Charting Content

As I’ve had occasion to note before on LaMarotte this past spring (link), newspaper circulation has been declining, relative to population, for quite a long time now. If we index both at 100 in 1970, by 2008 news circulation had declined to 78.3 and population had increased to 148.4. Nevertheless, newspapers—especially the big, influential papers—still have plenty of clout—not least in that they influence the notoriously lazy television media. That post came to mind yesterday as I was reading the Russia insert in the New York Times—in large part because the Russian offer had much more of the flavor of an old-fashioned newspaper. This morning I undertook something I’ve been wanting to do for a while now. I’ve taken the main section of today’s New York Times and classified its forty-four stories into five categories. Such classification is, of course, subjective. Here are my results:

[Note: Clicking through enlarges image. But changes introduced—by Google? others?—now do not bring you back to the post if you click on the Back Arrow. Instead, when wishing to return, press Esc.]

What did I classify as crime/malfeasance? Strauss-Kahn is not charged in a rape that allegedly took place in France. A hedge-fund chief goes to jail. Former premier of Ukraine faces investigation. Gunmen seize aide workers in Africa. Debate on how to handle terrorists. Online education and financial fraud. Custody battle and killings. California inmates end hunger strike. A story on drugs that came from the police. Connecticut triple murders. Finally, second chances after prison. Two of these stories are perhaps a little iffy, but I include them because they exhibit the Times’ fascination with prisoners.

The times coverage of foreign countries is interesting. In alpha order, Africa is mentioned three times (crime, economic news, and all other); Asia twice (Ukraine under crime, floods in Thailand), Europe once (Strauss-Kahn). Islamic countries clock in at eight stories, hence their assignment to a category. The Times’ coverage of Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, and others is almost obsessive; today is no exception.

The economic stories, predictably, are bad-news stories. Some of the stories bite especially because they underline the flavor of the times. Just to name four: fluoridation is being omitted to save money; insurance companies want to eliminate coverage of eating disorders; Congress wants to curb Pentagon cuts; California seems to be killing Medicaid.

The “All Other” category mercifully shared the second largest category with the economy and has a faintly upbeat flavor. It includes a story on Indian students finding places to study here, the floods in Thailand, but with emphasis on officials being blamed rather than the rains, discovery of prehistoric paint manufacturing in Africa, people who build mazes with and within corn fields, state casinos, Mayor Bloomberg’s girlfriend’s puppies (heart-warming?), privately owned parks, a professor who told a stutterer to sit down already in his class, consumers’ rights to sue, and David Brooks’ comments on clashes regarding the 9/11 war memorial.

So how does the equivalent coverage of Russia look? The comparison may not be fair because that paper is intended to make Americans feel good about Russia—rather than reporting news. But here it is. The stories broke into three categories: Politics (36.4%), Agriculture (27.3%), and All Other (36.4%). Politics? All lauding either Putin, Medvedev, or both. Agriculture? Green is the word here—and reveals Russia’s long-standing obsession with the sector. One of those stories features an American who went off to the Moscow region to make all kind of cheese! And the All Other? It deals with a prize awarded to an American professor, Russian charitable organizations showing children’s pictures to New York audiences, achievements in space, and the elimination of onerous employment records in Russia’s businesses. The author of that last story wonders how, in the future, “problem employees” will be identified when they apply for new jobs. That, I suppose, ranks as objective reporting. On the one hand, privacy, on the other…

A KIT of a PR Venture

I refer to an eight-page insert in the New York Times today. It’s actually a newspaper called Russia, with the secondary name of Beyond the Headlines. It features color photos, a few ads all promoting Russian interests. It is labeled ADVERTISEMENT at the top of the pages, but it is actually a paper produced by Rossiyskaya Gazeta, an official organ of the Russian government created in November 1990 by the Supreme Soviet. The whole production is very sophisticated, interesting, indeed good reading. The paper is on the Internet (link) and also appears as a supplement to the Washington Post. Its main sections include:

Front page
Politics & Society
Special Report
Business
Money & Markets
Opinion
Culture
Feature

Within each of these sections we find further subdivisions. On the Politics & Society page, for instance, we learn that only 29 percent of Russians want Putin, 11 percent want Medvedev. But no other candidates are shown. Some 18 percent, Russia tells us, want both candidates, 27 percent want neither, and 15 percent don’t know. On the Opinion page another poll tells us how Russians see the next twelve month economically. Only 5 percent say Good. Probably Good gets 33, Probably Bad 30 percent. Etc.

My headline comes from the Money & Markets page from a story headlined “KIT Finance Returns from the Dead.” KIT Finance is a St. Petersburg investment bank. Helpfully Russia tells me in a box that KIT is the Russian word for whale. Too big to fail? It delights me that in Russia an investment bank would have the chutzpah to call itself a “whale.” My cultural education is getting a lift.

Now, needless to say, this paper is intended to influence us downtrodden Americans. The Russians—and this, by our count, is the second issue of Russia that we have seen—intend to make a good impression. How better to do that than to present a crisp, informative, and comprehensive picture of a place we imagine quite differently. It’s a whale of an effort. What amazes me is that they would bother. We must appear to them a much bigger—and perhaps much more dangerous—fish than we look like to ourselves.

Articulating Principles

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty, and justice for all.

Liberty and justice stand in tension one with the other—and this tension by itself provides the rationale for government. Justice for all implies limitations on liberty—lest liberty turn into license. John Locke, in Of the State of Nature, gave formal arguments for this in the seventeenth century. Limited government, similarly, arises from the same tension. Liberty must be curbed for the sake of justice—but not more than justice demands.

And what applies to government applies with equal force to the exercise of any power—be that of a parent over a child, the head of a household over a family, a corporation, agency, etc. But if power must be curbed, the national government ultimately is the point of last recourse; but of course it is itself a power—and must be curbed in turn. And thus arises the notion articulated in the Declaration of Independence that government derives its power from the consent of the governed.

Is it really necessary to rehash all these old ideas once again? We know all this, don’t we? Well, we live in an age when the meaning of words like “is” is debated in grand jury hearings by sitting presidents; thus it may be a good idea to ponder fundamentals. Not least words like “all,” as in “justice for all.” And “justice” for that matter.

You might say that every time a tension appears, parties will form to either side. This seems to be the situation in our politics today. We have a party of liberty trying to maximize the limitation of government—and a party of justice, trying to maximize the justice for all. The tendencies are illustrated in the only passages, within the 2008 platforms for the two parties, one passage in each, that mention core principles at all:

From the Democrats:

Today, we pledge a return to core moral principles like stewardship, service to others, personal responsibility, shared sacrifice and a fair shot for all–values that emanate from the integrity and optimism of our Founders and generations of Americans since.

From the Republicans:

Republicans will uphold and defend our party’s core principles: Constrain the federal government to its legitimate constitutional functions. Let it empower people, while limiting its reach into their lives. Spend only what is necessary, and tax only to raise revenue for essential government functions. Unleash the power of enterprise, innovation, civic energy, and the American spirit—and never pretend that government is a substitute for family or community.

These two most recent formal platforms are here (Republicans, Democrats).

