Submerged

Brigitte flagged for me yesterday Glenn Haege’s piece in  the Detroit News. Haege writes a column for the paper (“The Handyman”), and this was his finger pointing at Labor Day today. His approach was novel: he listed eight unions all concerned with the building trades, four of which contributed concretely to the installation of a central air system in this house in July: Plumbing and Pipefitting, Electrical Workers, the Sheet Metal Workers International, and the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades. The list brought to Brigitte’s mind several members of the “grandchild” cohort in our extended family, a sufficient number so that we could locate one in eight of the nine Haege listed. One was left out, the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftsworkers.

The article also brought other old memories to the surface—not least what would strike most as the arcane naming conventions used by the Department of Labor to name the crafts—vast lists of which we regularly labor on at our company in publishing a title called Salaries and Wages. Back further still lay my “awakening” to the reality of the labor movement which came in college. I thank the Jesuits for making mandatory a course on the history of labor in my day (1950s); maybe such a course is still required. Finally, in a chapter on a book about ordinary life in Roman times, I read with great amusement a long, long list of “associations”—of craftsmen and trades, principally. The list was such as to make you raise your eyebrows twice, first because there were so many and so diverse—and no thick books on Caesar or Nero or Caligula (or even Augustus) ever mention them—and second because Brigitte then was editor-in-chief of Gale’s flagship reference book, Encyclopedia of Associations, the very book that started Gale Research.

Labor is—submerged. So, I discovered, are my reference books on it. I could find neither my college text nor yet the book on the Roman’s everyday life. What I discovered is that as knowledge vaporizes, dust collects—and that my highly diversified deposits of books need lots and lots of labor to organize again.

Quite instructive, actually. Labor Day goes back to 1882—celebrated that year in New York City. We owe to the labor movement the relatively civilized decades of the second half of the twentieth century. And alongside the slowly but steadily dropping curves of labor union membership, median income in the United States has been falling right alongside. And there is more, much more, that could be said in addition. Once a year, briefly, with a bit of sentiment—not enough. If we don’t mind our knitting, soon all the knitting will be done by slaves.

DIA: Trials and Triumphs

This past August 7 the people of the three counties that make up the Detroit Metro  passed a special millage to support the Detroit Institute of Arts. The DIA was in  part supported by state funds which, in this era of tax-cutting, had gradually eroded. Support for the millage had an interesting pattern. The relatively poor (67% in favor) and the rich (64% for) supported it strongly, the middle weakly (50.5% in favor)—thus Wayne County (median family income of $49,176), Oakland County ($61,907), and Macomb ($52,102); the values are from the 2000 Census. In any case, all counties passed it, and therefore the future of the DIA is now more secure.

Ever since we got to know the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art (as it is called today) as newly-arrived immigrants in Kansas City, we have been supporters of museums, hence this election had real meaning. Much is eroding in the culture, but there is a bedrock underneath—and such collective outcomes tend to confirm it.

Yesterday—thanks to John and Monique, who energize this aging couple and take us out to see the greater world—we went to see the latest exhibits at the DIA. The centerpiece of it was “Woman Holding a Balance” by the Dutchman Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675). I am showing it with thanks to Wikipedia (link). It is quite small, 14 by 16.5 inches, but bathed in Nordic light—which the painters of that region seemingly discovered in the seventeenth century.

I began taking a serious interest in art while a young man in the Army in Europe, and I subscribed then to book-of-the-month series published by Time-Life Books; that series was later transformed into the Time-Life Library of Art—but in my day monthly books featured lesser-known figures as well, like Jan van Eyck, (1395-1441). The first picture I studied, in fact, was that Flemish painter’s portrait of the Arnolfini couple (link—Monique and John, notice the little dog!). My second volume was Vermeer. So I started in the place and time where yesterday’s masterwork originated. Alas, those books are gone now. I’ve gradually given them all away. But it was a wonderfully rich experience to study these marvelous works in leisure—and then to travel to museums on vacations to see them. Praise the museums. In this realm that sometimes demands the grubby business of passing millage rates. Trials produce triumphs. But has it ever been different? Amazing what humanity can do against the odds.

