Mechanical mass

"I wonder what time is the next mass." Thomas said. "Or the mass that is not quite a mass. I'm not sure that I understand you on it."

"Oh, put in a stoimenof d'or in the slot, and push the button. Then the mass will begin."

Thomas did. And it did.

The priest came up out of the floor. He was not human, unless he was a zombie human. He was probably not even a programmed person. He may have been a mechanical device. He wore a pearl-gray derby hat, swish-boy sideburns, and common green shorts or breechcloth. His depilated torso was hermaphroditic. He or it smoked a log weedjy-weed cigarette in a period holder. He began to jerk and to intone with dreadful dissonance.

Then a number of other contrivances arrived from somewhere, intoning mock chorus to the priest, and twanging instruments.

[...]

At the Consecration, a sign lit up:

"Brought to you Courtesy of Grailo Grape-Ape, the Finest of the Bogus Wines"

(R. A. Lafferty: Past Master)

Mmmm... I wonder what was Lafferty's opinion on the changes to the mass after Vatican II. Maybe not very positive. Anyway, this is a great depiction of a debauched religious ceremony. A black mass, in a sense. The book goes on to mention that the wafers were "ancient-style hot-dog rolls".

The "Thomas" in the quoted passage is none other than Thomas More, or at least Lafferty's interpretation of him.

The effects of war on birds

The shells with black smoke, which the old-timers called "Americans" or "coal boxes", ripped with incredible violence. [...] The odd thing was that the little birds in the forest seemed quite untroubled by the myriad noise; they sat peaceably over the smoke in their battered boughs. In the short intervals of firing, we could hear them singing happily or ardently to one another, if anything even inspired or encouraged by the dreadful noise on all sides.

(Ernst Junger: Storm of Steel. Translated by Michael Hofmann)

At the corner of a stricken wood [...] at a moment when lyddite and shrapnel and machine-gun fire swept and raked and bespattered that devoted spot as though the artillery of an entire Division had suddenly concentrated on it, a wee hen-chaffinch flitted wistfully to and fro, amid splintered and falling branches that had never a green bough left on them. [...] There was a battered orchard alongside the stricken wood, and the probable explanation of the bird's presence was that it had a nest of young ones whom it was too scared to fed, too loyal to desert.

(Hector Hugh Munro "Saki": Birds on the Western Front)

Saki did not survive the war.

Mejorando mi calidad de vida

Recientemente he adoptado algunos cambios en mi rutina diaria que han contribuido a mejorar mi calidad de vida.

El primero consistió en deshacerme de mi despertador y pasar a depender de la alarma del móvil. El despertador era un artefacto infernal, con una alarma estridente que sólo sería apropiada para avisar de una invasión alienígena. De hecho, quizás el artefacto mismo fuese de origen extraterrestre, porque sus extremadamente crípticos controles a duras penas conseguía manipularlos.

Lo peor de todo es que, una vez que la alarma comenzaba a sonar, me veía obligado a levantarme inmediatamente para apagarla. El despertador se encontraba al otro lado del dormitorio, único lugar próximo a un enchufe. Y la alarma no se detenía por sí sola al cabo de un tiempo, al contrario: aumentaba progresivamente de volumen hasta amenazar con reventarme los tímpanos. Me estremezco al recordar los ¿mil? ¿mil quinientos? peregrinajes urgentes pero somnolientos al otro lado de mi habitación. ¡Cuánto sufrimiento innecesario! Si se concentrase en un sólo día, equivaldría al de romperse una pierna, como mínimo.

El otro cambio es utilizar el metabuscador de la red de bibliotecas de Galicia antes de pasarme por el Fórum Metropolitano o la González Garcés. Hasta ahora, cuando iba a una biblioteca sucedía algo de lo siguiente: o bien los puestos de consulta estaban ocupados, o si estaban libres no había traido bolígrafo para apuntar la signatura, o si lo había traído no tenía papel en el que apuntar. Y no queda bien mostrar a la bibliotecaria una signatura que te has escrito en la mano.

Calculo que estos dos cambios me han hecho un 1.7 por ciento más feliz.

R. A. Lafferty in the New York Times

I didn't expect to see Lafferty mentioned in the New York Times; I was pleasantly surprised. Quoting from Bill Hader's recommendation of the story collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers:

You get the feeling like it’s a guy just writing to amuse himself: “I don’t care if any of this makes sense, but I want to see weird stuff happen.” One of his stories starts off, “He began by breaking things that morning.” There’s a short story called “Ginny Wrapped in the Sun,” and it’s just about this little girl who’s super strong, running around, picking things up. You get such a sense of joy and boundless imagination in every sentence – even if the story doesn’t totally cohere, you feel like it’s about something.

Actually, beneath his crazy brilliant ebullient prose Lafferty is often dead serious. See for example stories like "The World as Will and Wallpaper" or "You can't go back".

By the way, "Ginny Wrapped in the Sun" is an apocalyptic tale full of allusions to the Book of Revelation. The title refers to the "woman clothed in the sun" of Revelation 12:1-10, who was the subject of a famous painting by William Blake. One character is called Krios, which is greek for "lamb". He is killed at the end. Ginny is going to "stay in a cave for twelve hundred and sixty days". That is reminiscent of:

And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days.

(The Bible, King James Version. Revelations 12:6)

I suppose there are more biblical references, but I didn't catch them. I'm also puzzled about the overall meaning of the story. Because it seems to have a meaning, only I can't make head nor tail of it.

Anyway, if only this were the beginning of some kind of RAL revival! A chance to get some of his more elusive volumes back in print. Or printed for the first time...

A dangerous sea voyage

Here is an amazingly entertaining account of a sea voyage between Alexandria and Cyrene in the fourth century. The author is Synesius of Cyrene.

Exposing the sick

Their sick they [those from Bastetania] expose upon the highways, in the same way as the Egyptians did anciently, in the hope that some one who has experienced the malady may be able to give them advice.

(Strabo: Geography, Book 3)

They [the Babylonians] bring their sick into the town square, since they do not use doctors. Each invalid is then approached and given advice by passerby who have either suffered from the same sort of ailment themselves or know someone else who has... These prescribe what they did to recover or what they know others did who recovered. You are not allowed to go by a sick person without asking what's the matter with him.

(Herodotus, quoted in Lionel Casson's Travel in the Ancient World)

When you are sick, people are always more than eager to share with you what treatment, recipe, or strange procedure cured them from the same ailment you are presently suffering. The ancient custom of exposing the sick exploits that compulsion, in lieu of professional medical advice that may not be available.

Apparently, in the Leon province of Spain sick people were still being exposed at the beginning of the past century. Or so says a footnote in my copy of Strabo.

A wildness more vicious

We are accustomed to think of the beasts of the forest and mountain as wild, and to think of the men who spring up, as it seems, from their soil as savage. But the truth is that there is a wildness more vicious (as we would know better if we were not so habituated to it) in certain domestic animals, despite their understanding so much human speech and sometimes even speaking a few words; and there is a more profound savagery in men and women whose ancestors have lived in cities and towns since the dawn of humanity. Vodalus, in whose veins flowed the undefiled blood of a thousand exultants - exarchs, ethnarchs, and starosts - was capable of violence unimaginable to the autochthons that stalked the streets of Thrax, naked beneath their huanaco cloaks.

(Gene Wolfe: The Sword of the Lictor)

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

(Walter Benjamin)

See also here. I don't know if Wolfe and Benjamin are right.

Defining science fiction

sfsignal asked several science fiction authors for his definition of the genre. John C. Wright's definition is extensive and thoughtful, and worth a read.

I also like another definition given here by Gregory Benford:

SF is a controlled way to think and dream about the future. An integration of the mood and attitude of science (the objective universe) with the fears and hopes that spring from the unconscious. Anything that turns you and your social context, the social you, inside out. Nightmares and visions, always outlined by the barely possible.

A working mind-body dualism

Brain trauma. Alzheimer's disease. Chemobrain. The evidence for our minds being completely dependant on our brains is incontrovertible, and yet we shy away for it, almost instinctively, towards some form of mind-body dualism, to the belief that we are in some sense separate entities from our bodies.

Mental reductionism, turns out, is somewhat counterintuitive. Let's imagine a world where it would be even more so. People in that world have bodies pretty much like ours, that get sick, grow old, and die. With one important difference: their brains, instead of being located within their bodies, they are all sealed inside a mountain! In people's heads grow antennae-like appendages which relay sense data to their remote brains, and receive motor commands in return.

