Collateral Murder

This post, I’m going to be performing an analysis of a video that popped up on my Facebook feed earlier this week; but, before I link it, it’s worth giving you fair warning that the content is pretty graphic, and the content is not to be taken lightly. The video in question is nothing especially new (the content was released by Wikileaks in a video entitled ‘Collateral Murder’ back in 2010), and deals with a snapshot of the Iraq war; namely, the killing of a group of apparently mostly innocent civilians by the crew of a US army Apache helicopter gunship.

This particular video tells the story of this events through the words of Ethan McCord, a soldier in the army who was on the ground at the time of the incident. But he begins with some mention of the tactics employed by the army during his time in Iraq, so my analysis will begin there. McCord talks of how, whenever an IED went off, soldiers in his battalion were ordered to ‘kill every mother****er on the street’, issuing 360 degree rotational fire to slaughter every person, civilians and insurgents alike, unfortunate enough to be in the area at the time and how, even though this often went against the morals of the soldiers concerned, a failure to comply with that order would result in the NCOs (Non-Commissioned Officers, aka high-ranking soldiers) in your platoon ‘make[ing] your life hell’. The death toll and slaughter this practice must have caused could hardly be imagined, but McCord does his best to describe it; he talks of ‘the destruction of the Iraqi people’, of normal, innocent people being massacred just for being in the wrong place in the wrong time. McCord also talks about ‘Ranger Dominance’ operations, in which a couple of companies walked unprotected through New Baghdad (a district of the larger city of Baghdad) to perform counter-insurgency tasks. An example he gives are ‘Knock-in searches’ (I think that’s the phrase he uses), in which soldiers knock on doors/break in in order to search for potentially insurgency-related material.

The reason for these missions, for this behaviour, and for the seemingly nonsensical, murderous missions these soldiers were asked to perform comes, basically, down to the type of war being fought. Once Saddam Hussein had been removed from power, many in the US government and army thought the war would be over before very long; just cleaning up a few pockets of resistance. However, what they didn’t count on was that a mixture of their continued presence in the country, their bad behaviour and the sheer dedication of certain diehard Hussein loyalists, and before very long coalition forces found themselves combating an insurgency operation. Insurgencies aren’t like ‘traditional’ warfare; there are no fronts, no battle lines, no easily identifiable cases of ‘good guys here, bad guys over there’. Those kinds of wars are easy to fight, and there’s no way that the military juggernaut of the US army is ever going to run into trouble fighting one in the foreseeable future.

Insurgencies are a different kettle of fish altogether, for two key (and closely related) reasons. The first is that the battle is not fought over land or resources, but over hearts and minds- an insurgency is won when the people think you are the good guys and the other lot are the bad guys, simply because there is no way to ‘restore stability’ to a country whilst a few million people are busy throwing things at your soldiers. The second is that insurgents are not to be found in a clearly defined and controlled area, but hiding all over the place; in safe houses, bunkers, cellars, sewers and even in otherwise innocuous houses and flats. This means that to crush an insurgency does not depend on how many soldiers you have versus the bad guys, but how many soldiers you have per head of population; the more civilians there are, the more places there are the hide, and the more people you need to smoke them out.

Conventional wisdom apparently has it that you need roughly one soldier per ten civilians in order to successfully crush an insurgency operation within a reasonable time frame, or at all if the other side are properly organised, and if that sounds like a ridiculous ratio then now you know why it took so long for the US to pull out of Iraq. I have heard it said that in the key areas of Iraq, coalition forces peaked at one soldier per hundred civilians, which simply is not enough to cover all the required areas fully. This left them with two options; ether concentrate only on highly select areas, and let the insurgents run riot everywhere else (and most likely sneak in behind their backs when they try to move on somewhere else) or to spread themselves thin and try to cover as much ground as possible with minimal numbers and control. In the video, we see consequences of the second approach being used, with US forces attempting to rely on their air support to provide some semblance of intelligence and control over an area whilst soldiers are spread thin and vulnerable, often totally unprotected from mortar attack, snipers and IEDs. This basically means that soldiers cannot rely on extensive support, or backup, or good intel, or to perform missions in a safe, secure environment, and their only way of identifying militant activity is, basically, to walk right into it, either intentionally (hence the Knock-in Searches) or simply by accident. In the former case, it is generally simple enough to apprehend those responsible, but successfully discovering an insurgent via a deliberate search is highly unlikely. It is for this reason that the army don’t take no for an answer in these types of searches, and will often turn a house upside down in an effort to maximise their chance of finding something. In the latter case, identifying and apprehending an individual troublemaker is no easy task, so the army clearly decided (in their infinite wisdom) that the only way to have a chance of  getting the insurgent is to just annihilate everyone and everything in the immediate vicinity.

That’s the reasoning used by the US forces in this situation, and it’s fair to say that in this regard they were rather stuck between a rock and a hard place. However, that doesn’t negate the fact that these tactics are, in the context of an insurgency operation, completely stupid and bull-headed. Remember, an insurgency operation aims, as military officials constantly tell us, to win hearts and minds, to get the civilian population on your side; that’s half the reason you’re not permitting your soldiers to show ‘cowardice’. But, at the same time and in direct contrast to the ‘hearts and minds principle’, this particular battalion commander has chosen to get his soldiers battering down doors and shooting civilians at the first sign of trouble. Unfortunately, this is what happens when wars are badly managed and there are not enough men on the ground to do the job; stupid things becomes sanctioned as ideas because they seem like the only way forward. The results are shown quiter plainly in McCord’s testimony: soldiers of the 1st infantry ‘the toast of the army’, men who ‘pride themselves on being tougher than anyone else’, are getting genuinely scared of going out on missions, fear welling up in their eyes as they wander unprotected through dangerous streets praying they don’t come across any IEDs or snipers.

And that’s just the tactics; next time, I will get on to the meat of the video. The incident that Wikileaks put on show for the world to see…

The Third Crusade Onward

When we think of the crusades, the subject of my previous two posts and this concluding one, it is primarily the third that springs to mind. This is partly because it was one of the biggest,with the three great European powers of England, France and the Holy Roman Empire uniting for the cause against the might of Islam behind Saladin, and also one of the simplest to understand; one lot of Christians fight one lot of Muslims and whoever ends up with the Holy Land is the winner. However, the main reason it is so well remembered is thanks to Richard I, also known as Coeur-de-Lion or Richard the Lionheart. Richard is a strange figure in English history; a Frenchman who never learnt English, visited England three times in his life, was a decidedly useless ruler who sold and taxed to death everything in England he could in order to pay for his wars, then completely bankrupted it by forcing his subjects to levy the single largest ransom in history to pay for his release and who is STILL somehow considered this great hero of English history. This is almost entirely due to the enduring tale of Robin Hood, whose struggle against Richard’s even more incompetent brother John (who acted as interim ruler during Richard’s absence), and the fact that Richard did some good PR work by forgiving John immediately after returning, before going off to war again, getting himself killed besieging a castle in France and forcing the country to put up with John as an actual king.

