Friday Photography: White Rose

Daryl Samuel

(3089/898) Media and culture, from A to C

2300) Much of the information [in the "information age"] is not true. We live in a time besotted with Bad Information.

Joel Achenbach
"Reality Check" in
Washington Post (12/2/1996)
quoted by Kendrick Frasier in
"Articles of Note" in
Skeptical Inquirer (March/April '97)

2301) Why get your news from seasoned professionals when you can get half-witted rumors from random strangers [on the Internet]?

Joel Achenbach
"Reality Check" in
Washington Post (12/2/1996)
quoted by Kendrick Frasier in
"Articles of Note" in
Skeptical Inquirer (March/April '97)

[One reason to get information from the web rather than from the seasoned professionals of journalism is that American journalism is a broken system. Not only is it continually being gamed by people who have discovered its inherent weaknesses, making it more difficult for reporting which intends to be neutral and biased to also be accurate, but at the same time, the continuing concentration of media ownership into the hands of a limited number of corporations makes contemporary journalism more vulnerable to manipulation from the top. This means that in some circumstances better and more accurate information is available from trusted sources on the web than is available from traditional journalism, which is on the one hand inhibited by conventions which are no longer totally relevant, and on the other has been invaded by people, at the top and the bottom, who have an agenda other than unbiased reporting of the news. – Ed Fitzgerald]

2302) What if I had grown up in the past of in a nonmedia culture? Would I still be "me"? Would my "personality" be different?

I think the unspoken agreement between us as a culture is that we're supposed to consider the commercialized memories in our head as real, that real life consists of time spent away from TVs, magazines and theatres. But soon the planet will be inhabited by people who have only known a world with TVs and computers. When this point arrives, will we still continue with pre-TV notions of identity? Probably not. Time continues on: Instead of buying blue Chairman Mao outfits we shop at the Gap. Same thing. Everybody travels everywhere. "Place" is a joke.

Douglas Coupland
"Two Postcards from the Bahamas" in
Polaroids from the Dead (1996)

2303) We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us.

Douglas Coupland
"James Rosenquist's F-111" in
Polaroids from the Dead (1996)

[Coupland is here wittier than he is wise – the theory of the "blank slate" has been thoroughly undermined. See Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate.]

2304) Two identical parties competing against each other with no alternatives – It's like the Disney version of democracy. How do you fight a cartoon?

Douglas Coupland
"Washington, D.C.: Four Microstories,
Super Tuesday 1992"
Polaroids from the Dead (1996)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 360 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Analyzing science

2296) It is high time [laymen] recognized [...] the misleading and damaging belief that scientific inquiry is a cold dispassionate enterprise, bleached of imaginative qualities, and that a scientist is a man [sic] who turns the handle of a machine of discovery; for at every level of endeavour scientific research is a passionate undertaking, and the Promotion of Natural Knowledge depends above all else on a sortie into what can be imagines but is not yet known.

Peter Medawar
Times Literary Supplement (10/25/63)
quoted by M.F. Perutz in
"A Passion for Science" in
New York Review of Books (2/20/1997)
[review of Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics
by Ruth Lewin Sime]

2297) Can science be shown to be a superior means of acquiring knowledge? Yes, it can, but only by showing that it is more likely to yield justified beliefs than any other methodology. Thus the real issues is not whether a belief is scientific or pseudoscientific but whether it is justified or unjustified.

We are justified in believing something to be true when it provides the best explanation of the evidence. Science is superior to other methods of inquiry because it usually provides better explanations than they do. The goodness of an explanation is determined by the amount of understanding it produces, and the amount of understanding an explanation produces is determines by how much it systematizes and unifies our knowledge. The extent to which an explanation does this can be determined by appealing to various criteria of adequacy such as simplicity, scope, conservatism and fruitfulness. No one wants to hold unjustified beliefs. The problem is that most people never learn the difference between a good explanation and a bad one.

Theodore Schick Jr.
"The End of Science?" in
Skeptical Inquirer (March/April 1997)

2298) If we believe in science and in its underlying rationality, then we can't stop at some particular place and say, "Beyond this point there be Tygers, paradoxes, the miraculous, the inexplicable." The trouble with science (one of the troubles) is that it isn't divisible; it doesn't take us so far and no farther, where we are forced to disembark and continue the rest of our voyage by miracle and marvel. If we believe in the need for miracles at any point in our journey, then we must give up on science altogether, right from the start. Science is an all-or-nothing thing, like being pregnant. [...] It may, of course, be that our ability to understand the "ultimate nature of things" is limited, but this doesn't mean that there is no ultimate nature of things or that their ultimate nature must be in the realm of miracles. Comprehension does not limit the physical reality of the universe, whatever or however complex (or simple) that underlying reality may be. Once we think comprehension limits physical reality, or even might, we leave science and enter into the gassy regions of metaphysics, the Land of Let's-Pretend.

