Highlights on my postings on Others' blogs
Posted by Jonathan Vos Post to Michael Berube's blog
http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/comments/678/
in response to his reply to Mark Bauerlein’s short
essay on Theory’s Empire

=========

When I say something akin to "When someone says that
the set of all correctly transmitted and understood
messages is a subset of all imaginable messages that
can be incorrectly transmitted or misunderstood, such
that misunderstanding is the condition of possibility
of understanding," I am not making "a deconstructive
move." I cite the inventor of Information Theory, the
man who named the Bit, Claude Shannon, with whom I had
profound conversations. The probability that EVERY one
of N letters gets delivered to one of the wrong N
people becomes, in the limit of large N, precisely 1/e
where e is the base of the natural logarithms. Sokol
made an important point that there are deep structures
in the universe, whether you consider them Physics or
Mathematics, which are NOT mere social constructs
(although Physics and Mathematics are, for us, social
processes by imperfect people). Whether or not you
believe in a Platonic Ideal, it is foolish to believe
that there is NO external universe, and NO laws
without polotical contingency. You can't legislate
"pi" to be 3, and not be a fool. You can't legislate
away the law of Universal Gravitation. You can't
eliminate the Law of Supply and Demand by fiat. If you
think so, you are not a Theorist. You are a
Solipsist. In which case, why are you reading MY
posting?

Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/13 at 09:01 PM


==========

Actually, I understand that the state of Indiana
legislated the value of pi as 3.3. You wouldn’t
believe the circles they have there.

Posted by Lee on 07/13 at 09:19 PM

==========

People have been getting that wrong for a long time.
1 Kings 7:23 in the King James Version states, “And
[Solomon] made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one
brim to the other: it was round all about, and his
height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits
did compass it round about”. 2 Chronicles 4:2 states
that the object was “round in compass” and that a line
of 30 cubits “did compass it round about”. 30 cubits
divided by 10 cubits for a shape “round in compass”
(i.e. circular) means that, since pi is the ratio of a
circle’s circumference to its diameter, pi = 3.0000.
Does that mean that the laws of geometry have changed
since the days of the Old Testament, or in the state
of Indiana? I think not. I think that the text must
be understood in the context of all possible texts, in
a lawful universe, which includes errors and
unreliable narrators. If the authors/editors of Kings
or Chronicles told us that a circle was 355 cubits
around and 113 cubits across, I’d know that they did
the same Math as the Chinese mathematician and
astronomer Zu Chongzhi did in the 5th century. I would
not deconstruct the ethnicities and relative political
systems of the Far East and Middle East. Only in Eric
Blair’s Room 101 is 2 + 2 = 5, and that took torture.

Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/13 at 11:18 PM

(106 comments) - (Post a new comment)

Legislating Pi magicdragon2 2005-07-14 08:30 pm UTC (link)

jonathan post <jvospost2@yahoo.com> > Actually, I understand that the state of Indiana > legislated the value of pi as 3.3. Close. A bill was introduced to make pi 3.2, but it didn't pass into law-- the Indiana senate "indefinitely postponed" consideration. (I believe it was introduced as a deliberate practical joke, although snopes.com doesn't go into the details.) As always, a good starting point is to check Snopes.com http://www.snopes.com/religion/pi.htm Full details (including the more detailed calculations on what exactly value they did chose for pi) are at the sci.math FAQ http://www.cs.uu.nl/wais/html/na-dir/sci-math-faq/indianabill.html -- Geoffrey A. Landis http://www.sff.net/people/geoffrey.landis (Reply to this)

Uranus, Voyager, and the Singularity magicdragon2 2005-07-14 08:32 pm UTC (link)

More discussion, about Voyager II and stuff, on the same blog. Michael Bérubé teaches literature and cultural studies at Penn State. His site includes links to about seventy of Bérubé's essays, published in academic journals (American Literature, Social Text, Modern Fiction Studies) and in more popular venues (Dissent, the Nation, Harper's, New York Times Magazine). http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/comments/679/ ===== Of course I contend that Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto are “out there” independent of social construct, having been an Astronomy professor, and having been Mission Planning Engineer for the Voyage II flyby of Uranus (Miranda was one of my responsibilities). And yet… the “discoverer” or “inventor” of Uranus did not, at first, accept that it was a Planet, as, by definition, all the planets were known. He was, after all, a music teacher in Bath, and leaped at the chance to name it after King George III. AND his sister, the abused opera singer, was co-dicoverer/co-inventor, and politicolegal truth established her as Assistant Astronomer Royal and most famous female scientist in the world. AND Neptune was discovered first in France or in England, take sides, and Pluto in America. AND Galileo saw Uranus first through a telescope, but didn’t know what he saw and recorded in his notebook. AND Pluto is arguably not a planet, but merely the largest Trans-Neptunian Kuiper Belt Object known so far. SOMETHING is out there, but we see through a telescope glass darkly, male, female, transgendered, nationalized, marginalized, imperialized, postcolonialized, enmeshed in old theory, revolting towards new theory, dragged down by chains of theory to drown in a sea of ink and flickering phosphor phish. “Natural and healthy evolution of a discipline” begs the question, as Evolution is itself a system of science, healthy presumes a medicalized view of the body, and discipline is most surely a social construct, unless you fall into the snowbanks of Two Cultures. Academic? That’s an anomaly, a 20th century fad, for Science to be dominated by the University, instead of by the Victorian Men of Leisure & Museum Curators, and liberal Curates and Naturalists in the 19th Century; or the virtual corporate web entity of cyborgs right now; or the unimaginable transhumanism beyond the Singularity. Will the argument persist in the Eschaton of Charles Stross, the galaxy-spanning culturea of Vernor Vinge and Iain Banks? Leptons to leptons; quarks to quarks. Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/14 at 04:27 AM (Reply to this) (Thread)

