Has One Life Been Made Better?
I can say with certainty that my attitude about members – and especially leaders – of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has changed dramatically in the past six months. And not for the better.
I’ve not seen one individual – within or without the church – whose life has been made better because of the meddling of the Mormon Church’s leadership in the political arena.
–Timothy Kinkaid, "A Culture of Bullying", Box Turtle Bulletin, 13 November 2008
In: All, Common-Place Book, Current Events, Faaabulosity
Causing Trouble
The TimesOnline [UK] reported on a meeting between then presidential candidate Barack Obama and now-familiar Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson ("Barack Obama asked gay bishop Gene Robinson what it was like to be 'first'", 6 November 2008). Many things were discussed, but I was most amused by the reported first words exchanged:
Obama: "Well you’re certainly causing a lot of trouble."
Robinson: "Well that makes two of us.”
[First seen at Towleroad.)
In: All, Common-Place Book, Faaabulosity
Beard of the Week LVII: A Marine in Vietnam
This week's beard belongs to an unnamed US Marine who fought in the Vietnam War. The date was 1966. I found this photograph on the website of the "White House's Commission on Remembrance". Here is the caption that accompanied the photograph (on this page about the Vietnam War):
Date: 1966
Title: U.S. Marines forward reconnaissance patrol sets up to counter attack North Vietnamese infiltration south of the DMZ.
Source: Photo by Larry Burrows, REQUIEM By The Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina, Random House 1997
Today, of course, is Veterans' Day here in the US, a day to remember and honor all our veterans from all the wars that the US has fought in. Today I found myself thinking about the Vietnam War, a war that seemed, in the end, nothing but a string of bad policy decisions and bad political strategies, that ended in a period of great cultural ferment. It was a war that didn't seem to satisfy anybody, but that a great many couldn't stop fighting.
It turned out to be a war that too many were still fighting at the start of this century, although it was "Mission Accomplished" over thirty years ago. So much of the strategy in the current war in Iraq, at least in the earlier days, seemed to be decided by those who still wanted to demonstrate, somehow, that their belief that we could have won the Vietnam War if–well, it's a long string of ifs and they seemed determined that it would not happen with their war in Iraq, that Iraq would not become a quagmire, that Iraq was winnable even without a goal or any idea what it was to "win", that they would be vindicated at last and could then move on past their embarrassment, anger, sorrow, and all the other heartaches that lingered for them after the unwinnable war in Vietnam. I know their emotions are strong and heart-felt, but they're also troublesome.
Troublesome in the obvious way: we're fighting a war in Iraq but too many of those making too many of the decisions are still fighting the war in Vietnam. Folks, this is not the Vietnam war! And, to be sure, this is not the only war from the past that's still being fought. There seem to be those who still don't realize, or won't recognize, that the South lost the US civil war.
Isn't it time that we stop fighting wars that are over with? There are so many better things we can be doing. I don't really know how to bring closure to these people who can't accept their losses, but it must happen somehow.
I admit to being cheerily optimistic sometimes, entirely without cause.* Regardless, I felt buoyed by last week's election–at least, in most ways. I rarely exhibit my emotions very openly, nor my patriotism, but it was exciting and good of America to choose the president-elect that we did, and I find myself hopeful that it may signal a real change, a bit of chemistry, perhaps some magic, that can help those in need finally find the strength or will or whatever to put some of their battles to rest and finally leave them in the past where they belong, but where we still remember.
———-
* It should, therefore, go without saying that I can be remarkably gloomy sometimes, too, also without requiring much of a reason. Remarkably, the optimistic seems to win out on average.
In: All, Beard of the Week, Reflections
Election Day-After
I am exceedingly pleased that Barack Obama is our president-elect, that so many people voted for him, and that the strident and hysterical appeals to racism, violence, and nationalism fell only on the ears of the most hysterical of the electorate who are now free to crawl back under the rotting compost heaps whence they came. Yes, yes, they're Americans, too–born here, at least–but it's time they grow up and start acting like Americans.
On the other hand, I am bitterly disappointed that so many Californians could vote in favor of their ballot's proposition 8, vote to take away rights from their fellow Californians. I may even be disgusted–we'll see. It will, however, be a Pyhrric victory, akin to the Supreme-Court victory hard-fought by the Boy Scouts: they got to keep in place their policy of rejecting gay people as scout masters but lost the respect their organization had kept for decades. Was it worth it?
I know, and the opposition knows, that they are on the losing side of history on equality for gay and lesbian people, and yet they persist in these battles as though it means permanent victory when, in fact, we all know that it will be temporary. What will last far longer is the bitter memory of hatred, religious bigotry, and outlandish false witness that they spent to delay the inevitable and keep alive their hard-won reputation for being mean spirited.
Optimistically I'm hoping that this is the last gasp of Republican mean-spiritedness that has pervaded our politics for at least the last two decades. Along with the mean-spiritedness came a whole passel of oligarchic policies that were bad for the economy, bad for society, bad for America. We've now done those experiments and there's now a whole lot of conservative territory we don't need to revisit. Despite anxious Republican assurances to the contrary (already being tried out days before the election), this election was a thundering repudiation of conservative policies. Here's hoping that the Bush administration has done as much damage to Republican ideology as it has to the country and our reputation in the world community.
