Tolkien Exhibit

I took notes at the exhibit at the Morgan Tolkien: Maker ofMiddle-Earth  and expected to comment immediately, while it was fresh in my mind last month.  I am glad I held off.  Much of the exhibit is about his own maps and artwork. The editions of Tolkien I have read, right from the beginning, have had the maps, which I loved, and artwork by others, which I have been lukewarm about.  When I was exposed years later to Tolkien’s own illustrations I didn’t like them any better, which surprised me. Smaug seemed more cartoonish than frightening, the original Hobbit dust-jacket put me off with its blobby trees and impossibly-steep mountains. Those are fine to designate mountains or forests on a map, but only by convention. I have looked at his other illustrations over the years and simply shrugged. Not much of an artist.  Not sure what ridiculous school of art he was trained in to be so stylized. I’m glad his words are so powerful that I don’t have to rely on the drawings.

The exhibit portrayed them in a way I had not thought through: they are not illustrations of real scenes, but of myths, or even the hazier, the emotiveprimary process  images that myths are founded on. I step backward into one of my own set of rules, which I had been ignoring for this topic all these years: Goethe’s ThreeQuestions. What is the artist trying to do?  How well did he do it?  Was it worth doing?  The first two must be answered before the third is attempted.

Tolkien of course knew these are stylized, not “convincing” in any realistic sense. He didn’t intend us to have that naturalistic experience of “feeling we could almost touch” the dragon’s claw, or some near-photographic reality of a mountain landscape.  He wanted install the deep memory of myths in our minds, of roads going up into distant mountains, or dark, impenetrable woods as caught out of the corner of our eye. These grow up in a culture over generations of songs, folktales, rituals and phrases and become the mind’s landscape, not the photographic landscape.  This would be a good spot to click through to the exhibition website above and click on the video.  The drawing “Eeriness” long predates any writing of The Hobbit yet could well be from Middle-Earth.  The trees have some impossible angularities and convergences. The foreground figure could be a wizard, and the distant figure in the road, a mere stick, might portend either danger or rescue. Or nothing at all, simply another tree in the forest.

I recall how distressed I was when I learned that a maker of horror movies was going to be doing Lord of the Rings. It offended against the literary Oxonian feeling of gowns and dons. Still, I thought later, this is the Tolkien who wrote “Beowulf:The Monsters and The Critics.*” The fantasy, gothic, horror, and science fiction genres were not distinct when he was writing.  JRRT had a great deal to do with making them more distinct.  I have never liked the horror genre.  But LOTR has a lot of elements of a horror novel, as does Beowulf. The monsters are central. Peter Jackson turned out to be the correct choice. The Beowulf poet uses a literary device to create a greater sense of ancientness.  Grendel is old, and has long troubled mankind. Thus when a second monster is introduced and it is his parent, we have an immediate sense of greater age and remoteness. Further description traces her all the way back to Cain, to the foundations of humankind. The was something similar visually in the beginning of the first Star Wars movie, when we see the hugeness of the ship chasing the small fighters.  There are long seconds running under its great length, impressing us with how outsized is this ship compared to its opponents – yet the camera draws back to show that the unimaginably long ship is in fact quite modest in size compared to another ship. We are jolted into seeing the immenseness of the latter.  Tolkien does something similar with the ancientness of his monsters. In Moria the dwarves seek knowledge of the death of a reestablished colony from decades before – already dusty, old; they read in a damaged record the colony was destroyed when it awakened an enemy that had troubled them in early, brighter days, deep in their history; when the Balrog fights deep in the earth with Gandalf we he was already impossibly old before that time, long predating the coming of the dwarves to Moria. The technique is used with Shelob, with the Ringwraiths, and with Sauron himself. We look back through many glass walls to see their beginnings.

He uses the same technique to create myth.  His hope was to create an English mythos similar to the Finnish Kalevala. He does this by having characters tell much of the story retrospectively.  We do not follow the attack of the Ents on Orthanc in real time.  Merry and Pippin describe it for us after. So also with Gandalf’s encounter with Saruman, and his fight with the Balrog. The device is used right off in The Hobbit, as the dwarves kick off the story by telling a story of ancient wrongs and ancient treasure. The past is everywhere in Middle-Earth, and there is always someone to tell you a story about it.

This is economical in the time needed to tell the whole tale. Summaries of battles, entire wars, or even long ages of history can be done in a few paragraphs.  Imagine how much longer LOTR would be if all the events were told in linear fashion! Yet I don’t think efficiency was the primary aim.  Tolkien created an entire history, and used a single great adventure in it to give us the whole.  It is a story of people telling stories, and even more distantly, repeating legends that have already changed over time, singing songs of events barely remembered, reading books that have long been forgotten, in languages and scripts that few read and none use anymore. Gandalf pores over a text that even its owners have neglected in Minas Tirith – and unearths Isildur telling a story. He created layers of history and culture stretching back into myth, and such things are impressionistic, shadowy, and indistinct, whether they are grim and eerie, bright and comfortable, or strange combinations of color and emotion. The tiny stick figure in “Eerieness:” Is this the long-sought prince, or a final enemy to be fought?  Have we seen this before, been here before?

Thus Tolkien’s other art, such as the bright homeliness of the Shire, or Bilbo’s emergence from shadow into open sun on the barrels at Laketown, is truer than a photograph. I am sure I have never been there, and yet, it is like something I remember.  Tolkien is drawing memories of trees in Faerie, not trees; memories of landscapes, not landscapes. His characters tell stories, or sometimes only rumors - not histories.

Additional notes: Tolkien based his stories on the maps and the languages, and the exhibit has a good deal of his writing on both.  While the map changed as Tolkien entered the world and learned the stories in it, he covering over small sections with new graph paper as he corrected the landscape, what is remarkable is how little it changed.  The first maps are clearly of the same Middle-Earth, and one could even believe his changes are improvements based on his visits to the terrain, not adaptations to fit the story.  It was also fascinating to see his side-by-side calendars of the events taking place in different locations after the Fellowship was sundered, to keep track of all parties as he wrote. There is a column for Sam and Frodo, a second for Merry and Pippin, a third for Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, with occasional subdivisions when those become divided or Gandalf’s movements need to be accounted for. According to the book Bandersnatch, there were discrepancies of weather and phases of the moon in some of the last events when he was writing quickly, which caused him no end of frustration during rewrites for publication, as he could not bear to have them be out-of-sync or papered-over.  This paralleling of the adventures breaks through in the text occasionally as characters wonder what is happening to the others, or Tolkien inserts a quick sentence to knit us back to events far away.

I was pleased to learn that JRRT regarded Bombadil as outside the story, not quite fitting, but necessary not only for plot but because he is an actual resident of the place.  I had always regarded Tom as not quite part of the story, something of an insertion. I was not distressed when he was not part of the movie. Yet to learn that Tom is part of many other stories, though this one only incidentally, makes entire sense to me. When after long years of avoiding the movie I finally saw it, I mentioned to my son my comfort with the missing Bombadil.  When I had read the books aloud those several times to the boys I worked very hard to compensate for Bombadil’s distance from the sense of the story by making him come alive.  This drew a flash of anger from my eldest, that perhaps I shouldn’t have worked so hard at it, then, as he missed Tom very much.

*Full text here.