The Uncertainty of Heisenberg, the Incompleteness of Godel, the wave/particle duality of light and matter, relativity - none of these is paradoxical. The fact that observation and even logic itself are limited, of that the underlying nature of things is merely probabilistic, may be distressing, but there is nothing paradoxical, nothing that contradicts itself. The appearance of a paradox is eventually resolved when better methods and better insights are developed. But the real point is, even if better methods and better insights are never developed, even if we never arrive at the resolution, the ultimate and rational nature of things is there; and it is there even if throughout the universe, in all space and in all time, there is and will be no intellect capable of resolving it. The capacity of minds to comprehend is not what makes reality real.

Ralph Estling
"Two Troubles With Science" in
Skeptical Inquirer (March/April 1997)

2299) [G]ood and kind people tell us that science is inadequate, this because it doggedly refuses to inform us how we should live our lives - by what ethical and moral principles we should live; how, why, and whom we should love; and so on. This complaint is widespread among the righteous.

The trouble here is that science is confused with rationality, as if the two were synonymous, when in fact science is just one subset, one kind of rationality, not the whole shebang. It is a vital part, but still only a part of the whole. As such, it does not deal with all forms of rationality, all logical inquiry and pursuits, such as how we should conduct our lives. That is not its job.

It is not science's job to supply answers to all our questions about why we are here and what to do about it. When it refuses to do so, it is not shirking its responsibility, abdicating its role. It is refusing to usurp the responsibility and role of reason, of which it forms a part, but with which it is not identical.

Ralph Estling
"Two Troubles With Science" in
Skeptical Inquirer (March/April 1997)

(3089/898) Authentic ain't everything

2295) [Sometimes] authenticity can be the enemy of creativity.

Phillip Saville
British television director
quoted by Steven Berkoff in
I Am Hamlet (1989)

(3089/898) Observations

2292) Students can't write clearly and they in turn can't think clearly, they can't read a challenging text, they can't make a cogent argument, and they can't analyze a political speech. [...] I keep saying to everyone who will listen that you can't run a democracy with people who don't know how to argue, don't know how to think clearly, and don't know how to express themselves.

Cynthia Griffin Wolff
MIT professor of humanities
quoted by Scott Lehigh in
"It's, like, extreme, but not gross" in the
Boston Globe (2/9/1997)

2293) [Y]ou don't pick a fight with some[one] you can't talk to!

C.J. Cherryh
Chanur's Venture (1984)

2294) There was a time and a rhythm in leading the helpless and the morally confused, a moment to snatch up souls before they fell to wrangling or wondering or asking too keen questions.

C.J. Cherryh
Chanur's Homecoming (1986)

(3089/898) Upstate/downstate

2290)
Q. A friend is thinking of moving from the city to the suburbs. As someone who grew up in the 'burbs and came to the city, what do you say to that?

A. [from Eric Bogosian] What do you think you're going to do? How do you think you're going to spend your time? How often do you think you'll actually be outside of the car when you're outside of the house? Do you think you'll ever walk again? I walk way more in the city than you ever will - it's no wonder heart disease on such a rise. The only time you'll interact with other people is at the supermarket. You won't have any other human relationships. People who live in the suburbs think the city is a dangerous place, but the city is full of established values about community that don't exist in the suburbs.

Q. So...?

A. Don't do it!

Eric Bogosian
"Questions for: Eric Bogosian"
New York Times Magazine (2/2/1997)

2291) From the time of Tocqueville, foreign-born observers of America have warned against the adulation of state governments. It does no good. Against all the evidence, Americans want to believe that Washington is a hellhole but Albany is not.

Michael Elliot
"The Ties That Band" in
New York Times Book Review (2/23/1997)
[review of The New Golden Rule
by Amitai Etzioni]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 360 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Names, again

2288) [I]t's silly to worry about a first name without considering what comes after it. Ideally, first and last names should meet and marry to create a strong, supple melodic line. If your last names is a monosyllable like Jones and you can't do anything about it short of changing it, you probably ought to give your child a longer, more fluid first name, like Jeremy for a boy , Margaret or Elizabeth for a girl.

Justin Kaplan and Anne Bernays
The Language of Names (1997)

2289) When I say New York I mean New York City, and when I say New York City I mean Manhattan.

Ed Fitzgerald
(c. 1997, attribution questionable)

(3089/898) Beak of the Finch

2284) The closer one looks at these performances of matter in living organisms, the more impressive the show becomes.

Max Delbruck
"A Physicist Looks At Biology" (1949) in
Transactions of the Connecticut Academy
of Arts and Sciences (38:175-90)
quoted by Jonathan Weiner in
The Beak of the Finch (1994)

2285) It is almost a law of science: the more indirect the evidence, the more polarized the debate. [...] Meanwhile, the more direct the evidence, the less the answers look either-or.

