A Small Opera

Every year Isaac plans and runs the Good Friday service where he is music director (St. Matthew's UMC, in Bowie, MD). I always attend because it will certainly feature a significant musical presentation. Occasionally I perform, more frequently I listen.

Tonight's special offering was a 20-minute, two-person opera with choir called "Saturday 29 AD", by Mark Schweizer. The characters were Pilate and his wife. He was washing his hands and trying to justify himself to his wife, while she thought he made the wrong decision, and the choir sang some atmospheric back-up.

Chuck Hastings & Jane Thessin sang the solo parts admirably and created a very engaging drama. The choir was subtle and effective. A special shout-out goes to Chuck McClurg for his rather startling and realistic hand-washing special effects.

On Not Finishing Kaku's "Physics of the Impossible"

I read a lot of popular-science books. You know I do this partly to support the Science Booknotes and Science Book Challenge projects at Scienticity. I often remark to myself how thoroughly I enjoyed a book that I chose arbitrarily at my library, maybe because the title appealed to me or the book spine was the right color for me that evening. The implication for me, I'm happy to say, is that there is a great deal of really very good writing about science for the non-specialist. It's satisfying to review these books and let other potential readers know about the great ideas they discuss.

Sometimes, of course, I select a book that turns out not to suit my taste for some reason. Generally speaking I prefer not to review a book I didn't care for because I don't see the point of a negative review about a book whose subject matter didn't really appeal to me or whose author wrote in a style that I found unsympathetic. After all, many others might find the book worthwhile or tune in to that author's particular style, and I'd much rather have a review in our booknotes collection setting out positive reason why a potential reader might choose to read a particular title.

Then there is the small but difficult category of books that I never finish reading because, for some reason or another, I find them too overwhelmingly irritating. For instance, I never finished reading Stephen Jay Gould's The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox (my booknote) because his writing was so bad, and so badly edited, that I conjectured that it had been written by pod people who had taken over his body. Happily, these are rare events, but sometimes it seems important to write about them.

What to do, then, when I find an author known for his (or her) enthusiastic and entertaining advocacy and popularizing for science whose writing exhibits a notable disregard for precision about scientific facts and, furthermore, who seems to have a superficial or incorrect understanding of parts of his or her subject matter?

When I read a book that I plan to write about, I keep a folded sheet of paper inside the back cover where I make notes of interesting ideas, things to mention, and possible quotations for use in a review. I also make a note of trouble spots in the text: unclear or badly written explanations, confusion over facts of science, and such things. When I have filled the pages with errors the author has made and I'm only on page 30 of the book, I know I have trouble on my hands, and a quandary. I can easily stop reading the book, but I have to decide whether to write about it or not. Is there a useful point — beyond venting my spleen — to writing about bad science writing?

I have such a case on hand with Michio Kaku's Physics of the Impossible_{*, in which the (apprently) well-known science popularizer talks about the physics and possibility of such science-fiction staples as invisibility cloaks, force fields, time travel, and such topics. It's a very appealing idea, I thought, but I had to stop reading; there were simply too many errors–some serious errors–of science to continue, all before I reached page 30, less than one-tenth of my way through the book.}

Let's begin by going through some of the problems that I had in these early pages.

1. Conflating Historic Events

"Growing up, I remember my teacher one day walking up to the map of the Earth on the wall and pointing out the coastlines of South America and Africa. Wasn't it an odd coincidence, she said, that the two coastlines fit together, almost like a jigsaw puzzle? Some scientists, she said, speculated that perhaps they were once part of the same, vast continent. But that was silly. […] Later that year we studied the dinosaurs. Wasn't it strange, our teacher told us, that the dinosaurs dominated the Earth for millions of years, and then one day they all vanished? No one knew why they had all died off. Some paleontologists thought that maybe a meteor from space had killed them, but that was impossible; more in the realm of science fiction [pp. xi–xii]

The idea that the continents might once have fitted together is a very old one, evident to most anyone who ever looked at a world map. These days we have at hand the well-established theory of plate techtonics to explain how it all could have happened, and certainly did happen. In the earlier twentieth century geologists and others began thinking more seriously about the idea of continents moving, but it was experimental results in the late 1950s and early 1960s that finally overthrew "conventional wisdom" that the continents couldn't just move around. Plate techtonics was well established as scientific orthodoxy by 1965.

The Alvarez Theory, the idea that the extinction of the dinosaurs was brought about by the impact with Earth of a large body from space, was first proposed by Luis and his son Walter Alvarez following on Walter's discovery of a thin sedimentary layer of iridium that dated closely to the time when dinosaurs disappeared. That theory did not appear until 1980. For many years afterwards the idea that an asteroid impact wiped out the dinosaurs was widely thought preposterous; before that time it hadn't even been thought of. By now, of course, it's widely familiar to the general public.

I hope you see my difficulty by now. The author writes that his teacher taught him that 1) some scientists speculated that continents drifted, an assertion that only makes sense prior to 1965, when Plate Techtonics was established; and 2) that some scientists though maybe an asteroid had killed the dinosaurs, an idea that no one had thought of until 1980. He writes that his teacher taught him these things in the same year, even though the closest in actual time that they may have come to each other is 15 years. In other words, this makes a good story but it's highly unlikely that these two events took place in the same year.

2. Confusing Words and Ideas

This problem is more subtle. In the first chapter Kaku has a section on "force fields", a common technology of science-fiction worlds for decades. Kaku unfortunately takes the words too literally and conflates the notion of a science-fiction "force field" with some combination of the ideas of "forces" and "fields" as they are used in physics, and so he spends some time talking about the four fundamental forces of the universe (gravitation, electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force) and discusses to some extent how each of these is formulated mathematically as "field theories". But one does not get "force fields" by simply combining these two concepts. He confuses the reader over these pairs of words used differently in two different realms, and then leaves the reader with the mistaken impression that "force fields" might become reality just as soon as physics catches up and discovers a new field theory for a "fifth force". None of this has anything useful to do with the concept of a "force field" as it's deployed by science-fiction authors.

