Social paradoxes and Football management
some of my banter from 2003
CHAPTER 05. 20th CENTURY LOGIC IN FOOTBALL MANAGEMENT.
WHY SCIENCE FAILED TO FIND THE RIGHT STARS WITH ITS ‘DARK SATANIC MILLS’.
KEYWORDS.
Reductionism, Utilitarianism, Plato, Paradox, Godel, Turing, Quantum, Popper, Globalism, Olbers, Clone death, 3rd Way, Ecumenical, Ethnology, Social Science, Glasgow Rangers FC
ABSTRACT.
Reductionism saw the science and technologies of the 20th century fail to reach an interplanetary perspective for the human race. Fraught with terminal paradoxes and flaws, the science of B Movies SciFi promises failed to deliver.
A paradigm driven by Platonic elitism [e.g. The Republic] and nepotism and assuaged by John Stuart Mill’s ‘Utilitarianism’ it became very, very difficult to get a game for both club and country in any industrial context for some reason no matter how talented, unique, enthusiastic or conformist one was.
In fact, even Globalism using these social and scientific elitist precepts did not lift Scottish industrial humanity out of a dark age.
Hard-line hot air failed to deliver anything other than a Virgin Records balloon attempting to mine sweep in Croatia to help out a United Nations task force disabled by hardware dysfunction.
Traditionally, the ignorance and sloth of humanity was the scapegoat for global failure. A good topic for indignant after-dinner rhetoric.
To aspire to what was elite however, one usually had to have something to say that would maintain one’s utility to massive Multinational Corporations that were seeking to expand their resource base and profits.
The days of faking a German accent at the Rockefeller Institute grant bids session whilst wearing a white coat however, are over.
These guys may as well have been Mary Poppins as they sang of ‘brown paper theses tied up with (super)strings .. these were a few of their favourite thingz.’ No Flash Gordon 1950’s Space Drive then.
It’s the pits, here we are stuck in Scotland with no holiday in the sun or indeed, around somebody else’s sun to look forward to and everybody in the world that does that science stuff an’ stuff like that doesn’t peruse reality in a rational way.
It’s not that the scientific methodology of reductionism didn’t produce enough failures because it persistently stripped the context off any process being observed, it’s just because we’re all finished ‘and we like it that way.’
Our own particular failures of the 20th century being almost completely sufficient to bury us in a dark age of magik and unreason we still have a legacy of joketown science that must be the envy of every intergalactic comedy department.
I’m now going to list a bunch of paradoxes and they have one thing in common; they all seem to get a game for Scotland and they cause catastrophic failure of the Scottish football Industrial Complex. They are all the one paradox caused by reductionism.
1. TURING’S INFINITE RECURSION BY INFINITE OBJECTS
PARADOX.
2. GöDEL’S INFINITE NUMBERING ILLOGICAL LOGIC PARADOX.
3. THE WAVE COLLAPSES WITHOUT WATERY ETHER PARADOX.
4. THE CLONE COLLAPSES WITHOUT GENETIC FILLER PARADOX
These 4 paradoxes are the severely injured power houses of a bad Scottish midfield.
For some reason this ‘pub-side’ [i.e. amateur team from a local drinking establishment] of very badly unfit players keep playing in the Scottish midfield. They don’t talk to one another, they don’t read the game, they never make a run up the park, they pass back, they don’t listen to their team mates – it’s as if they never played a good game of football in their lives. It’s as if they don’t know it’s football.
Sure they look good in their kit but the left winger Turing, trying to compute the best way up to the opposition goal line to set up an intelligent goal doesn’t know the rules of football – he’s blind. He staggers off into the crowd and feels his way up the park by grabbing onto everybody’s face, arms and jacket, and by the time he hits the advertising hording at the other end and fallen into the photographers he’s a complete mess.
Gödel does exactly the same on the Scottish right – it just isn’t logical.
Turing and Gödel both feel their way through an infinite number of spectators before they feel like passing.
Although the boy Wavey and the boy Clonesey try their devious best to be clever, they are good technicians of the game, they keep running out of steam in the middle of the park – this because they never seem to eat or drink anything between matches.
They are insubstantial.
They must be on drugs.
You really have to have something substantial inside you to hold up your backbone and tone up your stamina. It emerged that the pair of them had gone out on the binge yet again to Olbers’ – a nightclub on the west side of Glasgow the night before the match and discovered that they could get free stimulants - (free energy) all night every night – as much as they wanted.
Olbers had discovered an unlimited supply of ether that held up all the light in the Universe making the sky black - and he had a strong argument with Albert that ether exists.
That also made Albert wrong about the fixed speed of light.
Paradoxically although Olbers a German philanthropist had been on the go in Glasgow since the 1920’s he couldn’t have been an Einstein or he would have got his relatives selling it all over Scotland.
The Olbers family motto seemed a bit intimidating though .. ‘it’ll be all white on the night ..’ Perhaps they were forced to leave Germany by some Einstein who felt that they were being a bit unreasonable. Everybody knows that it’s black at night – that’s why we need street lighting.
Maybe that Einstein in Germany got his sums wrong – no matter.
How can you talk about light waves and ignore the medium of propagation - the aethert ???? Its like talking about boats and ignoring the water or talking about biological life without water.
Anyway, Wavey and Clonesey went to Olbers and got paralytic with ether and just fell over. It wasn’t that they just got their sums wrong, they just ignored the one vital clue – everybody knows you gotta drink the free water supplied there or you severely dehydrate.
Water is the stuff that keeps us together, and as we are 90% water and we keep running it out, it stands to reason that we have to keep putting it back in. Where Wavey and the boy Clonesey fell down was that they forgot to feel thirsty and hungry. They even forgot they had a body. Worse still they even forgot they had a game for Scotland the next night.
Everybody has a body that has water. The medium of the propagation of life. Everybody needs water. You take away water and we are a small bag of chemicals. If you eat another small bag of chemicals on top of the chemicals you already have – you need more water.
It deluges water in Scotland all the time ! how could they forget that ..
There cannot be wave particle phenomenon with out the medium of propagation.
There was Olbers nightclub giving the interstellar drug of ether away and those two clowns couldn’t care about how they handle themselves.
How do you get it into their stupid heads that they need water and metabolic filler if they cannot identify it.
Everybody in the Universe and everything in the Universe has to get from A to B through some common C.
The drugs would need to travel from mouth to toilet through some common water. (ie. a medium such as UNIVERSAL AETHER) If they claim their body and the Universe doesn’t need water and is made of air is it their right to be signing a commercial contract with the Scottish Industrial Football Association.
They need to be seen to at least patronise the context of healthy biology, as long as they can still play. So that their team mates don’t get worried during those long sub-tropical tours.
They had been faking their physio test results.
Maybe tell them that it’s like putting; air in their tyres, or seats in their car. Or – it’s like the circuit boards inside the TV they threw through the hotel window, or the mushy peas inside the cans at Tesco.
Einstein himself thought that Olbers and his freewheeling nightclub was ‘spooky’ because of inexplicable wave-like resonances - that refuted Einstein's theory.
If Albert was right that watery ether was not needed to dilute things down and mix up the vapours and ethers on their way through the kidneys, then the place would stay in business without clients being given water no matter how much drugs they ate. He would go one better on his German contemporary Olbers.