Jonathan Weiner
The Beak of the Finch (1994)

2286) John Endler, [who studies evolutionary pressure in guppy populations] does not like talking with Creationists [...] "I avoid it," It's really a waste of time. Not long ago on an airplane I talked for an hour with someone about what I do, and never once mentioned the word evolution. It's very easy to do, you know. Darwin himself doesn't use the word evolution in the whole of the Origin [of Species]. You just talk about what happens, and how you can study what happens: changes over many generations. It might be interesting to write a book that way now: don't use the word evolution until the very last page.

"Anyway, the whole time on the plane, my fellow passenger was growing more and more excited. 'What a neat idea! What a neat idea!" Finally, as the plane was landing, I told him this neat idea is called evolution. He turned purple."

"I've done exactly the same thing - and never let on it was evolution - and got exactly the same response," says Rosemary [Grant, who studies evolution in Darwin's finches in the Galapagos islands]. "I described our work on Daphne [Major] to a Jehovah's Witness. And he followed along, and said, "Oh, how fascinating.'"

"Asked intelligent questions," says Peter [her husband and fellow researcher].

"And I never plucked up enough courage to say, "Well, you know what all this means...'"

Jonathan Weiner
The Beak of the Finch (1994)

2287) [T]he strength and the weakness of science [is] that, without collective trust, it simply could not work. Instead there would be the dismal apparatus of mutual suspicion familiar to any accountant. Checking the scientific books in this way would be a task as joyless as accountancy: and no decent investigator would want to do it. That is why fraud [in the sciences] causes such dismay. [...] [T]he central truth about scientific fraud [...] [is that it] is extraordinarily rare. The reason is simple. Science is a card game against Nature, the ultimate opponent The hope is to deduce the hand she holds from the few clues she is willing to disclose. It is possible to win every time by faking one's own cards, but that removes the whole point of playing the game.

The commonest form of delusion in the sciences is self-delusion, persuading oneself that a result is there when it is not. [...] There is, certainly some dishonesty. Perhaps there is more than there was. It is not gratuitous [...]Instead it can be blamed on the intrusion into the laboratory of the morals of the marketplace.

Steve Jones
"Crooked Bones" in
New York Review of Books (2/6/1997)
[review of Unraveling Piltdown: The Science
Fraud of the Century and Its Solution
by John Evangelist Walsh]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 361 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Cultural imports

2283) It is easy to forget that "western" conceptions of culture have long allowed for a continuing interest in the non-European world; the debt was acknowledged, and it was quite often suggested that it should be increased. Renaissance scholars struggled to understand and to imitate Egyptian hieroglyphs. The eighteenth-century orientalist craze is familiar history. Learned philologists like Sir William Jones, friend of Dr. Johnson, inventor of the science of comparative philology, and expert in Sanskrit, translated many works from that language, and also from Arabic and Persian, to the considerable enrichment of later literature. In his ethical mode Matthew Arnold, apostle of European culture, extolled the Bhagavad-Gita. More fashionably, Paris in the last years of the nineteenth century was in love with Japanese prints, Balinese dancers, and other oriental manifestations. Gide explored Morocco, and E.M. Forster, along with many others, India. The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore was venerated, translated, and awarded the Nobel Prize. T.S. Eliot intoned the Upanishads, Ezra Pound discovered and adopted the Fenellosan Chinese character, and Yeats, who spent a lot of time attending to Tagore and other Indian sages, wrote Noh plays and celebrated the mask, the samurai sword, and the Japanese dancer. The early years of the present century witnessed a revolutionary cult of African sculpture.

Not all such enthusiasms can be dismissed as imperialistic self-indulgences, mere primitivism, "orientalism," chinoserie or japanaiserie; some were taken very seriously and some had a direct impact on Western culture. Indeed one could almost say that it has been in the very nature of Western civilization to study other cultures for its own use and benefit, and to revalue parts that have been obscured by historical accident; hence our interest in lost alphabets, lost languages, mysterious henges and cromlechs, and so on. But it can still be argued that all this archaeology, even at its most disinterested, was nevertheless part of the process of incorporating into the acquisitive European tradition whatever was valuable because exotic. Some cultural goods were brought in like silk from the mysterious East, their success dependent on Western money and Western ideas of luxury and the needs of various avant-gardes. On arrival they were made over into European goods.

Frank Kermode
"The World Turned Upside Down" in
New York Review of Books (2/6/1997)
[review of The Dictionary of Global Culture
edited by Kwama Anthony Appiah and
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.]

(3089/898) Ghost at the Feast

2281) [The] marriage of Romanticism and Freud which is film noir [...]

