Beard of the Week XXVI: Unjustly Neglected Beards
Gosh but it has been a long time since we've had a beard of the week. I suppose I've been preoccupied by finishing some projects for Ars Hermeneutica and by our production of "Kiss Me, Kate!". Fortunately the latter is now over with and some level of schedule flexibility returns.
Let me introduce the beard of British composer Sir Granville Bantock; not a household name, not even particularly familiar, but for no obvious reason. Bantock was born in London (1868) and died in London (1946), a little after Sir Edward Elgar, roughly contemporary with Ralph Vaughan Williams. Why he is nowhere near so well-known as those two is not obvious. He wrote a number of quite listenable pieces in a late romantic style that took some influence from Wagner, apparently. Here is a detailed list of his works. (The same site, on other pages, groups the major works by date of composition or title.)
As an assessment along these inexplicably neglected lines, I quite like the following by one Vincent Budd, from his very informative and comprehensive essay "A Brief Introduction to the Life and Work of Sir Granville Bantock". Clearly Mr. Budd is a strong supporter of this neglected composer.
Sir Granville Bantock probably has the unenviable distinction – with less than a handful of other arguable challengers – of being the most unreasonably neglected composer in the whole pitiable chronicle of neglected 20th century British music. He is truly the supreme musical Ichabod of our Isles and the almost complete disappearance of his works from the repertoire of his country is one of the strangest and perhaps saddest musical biographies of recent times. The winds of cultural opinatry and the gravities of critical mythologising have condemned him to a limbo of fabled ingloriousness and he is left as nothing much more than a fleeting footnote in the histories of British music: his foibles and idiosyncrasies have been exaggerated and his gifts minimised, misjudged, and precondemned; characteristic idioms glibly recast into mannerisms, influences reduced to imitation, and critical marginalisation all too easily transfigured into musical fault in the shallow doctrines of accepted musical historiography.
Yet, for all the unfounded, beggarly, and ignominious inscriptions cast upon his name down the years, as our century passes into another the music of Granville Bantock, like that of Herbert Howells, could well be on its way to becoming another prized rediscovery from our wasted musical treasures.
You may make your own assessment by noting how familiar to you is the name of Herbert Howells.
I recently came to know Sir Granville, a little at least, through his 'cello music. Since I am a long-time amateur cellist, my ear is tuned to noticing unfamiliar music for cello when it turns up on the radio, as his "Pibroch" for 'cello and piano did one day. It was pleasant to listen to, and it also sounded not so difficult as to be beyond my own modest capabilities to perform. Something new to play!
It seems that Bantock had a warm fondness for the 'cello, since there are a number of pieces in his catalog for my instrument. The chamber music conveniently fits on one CD. There are three sonatas for 'cello and piano, in g minor, b minor, and f# minor; an "Elegaic Poem" for 'cello and piano; "Hamabdil" for 'cello and harp, and the aforementioned "Pibroch". The "Elegaic Poem" and "Hamabdil" also appear in versions for 'cello and orchestra; with orchestra are three other poems for 'cello: "Sapphic Poem" (my interest is piqued), "Celtic Poem", and "Dramatic Poem". These, by the way, constitute his entire output of works for solo instruments with orchestra.
But all this is by and by, really. Yes, it was his 'cello music that attracted my attention initially, but it was this picture of him looking all Edwardian with his lush but attractively styled beard and bristly head of hair that really cemented my lasting interest.
Considering "Morality"
I want to recommend a fascinating piece at Pam Spaulding's, called "Former American Family Association columnist Joe Murray speaks out against homophobia and hypocrisy" (Pam's House Blend, 27 March 2007).
The first reason is that she reminded me of this tidbit from the mouth of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Pace:
I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts. I do not believe that the United States is well served by a policy that says its is okay to be immoral in any way.
There are all sorts of reasons why it's inappropriate — no, let's say "wrong" — to refer to immorality in that context, but what it's done for the moment is provoke me into realizing the sneaky bit of misdirection that's been persistently invoked by the right: using "moral" when they mean "biblical".
Some people might think that it's a big question whether homosexual activity is immoral — I don't: it isn't — and then they get confused and start thinking therefore, somehow, that being gay is immoral. There was a time about 20 years ago at the height of the "love the sinner, hate the sin" feint, when homophobes did try to make such a distinction, but they seem lately to have slipped down their own slippery slope and forgotten that they ever thought such a thing.
But that aside, I have yet to find a single instance of someone who thinks homosexuality is "immoral" who doesn't claim to base that viewpoint on their reading of the Bible. Further, all such people are convinced that all human morality flows from their God, their Bible, and that there can be no morality without it.
All that is hogwash, of course. It amazes me at times how little some people know or understand about their own religions, their own "holy book", and their own theology — let alone believing something so immature as that there would be no morality without their book of stories. One imagines that they can only be such vehement partisans of their own religion by knowing so little about it.
I do find it amusing that many of these people revile me even more as an atheist than as a gay man. If only I felt inclined to join the Communist party!