3. Casual Writing Leads to Mistaken Readings

In another space I'll write about what I think should be the prime directive of any writer about science : First, Do Not Mislead. Writing about science for a popular audience is an awesome responsibility; scientifically literate readers can fend for themselves, but if the author has in mind an audience of nonspecialists, it is vital that the author take the utmost care with describing and explaining facts from science, because the nonspecialist reader can easily invent his or her own mistaken notion of how nature works when presented with sloppy, incomplete, or imprecise exposition. I expect popular science writers to

1. Get it right, and
2. Say it clearly.

Here are just some examples of statements that I felt violated the Prime Directive in Kaku's writing. First, from the section on "Magnetic Levitation":

"One common property of superconductivity is called the Meissner effect." [p. 14]

When a superconductor in a magnetic field is cooled from its normal (non-superconducting) phrase to its superconducting phrase, it "expels" the external magnetic field from it's interior, which is to say that it creates on its surface electrical currents that themselves create a magnetic field that just cancels the externally imposed field within the superconductor. This is known as the "Meissner Effect", named for Walther Meissner. This is a defining characteristic of superconductors, a property necessarily exhibited by every superconductor. I find it odd to refer to it as a "common property of superconductivity", as though it's an incidental property seen in only some, perhaps many, superconductors, but suggesting that it is not a universal property.

In a section on "Invisibility", discussing the possibility of an "invisibility cloak":

"But today the impossible may become possible. New advances in "metamaterials" are forcing a major revision of optics textbooks. [p. 17]

Actually, the manufactured metamaterials that Kaku refers to, surprising and ingenious as they are, behave according to well-understood principles, requiring no "revision", just an increase in understanding how to manufacture materials with desirable optical properties. This is misleading and a type of sensationalism that doesn't serve the cause of increasing science literacy.

Later in the section on "Invisibility", Kaku turns to a discussion of electromagnetic fields, namely, James Maxwell's great advance in physical theory in the 19th century:

"(…If he [Maxwell] had lived longer, he might have discovered that his equations allowed for distortions of space-time that would lead directly to Einstein's relativity theory. [p. 19]

Now, here is a frequent problem with those who write about science. There are, in fact, two distinct theories of Einstein commonly referred to as "relativity" : the theory of "Special Relativity", from 1905, and the theory of "General Relativity", from 1916. Special relativity is a theory of electrodynamics, basically a theory of light, which also introduced the idea of four-dimensional "space-time" and that most famous of equations, E=mc^2. General relativity is a theory of gravitation, a geometrical theory that treats gravity as deformations in space-time.

Usually the context makes clear which "relativity" the author meant. But here our only guide is that Kaku speaks of "distortions of space-time". In special relativity travel at high velocities bring about time dilations and length contractions ("Lorentz Transformations"), i.e., distortions of space-time. In general relativity, gravitational effects are produced by the distortions of space-time caused by mass.

Carelessness here has caused a confusion that can't be untangled and therefore does nothing to enlighten the nonspecialist reader who may not distinguish the two "relativity" theories so easily to begin with.

4. Errors of Physical Fact

These were the most troubling errors that confronted me in reading the first sections of Kaku's book. Troubling because it betrays the trust between the nonspecialist reader and the authoritative voice of the author to make statement of physical fact, or to give descriptions of physical systems, that are imprecise or simply incorrect. I find it even more troubling when the author is a physicist who should be expected to get it right.

Back to the pages of discussion about Maxwell's Theory of Electrodynamics, the author writes:

Maxwell began with Faraday's discovery that electric fields could turn into magnetic fields and vice versa. He took Faraday's depictions of force fields and rewrote them in the precise language of differential equations, producing one of the most important series of equations in modern science. They are a series of eight fierce-looking differential equations. Every physicist and engineer in the world has to sweat over them when mastering electromagnetism in graduate school [p. 18].

While it is certainly true that every physicist and engineer had to sweat over the equations in graduate school–probably even using the same, nearly universally taught textbook–the italicized phrase (my italics) would raise any student's eyebrows. Whether the equations are "fierce-looking" or not is a matter of taste (I think they're rather elegantly simple myself), there are in fact only four equations, two for the electric field and two for the magnetic field.

I nearly dropped the book when I read this — I couldn't imagine how any physicist could have come to refer to "eight" equations. Now, while it's true that the electric and magnetic fields are written in modified form when they occur in materials, rather than vacuum, the equations stay the same. That there are two each for the electric and magnetic fields is fundamentally characteristic of the entire field theory.

Slightly further on, Kaku offers this analysis of the property of optical transparency in materials:

Maxwell's theory of light and the atomic theory give simple explanations for optics and invisibility. In a solid, the atoms are tightly packed, while in a liquid or gas the molecules are spaced much farther apart. Most solids are opaque because light rays cannot pass through the dense matrix of atoms in a solid, which act like a brick wall. Many liquids and gases, by contrast, are transparent because light can pass more readily between the large spaces between their atoms, a space that is larger than the wavelength of visible light. For example, water, alcohol, ammonia, acetone, hydrogen peroxide, gasoline, and so forth are all transparent, as are gases such as oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, methane, and so on.

There are some important exceptions to this rule. Many crystals are both solid and transparent. But the atoms of a crystal are arranged in a precise lattice structure, stacked in regular rows, with regular spacing between them. Hence there are many pathways that a light beam may take through a crystalline lattice. Therefore, although a crystal is as tightly packed as any solid, light can still work its way through the crystal.
Under certain circumstances, a solid object may become transparent if the atoms are arranged randomly [as in a glass]. [pp. 25–26]

It's at this point that I threw up my metaphorical hands in despair and stopped reading the book. This "explanation" of transparency is so totally wrong I hardly know where to begin.

