Why the big pause?

I dunno.

I didn't consciously give up blogging for Lent or anything like that.

I said a year ago when I came back that I would try to be fearless and exultant throughout these bonus years, but I haven't really done that.


Here, for instance, is a letter that I wrote but never sent, after telling a new acquaintance at a meeting in December that I was born in 'U.S.-occupied Mexico' prompted the sort of response that I ought to have been able to predict:

My conscience keeps sending me white feathers for being such a coward, so I am in the unusual position of writing to you to apologise for *not* starting an argument. I did not want to spend all evening arguing in Brisbane so I shied away from explaining where I really stand.

In essence, my anti-Americanism is from the Right, not the Left.

From a Right-Libertarian point of view, I find the erosion of civil liberties and the growth of government power in the United States chilling, but see that this has continued unabated under both Republican and Democrat regimes and - if you look at the perversion of the Department of Justice under the current administration - it is very much a case of: 'My father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions'.

The despicable degree of gerrymandering in the United States and its primitive 'first past the post' electoral system make it an embarrassment to more advanced representative democracies.

I do truly believe that the Democrats are the party of the millionaires and the Republicans are the party of the billionaires: but while millionaires can make their peace with an authoritarian state, sooner or later, the state (like we have seen in Russia) will come for the billionaires. Hence the party of the billionaires holds out the only hope for the freedoms of the ordinary citizen.

From a Theoconservative point of view, I consider abortion to be a monstrous evil and was shattered when the United States voted in a President whose record on the issue was so extreme. While not affiliated with any religion, I consider myself a monotheist in the Judaeo-Christo-Islamic tradition. I recognise that the idea that a child is the property of one of its parents at any stage of its life is a survival of ancient Roman law and the idea that it is part of its mother's body at any stage of its life is a survival of pre-Renaissance science. Thus I would gladly vote for any knuckle-dragging moron who promised to pack the Supreme Court with conservative justices who would overturn Roe vs. Wade.

From a Neoconservative point of view, I abhor unmanned drone strikes, assassinations, extraordinary rendition, and detention without trial in extraterritorial prisons, but consider these all to be symptoms of trying to fight Islamic radicalism on the cheap. Transforming the Middle East needed millions of men on the ground and occupying Iraq while leaving Iran intact to cause trouble was like liberating France in 1944 and not going on to invade Germany.

I think it is hypocritical that the United States clings to its (much less strategically vital) gains from its (much less justifiable) pre-emptive war of 1845 while demanding that Israel renounce all the gains from its pre-emptive war of 1967. This is my main motivation for asserting Mexican sovereignty over the Occupied Territories of Alta California, Nueva Mexico, and the Pimeria Alta region of Sonora where I was born.

Adrian Veidt, Johnny Come Lately, and refusal to be reconstructed

Finally watched the 'Steve Earle at Montreux' DVD I got for Christmas a few years ago last night. He seemed really bitter and grumpy. In all the Youtube videos I've found of him he seems bitter and grumpy too. But when I saw him live at the turn of the century, he was cheerful and perky.  (It should be easy to find the exact day, since Kasey Chambers was supposed to be his support act but didn't show since she was having a baby). He had a mustache when I saw him live, from which I conclude that having a mustache is an essential component of male happiness. Or maybe, that 2000 was a great time to be alive. Interesting to think that if Adrian Veidt was going to make a perfume to evoke 'Nostalgia' today, 'Millennium' would be a great name for it.

Anyway, I am prepared to cut Steve Earle a lot of slack for mean-spirited leftist grumping, since it was one of his songs that I listened to over and over again through my earphones on March 20^th 2003 while I gleefully walked from work to the station, tearing down anti-war posters. If he knew I'm sure he would be bitter and grumpy at me in particular.

Took a little while but we're in this fight / Ain't going home till we've done what's right

I think 'Kurdistan' scans a lot better than 'Vietnam' in the last verse. Which as written makes no sense, even in the most child-bridey redneck families. Let's say Grandma was knocked up almost immediately, so the narrator's mother was born in 1942/3. Even if we assume the narrator lied about his age to join the army (in 1972?!) it is hard to push his birth any later than 1956. Which is physically possible, I guess, and maybe just legal in Texas. Perhaps.

