Nachtblogging: "deeper than day had been aware"

I've been collecting night-time photos for a little while, since last summer, casually, whenever the fancy struck; and for a few weeks I've had it in mind to start posting some. At first it was going to be just one post, but I think I have too many of them for that. And besides, I tipped my hand with the last entry. So here's a first stab at it.

Each picture below is a thumbnail; click through for more.

* * * * *

The other day I was returning from my after-dinner walk to pick up this week's problem sets when I happened to look down.

Just some flowers? This is a long-exposure shot (one second); I'm sitting on the stone path behind our viewpoint and using my bag to try to stabilise the camera. If you click through, you can see I wasn't wholly successful. On first appearance you can't really see too well what first caught my eye, which was the grouping of the purple bulbs around the one orange-red bulb. The blues are a little too strong to let the purple flowers stand out -- actually, the ones on the left are well-hidden. In the click-through the bulbs are a bit easier to pick out. But whatever my original intent was, this scene has taken on its own character.

This shot summarises the palette that attracts me to night-time settings: forest greens, deep blues, and burning reds. The set is suffused with an almost unholy dim glow, and the long exposure yields powerful juxtapositions of light and dark. The backlight brings up the gothic architecture beautifully, the foreground flower is curiously emphasised, and the whole thing takes on a dramatic energy. In short, it's interesting: no, this isn't a picture of flowers; it's a picture about flowers.

Compare a roughly equivalent day-time shot:

This is the same plot, (a few days later, when I decided I wanted a comparison shot to show you: if you look carefully you can see the flowers are noticeably further along in bloom). The click-through is not as big and I haven't tried to crop it for composition. Nonetheless I think it's clear that even if the photo doesn't outright fail it is at best "just some flowers." The only thing close to interest is the upper-right corner, where the grass and the jagged shadow meet the wall. We can try to rescue it, like so:

You can decide for yourself if you think this merits being called a "rescue." It has a few merits, yet at best "it is what it is," and that is nothing close to the evening scene.

Let me share something curious from the same set. It's a bit nerve-wrecking taking these photos at night because of course I don't know until I get home whether the photo is bright enough, or too blurred, or whatever other failures might have happened -- the camera's LCD is hardly good enough to tell me this, especially when the ambient no-light makes it difficult to judge the brightness of the image! When that happens I can (short of trying to retake the photo -- not always possible) only hope for a software solution.

The software I'm using has a button suspiciously labelled "Photo fix." This runs a half-dozen or so algorithms to try to correct some problems -- colour balance, contrast, saturation, others. (You can also run these algorithms individually at a strength you specify, in case you actually know what you're doing.) The result of running this thing, as you might guess, is usually more entertaining than usable: although it often does a good job of identifying perceptual objects in the frame that are fairly-well washed out to mortal eyes, the end product of this process is typically pretty far-removed from reality. I would be very reluctant to use such a thing unless I needed an illustrative photo and all of mine were useless.

However, sometimes it can surprise you.

This came from a failed (too dark) shot of these flowers by running this "photo fix" algorithm. As a photograph, this obviously fails. The colours are wrong, too washed out; close-up, everything looks grainy, like it had been taken with a high-ISO film; and it's also blurred -- probably a consequence of the smoothing algorithm rather than my unsteadiness. Yet despite all this the effect is not altogether awful if I forget that it came from my camera and instead imagine it came from some novice impressionist painter's workshop. Looking at the click-through, the colours at the interface of the wall and the garden are still not good, but move away to center on the red flower, with just the green surrounding it:

Very striking! Call it found art.

* * * * *

This night-time photo series gets its own tag, "Deeper than day had been aware." There's an explanation behind this which is too long to give in entirety on the "About labels" page, so I'll take a page from what I did before there were labels and introduce it here, on the second entry under this tag (I retconned the previous entry into this grouping).

The quotation is from a poem in Nietzsche's Zarathustra:

I was asleep --
From a deep dream I woke and swear:
The world is deep,
Deeper than day had been aware.

As always, the translation is Walter Kaufmann's. (The other day I was in the bookstore [ahem] and a new translation caught my eye -- I might pick it up one day -- aren't you proud of me, that I didn't the first time I saw it? -- but wait, maybe it won't be there when I go back!) In the original, it is:

Ich schlief, ich schlief --
Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht:
Die Welt is tief,
Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht.

Kaufmann's translation is obviously fairly literal, but I like the fact that "Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht" sounds every bit as good as "Deeper than day had been aware."

This is a quatrain in a song that occurs several times in Zarathustra. It is, I would say, a rather important poem to the book. Unfortunately, I can't quite tell you its name. It first appears in Book III under the title "The other dancing song" ("Das endere Tanzlied") and in Book IV under the title "The drunken song" ("Das Nachtwandler-lied" -- more on that later). On the other hand, in that latter setting Zarathustra introduces it like so, in Section 12, after quoting pieces of it in the previous eleven parts:

Have you learned my song? Have you guessed its intent? Well then, you higher men, sing me now my round. Now you yourselves sing me the song whose name is "Once More" and whose meaning is "into all eternity" -- sing, you higher men, Zarathustra's round!

In the original, that last sentence is:

Singt mir nun selber das Lied, dess Name ist "Noch ein mal," dess Sinn ist "in alle Ewigkeit," singt, ihr hoeheren menschen, Zarathustra's Rundgesang!"

These German originals, by the way, are courtesy of Project Gutenberg's e-book. The declared name and meaning are given literally in Kaufmann's translation; a "Rundgesang" is a kind of chorus song (in the sense of a circle of people singing -- "runde" is cognate with our "round").

So what about that "Drunken song"? It will surely not surprise you to hear that this isn't exactly what "Das Nachtwandler-lied" means. A wandlung is a change or transformation (cognate with German "wandern," same as our "to wander"; so a change in the sense of a wandering away from the original), but according to my dictionary (thank you!) it also has a meaning in the German Ecclesiastical tradition -- it refers to the transubstantiation of Christ! Since Zarathustra is filled from cover to cover with Biblical allusions, it is not a difficult guess to make that this is the meaning intended. So I might guess at a rather more literal translation: "The night-consecrating song." All this just demands the question: what did Kaufmann have in mind?

Of course, "Night-consecrating song" is pretty good for our purposes here, too, even if it does miss some meaning there.

By the by, Mahler set this song-of-indeterminate-name to music in his Third Symphony, (Fourth Movement). The symphony is good but the movement in question is just eight minutes so I can't recommend it on that basis alone. Mahler's certainly isn't a drinking song, but a fairly ethereal piece with a light instrumental accompaniment (horn and clarinet solos with strings) to a soprano.

The Future of Credibility: “everything is what it is because it got that way”

It's Pandaemonium. I came to praise it, not to bury it.

In his tendentiously-titled Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett suggests an outline of a theory of the generation of speech. His outline is expressly directed against the classical notion that when I say something it is because I mean it. More precisely, he is arguing against the claim that there is necessarily within me a Central Meaner, perhaps that being myself or else a kind of homunculus, who holds safe the semantic meanings that I intend, and against which all my attempts to frame utterances are compared for semantic fidelity.

Imagine a great horde of senseless daemons, he says to us, rather than a single central homunculus, each with a phrase or piece of a phrase to suggest. These pieces are mere “found objects” and most are senseless or irrelevant. Irrelevant to what? -- to some kind of goal being held, but, crucially, not necessarily a semantic goal. (Dennett gives an example caricature of a person responding to hostility, starting with the angry flush “Go on the offensive!” and passing through “Cast aspersions on some aspect of his body!” on the way to “Say: 'Your feet are too big!'”. He assures us that we can then go home and curse ourselves for not having thought of a wittier retort.) All these “word-daemons” compete to put their mark on each others' candidates for a verbal utterance, and the stream of language they generate is adjudicated over, “yes or no”-style, by a horde of equally senseless “content-daemons.” This chaos does not end when the daemons together have assembled something that meets a Central Meaner's review. Rather, the putative semantic intention is itself modified by the judgments of the content-daemons upon the candidate utterances of the word-daemons.* The intention is “drawn” through an abstract semantic space toward the candidates, just as the candidates are drawn to the intention. What one has is not a kind of bureaucracy but (in Dennett's terminology) Pandaemonium, and it is “a process that is largely undesigned and opportunistic.”

This, if I may remark, is not a model that would have been taken too seriously as recently as the mid-nineteenth century. It is a thoroughly post-Darwinian conception, this supposition that all this chaotic variation can with only subtle environment constraints and interactions nonetheless construct something complex, something with significance, an utterance with a Meaning. Dennett directs this schematic model against the suggestion that the need for a Central Meaner would give necessity to the opposing theory of consciousness that he calls the Cartesian Theatre, (which is, roughly speaking, the idea that there is a single [physical or abstract] place where consciousness “all comes together”). In doing so he links our naïve sense that there must be a Cartesian Theatre to explain our experiences with our naïve presumption that there must be an agent's design behind anything complicated. There is indeed a commonality between them: both are a kind of turtle-stacking. (Check out the graphic on that page!)

