The Conversation Sandwich Theory
This was a title for a post that I've saved for sometime; it was something someone googled that carried them here for inexplicable reasons, but I thought it a very attractive phrase to describe something. Alas, I haven't been able to think yet of a good use for it.
I try to imagine what a "conversation sandwich" might be, perhaps a way of varying and associating topics so that conversation does not grow stale. Or, alternatively, a metaphor for creating conversation by putting the conversational meat between two lighter pieces of conversational bread.
Could there be some reference to condiments? Conversational mustard, maybe, or rhetorical ketchup? Is there lettuce or cheese in the sandwich? Are the crusts to be cut off?
I've been in a white-bread paradigm, but maybe whole-wheat bread would be more suitable, or maybe the newest craze for artisanal breads, usually found in distinctly non-artistic type situations. That, in itself, could be a metaphor for lively conversation in dull situations.
I'm afraid I'm at a loss, but it's such a nice phrase.
In: All, Curious Stuff, The Art of Conversation
Ball's Critical Mass
A week or two ago I finally finished reading Philip Ball's Critical Mass : How One Thing Leads to Another. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. (My book note about it, with different quotations, is here.)
I've become quite a fan now of Philip Ball's writing; previously I was wowed by Bright Earth, and The Ingredients. Happily for me, there are still some of his books that I haven't read.
This one struck me very personally in a couple of ways. Loosely speaking, it's about modern attempts to apply modern concepts in condensed-matter physics (encompassing thermodynamics, statistical physics, fluid dynamics, critical phenomena, chaos theory and others) to social systems and the collective behavior of humans. Once upon a time I did experimental research in condensed-matter physics, including several of the disciplines he talks about. Today, with Ars Hermeneutica, I'm quite interested in what I call "appropriate quantification", or how to apply statistical models to collective human behavior. Thus, there is a lot of resonance here. When I think about how irritating this book could have been had it been written by a less-accomplished science writer, it makes me admire Ball's talents that much more.
These are some excerpts that I marked to keep here in my common-place book.
To kick things off, here's an excerpt he quotes from C.P. Snow's famous book The Two Cultures, about the divide (real or imagined) between the sciences and the humanities. This is all Snow:
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's. [p.38 of Critical Mass]
Ball began his discussion by looking at the earliest attempt to make a science of social interaction, Hobbe's Leviathan. Later on, he wrote about how earlier ideas propagated into today's economic thinking.
The social contract proposed by Hobbes might sound like a forerunner of those advocated by John Locke (1623–1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), but it is instead the reverse. To Locke and Rousseau, the power conferred upon the head of state comes with an obligation to serve the interests of the populace; for Hobbes, the common people are contracted to serve their ruler. For Hobbes, the principal fear was of anarchy; for Locke it was the abuse of power, which is why he saw the need for safeguards to avoid absolutism.
But although apparently a proponent of autocracy, Hobbes also provides arguments that can be used to support both bourgeois capitalism and liberalism. Although he expressed an aversion to the way the mercantile society bred men whose "only glory [is] to grow excessively rich by the wisdom of buying and selling," which they do "by making poor people sell their labour to them at their own prices," he saw bourgeois culture as largely inevitable, and sought a system that would accommodate its selfish tendencies without conflict. To this end he left it to the market to assign the value of everything, people included: "The value of all things contracted for, is measured by the Appetite of the Contractors: and therefore the just value, is that which they be contracted to give." This fee-market philosophy found voice in Adam smith's Wealth of Nations in the following century. Those in Britain and the United States (and indeed elsewhere) who lived through the 1980s will recognize it as an attitude that did not wane with the Age of Enlightenment. [p. 29]
After we'd spent quite a bit of time using scientific models to understand some of the complexity of the market and larger economic systems, suddenly traditional economic theories seems hopelessly naive and more the product of wishful thinking than critical thinking.
So deeply entrenched is the free-market philosophy in American economic theory today (I am talking here about the pundits who exert a real influence–the TV analysts, the Wall Street Journal op-ed columnists, the think-tankists, and all too often the White House advisors–but not the academic economists) that the supporters of this creed are hoping even to ride out the catastrophic stock market collapse that is proceeding at full throttle at the time of writing. They place the blame on a few corrupt CEOs, on government policies, on fickle small investors, on labor unions, on left-wing critics who spread doubt and negative thinking–anywhere but on the market itself. If only all these people would behaved, say the free-marketeers, stocks would keep rising forever. [pp. 224–225]
Later, he moved on to using ideas from critical phenomena to look at systems that can apparently change their states spontaneously and suddenly. The key concept here is that of thermodynamic fluctuations.
