I took these on my mobile phone, before I realised I could take movies of more than about 25 seconds length. So I only have 3 short clips to demonstrate.
The quality is what you'd expect from filming someone on a mobile phone on Bank Street at night when slightly inebriated; also the guy plays guitar better than he sings, I think.
That thing on his stump is a coffee cup with a handle broken off, by the way.
Thursday, 17 December 2009
One-armed street guitarist plays the mean streets of Ottawa
Awesomeness in far-off places
In the news today:
Indian sect members vow to marry sex workers:
More than 1,000 followers of a multi-religious sect in northern India have pledged to marry female sex workers who want to escape exploitation.
Young Hindu, Muslim and Sikh men have been queuing up at the Dera Sacha Sauda (Abode of the Real Deal) in the town of Sirsa as "wedding volunteers".
This is the most awesome thing I have heard of in quite a while. This is pure straight-up hardcore Alexander Cruden-style awesomeness - except that even Cruden only responded to a prostitute's propositions by offering her a job as his housekeeper. God bless these people and may they have many happy years and screaming babies.
...there are probably reasons why this is also a bit foolish. But still. I think this falls under "I was cold and naked and you gave me clothing"; see also the numerous prophets who spoke of Israel as a whore and God as a lover who sought after her anyway. (A relevant Chesterton quote on the Middle Ages, because there's a Chesterton quote for basically everything: "Historic Christianity rose into a high and strange coup de thÃĐatre of morality -- things that are to virtue what the crimes of Nero are to vice.... Poetry could be acted as well as composed. This heroic and monumental manner in ethics has entirely vanished with supernatural religion. They, being humble, could parade themselves: but we are too proud to be prominent." It would seem that it hasn't vanished everywhere, and can exist in non-Christian environments.)
Also in Indian news: A pioneering Indian woman wrestler; and Indian plays harmonica through the nose:
He can even play two harmonicas at once, using his nose and his mouth... Mr Kumar did not acquire his skills overnight - he spends an hour a day practising yogic steps and breathing to strengthen his nasal powers.
Octopus snatches coconut and runs: video of octopi acquiring and using coconut shells.
...I will blog about something other than BBC news and Chesterton quotes. One day. Really!
(If God wills it and I'm still alive, of course.)
Saturday, 12 December 2009
Pimlico, Tirana, Self-righteousness
Artistic Administration in Albania
Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing -- say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico: for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved... If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence.
- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, ch. 5.
...all over town, drab, grey communist-era buildings have been given a multi-coloured make-over, as part of a policy spear-headed by Tirana's mayor, former artist Edi Rama, now in his third elected term.
He defends his clean-up and repainting as being far more than superficial. In the streets that have become patchworks of green, scarlet, yellow and purple, tax collection has become completely successful, he says.
He adds that pride in newly planted public spaces has been restored and with it a civic optimism. And he has many more ambitious design and construction plans.
...he points to surveys suggesting more than eight out of 10 residents want his makeover of the capital to continue - more, bizarrely, than confess to actually liking the new look.
"After many years of a totally rigid, collectivistic society, we found ourselves in an atomised, individualistic society," he says.
"So the deal now is to try to reconstruct a sense of belonging to the city and its public spaces, along with a sense of responsibility for them.
"Tirana before was like a woman lying in a bed because of a very serious disease. And now it is like a woman who got up, made herself up and is walking again with pride."
- Albania takes strides towards EU accession, BBC News
Do not do your good deeds in public for men to see
Being pleased with your own upstanding deeds is moral poison, according to recent research. Whilst not exactly news, it's nice to have a scientific angle on it:
...new research by Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong at the University of Toronto levels an even graver charge: that virtuous shopping can actually lead to immoral behavior. In their study (described in a paper now in press at Psychological Science), subjects who made simulated eco-friendly purchases ended up less likely to exhibit altruism in a laboratory game and more likely to cheat and steal.
...the findings add to a growing body of research into a phenomenon known among social psychologists as "moral credentials" or "moral licensing." Historically, psychologists viewed moral development as a steady progression toward more sophisticated decision-making. But an emerging school of thought stresses the capriciousness of moral responses... When people have the chance to demonstrate their goodness, even in the most token of ways, they then feel free to relax their ethical standards.
In 2001, Benoit Monin and Dale Miller of Princeton published a pioneering study of this licensing tendency. The study investigated whether showing a lack of bias in one situation would free subjects to express prejudice later on. They found that people who had designated a woman as the best candidate for a gender-neutral job were then more likely to recommend a man for a stereotypically masculine job. Another experiment yielded similar results with regard to race.
Newer work has focused on morality more broadly. Earlier this year, researchers at Northwestern reported that subjects who wrote self-flattering stories later pledged to give less money to charity than those who wrote stories that were self-critical or about someone else. In another recent study, participants who recalled their own righteous deeds were less inclined to donate blood, volunteer, or engage in other "prosocial" acts. They were also more likely to cheat on a math assignment.
- Buy Local, Act Evil (Can organic produce and natural shampoo turn you into a heartless jerk?), Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, Slate
The article makes the point that some of the results - regarding race and sex - can also be understood in terms of people displaying politically correct behaviour at first and then feeling free to disregard PC constraints afterwards. This makes a degree of sense, as it can get tiresome to keep pretending you think in a totally PC way and suppressing the parts of your thought that threaten to stray. If you find this burdensome it is totally rational to make a couple of token appointments to keep the Furies off your back and then go off and do what you were going to anyway - "look, I've hired a load of women when I didn't have to, now let me hire a man to do a man's job, yeah?" There's also some comments below the article arguing against the conclusions. It does seem to me that whether you choose green or earth-destroying products in an experimental simulation where it costs you nothing and it's apparent to the experimenter may not compare too well to the real-life situation. I'd expect the real-life situation to be less complimentary to ecologically-concerned citizens than an experiment like this, but it would be nice to have some studies on it.
Sunday, 6 December 2009
Book acquired
I have recently acquired Hilaire Belloc's complete verse. It's fun stuff - vigorous, impolite, lively. I note with bemusement he thought Napoleon was a good guy and went down in flames because "the devil didn't like him" (Nelson being Satan's instrument for getting rid of this particular annoyance to his plans). With less pleasure I note the occasional flashes of snide anti-semitism. The man being dead and buried and also vigorously opposed to Nazism since it first appeared, this can be perhaps overlooked.
Today, in a spurt of displacement activity when I knew I should be working, I wrote tunes for three of Belloc's songs (he probably wrote his own tunes as well, but I don't know if those have survived; if they have I haven't heard of them). I'll record them when I can, and stick them up here once I've figured out how to put music on a blog.
One is The Pelagian Drinking Song, the other two are from The Four Men and I cannot find (individual) pages for them anywhere on the interwebs, so post them below the cut.
A song against "that Spirit of getting-on-ed-ness and making out our life at the expense of our fellow men and of our own souls"
Thou ugly, lowering, treacherous Quean
I think thou art the Devil!
To pull them down the rich and mean
And bring them to one level.
Of all my friends
That found their ends
By only following thee.
How many I tell
Already in Hell,
So shall it not be with me!
I knew three fellows were in your thrall,
Got more than they could carry,
The first might drink no wine at all.
And the second he would not marry
The third in seeking golden earth
Was drownded in the sea,
Which taught him what your wage is worth,
So shall it not be with me!
There was Peter Bell of North Chappel,
Was over hard and sparing,
He spent no penny of all his many,
And died of over caring ;
He saved above two underd pound
But his widow spent it free,
And turned the town nigh upside down,
So shall it not be with me!
Then mannikins bang the table round,
For the younger son o' the Squire,
Who never was blest of penny or pound,
But got his heart's desire.
Oh, the Creditors' curse
Might follow his hearse,
For all that it mattered to he!
They were easy to gammon
From worshipping Mammon,
So shall it not be with me!
And Absalom,
That was a King's son,
Was hanged on a tree,
When he the Kingdom would have won,
So shall it not be with me!
