Shermer's Science Friction
Here's another title that I finished a couple of weeks ago: Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown., by Michael Shermer (New York : Henry Holt and Company, 2005). This, too, is a miscellaneous collection of essays, assembled under the general theme of skepticism and its central role in science. Some of the essays were better than others, but I found something of interest in each, and some I liked quite a bit, particularly the introductory essay, called "Science: Why Not Knowing". There's more, of course, at the Science Besieged Book Note.*
Here are two short paragraphs I wanted to make a note of. This first for its mention of the "Lake Wobegon effect", a common American delusion.
In recent decades experimental psychologists have discovered a number of cognitive biases that interfere with our understanding of ourselves and our world. The self-serving bias, for example, dictates that we tend to see ourselves in a more positive light than others see us: national surveys show that most businesspeople believe they are more moral than other businesspeople. In one College Entrance Examination Board survey of 829,000 high school seniors, 0 percent rated themselves below average in "ability to get along with other," while 60 percent put themselves in the top 10 percent. This is also called the "Lake Wobegon effect," after the mythical town where everyone is above average. [p. xxi]
This second is to keep hand to respond to those irritating people who are always quoting the biblical book of Leviticus at me as though it fully justifies their homophobia. It's a little reminder that even fundamentalists typically don't observe all the instructions in their holy book.
From Deuteronomy 21:18-21 (Revised Standard Version):
If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son, who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and though they chastise him, will not give heed to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, "This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice: he is a glutton and a drunkard." Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones; so you shall purge the evil from your midst; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.
———-
*I'm sure the pattern is clear by now. When I finish a book that might be of interest to Science Besieged Book Note readers, I write about it there and then note here all those passages that I'd marked that I wanted to copy down but that didn't seem to fit into the note that I was writing. Therefore, in case you, my four regular readers, find the excerpts of interest, I cross reference the two because the excerpts are different in each.
In: All, Books, Common-Place Book
Lightman's A Sense of the Mysterious
Another of the books I've completed in recent weeks — but only get around to mentioning now — is A Sense of the Mysterious, by Alan Lightman. Lightman is known as a physicist turned novelist, and he has taught both subjects at MIT. As a physicist and writer of fiction I feel a certain kinship.
Lightman's writing is at times exquisite; at worst it is better than most. His insights can be brilliant, too. It's a small book, and not all the essays I found to be equally good, but all were still excellent ruminations about topics scientific and literary and personal. Here are a few quotations that I wanted to save; as usual, there are more at my Science Besieged book note.
I've been thinking a great deal lately about the "scientific method" for Ars Hermeneutica; watch this space for further thoughts as they develop. Meanwhile, here Lightman touches on the subject with observations that I can't argue with.
All of which led me to question the meaning of the "scientific method." Since high school, I had been taught that scientists must wear sterile gloves at all times and remain detached from their work, that the distinguishing feature of science is the much-vaunted "scientific method," whereby hypotheses and theories are objectively tested against experiments. If the theory is contradicted by experiments, then it must be revised or discarded. If one experiment is contradicted by many other experiments, then it must be critically examined. Such an objective procedure would seem to leave little room for personal prejudice.
I have since come to understand that the situation is more complex. The scientific method does not derive from the actions or behavior of individual scientists. Individual scientists are not emotionally detached from their research. Rather, the scientific method draws its strength from the community of scientists, who are always eager to criticize and test one another's work. Every week, in many journal articles, at conferences, and during informal gatherings at the blackboard scientists analyze the latest ideas and results from all over the world. It is through this collective activity that objectivity emerges.
So how could I reconcile the Popperian view of science, with its unbudging demand for objective experimental test, against the Polanyian view, with so much emphasis on the personal commitment and passions of individual scientists? The answer, perhaps obvious but at first shocking to a young scientist, is that one must distinguish between science and the practice of science. Science is an ideal, a conception of logical laws acting in the world and a set of tools for discovering those laws. By contrast, the practice of science is a human affair, complicated by all the bedraggled but marvelous psychology that makes us human. [pp. 35–37]
In this next excerpt he touches on something that I think is at the heart of how science works: the contingent nature of scientific truth.
Something of the power of pure mathematics can be seen by its permanence. We often use the terms objective and subjective to distinguish between those things existing outside our minds versus those produced in our minds, things with reality and permanence versus things that shift and dissolve with each new point of view. Paradoxically, mathematical results, which we deduce in our minds, last forever. Gone is the civilization of ancient Greece, but not the Pythagorean theorem, which states that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle equals the sum of the squares of its two legs. Euclid's theorem that the angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees will always be true. New branches of mathematics have been developed, including new branches of geometry, but the angles of a Euclidean triangle will always sum up to 180 degrees.
Science, by contrast, is constantly revising itself, constantly changing its theories and results to give better approximations to physical reality. An example is the theory of light. The wave nature of light was first revealed in the mid-seventeenth century by the experiments of th Italian scientist Francesco Maria Grimaldi. Grimaldi discovered that the concentric circles of darkness and light produced by light emerging from a small hole are similar to the crests and the troughs of overlapping waves of water. In the mid-nineteenth century came Maxwell's fully quantitative theory of light as an electromagnetic wave. Maxwell's equations, however, did not correctly explain all phenomena of light. In the early twentieth century, experiments suggested that light does not always behave as a continuous wave; it sometimes acts as a group of discrete particles, or "quanta," called photons. In the late 1940s, physicists produced a new quantitative theory of light called quantum electrodynamics, replacing Maxwell's equations. In the 1960s, scientists went even further and proposed that the phenomenon of light is deeply connected to other fundamental forces. The theory of light was modified once again. Scientists have differing opinions about whether humankind will ever find the ultimate laws of nature, or whether such final truths exist. But there is no disagreement that the history of science is the history of an endeavor constantly revising and refining its laws. Scientific theories do not have the staying power of pure mathematics. [pp. 70–71]
By the way, I can relieve your sense of suspense and say now that I am one of those scientists who believe humankind will never settle on the ultimate laws of nature; science is far too restless a discipline. There are fundamental reasons that go very deep, but this isn't the essay to discuss them.
