Foundation movie in the works

...according to the Hollywood Reporter. I wonder if they'll tap into the current climate of declinism.

Hari Seldon is oddly reminiscent of Osama bin Laden in some ways: an inaccessible, charismatic figure who is likely dead but periodically resurfaces in the form of video recordings in order to encourage his followers and utter oracular pronouncements. The difference is that Laden is a bit more proactive in bringing about the Fall of the Empire. (Also, the leader of the Aum Shinrikyo cult was a total fan of the Foundation novels and apparently used them as a blueprint for the group's command structure and long-term plans.)

My favorite moment in the novels is when everybody in the First Foundation expectantly awaits the day when a new Hari Seldon recording is scheduled to play. They hope that Seldon's address will offer solutions to the current problems facing the polity, and reassure them of their predetermined destiny of prosperity and greatness. (The comfort, the respite from the terror of history afforded by the Seldon Plan is not unlike the one peddled by Marxism. There are also shades of Manifest Destiny.)

The grand day arrives at last. However, as the tape plays and they listen to Seldon's speech recorded centuries earlier, an horrific realization slowly dawns on them: Seldon is wrong this time. The current situation in nothing like the one he prophetised. The Seldon Plan has been derailed by The Mule, and the citizens of the Foundation are left adrift on a sea of uncertainty.

I'm not exactly a fan of Asimov's writing, but that is a truly sublime moment of cognitive dissonace. I hope they'll do it justice in the movie.

One for impiety, one for lawlessness

Dicaearchus (d.196 BC) was an Aetolian commander and pirate. [...] Dicaearchus had a tradition in which where ever he landed he would built two temples, one to Asebeia which means impiety and another to Paranomia which means Lawlessness.

(Wikipedia entry for Dicaearchus of Aetolia)

Aristomenes caused Scopas and his family to be put to death by poison; but did not allow Dicaearchus to die until he had had him racked and scourged, thus inflicting on him a punishment which he thoroughly deserved in the name of all Greece. For this was the Dicaearchus whom Philip, when he resolved upon his treacherous attack on the Cyclades and the cities of the Hellespont, appointed leader of the whole fleet and the entire enterprise: who being thus sent out to perform an act of flagrant wickedness, not only thought that he was doing nothing wrong, but in the extravagance of his infatuation imagined that he would strike terror into the gods as well as man. For wherever he anchored he used to build two altars, to Impiety and Lawlessness, and, offering sacrifice upon these altars, worshipped them as his gods.

(Polybius: Histories)

The Beginning is the End is the Beginning

The song that plays in the trailer for Watchmen is "The Beginning is the End is the Beginning" by The Smashing Pumpkins, which is a slower, moodier version of another song of theirs called "The End Is the Beginning Is the End".

That inversion in the titles reminds me of a pair of Gene Wolfe stories, "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" and "The Death of Doctor Island". I wonder if that trope has a name, and what are other examples of it.

José Padilha's "Tropa de Elite"

This movie would give Frank Miller an erection.

It is at its best when detailing the mechanisms of corruption (see also the mexican film La Ley de Herodes). When the movie centers on how badass BOPE members are, it veers into more cartoony territory. After films like Full Metal Jacket and Heartbreak Ridge, the "grueling training" trope has become something of a cliché.

"Unha colimaia de xente"

La sección Palabras con Memoria de la web de la AELG es una lectura fascinante. Recoge palabras del idioma gallego que son muy poco usadas, y que no figuran en los diccionarios. Por ejemplo:

colimaia/colimaiada.- Fato de trastes, chusma, caninea, gandallada. Lugar de escoita.- Corme (A Coruña). Fonte.- Xulio López Valcárcel

Colimaia me resulta muy interesante porque muchas veces se la oigo decir a mi madre, con el sentido descrito arriba. Me sorprendió cuando se la escuché por primera vez; la busqué en el Diccionario Xerais da Lingua pero no estaba. Es curioso que López Valcárcel se encontrase la palabra en Corme; mi madre es de Lugo, de la zona alrededor de O Cebreiro. Para ser una palabra tan poco usada, está bastante extendida.