At any rate, my thought upon reading General Pace's remark again was simply to think that perhaps it's time to start working harder on separating "morality" from "biblical", and perhaps discuss what is truly "immoral" versus some of the bizarre collection of misinterpretations from translated biblical texts that are thought to be the font of all morality. I note — again — in passing that homosexuality is not even mentioned in the much vaunted "ten commandments", although adultery is. Now, which sin can we deduce from this observation must be the more venal in their god's eye?
Now, before I forget to mention it, Pam's piece is a longish Q&A session with one Joe Murray, who used to write famously homophobic columns for the American Family Association, a notorious group of anti-gay activists. He's had something of a change of heart, and now apparently feels that the AFA goes too far. I found his answers to Pam's questions fascinating, and his steps on the path to moral enlightenment interesting, knowing with what voice he had spoken until recently. It's as though he has found the truth new and fresh, and sometimes it sounds that way coming out of his mouth.
"Official" Spring
Speaking of the Vernal Equinox, many people were — speaking of it — yesterday but occasionally with some imprecision, saying that spring "officially" arrived at about 2007 EDT. They would be better off saying "astronomically" arrived, since there's nothing "official" about it: no international committee meets to set the time of the arrival of springtime. Instead, we have chosen to relate the change of seasons to clearly and precisely defined events related to the apparent motion of the sun, events that have been noted since antiquity.
Because of the tilt of the Earth's axis of rotation (about 23.5°) relative to the plane of its orbit around the Sun, the zenith of the Sun (i.e., it's largest angle above the horizon each day) changes with the seasons; it's higher in the sky during summer and lower during winter.* In other words, the Sun appears to move not only along a path across the sky (the "ecliptic"), but that path appears to move higher and lower as the year progresses.
Now, imagine a line from the center of the Earth to the Sun; where the line passes through the surface of the Earth is the point at which the Sun, at that moment, can be said to be directly overhead. Let's call this line the "Sun Chord" — so far as I know it has no generally recognized name, and this name sounds harmonious.
As the days of the year pass, the apparent motion of the sun in the sky — or the intersection of the Sun Chord with the Earth's surface — traces out a squished figure-eight (the "analemma");# the exact shape of the analemma depends on the location of the observer.
As the Sun executes its stately analemmic dance, there are fixed extremes to its motion. When the Sun appears at its northern-most point, the Sun Chord passes through the "Tropic of Cancer", which is at a latitude of about 23.5°N; similarly, when the Sun appears at its Southern-most point, the Sun Chord passes through the "Tropic of Capricorn", is at a latitude of about 23.5°S. It is not a coincidence that these latitudes have the same angles as the tilt of the Earth's axis; it is a consequence of geometry. The Sun's passing through these extreme points is called a "solstice". In the northern hemisphere we often call the solstice that occurs in June the "summer solstice", and the solstice in December the "winter solstice".
Also during the year there are two times — very nearly 6 months apart and 3 months separated from each solstice — when the Sun Chord passes through the Earth's equator, i.e., when the sun is directly overhead at the equator. When the Sun appears to be moving in a northerly direction this point is the "vernal equinox" (or "spring equinox"); when the Sun is moving in a southerly direction this point is the "autumnal equinox". "Equinox", of course, means "equal night", a name given because the amount of daylight and nighttime are [roughly] equal everywhere on the Earth (except extremely near the poles, which are singular points in this geometrical picture).
And now to the point of this essay. Equinox and solstice times are mathematical concepts describing astronomical events. They occur at well-defined times that can be determined with as much precision as one would care to take. We can calculate to any number of decimal places the exact moment when the Sun Chord intersects the equator, making it possible to say that the vernal equinox occurred at seven minutes past eight (EDT) last evening.
Now, whether spring "officially" started then is another matter entirely, a matter of convention and history, but not a geometric necessity.
[After I'd started writing this piece, Isaac sent me a link to an essay on the vernal equinox in the New York Times by Natalie Angier, "The Tilted Earth at Its ‘Equal Night of Spring’ ", which adds some cultural considerations to the topic. The illustration is kind of cute, too, although it does suggest something more along the lines of a "martini equinox".]
———-
*This statement is true in both northern and southern hemispheres, but the seasons are reversed, which should become clear with a moment's reflection.
#Yes, this is true at the equator as well: the apparent motion of the sun describes an analemma. It is a common misconception that the sun at the equator is always overhead; what is true is that day and night at the equator are always equal, but there is apparent motion of the sun by about 23.5° to both sides of vertical.
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science
Welcome Equinox!
To welcome the Vernal Equinox tonight (at roughly 2010 EDT), we were out for a bite to eat and then a bit of shopping. The day was clear and warm, and the evening sky was clear and mild. At the time of the equinox we were outside strolling, and observed Venus and the crescent moon low in the Eastern sky.
The not-that-close-to-conjunction — the Moon and Venus were separated by perhaps 20 moon diameters — had been suggested as a tasty astronomical treat by a NASA mailing list that I'm on, and it was quite pretty. Venus was very bright; the Moon was the barest crescent, with the dark majority of the disk illuminated by ghostly Earth-glow. Happily, it was even prettier, and certainly more realistic, than something that might be done up by digital photo manipulation.