As we've seen before, now that the Republicans are a minority party again (a role they serve very well), experience shows they'll be all over the idea of promoting bipartisanship as a strategy which they are certain to ignore as a tactic and will forget if they ever regain the majority. Democrats in the Senate: remember the filibuster! Fall for that trick again and it will be "Fool me once…fool me twice…fool me thrice…." Don't be such fools. Bipartisan cooperation is good when it works to accomplish what's good for America.
There are many changes needed in governance, and plenty of legislation and policy that needs overhauling. That will need time to work through. But, there are also many things that have been sorely lacking in American governance during the last eight years that can be corrected instantly. I want to see a restoration of integrity, honesty, transparency, and democracy.
Obama is one man and can't do it all himself. Obama is also the focus of the hopes and energy of the 64 million people who voted for him, and we can accomplish anything we can dream together.
In: All, Current Events, Reflections
Election Day 2008
I so wanted to say that I late voted, but I guess I pretty much on-time voted, even though I feel so twentieth century voting on election day. One of our ballot questions here in Maryland did, however, address the possibility of early voting in our state, so one day soon we, too, might be able to use this trendy compound verb and early vote. (Probably it will happen sooner in Maryland than our chance to use that other trendy compound verb, to gay marry. Alas.)
At the polling place I've used every election for the past 10 years, the line was the longest I have ever seen, and I don't mean a little longer, I mean 5 to 6 times longer, stretching out of the hall, across the porch, down the front sidewalk, across the length of the sidewalk in front of the building and around the corner to the parking lot, a parking lot that was unusually ineffectual with so many people arriving to vote. However, our line moved continually and I was done in an hour. I called Isaac and he said that the line had been half again longer when he was there early in the morning.
As I think I always write on election day, I love seeing the diversity of young and old and every ethnic persuasion who show up to participate in democracy. The evening news loves to show these groups of people at each other's throats over contentious political issues, but today everyone was in a good mood and talked to their neighbors-in-line about matters of common interest to neighbors-in-fact.
It was a celebration today, despite the light rain when I was there mid-morning. People were in a festive mood. Poll workers offered sample ballots and coffee. The woman in front of me had a "porta-seat" with her, one of those three-legged devices that folds up into a cane. She could have made a tidy profit if only she'd been selling them!
As always, I'm pleased to have the little bilingual sticker on my shirt that says "I Voted / Yo Voté".
In: All, Current Events, Reflections
Beard of the Week LVI: Hand-Made Vacuum Tubes
This week's beard belongs to Claude Paillard, also known since 1959 as F2FO when he apparently received his amateur-radio license. M. Paillard's beard is on view after about 15 minutes in this 17 minute video, although his hands are visible much more frequently.
The title of the film, "Fabrication d'une lampe triode" ("Build a triode vacuum tube") may sound unusually recherché or highly metaphorical, but it is meant literally. M. Paillard is an amateur radio enthusiast with an interest in historic radio equipment (or, poetically in the original: "Amoureux et respectueux des vieux et vénérables composants"). As far as I can make out from the page about this film and M. Paillard — my French is getting rusty and the Google translator is useful but not nuanced — he was involved in a project to restore an old radio station and needed to build some triode vacuum tubes.
This film illustrates how he did this from scratch. It amazes me. He demonstrates so many skills and techniques that simply are not called upon much anymore and are largely being forgotten. It all makes me feel rather dated just because I know what a vacuum tube is.
But the beauty of this film, which is almost entirely nonverbal and requires no skills in French, is that watching it will fill you in on exactly what a vacuum tube is. Okay, it won't tell you how it works or why that's useful in electronic circuitry, but you'll get a remarkably tangible understanding of what's inside, and seeing its manufacture by hand, by someone actually touching all the pieces, shaping them and putting them together to make a functional whole, is a remarkable learning experience.
(The video was brought to my attention by boing-boing.)
In: All, Beard of the Week, Curious Stuff, It's Only Rocket Science
To Be Alive and in a Museum
From 8 February to 26 October, 2008, the National Portrait Gallery had an exhibition called "Recognize! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture". Seven artists were represented, in photography, film, painting, graffiti, and poetry. The two graffiti artists were Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp, both living in Washington, DC.
Alas, I didn't see the show. I will admit to being old enough and uptight enough that the idea of graffiti on public surfaces as art rather than vandalism still causes conflicts in my mind, but the photographs of their work on display is exciting: vibrant, colorful, and brilliantly executed. Conlon and Hupp collaborate, it seems; one excels at figurative art, the other at lettering, so they combined their talents. (See their work on this page.)
In the NPG blog ("RECOGNIZE! Graffiti Art"), Deborah Sisum wrote about the pair, and transcribed part of the interview with NPG web developer Benjamin Bloom (available on page linked above). I really enjoyed Hupp's enthusiasm and his attitude in this bit:
BB [for NPG]: How do you feel about graffiti being in a museum?
DH [Dave Hupp]: Well I’m glad to be alive and be in the Smithsonian. Because I guess not too long ago, you had to be dead to be in the Portrait Gallery, right?
BB [for NPG]: That’s true.
DH [Dave Hupp]: So to be alive and be in it is good! It’s a sign of the times. Some people may say “hey you’re a sell-out.” I look at it like being a musician, and never making an album or putting a CD out. Why are you strumming on that guitar for twenty years, if you can’t make a buck, or be seen, or be heard? And this is a way to be seen and be heard. This is huge—I guess when I walk down that marble floor and through the pillars and see these huge panels affixed to the wall, I’ll be like “damn, that’s our stuff.”
Which Votes Decide?
