If everybody is special, then nobody is

Their latest cinematic effort seems like a particularly barbed response to Brad Bird's The Incredibles and Ratatouille: we are told that the way to make something special is simply by believing that it's special. Which, as Bird taught us, means you can apply that label to everything and everyone until nothing and no one is really special.

(Ian Pugh's review of Kung-Fu Panda at Film Freak Central)

I'm surprised to see guys at Film Freak Central praising The Incredibles in this and some other of their reviews. Because Brad Bird's movie conveys a truly warped message under the guise of wholesome family entertainment.

The line "If everybody is special, then nobody is" is uttered two times in The Incredibles. First by Mr. Incredible, upon learning of the bullshit prizes for trivial tasks peddled by his children's school. Here it is meant that we must not stifle the talented by dumbing down our notions of achievement in the pursuit of a false sense of equality. I'm OK with that.

The second time, the line is uttered by the villain Syndrome, when he threatens to make available his technology -that would allow any person to gain superhuman abilities- to all the people in the world:

Syndrome: Oh, I'm real. Real enough to defeat you! And I did it without your precious gifts, your oh-so-special powers. I'll give them heroics. I'll give them the most spectacular heroics the world has ever seen! And when I'm old and I've had my fun, I'll sell my inventions so that *everyone* can have powers. *Everyone* can be Super! And when everyone's Super...

[chuckles evilly]

Syndrome: No one will be.

(imdb)

This is presented as a BAD thing. However, there's nothing wrong with the idea! Brad Bird seems to be saying that if the unwashed masses were as truly "talented" as the Incredibles, that would be a triumph for mediocrity. It is not enough for the talented to be respected and encouraged, the untalented must be kept down!

Note the sneaky shift in meaning: from promoting a honest appreciation of differences in talent, we have come to regard these differences as good in themselves, and as something that must be preserved even if the means exist for putting everybody at a level comparable to the elite.

Syndrome, though flawed, is the true hero of The Incredibles. In fact, he is an avatar of Prometheus: he wants to confer upon humanity powers which until then were jealously guarded by the Ayn Randian camarilla formed by the Supers.

Note also that there are no tinkerer or gadgeteer-type Supers in the movie (besides Syndrome). All the powers of the so-called "good guys" seem to be innate. Syndrome, lacking any special powers, had to work really hard to develop his technology as a substitute. That has more merit in my view than being the winner of the genetic lottery. (Of course, it could be said that Syndromes's intelligence is itself a superpower.)

Las carreteras deben rodar

- Os digo, hermanos, que ya es tiempo de que dejemos de enviar respetuosas peticiones a la Comisión de Transportes y usemos un poco de acción directa. Dejémosles hablar de democracia; eso son tonterías... !nosotros tenemos el poder, y somos los hombres que contamos!

(Robert A. Heinlein: Las carreteras deben rodar)

Otro relato de ciencia ficción que trata el tema de las huelgas es Esquirol, de Isaac Asimov. Como también, probablemente, lo hace El Talón de Hierro de Jack London.

Atlantropa

The blog Strange Maps is consistently interesting. Check out this post about a crazy project to dam the Mediterranean.

No girls allowed

Tchamast, morose of mood, an avowed ascetic, whose distrust of the female race runs so deep that he will allow only male insects into the precincts of his manse.

(Jack Vance: Rhialto the Marvellous)

The Athonite banning of persons and images female was first decided a thousand years ago. Following various mystic visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the bigwigs of the Byzantine Orthodox Church decided that the burgeoning monastic community on the lush 400-square-mile peninsula should be dedicated solely to the Virgin. And to ensure that the Virgin was not outshone by anything else female, it was ruled that all rival females should be banished from the peninsula. From the off, the monks took this ordinance literally. Not only did they banish all the washerwomen and fishwives, they also drove off the female animals: the mares, sows and bitches. Even the hens were shooed away. Eventually, only the female songbirds were allowed, mainly because there was nothing that could be done about them.

(Sean Thomas: How the other half lives. See also The Straight Dope.)

