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Table of Contents
Off-the-Wall Ideas
Fuzzy Thoughts About
Big Questions
Sports Notes
Customer
Service Notes (venting in frustration)
Travel Notes
by Richard Seltzer
Book Notes
Web Notes by Richard Seltzer
Book Collections on CD
and DVD
Online Education
About Writing
Fiction
China, Japan, India, and the US are all now racing to put men on the moon by 2020. Unlike the first time around, the objective appears to be to establish permanent bases. That raises the question of how well man can cope long-term in the Moon’s reduced gravity. Man evolved on Earth to live in Earth gravity. A major long-term change in gravity could lead to serious problems related to bone mass, muscle tone, and even the function of internal organs.
The Moon’s gravity is about 1/6 that of Earth. So someone who weighs 180 lbs. on Earth would weigh just 30 lbs. on the Moon.
In science fiction, the usual solution for weightlessness is magnetic boots or a spinning space ship/space station (wherein centripetal force substitutes for gravity), or some kind of ”artificial gravity.” But none of those solutions would make sense on the surface of the Moon.
Could that be a barrier to man living on the Moon? Or might a low-tech workaround solve the problem?
Why not just add weight?
For instance, a 180 lb. astronaut (lunonaut?) could wear a suit weighing 900 lbs., bringing his/her total weight to 1080 lbs. in terms of Earth gravity, and 180 lbs. on the Moon.
Keep in mind that the extra weight need not be “dead weight.” It could include oxygen, water, and food; armor (to protect against such hazards as tiny meteors, high-speed space debris, cosmic rays, etc.); and high-tech gear that extends a person’s capabilities.
Are NASA and other scientists considering such a solution?
(I’m just an armchair speculator.)
.22 caliber bullets have been recalled.
The FDA has determined that they have lead content and hence could be harmful to small children if swallowed.
In related news, the FDA is asking for additional funding so it can test other bullets for lead content…
You’ve heard that 40 is the new 30.
Well, now 60 is the new 40.
And the back is the new clitoris…
Molecular biologists have long puzzled over why there is so much apparently meaningless code in human DNA.
The answer is simple.
It was written by Microsoft. (Patent pending).
From an ATM, you can do business with many different banks. Why shouldn’t you be able to do the same with tellers? Why should ever bank have to have its own local storefront? Why not allow the creation of banking agencies that handle the transactions of a variety of different banks? Aside from eliminating the need for so much brick-and-mortar, banking agencies could provide value-added services that no one provides today. Insurance agencies handle transactions with a variety of different insurance companies. And because of their relationship with those companies and their knowledge of their offerings, those agencies can provide advice on which is the best one for you for each of your different insurance needs, and you can get X from one and Y from another and Z from yet another, but only have to deal with a single agent.
Similarly, banking agencies could make it easy for you to do different pieces of your banking with different banks, and yet have a simple single-point way of accessing all those accounts (both face-to-face with a human agent/teller, and also online).
Are there laws that prevent the formation of businesses of this kind? And if there are, should they be changed?
Today’s cigarette filters are on the receiving end — between the cigarette and the mouth. But much of the bad effects of smoking — to the smoker and to those around — are from the smoke, which comes out the other end.
So why not design a filter for the smoking end? This could be a reusable plastic or metal gadget you put over the cigarette. It would have to allow air to enter so the tobacco could burn. And it would have to filter out all harmful substances before releasing what had been smoke to the air. It should eliminate the odor of smoke as well. And it could also shut down after some short but reasonable period of inactivity, smothering/extinguishing the burning, as a way to prevent fires.
If such gadgets existed, then it would make sense to allow people who use them to smoke in public places, since there would be no danger or even odor from second-hand smoke.
X plotted the perfect murder — he planted bogus but superficially convincing evidence so he would be arrested and tried, knowing the evidence would be overturned in court and he would be acquitted and then immune from prosecution for that crime because of double jeopardy. (cf. Witness for the Prosecution) He is dlighted when the police arrest him and is not at all surprised when they transport him to a lockup out of town “for his safety”.
But he has actually been arrested by vigilantes who stage an elaborate sting operation (cf. The Sting and The Game). They orchestrate everything from arrest to trial, leading to a bogus acquittal by a bogus judge and jury.
He then proudly confesses to the murder, boasting of his brilliance — in front of numerous witnesses and on videotape, and is promptly arrested for real.
I’m feeling nostalgic — thinking back to college days, when my roommate and I would talk all night, trying to make sense of the “big questions”, when we dared to stretch our imaginations on subjects that we knew little or nothing about, when we speculated as if we could arrive at useful answers, even “truth”, simply by thinking and speaking clearly.
Partly I’m a victim of our historical age. Today, for the most part, generalists are obsolete; and the advancement of “knowledge” is left to a multitude of specialists who don’t talk to specialists in other fields; and no one is in a position to pull the pieces together and see if they make sense as a whole.
Partly, I’m a victim of my personal age. With experience, I’ve become less and less sure about everything. And, as a result, most of what I think about and talk about and write about is practical, limited — basically petty; and the “big questions”, topics that matter, get no time or attention at all. Either I defer to the “experts” (in matters of science) or I presume that since the questions are unanswerable, it’s foolish to waste time even trying to answer them.
Well I prefer to be wrong and sound foolish, rather than remain silent. I want to stir up the old fire of imagination, and try to make the best sense I can out of issues dealing with the nature and purpose of life. I hope that by posting these notions on the Web and maybe distributing them by email, I can stir up discussion with old friends and make new friends, leading to new ideas and refinement/correction of old ones.
Please join me in daring to express your own “fuzzy” ideas.
Disclaimer — I don’t know what I’m talking about, but that won’t stop me from saying it.
According to Wikipedia, Occam’s Law boils down to “the explanation of
any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating
those that make no difference in the observable predictions
of the explanatory hypothesis or theory.” Or “All things being equal,
the simplest solution tends to be the best one.”
But that statement itself is an assumption — a huge one. And the fact that much of science since Occam came up with that in the 14th century is based on that puts much of science in doubt.
When Newton came out with his laws of gravity, following in Occam’s
footsteps, he presumed that those laws would apply not just for the Earth
or the solar system or the observable stars — but everywhere.
Yes, that is simple, beautifully simple. But is simplicity truth? Is
beauty truth? Does “truth” mean anything?
A hundred years ago, on “A Pluralistic Universe” William James speculated that reality isn’t necessarily neat or logical or predictable. Rather, the world we live in is messy and mixed up and full of surprises.
More recent books like “The Elegant Universe” and “The Fabric of the
Cosmos” by Brian Greene, “Warped Passages” by Lisa Randall, and “Parallel
Worlds” by Michio Kaku explain the many flavors of
string theory (successor to quantum theory, which was the successor
to relativity, which was the successor to Newtonian physics). Those books
deal with a multitude of bizarre possibilities, such as multiple
universes, multiple dimensions, dark matter, dark energy, and negative
gravity. They build on the notion that not just our senses but our reasoning
abilities reach limits as the scale goes down or up, far beyond
our normal experience. Our ability to make sense of the world around
us evolved. The result is very practical for everyday life. But we are
not very well equipped to understand what happens on scales
smaller than an atom, much less smaller than an electron, or scales
larger than a galaxy, much less multiple universes.
Given those insights, isn’t it time to seriously question the basic assumptions of science?
Far too often, great scientists have, like Occam and Newton, presumed
that the universe is simple and logical — as if designed by an omnipotent
creator. But why — aside from the aesthetic taste of Plato and
his contemporaries — should simplicity and logic be presumed to be
“beautiful” and the beautiful presumed to be true? Personally, I find complexity
fascinating. And I suspect that, at some level, reality is
“broken” and discontinuous.
In other words, the laws of physics that apply in our solar system and
in our galaxy may not apply elsewhere in the visible universe, much less
beyond; or may not be stable, and if they change, may not
change in ways that are predictable.
So what? Well consider Hubble’s Law. Wikipedia explains “the redshift
in light coming from distant galaxies is proportional to their distance.”
In other words, our calculations of the distances from Earth of
stars and galaxies are based on analysis of the light from those bodies
and on the assumption that the same laws of physics that apply here also
apply hundreds, thousands, and even millions of light years from
here. That’s an enormous assumption, with mind-boggling consequences.