We therefore stand properly advised that in our new century we will brook no contention anywhere that sophistication mandates design. To now pass instantly from the ontologically profound to the perhaps merely interesting, and to keep up to the promise of the title and opening paragraph of this post, we in particular note that in the new society of the Internet there is no compulsion to subscribe to a Central Content Provider.

This is a change from the old model, the model of cable television and publishing houses, where the expense of broadcasting mandated a few powerful players. To be sure, Peter Mansbridge isn't going anywhere, but there's a reason why he's now reading out viewer e-mails on the air each night. It's spelled out in this article, which was first published in a magazine and only later reprinted in the author's blog – so don't hold it against it, that it didn't come from a Central Content Provider, that in fact you (maybe) first heard about it from my pointing it out.

For this is the basis for our Internet Pandaemonium: if you know me and trust me, if I have credibility, then my endorsement of content brings that content to your attention. If you agree it's view-worthy, you refer your own close neighbours to it. If not, it need not branch any more along that path, but remember that my other readers might feel differently. The more it's passed around, the more credence and significance it gains in the greater community: some memes gain tremendous attention, or tremendous notoriety, as any longtime Internet reader can verify. As for where that content came from before -- maybe I found it purely by chance, or from another blogger whom I read, who may himself just be another citizen marking out prose or maybe someone with a mission to find selected or special content, like a museum curator, or from a newspaper or other kind of dedicated, professional content provider. (As exciting as our new century is, we would be too reckless by half to lose our professional content providers: they still deserve our respect, even if their roles are changing.) In this particular case it's all-of-the-above: the article I just linked to isn't the link I followed to that blog. This fellow's blog is in my queue pending final decision on whether I should bookmark – add him to my trusted content providers. The ultimate origin of the article, for our purposes, is the author's blog, (strictly speaking, this origin is in the sense that “eukaryotes come from prokaryotes” rather than “eukaryotes come from primordial soup”, to anticipate parenthetically some ideas from the sequel); but every blogger is an author waiting for his work to be cited and to come to prominence, possibly as part of a greater content-complex (an organelle in a eukaryote). It doesn't happen often: the price, the scarce resource that demands differential survival (speaking so as to continue to anticipate), as always comes from the opportunity cost of a person's limited attention-bandwidth for consuming media. So most bits of content don't achieve total renown, but rather roam and hover between heaven and earth. (Mostly around earth: renown like flight is very expensive to support.)

Now let me make good on those anticipations. I used that word -- memes. If you've never heard it, maybe as always the Wikipedia summary can be helpful. In short, an idea is a meme, or more precisely an idea at the size that can be replicated. It might be as small as an idiom of language or the refrain of a song or as big as the text of a book. This is in analogy to the way that a gene is some span of codons in DNA, not of fixed length but rather defined in terms of its being able to be selected for or against. A gene is supposed to do something meaningful to the phenotype, which is either fit or not according to the environment, and this by backward-translation is a selection pressure against the various genes in the gene pool. The notion of a meme is, I believe, an idea whose time has come. Of the increasing number of contemporary popular works on the subject I can't sanction or sanction any, since I haven't read them. I can, however, (not to use my pulpit to promote too many more books) both on general and specific principles recommend Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, which to my mathematician's eye reads not so much as a book about biology as an extended worked example to support a nearly-axiomatic theory about differential survival of replicators. (This description is not meant to put you off it: that's good praise!) The memes, the so-called New Replicators that “live” not in space but in peoples' minds (hence why they're new – not so long ago there weren't any minds), are first introduced by that name in Dawkins' 1976 book, although I imagine the notion was anticipated by other authors previously.

With the meme as part of our vocabulary, more or less everything we've described so far today takes a single shape. They're all stages of memetic evolution.

And while we're here, what about that Wikipedia? I cited it so casually to give a reference to memes, but isn't that where Wikipedia itself came from – some kind of memetic evolution? Take a listen to this talk by the Wikipedian progenitor himself and decide whether it sounds like the same thing. Not to be tendentious myself but I think it does: each Wikipedia article is itself a meme complex adapted under the pressure of its editors and its editors' minds – that last meaning, perhaps, the memes living in the editors' minds? So a Wikipedia article is a complex adapted to the memetic environment that the editorial community represents. If you think the situation is disqualified because the editors are agents with intentions, remember the parable of the Central Meaner: those intents themselves are memes, or perhaps more precisely certain products of memes (in the sense that the phenotype of an animal is a product of its genotype).

This is encouraging in the sense that it seems this is an example of memetic evolution, but, to get back to the original objection of the last paragraph, if we were inclined to be suspicious of the memes and the prospects for memetic evolution, the fact of a Wikipedia citation about them is not going to be terribly convincing. The mere fact of the citation is mere question-begging! On the contrary, it is good and well, we imagine, to say that animals rose from natural selection; but why is it that we suppose the conditions are present in our world of discourse to make possible a memetic evolution by “natural” selection, even if we believe (“in our new century”) that this is possible in principle?

For if the conditions are not there, a Wikipedia citation must surely be a deeply suspicious thing. Supposing that daemons can make wisdom just by nattering suggestions is no better than saying that monkeys can write Hamlet given typewriters nor than saying a mammal came about by accident. Even Plato knew, despite not having Darwin's idea as a counterexample, that sophistication does not imply an agent's design; but chance alone does not gain sophistication without selection pressures causing differential survival. (The “nonrandom survival of randomly varying replicators,” in Dawkins' one-sentence summary.) So rose the animals, and so rise the meme complexes – supposedly. But is there or can there be really such a thing as the so-called “wisdom of crowds”?

What, for example, to make of such a famous experiment as Kasparov v. The World? Let me recall the circumstances of this event to you. In Summer 1999, Microsoft sponsored a chess game played (at correspondence time control, about one move per day) on their website. Garry Kasparov, recently having regained his status as the invincible champion with spectacular triumphs at Wijk an Zee and Linares in the first quarter of the year, commanded the White pieces, (with the assistance of his usual seconds). Captaincy of the opposing Black forces was given to – everyone who showed up: any person could log on to the MSN Gaming Zone and submit a vote for their team's play. The move with a plurality of votes would be the one made. The match was not so uneven as it sounds: four strong junior players were enlisted to provide brief recommendations to The World team, and still more strong players volunteered, including Alexander Khalifman, who went to Las Vegas in Fall 1999, while the game was still being played, and there won the FIDE World Championship. (At this time, the world championship was still a divided title, and Kasparov refused to play in FIDE's events.) Or perhaps after I, and Dennett and Darwin, praise Pandaemonium you might think the game unfairly balanced in the other direction?

No, it was not so. After several months of tough play, during which at times all three outcomes (win, lose, draw) seemed equally plausible, Kasparov was victorious, (in a queen-and-pawn endgame). Is this the logical triumph of expertise? I would be quick, in my Platonic prejudice, to think it so: understanding trumps grasping because that's what understanding is. Similar one-versus-many contests have been held, albeit with less fanfare and publicity, and they have often been decided for the expert and not the putative wisdom of the mob, but far from always. More recently, Arno Nickel, who holds the ICCF (international correspondence chess federation's) grandmaster title, bested the computer Hydra, by a score 2.5-0.5, in correspondence games; and this unthinking computing beast the same creature of awful power that beat Mickey Adams 5.5-0.5 over the board! But Nickel too has lost a game against The World, in the form of the community on the website ChessGames.com; it concluded in January of this year.

So what to make of all this? In a phrase, it's the difference between a mob and a crowd. Fickle folly can be incendiary, but it knows not how to aim itself nor cares what it burns. If a man leads a mob, it is at most as wise as he, and often less. Irina Krush, one of the World Team coaches Microsoft hired in the match against Kasparov, expressed her displeasure when some of her mob's decisions decided against her and Khalifman. A mob can beat Kasparov if Khalifman can. After it gave such a tremendous fight it is ungenerous, to say a minimum, to put that World Team closer to the monkeys than to Shakespeare, but one idly wonders if simply the presence of better tools, like a ChessBase wiki to replace the primitive forum design of the MSN Gaming Zone, might have made the difference.** Anyway, it's quite possible that to beat Nickel in correspondence games is more impressive than to beat Kasparov, so the proper tools have surely been developed. But the lesson is clear: It is the networking of the crowd that sets the stage for the miracle of memetic evolution, and not the noisy, violent hub-bub of the mob.

And, to get back to our Wikipedia problem after an extended parable, a fringe article is only as good as its first and only editor-progenitor, but a well-eyed treatise is a tremendous thing – as long as Wikipedia itself is properly built to encourage the right selection pressures. Remembering the talk, the last pieces come into place. You have administrators, (Dennett's content-daemons, the judicial counterparts to the word-daemons striving to craft prose), and they, of course, don't need to be experts in the article subject areas, no, not in anything but encyclopaedia mediation, -- and then, more or less, the “undesigned, opportunistic” process of evolution can start. Alexander Khalifman is a tremendous “chess expert,” but that's a word-daemon: he isn't on the right ontological level to exploit a Pandaemonium to challenge Garry Kasparov.

