Feral Memes

Trivia for the day

2008-01-20T20:17:47Z

For the ages, really.

Q: How did Gene Wilder come to play the Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles?

A: Wilder had been the #2 choice in casting. He was hastily called in on the second day of filming to replace ...wait for it... Gig Young, who'd been having DTs on the set on the first day.

(A Western movie binge? Nah: after seeing the 2007 3:10 to Yuma I ordered the 1957 version to refresh my memory, heard Frankie Laine sing its title theme, went to the Web to verify that he'd done numerous other songs for Westerns including Blazing Saddles, followed another link for the latter, and bingo. See how much you can learn when you no longer trust your memory?)

Bobby Fischer

2008-01-19T14:45:44Z

Edward Rothstein in the NY Times: "...as Bobby Fischer's death on Thursday might remind us, even abstract gifts can exact a terrible price."

Many of the commentaries assert or presume that there must have been a connection between Fischer's genius and his eccentricities (or paranoid schizophrenia, take your pick). Why should the combination be more than coincidence? Substantial research suggests that high-functioning people in all domains experience less mental illness than average. So was there ever any logic to Dryden's

Great wits are sure to madness near allied
And thin partitions do their bounds divide

beyond a visceral (envious?) insistence on balance or payback? Surely some of it is no more than an upscale, cognitive version of the tabloids' barely suppressed satisfaction that Michael Jackson or Britney Spears is, y'know, really weird and unhappy.

There Will be Blood

2008-01-14T16:55:59Z

It's coincidence that another movie follows so soon on the 3:10 to Yuma post. I've spent most of my life with my nose in a book, watching less TV and seeing fewer movies than most of my contemporaries. Only in recent years, mostly through Netflix DVD rentals, have I filled in gaps, systematically explored genres and directors and actors, and begun -- just begun -- to feel that I can "read" movies with anything like the skills and context I bring to books.

First: don't wait for DVD to see There Will Be Blood. Its overwhelming physical intensity will lose a lot on a small screen (no, 56" LCD in a home theater won't cut it.)

Second: Its inspiration was Upton Sinclair's novel Oil! , about a California tycoon and his son. Well, yeah but... that's misleading in that Sinclair's rep (90% from The Jungle and whatever we recall of "muckraking") brings to mind Progressive social/political reform and big-picture historicity. There Will Be Blood does portray a very convincing early-20th-century California. But what it's about is Daniel Day-Lewis's character, in the same sense that Citizen Kane is about Kane's. It's not irrelevant that Kane (and William Randolph Hearst) were newspaper tycoons, but the energy of the movie comes above all from a central figure who wants. Wants... something? Everything? That he doesn't know is part of the fascination, but you'll damn well know -- feel -- that whatever it is, he wants it more than most of us have ever wanted anything.

Ditto for There Will Be Blood: real blood, bloodlines, the Blood of the Lamb, and oil as the earth's blood make a rich and artfully exploited thematic mix. And it does matter that we bring to the movie a 2008 awareness of just what a big spike in the arm petroleum has been for the modern world. But it's possible to imagine this character and his story, like Kane's, set in another time and place and industry.

This is a great movie at a whole nother level than 3:10 to Yuma is a very good movie. My admiration for the latter is about craft and polish. I'd seen all its components used before, but they're exquisitely fitted, and the performances -- several of them first-rate -- are subordinated to that. In There Will Be Blood, although Anderson's craft is everywhere, "polish" is the last word that comes to mind. Is an earthquake or a heart attack polished? Day-Lewis eats the screen alive, sucks the air out of your lungs, takes you places you've never been, maybe places movies have never been.

Stop reading. Check your local listings. Go.

[Update: when I saw Day-Lewis as glass-eyed, blade-fondling Bill Cutting in Gangs of New York, it occurred to me that Leonardo di Caprio -- the nominal star -- would be well-advised to buy up and burn all the prints, because when he shared the screen with DDL he might as well have been invisible. Well, any other actor or director who wants an Oscar this year should do the same for TWBB...]

