^zhurnal - v.0.15

This is Volume 0.15 of the ^zhurnal --- musings on mind, method, metaphor, and matters miscellaneous ... a rather cluttered set of sporadic Good Mistakes. What's it all about? Maybe "... to create moments of philosophy --- that is, to pass from opinion to thought ...." It's also the journal of ^z = Mark Zimmermann. See the ZhurnalyWiki on zhurnaly.com for a parallel "live" Wiki experiment. For back issues of the ^zhurnal see Volumes 0.01, 0.02, ... 0.40, 0.41, ... Current Volume. Send comments & suggestions to "z (at) his (dot) com". Thank you! (Copyright © 1999-2004 by Mark Zimmermann.)

SecretOrigins

Shrouded in darkness ... lost in the mists of time ... buried inside an enigma within a conundrum ... trapped in the labyrinth of history ...

Well, not really. ^z is a somewhat silly signature, but it's all I've got. I started using it about 18 years ago at the ends of email and USENET newsgroup posts, and now I'm stuck with it. People sometimes ask where it came from, but there's not much to tell. I simply made it up. It's short, arguably a virtue; it's somewhat different; it's more-or-less memorable; it has a computerish flavor. My last name begins with "Z", as have virtually all my userids over the years.

Some folks whom I later met in person told me they pronounced ^z as "caret-Zee" (or "carrot-Zee"?!). Others called it "hat-Zee". I prefer to say "control-Zee" (or "control-Zed" at times). To a computer, the symbol ^z represents the ASCII decimal value 26, or in binary 11010. To MS-DOS it's an end-of-file marker; in UNIX it's a request to interrupt a process; for some other operating systems it means "kill" or "quit".

End of mystery ... ^z

TopicPersonalHistory

Datetag20010803


- Friday, August 03, 2001 at 04:47:12 (EDT)


LogicAndInformation

With ten minutes to spare before a meeting yesterday morning, I wandered into a medium-sized research library down the hall. On the shelves near the beginning of the "QA" section (math) I happened to see Logic and Information by Keith Devlin (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991). The title sounded interesting; Devlin writes well; I pulled the book down and opened it. Some quotes that leaped out from the up-front material:

It is therefore quite possible that we are not too far from the limits which can be achieved in artificial automata without really fundamental insights into a theory of information, although one should be very careful with such statements because they can sound awfully silly in five years.

- John von Neumann, 1949

Should it ever come about (and I think it will) that some of the ideas developed in these pages turn out to be of real 'use', I would hope that this book serves as a testament to the stupidity, even in those very terms of 'usefulness' that were foisted on the British university system, of judging any intellectual pursuit in terms of its immediate cash value.

- Keith Devlin, 1991

Of some fields it is difficult to tell whether they are sound or phony. Perhaps they are both. Perhaps the decision depends on the circumstances, and it changes with time. At any rate, it is not an objective fact, like 'the moon is made of green cheese'. Some subjects start out with impeccable credentials, catastrophe theory, for instance, and then turn out to resemble a three-dollar bill. Others, like dynamic programming, have to overcome a questionable background before they are reluctantly recognized to be substantial and useful. It's a tough world, even for the judgement pronouncers.

- Gian-Carlo Rota, 1985

TopicScience - TopicThinking

Datetag20010802


- Thursday, August 02, 2001 at 06:32:50 (EDT)


ZhurnalWiki

This ^zhurnal --- my online journal of thoughts and commentary --- has grown since April 1999 via a trivially-modified "guestbook" It's straightforward and allows me to post new entries every few days from almost any Internet connection and web browser that supports simple forms. Mostly I just write in a plain-vanilla text editor, putting in a few raw HTML tags by hand as needed ... easy enough, but prone to error on occasion when I fail to close a tag (oops! --- no </small> --- guess everything is in tiny type from here onwards, eh?!). The low-level approach also makes it difficult to build good cross-linkages to earlier ^zhurnal posts on related topics. I've used the poor-man's solution of putting a numerical HTML anchor corresponding to the message date into every title line, but that's kludgey and inefficient.