If there are, in fact, discontinuities in reality and variations in basic
physical laws beyond our galaxy, then what scientists have
concluded about the size and nature and past and future of this universe
(much less other universes) is seriously in doubt.
Perhaps it’s time to question such assumptions and to explore the possibility that reality is very messy, and that complex answers may sometimes prove more useful and suggestive than simple ones.
Sometimes “inspiration” isn’t a matter of stimulating new ideas, so much as confirming and clarifying thoughts you had before. In my eclectic reading, I stumble upon a passage that feels “right” not as a discovery of something totally unexpected, but rather as a clear and cogent expression of what I already believed, but hadn’t paid enough attention to.
Such was the case recently with a passage from Boethius. Who reads sixth century Latin philosophers? Well, sending out a “free ebook of the week” motivates me to be on the look out for little known/little appreciated works from long ago. In prison, awaiting execution at the random whim of King Theodoric of Italy, Boethius tries to make sense of life. Infinity, eternity, and chance reduce everything we might do to total insignficance.
Those thoughts didn’t strike me as new — rather his starting point toward religious faith seemed very similar to the world view of Ecclesiastes or of Camus in “The Myth of Sisyphus”, and from which Camus went in a totally different direction, valuing the heroism of continuing to live and do what you feel is “right” even if you believe life is meaningless.
But at this stage of my life (having passed 60), that starting point triggered another kind of response.
The endeavor to try to understand the nature of everything is unending. That’s just another aspect of infinity/eternity — no single breakthrough, no individual contribution matters in the long run, because the process of discovery never ends. There’s never a moment when “THE ANSWER” is found. Every answer gives rise to new questions, which lead to new insights.
Yes, part of why we exist (presuming there is a “why”) must be to participate in some way in such overall human endeavors — trying to make the world a better place than we found it, trying to advance knowledge, or trying to help those who might some day do so.
But another very important role (one which becomes all the more important the older we get) is personal — striving to make personal sense of the world that we live in and our role in it. I will never understand the absolute nature of anything, but I can arrive at a personal undersanding — building context through reading and experience, making personal mind maps to help me recognize interrelationships and potential directions, arriving at personal answers to the “big questions”, answers that help me deal with day-to-day reality and arrive at a sense of fulfillment, so the ordinary tasks and challenges of life make sense to me in a self-built context.
From this personal perspective, infinity and eternity are positive, not negative. Every moment in time is the middle of all of time. And every point in space is in the middle of all of space. I, just like everyone else who has ever lived, stand at the center of the universe. Truth and meaning aren’t outside somewhere to be discovered. Rather one of your goals should be to build and find truth and meaning, in the fabric and context of your life.
In practical terms, this means that I need not read and strive to understand the works of every major philosopher and scientist and novelist. Rather (after having sampled widely) I read particular authors because their perspective and style feel right to me. Their thoughts make sense to me and stimultae similar follow-on thoughts of my own.
Yes, learning is important, but not in the sense of struggling through everything written by the great names, in hopes of catching a glimmer of what they discovered; but rather in the sense of a very personal quest, following your natural path toward an understanding of what really matters to you.
Please send me email if you have a comment/reaction or if you’d like me to add you to an email distribution list for such thoughts.
A couple weeks ago I woke up and saw three hoodlums with machetes walk through the outside wall of my second floor bedroom. I screamed uncontrollably, waking my wife. There was no “waking up” at that point. I was already awake. I had seen the “vision” while awake. It took a long, long while for my breathing and heart rate to slow down. In the process, it occurred to me that I had come close to being scared to death. That it occurred to me that maybe I had been “scared to life”. I have this irrational belief that we have complex self-regulating mechanisms, and that a “dream” like that (not an ordinary dream composed of images from everyday life, and not a recurring dream heavy with “symbolism”) — one that comes out of nowhere and that you see while awake or semi-awake and that seems to serve no other purpose but to frighten you — must have a purpose, must fill a necessary function. And since it’s immediate effect to a sudden heart beat and breathing, it could be an early-warning reaction to a heart or breathing problem.
Last week, when I had my annual checkup, I told my doctor. He laughed. He had never come across an instance of dreams as warnings of serious physical problems or as an unconscious first aid mechanism.
But I can’t help but wonder…
My wife, Barb, has two or three such visions a week — terrifying apparitions in a half-awake state, where she sees people (people she has never seen before) in the room with her, often approaching her. The visions never speak. Only rarely do they act in a threatening way. But each time she screams. I feel like the husband in the TV series “Medium”. But there is no communication of any kind, and nothing comes of it, and each time the images/apparitions are different (sometimes alone and sometimes in groups).
We joke about ghosts, about the house being haunted. (We periodically have bizarre occurrences around the house — for instance, ice cubes form in the freeze with tall thin spikes, like stalagmites in a cave. I posted a short silly item in my blog here, with photos, in hopes that somebody could explain waht was happening, but that got zero response.) http://www.samizdat.com/blog/?p=99 Then we took a short tourist trip to London, and the first night in the hotel room, Barb woke up screaming that there were three men sitting huddled and frightened on the floor in the corner. The next morning we found out that two hundred years before the pub next door had been the last stop for prisoners on their way to be hung at Tyburn. So if it’s ghosts she sees, it’s not a matter of the house being haunted, but rather of her sensitivity.
But that’s a digression… My night terror got me to thinking, as I had many times before, about self-regulating mechanisms; how from the perspective of you own individual life events take on special meaning that they would have to no one else — leading you to see the world in different ways and to live life differently.
Seven years ago, at the age of 54, I had a stroke. I was eating salad at the dining room table and suddenly the room began to spin. Soon I was so dizzy I couldn’t sit straight in my chair, even holding on, desperately to the arms of the chair; and I almost fell to the floor (my wife caught me). The next morning, sitting at my computer in my home office, I had another dizzy spell and fell again. Then I knew I had to call the doctor. An MRI showed a serious stroke. There was a large black area in the cerebellum. A neurologist concluded that vertebal artery on the left side was occluded. Very fortunately, I had no negative affects from the stroke. It was a wake-up call, a reminder of my mortality, a warning that if there was anything I really wanted to do, I’d better do it. After a month or so of heightened awareness, I simply went about my business as if it had never happened.
Last year, at my annual physical, my doctor informed me that I have “pre-diabetes”, that it was inevitable that I would get diabetes, but that with diet and exercise I could postpone the onset of the disease. That was another wake-up call. I made abrupt changes in what I ate and started walking/jogging 1-3 miles per day. Since then I’ve lost 30 pounds and my blood glucose levels now delight my doctor. But aside from the greater concern about my physical condition, I simply went about my business as usual.
So I now see that terrifying “vision” as a mental/moral wakeup call. If the obvious physical signs aren’t enough to get me going, then my unconscious will take over and scare me into life.
That’s what led me to start this series of “fuzzy” thoughts, trying to make sense of questions I’ve left unexamined for far too long.
And, now I realize that the experience itself is an affirmation of a basic fuzzy belief of mine — that as individuals and as a species self-regulating mechanisms come into play, pushing us toward balance and reason and compassion. And in that context, our worst experiences and our worst fears can help nudge us in the “right” direction, as if some force were trying to navigate a huge ship down a river, with the crudest of controls, a push this way, then push that way. Toward what goal?
(The following thoughts are based on nothing but speculation.)
1) Tanking the season gave the Celtics an opportunity to give the kids experience and showcase their abilities. When the Boston media discussed the situation, they always presumed that the Celtics were losing on purpose, or at least not putting their best team on the court, in hopes of getting the #1 or #2 draft pick. And when the luck of the lottery didn’t go their way, the media reacted as if disaster had struck — the team (or rather General Manager Danny Ainge) had gambled everything on getting a high draft pick, and had lost. But in retrospect, it looks like Ainge had a Plan B. Putting all those rookies on the court as often as the Celtics did over the last few months of the season greatly increased their trade value. In fact, that may have been Plan A — trade the kids and put together a new team built around Pierce and a couple of other All-Stars. Getting #1 or #2 in the draft would have simply given Ainge more to work with as he made the deals. He wasn’t really gambling. Rather he had a long-term strategy from the beginning of last year and maybe from the time he took over as GM — get very talented kids, give them lots of experience quickly, showcase them, then trade them away to put together a dream veteran team that should be good for about three years. And, of course, he wouldn’t tip his hand talking about this plan. Rather he would hammer away at how great these kids all, and how he’d never part with them — thereby raising their value.