Don't Go There

2008-01-12T13:20:54Z

In this NY Times story, Lord Alton cites (without details) a twin brother and sister separated at birth who married -- a classic what-if in debates about adoption information. “They met later," he says, "and felt an inevitable attraction, and the judge had to deal with the consequences” when they sought an annulment.

Shall we parse the assumptions behind that "inevitable"..?

I didn't think so.

3:10 to Yuma

2008-01-12T12:20:00Z

This is a profoundly satisfying movie -- with the satisfaction still growing several days after seeing it, as I reflect on how and why it works so well.

Brief genealogy: Elmore Leonard's 1953 short story begat Delmer Daves' 1957 movie, a crisp and admirable Western but not on most "best of the genre" lists. Fifty years later, just about everything new that director James Mangold and his cast bring to the remake is both (1) an improvement and (2) perfectly true to the good bones of Leonard's story. And that's a lot of bones, because the story has two skeletons, two kinds of narrative, each thread generating its own tension and suspense within one plot.

Brief plot: A struggling Arizona rancher (Christian Bale) and his sons witness a robbery by a very bad outlaw gang. The very bad outlaw leader -- laid-back, smooth-talking, manipulative Russell Crowe -- is captured, and must be delivered to the railroad station so the title train can take him to trial. But, of course, his very bad gang -- now led by his very very bad second-in-command, Brad Foster (Six Feet Under) with a rattlesnake-heart transplant -- will do its damnedest to prevent that. The rancher volunteers for the escort "posse" because he needs the money, and we're off.

One thread is driven by the chronological suspense implicit in the title. Will they get to the station on time? How many of the escorts will survive the trip? Think High Noon, No Way Out... and yes, bizarre as it may sound, think "will the good guys get the Ring of Power to Mount Doom?"

The other thread is moral suspense. The prisoner, that silver-tongued devil, is alert to every opportunity not only to escape, but to harm his escorts or turn them against each other. How bad will our decent rancher have to become along the way? Will he be corrupted, pulled down to the prisoner's level? Think Cape Fear, The Desperate Hours. Think "will the Ring turn Frodo into another Gollum?"

Every scene, every incident, every line of dialogue advances one thread or the other, with a dozen memorable moments -- structural "beats" -- when they interact with each other in a new way. The external situation evolves along the way to the train station, changing the pressures on (and your expectations of) the characters. At the same time their moral positions vis-a-vis each other are evolving, so your hopes and fears about what will happen next acquire new facets. Circumstance and behavior push and pull each other so deftly that in the denouement, you accept extreme twists in both that would have seemed way over the top, unearned and arbitrary, in a lesser movie.

It's brilliant counterpoint, the more so because everyone involved knows it, trusts the good bones, and lets them work. When a point could be hammered home -- a "man's gotta do what a man's gotta do" speech for Bale, or an "I'm more evil than you can imagine" flourish for Crowe -- the temptation is resisted, the point suggested or understated with an exchange of glances or a throw-away line. As you watch, that seems no more than the conventional laconic manner of the Western. Only afterward do you realize what a bravura display of confidence it really is: the movie can afford to trust you because it has you so completely in the palm of its hand.

Westerns have never been especially important or iconic to me. But 3:10 to Yuma skips my "best of the genre" list to take a place among my favorite movies.

Fallows and Cromwell

2007-10-14T14:40:01Z

I've been catching up on Atlantic contributing editor James Fallows' weblog, and noticed the recurrence in recent posts of variations on the phrase "maybe it's just me, but..."

Now, usually when someone does that in public writing -- especially about contentious and polarized topics -- it's a little stroke of faux-humble snark. It signifies "Of course you, my readers, and all right-thinking people, agree with what I'm about to say."