One experimental peculiarity that the theory [a late 19th century by physicist van der Waals) did embrace was the extraordinary sensitivity of the critical point. A system near its critical state becomes extremely responsive to disturbances. If you squeeze a substance, it shrinks in volume. The resistance it offers to the is compression is a measure of its so-called compressibility A rubber ball is more compressible than a steel, ball, and a gas is typically much more compressible than a liquid–one can squeeze it more easily. At the critical point of a liquid and gas, the fluid becomes absurdly compressible–in fact, more or less infinitely so. In principle, the gentlest squeeze is sufficient to collapse a critical fluid into invisibility. This sounds absurd, and experimentally one can never observe such extreme behavior, because maintaining a substance exactly at its critical point is too difficult–the critical state is too unstable. but one can see the compressibility start to increase very rapidly as the critical point is approached. [p. 228]
A correction: the fluctuations are unstable only below the critical temperature; above, they are stable and can grow very large if one can contrive to get the fluid close enough to the critical point and keep it there. I once was able to do that. It was such fluctuations that we were studying with our Zeno space-shuttle experiment in the early 90s. We were able to keep a very small fluid sample stably poised some 3-millionths of a Kelvin (i.e., a centigrade degree) above its critical temperature to study the density fluctuations. The compressibility was so high that we had to do this in earth orbit (so called "micro-gravity") so that gravity itself would not move the fluid away from the critical point.
Still later the topic was networks and how they organize their connections and related topics, including a discussion of the Kevin Bacon degrees-of-separation game. Can all actors be connected to Kevin Bacon in just 6 or fewer steps? Is this deeply significant? Not really.
And what of the must burning issue: Is Kevin Bacon really the center of the movie universe? To answer this, one must calculate the average Bacon Number for the entire network and see how it compares with the equivalent measures for the other actors: the Elvis Number, the Bogart Number, the Brando Number, and so on. If Kevin Bacon really is the most important linchpin in the network, all other actors will, on average, be closer to him than to anyone else.
It turns out that not only is Kevin Bacon not the most important hub of the network, he is not even in the top one thousand (the list of course changes daily as new films are made). Currently up at the top is Rod Steiger (the average Steiger Number is 2.652), followed by Christopher Lee, Dennis Hopper, Donald Pleasence, and Donald Sutherland (who appeared in the movie version of Six Degrees of Separation). Marlon Brando is number 202, Frank Sinatra number 443. By the time we get to Kevin Bacon's level., the differences in the average Actor Number that separate successive actors in the list are tiny, about 0.0001.
So why was Kevin Bacon picked for this game? The answer contains the entire essence of a small world: in such a network, everyone appears to be at the center. Some are more "central" than others–but not by very much. Even relatively minor actors like Eddie Albert have a comparable network status to major stars. (Donald Pleasence was a fine actor but hardly a superstar.) [pp. 369–370]
Finally, a little quotation from Pericles [quoted on p. 425]:
Even if only a few of us are capable of devising a policy or putting it into practice, all of us are capable of judging it.
In: All, Common-Place Book, It's Only Rocket Science
Competent but Corrupt?
I saved this little observation from Avedon Carol some time back, and I'd thought to write something on the theme, about how so many of us liberal types talk about Bush and Cheney and their neo-con goons as though they were incompetent at running government, which presupposes that actually running the government were what they were trying to do. Like Ms. Carol, I've thought for awhile that it's probably to our disadvantage not to recognize that they might be having great success, accomplishing just what they wanted to accomplish while ignoring what we think of as their administrative duties and priorities. As she says, it's high time we realize this.
I just want to say: The trouble with the "incompetence" meme is that it assumes Bush/Cheney/GOP are operating on the same theory of government as the rest of us are. And while it's true that they hired people who were not competent to run government according to the agenda of the US Constitution, and that they have not run government competently if that was there intention, it is not at all reasonable to assume they have been incompetent at achieving what they wanted. I still think people should talk more about the fact that they are running the country into the ground just the way they wanted to.
[Avedon Carol, "I've Been Thinkin' ", the sideshow, 7 February 2007.]
Protecting from Tyranny
How curious. The Times of London reports that
“There are four or five generals and admirals we know of who would resign if Bush ordered an attack on Iran,” a source with close ties to British intelligence said. “There is simply no stomach for it in the Pentagon, and a lot of people question whether such an attack would be effective or even possible.”
[Michael Smith and Sarah Baxter, "US generals ‘will quit’ if Bush orders Iran attack", Times Online, 25 February 2007.]
In former times, we have had concerns about, and gone to some length to prevent, the possibility that our democratically elected leader (let's be generous and even include the not-elected presidents) might get too close to the military and use it to his own tyrannical advantage. At other times, Eisenhower warned us about the dangers of a rising military-industrial complex.
That, fortunately, seems the least of our worries when it comes to the Bush II administration.
One extra note on prevarication clarification. White House spokesman Tony Snow keeps repeating that "the President has no plans to invade Iran at present"; "no plans at present" easily changes to "previously had no plans" at a moment's notice, and the folks at the White House do not consider bombing Iran to be at all related to invading Iran.
Native Plants
How far can one go with fear of the "other"? I recently read a fascinating book by Robert Sullivan called Rats (more at my book note). My attention was drawn to the observations in this footnote about things "native":
The term native when used in regards to plants and animals can be complicated. In an essay entitled "The Mania for Native Plants in Nazi Germany," published in a collection called Concrete Jungle, Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, the director of Studies in Landscape Architecture at Dunbarton Oaks, in Washington, D.C., says "The missionary zeal with which so-called foreign plants are condemned as aggressive is significant. Such characterizations do not contribute to a rational discussion about the future development of our natural and cultural environment, but possibly promote xenophobia." Wolschke-Bulmahn points out that some plants that are considered "native" to the United States may have been carried over from Siberia by people immigrating to America over a land bridge, and he writes of an early proponent of native plants, Jens Jensen, a landscape architect who lived in Wisconsin, who advocated the destruction of "foreign" plants, especially "Latin" or "Oriental" plants. Jensen had close ties to Nazi landscape architects in Germany. In a journal, Jensen wrote: "The gardens that I crated myself…shall express a spirit of America, and therefore shall be free of foreign character as far as possible." In 1938, Rudolph Borchardt, a Jewish writer persecuted by the Nazis, wrote this of native plant advocates like Jensen: "If this kind of garden-owning barbarian became the rule, then neither a gillyflower nor a rosemary, neither a peach-tree nor a myrtle sapling nor a tea-rose would ever have crossed the Alps. Gardens connect people, time and latitudes…. The garden of humanity is a huge democracy. Is it not the only democracy which such clumsy advocates threaten to dehumanize."