Finally, this excerpt, which is about the character of mathematical proofs — in some sense the artificiality of mathematical proofs — something that will resonate with anyone who has taken upper-level math courses and read those dreaded words: "the details are left for the interested reader to show." I'll come back to this sometime when I talk more about what's wrong with the way we teach science and mathematics, something else I've been pondering for Ars Hermeneutica.
Mathematical proofs are not only about mathematics. They are about mathematicians as well. Euclid's proof [that there is no largest prime number — an example in the previous paragraph] is revealing for what is absent, as well as for what is present. There are no unnecessary elements, no false starts, no wrong turns. Undoubtedly, the first attempted proofs of the conjecture were clumsy, and Euclid must have thrown out a lot of good papyrus before he produced the proof that the handed down tot eh ages. Indeed, the ideal proof in mathematics shows no traces of the mortal path of trial and error that led to it. Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss, the great German mathematician, often called the "Prince of Mathematics," refused to publish his mathematical proofs until he had fashioned them into works of disembodied perfection. A cathedral is not a cathedral, he said, until the last scaffolding is down. When one looks at a proof by Gauss, it is impossible to tell where his reasoning began. Gauss wanted it that way. Pure mathematics is often compared to an art form, but it is a peculiar art form. A mathematical proof is a beautiful painting in which the viewer is not supposed to see the brushstrokes of the artist. That absence and simplicity is part of the aesthetic. [pp. 75–76]
In: All, Books, Common-Place Book
Slather on the Clichés
By the way, when I get around to writing a novel, remind me not to use the word "slather". It always irritates me when I read it. I was reminded of this while reading Laura Lippman's No Good Deeds this morning — she had someone slather peanut butter on a pine cone (but to maintain a sense of mystery, I won't say why).
It's not that it's a bad word as such, it just always seems to me to draw attention to itself, which gets in the way of the narrative.* Picturesque as the word is, it's of rather limited utility, too. Think for a moment. How many times have you heard of something being "slathered" other than butter? (The Lippman use with peanut butter is a definite aberration.) And then, if its only use is as a verb for doing something with butter, then why use it? Why not use "butter", or any of a dozen other possibilities?
In a novel like this that makes it a cliché, an unthinking use to create a ready-made picture in the mind's eye of the reader, not to mention an easy way to get from one word to another, chalk up another sentence, and move on from this 100,000-word best seller to the next. Imagine! Use "slather" in my book, apparently, and it's the first step on the clichéd slippery slope to turning out literarily sloppy best sellers. I'm sure there're no sour grapes in that evaluation.
In the early eighties I read all the existing canon of books by P.D. James as it was at the time, six or eight volumes. Before you get me wrong: P.D. James was no sloppy best-seller author either. For some reason that I can't fathom I noted and made of a list of what turned out to be six words that Ms. James used exactly once in each one of those books. For some reason these words seemed to draw attention to themselves when I read them. I can't remember the entire list, although I remember that these words were on it: "etiolate" and "detritus".
This is not to say that these words shouldn't be used, not at all. I do mean to say that attention getting words need to be used in a way, in fictional narrative at least, that's aware of their self-importance. It makes me think of a piece of music I heard on the radio a couple of days ago, a ballet suite by some early romantic composer who decidedly overused the triangle in his orchestration. Previously I would have likened it to fingernails on a chalkboard; henceforth I might liken it to an overuse of the triangle in orchestration. It's uncommon that I feel like covering my ears and shouting "arrrrgh!", unless maybe it's for Wagner's overture to "Rienzi", of which I've heard several times more than a lifetime's quota — and it wasn't that good to start with.
At any rate, if you see someday a manuscript in which I've used "slather", just cross it out and write a nasty little editorial note in the margin. I may snarl, but I'm sure I'll thank you for it later.
———-
*This refers to the theory of fiction of John Gardner's, which I'll write about at more length sometime soon.
Count My Words
A couple of years ago a job recruiter asked me "What would be your perfect job?" With some wit, but unexpected precision, I responded: "One that requires a knowledge of partial differential equations." This does sum up pretty well the level of technical skill and experience that would have characterized a suitable position for me, but the recruiter seemed not to find it a very helpful description.
Yesterday I thought of another: "One that calls upon a large vocabulary." This came to me, naturally, while I was having lunch at the Taco Bell. I was listening to the assistant manager repeat an order to one of the food preparers, and it struck me that the vocabulary he used in the course of his day was rather restricted, and that one could work at a similar sort of job and get by with a rather small vocabulary.
How small, I wondered. Let's make a rough estimate. By my count roughly 40 words are enough to name all the menu items (including modifiers like "crunchy", "soft", "beef", or "chicken").* Add some more words concerning ingredients that might be added or left out — say a dozen and a half — and the verbs and whatnot to describe that — another two dozen. That brings the total to about 85 words. Then there's the vocabulary necessary for running the store itself, words about cleaning the dining room or using the cash register and other tasks. Let's be generous and imagine it could take as many as 200 words.
Even if I make a large engineering allowance for margin of error, what we're estimating is that a worker at Taco Bell should easily be able to get through all daily tasks with a vocabulary of less than 500 words. Even if we doubled it and said a 1,000 words, this is not an extensive vocabulary. But then, the various jobs at a typical Taco Bell are highly constrained and systematic, doing much the same tasks repeatedly with little variation hour to hour, day to day.
