pumpkinstrokemarrow

Interested to read in the 'Economist' on the way home yesterday of the doings of a Chinese company called Huawei which, it seems, is muscling big time into the communications infrastructure market of the western world. Some people are concerned that the Chinese government may prevail on the Chinese company to abuse its position of trust and use said infrastructure for snooping. A legitimate concern given the track record of the various parties and one which I would have thought was hard to put to bed: how do you prove that a complicated device does not include some covert, possibly dormant, snooping parts? On the way I notice that one John Suffolk has acquired the grand job title (with the Chinese company) of 'global cyber-security officer', a John Suffolk who was a senior civil servant (having been parachuted in from somewhere in the private sector), so acquiring him is very much part of cosying up to our securocratic establishment. I came across him as the head of a bit of the Home Office with valiant and worthy objectives but which, at the time I left it, had succeeded in spending a lot of money without having too much to show for it. But he escaped without tarnish to a grand job in the Cabinet Office, from whence to China. Clearly a star at schmoozing around the higher echelons of government and its agencies.

Back home finished off a chance read of Sacks (see, for example, May 18) on the deaf - a short book called 'Seeing Voices' which I chanced across at Epsom Library. For an easy going book quite an eye opener. It turns out that sign language proper is a reasonably universal aboriginal language among the deaf. A full blown and very expressive language, quite different from, for example, signed English, which is just a mechanical transcription of English into signs. Prompted, I can see that sign might be very good at expressing space and movement. One product of all this is that the deaf can be very good at the minutiae of the movement of faces and hands: they can see things which the rest of us cannot. The Sacks line seems to be that the deaf should be taught this proper sign at an early age; this will give them community and enable them to develop - in a way that laboriously teaching them to speak and read English will not, this last being a very time consuming business. Striking the right balance between special needs & special facilities and integration is clearly tricky, with no simple solution. I suppose in passing that, like other minority languages, sign must include pots of imported words in order to function in the modern world. He also talks about the way that socialising in sign is very different to socialising with voice. A group of people can be conducting several conversations at once without getting in each others' way. One can converse - or eavesdrop - at a distance. Handcuffing a deaf person is equivalent to gagging a hearing person. Fascinating stuff, and I await my sign primer from the Galluadet University Press, via Amazon with interest. Gallaudet being a place for, and mainly of, the deaf.

PS: reminded of my entry of July 4th 2011 the other day by my purchase of a second potion dispenser from Boots. I had got used to the one I had and was looking forward to buying an identical one. Thought I had succeeded but get home to find that there has been a subtle change underneath. A change for the better, but a change nonetheless. Are thoughts of this sort going to be the only legacy of flogging through Houellebecq?