On Not Reading Singh's Fermat's Enigma
For a few days recently I was reading Simon Singh's book, Fermat's Enigma : The Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem (New York : Walker and Company, 1997, 315 pages). However, I stopped reading after about 80 pages.
The reason had nothing to do with the subject, which was interesting and developing reasonably well. Finding out more about Fermat, his work and his life and his time, and learning some about the man who has apparently proved Fermat's notorious "last theorem" (Wikipedia on Fermat's Last Theorem can fill you in on those details if you want) was all to my liking.
What was not to my liking was Singh's writing. It was writing that was too loose, too flabby when dealing with subjects that I feel require more precision in their presentation. Writing a popular treatment about a mathematical or scientific subject is no time for technically sloppy or carelessly inaccurate prose. Writing for the scientifically or technically unsophisticated reader demands care. I'm sure you're aware by now that this is an idée fixe for me, and for Ars Hermeneutica.
There were no major transgressions but a pile-up of minor infractions to the point that it was irritating. Let's look at a few examples.
Mathematical theorems rely on this logical process [of proof] and once proven are true until the end of time. Mathematical proofs are absolute. To appreciate the value of such proofs they should be compared with their poor relation, the scientific proof. [p.21]
In one sense you could say that once proven mathematical theorems are true, in the sense that once proven they stayed proved. However, the sentence is sloppy and ambiguous as a result, suggesting that perhaps the theorem was not true before it was proven.
That is not the way mathematicians look at theorems and proofs, however. Theorems are seen more as emergent truths of a mathematical system, statements that have always existentially true but unknown to be true before they are discovered and their truth established by means of proof.
It's akin to finding a rock and saying "I recognize this as a sedimentary rock, so it will henceforth be a sedimentary rock." Most of us would look askance at such a statement with the obvious reaction: "Wasn't it always a sedimentary rock, even before anyone saw it?"
Arguing in the author's favor, I suspect that he didn't mean his sentence this way; rather, he wanted to make the point that once the truth of a theorem is established by proof, that proof remains valid unless an error is discovered in the proof or some problem is discovered in the mathematical system in which the theorem and proof is embedded. However, that's not what he wrote.
As for that bit about "their poor relation, the scientific proof"–it will take at least another entire essay for me to deal with the issues raised by that "poor relation" jibe (it doesn't upset me that much) and the lack of understanding surrounding the reference to "scientific proof" (that does upset me quite a bit).
Together Fermat and Pascal would discover the first proofs and cast-iron certainties in probability theory, a subject that is inherently uncertain. [p. 40]
Yikes! According to the book-jacket, Mr. Singh has an advanced degree in particle physics. A great deal of experimental particle physics means looking at decay products of high-energy nuclear interactions, processes that are governed by probabilities. Exact probabilities in many cases. He should know better than to write that probability theory is "inherently uncertain." Probability theory is a mathematical discipline with exact results, and those exact results describe processes that are inherently uncertain. To ascribe "inherent uncertainty" to a discipline whose subject is "inherent uncertainty" is naive and/or thoughtless, and does nothing here to keep the unsophisticated reader from getting confused.
Fermat's panoply of theorems ranged from the fundamental to the simply amusing. Mathematicians rank the importance of theorems according to their impact on the rest of mathematics. [p. 66]
I simply found this statement bizarre, suggesting as it does that there are mathematicians someplace whose job it is to rank the importance of theorems to the world of mathematics. Do they have a list they check against? Where do they publish their list of theorems, ordered by importance?
Of course Mr. Singh is talking figuratively, looking for an "objective" way to describe the importance of Fermat's theorem, but he does it again with sloppy writing that suggests something quite other than what he intended.
Instances like these kept cropping up and their irritation overwhelmed me by around page 80. I knew by then that I wouldn't enjoy reading the book and it didn't even seem worth the bother of finishing so that I could write a negative book note–I much prefer guiding potential readers towards good books rather than away from bad books.
Part of my professional mission, though, is to consider how we (the big "we" of those who write science for general consumption) communicate science, and how we can communicate it better. Sometimes that means looking at examples of miscommunication so that we can improve. Think of is as an engineering approach (as Henry Petroski does in his excellent books) in which failure has much to tell us about how to succeed.
In: All, Books, It's Only Rocket Science, Writing
Reich on Ignoring Economists
After hearing Hillary Clinton say on television this morning: "I'm not going to put my lot in with economists” , Robert Reich wrote
In case you’ve missed it, we now have a president who doesn’t care what most economists think. George W. Bush doesn’t even care what scientists think. He rejects all experts who disagree with his politics. This has led to some extraordinarily stupid policies.
[Robert Reich, "Hillary Clinton Doesn't Listen to Economists", Robert Reich's Blog, 4 May 2008.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Current Events
Park on EMF Non-Dangers
Just in case you came in late, or you don't remember the events of the time, and never realized the terror that could be induced by toasters, Robert Park updates us on the utter lack of danger associated with electromagnetic fields (EMF).