It was an enchanted evening, although we saw no strangers across a crowded room.
In: All, Briefly Noted, It's Only Rocket Science
Simpson on "Immoral"
In World War II, a British mathematician named Alan Turing led the effort to crack the Nazis' communication code. He mastered the complex German enciphering machine, helping to save the world, and his work laid the basis for modern computer science. Does it matter that Turing was gay? This week, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said that homosexuality is "immoral" and that the ban on open service should therefore not be changed. Would Pace call Turing "immoral"?
Since 1993, I have had the rich satisfaction of knowing and working with many openly gay and lesbian Americans, and I have come to realize that "gay" is an artificial category when it comes to measuring a man or woman's on-the-job performance or commitment to shared goals. It says little about the person. Our differences and prejudices pale next to our historic challenge. Gen. Pace is entitled, like anyone, to his personal opinion, even if it is completely out of the mainstream of American thinking. But he should know better than to assert this opinion as the basis for policy of a military that represents and serves an entire nation. Let us end "don't ask, don't tell." This policy has become a serious detriment to the readiness of America's forces as they attempt to accomplish what is arguably the most challenging mission in our long and cherished history.
[former Republican Senator Alan K. Simpson, "Bigotry That Hurts Our Military", Washington Post, 14 March 2007.]
National Republican Resignation Week
Gosh, things are heating up in the resignation industry. Plenty of opportunity over there at Walter Reed still to lose lots of brass, General Pace with his big homophobic foot in his mouth, AG Gonzales — once seriously thought of as a candidate for the Supreme Court, now demonstrating why Congress should never rush to confirm a Bush appointment — taking full responsibility and no one even believes that, VP Cheney still much loved…the list is quickly becoming endless.
So endless, in fact, that any day now we might cross the line where the entire effort of the government and all the black ink of the fourth estate will be spent investigating corruption and talking about yet another resignation of a prominent Republican. Why, Fox news will no doubt by the end of the week consume all of its fair and balanced resources trying to defend the miscreants.
I have a suggestion to save time and money: let's declare, say, the week of 1 April to be "Republican Resignation Week". All those who have been, are, or will be feeling the pressure of federal investigation and indictment can simply step down, no resignation letters or "I'm not a crook" press conferences necessary. C'mon: everyone will be doing it!
Sorry, no amnesty though. After all, we need something to keep all those federal prosecutors off the streets.
Pace "Justifies" DADT
Sometimes the news — not to mention the people making the news — is just so breath-takingly stupid that comment seems unnecessary:
Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Monday that he supports the Pentagon's "don't ask, don't tell" ban on gays serving in the military because homosexual acts "are immoral," akin to a member of the armed forces conducting an adulterous affair with the spouse of another service member.
Responding to a question about a Clinton-era policy that is coming under renewed scrutiny amid fears of future U.S. troop shortages, Pace said the Pentagon should not "condone" immoral behavior by allowing gay soldiers to serve openly. He said his views were based on his personal "upbringing," in which he was taught that certain types of conduct are immoral.
[Aamer Madhani, "Top general calls homosexuality 'immoral' ", Chicago Tribune, 12 March 2007.]
One wonders how merely being gay can be "immoral" behavior. Some straight people of little imagination seem to think that being gay is somehow being sex, which must be why their little brains melt down when young people who have not yet experienced sex say that they are gay. One wonders again why some straight people of little imagination are so obsessed with sex in general and gay sex in particular.
I suppose we should be grateful that homosexuality has moved down the list towards adultery and away from some sort of capital abomination — although adultery used to be high on the list of capital offenses to some of the fundamentalist who love to condemn gay people. Do you think attitudes like the General's have an adverse effect on unit cohesion? (I wonder how similar are the thoughts of this General and the General in my previous post?)
As someone pointed out, this does rather beg the question of whether the General's own evidently stunted moral upbringing should be the basis of our country's military policy.
While we're on the topic, I think I'll mention the Service Members' Legal Defense Network's statement on the General's remarks.
Little Love Arrows
I am currently distracted by rehearsals every evening this week for our current musical production; we give our first public performance on Friday night, then four more shows that weekend and the next. This time: "Kiss Me, Kate", by Cole Porter.
One amusing moment in the show is the dialog between the star, Fred Graham, and a rival of his for the affections of Lily Vanessi, the General. Now, the General is a decided Republican*
The General is outlining his theory of women, whom he believes not only need a firm hand now and then but — between the General and Fred — he thinks they like it. Fred continues to draw the General out in very ironic terms:
Fred: Women should be struck occasionally, like gongs?
General: Who said that?
Fred: Noel Coward.
General: Now there's a man I'd like to meet — a real straight talker.
Fred: Um, not really.
Of course, what we have here is a little pun via Mr. Porter — himself a person of some homosexual persuasion — on the word "straight": Mr. Coward, a well-known person of the homosexual persuasion, can hardly be described as a "straight talker" and the joke is on the General but being a staunch Republican he doesn't realize it.
There is another place where the General sings his song to Miss Vanessi and refers to a time when things were "so gay". "Gay" was popular in song lyrics of the time; among other things, it's easily rhymed with lots of useful words about love and things.