[Robert Sullivan, Rats : Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants. New York : Bloomsbury, 2004. Footnote on p. 29.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, The Art of Conversation
On Reading A History of Reading
A few nights ago I finished reading a unique and interesting book: A History of Reading (New York : Viking, 1996), by Alberto Manguel. It's what it claims to be and is a lovely, literary and poetic tour through ideas associated with "the history of reading". (I have more to say about it in my Science Besieged book note.)
As usual now, at least with books that stimulate me, I collected a bunch of paragraphs that I wanted to make a note of; some are in the book note above, some end up here. There's no particular theme, just bits of resonance here and there.
This first one made me think of the current controversy — ripped from today's headlines! — about vaccinating school-aged girls against HPV, some detractors feeling that preventing a sexually transmitted cancer would lead to promiscuity. As we know, but as this demonstrates yet again, such notions that it's all for the good of the girls themselves are not really new.
After the letters had been learned, male teachers would be brought in as private tutors (if the family could afford them) for the boys, while the mother busied herself with the education of the girls. Even though, by the fifteenth century, most wealthy houses had the space, quiet and equipment to provide teaching at home, most scholars recommended that boys be educated away from the family, in the company of other boys; on the other hand, medieval moralists hotly debated the benefits of education — public or private — for girls. "It is not appropriate for girls to learn to read and write unless they wish to become nuns, since they might otherwise, coming of age, write or receive amorous missives," warned the nobleman Philippe de Novare, but several of his contemporaries disagreed. "Girls should learn to read in order to learn the true faith and protect themselves from the perils that menace their soul," argued the Chevalier de la Tour Landry. [p. 73]
I'm one of those people who has never felt quite like I was actually responsible for anything that I managed to accomplish. Years ago, in graduate school, a friend and I chuckled knowingly and recognized ourselves in a New Yorker cartoon showing a man sitting at a desk thinking "What if they find out?" We figured that being found out could happen anytime; it seems that Franz Kafka was a member of our group, too.
Kafka hated both the elementary school and, later, the Altstädter Gymnasium, or high school. He felt that, in spite of his successes (he passed all his grades easily), he had merely managed to deceive his elders and "to sneak from the first into the second Gymnasium grade, then into the third, and so on up the line. But," he added, "now that I had at last aroused their attention, I would o f course be immediately thrown out, to the immense satisfaction of all righteous men delivered from a nightmare." [p. 88]
Oh, now on to censorship — for our own good, naturally! Does this bit about Comstock and his fortitude in not wavering in the face of public opinion, when he knew he was on Jesus' mission, sound anything like any modern-day US presidents you know?
In 1872, a little over two centuries after Charles II's optimistic decree, Anthony Comstock — a descendant of the old colonialists who had objected to their sovereign's educating urges — founded in New York the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the first effective censorship board in the United States. All things considered, Comstock would have preferred that reading had never been invented ("Our father Adam could not read in Paradise," he once affirmed), but since it had, he was determined to regulate its use. Comstrock saw himself as a reader's reader, who knew what was good literature and what was bad, and did everything in his power to impose his views on others. "As for me," he wrote in his journal a year before the society's founding, "I am resolved that I will not in God's strength yield to other people's opinion but will if I feel and believe I am right stand firm. Jesus was never moved from the path of duty, however hard, by public opinion. Why should I be?" [p.284]
And a bit more about Comstock. Fortunately, Mencken had handy the pin to pop that balloon, a sentiment that seems widely applicable to today's moralists / ultra-conservatives.
"Art is not above morals. Morals stand first," Comstrock wrote. "Law ranks next as the defender of public morals. Art only comes in conflict with the law when its tendency is obscene, lewd or indecent." This led the New York World to ask, in an editorial, "Has it really been determined that there is nothing wholesome in art unless it has clothes on?" Comstock's definition of immoral art, like that of all censors, begs the question. Comstrock died in 1915. Two years later, the American essayist H.L. Mencken defined Comstock's crusade as "the new Puritanism", …"not ascetic but militant. Its aim is not to lift up saints but to knock down sinners." [p. 287]
In: All, Books, Common-Place Book
The Dumbest & Most Intelligent
Throughout this past week I heard occasional news reports about yet another helicopter crashing in Iraq or Afghanistan, killing several troops. I don't like it, but it happens — it's a war, as Dear Leader frequently reminds us.
Here's what I don't get: the unseemly rush by the pentagon to release word that none of these cases were the result of enemy fire. No! No! They were all equipment malfunctions.
