Country Standings

Four years is a long time. Every four years, about this time in an Olympics, I get confused when I see the country rankings.  In today’s presentation, for example, the Netherlands and the United States both have 12 total medals, but Norway ranks higher than the US. In the same list Russia with 10 total medals is ranked below Switzerland with a mere 4. So then the next question is, how much weight does each medal have to produce this result.

It turns out that the various ranking schemes one can find on the Internet merely confuse the issue, as illustrated in the following spreadsheet layout:

Sochi Standings as of February 13, 2014
	Rank as				Points for each kind of medal
	Reported	Medal count			Gold	Silver	Bronze	Total	Total
		Gold	Silver	Bronze	4	2	1	Medals	Points
1	Germany	6	2	1	24	4	1	9	29
2	Canada	4	4	2	16	8	2	10	26
3	Norway	4	3	6	16	6	6	13	28
4	Netherlands	4	3	5	16	6	5	12	27
5	USA	4	2	6	16	4	6	12	26
6	Switzerland	3	0	1	12	0	1	4	13
7	Russia	2	4	4	8	8	4	10	20

I’m showing the countries in rank order as reported by Sochi Olympics itself. To these rankings I’ve applied one of the ranking schemes (4/2/1) in which gold is multiplied by 4, silver by 2, and bronze by 1. There are also other schemes, e.g., 3/2/1 and 5/3/1. Notice that, in the last column, Canada should be fourth, with the US, and Russia sixth. Indeed no matter what the ranking scheme, each produces the same results. 

Well, it turns out that no “weighting” is used at all. What actually happens, I discovered, is that the results are subjected to a sorting algorithm with five parameters. The data are sorted by (1) gold count, then (2) silver, then (3) bronze, then (4) total metals—and if two countries are identical at that point, the last ranking is (5) alphabetical. No “points” or weights need to be applied—and Excel does a right fine job.

Olympic Curlicues

Curling is my most favorite winter sport in the Olympics. I watch the sport in other years as well thanks to an accident. Both in Minneapolis and later in Detroit, we’ve had access to Canadian television, and Canada is the curling-Mecca of the world.

Now comes a story in the Wall Street Journal  titled “How Russia’s Plot for Mercenary Curlers Failed.” (Yes. Rather milking the WSJ for posts today, but it’s a special season.) Evidently, a while back, at the Vancouver games, Russia decided to achieve medal-status in curling at Sochi. Its powers-that-be decided to hire high-ranking players and coaches from Canada and to give the players Russian citizenship when the time came. Internal resistance in Russia foiled this attempt; the Russian curlers we shall see this year (if they managed to get into the run-offs) will have been born (rather than born-again) Russians.

This got me thinking. The first thought was that Russia shouldn’t have hired Canadians; instead it should’ve hired some modestly competent Chinese coach, and never mind the sport. The Chinese know exactly how to excel in any Olympic sport they target. They’ve got the largest possible population from which to choose potential talent, and Communism (of late jettisoned by Russia) still helps them persuade the talent to undergo the herculean labors required to succeed. This then led to the second thought. The most potent tool for achieving Olympic Victory is no doubt Communism—recall, as Brigitte suggested, the East Germans’ always stellar showings while they called their country the GDR. The “free market” model just doesn’t cut it—not in the minor sports. Something more muscular is needed, like Communism.

Today Norway leads with 11 medals and Russia has 7. One of Russia’s medals comes from a South Korean named Victor An, a born-again Rusky. We laughed: All these nation-states competing at Sochi. And one truly International Competitor: Russia. For all we know their best talent has been recruited from every country in the world.

HT to Brigitte for flagging this story for someone who rarely gets to the sports page even in Olympic times…

The P Stands for Peru, the O Comes from Bolivia

I knew about the nightshade plants, family of Solanaceae, while I was still a child. It was the time of the transition from World War II to peace. We were in Germany then, emigrants from Hungary. I was learning German, and the word, Nachtschatten Pflanzen, made some big impression on me. At a certain age one thinks about new words—and sometimes that habit becomes permanent. There was an oddity about shadows at night, something oddly eerie.

I’ve always associated nightshades with what we call Latin America today. It wasn’t until the Internet made quick research rather easy that I learned, in my seventies, that Solanacea are found on every continent except Antarctica. The South/Central American imprint in my mind comes from the fact that these plants reached their greatest diversity there. All those we naturally associate with the family—tobacco, tomato, potato, chili and bell peppers—originate from that realm. Of that list, certainly these days, tobacco alone has a sinister reputation, but for me they all spell delight. The peppers, I think, are not routinely so classified in the popular mind. And the other day we’d come to wonder whether the potato belonged there. I thought so, but asked how certain I was, I said that I was very strongly inclined to think so, but I wasn’t dead certain.

Well, the potato comes from Peru and extreme northwestern Bolivia, its domestication dating back a good while by any measure, between 8000 and 5000 BC. Another thing that happens over extended periods of time, in a human being, is that memory decays. It was only after learning this, again, that I remembered once studying the almost bewildering varieties of potatoes that had once flourished in South America. Of these the common types available at Kroger are the minutest tip of an iceberg—but represent the great mass of all potatoes grown.

Looked at through a geological lens, the potato has done rather well considering the remoteness of its arising at such great distances from the center of human population density. A snapshot taken  in 2011 indicates that China grew the most potatoes in that year, followed by India and Russia—representing 43 percent of the world’s crop, 374,400,000 metric tons. Pretty good showing for a plant growing in nightshade.

Genetically-Modified Lit

A story in the Wall Street Journal today tells me that Tor Books (part of Macmillan now) has established a collaboration with NASA to produce science fiction. To quote: “The partnership pairs up novelists with NASA scientists and engineers, who help writers develop scientifically plausible story lines and spot-check manuscripts for technical errors.”

“Aha,” I thought. “Genetic modification in literature has now reached visibility.” Such things, of course, go back a long time. Writers who produce books based on publishers’ tightly written formulae are as old as certain popular romance fiction series. I recall once seeing very elaborate specifications—up to some 12 or more points described as “must” contents—for each of some five different sub-categories of romance fiction by one publisher. The process also began in science fiction much earlier. At least twenty years ago, one publisher approached me to write sci-fi novels for them based on specific content. I turned them down.

