No Telling How Much
It used to be that the federal government prohibited brewers from listing the percentage of alcohol on the labels of beers to discourage people from choosing their beverages based on alcohol content. But that's not true anymore.
In 1935, two years after the repeal of Prohibition, the Federal Alcohol Administration (FAA) Act prohibited the labeling of beers' alcohol potencies for fear of "strength wars" breaking out among competitive brewers. Ironically, some sixty years later when light beers and low-alcohol beers were becoming popular, brewers wanted the right to brag about how little alcohol their products contained, and they challenged the "no tell" law. In 1995 the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the labeling ban violated the First Amendment by interfering with the brewers' right to free speech.
[Robert L. Wolke, What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2002), p. 248.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Plus Ca Change...
Massive Election Conspiracy Not Required
Sometime ago, I read this article in The Washington Post on the topic of election fraud: had the presidential election suffered from it. This is the bit that has continued to niggle:
Similarly, it strains credulity to think that there was some sort of massive, coordinated effort to steal an election. Such a conspiracy would have had to cross state lines, involve hundreds or thousands of people and trickle down from the heights of power to the lowest precinct worker.
[…]
"This is not the first election with errors — and the simplest explanation is probably the right one. I think fraud on a massive scale that their conclusion essentially requires is totally implausible. To make it plausible it would have a lot of people working together, and you know from being in the news business how hard it is to keep something secret. …" [said Warren Mitofsky, the president of Mitofsky International, the company that performed the exit polling]["Vote Fraud Theorists Battle Over Plausibility: Study Gets Blog Love, But Comes Short of Proof", by Terry M. Neal, Washington Post, 24 April 2005.]
It's a bit difficult to see this as the typical strawman argument so popular in today's political discourse ('Why do liberals hate America so much?"), but it is.
The strawman: that election fraud would have required a massive conspiracy. Massive conspiracy in a society of reality TV and reveal-all talk-shows is beyond imagination (it is claimed), so it couldn't have happened. However, massive conspiracy was not required, and that's the point that is pointedly allowd to slip past in this masterly sort of misdirection.
"Conspiracy" is one or more people getting together and agreeing to keep silent or lie about something. Watergate was a conspiracy. The Bush Administration's WMD lies as a prelude to invading Iraq was a conspiracy. Real conspiracies tend to unravel sooner or later because it is indeed difficult for all the conspirators to keep their mouths shut 100% — the urge to tell someone something is usually just too great. The more conspirators, the harder it is to maintain silence.
However, what it alleged to have required widespread fraud in [at least] the 2004 national election, does not need widespread, "massive" conspiracy. Not at all. All it requires is the uncoordinated, non-conspiratorial actions of perhaps a few hundred people to alter the outcome of the election.
NB: none of these people need to work out the details with any of the others. They can each be separately motivated by such misguided loyalty to their candidate as they need to justify the means to their ends. The alleged election fraud, large as it seems to have been in overall effect, nevertheless was easily the result of localized contributions contrived by one or two people at a time.
- One person could easily have hacked all the Diebold touch-screen voting machines under his or her care, as has been demonstrated (see references below).
- One person can easily dispose of or invalidate large numbers of unwanted ballots marked for the "wrong" candidate.
- One person might make it her part to be sure that a few hundred extra names appear on lists of felons who aren't allowed to vote.
- One person can see to it that only half the number of voting machines are delivered to those districts where the person would like to reduce the number of, say, Democratic votes because the district is predominantly Democratic.
- One person can easily "accidentally misalign" three or four or five touch-screen machines in a precinct, resulting in hundreds or thousands of misdirected votes.
There are numerous way in which the actions of one person could be greatly amplified here or there, adding small amounts at a time to the accumulated fraud, and each of these little acts of sabotage can be repeated over and over, one person at a time, without working out the details with any conspirators.
Time and again reports have shown how there were hundreds of separated, uncoordinated instances of "little fraud", events that were readily controllable by the actions of one or two or three people. No "massive conspiracy" was required at all, although the result of lots of these "little frauds" was one great big fraud with widely distributed responsibility. It makes it all seem so much more insubstantial that way, as though it's all in one's peripheral vision. It also might make it seem not worth the bother of prosecuting all these "minor" little transgressions.
It does not, however, make the fraud less real just because it was not the result of "massive conspiracy". Of course, the claim will be made that there are alway errors, things always go a little bit wrong, but in the aggregate, when one looks at the entire population of votes cast, it is truly beyond belief that each of hundreds of accidental errors would all err in the direction that favored one and only one candidate. That is the capstone that marks this monument to "accidental conspiracy" and the large-scale fraud that resulted from lots and lots of conspiratorially isolated little frauds.
So, no "massive conspiracy" required at all, none needed, when a multitude of "little frauds" will accomplish the same thing with no significant responsibility resting anywhere. After all, what's a few hundred votes here, a thousand votes there, when surely it wouldn't affect the outcome of the election….
———-
Some references that I found useful when I was making notes for this post:
- "Researchers find holes in Leon County's election security"
- "Test shows voter fraud is possible"
- "Optical scan system hacked"
What's That In Your Briefs?
Okay, maybe it's just me, but here was this advertisement that I noticed in an article at TalkLeft ("New Damaging Information About Karl Rove", although there's no guarantee the ad will be there when you look).
Over a picture of a youngish guy in a power-blue shirt and power-red tie sitting comfortably at a desk behind piles of paperwork, this copy:
Hyperformance Briefs
You've put a lot into your brief. Now do it justice.
Hyperformance Briefs: indexed, hyperlinked, searchable, powerful.
Doesn't your brief deserve as much?
Although the ad is really about some sort of document management system for lawyers, I don't think you can blame me for thinking at first that it was about selling men's underwear.
I thought that "You've put a lot into your brief. Now do it justice." was particularly effective, and sure to appeal to most young lawyers in power-blue shirts and power-red ties.
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Let's Play Internet!
I won't claim this observation is at all profound, but it is curious, I thought.* Is this an example of a new game, named something like "Internet Quoting", akin to the well-known game known variously as "Telephone" or "Rumors" or "Whispers"? In the older game of telephone, one person in a line of, say, 20 people, whispers to her or his neighbor a sentence, phrase, or some other suitably short verbal expression. The person receiving the information, the "whisperee", then turns to the next person in line and whispers in that person's ear. This continues until the end when the last whisperee reveals the stream of words that s/he received. This end product is then compared with the way the information started out, and much hilarity ensues from observing the unintended corruption suffered by the original stream of words.
The similar network game, let's call it "Internet", involves quoting excerpts from someone else's blogs in one's own blog, and then having that quotation quoted by others, etc. The fun comes from watching the phrase or the attributions change as the quotation moves around. I'm thinking of becoming an Internet anthropologist, if only someone would pay me to track down these mutating phrases as they move around the Internet.
I was reading an interesting posting by driftglass, ' “Last throes”? ', in which he makes the striking assertion that President Reagan was responsible for elevating the anecdote to the position of national policy determiner, an idea I thought was fascinating.
Along the verbally stimulating and colorful way to his main point (as is his wont, and a good reason for reading his writing), he quotes James Walcott as saying in his blog when a similar verbal necessity arose:
The quote reads thus: “You rationalize it however you want, but that doesn't make it true. Or, as my friend Orac says 'The plural of anecdote is not data.'”