Now, if you're in a war and your helicopters are crashing, which would seem the most desirable spin, that 1) your helicopters are being shot down; or 2) the equipment is junk or your boys can't fly them?
At the same time, of course, we keep hearing reports that insurgents in Iraq are planning coordinated attacks on our helicopters! Why should the pentagon be surprised that its enemy might be making plans to shoot own its helicopters? Isn't this a war, in which people A shoot at people B's things and try to hurt them?
Is this just another example of the fear-building tactic that was so evident post 9/11 about the hijacking terrorists: that they were incredibly cunning and brilliant in carrying out a precisely timed, extremely well-coordinated attack, at the same time that they were culturally backward, towel headed idiots who could barely fly the planes (and never learned how to land anyway) and couldn't even appreciate freedom and democracy?
Which is worse: the absurdly dualistic propaganda or the number of people willing to believe it all, even before breakfast?
Harry & Pepper
Here's a heartwarming story* about true love. Harry and Pepper, residents of San Francisco, have been a devoted couple for 2 years.
Harry and Pepper both weigh eight and half pounds and stand about a foot and half tall. During feeding times the couple is the first to dine. Pepper has a preference for dining "al aqua" so his keepers have affixed a black leather armband to his wing so they can better monitor his feeding habits.
"He eats in the water so quickly it is hard to read his number," said Brown.
Pepper, tagged number 207, also has a "huge beak compared to his body size," said Brown. As for Harry, he prefers to eat on land and is recognizable by the large white spot at the base of his tail.
Harry, tagged number 201, loves to visit with the zoo's human guests. But he had trouble finding a home, or burrow, with the other penguins. He settled on a planter box close to the spot where the keepers feed the birds. His home was away from the colony and a short waddle away from the dinner table.
Not long after, Pepper moved in. Later on the couple moved to a nicer spot where they keep nest together. Last year during mating season they were given an extra egg to incubate. Zoo keepers said they made excellent surrogate parents.
According to the story, the penguins are far from the first same-sex couple known to zookeepers.
At the zoo, Harry and Pepper aren't the first same-sex Magellanic penguin pair. Tollini recalled there was another male pair – she has since forgotten their names – which also took great care of the nest in their burrow.
"I found a peacock feather in their burrow. It was very well appointed," she said.
There have been same-sex flamingo couples, gay lemur pairs, same-sex monkey couples, and canoodling between the zoo's former pairs of female Asian and African elephants.
"They did all sorts of things to each other with their trunks," said Tollini.
The article goes on to dispel a few more myths about same-sex couples, even among animals.
———-
*Matthew S. Bajko, "Love blossoms for zoo male penguin pair", Bay Area Reporter, 8 February 2007.
In: All, Faaabulosity, The Art of Conversation
Another Year, Another Report
Here I am with another reason why I've not been writing so much here; it's the usual: I've been toying with your affections and writing elsewhere. This time I was working on the first ever annual report for Ars Hermeneutica, to celebrate our first full month (now two months) of tax-exempt status.
The report is short, just a dozen pages; it's also in a small format, so there's not so much to tax one's reading stamina. It's probably the best summary to date of what Ars is all about. The file itself is a small PDF, downloadable from this link.
I invite you to read it for yourself and share it with an interested friend.
In: All, Speaking of Science, Writing
Ultra-Defense of Marriage
This is making a bit of a stir, as it should: a ballot initiative in Washington State (I-957: "The Defense of Marriage Initiative") that would require married couples — mixed-gender only, please! — to produce children to demonstrate that procreation is a realizable function of their union.
The background goes like this. In reviewing a couple of superior-court cases from 2004, the Washington Supreme Court bought the right-wing propaganda that marriages are primarily for having children:
On July 26, 2006, the Washington supreme court cited the "legitimate state interests" of procreation and child-rearing as a basis for preserving the defense of marriage act. The People of Washington find it desirable to place part of this ruling into statutory form and make procreation a requirement for valid marriage in this state. [from initiative text]
It has long been argued by anti-gay-marriage fanatics that marriage is strictly in some fashion about procreation or the logical possibility of procreation and therefore gay people simply cannot be married, nyah nyah.
Initiative 957, created by the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance, takes the fanatics at their word — not to mention the ill-considered statements of the Washington Supreme Court — and seeks to establish procreation as a requirement of marriage. The strategy is simple (quoting from):
The way we are challenging Andersen is unusual: using the initiative, we are working to put the Court’s ruling into law. We will do this through three initiatives. The first would make procreation a requirement for legal marriage. The second would prohibit divorce or legal separation when there are children. The third would make the act of having a child together the legal equivalent of a marriage ceremony.
But don't feel sorry for the newly weds: they'll have 3 years to produce their child. Phew.
Reactions so far among the right-wing fanatics has been mixed: some think the initiative barely goes far enough but is a good start; others are suspicious and think maybe they're being made fun of, but it still sounds like a good idea to them.
Although I hate to divert possible contributions from Ars Hermeneutica (see "Support Ars Hermeneutica"), the home page of the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance tells visitors how to contribute and how to obtain petitions to help gather the needed 224,880 valid signatures to get onto the November ballot.
In: All, Current Events, Faaabulosity
181 Bits of Lunacy
Recently I got a press release from NASA, called "181 Things To Do On The Moon" that asked the provocative — if non-musical — question:
If you woke up tomorrow morning and found yourself on the moon, what would you do?