Light, namely, propagating electromagnetic waves, only interact with matter via the electromagnetic field (with a notable exception in General Relativity that doesn't impinge on this discussion); in other words, light waves are sensitive to electrical charges, electrical currents, and magnetic fields. They sense the electrical charge of the electron "cloud" around an atomic nucleus; they might sense the positive charge of protons in a nucleus if they can get close enough for it to have an effect. Electromagnetic waves–light waves or photons, pick your favorite representation–do not interact with the mass of matter itself. Whether atoms are heavy or not heavy makes no difference, the light doesn't sense the mass. Hold that thought.

Now, while it is true that the atoms in a liquid or solid are much closer together than they are in a gas, the atoms are still so physically small and so distantly separated relative to their physical sizes–not to mention that the components of an atom are vastly tinier than the "size" of the atom itself–that most of matter, whether solid, liquid, or gas, is still empty space. Even in a crystal or a glass this is true. Physically, the mass of atoms occupies exceedingly little of the space of the object they make up. By "exceedingly little" I mean this: the volume of the atomic nucleus is only about 1/1,000,000,000,000^th the approximate volume of the atom itself.

I hope it's becoming clear by this point that how close the atoms are together has relatively little bearing on how much "space" in matter is taken up by substantial parts of the atoms. The simple deduction, then, is that material objects are not more transparent or less transparent because the atoms are closer or further apart such that they "block" the light. The light does not run into the atoms and get blocked by their physical size. They are in no sense like a "brick wall" in any way that I can imagine makes sense.

The transparency of any given substance is determined by the not-so-simple interaction between light waves of particular frequencies (or "colors") and the electric fields (predominantly) created in the substance by the particular configuration of its atoms. Gases do tend to be relatively transparent because the wide separation of their atoms creates a weakly interacting electric field. Nevertheless, some gasses do have colors because their atoms absorb certain wavelengths of light preferentially, through light waves being absorbed and/or emitted by the atomic electrons. Crystals have complicated and varied optical properties — transparency, opacity, colors in gemstones, birefringence, polarization rotations, etc. — depending sensitively on the periodically varying electric field inside the crystal that is produced by the regular (crystalline) placement of the atoms; but do keep your mind on the electric field inside the crystal, not the atoms "blocking" the light. There are also materials that are mostly opaque to visible light but that can be transparent in wavelengths of light that our eyes do not detect. The optical properties of materials is a rich field with lots of interesting effects and phenomena; get a taste for it, if you like, by looking up "transparency" in Wikipedia.

Looking up "transparency" is apparently something that author Kaku didn't bother to do when he should have. His explanation of the phenomenon I find so confused and misleading that I feel his writing does a serious disservice to the nonspecialist who reads his book hoping for understanding from a scientist who knows what he's talking about. This is why I stopped reading the book at this point, and why I have chosen to write about it.

One or two of the objections I noted earlier on amount to very little. I frequently find one or two little errors in any book I read, but it's usually just something to note with some amusement and then move on; rarely does a misstatement or error like that cause me serious concern, and I rarely comment on them in my review of a book. A whole string of them, page after page, however, convinces me that the author is a sloppy writer or has a very superficial knowledge of the subject at hand. When the writer is a working scientist writing about science, I am totally confounded. As for these bigger errors I've just discussed — they are inexplicable. It is the author's responsibility to realize the limits of his or her knowledge or understanding and find ways to avoid or correct problems in his or her writing.

These are the reasons why I simply cannot recommend this book to a general reader. That the book seems to have reached some level of popularity disturbs me : such poorly conceived and executed writing about science undermines the efforts of the many excellent writers about science — scientists, historians, journalists, and others — writing with more care and accuracy about their subject.
———-
^* Michio Kaku, Physics of the impossible : a scientific exploration into the world of phasers, force fields, teleportation, and time travel. New York : Doubleday, 2008. xxi + 329 pages.

What the Principled Republican is Believing this Week

For how many decades have we been seeing conservatives crusading under the banner that says "State's Rights"? Now, I'm sure that somewhere there are a few who actually are anti-federalist, but for the most part it's a cynical scheme employed in an attempt to derail any federal attempt at doing something distasteful to the politicians who rally in its name. Frequently it's done to delay or scuttle advances in civil rights. It's a popular charade because it sounds so principled and constitutional, thus convincing some gullible democracy-lovers to join the crusade.

How can we tell that it's really not a principled position? Let's see how easily it's dispensed with.

In the early part of this century (i.e., the 21st), many states' voters were suckered by fear-mongering Republicans into voting in favor of referenda and constitutional amendments meant to prohibit marriage equality for same-sex couples. How were such plebiscites on restricting citizens' rights justified? State's rights, of course.

As the argument went, marriage was a concept traditionally and best left to the states to decide–definitely not a federal issue. The states, and the people in the states, should have the power to decide this vitally important issue for themselves without federal meddling. The states, it was said, were the laboratory for experiments in social change, the rightful place for such "radical" ideas to be tested.

At least, this was the "principled" stand for the last decade or more when it seemed a given that Republicans could convince the electorate to restrict the rights of their gay and lesbian citizens in this way.

However, increasing familiarity with the idea of marriage equality for same-sex couples has seen increasing support across the country for marriage equality, to the point that the majority opinion is turning in favor of it. This means, of course, that arguing in favor of "state's rights" and letting each state decide this issue for itself — in the traditional and principled fashion — seems no longer the guaranteed bulwark against progress in civil rights that it was and the "principled" rhetoric has to change if a successful course to delaying this basic civil right to gay and lesbian people is to continue.

The bellwether? Rick Santorum, the principled conservative's conservative. Here he is speaking recently of the vital importance of the principle of state's rights, and the states as essential laboratories for social change:

"We can't have 50 different marriage laws in this country," [Santorum] said. "You have to have one marriage law."

So, maybe not so principled after all. I guess a strong, central government is the new Republican ideal.

Oh, and while we're on the subject of those Republican canards about why and how we can't have marriage equality, I'm sure you're aware of the big kerfuffle about mere [activist] judges deciding that same-sex couples can get married–somehow it's socialism!–or state legislatures suddenly not representing the people if they vote in favor of marriage equality–let the people vote! Because, in addition to thinking that "the people" are the best mob to take rights away gay and lesbian people, "the people" are known to Republicans always to be right. Let the people vote!