Now the difficulties here are to determine how to measure justice for all. In effect it is impossible, but there are certain indicators that might be meaningful. A clear one, from my perspective, is income inequality. It strikes me as a meaningful pointer indicating the slippage of justice in the United States that the Gini Coefficient, which measures income inequality, stood at 0.397 in 1975 and at 0.469 in 2010. The higher the Gini, the greater the inequality. This means that in the last 35 years income inequality has increased by 18 percent. Now a certain inequality is natural, of course. But what level is too high? Consider what the military pay differentials are. A four-star general earns 11.5 times more than a private does. In our economy, the top quintile of the population earns 15.4 more than the lowest quintile. Now while the number of four-star generals is a tiny fraction of all soldiers, the top quintile of the population is a full fifth of it. Therefore that 15.4 multiplier means more.

Liberty, to be sure, will minimally produce economic inequality—so that some, but not all, will have much greater wealth. The perception, at minimum, of “justice for all” erodes when this happens; and as it does, disorder mounts. Now, of course, this is a free country. Those who wish to work to maximize justice (thus constraints on the economy) and those who wish to maximize liberty (hence inequality in wealth), are free to do so. But it would certainly help if the underlying principles were spelled out and more openly discussed in debates and punditry than they are. Some people, indeed the masses, don’t seem to understand what is is.

Hokus-Pokus

Some quite delightful books exist that, nonetheless, are often overlooked, neglected. Such is, in my own case, one called Medieval Wordbook, by Madeleine Pelner Cosman, published in 1996. My own copy was a birthday gift in 1997 from fellow word-lover Brigitte. Today I ran into a look-up dilemma. I was trying to determine the roots of the word apophatic, as in that kind of theology, meaning negative, in connection with a post elsewhere. Nothing, nothing anywhere. I therefore dug deeply into the most hidden stacks of my dictionaries and found the delightful book above. It didn’t have that word either, but there it was. After my labors were over, I opened the book at random—not a bad way to enjoy such books, and discovered hokus-pokus. That word is more often rendered as hocus-pocus—and indeed that spelling is better. Here I learned, to my surprise, that its origins are the Latin words in the mass meaning “This is the body of the Lord”: hoc est corpus domini. That startled me until I read on. Turns out that medieval people used a contraction of that, by them, oft-heard phrase, at the consecration of the host, at mass, to characterize meaningless and deceptive magical incantations. As my source continues: “Quack physicians were sued by irate patients or by offended physicians’ and surgeons’ guilds for using verbal charms and talismans of nonsensical Latin in fraudulent cures.” Who’d have known—and who’d have linked it to the Latin Mass, itself now obsolete.

The Joys of the Craft

People place computer programming right next to accounting, mathematics, and economics, the dismal science. Only nerds and unathletic teen-agers could possibly pursue such occupations. There are also people who remember the weather on any one day, and at any one hour of that day all the way back to childhood. You name a date and hour. They will give you chapter and verse. Poor souls. Programmers aren’t quite as bad, but close. The public rolls its eyes. That programming can be high adventure, drama, and exalting, creative activity seems not quite credible. You want to play 0 and 1? Most people opt out.

Back in 1975 one Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., employed by IBM to manage the development of that company’s OS/360, a mainframe operating system, wrote a book entitled The Mythical Man-Month. It became an instant classic within the weird cabal of people who program computers. Back then I lived in the Paradise/Hell of code. I got the book and started reading it at once. Wonderful book, wonderful. Now the other day the book fell into my hands again. It lay in a box filled with mostly old science fiction volumes the Magee household was giving to the library; they’re running out of space. Was there anything in the box I wanted for myself? There it was, The Mythical Man-Month! And, of course, out of the box it came. A day or so later I opened the book again, once more delighted.

Now this book is about the inner aspects of building very large, complex programming systems; that’s what operating systems are. Thus the book deals with the paradoxical aspects of complexity. Yes, it is about computer system—but then, again, not really. It applies to all great enterprises—indeed, as the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy put it, it applies to Life, the Universe, and Everything. It transcends its subject narrowly viewed. But what immediately caught my attention in the 1970s was Fred Brooks’ insight into an activity the public does not understand. To summarize this insight, let me quote a section from Brooks’ first chapter. The section is titled The Joys of the Craft. The passage also illuminates the scope of the book.

     Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?
     First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.
     Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s office.”
     Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.
     Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.
     Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.)

That last parenthetical statement puts the absolute stamp of authenticity on this book. The very freedom of creation is itself a challenge—which few people awarely recognize unless they have visited those realms. The next and last section of this initial chapter deals with The Woes of the Craft. In a way they almost match the joys—but only almost. They are present in all creative work—one reason why I described my life in that realm as Paradise/Hell.

For the impatient, the “mythical man-month” refers to the curious fact that in great tasks, where by definition everything is connected with everything else, you can’t get the job done faster, or even on-time, by simply piling on the labor. Increasing the man-power can actually slow down the process rather than speeding it up.

Torture Then, Assassination Now

Predator drones firing Hellfire missiles killed Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen on September 30, 2011. Al-Awlaki was a U.S. citizen born in Las Cruces, NM in 1971. This was part of the vast collective insanity that plays out in the skies above us while down here all seems normal in up-scale Grosse Pointe Farms. Sunshine. Children going to school accompanied by parents weekdays. Down the street a lawn was dug up a couple of weeks ago to replace a defective sewer line. Now, thanks to Tocco Mannino Landscaping services, a new lawn completely hides the devastation. In the sky unspeakable madness. Some years ago I studied lawyerly documents showing why we could engage in torturing people. Today’s news tells me that the Obama administration evidently ordered al-Awlaki’s killing based on another lawyerly document justifying the event—provided that al-Awlaki could not be taken alive. It turns out that he might have been—taken alive. He and three companions were traveling by car and had stopped for breakfast. Helicopters might have landed and surrounded him. We’re not at war with Yemen, to be sure. Nor were we at war with Pakistan when we landed copters to grab bin Laden. I wonder. Was there also a lawyerly memo justifying military action in Pakistan before we landed?

Droning On

Thanks to a virus that seems to have affected the computer systems of the drone program of the U.S. Air Force, we learned yesterday of Creech Air Force Base. It is a small facility in southern Nevada across the highway, as it were, of Indian Springs, NV, a little place with 1,302 inhabitants. If you get tired of the splendors of Las Vegas, about 40 miles northwest of there, on U.S. 95, you can refresh your luck at Indian Springs Casino. The town is also home of the Southern Desert Correctional Center. The poignant fact in the story we read is that pilots report to work at Creech combat-ready; they’re wearing their flight suits. They work in a small concrete building seated in front of displays screens and guide drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and other places using a joy stick.

Amüsant…

Elections are approaching, and hereabouts school board wannabes are the first to have their signs out. Not surprisingly, this year as in most years, at least one candidate has an apple on his sign, and we’re expected to understand, instantly, that Apple = School. Walking along, the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil popped into my mind—assuming, of course, that it was an apple. Is the linkage biblical? If so it would be ironic, therefore the answer must be No. The student brings an apple to the teacher. The custom, Wikipedia informs me (but omits all detail) is common in Denmark, Sweden, and in the United States. Certainly not in Hungary, Germany, or in France—as I can testify from personal experience. Just to check this out, I put up a Google search in German. Yes, indeed. They know all about it—but associate it strictly with Amerika, find it amüsant, and speak of Bestechung (read bribing) of the teacher. One ultra-clever posting suggests an amusing explanation. Perhaps, the author says, tongue in cheek, writing in German but quoting in English, An apple a day keeps the doctor away was modified by clever students into An apple a day keeps the teacher at bay. He justifies this by noting that an “apple polisher” is a toady trying to curry favors. A toady? Why he was a charlatan’s servile assistant who ate a presumably poisonous toad to enable his master in expelling poisons. — Come on, already, etymologists! Where is that favorite word of yours? You should preface that by saying “perhaps.” I don’t believe it for a moment.

