Shane McGowan born December 25, 1957
December 25, 2007
December 22, 2007
A lump of coal in your stocking courtesy of the dismal science
Paul Krugman is a smart guy but he's no performer. He writes so lucidly on economic matters that I'm always brought up short when witnessing one of his talks. I imagine being in one of his classes at Princeton must be daunting for the student trying to follow the quicksilver coursings of his expressed ideas, which are congenitally cogent but when he speaks ex tempore rush from his mind to his his mouth unmediated by the the customary attention a public speaker pays to the formal requirements of being readily followed by a given audience.
Shifting from one stated thought to another is a tricky business in public speech, and is best attempted by any speaker only after being preceded by sufficient warning to the audience in some brief but comprehensible suggestion that now we're on to something else, accompanied by a fond farewell to the idea that's just now being left.
As he speaks, Krugman's mind seems constantly torn between saying the words coming from his mouth and evaluating the words coming from his mouth, and then instantly offering up a reformulation, emendation, verbal footnote or other bye the bye to almost anything he's just uttered, although it must be admitted that he resists as much as he can the temptation to completely drop what he was originally saying to follow along the trail of the interceding idea and its sequalia which is ever-receding end of so much of this kind of talk.
Which is not to say that this is not the way people speak. This is the way people speak. In conversation, people flit from one thing they've just said to some other whatever it may suggest as a matter of course, irrespective of the tangentiality of the suggested matter. When there's only one person speaking, this inclination can be policed, but in Krugman's case, alone there in front of his listeners, it is not.
He's worth listening to because he manages to convey, pace the disorderly delivery, real, informed alarm about the health of global financial institutions today as they grapple with the catastophic effects of the subprime mortgage meltdown.
He describes the current situation as unique, contrasting it with earlier episodes of instability — the Savings and Loan debacle of the late 80's, the economic collapses in Russia and East Asia, the bursting of the internet bubble at the turn of the millennium among the recent episodes which seemed to indicate as they played out that global financial institutions had the tools at hand to mitigate every foreseeable shock to the system. Krugman notes that the tactics used so successfully earlier simply don't seem to apply to this situation, which isn't a liquidity crisis — lenders unwilling to lend, drying up available capital, although there's a lot of that going on in an understandably skittish environment— so much as it is a solvency crisis brought on by a tidal wave of worthlessness settling in on a vast array of securities backed by subprime mortgages.
Krugman says that housing prices must fall by up to 30% if they are to return to historic costs relative to other parts of the economy. In that eventuality, housing bought at the height of the market, when customers were being shoehorned in to new homes or convinced to refinance using one of these vehicles, is now and for years to come worth less than the paper that must be paid off on it.
In a rising market, the usurious rate adjustment built in to the most liberal of these sub-prime instruments, which kicked in after a specified period of time in which the borrower paid some laughably small amount against the debt, could be easily eluded by the simple expedient of refinancing using the collateral of a house now worth more than the original loan to pay off that first loan, and rinse and repeat as needed to avoid the consequences of the unsupportable mortgage payment required when that loan's rate adjustment kicks in. The market slows, steadies, falls. Houses bought with sub-prime loans are now worth less than what is being paid for them by their owners. The chances to avoid the rate adjustment dry up. Borrowers are squeezed to pay more than than the house is worth, and at a faster rate, more's the pity. Foreclosures skyrocket.
And the market isn't really sure who owns all that bad debt, who'll be stuck with the payable bill for it all. Currently it's just sort of materializing out of the vaporous realm of serial securitizations which sought to leverage the collateral of the now thoroughly sunken value of those subprime mortgages into vaster and vaster loan arrangements, which according to best practices in business come due just as the monthly mortgage statement comes due for the homeowner, and must by the ineluctable laws of accounting properly materialize on the balance sheets of financial institutions left holding the bag, payable in full, at the end of a given reporting period.
Bear Stearns, whatever other irregularity it may have indulged in over the past 80 years, has never failed to show a profit for its investors, but this year reports a multi-billion dollar loss. Merrill Lynch, of the famous bull on Wall Street commercial, exposed itself to its first loss in almost three quarters of a century and made Bear Stearn look like it got off easy. Citigroup? … well, jayz. Who knows how far into the future they'll be paying for it? And the insurance bought by prudent investors to mitigate risk should the market go bad, as markets sometimes do, appears more and more to be worthless itself, being carried by insurers who, like the owners of those unpayable mortgages, cannot themselves meet their obligation to pay up in full for their share of the same failed investment in subprime-backed securitizations owed by Bear Sterns and Citigroup and Merrill Lynch and all.
When Paul Krugman says he's alarmed, listen.
December 21, 2007
Ho ho ho
I suppose that in the halls of academy the bright line between political scientists and those who fashion actual policy marks a well-established divide familiar to all those who care about that sort of thing. The political science people have their Department of Government at Harvard, and down the street the policy people have their Kennedy School of Government. This video crafts a sly parody of the television show "The Office" in which the Department of Government at Harvard is targeted to be absorbed by the Kennedy School.
The threatened merger is averted after a good deal of "Office"-like talk and camera work, resolved in the end by firing all the theorists. That's actually knee-slapping funny in context, as is the turn by the fellow with the William Kristol pinup in his locker.
[via…]
The threatened merger is averted after a good deal of "Office"-like talk and camera work, resolved in the end by firing all the theorists. That's actually knee-slapping funny in context, as is the turn by the fellow with the William Kristol pinup in his locker.
[via…]
December 08, 2007
Happy Rohatsu
Rohatsu is what the zen tradition calls Bodhi Day, the day Buddha achieved whatever enlightenment is. In Japanese, Rohatsu means the eighth day of the twelfth month.
Hundreds of years passed and people began writing down what the Buddha might have said at that tremendous moment, just sitting there, had he in fact said anything at all.
Siddhartha looked at the planet Venus in the morning sky on the day following one week's steady samadhi, and there he was, enlightened, Buddha.
One year ago today my father celebrated his last birthday. He was 89 that day, and gone in less than a month.
For Roman Catholics like my father, December 8 marks the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, mother of God. Although this feast is often confused even in the minds of nominal Catholics with the time God had his way with Mary and they conceived Jesus, it is not that conception, but her own conception that is being celebrated here. Notwithstanding the puissance of the godfucking of Mary that made Jesus, her own parent's fucking stands as the greatest, most thoroughgoing and holy human-on-human fuck of all time, producing as it did, according Catholic dogma, by the grace of god, the unblemished vessel of Mary herself, a fuck fully worthy of yearly commemoration.
My father enjoyed reminding everyone that kids got the day off from Catholic school on his birthday.
Hundreds of years passed and people began writing down what the Buddha might have said at that tremendous moment, just sitting there, had he in fact said anything at all.
Siddhartha looked at the planet Venus in the morning sky on the day following one week's steady samadhi, and there he was, enlightened, Buddha.
One year ago today my father celebrated his last birthday. He was 89 that day, and gone in less than a month.
For Roman Catholics like my father, December 8 marks the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, mother of God. Although this feast is often confused even in the minds of nominal Catholics with the time God had his way with Mary and they conceived Jesus, it is not that conception, but her own conception that is being celebrated here. Notwithstanding the puissance of the godfucking of Mary that made Jesus, her own parent's fucking stands as the greatest, most thoroughgoing and holy human-on-human fuck of all time, producing as it did, according Catholic dogma, by the grace of god, the unblemished vessel of Mary herself, a fuck fully worthy of yearly commemoration.
My father enjoyed reminding everyone that kids got the day off from Catholic school on his birthday.
December 06, 2007
December 05, 2007
Viscerally Anti-American, But Still…
You're wearing trousers with a tag on the back
and a cap with the visor turned up,
parading around Tuleto
like a lady's man trying to be seen
You're acting all American,
American, American,
listen here: who's asking you to?
You want to be all trendy,
but if you drink "whisky and soda"
you always end up sick!
You're dancing rock and roll,
and playing baseball,
but where'd you get the money
for the Camel cigarettes?
Mummy's handbag!
You're acting all American,
American, American,
but you're born in Italy, listen here:
there's nothing you can do,
O.K., Napoletano?!
You're acting all American,
American, American,
How can your loved one understand
if you're speaking half American?
When you're out loving under the moon,
where do you get a phrase like "I love you"?
You're acting all American,
American, American,
but you're born in Italy, listen here:
there's nothing you can do,
O.K., Napoletano?!
You're acting all American,
American, American,
...whisky soda & rock and roll…
—Renato Carsone - Tu' vuo' fa' l'americano
[via…]
December 02, 2007
December Weather
What I like about Weather.com is the tidy little box that shows you in big bolded numbers your temperature and in smaller type all the related info on wind and humidity and such after you enter your Zip Code.
The box has a reading for what your temperature "feels like," using some clever normalizing operation that I'm sure is a closely held trade secret taking into account the bearing of all the accumulated wind and humidity and stuff on the raw farenheit of the number. Some days in summer the box reports that Santa Cruz "feels like'" 76 degrees when the farenheit of it is only 71. Today at 8:45 am, 44 degrees farenheit "feels like" 44 degrees farenheit, according to Weather.com. So, out here in the garage today I'm simultaneously experiencing not only 44 degrees farenheit, but also at the exact same moment, what it feels like!
The forecast for today is cloudy skies, mild winds and a high of 61 degrees farenheit, whatever that may end up feeling like, more or less or equal to itself as may be. T-shirt weather Pacifica, is what I call it.
The box has a reading for what your temperature "feels like," using some clever normalizing operation that I'm sure is a closely held trade secret taking into account the bearing of all the accumulated wind and humidity and stuff on the raw farenheit of the number. Some days in summer the box reports that Santa Cruz "feels like'" 76 degrees when the farenheit of it is only 71. Today at 8:45 am, 44 degrees farenheit "feels like" 44 degrees farenheit, according to Weather.com. So, out here in the garage today I'm simultaneously experiencing not only 44 degrees farenheit, but also at the exact same moment, what it feels like!
The forecast for today is cloudy skies, mild winds and a high of 61 degrees farenheit, whatever that may end up feeling like, more or less or equal to itself as may be. T-shirt weather Pacifica, is what I call it.
December 01, 2007
On the Scent of the Desert Sage
On their way to making another film entirely, a camera crew from Coudal Partners ran into Ed Grothus of Los Alamos, New Mexico. The result is a remarkable video called Laboratory Conditions. Give it a look.
