Money-Crazed, AI-Driven

Two notes on culture. I’ve got to fix these moments sharply in my head just in case, over in the next world, they have historical archivists whose only access to data are the well-resolved memory pictures of the living.

The first concerns photos of traders published in the papers every time the markets plunge. The traders are always staring at computer screens, the screens themselves not visible to us. They stare with uniquely tense, mesmerized, yet vaguely troubled expressions on their faces—as if looking at a gigantic sci-fi monster. There is an awe in these faces. Beholding that awe—if we don’t know the context—we’d never imagine that they are watching the unfolding of an activity entirely produced by human beings acting deliberately, in detail, communicating sell and buy orders by means of machinery of the most extreme sophistication humanity has as yet seen. All of the communications rest on computers, hence my reference to Artificial Intelligence, not least some of the trading—done by computers following buy-sell algorithms carefully programmed by people with astounding mathematical skills.

The second is an amusing personal experience. The pool where twice weekly Brigitte does water aerobics is right next to a sandy beach on Lake Saint Claire. Of late I’ve accompanied her and, while she does her thing, I sit on an Adirondacks chair, read a book, or watch the beach. The other day I took my little Kodak and—not having tried this before—I rested it on the wide armrest of my chair and let it take a digital film of minute wave movements, the slow distant slide of sailing yachts, swallows flying swiftly by, the occasional people flip-flopping along carrying towels, and so on.

Later I engaged the services of YouTube to turn my camera’s digital feed into an actual video, planning to use it on a family photo blog. It all went splendidly—and I had a video for true contemplatives: In five minutes virtually nothing happens at all. The sail boats are too far away, the birds are too fast, the waves do move—but you have to concentrate to see them. Sun-drenched total boredom, if you like.

Imagine my surprise when, an hour or so later, YouTube informs me by e-mail that I may have committed copyright infringement against Giant Music Company So-And-So—and lest I endanger my massive assets in a lawsuit, YouTube invites me to visit their site and clear the matter up. Good Lord, I thought. What did I do? Exercising what lawyers call due diligence, I investigated immediately—by watching Sun-Drenched Total Boredom yet again. Well, sure enough. At our pool management sometimes plays music over a loudspeaker. You know how it is these days. Music must be present—lest Modern Man die of tedium. There is music behind narrative in documentaries, music behind drama lest I fail to know how to feel (romantic, tense, scared). Therefore music, pop music, while the good people of Grosse Pointe Farms splash in the pool. And some of that music, quite distant, broken up by distance, but audible, was right there, captured by my sophisticated little Kodak’s enormously capable sound system—and this camera about the size of my billfold! Copyright violation!

Money crazed and AI-driven. For surely, I thought, laboriously clearing up the matter by answering YouTube’s lengthy questionnaire by means of keyboard, screen, and Internet linkages (landlines, wireless, satellite, etc.), surely, I thought, no human being, watching that video, could possibly think me a Copyright Violator! The little film had all the facts. Distant music played for the public. All broken up. But no human being was actually involved in YouTube’s message to me. It was all done by AI. Wasn’t it? A machine examined my video, ingenuously captured the pattern of the music, matched it to a database of music, identified it as the sole property of Giant Music Company So-And-So, selected the appropriate standard text to send me, put it in an e-mail, and sent it to me for Action Now.

I hope the archivists over beyond the Border up there will appreciate this little snippet and treasure it as a true marker of the state of affairs in the twenty-first century of the current era.

Our lake, by the way, was named after Saint Clare of Assisi, originally called Chiara Offreducio (1194-1253). She was one of Francis of Assisi’s earliest followers, founded the Order of Poor Ladies, and was the first woman, so Wikipedia tells me, to write a Monastic Rule. My knowing this, to be sure, is a by-product of my twenty-first century experience, and due to my due diligence in looking up the exact spelling of Lake Saint Claire. I bring you an image of Saint Clare, also from Wikipedia here. As for the archivists over there, I expect that they’ve already heard of Chiara and have her on file.

On Walls

Years ago now—many—I happened to rise very early and, turning on the television (something very rare, but it happened that morning) I chanced across a lecture broadcast by the University of Missouri aimed at distant learners who rose before the light to get an education.