It Felt Good

The headline in this morning’s Detroit News was TEXAS BOUND, signaling that the Detroit Tigers had overcome the Elephant of Baseball last night in a fifth game of the series in a 3:2 victory, in Yankee Stadium yet! Enormously tense although the battle had been, it felt very good. And the bonus was that victory came with the strike-out of A-Rod. All right. A-Rod had been slumping, but it still felt great!

If statistics hadn’t been invented in the seventeenth century by such giants as Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat, it would surely have been invented when baseball dawned in the 1850s. Therefore this post will feature stats. Herewith a bar graph showing World Series winners:

Chart updated to show 2013 results.

The Yankees outrank all other teams by a mile (27 World Series victories to runner up St. Louis Cardinals’ 10). I’ve marked in red the teams we have been rooting for over the years, and they fall way, way below the top tier. We’ve also lived in the Washington, DC area—but there was no baseball team there then, the Washington Senators (1901-1960) had by then moved to Minnesota and become the Minnesota Twins. So we are linked. The second Washington Senators (1961-1971) moved to Arlington, Texas, and had become our next hurdle in the 2011 season, the Texas Rangers.

When you move about a lot, you acquire multiple teams to love—and what goes around comes around. Speaking of Texas, we almost became Texans back in the 1950s, and had we done so, this next battle, for the American League title, would produce the same kinds of inner conflicts that arise when the Tigers battle the Twins.

Here is how we almost became Texans. Our immigration sponsor was a Texas businessman. Such sponsors guaranteed the immigrant a job on arrival. That gentleman died unexpectedly as we were on the ocean, New Orleans bound—and New Orleans bound because we were Texas-bound. His son declined to assume his father’s sponsorship commitment, and the immigration officials then frantically searched for a new sponsor for us. She turned out to be an old friend of ours who lived in Kansas City—and we became Kansas City Royals fans instead.

Chance and circumstance. Hidden links and local loyalties. Skills and commitments—even in our pastimes. Odd thing, life. But it felt rather nice to be on the winning side last night. As for the Texas Rangers, they will be a difficult nut to crack. They’ve never won a World Series title and only a single AL Pennant—to the Tigers’ 10. In their eyes we will be the bad guys who must be overcome.

Give, Give

I am more and more convinced, that man is a dangerous creature; and that power, whether vested in many or a few, is ever grasping, and, like the grave, cries “Give, give.” The great fish swallow up the small; and he, who is most strenuous for the rights of the people, when vested with power is as eager after the prerogatives of government. You tell me of degrees of perfection to which human nature is capable of arriving, and I believe it, but, at the same time, lament that our admiration should arise from the scarcity of the instances.
      [Abigail Adams to John Adams, letter of November 27, 1775]

To which I might parenthetically add, Let’s hear it for our Founding Mothers!!!

(I found this in Women’s Letters: America from the Revolutionary War to the Present, edited by Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J Adler, The Dial Press, 2005.)

Candles in the Sky

The physicist David Bohm used to say that physicist were not physical enough. They relied too much on mathematical equations and had no, as it were, viscerally physical sense of what they were talking about. A variant of this came to mind yesterday as I first heard and then read about the 2011 Nobel Prize for physics awarded to Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Brian Schmidt. The variant is that we interpret physical observations based on theoretical structures. But the work these gentlemen engaged in was right physical, actually. They used arrays of massively modern telescopes to observe one type of supernova activity, that associated with Ia supernovae.

The terminology here is unfortunate. We have two kinds of supernovae, 1 and 2, but these are rendered in Roman form as i and ii. In the first category, i, interests us here. Type ii are produced by large stars late in their lives. In the first category, we have three subdivisions: 1a, 1b, and 1c; the first is produced by dwarfs, the last two by massive stars. On YouTube videos we hear people talking about “one A,” but in press accounts we see Ia. But never mind. the 1a’s are all white dwarf stars to begin with, and these are always associated with another sun; each dwarf is thus one member of a binary system. Furthermore, each is the collapsed form of the bigger of the two, with immense density. Most white dwarfs are about the size of the earth but have mass equivalent to 0.6 of the sun. The 1a supernova comes into being when the white dwarf sucks the mass of its binary companion to itself. Slowly its mass increases. When it comes very close to having 1.38 solar mass, it produces an enormous nuclear explosion, the supernova of type 1a. That number, 1.38, is called the Chandrasekhar limit, named after Subrahmanyan Chandrasekar who wrote a 1931 paper titled “The Maximum Mass of Ideal White Dwarfs.” The process described above is illustrated by the fabulous graphic authored jointly by NASA, the European Space Agency, and A. Field; I bring it courtesy of Wikipedia Commons (here).

The important point here is that white dwarfs never go into nova unless they reach that mass. And knowing that mass, we can calculate their brightness at peak with great precision. It is always just about the same. For this reason whenever such a supernova appears, we know how bright it must be where it is. Measuring its observed brightness with our by now stupendous instruments, we can therefore calculate how far away it is. 1a supernovae, therefore, act as a pretty reliable standard candles, thus objects of known absolute magnitude (luminosity). Knowing their observed magnitude, we can calculate their distance from us using a simple formula.

Our Nobelists looked for and found many, many supernovae of type 1a and measured their distances from us. In the absence of any kind of theory of the cosmos, this would give us a nice, clean idea how far away the most distant galaxies—those housing the 1a’s—are from us. Instead these men were greatly surprised by their findings. The most distant galaxies turned out to be much dimmer, thus much farther away, than they had expected them to be. I emphasize that word because “the model” now comes into the picture. That model, simply, is that the universe began with a Big Bang and has been expanding for 14 billion years. The expectation was that over time, the expansion would have slowed, decelerated, owing to the gravitational pull of everything on everything. Adam Riess uses the image of throwing your car keys into the air (read Big Bang). You expect the keys eventually to lose their upward energy—and to fall back down again. Instead, these keys just seemingly kept on going up. The following little graphic shows what they expected and what they actually saw.

Not to forget. The Big Bang is behind this expectation, thus a certain energetic, one-time dynamism. The Big Bang itself is based on Edwin Hubble’s observation that the farther galaxies are from us, the more red-shifted their light actually is, thus that the peaks of the light waves are farther apart. This used to be explained by saying that space was expanding and, as it expanded, it stretched the light. Today the explanation is that some kind of energy must be causing the expansion, dark energy, dark because we cannot detect it directly. And the observed red shifts—and now the unexpected dimming out of supernovae at great distances—has been interpreted to mean that the universe is mostly just that, dark energy (as I’ve had occasion to report here).

Alternative models are not even on the back burner these days. One of these might be that light gets tired as it moves, and therefore a red shift simply means tired light; hence there is no expansion. Fritz Zwicky (1898-1974), a physicist associated with supernovae, proposed the tired light hypothesis. Astronomer Halton Arp (1927-) holds “heretical” views on the red shift as well. If the red shift doesn’t always mean what Hubble thought it did, there might never have been a Big Bang. But we like the Big Bang. In the beginning, etc. Let there be Light. And having light, we now complete the picture with energetic Darkness.