The Fringe Versus the Mainstream

This would be an evil and irresponsible tweet coming from a single trolling individual.  However, I understand that such things happen, and have also read individual Republicans and Libertarians writing such unfair things.  It has always been so, and I remember it from my youth.  I don't know it it's worse now, but it was present then.

But the tweet is from the NH Democratic Party. A major political party is allowing its signature to be used on this. Perhaps I am simply not recalling when NH Republicans as a whole, or some prominent Republican spokesperson made a similar claim about Maggie Hassan, Jeanne Shaheen, or John Lynch. I again note that the Democratic mainstream - and now even in NH, which has been blessedly above this most of my life - is using the same language and tactics as the right-wing fringe. Give me counterexamples if I am wrong.

Mental health care is very expensive. In hospital, round-the-clock 1:1 suicide watches are not uncommon, and are labor intensive. (Run the arithmetic for how many of even your lowest-paid employees it takes to accomplish this for a half-dozen people every day. Small state, this.  Ramp up if you live in a state with more people.) Out of hospital, outreach to people so that they remain out of hospital is expensive, even at a few hours a day per person. Psychiatrists don't come cheap, round-the-clock nursing doesn't come cheap. Private hospitals go $2800/day, ours is $1357, with sicker and more violent patients. Republicans don't admit this because they want to pretend it's all cheap. Democrats don't admit this because they don't know if it costs a lot but don't want to know - they just want to list what they think we should do and send the bill to the citizens.  In my case, please note, I am not merely some crank making accusations at how Democrats just want to fund everything.  I am talking about real people who I work with who refuse to even look at the simple arithmetic*, because they are sure there are lots of rich and corrupt people out there who just won't pay their fair share, and it would only be a little more for each of us. So the budget is pinched and the expensive hospital is full with a waiting list, but somehow that's not really what's happening. Republicans not caring if people die, die, die is what's really happening.

So of course the only possible explanation is that those evil Other People must be getting paid off, bribed.  Everything would be good in the garden if it weren't for those hoarders.

Ranting. Sorry.  The irony is that we work in a building that was built as state-of-the-art thirty years ago when Chris Sununu's father was governor and pushed for it - and when he got to DC in the Bush administration, pushed for "Decade of the Brain" research funding. He was in many ways an entitled and arrogant bastard, but no taint of corruption has stuck, and he was always willing to allocate money well-spent.

*Not that social workers would get it even if they did look.  "I'd pay another $20 a week for this to be a country that took care of its poor and disabled the way it should." (Exact quote in a group of eight young social workers at lunch.  General nodding.) Yes, but would you pay another $200/wk? $400, if you make just a little bit more and are one of the better-paid in the building?  Or $600 week, if you are one of the best paid in the building? Pony up.  Pay it forward now, thanks. Then we can talk.

Comeback

I have lots of these on my YouTube feed, which has figured out I like track comebacks.  I have no idea who these women (girls?) are, but the announcers are entertaining. I think "from the depths of hell" is a bit of an overstatement, however.

Change

I have grave suspicions whenever someone declares that change is going to cause some discomfort.  I think they usually mean it will cause some discomfort for you. They have already made the changes they are going to, and now it is your turn.

At least, that's what I sometimes meant when I used to say such things.  I don't say that anymore, having been on the receiving end of it too often.  Others decide there will be changes.  There's not necessarily anything wrong with that.  They may be in positions of authority which allows or even requires it.  But the reluctance of others to sign on quickly and happily is seen as a fault, not as a possible indicator that the change is not the right one.  It's their change, of course it's the right one!

Game of Thrones

I have never watched, have no interest.  My impression from afar, that it lacks a moral core, seems borne out by David French's largely positive anticipation of season eight. Yet I had forgotten my own insight from years ago - not the first time that has happened on many subjects. Fantasy writers eventually tell us what they really think is evil.  I recall in Piers Anthony's first Xanth novel the playful treatment of demons, and his tweaking of conventional sexual morality.  Yet as the series progressed more serious questions started to intrude, almost unbidden.  Grundy the Golem wondered if he had a soul; the front edge of a real hell and real oblivion became central in Night Mare. When intelligent thinkers are honest, surprising this happen.

I gave up on the series as repetitive one or two books later, but I understand from others that he drew back from seriousness.  Small wonder he moved on to soft pornography next.

Or consider Oscar Wilde - yes, The Picture of Dorian Grey and other Gothic novels qualify as fantasy before fantasy was entirely a genre of its own. He made his career as a flaunter of morality and satirizer of it, but in the end penned some of the most insightful moral pieces of the 20th C and powerfully made his piece with God.  Long before his repentance, one can see his deep understanding.

So I am not surprised that "Game of Thrones" could not find an ultimate conflict internally and had to reach outside itself to remind not only its audience but its characters what real evil is like.

Popcorn

I remember the 1972 version by Hot Butter.  I don't know if I'd ever heard the original and I certainly never saw this Top of the Pops video.  Something interesting is that the speed is much faster than rock and roll songs, so even good 1969 dancers are having trouble finding moves they can get in and out of quickly enough. A few of them are figuring stuff out by the end. Disco went at about 120 beats per minute, and this is right about there. Rock was as slow as 60 beats per minute in its earlier years.


When popular songs went much faster than that, up over 100 beats per minute, they tended to get remakes that slowed them down considerably, as in "You Keep Me Hangin' On," and "Layla."  If you are looking for an older song to create an interesting cover, check out ones that have that very quick tempo and see what happens when you slow it by half.

Incarnation

In case you missed it when it was on the sidebar, there is this short essay from James, Incarnation.

I have bookcase and shoe stories as well, which is perhaps why it caught me so sharply.

Ancient Climate Change

The huge problems of climate change in prehistory are frequently invoked when discussing the peoples living in those times and how hard it was to adapt quickly.  At the beginning of the Younger Dryas around 12,700 years ago, the temperature dropped 6 degrees in about 30 years in Europe.  It may have dropped two degrees in a single year. People could not move south fast enough to survive.

Yet so far I can't help but notice that the catastrophes seem to have occurred because of rapid cooling or rapid drying.  Increased warmth and increased moisture do not seem to be a problem (with at least one exception on the moisture, because of flooding).

Don't quote me.  Someone may know better than I on this.

The Cathedrals

When the youth pastor preached a couple of weeks ago he mentioned singing songs by The Cathedrals in the car with his family on the way to his grandmother's funeral.  They were part of her life, and his, in North Carolina.  I had not heard of them, and went looking. I don't know what their signature song is, but I liked this one.

I thought Texan99 might like this second one.

21st C Christian

So you have a new idea, a way of interpreting the faith that has been uncommon, or even unknown in our history.  I don't have a problem with that.  I think that's possible.  While I think we should regard the people who knew Jesus personally as the strongest witness to what he actually meant, I can accept the idea that they were also culturally-bound, and truths might gradually emerge.

You disagree with 2000 years of other Christians, who presumably also had access to the Holy Spirit. I can see the possibility of that as well. I'm not writing that off as impossible. What I do find hard to accept is your absolute assurance that you are right and 20 centuries of other Christians are wrong. That, in and of itself, disqualifies you from further participation in the discussion.