November 30, 2007
Ampliatio and the Arbitrary Animal Preserve
The little blobs of orange in the image above (click the image to to enlarge a bit) are monarch butterflies, which winter in great number in the trees of Natural Bridges State Beach in Santa Cruz. Natural Bridges contains the only dedicated butterfly preserve in California.
In recent memory there were "bridges" at Natural Bridges, archways carved in the little promontory of mudstone rising on the south side of the lagoon where Moore Creek seeps into the Pacific. The larger of the two arches, in accordance with the long-term geology of the situation, collapsed one year in a particularly forceful storm. A single smaller bridge remains, visible as a shadowy semicircle above the waterline on the rock. The plural of "Natural Bridges" is earned by ampliatio, as discussed previously.
November 29, 2007
Lake Lexington, November 2007
Lake Lexington is a reservoir in the Santa Cruz Mountains above Los Gatos, California. It's part of the Santa Clara Valley's water system. They've drained it to do some work.
You can see the brown interdicting mound of the dam in the distance. Normally the water would reach about halfway up the dam, and lap the ankles of the eucalytpus on the surrounding shores.
Fire-tested Argument
Then you call on the name of your god, and I will call on the name of the LORD: and the god that answers by fire—he is God."
[…]
Then the fire of the LORD fell, and burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the stones, and the soil, and also licked up the water in the trench. When the people saw this, they fell prostrate and cried, "The LORD, –he is God, The LORD, –he is God!"
Then Elijah commanded them them, "Seize the prophets of Baal. Don't let anyone get away!" They seized them, and Elijah had them brought down to the Kishon Valley and slaughtered there.
You can raise all the intellectual challenges you want about faith and the origins of the universe, but at the end of the day, you have to worship the god who can set you on fire.
We like to think Elijah stood in front of the howling column of heavenly fire, straightened his robes, turned to the crowd and said, "Thus, my opponent's argument falls." Then, he finished the debate in the way that all debates should be finished: by having the losers slaughtered.
— David Wong, The 9 Most Badass Bible Verses, via Scott McLemee's Quick Study
Long ago in rhetoric the "Shut up about that" rule was concieved as an alternative method for effectively striking specific people and groups of people and what they might have to say from the list of those who could continue to argue the given point. Every formal argument has such a rule. Slaughtering the losers does directly ensure that their argument will go unheard in every case, and the "Shut up about that" rule in rhetoric cannot hope to be as utterly terminal as that, however much it hopes to achieve the same end, the silencing. As the volume of nattering coming from those under the injunction of the "Shut up about that" rule reaches its critical peak, the probability of their ending in the Kishon Valley increases as well, sad to say.
The Great American Novel vs. The Death of the Novel, a progress report
Time seems to be running out for the appearance of that hopeful monster, the Great American Novel, which was a project first bruited about in the early decades of the twentieth century and never taken to heart more tenaciously than by Norman Mailer, who died recently without quite realizing his own ambitions in this regard.
I'm sure Mailer was aware that The Executioner's Song is a magnificent book, and that his own high regard for it would be shared unfailingly down the ages by those who read it. And yet in the end he felt he hadn't created the thing, the Great American Novel that every novel writer of his generation had been led to believe was out there to be had.
Well, it was always more of a goal than a destination, The Great American Novel, and it doesn't even come up much anymore, really, even in the context of some wistful plan to throw down everything and devote oneself to art. People would most likely opt for music or acting these days if it came to that. The people who make novels have their own good reasons for writing them, but I don't think many novel writers nowadays are solely motivated by a desire to make that singularly great American one that once seemed possible in the back of the mind of many, and on the tip of the lip of Mailer for most of his career.
Mailer literalized the hunt for the Great American Novel as an agon for writers with their dedicated talents jostling for its prize, competitors for the thing that just might be had, might be made by dint of the superior effort of the very best of them, just then as the era of the Death of the Novel was beginning in earnest.
The Death of the Novel has been going on for decades now and it gets more press these days than talk of the Great American Novel does. Well, of course, it's a terrible loss for all concerned, the Death of the Novel, and it's only fitting that anyone with any sensitivity at all should pause to say a few words over the corpus, which was such a fine fit art in its day, now dying off, killed by offspring, just as it assisted in its own day in the Death of Poetry. Ah, well, in all the decades since the conclusive end of the form was first discerned, many sobering words on the subject have been announced with all the niceties of thoughtfulness and remorse that the occasion requires, and many wonderful novels have been published, but mostly, it is taking so long to complete that the Death of the Novel, too, seems more likely a goal than a destination. Whether it can be reached before the Great American Novel is uttered remains an open question.
I'm sure Mailer was aware that The Executioner's Song is a magnificent book, and that his own high regard for it would be shared unfailingly down the ages by those who read it. And yet in the end he felt he hadn't created the thing, the Great American Novel that every novel writer of his generation had been led to believe was out there to be had.
Well, it was always more of a goal than a destination, The Great American Novel, and it doesn't even come up much anymore, really, even in the context of some wistful plan to throw down everything and devote oneself to art. People would most likely opt for music or acting these days if it came to that. The people who make novels have their own good reasons for writing them, but I don't think many novel writers nowadays are solely motivated by a desire to make that singularly great American one that once seemed possible in the back of the mind of many, and on the tip of the lip of Mailer for most of his career.
Mailer literalized the hunt for the Great American Novel as an agon for writers with their dedicated talents jostling for its prize, competitors for the thing that just might be had, might be made by dint of the superior effort of the very best of them, just then as the era of the Death of the Novel was beginning in earnest.
The Death of the Novel has been going on for decades now and it gets more press these days than talk of the Great American Novel does. Well, of course, it's a terrible loss for all concerned, the Death of the Novel, and it's only fitting that anyone with any sensitivity at all should pause to say a few words over the corpus, which was such a fine fit art in its day, now dying off, killed by offspring, just as it assisted in its own day in the Death of Poetry. Ah, well, in all the decades since the conclusive end of the form was first discerned, many sobering words on the subject have been announced with all the niceties of thoughtfulness and remorse that the occasion requires, and many wonderful novels have been published, but mostly, it is taking so long to complete that the Death of the Novel, too, seems more likely a goal than a destination. Whether it can be reached before the Great American Novel is uttered remains an open question.
November 26, 2007
November 20, 2007
Water music
How alive this instrument is.
Over the course of nearly ten minutes, on its home acres, where influential heat may seasonably evaporate or effluential rain may fill to the lip the bowls of the jal-tarang, the tuning of each bowl must change as the amount of water in each bowl changes in the course of a performance. The tuning of each tune is itself liquid, in league with the liquid melody as made from the bowls that day. I suspect the jal-tarang player is intimately familiar with this eventuality, and has the well-trained knack for adjusting play accordingly.
Lionel Hamton must make do with a related instrument whose struck tones and intervals are at least nominally invariant:
November 19, 2007
The selling price of number 762 has yet to be determined
Barry Bonds' No. 756 to be branded with an asterisk and sent to Baseball Hall of Fame
By RICK FREEMAN, AP Sports Writer
September 26, 2007
NEW YORK (AP) -- The ball Barry Bonds hit for his record-breaking 756th home run will be branded with an asterisk and sent to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Fashion designer Marc Ecko, who bought the ball in an online auction, set up a Web site for fans to vote on the ball's fate, and Wednesday announced the decision to brand it won out over the other options -- sending it to Cooperstown unblemished or launching it into space.
Man Scorns What is Not So, Controversy Erupts
Mainly P.Z. Myers uses his web site Phayngula to bring down the hammer of thor on anyone god-deluded enough to offer up organized religious blather about evolution in public.
It's not uncommon for supportable facts about the one thing or the other to be challenged by the vigorous interposition of the immediate announcement of some unsupportable assertion about the matter springing from the resolute lips of those compelled for their own good and sufficient reasons to resist the fundamental imposition such facts represent on their understandably favored view of everything.
As a matter of practical humanity it's personally difficult to resist the inclination to adhere to the favored view, for all the good it generally does, with whatever amount of tenacity seems appropriate.
Those bothered most by assertions of supportable facts sense a threatening move on the part of those facts not only to shift the position of their favored view with those facts, an accommodation most people might begrudge is due, but to dislodge it entirely from what was previously understood to be its favored precinct, like an abalone in the shallows of the sea popped off its rock by the actively advanced pry bar.
Such is the case with people presently driven here in the United States to create their creation science or spawn their intelligent design in heartfelt reaction to the dull threatening realities of evolution by natural selection, hoping to see their beliefs substituted for the evidence at hand, particularly when it comes to the approved store of knowledges of the nation being parceled out to our nominally educable youth in public schools across the nation these days.
Supportable facts are always the rub in foundational arguments such as the ongoing foundational argument for evolution these days between people who know something about the supportable facts like P.Z. Myers, the biologists and geneticists and geologists and paleontologists and their kind, versus proud groups of god-deluded citizens who insist there must be somewhere in this fact-based narrative of life on earth to shoehorn in the unsupportable assertions of their own understanding of its creation as variously written in their variously holy books, none of which narratives of creation can be true unless all the others are false, creating a truly dramatic and admittedly absorbing Mexican standoff of unsupportable foundational assertions against which the supportable facts of people who know what they're talking about can easily enough go ignored at times unless they're promoted as vigorously as they are by folks like P.Z. Myers.
People who know what they're talking about have been actively arguing evolution's merits on the internet, pushing back against a lot of compulsively spread hooey about the matter, for a long time. The Usenet forum talkorigins.org. began in 1986, and it's far from finished going on about evolution. Undeniably, if anyone is to say anything useful about evolution at all in light of all the argument about it collected there at talk.origins over the years, they should at least show that they're familiar with the collected shape of that argument, with what's been gone over again and again at talk.origins down the years, the supportable facts of the matter, unless of course understandably enough they merely wish to say whatever unsupportable something or other rushes to their lips in the heat of what they recognize as a fundamental assault on their favored view.
P.Z. Myers himself, aside from being a Professor … of Science!, is among those who's spent a good amount of time on the internet distinguishing the supportable facts from the unsupportable assertions of evolution by natural selection in the well-established argument laid out not only at talk.origins over the years, but, with the advent of the world wide web and blogging software and all, such sites as Panda's Thumb, where I suppose I first encountered P.Z. Myers's writing.
