Luck, chance and the perception of coincidence

I have read that it is still inconcievable that a robot can be designed to catch a thrown ball. The casual sophistication of human perception is enormous: to work out from limited sense data not only what is going on in terms of movement, but then to predict and act on it, moving the hand so it is in just the right place. Usually (insert joke about cricketers here). This is achieved by some very clever under-the-bonnet stuff to do with mental spatial models. The human mind is very good at discerning patterns in high-noise data. Sometimes this is meaningful, as when the Greeks observed the planets and calculated their orbits (wrongly, but still); and sometimes it isn't, as when they played joined-the-dots to create the constellations. But being good at making patterns means that we spot 'coincidences' very easily, and are poor at judging probability. That's what keeps astrologers in business: they don't have to be right very often to seem to be on to something. This can be queried: when you look at the people spread-betting on a football match, if 40% bet on each team to win, and 20% bet on a draw, then at least 20% are going to be 'strangely prescient' (this time). And there was also that triumphant moment on the National Lottery when Mystic Meg predicted that those wearing red would be in for a chance tonight etc, but her pyschic powers totally failed to infrom her that that week's draw would be cancelled because of techncial problems.

The reason I raise this is because of the continuing saga of CNPS : Consecutive Number Plate Spotting [up to 48 now- exciting, isn't it?]. And I have borne out Richard Herring's observations on the Gods of CNPS: they are fickle, and they are cruel.

That's the emotional reality of it. Some days, some numbers, they smile, and offer up the numbers like ducks in a row; other days, other numbers, they hide, they cheat, they lurk in shadows, they dive into sidestreets as I approach. And sometimes, to rub in the lack of progress, they arrange parades of the last number, or the one after next, time after time, before getting a glimpse of the right one.

So what's going on, if we start on the basis that the Gods of CNPS (whisper it) don't exist?

Fickleness is easy to explain. As I calculated before, the number of other numbers seen before the right one will vary between 1 and 1000. So some will be long, some short. The long ones of course (duh) last longer, so one's "hours of waiting a long time" seem worse, and so a more memorable. Beyond that, though, I wonder whether the nature of the distribution is disorientating. Most phenomena we experience are bell-curves, where most values occur near the mean (so that rainfall goes up a little, down a little, except this year). But the number-plate probability 'curve' is flat: the extremes are as likely as the mid-range values. This makes it seem even more aribtrary than it is.

The cruelty, the taunting, is even simpler. We are focused on looking for one number, y, but keep seeing the x's we no longer need, or the z's, that we will need next but don't need now. How the Halls of Valhalla must ring with laughter. But, looking at just those three numbers, the likelihood that we see y before z or x is only 1/3. We are more likely to see one of the others. We are just as likely (1/3) to see both of the others before y. No wonder it happens so often. And for repeated numbers: after we have seen an x, there is (again) a 1/3 chance of a y, a 1/3 chance of another x, and 1/3 chance of a z. So building up a conspiracy against me is simple.

I'm not sure how far this gets us, apart from explaining why people are so easily convinced of the workings of fate or luck, and the strength of their convictions, however misplaced.

Overheard

"Have you seen my shower cap?"
"No- what were doing when you last had it?"
"Having a shower"

How to increase your blog traffic

I have posted before about Jakob Nielsen and his comments on blogs, written from the perspective of business-to-business web design. I concurred with most of his recommendations, in a theoretical way. Recently, though, I've noticed that my hit counter has, for the first time ever, shown signs of life (10 a day may not seem like many, but try saying that to someone who got three!). Here are my (experience based) suggestions:

• Give posts clear titles. After half a lifetime reading British newspapers, it seems wrong somehow to just say what something is, without trying to twist it somehow, use a quotation, or make it ironic. Wrong it may be, but nobody will be Googling for your play on words, so you'll be buried deep in page 10,000 of "Big Brother 7" or whatever.


• Guide newbies. Almost all your visitors will be visting only once, to look at a specific subject they are currently interested in. Most will move on. But make it easy for them to explore by having links to your best or most popular posts as part of the sidebar.


• Post often, or regularly. This is where I fall down, because my blog isn't the No. 1 thing in my life- it's down there at number 75 or so. Repeat visitors like to see new content. And of course, the more content there is, the more archive there is to be picked up by searches.


