Ghulf Genes

The Model T

2012-02-12T08:35:00.000-05:00

My oldest friend, Phil Cavanaugh, sent me these splendidimages the other day:

Part of Phil letter said:

Back in 1968 I dragged a 1924 Model T Fordtouring car out of a barn in Wallkill, NY. I spent the next year restoring itand have had it since. Over the next 43 years I’ve enjoyed many a tour drivingit. I’ve always lusted after Ford cars of the late Model T era, thus the years1926 and 1927, but these are hard to find and rarely in good shape. Finally Ifound one on eBay (where else) and bought it. I’ve since sold my 1924 to a guyin Tucson. The new car sat in a museum for five years and so is totally gummedup with gasoline; the gasoline has turned to varnish over time, and the caralso has a few other problems associated with advanced age. It will go toCollege Station to an expert this weekend and, hopefully, it will soon be backand running again. I’m attaching photos both of the old car (black) and new one(green).

Phil spent his working life as a superintendent of militarymuseums, an avocation born of his youthful fascination with history, especiallythat of the Civil War—but the impulse of preserving the authentic past extendedforward in time enough to bring us these resplendent survivors of the Youth ofthe Automobile.

Thanks, Phil.

Motivation? Gold!

2012-02-10T14:06:00.001-05:00

If you ask Google Maps to find the Canary Islands off theCoast of Africa—islands Columbus visited on his way to the “Indies”—and if thenyou simply pull the map using the mouse from left to right repeatedly, you canexperience at first hand the size of the Atlantic without ever getting wet.Columbus took a south-westerly path from there and arrived in the Bahamas. Thefirst island he encountered was San Salvador (his naming), which would alsohave been the first on his general path. Here he met the Taino, part of theArawakan peoples mentioned in the last post. Just idly pursuing those peopleand that language, I also chanced across Columbus’ own diaries, where his firstmeeting is recorded taking place October 12, 1492. I read on a bit (here is a link).Somehow it soon became dreary, the record of this momentous discovery.Evidently, from Columbus’ own point of view, it had only to do with gold. He wanted to find gold and spices, in that order, with piously murmured asides about the conversion of these friendly heathen to the One True Faith. Thediary leaves little doubt about the aims of this voyage of discovery.

This Key Won’t Open Any Locks…

2012-02-10T11:14:00.000-05:00

… or “Arawakan Spoken Here.” All right. So you’venever heard of the Arawakan people. Nevertheless, you have used the Arawakanlanguage if you’ve ever held a barbecue, owned or used a canoe, rested in ahammock, feared a hurricane, roasted an ear of maize, eaten a potato, usedtobacco—or visited the Florida keys. Well, You, my imagined reader, probably have heard of the Arawakans, but I had not, not until I got to wondering aboutthe origin of that word “key”—now that we are about to visit Florida.Geography, and geographical designations, are shaded by much mystery in mycase. I discovered that key comes from cay, an Arawakan word; the Spanishrendered it as cayo, slightly modifying a word used bythe Taino, a sub-group of the Arawakans, people who lived on the string ofIslands extending downward from the tip of Florida, beginning with the Bahamas,Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and then curling down toward South America (the LesserAntilles). Needless to say, the Taino lived in the Florida Keys too.Arawakan-speaking peoples also occupied many regions of what we today callLatin America. I am showing a Wikipedia map (link) of their settlements on thatsubcontinent, showing the Nordic and the Southern versions of that language inlight and dark colors. My next mystery is the archipelago. I can already hint thatit’s another lulu, but since that takes us to quite another location, I’lldefer unveiling my discoveries for now.

Still Wearing the Commercial Burqa

2012-02-09T11:27:00.000-05:00

When the Age of Oil finally ends, commercialism will mostcertainly die with it. I’m fairly sure of this because commercialism absolutelydepends on mass wealth, and mass wealth is due to “energy slaves.” Ponder for amoment world-wide energy consumption today (2005). It amounts to energyequivalent to 1.8 tons of oil per person per year; to be sure, not all of thatcomes from oil. The U.S. consumptionis 8.7 tons per capita, dwarfed by the consumption in Qatar, the world’shighest, at 21.5 tons of oil-equivalent. By way of contrast there isBangladesh, the world’s lowest with 0.2 tons or 377 pounds. Bangladesh comesclosest to what the world was like before the Age of Oil.

My topic today, however, isn’t oil. It’s the obscenity ofobscenities—commercialism’s most visible symbol, advertising on television.That too will disappear but will soon be forgotten. These forms of assault onhuman dignity will vanish because the arts needed to display them will decayalong with the high technology necessary to make them visible when energy-wealthwill be no more. Advertising, to be sure, is not on the same level of evil asthe gladiatorial games, human sacrifice, the immolation of Hindu widows, foot-binding,and other actual physical assaults (usually on women). But it does resemble an obscenitystill very much alive and well in parts of the Muslim world—the burqa.

Printadvertising doesn’t cover things up. And bits and pieces of that kind of advertising produced today willstill be in archives in the year 4000. That sort of stuff is relativelyinnocuous because it’s easy to ignore. But the Commercial Burqa? That we mustendure—and these days even on Public TV. It covers up the programming so thatit can’t be seen—not even through little holes in its fabric. We can mute it,to be sure, but the muting is itself a kind of burqa. And, to be sure, ads arebad. But silence? Lordy! Silence is reallyunendurable for us, creatures of our own time that we are.

The Spread of Fuzz

2012-02-07T10:18:00.000-05:00

Fuzzy logic had its beginnings circa 1965, the invention ofLotfi A. Zadeh. I remember it well because a most memorable colleague of mine,Howard Gadberry at Midwest Research Institute, introduced it to me. Howard, whowas my elder by two decades or more, and very impressive, yet had a child’sdelight in the new. He used to appear in the door of my office, stare at me atlength, and when he had my attention begin: “What do you know about sharpness?”Then—after the second or third such event I knew what was coming next—I knewthat I would now hear things about “sharpness” I couldn’t have predicted in ahundred years. So here was Howard: “Ever hear about fuzzy logic?”

In a nutshell fuzzy logic is based on probabilities, so incontrast to standard logic which produces True or False—and nothing else—fuzzylogic gives you Maybe and can also quantify it. That’s another way saying thatthis Whatever is neither this nor that. Everything blends.

Monique is leading a project at present which gives herteam, and I’m a member, an opportunity to look at U.S. economic sectors oncemore in revealing detail. And in conversation after conversation, the sametheme keeps emerging: the spread of the fuzz. Trying its absolute damndest tokeep the more and more rapidly morphing institutions coherent, at least forstatistical reporting purposes, the Bureau of the Census still valiantly clingsto concepts like Retail, Wholesale, Manufacturing, and Services, but in a kindof slow-motion shapeshift, our institutions will not, repeat not, hold their forms.

Now statistics, of course, are the tool by means of which weresolve the images of collective reality. Numbers are the photons that bringthe information. If outer physical reality were behaving as the economy does,we would have begun to panic quite a while ago. That dog is morphing intosomething else. But what is it. Nosooner do we say “fire hydrant” than it has shifted shape again and now looks—believeit or not—like a running bush.

It’severywhere. The phenomenon of fuzzing is most easily noted by seeing journalismmorphing into entertainment-propaganda-advertisements-for-myself-gossip-as-an-industry.But lordy, lord. When you see wholesale melting into communications, andmanufacturing exploding into a hive of bees, why then you wonder. But we aretrying our best to help Monique put the pieces together again. After all, whenthe subject is pharmaceuticals, people dotend to think, reading our compilations, that we are talking about drugs, not somenew forms of semi-monopolistic distribution.

Chop, Chop, Chop

2012-02-06T08:51:00.000-05:00

At any given time, that which is highly respectable is already dead, work on the advancing frontsof a field is mixed (thus the soaring observer in the sky discerns some merit in it) and that which is belowthe salt and off the reservation is the future. The last category might bedescribed more mildly, as is done by Aaron Preston in an article on AnalyticPhilosophy concerning metaphysical system builders. That activity is not countenanced by today’sphilosophers, he says; not, he adds, “as a respected professional activity” (link).

My own honored mentors on the nature of culture insistedthat absolutely everything is saturated with the feelings of the time. But theyhoped to teach that cultures change; theywere satisfied if only that wasunderstood; therefore they did not carefully describe the coexistence ofossification, transformation, and emergence.

In a field like mathematics which is inaccessible until its extremeabstraction is penetrated enough to reveal someof its meaning (or lack thereof), the cultural influence is difficult todiscern. But sure enough it’s there. I only briefly ventured into analytic philosophyin the first place in order to confirm my impression, prompted by the fact thatat least three big names in math had played roles there (Friedrich Frege, BertrandRussell, and Willard Quine). Thus I once more had to enter that unfortunateslaughterhouse where all your hear is chop, chop, chop. Life is stopped at thedoor and isn’t permitted in; inside blood and guts and shanks of meat. Itpleased me to discover that this form of philosophy, while evidently absolutelydominant in the English-speaking world, and spreading to other parts, isalready showing advanced decay—and is dominant because of that. Here is a field that attempted to materialize meaning, thus to make it fitfor scientific study. This was achieved by turning philosophy into linguistics, semantics, and grammar and forcing its statements to be expressed in formal reductive logic. In the process it caused meaning to vanish, which is the life of that cattle, retaining only itsgrammar: cattle made meat.

Ifind this fascinating. Mathematics emerged as a distinct language by means ofwhich additional layers of meaning in reality could once be made accessible. Andlike any other language—ordinary, philosophical, poetic—so also math retainedambiguities and marvels. But when it had been reduced to its pure grammar by analyticchop, chop, chop it ended up with a vast immensity of tiny marbles in fixedcategories the endless rearrangement of which into meaningless patterns is nowthe only “respected professional activity” in the realms of higher math. Or soat least Morris Klein observes in his worthy exposition of math—although hedoes so with a certain amount of nostalgia. (Speaking of language, the right word here is really the German Wehmut.)

Anticipating Just a Little

2012-02-05T12:33:00.000-05:00

Our florist had had a brainstorm. She planted grass in a ceramic dish to surround a little bunny that she hoped to sell. All in preparation of St. Valentine’s day no doubt. Irresistible for someone who is partial to rabbits. The grass is already in need of a trim, so we’re anticipating Spring just a little here.

Unable to See? Or is it Unwilling?

2012-02-04T11:00:00.000-05:00

I had correctly anticipated yesterday’s employment report—andalso the bubble of publicity that the data would produce: one side claimingcredit, the other denying it. In such a situation one almost never hears theplain and obvious truth of the thing, but it delighted me to hear David Brookssay it yesterday on the PBS News Hour. Here it is:

Presidents do not control the economy under their watch.They can have a marginal impact in extraordinary circumstances. But it has todo with a lot more complicated things then they are responsible for.

Evidently the dreary truth of things is too much for ourtimes. We prefer to make elaborate gestures quite devoid of all reality. Wewant our symbols to be simple. The highest celeb around is responsible foreverything. Never mind the facts.

Ithink it was during the same newscast that I heard Newt Gingrich say thatPresident Obama is “against American energy.” Now there’s a sound byte. It’snot meant to be teased apart into concrete meanings. Do that and you end upwith absolutely nothing at all. But I feel for those in whom such a chargeactually resonates; I wouldn’t want to be their parent, mate, or child.

More on Autism

2012-02-04T10:44:00.000-05:00

In an earlier post I noted changes in theofficial diagnosis of autism (link). One thing leads to another. On a walk withMonique, talking about that, she alerted me to the absolutely fascinating storyof Temple Grandin—and a movie about that lady’s early struggles—helped by aheroic mother, aunt, and various other creative and determined individuals to drawher out. Grandin developed from the most unpromising beginnings into a majorinnovator in animal husbandry; later she distinguished herself as professor andlecturer on autism. A brief video (link) will introduce her. Watching thatvideo—in which, among other things, she discusses the education of the youngand the importance of hands-on-learning—and having just seen the film, itoccurred to me first, what the real differences are between “hard” cases ofautism where some genuine differences exist in the formation of the brain,Grandin’s case, and the spread of “soft” autism which is most likely due tofailures of nurture, rearing, and education—hence the changes in diagnosis.Second, I discerned here the similarities between very gifted and creative andautistic people—which may have much to do with natural gifts of “seeing more,”as Temple Grandin did—she understood many things that others didn’t even notice—andgood nurture, education. Grandin’s is a story very similar to Helen Keller’s—withvery similarly triumphant outcomes. We know too little. But what I’m beginningto see clearly now is that the old ways of life were better suited to letchildren develop—playing in the real world with toys of their own making—andthat the best educational method, based on real observation of children, isMaria Montessori’s.

Formal Chaos

2012-02-03T08:38:00.002-05:00

My attempt is to give a suitable name to a contradictorytendency. It is contradictory to aim for Virtuous Vice, Dirty Cleanliness,Clear Murky Windshields, or the Still Small Uproar. Our culture, however, isforever trying to achieve this tottering balance. For a long time now I’vechuckled over the Informal Formality of dress when thirty-something celebsappear on some show in a formal jacket, buttoned white shirt, maybe evenwearing a tie—but they’re also sporting artfully cuffed and torn ancient bluejeans and a day’s growth of beard.

Order and disorder are clashing. We want both. We believe inartful compromise. We believe that nature knows best, read “free market,” butwe also need certain degree of predictability. So we create stock markets withstrict opening and closing hours, bells that ring, trading rules, and verytight qualifications for those who may play. Meanwhile these markets are ruled by collectiveemotions and panics—but the television pictures of trading from up close revealthat it’s a deadly serious business: not a smile anywhere in sight. Butsometimes quite conscious collective efforts shape the behavior. Yesterday themarkets were quiet. Why? Well, this morning at 8:30 am (it is now 8:26 as Iwrite), the Bureau of Labor Statistics will reveal January employment numbers.And traders stayed inactive yesterday awaiting this news. Institutionalizedemotions. Today it will be time to roar and rage. (Indeed I’m writing this tofill the time until 8:30. On the first Friday morning of each month, I postthose unemployment numbers on LaMarotte.)

It is true, is it not, that the promises of a presidentialcandidate are entirely dependent forfulfillment on another body, theCongress. Yet we treat campaign promises as meaningful. If we were serious, we’dinstitute a parliamentary democracy where the “president” becomes a function ofa party’s victory. In our case we have Institutionalized Contradiction. Chancemay deliver a president and a Congress of the same party, but then the partymay be so interlaced with Blue Dogs or Tea Drinkers that the outcome stillremains random.

Well,it’s 8:35. Enough of this. Time to see what Randomness has Wrought on theEmployment Front last month.

Verdinglichung

2012-02-02T11:43:00.002-05:00

English is a Germanic language but managed to get itself somixed with Latin that the title of this post in English is Reification. Nowthat’s a word one has to learn. Itdoes not communicate its own meaning. Well, Caesar did his damndest, but hedidn’t succeed well enough to Latinize German. Therefore the same word, inGerman, communicates without your having to know, in advance of meetingreification, that its root is res, orthing. Translated literally, we’d have to say thing-making-into. That ending,making-into, we always render in Latin. It comes from facere. We have objectification, beautification, verification—andwe verbify those words by using fy.So we could say thingify and get thegist just right—and right away improve the word by making thing visible. Now the irony of this little word is that it hasMarxist origins. Marx accused Capitalism of thingifying people. He thought—atleast for political purposes—that people were in some ways superior to things. He was being inconsistent, being an atheist.The notion that people are in some ways superior comes from the traditions ofbelief. (Yes, I’m aware. Reification is also used in the philosophical contextas the concretization of something abstract, thus a fallacy—kindred of thepathetic fallacy that causes a lake to smile in the sunshine.) Reification cameto my mind as I wrote the last post, because I find that action everywheredisplayed as a cause or expression of mass culture—and I always think of it as Verdinglichung because it’s more, as itwere, concrete.

Gross Domestic Alienation

2012-02-02T10:19:00.000-05:00

We are a social species and hence we want to make acontribution—not in some abstract and therefore meaningless way. Concretely.The contribution should be tangible. When life is structured so that ourcontribution does not tangibly extendbeyond the immediate family, in perception at least our sense of communityshrinks. Community is what we view as ours;what lies beyond it is the other.Thus our sense of genuine participation is greatly influence by the scale ofthings—and also by the nature of our contribution. It must be something real,complete.

Mass culture and mass communications, therefore, producealienation by their very nature.

This appeared quite early on by excessive division of labor.Before the robots arrived in manufacturing, people spent whole careers onassembly lines tightening three nuts on a part or attaching one little fixtureto a larger frame. Done with one, came the next. You were making a car—but wereyou really? When we arrived here in America my mother had a job for a whilewhere she sewed one part of a shirt sleeve on a machine—one after the other,one after the other. Then she got a job as the sole administrator (those werethe days!) at a doctor’s office. If we could march across the labor force andget a genuine, visceral feel for the content of jobs, we would soon discoverthat short-order cooks are among the few who have real jobs. But these don’t pay much. The robots have taken overtightening nuts, but in other spheres, the evil merely grows. I know a womanwho spent two years in training for a job which consists of classifying medicaltransactions reaching her as slips of paper and finding the ten, twelve-digitnumbers that correspond to these in various monstrously-sized insurancemanuals. Her reward, beyond pay, is the entirely abstract consolation that sheis working in healthcare.

I’ve barely even touched the tip of the iceberg. What goesfor work applies to everything else—non-societies of which we’re members, thenon-neighborhoods in which we live, the non-schools where we study or teach,the non-families that barely cling together by spider-webs of telephone calls,the non-networks that we call social.

GrossDomestic Alienation, beyond producing an ocean of subliminal frustration, alsoproduces vast emotional storms called elections and their hysterical coveragein the mass media. The insanity has become so habitual now, we barely noticeit. Send money, put up a sign, attend a rally, and cast a vote. Then go home ina warm and cozy cloud of conviction murmuring to your cell-phone saying, I’mmaking a contribution.

In Praise of Timelines

2012-02-01T10:49:00.000-05:00

Speaking of orienting oneself in time, I’ve become quitefond of well-constructed timelines, certainly reading them—but above all in thevalue of “rolling your own.” Making a timeline makes you keenly aware of howthings are related and in the linear fashion. And the very activity tends toforce a look at the context in which a particular subject evolves.