Look for a spacesuit lept first to mind to avoid having my blood boil in the vacuum. Then I started to wonder….
- Jumping 18 feet high would quickly lose its novelty;
- Hitting a golf ball half a mile might be useful if I played golf;
- One could try to see what's on the dark side, but it's dark over there half the month;
- We're well past 2001 so looking for a buried, black monolith probably wouldn't be worth the effort.
Then I read the press release, my sense of wonder — not to mention fun — diminishing rapidly. It turned out they were looking for serious answers.
Don't get me wrong: they were good answers. The moon would be a good base for doing radio astronomy, certainly. Also good would be characterizing the high-energy particles in the solar wind. I'm sure there's much to learn from accurate dating of lunar craters. There were also business ideas that were creative but mostly curious or odd.
Anyway, I sort of liked my ideas better.
In: All, Curious Stuff, It's Only Rocket Science
But Raman Noodle Live On
Like the author (Lawrence Downes) of the appreciation of "Mr. Noodle" in the New York Times (9 January 2007), I don't think I ever knew that Raman noodles had an inventor. I suppose I'd always imagined that such a ubiquitous part of Japanese culture and cuisine — as I thought of it — had always existed.
Raman noodles were an essential part of late-night sessions solving physics homework problems when I was a senior. Usually at about 2 in the morning my friend and fellow physics major Bill would dash across the hall to my room, carrying his hot pot in which we would prepare the sustaining favorite. I think we preferred beef flavor then, and I still do now. It has the most flavor to my tongue; it could easily be the saltiest tasting, which would also win my favor.
So too late I learned that Raman Noodles were indeed invented single-handedly by one Momofuku Ando in 1958; he died recently at age 96. He also founded Nissin Foods — still named on the packages I occasionally enjoy today — which made him a successful tycoon. Now that I know, I'd say he deserved it, too. The piece reports that Raman Noodles satisfies some 100 million people each day. Imagine that. In the picture that accompanied the piece, Mr. Ando looks pleased. I like that.
There was also this short appreciation of Raman Noodles:
Ramen noodles, by contrast [to other, inferior instant-noodle products], are a dish of effortless purity. Like the egg, or tea, they attain a state of grace through a marriage with nothing but hot water. After three minutes in a yellow bath, the noodles soften. The pebbly peas and carrot chips turn practically lifelike. A near-weightless assemblage of plastic and foam is transformed into something any college student will recognize as food, for as little as 20 cents a serving.
In: All, Food Stuff, The Art of Conversation
An Uncommon Woman
Just a few nights back I was part of a group conversation in which, through machinations now lost to my memory, the topic of playwright Wendy Wasserstein came up. She is apparently best known for her Heidi Chronicles, but I first knew her — and think of her most fondly — in connection with her earlier play Uncommon Women and Others.
Oh, I remember now! We were eating with a group of 10 or so when one of the people accidentally tapped her crystal stemware with a knife. All conversation stopped to wait for her announcement. I flashed on "Announcement! Announcement!" as a moment from Uncommon Women, a line that kept coming out of the mouth of one of the women characters. I smiled.
The play was set against the last year of "gracious living" at Mt Holyoke College, alma mater of Emily Dickenson, in various spots around a group residence for young women at the school. I don't know that the theme, or themes, of the play, mostly dealing with how these young women matured into, well, mature women was terribly profound. Nevertheless, the play always seemed to me to capture a lot of truth in two memorable and very funny acts.
I saw the play first on television years ago (a production on PBS). I also saw the play performed when I was doing graduate research at Duke, c. 1980. I enjoyed it immensely each time, and I like the memories of it that I have, and I find large chunks of it surprisingly memorable.
How odd it seems then, that Ms. Wasserstein should pop into my conversational stream so close to one year after her death, as I was reminded by this nice remembrance by Michelle Fiordaliso.
In: All, Music & Art, Reflections
When is Discrimination not Discrimination?
Many people have been raising an eyebrow at how odd-sounding are some of the arguments that The [Catholic] Church has been using in Great Britain to obtain an exemption from a new equality law concerning adoption by gays and lesbians. Now they have moved from arguing that being allowed to discriminate is central to their religious freedom to the idea that being told not to discriminate is discrimination against their god-given right to discriminate. Or something like that.
But the argument that gays and lesbians should sympathize with the situation of devout Christians as victims of discrimination signals a remarkable –if perhaps unwitting– evolution in religious thought about homosexuality. The ironic, and quite promising, outcome is that social conservatives are now expressing parity between the feelings of Christians and the feelings of gays and lesbians.
What might come of this newfound sympathy? Religious faith and practice have properly enjoyed special status in Western culture as a protected sphere. When John Locke and Thomas Jefferson articulated their influential theories of political liberty during the Enlightenment, freedom of conscience was fundamental‹the only way to give any real meaning to the period's new understanding of the relationship between the state and the individual. In a free society, any effort to dictate the shape of the human heart is considered not only inhumane, but impossible –as meaningless as squaring a circle. What people believe or feel inside is regarded as a matter of individual conscience, and cannot be mandated by a tribe, a King or a state.