Other low-skill jobs would seem to have the same characteristic. I wonder how vocabulary sizes change from job type to job type, or across different professions? It suggests, though, that highly constrained jobs require smaller vocabularies, and one might conjecture that the broader the scope of the job, the larger the vocabulary that might be needed to accomplish its tasks. I'm sure further study is called for, but I digress.
Suppose I start then with the job requirement of needing a large vocabulary, what job would be best for me? That's a bit harder to come up with.
Writing, of course, suggests itself. Who seems likely to use more different words than a writer? Fiction, I think, would leave more scope for using interesting words than nonfiction. While it's true that technical disciplines, for instance, may have a jargon all their own, I suspect that professional papers published in those disciplines still use a relatively small subset of available vocabulary, even if some of it is highly specialized and impenetrable argot.
Fiction seems the way to go, since anything can in principle be written about in any way that works. Think of Shakespeare's famously large vocabulary of some 30,000 words. What scope!
Given my been-there-done-that personality, I tend to look for jobs with constantly shifting, novel tasks jobs where I never know from day to day what new challenge is going to present itself. And, at the moment, I'm certainly getting my quota of ever-new, ever-changing challenges as I try to get Ars Hermeneutica going. What scope! What frustrations! But what vocabulary!
Now that I think about it, perhaps this is the best type of work for me if I apply my job requirement of wishing to use a relatively larger vocabulary. I don't know whether that makes me feel any better about it or not.
———-
*I might claim this supports my contention that there are relatively few substances, arranged in several manners, that make up the available food there. Basically, choose some innards and decide how those innards will be wrapped up, and there aren't that many choices. This always leaves me scratching my head over how it is that some people can spend upwards of ten minutes consulting with their order-taker about their dining choices.
In: All, Reflections, The Art of Conversation
Our Kids' Pedigrees
Push aside those bumper stickers about kids and honor rolls, our kids' pedigrees are available online! I refer, of course, to our adopted, ex-racing greyhounds, whose pedigrees Isaac was looking up today at greyhound-data.com. (One does start to get the feeling that almost anything you can think of can now be found online.)
Most of you will know about racing greyhounds, who have a professional racing career of only 2 to 3 years, except in rare cases, after which time they "retire". Not so long ago, "retirement" meant that the animals were destroyed, and many still are. However, for some time now there has been a growing "rescue" movement, now many, many groups that work with racing kennel owners to place "retiring" dogs in homes as pets. We understand that 1999 was the big turn-around year when more dogs were placed as pets than were euthanized. Greyhounds make great companions for many reasons — but ask me later, since this post is about our kids.
You may not be aware that there are two breeding groups of greyhounds, at least in the US. American Kennel Club greyhounds are bred for show; racing dogs' pedigrees are monitored by the National Greyhound Association. I mention this for two reasons: 1) if you look at AKC pictures of greyhounds and compare them to NGA greyhounds you'll see some differences — the breeding lines have diverged some over time; and 2) all records about racing greyhounds are kept by the NGA and associated groups, not the AKC.
We have shared our house so far with four dogs, two of which are still with us in person, all of which had distinctive personalities (to say the least!). We have yet to find any records for "Sunshine Spur", known to us as Sandy. This may not be surprising since she came to us after having lived in two or three other households and her records were incomplete or confused. For the others, though, there are pedigrees in the database and we found it fun to look at them.
Dowland* (track name "Don't Point": pedigree) has lived with us the longest, since 1999. Born in 1995, he's enjoying his advancing middle age. His paternal grandsire ("Dutch Bahama") and maternal great-grandsire ("Downing") both appear to be racers of some distinction — although Dowland himself was only average. When I look at the pictures for those two, I easily convinced myself that Dowland has Dutch Bahama's eyes and Downing's ears and stance. That's Dutch Bahama in the photo.
Arlo (track name "Rapido Arlo": pedigree) has a less distinguished past with a pedigree that exhibits a lot more inbreeding, although I don't really know the implications of that. He was born in 1977 and died in March, 2007.
Azalea (track name "PG Azalea": pedigree) is our newest arrival, an energetic red-brindled female born in 1999. I think her sire ("Flying Donruss") and dam ("Y Knot Orchid") have rather silly names, but the photograph of her maternal grandsire, "Flying Train", suggests a noble heritage if you ask me.
———-
*With a track name like "Don't Point", you can see why we changed his name when he came to us: would we call him "Don't" for short? Hardly. Anyway, we had decided to try to find a name with an initial 'D' sound, and we thought and thought until the obvious stuck us and we named him for one of our favorite composers, John Dowland (1563 – 1626). Why obvious? For some years we'd thought of John Dowland's big hit, Lacrimae Antiquae (sometimes sung with the words "Flowe My Teares"), to be "our song".
Beard of the Week XXVII: Tallis & His Scholars
This week's beard belong to English composer Thomas Tallis (c. 1510–1585), often hailed as the "Father of English Music". (Here's a brief biography.) However, this is only tangentially about Thomas Tallis.
I invoke Tallis' name because a couple of weeks ago — on Sunday, April first, to be precise — Isaac and my Dad and I went with some friends to Baltimore to a concert given by the Tallis Scholars, an a capella singing ensemble from England that specialize in sacred music from the Renaissance. Here is a brief biography of the group from their webpage (mentioned above):
The Tallis Scholars were founded in 1973 by their director, Peter Phillips. Through their recordings and concert performances, they have established themselves as the leading exponents of Renaissance sacred music throughout the world. Peter Phillips has worked with the ensemble to create, through good tuning and blend, the purity and clarity of sound which he feels best serve the Renaissance repertoire, allowing every detail of the musical lines to be heard. It is the resulting beauty of sound for which the Tallis Scholars have become so widely renowned.