Wrought Iron Returns

A winning snapshot from my rich collection of wrought iron photographs taken by Daughter Michelle in Paris two or three years ago by now. This one technically qualifies. The grating must be wrought iron. Michelle also has photographic gifts. Here is another—exploiting a diamond in green.

Playoffs

It’s playoff time in baseball, a time when we awaken to the sport if “our” team happens to be in contention. For many years now that either meant the Detroit Tigers or the Minnesota Twins. It is also an occasion for making valuable observations about human powers of identification. To give an example. Once more the two contenders are the Tigers and the New York Yankees. Leading off the Yankee batting order now is Curtis Granderson. Yesterday Granderson hit a home run to our great consternation—and thus appeared to us as the very Devil Incarnate. Yet, for years now (2006-December 2009), when Granderson came up to bat, all of our hopes rushed out and surrounded him—because he wore the D. He was one of ours. Indeed, when he left, this blog mourned the fact on December 9, 2009. Now we love to hate Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees—for all kinds of mostly irrational reasons. And I’ll tell you what. If A-Rod by some incomprehensible magic should one day become a Tiger player, that would certainly represent a day of great trial for me—because then I’d have to do major reconstruction of my personal love-hate list. Watching one’s own lower self in action is educational—but also safest when watching an innocent pastime like the playoffs.

Writing, Handwriting, Essays

Here a maddening—but also enlightening—fruit of experience. Mine. If I research a subject and then struggle to write my findings down well enough to make them understandable to the public in general, I will remember the basic facts and relationships for a long, long time. I will remember—but the reader might not. I know that also—from experience. Time and time again I remember reading about something complicated; I will have a vague sensation of understanding it; but when push comes to shove, I can’t reproduce that understanding properly.

My education in the United States began as a junior in high school. Until then I had been required to write essays—not after my Father enrolled me in school here. We learned recently that the teaching of cursive writing has been abandoned; children are taught to write, but not to “flow,” if I make myself clear. Demands to reproduce knowledge in writing had already begun to yield the field to questionnaires in my time (early 1950s). In college we were still expected to write answers to tests in little blue books; that was, in my case, at a Jesuit college, and I’m not sure how widespread that sort of testing was—or whether it still survives.

In the world of work—certainly at research institutes—writing was required to report results. My own interesting personal experience was that our Masters and PhD’s often lacked this skill so tangibly that I spent substantial parts of my time rewriting other people’s incoherent reports at the behest of my frustrated Director. I knew how. Time and time again, I was forced, eventually, to absorb the basic research, interview the researchers, and then do the work all over again—frequently changing the very conclusions—the thinking behind the authors’ conclusions having been too shoddy.

And that was then.

When we seek the causes of decadence, they are not hard to find. They hide in such details. Knowledge thins, understanding follows, and Emotion comes to rule. What is Counselor Deana Troi’s favorite question? “Yes. But how do you feel about it?” What is true at the level of knowledge is also true at the level of ethics. And then we throw up our hands at “the times.”

Elementary, My Dear Watson

The publication of data by a team at CERN† brought into focus, once again, the delightful parts of physics, thus the elementary particles, the neutrino specifically. The team clocked neutrinos travelling a distance of 732 km underground, at a depth, at the maximum of the path 11.4 km underground, faster than the speed of light by 60.7 nanoseconds. These particles came into view in the twentieth century, perhaps a time when physicists were tiring of the old-fashioned naming conventions. Hence we have quarks—with first names like Up, Down, and Top and colors—and neutrinos (first hypothesized by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930); neutrinos come in three flavors.

Both belong to the category of elementary particles, and those are defined as particles not known to have any deeper structure, thus not known to be built up from yet smaller particles. These are the smallest things we know to exist as definable entities. Here, in effect, are what the ancients (in the West fifth century BC) called “atoms.” Who knows. Our elementary particles may someday also turn out to be yet smaller empires of yet smaller things, but at the present Western Culture has done enough. Just yesterday came news that Fermilab is closing down its large hadron collider. Exhausted. The next great push is in some nebulous future; we’re resting on our laurels. And lovely, cute things they are. Here is a picture of them all:

The oldest, by discovery, are the leptons (from the Greek for slight, slender, delicate), and the first lepton was the electron, which dates to 1897. Our neutrino belongs to this category too. The quarks (we owe that name to one of James Joyce’s nonsense words used in Finnegans Wake) date to the 1960s. These two categories are known as fermions, that name derived from the statistics developed by Fermi and Dirac. Thus they obey Fermi-Dirac statistics.

The red particles are force carriers described by gauge theory; that theory deals certain kinds of fields. They’re usually just called bosons, and that name we owe to the Bose-Einstein statistics, which in turn describes their behavior. The Bose in that composite was one Satyendra Nath Bose (1894-1974).

But what is missing from this picture? Two bosons, of course. There should be six of them, shouldn’t there? Just for parity with leptons and with quarks! Let’s have some equality around here. Well, there are—two more. One of them is the graviton (in theory mediating the force of gravity) and the Higgs boson. That last one is quite beyond me; evidently the Standard Model of particle interactions requires yet another particle that Higgs and others simultaneously proposed from the Standard Model math. Neither of these missing two have made themselves visible to science—although the graviton is alive and well in science fiction.

The interesting feature of the Standard Model for me—its absolutely fundamental underlying structural assumption—is that nothing happens in physical reality, nothing, without the mediation of some kind of particle. One of those shown above—plus the two that we’ve still not managed to capture in a bubble chamber. Gravity is the elephant in this room: it is the most commonly experienced aspect of physical reality—but its little magic mediator has remained entirely elusive. Therefore, of course, we also still lack a comprehensive Grand Unifying Theory (GUT).

Having refreshed my memories of the neutrino, tracing its family lineage, I planned to write a post and prominently feature John Updike’s wonderful poem, Cosmic Gall. Alas! Still copyrighted. Therefore I provide this link. But for the lazy I will herewith present something of my own. It arises from two urges that ever battle within me. One is a wonder at humanity’s scientific achievements; the other is a dark urge always to deny. The first urge tends on the whole to triumph—and here is why:

Beta-Decay Believer

In neutrinos I have faith
Otherwise I’d not be wise.
Appearing thinner than all wraiths

They seem to lack all size.

Even in their bubble chambers,

To be seen for a brief time,

To display what we call flavors,

They must collide with nuclei.

And particles that even poets
Like Mr. Updike sometimes tease,
Must surely be as sweet as suet,
Fly fast as lightning dipped in grease

Thus faster than Sir Albert’s light—

To cognoscenti’s consternation

And ordinary fools’ delight—

As news break of the demonstration

Of such-like heresies. Indeed,

I say, tomorrow it might be Okay   

To say that light can violate the speed

Limit that Einstein posted yesterday.

But to doubt neutrinos would be rash

For Richard Feynman is a man

With whom I’d never dream to clash.

---------------
†Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire
Picture credit is Wikipedia (link).

This September, We’ll Remember…

Every September, marking as it does
The tail of the season, produces a
Plant to remember it by. Last year a
Pumpkin in the compost heap had pride of
Place, this year we celebrate two small tomato
Plants. They arrived in small black plastic pots
We could just lift up to the sun held in
Two hands. Buried, they grew into this vast,
Grand, mad, tumultuous exuberance.

Great Poet, But Was He Babylonian?