In this light, it is not hard to grasp the parallels between sexual orientation and religious faith that embattled Christians are now expressing. Religious individuals often speak of feeling a surge of emotion from deep within them, of hearing a calling from something outside of themselves, and of struggling to follow the dictates of their conscience in secular surroundings. Likewise, gays and lesbians frequently describe the undeniable force of their emotional attractions, the need to respect a commanding feeling that seems to come from something greater than individual whim, and the challenge of honoring their convictions despite social stigma.
[excerpt from Nathanial Frank, "Britain's Gay Adoption Debate", Huffington Post, 30 January 2007.]
In: All, Current Events, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Introducing Euclid
One of the things I was doing last week instead of writing here was writing elsewhere and taking care of some details for Science Besieged, the nascent online project of Ars Hermeneutica. There are a couple of things I might point out.
First, Science Besieged has a new mascot: meet Euclid, the crow. I was working on a small annual report for Ars when I realized that the Sun Project had a graphic for a logo, but Science Besieged did not, and it would look unbalanced in the report. So, I thought to take a few minutes or so to do something about it. Weeks later, I have.
I had intended for some time to use an animal mascot. I had also for some time been thinking about using a platypus, which animal I find very appealing. Alas, Isaac and some other did not find the platypus appealing for some reason, despite the cool electrical-field sensors that the platypus has in its bill.
So, I challenged Isaac to suggest a better animal, and he suggested the crow. As he said that science writer David Quammen had said, crows are really "too smart for their own good". (He actually said quite a few additional and amusing things — see the link above for an online version of his essay "Has Success Spoiled The Crow? The Puzzling Case File on the World's Smartest Bird".)
The time elapsed between deciding on the crow — the American Crow, to be specific — and having a graphic was spent with an artist friend of ours named Faith who agreed to draw a crow for us to use. She did with reasonable dispatch, and I finally got it scanned and such so that we could have a usable graphic.
That's all taken care of finally, and the Science Besieged website now sports its new badge that features Euclid. You can read more about him and our reasons for choosing the crow at the link above.
Second, I also had some books to finish reading and, consequently, two new book notes to write for Science Besieged, too. For some reason I felt like writing more than usual about these two books: Bright Earth, by Philip Ball (which I've mentioned previously), and The Red Queen, by Matt Ridley.
Now, when it comes to writing I need to get to work on some short fiction. I'm woefully behind even my own slow production and need to catch up some. Fortunately, I think I have several ideas that have reached a reasonable maturity.
More Bright Earth
I think I mentioned before that I had recently been reading Philip Ball's Bright Earth : Art and the Invention of Color (New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). Regardless, I've been finishing up my processing of the book, checking my notes, and writing my book note — in this case a rather lengthy one — for Science Besieged.
I think said then, too, how delightfully entertaining and informative I found the book. I can heartily recommend it to anyone to whom the topic sounds the least bit interesting.
As is now my wont, I found plenty of bits to quote from the book. Many that I thought were interesting and that suited my notes are copied into the previously mentioned book note. There were two leftovers; here they are.
This first one is just too good to pass up for its assessment of science — both Gombrich's misunderstanding and Ball's gentle correction.
Ernst Gombrich asserts that "art is altogether different from science," but the reason he gives will bring a rueful smile to the lips of many a scientist: "Art itself can hardly be said to progress in the way in which science progresses. Each discovery [in art] in one direction creates a new difficulty somewhere else. " One can see that Gombrich never dabbled in science. [p. 7]
This paragraph seemed so concise and piquant that I read it over several times just for pleasure at the language and the barely ominous pirouette about the Inquisition at the end:
Luther's Reformation engendered the Counter-Reformation as if preempting Newton's law of action an d reaction. It was a last attempt by the theocracy to assert dominance before the Enlightenment banished God's earth forever from the center of all creation. The Church, seeing its authority undermined by humanistic rationalism, rallied and imposed a theological set of values akin to that of the Middle Ages. Classical (that is, pre-Christian) learning, said papal Rome, was all very well, but the ultimate arbiter of all questions of conscience was God (or his representatives on earth), not science or nature. As judge and gatekeeper of the conscience of man, the Society of Jesus and the Inquisition offered their services. [p. 130]
No Special Rights for Catholic Church
I admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude at reading the lead of this article from the Guardian*
The Catholic church is almost certain to lose its battle for special treatment over gay adoption rules….
How shocking for me, a gay man, to hear that the Catholic Church is being denied special rights when it comes to discriminating against gays and lesbians.
This is part of the "debate" swirling around the new British law, soon to come into force, that establishes a fair amount of gay and lesbian equality in consideration of social services. As has been their hallmark, the Catholic and Anglican churches (at least) have demanded exemption so that they may continue to discriminate as suits their taste.
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor wrote to the prime minister [Tony Blair] demanding an exemption for Catholic agencies on the grounds that to "oblige our agencies in law to consider adoption applications from homosexual couples as potential adoptive parents would require them to act against the principles of Catholic teaching". His stand was endorsed by the Anglican archbishops of Canterbury and York.
I remember hearing a spokespriest arguing that "matters of conscience cannot be denied", but I agree with the stance that such an argument to continue promoting inequality and hatred is well past its use-by date.
Catholic adoption agencies, in a less-than-surprising move, are threatening to shut their doors over the "controversy". I can't say I see this as a bad thing, despite the short-term inconvenience to some looking to adopt. Should one religious sect (or "faith group", as mentioned in the article) be deciding on behalf of the entire country who should be eligible to adopt children?