HYBRIPHOBIA: REMEMBER WHEN POWER LINES CAUSED CANCER?
EMF stopped causing cancer in 1997, but no one bothered to tell Jim Motavalli, who wrote an Automobile column in the Sunday New York Times about the risks of EMF in hybrids. According to Motavalli the National Cancer Institute studied the cancer risks associated with electromagnetic fields. And so it did – but it couldn’t find any. You might think Motavalli would at least check the Archives of the New York Times. On July 3, 1997, the day the massive four-year NCI study of power lines and cancer appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Gina Kolata reported in the Times that the study was unambiguous and found no health effects associated with electromagnetic fields. An editorial in the same issue of the Journal put it in perspective: "Hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into studies that never had much promise of finding a way to prevent the tragedy of cancer in children. It is time to stop wasting our research resources." It all began in 1979 when Nancy Wertheimer, an unemployed epidemiologist, and her friend Ed Leeper, drove around Denver looking for common environmental factors in the homes of childhood victims of leukemia. It practically jumped out at them – every home had electricity. Their study was so flawed it would have been laughed off but for Paul Brodeur, a scientifically-ignorant writer for The New Yorker. He wrote a series of terrifying articles about power lines and cancer that were collected in a 1989 book, Currents of Death.[Robert Park, What's New, 2 May 2008.]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Snake Oil--Cheap!
Fast-Tack Evolution
The story, as it's told online in National Geographic News,* goes like this.
n 1971, scientists transplanted five adult pairs of [Italian wall lizards] from their original island home in Pod Kopiste to the tiny neighboring island of Pod Mrcaru, both in the south Adriatic Sea[, off the coast of Croatia].
Genetic testing on the Pod Mrcaru lizards confirmed that the modern population of more than 5,000 Italian wall lizards are all descendants of the original ten lizards left behind in the 1970s.
However, the Pod Mrcaru/Italian wall lizards of today are no longer much like the original pair. It seems that the population has evolved some new digestive strategies–and parts!–along with a different head with a stronger jaw to go along with the new strategy. All this they managed to do in only 30 generations on the island.
As the report says, all of the current lizards have been tested genetically and are known to be descended from the original pair. It also turns out that the new lizards have displaced the aboriginal lizards on the island when the first pair were transplanted. There is no determination mentioned about whether the new lizard is a different species from the original pair.
Isn't that interesting! Evolution in action, and on a surprisingly short time scale. How can this be possible though? Doesn't evolution take ages and ages to accomplish change?
Yes and no. As our understanding of evolution (and natural selection) improves and deepens, it seems that evolution is anything but uniformly slow and uniformly steady.# Indeed, the more modern understanding is coming to terms with how genetic information is prepared, as it were, to make rapid changes when the occasion arises. Some of this is touched on in Sean Carroll's book Endless Forms Most Beautiful.
Of course there is a political aspect to this report of scientific findings. Some evolution deniers will continue to deny that speciation is possible through evolution, but they will be seen to be wrong, probably sooner rather than later, too.
__________
*Kimberly Johnson, "Lizards Rapidly Evolve After Introduction to Island", National Geographic News, 21 April 2008.
#Although I don't really see the need to turn to the concept of Punctuated Equilibrium, as promoted by Eldredge & Gould to incorporate the nonuniformity. Doing so seems to me to caricature any realistic understanding of gradualism.
In: All, Eureka!, It's Only Rocket Science
Baroquen Bean-Paste
Matthew Guerrieri, at Soho the Dog (in "Miso, Soy of Man's Desiring") alerted me to a new product of immeasurable possible interest: Bach-Infused Miso Bean Paste.
According to company officials, the bean paste fermented for 150 days while the music of Johann Sebastian Bach was playing continuously (nearby? loudly? within its hearing?). There is, however, no indication of what salutary effects could be expected beyond improved profits for the manufacturer.
In: All, Curious Stuff, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Cheap Science Quiz
In a personal effort to promote science literacy, I took the very short# online quiz called "Could You Pass 8th Grade Science?" I'm sure you'll be relieved to know that I passed by answering every answer correctly.
But perhaps this is really a quiz for the quiz-writer, a test that we might call "Could You Pass 8th Grade English?" Unfortunately, one of the words in one of the questions is misspelled,* and one can only get the correct answer by correctly guessing what word was intended by the author. Neither could I find a way to leave a comment for the author suggesting a less embarrassing–and correct–spelling.
__________
#Therefore, it's not very likely to test one's actual knowledge of science as known to an eighth-grader.
*I don't want to spoil all your fun, but the problem is in question #6.
Technical Notice
Last night I upgraded my WordPress software to the recent version 2.5.1. It was a substantial change since I had been at version 1.5.2 for some time. Today I tidied up some details, particularly in the plugins.
The upgrade seems to have gone smoothly and it looks like I have everything working again now.