Consider the parallels. Literary talent is clearly in-born, present early. It is shaped by the person’s family and life experiences and indirectly by his or her times and circumstances. The works produced echo their producers and their times. Now to modify this natural talent from the outside artificially so that it will produce a uniform “fruit” matched to “market demand” in look, feel, sound, and smell is quite the same thing as genetically modifying all manner of agricultural products so that they will appeal to the Kroger and Safeway shopper instantly. The taste is sometimes off. Just recently Brigitte said something rather startling—quite spontaneously. She was eating an oddly shaped strawberry and said: “Amazing, actually. It almost tastes like a strawberry.”

Almost. Yes. Almost.

Full disclosure. Long ago Tor turned down my Ghulf Genes (the novel), despite efforts by my agent to get it read. I never imagined that, at some future time, I might be glad that they did.

The Two Footprints of the Information Age

At a DSO concert held at a nearby church a short while back, we sat (as usually) in the front row of a high balcony, just above the orchestra. That DSO stands for the Detroit  Symphony Orchestra. From our high perch we could easily survey the largely elderly crowd of music lovers—but here and there some young people too. I noticed that an elderly gent in the audience, waiting for the performance to begin, was operating a laptop computer. This made me curious. A More careful surveying revealed several others looking at pads and a larger number, here and there, were staring at or texting on smartphones.

This came to mind again yesterday when one of our morning conversations ranged over that topic so central to the elderly, be they Brigitte and me or, say, Miss Marple musing in Agatha Christie’s imagination.

I myself do not remember a time “before the telephone,” but you had to be a doctor to have one in the house. My grandfather was one—and I clearly remember that it once rang, and, for a joke, I got to go into a dark hallway and answer it. My memory is that of a strange sound coming from the black thing I was almost too little to hold—and its earpiece was several times the size of my ear. Buzzing and echo and what seemed to be a voice…

Remembering such things, we were soon making lists of all the extensive branchings of telephone and radio—of communications generally—that had sprouted since. Eventually we started toting up the costs of these activities tools and services too: cable and internet, computers and software, some of that software purchased yearly, like Norton’s antivirus immunization shots, cell phones and the disappearance of telephone boxes at Kroger and Safeway where, once, I used to call home for updates of my shopping list; indeed I used to head out making sure I had some quarters; these days I carry a Verizon phone with its own contract and regular monthly charges. But I digress. Part of that list includes movie rentals and DVR machines (which replaced the tape players) and a gaggle or pride or expense (not a bad generic for the category) of peripherals, cables, disk backups, portable hard drives smaller than my thumb, and a basement full of fossils filling wire baskets and boxes—obsolete electronics one simply hates to dump.

I got to wondering how much we actually spent on things like that. It seemed to me we spent a lot. And from that feeling comes my headline today. The communications age has two footprints. One is huge and one is relatively small. Turns out that I was confusing one with the other.

The large footprint comes from the importance communications services represent—and especially in the life of the elderly—and of the young. The failure of the internet is emotionally almost as bad as losing power; when the DVR misbehaves, somebody here makes energetic moves to restore the status quo, practiced in the art of applying the electronic equivalent of a Heimlich maneuver; it’s that important. Indeed it is important enough so that our collections-challenged but much loved little library is annually devoting more and more space to computers for patrons to use—instead of preparing to serve us with more words on paper when the terrorists finally take away our dreamtime.

Now the small footprint of the communications age turns out to be its total cost. Data on expenditures for internet, cable, cell phone services, movies, and such are strewn about the web; and they do tend to converge on a certain number but obviously leave much of the actual cost out. Using such methods (our own numbers are much higher), one sees a value of approximately $125 per month. I decided to look at national statistics, available from the Census Bureau’s Consumer Expenditure survey, to get a more general view. It turns out that, in 2012, the average household expenditure on communications (equipment and services both) comes to $185 per month; Canada, by the way, reports exactly the same figure collected the same way. Of this total $103 are accounted for by telephone, $82 by a category called Audio and Visual Equipment and Services. In 1989, the total was $83 per month (telephone $47, A/V $36). More to the point here is the percent such numbers represent to total household income. That percentage is the “footprint.”

It turns out that in 2012 the average annual gross household income was $65,596—and the Information Age claimed a mere 3.38 percent of that. That footprint was smaller in 1989—but not by much: 3.18 percent.

Huge impact on lifestyle, a quite small one on income. Everything depends on point of view.

Ode to an Ad

We found an ad that shows a farmer

Surveying vast worlds of green.

Far away a lowly mountain

Bows before his stern, commanding

Gaze. All’s in order, all’s control

Here, endless rows and rows and rows

Of green extend out to a vague,

A dim horizon. This isn’t nature,

It’s something more, a kind of manmade

Screen where every gene is modified

And only bits of puffy cloud

Exhibit in a timid and thus halting

Manner a touch of spontaneity.

The theme is “How the world advances,”

 (To where, one wonders, to what end?)

The way has naught to do with

Fertilizers, genetic tricks

Or weed control—though such are quite

Visible here. Rather, to our

Surprise, the deeper secret of

Control, the right to gaze emperor-like

Over a great domain, lies in tight reins

Held in firm hands over Invisibles

Like price of crops, the weather, and

The satanic dance of interest rates—

All achieved by riding on a relatively

Newly-crafted magic carpet—

Trading on the derivatives market.

Shrinking Recess, Thinning PE

Sometimes all the news that’s fit to air can give one a rude shock. News on PBS (I think) the other day informed us that Recess is shrinking in elementary schools and so is physical education (PE); in many districts PE has been eliminated outright. Here is a link to a presentation by the Center of Public Education (CPE) on this subject. Why is this happening? Well, more time is needed for English/Language Arts and Math (presumably to meet testing requirements) and the time must come from the presumably useless categories—or the expensive ones. PE is expensive and, in these days of seemingly skyrocketing bullying, Recess must be supervised. What shrinks or thins will disappear.

Per CPE’s article, in the 2001-2008 period 20 percent of school districts (translates into 1 in 5) have reduces recess; 9 percent of districts have reduced PE.