Now, in later years, one of the big complaints straight guys have made about the "homosexual agenda" is that it has ruined a perfectly good word, namely "gay". "Gay", they say, used to mean happy and carefree, something about which straight boys apparently wished to speak and sing frequently.
But then, "gay" also has meant gay in the modern sense for quite some time. Now it struck me: think for a moment about all those times when "gay" was used as a "good word". Largely, these uses seeped into the public lexicon via popular songs of the time, popular songs largely written by people like Cole Porter and Noel Coward, and others of notoriously homosexual persuasion.
What a delicious irony that so many of those "good" uses of the word "gay" might turn out to be coded little irony arrows launched to pierce the hearts of just those staunch straight men who decry its debasement since then.
———-
* Probably "staunch" in the manner of all such Republicans. Does this word ever get used to describe anything other than Republicans?
In: All, Faaabulosity, Reflections
Faaabulous Fridays
Late last night, after a longish rehearsal for "Kiss Me, Kate" (our production opens next Friday), we were talking with our young friend and Isaac's co-worker Sarah. Who knows exactly how the topic came up, but the bigger context was musicals and how, perhaps, people at "the office" would be better off if they just burst into song every now and then.
Coming along another track altogether was a random train of thought about "casual Friday", and how it is that what's "appropriate business attire" can change from day to day, a somewhat foreign concept for me anyway as the academic scientist / researcher, although I have been known to wear ties for certain occasions.
It struck us that what many, many workplaces could benefit from would be "Faaabulous Friday" — fun clothes, fun attitudes, and good production values, perhaps even with people bursting spontaneously into song and the occasional "ta da!" I'm thinking about making it policy for Ars Hermeneutica.
APS Openness
Today in Bob Park's What's New (9 March 2007 edition) was this tidbit:
OPENNESS: THE MARCH MEETING OF THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY.
The commitment of physicists to the principle of openness was tested this very morning in Denver at the APS March meeting, as it has been every year for 108 years. Roy Masters, author of "God Science and Free Energy from Gravity," was to deliver "Electricity from Gravity" at 9:36 a.m. Anyone can deliver a paper at the March Meeting. What if Masters actually succeeded in using up our gravity to keep the lights on? Not to worry.
I think all physics graduate students, sometime during their years' long hazing, have noticed this phenomenon. It's always good for a few giggles. But what Park says is true: any member of the APS may submit an abstract and deliver a 10-minute paper at general meetings of the society. Especially in the days when programs of abstracts were printed and distributed on paper, it was common for a few abstracts to appear for which no speaker materialized at the appointed time.
In my day there was someone who submitted an abstract at every opportunity, but who never appeared at the meetings; I don't remember his name or where he was from. In those days one had a piece of paper on which a rectangle was inscribed; one's abstract would be photographically reproduced and everything that was to be printed must appear withing the bounds. Said person always included a photograph of some geological feature, around which he typed his abstract, and then he filled the remaining bits of space with arrows to bits of the photo and handwritten notes. In the physics world I suppose it's what passes for conceptual art.
Similarly, for years while I was in graduate school, there was every month, without fail, a small advertisement in the back of Physics Today from a person whose name now escapes me, who was searching for his "gamma-gamma correlations". None of us knew what "gamma-gamma correlations" were — mostly because there is no such thing — but the advertiser never gave up hope.
Then, when I was nearing the end of graduate school, the advertisements disappeared. We were all a bit bereft at the loss of this institution. Then, after a couple of months another advertisement appeared in which the previous advertiser now promised to sell, for a small fee, something like all the secrets of the universe based on his theory about "gamma-gamma correlations", or something like that. He had apparently found them and we could all rest again, knowing that the integrity of fringe science was safe again.
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Laughing Matters
The "Woodstock of Physics"
There has been lots of talk, relatively speaking, this week about a now-famous event that took place at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society 20 years ago. The first piece that I saw was in the New York Times (Kenneth Chang, "Physicists Remember When Superconductors Were Hot", 6 March 2007 — his piece is fine, but I think I'll scream if anyone mentions mag-lev trains again in the same breath as superconductors, or anything else for that matter) about what quickly became known as "The Woodstock of Physics", if you can imagine.
Today it's the lead story in my e-mail's "Physics News Update" (9 March 2007 edition), by Phil Schewe and Ben Stein of AIP (the American Institute of Physics is an umbrella organization that encompasses the American Physical Society, and publishes Physical Review and Physics Today, among others).
So this is the story that got everyone all excited twenty years ago. I wasn't at that meeting — I usually attended a smaller local meeting the next month where most of my low-temperature colleagues congregated by tradition — but I certainly remember the buzz it created in the hallways near my lab. This is probably the event I will recall when people start talking again, as they seem to every generation or so, about how physics is pretty much played out and all important discoveries have already been made.
It was rather more excitement than you might expect to see among a group of typically staid physicists. By the way, this gives you a chance to see the differences between a news story written for the public, and one written with an audience of physicists in mind.