But it seems to me that more often than not, Fallows means it, which is uncommon and admirable. He's a superlative reporter and hard-working writer. When you've invested that much in forming a conviction, and you're putting it out there in the hope of swaying others, it's natural to position it as the only conviction supportable by sweet reason. It's hard, it's unnatural, to keep in mind that there may be a long road of persuasion ahead, that the rest of the world -- if it happens to be paying attention at all -- will take a while to Get It.

Maybe Fallows' "it's just me" is not an affectation or a tic, but a small intellectual (even spiritual) exercise to remind himself of that... sort of a vaccine against Pundits' Syndrome. Make it a habit, make an effort to mean it, and it could offer some modest protection against the temptations of crusade and fanaticism. Jacob Bronowski talked about that, standing in the ash fields of Auschwitz.

In 1650, Oliver Cromwell was trying to persuade the Scots Presbyterians to abandon their support of Charles II, and famously wrote to their governing synod: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." The line has a double edge, of course, because Cromwell was himself a man of such bulldozer conviction. But hey: we take our moments of clarity when we can get them, even when the motes in others' eyes are so much more obvious than the beams in our own.

Boston Blinkie

2007-02-02T01:36:18Z

I try not to clutter this space with the nine-day wonders, but the Boston bomb scare story has "culture war" and "project your phobia" written all over it.

One netizen I respect commented: "I tend to think this kinda stuff isn't funny in this day and age."

GMAFB -- look at the photos. What do you see? This is is not a duffel bag artfully left open with wires, a bundle of highway flares, and a bit of clock face showing. This is not (as other stories called it) a "package." Even the WaPo's choice of the words "small electronic circuit boards" and "[a] magnetic object, which looked like circuit boards with protruding wires" is loaded. What this is, what you see, what was located and positioned for passersby to see, is a display panel.

To anyone in this culture over the age of 14 months, it says Here I am, look at me

much louder than Mystery hardware in inappropriate location...

let alone Doh dee doh, nothin to see here foax, move along while I get ready to explode

Is it super-extra-suspicious because it's attached to a girder under a highway? I've spent many happy hours in New Jersey traffic jams approaching the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels. I've seen thousands of non-official signs and other forms of display attached to girders under I-95 and US 1. My heartbeat stayed steady.

Does the display panel show red numbers counting balefully down to apocalypse? (Cut the blue wire, Bond... the blue wire!)

Does it show the Arabic characters for

Surrender Laura!
(And her little dog Barney, too!)

No, it shows a stylized, chunky-pixel block figure flipping the bird. I've never watched the Aqua Teen show... but I like to think I'd know if this were the globally recognized Logo of Doom, spray-painted by Hezbollah teens, thousand-stitched into kamikaze belts by Aum Shinrikyo fanatics, branded into the privy door at the Unabomber's country place.

I can readily understand a Boston train passenger calling to report a quick glimpse. I have no quarrel at all with the decision to send a patrolman, even a bomb team, to check it out. But from the first moment someone got a close look at it, the response should have been ratcheting down, not up.

Now Boston's press and politicians and prosecutors -- and a good chunk of the punditocracy, not all on the usual GWoT Team -- are all committed to righteous indignation, and will have a hard time backing down.

Prediction #1: Legal charges and damage claims will, nonetheless, be quietly dropped. Too much fun for defense counsel otherwise.

Prediction #2: Right now, enterprising reporters are poring through 911 logs for all the other cities involved (and for Boston previously) to find out how many times authorities could have given themselves a wedgie about these signs... and didn't.

That empty feeling

2007-01-30T13:13:48Z

For the Pynchonistas, re the "hollow earth" passages in Against The Day and Mason & Dixon:

Courtesy of John M. Krafft, here's another photo of the tomb of John Cleve Symmes in Hamilton, Ohio. All comments about Levitra ads will be cheerfully ignored.

James Clerk Maxwell

2006-12-12T15:26:20Z

This was written in 1979, with an eye to magazine publication on the 100th anniversary of Maxwell's death.
It never found a home in print. I still like it.

