Marie Jaëll

 Radio Three's current Composer of this Week is at least a change from the recycled former CotWs padding out the weeks between the detailed celebration of Beethoven, I thought. So maybe it is just an attempt to rescue a composer from obscurity just because she is a woman. Sure enough, the first movement of her first piano concerto played today is run-of-the-mill Austro-German grandiloquence of a kind later guyed by Dohnányi. (The closing movement is similar.) However, the slow middle movement made me sit up. Original, slightly quirky, it seemed to point the way forward to Ravel. I normally object to "bleeding chunks" of concertos and symphonies being broadcast as is the custom now on Radio Three, but I would make an exception in this case.

Marie Jaëll is clearly worth investigating further.

Trump's America

 Patrick Cockburn in the Independent and in yesterday's i quotes Rudyard Kipling:

Every nation, like every individual. walks in vain show - else it could not live with itself - but I never got over the wonder of a people who, having extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more completely than any modern race had ever done, honestly believed that they were a godly little New England community, setting examples to brutal mankind.

It has to be said that this was from Kipling's short autobiography written late in life. His treatment by his neighbours in Vermont where he had set up their first marital home with his American wife still rankled. However, it is of a piece with his respect for other peoples, no matter what their skin colour. Although he clearly believed that to have been born British was to win first prize in the lottery of life, he was no white supremacist. He would have been appalled by Trump.

Trump's racist rants would be bad enough if they were confined to the US. (Perhaps, though, old world broadcasters like BBC, Channel 4 News and al-Jazeera should be more mindful of their own nations' records on racial exploitation when extensively covering the worst of America.) What is more dangerous, and where the rest of the world needs to take notice, is in his using xenophobic rhetoric in order to appeal to his core vote at home. From the Middle East to the Far East, he is stirring up conflicts and inhibiting free trade. It is going to make recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic - which he is also aggravating - all the more difficult.

One should have no illusions that a Democrat president will be any less tough in trade negotiations than Trump, but at least we can trust anyone who picks up on Obama's legacy will honour any international agreements. 

Bebop was on its way

 BBC's J to Z celebrates Charlie "Yardbird" Parker's centenary.

Poor Montenegro

 Once the butt of Viennese humour in the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire (Léhar's Merry Widow changed the German grand duchy of the play on which the operetta was based to a thinly-disguised "Pontevedro"), Montenegro escaped the break-up of Tito's Yugoslavia. However, on the brink of joining the EU, she is reported to be at the mercy of a would-be elected dictator on the lines of Belaruss' Lukashenko.

Abu Ja`far Mohammed bin Mûsâ al-Khowârizmi

A 9th century (or 2nd century according to the Islamic calendar) Persian writer from what is now Khiva in Uzbekistan is responsible for two words which may cause the uninitiated to shudder but whose concepts have driven scientific advance. "Algebra" comes from the title of his noted text book, Kitab al jabr w'al-muqabala ("Rules of restoration and reduction"). Algebra is a great and beautiful thing, but I am afraid that, like many a secondary school student before me, I struggled with anything more complex than quadratic equations. (I am a living example that you do not need a degree in mathematics to be a competent computer programmer. Indeed, two of the best I worked with at DVL - both women incidentally - graduated in classical languages. Admittedly, computer science is another matter.)

The other word, based on the name of Moses' son Mohammed's natal city, is "algorithm", This is a more recent coining, for which the Oxford Dictionary does not have a date for a first appearance in print. Fortunately, Donald V Knuth, from whose magnum opus I have extracted most of this information, comes to the rescue. It appears that the great Russian mathematician (and son of a great mathematician*) A.A.Markov jr. first gave the term currency in the early 1950s, probably in translation. Before then, it had clearly been in use orally among mathematicians, along with the term "computational method". Knuth makes the distinction between the two terms that the latter does not necessarily terminate**. He explains:

The modern meaning for algorithm is quite similar to that of recipe, process, method, technique, procedure, routine, except that the word "algorithm" connotes something just a little different. Besides merely being a finite set of rules which gives a sequence of operations for solving a specific type of problem, and algorithm has five important features:

1) Finiteness. An algorithm must always terminate after a finite number of steps. 

2) Definiteness. Each step of an algorithm must be precisely defined; the actions to be carried out must be rigorously and unambiguously specified for each case.

3) Input. An algortihm has zero or more inputs, i.e., quantities which are given to it before the algorithm begins.

4) Output. An algorithm has one or more outputs, i.e., quantities which have a specified relation to the inputs.

5) Effectiveness. An algorithm is also generally expected to be effective. This means that all of the operations to be performed in the algorithm must be sufficiently basic that they can in principle be done exactly and in a finite length of time. {Although, of course, that length may be immense]

So, an algorithm is like a recipe, only more rigorous, and likely to contain a number of repeated steps. It is devised by a human to solve a particular problem. If an algorithm is faulty, the fault lies in the logic of the programmer or systems designer. 

An algorithm may be computationally correct, yet produce results which are not acceptable to the object of the system as a whole. e.g. a Universal Credit client. In that case, the person who defined the system, or its parameters, should shoulder the blame. In the case of UC, that blame goes right to the top.

*A.A.Markov sr. among other things gave his name to Markov chains, significant in queuing theory. I know this only from a short series of lectures on applied mathematics given by the Civil Service College, created by Harold Wilson, continued by Edward Heath but killed off in its original form by Thatcher and Heseltine.

** Many a careless programmer has written no more than a computational method through creating a loop of instructions whose terminating condition may not be met..

Trials in absentia

 It is reported that the accused in the Harry Dunn fatal crash case may be tried here even though she has returned to the States. 

It seems to me that before we try the citizen of a (mostly) friendly power for what at worst would be manslaughter, the DPP should give greater priority to trying the murderers of Alexander Litvinenko and the perpetrators of the Salisbury poisonings. In the latter case, there were two attempted murders, an incidental manslaughter and two incidental cases of grievous bodily harm. 

Russia has changed her criminal code to forbid trials in absentia - but not before sentencing Litvinenko to death for writing his expose of the Moscow apartment bombings after being granted asylum in Britain.

US electoral law catches up

The 19th amendment on women's suffrage became effective 100 years ago. It had been ratified on 18th August, but it was on this day in 1920 that it was formally adopted into the U.S. Constitution by proclamation of Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby.

Greece undoing all her good work

 This blog on at least two occasions has praised the Greek government for alone among EU governments locking down quickly and completely under the threat of Covid-19. The Greeks reaped their reward in the form of low infection rates and consequently very low death rates. However, clearly under pressure from the leisure and tourist sectors, the restrictions on incomers were relaxed too soon. Euronews reports:

Cases in Greece have skyrocketed lately

Greece has a relatively low COVID-19 infection and death rate compared to other EU countries, but the spread of the coronavirus has skyrocketed in recent weeks.

The country has recorded more than 7,200 cases in total, including some 2,800 in August alone. 230 people have died from COVID-19 in Greece.

Authorities say the surge in cases is due to non-compliance with distancing rules in restaurants, bars and public gatherings. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has warned that "more radical measures, which will undoubtedly have economic repercussions", will be put in place if the spread of the virus continues.