[Update: Seen just after I posted the above, this quotation from cabinet minister Alan Johnson, with its concise summary against the case for exemption, was too good to leave out (bold mine):
But on Thursday Education Minister Alan Johnson, who has responsibility for adoption, said the government, including Blair, saw no case for special treatment.
"I don't see a case for exemption and I don't think the prime minister does," he told BBC radio.
"The case for no exemption has been made very eloquently. The strength of that argument suggests that we cannot introduce legislation to protect gays and lesbians against discrimination and at the same time allow that discrimination to continue."
Jeremy Lovell, "Churches set to lose appeal on UK gay adoption law", Reuters, 25 January 2007.]
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*Will Woodward and Severin Carrell, "Cabinet rejects exemption on gay adoptions", The Guardian [UK], 25 January 2007.
In: All, Current Events, Faaabulosity
Revising US History
I've finally gotten around to reading Jeff Sharlet's feature article for Harper's Magazine ("Through a Glass, Darkly : How the Christian right is reimagining U.S. history", December 2006) , and I thought it a very valuable contribution to furthering comprehension of the mostly inscrutable fundamentalist mind. It is an in-depth consideration of how fundamentalists look at history, particularly American political history, through fundamentalists eyes, and how different that can be from how the rest of us see history.
At its foundation, fundamentalist history attempts to see everything "though His eyes", putting the Christian spin on everything imaginable — plus some less imaginable. Over all it is an approach to revising American history — or uncovering actual history, as the fundamentalist might insist: America was founded as a Christian nation, but the evidence has been suppressed by secularists, so the fundamentalist story goes. Separation of church and state is, at best, a misunderstanding. There's also space in the article to consider, among other consequences, the movement for home schooling as a way to indoctrinate youngsters with these ultrachristian myths.
I had hoped for a short quotation that would summarize and portray the entire article, but it was hard to be selective, so I've settled for two, somewhat lengthy quotations. In this first excerpt, Sharlet tells about a conversation he had on his way to a fundamentalist rally. Do be sure to read from beginning to end so as not to miss the punch-line.
It would be cliché to quote Orwell here were it not for the fact that fundamentalist intellectuals do so with even greater frequency than those of the left. At a rally to expose the “myth” of church/state separation I attended this spring, Orwell was quoted at me four times, most emphatically by William J. Federer, an encyclopedic compiler of quotations whose America’s God and Country—a collection of apparently theocentric bons mots distilled from the Founders and other great men “for use in speeches, papers, [and] debates”—has sold half a million copies. “Those who control the past,” Federer said, quoting Orwell’s 1984, “control the future.” History, the practical theology of the movement, reveals destiny.
Federer, a tall, lean, oaken-voiced man, loved talking about history as revelation, nodding along gently to his own lectures. He wore a gray suit, a red tie marred by a stain, and an American flag pin in his lapel. He looked like a congressman, which was what he’d wanted to be: he was a two-time G.O.P. candidate for former House minority leader Dick Gephardt’s St. Louis seat. He lost both times, but the movement considers him a winner—in 2000, he faced Gephardt in one of the nation’s most expensive congressional races, forcing him to spend down his war chest. Federer considered this a providential outcome.
Federer and I were riding together in a white school bus full of Christians from around the country to pray at the site on which the Danbury, Connecticut, First Baptist Church once stood. It was in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists that Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase “wall of separation,” three words upon which the battle over whether the United States is to be a Christian nation or a cosmopolitan one turns. Federer, leaning over the back of his seat as several pastors bent their ears toward his story, wanted me to understand that what Jefferson—notorious deist and author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—had really meant to promote was a “one-way wall,” designed to protect the church from the state, not the other way around. Jefferson, Federer told me, was a believer; like all the Founders, he knew that there could be no government without God. Why hadn’t I been taught this? Because I was a victim of godless public schools.
“‘Those who control the present,’” Federer continued his quotation of 1984, “‘control the past.’” He paused and stared at me to make sure I understood the equation. “Orson Welles wrote that,” he said.
Then, at the rally, he has a confessional moment with Pastor Rusty, which emphasizes the concern with which fundamentalists continue to worry about "child sacrifice" and "sodomy":
On the Danbury village green Pastor Rusty gripped my arm and pulled me close, tears streaming from hazel eyes as he confessed that he had betrayed God. The rally had migrated from the hilltop to the town’s center, an historic patch of grass next to a redbrick parking garage. A stage had been erected, and on it a series of preachers sermonized about God and American history for a small crowd of parents and children sitting on blankets and in lawn chairs. Rusty and I talked back by the literature tables. He had something he wanted to explain. He had neglected the twin sins, he said, the two wicked acts that fundamentalists believe to be the collective responsibility of the entire society in which they occur. “Child sacrifice”—by which he meant abortion—“and sodomy. Any nation that condoned those behaviors? That did not challenge them, that did not prevent them from happening? It will be reduced to rubble.”