"Just because public opinion says something doesn't mean it's right," he said in the NBC interview. "I'm sure there were times in areas of this country when people said blacks were less than human."

Except when they're not, I guess. Who can tell? The principled conservative's conservative can!

And that closing remark in which he feigns never to have known a time when there might be some people in some area of the country who thought black people were less than human. What's that disingenuousness about? I'm sure he could even find some of those people today without trying too hard. I wonder if he's asked the people who come to his rallies?

[Quotations are from Bob Egelko, "Santorum backs nullifying existing gay marriages", 3 March 2012.]

Was That "Passive"?

In his A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926, so not so terribly modern but still rather fun), Henry Fowler famously described the attitudes of people in regard to the split infinitive in English:

The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know and condemn; (4) those who know and approve; and (5) those who know and distinguish. . . . [quoted]

The worst, of course, are those in category #2, those who don't know but care very much (TWDKBCVM).

In recent times misplaced, or misguided, anxieties over the use of split infinitives seems to have given way to a new leading concern for TWDKBCVM, namely, the dreaded (to them) passive verb construction. Wannabe "sticklers" that they are, they seem convinced that passives are sneaking into English usage and undermining its foundations with the same pernicious–but unspecifiable–undermining effect as (some believe) same-sex marriage has on so-called "traditional" marriage).

The biggest irritation, since we are talking about TWDKBCVM here, is less that they care so very much than that they know so very little; remarkably many people happily call out others on their use of the passive without having the least idea what a "passive" actually is. They want to protect the virtue and purity of the English language with a vigor and irrelevance that used to be ascribed to the French Academy, yet they can't recognize a passive construction even if it bit them in their gerund. But perhaps I state the problem backwards; the biggest problem with TWDKBCVM is that they seem to see "passives" positively everywhere they aren't. The irritation lies in the glee with which they rush to point out the phantom passives.

I had my own run-in recently with a young woman (of, perhaps, high-school age), a fresh recruit to the passive police. She had occasion to read a story I had recently completed and, in the excerpt we considered, she identified an embarrassing profusion of "passives" and suggested that I might invigorate my writing by using more "active" constructions. Happily, and perhaps with an over abundance of schadenfreude, I pointed out to her that none of the instances she voiced concern about were actually passive constructions, but merely instances of past progressive tenses. She seemed alerted to these suspect verb forms by the presence of "was", but I pointed out that when one was writing (<-- not passive!) in the past tense, "was" frequently appeared even in active constructions. Well, perhaps they weren't passives, she grudgingly agreed, but maybe I'd like to have a look at them anyway. I suspect that she had fallen under the influence of a well-meaning but misinformed teacher who taught that spotting an instance of "was" would probably indicate a lurking and dreaded passive. As a brief aside, I'll mention that I'm quite happy to have people read my stories critically, especially if the story is new and about to go public, but I do wish that more of them would concentrate on critiquing my characterization, my plot, my symbols, or my prosody, rather than trying to discover a typo or an unnecessary comma or a phantom passive. I'm not even going to attempt to say what a "passive" is because it takes some care to pin it down with precision. Fortunately, Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log has done it ("The passive in English"). It takes some careful reading, but you'll read it if you car–or need to defend yourself from TWDKBCVM.

Now, while Pullum has the dais and we're talking about this violent allergy TWDKBCVM have even to placebo "passives", one naturally wonders at the source of such an aversion. I'm readily convinced by this article of Pullum's ("50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice"; see also "Drinking the Strunkian Kool-Aid: victims of page 18") that a great deal of the blame goes to that precious little book known to its friends as "Strunk & White", i.e., those author's Elements of Style. Why, in Pullum's phrase, this obnoxious book came to have "the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates" is unclear. Perhaps it's due to the uncritical assessment of said students' teachers, often TWDKBCVM, who sold it to their students because–why?–it's so much easier to point to a simple reference that can be easily purchased and read in one sitting than it is to teach something? But then, that esteem would probably not grow so much if it weren't that many of those selfsame college graduates were also TWDKBCVM and desperate for an authoritarian voice to back them up, not on actual facts, but for their control-queen attitudes in trying to stomp out bad "grammar", even when they're woefully wrong.

Perhaps the answer is as simple as the observation, documented by Pullum, that Strunk & White were themselves TWDKBCVM rather than actual authorities on what a "passive" really is or why it might be bad. Regardless, I've known for some time that I have a fierce aversion to any icon of popular culture whose esteem vastly outweighs what it deserves.

Say, while we're on the subject of "grammar", what's the deal, apparently recently, with calling absolutely everything that has to do with constructing clear, written English "grammar"? The other day I saw a cartoon that made a deal out of "bad grammar", but used that to describe some grammar, some punctuation, and some confusion over homonyms, which I take to be diction. I mean, here we have all these amusing categories for the anal-retentive who really want to learn lots of semi-obscure nomenclature (although I try to convince my fellow writers that knowing some of it, so they can talk about their craft, is really vital to being an actual writer). Arnold Zwicky mentions the phenomenon ("Grammar shit"), but happily eases us back into amusing topics for conversation by mentioning Paisley designs and paramecia.

Oddly Popular

The other day I was looking at some statistics for this blog, and I decided to look at the blog postings that were the most frequently arrived at. Largely, this comes about through search engines and sometimes very loosely related search strings. I'm not sure I could ever have predicted beforehand that these five pieces would have topped the list.