Those remote brains are all pretty well tended for -maybe by some automated mechanism outside the control, or even knowledge, of the population- and kept safe from trauma, degenerative diseases, and the like. When a person reaches a certain age, his brain is scheduled for destruction, which comes swiftly and suddenly, without allowing any hint of senility to manifest itself.

In such a world, people would not possess clear evidence for minds having a physical basis. Drugs wouldn't work. No trauma-induced loss of consciousness, either. At most, injuries to the antennae could sever the connection between brains and bodies, but when those injuries finally heal, the patient would speak about being fully conscious throughout, but trapped in a silent darkness, unable to move. No Phineas Gage in that world.

How could a reductionist theory of the mind be developed, in that state of affairs? I see it very difficult. Imagine that, for the first time in millennia, a brain inside the mountain starts suffering damage. How would the owner of that brain cope with that? How could he even begin to conceptualize the experience of his decaying mental faculties, without any previous cases to draw on?

Karmic midichlorians

When George Lucas postulated midichlorians as the origin of the Force, legions of discerning nerds were justifiably incensed. Such a prosaic, mechanistic explanation for something as mystical and spiritual as the Force! Even if the Star Wars universe was wholly Lucas's brainchild, he had no right to unweave the rainbow like he did.

And yet, there are real-world religions that possess a markedly mechanistic view of spiritual matters. Consider for example the conception of karma in Jainism:

According to Robert J. Zydenbos, Jainism can be considered a kind of system of laws, but natural rather than moral laws. In Jainism, actions that carry moral significance are considered to cause certain consequences in just the same way as, for instance, physical actions that do not carry any special moral significance. When one holds an apple in one's hand and then lets go of the apple, the apple will fall: this is only natural. There is no judge, and no moral judgment involved, since this is a mechanical consequence of the physical action.

(Wikipedia entry for Karma in Jainism)

In Jainism, karma is referred to as karmic dirt, as it consists of very subtle and microscopic particles that cannot be perceived by our senses i.e. pudgala that pervade the entire universe. [...] Karmic matter is actually the agent that enables us (our consciousness) to act within the material context of this universe. When attracted to our consciousness, they are stored in our interactive karmic field i.e. karmic sharira. They are attracted to the soul on account of vibrations created by activities of mind, speech and body and stick to the soul due to various mental dispositions.

(ibid.)

Karmic midichlorians, more or less.

Edit: Come to think of it, karmic dirt also resembles the "Dust" in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.

A crappy "review"

Well, it would have been a review had the author even bothered to read the book.

The Darjeeling Limited

I have a doubt about this movie. At one point, there's a kind of flashback to the three brother protagonists stopping by a garage in their way to their father's funeral, in order to retrieve his car. The thing has a whiff of unreality about it (that could be said about the whole movie, but that sequence stands out). Is it a "true" flashback, or is it a dramatization of the story penned by the younger brother, who constantly asks the other two brothers for an opinion on it?

The movie was a bit too precious.

Lack of empathy for what we'll become

In the face of our universal inadequacy [...] man must go steeply up or down and the odds seem to be all in favor of his going down and out. If he goes up, then so great is the adaptation demanded of him that he must cease to be a man. Ordinary man is at the end of his tether.

(H. G. Wells: Mind at the end of its tether.)

Some folks might argue that it would be worth sacrificing all that makes us human if in exchange we were to receive the eternal life that's held out here. But if we aren't going to be the ones to receive this life, if instead it's going to beings that are not human and who won't use that life in pursuit of the things that make us human, then what stake do we have in such a future? Does it make any sense for us to root against our own species? I'm glad my computer has a large memory bank and a couple of the programs are fairly neat, but I'm not willing to exchange my life for them. Why would someone hope for the day when we exchange all of humankind for nothing more than such computer memory and programs? There's just something creepy and antihuman about this kind of desire and it makes Mr. Egan's imagined future seem awfully cold and uninviting. This is a future worth fighting against, though it's mildly diverting for a few hundred pages.

(from this review of Greg Egan's Diaspora in Brothers Judd)

Imagine a world where, by some natural and ineluctable process, each generation is slightly different - physically, mentally, and culturally - from the preceding one, but not so much that the preceding generation can't relate to it.

However, there's a number of generations N at which the accumulated changes would make it impossible for generation x to feel any kind of empathy towards generation x + N. In fact, they may even regard the people at x + N as abominations. Of course, when generation x + N comes along, all the people in generation x have long been dead.

But still, they might be aware of the historical trend. Suppose it takes one thousand years for N generations to come and go. Members of generation x will we looking at the complete extinction of their world - or at least, of anything they hold valuable and relatable in themselves - in 1000 years. How they would cope with that knowledge? If they really hate what they'll become, they could even set some kind of doomsday device to be activated a millenium in the future...

On a more down-to-earth note, which reformers and revolutionaries would still pursue their programs for change, if given complete knowledge of the effects of their reforms across time?

Weather and War

I've just learned that the term "front", in the sense of "weather front", was first used by a norwegian meteorologist just after World War I and it clearly has a bellic inspiration. The transition zone between two air masses was conceptualized as a battleground. Once you know that, the similarity between weather maps and war maps depicting WWI front lines becomes obvious.

I wonder, if the idea of what we call weather fronts had first crystallized in peacetime, would have it been conceptualized differently, in a less bellicose manner? You could use a "shoreline" metaphor, for example. How many metaphorical terms we now take as obvious and fitting are just fossilized remains of some past mindset?

Other things we owe to the Great War: the expression "going over the top", wristwatches, trenchcoats (obviously!) and chemotherapy (not so obviously, but mustard gas is a distant ancestor of current chemotherapy treatments).

Edge.org

As always, the responses to the annual Edge.org question are endlessly fascinating. This year's question was: What have you changed your mind about, and why?

The questions of previous years, here.

Edit: Particularly interesting responses by Joseph Ledoux about the workings of memory, Donald Hoffman and Peter Trivers on perception and self-deception, Scott Atran on the religious politics of fictive kinship, and Rupert Sheldrake on the skepticism of believers.

Tor Norretrander's views about permanent reincarnation are reminiscent of Derek Parfit's conception of the self.

I once talked with a computational linguist who shared Marti Hearst's surprise at the amount of things you can do in the field of language processing using only relatively simple, statistical techniques. That so much of our speech can be characterized and analyzed with such low-level techniques - which involve no real "understanding" - is a bit chilling.

What's really chilling is Thomas Metzinger's contribution about neuroethics and the nonexistence of moral facts.

Life extension

Down at The Volokh Conspiracy there's a very interesting post on the ethical implications of life extension technology (spotted at The Fourth Checkraise.)

My review of To Live Forever, a Jack Vance novel dealing with life extension, is here.

Not a Golden Age

There's an interesting article in The Economist about the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and the invention of agriculture. It paints the lifestyle in a less rosy fashion than Jared Diamond does. So maybe agriculture wasn't such a bad idea after all.

From the article:

What's more, the famously “affluent society” of hunter-gatherers, with plenty of time to gossip by the fire between hunts and gathers, turns out to be a bit of a myth, or at least an artefact of modern life. The measurements of time spent getting food by the !Kung omitted food-processing time and travel time, partly because the anthropologists gave their subjects lifts in their vehicles and lent them metal knives to process food.

Travel time, omitted? What an oversight! The daily commute is the key to History!

The regeneration of Time

During the course of the akitu ceremony [the Babylonian New Year festivity] the so-called epic of the Creation, Enuma Elis, was solemnly recited several times in the temple of Marduk. [...] the akitu festival comprises a series of dramatic elements the intention of which is the abolition of past time, the restoration of primordial chaos, and the repetition of the cosmogonic act.

(Mircea Eliade: Cosmos and Chaos)

It is also within the frame of the same akitu ceremonial that the festival called the "festival of the fates", Zakmuk, was celebrated, in which the omens for each of the twelve months of the year were determined, which was equivalent to creating the twelve months to come.

(ibid.)

See also the page for akitu on Wikipedia, and James Frazer's The Golden Bough.

Autorreferencia

En Edad de Oro hay un interesante post sobre sonetos autorreferentes.

Si se me permite la insolencia de establecer una analogía entre poemas y programas - programas de computador, mecánicos y estériles - diría que el equivalente a los sonetos autorreferentes en el campo de la programación son los Quines.

Un Quine es un programa que imprime su propio código fuente. Es decir, el resultado de ejecutar el programa son las mismas instrucciones del programa.