• Don't bother with carnivals, webrings etc. There are 100 million webistes out there. Sharing links and passing around a handful of readers from site to site makes no difference. That's not quite true, but in general I'd say if you're going to invest your time, put it into writing more content rather than chasing links.


• Be topical. My review of Not Going Out might not be very good, or thorough, or even a proper review, but it's currently Google's No. 1 hit for "Not Going Out review". Maybe you can't always be right- but you can always be first.


• Review things. Why? Because one of the great uses for the Web is for people to find out what a film/book/album is like. So people like reviews. Much better than hearing about shoe shopping or your favourite breakfast cereal.


• Link out. Links are helpful to the reader, and raise Google rank. Win, win.

Overheard

Manager 1: Are you going to the training course on Bullying and Harassment?

Manager 2: No, I'm good enough at those already.

Radio comedy sketch: Venus and Mars

FX: PUB BACKGROUND

RICK: There’s your pint.
HARRY: Cheers. Oh- I’ve been reading “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”.
RICK: It’s rubbish, isn’t it?
HARRY: No, it’s not, you’d be surprised.
RICK: Why?
HARRY: Well, it seems men’s minds are programmed differently to women’s.
RICK: How do you mean?
HARRY: Men focus on one thing, completely, but women are always multi-tasking, doing several things at once.
RICK: I’m not sure I’ve ever noticed that.
HARRY: Surely you have?
RICK: No, I don’t think so.
HARRY: Well, I’ve noticed that when Sue and I are, you know…
RICK: Having sex?
HARRY: Yes. I’m always concentrating, in the zone, giving it all that.
RICK: Yeah?
HARRY: But she’s watching TV, or checking her nails, or doing the crossword, at the same time.
RICK: That’s odd. She doesn’t with me.

FX: PUB BACKGROUND

Radio comedy sketch: Help desk

FX: RINGING TONE
BOB: Hello? Help Desk here.
ANGIE: Ah, good. Can you help me?
BOB: That’s what we’re here for.
ANGIE: OK, I’m just setting up my home network.
BOB: Fine.
ANGIE: Yes, I’ve unpacked the monitor, the keyboard, the scanner, the printer, the cables, the mouse, the speakers, the power socket and the surge protector.
BOB: And what is the problem?
ANGIE: I can’t reach the door!

FX CALL END TONE. RINGING TONE

SOPHIE: Hello? Help desk here.
MICHAEL: Hi. I’m having some trouble with my system. I can’t install the virus scanner.
SOPHIE: Ok, I’ll see what we can do. Can I take the details?
MICHAEL: It’s a Windows NT system, Intel Pentium, 340 megahertz.
SOPHIE: And the software?
MICHAEL: Version 4.5, SE.
SOPHIE: That should be ok. (PAUSE) What’s your date of birth?
MICHAEL: What? Oh, 2nd March 1980.
SOPHIE: Oh, I see.
MICHAEL: What?
SOPHIE: You haven’t really done your homework, have you?
MICHAEL: How do you mean?
SOPHIE: [READING] “Pisces should avoid IT applications while Mars is in the ascendant”
MICHAEL: I don’t remember seeing that.
SOPHIE: [READING] “... and beware periods of forgetfulness”. You should wait for a more propitious time.
MICHAEL: Are you seriously telling me that in the 21st century I need to wait for my stars to align correctly before I can use one of your products?
SOPHIE: [DREAMILY] Expect good news in the Spring, and get ready to upload Windows-based software when Aquarius rises.
MICHAEL: I’m sorry, I don’t believe in astrology.

FX: HANGS UP

SOPHIE: I’m fed up with all these Pisces.
BOB: They’re so sceptical.

FX: RINGING TONE

BOB: Hello, Help Desk here.
GEORGE: [SHOUTS] Help! Help!

FX: SPLASHING SOUNDS

BOB: Hello, can you hear me?
GEORGE: [SHOUTS] Help! I’m drowning! Please - help!

FX: HANGS UP

SOPHIE: Was that another shouter?
BOB: Yes. It’s just rude, isn’t it?

I'm going to count from 1 to 1000 while I'm driving

Richard Herring's excellent website introduced me to the strange world of CNPS: that is Consecutive Number Plate Spotting. He explains it better and funnier than I can here, but as a pointless longwinded harmelss taks, I felt inspired as I read. He took a year to spot the 1,000 numerical elements of number plates in the right order.