The professor used photos and art to illustrate changes in architecture over long historical periods in Europe, specifically walls: their absence, appearance, rising height, growing thickness, and flourishing infestation of metal and out-jutting rock-work on top to deny access to those who would enter uninvited. Over time, centuries. The lecture also featured windows in the same way. The professor showed a Roman villa circa 40 AD with a stupendous, generous frontage reminiscent of trophy homes in a modern suburban super-rich neighborhood—and then progressed forward in time. Windows at first grew smaller; next they acquired iron bars; next they appeared ever higher up, beyond the reach of a tall man’s outstretched hand; next, up there, they narrowed, ever more, until at last they had become mere slits sufficient to spy attackers and to aim arrows at them as they advanced. Thus these architectural forms evolved, from imperial Rome to the High Middle Ages, when architecture began very gradually to change again. Windows opened, as it were; and walls diminished.

I watched in absolute fascination. Of course, of course, I kept saying to myself—delighted by the obvious. Slowly but surely architecture will reflect the actual state of society. When cracks appear in the social order, life goes right on, but increasingly those who are able to enclose themselves do so ever more.

Years later—not quite so many viewed from today—a conference took Brigitte and me to Anaheim. Yes, we visited Disney Land. And after that, on a whim, we decided to drive south to San Juan Capistrano using I-5. Along the way we saw many, many walled and gated communities atop flat rises in the landscape, clearly visible from the highway, not least their gates. Seeing them I remembered that lecture, heard by pure chance. And I thought of it again today thinking of the riots in Britain.

The picture I am showing, from Wikipedia (link), was actually built in the early sixteenth century in Santo Domingo, the Americas—but it has such a wonderful name, Fortaleza Ozama, that I could not resist.

London Riots

Some of us around here encountered Theodore Dalrymple a decade ago and, in consequence, became aware of conditions at the bottom of British society. The occasion was his book, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (2001). Next we discovered that Dalrymple was the pseudonym of a British prison doctor, psychiatrist, and writer—a man of unusual background and history: His mother was a Germany Jewess who had escaped Nazi Germany, his father a businessman with communist leanings; Dalrymple became a doctor and spent years working in Africa before becoming a prison doctor in London and Birmingham and emerged as a harsh and caustic writer and critic of modern culture. Also widely read was his Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses (2005). His most recent book, which I haven’t read, is Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality (2010). Dalrymple’s writings are based on direct experience—hence are most persuasive. And he writes very well.

The doctor came back into my consciousness as London’s Tottenham area exploded in riots on Monday. Two books and scores of his shorter articles, usually appearing in City Journal (link), had taught me a great deal—but the experience isn’t pleasant, hence Dalrymple had faded into the background. Now he was back. When riots take place in our own culture, we don’t speak of “British Spring,” but I noted this morning that the Media reflex to celebrate popular uprisings could not be entirely repressed. The New York Times notes this morning  the sophisticated skills of the rioters in running rings around the British Police using Blackberrys for communication and Facebook, Twitter to organize the mobs. They say. Or echo the Guardian as saying.

I’ll have to keep checking City Journal to read Dalrymple’s take on all of this. It will be interesting reading—not pleasant, but interesting.

Vox Populi

In the United States, certainly, the stock market has come to be the effective expression of vox populi, shown again by yesterday’s events. The Dow plunged, eventually losing 634 points. President Obama went on TV and did the rational thing. He spoke of markets. Casually. No emotion. Markets rise, he said. Markets fall. But he was on television, again, only because the oracle was roaring its displeasure. Mid-day I got e-mail from a fundamentalist site asking: “Is God Angry with America?”

Celebribility, Electability

A headline in today’s New York Times: “Where Cubans Can Meet the Beatles at Last.” The story deals with a bar in Havana that features the images and music of the Beatles. But never mind the story; the headline caught my attention. The writer and editors presumably have some sort of vague conviction that Cubans had been deprived, until the opening of this bar, called The Yellow Submarine, of some kind of transcending value by never having experienced the Beatles—thanks to repressive communist manipulations of the media. Certainly the writer, probably the editors too, associate rock ’n’ roll with revolution, leftist politics, and rapture. And emotion, however produced, is the accessible form of transcendence these days. Therefore that phrase, “at Last” in the headline. One almost hears a sigh.

Got me thinking. Got me thinking that gifts that enable a person or group to achieve celebrity (“celebribility”) might have the same functional characteristics that enable a politician to be electable (“electability.”) That word has surfaced yet again and will be much repeated in the coming months. And then I got to musing about the differences.

Celebrities become celebrities because of what they actually do—they sing, act, sway their bodies, beat guitars, wiggle their leg (Elvis), or bare their body parts. This arouses emotions in the population, sells records, results in TV appearances, vast concerts (Woodstock), etc. The celebrity and the skills these people have are one and the same thing.

But the same is not true for the politician. Yes. Politicians also connect to people by their personalities, by what they say, by the colorful clouds of emotions they generate, by projecting images of glowing futures that they promise to create. But these gifts—attractive family, forthright visage, eloquence, passion, the hands reaching to touch other hands that hold cell phones to photograph the celebrated image—all this, while it produces electability, has almost nothing to do with the actions promised.