What a clever thing to say, thought I: "The plural of anecdote is not data." Surely I would have remembered reading Orac type that, wouldn't I? I do, after all, read Orac's blog.#
Well, Mr. driftglass does point out that Mr. Wolcott does himself point out that he was referred to Orac's saying by Kung Fu Monkey, and indeed that's correct. Here's what Mr. Wolcott wrote when he quoted Mr. Monkey:
"I'm not surprised your conservative-toned movie/script/project went nowhere. The vast majority of projects disappear. You rationalize it however you want, but that doesn't make it true. Or, as my friend Orac says 'The plural of anecdote is not data.'
In fact, the topic of Mr. Wolcott's article is the lack of a liberal conspiracy to control the film message in Hollywood products, a theme much adored by reactionary conspiracy theorists, and for this he points to Mr. Monkey (aka John Rogers), who is a professional screenwriter. In Mr. Wolcott's words:
A tip of the beret to Roger Ailes, who guides seekers of wisdom to a long and authoritative post by John Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey on the subject of Hollywood and its corrosive influence on everything heartland Americans cherish and value (when they're not doing crystal meth).
Sure enough, in the referenced article, "I WISH Hollywood Was That Organized …", John Rogers (who has a degree in physics, I was happy to discover, so I felt an immediate kinship, particularly since I'm an aspiring writer) sets out, with humor, to dispel the notion that Hollywood has the time or money or energy to work up a liberal conspiracy:
Oh — "Hollywood" is out of touch. "Hollywood" is liberal. The idea that "Hollywood" is some monolithic, organized … well, ANYTHING with a unified creative vision is patently ridiculous.
Sure enough, deep in the text, as he responds to the notion that someone once had a script turned down = evidence of liberal conspiracy, he talks about his own 25% hit rate with his liberal scripts and says
I'm not surprised your conservative-toned movie/script/project went nowhere. The vast majority of projects disappear. You rationalize it however you want, but that doesn't make it true. Or, as my friend Orac says "The plural of anecdote is not data."
Ta da! Now we'e getting close. So off I went to ask the all-knowing Google about "Orac anecdote data", and it gave me two relevant hits, entries in Orac's blog. The first is from 25 April 2005, "How not to win friends and influence people", in which Orac writes, in a discussion about Attorney General Gonzales and alternative medicines:
So I did the only thing that was left to me. I explained that a single anecdote does not constitute evidence for general efficacy, using one of my favorite sayings, "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data.'"
So there we see that Orac himself says that this is one of his favorite sayings, and who could disagree? It's a very useful retort.
But wait! There's one more entry in Orac's blog mentioned by Google, in which this phrase appears, and it's date is earlier than the one above: 25 March 2005, "A Response to "Herbinator"". This, I thought, would be the terminus, and I would see laid bare the original uttering of the phrase.
Alas, although it's one of his favorite phrases and, indeed, "as Orac says", it seems that the phrase was brought to his blog by someone named "Joan" who write this in the comments:
Joan said…
I'm sure you've heard this before, and not that I didn't enjoy your very well-put dressing down of the Herbinator, but sometimes it's nice to have that concise bon mot ready at the finger tips: The plural of "anecdote" is not "data."
"Joan" turns out to be "Joan O'Connell Hedman, freelance content provider", according to her website, which is cool since I myself am an occasional freelance content provider (i.e., "writer"). She also keeps a blog called "Oasis of Sanity". Back to the all-knowing Google with a request for information about "oasis sanity anecdote data".
Yes, two relevant entries again from Joan's blog.
The latest is dated 27 April 2005, a story called "ambushed". Joan tells about being in line to buy Splenda when one of those irritating do-gooders starts in on her about how Splenda has "chlorine" in it and will surely do irreparable harm to her insides. Joan apparently tried her best to ease the woman into the twenty-first century and a modicum of understanding of basic chemistry, but with no success. To herself she comments:
I've read all the "Oh my God!" emails over on Mercola's site, but I also know that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data". Splenda has been in use for decades now, and it has garnered only a tiny fraction of the horror stories that aspartame has racked up.
The earlier entry, "the Gawande kerfuffle: towards better medical outcomes", is dated 6 January 2005. In this one she writes (in the context of criticizing author Gawande for his slipshod handling of data, but the context doesn't interest me that much) — bold and italics are original:
I'd like to remind both the Postrels and Hu that the plural of anecdote is not data.(2)
Could it be? Is that a reference to a note that I see at the end of that sentence? It is indeed, and here is what she says:
(2) I have no idea who said this first, either. It wasn't me.
Alas, the trail grows cold right there for this particular chain of references. I could return to the all-knowing, but asking about " 'plural of anecdote' " gives 8,000 hits that would take awhile to sort out. "Plural of anecdote is data" is only an order of magnitude better.
But that's okay, this was still a fun round of the game "Internet".
[31 July 2005 update:]
I am delighted to see that I am now a dailyKos-designated expert on "the plural of anecdote is not data", thanks to "paradocs" and hisher amusing post in experimental anthropology called "Road Trip: playing 'Liberal Survivor' in Texas", where we find
And, in my observation – comparing road trips to Wisconsin last December and earlier this month, the frequency of of "W '04" bumper stickers on cars seems to be diminishing. I do realize that the plural of anecdote is not data.
and a link to yours truly.
Without meaning any disrespect, but in a spirit of celebrating the work of grammar police around the world, this is a good time to emphasize one of the many useful ways that one should use quotation marks. In this case, quotation marks around a word indicate to the reader that the author is referring to the word itself rather than the word's referent. For example
An apple might be red or yellow or green, but "apple" has five letters.
People tend to use this rule intuitively, although it is sometimes confused with thinking that the quotation marks are being used somehow to emphasize the word — a job for italics.
Therefore, I'd prefer to continue seeing this gramatically clearer usage of the cliché:
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
———-
*It also reminds me of my own personal issues with the widely spread notion that an academic named James Killaris is the coiner of the word "earworm". I discussed some of this in my own "Earworm Origins".
#I do remember seeing and probably skimming through both of the posts that I mention here, but obviously I didn't pay enough attention to the one to notice the phrase when he quoted it in the text. This just goes to show that it's next to impossible to overlook anything of importance on the internet!
In: All, Common-Place Book, Such Language!, The Art of Conversation
Not All Things Freeze
Some time ago I started reading1 Robert Wolke's What Einstein Told His Cook 2. It is a collection of very short pieces about food and cooking from a chemist's point of view, assembled from his Washington Post columns.
Rather early on though, he made a small error of fact. I point this out not to chastise the author, but as an excuse to talk about helium, one of my favorite science topics.2
He wrote:
[In answer to a reader's question about why frozen cola exhibits separated ice crystals:]
All liquids turn into solids — that is, they freeze — when they get cold enough.
[Robert L. Wolke, What Einstein Told His Cook 2: The Sequel — Further Adventures in Kitchen Science (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2005) p. 5.]
Before I make my point, there are a couple of preliminaries to discuss about freezing.
"Freeze" itself is easy enough: it just means turning from a liquid or a gas — better to say "from a fluid", because "fluid" encompasses both3 — into a solid. "Solid" generally implies some sort of crystaline structure, but we can be generous and include amorphous solids like glasses.4 In other words, we can take "freeze", as a synonym for "solidify", to mean much the same as it means in casual English.
"When they get cold enough" is also without serious hidden landmines, although usually a physicist will want to know under what conditions "they get cold enough". One common condition is that "they get cold" just sitting around in the air, under normal atmospheric pressure. This is frequent and familiar to us: we are very familiar with water freezing under normal atmospheric conditions.