I’ll give a brief example here of a Greek timeline of a mere146 years. It embraces the best known core of Greek philosophical work—but seenin its own context.

469	Socrates is born
460	Thucydides is born.
446	Aristophanes (the playwright) is born.
431	Peloponnesian War breaks out, in effect Athens (and allies) against Sparta (and allies). It will lasts for 27 years. In the Greek context it is a kind of World War in two phases.
427	Plato is born.
399	Socrates dies.
395	Corinthian War (Sparta against coalition of Thebes, Athens, Corinth, and Argos) breaks out, the second half of the Peloponnesian.
387	Corinthian War ends when Persia enters on Sparta’s side and saves its hide.
386	Aristophanes dies.
404	Peloponnesian War ends, largely because the Sparta’s ally, Persia, provides decisive aid. Persia is the Big Power in that time and region.
400	Thucydides dies.
387	Plato founds the Academy at his prime, aged 40.
384	Aristotle is born.
360	Philip becomes king of Macedon, and the expansion of that realm begins.
356	Alexander (later the Great) is born; he is the son of Philip.
357	Outbreak of the Social War, a conflict between Athens and parts of its alliance—Chios, Rhodes, Kos, and Byzantion—provoked by Athens’ demanding ways.
355	Social War ends. Athens is forced to give the rebels their independence, in part due to Persian pressures.
343	Aristotle becomes Alexander’s tutor and does the job for three years.
347	Plato dies at 82.
338	Athens loses its independence as Macedon extends its sway and comes to control all of Greece.
336	Philip of Macedon is assassinated. Alexander becomes king at 20, but he is already a genuine veteran of the wars of Macedonian expansion.
322	Aristotle dies at 62.
334	Alexander invades Persia (turn-around is fair play) by crossing the Hellespont (read Dardanelles) and the conquest of Persia is on.
323	Alexander dies in Babylon (make that Iraq, where else?) and the Hellenistic age begins.

As I’ve noted in an earlier post, this sort of thing isoddly informative. Reading Thucydides is like reading a modern author. The viewpoint, the realism, the whole approach is modern. So are the conflicts thatgive this period its defining framework. The first date is that of Socrates’birth, representing a kind of maturation of another age and time. Aristotledies toward the end, himself a perfectly modern sort of thinker. And the lastfigure to pass is the man who produced the environment of an earlier modernity—theHellenistic age.

Since of late I’ve been concerned with mathematics, I wouldhere note where Pythagoras fits into this timeline. He came before Socrates,born 570 BC and died 495. That should please mathematicians—who like to thinkthemselves foundational.

Month of Beginnings

2012-02-01T08:27:00.000-05:00

For us here “locally” February is the months ofbeginnings. Brigitte was born this day. On Friday we celebrate the anniversaryof our marriage. My genuine entrance into adulthood began when I entered theU.S. Army and left home, which happened on February 21. Back in those days thenation still celebrated Washington’s birthday on the actual date of his birth,February 22. Thus I got my uniforms, had my head shaved, and polished my newboots on my first day, and the second was already a day off. I thought: This isstarting out Ok. Then I went to look at myself in the mirror again; I had toget used to my new look. This blog also began in February—and sure enough itsfirst post is titled “Orienting Ourselves in Time.”

Gödel’s Proof—Or Was it a Spoof?

2012-01-31T12:04:00.001-05:00

When it comes to higher math, it’s a good policy to staycheerful—and to resist the waves and waves of frustration that well up. Takeone of the more prominent figures in that field, Kurt Gödel (1906-1978); he isfamed for his incompleteness theorems. I managed to find a partial translationof his first paper (link). It was written when Gödel was but 25. He doesthe job—the job is to humble mathematicians forever—in just 15 pages (the paperis longer, but it begins and ends with the translator’s notes). It’s good tostay cheerful because with effort the essence will emerge—not from fully penetrating the actual originals, mindyou, but because with the help of others one can get there. By essence I mean,enough to satisfy me that there is something worthwhile present here.

Gödel labored at a time when mathematicians were endeavoringto prove that various systems of mathematics were both complete and consistent.If they were neither—or one but not the other—the foundations of mathematicswere in trouble. Those engaged in such labors were the really big names in twentiethcentury math: Abraham Fraenkel, Friedrich Frege, David Hilbert, Giuseppe Peano,Bertrand Russel, and Ernst Zermelo. What Gödel proved, and thus upset the applecart was:

1. If the system is consistent, it cannot be complete.

2. The consistency of axioms cannot be proven within thesystem.

The reason for good cheer is that Gödel proved the liar’sparadox mathematically. That paradox originateswith Epimenides, an ancient Cretan philosopher-wit who asserted “All Cretansare liars.” If taken as a true statement, it is a lie; if as a lie, itcontradicts itself. The modern way is to ponder the truth-value of “This sentence is false.” Gödel substituted “notprovable” for lie or falsity. He showed that such a statement can be formulatedmathematically so that it is equally contradictory: if proved it is false, ifdisproved it is true.

Now completenessasserts that every proposition framed by a formal system can be proved. But consistency demands that the outcome ofany process must result either in truth orfalsehood, never both. Gödel therefore showed that mathematical systems areeither one or the other: if they are consistent, they are incomplete, if theyare complete, they are inconsistent. The consistent system must exclude the formula Gödel framed usingthe rules of the system and thus be incomplete. The complete system will include the Gödel number but, producingat least one paradoxical result, will be inconsistent.

Butwhat Gödel actually proved, it seems to me, is that Man is not God—although wekind of knew that already. He himself was not only a true believer, he boughtthe traditional package with all of its frills and was dead certain that hewould survive his own death. Good for you, Kurt Gödel. I bet you are stillchuckling over your life’s achievements somewhere out there in the transcendingether.

China Closer Up

2012-01-30T10:30:00.000-05:00

We saw a very interesting documentary released in 2009titled Last Train Home. It wasdirected by Lixin Fan, a documentary film director based in Montreal; the filmwas produced by EyeSteelFilm of Canada. Every year 130 million Chinesevillagers, who work in major cities, go home for the New Years Festival; itlasts fifteen days. This is an enormous annual migration—the subject of thefilm. It shows us the life of an ordinary family where Mom and Dad work in thefar-away city in the textile industry. Daughter and son are in the village withGrandma. In the process we hear from quite a few very ordinary Chinese workingat the lowest levels of that economy—who casually note that they have nounemployment benefits, health care coverage, and any other visible or tangiblesupport from any kind of welfare state. Meanwhile poverty, pollution, absenceof maintenance, and incredible crowding are everywhere evident. I got tothinking: This vast country has all the earmarks of the Free Market Paradiseour tax cutters and deconstructors of all things government seem to be aimingfor—and here it is, already available to millions in a communist realm. Allthose looking forward to our own achievement of that happy state simply must see this documentary.

F comes before M

2012-01-30T08:48:00.000-05:00

My subject is the claim I’ve often seen that mathematics isthe source of science and thus the father of modern technologies. A list thenusually follows ending with radio, television, and of late the Internet. Justlast night I read this paragraph in a distinguished book on Mathematics:

However, theKantian explanation that we see in nature what our minds predetermine for us tosee does not fully answer the question of why mathematics works. Developmentssince Kant’s time such as electromagnetic theory can hardly be endowments ofthe human mind or the mind’s organized sensation. Radio and television do notexist because the mind organized some sensation in accordance with someinternal structure then enabled us to experience radio and television asconsequences of the mind’s conception of how nature must behave.

[Morris Kline, Mathematics, p.342.]

Sure enough. But the thought here goes astray. It suggests thatmathematics lies behind electromagnetism—and radio and television. No. Faradaydiscovered electromagnetism by experiment—before young Maxwell came around totranslate it into elegant mathematical concepts. Thus F came before M. But itwasn’t Maxwell’s equations that led to radio but more unruly inventiveness bythe likes of Edison, Tesla, Marconi, Morse, and the like; you look in vain forpaeans to math in their histories. Television got itself going in 1884 when atwenty-three-year old German student named Paul Nipkow punched holes into adisk; he spun the disk above an illuminated picture and sliced, diced, andsubdivided it into many tiny images that we now call rasters. That was thebeginning.

No. Mathematics is the immensely helpful servant of science—andtechnology belongs to the inveterate tinkerers. Later, when inventions come tobe commercialized and engineers get going in rationalizing the processes, eachof them, of course, has had to master calculus and so forth and be handy withequations—although the results of the most useful of these are in the handbooksalready.

My image is that of two horses harnessed to the same cart.One is strong and unruly, the other is elegant and spirited. The strong onedoes most of the pulling, but when it comes time to take photographs of theteam, people take the picture from the side of the spirited, elegant horse. Oh,just look at it snort!

There is also a hierarchy here. Math belongs to the upperclasses. Faraday came from a poor working class family and was self-educated (asan apprentice in a bookshop); he knew very little math; when he rose in statureand worked as an assistant to Sir Humphry Davy at the Royal Institute, peoplethere did not consider him a gentleman. Maxwell came from the nobility, his father a lawyer and financially secure. The inventors like to grub about with matter, the mathematicians are more at homein the airy realms of concepts. Can we do without them? No. But let’s not forget where science really starts.

Finally,mathematics works because, when successful, it models reality. And realityworks.

In the Furnace

2012-01-29T10:04:00.002-05:00

A story in the NewYork Times reports on rifts appearing in the coalition opposing my favorite candidate, Vladimir Putin.Liberals look around at rallies and discover all kinds of people they don’tlike, thus ardent nationalists and those who want a Russia for Russians, adesignation that apparently excludes some ethnic minorities, among thenon-Slavic migrant workers. Earlier stories report on violence—including abeheading—attributed to splinter nationalists. The thought that came was: “We don’t live longenough to get wise, and by the time we do, we stumble about, and putting onsocks is a labor.” A second thoughtwas that until people emerge from the animal state, where tribalism is normal,they’re quite able to see “the other” as something to push away and even to kill—andfeel righteous about it! The third thought? Hell and damnation. It keepshappening, over and over again. Nothing’s ever learned. The fourth was, Du calme! This realm, this earth, thislife is a reverberatory furnace and not an end in itself. And by the time yourealize that, you’re close to metal and about to be poured.

A Priceless “Free Speech” Moment

2012-01-28T12:25:00.003-05:00

One way to sum it up is to say that today money may speak,but a hundred years ago bulls were well advised to wear pants. Puzzled? Readon.

It’s1907 and the leading tobacco company in the United States, American Tobacco, signsa contract with a stage-coach line. We’re talking about the horse-drawnvariety. The company wants to use the side sides of the stage-coach toadvertise one of its most popular brands, “Bull” Durham. The ads are made andaffixed, the first stage-coach heads out. A huge public outcry follows. Why?Well, the bull’s testicles are so prominently featured in the ad that peopledaren’t even look!! The City of New York, always a guardian of public morality,arrests the stage coach driver. The coach is rapidly shunted out of sight. Thenas now (some things never change), the affair bursts into litigation, and that,in turn, eventually reaches the Supreme Court no less. It is now 1911. And theSupremes uphold the city’s action, approve of the ban. What!? you cry. Hadn’tthose benighted judges heard of free speech yet? No doubt they had. It’s justthat they clean forgot it—staring at those humongous testicles.

A Higgs Gem

2012-01-28T09:45:00.000-05:00

Fans of physics are undoubtedly aware of the fact thatrecently the folks at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva undertook tests todetect the Higgs boson. It’s called “the God particle,” named that by Leon M.Lederman, a Nobel laureate in physics, because of its great importance forunderstanding matter—although he says, in jest, that he called it that because hispublishers refused to let him call his book TheGoddamned Particle instead—and that because the problem is so difficult andexpensive to solve. The Higgs boson is thought to give matter its mass.

Now there is no subject more obscure than quantum physics—notbecause it really is but because the practitioners of this art are unwilling todiscuss it in plain English. I sometimes think that they might refuse because,once spelled out, ordinary people might not be quite so impressed. Butoccasionally one finds some accessible explanations. I did, and I’d like toshare it. Call it a Higgs pentahedron, something of a gem. Back in 1993 WilliamWaldegrave, science minister in the United Kingdom, challenged physics to givea one-page answer to this question: “What is the Higgs boson, and why do wewant to find it?” The journal Physicspublished five winning entries, and these are accessible here.

The answers, taken together, give a very good understanding,particularly David Miller’s—but that one is really further illuminated byreading the others. Such clarity is extremely rare—like real gems.

WhatI got out of it is that in physics there are fields, and one of them is theHiggs field. Now to understand “field,” think of a lake. That’s the field. Butwhen energy in some way disturbs that lake, why then there are waves. Call eachwave a “particle.” As there are no lakes without waves, there are no fieldswithout particles, and the Higgs field has its own, the Higgs boson. It’s not really, like, a thing—just like the photon isn’t either. The photon is the wave inthe lake called electromagnetism. You’re in the picture, I think. It is alsoquite evident that such mysterious lakes and particles arise from mathematicalmodels built to make sense of observations—thus in the subatomic realm fromphotographs taken of “particle” collisions at such places as the Large HadronCollider.

Putting the Right Quote in His Mouth

2012-01-27T15:47:00.000-05:00

I came across a delightful quote today reading Current BookNo. 1. The quote was attributed to George Santayana (1863-1952). It said: “Thereis no God and Mary is His Mother.” Tell you the truth, that didn’t sound like Santayana to me; but then mymemories of that gentle philosopher go too many years back. This one has wit,to be sure, but there is also bite. So on returning home from Jeffrey’s Honda,where, believe it or not such delights visit me at right regular intervals whilewaiting, I turned to Bartlett’s—andamazed actually to find the quote attributed to Santayana. But the attribution,while assigned to the philosopher, was actually to the poet Robert Lowell (1917-1977),and specifically to a poem in Lowell’s LifeStudies titled “For George Santayana.” So the search didn’t end there.Finally I found the poem and herewith reproduce its first stanza:

Inthe heydays of ‘forty-five,

bus-loadsof souvenir-deranged

G.I.’sand officer-professors of philosophy

camecrashing through your cell,

puzzledto find you still alive,

free-thinkingCatholic infidel,

strayspirit, who’d found

theChurch too good to be believed.

LaterI used to dawdle

pastCircus and Mithraic Temple

toSanto Stefano grown paper-thin

likeyou from waiting. . . .

Thereat the monastery hospital,

youwished those geese-girl sisters wouldn’t bother

theirheads and yours by praying for your soul:

“Thereis no God and Mary is His Mother.”

Now I’ve been a writer, a poet—andalso an editor. So I have sympathies for the editor of Bartlett’s who decidedto stick this one in—and under Santayana. Irresistible. Particularly to certainCatholics of the damaged sort like me…

The Mouth of the Mice

2012-01-27T09:26:00.000-05:00

The future also throws its shadow, itself a worthy subject—butnot today’s. What I mean to indicate, however, is that we’re planning a tripdown to the Florida Keys, and in preparation for that I’ve been looking at maps.In that process I noticed that the Keys, if extended northward, actually beginwell above the Bay of Biscayne in a detached chain of islands of which MiamiBeach is a part. A satellite view of that (clicking on image will enlarge it,Esc returns):

This sort of meditation brings memories, in this case ofearlier trips to Florida. Then up floated a name: Boca Raton. That place is wayhigher than Miami, and looking at it one sees no bays of any sort. This got mecurious. I learned that the original name had been Boca Ratones—and that raton is a mouse, not a rat, in Spanish;the word for rat is rata, pl. ratas. Next I learned that the originallocation of that name was actually associated with the much more southerly Bayof Biscayne. Well. That bay is a pretty good-sized boca, meaning mouth. So. The Mouth of the Mice.

The marvels of modern life. With Google’s satellite mappingimages, I started to look for the teethof those mice. My assumption was that that gracefully curving thin line ofislands that form the Florida Keys and then run in parallel with Florida’s land mass might at one time have been more prominent at the outer edge of thatbay. The next two pictures show the map itself and then a closeup of a portionimmediately south of Key Biscayne. Here they are:

Quitevisible in the center of the second picture, faintly brown, are rock formationslying close to the surface of the ocean—and the black channels mark the placeswhere water had once carved paths for itself as it flowed into the sea. Wasthat rock lying higher in the old, old days when Boca Ratones had been named? Iexpect so. Or were sea-levels lower? To answer that question I’d have toundergo serious study—rather than meditating idly on an upcoming trip into places quite wondrouslydifferent than the eastern edge Michigan where once the Penobscot peopleroamed.

The Comedy

2012-01-27T07:51:00.000-05:00

Here a note triggered by a post on Laudator today (“Did Adam Laugh Before the Fall?”)—and its chain of references. In my youth, long before I’d ever read it, or knew anything aboutthe history of the title, I used to take great comfort in The Divine Comedy—and even more later when, in my college days, I became mad about theater and took a minor in Drama. This comfort may have come from my mother, but in any case it delighted me to think that at the Highest there was Laughter. Later I learned that my delight hadn’t been intended, actually. The work was originallyLa commedia di Dante Alighieri; someone else added the Divina and took the author out of the title. To modernize the sound of that, if I wrote something today and meant what Dante had meant by his title, I would call the work The story of Arsen Darnay. Commedia meant, self-deprecatingly,common or low art, popular, for the people, written in the ordinary language,not in Latin. Furthermore, it ended happily—whereas the “serious” stuff neverdid. That post today also made me wonder: Did Genghis Khan ever Laugh? DidStalin? Did Hitler? Did Homer? Just kidding…

Elections, Elections

2012-01-26T21:38:00.000-05:00

They’re everywhere, everywhere. Even we are now actively committed. The superpac ads are exploding all around us, we’re attending every spellbinding debate, we’re hitting the streets canvassing for our candidate, It (our candidate is unusual in being an It) is, we think, the only candidate worthy of political effort. And It only wants to raise our taxes (which tells you how we vote around here) by a staggering 0.7 mills per annum—or as much of that at maximum that It will need over the next eight years to balance Its budget. Yes, we say! Yes, to that.