In Praise of Court Jesters

Jon Stewart on August 31, 2012 (link): “The Old Man and the Seat.”

Cyber Evolution

In nature—and the cyber world belongs there too—the same old, same old always. If it exists and has some life, be sure that it will be invaded, must develop antibodies. Parasites will cover it, vines will cling to lift themselves into the light. The light in this case is human attention. I encountered “comment spam” on the Wordpress platform first, soon thereafter “visit spam.” Comment spam, typically written by people who learned English from a most amusing book I own, titled English as She is Spoke, consists of sending urls the sender hopes will be clicked through and read, generating traffic for that site. Visit spam consists of phony visits to a blog staged by some little bot, and many visits in succession so that the blogger thinks there is some sudden interest in a topic. Following that “source” back to its origin produces a commercial web page; if followed back a second time, another and completely unrelated one.

It’s a kind of cottage industry. The creating minds are sophisticated, the actual implementers the miserably underemployed—and what with the web being global—many live in Russia. No wonder they write such fascinating English. Spam control? Firewalls? Hey, it’s nature in the raw out there. Everything gets penetrated sooner, later. Spy vs. Spy. 

August: Last Day But One

The Fiery Skippers played with bees

Amid the mint in our back yard.

The sun was hot, there was a breeze

And Brigitte cooked us some Swiss chard—

Those huge green leaves, red narrow veins.

As off I went to grab my keys,

I heard the name John Maynard Keynes

And then a bit about Chinese

Atrocities against free trade.

Was haircut bound, two miles away,

You know, the scissors and the blade,

Returning I bought stovetop spray

From a one-line shopping slip

And made a lib’ry visit too

To optimize the outbound trip.

That might save gas; good thing to do.

But then, as later it turned out,

When Grosse Pointe Schools let their phone ring

And therefore put us in some doubt

When aerobic swimming would begin

Come Fall, indeed next week,

The keys had to be grabbed again

To storm the school and there to speak

Directly to the guardian—

Who sat, massive, behind a screen

Behind him a black telephone

Shiny, untouched, indeed pristine,

But one he did not deign to own.

Long story short, all was still well.

I paid a hundred, signed her up.

Then back to our Grosse Pointe hotel

To tell my mate, to sip a cup,

Well-iced—before a hot walk came,

And later dinner on spaghetti.

Next to Pier Park where my own dame

Attended her last Summer swimmy.

Then came evening and its doings,

The swim-shoes in the sink to soak.

Check the e-mail, to-ing, fro-ing.

The Tigers lost, Mitt Romney spoke.

Breadless Circuses

Is there a kind of archetype of rulership? And, for that matter, what is an archetype? In practice it seems to mean what most people understand by some concept, thus a widespread meaning, understood at once and essentially in the same way—without further elaborations, nuance, and learned exceptions. Rulership? Well, whoever can say, “Off with his head!” would appear to manifest it—provided, of course, that it really happens. It means ability to accomplish at the highest collective level what the person actually intends.

The American way of government as embalmed in the constitution ignores the archetypes that float about. By contrast the American way of electing its ruler makes maximum use of the archetype—thus in effect ignoring that a presidential election is not, repeat not, the election of a ruler at all. It is the election of electors who in turn elect an executive charged with executing the laws passed by Congress. Quite a contrast. Genuine rulers—the off with his head kind—tend to elect themselves. If that’s not the way they get there, they get there on a vast swell of popular hysteria so great that riding rough-shod over flimsy pieces of paper is quite easy—and easily enforced by thugs in shirts of the same color.

Ours is a kind of corporate model, in effect. At the archetypal level. At the corporate level the board composed of ownership selects the executive who runs the company; the board can also remove the chief executive if he doesn’t deliver. The cowardice of most boards is just a fact; but it happens. The difference in our governing structure is that the power is entirely in the hands of Congress—but not the at-will removal of the executive.

