The TOF Spot

Odds and Ends

2012-01-26T23:04:00.000-05:00

Great Opening Lines

Jon Gibbs, a local writer here in the Valley, runs a blog called An Englishman in New Jersey, for the simple reason that he is. He recently ran a contest called the Meager Puddle of Limelight Award for Best Opening Line.
and announced the winners, which I think are worth sharing:

The goddamn robots were at it again (Beth Cato aka celestialgldfsh)
The first words Henry Woods heard after his execution were, “You took long enough to get here." (Elizabeth Hull aka darkspires)
"Think of me as a time of year" whispered the raccoon, "like libraries in a late autumn afternoon." (Adrian Sterling aka raisinbottom)
You're all alone here, alone among the dead. (Phil Giunta aka pgiunta)
At the beginning, you see, Time had not yet come into being. (Sue Stone aka knittingknots)
Last night, I dreamed of the drowned man again. (Christine Lucas aka silverwerecat)
Miranda Lorensen was about to watch her brother die--again. (Phil Giunta aka pgiunta)
Nobody knew how and nobody knew why, but everywhere that Renee went the rain followed. (Angela De Groot aka angeladegroot)

The illustrious raisinbottom, who has graced us with his presence on the LiveJournal version of this very blog and has in my own opinion the most outre of the opening lines. Though truth to tell, I thought one of the non-finalists was pretty good:
I laid down on the tracks waiting for the 1:15 when a voice next to me said: Could you move up a bit?

If the job of an opening line is to get the reader to proceed to the second line, most of these do the trick most excellently.
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More Odds and Ends below the cut

Esteemed Cells

Another blow struck toward the curing of disease. Or not.
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For Some Values of Earth-sized

Another Earth-sized exoplanet found. So far, these finds have only re-emphasized how very different our own little world seems to be. For that matter, perhaps even how different our own little solar system is. I mean, superjovians whipping around their stars in a couple of days? Little Mercury needs 88 to pull the trick!
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Quote of the Week

The culture war is essentially over. Culture seems to have lost. -- Jerry Pournelle
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Poster of the Week

h/t Mark Shea

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The History Channel

h/t Mark Shea

Weather Gods

2012-01-22T19:01:00.000-05:00

Subject of the Reading

The Reader

The weather gods reached out with uncanny pinpoint accuracy to dump 5 inches of snow on the very day I was to have a reading/signing at the Barnes and Noble, the only serious snowfall so far since Halloween.

Consequently, only four people showed up. Unless they were trapped in the store by the snow and couldn't get away. A small group, but enthusiastic and participative, and we had good conversations. I read from the recently escaped book IN THE LION'S MOUTH. But you already knew that.

Could have been worse, I guess. In mathematics, 4>0. I'm not sure how big a crown might even show up there in theory. I was told that when the musical performer Pat Benatar did a signing, they sold only 150 books instead of the 500 they had hoped for. I signed a bunch of books that will now go on display for the weenies who did not defy the snow to come.

Are Media People Stupid?

2012-01-21T21:22:00.000-05:00

I don't normally ask rhetorical questions, but I have been struck in recent weeks by "memes" such as the following:

following the Jan. 3 Iowa caucus, Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, was believed to have won the Hawkeye State event by 8 votes. More than two weeks later; however, the final certified tally showed Santorum finishing in first place.

Only once did I see a news account correctly note that Romney and Santorum merely won the same number of delegates to the next level of caucuses. (I don't know how it works in Iowa, but I know how it worked in Colorado when I was a House District Leader. The caucuses elected delegates to the county assembly, which then elected delegates to the congressional district convention and the state assembly/convention, which then chose delegates to the national convention.) The phrase "won" was not especially relevant following the precinct caucuses. And it is especially not relevant when the margin is 8 votes. The correct term for the Iowa outcome was "tie."

The media are so enamored of the "horse race" metaphor that they do not seem to realize that a primary process is not a winner-take-all proposition, at least in most states. The parties are much more concerned with getting the right proportion of male and female delegates, of ethnic delegates, etc. We had to do some intricate balancing of presidential preferences versus required biological characteristics. But I digress.

Example: in one precinct caucus I ran, with 10 people attending, everyone voted for Gary Hart except two union members, who voted for Walter Mondale. The rules said that anyone getting more than 20% of attendees was entitled to at least one delegate. Our precinct got to sent three delegates to county, so Mondale got one and Hart got two. This over-represented Mondale (20% of votes; 33% of delegates); but we could not send fractional delegates. Then we had to make sure at least one delegate was female. (One year, when we were still in 1st District and I had not yet held party office, they discovered Mrs. TOF was American Indian, which made her a two-fer, so she got to be a delegate, and they got to check off two columns. But I digress)

The same thing applies to Romney "winning" New Hampshire. He got what, 39% of the vote? (Which I thought was pretty poor for the "governor next door.") Since a primary usually commits to the national, it means Romney got somewhere around 39% of of the small NH delegation -- which means most of the NH delegates will be pledged to someone else; and if some of those someones else drop out, then they will be free to shift votes to, well, someone else.

Example: at State Convention one year, the Carter people pulled some rule changes to convert delegates into droids, unable to change their minds in light of further data; viz., that Carter was a dork. This was triggered IIRC by a challenge to the incumbent by Teddy Kennedy. There was mucho dissatisfaction with Pres. Carter among Democrat rank-and-file; but we were not to be allowed to express it. So, we caucused anyway and Mo Siegel, the Celestial Seasonings guy, organized an uncommitted caucus for those who resented Carter but could not abide Teddy. We sent one third of the Colorado delegation as uncommitted; and the Teddy-ites sent another third. Just to poke Carter in the eye. I suppose by now there are rules to prevent such uprisings.

And the same thing applies to Gingrich in South Carolina. I haven't seen the percentages there; but again, it only means that Gingrich will have first dibs on the plurality of SC delegates.

What we ought to be seeing is not who "won" this state or that, but how many pledged delegates each candidate has racked up.

Then temper even that with those loco states who allow non-party members to vote in a party's primary. Primaries (and/or caucuses) are how the parties choose who they will run in the general election. Why should Republicans and people who couldn't make up their minds get to vote for who the Democrat's candidate will be? And vice-etc.-versa.

But TOF (I hear you say) the candidates themselves talk about "winning" this state or that in the primaries.

Ah (TOF answers) take the title of this rant and alter the second word as appropriate.

TOF at Boskone

2012-01-21T16:19:00.001-05:00

TOF's Schedule at Boskone, as of today:

Saturday 10:00 - 11:00, Creating Alien Characters, Harbor I (Westin)
        From the outside, how do we create alien species that are
        not just giant X or sentient Y -- like big ants or smarter
        cats?  From the inside, how do we even conceive  mentation
        that is fundamentally nonhuman, rather than just like us
        with an obsession for Z -- like money, honor, or status?

Saturday 13:00 - 14:00, Kaffeeklatsche: Michael F. Flynn
        Advance sign-up at Information required; limited to 10

Saturday 15:00 - 16:00, Autographing: Michael F. Flynn,
    
Saturday 17:00 - 18:00, Return of the Stagirite -- or Aristotle's Revenge
        Aristotle's notions are being resurrected with a fresh coat
        of paint and a new label.
            
Sunday 10:00 - 10:30, Reading: Michael F. Flynn

Why the Future Never Gets the SF Right

2012-01-19T21:50:00.000-05:00

There is an essay of mine here Why the Future Never Gets the SF Right.

Head on over and join in the discussion.

Reviews for In the Lion's Mouth & a PODCAST

2012-01-17T13:35:00.000-05:00

I blush to add the the following links to reviews. But I'll add them naetheless:

Fanatsy Book Critic

"I would say that a major part of the series' attraction is its execution - style, characters, world building"
LitStack

The quality of Michael Flynn’s writing is apparent in every sentence. In the first pages of In the Lion’s Mouth, his latest novel, we get the following description of one of his central characters, Francine Thompson:

“She stands by the large bay window that overlooks the endless prairie, though she herself overlooks nothing.”

By toying with the word “overlook”, Flynn gives his reader insight into his character – who is a kind of interstellar secret agent – by layering description with a nod to her constant and unerring attention to detail. This single example is significant only in what it indicates about Flynn’s writing as a whole, that he is both concerned with and playful with language. What this means is that In the Lion’s Mouth, like all the novels in his Firestar series, are more nuanced than merely being adventure fiction. They contain a depth and a whimsy that makes them enjoyable to read and easy to recommend.

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I am reliably informed that Interzone has a not-so-favorable review; but it is not web-accessible; so I don't know if the criticism is literary or political or for not writing the book the reviewer wanted to read.

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PODCAST

As part of the Great Lion's Mouth World Tour - which nowadays can be conducted from my office - Dungeon Crawlers Radio will host an interview with yr. obt. svt., TOF on Monday January 23rd @ 6:15pm MST (which is 8:15pm in real time) . Be sure to tune in. Or not, as it pleases you.

Listeners can access the show by going to www.DungeonCrawlersRadio.com and clicking on the audio player on the right hand side of the screen. Fun times for all!

Humanism in Danger!

2012-01-15T00:35:00.001-05:00

Tristan and Iseult

A Novel Idea

Among the gifts of the Middle Ages was the roman of the langue d'oil. Stories like Tristan and Iseult were different from the chansons de geste of the langue d'oc. Those had featured stereotypes -- brave hero, cowardly traitor, et al. -- performing iconic deeds symbolizing eternal verities. Not only were the chansons symbolic; symbolism was very nearly the point of it all.

The knight pledges fealty to...
a woman?
The seal of Raymond de Mondragon
posted by Gilles Dubois

The roman was something different; something novel. The central love intrigue of the roman leads to various invented episodes (which is why these were called "inventions" back in the day) and the characters evolve through interior conflicts, psychological situations, or invented circumstances, as did Tristan and Iseult, Lancelot and Guinevere, Parzifal, et al. This kind of story had no roots in the fables and tales of the literature of antiquity. For one thing, the subordination of the knight to his lady would have been unimaginable.

All of literature as we know it -- we might even say all of humanism -- stems from this idea of the character-who-changes through a series of events and encounters. But it all hinges on the notion that there actually are interior conflicts, psychological situations, and the like. It hinges, in short, on the freedom of the will.

Where There's a Way, There's a Will

Eliminative Materialism raised its pointy head in the 1960s to argue that there were no intentions, no beliefs, no ideas, but only the wind of physical causation blowing through the neural branches of the brain to create meaningless outputs. Although it is silly tout court, it has been passed along in one form or another like a venereal infection, often with the breathless aspect of one who believes he has discovered it for the first time. Or at least it's what all the kids at the Kool Kids' table say. Many do not follow the logic of it all the way down to the bone as the Churchlands and others have done, but think they can pull one brick out of the house without the whole wall weakening and collapsing on top of them.

Yes, that's right, sports fans! They're off the reservation, anxious to provide A.N. Whitehead with that "curious object of study."

It is deja vu all over again, as the great Yogi Berra once said. Once more it is amateur hour in the theater of philosophy. Trailing in the footsteps of Sam Harris, Patrick Haggard, and others, a congeries of atoms self-labeled for convenience "Jerry Coyne" was impelled by forces inevitably entailed by the Big Bang to output an editorial in USA Today, proving once again that those obsessed with religion wind up trashing humanism in their iconoclastic zeal:

Why you don't really have free will, Jerry Coyne

He reveals three conclusions of his thesis.

The will is not "free.
There is no "will."
And, when he writes: "we" are simply constructs of our brain,
There is no "you."

which must mean pari passu that there is no "Jerry Coyne." That's right. He has asserted that he does not exist. And since ex nihilo nihil fit.... Well, you fill in the rest.

But wait! "We" are simply constructs of our brain? Whose brain?

The Definition

The first error comes early, when inputs compel the coynean brain-atoms to output this string:

But before I explain this, let me define what I mean by "free will."

Question: How hard can it be to deconstruct a proposition when you get to define the terms?
Answer: Not nearly as hard as it would be if one used the actual definitions employed by the people who developed the concept in the first place.

That the definition the coynean atoms were compelled to use is "simply ... the way most people think of it" is little help, since "most people" are unlikely to have thought about it at all, let alone to have thought about it rigorously and logically. What if someone were to deconstruct evolution, saying "Let me define what I mean by 'evolution.' I mean it simply as the way most people think of it" and then go on to give some popular but simplistic misconception? No one as well-versed in the science of evolution as the redoubtable Jerry Coyne would be (were he not simply a construct of his brain) would accept such amateurishness for an instant. Nor should he do so when it is in a field wherein he is the amateur.

Here is the definition of free will emitted by the coyne brain-atoms (Hold onto your hats):

When faced with two or more alternatives, it's your ability to freely
and consciously choose one, either on the spot or after some deliberation.

A simple curve

So free will is defined as "your ability to freely... choose." Well, that's useful. "Rose is rose is rose," but what this tells us is that one should not rely on what "most people think" when defining technical terms. Goodness knows, "the way most people think of" simple would wreak havoc on simple curves in algebraic topology!

A non-simple, or complex curve

So what is the traditional definition of liberum arbitrium? It's ground we've covered before; but we'll repeat it down below. It's not like the coyne atoms are breaking new ground here.

A Test of Free Will

The brain atoms then propose:

A practical test of free will would be this: If you were put in the same position twice
— if the tape of your life could be rewound to the exact moment when you made a decision,
with every circumstance leading up to that moment the same and all the molecules
in the universe aligned in the same way — you could have chosen differently.

If this is the coynean brain-atoms' notion of a practical test, one wonders what would constitute an impractical one. But this sort of thing seems to be the norm among those whose brains practice philosophy without a license. We cannot in practice rerun the tape.

This is the dawning of the
age of Aquarius, or the
new Mayan calendar
or something

And "all the molecules in the universe aligned in the same way..."? This must include the molecule-heaps we call Jupiter and Mars. So when Jupiter aligns with Mars (and the Moon is in the seventh house...) Doesn't that all sound kind of astrologicalistic?

"Oh crap, not again! Buddha, get me
off this fracking wheel of existence!"

And it was in fact this idea -- that the actions of human beings were determined by the alignments of the universe -- that smothered natural science in the cradle even in ancient Greece, where it had briefly had a fighting chance. Indeed, when the various cycles of the universe have returned to their original positions, the Great Year would end, the world would be destroyed, and a new age would begin. (Hence, the Mayan calendar silliness.) Socrates will be born again, be denounced again, drink the hemlock again when "all the molecules in the universe aligned in the same way" again. (See Cleanthes, Chrysippus, et al. for details.)

On the other hand, the less-superstitious Stephen J. Gould famously asserted that were the clock of evolution reset, totally different species would likely evolve than those we know. Apparently, natural selection has free will, but we don't.

John Adams once observed that atheists generally belong to one of two sects. One ascribes everything to Fate (determinism). The other ascribes everything to Chance (randomness). Clearly, the coynean brain-atoms belong to the former sect, while the late Dr. Gould belonged to the latter. The curious thing is that devotees of each sect will wave their own metaphysical banner as proof that theism is wrong. It is wrong because everything is deterministic and nothing is due to chance. Or it is wrong because everything is random and nothing is determined. What this really indicates is that the truth or falsity of theism is entirely independent of whether Newton or Schrödinger wins the smack-down.

Coynean free will

The palmed ace, of course, is the set of preconditions. Why should someone with the same knowledge, same purposes, same motivations not freely make the same choice? Do we expect him to choose by random chance? Do the coyne atoms believe that a free choice must somehow be unexpected? But a free choice is not unmotivated. It is not purposeless. It is a rational choice, not a random one. One chooses deliberately, as the traditional "your money or your life" scenario beloved of sophomores everywhere clearly demonstrates. That is why "scientific" experiments that test "choice" against "random chance" are not only missing the point, they are not even aimed at the point.

The Argument from Determinism

Unable actually to rewind the tape, thus making the "practical experiment" completely nugatory, the coynean brain-atoms then provide "two lines of evidence" to suggest that such free will is an illusion. They are the same lines as in the 1960s when this sort of thing began.

we are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics.
All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws,
which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe.

Uncertain who this is?

A little behind the curve on the physics, I guess. Leaving aside that it is unclear which law of physics is violated if I choose to toss a stone, this argument relies on a metaphysical outlook that physicists began to abandon a hundred years ago. The Newtonian clockwork universe does not hold up. Beyond a certain time frame and certain demanded precision, calculations of planetary positions become indeterminate.

A crashing Bohr

Modern physics is grappling now with how to incorporate the observer into physical definitions and laws. This may be as explicit as in quantum theory, where outputs are not deterministic but rather probability distributions. But it is implicit in the very nature of natural science. Everything we know about nature is what has been initially given to our senses, which makes it observer-relative from the start. In this regard, the correspondence between Heisenberg and historian John Lukacs is instructive. In the revolution of 1924-27, Bohr and Heisenberg overturned the old determinism of classical mechanics placed man back in the center of things.

The proposition that {The world is lawful} is not the same as {The world is deterministic}.

Back when aqueducts were the cutting edge of technology, people saw the world in hydraulic metaphors and gave us the scientific theory of humors. So in the Machine Age, it was only natural to view nature as a collection of machines. But that some aspects of nature can be imitated by a machine does not entail that nature is a machine. We must not confuse a useful poetic metaphor for an ontological reality.

Your secret master

The Argument From the Brain

When the coynean brain-atoms emit "your brain — the organ that does the 'choosing,'" a second palmed ace is revealed. Namely, the assumption that an organ is an actor. We might say "your hand — the organ that does the 'grasping.'" There is some truth to it, but try saying "your hammer — the tool that does the 'nailing.'" Like the hand and the brain, the hammer does nothing unless someone uses it. In particular, no organ acts as an organ apart from an organism. Try putting a brain in a vat and see how long it takes before it constructs a "me." It is the whole being that exercises emergent properties, not any of its parts.

The situation is complicated by people who live normal lives despite having very little brain. The condition is called Dandy Walker complex and is a genetically sporadic disorder that occurs in one out of every 25,000 live births. There have been enough such cases that Dr. John Lorber published a 1980 article in Science titled "Is the Brain Really Necessary?" People born with parts of their brain missing will sometimes recruit other parts of their brain to perform the functions of the missing portions. This again suggests that the brain is in the self, not the self in the brain.
Chase Britton: Boy Without a Cerebellum Baffles Doctors
Consciousness in congenitally decorticate children: developmental vegetative state as self-fulfilling prophecy
(h/t to the Codgitator and Joseph for these examples)

We can't impose a nebulous "will" on the inputs to our brain that can affect
its output of decisions and actions, any more than a programmed
computer can somehow reach inside itself and change its program.

What it means to "impose" a will (nebulous or otherwise) on the "inputs" is unclear. Is it nebulous to "impose" a nebulous gravity on a planet? Gravity, like the will, is not separable from the physical body, but is itself not a material entity. Gravity, reproduction, motion, will are just examples of powers various kinds of material bodies possess: inanimate, vegetative, animal, and rational. Consider the problem of intention. How can you look at something?

The "inputs" to the brain are the sensations. At every moment, the senses are inundated with a cascade of photons, air waves, odor molecules, and so forth. Take photons. Where I sit right now, my eyes are awash in photons bouncing off the computer screen, the tea cup next to it, an empty can of Dr. Pepper Diet Caffeine Free, a Roget's Thesaurus, a cell phone, a talking bobble-head doll of Albert Einstein, a bust of Beethoven, the back wall for the desk, pigeon holes with CDs, manila folders, and so on. In terms of "inputs" all of these are going into my brain. So how is it that what I "see" is the tea cup? Somehow I can seine the whirlwind of otherwise meaningless photons and "privilege" those that have bounced off the tea cup. IOW, I really am able to "impose" my will on the inputs. Because there is nothing in the photons that can account for this. And this involves only the sensory imagination, not even the rational faculties.

This matter is discussed more fully in "Nonlinear Brain Dynamics and Intention According to Aquinas," by Walter J. Freeman, Dept. of Molecular and Cell Biology, U Cal Berkeley, Mind & Matter Vol. 6(2), pp. 207-234

And that's what neurobiology is telling us: Our brains are simply meat computers
that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes and experiences
to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output.

(Yup, he wrote that real computers are programmed by our genes. However, TOF will ascribe that to poor command of English grammar rather than to bizarre metaphysics.) But are our brains "computers"? See Minds, Machines and Gödel, J.R. Lucas

As Searle has pointed out, there are no computers in material nature. There is only plastic and metal and such. What makes it a computer are the intentions of a user. My tea cup, aforementioned, is a computer, presently executing the program "Sit there and hold my hot decaff tea." You see, just as the ancients saw hydraulic models everywhere in nature, and the moderns saw mechanical models everywhere in nature, we post-moderns now see computers everywhere in nature. The brain is now metaphorically a computer rather than a machine or a mixing bowl for the humors. But a poetic analogy is not necessarily an equivalence.
Is the Brain a Digital Computer? John R. Searle

Words like "computer," "programming," "code" and so forth inherently point to something outside the brain; that is, they are teleological. How can genes "program" a brain when genes have no intention? In a series of causal connections

→X→X→A→B→X→X→X→

where A represents the age of the tree and B represents the number of rings, what privileges A and B as the two end-points of a scientific law? What makes A the cause and B the effect when there are a host of Xs that come before A and after B? Answer: intention. But if the human mind has no will, it has no intention, and so there are no scientific laws, only material concatenations.

Recent experiments involving brain scans show that when a subject "decides" to push
a button on the left or right side of a computer, the choice can be predicted by brain
activity at least seven seconds before the subject is consciously aware of having made it.

We've seen this "experiment" before. Who ever supposed that a free exercise of will could not be predicted? The "can be predicted" meant that 60% of the time the prediction was correct. I could almost match that with a coin toss. From a materialistic viewpoint, all that has been observed is a flow of blood in certain regions of the brain "associated with" a motor function. It was the experimenter's free will intention to call that a "moment of decision." However, an article in Nature tells us:

Das and Sirotin used electrodes to measure neuronal activity at the same time and place as blood flow in monkeys who were looking at an appearing and disappearing dot. As expected, when vision neurons detected the dot and fired, blood rushed into the scrutinized brain region. But surprisingly, at times when the dot never appeared and the neurons remained silent, the researchers also saw a dramatic change in blood flow. This unprompted change in blood flow occurred when the monkeys were anticipating the dot, the researchers found. The imperfect correlations between blood flow and neural firing can confound BOLD signals and muddle the resulting conclusions about brain activity.
"Brain imaging measures more than we think: Anticipatory brain mechanism may be complicating MRI studies," Nature (21 Jan 2009)

So what the experiment showed is that the subjects body, habituated to a routine task, anticipated that task by as much as a few seconds.