Madness—in the form epidemics of experimentation—has long plagued education. Is this another enzyme on the loose? Or does this one come from “government’s too big, so let’s cut out the basics.”

So what is growing? Childhood obesity.

The Right Mix

One of the maddening aspects of human experience is that no belief system rooted in a single, clear concept ever works effectively—but that the “clear concept” nevertheless has genuine value. An example of this is liberty and the various doctrines that it has engendered beginning with the Enlightenment: laissez-faire, human rights, libertarianism, and the like. Evidently, the word “libertarian” was initially used in 1789 by William Belsham, an English political thinker. He opposed those who held a “necessitarian” view.” This contrast sums up the whole problem: human’s have free will while, simultaneously, we have to live in the realm of necessity. We can no more advocate a purely libertarian approach to ordinary life than we can support, philosophically or otherwise, a purely deterministic view. In both cases either one will immediately energize its opposite. Every movement of our body involves the flexion of some and the extension of other muscles. Maddening. But when it comes to muscles, we do not split into camps of flexarians and extensionists. We happily shovel snow, go up and down the stairs, and stir the tea using both in harmony.

Curiously libertarianism, unfolding in various ways, not least into democracy, developed at the same time as modern science—both born of the same rationalism. But science has fathered scientism, which is pure determinism; in that view it swallows free will, which becomes an illusory epi-phenomenon: humans are just puppets pulled by the springs of stimulus and response.

The unavoidable data of reality, which contain both real freedom and undeniable necessity produce the maddening situation in which keeping it simple renders one stupid. Laissez-faire worked reasonably well when society was still firmly anchored in the traditional synthesis of Christendom. As that creative impulse cooled, monarchy added more and more necessities to those supplied abundantly by nature—and these had to be shaken off. But in our day the traditional synthesis has decayed to such an extent that chaos grows all around us and yet more liberation seems downright crazy. I need not go far for an example. I just ponder watching a three-minute part of the recent Superbowl half-time show.

Upbraiding Modernity--Then

Thou has traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school; and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be u’sd, and, contrary to the King, his crown, and dignity, thou hast built a paper-mill.

The speaker here is Jack Cade, a rebel, addressing one Lord Say. The work is Shakespeare’s King Henry the Sixth, Part II, Act 4, Scene VII. The play is thought to have been written in 1591. King Henry VI lived his forty-nine years on earth between 1421 and 1471.

The context of this entry. I used a quote from Christina Rossetti in the last post then followed that up by reading other Rossetti snippets to Brigitte. We got to talking about linguistic changes between the nineteenth century (Rossetti’s years were 1830-1894) and today. She sounds quite modern. We went on then, armed with Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, to see how much had changed since the sixteenth century. And Mr. Cade’s little railing just happened to come up.

We both laughed. Ah yes. Arsen’s endless railings about Modernity are a mere echo of what came naturally to Shakespeare—looking back about a century himself. “You must put that up,” said my Editor in Chief—just seconds before the same thought would have occurred to me too. But then, you see, she is fast!

Snow on Snow

Snow had fallen, snow on snow,

Snow on snow,

In the bleak midwinter,

Long ago.

  [Christina Georgina Rossetti, A Christmas Carol]

Is one’s sense of extreme weather a function of age? Does frequent and massive snowfall produce dreads in men with creaky joints as shoveling is yet again ahead? So it seemed this morning. Snow on snow today, but in the here and now, and in such dense veils that I could barely make out the garage this morning at eight. It’s all way too much, I thought this morning. The “too much” included the contents of the Wall Street Journal; I only found it after groping about in the snow; it had been buried on our front step and well enough so that even its shape had been obscured. My rational self, which always only echoes the patterns of the past, put a sarcastic stop to such gloomy reflections. “Look it up,” it said. “I bet it’s not even a record-setting season.” So I did.

Well, it turns out, that snow on snow this year is certainly record-breaking. I looked up snow fall in December and January for 2011-12, 2012-13, and 2013-14. Two years ago we had 15 inches of snow in these two months, a year ago 19.4 inches, and this year 56.5 inches (link). These numbers apply to the Detroit Metro area generally; we know from Monique that results were even more extreme on the other side of the Metro.

For once the rational self was wrong—and Brigitte as usually right. Therefore writing about snow seems justified by the actual results out there, carefully measured by the Weather System.

Flowers Are Bought

On this day flowers are bought. My phrasing, obviously, is up-to-the-minute modern. It was in one of Theodore Dalrymple’s fascinating if also depressing books that we first encountered this sort of “objective” phrasing—when, writing about some man who had stabbed some relative,  Dalrymple quoted the man as saying that “The knife went in.” Well, on this day flowers were bought, and the very distant phrasing arises from my overhearing a conversation between wife Brigitte and daughter Michelle. They were discussing the role of birthdays in the life of women, and Michelle suggested that “We ought to return to the old days—when people didn’t know how old they really were. I think it should start after you turn thirty.” Flowers were bought because a recurrence in time took place. Whose it was will remain a secret, and the number of the recurrence is safe with me.

Flowers were bought because, on this occurrence, the retail system user has inexplicable urges to hasten the arrival of Spring. But the flowers were bought in the middle of a Winter Weather Advisory, which means that the snow was coming down and, once down, was piling up—so much snow the driver barely saw that the lights were blinking yellow, which they do on Saturdays on the thoroughfare that got labeled Moross.

There are no agents in this modern world. Cyclamens do not know their own name. No one waters them, but the water sprinkles down.

Other Sports

We’re now on the eve, almost, of the nation’s biggest sports event, the Superbowl. By tradition we number these in the Roman style—hence once a year I have to spend five minutes figuring out what structures like XLVIII mean. That comes to 48. (Maddening, really, these traditional ways of doing things. Logically XL should either mean 500 or 60—not 40, but I digress.)