Now I've begun experimenting with Wiki approaches to building and cross-linking notes to myself ... sort of a personal set of notecards (remember the Xerox PARC "Notecards" system? --- a clever hack that perhaps inspired Bill Atkinson of Apple to develop "Hypercard" ... and that therefore may be an intellectual grandparent of WikiWikiWeb). I'm developing and learning at the moment on a Macintosh iBook laptop under OS-X, Apple's new UNIX-based operating system, using and adapting the Wiki code shared by Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham in their book The Wiki Way.

As readers (if there are any besides me!) may have noticed, ^zhurnal entry titles for the past week have been WikiWords, run-together capitalized strings. There are now similarly-weird Topic words and, starting today, Datetags. Some other aspects of layout and format have also changed.

Yep, I'm attempting now to write my little essays in Wiki itself, and then translate them into "classic" ^zhurnal posts. Those WikiWords are thus live links to other pages --- or will be, if and when I manage to get a true Wiki up and runnning online.

A Wiki will allow anybody to comment on or add to the ^zhurnal (again, assuming anybody else wants to!). The Wiki markup language is extremely simple compared to HTML and produces nicely æsthetic formatting with minimal effort or distraction. Hyperlinks appear as if by magic; search through other Wiki pages is fast; and a click or two can uncover backlinks (pages with connections to this one). There are doubtless issues of content control, but I think that those can be solved.

So, please bear with me during this on-the-job training as I learn from my mistakes. The result, knock on wood, should be a better, more interesting, and more useful ^zhurnal. A static preview of it can be witnessed at http://www.his.com/~z/ZhurnalWiki/ZhurnalMainPage.html and on the ~600 other pages in that directory. (cf. ZhurnalWikiPreview, 22 July 2001)

Thank you, meanwhile, for your patience!

Datetag20010728

TopicZhurnal - TopicProgramming - TopicWriting


- Tuesday, July 31, 2001 at 21:37:47 (EDT)


SilverSkepticism

Back in the late 1960's as I was finishing High School I read a lot of books (cf. BookhouseBoy). I became convinced that hard times were a-coming ... that the US economy couldn't continue to prosper ... that the huge and growing deficit, declining savings rate, mammoth foreign trade imbalance, rising taxes, and sudden divorce of US money from its gold foundation, etc. all added up to a 1930's-style crash at the least. Following advice in tomes such as Harry Browne's How You Can Profit From the Coming Devaluation I sent a thousand dollars or so --- a fair fraction of my youthful savings --- to a Swiss bank. I used it there as collateral to borrow more money to buy bags of silver coins on margin.

Sounds silly in retrospect, and it was. I got back about half of what I had put in when I gave up in 1971, luckily for me. Silver prices didn't skyrocket, the US dollar didn't collapse, and the governments of the Western World didn't seize private holdings of precious metals.

But the lesson was a good one to learn: be skeptical of articulate, charismatic storytellers. Most critically: beware of futurists who plot exponentially rising curves for carefully-selected parameters. Real-world trends don't persist indefinitely. Geometric growth can't continue.

As Richard Hamming (cf. ResearchAndLife) and others pointed out long ago, "...a change of a single order of magnitude produces fundamentally new effects in a field." (Introduction to Applied Numerical Analysis, section 1.10). A few doubling times, and you're playing a completely different game. New rules mean new relationships and new patterns. New feedback loops among and within systems will produce new results. (cf. FifthDisciplinarians)

So disbelieve financial catastrophists when they forecast global monetary meltdown --- and disbelieve boom hucksters when they predict glorious global prosperity. Discount ecological catastrophists who fear imminent environmental disaster --- and discount their opponents who argue that pollution, ozone layer depletion, greenhouse gases, etc. are sheer fantasy. Raise eyebrows at technophiles who foresee effortless and ever-accelerating scientific/engineering progress --- and similarly wrinkle the forehead at technophobes who anticipate network gridlock, uncontrollable bio-nano-info-terrorism, and social infrastructure collapse.