2) Ainge and McHale probably had an agreement in principle long ago, even before the lottery. Boston sports reporters were caught off guard when Ainge quickly traded the disappointing draft pick for Ray Allen. All alone that deal seemed to make no sense. But if Ainge all along wanted to get Garnett, he had get past two hurdles: yes the Timberwolves (and his old friend and teammate Kevin McHale) had to agree on the deal, but Garnett had to agree as well. And, apparently, Garnett more than anything wanted to play for a serious contender. So Ainge needed Allen to make the case to Garnett that with the threesome of those two plus Pierce Boston would have great chances. If he got Allen and failed to get Garnett, he’d be left with a mess. So I’m guessing that Aigne was reasonably certain McHale would agree, and hence focused his attention on Garnett’s concerns.
While most football games are exciting up to the last minute, the outcomes of some become nearly certain when a three-point field goal would not be enough to tie.
I suggest creating a new category of field goal worth four points, instead of three.
You’d get the extra point for a field goal that is especially long — maybe 45 yards, maybe 50 yards — as measured from where the ball is kicked, rather than from the line of scrimmage. The four-point-line would be painted on the field, so the kicking team can deliberately and certainly set up to earn it.
This would add an exra element of strategy and excitement, like the two-point conversion in football and t he three-point shot in basketball. It would also increase the value of long-range place kickers.
If you happen to have connections with NFL management, please pass this suggestion along
What have the Patriots been doing? One week they play the Colts and shut down the most powerful offense in football. The next week they play the Steelers and score 41 points against the most powerful defense in football.
They keep winning and winning again, but in very different ways, adapting their style to match the strengths and weaknesses of their opponents.
What makes the difference? Extremely talented players? Incredible coaching?
I’m guessing that they have reinvented the game. That their style of play makes many of the old standard assumptions obsolete — including the concept of “parity.”
The NFL has prospered by making the strength of teams relatively equal, so any time could beat any other team on any given Sunday. They have done that primarily through the salary cap and the rules governing draft choices.
But the Patriots value players differently than the other teams in the NFL do. They have carefully assembled a set of very intelligent, flexible, well-prepared all-round football players, rather than a set of stars and specialists. Brady was a 199th draft pick. And they traded a second round draft pick for Corey Dillon. When this run began over a year ago, the Pats dropped their team captain and “star” defensive player Lawyer Malloy. He wouldn’t renegotiate his contract so the team could distribute the salary money more evenly and get the players they needed; and he wasn’t a team player. No matter how good he was as an individual players, he was not a good fit with Belichek’s system. So he went. The team lost the first game of the 2003 season to Buffalo. And since then, the team has just won, and won, and won again.
The Pats select and value all-round players who can take on multiple roles; intelligent players who can understand and execute complicated schemes, can handle multiple roles, and can improvise on the field taking advantage of unexpected opportunities. Troy Brown, playing offense, defense, and special teams, is the epitome of this flexibility and intelligence. Everybody on the field is involved in every play — receivers and back block; defense men come in for special roles on offense; receivers act as running backs. Brady throws to as many as nine different receivers in a game. And he has a remarkable talent for quickly seeing and evaluating opportunities — rationally dealing with many rapidly changing choices. Sometimes they line up on offense with everybody on the line and nobody in the backfield but Brady. Sometimes on defense the line never goes into a set position; the players stand and seem to roam about, upsetting the expectations of the opponents, so the players on the offensive line don’t knew who to block. In the typical game, every player on the Patriot bench (except the backup quarterback) played, and played in important situations. This wasn’t a matter of building huge leads and bringing in the backups when what they did wouldn’t matter.
The Pats had many injured players last year. And this year they were missing Ty Law and Tyrone Poole for most of the year, and Richard Seymour for the playoffs. But they just won and won and won.
Basically, in football, intelligence, flexibility and preparation reduce the effects of surprise, and extraordinary physical talent, and random events.
There were two old styles of football — motivational and x’s and o’s. In a game where two teams were evenly matched, the team with the greater motivation would often win. x’s and o’s were fancy plays and tactics where each individual player had a specialized role, like in an assembly line, and if everybody did just what they were told to do, they would prevail over a less well prepared opponent.
The Patriots play a different kind of football. Yes, they have plays that they have prepared. But the players are generalists rather than specialists and can each play a variety of roles, and all have the intelligence and flexibility to improvise and do whatever is necessary to outmaneuver their opponents. And their plays are designed with multiple roles and intelligence presumed. If the original play breaks down, they adjust, and even though this unique set of circumstances may never have occured before, they are familiar enough with this kind of play that they immediately help where help is needed.
Of course there’s always an element of chance. Of course these players are only human and are therefore subject to the mistakes that come from overconfidence. Yes, they blew a huge lead and lost to the lowly Dolphins.
But the Patriot’s style of football is so far superior to the styles of the other teams that they have quietly, unassumingly dominated the league for two years, repeatiedly beating teams, like the Colts, that the media rated as one of the best of all time.
Reinvented. Yes. For instance, consider the Colts game where with 4th down and 1 yard to go on about the Patriot’s 40 yard line, the Colts elected to punt. it was a good punt, putting the Patriots back on their own 10 yard line. By the old style of football strategy, the Colts had good field position, and were in excellent shape to get the ball back with even better field position. But the Patriots simply marched down the field, repeatedly gaining just enough for a first down. Their combination of runs and short passes was unstoppable. As a result, they ate up about eight minutes on the clock on their way to a touchdown. In other words, starting on their own 10 yard line turned into an advantage — giving them more opportunity to use time. It turned out that after that drive, the Colts were as good as beaten — there simply wasn’t enough time on the clock to make up the deficit.
Over the next few years, It’s going to be interesting watching as the other teams try to figure out and imitate the system.
And until those others do figure it out, it’s going to be a lot of fun being a Patriots fan.
In its continuing effort to put itself out of business, the US Postal Service raised prices again, and came up with creative new ways to drive away business customers.
While many people only see an increase of 2 cents in the the cost of mailing a letter, businesses now face major new levels of complexity. There are now THREE CLASSES OF FIRST CLASS MAIL — letter, flat, and package. These classes are defined by weight, by thickness, and by length-width. All postal clerks had to go to special training to learn what to charge for what. And many of them, even after the training, don’t understand the definitions.
It was bad enough last time around when they made Priority Mail depend not just on the weight, but also on the destination…
And meanwhile, they have been cutting back on the number of clerks available to service the public, trying to convince people to use their new computerized postal stations. But the new rules, with had to understand new definitions, will make those machine far more useless than before, and long lines will eventually force the USPS to hire more clerks again, increasing operating costs.
It’s amazing that the people setting post office policy and prices seem to have no understanding at all of the needs of their business customers.
Businesses pass along the cost of shipping to their customers. Hence a simple change of price presents no problem. But changing definitions and making the determination of postage prices more complex do present serious, costly problems.
Many small businesses that had loyally and unthinkingly continued to use the USPS for all their shipping will now comparison shop with UPS and FedEx. And this postage increase will end up netting the USPS less revenue than before. .
Why can’t they keep it simple?
I just got an automated phone call from RCn — not a great way to communicate with your customers… A call to the RCN service number (1-800-RING-RCN) confirmed what I had heard in that automated call. And the service person answering my query and hearing my concerns could not call me back and could not have a supervisor call me back because that was an incoming only call center — likewise, not a great idea.
The automated call informed me that they are changing the software that is used for recording TV programs on the DVR that they provide as part of their high-end digital cable service. The message indicated that any settings that you have saved will be lost in the process — as will all the programs that you have recorded on your DVR. In my case, that is about 100 hours of my favorite shows.
Not a good move. The DVR was their best customer-loyalty device. If you changed to a competing service, you’d lose those recordings, so hence you are willing to overlook other issues if the recordings stay in tact.
By deleting those recordings RCN is opening the door – almost asking their highest level (and highest paying) customers to switch to another service. (In our area, that would be Comcast)
I’m not sure if this is a nationwide change. But this tells me that RCN management is seriously flawed.