But people want to keep things simple—and as I’ve remarked elsewhere before, If you keep it simple, you are stupid. Therefore, at this season, we have political circuses. The Romans insisted on more. Bread and Circuses. We only get the circuses. The bread is supposed to come from G — no! Make that the Market.

Nature Knocking on the Door

Less than a mile away from where we lived in Hopkins, Minnesota in the 1970s and 1980s is St. Louis Park, a slightly more inner suburb than Hopkins of Minneapolis. Beyond those, however, came several more outer rings—enough so that we considered ourselves quite urban. Nevertheless, we happily cohabited with wildlife, in part because a Burlington Northern right-of way passes through that region, Seattle-bound, in part because it had and still has rather extensive undeveloped pieces of land. Foxes, deer. Once a deer got itself seriously entangled in the fencing of our residence—but managed to extricate itself while we were still scratching our heads and wondering how to free it.

Now, some two decades after leaving there, St. Louis Park put up some signs along a fairly new bike path. I bring a picture of one here thanks to the photography and hat tip of Patricia Bungert, a family friend. Nature is patient but persistent. Mind you, Brigitte and I believe that Minnesota will be the last bastion of civilization still standing when all else has succumbed to barbarism—but things are looking a little chancy when the Coyote is at the Door in St. Louis Park.

The Great Loneliness

Just a thought. The thought is that a great loneliness hides behind the awed elevation of Apple as the greatest company—measured in market capitalization—and the doom-gloom surrounding Facebook, because the company seems unable to get Wall Street to fall in love with it. One represents “connectedness” as a physical object, the iPhone, the other the virtual locus where souls meet to commune. The ubiquity of the word “mobile” (as in, Hey, that’s what we are!) seems to me to be part of the phenomenon. We are restless roamers on the go, agitated particles, moving too fast to smell the roses. I sort of doubt that we are any more mobile than we were twenty years ago, by actual physical measurement, so this is something in the air.

Some Silk Statistics

Having just celebrated the successful raising of seven of nine caterpillars into butterflies this summer, a little perspective might be in order. Silk, that most prized of all fabrics, derives from the silkmoth, Bombyx mori. The caterpillars undergo five transformations. In the fifth of these, they cover their bodies with a dense coating of raw silk. When the larvae have developed into moths inside these silky covers, they release an enzyme that produces a hole in the silk—and incidentally also causes silk fibers to break down. For this reason, the making of silk begins before the moth is ready to emerge. The pupae are dipped into boiling water to kill them.

Each chrysalis or cocoon is formed of a single strand of silk. Yes. Not a typo. The  cocoon is about an inch in length. The thread of silk that forms it ranges in length from a fifth to more than half a mile. After the cocoons are boiled, a human must find the end of the thread by brushing the cocoon by hand. That end is then threaded into a needle affixed to a machine or a wheel. Then the unraveling begins.

Now for the statistics. It takes 3,000 to 5,000 larvae to make one pound of silk. The world produces 70 million pounds of raw silk every year—and to do so, 210 to 350 billion larvae must die so that we can dress our ladies decoratively. And we were proud to have helped seven butterflies to flutter away freely this summer. Hhmm.

To raise such large numbers of silk-covered larvae makes the white mulberry tree (Morus alba) happy; the caterpillars feed on its leaves until they go into the silk-chrysalis state. To be sure, being eaten in order to be cultivated is not necessarily an ideal sort of existence. In 2002, I learn from Wikipedia, 3,890 square miles were under white mulberry cultivation in China to support the silk trade, which is more than the areas of Delaware and Rhode Island combined or 80 percent of Connecticut’s surface.