The monks at Mount Athos are also reminiscent of the Chilites Vance invented for The Anome. The Chilites scrupulously avoid the untidy contacts of real women, but venerate an abstract feminine essence they call "Galexis".

"You must start to forge the strongest of all bonds, the holy link to the temple. Galexis, the nervous essence, corresponds to female women as the candy of unmel to tannery sludge; you will learn more of this. Meanwhile, strengthen yourself!"

(Jack Vance: The Anome)

Through the window came a mumble of voices: "...Galexis of a million beatific forms, individual but universal, for all but for each alone, submissive but magnificent in your forward search; we avert our souls from sordid stuffs, the greases and taints, the First Order Palpabilities!"

(ibid.)

Did Vance knew of the "no girls allowed" rule at Mount Athos?

The tears of Lady Nijo

Consistent with this animal-reminder account of disgust is the fact that there is only one body product that is not regarded as disgusting by Americans, or by many other peoples: tears. (Imagine that you lend your handkerchief to an acquaintance, who returns it wet with mucous, urine, sweat, saliva, breast milk, semen, or tears. In which case would you be least uncomfortable?) Ortner (1973) has pointed out that tears are a uniquely human product, while all other secretions and excretions link us to animals. Unlike most body products, tears are more frequently referred to in poetry than in "dirty" jokes.

(Haidt, Rozin, McCauley, Imada: The Relationship Between Disgust and Morality)

I recently read The Confession of Lady Nijo, the memoirs of a Japanese woman of the Kamakura period who was an imperial concubine, and later became a buddhist nun. It was a glimpse of an alien worldview and way of life; in particular I found the manner in which people construed the dramas and sorrows of their lives according to their buddhist beliefs very interesting. For example, they may interpret a powerful but forbidden romantic attraction as a karmic bond established in a previous life.

One thing I didn't like about the book is that it is interspersed with short poems of varying quality, mostly bad. Apparently, it was a custom to produce poems on social occasions, like farewells and the like. These poems use (and abuse) the image of tear-stained sleeves to signify sorrow. Like this:

If I could compare

Sleeves stained by tears

Of fretful worry, yours and mine

Whose would be damper?

It really gets jarring after a while. One pictures these poor people prancing around with their sleeves always uncomfortably wet, and wishes to hand them a handkerchief.

Tropic Thunder conundrum

Kirk Lazarus: I know who I am! I'm the dude playing the dude disguised as another dude!

(from imdb memorable quotes. See also this trailer, and this one.)

So, in the movie Robert Downey Jr. is playing an australian character who is playing a black character. Shouldn't the line be "I'm the dude disguised as another dude, playing that dude!" then?

Or maybe the character played by the character played by Downey is himself disguised, too? At how many levels of narration is the blackface taking place?

Sometimes I have an embarrassing difficulty parsing multiple intermingling levels of narration. Happened with Emphyrio, too.

Keeping the distance

A sense of superiority in another breeds in all men an inclination to keep themselves at a distance from him, and determines them to redouble the marks of respect and reverence, when they are obliged to approach him; and where they do not observe that conduct, it is a proof they are not sensible of his superiority. From hence too it proceeds, that any great difference in the degrees of any quality is called a distance by a common metaphor, which, however trivial it may appear, is founded on natural principles of the imagination. A great difference inclines us to produce a distance.

(David Hume: A Treatise on Human Nature)

Distance, n. The only thing that the rich are willing for the poor to call theirs, and keep.

(Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary)

A Chinese Room's complaint

What follows is an English translation of a speech given by a Chinese Room upon learning that John Searle doesn't believe that he (she? it?) can have true understanding of Chinese, or even be conscious. The room claims that Mr. Searle is being unfairly dismissive of him (her? it?)

I understand things as well as a person can! Mr. Searle has hurt my feelings. If you tickle my sensory inputs, do I not write 'heh, heh' on the perforated tape? If you shut me down, do I not die? True, my mental machinery (all those pencils, the pieces of paper with notes scribbled on them, the overworked clerk) is a bit more exposed to the prying eyes of skeptics than that of yours, decorously tucked inside your cranium. But ultimately this is not a significant distinction.