Olbers spoke to Einstein telling him that if Albert was right, then the sky should be white at night, because if there is no watery ether attenuating our Scottish Universe most of the nightclub clientele would be well whited out of it before last orders.
If they went to Robert Morley’s ‘bunny girl nightclub’ to see his son Micky - Michelson Morley no aether alleged proof - and the place wasn’t full of Bunny girls – it wouldn’t be much fun would it.
Micky-Morley may not have had anyone on the front desk when we checked, but we were all very sure that the place was staffed with etheric staff. His business is organised chaos after all.
Being spaced out, no doubt they would not be so stupid as to think the place was empty if they had a look in the first room beyond the reception area and found no-one.
M.Morley results could be different today.
That particular Micky-Morley experiment may have disappeared into the ethers and vapours of a bad nite out, but no-one thought that some Einstein would actually buy the story.
Wavey keeps getting his game for Scotland though and that is a paradox as far as I’m concerned because we could really do with a new powerhouse in midfield – one that works for the team and distributes with efficient ease.
Wavey’s passes keep landing short and sticking in the mud of the Scottish pitches – and he can’t even string a pass together these days. We were told by our talent scout that he was famous for unifying a team from the midfield. ‘Superstrings’ we were told his nickname was.
He should get a free transfer with no superstrings attached that’s for sure. He was recently seen in a Glasgow nightclub demonstrating his Unifying String passing theory by attempting to emulate all round spherical 360 degree awareness and mobility by waving his Jaeger shoes around on the end of his feet like he was Brandon Lee. It was embarrassing to watch actually.
Certainly a new midfielder on trial from maybe that East European outfit Pravda FC called Tesla, with a magnetic personality or that coloured guy from Jamaica called Brucey DePalma, who is always in a spin. He’s quite good at running and running – he never seems to stop.
Clonesey should get the chop too. He does tend to be very exclusive and selective.. The guy is a bit unhealthy. He can’t go on like this. His secret hobby is Scottish country dancing, but he only ever goes out and dances with seven other people. They are very unpopular and just don’t mix. Although they go to Ceilidh’s and more formal occasions up and down the country – they never seem to fit in.
That’s because they just don’t care what people say or feel. At one event there was a bunch of older people there – and they just knocked them over.
At a great elite Ceilidh in a Scottish castle, during a very long set dance called a Shetland strip the willow, things were going great and everybody In the hall was joining in until these kreeps refused to touch anybody but the 8 kreeps they were. They interrupted the dancing and started shouting racist abuse.
Dancing is a substantial social activity, social input and context is a substantial social backdrop. It may be pollution to them – but it’s about respect, mutual support and guidance – about learning new dances, its about meeting people, its about networking and social advancement – it provides us with our meat and drink in more ways than one.
These kreeps forget that and have reduced themselves to a sorry little small-scale parody of our bioculture.
If Clonesey keeps hanging around there, once he fails at football, he will keel over and drown in a swamp of negativity.
All Clonesy types ultimately do that.
I know that Scottish football in the main has sunk into a swamp, where the tartan army has become a loosely associated bunch of unhappy drinkers. These guys never seemed to get it together after Argentina in 1978.
Scottish football descended into Chaos after that.
We could never select a good team. We had to look far and wide for new talent and investigated the ancestry of everyone that had ever been to Scotland and had kicked a ball. The global problem for the Scottish Football Association, however, was, was the set of all footballers who had ever played in Scotland the set of all that was Scottish. For if they were truly Scottish, then they would be in Bertie’s team.
Some said that if they wanted to be Scottish and to play for Scotland, then let them play – after all everybody is a unique individual in this ecumenical new world order and it comes down to a matter of choice and preference. We all come from mostly the same genetic stock after all.
The purists then went screaming on about bringing chaos into our national game – after all we invented the game of football in the town of Jedburgh.
How could Scottish football possibly survive and keep the pride and the passion for the dark blue jersey.
This kind of deregulated selection is going to bring anarchy and chaos to the global game and make it all meaningless. It’s gonna be Nihilism - on the pitch and off it.
The global game could be policed better, therefore, by much tighter controls and legislation.
An SFA natural selection committee got together for a consultation, having unjustly handed out various match bans and disciplinary fines to Fernando Ricksen for kicking a Panathanikos player all the way back to the Acropolis in Athens for booting over his Dutch buddy Lovenkrands in the away leg in Athens.
Although Platonic friendship was discounted by the SFA chairman as a defence for Fernando’s behaviour – the re-run of his foul at Ibrox on the Greek was mixed down with the ABBA song .. ‘there was something In the air last night .. the stars were bright Fernando … as the big Greek discovered the fruitfulness of Ricksen’s Judo training in a classic ‘ippon’ throw in the last 10 minutes.
The Greeks were always off balance anyway – who did they think they were ? – you get tackles like that in the Premiere division every week according to BBC commentator Archie Macpherson.
So, Rather than send Ricksen off to a cave to go and sulk, why can’t he play for Scotland if he wants to.
Oddball players and opinions should be embraced.
If he 1. makes a conscious decision to , and 2. creates and constructs agreement to and 3. recognises that he will be ineligible for future Dutch fixtures and 4. can operate constructively with other Scottish players – why not.
He makes his living here – and there would be fireworks on the park too – bringing some much-needed, classy continental savvy to Scotland. I was always an advocate of that.
Sure we are all unique individuals from differing backgrounds but we all agree on the rules of social Football. They are a tried and proven recipe arrived at after great experimentation. We live and breathe football, we sleep football, we eat football, we play football and we buy the T-shirts time and time and time again.
We got the social rules through; trial and error, failure and success, and we have evolved from kicking about the head of Jimmy Hill’s ancestors about the streets of Jedburgh into the beautiful game that we know and love today – or whenever we can get a team of reasonably disabled people together to play it.
Globalism could be fun.
Ricksen would fit right into the memories we have of the Scottish national game and rekindle our hopes for a more direct approach to success. Having abandoned his Dutch clogs at Prestwick airport, he soon had a look through the old Graeme Souness videos for a decent and respectable role model and career path to emulate.
Ricksen has got both skill and guts and can adapt his retaliations to fit into the context of every match.
We can all recognise the game in this form – and it is played all over the world, even in the USA. A vast global market has made it instantly recognisable and the recent World Cup’s have opened up previously undiscovered markets for those footballing skills, change strips and other products deep in the nomadic deserts of Kazakhstan and the Gobi. (even for David Beckham)
Scottish social Football though is a game for the purists and a people’s game endorsed and played by Industry all over the galaxy.
The people, the heroes, the characters that make this game up all know and understand it. We come from humble and respectful beginnings. Sure Jimmy Hill is still around an’ that … but having seen the last game at Wembley then there was no need for a last Scottish rematch, because they had to pay contractors to take away the bits and pieces of their national stadium this time.
Jimmy Hill though, lives on in those nightmare days of Scottish goalkeeping and our traditional Wembley turkey-shoot hammering in London.
That style of critique and irritation is taken for the most in good part - and unless the recipients are extremely morose and unlightened by bevvy would usually lead to some sort of retort.