Yes, I am getting a little impatient during this campaign, but not with the campaign itself, which seems to have been rather well paced. No, I've long ago lost patience with all the bellyaching from people who are so tired of this campaign and just want it to be over.
It started (at least) near the beginning of the year. We got to March and, for reasons beyond my comprehension, most people seemed to think that the Democratic primary should have been settled already. Tsk, I said, that's what conventions are for: to choose a nominee. Can you imagine a few decades ago actually having to wait! (Of course, it's a trick rhetorical question, since not so many people were involved in the process nor did they care quite so much as people seem to today.)
Then it's September and pundits and bloggers are demanding to know why Obama hadn't sewn it all up already. Tsk, I said, that's what the election is for!
Hae you noticed all the tiresome people who claim to disdain the horse-race aspect of campaigning then talk breathlessly about how we're winning or losing as a new poll appears every fifteen minutes?
I fail to understand how one can be winning or losing. Elections are discrete events that change the state of the candidates: before the event, they are both candidates; after the event, someone is a winner.* One does not become a winner gradually, although one can gain intentions to vote but those really don't count for anything until they are actualized in the voting event.†
So, to me, an election is something that happens as a discrete event (let's overlook early voting for the moment, too), and it has an outcome that is not yet determined but will be known sometime after the event. Except for all the psychological battles that go into the war for intentions to vote, I don't see any reason to anticipate the election event. I believe, deep down, that I really do not care one bit for the horse-race aspect, which I find tedious–but not so tedious as all those who complain about it.
I actually think that Obama's campaign has been well paced as it built its arguments and momentum geared toward the election-day event. Very unusual! Remember all those people wringing their hands in–what?–September when Obama took a weekend of vacation? To my mind it was a perfect opportunity to take a bit of time off and refresh the candidate before the endgame.
Today we arrived at my most peevish pet peeve, namely which votes will win it for which candidate. Current punditing has it that Ohio will determine the election.
What could that possibly mean? Remember, I see the election as a discrete event, albeit one extended over a period of time. Before the event, no votes are cast and no one has won; after the event all votes are counted and someone has won. Take away the necessary number of votes for the winning candidate, in any arbitrary combination, and a different candidate would have won. While votes are being counted the result is in an indeterminate state that I find most interesting: the outcome is determined but still unknown.**
Evidently I lack sufficient imagination to see how one can make the claim that any particular votes determined the election. It might be fun, enlightening even, to discuss how one group of voters or another contributed to a candidate's win or loss, or the demographics of the voters, but just because group Z contributed some number of votes that, when moved from one column to another would have changed the outcome of the election, there is no sense in which those votes determine the outcome. The winner is the one who obtains a specified fraction of the necessary type of votes.#
Honestly, I do get excited sometimes about campaigns and election results, but I try to save my anxieties for those things where it might be useful.
———-
* This is obviously a physicist's simplification since there can be plenty of circumstances that can deflect that simple outcome, but this is a first-order approximation anyway.
† You might be inclined to see this as something dangerously akin to the "observer effect" in quantum mechanics, but it's really not and I'd rather avoid that comparison, largely because I have some professional issues with the Copenhagen interpretation anyway.
** After polls close people love to speculate on the outcome of the count as is proceeds but, honestly, I don't see the point. It really makes no sense to me to talk about who's "ahead" anytime during that process.
# Regardless of how people feel about the importance of the popular vote in the presidential election, the result is nevertheless determined (except in extraordinary circumstances) by who wins the most votes in the electoral college, at least until we choose a different method, a process fraught with difficulties.
In: All, Current Events, Feeling Peevish
On Reading The Carbon Age
I recently finished reading The Carbon Age : How Life's Core Element has Become Civilization's Greatest Threat, by Eric Roston (New York : Walker & Company, 2008. 308 pages). I very much enjoyed the act of reading it, but it was only when I was writing about it that I realized that is really an excellent book on all counts. My book note is here.
In this case I think what I admired the most was the author's scienticity, which is how we refer to a scientific / rational / analytical / naturalistic perspective combined with the fortitude to integrate science moments into a larger cultural context. Mr. Roston did an excellent job of it, making it entertaining and informative without being the least bit silly or imprecise. As you may recall, I'm easily irritated by authors writing about science who do not take the trouble to be precise and thoughtful in their scientific exposition, but I had no such reaction here. If my memory is correct, I thought there was one explanation, out of the 300 pages, where the concept being explained was slightly befuddled–not a bad record!
But, our purpose here is to provide a place for a few excerpts that just didn't fit into the book note for some reason or that I marked specially for blogging. (It's true! Sometimes there are bits of the text that I think are a must-share but they don't share the tone of a book note, so it's lucky you!)
In this first excerpt, we're in the midst of a long discussion about carbon's place in the origins of life and how its central role may have come about. One of the great steps forward happened very, very early in the process. In a world of one-celled life, one cell managed to trap another cell inside it and the two continue to reproduce together to this day. Eukaryotes are organisms, including humans and most everything we think of as life except bacteria, whose cells are complex systems containing a nucleus and other parts, including mitochondira, which produce the energy the cell runs on by breaking down ("burning") carbohydrates. I liked this terse, elegant, and altogether sensible paragraph about that moment.