Mi madre ha pronunciado otras ocasiones palabras que no figuraban en los diccionarios, pero el caso es que no las apunté en su momento, algo de lo que me arrepiento. Ahora no me acuerdo cuáles erán... estaré con el oído atento en caso de que vuelvan a surgir. Claro, no puedo simplemente preguntarle "Mamá, ¿cuáles son esas palabras raras que usas de vez en cuando?" Para ella, no son raras en absoluto.

Otra palabra gallega que desconocía y que acabo de escucharle a mi madre es moxena. Aunque ésta sí la podemos encontrar en el diccionario; al parecer, significa "Partícula de lume que se desprende das chamas; tamén recibe of nome de charamusca, chareta, faísca, muxica, etc."

Westerns with odd punctuation

The book also features McCarthy's somewhat unusual writing style – there are, for example, many unusual or archaic words, no quotation marks for dialogue, and no apostrophes to note dropped letters.

(Wikipedia page for Blood Meridian)

Another western novel where the author experiments with punctuation (or the lack of it) is R. A. Lafferty's Okla Hannali, first published in 1972. In the book, all the dialogue uttered by choctaw characters (like the protagonist) has no punctuation at all:

"Maybeso you exaggerate," his son Travis would say. "Of course I do with a big red heart I exaggerate the new age has forgotten how I remember that the corn stood taller and the ears fuller nine of them would make a bushel and now it takes a hundred and twenty that doesn't consider that the bushels were bigger then the men were taller and of grander voice the women of a beauty to be found nowhere today except in my own family the girls sang so pretty with voices they walked so fine when they carried corn they could soft-talk you like little foxes those girls."

Lafferty offers a rationale for his stylistic choice, which may or may not have some historical basis:

Hannali did not speak in that manner because he was a clod, but because he was a Choctaw. Whether in English or Choctaw, all Chocs run sentences together with no intonation for either period or question. The educated Choctaws of that day -those who wrote in their own hands- punctuated either not at all or excessively. In official depositions one will find page-long screeds with no break at all. Or one will find random punctuation, with commas between almost every word, and perhaps a colon or semicolon between an article and its following noun. Someone had told them that they must punctuate, but nobody would ever be able to tell them how.

It could also be understood as an external form of Molly Bloom's internal monologue. I think it succeeds in giving the dialogue a sense of immediacy.

Calendario Floral

Ayer por la mañana vi cómo un operario de mono azul cambiaba la fecha del calendario floral en los Jardines de Méndez Núñez.

He de reconocer que la escena me decepcionó un poco... no sé, quizás esperaba descubrir que la fecha la cambiaba algún trasno mágico que viviese en una cueva secreta bajo el jardín y saliese cada mañana por el hueco de un árbol para hacer su trabajo.

Propongo adoptar medidas para rescatar la operación de cambio de fecha de su embrutecedor prosaísmo. Primero, contrátese a alguien afectado de enanismo, o, en su defecto, adminístrense a un niño las mismas hormonas retardantes del crecimiento que le dieron a Joselito.

Como uniforme, una chaqueta de vivos colores bordada de arabescos, pantalones bombachos, y zapatitos con pompones.

Los mismos que están haciendo las obras en el Parrote, podrían construirle al nuevo operario una casita subterránea en el parque, estilo Bilbo Bolsón o David el Gnomo. Insonorizada, claro, no le vaya a molestar el ruido del botellón.

Considero ésta una inversión necesaria y urgente, un uso productivo de los fondos públicos que redundará en beneficio de todos.

Reasons not to kill a stranger

In traditional New Guinea society, if a New Guinean happened to encounter an unfamiliar New Guinean while both were away from their respective villages, the two engaged in a long discussion of their relatives, in an attempt to establish some relationship and hence some reason why the two should not attempt to kill each other.

(Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs, and Steel)

Not unlike those Greek and Trojan warriors from the Iliad who, when they met in the field of battle, embarked on a prolix enumeration of their respective ancestors before coming to blows. Diomedes and Glaucus not only refused to fight each other, but even exchanged armors.

Also reminiscent of Oedipus, who met Laius at a crossroads and killed him for pretty flimsy reasons.

Jared Diamond, psychohistorian

Prediction in history, as in other historical sciences, is most feasible on large spatial scales and over long times, when the unique features of millions of small-scale brief events become averaged out.

(from the Epilogue of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel)

Psychohistory depends on the idea that, while one cannot foresee the actions of a particular individual, the laws of statistics as applied to large groups of people could predict the general flow of future events. Asimov used the analogy of a gas: an observer has great difficulty in predicting the motion of a single molecule in a gas, but can predict the mass action of the gas to a high level of accuracy. [...] Asimov applied this concept to the population of his fictional Galactic Empire, which numbered a quintillion.

(Wikipedia page for Pyschohistory [fictional])

Another candidate for real-world psychohistorian is Peter Turchin, who uses equations derived from population dynamics -modified to take Ibn Kahldun's concept of asabiyah into account- to model the rise and fall of precapitalist empires.

I'll have to check out War and Peace and War one of these days. I doubt I'll find it convincing, but nevertheless it has a fascinating thesis. (Turchin's name for his discipline, "Cliodynamics", sounds way better than "Psychohistory". Furthermore, this latter name is already taken.)

Assorted links

• Nick Szabo's essay on the origins of money. See also this other one.
• A survey of player-NPC dialogue systems in games. See also Dialog System on Wikipedia.
• An interview with Lee Kuan Yew. See also Social Development Unit on Wikipedia.
• My favorite part of David Hume's "A Treatise of Human Nature".

Henry Crabb Robinson

Henry Crabb Robinson residió en A Coruña como corresponsal de The Times durante la Guerra de la Independencia.

El periodista Elías Durán de Porras ha escrito un libro sobre su estancia: "The Times y La Guerra de la Independencia. Henry Crabb Robinson y la corresponsalía de The Times en A Coruña (1808-1809)". Ver los artículos en La Voz de Galicia y La Opinión Coruña.

Tres volúmenes de sus diarios y correspondencia están disponibles en el Internet Archive:

• Diary, reminiscences, and correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson. (Volume 1. Volume 2. Volume 3.)

(Hablando de ingleses en Galicia, aquí hay un blog escrito por uno.)

Ginny Wrapped in the Sun

I wrote here about the biblical allusions R. A. Lafferty weaved into Ginny Wrapped in the Sun. This post in the blog Bookfeed mentions a few more I didn't catch, and offers an interpretation of the story's meaning which I find very convincing.

Escapism

He cannot realise, he cannot make a tale of his own life; which crumbles in discrete impressions even as he lives it, and slips between the fingers of his memory like sand. It is not this that he considers in his rare hours of rumination, but that other life, with was all lit up for him by the humble talent of a Hayward - that other life which, God knows, perhaps he still believes that he is leading - the life of Tom Holt.

(Robert Louis Stevenson: Popular Authors)

That sounds almost parasitic on the part of imaginary character Tom Holt. Perhaps we shouldn't consider as part of our own lives the time spent daydreaming we are someone else.

Historical demography question

In books like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and William H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples I have seen mentioned that, until relatively recently in history, cities were demographic sinks ravaged by disease which required a steady stream of newcomers from the countryside to be able to sustain their population level.

How, then, did predominantly urban minorities, like medieval Jews, manage to sustain their numbers?

Sagan's response

Continuation of this post.

Frank Tipler used the possibility of self-replicating spacecraft to argue against the existence extraterrestrial civilizations. If such civilizations existed, at least one of them should have already developed self-replicating probes. These probes would have overrun the galaxy -including our solar system- in a comparatively short time. We don't have evidence for these probes, and therefore it is likely that humans are indeed alone in the Universe.