When the celebrity has projected his or her image of desirability and roused vast primitive emotions (rock ’n’ roll indeed)—his or her job is already done. In the case of the politician, the projection merely enables an ability to try to deliver. Oh yes. Eloquence, truth, a glowing future. I watched President Obama at his 50th Birthday fundraiser do his electability bid again in Chicago last Wednesday. And afterwards contemplated Grand Canyon-deep gorges that separate these acts of projection and any delivery at all.

Butterfly Update No. 3

The new home of our Black Swallowtail Butterfly caterpillars—indoors. We began with three. In other words, we could actually detect three caterpillars when we brought the plant indoors into the sunroom. Soon we discovered that we had five—and, indeed, we may have more. They are shown in sequence here, from the bottom of the plant to the top. The small one is the last discovered, and obviously a youngster.

To those who are getting tired of this story, our apologies. But in truth these matters are at least as interesting to us as “culture,” “society,” “art,” “history,” “language” and all the rest. First-timers to this thematic may wish to pursue the links below, which go backward in time.

• Initial discovery of Black Swallowtail caterpillars (link).
• The story of their initial development, outdoors, and loss to birds (link)
• Last year's story—and the famed Aristo! (link)

The pictures shown here were taken today. When we brought in the plant five days ago, the caterpillars were much smaller than the smallest one I show here today. These tiny things develop rather rapidly!

On Rising Curves

An early lesson I learned in my pursuit of practical economics—indeed I turned it into a personal slogan—is that no curve ever rises forever. It came in handy in the 1960s. Virtually every industrial curve was visibly rising, irresistibly, it seemed. Those of us hired to advise industry on the future were tempted to point at all those uptrending lines as the easy way out. Our clients were already on board with that. But one can’t take the low road, not responsibly. So I had my dispiriting slogan. Industry journals didn’t help. They made the most of those trends; boundless optimism was not only normal, it was politically correct. Just recalling the atmosphere then now reminds me how everything looked in those innocent days.

It was a period of continuous and rapid…Integration. The Industrial Age had, as it were, come of age. All that remained was to put all of the many pieces together. Technology, in those days, did not mean what it means today—the spread of cybernetics into ever smaller devices of communication. The word then meant the application of new materials across the vast universe of all kinds of products—industrial machinery as well as consumer goods. This included, at the industrial level, changes to machinery to process materials better and faster. One of the hottest trade magazines, those days, believe it or not, was Steel, and almost monthly innovations in forming, shaping, cutting, or preserving steel filled the magazine’s breathless pages. That too came to pass. Steel tried to keep itself alive by opening its pages more widely to technology (in the old sense of the word) but couldn’t quite manage the job. The atmosphere had changed. No sooner had the economy integrated all of these arts, mechanics, and materials than industry (old meaning) lost the public eye; its struts, wires, tendons, and muscles disappeared (as they do in organic bodies) under skin—and in their case beneath shiny outer bodies, the fuselage, and the reflecting surface of new architecture.

The next big visible issue turned out to be the very negatives of the now submerged Age of the Machine. Once it vanished, its wastes became visible. For some decades, beginning in the 1970s, Environment became the issue and eventually turned all of us into either would-be-green recyclers or dug-in clear-cutters and adamant regulation-haters. And then dawned the Age of the Computer with the Apple. The child of cybernetics—am I surprised that my spark plug fires at the wink of a built-in chip? not in the least; I’m inclined to yawn—the child of the chip is the Social Network, perhaps the last and final stage of…Integration. It’s still rising. Oh the excitement, the new Political Correctness (“Follow us on Facebook, Twitter”). Rising. Going public. Making the billions mushroom from nothing. But no curve rises for ever.

Is the next big age the Age of Disintegration? Have we just seen the birth of it in that almost-successful attempt to set a limit—somewhat lower than the sky—to debt? To be followed more effectively by new innovations coming tomorrow. Is this age beginning at the top but promising to come down all the way to us, bringing its desirable products and services to our own humble little homes in a decade or two? We shall see. But if it comes, the dis, we must remember that all rising curves eventually dip—and then in turn produce yet other new exciting things to write home about—if the Post Office is still up and running.

A More Visible Egypt

Having seen the secularist, modernist elements rise up in Egypt during the so-called Arab Spring, I watched with fascination as vast throngs of what the New York Times labeled Islamists filled Tahrir Square on July 29. This was a demonstration by the religious majority, estimated to account for between 80 and 90 percent of the population. Most of the rest are Coptic Christians. In the Nixon days this would have been called the silent majority. If the “spring” actually produces genuine democracy in Egypt, it is reasonable to anticipate a governing structure strongly reflecting the views of this majority—who favor Sharia law much more than libertarian secularist forms.