After so much chatter, let us remind ourselves that – it is a fait accompli; Pandaemonium is already here! It came in the form of the blogosphere and YouTube and other networking sites. (Pre-Internet models suffer from limited connectivity and content distribution – somewhat deficient for good examples of a functioning Pandaemonium, and so every film studio executive dreams of that rare word-of-mouth buzz.) Bloggers write and post content and link to each other; YouTube users have schematic personal pages on which they can, in addition to posting their own videos, link to particular other videos or to other users' personal pages. This is the minimum requirement. It doesn't have to be one or two sites in particular, and may not be in future. Indeed the Internet crowd can sometimes be fickle in its endorsement (the various blog-hosting services all rise, compete, and fall among themselves). What's important is just the structure on which the community builds itself, and any sufficiently self-connecting framework could do. From there we little daemons, simultaneously both word- and content-, we take care of things themselves.

And quite well, too. So ends my speech of praise.


(Endnotes.)

* For example, consider the "seductive turn of phrase." Where did the title "The future of credibility" for this entry come from, anyway? It's apparently a play against an earlier entry entitled "The end of credibility," (which, if you're looking for it, was the last of "Three Short Comments from Princeton"). Is this really the best I can do? The two entries don't seem to have a lot to do with each other, other than being about blogging. Maybe they're both about content distribution, from two different sides. Maybe it's just a weak play on words. But it has such a hold that the word "credibility" even gets a mention a little later, in the middle of a very important paragraph. There's supposedly an abstract semantic idea that this paragraph is to communicate, and that idea is independent of its instantiation in text, but in particular the "trust metaphor" to explain the low-level links between blogs is directly connected to this curious title. Can I say which came first in my thinking? For surely the meaning of the text would not be quite the same with a different metaphor.

In other examples, a "seductive turn of phrase" becomes its own justification, divorced from any external semantic concept. An easy way for this to happen is from grammatical ambiguity, say due to excessive editting for style over content.

Incidently, the titular quotation, "Everything is what it is because it got that way," is from D'Arcy Thompson's "On Growth and Form." (Peter Medawar called this "the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue." I haven't read it. It's about 1200 pages, which is rather longer than this post.) It is a little more obviously connected to the technical side of the subject matter.


** Everyone who has ever spent a little time slumming on a forum whose theme yields to certain frequently-asked-questions knows that Sisyphus himself hadn't such a futile task. I have examples in mind, but they're such dangerously contagious and stultifying memes I don't dare quote them – they're the memetic equivalent of the flu.


Postscript. Sorry about all the broken links; I've fixed them. They were there because I was composing this entry in a word processor (for the obvious reason) which was automatically turning all the quotation marks into smart-quotes (that angle toward text, like “...”) rather than the (uniformly-oriented, like "...") quotation marks that one needs to put in HTML tags.

Lost Blogging: from the Omo River Valley

Sometimes my notes disappear for a long time. It doesn't bother me much to have them sit unattended or even lost. From the writing point of view, if the note was to have prose value, it just allows for better editting. From the pedagogical point of view, if the note has a pedagogical purpose, it is true that almost no one learns something the first time they see it or write it down. And there is a certain strangeness to uncovering something a year or two past or older, a not unpleasant strangeness if it's not overcome by awkwardness. (Well, Aristotle's been dead a long time, so he can wait patiently while I change my mind about what I said about him.)

Usually the point is to polish them, if they're supposed to become journal entries, to embelish them with context and make out the rhythm of a full entry. It's not too infrequent that my point (there usually is one) is very short and I want to make it in a sentence or two. (I am reminded of the desire of my often-aphoristic dead German mentor to "say in twenty sentences what another would write a whole book on" -- I paraphrase this quote from memory -- good advice for philosophers.) But sometimes I think: These little sentences are just too cryptic. Who will know what they mean? If I had read them yesterday or the day before, would I know what I'm talking about? When I read them tomorrow, will I have an idea about what I supposedly meant? To be fair, do they really mean anything? If am I not understood, and there was something to understand, isn't it really my fault? (My "Gangasrotogati-living" dead German mentor, despite famously upset on this score, probably agreeing -- according to the proposition: man who uses Sanskrit in a passage about how he's not understood must be making a joke; I mean BGE section 27.) So I must draw out a verbal recording of mental context.

Dawn over the Omo River Valley

Anyway, not to tediously furnish yet another example of what I'm talking about in Sun-Drunken's most common bit of irony, but this entry was just supposed to be about a short, expository note to myself I found that I wrote last summer, in July or August, I'm not sure, that I figured I'd post with only a few fingerfehlers ("finger blunders") corrected. Editorial parentheses [...] in the original. (It's a compulsion.)

There's a BBC program they['ve] show[n] on CBC Newsworld called Tribe. It follows a Brit, Bruce Parry, on travels to see and live among various indigeneous tribes of the world. Once he went to live with the Nyangatom of the Omo River Valley, in Ethiopia, near the Sudanese border. The Nyangatom are proud [warlike] people living in ancient-style huts, drinking cows' blood in the daytimes, and wearing traditional clothes and raiments, with a few recent additions: t-shirts, AK-47's, and pierced bullet jewelry. There he was adopted by the village elder and made an honorary member of the Ibex, their corps of young fighting men. During the initiation ceremony they were harangued by their elder, who remarked that today's young men aren't like those who came before, that they laze around all day and can't protect their cattle, and drink too much alcohol. He might as well have added that civilisation is doomed for it -- but the Ibex warriors were quite keyed-up by it, and vowed to shoot and kill anyone who tried to steal their cattle, as the womenfolk sang a song about "Lokloram, the lion" (Bruce Parry's adopted name) and about how their enemies were afraid to cross the river.

Call it: From the

civilisation is doomed! because the youth are unruly

file, thinking of an (apocryphal?) ancient Sumerian (Akkadian? Babylonian?) text said to already have been making that argument. Of all the things I wonder about Sumer, the one I'd want answered most is about what it's like to live in a world that has no history.

(Insert externally-silent mental struggle about how much to amplify that remark in an already-burgeoning entry. I'll just leave a reference to the last sentence of the previous entry so we remember there's a theme being developed. Myth only counts as history at half-weight.)

Bullet-case earring?

Three quick remarks about the quoted text:

• Brackets on "warlike" because this is a word that comes as naturally as it sounds cheesy. It makes me think I've been deeply influenced by Zulus with tanks in Civilisation. I mean, people don't really talk like that, do they?


• Yes, I really wrote "womenfolk." I'm sorry. I swear that would never make it to the second draft, nor would the massive run-on final sentence. It's just a summary note to myself, damn it.


• Check out the similarity to the Wikipedia entry, whose current revision I note uses the word "warlike," with a placeholder for a citation (!), in the first sentence.
  

More Lost Blogging to come. I have a thing somewhere around here on airplane pictures which I promised back in December but actually dates to September. And I have a full Page-a-Day Calendar page of subject titles for Journal of a Lower-Division Grader I scrawled the last time I was marking papers.

Bruce Parry &c at the well

Pictures shamelessly borrowed fairly used from the BBC Tribe website.

Journal of a Lower-Division Grader: Introduction (and if you warned me,...)

"I despise your despising," spoke Zarathustra. "And if you warned me, why did you not warn yourself?""

There's something very dubious about work-related blogging. It seems to get people into trouble (cf. brief remarks here under "the end of credibility," or elsewhere at more length and erudition), for one thing. But more than that, and in its pervasity worse still, it seems all-too-often both unprofessional and morosely self-indulgent. How often do we read only glib snark cooked up from the catalogue of the daily travail? Endow it with vices and malfeasance beyond its station, and speak of it with the dryly clownish condescension of sufferance yielding to exasperation! But sad occasions are only sadder still when they command the service of powerful prose.

How often have I jotted notes on nothing-in-particular only later, a day, two days later, to find that I no longer had any interest in the subject? It is not that I am fickle or capricious, though perhaps I am. It's that the fundamental cost of all art, all media is viewer attention. The literature of forgettable pettiness only worths its price when it seasons itself with bile and hyperbole. It's the thing-of-the-moment that mistakenly universalises itself in a search for absent significance when it in truth has no such power. It's Guildenstern stabbing the Player King.

And it's really bad writing. Maybe not bad prose, maybe often not, but badly misspent. I think we ought to command better from ourselves. Call that a re-statement of our mission at Sun-Drunken.

If you remember the last time, or the time before that, or --, that I went on a tear immediately prior to doing, or while doing, exactly what I'd just railed against, I'm sure you know what comes next. It's not just self-conscious irony, the plainest special pleading, a seeking to convince the reader that really nothing wicked passes here by sending him through loops and whirls until he's too dizzy to figure out whether it's satirical or just crass. It was never the despising that was at fault. Returns are still being earned when Guildenstern furnishes his "art to creating suspense" with a "law of diminishing returns."