Richard was, however, a brilliant warrior and military strategist (which is presumably why he spent his entire life at war), and nowhere was this as well-illustrated as when he went crusading. Even when the vast armies of the Holy Roman Empire almost all went home after Emperor Frederick’s death, he was able to conquer the great walled city of Acre in little over a month. The city would go on to become the new home of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, previously destroyed by Saladin. The subsequent arguments over the city would result in all the remaining German forces and all but 10,000 of the French leaving the Holy Land, which didn’t prevent Richard from routing Saladin’s army when it ambushed his in the Battle of Arsuf, boosting the morale of his men. He captured several more cities, only being forced back from taking the severely weakened Jerusalem due to bad weather, lost the city of Jaffa to a large Muslim force and then defeated them too with a small force of just 2,000; no mean feat given Saladin’s known prowess as a general. Through Richard’s work, the Kingdom of Jerusalem was refounded, albeit without much of its original land or the titular city that Richard, for various reasons, neglected to capture.

In many ways, it’s a shame he was so successful and that his name, and that of his crusade, has lived on so long; Richard was by all accounts an all round terrible person, sanctioning the massacre of civilians at Acre and the mass beheading of prisoners in full view of the Muslim army after the battle because negotiations were taking too long to name but two things. By contrast, even European history has remembered Saladin as more than an ‘infidel’, but as a man of honour and chivalry; when his army retook Jaffa, he reportedly ordered the Christians to take shelter as he attempted to regain control of an army maddened with rage and with thoughts of revenge for Acre in its collective mind. He even sent exotic fruits and healers to his enemy when Richard was nearly dying of fever. He was also known to be supportive of scientific and academic advances in his realm, and died poor after distributing most of his money among his subjects. Richard, by all accounts, respected the hell out of his adversary for precisely these reasons, but couldn’t manage to be as good a man as him.

The Christian attempt to take back the Holy Land would never come close to Richard’s successes. The Fourth Crusade, declared by Pope Innocent III just 10 years later ended in disaster when the crusaders couldn’t find a way to pay the Venetian shipbuilders who built the largest fleet since Roman times to accommodate them, with the crusade sacking the Christian cities of Zara and Constantinople before being excommunicated by the pope and utterly falling to pieces, in the process signalling the end of the once-great Byzantine empire. Innocent III declared the last official papally-sanctioned crusade for the Holy Land 15 years after that, whereupon the crusading army was forced to surrender to Muslim forces in Egypt, No. 6 was little more than a series of non-papally sanctioned political manoeuvres by the excommunicated Emperor Frederick II of the Holy Roman Empire that did nonetheless give the Kingdom of Jerusalem actual control of Jerusalem for 20 years, but then Muslim forces invaded and took it back. Three subsequent crusades attempted to win it back, but none made it beyond North Africa. In 1291, the once-prosperous Kingdom of Jerusalem set up by Richard fell with the recapture of Acre by the Muslims, and the crusading dream finally ended. Not that anyone told the King of Jerusalem; officially the Kingdom merely moved to Cyprus and the title has lived on for many centuries. Nowadays many people, including King Juan Carlos I of Spain, have a claim on the title.

In many ways, the crusades were a reflection of the age, and particularly the role of the Church within it. The role of the Pope has (reportedly) existed for 2000 years, but it was during the medieval age, between the Norman Conquest and the Renaissance, that it really became a political force. Once just a voice on religious matters, it was during this time that the Christian world embraced religious zealotry; the age where the bishop was the most powerful voice in a community, and was just as much a political leader as the most powerful king or emperor. And, really, this was a direct result of the crusading idea, of the idea that violence in the pursuit of better things was justified, for this gave the church earthly power that it had never previously held. It can be easy to ignore the wills of the Church when all they can physically do to you is waggle a finger and talk about heaven and hell, but when an army marches under a cross, when people are prepared to kill and to die for God, then it becomes one hell of a lot harder to ignore. The Church fully embraced this power, calling crusades not just in the middle east but also for political reasons across Europe (even if not many people went on them), and crusades were even called as late as 1444 in the Balkans. The growing power and influence of the church in this age was perhaps best indicated in the Thomas a Becket incident, when Henry II (in a fit of rage) accidentally ordered the assassination of his archbishop. Henry, one of England’s greatest ever kings, was forced pretty much solely by public pressure to spend vast amounts of money on numerous acts of penance and his reputation has only just begun to recover. Even nowadays, with the role of the church vastly diminished (and to a far lesser extent), this idea of the Christian faith as a political force and even a tool for violence is still very much with us; it provided the moral justification used by the KKK, for example. The story of the crusades is an ugly one, packed to the brim with zealotry, bigotry, hypocrisy and violence on a truly appalling scale; but they are a lot more than just ancient history. The legacy of the crusades will be rattling around our world for many years to come.

Taking the Cross

My last post provided some theological and historical background to the crusades of the early medieval period, concerning the rise of

Islam and the theological debates of the time concerning the concept of a just war (there were also a few other reasons, such as the Byzantine Empire appealing for help after a long and tiring series of wars against the Turks and a general bout of religious mania that collectively gripped the Catholic world at the time, but these kinds of things are boring and can be summarised in an overlong clause-laden sentence.). Today is going to cover history in a more conventional manner: specifically, the early history of the crusades themselves.

The triggering act of the First Crusade was the Council of Clermont in July 1095, when Pope Urban II (in response to the Byzantine Emperor Alexios the First’s call for aid) made an impassioned speech to a large crowd of French nobles and clergymen. After beginning with the predictable rabble rousing stuff, detailing the atrocities performed by the Muslims on Christian pilgrims and other such bits of religious fervour, Urban moved on to propose a new type of ‘armed pilgrimage’ aiming to take back the Holy Land (although he didn’t specifically mention Jerusalem) from the Saracen infidels. And, like any good salesman, he ended with a special offer to nail down the deal; remission of sins (ie direct route to heaven) for all crusaders who either died in the attempt or successfully completed the crusade’s objective.

Whilst he had hoped for a big response, Urban never quite anticipated the sheer scale of what his crusade would become. Whilst he had anticipated (and got) a good number of knights and nobles making up his crusading army (mostly from France where he toured, but also from the Holy Roman Empire and Italy where local priests were encouraged to preach), what was not expected was the popular response. Thousands upon thousands of common people across Europe pledged to ‘take the cross’, armed with little more than religious fervour and a near-total lack of fighting ability, despite Urban’s attempts to make some of them (such as the women) stay home. Indeed, some 20,000 such pilgrims led by a successful Crusading preacher named Peter the Hermit were so wrapped up in zealotry that they set off for the Holy Land six months before anyone else (the disorganised mob were ambushed halfway through Turkey and only 3,000 escaped with their lives).