Please, if you happen to notice something that has gone awry and not been repaired, let me know in the comments.
Edward Lorenz and His Butterflies
The image at right is a gorgeous rendering† of a mystifying object known as the Lorenz Attractor. It shares its name with Edward Lorenz, its discoverer, who died earlier this month at the age of 90.* Edward Lorenz is sometimes called "the father of chaos", and the Lorenz attractor is the reason.
Lorenz was a mathematician and meteorologist. In the early 1960s he was using what is usually described as an "extremely primitive computer" (a "Royal McBee LPG-30") to work out some numerical solutions to a relatively simple set of equations he was using to model atmospheric convection‡. They are a simple set of differential equations, not particularly scary, so we might as well see what they look like:
The 
, by the way, are not spatial variables but instead more abstract variables that represent wind velocity, pressure, and temperature in the atmosphere. You can still think of them, though, as the three dimensions of an abstract "space" that is referred to as "phase space".# The 
and 
are parameters in the system, numbers that get set to some value and then left at that value; parameters allow the set of equations to describe a whole family of dynamical systems.
What happened next (in the dramatic flow of time) is a story that's been told over and over. Here's how the American Physical Society tells it:
He [Lorenz] kept a continuous simulation running on an extremely primitive computer [!], which would produce a day's worth of virtual weather every minute. The system was quite successful at producing data that resembled naturally occurring weather patterns: nothing ever happened the same way twice, but there was clearly an underlying order.
One day in the winter of 1961, Lorenz wanted to examine one particular sequence at greater length, but he took a shortcut. Instead of starting the whole run over, he started midway through, typing the numbers straight from the earlier printout to give the machine its initial conditions. Then he walked down the hall for a cup of coffee, and when he returned an hour later, he found an unexpected result. Instead of exactly duplicating the earlier run, the new printout showed the virtual weather diverging so rapidly from the previous pattern that, within just a few virtual "months", all resemblance between the two had disappeared.
At first Lorenz assumed that a vacuum tube had gone bad in his computer, a Royal McBee, which was extremely slow and crude by today's standards. Much to his surprise, there had been no malfunction. The problem lay in the numbers he had typed. Six decimal places were stored in the computer's memory: .506127. To save space on the printout, only three appeared: .506. Lorenz had entered the shorter, rounded-off numbers assuming that the difference [of] one part in a thousand was inconsequential.
["This Month in Physics History: 'Circa January 1961: Lorenz and the Butterfly Effect' ", APS News, January 2003.]
This was a shocking result. The system of equations he was studying was nonlinear, and it is well-known that nonlinear systems can amplify small differences — Lorenz did not discover nonlinear amplification as some have written. But this divergence of the solutions was extreme: after not much time the two solutions not only weren't close, they were so far apart that it looked like they never had anything to do with each other. This is a characteristic known as extreme sensitivity to initial conditions.
What's more, one could put in virtually identical initial conditions all day long and keep getting different results a little ways down the road. In fact, the state of the system at these later times was unpredictable in practical terms — the system was chaotic in behavior.
That chaotic behavior was shocking result number two. Chaotic behavior had long been associated with nonlinear systems, but not with such simple systems. The behavior seemed, in essence, random, but there is no randomness at all in the equations: they are fully deterministic.** Thus, this characteristic later became known as deterministic chaos.
Lorenz looked at the behavior of the solutions by drawing graphs of pairs of the dynamical variables as time progressed. The resulting paths are known as the system's trajectory in phase space. The trajectory for his set of equations looped around on two different spirals, never settling down to a single line and shifting sides from one spiral to the other at unpredictable intervals. (See this image for a beautiful example that illustrates these ideas.) The image above shows how the trajectory looks, seen in quasi-3D. (Follow the strings of dots as they swoop about one loop and then fly to the other side.)
These phase-space trajectories where unlike anything seen before. Usually a trajectory would settle down into an orbit that, after some time had passed, would never change, or maybe the orbit would decay and just settle into a point where it would stay forever. Think of a coin rolling around on its side on the floor: after awhile the coin flops over and just sits on the floor in one spot forever after.
There was another oddity, too, in these phase-space trajectories Lorenz plotted. Dynamical systems that are deterministic have trajectories in phase space that never cross themselves–it's just the way the mathematics works. However, Lorenz' trajectories did appear to cross themselves and yet, to speak loosely, they never got tangled up. The best he could say at the time was that the planes that the trajectories were in seemed, somehow, like an infinitely thin stack of planes that kept the trajectories apart, or something.
He published his results in the March, 1963 issue of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences; you can download the paper online from this page, which has the abstract of the paper on it. If you look at the paper you might see that Lorenz simply didn't have the vocabulary at the time to talk about the behavior of this system. All of that was developed about a decade later. Very few people saw his original paper and it had little impact until it was rediscovered c. 1970.