1. "Sandwich Thoughts" — For several years this small essay has persisted in my top five. It's merely some ruminations about big sandwiches and Subway sandwich shops changing the style of cutting their sandwich bread from what was known as the "U-gouge" to a "hinge cut". I favored the former, by the way, as do most people who've weighed in on the matter. I think that most people who arrive at this page do so by asking search engines for information on the question of whether all Subway sandwich meats are turkey based, a point I mention in the piece. The rather obvious answer is that some of it is, largely the cold-cut type meats, but things like chicken breast, roast beef, and tuna fish are quite evidently not. Sliced turkey breast is, naturally.
2. "The Matthew EFfect" — A posting in which I tried to track down the origin of the phrase "The plural of anecdote is [not] data". I only got so far with the question but turned up some interesting things, including the fact that there is dispute even about whether the original aphorism had the "not" in it. Judging by the number of people who read this page, there are quite a number of people who care very much about this question. For the reason behind the name of the essay, look in the final footnote.
3. "Beard of the Week XVIII: Bulgarian Wedding Bells" — About the wedding of pop celebrity Azis, "Bulgaria's famed Roma transvestite", marriage equality, and the discomfort that some gay mean feel about drag queens.
4. "Stephen Hawking Erroneously Found Dead in 'Death Panel' Marketing" — A short piece about the very odd kerfuffle during the recent health-care-bill debate (i.e., "Obamacare"), when the peculiar, misdirected notion of "death panels" were invented and marketed by Sarah Palin and her Republican cohorts, in which an editorial explaining "how government-run-healthcare 'death panels' wold imperil your grandmother's life, used as the centerpiece of it argument that famed physicist Stephen Hawking, whose life is challenged with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease) would be dead today if he had to live under the UK's socialized healthcare system". Unfortunately, what they got wrong is that 1) Hawking is, actually, British and 2) is still very much alive, thanks to 3) the British National Health Care system.
5. "When Celsius = Fahrenheit" — Finally, a blog posting with equations! As I explain at the beginning of the piece, quite a few people seemed to arrive at my blog by asking the google this question, something I found odd because I never had actually written regarding the question at all, but apparently I used enough of the words in a combination that made the google think I was relevant. So, since googling is destiny, I decided to write the piece that all these searchers were looking for and explain how to discover the single temperature at which the Celsius and Farenheit temperature scales refer to the same temperature with the same number. By all means, if you don't already know the answer have a go at figuring it out before you look.

Snippets of Cruise Conversation

Between Christmas and New Year's Eve, we went on a pleasant Caribbean cruise, taking the Carnival Elation from the Port of New Orleans, to Cozumel, to Progresso, (both on the Yucatan Peninsula), then back to NO. Pleasantly, this gave us the chance to visit for awhile with our friend Loretta, who lives in Baton Rouge and was amenable to 1) putting us up for Christmas night, the night before the cruise; 2) making us a lovely dinner for Christmas evening; and 3) picking us up at the NO airport and ferrying us to thee ship on Monday morning. It was very thoughtful and generous on her part and it made for a relaxing transition into cruise-mode.

Herewith, three small stories with a point.

One morning at [open-seating] breakfast we shared our table with a bright-eyed grandmother, who was cruising for her birthday with her family. She seemed already to be having a "blessed day", but I'm afraid I didn't listen to her much after she found occasion to say "and I really like that Tim Tebow".

Remarkably, at the same table on the same day, a woman who taught high-school biology. The conversation faltered a bit when, in reference to Halloween, she remarked that "we don't observe that Satanic holiday". I guess the enormous, jewel-encrusted pectoral cross she was wearing wasn't just for decoration.

One day for lunch I went to the counter where one asked for sandwiches, to get a grilled ham-and-cheese made by the helpful young man from Pakistan. He hoped to make light conversation.
"Are you traveling with your family?"
"No," I said, "just my husband and two friends."
His eyes popped out a bit. "Your wife?"
"No, I assure you, he's my husband."

I hadn't quite realized at the time that by merely being married we had become political activists and gay ambassadors, but there you go. It turns out to be not at all a bad thing.

p.s. There were other gratifying, and more positive, conversations. For instance, on our plane trip home, I sat next to a pleasant woman who, on discovering that I was traveling with my husband, was delighted to let me know that at her "place of worship" (Baltimore Hebrew Congregation) they were very accepting and indeed had just welcomed a new lesbian Rabbi and her partner.

The Inscrutable Muses

Last week I finished a story, known right now as "The Café Françoise". It is set in Nazi-occupied Paris during the second world war and involved a dangerous liaison between a French Resistance operative called Jean-Pierre Renard, and a Gestapo officer whose name was Klaus Nördlingen.

When I was looking for a name for the young German, I had in mind using the name of an old German city, thinking that doing so would lend an aristocratic air to the name, even if I didn't use "von" in the name. I looked at maps quite a bit and didn't see a name that jumped out at me as an obvious choice.

The name Nördlingen drew my attention when I saw it mentioned while reading Night Comes to the Cretaceous : Dinosaur Extinction and the Transformation of Modern Geology, by James Lawrence Powell, the clearest and most comprehensive book I've read about the Alvarez theory that the mass extinction that wiped out dinosaurs (among many others) was caused by the consequences following the impact of a large meteorite with the Earth. The book is from the late 1990s when the theory was still much more controversial than it is today.

Anyway, what was a respectable, Medieval, Bavarian town like Nördlingen doing in a book like that? Mass extinctions is your clue.

It turns out that the town of Nördlingen was built entirely within an ancient impact crater from a meteorite that collided with the Earth some 14.5 million years ago and a possible cause of the "Middle Miocene disruption". The crater, known as "Nördlinger Ries", was thought to be volcanic in origin until the 1960s when it was conclusively shown to be an impact crater.

Aerial photographs of the town are popular because its boundaries so clearly show the edges of the ancient crater; here are some examples.

Anyway, the name "Nördlingen" suited my needs perfectly and I rather liked the behind-the-scenes fact about the town of Nördlingen and its impact-crater boundaries. One must be vigilant, never knowing when the muse might speak.

p.s. This note came about because I just uncovered a small note on my desk from some weeks ago now : "Medieval German town (located w/in impact crater) : Nördlingen".

Frank Kameny on "Gay is Good"

The one thing I’ve said, if I want to be remembered for nothing else, it’s back in July, 1968 I coined the slogan “Gay Is Good.”