In trying to work out whether that was a good or bad time, I started looking at the probability, assuming at the start that there was a random distribution of numbers. My first approach was to think in terms of the probability that the next car would have the number required (1 in 1000 or 0.1%), or the second (1 in 999 or a tiny bit more than 0.1%), but then I realised that if I ignored duplicates, there was an elegant solution: for a given number (say 123), it could be encountered anywhere between 1st and 1000th, which neatly gives a mean order of 500th. So in order to complete the challenge, you might expect to have to see 500 x 1,000 = 0.5 million cars (about all the cars in Wales).

Thinking about the question of duplicates, it doesn't actually matter that much if there is a peak (say 100 extra cars with 101 in the number): it would mean that searching for 101 will be much quicker, but on the other hand other numbers would take longer to find since there would be extra 101 duplicates to go through. As far as I can, see this cancels out.*Update below

More problematic, and what gives the game its urgency and charm, is that the world has changed. In 2001, the old three-random-digit number elements plus year-denoting letter were replaced by a two-digit number denoting year + letters, which makes 01-06 easy to do, but also means that the pool of larger numbers is restricted to older cars : it may already be the case that there are no longer any cars with some numbers on the road, and there is no way to find out.

There is an odd apsect to the way the statistics work: it doesn't actually matter how long you spend looking on any particular day: fatalistically, if you only see 300 cars you're unlikely to see the number you need, but then, you might see 900 and still not see it.

There is, at a low level, a bit of the thrill of gambling: you sink into a depressed torpor as one wrong number after another flies by, until suddenly you see the one you need: surprise and joy, almost disbelief, lasts for a few seconds, and then it fades, you switch to the new number, hoping this time it'll be quick... in its own way, it's as addictive as nicotine.**Update below


UPDATES

* This is wrong, further thought has shown. The initial assumption is that there are 1000 numbers, equally distributed, and therefore there is 1/1000 = 0.1 % chance that any given number will be that required. If we then inflate the figure by making 5 numbers represented by 200 rather than 1 per thousand, then the likelihood of 995 numbers when being searched for is 1/2000 = 0.05%, and the likelihood of the five numbers is 200/2000 = 10%. Unfortunately, the higher probability only operates when looking for those five numbers; for all the other 995, there are more, twice as many, wrong numbers to go through. So no, it doesn't cancel out, it makes it harder.

** Having gone through this a few times now, and not being a gambler, I can see why they go on about lucky streaks. After initial hope, you fall into a stupor of near-despair- is that number ever going to come up? That's why, when it does, it is as much a surprise as a joy. Now comes the critical point: any logical view would be that having just won, you are almost bound to endure the long period of loss before you win again, and therefore you would think twice about betting again. Except the voice of hope tells you that you are on a roll, that no way will it be so long to the next win, it's worth trying for a bit at least-- and then in no time at all you have lost so much that it would be foolish to give up when you were 'due' a win again. My view on gambling is that you should look carefully at the people who want you to do it: experienced gamblers, gambling companies, the government. Do these often give away money?

The MS Office paperclip: beta version

The heart of darkness: Review of Martin Amis, House of Meetings

Amis is unafraid of the big issues. His obsession with politics, totalitarianism and corporate evil is sometimes interpreted as a bid for greatness, for respect; more likely it arises from a lively moral sense, triggered partly by concern for his burgeoning family, and partly from a feeling that in comparison to modern history the domestic arrangements of middle class Londoners are trivial as a topic.

House of Meetings takes Amis back to Russia, or rather the Soviet Union, and the corrosive effects of Stalin on his subjects. Unlike the broad factual account given in the earlier Koba the Dread, here he provides a narrative of a single family's experience as they attempt to live ordinary lives while being bent out of shape by the demands of the state. The anonymous memoirist who tells the story is met first as an angry dying man, touring the ruins of the Arctic labour camp in which he had been imprisoned; he writes a letter to his stepdaughter explaining his life, describing his loss of conscience. There follows a vivid description of life and death in the Gulag of the 1940s, whence he had been sent following the War, in which he had raped and fought his way into Germany. His uneasy accommodation with camp life is then disturbed by the arrival of his half-brother, Lev, and the news that Lev has married Zoya, a Jewess they both had pursued in their youth. The brothers fight to survive the camp as its regime changes following the death of Stalin, culminating in the provision for conjugal visits in the House of Meetings. Lev's assignation with Zoya leaves his spirit broken, and much of the rest of the book comprises speculation as to the cause. They are eventually released and find themselves marginalised under the Brezhnev regime; Lev chooses moral rectitude and material squalor; the memoirist material wealth, travel, and a series of unsatisfactory love affairs, culminating in the post-glasnost torpor of a society that believes so little in its future that people are reluctant to have children.