Geoffrey O'Brien
"The Ghost at the Feast" in
New York Review of Books (2/6/1997)

2282) Everyone who subscribes to cable television has had the experience of switching rapidly from channel to channel and hearing at every stop the same tones and inflections, the same vocabulary, the same messages: a language flattened and reduced to a shifting but never very large repertoire of catchphrases and slogans, a language into which advertisers have so successfully insinuated their strategies that the consumers themselves turn into walking commercials. It is a dialect of dead end and perpetual arbitrary switch-overs, intended always to sell but more fundamentally to fill time: a necessary substitute for dead air. Whether in movies or television dramas, talk shows or political speeches or "infotainment" specials hawking hair dyes and exercise machines, the homogenization of speech, the exclusion of anything resembling figurative language or rhetorical complexity or any remotely extravagant eloquence or wordplay or (it goes without saying) historical or literary allusions of any kind whatever, becomes so self-evident that the only defense is that winking tone of faux inanity of which the ineffable "whatever" seems to be an ironic acknowledgment. By contrast the dialogue in the old Hollywood movies unreeling randomly night and day - The Road to Rio or The Falcon in San Francisco or The File on Thelma Jordan - seems already to partake of some quite vanished classical age: how soon before it, too, needs footnotes?

Nothing leads from or to anything: the show rolls on because it isn't time for the next show yet. It is talk without any but the most short-term memory, as if language were not to be permitted its own past, a state of affairs which makes language in some senses impossible. In this context Shakespeare assumes an ever-stranger roles as he becomes the voice of a past increasingly less accessible and less tractable, the ghost at the fast-food feast. If in translation Shakespeare can remain our contemporary, in English he carries his own language with him, a language now almost accusatory in its richness when compared with the weirdly rootless and improvised speech of Medialand. "I learn immediately from any speaker," wrote Emerson, "how much he has already lived, through the poverty or splendor of his speech." But there is no telling what a four-hundred year-old man will be saying; the older he gets, the more it changes, and we no longer know if we really want to hear everything. It is like peering into a flowerpot full of twisted vines and splotched discolored lichen surviving improbably from some ancient plot.

It is absurd that Shakespeare alone should have to bear this burden, as if the whole of the European past rested on him alone, but that's only because nearly everyone else has already been consigned to the oblivion of the archives. We aren't likely to get (speaking only of the English tradition) the Geoffrey Chaucer movie, the Edmund Spencer movie, the John Webster movie, the John Milton movie, the William Congreve movie, the Laurence Stern movie, or even the Herman Melville movie; and the Bible movies, when they appear, owe more these days to the cadences of Xena: Warrior Princess than to those of King James. [...] Shakespeare has to stand, all by himself, for centuries of expressive language erased by common consent from the audio-visual universe which is our theatre and library and public square.

Geoffrey O'Brien
"The Ghost at the Feast" in
New York Review of Books (2/6/1997)
[review of Kenneth Branagh's film Hamlet,
and other Shakespeare films]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 361 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Free markets, predictions and information

2276) The stock market is s strange and wonderful thing. The immense effort that goes into explaining booms and busts masks their essential irrationality. One day mutual-fund investors are happy to shield their eyes from the wild risks they're taking;the next they're terrified and stuffing cash under mattresses. Everyone pretends to understand the panic; no one really does. Something changes in the collective mind.

Michael Lewis
"The Capitalist: The Silent Boom"
New York Times Magazine (1/12/1997)

2277) There are all sorts of necessary social and economic goods, [Robert] Kuttner says [in Everything For Sale], that markets can't be relied on to provide. Free markets underinvest in pure research, so government needs to finance it, or to structure the economy so that private companies can afford to conduct it. Government made us prosperous by creating the higher education system, railroads, canals, commercial aviation and the Internet. Moreover, markets generate problems - pollution, dangerous products, economic disasters like bank failures - so they need to be regulated. Regulation does not retard growth: "The zenith of the era of regulation - the postwar boom - was the most successful period of American capitalism." Finally, markets fail to provide all citizens with such essentials as health care, physical safety and basic economic security, so these have to come from government.

Nicolas Lemann
"When Markets Fail" in
New York Times Books Review (1/26/1997)
citing and quoting Robert Kuttner
Everything for Sale: The Virtues
and Limits of Markets (1997)

2278) We are endlessly indulgent of prophets and prognosticators, astrologers and nostrodami. They must, after all, know something. They can't be completely wrong, can they?

Julian Barnes
"Back to the Future" in
New York Times Book Review (1/26/1997)
[review of Paris In the Twentieth Century by
Jules Verne and Jules Verne by Herbert R. Lottman]

2279) Most predictions tell us less about the future than about the time at which the prediction was made. "Nineteen Eighty-four" is a surer guide to 1948, when Orwell was writing his novel, than to his dated hell.