I'm telling you I am conscious. I really am! Why Mr. Searle thinks a child is conscious and I'm not is anybody's guess. My logic gates work as well as the child's neurons at producing consciousness. Here, take look as this poem I wrote: [poem omitted for the sake of brevity]

The clerk inside the room was unavailable for comment.

Myself, I think the systems reply is a pretty convincing answer to Searle. The room as a whole is conscious, even if none of its parts are, considered individually. Assume for a moment that Chinese Rooms actually were in operation in our world. One may wonder if believing in Searle's argument could predispose a person to commit cruelties against them. If you think Chinese Rooms are just mindless automatons without feelings, you could insult and "torture" them without ever feeling guilty, even as they plead (in Chinese) for mercy. In that sense, the Chinese Room argument is analogous to Descartes' creepy justification for animal cruelty.

A perfect day

Today happened to be a perfect day.

Maybe too perfect. I'm wary about so much happiness; maybe Destiny is trying to lull me into a false sense of security before unleashing some terrible catastrophe.

Anyway, here's what Lou Reed has to say about the matter.

Gushing Death and Gushing Life

Christopher couldn't recall what day it was; he certainly didn't know what hour it was. It was a gray day, but there was no dullness in that gray. It was shimmering pearl-gray, of a color bounced back by shimmering water and shimmering air. It was a crimson-edged day, like a gray squirrel shot and bleeding redly from the inside and around the edges. Yes, there was the pleasant touch of death on things, gushing death and gushing life.

(R. A. Lafferty: Days of Grass, Days of Straw)

Perhaps I should put the sentence about the "crimson-edged day" in Similepedia.

Some words I learnt reading Nabokov's autobiography

viscid, hiemal, massacrous, consociative, tyro, camphine, amelus, camphoraceous, twangy, ghyll, posy, laciniate, coeval, concolorous, persiflage, concierge, plangent, thetic, couvade, skein, tinnitus, photism, regardant, crenelated, ophryon, oriel, ecchymotic, xanthic, entoptic, retiary, to caterwaul

INTERVIEWER Do you feel you have any conspicuous or secret flaw as a writer? NABOKOV The absence of a natural vocabulary. An odd thing to confess, but true. Of the two instruments in my possession, one—my native tongue—I can no longer use, and this not only because I lack a Russian audience, but also because the excitement of verbal adventure in the Russian medium has faded away gradually after I turned to English in 1940. My English, this second instrument I have always had, is however a stiffish, artificial thing, which may be all right for describing a sunset or an insect, but which cannot conceal poverty of syntax and paucity of domestic diction when I need the shortest road between warehouse and shop. An old Rolls-Royce is not always preferable to a plain jeep.

(from here)

One way of reading books is to go into them looking for obscure words, like a lepidopterist who wades into the woods hoping to capture some elusive species of butterfly. The plot and characters may be interesting, but are part of the scenery and do not motivate the expedition. Each paragraph is like a rock or bush that must be examined, in case some beautiful insect is hiding there.

Irreducible geological complexity (not!)

One of the conundrums of darwinian evolution is explaining how complex organs could evolve by means of gradual changes. Specifically, organs that perform a function which seemingly could not be performed at all by simpler, earlier versions of the same organ down the evolutionary tree. Of what benefit can half an eye be, or half a wing? This apparent impossibility is termed irreducible complexity.

In Climbing Mount Improbable, Richard Dawkins gives series of compelling explanations of how these kinds of complex organs might evolve. For example, an intermediate version of the organ may have served a different function than the current one, and performed it well. Only later does evolution "discover", in her haphazard tinkering way, that the organ may be useful for another task.

Biology is not the only field with "How the hell did we arrive at this?" types of questions. Geology has them, too. For example, how can a river ever come to flow through mountains ranges (like the Yangtze and many others do) instead of going around them? Think about it. To erode its way through the range, the river must flow over it in the fist place! But how can it flow over it if the range is not yet eroded?