The other day some announcement alerted us to the growing popularity of soccer among American women and girls, and we got to talking about the “other sports.” This then led to wondering what the big traditional sports of India and China might once have been. And had they survived? These days getting a quick look at such things is easy. What became clear is that among individual sports for males, wrestling is universal, for females dancing in some form certainly is. Among team sports what we call soccer had as big a footprint in China in ancient times as it now has in the Western world; the U.S. is the only major country that treats “football” with benign neglect. The Chinese cuju goes back to the second or third centuries BC—so that is pretty old. After a while we also remembered that Native Americans had also had a sport; it was (and is) played with a ball moved about by using a basket mounted on the end of a stick. I describe the game that way because, for the life of us, we couldn’t think of the sport’s name.

We couldn’t think of it despite the fact that the sport is played in Spring and Fall almost daily at the two middle-schools we routinely drive past—by girls as well as boys. Off I went to discover the name; as I was returning, Brigitte was calling ahead. Her memory had produced it: Lacrosse. “No wonder we couldn’t think of it,” I said. “It has a French name.” Yes. Canadians named the game, jeu de la crosse, crosse here meaning “a crooked stick.” The Ojibwa called it baaga’adowe…

Well, today—here is that vast weather of endless associations swirling in the collective mental air—came a story in the Wall Street Journal titled “Team Sports Don’t Make The Cut With American Kids.” The upshot of this story is that of six popular sports played by youths up to age 18, four have lost participation between 2008 and 2012: tackle football, soccer, baseball, and basketball; basketball is the biggest loser, having lost 8.3 percent of participation. Two sports have gained following: ice hockey, 64 percent, and lacrosse—a stunning 158.3 percent.

Will such shifts in popularity have any impact on the Superbowl? Of course not. Or, come to think of it, maybe. Superbowl Sunday is also undergoing transformations. Every year it has less and less to do with football and is more and more becoming the greatest religious holiday of Modernity, the Day of Advertising.

My images come from Wikipedia here and here. The first shows a Chinese drawing from the fifteenth century, the second the 2005 NCAA Women’s Lacrosse Championship.

Black Hole Denial Revisited

A while back (December 2011), I had a post entitled “Flirting With Black Hole Denial” (link). It surprised me, therefore, that Stephen Hawking appears to have doubts of his own, the doubts released January 22, 2014. Hawking, of course, is a top-ranked physicist and foremost student of black holes. The story is here. In his paper he says: “There are no black holes—in the sense from which light can’t escape to infinity.” His conclusion is based on the apparent conflict between quantum mechanics and relativity. He is quoted as saying to CBC News: “The conflict is that with quantum mechanics, you’re never destroying information. If information gets completely lost and falls into a black hole, there’s no way of reversing this. So either Einstein’s theory of relativity is incomplete, or quantum mechanics is incomplete.”  It will be fun to watch this one evolving over time.

What’s likely to fall into the devouring jaws of Doubt next? Dark matter perhaps? (link).

Full Moon Soon

For voluntary lunatics like us, 2014 begins auspiciously. The month began with a new moon on the 1st and will end with another new moon tomorrow on the 31st of January too. I stress that word, new, because, well, it will also be a full moon tomorrow; here is why.

What with the snow and cold—and hearing about Atlanta (Atlanta!??!) being paralyzed by ice—I might have overlooked this fact, distracted by the immediately here and now. But by happenstance I was reading one of Stephen Jay Gould’s books of essays, Eight Little Piggies, in which he reminded me that until 1959 of the current era no humans could possibly imagine the backside of the moon. In that year the Soviet Luna 3 probe photographed the far side; in 1968 Apollo 8 orbited the moon; hence Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders were the first three humans to see that side of the moon with their own eyes.

Now it so happens that when the Moon is New for us, it is Full Moon on the other side, on the one we sometimes refer to as the dark side of the moon. We would, of course, thus designated it; we are always seeing things from our peculiar perspective. I found a full image of that side on Wikipedia here—then got to wondering how come the moon persists in staring at us with one of its faces only.

The name of the explanation is synchronous rotation, also called tidal locking (a good visual example is here). The moon rotates around its own axis as it simultaneously rotates the earth. But its own rotation takes exactly the same amount of time as its circuit of the earth. Therefore one half of it is always oriented to our planet. The deeper explanation (hidden in that name, tidal locking, is that the earth’s gravitational force deforms the moon slightly, which aids and abets the moon’s rotational behavior.

What we see is what we get. But what we see depends on where we are.

Pete Seeger

It was some time in 1967 that we crossed the Iron Curtain as a family to visit members of our family whom World War II had left behind the Wall. This was one of the most memorable trips we’ve ever taken—and it so happened that we “encountered” Pete Seeger there for the first time, at least consciously. Seeger was 48 that year and had already achieved worldwide fame; without doubt we’d heard many of his songs already, but not quite consciously.

During that trip I took part of a morning to visit a bookstore in the town of Weissenfels (around 40,000). The store, to my amazement, featured literally scores of American writers of a left-leaning persuasion, all in translation—so much so that I needed the clerk’s help to find a book actually written by an honest-to-God East Germany author. Having found that, I chanced across a large American album. It was Pete Seeger’s “We Shall Overcome,” first published in 1966. I bought it right then and there.

What we did not know, when visiting there, was that Pete Seeger had performed in East Berlin early in January of 1967—which, perhaps, explains why his record would have been selling in Weissenfels. At any rate, that album became our introduction to this quite phenomenal figure in popular culture and, in our hearts, a close and valued friend. Later on, we once actually heard him perform in an outdoor venue somewhere in the Washington, DC area—and by that time our girls were lustily singing right along with him, having learned all the word from that East German album.

Who killed Norma Jean?

I, said the City, as a civic duty,

I killed Norma Jean.

Who saw her die?

I, said the Night, and a bedroom light,

We saw her die.

  [Norman Rostan, “Who Killed Norma Jean”]

Now Pete Seeger passes too—and time will silt him over, as it has silted over his album, which is around here somewhere, fossilizing slowly without a machine any longer available to play it. He died last Monday—and is probably tuning up his banjo somewhere beyond the Borderzone.

Dig Down to the Roots

A very thoughtful column by David Brooks in the New York Times today (“Alone, Yet Not Alone”) caught our eyes this morning. Its thematic is in the second paragraph:

There is a gap between the way many believers experience faith and the way that faith is presented to the world.