Julian Barnes
"Back to the Future" in
New York Times Book Review (1/26/1997)
[review of Paris In the Twentieth Century by
Jules Verne and Jules Verne by Herbert R. Lottman]

2280) The nation whose population depends on the explosively compressed headline service of television news can expect to be exploited by demagogues and dictators who prey upon the semi-informed.

Walter Cronkite
A Reporter's Life (1997)
quoted by Tom Wicker in
"Broadcast News" in
New York Times Books Review (1/26/1997)

(3089/898) Times they are a-changin'

2273) No one who isn't from New York [City] knows how to be a pedestrian. Pedestrians don't mosey. And they don't walk five abreast. I'd like to make New York unsafe for tourists. Why do they come here to stand in line?

Fran Leibowitz
quoted by Bruce Weber in
"Crime Is Down. Streets Are Clean. What's a New York Comedian to Do?" in
New York Times Metro section (1/12/1997)

2274) A conventional [music] video shows a singer strutting around doing his business [...] Making techno [music] is not really that photogenic. Generally, it looks like old people eating food. It's very boring.

Nick Philip
director of the Sun Electric
"Meccano" video
quoted by Neil Strauss in
"A New Spacey Look for MTV" in
New York Times Styles section (1/19/1997)

2275) Like many men who are well read and largely self-taught, [Bruce] Springsteen is attracted to polysyllables and sometimes mispronounces them.

Nicholas Dawidoff
"The Pop Populist" in
New York Times Magazine (1/26/1997)

(3089/898) Our legal system

2271) [A] trial is often not so much a dispassionate inquiry as it is a morality play. At best, it is an attempt to recapture events that were ambiguous in the first place; at worst it is a contest between opposing public relations machines, each trying to sell its own stylized version of reality.

Laura Mansnerus
"The Devil Is in the Details"
New York Times Week in Review (1/12/1997)

2272) [In Europe] you're looking at a legal system so much fairer, cheaper and more accurate than ours that they view us the way we view witch doctors.

John H. Langbein
(Yale University Law Professor)
quoted by Laura Mansnerus in
"The Devil Is in the Details"
New York Times Week in Review (1/12/1997)

(3089/898) Stay out of the bunker

2270) [W]ithdrawal and emphatic reaffirmation of local habits and customs has always been the first, most elemental and popular reaction to novelties that threaten established verities and routines of life. But throughout human history the occasional efforts made by creative minorities to borrow foreign ideas and practices and adapt them to local use have been far more important; for these efforts, when successful – and they have been successful only occasionally – allowed new skills to spread and evolve. The Moslem mastery and elaboration of Greek mathematical skill and the subsequent borrowing and further elaboration by Europeans after the thirteenth century provide a vivid example of such exchanges. The net effect of successful borrowing and adaptation was to increase human wealth and power by enlarging our niche in the ecosystem. This, in fact, is, and always has been, the central phenomenon of human history.

Retreat into a local cultural past – even when it is a reconstructed past that never existed before – can indeed sustain local morale and cohesion in time of troubles. But when the resulting bunker mentality dictates a systematic disregard of, or deliberate inattention to, the ideas and skills alien peoples and cultures have at their command, the end result is to be disastrously left behind by the rest of the world. [...]

If a nation or bloc of nations is to have long-term success, cultural continuity must somehow be combined with close attention to useful new ideas, practices, and technologies from near and far.

William H. MacNeill
"Decline of the West?"
New York Review of Books (1/9/1997)
[review of The Clash of Civilizations
and the Remaking of the World Order
by Samuel P. Huntington]

(3089/898) The techno-gap

2269) [I]ncreasing access to technology improves overall wealth, but also exacerbates inequality, because access benefits the information-rich the most. More and broader education is the single most effective way of reducing the disparity, but it doesn't work on the kind of time-scale that wins elections.

John Browning
"Cyber View: No More 9 to 5"
Scientific American (1/1997)

Propaganda watch

I'm beginning to see some propaganda around. Here's one example:



And here's another:

Electile Dysfunction: the inability to become aroused over any of the choices for president put forth by either party in the 2008 election year.

Now, note that both of these were sent to a friend of mine from some Republican friends of hers, so in both cases we're looking at Republicans saying that they're unhappy with all the candidates in the current cohort running for President.

What's the meaning of this? Well, either Republicans are actually tired of politics as usual, and are as disenchanted with their own candidates as they are with those of the Democrats, or else they're.... hmmmmmm ... let me think ... Oh, maybe they're trying to poison the wells and drive down Democratic turnout by spreading the idea that all politicians are equally reprehensible?

No, they wouldn't do that, would they?

In Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar Antony says:

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;

In Bush's case, it's hard to come up with any good he's done, except, perhaps, to put the lie to the canard that there's "no difference between the parties", no matter how close they sometimes come to each other on some issues.*

You remember that, right, how Ralph Nader went around telling everyone that Democrats and Republicans were exactly the same, and enough people believed him to help make it just that much easier for Bush to steal the election in Florida in 2000, and we ended up with him instead of Gore – you recall? And that's how we learned (onCe again) that there is a difference between Republicans and Democrats.