The capture and integration of one cell by another is called endosymbiosis. Nearly all eukaryotes have little organs ("organelles") called mitochondria. These cellular energy centers descend from purple sulfur bacteria, inhabitants of stomatolites in Shark Bay. This class of bacteria has made its living for as long as 3 billion years by using oxygen to burn carbohydrate fuel. Deep in the evolutionary past, some oxygen-breathing bacteria became engulfed within anaerobic cells, which needed help thriving in an atmosphere of increasing oxygen. These bacteria are the ancestors of our cellular power plants. The evidence is that bacteria and mitochondria share much of the same DNA. [p. 73]
In this next short excerpt, Roston comments on the familial culture of experimental scientists. I've known this phenomenon myself. I started out in low-temperature physics, an experimental discipline that appeared early in the 20th century when Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, the Dutch physicist, first liquefied helium in 1908. We were a small community and everyone could trace their lineage; there are only a couple of major branches of the family. I don't think I've seen this written about elsewhere and I thought Roston's observations were very perceptive.
Labs are structured as intellectual family fiefdoms. A professor "raises" his graduate students, who grow up and fan out across the world of research universities and private industry. Virtually everyone's intellectual ancestors [in chemical synthesis] can be traced back to J.J. Berzelius, the Swedish chemist who first called carbon "C". Every generation tends the repository of knowledge, weeding out its predecessor's bad ideas, answering some of their questions, and asking many of their own. [p. 135]
In: All, Books, It's Only Rocket Science
Something Inside of Them
One Stephen Baldwin (a person not really known to me) is quoted (by Andy at Towleroad) as saying:
It doesn’t mean that I think personally that making that [gay] lifestyle choice is wrong. The Bible says it's wrong and I believe in the Bible and I stand for that.
Misdirection + indirection. Cool! This is the neatest thing about modern gay lib and campaign wedge issues and California's Proposition 8: finding out who really, really hates homosexuality but really, really, really loves homosexuals.
And now, apparently, even more ways to have both ways. Not long ago we had Sarah Palin* who explained that she would never, ever personally judge anyone who might make, you know, that lifestyle choice, she feels that an anti-gay national constitutional amendment would be a good thing–but not personally judgmental or anything.
And so, the newest clever idea for indirectly expressing one's homophobia: oh, I don't care at all if people make that lifestyle choice, but I support the bible and my book doesn't like it.
I still remember, from decades ago now, a tiny newspaper article in which the reporter was talking to then president Ronald Reagan (remember him?), who had just had an operation to remove some cancer. The reporter referred to Reagan's cancer, and the president responded with "Oh no, I didn't have cancer. Something inside of me had cancer and it was taken out."
It was scary then; it's scary now.
__________
* I feel that I should explain, for people who might be reading this blog posting, say, a couple of months after the 2008 election, that Sarah Palin was the vice-presidential candidate of the Republican party, chosen by the now-forgotten John McCain for reasons that no one could fathom. At the time she was the governor of Alaska, a state where people evidently feel that the governor is not an important position in government.
In: All, Current Events, Feeling Peevish
Beard of the Week LV: SX-70
This week's beards belongs to an anonymous actor in this film from 1972. The film is 10:47 long; the actor who provides the excuse to include this first-ever video at Beard of the Week appears very, very briefly at the 1:48 mark; or, if you prefer, it's a different actor who appears very, very briefly at the 9:58 mark. The name of this extraordinary film is "SX-70"; it was made by Charles and Ray Eames. (Whether you should watch first or read first I can't say; if you have the time, watch then read then watch again.)
Some of us will be old enough to remember the Polaroid SX-70 camera and how exciting and modern it was. Such advanced technology! As the narrator says near the beginning:
Since 1947, Edwin Land and Polaroid have pursued a central concept, one single thread: the removal of the barriers between the photographer and his subject. [Title: "SX-70"] And now, a compact, folding, electronically controlled, motor-driven, single-lens reflex camera, capable of focusing from infinity down to ten inches, has been developed to exploit integral self-processing film units which, when exposed, are automatically ejected from the camera, with no parts to peel or discard, and whose final images emerge without timing, in daylight, where the viewer can see them materialize within the same transparent protective plastic cover through which the film was originally exposed.
The SX-70 looked like no other camera before or after, and worked like no other camera, either. The film was the culmination of this dream of Edwin Land's, and the camera's design and engineering gave the distinct impression that it had been thought about without preconceptions of how a camera should look.
But this isn't just about the camera, which is a marvel. I'm more interested right now in this film about the camera, and the film itself is a marvel.
From the Eames Office page about the film, some of the credits:
Presentation of the revolutionary SX-70 Land camera and its aesthetic potential that becomes a meditation on the nature of photography. A tour-de-force of filmmaking that gives the audience a real understanding of the workings of the camera.
Filmmakers: Charles and Ray Eames
Sponsor: Polaroid
Composer: Elmer Bernstein
Narrator: concluding statement by Philip Morrison
Date: 1972
Charles and Ray Eames were the remarkably creative and remarkably influential husband-and-wife design team working mostly from the 40s through the 60s (a quick biographical survey). Many of their designs have become so iconic that they are recognizable by countless people who have never heard of the Eames. There is just so much that I can't begin to organize my thoughts about them here, where my focus is on this one film anyway. When you have time, explore Charles & Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention.
Next in the credits is Elmer Bernstein, noted composer of many, many famous film scores like those for "To Kill a Mockingbird", "The Ten Commandments", "The Blues Brothers", and "Ghostbusters", to name a small fraction. The score is just a few instruments, nothing that's going to take a lot of time assembling and orchestrating, but nevertheless thoughtfully written and quite suitable for the film.