Thus the story is that of the nation, in microcosm. In Koba the Dread, Amis took care to show that Stalin was merely the most extreme and arbitrary tyrant produced by October: here, it would appear that Stalin was the sole cause of all woe. It was Stalin's camps that denatured his citizens, rendered them fearful, untrustworthy, and brutal. Nevertheless, Amis argues that the danger from the Russians is different in kind, not scale, from that of present-day Islamists, as represented here by the Chechen attack on School No. 1.

A conventional narrative structure would expose the unbalanced nature of the treatment: the memoirist's shifts in time and focus, and the giving and withholding of confidences, force the reader to grant him a hearing. They do, however, lead to a sense of anticlimax, since the impact of the camp section leaves the post-release saga as a minor addendum, echoing the exhaustion of the brothers. The plot is almost absurdly melodramatic, with its twins, death-bed confessions, and letters from the dead.

This would matter less is the characterisation of the memoirist was clearer. The descriptive style throughout is vintage Amis: clear, startling, elegant, poetic (contact with English culture is unconvincingly explained by the plot). The tension between this tone and his actions is an unresolved issue: we are perhaps half convinced by the evocation of what it feels like to kill, in the wild days when he takes the breakdown in order in the camp to murder the hated informers; but we are unconvinced by the interior view of the rapist, at either end of his life.

Amis expects his readers to know a lot of Russian history; he provides footnotes to identify Russian presidents, referred to by the memoirist by unfamiliar names, but does not elucidate the political developments for those unversed in the country's tragic arc.

But to write an encycopledic narrative would have taken a book much bigger than these 200 pages, which share with the short stories of Heavy Water an inexplicable luminosity, a subtle charge that leaves them resonating in your mind long after you have finished. A similar effect is derived from reading Time's Arrow, and of all Amis's works, it is that first-person narrative, of the other great European tragedy, which is closest in tone to this. A serious book for serious times.

Review of Not Going Out

Not Going Out is a new comedy on BBC1 for Friday evenings. And if that sentence doesn't make your spirits sink, you haven't been watching Blessed, or My Hero, or the under-powered Worst Week of My Life, or My Family, or that My Family clone so bad that my brain froze rather than allowing its name to reach the cerebral cortex. The bar for success is not set high.

It ought to pass it. The writing is sharp and clever, if a little self-indulgent: the inclusion of three zany elements (depressive author, Lee's job packing Christmas crackers, and circus skills class) in a single episode seemed to me to be trying a bit hard, when the core of the comedy has to be the interplay between Lee, Kate and Tim. Unfortunately some of the best lines were lost; Lee's delivery was so fast that he didn't give them space to breathe, and the audience's early laughter often swamped the killer line.

A more serious problem is the location: whatever one may say about Men Behaving Badly, Extras, or even Two Pints of Lager, they all have a distinctive locale, a real place where these characters and their relatives live. In contrast, Not Going Out is set in a vague generic city, the same city as Coupling, with an anonymous flat, anonymous bar, anonymous office, and characters with no history.

Kate is American, so she is earnest and New Age. That doesn't really cut it as back-story. It always amuses me when people say America is a classless society when it is clearly just as nuanced as ours: Friends isn't just six random people, but six people each from a specific social milieu.

Tim and Lee's characters are equally simple: accountant and slacker; so middle class and dolemite; so pompous and sarcastic. It's a bit schematic.

But it's not as if we are spoiled for choice if we want to watch smart comedy, so I'll hope for improvement.


Update

Now the series is over, and it's time to come off the fence.