All through my life Egypt was more or less invisible thanks to its probably defensive self-alignment with the West. You would behave that way if little upstarts like Napoleon invaded you from time to time and made themselves Big. Another way to read the Arab Spring is to read it as Winter in the West. The Euro-American culture is in decline. Therefore Egypt has become more visible now. This land became a unified state, hold on now, in 3100 BC. It has 80 million people. It must be enormously diverse. It is damnably difficult to picture to ourselves, in anything like rich detail, the genuine reality of other cultures. When they become visible, they always surprise us. Iran? We see a mullah with a long grey beard, his head wrapped in a vast shawl. Read Reading Lolita in Tehran (Azar Nafisi) as a corrective. And so on. Egypt? Tourists standing by camels while in the near distance a pyramid throws its shadow…

Caterpillar Crises, Recoveries

Late in July (as reported here) we discovered at first three and then an additional two tiny black-yellow caterpillars of one Black Swallowtail butterfly we had seen dancing our backyard some days before. Last year we had discovered one, and that one quite late in its progress. We named it, and the beauty that it eventually became, Aristo. Then, about three days later, the little dark but yellow-dotted creatures had rapidly grown to resemble last year’s Aristo, although they were then still less than half Aristo’s size. Herewith a couple of photographs of one, presented here, as it were In Memoriam. I’ll explain that phrase in a moment.

In Memoriam because, the very next day, to our utter horror, we discovered not only the first three we’d found but also the other two—gone. Some birds had found and dispatched them in the wink of an eye and five snaps of the beak later. And we entered a kind of period of mourning. And reflection. On the Nature of Things. All this marvelous work of butterfly flights, hovers over dill plants. Those very brief landings lasting just long enough to deposit eggs that, thanks to the gargantuan labors of DNA and enzymes and The Plan first appeared as lovely black-yellow and later as green-white-black caterpillars—intended someday soon, a few weeks later, to take wing themselves. But No! The sharp eyes of a bird, itself the magical product of nature, caught these delicious morsels and they turned into—food!

Over the next two weeks we happened to be present to witness for ourselves at least four or five new visits by Black Swallowtails. They must have very keen powers of smell to find our rather rich sampling of dill plants. They also came when we were gone, no doubt, and we’ve been gone a lot.

Well, what do you know! Inspecting those dill plants again, as I’ve done most mornings, this morning I discovered three new caterpillars, one on one and two on an other plant. They are at the early stage, thus very small, very dark, and displaying only a single yellow dot. Well indeed! I ran to get Brigitte. Then we prepared a large pot with fresh soil and immediately transplanted the two dill growths into the pot and brought that one indoors into our bright Sunroom where birds are perhaps visible but always through glass or screen alone.

Thus our butterfly adventure continues. If our luck extends, more notes will appear here in due time.

Are Shins Actually Involved?

Late night conversation last night in wider company produced the question: “Where does the word shindig, come from?” The questioner thought that it might have Irish origins. Not quite but mayhap. The origin is Scottish. Online Etymology Dictionary dates it to 1871 (dance, party, lively gathering) and adds that it probably came from the word shindy (1821) which meant “a spree, merrymaking.” Reaching further back, we get shinty, which was a kind of hockey-like game called, even earlier (1670s), a shinny. And that word, discounted by the word “perhaps,” comes from Gaelic sinteag, meaning a bound or a leap. The same word, but used as a verb, as in to shinny, meant to climb a rope, presumably using the shins and the ankles. So shins are—remotely—involved. And, for good measures, you might have jumped up on the rope a little executing a sinteag.

But if Gaelic was the original language, the Irish may have something to add as well, for all we know, because Gaelic is a Goidelic language, thus one branch of the Celtic tongue, the one they call “insular.” The other one was presumably spoken on the bigger landmass of what we now call Europe, but it was overwhelmed by the Latin.

Our Dictionary of American Slang, using the word “probably” (useful, these words, for etymologists) dares to be literal and says “a blow on the shin incurred while dancing,” saying they found this usage in 1859, adding “perhaps [!] by folk etymology fr the older shindy.” That dictionary also associates the word with a clambake.

Next time you’re invited to a shindig, leap to the occasion—and wear a tartan skirt or, if you insist on honoring the Irish, green.
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Wikipedia has an article on Shinty here as it is still played  in Scotland. Twelve players on each side. The image from the old days comes from a history of field hockey here. In Wales the game was called Bandy—now only played on ice. Ice… Ah! It has such a nice sound on this last day of a hot July!