When the official crusade of some 30,000 relatively organised men finally kicked off in August 1096 and, despite nearly precipitating war with the Byzantines they had gone to help with regards to sourcing supplies, was reasonably successful. They took back Nicaea, a city a little way to the south east of Constantinople, for the Byzantines, defeated a large Turkish army in the Battle of Dorylaeum, before laying siege to the large, historic Muslim city of Antioch (close to the border between modern-day Turkey and Syria). The siege lasted for nearly a year and the crusading army had to deal with an Islamic relief army shortly after capturing it, but the area was eventually subdued (read; the entire Muslim population were slaughtered) and the first European Prince of Antioch put in power. The remaining troops then marched to Jerusalem, dealing with plague, cannibalism and more enemies than you could shake a stick at on the way, but managed to force their way into the city, massacred the local Muslims and Jews who had fought against them in one of the most horrific acts of genocide in human history (the persecution of the Jews in Europe following Urban’s Christian, anti-semitic rabble rousing has been referred to as ‘the first Holocaust’), sacked every non-Christian building they could find and installed Godfrey of Bouillon as the first King of Jerusalem. Thus he became head of the most powerful and significant of the four ‘crusader states’ that the First Crusade founded in this region of the world. There was the landlocked County of Edessa in modern-day south-east Turkey, the Principality of Antioch in western Syria (on the mediterranean coast), the somewhat confusingly named County of Tripoli that covers modern-day Lebanon and is nowhere near Libya, and the largest and greatest of the lot: the Kingdom of Jerusalem, stretching from the County of Tripoli to the Sinai desert, taking in the Lebanese city of Tyre to the north, the walled city of Acre further south, and of course the city of Jerusalem itself.

That should have been that, and a new Christian land should probably have entered the world; but we must remember that most of those on the crusade had plenty of responsibility and property waiting at home for them. This meant the entire army pretty much dissipated in a few years, leaving Godfrey (who died a year later) and a small group of a few hundred knights to their fate in Jerusalem. Thanks to infighting amongst the Muslims however, there was initially no organised attempt to conquer the new Christian states, so the crusaders were able to survive and prosper. Indeed, even when some of them finally united (after a fashion) under Imad ad-Din Zengi, efforts to recapture the Holy Land were slow. Aleppo fell in 1128, but it wasn’t until 1144 that he caused the European world to sit up and take notice, when he conquered the County of Edessa (by far the weakest of the crusader states both militarily and financially). This prompted a second crusade, ordered by Pope Eugenius III, that completely failed to take it back; French and German troops were harassed by Muslim forces throughout their march through Turkey, arriving in Jerusalem with only enough men to launch a failed siege of Damascus (although one does have to wonder why they bothered, given that Damascus is miles away from Edessa). This failure, on it’s own, still wasn’t a massive issue, with the Kingdom of Jerusalem still together prosperous. Indeed, other aspects of the crusade were a resounding success: perhaps emboldened by the success of the first crusade, the powers that be decided that the second one would attempt to push back the Moors in Spain, and the men who arrived to do that job managed to make significant territorial gains in both Cataluña and Portugal. However, by the 1180s there was real trouble brewing in the Middle East. The great Muslim leader Salah al-Din, best known by his western name Saladin, had united much of the Muslim world behind him, using his not inconsiderable military nous to great effect. As well as building a sultanate so large and powerful that it spanned Egypt, Yemen, Iraq and Syria, he brought the full might of the Islamic world to bear on the crusader states. The Principality of Antioch and County of Tripoli were both reduced to slivers of their former selves, and in September of 1187 Jerusalem was overrun and the Kingdom of Jerusalem destroyed, prompting Pope Gregory VIII to prompt a third crusade. And we will pick up the story of that next time (which will be the last one of these, promise).

A History of Justified Violence

The Crusades rank among the most controversial wars in the history of mankind, and they go up against some pretty stiff competitors (WWI, the Boer War, and every time the English have fought their Celtic neighbours to name but a few). Spanning two hundred years, the historical view of the Crusades has changed slowly at the time; at the time they were thought a holy mission from God, at a later date a noble but ultimately flawed idea, and now many historians take the view that crusaders were little more than a bunch of murdering rapists plundering their way across the holy land. In fact, throughout history only one thing has been agreed on; that they were an abject failure.

The story of how the crusades came to be is a rather twisted one. During the early years of the second millennia AD, Christianity and Islam were spoiling for a fight that has, in some respects, yet to end. Christianity had a head start and had taken firm root in Europe, but over the last few centuries Islam had been founded and spread across the world like wildfire. Zealots, often with a Qur’an in one hand and a sword in the other had spread the word of Allah and Muhammed across the Middle East, Turkey, North Africa and pretty much all of Spain & Portugal south of Barcelona. Indeed, they probably would have gone further (given their immense technological, financial and military clout), had Islam as a religion not descended into infighting with the creation of the Sunni and Shia denominations and the collapse of the unified caliphate. Nevertheless, many Islamic empires were vast and incredibly powerful, and a serious force to be reckoned with.

The rise of Islam was an interesting phenomenon, unique to the world at the time, because of the way it is backed by the principle of jihad. Nowadays, the word tends to be taken to mean ‘holy war’, which is misleading- jihad refers to a Muslim’s attempts to struggle (‘struggle’ being the literal meaning of the word) against non-Muslims, both in a spiritual and worldly capacity. This can be taken to refer to a literal physical struggle against the enemies of Islam, and it was under this guidance that Muslim armies swept across the world under the banner of their religion. This was a strange concept to Christian nations, for whilst they had certainly fought before they had never done so for religious reasons. The Bible’s main messages are, after all, of peace and love for thy neighbour, and the Ten Commandments even state explicitly that ‘You shall not kill’. War was many things, but Christian was not, up until this point, among them.

However, the success of the Islamic approach, demonstrating just how powerful war and faith could be when they went hand-in-hand, lead the Church to reconsider, and added fuel to the fire of an already heated debate regarding whether the use of violence was ever justifiable to a Christian. There was already enough material to provoke argument; particularly in the Old Testament, God is frequently seen dispensing his wrath upon sinners (including one apparent count of genocide and a systematic cleansing of pretty much the entire world, among other things) in direct contravention of his son’s teachings. Then there were the questions of how one was otherwise meant to fight back against an invading force; ‘turn the other cheek’ is all very well, but loses its attractiveness when one is faced with someone attempting to kill you. Other schools of thought held that sin could be justified if it prevented a greater evil from occurring; but others stuck to the old view, claiming that violence could never be justified and only begat, or was begotten by, other violent acts.

It should also be remembered that the medieval Church was a distinctly political entity, and knew perfectly well that to attempt to tell, say, the vastly powerful Holy Roman Empire that it couldn’t declare war was just asking for trouble. Indeed, in later years the HRE even set up its own puppet papacy of ‘antipopes’, allowing them to excommunicate whoever they wanted and thus claim their wars were righteous.

