Science Marches On

TOF first ran across the notion of humans in America prior to the American Indians in a fiction! It was "Beringia," a 1990 story by Poul Anderson in his Time Patrol book The Shield of Time. It follows Wanda Tamberly, a time patrolman who has been studying this pre-Indian people (and has grown attached to them) when a band of Indians finds its way across the Bering Land Bridge. They bully the indigenous people (because they can. They are technologically more advanced.) But even when they don't, they over-awe the natives. But they also fear the native's powers of magic. After all, they are in their country and feeling very insecure, having fled their own land. Everything hits the fan, there are causal loops, and the time patrolman has to salvage her own reputation, too.

Spark of Genius

A new old story has gone up on the PREVIEW PAGE.

"Spark of Genius" is a 2700 word shortie written in November of 1989. It appeared in ANALOG (Jan 91). It's about writing. Sorta.

Huzzah

Finished the draft of "The Journeyman: In the Great North Wood" (there was a title-change along the way). It weighs in at 44.1 kilowords and so might undergo an edit in second draft to take up the hem or tuck in a pleat. It has already had two subplots excised completely.

Today's excerpt:

Teo joined Sammi at the council fire. “Sammi,” he said, “I been thinking.”
“Sammi not interrupt stupid plainsman on splendid innovation.”
“Hunh?”
“Nothing. What thought hatched by strenuous clucking?”
“Well, we been talking about making a sortie that will probably result in all of us getting croaked…”
“Songworthy, right?”
“Yah, except who’s gonna sing it? Well the whole reason is we’re running out of food. Otherwise, we could all sit tight until the Raccoons go away.”
“Can sit tight other way, too. Starve to death, go into rigor.”

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Christmas Post

Jimmy Akin has a series of posts on another board in which he looks at the ever-popular, yet seasonal issue of when Jesus was born.

1. The 100-Year Old Mistake About the Birth of Jesus
2. Jesus’ Birth and when Herod the Great *Really* Died
3. Does Luke Contradict Himself on When Jesus Was Born?
4. What Year Was Jesus Born? The Answer May Surprise You

This is a short precis of his material.

Journeyman note

Another 2000 words yesterday on "The Journeyman: In the Great North Wood," and rolling up on the climax. Huzzah!
Today's quote:

(Teodorq sunna Nagarajan) “How many arrows yuh got left, Ptarm?”
Chorchi did not bother counting. “Five,” he said. “You?”
“Seven.”
Chorchi studied the forestmen, who were massing for another assault. “Gonna be some left over."

Quote of the Day

Take your eye off Western Civilization for just a moment and it will be swinging from the rafters with its own belt around its neck...
-- Bruce Charlton

A Secular Alternative to the Ten Commandments

Here’s a Secular Alternative to the Ten Commandments
Lex Bayer and John Figdor (Time Magazine, Dec. 21, 2014)

“Pics or it didn’t happen,” the mantra of the Snapchat generation, is a simple but profound reflection of how we think. 

The fact that the authors consider this to be a "profound reflection" bodes ill for how the authors think. There are no "pics" for a great many things, including the rest of their article, so they appear willing not only to toss out most of history but also to overlook such things as Photoshop. There are not many "pics" of Hannibal and his elephants; but otoh a local restaurant had "pics" on its walls of white-bearded farmers standing beside ears of corn as tall as they or pumpkins the size of a farm wagon. That is:

• No "pics" but it did happen; and
• "Pics" but it did not happen.

What the slogan does reflect is our tendency to demand evidence only for that of which we are personally incredulous. And of course, to think in slogans.

So here are the Ten Secular Commandments, as detailed in Time, formerly a news magazine.

On the decline and fall of discourse

Do not get this man mad at you.

While browsing the web the other day on the TOFian Geburtstag, we revisited the delightful Underground Grammarian (left), who is no less delightful for being dead. His works can be found for downloading and also for reading.

It was in his collection Less Than Words Can Say that TOF found his discussion of "The Two Tribes" and the distinction between the snakes made of flesh and bone and the snakes made of discourse that so wonderfully informed his classic post "Adam and Eve and Ted and Alice."

So for today mot justes,we will quote from his 1978 collection The Leaning Tower of Babel and his discussion of what was then only a possibility: the creation of a federal department of education. First, the Underground Grammarian cites a passage in a report from what was then the Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW)

The findings suggest that psychosexuality constructs of agency/communion can be meaningfully operationalized to reflect the degree of psychosexuality integration, with different modes of manifestations and different correlates of interpersonal behavior associated with various levels on the integration continuum.

To which he comments thusly:

[This passage] is the prissy pirouette of the practiced posture-master. Ah, what skills. How prettily he prances from the operationalization of constructs to the reflection of the degree of integration, and gracefully glides on into modes of manifestation and correlates associated with levels on the continuum. Ah, how smart he must be. And how professional. How proud of him his mother must be, although probably not, we'd be willing to wager, nearly as proud of him as he is of himself. The attribute that always leaks out of such writing is that supposed virtue that educationists have chosen, ignoring logic in the service of sentimentality, as both a requisite to education and its best reward--Self-esteem.

The voice of that passage, however, is not just the voice of self-esteem. It is the voice of a man full of self-esteem. It is the pompous voice of self-awarded authority, the voice of command, the mighty voice from "above," in which no decent human should speak. It is Father Tongue.