A Drinking Song
On Sussex hills where I was bred,
When lanes in autumn rains are red.
Where Arun tumbles in his bed,
And busy great gusts go by ;
When branch is bare in Burton Glen
And Bury Hill is a whitening, then
I drink strong ale with gentlemen ;
Which nobody can deny, deny,
Deny, deny, deny, deny,
Which nobody can deny !
In half-November off I go,
To push my face against the snow,
And watch the winds wherever they blow,
Because my heart is high ;
Till I settle me down in Steyning to sing
Of the women I met in my wandering,
And of all that I mean to do in the spring,
Which nobody can deny, deny,
Deny, deny, deny, deny,
Which nobody can deny !
Though times be rude and weather be rough,
And ways be foul and fortune tough,
We are of the stout South Country stuff,
That never can have good ale enough,
And do this chorus cry !
From Crowboro' Top to Ditchling Down,
From Hurstpierpoint to Arundel Town,
The girls are plump and the ale is brown :
Which nobody can deny, deny,
Deny, deny, deny, deny !
If he does he tells a lie !
Thursday, 3 December 2009
Bleak Midwinter
December is the cruelest month
But this time for once my cheeks are warm
After long years in the monkey-house
I am ready for the storm
Let them throw all their cannonballs
Let all their strongmen come
I’m ready to go anywhere
Through venom, sick and scum
(December, The Waterboys)
This sadly does not quite describe me. Although I have been greatly strengthened by three things in the past week - ten minutes of centred prayer, meeting a friend I had not seen for a while, and an act of kindness coupled with a nice smile - many obstacles remain. "I need thy presence, every passing hour; what, but thy grace, can foil the tempter's power?"
--
Quote of the day, on the subject of drug-resistant bacteria: "It's more than a little embarrassing to be decisively losing a battle of wits to unicellular organisms." Indeed.
Headline of the day, from the Beeb: Man on 'chicken-licking' charge.
And today I found a blog with the fantastic title of Goat in the Machine ("this site is dedicated to his simple faith that what this world really needs is far fewer sheep and a bunch more goats").
--
Readers of blogs will doubtless have noticed the "Climategate" events in the last week or two: a leading climate research institute, responsible for important work in discovering and analysing global warming, turns out to have been run (according to leaked emails which are not, it appears, being contested) by persons of dubious integrity. Worst of all, to my mind: an email in which the institute leader declares willingness to delete data rather than hand it over to global warming sceptics; and another in which scientists are warned against putting data on FTP in case of sceptics finding and analysing it. (Later, a freedom of information act request for raw, unmodified data got the response that the data had been, somehow, lost. H'mmmmm.) So a bunch of influential, high-ranking scientists, doing important research into a highly important potential problem (namely "do we need to spend vast quantifies of money to stave off global warming?") turn out to be absolutely paranoid about... people wanting to see their data. Anti-scientific denialists hounding the scientists to show their working, prowling their FTP sites, rejoicing (while the scientists weep) when they can scavenge a few scraps of data... what's wrong with this picture?
The question being bandied about is whether this damages the idea of manmade global warming. This depends on whether this behaviour is widespread, and whether it's corrected or ignored. If there is a concerted effort across the field of climate science to ensure more transparency in data analysis, this storm will blow over; if there is circling of the wagons and grumbling against anyone who dares notice and point out the problem, it may not. Judith Curry's article on the matter has it exactly right. (Amazingly, some people criticise her for engaging with the "denialists" or admitting the problem. These people are acting very stupidly. Actions speak louder than words, and in a more universal language. Phil Jones wrote to a sceptic saying he would not hand over his data because the sceptic wished only to find problems with it. He failed to understand that the problems the sceptic found would be comprehensible to few, whereas his own evasiveness and fear of criticism speak badly of him in a language understood by many. Conversely, Judith Curry's willingness to engage critics speaks well of her in that same language; by extension, she makes the theories she is confident in defending look good as well.)
It is entirely possible that the problems shown in the CRU emails have metastasised beyond the one institute - these are leading and influential scientists, after all. If this is the case, this may start a chain of dominoes, with similar revelations made about other institutes and individuals. If there are genuine objections that have been successfully suppressed, then previously-silent scientists may gain the courage to notice problems they were wary of discussing before. It may be that the entire global warming scare is a fever about to break. Or it may transpire that the theory of man-made global warming is resilient in the face of any amount of scrutiny and transparency. I am curious to see.
--
While this scandal doesn't really weaken the case for man-made global warming too much (it just shoots out one tyre on an 18-wheeler), it does bolster the case of the sceptics: it shows that scientists are corruptible and can be induced to display behaviour and attitudes not geared towards rigorous uncovering of the truth. I was originally a little sceptical of Mencius Moldbug's analysis of global warming - his term "Puritan environmentalism" fits well, but just because the theory fits a certain mindset that you don't like doesn't mean that the theory is wrong or that those involved are distorting matters. In particular, his assertion that leading climate scientists deserve prison seemed utterly over the top. Now, it seems I gave him too little credit. (Moldbug is now having a field day on the issue.)
--
Per the Beeb, Climate e-mail hack 'will impact on Copenhagen summit' - Saudi Arabia, which is eager to keep everyone using its oil (and which has the immense chutzpah to demand compensation for loss of oil revenues as people switch to renewable fuel sources) is planning on using this to derail the summit. This, children, is why integrity is a good thing: Michael Mann and Phil Jones have derailed their own cause here. The BBC actually quotes Michael Mann on why the Saudis are full of it:
"There is a consensus among the world's scientists that climate change is real and there's a need to confront it," said Michael Mann from Pennsylvania State University in the US, a leading palaeoclimatologist.
"Those who are advocating inaction, that don't want to see progress in Copenhagen, don't have science on their side.
"Instead they've manufactured this false controversy to distract the public and to distract policymakers, to try to thwart progress in Copenhagen."
Mann is under investigation by the university where he now works because of being implicated in this "false controversy". The BBC thinks this is not worth noting, for some reason, and is thus implicitly presenting an accused party as a disinterested expert when he says that the accusations are trivial. This is either dishonest or incredibly lazy; either way the BBC are not earning their licence fee (which, thankfully, I do not pay).
(I have begun to notice in recent times that the Beeb's interest in giving the reader facts rather than spin varies greatly from subject to subject. I followed the BBC reporting on the Honduran crisis closely, mostly out of curiosity as to what the BBC thought it was acceptable for its readers to know at any given point. Today they finally given their readership clearance to discover that Zelaya was deposed on the orders of the Honduran supreme court - albeit indirectly; Zelaya mentioned it himself, and a BBC article quoted him. Although this may have been a moment of carelessness, as the article has now been updated and rewritten to include US reaction, and this has crowded out Zelaya's complaint - which, from memory, was that Honduras is still a dictatorship because the military who removed him and the court which ordered him removed are still there.)
(I really do not understand this behaviour. I do not see what interest the BBC has in covering for Zelaya, nor why this is given higher priority than informing their readership of events, nor why they think it morally acceptable to screen their readers' knowledge, nor why they think they can do this in an internet age and not have people notice what they're doing. It is very bizarre.)
Thursday, 19 November 2009
Roads, lingerie, Septuagenarian Bandits and the Benefits of Cannibalism
From the BBC today:
M&S Christmas TV ad 'offensive': I'll say. It's over a month to go and they're advertising already. Could be worse though, there's some people advertising in October.
....oh, wait, apparently it's cos it has some girl in her underwear and some character who is evidently supposed to be a boor goes "hubba hubba" or words to that effect. This is demeaning to women!
Can't get too worked up about this myself; I just wonder why M&S are catching flak for it and why it's making news. It's not like there aren't about a million TV programs and adverts which show scantily-clad women, and it's been this way for years. Sex sells, as they say (and the whole world is buying, quoth Creed.) Maybe society's becoming more Victorian or something.