Here, however, Zarathustra interrupted the foaming fool and put his hand over the fool's mouth. "Stop at last!" cried Zarathustra; "your speech and your manner have long nauseated me. Why did you live near the swamps so long, until you yourself have become a frog and a toad?... Why have you not gone into the woods? Or to plow the soil? I despise your despising; and if you warned me, why did you not warn yourself?

"Out of love alone shall my despising and my warning bird fly up, not out of the swamp.

"... What was it that first made you grunt? That nobody flattered you sufficiently; you sat down to this filth so as to have reason to grunt much -- to have reason for much revenge....

"But your fool's words injure me, even where you are right. And even if Zarathustra's words were a thousand times right, still you would always do wrong with my words."

Anyway, when the preface puts the body of text into the smallest corner of its shadow -- it could be bad writing, or it could be the preface was the point.

* * * * *

Way-back-when at UBC I took a class in Euclidean geometry. After the midterm a friend told me a sad story about the grading of one of the problems. It had asked for a statement of some theorem or definition or thing like this. As always in Euclidean geometry a good diagram was central to the issue, and she had included a helpful exegetical diagram. Alas, the instructor had not found it so helpful.

"I didn't label it a circle," she explained to me at some length. "That's why he took points off. You tell me, what else could it be?"

Obviously I couldn't say. I'd labelled mine.

"He said, 'Maybe you thought it was an ellipse'! What? What?! When in this class have we talked about ellipses?"

Well, it wasn't the most circle-like circle. They're not the easiest thing to draw.

"When has Instructor-Man even mentioned the word 'ellipse'?!"

Never, of course; if you have neither co-ordinate geometry nor solid Euclidean geometry at your disposal, and this was a strictly plane-geometric class, it's a bother even to say what an ellipse is.

So she went to work on him again, but it didn't help. He was the kind of person who helps earn a reputation for eccentricity for mathematicians. (It's a math pun; click the link to convince yourself it might possibly be funny.)

In truth, although I wished I could back up the professor's take, I really couldn't figure it out. I dislike unlabelled diagrams as much as the next guy, but this ellipse business couldn't be a serious criticism.

I have since recanted my naivete. A term or two grading papers has given me a somewhat more storied perspective. My understandings about what other people might mean when they speak what they say or write what they scribble are no longer Earthbound -- heavy, constrained by the gravity of consequence. Rather they roam between the sky and the space which is beyond, fantastic, undreambound. It's the fog of the Nothing, of the confusion-of-being, of the not-understanding and the not-communicating. It's sadness on a page.

And that's why I couldn't give examples. It would take a callous knowledge-worker not to empathise. Or at least it would if the clever critters didn't try their damn'dest to dress it up. And yet, heavens guard us, maybe now and then I've only rouged it -- I am on a deadline.

ambivalence resolved

I visited Chapter's at Robson one time during the summer. I had mischronometrised and arrived quite early for a lunch appointment with Craig and Papa. It's very pleasant to visit all the old haunts: see what's new, what's old that's reprinted and new again, what never went away. I have a mental checklist: any new-old Silverberg? or Heinlein? or Herbert? or --

Alas, that there could be new-old Herbert; alas, there only is new-new Herbert. Instead of a re-issue of Destination: Void, which even Papa doesn't seem, to my frustration, to own, or of The White Plague or The Jesus Incident, we get, at best, The Road to Dune, which, well -- it styles itself thus, above the oversized "DUNE" in that characteristic font that now means another wretched volume has come upon us:

The companion to the New York Times bestsellers including never-before-published chapters from Dune and Dune Messiah, original stories, and a new novel by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson.

This book first came to my attention that summer day. It was sitting there in hardcover. There is barely a hundred and twenty pages of actual Frank Herbert material, but such is the hold of it over me that I was tempted to grab it right then. But my better senses prevailed, and I left it alone.

A few days ago I was again in the Chapter's at Robson. It was the day after Boxing Day. It was very obviously the day after Boxing Day. The shelves often contained gaps great and small and many books on them showed curled corners and scuffs on the cover and ruffled pages: surely they'd been bought and returned and reshelved this Christmas season. With two gift cards whispering in my pocket and no prospects to use them for many months anon I was eager to increase the burden of my space-crunch. So when I saw The Road to Dune in friendly paperback size I was certain I had to have it.

And at home as I started to read I was not disappointed. I read a summary of an article that Frank Herbert was thinking to write in the 50's, about how for the first time a system of plantings had been developed to stop the encroaching sand dunes from burying the little town of Florence, Oregon. The dunes are driven some twenty feet a year by wind, like water in tempo largo. More than ten thousand types of grass had come into the experiment to find one that would set down roots that would help fix the top sand in place. Reading this, reading Frank Herbert's excitement at the ecological solution to an historic problem and his agent's nonplussed replies, I thought of green plants in the desert, of ornithopters, of the opening of the film Koyaanisqatsi with Philip Glass's awed score over waves of water and clouds and cars, of (Mother of Muad'dib!) rain from the sky of Dune --

I decided that if I was ever in the area I should drop by to see the environs of the town of Florence, Oregon, this place that set in motion these thoughts in Frank Herbert's head. A quasi-hajj to Mecca-on-the-West-Coast. I discovered that my friend Daniel, a.k.a. Billy, formerly of UBC Math and now of Oregon Math, attends school just two miles from the town. That started me thinking.

From the reportedly many boxes of notes and text uncovered by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson in the pieces of Frank Herbert's estate they gave us some hundred pages of drafts and excised material from Dune. Some of it requires no explanation:

Paul stepped out of bed in his shorts, began dressing. "Is she [the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohaim] your mother?" he asked.

"That's a fool's question, Paul," Jessica said. She turned. "Reverend Mother is merely a title. I never knew my mother. Few Bene Gesserits of the schools ever do; you know that."

There are so many things wrong with this passage about the only piece of interest is to know that even the pen of Frank Herbert scribbled the kind of things that I'd write and strike out instantly. There's no indication of where this fragment came from, and I imagine it was indeed quickly discarded, and survived by happenstance among the many pages of unused material.

Much of the discarded material is like this in character, almost pure exposition either dropped or strongly reworked into more natural settings. A little is reasonably polished work from earlier drafts of the plot, like a visit of Jessica and Duncan and twelve-year-old (!) Paul to Dr. Kynes. Some, a very little, is really literarily indistinguishable from the finished product; for example, a deleted scene from Dune Messiah wherein Paul receives Otheym's message from the Tleilaxu-made dwarf Bijaz, which ends:

"The spice, M'Lord," Stilgar said.

"Of course we'll stop all shipments of the spice," Paul said. "Let's see how they like that." [...]

Bijaz began to giggle.

Paul turned toward the dwarf, noting how the creature had the attention of everyone in the room.

"How they'll wish on the morrow they had no teeth," Bijaz sputtered between giggles.

"What in the name of the worm does he mean by that?" Stilgar demanded.

"Without teeth they'll be unable to gnash," Bijaz said, his voice reasonable.

Even Stilgar chuckled. Paul stood silent, watchful.

"Who do you mean by they?" Paul asked.

"Why, Sire," Bijaz said, "the ones who planted that stone-burner on you. Could it be they wanted you to stopple the spice?"

The prose is clean, smart, and beautiful, and paced like poetry. No coincidence: we are told that many passages in Dune began as Haiku and the like before being enlarged only as necessary to make grammatical English, and if Frank Herbert later discontinued this practice it's clear he'd mastered the lesson.

The Road to Dune contains a re-constructed short novel entitled Spice Planet, apparently based, how loosely one couldn't say, on original notes (characters and events) for a story about narcotics and feuding noblemen set principally on a planet known as Duneworld. This, it seems, was the first draft of the Dune concept, later expanded into a whole new universe shot through with themes of ecology, politics, leadership, history, religion, -- and so many more besides. It would be interesting to see the story of Duneworld written from Frank Herbert's hand, but mostly because it would be from Frank Herbert's hand.

The volume also contains a hundred pages or so of short fiction by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson. Most of it pertains to their books which they claim tell the story of the Butlerian Jihad. The last of them they describe in the introduction as in part a bridge between the end of Chapterhouse: Dune and their Hunters of Dune, the new first part of "Dune Seven" that they're writing. On the basis of this I sat down to read it. It's called "Sea Child," and it's a little over fifteen pages long. Someone please explain to me, then, why the first two are a summary of the current state of galactic politics. It's difficult to pick out something as representative of their prose, but this paragraph, towards the end of that summary, offends me particularly:

In moments of despair, Corysta [the Bene Gesserit protagonist of the short story] felt she had two sets of enemies, her own Sisters and the Honored Matres who sought supremacy over everything in the old Imperium. If the Bene Gesserits did not find a way to fight back -- here and on other planets -- their days would be numbered. With superior weaponry and vast armies, the Honored Matres would exterminate the Sisterhood. From her own position of disadvantage, Corysta could only hope that her Mother Superior was developing a plan on Chapterhouse that would enable the ancient organsiation to survive. The Sisterhood faced an immense challenge against an irrational enemy.