Perhaps the greatest epic poet who ever lived wasn’t really a single individual. I think I know better, but I posses no more proof than the collective deposit of all human scholarship asserts. The person I have in mind is Homer. And his name came into my focus this time while thinking about an SF TV series, Babylon 5, whose creator is clearly known by name, J. Michael Straczynski. It occurred to me that in our own time the epic poem is still alive and well, here and there only, as television series. Further that Babylon 5 qualifies as such an epic in its temporal width, breath, scope, content, and indeed in its mythological framing.

Homer’s two great works, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were performed at four-year intervals by rhapsodes (reciter-singers) at the Panathenaen Festival (where the Olympics where also held). Thus these works had performances before extensive audiences. To be sure: those were ages that came before anything like wide-spread literacy had yet taken root—much as Babylon 5 was being performed before vast audiences gradually once more losing those same roots (at least if recent statistical surveys are correct).

But when did our poet live? Certainly after the Trojan War (1194-1184 BC), but how long after? The earliest biographies of Homer appear to have been written some 800 years after the war. A man whom the Encyclopedia Britannica (EB) labels pseudo-Herodotus (the real one lived 484-425 BC) puts Homer’s birth at 1102 BC. The real Herodotus thought that Homer had lived “not more than 400 years before me,” which EB assumes meant 830 BC. So there you have the rough range.

In looking all this up—and realizing just how fuzzy and vaporous Homer’s origins really are—it delighted me to discover that a satirist of our own time notation, Lucian (125-180 AD) had suggested, in his True History, that Homer was actually a Babylonian and had been called Tigranes. How Lucian could have known that is not on record, but his argument was that Tigranes, having been taken captive by Greeks, assumed the name Homeros, which in Greek means “hostage.” (A Hostage for the Hinterland, as it were.) This gave me pleasure. It permits me to link a modern poet, Straczynski, and an ancient one. The first came from Babylon 1. The other created Babylon 5.

All things are possible—if the song has the right melody.

Canopus in Argo Navis

Members of my family are now reading Shikasta, both in paper and e-book formats. Shikasta is the first novel in a work by Doris Lessing titled Canopus in Argos, first discovered and introduced into Ghulfdom by Michelle, years ago already, but such works march through the clan at a royal pace, as it were. It was when I’d first read it, also years ago, that I became aware of an interesting fact. There really is a constellation Lessing called Argos, and the giant star Canopus is indeed its anchor. The official name of it is Argo Navis. Jason and his Argonauts are responsible for this projection onto the southern skies. And yes. The constellation is a ship. That constellation itself makes a spellbinding story in its own way.

Argo Navis has two unique features. It used to be the largest of the constellations, featuring the second brightest star visible in our skies: Canopus, of course. The brightest is Sirius. The second distinction Argo merits is that it is the only constellation, of the 48 that Ptolemy (90-168) listed in his Almagest, that has since been, well, chopped apart, dismissed, subdivided, what have you. It is no longer officially recognized as a constellation. As Doris Lessing no doubt believes, we are still living in the dark ages dominated by Shammat (read Devil), who wants to distract our eyes from Canopus.

Not surprisingly for me (temperamentally, obdurately, perversely traditionalist that I’ve become), the dismemberment of Argo took place at the hand of Nicolas Louis de Lacaille (1713-1762), the French astronomer. It took place in 1752, thus close to the period called the Enlightenment, the death of which I date to the French Revolution. What did de Lacaille do? He divided Argo Navis into Carina, Puppis, and Vela, the keel, stern, and sails of the old ship. Am I hearing cheers for Progress?

Now for some pictures.

This outline shows Argo Navis as the ancients probably depicted it, meaning the stars they connected to form it. Note the central, anchoring position of Canopus. You can also see Sirius high above at the right edge of the image. The sails are triangular in shape. The long line extending from the deck upward through the sails was once known as the Malus, the Mast but is now the constellation Pyxis, the Compass. The ancients once also drew lines downward from stars here marked b and n to represent oars. Next I show the constellations as de Lacaille drew them, first how the sky looks to human eyes, next the lines that form today’s Carina, Vela, and Puppis.



In the diagram above, the sails have been enlarged. Maybe the winds of modernity had really picked up by de Lacaille’s time. The French astronomer’s Carina does not have the diamond-shaped figure shown here atop its left extremity in blue (the red outlining is mine), but my source on Wikipedia commons (link), one Michelet B, includes it. To see these details, its best to click through, of course. The old ship, in other words, is still there, and not all that modified. But the name has been lost. But thanks to science fiction, as this work by Doris Lessing’s is classified, the lost memory of Canopus in Argos has been recovered.

I hesitate to say much about that opus beyond noting that the most stunning science fiction always transcends the genre. These books, beginning with Shikasta, are not really entertainment reading, do not fit the rubric of aesthetics, but are certainly something difficult and special.

Let me conclude with a stylized and popularized diagram I’ve found on a crossword puzzle page (link) (and nowhere else), without indication of its source. It’s the most pleasing image, but I for one can’t make any kind of sense of it. If true, however, Canopus is not in but out of Argos. And that’s a bit of a disqualifier.

Added November 14, 2011. In a comment to this post Claire Grace Watson informed that she is the source of the image shown above. The lovely diagram is the way the Minoan Age (27th to 15th century BC) saw this constellation. Claire's own site, Disk of the World, is a beauty and a wonder (link). She is a Florida-based writer and artist. Thank you!

Happy Birthday!

Who?

My homepage graphic is a photo of a long dock pointing into a lake, one of Google's stock images. I rarely click to see what image Google hides, but that it has some image on a given day is shown by little colored dots next to its name. Today I clicked the dots. It's Google's Thirteenth! My respect for that number is known, hence this posting. And with thanks for the free services this blog has received over a period growing into its third year. All the best.

Emptiness

My exercise is walking. For the second year now my walks take place in a quite different neighborhood in fall and winter than my own—owing to the place where Brigitte does her aqua dynamics. Our own is old and upscale, this one is young and upscale. Ever since we moved to Michigan in 1989, the most striking feature of these neighborhoods has been their emptiness—if you ignore automobiles—and this holds as strictly in the old as in the newer area. I walk at least an hour, more often an hour and a half. In that time I rarely see more than one or two people—exempting only grass-cutting crews. These are loud clusters mostly of machines, one or two men wearing ear protection and blowing grass off sidewalks when I actually see them on foot. I let the sound of these clusters guide my walk, hence often only hear but don’t see them.

My first walk this fall in the new area came the other day. Herewith some images of emptiness.

One sees tell-tale signs of human activity, thus this severe abstract art of lawn-painting done with a massive riding mower.

The neighborhood is younger, but here and there developers have spared one or two of the aboriginal inhabitants. Here is one that invited me to “keep looking up.”

This image shows, curiously, a walking path down the center of a large grass-covered island. Coming right at it from the far distance is a car, but it will have to turn rather than entering this narrow strip intended for the walker. But no walker in sight—except myself. Trees, power lines, pavement, houses, bugs, birds, squirrels, butterflies—and giant insects like trucks, vans, cars. No people in sight. This, I expect, is what our biophysicists see when they examine the innards of living cells. They see a landscape empty of agency. The actual “people” who fashioned the chemical civilization are nowhere to be seen.

And then there are pristine object lessons in Infinity, e.g. this arrow-straight sidewalk. Tangible silence. Tactile emptiness.