Cultural Indicator: The Opposition Response

Since 1790 U.S. presidents gave a State of the Union report—and no response from any opposition followed. For much of our history, these reports were written rather than spoken. This repeated for 176 years until, in 1966, with Lyndon Johnson president, began the practice of an opposition response. Since then, with but one exception, Lyndon Johnson’s last State of the Union, every oral presentation of this report has been followed by negative congressional echoes.

I still remember, when the first one came (and every time after) thinking that this was somehow wrong. We don’t have two or three presidents. Why two or three states of the union? The Constitution, Article II, Section 3, requires the president to give such reports. There’s nothing in the Constitution about an Opposition Response. The response demeans the office, degrades the symbol—and when the symbols are tarnished, look out.

Certain kinds of opposition are out of place. When the Queen of England Speaks—to be sure echoing sentiments approved by the majority in Parliament—the opposition keeps mum. My perception is that respect for the office of president in our country has been visibly declining, and ever-increasing “opposition responses” to every major presidential address are the formal sign of that. The actual signs are many and increasing—thus behavior that actual signals contempt for the president, done by a nod and a wink, but clearly understood by vast constituencies. But therein lies genuine danger.

Grim although the prospect is—and unlikely that I’ll actually live to see it—this too shall pass. A time will come when some future president will speak and no one will rise to give a response—because it might prove lethal. And after that future presidents won’t bother giving states of the union, either, because there will no longer be a union in our current sense. Time is on my side. Whatever rises is sure to fall; whatever sinks is sure to rise again. And when it does, it won’t be pretty. Pay me now or pay me later.

Let’s Hear it for Bombina

If members of the Kingdom Animalia could communicate through the Media and, doing so, keep a sharp eye out for discriminatory treatment of their many kinds, be sure that one of the most vocal of the Orders would be the Anura, the classification that includes all of the species of Frog. So where does the toad belong? It turns out that, taxonomically, they are frogs, and the toad designation might be viewed, if you’re a frog, as scurrilous.

Let’s imagine a situation in which the Order of Anura took part in what is known as the Great Dialogue on Living Being Rights. And just so that we, the humans, would get the message right up front, face-to-face, and personally, the chief spokesperson chosen by Frogdom to represent it would no doubt be a European Fire-bellied Toad, a person of quick wit, sardonic temper, and stunning looks—and she would be known frequently to say to the press. “Linnaeus Schminaeus! look. Just tell me what I look like. Do I look like a frog or don’t I? Did I call myself a European Fire-Bellied Toad or did I call myself Bombina bombina? The latter, you will find. Look high and low in Linnaeus’ classification scheme. I urge you to do it. Dig, dig, dig. Nowhere—I assure you, nowhere—will you encounter the word ‘toad’ within the order of Anura. Yes, yes. I know. One of you will say that the Family Bufonidae are called the ‘true’ toads. You might say that. But we, in the Order of Anura, deny any such designations apparently based on your distorted aesthetic sense and well known color prejudices. Do I look brown to you? Only if you’re color-blind. But I’m a toad so far as you’re concerned. Nor will you find Bufonidae anywhere in my name. But I’m still a toad. Well, in defense of the Bufonidae—and the 500 species they represent—I must insist that none of them thinks itself a toad either! You point to special glands in the back of their heads that they use to squirt poisons? Well, my dears! What you call poison is a uniquely delightful chemical feature of all frog designs, in some more, in some less self-dramatized. Our research—and we’ve done it in depth—suggests that Linnaeus never used the word. Neither should you. There are no toads—only frogs. And tell them Bombina told you.”

Inspired by reading “I killed the Bufo Toad,” by Mark Derr in the New York Times (July 23, 2011). Pic thanks to Wikipedia here.

Nests of All Kinds

They rest, float, hang. They’re scraped, found, dug, hung. They’re formed of pebbles, sticks, living plants, horse-hair, reed, stalks, mud, anything at all. They are often reinforced, wedged between branches, carved out of living cactus plants, and suspended or glued using spider-silk. Most are hidden or carefully camouflaged; in some the bird seals itself in and is fed by its mate through a slit. Some are rudely appropriated from groundhogs—and some the most visible feature of the landscape as you look up—or of the urban skyline in a town, provided of course that its population tolerates birds. More on that in a moment. My subject is Avian Architecture, the title of a new book (June 2011) by Peter Goodfellow, just recently published by Princeton University Press. Brigitte saw a review of it intriguing enough so that we bought a copy then and there. It has given us great pleasure and we recommend it to anyone interested in the natural world—and as Sidney Lanier once put it, in the greatness of God:

As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God.
         Sidney Lanier, The Marshes of Glynn

Goodfellow is a retired English Teacher, birdwatcher, and author of other books on birds. Avian Architecture has wonderful pictures but is much more than a coffee-table book. First, it’s short, 160 pages. Then it is organized into twelve chapters—each one about one of the major categories of nests. Goodfellow divides his chapters into an introductory text with illustrations, a spread with “blueprints” that lay out the schematics of the nest-type under discussion. Next comes a spread on materials used and special features. Then follow case studies of different species, in all manner of environments, and how they deploy this type of nest. Fascinating stuff. And, indeed, one cannot help but wonder about the creation of such marvelous ways of hatching eggs and raising chicks.

We grew up in Europe in smaller towns and therefore grew up with stork nests. My first experience of one was in Tirschenreuth, in Germany, where a nest sat on top of Tirschenreuth’s famed church, Mariä Himmelfahrt (Mary’s Assumption). A stork nest was evidently continuously present on that church since the nineteenth century, although not always on the church’s roof. It now has its home on the roof of the vicarage, as shown in the photograph. You may have to click on the photo and then enlarge it to see the nest well. Sometimes humans participate in nest-building too. This particular stork’s nest has a steel platform installed there with some effort, using a fire-engine crane, in 2009, to give the storks (they arrive unfailingly in Spring) a better home.

To show another kind of highly visible nest, the picture on the left shows the suspended nests of the Crested Oropendolas. They are black birds, with blue eyes, yellow beaks, and have a long, vividly yellow tail. Goodfellow classifies such nests under the category of Hanging, Woven, and Stitched Nests and covers them in wondrous detail in Chapter Eight. The one I’m showing is a sub-category called the woven pendulous basket. It is three feet long and seven inches wide at the bottom. You will find a detailed blueprint in the book. The photograph I’m showing, however, comes courtesy of the Trinidad Birding website here.

Hot July

It’s blistering outside but cool in my basement. The head doesn’t work in the heat and must be distracted. I’ve distracted myself by looking for long-term temperature charts provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Mind, they don’t actually administer the oceans and the atmosphere; nor do they service the weather through the National Weather Service. But they measure and record things. Here, for instance, are charted data for two years, 2000 and 2010, showing both temperature and precipitation for the Detroit, MI metro area:




Of interest here is the dark blue quiver overlaying the green and topped and tailed by pink and blue. The dark blue indicates actual highs and lows. I’ve looked at a decade of such charts, and with one exception (2003, in which August looked hotter), July uniformly ranks as the hottest month. The inset is a legend to the graph above. Clicking it will make it easier to comprehend. The pink colors are all time highs, the blue the all time lows, and the green is an average of the highs and lows.

If we compare the two years, looking at July, we see that temperatures were generally lower in 2000 than in 2010. And looking at all of the annual plots (available here—and you can enter your own city to localize the display) shows a steady increase in temperature to the current time.

The graphic on the left shows July-only data for 2000, 2010, and 2011. I graphed the 2011 data myself from published figures through July 21, thus yesterday. 2011 looks like it is aiming for a record too…

Knowing which I pause for a moment to contemplate our fate. The dehumidifier is working hard in the background by the work bench, its sound rather calming, reassuring. It’s still working—and my screen is lit—but several very large communities are without power. The basement may still be cooler than the living room—and in those power-challenged communities you will enter the bedrooms upstairs at your own peril. The flashlight directed at the screen of the computer downstairs will show nothing but screen! Ah, the bennies and brownouts of a high tech society.

Illusions of Empowerment

Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? Psalms 2:1

Why do the news enrage me? My best teachers have taught me that if I do—experience rage—I must look within, and in a hurry—thus not outside at the supposed outer triggers of that low emotion. Rage is a sign of not being grown up. At 75? Exactly. Time to look within.

The cause of rage, undoubtedly, is a sense of my own impotence. But if I feel impotence then surely I’m identified with a group in government. I am projected. I’m permitting myself to enjoy an illusory sort of power, and my rage comes because “my” power is not being wielded as “I” think that it should be.