There's no sentence of this dreadful paragraph that doesn't make me cringe. The centerpiece of its naivete (as opposed to its rotten, cliche-ridden prose, which is a sample representative of the whole) is that little aside about Mother Superior. It reads like bad fan-fiction: the blunder is of assigning paramount significance to exactly what was in the text of the prior books, no less and no more. If we the reader spent two books following Mother Superior, surely Mother Superior is on everyone's mind. Truly she must have some awesome cult of personality to be solely responsible for the course of galactic politics. As to the details of the war, it's clear they don't understand that the weapons and battles are incidental. The motives of the foe, moreover, were revealed slowly and imperfectly to us, and I don't remember "supremacy over everything in the old Imperium" being anything more than a means; but this is the level of subtlety that Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson will pitch to us.

For the lesson is that there will never be a moment in the books of these two like when Bellonda drops into the scene with an anguished cry: "Lampadas!" We know what she means: the training planet has been found and destroyed; all the Sisters and Reverend Mothers and the soldiers who defended them and their marshal, who we knew, died there. It is a crushing sentence for our protagonists and for us, and it's one the like of which we won't see anywhere in Dune Seven. They'd blow one word into a full scene and the content would be shot away, unrecoverable, just like they spammed us with two pages of irrelevant galactic simplifications in a fifteen-page short that barely gets off the beach before it delivers its metaphors with a heavy, Harkonnen-sweaty hand.

So what I'm saying is -- the spirit of restlessness that came years ago with the production of new books with "DUNE" in great letters upon them has fallen still. There is not now and will not be more old Herbert. The shlock released between those covers is puerile and clunky in equal measure. It is by me simply unreadable. There is no other thing to say about a book that can't pass half a page without dropping some dreadful nonsense, say:

In the floating image, the bristling ships opened fire, unleashing incineration waves with devices the Bene Gesserit had since named "Obliterators,"

to borrow a half of a single sentence from the first page of the excerpt of Hunters of Dune helpfully included at the back of Road.

So what I'm saying is -- I'm not buying any more of their damn'd books.

So what I'm saying is -- if anyone manages to get through "Dune Seven," let me know what's up with the Enemy. I'm all right with not knowing, but hey -- as with the transcendentality of π, if you could know, wouldn't you want to know?

That's all I'm saying.

Benedictions: "and the shadows of things that might be?"

The merriest, sunniest of winter festivals to all.

Domicile Tour Extravaganza 2006 continues

This morning I find myself with quite a lot of time and an interdiction against making a noisy pest of myself. For somehow I woke up about three hours on the clock earlier than usual. This spate of temporal gratuity left me questing for things-to-do, and the fact of my seeing the family later today gave me a hint.

Something... I'd neglected. Something I'd forgotten. Willfully? Nolens, volens? I'm no six-o'clock-in-the-morning-philosopher, which surely lessens my prospects for escaping from Elba Island should I find myself banished by a vengeful, fearful Europe, so I'll skip right past the Chairman Kaga impersonation to the narrative crutch -- I mean, the object of interest around which I have to spin a cohering net.

First, for reference, let us go anachron a little ways, so that I can demonstrate I was planning ahead. The date is 9th September 2006. I had arrived in Princeton the previous night.

As you enter the suite and, well, walk about two-thirds in and look right and back you see this view. The fireplace is not operational (the chimney is sealed) and that's a carbon monoxide detector in the socket. It's not the only carbon monoxide detector in the suite. In fact, it's not the only carbon monoxide detector in the room. Redundancy -- saving lives since the dawn of man.

Here's my desk. This view is from the middle of the room; you can see the bedroom through the door on the right. The desk is too small -- you'll see what I mean in a minute -- and the desk-chair is quite inferior to the type they have in the New Graduate College rooms. Those chairs, as you can see with careful inspection, are actually of a rocking variety. Their paleolithic counterparts are orthogonally built of rigid wood in inhuman proportions, the sort of inplastic thing which I cannot believe is ergonomically sound.

Anyway, there's nothing of especial interest here. I just thought it seemed a bucolic scene.

Speaking of pastoral New Jersey, here's the summertime view from the window in the room we were just in. The suite is situated on the west wall of the North Courtyard, half of which you see here. If you go up those steps in the back, under a short archway, right twenty paces or so, and turn left, you'll see something like this, except without the snow. So that's where I am in the complex.

Naturally (naturally!) I was concerned about my boxes. Long-time readers and, umm, blood-relatives will need no wordsmithery on this occasion to conjure a sense of the scene, which is good, because it would probably just come out as a bunch of mixed metaphors. Yes, after my little-blogged-about struggle with Moving & Storage, the student-run, well, moving-and-storage concern, I was touched nervous. In fact at this time I couldn't even confirm that my things had been in storage. However, being made of stern stuff, I was not even close to panicking when it happened on this lovely Saturday afternoon that I heard some boxy noises thump-thump-thumping outside my chamber door. Engrossed in my business, I had time only to turn and see several large people retreating along the stone path.

Yes, indeed, I was about ready to forgive. Not only had they apparently in fact picked up and stored my boxes -- without, as I would shortly find out, even any water damage (phew!) -- but they had managed to deliver them directly to my door, on the second floor, in the residence that a university-politics war was fought to keep past the edge of campus. Someone anonymous had not, as I would also shortly find out, gotten the message about not picking them up by the handles, but this minor fault I am eager to wink at, for after all I have done the same now and then.

Especially observant long-time readers will note, however, two interesting facts about this picture. First, that the door is propped open with a chair. (You will all be delighted to learn that I locked myself out not once all term.) Second, that something is missing. Not to turn this into an obnoxious "what's wrong with this picture?" problem, but compare an earlier portrait of The Thirteen.

Hmm.

(Preternaturally observant readers will note a third thing, namely that I have adopted a different file-naming convention. Good-bye, room_0.jpg; hello, window.jpg.)

Not to keep you in suspense for too long: as evidenced by how you're only hearing this tale now, three months later, instead of at gruesome, abusive length before, things concluded happily an hour or so later:

After another thump-thump-thump I checked the hall, to be greeted by this wonderful tableau. Hosanna in excelsis! Thanks be to Moving & Storage for their timely aversion of the rending of garments and full-throated curses in Cerberus' name under the next full moon.

Now let us away, friends, to a moment closer to the present one. Just two days ago, here was the state of things.

The bookshelf, which holds some of my books. It's a little small. There was some overflow. Here, and... elsewhere. In case you're wondering, I'm pretty sure that kettle is fire-safety-inspector-approved. I guess I'll find out during the spring inspection. The click-through is just small enough that you can't really read the titles on most volumes unless you already know them. Sorry. Anyway, I'm a little disappointed with this shelf, to be frank. It feels like something just stuck on the wall; whereas last year's integrated desk-shelf combination made for a quite nice picture.

On the plus slate, you can see some empty floor space, which was lacking in the quite-easy-to-vacuum previous apartment.

Before we move to the back room, here's the desk, circa today. Not much to see here. The strange, ugly green thing on the left is a towel over the small table (same model as last year). Said table is so small about the only functional thing I could manage with it was to turn it into a poor-student's Ottoman. (There's a sitting chair left, off-camera.) More books on the desk. You can't really see the second tier, a small mess of papers, behind them. That's a little bottle of honey on the right end of the window ledge, if you were wondering what was up.

So... it's another bookshelf. This is the view if you're leaning back on the foot of the bed and, well, staring at the bookshelf. There's Sha-naqba-umuru with the textbooks, and that curious blotch of colour in front of the compact discs is the Phantom of the Opera table accent.

I saved the most boring shot for last. Think of it as a sad, wistful denouement, because otherwise it was just a pothole in the narrative road. There's, umm, a picture frame behind the open book.

* * *

The squirrels are stirring outside. The world is waking up. Airplane pictures (I'm sure you can't wait) later.

Home: "Behold! human beings living in a underground den"

Nervous prefaces should be expunged. It's elementary. At worst they're an ad misericordiam special plea, at best merely bad prose. But in the medium of the blog I think we will have to get used to them. There is a lot of nonsense out there and sometimes people realise when they're writing it. If you feel exasperated with mine, keep in mind I've already given you my one-page take on Hamlet. There are any number of indulgent existential whiners who couldn't write three coherent sentences on the man who beat them all to it.

This, then, is a nervous preface. This post is going to get a little weird, and I thought it would be best to explain beforehand, in the hopes that by the end the reader will think I'm a nervously clucking hen and the untoward sleeps breezily tonight. That would be ideal.

