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NOTICE: As you will notice, I have
no qualifications for these random musings. I can't justify them in the
least.
They are more to justify myself to myself.
With great fire, I began my little log, at a time when some projects collapse and I needed to talk. That's all it seems to me to be about, whether it is a novel or a play or a piece of dance or music: a conversation with somebody to pass the time pleasantly before the inevitable end. It's not as important to say something wise as it is to say it with convincing conviction. MUSING #16. Prompted by a lecture on the Archimedes
palimpsest.
Scientific
Cover Up!
The ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes was
one of the most original and fecundant scientist ever. MUSING #15. Prompted by the birth of a baby.
What's
the Why?
As noted on 'Scrubs', NBC's authoritative
program on hospital life, there's a rough numerical parity between
births and deaths. There's an exact symmetry between the events
recently for me. MUSING #14. Prompted by a job change. A
Rake's Progress
When starting out, you want a career that is significant, if not to the world then at least to yourself. Later you settle for a meaningful career, if not for the world then at least for yourself. Later, you settle for an interesting job. If not interesting, at least moral. If not moral, at least not harmful. If harmful, at least not criminal. If criminal, at least with a light sentence with work release. If a heavy sentence, then the hope of retiring or dying sometime after the statute of limitations runs out. Some people get stuck on the first rung of this ladder to hell. Some jump off mid-rung. Some make it to the bottom. The most you can pray for is delusion of thinking what you are doing is significant. The delusion is wonderful, invigorating and necessary. -nf MUSING #13. Prompted by a perfectly good
afternoon wasted by TV.
Sorry,
Charles. It's only a game.
Actually I mean: It's only a pastime. Perhaps a pleasant, beneficial and social pastime, but just a pastime. I refer to golf. I don't play it. Never have and suspect never will. And I usually don't watch it on TV except that a brother-in-law is now involved with professional golf. And perhaps that's why you can't convince me that it is anything other than a pastime, like poker or pool are. It is not a sport. That's why I think Tiger Woods stands out. He obviously hasn't gotten the message that it's not a sport. The 2006 win in Chicago showed him to be the only one who took it seriously. Compared to him everybody else was out for a pleasant walk in the country. His concentration was palpable. Calling it a sport gives duffers the delusional luxury of
thinking that they participate in a sport. Sorry, Charles. It's only a
sport for one. -ds DAFFINITIONS #2: A Funny Person: A person who thinks that they are funny and laughs at their own jokes. A Comedian: A person who thinks that they are funny and doesn't laugh at their own jokes. Comedy: The woman gets her way. Tragedy: The man gets his way. MUSING #12. Prompted by waiting for a large kidney
stone to
pass.
Science
as a
Project of Monotheism
(See disqualification note above.) The grand, overarching philosophic assumption of science is that the physical world is susceptible to rational explanation. (For rational read double metaphoric ratios: energy is to matter as the algebraic symbols 'e' and 'm' are to each other in the formula e = mc². Who would have thunk it?) The crucial thing is that mind is applied to understanding. If the world were not rationally constructed, then how could a god (or some rational force) have constructed it? Religion
(at least monotheism) needs science more than
science needs religion. The more rational the world is proven to be,
the more
likely it is that is could have been ‘made’ by a divine being. Newton
saw his unifying of earthly gravity with planetary motion as a
manifestation of
God’s divinity in action. (He also secretly didn’t believe in the
Trinity but
believed in a single godhead, a dangerous disbelief in England at the
time.) I idly speculate that pantheism, where every
separate
force
has a separate god (a wind god, a god of the seas, a god of thunder and
so on)
would never support a science that seeks the unity of nature. The
hope for a grand unified theory of everything is the hope for a grand
unifier. -ds MUSING #11. Prompted by John
Eliot Gardiner & Philip Pullman on the BBC on Bach.