"THE WOODSTOCK OF PHYSICS," the famous session at the March 1987 meeting of the American Physical Society, earned its nickname because of the rock-concert fervor inspired by the convergence of dozens of reports all bearing on copper-oxide superconductors. The 20th anniversary of this singular event was celebrated this week at the APS meeting in Denver.
Why such an uproar over the electrical properties of an unlikely ceramic material? Because prior to 1987 the highest temperature at which superconductivity had been observed was around 23 K [i.e., "Kelvins", centigrade sized degrees where 0 K is "absolute zero"]. And suddenly a whole new set of compounds–not metallic alloys but crystals whose structure put them within a class of minerals known as perovskites–with superconducting transition temperatures above 35 K and eventually 100 K generated an explosion of interest among physicists. Because of the technological benefits possibly provided by high-temperature superconductivity (HTSC)—things like bulk power storage and magnetically levitated trains—the public was intrigued too.
This week's commemoration of the Woodstock moment (the months of feverish work leading up to the 1987 meeting) provided an excellent history lesson on how adventurous science is conducted. Georg Bednorz (IBM-Zurich), who with Alex Mueller made the initial HTSC discovery, recounted a story of frustration and exhilaration, including working for years without seeing clear evidence for superconductivity; having to use borrowed equipment after hours; overcoming skepticism from IBM colleagues and others who greatly doubted that the cuprates could support supercurrents, much less at unprecedented temperatures; and finally arriving at the definitive result–superconductivity at 35 K in a La-Ba-Cu-O compound. In October 1986 Bednorz and Mueller prepared a journal article confirming their initial finding in the form of observing the telltale expulsion of magnetism (the Meissner effect) from the material during the transition to superconductivity. Submitting this paper, however, required the approval of the IBM physics department chairman, Heinrich Rohrer who, that very week, had been declared a co-winner of the Nobel prize for his invention of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM). Afraid that he would not be able to obtain the preoccupied Rohrer's attention, Bednorz obtained the needed signature by thrusting the approval form at Rohrer as if he (Bednorz) desired only a celebratory autograph. A scant year later Bednorz and Mueller pocketed their own Nobel Prize.
The IBM finding was soon seconded by work in Japan and at the University of Houston, where Paul Chu, testing a YBaCuO compound, was the first to push superconductivity above the temperature of liquid nitrogen, 77 K. Very quickly a gold rush began, with dozens of condensed matter labs around the world dropping what they were doing in order to irradiate, heat, chill, squeeze, and magnetize the new material. They tweaked the ingredients list, hoping to devise a sample that superconducted at still higher temperatures or with a greater capacity for carrying currents. At this week's APS meeting Chu said that he and his colleagues went for months on three hours' sleep per night. Several other speakers at the 2007 session spoke of the excitement of those few months in 1987 when-according to such researchers as Marvin Cohen (UC Berkeley) and Douglas Scalapino (UC Santa Barbara)-the achievement of room-temperature superconductivity did not seem inconceivable.
The Woodstock event, featuring 50 speakers delivering their fresh results at a very crowded room at the New York Hilton Hotel until 3:15 am, was a culmination. In following years, HTSC progress continued on a number of fronts, but expectations gradually became more pragmatic. Paul Chu's YBaCuO compound, under high-pressure conditions, still holds the transition
temperature record at 164 K. Making lab samples had been easy compared to making usable power-bearing wires in long spools, partly because of the brittle nature of the ceramic compounds and partly because of the tendency for potentially superconductivity-quenching magnetic vortices to form in the material. Paul Grant, in 1987 a scientist at IBM-Almaden, pointed out that HTSC applications have largely not materialized. No companies are making a profit from selling HTSC products. Operating under the principle of "You get what you need," Grant said, superconducting devices operating at liquid-nitrogen temperatures weren't better enough so as to displace devices operating at liquid-helium temperatures.Nevertheless, the mood of the 2007 session (Woodstock20) was upbeat. Bednorz said the 1986/87 work showed that a huge leap forward could still take place in a mature research field whose origins dated back some 70 years. Bednorz felt that another wave of innovation could occur. Paul Chu ventured to predict that within ten years, HTSC products would have an impact in the power industry. Paul Grant referred to the study of superconductivity as the "cosmology of condensed matter physics," meaning that even after decades of scrutiny there was still much more to learn about these materials in which quantum effects, manifested over macroscopic distances, conspire to make electrical resistance vanish, a phenomenon which at some basic level might also be related to the behavior of protons inside an atomic nucleus and the cores of distant neutron stars.
(Photographs and an original summary press release from the 1987 meeting is available at our Physics News Graphics website, www.aip.org/png)
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Reflections
Off to a Good Start
I was, just a few moments ago, reading something that referred to the first sentence in a book, and instantly I realized I had forgotten to share my favorite. It's certainly not quite so familiar, say, as
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.*
or
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.**
but I found it very witty and effective.
This sentence comes from John Wilks, The Properties of Liquid and Solid Helium (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1966). When I was in graduate school, doing my dissertation experiment measuring transport properties in liquid helium in our low-temperature lab, this book was my constant companion. I bought my own copy as a special treat sometime c. 1980, paying (if I remember correctly) about $75 for it at the time, which seemed exceedingly expensive to me, a poor graduate student.