...Men and women are different, essentially and (we hope) ineradicably. Men don't grow up. Pure seriousness seizes only a few of them, and only from time to time. They pretend to be something. They pretend to be sages or soldiers, or anything in between. Even the most witless and inept can find some system, made by men and for men, that will pay him for pretending to be a superintendent of schools, or a language arts facilitator, or something.

"Pretending to be a superintendent of schools, or a language arts facilitator, or something" is indeed a mot juste. It is the "or something" that graces the sentence and raises it above the pis-elegance of operationalized constructs of agency. Unless TOF has misspelled that sobriquet.

He then discusses a classroom "workshop" in which students who would never garble sentences in the manner presented are invited to ungarble them.

To make a bad thing worse, the concocters of this silliness can't even garble skillfully. Having vouchsafed that "word order affects the meaning of a sentence," and having asked that students assemble "clear and sensible sentences" from "groups of words" that could never occur naturally, these reading experts proceed to dream up "problems" of this kind:

• the knights made out of marble sat at a round table
• persons in distress rescued the knights
• some knights went in search of holy objects on quests

Try now to imagine the plight of those unlucky sixth graders--there are plenty of them--who can see, as anyone but a reading expert might, that those "groups of words" are "clear and sensible." If there is anything at all "wrong" about them, it is only that they will not win approval from the teacher, who can easily discover, by looking it up in the handy teacher's guide that comes with Expressways, that those clear and sensible sentences are not the clear and sensible sentences that the reading experts had in mind, not the "correct" solutions to "problems" that would never have existed in the first place if it weren't for the fact that the reading experts always need tricky new gimmicks to put in their unbooks.
The exercise pretends to ask a question about grammar, the system of principles by which we all, sixth-grade children included, can and do form any of an infinite number of possible sentences, including the three supposed "problems" cited above. But in fact, it asks a question to be answered out of that minimal kind of reading that is really nothing more than the reception of communication. And, probably for the remediation of those obstinate students who persist in suspecting that it is by form, not content, that a sentence is a sentence, there is a postscript to all this absurdity. It's called "Interaction":

Make up your own scrambled sentences about how Merlin could help you. Have a classmate unscramble your sentences.

It's not enough, you see, although it is required, that educationists commit nonsense. They are, as they are always saying, such giving and sharing people. And when they commit nonsense, everyone commits nonsense.

This was written in AD 1978, so TOF's Faithful Reader can see that the collapse of Western Civilization is of long standing. It did not even require a full cabinet level department, only a satrapy within a broader-defined department. Given what "educationists" accomplished with only a third of a department, we can only stand in awe of what they have done with a full one.
++++++++
Lagniappe:
The Underground Grammarian taught at what was then Glassboro State Teachers College and is now yclept Rowan University, having given up in the meantime on the training of teachers. TOF cannot resist the following snip, also from the aforesaid collection, and leaves you with this thought:

And fortunately, while we do still permit the study of a few foreign languages here, we find that most of our incipient schoolteachers don't even need to be advised to choose Puppetry Workshop or the History of Jazz rather than French or German as what we call "humanities electives." They know a humanity when they see one.

There's nothing humane about irregular verbs, and an obsession with foreign language is even more dehumanizing for the teachers than for the students. The teachers are supposed to know the irregular verbs. And the case endings--all of them. And the use of the imperfect subjunctive. And thousands of un-American idioms. You can be pretty damn sure that any teacher who is actually an expert in some foreign language has put more effort into rote learning than into relating to self and others, and will almost certainly be more interested in the mere facts of a narrow discipline of dubious relevance than in the true goals of education: appreciation, awareness, global and/or environmental consciousness, and rap sessions on death and Gay Rights. We are not the least bit interested in turning out that sort of teacher, thank you.

Chasing the Phoenix

Chasing the Phoenix

by Michael Swanwick  
Tor Books, 2015

 

TOF is unsure of the publication date for this gem, he read it in prepublication proofs. The web says August 2015. However, Faithful Reader ought to reserve a copy as soon as he, she, or it is able. Everything in this noble novel works -- from Surplus, the genetically-engineered dog, to the Hidden King who wants to reunite a a far-future, post-tech China, to even the office-names of supporting  characters. (One general is named Powerful Locomotive.) The dialogue is entertaining, the plot twists clever and supple, the narrative voice perfectly tuned, and the whole story suffused with sly Swanwickian humor.

There seems more than a touch of R. A. Lafferty in the thing, for those whose tastes run in that direction.

In this future, armies march with archeologists on staff, whose job is to unearth and restore ancient high-tech battle machines. The AIs that once ran the world tried to exterminate man, but were outlawed and destroyed. Maybe.

Darger and Surplus, the two heroes, are a pair of con-men whose goal is to get rich by attaching themselves to an up-and-coming warlord, the Hidden King. They pretend to have limited superpowers (Darger calls himself the Perfect Strategist) and bit by bit they talk themselves deeper into the complex rivalries of this future China.

They are not, however, the only ones running an agenda.

Duhem on Physical Theory and Experiment

Let's see if this works. It should come out as a slide show.
Duhem on Physical Theory and Experiment


which outlines Pierre Duhem's takedown of falsification and positivism. 