If I owned any RCN stock, I’d sell it immediately, right before calling Comcast to switch services.
Prices in London, for just about everything, including brand-name products that are sold worldwide, are about double what they are in Boston. It is so bad that Britain could/should offer free airfare to London for Americans, and profit from all the money the Americans spend while there.
Tourist destinations that are outrageously expensive –
Tower of London, Globe Theater, Westminster Abbey, Chuchill War Room
What’s free –
National Gallery, Tate Britian, Tate Modern, British Museum
The prize-winning ripoff — Near Westminster Bridge there’s a public restroom that you have to pay 50 pence (about $1) to enter.
Second place winner — At theaters, instead of giving you a program, the ushers try to sell you one for four pounds ($8).
What Londoners have to pay for things you would never expect to have
to to pay for –
2500 pound ($5000) fine for truancy from school.
A “congestion” charge for driving a private car in downtown London.
(Apparently, that cuts down on traffic and pollution. The mayor of
New York has proposed doing the same in his city).
Tidbits we didn’t see in the guidebooks –
The National Theater is closed on Sundays, even the ticket office. They have no signs listing what’s playing, and no brochures available.
The boat ride to Hampton Court from Westminster Bridge is 4 hours long (Rick Steve’s says 3 hours). The first half hour was interesting. The rest very slow and boring. The palace itself was expensive to get in, and there was nothing to see (and very little time to see nothing, because the boat ride was so long.) Big rooms, mostly empty except for a random selection of tapestries and paintings not worthy of the National Gallery, presented in poor light. A waste of time and money. Cf. Versailles or the Breakers in Newport. The palace is beautiful on the outside. Just don’t bother to go in.
The British Museum is free, but just a collection of random artifacts from all over the world, randomly displayed, mainly in glass cases, with no sense of context or meaning. What a collosal waste.
National Gallery is free, with fine historical works of art, well selected, and well arranged, with excellent lighting and room to enjoy the paintings.
The Tate Britain (gallery), contrary to Steve’s, is open until 10 PM on the first Friday of the month. My favorites were Ophelia by Millais and a painting of fishing monks.
Buses are the best way to get around downtown London. They run frequently and predictably. A single fare is expensive. But get an inexpensive one week pass (”oyster card”) and ride as much as you want.
What happened to the birds?
There are very few pigeons in London nowadays. It used to be that at Trafalgar Square and Picadilly Circus hundreds, even thousands of pigeons would swarm, landing on your shoulders and head. One elderly pigeon lover, who was feeding a few pigeons in Kensington Gardens, explained that the mayor had launched a campaign to get rid of the pigeons. Apparently, they scared them away with loud noises and made uninhabitable the places where they used to nest.
Also, he noted, there are no sparrows now in London, and no one knows why. But there are lots of large water birds along the Thames.
We saw very few dogs (less than half a dozen in a week), and no cats at all.
British word choices –
yield = give way
detour = diversion
exit = way out
line = queue
do not disturb = sleeping (on sign)
map = plan
take out (food) = take away
room to let
to live and let live; to let live would be to rent a life
“rough sleeping prohibited”
fixer upper (apartment) = “the flat could benefit from refurbishment”
french fries = chips
potato chips = crisps
subway = underground
A recording in the “underground” repeated over and over “mind the gap”. How much did Gap have to pay for that?
My wife and I were in London for a week — all for pleasure, no business.We looked forward to going to plays — not the same old retread musicals we could see in New York or Boston, but rather plain old fashioned plays.
At first the prices were scary. (Everything in London cost about double what it would cost in Boston). Then we found the half-price ticket office near Leicester Square. (There are dozens of storefronts purporting to sell discount theater tickets, but only one is official”. It is located the right one is on the square itself, just two blocks from Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery.)
First on our list was “Under the Lintel” starring Richard Schiff (from West Wing). Reportedly it was about a librarian who goes in search of a book that is 113 years overdue. A bit bizarre for a plot. But, then again, I’m bizarre. I had brought along for our trip a 1905 edition of Baedekker’s Guide to London. And, by coincidence, the book the librarian in the play is looking for is a Baedekker’s from about 20 years before that. The ticket office kept telling us to come back the next day and tickets for it should be available soon. It turned out that the show had been cancelled the week before.
So in lieu of that, we sent to see The Lady from Dubuque by Edward Albee, starring Maggie Smith. This play bombed when it was first produced in New York long ago. But reviews said good things about the new version. The reviews were totally wrong.
There is some potential in the never-explained arrival of the Lady from Dubuque who claims to be the mother of a woman dying of cancer, but who may represent death. But the first act is a throwaway — six people who are supposed to be friends, but who just yell at, insult,a nd make fun of one another, over and over again. The Lady first appears in the final few seconds of Act I. Act II moves at a good clip for a while, then fizzles. The key metaphor, that death is like a nuclear war, feels dated and doesn’t resonate. Then the play suddenly ends, for no evident reason.
The writing is grossly incomplete. The first act should be trimmed by 2/3 and there should be a complete act added after the present ending.
If the Lady is supposed to have some metaphysical or symbolic significance, let her do something, or let there be substantial speculation at least regarding who she is and why she is there. Giver he friend Oscar a meaningful role, rather than just serving as an excuse of a series of dated, unfunny black jokes. Perhaps do something more with the dying woman who yells a lot in Act I and hardly syas a thing in Act II. Maybe have the others not know she is dying, or have the others know but not her know — anything that could lead to a revelation/realization of some significance. Give us some sense of who these people are. Give us some reason to care about them.
On the plus side, Maggie Smith did her part well. I saw her in a show called “Maggie” in in London back in 1965 (when I was going to Brentwood School in Essex. And here I was seeing her again on the London stage 42 years later…
Next, we tried Treats. We hadn’t heard anything about it, hadn’t seen any reviews. But it was starring Billie Piper, and my wife remembered her from Dr. Who. Why not gamble? It’s a non-story about a girl and two guys. Now she’s with one, now with another. Why? Who cares? This play never starts. It has no begining, no middle, and no end.
Last we decided to try The Woman in Black. This production has been around for 18 years — tried and true. It promised to be a scary story. But the scariest parts were when the audience screamed (for no apparent reason).
All three of these plays were just two acts long. Too short. No real beginning or middle or end. And, for the most part the casts were small. Three people in Treats. Two in Woman in Black. And Under the Lintel, which we didn’t get a chance to see, was, reportedly, a monologue, with just one actor. And London is supposed to have the best theater in the world??? How can a serious stage actor make a living?
The extended family and friends of Max, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, accidentally spend ten days together, in relative isolation, during the time of the US invasion of Iraq. On the one hand, little happens, aside from sex (presented directly, unromanticized, with no embarrassment). On the other hand, the conversational interactions among hosts and guests lead them to discover aspects of one another and themselves, and you get quickly drawn into the lives, concerns, passions, and relationships of these diverse people.
Max admires “My Dinner with Andre,” a powerful and memorable movie which
consists entirely of conversation in a restaurant. This novel has that
tone and that strength. The circumstances and the mix of characters lead
to insights into the purpose, direction, and meaning of contemporary life
and politics; into what makes a movie work and what makes
a life “work”. Max also admires “The Seventh Seal” and is tempted to
do a movie based on Gogol’s “Taras Bulba”, and the talk ranges wide and
far, touching on contemporary moral dilemmas, the business of movie-making,
and the meaning of violence and death.
Some of my pleasure in reading this book derived from the fact that
I, like Max and his girl-friend Elena, am of the Baby Boomer generation.
I lived through the 60s and Viet Nam and all that has happened since then,
and found it easy to relate to what mattered to them. It was also refreshing
to read of sexual passion and love between intelligent and experienced
50-somethings.
I suspect that it will prove to be important not as a literary work, but rather for its emotional and political impact — like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
At first I read it as fiction set in an exotic environment, where culture, religion, and law are so different from what we are familiar with that it’s like a galaxy far, far away.