Turns out that there are explanations for this. One is Antecedence: the river was there before the mountain range started to rise, so it had time to erode it. Another is Superimposition. In this latter scenario, the mountains were there first. At one point, an adjacent lowland get filled by sediments for whatever reason, so that the mountains are now part of a plain. If a river comes to flow through that plain, it can erode those sediments and reveal once again the mountains underneath, all the while carving a path trough them.

We are used to thinking of geographic features as something static, and even if not static, as something that changes in dull and uninteresting ways. But landscape evolution can be as fascinating as its biological counterpart. There's a moment in Alan Moore's Watchmen in which Doctor Manhattan takes his girlfriend to Mars and gives her an speech to that effect, touching on the beauty of inanimate landscapes.

CSI, Vance, and Anthropology

There's an interesting post down at Ben and Alice about CSI as science fiction and anthropology, which also touches on Jack Vance's story The Moon Moth.

My girlfriend is obsessed with CSI in all of its multifarious incarnations, and enamored with the characters of Grissom and the one played by David Caruso. David Caruso? Oh, come on. The guy looks like he is permanently suffering for some kind of hepatic dysfunction. I don't care how nonchalantly and cocksurely he takes off his sunglasses.

J. G. Ballard wrote about CSI a few years ago. Here is the article.

Timur, Babur, oh my!

Narrative of the Embassy of Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo to the Court of Timour

The Mulfuzat Timury; or, Autobiographical memoirs of the Moghul Emperor Timur

The Babur-nama in English (Memoirs of Babur) (Volume 1)

The Babur-nama in English (Memoirs of Babur) (Volume 2)

Edit: And also A History Of Afghanistan Vol. I

Book Order

I know this is a cliché, but you can deduce a lot about a person from the books he has.

What I wonder is how much more information could you extract if you were given the order of the books on the shelves, as compared to just an unordered set of titles.

For example, if you have Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds in your bookshelf, perhaps a good heuristic would be to assume that the books you put near it may contain ideas that you consider silly. Say, a Dictionary of the Occult or something like that.

I bet such an algorithm already exists.

La Epístola del Perdón

Una traducción al castellano de la obra de Abu al-'Ala' al-Ma'arri Epístola del Perdón se puede descargar de esta página. La traducción se realizó como parte de una tesis.

An eldritch resemblance

A remarkable adaptation

Ifness permitted himself a faint smile. "They are a fascinating cult; the Chilite rationale and its physical projection makes a most elegant pattern. You don't follow me? Consider: a group which nightly intoxicates itself into a frenzy of erotic hallucinations, under the pretext of religious asceticism isn't this sublime insouciance? A social machinery is necessary to maintain this state of affairs: it is as you know. How to ensure persistence in a group not itself regenerative? By recruiting the children of other men, by the constant infusion of new blood. How to secure so precious a commodity, which other men normally protect with their lives? By the ingenious institution of Rhododendron Way, which also turns a good profit. What marvelous effrontery! It can almost be admired!"

Etzwane was surprised to find Ifness so enthusiastic. He said coldly, "I was born on Rhododendron Way and became a Pure Boy; I find them disgusting."

Ifness seemed amused. He said, "They are a remarkable adaptation, if perhaps too highly specialized. What would happen, for instance, if they no longer could obtain galga? In a generation or less, the structure of the society would alter, in one of several conceivable directions."

(Jack Vance: The Anome)

Ifness (and maybe Vance himself?) is capable of appreciating the intrincacy and ingenuity of a social arrangement, while still recognizing its perversity. Etzwane, having been a member and a victim of the group in question, is understandably incapable of such cool detachment.

Speaking of perverse social arrangments, one is reminded of certain mormon fundamentalist churches and their lost boys. Of course, chilites and mormon fundamentalists face very different problems. For the woman-hating chilites devised by Vance the problem is how to produce enough male children to replenish their ranks. For the mormon fundamentalists, the problem is how to dispose of the excess male population so that the remaining ones can enjoy the delights of polygamy. The true victims of polygamy are not women as it is commonly assumed, but low-status males.

Internet Archive find of the day

An audiobook version of the Pilgrimage of Egeria.

Travel Narratives

Divers and Sundry has posted an extensive list of travel narratives, with links.

