Google being the wonderful tool that it is, I rapidly turned up all sorts of fascinating stuff, including a recent paper from Peking. This paper included the rather splendid diagram reproduced left, demonstrating that the memcomputer completes the virtuous square of fundamentals. Voltage, current, flux and charge paired up with inductance, resistance, capacitance and now transcendance, this last one being the big T at the bottom of the right hand square. Perhaps I ought to tell a mason.
What also caught my eye was the fact that the work that went into the paper was 'supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grants 11227405, 11374347, 11274363 and 11474335, and by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences under grant XDB07030200'. Just like academics here, academics there are chained to the funding treadmill. It might be the Peoples' Republic, but they use the same old capitalist methods as we do now, the days of academics getting life tenure from an early age, free to get on with serious work or to go punting, as the mood might take them, being long gone.
But we do lose something. Academics have to spend a good part of their time fighting their way up the funding ladder. Demonstrating that the bee in their bonnet is useful in some sense understand by the likes of Chancellor Osborne. Time which might have been spent, better spent one might argue, with their bees.
I associate to a small meeting I went to along time ago where one Maurice Dobb, sometime fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, was the invited speaker. An academic of aforesaid old variety; no grant-drill for him. I imagine that he was talking about affairs in what was then the Soviet Union, and being young and ignorant I thought to ask him whether people in this peoples' republic had banks and cheque books, just as grown ups did in England. He was rather amused by the question and was able to assure me that they did indeed have banks and cheque books just like us.
From where I now get to the idea that one might have all kinds of different ways of organising oneself from a political point of view, but an awful lot of stuff is the same the world over. We all need our meds., we all need our social workers, our bankers and our insurance brokers.
I include these last on the grounds that large organisations, such as the Civil Service, were (and perhaps are) allowed to dispense with car insurance for their fleets of cars, on the grounds that they were big enough to carry their own risks. Whereas now, I believe they have found it works better to use an insurance company to manage the whole business for them. Administration arising from motor accidents is not core business and should be outsourced.
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