"Decisions" made like that aren't conscious ones. And if our choices are unconscious, with some determined well before the moment we think
we've made them, then we don't have free will in any meaningful sense.

Of course, it means nothing of the sort. Bodily anticipation of a known muscle motion is not a "decision."

The traditional philosopher will quite happily acknowledge that some decisions really are automatic, unconscious, habitual, genetic, impaired by strong drink, and so on. (Aquinas gives the example of a scholar absent-mindedly stroking his beard. So it's not like these are brand new ideas.) Most of life is lived on automatic pilot. No problem.

Oh Noes! What to Do?

The most bizarre part of the column is that after telling us we have no free will, the coynean brain-atoms then tell us

So if we don't have free will, what can we do?

Well, according to the rest of the column, there is nothing that "we" can "do," because "we" is an illusion and so is the choice to "do" anything. We will simply be blown hither and yon by the winds of Newtonian physics.

And there are two upsides [to denying free will]. The first is realizing the great wonder and mystery of our evolved brains, and contemplating the notion that things like consciousness, free choice, and even the
idea of "me" are but convincing illusions fashioned by natural selection.

If "me" is an illusion, it is difficult to figure exactly who will be realizing, wondering, and contemplating - or suffering the illusion. If there is no free will, then whether the illusion of "we" suffers the illusion of wonder will be the result of physics and not a consequence of the denial, let alone an upside. But that's sort of incoherence is what happens when you arbitrarily change one piece in the jigsaw puzzle of life. The rest starts to not fit together right.

Further, by losing free will we gain empathy, for we realize that in the end all of us, whether Bernie Madoffs or Nelson Mandelas, are victims of circumstance
— of the genes we're bequeathed and the environments we encounter.
With that under our belts, we can go about building a kinder world.

In other words, the brain atoms have discovered that we are all sinners and "there but for the grace of God go I." How "losing free will" will necessarily generate the illusion of empathy is left unsaid; as are the reasons this would impel "us" to build a "kinder" world. Can't "go about" doing diddly without first deciding to do it, and ex hypothesi, there ain't no deciding going on. So whether a kinder world gets built is a consequence of the alignment of molecules in the universe, not of any illusory realization by an illusory "we."

So What is Liberum Arbitrium?

philosophers have concocted ingenious rationalizations for why we nevertheless
have free will of a sort. It's all based on redefining "free will" to mean something else.

Of course, the perceptive reader will have noted how clever the philosophers were to have "re"-defined free will so many centuries before the winds of random causes blew through the coyne-atoms to output that random string. Or could it be the coyne-atoms that have redefined free will using a tautologous definition? What we shall do is remind our Gentle Reader of the original definition of liberum arbitrium, the one that lay behind all that philosophizing and theologicizing that so many are anxious to avoid.

First, the will.

As the diagram indicates, the Volition stands to the Intellect (Conception) as the Emotions stand to the Imagination (Perception). So the will is a kind of appetite or desire; viz., the intellective appetite, analogous to the sensory appetites. It is a "hunger" or "desire" for abstracted concepts. This is one of the reasons that "experiments" in which the subjects twitch fingers or flip switches aren't testing the Will as such. Bodily motions are not the proper object of volition (except to the extent that the intellective appetite may govern the sensitive appetites, cf. dieting.)

Proof that the Will is Free

1. It is impossible to desire what you do not know.
2. Our knowledge of an end may be imperfect.
3. Therefore, our desires toward it are imperfectly determined.
4. That which is imperfectly determined is free to some degree or another.

We can test this by considering a case in which knowledge is perfect. For example, that 2+2=4 is to one versed in arithmetic perfectly known. The will has then no latitude (degrees of freedom) in "choosing"/"assenting to" it. If however, we were given the proposition "Card X = card Y iff א(X) = א(Y)" the will would be free to assent or withhold assent to the extent that one had knowledge or not of cardinal arithmetic. IOW, "free" is not meant in the Nietzschean sense (the triumph of the Will over the Intellect), but in the Aristotelian-Thomistic sense by which the Intellect is prior to the Will.

The will's freedom follows from the quality of the information it receives from the intellect. The fuzzier the knowledge, the freer the will. But inasmuch as nothing in the physical world is as perfectly known as in mathematics, the will has "play" or "freedom" in virtually all circumstances. It may help to understand "free" will in the same sense as "free" fall or a "free"-running river.

The interested reader may refer to

Thomistic Psychology, Robert E. Brennan

Philosophy of Mind, Edward Feser

As well as two short blog posts:Ramble on free will, James Chastek

A thought experiment about determinism, James Chastek

Umm, Didn't We Get Off-Target?

Not really. The coyne-atoms took aim at a no doubt sincerely held illusion that free will was "religiose" and therefore double-plus ungood. Because of this, free will is double-plus ungood, and rejected. Otherwise, the grave insistence with which people insist that they do not exist, cannot think, cannot intend, etc. is incomprehensible. But in taking aim at religion, they popped humanism square between the eyes.

Because literature not only makes no sense if eliminative materialism is true, the whole rationale of the roman becomes vacuous. And we note in passing that many in that camp - at least on the Internet - seem to have a tin ear for literature and the literary way of thinking. Did not Hume, after all, recommend burning all such books?

The Autumn of Modern Science

2012-01-12T21:28:00.001-05:00

The World of the Spiral Arm

Buy early and often

In The January Dancer, Up Jim River, and soon In the Lion's Mouth, the world is shown as no longer having science. Yet they travel by interstellar tunnels, use artificial gravity, etc. Some have wondered how this can be so. But medieval China is a case in point. China never did have what we could call natural science; but during Ming times she certainly had a high technology. Facts, but no Theory.

The planets of the Periphery and the Central Worlds likewise have a black-box technology. They know which Xs produce which Ys. They just have no idea how or why. Ancient gods like Einstein have bestowed these things on them and they work. What more do they need?

But how did matters come to such a pass?

The Modern Ages were the Age of Science. By this, we mean something very particular, and nor merely the study of nature. For one thing, people in other ages and in other civilizations studied nature. Some of them. Some of the time. But there was a Modern way of doing science distinct from the ancient and medieval ways -- and from the post-modern way we are entering.

The Great Pyramid of Geeks

What Science is Not

Henri Poincare famously said that just as a house is not simply a pile of bricks, science is not simply a pile of facts. People in all cultures have discovered facts and collected curiosities. But this sort of serendipitous ingathering is not science-with-a-capital-S. One may gather pragmatically a great many facts without forming any coherent world picture.

Nor is science the formulation of rules of thumb. These are haphazard, fortuitous, traditional, the sort of lore that tinkerers and craftsmen develop informally.

Physical Theory

While scientists must gather facts and really ought to formulate laws (in mathematical terms, if possible), what distinguished Modern Science was the use of physical theory. These are quasi-metaphysical narratives that "make sense" out of a body of facts, and from which the laws can be deduced and the facts predicted. Facts do not explain themselves, and have meaning only in the light of a theory.

The demonstrative regress: a posteriori induction from
sensible singulars to intellectual universals; then a priori
deduction from the universals back to the singulars.

In late medieval times, Robert Grosseteste formulated what he called reduction-and-composition to connect the quiae (facts) and the propter quid (reasons or theory). This was taught to Galileo by his Jesuit instructors as the "demonstrative regress." An example is proceeding from the quia "the moon has phases" to the propter quid "the moon is a sphere."

ASIDE: We can see immediately what is unsatisfying about evolutionary just-so stories. They employ only the a priori half of the loop.

This is also what is wrong with ancient Greek "science." They never let the quiae get in the way of a really cool propter quid. Or they wouldn't have if they had spoken Latin instead of Greek. But the ancient Greeks had Theories, but no Facts. At least not in the modern sense of deliberate and measured observations.

(Fact, from factum est: "that which has the property of having been accomplished." In German: Tatsache: lit. "deed-matter." Fact is cognate with "feat." Rather than passively listening to nature, the moderns went out and interrogated her with deliberate data collection and experiment. Facts are made, not found.)

Aristarchus did not suggest a heliocentric earth because of a close study of the facts of planetary motions, but because fire was nobler than earth and the center was a nobler position than the periphery. Ergo... There are many names for that kind of reasoning, but "scientific" is not one of them. Democritus' "atoms" were an assumption, not a conclusion based on or confirmed by observable facts. Lucky guesses are not science, either. Otherwise, we would credit Jonathan Swift with the discovery of the Martian moons.

The Chinese had facts without theories; the Greeks had theories without facts. If you don't have both a posteriori and a priori, you don't have your science yet.

Billy Ockham, OFM

Billy Ockham Takes a Shave

Ockham's Razor states "Don't have too many terms in your models, or else you won't understand your own models." It was not that the simplest explanation is more likely to be true, as some think. Bill specifically said that the Real World™ could be as complicated as God willed. It was our models of the world that had to be simple. Don't explain Y with X1, X2, and X3 when X1 and X2 will do nicely. (But don't neglect X3 when there is too big a gap between the model and the world. Entities should not be multiplied without necessity.)

(*) razor. The medieval used a straight razor to scrape the ink off the surface of a parchment so that it could be used again. Hence, eraser. Ockham famously "erased" several terms from what he called the "old way" of modeling cognition to create the "modern way."

The Collapse of Modern Science

There are a number of markers of this collapse. Quantum mechanics and general relativity stomped all over the mechanistic Newtonian universe of absolute space. The emergence of Government as the primary funder of scientific research compromised the independence of science, as Eisenhower warned it would in his Farewell Address. The perverse incentives inherent in the Baconian-Cartesian model of science elevated goals (Racial Hygiene, Save the Planet™, New Product, etc.) above the actual science. The feminist-environmentalist critique took some of the bloom off the rose and the Modern mythos of “progress, science, and industry” gave way to a Postmodern mythos of oppression and pollution. The old slogan “Better Living Through Chemistry” began to seem a sick joke. (cf. the 1989 Smithsonian exhibit called “Science in American Life," which presented American science as a series of moral debacles and environmental catastrophes: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Silent Spring, Love Canal, Three Mile Island, and the explosion of the space shuttle. (Christina Hoff Sommers, “The Flight from Science and Reason," Wall Street Journal, 7/10/95)

Physicist complaining

(After physicists complained, some changes were made to the exhibit.)

Even in Science Fiction, dystopias began to replace the Scientist-Heroes of the 1940s and 50s. Enrollment in science, math, and engineering courses began to plummet. Everyone wants to be America's Next Top Model, not her Next Top Organic Chemist.

About "40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree." (60 percent if pre-med students are included.) Some universities are trying to teach science and engineering without so much math. Wonder how that will work out. ("Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It's Just So Darn Hard)" New York Times, Nov. 4, 2011)

These are mostly sociological factors. But now add one more: There's too much damn data.

Après Moi le Déluge de Données

In "To Know, but Not Understand" an article in The Atlantic excerpted from a forthcoming book, Too Big To Know, David Weinberger points to the explosion of data in the sciences.

In 1963, Bernard K. Forscher of the Mayo Clinic complained in a now famous letter printed in the prestigious journal Science that scientists were generating too many facts. Titled "Chaos in the Brickyard," the letter warned that the new generation of scientists was too busy churning out bricks -- facts -- without regard to how they go together. Brickmaking, Forscher feared, had become an end in itself. "And so it happened that the land became flooded with bricks. ... It became difficult to find the proper bricks for a task because one had to hunt among so many. ... It became difficult to complete a useful edifice because, as soon as the foundations were discernible, they were buried under an avalanche of random bricks."

If science looked like a chaotic brickyard in 1963, Dr. Forscher would have sat down and wailed if he were shown the Global Biodiversity Information Facility at GBIF.org. Over the past few years, GBIF has collected thousands of collections of fact-bricks about the distribution of life over our planet, from the bacteria collection of the Polish National Institute of Public Health to the Weddell Seal Census of the Vestfold Hills of Antarctica. GBIF.org is designed to be just the sort of brickyard Dr. Forscher deplored -- information presented without hypothesis, theory, or edifice -- except far larger because the good doctor could not have foreseen the networking of brickyards.

What's in it? Schrödinger's cat

And there you have it. Back to the black box of the pre-scientific age. Bricks without Poincare's edifices. Facts without theories. There are too many Ockhamite entities for the human mind to grasp.

Among other things, the low expense of storing data now means that crappy data gets saved along with the good. The tares are gathered up along with the wheat. The flip side is the high cost of editing such massive amounts of data, so much of the editing and adjusting is done by automated algorithms, facilitated by computational speeds that make the data easier to share. We need no longer think about the data. It's all numbers in a data base.

All this has, as Weinberger says, "led us to science that sometimes is too rich and complex for reduction into theories. As science has gotten too big to know, we've adopted different ideas about what it means to know at all." Systems biology, he says, simply was not possible in the Age of Books. (And recall that the Modern Ages were also the Age of the Book. And stop by Borders to see how well that's going.)

The complexity of the world
Models this complex -- whether of cellular biology, the weather, the economy, even highway traffic -- often fail us, because the world is more complex than our models can capture. But sometimes they can predict accurately how the system will behave.

Looks like Billy Ockham called it right, and the scientific method is headed for the ash-heap of history. Or at least the Modern scientific method. Welcome to Postmodern Science. The quasi-Ming China facts-without-theory world of science-less technology that permeates the Spiral Arm in the January Dancer and its sequels.

Weinberger goes on to show that he may have heard of the Demonstrative Regress:

This marks quite a turn in science's path. For Sir Francis Bacon 400 years ago, for Darwin 150 years ago, for Bernard Forscher 50 years ago, the aim of science was to construct theories that are both supported by and explain the facts. Facts are about particular things, whereas knowledge (it was thought) should be of universals.

Except he gets ahead of himself. The distinction might be between knowledge and understanding. You can know the facts; but you cannot understand them. A theory, you can understand.

Eureka!

Weinberger has a particularly nice paragraph that sums up the old Modern Science (although TOF can quibble with the use of "random").

We therefore stared at tables of numbers until their simple patterns became obvious to us. Johannes Kepler examined the star charts carefully constructed by his boss, Tycho Brahe, until he realized in 1605 that if the planets orbit the Sun in ellipses rather than perfect circles, it all makes simple sense. Three hundred fifty years later, James Watson and Francis Crick stared at x-rays of DNA until they realized that if the molecule were a double helix, the data about the distances among its atoms made simple sense. With these discoveries, the data went from being confoundingly random to revealing an order that we understand: Oh, the orbits are elliptical! Oh, the molecule is a double helix!

But now, there is just too much data to stare at, and there never comes the moment of Oh! Perhaps there always was too much data -- but we just didn't have it all; and that was why one theories kept getting falsified. But maybe, too, we needed the incremental theories precisely because things were "too big to know."

Too much data?

Weinberger tells of a computer program called Eureqa that seines the ocean of data and iteratively constructs equations which adequately predict the outputs. This sounds like orthogonal factor analysis by way of step-wise regression - on steroids. But the resulting equations will be heuristic and not built on any insight into the problem. "After chewing over the brickyard of data that Suel had given it, Eureqa came out with two equations that expressed constants within the cell. Suel had his answer. He just doesn't understand it and doesn't think any person could." But that is probably because the various Xs in such equations need not correspond to any physical factor in the system.

That is, a bunch of inputs -- X1, X2, ..., Xn -- are put into the black box and out comes one or more formulae: Yi = g(F1, F2, ..., Fk). But a factor Fj might not represent any of the various X1, X2, ..., Xn. The equations "work," just like old rules of thumb, but provide no understanding of the process.

when Sir Francis Bacon said that knowledge of the world should be grounded in carefully verified facts about the world, he wasn't just giving us a new method to achieve old-fashioned knowledge. He was redefining knowledge as theories that are grounded in facts. The Age of the Net is bringing about a redefinition at the same scale. Scientific knowledge is taking on properties of its new medium, becoming like the network in which it lives.

Let's not give Frankie Bacon too much credit; but that story is part of the Origin Myth of the Modern Ages. Weinberger is telling us that the Modern Ages are indeed over and along with the Book, the School, Industry, Europe, and the rest, the Modern way of doing science is as dead as the Medieval way. Well, it had a good run.

That doesn't mean no one will study nature any more. It does mean that they won't do so in the same way. Compare reading. The end of the Age of the Book does not mean no one will read. It means they will not read in the same way. The manner in which readers grasped the contents of a scroll differed from the way their successors grasped the contents of a manuscript codex, a printed book, or a computer screen (back to scrolling?) The expectation of an understandable physical theory may fade, to be replaced with direct "mechanical" grappling with the forest of facts with no expectation that they "make sense." That is the world of the Spiral Arm series.

God ordering the world "by number,
weight and measure"

One of the "memes" of the Middle Ages was that since the world was created by a rational God who "ordered all things by number, weight, and measure," the world could be understood by reason through numbering, weighing, and measuring things in the world.

It would seem that the opposite is true. Having abandoned the belief, we are about to abandon the conviction.

So, What Next?

Well, let's see. We're back to black-box rules of thumb. People will take the outputs of the oracle-computers without understanding what they really mean, and apply them successfully or not. But causal principles that are not known ("manifest") are hidden ("occult"). And the attempt to manipulate physical matter by use of occult powers was called "magic."

It's not just that the technological fruits of the advanced science will seem to be mirabilia ("marvels," "miracles") it's that the scientist-priests themselves will not understand the principles behind them, either. So perhaps Arthur C. Clarke was far more right than he knew when he said that a sufficiently advanced science would be indistinguishable from magic.

edited 15 Jan for length, typos, and excessive digression, even for me.

Flynnstuff on the Web

2012-01-11T22:32:00.000-05:00

Litstack has decided that I am a Featured Author for January. Hoo-ah.

They review January Dancer (appropriately enough) here:
http://litstack.com/?p=4060

And Up Jim River here:
http://litstack.com/?p=4242

Something That Crossed My Mind

2012-01-11T15:23:00.001-05:00

Oh, yes....

&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;h&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

h/t Mark Shea

Okay. And then there is this:

&amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;gt;vvv

I actually quibble with one thing he says. The Mayans (and others who used this and similar calendars) did think that the world was destroyed and reborn at the end of every Great Year. (Although the term "great year" is Chaldean, it was also used by the Greeks and by some people in the Renaissance.) The notion is that when everything in the universe is aligned once more as it was in the beginning, everything will reboot. Socrates will be born again, be denounced again, and will again drink the hemlock when everything is aligned the same was as before. This is curiously consonant with the beliefs of determinists, who substitute something they call "physical causes" for the alignment of the stars. But more on that later.

How to Read the News

2012-01-10T17:36:00.000-05:00

In an article on the National Public Radio web site:

[Rob] Boston [at Americans United for the Separation of Church and State] says of course religious believers want to impose their views on the world — witness the fight against same-sex marriage.

Can anyone spot the logic error?

Beat Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar

2012-01-10T10:45:00.000-05:00

From The Atlantic magazine, a short piece on Josef Skvorecky, a refugee to Canada from the Prague Spring of 1968. In the intro to his book The Bass Saxophone, he lists a set of regulations that had "engraved themselves deeply on my mind," issued during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. They were binding on all local dance orchestras.

Pieces in foxtrot rhythm (so-called swing) are not to exceed 20% of the repertoires of light orchestras and dance bands;
in this so-called jazz type repertoire, preference is to be given to compositions in a major key and to lyrics expressing joy in life rather than Jewishly gloomy lyrics;
As to tempo, preference is also to be given to brisk compositions over slow ones so-called blues); however, the pace must not exceed a certain degree of allegro, commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo (so-called hot jazz) or in solo performances (so-called breaks) be tolerated;
so-called jazz compositions may contain at most 10% syncopation; the remainder must consist of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races and conductive to dark instincts alien to the German people (so-called riffs);
strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit (so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc.) as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl (so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.);
also prohibited are so-called drum breaks longer than half a bar in four-quarter beat (except in stylized military marches);
the double bass must be played solely with the bow in so-called jazz compositions;
plucking of the strings is prohibited, since it is damaging to the instrument and detrimental to Aryan musicality; if a so-called pizzicato effect is absolutely desirable for the character of the composition, strict care must be taken lest the string be allowed to patter on the sordine, which is henceforth forbidden;
musicians are likewise forbidden to make vocal improvisations (so-called scat);
all light orchestras and dance bands are advised to restrict the use of saxophones of all keys and to substitute for them the violin-cello, the viola or possibly a suitable folk instrument.

The Atlantic calls this perhaps "the single most remarkable example of 20th-century totalitarian invective against jazz." Gotta watch out for that there foxtrot.

In addition to the ritual use of phrases like " Jewish-Freemasonic," "Jewishly gloomy," " Negroid excesses," the reader is struck by the impulse of the Late Modern State to micromanage with detailed regulations. "The double bass must be played solely with the bow." "Drum breaks longer than half a bar in four-quarter beat" are prohibited. (But with an exception made for military music!) "Not to exceed 20% of the repertoires." "At most 10% syncopation."

That sort of nit-picky over-regulation has no place in a free republic and could never happen here.

Three Hundred Years

2012-01-08T18:05:00.000-05:00

In his fascinating book Oral Tradition as History, Jan Vansina describes something he calls the floating gap. The book is replete with examples of oral traditions, such as in Africa, among the Hopi, and other people. He even mentions some oral traditions regarding local or family events among the modern English, et al. His purpose is to investigate under which conditions such traditions can be used as reliable history.

Especially interesting in this regard is the origin of a certain tradition among the Hopi recounted on pp 19-20.

Photo ca. 1930. Note that the Hopi had begun adopting
Plains Indian costumes by that time.

Sometime between 1853 and 1856, as they were returning to their home on First Mesa from a visit to Fort Defiance, a party of ten Hopi were attacked by Navajos. At least four Hopi were killed, including the village chief. As a result a new clan took over the headmanship of the town. The battle led to retaliation, but eventually peace was concluded and a boundary between Hopi and Navajo was agreed on. The new boundary passed close to the spot of the ambush.