Construir un Quine no es difícil, aunque a menos que el lenguaje de programación incluya instrucciones destinadas específicamente a listar programas - lo que es un poco como hacer trampa - tampoco es tan trivial como parece a primera vista.

Kurt Godel hizo amplio uso de la autorreferencia en las Matemáticas para probar su famoso Teorema de la Incompletitud, que dice que para cualquier conjunto de axiomas -excepto los más triviales- hay afirmaciones que son ciertas bajo esos axiomas, pero que no pueden ser probadas a partir de ellos.

Me pregunto si hay algún análogo poético para el Teorema de Godel. Ahora mismo no se me ocurre ninguno.

Una amena discusión de dicho teorema, y de la autorreferencia en general, puede encontrarse en el libro Gödel, Escher, Bach: un Eterno y Grácil Bucle de Douglas Hofstader. Como el título insinúa, parte del libro se dedica a explorar la autorreferencialidad en la música de Bach y en la pintura de M. C. Escher.

Para más información, ver el post "Autorreferencia" en La Explanada de Avente.

Ayer me compré un traje

Y la primera pregunta que me hice una vez realizada la compra fue: ¿será éste el traje con el que me entierren? Pregunta morbosa, lo reconozco. Pero también natural a partir de cierta edad, me parece.

¿Me equivoco quizás respecto al procedimiento usual en caso de defunción? Cuando uno muere, ¿es necesario comprar un traje especial destinado específicamente a que te entierren con él?

El traje es de color gris, con rayitas blancas.

Automatic programming

It's a shame that automatic programming isn't more like automatic writing. I would love to know what an application programmed by my subconscious would look like. I bet it would have GOTOs, lots of them. The repressed always returns.

Possible idea for a science fiction story: a world where the act of programming is considered to be inspired by the gods. There could even be "code literalists" who oppose any refactoring of legacy applications for religious reasons.

And what about a sect of programmers/mystics? Computer code is very well suited to kabbalistic interpretation, I think. I would go as far as saying that, for most Perl programs, it is the only possible one...

Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream

The daily commute

It is undoubtedly true that a large part of the population of a polis were "city-farmers" and that was possible because the great majority of city-states were so small. If the territory of a city-state as a circle with the city in the middle, a territory of 200 square kilometers would have had a radius of 8 km. People could well walk 5–10 km every day (or ride a donkey) to go to and from work. That is something many modern historians find diffcult to conceive but to which they need to acclimatise themselves: in ancient times people’s daily mobility was much greater than is normally allowed, and it seemed entirely natural for farmers to go out of the city daily to their plots and back again.

(Mogens Herman Hansen: Polis, an Introduction to the Ancient Greek City-State)

Someone should write a history of the daily commute. What? Too trivial a theme, you say? Bah. If there's a history of the toothpick, I don't see why there can't be a history of the daily commute.

Bonus points if the author makes it the central, all-explaining factor in his vision of History. Like the idea of class struggle within marxism, the daily commute would lay at the heart of every acceptable historical narrative. For example: the fall of empires could be explained because the commutes got too long, leaving no time for actual work and causing rebellions by exasperated, disheveled workers. Or: great efflorescences in art begin when commutes get long enough for bored people to start pondering some artsy project to pass the time.

By the way, IBM says commuting will be less tiresome in the future:

IBM's contention that driving will become safer and less aggravating may be particularly tantalizing for many. The company said that during the next five years, a "wave of connectivity" between vehicles and roadways will help keep traffic flowing smoothly, drive down pollution and get you to your destination easier, "without the stress."

(from this article in Computerworld)

Yeah, sure.

Van Helsing, Job, mesías

(Spoilers para la película "Soy Leyenda".)

"Soy Leyenda" consigue hacerte sentir una gran empatía por el personaje interpretado por Will Smith. Es casi como el programa de Mercer descrito en la novela "¿Sueñan los androides con ovejas eléctricas?" de Philip K. Dick...

La película es más sutil e inteligente de lo que cabría esperar de un blockbuster; ciertamente está a años luz de engendros como "Transformers". Me fascinó la interacción entre Neville y los vampiros, como estos últimos son más inteligentes de lo que Neville cree, y terminan usando su deseperación y ansia de compañía humana para hacerle caer en una trampa similar a las que él mismo les tiende.

No se dice explícitamente, pero se da a entender que lo que motiva al líder de los vampiros es rescatar a la vampiresa que Neville ha capturado para probar en ella su vacuna. Como en la novela, Neville es a la vez Van Helsing (porque combate a los vampiros) y una inversión de Drácula (un "monstruo" que ataca cuando todos duermen y que intenta convertir a la novia de un personaje en un "mostruo" de su mismo tipo, es decir, un humano).

La película también asigna al personaje de Neville otros arquetipos que creo recordar no se enfatizaban tanto en la novela. Neville es un mesías (ver la portada de la revista "Time" colgada de la puerta del frigorífico) que busca la salvación de la humanidad. Un mesías rechazado por aquellos a los que intenta salvar:

[while the Dark Seekers try to break through a plexiglass door in Neville's laboratory]

Neville: [screaming] I can help. I can save you. I can save everybody.

(imdb)

Neville es también una especie de Job, un hombre que sufre la pérdida de todo lo que le es más querido: su mundo, su familia, y finalmente el último lazo que le quedaba con ésta, su perro. Lo que, en cierta forma, explicaría el insatisfactorio final de la película: el libro de Job en la Biblia también concluye de manera nada convincente...

A theodicy for cosmic catastrophe

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

(H. P. Lovecraft)

Imagine millions of inhabited worlds being sterilized, and turning into dead wastelands. Imagine thousands of civilizations coming to their end, never to rise again. Not because of their own follies but instead crushed by the dumb, indifferent, and utterly inescapable machinery of the universe. That may be happening (or has already happened, if you take into account all those light years...)

Tens of millions of stars, including those with orbiting planets, are likely in the path of the deadly jet, said study co-author Martin Hardcastle of the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom.

If Earth were in the way - and it's not - the high-energy particles and radiation of the jet would in a matter of months strip away the planet's protective ozone layer and compress the protective magnetosphere, said Evans. That would then allow the sun and the jet itself to bombard the planet with high-energy particles.

And what would that do life on the planet?

"Decompose it," Tyson said.

(from here)

Of course, if the Rare Eath Hypotesis is correct, instead of witnessing a cosmic holocaust on an uninimaginable scale, we are just watching a rare and interesting celestial phenomenon. See also: the Fermi Paradox.

Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker is now avaliable for free on manybooks.net. I strongly recommend the book; it's a seminal work of science fiction. One chapter deals with an extraterrestial civilization, of a technological level comparable to our own. They discover that their planet is slowly losing its atmosphere, and there's nothing they can do about it. The next centuries will be the last.

The human protagonist is horrified by this perspective:

The thought of the disaster which almost certainly lay in wait for the Other Men threw me into a horror of doubt about the universe in which such a thing could happen. That a whole world of intelligent beings could be destroyed was not an unfamiliar idea to me; but there is a great difference between an abstract possibility and a concrete and inescapable danger. On my native planet, whenever I had been dismayed by the suffering and the futility of individuals, I had taken comfort in the thought that at least the massed effect of all our blind striving must be the slow but glorious awakening of the human spirit. This hope, this certainty, had been the one sure consolation. But now I saw that there was no guarantee of any such triumph. It seemed that the universe, or the maker of the universe, must be indifferent to the fate of worlds. That there should be endless struggle and suffering and waste must of course be accepted; and gladly, for these were the very soil in which the spirit grew. But that all struggle should be finally, absolutely vain, that a whole world of sensitive spirits fail and die, must be sheer evil. In my horror it seemed to me that Hate must be the Star Maker.

(Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker)

However, a philosopher of the alien race sees things differently. He intones a prayer of absolute acceptance to the remote (and perhaps altogether nonexistent) creator of the universe, the Star Maker:

"Even if the powers destroy us," he said, "who are we, to condemn them? As well might a fleeting word judge the speaker that forms it. Perhaps they use us for their own high ends, use our strength and our weakness, our joy and our pain, in some theme inconceivable to us, and excellent." But I protested, "What theme could justify such waste, such futility? And how can we help judging; and how otherwise can we judge than by the light of our own hearts, by which we judge ourselves? It would be base to praise the Star Maker, knowing that he was too insensitive to care about the fate of his worlds."