Panda's Thumb was and is a weblog published by a group of academics who have a command of the supportable facts of evolution by natural selection and a taste for laying into the claimed "science" of the proponents of Intelligent Design, which represents the latest expression of the continuing outcry of people really fundamentally challenged by the crimp all this evidence of natural selection puts in their favored god-deluded view. I suppose, without ever having bothered to find out, that the blog's name is a reference to Stephen Jay Gould's popular book of the same name.
Myers is a biologist, a professor of the stuff at the Morris campus of the University of Minnesota, giving him a vested interest in seeing that god-deluded claims don't interfere with the functioning of his profession. His blog Pharyngula is well-visited.
Often enough the comments attached to the regularly updated writing of Professor Myers posted there at Pharyngula are awash in outbursts of text from those who feel most keenly the contradiction to their favored view embodied in evolution by natural selection, outbursts dealt with summarily by P.Z. Myers and the band of others who've joined there in an ongoing correspondence, inhabiting a public space where the inevitable ongoing intrusion of unsupportable assertions into the argument for evolution by natural selection can be given the focused back of the public hand by those who know their supportable facts and all.
I admit I'm moderately uninformed on these matters myself.
Once in awhile P.Z. Myers puts down his cudgel and resorts to writing down the supportable facts of his craft, the science of biology. Some time ago he wrote what must have seemed to him a brief overview of the role of the hox genes in the structural development of embryos, no doubt gathered from all the notes he's piled up over the years representing his developing understanding of the subject, such as it may be. I'm not sure that Hox genes are the focus of P.Z. Myers's interest in biology. They may be just something he knows about as a matter of course, being a professor of the stuff.
It's just as well that he writes lucidly on the subject, because explaining the intricate workings of Hox genes involves marshaling a lot of complicated general knowledge, of DNA and chromosomes and embryos and such, and then adding to those complications the specific complication of how Hox genes themselves physically fit into that general picture, with all the basic good they do regulating the embryonic development of the physical framework of the beast that owns them. Hox genes ensure that the front of the beast and all its associated bits goes here, the mid goes here, and the back end with all its trailing matter goes back there behind, all according to the Hox genes owned by the beast.
The Hox genes, which are not one strand of genes, but a whole complex of sequentially linked chains of like genes on the chromosome, sit on the chromosome directing the eyeballs toward the head and the asshole toward the back as fits the generally understood development of the beast in embryo. The paired parts of the bilaterally organized beast, if so organized, are sent their respective way by the Hox genes as well.
Hox genes were first testified to by an observation of anomalies in their normal workings, in mutations that made an antenna where the leg of a fly should be (antennapedia), for example, or the eye of a crustacean replaced instead by an antenna, or where a petal should be, a stamen.
I imagine generations of post-docs have played this trick and others like it on drosophila lineages, breeding whole misshapen batches of the things, putting an antenna where the leg should be or displacing the eye from here to there on the little beasts to confirm their own understanding of the techniques available to their craft which make it possible to reveal the curious play of the Hox genes in regulating the general disposition of the bodyparts, fore, mid and aft. The weight of supportable facts about Hox genes engendered by all these intrusive observations into the formal structure of drosophila is considerable, from what I understand.
I do wonder about the ocean sunfish, though.
On my first marveling view of the beasts at the Monterey Bay Aquarium recently, I couldn't help but think of the first of the two posts written by P.Z. Meyers on the subject of Hox genes, which I'd idly glanced at and most certainly only partly comprehended some time before going to the Aquarium, and idly speculated while I watched them circulate in their huge tank of water, based only on my glancing familiarity with the facts of the matter, that the Hox genes of ocean sunfish must have some say in the abrupt wrapping up of the beast's form, which by most accounts of a fish would taper off to the agreeable formality of tail, but instead in the ocean sunfish comes to its curious bulbous compact halt just where the finality of a tail and all its associated bits might be expected to begin in what we commonly presume to be the layout of a fish. That the ocean sunfish has no scales is only a subsidiary marvel compared to its unique aft. It's just not a tail back there at all, by any measure.
But I don't really know if this truly marked divergence in the sunfish reaches right back into the nature of its Hox genes, snipping off the tail right there in the process of resolving the most basic inclination of its oriented parts, diverging before the tail even has a chance to be a place to put parts on a sunfish, or whether the tail that might be advanced by those genes is turned to its other end by the intercession of the successful play of some other bunch of genes, Hox or not, going on about their own simultaneous chemical business there in the embryo. If it's the Hox genes that are responsible, I can only say that the ocean sunfish must carry a highly distinctive bunch of them to do the remarkable job of rounding off it does.
It's not uncommon for supportable facts about the one thing or the other to be challenged by the vigorous interposition of the immediate announcement of some unsupportable assertion about the matter springing from the resolute lips of those compelled for their own good and sufficient reasons to resist the fundamental imposition such facts represent on their understandably favored view of everything.
As a matter of practical humanity it's personally difficult to resist the inclination to adhere to the favored view, for all the good it generally does, with whatever amount of tenacity seems appropriate.
Those bothered most by assertions of supportable facts sense a threatening move on the part of those facts not only to shift the position of their favored view with those facts, an accommodation most people might begrudge is due, but to dislodge it entirely from what was previously understood to be its favored precinct, like an abalone in the shallows of the sea popped off its rock by the actively advanced pry bar.
Such is the case with people presently driven here in the United States to create their creation science or spawn their intelligent design in heartfelt reaction to the dull threatening realities of evolution by natural selection, hoping to see their beliefs substituted for the evidence at hand, particularly when it comes to the approved store of knowledges of the nation being parceled out to our nominally educable youth in public schools across the nation these days.
Supportable facts are always the rub in foundational arguments such as the ongoing foundational argument for evolution these days between people who know something about the supportable facts like P.Z. Myers, the biologists and geneticists and geologists and paleontologists and their kind, versus proud groups of god-deluded citizens who insist there must be somewhere in this fact-based narrative of life on earth to shoehorn in the unsupportable assertions of their own understanding of its creation as variously written in their variously holy books, none of which narratives of creation can be true unless all the others are false, creating a truly dramatic and admittedly absorbing Mexican standoff of unsupportable foundational assertions against which the supportable facts of people who know what they're talking about can easily enough go ignored at times unless they're promoted as vigorously as they are by folks like P.Z. Myers.
People who know what they're talking about have been actively arguing evolution's merits on the internet, pushing back against a lot of compulsively spread hooey about the matter, for a long time. The Usenet forum talkorigins.org. began in 1986, and it's far from finished going on about evolution. Undeniably, if anyone is to say anything useful about evolution at all in light of all the argument about it collected there at talk.origins over the years, they should at least show that they're familiar with the collected shape of that argument, with what's been gone over again and again at talk.origins down the years, the supportable facts of the matter, unless of course understandably enough they merely wish to say whatever unsupportable something or other rushes to their lips in the heat of what they recognize as a fundamental assault on their favored view.
P.Z. Myers himself, aside from being a Professor … of Science!, is among those who's spent a good amount of time on the internet distinguishing the supportable facts from the unsupportable assertions of evolution by natural selection in the well-established argument laid out not only at talk.origins over the years, but, with the advent of the world wide web and blogging software and all, such sites as Panda's Thumb, where I suppose I first encountered P.Z. Myers's writing.
Panda's Thumb was and is a weblog published by a group of academics who have a command of the supportable facts of evolution by natural selection and a taste for laying into the claimed "science" of the proponents of Intelligent Design, which represents the latest expression of the continuing outcry of people really fundamentally challenged by the crimp all this evidence of natural selection puts in their favored god-deluded view. I suppose, without ever having bothered to find out, that the blog's name is a reference to Stephen Jay Gould's popular book of the same name.
Myers is a biologist, a professor of the stuff at the Morris campus of the University of Minnesota, giving him a vested interest in seeing that god-deluded claims don't interfere with the functioning of his profession. His blog Pharyngula is well-visited.
Often enough the comments attached to the regularly updated writing of Professor Myers posted there at Pharyngula are awash in outbursts of text from those who feel most keenly the contradiction to their favored view embodied in evolution by natural selection, outbursts dealt with summarily by P.Z. Myers and the band of others who've joined there in an ongoing correspondence, inhabiting a public space where the inevitable ongoing intrusion of unsupportable assertions into the argument for evolution by natural selection can be given the focused back of the public hand by those who know their supportable facts and all.
I admit I'm moderately uninformed on these matters myself.
Once in awhile P.Z. Myers puts down his cudgel and resorts to writing down the supportable facts of his craft, the science of biology. Some time ago he wrote what must have seemed to him a brief overview of the role of the hox genes in the structural development of embryos, no doubt gathered from all the notes he's piled up over the years representing his developing understanding of the subject, such as it may be. I'm not sure that Hox genes are the focus of P.Z. Myers's interest in biology. They may be just something he knows about as a matter of course, being a professor of the stuff.
It's just as well that he writes lucidly on the subject, because explaining the intricate workings of Hox genes involves marshaling a lot of complicated general knowledge, of DNA and chromosomes and embryos and such, and then adding to those complications the specific complication of how Hox genes themselves physically fit into that general picture, with all the basic good they do regulating the embryonic development of the physical framework of the beast that owns them. Hox genes ensure that the front of the beast and all its associated bits goes here, the mid goes here, and the back end with all its trailing matter goes back there behind, all according to the Hox genes owned by the beast.
The Hox genes, which are not one strand of genes, but a whole complex of sequentially linked chains of like genes on the chromosome, sit on the chromosome directing the eyeballs toward the head and the asshole toward the back as fits the generally understood development of the beast in embryo. The paired parts of the bilaterally organized beast, if so organized, are sent their respective way by the Hox genes as well.
Hox genes were first testified to by an observation of anomalies in their normal workings, in mutations that made an antenna where the leg of a fly should be (antennapedia), for example, or the eye of a crustacean replaced instead by an antenna, or where a petal should be, a stamen.
I imagine generations of post-docs have played this trick and others like it on drosophila lineages, breeding whole misshapen batches of the things, putting an antenna where the leg should be or displacing the eye from here to there on the little beasts to confirm their own understanding of the techniques available to their craft which make it possible to reveal the curious play of the Hox genes in regulating the general disposition of the bodyparts, fore, mid and aft. The weight of supportable facts about Hox genes engendered by all these intrusive observations into the formal structure of drosophila is considerable, from what I understand.