These points or orbits in phase space that are the long-time trajectories of dynamical systems are known as the attractors in the phase space, for rather obvious reasons. The Lorenz Attractor, as it became know, was an altogether stranger fish than those normal attractors. As part of the rediscovery of Lorenz' work, in a famous and highly unreadable paper by David Ruelle and Floris Takens ("On the nature of turbulence", Communications of Mathematical Physics 20: 167-192; 1971) the term strange attractor was created to describe such dynamical oddities of deterministic chaos as the Lorenz Attractor.##
Strange attractors have had quite the vogue, as has deterministic chaos in dynamical systems. The characteristic feature of deterministic chaos, in addition to its unpredictability, is its extreme sensitivity to initial conditions.&& Also in the seventies Benoit Mandelbrot's work on fractals began to enter the mathematical-physics consciousness and the concepts developed that allowed strange attractors to be described as having non-integer dimensions in phase space. The dimension of the Lorenz Attractor is about 2.06, so it's almost but not quite flat or, alternatively, it's the "thick" plane that Lorenz originally conceptualized.
Lorenz has contributed to the popular culture, but few people are aware of it. His original interest was in modeling the atmosphere in the context of weather forecasting. His discovery of the Lorenz attractor and deterministic chaos (albeit not called that at the time) made it suddenly apparent that there were probably limits to how long the "long" in "long-term forecasting" could be. As he put it in the abstract to his paper, "The feasibility of very-long-range weather prediction is examined in the light of these results." Very understated! There's no direct calculation of the time involved–it's probably impossible, or nearly so–but it's generally thought that good forecasts don't go much beyond three days. Check your own five-day forecasts for accuracy and you'll start to see just how often things go awry around day five. The point here is that weather models are very good but there are fundamental limitations on forecasting because of the system's extreme sensitivity to initial conditions.††
If you've been reading the footnotes, you already know that Lorenz gave a paper at a AAAS meeting in 1972 titled "Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?" And that's how the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions of systems exhibiting deterministic chaos became known as "the butterfly effect".
For pretty good reasons, many people are fascinated by creating images of the Lorenz Attractor. Among other reasons it seems infinitely variable and, well, so strange. This Google images search for "Lorenz attractor" can get you started on that exploration.
———-
† This is my source page for the image, which itself has an interesting history. It was rendered by Paul Bourke, who has a gallery featuring many beautiful images of fractals and strange attractors and related objects, of which this is just one example.
* Some obituaries:
Finally, Bob Park had this to say:
EDWARD N. LORENZ: THE FATHER OF CHAOS THEORY.
A meteorologist, Lorenz died Wednesday at 90. He found that seemingly insignificant differences in initial conditions can lead to wildly divergent outcomes of complex systems far down the road. At a AAAS meeting in 1972, the title of his talk asked "Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas." Alas, the frequency of storms cannot be reduced by killing butterflies.[Robert L. Park, What's New, 18 April 2008.]
‡ The equation set is derived from the full set of equations that describe Rayleigh-Bénard convection, which is thermally driven convection in a layer of fluid heated from below. In my early graduate-school days I did some research on the topic, which may explain my early interest in chaos and related topics.
# A "space" is quite a general thing and could be made up of any n variables and thereby be an "n-space". However, the phrase "phase space" is generally reserved for n-spaces in which the n variables are specifically the variables found in the dynamical equations that define the dynamical system of interest. For present purposes, this footnote is entirely optional.
** Deterministic here means pretty much what one thinks it would mean, but more specifically it means being single-valued in the time variable, or, equivalently, that the solutions of the equations reverse themselves if time is run backwards. Virtually all real dynamical systems are invariant under time reversal.
## I tried to read part of the paper once. I remember two things about it. One was that they said the paper was divided into two sections, the first more popular in development, the second more mathematical; I couldn't get past the first page of the first section. But I also remember how they developed some characteristics of these attractors, which seemed very peculiar at the time, and then they simply said: "We shall call such attractors 'strange'." Et voilà!
&& Also expressed as exponential divergence of phase-space trajectories.
†† The Met–the UK Meteorological Office–has an interesting series of pages about how weather forecasting works in practice, starting at "Ensemble Prediction". The Lorenz attractor appears on the second page of that series, called "The Concept of Ensemble".
In: All, Curious Stuff, It's Only Rocket Science
Larry King on Larry King
You may recall the events of a few of months ago when gay student Lawrence King was murdered by a fellow student. On 25 April a national day of silence will be observed by many students in many schools to bring attention to the problem of bullying and name-calling faced by so many young people who are seen as different. Yes, I was one of those taunted for being different.
The annual event is sponsored by GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. Naturally the idea infuriates the anti-gay forces, who every year pathetically try to figure out how they can label silence as "disruptive behavior" and "promoting homosexuality". This year's event is dedicated to the memory of Lawrence King.
The television celebrity Larry King has recorded a public-service announcement about the Day of Silence and the other Larry King. I thought it was worth hearing.
[Seen at Box Turtle Bulletin.]
