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.