He shook his head, eyes squeezed shut. The church had allowed women to murder their children and men through sodomy to damn themselves and all their brothers. It was his fault more than theirs because he knew the “blueprint of God’s Word.” He had pored over the Bible and the Constitution and the Mayflower Compact, had memorized choice words from John Adams and John Witherspoon and Patrick Henry, Jeremiah and Nehemiah and John the Revelator. Scripture and American history are in agreement, he had found: beneath God, family, and church is the state, with only one simple responsibility: “The symbol of the state is a sword. Not a spoon, feeding the poor, not a teaching instrument to educate our young.” Rusty stepped back, fists clenched. “And the sword is an instrument of death!” he yelled. He twitched his Italian loafers in a preacher two-step. He shook out his neck like a boxer. Then sorrow slumped his shoulders. He had failed to wield the sword. He had failed the widows and orphans. He had failed his brothers lost to sodomy. “There’s nobody clean in this,” he whispered.
As has been said many times — and repeated by me on more than one occasion — it matters not whether what they believe is true; what matters is that so many believe it so fervently.
Is it dangerous? It depends on numbers in some cases, and the willingness in other cases for some to do what they hear their god telling them to do, from beating up a few fags on a Saturday night to bombing abortion clinics and murdering doctors.
Consider for a moment that the current president likely ascended to office on a wave of messianic fervor and what a mess has resulted from his ideas about conducting domestic and foreign policy as He would have it. Consider further the keen disappointment of many of W's former supporters that, alas, the president has not been fundamentalist enough to suit them.
In: All, Reflections, The Art of Conversation
Encaptionating
Thanks again to Maud Newton* comes this fun idea that blends language and not-always-so-helpful modern technology. She reports that
A reader who calls himself Angry Young Man has figured out a way to automate New Yorker cartoon captions — using New Yorker short stories.
It seems that Angry Young Man discovered that applying Microsoft Word's "autosummarize" function ("tools" menu) repeatedly to New Yorker stories left a residue after several iterations that sounded like the characteristically droll captions to New Yorker cartoons. It's easy to imagine how that might be true.
Naturally, this sounded like a word game, which I am tentatively thinking of as "encaptionating', too simple and too fun not to indulge in a bit.# Therefore, I've done a couple of short experiments using my own (written under my alternym Jay Neal — see link above) published (or soon-to-be published) fiction as input.
The first example comes from a longish story, "Goodland, Kansas", which will be published in a few months by Cleis Press in the book Country Boys, edited by Richard Labonté. The original story had about 6,000 words.
First, after 4 iterations with autosummarize (I've done some reformatting):
"I’m Alan Morrison.” Now Alan seemed more distracted. Alan seemed surprised by Donny’s offer.
Ross intoned. Alan asked. Kenny sounded confused.
Kenny scowled and Alan poked Ross in the ribs with his elbow.
' “Good,” Ross said,' Alan said with evident delight.
Ross didn’t stop him. Alan’s hand easily slipped under Ross, where he lightly fingered Ross’ balls.
Alan counted next. Kenny counted last. Ross made no response.
“I think Kenny’s asleep,” Alan whispered.
"Kenny? Why?”
Kenny giggled. Ross turned and left.
Alan asked. Alan affected an innocent air. Alan shook his head slowly. “Poor Ross.“
Kenny?
And then after another iteration — not quite to caption state:
"I’m Alan Morrison.”
Ross intoned. Alan asked.
Alan counted next. “I think Kenny’s asleep,” Alan whispered.
Kenny giggled. Alan asked. “Poor Ross.“
Kenny?
Now on to a story called "The Lighthouse Keep", which was recently published in Best Gay Erotica 2007, edited by Timothy J. Lambert & Richard Labonté (Cleis Press, October 2006). This story has quite a different voice, and was 3,500 words long. After four iterations:
The Lighthouse Keep:
“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight…?”
“Do you keep the lighthouse?”
“Heed my warning and do not approach the lighthouse” indeed.
The Keep slowly, deliberately coiled the whip in his hand then stepped towards me. Several times he plunged in the whip, and each time I pumped out another load.
The candles flickered ominously.
One more iteration gave a sort of Haiku version:
The Lighthouse Keep:
“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight…?”
The candles flickered ominously.
which, to me, captures the mood with chilling accuracy.
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*Maud Newton, "Repurposing New Yorker Fiction", Maud Newton, 11 January 2007.
# This reminds me of a computer-necessary game known as "Travesty", that generates text based on word-pair associations (or correlations) in some input text. Fellow motsseurs might recognize the "travesty" idea since I remember its being a fad topic for awhile in the newsgroup c. 1993, introduced by Jojo to mock the Melmon, if I remember correctly. I had hoped to dispense with all I had to say about it in this footnote with a quick reference or two, but it's already grown out of hand and will require a separate post.
In: All, Curious Stuff, Such Language!
Plutoing Around
I don't usually approve of verbing nouns, but sometimes it's amusing enough.* I was interested to follow several pointers to the announcement by the American Dialect Society that they had chosen "plutoed" as their word of the year. NB, the word "plutoed" is intended as the past-tense form of the verb "to pluto", meaning to devalue something, in analogy to the way in which the quondam planet Pluto was demoted to the status of minor planet in 2006 by the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union.
Upon reading the press release about the vote for "to pluto", I am fascinated to see that the word "snowclone" was nominated for "most creative word or phrase"; to read about snowcloning in action, visit Language Log. (Tell Arnold I said "hi!")
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*And, of course, there's this gem: "Any noun can be verbed", which I first heard out of the mouth of fellow graduate student Myron c. 1980.