How did I get here? We were discussing the fine threads that hold the Swallowtail chrysalides suspended from a plant stem—while the bottom is glued to the stem so well that the chrysalis gives way before the seal does. Brigitte got to talking about silk, which those suspending filaments surely are—and we realized that we knew nothing about the subject except that silk came from worms. We soon learned that these worms are caterpillars…

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My image of the white silkmoth cocoons is from Offset Warehouse (link). A very instructive site on how the actual silk extraction takes places comes from wormspit.com (link).

The Last of the Season?

This year here at Rancho Mariposa we have raised nine Black Swallowtail butterflies. Of those nine two passed away soon after shedding their chrysalis—in both cases the problem was a defective right wing. (Is Mother Nature signaling something?) The last one appeared this morning, a very healthy and very big lady. And she was really ready to head north; they always head north, until, I suppose, the migration period to the south sets in. I’d barely begun to take some photographs when she just took off.

So the raising season is over, but new visitors continue to arrive. Today I took some pictures of the Fiery Skipper. Several were taking an interest in our overflowing mint plantation. More on that subject later. Should other butterflies ask, you can tell them that the Rancho is still open, and the dining is free. The year's final report will be presented after the first frost.

Junonia Coenia

The Common Buckeye has a moth-like coloration, but it is emphatically a butterfly. It belongs to the same family as the Monarch and the Red Admiral, the Nymphalidae. The German entomologist Jacob Hübner (1761-1826) created, if that’s the word for it, the Junonia genus; it has somewhere between 30-35 species. This naming took place in 1819, and the imprecise number of species has a meaning of its own. Disputes surround the classification of some species within the group; some people put  them under Juno’s care, others under one on another closely related genus. Now 1819 is not that long ago; the situation is still fluid, as it were. And for all we know, the Lepidoptera collectively might be spawning new species yet without notifying human lepidopterists as common courtesy, one supposes, would require.

I became hooked on butterflies when writing the Ghulf Genes novels in which I had one character, who was always very lucky, discover a new species in Spain as a child—which device necessitated an entrance to the subject. I was at first intrigued and then entirely bowled over by the vast complexity. Which is both instructive and humbling. One discovers not only deep layers in nature but also unknown communities of humans laboring away—of which Jacob Hübner is one.

One aspect of that community is now rising forcefully in my awareness. Here are scientists who inherited naming conventions from the days when Latin was the English of the world; they are still at it, creating names, but absentmindedly, as it were, never bothering to record, anywhere, what those words mean in the global language of today. Junonia? The goddess Juno, no doubt, lurks between the leaves there. Coenia? I spent far too much time trying to run it down and failed. But it might have something to do with “muddy”; the closest Latin I could find was coenosus, meaning muddy or turgid or boggy. The coloration of the creature? Well, perhaps.

This post is occasioned by a visit from a Buckeye (in England also called Commodore or Pansy) yesterday. It was a little frustrating trying to get a good photo; I show two that weren’t a disaster. Then, to do some honor to this butterfly’s real patterns, I show a more happy picture I managed to take last year about this time.

The Buckeyes’ favorite food is the snapdragon; they feed on its nectar and their caterpillars eat the leaves. I took the photo I show from a site called Whole Blossoms (link). By all means purchase some at the site, and the Buckeyes will come—although, in our case, they visit to enjoy our mint and basil.

The Great American Desert

The region of the country known as the Great Plains, extending in a wide band from New Mexico and Texas northward to include Montana and the Dakotas, but going on up into Canada, had a different name in the nineteenth century. People called it the Great American Desert. I show a map of the region on LaMarotte (link) in a post that briefly looks at drought conditions in 1934 and this year.

Here in Michigan, water, water, everywhere. My front lawn actually has fresh grass growing whereas, in ordinary times, it is by now a yellowish disaster. The backyard is lush. Our tomato harvest exceeds all expectations. But we have family living in the reemerging dust bowl. Such things prompted my glance back—and produced ambiguous feelings.