Two Part Invention She David walked sat into in the a room chair. and He looked wondered out why the she window. had It entered was the not room obvious again as after to having why been the gone snow for blowing several so hours. hard Was had she not home frozen to on stay the or window was and she celled just the waiting room for as the a snow white to tomb. stop? But The the dryness room of as the warm room and seemed the to hand sharpen that the she perfume sought she was wore. there "Hello" to he be said. held. -ds Part 3 latter. DAFFINITIONS #1: Belief: A sanctioned prejudice. An Infant: A toothless terror; a portable person. Birds: Ministers of the air who, when on the ground, waddling around as if their hands were tied behind their backs. They traded hands for wings. -ds OBSERVATION #2: Science requires the willing suspension of beliefs. -nf MUSING #10.
Prompted by a
warm winter.
An
Object Lesson in Free Market Competition
I use to have a
pleasant hour’s morning commute along a scenic highway.
There was a cluster of independent gas stations in a clearing just before I got to work. Regardless of how low gas prices got back then, one of the stations consistently had prices one penny lower than the others. As a result the gas prices for this cluster was ten to fifteen cents lower than other stations in the area. One wintry morning I rounded the grove of trees that hid the gas stations and saw the smoldering carcass of the cheap gas station, one window obvious shattered inward. The burned, sooty walls contrasted nicely with the bleak snow. The papers said it was arson but the police weren't sure who had done it. By the next morning, snow covered the charred two-by-fours and the price of gas went up twenty cents for the rest of the time that I commuted. And that's the way it works. --nf-- MUSING #9.
A sudden thought
prompted by a nice book.
Bragg's English While in England, my wife got Melvin Bragg's 'The Adventure of English'. Melvin is the somewhat notorious want-to-know-it-all host of the BBC4 show "In Our Time" that tries to have intelligent expositions on history, science, the arts and philosophy mainly, but not always, with an eye towards the past. In the areas where I have some knowledge, I know he -- and less excusably his guests -- get lost in the weeds quite often which makes me wonder about his shows in areas that I have no knowledge of. His weakest suit is in modern sciences. But to the book. It admirably covers the time from proto-English with the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes up to contemporary American English and world English, tho at times it seems more of a hymn of praise (with verses repeated) than a serious study. An interesting revelation for me was that Elizabethan writers where well aware of the mutability of language since for them the language of Chaucer, then only two hundred years old, was difficult to read. They saw the writing on the wall: nothing lasts. Shakespeare's lines "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see/ So long lives this (poem) and this (poem) gives life to thee" are ironic since he's knows that nothing will last and 'thee' by then was archaic. Melvin is a dyed-in-the-wool Englishman writing about English. He praises English for being adaptive and inclusive (such as with the wealth of infused French) and he is contradictorily congratulatory when English stubbornly refuses to admit words (as it did with Celtic). When English is late in a development, he praises that. When it is early, he praises that too. I don't think English is uniquely adaptive as a language as he seems to champion, tho I am no expert and the experts will have the bias of the language their mother's taught them and I will only read experts that write in English. I do wonder whether being an island focused the language in ways that continent bred languages, with fluid and ill-defined borders, did not. Other characteristics that he trumpets seem products of any language that obtains a written form. Out of necessity he singles in on important events and great chroniclers, molders and users of English such as the various conquests and Chaucer, the Tyndale Bible, Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson. He may be right here in that English seems to have single, idiosyncratic giants where as continental languages tend to have schools and academies. Being, I assume, an Anglican he sees the evil Catholic Church suppress an English bible and sees Henry the Eighth as a hero of the language, tho I would place equally blame for the cruelty on both church and state. The big, long lasting battles of any language are between the elite and the vulgar, the rulers and the ruled, the capitol and the country side, stability and decay, the proper and improper, proscriptive and descriptive. Since he so well chronicles the battle in England and the US for 'proper' English, I'm surprised that he didn't see the battle between Catholic authority and vernacular bible just another English battle with itself. (I quibble too with strange uses of punctuation that obscure the flow of sentences and with obvious editing lapses, such as lists of words that have repeats.) The book is worth a read as long as you realize that it is an adventure seen thru the prism of Melvin's mind. -- ds MUSING #8. Prompted by a cloudy night. Dawn’s Early Light Only once or twice I have been far away enough from city light to see the night sky as it had been seen for thousands of years, before the industrial revolution, to see thousands and thousands of stars. It was when camping in Upper Michigan and driving thru Canada during a late-summer meteor shower and a summer aurora display. In the next decade, the successor to the Hubble telescope will hopefully optically resolve the first stars ever of the big bang, the stars that made our sun. Technology has stolen our personal
view of the skies but given us glimpses of the edge of time. I don’t
know if
it’s a fair tradeoff, but it is a trade. -- nf MUSING #7. Prompted by yet another boring day. Lords of a Ring Long
ago, from a place far away, a new job sent me to training in
Chicago. I knew the training would be
mind-numbingly boring, so instead I dropped into the Fermi Labs, hot
bed of the
newly emerging field of quark physics, in the small Chicago suburb of
Batavia, IL.