However, the real trump card for the ‘just war camp’ was Jerusalem. The city of Jesus’ Crucifixion, the capital of Israel under the rule of King David (it is worth remembering that Mary’s spouse Joseph was of the House of David, hence why he returned to Bethlehem, the city of David when the Roman census was called), thought by many to be the place of Christ’s hidden tomb, it was the holiest city in the Christian (and Jewish) world, as even the Vatican would admit. However, it was also where, according to Islamic scripture, Muhammed undertook ‘the Night Journey’, in which he travelled to Jerusalem on a winged mule, and met with several prophets before ascending to speak directly with God (apparently the main source of discussion was an argument between God and the prophet Musa concerning how many prayers per day were required, with poor Muhammed acting as a messenger between the two. I would stress, however, that I am not especially knowledgeable with regards to Muslim scripture; if anyone wants to correct me on this, feel free to do so in the comments). This made it one of the holiest cities in the Muslim world, and Islamic forces had captured it (and the rest of Palestine to boot) in 636. The city had changed hands several times since then, but it had remained Muslim. For a long time this hadn’t been too much of a problem, but come the 11th century the Muslim rulers started acting against the Christian population. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was destroyed, the Byzantine Empire (which, although Orthodox, was still technically on Catholic Europe’s side) was getting worn down by near-constant war against its Muslim neighbours, and Christian pilgrims started being harassed on their way to Jerusalem.

It was this that really tipped the Catholic Church’s ‘just war’ debate over the edge, and the Church eventually adopted the stance that war could be justified in the eyes of God if it was pursued in His name (a concept similar in nature to the jihad principle of justified warfare in fighting against the enemies of one’s religion). This was a decision made with one thing in mind; to win back the Holy Land from the Saracen infidels (Saracen being the coverall name given by Catholics to the Muslim occupiers of Jerusalem). To do that, the church needed an army. To get an army, they called a crusade…

‘Bored’ Games?

I actually like board games; and no, I am not five years old. Not talking about the tabletop RPG, that most nerdy of activities, not talking about chess, fantastic though it is, not talking about su doku and the whole ‘brain trainers’ kettle of fish. No, I’m talking about the stuff we first learned to play as kids, where a coloured board, some dice and a few cards combine to create possibly the most stereotypical family play environment imaginable.

I am not, however, part of a vast subculture here, for whilst board games do have a reasonably healthy ‘hardcore’ market among older gamers (a category I do not consider myself to belong to), and there is an awards ceremony (the Spiel des Jahres) is specifically to reward excellence in board game, but it is an undeniable truth that the majority of bored games are marketed for and sold to young children and families. Moreover, the very concept of grown adults playing board games is considered an inherently strange one, and god forbid that you ever try to lead a ‘normie’ over to the boardgaming cause if you don’t expect to be treated like some form of primitive. As with so many things, I don’t consider this an ‘issue’ so much as something relatively interesting, so I thought it might be interesting to delve into for a short post. Hey, gotta write ’em about something.

The story of why no self-respecting adult can get away with playing board games begins with the games themselves. Consider this; what two things do games like Monopoly, Risk, Snakes & Ladders and Battleships have in common? Firstly, that they are all highly popular and everybody knows about them; these are the board games we learnt to play as kids. Secondly, they are truly awful. Something like Snakes & Ladders is an entirely futile task based solely on throws of a dice, which anybody older than about four can work out, whilst something like Risk takes absolutely forever to get through a game of (as well as being far too fiddly for its own good). Monopoly combines the worst of both worlds, being simultaneously hugely reliant on luck and godawfully long, not to mention the fact that it’s a family game based, basically, about being mean to one another, whilst Battleships combines both of these features (albeit in a slightly less interminably long format) with incredibly formulaic gameplay and being amazingly easy to cheat on. And those are just the examples I can think of in my head; there enough other famous games (and quite a few more not-famous and equally awful ones) with similar issues, whilst stuff like Cluedo and Trivial Pursuit, whilst not as bad, are somewhat uninspired by nature. Compare that to something like Settlers of Catan or K2, which are simple enough to learn (once one of you knows the rules), incorporate enough skill and strategy to be fun and don’t take seventeen and a half hours to play through (these style of games usually fall into the category of ‘German style’, for the record… but I really don’t want to delve into that now)

This begs the obvious question… why do we end up playing all these terrible games? The answer is, of course, to do with when we start playing board games- as children. As previously mentioned, children are by far and away the biggest market for board games, and it is considered almost an integral part of ‘normal’ middle class family life to have a few board games in the house- something to prevent the kids from ruining Mrs. Jones’ petunias or watching too much rubbish TV. So, parents pick something that is easy for a child to get their head around and, just as importantly, won’t tax their mental faculties as they try to learn the rules. The simplest way of doing this, of course, is for them to just buy the games they played as children, the ones that absolutely everyone knows the rules of, the ‘old favourites’ such as those mentioned above. This is why classics like Monopoly are so enduring, and why everybody knows why they work, which encourages parents to buy them, which means people learn them as kids, which means everybody knows them, which means… and so on down the vicious spiral. This, combined with the uncomfortable fear factor of trying to play a game whilst not fully understanding it or (horror) potentially losing to one’s offspring, puts a lot of parents off branching out with their choice of boardgames, which is perhaps understandable.

The ‘child factor’, incidentally, adds another push factor to the idea of playing boardgames when older. As boardgames are only really played by parents as a diversionary tool whilst their children are young, they become very much associated with our childhood days. Given that every child and teenager always wants to forget those embarrassing days way back when, this means that in our slightly older years, we actively reject the idea of board games as being ‘for babies’, and are frequently reluctant to open our mind to them (again, understandably). And, if we get into the habit of not doing something during these pivotal developmental years, the chance of us ever doing it in later life becomes increasingly slim.

Board gaming is not for everyone; I, for instance, would not consider myself massively enamoured with it, as they are usually a lot harder to get into than most other game formats since they don’t have any form of tutorial, and are often not taught word-of-mouth by an experienced player as card games are. They also frequently don’t have quite the same scope or ability to be artistic with their storytelling as other forms of media; but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be fun, can’t be serious, can’t be dramatic, can’t be funny, can’t be entertaining, or can’t be compelling to play. Board games need not be ‘bored’ games, although they easily can be; every so often, it’s worth giving something new, a decent shot.

Quality vs. Quantity

It’s an old saying, usually coming straight from the lips of the slightly insecure or self confident: ‘I do quality, not quantity!’. It’s a very appealing idea, the concept that skill and ability can mark one out from pure brawn and throwing vast amounts of resources at a problem. But sometimes quality is not the answer. Sometimes quantity is the way forward: and to illustrate this, I’m going to tell a story.