Two kinds of Great American Deserts. There is the physical and economic kind—and then the cultural kind. In the middle of the Great Depression, most of the agricultural regions turned to dust and produced a sizeable migration to the west and east. That era left a very deep impression on the people who passed through it—and in turn what now is labeled “the Greatest Generation.” It is very humbling to realize that genuine and collectively experienced hardship lifts humanity—whereas massive wealth, also collectively enjoyed, produces decadence, whining, deadlock, and galloping incoherence. If the tendency is upward, the collective benefits—no matter what induced that movement.

Ambiguity arises because I hear a lot of whining in the media over such matters as a sluggish GDP growth—and I do feel genuinely sympathetic to the people hurt by our Great Recession and our Little Dust Bowl—but it strikes me that a reminder, if not too harsh, that we’re actually living somewhere between the rock and the hard place, is good for the soul. Bring on the hardship, Lord. But, please! Not today.

Lake Saint Clair

A river runs through it. It is a fact—and visible from its satellite image if you look closely. The Saint Clair river itself originates in, and drains, Lake Huron. After passing through the lake, it becomes the Detroit river and in due time it feeds Lake Erie to the south. In the lake itself, the river almost, but not quite, marks the border between the United States and Canada. The border parallels it but slightly to the East. Where the river is more bounded by land to the north and south, it is the border.

An excursion yesterday to the very tip of the Grosse Pointe Farms Pier Park had us watching huge freighters slowly, very slowly, come toward us, getting both much larger and travelling much faster. The ships use the river itself; its channel is at least 21 feet in depth; the rest of the lake, at its deepest, is around 17 feet: from the water it represents an invisible highway, but the ships’ masters follow navigational maps showing plenty of detail. The width is about 800 feet, so that the freighters can pass each other—even in the fog; but for safety then they sound their mournful horns at intervals. The lake, at its widest, is about 27 miles across.

The Iroquois called the Lake Otseketa, which (according to Susan Stevens on Facebook) meant sugar or candy; my informant also offers an alternate name, Ganatchio, meaning kettle, based on its shape. From a very high satellite view, the lake more resembles a right fist with the index finger pointing north.

The European discoverer of the lake was René Robert Cavelier.  The date was August 12, 1679. Present with the party was Father Louis Hennepin, O.F.M—who noted that that day happened to be the feast day of Saint Clare of Assisi, another and most famous Franciscan. Presumably he did the naming—and also recorded (he was the expedition’s official historian) what the Iroquois called it. Our family has a kind of linkage with Father Hennepin—a man who got about. He was one of the discoverers of Niagara Falls, Lake Saint Clair, and Saint Anthony Falls now in Minneapolis. I worked for a while in Niagara Falls, we lived in Hennepin County in Minnesota, and yesterday we watched the freighters plow the sky-blue waters on Lac Sainte-Claire.

Concerning the spelling here. Saint Clare was born Chiara Offreduccio. Clare is sometimes spelled Clair or Claire. The tailing E of the original name bestowed by Hennepin got chopped, perhaps by accident, in an official mapping of the region that took place in 1755. But both Grosse and Pointe, in our town, Grosse Pointe Farms, managed to hold on to theirs. You lose some, you gain some.
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Image from Google Maps but rendered non-interactively as a picture. Click to enlarge, Esc to return.

Not Surprised

The New York Times reports this morning that on-line dating services—well at least one, OkCupid—has discovered that single people meeting in bars find it easier to encounter individuals they actually like. People are perversely peculiar: they cannot be captured abstractly using questionnaires. Just yesterday I noted in a comment here that in modern times people live in an abstract world; they live suspended in thin air. Their roots don’t reach the soil of organic reality, real culture. This story was a kind of Amen to that comment. Evidently these services work by matching people with nicely-fitting “profiles”; those people then “get to know each other” by exchanging e-mails; after fairly extended periods like that, they arrange to meet for a meal or a drink. And in most cases in, like, five seconds, they know this was a bad mistake. But in a bar now—or some cookout—lo and behold. Once a spark appears, and there is a kind of drawing together—and it’s clearly visible in the sparkling of the eyes—e-mails are just fine to keep it going once it’s started. The inverse doesn’t work. The dating services, however, do provide a genuine service by arranging such physical encounters. All those people in the bar are certifiably single and searching. Odd that modern urbanized existence, where vast masses live almost shoulder to shoulder, should fail naturally to produce social encounters so that the Market must be summoned. The married mingle in various ways—block parties, children’s sports, church, and so on—but those single, or single again, in their late twenties and thirties? Much harder to do.