You know this was long ago because I simply parked my car and walk about the place, unchallenged by anyone. (http://www.fnal.gov/pub/about/public_affairs/currentstatus.html) I'm sure if I pushed hard enough, I would have found restricted areas. But as it was, I was able to walk freely for hours thru the Tevatron, a giant ring in the dirt, then under construction and the CDF (Collider Detector). I was free to wander thru Wilson Hall and main office building, again unchallenged. And I had lunch with a bunch of physicists, the lords of the ring, in the cafeteria. I wish I could say I overheard mystifying arguments about quarks and leptons. Instead, I heard physicists complain about the price of coffee and the cold weather. All professions have cant that is unintelligible to laity. When a sailor says 'leeway' or a carpenter says 'shoe', the labels may be obscure, but the underlying concepts are prosaic. Not with particle physicists. (Or for that matter, genetic engineers, number theorists or a thousand other specialties.) Their cant is occult and their concepts are hidden. They speak in terms of mathematics about spaces that our senses cannot comprehend. When they speak, they speak to an elect group of anointed who speak the same language and have lived where they have lived intellectually. That's why I get annoyed when folks like Ray Kurzweil make statements like "In twenty years we will know whether string theory is valid." Who is the 'we'? Not me. Not him. A small group of arguing theorists will think they know something but, like Cassandras, will be unable to tell the rest of us what it is. Meaning, truth, knowledge reside in a community that share the same language and values. e=mc² only has meaning if we share the underlying meaning of the symbols and the concepts they embody. We live when few understand anything about how their world works, how computers work, or airplanes, or even cars run. What math is? What evolution is? It is magical ignorance. When 'we' finally 'understand' the nature of physical reality, it won't be a large 'we'. It will be a small band of monks and nuns who speak in occult terms and who can't prove it to us. They should consider a vow of silence lest they betray the complexity of nature. -- nf MUSING #6. Prompted by yet another rejection letter. The Fame Game Occasionally I run into people who are famous. On the other end of the spectrum, I occasionally have to submit to the indignity of interviews and local publicity for a show of mine. Both in receiving and giving, fame is seductive. It must be similar to what ancient Greeks,
Romans and
Renascence men called Glory. It’s what Homer's warriors fought
for: that
their names would be remembered after they died. It's what Falstaff
mocks. I come to mock fame not to praise it. Why should I care if a person I have never met,
and probably
never will meet, reads my name in a newspaper, or sees my name on
television
or the
web? Why the more strangers see or hear a name, the more fame? Is
evoking the letters and sound of a name
magical? Are the names of Hercules or
Priam magical? In some sense they are. But does it help Priam?