The first paragraph presents the problem:

There is a vein of hostility against orthodox religious believers in America today, especially among the young. When secular or mostly secular people are asked to give their impression of the devoutly faithful, the words that come up commonly include “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” “old fashioned” and “out of touch.”

The column is well worth reading in full—and should be relatively easy to get on-line even by those who are not subscribers to the paper. It illustrates a general problem reaching far beyond its contrast between religious and secularist behavior. Prejudices arise when people misinterpret what they do not understand and have never experienced. Every human avocation will have its behavioral counterparts; if only the behavior is seen, and the motivation behind it is hidden from view—as internal experiences will inevitably be—superficial appearances will be misread by the uninformed.

Misreading behavior, of course, can also be found among believers—who fail to cut the secularists slack. Pope Francis has been pointing that out in recent times. The story also reminded me of a Sufi snippet I read somewhere in the work of Idries Shah. It concerns a Sufi teacher called Abdul Qasim Gurgani. Eager want-to-be disciples surrounded him and once pestered him about his humility. He said: “My humility which you mention is not there for you to be impressed by it. It is there for its own reason.”

Playing Pretend

Tonight is the State of the Union address. In our day, as usually, the media were projecting the main thrust of it days ahead of time. We were told that President Obama, whose ability to govern has been neutralized by the paralysis of the legislative branch, will announce initiatives in 2014 he is able to carry out without legislative backing. Thus he will act administratively.  

But it is well to remind ourselves that important actions always involve some kind of compelling force—and the expenditure of money. All matters left to the President’s sole discretion tend to be of a minor nature. The Constitution, Article II, Section 2, grants him command over the military—but not declaration of war. He may also “require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in cases of Impeachment.” He “shall [also] have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.” This part of Section 2, however, is now being reviewed by the Supreme Court which will decide “what is is,” i.e. what “the Recess of the Senate” actually means—seeing that the Senate has been playing games and pretends to be in session when it actually is not. Finally, in Section 3, the following words appear: “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” What little freedom the President possesses, administratively, lies in that phrase. When Congress has not been meticulously detailed in specifying exactly what the President has to do, the President is free to interpret the vagueness. Let us say that some law requires that regulations be issued on, say, toxic gas emissions. In that case, up to a point, it is up to the President to define what “toxic” means and then to lay down in detail how that gas is to be regulated.

Congress sometimes, pretending to be regulating something, to satisfy a noisy constituency, will pass a law requiring that the President shall issue regulations that have no real power. Such was the case in the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) a long time ago (1976). It demanded that the EPA promulgate “recommended guidelines” for the disposal of solid waste. These guidelines had no teeth. Nonetheless, they were part of the Act. I was then at EPA. We largely ignored this requirement of the RCRA. The process for promulgating “guidelines” was just as lengthy and onerous as issuing real “regulations.” It took months of work, publication in the Federal Register, public meetings, publication of comments, and a long process of answering each comment. So we “neglected” these guidelines until we were sued by a consortium of environmental activists.

These activists, in turn, sued not because they wanted guidelines but because they wanted regulations. But until the guidelines were available, they could not pressure Congress to revise the RCRA to turn them into regulations. This, you might say, is the “glory of democracy” up close and personal. Despite our vast effort to publish guidelines, no regulations ever followed—because Congress didn’t want to do it.

It the President can be sued because he doesn’t do something, he can be (and very often is) sued because he does. This is happening in countless cases every year. The processes drag on and on. Their chief merit, it seems to me, is job-creation, creating jobs for lawyers. But, in these latter days, even that seems to be flagging. Just the other day I saw a story about graduating lawyers having problems finding actual jobs…

The President’s intention, therefore, to use his oh so limited administrative powers to lift employment, curb poverty, implement health care, and to solve the immigration problem will, if minorly successful, no doubt still be under litigation after he has retired and Hawaii is building the Obama Presidential Library.

Milkweed in Winter

So this has been a rather snowy winter around here. Genuine snow-falls almost daily. Looking out the window of our sunroom yesterday it seemed to me that our skeletal milkweed had suddenly bloomed again. For images of milkweed in bloom, we have to go back a ways to October (link).

A $46 Million Minus Sign

In the Wall Street Journal this morning comes an article titled “New Masters of the Art Universe.” Hedge fund managers are evidently spending their small change on buying expensive art and then—they can’t really help it, it’s a reflex with them—trading these art works again. I was just scanning the story sort of when I saw one purchase that made me laugh spontaneously. One no doubt famous trader had spent $46 million on a painting simply known as Rothko’s “No. 11 (Untitled).” I am bringing a copy of it here—not, mind you, a photograph. I dare not reproduce the actual image lest I be sued for copyright infringement. I made it myself using the Paint program Microsoft conveniently supplies with my Vista operating system.

Moments later Brigitte was laughing with me. Now, of course, ours is but a view from one perspective. We view art as imagery. And yes. Rothko’s total oeuvre, to give it the appropriate description, is mostly minus signs in different colors, but his pronounced preference is for shades of red and orange. The few blue-tinted minus signs don’t look at home at all. Green is absent, except in the pocket of Rothko buyers. The more comprehensive view point, in which “art as image” is only a slice, includes vast ranges of human perception based on trading value, money, shorting and longing any kind of saleable object. And that’s where our Masters of the Art Universe are busy vying with one another for reflected glory. 

Iconotropy

The subject arose—these things happen seemingly by chance, like seeing a cardinal appear on a snow-covered branch in January—why it was that God forbade the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge to a certain pair in Paradise…and how come it was the woman who reached for the fruit and not the man—whereas it is only too well known that in such cases the woman would have been more passively cautious whereas the man, typically of  men, would have grabbed the apple first, even priding himself of able to climb the tree if so required.

Well, never mind. The discussion, as it evolved, brought back memories of Robert Graves’ call it essentially unreadable book, unreadable to an amateur, like me, who knows no Latin and even less Greek really—The White Goddess. In that book Graves coins the word used in my title, a word that the Wiktionary (here) defines as follows:

The accidental or deliberate misinterpretation by one culture of the icons or myths of an earlier one, especially so as to bring them into accord with those of the later one.