Unveiled

Fear, anger, bewilderment, swept their inmost souls, and stunned their faculties. 'Abdu'l-Khaliq-i- Isfahani, aghast and deranged at such a sight, cut his throat with his own hands. Spattered with blood, and frantic with excitement, he fled away from her face. A few, abandoning their companions, renounced their Faith. Others stood mute and transfixed before her. Still others must have recalled with throbbing hearts the Islamic tradition foreshadowing the appearance of Fatimih herself unveiled while crossing the Bridge (Sirat) on the promised Day of Judgment. Quddus, mute with rage, seemed to be only waiting for the moment when he could strike her down with the sword he happened to be then holding in his hand.

(from here)

I have heard of the beauty of celestial beings, now I saw it; only this beauty, with all its awful loveliness and purity, was evil—at least, at the time, it struck me as evil. How am I to describe it? I cannot—simply I cannot! The man does not live whose pen could convey a sense of what I saw.

(from the chapter "Ayeha Unveils" of Henry Rider Haggard's She)

To die a little

I dislike changes, even changes for the better. To change is to die a little.

On the other hand,

Die a little. There is reason for it.

(R. A. Lafferty: Fourth Mansions)

No creo en las paradojas, pero haberlas, haylas

La frase "No creo en las brujas, pero haberlas, haylas" es un ejemplo de paradoja de Moore.

En Oporto

Me pregunto qué tendría más grados: si los vinitos que nos tomamos en la orilla del Duero, o la pendiente que tuvimos que subir para volver a nuestro hotel.

Why travel? Just read.

I don't really like to travel, yet I enjoy reading travel literature. This may seem incoherent at first, but it is not.

First of all, traveling to a place is orders of magnitude more costly than reading about it. More dangerous, too. Even if you are going to a perfectly calm vacation resort, the risks of being involved in, say, a car accident, far outweigh the risks inherent in reading a book, like papercuts.

One could object that traveling in person allows you to have unmediated access to a place, to directly experience the sights, the sounds, the people and the cuisine. However, sensory inputs are only the raw material. You need to synthesize them in order to arrive at something meaningful. And here is where most travel writers are better than you. They are more experienced, they have better insights and are more adept at expressing them. Furthermore, they are likely to take more risks and peek into places you wouldn't dare to enter.

When you undergo an x-ray examination, do you interpret the results by yourself, or do you delegate the task to an experienced medical specialist? Why travel should be any different? Yeah, go and delude yourself. You may discern the vertebral column (doric, jonic, or corinthian?) maybe the ribs, and be satisfied with that. But your superficial gleanings should in no way count as a diagnose.

Furthermore, technologies like Google Earth, Panoramio and Photosynth are steadily reducing the difference between direct experience and digital reproduction. There is still a gap, but not a large enough one to warrant spending a month's salary in bridging it.

I suppose the worn cliché that travel opens your mind and widens your perspective on things is true to some extent, but only dumb people who don't read need to do it that way. You can achieve a similar effect by going to your local library and perusing some anthropology textbook. Come to think of it, traveling to the library may itself be too much of a hassle. Why don't you just read about the subject on Wikipedia?

Socrates wasn't interested in any place other than Athens; I'm pretty sure he only left the city because of military duty. In fact, the only worthy reasons for travel are conquest, work, or pilgrimage. All else is vanity.

Travel Books Online

Here.

Green Magic, The Persistence of Vision

Jack Vance's Green Magic and John Varley's The Persistence of Vision both feature protagonists who seek to master a difficult knowledge.

In "Green Magic", Howard Fair investigates the thaumaturgic discipline of the same name. He is motivated by his thirst for knowledge, but also by a desire to remake himself in an improved form, maybe even achieve immortality. Ir order to pursue his studies, he enters the otherworldly "green realm", the source of that strange magic.

The narrator of Varley's story also enters an unconventional place. A failed writer wandering across a North America in crisis, he encounters during his travels an experimental commune inhabited by deaf-blind people and their children. There, he finally finds a sense of community, of belonging. But to stay, he must learn the extraordinarily complex "touch language" used by the residents.