(It probably will be soon enough anyway. Society's attitudes regarding sex, nudity &c. are not static, and are subject to oscillation. At some point the pendulum will swing the other way - helped by the fact that a large chunk of our population is now from various former colonies where people are more socially conservative. New Labour, according to recent reports, thought it would be fun to spite conservatives by racking up immigration levels...)
FBI hunting elderly bank robber:
The FBI is hunting an elderly man who is said to have robbed five banks in California in the last three months.
The man - in his seventies - has been dubbed the Geezer Bandit.
In the US a geezer is a word for an eccentric old man: in a previous heist he was reportedly seen wearing tubes connected to an oxygen cylinder.
...Law enforcement officials say he should be considered armed and dangerous.
UK to pay for safer roads abroad: apparently our roads are so fantastic we're evangelising for road safety in third world countries. Hopefully we will insist on them driving on the civilised side of the road, unlike (sadly) the vast mass of the rest of humanity. (Samoa recently made the switch despite fears of accidents, chaos, doom and destruction; I have been unable to find any news stories about such accidents actually happening, so must assume it passed off without a hitch.)
Immune tribe 'indicates CJD hope':
The Papua New Guinea tribe developed strong genetic resistance after a major epidemic of the CJD-like disease, kuru, spread mostly by cannibalism.
Medical Research Council experts assessed more than 3,000 survivors of the mid-20th Century epidemic...
Kuru, a prion disease similar to CJD in humans and BSE in animals, was transmitted at mortuary feasts where - until the practice was banned in the late 1950s - women and children consumed their deceased relatives as a mark of respect and mourning.
I seem to remember a Chesterton poem remarking of a strange and exotic individual "his ways were strange. He/ate his papa... but reverently."
It's noted as being amazing that evolution took place so quickly. Not really - it would be amazing if this gene were simply not present beforehand, because a random mutation conveniently happening so quickly and just when needed would be a highly unexpected thing. But if the gene were present beforehand, it would be pretty much what you'd expect, just as if you killed off everyone whose last name didn't begin with an "F", you would have a society whose family names all began with "F" for quite a while. Also... I guess I'm not much better by thinking "awesome!" and blogging about it, but the scientists' response is a bit creepy on places. "It's a fantastic demonstration of natural selection", one says, about an epidemic that killed large numbers of people. You don't see theologians and ethicists happily pointing at horrible crimes and saying "this is a fantastic demonstration of original sin" or "what a wonderful demonstration of man's inhumanity to man". Well, I hope you don't.
Also, months after the rest of the internets, I have finally discovered Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog, which is quite thoroughly awesome.
Sunday, 15 November 2009
Greater and lesser evils
Adjusting to life after death row:
In the 14 years of his stay, he saw 12 of his fellow inmates - friends - be executed.
"On death row we're supposed to be the worst of the worst, yet within 24 hours of [an] execution, we fast that whole day. Everybody on death row, they will pray for the victim's family, we will pray for our family. Asking that God ease everyone of their burdens and pain."
--
I have a Swedish-Finnish friend (there's a Swedish-speaking minority in Finland) who I was arguing with one day (we argued a lot, he was easy to disagree with, in a good way) and who turned out not to know that Sweden was running eugenics programs - forced sterilisations - into the 1970s. He just didn't believe it when I told him. It never occurred to me to wonder if my own country was also running pointlessly evil and inhumane programs in recent memory, which I as a good patriotic citizen ought to know about. Well...
Ordeal of Australia's child migrants:
The story of the British child migrants sent to Australia has been described as a history of lies, deceit, cruelty and official disinterest and neglect.
Before being shipped out to Britain's distant dominion, many of the children were told their parents were dead, and that a more abundant life awaited them in Australia.
Most were deported without the consent of their parents, and commonly, mothers and fathers were led to believe that their children had been adopted somewhere in Britain.
On arrival in Australia, the policy was to separate brothers and sisters.
And many of the young children ended up in what felt like labour camps, where they were physically, psychologically and often sexually abused.
Appalling and bizarre. What reason would a nation have for exporting children? Did some government officials wake up one day and say "today, let's be bastards!"? But apparently there was a logic to it:
The Australian government viewed them as ideal young immigrants - a popular slogan at the time was "the child, the best immigrant".
The British government saw them as a burden on the state, and was happy to see them go.
Reflects better on the Australians than on the British. Not quite Mother Teresa saying "there are no unwanted children in the world - send them to me!" or the Statue of Liberty proclaiming a desire for the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, but at least whereas Britain just wanted to get rid of the little vermin, the Ozzies valued them kids a little - if not enough, apparently, to check to see if they were being treated well:
...In testimony before a British parliamentary committee in the late 1990s, one boy spoke of the criminal abuse he was subjected at the hands of Catholic priests at Tardun in Western Australia.
A number of Christian brothers competed between themselves to see who could rape him 100 times first, the boy said.
The Christian Brothers have an entire wikipedia article devoted to sex abuse scandals by that order. (I checked on realising I had only ever heard of them in connection with child rape or harsh treatment.)
(While browsing I also saw the article on Magdalen Asylums, another depressing chapter in the history of the Irish Church: what started off as a rehabilitation movement for prostitutes ended up as, virtually, a jail for lifelong imprisonment of single mothers, a situation which was totally ignored by the entire country for half a century.
(This is the kind of thing that hangs at the back of my mind when people argue about the relation of church to state - quoth Lincoln, if you want to see what a man's made of, give him power - he might well have added, and then give him respect and reverence and a high position in society, so that no man is keen to speak against him, and others will hush up his misdeeds for him. The Church is built on the sacrifice of her Bridegroom, the ultimate subversion of all power, the ultimate outsider getting worked over by The Man - "that God could have His back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever" - and when the Church becomes The Man and starts using the tools of The Man, war, violence, incarceration, power over fellow mortals, &c, things have the potential not just to go horribly wrong but to be given a new dimension, as blasphemy, when they do - it's a deeper crime when the corrupt churchman abuses those he's entrusted with pastoral care concerning.
(Similarly, no-one remembers the Inquisition badly because they were the worst monsters in history, and by the standards of the time there's things to be said in their favour. They are remembered badly because they tortured and executed while wearing the Cross, in what should have been the full light of moral day, in the name of a tortured and executed God. The common torturer can say "well, it needs doing, and besides, can't all be perfect, can't all be like the monks and priests and wotnot who live a higher life, you in your small corner and me in mine, ey, what?"; but what happens when the monks and priests are ordering the torturer around?)
--
My own woes are less. Too much work; have to work Sunday, which I hate - I know "the Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath", but I do not have to like it, particularly. [EDIT: actually I just skived the whole day, as it was my duty to God and humanity to do. I stayed up so late saturday night working I was in no condition to do anything on sunday.]
Friday, 6 November 2009
On the Hamming Up of Hadronic Collisions
I have recently been looking through the Register's articles on the Large Hadron Collider and related topics, the writers of which have grasped an important truth: that discussing a miles-wide apparatus solely devoted to smashing things together at inconceivable speeds, for purposes incomprehensible and arcane, under the direction of a technowizardly caste devoted to coming up with ever wilder and crazier theories as they plumb the mysteries of the universe, presents a glorious opportunity for hamming things up massively. Notable headlines and headlines:
Helium hole hiccup halts Hadron (subtitle: Problem-prone particle project postponed)
New antimatter atomsmashers 'may destroy themselves' ("'Imagine there are all these huge bells, see,' says prof"):
A top British atom-smasher boffin says that next-generation antimatter accelerators being planned to replace today's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are at significant risk of "destroying themselves", as they rend the very fabric of the universe apart in their search for cosmic secrets.
The LHC has already shown that rashly turning up the Big Knob on such machines can lead to trouble, with a faulty electrical connector on the mighty underground proton-punisher melting last year - not only bringing the titanic magno-doughnut grinding to a halt, but also releasing a fearful tide of helium superfluid, deadly stuff which crawls up walls, eels through the tiniest crack etc. Only by lucky hap did bystanding boffins escape being transformed into frosty stalagmite statues.