However, thermodynamically speaking, freezing under normal atmospheric conditions is not terribly interesting scientifically, even if it can be well defined. A particular condition of thermodynamic interest is when a substance freezes "under its own vapor pressure".
Imagine a closed vessel — make it clear glass so we can see what's going on inside — filled only with pure substance of interest and then sealed off. We put enough stuff into the vessel and lowered the temperature enough, that there is liquid stuff and gaseous stuff in the vessel, both visible at the same time. On the earth, all the liquid will be at the bottom of the vessel, and all the gas will be at the top, with the two phases separated by a "menicus", or interface.5 Let's also say, to avoid misunderstanding, that the meniscus is exactly in the middle (by volume) of the vessel. That way, as we vary the temperature there will always be gas and liquid in the vessel, and the meniscus will always be right in the middle. If we keep the temperature of the vessel constant for awhile, so that all the stuff is at the same temperature, then the two phases are said to be "coexisting in thermodynamic equilibrium".
Now, lower the temperature of the stuff in the vessel and, sooner or later, solid stuff will appear and the material is said to have frozen "under its own vapor pressure". In fact, there will be a unique temperature, called the "triple-point temperature", at which gas, liquid, and solid phases can all coexist in thermodynamic equilibrium.6
To be precise then, our author probably meant by his statement that all liquids freeze under their own vapor pressure if they get cold enough.
However, this isn't strictly true. The element helium has many interesting and surprising properties. Among them, helium is the only element that will not freeze under its own vapor pressure. It will indeed freeze, but it must be under at least 25 atmospheres of pressure to do so. This also implies that helium has no triple point, unlike any other elemental substance you can think of.
For many years around the turn of the 19th to 20th century, there was thought to be a class of substances called "permanent gasses". These were gases that could not be caused to condense into droplets of liquid, no matter how much pressure was applied to them. Then it was discovered that they would condense, provided they were cooled to low enough temperatures first. The temperature below which each must be cooled before condensation is even possible is its "critical temperature".7
The critical temperature is usually not the same as the "boiling point" temperature. "Boiling" usually implies that the substance is at atmospheric pressue. For example, nitrogen boils at 77 K8 but its critical temperature is about 126 K; oxygen has a critical temperature 155 K, but boils at 90 K.
The critical temperature of helium is 4.2 K, which is really, really, really cold. Until helium is cooled at least to that temperature, condensation is impossible and liquid cannot be produced under any pressure. As it turns out, the critical pressure is low, so helium will liquefy rather easily at atmospheric pressure, if one can get it cold enough.
Helium, the last of the "permanent gases", was finally liquefied by the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in 1908 at his laboratory in Leiden.9 Some of us, who have been low-temperature physicists in previous lives, think of Kamerlingh Onnes as a sort of scientific grandfather, since we date the beginning of low-temperature physics to his liquefaction of helium. We also esteem the memory of Sir James Dewar(1842–1923), inventor of the Dewar flask (commercially known as a Thermos bottle), without a couple of which my own thesis experiment would not have been possible. Like atomic physics, low-temperature physics is a distinctly 20th-century discipline.
Helium does not freeze under its own vapor pressure, but it does do very odd things when it is cooled further below its critical temperature. At 2.17 K (at vapor pressure, i.e., at liquid-vapor coexistance), pure helium-4 (by far the most abundant isotope of helium10) undergoes what is know as a "superfluid transition", also called the "lambda line" (the reason why to be explained in another essay sometime). The superfluid phase of helium exhibits many wondrous properties, like the lack of viscosity — the ability to flow through microscopic channels unimpeded11 — and various other unusual behaviors.
However, we must save those topics for another time.12
———-
1I've long since finished, too, and moved on to the prior volume in the series. I find them a little on the light-weight side, but considering the audience and the venue, that's not altogether surprising. Regardless, they have been fun and informative reading.
2I have no doubt that this is because in my formative years, i.e., when I was a graduate student, I did low-temperature work (cryogenics) at liquid-helium temperatures (about 2–5 K, or 2–5 degrees above "absolute zero") measuring properties of helium itself.
3Operationally, "fluid" is anything that "flows", i.e., any substance which is subject to the equations of motion from fluid dynamics.
4There is controversy over whether "glassy solids" are a different form of matter from gas, liquid, and solid, but for the present purposes it's not necessary to choose sides.
5Observing the meniscus, for example its curvature, can tell us many interesting things about the properties of the substance.
6Practically speaking, triple-points are very useful since they occur at a unique, well-defined and reproducible temperature. If one can contrive, say, to have a glass vessel filled with pure water in equilibrium with all three phases present, then one knows exactly what the temperature is of the entire system. This procedure is actually used in the definition of the "International Practical Scale of Temperatures", a set of standard procedures for establishing nearly thermodynamic absolute temperature calibrations in the laboratory. Temperature, though, is a whole other story.
7Since "critical phenomena", the study of elemental properties very near the critical point (i.e., near the critical temperature and critical pressure) was my area of research for some 15 years or more, there's much more I could say about it, but this isn't the place.
8"K" is the abbreviation for Kelvins, the units of the thermodynamic temperature scale. A Kelvin (NB, not "degrees Kelvin"!) is the same size as a Celsius degree; "0" on the Kelvin scale is "absolute zero", which is about -273 centigrade degrees, or -459 Farenheit degrees.
9Read a fascinating essay about this called "Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and the Liquefaction of Helium", written by Jedtsada Laucharoen, a student at the Horace Mann School, The Bronx. His essay was the 1st place prize winner in the physics category of the "Laureates of Tomorrow Nobel Essay Contest".
10The only other naturally occuring isotope is helium-3; I forget offhand what the relative abundances are. But, this does give me an excuse to quote (from memory, so my precision may only be close) my favorite first line from a book, J.D. Wilke's Properties of Liquid and Solid Helium (my bible in graduate school): "Helium exists in three naturally occuring isotopes: helium-4, helium-3, and helium-6; as the latter has a half-life of only 0.67 seconds, it need concern us no further." And, indeed, in the ensuing 700+ pages, helium-6 is never mentioned again.
11Every low-temperature physicist's nightmare is to develop a microscopic "superleak" in his apparatus. Below the superfluid transistion helium will pour out of the apparatus, but it is exceedingly difficult to do leak detection at such low temperatures, so the usual response is to throw the thing out and start over. Fortunately, I never faced encountered that problem.
12As a closing treat, I will thrill you with the title of my Ph.D. dissertation: Shear Viscosity and Thermal Conductivity in Liquid Helium-4 and Dilute Mixtures of Helium-3 in Helium-4 near the Lambda Transition
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, The Art of Conversation
Mathematical Puzzles
No thanks to Elayne Riggs, where I saw the game mentioned, I have now wasted something near to 20% of the last two days playing a game called Planarity. She's usually such a sensible person, too, so I don't know what happened here.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, this is just the type of game that can keep me quiet and still for hours at a time. In this game, you get a bunch of circles in the game arena, and each circle is attached to two or more other circles by lines. The objective is to move the circles about so that none of the lines cross. Successive "levels" of the game have increasing numbers of little circles.
Solving puzzles like this often gives me the feeling that I can almost see an algorithm to use that will produce a solution, or that I can start to see some significant tactics. I used to play lots of solitaire on my computer ("Seahaven Towers", a Free Cell variant), and felt that I should write a monograph on winning tactics n solitaire games. Although I never discovered an algorithm, I generally one 3 out of 4 games provided I was feeling persistent. The conclusion: stare at something long enough and one starts to see patterns, whether they're really there or not.