Pleiades

My title refers neither to the Pleiades in the Constellation Taurus nor to the seven daughters of Atlas who were transformed into those stars. Rather, I am drawing attention to a eponymous website (link). I stumbled upon it rather late in my e-life. I could have used it many times before. Under senior editors Roger Bagnall and Richard Talbert, Pleiades provides information on the current location of ancient sites in the Greek and Roman world. The site hosts contributions of scholars and other kinds of madmen—and transforms obscure knowledge into maps you can actually look at, and with confidence.

I went there, as the saying has it, because I wondered about the location of Marpessos, the birth-place of Sybilla (mentioned in the last post). More specifically, that river, Aidoneus, intrigued me. The best I could do with that name was to discover that it was one of the names of Hades. The clouds eventually cleared, and Pleiades became visible. After that I managed to get a map location of ancient Marpessos in current-day Turkey. It follows here. I point to it with a faint arrow in western Turkey using a map courtesy of Bing.

A blow-up of the map, this time from Google, shows the town of İntepe, Turkey as the largest nearest settlement. But the old Marpessos was actually further south and east, thus in the vicinity of Çamlica toward the center and bottom of the map.


View Larger Map

What saddened me is that there are no rivers in this regions, not even brooks, nothing flowing and large enough to leave a line visible on any web-map I’ve consulted at the highest level of magnification. Maybe Aidoneus was subterranean, which would be right for a river from hell.

Note on the Optics of History

This post is an addendum to my “Sibylline” posts, on the general subject (here) and on Saint Hildegard of Bingen (here). As I noted in the first, the original prophetess who probably lent her name to a long line of sibyls, Sibylla of Marpessos, lived in or before the sixth century BC. In my second post I write about a prophetess who lived in the twelfth century AD and was born more than 900 years ago. The big difference between these two figures is that Sibylla, while her name and fame survive, is by now very obscure; in contrast, we have masses of information about Hildegard. Mere phrases of almost equally obscure but famous writers refer to Sibylla. Thus (as I’ve already quoted earlier, Heraclites said of her: “With her maddened mouth … she reaches a thousand years with her voice by the power of the god”—much as Hildegard’s voice still reaches us today. The magical or spiritual powers of these women are explained in different ways depending on the culture that surrounded them. The ancients derived the sibyls from divine-human unions, as in this quote from the Sibylline oracles† I’ve chanced across:

[A]nd I am born between a mortal and a god,
Of an immortal nymph and a father who fed on bread;
From my mother Ida-born, but my fatherland is red
Marpessos, consecrated to my mother, and its river is the
Aidoneus.

By contrast Saint Hildegard’s gifts were attributed to divine inspiration. The ancient sibyls have become almost invisibly tiny owing to temporal distance, whereas Hildegard is still accessible to us today through many writings, not least her own.

Now writing these posts the obvious occurred to me. It is that those ancient women were doubtless as real and complex in their own times as Hildegard was in hers. That their fame rested on something more than just a “maddened mouth,” rested on real qualities and gifts as marvelous as Hildegard’s. These women often had long lives—certainly true of the Sibyl of Cumae in the early Roman era. If by some science fiction magic we could be transported to their own times, taught the language by some little Star Trek device plugged into the left ear, and by a “time distortion” so very common in SF series we could spend, say thirty years observing those times while not aging but ten minutes in our own—why then we would be as amazed and awed by the ancient sibyls as we are by a phenomenal figure like Hildegard of Bingen.

Through the incredible compression of time, however, the ancient sibyls appear small. Therefore the modern tendency is to display a half-sardonic little smile when stories of them surface. We belittle the past because it has become—tiny. This applies, of course, to all of the figures of the past. Despite our at best modest achievements, we feel superior to them, dismissing the past’s utter ignorance. “Can you imagine? They cut up goats, looked at their guts, and from that foretold the future? What a scam. Boy those people were gullible. Gullible!” Do we have social habits equally absurd? Of course we do. Do we notice our own silliness? Not in the least. But it will take two thousand years or so before the public then, enmeshed in yet other insanities, will look at us with those bemused smiles of superior wisdom with which we contemplate the benighted ancients.

---------------
†Jennifer Lynn Larson, Greek Heroine Cults, p. 126, available on the web (link).

Piling it on: Another Orwellianism

It startled Brigitte yesterday to hear, on a rebroadcast of a hearing by the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth, tax exemptions and loopholes defined, by various high-level witnesses as, tax expenditures. This morning she asked me to define “tax expenditures.” Okay. That sounds like a rather weird question, but I knew she was going somewhere interesting. So I began in my usual down-to-earth way saying: “Well, checks the government writes to pay soldiers, buy tanks, Social Security, pay its bureaucracy, maintenance of national parks…” Brigitte stopped me. And she told me what people, like one-time Fed Chairman Greenspan, and others, defined as “tax expenditures.” The things she included did not sound like expenditures to me.

“It’s another of your Orwellianisms,” she said.

I went on a hunt. Sure enough. I found the matter explained on Deliberately Considered (link). Here is the relevant paragraph:

Are tax expenditures an entirely different matter? The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 (Public Law 93-344) defines tax expenditures as, “…revenue losses attributable to provisions of the Federal tax laws which allow a special exclusion, exemption, or deduction from gross income or which provide a special credit, a preferential rate of tax, or a deferral of liability.” That is, in plain English: tax expenditures are lost tax revenues caused by special exceptions to tax laws. By law, a list of “tax expenditures” must be included in the President’s budget in a section titled “Analytical Perspectives,” prepared by the Office of Management and Budget. The list for 2012 includes 173 “tax expenditures (p 241 – 251),” which total over one trillion dollars for the fiscal year beginning October 1, 2011. As objective as this may sound, the list and estimates of “cost” is actually quite subjective, because analysts posit the starting point of the tax baseline.

Congress was dominated by the Democrats (both houses) in that year. The motivation behind this phrasing could, presumably, be pinned down sharply with lots of research. But never mind that. Here is a simple case of using a word to mean roughly the exact opposite of what it has traditionally meant.

You cannot expend, meaning spend, money you don’t actually have. To view as expenditures money that you have not collected—and have not collected because laws in place prevent you from collecting them—that is not a tax expenditures.

Behind this lies some kind of really strange logic, certainly intended in some ways to confuse. That is the issue, always, when the meaning of words is arbitrarily changed by those with authority enough to make the concept stick more or less.

The Ecliptic

Today’s the day of the autumnal equinox. I understand it better this year than ever before. In the course of writing a post on the astrolabe for LaMarotte, I came to understand what’s known as the ecliptic. It is one of those maddening words. It reflects simultaneously two different points of view and two theories of the solar system. In one the sun goes around the earth; in the other we go around the sun. Here for instance is Webster’s definition of the ecliptic:

The great circle of the celestial sphere that is the apparent path of the sun among the stars or of the earth as seen from the sun: the plane of the earth’s orbit extended to meet the celestial sphere.

