PITLOCHRY : IN THE HEART OF SCOTLAND

 

WIKI

13 INCREDIBLE THINGS TO DO

TOP 23 THINGS TO D

• • River Tummel
  • Queen’s View
  • Falls of Bruar
  • House of Bruar
  • Pitlochry Festival Theatre
  • Ben Vrackie
  • Moulin Village and Brewery
  • Schiehallion
  • The Hermitage
  • Pitlochry Dam Visitor Centre
  • Pitlochry Salmon Ladder
  • Blair Castle & Gardens
    • Blair Gardens – Hercules Garden
    • Blair Gardens – Diana’s Grove
    • Blair Gardens – St Bride’s Kirk
  • Iain Burnett Highland Chocolatier
  • Explorers Scottish Plant Hunters Garden
  • Atholl Palace Museum
  • Black Spout Wood
  • Heather Gems
  • Killiecrankie Gorge
  • Enchanted Forest
  • Faskally Woods
  • Edradour
  • Blair Athol Distillery

Killiecrankie Gorge was once the site of one of the goriest battles in Jacobite history. Head to the visitor centre where you can find out more about this famous battle, alongside the fascinating geology, wildlife and history of the area. Take a short walk to marvel at the 18ft-wide Soldier's Leap, admire the stunning views along the way, and if you continue on the path you will reach the southern end of the Pass of Killiecrankie. During rainy spells, keep an eye out for salmon leaping at the falls beneath the Soldier's Leap - it's quite a sight to see!

                    

Ben Vrackie

This well-known and much-loved hill provides a scenic backdrop to Pitlochry with a summit that peaks at an incredible 2,757 ft (841m). Ben Vrackie translates as 'speckled mountain' which dates back to a time when white quartz could be seen scattered across its slopes. Venture to the summit and take in the breathtaking views of the Beinn a Ghlo range to the north and the Strathtay and Strathtummel areas to the west.

Situated within the Tay Forest Park, Faskally Wood is home to a wide range of tree species, some more than 200 years old, as well as hosting the popular Enchanted Forest event which takes place here in October each year. Within the forest, explore the tranquil Loch Dunmore which features its own boat house and picturesque timber footbridge. Or head along one of the many trails and signposted paths to enjoy views over the lochside trees, marvel at the blossoming buds in spring and in autumn you can admire the stunning blends of reds and purples.

History[edit]

A war memorial, which stands just in front of the town's Memorial Garden, immediately to the south of the former Public Library, commemorates both world wars. It was unveiled and dedicated in 1922^[3]

Pitlochry today dates largely from Victorian times, although the areas known as Moulin and Port-na-craig are much older. History records that Moulin Kirk was granted by the Earl of Atholl to Dunfermline Abbey in 1180 and Moulin became a burgh of barony in 1511. Port-na-craig was the site of the original ferry over the River Tummel which operated until the suspension footbridge was built in 1913. Building between these two separate communities followed the construction of the military road north in the 18th century which followed the line of the present main street. Moulin contained the parish school which was attended by Alexander MacKenzie (1822-1892), the second Prime Minister of Canada. This schoolhouse "Blairmount" now operates as a luxury holiday rental.

In 1842 Queen Victoria visited Perthshire on one of her grand tours and her favourable opinion of the area caused the town to be more widely noticed. After its railway station was built in 1863, Pitlochry became a favoured destination for tourists.

Robert Louis Stevenson stayed at Fishers Hotel in June 1881 with his wife Fanny and mother.^[4] The party then moved to Kinnaird Cottage in nearby Moulin. Here Stevenson worked on "Thrawn Janet" (1881), "The Merry Men" (1882) and "The Body Snatcher" (1884).

In 1947 Pitlochry became a burgh. That year also saw the beginning of construction of a dam as part of the Tummel hydro-electric power scheme. The dam and its fish ladder are a popular tourist attraction today. The damming of the river created an artificial loch, Loch Faskally, but flooded a large area north of the town including the old Recreation Park, which was relocated to its current position. The new burgh council adopted the local public hall as Pitlochry Town Hall shortly after it was formed.^[5]

From the 1960s, Sir Robert Watson-Watt, an inventor of radar, and his wife, Dame Katherine Jane Trefusis Forbes, Director of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force in World War II, lived at her summer house, "The Observatory", in Pitlochry. Both are buried in the churchyard of the Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity at Pitlochry.