They are a group of 10 singers (2 each voice with 4 tenors for divided parts). Indeed, their purity of sound would be hard to match, and the blending of their tones was exceptional. One big reason for this is undoubtedly the fact that they sing in tune (the "good tuning" mentioned above), with wide, perfect intervals; such attention to tuning is uncommon enough that people will remark on the sound when they hear it without realizing why. The expression and phrasing that Mr. Phillips brings to the group might be described as on the dry side, but it treats the music well — and I would generally prefer that to an over romantic approach.
Here is the program they performed:
- Claudio Montevrdi (1567–1643): Messa a quattro voci da capella
- Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525–1594): Peccantem me guotidie and Dum complerentur
- John Browne (c. 1480–1505): Stabat iuxta Christi crucem
- Orlande de Lassus (?1530–1594): Media vita
- Nicholas Gombert (1495–1560): Media vita and Magnificat IV
Here are two selections from the program notes that I found interesting.
Nicholas Gombert, born in approximately 1495, was a major figure in the second generation of famous Flemish composers. Unfortunately, his biography will forever be mired in controversy, as there was a contemporary rumour claiming Gombert acted improperly with a boy and was sentenced to a period of exile on a ship in the Mediterranean. On this ship. the story goes, Gombert wrote eight Magnificat settings–one in each of the eight church modes — and these were of such a high quality that they secured his release. Magnificat IV, which closes tonight's concert, highlights his unique and expert use of thick, low, and constant textures. It is a marvel of early 16th Flemish counterpoint, with lengthy sections of dense polyphony, punctuated by clearly audible points of imitation. In the last verse, two new voices are introduced within the same ranges outlined earlier, further thickening the texture and contributing to its powerful conclusion. Gombert's motet Media vita is another example of his mastery of these thick, rich textures. Written for six low voices, including the rare inclusion of a baritone part, it is a relentless complex of thorough counterpoint including, in brief passages, writing which suggests the possibility of false-relation dissonances, a technique most strongly associated with English composers of the time.
[…]
John Browne lived and wrote as one of the most famous and skilled English composers of his day. Born in the third quarter of the 15th century, he never held a post in the Chapel Royal. However, the work which appears on tonight's program, Stabat juxta, contains as its cantus firmus tenor voice a secular song composed to commemorate Prince Arthur's taking-up his duties as prince of Wales. The prince died in 1502 and the union of this secular song and the text depicting the Blessed Virgin Mary at the base of the cross suggests that the work was written for Queen Elizabeth, the wife of Henry VII. The piece itself is extraordinary in its use of six men's voices and in this way is similar to the rich style used by Gombert.
I'm a big fan of Renaissance music and most of the composers were familiar to me, but I'd never heard of John Browne before and this Stabat Mater was indeed extraordinary. I'll have to listen to it more to discover exactly what made it so different sounding from the others — it may have been the dense, low texture as suggested in the program notes — but it was quite evident on first hearing, whatever it was. I'll be doing the research soon since we were prompted to buy the group's recording of music by Browne after the concert.
Aruba Must Recognize Gay Marriage
Here's another little bit of cheery news. It didn't want to do it, but Aruba is now the first Caribbean island that will recognize same-sex marriage. Same-sex marriage is legal in Holland, and Aruba is still ruled by Dutch law, therefore:
The [Dutch] Supreme Court ruled today that a same-sex marriage conducted in the Netherlands must be recognised on Aruba. Two Dutch women who wanted to be entered as a married couple in the civil register in Aruba had brought the case to court.
["Aruba must recognise gay marriage", Expatica, 13 April 2007; first seen at Towleroad.]
Ifill on Imus
Gwen Ifill on Meet the Press, 15 April 2007 (transcript via Think Progress):
A lot of people did know and a lot of people were listening and they just decided it was okay. They decided this culture of meanness was fine — until they got caught. My concern about Mr. Imus and a lot of people and a lot of the debate in this society is not that people are sorry that they say these things, they are sorry that someone catches them. When Don Imus said this about me when I worked here at NBC [over ten years earlier], when I found out about it, his producer called because Don said he wants to apologize. Well, now he says he never said it. What was he apologizing for? He was apologizing for getting caught, not apologizing for having said it in the first place. And that to me is the debate we need to have, David is right, about the culture of meanness, about the culture of racial complaint, about the internal culture within our community about how we talk to one another. But just this week it was finally saying, enough.
In: All, Common-Place Book, Current Events
I Have an Idea
This is an essay about ideas: whence they come, in what form, how quickly they disappear, and why I always feel like I'm getting behind on things.
I had this idea — to write this essay — nearly an hour ago, but it took me this long to finish what I was doing then, do a couple of other necessary things, and then get myself to the computer (the first available means of writing, in this case) and put pixels to screen. During that time I was thinking of various phrases I might use, words and bits of language to explain my thought, and came up with a dozen interesting observations I wanted to be sure to mention, half of which I've now forgotten.
One might naively imagine that ideas arrive at the speed of language, that they come walking leisurely along at about the same rate that one might read the words that describes them. Is this true for anyone? It certainly isn't true for me.
Ideas for me arrive whole — thump! — like a 16-ton weight dropping in front of me. But maybe that's a bad metaphor, because ideas, when they arrive, seem much more delicate than that; not necessarily fragile, but easily dispersed. Imagine, then, that they arrive like a dandelion blooming, suddenly and unexpectedly and then almost instantly changing to a fluffy seed-head that threatens to disperse irrevocably, forever denying one a chance for closer observation, should a small puff of wind come along.