February 2020 Madness

Next year, New Hampshire will have its over-important primary, right after Iowa's over-important caucus, followed by whatever it is that South Carolina does.  As a side-note, I will acknowledge that of course this is crazy, but the combination is relatively representative of the country, and these are small, inexpensive places for candidates to give it a try,  So just suck it up, America.

There are so many candidates on the Democratic side this time around that there has to be some way of getting control. As we have just gone through the NCAA basketball championships, we are all familiar with that tournament style. I propose that we have a Democratic debate bracket. We really should have done it in 2016 with the Republicans and their Gold Rush Boarding House of candidates but we didn't.  We already have more than 16 candidates.  I don't think we'll get to a full bracket of 32, but we might. We can give the top candidates a bye for one round. As with the NCAA, we can hold more than one debate per night, with an eye to prime time.  Pit the #1 Candidate in the polls versus the #16 in a one-on-one debate, followed a week later by the "winner*" going up against the winner of the #8 vs #9 debate.

I thought of this as just funny at first, but looking at it, I like it even more.  An obscure candidate gets a much better shot at presenting her case than otherwise, going head-to-head with Bernie or Kamala or whomever.  Yes, that obscure candidate will probably not prevail, but she will get a much better venue. I think those one-on ones would draw, much better than the current fraudulently moderated items. The Democratic powers could say to the little ones "Hey, you had your chance, don't blame us." The favorites could try to play it safe but that could explode on them. I would absolutely sign on to watching this, while I wouldn't watch five minute of the Democratic debates otherwise. Whoever wins will have to go head-to-head against  single Republican anyway.  You might as well learn who's up for that.

Who a candidate drew as a matchup in each round would have some luck and unfairness attached to it, just as happens in your high school state field hockey tournament.  Too bad. Deal with it. Of course Hillary Clinton wouldn't have wanted to debate the #8 candidate last time around - too much risk.  But Democrats would have seen what they needed to to help her in the finals against Donald.  They didn't, and she didn't. I suspect under that system Bernie would have done even better; Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina would have done better. I don't know about Trump.  Would this have been death for him, or exactly his best venue?  I don't know.

Here are the current numbers. The current debates would be Gillibrand-Buttigieg.  Awesome.  Booker-Gabbard. Oh man, I would absolutely tune in for that. Castro-Booker.  Pretty good. Bloomberg versus Beto O'Rourke. Yes, yes, yes!  Of course, I think anyone one-on-one versus Beto exposes him as a cipher. i don't know who Warren and Biden draw in the first round.  It would still be more fun.  Head-to-head.  That's what we want.

* the argument over who won the previous week's debate would also be fun.  If a low ranking candidate shot up from 1% to 8%, isn't that a win? Or do we just stick with next week's poll numbers? Run the tournament twice, once in September and another in Dec-Jan.

Hobbits in Kentucky

Reading my stats, it showed up again.  The post on Hobbit names in a narrow section of Kentucky seems to attract a small but steady googling year after year.  I get amused every time by re-reading that one of my sons knew one of these people, a Butterbaugh, pronounced BOOderbaw, thank you very much.

I do have notes from the Tolkien exhibit in New York, but haven't put them into a post yet.  I will.  There was nothing stunning that demanded immediate report.  There  were some things Tolkien fans would find interesting. There was a great deal of focus on Tolkien's own artwork and seeing it closely. I changed my mind about some things I hadn't previously liked.

Onomastics

Onomastics, how we name our children, has been a source of fascination to me since college, when I read a brilliant essay illustrating that weird and misspelled named are less frequent in pedobaptist cultures.  The thought was that having to run the baby's name past a minister or priest created a social pressure toward tradition and respectability. Black preachers could spell "Isaiah" correctly, but they didn't get the chance to put their oar in early, as the white Methodist or Presbyterian preacher across the street did. In the very next essay in my college text, I learned that Puritans would use names over, which very few other cultures did.  If Ephraim died in the year he was born, the next son was often named Ephraim.  Most cultures considered that bad luck, but Puritans thought more in terms of the whole family having a continuity extending forward.

My wife is Tracy.  The priest refused to baptise her with that name because there is no Saint Tracy. Her mother was a stubborn woman and was likewise immovable, but the priest went forward in command of the ceremony.  So if you meet my wife in heaven, her namecard might say Therese instead. At least one of my five sons will be unable to recognise their mother in heaven because of this.  Which will be uproarious. Relatedly, using "salmons" as a plural will also be an identifier of our group.  Drop over and say hello when you hear that.

Looking up an old post to create a link for a site that linked to me, I decided that my posts on onomastics over the years were so interesting that I would not single any out.  The whole batch is fun. Should I do a book of my best 300 posts, two per page? The idea is intriguing, and the title Assistant Village Idiot would certainly jump off the page at Amazon.  Yet my strength is not in 300 stunning posts, but in 1000 mid-range interesting and informative, maybe more. We all have to know who we are.

Note: In a post on my respect for the name "Oscar" years ago, Sam L was on board and had a clever response.  We have some continuity here.

Descended From Nobility

I have been doing the Ancestry.com thing, and pushed a couple of lines back before 1500 before I decided that this was way too much work for very little return. Records in Europe - England, Sweden, Holland, and Ireland, at least - are not as good as American Puritan (and presumably, FFV) records. Not close. One is clicking merrily along from John Jr to John Sr and suddenly recognises that wait a minute, this woman is giving birth at fifty-seven years old. Or twelve. I know that longevity runs in families, but two generations in a row living to be more than 100 seems...unlikely.  Especially as one seems to have moved from Somerset at 84 to Suffolk for no apparent reason.  As I have discussed before, naming was very conservative in England for 650 years, with a huge percentage of girls being named Mary, Elizabeth, Anne, Margaret, Alice; boys John, William, Robert, Charles, Henry, Richard.  Because of this, there are lots of people with the same name.  I had a weird situation of a John Neat in my ancestry around 1800, who had a parallel with a John Neat in England only about 20 years earlier, both having married a woman named Mary, and so showing up as hints for possible ancestors.  And don't even get me started on John Andersson, son of Anders Jonsson in Sweden.

Parenthetical:  When one is not really caring about the right answer, only trying to get one's work recorded for posterity, good or bad, one goes quickly to losing one's temper and muttering "Well someone was his mother, and who the hell cares if it's Josefina or Margeta?  They're dead!  They don't care!  We'll laugh about this in heaven if we all get there!" No, no, that was his first wife, which was also my sister's name, which is why you got confused.  Let me introduce you to them, they're both lovely.

This is clearly bothering me too much. I got distracted in my introduction and haven't gotten back to the title topic since.

We all find nobility, though perhaps not royalty, for good reasons.  They were better fed, had more descendants, and everyone kept better records about them.  People with a little money had twice as many surviving children, and those with lots of money about five times as many.  Yet because of primogeniture - which my oldest son keeps complaining is a conservative custom we should have retained - the title only went to one, or if deaths intervened, perhaps a second.  Yet those other sons of Earls got to be at least Knights, and some title or other would descend for a few years.  And those would remember. We're descended from Barons, doncha know. And if six people die before ye, ye'll be a baron yourself.  So it's probably not a lie if your aunt insists you have Duchesses in your background.  Of course you do.  You have a thousand ancestors from the late 1600s, and a million from the 14th C. But they didn't keep track of the serfs and scullery-maids so well.