Anyway, this is the first sentence in the book:
Helium exists in three natural isotopes: 3He, 4He, and 6He; as 6He has a half-life of only 0.67 seconds it need concern us no further.
Such dispatch! True to his word, the short-lived isotope is never once mentioned again in the remaining 700 pages of the book.
———-
* Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, of course.
**Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.
Please, Call Me Rod
It seems to me that the Republican party has two options when it comes to their homosexual menace:
- Purge the party of all known and unknown homos; the difficult part, as recent history has shown, is the "unknown homos" bit; or
- Recognize that fags happen and go with the flow; they needn't, of course, participate in homosexual orgies — unless they want to.
This all comes to mind while I'm reading today a bit more background about the recent, somewhat eventful Conservative Political Action Convention, the one at which Ms. A. Coulter now infamously referred to John Edwards with the word "faggot".
Well, the new story, which I'm finding hard to keep straight on the details (fortunately, Max Blumenthal has it all: "CPAC's Gay Porn Star Honoree, Ann Coulter, and the Politics of Personal Crisis"), involves in addition to the flip-flopping Romney (who loved fags before he hated them), who introduced the Queen of Faggotry herself, a new arch-conservative force, former Marine Cpl. Matt Sanchez, who won the Jeanne Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom Award at this year's CPAC.
Well, it seems that Cpl. Sanchez had an earlier career in gay porn, in which he was known as Rod Majors (if only they'd hire me to create names, gay porn stars wouldn't all have ridiculously stupid names). Evidently he's also worked as a gay escort. Shall we stroll arm-in-arm down the Jeff Gannon Lane of Memories?
As you know, I certainly don't find anything wrong with gay porn stars. I do, however, find something wrong with gay porn stars becoming darlings of the homo-hating right wing. Tsk, tsk. As Mr. Blumenthal put it:
There is of course nothing inherently wrong with Sanchez being a gay porn star or a male escort. His past is only notable because he chose to join a movement that exploits anti-gay sentiment for political gain. Coulter's now-famous "faggot" remark was not an aberration, but rather a symbol of the politics of resentment that propels the conservative movement and its elected Republican surrogates; a reflection of the bigotry conservatives have sought to write into the Constitution through the so-called Federal Marriage Amendment. The ascendant "family values" wing of the right is also responsible for sabotaging legislation allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the armed forces, a maneuver that may now spell the end of Sanchez's career.
Update a couple of hours later: You might enjoy the photo of Rod and AC together, plus the additional details, at Towleroad: "Conservatives Laud Gay Porn Star Marine", where Andy Towle reports that he actually dated Sanchez a couple of times.
In: All, Plus Ca Change..., Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Thugs vs. Pansies
I've just finished an odd book called Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, by Nicholson Baker (New York : Random House, 2001). It's an unexpected polemic against the destruction of books by libraries which in itself sounds odd.
Baker traces the rise of the idea of "brittle books" and the response to it. Beginning in the 1950s with claims that newspapers were crumbling because of acidic paper, many libraries, led by the Library of Congress and government funding, began microfilming and then destroying their newspaper archives. In the next decade they moved on, heaping hysteria on the idea of "brittle books" that were "turning to dust" in order to create an emergency that would feed federal funds from congress to their microfilming operations. Well, it turned out that the newspapers and the books weren't turning to dust, but that librarians with an administrative bent felt quite proud at having staved off the necessity for a few years of building new shelves to house their collections. There's more at my Science Besieged book note about it all.
Anyway, one catch-phrase for this operation was "destroying to preserve", since the bound newspapers and "brittle books" had their spines sheared off to make microfilming more efficient, after which the pages were discarded. This led to the rise of the technical distinction — not readily recognized to the lay person, much to the advantage of the leading microfilmers — between "conservation", in which physical books were treated with care to keep them intact; and "preservation", in which it was the text that was to be preserved, not the physical book.
This is all somewhat lengthy preparation for this little anecdote that amused me, about the battle between "thugs" and "pansies".
In the early eighties [i.e., 1980s], Wesley Boomgarden briefly ran the preservation-microfilming operation at the New York Public Library, where his crew filmed more than two million pages, or ten thousand book and journal volumes, per year ("a lot of material from the Jewish division," Boomgarden recalls, "a lot of material from Slavonic"); now he is the preservation officer at Ohio State. In 1988, writing in the pages of an anthology called Preservation Microfilming: Planning and Production, Boomgarden nicely captured the tension that existed between preservers and conservators:
When my hard-working preservation microfilming staff wheeled truck after truck of brittle volumes into the conservation laboratory each week–to use thei r"low tech" power cutter in the process of cutting off spines to make filming easer, faster, cheaper, and better–they were villified [sic] by the conservation shop staff and called "thugs" who were destroying books in order to save tyhem. And, because of the accusers' pitiful statistics in conserving those minute numbers of dainty things–we "thugs" in turn labeled our conservation studio colleagues as "pansies."