Berkley Square

We just finished seeing the tenth and last episode of a 1998 BBC series called Berkley Square. It follows the trials and tribulations of three nannies. We found it far more tense and gripping than any current-day spy thriller can possibly be. The reasons are the three most important facts about fiction (on the model of real estate): character, character, character. The tale ends, sort of, but enough pieces are left hanging so that not everything is properly resolved. A heavy web search does not show that this initial showing, in ten episodes, was ever followed by a continuation—although I “remember” the ultimate resolution. Now how could that be? 

The Inch and the Oate

We played MyWord yesterday afternoon and Brigitte gave me inchoate as my test word. I got there, actually, but it was a struggle, in part because I didn’t really know the word, you know, up close and personally. I didn’t know how to spell it, either. I’ve heard it spoken hence when I read it I read it as in-ko-ate—and every time I do it, I always wonder what that H is doing there. The H is silent, not like in cha-cha-cha. And I’ve always understood the word, from the context, as meaning incoherent, which is close but no seegar.

Very confusing word. It should be banned. Its actual meaning is “rudimentary,” thus something  still in early stages, undeveloped. Sure enough, its origin is Latin, a variant, mind you, of incohare, a verb meaning “to begin, to hitch up.” Therefore that H got moved. The confusion comes because the word derives from in and cohum. Notice where that H is. Cohum means “the strap affixed to an oxen’s yoke.” In is used in its second sense, thus “in, into, on, upon,” not it its first Latin sense meaning “opposed to, not, against, etc.” Inchoate entered the language first. Then some people, misunderstanding what it meant—or at least what the in meant, began using choate as an adjective to mean “finished.” They thought that inchoate meant “unfinished,” therefore removing that in would produce “finished.” The Online Etymology Dictionary informs me that Oliver Wendell Holmes lamented the use of that choate in a letter in 1878, calling it barbarism in legal language. What are things coming to…

Pronunciation also varies, and Webster’s gives two versions. In what follows the emphasized syllable is italicized. in-ko-ate. in-ko-it. I’ve been pronouncing it in-ko-ate, so getting that wrong too. Satis. Basta. Done with it.

My test word for Brigitte? Solecism. Meaningful coincidence, in a way. That word means “mistake in speaking or writing.” Applies, generally, to inchoate, I’d say. I’ll stick to rudimentary.

Mid-August Walk

The Cepheids of Henrietta Leavitt

There is a category of stars, known as the cepheid variables, that grow bright from a relatively dim state within a fixed period of days and then revert to a dim state in the same period—only to do it again. Their name derives from the first of these discovered, the Delta Cephei, in the Constellation of Cepheus in 1784. These suns are big—five to twenty times the size of our sun. They expand as they grow brighter, grow small again as they go dim. The following graphic, from the European Space Agency (link), illustrates the process.

The mechanism of pulsation is explained by doubly- or singly-ionized helium in the stars. Doubly means that two electrons are missing, singly that one is missing. Doubly ionized helium is more opaque. When the cepheid is dim, its outer atmosphere is high in doubly-ionized helium; it holds radiation in. As the sun heats, it expands and cools; as it cools the helium becomes less ionized and more transparent; the expanded star is bigger and brighter; more light escapes. Expansion is countered by the sun’s gravitational pull, and the process reverses.