But then two transformations took place. first, the characters are so well drawn and so sympathetic that I identified strongly with them; and as they endured and survived one outrage after another, I felt like I’d lived through those events with them. Then, near the end, after about 30 years of narrative, I started to recognize some of the political characters and events. I had caught glimpses of that “current history” on the news, after 9/11. And I began to realize the effect of the actions of the US government on the lives of these people who I now cared so much about.
Earlier, I had found it ironic and amusing that these people, especially the women, were much better off when the Russians were in control. But at that point, I was still reading at an emotional distance.
The pivotal passage is a page which seems to be a simple translation, without commentary, of a Taliban edict, issued when they took control of the country. The understated, matter-of-fact words bring home that the brutality and injustice are not the result of a passing whim of an insane dictator, but rather stem from the culture. The fact that the new rules and laws require no explanation and no justification makes them seem nearly inescapable.
After that, the nightmare these characters live through becomes holographically horrific.
The Taliban come across as so villainous that I couldn’t help but see Bush’s intervention in Afghanistan as the best thing that could have possibly happened for Afghanistan.
So here I am, believing that the Iraq War was a terrible mistake and that we should get out of there as soon as possible. Here I am, rooting against Bush’s every move, like I root against the New York Yankees. And now, all of a sudden, I see post-9/11 events from a different perspective, and I’m shocked to recognize my favorite villain as the hero in the white hat coming to the rescue of the Afghani people, who are so in need of and so deserving of all the help they can get. And I start to suspect that the situation in Iraq under Saddam Hussein was comparable.
At least that is my immediate reaction from reading this book — and normally I tend to be biased and inflexible in my political views.
I don’t know what the long-term effect of this reading experience will be, but I suspect that at the very least I will now consider the situations in Afghanistan and Iraq as extremely complex, with lots of gray, and no simple solutions, but needing solutions. And I will be concerned that in reaction to the present mess over there, the people of the US could become isolationist, defensively moving away from trying to help deal with problems on the other side of the world.
“A Thousand Splendid Suns” is not just another novel…
This weeks’ selection is a little known but important “prose poem” by Edgar Allan Poe — “Eureka”.
The first I heard of it was in “Parallel Worlds” by Macho Kaka (”professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York and cofounder of string field theory”, p. 28:
“Similarly, one might suppose that the farther a star is, the fainter it is. This is true, but this also cannot be the answer. If we look at a portion of the night sky, the very distant stars are indeed faint, but there are also more stars the farther you look. These two effects would exactly cancel in a uniform universe, leaving the night sky white. (This is because the intensity of starlight decreases as the square of the distance, which is canceled by the fact that the number of stars goes up as the square of the distance.)
“Oddly enough, the first person in history to solve the paradox as the American mystery writer Edgar Allan Poe, who had a long-term interest in astronomy. Just before he died, he published many of his observations in a rambling, philosophical poem called Eureka: A Prose Poem. In a remarkable passage, he wrote:
“‘Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us an uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy — since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing that the distance of the invisible background [is] so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.’
“He concluded by noting that the idea ‘is by far too beautiful not to possess Truth as its essentiality.’
“This is the key to the correct answer. The universe is not infinitely old. There was a Genesis. There is a finite cutoff to the light that reaches our eye. Light from the most distant stars has not yet had time to reach us. cosmologist Edward Harrison, who was the first to discover that Poe had solved Lobbers’ paradox, has written, ‘When I first read Poe’s words I was astounded: How could a poet, at best an amateur scientist, have perceived the right explanation 40 years ago when in our colleges the wrong explanation… is still being taught.’”
I was surprised to discover that “Eureka” is not included in the 5 volume Raven edition of Poe’s works and also does not appear in Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe by John Ingram.
I eventually found it at the Web site of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore http://www.eapoe.org/works/index.htm That’s a great resource for Poe fans.
I’ve now updated my Poe CD, adding Eureka, and a biography of Poe, and Charles Adelaide’s translation of Poe to French. (Adelaide, the poet, did such a fine job that Poe’s reputation today is far greater in France than it is in the US.) http://samizdat.stores.yahoo.net/poe.html According to the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore Eureka was published
around August 1848. “The number of copies printed is uncertain. Although Poe dearly wanted an edition of 50,000 copies, apparently only 500 were printed.”
According to Wikipedia:
“Eureka, an essay written in 1848, included a cosmological theory that anticipated black holes and the big bang theory by 80 years, as well as the first plausible solution to Lobbers’ paradox. Though described as a “prose poem” by Poe, who wished it to be considered as art, this work is a remarkable scientific and mystical essay unlike any of his other works. He wrote that he considered Eureka to be his career masterpiece.
“Poe eschewed the scientific method in his Eureka. He argued that he wrote from pure intuition, not the Aristotelian a priori method of axioms and syllogisms, nor the empirical method of modern science set forth by Francis Bacon. For this reason, he considered it a work of art, not science, but insisted that it was still true. Though some of his assertions have later proven to be false (such as his assertion that gravity must be the strongest force—it is actually the weakest), others have been shown to be surprisingly accurate and decades ahead of their time.”
From the preface of The Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe by John H. Ingram:
“For another year or so Poe lived quietly at Fordham, guarded by the watchful care of Mrs. Clemm,–writing little, but thinking out his philosophical prose poem of “Eureka,” which he deemed the crowning work of his life.”
from the Introduction to Selections from Poe by J. Montgomery Gambrill”
“The family now moved to a little three-room cottage at Fordham, a quiet country place with flowers and trees and pleasant vistas; but illness and poverty were soon there, too. In 1841 Virginia [Poe’s first cousin and wife] had burst a blood vessel while singing, and her life was despaired of; this had happened again and again, leaving her weaker each time. As the summer and fall of this year wore away, she grew worse and needed the tenderest care and attention. But winter drew on, and with it came cold and hunger; the sick girl lay in an unheated room on a straw bed, wrapped in her husband’s coat, the husband and mother trying to chafe a little warmth into her hands and feet. Some kind-hearted women relieved the distress in a measure, but on January 30, 1847, Virginia died. The effect on Poe was terrible. It is easy to see how a very artist of death, who could study the dreadful stages of its slow approach and seek to penetrate the mystery of its ultimate nature with such intense interest and deep reflection as did Poe, must have brooded and suffered during the years of his wife’s illness. His own health had long been poor; his brain was diseased and insanity seemed imminent. After intense grief came a period of settled gloom and haunting fear. The less than three years of life left for him was a period of decline in every respect. But he remained in the little cottage, finding some comfort in caring for his flowers and pets, and taking long solitary rambles. During this time he thought out and wrote “Eureka,” a treatise on the structure, laws, and destiny of the universe, which he desired to have regarded as a poem.”
from “Edgar Allan Poe” by R.W. Griswold, which appeared in The International Miscellany of Literature, Art, and Science, volume 1, number 3, October 1, 1850?:
“For nearly a year Mr. Poe was not often before the public, but he was as industrious, perhaps, as he had been at any time, and early in 1848 advertisement was made of his intention to deliver several lectures, with a view to obtain an amount of money sufficient to establish his so-long-contemplated monthly magazine. His first lecture–and only one at this period–was given at the Society Library, in New York, on the ninth of February, and was upon the cosmogony of the Universe: it was attended by an eminently intellectual auditory, and the reading of it occupied about two hours and a half; it was what he afterward published under the title of ‘Eureka, a Prose Poem.’
“To the composition of this work he brought his subtlest and highest capacities, in their most perfect development. Denying that the arcana of the universe can be explored by induction, but informing his imagination with the various results of science, he entered with unhesitating boldness, though with no guide but the divinest instinct,–that sense of beauty, in which our great Edwards recognizes the flowering of all truth–into the sea of speculation, and there built up of according laws and their phenomena, as under the influence of a scientific inspiration, his theory of Nature. I will not attempt the difficult task of condensing his propositions; to be apprehended they must be studied in his own terse and simple language; but in this we have a summary of that which he regards as fundamental: ‘The law which we call _Gravity_,’ he says, ‘exists on account of matter having been radiated, at its origin, atomically, into a _limited_ sphere of space, from one, individual, unconditional irrelative, and absolute Particle Proper, by the sole process in which it was possible to satisfy, at the same time, the two conditions, radiation and equable distribution throughout the sphere–that is to say, by a force varying in _direct_ proportion with the squares of the distances between the radiated atoms, respectively, and the particular center of radiation.’