And that really, it sort of, it epitomizes really my entire approach to all the issues. You have to take an affirmative approach on these things. In other words, if I may expound for a moment — people tend almost automatically, since we are under attack, and we are under criticism, they tend to respond defensively and reactively. Around then, taking the next step and responding on the offensive and proactively. In other words, the tendency — we’re told that homosexuality is bad in all sorts of different ways so the response tends to be “It’s not bad.”

You have to take the next step and say, “Not really, it’s not bad. It’s good.” It’s not that same sex marriage will not damage the institution of marriage. Same sex marriage will enhance the institution of marriage. You have to consciously take the next step and move over into being affirmative and so here again, it’s not that gay is not bad, it’s that gay is affirmative and good.

That came out of, in those days — again you have to go back to the issues of that day and the rhetoric of that day — in June of 1968 I saw on television an item of Stokely Carmichael leading a group of students at a college in Salisbury Maryland, chanting, “Black Is Beautiful.” And again, same thing. It’s not that black is not ugly, or in other ways lesser. We’re going to take the next step, “Black Is Beautiful,” and I realized I had to do exactly the same thing. I tossed around words and phrases. “Homosexuality” was obviously too clinical. “Good” was sort of bland; on the other hand it covered all the possibilities. Some people had suggested to me, “Gay Is Great,” but that sounded a little bit too informal. So ultimately I came up with that. It was adopted in August at a meeting of what was then the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations as a slogan.

Meanwhile, in those days, Playboy had a separate little publication called the Playboy Forum, and they had a long article, just about that time, July, August, September, which was sort of, at best wishy-washy about the gay issue. So I wrote them a long letter — I can be verbose at times — and I included “Gay Is Good.” And to my pleased astonishment, the following February or March of 1969, they published my whole letter under their heading, “Gay Is Good.” And that sent it out to the whole public, and we’re off and running.

–Frank Kameny (1925–2011) [quoted by Jim Burroway, "What Frank Kameny Meant By 'Gay Is Good'", Box Turtle Bulletin, 12 October 2011.]

Because He's Conservative

"So I don’t support gay marriage despite being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I’m a Conservative."

— David Cameron, UK Prime Minister [quoted by Peter Lloyd, "PM David Cameron re-iterates backing for gay marriage at party conference speech", Pink Paper, 5 October 2011.]

Literary Statistics

Tonight, for a project that I'll describe later, I put together an inventory of my fiction writing, i.e., those stories and things authored by Jay Neal, my pen-name for fiction. I found things to interest me; your mileage will undoubtedly vary.

One thing : I'll refer to "stories", but it's a bit difficult to say exactly what is a "story". I include in my count a few incidental pieces, one of which is only 144 words long but that I'm rather proud of, but the longest, at about 7,000 words, is decidedly a short story. Most of them are stories of roughly 3,000 words, a length that was thought optimal for the magazines I wrote for for several years. So, while they're not all quite stories, they're all literary oeuvre clearly in Jay Neal's hand. The average length is 3,250 words.

My first story I slogged through finishing in December 1998. What I remember about it was that, with my 3,000-word target in mind, I put all the words into it I could think of and sweated and thought and typed and ended up with … about 1,200 words! Talk about demoralizing. But I rethought it from the beginning and redid the story, ending up with a new, improved, 3,500-word version. Phew. That story turned out to be a warm-up for writing a story that I'd long been thinking about but hadn't found a way to tell it, but with the narrative ice broken I did find a way into the story and I'm still happy with the result.

Story #4, "A Bedtime Story", was a fairy-tale / fable that came out very nicely but was anything but smooth writing — Isaac can attest that I screamed at the computer frequently trying to get it to behave. It's been in print on three occasions so far, my most-published story and a sentimental favorite for many of us.

Story #5 I wrote for the anthology Bearotica, edited by R. Jackson (happily, recently back in print thanks to Bear Bones Books and Lethe Press). With this one, called "Blade" after one of the central characters, I expanded my horizon out to 5,000 words, which gave me some good scope to examine what turned out to be two very interesting characters: a middle-aged, suburban, white-bread gay man, and a barely legal, street-smart punk, who happen to find themselves attracted to each other. At least I found them interesting! It also was the start of a very productive relationship with a very understanding and supportive editor and collaborator that continues to this day.

Well, I don't need to go on right now about each story when all I was going to do was mention some statistics.

In total, there are 40 stories (pieces, oeuvres, etc.). Of those there are 7 that have had no public airing — I put it that way because 2 have been published online and one, in the form of a short play, was given a public reading some years back. The rest (30) have been printed on paper in some form, either magazine or anthology, for a total of 39 publications events (i.e., seven have been printed twice, one has been printed three times).

The number that fascinates me, though, is that together these 40 completed things contain 129,970 words. Not so much, really, compare to quite a number of authors — I'm a very slow writer at fiction and I don't focus my attention on it as often as I'd like. Still, it seems a bit of a marvel to me.

Oh yes, I still write, and I still quite like to write fiction. Not to mention that there are at least half a dozen stories in my mental queue, waiting to be put down slowly on paper (literally, since I generally write on paper with a fountain pen). Also not to mention that I have a story in progress that I really should be working on right now rather than writing this.

Ah well, so many words, so many ideas, so little time.

Android Wallpaper & Eye for Science Images (Again)

I'm still inspired by joining up images from the "Eye for Science" project database with smartphones, and today I implemented another way to make it easy and quick way to turn an image you like into smartphone wallpaper.

All I've done is add a QR Code to the image page, i.e., the page you get when you click on the thumbnail image in the widget at the upper left (if you're looking at this in my blog, and if you're not you can do so to see what I'm talking about by clicking here).

When you see an image that you think will make a stunning wallpaper image on your smartphone, just use of the available bar-code scanner apps to scan the QR Code, which will translate to the URL of the image page it's on. You can then easily load the page on your smartphone and use your phone's image options to make the image your wallpaper. At least, that's the way it works on my Android phone.