Re: Uranus, Voyager, and the Singularity magicdragon2 2005-07-14 08:33 pm UTC (link)

"Jonathan Vos Post: the 'discoverer' or 'inventor' of Uranus did not, at first, accept that it was a Planet, as, by definition, all the planets were known..." Thanks for adding that item to the mix! The discovery of Neptune, I think, is every bit as good a demonstration case for Kuhn as was the discovery of oxygen. And I am such a Voyager spacecraft fan; I’m thrilled to hear that you were one of the people responsible for it all. The Uranus flyby was 1986, wasn’t it? And the Reagan Administration wanted to cut the program’s funding. We would have missed seeing those eerie clouds, that gossamer ring, and Miranda. The Neptune encounter three years later was awesome, as well, and imho Pluto isn’t really a planet. Posted by Michael on 07/14 at 10:30 AM (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

Re: Uranus, Voyager, and the Singularity - magicdragon2, 2005-07-14 08:34 pm UTC

Re: Uranus, Voyager, and the Singularity - magicdragon2, 2005-07-14 08:34 pm UTC

Re: Uranus, Voyager, and the Singularity - magicdragon2, 2005-07-14 08:35 pm UTC

Great First Lines of Books magicdragon2 2005-07-22 05:57 pm UTC (link)

I've been posting Great First Lines of Books on a Michael Bérubé thread entitled Friday, July 15, 2005 Arbitrary. Fun. Charlie Harris, professor emeritus of English at Illinois State University, contemporary literature reader/critic extraordinaire (secretary of the Center for Book Culture.org and former director of the Unit for Contemporary Literature), and all-around fine fellow, informs me that a bunch of literary-minded folk are putting together a list of Great First Lines in Novels, as an arbitrary-but-fun counterpart to the American Film Institute’s 100 great movie lines. So far they have over 150 nominations... But then Michael Bérubé got way over 200 comments. Mine include the ones that follow. (Reply to this) (Thread)

Re: Great First Lines of Books, 2 magicdragon2 2005-07-22 06:03 pm UTC (link)

A) “It was nearing midnight and the Prime Minister was sitting alone in his office, reading a long memo that was slipping through his brain without leaving the slightest trace of meaning behind.” (B) “‘To SAIL beyond the world--’” (C) “I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped.” (D) “Like a raging mountain, the Terichik rose screaming from a frozen, nightdark sea.” (E) “The flat afternoon spread over the black and gray mountains like a stage backdrop, the color of a dog’s pale crazy eye.” (F) “In a broad Moscow street not two hundred yards from the Leningrad station, on the upper floor of an ornate and hideous hotel built by Stalin in the style known to Muscovites as Empire During the Plague, the British Council’s first ever audio fair for the teaching of the English language and the spread of British culture was grinding to its excruciating end.” (G) “Two minutes before he disappeared forever from the face of the Earth he knew, Joseph Schwartz strolled along the pleasant steets of suburban Chicago quoting Browning to himself.” (H) “HARI SELDON-- ... born in the 11,988th year of the Glactic Era: died 12,069.” (I) “Prospero and Roger Bacon, the two main characters in a story that seems crammed with wizards, were wizards.” (J) “‘I wouldn’t go into biology if I were starting again now. In twenty years’ time it is the biologists who will be working behind barbed wire.’” (K) “On Earth it would be a fearful thing to see a man chasing down the street after the skin from a human face, a thin layer of tissue blown about like a piece of paper by the wind.” (L) “This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying… but nobody thought so.” (M) “The predicted cataclysm, the Wasting, has come and--it seems--gone: pollution, exhaustion and inevitable wars among swollen, impovershed populations have devastated the world, leaving it to the wild weeds.” (N) “J. D. Sauvage, the alien contact specialist, drifted in zero g and waited for a message from an unknown civilization.” (O) “As I left the Kenya Beanstalk capsule he was right on my heels.” (P) “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.” (Q) “Jagged green lightning danced on the horizon and the wind came ripping like a blade out of the east, skinning the flat land bare and sending up clouds of gray-brown dust. Gilgamesh grinned broadly.” (A) J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. (B) Poul Anderson, The Boat of a Million Years. (C) Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory. (D) Larry Niven & Steven Barnes, The Barsoom Project. (E) Greg Bear, Darwin’s Radio. (F) John Le Carre, The Russia House. (G) Isaac Asimov, Pebble in the Sky. (H) Isaac Asimov, Foundation. (I) John Bellairs, The Face in the Frost. (J) George Turner, Beloved Son. (K) Philip Jose Farmer, Father to the Stars. (L) Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination. (M) Suzy McKee Charnas, Walk to the End of the World. (N) Vonda N. McIntyre, Transition. (O) Robert A. Heinlein, Friday. (P) Douglas Adams, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish. (Q) Robert Silverberg, To the Land of the Living. Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/17 at 03:59 PM (Reply to this) (Parent)