Speaking of history, one of the things we can do with a phylogenetic analysis of the Hox cluster is see fascinating aspects of our ancient history. Since the genes are conserved, we can map correspondences between them within a lineage and in comparison with other lineages. We can surmise where duplications and deletions occurred, and most interestingly, since the genes are associated with morphological regions of the organism, we can speculate about how new additions to animal morphology occurred.
— P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula, on useful speculations
I do wonder about the ocean sunfish, though.
On my first marveling view of the beasts at the Monterey Bay Aquarium recently, I couldn't help but think of the first of the two posts written by P.Z. Meyers on the subject of Hox genes, which I'd idly glanced at and most certainly only partly comprehended some time before going to the Aquarium, and idly speculated while I watched them circulate in their huge tank of water, based only on my glancing familiarity with the facts of the matter, that the Hox genes of ocean sunfish must have some say in the abrupt wrapping up of the beast's form, which by most accounts of a fish would taper off to the agreeable formality of tail, but instead in the ocean sunfish comes to its curious bulbous compact halt just where the finality of a tail and all its associated bits might be expected to begin in what we commonly presume to be the layout of a fish. That the ocean sunfish has no scales is only a subsidiary marvel compared to its unique aft. It's just not a tail back there at all, by any measure.
But I don't really know if this truly marked divergence in the sunfish reaches right back into the nature of its Hox genes, snipping off the tail right there in the process of resolving the most basic inclination of its oriented parts, diverging before the tail even has a chance to be a place to put parts on a sunfish, or whether the tail that might be advanced by those genes is turned to its other end by the intercession of the successful play of some other bunch of genes, Hox or not, going on about their own simultaneous chemical business there in the embryo. If it's the Hox genes that are responsible, I can only say that the ocean sunfish must carry a highly distinctive bunch of them to do the remarkable job of rounding off it does.
November 12, 2007
November 07, 2007
November 04, 2007
Moderately Uninformed
I know little enough of science. I have a small store of the basics, but with all the distractions have never delved deeply into any of its parts. I can express the distinction regularly, if somewhat elliptically, between the accelerations of Newton's Second Law of Motion and the dissipations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and "iff" pressed can perform many of the basic operations of algebra, Euclidean geometry, and sums. I can listen to the arguments being successfully carried along in their discourse by scientists who seem to know what they're talking about with what I consider passing comprehension, to the point of getting the drift of the thing pretty much, the gist which, without further study on my part, I'm happy enough to carry away from any of science's bailiwicks.
From time to time the gist of what I've brought away of the drift of the argument of scientists exposes some prior misapprehension of fundamental processes of nature on my part which has led me to entertain up to that point counterfactual suppositions about the the way things actually work, suppositions which must be sloughed off of course if the gist of what people who seem to know what they're talking about is to be entertained instead. But most often there is no prior misapprehension to contend with at all, since I lack prior thought on the matter brought to my attention by the discourse of scientists to begin with.
I find all this talk of evolution, for example, with its entailed stuff of natural selection, plausible enough. Much of what I've ever read about evolution was written by Stephen J. Gould, the late paleontologist and popularizer of science. His monthly essays for Nature magazine, collected over the years in a number of books, are a marvel of American literature, spinning out in an episodic way the history of the idea of evolution from its first bruiting about to its abrupt efflorescence in the work of Darwin and Wallace in the mid-1800's, and on even unto the contested fruit of the mature idea of it in our own present day.
Often enough Gould's essays recount stories of scientists whose ideas were influentially misconceived to begin with or influentially misrecieved by the intended audience when finally communicated, and all the bother entailed by either alternative. I just generally like this kind of story, and have been pleased to follow Gould's tellings even through the choking thicket of unavoidable terminologies that spring up everywhere in them, being stories of science and all.
My wife, noticing that I've collected most of Gould's popular writing over the years, bought me Punctuated Equilibrium for Father's Day. Many of the arguments made favoring the idea of punctuated equilibrium in that book are anchored in just the sort of unavoidable terminology that shows up in his writing for a general audience, except here, being an excerpt from an even more compendious attempt to summarize with some rigor the view of evolution he argues for in a book called The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, the unavoidable terminology is unceasing. It's in every paragraph.
Gould and his partner, Niles Eldridge, the fellow who actually had the idea of punctuated equilibrium but wisely left the writing of it up to Gould, published a famous paper in 1972 that set a good fundamental argument going in the natural sciences about the true shape of evolution.
Gould came up with the catchy phrase "punctuated equilibrium" to formalize the understanding of data collected over the last few centuries by paleontologists, data derived from all the rocks with remaining bits of evident forms of life stuck in them that have been exhumed from the ground and examined with the clever methodologies of the natural sciences over the years. Gould and Eldridge pointed out that paleontologists have always known, but until then never willingly brought up the crucial but widely recognized detail apparent to all those familiar with the fossil record: over the course of unimaginably long periods of time, most Metazoan species remain identifiably the same, they do not gradually turn into something else as those who do not know the fossils might suspect based on then-current understandings of the processes of natural selection.
The fossil record is a record of stasis with respect to speciation, according to the data of the paleontologists, who have catalogued and shelved a wide ranging if recognizably incomplete record in rocks of the prodigious variety of remains of living things down the ages stuck there in those rocks, confirming evidence of what once flourished and then faded into rock in profuse and lasting numbers over immensely long periods of time past, living things remaining fundamentally the same over all those vast lengths of time, and leaving fundamentally similar remains all the while. Very occasionally these periods of recorded stasis are punctuated by the appearance of new, related species. Gould and Eldridge proposed that this model, the model of prolonged, potentially punctuated stasis, founded on what can be gleaned from an examination of the source material of paleontology, is an accurate model of how most species come to be, at least in the realm of the Metazoans, home to our own sweet species itself.
This claim sets up an interesting argument with people who's understanding of evolution is anchored in the standard evolutionary perception of incessant indifferent inexorable processes of natural selection working their gradual wiles, accumulating profound changes in populations in a species over time until those changes add up to something new, what Gould calls here gradualism: origin by "anagenesis."
And Gould acknowledges that in some clear cases anagenesis is exactly what the record shows, a species gradually transforming itself over some great length of time from one distinguishing shape and size to the next. But Gould submits that this is not the history of most species at all. Most species don't participate in any meaningful way in the self-improving gestures of anagenesis, but rather go on and on lounging around some mean of their own disposed values for millions upon millions of years until given some reason to cease.
Darwin himself had proposed, and subsequent evolutionists long accepted, that lack of overwhelming evidence for anagenesis in the remains was to be expected considering the incomplete record of geology, cutting off any contrary talk on the part of paleontologists about what was evident to them from what they'd managed to collect and analyze over the course of more than a century of assiduously sifting through all crusts of earth from sea floor to mountaintop: stasis, potentially punctuated by the appearance of new species, is what the data shows. The species remains significantly the same for all the long time of its existence, not turning slowly to some other form as anagenesis requires, but remaining the unique beast it always was from first to last, punctuated on special occasions in the record by the relatively sudden appearance of new, related forms.
Anyway, Gould makes his argument for the contentious concept of punctuated equilibrium and finds it serviceable enough in the final analysis. Well, it's his book, and I have no way of judging whether he's given short shrift to cogent arguments against the idea and all it entails for understanding natural selection, but even lacking a true grasp of all the terminology, still, I can see what he's driving at, and it all seems likely enough as far as I can tell —which distance isn't all that far into the matter, admittedly. I stumble along just next to the cartload of knowledge needed for comprehension of a lot of what Gould has to say. Here's an example:
Something's odd about this table. Look up at the top there where the abbreviated names of the geological ages go trundling across. See? SIL>|<DEV >|<CARB … Now, look below at the corresponding ages in millions of years down at the bottom.
I don't believe the Devonian age fell in the years indicated here, and I don't think the Silurian should even be mentioned in a table that only goes back 350 million years. So the data points on the chart, assuming they're being associated with the same Silurian and the Devonian everybody else means, are being compressed in some odd way that deforms the curve Gould points to repeatedly in his argument for punctuated equilibrium.
What's up with that? I fall short of knowing.
From time to time the gist of what I've brought away of the drift of the argument of scientists exposes some prior misapprehension of fundamental processes of nature on my part which has led me to entertain up to that point counterfactual suppositions about the the way things actually work, suppositions which must be sloughed off of course if the gist of what people who seem to know what they're talking about is to be entertained instead. But most often there is no prior misapprehension to contend with at all, since I lack prior thought on the matter brought to my attention by the discourse of scientists to begin with.
I find all this talk of evolution, for example, with its entailed stuff of natural selection, plausible enough. Much of what I've ever read about evolution was written by Stephen J. Gould, the late paleontologist and popularizer of science. His monthly essays for Nature magazine, collected over the years in a number of books, are a marvel of American literature, spinning out in an episodic way the history of the idea of evolution from its first bruiting about to its abrupt efflorescence in the work of Darwin and Wallace in the mid-1800's, and on even unto the contested fruit of the mature idea of it in our own present day.
Often enough Gould's essays recount stories of scientists whose ideas were influentially misconceived to begin with or influentially misrecieved by the intended audience when finally communicated, and all the bother entailed by either alternative. I just generally like this kind of story, and have been pleased to follow Gould's tellings even through the choking thicket of unavoidable terminologies that spring up everywhere in them, being stories of science and all.
My wife, noticing that I've collected most of Gould's popular writing over the years, bought me Punctuated Equilibrium for Father's Day. Many of the arguments made favoring the idea of punctuated equilibrium in that book are anchored in just the sort of unavoidable terminology that shows up in his writing for a general audience, except here, being an excerpt from an even more compendious attempt to summarize with some rigor the view of evolution he argues for in a book called The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, the unavoidable terminology is unceasing. It's in every paragraph.
Gould and his partner, Niles Eldridge, the fellow who actually had the idea of punctuated equilibrium but wisely left the writing of it up to Gould, published a famous paper in 1972 that set a good fundamental argument going in the natural sciences about the true shape of evolution.