Botanist sues to stop CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe ("Hawaiian in lawsuit against particle billiards rig"):
A particularly violent game of proton billiards, for instance, of the very sort the LHC's superpowered seven trillion electron-volt atomic cues are designed to play, might lead to all sorts of trouble. Quarks might get mixed up into "negatively-charged strangelets" which would turn everything else they touched into strangelets as well. The Earth, and then perhaps the entire universe, could be turned into a fearful strangelet soup; or perhaps custard.
Scientists, of course, insist these fears - as well as fears of microscopic black holes, or quantum vacuum collapse - are overblown: Hadron boffins: Our meddling will not destroy universe; CERN declares Large Hadron Collider perfectly safe. But that's not the only potential problem...
'Something may come through' dimensional 'doors' at LHC ("Attack of the Hyperdimensional Juggernaut-Men"):
A top boffin at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) says that the titanic machine may possibly create or discover previously unimagined scientific phenomena, or "unknown unknowns" - for instance "an extra dimension".
"Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it," said Sergio Bertolucci, who is Director for Research and Scientific Computing at CERN...
...it seems a racing cert that we're looking here at an imminent visit from a race of carnivorous dinosaur-men, the superhuman clone hive-legions of some evil genetic queen-empress, infinite polypantheons of dark nega-deities imprisoned for aeons and hungering to feast upon human souls, a parallel-history victorious Nazi globo-Reich or something of that type.
We took the matter up with Dr Mike Lamont, a control-room boffin at the LHC.
"We're hoping to see supersymmetry and extra dimensions," he confirmed.
Pressed on the matter of doors through which something might come, as hinted at by Bertolucci, Lamont rather elliptically said "well, he's a theorist"...
Large Hadron Collider scuttled by birdy baguette-bomber:
A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week which saw significant overheating in sections of the mighty particle-punisher's subterranean 27-km supercooled magnetic doughnut.
(It was this article I came across first, linked to from here; best comment of which. It's particularly notable coming on the heels of a new and curious theory recently proposed: that the Higgs boson cannot exist on its own; therefore physical conditions that would isolate and detect the Higgs boson cannot and will not occur; and therefore all possible timelines will and must diverge from allowing the conditions that would create a detectable Higgs boson. Or, in the words of one of the proposers: "It must be our prediction that all Higgs-producing machines shall have bad luck.")
Boffinry bitchslap brouhaha: Higgs and Hawking head to head ("Proton cannons for two, coffee for one"):
Hawking is well known to have bet $100 that Higgs' boson brainchild, the so-called "god particle", doesn't exist.
It's thought among boffins that if the elusive deiton - postulated by Higgs back in 1964, but never yet detected - is real, it ought to appear in coming years among the variegated debris to be produced at the LHC by smashing up protons with extreme violence. If it does, Higgs will be in line for a Nobel Prize.
Hawking, however, reckons that instead a number of "partner" particles will appear. These would potentially torpedo the Standard Model on which modern physics is based, and snatch away Higgs' long-awaited Nobel laurels to rest instead atop Hawking's eminent brainbox.
It would seem that the duelling boffinry heavyweights will have to settle the matter in the only honourable way open to men of their sort: with enormous hyper-powered magnetic proton cannons at fifty paces. Higgs for one seemed confident about the result, telling the Times that he has champagne waiting on ice to celebrate victory.
Boffins: Stop trying to monetise us, you don't know how ("Bitchslap for gov profitable-science plans"):
British boffins have cast doubt on government plans to reorient the nation's scientific and technical research so as to benefit the economy. They say that the connection between research and economic impact is poorly understood, and suggest that the government resists the temptation to meddle until it knows what it's doing...
They argue that it's already hard enough to attract bright students into science/tech/engineering/maths (STEM) subjects. If the kids see nothing ahead but a lifetime of dull but worthy toil producing possibly profitable new kinds of geriatric medicines, low-energy lightbulbs, ecologically friendly paint etc, they may not be willing to accept the massively higher student workload required to qualify in STEM subjects. Instead they will be likely to drift into parasitical, useless fields such as rap music, law, financial services or journalism. Thus it's vital to keep funding glamorous sexy research involving colossal atomsmashers, space telescopes, interplanetary probes and suchlike.
Absolutely. Although some claim that colossal atom-smashers can hold their own in the profitability stakes as well - CERN Proton-smashers: We are economically valuable ("Bitchslap for Drayson 'research to benefit economy' call"):
"...When you get a big group of highly intelligent people together trying to achieve difficult things, if they need something they just sit down and invent it. And those inventions are often very useful...
"Now the medical imaging industry are looking at what we've done, with a view to making combined PET/MRI scanners," adds Gillies. "Of course, it won't make us any money."
(This article also contains the noteworthy description of the LHC as full of magnetism, using a 27km doughnut-shaped field generated by liquid-helium-chilled superconductor magnets to channel its brutally powerful beams of protons.)
Further opinions on the subject are given in Hands off our boffins!. One scientist states:
"But we are keeping up research that isn't economically relevant... there are cosmologists doing really great inquiry into the origins of the universe. That doesn't have any real benefit to the economy, but we think it's worth doing. It's about curiosity, it fulfils a basic human need."
And the article closes with the writers offering their own opinion - that basic science, or "blue sky" research, should continue to be funded, maybe even get more money -
And we say this money should be spent on proper science and ultra-technology that has absolutely no obvious benefit - space probes (ideally packed with scientifically questionable but pleasingly dramatic astronauts), mighty atomsmashers, telescopes and the like. There should also be legions of premier-league brainboxes kicking scientific arse for old Blighty, engaging in totally incomprehensible boffinry deathmatch arguments, reaping a glorious harvest of Nobel prizes and generally making the world a more interesting place.
If the odd spin-off economic benefit should occur then well and good, though we feel on the whole this would work better if published for the benefit of the entire human race than if held as intellectual property - the web, to name one such development, would probably never have worked if it had been someone's property. But trying to deliberately make such things happen in a direct and visible way is foolish and probably damaging at best, shortsighted and venal at worst.
Amen to that.
Tuesday, 15 September 2009
Arg
"The reason for our sadness is the futility of our love, the overwhelming power of finitude, death, suffering, and falsehood. We are sad because we are left alone in a contradictory world where enigmatic signals of divine goodness pierce through the cracks yet are thrown in doubt by a power of darkness that is either God's responsibility or manifests his impotence."
- beer-drinking Bavarian Pope fellow
Monday, 17 August 2009
Edge of Stability
My bag got stolen the other day. Little was lost of monetary value; just notes, papers, sketches, a gift from a friend - things that you can't replace in a hurry, or ever (also, two bananas). I am rather annoyed, although trying to maintain an attitude of peace and forgiveness.
Losing my notes doesn't help with feeling utterly disconnected from and incapable of my work, either. You who pray, pray for me.
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However, I have just received an email from someone I had lost touch with and wished to track down. Deo Gratias.
Thursday, 13 August 2009
Ballades and suchlike
It has long been a matter of concern to me that a great many of Chesterton's ballades are nowhere to be found on the internet, so that when I wish to link them or read them to someone, I am out of luck unless I have the entirety committed to memory (which I did, in the case of one or two, once; although no longer). Therefore, I have borrowed my parents' collection of Chesterton's verse, and begun sketching illustrations for certain of them, intending to put them up here and make them fodder for blogging.
But alas (or, maybe, not), it seems his ballades are already available online, because Google books has the text of the relevant volume of Chesterton's complete works, including some ballades I'd never come across before. However, this only makes my intended work unnecessary, rather than pointless, so God willing, there will be some ballade-blogging here next week.
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In unrelated news, some fear that the US may be running out of sugar. I'm sure there are reasons why this is a bad thing and I shouldn't hope to see the US, and my own country too, afflicted by such a terrible event; but I can't think of any right now. (Maybe it would put dentists out of business...?)
