Mother of All Things

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Do You Speak or Are You PIE?

If eighteenth century scholarship was right, the answer is: Minimally one, most likely both. By eighteenth century scholarship I only mean the philologist Sir William Jones (1746-1794) who in his brief life managed to master Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic, and Persian and reached the conclusion that they probably arose from the same single language. This ancient tongue was still alive, well, and single until 3700 BC. Then it began to start having the children named above. That root has come to be known as Proto-Indo European. Its acronym, PIE, has kept turning up like an unrecognizable shard in my researches into the origin of words. This morning I was tracing the word decorum and eventually came across this: “from PIE base *dek- ‘to receive, be suitable’ (see decent).” There it was again.

To look up words very often does, if you give the impulse rein, produce an ever deeper descent into the seeming infinities of the past. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. And then you discover yourself lost in the Pontic-Caspian steppes, thus a region north and east of the Black Sea, where the proto-people who spoke PIE herded their flocks before some headed east, some west, some north, some south to become all those other people. The smartest of them headed very far south and east and settled in India. There they developed Sanskrit, a language that William Jones considered to be “more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either.” This comes from a book titled Discourses delivered before the Asiatic Society: and miscellaneous papers, on the religion, poetry, literature, etc., of the nations of India.

Here I must parenthetically say: The eighteenth century lacked computers, telephones, air conditioning, cars, air travel, electric light, Facebook, and Twitter—yet a person could evidently write and mean a phrase like “more copious than Latin” while referring to Sanskrit—and still quite young…

Anyway, the Pontic-Caspians spoke PIE, and so did the Goths and Celts before they managed to develop Gothic and Celtic. Our most ancient European poetry, like the Edda, therefore shared proto particles with the Rig Veda and Mahayana Buddhist scriptures. Most of us, alas, are speaking PIE deep down. And genetically most of us living in these latter days also carry Proto-Indo European genes.

ICYDK

Brigitte was laughing at herself for having used BTW on Facebook. She next recited the other two Internet Slang words she knew. Then an idea struck her. “You should write a poem using those abbreviations,” she said. Such challenges I can’t resist. Herewith:

AFAIR
Last saw you at the mall
LOL
At the huge crowd.
Then you saw Jack,
Said BRB.
I gave chase
But didn’t see you F2F
TTUTT
Complained to Ruth
She shrugged, said MLAS
And DBEYR.
ATOY
But G2G. BG.
CU

Translated:

As far as I recall
Last saw you at the mall
Laughing out loud
At the huge crowd.
Then you saw Jack,
Said “Be right back.”
I gave you chase
But didn’t see you face to face.
To tell you the truth
Complained to Ruth.
She shrugged and said, “My lips are sealed”
And “Don’t believe everything you read.”
Am thinking of you
But got to go. Big grin.
See you.

In due time the idea occurred to me that if Internet Slang (IS) grew and expanded, in due time we would eventually “evolve” a new language as brief and elegant as the Chinese script. At once I went to work in order to translate our best-known IS symbols into Chinese—and in the process a certain sobriety set in. Here, for instance is the Chinese for the fully spelled out “Laughing out Loud”:

笑出声来

That’s not simple at all, folks. ICYDK basic Chinese literacy requires knowledge of 2,000 characters; the reader of a newspaper must be able to handle 4,000 to 5,000. Higher levels of comprehension lie north of there. The largest Chinese dictionary contains 106,230 characters, but that set includes variants used in Vietnam, Korea, and in Japan; that one is titled Yitizi Zidian; it appeared in 2004. An earlier massive dictionary, issued in 1995, the Zhonghua Zihai, holds 85,568. The Japanese Dai Kan-Wa jiten features 50,000+, the South Korean Han-Han Dae Sajeon 53,667 characters. Those poor Chinese! They’re up against it. How would they go about abbreviating 笑出声来? What three strokes of that bewildering variety will be equivalent to LOL?

ICYDK? In case you didn’t know.

A Greek in Rome

Sometimes I feel as once a Greek might have felt in Rome. That thought surfaced sharply when I read Lucio Russo’s The Forgotten Revolution (see this earlier post). The author makes the case there that the Romans had little use for pure science; their consuming interest was power. Yesterday the same thought surfaced when a Japanese student commented on one of my forays into Mathematics on LaMarotte, namely calculation of the log of numbers by hand. My reader sent me notes on how the Japanese calculate square roots by hand. Initially the graphic did not make complete sense to me, hence I attempted to fill in the blanks using Google—and failed on that attempt much as I’d failed earlier on logs. But then came inspiration. I put my question into German and let Google rip again. I instantly had four quite useful answers in that language. Later my Japanese correspondent sent me more materials, not least a link to a Japanese website that—like those in German—took on the question in order to educate its young and (in my case) the venerably old.

Europe and America. Greece and Rome. Genuinely cultivated Romans, to be sure, spoke Greek and valued Greek learning. But Rome, at least until it split in two, was the center of the world. Greek immigrants were everywhere—many of them slaves of course. As Europeans flocked to America—but not as slaves, thank the Lord. Superior culture to one side, superior power to the other. The Greek in Rome must have felt both—and also experienced the ambiguity of that. Odd how an ancient experience now has a modern parallel. And as the United States behaves ever more imperially, the more that feeling intensifies, at least in me. Once the “country of immigrants” made me feel at home; now alienation grows apace—even as I realize that after sixty years of residence I would be quite at a loss in the Old Country unless I quickly mastered Turkish.