Pitlochry Festival Theatre^[6] was founded by John Stewart in 1951, originally situated in a tent in the grounds of Knockendarroch House in Lower Oakfield. The tent became semi-permanent and remained there for 30 years until the current building at Port-na-craig opened in 1981.

The town was awarded a Gold Medal in the 2009 Britain in Bloom horticultural contest, and outright winner in the category of Small Town.^[7]

ON CRITICIZING THE BODY MASS INDEX---A STATISTICAL INTERPRETATION

                                                   

                                                                            

                                                                  

                                                         BODY MASS INDEX (WIKI)  

History[edit]

Obesity and BMI

Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician, and sociologist, devised the basis of the BMI between 1830 and 1850 as he developed what he called "social physics".^[3] Quetelet himself never intended for the index, then called the Quetelet Index, to be used as a means of medical assessment. Instead, it was a component of his study of l'homme moyen, or the average man                                                                    

                                                                               

                                                                              

STATISTICAL INTERPRETION: Suppose we tried to fit a linear regression line of form

                            Y= A +B X

to the log (weights in grams) and log (heights in centimetres) for a random sample from a 

specified  population. Then the BMI would only be a reasonable summary if (1) a straight line

 gives a good fit, and (2) he least squares estimates are close to A=0 and B=2. For some

 populations, a  totally different curve could be fit, It would be better to fit a bivariate distribution

 to a bivariate scatterplot of log heights and log weights, Then the patient's data point 

could be inserted on the diagram, and a professional assessment made, The bivariate normal 

distribution  may or may not give a good fit, I can see how Quetelet's suggestion is clearly 

discriminatory against some populations,. He presumably knew that at the time.

        If Y=A+B is a good least squares fit,  then   

       BMI*= Weight/ [exp (A)X height to the power B}

        is a reasonable index, which may be compared with percentiles for the population.

        However other factors should also be taken into account

                                                      SIMPLE LINEAR REGRESSION  

                            (Maybe the authors should have taken logs first. Their data may not be real)

Simple Linear Regression

---

Regression analysis makes use of mathematical models to describe relationships. For example, suppose that height was the only determinant of body weight. If we were to plot height (the independent or 'predictor' variable) as a function of body weight (the dependent or 'outcome' variable), we might see a very linear relationship, as illustrated below.

We could also describe this relationship with the equation for a line, Y = a + b(x), where 'a' is the Y-intercept and 'b' is the slope of the line. We could use the equation to predict weight if we knew an individual's height. In this example, if an individual was 70 inches tall, we would predict his weight to be:

Weight = 80 + 2 x (70) = 220 lbs.

In this simple linear regression, we are examining the impact of one independent variable on the outcome. If height were the only determinant of body weight, we would expect that the points for individual subjects would lie close to the line. However, if there were other factors (independent variables) that influenced body weight besides height (e.g., age, calorie intake, and exercise level), we might expect that the points for individual subjects would be more loosely scattered around the line, since we are only taking height into account.

                                         FEARING THE BLACK BODY

                                        THE RACIAL ORIGINS OF BLACK STIGMA

                                         ASK A FAT GIRL: FAT PHOBIA  AND RACISM

                                        (Thank you for these three references Scott Forster!)

                                            THE BIZARRE AND RACIST HISTORY OF THE BMI

                                           

                                                                      

Quetelet believed that the mathematical mean of a population was its ideal, and his desire to prove it resulted in the invention of the BMI, a way of quantifying l’homme moyen’s weight. Initially called Quetelet’s Index, Quetelet derived the formula based solely on the size and measurements of French and Scottish participants. That is, the Index was devised exclusively by and for white Western Europeans. By the turn of the next century, Quetelet’s l’homme moyen would be used as a measurement of fitness to parent, and as a scientific justification for eugenics — the systemic sterilization of disabled people, autistic people, immigrants, poor people, and people of color.

                                                            

By 1985, the National Institutes of Health had revised their definition of “obesity” to be tied to individual patients’ BMIs. And with that, this perennially imperfect measurement was enshrined in U.S. public policy.

In 1998, the National Institutes of Health once again changed their definitions of “overweight” and “obese,” substantially lowering the threshold to be medically considered fat. CNN wrote that “Millions of Americans became ‘fat’ Wednesday — even if they didn’t gain a pound” — as the federal government adopted a controversial method for determining who is considered overweight.”