An idea, as I said, arrives whole, but it is the idea that is whole and not the thing for which it is the idea that is complete, which hardly sounds like it makes sense as I type it. The idea is whole as a seed is whole (the dandelion provides another metaphor!) but far from being the entire plant; before the idea becomes the thing, there's a lot of growing and nurturing to take place. Nevertheless, it seems as thought the seed of an idea contains the germ of all that will eventually emerge. However, nurturing and growing the idea takes work and time — which, I suspect, contributes to that feeling I have of always getting behind on doing the things I want to get done. This is particularly vivid in working out a fiction idea: I might imagine the situation, some plot events, and characters complete with their histories, but until I let the characters lose into that situation I can't imagine everything that they're going to say or do. There's always room for the unexpected in working out an idea.
A picture comes to mind, a scene from a favorite movie: Brazil. Our hapless hero has been plunged into a multi-storied corporate beehive. He's standing outside his office and sees nothing but endless corridors stretching identically in all directions. In the distance he hears a buzz of activity — it's the boss, on the move, weaving a patter through the corridors as though he actually knows where he's going. And when the boss moves, it seems that all of his yes-men, supernumeraries, and brown-nosed toadies move with him, hovering about shouting questions and taking down answers. What a racket!
This is often how ideas arrive, not as pristine, shining objects on a cloud with a celestial choir singing gently in the background, but with a confused, noisy clump of words and thoughts and phrases and images that swirl around the idea and jostle for attention. Sometimes it's easier just to go back to sleep.
Fine, so there's the idea and all those bits of sentences and metaphors and imagery, just waiting to be noted down. What could be easier? But when it all comes along much faster than one can write it down — provided one is in a place where there is even the means to write — it's impossible to capture all the bits, particularly since they don't organize themselves in any sensible way. Instead you have to waste time getting all the subordinate thoughts to line up by height so you can even begin to make sense of them, and then you discover that one or two have disappeared to go to the bathroom and another is off chasing butterflies.
These ideas, for me, arrive in a fashion rather like déjà vu, which always resolves itself into a moment for me, a particular instant, like a snapshot, that gives the uncanny feeling of having happened before. What has always seemed odd to me, though, is that I can feel it coming. I get a sensation that lasts for maybe half a minute, maybe a minute or two, that a moment of déjà vu is about to happen … then … boom! … it does. That was it right there, not a moment before, not a moment after.
In similar fashion, I might be reading and start having the sensation that two or three trains of thought are speeding towards each other and that in a moment — boom! — they collide and there's an idea lying there in their wreckage. That twisted and mangled thing is the idea, not all the stuff that was leading up to it. An idea sometimes seems like a surprisingly coherent, identifiable entity.
Then the trouble comes in expressing the idea. The more the delay — and some is inevitable — the more the mind keeps churning and coming up with further thoughts and images. Are these thoughts related? Are the images meant as metaphors? Or, as seems equally plausible, are the thoughts and images just random firings of the brain that, because of their proximity to the nascent idea, get dragged in as enhancement and metaphor? Maybe it's this happenstance that finds new connections between ideas and I should welcome it. The bit about the dandelion and the scene from Brazil, for instance, both arrived some time after the idea to write about ideas arrived, but now they seem organically connected to me.
And so, there's the idea, and then before one can even express the idea it becomes laden, perhaps burdened or overburdened, with unrelated thoughts that become related thoughts. It starts to seem like the rarest of things to me that any idea can get out with any of its identity intact amidst all that mental chaos.
Ah, chaos. Now, there's an idea I could go on about for awhile!
Protecting One-Celled People
The dependably wry Robert Park had this* to say about the sanctity of "one-celled people":
1. STEM CELLS: PRESIDENT BUSH VOWS TO PROTECT ONE-CELLED PEOPLE.
The Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act passed the Senate 63-34, but President Bush promises a veto. He said the use of embryonic stem cells in research "crosses a moral line." In case you're wondering where this "moral line" is drawn, WN has looked into it. George W. Bush and other conservative theologians believe a "soul" is assigned to the fertilized egg at the instant of conception. That makes it a person, even though it's not counted in the census. In-vitro fertilization makes a lot more of these one-celled people than it needs; leftovers are stacked in the freezer until it starts filling up. President Bush cares deeply about these helpless one-celled people and wants to ensure they are properly flushed down the disposal rather than exploited by godless scientists interested only in the reduction of suffering.
*Robert Park, "What's New" for 13 April 2007.
Liberal vs. Conservative, Again
The following I wrote in the first instance as a comment at SWAnderson's blog, in response to a comment by RightSaidFred that "You two [i.e., me and SW] seem to carry an unshakable faith that the human condition can be perfected by government action."
Since it came out rather longer than the pithy epigram I had hoped for, I'll include it here to pad out the blog.
Living as a social animal, humans can interact with their society in one of three ways:
- By ignoring it;
- By banding people together in order to exploit them; or
- By banding people together to improve their collective lot.
The first are sociopaths and often come to bad ends. The second lot become Republicans and sooner or later come to bad ends. The third lot are Liberals; sometimes things get better for them all, but usually no one reaches quite the excesses that the second kind can obtain temporarily.
Necessarily, the Liberals actually believe that our lives can be improved and that it's honorable to improve the lives of others' as we improve our own. The cynicism of Republicans, who see people as mere rungs on their climb up the ladder of power and personal wealth, do not believe they have any place in improving anyone else's lot because they believe it is at the cost of their own power and wealth.
Liberals believe that government can do good, because they see government as the best management option for getting groups together to accomplish what they cannot accomplish on their own. Republicans, not surprisingly, detest government because it stands in their way of their glorious rise to power and wealth if they do so. Readily created abundance versus a pie with limited slices.