Calling Spades Qaeda

It’s extraordinarily difficult to make out what really goes on far away in war theaters—the reason being that our leaders and our media refuse to call a spade a spade. Now institutional anxieties within our military are causing more or less murmured agitation and advocacy for a continued role for troops in Iraq. And the reason for that (yes, you guessed it) is because amorphous Al-Qaeda is once more on the rise. But through the fog of war, PR, and proactive covering of rears, one can still with a little effort deduce what is really happening. And it strikes me that the Qaeda Thing—which our media insist on referring to as an organization—may not have anything to do with it—except lending a resonant label for something both simpler and more complicated.

There is a simple pattern here. Before the 2003 U.S. invasion a Sunni minority ruled a Shi’ite country. The Sunnis were forced from power, the Shi’ites took over. Sunni partisans mounted a resistance effort to the resulting occupation, but this activity has been renamed terrorism. Under General Petraeus some efforts succeeded in dampening down Sunni resistance by co-opting elements of Sunni tribal leadership. But the Sunni resistance was not thereby entirely extinguished. It continues to exist and, after departure of U.S. troops, will undoubtedly cause continued resistance—this time against the Shi’ite regime. But Sunni resistance has now been labelled Qaeda. Not because, in reality, there is a genuine organization that in any way resembles a coherent armed force. It is called that for political reasons because the word produces resonance.

What we have in Iraq now, had before we invaded, while we were there, and will have after we leave is a population group culturally distinct from the Shi’ite majority that refuses assimilation either into the Shi’ite majority or into the rather vaporous something we call a secular society ruled by democratic means and cohering by economic interest alone. That’s an imposition from the outside. When the opposition is labeled Baathist or Sunni, as it often is, but only in later clauses of media sentences, at least we’re close to spades. Qaeda is far away.

That our military leaders are anxious is also understandable. Once out of the line of fire overseas, they don’t want to be saddled with blame for the failure of a Mission that seemed to have been Accomplished long, long before it even began.

Freshness Algorithm

The electrification of information has had one obvious consequence. My morning paper always brings old news. Not surprisingly print-circulation is heading down and newspapers are folding. What keeps some papers alive is the habit some of us still have: get up, make coffee, get the paper. Television coverage brings the fastest news. When crises erupt—domestic or global—the 24-hour news channels will have the instant coverage, albeit bent all out of shape. Time and time again, attempting to get more comprehensive but still instant news, I’ve found that the Internet is hours behind—as is radio. Not that, mind you, speed will help me in any practical, real-life sense. Crises are always distant. When they are not just now but here, we run out of the house to see with our own eyes—which happened a year ago when the power lines behind our house suddenly caught fire.

Today comes news that Google is too slow—and in consequence of that its minions have labored and introduced a “freshness algorithm.” Evidently the fastest news is not on TV any more. It’s on Twitter and on Facebook. Instant now means second to second, and a seg of the pop feels deprived because the Google searches do not bring them Twitter feed results whereas Bing “includes more Twitter and Facebook posts than Google does in search results” (NYT this morning). That “seg of the pop” is my try to learn to write in Twitterese.

What supports all this ultimately silly hysteria for second-to-second currency is the built-in biological imperative of our sensory apparatus. Of course we want to know, and right away. But what our sensory structures haven’t internalized as yet is that the electrified environment artificially enlarges the world and makes events very far away appear to be nearer and more relevant than they really are. As if it mattered diddly whether or not Papandreou will or will not hold a referendum. Yes it might have consequences to us personally, but there is nothing we can do right now (indeed ever) to counter them—even if a 140-word Twit could actually spell them out.

SCALP IT

Herewith a quote from Angela Thirkell’s 1958 novel, Close Quarters:

     “Plastic!” said Captain Gresham with deep scorn. “And Pink.”
      “You’ll have to get used to it, darling,” said his wife. “The kitchen garbage tin is plastic now and so is the big washing-up basin and that red broom with red bristles that you admired. And Lady Graham’s housemaid’s new teeth, because she told me so.”
      “You can’t even get an anagram out of Plastic,” said Captain Gresham, happy to discover a new grievance.
     Everyone at once tried to get an anagram, the only one approximating to a possible hit being SCALP IT, which was ruled out by John Leslie as unfair because it ought to be one word.

I’d spent much of my day yesterday studying the subject of plastics for a project—in course of which I’d noted the sudden and rather awesome explosion of plastics into the world after World War II. Thus reading that passage in the evening, I experienced it as a “meaningful coincidence.” Or was it just a case of plastics’ ubiquity?

One Creator—or Forgettable

To rise above a certain mediocre level, creative works must be fashioned by a single individual—or, to put it more gently, the core creation must be by one person even when the work is later translated into, say, a movie or a television series. In that translation, in turn, it is important that the direction/production of the piece—quite a different kind of creativeness—also be in the hands of a single person with requisite talents. Regarding this last point, I’m thinking of Masterpiece Theater pieces or the Mystery series that have come to us principally from the BBC. Those that genuinely succeed were made from novels or stories. Some of these have succeeded so well that, later, other authors have produced new segments “based on the characters created by [fill in the blank].” The “characters” very often do carry the series forward well beyond the original author’s living work, but a kind of “fade” becomes obvious eventually. Series based on a “concept” reducible to a page—to help sell the idea—and then executed by a “stable” of writers is invariably and by design something second rate.