Henrietta S. Leavitt (1868-1921) discovered an interesting relationship between these stars’ change in luminosity and the period (measured in days) it took them to go from peak-to-peak or trough-to-trough: the brighter the star, the longer the period. This news surfaced in 1912—and Leavitt appeared in my own telescope again yesterday when I was looking back to that year. Ah, yes! An interesting story. The paper in question was by the Harvard astronomer Edward Pickering (1846-1919); Leavitt worked for Pickering at Harvard with other women studying and cataloging photographic images of the sky. She turned sixty-six that year. The paper was called “Periods of 25 Variable Stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud”; it was published in the Harvard College Observatory Circular and cited Leavitt’s work. Leavitt had written an earlier paper, but it was only available in the Annals of Harvard College Observatory. It was dated 1908 and titled “1777 Variables in the Magellanic Cloud.” (Image from Wikipedia here.)

The ladies who worked for Pickering did the mind-numbing “clerical” work so that their male betters could do the “serious thinking.” My own conviction, to the contrary, is that real discoveries are made when creative people study the actual raw data—whatever form they take. And Leavitt was one of these. She began to record the luminosity and periods of the cepheids—and as any awake mind will do, she began to chart them. Soon she discovered the highly predictable relationship between period and luminosity. The longer the period, the brighter the peak. Leavitt had made a very fundamental discovery—used to this day to measure stellar distances.

So how does this work? The apparent magnitude of a star is provided by its luminosity as observed from the earth. If the two variable stars have the same regular periodicity, they can be assumed to be the same size, wherever they are. As for their absolute magnitude, that all depends on how far away they are. Leavitt made the simplifying assumption that the Cepheids in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) were roughly at the same distance from us. Therefore, their absolute magnitudes could be measured as soon as the distance to the SMC became known. Thereafter, the periods of the stars alone, no matter how dim or bright they were at peak, could yield their absolute magnitude. And then, in turn, those two values (M for absolute, m for apparent) could be used to calculate the distance. And, indeed, that turned out to be true. The formula is D = 10^(m-M+5)/5 .

Absolute magnitude needs a little more unpacking. It is the brightness that a stellar object would have if it were observed at a distance of 32.6 light years (10 parsecs) from the surface of the sun. The star nearest to us, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light years (1.3 parsecs) from us.

The distance to the SMC was first estimated by Ejnar Hertzsprung in 1913. He used the cepheid variables in his method. His estimate, of 30,000 light years, was way off, but the method was later perfect. Now we know that the distance is 199,000 light years. The current method of calculating the absolute magnitude of a cepheid variable star is to:

• Measure its dimmest and brightest luminosity, calculate an average, and call that apparent magnitude (m).
• Calculate the absolute magnitude (M) from the period (P) using the following formula: M = -2.78 log(P) - 1.35. The constants used are built-in factors and adjustments necessary to indicate distance to the SMC.
• Use the distance equation (D = 10^(m-M+5)/5) to obtain the distance in parsecs.
• Multiply that number by 3.26 to get light years. 

Henrietta Leavitt thus, a hundred years ago, gave us what are called standard candles (they flicker, sort of, after all). Using them we can measure how far away they are. The art has made great advances since. Other categories of cepheids, with much longer periods, have been discovered. Methods of measurement have greatly improved. And the art is still somewhat iffy. But it’s good enough for astronomy work.

Wither Thou Goest

Back when I was writing the Ghulf novels, it amused me to give the Martians what I called “decorous” speech—in part motivated by memories of times when formal, familiar, and vulgar speech coexisted and those capable of all three used them by conscious choice. This was quite easy to observe for a young person in Europe, especially in Germany. There regional dialects were different enough so that they had to be learned. While a boy I moved from Bavaria to Swabia; there I was sent to a boarding school—and it took me several weeks before I’d learned to talk properly with my school mates—although, to be sure, we could understand each other if both spoke High (read Radio) German. Many years later I lived in Germany again as a soldier, and I knew people whom I observed speaking formally with colleagues, familiarly with close friends, and in the regional dialect all within a ten minute period, quite spontaneously—all depending on who the other party was. I first experienced this in childhood. When some tensions arose at home, my father had a habit of assuming formal speech with my mother, to indicate displeasure, whereas he used the familiar form at other times—and my mother, quick on the uptake, answered in kind.

