful. Or whatever.

I just had to delete 17 spam comments, advertising ‘Phentermine’ (a diet pill similar to amphetamine, apparently) and gay sex (when two chaps of the same gender shag, apparently).

So that must mean that somebody is reading me!

(Oh, and one comment from Mr 1, daring to disagree with my opinions concerning the Co-op’s cheese-of-the-gods Wensleydale with Cranberries.) (I didn’t delete it though, 1.)

It’s probably seasonal, what with the cranberries and everything, so I suggest, (unless you have a very serious aversion to cheese), that you run to your nearest Co-op and stock up.

On Andrew’s Mental Dribbling we attempt to answer the big philosophical questions, like ‘Does God Exist?’ and ‘Does He Have A Beard?’ Or, if not answer them, at least defer them to an authorititive source. Or, if not defer to an authoritititive source, at least quote (third-hand) a random sample of Americans from a (possibly fictitious) poll:

A new H-Net/Fritz media poll reveal that 96% of Americans who believe in God also believe that God has a beard. Of those people, 89% believe that God’s beard is white, 2% believe God grew his beard (and therefore at some time did not have a beard), while 94% believe that God has always had a beard and has never been clean shaven. 10% of Americans do not believe in God. The Reverend Brendan Powel Smith, July 2005

I think we can all agree that the matter of God’s beardiness is ultimately a matter of faith. Clean-shaven or hirsute, Jehovah’s facial hair is not a matter which can be settled by rational debate. However, quite clearly, God does not have a moustache.

Hell

…And how to get there

www.entrances2hell.co.uk

A marvelous site. Very funny. Impossible to summarise. (Okay, it’s not impossible to summarise, but you’ll enjoy discovering it for yourself, I promise.) Read the ‘letters’ page for a laugh-out-loud potpouri of admiration and flumoxed literalists.

…And what you’ll see when you do

Dial-The-Truth Ministries’ The Truth About Hell

One of these religious nutcase sites where it’s not entirely clear whether they’re serious or not , but where the sparcity of gags makes you fear that, actually, they’re for real. (“Halloween comes from ancient Baal rituals that practiced human sacrifices of children!”, “Katrina: Mother Nature or the Wrath of God?”)

…But what you probably won’t hear

There was a widely-circulated Internet legend a year or two back, claiming that Siberian scientists had recorded audio of screaming damned souls, literally from Hell, after drilling deep into the Earth’s crust. You find the story repeated from time to time among the more gullible (e.g., the Dial-The-Truth Ministries site listed above). This page is a fascinating piece of investigation into the origin of the story.

Drilling To Hell—Facts

…The Truth They tried to suppress

I would like to introduce you to the world of Dr. Dino’s “Creation Science Evangelism”. It takes the somewhat dubious position that the Earth is only 4000 years old (give or take) and that the science of evolution is wrong. It also combines the irrisistable allure of Jesus and dinosaurs. (They’re pro-dinosaur, but anti-Darwin.)

I was concerned, however, that they seemed to be missing out on another oft-ignored scientific truth, that of Hell being at the centre of the Earth (see above), so I wrote them the following email:

Dear Dr Dino,

I loved the site! Really funny.

I’m surprised you’ve missed out a section on Hell in The Centre of The Earth though. http://www.av1611.org/hell.html includes cutaway diagram of Earth, clearly showing Beelzeebub’s molten home. (http://www.entrances2hell.co.uk/ is pretty good too, but it’s certainly not as slick.)

They wrote back with

Thanks for the email,
The Bible does refer to hell’s physical location being in the center(heart) of the earth.
Matthew 12:40
For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the {heart of the earth}. Our main focus however is on creation vs. evolution.

Bit of a disappointing reply. Wasn’t sure whether they knew I was taking the piss or whether in fact they were.

Much like Jesus’ parentage, we may never discover the truth.