Sisters of the Sacred Heart

This was one of the toughest stories to move. It was written originally in June 1989, and Gardner Dozois said it was a perfect story for The Twilight Zone magazine. Alas, TZ magazine had folded, and Gardner wasn't looking for that kind of story. Also, it was too long. I shortened it and tried some more. KK Rusch did not like the original ending. Neither did some others who looked at it. It was substantially revised in 1991, 1992, and 1997. Along the way, it got tightened, rewritten, re-ended. The version posted here at the STORY PREVIEW PAGE is like rev.5 or something. It is, however, substantially the same story of 1989.

Eventually, it found a home in the magazine Dappled Things (Easter 2010)

The Chthulu Reaction

The orange powder is ammonium dichromate and when heat is introduced, it forms nitrogen gas, water, and ammonium (III) oxide, which is the dark powder that looks like the volcano you see.

What appears to be tentacles is actually what happens when heat is introduced to mercury (II) thiocyanate. The white solid expands when it's heated to become a dark, tentacle-like mass due to its decomposition to carbon nitride. In addition, sulfur dioxide and mercury (II) sulfide are also produced. The reaction is appropriately nicknamed the "Pharoah's Serpent" and was sold in stores as fireworks until people realized it's toxic.

-- Apparently, Burning NH4Cr2O7 With HgSCN Opens A Portal To Hell.

TOF remembers those "fireworks." You lit up a pellet and a "snake" grew out of it and curled all over. He does not recall all the 4th of July dead bodies from the mercury thiocyanate, sulfur dioxide, and mercury sulfide, but supposes they must have been on the next block.

On This Day in History

The estmable Dr. Boli tells us that...

On this day in 627, the Roman Empire in the East finally broke the power of the Persian Empire after more than seven centuries of nearly constant conflict—the longest, and therefore most profitable, war in human history. It was the greatest triumph of the Roman Empire, and it lasted for about half an hour, after which the Caliphate obliterated Persia and reduced the Roman Empire to a state about the size of Delaware.

Flynncestry: Ragtime Flynns

Daniel Joseph Flynn goes to Phillipsburg

Daniel Joseph Flynn
(1871-1944)

This account is based on sundry documents in hand and on a transcript of a conversation with Francis Joseph Flynn, Sr (Pop-pop), May, 1976.  At the time of the recording, he was 76 years old and was talking about when he was a kid.  Those who remember him are welcome to supply his vocal mannerisms and to make metronomic hand-chopping gestures as they read his words.

 

After John Thomas Flynn was crushed in the railroad repair yards in Washington NJ in 1881, his oldest boys, Martin (12) and Daniel (10) had to go to work to support the family. According to TOF's grandfather, they would hop the freight train when it slowed down through the Yards and ride it through the tunnel to Oxford Furnace, where they worked in the Nail Mill. In the interview taped in May 1976, Pop-pop remembered:

Oxford Furnace, late 1800s

"My dad first worked... he worked in Oxford. They made steel, or rather iron. They cooked up the ore and made ingots, pig iron, until that ore played out. It was the Oxford Iron Mills."

The Merriam Shoe Co. had relocated from New York City to Newton NJ in 1873, and "attracted to the novelty, townsfolk peered inside and wondered at the mechanical wizardry of the modern factory system." Modern, indeed. A steam engine powered the belts that moved the machines. The Sussex Register thought that “the only question that remains to be settled is, will Mr. Merriam be seconded in his efforts by a competent corps of women and children from this county, who are willing to become his employees?” This was just in time for Martin and Daniel to become two of those children, for in...

Feats of St. Nicholas

When TOF was a TOFling, it was the practice of Haus Flynn to set one's shoes outside the bedroom door in order to collect goodies left there by Good St. Nick. Later, after there were too many shoes cluttering up the hallway, this took the form of socks hung under the mantlepiece. TOF's maternal relatives, by which he means virtually the entire neighborhood where he grew up, were German and therefore hip to the good Sankt Nikolas, since elided via niederländisch to Santa Claus.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus; although the Santa Claus of the popular imagination could be accused of identity theft:

Artist: Lukasz Ciaciuch/Luki.igrek.net
Image: ChrisTnet.cz

The Engineer Discourses Upon His Love

A change of pace. The first poem I ever sold for cash money was "The Engineer Discourses Upon His Love," now appearing for a limited engagement on the Preview Page. It appeared in ANALOG, March 1989 and was reprinted in the Rhysling anthology for that year as a nominee, and again in the collection Captive Dreams.

It ends in a pun of dread and scandalous entendre.

Something is not right.

h/t Matt Briggs

Microagression

The latest fad among the bien pensants on campus is the notion of "microagression." It is never too clear of what this offense consists but, like Potter Stewart's obscenity, "you know it when you see it." Of course, "seeing it" is always after-the-fact, which means those accused seldom know they are doing it until the after accusation is itself leveled. This induces a level of terror in the intended targets. At least the old heresy hunters, Chesterton once pointed out, went to great pains beforehand to spell out exactly what the heresies consisted of.

The targets of opportunity in this case, at least those mentioned in the linked article, are liberal professors, so we are evidently in the phase of the Revolution when the Revolution begins to eat itself and Robespierre goes to the guillotine. Perhaps it is because liberal professors are so accustomed to apologize at the drop of a hat that it is easier to terrorize them.

Take the first example. Education professor Val Rust, who was into multiculturalism before the word existed. In a class on dissertation-preparation, he committed such microagressions as correcting someone's capitalization, helping them simplify complex rambling sentences, and other thought-crimes against scholars of color.