Great First Lines of Books, 3 magicdragon2 2005-07-22 06:04 pm UTC (link)

“It was nearing midnight and the Prime Minister was sitting alone in his office, reading a long memo that was slipping through his brain without leaving the slightest trace of meaning behind." Jonathan, you are now in violation of sixteen distinct international copyright laws. Everyone knows, or else should know, that no blog citation of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is permissible until 16 August 2005. Posted by Michael on 07/17 at 11:23 PM Michael, perhaps I should have known having, after all, spoken with J. K. Rowling and her publicist at a signing of a previous book in San Marino, California. I should have known through my wife, also from Edinburgh, Scotland. I am sensitive to intellectual property issues through my years of work as a consultant to top Patent Law firms, or through my training as an elected officer of the national Writers Union, or my work in Science Fiction Writers of America, Mystrery Writers of America, and the like. If I have caused you any difficulty, I apologize. I am a professional author, editor, and publisher. As a big fan of J. K. Rowling, I certainly intended no harm, but I honestly did not know of this embargo. In fact, I coulds swear that I heard that first sentence read out loud on KPCC-FM radio, perhaps as a National Public Radio event. Please don’t sic the Dementors on me. What, what’s that at the window? AAAAAAiiiiiiieeeee.... Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/18 at 12:55 AM (Reply to this)

Great First Lines of Books, 4 magicdragon2 2005-07-22 06:06 pm UTC (link)

211. “I never was a virgin.” [Susan Isaacs, Lily White, 1996] “Most people won’t even open the door when someone rings their bell.” [Harold Q. Masur; So Rich, So Lovely and So Dead; 1952] “When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere. I felt that from the moment I woke.” [John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, 1951] “Masked eyes peered through the semi-darkness of the room.” [Charles Harness, The Paradox Men, 1953] “From the cold-storage locker at the rear of the store, Victor Nielson wheeled a cart of winter potatoes to the vegetable section of the produce department.” [Philip K. Dick, Time Out Of Joint, 1959] “The volcano that had reared Taratua up from the Pacific depths had been sleeping now for half a million years.” [Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End, 1954] “Although I am writing this in the year 1877, I was not born until 1921. Neither the dates nor the tenses are error ... “ [Ward Moore, Bring the Jubilee, 1955] “When I was quite small I would sometimes dream of a city - which was strange because it began before I even knew what a city was.” [John Wyndham, The Chrysalids, 1955] “She was a girlygirl and they were true men, the lords of creation, but she pitted her wits against them and she won.” ["Cordwainer Smith” pseudonym of Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, The Ballad of Lost C’Mell] well, actually a short story, as is: “Martel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger.” ["Cordwainer Smith”, Scanners Live In Vain] “It is established beyond doubt that Mr. Butler was drunk at the time.” [Rafael Sabatini, The Snare] “The young lieutenant-colonel was drunk, apparently, and determined to rush upon disaster.” [Gordon Dickson, Tactics of Mistake] “Mankind consisted of 128 people.” [Willaim Tenn, Of Men and Monsters, 1968] Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/19 at 10:57 PM (Reply to this)

Great First Lines of Books, 5 magicdragon2 2005-07-22 06:07 pm UTC (link)

216. “Suddenly Rodrone understood why the scene before his eyes held such a fascination for him, and why he returned again and again to worlds like this one. Lurid, offbeat and infernal, it offered the exaggerated symbolism of a painting rendered by a schizophrenic; and so drew him to that attractive realm of mental aberration where thoughts and actions could all be bizarre without feelings of shame...” [Barrington Bayley, The Star Virus, his 1st novel] “We are each the love of someone’s life.” [Andrew Sean Greer, The Confessions of Max Tivoli : A Novel] “As the vibrations died down in the laboratory the big man arose from the glass chair and viewed the complicated apparatus on the table. It was complete to the last detail. He glanced at the calendar. It was September 1st in the year 2660. Tomorrow was to be a big and busy day for him, for it was to witness the final phase of the three-year experiment. He yawned and stretched himself to his full height, revealing a physique much larger than that of the average man of his times and approaching that of the huge Martians. His physical superiority, however, was as nothing compared to his gigantic mind. He was Ralph 124C 41+, one of the greatest living scientists and one of ten men on the whole planet earth permitted to use the Plus sign after his name. Stepping to the Telephot on the side of the wall, he pressed a group of buttons and in a few minutes the faceplate of the Telephot became luminous, revealing the face of a clean-shaven man about thirty, a pleasant but serious face.” [Hugo Gernsback, Ralph 124C 41+ A Romance of the Year 2660, First serialized in the pages of Hugo Gernsback’s own magazine, Modern Electrics from April 1911, to March 1912, then printed in book form in 1925] “Because of who he was, and what he was, he asked for and they gave him, an aircraft to take him anywhere in the world.” [John Brunner] Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/19 at 11:46 PM (Reply to this)

Great First Lines of Books, 6 magicdragon2 2005-07-22 06:08 pm UTC (link)