So, to someone pattern-oriented like me, with a taste for mathematical conundra, this is the perfect diversion. For others, including some friends whom I won't mention and — apparently — Ms. Riggs, a game like this one is a fast track to frustration.
It's not with the intention of irritating those same friends that I mention that I did manage to complete a "level 10" puzzle this afternoon. It may, however, be a little while before I make it any further than that.
Singular Experiences
Tonight Isaac and I had dinner with our favorite engineer and said engineer's son; both are men with enquiring minds willing to play tag with silly and frivolous topics, in which we nevertheless try to find meaning or at least amusement. It's a game we enjoy.
RT (the engineer) offered crocodile-tear regrets that he had not been to our most recent tap-dancing class. His loss, I put forward. I then related some of my feelings upon two special events: 1) buying my first pair of tap shoes (last Saturday); and 2) doing tap class wearing my first pair of tap shoes.
Sometimes I contend that there are [at least] two things I've always wanted to do: 1) sing countertenor; and 2) learn to tap dance. The first doesn't look so likely at this point, although I still sometimes belt out a very creaky verion of "Sound the Trumpets", the most fabulous countertenor duet from Henry Purcell's (1659–1695) "Come Ye Sons of Art", a birthday ode for Queen Mary, when I am certain that no one can hear, e.g., while I'm mowing the lawn. What it looks like to the unhearing observer, I couldn't say.
At any rate, through happenstance, I'm taking tap-dancing classes. Our musical-theatre troupe (very amateur, but significantly improved after 9 years and 18 productions) is planning to do "Crazy for You" in the spring of 2006. In preparation, our energetic choreographer (who first worked miracles turning six middle-aged Methodist men into tap-dancing cowboys for "Oklahoma" — a phenomenon, to be sure) is giving tap classes in preparation. (It is, of course, known as the church's "tap ministry".) The classes are fun and my doctor will be impressed by this new exercise regime.
So anyway, last Saturday I finally went and bought my tap shoes. It felt like the fulfillment of forty years of expectations, mixed with a hearty dose of "who do I think I am buying tap shoes" humility. Nevertheless, I did it. They fit beautifully, and the weight is balanced so nicely that one's feet almost can't resist doing f-lap-ball-change all by themselves. Finally, I got audio feedback on my steps and their rhythm. Finally, I was tap dancing.
Unless you've tried it, you don't really know what an unusual but satisfying experience it is to be doing real tap-dancing figures.* I explained to RT & son that I think tap dancing appeals to me because it is so synthetic, so artifical and stylized an activity, this idea of playing percussion with one's feet.
Tapping is certainly unique. However, the experience that struck me as singular was being in the midst of a group of twenty people, all executing the same steps in syncronization (more or less — we are mostly beginners, after all), moving as a group one way or the other. There's some sort of gestalt thing that happens, which is difficult to explain. You really need to try it for yourself.
That led us for a few minutes to talking about singular experiences. One other that came to mind was the time that I went with Isaac and his [English] handbell choir to a regional handbell workshop. Here, if you can, you should try to imaging a gymnasium filled with two or three dozen handbell choirs, each choir having some 15 handbell ringers. Now, try to imagine the sound (and the volume!) when all these people start ringing their bells in performance. There's nothing that compares.
Two singular experiences remembered in one night: not bad.
———-
*… and not falling over, in most instances. I don't want pity or anything, but I am nearly fifty, and probably because of my diabetes my balance is not always quite what it was in my youth. On the whole, the effect is probably somewhat comic.
Liberal vs. Authoritarian
Phillip Honenberger, in an essay called "John Locke and Religious Fundamentalism" (What is Liberalism? 11 July 2005), wrote about the worldwide tensions between Liberalism and what we tend these days to label as Fundamentalism, and then (correctly, I'd say) he identifies Fundamentalism as just another packaging of Authoritarianism (which also travels under the guises of Totalitarianism, Facism, etc.).
This would be merely an empty exercise in taxonomy except for an interesting suggestion that he makes. Liberalism, he asserts, has its foundation in a desire for universal liberty, a basis for liberalism worldwide, whereas Authoritarians (or Fundamentalists) around the world do not share a consistent fundamental philosophy.* Instead, each authoritarian sect claims as its basis the revealed truth (religious or political) of different authorities.
What this means, our author suggests but which I paraphrase, is this: in effect, there are many more liberals worldwide than fundamentalists. In any "us" against "them" scenario, the number of liberals with a common goal far outweigh the number of fundamentalist who share a common goal, since different flavors of authoritarians follow different authoritative voices, recognizing only their own authority as being absolutely correct. He takes this as a reason for optimism that sooner or later, rational liberalism will prevail over revealed authoritarianism / fundamentalism. One should probably add, that is unless the authoritarians / fundamentalists manage to destroy us all first.
He ends with an interesting quotation from John Locke's "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding", in which Locke proposes an argument that favors rationally derived truth over any "truth" that comes through revelation from authority.
"What I see, I know to be so by the evidence of the thing itself; what I believe, I take to be so upon the testimony of another: but this testimony I must know to be given, or else what ground have I of believing? I must see that it is God that reveals this to me, or else I see nothing. The question then here is, How do I know that God is the revealer of this to me; that this impression is made upon my mind by his Holy Spirit, and that therefore I ought to obey it? If I know not this, how great soever the assurance is that I am possessed with, it is groundless; whatever light I pretend to, it is but enthusiasm… For if I mistake not, these men receive it for true because they presume God revealed it. Does it not then stand upon them to examine upon what grounds they presume it to be a revelation from God?"
Mr. Honenberger claims great success in using this to confound fundamentalists by demanding how they can know that their Bible truly is divinely inspired and not the product of a false authority other than their God? He feels that
By taking our side with reason rather than enthusiam, we liberals have a powerful tool for gaining the ideological upper hand on fundamentalism.
———-
*Oddly, I see that this was already on my mind when I was writing a few days ago my short table comparing "Liberal vs. Conservative". I had put
Liberal: See for yourself
Conservative: Trust me
Perhaps I should more precisely have called it "Liberal vs. Authoritarian".
In: All, The Art of Conversation
Republican Fortunes
Last night we ate at our semi-local Pho restaurant. After our big bowl of tasty noodle soup, we were given fortune cookies, standard chinese-restaurant fare, although this was nominally a Vietnamese restaurant.
The one Isaac opened said:
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
It sounded to us like an explanation for the [alleged] election in 2004 and subsequent activities of the current president and his administration.
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Splenetics
Making the Bomb — Excerpts
A big chunk of my month of June was spent reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1986) an historically precise and yet dramatic telling of the story of the people and events that came together to unlease the power of nuclear fission at the end of World War II. Given my education as a physicist, the scientists protrayed on these pages have iconic significance, and I found it thrilling to see them come so alive through Rhodes' compelling writing.
This is the rare sort of book that changes my outlook on the world, and my understanding and approach to interpreting events. I knew this was happening through at least two indicators: 1) the excitement I felt while reading, the compulsion to read faster and turn pages faster; and 2) the number of passages I marked to save in some way as notes to myself in the future. Little slips of paper were sticking out out all over the book by the time I finished; I know I'm not unique because when I borrowed the book from a friend, he had already marked it with dozens of yellow Post-Its.
I've finally finished typing in all the passages I had made note of. I still don't know what to do with them. Each passage stimulates enough ideas for several essays, but I know that if I waited to write each one it would be months or years before I got around to it and had lost the notes. Regardless, these were the gems I wanted to save as souvenirs. For relative safe keeping, I put them here. If all goes according to plan, some will turn into essays as time passes. With that in mind, read through them or pick and choose as you like.