Tensions arose over Rust’s insistence that students use the more academic Chicago Manual of Style for citation format; some students felt that the less formal American Psychological Association conventions better reflected their political commitments. 

The idea that format and grammar do (or ought to) reflect "political commitments" is bizarre, and indicates that "political correctness" is not as innocuous as many suppose. Under the neue Rassenwissenschaft, Asian students are considered to be "white" for purposes of attack. This is likely because they do well in scholastics, which students in Newark public schools a couple decades ago denounced as "acting white" in their attacks on Caribbean blacks.

Generals Fight the Previous War

The thing that is striking about these attacks on liberal professors is the utter triviality of the accusations. The Chicago Manual of Style is racist? Really? Oh, wait: it makes the scholar of color feel "unsafe." One is tempted to say "Man up," save for the obvious problematics of that phrase. Scholars of gender will feel unsafe. This has spilled out from the hothouse of academe into such places as SF conventions, where those who trained their craft in academe have begun setting up "safe spaces" for selected protected groups. Back in the 60s we used to call that "segregation" or "apartheid."  And yes, some observed that it was sometimes voluntary and that people did like to hang out with their fellows; but that attitude was denounced back in the day. Now it is cutting-edge progressivism. Go figure.

So what's going on? Perhaps it is no more than nostalgia: modern students longing for the good old days when their parents and grandparents manned the barricades in 1968 and fought racism. One major difference between flinching from "microaggression" and those days was that when people cried "Racist!" in the 60s, they were often dealing with the true quill. The didn't just "feel unsafe," they often were unsafe.

Protestors being prevented by National Guard troops from
attacking black demonstrators, Milwaukee 1966.

For example: the Incomparable Marge once walked across a bridge; viz., the 16th St. Viaduct in Milwaukee in 1967. This was described as "the longest bridge in the world," since it connected "Africa to Poland." People on the South Side were disinclined to sell their houses to persons of color. (BTW, that locution would have been denounced as racist back then. Now of course it is de rigueur.)  In the course of this, she had to walk between two crowds of screaming whites, spitting, shouting invectives of the most vile sort, raining special ire upon the priests and nuns in the march. (Being Polish-Americans, they doubtlessly felt betrayed by seeing Catholic clergy on the "other side.") The Marge saw one Jesuit priest pulled out of the march and pummeled by the crowd before the Guardsmen could rescue him.

Feeling unsafe in the progressive cocoons of academe and SF cons? Friends, these folks don't know what "feeling unsafe" means. Ask Goodman, Schwerner, and Cheney.

But they want to think they are cut from the same cloth, that they too are "out there." They don't understand the difference between winning the war and mopping up.

So, in honor of microagression, TOF presents an excerpt from The Shipwrecks of Time, describing a protest at the home of Judge Cannon. The Milwaukee Youth Council had targeted him, believing that, as a devout Catholic with a solid record of progressivism, he could be persuaded to publicly resign from the segregated social club "The Eagles."

The excerpt follows. Frank and Carole are fictional characters, but everything else -- including many of the quotes -- comes straight out of newspaper accounts of the event. The reader should be aware of two things: Frank had earlier heard the expression "Nobody back in the World knows shit" from a Vietnam vet expressing scorn for both an anti-war protest and the pro-war counter-protesters. Second: a week or so before these events a bomb had been set off in the headquarters of the NAACP in Milwaukee. Oh, and the black power advocate, Fr. Groppi, was white. The parish where he was assistant was about half-black, half-white.

Action Figure

Getting all medieval on your ass is..... Doc Angelic!!

h/t Mark Shea

Mottoes

Get your daily Calvin-Hobbs fix at http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/

Feast of St. Catherine of Alexandria

St. Catherine of Alexandria
Symbolism. The martyr's crown. The wheel on which
she was tortured. The sword by which she was beheaded.
The books and astrolabe for her erudition.

TOF's Faithful Reader may recall that the parish church in Oberhochwald/Eifelheim was the Church of St. Catherine of Alexandria, whose feast is today. She was one of the most popular saints in the Middle Ages, especially so in universities.

Clearing the Tabs

An informative potpourri today, O Faithful Reader.



1. Darwin Catholic reports on Slate's denigration of women and its desire that they be more like men, which is the only truly worthy aspiration. Motherhood, it seems, detracts from productivity in business, a cog in which machine is or should be the goal of all. The delight, as Brandon points out in the comments, is to see Slate acting as a shill for corporate interests.

2. Meanwhile, Wired lets us know that those people should not be allowed to "breed." One supposes that "everything old is new again" and the search for the superman continues. Why are they called "progressives" if they simply repeat century-old tropes? What judgment Darwin would make of this!!

3. An intriguing new blog in which issues of climate science are debated among professionals. Each "issue" starts with a statement of the problem followed by three to five "guest blogs" by scientists on one side or another. Best of all, the comments are in two buckets: one for scientists and the other for everyone else. That way the loonies can more easily be ignored. The linked issue regards the possible imminent occurrence of a new Maunder minimum.

4. James Bowman comments on the continuing vandalism of works of art by the barbarians of the New Age. Artists of the past must and will be brought into line with current goodthink.