Fashions in Time

Last Sunday we entered a kind of Twilight Zone—and our visceral memories knew it. So did the batteries in the simple clock that hangs in our kitchen. In the morning Brigitte wondered: Had Daylight Savings Time ended? Had I failed to reset clocks? And the kitchen clock stopped in protest. Turns out that right up to 2006, DST in the United States ended on the last Sunday in October. But the Energy Policy Act of 2005 had moved the start of DST up in time to the second Sunday in March—and lengthened its duration to first Sunday in November. All this in the name of saving energy. We will do anything, in other words, except something genuinely effective, to save energy. A graphic to make things clear:

We used to call this “summer time,” and once upon a time it had some relationship to the movement of the sun—although nowhere uniformly. European Summer Time extends from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October. But fall ends in September. Still, that is closer. With the change that set in for us here in 2007, summer time pretty much lost its meaning—summer very much over when somber November starts enduring after the pumpkins have been carved.

Ever since Germany introduced DST (as Sommerzeit) in 1916, it has had progressive proponents and traditionalist opponents. Something about “summer time” does indeed remind me of the renaming of months after the French Revolution. Fashions in time are fashions in culture. It strikes me as significant that the trend now is to abandon DST. Most of the globe’s population no longer lives under the DST dispensation. A quite large country left DST behind: Russia under Medvedev—why, just this year! The map I present from Wikipedia (link) shows how things now stand.

As for us, I replaced the batteries in the kitchen clock. And we anticipate “falling back” in the Fall, thus on Sunday morning, November 5.

Ghulf Pupkins 2011

For night...


For light...

New Titles Over Time

I came across a tabulation not quite by chance today. It was in a book titled The Book Publishing Industry by Albert N. Greco, published in 2003 by Psychology press. The data came from R.R. Bowker, the gatekeeper on books. I was looking at total new title output from 1880 through 1989 by decades. The listing is visible here and excludes backlist books, thus reprints of older titles. I thought I’d chart these data against population growth. Here is the result:

What struck me here is the meandering pattern from 1880 through about 1959—and then the sudden upward explosion in titles. As always when the subject is books, we have multiple measures, of which “title” is one, “number of copies sold” is another—and “content” is the most mysterious third. If we look back to the very beginnings of book publishing using machines, the “content” was Bibles. Back in the hand-made book ages, the most common content was “prayer book.” Now looking at this image, we’ve no precise idea of the content heading for the skies there.

Once I had these data, I could also do a kind of approximation of new titles per capita, which I show next—albeit the measure I’m using is new titles per 1 million population:

The first bar pretty much encompasses the period known as The Gilded Age. A surge in reading was evidently not a feature of it. The early peak corresponds to World War I—but if war causes reading, what happened in 1940-1949? What this chart tells me, however, is that the first eight decades in this period may be more representative of “normalcy” and the last three signal some sort of “anomaly.” All population data in the two graphics are population at the midpoint of each decade.

Tantalizing. But today is a busy day, so enough.

The Crusades in Context

The Arabs have memories just as spotty and biased as our own. Thus with western incursions into Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places, they have talked about the Crusades—but in tonalities as if those by now ancient wars had been unprovoked aggressions. That period had never properly gelled in my mind. I thought I’d get myself a broader perspective on this subject.

To sum up my conclusions briefly, the Crusades turn out to have been a relatively brief and not very successful attempt by European kingdoms to counter the massive northward expansion of the Muslim culture. That culture’s penetration was largely successful in the East, less so in the West. In both cases it touched places my family intimately knows. In the west the Muslims conquered Spain where Monique had lived and studied; that thrust penetrated into France; it was stopped at Tours, where Michelle lived for a while. In the East, much later, it reached the edges of Vienna in Austria; thus it had covered all of the places where I had lived in Hungary as a child.

Let’s take a look at this expansion over time. When Emperor Diocletian retired in 305 AD, the Roman Empire had been split in two halves, one ruled from Rome the other from Byzantium. I show a map here from BibleStudy.org (link). The red line indicates the border between the Western and the Eastern (and future Byzantine) reaches of the Roman Empire. In effect this is also a picture of Christendom projected geographically.

Let me next trace the Muslim expansion in cartoon fashion now, beginning in 305. I have the outline from a kid’s site, MrDonn (that’s where one really learns things) (link). The map’s a little clumsy; the Black Sea is a little tilted. Muslim expansion began in the east just about 300 years later (in 630). The Byzantines lost their African holdings as well as the Levant. These thrusts reached well into Byzantine territories so that the Empire had to defeat the Muslims twice (674, 714) just to hold on to Constantinople. In the west the Arabs invaded Spain (then the Visigothic Christian Kingdoms) in 711. By 732 they had penetrated into France, but they were stopped, and rolled back, in the Battle of Tours. I show the situation in 750 AD.