Also in the news... I can't really think what to say to this, except: somehow, so very, very German. Not typical German behaviour, but it wouldn't happen quite that way anywhere else.
In recent days I have also seen movies, but those can wait a bit.
Friday, 17 July 2009
Films, cont.
I also went to see Public Enemies recently. This was OK; good performance from Johnny Depp, especially, looking somehow more square-jawed than as Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean (which is how I always think of him - his acting may have consisted of nothing more than swaggering about a bit and twitching a lot, but he twitched with such aplomb), but also from Christian Bale as a G-man manhunter. This made a pleasant change from Terminator: Salvation, which still sticks in my mind for being so horrendously bad; in Public Enemies, Bale plays a character with actual character, and does a good job of it. The grey-haired old Texan Ranger is also memorable: smart, experienced, has an intrinsic respect for those he hunts as men, so that he both predicts their actions and bends down to hear their last words - the kind of man one would like to be hunted and shot by, if ever one were a wanted outlaw.
I'm curious whether the fledgeling FBI was as willing to resort to torture and prisoner abuse to get information as shown in this film. The first time (which, from what Wikipedia says, was made up; the tip-off involved came from a relative of one of the lodge workers), I didn't understand why the prisoner didn't simply give false information, there wouldn't have been any immediate penalty; charming of him to be so honest. The second time, the prisoner was a little smarter.
Beyond that, I have little to add to Elberry's comments, which look at the film in terms of Michael Mann's larger oeuvre.
Also on matters film-related, I came across this parody trailer for the upcoming disaster film 2012. Not only is it funny in its own right, even if you've never heard of the subject before, but it makes me want to go and see the film more than the official trailer does.
Possibly I may go to see Up this weekend, as I have heard good things of it. (I really hope I don't have to see the Bruno trailer again.)
Thursday, 9 July 2009
Film Viewing
Yesterday I saw The Limits of Control, by Jim Jarmusch; a very memorable film, and one that resists analysis, one that has to percolate through the brain for a while without categorising or dissecting. It is dreamlike and intense, a film that can get away with having nothing happening for 90 minutes because that nothing happens so profoundly; per the article cited in the cinema magazine, it shows "a Zenlike awareness of the sensorial and auditory universe", a cryptic phrase which makes perfect sense once you've seen it. In less skilled hands it would have been a pretentious disaster. It is quite remarkable. I do not expect to see anything like it again.
(Jarmusch knows Tom Waits, so I wonder if the climax of the movie was inspired by that Black Wings song from Bone Machine.)
I also recently saw Terminator Salvation, but the less said about that, the better.
EDIT: Also saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. It was good. Although when I say "good", I mean "fun movie, good action sequences, plot that makes rudimentary sense" - all the things I hoped for from Terminator Salvation but didn't get. It helped that the movie didn't take itself too seriously. It's also been a while since I saw an American film that was so positive towards its own armed forces: despite the perversity of beaurocrats and politicians, American soldiers exist here to kick donkey, endure difficulty, and blow up priceless archaeological ruins in a good cause. This is what Hollywood does best and is entirely right and proper to a blockbuster movie, where worrying about the cycle of violence and the military-industrial complex is counterproductive. ("Look how bravely we're subverting the American crypto-imperialist hegemonic paradigm!" No. Shut up and gimme more explosions.) However, the portrayal of the military could have been thought through a little better - a lot of lives are wasted because highly-trained infantry are being sent up against Decepticons with submachine guns, which is beyond stupid.
Also I am not sure I approve of the scene which involves one character torturing another with a blowtorch, even if the torturee was a killer robot from outer space. That said, it was arguably justified in terms of subduing the robot, who was then (successfully) interrogated by changing tack and being nice to it - a degree of unexpected realism in such an action movie, where drugs, pain and fear are often regarded as more efficient (or, at least, more exciting) ways of extracting information than kindness and cunning.
Tuesday, 7 July 2009
Another Year Survived
3 decades and still not dead yet. In celebration, today we ate cake.
Also, Elberry has kindly wished me happy birthday by writing a tale of my imminent death ("the Viking" being my nickname at university, for reasons apparent to anyone who's ever met me; readers are assured I do not, however, wield a spear in real life).
Monday, 6 July 2009
Fear me.
Also, I ponder setting Browning's Porphyria's Lover to music after I found myself singing bits of it to the andalucian cadence* in the shower this morning and humming a possible instrumental lead-in. My mother, however, has discommended the idea on the grounds that the poem is about a creepy guy who kills his girlfriend for no apparent reason. She has a point; possible distastefulness aside, Nick Cave has that market cornered already. I kissed her goodbye, said all beauty must die. I leant down and planted a rose between her teeeeeeeeth....
* Simple form e.g.: Am // G // F // E, or swap Am for C or F for variation; more involved form: Am / D7 // G / C // F / Dm // E. Porphyria's Lover,, however, has a five-line rhyme pattern, so further modification would be necessary.
Wednesday, 10 June 2009
Unhappy occurrence
Visitors (not that I get many, but just in case) may note that certain pictures in old posts no longer display. The image-hosting site I used to use appears to be malfunctioning, or to have shut down - hopefully the former. Updates will be posted on clarification.
Friday, 29 May 2009
Ottawa, in pictures.
I have been living in Ottawa for several months now, and have possession of one of those new-fangled "mobile phone" contraptions the youngsters use nowadays to annoy other travellers on trains and take photos with when kicking people into a coma. I, however, have not used it for such anti-social purposes, but have contented myself with photographing the city and making occasional calls to family and friends. Some of the results follow.
Ottawa being in Canada, pictures of snow are pretty much obligatory. In the winter months the temperature frequently dropped to 20 below, and the city looked like this:
Springtime in Ottawa is a slight improvement. Here is a picture of an early April blizzard:
...ok, ok. That was just a freak spring snowstorm. It can actually get quite nice. This is Sussex street in the early evening, taken using the panoramic picture function (which splices together 3 photos):
On the same evening, the view from the steps of the Notre Dame Basilica (click for larger version). Note the symbolism: the spider, representing Satan, advances in the centre, flanked by the seat of the worldly power he promised Christ (the Canadian parliament, on the left) and the empty vanities of the world (the national arts centre, on the right). Such are the powers arraigned against the Church, and against the believer who seeks her refuge.
More panoramic images - Rideau street:
And, at night, the view from MacKenzie-King Bridge:
In fact, even King Edward street can look nice at night - this is the view from the upper stories of the Quality Hotel:
(By day, the MacKenzie-King bridge looks like this:
King Edward St., however, looks considerably grimmer.)
Now, Ottawa is not as lively and cultured as, say, Montreal, where the air seems to veritably vibrate with art and beauty and frenchness. Nevertheless, interesting things do happen here. For instance, eating my shreddies in the morning, I find:
No, your eyes do not deceive you. That is a four-fold shreddie. Truly, this is a city of wonders.
But the curiosities do not end there. The other day, I went to use the toilets in our institute, and what did I see?
A refridgerator. Relieving itself.
Obstruction of the toilets may be forgiven this fridge, however, as it showed a commendable and chivalrous concern for the weaker and more vulnerable in society. Witness:
On the wildlife front, here is a dog, staring out of an SUV:
I am unsure what this bird is. I initially suspected it of being a Canada Goose, that infamous and spiteful avian which recently brought down a passenger aircraft over Houston, but a quick consultation with Wikipedia indicated that Canada Geese look totally different. 
For now, this is all. Perhaps more may follow.