5. The estimable John C. Wright points us to a video in which a woman walks along the streets of NYC and is accosted by all the usual suspects.This is a parody of another video by feminists which triggered an internecine battle between those wishing to expose the harassment of women and those concerned that all of the harassers shown were POCs.

6. Atheist John Gray on "The Closed Mind of Richard Dawkins." Gray's point is that Dawkins is not a very scientifical fellow and approaches atheism with the unfortunate pulpit-pounding of a religious zealot. Of course, that Dawkins is a Calvinist preacher has long been obvious. What is genetic determinism but predestination in a lab coat.

7. Our old buddy Aristotle comes in for some kudos from unlikely sources. Despite getting many facts wrong -- supposing our translations are accurate as to the meanings of the terms then in use -- his methodology was sound, and is used to this day. So, he should get a retro-Nobel Prize; or at least a reappraisal of his physics. Aristotelian physics, the author contends "is a correct and non-intuitive approximation of Newtonian physics in the suitable domain (motion in fluids), in the same technical sense in which Newton theory is an approximation of Einstein's theory."

8. Speaking of which, Hassing once gave a lecture examining the revolutionary nature of classical physics versus both the Aristotelian physics that preceded it and the quantum physics that supplanted it. He discusses the various shaky foundations that underlie the Newtonian world-view.

9. In line with which is a paper by Nancy Cartwright on How the Laws of Physics Lie.

ΨΦ

A new and curious magazine/journal has come to TOF's attention; viz., Sci Phi Journal, Issue #1 of which can be found here. It is a curious mixture of science fiction and philosophy. I mean, whoever heard of that escapist stuff taking on issues of high philosophy.

Issue #1 features four short stories and a novelette, plus five articles on philosophy. Each of the stories is followed by a short supplement on the philosophical issues it tackles. The philosophy articles are not supplemented by short stories tackling the issues raised, however.

The Table of Contents for Issue #1

FROM THE EDITOR
By Jason Rennie
 
SHORT FICTION

DOMO
By Joshua M. Young
FALLING TO ETERNITY
By David Hallquist
COSMIC FOAM
By Frederick Best
ABANDONED RIVER, DRY WATER
By Jane Lebak

ARTICLES

IN DEFENSE OF THE MATRIX SAGA: APPRECIATING THE SEQUELS THROUGH PHILOSOPHY
By David Kyle Johnson
STAR TREK’S PRIME DIRECTIVE: MORAL GUIDELINES, EXCEPTIONS,
AND ABSOLUTES
By James Druley
PERSONHOOD IN H. BEAM PIPER’S LITTLE FUZZY
By Stephen S. Hanson
“I AM GROOT”: AN ARISTOTELIAN REFLECTION ON SPACE ALIENS AND SUBSTANCE
By Daniel Vecchio
ENDANGERED SPECIES: EXPLORING ENHANCEMENT, GENETIC ENGINEERING, AND PERSONHOOD THROUGH THE WORLD OF SWEET TOOTH
By Ruth Tallman

NOVELLETE

THE IDEAL MACHINE
By John C. Wright

BOOK REVIEWS

LARRY CORREIA'S MONSTER HUNTER INTERNATIONAL BOOK 1
Reviewed by Peter Sean Bradley

All of the entries are quite good, but special mention must be made of the estimable Mr. Wright's "The Ideal Machine," which is delightfully Laffertyesque in its account of a First Contact in rural Virginia involving two military helicopter pilots, a priest, and the aforesaid machine.

Germanobeastnaming

German, the Legoblock language, can construct new words from old. For example:

Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän

is a fine example, should you ever need a single word to designate the captain of a Danube steamship for a travel company. He (or she, we hasten to add) would be a Danubicsteamshiptravelcompanycaptain. Think how this would reduce the word count in your latest manuscript!

Of particular interest are the names of beasts:

There is the appropriatelynamed skunk (Stinktier – stink-beast) and sloth (Faultier – lazy-beast) and the humourslynamed platypus (Schnabeltier – beak-beast).But what are we to make of the racoon (Waschbär – wash-bear) and the slug (Nacktschnecke – naked-snail). At least these keep genus or order straight. However, the porpoise is Schweinswal (pig-whale) and it is hard to see how pigs come into it, Linnaeus-wise.

Most puzzling of all is the squirrel: Eichhörnchen, which breaks down either as:

Eiche (oak tree) + Horn (horn) + -chen (little) or "little oak horn"

or more mysteriously as:

Eiche (oak tree) + Hörnchen (croissant) or "oak croissant"

Croissant? The Austrians, though Darwinianly challened, at least seem reaonable in calling the squirrel:
Eichkätzchen or Eichkatzerl, meaning "oak kitten"

Fun and Games on the Old South Side

Haven't seen this sort of action in the neighborhood since they tore down the Delaware Terrace projects. The cops raided a house about a block away from TOF, looking for a fellow who had been dealing heroin on a nearby playground. There is an alley running behind the duplexes shown in the picture, and the playground is across that alley. In TOF's youth, that playground was actually a cornfield, improbably surrounded by houses and (on one side) by a carpet factory. Every spring the farmer would drive his tractor down from the hill and plow it up and plant corn. Eventually, a new generation of kids arose who regarded the corn as free for the taking, so he gave up and sold out and the city built a park where people could pedal heroin. The carpet factory is also gone. There is a drug store on the site.