That second change paved the way for a new public health panic: the “Obesity Epidemic.” By the turn of the millennium, the BMI’s simple arithmetic had become a de rigeur part of doctor visits. Charts depicting startling spikes in Americans’ overall fatness took us by storm, all the while failing to acknowledge the changes in definition that, in large part, contributed to those spikes. At best, this failure in reporting is misleading. At worst, it stokes resentment against bodies that have already borne the blame for so much, and fuels medical mistreatment of fat patients.

ON OUR THREE QUOTES CONCERNING GALTONIAN EUGENICS AND FALSELY OBJECTIVE STATISTICS by Tom Leonard

                                                        In her fascinating article

                                                         BECOMINGS OR FIXITY 

                              (International Review of Theoretical Psychologies, 2021)  

                                                   

                                                       ANN ALISON PHOENIX 

                                                          Professor of Education 

                                                      University College London

                                                           cite my blogpost

                              THE LIFE OF SIR  FRANCIS GALTON (High Class Operator)        

                                           

             and includes my quote to the 2019 UCL Commission of Inquiry:,

             ""Eugenics was not universally popular in its heydays. Early critics of Eugenics included Lester Frank Ward, GK Chesterton(see his 1917 book Eugenics and Other Evils), Franz Boas, Halliday Sutherland, and Aldous Huxley, Liberal MP Josiah Wedgwood would speak against the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. This Act, though containing elements of welfare state provision, also made judgements on mental abilities as if they were fixed and biological rather than the result of material social conditions

      The early eugenicists cannot therefore be exonerated on the grounds that their preachings were unquestioned at that time.""

                                                

                   Tom was also cited on in Professor Phoenix's  public lecture at Aarhus University 

                   (video) after about 20 minutes.

                                                                                      

As we explained to the UCL Commission of Inquiry in 2019, Aldous Huxley is controversial. He supported some Eugenics policies before writing Brave New World, which GK Chesterton regarded as anti-eugenic----but others didn't.  Huxley may have been a Fabian and a supporter of MONDISM.

                                                                        

Named after the industrialist Alfred Mond, Mondism was a system first mooted in Britain during the late 1920s whereby trade unions would attempt to maintain working-class living standards and assist industrial efficiency by cooperating with employers. Strongly supported by right-wing trade union leaders, it was condemned on the left as class collaboration.

Professor Phoenix also joined us in her article by heavily criticising the racist and ableist manner in which Karl Pearson and Sir Ronald Fisher distorted Statistics while imposing Eugenics on the population, and endorsing settler colonialism and population eugenics on a global scale. We agree with the South African graduate Nathaniel Joselson, who is also cited in Ann's article, that it is essential to now decolonialise the false objectivity in Statistics. See my  interview in 2014 to Statistics Views, in which I say

"I believe that most statistical investigations are inherently subjective in nature, and that statisticians should no longer attempt to achieve ‘false objectivity’. Rather than attempting to educate the public in a possibly misleading manner, I think that our leading statistical societies should focus on encouraging their members to invariably insist on fairness, professionalism, and impartial honesty, while acknowledging the subjective nature of their conclusions. It is only then that we can hope to properly educate the public regarding the real benefits that can be gained from statistical investigations." 

                                                             Pearson: Falsely Objective

Fisher : Falsely Objective

   See also: MY INTERVIEW BY DIEGO PFREZ in ISBA BULLETIN, 2016, in which I say

 "When I was at UCL, I was taught to revere Karl Pearson and Ronald Fisher. Fisher was professor of Eugenics at UCL and so like Pearson and of course Galton before him, was associated with the Galton Laboratory. A lot of Fisher’s work in Genetics concerned Eugenics. A lot of Pearson’s work in Statistics which was published in Biometrika concerned Eugenics. In other words, comparisons were made of the attributes of different ethnic groups. I don’t know whether their motives were good or not but what came out of the subsequent Eugenics movement around the western world during the 20th century is absolutely terrifying, for example, forced sterilizations, racial discrimination, the CIA mind control program MK Ultra, and genocide."

CLICK HERE FOR  

FIFTY OR MORE PRE-EMINENT STATISTICIANS AFFILIATED WITH THE

EUGENICS MOVEMENT

Professor Phoenix was a member of the Commission of Inquiry when we gave expert witness testimony at UCL in July 2019.

See THE FORSTER-LEONARD SUBMISSION TO THE UCL EUGENICS INQUIRY  

My co-author and historical advisor Scott Forster