The Industrial Revolution was the biggest, most tumultuous and most difficult period of transition that the western world has ever been put through, and design was no exception. Objects once made individually and by hand, the work of skilled craftsmen, were now produced using vast steam-powered machinery owned and directed by rich businessmen. And being businessmen is the key here; they wanted their products to sell to the general public, and the only real way they knew how to do that back then was to make the things cheap. This generally manifested itself in making products as simple to produce as possible using the machinery of the day, and the idea of ingratiating design elements into these processes didn’t register on their conciousness; perhaps rightly, since the majority of the populace being sold to were rather poor and may not have been able to afford the prettier, more expensive item. What this did mean was that the products ordinary people filled their homes with were usually large, since Victorian machinery couldn’t handle high tolerances too well, decorated in a rather gaudy, ‘tacked on’ fashion rather than having beauty as part of the design, and were often of a very poor quality as manufacturers skimped on materials and good processing. We must remember that this was the golden age of deregulated industry, companies having no responsibility to either adhere to standards or treat their low-paid, overworked and awfully treated workers with any degree of respect.

This state of affairs was deplored by John Ruskin, an art critic and thinker of the time. He argued for a return to the old ways of doing things, with small-scale industry taking the place of big business and simple, good-quality, hand-crafted products replacing the mass-produced goods of the Victorian age. Since he actually had other things to do with his time, he didn’t expand on this plan to any great degree; but a man named William Morris did. Morris was a designer whose textiles designs would make him rich and whose poetry would make him famous, but he latched on to Ruskin’s ideas whilst at university, and they turned him into an early socialist. Indeed, he spent a decent chunk of time in later life standing on street corners distributing socialist pamphlets, but that’s another story. Morris took Ruskin’s ideas and, with a group of like-minded friends, founded a new design movement based on Ruskin’s philosophy. They wanted a return to craftsmanship, to put skill back into design and for workers to ’empower’ themselves through the making of good-quality, appropriately sized, simply designed products, putting them in charge of their own lives rather than acting as slaves to the corporation. More than that, they wanted to reinstate the role of design as a fine art, putting beauty into everyday products for everyday people, and to advance the art of design in general. This movement would later become known as the Arts and Crafts movement.

This movement was around between around 1860 and 1900, and enjoyed some success in revitalising design as an art form. Various universities and other intellectual establishments began founding schools of design, and as the Industrial Revolution wore on even the capitalists began to take notice of these new ideas, realising that the common people could be persuaded to buy their products because they were designed well rather than just because they were cheap. And what about the Arts & Crafts philosophy? Well, a few organisations were set up promoting just that idea, trying to bring together skilled craftspeople into a setup styled as a medieval guild. And they totally bombed; the production of individual, hand crafted items took so many more man-hours than the industrial mass-production process that simple economics (then a rather under-developed field) dictated its price was far beyond the price point of the ordinary people Morris’ philosophy aimed to serve. Whilst the products they produced were undoubtedly beautiful, and advanced the art of design considerably through their use of unusual materials and craft techniques, producing such quality products was simply not a viable solution to providing for the common man.

Indeed, it wasn’t until the 1920s that a design movement finally managed to make itself felt among the common people. In Germany, the Bauhaus school was set up in Weimar (home of the titular new republic that would be replaced by the Nazis in 1933) and began educating designers in all aspects of craftsmanship and fine arts, something that William Morris would doubtless have agreed with. However, the reason that the Bauhaus style proved so internationally successful, and continues to be relevant today, is for its acceptance of the machine age, and for experimenting with techniques from an industrial, rather than crafts, background. A good example is tubular steel; in the 1920s, extruded tubular steel (without joints in it) was a new innovation that was much stronger than previous efforts. Bauhaus designers immediately began experimenting with it, and when Marcel Breuer designed his Model B3 chair (later known as the Wassily chair) based around a tubular steel frame it put the material, and the chair, on the map. Here was a style whose products could be produced on a large scale, making them globally famous, and the style flourished because of it. Even today, products can be bought based on Bauhaus designs or in the Bauhaus style, and whilst many of William Morris’ wallpaper prints are still available, they are all now mass-printed in factories. He must be turning in his grave.

This is just an example, but it successfully illustrates a point; that, on a large scale, going too far into the quality side of things simply isn’t sustainable if it comes at the expense of quantity. It just comes down to the economics of the problem; the consumer culture gets blamed for a lot of things, but the extent to which mass-production has made ‘luxury’ goods affordable to the common people and made all our lives more comfortable is frequently neglected. Quality at the expense of quantity is rarely the answer; best, of course, is trying to find a way to do both.

The Biggest Debate

OK, gotta brace myself for this one; it’s the gay marriage debate.

Even now, over a decade into the 21st century, it still isn’t too hard (if you’re looking in the right place) to find somebody to tell you that homosexuality is wrong/sinful/weird/unnatural/ARE YOU A FAG?!?!?!?! (apologies for using that word). Normally this blog does not go into my Views on any subject, but on this occasion I think I might relax these opinions to say that there is absolutely no justification for any of these opinions that is not a load of dingo’s kidneys. Yes, homosexuality isn’t exactly evolutionarily selected for and doesn’t produce babies; but given that it’s been observed in a range of animals from bats to swans, nature apparently doesn’t have too much of a problem with the idea, so anything along those lines is out of the window. Yes, homosexuality is kind of a weird concept for your average straight person and you might find the idea a bit ‘icky’, but unless someone of your own gender starts hitting on you then there’s no reason why this should affect you. And if anyone starts quoting the Bible at me, I’m going to start pointing out how Jesus was a socialist and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.

Ahem. Sorry about that.

Anyway, the point I was getting at is that any debate concerning homosexuality is generally confined to this group of people shouting very loudly at the gay community and the rest of the civilised world. And, in recent history, said civilised world has been doing a lot of the winning; the gay community is a well-recognised part of our society and now the sight of two dudes making out, whilst uncommon, isn’t exactly something to write home about. History will probably record the recent gay marriage debate in countries across the world as just another stepping stone along the road to sexual equality, but from my point of view one interesting thing struck me about the debate, or more specifically the debaters. Those opposing the idea of gay marriage frequently were, or at least came across as, people who didn’t have a problem with gay relationships or civil partnerships but who were specifically opposed to gay marriage as a thing, which I found quite interesting. I’ve actually been putting off writing this post for a while because, well… controversy is not my strong suit, but I haven’t really been able to get the thought out of my head so I guess you’re stuck with it now.

To me, this aspect of the gay marriage debate really centred on what definition of marriage the person in question was using. To those who think that marriage is simply a strong, legally binding before-God-under-oath etc. expression of binding love between two people who want to spend their lives together, then sexual orientation doesn’t really come into the picture; love is universal regardless of orientation, so according to this definition so too should marriage be. However, those opposed to gay marriage had some other idea of what marriage was meant to be, something that, by its very nature, made it something that could, almost by definition, only be between a man and a woman, and that civil partnerships exist for gay couples separately for a reason (incidentally, I personally think that the main bone of contention with the idea of a civil partnership among the gay community concerns the lack of cultural identity it carries, making it seem like a label more than a true, fundamental expression of love). Not being in this camp myself (and not having much first-hand experience of marriage), I thought I might investigate exactly what this definition of marriage might be, in order to get to the heart of the disagreement.