Then there's Philip Morrison, whose distinctive voice appears near the end, where he takes over from the anonymous narrator in the rest of the film. Morrison, who died in 2005, was a physicist of some renown, but I think his more important contribution was as an explainer and popularizer of science, as he did with his remarkable television series (and book), "The Ring of Truth" (1987). Then there was the "Powers of Ten" project (1977), the justly famous film of which he worked on with the Eames (watch the nine-minute film). He had also been the main reviewer of books for Scientific American since 1965, a remarkable legacy.
But this list of luminaries would contribute empty celebrity if the film itself weren't brilliant, and it is. It was shown originally at a Polaroid shareholders meeting and subsequently used internally as a sales tool. It was not made for average viewers, perhaps, and wouldn't be the right tone for a television advertisement, but it's not intended for a predominantly technical audience, either. Instead, it's made for viewers of some intelligence who are willing to give it their attention and learn some amazing things.
I am particularly delighted at how the language is kept clear and understandable, particularly as it's supported by the visuals, without being patronizing or gratuitously simplified. Amidst the poetical and metaphysical thoughts about photography as an art form, watch for the exposition about the camera, how it operates, and all the technical advances it contains. Pay attention: it's all too easy to be drawn into the narrative without realizing that all that technical information is entering your mind with relative ease.
As you might expect, there are plenty of people taking pictures with the camera, demonstrating what fun it is and how it is used and its various special features. But look at what they're taking pictures of: several appear to be scientists, or even amateurs of science, documenting the natural world. Of course, there are also proud parents taking pictures of their children, but they're just part of the panorama. But even while we see the parents photographing their kids, we are also shown that the SX-70 has a fast lens, a short focal length, a quick shutter that can stop action, and the ability to take exposures in quick succession. The Eames are not merely marketing the SX-70 in this film, they are demonstrating its capabilities and technologies and making that look easy.
I love the attitude that includes the scientific as part of the cultural, a film that combines poetry and philosophy and technical explanations and kids and nature into one amazing whole that's so amazing one hardly notices that all that's going on. I like how the technical specifications of the camera are explored and shown rather than explained–before the narrated explanation (beginning at about the 4:15 mark) of the internal workings of the camera–assuming a viewer without special technical knowledge but sophisticated enough to absorb the ideas.
Then, when you do get to the technical narrative, notice how crisp and concise the narration is, and how it's so beautifully documented by the combined animation and live action (done in the days before CGI). I don't think it hurts anyone to hear the word "aspheric", even if it's not a familiar word–yet. And while we're there, let's not overlook the achievement of the Eames' documenting the internal mechanisms of the camera. There are as many shots in there as Hitchcock used in that famous murder scene in "Psycho".
Amazing. It inspires me and intimidates me at the same time, which I expect is a good thing.
(This film came to my attention via The Mid-Century Modernist, "Polaroid SX-70 Film by the Eames", 6 September 2008.)
In: All, Beard of the Week, It's Only Rocket Science, Music & Art
"Yes on 8" Adopts Palin-Zombie Tactics
We've talked a time or two about California's Proposition 8, the proposed state constitutional amendment referendum that wants to deny same-sex couples the established right to marry in that state.
There is, of course, an organization advocating in favor of the amendment (largely with money contributed by mormons) with the inspiring name "Yes on 8".
In a story of rather breathtaking stupidity, it is revealed* that "Yes on 8" has sent letters to some 35 Caifornia businesses that are on record as contributors to "Equity California", an organization that advocates for same-sex marriage equality.
In this letter, signed by four members of the "Yes on 8" executive committee, the recipients are urged to make contributions to the "Yes on 8" campaign that matches their contributes to "Equity California", or else:
Were you to elect not to donate comparably, it would be a clear indication that you are in opposition to traditional marriage. You would leave us no other reasonable assumption. The names of any companies and organizations that chose not to donate in like manner to protectmarriage.com but have given to Equality California will be published.
What a curious threat. The groups receiving the letters are already part of the public record and, generally quite proud of the fact that they have contributed in support of marriage equality.
In a campaign season that's seen lots of stupidity, surely this ranks high on the list. As an extortionate protection scheme it's not very well thought out, threatening to "tell" something that the recipients would be happy to publicize. It makes me think of the Monty Python routine about the Piranha Brothers.
And that's what put me in mind of the Palin-Zombie: Republicans Need Brains! Brains!
———-
*Virtually simultaneously in the blogs I read: "Yes on 8 Launches Blackmail Campaign", Box Turtle Bulletin; "Protect Marriage Blackmailing Businesses to Support Prop 8", Towleroad; "Yes On 8 Launches Blackmail Campaign", Joe.My.God; “Yes on 8″ Blackmailing Donors to the 'No' Side" firedoglake; all on 24 October 2008.
In: All, Current Events, Laughing Matters
Greenspan's World Model "Flawed", he admits
For future reference, I wanted to note that Alan Greenspan has detected a flaw in his model of how the world works. Ayn Rand will be spinning in her grave!
Accused of contributing to the meltdown, but denying that it was his fault, [former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan] Greenspan told a House panel the crisis left him – an unabashed free-market advocate – in a "state of shocked disbelief."
The longtime Fed chief acknowledged under questioning that he had made a "mistake" in believing that banks in operating in their self-interest would be sufficient to protect their shareholders and the equity in their institutions. Greenspan called it "a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works."