The right attitude:

Be prepared, in other words, to be surprised --- and to recover quickly.

(cf. MoneyWisdom and BennettOnLife)

Datetag20010729

TopicEconomics - TopicSociety
- Sunday, July 29, 2001 at 12:08:06 (EDT)


StagesOfWork

When you begin a career, what counts is what you know --- your skills applicable to specific tasks that you have been assigned, your schooling, your relevant experience, etc.

In the middle of a successful working life, what starts to matter most is who you know --- your network of connections, your ability to tap into the right experts, and your power to bring a team together to get a big job done effectively.

But if you reach mature status in an organization, what really makes a difference is who you are --- your reliability, honesty, vision, helpfulness, and the other classic "Boy Scout" virtues. Mere cleverness isn't enough. You need to have built trust.

(cf. AgesOfWork)

TopicOrganizations - TopicLife


- Saturday, July 28, 2001 at 14:47:37 (EDT)


GameDays

Every month or so a retired colleague, JF, invites a crew of friends over to his house to play. He gets a nice mix of people --- maybe half a dozen, young and old, male and female, silly and serious --- to spend a chunk of the day socializing and rolling dice, shuffling cards, or pushing blocks of wood around a board. Typical activities in recent gatherings:

All pleasant pastimes for a Sunday afternoon....

(cf. ZarStory)

TopicPersonalHistory


- Friday, July 27, 2001 at 05:42:02 (EDT)


BossJobs

The chief functions of a front-line manager in a large organization are to: Not easy! I tried, without much success, 1988-1990. As the saying goes, the two happiest days in a man's life are when he gets his boat, and when he sells it. My escape from management was indeed one of the brighter moments of my career.


- Wednesday, July 25, 2001 at 05:21:27 (EDT)


GutStrings

Medieval and renaissance music is often played on early instruments using original-style strings, sometimes called "catgut" but actually made nowadays out of sheep intestines. Unlike steel or nylon, gut absorbs moisture from the air on humid days. The strings can thus lengthen and change pitch quite significantly during a performance. At one summer concert Scott Reiss and Tina Chancey (of the group Hesperus) explained to their audience why they had to pause to retune their instruments. In concluding his remarks, Scott said, "We tune, because we care."

Tina added, "Today, we care a lot!"


- Tuesday, July 24, 2001 at 05:48:23 (EDT)


ZhurnalWiki Preview

Recently I've been working on an experiment with Wiki --- the simplest collaborative environment that could possibly work. ("Wikiwiki" means "quick" in Hawaiian.) A Wiki is a set of Web pages designed for extremely rapid evolution and extraordinarily productive use. Wiki was invented by Ward Cunningham in 1994. The book The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web by Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham (Addison-Wesley, 2001) explains Wiki and provides a stand-alone highly-customizable Perl-based Wiki server which runs on almost any computer system. (Cf. http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb for a quick start via one of the oldest and largest Wikis; cf. http://www.leuf.net/cgi/wikidn?TheWikiWay for an entry into Bo Leuf's Wiki domain, where his online Wiki-based diary resides.)

The ^zhurnal, with its ~600 interrelated entries over the past 2+ years, cries out for restructuring into a Wiki web. I'm learning as I go ... it's taking a lot of time and by-hand editing ... but I hope within a few weeks to have cleaned up and posted a static "snapshot" of the ZhurnalWiki which I've begun running on a laptop at home. Eventually it would be nice to have a dynamic ZhurnalWiki which anybody could add to and improve --- but to implement that will require a bit more computer privileges on the server (to run CGI scripts) than I have, as well as more time and cleverness. Maybe some day!