In order to suppress government success, Republicans slander it whenever possible by labeling it according to Reagan's odd fantasy of claiming Liberals think government is the agent to solving all problems that people perceive. Liberals know quite well that government is not the solution to all problems, just that it can assist at times in solving some problems, particularly those that are larger than any individual's capabilities to solve alone.
Thus it comes about that Liberals try to make government work efficiently and accountably, while Republicans try their best to discredit and dismantle government whenever possible; during the Bush II years they have found that corruption, mendacity, and incompetence are remarkably successful in scuttling the smooth and useful operating of government, at least in the short term. It is now our place to discover just how successful they have been at government destruction. (Of course, this is why Republicans seem so bad at government administration: they simply don't believe in it as a thing worth doing, let along worth doing well.)
It seems unlikely, however, that Republicans have successfully destroyed our government in total, mostly because most people understand that government can help to solve some problems that would otherwise be intractable.
[originally: comment to "Impeachment might be deserved, but that’s not enough", Oh!pinion, 12 April 2007.]
Symbolic Imus
Oddly enough, I don't know a thing about Don Imus except what I read — which is a lot in the past few days — because I never listened to him. Come to think of it, I never listened to or read (whichever is appropriate) Anne Coulter or Sean Hannity or Rush, either; instead of complaining about what they say and wondering why people should even pay them a moment's notice, I don't.
By all accounts, I seem to be the only person I've seen mention Mr. Imus who has not ever appeared on his show. Odd that, but I was never asked for some reason. Therefore I cannot comment on how the real Don Imus compares to some other Don Imus.
But still, people can be so dense sometimes. Here's something on the celebrated event by Dick Cavett:
Is there not a sort of a conundrum in everyone’s agreeing that the words are horrible, and not fit to be broadcast or heard — and then hearing them re-aired every 20 minutes on most TV channels? Not even euphemizing the H-word. Some of the seeming astonishment expressed about how well-spoken, attractive, articulate and self-possessed the basketball players are — all true — at times bordered a bit uncomfortably on Obama’s being called (surprisingly?) “articulate” and “clean.”
[Dick Cavett, "Imus in the Hornets’ Nest", via Donkey O.D., 11 April 2007.]
Perhaps this is something in the form of a rhetorical flourish, but it doesn't seem so. How can someone of Mr. Cavett's noted perspicacity think for even a moment that all the kerfuffle comes down to "nappy-headed ho's" being naughty words that should not be uttered on the air. Puhlease.
The naughtiness does not inhere in the phrase as I'm sure Mr. Cavett and most everyone else realizes, and the outrage is not about Mr. Imus' merely saying it. It's more in the nature of a synecdoche, a literary tip-of-the-iceberg that means far, far more than the phrase in question and its alleged naughtiness.
"But! But!" sputter his defenders, those who rush in and hope that it's all a free-speech issue, or something important and constitutional, "it was just a joke!" To my ear, that just makes matters worse.
To my ear, then, the whole Imus-foot-in-mouth incident is seen to reveal the much, much bigger problem of residual, undergound, hidden racism that's alive and well in the US today, shared nudge-nudge-wink-wink assumptions and attitudes that make it plausible that the incident might be construed as humor. The incident reveals all this in misdirected clarity for everyone to see and react to — "misdirected" because I think most people understand what the issue really is but they can couch all their "debate" in terms of the un-utterability of the phrase in question rather than talking about the real issue. That means that Imus can also be punished for his infractions — most of which constitutes offering a suitable incident for the misdirected discussion — without having to say that he's really a scapegoat, the mere representative of a problem revealed by his representative incident.
It's not Imus that's being punished, it's the shared attitudes of white America that are being put on notice, and it makes people uncomfortable out of all proportion to any upset they might feel over whether Mr. Imus should lose his job or not, an issue about which I suspect most couldn't care less. Mr. Imus is a symbol who happened to say something at the wrong time that revealed the barely concealed racism that he shared with his fans, and they're surprised to find that the popularity of their racial prejudices are fading as fast as the popularity of Bush Republicanism.
Researching Porn
I'm not quite sure how it came up — pardon the expression — but I had a conversation today about some of the research I've done for my short fiction. Recall that the stories I publish are directed at an audience of adult, gay men and you may wonder a moment about the type of research I'm talking about, but that's not what I meant at all.
I like for facts and settings in my stories to be accurate, and occasionally plot elements arise that require fact checking. I won't reveal the use to which I put them — I try to sustain a modest sense of mystery — but these are some of the unexpected topics that I recall looking into:
- The year in which Dutch Elm disease arrived in north-central Ohio
- The historically largest ethnic groups in Cleveland, which meant looking at the names found on tombstones in suburban Cleveland museums
- In what years Harley Davidson produced their Electra Glide model motorcycle when the pan-head engine was an option
- The names of the two-tone color schemes for the Chevrolet Belair in the 1957 model year
- The hundred-years' war
- The repeal of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and the expulsion of the Huguenots from France
- The Caribbean career of the pirate Blackbeard
- Works Project Administration (WPA) swimming-pool construction and post-office mural projects in northwestern Kansas (in the 1930s)
- Recordings by Ella Fitzgerald
Feel free to try matching these up with the story titles if you like. Oh yes, I also looked up street maps and photos of civic buildings in Goodland, Kansas, but guessing which story they were used in is a give-away if you look at the titles.
Dodd on Equality
I lived in Connecticut, going to graduate school at Wesleyan University, when Chris Dodd first ran for Congress. I had a favorable impression of him then, perhaps because of the attitude that leads to the types of things he's saying now.