–Alan Greenspan, 29 October 2008, in remarks to the US House [of Representatives'] Oversight Committee (source)
In: All, Briefly Noted, Current Events
On Hydrogen (& Physics Humor)
I recently finished reading the book Hydrogen : The Essential Element, by John S. Rigden (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2002. vii + 280 pages). Here's my book note. It's a book I can recommend.
As I mentioned in the book note, the "hydrogen" of this book is the physicist's "hydrogen",* the simple atom of electron + proton (with some isotopic variations) that is the simple test case for all physical theories that deal with things atomic: if it doesn't work for hydrogen, it's not going to work.
Hydrogen is overwhelmingly the most abundant atomic species in the universe, making up about 74% (by weight) of the matter we can see. It is the predominant fuel that stars burn through fusion (to make helium nuclei). Hydrogen is the earliest element in the cosmos, protons condensing from a universe of quarks when the temperature finally became low enough, in the period (the "hadron epoch") between one microsecond to one second after the big bang.† It was some time longer before the universe cooled enough (some 380,000 years!) for the protons to capture and hold onto electrons, thus becoming actual atoms of hydrogen (Of course, there had to be electrons to capture; they condensed around one second ABB.#)
Anyway, the history of our modern understanding of the hydrogen atom, and the efforts to gain that understanding, is virtually identical to the history of "modern physics", by which we loosely mean all that physics stuff from the early twentieth century: quantum mechanics and its friends. Lots of other interesting things get thrown in, too, from all the attention the hydrogen atom got. A couple of the more interesting: the development of the hydrogen maser and very high precision time keeping (i.e., "atomic clocks", leading to the GPS), and the invention of a technique known to physicists as NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance), which in recent decades developed into the familiar MRI (magnetic-resonance imaging‡).
Anyway, that's book-note stuff. What we're all about here is a couple of leftover quotations from the book that go under the heading: "Physicist's and their Strange Sense of Humor". The first two quotations reveal things that physicists find almost knee-slappingly funny but may remain inscrutable to nonscientists (and I wouldn't worry about that either, if I were you–you're not missing all that much).
Paul Dirac was a[n] unusual person. Perhaps because Dirac's father demanded that his young son use French rather than his native English to converse with him, the young Dirac adopted the habit of silence during his childhood simply because he could not express his thoughts in French. Whatever the reason, the adult Paul Dirac was a a man of silence. Dirac's silence was so intense that it inspired a little levity among physicists. In physics, the units given to physical quantities like time or length are important. Physicists, clearly in jest [!], have defined the unit of silence as the dirac. [p. 89]
For this second joke, I might mention that it was Ed Purcell who pioneered the NMR technique, and that the technique uses magnetic properties of the hydrogen atom, which moves much like a gyroscope when magnetically disturbed (hence the reference to "precessing"**).
I remember, in the winter of our first experiments, just seven years ago, looking at snow…around my doorstep–great heaps of protons quietly precessing in the earth's magnetic field.
–Edward M. Purcell [quoted on p. 137]
Finally, this one goes into that file where we put really bad predictions of what the future might hold.
In 1952, neither Purcell nor Bloch could have predicted the ways their discovery would advance understanding of solids, of the structure of chemical molecules, and even more. In fact, a representative from Dupont Chemical Company visited Purcell soon after the paper announcing the discovery was published. The Dupont scientist asked Purcell what the practical applications of NMR might be. Purcell responded that he could see no practical applications. In this, Purcell was very wrong. [p. 147]
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* Rather than, say, a chemist's "hydrogen" with discussions of interesting molecules and acids and reducing reactions and carbohydrates, etc. Nor is it an engineer's "hydrogen", nor a politician's "hydrogen" (as in "hydrogen economy"). They're all stories for another book for someone else to write. What a publishing opportunity!
† I just read this the other day about the big bang and the origin of the cosmos (and now I forget who gets the attribution): "In the beginning there was nothing, then it exploded."
# We could just say "it happened at one second", since the current understanding has it that time (whatever it is besides a whole other story) began with the big bang.
‡ I'm sure I've expressed my peevishness before about how the perfectly good word "nuclear" had to be expunged before MRI could be a commercial success.
** When some body, like the Earth or a hydrogen nucleus, rotates about an axis, and that axis is tilted relative to some other axis about which the tilted axis itself executes a (generally much slower) rotation (a kind of wobble), that latter motion is referred to as "precession". The precession of the Earth's axis takes about 26,000 years. Hydrogen atoms do it at about 500 megahertz (or 500,000,000 times each second).
In: All, Books, It's Only Rocket Science
Californians to Vote on Ellen's Divorce…
…not to mention George Takai's, not also to mention that of several tens of thousands of same-sex couples now married. You may recall that on the next voting day in California, residents of that state get to vote on "Proposition 8", a proposed constitutional amendment intended to remove the established right of same-sex couples to marry in that state.
In her blog, Ellen had this to say:
Hey everybody. There’re only a couple weeks left before we vote. In California there’s a proposition that’s trying to take away my right to be married. And if it passes, my marriage will probably no longer be valid.
The supporters of Proposition 8 have raised more than $25 million just to discriminate against same-sex couples who want to get married. That’s a lot of money.
I can think of 25 million other uses for all that money:
– How about paying teachers more?
– What about helping those people who just lost their homes in the recent fires?
– How about buying a pony for every child in California? How much fun would that be?!Don’t let them convince you that discrimination is okay just because they can pay for a commercial. It’s wrong. Please vote NO ON PROPOSITION 8! I’m begging you. If you vote no on Prop 8, I’ll buy you a pony.