To withdraw these projections is to face reality. Reality is always sobering, indeed boring, quite banal, quite pedestrian. It is that I’ve no effective power to shape public life at all—not in the sense that I attach to the verb “shaping.” I’m shaping this log post, not that out there. The illusion arises from the very structure of news reporting. I can follow almost hour to hour what plans are ripening—or not—in a city about 1,000 miles from here. The huge machinery that brings this news suggests that it is “important.” It might be, for all I know, but is it important for me? The suggestion of such phrases as “the people’s right to know” is that I need to know because…? Because knowing things, and being well-informed, I can act appropriately. But here is where impotence begins to show itself. My one and only future act will be to vote, 15 months from now, for maximally 1 of 3 presidential candidates, one representative, and one senator. I live in a district gerrymandered so that it is overwhelmingly democratic; the Democrat will win. Therefore the vote is predetermined as I sit here—shaping this post. That election-outcome is not mine to shape.

The structure of our political life has lost its organic rootings. It is now the function of the fluidity of money, of communications, and of huge numbers. They produce a kind of delusional effect. The news produces a consciousness that what I’m reading is important, but in any realistic sense “important” can only mean that I can actually do something about unfolding events. In effect, and this is the lesson of the huge numbers, I actually cannot.

All of my actions, to be sure contribute to what are public outcomes. But any personal act is so tiny that it does not actually matter at the public scale. My spending produces jobs, GDP, affects the value of the dollar. My vote elects some of those on TV. To influence my infinitesimally tiny contribution a tsunami of communications difficult to avoid discharges its relentless waves over me. They cause a feeling of empowerment (knowledge is power), but while I have huge knowledge, I have no power at all. Not really. Therefore my expenditures of emotion are just wasteful. To be effectively informed, a monthly summary, if done well, would be more than enough. “Done well” would mean factual reporting of actual outcomes augmented by statistical reporting on the consequences of past actions.

News function in two ways. One of these is as education of a sort: here is humanity in its collective form. The other is as entertainment. Watch your heroes and villains. Experience the ecstasy of victory, the shame of defeat. But it’s rather poorly written fiction.

Organic forms of political organization would develop from the local level. The local would in turn be mirrored on ever higher levels in much the same way. The citizenry would only ever elect local officials, local officials the county officials, county the state, and so on. Money would have to be taken out of it. Keep it personal in order to maximize responsibility. The current system, which appears like bad fiction on the media, actually is a fiction based on abstract principles. It is the fiction that all people aged 18 and over are qualified to elect officials at every level of government. This system only works because money enables power seekers to reach the public by means of communications at essentially the emotional level only. Fluidity of money, of communications, huge numbers. Illusions of power. Chaos. Rage.

The Suspense…

The suspense began about a week, ten days ago when—in thrilled shock—we saw a Black Swallowtail butterfly fluttering energetically, erratically in our back yard and, sure enough, briefly pausing at every one of our dill plants. The lovely creature lingered, always moving, at least fifteen minutes and made several rounds of the whole domain, now disappearing behind the garage, now reappearing over the wooden fence. At Brigitte’s suggestion three days I ago I went and inspected our dill plants. On one of these I discovered three tiny black forms. There was just a hint of color in the center of at least one of them. Yesterday morning they all had the marking and had grown visibly in length. By afternoon we could discern them moving under a magnifying glass. Last evening Michelle, impatient at my hapless fumbling with the camera (and my fuzzy results) took it out of my hand and produced the first image in 2011 of Artisto’s Return. If the suspense is too much for you, look here. 

We noticed one caterpillar last year on the 27th of July, by then already quite big. This year we’ve counted nine separate tiny caterpillars at the stage shown in the photograph. Michelle took a very tight close-up. The little creature is barely visible to the naked eye. Today, almost by way of confirmation that, indeed, Black Swallowtail butterflies are in migration, we saw another one this morning. It visited—and fed on—the same plants where the tiny caterpillars are, communed with us for fifteen minutes, and then headed on north.

Garden in July

Hostas in bloom...

And tomatoes going crazy in confinement.

Stoutly Naive

Not a year passes but I read, usually in some philosophical context, the common man berated for his naiveté. But why do writers use that word? To signal nest odor? The word comes from just born, thus immature. It has connotations of native (“primitive”) or rustic (“stupid”). Thus to use the word is to claim superiority, sophistication, a certain elevation above the great unwashed.

The roots of this usage appear to rest on the notion that ordinary people, when they see an apple, think that they actually see an apple—and are too stupid to know that what is in the head is actually a representation of an apple, not the apple itself. But when people see an apple, they think of it out there, on the table, in the bowl, not in their heads at all. To be sure, what reaches the eyes is light reflected from the apple. It is then transformed into signal. The signal is translated by intellect, aided by memory, into a state of the brain that the mind then, if it needs to, can actually name using a concept. But the light must come from something. The machinery that translates it into a signal is naturally formed by a normal body. Description of the process—which I’d venture would take at least two or three months of very intensive study even mildly to grasp—in no way takes anything away from the concrete facts that something is out there. There is nothing immature, primitive, or stupid about the ordinary person’s naive realism. As ordinarily seen, people see an apple. When this act is painfully analyzed, we get a process—knowing which is not in the least necessary to get along in the ordinary world. So why else call people naive unless it is to shine in the eyes of those initiated into the “higher mysteries.”