So let's not fall for the same old trick wrapped up in new packaging. There is a difference between the parties, and there are politicians who are better than others, and it so happens that many of the bad ones are on their payroll, and many of the good ones are on ours But be that as it may, even if both candidates, Democratic and Republican, turn out to be equally bad, the Democrat will be (as LBJ is said to have said) our son of a bitch, and not theirs, and that makes the Democrat prefereable, because we have some influence then that we wouldn't have otherwise.

Be on the lookout for other instances of this new Republican ploy. And cheer up, folks, we're seeing the end of a very bad time, and we're coming into an election of historic change.

[Thanks to Shirley for passing along the propaganda.]

^* Of course, that's precious little good for the scale of the evil Bush and Cheney have laid on us. We'll be digging out from their blizzard for a long time. Our children's children will still be feeling the effects.

(3089/898) The illusion of consciousness

2268) Consciousness is an illusion that the brain constructs to simulate the world around us. It does this so seamlessly, that we are convinced we are experiencing reality directly, even though all our information is heavily processed before we become aware of it. Colors, sounds and tastes exist only in our heads, they are the brains coded representations of important physical properties of the outside world, such as the frequencies of light waves, the vibrations of air molecules and the structure of chemicals.

Nicholas Wade
"Software for the Brain"
New York Times Book Review (12/29/1996)
[review of Kinds of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett and
The Conscious Mind by David J. Chalmers]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 363 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

Different strokes in America, buddy

(3089/898) Bernard Wolfe: Limbo

2262) There was probably a touch of psychic hari-kari in every human community. For every community promulgated some sacred mission or other, dedication was the matrix of every group, its psychic glue - and every communal mission was in the end a bit absurd. Why? Well, simply because it demanded of all men within its pale that they order their psychic economies to conform with the group goal, verticalize their horizontal instincts: this was the meaning of the reality principle as superimposed on the pleasure principle. But the reality created and deified by the community, although it undoubtedly paid some emotional dividends to those who kowtowed to it, never turned out a really adequate substitute for the simpler instinctual pleasures sacrificed at its altar: peace, for example, was a hollow gift when purchased at the price of orgasm, or limbs. So even in the most socialized citizen, the most obedient, there was a festering remnant of discontent. Particularly since, when he looked around, he saw other men in other places devoted to goals quite antithetical to his own - and every bit as solemn about it.

Good enough. It followed, then, that the healthiest society was one which allowed its members ample escape valves for the discontents fomented by civilization and its instinct trampling ends: along with the bread of solemnity, plenty of irrelevant circuses in which clowns rode all the sacred cows. Where there were enough such circuses, little ambivalence remained to poison the more devotional activities. But among people who were discontented enough, and were not provided with enough drainage systems for their malaise, every day was something of a circus, ever solemn undertaking poisoned by a certain tongue-in-cheek attitude - they did obeisance to the community's lofty goals but always with a shrug of the shoulders and sardonic shadows playing around the mouth and the tacit suspicion that "Dolce far niente." ["Doing nothing is sweet."]

Bernard Wolfe
Limbo (1952)

2263) [E]very one of the big salvationist movements in history - from the Ten Commandments all the way down to the Mormons' Latter Day Sainthood and Christian Science and Jehovah's Witnesses and Fletcherism and Bolshevik-Leninism and Dianetics and Orgonotics and Santa Monica Vedanta and Mangunga - every one of them might have started out as a great Swiftean joke. That some humorless man got hold of and took literally.

The jokes got wilder and wilder, people laughed less and less.

Bernard Wolfe
Limbo (1952)

2264) Thing is, man has always been uneasy with the world as it is - its disarray, its slipshoddiness. Can't stand an indefinite turbulence in his affairs. People are too damned neat to live with the world's litter; maybe it come from too much toilet training. Man isn't the tool maker, the speech maker, the concept maker; pre-eminently he's the system maker, the compulsive bringer of order into primordial messiness.

Bernard Wolfe
Limbo (1952)

2265) All along, the philosopher's Holy Grail has been the magical Hyphen, some unified-field theory or another. After the religious short cuts [...] had been tried and failed - the Catholic's hierarchical stepladder to the One, the Protestant's individual pipeline - the philosopher's had a try at patching things up. They were all variations on Descartes, trying to find the missing cosmic link in one pineal gland or another. [...] Often a guy seem to get a hold of some provocative kernel of an idea, some puny lever with which to pry open this or that chunk of reality - but invariably he palmed it off as the Ultimate Lever. Some of these guys, in fact, judging from the grandiosity and fanatical intensity of their writings, were in the strictest sense pathological, determined to find the one key that would open all doors. It never occurred to them that different doors might be fitted with totally different kids of locks. So that anybody rash enough to pose as cosmic locksmith should, in the interest of public safety, himself be locked up. To mix the figure still further, a key which is fobbed off as a cosmic can opener can very easily be turned into a bull whip or truncheon or automatic - or steamroller.