Industrialized Alkaloids

2012-01-25T11:40:00.000-05:00

What do caffeine, cocaine, nicotine, and morphine have in common? They all comefrom plants in which they form a relatively small part of plant tissues. Thepsychoactive effects of ingesting these molecules have caused humanity toharvest them long before anything like civilization dawned. The first threehelp us manage stress by acting simultaneously as stimulants and as relaxants;the last, along with codeine, alleviates pain. All belong to the chemicalfamily of alkaloids; thus the molecules feature ring-formations in whichnitrogen is dominant but linked to other elements.

Recently Brigitte and I were talking about nicotine, and thesubject of people in the Andes chewing coca leaves came up. Didn’t that help thoseliving in high altitudes where oxygen is thin? That got me to thinking aboutthe sometimes disastrous consequences of human ingenuity. These plants wereused in pre-industrial times—indeed as some are still used today, like cocaleaves still are, like coffee still is—in a form that does very little harm. Egyptiandoctors used to tell their patients to eat poppy seeds to lessen pain. I recallmy mother telling us that Hungarian peasant women used to tie poppy seeds in abit of cloth and give it their babies to lick in order to keep them quiet;these were ordinary poppies, not the opium variety, but all poppies contain thedrug. The American Indians chewed tobacco or smoked it in ritual settings—butthat smoke was far too harsh for inhalation. The strongest of these drugs,morphine, was the first to be industrialized as smoked opium—and thus it began toharm its addicts. Extracted and purified cocaine is also a wildly addictivedrug—but it requires highly developed industrial processing to extract it inconcentrated form. And in the case of tobacco, its transformation into cigarettesis the chief reason why lung cancer ranks so high as a killer. Cigarettes aremild, the inhalation of the smoke is easy—and the nicotine reaches the brainalmost instantaneous and thus releases hormones and neurotransmitters in suchmagnitudes that the effects are very rapid and highly desirable.

In some areas, a lot of knowledge is a dangerous thing; chew on a leaf andponder this while the coffee brews. A lot of knowledge mixed with a highlycommercialized culture—now that becomes reallydangerous.

Not a Lot of Popularizers

2012-01-22T09:50:00.000-05:00

1975 The Tao ofPhysics

1979 The Dance of the Wu Li Masters

1984 The LookingGlass Universe

1984 In Searchof Schrödinger’s Cat

1988 The Symbiotic Universe

1988 A Brief Historyof Time

1989 Coming of Age inthe Milky Way

The 1970s and 1980s produced a rash of popular books onphysics. In 1994 came Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace,another book I bought along the way, but the curious thing is that stringtheory does not lend itself to popularization quite so much—either that or thehot air has cooled in this balloon: we don’t have a string of books on stringtheory; it is too evidently a theory based on pure mathematics. When one of those twin brothers goes off on adecades-long trip to outer space at speeds close to the speed of light—andreturns to find the other twin an old man while he is still full oftestosterone—why that’s a worthy plot. Trips into Hilbert space, a mathematicaldimension, just don’t have the same sort of impact.

The less accessible a subject, the less it will be known tothe public—and the more so, if it is deemed important, will it be wrapped inawe. Mathematics wins that prize hands down. I’ve been reading Morris Kline’sbook, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, a Christmas gift from Brigitte—she who knows what I need. It is not an attempt at popularization, to be sure, but the closest thing we’relikely to get. It was published in 1980 by Oxford University Press and tellsthe (I’m not kidding) nail-bitingly suspenseful story of the history of math.As Brigitte will testify, I’ve read many, many books of which, at first, I’veunderstood at most, say, twenty percent of the content. I have some of thecharacteristics of the junk yard dog. This book is one of them. It is myconviction that anything made by humans is accessible—if only one makes theeffort to penetrate the subject. Eventually, as John von Neumann said of math,you get used to it. And after years, one fine day, we find out that it’s true.The grand old patterns of human nature appear quite clearly again, and what feltlike impenetrable fog becomes the same-old. The mild reward is that, at thatpoint, you can eventually feel theproblems the great but largely unknown names (who’s ever heard of Kronecker,Borel, Lebesgue , and Baire, for instance) actually felt as real. In my own case,alas, once I’ve penetrated the actual patternof the thing, I tend to lose interest. I’m interested in the shape of things. For me it’s all about orientation. I appreciate the work ofpopularizers, and almost-popularizers like Morris Kline, because they let meget there faster.

Sometimesit does take decades to get anywhere at all. It’s been a long time since I’vefirst started looking into physics—a subject entirely inaccessible until onehas managed at least a certain level of comfort with mathematics, which, thesedays, is physics. Until then a vastcomplex field that throws huge shadows over everything, from practical life tocosmology, has the aspect of watching an elaborate thirteenth century Japanesedrama unfold, told entirely in Japanese, and all you get is the emotional toningof the harsh shouts of the samurai engaged in its battles.

Proving God in the Lab

2012-01-21T10:46:00.000-05:00

It startled me a little the other day to discover that Dr. RobertJ. Spitzer, a priest, was giving lectures on the Anthropic principle on EWTN,the Catholic Television channel. The Anthropic principle dates to 1973and was first offered by physicist Brandon Carter. It suggests that theuniverse is fine-tuned in detail to make life possible.

Behind this principle are two assumptions. One is that theuniverse began, thus that a big bangtook place. The other is that the starting conditions, the basic laws, might have been different. Three ofthese are gravity, the strong force (holding atomic nuclei together), and theelectromagnetic; that last holds electrons in place around atoms and makesmolecules possible. Very small changes any in these values would have produced auniverse in which life would not have been possible. To take just one, gravity,if gravity were greater stars would have burned out more rapidly—no time forevolution. If weaker, no suns would have formed, no light would have nurturedlife on planets; indeed planets wouldn’t have formed either. The principle ismuch more elaborate, but this much will suffice. The principle is named anthropic,thus related to man, because without finely-tuned laws, no humans would havecome about.

The theory is not, of course, accepted in mainstreamscience; every discussion of it is bristlingly defensive. Modern sciencedoesn’t hold with any kind of “tuning” at all; tuning implies a NoNo, namely thatsomebody is out there, behind thecosmos. At the same time, the principle at least implicitly views “life” asarising from matter; otherwise no tuning would be necessary. Alongside the bigbang theory, which appears also to point at a “scientific” description ofcreation, the Anthropic principle is a favorite of those who would ground faithon the presumably more respectable foundations of science than on humanintuition.

I’ve always found the Anthropic principle dubious for simplereasons. We don’t know what life is.We also haven’t the faintest notion about the basics of matter and have noproven theory of gravity (one of the tuned characteristic); all we have isdescriptions of it. In one sense reality is an enormous Rorschach inkblot whichpermits any kind of projection whatsoever.

This prompted me in the beginning (of this blog, that is) towrite a spoof on “the new saints” (link). One of the co-discoverers of the bigbang was Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest and physicist. I’ve always sharedhis very sensible approach to the subject. When he got word that Pope Pius XIIwas about to address the subject in a favorable manner, Lemaître hastened tothe Vatican to put in a good word with Papal advisers. The big bang is just ascientific theory. And the fate of these is often to be overturned in time. Thestory of that intervention is told in this article (link). Lemaître’s ownwords, quoted in that article, are appropriate:

As far as I can see, such a theory remains entirely outsideany metaphysical or religious question. It leaves the materialist free to denyany transcendental Being… For the believer, it removes any attempt atfamiliarity with God… It is consonant with Isaiah speaking of the hidden God,hidden even in the beginning of the universe.

That’s the right approach.

Definitions and their Consequences

2012-01-20T10:52:00.002-05:00

The A.D.A.M. Medical Encyclopedia defines autism, in part, as follows:

Autism is a developmental disorder that appears in the first 3 years of life, and affects the brain’s normal development of social and communication skills. Autism is a physical condition linked to abnormal biology and chemistry in the brain.

This is a general definition, not the clinical one. That one is found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Today the New York Times reports that the fifth edition of DSM may redefine the condition. Both the current text and the proposed change are accessible here, courtesy of the American Psychiatric Association. The link takes you to the proposed change; the old one is under the tab labeled DSM-IV. The change appears to be a tightening of the definition—and thereby hangs a controversy.

Under tighter rules fewer people will be diagnosed—and therefore qualify for various financial programs in support of autistic individuals. The new definition will no doubt continue to serve in the identification of genuine cases of children who really have this condition.

But there is another aspect to this story. Autism, a relatively newly recognized condition, has seen explosive growth, which may or may not be real. What do I mean by that? Here is a condition that manifests poorly developed social and communications skills; but its underlying physical causes are unknown. Thus it is similar to ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), another very prevalent condition. Government funded support programs have developed for both. But where the condition is difficult to diagnose by physical tests and the behaviors may be caused by something other than physical conditions—and where program are present—the tendency of physicians is to diagnose a fundable condition and then to breathe a sigh of relief.

I call this a newly recognized condition. Indeed. My 1967 Webster’s Collegiate defines autism as “absorption in fantasy as escape from reality.” I find myself quite autistic, under this definition—to the benefit of mystery novel writers.

Let me wrap up this topic with a footnote. That A.D.A.M. in the medical encyclopedia stands for Animated Dissection of Anatomy for Medicine.

On the same NYT front page today the second lead story reports on sharply rising attacks by the new Afghanistani army on NATO forces. Here we have a definitional problem of another sort. Those whom we cajole or coerce to serve in an army we have created as the country’s occupying power are defined as allies. But the definition doesn’t seem to fit—because the alliance isn’t altogether voluntary.

Austen Before Kodak

2012-01-19T21:45:00.002-05:00

In the National Portrait Gallery in London hangs what appears to be an unfinished portrait of Jane Austen executed in pencil and in watercolors. It is the work of her sister, Cassandra. Anyone wishing to see pictures of this writer need but to go to Google Images and type in “Jane Austen” to see lots. Cassandra’s portrait, of which I reproduce a cropping from a BBC documentary shown on Austenonly (link), apparently served as the starting point for many other portraits produced much later, each as it were “improving” on the original. The picture may not have been entirely successful—the reason, perhaps, why Cassandra only colored the face. The National Portrait Gallery (here) cites a niece of Jane’s as follows: “There is a look which I recognize as hers, though the resemblance is not strong, yet as it represents a pleasing countenance it is so far a truth.” The picture dates to 1810, thus more than a decade before photography began as the daguerreotype. I’ve been thinking about Austen again because I’m reading P.D. James’ most recent novel, Death Comes to Pemberly. And today I learn that Eastman Kodak has declared bankruptcy. The days of old-fashioned photography on film are drawing to a close. So I thought I’d mark the day.

I’ve always liked this picture and have viewed all others as somehow failing. The clue to that is the phrase I quote above: “a look which I recognize as hers.” Even Cassandra may have rendered her sister as prettier, perhaps, than she was, but she did manage to capture “a look.” Someday perhaps fairly soon all photos will be held exclusively on minute surfaces of doped silicon accessible only by means of machines and electricity. And when electric power fails or flags at last, those picture will be altogether lost unless someone bothered to print out copies and saved them in an album. And then back to the drawing board…

St. John’s College

2012-01-18T10:22:00.001-05:00

The college has two campuses located in Annapolis, MD and in Santa Fe, NM. Few things are rooted so deeply in time, but this college grew out of King William’s School in Maryland founded in the colonial year 1696. The school’s curriculum is grounded in the great books and is unified, meaning that all students take the same courses and all courses are required—no majors, minors and all of that machinery. Paradoxically, this very elite program was the consequence of failure—the curriculum adopted in 1937 when the college, organized along conventional lines, was facing a desperate financial crisis. The “new program” miraculously saved it. To get a feel for what such a program means, here is a link to the reading list divided by year.

Long observation teaches that virtually any conceivable good (or evil) will have its place somewhere on this plane of existence. A place like St. John’s is a little unbelievable—and two campuses yet. We learned of the existence of this school in a curious way, through a letter that one of Brigitte’s swim-exercise friend shared with her, a letter written by the friend’s grandniece. The letter-writer, a young woman in her sophomore year, casually describes some of her studies—along with lots of other things. The contents of the letter and its stunningly good English almost shocked. A forgery? A little joke? No. For real. Both of us observed a minute of reverent silence after having read it—not quite trusting our eyes, as it were.

To Be a Tree

2012-01-17T22:19:00.003-05:00

It may well be, if we but knew it, that this dark realm is here to shape

Countless avenues for spirits to help them make their Great Escape.

Who is to say that grasses, trees, that animals and plants are waste,

That only humans hold the keys and will be raised, allowed to taste,

Experience the real salvation? We can’t. We only ever

Know other beings’ emanation, signs, and sights. Endeavor

Although we might to get a view from the inside, we fail, we can’t,

Although a smile, the other’s sighs, sometimes produce the small, scant

Hint that our life is also in their eyes. On walks betimes I feel

That trees and I communicate, indeed that rustling leaves conceal

The meanings they articulate to one another too. There is no waste.

The dog has feelings, thoughts, and dreams. Matter, spirit are so interlaced

In dogs we can’t make out the seams where in them souls from bodies part

The inwardness of flowers, in trees the deep emotions in their hearts?

That knowledge isn’t ours. Is there a gulf here? Or just degrees?

Sometimes for an hour’s spell on walks I ponder such odd mysteries.

Youth, Illusion

2012-01-16T07:32:00.002-05:00

We watched The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie again after a lapse of four decades. Miss Brodie is a fictitious, charismatic teacher in Scotland brim-full of romantic notions, the religion of true art, and an admiration of the emerging men-on-horseback of her time, Mussolini and Franco. The first time and now again my Mother’s romantic admiration of all things Italian (when I was still a child) came back powerfully as I watched Miss Brodie. Today—what with the passage of those decades—the realization came that the world always looks quite different in youth. Hope always springs eternal, and when the rosy fingers of some great new dawn seem to be coloring the edges of the sky, young hearts enlarge. So it had been with my then still very young Mother—before the grim tales of the various collective horrors actually unfolded. At my age one knows too much. Nothing any longer deceives or tempts—no Arab Spring, no Tea Party, no Occupy Movement. A while back now we had an occasion to see some of Leni Riefenstahl’s films; she was both Hitler’s best propagandist and unquestionably one of the greatest film talents of the last century—alas she got it both wrong, her subject and the time. But it is worth while sometimes to imagine seeing those movements, Mussolini’s, Hitler’s, as the people of their countries saw them early on. Then, as now, I am sure, those over 70 remained unimpressed, indeed quite dubious. It takes a lot of years before this wondrous, green or snow-glittery lovely world reveals its true face as the valley of the shadow of death. Is that man suffering depression? Naw. Quite cheerful; not what it sounds like. But one just knows. If in doubt, give it time.

Let’s Hear it for the Minus

2012-01-15T17:55:00.003-05:00

Negative numbers deserve respect such as they rarely ever get.

In Math they have been dubbed absurd, an adjective that really hurt

When the nasty appellation saw its earliest application

In quite ancient, hoary times. Too long have nasty crimes

Like that stained Abstraction. Our times now call for action!

Let us rise now and defend numbers we can’t apprehend

Wearing those humbling minus signs they’re forced to show in lines

Doing subtraction which adds or division which just pads

Positive numbers’ sums. Let’s join and clear those slums

Below the Zero’s sway. Arise from Berkley to Bombay.

Negatives have a true domain in which they ought to reign

Supreme rather than merely be used when needed—cavalierly.

Wine, Loaf, Thou—and Math

2012-01-13T13:16:00.005-05:00

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131), known to most by means of Edward FitzGerald’s translation (using a loose meaning for that word) of the Rubaiyyat, was also and perhaps predominantly a mathematician and a philosopher of the school of Avicenna. As I noted earlier (here), I am now reading a wonderful book on mathematics—one of whose early themes is Euclid’s fifth postulate about parallel lines. Khayyám played in that game too, and it delighted me to discover the page of a Persian manuscript of his reproduced by Wikipedia (link). Looks odd that, doesn’t it. FitzGerald was a wonderful poet but apparently challenged in finding original material. His Rubaiyyat is a kind of free, rearranged, and often reinterpreted rewrite. Robert Graves offered a more authentic version, but got shouted down. Meanwhile I note that people of a certain stripe—those who, like Khayyám, believed in the priority of intuition in knowledge—nonetheless often spend huge chunks of their time on mathematics, and the higher the individuals’ rank and fame, the more likely that turns out to be. Avicenna (Ibn Sina), whose thought Khayyám followed, was of that persuasion too.

Even a Little Learning…

2012-01-12T11:47:00.004-05:00

Even a little learning teaches that the blight on human nature is a kind of perennial. Drinking deeper but confirms it. A good example comes in today’s post on Laudator Temporis Acti (link); it is delightfully titled—but it could’ve been titled “So What Else Has Changed.”

Some stray thoughts that rose, reading that. Note the language. Rose. Not progressed. In our times, albeit ever more hesitantly, we believe in progress. Applied to the diurnal grind of collective life, that turns out to be a denial of what we plainly see. Progress is either personal and creative or it’s just as vanishing as everything else. Ocean waves do not progress, they rise and fall; tides ebb or flow. Deprived of the alluring temptations of progress, that still leaves doing—doing the right thing. And to the devil with the consequences.

Those with little learning, like me, probably wondered where it is, that Pierian spring. I looked it up. Turns out that a portion of Greek Thessaly was called Pieria (link), home of Mount Pierus, the home of the Muses. Being a mount it had at least one spring.

The phrases is known to all from Alexander Pope poem, An Essay on Criticism, but the reference was already there in Petronius’ Satyricon. Here is the verse in J.M. Mitchell’s translation.

I LOSE MY WAY

But whether he’s nursed ‘neath the fortress grim of the armed Tritonian maid,

Or a Spartan settlement nurtured him, or the home where the Sirens played;

His boyhood’s years he must give to song, and quaff the Maeonian spring

With a generous heart; he must hurry along, just giving his steeds their fling,

With Socrates’ pupils, and unafraid, he must learn from Demosthenes

To wield the orator’s giant blade; and — when he has learned all these —

Then let the poets of Roman race throng round, and, their old Greek dress

But lately shed, in native grace, lend him their own loveliness.