Friday, 24 April 2009
On Robin Hood, and Literacy
A while back, there was an article by Tom Shipper at Christianity Today, reviewing Stephen Lawhead's Hood, first book in a trilogy about Robin Hood. (I read it myself and liked it, but I like Lawhead's stuff generally.) It is a review notable not so much for its opinions of Lawhead's efforts (it mostly spends time whaling on him for historical inaccuracy) as for its description of the original Robin Hood of the mediaeval ballads:
...the Robin Hood cycle, though so often reproduced by moviemakers, producers of tv series, and children's authors, has long presented the most serious problems of adaptation. To start with, there is no clear story of Robin Hood... Instead, what we have is a powerful scenario: outlaws, greenwood, merry men, longbows, inept officers of justice like the Sheriff of Nottingham. Merry Men are captured and rescued, the rich are robbed to feed the poor, traps are set and escaped from, in the end the king turns up and forgives everyone. But there's not much story in it, and there's no canonical version like Malory's Arthur.
Another problem (now significantly so unwelcome as to be all but forgotten) is that while the earliest literary versions we have may be weak on narrative, they are remarkably clear about their social positioning. The figure of the man in the greenwood, Robin Hood, or Robin 'Ood, or (T.H. White's idea) Robin Wood, may go back centuries into the time of myth, but Robin as we have him in the Robin Hood ballads of the late Middle Ages is a representative of the yeomanry. His weapons are the cheap ones of the rural peasantry, bow and quarterstaff. Sometimes he has a sword, but he never wears armor and does not ride to battle. His social prejudices are those of the rural peasantry as well—and this is where the embarrassment starts for the modern rewriter. Medieval Robin has nothing against the aristocracy at all, indeed he likes them, and is ready to assist them, as long as they are real aristocrats (i.e., men who have inherited their rank from old time), and as long as they are prepared to be "good fellows." His enemies and victims are tax-collectors, officers of the central government, the upper ranks of the clergy, especially abbots of well-endowed monasteries, and in particular lawyers: the literate classes, in other words. Modern writers, perhaps uneasily aware that they themselves would get very short shrift from a modern Robin, find this hard to sympathize with, while Marxist and sub-Marxist academics feel that Robin is much too like the surly, independent, white male Republican or Conservative citizens who voted in Presidents Bush, Bush, and Reagan, and Mrs. Thatcher too.
The medieval ballads indeed seem very clearly to spring from a particular time, the time of Edward, "our comely king," as they loyally call him. Which Edward? Surely Robin's archery gives the answer. It is Edward III (d. 1376), whose smashing, unexpected, and successive victories over Scots, French, and Spanish relied as heavily on the unique skills of the English bow-using yeomanry as they did on the more familiar ones of the English armored aristocracy—with whom the yeomen (as in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales portraits) formed both a social unit and a weapon-system. That cohesion did not last long, dissolved by cannon and handguns, and the yeomanry's moment in the sun soon passed, to be remembered only in the titles of some British military units, recruited for generations from the upper ranks of the rural peasantry, officered by the rural gentry, and, like their redneck successors, always ready for an excuse to break the heads of the urban proletariat whom they despised.
All clear enough, but a deep embarrassment to even 19th-century liberals, and with little appeal to modern urban consumers of fiction. And then there is the basic contradiction: Robin hates all officers of the crown, but is totally loyal to the king. Again, this is perfectly familiar in certain circles even now, where the "support our troops" bumper sticker may well co-exist with utter hostility to all agents of the government, and especially the IRS. But it's not a nice scenario.
These days, you could add something about tea parties and Going John Galt to that last.
Shipper's critique, to which all of this is germane, is that Lawhead's basically the latest in a long time of people to rewrite Robin Hood into the kind of myth you could make a Hollywood movie out of, or a Disney one if you toned down the content: the Merry Men are fighters for freedom and justice, and their enemies are cruel oppressors and unjust usurpers. Peasant outlaws robbing the urbane educated classes needs to be parsed as poor vs. rich and hence as oppressed vs. oppressor, rather than country yeoman vs. edumacated townie (or, in Mencius Moldbug's terminology, Vaisya vs. Brahmin): Shipper doesn't pursue this point much, but Western audiences - and particularly Western creative classes - are bizarrely willing to embrace "eat the rich" sentiments while being well-off, or even horrendously rich, themselves (cf. Neil Young: "poor people gonna rise up and take what's theirs", or the ne plus ultra, John Lennon, millionaire, singing "imagine there's no money"); parsing the story as country yokels vs. literate classes would be a trickier proposition, let alone as rednecks vs. city liberals (unless you wanted Hollywood to make Robin Hood the villain...)
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On reflection, though, I realise I'm writing and thinking as if it were in some way contemptible, or wrong, to rewrite the Robin Hood myth as Shipper describes. This is not the case: every age reinvents myth and, to a degree, history in accordance with its priorities - the Middle Ages did this shamelessly with the Miracle Plays (one Harrowing of Hell play ends with a comedy epilogue in which the demons, having been thoroughly Harrowed, are consoled by the arrival of a Muslim barmaid damned for watering down beer). And if the theories Shipper refers to are true, the Middle Ages did this with Robin Hood, as well, adapting the Man in the Greenwood to the situation of the wealthy literate classes increasing in number, and having an increasing impact on society. Now our entire society is literate, so when scavenging the older myths we emphasise the "wealthy" part of Robin Hood's adversaries. All perfectly right and proper.
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Apropos of literate vs. illiterate, there's a highly interesting article on the subject here (scroll about halfway down):
It’s difficult to prove that oral and literate people think differently; orality... doesn’t “fossilize” except through its nemesis, writing. But some supporting evidence came to hand in 1974, when Aleksandr R. Luria, a Soviet psychologist, published a study based on interviews conducted in the nineteen-thirties with illiterate and newly literate peasants in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Luria found that illiterates had a “graphic-functional” way of thinking that seemed to vanish as they were schooled... Literates saw optical illusions; illiterates sometimes didn’t. Experimenters showed peasants drawings of a hammer, a saw, an axe, and a log and then asked them to choose the three items that were similar. Illiterates resisted, saying that all the items were useful. If pressed, they considered throwing out the hammer; the situation of chopping wood seemed more cogent to them than any conceptual category. One peasant, informed that someone had grouped the three tools together, discarding the log, replied, “Whoever told you that must have been crazy,” and another suggested, “Probably he’s got a lot of firewood.” One frustrated experimenter showed a picture of three adults and a child and declared, “Now, clearly the child doesn’t belong in this group,” only to have a peasant answer:
Oh, but the boy must stay with the others! All three of them are working, you see, and if they have to keep running out to fetch things, they’ll never get the job done, but the boy can do the running for them.
Illiterates also resisted giving definitions of words and refused to make logical inferences about hypothetical situations. Asked by Luria’s staff about polar bears, a peasant grew testy: “What the cock knows how to do, he does. What I know, I say, and nothing beyond that!” The illiterates did not talk about themselves except in terms of their tangible possessions. “What can I say about my own heart?” one asked.
...Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,” whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, clichÃĐ and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.
The point of the article (which should be read in its entirety) is that if the written word changes how people think, the tendency of modern technology to shift from the word to the image will do the same, and this will be a bad thing. Television, and now the internet, are encouraging a kind of "secondary orality", to use the article's phrase: losing some of the advantages of the literate mind, while gaining none of the advantages of pre-literate culture: oral culture is a tradition within a community, whereas the internet and television are solitary vices and do not encourage human interaction.
I think, though, that the internet has advantages that are not being given full credit by the article: it facilitates the spread of knowledge, and the ability to check one's facts (wikipedia is invaluable for this, if one remembers to be skeptical on controversial issues, and that the citations are there for a reason). I am also informed that giving children access to laptops changes the way they think: text on paper is necessarily linear, and moves in a given order; on the internet, hypertext is non-linear, and children brought up on it think in a more non-linear fashion. What the results of this are, I don't know; they may be good or bad.
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I don't suppose it was just the isolated issue of graphic-functional vs. abstract thought patterns that caused the dislike shown in having Robin Hood prey on the literate classes - although if the literates treated culture differently, disliking the low-brow entertainment, cliches and stereotypes that illiterates valued, that would contribute. Possibly it was also the way some literate types tend to look down on others, whether contemptuously or benevolently, wandering round with their nose in the air thinking they're better than everyone else (I used to be like this when I was younger and exceedingly arrogant) or patronisingly wondering how to fix the world (something I'm still guilty of, I confess; though I don't suppose the literates back then were as prone to Moldbug's "nostrism" as we are now).