[pp. 109–110]
In: All, Books, The Art of Conversation
About that Word "Faggot"
There has been brewing brouhaha this weekend about the occasion at a recent meeting of political conservatives, in which Ms. Ann Coulter, in what was apparently a weak attempt at humor, used the word "faggot" in reference to presidential candidate John Edwards. I usually go out of my way to ignore Ms. Coulter, who seems to think of herself as a terribly witty satirist, but whom I think of as an attention-seeking, cruel person whose celebrity is a barometer of everything most strident and hateful about our current public discourse.
I mention the accursed event this time only to point out a piece by Pam Spaulding, "Coulter: 'The word I used has nothing to do with sexual preference. It is a schoolyard taunt.' " Pam discusses the connection between Ms. Coulter's "joke" in the context of alarming recent national increases in fag bashing, sometimes fatal fag bashing, how it is provoked, and how little it seems to upset large segments of our society.
Frankly, I think some of the response to the episode is somewhat over played, but only somewhat. On the other hand, Ms. Coulter is more than deserving as a target of the disapprobation and if something good is about to come out of it the last thing I would do is suggest that things get toned down at all.
Lammy Finalists for 2006
The finalists for this year's Lambda Literary Foundation awards ("Lammys") were announced last week on 1 March; winners will be announced on 31 May. My chances of winning about 7% of a Lammy (again!) have increased, nearly doubled in fact, because this year I have stories in two nominated anthologies:
- my story "Duck Tails and Fins" was in Bi Guys, edited by Ron Jackson Suresha (Harrington Park Press), nominated in the "Bisexual" category; and
- my story "The Lighthouse Keep: A Gothic Tale" was in Best Gay Erotica 2007, edited by Timothy J. Lambert & Richard Labonté (Cleis Press), nominated in the "Gay Erotica" category.
They were both quality productions that I'm proud to be part of, if you ask my opinion. Congratulations to the editors and my fellow authors!
On Reading Vaccine
A little while back I finished reading Vaccine, by Arthur Allen (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 2007). I admit a prior interest in reading some history about vaccination, but I didn't expect to enjoy it nearly so much. Until I discover a better example, this book strikes me as the book to read on the subject: well organized, comfortably written, filled with fun stories, illuminating facts, and thoughtful analysis. (More at my Science Besieged book note.)
As usual, there were a couple of quotations that I couldn't find a place for but wanted to note down.
First, about the connection — emotional if not directly causal — between vaccination and the Raggedy Ann doll.
The smarter antivaccinationists picked up on Progressive-era public health's intolerant streak. "A bull in a china shop is a gentle, constructive creature compared with a lot of prim and more or less pious folks when they start in to clean up society and the world," wrote the activist Lora Little. "Mr. Sudden Reformer sees something he does not like in some of his fellow citizens. Very likely it is a reprehensible thing. Plenty of evils exist in the lives and habits of all classes. This would be a thing of which Mr. Sudden Reformer is not himself guilty, therefore he hates it with a mighty loathing. Dwelling on it, he works himself into a frenzy. He would suppress, eradicate, exterminate and stamp out that evil instantly."
Artists and intellectuals were prone to challenge vaccination as unintended consequences continued to dog the procedure. In 1915, Marcella Gruelle, daughter of the New York City illustrator Johnny Gruelle, became paralyzed soon after a vaccination was administered at school without her parents' permission, and later died. Gruelle believed fervently that the vaccination had killed his daughter, although the medical record blamed a heart defect. He created a special cloth rag doll for her during her illness, a floppy doll with hair fashioned from red yarn. Gruelle called it Raggedy Ann. The doll, with its limp limbs, became a symbol of vaccine-damaged children, and Marcella was the heroine of the Raggedy Ann stories that Gruelle went on to illustrate. The editor of Life magazine, John Mitchell, was so strongly antivaccine that he published a prayer in the magazine to the effect "that our children may in future be born immune from all diseases of the kinds for which toxins and serums are injected in their blood–most especially, dear, lord, smallpox, for the supposed prevention of which the ancient, useless, dangerous and filthy rite of vaccination is performed." [p. 99]
New techniques and new afflictions require new words:
War on diphtheria opened a new door in science by introducing the massive, almost industrial use of animals to teat and produce biological products. It was diphtheria investigations that gave rise to the term "guinea pig" to describe an experimental subject. Thousands upon thousands of the adorable little Andean creatures were slaughtered in the great European bacteriological labs after Loeffler discovered in 1884 that, unlike mice and rats, guinea pigs were highly susceptible to the germ. George Bernard Shaw, an animal lover and a skeptic of the Pasteurian worldview, as we've seen, described the extension of such experiments to human subjects as "the folly which sees in the child nothing more than the vivisector sees in a guinea pig: something to experiment on with a view to rearranging the world." Thus "guinea pig" entered the English language, reflecting a new social risk brought on by medical progress.