(Everything below this line is quoted from the book; all blockquoting is original to the book.)
———-
The best way to do the job, Polanyi argues, was to allow each worker to keep track of what every other worker was doing. "Let them work on putting the puzzle together in the sight of the others, so that every time a piece is fitted in by one [worker], all the others will immediately watch out for the next step that becomes possible in consequence." That way, even though each worker acts on his own initiative, he acts to further the entire group's achievement. The group works independently together; the puzzle is assembled in the most efficient way. [p.34]
* * *
An important 1903 paper written [by Rutherford] with Soddy, "Radioactive Change", offered the first informed calculations of the amount of energy released by radioactive decay:
It may therefore be stated that the total energy of radiation during the disintegration of one gram of radium cannot be less than 108 [i.e., 100,000,000] gram-calories, and may be between 109 and 1010 gram-calories…. The union of hydrogen and oxygen liberates approximately 4 x 103 [i.e., 4,000] gram-calories per gram of water produced, and this reaction sets free more energy for a given weight than any other chemical change known. The energy of radioactive change must therefore be as least twenty-thousand tmes, and may be a million times, as great as the energy of any molecular [i.e., chemical] change. [p. 43]
* * *
An eyewitness to the [1908 Nobel Prize] ceremonies [at which Rutherford was given his prize in chemistry, not physics] said Rutherford looked ridiculously young — he was thirty-seven — and made the speech of the evening. He announced his recent confirmation, only briefly reported the month before, that the alpha particle was in fact helium. The confirming experiment was typically elegant. Rutherford had a glassblower make him a tube with extremely thin walls. He evacuated the tube and filled it with radon gas, a fertile source of alpha particles. The tube was gastight, but its thin walls allowed alpha particles to escape. Rutherford surrounded the radon tube with another glass tube, pumped out the air between the two tubes and sealed off the space. "After some days," he told his Stockholm audience triumphantly, "a bright spectrum of helium was observed in the outer vessel." Rutherford's experiments still stun with their simplicity. [p. 45]
* * *
It was also entirely in character, when Fermi came to Copenhagen [in the summer of 1938], that Bohr should lead him aside, take hold of his waistcoat button and whisper the message that his name had been mentioned for the Nobel Prize, a secret traditionally never foretold. Did Fermi wish his name withdrawn temporarily, given the political situation in Italy and the monetary restrictions, or would he like the selection process to go forward? Which was the same as telling Fermi he could have the Prize that year, 1938, if he wanted it and was welcome to use it to escape a homaland that threatened now despite the distinction he brought it to to tear his wife from citizenship. [pp. 243–244]
Laura Fermi woke to the telephone early on the morning of November 10 [1938]. A call would be placed from Stockholm, the operator advised her. Professor Fermi could expect it that evening at six.
[…]
Instantly awake to his wife's message, Fermi estimated the probability at 90 percent that the call would announce his Nobel Prize. As always he had planned conservatively, not counting on the award. The Fermis had prepared to leave for the United Sates from Italy shortly after the first of the year. Ostensibly Fermi was to lecture at Columbia for seven months and then return. For stays of longer than six months the United States required immigrant rather than tourist visas, and because Fermi was an academic he and his family could be granted such visas outside the Italian quota list. The ruse of a lecture series was devised to evade a drastic penalty: citizens leaving Italy permanently could take only the equivalent of fifty dollars with them out of the country. But the plan required circumspection. The Fermis could not sell their household goods or entirely empty their savings account without riskihng discovery. So the money from the Nobel Prize would be a godsend.
[…]
In the meantime they invested surreptitiously in what Fermi called "the refugee's trousseau." Laura's new coat was beaver and they distracted themselves on the day of the Stockholm call shopping for expensive watches. Diamonds, which had to be registered, they chose not to risk.
[Near six o'clock the phone rang, but it was friends with news that Italy has just that day announced harsh racial laws aimed at Jews. Fermi's wife was Jewish.] The passports of Jews had already been marked. Fermi had contrived to keep his wife's passport clear.
[…]
Fermi took the Stockholm call. The Nobel Prize, undivided, would be awarded for "your discovery of new radioactive substances belonging to the entire race of elements and for the discovery you made in the course of this work of the selective power of slow neutrons." In security the Fermis could leave the madness behind. [pp. 248–250]
* * *
When Tuve had first proposed the Van de Graaff [to be built at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism laboratory, in an early effort to observe the fission products resulting from bombarding Uranium with neutrons] to the zoning board of the prosperous Chevy Chase neighborhood [in Maryland, but still suburban DC] the board turned him down. Smashing atoms smacked of industrial process and the neighborhood had its property values to consider. Tuve noted the popularity of the Naval Observatory, across Connecticut Avenue a few miles west, and rechistened his project the Atomic Physics Observatory, which it was. As the APO it won approval. [p.272]
* * *
More crucial for Bohr was the issue of secrecy. He had worked for decades to shape physics into an international community, a model within its limited franchise of what a peaceful, politically united world might be. Openness was its fragile, essential charter, an operational necessity, as freedom of speech is an operational necessity to a democracy. Complete openness enforced absolute honesty: the scientist reported all his results, favorable and unfavorable, where all could read them, making possible the ongoing correction of error. Secrecy would revoke that charter and subordinate science as a political system — Polanyi's "republic" — to the anarchic competition of the nation-states." [p. 294]
* * *
From the New York Times of 30 April 1939 [quoted on p. 297]:
Tempers and temperatures increased visibly today among members of the American Physical Society as they closed their Spring meetings with arguments over the probability of some scientists blowing up a sizeable portion of the earth with a tiny bit of uranium, the element which produces radium.
Dr. Niels Bohr of Copenhagen, a colleague of Dr. Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J., declared that bombardment of a small amount of the pure Isotope U235 with slow neutron particles of atoms would start a "chain reaction" or atomic explosion sufficiently great to blow up a laboratory and the surrounding country for many miles.
Many physicists declared, however, that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to separate Isotope 235 from the more abundant Isotope 238. The Isotope 235 is only 1 per cent of the uranium element.
Dr. L. Onsager of Yale University described, however, a new apparatus in which, according to his calculations, the isotopes of elements can be separated in gaseous form in tubes which are cooled on one side and heated to high temperatures on the other.
Other physicists argued that such a process would be almost prohibitively expensive and that the yield of Isotope 235 would be infinitesimally small. Nevertheless, they pointed out that, if Dr. Onsager's process of separations should work, the creation of a nuclear explosion which would wreck as large an area as New York City would be comparatively easy. A single neutron particle, striking the nucleus of a uranium atom, they declared, would be sufficient to set off a chain reaction of millions of other atoms.