Let the page have done with the dusty Court, let Fortune go her own way;

Let the theme be banquets and fields hard fought, told bravely in warrior lay;

Let Cicero’s thunders try thy soul; be these thy strengthening.

So in full flood high thoughts shall swell from the true Pierian spring.

Kaleidoscopy

2012-01-11T11:50:00.001-05:00

Kaleidoscopes produce their beautiful images by causing bits of colored glass to move about in a restricted field. The source of their movement is gravity as the device is turned. The pleasing images are caused when two or more mirrors multiply a single image and create a symmetrical composite. Now what interests me here is that the bits of colored glass (or whatever else is used) never change—except their locations relative to each other. The only energy entering the system is the turning of the device; that invokes the pull of gravity. Yet the image appears to be perpetually new. But what we’re really looking at is something rather static.

The kaleidoscope, for me, serves as a wonderful analog to politics. Here the pieces are “interests” of every conceivable kind—economic, ideological, religious, philosophical, social. They arise from unchanging human characteristics; only such characteristics—never anything creative or original—ever become visible within collectives. The gravity is self-assertion. The mirrors are the media. The kaleidoscope of politics is, to be sure, many-fold more complex. The pieces are capable of changing color, size, and shape, but the moving force behind them remains the same. Each election is yet another turn of the device—but afterwards, although the image changes, nothing else ever does.

Those poor little pieces of glass. I bet, deep down, strange yearnings make them long for the ocean beach. They would, if they could, escape and return to nature, once more moved, when moved at all, by the surging surf. And at vast intervals in glass-bead time they would see, say, the brief visit of a gull and the even more rare descent of an exploring beak.

One Jewel in the Crown

2012-01-11T10:08:00.002-05:00

Entering my library last evening, I encountered a small round table prominently positioned in the entry passage. On it lay some six stacks of stark, white Xeroxed pages. They spelled out the grim facts of our local system’s financial woes. The Grosse Pointe communities in Michigan are unambiguously wealthy, but our library is suffering. Property values have plummeted and with it property taxes; our library gets 91 percent of its revenues from that source. County and state aide to libraries have shrunk 26 percent since 2007. We are now facing a 45 percent cutback on collection purchases and a 50 percent cut in administrative services—never mind all the rest. This leaflet, to be sure, is intended to drum up support for a millage rate increase. The library won’t close anytime soon. But it brought back a recurring thought: libraries are certainly at least one jewel in the crown of higher culture. I watch their health closely as an indicator, only too aware that the higher ranges of human experience depend on helpful institutions, and those, in turn, on a certain order and degree of wealth.

In the small circles of those concerned with books, the words of Ammianus Marcellinus, a sardonic fourth century Roman historian of Greek origin, echo. A gruff rhetorical phrase in his writings, describing his environment, was “libraries closed like tombs.” The time referred to was 380 AD. Now, to be sure, it was just a throw-away remark more intended to convey a flavor than the results of an exhausting census; we hear such comments quite often in our day as well. Careful scholars like George W. Houston (writing in the Library Quarterly in 1988) point out that Ammianus did not mean public libraries; they survived in the West at least until 455 AD. But you get my drift; the death of the Roman Empire did spell the death of such public institutions.

I got to wondering about those Roman public libraries. They existed, sure enough, but had a different character than our lending libraries. Books, meaning scrolls, could be taken out and read—not at tables but in surrounding gardens, standing in the shade or walking about; under the eaves in the shade, as it were. Public readings were a common feature at these places so that even those of the great majority who could not read could gather and hear books read aloud. Books, literature, learning, the intellectual, the spiritual life belong in some ways to the immaterial dimension so that their structures are really relationships between people of like interests. But in this realm we can’t partake of any kind of community without physical underpinnings. These require stalwart votes to pass that temporary millage increase. Failing that, here in Grosse Pointe, one of the jewels in the crown of the Detroit metro area, we will lose one of our three library branches and face 30 percent cutbacks in hours and in staff.

Even the Sky

2012-01-10T18:23:00.001-05:00

Everybody’s voting in New Hampshire tonight, including the Michigan sky. But the light breeze high up had already erased the name of the candidate by the time we saw the Sky, its X.

Quick Update of McLuhan

2012-01-10T13:56:00.003-05:00

The tedium is the message.

Language and Meaning

2012-01-08T09:17:00.009-05:00

Language is the carrier of meaning. A source of useful contemplation for me of late has been the possibility of communication by meanings alone, dispensing with the carrier. Not that that’s possible in this dimension, but it may be possible in the Beyond. The thought here is that the carrier actually influences that which it carries. There is Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism, The medium is the message. Supposing that we are awaiting the Dalai Lama. Here is this ornate pillared building and the crowd is on wide steps leading up to it, a wide boulevard below. And here comes the Dalai Lama—on a bicycle. The bicycle is his carrier. But suppose the Dalai Lama arrives in a long, sleek limousine. Three or four people stumble out first, not least the chauffeur, wearing a uniform. Finally the Lama himself clad in Tibetan robes. Yet another image. The Lama comes by helicopter—and the furious wind of his descent make people raise their hands to fend off the blast of air. The carrier modifies the meaning. — Abrupt shift. — For me the words “original sin” carry a very potent meaning. In many ways it is one of the most useful meanings for understanding at least human reality. But the words that carry it also carry extra baggage that causes many people to reject their meaning. We would agree on a whole lot more things if meanings came to us naked.

Libraries Don’t Vanish

2012-01-07T14:37:00.002-05:00

Several hours of Internet outage this morning stopped my habit-world dead in its tracks. My mornings are spent on the web, and the outage made me feel as if someone big had sat down on my chest. It took me a few aimless circles around obstructions down in this basement before vague memories returned. Ah, yes. Back in the Long Ago. I used to write on paper with a pen under a bright light. And all else equal I might have read a book. I had worked in the Long Ago. Back then the telephone facilitated communications, but the work proceeded on paper. The institutional support was the publishing industry and libraries. Libraries sometimes closed, but they did not disappear. Nor did the books of publishers when they went out of business. The books remained on shelves. Answers were difficult to get, to be sure, and it took longer to get them.

Back when the world began, thus in Tirschenreuth immediately after World War II, we had no libraries; indeed it took two or three years before even a tiny bookstore opened. At first we had no newspapers either. Later on, living in Staufenberg to the west, the nearest so-called library was in Gernsbach three kilometers away, and we paid a small fee there for every borrowed book. Indeed, when I come to think of it, that was the only library I ever visited in Germany. In Kansas City, after our arrival here, weekly trips to the downtown library became a sacred ritual.

I went upstairs to commune with Brigitte. Libraries. In Europe. She is some years my senior and remembers more about those times. The war had no sooner ended, she relates, than the occupying powers caused all libraries to close. Bang. You can hear doors slamming and the locks clanging shut. Why? Well, libraries were ordered to sanitize their contents—to remove all traces of history-rewritten produced by the Nazi powers. In her school library in Weissenfels, whole shelves were actually covered with signs forbidding even touching books. A small set of shelves were open to the students—while ideological cleaning proceeded. The city’s main library, a grand structure, stood dead and mute for years. Call it a library outage. But the physical structure still remained.

Everything has a silver lining. Last time this happened I went half crazy talking to recorded voices at AT&T and resetting two computers at regular intervals for the better part of a day. But it turned out that the Internet returned miraculously all on its own. Did so again today. I wrote on paper. I read a book. A novel experience in the morning. Brought back memories of another time. Not all bad, the Long Ago. I seemed to have a lot more time this morning.

Dust Bunnies

2012-01-06T13:21:00.002-05:00

An addendum to the last post. Having to do some basement cleaning today, a thought occurred. If Maxwell, Lorentz, Einstein, and countless other physicists had expended their energies and equations on how dust bunnies form—and applied the resulting insights to the improvement of brooms—they might have benefitted me, today, a whole lot more than by thinking deeply about spacetime.

Has a Crack Appeared?

2012-01-06T11:11:00.002-05:00

I came across an interesting and recent development in physics dating to 2009. The Scientific American reported on the matter on November 24, 2009 (link); New Scientist had an article on it dated August 9, 2010; that article is not online, but a summary of it is presented by The Daily Galaxy (March 24, 2011, link).

The discoverer in question is a physicist working at the University of California, Berkeley named Peter Horava or Petr Hoyava or, most likely, Petr Hoava. (That box stands for an r with a caron on top of it; the ASCII code is not recognized by Blogger.) Horava is also, according to Wikipedia, a member of the theory group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Horava’s discovery, working with an allotrope (read “form of”) carbon known as graphene, is that the behavior of this carbon at near absolute zero temperatures suggests that Einstein’s spacetime may not be real at all, that gravity acts differently in different temperatures, that the warping of space and time by mass may be illusory. What we see is caused by gravitation which does not act uniformly everywhere. This view appears to confirm the claims of quantum physics that gravity is due to an exchange of particles, like electromagnetism, in this case the graviton, not due to the deformation of spacetime.

Now this discovery is beginning to make waves for a reason. It promises, finally, a unified theory of gravitation which will make the results observed by general relativity and quantum physics agree with each other—but, to be sure, at some expense to General Relativity’s claim to universal applicability. Well.

And there is more. As might be expected, views of black holes, the big bang, dark matter, dark energy, and the expansion of the universe all appear in very different light. For this reason, rather than summarily dismissed, Horava’s suggestions and modified equations are getting a lot of attention from quantum physicists.

I note this here because spacetime is my favorite bête noire. Yet it is so fundamental to general relativity that any crack that separates those two words means a revolution in physics. Unfortunately I cannot hope personally to check the results however much I’d like to. It would require me to master Maxwell’s equations presented in his On Physical Lines of Force (link), the Lorenz transformations that “correct” or “complete” them, and—for that matter—the evolution of concepts as rendered in the language of mathematics all the way from the days of aether to the present. I haven’t got the right stuff. But I have a very keen intuition!

Math Note

2012-01-04T15:49:00.002-05:00

The book under consideration is Morris Kline’s Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty. Wonderful book—and a nice companion to one I’d recently read on Hellenistic Science (link on this blog). For as long back as I am able to remember, I’ve always thought of mathematics as a language—natural, perhaps, for someone like me who had to master three languages beyond my mother tongue before I was sixteen—and someone who got deeply into computers more or less by playing around with their insides. This work tells me that math was long and traditionally viewed as something else—the code deeply embedded in Nature and revealing the secrets of God’s design. The loss of certainty, therefore, is a modern phenomenon, another great disillusionment—but one I had been spared. Math viewed as language explains more. It suggests that math has two aspects: its rules of application, thus its grammar, and the meaning assigned to perfectly legal equations and functions—which may be quite defective.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky

Nothing wrong with the grammar here. Now when it comes to reality, some of the most familiar aspects of which quite escape genuine physical grasp—such as the workings of gravity—giving explanations for them using the pristine grammar of math but meaningless concepts is good fun for toves and the mome.

Old Gifts and New

2012-01-03T14:29:00.002-05:00

Today the new brings the old. Quite some time ago my brother, Baldy, discovered that a book had been published about Tirschenreuth, the Bavarian town. It’s a modest place of around 9,000 inhabitants, but one of our important family locations. We lived there as a family as World War II came to an end. Multiple posts here hark back to that place. I’ve intended to mention that book here for a long time, but the means of showing it were lacking. Now a new gift, called the HP Photosmart 5510, provides the means. It is a printer, scanner, copier, and photo printer all rolled into one. Until now I’ve had to photograph books or their contents. Now I have a new tool. Herewith three images produced using Photosmart, beginning with the book itself.

The title of the book is Long Ago in Tirschenreuth. That word, Damals, does not have an actual English equivalent. A forced translation of it is There Once, that “once” not further amplified, but the word’s essence is remembrance. The author is Eberhard Polland, a writer, the publisher is Bücherhaus Rode, Maximilianplatz 38, 95643 Tirschenreuth, Germany. The book appeared in 2010.

An image of the market square (Maximilianplatz formally, but everybody called it Marktplatz) is a kind of signature for this town if the photo includes the town’s church, named Mariä Himmelfahrt (Mary’s Ascension).

The region is blessed with high quality clay deposits, and one of the oldest industries in the region, although not in Tirschenreuth itself any more, is porcelain. One of the producers of the finest high quality porcelain is Falkenpozellan GmbH located not far away in Bärnau on the Czech border. Well, Tirschenreuth was the first, and the factory was right in town—damals. The old ad reproduced in this book of remembrance says on top: “A nurturing place for German quality work.”

My Photosmart is another and this time an American instance of quality workmanship. It speaks to my computer by wireless means; we’ve tried its prowess printing photographs, and, by golly, they look just like the photographs of old, brilliant colors, stiff little pieces of shiny paper. This gift came to me from a virtual person, ECDI, the acronym of our company name. We live in a mysterious world where invisible persons give valuable, tangible gifts. Thank you, ECDI; thank you, Baldy, for that book.

Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter

2012-01-02T09:30:00.004-05:00

Precisely two years ago I wrote a post (link) on an Apostolic Constitution, Anglicorum Coetibus (Groups of Anglicans). Today comes a story in the New York Times telling us of the first implementation of that constitution. An Episcopal group has been joined in communion with the Catholic Church. Its former bishop, Jeffrey N. Steenson, has been named the Ordinary of the Chair of St. Peter headquartered in Houston. My post explains what an “ordinary” means; by this appointment Steenson becomes a member of the United States Conference of Bishops, indeed the first married priest ever (three children).

Soon after my original posting I noticed that that post began gathering a steady readership. At first I thought the title caused this traffic (When the Ordinary is Extraordinary); then I began to wonder; but the stats don’t really tell you anything. My post had noted an event that had taken place on November 4, 2009 and we had read about in the pages of the The American Conservative. The odd coincidence of today’s story on that subject, first broached January 2, 2010 here, appearing in the paper on January 2, 2012, makes me think: Meaningful coincidence. So here it is, recorded.

Recalling Eliade

2012-01-01T10:46:00.002-05:00

Full turns of Time’s big wheel always cause me to recall Mircea Eliade (1907-1986). He was one of the chaotic but inspired thinkers who influenced people like me, thus people who rashly jettisoned tradition, religion in youth. People like me needed guides who seemed to have embraced the modern but then had come to doubt it. Another such was Carl G. Jung. I was exposed to such brilliant modern interpreters of the traditional as Etienne Gilson, but stuff like that flowed over me and left no trace. Traditionalists did not engage the world I thought I knew. Brought up in, but rejecting, a tradition in which the liturgical year played a major guiding influence, I had to read a book like Eliade’s Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return before I intuitively understood the genuine meaning underneath such structures as the liturgical year. To think of myth as actual, real, here and now—that’s something of a leap. But exactly the same process fashioned my approach to mathematics. I was taught it in the traditional way—which assumes that I’ll be a good boy and simply cram the information, learn the rituals, and accept all that without intuitive assent. I didn’t. I put math right next to religion as something to be despised—useful in minor ways but beneath the dignity of genuine engagement. Until later—when I tackled the subject on my own. Odd this. But there always will be people of my sort who don’t take well to regimentation—those for whom, in fact, regimentation is a signal that something must be viewed as dead. Education can’t be mechanized—not the real thing. But teaching anything at all effectively is extremely expensive in time and money. But when it’s done right, at least we get something for the effort and resource expended.

Time’s Gate

2011-12-31T08:21:00.000-05:00

I am running out of wrought iron gates bequeathed to me by daughter Michelle’s unfailingly apt photography. Luckily this last remaining one, also from somewhere in France, serves my purpose well today.

We set symbolic boundaries to time’s vast flow. They resemble this remnant in a way. This gate probably dates back at least to the nineteenth century. It can’t deny the intruder passage. The wall itself is eroded, broken, and if we wish to reach the rich, green, shaded future, we need but step around this would be barrier. That much more modern-looking little sign affixed to the old rusting gate intrigued me for quite a while. Finally I succeeded in reading it. Attention au chien, it says. Beware of the dog. But the dog is also gone, no doubt. The wall cannot contain it. It ran away anno long ago. We pass into the coming year as easily as falling fast asleep. But the sign still serves a purpose. It reminds us, as we pass: Beware, beware!

The Year That Was

2011-12-30T10:48:00.000-05:00

Bananagrams in January.

Orchids in a February storm.

In March the Justices decreed: Corporate “persons,” have no “privacies.”

In April Glen Beck left the Fox.

May planted our tomatoes.

June’s Robert Gates departed the five-cornered house.

July brought back our butterflies.

We raised them in August sailing Schooner Manitou.

The Euro sickened in September.

In October we just counted strikes.

November belonged to Babylon 5.

December we’ll remember as the month of Iraq.

Relationships of Choice

2011-12-29T10:09:00.001-05:00

In describing his views of heaven and hell, Swedenborg presents a world where people choose their own environments, but these are not, as it were, geographical. Souls select communities in which they feel at home. Therefore the condemned want to be in hell; the saved choose a heaven that suits them. Indeed we see souls, as it were, doing their real estate shopping by visiting these high communities. If they sense mutual agreement, they settle; if not they move on. There is, to be sure, also an intermediate region that reminded me of purgatory, a region where the initial sorting happens.

When I first encountered this view a German word presented itself spontaneously, die Wahlvervandschaften. The word literally means relationships of choice, but Goethe’s novel of that title is rendered as Elective Affinities, a novel I’d read, but only in part. A couple invite a man and a woman for a weekend, as it were, and wouldn’t you know it, the result is a kind of mixing of affinities. Goethe’s reference is to chemistry. In the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century chemists used “affinity” as the handy concept to explain why some elements attract each other while others won’t compound.

Reading that book, as soon as I discerned what would be coming down, I lost all interest. “Chemistry?” I muttered. “In that case there is no genuine choice. So why use that word?” A kind of determinism in elegant guise. Goethe’s novels are also incredibly longwinded, hence I’ve only ever sampled them. But I liked the title and the concept—but only if real choice is actually involved.