If it is a circle, why call it the ecliptic? It comes from creating eclipses, not the shape, although the earth’s orbit is ever-so-slightly elliptical, but not so much that you would notice. That path of the sun among the stars is the legacy of the geocentric view. It prevailed from the end of the Hellenistic era to the acceptance of Copernicus and Galileo in the West. The earth as seen from the sun is the other, the heliocentric view. Now, confusingly, virtually all pictures of the ecliptic have the earth smack in the center—so that the sun seems to be doing all the moving. That, of course, shows that our real orientation is egocentric. The ecliptic only interests humans because it explains the seasons on earth. An honest picture is the following:

The sun is squarely in the center. We do the traveling. The line we describe is the ecliptic. The sun is “in Aquarius,” as people say, meaning from our perspective; therefore it’s late January or early February. The circle of the zodiac was first determined by people waiting for sunrise. As soon as the first light appeared, they looked above that spot at the still dark sky. The constellation they detected right above the sun was the “house” in which the sun was rising. In July-August, when the earth will be where Aquarius is shown on the sketch, the dawn-watchers will see the constellation of Leo instead. Brigitte was born in Aquarius; I was born in Leo. Astrologically we complement each other. But, of course, neither Aquarius nor Leo ever move. Nor does the sun except around its axis. Anyone who could survive on the sun and live in a fixed spot there could divide his sun-day into twelve sun-hours by looking at the sky and reading off a sign of the zodiac. “See you no later than Sagittarius…”

But let’s now turn to the more usual illustration. An attractive one is show below from Wikipedia’s page on the Equinox (link). As expected, it shows the ecliptic circling the earth, whereas the earth is circling the sun, but never mind. What Wikipedia is doing here is depicting the first part of Webster’s definition above, the sun’s apparent path.

Notice next that the earth, which circles the sun following the ecliptic (the horizontal light-green ellipse), does so at a tilt to the ecliptic. This also means that our equator—and the “celestial equator” that we project from it (tilted dark-green oval)—are also at a tilt. As this diagram clearly shows, the ecliptic is therefore located below the equator through half the year and above it through the other half. And where we see the ecliptic, there we see the sun. Therefore the sun appears below the equator and then above it. The exceptions are two days of the year when the ecliptic makes its two crossings. Those days mark the autumnal and the vernal equinoxes; the sun is precisely over the equator. During those two 24-hour periods, day and night are of equal length. Note that the point of crossing is at the intersection of the vertical line drawn at 90° to our actual orbital plane, thus to the ecliptic.

Another Orwellianism?

The one I have in mind is calling suicide bombers cowards. This one’s been around for a while, but not all that long; but I do think that it predates the 9/11 attack. Every time I hear it, I shudder. The dictionary definition is rather straight-forward: “one who shows ignoble fear or timidity.” Ordinary Americans seem to accept this definition without any difficulty at all. Even a cursory look at the web shows many exchanges questioning this use of the word. The consensus seems to be: It takes courage to become a suicide bomber, not cowardice. Those on chat sites who disagree with this position show themselves to be quite incapable of using language as a carrier of truth.

Let me sharpen the issue. Let’s take a man who enlists in our volunteer army in a time of war. By doing so he agrees to fight in combat, thus endangering his life. The difference between this man and a suicide bomber, who also views himself as killing enemies, is the probability of paying the ultimate price. Are we therefore entitled to call the new enlistee a coward lite—and lite because he might survive his career under arms?

This subject has even attracted academic interest. Michael Weber of Yale has published an article in Public Affairs Quarterly (October 2005) titled “Are Terrorists Cowards?” It’s interesting reading. It instructs us concerning the mental acrobatics possible, indeed necessary, when we accept the premise, even if only for the sake of argument. Weber’s bottom line is that calling terrorists cowards is a rhetorical device to strengthen the American people to “support aggressive reply to terrorist attacks” and that “If this is right, and intentional, then perhaps Bush and other leaders who insist that terrorists are cowards are smarter than we think they are, however much we might hate to admit this.” — And I paid JStor $18 for the privilege of learning this?

The genuine value I obtained from the article is the reminder, Weber provides this in a footnote, that Bill Maher, the late host of Politically Incorrect, got his show cancelled when he opined that the 9/11 terrorists had been courageous rather than cowardly.

My bottom line, obviously, is that courage is courage, cowardice cowardice. Calling one the other can’t really fool the common people but may cause the privileged minority to lean every which way to stay on message. I also have genuine grounds for writing off our entire establishment. The center will hold, however, even if it has no voice.

Biting on the Coin of Science

The curious fact about science is that those who invoke the word are not actually talking about the activity but about something that they take to be Authority, something functionally equivalent to what in other times the Holy Word represented. In secular times that word is supposed to be the last word on any subject. The problem is that we still have meaningfully large constituencies that believe in the scriptures. And that we have not one but many scriptures that compete. Actual science does not lend itself to ex cathedra pronunciations. It offers no absolute certainties. These can be read into certain scientific findings, but those who know their science know that those who treat scientific findings as certainties are making a category error.

And Say Hello to Beatrice for Me

I learned of this poetic excursion by one of my favorite poets, Kipling, about one of my very favorite novelists, from yet another, Angela Thirkell (in her Jutland Cottage). Now all three are Up there. Herewith:

Jane’s Marriage

by Rudyard Kipling

Jane went to Paradise:

That was only fair.

Good Sir Walter followed her,

And armed her up the stair.

Henry and Tobias,

And Miguel of Spain,

Stood with Shakespeare at the top

To welcome Jane —

Then the Three Archangels

Offered out of hand

Anything in Heaven’s gift

That she might command.

Azrael’s eyes upon her,

Raphael’s wings above,

Michael’s sword against her heart,

Jane said: “Love.”

Instantly the under-

Standing Seraphim

Laid their fingers on their lips

And went to look for him.

Stole across the Zodiac,

Harnessed Charles’s Wain,

And whispered round the Nebulae

“Who loved Jane?”

In a private limbo

Where none had thought to look,

Sat a Hampshire gentleman

Reading of a book.

It was called Persuasion

And it told the plain

Story of the love between

Him and Jane.

He heard the question,

Circle Heaven through —

Closed the book and answered: “I did – and do!”

Quietly but speedily

(As Captain Wentworth moved)

Entered into Paradise

The man Jane loved!

Jane lies in Winchester, blessed be her shade!

Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made.

And while the stones of Winchester – or Milson Street – remain,

Glory, Love, and Honour unto England’s Jane!

Computer as Typewriter

When my Internet connection fails I feel a kind of silence, but it’s not the pleasing kind. It’s the silence of a power failure. We’re used to the all-pervading vibration all of our electric gadgets. It’s the silence of the dead refrigerator. Next I note that the software I use most is absolutely useless. What remains is the functionality that made me buy a computer long ago. The computer is the typewriter I once but dreamt about. Brigitte and I chanced across a new store that sells old objects—old objects and beautiful. We saw two or three old typewriters on display there—and I do mean old. But they were in pristine condition. We stopped before them and reached out reverently to touch raised keys. Memories. The keys activated slender metal armlets; at the end of each was a tiny metallic letter you can feel with the fingertip. But the feel of these old tools is also awkward. They are bulky, primitive—as if, reaching into a kitchen drawer for a knife we’d come up with a stone chipped so that it has a kind of cutting edge.

Back in antiquity, in my BC years, I used to pass a computer store on trips for groceries. It was dark in there as in stores that sell radios, music systems, TV sets. Techy. Finally one day I dared to enter this alien space. I stood unmoving, a little awestruck. I did not understand the things I saw. My rigid silence eventually drew a clerk. Could he help me? I said: “Do you have any of these that come with a typewriter attached?” This my incoherent way of asking if you could get computers to print something—which I had then imagined as requiring little metal armlets hitting a rubber roller moving paper upward line by line.