* * *
In a 1978 memoir [Carl Friedrich] von Weizsäcker [working in Germany] remembers … realizing in discussions with a friend [in 1938] "that this discovery [of Uranium fission] could not fail to radically change the political structure of the world":
To a person finding himself at the beginning of an era, its simple fundamental structures may become visible like a distant landscape in the flash of a single stroke of lightning. But the path toward them in the dark is long and confusing. At that time [i.e., 1939] we were faced with a very simple logic. Wars waged with atom bombs as regularly recurring events, that is to say, nuclear wars as institutions, do not seem reconcilable with the survival of the participating nations. But the atom bomb exists. It exists in the minds of some men. According to the historically known logic of armaments and power systems, it will soon make its physical appearance. If that is so, then the participating nations and ultimately mankind itself can only survive if war as an institution is abolished. [quoted on p. 312]
* * *
[At a meeting on 21 October 1939 of Szilard, Teller, & Wigner with military representatives] Adamson [the Army representative] had anticipated just such a raid on the public treasure [when Szilard asked for only $6,000]. "At this point," says Szilard, "the representative of the Army started a rather longish tirade":
He told us that it was naive to believe that we could make a significant contribution to defense by creating a new weapon. He said that if a new weapon is created, it usually takes two wars before one can know whether the weapon is any good or not. Then he explained rather laboriously that it is in the end not weapons which win the wars, but the morale of the troops. He went on in this vein for a long time until suddenly Wigner, the most polite of us, interrupted him. [Wigner] said in his high-pitched voice that it was very intereting for him to hear this. He always thought that weapons were very important and that this is what costs money, and this is why the Army needs such a large appropriation. But he was very interested to hear that he was wrong; it's not weapons but the morale which wins the wars. And if this is correct, perhpas one should take a second look at the budget of the Army, and maybe the budget could be cut.
"All right, all right," Adamson snapped, "you'll get your money." [pp. 316–317]
* * *
[James Bryant] Conant emerged from the Great War with the rank of major for his work in poison-gas research at Edgewood. In his autobiography, written late in life, he justified his participation:
I did not see in 1917, and do not see in 1968, why tearing a man's guts out by a high-explosive shell is to be preferred to maiming him by attacking his lungs or skin. All war is immoral. Logically, the 100 percent pacifist has the only impregnable position. Once that is abandoned, as it is when a nation becomes a belligerent, one can talk sensibly only in terms of the violation of agreements about the way war is conducted, or the consequences of a certain tactic or weapon. [quoted on p. 358]
* * *
[Fermi, talking about the building of the first Uranium test pile at Columbia in 1941:] "We were reasonably strong, but I mean we were, after all, thinkers. So Dean Pegram again looked around and said that seems to be a job a little bit beyond your feeble strength, but there is a football squad at Columbia that contains a dozen or so of very husky boys who take jobs by the hour just to carry them through college. Why don't you hire them?
"And it was a marvelous idea; it was really a pleasure for once to direct the work of these husky boys, canning uranium — just shoving it in — handling packs of 50 or 100 pounds with the same ease as another person would have handled three or four pounds." [quoted on pp. 396–397.]
* * *
"We did not speak the same language," Bohr said afterward [his meeting with Churchill in 1944]. His son found him "somewhat downcast." He was angrier than that; in his seventy-second year, still stinging, he told an old friend: "It was terrible that no one over there" — England and America both [Bohr was Danish] — "had worked on the solution of the problems that would arise when it became possible to release nuclear energy; they were completely unprepared." And further, "It was perfectly absurd to believe that the Russians cannot do what others can…. There never was any secret about nuclear energy." [p. 530]
* * *
Openness [about developments in nuclear physics and fission research] would accomplish more than forestalling an arms race. As it did in science, it would reveal error and expose abuse. Men performed in secrecy, behind closed doors and guarded borders and silenced printing presses, what they were ashamed or afraid to reveal to the world. Bohr talked to George Marshall after the war, when the Chief of Staff had advanced to Secretary of State. "What it would mean," he told him, "if the whole picture of social conditions in every country were open for judgment and comparison, need hardly be enlarged upon." The great and deep difficulty that contained within itself its own solution was not, finally, the bomb. It was the inequality of men and nations. The bomb in its ultimate manifestation, nuclear holocauset, would eliminate that inequality by destroying rich and poor, democratic and totalitarian alike in one final apocalypse. It followed complementarily that the opening up of the world necessary to prevent (or reverse) an arms race would also progressively expose and alleviate inequality, but in the direction of life, not death:
Within any community it is only possible for the citizens to strive together for common welfare on the basis of public knowledge of the general conditions of the country. Likewise, real co-operation between nations on problems of common concern presupposes free access to all information of importance for their relations. Any argument for upholding barriers of information and intercourse, based on concern for national ideals or interests, must be weighted against the beneficial effects of common enlightenment and the relieved tension resulting from such openness.
That statement, from an open leter Bohr wrote to the United Nations in 1950, is preceded by another, a vision of a world evolved to the relative harmony of the nations of Scandinavia that once confronted each other and the rest of Eruope as aggressively and menacingly as the Soviet Union and the United Sates had come by 1950 to do. [p. 535]
* * *
The official Los Alamos history measures the significance of Frisch's Dragon-tickling [experiment in early 1945]: "These experiments gave direct evidence of an explosive chain reaction. They gave an energy production of up to twenty million watts, with a temperature rise in the hydride up to 2oC per millisecond. The strongest burst obtained produced 1015 neutrons. The dragon is of historical importance. It was the first controlled nuclear reaction which was supercritical with prompt neutons alone." [p. 612]
* * *
But the nation-state was not the only new political system invented in early modern times. Through the two centuries of the nation-state's evolution the republic of science had been evolving in parallel. Founded on openness, international in scope, science survived in the nation-state's midst by limiting its sovereignty to a part of the world which interested the larger system hardly at all: observable natural phenomena. Within that limited compass it proved spectacularly successful, lighting up the darkness, healing the sick, feeding the multitudes. And finally with the release of nuclear energy its success brought it into direct confrontation with the political system within which it operated. In 1945 science became the first living organic structure strong enough to challenge the nation-state itself.
The conflict between science and the nation-state that has continued and enlarged since 1945 is different from traditional forms of political conflict. Bohr visited the statesmen of his day to explain it but chose to be diplomatic rather than blunt. He explained that with the coming of nuclear weapons the world would arrive at an entirely new situation that could not be resolved by war. The situation might be resolved by statesmen sitting down together and negotiating for mutual security. If they did so, the inevitable outcome of such negotiations, given the understandable suspicion on every side, must be an open world. To Winston Chruchill and apparently also to Franklin Roosevelt Bohr's scenario appeared dangerously naïve. In his role as spokesman for the republic of science Bohr certainly carried news of danger, but he was never naïve. He was warning the statesmen that science was about to hand them control over a force of nature that would destroy their political system. Considering the slaughter that political system had perpetrated upon the twnentieth century, he was polite enough not to add, the mechanism of its dismantling had turned up none too soon. [pp. 782–783]
* * *
Science is sometimes blamed for the nuclear dilemma. Such blame confuses the messenger with the message. Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann did not invent nuclear fission; they discovered it. It was there all along waiting for us, the turn of the screw. If the bomb seems brutal and scientists criminal for assisting at its birth, consider: would anything less absolute have convinced institutions capable of perpetrating the First and Second World Wars, of destroying wiht hardware and callous privation 100 million human beings, to cease and desist? Nor was escalation inevitable. To the contrary, it resulted from a series of deliberate choices the superpowers made in pursuit of national intersts. [p. 784]
In: All, Books, Common-Place Book
Rove's Nondisclosure Agreement
For those who are emotionally concerned with whether Karl Rove has actually violated the letter (perhaps even the punctuation) of the law, this note just came in from Rep. Henry Waxman's (D-CA) office, via the Government Reform Minority Office mailing list:
Friday, July 15, 2005 — A fact sheet released today by Rep. Waxman explains that the nondisclosure agreement signed by Karl Rove prohibited Mr. Rove from confirming the identity of covert CIA agent Valerie Wilson to reporters. Under the nondisclosure agreement and the applicable executive order, even ?negligent? disclosures to reporters are grounds for revocation of a security clearance or dismissal.