217. {Theory of Opening Sentences} “ I’ll muck about with an idea for as long as it takes (months, usually, and sometimes years) to figure out what I want to do with it, jotting down notes and the occasional line of dialog until I’ve got what seems to me the perfect opening sentence, one that roots the reader in the situation and gives me the chance to move forward rapidly. ‘He died.’ Or ‘The Bureaucrat fell from the sky.’ Or ‘On a hilltop in Arcadia, Darger sat talking with a satyr.’ Then I keep on playing, thinking, inventing, projecting, until I’ve figured out how the story is going to end. And that’s the point when I can begin writing. I start at the beginning and aim at the end and try to see how fast I can get from one point to the other.....” “What would you like your epitaph to read?” “MICHAEL SWANWICK 1950—98,347 This monument erected by his loving widow, Marianne Porter.” [Interview: Michael Swanwick: Twenty Questions from Lynne Jamneck By Lynne Jamneck 17 November 2003] 218. Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/19 at 11:50 PM “Oho. Like it starting, oui? Don’t be frightened, sweetness; is for the best. I go be with you the whole time. Trust me and let me distract you little bit with one anasi story: It had a woman, you see, a strong hard-back woman with skin like cocoa-tea. She two foot-them tough from hiking through the diable bush.” [Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring, 1998] Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/19 at 11:53 PM (Reply to this)

Great First Lines of Books, 7 magicdragon2 2005-07-22 06:09 pm UTC (link)

221. From the genre of Westerns: “The second banner said ‘Hero of San Juan Hill.’” [Elmore Leonard, The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories] Yes, he started in this genre before switching brilliantly to Mystery “IT IS ENTIRELY APPROPRIATE TO THE COURSE OF OUR own exploration that the first Western work devoted mainly to China should be evasive and problematic.” [Jonathan Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds] Okay, nonfiction and a pun on “Western.” “Here is the real world : monts of Neversummer like a heap of broken glass.” [James Galvin, The Meadow] “I want to know what salmons know, when they sail up very fast towards the source of the river, against the whole world, to die”. [Elwood Reid, What Salmons Know] “As it happened, Rebbecca’s feet did not grow, so though in time she herself became a very tall woman, her feet remained as small as a child’s, with tiny rosebud toes and nails as thin and translucent as the membranes of eggs. As it also happened, Rebbecca’s ambition in life, her one true and most steadfast desire, was to grow up and climb mountains. And not just any mountains either, but the tallest mountains in the world—Everest, K2, Denali. Old people had done it; young people had done it; even once, a blind man had done it—and Rebbecca reasoned, if they could, why not her?” [Katharine Haake, The Immortal Feet] “My parents’ Ford station wagon hit a concrete divider on U.S. 95 outside Biddeford, Maine, in August 1990.” [Ron McLarty, The Memory of Running] “Life is painful and disappointing.” [Michel Houellebecq, Against the world, against life] Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/20 at 08:45 PM (Reply to this)

Great First Lines of Books, 8 magicdragon2 2005-07-22 06:10 pm UTC (link)

222. Now, carefully avoiding the USA: “I was not sorry when my brother died.” [Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions, Women’s Press in 1988] This first novel, abour AIDS, is by an author born in Mutoko in colonial Rhodesia, which became the independent state of Zimbabwe in 1980. “I went down to the Piraeus yesterday.” [Plato, The Republic] “The Beast destroyed my brief peace.” [Guy Vanderhaeghe, My Present Age] Canada Back to Westerns: “On the third day of their honeymoon, infamous environmental activist Stewie Woods and his new bride, Annabel Bellotti, were spiking trees in the Bighorn National Forest when a cow exploded and blew them up.” [C. J. Box, Savage Run] “As full and frank a Portrayal as I am able of myself, Mary MacLane, for whom the world contains not a parallel.” [Mary MacLane, The Story of Mary MacLane, 1902] MacLane’s first book, The Story of Mary MacLane, sold nearly 100,000 copies in its first month, and was praised by H. L. Mencken and Hamlin Garland. And Easterns: “China is the European Middle Ages made visible.” [Edward Alworth Ross, The Changing Chinese: The Conflict of Oriental and Western Cultures in China, New York: Century, 1911, p. 3] 1st sentence, though p.3. And, pardon the French: “Take that fucking Walkman off, get your arse in here and show me how I do an all-staff e-mail.” [Matt Beaumont, “e"] British novel written in 2000 entirely in the form of e-mail communications. Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/20 at 09:12 PM (Reply to this)

Great First Lines of Books, 9 magicdragon2 2005-07-22 06:11 pm UTC (link)