Gould came up with the catchy phrase "punctuated equilibrium" to formalize the understanding of data collected over the last few centuries by paleontologists, data derived from all the rocks with remaining bits of evident forms of life stuck in them that have been exhumed from the ground and examined with the clever methodologies of the natural sciences over the years. Gould and Eldridge pointed out that paleontologists have always known, but until then never willingly brought up the crucial but widely recognized detail apparent to all those familiar with the fossil record: over the course of unimaginably long periods of time, most Metazoan species remain identifiably the same, they do not gradually turn into something else as those who do not know the fossils might suspect based on then-current understandings of the processes of natural selection.
The fossil record is a record of stasis with respect to speciation, according to the data of the paleontologists, who have catalogued and shelved a wide ranging if recognizably incomplete record in rocks of the prodigious variety of remains of living things down the ages stuck there in those rocks, confirming evidence of what once flourished and then faded into rock in profuse and lasting numbers over immensely long periods of time past, living things remaining fundamentally the same over all those vast lengths of time, and leaving fundamentally similar remains all the while. Very occasionally these periods of recorded stasis are punctuated by the appearance of new, related species. Gould and Eldridge proposed that this model, the model of prolonged, potentially punctuated stasis, founded on what can be gleaned from an examination of the source material of paleontology, is an accurate model of how most species come to be, at least in the realm of the Metazoans, home to our own sweet species itself.
This claim sets up an interesting argument with people who's understanding of evolution is anchored in the standard evolutionary perception of incessant indifferent inexorable processes of natural selection working their gradual wiles, accumulating profound changes in populations in a species over time until those changes add up to something new, what Gould calls here gradualism: origin by "anagenesis."
And Gould acknowledges that in some clear cases anagenesis is exactly what the record shows, a species gradually transforming itself over some great length of time from one distinguishing shape and size to the next. But Gould submits that this is not the history of most species at all. Most species don't participate in any meaningful way in the self-improving gestures of anagenesis, but rather go on and on lounging around some mean of their own disposed values for millions upon millions of years until given some reason to cease.
Darwin himself had proposed, and subsequent evolutionists long accepted, that lack of overwhelming evidence for anagenesis in the remains was to be expected considering the incomplete record of geology, cutting off any contrary talk on the part of paleontologists about what was evident to them from what they'd managed to collect and analyze over the course of more than a century of assiduously sifting through all crusts of earth from sea floor to mountaintop: stasis, potentially punctuated by the appearance of new species, is what the data shows. The species remains significantly the same for all the long time of its existence, not turning slowly to some other form as anagenesis requires, but remaining the unique beast it always was from first to last, punctuated on special occasions in the record by the relatively sudden appearance of new, related forms.
Anyway, Gould makes his argument for the contentious concept of punctuated equilibrium and finds it serviceable enough in the final analysis. Well, it's his book, and I have no way of judging whether he's given short shrift to cogent arguments against the idea and all it entails for understanding natural selection, but even lacking a true grasp of all the terminology, still, I can see what he's driving at, and it all seems likely enough as far as I can tell —which distance isn't all that far into the matter, admittedly. I stumble along just next to the cartload of knowledge needed for comprehension of a lot of what Gould has to say. Here's an example:
 |
| I fall far short of understanding this |
Something's odd about this table. Look up at the top there where the abbreviated names of the geological ages go trundling across. See? SIL>|<DEV >|<CARB … Now, look below at the corresponding ages in millions of years down at the bottom.
I don't believe the Devonian age fell in the years indicated here, and I don't think the Silurian should even be mentioned in a table that only goes back 350 million years. So the data points on the chart, assuming they're being associated with the same Silurian and the Devonian everybody else means, are being compressed in some odd way that deforms the curve Gould points to repeatedly in his argument for punctuated equilibrium.
What's up with that? I fall short of knowing.
November 01, 2007
Tectonic shift
My wife and I got cellphones this week. I'm of two minds about being instantly available by telephone, influenced in part I admit by my experience working the evening shift as a PBX operator in a Pacifica, CA medical center years ago. Ah, well. I was a poor choice for a bad job, in retrospect, and as the telephone played a necessarily central role in the work, I've been for some time leery of reengaging the technology I failed so miserably those many years ago.
It was my poor adaptation to the irreducibly interruptive nature of the job of switchboard operator that made a ruin of my work there, I admit. There I'd be in the little closed parenthesis of a receptionist's cubicle in the post-office hours medical building making my $1.65 an hour. Upstairs there were the patients in a long term care facility, and out there were the people in the world who might want to talk to them, and of course the doctors on call out on the town at some fancy restaurant or other, I the one standing in the way of these people having the same instant telephonic connection with one another as that enjoyed with the whole world by everyone with a pocket to spare for a mobile phone these days.
Suddenly, arbitrarily, there'd come a call. Interrupting my credulous coursing through Nietschze as translated by Kauffman, I'd turn to the PBX machine and see if I couldn't deflect the interruption quickly along its proper path, some relative connected to an old one housed upstairs, some plaintive patient seeking a soothing something from a doctor.
At the time my underdeveloped ability to constantly initiate a new task in the midst of another, to be torn suddenly from whatever it was I was about to attend to, to some intruding new unscheduled something or other, often enough resulted in the incompletion of one or both of the tasks in the event. Before long, in the face of successive failures in this regard, an unwillingness to be interrupted in my reading grew like a carapace around the body of my work at the PBX, benefiting no one, it must be acknowledged.
I recognize the utility of immediate telephone contact encased in this compact little tool of a mobile phone, and the concievable but unlikely to be utilized utility of the text messages and photographs it makes possible, too. But I drag along with me my unwillingness to hear the interruptive phone ring at all, an abreaction developed to a fine if unhelpful sensitivity at that job long ago.
Along with the mobile phones, we were delivered an earthquake this past week. It lasted suprisingly long, the land rolling under our house in Santa Cruz for nearly 20 seconds after the initial jolt that announced it. I immediately wondered where it was centered. For all intents and purposes the quake in 1989 along the transverse section of the San Andreas Fault that passes through the northern part of Santa Cruz County was centered directly underneath our house, but I guessed that this week's earthquake wasn't so local, wondering as it went on if what we were experiencing wasn't the distant report of the dramatic lurch of the Hayward Fault everyone recognizes must come some day.
We had no damage, and except for the framed print of this image, which fell harmlessly from a bookshelf onto the ironing board below, nothing was dislodged by all the earthquake's extended roiling.
It didn't occur to me to use my new mobile phone, which, as it turns out, would have been useless in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.
It was my poor adaptation to the irreducibly interruptive nature of the job of switchboard operator that made a ruin of my work there, I admit. There I'd be in the little closed parenthesis of a receptionist's cubicle in the post-office hours medical building making my $1.65 an hour. Upstairs there were the patients in a long term care facility, and out there were the people in the world who might want to talk to them, and of course the doctors on call out on the town at some fancy restaurant or other, I the one standing in the way of these people having the same instant telephonic connection with one another as that enjoyed with the whole world by everyone with a pocket to spare for a mobile phone these days.
Suddenly, arbitrarily, there'd come a call. Interrupting my credulous coursing through Nietschze as translated by Kauffman, I'd turn to the PBX machine and see if I couldn't deflect the interruption quickly along its proper path, some relative connected to an old one housed upstairs, some plaintive patient seeking a soothing something from a doctor.
At the time my underdeveloped ability to constantly initiate a new task in the midst of another, to be torn suddenly from whatever it was I was about to attend to, to some intruding new unscheduled something or other, often enough resulted in the incompletion of one or both of the tasks in the event. Before long, in the face of successive failures in this regard, an unwillingness to be interrupted in my reading grew like a carapace around the body of my work at the PBX, benefiting no one, it must be acknowledged.
I recognize the utility of immediate telephone contact encased in this compact little tool of a mobile phone, and the concievable but unlikely to be utilized utility of the text messages and photographs it makes possible, too. But I drag along with me my unwillingness to hear the interruptive phone ring at all, an abreaction developed to a fine if unhelpful sensitivity at that job long ago.
Along with the mobile phones, we were delivered an earthquake this past week. It lasted suprisingly long, the land rolling under our house in Santa Cruz for nearly 20 seconds after the initial jolt that announced it. I immediately wondered where it was centered. For all intents and purposes the quake in 1989 along the transverse section of the San Andreas Fault that passes through the northern part of Santa Cruz County was centered directly underneath our house, but I guessed that this week's earthquake wasn't so local, wondering as it went on if what we were experiencing wasn't the distant report of the dramatic lurch of the Hayward Fault everyone recognizes must come some day.
We had no damage, and except for the framed print of this image, which fell harmlessly from a bookshelf onto the ironing board below, nothing was dislodged by all the earthquake's extended roiling.
It didn't occur to me to use my new mobile phone, which, as it turns out, would have been useless in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.
October 29, 2007
On the omnipresence of limited abilities
The system-wide spelling checker now does grammar too. Bad grammar gets a green underline instead of red.
It's not the most robust grammar checker in the world—for example, it thinks "This are good" is perfectly fine—but like the spelling checker, its omnipresence makes up for its limited abilities.
— from John Siracusa's exhaustive review of the newly updated Macintosh operating system, OSX 10.5, at ars technicha
Over at Language Log, Geoffrey Pullum, who is an actual bespoke linguist and therefore to my mind entitiled to go on about such things, says a few brisk things about computer grammar checkers. He quotes Jason Snell approvingly:
"… Grammar Check—at last, the most useless feature ever added to Microsoft Word has been added to Mac OS X! With this feature, an infinite number of monkeys will analyze your writing and present you with useless grammar complaints while not alerting you to actual grammatical errors because computers don't understand grammar. Sure, it sounds great on a box—or a promotional Web site—but anyone who knows, knows that grammar checking is a sham. Just say no."
In his review John Siracusa says the grammar checker's omnipresence makes up for its limited abilities, but this can't be the measure against which he judges all poor tools. Just because it's nearby doesn't make up for anything if it can't do the job right. And now the grammar checker, which in this case is a grammar checker not even as robust as the common run of them so roundly denounced by Mr. Snell above, is just that: ubiquitous, now capable of interposing its errant stuff anywhere the Macinosh user might care to sneak off to and write a bit of something.
Mr. Siracusa has a comprehensive knowledge of the Macintosh operating sysem in all its bewildering modern-day complexity, as his review demonstrates, and on any number of abstruse issues affecting the coding of the thing he has firm opinions that are well beyond my ability to follow. But I think I equal and perhaps surpass him in my experience with poor tools. Generally, having them at hand only increases the inevitable mischief they'll work.