Carl Sagan tried to answer his argument in his paper The Solipsist Approach to Extraterrestrial Intelligence. He argued that self-replicating probes (also called von Neumann Machines) would end up going rogue and posing a threat to the original builders. Advanced civilizations, being aware of the danger, would not build them in the first place:

these implacable replicators will not stop until the entire Universe has been converted into ~10^47 von Neumann machines, which then presumably cannibalize each other. If anything like this were a real danger, an emerging interstellar civilization would be wise, as a matter of self-preservation, to take steps to prevent it. No civilization could be sure of the ultimate fidelity over > 10^6 years of the self-replication programs of the von Neumann machines, and whether they ultimately might pose as grave a threat to the planets of their builders as to any other world. [...] Thus, the prudent policy of any technical civilization must be, with very high reliability, to prevent the construction of interstellar von Neumann machines and to circumscribe severely their domestic use. If we accept Tipler's arguments, the entire Universe is endangered by such an invention; controlling and destroying interstellar von Neumann machines is then something to which every civilization -especially the most advanced- would be likely to devote some attention.

I find Sagan's response unconvincing, for a number of reasons. Firstly, he assumes that all civilizations would care enough about their long term prospects to renounce the shorter term gains promised by a dangerous technology. This hasn't always been the case here on Earth (see the book Collapse by Jared Diamond.) And von Neumann machines only need to be invented once. What about a civilization that knows it is doomed due to some impending cosmic disaster, like a supernova? They wouldn't have a future that could be imperiled. What about two warring civilizations, like the ones depicted in Stanislaw Lem's novel Fiasco? They could resort to dangerous measures in their attempts to win the war.

Secondly, I doubt that "responsible" civilizations could defeat a rogue probe outbreak initiated by an irresponsible one. Von Neumann machines are likely to be though foes, because of their rapacious, unrestrained, endlessly proliferating nature. (If you want proof of this, try fighting the Slylandro probes in Star Control II.)

Lastly, maybe machines could be constructed that would never go rogue, even after 10^6 years. It's a matter of putting enough checks and controls in the design to ensure accurate replication. Of course, absolute safety is impossible, but perhaps the probability of a replication error could be reduced enough to make it unlikely to happen within the Universe's lifespan. Knowing that, civilizations would not be afraid to build them.

Mathematics as magic, magic as mathematics

I have often admired the mysticall way of Pythagoras, and the secret Magicke of numbers

(Sir Thomas Browne: Religio Medici)

In this fashion did Turjan enter his apprenticeship to Pandelume. Day and far into the opalescent Embelyon night he worked under Pandelume's unseen tutelage. He learned the secret of renewed youth, many spells of the ancients, and a strange abstract lore that Pandelume termed "Mathematics."

"Within this instrument," said Pandelume, "resides the Universe. Passive in itself and not of sorcery, it elucidates every problem, each phase of existence, all the secrets of time and space. Your spells and runes are built upon its power and codified according to a great underlying mosaic of magic. The design of this mosaic we cannot surmise; our knowledge is didactic, empirical, arbitrary. Phandaal glimpsed the pattern and so was able to formulate many of the spells which bear his name. I have endeavored through the ages to break the clouded glass, but so far my research has failed. He who discovers the pattern will know all of sorcery and be a man powerful beyond comprehension."

So Turjan applied himself to the study and learned many of the simpler routines.

"I find herein a wonderful beauty," he told Pandelume. "This is no science, this is art, where equations fall away to elements like resolving chords, and where always prevails a symmetry either explicit or multiplex, but always of a crystalline serenity."

(Jack Vance: Turjan of Miir)

The Vance snippet come from the Mathematical Fiction site.

The rude, dissolute manners of the people

Some young man, possessed of fortune, health, and leisure, should make an autumnal voyage into that kingdom [Spain], and should spend a year there, investigating the natural history of that vast country. Mr. Willughby passed through that kingdom on such an errand; but he seems to have skirted along in a superficial manner and an ill-humour, being much disgusted at the rude, dissolute manners of the people.

