Winter XIV. Lancashire + Information presentation

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Winter XIV. English comfort

[Cont. from previous section]

If the ingenious foreigner found himself in some village of manufacturing Lancashire, he would be otherwise impressed. Here something of the power of England might be revealed to him, but of England’s worth, little enough. Hard ugliness would everywhere assail his eyes; the visages and voices of the people would seem to him thoroughly akin to their surroundings. Scarcely could one find, in any civilized nation, a more notable contrast than that between these two English villages and their inhabitants.

Yet Lancashire is English, and there among the mill chimneys, in the hideous little street, folk are living whose domestic thoughts claim undeniable kindred with those of the villagers of the kinder south... More than a hundred years ago, power passed from the south of England to the north. The vigorous race on the other side of Trent [?] only found its opportunity when the age of machinery began; its civilization, long delayed, differs in obvious respects from that of older England. In Sussex or in Somerset, however dull and clownish the typical inhabitant, he plainly belongs to an ancient order of things, represents an immemorial subordination. The rude man of the north is -- by contrast -- but just emerged from barbarism, and under any circumstances would show less smooth a front. By great misfortune, he has fallen under the harshest lordship the modern world has known -- that of scientific industrialism, and all his vigorous qualities are subdued to a scheme of life based upon the harsh, the ugly, the sordid. His racial heritage, of course, marks him to the eye; even as ploughman or shepherd, he differs notably from him of the same calling in the weald or on the downs... he seems even yet stamped with the half-savagery of his folk as they were a century and a half ago... This fair broad land of the lovely villages signifies little save to the antiquary, the poet, the painter. Vainly, indeed, should I show its beauty and its peace to the observant foreigner; he would but smile, and, with a glance at the traction-engine just coming along the road, indicate the direction of his thoughts.

Alpha.

A “traction engine” was the precursor of today’s truck or lorry. I continue to be confounded by the regionalism of Britain. From Parade’s End I learned how the Yorkshiremen viewed the people from the south of England, and I guess here we see the obverse of that coin. Is there really such a racial difference though? You’d think he was talking about the Welch or the Scots or the Irish. I visited New England for the first time one summer when I was still in college. I camped near North Truro on Cape Cod and took a ferry to Nantucket. What amused me was the regional pecking order. People on the Cape spoke disparagingly of residents living on the west side of the canal, in Massachusetts proper. The natives of Nantucket held an even lower regard for the residents of the Cape... who were really just mainlanders, and dismissed the people on Martha’s Vineyard since “you can actually see the land from there.” I think the speaker might have spat after having said that. I sometimes wonder if people who propose global order and serenity -- whether the United Nations, the International, or the City of God -- have spent any time at all talking to actual people.

Styles of information presentation.

People have been making charts of the movement of stock and commodity prices (over time) for a long time. In the U.S., Charles Dow was an early figure in this study which today is known as Technical Analysis or TA. The standard American way of indicating price information on a chart for a long time was the bar.

This simple device gives you, at a glance, all the information you need about the change of price over some interval of time (an hour, a day, a week, a month). For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to stick to daily charts, so the left tick indicates the price at the opening of the market. The right tick indicates the closing price. While the top of the bar gives you the high of the day and the bottom reveals the low of the day.

This works just fine, and some people continue to use these bars today. But more people, I believe, have adopted or switched to the Japanese “candlestick” method of displaying this information:

According to Steve Nison, candlestick charting first appeared sometime after 1850 [in Japan]. Much of the credit for candlestick development and charting goes to a legendary rice trader named Homma from the town of Sakata. It is likely that his original ideas were modified and refined over many years of trading eventually resulting in the system of candlestick charting that we use today.”

-Source

Candlesticks are a bit harder to explain, there are a few more rules, but viewing candlesticks is much more interesting and, at least in theory, revealing.

The two dimensional part of the candlestick is termed the “body” while the line above or below is termed the “shadow.” The body is filled with a color if the close was below the open; while if the close is above the open the body is left un-pigmented. The shadows, if they exist, indicate a high above the body or a low below the body. The Japanese have gone much further and come up with names for a wide variety of candlesticks, and even sequences of candlesticks, that they believed were revealing of market trends or, even more important, trend changes. Here is a chart example. In these cases, the named candlestick is seen as signaling a trend change: First a bullish change and then a bearish change:

I believe candlestick charts are helpfully visual in the same way that a graphical user interface (GUI) on a computer is helpful. Today there are still a few die-hard nerds who believe Microsoft’s MSDOS command line interface ...

...was superior to the Macintosh OS or Windows... and they are not wrong -- from their point of view. The simplicity of a non-graphical user interface is a real value: Much simpler code and quicker performance. Yet how many people today would be using laptops, tablets, and smartphones with a command line interface? Not me. 

The way, even the style, with which information is presented is often as valuable as the content of that information. This is also, I think, why Nietzsche has inspired (for better or worse) generations of readers while people like Kant and Foucault are known to much more limited and specialized audiences. Reading literature, especially the Classics, in the vernacular rather than in Greek and Latin is yet another instance of something similar -- I’m certain Ryecroft derived more from reading Horace in Latin than I did from reading him in an English translation. But I’m also certain that I, and many other people, would never have been exposed to him at all if he was only available in Latin.

Next: Winter XV. Treehouse.