October 28, 2007
October 27, 2007
From the files of the Bureau of Lost or Stolen Appellations: The case of the loosed word
From the invaluable Silva Rhetoricæ created by Professor Gideon O. Burton of BYU:
In the case of the indicated Simon, the name did not cease with the disease, but carried its baggage of significances forward with each new utterance, extending by ampliatio the allowed reference to the now no longer existent condition. Simon is not a leper, but he remains Simon the leper by ampliatio.
Additionally, as confimed in private email by Professor Gideon O. Burton himself, whose judgement goes unquestioned here at the Bureau, ampliatio can also serve a word back along the arrow of time into a past that happened well before the name itself was first brought up.
Thus, in saying, "Reptiles roaming Montana all those many years ago were the famous dinosaur kind of reptiles, as shown by the bone," a little ampliatio issues out of Montana, casting the word back, a made word, Montana, the newly acceptable something or other to call the indicated American place in the late nineteenth-century hurley-burley of its approaching statehood, ampliatio in our example casting the new name made for the new made state comprehensibly back into a past before that name obtained, and then dragging forward the meaning of Montana made there to suit the needs of saying "Reptiles roaming Montana all those many years ago were the famous dinosaur kind of reptiles, as shown by the bone."
Useful stuff, ampliatio. It allows for the application of the appellation along the termporal plane, the word tossed comprehensibly forward and back along the time line measured from the word's first use, leaving the messy analysis of all the other wanderings of word meanings to all your other tools.
Naturally in an effort to reduce the work flow here at the Bureau to a mangeable stream much of our attention over the years has been directed toward separating out as early as practicable in the application process those cases involving the loosed name, which are properly referred to the Ampliatio Work Group (which has operated semi-independently and only nominally under the direction of the Effectuator for some years now), rather than the lost or stolen name which is our own specialty here at the Bureau. The pre-application interview is meant to redirect such cases, but no system is perfect, and sometimes we find ourselves well along the path of processing a claim before it's discovered to everyone's annoyance that it was the loosed name not the lost or stolen one that was in question all along, the client having taken on advertently or not some appellation that cannot fail to be carried forward or now tossed back at the whim of the ampliatio engendered by it. As that which is left of the past word brought forward is so hard to lose, and what's sent back in time by the new made name can hardly be stolen from a past it never had, it's difficult to see how the resources of the Bureau, such as they are, can be of any help in these cases, but this fact is lost on many prospective clients.
/p.r.
Secretary to the Deputy Effectuator
Bureau of Lost or Stolen Appellations
WAAGNFNP (ret.)
ampliatio ampliatio am'-pli-a'-ti-o
from Lat. amplio, "to extend"
adjournment, an old name for a new thing
Using the name of something or someone before it has obtained that name or after the reason for that name has ceased. A form of epitheton.
Examples
Even after the man was healed from his ailment by Jesus, he was still referred to as "Simon the leper."
In the case of the indicated Simon, the name did not cease with the disease, but carried its baggage of significances forward with each new utterance, extending by ampliatio the allowed reference to the now no longer existent condition. Simon is not a leper, but he remains Simon the leper by ampliatio.
Additionally, as confimed in private email by Professor Gideon O. Burton himself, whose judgement goes unquestioned here at the Bureau, ampliatio can also serve a word back along the arrow of time into a past that happened well before the name itself was first brought up.
Thus, in saying, "Reptiles roaming Montana all those many years ago were the famous dinosaur kind of reptiles, as shown by the bone," a little ampliatio issues out of Montana, casting the word back, a made word, Montana, the newly acceptable something or other to call the indicated American place in the late nineteenth-century hurley-burley of its approaching statehood, ampliatio in our example casting the new name made for the new made state comprehensibly back into a past before that name obtained, and then dragging forward the meaning of Montana made there to suit the needs of saying "Reptiles roaming Montana all those many years ago were the famous dinosaur kind of reptiles, as shown by the bone."
Useful stuff, ampliatio. It allows for the application of the appellation along the termporal plane, the word tossed comprehensibly forward and back along the time line measured from the word's first use, leaving the messy analysis of all the other wanderings of word meanings to all your other tools.
Naturally in an effort to reduce the work flow here at the Bureau to a mangeable stream much of our attention over the years has been directed toward separating out as early as practicable in the application process those cases involving the loosed name, which are properly referred to the Ampliatio Work Group (which has operated semi-independently and only nominally under the direction of the Effectuator for some years now), rather than the lost or stolen name which is our own specialty here at the Bureau. The pre-application interview is meant to redirect such cases, but no system is perfect, and sometimes we find ourselves well along the path of processing a claim before it's discovered to everyone's annoyance that it was the loosed name not the lost or stolen one that was in question all along, the client having taken on advertently or not some appellation that cannot fail to be carried forward or now tossed back at the whim of the ampliatio engendered by it. As that which is left of the past word brought forward is so hard to lose, and what's sent back in time by the new made name can hardly be stolen from a past it never had, it's difficult to see how the resources of the Bureau, such as they are, can be of any help in these cases, but this fact is lost on many prospective clients.
/p.r.
Secretary to the Deputy Effectuator
Bureau of Lost or Stolen Appellations
WAAGNFNP (ret.)
October 20, 2007
Becoming Resigned
Sat Oct 20, 5:27am
TEHRAN(AFP, via Yahoo! News)- Iran's top negotiator on its controversial nuclear programme, Ali Larijani has resigned, the state news agency IRNA reported on Saturday, quoting the Islamic republic's government spokesman.
[…]
Elham added that Iran's meeting with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana will go ahead "as scheduled with the new head of supreme national security council," which was headed by Larijani as his official title.
[…]
Despite several meetings during the past year, Larijani and Solana have not overcome the deadlock over Tehran's refusal to suspend its sensitive uranium enrichment activities.
[…]
The West, led by the United States, believes that Iran's nuclear programme is cover for a drive to develop an atomic bomb, but Tehran insists it is for civilian objectives only.
If Iran wishes to transform itself now from an oil-producing economic power to an electrical-energy producing economic power by way of nuclear energy, then this is certainly the time to do it, while Iran's diminished supply of oil is still raking in huge amounts of cash that can be spent on such a far-sighted transformation.
In the years since the invasion of Iraq by the United States, the price of oil has risen from near $50 a barrel to nearer $90, lots of that profitable rise making its way into the Iranian economy. With all that money sloshing around in a system that is formally closed off in certain directions by international sanctions, things cost more in Iran over time. The cost of living there increases inexorably, and the general attitude so acutely labelled social unrest becomes intrinsic to all those increasingly unable to afford to live there at all.
If the belief on the part of the West, led by the United States, that "Iran's nuclear programme is cover for a drive to develop an atomic bomb" is a belief fueled by the incorrigible foriegn policy fantasies of the Bush Administration, then it is unlikely to be true in any meanigful sense, or, believed in one way or the other by anyone speaking for the Bush Administration on the matter, each of whom I personally suspect of having their own reasons for making any claim.
"Head of supreme national security council" is the official title of the position Mr. Larijani held until his resignation, according to the report by AFP. Perhaps there's a more acute translation of Mr. Larijani's job title; however it's said, introducing the blunt granduer of "supreme" into the mention of any arbitrary government job is not an uncommon move. Evidently this is the case in Iran, where millennia of government jobs have experienced the inflationary effect of introducing progressively more exalted terms for what was commonly called something else before, to the point where the significance of "supreme" itself, the logical end of such inflation, becomes deflated by regular use, and only the degree of utter generality expressed by the rest of the job title can lift it back up. The more general the rest of the title, the greater the degree of supremacy being claimed by its owner.
Mr. Larijani was given a portentious and succinct title, and a job he tried to resign from many times.
He mentioned on Wednesday that Vladimir Putin had floated a proposal to break the deadlock in the crisis when he spoke with supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during his visit to Iran earlier in the week.
On Friday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the Fars News Agency there was no nuclear proposal.
It's not clear where President Ahmadinejad got this idea, which contadicts what Mr. Laijani said just a few days before. Perhaps he was told to say it by supreme leader Ayatollah Khomenei for some reason. Maybe Putin asked him to say it. Or maybe he just came up with it on his own.
At any rate, Mr. Lijani is out, and Mr. Solana, who is tasked with reporting back by mid-November to a consortium of nations including Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and the United States on Iran's willingness to forswear its uranium enrichment program, is left with no one to dance with at the present time.
October 19, 2007
Continuing on with the rice for hungry people
I constructed a game from the quiz found at freerice.com, as discussed in the preceding post here at the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal).
It would probably be best to read that previous post to get a sense of what the freerice quiz is about, but as for the the description of the game made from it, the statement above is unexceptional. The participant's vocabulary is tested. All who can play to Level 50 and out in thirty minutes time, do, and are discharged from the game. The remainder flounder about for half an hour accumulating more and more correct answers along their longer path to the unachieved goal, Level 50 and out, and then they stop.
The more correct answers necessary to arrive at level 50 and then out, the better for the hungry people waiting on their rice, since correct answers instantly translate into grains of rice for hungry people by the rules of the game.
So best play in this game would be to play for the entire thirty minutes, accumulating scads of correct answers, but choosing some errant definition of the word given in the quiz from time to time instead of plowing with a perfect string of correct answers directly toward the inevitable moment of exit from Level 50 and from the game, an inevitability foretold by languagehat's experience with the quiz and my own.
No one knows all the words. No one knows all the words in the list of them in Level 50 of the quiz, and few know all the words in the list of them in Level 49, and only slightly more know all the words in the list in Level 48.
The path of best play is the longest path that doesn't quite arrive at Level 50, but that extends all the way to the end of the half hour, grabbing up as many correct answers as possible without ever reaching that state where one bad choice ends the game rather that prolongs it.
This game is left as an exercise for the reader.
Say you may test your vocabulary against however many words you can evaluate in thirty minutes time but must stop play if you fall from Level 50 (judging by languagehat's experience, you will). With best play, how many grains of rice can you accumulate for hungry people?
It would probably be best to read that previous post to get a sense of what the freerice quiz is about, but as for the the description of the game made from it, the statement above is unexceptional. The participant's vocabulary is tested. All who can play to Level 50 and out in thirty minutes time, do, and are discharged from the game. The remainder flounder about for half an hour accumulating more and more correct answers along their longer path to the unachieved goal, Level 50 and out, and then they stop.