[Ellen DeGeneres, "Don't Discriminate — No on 8!", The Ellen DeGeneres Show, 22 October 2008.]
Aside from its sheer size, the $25 million raised (wasted?) by opponents of marriage equality (aka "sore losers") is interesting because some $18 million of it came from members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. NB: it didn't come from the church itself, which would be illegal; it came from members of the church who were strongly urged by church leadership to "do everything they could" to win passage of Proposition 8.
It's not entirely clear why Mormons feel the intense need to see the right of same-sex couples to marry taken away. Some commentors believe that the LDS church is trying to win (buy) respectability from other denominations. Whatever, I think it's perverse.
Regardless, most of the money goes for buying television advertisements–another huge waste of money, in my opinion. A pony would be much more fun.
But anyway, these advertisements are rather strident, hysterical, and excessively untruthful. Apparently one of the biggest ways that civilization as we know it will end is through the teaching to second-graders that same-sex marriage is okay!. Goodbye civilization.
This end-of-civilization event is dramatized by a young girl's arriving at home an announcing "Guess what we learned in school today! That a prince can marry a prince!" In this hysterical universe the mother appears horrified as the ominous voice-over intones something about "Don't think it can happen…?"
Here's why this surprises me: doesn't virtually every second-grader (or there-abouts-grader) announce his or her intention to marry his or her best friend? Isn't this best friend — the betrothed — usually of the same gender as the betrother?
Furthermore, isn't this situation nearly always one that embarrasses parents and makes them wring their hands, wondering how to answer? "Nearly always" because there are always a few non-neurotic parents who know enough to say "that's nice dear, we'll all come to the wedding" and worry about it no further. Then there are those, I guess, for whom this question is the early warning sign of impending choice by their young one to adopt the you-know-what lifestyle and they feel the pressure to answer the question very, very carefully lest they impel their child in the wrong direction. Horror!
Well, for those who worry in California (or Massachusetts, or Connecticut), they currently have the easy answer: "that's nice dear, we'll all come to the wedding since it's a constitutional right". Done. Clean, tidy, non-embarrassing and unlikely to be a major contributor to the child's lifestyle choice.
Unless, of course, they — the parents who worry so much that a gay person somewhere might be secretly happy and that this innocent question from their own child might signal the presence of a gay-to-be in their midst — are successful in taking away the right of Californians to marry the partner they love.
Now, why would they shoot themselves in the foot like that? Wouldn't a pony be a lot more fun?
In: All, Current Events, Faaabulosity
Another Little Palin Song
Thanks to Alex Ross, who writes about music at The New Yorker and in his blog, my attention was drawn to this quirky little "number", a collaboration between Sarah Palin and pianist/composer Henry Hey. I love quirky, as you know by now.
Ross described it as "Sarah Palin's magisterial explication of the Wall Street bailout, with an ingenious, speech-based accompaniment somewhat in the manner of Steve Reich's Different Trains." At the YouTube page, Hey says "Sarah Palin sings a little song to Katie Couric. … I did this Thursday afternoon in between some work."
I love what happens in between some work. Who knew she had such hidden talent as a vocal stylist? (About Mr. Hey the evidence of his creative talent is more evident.)
In: All, Current Events, Music & Art
David Sedaris on Undecided Voters
I look at these people [undecided voters interviewed on TV] and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?
To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”
To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
[David Sedaris, "Undecided", The New Yorker, 27 October 2008 issue.]
(Thanks to Joe.My.God)
In: All, Common-Place Book, Current Events
Beard of the Week LIV: Waters of Thirst
This week's beard belongs to British writer Adam Mars-Jones (b. 1954); I haven't yet identified the terrier (despite the fact that they seem to be always depicted together / photo source).
Mars-Jones has a large literary reputation for an author with — until now — a surprisingly small output of fiction. I know him for two things: a collection of short stories, Monopolies of Loss (1992), and his first novel, The Waters of Thirst (1993). On the strength of those two work he's been on my personal list of favorite fiction authors for over a decade.* I have yet to read an earlier collection of short stories, Lantern Lecture (1981), nor his collection of essays, Blind Bitter Happiness (1997).
After this amount of time, given my spotty memory, I barely remember what either the novel or the short stories were about, but I do remember the intensity with which I enjoyed reading them. It was a sense of amazement at the beauty of the words Mars-Jones chose to use to tell stories that fascinated me. About The Waters of Thirst I wrote in my book of books (see footnote): "A tour-de-force, literary novel that I read as compulsively as a best-selling page-turner. Breathtaking seems an understatement." When it comes to "literary" novels I so often veer towards considering them pretentious or unreadable that I consider this high praise.
At least those two books made enough of an impression that I kept Mars-Jones' name in my mental list for over a decade of no new books coming to my attention. During that time the internet came into its own and I could do things like search for his name to find out whether he was even still alive. He was. He was mostly working as a book reviewer for the London Observer, which I thought was a bit of a let down, actually.
Ah, but this year there's been buzz. Why? Mars-Jones has just published a new novel, called Pilcrow. The reason for the buzz is that this novel, far from the slim, obviously literary The Waters of Thirst, is some 500 pages long. Not only that, but it's planned as the first book of a trilogy. This will explain the title of the review in the Telegraph: "Adam Mars-Jones: When the dam breaks" (5 April 2008).