So much for history. Two versions of the event were recorded by anthropologists in 1892, just under forty years later. One was a bare recital of the facts. The other was a memoir by Djasjini who had been a survivor of the attack. His account is more detailed, but is still essentially a narration of events. A second survivor, Hani, had been a boy in 1853/6, badly wounded, but survived. By 1892, he had become chief of the Singer Society and directed the Wuwutcim ceremony at which the first, bare-bones account had been recited. Perhaps he had been the reciter.

A third version was published by a Hopi in 1936, some eighty years after the events and forty-four years after the original recordings. The story is now markedly different in character. The Hopi have gone to Fort Defiance because two men in love with the same woman, decide to show their bravery by sacrificing themselves to be killed at the boundary so that the boundary would be marked forever as sacred. The whole thing is predestined, as attested by the appearance of Eagle and Rabbit. The wounded boy Hani is now the hero of the story and idealized to recall the little Twin War Gods of Hopi myth.

IOW, the story has been retrofitted into a pre-existing mythos of other stories and traditions. The story was now an explanation of why the boundary was where it was, why there had been a change in leadership, and why the present leadership was right and true and good. It became a shared story because these things must never be forgotten.

Historical Consciousness

John Lukacs liked to use the phrase "historical consciousness," which he thought was increasing during modern time. It refers to knowledge of the past as past. Vansina explains that this sort of thinking -- linear change, chronology -- provides many accounts: a wealth of detail regarding the present. But beyond a point accounts become sparse, the names in the genealogies become few. Then, for the remote past -- "origin time" -- the accounts once more become plentiful and detailed. The origin time accounts are myth; that is, the social charter of the society.

In the genealogy of O Flainn of Sil Maelruain in O'Hart's Irish Pedigrees, the more recent generations are complete, and the most ancient names follow the annals. But in between there are simply not enough generations listed to cover the number of years involved!

Beyond a certain depth of time -- which differs for different societies because time is reckoned in generations or other social constructs, rather than in sun-circuits -- chronology can no longer be kept. Accounts fuse and either drop back into Origin Time, where they are assigned to a Culture Hero, or they are forgotten. Vansina calls this

The Floating Gap

But it might be called the Floating Horizon, that is, the horizon of historical consciousness. Within this horizon, actors are real people with complex motives dealing with a complex cultural context. Beyond this horizon, actors become archetypes with simple motives dealing with a black-and-white cultural contests that matters greatly to the story-tellers.

Pierre Paul François Camille
Savorgnan de Brazza

The horizon "floats" because it keeps moving forward as generation follows generation. The Hopi story of the 1850s Navajo ambush was still historical when it was told by Djasjini and (maybe) Hani, two eyewitnesses, in 1892. But by 1936, it had fallen below the horizon and Hani had become a Culture Hero.

Among the Tio of the Congo ca. 1880, the horizon lay at ca. 1800. By 1960, it lay at 1880. Had the Tio remained completely oral, the arrival of de Brazza in 1880 would now have become timeless myth. As it is, writes Vansina, he has become a Culture Hero -- but one who can still be dated.

So does the advent of written culture abolish the floating horizon?

Yes and No

The horizon is at least potentially eliminated among professional historians, who familiarize themselves with the documentation of the era which they study. In the primary documents one can find the complexity and humanity of the actors and their circumstances. To some extent, those who read the historians can also accomplish this.

But who has time to read all that? Have you read the accounts of the Warren Commission? The primary sources for the attack on Ft. Sumter? The poetry of Eustace Dechamps? Most of us must depend on accounts that are little different from oral traditions.

The Shipwrecks of Time

Francis Bacon once wrote (in The Advancement of Learning) that “Antiquities are remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwrecks of time.” That is, what we have of the past is only what has survived haphazardly. It is not even a random sample (which means that without "external information" we cannot draw inferences about the whole of society from the data). As we go further back in time, the survivors of the shipwrecks become fewer and fewer, and their reliability becomes more and more questionable.

For recent times, where there are many accounts, we can weigh one account against another, consider the agendas the writers may have had, and so on, and at least approximate to the truth. But when there are only three surviving monuments from the reign of a particular pharaoh, and those built under the pharaoh's direction, are we getting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

I will suggest, blushingly, that for us the floating horizon lies at about 300 years in the past.

King Art

King Arthur is supposed to have lived in the 5th cent. By the time of Charlemagne, 8th cent., he had become the Stuff of Legend in such compilations as the Historia Brittorum which, though presented as a chronicle, was by its author termed "a heap of all he could find." That means "excerpts, chronological calculations, glosses, and summaries based on earlier records, many of which no longer exist." Folk legends about Arthur were already in circulation. These legends were further embellished during the feudal age. By now, the complex reality of Arthur has vanished beneath a heap of round tables and grail quests and adultery collectively called The Matter of Britain.

Big Chuck instructing Pious Lou

By the time of the troubadors, 11th cent., even Charlemagne had become legend in a series of pop songs called the chansons de geste -- songs of [heroic] deeds -- which collective comprise The Matter of France. These tales cumulatively defined who the French were, and provided culture heroes. lessons in life, and raisons d'etre.

However, unlike Arthur, some histories touching on Charlemagne have survived the shipwrecks of time: The Life of Charlemagne by his hero-worshiping minister Einhard, who wrote in imitation of Suetonius' Life of Augustus; a less reliable account by the Monk of St. Gall (assumed to be Notker the Stammerer. There is also the Annales Regni Francorum, which were the court chronicles. So we can to some extent separate the history from the myth from the history of the myth.

Hruoland

Medievals often portrayed multiple events on one canvas.
This one shows eight episodes in the Song of Roland

Everyone knows the story of Roland. But here is the Annals of the Kings of France on the Spanish expedition:

DCCLXXVIII [778]. Tunc domnus Carolus rex iter peragens partibus Hispaniae per duas vias; una per Pampilonam, per quam ipse supradictus magnus rex perrexit usque Caesaraugustam [Zaragoza]. Ibique venientes de partibus Burgundiae et Austriae vel Baioariae seu Provinciae et Septimaniae et pars Langobardorum; et coniungentes se ad supradictam civitatem ex utraque parte exercitus. Ibi obsides receptos de Ibin al Arabi et de Abutauro et de multis Sarracenis, Pampilona destructa, Hispani Wascones [Basques] subiugatos, etiam et Nabarros, reversus in partibus Franciae.

No mention of the ambush, or Roland. Here is Einhard (in English):

In the midst of this vigorous and almost uninterrupted struggle with the Saxons, he covered the frontier by garrisons at the proper points, and marched over the Pyrenees into Spain at the head of all the forces that he could muster. All the towns and castles that he attacked surrendered. and up to the time of his homeward march he sustained no loss whatever; but on his return through the Pyrenees he had cause to rue the treachery of the Gascons. That region is well adapted for ambuscades by reason of the thick forests that cover it; and as the army was advancing in the long line of march necessitated by the narrowness of the road, the Gascons, who lay in ambush [778] on the top of a very high mountain, attacked the rear of the baggage train and the rear guard in charge of it, and hurled them down to the very bottom of the valley. In the struggle that ensued they cut them off to a man; they then plundered the baggage, and dispersed with all speed in every direction under cover of approaching night. The lightness of their armor and the nature of the battle ground stood the Gascons in good stead on this occasion, whereas the Franks fought at a disadvantage in every respect, because of the weight of their armor and the unevenness of the ground. Eggihard, the King's steward; Anselm, Count Palatine; and Roland, Governor of the March of Brittany, with very many others, fell in this engagement. This ill turn could not be avenged for the nonce, because the enemy scattered so widely after carrying out their plan that not the least clue could be had to their whereabouts.

This is the only mention of Hruolandus in historical documents. Roncevaux is not mentioned. Einhard was in-the-know, being a friend of Big Chuck and all; but here's the rub. His Life of Charlemagne was one of the most popular books of the Middle Ages and many copies were made -- by hand. There are nine in various collections. Not all of the copies mention Roland; and the most important copies were made in the 11th century, after the pop tunes celebrating Roland had become common. And on one manuscript, the copyist notes that Einhard "forgot" to mention events that everyone knew. It is at least possible that the only mention of Roland -- simply that he died in the ambush -- was inserted into the text by a later copyist who was "correcting" an omission, and all copies thereafter repeated the insertion. (The songs, btw, replace the Basques with the Saracens, so it would fit the medieval templates.)

So was there a Roland at all? Did he die in the Basque ambush and move from history into legend? Or was he like Lancelot, an invention of the troubadours who in this case wound up inserted into a history? Unless more shipwrecks are discovered, how are we to know?

And Three Hundred Years Ago

from now takes us back to ca. 1700. Have the real historical personages of the 1600s shifted from history to legend (except among professional historians of the period)?

You betcha. Galileo has become a Culture Hero, simplified from human being to archetype, and the events around him have been caricatured in a legend supporting the foundation myths of the Modern Ages. All the others who did important work -- Harriott, Fabricius, Scheiner, Kepler, et al. -- have faded and their accomplishments have been assigned to the Culture Hero. Not by those who have studied the period, but by the culture-at-large. Just as the ambush of the Hopis by the Navajos was reimagined as a symbolic encounter whose meaning related to 1936 social relations, so too has the story of Galileo been incorporated as the Genesis Myth of the Modern Ages.

Note the iconic poses to support the Origin Myth.
The painting dates from 1857, of course, when
the War Between Science and Religion™ was invented.

You will look long and hard in writings of the 18th and early 19th centuries for any mention of Galileo giving him his modern mythic status. He was still within historical consciousness. But by the time the War Between Science and Religion™ was being invented in the mid-19th century, he had fallen below the horizon and become a Symbol, not a Person. No one but professionals remembered any longer the role of Florentine-Roman politics, the Bourbon-Hapsburg conflict, the jealousy of the physicists, the personalities, flame wars, and other details. It would make our heads hurt. I mean, I don't know what's going on in my house sometimes, let alone some distant time and place. Late Renaissance Italy was not an uncomplicated milieu and what loomed in importance to them is largely unknown to us; just as what looms in importance to us was largely irrelevant to them.

Note of the Foot: It's not only Galileo who has become legend. Think of the Pilgrims, of Jamestown and Pocahontas, the pirates of the Caribbean, the Three Musketeers, and other matters of the 1600s. How do they appear in history versus popular imagination?

I Told You That To Tell You This

I am now 41,000 words into a new novel entitled The Shipwrecks of Time. Woo, as they say, hoo.

Part I Old Books
Presently, it is 1966, Frank is meeting with Sorgensson in Aachen, Wilma and Carole have finally become friends, the Negroes in Milwaukee are becoming restless, and US troops recently engaged in direct combat at a place called Ia Drang. Maybe, just maybe, Frank has gotten a lead on the Peruzzi Manuscript. Wilma is finishing her concordance of the Matter of France by trying to identify actual historical figures that may have inspired the characters and events in the chansons. Ed White has walked in space.

If only they can figure out why other researchers looking for the Peruzzi Manuscript have from time to time wound up dead.

Part II Old Film
Part III Old Bones
Wouldn't you like to know... mwahahah
So would I, actually.

2012-01-06T18:05:00.000-05:00

Received today by UPS courier, my official copy of IN THE LION'S MOUTH

Sing, O harper, the anger of Donovan buigh,
That graced us all with boundless grief,
And left brave men a prey to dogs and kites
As we foresaw upon that fateful day
When Donovan buigh and Those of Name
First fell out.

When his wrath at first arose ’twas I he fixed it on.
Oh, yes. ’Twas I who hauled him from his happiness
Off those same Jehovan streets where once he walked,
And had he not his eye upon more distant joys affixed,
We’d twain lie dead in those same gutters, gutted
By each other’s skills. But he foreknew, and so forbore to fight
And did submit him to my plea. But know this now, O harper.
It was to thee that he was bound when I untimely snatched him up.
Attend my tale and learn
Why once-great cities burn.

Prize of a Hearty Handshake to the first who spots the allusion and guesses the theme of the book.

Interpreting the News

2012-01-06T17:55:00.000-05:00

Hey, boys and girls, can you spot the logic in the following headline?

"Report: Health Insurance Profits Rise Despite Health Care Reform"
--headline, NationalJournal.com, Jan. 5

Yes, that's right, sports fans. Since the point of Health Care Reform™ is to require everyone to by health insurance, insurance companies will then be selling more policies, more cash will flow in, and their profits will rise. Not "despite," but "because."

Note that another purpose was to require policy coverage be given to people with pre-existing conditions. This vastly changes the actuarial risk to the insurance pool and in fact changes it from insurance to entitlement. A greater actuarial risk means a higher premium to cover it, and this too means a rise in profits.
+ + +

Gandersauce Alert

"It is disturbing that President Bush has exhibited a grandiose vision of executive power that leaves little room for public debate, the concerns of the minority party or the supervisory powers of the courts. But it is just plain baffling to watch him take the same regal attitude toward a Congress in which his party holds solid majorities in both houses. Seizing the opportunity presented by the Congressional holiday break, Mr. Bush announced 17 recess appointments--a constitutional gimmick. . . . Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton made scores of recess appointments. But both of them faced a Congress controlled by the opposition party, while the Senate has been under Republican control for Mr. Bush's entire five years in office."--editorial, New York Times, Jan. 9, 2006
"Nearly six months after it opened its doors, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finally has a director, after President Obama's recess appointment of Richard Cordray. . . . Mr. Obama also appointed three new and qualified members to the National Labor Relations Board. . . . Announcing the appointments, Mr. Obama also asserted a welcome new credo: 'When Congress refuses to act, and as a result, hurts our economy and puts our people at risk, then I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them.' Hear. Hear."--editorial, New York Times, Jan. 5, 2012

And this is just plain funny, from the WSJ Best of the Web

"A poorly chosen baby name can lead to a lifetime of neglect, reduced relationship opportunities, lower self-esteem, a higher likelihood of smoking and diminished education prospects, according to a new study of nearly 12,000 people," Canada's National Post reports:

The research, which appears in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science [sic], is thought to offer the firmest conclusions to date that "unfortunate" first names evoke negative reactions from strangers, which in turn influence life outcomes for the worse.

The story's headline adds even more ill effects: "Bad Baby Name Could Leave Your Child Sadder, Dumber: Study."

Hmm. We have a president named Barack Hussein, and as of a month ago the two leading contenders to challenge him were Willard Mitt and Newton Leroy. That ought to clear things up for anyone having difficulty fathoming the rise of Richard John Santorum.

Global Warming

is there anything it can't explain?

A Common Misperception

2012-01-04T00:01:00.000-05:00

Creation is not a one-time event
but a continual holding in being

A correspondent in another venue, whom we will call Charles Cheese, writes:

[Scientific explanation] would be moot if Biblical creation were found to be true ... why bother to find out what makes people sick if it would only take prayer to cure you? Why bother to discover what cause earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or other natural disasters if it the just punishment of a displeased God? There would be absolutley no need for any science if ... that's how God did it, is the answer to every question!

TOF is somewhat mystified by this contention, and for two reasons.

1. The first is that creation has nothing to do with people getting sick or with volcanic eruptions. Simil atque, science has nothing to say about creation. Creation is the joining of an essence to an act of existence; that is, it is to make something actually exist. Transformation, or "motion," is a change of something that actually exists into something else. These transformations are the proper object of natural science. To regards being-as-such as a creation need not inhibit someone from discovering the causes of its motions.

What is the cause of the boiling?

A suitable analogy (h/t James Hannam) would run this way: Suppose I put a pot of water on the stove to make some tea. A physicist then runs into my kitchen and begins measuring temperatures of the coil and the water, the vapor pressure, conductivity of the kettle, and all what have you. When he is done, he thoroughly understands what makes the water boil. He knows the water, the fire, the air, and even, regarding the kettle, the earth. The one thing he does not know from all his measurements is that I wanted to make a cup of tea.

Ah! Earl Grey decaff!

My desire for the tea - decaffeinated, as it happens - is the primary cause. The heat, the water, the metal of the kettle comprise collectively the secondary causes, a.k.a. instrumental causes.

When asked about the possibility of a Tea Maker, the physicist honestly replies, "Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis." And indeed, he does not. For in the physics of boiling water, the desire to drink tea is not an efficient cause, and so is methodologically irrelevant.

Grasping "boiling water" does not
mean grasping boiling water.

But notice: the fact that I may recognize a Higher Purpose behind the boiling of the water does not prevent me from investigating the physics of it. In fact, in my desire to drink tea, I may be spurred, nay indeed, impelled to study and grasp the mechanics by which the boiling is accomplished.

The medieval natural philosophers, recognizing that final causes were primary causes, knew that they stood "outside the physical process," so to speak. To make tea is why I boil the water. It is not part of how the water boils.

The Thomian "pleat" manifold is
an example of an attractor basin

Thus, when science was subordinated to engineering in the Scientific Revolution, and its purpose changed from understanding and appreciation of the beauty and order of the universe to making useful and profitable gadgets for man's dominion over the universe, final causes fell out of use and focus was fixed on a subset of efficient causes (the metrical and controllable ones) and partly on material causes. Not until the present era did final causes and formal causes make a comeback, suitably gussied up as "attractor basins" and "emergent properties."

"But, TOF," (I hear you say), "you said there were two reasons you were mystified by Mr. Cheese's contention! What pray tell is the second?"

Easily said. If believers in "Biblical creation" were satisfied with "Goddidit" and did not look for secondary, instrumental causes, then we should expect to find hard empirical evidence in history that this was the mainstream reaction of Christians, especially in the Middle Ages, oft called the Age of Faith because they were always demanding reasons for this or that. So what does the empirical evidence say?

2. The empirical facts of history say that the Christians did not agree with Mr. Cheese.

Big Al

Damn. As St. Albertus Magnus put it in De vegetabilibus et plantis:

“In studying nature we have not to inquire how God the Creator may, as He freely wills, use His creatures to work miracles and thereby show forth His power; we have rather to inquire what Nature with its immanent causes can naturally bring to pass.”

And in his De mineralibus, he writes:

"It is the task of natural science not simply to accept what we are told but to inquire into the causes of things."

Or more directly, William of Conches in (iirc) the Dragmatikon:

"[They say] 'We do not know how this is, but we know that God can do it.' You poor fools! God can make a cow out of a tree, but has He ever done so? Therefore show some reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so."

And Big Al, Billy Conches, Tommy Aquinas, Gus Hippo, and others were not marginal players. This was the mainstream position. Naturally, in every age we have Biblical literalists. They are especially common among atheists and fundamentalists. But literalism leads folks like Mr. Cheese to tie themselves into knots over what their theory says Christians ought to have thought, in opposition to what the Christians' own writings show that they did think. But that should be a clue that naive literalism is not an adequate reading protocol.

God ordering the world by number,
weight, and measure. Bible
Illumination c. 1252-70.
Cathedral Museum, Toledo, Spain.

A favorite Biblical quote in medieval natural philosophers was "For you have ordered all things by measure and number and weight" (sed omnia in mensura, et numero et pondere disposuisti) (Wis. 11:21) They took this to mean that the World (universe) was ordered in such a way that measuring, counting, and weighing things would make nature intelligible. This is a necessary mental attitude for the emergence of science.

We also find "Solomon" extolling natural science (Wis. 7: 17-22):

"For [God] gave me sound knowledge of what exists,
that I might know
the structure of the universe and the force of its elements,
The beginning and the end and the midpoint of times,
the changes in the sun’s course and the variations of the seasons,
Cycles of years, positions of stars,
natures of living things, tempers of beasts,
Powers of the winds and thoughts of human beings,
uses of plants and virtues of roots—
Whatever is hidden or plain I learned, for Wisdom, the artisan of all, taught me."

This does not sound at all like urging the neglect of natural sciences or secondary causes. It sounds like they regarded the study of such things was a worthy occupation for grown-ups, another mental prerequisite.

The key was the doctrine of secondary causation, as expressed here by :

Augustine of Hippo:

"It is therefore, causally that Scripture has said that earth brought forth the crops and trees, in the sense that it received the power of bringing them forth. In the earth from the beginning, in what I might call the roots of time, God created what was to be in times to come."
-- De genesi ad litteram, Book V Ch. 4:11

IOW, Gus thought that nature was "packed" with natural powers by which it would accomplish things. Like evolution or something.

William of Conches:

“[God] is the author of all things, evil excepted. But the natures with which He endowed His creatures accomplish a whole scheme of operations, and these too turn to His glory since it is He who created these very natures.”

Thomas Aquinas:

"Nature is nothing but the plan of some art, namely a divine one, put into things themselves, by which those things move towards a concrete end: as if the man who builds up a ship could give to the pieces of wood that they could move by themselves to produce the form of the ship.
-- Commentary on Physics II.8, lecture 14, no. 268

Mr. Cheeze's concern was that Christianity be seen as an impediment or roadblock to the development of science, and so he confused belief in Christianity with a sort of paganism.
+ + +

What has all this to do with writing science fiction?

Noble Queen dubs Brave Knight
Mate in three moves.

Easily said. One of the complaints levied against genre writing in general is that its characterization is thin. This is because it oft makes use of archetypes, much like early medieval fables and chansons de geste. The chansons featured stock characters: the bold hero, the beautiful Saracen princess, the brave traitor and the cowardly traitor, the worthy opponent, noble king, wise queen, et al. Each of these performed acts typical of his type. "What's my motivation" would never occur to Roland. He didn't blow Oliphant because heroes never cry for help. Real knights of the real Eighth Century were never so stupid. OK, well maybe some of them were. They were not called "kettleheads" in real life for nothing. But you get the drift I hope.

Well, a lot of SF is populated by such stock figures. Fewer now than in days of yore. But one of the reasons for characters that "feel thin" is that the writer cannot get inside their skin and write them from the inside. This is especially true of those characters supposed to be "bad guys." More so even than the "hero" the bad guys have transparently wicked motives. Of course, the businessman will be an evil conspirator. Of course, the religious character is a rube or a hypocrite. Of course, the general's first impulse is to launch the nukes. Similar, of courses afflict the favored characters, but "the Other" is especially hard to draw with empathy.

So here's the lesson: the more mythological your understanding of the Other, the more of a stock cut-out your character will be. The discourse above featured a mythological understanding of how Christians engaged natural science; but it might be anyone that you grasp first as a Category rather than as a Person; and it might be in any walk of life.