The recipe for good Scottish social football is cultured and controlled diversity using the skills of some very unique individuals who can utilise the digital infrastructure with their intelligence and various gifts.
There is also opportunity to progress in Football too. Another Ibrox hero, Ally McCoist went on to become famous with quick fire humour and deviously brilliant recall in the game show called ‘A Question of Sport’.
I am not sure if he made it with the blonde presenter though but that was the fun of it.
It might be said that the game will never last – that if so many people rip it all apart with their own selfish agendas and stupidity that it will fall over like a bad version of Windows 95.
To that I would say that we – all us social football fans, have many attributes in common that keep us all truckin’ between local league fixtures and world cups.
1. we can focus ourselves on football 2. we are persistent with our football stuff 3. we patronise and nurture the game 4. we constantly explore our business interests 5. we are willing to endorse new synthesis 6. we utilise football in our recreation 7. football gives us a sense of community 8. we build stadia and archives to facilitate, stage and store the games and products and processes with.
Sure the game has its outlandish hackers and critics who like to turn up just to trash our memorabilia cupboards and social life – they may wear a strip and act like football fans but you can tell a mile off they’re out for trouble.
They are recognisably pointless and as they say … ‘no reason to live but we like it that way.’
Having to endure these people posing as football supporters is hard, especially when we as a supporters club endorse the values of; chivalry, love and peace and a SKY sponsorship deal in Europe.
Governing the uncertainties of rights and dignities with law during crowd trouble at a match, we can leave ourselves open to punishment by other pointless detractors out to look for trouble.
If we could somehow see into the minds of these evil people – we could get this all sorted out very quickly so that we could live peacefully enjoying the continuity and values of sport and social contracts that we love and enjoy.
Bertie has a paradox with the Scottish game however when it comes to team selection. Is the pool of all footballers a pool that is Scottish. If we can Russell up a few more sets of contenders and if Bertrand can overcome the paradox of thinking like a despot Descartes and If we can get a billion unique people to agree what the game and its local commitments are all about – he’ll not know who to leave out – who knows – maybe Obi Wan Kanobi will get a game in a dark blue jersey too.
It emerged .. that the problem folks and indeed Bertie Vogt’s have with the world just now is that all is Gesellschaft i.e. we have a social system in which relationships are impersonal or associational.
Presumably because in Scotland where it’s the pits, all the Gemeinschaft is closed. i.e. a stable secure society is now Geschlossen to new ideas and directions.
This is because Scottish Morals are in decline and Utilitarianists like Stu Mills know what to do about it and they don't care what we say.
According to Stu Boy Mills ‘Our moral faculty, according to all those of its interpreters who are entitled to the name of thinkers, supplies us only with the general principles of moral judgements; it is a branch of our reason, not of our sensitive faculty’. ‘In Football, pleasures or pains which may be expected to consequentially issue from the physio, the board, or the manager must all of them be expected to be experienced.’. ‘ .. the pleasures taken in at the eye and ear are generally very complex. The pleasures of a country scene, a football pitch, for instance, consist commonly, amongst others, of the following pleasures… of treating whole teams by separating them into their parts, abstract running off the ball and man for man marking.’
As a former Ranger’s manager, he would say ‘there are runs which must be made so that an opening can be made for passes that other attackers can depend on.’ Mills used to select Wavey for the Rangers right wing all the time, asking him to try to do some infield running and to cover the younger and fitter hopeful wing back looking for his Scotland place. Wavey’s response was - ‘ unselfish running like that would sacrifice his touchy feely tete-a-tete with the supporters, linesmen, dugout and photographers, stewards, policemen and the ball-boys. Basically, he said, if you can’t get in amongst the crowd and have a laugh, it’s pointless me even turning up.’
Scotland lost its last utilitarian hedonist with the retiral of Joe Jordan. Although Joe retired minus most of his front teeth – the pain, the pleasure and the legislation of the Scottish game regularly saw him dive headfirst into scoring opportunities that would have needed sophist mathematics to avoid. He was never as confused as John Stuart Mill though – concussed maybe, but not confused.
Plato tried harder than Mill ever did to get life the universe and everything sorted out. That is until a descendent of Queen Victoria and heir to the throne of Ibrox, George Albertz Popper also known as Karl Popper, the father of the scientific method delivered a thunderbolt shot from 25 yards into the back of the Panathanikos net, dealing a fatal blow to the enemy of the state of Scottish football.
An unstoppable shot past Plato the Greek goalkeeper who was so far off his line and so unsighted he may have been heading off to get a pie and Bovril. Popper’s Teutonic demolition of this guys European career as an elitist became a footnote to recent history when he was asked to head back to Germany to use his thunderbolts elsewhere.
If we cannot depend on an international goalkeeper such as Plato, to who or what can we turn but our own innate sense of irony to get us past these bad fixtures where we should have stayed at home in our caves instead of being exposed to the bright glare of an international-class floodlit Olympic Stadium and a global audience.
The morality of chaos and broken careers is evident to all though, as people must find themselves useful, nurtured and integrated amongst the new chaotic deregulation of the global football market.
Agreeing to drugs tests, ancestor research and new and more rigorous disciplinary measures will become an increasing necessity in a competitive open market.
The problem as Global Fuss ball executives may see it, is that there could be an influx of illegal aliens causing mayhem with the club and national game structures such that current entrenched financial obligations may have to be overturned to upgrade the facilities to supply an ever increasing market.
Certainly with the boy Clonesey and his primitive amiga senor Wavey still staggering about the park in Glasgow, and with Gödel and Turing newly equipped with guide dogs, the beautiful game in Scotland certainly isn’t the beautiful game anymore.
How can we know that the game can only get better and that the sun will rise again on Scottish football though ?
Hume-so-ever we discuss this with in Scotland will immediately start screaming about stuff that isn’t about football.
Celtic supporters cannot discuss Celtic, and those pretenders to Ibrox expertise could not even identify what happened to the Bonnie Dundee keeper in the nightclub toilet the day before the cup final match season 2001/2002.
Now just ask the boy Clonesey, Wavey, Turing and Gödel what happens when you don’t play to the rules of the game, or try to play football when you think that you’re really playing America football, and see how long you last before SKY DIGITAL backs out of its sponsorship option.
It takes more than an alien in a football strip to make a footballer.
Those were the days; Dennis-the-menace Law, Robert Maxwell the demon thief paradox, Lord Kelvin’s 1901 Chaos Theory, James Clerk Maxwell – a guy whose feelings got Hertz – and old Nick himself, Mr Tesla whose theories of free global football never made it past the turnstiles of the New Jersey Rams.
Although local hero Jim Baxter, from Cowdenbeath, Fife, whose dextrous football may have made it into sponsorship for Royal Game soup made by the famous Baxter the Butchers never did see his demolition of the English World Cup winning side in official video after the BBC editing unit had gotten through with it – he may rest assured, however, that there is still some meat left in the Scottish game.
It may not have any dextrose in it any more though, those additives having been supplanted by a more euro-regulated ‘E’ variety so obviously now enjoyed by many of his former neighbours.
The SFA, the Scottish Football Association may still be a wee bit worried about the emergence of thingz whot we canna Handel. It must be said though, that football is a strange attractor that hangs together there in the air like a big red leather match ball on a snow-covered pitch at Pittodrie Aberdeen, as Colin Stein comes in fur the header on the end of a long hospital ball punt-out by Peter McCloy.