FWIW, I also think 'Al-Zarqawi' scans better than 'Robert E. Lee' in this song. Though I've never gotten around to writing a set of lyrics to match.

The other day I picked up some za'atar from a takeaway food shop here that has a few shelves of middle eastern food since it is run by Egyptians - we are too small and rural to support an actual Egyptian restaurant - and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was made in Zarqa, Jordan. I was almost as pleased as when my 'One China' shirt arrived and turned out to be made in Haiti. No longer will this apparently bleak industrial city be associated in my mind only with a famous terrorist, but with tasty noms. I will cling to this, as to my Haitian T-shirt, as one more sign of the coming of Happy Fun World^TM.

Ten Rules of Writing

The other day someone tweeted a link to something about how somebody's 'Ten Rules of Writing' were overrated, but I forgot who the somebody was, and it turns out in the googlesphere that all sorts of people have written 'Ten Rules of Writing'. So I thought, hey, why not add to the confusion?  So here goes, the Dr Clam Ten Rules of Writing:

1. When you use a word, make it mean whatever you want it to mean. That way lies glory.

2. If examined carefully enough, every plot will turn out to be rubbish. If not examined carefully enough, any old rubbish plot will do. Do most people examine things carefully? I think, probably no.

3. Abhorrence of cliches is a silly fad of our time unknown in the great storytelling cultures.

4. Boxing things into narrow 'genres' is a silly fad of our time unknown in the great storytelling cultures.

5. All writing is really first person. When you write in third person, you are also creating the invisible narrator who is telling the story. Try not to make that person you all the time.

6. All writing is also second person. When you write in first person, you are also creating the second person who is listening to or reading the story in the world of that first person. Try not to make that person me, because I don't like to read about love triangles with vampires and werewolves. Try not to make that person somebody who knows all the same stuff and thinks the same way as someone from your world, unless your world and the first person's world are the same world.

7. Don't have more than one differential equation per page on average, or more than three in a row on the same page.

8. In the next few centuries gender will become an optional extra for humans, so if you want your work to be appreciated by the far future, use only genderless characters.

9. 'A Viking never apologises and a Viking never explains.' (Hagar the Horrible) And the Viking sagas are still being read today. Coincidence? I think not.

10. 'Figuring out things for yourself is the only freedom anyone ever really has. Use that freedom.' (Jean Racszak, Starship Troopers)

You know that bump in Africa is really a dimple in the Atlantic Ocean?

Men of Dunwich was one of fifteen books I bought at the second-hand bookshop on campus last week. This is not as profligate as it sounds. The shop has a $1 trolley parked outside the door, which usually leans heavily towards things like obsolete first year accountancy textbooks. Yet I always have a look at it every time I go past - I cannot help it - and last week there was something interesting-looking about the Zulu wars and another called 'The World of the Phoenicians', so I took them in to pay. The woman at the counter was on the phone, and when I presented my books she just gestured to a corner where there were two cardboard boxes full of paperback books.

It turned out when she got off the phone that she had not yet gotten around to pricing them and putting them on the shelves, so was happy to sell them for $1 as well.

They were much more interesting than the usual sort of books on the $1 trolley. There was a lot of history, of a particular old-fashioned kind: lots of pre-20th century British history, from the Saxons up to the Zulu wars. Lots of the other sort of history you would learn in pre-20th century Britain: Classical Greek and Roman, with lots of primary sources: Tacitus, and Thucydides, and such. a smattering of more general history, a smattering of mythology, a bit of popular science (Gould and Feynman and such). And, er, not a few books on the 'history and sociology of sex'. You have probably already imagined yourself a personality belonging to those boxes of books. I certainly created a mental image of a donnish figure with a rakish streak, perhaps a retired academic in history.

Not until later did it occur to me that perhaps no such personality ever existed. You don't usually give the books you like away. And for every time you die or go into a home and liquidate your book collection, you are going to move house or have a general tidy a dozen times. I shudder to think at the personality that could have been constructed based on the box of books I gave to Saint Vincent de Paul when we left Guildford.