Meanwhile, for the record and to share an outline of what I've done and plan to do, the major steps are:

  1. Get Bo & Ward's "Quickiwiki" up and running on this Macintosh iBook under Apple's OS-X (using the UNIX Perl interpreter)
  2. Take Volumes 1-14 of the ^zhurnal since April 1999, merge the items into a big file (~1.1 MB) and, in a simple word processor, substitute Wiki-style mark-up for HTML tags
  3. Convert ^zhurnal entries one-at-a-time into Wiki pages using Wiki edit/save tools
  4. Fix typos and formatting oddities
  5. Add cross-links and index pages based on common topical themes
  6. Convert the ZhurnalWiki pages out of their dynamic Wiki form into a static HTML image
  7. Upload!
I've got the first few steps finished and am iteratively hacking away at the annotation and cross-linkage operation. But I must admit that I haven't written the program(s) to build a frozen web out of the live Wiki ... though I think it will be relatively straightforward to perform. Since the existing "wiki.cgi" script converts a file on-the-fly into HTML, putting a wrapper around that and letting it work its way through the ~600 ZhurnalWiki pages should do the job. I estimage it will only require a few lines of UNIX shell script and/or Perl. Famous last words? My time estimates for programming projects are generally optimistic by a factor of three --- even when I take into account my congenital optimism. So if the planned ZhurnalWiki doesn't materialize for public use before the next equinox, please forgive me....


- Sunday, July 22, 2001 at 17:14:44 (EDT)


Wouff-Hong & Rettysnitch

Annoyed by spam? Offended by drooling online porno-pimps? Tired of stupid commercial Web sites that put stylistic frippery and banner ads ahead of content? Bugged by pop-up windows? Who isn't?

The Internet is sick, just as ham radio was sick back in the years after the First World War, when bad amateur operators and lawless commercial stations fought for control of the airwaves. The good hams --- who sought to use radio for fun, learning, public service, and emergency disaster aid --- were getting drowned in the noise

Hiram Percy Maxim (call sign W1AW, "The Old Man" and founder of the American Radio Relay League) discovered the answer, or actually, a couple of answers. The Wouff-Hong is a mystical object of unspeakable terror, "amateur radio's most sacred symbol" which "stands for the enforcement of law and order in amateur operation." Its partner, the Rettysnitch, "is used to enforce the principles of decency in operating work." Physically, the Wouff-Hong looks like a couple of rough chunks of wood banded together in a forked configuration; the Rettysnitch is a pointy metallic probelike device. Their method of use is too gruesome and horrible to describe.

OK, for the unromantic realists who haven't yet understood: they were jokes. But what the Wouff-Hong and Rettysnitch stood for was real. There was no technological way to keep abusers off the air, and there were no governmental regulations that could be enforced. But if social pressures could be generated and brought to bear, there was a chance. If decent hams refused to tolerate or talk (telegraphically speaking) to rotten ones, the bad eggs would learn to clean up their acts. If violating the rules was shameful, and if violators were exposed whenever they were identified, then even the lids who lacked any sense of propriety would hesitate before interfering with legitimate amateurs.

Where are the Internet's Wouff-Hong and Rettysnitch now, in our time of desperate need?


- Thursday, July 19, 2001 at 16:52:02 (EDT)


Broken Symmetry

John Scarne (1903-1985) was a brilliant magician, a genuine genius at sleight-of-hand. He was also, alas, a shameless self-promoter. In cards and dice manipulation he was peerless, but in his attempt to position himself as the world's greatest board game designer he fell far shorter on the cosmic scale.

Author Blake Eskin wrote about Scarne and his hubris in the Washington Post Sunday magazine recently (15 July 2001, "A World of Games", pps. 18-22, 26-28). About 35 years earlier, I had an encounter of my own with John Scarne that corroborates Eskin's judgments. In the mid-1960s I somehow heard of a game that Scarne had created and was selling. Probably it was mentioned in a Martin Gardner Scientific American "Mathematical Games" column, or maybe an advertisement for it appeared in Chess Life & Review; I forget.