Douay-Rheims (1582): “Whithersoever thou shalt go, I will go: and where thou shalt dwell, I also will dwell.” Ruth 1:16.

King James (1611): “Wither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge.”  

Revised Standard (1952):  “Where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge.”

Jerusalem Bible (1966): “Wherever you go, I will go, wherever you live, I will live.”

Modern Language (1969): “Wherever you go, there I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge.”

New English (1970): “Where you go, I will go, and where you stay, I will stay.”

Living Bible (1971)” “I want to go wherever you go, and live wherever you live.”

Herewith an illustration of an evolution from decorous to formal speech over time. My favorite is the King James, of course, although I always substitute “shall go” for “will go.” What you first hear sticks more or less. Looked at carefully, some interesting differences appear here. Withersoever is a bit of a tongue twister, made simpler in the King James, then replaced by where or wherever. Wherever is emphatic, signaling that the place could be nasty—and I would still go. Where is more neutral. We no longer lodge anywhere. We live. The New English Bible compromises and uses stay. The oldest version uses dwell, which is actually closer to live than to lodge. I am amused by the insertion of want in the most recent version cited; it suggests an aura of modernity.

Unfortunately I’m not qualified to give you lower versions. Informal might be: “Whatever. I’ll stick with you.” The pop version? “Where you hang, baby, I hang.” — I could imagine pop culture LOL at my naïveté if I could imagine that it could read.

A Quick Glance Back

Even the tiny handful of people who were born a hundred years before, or even one or two years earlier, cannot remember 1912 because they would have been too little. So why do I glance back? The news these days are relentlessly centered on financial malfeasance, the economic slump, and tiny electronic appliances we hold in our hands. And, of course, the elections—but that’s a perennial. That all-purpose warding phrase occurred: This too shall pass. Then I thought I’d look. Sure enough, looking by decades, the menu changes but—say in 2002, 1992—not yet the taste and flavor. So I went back a hundred years.

1912. Taste and flavor are quite different. It was the year that the Titanic sank. If you are now a citizen of Arizona or New Mexico, those two regions became states of the Union that year. The year before there were no Girl Scouts of America. In a hard-fought contest, T. Wilding defeated A. Gore. Gore? Already campaigning back then? No. This was Wimbledon, and A. Gore was Arthur Gore. Elihu Root—whose name signaled recognition in my mind but little else—won the Nobel Peace Prize for promoting international cooperation between nations through arbitration. Root failed. If a time machine could transport me to August 17, 1912, and in conversation I would refer to the two World Wars, people would give me puzzled looks. The roots of war, however, were also present—and not just the roots of the great wars but multiple small ones that still plague us: the Balkan Wars began in October. This signaled the eventual breakup of the Ottoman Empire. Serbia and Bulgaria, with secret Russian backing—and joined by Greece and Montenegro—set about to reclaim Ottoman conquests of European territory. A hundred years later, that process is still in motion.

Today brings news of banks hoping to get a special Internet domain-name category. In 1912 the Radio Act parceled out three- and four-letter station codes and restricted access to one radio frequency. The unemployment rate was 4.6 percent in the United States. My time-travelling self is also babbling on about the coming Great Depression—and getting the Cassandra treatment. No one believes my prophecies. Woodrow Wilson was still running for President, running against Roosevelt—Teddy, that is—running as a Bull Moose yet. Same old politics—but a somewhat different flavor.

My time-time travelling persona, looking forward in time from 1912, gains a quite different view of that well-worn phrase, This too shall pass. Yes, it will, this world of 1912. But what shall come in its wake? What came for that time were two of history’s greatest wars, its greatest collective economic meltdown, the Ice Age of the Cold War—which, oddly, created a period of sanity in this country—and after that, and the Berlin Wall, the perfecting hand of Progress has brought us Today. And this too shall…