The more correct answers necessary to arrive at level 50 and then out, the better for the hungry people waiting on their rice, since correct answers instantly translate into grains of rice for hungry people by the rules of the game.
So best play in this game would be to play for the entire thirty minutes, accumulating scads of correct answers, but choosing some errant definition of the word given in the quiz from time to time instead of plowing with a perfect string of correct answers directly toward the inevitable moment of exit from Level 50 and from the game, an inevitability foretold by languagehat's experience with the quiz and my own.
No one knows all the words. No one knows all the words in the list of them in Level 50 of the quiz, and few know all the words in the list of them in Level 49, and only slightly more know all the words in the list in Level 48.
The path of best play is the longest path that doesn't quite arrive at Level 50, but that extends all the way to the end of the half hour, grabbing up as many correct answers as possible without ever reaching that state where one bad choice ends the game rather that prolongs it.
This game is left as an exercise for the reader.
October 18, 2007
A nutritious game
Every time your browser loads a page that has an advertisement on it, the server out there on the internet that hosts the page registers a page hit, one of the metrics used to determine how much an advertiser pays the page's owner for publishing that ad. Here's a site that turns page hits into advertising dollars into grains of rice to feed hungry people.
If lots and lots of people visit freerice.com, the page hits pile up. The advertisers at the free rice site have been persuaded to fork over the equivalent of a few extra grains of rice for each additional page hit registered by the participants in the site's vocabulary quiz, who, if my experience is any measure, will click and click and click away at the suggested definitions, piling up the page hits and the grains of rice for hungry people, until running out of words after thirty minutes or so. Any site that can sustain the presence of an individual reader for thirty minutes at a stretch is a marvel in this age, prized by advertisers for the good chance that their pitch will be noticed if repeated over and over as the page hits mount.
I ran into the site by way of languagehat, who pointed to a Metafilter thread where freerice.com had been discussed, and mentioned that he'd reached the score of fifty.
After about twenty-five minutes I was able to reach Level 50, staying there just long enough to click on the wrong definition of the very next word and falling immediately back down to Level 49. But still, even if it was an outlier I took some pleasure in reaching at least once that territory where languagehat roams so freely, and at some point in the twenty-five minutes I realized that would be the goal, to get to Level 50 and see how long I last and stop.
The quiz is straightforward: a word is served up with four possible meanings. The participant clicks on the suspected meaning and moves on to the next page, where the choice is scored, and a further word offered up. With a series of correct answers the participant ascends to the next level until Level 50 is reached. With a wrong answer, the participant is demoted to a lower level. The quiz words are given in ascending order of obscurity, with Level 50 containing words that are almost never reached for and Level 51 presumably containing words that are never encountered at all.
Anyhow, I played the quiz simultaneously in two browser windows. I did middling in the right hand window, where I started off with a bad go and took some time getting back up into the 40's, though in the process found that I was actually accumulating a lot more rice for hungry people in that quiz than in the quiz in the left-hand browser, where I was relatively error free and rose through the levels without a lot of backtracking. Every time I fell from and then regained Level 43 in the right-hand window the slog back up to 43 was rewarded with its additional grains of rice, so that by the time I reached Level 50 in the quiz on my left I had actually managed to accumulate 50% more rice for hungry people in the quiz on my right, 1200 grains or so to 800 something.
This is a curious result. I failed more often in the right hand window, but that quiz was more productive. Because I took a much longer path to Level 48 it required many more correct answers to get there than it did to reach Level 48 in the left-hand quiz, and as the correct answers accumulated on the right, so did the grains of rice for hungry people.
Say you may test your vocabulary against however many words you can evaluate in thirty minutes time but must stop play if you fall from Level 50 (judging by languagehat's experience, you will). With best play, how many grains of rice can you accumulate for hungry people?
If lots and lots of people visit freerice.com, the page hits pile up. The advertisers at the free rice site have been persuaded to fork over the equivalent of a few extra grains of rice for each additional page hit registered by the participants in the site's vocabulary quiz, who, if my experience is any measure, will click and click and click away at the suggested definitions, piling up the page hits and the grains of rice for hungry people, until running out of words after thirty minutes or so. Any site that can sustain the presence of an individual reader for thirty minutes at a stretch is a marvel in this age, prized by advertisers for the good chance that their pitch will be noticed if repeated over and over as the page hits mount.
I ran into the site by way of languagehat, who pointed to a Metafilter thread where freerice.com had been discussed, and mentioned that he'd reached the score of fifty.
…As you get words right, you move up to higher levels; the highest is Level 50, and I've managed to stay there for fairly long periods... but then they stump me with a word like nisus (yes, I should have studied harder in Latin class) and I drop back down.
After about twenty-five minutes I was able to reach Level 50, staying there just long enough to click on the wrong definition of the very next word and falling immediately back down to Level 49. But still, even if it was an outlier I took some pleasure in reaching at least once that territory where languagehat roams so freely, and at some point in the twenty-five minutes I realized that would be the goal, to get to Level 50 and see how long I last and stop.
The quiz is straightforward: a word is served up with four possible meanings. The participant clicks on the suspected meaning and moves on to the next page, where the choice is scored, and a further word offered up. With a series of correct answers the participant ascends to the next level until Level 50 is reached. With a wrong answer, the participant is demoted to a lower level. The quiz words are given in ascending order of obscurity, with Level 50 containing words that are almost never reached for and Level 51 presumably containing words that are never encountered at all.
Anyhow, I played the quiz simultaneously in two browser windows. I did middling in the right hand window, where I started off with a bad go and took some time getting back up into the 40's, though in the process found that I was actually accumulating a lot more rice for hungry people in that quiz than in the quiz in the left-hand browser, where I was relatively error free and rose through the levels without a lot of backtracking. Every time I fell from and then regained Level 43 in the right-hand window the slog back up to 43 was rewarded with its additional grains of rice, so that by the time I reached Level 50 in the quiz on my left I had actually managed to accumulate 50% more rice for hungry people in the quiz on my right, 1200 grains or so to 800 something.
This is a curious result. I failed more often in the right hand window, but that quiz was more productive. Because I took a much longer path to Level 48 it required many more correct answers to get there than it did to reach Level 48 in the left-hand quiz, and as the correct answers accumulated on the right, so did the grains of rice for hungry people.
Say you may test your vocabulary against however many words you can evaluate in thirty minutes time but must stop play if you fall from Level 50 (judging by languagehat's experience, you will). With best play, how many grains of rice can you accumulate for hungry people?
October 10, 2007
October 09, 2007
A Hardly Strictly Followup
Sunset behind the Star Stage on Sunday at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco.
That white-haired fellow on the right is Del McCoury, singing Richard Thompson's Vincent Back Lightning, just as he does in this video, except right there live in front of a few thousand people in Golden Gate Park's Lindley Meadow, deftly transporting the crowd and Thompson's song all the way to Kentucky by way of Bluegrass.
I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of people showed up for the festival this year. Many hundreds of thousands, I'm guessing. Most likely plenty attended all three days, as we did.
Earlier on Sunday I entertained the passing thought than John Langford would induce a heart attack in himself with all his vigorous prancing around the stage as the rest of the Mekons sang a chorus of "this is the end, this is the end," as shown here:
Jeff Tweedy played a remarkably long and engaging solo set to close the show on Friday night. Friday is the only day on which the Festival uses just the one stage. Saturday and Sunday's shows are spread out over five, and there's more good music than one ear can possibly entertain going on all at once all weekend long on those five stages.
Los Lobos played a sizzling set to close out Saturday's show on the Star Stage, preceded by my wife's favorite of the weekend, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, with Victor Wooten and Futureman himself, just like in the old days.
So what if we missed Jorma and the Austin Lounge Lizards and Steve Earl and Robert Earl Keen and Ricky Skaggs and Boz Skaggs, and David Grissman and Marley's Ghost and Gillian Welch and James McMurtry and The Flatlanders and Nick Lowe and the New Lost City Ramblers?
What the hey. We heard more than our fare share of good music anyhow.
Here's a picture of Warren Hellman, the originator of this million dollar bash, wrestling with his banjo, joined by Ron Thomason of the Dry Branch Fire Squad and the fine fiddler Heidi Clare.
That white-haired fellow on the right is Del McCoury, singing Richard Thompson's Vincent Back Lightning, just as he does in this video, except right there live in front of a few thousand people in Golden Gate Park's Lindley Meadow, deftly transporting the crowd and Thompson's song all the way to Kentucky by way of Bluegrass.
I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of people showed up for the festival this year. Many hundreds of thousands, I'm guessing. Most likely plenty attended all three days, as we did.
Earlier on Sunday I entertained the passing thought than John Langford would induce a heart attack in himself with all his vigorous prancing around the stage as the rest of the Mekons sang a chorus of "this is the end, this is the end," as shown here:
Jeff Tweedy played a remarkably long and engaging solo set to close the show on Friday night. Friday is the only day on which the Festival uses just the one stage. Saturday and Sunday's shows are spread out over five, and there's more good music than one ear can possibly entertain going on all at once all weekend long on those five stages.
Los Lobos played a sizzling set to close out Saturday's show on the Star Stage, preceded by my wife's favorite of the weekend, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, with Victor Wooten and Futureman himself, just like in the old days.
So what if we missed Jorma and the Austin Lounge Lizards and Steve Earl and Robert Earl Keen and Ricky Skaggs and Boz Skaggs, and David Grissman and Marley's Ghost and Gillian Welch and James McMurtry and The Flatlanders and Nick Lowe and the New Lost City Ramblers?
What the hey. We heard more than our fare share of good music anyhow.
Here's a picture of Warren Hellman, the originator of this million dollar bash, wrestling with his banjo, joined by Ron Thomason of the Dry Branch Fire Squad and the fine fiddler Heidi Clare.
October 05, 2007
How News Breaks
Chris Matthews speaking at a bash celebrating the 10th Anniversary of Hardball, declared he wanted to make some news with his remarks, and went on to chide the Bush Administration for trying to influence the editorial content of his show, something that had never happened under Clinton.
"They've finally been caught in their criminality," Matthews said, although what exactly led to this conclusive apprehension on the part of Matthews he left unstated, allowing the listener to assume any one of the most recent examples of the Administration's depredations for whatever Matthews meant by that. And in fact, this is a nefarious crew, the Bush Administration, with a laundry list of possible referents.