Actually, my first impressions proved quite reliable: the Tim character proved impossible to develop, and played only a minor part towards the end. The core of the comedy is the relationship between Lee and Kate, one of comfortable coupledom without the sex, masked by verbal bickering. Megan Dodds managed to undercut the excessive kookiness or earnestness of some of her lines with a sly twinkle in her eye that implied her detachment from her statements. Lee remained slightly problematic, partly because his character was boxed in by its narrow definition: the most complex thing he could do was to realise how he felt about Kate; but also because unlike Megan's actorly clarity of diction, his remained a rushed mumble. Jokes about the badness of Kate's cooking aren't funny: strangely enough, neither were the similar jokes in My Family, Butterflies, or The Young Ones. The only halfway good jokes about bad cooking were in (crikey) The Vicar of Dibley. So leave it.

Paradoxically, this was a comedy that tried too hard: it would have been better with fewer wisecracks and a more paced direction. Still, all on board for Series 2 (no, not you, Tim).

Einstein: the delinquent years

Created using the Einstein message creator www.hetemeel.com.

Is he having a laugh? Extras, That Mitchell and Webb Look and Lead Balloon

It is ironic that Ricky Gervaise, who saves his sharpest barbs for what he dismisses as catchphrase comedy, has unleashed a catchphrase himself: in the last week I have heard at least three broadcasters say "Is he having a laugh?", in contexts where it is clear that the phrase has risen from their subsconcious, without any deliberate attempt to reference its source. So people are watching the new series of Extras. It's hard to see why exactly: the three main jokes are repeated each episode:
1. people are more prejudiced than they are allowed to admit these days, and this may be revealed in extreme situations
2. celebrities famous for their amiable image are in real life obnoxious in various ways
3. people (particularly Andy Millman) will sometimes have to deal with the conflict between what they want to do and social norms of behaviour

We haven't yet seen the last variation on the celebrity joke- Jeremy Paxman, Julie Burchill or Richard Littlejohn revealed as mild-mannered and indecisive in private.

But although I have laughed from time to time, the truth is that Gervaise's school of the comedy of embarrassment can get a bit wearing. In the most recent episode, Millman storms into a high-price shop to revenge Maggie's hurt feelings, boldly promised to buy the dress regardless of cost, and then attempts to wriggle out of paying for it once he finds out the price. This is quite funny at first. But watching five minutes of wriggling is painful, or boring. Now that Millman has lost his status as an Everyman figure, since being shown up at a BAFTA awards ceremony is unlikely to chime with many of the audience, the reliance on accuracy rather than gags that made The Office compulsive viewing is unavailable as a fall-back.


I have seen it suggested that putting on sketch-based That Mitchell and Webb Look immediately afterwards was tempting fate, but it bears up well, mainly because unlike most sketch shows its hit rate is close to 100%, probably because it is writer-driven. Some of the recurring sketches, such as the snooker commentary, worked better on radio, but the razor-sharp parodies of pointless gameshows, docusoaps, and lifeswap programmes are both accurate and funny.


Lead Balloon, Jack Dee's new comedy, isn't bad either. It was instructive to compare its first episode with last week's Extras, since both featured an accidental humiliation turning into a media frenzy despite the best efforts of the main character. There were some graces of omission: the tearaway teenage daughter was dealt with in passing in a matter-of-fact way, rather than forming a whole episode as it would in My Family. The foreign au pair was a bit unwelcome; the American agent was the major pain, along with the recursive 'I'm a comedian trying to write comedy' segments which comedians seem to love despite the indifference they inspire in everyone else. Strangely enough, in the light of my comment on Extras, Jack Dee is portrayed as being a nicer person 'offscreen' than in his usual persona.

Change and decay 7

Selections from the Littleworth Estate Papers
Letterhead: Littleworth Estate Telephone Littleworth 102 Telex LITTLEWORTH[Typescript]
Herr Goering
Reichsluftfahrtministerium
Wlihelmstraße 79
Berlin
Deutchsland

21st April 1937

Dear Herr Goering

Further to your enquiry concerning availability of aluminium and magnesium for your Ministry, I am pleased to confirm that we hold substantial stocks of these materials.

It is our understanding that under the recent international agreements restricting the trading of munitions and related raw materials to Spain, it would be advantageous to both parties to handle delivery via Eire, since it is not a signatory and remains open as an entrepot.

We await your instructions

I remain, Sir, your obedient servant

H Eldon

[manuscript] P.S. You must visit us again for the grouse season!