Since the only difference between a same-sex and straight relationship is, fundamentally, the bits of genitalia involved, it seems natural to begin from a standpoint of biology. Maybe the definition of marriage we’re looking for concerns itself with a bond consummated through y’standard heterosexual mating procedure? My mind is instantly drawn to the image of marriage proposed in ‘Game of Thrones’ (books, I haven’t seen the TV series’), in which the bride is publically stripped and ‘bedded’ on her wedding night in an elaborate piece of tradition that is mostly (the final act excepted) performed in front of a large, drunken feast. In any case, this definition falls at the first hurdle; heterosexual sex is, if we’re talking about the pure emotional link of mutual enjoyment, satisfaction and emotional bonding, no different from homosexual sex (or else… well why would they do it?), so on its own this doesn’t seem enough.

The end result of heterosexual sex, however, may point us in a better direction. Unlike homosexual relationships, heterosexual ones are biologically capable of producing babies (I will ignore for now the idea of sperm banks and such, which are a whole different business) and expanding the population, so maybe the basis for our alternative definition of marriage is a union through which to produce children, or something along those lines? This has some grounding in theology too; Adam and Eve were, according to the Bible, the first married couple (I think, anyway; I’m not too hot on my Bible study), and since God wrote the laws of  biology it makes sense that he’d start off with a pair capable of continuing the lineage of the creatures made in his image. Or at least, after he made Eve, he sensed the potential the idea could have. It is presumably for this reason that the Bible incorporates specific instruction for Adam & Eve, and the book’s subsequent readers, to ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ (Genesis 1:28), and why the Church has such strong views on the concept of sex outside marriage. But anyway; really, the validity of this argument, of the idea of marriage as a vehicle to producing children, is a personal rather than religious one, although you do have to wonder what such people think of people who have sex and children out of wedlock. Or maybe such people don’t exist. I dunno, I’m speculating here.

And whilst we’re on the subject, let’s talk about religion, a favourite point of reasoning from internet comments sections (yes, occasionally I make the cardinal sin of reading those things). There is an argument that runs roughly along the lines of ‘religion hates homosexuality, marriage is a religious ceremony, therefore the two are incompatible and a homosexual marriage is a ridiculous idea’. Proponents of this argument are less opposed to the introduction of a gay marriage bill than they are just thinking it’s kinda weird, and are the source of a hilarious turn of phrase that has cropped up all over the web ‘giving gay people the right to marry is like giving men the right to an abortion’. The second tenet of this argument is, however, rather a large assumption and the matter of considerable debate for, in modern society, marriage is technically a legal process. This is a concession made to respect those of other faiths (and quite right too), but is responsible for why a wedding can take place in a registry office just as easily as the church. It is also true that marriage was initially nothing to do with religion at all, but a matter of business; one family trading a woman to another in exchange for cash, and that religion rather inherited the concept as the idea of love in marriage became steadily more important over the centuries… but how you interpret this one is really down to personal debate. I happen to know for certain that this group exists, because I’ve seen plenty of arguments with them.

However, I personally think that the most likely reason a person would be against the idea of homosexual marriage but not homosexuality itself concerns the idea of ownership. The very idea of ownership is a quite strange and interesting one, but the thrust of the issue in this context is that human beings frequently feel a strange sense of belonging and ownership of a lot of things, be they objects, people or even ideas. A good example is patriotism/nationalism, where the idea of ‘belonging’ to a particular patch of land with a certain type of people can get so strong that they want to stop other people coming to their patch of land and ‘stealing’ their identity. And I think the same thing applies to marriage; married people have a sense of ownership over the idea, that it is fundamentally theirs and they don’t want to share it with other people. It sounds both a childish and bigoted point of view and, to an extent, it is; but hey, humans are irrational creatures in the end. I can only hope that holders of this view don’t feel quite so angry with it a few years down the line.

Personal History

Our lives today are more tracked, recorded and interconnected than ever before, for good and ill. Our phones can track our every moment, CCTV and other forms of physical recording have reduced our opportunities for privacy whilst out in public and, as the Leveson inquiry showed, modern technology makes it easier and easier for those who want to to keep tabs on all our activity. However, the aspect of this I want to discuss today concerns our online presence, something that is increasingly becoming a feature of all our lives.

On this blog, I try to be careful; I don’t mention my name, age or specific location and never put any photos of myself up. I also try, wherever possible, to be careful in other places online too; I don’t put photos on my Facebook page (since photos can be seen by anyone, regardless of whether they are your friend or not), try to keep a hold of my tongue when on forums, and try to operate a ‘look don’t touch’ policy in most other areas. But then again, I’m kinda lucky in that regard; I am not highly sociable, so rarely find myself in the position of having 100 embarrassing photos & videos put up concerning ‘that HILARIOUS thing you were doing last night’, and am not a public figure in any way. Basically, I am able to maintain a reasonable degree of privacy on the web by virtue of the fact that other people are unlikely to… contribute to my online profile.

Others are, of course, not so lucky; either that or they don’t especially care, which is, I suppose understandable. Sharing information about ourselves is, after all, pretty much exactly what Facebook and the like are for. However, we are frequently told how damaging it is to have such a wealth of information about us so blatantly available online; a quick Google and Facebook search of a client is now pretty much standard procedure when it comes to job applications, and even if there aren’t any pictures of you with underwear round the ankles vomiting into a fountain, they can build up a negative image of a potential client. An interviewer (well, a presumptive one) might, for instance, take a look at all the pictures showing you hanging round with mates at a club and think you are a habitual drinker and partygoer, neither of which exactly say ‘productive worker who’s always going to be in on time and in top condition’. Even beyond the world of work, there is the potential for serial embarrassment if pictures that were meant to be shared between friends make it out into the big wide world, and there is even the worrying idea of ‘cyber stalking’, made so easy thanks to the internet, entering your life.

However, perhaps most interesting are those in the public domain, both people and companies, who must control what totally uncontrollable, and usually unknown, people can choose to put online about them. Not only can this be personally hurtful for individual people, but for many such figures their livelihood is dependent on their reputation. All it takes is a spree of bad press reports for a negative image to tar one’s brand for a long old time, and all of the incalculable lost revenue that comes with that. The internet has a large memory and billions of people to contribute to it, and even a few particularly vociferous bloggers can keep bad words in the Google suggestion bar for a very long time.