Graves held that images, usually carved or rendered as mosaics, created in the Age of Matriarchy were later reinterpreted in such a manner as to conform to the ideology of the Age of Patriarchy that rose to dominance later. Literally, the word means “image-turning” in English.

Graves provides many examples of such reinterpretation, but one of these will do. Take the tale of Paris, the Trojan, who, given an apple by Hermes at Zeus’ institagion, was to decide which of three goddesses (Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite) was the most beautiful. Paris chose Aphrodite and, by this decision, caused the later eruption of the Trojan war as the slighted goddesses decided to retaliate. This tale, of course, is an extreme abbreviation.

Graves argued that the tale was formed from icon created in the matriarchal age in which the Tripple Goddess is shown; and one of them is handing an apple, sacred to the Goddess, to a shepherd. Graves emphasizes that the three are not competitors but persons of a single being. Obviously the image shows the hand-off of an apple: a man’s hand, a woman’s, both touching the apple in the act—but nothing showing who is giving to whom. In one tradition the power of blessing—with the sacred apple—is that of the feminine. In the other, the power is with the male.

Similarly, the same icon is the source of the tale in Genesis in which woman (Graves calls Eve “the Mother of all Living”) gives an apple to Adam. But here the female’s action is interpreted as disobedience of the male figure of God the Father. And Graves saw this as an instance of iconotropy.

Quite amazing things turn up when the rare bird lands. And sometimes the answer is very obscure indeed if one’s rather random walk through literature, sacred and heretical, produces words no one ever uses anymore.

DIA: Elusive Coherence

We live in a catch-as-catch can world. On two earlier occasions I’ve mentioned the Detroit Institute of the Arts (DIA) (link, link). It has the misfortune, now that Detroit is in bankruptcy, of being municipally owned. To satisfy the city’s $18 billion in debt, the holdings of the DIA, valued at around $1 billion, may be sold. The picture here, however, is more complicated than would appear. We all think of the DIA as the museum. But things are otherwise.

The DIA, per its own June 30, 2013 financial report, is a 501(c)(3) not-for profit corporation. The first of its several purposes is to “Assist the Arts Commission of the city of Detroit (the City) with the operation of the Museum under contract with the City.” In other words, the DIA does not own most of the art the DIA shows; the City does. The same report also states explicitly that “the City holds legal title to certain museum assets, including artwork.” Evidently that title is to most of the DIA’s holdings; the DIA’s financial report itself only shows total net assets of $176 million. Furthermore, according to news reports, DIA may have to sell art up to a maximum of $500 million to satisfy the City’s bankruptcy. Concerning its holdings of art, the DIA has this to say in its financial report:

In conformity with allowable museum financial statement presentation practice, the value of the art collection is excluded from the statements of financial position. Title to art objects purchased by or donated to the DIA is in  the name of the City absent contrary restrictions imposed by a donor. Such art is accessioned to the permanent collecton of the museum upon approval of the Board of the Arts Commission of the City.

The report also states that the DIA (read the City) received donated art valued at $2.1 million in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2013—but that that sum (unaudited) does not appear in the financial report. The City of Detroit—not the DIA—also owns the building and land occupied by the DIA.

Now the state, in the person of the Attorney General of the State of Michigan, has issued a Formal Opinion (No. 7272, dated June 13, 2013. It assets that “The art collection of The Detroit Institute of Arts is held by the City of Detroit in charitable trust for the people of Michigan, and no piece in the collection may thus be sold, conveyed, or transferred to satisfy City debts or obligations.”

Which makes me wonder whether or not such a Formal Opinion may be overturned in the courts. Or is that the final word on the matter? If so, why is that not common knowledge?

I looked up this much of the background because a cabal of foundations, lead by the Ford Foundation, has offered the DIA $300 million to be used to satisfy some, at least, of the City’s underfunding of its pensions. The total of those underfunded pensions is $3.5 billion; therefore the $300 million is but a drop in the bucket. And yet—despite that—the New York Times informs me that the DIA may still have to cough up $500 million.

It will work out somehow. But my sense of outrageous disorder in the world keeps being confirmed. And having watched a dreadful story on PBS last night, it makes me wonder how far $300 million might go toward eradicating cholera in Haiti, evidently planted there by UN soldiers sent to keep order in that devastated region. Especially if, despite $300 million, the DIA still has to sacrifice its Van Gough and such.

Tracing Kinds of Quince

The season of remembering is here—remembering the sunny days of Spring and Summer, remembering the deeper past—and such memories sometimes join. ‘Tis the season, after all, when gardeners curl up with seed catalogs.

Brigitte was looking out at the now, temporarily, melting snow and noted that our lilac bush has more than doubled in height and width since its acquisition three years ago. Then she added mournfully: “But we’ve yet to see any quince on our quince bush.” That bush joined our garden two years ago.

Brigitte’s statement then constellated—as mention of quince always does—an early period in my life, circa 1942, the year I first went to school. That happened in a small city in Hungary, Cegléd, these days with a population of 38,000. My father was briefly stationed there as a soldier. We lived in a palatial mansion then, complete with servants’ wing and two floors with exceedingly high ceilings. The pile was heated by huge stoves—which were so expensive to feed with wood that in the single winter we spent there, most of the house was shut down. And while we had stables accommodating four horses at need, a huge and several formal gardens, the toilet was out of doors—which lent winter yet other charms. But one of the charms of this place was quince. We had at least four large quince trees; they produced abundant and large fruit. Of Cegléd I remember the swimming pool we walked to—very modern—the school I attended, which was five grades in one small room, each grade with a single bench on which we sat. There were five of us first graders and I sat in the middle of the first bench. Why so small? In a moment. I also remember the main shopping street, quite near us, where I first noticed with childish wonder that women wore very high heels.