And speaking of the chansons de geste..... But that is for another time.

Oh Happiness! our being's end and aim!

2011-12-29T21:05:00.000-05:00

So said Pope. No, not that Pope. The one who wrote poetry.

In another venue, TOF chanced to encounter the following encomium to evolution:

The brain evolved in the same way the fins evolved: because their evolution conferred survival advantages in given situations.

Now the curious thing was that this statement was made by an individual (whom we will call "Adam Apple") who also asseverated that there was no τελος in nature. I will wait a moment for my reader to stop banging his forehead against his desktop. You could damage your computer screen that way.

....(waiting)
....(waiting)

There. Didn't that feel good when you stopped?

Yes, sports fans. The same person who stated that there were no ends in nature also claimed that evolution was for conferring survival advantages. But for-ness or toward-ness is precisely what it means to have finality. When this was pointed out, he simply repeated his act of faith that there was no finality in nature. He literally could not grasp that he had been proposing "survival advantage" as the final cause of evolution.

There are several possible reasons for this:

The meme that there is no finality in nature has parasitized his brain, and no contrary thought can wriggle in.
He labors under the misapprehension that "they" have proven scientifically that there are no final causes.
He does not understand what finality, final causes, ends, or other synonyms actually mean, and has not troubled himself to learn.
He believes that to believe in finality will require him to believe in Something Weird over and above that.

Let us examine these reasons.

Brain with memish parasites

1. Brain Meme. Taking the least charitable first, we may note that while there might be finality in nature, there is certainly no meme in nature. Memes are one of the more outré inventions of the science popularizer and professional atheist, R. Dawkins. They seem to be derived from notions of angels and demons; but there is no hard, empirical evidence for the existence of these immaterial beings that supposedly control our lives.

We can express this in normal terms by saying that Adam has an idée fixe. He learned that this was so from revered books and teachers and cannot shake it off. (Yes, I know. But we already had words like "idea." Why did we need "meme" save to provide a fake aura of scientificality.

2. Disproven by Science™. That finality has been "disproven" is likely the root of his conviction that there is no finality. After all, "they" have said it, he believes it, and that settles it. But whether there be final causes or no is not a physical question, it is a meta-physical question; and you can no more disprove a metaphysical principle with physics than you can disprove the Euclidean postulates with Euclidean geometry. And for much the same reason: metaphysical stances set the boundary conditions for physics. They are what you must assume before you can even do the physics.

Frank Bacon

Now when we examine what the Scientific Revolutionaries actually said, we find more nuance. Francis Bacon (left) acknowledged that final causes existed in nature. He just didn't think they were useful. Etienne Gilson noted that to understand that a bird's wing was for flying helped you to understand and appreciate the beauty of nature; but to understand the efficient causes of how the wing enabled birds to fly would help you build airplanes. Since the essential nature of the scientific revolution was to move Natural Science from Art Criticism to a subset of Engineering, Bacon and Descartes said the hell with final causes. Gilson adds sadly that if Descartes had only written "in addition to" rather than "instead of," we could have saved most of the incoherence that has afflicted modern philosophy.

The rejection of finality was a methodological choice. It was discarded, not disproven. But once you have said that finality is not part of Science™, they become invisible to the methods. It would be like demanding that only metal detectors are valid instruments of science, and then denying the existence of wood.

3. What is Finality? Objections #1 and #2 stem from #3, a misunderstanding of finality. We observe everywhere that nature works to an end. Many finality deniers take this to mean "self-conscious purpose" and laugh that a river has no "intention" of reaching the sea. But all it means is that natural processes tend to arrive "always or for the most part" at the same end point. An acorn always grows into an oak, and not into a chimpanzee. A river flows toward the point of minimum gravitational potential. A bird gathers twigs in order to build a nest. And so on. The very nature of a scientific law of nature is to describe how A entails B "always or for the most part." Efficient causes may push matter around; but unless they push it some particular direction, there is no scientific law.

William Wallace distinguishes three kinds of end:

1. Terminus. In traveling from "here" to "there," the "there" is the end of the trip, where the traveler comes to rest. When such stability terminates a natural process, whether inorganic or organic, it is the end of the process and as such its final cause.
Falling motion terminates when the heavy object arrives at a center of gravity.
Fleas grow, but not to the point where they reach the size of elephants.
Chemical reactions "go," but they also "stop," for example, when hydrogen and oxygen combine to form a stable molecule in water.
The breakdown of uranium terminates at lead.
[TOF: Regular cyclic behavior counts as "at rest". We would say "equilibrium state" in modern lingo.]

2. Perfection. When a thing has attained all that is necessary to its nature it has reached an end of another sort. It is more perfect (per-fectus, "thoroughly made") and possesses no de-fectus, i.e., is lacking in nothing it should possess to be what it is.

When two hydrogens and one oxygen atom have combined, the water molecule is perfected. The molecule lacks in nothing it should possess to be a water molecule.
When a tiger cub has matured into a tiger, possessing all the organs and capabilities of a tiger, it has been perfected.

3. Cognitive. Many animal and human activities are planned or intended in advance and so can be seen as end-directed from the beginning. A person building a house or a bird building a nest must have in advance some notion of what is intended, either intellectively or instinctively. Otherwise neither builder would know how to gather the materials. Much of the difficulty with teleology in nature arises from seeing all final causality as intentional or cognitive, and not differentiating the cognitive from the terminative and the perfective.

Einstein refutes a scientific
theory

Final causes make efficient causes coherent, and evinces an order in the world. Einstein put it this was in a letter to M. Solovine:

“You find it surprising that I think of the comprehensibility of the world... as a miracle or an eternal mystery. But surely, a priori, one should expect the world to be chaotic, not to be grasped by thought in any way. One might (indeed one should) expect that the world evidenced itself as lawful only so far as we grasp it in an orderly fashion. This would be a sort of order like the alphabetical order of words. On the other hand, the kind of order created, for example, by Newton’s gravitational theory is of a very different character. Even if the axioms of the theory are posited by man, the success of such a procedure supposes in the objective world a high degree of order, which we are in no way entitled to expect a priori. Therein lies the miracle which becomes more and more evident as our knowledge develops.”

although he likely did not realize that he was affirming finality when he wrote this. Cardinal Schoenborn of Vienna put it this way:

Scientists are most welcome to "explain everything they need to without appeal to God;" indeed, I hope all the readers of First Things would join me in strenuously objecting if God is ever invoked in the course of normal scientific explanation! But, as I have said repeatedly, the key questions we face have nothing (directly) to do with theology. The key questions rather have to do with scientism and reductionism. Can modern scientists "explain everything they need to" without reference to the irreducible hierarchy and patterned structure actualizing natural things (what the old philosophers called formal causes)? Can they "explain everything they need to" without reference to the regularities and lawlike tendencies of natural beings (in the old terminology, final causes)?

It is true that modern scientists have typically rejected these notions, but they haven’t eliminated them, only ignored them. More precisely, they have presupposed and relied upon them while simultaneously claiming their nonexistence.

4. Finality is a "Gateway" Belief. This may be the key obstacle. There is a modern belief that establishing finality as a fact of nature is very difficult, but once you have done so, God easily pops out the other end. Because they reject this conclusion, they reject finality. However, Aristotle, who thought finality in nature as rather obvious, never reasoned from finality to God. Thomas Aquinas, who did so reason, thought that finality was obvious, but establishing the chain of reasoning from there to God was very difficult. IOW, one may accept finality without risking one's a priori beliefs.

Aquinas also reasoned from motion, efficient causes, and generation-and-corruption to God, but few indeed would reject motion (like Parmenides, though for different reasons) or efficient causes (like Hume, because without finality they made no sense), or things coming into and passing out of being (like anyone pre-Darwin, insofar as species coming into and passing out of being.)

Brains and Fins.

Squirrel with brains
and more!

Now what about brains and fins conferring "survival advantage"? It would be obnoxious to notice that a great many kinds of beings have survived without either brains or fins, so let us consider what it means to confer an advantage. Would a fin confer an "advantage" on a squirrel?* On a giraffe? It does not seem likely. Whether a feature is an "advantage" or not depends on what the organism is trying to do; that is, on its niche. If a bird is trying to crack nuts, one sort of beak is advantageous. If it is trying to loosen bark to get at the insects beneath, then another sort of beak is advantageous. If a bird changes behavior -- perhaps because it finds itself blown by the winds to a new environment -- then the direction in which natural selection nudges it will change. Thus, we see that the organism's behavior is part of what sets the end for natural selection, and thus (at least in part) constitutes the final cause of natural selection.

(*) We leave aside the advantage of brains. Many people equate brains with minds, and so become confused when we insist on approaching the brain materialistically as just another organ, one that processes sensory inputs, collates them, and activates motor neurons and the like. Arguably, every animal on Earth has a brain of some sort.

χmas Time is Here By-Golly

2011-12-26T01:48:00.000-05:00

As dependable as holly and mistletoe are the old fundamentalist claims that Christmas is "really" just a pagan festival. In a recent Letter to the Editor of our local paper, a writer whom we will call "Mr. G" called it "bizarre" to acknowledge a deity with a "mere human construct" like a calendar. By this we must suppose that cathedrals, statues, stained glass windows, Handel's Messiah, and the designations BC and AD are "bizarre." Well, tastes vary, we suppose.

This post is a somewhat expanded version of my reply, which appeared a couple days later.

Mr. G claimed that Dec. 25 was the pagan Roman celebration of the winter solstice. But this cannot be true for the excellent reason that:

the Romans did not celebrate solstices and equinoxes, and
Dec. 25 was not the solstice!

Regarding #1, the Romans paid far more attention to the Kalends and the Ides, which marked the New Moon and the Full Moon, resp. (The Nones marked the quarter moon. Oddly, the three-quarter moon was not officially noted.) The ancient Roman calendar was essentially a lunar one. Dates were specified as "days prior to" one of these markers, with the marker itself as day I. (They did not have a 0.) Hence, Pridie Kal. Ian., the "day before" the Kalends of January was considered as "two days before the Kalends" because the Kalends itself was counted as Day I. Thus, VIII Kal. Ian. was 25 Dec., etc.

Regarding #2, hard to say. The Julian calendar was screwed up for thirty-six years after it was implemented. (They were leap year-ing every third year! Oops. Our bad. It was that Roman "inclusive count" again. The pontifices included the initial year as one of the four years, and so it became de facto a three year cycle.) And as time went on, their essentially lunar calendar got more out of synch with the solar. Augustus corrected the error by ordering the next three leap years to be skipped. The lists of Republican festivals puts the solstice on 21 Dec., but many bloggers and others state that the solstice actually was on 25 Dec. The Julian calendar added three extra leap days to February every four hundred years. It's late night/early morning as I write this, but it seems to me that the extra leap year days would push all subsequent dates forward wrt the solar year, and so the solstice would slide backward through the calendar.

However, no Roman feasts fell on Dec 25. The biggest festival, Saturnalia, ended several days earlier, usually on the 19th. Mr. G fudged a bit in his letter on the coincidence of dates and widened his specification to "on or around" the Roman festival; but the Roman calendar was so thick with celebrations that pretty much any randomly chosen day in December would be "around" some Roman festival.

The following are the festivals under the Republic for the month of December:
(ca. 3/4 Dec) Bona Dea - A women's festival of no fixed date.
Non. Dec (5 Dec) Faunalia rustica (a "pagan" (i.e., rural) festival imported into the City)
III Id. Dec. (11 Dec) Agonia
Prid. Id. Dec. (12 Dec) Consualia
XVI Kal. Ian. (17 Dec) Saturnalia (usually 3 days, expanded or contracted in imperial times by various emperors. A day of hilarity and noblesse oblige in which upper class people allowed lower class people to pretend to be powerful. Included gift-giving.)
XIV Kal. Ian. (19 Dec) Opalia
XII Kal. Ian. (21 Dec) Divalia (center of the winter solstice; but not a sun-festival.)
X Kal. Ian. (23 Dec) Larentalia (a parentatio for the dead, spec. Larentia, a demi-god).
Kal. Ian (1 Jan) Aesculapio, Vediovi in Insula and that takes us into January.

Mr. G then connected Christmas with the Feast of the Unconquered Sun

Clem Alexandria

Emperor Aurelian supposedly started this feast in AD 274, but St. Hippolytus referred to Dec. 25 as Christmas in AD 202/211, around seventy years earlier. Clement of Alexandria, a contemporary, also indicated 25 Dec. It actually seems more likely that the Emperor was trying to co-opt the date from the already-existing Christian feast rather than vice versa!

It also seems that Sol Invictus was not pegged at 25 Dec until much later. Aurelian's original inscription makes no mention of a date:
Soli invicto sacr.
pro salute et inco
lumitate perpetui
imp. Caes. L. Domi
ti Aureliani Pii Fel.
Aug. p.m., t. p. VI, cos.
III, p. p., proconsuli[s]

A doctoral dissertation on the cult of Sol by Steven Hijmans, here, states:
“there is no evidence that Aurelian instituted a celebration of Sol on that day [December 25]. A feast day for Sol on December 25th is not mentioned until eighty years later, in the Calendar of 354 and, subsequently, in 362 by Julian in his Oration to King Helios” [p.588 & p.6 of pdf]

Hippolytus OTOH supposedly wrote:

For the first advent of our Lord in the flesh, when he was born in Bethlehem, eight days before the kalends of January [December 25th], the 4th day of the week [Wednesday], while Augustus was in his forty-second year, [2 or 3BC] but from Adam five thousand and five hundred years. He suffered in the thirty third year, 8 days before the kalends of April [March 25th], the Day of Preparation, the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar [29 or 30 AD], while Rufus and Roubellion and Gaius Caesar, for the 4th time, and Gaius Cestius Saturninus were Consuls.

which seems clear enough. For a discussion of the text, see the above link for Hippolytus and also this one. In any case, the first definite mention of 25 Dec. as Christmas (ca. AD 206) predates the first definite mention of 25 Dec. as Sol Invictus (AD 354) by about a century and a half!

So Why VIII Kal. Ian.?

A Jewish tradition supposedly held that great prophets entered the world on the same date they left it. Calculations of Good Friday pegging off Great Passovers (those that fell on Sabbaths) yielded March 25 or April 6, depending on various calendrical assumptions. If Christ was conceived on March 25, the Incarnation, then after a normal pregnancy Christmas would be Dec. 25, nine months later.

Ditto for April 6→Jan 6. Let's not forget the Orthodox Church. People who insist that "the Christians picked 25 Dec in order to co-opt a Roman festival" forget that the bigger church of the East had started with a different date.

When all the planets line up, the world ends.
Again. Cf. Mayan calendars and other
silliness.

Both Hippolytus and Clement seem to have started from the common assumption that the world began with the spring equinox. (This notion of constantly recurring celestial patterns was a given in the ancient world. The pagans insisted that men were prisoners of these cycles [a quo, "astrology"] while the Christians claimed otherwise.) What could be more natural than to suppose that God was incarnated on the anniversary of the creation of the world? Remember, the ancient Christians were most concerned with the Incarnation and the Resurrection. The date of Christmas was simply a mathematical fall-out from these.

In short, Christians celebrated Christian festivals for Christian reasons, however bizarre this might have seemed to Mr. G.

Pagan Trees, et al.

Lastly, Mr. G pointed out that various customs - gift-giving, decorated trees, etc. - were pagan customs before the Christians took them over. Romans indeed exchanged gifts during Saturnalia, and Germans decked trees to celebrate important events, secular and sacred. But Mr. G overlooked the fact that the Christians were Romans, Germans, et al. Is it really so surprising if Roman Christians exchanged gifts at Christmas or German Christians decked trees to celebrate? Or that these customs would spread beyond their ethnic origins into the wider Christendom? It is neither an insidious paganism infiltrating the rites of the Whore of Babylon, nor a clever Christian plot to take over by co-opting pagan practices. (It is often hard to distinguish a fundamentalist critique from an neo-"pagan"/atheist one.)

Besides, the contention suffers from the Late Modern disease of literalism, or of formalism at the expense of substance. Let's suppose that Adam shoves an old lady in front of a bus and Bruce shoves an old lady out of the way of a bus. Can we really say there is no difference between them "because they both shove old ladies around"? No, the external form of the action does not tell us the whole substance. The two acts, while formally the same, are materially different.

The same is true of German Christians decking trees or Egyptian Christians depicting Madonna-and-child in the familiar Isis-and-Horus pose. Formally they are the same as the pagan practice, but substantially they are different. Like Adam and Bruce shoving old ladies, what people do matters less than why they do it.

Interview With the Flynn

2011-12-24T14:08:00.000-05:00

I have been interviewed.

Science Fiction Theater

2011-12-23T19:13:00.000-05:00

Hoo-ah. This was a favorite TV show of mine when I was a kid. When media science fiction was not all space wars and monsters.

It's also interesting to visit an alien civilization; viz., the 1950s.

The War Between Reason and Religion

2011-12-23T13:40:00.001-05:00

Agobard of Lyons, "On Hail and Thunder" (9th Century)

A certain stupidity was spread a few years ago, when some cattle died, so that people said that Grimaldus, the Duke of Benevento, had sent men with powder that they sprinkled through the fields and mountains, meadows and springs – because he was hostile to the most Christian Emperor Charles, and cattle died from this sprinkled powder. We have heard of, and seen, many men seized for this reason, some of them struck down and slain, but most of them tied to boards, thrown into the river, and killed. And, what is truly amazing, the very ones who were seized would give evidence against themselves, saying that they had such a powder and they had sprinkled it. For thus the devil, when his power was received into them by the secret and righteous justice of God, was able to enter them to such an extent that they became false witnesses against themselves to the point of death. And neither instruction nor torture nor death itself deterred them from daring to speak this falsehood against themselves.

This was believed by everyone, so that there was scarcely anyone to whom it seemed absurd. They did not consider rationally, how such a powder that would kill only the cattle and not the rest of the animals could have been made, or how such stuff could have been carried across regions so broad that people could not have sprinkled them with powder, not even if all the Beneventan men and women, old and young, had come through the region with three full carts of powder.

So much stupidity has already oppressed the wretched world that Christians now believe things so absurd that no one ever before could persuade the pagans to believe them, even though these pagans were ignorant of the Creator of all things. On this account, therefore, we have brought this last incident into the midst to our discourse, because it is similar to the topic on which we are speaking and can give an example of inane seduction and true impoverishment of sense.

Flynn in the Window

2011-12-19T20:01:00.000-05:00

No, I don't know why it appears sideways. But the Barnes and Noble at PA 33 and Freemansburg Ave. in Easton will be hosting your humble servant for an afternoon of reading and signing. We can only hope my fan shows up.

The photo was captured by my daughter with her phone as she was walking by.

Fun With Statistics

2011-12-19T00:31:00.001-05:00

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Steven Pinker, whom we last saw here making a hash of the mind-body "problem" and earlier denying the existence of human dignity, is a Public Intellectual. Now, someone who intellectualizes in public may have other bad habits, and here we find him setting eyes rolling among both statisticians and historians with a book entitled The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Dr. Singer sometimes presents as a scientist, but on closer examination, we find he is only a psychologist. (Yes, yes, I know; but for me the touchstone is physics.) It is unclear what aspects of training in the psyche provides expertise in historical analysis or even in statistics. Psych majors often take Stats-for-psych-majors, but this ought not be confused with the true quill. Certainly, any author who gets his name in larger type than the title of the book is an Important Author. But perhaps this is no more than a distinguished expert in one field trying to import that distinction to an alien field, with indifferent results.

(Yes, yes, I know. But TOF does not pretend to be a Public Intellectual or even an Important Author.)

The Nine Apocalypses of the Horsemen

Pinker's thesis in this book is that we are all much nicer now. The usual condemnation of the twentieth century as the bloodiest in history is, he says, "historical myopia," and to prove this he investigates all sorts of "forgotten conflicts." World War II, he says, is only the ninth most destructive atrocity of all time:

the An Lushan Revolt
the Mongol conquests
the Mid-east slave trade
the fall of the Ming dynasty
the fall of Rome
Tamerlane’s conquests
the annihilation of the American Indians
the Atlantic Slave Trade
World War II

Note that eight of the nine involve people riding horses. Surely equestrianism is a major source of bad behavior. It's all that horsing around.

However, the first thing Ye Olde Statistician notices is that these are not all the same kind of thing. There is a problem of operational definition here. Why are "the Mongol conquests" all lumped together when the wars of German imperialism (Dano-Prussian, Austro-Prussian, Franco-Prussian, and World Wars I and II) are counted separately? Does "the annihilation of the American Indians" include the massacre of Ft. Sims or the attack on Jamestown? Some of the nine are sharp, somewhat well-defined conflicts; others are long, drawn out processes over many decades or even centuries. Why not count the "wars of nationalism" as one long, drawn out conflict along the lines of the slave trade? Why not include the deaths from poison gas, machine guns, nuclear weapons and such as being due to "the science trade"?

One (#7) is arguably due less to man's violence than to disease. But then so were most deaths in most past conflicts. But then is the Spanish Flu included with World War I? Most Amerinds died of disease; and given the circumstances, would have died had the Europeans come with rainbows and fluffy bunnies rather than swords and muskets. The Black Death took about a third of Europe (according to some estimates) but its spread was facilitated by the Mongol conquests. Was the plague accounted to the Mongols or not?

These are non-trivial questions in statistics. The first problem is always that of operational definition of the unit of study.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

The second is... where the heck did he get the death toll numbers? There is a weird tendency on the part of moderns to suppose that numbers tolerably well-known in the Late Modern Age were just as well known in earlier ages and other milieus. Therefore, wild guesses are given the same credence as actual counts and measures. TOF has seen estimates of the Amerind population of the US and Canada ca. AD 1500 anywhere from one million to forty million. So how big was #7?

Pinker uses a table of historical death tolls, which according to Humphrey Clarke at Quodlibeta "appear to have been lifted from a site called ‘Necrometrics’ authored by Matthew White." In fact, Pinker cites Matthew White's Great Big Book of Horrible Things (Norton, 2011), as if it were actual historical research. White is a librarian with "a few years of college" who seems to make a hobby of amateur history, including some whimsical "surreal histories." From an SFnal/AH pov, his site is rather engaging, even when he succumbs to Standard Issue assumptions.