In the Field

Only a moment ago he asked Mrs. Murdoch to fetch his parents. Now all three are standing
in the kitchen doorway, but he is watching the reflection that dances above the stove, across
the ceiling. When he notices the adults, he mischievously flashes sunlight in their eyes.

Mr. Maxwell squints and raises a hand to block the glare, but his
voice is indulgent. "What are you up to now, Jamesie?"

"It's the sun, papa. I got it in with this tin plate."

Before the afternoon is over, Jamesie will roll the plate around
the pantry floor until Mrs. Murdoch sends him outside; beat it as
a drum, marching against Napoleon with the Iron Duke; fill it
with pink granite pebbles; empty it again, set it afloat on the
duck pond, and bombard it with pebbles until it is swamped by the
interlacing waves.

*

The antenna turns slowly against the spin of the earth, tracking
a galaxy eight billion light-years away. That far away, that long
ago, the galaxy's core was exploding with unimaginable violence.
Here and now, the radio outburst is almost lost in background
noise. Penzias and Wilson thought that the noise in their antenna
might be caused by pigeon droppings. Instead, it was the echo of
the Big Bang.

**

Where did the Big Bang go? Into waves.

Waves in what?

In the field. The electromagnetic field. Maxwell's field.

What is the field?

It's like the water in ocean waves. It's like the air in sound
waves. It's like the earth in seismic waves. It's like...

What is the field?

It's the sum of all the waves that ever were and all the waves
that will ever be.

Oh.

***

Penzias and Wilson weren't the first to have noise problems.
Radio astronomy goes back to Karl Jansky, who hoped to trace the
annoying static in long-range radio. Which goes back to Marconi,
who made a revolution out of a laboratory curiosity. Which goes
back to Heinrich Hertz in a darkened room at Karlsruhe, adjusting
the gap between two brass spheres until he saw a spark: the first
radio message. Which goes back to James Clerk Maxwell, who caused
that spark as surely as Hertz's transmitter.

"One cannot escape the feeling," Hertz would write of Maxwell's
equations, "that these formulae have an independent existence and
an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are,
wiser even than their discoverers, that we get more out of them
than was originally put into them."

Poetic license, of course. Scientific piety. Out-and-out
Pythagorean symbol worship .

"A more thorough mathematical study of Maxwell's equations,"
Einstein went on, "shows that new and really unexpected
conclusions can be drawn and the whole theory submitted to a test
on a much higher level..."

Come now; you can't really get more out of them than was
originally put into them. According to information theory, you
can't get even that much.

"A great part of twentieth-century physics and mathematics could
have been created in the nineteenth century," Freeman Dyson
argues, "simply by exploring to the end the mathematical concepts
to which Maxwell's equations naturally lead."

What are you up to, Jamesie?

****

At the moment he is staying too late at the Cavendish again. He
watches young Glazebrook measure light refraction in prisms of
Iceland spar. It is the spring of 1879, five years since the
laboratory opened, but Professor Maxwell still supervises
research as carefully as he planned and equipped the building.

The refraction measurements agree with theory to one part in ten
thousand. It's good, sound work, as solid as anything they are
doing in Germany. So much for the doubters at Nature who seemed
to think it shameful for Fellows of Trinity to be messing about
with apparatus!

Pain wrenches at his gut. He murmurs a word of encouragement for
Glazebrook before retreating to his office for some carbonate of
soda in a glass of water. He should go home to Katherine, but
perhaps... yes, just a little more work on the latest proof
sheets of the Cavendish book. How prescient the man was,
anticipating so much of the work of Ohm, Ampere, even Faraday ---
and publishing scarcely any of it, the d---l take him !

In a few months, An Account of the Electrical Researches of the
Honourable Henry Cavendish, F.R.S., between 1771 and 1781 will go
to press. A month after that, Professor Maxwell will die of
cancer of the stomach.