(Rev. Gilbert White: The Natural History of Selborne)

White is referring to this Willughby.

The epidemiology of Madame Bovary

Towards the end of chapter six in Part II of Madame Bovary, Charles, Emma, and Monsieur Homais discuss the dangers that may await Leon in the city of Paris:

‘That is true,’ said Charles; ‘but I was thinking especially of illnesses—of typhoid fever, for example, that attacks students from the provinces.’

Emma shuddered.

‘Because of the change of regimen,’ continued the chemist, ‘and of the perturbation that results therefrom in the whole system. And then the water at Paris, don’t you know! The dishes at restaurants, all the spiced food, end by heating the blood, and are not worth, whatever people may say of them, a good soup.’

The greater susceptibility of people form the countryside to infectious diseases is mentioned in William H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples:

in the nineteenth century, before inoculations became standard, draftees into the French army from the countryside suffered-sometimes seriously-from infectious disease to which their city-bred contemporaries were almost immune, having already been exposed. As a result, robust peasant sons had a far higher death rate in the army than did undernourished weaklings drafted from urban slums.

Enmendándole la plana a Flaubert

Al llegar al pie de la cuesta, Rodolphe aflojó las riendas. Arrancaron al unísono, de un solo impulso y una vez llegados a lo alto, los caballos se pararon de repente y el gran velo azul del sombrero de Emma volvió a caer sobre su rostro.*

* Aquí me he permitido enmendarle la plana a Flaubert, que se limita a decir "son grand voile bleu retomba" , o sea "su gran velo azul volvió a caer", pero lo he hecho porque me parece que quedaba confuso. Y además, más adelante se ve que Emma llevaba un sombrero con velo. (N. de la T.)

(Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary. Tusquets Editores, Colección Fábula. Traducción de Carmen Martín Gaite.)

I doesn't take much time to fill up

One might at first be surprised that Clovis descendants could reach Patagonia, lying 8,000 miles south of the US-Canada border, in less than a thousand years. However, that translates into an average expansion of only 8 miles per year, a trivial feat for a hunter-gatherer likely to cover that distance even within a single day's normal foraging.

(Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs, and Steel)

It has been theorized that a self-replicating starship utilizing relatively conventional theoretical methods of interstellar travel (i.e. no exotic faster-than-light propulsion such as "warp drive", and speeds limited to an "average cruising speed" of 0.1c.) could spread throughout a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as half a million years.[2]

(Wikipedia entry for Self-replicating spacecraft. See also: Fermi Paradox.)

For any reasonably long-lived culture, its romantic initial period of expansion and "frontier spirit" is bound to be relatively short compared to the full extent of their continued existence. To idolize such a transient epoch of its history -to nostalgically pine for it- is more than a bit immature. Like a full grown man stuck in his childhood to an unhealthy degree.

Hoarding ebooks

We have books whose papers are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams. Books whose pages are not paper at all, but delicate wafers of white jade, ivory, and shell; books too whose pages are the desiccated leaves of unknown plants. Books we have also that are not books at all to the eye: scrolls and tablets and recordings of a hundred different substances. There is a cube of crystal here -though I can no longer tell you where- no larger than the ball of your thumb that contains more books that the library itself does. Though a harlot might dangle it from one ear as an ornament, there are not volumes enough in the world to counterweight the other.

(Gene Wolfe: Shadow of the Torturer)

Inconspicuously lodged among my books, there is a CD box which is slowly being filled with content downloaded from places like the Internet Archive and Google Books. I'm pretty sure the box holds more books than my "real" library, if that's not the case already, it will soon be.

I know that having permanent local copies of all that content is stupid. Why don't just create some bookmarks, and download each text just before reading? But some primitive part of my brain with an atavistic penchant for hoarding wants it that way.