From the story:

Easton police served a narcotics search warrant and made one arrest Wednesday morning on the city's South Side.
Elijah Thompson, 23, was taken into custody as part of a Vice Unit investigation into heroin dealing at Milton Street Playground, police Lt. Matthew Gerould said at the scene.
Police obtained a search warrant for a car behind the home, Gerould said, and found $1,500 worth of heroin in the vehicle, Gerould said. Drugs were not found in the house but packaging materials were, Gerould said.

If you take a gander at the picture, you will see a big stone house in the background. This was the first house in the area and was built and inhabited by Francis Schwar (pron. Schwär), from an extensive family of stone masons. The area was once known as "Schwartown" for the large number of relatives scattered about. Their daughter was TOF's grandmother, who lived two houses to the left, off frame. Two houses farther down is the TOFian Fortress of Solitude.

Special Response Team action is actually rare these days on this side of town. But some years ago, before the projects were torn down, a dead body turned up at the intersection in the background. In another incident around the same time, a car full of urban youth pulled up to the red brick house across the street to the left from the Schwär house in the background, and took refuge inside. (That house, too, had once been a Schwar house.) Shortly after, another car pulled up and a hand emerged from the window with a gun, but found no target but a tree. That incident was captured on a nearby security camera. The first car, the one from which the youths had emerged, was being sought by cops for a drive-by shooting in the West Ward. Apparently, the cops were not the only seekers. The gun-brandishers were organizationally related to the targets in the original fusilade.

Flynncestry: To the Shores of Amerikay

John Thomas Flynn (c.1841-1880)
Only known likeness; water-damaged

4. John Thomas Flynn

The search for the Flynns began many years ago when TOF was yet young and not yet as close as now to being an ancestor himself. TOF was the eldest of some twenty-odd cousins, some of them very odd indeed, and had lately come into the intelligence that not only did his father, Pere, also have cousins, but so did his grandfather, Pop-pop. The Flynns and allied families, while not so numerous as the descendants promised to Abram and Sarah, would have made a respectable turnout at any rowdy party, nor made it any less so.

And so, TOF, with a cassette tape recorder in hand -- you may recollect such devices from the Paleophonic Era -- went over the river and through the woods to grandfather's house, and there in the Sacred Kitchen, where Irish families always seem to congregate, he mercilessly interrogated his aged grandsire. Well, perhaps he was not so aged as he seemed at the time. In fact, he may have been about the age TOF is today. Any cousin happening to read this will recall the deep timbre of his voice, the precision of his speech, and the hatchet motions of his hand as he made his point. 

Family history is lived forward, but often discovered backward. So one starts with the living and peels back the onion generation by generation, overcoming curiosities and contradictions and resolving oral traditions along the way. Bits and pieces accumulate, not always in logical order. In the course of the interview, several things ancestral emerged.

• Pop-pop had never known his paternal grandfather, who had died when his father was only ten.
• He was no longer certain of that grandfather's name, but thought it might have been James or John.
• His grandfather had been killed on the railroad when he was caught between two coal cars and crushed to death, sometime he thought in the 1880s.
• He had married Anne Lynch, who had worked for "a miller and his wife."
• They had all lived in Washington, NJ, where the railroad yards were.
• He had come from Ireland, and there were two sisters and a brother who "went to California to look for gold."

Armed with this somewhat fluffy information, TOF wrote to the NJ Vital Statistics, and asked vaguely about Flynns killed on the railroad in Washington NJ in the 1880s. Bureaucrats were more nimble in those days and, after all, how many Flynns could have been killed in railroad accidents in Washington NJ in the 1880s? 

Ans.: Two.

But it may be best to let the story tell itself in the proper direction. 

Veteran's Day (née Armistice Day)

Today is Veteran's Day (née Armistice Day) 

At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the guns in Europe fell silent at last. The United States built a wall inscribed with the names of servicemen killed or missing in the nine years' war. In three-and-a-half years, the Allies in WW1 suffered deaths amounting to 103 Vietnam walls. That's just over 2.5 Vietnam walls every month.

Technically, it was only an armistice, and 21 years later, they had to do it all over again; this time with massive civilian casualties.

Since then, Armistice Day has been expanded to include all veterans of all wars. As generally done on Veteran's day, TOF appends here a short account of veterans in my own and the Incomparable Marge's families. 

TOF himself is not a veteran.  The closest he got was two years of Artillery ROTC (so he can call down shells on your location.  You have been warned.) but he was classified 4F by a wise military. This was at the height of the Vietnam War, to which TOF expressed opposition, though unlike other opponents, it was LBJ's insistence on micromanaging the war that irritated him the most, as well as Sec. McNamara's weird focus on corporate-like numbers crunching.

Note: TOF does not know why there are whimsical font and font size changes scattered throughout this post. He has tried several times to correct them but has been defeated by the daemons of the internet each time.

Werehouse

In the late 1980s I set out to write hard science fiction fantasy stories. These included pixies ("From the Corner of the Eye"), dragons ("Dragons"), ghosts ("Mammy Morgan Played the Organ; Her Daddy Beat the Drum"), mummies ("Flame of Iron"), demons ("The Feeders"). "Werehouse" is the  werewolf story.