Next, cool ancestors exert a gravitational pull.  People want to get there, and so lower their standards to make the claim.  I hit one set of hints about a Puritan Elizabeth about 1630 and saw the repeated assertion that she was the daughter of King James I /VI and Anne of Denmark.  The evidence seemed to be no more than that she was named Elizabeth, and they had a daughter named Elizabeth. Dude, I think we would have heard.  If James I/VI had had a daughter who sympathised with the puritans enough to come to America when it was a dirty, death-filled primitive colony it would have been all over our history books.  There would be not only statues, but towns named after her.  Maybe a whole colony.

I feel the tug myself.  I hit a Churchill in the ancestry and thought Oh! Winston! My wife reminded me that he was American on his mother's side, so any relationship would be...more remote. Yes. True.

I may do an entire post on the patent impossibilities that people put forward as reasonable on ancestry websites. If "researchers" only remembered Jamestown 1607 and Plimoth 1620 a lot of idiocy could be avoided. And that no Englishmen lived in North Dakota in 1726.  Plus, enough biology to know what ages women could usually bear children. Or that they wouldn't normally have one six months after another. I admit, naming towns in New England and Virginia after familiar places in East Anglia or Wessex does confuse the issue.  But you take on that responsibility when you type.

I hit something similar as my Massachusetts North Shore  ancestors converged on 1700, or ahem, 1692.  Everyone wanted to tie in to the Salem Witch Trials somehow. Or also, the Mayflower. Everyone want one of those.  I've got lots, mostly the least-respectable Stephen Hopkins and his many descendants. The next ship, the Anne?  Not so much. I probably have just as many from there, but people didn't work as hard to find those.

Memento Mori

Memento Mori

I went for a walk in "my" woods today, where I had not been in over sixteen months because of the ticks. (I may have gone once in 2018.) I knew that the usual groomer of trails had been sick and noticed the quick deterioration of two of ten little bridges over trickles. There were no footprints, tire prints, snowshoe prints, not in mud or snow. There were fallen branches, ones that any previous passer-by would have easily lifted and tossed aside. So no one has been here. On the other side of the Forest Service land there is reportedly timbering going on.  I expected to come to the edge of it, but only barely heard chain saws at the farthest southern point before turning west. I have liked being one of the few - it is quite different to realise you have been the only for many months.

Nor any animals, though they may show soon.  No deer, no fox, no rabbit, no moose, no grouse. No bear or coyote, which live here but I do not see.  Few birds.

I stopped in to see the previous groomer and repairer, a pleasant man I had conversed with a few times when our paths crossed.  His wife answered the door and invited me in.  Within three sentences she had referred to him in the past tense.  So I should have done better at that, going and seeing him sooner. Steven Waldorf.

The Pace of Change

"The pace of technological change has speeded up over the millennia. Our ancestors spent many thousands of years as hunter-gatherers, during which time the pace of change was glacially slow. It shifted up a gear with the transition to farming and again with industrialization.  A key factor seems to be the number of people within a communicating group.

A larger community gives greater scope for invention. The greater the number within a group, the more likely it is that among them will be an inventive type who thinks up something new. Inventors area tiny percentage of any society. Possibly natural selection favored minds that learned from successful members of their group, rather than always trying something new (a risky strategy). Among the small hunting bands before farming, it might be generations before an exceptionally creative individual cropped up in any given band. Also, the larger the communicating group, the greater the exchange of ideas, and the less chance of innovations being lost.

Farming could support larger communities, and industrialization created huge cities. Both can produce a surplus beyond immediate subsistence needs. They can support the occasional inventive soul through the trial-and-error process of innovation. Just as importantly, the economic basis of a society dictates the communication range of any individual within it. Innovation can increase that range.  Agriculture generated writing.  Industry generated communication devices such as the telephone.  Inventors these days can not only build upon a vast knowledge base established by generations before them, but also test their ideas among like-minded people around the globe. Are we seeing another step-change in the pace of innovation as a result of the Internet? It could be.  Will today's inventors find answers to the problems we have created ..." Jean Manco Ancestral Journeys. 

It doesn't even seem up for question to me.  We have already seen one step change because of the internet, which is why the term "digital native" is even a thing.  My question is whether there is a second one already brewing.I may be defining them differently.  She skips from writing to telephone.  I would insert the printing press in there, and the subsequent explosion of literacy.

Christ and the Church

The Church is called the Body of Christ. The head and the body do not separate.  It is worth noting that Christ did not abandon his Church even when it betrayed him.  Nor should we, even if it betrays us.

When Jesus appeared to the disciples after the Resurrection, he still had the wounds.  He is no longer dying on the cross, but the wounds remain with him - it looks like forever, though "forever" is a word that may turn out to not have a clear meaning. I suppose it works in reverse now as well, that we are to perceive the resurrection even on Good Friday.

Russians. Bagels. Liberty.

Just to see how fast you can switch gears.

It is always nice to have one's rank prejudices completely confirmed.  When walking about in New York I heard many foreign languages. German, Spanish, and French were easy to recognise, though I suppose a Portuguese speaker might have snuck by who I identified as Spanish.  Chines versus Japanese I could tell, not from language but from behavior. But there were Slavic speakers everywhere and I cannot tell them apart.  I can sometime eliminate - Those aren't Bosnians, anyway.  I don' think they are quite so southern as Bulgarians. Yet I did gradually settle upon one group as richer, louder, more shopping bags, more arrogant. I decided those were Russians.  I ran this by a Belorussian doctor friend of mine this morning.  He laughed and said I was probably right, but were they wearing - he could not find the word at first...leo-pards...animals..."Furs?" I asked.  Yes, rich Russians wear furs!  As a matter of fact, they were!  He assured me they were in all probability Russians. Vindicated.
*

I liked the method of preparation of my marginally best bagel and cream cheese - oven toasted with the cheese already in, versus toaster and added later.  In looking up the time and temperature for toasting a bagel in the oven*, I ecountered many pages of bagel-snob sites. It gets tiring, really. CS Lewis wrote decades ago about a person who claimed to like music but upon discussion revealed they only liked a single type of music, and only that performed by specific artists.  We might extend that to a person who says they love books, but turn out to only like mysteries, British, before 1960. Ot to enjoy wine, yet if you get them talking, only the Cabernet Sauvignons and a few related reds, only French, and particular years. He says he loves women yet criticises the appearance of 95% of them. I think it's the same for bagel-lovers. There is just so much wrong with all those other bagels outsied New York, both in foundation and in presentation.  I'd like to see how much of that stood up to independent taste test. Remembering my uncle's amusement that Denny's won the clam chowder taste test two years running in San Francisco, and the yearly revelation that wine critics cannot remotely agree on cheap versus Dom in blind tests - and sometimes cannot tell white from red - I am suspicious how much of this is real.

As a comparison, New Englanders can absolutely tell real maple syrup from "pancake syrup," or whatever they call it.  If someone tells you they can discern New Hampshire from Vermont from Quebec they are lying, but we can all tell the real from the cheap commercial.
*

When Americans get involved in foreign wars and they aren't going well, we shake our heads and say that the people of these countries have to pay the cost of liberty themselves, and if they won't then maybe there's not much we can do to help them. After all we paid that price, which is how we got this country of our own and everything. It occurred to me while listening to a Patrick Wyman podcast that we actually paid a comparatively small price.  England was far away, and preventing us from pulling away would take a lot of resources.  Also, the French were helping us, for reasons of their own. We got lucky in that last Cornwallis campaign, as more than one American general - including the friggin'-awesome Fighting Quaker Nathanael Green figured out that "losing" battles in the traditional sense while stretching out your enemy's supply lines and inflicting continual casualties would win the war.  Plus , we had the Scots-Irish, who were sick of war and wanted nothing more than to be left alone untile they learned "Wait, you're fighting the English? Let me grab my second gun and kiss the wife goodbye." And they had barely gotten here.