Bvalitu was silent in his mind for a moment. Then he looked up, searching among the smoke-clouds for a daytime star. And then he said to me in his mind, "If he saved all the worlds, but tormented just one man, would you forgive him? Or if he was a little harsh only to one stupid child? What has our pain to do with it, or our failure? Star Maker! It is a good word, though we can have no notion of its meaning. Oh, Star Maker, even if you destroy me, I must praise you. Even if you torture my dearest. Even if you torment and waste all your lovely worlds, the little figments of your imagination, yet I must praise you. For if you do so, it must be right. In me it would be wrong, but in you it must be right."

He looked down once more upon the ruined city, then continued, "And if after all there is no Star Maker, if the great company of galaxies leapt into being of their own accord, and even if this little nasty world of ours is the only habitation of the spirit anywhere among the stars, and this world doomed, even so, even so, I must praise. But if there is no Star Maker, what can it be that I praise? I do not know. I will call it only the sharp tang and savor of existence. But to call it this is to say little."

(Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker)

This is a beautiful and chilling passage; one of my favorites in all science fiction.

Farenheit 451

This article on The New Yorker about the decline of reading brings to mind Bradbury's Farenheit 451. That book is not really about censorship: as Bradbury himself has stated -to the surprise of many- in a recent interview, it is about television destroying interest in literature. Critic David Pringle was very perceptive when he said as much in his volume Science Fiction: the Best 100 Novels. IIRC, he thought that Bradbury was being overly hostile to new forms of media; had the book been written in more recent times, it would have attacked videogames, too.

The novel was successfully adapted to film by Truffaut (gotta love the opening title sequence). Nevertheless, if Farenheit 451 is really about movies and television overthrowing literature, there is an inherent paradox in adapting it. And I very much doubt that Frank Darabont can do a better job than Truffaut.

But, who cares about what Bradbury really meant, anyway? The death of the author and all that.

Nature reclaiming the works of Man

A staple image (we could say a cliché, if it wasn't so effective) of post-apocalyptic stories consists in having wild animals prancing through the empty ruins of what formerly was a busy urban center, or some other place sinonymous with civilization and man-made environments. I am Legend does this, at least judging from the trailer. So do Children of Men (the deer in the nursery) and Twelve Monkeys (the escaped zoo animals Bruce Willis encounters on his initial excursion).

Much of the rural imagery from the works of the Romantics included aestheticised, picturesque ruins from a previous age (usually, although not always, Classical temples, columns and statues). Early on, I noticed similarities between these images and images of the modern city in ruins in various Science Fiction films or read descriptions of in Science Fiction novels. It occurred to me that the image of a well-known city in ruins was a powerful one that people might use in a variety of ways to express a variety of ideas. What does it mean? Why the fascination?

That quote comes from Where London Stood, a site dedicated to literary depictions of the City in Ruins, and which itself seems to be abandoned. Sad... but oddly appropiate!

Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote the following about the Romantic infatuation with ruins:

Civilisation is not "just there," it is not self-supporting. It is artificial and requires the artist or the artisan. If you want to make use of the advantages of civilisation, but are not prepared to concern yourself with the upholding of civilisation- you are done. In a trice you find yourself left without civilisation. Just a slip, and when you look around everything has vanished into air. The primitive forest appears in its native state, just as if curtains covering pure Nature had been drawn back. The jungle is always primitive and, vice versa, everything primitive is mere jungle. The romantics of every period have been excited by those scenes of violation, in which the natural and infrahuman assaults the white form of woman, and they have depicted Leda and the swan, Pasiphae and the bull, Antiope and the goat. Generalising the picture, they have found a more subtly indecent spectacle in the landscape with ruins, where the civilised, geometric stone is stifled beneath the embrace of wild vegetation. When your good romantic catches sight of a building, the first thing his eyes seek is the yellow hedge-mustard on cornice and roof. This proclaims, that in the long run, everything is earth, that the jungle springs up everywhere anew. It would be stupid to laugh at the romantic. The romantic also is in the right. Under these innocently perverse images there lies an immense, ever-present problem: that of the relations between civilisation and what lies behind it- Nature, between the rational and the cosmic.

(José Ortega y Gasset: Revolt of the Masses)

I suppose the definitive Romantic/Postapocalyptic tale would be Mary Shelley's The Last Man, a roman à clef with barely concealed versions of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley as characters. It's kind of boring, though, and mostly of historical interest.

Eastern bloc retrofutures

Check out this series of covers from old soviet and eastern bloc science fiction magazines posted at Dark Roasted Blend (link spotted at Bodly Go.)

Tropes and Patterns

Generations of men, throughout recorded time, have always told and retold two stories - that of a lost ship which searches the Mediterranean Seas for a dearly loved island, and that of a God who is crucified on Golgotha.

(Jorge Luis Borges)

The storytelling tropes collected in TV Tropes (warning: the site can consume hours of your life) are, in a way, analogous to software designs patterns, only for fiction writing. Although some should be considered antipatterns more than anything else...

One can daydream about expressing all those tropes in a machine-understandable form, and feeding them to some kind of automated story generation device.

See also The Grand List Of Console Role Playing Game Clichés, The Big List of RPG Plots, The Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés and Strange Horizon's Stories We've Seen Too Often. Let's not forget Georges Polti's The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, either. More pop-culture goodness at Don Marksteins's Toonopedia, Scott Shaw's Oddball Comics, and of course at Superdickery.

Through other eyes

Laguagehat has a post on Proust as a sf writer. The following passage is quoted:

A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything that we saw in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage of discovery, the only really rejuvenating experience, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is...

With that same premise, R. A. Lafferty wrote a story both funny and profound, unsurprisingly titled "Through Other Eyes". It is part of his collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers.

As the story begins, eminent scientists Gregory Smirnov and Charles Cogsworth have just completed their exploration of the past using a Time Machine. They were present at the most important events in History, they have met the central characters face-to-face. And they were bored. The great events were not as spectacular as advertised, and ended too soon. The kings, poets and philosophers turned out to be an uniformly dull and annoying lot. For example:

"I wasn't too happy with Aristotle the day we caught him. That barbarous north-coast Greek of his!" Three hours he had them all busy curling his beard. "And his discourse on the Beard in Essential and the Beard in Existential, did you follow that?"

"No, to tell the truth I didn't. I guess it was pretty profound."

(R. A. Lafferty: Through other eyes)

So, the Time Machine was a failure. But they have a new toy to play with: a device that allows one person to see through the eyes of another, not only in a strictly visual sense, but in the sense of inhabiting the other person's particular experience of the world.

"As he grew older Charles Cogsworth came to many signs that the world he saw was not the world others saw. There came smaller but persistent signs that every person lives in a different world."

(ibid.)

They soon test the machine on friends and associates:

"He is a greater man than I [...] And he lives in a better world."

It was a better world, greater in scope and more exiting in detail.

"Who would have thought of giving such color to grass, if it is grass? It is what he calls grass, but it is not what I call grass. [...] It is a finer sky that I have known, and more structured hills. The old bones of them stand out for him as they do not for me, and he knows the water in their veins."

(ibid.)

The problem comes when Cogsworth tries to see the world through the eyes of his enchanting female colleague, Valery Mok. The results are not what he expected:

"And to her the grass it self is like clumps of snakes, and the world itself is flesh. Every bush is to her a leering satyr, and she cannot help but brush into them. He sees every cloud as a mass of twisting bodies and she is crazy to be in the middle of them."

(ibid.)

This fiery view of the world is too much for Cogsworth, who ends having to spend six weeks in a sanatorium to recover. He now regards Valery as a base and excessively sensuous creature. Conversely, Valery finds Cogsworth's experience of the world to be stale and dead:

"Gregory Smirnov let me use your machine. I saw the world the way you see it. I saw it with a dead man's eyes. You don't even know that the grass is alive. You think it's only grass. [...] How can you be so dead? And I always liked you so much. But I didn't know you were dead like that. [...] By the way, who gave you the idea that blood was that dumb color? Don't you even know that blood is red?"

"I see it red."

"You don't see it red. You just call it red. That silly color isn't red. What I call red is red."

(ibid.)

"Redness" is the canonical quale. Laffety's story serves as a good illustration of the inverted spectrum thought experiment in Philosophy of the Mind. The essay "What it is like to be a bat?" by Thomas Nagel also touches on related themes.

Analíticas

Recibir los resultados de un análisis de sangre me enerva sobremanera.

No sólo porque el colesterol esté muy alto (que lo está) o los leucocitos muy bajos (que no me acuerdo si lo están o no). Es más bien el descubrir que tu sange no es una substancia simple, sino una mezcolanza de fluidos diversos en delicado equilibrio.