Thursday, 12 March 2009
On Watchmen, and Violence
I saw Watchmen last night. Good, after a fashion. With certain qualifications.
I find it helps with these things not to expect too much. I expected little of Transformers, and thus enjoyed it greatly. I had read that Watchmen lacked fire and impetus and tension, and indeed it did (though the original comic had a sort of grim bloodlessness to it anyway - Moore is very cerebral); so I wasn't disappointed, and the movie is visually fantastic, so there were many parts I enjoyed a fair bit. Furthermore, the ending has been tweaked a little to make orders of magnitude more sense. (Consider the original comic, you who have read it. Consider how long it will be until someone dissects what they find in New York and figure out where its constituent parts come from. Consider what happens when they do DNA testing, and then clone the brain. The game will be up, the US will start looking for someone to blame, and the world will have new forms of weaponry. Messy.) (This is a strike against the comic insofar as its supposedly-intelligent villain/saviour is not being very smart; in the film, he's smart but arguably incredibly naive, because human nature won't change: the measure taken to produce peace will need repeating again, and again, and again...) (Cf. Evil Overlord List #12: One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.)
Rorschach is brutal, and horrible, and also the best thing on the screen. (More in spite of than because of his brutality. The original comic did not have all those cracking and scrunching noises when he interrogates people, which made it a tad easier to like him.)
Dr. Manhattan seems somehow more vulnerable, more human, than I remember him being from Dave Gibbons' clinical, emotionless rendering of him. When reading the comic I had not taken note of his hunger for transcendence, that he desires to see a miracle, which makes sense - he's trapped in a clockwork world, unable to change anything, past or future (both of which he sees with far too much clarity). (Cf. Chesterton's Orthodoxy:
[T]he materialist, like the madman, is in prison; in the prison of one thought. These people seemed to think it singularly inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large. The size of this scientific universe gave one no novelty, no relief. The cosmos went on for ever, but not in its wildest constellation could there be anything really interesting; anything, for instance, such as forgiveness or free will... the machinery of this cosmic prison was something that could not be broken; for we ourselves were only a part of its machinery. We were either unable to do things or we were destined to do them.
There's some of this in Dr. Manhattan; although he finds a partial answer in reverence for life, the imago Dei, and then waltzes off to another galaxy to become a Demiurge.)
The movie has one major downside, namely the gore and violence, which I did not like. Some of this was present in the comic, which was a shade more brutal and bloody than a story about people in spandex kicking each other strictly need to be. The movie decided this was not sufficient, and added more.
There were points where the violence was artistic and admirable - Dan and Laurie in the prison, for example, wading through escaped prisoners. This is proper to an action movie, which basically lives off the excitement of violent action, the exchange of blows and projectiles and explosive devices.
There were points where the violence, or rather the gore involved, was excessive. This is a subjective thing, how violent a movie should be, and how much of the results (in terms of mutilation, injury, etc.) should be shown. Rorschach burying a meat cleaver in someone's head, and a bullet going through Veidt's secretary's leg, seemed this way to me. Justifiable in terms of the story (just about), but gratuitous in that they did not need such explicit showing. Similarly, 300: severed body parts and lots of blood are the logical consequence of large numbers of people attacking each other with sharp objects, but it could easily have done with a little less. It is excessive; but my sense of it is that the movie is simply blasÃĻ about gore, and expects the viewer to be too.
Then there were points where the gore was not merely gratuitous, but seemed to be revelled in. The movie had little excuse for showing a man's broken arm spurting blood from the elbow; or showing bloody body parts hanging from the ceiling; or showing a man's bloody stumps after having his arms cut off. The difference is between the camera not bothering to avoid the bloody consequences of violence, and actively seeking out the gore - the camera seemed moved to snatch glimpes of injury and mutilation out of perverse titillation at the sight.
This bothers me. Wallowing in violence for the kinetic thrill of it is one thing: whether it goes too far or not, I understand it. Wallowing in gore and blood and body parts is outside of what I understand and sympathise with - it pertains more to a psychopath than a normal human being. It reminds me of Brian Cox' Hannibal Lecter (in Manhunter): normal-seeming, but his eyes light up, ever so slightly, when handed photos of the Red Dragon's victims to look at. The implication that even a small chunk of the viewing public shares this mentality is rather worrying.
(I formed these thoughts, or most of them, commenting on John Wright's livejournal entry on the movie. John Wright says "it is not as bad as some modern horror movies". I find myself really not wanting to know.)
Saturday, 28 February 2009
Dispatches from a Reductionist World, II
Leonard Cohen has on occasion informed the world that, though the rocket ships climb through the skies, the holy books are open wide, and the doctors are working day and night, they'll never, never find that cure for love. There exists neither drink, nor drug, for nothing is pure enough to be a cure for love.
I have long suspected that the main reason for this is that there is no demand for a cure for love, and therefore no-one seeks to find one. Ask any doctor or rocket scientist if they've been working day and night trying to find a cure for love. They will tell you, "no".
I mention it as research has been proceeding which raises the spectre, not yet of a cure (although it may count as progress towards that goal) but of for other forms of tinkering with the biochemistry involved. From the BBC:
Couples should not worry when the first flush of passion dims - scientists have identified the hormone changes which cause the switch from lust to cuddles.
A team from the University of Pisa in Italy found the bodily chemistry which makes people sexually attractive to new partners lasts, at most, two years.
When couples move into a "stable relationship" phase, other hormones take over, Chemistry World reports.
But one psychologist warned the hormone shift is wrongly seen as negative.
Dr Petra Boynton, of the British Psychological Society, said there was a danger people might feel they should take hormone supplements to make them feel the initial rush of lust once more...
The scientists found that the lust molecule was replaced by the so-called "cuddle hormone" - oxytocin - in couples who had been together for several years.
I share Dr. Boynton's fears - "I'm concerned that, having identified these hormones, there will be some move to suggest replacements to recreate the early passion." It is likely to happen. Imagine the kind of complication it will add to relationships when cuddle pills are available, the emotional blackmail of "if you loved me you'd take that so you could love me even more", the increasing inability of the rising generation to handle love without drugging themselves into the appropriate state of mind. Imagine the legislative wrangles, the debate over advertising, the massive arguments over morality, the Pope getting lobbied to change his archaic, regressive, anti-love positions after he says it's probably a hideously bad idea and ARE YOU ALL INSANE WHY DO YOU WANT TO DO THAT TO YOURSELVES, the reactionary forces in society getting shouted down for wanting to restrict people's freedom whenever they point out research showing that popping oxytocin eventually degrades your overall ability to relate to other people in a balanced fashion, &c. May sound insane, but progress marches on, you know? There's lots of things in modern society that would have sounded appalling, outlandish or insane thirty years ago but we almost take for granted now; doubtless if we could see our great-grandchildren's future we'd be utterly horrified.
Or maybe I'm being overly pessimistic and paranoid. (When I was 11, my teacher would sometimes snap "pessimist!" at me for being, well, pessimistic. But there's nothing wrong with that! I demand my right to misery!)
Michael Gross, a bio-chemist and science writer who has studied the latest findings, said: "It shows that different hormones are present in the blood when people are acutely in love while there is no evidence of the same hormones in people who have been in a stable relationship for many years.
"In fact the love molecules can disappear as early as 12 months after a relationship has started to be replaced by another chemical glue that keeps couples together."
When people talk of "there being a chemistry between us", they don't usually mean it so literally. But here's the best line of the article:
He added: "To any romantically inclined chemist, it should be deeply satisfying to be able to prove that chemical messengers communicate romantic feeling between humans.
What can you say to that?
Friday, 27 February 2009
Woe and thermodynamics
Thermodynamics is evil. Statistical thermodynamics verges on obscenity at times. At university I sought to avoid learning much about them and made up by getting good enough marks in everything else.