224. “I am in a car park in Leeds when I tell my husband I don’t want to be married to him anymore.” [Nick Hornby, How To Be Good] “From the very first sentence of the prefatory note — ‘In The Mask of the Beggar a nameless artist seeks mutualities between cultures’ — to long statements in the final chapter, [Wilson]Harris expresses his ideas directly rather than, as in much of his previous work, engaging the reader in literary archeology.” “As a kind of aesthetic summation of Harris’s career, it is perhaps not surprising that The Mask of the Beggar is also his most personal novel. Some twenty pages from the end, the man who calls himself a sculptor suddenly makes a confession, declaring, ‘I am largely an intuitive writer,’ and proceeds for two and half pages of italicized prose to produce a sort of credo. ‘We have been intuitively seeking in this fiction hidden twinships and physicalities that are wholly neglected in creative complexity,’ the writer informs the reader, explaining some lines later that some events ‘lie beyond conventional language,’ for ‘bland convention . . . misses mutualities, dualities, ecstasies that grope into a marriage with infinity,’ meaning that the conventional novel cannot capture the simultaneous presence of the past and the future in any given present, nor arrive at ‘the intricate far-reaching truths that art seeks.’” [url="http://www.centerforbookculture.org/context/no14/Ghose.html"]Reading Wilson Harris’s The Mask of the Beggar, by Zulfikar Ghose[/url] Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/21 at 01:25 AM 225. “Children all over the world wonder about the Easter Bunny.” [Linda Spaulding, Adventures to Easter Land] “I was a little boy playing around my father’s hut.” [Camara Laye, The Dark Child] “Ruth remembered drowning.” [Christina Schwarz, Drowning Ruth] “I learned the Chinese for ‘drop trou’ on the set of a nighttime television drama called Foreign Babes in Beijing.” [Rachel DeWoskin, Foreign Babes in Beijing] “‘Can’t complain.’ The first sentence sums up both the political dimension (complaint is impossible because there is nothing to complain of) and the attitude of the narrator. He counts himself most fortunate to subsist with his large family in a superannuated circus caravan (the decoration of this, “ a pig wearing a hat, a tiger baring its fangs”, is the first of a series of allegorical touches) and to work, sometimes on continuous shifts of more than twenty hours, as a hull-welder. For those reactionary elements among his work-mates who subscribe to such bourgeois – liberal slogans as “justice, equality, bread, meat” he feels pity and contempt. Give Us This Day [by Janusz Glowacki] is an effective documentary, a humorous, personal and matter-of-fact supplement to the frequently bombastic coverage given by media (predictably, there are jokes about the gullibility of the Western news teams).” [Lewis Jones, The Times Literary Supplement, 3 VI 1983, London] Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/21 at 01:35 AM (Reply to this)

Great First Lines of Books, 10 magicdragon2 2005-07-22 06:12 pm UTC (link)

226. “As the plot took shape, Frank Herbert needed a setting. According to a personal friend of his, Mr. Herbert originally planned to set the story on Mars, but that idea was changed as his idea for an ecological novel developed. One experience in his writing career helped him decide upon the novel’s home: Arrakis, also known as Dune. For a potential magazine piece about a project by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which was studying ways to control the movements of sand dunes, Mr. Herbert went to the coasts of Oregon. Remembering that our Western civilization started in the deserts of the Middle East, he made his decision. ‘I did what science fiction writers always do--I amplified the idea of desert to a whole planet. That meant I had to go into the history of desert cultures; their survival.’ Over the next six years, Frank Herbert primarily studied Arabic, and as a result, much of his Dune terminology uses Arabic roots. With the plot and most of the setting finally coming together, the world of Dune began to take shape. As Frank Herbert introduced his novel, he summed up the reasons for its success in the first sentence of the introduction taken from ‘Manual of Muad’Dib’ by Princess Irulan: ‘A beginning is a time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.’” The Origins of the Dune Chronicles Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/21 at 01:40 AM 227. <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/187/10.html “>Carl Van Doren (1885–1950). The American Novel. 1921. VII. Mark Twain</a> “OF the major American novelists Mark Twain derived least from any literary, or at any rate from any bookish, tradition. Hawthorne had the example of Irving, and Cooper had that of Scott, when they began to write; Howells and Henry James instinctively fell into step with the classics. Mark Twain came up into literature from the popular ranks, trained in the school of newspaper fun-making and humorous lecturing, only gradually instructed in the more orthodox arts of the literary profession.” “Tom Sawyer cannot be discussed except in connection with its glorious sequel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). ‘By and by,’ Mark Twain had written to Howells when he announced the completion of Tom Sawyer, ‘I shall take a boy of twelve and run him through life (in the first person)’; and he had begun the new book almost at once; but with characteristic uncertainty of taste he had lost interest in it and turned to struggle over a preposterous detective comedy which he wanted to name Balaam’s Ass. Again in 1880 and finally in 1883 he came back to his masterpiece, published two years later. In spite of this hesitation and procrastination Huckleberry Finn has remarkable unity. To tell a story in the first person was second nature to Mark Twain. His travel books had so been told, no matter what non-autobiographical episodes he might elect to bring in. But he was more than a humorous liar; he was an instinctive actor; Sir Henry Irving regretted that Mark Twain had never gone upon the stage. Once he had decided to tell the story through Huck Finn’s mouth he could proceed at his most effortless pace. And his sense of identity with the boy restricted him to a realistic substance as no principles of art, in Mark Twain’s case, could have done. With the first sentence he fell into an idiom and a rhythm flawlessly adapted to the naïve, nasal, drawling little vagabond. ‘You don’t know me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.’” Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/21 at 01:44 AM (Reply to this)

Great First Lines of Books, 11 magicdragon2 2005-07-22 06:13 pm UTC (link)