By 1097, two years after the First Crusade (1095-1099) began, Byzantium had lost all of Turkey in the East. My cartoon, as it were, shows the situation before, the next one the situation after the period of the Crusades. Within a year of this beginning, the Crusader States had been established in the Levant and Spain’s reconquest had then begun. The last of the cartoons shows the situation as of 1204, with gains made by Christendom shown in yellow. The Fourth Crusade (1202-1204) had recovered parts of Western Turkey (the Empire of Nicaea). My own impression is that both the gains in Turkey and in Spain were ordinary political ventures—reactions to the centuries-long Muslim push north. Only the slender gains in the Levant, the carving out of Crusader States, so-called, were intimately linked to recovering the geography where Christianity had had its founding. But it was a recovery. The Byzantines had once ruled that geography.

Levant? The word’s meaning is “orient,” where the sun rises in Middle French—thus regions east of Rome and Greece. It means the area now occupied by Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan. The Crusader States were all established in the period 1098-1104. The longest-lasting of these was the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which ended in 1291 after 192 years of rule. Here is a graphic that shows the Crusader States in some detail:

During these centuries the Byzantine empire was also effectively dismembered by the establishments of independent kingdoms from the north (Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria), from the West (Venice, the holder of the Empire of Nicaea), and from the South (the Muslims). But these successor states eventually yielded their sovereignty to the Ottoman Empire, thus another powerful representative of the Muslim culture. Its expansion in stages is shown in the following graphic. Both the last and following maps are from Wikipedia Commons (here and here).

The Muslim culture still rules Turkey, regions south of there, and all the regions of North Africa. The process is still going on—witness attempts by the west not to convert the Muslims to Christianity but to persuade them to embrace representative democracy. All that changes is the same-old. And in 1947 we did manage to reestablish the Kingdom of Jerusalem again, if by another name. Yes. The process continues. And the maps will keep on changing. La Reconquista of Spain, by the way, took until 1300. And the break-up of the Ottoman had to await the end of World War I.

The Lure of Rebellion

Two headlines in the New York Times. On the front page “China Reins in Entertainment And Bloggers”; leading the Styles page is “To Be Young, Hip and Mormon.” The paper’s general stance on things signals the tone of the presentations by headline alone. The Evildoer in the first case is the Government of China, in the other the Mormon Church. The heroes are the rebels. Moving in a little, I discover that China has a ministry called State Administration of Radio, Film and Television. It is now telling TV stations to limit entertainment shows and to increase news coverage. The Times quotes it as aiming to root out “excessive entertainment and vulgar tendencies.” In the Hip-and-Mormon story, the hero runs a rock band, celebrates drowning one’s sorrows in bourbon and explores “the seedy underbelly of his hometown, Las Vegas.” But the hero also made a short video for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in which he proclaims himself a Mormon. But why did the Chinese ministry countenance the growth of vulgar tendencies in the first place? And why did the Church selected this musician to advertise it? The ambiguous behavior of authority, of course, is itself an indicator of the times. Of interest here is the thrilled fascination with rebellion, its favorable treatment on the one hand, anger at its suppression on the other.

As order gradually shatters, as the seedy underbelly becomes the seedy whole—and while the money lasts and a little bit of order still remains—rock stars shall lead us. But when chaos has come to rule, rebellion will take another form. It will manifest as a ruthless quest for order, sword in hand, and public admiration of those who seek the holy.

Organic and Mechanical

Let’s sort the words first. What I intend to mean here by these words is “the living” and “the dead,” in the sense that the organic is alive whereas the mechanical lacks that strange quality. But, turns out, both words have very similar rootings in the concept of a “tool.” The first comes from the Greek organon, which meant a tool or implement, a musical instrument, and then an organ of the body. Our own organs in churches carry the second meaning to this day. Going deeper, the Greek meaning arose from “that with which one works,” hence the notion of a tool, and organon came from ergon, which means “work.” Mechanical, in turn, comes from the Greek mekhane, meaning a device or a means (to accomplish something).

Now let me introduce what might sound like a non sequitur. The reason why Muslims keep insisting, to the total irritation of our journalists, that Sharia law must be the center of their laws (e.g., in Libya just yesterday) is because Muslim culture is still more organic whereas the older secular culture is mechanical.

It is, of course—especially in modern thought—almost meaningless to speak about the “life” of a culture, much less to suggest that younger cultures may have more life than the older and the more developed. But one indicator that I would offer is the role that religious life plays in each. Where it is still prominent, that mysterious something we call life is still active within it, whereas in highly developed civilizations it is dismissed as non-existent. In a living culture (which the historian Oswald Spengler called Kultur) the intuitive element is strongly active still, thus has a collective presence. In a civilization (a word Spengler only applied to secular periods of developed cultures) the intuitive is altogether absent. In one something transcendent is worshipped consciously; in the other only raw power is acknowledge to have genuine sway; to be sure, it is sentimentalized into the power of the electorate, the people, etc., but in effect this power is centered in the human; nothing beyond it.

In younger cultures humans are created by the divine. In secular cultures life itself is just a region of materiality that spontaneously arises when the right conditions prevail. Not that in our modern culture, all around us, the religious is altogether absent. Far from it. Brigitte and I were just remarking on the many, many churches thickly present all around us. But the religious has lost its sway over the collective. It is no longer actively present in it. The civilization has become mechanical. We speak of laws—and almost never even of the spirit of the laws. The last time that subject was still seriously discussed was in the eighteenth century by Montesquieu—and, notably, he titled his work a defense of the same.

