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.