He was speaking before a crowd of people including Alan Greenspan, Ted Kennedy, his pundit colleagues Andrea Mitchell and Tim Russert and a bunch of MNBC/MSNBC brass, according to examiner.com.
I think a lot of people caught on about this Administration's criminality from the very first, making Matthews's use of the word "finally" seem past due from him, coming from someone who's expected to be up on news from Washington and all.
Everyone already knows about the assaults on Social Security and on science and about Katrina and torture and the spying in on everyone everywhere in defense against fearful terror.
Somehow Matthews didn't catch that part until now, or saw no reason to share his insight long after instances of malign behavior in all these various venues had permanently convinced a vast majority of Americans that the President was a wrongheaded dolt whose polices must no longer be entertained. In public polls, Bush's raw approval rating has remained in the low thirties for more than a year now for all the reasons people have for disapproving of the bad job he's doing so willfully. Matthews, inchoate before his pundit peers, finally comes around.
Today President Bush said once again, "…we don't torture."
This is political speech, and protected under the First Amendment. He's the President, and he can say anything he wants and there's really nothing to do for it. It's in the Constitution.
He can say over and over again for all the reasons it would be politic to do so, including self-incrimination, that the United States doesn't engage in torture, and of course that's allowed. It is not by any measure true, howevermuch the definition of torture is worked over in the back rooms of the Justice Department and the White House to suit Bush's usage.
Chris Matthews may or may not report that the President gave a strong defense of the Administration's detention policies today; somebody will, if only on Fox News.
"We stick to U.S. law and international obligations," the President said, selecting his words.
There is an ocean of news of criminal torture breaking against the rock-ribbed shore of political speech pronounced by Bush today. But then again, maybe Chris Matthews was talking about something else.
October 04, 2007
Mr. Hellman's Fine Spread
Each year on the first weekend in October, on one side of the City of San Francisco you have your Fleet Week ceremonies and celebrations, with their inevitable intrusions of Blue Angels all over the city's airspace , and on the other side of San Francisco, in Golden Gate Park, Mr. Waren Hellman's nice gift to the city, the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, which he foots the bill for like a perfect gentleman.
You can chose to go for free to Speedway or Lindley or Marx Meadow in the park this weekend, putting yourself in the near neighborhood of more good music than one ear can stand, thanks to Mr. Hellman. He's the fellow in profile with his arm resting against the spray bottle in the image above, sitting with his pals at this year's Strawberry Music Festival. He likes that kind of music, and he lavishes it on San Francisco each year.
The show runs from about noon to 7pm on five stages, and draws an enormous crowd to Golden Gate Park, as might be expected. A good portion of the crowd just won't sit down, but forms endlessy refreshed streams of strollers navigating their way between the five stages or to and from strategically placed port-a-potties or food stands, but for the most part the thousands and thousands of people who show up stake out some sedentary spot in the crowd at one stage or another and stick to it.
It's so good.
You can chose to go for free to Speedway or Lindley or Marx Meadow in the park this weekend, putting yourself in the near neighborhood of more good music than one ear can stand, thanks to Mr. Hellman. He's the fellow in profile with his arm resting against the spray bottle in the image above, sitting with his pals at this year's Strawberry Music Festival. He likes that kind of music, and he lavishes it on San Francisco each year.
The show runs from about noon to 7pm on five stages, and draws an enormous crowd to Golden Gate Park, as might be expected. A good portion of the crowd just won't sit down, but forms endlessy refreshed streams of strollers navigating their way between the five stages or to and from strategically placed port-a-potties or food stands, but for the most part the thousands and thousands of people who show up stake out some sedentary spot in the crowd at one stage or another and stick to it.
It's so good.
Think Thing
If you think that, you've got another think coming.
If you think that, you've got another thing coming.
Never once in the long years I'd assumed I was familiar with the phrase had I considered that the actual asserted value of x being offered in the common enough phrase you've got another x coming, might be the word "think." Not once.
"…another think?" I thought, when apprised of this a few years back. "Think? Really?"
Now and then I notice a brief eruption of controversy over which word is correct.
But for the most part I don't think about the thing at all. And if you think I might be swayed by one side of the argument or the other, well, …no. No, I am not swayed at all.
Because, you see, I've never used the phrase myself as near as I can recall. It's just not the way I talk to people.
If you think that, you're a fucking idiot.
Yes, yes, I've used that. And…
Do check your priors!
But not the thing with the think, no.
October 03, 2007
Earlier in the Quotidian
My brother lives in Washington near Gig Harbor. He called all of his siblings up to his house on the Key Peninsula for a weekend in August.
We went to Tacoma to see the Museum of Glass, centerpiece of the new downtown in Tacoma.
The Museum features an enormous breast-or-tilted-teepee-shaped cone of metal reminiscent of Tacoma's earlier use for its waterfront, as suggested by this image by Michael Hamilton.
The cone and the grounds around it and the attached Chihuly Brige of Glass command a vast amount of space along the Thea Foss Waterway just across from downtown, the Museum grounds connected to downtown just there by that bridge, the Museum grounds delivered to downtown by a wide stair winding around the base of the prominent cone of the museum and up to the bridge of glass and over the intersecting wide corridor of interstate highway and rail that sluices through the town there just like a river separating the two districts, nicely joined again by that happily placed bridge.
Inside the cone of the museum of glass the girders are visible. I have no idea what kind of metal is being used here. It could be alumino-titanium for all I know. Holds up quite well, whatever it is.
Here's what it looks like under the cone in the workspace where the glass is being made:
The one in the yellow shirt is leading the team. In the back you can see another similar glass being tended to while the torches get taken to the one fresh out of the oven.
Eventually the whole bunch of them attempt to join the two parts together:
The Museum shows how art glass is made (the work's progress can be followed from seats in the balcony above the workspace). The Museum shows off, too, some outcomes of all this glass making artistry with a modest number of items on display in its exhibit wing.
The untitled styrofoam cups of Chris Taylor (2005) update the Ballantine beer cans observed by Jasper Johns (1960) by thoroughly modernizing the material being observed. Here's the ubiquitous styrofoam cup, now, observed in art glass form, superceding the ubiquitous rolled sheet metal container of the commercially available stuff made by Ballantine and sold as beer commemorated in the painted bronze of Johns.
The two cups are curiously joined, as I see it.
The expanse taken up by the grounds of the Museum of Glass seems depopulated for a public space. Maybe this will change when the nearby inbuilding of urban apartment spaces is complete and the natural inclination to go somewhere nearby is established in the new residents of downtown Tacoma as they begin to flesh out the uses for such a space in their new city.
As yet the downtown neighborhood isn't densly populated enough to require quite so much space to spread out in, or renowned enough to make many travelers go to Tacoma on purpose and clog the place up on their own.
From the Chihuly Bridge of Glass it's just a short jog across the main street there downtown to stairs leading further up the hill and onto the campus of the University of Washington Tacoma, connecting the campus with the waterway by this broad pedestrian pathway, a pathway intersected on the main street by the trolley line running through downtown. This is a good and thoughtful design for an urban core minus the few hundred thousand people whose activities could easily be provided for in the space made available for them in Tacoma.
There are certainly enough people innately indifferent to weather to populate such an agreeable space as downtown Tacoma is now, now that the viscous air of the pulp mills of decades past has dissipated. Downtown Tacoma is a habitable enough space for those inclined at all towards urban living, always allowing for the inherent sogginess of the place.
We went to Tacoma to see the Museum of Glass, centerpiece of the new downtown in Tacoma.
The Museum features an enormous breast-or-tilted-teepee-shaped cone of metal reminiscent of Tacoma's earlier use for its waterfront, as suggested by this image by Michael Hamilton.
The cone and the grounds around it and the attached Chihuly Brige of Glass command a vast amount of space along the Thea Foss Waterway just across from downtown, the Museum grounds connected to downtown just there by that bridge, the Museum grounds delivered to downtown by a wide stair winding around the base of the prominent cone of the museum and up to the bridge of glass and over the intersecting wide corridor of interstate highway and rail that sluices through the town there just like a river separating the two districts, nicely joined again by that happily placed bridge.
Inside the cone of the museum of glass the girders are visible. I have no idea what kind of metal is being used here. It could be alumino-titanium for all I know. Holds up quite well, whatever it is.
Here's what it looks like under the cone in the workspace where the glass is being made:
The one in the yellow shirt is leading the team. In the back you can see another similar glass being tended to while the torches get taken to the one fresh out of the oven.
Eventually the whole bunch of them attempt to join the two parts together:
The Museum shows how art glass is made (the work's progress can be followed from seats in the balcony above the workspace). The Museum shows off, too, some outcomes of all this glass making artistry with a modest number of items on display in its exhibit wing.
The untitled styrofoam cups of Chris Taylor (2005) update the Ballantine beer cans observed by Jasper Johns (1960) by thoroughly modernizing the material being observed. Here's the ubiquitous styrofoam cup, now, observed in art glass form, superceding the ubiquitous rolled sheet metal container of the commercially available stuff made by Ballantine and sold as beer commemorated in the painted bronze of Johns.
The two cups are curiously joined, as I see it.
The expanse taken up by the grounds of the Museum of Glass seems depopulated for a public space. Maybe this will change when the nearby inbuilding of urban apartment spaces is complete and the natural inclination to go somewhere nearby is established in the new residents of downtown Tacoma as they begin to flesh out the uses for such a space in their new city.
As yet the downtown neighborhood isn't densly populated enough to require quite so much space to spread out in, or renowned enough to make many travelers go to Tacoma on purpose and clog the place up on their own.
From the Chihuly Bridge of Glass it's just a short jog across the main street there downtown to stairs leading further up the hill and onto the campus of the University of Washington Tacoma, connecting the campus with the waterway by this broad pedestrian pathway, a pathway intersected on the main street by the trolley line running through downtown. This is a good and thoughtful design for an urban core minus the few hundred thousand people whose activities could easily be provided for in the space made available for them in Tacoma.
There are certainly enough people innately indifferent to weather to populate such an agreeable space as downtown Tacoma is now, now that the viscous air of the pulp mills of decades past has dissipated. Downtown Tacoma is a habitable enough space for those inclined at all towards urban living, always allowing for the inherent sogginess of the place.
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