Maybe those boxes of books were sold by someone who had decided they were bored with 1066 and all that rot, and had repented of their youthful weakness for scholarly anecdotes about prostitutes in Victorian London. Maybe they weren't old books (as most of them were) because they belonged to an older person, but had been picked up by a student who liked to haunt second-hand bookstores and was leaving town.

I suppose used ebook readers will be interesting too.

Consumer Confidence Rising

...gently rising, rising, as a stiff bloated corpse gently rises above an oily river that flows under endless onyx bridges to a black, putrid sea.  

(H. P. Lovecraft, 'The Rats in the Walls')

Nothing new under the sun

Here is a statement of the obvious on tax policy:

When tax assessments and imposts upon the subjects are low, the latter have the energy and desire to do things. Cultural enterprises grow and increase, because the low taxes bring satisfaction. When cultural enterprises grow, the number of individual imposts and assessments mounts. In consequence, the tax revenue, which is the sum total of the individual assessments, increases.
When the dynasty continues in power and their rulers follow each other in succession, they become sophisticated. ... Their customs and needs become more varied because of the prosperity and luxury in which they are immersed. As a result, the individual imposts and assessments upon the subjects, agricultural labourers, farmers, and all the taxpayers, increase. Every individual impost and assessment is greatly increased in order to obtain a higher tax revenue. ... Then, gradual increases in the amount of the assessments succeed each other regularly, in correspondence with the gradual increase in the luxury customs and many needs of the dynasty and the spending required in connection with them. ... The assessments increase beyond the limits of equity. The result is that the interest of the subjects in cultural enterprises disappears, since when they compare expenditures and taxes with their income and gain and see the little profit they make, they lose all hope. Therefore, many of them refrain from all cultural activity. The result is that the total tax revenue goes down, as individual assessments go down. Often, when the decrease is noticed, the amounts of individual imposts are increased. This is considered a means of compensating for the decrease. Finally, individual imposts and assessments reach their limit. It would be of no avail to increase them higher. The costs of all cultural enterprise are now too high, the taxes are too heavy, and the profits anticipated fail to materialise. Finally, civilisation is destroyed, because the incentive for cultural activity is gone.




And here is another statement of the bleeding obvious, which is all the answer anyone needs to give to Dawkins et al.:

Man should not trust the suggestion his mind makes, that it is able to comprehend all existing things and their causes, and to know all the details of existence. Such a suggestion of the mind should be dismissed as stupid.



And here are some observations on pedagogy, which are spot on and universally ignored nowadays: 

Scholars often approach the main scholarly works on the various disciplines, which are very lengthy, intending to interpret and explain. They abridge them, in order to make it easier for students to acquire expert knowledge of them. ... This has a corrupting influence upon the process of instruction and is detrimental to the attainment of scholarship. For it confuses the beginner by presenting the final results of a discipline to him before he is prepared for them. This is a bad method of instruction. ... The procedure also involves a great deal of work for the student. He must study carefully the words of the abridgment, which are complicated to understand because they are crowded with ideas, and try to find out from them what the problems of the given discipline are. Thus, the texts of such brief handbooks are found to be difficult and complicated. A good deal of time must be spent on the attempt to understand them. ... The habit that results from receiving instruction from brief handbooks, even when such instruction is at its best and is not accompanied by any flaw, is inferior to the habits resulting from the study of more extensive and lengthy works. The latter contain a great amount of repetition and lengthiness, but both are useful for the acquisition of a perfect habit. When there is little repetition, an inferior habit is the result. This is the case with the abridgments. The intention was to make it easy for students to acquire expert knowledge (of scholarly subjects), but the result is that it has become more difficult for them, because they are prevented from acquiring useful and firmly established habits.

...A good and necessary method and approach in instruction is not to expose the student to two disciplines at the same time. Otherwise, he will rarely master one of them, since he has to divide his attention and is diverted from each of them by his attempt to understand the other. Thus, he will consider both of them obscure and difficult, and be unsuccessful in both. But if the student's mind is free to study the subject that he is out to study and can restrict himself to it, that fact often makes it simpler for the student to learn.