So how does Pinker know how many people died in the great An Lushan Revolt?

Funny You Should Ask

He obtains the figure from White's little big book. How a librarian with no training in history becomes a reliable source for medieval Chinese history is a mystery. The figure is obtained by comparing the Chinese census of AD 753 (52,880,488) to the census of AD 764 (16,900,000). Holy moley! Where'd 36,000,000 Chinese go? They must be casualties of the revolt.

Not so fast. Humphrey Clarke, at Quodlibeta, quotes David Andrew Graff’s ‘Medieval Chinese Warfare’:

After the An Lushan rebellion, the Tang court lost the ability to enroll, enumerate, and impose taxes directly upon the majority of China’s peasant households. This development is dramatically illustrated by the decline of the registered population from approximately nine million households in 755 to less than two million in 760.

(Graff, Medieval Chinese Warfare, p. 240)

IOW, the enormous decline in population was due to the disruption of the imperial administration, the rise of regional warlords, and the bureaucratic inability to count them rather than to death in the revolt. Oh, well. An ancestor of my wife appeared in the 1850 US census and the 1870, but not in the 1860. Would anyone assume that he had died in the Civil War and been resurrected? Or simply that a family traveling in a covered wagon across the Midwest might plausibly be missed?

Statistical Adjustment of Data

This is sometimes legitimate. If a triangular plot of land is surveyed and the interior angles do not sum to 180º it is perfectly okay to adjust the measured values. There are at least two different ways to do this, and the choice should be justified. So what did Pinker do with the raw swags he used for "data"?

In order to obtain his ranking, Pinker norms the supposed death tolls of these events to the world population at the time, as if dividing one swag by another swag would yield a useful ratio. However, let's consider that definition. There are two relevant problems.

We Are the World. What relevance has the world population to measuring the magnitude of violent events? When the allied Kickapoo, Ojibwa, Ottawa, Potawatomi, and Sac and Fox tribes massacred the Illinois ca. 1769, should the death toll have been divided by the total population of the world? China, India, and Europe were well beyond the reach of Kickapoo arrows and were not at risk. Perhaps the relevant divisor should have been the targeted Illinois population? Or if the Illinois fought back, perhaps also the population of the Kickapoo army? Similarly, the vast majority of the world was never in harm's way of An Lushan's armies. Why should the "fall of Rome" be scored based on how many people were minding their own business in India and China? When the Germans systematically rounded up and massacred Jews, was the relevant denominator the world's population, Europe's population, or the Jewish population?

For a consideration of how this might be better done, consider Lewis Fry Richardson's "The Statistics of Deadly Quarrels," which looks at violent acts ranging from individual murders to wars. Richardson applied the methods he had developed for weather systems to the question of violence, using statistical analysis, goodness of fit, and systems of differential equations. Two excerpts appear in Newman's The World of Mathematics: "Mathematics of War and Foreign Politics" and "Statistics of Deadly Quarrels"

For example, Richardson divided both the Great War and the Napoleonic Wars into individual conflicts: The Western Front, the German-Russian Front, the Italian Austrian Front, and so on. This is the opposite of Pinker's Lumping strategy.

Another example is Singer and Small's work, The Wages of War, 1816-1965: A Statistical Handbook. Both Richardson and Singer/Small confined themselves to a range of times for which fairly reliable data could be garnered, contrary again to Pinker's strategy of swag data.

Quantity or Quality? The second relevance question related to the metric is this. If the Germans has decided to eliminate Frisians instead of Jews, would that have meant they were less violent? If Hatfield undertakes to kill McCoys, does it matter how many McCoys there are, or how many he can get in his sights -- or only that Hatfield thinks nothing of killing them? IOW, what has the magnitude of success got to do with whether people have become more or less violent?

For further discussions of Pinker historiography, see Humphrey Clarke's comments on the Albigensian Crusade, Medieval Murder Rates, the Mongols, and generically Christian violence, which seems to be Pinker's actual interest. His thesis does reinforce some folks in their prior beliefs, and so is praised in those quarters.

That Old Time Religion

This raises the interesting question of what is religious violence. This is not as easy as it sounds. Pinker notes (with an apparent rhetorical smirk):

World War I, as I recall, was a war fought mostly by Christians against Christians.

That "as I recall" bit is pretty cute, and he seems to have written it as if it were meant seriously. But if that is his criterion then gandersauce requires us to count all the black men who were lynched by Democrats in the 1910s-1940s. World War I was also fought mostly by modern scientific Europeans against modern scientific Europeans. So what? It remains to be shown that Imperial Germany, Austro-Hungary, France, England, et al. went to war because they were Christian or modern scientific Europeans, or that mobs of Democrats lynched black men because the lynch mob were Democrats.

Pinker seems impressed with what people call themselves or he would not have made that fatuous remark about WW1. North Korea calls itself a democratic republic, but need we take the claim seriously? If the Europeans of 1914 were Christians, they were simply members of the State Established Churches. Worship of the Nation had by then long submerged worship of God. War posters like the one on the left cited the State or the Folk, but not the Church.

Or as our old buddy Tommy Aquinas put it, there is a difference between a human act and the act of a human. The former is what a man does because he is a human; the latter is merely something that he does. In the same way, a scientist (e.g., Fritz Haber) might devise a new means of mass murder (poison gas) for the Great War; but does he do it because he is a scientist or because he is a patriotic German? I don't mean his technical skills, but his motives.

Even when there seems to be a "because-ness," closer inspection reveals greater complexity. Sure, there was a time when you could gin up a crowd to lynch someone because he was a dirty stinking Calvinist and this here is Lutheran land. But there are times and places when you could do the same thing using race or ethnicity or even economic commitments. If human beings are prone to violence, then it may not matter much what is used to incite them.

Thus when we examine the Huguenot wars in France, what we discover is that three Great Houses were fighting for control of the French throne, and they swung back and forth between Calvinism and Catholicism as the needs of state dictated. "Paris is worth a Mass," Hank Bourbon famously declared as he shed his Calvinism for convenience. A more accurate title would be the War of the French Succession.

Even the Thirty Years War is iffy. The German princes did not declare themselves independent of the Empire because they had become Protestant; they became Protestant because they wanted to declare their independence of the Empire. And can a war in which the Pope and the French crown supported the "Protestant" side really be called a religious war? It was really a war between Bourbon and Hapsburg, with both Protestant and Catholic princes on both sides.

Heresy was often a surrogate for political disloyalty, which is why heretics were more severely persecuted by the secular power. The church authorities were derided as "soft-hearted" (clericalem verens mollitiem) because they preferred persuasion.

Take another look at Pinker's list of the top nine, above. Note that the top six are all pre-Christian and non-Christian events. And the last three date from after the subordination of the Church to the secular State; that is, after the Concordances, the English nationalization, and cuius regio, eius religio.

But Wait a Minute

Is the pertinent metric really the number of deaths, even the number of deaths per world population, or the number of deaths per the at-risk population? If the thesis is that people have gotten less violent in recent times, would not the proper metric be the percentage of people who initiate violent encounters? Pinker's metric is a measure of success. It says nothing about the tendencies of human beings in general. If two wrathful sociopaths refrain from fighting because they each fear death at the hand of the other, can we say that they are less violent? Or only that they have not yet seen an opportunity for violence without retribution?

The irony here is that Pinker first

"achieved notoriety through his attempt to reinstate the idea that the human mind is fixed and limited. His bestseller The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), an assault on the idea that human behaviour is indefinitely malleable, was controversial for several reasons—not least for its attack on the belief that pre-agricultural cultures were inherently peaceable. The book provoked a storm of criticism from liberal humanists who sensed—rightly—that this emphasis on the constancy of human nature limited the scope of future human advance."

-- John Gray, Delusions of Peace

Yet this new book asserts precisely that malleability! Heh. But we don't have to take Gray all that seriously, either. After all, he is simply being remorseless but from the same pov as Pinker.

However, that being said, it is rather likely that violence has toned down since Cahill made the same point in his book The Desire of the Everlasting Hills. It's not the body count, so much as the insouciance with which we resort to violence. The degree of casual violence in the Classical world is almost unimaginable to us. We are far less casual about such matters now, and this is true despite sporadic outbreaks of mass State violence. Our technology allows States to kill more people in larger batches. But at one time the Men With Swords could and did kill with impunity.

Sometimes the Mask Slips, Just a Little

2011-12-17T19:09:00.000-05:00

In A Manifesto for Sustainable Capitalism, by Al Gore and David Blood, we are struck by a vital question: How long did Gore have to search for a co-author named Blood?

Other than that, it is the same old delusion that Really Smart People, namely Us, can plan and operate a "chaotic" system. The commoners are obviously incapable of making their own decisions on how to spend their own money. "You might not spend it right," Bill Clinton once worried in a speech in Buffalo. But, heck, we can't even solve the 3-body problem in physics under one natural law, that of gravitation. What makes anyone think they can solve the 300 million-body problem is sociology and politics.

Authoritarian states, however, are inherently brittle. If I don't "spend my money the right way," the damage is confined to me and mine, and perhaps some nearby. My bad is washed out in the decision-making of millions of others, as well as my own second thoughts. If the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania makes a bonehead decision (a given - there is something in the water of the Susquehanna River that affects cognitive function in Harrisburg) the Sovereign States of New Jersey, Ohio, New York, and Maryland may survive the blast. (Can't say about Delaware. It's so small and way too close to the fallout from Philadelphia.) Harrisburg's bad is tempered by the blast walls and watertight compartments of the State boundaries.

However, when decisions are centralized in a Grand Council of Fasces, mistakes will not be "averaged out" by independent, counteracting decisions, and we get single-point failure modes. It's like the Death Star. One photon torpedo up the wrong waste vent and kablooey.

The difference between the fascism promoted by Blood and Gore and that promoted by Mussolini is that Mussolini was actually trying to "make the trains run on time." Blood and Gore do not seem to care if the trains run at all, as long as everything is green and we feel really good about ourselves. Jerry Pournelle discusses the article here.

It's a religious thing, I suppose. We must act piously in the name of the green goddess, so that we may feel righteous about our own righteous righteousness. At least in old-time "science and technology," it used to matter if the theory actually worked.
+ + +

And if we can't trust people to make their own decisions, we sure can't trust the people's representatives to make them. Why, they are apt to disagree among themselves and not do the right thing. That's why economic fascism entrains political authoritarianism. Or as President Obama recently put it:

"Well, what we’re going to have to do is continue to make progress on the economy over the next several months. And where Congress is not willing to act, we’re going to go ahead and do it ourselves."

Clearing the Tabs

2011-12-16T21:19:00.000-05:00

The First Sorrowful Mystery
What does a society do when it has devalued children, gated their communities, disparaged "breeders," and slaughtered the unwanted?

Ans: Pretend pregnancy.

The Second Risible Mystery
Is Star Wars actually a deeply hidden allegory for niche neep? Exspecto quod animadverto!

The Third Logical Mystery
When is a confirmation of the multiverse theory not a confirmation of the multiverse theory? Pretty much anytime, but in particular here.

The Fourth Statistical Mystery
When is correlation not causation? Bzz! Trick question. Correlation is never causation, though TOF wishes the New Breed of scientist would ponder this more closely. Some examples, h/t to Alert Commenter Aaron.

TOF stands in silent awe at the knowledge that there are people in the world with sufficient time on their hands to put such things together.

The Gandersauce Society

2011-12-16T21:01:00.000-05:00

On the lookout for special pleading and double standards everywhere.
Our motto: What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Our entry for the day:

Pity the first lady. Every time she pulls a frock from her closet, changes her hairstyle or raises a well-groomed eyebrow, someone somewhere not only parses her decision and weighs its symbolism but also attempts to give it a whiff of scandal, back-room tumult, or something equally unseemly."--Robin Givhan, TheDailyBeast.com, Feb. 2

"Style can be used to break down barriers. It can show stature and authority and also exude commonality. But when it is too perfect, too formal, too stiff, it sets one apart. In Mrs. Gingrich's case, style implies a social hierarchy that, far from exuding empathy, reflects the haughty airs of noblesse oblige."--Robin Givhan, TheDailyBeast.com, Dec. 12

h/t to WSJ Best of the Web

This is Kool

2011-12-15T23:02:00.001-05:00

&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;h/t &amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;
h/t Mark Shea

The Journeyman: On the Short-Grass Prairie

2011-12-14T15:21:00.000-05:00

TOF is pleased to announce that his story "The Journeyman: On the Short-Grass Prairie" has been accepted for publication at Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact. The story describes an adventure undertaken by Teodorq sunna Nagarajan, whom my perceptive reader will recognize as a player in the novel Up Jim River. This story takes place on his home world, called World, well before he finds his way to the Spiral Arm and the company of the harper and the scarred man.

As teaser, the story opens thusly:

A Snake in the Grass

Teodorq sunna Nagarajan the Ironhand slept on the open prairie in a spot no wise man would have chosen for a camp, and in which therefore no cunning man would think to find him. And cunning indeed were the men who followed the spoor of the son of Nagarajan. It was a cold-camp. Fire warms and counsels and keeps at bay certain creatures; but others it beckons, and those others Teodorq was disinclined to signal.

On all the Great Grass, he feared no man; but fearing a score of men was another matter. One Serpentine, he could meet knife-to-knife. Half the clan, maybe. But not all the Serps all at once. It would be a songbound feat even to evade them.

He had scattered caltrops made of thornbrush to warn of unwelcome guests, as a cautious fugitive might do; but he had spread them half a league to the south, so that any who stepped on them would think he had gone toward Mud River, seeking sanctuary with the boman of Luviness, who was a distant cousin by marriage to his father. The best false trail is one a prudent man would choose.

Though if Teodorq had been a prudent man, he would not now be on the lam.

What Happens When a Pair of Irishmen Go to France

2011-12-09T22:51:00.000-05:00

In the early 800s? The Monk of St. Gall (probably Notker the Stammerer) tells us:

Now it happened, when [the illustrious Charles] had begun to reign alone in the western parts of the world, and the pursuit of learning had been almost forgotten throughout all his realm, and the worship of the true Godhead was faint and weak, that two Scots came from Ireland to the coast of Gaul along with certain traders of Britain. These Scotchmen were unrivaled for their skill in sacred and secular learning: and day by day, when the crowd gathered round them for traffic, they exhibited no wares for sale, but cried out and said, "Ho, everyone that desires wisdom, let him draw near and take it at our hands; for it is wisdom that we have for sale."

(Trust an Irishman to come up with the notion of hawking wisdom in the marketplace!)

Now they declared that they had wisdom for sale because they said that the people cared not for what was given freely but only for what was sold, hoping that thus they might be incited to purchase wisdom along with other wares; and also perhaps hoping that by this announcement they themselves might become a wonder and a marvel to men: which indeed turned out to be the case. For so long did they make their proclamation that in the end those who wondered at these men, or perhaps thought them insane, brought the matter to the ears of King Charles, who always loved and sought after wisdom. Wherefore he ordered them to come with all speed into his presence and asked them whether it were true, as fame reported of them , that they had brought wisdom with them. They answered, "We both possess it and are ready to give it, in the name of God, to those who seek it worthily." Again he asked them what price they asked for it; and they answered, "We ask no price, O king; but we ask only for a fit place for teaching and quick minds to teach; and besides food to eat and raiment to put on, for without these we cannot accomplish our pilgrimage."

This answer filled the king with a great joy, and first he kept both of them with him for a short time. But soon, when he must needs go to war, he made one of them named Clement reside in Gaul, and to him he sent many boys both of noble, middle and humble birth, and he ordered as much food to be given them as they required, and he set aside for them buildings suitable for study. But he sent the second scholar into Italy and gave him the monastery of Saint Augustine near Pavia, that all who wished might gather there to learn from him.

But when Albinus (Alcuin), an Englishman, heard that the most religious Emperor Charles gladly entertained wise men, he entered into a ship and came to him. Now Albinus was skilled in all learning beyond all others of our times, for he was the disciple of that most learned priest Bede, who next to Saint Gregory was the most skillful interpreter of the scriptures. And Charles received Albinus kindly and kept him at his side to the end of his life, except when he marched with his armies to his vast wars: nay, Charles would even call himself Albinus's disciple; and Albinus he would call his master. He appointed him to rule over the abbey of Saint Martin, near to the city of Tours: so that, when he himself was absent, Albinus might rest there and teach those who had recourse to him. And his teaching bore such fruit among his pupils that the modern Gauls or Franks came to equal the ancient Romans or Athenians.

Then when Charles came back, after a long absence, crowned with victory, into Gaul, he ordered the boys whom he had entrusted to Clement to come before him and present to him letters and verses of their own composition. Now the boys of middle or low birth presented him with writings garnished with the sweet savours of wisdom beyond all that he could have hoped, while those of the children of noble parents were silly and tasteless. Then the most wise Charles, imitating the judgment of the eternal Judge, gathered together those who had done well upon his right hand and addressed them in these words: "My children, you have found much favor with me because you have tried with all your strength to carry out my orders and win advantage for yourselves. Wherefore now study to attain to perfection; and I will give you bishoprics and splendid monasteries, and you shall be always honorable in my eyes." Then he turned severely to those who were gathered on his left, and, smiting their consciences with the fire of his eyes, he flung at them in scorn these terrible words, which seemed thunder rather than human speech: "You nobles, you sons of my chiefs, you superfine dandies, you have trusted to your birth and your possessions and have set at naught my orders to your own advancement: you have neglected the pursuit of learning and you have given yourselves over to luxury and sport, to idleness and profitless pastimes." Then solemnly he raised his august head and his unconquered right hand to the heavens and thus thundered against them, "By the King of Heaven, I take no account of your noble birth and your fine looks, though others may admire you for them. Know this for certain, that unless you make up for your former sloth by vigorous study, you will never get any favor from Charles."

(You can't help but like Charlemagne for these sentiments.)

Adventures in Statistics

2011-12-09T18:09:00.000-05:00

The following graph was prepared by NOAA and presented on the National Public Radio website. The gist of the accompanying article was OMG!! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!! Or something like that. In particular, weather ("which is not climate") has suddenly become climate again.

at least until the last line of the article:

Scientists blame an unlucky combination of global warming and freak chance. They say even with the long-predicted increase in weather extremes triggered by manmade climate change, 2011 in the U.S. was wilder than they predicted. For example, the six large outbreaks of twisters can't be attributed to global warming, scientists say.

(emph.add. Note the bald assertion "manmade." No indication that since the earth had been
warming for upwards of 400 years, at least some of that increase had to be natural. We are
left to wonder if there would still be weather extremes if the climate were changing naturally.)

Of course, the long-predicted weather extremes were not all that long-predicted. I can remember when it was increased temperatures, pure and simple, that would kill us. (Of course, I also remember when it was going to be the Coming Ice Age.) But about ten or so years ago the secular trend changed from the 1980-2000 increase to a more stationary series 2000-2011. With the globe no longer warming quite so much, the mantra changed to "climate change" and this led to "global climate disruption." As more and more snowfalls stalked Al Gore across his speaking itinerary, the claim escalated that "extreme weather," and not simply warmer weather, would be the consequence of nefarious Western technology.

Now go back up to the graph. I'll wait.

Back? Okay. Notice that NOAA is not measuring physics but economics. First, they are only counting weather events that caused more than a billion dollars damage. Do we expect more of those today than 30 years ago? Well, my handy-dandy inflation calculator tells me that one billion 2011-dollars is equivalent to $364 million in 1980-dollars, so there will surely be fewer billion dollar events in the early part of the graph. Also, there are more people now than then, so the amount of infrastructure in constant dollars or not will have increased, too.

Do not be deceived by the dotted line, which is the total damages in 2011 dollars. That is the normed value of the events that already cost a billion dollars in current-year value. IOW, first we select events that cost a billion or more (blue bars), then we add up their costs in current-year dollars (bluish line), and only then do we convert that to 2011-dollars (red dotted line). Question is: were they deceiving themselves as well?

Now, that being said, take another look at the graph of damages. Discount the Katrina spike in 2005. Is there really an upward trend in the dotted line, or are the data consistent with a stationary series? How much can be attributed to population growth? New Orleans in 2005 simply had more stuff to damage than New Orleans in 1969 (Hurricane Camille, strangely prior to the start of this graph) and her levees were in disrepair. That ain't the weather's fault. It's much easier to have a billion dollar storm than it was thirty years ago, because there are more billions worth of infrastructure built since then. There were 227 million Americans in 1980, 309 million in 2010, so we ought to expect at least an increase of 36% in the amount of Stuff.

He Has Never Seen a Year Like This

But the money quote is this one:

The AP spoke to National Weather Service Director Jack Hayes, who said he has never seen a year like this in terms of extreme weather. Hayes has been a meteorologist since 1970 and calls the waning year, "the deadly, destructive and relentless 2011."

Ever since 1970, hunh? And Hayes has never personally seen a year like this? Anyone remember when short time frames were said to be insufficient to judge climate change? Or at least insufficient to drop heavy hints about it?

How about the 19th century? (Or would that make the "billion-dollar" business a little too obvious? Log cabins and soddies don't add up to much, dollar wise, even allowing for inflation.) The great storm that started in Nov 1886 and lasted into January destroyed the open range cattle industry. An 1888 blizzard paralyzed the Northeast railroads and put New York City only days away from running out of food and coal. Another blizzard on the plains trapped schoolkids in their schools, and many died. During the Great Blizzard of 1899, it snowed in Florida.

19th century: Where is Global Warming when you really need it?

Look at the wood cuts by Currier and Ives to see what winter was like before global warming. (Heck, I can remember bad weather from the 1950s.) Then, too, we find that Niagara Falls largely frozen in this image from the Niagara Falls Public Library. The date is supposed to be 1911.

The interval from 1881-1900 captures four of the ten most deadly hurricanes in US history. And there were a lot fewer people back then. Of recent hurricanes, only Katrina in 2005 makes the list.

Rank	Hurricane	Season	Fatalities
1	"Galveston"	1900	8,000–12,000†
2	"Okeechobee"	1928	2,500+†
3	Katrina	2005	1,836
4	"Cheniere Caminada"	1893	1,100–1,400*
5	"Sea Islands"	1893	1,000–2,000†
6	"Florida Keys"	1919	778
7	"Georgia"	1881	700†
8	Audrey	1957	416
9	"Labor Day"	1935	408
10	"Last Island"	1856	400†

We could look at tornadoes, too; but you get the idea. Then there was the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, also prior to NOAA's graph, and to Hayes meteorological experience. And we could go on. Pfui, sez I.