“Poe was thoroughly persuaded that he had discovered the great secret: that the propositions of “Eureka” were true; and he was wont to talk of the subject with a sublime and electrical enthusiasm which they cannot have forgotten who were familiar with him at the period of its publication. He felt that an author known solely by his adventures in the lighter literature, throwing down the gauntlet to professors of science, could not expect absolute fairness, and he had no hope but in discussions led by wisdom and candor. Meeting me, he said, ‘Have you read ‘Eureka?'’
I answered, ‘Not yet: I have just glanced at the notice of it by Willis, who thinks it contains no more fact than fantasy, and I am sorry to see–sorry if it be true–suggests that it corresponds in tone with that gathering of sham and obsolete hypotheses addressed to fanciful tyros, the ‘Vestiges of Creation;’ and our good and really wise friend Bush, whom you will admit to be of all the professors, in temper one of the most habitually just, thinks that while you may have guessed very shrewdly, it would not be difficult to suggest many difficulties in the way of your doctrine.’ ‘It is by no means ingenuous,” he replied, ‘to hint that there are such difficulties, and yet to leave them unsuggested. I challenge the investigation of every point in the book. I deny that there are any difficulties which I have not met and overthrown. Injustice is done me by the application of this word ‘guess:’ I have assumed_nothing_ and proved _all_.” In his preface he wrote: ‘To the few who love me and whom I love; to those who feel rather than to those who think; to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities–I offer this book of truths, not in the character of Truth-Teller, but for the beauty that abounds in its truth: constituting it true. To these I present the composition as an Art-Product alone:—let us say as a Romance; or, if it be not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem. What I here propound is true: therefore it cannot die: or it by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will rise again to the life everlasting.’
“When I read ‘Eureka’ I could not help but think it immeasurably superior as an illustration of genius to the ‘Vestiges of Creation;’ and as I admired the poem, (except the miserable attempt at humor in what purports to be a letter found in a bottle floating on the _Mare tenebrarum_,) so I regretted its pantheism, which is not necessary to its main design. To some of the objections to his work be made this answer in a letter to Mr. C.F. Hoffman, then editor of the _Literary World_:
‘_Dear Sir_:–In your paper of July 29, I find some comments on ‘Eureka,’ a late book of my own; and I know you too well to suppose for a moment, that you will refuse me the privilege of a few words in reply. I feel, even, that I might safely claim, from Mr. Hoffman, the right, which every author has, of replying to his critic _tone for tone_–that is to say, of answering your correspondent, flippancy by flippancy and sneer by sneer–but in the first place, I do not wish to disgrace the _World_; and, in the second, I feel that I never should be done sneering, in the present instance, were I once to begin. Lamartine blames Voltaire for the use which he made of (_ruse_) misrepresentation, in his attacks on the priesthood; but our young students of Theology do not seem to be aware that in defense or what they fancy to be defense, of Christianity, there is anything wrong in such gentlemanly peccadillos as the deliberate perversion of an author’s text–to say nothing of the minor _indecora_ of reviewing a book without reading it and without having the faintest suspicion of what it is about.
‘You will understand that it is merely the _misrepresentations_ of the _critique_ in question to which I claim the privilege of reply:–the mere _opinions_ of the writer can be of no consequence to me–and I should imagine of very little to himself–that is to say if he knows himself, personally, as well as _I_ have the honor of knowing him. The first misrepresentation is contained in this sentence:–’This letter is a keen burlesque on the Aristotelian or Baconian methods of ascertaining Truth, both of which the writer ridicules and despises, and pours forth his rhapsodical ecstasies in a glorification of the third mode–the noble art of _guessing_.’ What I _really_ say is this:–That there is no absolute _certainty_ either in the Aristotelian or Baconian process–that, for this reason, neither Philosophy is so profound as it fancies itself–and that neither has a right to sneer at that _seemingly_ imaginative process called Intuition (by which the great Kepler attained his laws); since ‘Intuition,’ after all, ‘is but the conviction arising from those _in_ductions or _de_ductions of which the processes are so shadowy as to escape our consciousness, elude our reason or defy our capacity of expression.’ The second misrepresentation runs thus:–’The developments of electricity and the formation of stars and suns, luminous and nonluminous, moons and planets, with their rings, &c., is deduced, very much according to the nebular theory of Laplace, from the principle propounded above.’ Now the impression intended to be made here upon the reader’s mind, by the ‘Student of Theology,’ is evidently, that my theory may all be very well in its way, but that it is nothing but Laplace over again, with some modifications that he (the Student of Theology) cannot regard as at all important. I have only to say that no gentleman can accuse me of the disengenuousness here implied; inasmuch as, having proceeded with my theory up to that point at which Laplace’s theory _meets_ it, I then _give Laplace’s theory in full_, with the expression of my firm conviction of its absolute truth _at all points_. The _ground_ covered by the great French astronomer compares with that covered by my theory, as a bubble compares with the ocean on which it floats; nor has he the slightest allusion to the ‘principle propounded above,’ the principle of Unity being the source of all things–the principle of Gravity being merely the Reaction of the Divine Act which irradiated all things from Unity. In fact _no_ point of _my_ theory has been even so much as alluded to by Laplace. I have not considered it necessary, here to speak of the astronomical knowledge displayed in the ’stars _and_ suns’ of the Student of Theology, nor to hint that it would be better to say that ‘development and formation _are_, than that development and formation _is_. The third misrepresentation lies in a foot-note, where the critic says:–’Further than this, Mr. Poe’s claim that he can account for the existence of all organized beings–man included–merely from those principles on which the origin and present appearance of suns and worlds are explained, must be set down as mere bald assertion, without a particle of evidence. In other words we should term it _arrant fudge_.’
The perversion at this point is involved in a willful misapplication of the word ‘principles.’ I say ‘wilful’ because, at page 63, I am _particularly_ careful to distinguish between the principles proper, Attraction and Repulsion, and those merely resultant _sub_-principles which control the universe in detail. To these sub-principles, swayed by the immediate spiritual influence of Deity. I leave, without examination, _all that_ which the Student of Theology so roundly asserts I account for on the _principles_ which account for the constitution of suns, &c. ‘In the third column of his ‘review’ the critic says:–’He asserts that each soul is its own God–its own Creator.’ What I _do_ assert is, that ‘each soul is, _in part_, its own God–its own Creator.’ Just below, the critic says:–’After all these contradictory propoundings concerning God we would remind him of what he lays down on page 23–’of this Godhead in itself he alone is not imbecile–he alone is not impious who propounds _nothing_. A man who thus conclusively convicts himself of imbecility and impiety needs no further refutation.’ Now the sentence, _as I wrote it_, and as _I find it_ printed on that very page which the critic refers to and which _must have been lying before him_ while he quoted my words, runs thus:–’Of this Godhead, _in itself_, he alone is not imbecile, &c., who propounds nothing.’ By the italics, as the critic well knew, I design to distinguish between the two possibilities–that of a knowledge of God through his works and that of a knowledge of Him in his _essential nature_. The Godhead, _in itself_, is distinguished from the Godhead observed _in its effects_. But our critic is zealous. Moreover, being a divine, he is honest–ingenuous. It is his _duty_ to pervert my meaning by omitting my italics–just as, in the sentence previously quoted, it was his Christian duty to falsify my argument by leaving out the two words, ‘in part,’ upon which turns the whole force–indeed the whole intelligibility of my proposition. ‘Were these ‘misrepresentations’ (_is_ that the name for them?) made for any less serious a purpose than that of branding my book as ‘impious’ and myself as a ‘pantheist,’ a ‘polytheist,’ a Pagan, or a God knows what (and indeed I care very little so it be not a ‘Student of Theology’), I would have permitted their dishonesty to pass unnoticed, through pure contempt of the boyishness–for the _turn-down-shirt-collar-ness_ of their tone:–but, as it is, you will pardon me, Mr. Editor, that I have been compelled to expose a ‘critic’ who courageously serving his own _anonymosity_, takes advantage of my absence from the city to misrepresent, and thus vilify me, _by name_. EDGAR A. POE.
‘Fordham, September 20, 1848.’
“From this time Poe did not write much; he had quarreled with the conductors of the chief magazines for which he had previously written, and they no longer sought his assistance.”