By the way, if you just want to look through some random images you can access this URL : http://scienticity.net/efs. Then, if you see an image you'd like to make into wallpaper, follow the steps above. You can do this repeatedly : every time you access that URL you get a different image randomly chosen from the "Eye for Science" collection. It's a great way to waste a few minutes or a few hours late at night.

"Eye for Science" and Android Wallpaper

You may recall my mentioning Scienticity's "Eye for Science" project, a Flickr group to which members contribute interesting and provocative images that tell a story about science or nature or something related, which images we then try to get in front of others to provide a brief science moment. One way we do this is through a widget that shows a clickable thumbnail of the image; you can see it in action right there on the right of this blog page (or the left, if I've redesigned the theme). Every time the page is reloaded, a different image, chosen randomly from the group, shows up. At the time of my writing this the project has been going for a little over two years and the group has 97 members who've contributed 994 images. Why not consider joining us?

Ever since smartphones started to appear I've wanted to have an "Eye for Science" app that would serve up a random image from the collection whenever the user accessed the app. But, I've never taken the time to learn how to program in the necessary way to create such an app. Very recently I upgraded my own phone to something "smart", an Android model as it turns out, and the thought crossed my mind again, and I made a happy discovery : no programming required!

Well, nearly. Which is to say that I could accomplish the best part of what I wanted with tools that existed on my phone, without writing an app. What I decided I wanted one afternoon was to use an eye-for-science image for my phone's wallpaper and be able to change it easily whenever the whim arrived to do so, maybe every day (or more often). I did have to do a little behind-the-scenes programming with the Scienticity-hosted webpage that accesses the Flickr database, but that I knew how to do.

So, here's how I have a pseudo-app–a bookmark, actually–on my Android home page that let's me view a random sciency image and make it my wallpaper.

I used the "web" app (browser) to access the url, http://scienticity.net/efsm/ ; you can do this in your regular browser, too, there's nothing magical about it. Accessing this URL returns a random, full-sized image from the Flickr database, along with the title and caption, the same thing you'd get by clicking the thumbnail in the widget on this page.

Once I have this page in my browser I can make a bookmark ("menu / more / add shortcut to home") on my home screen. From my home screen, then, touching the bookmark opens this URL in my browser with a new random image. If I'm already looking at an image page I can get a new image, randomly selected, by touching "menu / refresh", because each time I access the URL I get a new random image. Then, I can keep trying images (and enjoying what I see) until I get to one that strikes me as something that will make good wallpaper.

Then — on my phone at least — all I have to do is touch the image on my screen and hold my finger there until I get a menu of options, one of which is "set as wallpaper". I touch that option and I have new wallpaper!

I'm a little embarrassed to say how inordinately pleased I am to be able to set my wallpaper so easily to new eye-for-science images whenever I feel moved to do so, but there you go.

Please, I invite you to give it a try, It's quick, it's easy, and you'll see interesting things that might make you think "hunh", which is the goal of the project. Have fun!

"The Third Man" and Artistic Inevitability

Recently I watched, not for the first time, the film "The Third Man", directed by Carol Reed and starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton. It's an extraordinary film and one of the few that seems to stand up to my repeated viewing. This time I thought to watch it because I wanted to study some aspects of the narrative and characterization as entertaining research for a story I'm working on.

Watching the story whose screenplay was by Graham Greene so closely as I did was a firm reminder that I had yet to read anything by Graham Greene, clearly a deficiency that needed to be remedied. I'd suspected for some time that I'd find his style and subjects sympathetic to my tastes, so now was the perfect time to find out.

On the next library night (Monday) I even remembered to have a look for some Greene. I still have the Collected Stories to look forward to, but I have now read The Third Man, the novella that Green wrote as a preparation for the screenplay and later published. I was quite right about my liking for his writing, for his language, for his sentences and narrative details that seemed natural and unintrusive, and for the way he worked through his story. It was very vivid writing, easily rivaling the movie.

What interested me most, though, was not the similarities to the movie but the differences. I'll try to say why after recounting a couple of them, but I fear it may be still too complicated a thought for me to be clear about.

There were a number of little differences, but here are two that seemed significant plot or character points.

1. In the movie, when Martins goes one night with Anna back to Harry's apartment and there is a crowd outside the door, the little boy accuses Martins of murdering the concierge, and that seems to be the reason Martins runs away, to escape what could be a mob after him as accused murderer. In the book, the boy says the same things but there's no feeling that the people are turning toward mob behavior; Martins makes a quick get-away with Anna in order to avoid getting tangled up with the police right then, and not out of fear of the accusation.

2. In the movie, Martins appears at the reader's group meeting to speak on "the modern novel" and does a miserable job of answering questions from the audience; he seems quite preoccupied and his poor performance seems to cause him so much anxiety–that and all the people leaving–that he rushes from the meeting to his next scene. In the book, however, he performs adequately, if without much sparkle. The Q&A session goes along, he makes answers that are passable, and the meeting ends without providing him the same motivation to rush off to Anna's apartment.

I am not disturbed by these differences at all. I rather enjoy seeing/reading different version of a thing, seeing how ideas get worked out. I have a few personal stories about that to tell in a little bit.

The big question that interests me here, one that has interested me for some years, is the process whereby some thing being made by a creative person — an artist, composer, writer, musician, etc. — goes from being a spontaneous/considered product of creative work to being an artistic artifact and subject to artistic reverence.

For example, a painting. When the painting leaves the hands of the artist and becomes "art", it becomes an untouchable relic of some sort of artistic perfection. It must be touched — if it be touched at all! — by fresh, lint-fee cotton gloves, and it must be preserved in the state and condition that it was when the act of creation ended. I have two anecdotes to tell.

My art teacher in college painted large canvases by laying them down on his studio floor and working over them, as we've seen, say, in photographs of Jackson Pollock working. My teacher took great delight in the various things that might fall onto the surface of his canvas as he worked : bugs, used matches, bits of this and that. He felt that the universe was participating in the creation of the art work by contributing these more-or-less random elements. In one view, random bits of crap fell on his paintings and he didn't much care. But once that painting entered a collection and was hung on a gallery wall it became Art, and all of those random little bits of crap had to be preserved and taken care of as part of an unchanging, not-to-be-corrupted "artistic statement". When and how did that transition happen?