In: All, Current Events, Faaabulosity
Charlie Charlie Rose is a Rose is a Rose
Years ago, when I was still watching television and before Isaac — hence before Isaac and I managed to find so many other things to occupy our time — I liked to watch Charlie Rose. I liked his conversational interview style, I usually enjoyed what he found to talk about with guests I didn't mind listening to, and there were some memorable moments.
This short piece (3.5 minutes) below is by one Andrew Filippone Jr. It is called "'Charlie Rose' by Samuel Beckett". In it Charlie Rose appears to interview himself across an absurdist's table with mystifying, intriguing, and funny results. I laughed. The way he says "Google" is so funny.
[First seen at Boing Boing.]
Doing the Impossible
Hillary would have to win 69% to 70% of the delegates in every remaining state in order to catch Obama. He [NBC's Chuck Todd] then says that if Obama and Clinton split Indiana and North Carolina on May 6, as expected, then she'd need to win 80% of the delegates in every remaining state. Basically impossible.
[John Aravosis, "NBC's Chuck Todd: Impossible for Hillary to catch up", AMERICAblog, 22 April 2008]
Clearly it is not "impossible", since they say, right there, what has to happen, and that is possible. Very unlikely, perhaps, but not "impossible", not even "basically impossible".
If there's one thing that has irritated me during this Democratic primary is the repeated claim that it is impossible for Hillary to win. I'm afraid that, as a scientist, I have a different idea about what "impossible" means and until one of the candidates has garnered a majority of delegates it is still possible for the other one to win.
If it's one thing I can't stand it's imprecision. Well, imprecision and bad manners. Okay, two things.
In: All, Current Events, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Beard of the Week XXXV: The Sound of Music
This week's beard belongs to Thiemo (died 1102), a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church. This information, from Catholic Online, appears to be about half of everything known about Thiemo:
Benedictine bishop and martyr, also called Theodinarus. A member of the family of the counts of Meglin, Bavaria, Germany, he entered the Benedictines at Niederltaich and soon acquired fame for his skill as a painter, metalworker, and sculptor. He was elected abbot of St. Peter's, Salzburg, in 1077 and appointed archbishop of Salzburg, Austria, in 1090. His office brought him into conflict with the German King Henry IV (r. 1056-1106) during the Investiture Controversy and, as Thiemo sided with Pope St. Gregory VII (r.1073-1085) in the struggle, Henry exiled him. Journeying to Palestine to aid the crusading movement, he was captured by the Muslims and imprisoned at Ascalon (modern Israel). Tortured for a long time, he was finally killed for refusing to abjure the faith.
This lovely image (source) is a modern stained-glass window, one of 32 windows representing "Saints and Holy People of Austria" to be found in the modern parish church of Liesing, the work of one Martin Häusle of Feldkirch. The church's website is attractive and worth a short stroll.
Liesing is a district of Vienna, added shortly after the Anschluss of 12 March, 1938, when Germany annexed Austria. Which brings us to the real topic of this post: "The Sound of Music", the last musical written by the team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, premiered in 1958, just three months before Hammerstein's death. The original stage production starred Mary Martin, for whom the role of Maria was written. Maria, of course, later claimed wider celebrity with the release of the movie version starring Julie Andrews as Maria.*
"The Sound of Music" (about the show) is set in Austria and the action takes place shortly before and immediately after the Anschluss, hence the exceedingly tenuous connection with Liesing and St. Thiemo.# It's an unusually specific time setting for a show like this, but the events of 12 march 1938 provide an important dramatic element in the plot.
I frequently find the books of Broadway musical unsatisfying, with thin plots, poor characterization, and musical numbers that seem gratuitous–even though I realize that most normal people don't go through everyday life bursting into song, but that's another matter. I will even admit that I was predisposed to look on this story unfavorably, no doubt because it featured so many children.
I apologize. Much to my surprise, the book for "The Sound of Music", written by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, is really very, very good. The story is interesting and far from ordinary, the characters are as fully characterized as possible for so many in so short a dramatic space, the plot-lines develop quite naturally and support each other, and there is a gratifying economy of plot devices and symbols that play out through the show. In short, the play part of the musical is really quite good.
And, of course, the musical score is quite engaging and fun to play. Playing 'cello in the pit orchestra is what I'm doing in this production. When we were getting ready for auditions and casting there was enough uncertainty in my life that I didn't want to make a commitment to a stage role and opted instead for the orchestra.
Playing in the pit orchestra for musicals is something I very much enjoy but don't get to do so often anymore.† It's an entirely different experience from playing in a concert with an orchestra, say. Typically the music is technically easier, but coordinating all the bits of music with the stage action in a seamless way can be a fun challenge. The 'cello part for "The Sound of Music" is not so difficult, but it's satisfying to play. However, there's a lot of it so my fingers are a bit tired after three hours of what seems nearly continuous playing. I'm out of shape for marathon performing.