*****

"You know in part, at least, how in this case the promise of
youth was more than fulfilled, and how the man who, but a
fortnight ago, was the ornament of the University, and --- shall
I be wrong in saying it? --- almost the discoverer of a new world
of knowledge, was even more loved than he was admired, retaining
after twenty years of fame that mirth, that simplicity, that
childlike delight in all that is fresh and wonderful, which we
rejoice to think of as the surest accompaniment of scientific
genius. You know, also..."

The Rev. Dr. Butler will prove in stately periods that science,
Christianity, and eminence are compatible. But many in the chapel
are remembering Maxwell's terrier, which would chase its tail
until he gestured, then reverse direction, again and again, until
he brought it to rest like the balance-wheel of a watch. Or
the "d---l on two sticks," the gyroscopic toy that was never out
of his hands for long. Or the pins and string he used to draw
a new kind of ellipse when he was still a schoolboy.

******

Edinburgh, 11th March 1846

John Clerk Maxwell, Esq.

My Dear Sir ---
I am glad to find today, from Professor Kelland,
that his opinion of your son's paper agrees with mine; namely,
that it is most ingenious, most creditable to him and, we
believe, a new way of considering higher curves with reference to
loci. Unfortunately, these ovals appear to be curves of a very
high and intractable order, so that possibly the elegant method
of description may not lead to a corresponding simplicity in
investigating their properties...

*******

"Wheels within wheels," we say of a complex machination. It was
the baroque epicyclic complexity of it all that doomed Ptolemaic
astronomy. Kepler demolished the starry spheres. Descartes
offered swirling intangible vortexes to replace them, but Newton
needed only the reach of gravity to pull together a new cosmos of
ellipses, parabolas, hyperbolas. He confessed misgivings:
"...that one body may act on another at a distance through a
vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through
which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another,
is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in
philosophical matters a competent facility for thinking
can ever fall into it."

Yet it worked, and promised to make sense of electricity and
magnetism, too. Until Faraday started messing about with
apparatus, and saw lines of force, as real to him as iron
filings, around every charge, magnet, and current. Newton's heirs
were not amused. "I declare," sniffed the Astronomer Royal, "I
can hardly imagine anyone, who knows the agreement between
observation and calculation based on action at a distance, to
hesitate an instant between this simple and precise action, on
the one hand, and anything so vague and varying as lines of force
on the other."

Worse was to come. In 1855, young Maxwell began to extend
Faraday's ideas in a ten-year campaign. "I was at first almost
frightened when I saw such mathematical force made to bear upon
the subject," Faraday admitted, "and then wondered to see that
the subject stood it so well." Maxwell modeled not just lines of
force, but sheets and surfaces of it, rotating tubes of invisible
fluids, particles of electricity spinning between the tubes,
wheels within wheels that put Ptolemy and Descartes to shame. Yet
it worked.

And Maxwell didn't believe it for a minute. He borrowed from
mechanics, he said, "to allow the mind at every step to lay hold
of a clear physical conception, without being committed to any
theory founded on the physical science from which that conception
is borrowed." By 1865, in A Dynamical Theory of the
Electromagnetic Field, he abandoned the gears and the plumbing.

What remained was the field. It needed no properties that were
not in his beautifully symmetric equations. It accounted for all
known phenomena of electrical charges, magnets, and their
motions. It carried waves at a speed he could calculate.

********

Hertz understood, and a few others. Most were like C.J. Monro,
who wrote to Maxwell: "The coincidence between the observed
velocity of light and your calculated velocity of a transverse
vibration in your medium seems a brilliant result. But I must
say, I think a few such results are wanted before you can get
people to think that, every time an electric current is produced,
a little file of particles is squeezed along between rows of
wheels..."

There was no need to think that. The Cheshire Cat vanishes once it has smiled.

Where did the cat go?

Into the field. The electromagnetic field. Maxwell's field.

After a pigeon?