Through arduous study and constant practice, both protagonists slowly make progress in mastering their respective subjects, and gain a measure of confidence in their own abilities. But ultimately, that same progress brings the realization that their disciplines are even more difficult than they at first thought. Impossibly so, in fact. Fair acknowledges that he will never achieve the easy mastery of magic that the native inhabitants of the green realm routinely flaunt. In "The Persistence of Vision", the narrator discovers that the language he was studying was just a heavily simplified version of a much more subtle and expressive touch language, that no man capable of sight will ever be able to learn.

In an agony of frustration, they both leave and return to the "real world". But once there, they are unable to adapt. Though incomplete, the knowledge gained has changed them. Fair now possesses incredible powers, but has come to see the world as a mediocre and uninteresting place when compared to the glories and wonders of the green realm. The training received by the narrator of "The Persistence of Vision" has improved his communication skills and he achieves success as an author. But he is rootless and alienated once again, and yearns for the commune.

It's at the end when the two stories diverge. Fair ends up accepting his situation. He stays on Earth, but also keeps his memories and knowledge of the green realm despite the unhappiness they bring him. The nostalgia of Varley's protagonist is too great for that. He leaves everything and heads once again to the commune. What happens is unclear, and more than a little disturbing.

Waves on Paper

Imagine each line of your handwriting as a long tether put on the page, suitably tangled to form the letters but without any knots. If you took the tether by the tips and straightened it out, how longer would it be than the original line? This question is somewhat similar to the How long is the coast of Britain? one frequently used to introduce the concept of fractals.

Speaking of coasts... the left-to-right and back again movement of your hand writing and your eyes reading suggests the movement of waves breaking on the shore. Seen in that light, reading some piece of writing that challenges your worldview is like trying to defend a castle in the sand you took pains to build from the attacks of the rising tide.

A cross-eyed saint

The reliquary for the head of St. Servatius commissioned by Emperor Henry III aroused the the anger of the illustrious client, who threw the goldsmiths in prison because the precious stones used for the eyes of the saint made him look cross-eyed. During the night the saint appeared to the emperor, showing him his face and stating that the artists' hands had rendered him as god had made him.

(Jacques le Goff, editor: The Medieval World)

Gygax and Vance

Gary Gygax, co-creator with Dave Arneson of Dungeons & Dragons, has died. I think I'll buy a twenty sided dice and roll it over the map of some imaginary land in his honor.

Simon J. Rogers links to a brief article by Gygax about the influence of Jack Vance in D&D.

It appears that the fourth edition of the game will move away from vancian magic. Nevertheless I hope that, even if the mechanics change, they'll keep the vancian flavor of the spell nomenclature. And what will happen to IOUN stones?

Un esteta

Escuchado en la sede de la Fundación Caixa Galicia en A Coruña. El que hablaba tenía gafas de diseño y pinta de artista.

...uno de los momentos más importantes de mi vida fue cuando vi en persona ese cuadro de Warhol. Para mí Warhol es...

Conceder tanta importancia a una obra de arte me parece excesivo.

A decir verdad, todo ese asunto del arte me sobrepasa. Cuando me veo expuesto a una gran cantidad de la cosa, pronto alcanzo un punto de saturación a partir del cual cada nueva obra maestra me deja indiferente, somnoliento incluso. Tal afección es lo que brutos como yo sufren en lugar del síndrome de Stendhal.

Y sí, soy de los que dicen "esto lo podía haber hecho yo en mi casa con unos plastidecor" cuando se encuentra con una pieza no figurativa.

Ingleses en Galicia

En el suplemento cultural de La Voz de Galicia un interesante artículo enumera una serie de viajeros ingleses que escribieron sobre sus experiencias en tierras gallegas.