By contrast I’ve spent quite a lot of time—usually on walks—pondering Swedenborg’s projection. In that view the choice is real. We see such choice in this dimension too. Like clings to like, although what like means is often rather coarsely spun. Thus, for instance the wealthy live together, the artsy have their quarters. The poor endure their slums but, having endured them, feel more comfortable there. Freed of the weight of matter and its rude demands? In a realm where matter does not weigh us down, in a world where residence is not a matter principally of income and proximity to work—and the need for work seems also suspended and, per Swedenborg, is also a matter of choice—surely there people would then relate with those who genuinely please them. The Internet has created a new version of such odd, virtual spaces where we may cultivate Relationships of Choice. Blogs. Here they are, floating in the immaterial world of cyberspace. Each blog creates a kind of cultural environment readers are never compelled to visit. They do so at their choice.

My Sentiments Exactly

2011-12-28T12:32:00.001-05:00

P.D. James, now in her nineties, has published a new novel, Death Comes to Pemberly—my luck to get it as a Christmas present this year. The novelty of this novel? It is the latest entrant into a growing genre: Jane Austen—or a Jane Austen character—featured in a murder mystery. I’ve just started reading the book, so no more on that subject now. But it brought to mind (the mention of Austen always does) Sense and Sensibility. That nineteenth century work would now have to be titled Reason and Feeling, a much less fetching phrase.

In the modern sense (that word again), our access to reality is through the senses—and that reality is therefore of a material character. And there is nothing else. The material is best understood by hard, logical, scientific, rational approaches in which feeling is held at bay. Curiously feeling is, in common usage today, quite divorced from physical touching; that’s where the word is rooted. Today it means emotion. And Austen’s title, a snapshot of language at a moment of historical time, has always sharply focused for me the materialization, as it were, of a strictly human capacity, that of consciousness. In that sense(!) sense emphasizes the intellect while sensibility points to the modes of intuition, feeling, indeed also of judging: the act of putting a value of some sort, positive or negative, on that which is perceived.

Sensibility has shrunk in meaning and signals a kind of rationality. Such a quality is now ascribed to a person who’s simply sensible. Other words, all ultimately rooted in the senses, that have had similar histories. Sententious comes to mind. It once meant terse, pithy, and full of meaning, a maxim. Now it means moralizing balderdash. Sentiment, derived from the Latin for feeling, once had a neutral tone but has been degraded to mean a thought arising from pure feeling only and therefore lacking the admired teeth of rationality. Unless, of course, the person says, my sentiments exactly. In that phrase the old take on things, thus “my considered opinion,” still prevails.

Here, of course, the necessarily personal character of perception plays a role in producing ambiguity. We think of the rational as capable of confirmation. Out there. Feelings are subjective and, as such (unless we are celebrities), of no importance whatsoever—unless some sort of hard, material underpinnings can be dug out of all that sentimental mush. Sentiment and navel-gazing are both condemned. But there is that Know Thyself. And when all is said and done, sense as rationality produces nothing but statistics, dry as dust.

Pemberly, by the way, was the great estate owned by Fitzwilliam Darcy, he who won the heart of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice.

News from the Vendian

2011-12-27T11:22:00.000-05:00

Headline-writing is an art most resembling free verse. Free verse is a flattering sort of writing genre, much like modern art. Anyone can do it. The two headlines I want to talk about today come, respectively, from The State Column (link) and Science News (link):

Fossilized cells found in China may challenge theory of evolution

Early animals dethroned

The actual stories beneath these leads deal with the same subject; it’s the discovery of some fossilized blobs of once living matter 570 million years old. Such blobs were once thought to be algae; then, in 1998, they were reclassified as the embryos of animals; now X-ray methods have revealed that they are neither. They appear to be some precursor creatures that divide by a process called palintomy. New cells form inside the blobs until they are compressed so much that the blob explodes and lets them out. Cell-formation by palintomy resembles cell production in an embryo, hence the 1998 reclassification. And since no animals, as such, in embryo or otherwise, have been found as far back as 570 million years ago, the current discovery is best described by the headline from Science News: Early animals dethroned. Sorry, folks. Animals came later. The State Column, however, is a political publication; its pages are as thick with news of Gingrich, Trump, Perry, Romney, and Ron Paul as those blobs are thick with would-be spores. Therefore this minor re-dating of a recent back-dating of animal origins suddenly becomes a “challenge” to the very “theory of evolution.” Goodness gracious.

The real formation of animals took place in the Cambrian period 543-490 YA (that’s years ago). Therefore the blobs date to the Vendian (650-543 YA). Darwin hoped that life could be extended back and said that “the difficulty of assigning any good reason for the absence of vast piles of strata rich in fossils beneath the Cambrian system is very great” (Origin of the Species, Chapter X), hence the effort by some means to extend the records backwards, and the Vendian is the new frontier of that. Two steps backward, one step forward. Ain’t that a shame? For the sensitives it shakes the very foundations of reality.

Advent Season, Short and Long

2011-12-25T09:21:00.002-05:00

The Advent season lasts three or four weeks all depending on which day of the week November 30 falls. November 30th, the feast of St. Andrew the Apostle, anchors the season. The temporally nearest Sunday is always the first Sunday of Advent. Therefore if the last day of November falls on a Sunday through Wednesday, the season is long, if Thursday through Saturday, the season is short. This year Advent began on November 27, therefore we’ve just completed the longest Advent, lasting fully 28 days.

As soon as I was a little grown, which meant that we were living in deeply Catholic Bavaria, lighting those four candles on the four Sundays of Advent has been the most memorable part of Christmas for me. Now I discover that the Advent wreath has its origins in a Lutheran tradition dating to 1839. That year a Lutheran theologian and teacher, Johan Hinrich Wichern, took on the care of several poor children and moved into an old farm house with them. Came the Christmas season, and the children began to agitate. They wanted to know when Christmas would finally come. Wichern took an old wagon wheel and constructed the first-ever Advent wreath. He placed 20 small red candles for the days of the week and four large white candles to mark the Sundays. The reason for this arrangement emerges when we look at a calendar for 1939, presented herewith.

December 1839
S	M	Tu	W	Th	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31

Ever since, as it were... Now, mind you, controversy soon surrounded this custom, and in a few decades or so Wichern’s origination of this custom came under fire. Someone claimed that a poem, written by a famous German poet, Matthias Claudius, who’d lived in the eighteenth century, had already appeared back then celebrating the Adventskrantz. But thanks to the diligence of the German Wikipedia, whence I have this lovely story (link), the actual author of the poem was a grand-nephew of Matthias, himself a lyricist and teacher, named Hermann Claudius (1878-1980). Thus Wichern retains his title. Not that people have got message yet—hence I encountered accounts of the wreath placing it into the dim pasts of antiquity.

In any case, we lit our candles yesterday evening for the first time, just about a week late. The long season’s done. And thus we wish you all a Merry Christmas on this Christmas Day.

'Tis the Evening

2011-12-24T17:00:00.001-05:00

In Memoriam

2011-12-23T09:15:00.002-05:00

German Wikipedia (link).

We get a German-language weekly, the Wochenpost, passed on by friends. A recent brief feature told me something I should’ve known, having lived in Bavaria, but in our youth we just absorb the old and worn and don’t think much about it. Life draws us on. Seems that in old, poor days Bavarians buried their dead on a board or plank. They called it the plank of the dead (Totenbrett). They wrapped the body in a sheet and tied it to a narrow board. They lowered the board into the grave or, untying the strings, let the body slide into the grave. When they saved the plank, the carpenter shaped and decorated it to make a marker erected either by the grave itself or in some other public place. They often carved some motto on the board—as later, also, onto grave markers made of stone. Here is a sample:

This Plank here says to Thee:

“What You are now were we,

What We are now you’ll be,

For all Eternity.”

As a boy in Tirschenreuth I saw those Dead-Planks standing here and there awesomely weathered, indeed almost black, in the cemetery where we used to go sleigh-riding in the winter. It had a little building, too, and, sometimes a dead person was laid out in there on a stone table. For this reason we always went and looked through the glass door. It was a strange sort of moment, always, but at that age we took it all in stride. Other days, those. We lived with death casually. It was a part of life.

Realism and Humility

2011-12-22T11:05:00.001-05:00

Humility is not some sort of pretended self-belittling, not some kind of show to demonstrate piety. It is the consequence of observation. It arises from hard realism. A brief Sufi account about a sage illustrates this. I read it in one of Idries Shah’s book. A group of would-be Dervishes surrounded a sage to tell him how much they admired his humility. The sage dismissed them gruffly. He said: “My humility isn’t there to make impressions. It serves another purpose.”

I am thinking of Iraq. I am thinking of our unrealistic expectations that, magically, democracy will break into blossoms in that country now that we’ve removed the Overwhelm. Realism would have counseled quite another slant on things. That region, to be peaceful, has always demanded an overbearing force.

1508-1533	Safavid Dynasty of Iran ruled there
1533-1918	Ottoman
1917-1920	British occupation
1921-1958	Kingdom
1939-1945	World War II and British re-occupation
1958-1963	Republic
1963-2003	Baathist era. Saddam Hussein takes power in 1979
2003-2011	US occupation
2012-	We shall see

Mind you, this tabulation is too neat. There were regime changes during the Ottoman era as different elements of the Ottoman empire held power there. Civil and tribal wars as it were spiced up that period as well, and in the 1622-1638 period the Safavids held power again. There were coups, rebellions, and other messy situation throughout the Baathist era too. And the U.S. occupation was marked by almost constant combat.

Today my paper says that Al Maliki is embarrassing President Obama because the precious power-sharing arrangements that we forced into place there are breaking down at once. Pride—national, party, personal—prevents us from being realistic in public. Part of that is the phony pretense that our holy collective can never do wrong. Realists therefore are punished or marginalized and politicians make a huge pretense. Iraq was an unjust war, itself caused by pride. Obama did not approve of it, but now he too is dyed in the color of the same lie. It is for reasons such as the above that I assert that collectives are by definition inferior to individual humans; therefore the religion of nationalism is a kind of animal worship.

While on the subject. Iraq, the name of this place, harks back to the ancient city of Uruk once located in Sumer, the predecessor of the Akkadian, later the Babylonian empires. The Hebrew was Erech, the Latin Orchoi. It was located in the south-eastern part of today’s Iraq (link).

Daughter Zion

2011-12-21T19:28:00.004-05:00

To mark the first day of the Jewish Festival of Lights, Hanukkah, I bring a famous oratorio written by Handel. The music itself was composed around about 1747 and fitted to words written by Thomas Morell: See, the Conquering Hero Comes. It was originally part of Handel’s Joshua. A few years later, Handel lifted the piece and used it, again, in Judas Maccabaeus, he who was the famous hero linked to the Festival of Lights. The first two verses of the song run as follows:

See, the conqu’ring hero comes!

Sound the trumpets! Beat the drums!

Sports prepare! The laurel bring!

Songs of triumph to him sing!

See the godlike youth advance!

Breathe the flutes and lead the dance!

Myrtle wreaths and roses twine

to deck the hero’s brow divine!

When I came to this country and attended one of my earliest Advent-time musical events, it surprised me to hear that music and those words. What I had gotten to know was something quite different—not in sound but in its words. What we heard in Germany, sung to the same music, was Tochter Zion. I always thought it was the German version of Judas Maccabaeus. Not so—at least so far as I’ve been able to determine, and time is running out today. Thus, for example, I could not find “Tochter Zion” in the sole German-language libretto of Judas Maccabeus I’ve managed to find on the web. What I do know follows, but first two verses, in German and then followed by my translation:

Tochter Zion, freue dich,
jauchze laut, Jerusalem!
Sieh, dein König kommt zu dir,
ja, er kommt, der Friedenfürst

Hosianna, Davids Sohn,
sei gesegnet deinem Volk!
Gründe nun dein ew’ges Reich,
Hosianna in der Höh!

Daughter Zion, sing for joy,

Gladly shout Jerusalem!

See, your King approaches now,

Yes, he comes, the Prince of Peace.

Hosianna, David’s son,

Blessed is thy folk in thee!

Founder of eternal realm,

Hosianna in the heights!

The words certainly fit the context of the story but are quite different. Indeed they were written around 1820 by an evangelical theologian, Friedrich Heinrich Ranke. He set the words to Handel’s music. The piece became enormously famous—as indeed the English-language version has as well.

In whatever language, by all means let us celebrate the Festival of Lights—in the most universal language of all, that of music. But, to tell you the truth, I side with Daughter Zion. I rather have my fill of conquering heroes.

Flirting with Black Hole Denial

2011-12-21T13:36:00.002-05:00

In the New York Times’ Science Times yesterday came a story of a massive cold gas cloud being sucked into the black hole in the center of our galaxy. The observations, using infrared light, come from the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Sagittarius A* is at the center of the galaxy. It is sucking at the cloud so that the cloud moves at 1,000 miles per second. The NYT story contains this reassuring observation: “Sagittarius A*, pronounced A-star, has so much gravitational pull that it will eventually consume everything in the galaxy.” Sez who? Sez Relativity.

At times like these I feel akin to those (if they still exist) who assert that the earth is flat. I’m always flirting with black hole denial, although, to tell the truth, it’s really part of my heretical clinging to a Steady-State theory of the universe. Consequently I doubt that the big bang ever took place, that the universe is expanding, that gravity bends light, that space-time is real, etc., etc. Black holes are an inference from equations based on the theory of relativity, specifically that mass causes the deformation both of space and of time. Without such an idea, no black holes. Relativity has become sacrosanct; hence we now “see” black holes where all we actually see is light.

Herewith some pictures of what we do see.

Above I show a photograph of the Milky Way with a line pointing at its center. The line is not pointing at that dark formation with a tail; it points at light beyond it. The dark stuff in the foreground is formed of dust. What delights me in this view is that we see actual buildings as well by way of telling me what, on a very lucky day, the naïve man-on-the-street, that’s me, might actually behold—unless they were using some kind of fancy lens.

Next comes a telescopic view using infrared light. This is still our own galaxy. Obvious from this view—because we don’t see the galactic arms spread out individually—is that we can’t look down at its center from above, not from where we take such shots. Trying to see through to the center, we’re always looking through a screen of stars, at least at this level of resolution. We have to magnify enormously so that ever narrower segments become ever more resolved to view.

This next infrared image, taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, is another infrared photo of the galaxy, its center, and it shows us a bright central spot where Sagittarius A* is one of the donors of the luminosity we see.

Finally, here is a close-up of Sagittarius A*, taken from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory. The two circled spots are sites of fairly recent major explosions, the reason why they are marked. Sagittarius is that triangular and bright formation marked by NASA so that we can’t miss it. So where is the black hole? Even light cannot resists its awesome devouring suction. Now, looking at this, it amazes me that anyone could possibly see a very large cold cloud here; and cold, I remind myself, means that it’s not emitting light. Yet we are able, at this enormous distance, to calculate its speed with great precision. I know, I know—what do I know.

But I do know what to do when satanic forces attack my faith. I must put doubt resolutely to one side and pray fervently using these words: “Black Hole, I do believe; help thou mine unbelief.”
---------------
Sources for the images are in order: one, two, three, four.

The 38th Parallel

2011-12-20T11:40:00.001-05:00

The passing of Kim Jong Il, the ascension of Kim Jong Un (the young’un, we might say), has been accompanied by news stories, not surprisingly, about our own presence is South Korea and the fact that the only power likely to have any influence on North Korea is China. This got me thinking—about spheres of influence. That subject, in turn, always reminds me of Geroge F. Kennan, the diplomat and thinker, to whom I owe my basic understanding of international affairs. Kennan was a rational thinker and, for me, the best guide in assessing what the media invariably confuse and distort. (An earlier post on Kennan is here). We look to China because that difficult-to-grasp country, invariably labeled a “failed state,” is in China’s sphere of interest—whereas South Korea marks, as it were, a point beyond which we have real trouble reaching. And that line of thought then produced another. The 38th Parallel North is the only formal geographical boundary that also sharply marks two spheres of touching influence.

Not until today, attempting to find a map with that latitude marked, did I realize how close we’ve lived to it—here in the United States. We were just north of it in Kansas City, MO, our first home in the United States—which we reached just as the Korean War was winding down. When he was still in Evansville, IN my brother Baldy lived about as close to it as is possible in the United States. Other cities within shouting—and certainly within easy driving—distance are Sacramento, CA, Richfield, UT, Hutchinson, KS, St. Louis, MO, Louisville, KY, and Charleston, SC. We’ve driven right through that parallel and never even knew it…

Capricorn Approaches

2011-12-19T10:52:00.002-05:00

We shall enter the astrological period of Capricorn with the Winter solstice on Thursday. Looking ahead a little this morning, I met this image on Wikipedia (link) and thought it lovely enough to reproduce. It originates in a fifteenth century astrological book captured by an unknown scanner and placed on the world wide web a while back. The pleasing image suggests to me that even a pagan (or in the fifteenth a kind of neo-pagan) view of this season beats anything our time routinely produces to celebrate the ultimate feast of Commercial Consumption.

Capricorn is the sea-goat—although we see no ocean anywhere here. The name of the constellation evidently arose in Babylonian times and, at one time, featured a fish as well as a goat or a goat’s head. Such is the nature of staring up into the sky and connecting luminous dots. Anything goes.

In astrology constellations mark the year. For a period of roughly a month, in this case from December 22 through January 20, the sun rises in the House of Capricorn. Looking up at the still dark sky very early in the morning as the sun’s first rays appear, it is that constellation that is directly above the sunrise in the northern hemisphere, hence that is the “house” the sun enters.

Now in the astrological scheme of things, every period has its ruling planet. Here “planet” must be understood somewhat loosely if we use a modern conception of things. Thus not only the planets but also the sun itself (associated with Leo) and the earth-satellite, the Moon (associated with Cancer), act as rulers. Capricorn’s ruler is Saturn, evidently because the planet is in the ascendant during this period. Its glyph symbolizes material reality as a cross burdening spiritual nature, symbolized by the half-circle—the inverse of Jupiter’s symbol, in which the spiritual dominates matter. Saturn therefore suggests limitation—a fitting sort of message in our currently troubled economic times. It is the ruler of this season, of course, that gave this festival, in Roman times, its name: the Saturnalia.