This has lead, in the last few years, to the rise of a new industry; that of online reputation management. These companies have a simple enough remit; to disassociate their client from negative connotations online wherever possible. Unfortunately, this isn’t a matter of just shutting people up, because this is the internet and that kind of thing never ends well.  No, these businesses have to be a mite more subtle. For example, let us imagine, for the sake of implausibility, that Benedict Cumberbatch is linked with a rabbit-murdering syndicate, and although nothing is ever nailed down there are enough damning news bulletins and angry blogs that this thing is going to hang around forever. A reputation management company’s initial job would be to get this off the front page of Google, so they have to create some more content to hide the bad stuff; 94% of Google searches never get off page one. However, they can’t just produce huge numbers of spam-like articles to the vein of ‘Benedict’s a nice guy! Look, he’s cuddling a kitten! He gives money to nice charities!’, because people are smart enough to tell when that kind of thing is happening. So, a large amount of neutral or neutral-positive stuff is generated; certain sites might be paid, for example, to talk about the next film or theatre project it’s announced he’s appearing in. A variety of content is key, because if it’s all just carbon copies of the same statement people will smell a rat. Once the content’s been generated, there comes the matter of getting it circulated. Just writing a program to generate hits artificially isn’t enough on its own; this is where the world of sponsored Facebook links comes in, trying to get people thinking and talking about non-rabbit murdering stuff. This prevents more negative content from being generated and existing stuff from getting traffic much more effectively. The job is, however, an extremely slow one; a news story that breaks over the course of a week can take a year or two to fix, depending on the ferocity of one’s opponents.

When the world wide web, or ‘the information super-highway’, as it was also known back then, first came into our workld back in the 90s, people had high hopes. We could learn things, share things, discover stuff about one another, foster universal understanding. And, whilst we can now do all these things and more, the internet has become infamous too, scaring corporations and people alike with what billions of interconnected people can make happen. It is a strange place that many try to tame, out of necessity or out of fear. For many, it’s a battle they are doomed to lose.

PS: I feel like I should slightly apologise for not really having anything to say here. I guess I didn’t really think of a conclusion in advance

Zero Dark Thirty

Well, I did say I wanted to make film reviewing more of a regular thing…

The story of Zero Dark Thirty’s production is a both maddeningly frustrating and ever so slightly hilarious one; the original concept, about an intelligence officer’s incessant, bordering on obsessive, quest to try and find Osama bin Laden was first brought up some time around 2010, and the screenplay was finished in the spring of 2011. The film’s centrepiece was the Battle for Tora Bora, which took place in late 2001; American and allied forces had been on the ground for just a few weeks before the Taliban government and political system was in total disarray. Al-Qaeda were on the run, and some quarters thought the war would be pretty much over within a few months, apart from a few troops left over to smoothen the new government’s coming into power (yeah, that really worked out well). All the intelligence (and it was good too) pointed to bin Laden’s hiding in the mountains of Tora Bora, near the Pakistani border, and after a fierce bombing campaign the net was tightening. However, allied Pakistani and Afghan militia (who some believe were on the Al-Qaeda side) requested for a ceasefire so that some dead & wounded might be evacuated and prisoners taken; a move reluctantly accepted by the Americans, who then had to sit back as countless Al-Qaeda troops, including bin Laden, fled the scene.

Where was I? Oh yes, Zero Dark Thirty.

This was originally planned to be the central event of the film, but just as filming was about to commence the news broke that Bin Laden had, in fact, been killed which, whilst it did at least allow the filmmakers to produce a ‘happy’ ending, required that the whole script be torn up and rewritten. However, despite this, the tone and themes of the film have managed to remain true to this original morally ambiguous, chaotic story, despite  including no footage of any events prior to 2003. We still have the story of the long, confused and tortured quest of the small team of CIA operatives whose sole job it was to find and kill bin Laden, and it honestly doesn’t feel like the story would have felt much different were it to end with bin Laden still alive. And tortured is the word; much has been made of the film’s depiction of torture, some deploring the fact that it is shown to get vital information and arguing that the film ‘glorifies’ it, whilst others point out the way that the key information that finally revealed bin Laden’s location was found after the newly-inaugurated President Obama closed down the ‘detainee’ program. Personally, I think it’s depicted… appropriately. This is a very, very real film, telling a real story about real events and the work of real people, even if specifics aren’t the gospel truth (I mean, there’s only so much the CIA are going to be willing to tell the world), and nobody can deny that prisoners were tortured during the first few years of the war. Or, indeed, that the practice almost certainly did give the CIA information. If anything, that’s the point of the torture debate; it’s awful, but it works, and which side of the debate you fall on really depends on whether the latter is worth the former. In any case, it is certainly revealing that the film chooses to open with a torture scene, revealing the kind of pulls-no-punches intent that comes to define it.

There are the depictions of the chaos of the intelligence process, the web of indistinguishable truths and lies, the hopes pinned on half-leads, all amid plenty of timely reminders of just what is at stake; the attacks, both the big ones that everyone’s heard of and can relate to and the littler ones that hide away in the corners of the media reporting that manage to mean so, so much more to our chosen characters. Of particular note is the final attack on bin Laden’s compound, in one of the least ‘Hollywood’ and most painstakingly accurate portrayals of a military operation ever put onto the big screen. It also manages to come across as totally non-judgemental; torture, terrorism and even the killing of one of western culture’s biggest hate figures of the last decade are presented in exactly the same deadpan fashion. In another film, neutrality over contentious issues can come across as a weak cop-out; here it only adds to the realism.

The most obvious comparison to Zero Dark Thirty is The Hurt Locker, director Kathryn Bigelow’s previous ultra-realistic story about the War on Terror, and it is a pretty fair comparison to say that what The Hurt Locker was to soldiers, Zero Dark Thirty is to intelligence. However, whilst The Hurt Locker was very much about its characters  and their internal struggles, with the events of the film acting more as background than anything else, Zero Dark Thirty is instead dedicated to its events (to say ‘story’ would rather overplay the interconnectedness and coherence of the whole business). Many characters are reduced to devices, people who do stuff that the film is talking about, and many of the acting performances are… unchallenging; nothing against the actors concerned, just to say that this is very much Bigelow’s film rather than her characters. The shining exception is Jessica Chastain as our central character of Maya, who manages to depict her character’s sheer drive and unflinching determination with outstanding aplomb: as well as showing her human side (in its brief appearances) in both touching and elegant fashion.

For all these reasons and more, I can wholeheartedly recommend Zero Dark Thirty as something people should try and see if they can; what I cannot do, however, is to really enjoy it. This isn’t because it isn’t fun, for lots of great films aren’t, but because it doesn’t really stir any great emotions within me, despite asking its fair share of moral questions about war. Maybe its because I tend to be very analytical over such matters, but I’m inclined to feel that the film has actually taken its neutrality and frankness of delivery a little too far. By having no really identifiable, consistent, empathetic characters beyond Maya, our emotional investment in the film is entirely dependent on our emotional investment in the subject matter, and by presenting it in such a neutral matter it fails to really do so in people without a strong existing opinion on it. I have heard this film described as a Rorschach test for people’s opinions on the war and the techniques used in it; maybe my response to this film just reveals that I don’t really have many.