Priam doesn't care about his posthumous fame: If there
is a
conscious afterlife, then he is either in heaven or in hell. In either
case he
doesn't care. If there is no conscious afterlife, then he doesn't care
either. Homer is the best candidate for 'everlasting'
fame. But
Homer wasn't his real name. And there may not have been a Homer. And in
a
billion years the sun will explode and burn all of this to toast
anyway. It's a charade. So
why
is it so seductive? A reasonable use of 'fame' might be to
induce strangers to shows. The desire for fame
may be some
biological control innate in
humans
that induces them to do things that benefit a society but that they
wouldn't do otherwise,
like die in
battle
or write a novel that will never be published.
MUSING #4.
Prompted by the
Halloween Eve time change. Have we saved any daylight yet?
What we do cannot be for the future or fame. The best we can do is have a conversation with the person next to us, on the train, on the boat, across the table, in the here and now, before it is too late. -- ds MUSING #5.
Prompted by the
fall of a leaf.
Why the Theory of Evolution is Wrong and Always Will Be In my naïve way and in my idle time, I divide the sciences into two types: narrative and non-narrative. Non-narrative sciences involve events that are repeatedly observable, such as billiard ball collisions, the orbits of the planets, the glow of starlight. Observations of these repeated events allow development of precise mathematical theories. Narrative sciences involve unrepeatable events: Hitler's invasion of Poland, the big bang, the Cub's 1908 World Series, the last Ice Age, the end of life on earth. Instead of precise theory, we are left with creating plausible narratives. The narrative is constrained, for instance, in the case of the big bang by sophisticated physics. But the event itself is unrepeatable and we are left ultimately with a narrative. And narratives are the territory of myths and legends. Since we cannot repeat and repeatedly repeat the origins and millenniums of time, evolution can neither be proved nor disproved in the way that Newton's theory of elastic collision can be tested and proved. We cannot recreate the earth of four billion years ago. Aided by science, we can only create a plausible narrative. That narrative includes the Origins of the Species as proposed by Darwin. There are of course competing narratives for the origins of matter, life and species. Hindus, Zoroasterians, the Hebrews, the Hittites, the Norse, the Mande, the Hopi, the Greeks, the Japanesse all had (have) competing and countless other narratives, some more or less constrained by observation. (The Greeks, unlike the early Christians, considered their narratives to be at best tall tales and unsuitable for the purposes of science as witnessed by the advance they made in science compared to other races.) The problem with the sad little Theory of Evolution is that it is a only theory, at best a hypothetical narrative constrained by observation, mutable by further reflection and observation. It can't hold a candle to any creation myths since they are the immutable Truth. And the Truth will always win over timid, mutable, incomplete theory and hypothesis. After all, the truth is the whole truth. It will be interesting, in the Chinese-curse sense of the word, what will happen when China and India, unconstrained by god-given truths, push science forward while we sit comfortably in the halo of our Lysenko Truth. -- nf The Looming National Natural Debt I recently
heard a
politico-economist on CSPAN railing against W, calling
it criminal to burden future generations with a national debt.
But the national debt is a legal fiction. A few good rounds of inflation would easily wipe it out. What can't be erased is the destruction for future generations of their share of nature and natural resources. When Lewis and Clark went up the Missouri, the water fowl and buffalo where so thick in the river that the boat was impeded. I live and grew up near what used to be a natural Eden, a wonder of the world: the Kankakee River Valley, where wildlife was so thick that the skies darkened with the passage of geese and the crowned heads of Europe and potentates of Asia flocked to hunt (to death) the game. We melt the ice caps, irrevocably alter climate, squander energy, see the last generations of species die. What is new is that consumption is to the point of extinction, to the point that nature cannot renew itself. This is a debt to future generations that can never be forgiven. (See disclaimer above: I feel that a ledger sheet for government spending should be created showing debt incurred for consumption (importing oil or Game Boys) versus debt incurred for capital or human improvements (bridges or education), just as businesses differentiate between expenses to buy new manufacturing equipment and expenses to built golf courses for CEOs. The current national debt seems for the purpose equivalent to spending company money on golf courses (God knows we need more land converted to that), in my uneducated opinion.) -- nf MUSING #3.
Prompted by Mars
being close to Earth.