Fortunately the show ends with the best 'cello bit anyway: the Reprise of "Climb Ev'ry Mountain", which is filled with enough fortissimo double-stops and four-note chords to keep any cellist happy. The musical arrangement also manipulates the audience into a very cheerful, optimistic mood so they're always ready with generous applause at the end.
But it has kept me busy, particularly this week. With nightly rehearsals this week and three performances this weekend (and three more next weekend), we've done an entire show of close to three hours every night this week.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention this fun new feature at R&H Theatricals: type in our zip code (20715) in the "Find a Show Near You" box on the left and you will indeed find that St. Matthew's Musical Theatre Troupe is performing "The Sound of Music" this weekend and next, with the address in case you want to drop by. Tickets are dirt cheap.
———-
* Isaac reports that Maria von Trapp, who was the basis for the character Maria, said when she saw the movie, "It's a very nice story, but it's not my story." Well, these things happen. As it turned out, events were rearranged, compressed, and even made up, but the stage story was the better for it.
# I had decided I wanted to write about "The Sound of Music" for this week's weekly beard, and this is how far I had to go to find anyone with a beard at all connected.
† However, my most recent gig wasn't that long ago, since I played in the 5-piece ensemble for "Wings", when I directed that show about 18 months ago.
In: All, Beard of the Week, Music & Art
Tutu on Human Rights…Again
This week people all around me here near Washington, DC are all agog with the arrival of The Pope, which is odd since so few of them are Catholic although it is true that Vatican City tends to have pretty stamps and he is the head of state of that petite philatelic gem. As I told a friend recently, Americans seem fascinated by anyone from another country whose first name is "The": The Queen, The Princess, The Pope….
Only last week a more modern world-leader was in the country but, alas, his first name is not "The" and he didn't get so much attention. Desmond Tutu was in San Francisco last week to accept an award from the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.
On 9 April he gave a speech at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. I haven't found a transcript of the speech, but this excerpt from a news story ("Desmond Tutu Speaks to Queer Crowd", BGay.com, 9 April 2008) gives a nice summary. It provides a bit of antidote for The's poisonous obsessions.
In his 30-minute address, Archbishop Tutu said that for his part it was impossible to keep quiet "when people were frequently hounded…vilified, molested and even killed as targets of homophobia…for something they did not choose—their sexual orientation." In the face of this ongoing persecution, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient praised LGBTI people for being "compassionate, caring, self-sacrificing and refusing to be embittered." He spoke critically of his Church, apologizing for the way it has ostracized LGBTI people, and for making them feel as if God had made a mistake by creating them to be who they are. "How sad it is," he said, "That the Church should be so obsessed with this particular issue of human sexuality when God's children are facing massive problems–poverty, disease, corruption, conflict…"
In: All, Current Events, Faaabulosity
Little Snoring
It turns out that, in Norfolk, England, there is indeed a village called "Little Snoring" (map here). We're told that the name merely means that it's the place of the people who followed a man named Snear, as though that makes it better somehow. Among other interesting facts: Little Snoring is bigger than Great Snoring, which would seem fitting for a culture that describes its private schools as "public schools", although you have to go to Great Snoring to find a manor house.
We know now about Little Snoring because Isaac was looking for images to use on on a church bulletin at work and this somehow lead to his reading about churches in Norfolk. In particular, he seemed delighted by St Andrew, Little Snoring. From the photos provided it looks like a charming little church, one that I am certain we would visit if we happened to be passing through Little Snoring. St Andrew, it seems, has a distinctive tower but I'll not give away its secret–you can follow the link to find out and learn a little Norfolk history and culture at the same time.
It's not clear just how old the church is, but there is a list of the rectors of Little Snoring that records names back as far as 1292, when John de Waltham was rector. This I found on a lovely site about Great & Little Snoring, which has more historic information about the villages. Under "places" you'll find more information about St Andrew's, of course. In "Records" you can find names of people baptized (starting with Alice Marshall on 23 October 1559) or buried (starting with Robert Colls, on 1 September 1559).
Also in 1559, Thomas Heldridge married Margerie Thirkyng, and Thomas Colles married Joane Man. One wonders whether Thomas Colles was related to Robert Colls, who died that year. Thomas and Joane, by the way, had a child, William Colles, who was baptized on 19 March 1563. Sadly, Thomas and Joane apparently had no more children, but their son William seems to have had quite a number: Alice (1588), Richard (1589), Marie(1591), Anne (1593), William (1596), Agnes (1599), and Sarah (1609); it's not clear from the baptismal record whether their mother was the same in each case.
What a nice time I've had visiting Little Snoring this evening.