---

Letterhead: Littleworth Estate Telephone Littleworth 2 [manuscript]
Lt H. Eldon
2nd King’s Rifles
South Africa

10th March 1902

My dear Harry

I’m pleased to hear that you are now back ‘in the field’. I trust you are fully recovered – one hears such terrible things of military hospitals. The newspapers here report nothing but victories. You should watch for the arrival of a shipment of barbed wire in the Province, from our mills – we have been contracted to supply 88 tons to the War Dept for use in civilian detention camps. This was most opportune, since we had been contemplating selling the works – there has been much agitation amongst the men over pay and hours of late, and it has been all the police could do to break up their protests. I have sent a parcel of food which no doubt will arrive in a few weeks.

You are much in our thoughts

Best wishes

Edward

---

[manuscript; copy letter in letterbook]

T. Osprey, esquire
Deptmt of Supply
Richmond
Virginia
American Confederacy

10th January 1863

Sir

We are obliged for your letter of 1st ultimo and beg to tender these prices for your consideration:

Swords, forged and tempered £1 per dozen
Daggers, 6” blade 6 shillings per dozen
Bayonets, 8” blade 10 shillings per dozen

We can supply leatherwork, scabbards, & cetera, at little additional cost, but believe that these may be more readily obtained by yourselves locally.

Our company does not manufacture rifles; we would be willing to act as agents on your behalf in securing the same, tho’ our govt’s intransigence would entail some difficulties on our part.

I beg to remain your most obedient servant

Edward Eldon

---

[manuscript]
From: Tom Eldon
Cold Harbour Hall
Kingston
Jamaica

To: Miss Frances Eldon
Littleworth Hall
Littleworth

1st October 1803

Dearest Cousin Frances

You inquired after our situation here. You may have read in the Gazette that the Negro rebels have been defeated and captured at last. The ringleader, styling himself “Captain Moses”, was an escapee from Mr Jones’ estate, just over the creek from us. Jones tells us that he had been making an experiment in educating the savages, but has resolved to desist in such efforts. Captain Moses was hanged by the militia in the Town Square this last week, although our niggers mutter that it was another man and that Moses lives. We have whipped them and keep them locked up at night, yet they do not apply themselves to their work.

We anticipate the arrival of a new shipment within the month, wch will be sorely needed, so many of our current complement having died from malarial contagion. Alas, prices are rising now that supplies are short, the Navy’s patrols having dislocated the traffic.

You should soon receive at the Hall a delivery of Wedgwood’s porcelain – I would be obliged if you would inspect it as to condition, since the factory disclaims any control of its carters. I am as yet undecided where it is best to place; if you let me know it has arrived I shall be put upon to chuse!

I trust that you will not find me importunate in allotting you such a task
And remain
Your loving cousin
Tom

---

Change and decay 6

The papers of most landowning families are testimony to their two great passions: the accumulation of land, to generate income, and litigation, to expend it upon. The Sheldons were, it appeared, more interested in the former than the latter- certainly the correspondence with the family lawyers was mainly about property rather than law. It was no surprise to me, then, that the majority of the records filling the room were legal papers, neatly tied with fading pink ribbon, sealed with cracked red wax, grubby to the touch.

A librarianship student once told me that the ‘dirty bits’ in library books can easily be found because in much-borrowed copies they become physically dirty, begrimed by hundreds of sweaty thumbs, or worse. Old title deeds are similar; the bundles of documents fall open at passages of particular interest (usually financial).

It was clear that the Sheldons were free from any snobbishness about trade: following the Emperor Vespasian’s dictum that ‘money does not smell’. As well as running their park and home farm, and leasing out neighbouring farms, they had a hand in the local ironworks, railways, brickmaking kilns and shops.

Review of Martin Amis: The last days of Muhammad Atta

Martin Amis was born to inhabit the post-9/11 world. His earlier works are rendered numinous by the sense of imminent apocalypse, the feeling that civilisation's grip on survival may slip at any moment. Amis's response has been almost personal, as if he specifically were targeted; the scrappy narrative of Yellow Dog is disordered by the viscerality of his emotion, disarming his critical intelligence. As James Thurber wrote, in the happier and more carefree days of 1930s Europe: "He had always feared that something like this would happen to him, and now it had". So it is no surprise to find that five years on he is still focused on terror and its agents; the question is whether he has been able to apply analysis beyond emotion and narrative.