It is very likely the most awful, hopeless, cynical, and depraved story I've ever written. In a strangely literal sense, it stinks. There is a rape and several murders. It uses some bad words and the future in which it takes place is one where things have gone not just wrong, but very, very wrong in multiple ways. It was inspired by the then-popular slogan "Sh*t H*ppens" and the mindset which that implies about agency and responsibility. What happens if indulging the appetites is given free rein. I thought for a time that I would not post it, and perhaps I shall only leave it up for a short time. Let's call it a cautionary tale. It's told in the first-person illiterate

At 11,000 words, it is novelette length. I sent it to Analog, which turned it down as too disgusting, then to Asimov's, which didn't buy the science. Omni also turned it down and Amazing responded that it was not accepting unsolicited mss. Finally, Toni Weisskopf told me about New Destinies, a Baen paperback "magazine" and it appeared in their Fall 1990 issue. It was included in my collection The Nanotech Chronicles and again in a Baen anthology titled Tomorrow Bites.

The carters in the story take the name from Henry Carter in "Remember'd Kisses" and the old newspaper headline Kops Katch Killer Klone refers to "The Laughing Clone," both also included in The Nanotech Chronicles. A close reading of the later Nanotech stories and the "Neighborhood" stories in Captive Dreams indicate an alternate history within the cycles. "Werehouse" is a darker future than the others.

To read the story, if you've the stomach for it, go over to the the story preview page.

First Way, Part IV: The Cascades

Previous episodes in this exciting series, now drawing toward its thrilling climax:

• Background lays out the history of the Argument from Motion and the impatience of those who demand that it prove more than it asserts to prove (e.g., that it prove that Jesus is Lord or some such thing, as if the objector were genuinely concerned about this shortfall).
• Part I A Moving Tale discusses the concept of "motion" used in the Argument from Motion, and how this is persistently misunderstood today. 
• Part II Two Lemmas demonstrate that 

1. Whatever is being actualized right now is being actualized by another. 
2. There cannot be an infinite regress of instrumental changers,

• Part III: The Big Kahuna combined the two Lemmas into the first theorem and its corollaries

A number of objections and misunderstandings were also addressed in these prior posts.

We are now ready for Thomas' throwaway teaser: "and this [the unmoved mover] is what all men call God." Folks who have never read any further (if they have even read that far) are often puzzled. How do you get God out of that? TOF hears them cry in bewilderment.

The answer lies in the several hundred further Questions and Articles in which these points are developed. In the interests of brevity, a few subsequent proofs will now be stated without extensive arguments, but ought to be intelligible in the light of what has already been said.

The Pennsylvania Election: 2014

Pennsylvania famously consists of three countries: Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and All the Rest. Often, statewide elections favor Republicans because Pittsburgh Democrats (who tend to be guns-and-Bibles, working class economic liberals) do not always see eye-to-eye with Philadelphia Democrats (who tend to be Main Line, upper class social liberals). Since Philadelphia outnumbers Pittsburgh, they usually get the pick and sometimes manage to alienate their allies in the West.

Soul of the City

An old story from 1989 has gone up on the Story Page. "Soul of the City" is a short story in the Nanotech Chronicles cycle in which Charlie Singer, the main character in "The Washer at the Ford" and a bit player in "Melodies of the Heart" and (more recently) "Hopeful Monsters," makes an appearance. This story is set earlier in his career, before SingerLabs became the big deal it would later be.

One of the tactics of the SF writing game is to take a technological innovation, ask who it would hurt the most, and write that person's story. This might even be the definition of a large branch of SF. This is what makes the story of John Henry ("The Steel Driver") a retro-SF story. The converse story is that of the Wonderful Invention in which the protagonist uses the new tech to perform some heroic feat; for example: if John Henry had used the new steam drill to rescue friends trapped in a cave-in, and so comes to see tech progress as Good.

Dr, Boli's Top Ten

Dr. Boli's Celebrated Magazine informs us of the Top Ten Inventions of the Last Thousand Years, to wit:

1. The top-ten list. This epochal innovation in philosophical method gave the ordinary thinking man or woman in the street a simple means of organizing all useful knowledge on any given subject, elevating common discourse to its present exalted level.
   
2. Tomato sauce. It is hard to imagine, but before Columbus there was no such thing as tomato sauce in any European cuisine. The life expectancy in the Middle Ages was appallingly short, and many culinary experts believe it was because most of Europe’s favorite foods were barely edible without some form of tomato sauce.
   
3. The newspaper. Until the advent of the newspaper in the 1600s, fish was sold unwrapped, and carrying it home from the market was a delicate and frequently messy business.
   
4. The advertisement. Before the discovery of advertising, anyone who wished to purchase an item would have to pay a personal visit to the craftsman who made it. The craftsman would then be required to produce actual samples of his work to prove that his goods were satisfactory, depriving a great many incompetent craftsmen of the means of making a living. Today, the purchaser seldom handles the goods until after the purchase, and buying decisions are made on the basis of the seller’s claims rather than the buyer’s observations. The quality of the advertising, rather than the quality of the goods, thus determines the ability of the manufacturer to make a profit.
   
5. The Jacob’s ladder. Until the invention of the high-voltage traveling arc, commonly called a Jacob’s ladder, it was impossible for a mad scientist to know whether anything electrical and sciencey was actually going on when he attempted to give life to the monster he had created.
   
6. The greeting card. Today it is hard for us to imagine the primitive world before the greeting card, when correspondents who wished to communicate by writing were required to express their own sentiments in ink, which in turn necessitated their having sentiments to express.
   