"Guinea pig" was not the only neologism to emerge from this Promethean era. As scientists such as McFarland in Philadelphia and Milton Rosenau of the new Hygienic Laboratory were getting a handle on the bacterial contamination of smallpox vaccine at the beginning of the twentieth century, young scientists in Vienna became aware of another disease process that could be set off by immunization. The syndrome occurred in children following the injection of diphtheria antitoxin. To make the substance, a horse was injected with increasing dosages of diphtheria toxin until its body had produced enough antibodies to be harvested. The hose was then bled, the red blood cells separated out, and the clear yellow serum, which contained the antibodies, was heated to kill bacteria. Of course, the serum contained more than just diphtheria antibodies. It contained antibodies to other germs the horse had been exposed to, and billions of other proteins that the human immune system would recognize as foreign. The injection of these substances into the blood for thousands of people created a new arm of the growing field of immunology–the study of allergy.
When practitioners injected crudely separated horse serum into a small child, it often produced an allergic response–and the child might respond with a full-out anaphylactic reaction to a second injection. Neither "allergy" or "anaphylaxis" were terms that existed before the twentieth century. Clemens von Pirquet, a scientist working at the Universitaets Kindkerklinik in Vienna, first invoked allergy in his 1906 publication Klinische Studien über Vakzination and vakzinale Allergie, to refer to responses observed in some children vaccinated against smallpox. There were two different responses to antigenic stimulation, von Pirquet noted: immunity, and "altered reactivity"–allergie, in German. The term anaphylaxis, or "against therapy"–was coined in 1902 by two French scientists, Charles Richet and Paul Portier, who found that a tiny amount of jellyfish toxin produced an inflammation in a dog dramatic enough to kill it. Upon the second injection of antitoxin, some children responded with an almost instantaneous rash and skyrocketing fever. Von Pirquet and his younger colleague, Bela Schick, called it Serumkrankheit, serum sickness. They theorized that the first injection had led to the synthesis of antibodies, whose rapid response to horse proteins after the second shot led to a systemic reaction. This completed the basic picture of allergic responses. [pp. 125–126]
In: All, Books, Common-Place Book, The Art of Conversation
Lunar Eclipse, 3 March 2007
Passing along information received from a NASA mailing list, there is to be a lunar eclipse starting this coming Saturday evening. Some of will be visible everywhere in the 48 contiguous states, the eclipse being already underway at moon-rise in this region.
NASA provides a very nice map with times and coverage, with a full text description on another page. While I'm talking about it, you might also like to know about the NASA Eclipse Home Page, operated by Fred Espenak ("Mr. Eclipse") at the nearby Goddard Space Flight Center.
Server Indigestion
For the last few days access to this blog for you, my four regular readers, has been spotty and for long stretches non-existent. Same for me, actually: I couldn't write, you couldn't read. Some, of course, who don't understand our strange symbiotic compulsions would think this, at worst, a minor inconvenience. How little they understand.
I'm told by my hosting service that the problem was traceable to a rogue process that was heavily loading the database and sometimes caused things to slow down tremendously, at other times to stop working altogether. At the moment, the server seems to be working well. I have no positive word that anything has been fixed, but we can always hope.
Anyway, no need to adjust your sets, and I'll try to get back to thinking of fascinating, deeply thoughtful topics to write about.
The Maillard Reaction
Sometimes I read the food article in the Baltimore Sun, and occasionally I'm surprised, perhaps even astounded, to find sciency discussions related to food chemistry and cooking physics. It's even more a delight when the author is attentive and gets it right!
Gosh, this one I clipped a long time ago, but it's still useful. From a piece about the "browning reaction" (i.e., the "Maillard reaction") and its relation to caramelization:
One nice day in 1912 Louis-Camille Maillard, a French chemist, conducted a simple experiment in his lab that turned out to be a shortcut that created meat flavor and meat aroma without any meat. He heated sugar (in the form of glucose) and glycerin (a sweet, syrupy alcohol), and his lab instantly smelled like a kitchen with a faint aroma of roasting meat.
Today we call his discovery the Maillard reaction. It turned out to be the chemical basis of much of our cooking, the most powerful flavor producer in the pot and in the oven. All chefs learn about it early in their training; they also know it as the browning reaction because all foods that acquire the flavor compounds of this reaction also turn brown in the heat.
This was good and commendable, but the author went further and explained how it happens with what I thought was unusual clarity.
The browning reaction is a chemical action between protein (amino acids) and sugars in the food. It needs high temperature, between 300 and 500 degrees. The browning only takes place at and near the surface of the food. Inside the food the temperature is too low and moisture too high for the flavors to develop. However, the myriad, rich flavor compounds from the outside can migrate deep into the food.
According to food guru Harold McGee in his book, "On Food and Cooking," "at least 100 different reaction products" result in browning, many of them flavoring compounds.
Caramelization, the second flavor-inducing chemical reaction, comes into play when the temperature of the food climbs to between 350 and 400 degrees, changing sugars into caramel. This process is a complex chain of chemical reactions producing more than 100 new compounds you don't need to know too much about — but the resulting flavors are something you definitely want to have on your plate.
[Quotations from: George Erdosh, "The golden touch: The chemical reaction of browning foods ignites flavor", from The Chicago Tribune, in The Baltimore Sun, June 2005 (no date specified on the page).]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, The Art of Conversation