We paid our huge cost later, in the Civil War, between the two competing American values of "We can do what we want, dammit" versus "All men are free." But that's another story.  I suppose one could consider that a continuation of the American Revolution Question, as WWII is an extension of WWI, but that seems a matter for historians. Still, we did not pay the existential cost we are asking Kurds Or Pashtuns or Venezuelans to pay now to get their freedom.  I don't like to say it, but we had it sort of easy.  It is true that the British had the best army and best navy in the world at the time, and had they decided to invest those resources into keeping us we would have paid a higher cost.  Because that was a possibility we should credit our forefathers with the courage of willingness to pay, though they ended up not having to.

I think the myth of our own cost might inform too much of our foreign policy since 1900.  We have thought that true believers in freedom would pay any cost, because we did.  Except we didn't.We timed our revolution well, likely by a collective intuition that the best interests of the British - who were not a different people from us but our nearest equivalents - could convince them to be persuaded by steadfastness, good trade, and a few solid traditional victories mixed in with the guerrilla warfare, would be satisfied by cutting their losses and making nearly as much money from us in partnership as in colonial domination.


*350, 10 minutes, moistened, thin slab instead of whipped spread

Travel With Children

A reminder that we learned from expensive experience not to take your children to a place in hopes of inspiring them on a subject.  Teach them something about Paris before you buy tickets to France.  Then when you are planning the trip they will begin to get excited. This also is a strong tendency for local trips such as the aquarium.

They are a bit like horses, preferring familiar things.

Reason and Trump

This is what I have been saying from the start.  If I have got Reason magazine on my side, that's a victory.  The Volokh Conspiracy should be next.  Trump does say some alarming things, betraying a serious misunderstanding of the Constitution and legal precedent, the separate powers of government, and sometimes the simple rules of decency (though you will notice that was mostly the campaign and has receded since inauguration). Yet when one looks at what he has actually done, it is quite moderate, enough so that some of his supporters are beginning to grouse that he hasn't followed through on the scorched-earth policy they expected.

Watch their hands, do not listen to their words. Years after Trump is gone, you can hold to that rule. Obama's speech at the 2004 Democratic convention was one of the great speeches of American history.  It should be sent out to schoolchildren to be memorised.  Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have borne much relationship to his presidency.

Cyclists

Instapundit linked to this from Top Gear.

They are beloved because they don't burn petrol, and provide exercise in addition to their transportation function.  But around here they are seldom actual transportation.  I am of federalist and libertarian bent, so I approve of Seattle and Boston and Miami making their own decisions about bicycles, not caring a fig for what I say. Colleges, which create their own urban densities and have  lots of young exercising people with short-distance transportation needs, should be able to arm-wrestle with their local governments about regulations as well.

Yet the arguments in favor of making the public thruways bicycle-friendly are an excellent example of logical ideas that look great at first, but evaporate one step later.  Cyclists' taxes go to the construction and upkeep of roads, why shouldn't they benefit as well?  Yes, fine, but the same could be said about airport runways and train tracks.  The reasons we would not insist cyclists could use those would be the same for cars. Plus, we did not upgrade those roads to current standards for bicyclists. That the smoothness and directness are also useful for them is a by-product.

Saving oil?  Fairly negligible.  Decreasing congestion?  A good point, yet at what cost to safety?  But isn't the safety issue mostly the fault of huge heavy cars and trucks, risk borne by the vulnerable two-wheeled driver? Another almost-good point.  I would say you can't have that both ways.  If your argument is that you are bearing the primary risk, then fine, it's your risk, and I don't want to hear any more about it.  But if you think accommodations should be made beyond an obvious minimum for cyclists, then accommodations. You are now affecting others and their choices.

The width of roads was built for "autos plus a bit." Bicycles have lived in the bit.  They want more "bit," which I can understand, because it is safer for them.  I consider that a small cost on many roads. Glad to let them get the extra bit. Yet as soon as one gets to intersections and turns - which I think is unavoidable - the car-bicycle interaction gets quickly more complicated.  I have yet to fully get how bicycle lanes make things better at those points.

I seldom encounter commuter cyclists.  What I see are recreational cyclists, who think they should be able to tee off on - no, I'm sorry, those are golfers; jet ski across - no I'm sorry that's recreation on the water; cast their lines across - no, that's fishermen;  set up a deer stand on - no, that's hunting; put up bleachers, shelves, picnic benches - no, those are other recreational choices - on the roads because...well, because.  Because they are exercising on outmoded-design vehicles and aren't burning coal, I suppose, so we should therefore defer to them.

My experience is that I have to thread the needle with my car - which the road was designed for - to avoid hitting them or infringing into the lane of another large vehicle. The complaints that they are rude and don't follow the rules of the road may be so, but that is not my experience.  My experience is people on speedy but fragile unprotected bits of metal, singly or in groups, taking up dangerous amounts of my lane.

Wealth

I discussed over a decade ago a Jewish perspective on wealth by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. His complete essay from 1985 is at the Social Affairs Unit. (Hmm, I have not been to that site in a long time.  I should do that today.)

I have something simpler today.  The most reliable way to wealth is to give things away, and money may be the most important of those.  I don't have the contemplative chops or long experience to say that it is the best way, and certainly not the only way, because I don't know that.  Nor do I say it is an infallible or automatic method, as I have read of people who in their enthusiasm gave away what they could not really spare and regretted it.  In these situations they are often giving to the undeserving, fraudulent, manipulative, doesn't it seem?  These may still have been good Christian decisions that they needed to make to slay some other god before the altar of the One God.  But they did not end by calling themselves wealthy.  So I admit of many exceptions and admit also there is much here I do not understand.  People are very individual.

But I do see this as true in my own life, and many I see around me.  It seems a great contradiction, but Christianity is built on such paradoxes. We can easily imagine how giving things away would impoverish us, but make us wealthy?  How can this be?

I suspect there are many hidden mechanisms by which God makes such things work, but I know at least one.  When we give things away, we soon try to focus on what people really need, and which people have great need at present.  We set up a hierarchy of what is important to sustain life, to encourage others, to reduce their vulnerability and fear. We begin to identify that A is essential, B is important, C is sufficient, and D might be forgone in favor of giving A to a second person instead.

We come to see that we have A, B, C, and lots of D ourselves, in abundance.  This is not only an intellectual, guilt-ridden exercise of "Oh, I have so much.  I should be more grateful," but a belief which gradually asserts itself.  We see our own wealth.* You can see all this as a trick, I suppose, a way of reframing the old information, but I think lesson would be a more accurate description than trick.

If you didn't read the linked essays at the beginning, you might find them valuable now.