Fascinating Footnotes
Just yesterday I finished reading Sharan Newman's The Real History Behind the Da Vinci Code (Berkley Books, New York, 2005). We know and enjoy Newman's writing from her outstanding series of historical mystery novels, set in medieval France, staring the fascinating Catherine LeVendeur; Newman happens to be mentioned in my own "Top Twenty Mystery Authors: 2005" list.
This present book, however, is nonfiction, Newman writing as an informative and entertaining Medieval historian. From the title it's easy enough to guess: the book is a collection of short essays about topics mentioned in Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, topics Newman explains she was repeatedly being asked to comment on so she decided to save time and write down the answers.
But my interest here is in her footnotes. I've always been fascinated by footnotes. I think, as a child, I was puzzled by how a book could be written so that a footnote was always on the correct page.0 Fortunately, I've since seen examples of footnotes not entirely contained on the subject page, including Garrison Keillor's notorious 22-page footnote in Lake Wobegon Days. They've stopped being the inscrutible mystery to me that they once were.
Still, footnotes fascinate me — and that includes endnotes, too. Anything with superscripted numbers or symbols is a magnet to my attention. I see that little character floating invitingly above the line of text and I am irresistably drawn to look at the bottom of the page, the end of the chapter, the end of the book, wherever it takes me, to see what it was that the author needed to write but felt was not quite enough part of the text to be parenthetical (in any of the several ways that parenthesis can be printed). That makes them enigmatic to me, neither-here-nor-there thoughts for which I feel an innate sympathy.
Perhaps, then, it's not surprising that the most memorable bits from Newman's book, for me, were some footnotes. Here they are.
- [endnote #3, p. 97] Aux Grenons means "with a really big mustache."1
- [endnote #9, p. 145] Catherine also laid out gardens for the Louvre and brought ballet and zabaglione to France. There are people who feel this outweighs a little massacre and are quite fond of her.2
- [footnote, p. 320] I know this is picky, but it drives me crazy. Wicca is a masculine term. Wicce is the feminine. Both were pronounced "witcha' by Saxons. People today may say it any way they like, but don't tell me that "wicka" is the original. Thank you; I feel much better now.3
———-
0When my age was still in single digits, I had many strange ideas. I probably still do, come to think of it. Anyway, once I set out to write a novel, typing it on a typewriter (personal computers not yet invented — they would have saved me much foolishness). For several pages I went to a great deal of trouble searching for just the right words to use in my sentences so that all the text would come out right justified. I thought it was quite a waste of time, but it was the way all the books were printed….
1From the essay on "Godefroi de Bouillon", this note marks a sentence from p. 94: "Godefroi was born about 1060, the second son of Eustace aux Grenons, …."
2From the essay "The Louvre", the note is at the end of this sentence on pp. 142-143: "The Grand Gallery, where the Mona Lisa now hangs, was begun by Catherine de Medici (1519–1589), queen regent [of France] in the late sixteenth century and better known for her involvement in the massacre of the French Protestants on Saint Bartholomew's day, August 24, 1572."
3This is a footnote to this sentence on p. 320: "Finally, there is the Anglo-Saxon word wicca, meaning one who casts spells."
Liberal v. Conservative
| Liberal | versus | Conservative |
|---|---|---|
| It's allowed if it's not prohibited. | It's prohibited if it's not allowed. | |
| Hey, that's ours! | Hey, that's mine! | |
| Do as I do. | Do as I say. | |
| We're all in this together. | Watch out for number one. | |
| I've earned this. | I deserve this. | |
| See for yourself. | Trust me. | |
Rove Dancing on DSM Grave? (BBA XIV)
Kenneth, sitting in his comfy chair, had his laptop in his lap, reading blogs to see what was on everyone's minds. Frank, similarly arrayed, was reading e-mail or downloading dirty pictures, or both. The companionable silence of shared but independent absorption had settled over them some time ago.
"Do you think Rove did it on purpose?" Ken mumbled.
"Undoubtedly," Frank answered without looking up. "Did what?"
"Well, several things, but I'm thinking about the Plame Affair: revealing Plame as a CIA agent — while carefully not saying her actual name, of course — and then letting himself be revealed as the source."
"Oh, sure. Rove doesn't usually do overtly stupid shit by accident."
"But what's his motivation?"
Frank didn't even stop to think. "For naming Plame, it was the usual childish retribution: revenge for the perceived slight of an opponent's telling the truth about something, in this case the non-case of the Nigerian uranium."
"Okay, that's really pretty simple," Ken allowed, "but what about this business of letting himself be fingered. Clearly the administration must not be expecting any real fallout."
"Of course there'll be no fallout," Frank snorted. "Since when has the White House's 'taking responsibility' for anything actually had discernable effects? Rumsfeld takes 'full responsibility' all the time, and he's still got a job."
"So you don't think they'll fire Rove?"
"Oh they might if doing so appeared expedient, but why would that change anything anyway? There would still be no consequences. They could fire Rove and all the fire could die down and he could still operate the Bush dummy and no one would notice the difference."
"Still , it stirs up a lot of dust, which should at least make for itchy eyes."
"Oh, it might be irritating, but this administration is very good at keeping the dust stirred up. It's central to their Policy of Impunity: the press may be a lap dog, but even the blogs forget the most heinous infractions after awhile, largely because there are so many heinous infractions that it's hard to keep up with them. They keep on doing this stuff and so far all they've had to do is wait for any consequent fuss to die down, which is always has. This revelation about Rove has certainly served its purpose."
"Oh!" Kenneth actually turned to look at Frank. "There's a purpose to fingering Rove?"
"Well, by design or happenstance, it has distracted everyone from the business of the Downing Street Memos, hasn't it?"
"Gosh, I guess it has pushed that story into the background."
"I take it as an indication of how worried the administration is about the DSM revelations, that Rove would run into the spotlight and dance a tarantella to distract everyone from keeping the pressure on about investigating impeachable offences. I figure that whole thing where he provoked liberals by saying that they didn't understand 9/11 was just his way of standing on the diving board and yelling 'Mommy! Mommy! Look at ME!' before beginning his dance. "
"Rove dancing a tarantella on a diving board?" Ken turned back to his blog reading. "Not a terribly pleasant image, is it?"
[This continues my series of posts concerning the pre-Iraq-war actions of the US administration, aimed at increasing awareness of those activities, as part of the Big Brass Alliance (or BBA) and it's support of AfterDowningStreet.org. For more information from me, see my first posting on The Downing Street Memo: "Worth Remembering"]
Crude Poetry
Sometimes, driftglass reads to me like some sort of stoked-up poetry, usually a good thing. Although this stanza comes from the middle of a longer epic about using deliberately crude language*, it seems to have more truth per word than mere prose.
Being gay is not a sin or a crime or any-damned-thing other that the business of the consenting adults involved. Is it my cuppa tea? No, but going after someone who is gay for being gay is just despicable. Profoundly un-American and un-Christian.
OTOH, in case you hadn’t noticed, our Adversaries seem positively obsessed with sex, especially gay sex. A shockingly high percentage of Republicans seem to be self-hating gay men, and a vast number of others are so paranoid about their manhood that they’re willing to go to war to prop up their limp dicks. Cruel, brittle, bitter egos barely papering over deep fears of impotence and inadequacy.