Bernard Wolfe
Limbo (1952)

2266) [W]hat distinguishes man from animal? Not hands, not superego, not logic, not the ability to abstract and make instruments, not his myths and dreams and nightmares - the beginnings of all these things are there in higher animals, it's just a matter of man having more of the same. There's only one thing man can do that's beyond all other animals on earth: he can laugh. [...] Correction. Two things distinguish man from the animal. He laughs - uses throat can vocal cords in a most unfunctional way. Also cries - first time in the animal kingdom the tear ducts were ever put to such fantastic unfunctional uses. And performs both unfunctional activities as one function, when he's fully human. Homo Dei, the weepy titterer: laughs til the tears come.

Bernard Wolfe
Limbo (1952)

2267) Anybody who "paints a picture" of some coming year is kidding - he's only fancying up something in the present or past, not blueprinting the future. All such writing is essentially satiric (today-centered), not utopic (tomorrow-centered). This book, then is a rather bilious rib on 1950 - on what 1950 might have been like if it had been allowed to fulfill itself, if it had gone on being 1950, only more and more so, for four more decades. But no year ever fulfills itself: the cowpath of History is littered with the corpses of years, their silly throats slit from ear to ear by the improbable.

I am writing about the overtone and undertow of now [i.e. 1950] - in the guise of 1990 because it would take decades for a year like 1950 to be milked of its implications. What 1990 will really look like I haven't the slightest idea. Nobody can train his mind to think effectively, without vertigo, in terms of acceleration and accelerated accelerations - and nobody can foretell Clio's pratfalls. On the spurious map of the future presented herein, on the far side of the pinpoint of now, I have to inscribe, as did the medieval cartographers over all the terrifying areas outside their ken: HERE LIVE LIONS. They could, of course, be unicorns, or hippographs, or even giraffes. I don't know if there's going to be a 1990.

Bernard Wolfe
"Author's Notes and Warnings"
Limbo (1952)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 363 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) We contain multitudes

2258) When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! You can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth.

Steve Jobs
interviewed by Gary Wolf in
"Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing" in
Wired (2/1996)

2259) Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.

Mark Twain
Following the Equator (1897) [ODQ]

2260)
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes).

Walt Whitman
"Song of Myself" in
Leaves of Grass (1855)

2261) Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

Jules Henri Poincare
quoted by Bertrand Russell in
Science and Method (1913) [B16]

(3089/898) Gould: Full House

2248) [P]robably more intellectual energy has been invested in discovering (and exploiting) trends in the stock market than in any other subject - for the obvious reason that the stakes are so high, as measured in the currency of our culture. The fact that no one has ever come close to finding a consistent way to beat they system - despite intense efforts by some of the smartest people in the world - probably indicates that such causal trends do not exist, and that the sequences are effectively random.

Stephen Jay Gould
Full House (1996)

2249) In the second most prominent fallacy about trends, people correctly identify a genuine directionality, but then fall into the error of assuming that something else moving in the same direction at the same time must be acting as the cause. This error, the conflation of correlation with causality, arises for the obvious reason (once you think about it) that, at any moment, oodles of things must be moving in the same direction (Halley's comet is receding from earth and my cat is getting more ornery) - and the vast majority of these correlated sequences cannot be causally related. In the classic illustration, a famous statistician once showed a precise correlation between arrests for public drunkenness and the number of Baptist preachers in nineteenth-century America. The correlation is real and intense, but we may assume that the two increases are causally unrelated, and that both arise as consequences of a single different factor: a marked general increase in the American population.

Stephen Jay Gould
Full House (1996)

2250) The chess board is the world, the pieces are the phenomenon of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.

T.H. Huxley
A Liberal Education (1868)
quoted by Stephen Jay Gould in
Full House (1996)

2251) Huxley's metaphor fails [...] because we cannot depict the enterprise of science as Us against Them. The adversary at the other side of the board is some complex combination of nature's genuine intractability and our hidebound social and mental habits. We are, in large part, playing against ourselves. Nature is objective, and nature is knowable, but we can only view her through a glass darkly - and many clouds upon our vision are of our own making: social and cultural biases, psychological preferences, and mental limitations (in universal modes of thought, not just individual stupidity.)