Φ

Phi is one of very few numbers to have three ‘names’ of sorts; the first is, of course, phi (from the Greek letter Φ, pronounced ‘fee’), and the second is its numerical representation, 1.618 (to four significant figures; the number itself is equal to (1+√5)/2). The third comes courtesy of Dan Brown,  semi-conspiracy theorists and lots of gullible people around the world, and generally comes in a form similar to ‘SERIOUSLY IT’S ACTUALLY A THING DON’T GO AWAY PLEASE’.

Y’see, phi is a number with a great deal of myths, or at least half-truths, surrounding it, which lead a lot of people who don’t do enough research into things to believe it all holds a vast array of semi-magical properties, ranging from molluscs to architecture. Many of this myths, some of which shall be explored later, found their way into Chapter 20 of The Da Vinci Code, which (some might say unfortunately) went on to be a bestseller. Dan Brown is an entertaining author, but a great deal of his work is based around these sort of half truths. This is hardly something that only he is guilty of as an author, but unfortunately a habit of including a section named ‘Facts’ at the start of his books and a tendency to at least start from a position of truthfulness has lead a few too many people to think that far too much of what he says is true. Hence why large portions of people get very, very angry at him, and why phi is rarely a concept taken seriously within intellectual circles.

Anyway; back to the number itself. Phi’s unique property as a number is, seemingly, innocuous enough; if you subtract 1 from it, and then divide one by that number, you return to 1.618 (or, to put it another way, 1/0.618=1.618). Go find a calculator and try it if you want; if you set it up to perform this function [1/(1-Ans)=Ans], you can start from any number above 1 and should end up at phi after a few iterations.

Phi was discovered by Greek mathematicians, never ones to leave such a nicely self-fulfilling number alone once they’d got hold of it, and rapidly realised something quite nice concerning phi and rectangles. If you take a rectangle with a short side of length 1 unit and a long side of length Φ units, and then cut away from that a square with side length 1 unit, then the little rectangle you get left over will be the same shape as your original rectangle; the ratio of its side lengths is 1:1.618. It also just so happens that a rectangle this shape looks very… balanced and aesthetically pleasing, and so our overenthusiastic Greek mathematician friends dubbed this shape ‘the perfect rectangle’ and called phi ‘the golden ratio’.

Phi found its way back into the mathematical world several hundred years later in the early 13th century when a Pisa-born (Pisan? Pisaish? Not sure) mathematician called Leonardo Fibonacci started messing about with what would later become one of the most famous mathematical sequences of all time. The Fibonacci sequence is a very simple business; start with two ones and then, for each successive term, add the previous two. So we start with 1 + 1 = 2, then 1 + 2 = 3, then 2 + 3 = 5, then 8, 13, 21, 34 and so on. The reason it has a relation to phi is that if you divide two successive terms of the sequence by one another then you get an approximation to phi, with the approximation getting more accurate as you go further up the sequence. It starts off rather vague (1/1=1 and 2/1=2 aren’t even close), but before long things start to converge (8/5=1.6, much more like it), until eventually we arrive at something very very close (610/377= 1.618037, accurate to five significant figures). This, once again has a geometrical analogy; if you stick two squares of side length 1 unit together, and then add a square of side length two units, and then one of side length three and so on, you start building up an increasingly large rectangle; a rectangle, moreover, that starts to look suspiciously like our old friend ‘the perfect rectangle’ the more squares we add.

However, the reason phi has got so many people worked up and excited over the years is its habit of turning up in nature; although, it must be said, it doesn’t do so nearly as often as people think. A good example occurs in flowers; if you count the petals on flowers, the final number is often one of those in the Fibonacci sequence (so you get three-leafed clovers one hell of a lot more than four leaved clovers). One flower of particular interest is the rose, which often has eight on the inside and five around the outside to make 13 overall; 3 Fibonacci numbers. There are even arguments that pineapple skins and sunflowers share this feature, but trying to explain that without pictures is rather beyond my capabilities. Nobody’s entirely sure why this is, but many attribute it to a mixture of luck and confirmation bias; once somebody tells you about phi, it’s hard to stop seeing it everywhere and to ignore the countless occasions when it doesn’t crop up. I mean, 3, 5 and 8 are hardly uncommon numbers off their own bat.

However, this hasn’t deterred supporters of the theory, who claim phi turns up literally everywhere; far more often than it actually does, in fact. There are three commonly stated examples of complete phi-related bullshit that are particularly aggravating to those who know about them. The first concerns the Parthenon, in Athens, of which it is said that if you look at it front on the shape of its profile fits exactly into a perfect rectangle. Even if it did, this wouldn’t be too surprising, for as we’ve said the perfect rectangle happens to be an inherently aesthetically pleasing shape that it would not be too surprising to see incorporated into architecture to make a building look good, but the fact is that this claim is totally wrong. Pictures claiming to show it always leave out a few stairs at the bottom, or use a slightly imperfect rectangle; the relationship is close, but not ‘perfect’ as some people like to believe.

The Da Vinci connection to phi is, perhaps surprisingly, not confined just to Dan Brown; after Fibonacci, Da Vinci’s tutor Luca Pacioli was the first person to write about it (his book was entitled ‘the divine proportion’, Φ’s other nickname), and did so in a book that Da Vinci apparently illustrated. He definitely knew about the thing, therefore, but didn’t use it to compose either the Mona Lisa or the Vitruvian man. In fact, the name of the latter work gives a clue as to where its dimensions come from; Vitruvius was a Roman now known as ‘the world’s first engineer’, who used proportions of the ‘ideal’ human body (or at least what the Romans thought of it) when designing buildings. His dimensions, however, were based merely on the idea that one’s armspan and height are equal and eight times the height of the head, and didn’t use phi at all. Many phi supporters will tell you that phi does crop up a lot when measuring the human body, and in some people it does; but if we look at anthropometric data to get average data, the number of times phi appears drops markedly. In any case; there is a LOT to measure in the human body, and frankly it would be more surprising if a few of the ratios didn’t end up being phi, particularly what with it being a ratio our eye has evolved to find pleasing.

And then there’s the nautilus; an incredibly beautiful deep-sea mollusc that spends its days bobbing up quite happily in its remarkable spiral-shaped shell. However, some will tell you that such a shell is, in fact a ‘golden spiral’,  getting further away from its centre point by a factor of Φ every quarter-turn (this is the typical way of measuring spirals, because REASONS). Unfortunately, this theory was shot down in 1999 when an American mathematician named Clement Falbo decided that the best way to spend his time was to measure a few hundred shells and work out an average. His results came to an average spiral ratio of 1.33:1, making the nautilus the bearer of just another old-fashioned logarithmic spiral (incidentally, there are other, far less pretty, molluscs that do have ‘golden shells’, but people tend to forget about them for some reason).

The ‘golden ratio’ is an interesting little piece of mathematics, the kind of thing that nerds make jokes about on the internet and inconceivably bored teenagers mess around with on calculators at the back of Friday afternoon geography (I speak from extensive personal experience). It pops up in a lot of places and has several interesting properties; but some divine mathematical instrument with which to describe the whole natural world?

…might be going a bit far.