228. bblog: Bill Brown’s Blog, March 29, 2003 “David Crawford’s Stop Motion Studies are interesting photographic compositions, as long as you don’t read the pomo captions he’s attached to make them sound significant in addition to interesting:” “‘The Stop Motion Studies extend my long standing interest in narrative and, in particular, look at the subway as a stage upon which social dynamics and individual behavior are increasingly mediated by digital technology. As one of the most vibrant and egalitarian networks in our cities, subways bring people from a wide range of social and cultural backgrounds into close contact with each other. This process plays a significant role in shaping both the character of a city as well as our individual identities.’” “Please also note the lack of superlative qualifiers in the first sentence and the failure to use a more powerful adjective than ‘interesting.’ The pictures are interesting, though completely devoid of meaning.” “Surprisingly, Crawford ‘has received numerous grants, honors, and awards from organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.’ The quote above was probably taken directly from his grant proposal.” Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/21 at 01:51 AM 229. “Miss Marsalles is having another party.” [Alice Munro, Dance of the Happy Shades] ========== David Gergen, editor-at-large of U.S. News & World Report, converses with Jill Ker Conway, Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about her new book When Memory Speaks, Reflections on Autobiography. DAVID GERGEN: Jill, welcome. JILL KER CONWAY, Author, “When Memory Speaks:” Good to be here. DAVID GERGEN: It’s good to have you. And in your new book there are two questions embedded in your very first sentence. You say, “Why is autobiography the most popular form of fiction for modern readers?” Two questions: Why is autobiography so popular, and why is it fiction? ========== “In his 1889 review of The Winning of the West [by Theodore Roosevelt], [Frederick Jackson] Turner showed himself as both a parochial introvert fascinated by his own isolation, and a bold thinker who would contribute importantly to new schools of historical thought. The insulated westerner made his appearance at the outset, when, in the first sentence, Turner somehow felt obliged to acknowledge that ‘America’s historians have for the most part, like the wise men of old, come from the East.’” Roosevelt, Wister, Turner, and Remington Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/21 at 02:00 AM (Reply to this)

Physics is cool in Chiang "Story of your Life" magicdragon2 2005-07-22 11:07 pm UTC (link)

Okay, THIS one posted on Yoon Ha Lee's blog http://www.livejournal.com/users/yhlee/369784.html?view=2815608#t2815608 (the previous was a comment on her comment on Coalescent blog): From: magicdragon2 Date: July 22nd, 2005 - 10:47 pm Physics is cool in Chiang "Story of your Life" I liked it more than you, but partly because the Physics is right. The aliens see things in a dual way to us, based on -- well, look up the principle of Least Action. That is a subtle clue that they are dual to us in some other way, which turns out to be the central stance on the metaphysics of Time. The portrayal through motherhood was a plot device, but through Linguistics -- well, that was done VERY well, in my humble opinion (Psycholinguistics and Computational Linguistics at Caltech). Moreso, we experience the viewpoint character's change in perception, which is hard to do. Flowers for Algernon being one of the greatest such examples. I think your dislike of the daughter, and the slow pace, throws you off. It's there for a reason. Finally, the psychology is an exaggeration of the frustration that any parent experiences in trying to influence one's child in one way, which ironically accomplishes something else. (Reply to this)

War of the Numbers magicdragon2 2005-07-22 11:09 pm UTC (link)

[Yoon Ha Lee (yhlee) wrote in shortform, @ 2005-06-20 18:29:0] I commented: War of the Numbers magicdragon2 2005-07-22 15:14 (link) I've been publishing SF stories for a long time -- Analog, Amazing, Omni, etc. -- and get frustrated when stories that I think are among my best get standard rejection slips or, anyway, short signed letters, but no sales. One story from last year that I particularly liked was "War of the Numbers" -- sort of Swift's "War of the Books" but entirely about the integers, each of them personalized, and the conflicts between them about their properties and what subsets they belong to. I've practically given up on submitting stories, poems, and novels to major publishers. Eventually, everything I write gets published, but this has taken 5,000+ rejections so far. I mean, a novel sits on someone's pile (even if they solicit it) for a year or two, and then they sometimes lose it, or sometimes die before reading it. So I get an average of over one publication a day (over the past 1.5 years) meaning on an edited web site (not blog, not my own site), such as MathWorld or the Onbline Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, or Prime Curios. I get it accepted and posted FAST by distinguished Math editors, and I get feedback fast, emails, and have gotten several new coauthors that way. Snailmail and editorial offices in New York, just too inefficient, in the internet age. Hey, I started computer programming in 1966 -- that's 39 years ago. Why should Literature drag me down, when I'm accelerating in Math? And now I can claim roughly 1,200 publications, presentations, and broadcasts to my credit. It's all hypertext, consciously and deliberately, since I worked with Ted Nelson and first demonstrated working hypertext on PCs (before IBM, Apple, Tandy made them) at the world's first Personal Computer Conference in Philadelphia in -- was it 1976? (Reply to this)

Reply to when did "au jus" become a noun? magicdragon2 2005-07-23 04:51 am UTC (link)

On Madelein Robins' blog "100 Percent, Doc is reply to her question: Thursday, July 21, 2005 Grouchy Question #1 I'm always asking myself grouchy questions. Here is this afternoon's: when did "au jus" become a noun, as in "served with au jus?" Ick. posted by Madeleine Robins at 4:07 PM Anonymous said... My wife and I heard Steve Allen make a presentation about his book "Dumbth." He describes that, because of his tours, he often stays in hotels and orders room service. Once he phoned to do so, but asked "what is the soup de jour?" The clerk said he'd check with the kitchen, then phoned back a few minutes later. "You asked what was the soup du jour? It's the soup of the day." -- Professor Jonathan Vos Post livejournal blog = magicdragon2 9:46 PM (Reply to this)

"why people are mean to string theorists?" magicdragon2 2005-07-23 05:18 am UTC (link)