Now the quince we have—along with Monique and Theresa, one of Monique’s neighbors (which also inspired us to buy quince bushes)—turn out to be flowering quince, formally Chaenomeles speciosa. This species produces fruit similar to but somewhat smaller than the quince in Cegléd. Speciosa, at maximum height, is about 3 meters; the fruit is dark yellow. The species that grew, and presumably still grows in Cegléd is Cydonia oblonga; it is a tree that, at maximum, reaches 8 meters into the air; its fruit is much larger, pear-shaped, and green to light yellow; a tree will typically produce about 300 pounds of fruit in a season. For these reasons, I’ve wondered, since getting our shrub, if they are really closely related. It turns out that they are: Same family (Rosaceae), same tribe (Maleae), same subtribe (Malinae), and same subfamily (Amygdaloideae). They differ in genus (Chaenomeles vs. Cydonia) and therefore also at the species level.

Cegléd had a very rural feel to it in my early years; it has since developed a good deal. It appears to have been a strongly protestant city; its largest church is also the largest Calvinist church in all of Hungary; Protestantism, in Cegléd has a very big footprint, not least several huge Lutheran and another large Calvinist church. For this reason, perhaps, my father arranged for me to attend a Catholic school—and one within walking distance. Hence the small classes—and five grades taught simultaneously by a single teacher; he would spend about five minutes on one grade then shift to the next—while those left behind had some task to perform…

Reminiscing in old age in the Age of Information is often quite an active business. Thus helped by Google Maps I was rapidly able to locate the swimming pool where we had spent many sunny afternoons—and, remembering the streets we walked to get there and to get back, I also managed, more or less accurately, I believe, to vaguely to locate where we had lived. To give a feel for the look of the place, I reproduce here a photograph taken by one Károly Héda titled “View from Eötvös Square” (link). The picture is recent, but it did really look like that once. The church in the distance is Holy Cross, so Catholicism is present. But for emphasis I am showing, in the second image, the Calvinist Great Church, as it is known, of Cegléd, from Wikipedia (link).

So who was Eötvös? As best I can discover, he was probably Loránd Eötvös (1848-1919), a well-known Hungarian physicist and the inventor of the torsion pendulum used in clocks; that process uses a heavy cylindrical weight, suspended on a spring, to provide the action of a pendulum. In my search I also discovered another Péter Eötvös (born 1944) who is a well-known composer and conductor. But the square, I think, belongs to Physics.

Now back to quince again. I show here the fruit, first, of the quince tree and, next, of the quince shrub. For a look at our own shrub, I suggest you check out this earlier post (link).

Amazing, really, the paths that memory produces—much like that of a donkey going from one cactus to the next. And elaborating in detail on all the little seeds one finds in memory’s catalogue, like that torsion pendulum for instance, would easily produce a volume. But a post, today, must suffice.

Symbolic Sugar

The term came up because I used one of those punches intended primarily for punching holes through paper—so that sheets may be placed in a three-ring notebook. The device is quite good for punching holes through belts as well. Quite contrary to what I see when I issue from the shower, I seem to be getting thinner; therefore my belt must be tightened at intervals. Well, the punch had been used, since the last time, for its intended purpose, and as I cleaned out its hollow tube, bits of round papers fell out as well. “Look, confetti,” Brigitte said. And then she wondered what the word meant.

Well, it comes from a Latin word meaning “to make with,” therefore the word “ingredients” is being understood. Comfacere. The word came to be associated with light pastry and candy later. The m in com got changed to an n. Our word “confection” comes from it. In Italian this turned into confetti—and originally meant small candy thrown into crowds at festivals.

Later on it turned out that it’s a lot cheaper to toss tiny bits of paper than heavier candy. A tightening of belts, perhaps? So there you are. When they rain confetti on us, we are receiving symbolic sugar—and that’s good for an attractively low Body Mass Index. Mine is almost normal; not quite, but almost.

For Christie’s Sake!!

It strikes me as quite implausible to imagine that people delayed an hour or more because a bridge is closed would reason as follows:  “This must be my Mayor’s fault, a Democrat, who failed to endorse my Governor, a Republican. And this is what he gets. Therefore I will not ever vote for my Mayor again.” If traffic delays produced such thought, we would have recall elections all over the country every month, and nothing would get done. Come to think of it, nothing is betting done anyway.

Here is a popular Governor. His chances to run for president are now totally ruined? I’m made to think so by a press possessing the brain-size of sharks. (We learned yesterday that sharks have quite minute brains.) In 2016, yet. When I let my mind roam over attractive candidates for president, Christie does come to mind, along with Jerry Brown of California—and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg. With a Democratic Congress behind her, Hillary Clinton, seems to me, would also make a formidable president, but that proviso makes such an outcome unlikely. Furthermore, while certainly a wild man, but in an attractive way, Christie might just be taken at his word. He did not cause that traffic jam.

Shaking my head, moving my hands wildly. The New York Times again tells me that our Visa Card is unresponsive. We may be denied such news in the future unless we act with alacrity. Might be a good idea to let the paper lapse…

Converging Echoes

A splendid episode of Nature on PBS last night brought us the latest news, you might say, of the Lipizzaners of Austria: “Legendary White Stallions.” The subject is close to home because, as I’ve had occasion to report quite a while back now (link), my Father was a dedicated patron and practitioner of dressage, the peak, you might say, of equestrian pursuits. Yesterday’s program (a rerun, I can’t find when it first aired) centered on the horses, their breeding, training, and ultimate retirement. This is a highly traditional activity, evidently very well funded, and seems to preserve, but in a fully-alive version, something grand that, surely even when it began, in 1565, in Vienna, would have seemed as strange and wonderful as it still appears to us today. This, then, is one of the echoes from the past I want to note.

The other begins with the program itself, Nature. Nature is the production of THIRTEEN, the New York-based PBS station. A lonely tree in what appears to be a desert-like region is its signature. I forget how this linkage got established, but I can never see that picture without immediately recalling a mini-series of the 1980s called The Flame Trees of Thika—indeed thinking, when I see it, that Nature’s logo is a flame tree. Yesterday I stood corrected. Brigitte, who is a great fan of that image, was a little startled when I called it the “flame tree” yesterday. “No, it’s not,” she said. “Thika? That’s a different sort of tree.” So off I went to check this matter out.

As always, in such situations, I was convinced that Brigitte was right, of course. Her eye for shapes is as infallible as is Pope Francis when addressing faith and morals formally. What I wished to discover is why I had made that linkage.