I would suggest that the uproar over Sharia, here in the west, is an indicator. Now, mind you, we dislike many aspects of that law and rightly so. But if we substituted Christian law in its place, the uproar would be the same. The uproar simply signals that we no longer understand a whole dimension of reality. It’s become a lifestyle choice. And minorities within our own borders who still espouse the higher reaches, the intuitive dimension, are regularly subjected to scholarly attacks in our organs (!) of communications.

Newscast

The y-axis rises, the x-axis runs.
A matrix of pixels here makes a universe
Of Maxwell’s equations, plastics and glass.

Beautiful women like hard metallic flowers
Recite the day’s political howlers chapter and verse.

Words hasten left to right and overlay the spoken
With the written Dows and Earthquake wrecks
And Thailand floods. The globerati travel
To impress and scold the Arabs fronting microphones
While our home-bound cognoscenti incandesce
Before the cameras.

Enough. A click brings shocking silence. It lasts.
Nothing happens but the night. Then look.
A shadow follows headlights faintly out there
In the falling rain.

Breakfast at National Coney Island

This one’s on the intersection of Gratiot Avenue and I-696 in Roseville, MI. A huge tower marks it—visible from every sky direction long, long before you reach it. To tell the story of my breakfast, I have to subject you to the tedium of “getting on in years,” which is a euphemism for aging.

For readers over fifty, this will serve as a tutorial on things to come. Younger souls might want to skip. I have what I call Medical Days these days, meaning recurring doctor’s visits. After my tête à tête with Dr. LR, I step next door to deliver samples of body fluids. But all of this requires that I should arrive in a fasting condition. For this reason I make appointments as early as possible.

In what still seemed like dead-of-night I found a slip on the rug before the tub, a note from Brigitte saying: “Since you’ll already be at Nine Mile road, why not try to get some peanut butter? ❤ B” Long story here. Peanut prices about to spike 30 percent, we want to stock up before they rise, and long experience has taught me that the lowest prices are at Walmart and at Aldi’s—both close to the geographical point that Brigitte’s “Nine Mile road” signals.

Starved, therefore, and dizzy with lack of coffee, I went to get Smucker’s at Walmart ($2.48 per jar). On the way back the National Coney Island Tower proved irresistible, so I stopped for breakfast—before I went on to Aldi’s where the peanut butter is even cheaper ($1.69 a jar), albeit it isn’t “natural.” Then with two flats holding 24 jars, home.

My first visit to NCI - Roseville—but a delightful discovery. We have these markers, you might call them, markers of times gone by. String theory in physics suggests that time travel is possible if you can harness the energies of something like a mid-sized quasar. But those in the know (thus people who are “getting on in years”) know that time travel is already entirely here and now, and if you want to experience the 1950s—both in physical settings, the taste of food, the cheerful service, and the clientele—you need but get in a car around about 8:30 am on an October Monday and travel to Gratiot and 696 to find it at places like the National Coney Island. I shall be back again. On my next Medical Day.

Al-Sadr and the Future

The U.S. invasion of Iraq began on March 19, 2003. Just twenty-three days later, a 40-year old Shi’a cleric named Abdul Majid al-Khoei died of stab-would at a mosque in Najaf. Najaf is the third-holiest city of Shi’a Islam and, in Iraq, a kind of center of Shi’a politics. The man was the son of the late Grand Ayatollah Abdul-Qasim al-Khoei. He was a moderate and revered leader of Shi’ites. For convenience I’ll call the father the Elder Khoei, the murdered son the Younger. The Elder was famed for opposing Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s attempts to unite all Shi’a jurists and was therefore viewed as a barrier to Khomeini’s ambitions to dominate the entire Shi’a world. Later, when, during the first Iraq war, George H.W. Bush called for a Shi’a uprising, the Elder Khoei published a fatwa calling for humane behavior by his followers and forbade vengeful attacks. Saddam Hussein arrested him when the U.S. did not quite follow through that first time around; the Elder was later released but died in 1992 while still under house arrest.

His son escaped and set up a resistance movement in London. No sooner had the U.S. invaded Iraq and, this time, signaled its intention to do the whole job, the Younger Khoei hastened to return to Iraq again and, no sooner arrived, began setting up a structure to organize the Shi’a clerics and, thus, taking up his father’s mantle. But he was stabbed to death—and because of that event, and because a young cleric named Muqtada al-Sadr was implicated in this assassination, I became aware of al-Sadr quite early and, in the process, aware also of the great complexities hidden in that social realm.

Al-Sadr comes from a rival section of the Shi’a clergy, his own father also a famed but dead leader, Ayatollah Mohammad al-Sadr. But the al-Sadrs represent a tradition less inclined to favor benign approaches whether to conflict or to the West. The killing of the Younger Khoei was a straightforward grab of power. And, indeed, soon after that, al-Sadr emerged as the defacto internal opposition to the American presence in Iraq. Patrick Cockburn, in a book entitled Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq, gives us al-Sadr’s views. Asked what he thought of Saddam’s fall from power, Muqtada said: “The smaller devil has gone, but the bigger devil has come.” Muqtada never deviated from this course; never cooperated with the occupying power; raised, deployed, and controlled his Mahdi army; and but for his support today’s Prime Minister, al-Maliki, could never have taken power. Therefore, it seems to me, the future of Iraq and Muqtada al-Sadr are linked like Siamese twins—unless another assassin’s knife severs the two. But we shall see.