Uncertain Principles, attempting to answer the question "why people are mean to string theorists?" Mind you, I’m a protege of (and coauthor with) Richard Feynman, who was deeply skeptical of String Theory, but I like to think that I keep an open mind. I taught a class in multidimensional geometry and string theory to graduate design students at Art Center College of Design (where Bruce Sterling is currently “Visionary in Residence”). String Theory is quite pretty. But it is a defect, so far, that it equally well explains some 10^500 universes. Since I’m only aware of being in one of them, there is some issue with the topology of the “landscape” — the superspace of all possible universes. Unless String Theory can constrain this, it’s one of those approaches, such as Fritz Zwicky’s “Ideocosm” (the space of all possible ideas) which is appealing, but not, in and of itself, useful for solving many questions. But I’ll wait and see… Jonathan Vos Post, 2005-07-23, 1:14am [link] (Reply to this)

Sports as statistics generators magicdragon2 2005-07-23 05:47 am UTC (link)

More to Life than Kitchens, blog by Kate Yule. Reply to "Terry Pratchett said The Tin Men by Michael Frayn was a neglected classic.... In fat [sic] all the complex mass of statistics produced by the sports industry can without exception be produced not only more economically by computer, but also with more significant patterns and more amazing freaks. I take it that the main object of organised sports and games is to produce a profusion of statistics?" "Oh, yes," said Rowe. "So far as I know." ..."One needs to get these fundamental considerations straight before one builds on them. Anyway, if that is so, I think we can assume that a computer is a more efficient statistics-producing machine than any possible combination of horses, dogs, or muscular young men. My posting: There is painfully much truth in this, from a certain point of view. There are plenty of people who find the numbers to be the most entertaining part of baseball and Cricket [insert Ramanujan anecdote here, if you like], the two sports which seem to best produce statistics. There is even at least one person who went from Mathematics to professional inmvolvement in baseball (the reverse of the normal trajectory). And then there's the amazing Bill James, on retainer to half the major League baseball teams. He's a fellow Caltech alumnus, so I run into him now and again. He invented, to mention just one nugget, "The Pythagorean Theorem of Baseball." (Reply to this)

Gang of 14 versus Aslan magicdragon2 2005-07-23 03:54 pm UTC (link)

Posted 2005-07-23 15:51 on Spacecrab: The still photo being: "Aslan grilled by Senate Committee?" 1. Are you or are you not troubled by allegations of nepotism with The Magicians Nephew? 2. Is not the Wardrobe a security problem, in London under the current situation, as portrayed in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe? 3. Can you comment on the Animal Rights implications of the phrase "The Horse and His Boy?" 4. Why are you making a stand in favor of Royalty in the context of modern Democracy, vis a vis Prince Caspian? 5. Please explain your philosophy of naval power and force projection, as hinted at ambiguously in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. 6. Okay, we know about The Silver Chair, but what's your position regarding the Electric Chair? 7. The Last Battle. Here, or must we take it to the enemy? (Reply to this)

Science Fiction as Rationalism magicdragon2 2005-07-23 04:17 pm UTC (link)

Posted 2005-07-23 16:14 on the thread "The rise of the irrational" ("The more I have studied the history of science fiction, the more I have become convinced that it is intimately associated with the rise of rationalism....") at the Through the Dark Labyrinth blog by Paul Kincaid. I mostly agree, but we are talking about a certain (major) subset of Science Fiction, and a certain (major) subset of Rationalism. This discourse centers on Engineering/Scientific Rationalism, whose default Metaphysics was Logical Positivism. It is central in certain countries -- typically those with large R&D budgets, nuclear power, space travel. These include, in particular, USA, England, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, Brazil, and various anomalies (Australia/New Zealand). Further, this excludes Science Fiction written in reaction to the subset you describe -- Lem's "Solaris," Phillip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, the New Wave, for example. In a sense, you are addressing the nature of explanation, which shifts the emphasis to Epistemology. Science Fiction can be explicitly epistemological. As pointed out at the plenary panel of SF writers at the Las vegas annual meeting of the Science Fiction Research Association, Science Fiction is one of the few genres of literature where it is crucial to understand WHAT the characters know, and HOW they know it. Related genres include the Mystery, and the Espionage/Thriller. Science Fiction can be most epistemological if it is, or tries to be, about actual scientists as they do their actual work (Benford's "Timescape" being a supreme example, or Bear's "Darwin's Radio"). Similarly, Science Fiction can be most epistemological if it is of the First Contact subgenre, where the issue is the linguistically clouded comparison of our way of knowing and expressing with that of the Alien. What springs to mind is, for instance, Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life." (Reply to this)

WB's frog no longer has a leg to stand on magicdragon2 2005-07-23 04:23 pm UTC (link)

Posted 2005-07-23 16:21 at Geri Sullivan's "Five Frogs" thread of the blog Toad Hall Transitions: Happy Birthday. Sorry to be the bearing of sad tidings in Froglandia, but: WB's frog no longer has a leg to stand on By Scott Collins Los Angeles Times Originally published July 23, 2005 HOLLYWOOD - The frog is dead - killed by the bosses at the WB Network. Michigan J. Frog, the dancing, singing cartoon amphibian brought to life half a century ago by legendary animator Chuck Jones, has been booted as the corporate mascot at WB, which is struggling to shed its teeny-bopper image. "The frog is dead and buried," WB Chairman Garth Ancier told reporters yesterday morning at the semiannual Television Critics Association media tour in Beverly Hills.... (Reply to this)

re: A Short Review of THE ISLAND. magicdragon2 2005-07-23 04:35 pm UTC (link)