* I gave my children contradictory messages on this as they grew up.  I hope this was in a good way, capturing the paradox.  I would sometimes say we could not buy something they were wishing for "because we are poor."  Yet in another context I would say "Well, we're rich.  Life is good."  I know that's the right thing to do in principle, but I don't know if my execution of it was good.

Shirley Temple Vs. Sombrero

The Shirley Temple was the drink in earlier years, allowed to children at restaurants so they could feel grownup, having something that looked like a cocktail but had no alcohol.  In my family - mother's side, father's side, and stepfather's side all three the theory was different.  They introduced you to actual alcohol, very gradually, starting at a young age. I recall belting down two of Uncle Freddy's whiskey sours at age 17 and signalling to my younger brother that we needed to go for a walk....like NOW... because the risk of me doing something silly was suddenly very real. 

Yet the drink of choice for teenagers  in our New England family was "The Sombrero" made with milk and coffee brandy, especially Allen's Coffee Brandy from Maine. With Moxie  it is called a "Burnt Trailer," which I knew, and with Diet Moxie (a terrible abomination) called a "Welfare Mom," which I didn't know, but you see how low we are going here.

BTW, Moxie is a big deal in the AVI history.  I don't mention it much here, but I bought my sons memeberships in the Moxie congress, and previous commenter Sponge-Headed Scienceman has a book on Moxie coming out this spring.

Back on task. The drink I knew as a Sombrero is - I just learned, looking this up - also called a Liquid Panty Remover or a Leg-Spreader, which lets you know we are going even lower now.  I never knew this.  It's the sort of name that goes to girlie drinks, which makes me think "had I only known." So I won't be mentioning it to my granddaughters as a family cultural tradition after all, as I had originally thought.

So, I decided five years ago I missed the Sombrero, but only broke down an bought coffee brandy yesterday.  I still like this drink, but fear I could easily drink four in rapid succession.

Spectral = Recovered

In discussing ancestry, it occurred to me that Spectral Evidence is not different from Recovered Memory. Whenever we feel morally superior to our ancestors, we are cherry-picking the evidence.

On The Other Hand - I Love NY

Well, actually, I don't. But I don't have additional reasons to dislike it it as I thought I would. I see some good in it.

It's an overstimulating place, and some people greatly desire that.  Nor should that be despised.  Those of us who prefer quieter places can tell ourselves this is wiser, more mature, more at peace with the world.

On the other hand, the places of ferment, interaction, too little sleep, and too much action have been the drivers of improvement, historically.  Leaving New York in specific out of it for the moment, cities have been the places of trade, education, new ideas, new jobs and industries, and it has been that way for centuries. They say there is so much happening, and I suppose there is.  With millions of people there, a lot has to be happening just by default. Yet it isn't just more of what happens in Davenport.  It's mostly that, but at such great density the whole nature of interaction takes on qualitative changes as well.

People say they like that there is so much more diversity in New York, but that neglects the fact that people mostly just like observing that, not participating in it so much.  You can only know so many people, the rest are just background.  It excites people that the background is so diverse. Not the same thing.

On the other hand, whatever you look like, you can find people in New York who look like you, giving you an ongoing visual cue there's a place for me here. That has value. While all humans can transcend mere appearance and find common cause and friendship with other humans, the head start is necessary for some, and at insecure times, something that all of us fall back on.

The art museums! The famous places! The cultural opportunities! The great universities! Well, yes, but the locals don't actually go to those all that often. As with the diverse appearances, it's mostly just background, giving people the impression that they are participating in elevating culture. Not the same thing. I have cynically said "they just mean restaurants," in the past.  More on that to come.

On the other hand, they probably go at least a bit more often than folks not in the city. More deeply, they are constantly reminded that such things exist, and have importance. It may be background, but it is the real background of Western Civilisation.  Children grow up knowing that these temples are important, even if they seldom attend there.  And when they likely get dragged to a few on school trips, the place is still seen by them next week and next year, prompting some memory. It doesn't make or break an education, but it's a supporting piece.

I noticed in Oslo the same fascination with diverse food! as a marker of multi-culti superiority. There is a variety of food in New York. Most of it is food you can get other places just as easily, but there is one great difference.  It's just everywhere - as it is in smaller downtowns, or malls, or county fairs - yet in New York it's over a more extended geography. There are millions of people in those buildings, they have to eat somewhere. One smells food and sees food everywhere. This is more pronounced in touristy areas, but it is still very high off to the side. I don't get the cultural uplift from mere overstimulation, though. Sensation-seeking people go to cities and have withdrawal when they have to visit a place that doesn't assault them with smells.

On the other hand it is exciting.  We're wired that way, not just city people.  And my lack of being impressed circles back on itself.  It may seem a small lesson in diversity to know what other cultures have for food.  It doesn't tell us much about their history or other cultural items. Yet to them it is Their Food(!) and very much part of their culture, especially when they don't live there anymore. You do get to know something about them.  Plus, knowing the food is some foundation for learning other things about a place later. Why so much fish? What's with all the spiced rice?  They don't eat beef?  

I walked on the High Line, which was narrower than I expected. It seemed a bit tourist- heavy, and I also noted there were few black or Hispanic people there. No clue why not. Gay men seem to like the place. Some female joggers, but the narrowness makes it more difficult. Still better than the street, I guess. I observed people speaking a Slavic language more loudly and self-importantly, with better clothes and more shopping bags than the many other Slavic speakers.  I eventually concluded they were Russian.  Just my stereotype - though I'll bet I'm right. It gave me some clue as to why people are irritated by Americans talking more loudly in public.  What makes them think they're better than the rest of us, like they own the place, eh?

Elizabeth Warren - Tone

(Reposted from nearly seven years ago, when Warren was running against Scott Brown.)

I am at church camp and get to see the Olympics in the evening.  As it is a Massachusetts station, I also get to see political ads for Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren.

I will cover the content in a bit.  Suffice it to say at present that I have noted the content and am not responding to tone merely. They are related, but I am not responding, as folks* sometimes do, to her hairstyle, or accent, or choice of clothing, or timber of her voice or other irrelevancies. I am commenting on tone in the sense of shading, emotion, and expression. 

Warren's tone is off-putting to me, but the style has been common to Democrats over the years, and I think it is enormously revealing about the political divide in this country.  She is a hectoring schoolmarm - not the kindly but stern old-style female teachers of conservative mythology, but the stereotypical nagging, lecturing, and prim Miss Grundy's of the bad old days.  Our young people have enormous debts for student loans, but they haven't spent it on candy or anything, they have spent it on (overpaying for the dubious services of people like Ms Warren, oh excuse me) education, and WASHINGTON hasn't been fixing that, they have been giving presents to X and Y instead. Elizabeth Warren is going to go there and give them a piece of her mind, let me tell you.

Arne Arneson in NH used to do much the same, explaining oh-so-patiently to all you stupid people what was good for you if you would only listen; Obama has a fair bit of it.  Hillary Clinton would do it sometimes, not always, but Warren is just dripping with it.  I have wondered how such an approach can possibly appeal to voters.

Easy.  Her potential supporters don't think they are the one's being addressed.  They think teacher is going after those other kids at the moment - the bullies and snobs and dweebs, not the cool kids like us - and are smirking in the back row.  Democrats promise in every election to fight for you, because that is how they think the world works.  You won't get anything good if they don't kick powerful people in the balls on your behalf. Republicans promise to work for you.