Aunque todos los numeritos se mantengan dentro de los límites recomendados, la mera constatación de tu pluraridad sangínea basta para recordarte lo efímero y poco esencial que es tu cuerpo. Lo que tiene partes se descompondrá algún día, y por si fuera poco está sujeto a paradojas sobre su identidad, como la del barco de Teseo. Por cierto, en nuestros cuerpos hay más bacterias que células propiamente humanas.

Por las venas de los dioses olímpicos fluía una sangre enrarecida e incolora. Las analíticas que se hiciese Apolo no le harían preocuparse por los triglicéridos o la bilirrubina. Como mucho, habría una línea avisando de excesivos niveles de icor, que podrían resultar venenosos, no al mismo dios, sino a los mortales cuya sangre salpicase.

Me desagrada tener estructura interna. Por dentro yo quiero ser de barro, como los golems del folclore judío. En mi opinión, los cuerpos de Adán y Eva deberían haber seguido siendo barro después de su creación. ¿Cómo habría transcurrido el crimen de Caín si Abel no hubiese tenido sangre, la cual -una vez derramada- clamase a Dios por justicia? ¿Habría permanecido Caín impune?

Y ya que hablamos de la sangre de Abel, apuesto a que tenía el colesterol alto. Recordemos que Abel era pastor, y ofrecía a Dios sacrificios de carne. Caín en cambio era agricultor y probablemente seguía una dieta mucho más sana, aunque menos sabrosa.

Uno se siente tentado a reescribir Génesis incluyendo una forma alternativa de pecado original, que tuviese que ver más con la simple gula que con el ansia de conocimiento o de igualarse a Dios. Después de todo, cuando salimos a la calle nos encontramos con más obesos que Faustos. De manera análoga, el asesinato de Abel podría reinterpretarse como el producto de una rivalidad entre cocineros que compiten por la atención de un cliente muy selecto (o de tres, según se mire). La hipercolesterolemia sería entonces la marca de Caín.

Tengo que dejar de comer tanto chorizo.

Edit: un bonito recordatorio del horror de la carne, y de lo deseable que resulta tener un cuerpo mineral, o incluso etéreo, se puede encontrar en el relato de Terry Bisson They're made out of meat.

Ancient Germany Map

This post at Strange Maps is very interesting. Kind of makes want to play Darklands...

One branch of the suebi tribe mentioned in the post eventually settled in Galicia.

Edit:

After the kingdom of the Suebi was conquered by the Visigoths in 585, Braulio of Zaragoza (590 - 651) depicted the region as "the edge of the west in an illiterate country where naught is heard but the sound of gales".

(Wikipedia page for suebi)

Broken swords

If swords are phallic symbols, then what to make of the recurrent "sword that was broken but now has been reforged at last" motif so common in epic fantasy novels? Consider for example the sword Narsil in LOTR.

My take is that the motif is really a metaphor for the overcoming of a long period of sexual impotence, maybe with the help of the elven alchemist Viagh'Grah.

Palabras que suelo confundir

asébeia y asabiya (y también aristeia).

El concepto de asébeia es interesante. Que una religión carezca de dogma no implica que carezca del concepto de impiedad.

El concepto de asabiya, central en la obra de Ibn Jaldún, lo encontré por primera vez en el libro "Los moriscos del reino de Granada" de Julio Caro Baroja.

Dicho concepto también juega un papel importante en las teorías cliodinámicas de Peter Turchin (teorías que el resto de sus colegas historiadores no parecen tomar demasiado en serio).

Four Paths to Utopia

In Gray’s telling, the doctrines of Soviet Communism, Nazi racism, Al Qaeda’s technophile fundamentalism and the Bushian “war on terror” are various forms (however incompatible) of an essentially utopian impulse derived from an Enlightenment notion of progress. That notion is misguided: scientific knowledge and technological power increase over time, but there is no reason to think that politics or morality can progress in the same way. The belief in progress is just a secularized form of Christian theodicy, infecting even those minds that otherwise seem combatively atheistic. Apocalyptic impulses are coded into every ideological genome.

(Scott McLemee: What Price Utopia?)

That "Black Mass" book by John Gray sounds interesting. But perhaps I should read Norman Cohn's "Pursuit of the Millenium" first. It has been sitting in my "to read" pile for a long time.

The halting problem and qualia

"Given a description of a program and a finite input, decide whether the program finishes running or will run forever, given that input."

(Wikipedia entry for the Halting problem)

The undecidability of the halting problem is a well-known result in the Theory of computation. There is no Turing machine that can both solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs AND be garanteed to always achieve the answer in finite time. Turing Machines tasked with solving the halting problem may themselves never stop!

Now, imagine that the functionalist conception of the mind is the correct one. That means some Turing machines, when run, can have (produce?) minds, and qualia. Obviously, not all of them do. I don't think a machine that continuously writes in a tape an alternating sequence of ones and zeroes -or my computer for that matter- is as conscious as me. (Though my computer is certanly evil.)

So we need a way to decide which computations produce minds and qualia, and which don't. This could be a pressing issue in a post-singularity scenario, where computation is pervasive and a bewildering menagerie of vastly different minds and bodies have come into existence. In that scenario, the problem of other minds would be no mere solipsistic daydream, but a very real issue and a matter of utmost concern. Why?

Contingent facts, like that every human brain has been shaped by the same evolutionary processes, ensure that we all have roughly similar bodies and minds, and that we experience roughly similar mental states and qualia. If I pinch somebody, I can be pretty sure that he feels pain. For one, I feel pain when pinched, and his body and nervous system are structurally similar to mine. Also, he might complain in a language I can understand, or simply start wailing.

After the singularity, we would have no such anchors. Every sufficiently complex algorithm being executed in the universe could turn out to be a mind. Perhaps a completely alien one with which communication would be impossible (like Stanislaw Lem's Solaris). Or perhaps a mind very much like ours living in a simulated environment, only the algorithm is such that we can't easily realise that (imagine for example a mind running on obfuscated code). Unknowingly stopping the execution of such an algorithm would be tantamount to involuntary mindslaughter.

So, should we refrain in the future from ever closing our screensavers? That doesn't seem practical. What we need then is a Turing machine which, given the description of another Turing machine, can predict if the execution of that machine will produce a mind. We could test our screensavers with it, to check if we are morally allowed to close them.

But, what if the "is-there-a-mind" problem turns out to be, in a way, analogous to the halting problem? If any possible Turing machine for solving the "is-there-a-mind" problem may itself develop a mind? If a machine cannot "detect" pain without feeling pain, or "detect" love without falling in love? That would bring with it a host of difficult issues.

I think this is a nifty premise for a science fiction story. (If such a story already exists, I'll be pissed off. One would like to have an original idea once in a while.)

Rereading Vance

Jeff VanderMeer recently reread Jack Vance's The Dying Earth. A few months ago, Robert Silverberg did the same.

Elizabeth, The Golden Age

The storm threatens the Spanish Armada; the spaniards, fearful, turn to prayer. And to whom they pray? Well, to the Virgin Mary, of course! They are catholic, you see. (Also pay attention to the rosary sinking into the depths. SYMBOLISM!)

That got me thinking. I realized that Elizabeth was being portrayed as another Virgin Mary, in a way. Consider the repeated emphasis on her virginity, or the light that bathes her during the failed assassination attempt, which can only be described as a saintly aura... or maybe the glow was a just a toned-down version of The Power of Love?

Anyway, Cate Blanchett looks better as a warrior queen in armor than as a bipolar Virgin Mary, in my opinion. Someone make a Boudica movie and give her the part, please.

The spaniards are depicted as the bad guys through and through, no doubt about that. I was puzzled mid-movie because torture against members of a religiously motivated insurgency was being portrayed as neccessary for the safety of the kingdom. In our post-Guantanamo days, this is a complete no-no for movies. But near the end, the film pulls an unconvincing (and unhistorical, though I may be wrong) plot twist that shows all the torturin' to be ultimately counterproductive.

All things considered, the movie is more than just anti-catholic: it is anti-religion in general. Protestantism seems to be used as a mere placeholder for our enlightened modern ideals of toleration. Not a lot of protestant religious fervor is shown.

The best way to enjoy the film is to accept its outrageousness and embrace it as a camp masterpiece. Revel in the pretty images that come by every now and then, and improve the dreadful dialogues in your head as they are being perpetrated.

The moment when Elizabeth asks John Dee about the battle, and he prophetizes that one great kingdom will end but doesn't make clear which one, is reminiscent of the Delphic oracle's answer to Croesus.