I come from a small country regularly overrun and dominated by bigger powers. Not that I experienced this, but I was steeped from childhood on in history of a certain flavor. When I see invaded countries’ leaders cooperating with us, names like Quisling rise spontaneously in my mind. And the less modern and commercialized the invaded culture is, the more often it has been oppressed from above—as Iraq was by the Ottomans, the British, the Americans and, inside that country, the Shi’ites by the Sunnis—the more I think a visceral resistance to the invader or oppressor must be given weight, at least in looking to the future. No. Democracy and the Hidden Hand are not at all innately loved objects of aspiration by traditional populations. The Civil War was singular—and happened too long ago to have left its marks deeply enough in the American soul—hence a certain naïveté permits us to engage, without much thought, in nation-building ventures. So let us watch Iraq evolve post December 2011 and learn something from the experience.

Near-Forgotten Genius

I came across the quote that follows in an effort to understand better certain aspects of theoretical dimensions beyond the familiar three. My search was prompted by reading Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace. That book basically concerns string theory. The quote:

Time is a man-made reference used for convenience and as such the idea of a “curved space-time” is delusional, hence there is no basis for the Relativistic “space-time” binomium concept. I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. It might as well be said that God has properties. He has not, but only attributes and these are of our own making. Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view. [Nikola Tesla quoted in New York Herald Tribune, September 11, 1932]

The world is vast, my education spotty, hence I recognized the name but could not do much more than that. The thought expressed, however, is most congenial. I’ve always had major problems both with spacetime and with time dilation—thus the concept that time slows down with speed of travel, and the astronaut wandering out there at near-light speed would return from his years-long trip to find that he was much younger than his twin brother. At one time I spent real concentrated time studying Einstein’s theories—in the original, at that—and came to the conclusion that while clocks certainly did slow down with speed, it was the clocks that misbehaved, not time. Therefore I’m not persuaded that time dilation has been proved. I have similar problems with thinking of time as a dimension (except as a math token) and with dimensions beyond the conventional three.

Today I checked into the Serbian, Nikola Tesla (1856-1943). He was an inventor of genius. We owe him the discovery of alternating current, modern electric power plants, the AC motor, and wireless power transmission. He also built the first hydroelectric power plant, with a fellow called Westinghouse, at Niagara Falls—a place I used to haunt once when I worked for Carborundum. Tesla also clashed with other greats of his time whose names are household words while he has been as good as forgotten. A nice summary of this very strange man’s very strange and adventurous life is provided in a YouTube film (link). A listing of some thirty-six devices and principles developed by Tesla is available on Wikipedia’s article on this man (link).

Throw Khadafi from the Air (A Bomb, A Bomb)

We live in truly mad times. Perhaps all times are mad, but the difference today is that now they come blurring over our TV screens as soon as they happen, blood, rags and all, bodies dragged from concrete pipes, psychedelic Tommy guns held up to blast the air. Wolf Blitzers magically rise like newly created flowers to tells us all about these wonders, even when it’s not their time to be on air. It all blurs nowadays, legality, interest, law, license, right, wrong, reason and insanity. Ring around the rosy, a pocket full of posies, “Ashes, Ashes!” We all fall down.

Physical, Mental

It’s curious but oh so true that genuine learning is enormously helped by a physical component, a physical doing. Reminded of this by a post on Laudator (link) that comments on the Latin proverb, Qui scribit, bis legit, Who writes, reads twice. I learned this long ago if in a larger context—namely the difference between doing your own research versus relying on a Research Assistant. Here a post on that a while back. Why is this true?

Is it that, for instance, copying out a quote by hand or keying means that you read it twice? Why does a graph you make yourself, laboriously in Excel, become more real than one you glance at in a paper? My own guess is that the brain stores more than merely memories. It stores a kind of invisible weight or stamp with every memory. The heavier the weight, the darker the stamp, the more accessible that memory later becomes. The brain developed as an organ for dealing with the physical world, hence physical involvement tells the brain: This is serious; he really cares. More ink on that inkpad, add some lead.

Another explanation is that the brain labels the mere reading of a page, the glance of an eye lite. It takes very little time. Hence it gets routine storage at best. Multiple readings, effort at grasping the meaning, much underlining, better yet, comments in the margin—the brain is alerted. And of course, the more time is spent, the more important.

When it comes to the genuinely experiential—say cooking or gardening—reading about it, even copying out a recipe, is as it were nothing, nothing at all, compared to actually doing the thing. Boy does that recipe expand, in my case into a veritable primordial jungle of experience, when I try to do what, for Brigitte, is effortless as she half listens to the pundits shouting at each other on the television all the while.

Sand You Were and Sand You Will Become

The clash of great collectives, thus cultures and civilizations, is a fascinating story with discernible laws of their own, but the subject interests at most one person in multiple thousands. We’re time-bound. Our time horizons are quite short, at most years, usually much shorter. Virtually nobody wonders how things will look a century, never mind three centuries hence.