These people are bigots with public manners and private codes. It makes them schizophrenic, which gives us an opening. Remember how freaked out the Cheneys were during the campaign when Kerry referred to their openly lesbian daughter as…a lesbian?
These people think being gay, for example, is shameful and an abomination, but the dictates of the political world demands they pretend otherwise. To these people – to the people in power — I think we are frankly obligated to occasionally be as offensive and insulting as we can be without wandering over into libel and physical threats. To highlight the contradictions.
———-
*driftglass, "A priest, a rabbi and a Lenny Bruce walk into a bar.", 11 July 2005.
Do Bisexuals Truly Exist?
The psychologists found that men who identified themselves as bisexual were in fact exclusively aroused by either one sex or the other, usually by other men.
Hence the title of the article, since the hoary old saying among many gay men (well, straight ones, too) is to the effect that bisexuals don't truly exist: "all men are either gay, straight, or lying".
This has generated some controversy, at least among gay writers. Consider Michael Giltz writing at AMERICAblog ("Bisexuality Study: NYT Gives Prominence To Disgraced Researcher")
You would think, you would hope that the New York Times would do a little research of its own before splashing the work of Dr. J. Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and the study's lead author.
Michael Bailey, author of the so-called research on bisexual men reported in the New York Times, has a history of publishing spurious psychological text which attempts to alienate queers. His book "The Man Who Would Be Queen" was so discredited among most psychologists as to cost him his dept chairmanship at Northwestern University, disparaged and outraged the US transgender community, and so vehemently declaimed by the GLBTQ intellectual community that the Lambda Literary Foundation withdrew its award of a Lammy (and led LLF president Jim Marks to recently resign). Now, this "expert" Michael Bailey has turned the focus of his distorted vision of human sexuality from transgender folks to bisexual men.
———-
*Benedict Carey, "Straight, Gay or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited", New York Times, 5 July 2005.
#On the phone this afternoon, we were discussing Ron's aspirations for increasing "sexual literacy" (there was context, but that train of thought is long out of the station), and decided that perhaps we should call ourselves "sexual literacy workers".
In: All, The Art of Conversation, Writing
Heavens to Murgatroyd
FRANKFORT, Ky. — A special grand jury indicted three of Gov. Ernie Fletcher's subordinates, including his deputy chief of staff, on various misdemeanor charges, including criminal conspiracy and political discrimination.
Dick Murgatroyd, Fletcher's deputy chief of staff and former deputy transportation secretary, was indicted Wednesday on allegations of political discrimination, criminal conspiracy and violating state employees' rights.
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Splenetics
Eighth-Century "Traditional" Marriage
Today I started reading a mystery novel by Peter Tremayne, Badger's Moon. This book continues his series feturing Sister Fidelma. The stories are set place in mid-eighth-century Ireland.
To orient his readers who might be unfamiliar with the customs and laws of the time, Tremayne puts an "Historical Note" at the beginning of the books.
Today as I read the "Note", I was particularly taken with the following section describing customs concerning marriage and priestly celibacy during the period. In the context of modern-day teeth-gnashing and hand-wringing by arch-conservatives over priestly traditions and marriage traditions, traditions that are frequently claimed to have persisted unchanged for thousands of years (or since the Bible was written, whichever came first), there are many enlightening observations about the number of forms of legal marriage at the time (i.e., more than merely one), and a suggestion that celibacy for priests (not always the norm, one will note) seems to have come about because of inheritance concerns and intense lobbying by an arch-conservative misogynist. (Sound familiar?)
One might also note, as celibacy came to be inforced, the glorious ways that women were treated by the Pope [!] within the confines of "traditional marriage".
In spite of previous explanations on this matter, however, a few readers were surprised when in The Haunted Abbot it was revealed that Sister Fidelma and her companion Brother Eadulf had undertaken one of the nine legal forms of marriage under Irish law.
While there were always ascetics in the churches who sublimated physical love in dedication to the deity, it was not until the Council of Nice in AD 325 that clerical marriages were condemned (but not banned) by the hierarchy of the Western Church. Celibacy was not a popular concept. It arose in Rome mainly from the customs practised by the pagan priestesses of Vesta and the priests of Diana, which became an inheritance of Roman culture.
By the fifth century, Rome had forbidden its clerics from the rank of abbot and bishop to sleep with their wives — implying they were still marrying — and shortly after, even to marry at all. The main reason appears to be property concerns, for Pope Pelagius I (AD 536-61) decreed that sons of priests should not be allowed to inherit church property. The general clergy were discouraged from marrying by Rome but not expressly forbidden to do so.
The celibacy lobby in Rome became strong and it was Peter Damian (AD 1000-1071), a leading theologian whose writings reveal him to be a misogynist, who became a major influence and persuaded Pope Leo IX (AD 1049-54) to enforce celibacy on all clergy. Leo IX ordered the wives of priests to be sent as slaves to Rome for the Pope to 'dispose of'. In AD 1139, Innocent II tried a softer approach by requesting all priests to divorce their wives. But Pope Urban II, in AD 1189, decreed that wives of priests could be seized and sold as slaves by any of the European feudal lords. The priests fought back. It took Rome a long time to enforce universal celibacy. The Celtic Church took centuries to give up its anti-celibacy and fall in line with Rome, while in the Eastern Orthodox Church priests below the rank of abbot and bishop have retained their right to mary until this day.
[Peter Tremayne (pseud. for Peter Berresford Ellis), Badger's Moon (St. Martin's Minotaur, New York, 2003) pp. xi-xii.]
And here's a bonus quotation, from the same "Historical Note" (page ix):
The law of primogeniture, the inheritance by the eldest son or daughter, was an alien concept in [eighth-century] Ireland. Kingship, from the lowliest clan chieftain to the High King, was only partially hereditary and mainly electoral. … If a ruler did not pursue the commonwealth of the people, he was impeached and removed from office.
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., The Art of Conversation
Republican Chickenhawks
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*Just for its sheer rhetorical exhuberance, consider this aside written by driftglass ("On This Fourth of July"):
(Seriously, watching these Gap-clad Yahoos trying to paper over the moral bankruptcy and cowardice of their party and positions with nothing but empty decibels and hysterically spasmodic knee-jerkery is like unto watching a Busby Berkley epic recast with Third Stage syphilitics, water-head drunks and St. Vitus’ Dancers: There’s a sense of horror that no Grown-ups are putting a stop to it… a certain, shameful, geek-show fascination…and a degree of wonder that, given the headless-Chickenhawk flailing that passes for forensic skills on the Right, they all haven’t just kicked each other’s million-dollar orthodontia down each other’s throats.)
Statistical Fluctuations
Abraham Pais, a physicist who wrote what is generally regarded as the definitive scientific biography of Einstein, said of his subject that there are two things at which he was "better than anyone before or after him; he knew how to invent invariance principles and how to make use of statistical fluctuations." Invariance principles play a central role in the theory of relativity. Indeed, Einstein had wanted to call relativity the "theory of invariants".
["Miraculous Visions: 100 Years of Einstein", The Economist, 29 December 2004.]
By way of explanation for the quotation: I came across it a few months ago and wanted to make note of it 1) because it's quite true, and gives a remarkable insight into Einstein's mode of thinking; and 2) because fluctuations loom large in my own way of looking at the physical world — because of my working experience in science — and because invariance principles are an interesting and important concept in physics. I'd like to discuss both of them sometime, but it will require far more presence of mind, and time, than I have to give it right now. So, I'll preserve the quotation here and maybe get to it later.
In: All, Common-Place Book, It's Only Rocket Science