After a transverse undulation in the luminiferous ether.

Oh.

*********

We all know about the ether, the supposed medium for electromagnetic waves.
One of those weird substances people used to believe in, like phlogiston or
caloric, right? It had to be infinitely rigid yet infinitely tenuous. Michelson and Morley
mounted their instruments on a stone slab, set the slab afloat in mercury, and took
their readings on tiptoe, after midnight (no fluid waves, no sound waves, no seismic
waves, please). All the world of physics held its breath, and... no ether. Nothing but light
itself.

Too bad about Maxwell. After all, he had written right there for all to see in the Britannica ---
hell, he and Huxley were the science editors, ninth edition, 1878! --- "there can be no
doubt that the interplanetary and interstellar spaces are not empty, but are occupied by a
material substance..."

It's a good thing Michelson and Morley set us straight, right?

**********

FitzGerald, 1878: "If the Maxwell theory induced us to emancipate ourselves from the
thralldom of a material ether, it might possibly lead to most important results in the theoretic
interpretation of nature."

Einstein, 1938: "It was, indeed, a long time before the full content of Maxwell's theory was
recognized. The field was at first considered as something which might later be interpreted
mechanically with the help of ether. By the time it was realized that this program could not be
carried out, the achievements of the field theory had already become too striking and
important for it to be exchanged for a mechanical dogma..."

Feinberg, 1968: "The notion that light is fundamentally just another kind of matter is likely to
persist in any future theory."

You can still read in textbooks that Einstein created special relativity to account for the
Michelson-Morley results. In fact, he was not thinking of that at all. He was thinking instead
that the most important property of Maxwell's equations was their symmetry. What would
happen to the symmetry if you could ride on a wave of light?

While the others were trying to explain where the cat had gone, Einstein was looking very
hard at that smile.

***********

There was much more to Maxwell than "mathematical force," although in that he ranks behind
only Newton and Gauss. True, he calculated for two happy, exhausting years to prove that Saturn's
rings must be made of separate particles. True, his work on kinetic theory set physics firmly on
the statistical path to quantum mechanics.

But he was also the Jamesie who had never been satisfied with anyone's answers to his everlasting
"What's the go of it?", persisting: "But what's the particular go of it?" He stoked fires and hauled ice
while his wife took meter readings. (They were measuring the viscosity of gases in a tube that ran
through the garret of their London home.) He projected a color photograph in 1861, while Matthew
Brady was still mastering black and white. (It shouldn't have worked, because the plates he called
"red" and "green" were in fact insensitive to those wavelengths. Unknown to him, they did capture two
bands of ultraviolet light, which just happened to give the same effect. A lucky coincidence, if you like.)
His stamp would still be on the Cavendish when Rutherford began messing about with atoms.

He lectured at workmen's evening classes, and contributed private essays as a luminary of the
Cambridge Apostles. Then there was the Britannica, of course; some physicists today cherish copies
of that ninth edition as a bibliophile would treasure a First Folio. And he found time for poetry that
ranged from hymn to parody to philosophic doggerel:

Till in the twilight of the Gods,
When earth and sun are frozen clods,
When, all its energy degraded,
Matter to ether shall have faded,
We, that is, all the work we've done
As waves in ether shall forever run
In ever widening spheres through heavens beyond the sun.

************

Now: do you understand about the ether? About the waves? Not if you still believe that history runs
by textbook time, one-way.

Look: the full symmetry of the equations, still unfolding, yields two kinds of waves. There are the
waves that spread and fade into noise, ever-widening spheres around every star, every spark,
every quantum jump. The others, the time-reversed mirror images Wheeler and Feynman called
the "advanced" waves, are strange, but at least as real as iron filings. They begin as noise at the
edge of space-time and converge, strengthening, coming into phase, arriving all at once to be
sucked into the star, quench the spark, cause (if you like) the quantum jump.