(Ibn Khaldun, al-Muqaddimat, 1377, translated by Franz Rosenthal. from the abridged version by N. J. Dawood.)

Hmm, this is post

I don't really have a dog in this race but I thought this would be funny

"Fellow Australians, it is my melancholy duty to inform you officially, that in consequence of a persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her and that, as a result, Canberra - and possibly Queanbeyan - are also at war. (With the rest of Australia probably following in 1943)."

(Robert Menzies, 1939)

Like, wow...

My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. 

Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. 

He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement. 

(Joe vs the Volcano, 1990)

Sometimes I feel as if I were almost about to wake up. Every year I give at least one lecture about how amazing biochemistry is, with lots of pictures of complicated molecules self-organised into fantastic systems, but I forget how *amazing* biochemistry is. It. Is. Amazing.

All this origin of life stuff focussing on replication as if that was the be-all and end-all, talking about the 'RNA world' or the 'protein world' or the 'Ke$ha world'[1], or whatever, as if any of those things could just fall together into existence somewhere - the people who talk like that are asleep.

The people who throw their hands up in the air and say 'it must have been a miracle', they probably just woke up once for an instant and were bowled over by the amazingness of it all.

I think the beginning was long ago and far away.

This is the minimum it needed.

I have no idea how many generations of life-not-as-we-know-it succeeded each other, each one nom nom nomming the remains of its predecessors, before life-as-we-know-it developed. I have no idea if life-as-we-know-it was designed in a test tube by some form of life-not-as-we-know-it.

But, I am pretty sure whatever happened was all complete before our solar system congealed out of a molecular cloud. I know there is *no point* working backward from life as we know it to get to the origin: we have erased our tracks.

I would like to work forward, but I don't even known what molecules to start looking at, since every organic molecule we see on Earth is part of a system that has comprehensively been worked over by living organisms for billions of years, making and breaking molecules to suit themselves. I know the molecules we see in space are the most common ones, and the ones exposed on the surfaces of things, so are not likely to reflect the complexity available there, and - I suspect - are also ultimately products of a carbon cycle comprehensively worked over by living organisms for billions of years.

Life is amazing.

The fact that the problem is immeasurably vaster and more complicated than we ever thought it would be does not mean it is insoluble. It doesn't mean we should give up and fall back on the God of the Gaps.

We should just live in a state of constant total amazement.


[1] ZOMG, there actually was a vaguely relevant link for that product of random neurons firing. Go figure.

Cry Havoc etc., Part Two

One of the traditional strategies for getting people to assent to things that are dumb is the strategy of the False Dichotomy. It works like this:

1. Formulate a problem in terms of two ‘opposite’ answers (e.g., Faith vs Works; Capitalism vs Communism; XTC vs Adam Ant)

2. Disprove the bejesus out of one answer

3. Wait for your target to embrace the other answer warts and all, hoping they are not imaginative enough to realise there are other options.

For example:

Darth Sophus: “This hairy creature must be an Ewok, or a Wookiee.  While fully grown, it only reaches to mid-thigh, which is very short for a Wookiee. When beaten in games, it does not tear your arms off, which Wookiees have been known to do.  ... [nine pages of argument omitted] ... therefore, this creature must be an Ewok.”

Hairy creature: “Woof! Woof!”

It is usually less obvious than this.

So, I had been writing about Prof Lennox's book 'God's Undertaker' and had gotten up to the anthropic principle. I don't know how likely my two hand-waving explanations-away of the anthropic principle are to be borne out by events. Probably not very. My prejudice against being in a peculiarly unusual universe might just be an irrational prejudice.

But this doesn't mean that the only two possibilities for the origin of the universe are a multiverse or creation by the God of the Judaeo-Christo-Islamic tradition. There are lots of other possibilities, as the orcs are discussing about 70 seconds into this short film.