Here is a paragraph of a review from the Guardian Books Blog ("Waiting for Pilcrow", by Ryan Gilbey, 14 March 2008)
Out of this fertile terrain has sprung – if that's not too urgent a word for a work that's been so long coming – the writer's second novel, Pilcrow, a richly-textured prequel to "Everything is Different in Your House" that runs a generous 544 pages to the original story's 23. Pilcrow (which will be published in April) covers John Cromer's life from birth, in early-1950s Bourne End, to adolescence, and places the reader squarely inside his busy-bee mind and encumbered body. While the latter is inhibited by the onset of Still's Disease, a condition exacerbated by the prescription of bed-rest ("Those years in bed had been a sort of kiln slowly baking my joints into hardness"), John's loop-the-looping imagination renders him and his prose weightless; fantasies, conceits and word-games are woven from the humblest materials. And if you thought you knew the nooks and crannies of the coming-of-age genre, to which Pilcrow tentatively belongs (at least in its latter section), then the novel will prove especially refreshing. "Adolescent fumbling" doesn't cover the extent to which John's body, and the bodies of his various objects of desire, impede the course of true lust ("Because of the inflexibility of my wrists, there was no possibility of me turning my palms towards Julian's crotch. I would have to make do with the backs of my hands").
From another review ("Adam Mars-Jones", Gay Times [UK], 8 April 2008) I particularly enjoyed reading this: "Early readers of the book have been surprised that it has the bad manners to be funny", because it reminded me that beautiful words put beautifully together can still contain a great deal of humor, and I remember that I had laughed before while reading his stories.
Some critics of Mars-Jones that I've read, generally those who find him too toney or hoity-toity, love to mention that he was a Granta "Best of Young British Novelists" in both 1983 and 1993, the first time well before he'd written a novel. (These are generally the same critics who find Granta too hoity-toity, so the association serves their purposes. One presumes that those critics had pieces rejected by Granta. Such is the objective nature of literary criticism.)
Well, one man's hoity-toity is another man's ebulliently allusive writing. As an example that I found online, you might like to read Mars-Jones' essay "Quiet, Please" (Granta 86: Film, Summer 2004), his thoughts on how important it can be to leave out the musical soundtrack occasionally and let the movie tell its story by itself. If it doesn't seem too hoity-toity to you (i.e., too Granta), you'll probably marvel at the rich expression of his writing.
Finally, from the small amount of available online Mars-Jones, this curious pair of essays. The first is "I Was a Teenage Homophone" (New Statesman, 19 June 1996); the second is "We don't want to be special now" (New Statesman, 14 February 2000). The first is a more personal work about Mars-Jones delayed puberty and delayed discovery of his own homosexuality; the second looks at the recent history of "gay liberation", finding some differences between how it happen in America and how it happens in Britain.
I expect I'll report back on Pilcrow once I've had a chance to get a copy and read it.
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* I read Monopolies of Loss in January of 1996, and The Waters of Thirst in February of 1997. My "Book of Books" is very convenient sometimes!
In: All, Beard of the Week, Books, Faaabulosity
Random Reading
Perhaps I was inspired by the idea of random in our recent discussion (okay, monologue) about random noise, but I thought of one more little bit of random noise to finish it off.
Namely, I added a link, which should appear in the top of the right-side column, that, if you click on it, will produce a randomly* selected posting from this blog. With (just now) over 1,175 to select from you can waste quite a bit of time without ever having to make any volitional choices. Amazing!
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*Well, pseudo-random to be precise. What's the difference? Random-number generators on computers are not actually random but they do produce a sequence of numbers that appear very nearly random. You know they're not random because if you start one over in exactly the same way as before, it will produce exactly the same sequence of numbers as before; such sequences also repeat themselves sooner or later, although the better designed ones can produce sequences of 10,000 numbers or more before they repeat.
Computers running programs, which are deterministic machines (at least these days, even if some Microsoft products don't seem all that predictable), cannot produce sequences that are actually random. However, there are simple pieces of hardware that can be added to a computer system in order to generate sequences of real, actual random numbers.
In fact, I just learned from Wikipedia (Random Number Generators) that 8-bit Atari computers actually contained an electronic circuit that sampled random electronic noise to generate actual random sequences. This is discussed in an article ("RANDOM ATARI: Enhancing the number generator", by David McIntosh, dating from March 1989) that talks about how to generate a pseudo-random sequence for testing programs, when one needs reproducibility. Some people are never satisfied!
School-Bus Driver Assaults 10-Year-Old Passenger
I've been hearing bits about this story for a couple of days. Some things simply defy understanding. Here is a summary from the hometown newspaper:
A Bourbonnais [Illinois] Elementary School District No. 53 bus driver was arrested Thursday [9 October 2008] for mob action after he allegedly taunted a 10-year-old student and encouraged others on the bus to chase after the boy.
Russell A. Schmalz, 46, was arrested by the Kankakee Sheriff's Police Department, Chief Deputy Ken McCabe said. Schmalz is also charged with endangering the life of a child and battery.
"The incident occurred last Friday," McCabe said, alleging that Schmalz was taunting the boy by calling him "gay."
"When the boy got off the bus the driver encouraged several other students to go after him and tackle him. Our investigation shows that occurred," McCabe said this morning.
[Bill Byrns, "Bourbonnais bus driver arrested after alleged taunting", The Daily Journal, 10 October 2008.]
In: All, Current Events, Plus Ca Change...