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Democratic presidential hopeful Chris Dodd told Concord High School students Wednesday that people debating gay marriage should ask themselves just one question: What would you do if your child were gay?
Dodd said anyone who would deny a gay child the right to be happy isn't being honest.
"We ought to be able to have these loving relationships," the Connecticut senator said.
Dodd, the father of a 2- and a 5-year-old, said his daughters could grow up to be lesbians and he hopes they would have the opportunity to enjoy marriage-like rights.
"They may grow up as a different sexual orientation than their parents," Dodd said. "How would I want my child to be treated if they were of a different sexual orientation?"
Dodd, who opposed a constitutional amendment to limit marriage to man-woman unions, said he supports civil unions, but not gay marriage. Asked afterward what he sees as the difference, he said: "I don't think probably much in people's minds. If you're allowing that, all the protections you have there, you've covered it."
[from Philip Elliott, "Dodd weighs in on gay marriage", Connecticut Post / AP, 4 April 2007; via Pam's House Blend.]
In: All, Current Events, Faaabulosity
Finlay's Jewels
I have been reading plenty lately, just not writing so much about the books. Now I'm trying to catch up a bit, which may be a hopeless task.
One of the several fascinating titles from recent weeks was Victoria Finlay's Jewels : A Secret History (New York : Ballentine Books, 2006). It's an interesting read. Even I am attracted by the romance and sparkle of precious gems. She's written a nice, readable book that is a collection of nine rambling essays about different gems. They're engaging and informative. [See more at the Science Besieged book note, including some other interesting excerpts.]
Here, as usual, is a couple of leftover quotations from the book. In this first excerpt, she relates some interesting fashion history to the original marketing success of cultured pearls — a process first made commercially successful during in Japan by the Mikimoto mentioned. (I'm also interested in the metaphysical question of whether cultured pearls, created in exactly the same way as "real" pearls, are "real" or "fake".)
After all the international controversy about whether cultured pearls were "real" or "fake" it was, ironically, the Second World War and the postwar period that secured the newly invented Japanese gems a lustrous international future. The Allied occupation forces arriving in Japan following VJ-Day on August 15, 1945, could immediately see the money-laundering potential of pearls and banned all domestic sales. Mikimoto was allowed to sell only to the occupation forces. It was hardly surprising that the prices were low enough for ordinary American soldiers to afford them, and GIs bought them in huge numbers to take home to their mothers, sisters, wives, and sweethearts. In 1945 there was a particularly good harvest because the pearls had been allowed to grow inside the oysters for several more seasons than usual and were especially lustrous.
The arrival of "pearls for the people" coincided with the reinvention of the "twin-set." The combination of a woolen sweater with a cardigan had beencreated in America in 1934 as a form of thermal underwear. But by the 1950s, twin-sets were seen as smart daywear and women, who wouldn't normally have dreamed of being seen in public with their underwear showing, were buying them in vast quantities. When fashion editors on both sides of the Atlantic decided that the pearl necklace reinforced the demure image of the layered woolen look, the future of cultured pearls was assured. After the war, many women in Europe and America had gone out to work for the first time and many used their new buying power to purchase pearls. [p. 110]
Now, one other little detail clearing up the origins of the "carat" as a unit of measure.
The Ottomans, and indeed most people involved in the gem business at the time [the sixteenth century], would have weighed the stones using the same measuring system as we have today. The "carat" is an archaic measurement that probably originated in the bazaars of the Middle East and Asia, based on the weight of carob seeds–keration in Greek. Jewelers chose the seeds because they were fairly uniform, and therefore trustworthy for measuring tiny and expensive gems. But the scale was still approximate and even in the nineteenth century when some attempt was made at standardization, a "one carat" peridot could still weight anything from 199 milligrams in Lisbon to 207 milligrams in Venice, which was a problem for international traders. in 1877 several prominent merchants, from London, Paris, and Amsterdam, met up to sort out the confusion. In the kind of pan-European spirit that today would endear them to the Brussels bureaucrats they agreed that in future "one carat" should be the same wherever you were, although the efficiency of their decision was somewhat undermined by the agreement that this uniform weight would be exactly 205 milligrams. Thirty years later the next generation regretted the odd number and from 1907 in Europe and 1913 in the United States a carat was agreed to be the more manageable figure of one-fifth of a gram. [pp. 176–177]
In: All, Books, Common-Place Book
"Official" Birthstones
I've always wondered at the particularly American penchant for "official" pronouncements, regardless of their origins. I wrote previously about the "official beginning of summer", as an example. In my recent reading, I was happy to discover just how "official" is that list of "official birthstones", particularly since a few years back I saw Hallmark promoting a "non-traditional birthstones" list.
Here's the scoop on "official" birthstones from the appendix in Jewels, by Victoria Finlay, who seems equally baffled by the acceptance of this "official" list. By the way, I ignore it mostly because I don't care that much for diamond, my own "official birthstone".
January — garnet
February — amethyst
March — aquamarine
April — diamond
May — emerald
June — pearl or moonstoneJuly — ruby
August — peridot
September– sapphire
October — opal or tourmaline
November — topaz or citrine
December — turquoise or blue topazThis list was drawn up by the American National Association of Jewelers at a meeting in Kansas City in 1912. These were the stones that jewelers in America most wanted to sell. One of the greatest mysteries about the birthstone system is how widely it was accepted, even if it had no provenance beyond a Missouri boardroom. Until the end of the 1960s ninety-four percent of couples in Japan used the bride's birthstone for their engagement ring. Even today people throughout the world choose gems according to an arbitrary decision made by businesspeople nearly a century ago. There is a move to make tanzanite, discovered in 1967, an alternative December gemstone.