I could appeal to Democrats on the altruistic grounds that this is an evil, divisive approach to getting things done, forever pretending that it is Powerful People who are cutting in and getting all the prizes that you deserve, but I have given up on that.  You want to believe her on that score too much.  But I might still be able to get through to you on the grounds of self-interest:  it's you she's lecturing, not some vague other people called "Washington."  She is Washington. It's not you she's going to rescue, it's you she's going to make do things.

*Those "folks," I am claiming, are overwhelmingly Democrats, who haven't liked Sarah Palin's, Laura Bush's, or Ann Romney's life-choices, voice, hair, or background.

Sociopathy

I have mentioned before that much of what gets described as racism, sexism, etc is "merely" sociopathy.  People who want to hurt you may not hate your race, your sex, your religion, or your origin any more than the next guy. They just want to hurt you. They grab whatever stick is at hand. One sees this in street attitudes all the time.  This week we saw it in UFC woofing Conor MacGregor, and then returned by his opponent. The league official who called this "unacceptable" is laughing into his sleeve as he says it.  They love this.

On a psych unit or in prison, there are lots of people who don't have good frontal-lobe control over what they say.  The book and movie myth of calculating, patient criminals is great theater, but bad reality.  "There ain't enough fence to keep the sheep in" with these people, and it just pours out. Next week they will happily be allies with another from the same group, if they are ganging up on some other victim.

Twitter.

What If Everything You Know Is Fake?

There was a Firesign Theater album "Everything You Know Is Wrong" that came out in the 70s.  It was not that funny, not their best work.  It was mostly just cynicism and mockery.  I thought of the title when Maggies's linked to Real Clear Politics' What If Everything You Know Is Fake? The article operates mostly from one point of view, but it is a good general question to ask.  I say that you and your sources are unreliable, you say that mine are.  In nine cases out of ten, neither of us knows that much about the subject in question, but we have reasons for choosing the sources we do.  What to do, what to do?

We can start by looking carefully at who is fighting fair. While the side that is more nearly correct in an argument might not be morally superior in any way, all of us try to put our best arguments forward, not our worst.  I assume that people would use good arguments if they knew them.  If they thought the statistics were on their side, they would appeal to those.  The advice to lawyers to 1. Argue the facts, 2. Argue the law, 3. Pound the table is actually what most of us do, though likely not so obviously. If they are pounding the table, I want to know why.

Who is being insulting, openly or slyly?  Who is changing the subject rather than answering?  Who is appealing to social popularity rather than reason, or emotion rather than reason? Who is listening and responding to the arguments given, who is pretending that they can summarise the opponets' arguments in a vicious way?

There are sites about logical fallacies.  Fine. But the fallacies are nearly always escorted by simpler infractions or cheap shots. There are arguments over who is an authority and who is not - because lots of people appeal to authority, but define it differently. Yet those arguments also seem to devolve into accusations of bad faith very quickly as well.

There are many subjects I don't know much about, yet feel confident forming an opinion about anyway, because of my experience with the styles of argument on the topics I do know something about.

It's not actually very hard.  One doesn't need to be overwhelmingly bright or learned - not in theology, not in science, not in politics, not in understanding human nature. Just be willing to look at who is fighting fair - not in the best, protected enclaves, but in the arena of competing ideas. You can even do it in foreign languages you barely understand, in a pinch.

Fighting fair tells you what you need to know 90% of the time.

Quora Answer

I usually keep my Quora worlds and blog worlds separate, yet I thought this would be of interest.

The question was How Can I Retrieve My IQ Score and Decrease Psychosis' Effect On My Cognition? I clicked back to learn more about the requesting person and learned English is not his first language, and that his question is a true cri de coeur, as he is in a bad spot. My answer:

I have two credentials listed, depending on the topic. This one seems related to my IQ credential, that I was president of an ultra-high IQ society thirty years ago. That has some value. Not stunning, but something. I have known many, many very smart people in my life. Some in person, some only online or by correspondence. Some of them were ill or compromised, but still smart.

My other credential is around psychiatric issues. I have been a psychiatric social worker at a state hospital, mostly working with acute emergencies, for over 40 years. Your question broke my heart, yet my news for you is not entirely bad. There are not a lot of things you can cling to, but there are some that are quite real. I couldn’t live with myself if I just told you crap at this point. So hang on, and read to the end.

Rule #1. (But see #5) Blood flow to the brain. Keep repeating that to yourself. There is an unfortunate sapping of motivation that comes with schizophrenia in particular, but all psychotic and affective disorders. The evidence that intense exercise is good for you is not solid. It will make you feel better, as it does everyone, and I don’t sneer at that. Climb mountains. Play competitive tennis. Whatever. Yet those are likely not as important as dragging yourself out for a mere walk around the block when you feel you have no reason for that. Find friends who will risk being rejected to make you do that. On any given Tuesday, it won’t mean much. But for all your lifetime of Tuesdays, blood flow and activity will mean a lot. (Intellectual exercise is actually not Rule #2.)

Rule #2. The balance between medications, psychotic breaks, and long-term side effects is impossible. But you are smart, and you can do this. Psychotic illnesses do erode cognitive function. There are workarounds, but that is true. The medications commonly given for psychosis can also slowly erode functioning. The temptation will be to take the absolute minimum of medication to minimise that. But psychotic or affective breaks are devastating to both long-term and short-term cognitive functioning. It is no good to hold by white-knuckles to a 1% loss of cognitive functioning over a decade by risking a 10% drop from a serious acute episode. Your intellect simply has to rule your feelings in this. Do not take the minimum medication, that will always go bad in the end. Decide for yourself with your prescriber (please show her/him this) whether you should hover at one rung above the minimum, or two. There will be more side effects. But the side effect of underdosing is far worse. You are smart. You can do this.

Rule #3. Maintain social contacts. These will stimulate you cognitively more than crossword puzzles or Trivia Nights or classical music or visits to museums. Even fools are preferable to mental isolation. Jerks over  Jeopardy!

Rule #4. Nonetheless, there is value in purely intellectual exercise, though not what one would think. All the online, paper-and-pencil, and board games share a common trait: they are drawn from the culture of 2019, which is the one you live in. I usually advise people to read things from other centuries, as CS Lewis suggested, for wisdom. Those allow us to step outside the prisons of our own era. But for your case, I ask you to divide those. Let intelligence be focused entirely on what is current, what might be asked by surprise, what people will talk about at work, what will keep you grounded in today. It is something of a cheat code, to pretend to be smarter than you are by being up-to-date. But when you are in your 50s and 60s, that habit will be pure gold.

And yet Rule #5, which is really #1. Wisdom is more important than intelligence, and wisdom comes from God. Pursue the wisdoms that other eras have embraced. The medievals had four cardinal virtues - Patience, Temperance, Courage, Justice - and three theological virtues - Faith, Hope and Charity. Take a full day to contemplate each of those seven, then come back to this. It's Lent, after all, so you'll be in good company.

I ask you - if you are embracing each of those seven and growing in them all, however fitfully and intermittently, is IQ really all that important? You thought you had an opportunity to become a genius. Becoming a saint is offered to you instead. Saint is better, and most geniuses in history (though not now) would have told you so.

JP Morgan Library

The rooms are certainly impressive.

The bookcases are certainly impressive

The rarity and beauty of the books is certainly impressive.