If you are a Poe fan, you should also read Matthew Pearl’s new novel “The Poe Shadow” in which the characters try to unravel the mystery of Poe’s death. (Pearl’s first novel, The Dante Club, set in Boston just after the Civil War, and featuring Longfellow, Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes as characters, was simply brilliant.)
Suggestions always welcome. Send me email if you want to be added to the distribution list.
Warped Passages: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions by Lisa Randall
On the plus side, this book will expand your understanding of the concept of “dimension”. It also has clear explanations of developments in physics in the days of Einstein and the early stages quantum theory. Above all it gives you a sense of physics as a living, growing, very human endeavor — a constant challenge, a source of one fascinating puzzle after another, requiring creativity and ingenuity to simply imagine all that might be possible. Half the book deals with theories that have not yet been proved — fascinating ideas that might turn out to reflect the “real world” but that regardless of that have a puzzle and artistic appeal.
The author is not a reporter or science popularizer, but rather one of the leading theorists. If what she presents is an accurate account of recent developments (and I have no reason to doubt that it is), she deserves a Nobel Prize.
Unfortunately, while she seems to try hard to make her book readable and to make the concepts accessible to the non-professional, the narrative becomes increasingly difficult to follow. A typical passage from the second half of the book: “This meant, paradoxically, that you could use perturbation theory to study the original strongly interacting, ten-dimensional superstring theory. You would not use perturbation theory in the strongly interacting string theory itself, but in a superficailly entirely different theory: weakly itneracting, eleven-dimensional supergravity. This remarkable result, which Paul Townsend of Cambridge University had perviously also observed, meant that despite their different packaging, at low engergies, ten-dimensional superstring theory and eleven-dimensional supergravity were in fact the same theory. Or, as physicists would say, they were dual.” What?????
It’s like trying to read a book in a language you don’t know. Somehow I managed to look at all the words, but I don’t feel that I really “read” the book. And I could probably look at all those words several more times without understanding any more of it. So I come away impressed at the author’s knowledge and accomplishments and creative enthusiasm, but totally frustrated. I simply have no idea what she is talking about. If only I could find a book that unravels the mysteries of this book…
In a column that appeared in the NY Times today (April 9, 2007), Edward Rothstein tells of his enthusiasm for the wide variety of rare and unusual books that appear on our book-collection CDs and DVDs. For the next few days that article ”Sampling, if Not Digesting, the Digital Library” is available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/arts/09conn.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
A customer recently asked me if I know of any programs that make the computer display look and feel like a printed book, so you “turn a page” rather than scroll. Here’s my answer:
When I first came upon books in electronic form, that’s the way I thought — trying to replicate in the electronic world what I was used to with printed books. But that wore off fast. The whole notion of “pages” soon goes away. You might want to check http://www.samizdat.com/guide.html for some suggestions, also my “new customer orientation” documents at http://www.samizdat.com/orientation.html
I’d suggest that when you decide to read a particular book, you copy that file to your hard drive. Then you will be able to input and save your comments/thoughts/highlighting, as well as marking (and then searching for) where you last left off reading. And if you prefer larger type or a particular font, you can save the file with those preferences. I don’t know of a good program that does what you are asking for. But I do believe that once you dive in and get used to reading books on your computer, your desire for a look-and-feel similar to paper is likely to fade away.
My wife recently bought a 7-year-old second hand Dell laptop with Linux for $50. I’ve been experimenting with it and find that it works great for reading books on our book-collection CDs and DVDs.
With this version of Linux (Ubuntu), after I put in the CD, I click on Places, then Computer, then CD-ROM drive, and I see a list of the folders and files. If I wish, I can click on index.html and a web browser opens showing the table of contents with links to each book. Click on a book title and the book opens for reading in the web browser.
As an alternative, I can click on folders to see what they contain (the file names are complete book titles, not numbers or codes). Clicking on a book-title/file name opens the book so I can read it with the built-in word processor. Or I can click and drag a book title to the Desktop. That moves a copy of the book to the laptop, so as I read I can add my own notes (including a marker for where I left off reading last); and it means I’ll see that book on the Desktop the next time I turn on the laptop — without having to have the CD in the drive. I have picked a couple dozen books I want to read soon and dragged them all to the Desktop from the various CDs on which they appear.
I was very proud of myself for having discovered such a handy way to use these CDs/books on a Linux system, when my wife pointed out to me that you can do the same thing (dragging files to the Desktop) in Windows and Macintosh. I had simply never realized it was so easy…
Please take a look at our Yahoo Store http://samizdat.stores.yahoo.net/ With nearly 12,000 books organized in nearly 200 different CD collections, we needed to reorganize our online store to make it easier to find what you want. In some cases, the same book might appear on several different CDs. For instance, Plato would appear in Philosophy, Ancient World, and Non-Fiction; and Shakespeare would appear in British Literature, Drama, and in 16th Century, as well as on a separate CD devoted to his works and the works of his contemporaries. Much of the value-added is in the organization which leads to this overlapping — the books are presented in useful contexts, so you can readily find what you want, and so you can see relations and connections among books and authors.)The new store design (launched in March 2007) includes a search box at the top of every page. You can enter an author’s name or a book title and get a list of links to the item-pages for the book collection CDs on which they appear.
It also has a navigation tool bar on the left margin of every page, to make it easy to go to the main categories (DVDs, Classic Collections, Period, Genre, Theme, Region/Country, World Leaders, and Authors).
And at the very top of each page, you can click to get to an “alphabetical list of CDs and DVDs.
Standard email packages make it very easy to edit the “return address” — to make it anything at all. And “spoofing” is sending out email that purports to be from a different person.
It took half a day for me to clean up the mess so I could send and receive email normally again, and to change my email settings to avoid this happening again. (I had made the mistake of having mail sent to wrong usernames at my domain name forwarded to my real email address. Now bouncebacks with address like that will simply be deleted).
Many of the bounce-back messages came by way of spam firewalls, like Barracuda. That amazed me. Since everyone knows that spammers “spoof” the return address, why do spam firewalls send the messages back to the return address? Spamming is bad enough — not just clogging our mail boxes and making it difficult to see real and important messages, but wasting bandwidth for all of us. And now it turns out that the automated settings used by spam firewalls are multiplying the problem — bouncing back millioins of billions of messages to addresses that had nothing to do with the spam. Isn’t it about time they changed that?
This time, Cabonite saved me.
A couple months ago, I subscribed to their backup service (after a free trial month, just $49.95 a year). Over the course of a couple weeks, in the background while I went about my regular work, Carbonite backed up all the data (not the the software) on my hard drive — over 90 gigabytes. And once the initial backup was complete, their system automatically and immediately backed up every file I created or changed. So when my main PC went down this time, everything was backed up.
If I wanted to switch to a new computer or if the repair led to a complete wipe of the hard drive, I could restore everything. And I could select which folders and files I needed restored right away and let the rest restore int he background, however long it took.
And in the typical scenario, whereby I continued working on an older secondary machine while the main one was being fixed, I could restore critical folders or files to that machine, and continue working without delay; and then do the main restore on the original machine when it was ready.
The last time I bought a computer, I was very tempted to get one that automatically “ghost” copied everything to a second drive. But Carbonite was a far better choice. With local ghosting, when your PC goes down, you lose access to both drives, and you lose time getting back up again. How much is a day or two or three of business worth to you? And that’s what you’re likely to lose while your PC is in the repair shop, even if all your data is preserved.
With Carbonite, it only takes a few minutes to set up a seconary machine on your account and restore the files you need to continue your work, with very little, if any, interruption.
This is truly a great service. Check it out at http://www.carbonite.com/
I’m experimenting posting my book collections on CD and DVD at a new site http://www.floofie.com/ They have three sections: Selling, Personals, and Job Listings. I’ve only tried the Selling so far.
Posting items for sale is free and extremely easy to do. (Far far easier than Ebay or Gooble Base).
Apparently, they have no transaction software. Buyers contact sellers by email.
It’s very new. They are looking for postings. Give it a try.