Lastly, I really liked the figure of the jesuit assassin, though he was woefully underutilized. Jesuit assassins are the most entertaining part of the black legend's imaginarium, in my opinion. More movies should feature them (the albino killer in "The Da Vinci Code" was the only remotely sympathetic character in that cinematrocity). Another jesuit assassin appears in the comic Heart of Empire by Bryan Talbot. What are some other examples?

Doorlocks and the Theory of Everything

When arriving home the other day, I met a neighbour who was having problems opening the front door to the building. "The lock's broken again", she complained. Actually, it wasn't. She just had been turning the key in the wrong direction. For two minutes.

I, too, sometimes forget which way to turn the key. Fortunately, there are only two possible ways. As part of their work, theoretical physicists have to deal with rotations in many dimensions of mind-bogglingly complex mathematical structures, like E8. So perhaps I wouldn't do too well at theoretical physics.

Southland Tales

"I'm making fun of myself, the angry liberal," Kelly said. "The joke is that things have gotten so bad that even neo-Marxists have been forced to bear arms."

(Richard Kelly, talking about Southland Tales)

Marxists, bearing arms? What an unlikely idea! This Richard Kelly guy has quite an imagination.

Avestruz versus Cerdo

Esta mañana mi padre vio a un avestruz importunar a un cerdo. El puerco estaba tan feliz retozando en su barrizal cuando el avestruz se le acercó y comenzó a asestarle picotazos. Y los picotazos de avestruz no son moco de pavo.

En vez de la reacción furiosa que cabría esperar, la víctima se limitó a emitir sin demasiada convicción periódicos gruñidos lastimeros. Y nada más, ya que la molicie del puerco se impuso a su incomodidad y le llevó a permanecer, estoico, en su barrizal, que otrora fuese Edén.

Al parecer la escena resultaba tan hilarante que mi padre y la demás gente que le acompañaba no pudieron contener las carcajadas. Todo el mundo que pasaba por el lugar se detenía un buen rato a contemplar el espectáculo.

Aunque me hubiese gustado estar allí, la hilaridad animal tiene sus peligros. Recordemos que, según la leyenda, el filósofo estoico Crísifo murió de risa mientras contemplaba a un burro borracho que intentaba comer unos higos.

Ojalá ningún avestruz furioso se entrometa en nuestros lodazales particulares. Y si lo hace, al menos que no haya testigos.

¡Chúpate esa, Descartes!

Lichtenberg afirmó que Descartes se equivocó justo en lo que pensaba que era lo más cierto. No debería haber afirmado que un pensador tiene que ser una entidad que existe separadamente. Su famoso Cogito no justificaba esa creencia. No debería haber afirmado, "Pienso, luego existo". Aunque esto es verdadero, resulta engañoso. Descartes podría haber dicho en vez de eso, "Se piensa: el pensamiento tiene lugar". O también: "Esto es un pensamiento, por tanto, como mínimo, se piensa un pensamiento".

(Derek Parfit: Razones y Personas. Antonio Machado Libros, Colección Teoría y Crítica)

Mereological nihilism and its activists

Mereological nihilism [...] is the position that objects with proper parts do not exist (not only objects in space, but also objects existing in time do not have any temporal parts), and only basic building blocks without parts exist (e.g., electrons, quarks), and thus the world we see and experience full of objects with parts is a product of human misperception (if we could see clearly, we'd not see compositive objects).

(Wikipedia entry for Mereological nihilism)

The Null-Os in Philip K. Dick's eponymous short story could be thought of as active (and enthusiastic!) followers of mereological nihilism:

Null-O is a 1958 science fiction short story by Philip K. Dick. This rather brief story examines the concept of totally unempathic and 'logical' humans. These beings view individual collections of matter, i.e. any object, as subjective structures and see the true state of reality as an 'undifferentiated world of pure energy'. After attaining positions of power they proceed with a plan to ultimately return everything in the universe to this state. This is to be done by the construction of successively more powerful bombs, ultimately resulting in the rather improbable 'U-bomb' that will homogenise the whole universe.

(Wikipedia entry for Null-O)

It's a really wacky story, and not exactly a literary masterpiece I guess, but nevertheless it is among my favorite PKD works. I have already quoted from the story in an older post.

Is "Null-O" a satire of A. E. van Vogt's "The World of Null-A"? Possibly. Dick wasn't very keen of the idea of superpowered, superintelligent, omnicompetent mutants coming to save the day. See also: The Golden Man.

War, Altruism, Genes, Morality

Throughout history it has been almost axiomatic that a nation seeking to avoid subjection to a foreign overlord must itself achieve and exercise the powers of an overlord, and will succeed in doing so only by having at its disposal substantial military capabilities—and using them. One must rule or be ruled; there is no middle course.

(Trevor Bryce: Life and Society in the Hittite World)

Altruism—benefiting fellow group members at a cost to oneself—and parochialism—hostility toward individuals not of one's own ethnic, racial, or other group—are common human behaviors. [...] Our game-theoretic analysis and agent-based simulations show that under conditions likely to have been experienced by late Pleistocene and early Holocene humans, neither parochialism nor altruism would have been viable singly, but by promoting group conflict, they could have evolved jointly.

(a scientific paper quoted in this post at Dienekes' Anthropology Blog)

Once we see that our moral beliefs are simply an adaptation put in place by natural selection, that is an end to it. Morality is no more than a collective illusion fobbed off on us by our genes for reproductive ends.

(Michael Ruse)

Each of the quotes is unsettling enough by itself, when taken together the picture becomes almost unbearably grim. Not only war is an inescapable evil but, ironically, our nobler instincts are mere byproducts of it, arrived at through a blind process of natural selection that has nothing to do with any kind of objective moral facts, which indeed may not exist.

On the other hand, consider puppies. Puppies are cute.

Google Hollow Earth

There are other worlds, but they're all in the mind of D&D nerds and they're full of sissy elves.

(Paul Eluard)

Sometimes, when I wallow in my abject nerdom and my already tenuous link with reality gets streched even further, I ponder that versions of Google Earth for imaginary worlds would be mightly cool, and useful to boot. For example, Google Tschai would be an invaluable tool for planning your incursions into the Carabas in search of sequins. And in some cases, the very fate of the world depends on a properly planned quest. One does not simply walk into Mordor, but consults Google Middle Earth first (Galadriel's mirror has a really cool interface, by the way, even if the search results are a bit erratic).

However, such projects would be fraught with technical difficulties. Our world is pretty simple: emerged bidimensional surfaces (save for some slight bump here and there, like the Himalayas) which are easily observed by the prying eyes of satellites. Fantasy worlds are more complicated. What about underground kingdoms, like the Underdark or Foreverness? Satellites won't be of much use in those cases; we would need something like Barrington Bailey's "antronoscope":

A more detailed exercise in alternative cosmology is found in "Me and My Antronoscope'' (1973), which is set in a rigid universe where life exists in bubblelike lacunae. A rebellious individual in one such lacuna challenges the reigning orthodoxy with his notion that the continuum contains other worlds, and sets off defiantly in his solidity ship in order to search for them. After a long journey he breaks through into a new cavity, and, though it is empty and lifeless, he feels that its existence vindicates his theory. He perishes, convinced that he has been the pioneer who will lead his race to the conquest of the universe. This little drama is perceived by the inhabitants of another world by means of an antronoscope, and their activities form a frame narrative offering the merest glimpse of the other wonders of the infinite universe which this marvelous device exposes to their eyes.

(Brian Stableford's review of Barrington J. Bayley's The Knights of the Limits)

And let's not forget underwater kingdoms, and cloud kingdoms. The latter ones may change position -or even form, or dissolve- in a matter of days according to the prevailing winds. The map may quickly become obsolete unless it is frequently updated.

From the shelf Gersen took down an untidy portfolio, containing ballads, odes, dithyrambs: A Growl for Gruel, The Juices I Have Tramped, I Am a Darting Minstrel, They Pass!, Drusilla's Dream, Castles in the Clouds and the Anxieties of Those Who Live Directly Below by Reason of Falling Objects and Wastes.

(Jack Vance: The Palace of Love)

Besides the difficulties with data acquisition, the layer functionality of Google Earth would have to be greatly extended to allow switching between all those superimposed realms. And I'm not even going to discuss the possibility of alternate versions of the same world in parallel dimensions, or lovecraftian Dreamlands. No doubt those at Google were aware of all the hurdles I mentioned. That's why they decided to tackle the simplest case -the real world- first.