Reflect: does the radio telescope help collapse a galaxy? Does a photon leap from John Clark
Maxwell's retina to the shiny toy, bounce to the nearest star, burrow inward to split helium into hydrogen?

*

"It's the sun, papa. I got it in with this tin plate."

Snark in spaaaace

2006-12-11T15:36:44Z

"Which X-Treme Spacer Are You?" is up at SpaceDaily, although the question mark failed to reach orbit.

It's much snarkier in tone than Down to Earth as a whole. I just needed to vent some of my impatience with those who want the thrill of space without the gritty work of either persuading taxpayers that it's worthwhile, or persuading investors that it's profitable.

Welcome: orientation

2006-09-14T13:38:48Z

No, this is not Monte Davis the Florida realtor, Monte Davis the author of short SF stories, or Monte Davis the retired nuclear engineer.

This is the science and business writer, occasional teacher (Dalton, St. Michael's School, Temple), alumnus of Collegiate School, Princeton, and Sarah Lawrence College. I'm currently working on Down to Earth, a book about the midlife crisis in the Space Age as it approaches 50. If that's the kind of thing you like, you may like this journal. Email goes to monte.davis AT verizon.net

Too much information, 2

2006-09-14T13:24:09Z

In the 1970s, biofeedback experiments showed that people could learn to alter their EEG rhythms and skin temperature. Many suggested that we might be able to gain more extensive conscious control of physiological functions "under the hood." In "Autonomy," Lewis Thomas responded:

"My trouble, to be quite candid, is a lack of confidence in myself. If I were informed tomorrow that I was in direct communication with my liver, and could now take over, I would become deeply depressed. I'd sooner be told, forty thousand feet over Denver, that the 747 jet in which I had a coach seat was now mine to operate as I pleased... Nothing would save me and my liver, if I were in charge. For I am, to face the facts squarely, considerably less intelligent than my liver. I am, moreover, constitutionally unable to make hepatic decisions, and I prefer not to be obliged to, ever."

This is not Luddite "some things Man was not meant to know...", nor Dave Barry whimsy. This is a very practical acknowledgment that there are good reasons for the relatively narrow, high-level user interface we have.

Down Among the Molecules

2006-09-13T16:54:41Z

One of the best visualizations of cell biology I've ever seen: http://www.xvivo.net/press/harvard_university.htm

What it still can't show, though, is how fast things happen down there. Even sizeable biomolecules have so little mass that they zip around at biological temperatures. Protein folding that strains supercomputers to model can happen in a fraction of a second, in many places around a cell at once. I wrote recently in a comment thread at Derek Lowe's fine Pipeline weblog:

"As a science writer... I've found that the statistical aspect is hardest to get across, and failure to grasp it underlies a lot of misunderstandings. Use the lock-and-key metaphor for inorganic catalysis or enzymes, and laymen nod. You've gotten somewhere -- but you've also reinforced the imagery of macroscopic mechanisms. They're not thinking of a statistical jiggle with thousands of 'keys' being tried per second, so the enormous enhancements of reaction rates are still kinda magic..."

Too much information

2006-09-13T13:22:20Z

Alfred North Whitehead: "It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking about what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the numbers of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in battle -- they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments."

That one has grown on me over the years, and primed me for ideas such as those in The Society of Mind and The User Illusion. They're percolating out via Blink and Mind Wide Open. Attentive, verbal (or verbalizable) thought is a small "follow spot" that skitters around amidst a whole lot of autonomic and automatic black-box activity. Similarly, in vision, we have a small area of sharp vision at the fovea -- plus a lot of slick tricks (in eye movement and in processing along the visual pathway) which allow us to believe that the whole visual field is in focus at once, like a camera's focal plane. In speech and hearing, we couldn't talk or listen as fast as we do without branching execution: dozens of guesses per minute about what's most likely to come next.

For much of the last century, "the unconscious" was all about repression, to forestall conflict up on the bridge. The version that's more compelling today is all about activity that we simply don't have the processing power to do consciously. IOW, a shift between the two meanings of "too much information..."