Curiously Middling

2011-12-18T19:20:00.000-05:00

Just a note. Political candidates find it permissible to be pro middle class, laudable to bewail the shrinkage of that class, and Okay (indeed obligatory) to say nothing about any other class. Here I am naively persuaded that those who wish to serve “the people” ought not to slice-and-dice them into classes and only pick the middle. Those below the poverty line—they numbered 43.6 million in 2010—are by definition below the sacred middle. Have pollsters discovered and told our candidates that the over-whelming majority considers itself middle-class, views the poor as under-human, and the upper class as its own next stop on the Progress Shuttle? Maybe. I must recalibrate my visor. Every soldier is a hero. All firemen are heroes too. To create a job you have to be a millionaire. All businesses are small business. All citizens are middle class. All journalists are trembling in their eagerness to defend the public’s right to know. To know what? That they are middle class. And by that great achievement, magically entitled to—well, to be flattered.

Heavy My Fardels Today

2011-12-18T11:02:00.001-05:00

Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
[Shakespeare, Hamlet]

Use short, declarative sentences. Yes. Unless you’ve learned your letters and you are Shakespeare. But this but an aside. My subject is fardels—and my superficial ignorance. Today’s waking shock for me was reading that the Senate had passed a two-month extension of the payroll tax cut, so called, and the word “fardel” came spontaneously to my mind. Why, I wondered. And then I wondered: What does that word actually mean? I realized that I meant pigsty, a word that seemed to me very descriptive of today’s Washington, but a troubling undercurrent told me that I had it wrong. Shakespeare, wasn’t it? Had only ever seen that word in Shakespeare somewhere. But first, the dictionary. F-A-R-D-E-L.

Turns out that fardel means bundle today. Thus Webster’s asserts, and they know more than I do. But archaically, and that surely could mean Shakespeare, it meant burden. Not pigsty. On to the Online Etymology Dictionary. It never fails to enlighten. I learned that the word probably came from the Arabic, fardah, where it means a package. Reminded me that distant wars always introduce new words into the language, and that fardah entered French no doubt as far back as the Crusades, thence into English. Nothing propinqs like propinquity, and thus I also learned, sort of by the way, that when a woman puts on makeup, she is actually farding her face, but that word, turns out, comes from the Germanic fard, no doubt the root whence Germans get Farbe for color.

My superficial linguistic memories are spotty, but my deeper unconscious caverns are deeper. Reading about the Senate this morning made me feel the burdens of my times, and hence that word was there to give them a proper name. But pigsty is not a bad update. Not bad at all.

Wonder-Child

2011-12-17T09:47:00.000-05:00

I imagine with amusement Christopher Hitchens’ amazement on finding himself still there, just outside the Pearly Gates, after cancer took him away December 15 at the relatively young age of 62. But, of course, the arrival of such a figure over there must have attracted a crowd of those still interested in our doings in the lower realms. It’s not every day that a prominent, witty New Atheist experiences the unveiling. And seeing those smiling crowds assembled and St. Peter opening the gate undoubtedly energized Christopher at once. He liked nothing else quite so much as an audience. And no doubt, minutes after entry—and of course he went right in—he was already saying utterly clever things, his audience much entertained. He went right in, I here assert, because he was, down here, and remains still, up there, a wonder-child, a precocious, likeable, and ultimately innocent young thing. His very quick wits, of course, already saw the new approach to pearly fame—up there too. His new theme, rapidly unfolding, is the curse of atheism and how, cleverly, he’d managed to overcome it, down here, by pretending to embrace it with sufficiently wild exaggerations to make it sound ridiculous.

Pulled Shade

2011-12-16T10:05:00.004-05:00

Blue door, black iron in the shape of hearts.

The door has lost its handle and

The shade has been pulled down.

Once this grate gave a view

No doubt into a darkened hall

With a Persian rug visible,

Barely, if you stared.
Beyond it light and hints of

Living space with a kind of,

Sort of, warmth.

All gone now. What we see now is

Eyes, eyes staring out, from a flat

surface, just looking.

At you.

Confusion of Tongues

2011-12-15T08:05:00.000-05:00

Deep students of the Bible might these days find a quite wonderful example of the “confusion of tongues” developing in plain sight and hearing right now and today—as our legislators try desperately to finish their business and get out of town for the Christmas holiday.

St. Peter, Paul, and Mary

2011-12-13T18:34:00.003-05:00

In other words the Public Broadcasting System is having its Christmas-season fund-raiser. This means that the Public TV programming changes, becomes more popular. In turn I learn what popular means. It means André Rieu, Celtic Dancing, Jazz, lectures on Diet-Health-and-Self-esteem, lectures on Wealth-Management-Wills-and-Heirs, Pop, Rock & Soul, and … Peter, Paul, and Mary. Alas, Mary Travers is now only alive on film; she passed in 2009. At least two decades and probably longer, fundraising time brings these people whom—was it the teens of our own children? Probably—we somehow missed. We checked out of “folk” when Pete Seeger waned and haven’t kept up with later Woody Guthrie wanna-bes. But we loved Pete. The PBS slogan is Be more. But when they are soliciting for funds—which is what “public” means in the United States, richest-country-in-the-world-etc., my temporary slogan is, Be less. Be less and wait until As Time Goes By resurfaces again; no matter how often we see those episodes, the pleasure remains entirely undiluted.

When Will This Spring End?

2011-12-12T09:39:00.001-05:00

I note that opportunist Mikhail Dmitrievitch Prokhorov is suddenly running for the presidency of Russia. Who is this Prokhorov? Why, he is the owner of the New Jersey Nets. He is also a billionaire from Russia, born in 1965, who got to be a billionaire in the chaos of Russia’s transition to “democracy” at age 28 when, having managed to become head of the Management Board of the International Finance Company, he “acquired” a state-owned bank that just happened to own vast mining properties that he later sold. Well, enough already.

It looked for a while as if Russia were sensibly abandoning its “democracy” in favor of order, but what with the virulent Arab Spring spreading its spores all over the world, things appear to be unraveling there. Headlines speak of Russia’s “awakening,” the protests against Putin are led by a punk rock band called The Last Tanks in Paris, and the Last Tanks are helped by a rap group called Rabfak whose symbol is a skeleton’s hand giving us the finger. Billionaires, punk bands, and university students. Rock on, comrades, rock on.

Unordnung und frühes Leid

2011-12-11T12:56:00.001-05:00

The phrase means disorder and early pain. I came across it when I read a novella by Thomas Mann of that title in my youth. It’s usually translated as Disorder and Early Sorrow, but Leid has many meanings, among them suffering, grief, sorrow, and pain. I was nineteen at the time, and the moment I read it, it became part of the fabric of my life. I’ve repeated it countless times since, always in German, always just to myself, and always when I felt genuine pain—which has a much more active quality than sorrow. But never mind. Mann’s story is set in the Munich of the 1920s, the Weimar Republic, a time of virulent inflation and disorder in Germany. We see that world through the eyes of a history professor, Abel Cornelius, his family, his parents, his wife, his teenage children. The resonance was present right away. Cornelius saw his times—indeed the present—as lawless, insolent, and unaware of history. The theme of the story is withdrawal, into the private, and the conservation of the timeless and therefore holy and beautiful past—which the professor feels guilty in embracing, seeing his animosity to unfolding history, while embracing that which is no more, as the unclean love of death. So he felt—the character—echoing his own creator, Thomas Mann himself, who was writing something strongly autobiographical. Yet here I was, nineteen, filled with life and energy, and yet I agreed with him. And through my life I came to see it differently; I’ve come to see what he regarded as the past as something in another dimension, and his embrace of death as a mistaken embrace, instead of the transcendental.

Of late I’ve been lending a hand to the family enterprise, and, in the process, looking deeply at a score or more of major industries at a far deeper level than I usually do these days in retirement. Not surprisingly, therefore—the repetitious assault of chaos finally wearing me down—that the old phrase, Unordnung und frühes Leid, was once more on my lips. Lordy, lord, lord. To hell in a handbasket. But this disorderly present, as I see from my studies—and remembering Thomas Mann and the 1920s—is always with us. And the holy and the beautiful remain, as always, at one remove.

Oh, the Suffering!

2011-12-09T07:33:00.001-05:00

A story in the NYT yesterday amused me—and fit into my theme on attention seekers. Headline: “Britain Suffers as a Bystander to the Euro’s Crisis.” How does this suffering manifest? Simple. Britain wanted no part of the Euro. In effect, come to think of it, Britain is quite ambivalent about Europe as well. But in its having-it-both-ways approach, it is part of the European Union but not of the Eurozone. Not being “in the zone,” it has no influence. It’s standing by but nobody is looking, never mind bowing. Today another story comes, in the same space, echoing the same message. Is the NYT here using Britain as a stand-in for the United States? Also just standing on the sidelines? Well, Timothy Geithner was over there, was at least trying to be influential. But, guess what? He didn’t get to lean on the Big Kids, thus Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy. He only got to talk to bankers and other ministers like himself. A puppy barely noticed by the big stomping elks? Oh, so painful, not to be at the center of attention. That’s suffering!

Roi Soleil

2011-12-08T07:27:00.000-05:00

I wish I could remember the source. I don’t. Nevertheless I well remember reading in the early 1960s something to this effect. “Any man observed to have been in conversation with Louis XIV for at least fifteen minutes, could turn that event into enduring personal wealth.” Back then—I mean in the 1960s—the media had certainly already emerged. It hadn’t as yet turned into the modern version of the court of Louis XIV. The media’s power, to be sure, is not quite so concentrated as that of the Sun King, but these days it sheds the same sort of sunlight once shed by Louis Quatorze. My author had not elaborated—assuming that his readers were sophisticated. The statement puzzled me at first until, by simple reasoning, I saw how that could indeed be true. People seek those who’re close to the source of power; being sought-after gives them opportunities; furthermore the mere appearance of being connected will suffice; the person need have no genuine power. It’s all reflection, as it were, like that of sunlight. Today’s Roi Soleil is actually the media. Therefore, de facto, we already live under a monarchy. We just haven’t realized it yet.

War’s Shadows

2011-12-07T08:56:00.005-05:00

We arrived in the United States in the summer of 1951, thus some months before the last veteran of the American Civil War died on December 31 of that year. He was Albert H. Woolson aged 106. That war ended in 1865. Some long shadow. An image of Woolson is on Wikipedia; he looked exactly like the men whose images are now being shown as veteran survivors of Pearl Harbor. This suggests that not until 2033 will our energetic media fail to find a person who had been there when the time to recall the “Day of Infamy” returns yet again. What is said at such occasions tells me something of our current culture. Maybe in 2033 we’ll mark the day with silence.

- - -

I stand corrected. Albert H. Woolson died August 2, 1956. I have friends with keen ears and eyes in the Civil War field. My eye may have slipped as I looked at that list...

Szent Mikulás

2011-12-06T07:31:00.005-05:00

In my childhood, on the night of December 5, we shined our shoes and put them on the window sill before we went to bed. This morning we rushed to the window to see what Mikulás had brought us. Here read St. Nicholas. December 6 was the opening day of the Christmas Season for children. The gifts were fruit, candy, and such—lots of wrinkled up red wrapping paper for atmosphere—and for each child a switch (see image) our parents could use to punish us if we were bad. Those must have been sold at the market, I think—and then saved for next year when we weren’t paying attention. My last such Szent Mikulás celebration was problematic. On December 5 of 1944 we found ourselves aboard a train. The carriage had been equipped with beds and such; it had windows but they didn’t open and had no sill. What to do? My Mother told us that Szent Mikulás would “understand.” Therefore we placed our shoes next to our beds… Well, train or no train—we were bound out of Hungary and on the very first stage of our long voyage into the greater world—we discovered that Mikulás had found a way. And in the morning, to our delight….

That name, in Hungarian, is pronounced Sent Me-cool-lahsh. Image courtesy of Wikipedia (link).

Contemplating the Big Picture

2011-12-05T08:45:00.000-05:00

It frustrates many to do that. When done right it produces understanding and knowledge of what must be done. But what must be done is puny, over against that picture, unlikely to have any effect. What must be done turns out to be the usual daily grind done right with a cheerful attitude, whereas the “Big Picture,” to be changed in any way, appears to require gigantic deeds of transformation. But understanding of that picture teaches that that can’t actually be done. “Yes, yes, yes!” cries the impatient activist, “but if we could just get people to back us…” But that, in turn, suggests that we should see “people” in the aggregate, and, once more, the Big Picture is sobering. That reminds me of The Little Duck.

That was a poem published by Donald Babcock in The New Yorker on October 4, 1947. Babcock died in 1986, hence his poem, part of which hangs in a frame on one of our walls, is still under copyright until 2056, thus I can’t quote it. But it deals with a little duck “riding the ocean a hundred feet beyond the surf, and he cuddles in the swells.” A great heaving moves the Atlantic, but it does not bother the little duck. “He can rest while the Atlantic heaves, because he rests in the Atlantic,” Babcock tells us, ignorant of the ocean’s vastness but aware of it. “He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity—which it is.” Babcock then ends by saying:

I like the little duck.

He doesn’t know much.

But he has religion.

So that’s what contemplating the Big Picture really is. To have religion. It’s humbling, is what it is. Most people don’t want to be a little duck. They dream, instead, of being Conan the Barbarian.

Saved by Pipes and Ignorance

2011-12-04T09:33:00.000-05:00

When I hear the water rushing, carrying waste through the pipes,
And it’s the small dark hours still, and most are still in bed asleep,
A thought occurs, a shudder at the thought, that soon that rush
And gurgling echo will become a thund’ring roar through miles of pipe
As millions wake up and shower and drive to power breakfasts
In sleek cars whose massive mufflers dim a hellish roar that, if it could,
Would cleave the very sky.

We lift our eyes adoringly at human grandiosity
And worship our genius, while we ignore the wastes that flow
Down from our bodies into tubes. But were in not for saving pipes
And walled lakes where raw sewage rests, awaiting its timely release
Into our riverbeds, why then we would be forced to feel
A certain shy humility. We save our pride by using pipe,
Keeping all that out of sight, the body’s nasty turbulence,
Practicing willed ignorance.

Dew of the Sea

2011-12-03T12:21:00.003-05:00

Herewith some images of our own Rosemary in bloom. This variety, Blue Lady, is one of the common three; the others have white or slightly pinkish blooms. Its name is Rosmarinus officinalis, which, teased apart, means dew of the sea. That officinalis comes from officina, meaning workshop, and Linnaeus et al. presumably mean apothecary shops where such herbs as Rosemary were sold. The unscientific but older tradition associates this herb with helping memory—hence worn at funerals and placed on graves. “There is rosemary, that’s for remembrance,” quoth Ophelia in Hamlet. The herb also alleviates pain, spasms, and helps the circulation. Good for you.

Rosemary likes warm, dry weather and naturally grows in Oregon, California, Texas, and in the two Carolinas—or in Michigan if you let it migrate indoors in the winter. In warm climates it may bloom the year around, but its natural blooming period is mid-Spring. Well, its mid-Spring here, in our sunroom, in December. Our plants think that Brigitte is Mother Nature—and rightly so, I think.

Not Quite So Simple Simon

2011-12-03T10:54:00.002-05:00

Simple Simon met a pieman going to the fair;
Said Simple Simon to the pieman “Let me taste your ware.”
Said the pieman to Simple Simon “Show me first your penny.”
Said Simple Simon to the pieman “Sir, I have not any!”

Said Paul Krugman to Simple Simon, “Why don’t you print you some?
When one is pressed in matters money, printing it beats having none.”
Said Simple Simon to Paul Krugman, the pieman near forgot,
“Why don’t you give me some of yours and stop talking fancy rot.”

Money is ... What?

2011-12-02T10:31:00.000-05:00

Money is fungible. That certainly sounds sophisticated. I might—indeed I’m almost forced to—consider that very word, all by itself, to be a sign of sophistication. So if someone trots out a definition of money like that, he must seem doubly smart. The odd thing with fungible is that it points to a triviality. Next, that it isn’t actually true, at least not over time. So let’s see what it means.

The word’s literal meaning is “capable of being used in place of another.” Taken literally, this translates into saying that “money is capable of being used in place of money,” which, to be sure, is true enough, but, if so, why bother with the definition. We already know that money is, ah, money. But what the sophisticates have in mind is something else. Let me illustrate that by using another something that is also fungible. Crude oil is fungible. To make this meaning plane, let me put it this way. Somebody knocks on your oil well door and says: “Can you lend me a barrel of crude?” It’s a friend, and you say “Sure.” Out goes the barrel of crude. A couple of weeks later a pickup pulls up. It’s your friend. Two of his helpers are rolling a barrel toward your oil well’s door. It’s full of crude oil. One glance tells you that. Now when you lent that first barrel, you did not take an exhaustive chemical analysis of the crude. So now you don’t bother repeating that analysis to make damned sure that the barrel you lent is actually still the same oil. Oil is oil. And money is money. Both are fungible, meaning functionally the same. Not surprisingly, our word function derives from fungi, thus “to perform, execute, or to discharge.”

Stupid definition, but if you fancy yourself an economist, at one point in your life at least, that phrase must come out of your mouth. This is my occasion. The $10 bill you lend, when the $10 is returned, does not have to be the same bill. Indeed it could be two fivers or some combination of other bills or coins amounting to ten.

Now to my second point. It turns out that this definition is not strictly speaking true—unless the exchange takes place over a very short time. Fungibility applies much more appropriately to crude oil or wheat or barley or pork bellies than to money. Money retains its nominal value, not its purchasing value. In deflationary periods it gains, in inflationary periods it loses value. It is for this reason that the sophisticates of the world are urging Europe to print money in efforts to stem the tide of the Euro Debt Crisis. It takes sophistication to know that inflating money robs somebody of purchasing power—but money is fungible. Therefore you pay your $10 debt, if you pay it later, with a bill that’s only worth $9.45. There is a real gain here of 55 cents. Multiply that by billions—and that’s real money.

Oh, a Quotation

2011-12-01T07:57:00.002-05:00

Never hesitant to promote my favorites, herewith another small snippet from Angela Thirkell’s 1958 novel, Close Quarters:

“You know, Margot, you are a remarkable woman,” said Everard. “You never lost the childlike in the larger mind.”

“Haven’t I?” said Mrs. Macfadyen. “Who said that?”

Mr. Carter said Tennyson.