The Unkindness of History
I am pleased that Arianna Huffington has so succinctly summarized (here) this week's startling-yet-not-unexpected revelation from inside the Bush administration, complete with a perceptive remark from John Ashcroft of all people that indicated they really did realize they were doing bad things:
This week, being sent to the Principal's office took on a whole new meaning when we learned that the National Security Council's Principals Committee – which included Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet, and John Ashcroft – discussed and approved very specific details of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" the CIA could use against al Qaeda suspects, down to the number of times they could be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or waterboarded. Talk about hands-on management! The money quote on this sordid episode was delivered by Ashcroft who, after one meeting, said: "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly." And with that, Bush's Principals took a hatchet to America's principles.
We can now vividly see George W. Bush as a tragic figure of Blanche DuBois proportions: "I have always relied on the unkindness of history."
I have known many people to accuse me, an atheist, of having no morals because I have no god, but it would appear that having no brain–or a heart?–might be a bigger impediment. But I'd better be careful here lest I get into one of those Hollywood-pitch-style "Streetcar Named Desire"-meets-"The Wizard of Oz" moments.
In: All, Laughing Matters, Snake Oil--Cheap!
Celebrating Poetry
Melanie has been reminding me that April in the US is celebrated–by the artsy-fartsy elite, at least–as National Poetry Month. I decided I could celebrate and accomplish some self-promotion at the same time.
Now, let me admit that I have some issues–my own personal issues–with poetry. I don't always feel that poetry is my friend, although I'd like to be attracted to it. If I'm reading a novel and there's an offering of poetry, or something nonfiction with some poetic examples, I often skim through or skip over the poetical parts. I don't know why; some primal fear of some sort.
For years I felt that I didn't understand poetry, which is to say understand it in a deep way. I could read it, analyze as necessary, see allusions and metaphors and symbols and interesting structural things. I even wrote a computer program (in FORTRAN, on punch cards!) in college (this is thirty years ago now) with a fellow student to analyze feet in Greek poetry. But intuitive understanding seemed to elude me and poetry left me unsatisfied, if not exactly dissatisfied.
Then the oddest thing happened. In 1994 I had my revelation about hermeneutics* and thereafter I felt like I understood, really understood, poetry. The problem was that even though I now understood it, I didn't really enjoy it all that much more. Clearly something was and is still missing in my dysfunctional relationship with the poetic arts. But, I'll keep trying.
Nevertheless, I'll offer a poem. Right here, right now. Naturally it has a bit of a story.
I found out just a couple of months ago that my friend and long-time editor Richard Labonté was putting together a collection of bear stories for Cleis Press. The anthology, expected to be published at the end of July, is called Bears: Gay Erotic Stories. (TLA has prepublication information, which is obviously incomplete since Jay Neal is not mentioned, but we'll let that pass for now). To keep the story short, I'll have a story in the collection (and it's a story with its own story, but that's another story altogether).
Every one of these anthologies comes with short "author bios" in the back of the book, usually about 100 words written by each contributor. I'd used variations on the same five or six sentences for several years and I wanted something new.
So, instead of a bio as such, I wrote a poem that I thought expressed my attitudes about my fiction. It's actually a pastiche, as you will recognize, of Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric", so I think of it as my "Homage to Whitman".# Authorship is attributed to Jay Neal, of course.
I sing the body hirsute and husky,
The legions of those I love have girth and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, write of them.The expression of the well-made bear appears not only in his beard;
It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his knees,
The curve of his belly, the volume of his chest.This is my story: Mouth, tongue, lips, nose, eyes, ears,
Strong shoulders, manly beard, hips, inward and outward round,
Man-balls, man-root, strong set of thighs well carrying the trunk above.To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, or more,
I linger to see his back, his ass, the hair on the back of his neck.
Examine these limbs–they shall be stript that you may see them.
I bear witness.
———-
* I'm sorry, but that's really, really a topic for another time. I do have some notes about it here someplace….
# More of the words are Whitman's than are mine, which you may find surprising. If you'd care to compare, here is the master's original.
Recent Days
There has been some disruption in routines around the house lately.
On the internet front there was none–internet, that is–from sometime early Saturday until late Tuesday. Our router stopped working and nothing except waiting for a replacement to arrive would fix the situation. Over 80 hours total of deprivation! My goodness but it seemed an eternity. Verizon FiOS support gets mixed marks: a) being forced to talk to the automated Miss Verizon until she determined that, indeed, she couldn't fix the problem and would hand me over to a person, when I knew what the problem was–not helpful; b) the actual people I talked to, however, were very helpful and considerate.
Isaac is battling a rather strong insurgency of cellulitis in his lower right leg. Cellulitis is an infection of the connective tissues of the skin (more here and here, if you want details). He's had it three times before in the last decade or so. This round is acting pretty tough but is responding slowly to antibiotics. He's starting to get around better but he's still trying to maximize his time at home with his leg up, which reduces swelling and keeps more problems at bay.
Meanwhile he continues playing for rehearsals of "The Sound of Music", our musical theatre group's latest musical production. I decided I wanted a lighter schedule this time so I'm playing 'cello in the pit orchestra. The 'cello part is great in "Climb Ev'ry Mountain".