Colin Stein may have had a bad knock of heads with Willie Miller the Aberdeen defender, and ended up with an eye as red as the eye of Jupiter for his troubles – but he did score.
The subsequent argument with the Ger’s Physio for an early hot bath, however, was ignored when the physio responded thusly :
‘.. What is the function or causal role of pain ? At bottom, it seems plausible to say, the business of pain is at least typically to alert us to bodily damage or malfunction, and to spur us into protective or avoidance behaviour. For instance, a painful ‘burning’ sensation (as we call it) is normally produced by a skin-damaging contact with a cold or even hot surface and eventuates in a speedy attempt to withdraw from that playing surface. Colin is in pain if he is in a state standardly produced by bodily damage or malfunction, and which in turn produces reactions like tears or moans, and prompts avoidance responses. This of course, is far too simple …..’
Colin, stunned by the erudite gravity of the Ger’s physio who had obviously forgotten about his darts-club donation of a vanload of sponsorship booze, hit back with an amazing volley .. ‘a successful type of animal, one which can look after itself, must have a sensory mechanism which will signal events likely to damage it and the signals must have priority over all others .. It must be a sensation to which we cannot manage to remain inattentive and one which we feel compelled to bring to an end as soon as possible … my mate Adrian said that in 1947. ‘the physical background of perception’ published by Clarendon.
The physio retorted, listen buddy – you’re going to get a free transfer to Coventry, but you can come back to score the equaliser that will give Rangers the League in 1976 at Easter Road. Ok then said, Colin, ‘Colin is just big pawn in this small game.’
To that the physio replied that ‘although you are in possession of a hard knock, and interstitial fluid is currently accumulating in these sub-cutaneous regions … prod, prod … it would be far better in my professional opinion if you tried to run the injury off before it really stiffens up. No, other players get these injuries all the time, honest, I’ll just spray some painkilling adreno-cortisone on it.
That last manager Stu Boy Mills used to give all his players pills and injections to keep them playing even if they didn’t need them.
To which Colin replied .. ‘ Listen, strange new age colleges prescribing substances and issuing certificates is no basis for a system of competent health care. The presence or absence of relief from extreme excitation isn’t why I play football. Supreme enjoyment of my life comes from an endorsement of the social and managerial contract not from some farcical quacked-up physio’s diagnosis. You can’t go round behaving like a doctor because you think you have X-ray eyes. If I said I was a brain surgeon because I had an NVQ in woodwork, they’d put me away. If I keep playing in this bruised condition, I won’t be fit for the Celtic match next week, and I’ll miss the team bonus, and the bi-weekly sponsorship session that I’ve already ratified with my Agent.
Everybody loses, there isn’t another fit striker and the Board will take no extreme pleasure in that whatsoever – and it’s your job on the line not mine.
Colin Stein could later be seen on a pair of crutches chilling out at Olbers nightclub in Glasgow.
Some of the current imports to the Scottish game from Europe are currently demonstrating Xeno’s Paradox whereby they start a run up to the opponents 18 yard box from the halfway line and never get there in any half of that match whatsoever.
Although costing a lot of money, they do continue to demonstrate what was Xenophobic about Scottish mentality in that they hate winning as much as we hated losing.
They play the boy Clonesey and Wavey and Turing and Gödel every week in Scotland and even bring chocolate onto the park to feed the latter two blind guys’ guide dogs.
No matter what happens in future shake-ups of the Scottish football industry though, they never will have enough personality to get; on a question of sport, or, a night out with a natural blonde presenter.
There seems, in conclusion, that there are two stories to tell about Scottish Industrial Football in the 20th Century.
Firstly the industry itself was a consistent and aberrant joke as illustrated by the following quote.
Secondly it was a truth that … ‘it was not what you knew but who you knew’.
If any distant Interstellar spacefarers arrive to find us still jerking off in the darkness once the lights go out – and they find a good university textbook amongst the mould – they may be able to unjustly reason that we were still involved in Industrial Physics.
W . Watson’s famous ‘INTERMEDIATE PHYSICS’ , edn1 (1916)
edn.2. 1923 chapter 6 on photometry page 359 para 2&3 refers …..
The standard unit of illuminating power ordinarily adopted is that of a ‘standard candle’. The standard candle is a sperm candle, 7/8ths of an inch in diameter, which burns 120 grains (7.776 grams) of wax per hour. This standard is a most unsatisfactory one, since it is very variable. For this reason other standards have been adopted, but they have been compared with a large number of standard candles, and their illuminating power is expressed as so many candle power. Thus the Harcourt pentane standard lamp is adjusted to give an illumination equal to that which on average would be produced by ten standard candles, and hence is called a ten candle standard. The three most important of these subsidiary standards are;
1. The Harcourt lamp referred to above, which burns pentane, and when in use has the flame adjusted to the specified dimensions.
2. The Hefner lamp, which burns amyl acetate, and again has the flame adjusted to fixed dimensions.
3. The Carcel, which is a lamp burning colza oil, and is not very much more constant than a standard candle.
Electric filament lamps are often used as subsidiary standards of illuminating power, their candle power when a definite current is passing being determined by comparison with one of the standard lamps described above. Although the candle-power of an electric lamp when the electrical conditions are kept fixed is for a limited time much more constant than is that of any other source, yet there is a gradual change which precludes their adoption as fundamental standards.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
Lieutenant-Colonel Watson, C.M.G., F.R.S, joined the British Expeditionary Force in France in the spring of 1915, immediately after the first launching of gas attacks by the German army against the British forces.
He took charge of the Central Laboratory at the General Headquarters, and rendered invaluable help to the allied cause in the subsequent chemical warfare. Insistent on obtaining all his knowledge at first hand and anxious to share all the dangers of those around him, he was severely gassed more than once, and the effects thereof greatly contributed towards his death.
He remained in charge of the Laboratory until the cessation of hostilities, returned to England shortly afterwards, but died in Wandsworth Military Hospital on march 3rd, 1919, adding another to the list of invaluable scientific lives lost in the great struggle.
In issuing a new edition of INTERMEDIATE PHYSICS, no vital changes have been made, but it has been carefully revised in those sections where important recent work has been done. Certain other sections have been added, and the physical constants quoted have been replaced by the latest values. The Editor hopes that the interest shown by readers who forwarded suggestions or criticisms to the late author will be continued, and such advice will always be appreciated.
H MOSS 1923
Imperial College of Science and Technology, London.
Pub. Longmans, Green & Co.
39 Paternoster Row, London, EC4
New York, Toronto, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras 1923.
Printed in Great Britain by Robert Maclehouse and co. Ltd
The University Press, Glasgow.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
MILL J S, ‘Utilitarianism’, Warnock ed. Pub. 1969, Fontana.
MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL Pub. 1975, Charisma Classics on cassette number CHCMC 17, Virgin Records.
SMITH & JONES, ‘The philosophy of mind’ pub. 1986, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-31250-7.
SPENCER M, ‘the Foundations of modern Sociology’ edn.2 pub. 1979, Prentice-Hall, ISBN 0-13-330308-X.