[Victoria Finlay, Jewels : A Secret History (New York : Ballentine Books, 2006), p. 373]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Naming Things
The $3-Million Book
Here's a nice little story that says there's still hope for a bribe-free, morally just society. I'll cut-and-paste it just as I found it at Avedon Carol's ("Interweaving the Internet").
Bookslut: In May 2005, Cary McNair told the St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Austin, TX that if they did not remove Annie Proulx's short story "Brokeback Mountain" from its 12th grade reading list, he would pull a donation of $3 million to the school's rebuilding fund. St. Andrew's board of trustees opted to leave the story on the reading list and let McNair keep his money. Board member Bill Miller said, "St. Andrew's has a policy not to accept conditional gifts, whether it's $5 or $500,000." The school's decision caught the attention of author Lisa Yee, who posted the story on a listserv for young adult fiction authors. Two other authors had the same immediate response. Jordan Sonnenblick said, "[Mark Williams] and I posted back at the same time, 'We need to all send books to that school to support them.'"
Spring-Time Azalea
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Please welcome the newest addition to our household: Azalea. She is a 7-year-old red brindle ex-racing greyhound; in fact, all of our four-legged companions for the last eight years have been ex-racers because they make great companions. She arrived two days ago to take up the position recently vacated by Arlo, who died on 22 February of this year, aged 9.5 years. Dowland, our red boy who has lived with us since 1999 (he's almost 12 years old), seems happy enough to have some company again.
Although Azalea once raced, she hasn't for a number of years — racing-greyhound careers typically end when the dog is two to three years old. We know that she is a survivor of Hurricane Katrina, living in a kennel when her family was evacuated. Family life before the hurricane had become stressful with the arrival of a new baby, and while she was living at the kennel her greyhound companion died. She made her way north in search of a more stable home, thence to our house, through the auspices of Greyhound Pets of America, Maryland chapter. GPA-MD has matched us up with three of our four hounds.
She is still getting settled in, but she has had some experience with moving to new places so it doesn't seem to alarm her too much. She's been acting comfortable — i.e., sleeping most of the time, as greyhounds will do — and exploring the house with interest. She also likes to have her back scratched a lot. She does seem to have a very nice personality which, as we know from experience with Arlo, can sometimes indicate a taste for mischief of which there have been no signs so far. We don't know that she's channeling Arlo yet, but she does exhibit the same characteristic jauntiness of the ears that he did, ears that fold and point this way and that seemingly of their own volition ("ears akimbo", a friend suggested).
By the way, don't be taken in by the pitiful look she displays in the upper photograph; all greyhounds are masters of this method of getting their humans to give them what they want, which is usually a doggie treat or a walk.
Peeps Evolve
I was quite delighted to discover last night, when I stopped in at our neighborhood drugs & sundries store, that there was a new variety of Peeps evident in pre-easter menagerie on display. Perhaps it was even a new species, but it might be too early to tell. Recent times have seen the appearance of Peeps in a variety of colors, both pastel and saturatedly lurid, as well as some weird bunny shapes that are more making mock of the original, inspired chick-shape than an inspired new silhouette. But this was more exciting to my diabetic eyes than any of those.
Sugar-free Peeps! Made in the original, brilliant yellow Peeps shape, too! I have long been a connoisseur of the non-comestible applications of Peeps (such as the now famous "peeps jousting", requiring in addition to the Peeps a microwave oven and a pair of toothpicks — the Wikipedia article on Peeps has some leads to such topics), a tradition that seemed to me to grow from the popularity of physics experiments with Twinkies that were such a fad when I was in graduate school.*
Now, though, with Sugar-free Peeps, even Isaac and I and may participate with relatively little guilt (they still have some carbohydrates) in consuming the little yellow creatures. But don't tell Isaac — they're now a surprise for his Easter bag!
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* I can't locate the web page at the moment, but a decade ago there were available online summaries, with photographic data, of experiments measuring various physical properties of Twinkies: electrical conductivity, Young's modulus (elasticity), ignition temperature, etc. It was, admittedly, sophomoric, but then there's no accounting for the sense of humor of students of physics.
In: All, Curious Stuff, Food Stuff
Deadline for Victory
I hear the soundbite of some Senator arguing against putting any sort of date for withdrawal from the Iraq quagmire. The claim: any sort of deadline would tell the "terrorists" just how long they have to wait us out.
To my ear, the implications of that argument are two-fold:
- If we don't want them to know how long they have to wait us out, doesn't that presume that we will not defeat them in that time, i.e., be "victorious"?
- Does it leave open the possibility of ever planning to withdraw? How about, say, 2045? 2034? 2019? 2015? Am I getting closer? Recognize the specious argument of the same "Mr. Churchill, what do you think I am?" category?*
Besides, when date of a pull-out is talked about, why should Republicans absolutely rush to assume that Democrats are not suggesting that the administration will be totally victorious in its pretty little war by then? Shouldn't they be thinking of it as a "Deadline for Victory"? Shouldn't talk of, say, an eighteen-month plan for victory have the terrorists quaking in their combat boots?
Republican can be so defeatist sometimes. Tsk.
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*Just in case you don't recognize the allusion, here is a version of the exchange:
… a Winston Churchill story [about] Lady Astor who[m] Churchill asked to sleep with him for a million pounds.
"She said `Yeah, I think I would, Mr. Churchill.' And he said `Well, how about I just pay you a dollar, will you sleep with me?' She said `What do you think I am?' And he said `Well, we just determined what you are, now we are debating price.'"
[source]
Although the above adequately summarizes the anecdote, I don't think it can be terribly accurate. Do we really believe that Lady Astor would respond with "yeah"?
In: All, Current Events, Splenetics