The optics

I managed to forget my glasses at home when I went to work today. I realized en route but the bus was coming at that point so I just decided to go with it. Wearing glasses for me is mostly to keep double vision at bay so I spent a lot of time closing this eye and then that one. Kind of annoying as opposed to fatal. Not likely to repeat the experience any time soon.

𓆙

Life is fascinating. Our lives? Sure, but that's not quite what I mean.

While snake's eyes don't look too much different from lizard's eyes, they function quite differently. For one thing, they don't have lids, where lizards have three. Their eyes are protected instead by a transparent lens. There are other differences as well, including the way the eyes focus.

And needless to say these eyes are different from just about any other land vertebrate. Why is that? Well, one should be humble when discussing evolution, since we don't see it and information is always changing. But it seems like when they split from lizards they moved largely underground and were nocturnal. Their eyes atrophied from lack of use. Then when conditions changed they re-evolved their visual systems, fulfilling many of the same purposes in different ways.

Absolutely filled with surprises.

How the west was

I read Max Brand's Destry Rides Again recently. I'll be available to talk about it, for some.

One of my reactions to the character of Harrison Destry was that this seems like a very unusual character for James Stewart to have played. Calling Destry's background "wild" would be a severe understatement.

What I've recently found out is that Stewart never played the role of Harrison Destry. Literally. The movie has a different plat from the book, and the character's given name was switched to Tom in the course of pre-production.

My honest guess is that Max Brand was a hot property, but the studios didn't think the character would work on film, perhaps because his being a cool-acting criminal would have upset the production code. The book had an actual adaptation a few years before, with Tom Mix in the lead. One of his few sound films.

backseatdriver.exe

Grammarly strikes me as an early version of the AI-powered chatbots that have been in the news lately. Or at least  a product of the same process. Both are canned, reflecting committee thinking in a depersonalized way.

Of course it's natural that such a technology would spread. A lot of people are required to write for their jobs and/or forms and applications, but don't consider themselves writers. Since they're not trying to express themselves, it's no surprise they're happy to delegate a lot of it to an app in their computer. Still, it's a simple way to get your work hijacked.

[appropriate emoji here]

Coagulopath has a particularly thorough deconstruction of a current phenomenon this week. Now I've never called anyone a "soyboy" and I don't plan to. At my age any such epithet would wound my dignity as much as his, probably more. But it's an interesting read nonetheless.

When he says this type of young man is "'woke' but a special kind of woke" I think that gets at this particular class and a lot more besides. The phrase "attention economy has come into high use in recent years. Attention is understood to be an increasingly rare resource. 

The great virtualizing of physical space, the reduction of everything to a few images and hashtags, the constant need to keep checking your phone to see if everything's changed: all this has created a very damaged kind of person. But they can take comfort in the fact that there's always a way to take that damage and grab more attention with it.

So that makes it all right? Questionable.

Είναι όλα ελληνικά για μένα.

I'm reading a book now called Plato Prehistorian, by Mary Settegast. True to its title, the book explores the possibility that events from Plato's books―which it's always been assumed he took from Greek mythology―were actually based on real events in what was already a distant past. Prehistoric, either because people involved hadn't developed writing yet, or they had but their writing was lost.

It's an interesting idea. The danger with this kind of investigation is that mythology and philosophy could get flattened down to a kind of historical reporting, purely utilitarian. But Settegast knows her stuff on the great epochs of the recent past. And she's got interesting ideas on what happened during the ice age. 

In the background

The laundromat I go to is basically mirrored. It's got top-load machines on opposite ends, front-loaders of increasing expense in the middle, driers running along the side. On one end of the store the TV is in English, on the other it's in Spanish. 

The last couple of times I've done my wash stayed mostly on the Spanish side. Why? Okay, since you asked.

It's hard not to be distracted by the TV if it's playing, even though I go with a book. It used to be that if you went early enough the soaps would be playing. But NBC canceled its last soap, Days of Our Lives, at the end of last year.

I've never been a soap follower, but these stagey dramas were their own little world, and benign overall. With the last one gone the timeslot has been handed over to news. And while there's nothing wrong with keeping the public informed, that's not what network news is there to do. I'm not sure it ever was, but especially not now.

On the Spanish side it's entertainment magazine-type shows and―yes, Virginia―telenovelas. People seem to be having a good time, at least, and there's not so much to bug me.

'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'.

We believe the science. The science tells us what to believe. And on like that.

Found through William M. Briggs is this story about Durham academic Peter Vickers and his plan to assess the truth of scientific theories through broad consensus. 

“Humanity has never had a way to measure reliably the opinion of the scientific community,” explained Professor Vickers, who claimed efforts to do so have been “small scale” and reliant on fewer than 2,000 responses. “We need a way to access scientific opinion on a large scale and internationally,” he added of the proposed Institute for Ascertaining Scientific Consensus.

I'd say this process sounds corruptible, but in all likelihood it is absolutely corrupt from the outset. We've had more than sufficient evidence over the past few years of how the role of experts is to tell the government what it wants to hear, and how experts who don't comply suddenly find themselves not experts anymore. The odds of this committee producing anything as beautiful and useful as a camel are nil.

This kind of easy and streamlined process for arriving at scientific consensus will produce a lot of definitive answers that―rightly―no one out side of a well-placed clique will believe. So why even bother with it? Patronage, I'd bet.

________ __________

 

A few years back I bought a two-CD best-of collection by Fairport Convention. The first CD has gotten some mileage on it. I've hardly listened to the second CD at all.

Part of the reason is that most of the first disc has Sandy Denny on lead vocals, with a few featuring her predecessor Judy Dyble. After Denny left the band continued until, well, the present day from what I understand, but as something of a sausage party.