It's a certain special brand of weird. I've been putting it off. Today I was baking cookies, though, and remembered that once and not so long ago I posted my cookie recipe here. (Actually, I think it's at least half Grandmother's. Hi, Grandma.) So some curious things have shown up now and then. This is another cookie recipe.

So I've got some photos to show you. Here ends the nervous preface. There lie dragons.

* * * * *

Once and not so long ago a man packed his books and music and linens into eleven sturdy boxes and sent them off with a "Godspeed, sturdy boxes" to the other side of the world. They braved the road and the customs agent to arrive, eventually, safely, a little battered, with a little more packing tape than when they left, but whole. The man met them there and unpacked them with a "Thank you, brave boxes" and flattened them and put them under his bed. There they lay for a half-year, waiting for their time of glory.

And it came. They poured from the underworld and, armoured with the steel hide of duct tape, readied to once more take up their charge. And yet, and yet, they were too few: for in the intervening time the man had bought more books and more music and home appliances, and these things no longer fit into the eleven. "I need another box," the man said to his heart. "I have this one here spare, which someone sent to me and I kept safe; now they number twelve. And yet, and yet, they are still too few, and too small besides: my home appliances will not fit in a box a foot and a half on the diagonal."

So warned, he wondered where a youthful, bountiful box might bloom; but no one sold him boxes, not even the ineptly run local storage concern. Time passed and trees flowered -- until one morning something remarkable happened. The man awoke and stumbled from his home to break his fast; and there, on the side of the road beneath an arch, discarded haphazardly, unwanted, in a pile of refuse, lay a great bear of a box, two feet on a side! "This is it, my champion!" spoke the man to his heart. "A box of the proportions we desire. And yet, and yet -- is it possible -- could we -- might one just take it?" And he thought about it still. "Here it lies, on the side of the road in a pile of refuse," he mused. "Soon the garbageman will come and take it away. Look you here! No one wants it. Take it now!" And so ordered by himself, he obeyed, and took the box to his home. Now they numbered thirteen; and when the man returned not so much later from his breakfast the refuse all was gone.

	So these are the Thirteen. Umm, except that there is obviously an even number of them. I guess I had already packed one and it's hiding behind the camera. (Also, this file is called "room_0.jpg". Some people like to start counting from zero, but I'd better just confess. Apparently I started numbering my pictures from the last in the series and couldn't count. Well, at least it's not room_negative_1.) This is the south-east corner of the room. (You can see one of my speakers, and the subwoofer under a pillow -- that was to hide the bright green light at its back, which was clearly visible from where my head lay at night. To regain a little lost cred, that book on the table is called "Automorphic Forms and Representations.") This was an ideal place to put the boxes, with one minor drawback--
	--namely, that if you wake up in the dull, suffused glow of dawn, it looks for all the world like there's a two-metre-tall thug with a Darth Vader-esque head standing at the base of your bed. (Apparently I was so shocked by the recollection that I called this file room_2. Oy.) This parable, by the way, has a moral; it is: "On a long enough timeline, good things happen, just by chance." I seriously was thinking (as opposed to thinking seriously) about this problem for four weeks before I found that discarded "Dell" box. Special thanks to A.N. for ordering a laptop at the end of the year.
	So this the south-west corner. My desk and shelving. It's looking like there's space because I've already started taking books down at this stage. A certain party was encouraging me for some time to take pictures of my living space but I the unruly son was quite belated about it. By this stage it was "If not now, when?" and "It's cleaner than usual, and anyway I can blame any disarray on the fact that I'm moving. That's the ticket." So that answers your question, if your question was, "Why are we getting a tour (of some place he doesn't even live in anymore)?" Click through for a bigger version, my voyeurs -- I mean, concerned parties. Umm... ignore all the Amazon boxes. They send huge boxes for the smallest items, a manifest waste of space, I swear. Moving on, I want to introduce someone:
	Say "hello" to Professor Albert. In tiger form. (Wait... room_5? I give up. Seriously, this time I just changed my mind about the flow of my narrative.) This one is really its own punchline. (In truth, I think he's adorable in addition to hilarious.) You may recall there was recently a major anniversary in the physics world -- one hundred years for the "Annus Mirabilis," the year in which Einstein published a large number of revolutionary papers, including the original Special Relativity paper and the Nobel-prize-winning paper on the photoelectric effect. You may not recall there was recently a major anniversary for the Institute for Advanced Study -- seventy-five years since its inception. You may also not recall that recently there was the fiftieth anniversary of Einstein's death. (Ugh.) These were the same years. I do not recall for which the plush is commemorative.
	Let's zoom out a bit. This picture has nothing of especial interest (no, I do not normally make my bed, this is not in situ, it is staged), it just completes the tour and gives the reader a break before we press on. If you look closely back at my desk, you can see another figure, adjacent to Professor Albert, partially obscured by a bag of tea leaves. Now who could that be?
	It's -- my word -- it's Little Richard Wagner! You can even wind him up, and he plays a music-box version of "Ride of the Valkyries." Now this demands an explanation. Back in March, two-thirds of Party the Third (that's Mom and Bruce, if you're keeping track) were passing through the area and took me to the New York City Opera, where we saw a production of -- Don Giovanni, by Mozart. At the gift kiosk downstairs they had Little Mozart and Little Wagner, too. Since stormy petrel Little Wagner is clearly superior to, umm, stormy petrel Little Mozart, the rest is clear. He comes with a little tag identifying the queer fish that made him: a little shop called the Unemployed Philosopher's Guild. A branch of their merchandise is a little suspect ("indictmints"?) but if you stick to the non-political you can spend a few happy minutes exploring their stock. I'll mention two I especially enjoyed:
	"Nietzsche's Will to Power Bar," his name spelled correctly on most pages. "When your Wille zur macht is a flagging or you're just a little tired of transvaluating all values.... These bars, like other 'energy bars' are packed with protein, vitamins and chocolatey goodness. Whether you're philosophizing with a hammer, or just trying to get through your day, these will help." In case you were wondering, that's an hilarious bit of copy.
	"What Would Nietzsche Do?" I ask myself now and then. I also ask myself if this "100% cotton" shirt is Egyptian or some low-quality knockoff, because this is about one of two pieces of apparel with text other than "No bleach, tumble dry medium" I'd consider wearing. I'd feel very cheeky doing so.
	That brings us to this guy, who you can't even see on my desk in that picture. His name is Sha-naqba-umuru, and everything about him clearly demands an explanation. Where to start? Hum, let me ponder for a line or two. All right, where it came from: Last year Craig (the other third of Party the Third) visited Las Vegas (with Cindy and their friend, Ted) for a weekend. They brought back a little present, this "Excalibear," which is what passes for clever at the hotel they were staying at. (Try to guess what it was called.) Which leaves the name: Sha naqba umuru is ancient Sumerian (or possibly Akkadian) for "He who saw the Deep." (There's no chance the punctuation is correct -- there's an apostrophe in there somewhere-- and I don't have my book handy to check.) It's a name for Gilgamesh, king of Uruk. (Now that I think on it I'm not entirely certain to what "the Deep" refers, although it's evidently a really cool sobriquet.) Anyway, in context of our magical bear here, it refers to his position as a personification, an avatar if you will, of my Platonist mysticism. That wand he carries is not fabric, cardboard, and glue, but a fantastic relic, the Reifying Juju, which instantiates in the physical world things which existed theretofore only as perfect, Platonic abstractions. To put it in more down-to-Earth terms, the Reify is to the Platonist as the Force is to the Jedi.

Now don't I feel silly. That wasn't curious at all. You know, it's good to branch out a little. With so many varied people potentially reading, I worry about what people see. Falling silent -- driving the readers away -- solves it simply.

* * * * *

Update, the next morning. I changed the pictures so that they're now thumbnails (width 240) for slightly larger pics (width 320, except for the two "this is just a picture of my room" shots, which I think were 640) to correct the unreadable vertically-stretched text in the second column. (Well, that's just what bad planning gets you.) As a bonus for your forbearance, here's another picture of someone else's merchandise (which is, umm, maybe not for public use, now that I think of it, just like the other two):

"Here's Looking at Euclid"

That, by the way, is the diagram for the elegant and extremely useful Proposition I.1 of the Elements, "To construct an equilateral triangle on a given line segment AB." Snazzy, but a little on the nose, don't you think?

Resurrection: "aufersteh'n, ja aufersteh'n wirst du"

Hi, everyone. Long time no see. Qu'est-ce qui se passe?