Later I also discovered that the computer was not too bad a calculator, either. And I even knew its name, a spreadsheet, because I’d earlier used paper spreadsheets, and little electric calculators, to do laboriously what now happened all at once. Change one number and the results of all linked equations changed at once. In a word, my life became much easier. What used to take weeks of effort—like typing a long manuscript—became the work of a couple of days of final proofing. What used to take days of calculation got done in an hour or two.

Then came the Internet. And when it’s not available, and the old uses of the computer are suddenly its only uses, then I feel exactly the same way as we did in the store the other day fingering those heavy, clunky keys. We’ve just experienced such a failure, an outage due to a defective power cord. It extended over two days; for more, see this. Bracing, that, I can tell you. What if the power had also failed? I just realized that I no longer own any kind of typewriter, not even an electric one. And as an emergency measure, I would be tempted to buy one of those antiques we saw—if I could find a source for typewriter ribbons. Instead I’ve just taken an inventory. Thank heaven I still own pencils and even an actual bottle of ink. When the end times come, we shall still write. Courage. We shall overcome.

The Sibyl of the Rhine

Today is the feast day of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), a remarkable figure of the twelfth century, of a reach and influence—not to say diversity of talents—difficult to match in that period or any other. Quite rightly she is known as the Sibyl of the Rhine—that title linking her back to visionary women all the way into antiquity. More than that. In this suffocatingly secular era, she is one of the only great saints with an active popular cult. In her own time her spirituality, in subsequent times her fame as a prophetess, in our own her music—and a popular embrace of feminism—keep her name alive for a public that extends far wider beyond the Catholic culture which was her world.

This woman was a phenomenon—from the beginning. Walking with her nurse as a child, she passed a cow. Hildegard was the tenth, youngest child of a noble family; she tended to be sickly. “Look,” she said, pointing at the cow. “Look how beautiful the calf is inside the cow, all white with dark patches on his forehead, feet and back!” Hildegard was five years old! A wide-eyed nurse told Hildegard’s mother about this. The mother decided to follow matters. And, Yes. At the calf’s birth, the future saint turned out to have seen just what she’d described to her nurse. — I have this story from testimonies presented during the process of Hildegard’s canonization. That process petered out; Hildegard was never officially canonized. But such was her fame and following that the Church entered her name into the Roman Martyrology, a book that holds a list of saints recognized by the Catholic Church.

Hildegard had visions very early in life. The first, as she recalled in an autobiography, had come at the age of three. She was 42 before, in midst of yet another crisis of health, she began to write her visions down. She regained her health at once. That work was Scivias (Know the Ways); it records twenty six visions. She also supervised the production of thirty-five illustrations.

Here was a woman who’d never had formal education and acquired her Latin bit by bit, on her own. Yet she wrote nine books in Latin, some quite extensive. Scivias has 150,000 words and, in modern print, would be 600 pages long. Three books of visions. Six other works. Physica is about natural science, Casae et Curae concerns health, herbs; she also wrote a second book on medicine. She published her own letters, a hagiography; she wrote on the rule of monastic orders, on women, children, and childbirth, and other subjects. Some of these works were in German. She also wrote a morality play (Play of the Virtues)—for which she also composed the accompanying music. She was a poet; some 70 of her poems survive. And—such is the nature of a creative soul—she created a special alphabet in which to render a new language that she had created. She called it Lingua Ignota, the unknown language. A phenomenon.

She also acted in the world. She corresponded with the great and mighty. Quite early she won the admiration of a powerful future saint, Bernard of Clairvaux, founder of the Cistercian order. She corresponded with the Pope. At the height of her fame she conducted four preaching tours, appearing in major cathedrals. A woman preaching in that era was quite a sensation—but the great men of her era were in support. And not least—and this endeavor was also very much in the world—she founded three monasteries for women, almost always against the inertial but also only initial opposition of local bishops. She is most famed for her music today.

YouTube likes Hildegard. Many, many selections. A short piece, O vis aeternitatis (2 minutes) is here. A longer presentation, but with many illustrations from her prophetic works (9+ minutes) is here. The last is Canticles of Ecstasy. Her work is also available on CDs. Some put her compositions at 70, some at 80; she might have had others that did not survive.

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I encountered Hildegard at Barnes & Noble, actually—looking for a gift for my Mother. Mother loved and also played music. A package fell into my hands. It was a CD and a book, entitled Vision, shrink-wrapped tightly together. A medieval nun who composed music? This was the gift. Only later, after I’d read the book, did I discover that I’d lived some time in Hildegard’s back yard, as it were, in Bad Kreuznach during my army years—just nine miles south of Bingen on the Rhine, where Hildegard, a Benedictine nun, founded the first of eventually three monasteries.

The appearance of such people makes me shake my head. The Sibyl of the Rhine? Hildegard’s prophecies were decidedly about transcendental realities—not future wars, conquests, and such. Yet she was deemed a prophet. And many people in the secular world of that time scoured her writings looking for “hints” that they might turn to some advantage. This grubby interest, however, caused her writings to be copied and thus preserved.

The present interest is of a similar nature. Feminism discovered in her a medieval woman who confronted the dominant male order and prevailed against it. Yes. It’s possible to treat history as a Rorschach blot and read into it whatever pleases. A closer look at Hildegard reveals, instead, a time radically different from our own. Radically different. Except for the same-old, same-old. It’s still there in the twelfth as in the twenty-first. But the air has a different feel.

Let me conclude this long post with a quote from Scivias. The speaker is Love:

Thus I am concealed in things as fiery energy. They are ablaze through me, like the breath that ceaselessly enlivens the human being, or like the wind-tossed flame in a fire. All these things live in their essence, and there is no death in them, for I am life. I also am rationality, who holds the breath of the resonant word by which the whole of creation was created; and I have breathed life into everything, so that nothing by its nature may be mortal, for I am life.

And I am life: not the life struck from stone, or blossoming from branches, or rooted in a man’s fertility, but life in its fullness, for all living things have their roots in me. Reason is the root, through which the resonant word flourishes.

Booze Imbued the Bibber

The linguistic secret in this title is that all of the words in it, neglecting the article only, have to do with moisture and derive from the concept of drinking, although by different routes. The bibber, usually rendered as the winebibber, derives from the Latin bibere, to drink. Imbue means (Webster’s) to tinge or to dye deeply and to cause to become penetrated. The Latin here is imbuere—but that word came from imbibere, thus to drink or to soak in. In our enlightened times, with every step farther removed from the humble handicrafts where people did the soaking and the dying by hand, the word has come to have a quite different and abstract meaning—as this quote illustrates, from the highest authority, as it were:

Nevertheless, in order to imbue civilization with sound principles and enliven it with the spirit of the gospel, it is not enough to be illumined with the gift of faith and enkindled with the desire of forwarding a good cause. [Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris]

But let’s descend to the lowest low, booze. That word derives from the Middle Dutch verb busen, thus to drink heavily. The word appears to have achieved the status of a noun by the early eighteenth century. The powers that be (I mean in heaven, now) do have a sense of humor. Etymologists believe that the name of a Philadelphia distiller, called E.G. Booze, had something to do with the word’s spread. I myself even like that e.g.

This discussion with a hat tip to my Muse, Brigitte, who looked up from the paper the other day and wondered about the origin of imbue. Curiosity imbues her, you see.