I am currently having to read up on complex statistical thermodynamics (at way beyond undergraduate level) in order to modify someone else's code in a programming language I don't actually know. Also, I'm under a tight deadline that I'm unlikely to make. Fun!
Students! Do not despise the apparently-useless things in your curriculum. (My father once told me that engineers who grok thermal convection have it made, because such a vast majority of engineering students whimpers and retreats from it.)
--
Both Elberry and the Kraken have recently commented on the same subject: the death, or penury, of language, and particularly the overuse of the word "like". I myself am no brilliant user of words, and understand the problem that arises when your thoughts outstrip your tongue, and it becomes necessary either to say "like" a lot or just go "um" and "uh". This is probably why my written English is generally a bit stilted and heavily influenced by what I've been reading recently - I don't have much of a natural idiom, a fluent sense of how to speak and what to say, a protocol for getting my thoughts and words to mesh; which makes my writing doubly artificial, and somewhat chameleonic.
It doesn't help that I've lost my first native language, sort of: I spoke both Welsh and English at the age of five, and would wander round babbling away in Welsh, according to my mother. Then we moved back to England and I lost all of my Welsh except for two words - hogan drwg, "bad boy", and I'm probably spelling them wrong - and lost my Welsh lilt, too, leaving my voice unaccented and monotonous, by British standards - a friend at university told me I spoke like a robot doing a very bad impression of a human being.
(Tangential thought: There's a potential rationalistic explanation for the sense of Original Sin, of being Fallen, of things just not being right, based around Eden simply being a projection of the shared experience of losing childhood simplicity - as Chesterton pointed out, the entire human race has a tradition of the Fall, and all legends say the Earth was kinder in its earlier days. For a Christian, the innocence you lose in growing up - in my case, also, a native language lost in growing up - is a kind of metaphor for the Fall, the loss of original innocence, the loss of the heart's language; for a skeptic, the logic works perfectly the other way round. Strangely, I've never heard this argument pushed much. I guess if you felt that kind of loss strongly enough to think it worth addressing, you wouldn't become a skeptic in the first place - or at least, you wouldn't be so interested in knocking religion, as you'd regard the whole sin/grace/redemption schema of the Christian faith as a kind of communal psychotherapy, which the secular world has no clear alternative to.)
(Also, I'm starting to romanticise my childhood. I'll be getting myself a rocking chair next.)
My mother is even worse at using words, and even more scatterbrained than I am, and conversation with her involves lots of "put the thing in the, you know, thingy, and - what? Look, just do it! - um, you know what I mean, the uh, thing, the -" &c. &c. Clearly there is a family tendency to not get on with words, because I'm going the same way.
God willing I shall produce more art soon, workload permitting. Art I can deal with; language, not so much.
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
On the Freedom of People to Disagree With the Truth
Originally tendered as a reply to this post.
The relativistic all-viewpoints-are-good attitude of the age is a factor only insofar as it raises questions we should be able to answer (like Colm’s); we’re under no obligation to hold to it otherwise, as pretty much nobody else does. A genuine relativist would probably find issue with, say, imposing laws on anarchists, and certainly find issues with forcing libertarians to pay taxes towards a welfare state, or forcing Christians to pay taxes towards a health system that provides abortions.
To my mind, the important issues are as follows:
Firstly, should there really be any tactical aspect to deciding how much freedom of expression people have? If it’s a factor that people might be exposed to arguments that are wrong and harmful (on any level), that’s (a) a logical route to ever-decreasing freedom of expression, and (b) effectively an admission we’d be in favour of far more freedom of expression if it was only the Christians (or, at any rate, the monotheists) who were in a position to express ourselves. I dislike the idea of the latter, as it means our ideals relating to freedom (or, better, our concept of the glory and dignity of the human being, and hence his liberty - indeed, duty - to speak truth as he sees it) are something of a luxury, to be abandoned whenever some human being, not utterly devoid of glory and dignity, stands forth to honestly proclaim something flat-out wrong. Nothing wrong with revamping your ideals when they lead to bad results (ideals should be open to correction), but it could also be parsed as a lack of intellectual integrity.
Secondly, truth should not fear error. Back in the day, Edmund Campion’s challenge to the English Protestant establishment, to give him a forum to debate their theology in (rather than just trying to have him arrested and horribly executed), was sneered at as “Campion’s Brag” by his enemies; a sneer which does not reflect well on them, now. Atheists cannot make any such brag these days, as Hitchens has expressed a kind of grudging low-grade admiration for the willingness of Christians to debate him when he was on promotional tour for God Is Not Great; and Dawkins’ God Delusion presents numerous anecdotes of witty atheist ripostes to theist foolishness in debate - a backhanded admission that Dawkins, also, never found the slightest problem getting his opponents to step into the ring. (I remember one atheist internet site whose FAQ explicitly addressed the issue of Christians coming along and asking for personal debating partners.) This, I think, is to the credit of the Church, and hence to the glory of God.
(In a similar vein, Porphyry’s 15-volume assault on Christian doctrine was dealt with creditably by those Christians who sought to provide rebuttals. It’s lost now, along with all the rebuttals; I think the Church should have preserved them, as a resource for later controversy.) [EDIT: As far as I've been able to find out, Porphyry's work was actually burnt at the order of the Emperor Justinian, which is even worse.]
Thirdly, your problem, as posited, assumes that atheists spreading error is a bad thing as it draws people away from God. To support this, there is the scripture that says, It is inevitable that stumbling blocks come, but woe to him through whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea, than that he would cause one of these little ones to stumble, and you can argue that one should not give atheists the opportunity to draw down such woe upon them; and also that, in aiding and abetting atheist freedom of expression, one assists in setting up stumbling blocks, and is thus also inviting woe. This is a very serious objection, to which I answer: firstly, doing anything to suppress atheist freedom of speech is handing them ammo on a plate and bolstering their impression of being persecuted; a lack of fear towards atheism is a good testimony, whereas fearing the effectiveness of their slogans is a bad testimony. It sets up a stumbling block to allow atheists their platform; it also strengthens the stumbling block to deny them their platform.
Secondly, I recall to your memory the Chesterton book The Ball and the Cross, wherein an atheist and a Christian are persecuted because they both regard the issue of the existence of God to be very serious, indeed, worth fighting about, whereas society in general just doesn’t care that much. I think a similar state of affairs exists today - a relativist approach to truth, a belief it doesn’t really matter as long as you’re sincere, a desire not to rock the boat (remember the judge in tB&tC saying religion should be a private affair?) - but Dawkins, Hitchens et al. provide perverse testimony that it does matter. In many ways the atheists are in the pay of the Zeitgeist (their general morality is that of modern secular liberals, and the general morality of atheists in 50 years time will doubtless be unrecognisable), but they’re not post-modern, and they’re dead-set against the lie that the objective truth of supernatural claims is less important than whatever works for you, the Imperial Autonomous Self (as one Mr. Shea puts it), which I think genuinely does separate people from God, and works towards the ruin of souls. Their loud ranting forces people to awaken and think a bit. I wouldn’t go so far as to describe atheists as allies of a sort, but there is a silver lining there. (On a genuinely real cloud, to be sure.)
A fourth point is that Satan gets his time to rant and accuse in the courts of Heaven, that God allows truth to be put on trial. This isn’t terribly pleasant for the Jobs of the world, but God in his wisdom allows it. Admittedly, that God does something is not licence for us to do the same, however - “stumbling blocks must come”, &c.
Fifthly, all kinds of virtue should be able to find their place in the house of God, typically-atheist virtues included. Voltaire’s willingness to fight to the death to defend people’s rights to flat-out disagree with him is, arguably, a virtue. What place should this find in the Church?
Sixthly, platforms, liberties, &c are the issues and weapons of the world, not of God. As Brian points out, Divine powerlessness is better than human power. Not that things of this world aren’t worth giving thought to, but the folly of God is better than the wisdom of the World.
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