One last thing: what type of map projection is the one best suited to hollow earths, in particular those hollow earths open at the poles, in which the external and internal surfaces communicate? And for worlds in the shape of mobious strips, or klein bottles? These are pressing questions, in my opinion.

In general, the concept of GIS for fantasy worlds offers untapped, if challenging, possibilities.

Edit: How naive of me. Apparently, Google Middle Earth already exists.

Hola, soy yo

Cando llames al portero automático de tu casa y pregunten "¿Quién es?" no respondas "Soy yo". ¡Por supuesto que tú eres tú! ¿Quién ibas a ser, si no? Esa afirmación es siempre cierta, quienquiera que la diga. Por lo tanto, no le sirve a la persona en el piso para determinar quién es el que está en el portal. En todo caso, lo hará basándose en el tono de tu voz u otros aspectos ajenos al contenido proposicional de tu afirmación.

Deja de decir "Soy yo". Intenta comunicar algún pequeño dato fácilmente obtenible que pueda resultar marginalmente útil a la persona en el piso, como por ejemplo la hora, el tiempo que hace fuera, o si al venir has visto un gato.

Lost books, imaginary books

Lost books -see this post at Memorabilia Antonina- fascinate me. So do imaginary books. They're both a tease, suggesting unexplored literary landscapes while reminding us of that they're out of our reach.

I'm trying to remember examples of fantasy works wherein an imaginary book is regarded as lost. Right now I can't come up with anything, but they exist for sure. Conversely, I wonder if some of the works which we now regard as lost in truth never existed; a joke played on posterity by our ancestors.

Has any fearless classicist ever tried rewrite a lost work? To provide plausible, if fanciful, reconstructions the two missing parts of Aeschylus' Prometheus trilogy for example? The techniques pioneered by Pierre Menard could be of use...

Perhaps we should consider these two conditions, being lost and being imaginary, as part of the natural lifecycle of books. Because every book starts as an imaginary, unbirthed entity in the mind of its author. And every book will eventually be lost and forgotten at some point; entropy will take care of that.

Horses and Mules Exempted

The imposition of the death penalty (otherwise extremely rare in The Laws) for intercourse with pigs, dogs, and sheep might reflect Hittite society’s repugnance at bestiality. But that seems to be negated by a clause (200-a) which explicitly exempts from punishment those who indulge in sexual relations with a horse or a mule. Speculation on why one may have sex with such animals but none others has led to a number of explanations in the scholarly literature which are ultimately inconclusive, even if they have the merit of being ingenious and entertaining.

(Trevor Bryce: Life and Society in the Hittite World)

Glandular Apostasy

I wonder if some people are temperamentally "programmed" to completely change their convictions at one point in their lives, whatever those convictions happen to be. Such a change would be fueled by an inner pulsion, to be rationalized only afterwards with more or less convincing explanations.

Every worldview holds a paradox at its core, gnawing at it like the proverbial worm in the apple. Every movement has its share of irksome members and vociferous blowhards. When a prospective apostate of the type I have hypothesized arrives at a particular stage in life (say, full maturity) his disillusion gland stars pumping chagrinine into his bloodstream. He becomes hypersensitive. What yesterday seemed like slight cracks in his intellectual edifice now become gaping holes that threaten to tear it down. The other tenants go from friendly neighbors to obnoxious bores, or worse. He begins to consider moving house. He finally does and, just before he arrives to his new mental home, the disillusion gland stops secreting and withers, not to work ever again. What a sturdy, solid house, unlike the old one! How friendly the neighbours! And yet, had he started there, he would have travelled the other way.

Mad Max in the Bronze Age

Yet the actual nature, extent, and duration of their activities [of the Sea Peoples] leave much room for doubt. The view that they were participant in a carefully planned military operation is not sustainable. Rather, they were a largely disorganized array of groups, who banded together from time to time in their wanderings and sometimes joined forces for raids and, on occasions, more extensive military operations. They may have had much of the character of the roving, marauding bands that are frequently depicted by science fiction writers in a post nuclear war environment.

(Trevor Bryce: Kingdom of the Hittites)

Quote spotted at Google Books. The amount of content avaliable there is surprising.

The Power of Love

Warning: spoilers for Stardust.

There are good fantasy movies, mediocre fantasy movies, and bad fantasy movies. Then there is a special brand of bad fantasy movie, which is truly the bottom of the barrel, the dregs of the cup, the worst of the worst.

I'm referring to those where Evil is defeated at the end through the POWER OF LOVE. During the final confrontation with the bad guy, the protagonist, who has a big warm heart full of loving-kindness towards his parents, his lady friend, or his pet hamster, somehow externalizes those feelings as colored death-rays which affect only evil people, thus killing the bad guy. That's what quality fantasy consists in, the scriptwriters seem to believe: representing human feelings as colored death-rays.

The first Harry Potter movie belonged to that wretched company. Now you can add Stardust the movie to the list (did the original Neil Gaiman story have such a crappy ending?).

Edit: Here is tedg's review of the movie.

Parfit and The Prestige

I was going to make a post about how a scene in Christopher Nolan's The Prestige perfectly illustrates a philosophical point about identity made by Derek Parfit in his work Reasons and Persons, but after a brief search I discovered that a similar post already exists elsewhere. So read it, and this follow-up too.

Lafferty on shooting and being shot at

Here is a quote by R. A. Lafferty about shooting people.

Here's another about being shot at:

When a man shoots at you once it can be an accident. When he shoots at you a second time he is still entitled to the doubt. But when he keeps it up the doubt gradually fades, and a certainty develops.

(R. A. Lafferty: The Devil is Dead)

Speaking of Lafferty, sfsignal has recently posted a link to a short story by him in Gutenberg titled "Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas".

Peril from the Provinces

The post Which leaders make history? at Marginal Revolution quotes the book Arsenals of Folly:

Leaders who make history are often provincials: Provincials attempt what sophisticates consider naive.

(Richard Rhodes: Arsenals of Folly: the Making of the Nuclear Arms Race.)

I was reminded of:

Judge, Sir, of my surprise, when I found that a very great proportion of the assembly (a majority, I believe, of the members who attended) was composed of practitioners in the law. It was composed, not of distinguished magistrates, who had given pledges to their country of their science, prudence, and integrity; not of leading advocates, the glory of the bar; not of renowned professors in universities;—but for the far greater part, as it must in such a number, of the inferior, unlearned, mechanical, merely instrumental members of the profession. There were distinguished exceptions; but the general composition was of obscure provincial advocates, of stewards of petty local jurisdictions, country attornies, notaries, and the whole train of the ministers of municipal litigation, the fomenters and conductors of the petty war of village vexation. From the moment I read the list, I saw distinctly, and very nearly as it has happened, all that was to follow.

(Edmund Burke: Reflections on the French Revolution.)

Wasn't Robespierre from the provinces, too?

Hubbard, Malzberg, and other things

The blog Sans Everything has a post arguing that science fiction is at its core a religious genre, and establishing a dichotomy beween L. Ron Hubbard, who became a messiah, and Philp K. Dick, who could have done so but chose not to.

Theres's also a post on Barry N. Malzberg. The blog's non-sf related entries are interesting, too.

"and the dirt came out"

Say you were some dashing gentleman who offended some other dashing idiot, grabbed his favorite prostitute off him or whatever, and you had a duel. Even if he only got in one belly thrust before your seconds called a halt, which they usually did very fast once claret was poured, you were gone. Once that knife or sword sliced into the peritoneum, it would pierce your intestines and spray a lot of shit, literally, through the bowel.

(The War Nerd: Shank you very much)

And Ehud came unto him; and he was sitting in a summer parlour, which he had for himself alone. And Ehud said, I have a message from God unto thee. And he arose out of his seat.

And Ehud put forth his left hand, and took the dagger from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly:

And the haft also went in after the blade; and the fat closed upon the blade, so that he could not draw the dagger out of his belly; and the dirt came out.

(The Bible, King James Version. Judges 3:20-22)

When is the best time to blog?

When you have other things to do, urgently.

When is the best time to live?

To the theatre!

Last friday, my girldfriend and I went to the Rosalía theatre in A Coruña to watch a representation of Romeo and Juliet by the young talents of the Teatro do Noroeste company.

At two moments during the play both leads went naked; I was attentively scandalized. Juliet had beautiful feet. Afterwards my girlfriend assured me, to my relief, that she never glanced at Romeo with anything other than a cold and detached critical appreciation.

What I'm trying to say is, I think I'm starting to appreciate Shakespeare.

I found that one feels more compelled to write about the plays he attends than about the movies he watches. A movie is nothing more than a faint echo of things that happened elsewhere. With plays, you were there.