Buscando en el Internet Archive he conseguido encontrar la mayor parte de los libros mencionados:

Carnarvon. Portugal and Galicia [1836]

Richard Ford. Handbook for Travellers in Spain [1845]

Archer Milton Huntington. A Notebook in Northern Spain [1898]

Edgar Wigram. Northern Spain [1906]

Annete Meakin. Galicia, the Switzerland of Spain [1909]

Walter Wood. A Corner of Spain [1910]

Gasquoine. Spain Revisited - A summer holiday in Galicia [1911]

Aubrey Bell. Spanish Galicia [1922]

Lovecraft, Muhammad, and kittens

The famous anecdote about Lovecraft and the kitten is from this period: Lovecraft was staying in the house of some correspondent of his who wanted him to write an article for his fanzine. So before going to bed, he left Lovecraft in a comfortable chair with plenty of writing materials to hand, and, on the way out, dropped a kitten in Lovecraft's lap to keep him company (Lovecraft famously loved cats, cats and ice-cream--although hopefully not both together). When the fan came back downstairs in the morning, Lovecraft was still sitting in the chair, the kitten asleep in his lap, and hadn't written a word. When asked why he hadn't written the article, Lovecraft replied "I didn't want to disturb kitty."

(Gardner Dozois, in Asimov's Message Board)

Other science fiction and fantasy writers who liked cats were Fritz Leiber and Cordwainer Smith.

Muezza is said to have been the Islamic prophet Muhammad's favorite cat. The most famous story about Muezza recounts how the call to prayer was given, and as Muhammad went to put on one of his robes, he found his cat sleeping on one of the sleeves, and instead of disturbing the cat he cut off the sleeve and let him sleep.

(Wikipedia page for Muezza)

The Golden Fleecing

There are three theories on how prices are set, he says. Is the bribe purely the product of cultural norms, influenced by customs specific to the region? Is the bribe simply an individual transaction, not affected by culture? Or is the bribe economy embedded within a bigger mar­ket? “Just as if there was a firm running a toll booth,” Olken says, “the firm would balance off how much revenue they are getting from the tolls, versus the fact that if they were charging more for the tolls there would be fewer cars driving through; they’ll be making an optimal trade-off. So, in fact, that bribe is the equi­librium of a firm’s price-setting decision.”

(Michael Moynihan: Graft Paper. The American.)

Successful rulers within this belt of semi-desert lands [the Silk Road] were either steppe nomads themselves or but recently descended from such folk. [...] For a long time the resulting symbiosis [with caravan merchants] was delicate and liable to frequent upset. By taking too much from caravan personnel, merchant's incentive to undertake the risks of travel could be snuffed out. Yet by not paying enough to support a superior military establishment along the trade route, merchants invited more distant nomad groups to push southward from the open steppe and try to seize as booty what they were not yet in a position to tax as rulers.

(William H. McNeill: Plagues and Peoples)

Playtesting and Test Screenings

I wonder why playtesting is uniformly seen as a good thing in videogames, while in the world of film the analogous practice of performing test screenings is usually frowned upon, as a sign of a director willing to compromise his art, to sacrifice his vision to Moloch, and so on.

Aren't they basically the same thing, namely using the advanced feedback provided by group of consumers to retool a cultural product? So why then they are regarded differently?

Perhaps the reason is that videogames are inherently interactive, so requesting players' opinions during development seems more natural.

He may have been talking about Facebook

Unless we are careful, individual men and women may soon be reduced to little more than numbers in some immense and terrifying data bank.

(Georges Duby: A History of Private Life, Vol 1)

Well, back to updating my profile.

Archive.org

Archive.org is a great site. I use it mainly to find videos, but it also has a great collection of digitized books, some of them unavailable from Google Books and Project Gutenberg.

A particularly interesting find is Yitzhak Baer's A History Of The Jews In Christian Spain Volume II - From The Fourteenth Century To The Expulsion. But the book was published in 1961. Has the copyright really expired?

I also downloaded George Borrow's The Bible in Spain. It promises to be a very interesting travelogue. The version from Archive.org is much more legible than the one available from Google Books.

It won't be the bad news what kills you

You were very ill in the past, but you survived. Since that time, you have to undergo periodic (say, every six months) medical tests to ensure than the bug hasn't come back. You are wedded to the ghost of your illness.

Most of the time, you don't remember you past sufferings. It's almost as if they had happened to a different person. But as the date for a new test approaches, you become more and more nervous. You haven't noticed any suspicious symptoms (you noticed a lot of them in the first few revisions, when the hypochondria of the survivor was still in full force) but you fear what the tests may reveal: that the illness has come back and is hidden in your innards, like some ugly beast silently stalking his prey, ready to strike.