“Oh, a quotation,” said Mrs. Macfadyen. “Donald was always saying bits of poetry and bits of prose too. His people were very poor and he taught himself to read and save up his pennies, when he got any, to buy books off the second-hand stalls on market day. But I don’t think Tennyson was one of his poets. It was mostly Scott and Burns and the metrical psalms. He would have liked that line you quoted just now—he never lost the child’s mind.”

“I think the biggest people don’t,” said Mr. Carter. “That’s why one can meet them so easily.”

The quote comes from a longish poem by Tennyson and a passage quite remarkable especially after the years have cumulated and taught a body the actual truth of it. I’ll quote it here, piling it on, as it were:

For woman is not undevelopt man,
But diverse: could we make her as the man,
Sweet Love were slain: his dearest bond is this,
Not like to like, but like in difference.
Yet in the long years liker must they grow;
The man be more of woman, she of man;
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,
Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind;
Till at the last she set herself to man,
Like perfect music unto noble words;
And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time,
Sit side by side, full-summed in all their powers,
Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be,
Self-reverent each and reverencing each,
Distinct in individualities,
But like each other even as those who love.

[Lord Alfred Tennyson, The Princess]

Natural and Ritual

2011-11-30T08:50:00.003-05:00

My earliest encounter with culture was learning manners, how to behave at the table, what implement to use and how, what I could reach for, what I must ask for, what word to use, the tone, its volume, its timing. You did not interrupt others’ speech. I had to look at people when I spoke to them. I did not shout at the ceiling. It was complex, all of this. I learned to modulate my voice, learned to append such sounds as “please,” “may I,” and “thank you” to various actions. Manners involved keeping my spine oriented in certain ways. Thus I could not just disappear under the table cloth and crawl among the legs down there—however attractive that often seemed. I had to clear my plate, avoid throwing bits of bread at my sister, keep both hands visible but my knees hidden—volumes of manners, but not a single line to be read. All this took place long before school began.

To learn this behavior and all that ultimately flowed from it—because the rituals of eating expanded to the whole domain of human interactions in my childhood and, in process of being mastered, taught us all about relationships to old, young, ladies, gentlemen, teachers, siblings, other children, etc.—other structures had to be in place as well. We ate meals at certain times. We ate communally—after washing hands. And after washing hands, the towel had to be hung in certain ritual and proper ways. The table was set. It had a table cloth (the white purity of which must be protected). We had our places. So in turn all else was also regulated. To do all this required a certain attentiveness, concentration. Life acquired an invisible and also hierarchically layered structure of dos and don’ts and be-alerts. Amazingly that great facility, habituation, enabled whole cultures to acquire and practice these strange arts of unnatural, ritual behaviors that, in the aggregate, held value systems. The values, when you wished to concentrate enough to dig them out, revealed themselves quite clearly.

Watching a film about Taiwan the other day—it was not about manners—reminded me of cultural rituals—and that they remain active elsewhere. Reminded me of my one and only trip to Japan where, moments after my arrival, I felt glad that I too had been brought up in a culture quite like that one. It thus took me but moments to adapt my own behavior to theirs. Reminded me that effort is required to manifest value at this ritualized level of ordinary behavior—and because it’s present there, also manifesting at higher levels. Effort and time. So many changes. Women in the workforce. The erosion of domestic habits as the house is robbed of labor. Grab a pizza on the way home. And find the kids at home on the couch with bags of chips and cans of pop staring at the TV screen. Pop goes the weasel.

Not a School, A Flagship

2011-11-29T09:36:00.001-05:00

Those of us “left behind” by the Rapture of Modernity when it came, gosh, I can’t quite pin down the date, need help in understanding what we read in the papers. I read in the papers this morning that Ohio State hired a coach who will receive $4 million a year in pay plus lots of extras. This led me to wonder, actually for the first time ever, what the difference between a state university (e.g. Ohio State) and the state’s university (University of Ohio) is. Well, good luck. State universities at least appear to be land grant institutions. And Land Grant institutions came about because the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 passed. The root of these bills was a movement, dating back to the 1830s, to establish agricultural colleges. Here is the purpose of these as initially formulated in the first Morrill Act (cribbed from Wikipedia):

[W]ithout excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life. [7 U.S.C. § 304]

The emphasis is mine—and I find that phrase instructive. The Congress of 1862 clearly felt that there also were other classes in the United States, and here they’re singling out the industrial classes and their several pursuits and professions. Well, as we can see, they’ve come a long ways, these industrial classes.

The Morrill Act left the identification of schools to receive funds under the Act to the state legislatures. And those institutions getting the nod came then to be called land grant institutions. The University of Ohio (founded 1804) is not, but the Ohio State (1870) is a land grant institution. By contrast, here in Michigan, both University of Michigan (1817) and Michigan State (1855) are. Both institutions, in Michigan, are also labeled Flagship institutions. That curious designation came into use, according to Wikipedia, citing Robert M. Berdahl, former Berkley chancellor, in the 1950s when a wave of post-war expansion enlarged the state university, read Morrill Act, school systems. The original land grant colleges were labeled Flagships, thus the old boys who, being older, merited greater respect. Do I get it, finally? I think so.

Now Ohio State excels in many, many ways. It is indeed a Flagship, not merely in having a pretty pricey new coach. Those still clinging to “the arts,” liberal and otherwise, will be pleased to know that Ohio State’s Wexner Center of the Arts is described as featuring “groundbreaking deconstuctivist architecture” and “being lauded as one of the most important buildings of its generation.” It’s most prized item is Picasso’s Nude on a Black Armchair. I’d like to show the image, but it’s surrounded by copyright protection. But if you must look at a nude today, here is a link.

The Wexner Center owes its name, and its Picasso, to the generosity of Leslie Wexner, Ohio State alumnus. Wexner himself is chairman of Limited Brands, a clothing company. Limited owns Victoria’s Secret, thus the thematic link to that nude is, in a way, present. Limited also own Bath & Body Works and La Senza, to strengthen that theme. Justin Smith Morrill of Vermont (1810-1898), who started life as a merchant’s clerk before rising to the House and Senate, knew what he was about when he engineered the future education of the industrial class.

My Buddy, the Other, is Getting Tiresome

2011-11-28T19:23:00.000-05:00

With age comes a clear experience of the body as machine—the other, not bloody hell me. A head-cold plagues me, its sequence predictable. Tight, swollen sinuses, runny nose; next comes the sore throat; the coughing will sink gradually down into the lungs. I work my way through this with the same sense of grumbling irritation that would arise if they had torn up our street for repaving and I’d have to squeeze past huge machines to do my daily rounds. The “other” is very noticeable at such times. When I’m normal, though, I also experience its equivalent. I’ll note, for instance, that I’ve left some book upstairs. Then I grumble about bodies—because to get the book, I have to drag this whole big lump up with me two flights of g.d. stairs.

Pilgrimages in our Future?

2011-11-28T08:32:00.000-05:00

Notions like “dilution of culture” need parsing. We’re awed by massive powers in our time and march around with anxious eyes glancing at such ephemera as The Economy or The Culture. Sometimes useful insights just roll out of the fingers and I don’t realize their utility until I’ve read what has just “happened.” A phrase like that came the other day. “Experience is sovereign, of course,” I typed, “whereas the objective is just statistics.” That translates into the obvious, but the obvious is sometimes novel.

The Economy is getting, holding a decent job. One job. I am a carrier of culture. Whatever values of the past I actually embody, have at my fingertips, and permit to guide my behavior, that is culture. “Dilution of culture” therefore means loss of values in individuals by generational change. By whatever mechanism. Culture is lost when parents or education fail individuals, when distractions overcome them. It matters—at the individual level. When we extend it and speak of phenomena in general, we mean “on average,” and that’s just statistics. That is why vast up-swells of activism deceive both those who participate in them as well as to those who merely watch and think that they’re beholding change. The activists intend to change others. Meanwhile those actions that actually improve the lot of individuals—say creating one or two jobs in efforts to implement a good product useful to others or grasping something by effort and thus illuminating a single person’s understanding—they remain invisible.

Not all collective movements have this useless character. I’m now thinking of great pilgrimages—going on these we intend to change us.

The Immigrant

2011-11-27T09:15:00.000-05:00

I pity the poor immigrant
When his gladness comes to pass.
[Bob Dylan]

I don’t know much about that poor immigrant in Bob Dylan’s song—beyond what Dylan tells me, namely that he “wishes he would’ve stayed home”—but he comes to my mind every time we enter this season of Black Fridays, Cyber Mondays, and “Only X days until X-Mas.” I think of this poor immigrant as humanity in this world of ours—and when his gladness comes to pass is the time when goodies have piled up, higher and higher, so high, in fact, that for a moment gladness comes, until it passes again. And so it goes on…

The still small voice within us tells us when we’re young that life must have meaning beyond pleasure, happiness must mean something—and something more than satisfaction. But without help from all the other immigrants, it’s difficult to discover when we’ve reached equilibrium and thinking about going home again should become our real concern. The quality of a culture can be measured by the help it gives us to recognize when we’ve had enough. To turn our back on a culture that promotes consumption is neither negativity nor alienation. It’s the beginning of repatriation and leaving our immigrant status behind.

——

Here a link to the lyrics of this poem by one of our most underrated poets.

Notes on Human Time Perception

2011-11-26T10:24:00.004-05:00

We explain it all by memory—and the utility of recalling past events by thinking that they help us cope adaptively with threats that always loom ahead. We live in the present, we say, but we mean something much more generous and expansive than the moment; indeed when we happen briefly to live in the moment, something intense is going down, whether pleasurable, tense, or unpleasant. There is that very happy notion of the “specious present,” something that includes recent time not all that easily measured by clocks—thus my morning thus far, certainly the last ten minutes, but the “moment” I try to pin it down, it expands. The specious present also throws its shadow forward—so that, later today, when a long walk awaits me to pick up my car with its new tire, that too is part of my present, not least putting on my jeans and shoes before that walk begins; but that forward-leaning shadow of the present is more tentative. If it should start raining, my specious present will include getting Brigitte to drive me to Belle Tire….

That phrase was evidently coined by someone called E. Robert Kelly but quoted, but under a pseudonym, by William James (link). Never mind, but thanks for the word, Robert. Every person who’s ever thought about time has come up with the feeling of the specious present and has held it in mind pondering what “moment” actually means—concluding that it’s actual a triviality, like the second. It only matters when you wish to break the record for the 100-meter dash.

Now it occurred to me today that our sense of time is far, far more expansive than even that generous specious present. Some posts on Ghulf Genes get far more readers than I’d ever expected—because they trigger the long memories of people. And today I saw, once more, that some memories I recorded regarding Neubrücke Hospital in Germany in my Army days have, again, received their couple of weekly visitors—as people are looking back and make their pasts presents again.

This in turn made me think that, quite possibly, humans originate in another reality qualitatively other than ours, the one that’s governed by its clocks. And it’s not the utility of memory for Darwinian survival that gives us our sense of time but some other inner sense that we are sovereigns over time, that we are lords of past and future both, but temporarily challenged somewhat in holding on, at all times, to our specious earthly life.

Specious? Have I got you wondering? Originally it meant good-looking and beautiful. It came to mean, in the seventeenth century, something seemingly desirable but actually deceptive. Therefore the specious present isn’t really present—and by twist and turn our present life isn’t really life—not the way we’re really created to live. This life is a byway but not, thank God, a cul de sac.

YADIRF KCALB SI WORROMOT

2011-11-24T08:03:00.002-05:00

.yvurt-yspot era sgniht, swen eht lla s’taht nehw dnA

A More Quiet Time

2011-11-23T09:02:00.003-05:00

George Orwell wrote the script and we strive to implement it. With two wars winding down and the Arab Spring confusing everything, with bin Laden dropped into the sea and the successive killings of an endless series of secondary leaders grimly celebrated (but their names are all the same, it seems, and until they die we’ve never heard of them) it is really time now to shift attention to the next new enemy. The process is under way. A succession of articles and programs on TV are teaching us to fear the Yellow Peril once again.

That reminded me of an old friend, Lin Yutang, a venerable publisher, The Modern Library, and of the 1950s in America, which was a much more quiet time. These things are subjective. The word suggests something less than or inferior to objective—but personal experience is sovereign, of course, whereas the objective is just statistics. The fifties appear as turbulent as the present when listing world events (Korea, Cuban revolution), cultural explosions (Elvis), political witch hunts (McCarthy), or global competition (Sputnik). But the feel of life was altogether different. It was a much more quiet time because the public media had not yet come of age, the Information Age still in the womb, and even the Internet’s seed, ARPANET, still just shy of a decade away.

At the same time the means I needed to orient myself were wonderfully organized. I turned 14 midway through 1950. Books were becoming quite affordable; in Europe we had Rororo, Germany’s first pocketbook publisher—brimming with classics. And arriving in the United States, everywhere we lived—large public libraries. We used to take the streetcar downtown to visit the big downtown library in family expeditions: we owned no car. Here we also rapidly discovered a publisher with a fitting name: The Modern Library. It published wonderful and very affordable hardbound classic and modern works of value. They formed the foundations of our own private family library. And it was between the covers of one of these books that I came across The Wisdom of China and India, by Lin Yutang.

We had time in the 1950s. Between the green covers of that book, at 16-17 years of age, I read the basic scriptures of Buddhism, Laotse on the Tao, the Shu Ching, the Chinese Book of History, and much, much else. The Book of History was fascinating. The mandate of heaven, the virtue of the ruler—quite different from the concepts of governance that I was getting elsewhere. My world expanded—but in quite a different way than it expands now, for the young, by means of instant access using the web. It also led to a life-long interest in China and other cultures. Such experiences acted to inoculate me against the plague of modern times, which is information overload. Does it really enlarge my understanding to see bloody faces in Tahrir Square in Cairo or red pepper-spray in Oakland in real time?

In the more quiet times of the 1950s (and we were already, then, in the midst of the great decadence, but still) there was less information but what there was came in wonderfully concentrated, structured, and thoughtfully presented forms, encompassing the most ancient as well as current times, thanks to the creative labors of such as Lin Yutang and publishers such as The Modern Library.

But would I want to go back to such times? Give up all this instant access? My answer is: Why not? Such services as the Internet are only really useful to people who already know something—and can therefore sort the steel from the dross.

Mother of All Things

2011-11-22T11:09:00.001-05:00

It’s 10:30 on a Tuesday morning, and I’m sitting at a computer. And the thought then occurs: How many others are doing the same thing in this country right now? Well, that answer is difficult to get, but those who’re guessing are putting the number upward of 160 million; I bet they’re way short of the total. But this in turn made me wonder about the first one. That of course was ENIAC for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, born in 1946, in Pennsylvania, more precisely at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania. It’s father was the U.S. Army—and its mother War, the mother of all things. It was intended to calculate artillery firing tables.

Now this baby was a large one. It weighed 30 tons and occupied 1,800 square feet, thus the footprint of a house. IBM was present at this event in a kind of godfatherly role. It made accounting machines that used punch cards. ENIAC was made to feed on such cards and also to spit them out again as its great output. And IBM’s accounting machines, operating off-line, could then translate what the baby was saying into human speech.

Artillery firing tables. Well and good. But it turns out that, as ENIAC was being nursed into its functional being, John von Neumann, the famed mathematician, heard about this thing and got very interested. Neumann then was working at Los Alamos on the hydrogen bomb project. That project needed lots and lots of calculation—so many, in fact, that he persuaded ENIAC’s nurses that the new-born computer’s first ever calculation would take place on behalf of the H-bomb. And so it happened. Now we’re quite accustomed to think of computers as superfast and dealing with very large numbers. ENIAC was fast. It operated a thousand times faster than electro-mechanical computers of that time could manage; ENIAC was purely electronic; it didn’t have to throw mechanical switches to mark its calculations. And as for big numbers, that first test run required, for its input and its output, one million punched cards.

Pic Credit: U.S. Army, from Wikipedia (link).

Fermi's Q

2011-11-20T07:24:00.001-05:00

While on the subject of UFO-denial conspiracies (see last post), what about Fermi’s Q? The conspiracy theorists will undoubtedly note that within days of the appearance of a White House denial that extraterrestrials exist, have contacted earth, or that we’re studying captured UFOs in hopes of finally developing a weapon that will work against both Al Qaida and the Taliban, National Public Radio has revived that long-forgotten canard, Fermi’s Question. NPR is part of the government, isn’t it? Now suddenly Fermi? In hopes of enlightening the public, here is the low-down on Fermi’s Question.

It’s summertime at Los Alamos, NM, the year is 1950 (although some say 1951, some 1952, and some even 1947—and the theorists will know how to interpret those ambiguities). Atomic physicists are having lunch. The weather’s balmy. Lunch drags on. The talk turns to space, to travel at or beyond the speed of light. Some opine, and some say that it’s Fermi who opines, that the odds of discovering a faster-than-light-speed means of travel are pretty darn good. This leads to speculation on who might be out there, how many other intelligent civilizations. Fortunately all there carry envelopes, and therefore some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations are easily made, and the upshot is that all present agree. There must be lots and lots and lots of other bright civilizations, so many, indeed, that a large number of them should by now have visited and, if that’s still difficult, at least communicated.

The lunchers are sitting in a moment of silence now, contemplating those large numbers, when Enrico Fermi breaks the silence, voicing his famous question. “Where is everybody?”

Good question, Enrico. One’s tempted to imagine that this question directly led to the SETI program later, but no. Turns out that the question’s been around for a while, at least since, in 1896, Nikola Tesla (another strange one mentioned recently on this blog here) suggested contacting aliens by radio. The question has been in the air, you might say, and perhaps literally so. Or so the conspiracy theorists will note. But the question is a good one because statistics tell us, aided by theories suggesting that life springs spontaneously from bits of water if the conditions are right, that life should be everywhere, on trillions of stars, and certainly hundreds of millions should have advanced enough to be communicating. So, therefore, where is everybody? Why hasn’t somebody checked in?

Enrico Fermi, who with Robert Oppenheimer, is viewed as the father of the atomic bomb, might have considered the possibility that, in the vector of life, inevitably, atomic bombs would be discovered—and discovered before faster-than-speed-of-light travel. And therefore, perhaps, most of those millions of advanced civilizations have managed to blow themselves to kingdom come.