Posted about 9:30 a.m. Pacific Time, at the Undulant Fever blog of Bruce Arthurs, 7/21/2005, A Short Review of THE ISLAND. Good review. Haven't seen you since CopperCon, I think, but your style of Grumpy is exactly what Andy Rooney is missing. He has all the fannish traits except, well, y'know, he doesn't care about Science Fiction or Fantasy or Horror. Can you imagine him in a Masquerade? At least this is intentionally check your mind at the door, as opposed to Spielberg, who manages to check H. G. Wells' prodigious intellect entirely. Spielberg, who CAN make great films (Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List) absolutely refuses to see the rationalist empiricist base to Science Fiction as such. So, I hate to get you into the eternal debate between Science Fiction and Sci-Fi, but where does The Island stand in this? (Reply to this)

"Everything Bad" -- computer games good for you magicdragon2 2005-07-25 03:36 pm UTC (link)

Posted July 25, 2005 11:33 AM on stevenberlinjohnson.com thread "The Kids Are Better Than Alright" -- involving the book "Everything Bad" with its controversial claim that computer games and videogames can be good for people. I can't infer causality from this anecdotal evidence, but my son grew up playing a lot of videogames and computer games. He is now, aged sixteen, a university senior with a straight A average in Computer Science and Applied Math, on full scholarship, with a brown belt in a demanding style of karate, a published author, and an elected member of the student government handling a multimillion dollar budget for a campus of 20,000 students. He is not the youngest student there (he aced the college entrance exams at age 12, and we had him finish 8th grade before going straight to university). The other very precocious students also spend a lot of time playing computer games. (Reply to this)

You never see a dog with a wristwatch magicdragon2 2005-07-25 03:47 pm UTC (link)

Emailed to "Evil Genius Chronicles" The blog said: "Dogs lead a nice life. You never see a dog with a wristwatch." -- George Carlin so I replied: Re: your George Carlin quotation, 23 July 2005 Dogs tried wearing wristwatches for a while, but got really annoyed at how many humans were late putting out dinner. "Screw up like that again," said a major dog spokespooch, "and we'll stop barking at strangers that threaten your territory." Then the bitch glared at me for a while, concluding: "and, from now on, fetch your own damn sticks." (Reply to this)

Unorthodox Chess From an Odd Mind magicdragon2 2005-07-25 03:53 pm UTC (link)

Posted on Making Light, "Fairy Chess" thread Jonathan Vos Post ::: (view all by) ::: July 25, 2005, 11:52 AM: Saint Bobby Fischer, free us from the yoke of memorization! [Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<a mirabilis.ca</a>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.] Posted on Making Light, "Fairy Chess" thread Jonathan Vos Post ::: (view all by) ::: July 25, 2005, 11:52 AM: Saint Bobby Fischer, free us from the yoke of memorization! <a href="http://www.mirabilis.ca/archives/003106.html"mirabilis.ca</a> discussed and linked to: From Wired: Unorthodox Chess From an Odd Mind. Two dozen programmers from around the world have signed up to compete in Germany next month in the first computer chess tournament devoted to Chess960, a game variant invented by fugitive chess genius Bobby Fischer that's slowly gaining rank among grandmasters. The rules of Chess960 are mostly the same as orthodox chess -- but the setup incorporates something once considered anathema to the game: chance. Pawns begin where they always do. However, the pieces behind them on the white side are arranged at random, with the proviso that bishops must end up on opposite colors, and the king dwell somewhere between the two rooks. The black pieces are lined up to mirror the white. That makes for 960 different starting positions in the game, instead of just one. The point of Chess960 is to free chess from the yoke of memorization. The opening phase of a chess game as currently played has been subject to a hundred years of scholarship and play, and today players are hard pressed to find so much as a viable pawn push within the first 20 moves that hasn't been thoroughly analyzed. [continue] (Reply to this)

First American Zeppelins magicdragon2 2005-07-28 05:19 pm UTC (link)

Posted on Charles Stross' blog, 07-28-2005 01:17 PM ET (US) Thaddeus Lowe, a local figure in Altadena/Pasadena, california, History, was one of the American Civil War balloonists. He spread the word. In 1913, Roy Knabenshue became the first person to fly a dirigible in the United States, having, in Tom Swiftian fashion, designed and built one himself. His hangar was 300 feet away from Soth Pasadena's northeastern border, at the bottom of Raymond Hill. For $25.00 he would give locals a ride, crusing at 800 feet over Mission Street to the Arroyo. On 13 March 1918, Colonel Hensley, Jr., and three lieutenants visited Arcadia (East of Pasadena) to organize an Army Balloon School, for an estimated $360,000. By the end of July 1918, there were four companies in training. By Sepetmber 1918 there were 10 mess halls, eight barracks, six latrines and bath houses, five hose housing buildings, a Commanding Officer's quarters, a hospital, guard house, company store, post exchange, headquarters, photo lab, sanitary sewars, gas main, and motor works repair stop. By 23 June 1919 two balloons were flying, and, 17 days later, four balloons flying with 14 officers and 10 cadets. By 27 June there were 101 enrolled cadets and six balloons flying regularly. They became known as "the eyes of the Army." I have more data on this, but suffice it to say that I have visited the site of the 183 acre Ross Army Air Balloon School. It is now a golf course. (Reply to this)

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