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.