7. Homeopathy. Thanks to the pioneering discoveries of Samuel Hahnemann, it is possible to start with literally nothing and end up with profitable employment for countless thousands of homeopathic practitioners.
   
8. The grant proposal. In ancient times, an artist soliciting a commission was forced to come up with a design, often one requiring considerable mechanical skill in the execution, that expressed some definite idea which was communicable by visual means to the viewer. The advent of the grant proposal made it possible for artists of any skill level to receive commissions for piles of detritus pulled from the Dumpster out back, as long as the proposal itself assigned a suitably fashionable meaning to the work.
   
9. Pong. This wildly popular game showed the world that there is no activity so excruciatingly dull that it cannot be rendered enchanting by projecting it on a computer screen.
   
10. The emoticon. Before the technology experts at Carnegie Mellon provided us with a means of expressing the intended mood of written communications, writers were forced to make precise choices of words and sentence structures to indicate whether a given statement was to be taken as cheerful, surprised, sarcastic, or sad >;K (winking cat).

When is the Golden Age?

From the blog Mr. Magundi Speaks His Mind ("Discussing Politics in Mixed Company Since 2011"), part of Dr. Boli's vast publishing empire, the following post, reproduced without comment:

“So why is it so hard to tell whether you’re on the left or on the right, Magundi?” Mr. Bates asked, for once with no sign of hostility.

“Because I’m not—and that, incidentally, makes me one of the privileged and powerful among us ordinary citizens.

“I will tell you what the difference between the left and the right is. The right believes that the golden age is in the past—that we can solve our current problems only by returning to the wise principles and moral behavior of days gone by. The left believes that the golden age is in the future—that we can solve our problems only by moving away from the darkness and superstition of the past and forward to a society based on enlightenment and benevolence.

“Nature has somehow provided that there will always be roughly equal numbers of people who believe in the golden age of the past and the golden age of the future, and these people will reliably vote for the parties that represent their prejudices. But there is also a third group—those of us who believe that, in this fallen world, there never was a golden age, and there never will be a golden age. We are free to decide that this policy or that policy is likely to be to our advantage, however temporarily; and so we may swing wildly from left to right, according to the conditions we see in the world, or according to the personalities of the politicians, or according to what we ate for breakfast. As voters, therefore, we are the ones who actually choose the leaders for the rest of you.

“So if you are a politician on the left or the right, my advice to you, since I am a member of the only group of voters who can actually decide the election, is to give me a splendid pancake breakfast, with the best sausage, none of that frozen stuff, and fresh strawberries for the pancakes.”

The Summa of All Internet Debate

From Deogowulf's now sadly silent The Joy of Curmudgeonry, a scenario familiar to many at various blogs:

Thermippos — The Complete Dialogue
The scene is the agora, outside the office of the magistrate. Socrates is on his way to answer charges of impiety. There he meets Thermippos holding forth confidently amidst a gathering of young men. Naturally, since death is on his mind, Socrates seizes the opportunity to discuss the subject with a man who seems certain of everything.

Socrates. You agree, Thermippos, that all men are mortal.
Thermippos. I do.
Socrates. And you agree furthermore that I am a man.
Thermippos. I have no reason to doubt it, Socrates.
Socrates. Surely then you agree that I am mortal.
Thermippos. I didn’t say that. You did. Don’t put words in my mouth.
Socrates. I beg your pardon, Thermippos, but I have simply drawn what follows.
Thermippos. Strawman.
Socrates. But no true reasoner could fail —
Thermippos. Ah, the no-true-Macedonian fallacy.
Socrates. But, Thermippos, given the logical form . . .
Thermippos. Define “logical form”.
Socrates. . . . you must either accept the conclusion or reject at least one of the premises.
Thermippos. False dichotomy.
Socrates. I see, Thermippos. You’re an idiot.
Thermippos. And that’s an ad hominem.

Socrates ad-hominems Thermippos with a brick. The charges of impiety are dropped.

Quote of the Day

Self-control is the control and rightful-ordering of desires and passions by the rational self. Liberation, as promoted by liberals, socialists, and other libertarians, is the setting-free of desires and passions from the command of the rational self, the thraldom of the latter to the former, and the manipulation and control of the desires and passions by outer forces over the vanquished self. This is the “free man” which the libertarians promote: the man without self-control, not a master of his passions, but their thrall in “free expression” — and a thrall also to those who know how to manipulate and control the passions of others.

The Dizzy Pace of Change

Siris notes that the difficulties of authors with publishers is nothing new:

This little work was finished in the year 1803, and intended for immediate publication. It was disposed of to a bookseller, it was even advertised, and why the business proceeded no farther, the author has never been able to learn. That any bookseller should think it worth-while to purchase what he did not think it worth-while to publish seems extraordinary. But with this, neither the author nor the public have any other concern than as some observation is necessary upon those parts of the work which thirteen years have made comparatively obsolete. The public are entreated to bear in mind that thirteen years have passed since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes.

-- Jane Austen, in the Advertisement to Northanger Abbey. She was only able actually to publish the book because the publisher sold it back to her in 1816.

TOF notes another intriguing detail: the dizzying pace of change in the years between 1803 and 1816! Miss Austen felt it necessary to caution her readers because "during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes."  This is much like cautioning readers today of the many changed since a text was written in 2001. It seems that such is not such a new thing after all.