What's not impressive is the loss of the ability of these books to ever teach anyone anything again.  They were not acquired to teach anyone anything, they were acquired to be displayed. They are less antique cookware or antique musical instruments, which can at least still show us how people played music and cooked even if they are no longer used for the purpose.  they are far less useful that antique works of art, which can at still be viewed and appreciated.

That the books are behind bars is grimly symbolic. These books are imprisoned, and I found it a sad place.

Millions And Billions

(Reposted from 2010. I was thinking of this problem in relation to the Green New Deal, and grand government projects in general. I don't think people advocating for these programs have much of an idea of how big a billion is, and absolutely no idea how big a trillion is.  It's just a Big Number. I just have this worry that 93 trillion seems smaller to them than 730 billion, because 93 and 730 are ideas they can get their heads around, but billions and trillions are just Big Numbers. Of course  93 Big Numbers is less than 730 Big Numbers, so we can clearly afford it.)

*********

This post sets up a point in a later post, but is interesting in its own right.

When measuring vocabulary in IQ tests, it has long been observed that higher education effects disappear by the time individuals are in their 50's - and they aren't that dramatic after a few years out of college anyway. While education does expose one to more words, and creates contexts in which these words are used, much of it is the specialised vocabulary of each discipline. That is a fine thing, for everyone must mean highly similar things in academic discussion when they say neurotic or microeconomics, or little more can be learned.

Something similar happens with numbers. We are not born knowing what a million is, or even a thousand. To all of us, numbers are no more meaningful than the hrair of Watership Down, where everything beyond four is simply "many." We can visualize a dozen somethings and understand it pretty early in life, but we have to work up to an intuitive meaning of a hundred by fooling around with sevens and dozens as we go through childhood. By adulthood, we have enough experience with setting up chairs, making change, and estimating distances that the "hundred" idea is well-embedded. We don't really get to a thousand with that except in more specialised settings which vary from person to person. But we do get a pretty good idea of a thousand because we know that it's ten of those hundred-thingies. Nearly everyone deals with thousands and ten-thousands in some setting and knows what they mean in context. Because we learn to manipulate the symbols of mathematics as children, we are often able to work with these numbers even before we get an intuitive handle on them. 4000rpms has a meaning with engines - it has a sound, it has a feel. From such islands of knowledge we can work in both directions to solidify our understanding of numbers.

I had an advanced studies course in Concepts of Mathematics one summer in high school. Mr. Hulser, quite sure that all of us were going on to take many more advanced math courses, put some stress on our working with large numbers for its own sake. He stated that "research" had shown that people didn't really have much idea what a million was, and though they knew in the abstract that a billion was a thousand millions, the actual working estimates they used showed that they experienced a billion as about ten million. A billion was just a "big million." I don't know if there was ever any real research behind his statement or whether it was just his observation that he tried to give a little more authority to, but it has always seemed plausible to me, given the way numbers get used in conversation and in newspapers. Hulser was not talking about the common man when he gave this estimate, BTW. He was talking about those educated people who happened to be in other fields. They didn't really get big numbers. But we, the budding mathematicians, the chosen ones, must do better than that. We needed to develop that intuitive sense that a million was not a hundred thousands, but a thousand of them, and billions not ten million. He thought best we might hope for by the end of college was an idea of a billion that was only one order of magnitude short instead of two. But it was important nonetheless, because sometimes in solving an equation we might have to intuit where solutions might lie by envisioning the graph.

He stated that confusing millions with billions was a terrible error, and had caused much mischief in the world. The innumeracy of otherwise educated people appalled him - though he left that said only by implication, perhaps not wanting to make us any more arrogant than we already were.

I think he was very much onto something. As we go through adulthood we encounter big numbers all the time, and have to make some sense of there being 15,000 people in a town in 1980 and 19,000 in 2000; of salaries, world population, budgets, odometer readings. We gradually build up a storehouse of these, to gain some control (beyond the mere manipulation of the symbols) of big numbers. And we do this along much the same lines as we do vocabulary - the brighter ones keep acquiring more understanding and more control, so that even a number such as 11.2 million might have some sense to it. And we know that a billion is much more than that, even if we can't make a very precise picture in our heads. Much, much more.

It turns out to be one of those rough measures of intelligence. Anyone might mishear or misspeak on occasion, but consistently messing up million and billion as concepts, just because they sound alike, is a sign, not only of a person who doesn't work with large numbers much, but of one who does not understand the large numbers that flow past him in his life.

Ghosts

I told my children growing up that when you get married, you do not marry only a person, but an entire family.  Even if they are dead, you are marrying their ghosts.

I wondered this week if the same is true for divorce.

Coastal and Riverine Settlements

I recall being fascinated in the 1980s by James Michener's Chesapeake, with its description of how interaction was much more along waterways than over land. It took a long time to get a train route down the center of the Delmarva Peninsula, because few people went that far inland. Michener's books often had the theme of geography=destiny, never more obviously than in that book. For one raised in a world of streets, roads, and highways, it was a new idea, and I marveled at how odd the Chesapeake area was. Though I no longer lived there, it did help me understand in retrospect some of what I had seen at college.

Since then I have encountered the water-centric perspective in the geography of other places, but until recently, still regarded it as odd. It's not odd.  It's much more the norm for thousands of years.  The American perspective is different because we think so strongly in terms of expansion across the continent, from Atlantic to Pacific. As our expansion started just about at the time of the Revolution and was mostly complete by 1900 that map-filling drama across land is a lot of how we think of ourselves. Yet even for us, settlement was coastal until the Scots-Irish came in and leapfrogged to the unsettled areas. And they didn't build cities, they wanted land for each family, because of what they had come through in Great Britain. Towns for trading was about it. The French had explored the rivers, but the English did not pay much attention to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi until the Louisiana Purchase. Even after that, exploration was along those waterways before there was much striking out across the territory.

Heck, lots of it is still pretty empty.

Last week I learned the coastal settlement was even stronger than I had previously thought.  Tracing all ancestral lines back to the immigrant ancestors as far as could be determined, I noticed how absolutely everything was right on the coast or a town away at most for the whole first hundred years of settlement.  Dedham and Concord, MA were the frontier at less than 10 miles in for the first century of colonisation. Similar patterns held in the other New England states.  Except Vermont, which was mostly empty until the Revolution.

In your junior high social studies book about great empires, huge swaths of territory around the Mediterranean would be colored in, showing what Alexander conquered or the Ottomans controlled. Yet these deceive.  What they conquered and controlled was often cities on coasts or rivers.  that was where most of the people were, and those cities had powerful influence on the rural areas around them.  City-states, or something like it.  Their influence waned as one got farther from the city walls, but then, so did the population density. We see it also now in maps of China or Russia.  Yes, they do "control" large amounts of territory, in the sense that no one is going to secede or stage a coup from those remote areas, but they are often ignored back there as well.  Yes, even in dictatorships you can do that, so long as you don't draw attention to yourself, because it just takes too many people to keep an eye on you.  China's enormous population is on the coast, and up a couple of major rivers.

Even back to the Indo-European tribes entering Europe, which looks on the map like it's across land, is less so once one leaves Asia.  The settlement patterns are along the Danube and Dniester, eventually meeting distant cousins who have worked their way along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts and entered by the Rhone or the Rhine.