CHAPTER 05. 20th CENTURY LOGIC IN FOOTBALL MANAGEMENT.
WHY SCIENCE FAILED TO FIND THE RIGHT STARS WITH ITS ‘DARK SATANIC MILLS’.
KEYWORDS.
Reductionism, Utilitarianism, Plato, Paradox, Godel, Turing, Quantum, Popper, Globalism, Olbers, Clone death, 3rd Way, Ecumenical, Ethnology, Social Science, Glasgow Rangers FC
ABSTRACT.
Reductionism saw the science and technologies of the 20th century fail to reach an interplanetary perspective for the human race. Fraught with terminal paradoxes and flaws, the science of B Movies SciFi promises failed to deliver.
A paradigm driven by Platonic elitism [e.g. The Republic] and nepotism and assuaged by John Stuart Mill’s ‘Utilitarianism’ it became very, very difficult to get a game for both club and country in any industrial context for some reason no matter how talented, unique, enthusiastic or conformist one was.
In fact, even Globalism using these social and scientific elitist precepts did not lift Scottish industrial humanity out of a dark age.
Hard-line hot air failed to deliver anything other than a Virgin Records balloon attempting to mine sweep in Croatia to help out a United Nations task force disabled by hardware dysfunction.
Traditionally, the ignorance and sloth of humanity was the scapegoat for global failure. A good topic for indignant after-dinner rhetoric.
To aspire to what was elite however, one usually had to have something to say that would maintain one’s utility to massive Multinational Corporations that were seeking to expand their resource base and profits.
The days of faking a German accent at the Rockefeller Institute grant bids session whilst wearing a white coat however, are over.
These guys may as well have been Mary Poppins as they sang of ‘brown paper theses tied up with (super)strings .. these were a few of their favourite thingz.’ No Flash Gordon 1950’s Space Drive then.
It’s the pits, here we are stuck in Scotland with no holiday in the sun or indeed, around somebody else’s sun to look forward to and everybody in the world that does that science stuff an’ stuff like that doesn’t peruse reality in a rational way.
It’s not that the scientific methodology of reductionism didn’t produce enough failures because it persistently stripped the context off any process being observed, it’s just because we’re all finished ‘and we like it that way.’
Our own particular failures of the 20th century being almost completely sufficient to bury us in a dark age of magik and unreason we still have a legacy of joketown science that must be the envy of every intergalactic comedy department.
I’m now going to list a bunch of paradoxes and they have one thing in common; they all seem to get a game for Scotland and they cause catastrophic failure of the Scottish football Industrial Complex. They are all the one paradox caused by reductionism.
1. TURING’S INFINITE RECURSION BY INFINITE OBJECTS
PARADOX.
2. GöDEL’S INFINITE NUMBERING ILLOGICAL LOGIC PARADOX.
3. THE WAVE COLLAPSES WITHOUT WATERY ETHER PARADOX.
4. THE CLONE COLLAPSES WITHOUT GENETIC FILLER PARADOX
These 4 paradoxes are the severely injured power houses of a bad Scottish midfield.
For some reason this ‘pub-side’ [i.e. amateur team from a local drinking establishment] of very badly unfit players keep playing in the Scottish midfield. They don’t talk to one another, they don’t read the game, they never make a run up the park, they pass back, they don’t listen to their team mates – it’s as if they never played a good game of football in their lives. It’s as if they don’t know it’s football.
Sure they look good in their kit but the left winger Turing, trying to compute the best way up to the opposition goal line to set up an intelligent goal doesn’t know the rules of football – he’s blind. He staggers off into the crowd and feels his way up the park by grabbing onto everybody’s face, arms and jacket, and by the time he hits the advertising hording at the other end and fallen into the photographers he’s a complete mess.
Gödel does exactly the same on the Scottish right – it just isn’t logical.
Turing and Gödel both feel their way through an infinite number of spectators before they feel like passing.
Although the boy Wavey and the boy Clonesey try their devious best to be clever, they are good technicians of the game, they keep running out of steam in the middle of the park – this because they never seem to eat or drink anything between matches.
They are insubstantial.
They must be on drugs.
You really have to have something substantial inside you to hold up your backbone and tone up your stamina. It emerged that the pair of them had gone out on the binge yet again to Olbers’ – a nightclub on the west side of Glasgow the night before the match and discovered that they could get free stimulants - (free energy) all night every night – as much as they wanted.
Olbers had discovered an unlimited supply of ether that held up all the light in the Universe making the sky black - and he had a strong argument with Albert that ether exists.
That also made Albert wrong about the fixed speed of light.
Paradoxically although Olbers a German philanthropist had been on the go in Glasgow since the 1920’s he couldn’t have been an Einstein or he would have got his relatives selling it all over Scotland.
The Olbers family motto seemed a bit intimidating though .. ‘it’ll be all white on the night ..’ Perhaps they were forced to leave Germany by some Einstein who felt that they were being a bit unreasonable. Everybody knows that it’s black at night – that’s why we need street lighting.
Maybe that Einstein in Germany got his sums wrong – no matter.
How can you talk about light waves and ignore the medium of propagation - the aethert ???? Its like talking about boats and ignoring the water or talking about biological life without water.
Anyway, Wavey and Clonesey went to Olbers and got paralytic with ether and just fell over. It wasn’t that they just got their sums wrong, they just ignored the one vital clue – everybody knows you gotta drink the free water supplied there or you severely dehydrate.
Water is the stuff that keeps us together, and as we are 90% water and we keep running it out, it stands to reason that we have to keep putting it back in. Where Wavey and the boy Clonesey fell down was that they forgot to feel thirsty and hungry. They even forgot they had a body. Worse still they even forgot they had a game for Scotland the next night.
Everybody has a body that has water. The medium of the propagation of life. Everybody needs water. You take away water and we are a small bag of chemicals. If you eat another small bag of chemicals on top of the chemicals you already have – you need more water.
It deluges water in Scotland all the time ! how could they forget that ..
There cannot be wave particle phenomenon with out the medium of propagation.
There was Olbers nightclub giving the interstellar drug of ether away and those two clowns couldn’t care about how they handle themselves.
How do you get it into their stupid heads that they need water and metabolic filler if they cannot identify it.
Everybody in the Universe and everything in the Universe has to get from A to B through some common C.
The drugs would need to travel from mouth to toilet through some common water. (ie. a medium such as UNIVERSAL AETHER) If they claim their body and the Universe doesn’t need water and is made of air is it their right to be signing a commercial contract with the Scottish Industrial Football Association.
They need to be seen to at least patronise the context of healthy biology, as long as they can still play. So that their team mates don’t get worried during those long sub-tropical tours.
They had been faking their physio test results.
Maybe tell them that it’s like putting; air in their tyres, or seats in their car. Or – it’s like the circuit boards inside the TV they threw through the hotel window, or the mushy peas inside the cans at Tesco.
Einstein himself thought that Olbers and his freewheeling nightclub was ‘spooky’ because of inexplicable wave-like resonances - that refuted Einstein's theory.
If Albert was right that watery ether was not needed to dilute things down and mix up the vapours and ethers on their way through the kidneys, then the place would stay in business without clients being given water no matter how much drugs they ate. He would go one better on his German contemporary Olbers.