I’m thinking now of the oil-rich Arab countries in the first instance. They belong to the Muslim culture; it is younger than the Western. It originated in the seventh, the Western (Christendom) in the forth century. I date the first to 632 when Muhammed died and the second to Constantine’s ascension or, more specifically, to the Edict of Milan in 312. Younger, older.

Cultural clashes make winners and losers, and to some extent the outcomes are predictable. A mature civilization encroaching on a relatively primitive culture spells the domination of the primitive by the mature—and often, when primitives are not very numerous (such was the case in Europe’s invasion of America) the virtual wipe-out of the primitive. When both cultures are in their growth phase, the older will more likely win if all else is equal. This has been the case in the clash between the West and the Muslim culture. Therefore it is we who established Israel in Palestine. It is we who’re “nation-building” in Iraq and in Afghanistan rather than, say, The Caliphate nation-building in Texas or in Florida.

The Romans expanded northward and subjected what today is France and England; they also warred against the Germans like we war against Afghanistan—not quite succeeding—and found little footing east of the Rhine.

When a decadent civilization is up against a younger one it is ultimately overrun, but the younger of the two will absorb the culture of those that it conquers. Thus Germanic tribes eventually overran Rome. Thus also the Mongols under Kublai Khan conquered China. The English conquered India, a decadent civilization, that had been overrun earlier by the Muslims. China was less decadent. It was somewhat “opened,” meaning to trade, by the Opium Wars, but it was never colonized like India; and now, rising, when it looks out onto the world, it is not through westernized eyes.

Now what lies ahead of us in the long run—and there is no need to worry, it won’t affect most people living now—is that the Western decadence will deepen just as fossil fuels run out. Muslim populations are already, as I write, interlacing western populations in Europe, including England; they are notorious for breeding, resisting integration, and heeding their mullahs. When the oil wells dry up, great transformations, and confusions, will preoccupy the “developed” world—most endangered by its vast reliance on fossil fuels. The Arab countries, where all of the world’s attention is now, will become what they have once been—mostly sand. And our vital interest in maintaining Israel, our de-facto 51st state, will become almost indiscernible; we’ll be too busy learning to farm and to weave. What will then become of that outpost of the Western world embedded there, by force, in the midst of the Muslim culture? Will Israel conquer the sand or will the sand conquer Israel?

Nonplussed by Nonplus

Many, many decades have passed, virtually my entire English-speaking life, and in that time I managed to resist looking up the word nonplussed when I came across it. Yes. And this despite the fact that context almost never revealed the meaning of the word to me. Yes again. Tried to guess it. The roots are not only visible but also immediately graspable by anyone with even just a sliver of Latin. Non is no, not; plus is more. So we get something like this: “She was nonplussed by the scene that now unfolded.” I substitute: “She was no-mored by the scene that now unfolded.” Does the meaning now emerge? Not for me. Does it mean that she was shocked enough to decide never again to visit this place? Does it mean that she’d seen enough and wished to see no more? In the past I’ve invariably turned my mental attention sharply aside, telling myself “bad English, worse Latin”—yes, even when Agatha Christie did it, as she occasionally did. And I like Christie a lot!

Well, today in a blog comment—there was the word again. But today the context was such I really did wish to understand what the commenter meant by that. So I broke down and looked it up.

Google sometimes produces a dictionary definition as the first response to a search, and it produced the following:

Well, here is a pretty kettle of fish. The two definitions of this word are contradictory—and neither has much or indeed anything to do with “no more.” Additional digging into this contradiction produced the following quote from the Oxford Dictionary people (link). They rank high in Word Land even if they are British and hence, well, a little down-the-nose when talking about our uses of the language:

In standard use nonplussed means ‘surprised and confused’, as in she was nonplussed at his eagerness to help out. In North American English a new use has developed in recent years, meaning ‘unperturbed’ — more or less the opposite of its traditional meaning — as in he was clearly trying to appear nonplussed. This new use probably arose on the assumption that non- was the normal negative prefix and must therefore have a negative meaning. It is not considered part of standard English.

Not part of “standard English”! Looks like we’ve done it again. The comment I read came from a relatively young American. So I still don’t really know what the comment meant. But, it seems to me, my old policy was a good one and needs only a small adjustment. When Agatha Christie uses the word, I can read the meaning as baffled. But when it comes from a young American, I must discretely look the other way.

Babylon 1?

Well, not quite. The object shown, however, might be labeled a Babylon 1 Prototype. The image is powerfully reminiscent of Babylon 5, once more proving that real scientific advances always begin in science fiction. This object, to be sure, is the design of an unmanned space probe, without an engine, yet, created by Icarus Interstellar, an organization of volunteer designers who, here, are building on the foundations laid by a British project (dating to the 1970s) called Daedalus. The image appeared in the New York Times Science Section today.

