So Doku

On Sunday I attended the Times national So Doku championship, even though I never solved one of these puzzles in my life. I was there as part of my brilliant career as invigilator, and my job this time was to check the answers of the participants. There were over a hundred of them, all sitting in one room. Most of them looked in their 40s and 50s, lower middle class, more men than women (3:2 ratio. I counted. Invigilation makes you very bored). Almost all, save three or four, were white. I don't know it that's the profile of the average so doku fan or the average Times reader.

I sat there and watched foreheads furrow, eyeballs roll, fingers stretched, and tongues peek from tightly closed lips as they tried to get the numbers right. I thought how once we humans preferred to run around and try to climb treas and kick balls. But now we sit in a room and write numbers into little boxes. What a technocratic society we live in. We measure a genius by her or his ability to arrange a nine by nine matrix in the right way and quickly as possible. Other societies may pick their geniuses by their ability to get the best apple yield or to crack car locks.

But I heard somewhere that there's a lot of creativity in writing these puzzles, and the ones produced by computers are hugely inferior. So humanity still kicks ass. The composers of Sunday's puzzles stood at the side of the room, a quiet couple of earnest and lean looks from the So Doku Syndicate, the group that really runs the universe. They reminded me of the virtual reality terrorists of Kronenberg's Existenz.

For so doku fans in my readership, two set of puzzles are waiting for you, if you want, the junior ones for under 12 and 13-16. I tried the one for under 12 children, and failed. I used to think I was good with numbers.

Marx and Windows

It's the exams season and I'm once more working as a supervisor. Today in one of the rooms in the new extension of the college, with a huge glass wall but no windows. There's an air conditioner which is always either too cold or hot. The control is a flimsy plastic switch, which some people take pleasure in pouring superglue on. As a result I often find myself in a freezing room (with 20 shivering candidates). I wonder what happened to windows: a great invention, which helps to regulate air flow and temperature. Best of all, it doesn't take electricity. What will happen to these air conditioners when energy prices quadrupole?

The exams period is good to catch on all the reading I avoided. For the past three days it has been Das Capital. I expected something densely complex, but to my surprise the text - while cumbersome and tedious - is far from difficult. Another surprise was to find Marx overtly antisemitic:

The Capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews [...]

(Volume I, Part II, chapter IV, The General Formula for Capital).

All I can say is, look at the mirror, dude.

Probably the worst thing is his sense of humour. He loves to make these erudite, smug and completely not funny comments. He sounds like those types in the British Library one has to avoid at all costs, especially if you're a young good looking girl.

On a more learned note, it is interesting that Marx's world, in which value is congealed labour, is a world of nature shaped by man (sic). That is: nothing in his account is finite, certainly not water or energy. Capitalism has unleashed a world of exponential growth, restricted by its own speed limit only, or perhaps by the uprising of the proletariat. It is a presupposition he shares with liberals, and one that we may all soon find disastrously wrong, when the finite-ness of our world will force us to stop building offices without windows.