Soon after Denny left they lost their guitarist Richard Thompson. And before any of this happened their drummer Martin Lamble died in a tragic van crash, not yet having reached the age of 20. 

I can respect the remaining members and a few new recruits for trying to keep it all going, but the later stuff just doesn't feel like it's for me.

Fake flakes

In my bathroom there's a window over the shower. Whenever it rains it looks like it's snowing out this window. Some combination of the warp and weft of the screen window over it and the bright streetlight on that side of the building.

It's very much raining right now. But it's not cold. 52° Fahrenheit. That's sure not cold for January. But look out this one window and you might think...

Hell, sometimes it looks like it's snowing when it's not doing anything outside.

Submitted for your approval...

Sometimes you read two pieces of writing within a fairly short period of time, and there's just something there. They might not be about the same subject, or in the same style. Maybe one is good and one...isn't. Yet still, the two are connected somehow. 

In this corner, an anxious plea from the pop culture virtue complex. Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans want, need, and of course deserve a new Buffy series, but they also want it untainted by creator Joss Whedon*. The idea is as absurd as Harry Potter unsullied by JK Rowling, but guess what? Some people want that, too. The article's author makes a fairly naked plea for Whedon to make some kind of deal to formally step aside so that such a show can go forward without benefiting him? But why on Earth would he do that? If my career had been destroyed by a whisper campaign I'd take pleasure where I could, and the angst of nerds who had decided to turn on me would definitely count.

In another corner we have an essay from Lionel Shriver on what's gone wrong in the raising of young people. As she notes, the idea of building character has become passé, and to some extent has taken the entire concept of learning with it. The child comes into the world knowing what it needs to know, all it will ever know. There's an echo of Rousseau in this, but in application it's led to a great deal of despair.

Minors don’t know anything, which is not their fault. We didn’t know anything at their age, either (and may not still), though we thought we did — and being disabused of callow, hastily conceived views and coming to appreciate the extent of our ignorance is a prerequisite for proper education. Yet we now encourage young people to look inward for their answers and to trust that their marvellous natures will extemporaneously reveal themselves. With no experience to speak of and no guidance from adults, all that many kids will find when gawking at their navels is pyjama fluff. Where is this mysterious entity to whose nature I alone am privy?

Here's how I see the connection between these two articles. Children as a rule have no chill. Maturation is a process of learning that there are still things you don't know and things you can't control. Turning a screenwriter into an idol and then devoting your waking hours to tearing him down indicates that these lessons haven't taken, and probably aren't welcome. But they must come.

* My aforementioned watch/rewatch of old Dick Van Dyke Show episodes actually put me onto this, as tonight I saw one that Whedon's grandfather John Whedon had written.

Look both ways before crossing

We're a little over a week into January. January was named after the Roman god Janus. I think I was in grammar school or middle school when I first found this out. But there are a few other things I either didn't know or hadn't thought of. 

Janus is a strictly Roman god, with no Greek equivalent. That's one of the things I hadn't really thought of, and it's interesting given the tendency for Roman mythology to come off as a gaudy foreign remake of Greek mythology. Apparently the Romans also believed that he was one of the first kings of Rome. If this is actually true it would provide an interesting point of similarity between the Romans and the Thracians, who also seem to have elevated some of their temporal leaders to godhood.

There's an intriguing suggestion that the worship of Janus continued during the Gothic wars, which were well after the Christianization of Rome, and even into the Middle Ages. Perhaps they looked to him for guidance during another time of great transitions.

Creativity: Not Even Once

Should authors stick to only writing characters who fit their own demographic categories? No, obviously not. That would be stupid. And yet some have landed in hot water because they haven't done this. 

So it's heartening to see author Zac Bissonnette give props to Jonathan Kellerman's Alex Delaware series, which also includes as a prominent character Milo Sturgis, a gay LAPD detective, despite Kellerman not being gay. Kellerman, who I confess to not having read, shows a wise attitude toward artistic practice in the interview. 

Not that I agree with everything Bissonnette writes here. He also states that, "The generation of crime writers who preceded Kellerman—Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler, and too many pulp novelists to name—often wrote books rife with misogyny and casual racism, to the point where they can be hard for a modern reader to get through." That would seem to indicate that I am not a modern reader. Which would explain a lot, now that I think of it.

Looking in the wrong place

Took a little time today to go back in time a little bit and read this story on what became known as the Covington Catholic incident. Although it didn't take place there, but in DC. For those paying attention―and I can't really say I did at the time―it was an early warning that the news media was not only falling short, but doing something very different from what its job should be. 

Some aspects of the case are very much of its time and of ours 3-4 years later. Particularly the way both protesters and the internet decided that a bunch of white teenagers from a Catholic school were the villains of the story even if they were mostly just trying to stay out of the way.

But there's a more long term pathology at work here as well. Now that cell phones are pretty much universally equipped with video cameras, anyone can take a video of anything at any time. And so a lot of people take advantage of this. But the broad tacit assumption is that video you take will show everyone that your subjective view is objectively right. It can't really do that, but once you try there are other people who will go along. Either to be polite or because their prejudices are similar to yours.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

 

While we're still having a bit of a mild spell, the calendar says we've still got most of winter ahead of us. So we may as well develop an appreciation for it.

The above painting is by Paul Gustav Fischer, a Danish artist of Polish-Jewish descent. The city depicted is Copenhagen. And it's lively. The people appear to be walking briskly, except for the lady pushing the cart. And while you want to be wearing a nice insulated pair of boots while walking in snow like that, Fischer also captures how it can highlight nice details, like the awnings over a store.