Olbers spoke to Einstein telling him that if Albert was right, then the sky should be white at night, because if there is no watery ether attenuating our Scottish Universe most of the nightclub clientele would be well whited out of it before last orders.
If they went to Robert Morley’s ‘bunny girl nightclub’ to see his son Micky - Michelson Morley no aether alleged proof - and the place wasn’t full of Bunny girls – it wouldn’t be much fun would it.
Micky-Morley may not have had anyone on the front desk when we checked, but we were all very sure that the place was staffed with etheric staff. His business is organised chaos after all.
Being spaced out, no doubt they would not be so stupid as to think the place was empty if they had a look in the first room beyond the reception area and found no-one.
M.Morley results could be different today.
That particular Micky-Morley experiment may have disappeared into the ethers and vapours of a bad nite out, but no-one thought that some Einstein would actually buy the story.
Wavey keeps getting his game for Scotland though and that is a paradox as far as I’m concerned because we could really do with a new powerhouse in midfield – one that works for the team and distributes with efficient ease.
Wavey’s passes keep landing short and sticking in the mud of the Scottish pitches – and he can’t even string a pass together these days. We were told by our talent scout that he was famous for unifying a team from the midfield. ‘Superstrings’ we were told his nickname was.
He should get a free transfer with no superstrings attached that’s for sure. He was recently seen in a Glasgow nightclub demonstrating his Unifying String passing theory by attempting to emulate all round spherical 360 degree awareness and mobility by waving his Jaeger shoes around on the end of his feet like he was Brandon Lee. It was embarrassing to watch actually.
Certainly a new midfielder on trial from maybe that East European outfit Pravda FC called Tesla, with a magnetic personality or that coloured guy from Jamaica called Brucey DePalma, who is always in a spin. He’s quite good at running and running – he never seems to stop.
Clonesey should get the chop too. He does tend to be very exclusive and selective.. The guy is a bit unhealthy. He can’t go on like this. His secret hobby is Scottish country dancing, but he only ever goes out and dances with seven other people. They are very unpopular and just don’t mix. Although they go to Ceilidh’s and more formal occasions up and down the country – they never seem to fit in.
That’s because they just don’t care what people say or feel. At one event there was a bunch of older people there – and they just knocked them over.
At a great elite Ceilidh in a Scottish castle, during a very long set dance called a Shetland strip the willow, things were going great and everybody In the hall was joining in until these kreeps refused to touch anybody but the 8 kreeps they were. They interrupted the dancing and started shouting racist abuse.
Dancing is a substantial social activity, social input and context is a substantial social backdrop. It may be pollution to them – but it’s about respect, mutual support and guidance – about learning new dances, its about meeting people, its about networking and social advancement – it provides us with our meat and drink in more ways than one.
These kreeps forget that and have reduced themselves to a sorry little small-scale parody of our bioculture.
If Clonesey keeps hanging around there, once he fails at football, he will keel over and drown in a swamp of negativity.
All Clonesy types ultimately do that.
I know that Scottish football in the main has sunk into a swamp, where the tartan army has become a loosely associated bunch of unhappy drinkers. These guys never seemed to get it together after Argentina in 1978.
Scottish football descended into Chaos after that.
We could never select a good team. We had to look far and wide for new talent and investigated the ancestry of everyone that had ever been to Scotland and had kicked a ball. The global problem for the Scottish Football Association, however, was, was the set of all footballers who had ever played in Scotland the set of all that was Scottish. For if they were truly Scottish, then they would be in Bertie’s team.
Some said that if they wanted to be Scottish and to play for Scotland, then let them play – after all everybody is a unique individual in this ecumenical new world order and it comes down to a matter of choice and preference. We all come from mostly the same genetic stock after all.
The purists then went screaming on about bringing chaos into our national game – after all we invented the game of football in the town of Jedburgh.
How could Scottish football possibly survive and keep the pride and the passion for the dark blue jersey.
This kind of deregulated selection is going to bring anarchy and chaos to the global game and make it all meaningless. It’s gonna be Nihilism - on the pitch and off it.
The global game could be policed better, therefore, by much tighter controls and legislation.
An SFA natural selection committee got together for a consultation, having unjustly handed out various match bans and disciplinary fines to Fernando Ricksen for kicking a Panathanikos player all the way back to the Acropolis in Athens for booting over his Dutch buddy Lovenkrands in the away leg in Athens.
Although Platonic friendship was discounted by the SFA chairman as a defence for Fernando’s behaviour – the re-run of his foul at Ibrox on the Greek was mixed down with the ABBA song .. ‘there was something In the air last night .. the stars were bright Fernando … as the big Greek discovered the fruitfulness of Ricksen’s Judo training in a classic ‘ippon’ throw in the last 10 minutes.
The Greeks were always off balance anyway – who did they think they were ? – you get tackles like that in the Premiere division every week according to BBC commentator Archie Macpherson.
So, Rather than send Ricksen off to a cave to go and sulk, why can’t he play for Scotland if he wants to.
Oddball players and opinions should be embraced.
If he 1. makes a conscious decision to , and 2. creates and constructs agreement to and 3. recognises that he will be ineligible for future Dutch fixtures and 4. can operate constructively with other Scottish players – why not.
He makes his living here – and there would be fireworks on the park too – bringing some much-needed, classy continental savvy to Scotland. I was always an advocate of that.
Sure we are all unique individuals from differing backgrounds but we all agree on the rules of social Football. They are a tried and proven recipe arrived at after great experimentation. We live and breathe football, we sleep football, we eat football, we play football and we buy the T-shirts time and time and time again.
We got the social rules through; trial and error, failure and success, and we have evolved from kicking about the head of Jimmy Hill’s ancestors about the streets of Jedburgh into the beautiful game that we know and love today – or whenever we can get a team of reasonably disabled people together to play it.
Globalism could be fun.
Ricksen would fit right into the memories we have of the Scottish national game and rekindle our hopes for a more direct approach to success. Having abandoned his Dutch clogs at Prestwick airport, he soon had a look through the old Graeme Souness videos for a decent and respectable role model and career path to emulate.
Ricksen has got both skill and guts and can adapt his retaliations to fit into the context of every match.
We can all recognise the game in this form – and it is played all over the world, even in the USA. A vast global market has made it instantly recognisable and the recent World Cup’s have opened up previously undiscovered markets for those footballing skills, change strips and other products deep in the nomadic deserts of Kazakhstan and the Gobi. (even for David Beckham)
Scottish social Football though is a game for the purists and a people’s game endorsed and played by Industry all over the galaxy.
The people, the heroes, the characters that make this game up all know and understand it. We come from humble and respectful beginnings. Sure Jimmy Hill is still around an’ that … but having seen the last game at Wembley then there was no need for a last Scottish rematch, because they had to pay contractors to take away the bits and pieces of their national stadium this time.
Jimmy Hill though, lives on in those nightmare days of Scottish goalkeeping and our traditional Wembley turkey-shoot hammering in London.
That style of critique and irritation is taken for the most in good part - and unless the recipients are extremely morose and unlightened by bevvy would usually lead to some sort of retort.
