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.