Design By Intent, Intent By Design I used to work as an
engineer,
so the word 'design' has special meaning to me. Design
requires intent and predictability. Intent arises from present needs.
Predictability gives the illusion that the future can be controlled.
A bridge is a simple thing. It has a simple purpose and the intent is simple: traffic of some certain weight, size and speed must travel over the bridge to the other side of the river. I predict how steel and concrete, earth and wind, trucks and cars will behave. Based on those predictions, I design a bridge. (In reality, I don't make these predictions. Engineers over the ages have tested and cataloged the strength of concrete and steel. They know the bulk properties of these materials. And hopefully my calculations are right and I hired an honest, competent contractor.) In physics, the annoyingly simple 'three body problem' is still a problem because it is mathematically impossible to predict accurately the paths of three or more bodies orbiting each other. The detailed future of large systems is too complicate to predict. Can I 'backwards' predict? If I walk into a woods and find a bridge decayed by years of neglect, then I could infer that there had once been a bridge builder and once a river in that woods. The mystery isn't the bridge in a woods. The mystery is the woods. Systems called 'woods', oceans, life, the earth and heavens, are far too complicated and subtle for any intelligence to comprehend or control or predict. They interact in unpredictable ways that defeat design and intent. (One is free to image a being that defies mathematics, a god that can square a circle, if you want. But then throw out mathematics as unwarranted assumptions.) To quote the famous particle physicist, Yogi Berra, "The future ain't what it used to be." -- ds MUSING #2.
Prompted by the
end of the White Sox season and of investigations into high crimes.
Message
to the Managers of Team Houston
Blame the
dome. Blame Houston. Blame umpires. Blame your opponents. Blame the
previous
manager. Blame the press. Blame liberals. Blame the 1960's. But don't
blame the team that what brung you to the big show. -- dsMUSING
#1. Resulted
from a reader of a play of mine that objected to a character addressing
the audience directly.
The
Superiority of the Audience
An actor is superior to an individual member of an audience, at least in this respect: the actor and the playwright, director, crew, etc. have worked weeks for this moment, whereas the audience member has not. However, collectively, the audience is superior to the actor. The actor bows to the audience. He awaits the approval or disapproval of the audience. We boo the villains and cheer the heroes. That is the power relationship in theater: The actor is superior to individual members of the audience but inferior to the audience as a whole. If the actor steps out and speaks directly to the audience, he does so in humility since he is inferior to the collective. Thus the prologs and epilogs in Shakespeare beg forgiveness and seek supplication. He may never speak to one audience member alone unless the decorum of theater has been broken, as when a cell phone goes off and he asks that member to silence the infernal machine. At that moment, he speaks from his superiority over the individual member. He speaks for the weeks of preparation he has done. He must quickly regain the decorum after breaking it or all is lost. For comic effect, he may however wink, mug or grimace towards one member of the audience. At that moment, he is letting that one member briefly join in on his superiority, disdainfully admit their common humanity. But only for a moment. When my character speaks to the audience, it is from a position of weakness, of supplication, of asking ultimately for judgment, a judgment my character hopes is in his favor. All acting is pleading, either to other characters on stage or to the audience. The plea is that I am exceptional and, since I am exceptional, the inexorable laws of nature somehow do not apply to me. That the fame I gain on stage will somehow carry me beyond my mortal moments into an eternity of renowned. When my character speaks to the audience, it is that part of him that seeks immorality that speaks. As Mozart noted in (Shaefer's) Amadeus, the audience becomes the gods. I don't distinguish between the actor and the part being acted. As audience, we are gods of judgment both for the performance (what the actor does) and for what is performed (the character created by the author). We judge both simultaneously. In a good performance, they are indistinguishable. -- ds SC points out that in the prologue to Congreve's 'The Old Bachelor', Mrs Bracegirdle says, Pinteresquely, "...now no more like suppliants we come. A play makes war, and prologue is the drum. Armed with keen satire and with pointed wit, we threaten you who do for judges sit." |