The recipe for good Scottish social football is cultured and controlled diversity using the skills of some very unique individuals who can utilise the digital infrastructure with their intelligence and various gifts.
There is also opportunity to progress in Football too. Another Ibrox hero, Ally McCoist went on to become famous with quick fire humour and deviously brilliant recall in the game show called ‘A Question of Sport’.
I am not sure if he made it with the blonde presenter though but that was the fun of it.
It might be said that the game will never last – that if so many people rip it all apart with their own selfish agendas and stupidity that it will fall over like a bad version of Windows 95.
To that I would say that we – all us social football fans, have many attributes in common that keep us all truckin’ between local league fixtures and world cups.
1. we can focus ourselves on football 2. we are persistent with our football stuff 3. we patronise and nurture the game 4. we constantly explore our business interests 5. we are willing to endorse new synthesis 6. we utilise football in our recreation 7. football gives us a sense of community 8. we build stadia and archives to facilitate, stage and store the games and products and processes with.
Sure the game has its outlandish hackers and critics who like to turn up just to trash our memorabilia cupboards and social life – they may wear a strip and act like football fans but you can tell a mile off they’re out for trouble.
They are recognisably pointless and as they say … ‘no reason to live but we like it that way.’
Having to endure these people posing as football supporters is hard, especially when we as a supporters club endorse the values of; chivalry, love and peace and a SKY sponsorship deal in Europe.
Governing the uncertainties of rights and dignities with law during crowd trouble at a match, we can leave ourselves open to punishment by other pointless detractors out to look for trouble.
If we could somehow see into the minds of these evil people – we could get this all sorted out very quickly so that we could live peacefully enjoying the continuity and values of sport and social contracts that we love and enjoy.
Bertie has a paradox with the Scottish game however when it comes to team selection. Is the pool of all footballers a pool that is Scottish. If we can Russell up a few more sets of contenders and if Bertrand can overcome the paradox of thinking like a despot Descartes and If we can get a billion unique people to agree what the game and its local commitments are all about – he’ll not know who to leave out – who knows – maybe Obi Wan Kanobi will get a game in a dark blue jersey too.
It emerged .. that the problem folks and indeed Bertie Vogt’s have with the world just now is that all is Gesellschaft i.e. we have a social system in which relationships are impersonal or associational.
Presumably because in Scotland where it’s the pits, all the Gemeinschaft is closed. i.e. a stable secure society is now Geschlossen to new ideas and directions.
This is because Scottish Morals are in decline and Utilitarianists like Stu Mills know what to do about it and they don't care what we say.
According to Stu Boy Mills ‘Our moral faculty, according to all those of its interpreters who are entitled to the name of thinkers, supplies us only with the general principles of moral judgements; it is a branch of our reason, not of our sensitive faculty’. ‘In Football, pleasures or pains which may be expected to consequentially issue from the physio, the board, or the manager must all of them be expected to be experienced.’. ‘ .. the pleasures taken in at the eye and ear are generally very complex. The pleasures of a country scene, a football pitch, for instance, consist commonly, amongst others, of the following pleasures… of treating whole teams by separating them into their parts, abstract running off the ball and man for man marking.’
As a former Ranger’s manager, he would say ‘there are runs which must be made so that an opening can be made for passes that other attackers can depend on.’ Mills used to select Wavey for the Rangers right wing all the time, asking him to try to do some infield running and to cover the younger and fitter hopeful wing back looking for his Scotland place. Wavey’s response was - ‘ unselfish running like that would sacrifice his touchy feely tete-a-tete with the supporters, linesmen, dugout and photographers, stewards, policemen and the ball-boys. Basically, he said, if you can’t get in amongst the crowd and have a laugh, it’s pointless me even turning up.’
Scotland lost its last utilitarian hedonist with the retiral of Joe Jordan. Although Joe retired minus most of his front teeth – the pain, the pleasure and the legislation of the Scottish game regularly saw him dive headfirst into scoring opportunities that would have needed sophist mathematics to avoid. He was never as confused as John Stuart Mill though – concussed maybe, but not confused.
Plato tried harder than Mill ever did to get life the universe and everything sorted out. That is until a descendent of Queen Victoria and heir to the throne of Ibrox, George Albertz Popper also known as Karl Popper, the father of the scientific method delivered a thunderbolt shot from 25 yards into the back of the Panathanikos net, dealing a fatal blow to the enemy of the state of Scottish football.
An unstoppable shot past Plato the Greek goalkeeper who was so far off his line and so unsighted he may have been heading off to get a pie and Bovril. Popper’s Teutonic demolition of this guys European career as an elitist became a footnote to recent history when he was asked to head back to Germany to use his thunderbolts elsewhere.
If we cannot depend on an international goalkeeper such as Plato, to who or what can we turn but our own innate sense of irony to get us past these bad fixtures where we should have stayed at home in our caves instead of being exposed to the bright glare of an international-class floodlit Olympic Stadium and a global audience.
The morality of chaos and broken careers is evident to all though, as people must find themselves useful, nurtured and integrated amongst the new chaotic deregulation of the global football market.
Agreeing to drugs tests, ancestor research and new and more rigorous disciplinary measures will become an increasing necessity in a competitive open market.
The problem as Global Fuss ball executives may see it, is that there could be an influx of illegal aliens causing mayhem with the club and national game structures such that current entrenched financial obligations may have to be overturned to upgrade the facilities to supply an ever increasing market.
Certainly with the boy Clonesey and his primitive amiga senor Wavey still staggering about the park in Glasgow, and with Gödel and Turing newly equipped with guide dogs, the beautiful game in Scotland certainly isn’t the beautiful game anymore.
How can we know that the game can only get better and that the sun will rise again on Scottish football though ?
Hume-so-ever we discuss this with in Scotland will immediately start screaming about stuff that isn’t about football.
Celtic supporters cannot discuss Celtic, and those pretenders to Ibrox expertise could not even identify what happened to the Bonnie Dundee keeper in the nightclub toilet the day before the cup final match season 2001/2002.
Now just ask the boy Clonesey, Wavey, Turing and Gödel what happens when you don’t play to the rules of the game, or try to play football when you think that you’re really playing America football, and see how long you last before SKY DIGITAL backs out of its sponsorship option.
It takes more than an alien in a football strip to make a footballer.
Those were the days; Dennis-the-menace Law, Robert Maxwell the demon thief paradox, Lord Kelvin’s 1901 Chaos Theory, James Clerk Maxwell – a guy whose feelings got Hertz – and old Nick himself, Mr Tesla whose theories of free global football never made it past the turnstiles of the New Jersey Rams.
Although local hero Jim Baxter, from Cowdenbeath, Fife, whose dextrous football may have made it into sponsorship for Royal Game soup made by the famous Baxter the Butchers never did see his demolition of the English World Cup winning side in official video after the BBC editing unit had gotten through with it – he may rest assured, however, that there is still some meat left in the Scottish game.
It may not have any dextrose in it any more though, those additives having been supplanted by a more euro-regulated ‘E’ variety so obviously now enjoyed by many of his former neighbours.
The SFA, the Scottish Football Association may still be a wee bit worried about the emergence of thingz whot we canna Handel. It must be said though, that football is a strange attractor that hangs together there in the air like a big red leather match ball on a snow-covered pitch at Pittodrie Aberdeen, as Colin Stein comes in fur the header on the end of a long hospital ball punt-out by Peter McCloy.