Over ten years ago, when I first joined Amazon Associates (the Amazon referral program), it was simple, easy-to-use, and profitable. You put links on your Web pages to specific books at Amazon, and got a flat percentage of the revenue if and when people using your links bought those books at Amazon. I had hundreds of book reviews and a variety of lists of the 2000+ books I had read over the course of 30+ years. So I put thousands of Amazon Associates links on those pages, and each quarter I’d get a few hundred dollars in referral fees.
Then, over the years, as Amazon expanded beyond books to many other kinds of products, they repeatedly messed with their referral program, making it far more complex in their effort to force partners to promote those other products. And referral fees for plain links to individual books dropped precipitously.
Now Amazon has created a variety of “widgets”. These are fancy, eye-catching graphical ads that you can embed on your Web pages to encourage more Amazon sales and more referral revenue. So I’ve been experimenting.
For examples of their new “product link” widget, please check my book review of “Ten Days in the Hills” by Jane Smiley at http://www.samizdat.com/isyn/tendays.html After the brief review text, you’ll see a series of five Amazon ads, side-by-side, for that book and other works by Smiley. And at the bottom of the page, you’ll see a “product cloud” widget. That’s an automatically generated list of a variety of products for sale at Amazon. As you move your cursor over the text, you see more details about the various products, and if and when you click, you go to that product page at Amazon. The products included in the product cloud depend on the text of the Web page in which it appears. Go to my home page http://www.samizdat.com/ and look at the bottom of the page. There you’ll see another product cloud, with a very different set of products, even though the product cloud code embedded on both pages is identical.
Check http://www.samizdat.com/fanfics/StrengthComeWithTime1.html for an example of Amazon’s “Omakase” widget. That page is chapter one of a “fanfic” by my son Tim. That’s a story based on characters and situations from Japanese anime and manga stories. And below the text of the story, you’ll see an Amazon banner ad with links to three different books, two of which relate to Inuyasha, one of the anime characters in that fanfic. Once again, the links are automatically generated based on the text of the Web page. Then check http://www.samizdat.com/read2007.html which is a list of the books I’ve read so far in 2007. You’ll see product link widgets next to individual titles, and at the bottom of the page you’ll see another omakase widget, featuring links to three books (in what looks like a banner ad). The code is the same as on the fanfic page, but the books displayed here are different.
If you happen to see a double underline on a word of phrase of any of my pages, move your cursor over it, and you’ll see that it’s an Amazon link, automatically generated by their “Context Widget”. That brings leads to some bizarre results. Near the bottom of my home page http://www.samizdat.com/ you’ll see such a link on the name of my son Bob Seltzer that leads to the Amazon page where a CD of his chess games is on sale. You’ll also see such a link on the name of my son Michael Seltzer that leads not to a book of his, but rather a book by someone else with the same name.
Tempted by the revenue potential, I spent several hours last week adding these widgets. According to the Amazon Associates stats, these links have led to thousands of click throughs, but almost no sales. So far, they have earned me less than a dollar (payable in three months and these ads have induced many visitors to leave my site and go to Amazon
So while the experiment was interesting — I was amazed at what was possible — the results are disappointing.
In any case, you can sign up for Amazon Associate at http://associates.amazon.com
If any of you try these widgets and get markedly better results, please let me know how you did it.
I just discovered that on 3/29/2007 someone hacked into my Web files
and added the spam-text shown below in the header. The original files
on my hard drive are unaffected — only the files on the server at my Web
host were changed.
It appears that they did this automatically, putting the new text in
every page with the name “index.html” in all of my directories.
The new text does not appear when you access a Web page of mine unless you do “view source”. It appears to been inserted for purposes of raising ranking for these sites in search engines.
The bogus text links to specific pages at the following sites:
upss.org, acejs.com, mathematicshelpcentral.com, mmicorporation.com, and perplex.at
Do any of you know anything about the companies that run those sites? Have any of you had a similar experience?
I have notified my Web host company asking them if they know how this could have happened and how to avoid it happening again.
For a quick fix, all I need to do is upload the correct versions from my hard drive.
I suspect that a hacker may have accessed password files on the Web
server and then run an automatic program to insert this spam text into
all pages named index.html not only on my Web site, but also on others
on the same server.
Today, many high schools, especially small rural high schools, have difficulty offering classes such as AP biology, Latin, AP calculus, and other similar classes due to budget constraints, classroom overcrowding, lack of qualified teachers, and other important issues. Currently, many that school districts and states are addressing these problems by offering a variety of online classes. Some districts have opened 100 percent online or virtual high schools, which has generated a heated debate among educators about the effectiveness and even appropriateness of such schools. Do you think 100 percent online high schools are an effective solution? Why or why not?
Answer:
Definitely no.
Online education works for self-motivated mature people who are adding to their already substantial grasp of a given field.
Only exceptional high school students would be motivated and mature enough and have enough background in a given subject to be able to benefit from online instruction.
Question: I am a teacher in VA. More people are connected to the Internet than ever before, but a large population of users is still not connected. Students do not always have access to technology, the Internet, and the World Wide Web and this creates a division between the technology haves and have-nots, known as the that digital divide .
Recently, I designed a project that required my students to work in groups and conduct research on a specific content area. Knowing that only a portion of my students have computers at home, how can I design meaningful homework assignments that take into account students who do not have access to computers or the Internet at home?
Answer: The Internet is now an integral part of modern life — for business and for play. When you give an assignment that requires using the Internet for research, you are not just teaching the content, you are also teaching the use of the Internet as a tool. When you form the groups, make sure that each group has at least one student who is experienced and confident about using the Internet. And make it clear to students that they can use any Internet-connected computer to do the assignment (at school, at home, at public libraries, and even Internet cafes etc.) Those who don’t have computers at home need to become familiar with the alternative ways of connecting — where they are and how to use them.
And, of course, you should go over the basics in class (with handouts too) — google, wikipedia, youtube etc., and the social sites (like myspace and classbook) that they are sure to have heard of, mentioning the risks involved and appropriate behavior.
If you were giving an assignment requiring research in a physical library and the class had never been to the library before, you would likewise go over appropriate etiquette and also, if they needed to get there by public transportation, you would not just give them directions for how to get there, but would also discuss the risks and how to minimize them.
I recently got an email from a couple of young (15-16) writers, who are halfway through their first novel, and were asking for advice on how to get published. Here’s my answer:
That’s a tall order. I wish I had the answers.
I’m 60, and have been writing books since I was about 14, and I still haven’t figured out how to deal with the marketplace.
I’ve had a novel published by Houghton Mifflin, and a Russian translation published by another company, and four Internet-related business books published by various companies. And I’ve also self-published a couple of my books; and I now publish book collections on CD and DVD (see my online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat ) I also have completed manuscripts of three novels that I have not yet been able to sell.
Advice –
1) If you need to write because that’s who you are, keep at it and
don’t give up, ever. The satisfaction comes from the writing itself and
from the reactions of readers. If your aim is to get rich quick,
forget it.
2) Writing a novel is about 5% of the job. 50% is building a network
of contacts in the publishing world and fine-tuning your marketing pitch.
The other 45% is rewriting again and again and again, until the story finally
becomes what it can become (not just in your mind, but in the minds of
your readers).
3) Read thousands of books/stories and try contacting the authors/agents/editors
of those that resonate with you.
4) Submit query letters and samples of your writing to agents/editors
(starting with those who answer your correspondence in #3 above). If you
are writing fantasy/scifi, attend conferences where you can have an opportunity
to meet authors and their editors and their agents.
5) Submit stories and novel excerpts to magazines (no matter how small
and no matter whether they pay) — both print and online. Try to get
your work to readers, try to build an audience, solicit reactiosn, and
learn from the feedback you get.
6) Start reading The Writer and Writer’s Digest and Poets & Writers
(your local library probably has back issues of those magazines) for advice
on writing and marketing, and use the directories they publish for lists
of agents and authors. If you can afford it, try some of the many
writers’ workshops that are held in the summer, and take advantage of the
opportunities there to meet and get to know published authors, agents,
and editors. When you go to college, take creative writing courses.
Maybe even go to graduate school for an MFA.
Lightning may strike (as it did for the author of Eragon). But
be prepared for a long journey.
A
library for the price of a book.
Published by Samizdat Express, 213 Deerfield Lane, West Roxbury, MA 02132. (203) 553-9925. seltzer@samizdat.com
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