Stephen Jay Gould
Full House (1996)

2252) We often portray taxonomy as the dullest of all fields, as expressed in a variety of deprecatory metaphors: hanging garments on nature's coatrack; placing items into pigeonholes; or (in an image properly resented by philatelists) sticking stamps into the album of reality. All these images clip the wings of taxonomy and reduce the science of classification to the dullest task of keeping things neat and tidy. But these portrayals [...] reflect a common fallacy: the assumption of a fully objective nature "out there" and visible in the same way to any unprejudiced observer [...] If such a vision could be sustained, I suppose taxonomy would become the most boring of sciences. for nature would then present a set of obvious pigeonholes, and taxonomists would search for occupants and shove them in - an enterprise requiring diligence, perhaps, but not much creativity or imagination.

But classification systems are not passive devices in a world objectively divided into obvious categories. Taxonomies are human decisions imposed upon nature - theories about the causes of nature's order. The chronicle of historical changes in classification provides our finest insight into conceptual revolutions in human thought. Objective nature does exist, but we can converse with her only through the structure of our taxonomic systems.

We may grant this general point, but still hold that certain fundamental categories present so little ambiguity that basic divisions must be invariant across time and culture. Not so - not for these, or any subjects. Categories are human impositions upon nature (though nature's factuality offers hints and suggestions in return).

Stephen Jay Gould
Full House (1996)

2253) [T]he three standard measures of central tendency, or "average" value - the mean (or conventional average calculated by adding all the values and dividing by the number of cases), the median (or halfway point), and the mode (or most common value). In symmetrical distributions, all three measures coincide - for the center is, simultaneously, the most common value, the halfway point (with equal number of cases on either side), and the mean. This coincidence, I suspect, has lead most of us to ignore the vital differences among these measures, for we view "normal curves" as, well, normal - and regard skewed distributions (of we grasp the principle at all) as peculiar and probably rare. But measures of central tendency differ in skewed distributions - and a major source of employment for economic and political "spin doctors" lies in knowing which measure to choose as the best propaganda for the honchos who hired your gun. [...]

In general, when a distribution is prominently skewed, mean values will be pulled most strongly in the direction of skew, medians less, and modes not at all. Thus, in right-skewed distributions, means generally have higher values than medians, and medians higher than modes. If we start with a symmetrical distribution (with equal mean, median, and mode), and then pull the variation to form a right-skewed distribution the mean will change most in the direction of skew - for one new millionaire on the right tail can balance hundreds of indigent people on the left tail. The median changes less, for a single pauper will now compensate the millionaire when we are only counting noses on either side of a central tendency. (The median might not move at all if only the wealth, and not the number, of people increases on the right side of the distribution. But if the number of wealthy people at the right tail increases as well, then the median will also shift to the right - but not so far as the mean.) The mode, meanwhile, may well stay put and not vary at all, as mean and median grow in an increasingly right-skewed distribution. Twenty-thousand per year may remain the most common income, even while the number of wealthy people constantly increases.

Stephen Jay Gould
Full House (1996)

2254) What are the real success stories of mammalian evolution? We can answer this question without ambiguity, at least in terms of numerous species and vigorous radiation: rats, bats, and antelopes [...] These three groups dominate the world of mammals, both in numbers, and in ecological spread.

Stephen Jay Gould
Full House (1996)

2255) The obvious main difference between Darwinian evolution and cultural change clearly lies in the enormous capacity that culture holds - and nature lacks - for explosive rapidity and cumulative directionality. In an unmeasurable blink of a geological eyelash, human cultural change has transformed the surface of our planet as no event of natural evolution could ever accomplish at Darwinian scales of myriad generations. (Natural catastrophes of a physical nature, like the bolide that triggered the great Cretaceous extinction, may wipe out many forms of life in a geological moment, but no known process can produce natural evolutionary change at anything like the speed and extent of human cultural transformation; the impressive and maximal rapidity of the Cambrian explosion lasted some 5 million years.

Stephen Jay Gould
Full House (1996)

2256) Cultural change [...] receives a powerful boost from amalgamation and anastomosis of different traditions. A clever traveler may take one look at a foreign wheel, import the invention back home, and change his local culture fundamentally and forever. One brace of guns, one bevy of war chariots, imported with engineers and tradesmen to keep them in working order, can transform a limited and peaceful state into an expanding engine of conquest. The explosively fruitful (or destructive) impact of shared traditions powers human cultural change by a mechanism unknown in the slower world of Darwinian evolution.

Stephen Jay Gould
Full House (1996)

2257) [T]he great fuzziness of our age - so-called "political correctness" [...] a doctrine that celebrates all indigenous practice, and therefore permits no distinctions, judgments, or analyses.

Stephen Jay Gould
Full House (1996)

Thanks, Suzanne

Suzanne Pleshette
January 31, 1937 – January 19, 2008

ONE YEAR TO GO!

In just 365 days, no more Bush, no more Cheney!


Note to the unduly credulous: No, this is not a photograph from an amazing anti-Bush rally held somewhere today, it's been altered from a photograph taken years ago in connection with another event altogether. Don't believe everything you see.