A Name Emerges

The nation’s editorial, headline, and slogan-forming powers overnight created a new name for what began as the Wall Street Protest. That name is OCCUPY, and the movement that it represents has now also been baptized the OCCUPY MOVEMENT. I sat down this morning wondering how many protests had taken place yesterday and began by using the search phrase “city protests.” Google then undertook to educate me. The search phrase of choice is, well, occupy. I put in that word and then a letter of the alphabet. Google now has a facility that displays a “News for occupy __________” headline followed by links. Thus:

Following this technique, I was able to build the following list:

The facility also provided content for some of the blank letters, but these were foreign or tongue in cheek. For E: Everything. For F: Frankfurt (Germany), G: Greece/Germany, I: Israel, J: Japan, Q: Qatar, R: Rome, T: Toronto, and for Y: Yourself. Only X and Z were left out in the dark. (I notice now, too late, that Vancouver really belongs in this paragraph, not in the table...)

It also appeared that the old designation, Silent Majority, has been renamed The 99 Percent. Visibly troubled spokes-types on the right tried their best to suggests that among the 99 Percent were people making as much as $500,000 a year and more, but the mood on TV news was not very open to such correctives and these were met with faint, dismissive, and sometimes contemptuous smiles.

That 99 Percent has legs, I tell you—in a season when numerical slogans like 9-9-9 have legs, in the age of Tweets, something shorter is even better. Now, it seems to me, the election campaign is turning interesting.

October Butterfly?

Have we mentioned Zeno yet? I think not. We’re almost too shy to confess that Black Swallowtail butterflies seem to have zeroed (or is it zenoed) in on us.

As October began unfolding, Brigitte discovered yet another tiny tiny late-season caterpillar on the last lonely dill plant out of doors. She promptly recreated the summer’s environment in our sun room again, and the little black thing, with but a token yellow spot to hint at future color-wonders, has meanwhile grown to full size. Let me just hide the dramas that soon unfurled around Zeno, as Brigitte named this creature. Someday we might tell you about Zeno’s altogether surprising ways of living, not least about his or her mysterious disappearances and such. We’ve almost solved the mystery, but there is still a bit of doubt left to overcome. For now, shyly, we present a picture of our October Butterfly to be. When? Maybe before November comes. Or maybe when the first snow falls.

Take Your Pick: Coffee or Gasoline

ABC news made me choke on my just-taken sip of coffee in a segment they based on a Guardian story. The YouTube version of the ABC’s coverage (short) is here. The Guardian story is here. Global Warming is now threatening future supplies of coffee beans, and the authoritative source of this is Jim Hanna, Starbucks own director of sustainability. Wow! Worse yet, cocoa beans are facing the same dread future. At the same time, the New York Times this morning wonders whatever happened to Global Warming concerns in the United States? It’s become a non-issue with both political parties. That’s going to change now! Time to wake up, folks. When push comes to shove, and a forced choice is presented to us—coffee or gasoline—I rather suspect that gasoline becomes a threatened species of a liquid. Add chocolate to into the mix and gasoline is doomed.

A Note on Technology

I did not undertake to play the book meme that went around a while ago (here and here), but my own habit is to read multiple books at the same time. Of those, very frequently, some will be re-reading books once more. Just recently I read again Arnold Toynbee’s Christianity Among the Religions of the World, a worthwhile venture at any time. It dates back to 1955 when Toynbee presented the contents of this book in a lecture series in the United States. What struck me this time, reading this book (the last time was in 1965) is Toynbee’s linkage of post-Christian western civilization with technology. The two are linked over and over again. The subject of technology is always present somewhere in my current thought. In fact I’d just read about the sputtering sort of appearance of it during the Hellenistic era in The Forgotten Revolution, on which more here. Years ago now, reading Lynn White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change, I’d come to the conclusion that—to the contrary of our common view—technology was present, changing, improving, and evolving as far back as we can see. And, indeed, as I was reading Toynbee I was also reading an essay by Sir Steven Runciman titled “Constantinople and Baghdad: Cultural Relations” in an essay collection titled Cultural Encounters. In that essay (here we go again!) there are several mentions of technological innovations, both on the Byzantine and on the Muslim side, dating back to the ninth, tenth, and later centuries, all of them considered pre-technological.

Why then, in these later centuries—say the eighteenth or nineteenth and thereafter—does technology suddenly begin to throw so great a shadow that an eminent historian chooses it as defining our times? The reason for that, it seems to me, is that the massive expansion of technology is very visible, its technical complexity and the engineering ingenuity is easily linked to advances in science (even though the two are not at all invariably linked), but the cause of this expansion is not. And the cause of that expansion has been the discovery and exploitation of fossil energy—coal and then petroleum.

The age of technology is also the age of metals. But humanity has worked metals as far back as the Bronze Age (3000 BC). Why the recent expansion of the use of metals beyond weaponry? Again. Same answer. Massive metalworking requires enormous amounts of cheap energy. We might say that technology, viewed over millennia, is the consequence of human ingenuity. Its expansion is the consequence of the Age of Oil. But this has important implications. We are approaching Fossil Sunset now. And while our technological optimism is high (but itself caused by the free wealth we discovered underground) when oil runs out and coal is used up rapidly—minimally within a hundred years—the remaining ways of generating energy will yield vastly less usable power. Hence, therefore, technology cannot be viewed as a permanent gain—except in the millennial view, thus at low levels of use. In the not too distant future, our technology will be better. Technology as always improved and will continue to do so. But it will no longer be pervasively present in everyday life and major re-adaptations are in the offing. The consoling thought is that we are extraordinarily adaptive, and when that time comes, those of us now who have an existential crisis when the Internet fails will no longer be alive.