Reading a book from the screen is always a painful experience, but I've found that reading DJVU files is slightly better that reading HTML or plain text. These latter formats seem strangely unsubstantial and fragile, the letters ready to scatter like fallen leaves and the merest stirring in the electronic ether. Raster formats like DJVU feel more weighty, less impermanent. Some books from the Internet Archive even have scribbled marginalia, which goes a long way to give the feeling of a real book. (Supposedly, this digitized copy of Amiel's journal has notes and marginalia by none other than Herny Miller.) Some recent finds:

• Sir Henry Layard: Early adventures in Persia, Susiana, and Babylonia. part 1. part 2.
• Baron de Tott: Memoirs.
• Rafael Cansinos-Asséns: Salomé en la literatura.
• Trollope: Domestic Manners of the Americans. part 1. part 2.
• Oliver Wendell Holmes: The autocrat of the breakfast-table.

Spain's decline: what were the causes?

Spain is in many places, not to say most, very thin of people and almost desolate. The causes are:

1. A bad religion.
2. The tyrannical Inquisition.
3. The multitude of whores.
4. The barrenness of the soil.
5. The wretched laziness of the people, much like the Welsh and the Irish, walking slowly, and always cumbered with a great cloak and long sword.
6. The expulsion of the Jews and Moors, the first of which were planted there by the emperor Adrian, and the later by the Caliphs after the conquest of Spain.
7. Wars and plantations.

(Francis Willughby: A Relation of a Voyage made through a great part of Spain [1673])

Eerie!

As one commenter to this BLDGBLOG post notes, the long-exposure photographs by Alexey Titarenko for City of Shadows are reminiscent of some paintings by Zdzisław Beksiński featuring massed corpses marching.

Like this one.

Happy nightmares!

Songs of the Dying Earth

The Jack Vance tribute anthology Songs of the Dying Earth seems to be shaping up nicely. The anthology is reminiscent of other projects like The Last Continent: New Tales of Zothique and Night Lands Vol I: Eternal Love. (Author John C. Wright contributed to the latter, and will have a story in the Dying Earth one, too.)

Here are some of my hopes for "Songs...". First, I hope that they do not sacrifice any creative possibility for the sake of story consistency or continuity, either with Vance's original work or among the new stories themselves. Vance is not Tolkien; he usually isn't very concerned about such matters.

Second, I hope that not all of the stories recycle old places and characters invented by Vance. Sure, it would be nice to read about ol' Cugel again, but it would also be interesting to expand the Dying Earth universe with brand new characters and locales.

Third, and most important, I hope stories are featured that go beyond merely imitating Vance's style and touch on some the deeper themes (the grim view of humanity, the cultural relativism, the religious satire...) underlying the Dying Earth tales. Not necessarily to agree with them; perhaps to comment on, subvert, or criticize them!

In that respect, I'm really intrigued about contributions by women authors like Paula Volsky, Elizabeth Moon, and Liz Williams, because anyone interested in giving a female (feminist?) perspective on the Dying Earth stories will have a lot to chew on.

For example, what do they think about T'sais/T'sain? In that storyline, women are created in vats, their physical and mental characteristics determined by the whims and preferences of powerful male mages. Do they find this reworking of the Frankenstein/Pygmalion myth disturbing? Do the mages have too much power over their female creations? T'sain doesn't seem to mind, but presumably her brain was designed not to mind. Maybe T'sais is the sane -if unhappy- one?

What about the unflinching cruelty directed against female characters in the Cugel stories? Granted, the Gugel stories feature cruelty against pretty much everybody, but still... Derwe Coreme (oterwise a powerful and independent character) is abandoned to sexual slavery at the hands of the Busiacos. It is also implied that Cugel raped Derwe. At one point, he uses extortion to gain sexual favors from another woman.

Finally, the first Rhialto the Marvellous story is a reenactment of the war of the sexes featuring mages and witches, and a (kind of funny) apology for traditional gender roles.

I can't wait to get my hands on "Songs..."! The planned Wild Thyme, Green Magic also looks interesting. Now, if only they decided to reprint Bad Ronald...

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).