For those who know our friend HelenJean, this past Sunday (at Isaac's church) was the latest installment of her early-music concerts featuring her friends and fellow students from Peabody, where she herself is now enrolled in a degree program after several years of just taking courses that interested her. (HelenJean is our age, which makes her a very non-traditional student.) The concert was a great success.
Ed Kelly: "What If?"
You may remember the case of the now-notorious homophobe in Oklahoma named Sally Kern, the one who fervently believes that gay people are a bigger threat to America than terrorists, etc. A little while back there was a rally on her behalf; 1,000 people attended to shout their support for Sally's bigotry and to proclaim their own bigotry.
This caused Ed Kelly, editor of The Oklahoman, some embarrassment for the state of which he's so proud when there are so many important issues that might benefit fropm the voices of Oklahomans in support. Here's his two-minute video editorial, called "What If?"
[I saw this first at Towleroad, but I wanted to give a little extra link-love to the right-thinking folks in Oklahoma.]
In: All, Current Events, Faaabulosity
Old Ideas for New Crises
The context was a blog entry about financial difficulties for Border's bookstores, but this excerpt jumped out and grabbed my cuffs.
In 1932, according to the author of The Coming of the New Deal [Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.], more than a quarter million families lost their homes through mortgage foreclosures; this at a time when the population of the United States was not much more than a third of what it is today. The first response of government, Herbert Hoover's Home Loan Bank Act of 1932, like Republican proposals to meet the current crisis, offered financial incentives to lenders. This did nothing to cure the problem. When Franklin Roosevelt defeated Hoover in the November election, the rate of foreclosures had risen to almost a thousand a day.
What did Roosevelt do? In his famous first hundred days, he created a new agency, the Home Owners Loan Corporation, which bought mortgages from the lenders who could no longer carry them, financed payment for taxes and repairs, and "rewrote the mortgages to provide for easy repayment over a long term and at relatively low interest rates." One out of every five mortgaged homes in America benefited from this program. The real estate market was saved from collapse and banks, instead of failing, once again began to lend money to people who wanted to have a home of their own.
[Lawrence Alexander, "Knowing More and More About Less and Less", Huffington Post, 4 April 2008]
Of course, it was easier in those days when someone actually knew who owned the mortgages, but it's an idea.
In: All, Briefly Noted, Common-Place Book
Differences in Celsius & Fahrenheit
Here's an unexpected bit of innumeracy.
I'm about to finish up a book by Colin Tudge called The Time Before History : A Million Years of Human Impact (New York : Scribner, 1996; 366 pages). I expect there will be a book note soonish.
Anyway, here are two quotations from two nearby pages. See if you spot the problem.
We know, too, as related in chapter 2, that when the ice ages ended, they could, in any one place, end fast. Twenty years could see a 7°C (44°F) rise in temperature; the difference between a frozen landscape and a temperate one. [p. 301]
Besides, at the trough of the last ice age, 18,000 years ago, the surface of the sea in the eastern Mediterranean is known to have cooled by more than 6°C (43°F), which in ecological terms is huge, and yet the elephants and their miniaturized neighbors came through those harsh times. [p. 302]
Your reaction may be different, but the author's–or editor's!–error in converting the temperature differences from Celsius to Fahrenheit stands out to me as though written in flashing neon. Could they really believe that the temperature of the Mediterranean had changed by an amazing 43°F? "Huge" is one thing, but that's huge!
Not so long ago I wrote at excessive length about how to convert values on one temperature scale to values on the other. What I didn't talk about was how to compare temperature differences.
Look again at the formula for converting Celsius temperatures to Fahrenheit temperatures:
If we talk a bit about this equation, there are two things that it is telling us:
- That Celsius degrees are bigger, nine-fifths bigger, than Fahrenheit degrees, which means that it takes fewer Celsius degrees to express a temperature change than Fahrenheit degrees; and
- That the zero points on the two scales are offset by 32°F.
But this equation and this explanation refer to converting temperature values on one scale to the other. If we want to talk about temperature differences, that's another matter, and that's why it's good to talk/think about what the equation above is saying.
Suppose we have two temperature values specified on the Celsius scale; call them 
and 
. Then, to find the corresponding temperature difference expressed in terms of Fahrenheit degrees, we need to write down these two equations:
and then subtract one from the other. Do the algebra and you find
You'll notice that the offset value of 32 disappears when you do the subtraction. This is as we expected because we had just talked about how Celsius degrees are nine-fifths bigger than Fahrenheit degrees.
But now you can see the error made by the author or his editor: they erroneously used the equation to convert temperatures on the Celsius scale to temperatures on the Fahrenheit scale, rather than merely change a temperature difference from degrees of one size to degrees of another size.
The innumeracy aspect is that, before using the conversion equation, one should know what it is saying. This simple step would alert anyone that 6°C could never be 43°F. Knowing that Celsius degrees are nine-fifths bigger than Fahrenheit degrees let's us write the correct values for these temperature differences immediately:
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science