As I said in Part One, in Chapter 6 Prof Lennox loses me. He makes a very typical Creationist distinction between microevolution and macroevolution and implies, without explicitly saying so, that 'macroevolution' cannot occur by natural means. (Losing me at this point by ignoring all the suggestions that have been made in terms of natural alternatives to simple natural selection on random variation) To me, this supernatural intervention is inconsistent with the behaviour of the Creator(s) postulated in Lennox's discussion of the anthropic principle: a Creator or Creators that would make a universe so exquisitely poised on the values of a few constants to allow life to one day appear would surely allow its progress to unfold according to very unlikely, but natural, events. It does not seem in character for Him/Them to come in with a miracle every time a new genus of beetle is needed. This degree of micromanagement just seems psychologically implausible. And no matter how much Prof Lennox claims it isn't, this is the 'God of the Gaps' pure and simple.

The psychological implausibility of supernatural intervention struck me even more so in Chapter 7, which is about the origin of Life. A universe dependent on one chance in 10⁴⁰ for the conditions to allow life to exist at all would surely be a universe where the specific conditions for the beginning of life were also incredibly unlikely - happening perhaps just once in the universe, in one pond, or deep in the interior of one comet. But by natural means, not supernatural.

I am confident that the origin of life is a soluble problem. I think its solution is far away, and that it will not be found by working backwards from the incredible complexity of life 'as we know it' - which is no more complex biochemically than the very earliest life we have ever found traces of on our planet.  I don't discount the possibility that life 'as we know it' was intelligently designed - but by creatures inside the universe.

Rather than working backwards, a solution will be found by working forward from physical chemistry. Simultaneously we should be broadening our knowledge of what life is and what raw materials are available for it to get started. Here are some things we should be finding out:

What sort of life exists elsewhere in our solar system? 
If the answer is none, we know we need to keep looking (working forward) for a mechanism by which life could have gotten started on Earth. If we find things that are based different chemistry in different places, we need to look for intelligent designers. If we find things based on broadly similar chemistry (my hunch) we need to look for the cradle of life further away.

What is the maximum lifetime of molecular clouds?
These are the places stars get started. If matter can hang around in them for reasonably long times, in reasonably large lumps, accumulating molecular complexity, and ideally get transferred from one molecular cloud to another, we have a reservoir of time and space for life to get started in.

The sorts of molecules we can observe spectroscopically from molecular clouds in general are not likely to reflect the molecular complexity available, since space is a pretty destructive environment, so we should be investigating the remnants of molecular clouds closer to home by drilling into the middle of comets: What sort of molecules exist in the interior of 'dirty snowballs', relatively safe from ionising radiation? Of course, if there is life there already, the distribution of molecules we find won't help...


 As far as the later chapters go:

I sort of glazed over in the probability chapter. I think this is what most undergraduate students do when people are talking about probability so I don't feel too bad about it. But I have read these kind of 'making a 747 by throwing bits of scrap metal together' arguments before. They are superficially appealing but are just another demonstration of how daunting the task is when you are looking backwards from the very complicated thing. You build up to complexity by walling off bits of the universe so there is a system and a surroundings. Compartmentalisation is the key. More later once I hear what other people think about the second half of the book. P'raps.

The idea of 'information being conserved' doesn't hold in biology. One airborne seed lands on Anak Krakatau. It grows into a plant, and in six months releases ten thousand airborne seeds, all of which are genetically different. Information increases. Sex = Lack of conservation of information.

And, I agree completely with Lennox on Hume and miracles: Hume's 'disproof' is just a classic example of begging the question.

If you can't trust the interwebz, who can you trust?

The Da Vinci Connection

The first big disappointment of my book-reading year has been Robur the Conqueror.

It can be summarised as follows:

1) Helicopters are better than hot air balloons

2) Americans are easily caricatured

3) Characterisation is for losers

That’s about it.

While preparing this exhaustive summary it struck me that Jules Verne was the Dan Brown of his time. Both authors produced books consisting of lumps of poorly-digested research stuck together with action sequences engaged in by two-dimensional characters. And, look at the supposedly baffling cryptograms at the beginnings of ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’ and ‘The Da Vinci Code’. They are both so terribly lame.   

The big difference – which reflects badly on our century, rather than on either of these tremendously successful and industrious writers – is that in the 19^th century ordinary people were interested in science and technology, whereas today, having sloughed off the inheritance of the Enlightenment like so many of Lady Prunella’s petticoats, ordinary people are interested in waffly occult rubbish.