A bomb with two fathers and no mother? Now there’s an interesting mystery to ponder.

Let's Just Start With That Missing Date...

2011-11-20T06:20:00.001-05:00

Those drawn to conspiracy theories won’t be silenced by official announcements even if these bear a White House stamp. The other day one Phil Larson answered a petition signed by 12,078 people. The petition says: “formally acknowledge an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race - Disclosure.” Phil also includes another petition, this one signed by 5,387 people and answers them both in the same response: “Immediately disclose the government’s knowledge of and communications with extraterrestrial beings.” Phil works for the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy. His response, headlined Searching for ET, But No Evidence Yet, is on the Internet (link). It is negative. White House Stationary. The relevant paragraph follows:

The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race. In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye.

This will, of course, merely give new impetus to the conspiracy claims. Phil Larson? Who in the heck is that? At minimum the official response should have been countersigned by General Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That might have peeled off perhaps one, but only one, of the 12,078 signers, none of the 5,387. The Obama White House? You think those ninnies have clout? Think again. Hey! I’ve looked high and low on that so-called “response” but I can’t find a date anywhere. What do they think we are? Stupid? No date! That’s just the start of deniability….

Egypt: Twixt Rock and Hard Place

2011-11-19T11:34:00.003-05:00

The up-swell of Islamist protest in Egypt. Fascinating. It pits the military (read the monarchical impulse) against the Muslim Brotherhood. The modernists and liberals, meanwhile, watch with minority trepidations from the side-lines. The military as “defender of the constitution” brings memories of Turkey and of Kemal Ataturk. Ataturk, of course, was the modernizer. Above all he wished to free Turkey of religious dominance. But the hard place, ultimately, is democracy. Now we see the same pattern once again, and once more in a modernizing Muslim state. Democracy comes of age when the genuine elites are secular by deep conviction and the religious faith is shattered into numerous-enough little pieces so that no one can hope to dominate. That was the case in 1776 or thereabouts. Our Washingtons and Hamiltons, our Jeffersons and Franklins? Secular to their very enlightenment cores. And the religious character of the American population was a scatter of parts left by an explosion called the Reformation…

Contrarians

2011-11-19T10:47:00.001-05:00

Some of our plants just don’t know when to give up. They just keep bestowing color. And our plastic butterfly appears in this photo to be heading out into the clouds.

Ice Ages: Tiny Variations, Huge Effects

2011-11-19T10:02:00.004-05:00

They say that people old enough then to remember, know exactly what they were doing when President Kennedy was assassinated. I was at the office and reading an article in Look magazine about global cooling. Yes, cooling, believe it or not. And why? I had become very interested in ice ages and keen to discover what had caused them. That was November 22, 1963. Many things interested me at every point in my life. The assassination pinned that interest precisely on my personal time map.

The prevailing explanation in those days, at least those easily accessible without gargantuan studies (no Internet then, remember)—the broad explanation, still repeated today, was that the cause of ice ages was not known precisely, but the suspects were (1) volcanic dust and carbon dioxide in the air, (2) shifts in the earth’s crust, and (3) continental uplifts. The Encyclopedia Britannica (“last word”) available then, lead with these causes and had them numbered, as above; the discussion pointed out the problems with each. Then followed a discussion of two other theories; let’s call them Tilt-and-Orbit and Solar Radiation. Tilt-and-Orbit is based on known variations in the earth’s orbital eccentricity, its axial tilt, and shifts in the earth’s perihelion, thus the point where it approaches the sun most closely. In the discussion of this theory, the EB mentions the name of M. Milankovitch, a Serbian geophysicist. EB then proceeds to produce a longish paragraph in which it presents four numbered objections to this theory. Solar Radiation says that the sun’s radiating heat-output increases and declines over long periods of time. Now that was the view in 1953, the date of the EB’s edition. Needless to say popular media in the 1960s, like Look magazine, never got past Volcanoes-Crusts-and-Continents.

The work of Milutin Milanković (1879-1958) was first published in 1912 under the title of Contribution to the mathematical theory of climate. In 1914 he wrote a monograph called About the issue of the astronomical theory of ice ages. Interned in Budapest during World War I, he perfected his thought and produced a theory known as Milankovich cycles. His theory of cycles, based on the Tilt-and-Orbit approach (as I’ve dubbed it), was up there as a theoretical offer until scientific exploration, namely deep-ocean core sampling, finally showed that Milankovich was right on target. A paper published in Science by James Hayes, John Imbrie, and Nicholas Shackleton, “Variations in the Earth’s Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages,” is viewed as the defining link between the math-predictions and physical observation. And that paper appeared in 1976.

Well, yesterday, November 18, 2011, “Science Friday” on NPR, I was trying to find a tire and hence listening to the car radio—and now I learned that perhaps, just perhaps, we do have a straightforward, but very complicated, theory explaining the ice ages. It is complicated because changes in the tilt of the earth’s axis (40,000 years from min to max), changes in the earth’s orbital eccentricity (91,800 years), and in the earth perihelion (21,000 years) each has its own timing. And sometimes they counteract each other’s effects. Furthermore, the differences between minima and maxima are rather minute. Let’s look at eccentricity. If the earth’s orbit were perfectly circular, its deviation would be 0.0. But actual values range from 0.0034 to 0.058, presently at 0.0167. Now that is a tiny deviation from circularity, so much so that for all practical purposes our orbit is a circle. Similarly with the axial tilt. At minimum it is 22.1 degrees, at maximum 24.5 degrees. Our current tilt is 23.44 and decreasing. The inset illustrates just how small a change that is. Yet when at last the time cycles coincide appropriately—and there is no interfering human meddling, like burning up all of the oil and coal stored over millions in just two hundred years, thus loading the air with carbon dioxide, ice ages are in the cards. Tiny deviations, huge consequences, but our lives are too short to notice much of a change. And experts on long-term trends are not in agreement. Some see the earth cooling for another 23,000 years. Others see it warming for another 50,000. Take your pick. What I’d like to know is how on earth anyone could precisely calculate even such a thing as the earth’s tilt now, never mind what it was 30-, 40,000 years ago.

Trepid Agonist

2011-11-18T17:14:00.002-05:00

Was driving behind a Dodge Intrepid today and got to wondering about the root of that word. Turns out that trepid is a recognized word meaning scared, but that meaning did not come to my mind. Reason? Perhaps because it’s not much used. Intrepid, by contrast, means undaunted, courageous—and, as probably intended by the Chrysler folks, suggests someone with attitude. That in turn led me to search for other words where the negation of the root is common but the root isn’t used anymore. Soon I had a candidate, indeed a talented one, useful both for con and pro. Agonist! Antagonist? Absolutely. Protagonist? Yes, sir. But agonist, meaning a combatant, competitor, actor, or agent—No. Not ever used. There must be other candidates, but my hours-long ‘agonies’ trying to get a Honda tire replaced, unsuccessfully, ended before I had discovered another example. But one thing is certainly true. An agonist, whether anti or pro, whatever the cause, had better be intrepid. Trepid will simply not do.

Spires

2011-11-18T16:46:00.001-05:00

One barely sees the old spires pointing at the sky unless by chance the landscape opens from an unexpected angle. Brigitte has weekly swim sessions at a middle school called Parcells, and while she swims I go on walks. Returning from that jaunt a while back, I suddenly saw the old brick spire, a dead volcano, as it were. We’ve gotten well acquainted since that time, and I nod to the old thing as to someone of my own generation. The times have passed us both, but we’re both still around.

Middle schools don’t get much glory, and therefore it took me an arduous forty minutes finally to pin down its age. Parcells Middle School saw its completion in 1948 when, presumably, King Coal still had something to say about the heating of large buildings. Back then stacks were high so that the wind could carry the smoke ever to the east around here. Today the smoke is gone, but as I return to Parcells on foot from my walks, I start to see five, six black birds as I draw nearer sitting on the smoke-stack’s rim enjoying the great view from up there. They just sit and, sometimes, rustle their wing feathers.

Does this spire point to the past—or to the future? Who knows. But it’s pointing up, which, come to think about it, is the right direction, either way.

Never Mind Story, Get The Formula Right

2011-11-16T08:00:00.001-05:00

My search for good mystery fiction continues in cycles, my success about the same as that of Diogenes. Diogenes, as you’ll perhaps recall, used to carry a lit lamp around in sunshine; and in those days that lamp lacked batteries. Asked what he was doing, he used to say: “I’m looking for an honest man.” Here a recent disappointment. On the cover an almost naked geisha with a marvelous dragon tattooed on her back. Assassin’s Touch. By Laura Joh Rowland. That Joh in the name suggested an Asian author, possibly good. Warning me off was a quote from The Denver Post’s review. It said: “Sano may carry a sword and wear a kimono, but you’ll immediately recognize him as an ancestor of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade.” Still, I succumbed. Had to check something out. Well, The Denver Post’s reviewer had evidently failed to read the book. Deadlines, you know. No sign of Sam Spade anywhere. But neither did the book even remotely capture at least my imagined life of the Tokugawa Shogunate. But the formula, mind you, is good. Samurai detective placed so highly he virtually runs Japan; and better yet, Mrs. Samurai Detective is also a detective, don’t you know. And there is a kind of veneer of historical fact… Sigh.

Relighting my lamp a few days later I chanced across Christopher Fowler’s Bryant & May off the Rails. Fowler is more skillful than Mrs. Rowland, but formula dominates here too. Two aging detectives run the Peculiar Crimes Unit (PCU) in London. It’s a special agency with freedom to sidestep the usual rules. Where have I seen that before if not everywhere. Do you want a stunningly drawn portrait of London at its most decadent—transcending even Theodore Dalrymple’s shuddering descriptions—not least encyclopedic as well as microscopic knowledge of the London Underground? If yes, this is the book for you. Their eccentricities rival the characters’ emptiness. But the story isn’t getting anywhere as corpses pile up, each victim vividly described. But why don’t I feel anything? Because I’m seeing surfaces and nobody is home… Witty chit-chat on and on, but then I close the book. I’ll have to get some new batteries and try again.

The Disk of the World

2011-11-14T08:20:00.002-05:00

By means of a series of linkages I’ve become aware of the Phaistos Disk, a Minoan clay disk dating to the second millennium BC. After reading Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series of novels, I became aware of the fact that a southern constellation called Argo Navis once existed. Trying to see that constellation I came across multiple diagram of it. The origin of the most pleasing of the lot, which I reproduced with others in the post on this subject (link), I could not properly source; it came from a crossword puzzle page. Then yesterday the artist who had actually drawn it, Claire Grace Watson, posted a comment. Where she had discovered it, it turns out, was on the Phaistos Disk (side B), and the story of that is found on her site Disk of the World (link). The Wikipedia article on the subject is here; that’s where I got the image of the disk (side A) that I show here. Now this set of linkages constellates (!) a new thematic which is itself a perfect match for Doris Lessing’s work: mysteries upon mysteries. Of these Claire Watson’s wondrous site is itself a marvelous instance. Those inclined to wonder about past and future ought to see it, hence I provide the link.

Selective Censorship

2011-11-13T08:41:00.000-05:00

While reading the Sunday paper, in which the usual madness coincides with really outlandish fashion pictures, whether in ads or in “style” sections, the germ of a joke popped into my mind. It went like this. Q: “What do people in Heaven call a group that’s dressed weird and acting crazy?” A: “A humanity with oil wells.” Just another furtive thought, half-baked and thus at once dismissed. But then I became aware of the root of it, which is “dressed like an Indian with an oil well.” I got to wondering where the phrase originated. Google, of course. And then came a surprise. I got a single hit. The phrase appears in a 1954 play written by Harry Kurnitz, Reclining Figure, available on Google Books. Hhmmm. I tried Microsoft’s Bing. My answer was No results found for "dressed like an Indian with an oil well".

Now I got to wondering. Has the Millennium dawned and I haven’t noticed? Two possible answers. That phrase was very common in the 1950s—the reason why Kurnitz, a very prolific screenwriter (Errol Flynn movies, Witness for the Prosecution, How to Steal a Million, Once More with Feeling!), who knew his public, used it in a play. But then came the silencing wave of political correctness. And by the time journalism was routinely Internetted and therefore indexed, the phrase had become taboo.

But political correctness has not extended evenly and does not cover Gypsies, for example. Yes, of late, since the uproars in France over Sarkozy’s attempt to push them out of France a couple of years back, we are now anxious to call them Roma. But if we search the Internet using the words gypsy and steal, lots and lots of hits. We learn, among other things that to gypsy is to steal, to rob. Polack jokes still get us pages, but Wop jokes don’t. They’ve been replaced by Italian jokes. All right. I tried Indian jokes. Well. I got a couple of entries. But when I examined the jokes themselves, they turned out to be Honky jokes which, the Wikipedia instructs me, are jokes directed at Caucasians, and predominantly in the United States.

Beginning to feel jealous now, I tried Hungarian jokes, and found myself reassured. Yes, the category exists. Example. Q: How do you sink a Hungarian battleship? A: You put it in the water. Another one is Q: Why wasn’t Christ born in Hungary? A: Because they couldn’t find three wise men and a virgin. That last, of course, is the kind of joke people make about themselves—and sure enough, I found the same joke playing the same role as an Irish and as an Italian joke. Having researched enough, I went back to finish my breakfast—but a mental image of a television ad lingered in my mind. It was the image of a seated Indian chief with a big teardrop forming in his right eye.

Grown Ups

2011-11-12T08:45:00.002-05:00

My grasp of democratic politics is virtually nil, and of such politics in Greece and Italy even weaker. But from a kind of child’s perspective and at a great distance, the changes at the top in these two countries, formalized in Greece, close to accomplished in Italy, look very interesting.

In Greece Lucas Papademos has become Prime Minister. Serious business; the NYT signals that by showing high clergymen in traditional Greek Orthodox garments administering the oath of office. Interesting figure. Papademos has degrees in physics, in electrical engineering, and a doctorate in economics all earned at MIT. He spent a decade teaching economics at Columbia University. He worked for the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston. He was also a visiting professor at the Kennedy School of Government and at Harvard. Thus far his career in the United States alone. In Europe he was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Financial Studies at the University of Frankfurt. Next he rose from a position as chief economist at the Bank of Greece to become its governor a decade later. He went on from there to the European Central Bank as vice president. Last year he left that position to become an advisor to Prime Minister George Papandreou. Last, not least, he is a member of the Trilateral Commission. This is a high-level discussion group founded by David Rockefeller and organized (along with others) by Zbigniew Brzezinski. The “three” in that trilateral arrangement are the United States, Europe, and Japan.

Let me turn next to Mario Monti, most likely to become the new leader of Italy. Monti has degrees in economics and management from Bocconi University in Milan. He completed his graduate studies at Yale University under James Tobin, Nobel Prize winner in Economics (1981). (Tobin himself was on the Council of Economic Advisors and a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.) Monti began an academic career at the University of Turin. After five years there he returned to Bocconi University as a rector and then became its president. He is also first chairman of Bruegel, a Brussels-based economics think tank and is the European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission. He has served two terms as a member of the European Commission.

What are we seeing here? We’re looking at serious credentials, solid academic and administrative careers ending in executive positions. Independence. Appointed service to high level posts with international bearing in banking, finance, and economics.

When things have really, really ground to a halt, at last the call goes out to the grown ups. But can they sail the boiling oceans of greed, panic, and passion? These men, one feels, will give it the old college try.

Rare Blooms

2011-11-11T09:08:00.000-05:00

A rare date like 11-11-11 might perhaps be the right day on which to remember rare cultural blooms. One that comes to mind—because we’ve recently watched the series again—is Reilly: Ace of Spies, a 12-episode dramatization of the life of Sidney George Reilly. The series, produced by Euston Films, first appeared in 1983; the next year appeared the 14-episode The Jewel in the Crown, a filmed version of Paul Mark Scott’s Raj Quartet. That was another. Reilly was made by Euston Films, Jewel by Granada Television. We’ve always had a very high regard for Granada—so much so that, in the olden days when early credits for a new show began to roll and Granada appeared on the screen, we relaxed. We were in good hands. Granada also produced Brideshead Revisited (1981) and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984).

The dates tend to cluster, and if we add a few other stunning shows, they extend back to the 1970s and forward somewhat to the early 1990s. Well, it turns out that both Euston Films and Granada Television were agents of ITV, Britain’s commercial television; the I stands for Independent. Euston Films was a subsidiary of Thames Television, a licensee of ITV, and created by ITV executives to produce programming; Granada Television was an ITV contractor for North West England but lost its identity in 2002.

ITV itself was created by the Television Act of 1954 as a competitor to the BBC. And some of the shows that we admire are evidently the flowering of this competition. It took about twenty-thirty years for the products to ripen—but they rapidly faded within another decade. Alongside these classics in British television grew programming consciously aimed at different classes with barely disguised propaganda slant (okay, it’s just an opinion). But for a while there both BBC and ITV produced some rare flowers.

Those of you who watched Reilly probably still remember the haunting musical theme that introduces and ends each episode, composed by the Russian Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975). He lived through the weird period that this very strange story covers and the music reflects it. If you want to hear it and watch the opening images, here is the YouTube link.

The Plants Come In

2011-11-10T18:15:00.009-05:00

Blogs by nature are like calendars. Last May the fifth I marked the plants’ return—from our basement and our sunroom to the light of nature. Today the plants came in again. It looked like frost might come overnight. Returning home last night in the rain, we noted that the raindrops landing on our windshield were crystal shaped; soon we saw them out there as visible blobs of snow.

Our real clock is the sun. But while humanity at its pedantic lowest devises atomic clocks with which it can more or less prove (though not to resistant me) that time actually slows down with increasing speed, as Prophet Albert claimed, Mother Nature’s nearest clock keeps a kind of royally negligent but still unfailing time. By my equally sloppy measurement the plants were out there exactly six months and five days.

In the spring, probably echoing the plants’ own emanating thoughts, I feel a gladness that they now escape the over-dry drear of the indoors. But in the fall, their thoughts are not all that different—a kind of gladness is present in them, a kind of breathing out as the temperature suddenly rises and in the darkness by the furnace a kind of familiar white horizon, the basement’s painted wall, dimly appears.