Is Bertrand Russell right when he says:

Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false. [Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth]

When Bertrand Russell sees an apple, does he actually see uncountably many atomic cores surrounded by probability waves of electrons and enormous voids between these structures? Or does he just see an apple? Which is the true picture of reality? Must it be the voids and only mathematically accessible waves—or is it the shiny red thing there? Or both? Or the cellular structure, with its mitochondria? What scoffers call naive may just be an indication of scale.

This is a minor matter, to be sure. People tend to be silly and try to make themselves look bigger than they are. No big deal. But such charges of naiveté are also used to suggest that people naively believe themselves to have minds (whereas all they have is neurons) and that they have souls (whereas all they are is dissipative structures). That last is a little obscure. The phrase is Ilya Prigogine’s who suggests that life is just a certain kind of self-organizing natural system. When it comes to such extensions of the concept of human naiveté, one wonders who is lost and thus needs a stiff dose of amazing grace.

Incredible Diversity

This happens roughly every other year—whenever I have an unusually long wait at an airport and, as a consequence, see unusually large numbers of people. I suppose you have to be at a major city’s airport. Detroit certainly works, and I’ve seen the same both east and west and in Chicago too. One sees every race, age, and every conceivable body type, male and female—and for each of those categories, in addition, I also see them in quite ordinary American dress and in traditional garb from all over the world. It’s amazing. I first had this feeling—namely that humanity is extraordinarily—and physically—diverse when perusing one of Jared Diamond’s books (I think it was Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed); there I saw photographs of all kind of people from around the globe thickly clustered, and the impression was striking. Now airports are enough to bring the feeling back. Hasn’t always been so. In the heydays of my travelling (1970-80), the fabulous diversity was beginning to appear. Now in a community like Detroit it is the norm, especially in summertime, when families visit from all corners of the world. Reminds me of a fascinating discussion of human nature Mortimer Adler presents in Ten Philosophical Mistakes. He invites us to consider animal species. Looking at each, he says, you would note differences. But…

The dominant likeness of all members of the species would lead you to dismiss as relatively insignificant the differences you found, most of which can be explained as the result of slightly different environmental conditions.

He then invites us to make random drop-in visits to look at human societies.

You would come away [from such a venture] with the very opposite impression from the one you took away from your investigation of the populations that belonged to one or another animal species. You were there impressed by the overwhelming similitude that reigned among its members. Here, however, you would find that the differences were dominant rather than the similarities.

Adler was, of course, not talking about physical differences—but they’re also present. As above, so below.

This Mare Has No Stallion

What mare do I have in mind? Let me get there slowly. Another word I chanced across this time caught my attention—although I’d seen it hundreds of times before: hagridden. I’d never looked it up before and assumed it meant an old man nagged to distraction by an old woman. Why, I wondered, don’t we have a word like, say, grump-ridden? Where is the masculine of hag? Boy! Let me tell you. Questions like that do open up the linguistic abyss. To get to the bottom quickly, hag originally comes from diviner or soothsayer, and, in European paganism, these were always and exclusively women. The root of the word is Old English hægtesse (witch, fury). The same word in Old Middle German was hagzusa, from which we get the German Hexe. Remembering Robert Graves (always fondly), it comes to mind that European paganism had a matriarchal background, hence divine males and grumpy old men did not have much standing. To be hagridden, therefore, means to have an old witch badly troubling your dreams.

“Of course!” I said to myself. “That’s why we have nightmares, not nightstallions.” But I was wrong again. The mare in the nightmare is not a member of the genus Equus which comes in female and male genders. No. The mare in nightmare comes from Old English mera or mære meaning goblin, the female kind. Not a horse in sight.

We have to go back to the resolutely masculine Latin culture before we discover the incubus, the masculine dream-entity that lies down and suffocates the sleeper. My favorite etymology dictionary dates it to 1200 as the evil protagonist of nightmares. We have to wait until the 1300s before he is joined by succubus, the female ghost that has sex with men in sleep—that word formed from the Late Latin succuba, a strumpet. Those familiar with Google’s Ngram Viewer† can easily discover that, whether ghost or flesh, males are always much more eager for sex than women:

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†Ngram viewer is a Google facility that scans digitized books accessible to Google from 1800 to 2000 and counts the frequency of words used in these sources. You enter two words or phrases separated by a comma. The address of the facility is here.