I heard a story once concerning Jackson Pollock, since we mentioned him. Apocryphal or not, I don't much care because the point of the story is useful here. It seems that Pollock had painted various unstretched canvases that were going to be mounted on frames as the backdrop for a ballet. When the canvases arrived it was discovered that the canvases were a foot longer than the frames. What to do? It was a quandary that confounded the set designers and trustees. In desperation someone suggested cutting a foot off each of the canvases to make them fit. People were horrified. This was suggesting sacrilege! These canvases were Art, created by a famous Artist!!

As the story goes, someone finally realize they could call Pollock and ask his advice. His suggestion : "Cut a foot off the damned things!"

What is the inhibition that makes the art work inviolable when it leaves the hands of the artist? I'm not saying that the attitude is entirely misplaced, not at all, but I find it hard to understand, too.

My own stories in this conceptual file folder have to do with the short stories I write. The reactions I get as a writer sometimes mirror this reverence for Art. Sometimes I have occasion to ask an editor how many words she'd like in a story to suit the space she has to fill. "Oh," she'll say, "however long it comes out is fine. I know that creativity can be unpredictable sometimes and the muse must be satisfied!" [My paraphrase, of course.] If I try to explain that I am a writer and if the editor wants exactly 2,873 words she will get exactly 2,873 words; she'll either be unbelieving or disillusioned.

A good story, of course, seems inevitable when a reader reads it, but that's the art (if you will) of fiction, making the story seem natural and inevitable. That what Graham Greene did in his novelette, then did again differently in the movie as Carol Reed filmed it. Now I hope you see my point : both tellings of The Third Man seemed unforced and natural, the uncontrived telling of this unique story in its inevitable working out. Except, it clearly wasn't that–couldn't be that–because there are two versions and they're both good.

I know many people like the idea and believe it possible to point to the correct version of a story. the one true and authentic artistic expression. Well, they will inevitably be disappointed. I have several stories that have been published multiple times and my experience says there are never two versions that are identical, even when one tries to make them so. Things happen–so do copy editors! To be honest there are a number of things about my writing that don't strike me as at all sacred and untouchable and I easily adjust to house style and hard-working copy editors. Occasionally something turns up that I feel strongly about; it's usually unexpected and since I'm generally easy going I usually get my way if I feel strongly about that detail.

Once, for example, I had written that a bear in a story went to a bar and asked for a "Diet Coke". The copy editor, for some reason, suggested changing it to just "Coke", perhaps to save a word, who knows? I saw the suggestion and suddenly realized that it mattered greatly to me. Bears tend to be larger men, some are concerned about that and the calories they consume, many others might be (as I am) diabetic, so I felt that there was an important if barely noticeable issue involved with my character's choosing "Diet Coke" and I really wanted to keep it that way. I explained and we kept it, of course.

But sometimes these things happen and changes get made because they don't matter very much to the story, really, and then the story is published and becomes Art, expected to be unchanging and untouchable, even though it can hardly happen.

Some years back I started a story, got 1,000 words into it and discovered that I had absolutely no idea what happened next. Those 1,000 words sat unused for about 3 years until I one day realized how I might finish that story. Now, if that doesn't sound like a muse of inevitability and only-one-way to tell a story I don't know what does. I mean, it took me 3 years to find the single, unique possibility that existed for finishing that story.

So, I finished it and sent it to an editor. Well, he responded, he liked the idea but he wasn't so sure about the ending. Would I consider changes? Well, yes I would, but it might take another 3 years! In fact, I jest. It required backing up nearly to the original 1,000 word mark but I wrote a second, significantly different ending the next week. So much for the inevitability of the original ending!

It got better than that, of course. The story in that second version didn't end up in the projected anthology. When another opportunity came along I wrote a third ending, once that combined elements of the first two endings, and that's how it was published. The experience did confirm for me how silly it was to believe that there's only one way to tell a story.

My final summary point? I don't have one. That's not the way I'm telling the story. I don't have a final answer for how artistic creation transforms in Art, but I'm enjoying working on the question.

"Lay" vs. "Lie"

When it comes to the inscrutably arbitrary intricacies of the English language (any major variant), I am quite pleased with myself that I somehow managed to memorize the differences between the verb spelled "lay" versus the verb spelled "lie" many years ago. However, my dirty little secret is that I am hopeless at any sort of conjugation of said verbs and tend to construct my sentences so that I only use the simplest forms.

Well, no more. I feel like empowering myself! I am grateful to Geoffrey K. Pullum at Language Log ("Be appalled; be very appalled") for putting this very useful information in front of me:

• lay = {lay, lays, laid, laying, laid} is the transitive verb meaning "deposit, or cause to recline";
• lie₁ = {lie, lies, lay, lying, lain} is the intransitive verb meaning "recline"; and
• lie₂ = {lie, lies, lied, lying, lied} is an additional confound, an unrelated intransitive verb meaning "tell a deliberate untruth under conditions where truth was expected"

Here are those same forms in a table:

	lie "fib" (intransitive)	lie "recline" (intransitive)	lay "deposit" (transitive)
plain form / plain present tense	lie	lie	lay
3rd person singular present tense	lies	lies	lays
preterite (simple past) tense	lied	lay	laid
gerund-participle	lying	lying	laying
past participle	lied	lain	laid

Now, Mr. Pullum is rightly appalled at the chaos apparent in the table above — a situation clearly not directed at ease of use or learning, for that matter — but there you go. Perhaps someday we can all get behind new verbs and new verb-forms to replace this hopeless muddle, but until that happy time we must try to press ahead and conjugate uneasily but correctly. Unfortunately, these verbs crop up too frequently in writing to avoid their use altogether.

After I finish with these, I think I will move on to trying to figure out "awaken".