The first clue here was that both Nature’s tree and the Flame Trees are African. Nature’s image is an African acacia. And the Flame Trees of Thika? Well, the mini-series was made from a memoir written by Elspeth Huxley about her childhood in Kenya. Elspeth Huxley is part of the Huxleys—of whom Brigitte and I very fondly remember particularly Laura Huxley, the wife of Aldous, whose books, particularly This Timeless Moment and You Are Not the Target helped us cope with life in the long ago. So here is another echo. But back to those trees.

I bring two images. The first, by Peter Pazucha, a retired photographer (link), shows a panoramic view of flame trees. The second is one of the covers of Huxley’s memoir itself, showing the same shapes but not quite so prominently.

So it’s all in the shape of the trees. But here is a little more. Some of the flame trees (or those so named) belong to the same family as the acacia: the Fabaceae. But the Kenyan tree is most likely the Spathodea, family of Bignoniaceae; it has red flowers that resemble flames in bloom. Odd how things sometimes resemble one another even when their physical linkages are extremely distant. But in our memories certain things converge and signal the presence of values never forgotten.

Traditional Mysteries

Close readers of the economics pages may have noticed the confirmation of Janet Yellen as Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank—and wondered why, in the stories about this event, pundits are treating the lady as a de facto Queen of Finance in the United States—indeed, as one put it, the most powerful woman in the world.

After all. After all, if we stick strictly with the mechanics of the thing, the policy set by the Federal Reserve Bank is expressed in the decisions taken by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). That body is made up of twelve members and reaches decisions by voting. Seven of its members, including the chair, are members of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Five other members are drawn from the twelve presidents of the twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks of the United States. One of those, however, has a permanent seat on the FOMC, the president of the NewYork Federal Bank. The other four serve for one year and are then replaced by another four drawn from regional federal banks.

What we have here, in other words, is a straight-forward democratic arrangement in which the Chairwoman of the Fed could just as likely be on the losing as on the winning side of a particular vote. Why then is she treated as the de facto “monarch” of monetary policy.

Well, the simple answer is that she actually is—now that she is confirmed. But the reason for that has little to do with voting and everything to do with the gradual evolution of a tradition. Let me try to describe this.

The simplest way to put this is that the FOMC is governed by consensus—not really by majority vote. The consensus forms around the person of the Chair. In the course of FOMC meetings, members of the committee may disagree with the Chair and may also express their dissent in so many words; but when it comes to a vote, they will back the Chair. It is customary for all Governors to vote unanimously with the Chair—and to be joined by the President of the New York Fed in doing so. That produces a majority of eight, each time. But the tradition at the FOMC is that no no more than two members may dissent. This is described as the “informal policy of the FOMC.” Dissents, some say, are intended to signal potential changes in policy in the future.

It’s quite amusing, in a way, to read how academic observers of this process attempt to explain it. At best they merely describe how it has gradually come about. As for the Why of this curious centering of effective power in one person, students of the process fall back on equally nebulous phrases. The importance or prestige of the office has gradually increased. A “tradition” rules this community; it is made up of, after all, highly qualified experts who’ve spent entire working lives in or around banking and finance. They all abhor the evil consequences of signaling rifts to the Market. The real decisions are worked out in privacy and out of the glare of journalistic light. Therefore, you see. And, presumably, whoever is appointed to be Chair of this institution will be reliably a member of this community and will uphold the traditional way. She or he will move to a vote only after the decision has been sanctioned by consensus.

No wonder, then, that chairs of the Fed are by any measure the most careful speakers in public—and their words are subjected to careful parsing as if they were an omen or issued from some being beyond the clouds.

It remains a fact, nonetheless, that this very sane and deliberate tradition of governance—at least of a part of our public affairs—could break down and, given time enough, someday will do so. Not, we hope, under Janet Yellen. May she rule in peace.

The Closing Bracket

Brigitte reminded me this morning that it is Three Kings Day—Epiphany. “Ah yes,” I thought. “The sixth.” In Europe, at least if you were a child, the Christmas Season began with St. Nicholas day—not with the first Sunday in Advent. St. Nicholas day falls on the sixth—of December. As children we put our shoes on the window sill the night before and went to bed. In the morning the shoes were filled with fruit, candy and cookies; bright red paper and twigs of fir decorated the display; and for good measure each child also received a switch, to be used on our bottoms if we should be bad. And the season also ended on the sixth—of January, when the angels notified the shepherds and the Three Kings came to visit the Christ-child in his manger. That day—both for Brigitte (who lived her childhood in Poland) and for me (in Hungary), that day was also traditionally appointed to take down the Christmas tree and to store the Christmas decorations for another year. The season lay between brackets, you might say, isolated from the relentless flow of the world—thus outside of time.

Let’s Kick It

It’s high time now for 2013 to kick the bucket—I mean on this blog. Until a 2014 post appears, the last year hangs around, at least in the margin. So it is time. That phrase—“kicking the bucket”—appearing in my mind, I did what I’ve done at least five times before since the appearance of search-engines. I tried to discover the origin of that phrase. Wikipedia does its best (here) but largely fails, I think. Suicide? Not very likely. The reflexive, spasmodic stiffening of leg muscles appeals to me, accompanied, no doubt, by that “last gasp.” For me the best depiction of this supposed terminal action is held in the movie It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The kicking is done by Jimmy Durante quite early in the movie, and it looks awfully authentic.

In my childhood back in Europe, comedy put its stamp on the last day of year on the radio. Even as young children, Brigitte and I used to listen to those broadcast as bright children would, not really getting the jokes but enjoying the novelty of late, late, late-night radio listening. On my last shopping trip in 2013, also listening to the radio, I noted with pleasure that NPR had embraced that sort of programming too on the 31st. While my trip lasted, the object of the jokes was Microsoft and its famed leader, Bill Gates. And the snippets were extremely funny.

Therefore it’s appropriate to part with that year lead by Jimmy Durante. Like all real comics he was a contrarian figure who managed to delay his own passing by almost a whole month. He kicked the bucket in actuality on January 29, 1980—no doubt needing to rest up, first, from his antics on December 31, 1979. Humor lifts us above the dreary fray. Our  sense of humor may well be our best gift from on High.