The Neolithic Revolution and the Repugnant Conclusion

The Repugnant Conclusion is a result in population ethics which the man who came up with it (philosopher Derek Parfit) finds distasteful, but difficult to avoid. Basically, it states that for any given population with a high quality of life, there's a much larger population whose existence, if other things were equal, would be better even if its members have lives barely worth living. That is, the aggregate quality of life of the larger population dwarfs that of the smaller population by reason of its numbers alone.

An interesting and disturbing concept, but somewhat theoretical, isn't it? Well, the fact is that the scenario used to illustrate the Repugnant Conclusion closely resembles an aspect of the Neolithic Revolution mentioned in places like Jared Diamond's essay Humanity's Greatest Mistake.

Apparently, hunter-gatherers lived longer and healthier lives than agriculturalists, with more leisure time. However, their way of life did not support high population densities (that is, they correspond to the high-quality-of-life-but-small-size population in the Repugnant Conclusion). Hunter-gatherers were nevertheless displaced by the agriculturalists, who were worse fed, suffered from more diseases, lived less, and had to work more. Why, then, the latter prevailed? Because agriculture supports greater population densities. Thus, farmers will end up overwhelming hunter-gatherers. (Are the various myths of a past Golden Age a dimmed cultural memory of the hunter-gatherer epoch of human history? Or is that benevolent conception of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle the newest iteration of the myth of a Golden age?)

It is often argued that agriculture gave humans more control over their food supply, but this has been disputed by the finding that nutritional standards of Neolithic populations were generally inferior to that of hunter gatherers, and life expectancy may in fact have been shorter (see "Disease" below). In actual fact, by reducing the necessity for the carrying of children, Neolithic societies had a major impact upon the spacing of children (carrying more than one child at a time is impossible for hunter-gatherers, which leads to children being spaced four or more years apart). This increase in the birth rate was required to offset increases in death rates and required settled occupation of territory and encouraged larger social groups.

(Wikipedia article on the Neolithic Revolution. And here is a dissenting view critical of Diamond.)

From the vantage point of our modern society, in which we are far better off than any hunther-gatherers (though some may disagree) the transition to civilization may have been worth it after all. But suppose for a moment that, for whatever season, the development of human societies had stopped at the level of the Ancient Near East, of even the Middle Ages, and had stayed at that level forever. Would the transition have been worth it in that case?

Lets remember that, until relatively recently, the vast majority of humans were farmers who did not receive any significant benefit from civilization, which was the prerogative of a tiny elite (the governing and priestly classes, city dwellers in general). In fact, that elite ruthlessly exploited farmers for its own benefit. They were what historian William H. McNeill calls macroparasites in his book Plagues and Peoples.

Many of the greatest cities of classical times were placed within sight of forbidding highlands. Every year their inhabitants ransacked the surrounding countryside to feed themselves. Describing the symptoms of widespread malnutrition in the countryside in the middle of the second century, the doctor Galen observed: "The city-dwellers, as was their practice, collected and stored enough corn for all the coming year immediately after the harvest. They carried off the wheat, the barley, the beans and the lentils and left what remained to the country folk." Seen in this light, the history of the Roman empire is the history of the ways in which the 10 per cent of the population, who lived in the town and have left their mark on the course of European civilization, fed themselves, in the summary manner described by Galen, from the labours of the remaining 90 per cent who worked the land.

(Peter Brown: The World of Late Antiquity)

The typical Middle Ages farmer didn't give a fig that Plato ever existed. The pressures of rapacious nobles and tax collectors were much more real to him. Not that city dwellers fared better in all respects, either. Until relatively recently, cities were demographic sinks ravaged by disease who needed a constant influx of people from the countryside to maintain their population level.

La Llave de Cristal

Una cerrajería/ferretería situada en la Calle de la Merced de A Coruña tiene el bonito nombre de La Llave de Cristal, supongo que inspirado por la novela de Dashiell Hammett. Creo que la leí hace tiempo, pero no me acuerdo de mucho.

Otros posibles nombres de inspiración literaria para una ferretería: El Tambor de Hojalata, El Soldadito de Plomo, El Talón de Hierro.

Edit: Parece que se trata no de una cerrajería/ferretería, sino de una cerrajería/cristalería. Así que el nombre es perfectamente apropiado.

Dragon Wars and Dragon Masters

This is a poster for D-War (Dragon Wars) a movie so bad watching it will give you eye cancer. The poster is reminiscent of one classic cover for Jack Vance's The Dragon Masters, a novella so good that its reading sets cross-eyes straight and allows you to perceive three extra colors of the spectrum*.

* hyperbole.

Slow Tuesday Night

The breakneck pace of catchphrase evolution suggested by this strip at Language Log ("ultra-hip nostalgic retro-phrase, ironically evoking the earlier era of ten days earlier") reminds me of a Lafferty story, which also deals with compressed timelines and is avaliable online: Slow Tuesday Night.

The panhandler was Basil Bagelbaker, who would be the richest man in the world within an hour and a half. He would make and lose four fortunes within eight hours; and these not the little fortunes that ordinary men acquire, but titanic things.

(R. A. Lafferty: Slow Tuesday Night)

Catchphrases are not a new phenomenon. How far back in history they go? Is there any study that deals with that question? I suppose the population density provided by cities is necessary for catchphrase spreading.

Vista al suelo, vista al cielo.

Si nos viésemos forzados a elegir entre caminar mirando siempre al suelo y caminar mirando siempre al cielo, ¿cómo deberíamos escoger?

Es cierto que la primera opción expondrá a nuestra mirada dolorosos testimonios de la corrupción de este mundo sublunar, como por ejemplo las cagadas de perro. Pero no es menos cierto que precisamente tales visiones desagradables son las que nos evitan en gran medida contactos más bruscos y directos con lo indeseable. El contemplador del infinito pisa más mierda.

La vista al suelo ofrece otras ventajas. Calculo que a lo largo de mi vida han sido alrededor de ocho con cincuenta los euros que me he encontrado tirados en la acera. ¿Compensa ese dinero la pérdida del cielo estrellado, de las nubes algodonosas? ¡SÍ!

No niego que la bóveda celeste sea una visión inspiradora, ennoblecedora incluso. Pero a veces está nublado. ¿Y qué impresión se da a la gente? Cuando nos cruzamos con un mirasuelos, pensamos que está enfadado o triste, algo para lo cual casi todo el mundo tiene motivos. Los miracielos en cambio parecen ingenuos, y hasta bobos.

Undead commentary

We have now discovered a motive which can explain the idea that the souls of those who have just died are transformed into demons and the necessity felt by survivors to protect themselves against their hostility.

(Sigmund Freud: Totem and Taboo)

- They were chasing me... screaming... I was scared.

- Who were chasing you?

- My mom... my dad... They were trying to kill me. There were others, too.

(a bit of dialogue from 28 Weeks Later)

Roger: You'll take care of me when I go, won't you, Peter?

Peter: Just rest, man. Save your strength.

Roger: I don't want to be walkin' around... like THAT!... Peter... PETER?

Peter: I'm here, man!

Roger: Don't do it until you are sure I *am* coming back! I'm gonna try... not to... I'm gonna try... not to... come back. I'm gonna try... not to...

(a bit of dialogue from Dawn of the Dead [1978])

Having a loved one turn into an inhuman (but still recognizable) monster who seeks to harm you is a primal fear. The modern remake of Dawn of the Dead knows this and exploits it to the maximum. From sleeping happily in her husband's arms, in a matter of seconds the protagonist finds herself being chased by that same husband, now suitably zombified. Meanwhile, the Apocalypse rages around her.

This review of the movie in Cinematical states that the film (especially the terrifying beginning set to Johnny Cash's "The man comes around") manages to evoke the feeling of horror and disorientation of 9/11, at least for the reviewer.

I would also say that the underrated 28 Weeks Later is a perfect metaphor for some aspects of the situation in Iraq, and for our current climate of fear in general. The first three minutes of the movie are here. Zombie films: great sources for sociopolitical commentary.

Poets and Publicists

This post on The Mumpisums reminded me of...

"Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time-"

That's the sort of thing she would have written before the rise of advertising. The correlation is perfectly clear. Advertising up, lyric poetry down. There are only so many people capable of putting together words that stir and move and sing. When it became possible to earn a very good living in advertising by exercising this capability, lyric poetry was left to untalented screwballs who had to shriek for attention and compete by eccentricity."

(Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth: The Space Merchants [1953])