Hillaire Belloc once wrote that we tend to be overly impressed with our most recent experiences, and expect the recent past to continue. Hence, the short-term perspectives give us global cooling or global warming, depending on the decade.

The problem with the long-term, of course, is that the data are not so good and one must make do with surrogates; and when the surrogates fail to match the actuals where they overlap, we must "hide the decline." Bummer.

Arab Spring

2011-12-05T19:59:00.000-05:00

Egypt, We Hardly Knew Ye

Information seems to be that the Muslim Brotherhood received 45% of the Egyptian vote and an even more extreme Salafist party received 25%. Were these early returns or final results? In so, the clueless scions of Generation Tweet and the Urban Intellectuals have been snookered again, just as in Iran years ago. They actually thought they were numerous and important. Hey, we used social media to bring down the secular regime! How kool is that? Then they learned that others regarded them as part of the 1%.

The question now is whether the Army will permit this to happen. Even other Arabs notice that those countries run by strict shari'a tend to be the poorest and most repressive ones.

Meanwhile, after

Occupational Autumn

The Los Angeles Times asked quondam occupiers "what message they hoped people would take away from it." The following are the important messages:

"We the people are the powers that be."--Allen Lasley, 26
"We have to stop taking and start giving. That is the mind shift I am trying to bring to the world."--Matt Wegner, 53
"Government power is an illusion. We placed them there. We can always take it away from them."--Michael Basillas, 26
"Politics matters. It is not peripheral. If you want to build a better world, you have to engage in the political process. We need to build a kinder, gentler world."--Joseph Thomas, 50
"The major thing is that something is wrong with society."--Vivian Ortiz, 19
"The disparity in wealth is saddening. To do nothing is just not an option for my soul."--Gabriel Martinez, 25
"The government is totally messed up. Everybody here can agree on one thing: Things are not right."--Rachel Bulisky, 29

A great deal of that sounds like it could have come from a Tea Party gathering, albeit a highly disorganized, clueless, and extremely messy Tea Party gathering. It makes me wonder why mostly Democratic city administrations* moved so simultaneously to close down the "Obamavilles." Perhaps comments like "The government is totally messed up" informed their choice. Once it became clear that the Occupiers were not in the tank for the administration and resisted being co-opted by surrogates sent to address them, there was no political gain to be had. On the positive side, they did not stain any tank treads.

Or is all that too cynical?

(*) New York's mayor is a lifelong Democrat who switched to Republican because there was less competition on their primary ballot.

Meanwhile, Deutsche Welle asks, amidst the usual boilerplate:
"As winter sets in and cities across North America clear Occupy protesters from their camps, many wonder what lies ahead for a movement without a geographic base, leaders or concrete demands."--Deutsche Welle website, Dec. 3

Let's see....
No leaders, no concrete demands, no geographic base... What does lie ahead? Ooh, wait. I know!

Into the New Millennium

2011-12-04T16:07:00.000-05:00

Analog Magazine's first enthology (that's Enthology, not Anthology) is entitled Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010. It's available in Kindle format.

Why do I mention it, you ask? Because TOF is one of the authors therein, natürlich. And of course with a cross-grained story set in the 1300s; viz., "Quaestiones super caelo et mundo." Some new millennium, right? (Harry Turtledove has a story set in the 1600s, but I have him beat for retro.)

The indicem contenta are

Outbound, by Brad R. Torgersen
The Universe Beneath Our Feet, by Carl Frederick
Quaestiones super caelo et mundo, by Michael F. Flynn
The Purloined Labradoodle, by Barry B. Longyear
His Hands Passed Like Clouds, by Rajnar Vajra
Sheena 5, by Stephen Baxter
Tine Berries, by Richard A. Lovett
Shed Skin, by Robert J. Sawyer
Fly Me to the Moon, by Marianne J. Dyson
Kyrie Eleison, by John G. Hemry
Pupa, by David D. Levine
Forget Me Not, by Amy Bechtel
The Night of the RFIDS, by Edward M. Lerner
Alphabet Angels, by Ekaterina Sedia and David Bartell
But It Does Move, by Harry Turtledove
Chain, by Stephen L. Burns

which as you can see is an illustrious company with familiar names and excellent newcomers to the atriis analogia. Buy early and often.

A Few Odds and Ends With No Apparent Connection

2011-12-02T23:18:00.001-05:00

While cleaning out a folder of various snips and such, I ran across several items that seemed to concatenate and thought I'd try to stitch them together.

Which is the nutcase?

The first, by movie critic John Bowman, regards the connection between Charlie Sheen and Moammar Ghadaffi. Both, he says, rely on the persistence in legend of a long gone bogey-man. In Ghadaffi's case (as for many others), it was long-vanished Italian (French, British,...) colonialism. But there is a Genesis narrative supporting Mr. Sheen, as well.

Both [Mr. Sheen and Mr. Ghadaffi] were based upon a founding narrative of the culture that each man shared with his less addlepated fellow countrymen. ... For the founding narrative of today’s popular culture also involves a noble rebellion of the oppressed. Without the success of the free, egalitarian, life-affirming unofficial culture of yesteryear against the "uptight" and "repressive" official culture, Charlie Sheen would be unimaginable, and he depends as much on the pretense of this long-defunct cultural regime’s continued existence as Colonel Gaddafi does. It’s what makes him an interesting, rebellious, "transgressive" pop culture hero and not just a poor, self-destructive, strung-out nutbag. In this sense, his claim to be a "total rock star from Mars" with "tiger blood" had a certain truth to it, since rock stars who come from nearer to home and whose blood is anthropoid have been waving the same bloody shirt for almost half a century, ever since the official culture pronounced its dying benediction upon the noble cause of removing the stigma of hypocrisy from youthful self-indulgence and quietly gave up the ghost.

Arch-rebel against
the Establishment

This in turn reminded me of an account I read of a history class in which the students were being shown a newsreel of the Spanish Civil War. The all-caps headling plastered the screen and the narrator intoned (in those exceptionally grave newsreel tones of voice) THE REBELS ADVANCE ON MADRID! The students burst into cheers. They had been conditioned all their lives to equate "good" with "rebellious" and did not stop to recall that in the Spanish Civil War, Franco was the rebel.

But speaking of rebelliousness and rejecting the trendoid bourgeois consumerism of post-modern life for the independent lifestyle, we have this comment from the website Art of Manliness.

The indie identity is based on the idea of being independent from the mainstream. To this end, indie people buy clothes, CD’s, furniture, books, food, and concert and movie tickets that are not popular with the masses. Instead of going to Chili’s, they frequent their local Thai restaurant; instead of going to Wal-Mart, they go to Whole Foods; instead of picking up the new Coldplay CD, they buy an album from Blood Red Shoes; instead of shopping at the Gap, they buy from American Apparel; instead of buying a Dell they buy an Apple (sure they’re a big corporation, but they’re so cool). But what is the common denominator in all of those things? Spending money. Consumption. Indie people express their independence from the mainstream by doing the single most mainstream thing possible: basing their identity on what they consume.

... It doesn’t matter that instead of buying things from big corporations you buy free trade coffee, organic apples, and handmade Guatemalan rugs, you’re still basing your personal identity on your identity as a consumer. You are driven by the desire to consume something first before it is consumed by the masses. It’s the new millennium’s take on “keeping up with the Jonses.” And it’s just as conformist as it was in the 50’s.

Vlachs

A useful point to keep in mind. Especially by those of us who have no idea who Coldplay is, let alone Blood Red Shoes. John Lukacs observed that when capitalism finally fell, it did not fall to socialism but to consumerism. There is something a little desperate about the anxiousness not to be seen buying what Those Common People buy. A Greek friend once coined a term: Vlachophobia. The Vlachs are apparently the country bumpkins of Greece, and the term was intended to mean something like "fear of being hick." Once everybody from Middle America started eating arugula in their salad, they had to go dig up goat cheese. Probably from goats herded by Vlachs. As this is now becoming ubiquitous, the trendoid masses and the Vanguard of the Trendoids will have much to answer for.

Going off on a seemingly unrelated tangent, we ran across the following comment by physicist Stephen Barr in a review of E.O. Wilson's The Creation: A Meeting of Science and Religion. As one might expect, Dr. Wilson knows much of the one, not so much of the other. In the course of the review, Dr. Barr drew an interesting analogy.

Why do scientists always
look so nerdy?

Just as the events of a play unfold according to an internal logic and have among themselves causal relationships, and nevertheless the whole play with all its parts has its being from the mind of the playwright, so too in the universe there are natural causes, processes, and laws, and yet the whole depends for its reality upon God. Did this insect evolve or is it created by God? To ask that is as silly as to ask whether Polonius died because Hamlet stabbed him or because Shakespeare wrote the play that way. For Wilson, nature is a play that somehow wrote itself, and, since he cannot find the author among its dramatis personae, he concludes that he must not exist.

It is best not to push the analogy too far, since it is an analogy, not an equivalence. Yet any writer is familiar with the phenomenon in which his characters "come alive" and start doing things not consciously in the plot. So it may not be far-fetched, only middling-fetched. But this segues naturally into another essay regarding Christianity and we find the unexpected tie-in to the earlier passages on youth rebellion and the derogation of the "hypocrisy" of their elders.

It is part of an exchange of letters between Christopher Hitchens and a theologian named Douglas Wilson, about whom TOF is uninformed. Douglas Wilson writes:

Among many other reasons, Christianity is good for the world because it makes hypocrisy a coherent concept. The Christian faith certainly condemns hypocrisy as such, but because there is a fixed standard, this makes it possible for sinners to fail to meet it or for flaming hypocrites to pretend that they are meeting it when they have no intention of doing so. Now my question for you is this: Is there such a thing as atheist hypocrisy? When another atheist makes different ethical choices than you do (as Stalin and Mao certainly did), is there an overarching common standard for all atheists that you are obeying and which they are not obeying? If so, what is that standard and what book did it come from? Why is it binding on them if they differ with you? And if there is not a common objective standard which binds all atheists, then would it not appear that the supernatural is necessary in order to have a standard of morality that can be reasonably articulated and defended?

Well, this is a question that we have dealt with before, but it relates to Charlie Sheen, youth rebellion against hypocrisy, and the students cheering Franco (however inadvertently they did so). What exactly was the standard to which the youth believe their elders hypocritical? And is it an excuse for bad behavior to say that since we have no standards, we cannot behave hypocritically?

Somewhere TOF marked, then lost, an essay they gist of which was that in the post-modern world, hypocrisy has become the only sin. If you preach faithfulness and then cheat on your spouse, then you are a vile hypocrite. But if you do not hold faithfulness a virtue, then you may cheat with gay abandon and own no guilt.

Which returns us to critic Bowman. In reviewing a production of Moliere's Don Juan, he writes:

Don Johnny. Was he acting
out due to his cross-dressing?

Crazy Fred

Throughout this long speech, as delivered by Jeremy Webb in the role of the Don, the audience laughed and clapped and cheered. Hooray for the libertine! Bravo the murderer! So long as he is assailing the hypocrisy of more respectable folk, we’re meant to be on his side, apparently.

I know there is a fashionable view, derived from the existentialist philosophers, that Don Juan is an admirable character because he is the only one in the play, or in Mozart’s opera, with the guts to be who he really is and not to dissemble and make a virtue of his weakness like the bourgeois prigs and hypocrites he defies. But somehow that point of view, like the belief in the Nietzschean superman, depends on his being unique, or at least in the minority. If the bourgeoisie is united in finding bourgeois respectability merely hypocritical then it’s not really respectable anymore, is it? Once everybody is defiant, then there’s no one left to defy. Once vice becomes universally admirable, then it is virtue which is the quality of the rarer and higher sort of fellow. Once everybody worships at the shrine of the Übermensch, then the Übermensch becomes a bit of a joke.

But all this is part and parcel of the post-modern 'tude, by which "all virtue and piety are hypocrisy." Our post-modern poser can no longer even imagine, let alone conceive, that another person might be sincerely virtuous. What has been the fate of every TV character openly virginal but that she must lose her virginity in a meaningless act of plumbing? That'll teach her her place. If a TV mystery involves overtly religious (or at least overtly Christian) characters, it's even money that the father is having an affair, the mother is a drunk, and one of them is the perp. Because, like, you know, no one can actually believe that stuff, so they MUST be hypocrites; and hypocrites are capable of anything.

The hypocrite does have one redeeming virtue. He at least acknowledges that his behavior is wrong and holds himself to shame and guilt. And when we lift the curtain a wee bit more, we realize that because someone says one thing but does another, he need not be a hypocrite. He may be weak, or overcome by temptation or by circumstances, or driven by a compulsion or habit (genetic or otherwise) and still sincerely hold that what he has done was wrong. A man who rails against smoking, but is caught puffing a ciggy, may sincerely believe smoking is bad and sincerely believe that he himself has been bad. Those who have smoked tell TOF that it is habituating (some say addictive) and is correspondingly hard to quit, even with the best of intentions. It is not hypocritical for the fallen to admit to falling. Quite the contrary. Doctrine tells us that everyone is a sinner, and it is just a matter of when and where and for what matter. And it also tells us that guilt is mitigated to some degree by such things as habit and compulsion. It is up to the post-modern standardless Puritan to hold sternly to non-forgiveness and to rake over peccadilloes decades old, recognizing no mitigating circumstances.

The hypocricy comes in when the doer really does not believe what he has done is bad, but claims he does anyway, paying the tax that vice owes to virtue. He smokes or cheats or steals because he doesn't really believe these things are wrong, but he gives lip service to the old "social norms" and comforts himself that "everyone else" smokes or cheats or steals, too. So it must be all those "virtuous people" over there who are the real hypocrites.

(Side thought: Maybe that's how to get people upset over North Korea. They call their state a "democratic republic" when it clearly is not. Those hypocrites! OTOH, there are people who believe that you are what you call yourself; so....)

Oh well. If only them hypocritical Christians had not suppressed the innate rationalism of Greco-Roman paganism! This contention led one atheist, Tim O'Neill of Armarium Magnus, to make the following sardonic observation fairly deep into a reply to well-known polemicist Charles Freeman, who had objected to a review of one of his (Freeman's) books

As a humanist with a fondness for most aspects of the ancient and Medieval past, I'd certainly lament the destruction of pretty buildings. And the oppression of pagans by Christians is about the same as the oppression of Christians by pagans to me, since (i) I'm a non-believer and (ii) I avoid value judgements about the supposed sins of the distant past. But how "mounting evidence" that Christians closed down the irrational, superstituous cults of their religious rivals and no longer allowed painted priests to shake rattles and intone chants at incense-wreathed statues of Olympian gods somehow supports your thesis I really can't fathom. The fact that the Flamen Dialis in Rome could no longer wear his magical hat, no longer observed his strange taboos against touching raw meat or beans and no longer had to carefully guard against sleeping in a bed whose legs were smeared with clay (?!) may be sad if you're into that kind of thing, but I can't see what the death of such weird superstitions have to do with any argument about rationality.

Yes, they do seem to be cutting
his head off

We tend to think of the Classical world as being more rational than it was. This is because the medievals preferentially copied books of logic, reason, mathematics, medicine, and natural philosophy. This does not mean, as one correspondent unacquainted with elementary set theory put it, that they copied most of the Greco-Roman rationalistic corpus. It means that most of what they copied were the rational works. They did not bother with the other stuff until the Renaissance rolled around and people wanted to party more. Then we got the plays and poems and sacerdotal texts and the works of Hermes Trismagestis.

So what did the medievals do with all that logic and natural philosophy stuff? They used it as text books for their new-fangled universities. There have always been schools, and have always been masters who lectured to their disciples; but never before were there machines for learning a standard curriculum staffed by professional licenced teachers with degrees of attainment and funny hats. Let's turn to Michael H. Shank, "Myth 2. That the Medieval Christian Church Suppressed the Growth of Science," in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science, ed. Ronald L. Numbers, an uneven collection of essays on the topic of science and religion.

The proliferation of universities between 1200 and 1500 meant that hundreds of thousands of students - a quarter million in the German universities alone from 1350 on - were exposed to science in the Greco-Arabic tradition.
...
These individuals benefited from the considerable freedom of thought allowed by the university disputation, which required that arguments pro and contra various propositions be advanced and defended on rational grounds alone. It was the scholars' fellow disputants who regularly sought to give them grief; most of the time, "the Church" did not.

Between 1150 and 1500, more literate Europeans had had access to scientific materials than any of their predecessors in earlier cultures, thanks largely to the emergence, rapid growth, and naturalistic arts curricula of the medieval universities. If the medieval church had intended to suppress the inquiry into nature, it must have been completely powerless...

Bobby Grosseteste formulated
the scientific method

Here is an example of that repression: Robert Grosseteste (1175-1253), rector of Oxford and Bishop of Lincoln, in his ‘Treatise on Light’ (De luce), wrote that out of nothing pre-existing, God had created a single point from which the entire physical order emerged by way of extension or expansion. The first dimensionless point was light which was one and simple, "containing matter implicitly in the form of light." If only he had known of the singularity, the big bang, and the convertability of mass and energy, poor dude. Oh, wait...

But let us not be whiggish. Grosseteste was doing philosophy, not experimental science. To be fair, many post-modern scientists do the same thing, the difference being that they don't know how to do philosophy. Still, it is interesting to see empiricism catch up with Grosseteste's reasoning.

Speaking of those universities, we learn the following from an essay written by George Weigel on a new college in Wyoming. In the course of it he mentions:

In 1970, Washington’s largesse led the University of Kansas to create a pilot project in classic liberal arts education called the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program, or IHP. The program was led by John Senior, Dennis Quinn, and Frank Nelick, three brilliant teachers who believed passionately that higher education meant immersion in the classic texts of western civilization and civilized conversation about them. Many IHP students soon discovered that wrestling with the literary and philosophical classics of western civilization meant encountering, and thinking seriously about, the Catholic Church.

Conversions, intellectual and religious, followed. Those conversions later produced numerous vocations to the priesthood and the religious life, and two bishops. Authoritarian liberals on the KU faculty killed the IHP in 1979.

Can't have too much of that Western Civilization thingie running around. Who knows where that might lead? Parliaments and natural science, and who knows what else? People might fall into double-plus ungood badthink. Or save the world. Or something.

Well, we don't need any of that stuff, do we. What if we simply abandoned that Old Time Morality. James Taranto writes on Wall Street Journal's The Best of the Web. (Scroll down to the whimsically-titled "Great Moments in Socialized Medicine".)

Physicians working for Britain's National Health Service "are failing to inform up to half of families that their loved ones have been put on a scheme to help end their lives, the Royal College of Physicians has found," reports London's Daily Telegraph:

Tens of thousands of patients with terminal illnesses are being placed on a "death pathway", almost double the number just two years ago, a study published today shows.

Health service guidance states that doctors should discuss with relations whether or not their loved one is placed on the scheme which allows medical staff to withdraw fluid and drugs in a patient's final days. In many cases this is not happening, an audit has found. As many as 2,500 families were not told that their loved ones had been put on the so-called Liverpool Care Pathway, the study disclosed.
If you want to be philosophical about it, every living thing is on the death pathway. But the idea of government employees pushing human beings down it faster is chilling, to say the least.

Let's not have any
rooster-synonym jokes, please.
It's a fowl practice.

Of course, it's also interesting that the wickedness being reported was not snuffing granny with the "injections of inheritance" or anything like that. It was snuffing granny without telling the family first. Why, the next thing you know Scientists™ will be worrying that men having sex with animals are at higher risk for penile cancer and recommend, not that men should not have sex with animals (how judgmental!) but that they should wear a condom when they do. Not that there's any such thing as a "slippery slope" or nothing.

Well, as long as they aren't hypocrites knuckling under to bourgeois notions and antiquated Catholic dogmas, then it is OK. The rebel Don Juan is marching on Madrid.

Head Lines

2011-12-02T21:57:00.000-05:00

The Answer is No
"Have You Hugged a Port-a-Potty Lately?"--headline, San Antonio Express-News website, Dec. 1

Hmm. Well, It's Not the Beard...
"Why Egypt's Salafis Are Not the Amish"--headline, Council on Foreign Relations website, Dec. 1

This is Pretty Much the Definition of a Night Club, Isn't It?
"Cops: Drunk Man Annoys Women at Cambridge Nightclub"--headline, Cambridge (Mass.) Chronicle, Nov. 30

Firestar, redux

2011-11-28T20:02:00.000-05:00

Fresh New Second Edition!

A box full of author's copies arrived today.

The first book of the Firestar series is back in print. There is no change from the first edition, which means it is now mostly alternate history. Back then, 1999, 2000, 2001 etc. were all in the future! One of the problems with near-future SF, I fear. I suppose we could have bumped everything up a couple of years; but really, why pretend that this is an effort to predict the future, rather than the stories of a potpourri of characters? The science and technology of SSTO is still there; but it's interesting to see what this future omitted or overlooked.

Anyhow, for people who missed it the first time around -- and judging by sales, many of you did -- now have a chance to make up for that lack. Buy early and often!

It is my understanding that Tor intends to bring back the entire series: Firestar, Rogue Star, Lodestar, and Falling Stars. I wonder if there will be a boxed set? Woo-hoo.

Thanksgiving

2011-11-25T18:20:00.000-05:00

was celebrated in the usual fashion by the 105th meeting between Easton Area (PA) High School and Phillipsburg (NJ) High School. In anticipation thereof the Easton Red Rovers burned down Phillipsburg.

Well, okay, it was just the annual bon-fire, in which thousands of bon were toasted; but it was likely visible in Phillipsburg. In retaliation, Phillipsburg, whose town thoughtfully outlawed bonfires a few years ago due to all the dead bodies charred beyond recognition -- oh, wait, because someday there might be dead bodies charred beyond recognition -- put on a big fireworks display, not having evidently received word of the dangers of fireworks.

I look upon this with benign indifference, having attended Notre Dame High School in days of yore.

The Grand-Daughter, who plays baritone horn in the EAHS Marching Band performed at the bon-fire and at half-time of the game. She is not the smallest bandster, nor is the baritone horn the largest instrument; but I believe it is the largest instrument:player ratio in the band.