I ordered the game, which was modestly named "Scarney" by its developer. It was fun, in an abstract set-theoretic sense: two players took turns placing tokens down on a 4x4 board, and then took turns removing tokens and scoring points. The pieces came in four colors and were each marked with from one to four spots.

Pretty mathematical, in other words ... but after studying Scarney and playing a few test matches with my brother, it was clear to me that its designer was no mathematician. The rules were badly flawed: the second player could win trivially every time, just by playing in a symmetric pattern opposite to the first player's moves. Ugly-o!

I wrote to John Scarne, told him about the error, and suggested a small modification that would break the symmetry without otherwise marring the game. Scarne wrote back --- but instead of graciously acknowledging his mistake, he claimed in his letter to have already found the problem and to have independently chosen the same fix that I proposed. Coincidence? Or an attempted face-saving cover-up when a young teen-ager spotted a big boo-boo in a game that somebody hoped would make his name a household word?

Sure, everybody's insecure, at least most of the time. Sure, almost everybody dreams of fame, and maybe fortune. The tough job is to be uncorruptably honest with oneself ... hard-headedly realistic about one's abilities and achievements --- and then go on from there to find joy in doing one's best, without regard for mass recognition or lack thereof. It's part of growing up....


- Wednesday, July 18, 2001 at 00:12:54 (EDT)


LensManic

E. E. "Doc" Smith was an industrial chemist, but he also wrote science fiction stories back in the "Golden Age" of SF, beginning in the 1930's. Doc Smith wasn't much for character development or literary frills. But his plots were action-packed and spanned the galaxies ... even allowing for the fact that, when he began his Skylark series of novels, the actual size and nature of the cosmos was far from understood by astronomers. No matter! Smith's protagonists --- clean-cut all-American-style scientists and engineers and soldiers --- invented new rays, discovered new laws of Nature, and built new spacecraft ad lib. Whatever it took to beat the bad guys and save the world(s).

Many years ago during times of stress I found great comfort in Doc Smith's quaint yarns, especially the parts where modest self-effacing characters triumphed over impossible odds. Those were folks to identify with! A better-than-average sample of Smith's prose follows; I remember enjoying it one night before a Caltech physics department comprehensive graduate written exam. (Those were tests of one's problem-solving abilities in classical and quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, nuclear physics, etc.; cf. ^zhurnal 2 February 2000.) Our Hero, Kimball Kinnison, is working with a reference librarian to pick out a team of ~50 super-geniuses, the "... most eminent scientists and thinkers of all the planets of Galactic Civilization ...", for a special project to create some new black-hole-like artifact. The librarian has been asked to identify candidate mega-brainiacs:

     "Such a group can be selected, I think." The girl stood for a moment, lower lip held lightly between white teeth. "That is not a standard index, but each scientist has a rating. I can set the acceptor . . . no, the rejector would be better --- to throw out all the cards above any given rating. If we take out all ratings over seven hundred we will have only the highest of the geniuses."
     "How many, do you suppose?"
     "I have only a vague idea --- a couple of hundred, perhaps. If too many, we can run them again at a higher level, say seven ten. But there won't be very many, since there are only two galactic ratings higher than seven fifty. There will be duplications too --- such people as Sir Austin Cardynge will have two or three cards in the final rejects."
     "QX --- we'll want to hand-pick the fifty, anyway. Let's go!"
     Then for hours bale after bale of cards went through the machine; thousands of records per minute. Occasionally one card would flip out into a rack, rejected. Finally:
     "That's all, I think. Mathematicians, physicists," the librarian ticked off upon pink fingers. "Astronomers, philosophers, and this new classification, which hasn't been named yet."
     "The H.T.T.'s." Kinnison glanced at the label, lightly lettered in pencil, fronting the slim packet of cards. "Aren't you going to run them through, too?"
     "No. These are the two I mentioned a minute ago --- the only ones higher than seven hundred fifty."
     "A choice pair, eh? Sort of a creme de la creme? Let's look 'em over," and he extended his hand. "What do the initials stand for?"
     "I'm awfully sorry, sir, really," the girl flushed in embarrassment as she relinquished the cards in high reluctance. "If I'd had any idea we wouldn't have dared --- we call you, among ourselves, the 'High-Tension Thinkers'."
     "Us!" It was the Lensman's turn to flush. Nevertheless, he took the packet and read sketchily the facer: "Class XIX --- Unclassifiable at present ... lack of adequate methods ... minds of range and scope far beyond any available indices ... Ratings above high genius (750) ... yet no instability ... power beyond any heretofore known ... assigned ratings tentative and definitely minimum."
     He then read the cards.
     "Worsel, Velantia, eight hundred."
     And:
     "Kimball Kinnison, Tellus, eight hundred seventy-five."
--- from Gray Lensman, Chapter 8.