The Last Days of Muhammad Atta is a longish short story, filling a gap in the real chronology of the attacks with a visit to a dying imam to collect a bottle of holy water. It is based largely on reality, so much so that arguing about what 'really' happened becomes a legitimate critical stance. But since it is also an interior monologue of someone now dead, it also is, emphatically, a fiction.

Most is based on inference. Amis has described the moral revolt of the body, the physiological resistance to ethical sickness, previously, in Time's Arrow, and it seems reasonable that Atta might suffer similarly. In trying to present the thought-processes of a terrorist, Amis is exploring the big question: Why? How could humanity do such things?

From a UK perspective, there is a long tradition of not caring very much about motivation. The tedious horrors of the IRA bombing campaign awakened no desire to know why they were doing it; a dismissive shrug implied that they must, for whatever reason, like doing these things. This may have been partly ignorance: few would have responded to a set of grievances which started in 1690, or 1649, or maybe back in 1167. But it was also the product of a determination that anyone resorting to violence should lose the right to be heard (so much so that the government had to consistently mislead parliament by denying that it was, in fact, negotiating with the terrorists while stating publicly that it would under no circumstances do so). Even 7/7 was met with bewilderment rather than curiosity. Things seem to be changing now: the recognition that there is a vast pool of ill-will rising slowly to the boil is spreading.

Even so, Amis is perhaps wrong to assume that his readers are as interested in 9/11 as he is; certainly his casual mention of the 'muscle Saudis' relies on too much detailed knowledge (the phrase seems to be one of his coinage): not everyone knows or cares too much about what happened, even if their geopolitical concerns leads them to be interested in consequences.

In some ways, Amis cheats, since he does not provide an insider's account of religious fanaticism tied up with modern technology; rather his exemplar is a steely nihilist who has rationally identified jihad as the only contemporary cause worth following. In tone, Atta sounds most like the blandly certain figure of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent; and of course this is a reminder that nihilism is not new, going back at least 150 years.

Nor, of course, is zealotry. Although the story only shows the fanatics through the distorting contempt of Atta, this is little loss, since we know zealots, we've done zealots. They are hardly a new phenomenon. Even the suicidal element is not completely new: in the past, nationalists have been pleased to praise those who were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, either on an individual basis, as soldiers, or on an industrial basis, like the kamikaze pilots.

So perhaps the problem Amis is picking at is not a problem at all; or only a practical problems: people behave in this way, as they have before. How to stop them? It depends on what made them that way. Atta is presented as a sociopath: his world is without laughter, or music, or love, or sex, or passion: the closest he comes to enjoyment is in spite and certitude; if one were to ask what radicalised him, one would have to ask a psychologist, not a politician.

He story has some epistemological flaws: on a couple of occasions, the author reminds the reader of what followed Atta's death (hardly necessary in any case, but in any case unknowable to Atta). There is one clear error: Amis says Atta knew that the steel would buckle, the towers would collapse. He probably didn't, since the architects who designed it didn't know; and there is an army of conspiracy theorists willing to argue that the steel did not in fact buckle, and demolition charges were needed to make it do so. It is more plausible that Atta's sacrifice was made in the expectation that the crash would be gesture, a ruthless, potent, symbol of the illusory nature of the West's invulnerability, rather than large-scale slaughter.

The story is plotted as a circle, a circle of hell, in which Atta is doomed to relive this day, with its petty and great punishments, for ever. This is a plot Amis has used before, in his earlier short story Denton's Death, itself a macabre reworking of Kingsley Amis's short short story Mason's Life. The question of justice hangs over the whole enterprise, of sufficient or appropriate punishment. Theologians across the centuries have found it easier to excuse the suffering of the righteous (since it is good for the soul, or because they have sinned) than the flourishing unpunished of the unrighteous. Amis feels that mere extinction is insufficient punishment, a feeling with popular support, although he might be surprised to find himself agreeing with those who say 'Death is too good for him'.

Although it may not be Amis's intent, his portrayal of Atta as a banal, limited, troubled individual humanises him: these are not monsters. If they were, the action required would at least be clear. But life is not as simple as that.