This is the band on Meet the Band day showing off their field show. At around 4:30 or so, the Littlest Baritone is approximately front and center walking backward. (They were supposed to, foo.)

Following The Game -- in this region there is only one The Game -- in which Easton took revenge for last year's loss, we repaired to Uncle Francie's place for turkey buffet. This is held, naturally enough, in the bar room, where family has behind-the-bar privileges.

We also pause here to note patriotically that Easton PA was the first recorded site of a Christmas tree, it having been noted in a traveler's diary as a "local German custom" of decorating trees, in 1816.

Today is the lighting of the Easton Peace Candle, sometime "World's Largest Non-Wax Candle." I am unsure of the rules that must be met in this regard. Are there wax candles larger than this? In any case, the EAHS Choir will be singing, and the Incomparable Marge has just informed me that the Grand-Daughter was front and center on the TV broadcast.

The Candle has been going on for only 60 years. I am old enough to remember when it was called "The Christmas Candle," but the name was changed back during the Vietnam War. And the Baby was called not only Wonderful Counselor, but also Prince of something or other.

In the Lion's Mouth

2011-11-22T15:08:00.002-05:00

Two More Reviews heard from

First, from ConNotations:

In the Lion's Mouth
by Michael Flynn
Tor Books, 2012, $25.99, 299 p

When's the last time you were smitten with a writer's word-smithing? Which authors have the power to transport you? Patricia McPhillip? Emma Bull? Steven Brust? Lois McMaster Bujold? Well, if you haven't already discovered Michael Flynn, get ready to add him to that list. Flynn is amazing. I haven't gotten this drunk on sheer words since I read Bone Dance. And the story is dam' good - no lack of action here.

Donovan, the scarred man, was on his way home - sort of - at least, he has a daughter he rather wants to see again, and maybe, just maybe his daughter's mother won't kill him on sight. Unhappily, he got abstracted by Ravn Olafsdottr, a Shadow agent, under orders to bring Donovan to a planet - not his destination - to assist in a little matter of rebellion and war.

Donovan, like Odysseus before him, is a man of many tricks. He is also, thanks to the Confederacy, a man literally of many minds. So he is remarkably resourceful - but how can you trust a man with a personality like a dodecahedron?

Ravn manages to survive Donovan's displeasure - one assassin can recognize another's repertoire - and has come to tell the women Donovan loves why Donovan himself never arrived. She spins out a tale of exceptional violence, triple-treacheries, and the strange loyalties that turn war's outcome. Embedded in her narrative is a challenge, one which Bridget ban, a Hound with the authority to summon and command other Hounds, must decide how to answer. But quietly listening all the while, and drawing her own conclusions, is Mearana, Donovan's daughter, and she has a mind very much her own.

In the Lion's Mouth is a sequel to The January Dancer and Up Jim River, and it is of course best to read them in order. However, it is possible to start a series midway and made very good going; so, do as you will.

This is space opera at its best: it ranges across galaxies; it involves empires, political intrigue, thwarted romance, and heroic deeds. In addition, Flynn, whose name suggests Irish ancestry, uses his bardic talent to emulate Homer in some passages, to ravish your soul in others, and to play most exquisitely the polyglot game. Characters frequently use languages as a kind of warfare or to test each other (when they aren't testing each other in more lethal ways). John M. Ford would have delighted in this. In fact, if you wish Ford had written sequels to Growing Up Weightless, you might consider this series the great-great, ever so great descendant, the distant future of that cryptic storyline. With more Gaelic. Flynn has the good grace to be prolific, with eleven-plus books published through Tor, so there is much, much more to enjoy of his imagination and craft. - Chris Paige

The second is from RT Book Reviews:

IN THE LION'S MOUTH
by Michael Flynn
Genre: Science Fiction, General Science Fiction
RT Rating
Space opera is not usually rife with mythological references or Celtic-flavored fantasy elements, but this third installment in a trilogy that began with The January Dancer uses both to interesting effect. Flynn’s unusual approach adds a layer of interest to a rather standard plot of civil war and betrayal, but readers who like their science fiction straight up might grow impatient with his use of multiple dialects, poetic devices and ballads, and a narrative technique that relies on numerous points of view throughout.

In the long struggle between the Confederation of Central Worlds and the United League of the Periphery, the Hounds and the Shadows are the secret agent arms of each power. Long enemies, when Ravn Olafsdottr, a Shadow, arrives at the stronghold of Bridget ban, a Hound, with the story of Donovan buigh, Bridget’s missing former lover, a truce is called. As Ravn relates the story of her capture of Donovan, Bridget learns of Donovan’s unwilling involvement in a civil war between rebels and loyalists in the Lion’s Mouth, the Shadow’s organization bureau. (TOR, Jan., 304 pp., $25.99)
Reviewed By: Donna M. Carter

(I suppose it's a good review when the only complaint regards the "use of multiple dialects, poetic devices and ballads, and a narrative technique that relies on numerous points of view." I have actually gotten kvetches in the past that my books have "too much characterization" and that all he (the reader) wanted was "content." This is much easier to do with a single POV, no differences in voice, and none of that poetry stuff. I think it's called an "outline" or "cliffnotes.")

Starred Review

2011-11-21T12:23:00.002-05:00

In the Lion’s Mouth received a starred review in today’s issue of Publishers Weekly!

In the Lion’s Mouth
Michael Flynn. Tor, $25.99 (304p) ISBN 978-0-7653-2285-2

Prometheus Award–winner Flynn follows Up Jim River and The January Dancer with another powerful tale of far-future humanity. Donovan buigh, an amnesiac with multiple personalities, is en route to his lover and their daughter when assassin Ravn Olafsdottr kidnaps him. Ravn plans to make Donovan a rallying symbol in a secret rebellion undertaken by the assassins called Shadows against the Confederation oligarchy. Donovan reluctantly agrees, at first watching from the sidelines and then overturning all expectations in a glorious culminating firefight. The story, which Ravn relates with dramatic oratory, is a marvelously heroic ancient legend reborn in humanity’s future days. Space opera fans will be swept away by the poetic rhythm and subtle plot construction, and the open-ended conclusion will leave them clamoring for future Donovan buigh adventures. Agent: Spectrum Literary Agency. (Jan.)

Is This an Answer?

2011-11-15T19:28:00.001-05:00

Recently, I had occasion to read two items in close mental proximity. One was by a blogger who calls himself in a touching fit of Objectivist modesty Blazing Truth, which I stumbled across in the usual fashion while googling for something regarding Aristotle's potency/act distinction that I thought I might use in a PowerPoint presentation. The other was an essay by the inimitable James Chastek continuing a discussion on the nature of the sensibles.

If it's not one thing, it's another. First, the one thing.

1. If it's not one thing....

Our intrepid Blazing Truth, whom I will call "Blaze" as a nickpseudonym, evidently believes that the God of classical theism is a scientific hypothesis put forward to explain natural phenomena, and that therefore Thomas Aquinas' "First Way" (a.k.a. the "argument from motion") is an attempt at physics and is therefore false because he did not know Galileo, Newton, and Einstein. Unlike many others, he is honest enough to admit that he has in earlier posts misunderstood the nature of the argument and the meanings of the terms as they were used in the argument. He does not change his mind, obviously. He simply reiterates his objections from physics.

Now one of the objections is to the proposition that "whatever is changing is being changed by another." He does not realize that Aristotle and Thomas were aware that a dog, for example, could be changed in location, by its own decision, and what was meant here was that in compound bodies, the motion of the whole (dog) was due to the motion of a part (legs). Thus, when Blaze says

It is wrong to think of the actualization of an atom’s beta decay as *dependent* upon the weak nuclear force. It should instead be said that the weak nuclear force is a property of the atom itself. To be clear, the weak nuclear force is contained within the atom, and it is not an external actualizer. There is no external force which facilitates beta decay.

But of course, it was Aristotle who claimed that powers arose from within the being. It was the Cartesian revolution that postulated "dead" matter that was simply particles in motion, moved from without. The weak nuclear force is, philosophically, a "part" of the atom and is surely able to actualize the potential of another part. At least Blaze grasps that Aristotle's κινεσις meant actualizing a potential, even if he is not entirely clear on what potentials and actualization are.

You will notice that physicist William Wallace included the Weak Force as one of the powers of inorganic being in his model, above. (The others are strong force, gravitational force, and electromagnetic force.) Together, they constitute the substantial form of inorganic being, such as an atom. If any one of them were removed, the matter would cease to be matter as we understand it. Blaze recognizes this, but seems to think it is an objection to Aristotelianism rather than a feature of it.

But the piece de resistance is that trusty old internet stand-by, quantum mechanics. (It has been suggested that in any internet discussion, the first person to evoke the quanta should automatically lose.) Blaze writes:

It is because of virtual particles that spontaneous phenomena exist. Examples of these include but are not limited to: the Casimir force, spontaneous photon emission during decay, Hawking Radiation, etc. Again, it is wrong to say that these particles are dependent upon anything.

He evidently thinks that spontaneous changes are not caused by anything. They are magic. On another, linked site, he counters the proposition "whatever is changing is being changed by another" by saying some things are changing without being changed at all. This is a neat trick, actually. (Pun intended.)

Some might say that the spontaneous virtual particle pairs are empirical evidences of God creating. Bingo, there they are, coming out of "nothing." (They aren't really; but then the not-nothing becomes the changer....) The respondeo is "IT JUST IS!" Curiously enough, this was the answer God is said to have given Moses when Mo asked him his name: I JUST AM! For those easily amused, such as me, this is easily amusing.

On a linked site, Blaze says:

According to the most commonly accepted interpretation of quantum mechanics, individual subatomic particles can behave in unpredictable ways and there are numerous random, uncaused events. (Morris, 1997, 19)

Now, the obvious response is that the most commonly accepted interpretation of quantum mechanics must therefore be wrong. A physicist friend once commented that if a theory results in singularities and paradoxes, there is something wrong with the theory, not with the world. There are, after all, several other interpretations of quantum mechanics, all of them compatible with the observed data and the mathematical laws, and not all of them produce the paradoxes. Mathematical models typically break down precisely at boundary values.

Blaze has also, unwittingly, drawn a line inside the material universe and said, "Thus far can physics lead, but no farther!" After that, it's faith and turtles all the way down, I suppose.

Now the other.

2. ...It's the other.

Nothing is in the mind that is not first in the senses. Thomas was an empiricist. He always started with actual experience. In that he differed from modern materialists, who often start with some abstract Truth, like "materialism," which they then apply willy nilly while keeping their eyes firmly closed when passing the bristling strongholds of mathematics.

The problem of the sensibles. Things enter our mind through our senses. The external senses are things like sight, hearing, etc. The inner senses are things like the common sense (which integrates all the sense impressions into a single, not necessarily visual image), memory (which stores the image) and imagination (which manipulates the image). (The intellect then reflects on these perceptions and abstracts concepts from them, and so on.)

Chastek's series of essays on the sensibles looked at the distinction between proper and common sensibles.

Proper sensibles: are those that can be sensed by only one sense; such as color, sound, smell and taste. They cannot be confirmed by other senses, esp. by touch. We can't listen to red. If we try to touch red at second hand, such as by measuring the frequencies of reflected light, we are confirming red based on the given experience of seeing red. Proper sensibles are, however, the first things we know of an object in our senses.

Common sensibles are those that can be sensed by more than one sense; such as shape, number, motion, etc. They are more reliable because they can be confirmed, and perhaps more certain as well.

During the Revolution, Galileo and then Descartes took this distinction and ran with it.

Aristotle's terms → Galileo's terms → Descartes terms
Common sensibles → “primary qualities” → “objective” qualities.
Proper sensibles → “secondary qualities” → “subjective” qualities

The revolutionaries then declared that only the objective (metrical, controllable) qualities of an object were mete for science. Devotees began to claim that proper sensibles (subjective qualities) did not even exist in the world. If a tree fell in the forest and no one was there to hear it, it did not make a sound. It made waves in the air. These are objective. It did not make a sound.

—Aristotle said that we cannot err about the proper sensibles. But, said Chastek, color is not perfectly objective. A bee sees two colors on sunflower petals; humans, only one. Deer see bright orange vests as same color as trees. So who sees the "right" color of a hunter's vest: deer or man?

So Thomas wrote that we cannot err about the sensible insofar as it is sensed. Meaning that if you see a blue sheet of paper on the table, then you have seen "blue," and that's it. This is true even if the sheet was "really" white and the room was lit by black light. The blue is in your consciousness. End of story.

So in Aristo-Thomism, the sense object is a compound of

a thing in the world and
the subjective/personal dispositions of the one sensing.

IOW, the observer affects the thing observed. The proper sensibles really do exist in the world AND they are combined with observer’s subjective disposition. Why don't we call this "the observer effect."

Funny. That has a familiar ring to it.

Keine Problem, Werner!

Hey, glad to meet you, Ari!

They meet!

So Aristotelianism already denied perfect objectivity to sensation.

We can say that there’s a difference btw the subjective and objective elements of sensation,
We cannot say what the difference between these two elements is.

Heisenberg, classically educated, knew this. His was the last generation of scientists to receive a rounded education.

3. So what was that Quantum Stuff all about?

Common sensibles (e.g. quantity) can be absolutely separated from their foundation in the proper sensibles. Physics has assumed that the quality of the common sensibles is identical to the quantity of a mathematical account. This might just be the source of the quantum paradoxes. We think we can have a true “wave” or “particle” – or any quantity at all – in an area where the proper sensibles cannot exist.

Decartes' res extensa stripped world of sensibles (or qualia). His res cogitans claimed that the sensibles are projected into the universe by the observer. Thus was born the "problem of the qualia," as it is now called. This bifurcation is by now so ingrained that moderns must struggle even to recognize, let alone eradicate it. But eradicate it, we must if we are to resolve the quantum paradoxes. We must "Rediscover the corporeal world!"

The apple really is red!

Physicist Wolfgang Smith has written about this in his book, The Quantum Enigma. He claims that by properly understanding the distinction between the "corporeal apple" and the "physical apple" -- that is between the apple of the senses and the apple of physics -- and understand how these two planes of existence map to each other, we can resolve the quantum paradoxes. Aquinas to the rescue, once again.

The Paradox of the Gap. CORPOREAL Apple in the world (the Matter) enters the mind
through the various senses, where it is unified as an ymago. (The intellect may then
abstract the Forms, like red, or even apple in general from the particular apple of sensation.
Meanwhile, the PHYSICAL Apple is measured by the Instruments and is expressed
in forms abstracted only from the metric qualities of the Apple. Formally, it is
an equation. The Corporeal Apple may present a Physical Apple; but it is more problematical
to go from a Physical Apple to a Corporeal Apple. The gap between the Corporeal Apple and
the Physical Apple is where the Quantum Paradoxes lurk.

But about this I can say no more until I secure, read and digest a copy of Smith's book. Then I can regurgitate it all over your screen.

Now, to the point. (Yes, I had one; though I almost forgot it.) Back to Chastek. Consider that we can only touch things with photons and electromagnetic particles. These are very small things. When a photon bounces off the apple to the apple of our eye (and then becomes the apple of our perception) the apple is affected by the impact of the photon. Big deal, says the apple. I am big and it is small. A flea. It is no more than a bug on the windshield of my life. And indeed, our anthropomorphic apple is correct. The apple is changed so minutely by shining a light on it, that we would need godlike powers to detect it. (But we do know that we can move things with the impact of light. You know that, right?)

But what is true for apples is not true for subatomic particles. In that realm, the particle that we sense by are large compared to what we are trying to sense. The impacts of the sensory light or particle beams are plenty powerful; less a bug on the windshield than a deer. Chastek compares hitting a bug to hitting a tree. Relative size matters. No wonder that "the quanta are a hopeless mess" (as the Bohr-Einstein letters complain).

For a macro appreciation of what sensing the quantum world would be like, suppose we did not "see" by photons bouncing off the object and into our eyes, but by rubber balls bouncing off and impacting on our skin. In that case, a chicken may look very different from an egg. And we might wonder at the quantum enigma of chickens hatching from broken eggs; for almost every egg we "see" would be broken, and we would suppose this to be their natural state. But all we have done is turn a tennis ball launcher on the egg in order to "illuminate" it.

The Only Thing Necessary to Say

2011-11-12T15:07:00.000-05:00

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

- Edmund Burke

The Eleventh Hour

2011-11-11T11:37:00.000-05:00

of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

First day of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive
26 Sept. 1918

"It was on Sept. 26 when the big drive started in the Argonne Forest and I saw all kinds of things that I never witnessed before. We started out on the night of the 25th. At 9 o'clock we commenced a tank road and worked our way almost to the German's front line trenches. At 2:30 one of the greatest of all barrages was opened. It was said that between 3500 and 4000 guns, some of them of very large calibre, went off at that hour just like clock work. We worked on this road under shell fire until about 3:45 and then went back until the infantry went over the top at 5 oclock. We followed with the tanks. That is the way the Americans started and kept pounding and pushing ahead until the great day on Nov. 11. ...

Harry Singley, 304th Engineers,
Rainbow Division

It was some life. I am proud that I went through it, for nobody on the Hill will have anything on me... I was a little with sneezing or tear gas. It made me sick but I remained with the company for I did not like to leave my detachment at any time for if something would happen, I thought, there would be plenty of help. I felt much better in a few days. A small piece of shrapnel splinter hit me below the knee. Otherwise I was lucky. ..."

"Somebody will wake up soon when the boys get back to the States..."

The Importance of Geography

2011-11-09T11:28:00.000-05:00

Stratfor.com presented this useful map in a subscription ad. It more or less speaks for itself. The intra-European topological connectivity for the North German Plain shows navigable rivers (and connecting canals) permeating the landscape. Italy has only the po' Po. Navigable rivers reduce transportation costs by oodles (a technical term meaning "lots"). Even more so did they do so before motorized land transport and paved roads, let alone air-freight. But nothing moves bulk in bulk the way river barges do.
France and the Low Countries (the "Nieder Lände") do not do badly on this score, either. Note that Germany has no rivers that are entirely in Germany, while France's major rivers are entirely within France. This is one reason for the historical difference in emphasis of the two state's economic policies. Note, too, that any attempt to enumerate Europe's river valleys will encounter an Aristotelian infinite regress. No other region on earth is so geographically separated and knit together at the same time; which may be why Europe churns with commerce, but not political unity.
But there are a few questions:

1. What about Little England? Stratfor's question was only why Germany specifically is richer than Italy specifically. When we take a broader look, there is a second factor: specific coastline. This is the ratio of the length of coastline to the area enclosed. Western Europe in general has the highest specific coastline of any place on earth, excepting the island archipelagos of SE Asia. Thus, Western Europe has the highest specific coastline of any substantive continental landmass (6 x 10^-3 km^-1 vs. 1.7 x 10^-3 km^-1 for Asia).
Specific coastline plus the lengths of navigable rivers for Europe is 9 x 10^-3 km^-1, compared to 1 x 10^-3 km^-1 for China, and 5 x 10^-4 km^-1 for India. That is, Western Europe is nine times more topologically connected than India or China. (cf. Nicholas Rashevsky, Looking at History Through Mathematics.)
2. Specific coastline? This is more difficult to measure than you may think. coastlines are fractal, and with an infinitesimal measuring rod, all shorelines are infinitely long. In fact, that undulatoriness (a term I have just coined because English doesn't have enough words already) also comes into play: a straight shoreline is "shorter" than one with many bays, inlets, points, and peninsulas. Africa has a long shoreline but very few harbors, and so its coast is "smoother" than Western Europe's. Also the escarpment comes nearly to the shore, so that most African rivers coming down from the hinterland encounter daunting waterfalls, cataracts, and rapids that impede navigation. Ever wonder why the Nile and the Niger were homes to Africa's main civilizations?
3. Hey, Didn't Rome Used to Rule the World? Sure, and wasn't Italy richer than Germany during "the grandeur that was Rome"? How come, Mr. Geography Guy? Simple to say, I answer. It's that specific coastline thingie. Lay a grid over the whole Med basin. Color in red every grid square that contains a segment of shoreline. OK? Now color in green all those grid squares which, as the center of a tic-tac-toe pattern, have a majority of red squares among their neighbors. (Note that not all red squares will become green!) Call this the "littoral econiche." (Why not?) You will find that it pretty much matches the distribution of Greek city states and colonies, including even Marseilles and the Crimea. This is why the Eastern Empire was the economic powerhouse of Rome, why the Empire split in two the way it did, why Belisarius' reconquista went so far and no farther, and why places like Sicily and Venice remained nominal Byzantine exarchates in a Germano-Western Sea.
4. So Why Isn't That Still the Case? Two words. Allahu akbar. During the "glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, the Mediterranean was a highway. After the first two jihads, it became a wall. All the Mediterranean islands, from the Balerics, through Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, Crete, to Rhodes were conquered by jihadis. The historian ibn Khaldûn bragged that "the Christians cannot float a plank on the Mediterranean!" This was Not Good insofar as Western trade was concerned. So the Roman gold solidus, which even Charlemagne (aka, Big Chuck) had still used, disappeared from the West, towns rotted, and the Dark Ages actually became very very dim, because as fast as the Franks and Saxons could write things down, the Saracens, Vikings, and Magyars would come and burn things up. Even Iceland and Ireland were raided by Saracen slavers. Meanwhile, the Vikings took advantage of those navigable rivers and long coastlines to keep the North in turmoil. However, once the barbarians were converted (or, in the Saracen case, repulsed), Europe developed new trade roots (that's a deliberate misspelling, folks). In place of the now-forbidden Mediterranean routes, the Europeans developed new ones in the North. Poorer to begin with, they bootstrapped. Look at those rivers above again and think "Hanseatic League."
Northern Italy is wealthier than southern Italy. What do the poorest parts of Europe -- Spain, southern Italy, Greece and the Balkans -- have in common. All were once ruled by muslim imperialist-colonialists; and dhimmis seldom prosper. But even so, it was the conversion of the Med from a highway of happy commerce to a war zone that destroyed the Southern prosperity of antiquity.

5. Bonus maps from Stratfor.

When the agricultural regions and river systems of North America are overlaid, we find that the largest contiguous agricultural region on earth is permeated by the longest interconnected navigable river system on earth. There is no similar congruence anywhere in the world.