The big news at the beginning of the semester is and must be the new classes, but we're still easing into that (one hasn't yet begun, even), so I'll hold off for the moment. Suffice to say that this year's crop looks to surpass that from the fall, with two number theory classes, including one taught by Andrew Wiles (which hasn't begun, so who can say if it will be beyond the horizon), and a geometry-flavoured class. Indeed, all would be perfect except for a foul scheduling accident that I had to watch happen, in person, with all the dread of watching two trains ram, from a distance, slow-motion-like. The other number theory class was originally at 1630-1830 Monday evening, so it was no surprise to me when the first order of business there yesterday was to negotiate a new time. Alas! Miserere, misero me, the time picked was 1400 Tuesday, consuming, like Jormungandr, the likewise-located discrete math class of Paul Seymour that I had so anticipated. An embarrassment of riches, verily. If this is the mightiest problem we encounter --

-- but it is not; finding the damn'd local chess club is far thornier. It is far more difficult than checking their website. However, I heard today that Ed Witten (yes, that Ed Witten) plays chess at such-and-such a location Fridays at nine o'clock in the evening or so. Needless to say I was struck profoundly by this remarkable confluence, and will have to investigate this rumour.

I should say where I heard it: over dinner. The dean of the graduate school, Bill Russell, hosts monthly gatherings for a small number of random invitees. Tonight my ticket came up. Despite having several days to think about it, though, I didn't manage to ask for a suggestion on dress. This kills me every time. I end up coming with the most mongrel compromises. Today I interpolated my blue sweater between the lavender shirt (and tie) and my suit jacket, with the light pants (and the good shoes, needless to say). I think this worked quite well; in fact the assistant dean had a red sweater-vest type under his suit jacket, and I managed not to be better dressed than the host, which would presumably be unforgiveable. (That was my fear, anyway; you can set me straight on protocol, a subject which didn't quite come up in the past.)

Anyway, dinner was quite the usual story: I managed to definitely not impress before and during dinner but relaxed into the setting afterward. I had a lovely chat with variously an historian, an architect, an economist, and a neural microbiologist. I asked our economist whether he feels (as I had read in a paper recently) that his field has gotten out of touch with the real world, and he told me that he likes the elegance of his theories. I suggested he move to Fine Hall. Architects, it turns out, have a huge breadth of knowledge that they draw on professionally, and we found a mutual interest in Greek philosophy and Bach, inter alia. Finally our historian friend won my heart by enthusiastic interest in my mathematical anecdotes and asking to keep my demonstration napkin.

I'll spare us all the meditations on the nature of happiness and our relationship to the Platonic Realm and instead present a preliminary trifecta of anecdotes.

1. Birthday Surprise. This is a fun trick to warm up with that consistently astonishes people who've never heard it. It has a good moral, too, that statistics does not come intuitively to people in general. The question is: how many people do you need in a room before it's more likely than not that two of them share a birthday? I observe, trying out some showmanship, that of course you'd need 367 to be certain of it. Now no one ever ventures a guess about number, but on first impression 23, the correct answer, is rather small!
   
2. Bottle Imp Paradox. This is one of my favourite problems, but you might want to replace it with something else, because I've never yet met someone who thought the same way. The set-up is this. You are offered a chance to purchase, for any price you care to name, a bottle imp. This bottle imp grants an unlimited number of wishes for you, with the sole condition that you must in turn sell (not discard or gift) the bottle imp to someone else after some finite time span, say twenty years. The condition of sale is that you must sell the imp for a strictly smaller amount of money. (Now, this is a game theory problem, not a gedankenexperiment in the value of a thing, so what this means is that if I pay one hundred cents then I sell it for at most ninety-nine cents. There is no such thing as a half-cent or a peso or inflation or whatever.) Failure to sell (by you, or by the next person, who inherits all the conditions) results in a terrifically gruesome, unspecified penalty exacted by Mephistopheles, from whom you cannot hide. (Or maybe Samiel, the Dark Huntsman.) The question: Do you buy the bottle imp? And if so, for how much? The rational answer is that you do not buy it, for any price: for clearly you would not buy it at one cent, for then no one would be able to buy it; but then not at two cents, for then no one would be willing to buy it; or if not n cents, then also not n+1. But, and I think I'm not alone here, I definitely would buy the damn thing, for as much as I had in my piggy bank. (The bottle imp can make currency, so it's all funny-money anyway.) I'm not saying the bottle imp's wishes would make me happy, technically speaking, but it's got to be worth it; and after all if I'm being irrational in buying it, I can bet there's an irrational person to sell it to....
   
3. Angle trisection. Save the best for last, assuming they're still paying attention. Many people (most, frankly, considering the audience you've got to have even to consider telling these stories) have heard that it's impossible to trisect an (arbitrary) angle using straight-edge and compass, or at least can think back to their high-school geometry and what it means. (Bonus points for me: mention that one uses Galois theory to show this, giving a beautiful application of the theory which I tell everyone I study when they ask.) Regular listeners will of course recollect that this can be done by origami, and the construction is wonderfully simple and easy to demonstrate with a pen that writes well on napkins.

So, a very pleasant evening. Moving on, more miscellany. Of course the Olympics have started. I hoped to catch highlights on cbc.ca, as they stream their daily newsprograms -- but the perverse Olympic broadcast regulations force them exactly not to stream their shows for the duration. So I'm completely blanked out, with the sole consolation that the curling scores are updated more-or-less in real time. It would have been nice to see the figure skating program (heck, to watch the curling!) although it seems my favourite guy, Alexei Yagudin, has bowed out (he was having knee problems last I heard, which was years ago... it's been a while without television, really).

Also: you may have heard there was a lot of snow here recently. We're relatively south and still got quite a bit. I'm told it's expected to warm up very shortly, and then it will all be gone. Already much of it seems to have melted. This meant only that I had to act fast, of course. So I took a quick jaunt to get the shot I needed, and picked up a few incidental ones along the way. My batteries, let it be known, did not fail me.

The view almost immediately outside my room. Continue past an archway hidden by the tree:

For those worrried I would catch my death of chill going to eat breakfast and dinner, the far building opens into the dining hall, so splice this one with the last and you'll see about how far I walk. Speaking of which, time for a little indulgence in an old passtime.

A dragon and a monkey and some other things guard the door. And look up a bit?

More. (Click through for the original.) And -- what's that? -- how can it be?

For he is the Kwisatz Haderach! Oh, yes, more tigers.

Lastly, what we were waiting for:

Click through and compare and compare.

It was a little hard to get the shot, for this reason, but we did all right.

Which brings us about to the end, or a good enough place for one. Good night, all. Magnificent dreams.

Inferno: "lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate"

Dante, in what seems to be a considerable break with tradition both Catholic and polytheistic, conceives the deepest regions of the underworld realm not as a lake of fire-and-brimstone, a black, shattered, noxious and bubbling volcanic parody of grassland and clear rivers, not, in a word, as a hellhole, but as a desolate and chilled wasteland, frozen and cooled in perpetuity by wind from the flapping of the great demon's wings as he chews in his mouths the carcasses of Brutus, Cassius, and Judas.

I'm sure this was a shocking plot twist at the time. I lived in a temperate zone and from time to time went skiing. Therefore Siberians, Vikings and Mongols may laugh, but like Robert Frost before me I will say only that from what I've seen ice is a credible way for the world to end.

Temperature dropped precipitously today -- still single-digits-below in celsius during the day, but I'm quite ready to move on. Next two days I'm hiding at home, drinking my tea, and listening to Mahler.

Postscript, Thursday night. I've kept to my agenda and Old Man Winter to his. Example of headline I'd rather not see with a stopover in Toronto: "Storm brings transportation chaos to southern Ontario". The article continues with a cheery sub-headline including the phrase "...a massive snowstorm struck with a vengeance, cancelling and delaying air travel and gnarling road traffic" which situation is expected to "continue through Friday morning." Suddenly I don't mind anymore that my plane is a day or two later than it could have been scheduled. But hey, there's a sun peaking out for Saturday.

Postscript, Friday morning. -- Look, Sulu: the sun's come out. It's a miracle. Nay, Mr. Chekhov, some unholy pact has reordered the seasons. Today I woke and checked the local paper (online) and thought the reported temperature, over 40 (!), was victimised by a typo, and not because it's in degrees Fahrenheit. But when I poked my head outside I found it had indeed warmed thirty-odd degrees (Fahrenheit) over -- yesterday; for the mounds of snow accumulated (including from a brief snowfall two days ago) looked sad and desiccated, muddy ground was everywhere visible, and no one hunched against the wind. It was eerily calm. I just hope apocalypse can hold off a few days.

Speaking of which (ho, ho!), debate's on tonight! cbc.ca promises to stream [not in RealAudio or equivalent as erroneously reported earlier] this stultifying tradition live, with analysis, too, in case I don't understand it or something. I know no one watched last night's, but do you notice anything curious about, say, the front-page picture on theglobeandmail.com? I observe that three of them (Mr. Duceppe's is hard to see) are wearing very similar striped ties. No wonder Mr. Martin is smiling, having barely avoided faux pas and instead looking like the leader he is on the tie front.

Tigers: "more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of"

They provoked interest and speculation unprecedented at Sun-Drunken. What do they mean? Who made them? What are they? Tigers? or prototigers? Lionesses? or not even mammals? Hybrid gone deformed? Groundhogs? or beavers? Giant prehistoric beavers? Obscure Japanese cinema amok on otherwise dignified campus?