Colin Stein may have had a bad knock of heads with Willie Miller the Aberdeen defender, and ended up with an eye as red as the eye of Jupiter for his troubles – but he did score.
The subsequent argument with the Ger’s Physio for an early hot bath, however, was ignored when the physio responded thusly :
‘.. What is the function or causal role of pain ? At bottom, it seems plausible to say, the business of pain is at least typically to alert us to bodily damage or malfunction, and to spur us into protective or avoidance behaviour. For instance, a painful ‘burning’ sensation (as we call it) is normally produced by a skin-damaging contact with a cold or even hot surface and eventuates in a speedy attempt to withdraw from that playing surface. Colin is in pain if he is in a state standardly produced by bodily damage or malfunction, and which in turn produces reactions like tears or moans, and prompts avoidance responses. This of course, is far too simple …..’
Colin, stunned by the erudite gravity of the Ger’s physio who had obviously forgotten about his darts-club donation of a vanload of sponsorship booze, hit back with an amazing volley .. ‘a successful type of animal, one which can look after itself, must have a sensory mechanism which will signal events likely to damage it and the signals must have priority over all others .. It must be a sensation to which we cannot manage to remain inattentive and one which we feel compelled to bring to an end as soon as possible … my mate Adrian said that in 1947. ‘the physical background of perception’ published by Clarendon.
The physio retorted, listen buddy – you’re going to get a free transfer to Coventry, but you can come back to score the equaliser that will give Rangers the League in 1976 at Easter Road. Ok then said, Colin, ‘Colin is just big pawn in this small game.’
To that the physio replied that ‘although you are in possession of a hard knock, and interstitial fluid is currently accumulating in these sub-cutaneous regions … prod, prod … it would be far better in my professional opinion if you tried to run the injury off before it really stiffens up. No, other players get these injuries all the time, honest, I’ll just spray some painkilling adreno-cortisone on it.
That last manager Stu Boy Mills used to give all his players pills and injections to keep them playing even if they didn’t need them.
To which Colin replied .. ‘ Listen, strange new age colleges prescribing substances and issuing certificates is no basis for a system of competent health care. The presence or absence of relief from extreme excitation isn’t why I play football. Supreme enjoyment of my life comes from an endorsement of the social and managerial contract not from some farcical quacked-up physio’s diagnosis. You can’t go round behaving like a doctor because you think you have X-ray eyes. If I said I was a brain surgeon because I had an NVQ in woodwork, they’d put me away. If I keep playing in this bruised condition, I won’t be fit for the Celtic match next week, and I’ll miss the team bonus, and the bi-weekly sponsorship session that I’ve already ratified with my Agent.
Everybody loses, there isn’t another fit striker and the Board will take no extreme pleasure in that whatsoever – and it’s your job on the line not mine.
Colin Stein could later be seen on a pair of crutches chilling out at Olbers nightclub in Glasgow.
Some of the current imports to the Scottish game from Europe are currently demonstrating Xeno’s Paradox whereby they start a run up to the opponents 18 yard box from the halfway line and never get there in any half of that match whatsoever.
Although costing a lot of money, they do continue to demonstrate what was Xenophobic about Scottish mentality in that they hate winning as much as we hated losing.
They play the boy Clonesey and Wavey and Turing and Gödel every week in Scotland and even bring chocolate onto the park to feed the latter two blind guys’ guide dogs.
No matter what happens in future shake-ups of the Scottish football industry though, they never will have enough personality to get; on a question of sport, or, a night out with a natural blonde presenter.
There seems, in conclusion, that there are two stories to tell about Scottish Industrial Football in the 20th Century.
Firstly the industry itself was a consistent and aberrant joke as illustrated by the following quote.
Secondly it was a truth that … ‘it was not what you knew but who you knew’.
If any distant Interstellar spacefarers arrive to find us still jerking off in the darkness once the lights go out – and they find a good university textbook amongst the mould – they may be able to unjustly reason that we were still involved in Industrial Physics.
W . Watson’s famous ‘INTERMEDIATE PHYSICS’ , edn1 (1916)
edn.2. 1923 chapter 6 on photometry page 359 para 2&3 refers …..
The standard unit of illuminating power ordinarily adopted is that of a ‘standard candle’. The standard candle is a sperm candle, 7/8ths of an inch in diameter, which burns 120 grains (7.776 grams) of wax per hour. This standard is a most unsatisfactory one, since it is very variable. For this reason other standards have been adopted, but they have been compared with a large number of standard candles, and their illuminating power is expressed as so many candle power. Thus the Harcourt pentane standard lamp is adjusted to give an illumination equal to that which on average would be produced by ten standard candles, and hence is called a ten candle standard. The three most important of these subsidiary standards are;
1. The Harcourt lamp referred to above, which burns pentane, and when in use has the flame adjusted to the specified dimensions.
2. The Hefner lamp, which burns amyl acetate, and again has the flame adjusted to fixed dimensions.
3. The Carcel, which is a lamp burning colza oil, and is not very much more constant than a standard candle.
Electric filament lamps are often used as subsidiary standards of illuminating power, their candle power when a definite current is passing being determined by comparison with one of the standard lamps described above. Although the candle-power of an electric lamp when the electrical conditions are kept fixed is for a limited time much more constant than is that of any other source, yet there is a gradual change which precludes their adoption as fundamental standards.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
Lieutenant-Colonel Watson, C.M.G., F.R.S, joined the British Expeditionary Force in France in the spring of 1915, immediately after the first launching of gas attacks by the German army against the British forces.
He took charge of the Central Laboratory at the General Headquarters, and rendered invaluable help to the allied cause in the subsequent chemical warfare. Insistent on obtaining all his knowledge at first hand and anxious to share all the dangers of those around him, he was severely gassed more than once, and the effects thereof greatly contributed towards his death.
He remained in charge of the Laboratory until the cessation of hostilities, returned to England shortly afterwards, but died in Wandsworth Military Hospital on march 3rd, 1919, adding another to the list of invaluable scientific lives lost in the great struggle.
In issuing a new edition of INTERMEDIATE PHYSICS, no vital changes have been made, but it has been carefully revised in those sections where important recent work has been done. Certain other sections have been added, and the physical constants quoted have been replaced by the latest values. The Editor hopes that the interest shown by readers who forwarded suggestions or criticisms to the late author will be continued, and such advice will always be appreciated.
H MOSS 1923
Imperial College of Science and Technology, London.
Pub. Longmans, Green & Co.
39 Paternoster Row, London, EC4
New York, Toronto, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras 1923.
Printed in Great Britain by Robert Maclehouse and co. Ltd
The University Press, Glasgow.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
MILL J S, ‘Utilitarianism’, Warnock ed. Pub. 1969, Fontana.
MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL Pub. 1975, Charisma Classics on cassette number CHCMC 17, Virgin Records.
SMITH & JONES, ‘The philosophy of mind’ pub. 1986, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-31250-7.
SPENCER M, ‘the Foundations of modern Sociology’ edn.2 pub. 1979, Prentice-Hall, ISBN 0-13-330308-X.
Comments