Why does China always want to break up into three pieces? Because there are three river valleys, and they don't connect, except through some man-made canals. The Yellow drains the loess plains, the agricultural breadbasket, in the north; but it is poorly navigable and prone to dramatic floods. There is no port at its mouth. The south is subtropical and rife with diseases to which the northern Han clans are not immune, impeding northern control of the south. Both the Yang-tze and the Pearl have major ports (though one, Shanghai, was built by Europeans) but the systems do not interconnect.

Russia has numerous rivers, and the Volga-Don system is highly connected and embraces the Ukrainian breadbasket. (A littoral analysis of the river system picks out the distribution of the medieval Russias -- and the Moscow-Vladimir region has the highest topological connectivity.) But it drains into the landlocked Caspian and the Ukraine breadbasket (and the Don) is now independent of the other Russias. All the other Russian river systems drain north into the Arctic. So Russia has no ice-free international ports. And Siberia is not famed for its agricultural fecundity. Any questions why Russia has always been inward-looking and isolated?

Commentary on these matters are here: The Geography of Recession

The Feast of All Saints

2011-11-02T00:26:00.002-04:00

This is a reprint of a post from two years ago in Live Journal.

Everyone thinks this is the Irish Feis Samhain, which began at sunset on 31 Oct and that the Church co-opted the date. However, the feast "in honor of all the saints in heaven" was originally 13 May, and Pope Gregory III (d. 741) moved it to 1 Nov to mark the dedication day of All Saints Chapel in St. Peter’s at Rome. There was no connection to distant Irish customs, and the parishioners of St. Peter would not likely have been beguiled by it. Not until the 840s, did Pope Gregory IV declare All Saints to be a universal feast, not restricted to St. Peter's. The holy day spread to Ireland.

The day a feast is the "vigil mass" and so after sunset on 31 Oct became "All Hallows Even" or "Hallowe’en." It had no more significance than the "Vigil of St. Lawrence" or the "Vigil of John the Baptist" or any of the other vigils on the calendar.

In 998, St. Odilo, the abbot of the powerful monastery of Cluny in Southern France, added a celebration on Nov. 2. This was a day of prayer for "the souls of all the faithful departed." This feast, called All Souls Day, spread from France to the rest of Europe.

That took care of Heaven and Purgatory. The Irish, being the Irish, thought it unfair to leave the souls in Hell out. So on Hallowe'en they would bang pots and pans to let the souls in Hell know they were not forgotten. However, the Feast of All Damned never caught on, for fairly obvious theological reasons. The Irish, however, had another day for partying.

After the Black Death, All Souls Day became more important, and a popular motif was the Danse Macabre (Dance of Death). It usually showed the devil "leading a daisy chain of people — popes, kings, ladies, knights, monks, peasants, lepers, etc. — into the tomb." Sometimes the dance was presented on All Souls’ Day itself as a living tableau with people dressed up in the garb of various walks of life.

"But the French dressed up on All Souls, not Hallowe'en; and the Irish, who had Hallowe'en, did not dress up." During the 1700s the Irish and French Catholics began to bump into one another in British North America and the two traditions mingled. "The Irish focus on hell gave the French masquerades and even more macabre twist."
(h/t: John Farrell)

So in honor of All Saints Day, I offer a list of saints and beati and a reminder of what "catholic" means.

A Potpourri of Saints:

The Jews: Joseph of Palestine; Pope Zozimus; Romanus the Melodist; Daniel of Padua; Julian of Toledo

Sharbel Maklouf

Syria: Habib the Martyr; John of Damascus; Pope John V

The Lebanon: Rafka al Rayes; Sharbel Maklouf

Greece: Irene; Pope Sixtus II; Macrina; Alexander Akimetes

Rome: Agnes; Cecilia; Pope Cornelius

Gus Hippo

North Africa: Perpetua and Felicity; Cyprian of Carthage; Augustine of Hippo

Egypt: Anthony the Hermit; Maurice and the soldiers of the Theban Legion; Catherine of Alexandria

Everyone's Little Sister

The Palestinian Arabs: Moses the Arab; Cosmas and Damian; Mary Baouardy, the Little Sister to Everyone

Iraq: Maruthas of Maiferkat; Ephraem, the Harp of the Holy Ghost

Persia: Anastasius Majundat; Abdon and Sennen; Shapur of Bet-Nicator

Ethiopia: Iphegenia of Ethiopia; Moses the Black

Moses the Black

The Yemen: Sheikh Aretas of the Banu Harith and the Martyrs of Najran

Armenia: Isaac the Great; Gomidas Keumerigian

Georgia: Nino Christiana, Apostle-Mother of Georgia; Euthymius the Enlightener; George Mtasmindeli

Italy: Thomas Aquinas, the “Dumb Ox”; Maria Goretti; John Bosco; Pope John XXIII

Spain: Nathalia and Aurelius; Theresa of Avila; Dominic de Guzmán

The Basques: Ignatius Loyola

Portugal: Anthony of Padua; Isabella

The Little Flower

France: Margaret Mary Alacoque of the Sacred Heart; John Baptist de la Salle; Theresa of Lisieux, the Little Flower

The Bretons: Alan de Solminihac

The Belgians: Mary of Oignies

Ireland: Brigit; Conleth of Kildare; Colmcille of Iona; etc.

Scotland: David, King of Scots; Margaret of Scotland; John Ogilvie

England: Augustine of Canterbury; Edith of Wilton; Thomas More; Margaret Ward.

Wales: Dafydd of Wales; Cadoc of Llancarfan

The Rhine-Sybil

Germany: Gertrude of Helfta; Herman the Cripple; Hildegard of Bingen, the Sybil of the Rhine

Austria and Switzerland: Nicholas von Flue; Jakob Gapp

Scandinavia: Gorman of Schleswig; Hallvard of Oslo; Bridget of Sweden; Thorlac of Iceland

The Baltics: George Matulaitis of Lithuania

Hungary: King Istvan the Great; Elizabeth of Hungary

The Czechs: Good King Wenceslaus; Agnes of Bohemia; John Nepomucene Neumann

Poland: Hyacinth Ronzki; Stanislaus Szczepanowski; Mother Mary Theresa Ledochowska; Pope John Paul the Great

Mom

Albania: Mother Theresa of Calcutta

The Balkans: Sava of Serbia; Mark Korosy of Croatia; Ieremia Stoica of Romania; Bishop Eugene Bossilkov of Bulgaria

All the Russias: Sergius of Radonezh; Euphrosyne of Polotsk; Vladimir of Kiev; Josaphata Hordashevska

The Mohawk Lilly

Native Americans: Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin of Guadeloupe; Kateri Tekakwitha, the Lily of the Mohawks

Puerto Rico: Carlos Manuel Rodríguez Santiago

Mexico: Bartholomew Laurel; Miguel Pio

Oscar Romero

Guatemala: Peter Betancur

El Salvador: Bishop Oscar Romero

Peru: Rose of Lima; Ana de los Angeles Monteagudo

Ecuador: Mercedes of Jesus; Mariana de Paredes, the Lily of Quito

Brazil: Antonio de Santa Ana Galvao; Paulina

Paraguay: Roque Gonzalez de Santa Cruz

Chile: Teresa of the Andes

Dorothy Day

United States: Katherine Drexel; Mother Frances Cabrini; Dorothy Day

Canada: Marguerite D’Youville; Mary Rose Durocher

India: Alphonsa Mattahupadathus; Kuriakose Chavara; Mother Mariam Thresia Chiramel Mankidiyan

Magdelene of Nagasaki

The Philippines: Lorenzo Ruiz

China: Thaddeus Lieu; Agnes Sao Kuy

Mother Mankidiyan

Japan: Father Thomas Hioji Rokuzayemon Nishi; Magdalene of Nagasaki

Korea: Agatha Kim; Paul Chong Hasang

Thailand: Philip Siphong; Lucy Khambong

Viet Nam: Agnes De; Father John Dat

Mother Bakhita

African Diaspora: Benedict the Moor; Martin de Pores

Uganda: Charles Lwanga

The Sudan: Mother Josephine Bakhita

The Congo: Anuarite Nengapeta

Madagascar: Victoria Rasoamanarivo

+ + +

Down through the centuries, the Catholic Church has learned much from successive secular orders. From the East it learned a sense of the great mystery and transcendence of God—a more mystical and contemplative cast of mind. From the ancient Greeks it learned to love reason, proportion, and beauty. From the Romans it learned stoic virtue, universal administration, and a practical sense of law. From the French it learned the upward flare of the Gothic and the brilliance of idées claires and rapid wordplay. From the Germans, metaphysics, formidable historical learning, and metahistorical thinking. And from the Anglo-Americans, a dose of common sense and a passion for the religious liberty of the individual conscience.

-- Michael Novak, "Remembering the Secular Age"

History Repeats Itself -- a second time?

2011-10-30T14:00:00.000-04:00

Nancy Kress has posted an excerpt from sir John Froissart, about the Peasant's Revolt in response to the Statute of Labourers (1351).

Occupy London, 1381

What Hath Global Warming Wrought?

2011-10-29T17:07:00.001-04:00

Snow near my brother's house by Philadelphia

It is snowing here in the Lehigh Valley. Forecasts are for 4-8 inches. It is not yet Hallow E'en.

Now, the IPCC models were always in agreement that most of the warming would take place in Northern Hemisphere winter nights (which actually doesn't sound so bad), so the trend toward colder over these past ten years or so is whiffing a lot like Popper. But never fear: weather is not climate! (Except when it is: cf. Katrina, Irene, Texas drought, etc.) And it ain't global warming no more; it's climate change! So any time the climate seems to change, it is due to climate change. And never mind the dizzy spell from circular reasoning. I suppose the orbits of the planets can now be explained by location change, too.

The models also predict the atmosphere will warm first and most; but the satellite measurements persistently show otherwise. Must be something wrong with the satellites, or the scientists who interpret them, or perhaps with the world itself, which insists on doing its own thing. Surely, it cannot be because the climate models are not yet up to snuff.

Meanwhile, as a reminder, a glance at a chart I found back in 2009 shows the process rather well:

The arrow points to 2009. The trend+MDO model predicts that temperature "anomalies" will continue to drop (on the average) until about 2030, then cycle up again until about 2060. That's if the rebound from the Little Ice Age continues on a linear path. (Personally, I think it will resemble more a logistic curve; but that's just me.)

2011-10-26T13:39:00.001-04:00

TOF Translation Service

Current global warming appears anomalous in relation to the climate of the last 20000 years
Svante Björck
Department of Earth and Ecosystem Sciences,
Division of Geology, Quaternary Sciences, Lund University, Sölveg. 12,

223 62 Lund, Sweden

ABSTRACT: To distinguish between natural and anthropogenic forcing, the supposedly ongoing global warming needs to be put in a longer, geological perspective. When the last ca. 20000 yr of climate development is reviewed, including the climatically dramatic period when the Last Ice Age ended, the Last Termination, it appears that the last centuries of globally rising temperatures should be regarded as an anomaly. Other, often synchronous climate events are not expressed in a globally consistent way, but rather are the expression of the complexities of the climate system. Due to the often poor precision in the dating of older proxy records, such a statement will obviously be met with some opposition. However, as long as no globally consistent climate event prior to today’s global warming has been clearly documented, and considering that climate trends during the last millennia in different parts of the world have, in the last century or so, changed direction into a globally warming trend, we ought to regard the ongoing changes as anomalies, triggered by anthropogenically forced alterations of the carbon cycle in the general global environment.

+ + +

TRANSLATION: Data on paleotemperatures are fuzzy and uncertain, therefore we're all gonna die!!!

For further commentary, see here.

Forget the 1,900 papers published in the past documenting the Little Ice Age in China, New Zealand, Chile, Greenland, Europe, etc. Compare one site in the Southern Hemisphere to one site in the Northern Hemisphere and all past science can be dropped down the memory hole with no more than a casual remark that it "will obviously be met with some opposition." Ya think?

Sure, temperatures might have been warmer in the past than today, but you can't prove really-truly no-foolin' that they changed absolutely simultaneous all over the world at the same time. So there.

The Baconian paradigm may be starting to eat its young.

__________________________
We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.

-- Phil Jones, Hadley Climate Research Unit

Odds and Ends

2011-10-25T19:42:00.000-04:00

Only in Pennsylvania

In New York City, when someone wants to sell you a bridge, it's a fraud. In Pennsylvania, they actually go out and get a bridge - and it's theft.

Does This Bother Anyone?

Should it?
a) Lead Author on definitive paper
b) is president of a consulting firm
c) That makes its money on the fruits of such papers.

Caesar omni suspicione maiores debent esse uxorem.

Fossil Genes, OWS, Precognition, and Intrepid Pathfinders below the cut

Fossil Genes

Could humans one day be induced to lay eggs?

You Can't Make This Stuff Up!

In the WSJ weblog, Best of the Web, James Taranto writes:
"It's turning into us against, them," says a 36-year-old Occupy Boston protester quoted by the Boston Herald's Howie Carr. Wait, wasn't that the idea? Not exactly. It turns out that when he says "them," the guy is referring not to billionaire Jewish bankers but street vagrants. "They come in here and they're looking at it as a way of getting a free meal and a place to crash, which is totally fine, but they don't bring anything to the table at all."
The same is true in New York, where, according to the Daily News, "Zuccotti Park has become a haven for the homeless," who are abandoning shelters and camping out at the park, "enticed by the allure of free food and a community of open-minded people." But as in Boston, open-mindedness goes only so far. "We have compassion toward everyone. However, we have certain rules and guidelines," says Lauren Digioia, 26, who belongs to the "sanitation committee":

"If you're going to come here and get our food, bedding and clothing, have books and medical supplies for no charge, they need to give back," Digioia said. "There's a lot of takers here and they feel entitled.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports on the "library" at Occupy Boston, which carries a full range of titles from Z to Zinn. The best detail is this: "The librarians have eschewed the Dewey Decimal System, concerned by historical accounts that portray Melvil Dewey, its inventor, as a racist and misogynist." Take a college humanities department and deprive it of all the support it receives from capitalist enterprises--investment income from the institution's endowment, tuition money from well-heeled parents, subsidies from taxpayers--and what do you get? A bunch of crazy freeloaders sleeping in a park.
+ + +

As the Occupy Wall Street movement expands, protest organizers are struggling with distributing the $500,000 in donations they have received and quelling disgruntled protesters.

Pete Dutro, a member of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) finance committee, dismissed reports that squabbling was growing among the ranks regarding fund distribution.

"Finances are always a flash point for a lot of organizations," Dutro, 36, said.

The New York Post reported groups of protesters were upset for having to fill out paperwork to access funds, such as money to reimburse drums that had been vandalized one late night.

"There are people who don't want to follow the process and there's not a whole lot I can do for them," Dutro said. "How is that going to be accountable?"

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Now look how this idea plays itself out in reality. New York magazine has a piece on a conflict that has broken out within Krugman's Army: "It began, as it so often does, with a drum circle." Drummers drum for hours on end, irritating neighbors and even "many of the sleep-deprived protesters."
So the "General Assembly," the Occupiers' quasigovernment, imposed limits on drumming, which prompted a drumbeat of opposition:

"They're imposing a structure on the natural flow of music," said Seth Harper, an 18-year-old from Georgia. "The GA decided to do it ... they suppressed people's opinions. I wanted to do introduce a different proposal, but a big black organizer chick with an Afro said I couldn't."

To Shane Engelerdt, a 19-year-old from Jersey City and self-described former "head drummer," this amounted to a Jacobinic betrayal. "They are becoming the government we're trying to protest," he said. "They didn't even give the drummers a say . . . Drumming is the heartbeat of this movement. Look around: This is dead, you need a pulse to keep something alive."

The drummers claim that the finance working group even levied a percussion tax of sorts, taking up to half of the $150-300 a day that the drum circle was receiving in tips. "Now they have over $500,000 from all sorts of places," said Engelerdt. "We're like, what's going on here? They're like the banks we're protesting."

This is rich enough to be part of the hated 1%. If Engelerdt's brain weren't filled with Barberian nonsense, he would realize it's not like the banks they're protesting, it's like the government they're hoping to expand.

Precognition

In an essay written two years previously, James Chastek replies to whyevolutionistrue's triumphalist literalism regarding Adam and Eve even before he made it!

How to be Hawkeye the Pathfinder in the Urban Forest

Just look for the natural signs of direction.

Stand-Up Mathematics

2011-10-22T23:41:00.000-04:00

I went to the restaurant and ordered a prime rib. But then I discovered I could not divide it.
When Heisenberg visited the Institute for Advanced Studies, a state trooper stopped him on the Jersey Turnpike. He came up to the car and said, "Sir, do you know how fast you were going?" Heisenberg answered, "No, but I can tell you exactly where I am."
They try to tell you πr² but pie are not square. Pie are round. Cornbread are square.
If you go on vacation, ask Erwin Schrödinger to house-sit, because he can watch your cat,.
The integral ∫1/(cabin) d(cabin) equals ln(cabin)
The formula for the standard deviation is complex enough that many people have a deep and unreasoning fear of it. This phobia was intensively studied by the great Viennese psychiatrist Sigma Freud.
The mode is the most frequent number in a sample. So in the sample 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, π, π, π, π, π, π, π, π, π, π, π, π, 4, 4, 5, we have π a la mode.
Say... How exactly can a deviate be standard?
We should build a gambling oasis in the desert near Las Vegas and call it Möbius just so on the Strip we can truly say that what happens in Möbius stays in Möbius.
I met a girl once who was in a complex relationship. She gave be her imaginary number.

A smutty mathematical story:

Once upon a time pretty little Polly Nomial was strolling across a field of vectors when she came to the edge of a singularly large matrix.
Now Polly was convergent and her mother had made it an absolute condition that she must never enter such an array without her brackets on. Poll however, who had changed her variables that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved, ignored these conditions on the ground that they were unnecessary, and made her way amongst the complex elements.
Rows and columns enveloped her on both sides. Tangents approached her surface; she became tensor and tensor.
Sordid details here

Best Selling SF Paperbacks

2011-10-19T18:57:00.000-04:00

I am informed by my agent that:

Below is the Locus paperback line-up of bestsellers, in the October issue. THE JANUARY DANCER is #6 -- and considering that the George R.R. Martin fantasy series takes up the first four slots, that makes you, #2 on the bestseller list after the HBO-related works.

Congratulations!

1)    A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin (Bantam) 13, 2
2)    A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin (Bantam) 10, 1
3)    A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin (Bantam) 10, 2
4)    A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin (Bantam) 9, 4
5)    Heartless, Gail Carriger (Orbit US) 2, 9
6)    The January Dancer, Michael Flynn (Tor) 1, -
7)    The Fuller Memorandum, Charles Stross (Ace) 1, -
8)    Imagers Intrigue, L.E. Modesitt Jr. (Tor) 1, -
*)    Kittys Big Trouble, Carrie Vaughn (Tor) 1, -
10)   Mission of Honor, David Weber (Baen) 1, -

And so it is with a hearty vote of thanks to my dedicated fan that he (or she) has ventured forth and purchased so many copies.

The Incompleat Flynniana

2011-10-19T00:34:00.000-04:00

For some reason, only the first 72 were published.
The remainder:

73. (not for sale)

74. A Thread of Years (in abeyance)

75. 3^rd Corinthians

76. The Iron Shirts

77. skipped

78. The Clapping Hands of God (loose connection with Eifelheim)

79. Mayerling (in progress)

80. Dawn and Sunset and the Colours of the Earth (Asimov’s)

81. In Panic Town on the Backward Moon (in progress)

82. Tales of the Irish Pub (possible collection)

83. Probably Murder

84. De revolutione scientiarum in media tempestas (fact article)

85. Quaestiones super caelo et mundo

86. The January Dancer

a. Sand and Iron

87. The Shipwrecks of Time (in progress)

88. Where the Winds Are All Asleep

89. Cargo

90. The Forest of Time (Arc Manor e-book)

91. Up Jim River

a. On Rickety Thistlewaite

92. The Autumn of the Modern Ages (in progress)

93. Places Where the Roads Don’t Go (for §99 Captive Dreams)

94. In the Lion’s Mouth

a. The Frog Prince

95. Hopeful Monsters (for §99 Captive Dreams)

96. The Return of the Zombie Sea Monster (accepted; to appear)

97. Buried Hopes (for §99 Captive Dreams)

98. The Journeyman: On the Shortgrass Prairie (draft finished)

99. Captive Dreams (pending collection, Arc Manor)

100.On the Razor’s Edge (pending)

101.The Chieftain (in progress)

The TOF Spot

Odds and Ends

Weather Gods

Are Media People Stupid?

TOF at Boskone

Why the Future Never Gets the SF Right

Reviews for In the Lion's Mouth & a PODCAST

Humanism in Danger!

The Autumn of Modern Science

Flynnstuff on the Web

Litstack has decided that I am a Featured Author for January. Hoo-ah.

They review January Dancer (appropriately enough) here:http://litstack.com/?p=4060

And Up Jim River here:http://litstack.com/?p=4242

Something That Crossed My Mind

How to Read the News

Beat Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar

Three Hundred Years

Interpreting the News

A Common Misperception

Oh Happiness! our being's end and aim!

χmas Time is Here By-Golly

Interview With the Flynn

Science Fiction Theater

The War Between Reason and Religion

Flynn in the Window

Fun With Statistics

Sometimes the Mask Slips, Just a Little

Clearing the Tabs

The Gandersauce Society

This is Kool

The Journeyman: On the Short-Grass Prairie

What Happens When a Pair of Irishmen Go to France

Adventures in Statistics

Arab Spring

Into the New Millennium

A Few Odds and Ends With No Apparent Connection

Head Lines

Firestar, redux

Thanksgiving

In the Lion's Mouth

Starred Review

Is This an Answer?

The Only Thing Necessary to Say

The Eleventh Hour

The Importance of Geography

The Feast of All Saints

History Repeats Itself -- a second time?

What Hath Global Warming Wrought?

Odds and Ends

Stand-Up Mathematics

Best Selling SF Paperbacks

The Incompleat Flynniana

They review January Dancer (appropriately enough) here:
http://litstack.com/?p=4060

And Up Jim River here:
http://litstack.com/?p=4242