Because a man knows to give the people what they want, here it is, no more nauseatingly wimpy polemics against bad lock design (I swear those clowns are half-way to a KUCA, specifically, the "useless" half, missing only the necessary irony) and bureaucrats: up close and uncut, you see what I see. These below are real thumbnails; click through for the massive (650-850kb, 1700x2270) originals.

Note the distinctly non-flat tail, sleek skull with slanted eyes and swept-back ears, and characteristic growl with saber-like fangs. Contrariwise, the pose of course is very distracting, and I didn't realise they could have haunches like that, nevermind the protruding bellies.

Here's a real tiger for reference, courtesy of Google (and, uhh, Associated Press, apparently).

But, you know, as much as I make light of them, in truth I'm envious. I wish I could have obscure and bizarre statuary. Couldn't really move them around with me, though.


On a related subject: Ever since I found Gargoyles of Princeton: A Grotesque Tour of the Campus (I keep telling you about these people) I've had that "gotta-catch-em-all" one gets when just the right triviality comes along over which to obsess. Granted this was just last night; but the fact that I went out the very next day to snap some shots suggests I am just as Orpheus in the underworld. So now I've got fifty pictures of miscellaneous gargoyles. I think I'll make a checklist. Here's a sneak peak, one of the weirder gargoyles. This "see-it-or-disbelieve-it" gargoyle is on the local gymnasium. (Also a thumbnail.)

Arrival: "as much like Oxford as monkeys could make it"

Pictures, pictures! He held the camera in his hand and felt a giddy rush. Let me chronicle the world, he said. Later he sorted through them.

Here's my journey, up to now. Click images for a slightly larger view. (I took them all at 22xx by 17xx but obviously I'm not hosting something like that.)

I wonder if they cap my bandwidth each month, or just get angry if I use too much. Judging from the sustained 1 megabyte per second transfer I got downloading a patch earlier today, though, they're not in much of a position to carp.

There seems to be a high gap of white-space between here and the start of the table. Someone give me a clue? HTML and me, huh --

[Postscript. Some small edits Monday morning. I feel particular shame over my inability to reason spatially in a certain skew shot near the top.]

patience on the runway
	On the second flight of the day, Toronto to Newark, I had a window seat. In fact, an emergency window seat. The flight attendent quite earnestly asked me if this was all right. "As long as it's not used," I quipped. Here we're waiting on the tarmac. Later he explained how to remove the window. As it turns out, it was not used.
ascending to the heavens
	Take-off is pretty exciting when you're there, somewhat less so when you're not. Obviously, the anticipation and the power of the engine and the floor not being down anymore are integral to the experience. I guess this captures that last a little bit. Anyway, Toronto looks like a nice place from the air. If only its citizens didn't have that infernal gall of theirs. Vancouverites know better: their city is best, or maybe would be if Zurich vanished.
suspended o'ertop
	And here's proof. Take a look at that. No mountains in sight! They've got some water, sure, (it's not really near an ocean,) but where are the mountains? Without them, those dangling clouds are cute, not an antediluvian menace.
modern world at a glance
	My worldly American neighbours might find this charmingly rustic, provincial, even parochial. Just like the lady at the shuttle bus company who asked for my phone number (to look for it in the database: still trying to find my reservation at this stage) and, upon receipt, said with fatigue bordering on contempt: "Area code..."
not upside down
	I took a lot of clouds pics, more or less under the hope that one or two might turn out all right, interesting, etc. A few did the former but the clouds that day just weren't so exotic or photogenic. This is the fluffiest of the bunch. As you can see, its chief redeeming feature is the novelty that it looks like it's upside-down, taken at sea, but it's not. The clouds are below us, ho-ho.
clouds swim among clouds
	I'm on top of the world, looking down on Creation, bum bum, bum,...
not actually inside Miniluv
	Just after putting my bags inside, I snapped this shot of the sterile-looking hallway. There is one more pair of doors behind me, making ten in all. (Those keeping track will realise I mistakenly put myself "third from the back" previously. Shucks.) Fortunately, at this stage my large suitcase was propping the door open, preventing me from, say, accidentally locking myself out.
evidence those stains are not my fault
	It's slightly fuzzy, and the colours aren't totally right, but we work with the single shot we snapped before moving in. (I'm not taking another one and revealing to the world that even without any of my boxes I can still suffer the shame of an untidy room.) Still, the calm, cozy feel is apt. Careful examination will reveal that there are two chairs, not one, and pretty comfortable ones, at that. The closet and drawers are on the right, blocked by what looks like the door, still propped open by my luggage. All in all, much better than I had feared. Shortly afterward I tried to relax. Rather thirsty from the long trips through a sun-drenched world, I stepped out to fill my mug from the washroom sink. My luggage was no longer adjacent to the door.
idyllic Elysium
	Go down the humourless hallway, through the menacing firedoor, into the atrium, and look left. This is the pleasant slice of pastoral New Jersey that you will see. I went on a walkabout today [Sunday -- this entry posted early Monday morning], snapping photos as I went. It was very bright out, very summer-like.
brick and mortar, arch and lamp-post
	Not quite like the buildings back home. This is still on the grounds of the Graduate College. The architecture is entirely typical of more-than-every-other building on campus. I'm sure in a few months I will be quite oblivious to it, so a few shots to send Back Home are in order.
Tower of Babel Cleveland
	Jutting up to heaven, Cleveland Tower looks o'er the Graduate College. I assume there was a person named Cleveland, who possibly donated some money. Most of the buildings around here have plaques ready to inform us of the buildings' history. No doubt a cursory examination would have revealed the sordid story of this bright tower, but I had an agenda. Today I wanted to find a first-approximation of an efficient route to the math building, Fine Hall.
archaic meets modern among architects
	More or less, I planned to just "walk over there," taking what few turns I might need to. Alas, it did not turn out that way. Here I get distracted by an anachronistic juxtaposition.
just pleasantly archaic
	After just a couple of left/right decisions, I was getting onto the wrong track. My path-finding algorithm didn't seem to be so good. This makes concrete some of the jokes I was telling just yesterday: "Ah-ha! A solution does exist!" ("but it runs in n2 factorial time!" -- true story from commutative algebra. -- or something like that; I just remember hearing it from Zinovy Reichstein.) Anyway, I amused myself by taking some pictures along the way. This made me feel slightly more productive. However, given the sun I would have traded it for actual productivity.
more detour
	A slightly more-grand-than-typical building. I like the turrets. If I had turned right 'round about here, I would have been peachy. But I decided to circle back and try a different path after consulting with my map.
same detour
	But why would you do that, I hear you asking. After all, it's counter to the algorithm. The first reason is that there is a solid black line of a building where I thought I was on the map. The second reason is carefully hidden in this shot of yet another building I thought looked nice, the rube I am.
malformed, wicked lion-beaver-things, defend us!
	Here's detail on the guardian figures by the road of the shot above. I have no idea what those things are, but I'll just call them lions, because they don't look much like tigers. They don't look so much like lions from this angle, either. I think I just called them lions because I'm accustomed to seeing statues of lions. They're certainly not hoary marmots. Note, while we're here, the forbidding DO NOT ENTER (on pain of horrific things, they evidently didn't have enough space to elaborate) sign.
flying beasts, defend us!
	By this time I was keeping an eye out for that old standby, the gargoyle. It didn't take twenty seconds to find this example. I think it's some sort of lizard-snake-dragon-thing.
more ostentation
	This is one entrance to the Frist Campus Center (yes, that Frist), where apparently all the happening things happen, like the chess club. At this stage I knew again where I was -- this building is quite close to Fine Hall.
a fine hall
	At last, that veritable holy place. It's a huge building. I didn't take any shots from high-atop, on the theory that I had to save something for later. I was also rather hungry and wanted to get home. Consequently after collecting my snippets of mail from the box here I made my way to a small Greek diner I had noted from the Guide to Everything I received when I checked in. (It is aptly named.) I also found a helpful list of incoming graduate students. Apparently there are fifteen of us. Long-time readers will realise that this ameliorated a potentially awkward situation that had been on my mind.
en avante, lion-things
	On the way back, I found a quite acceptable route, very direct, west across campus, although not quite at the north/south level I'd want. It was not until I passed through these curious-looking statues that I realised I had very nearly been here before. The fools! Their sign was wrong!
sweet home again
	Finally, I returned home. All told I was out for a little more than 1.5 hours. It felt like a little longer than that. I'm still not quite on their time. Today otherwise I've been reading and resting. I took a brief nap, more or less by accident, which was probably not a good idea; but it did leave me alert enough to hammer out this update. It is now past midnight, Eastern. I'll have to change Sun-Drunken time to that of the East coast. I confess I'm still mentally subtracting three every time I look at a clock, even though they're all Eastern, but there was a time this afternoon when I took my watch at face value. The assimilation proceeds.