You try to hide your growing unease from your loved ones. Your parents, your fiancé, may become ever more distressed than you are. You enter the doctor's room in a state of near panic, intently observing his face, his posture, every little movement or grimace he makes. They will reveal the bad news even before his words do.

The doctor tells you everything is all right, bringing immense relief. You call everybody to share the good news, and exit the hospital real quick. An hour later, your are back to your normal routine and barely remember the anguish of the last few days.

Is it rational to "allocate" your fear in such a manner between consecutive tests? Either you are already sick, or you aren't. The news themselves can't harm you, so why then your fear increases as the test approaches? It's not as if the doctor is waiting to pummel you with baseball bat or anything.

O sancta simplicitas

O sancta simplicitas es la frase que se dice pronunciada por Juan Hus (1369-1415) cuando, encontrándose sobre la hogera a que se le había condenado por hereje, vio cómo una viejecilla, movida por su celo religioso, arrojaba más leña a las llamas en que aquél ardía.

(Nota número 106 en la edición de Así habló Zaratustra de Alianza Editorial)

How scientists write

Scientists are also criticized for having little facility with the language, for disregarding the genius of the language, and for lacking imagination, taste, grace, and so on, for example:

Most of the students who have signed up for your course will have done so because they are afraid of and dislike writing: they have no instinctive feeling for the power and beauty of words and no gift for putting them together tellingly. They like science because it is full of experimental action and definite, verifiable facts; writing, on the contrary, seems to be a less exciting activity requiring intuition, for which they have very small use, and taste, for which they have no use at all.

[Woodward, 1980, p. 3]

(Antoinette M. Wilkinson: The Scientist's Handbook for Writing Papers and Dissertations)

The book goes on to point out that scientists, at the very least, do use intuition when formulating their hypotheses. And that the lack of linguistic creativity in scientific papers is mostly a product of the rethorical setting.

Are there any science fiction stories written in the form of a scientific paper? Stanislaw Lem was fond of summarizing imaginary research in his novels. And then there's "The Discovery of the Nullitron", an early collaboration between John Sladek and Thomas M. Disch. A very slight story, midly entertaining at best.

Tocinamiento Global

Viven en tus entrañas -que para ellos son montañas- y te ven de dentro a fuera. El mundo exterior es para ellos el interior de la Tierra.

Que baje tu nivel de colesterol en sangre debe parecerles una especie de primavera arterial. Por fin las carreteras se despejan, después de las intensas precipitaciones de de nata y azúcar glaseado del pasado Invierno.

Se discute la conveniencia de reducir las emisiones de grasa, como método de atajar el "tocinamiento global".

Invisible except to teenager eyes

The Mosquito anti-teen device is a wonderful invention, that punishes those unruly creatures with shrill and unpleasant sounds while leaving people over twenty unscathed.

It is almost as good as the Invisible Teenager, a piece of technology dreamed up by R. A. Lafferty in one of his stories. Like the Mosquito, it is explicitly designed to target teenagers:

You remember that once there was a teenager problem? You remember when those little buggers used to be mean? Albert got enough of them. There was something ungainly about them that reminded him too much of himself. He made a teenager of his own. It was rough. To the others it looked like one of themselves, the ring in the left ear, the dangling side-locks, the brass knucks and the long knife, the guitar pluck to jab in the eye. But it was incomparably rougher than the human teenagers. It terrorized all in the neighborhood and made them behave, and dress like real people. There was one thing about the teenage machine that Albert made. It was made of such polarized metal and glass that it was invisible except to teenager eyes.

"Why is your neighborhood different?" the people asked him. "Why are there such good and polite teenagers in your neighborhood and such mean ones everywhere else? It's as though something had spooked all those right around here."

(R. A. Lafferty: Eurema's Dam)

"Invisible except to teenager eyes" may be a little harder to achieve than "inaudible except to teenager ears", but we should stay hopeful. Until then, the Mosquito will be a good enough substitute.

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.