Twistings and turnings

2006-09-12T17:46:48Z

Ted Taylor, by acclamation the best nuclear-weapon designer ever, began but never published a memoir called Changes of Heart. He describes August, 1945:

Most people were shocked by the simultaneous news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the atomic bomb test at Alamogordo. I was mostly embarrassed. I had just gotten a degree in physics at Caltech, but had never heard of nuclear fission. Several other midshipmen who had heard the news on the barracks radio at Fort Schuyler in New York City asked me to explain how such a big explosion could come from such a small bomb. I couldn't even make up anything credible. Oliver Selfridge, hardly a model midshipman but a very bright mathematician from MIT, had picked up some information about nuclear fission before it was covered by the Manhattan Project's cloak of secrecy, and instantly became our battalion's expert on the awesome events. I felt cheated by not being in on what was going on. Oliver went on to become a prominent authority on artificial intelligence. I started a career that for some 30 years revolved about nuclear fission. I also started a series of twistings and turnings trying to fit into and rebel against the nuclear age.

At times, Down to Earth feels like nothing but twistings and turnings in trying to fit into and rebel against the consensus narrative of the space age. (And, of course, it keeps bumping into nuclear energy as space technology's ambivalent twin...)

This LJ's userpic

2006-09-12T12:08:08Z

It's a Crookes radiometer or light mill. Like many things in this world, that it works is much more obvious than why it works. The first-pass explanation fooled even the insanely great James Clerk Maxwell.

This LJ's Title

2006-09-11T14:16:30Z

Somewhere in Vance Bourjaily's novel Brill Among the Ruins (1970), a character is thinking about the latest fantasy pronouncement from the White House. He judges that as far as public life is concerned, he is living "in the the time of the dangerous clowns." It seemed apt to me at the time.

Still does, really.

[Update 2008: not the LJ's title any more, but the times haven't changed.]

The War for the Walnuts

2006-09-11T13:56:08Z

It's that time of year: the three walnut trees in the back yard are dropping their bombs, from table tennis to lawn tennis in size, and almost as Day-Glo green as the latter. The thick husks are loaded with tannins, etc. that are at least somewhat discouraging to squirrels, possibly good for seedlings. I know they're discouraging to the lawn: every walnut left to rot produces a small Ground Zero of browned and stunted grass. So morning coffee time is stoop-and-gather time, all the while reflecting that the sweet visual landscape is a guerrilla war between trees that want more trees and grass that doesn't want anything blocking the sun.

The Edward Hicks House is a few blocks away. Peaceable Kingdom, my ass.

Flavors of interest

2006-09-10T18:26:35Z

Still undecided on the best generic term to use in Down to Earth for "those who think a lot about how to get off this rock." Space... enthusiasts? fans? advocates? A neologism such as "spacers," which would let me set the connotations as I go? Or vary it by context? It has to be broad enough to use without lots of niggling qualifications, but there are so many sects within the big tent, and I don't want a word that makes it too easy for a reader to say either "that's me" or "that's not me."

Global search and replace makes a choice easy to implement -- and too easy to postpone.

Ahem

2006-09-10T17:34:10Z

OK, things got busy for a few weeks there. Then I got forgetful for a few months there.

But if The Wire can start up again today after a dreadfully long lapse, why can't I?

ISDC

2006-05-01T16:01:52Z

Headed to Los Angeles Wednesday for the International Space Development Conference. Four days with only 14 interviews scheduled, in addition to the 22 sessions I'm determined to see and the panel I'm moderating. What to do with all the spare time?

[Postscript] Among other things, meet Keith Cowing, Sam Dinkin, Jeff Foust, Dave Hoerr, John Carter McKnight, John Mankins, Jim Muncy, Tom Olson, Rand Simberg, Michael Turner, and many of the usual suspects from Liftport ...