- Monday, July 16, 2001 at 04:02:20 (EDT)


HighCool

At a local library used-book sale recently I picked up a small Peter Pauper Press volume, Japanese Haiku. An inscription inside the front indicates that it was a 1967 Christmas gift from "Jean" to "Linda", who met at "Camp Hitaga" and became friends. (Where are they now? Did the book end up in her estate when Linda passed away? Or was it simply misplaced and donated to the library inadvertently?)

That little book brought back some haiku-related memories of a friendship of mine from about the same time. Joe Walling and I were students together at J. H. Reagan High School in Austin, Texas. We were comrades but parted ways at graduation, when he went to Rice University and I stayed nearer to home at the University of Texas. But a year later I transferred to Rice, and Joe invited me to share an apartment with him and a couple of other students. We exchanged banter and wordplay constantly. I remember commenting, at dinner when I had cooked green peas and one of my roommates refused to eat them: "All we are saying, is give peas a chance!" (OK, so maybe you had to be there, in the early 1970's, for it to work. Sorry....)

In a more poetic vein, Joe Walling occasionally tried his hand at verse. His best haiku was beautiful, striking, and cannot be repeated here --- since, besides issues of copyright, its imagery is rather too explicit for this journal. Joe's effort begins:
     Creamy-thigh'd goddess
and goes, hmmm, up from there. Typically sophomoric, in other words ... but hey, we were all sophomores at that time.

(cf. ^zhurnal 29 September 2000 for other notes on the Rice experience.)


- Sunday, July 15, 2001 at 05:36:42 (EDT)


PET ^z Bibli++

While cleaning out a long-unopened desk drawer, my wife (Paulette Dickerson) discovered a ledger from the early 1980s which offers additional data on ^z's hobby computing writings. To supplement the bibliographic saga begun in ^zhurnal 23 May 2000: Clearly, during his final year or two of graduate school at Caltech ^z could have spent a bit more time working on his thesis and a bit less time standing in line at the Post Office submitting manuscripts....


- Saturday, July 14, 2001 at 05:49:42 (EDT)


MockMack

Annoyed by monster sport utility vehicles (SUVs) that hog the road? You need MockMack™! This inconspicuous luggage-rack attachment folds flat on the top of your car ... but if an aggressive driver cuts you off, just press the activation key and it flips up to display the grille of a super-size semi diesel tractor --- complete with bulldog logo (or extra-price optional designs of your choice). The MockMack™ then glides forward on a pair of telescoping rails, until it hovers just aft of the back window of the unfriendly SUV at 12 o'clock. When the aggressive driver glances into his rear-view mirror and sees the glowing red LED eyes of the bulldog on the grille behind him ... well, perhaps the movie Duel will come to mind. Perhaps he will drive a bit more cautiously in the future, when he gets his little truck out of the ditch.

When its mission is accomplished, MockMack™ retracts instantly to its stow-away position on top of your car. You smile ... and remember our corporate slogan: It's not just the mind that boggles!

(Cf. ^zhurnal 16 June 2001)


- Friday, July 13, 2001 at 04:44:50 (EDT)


Digging the Stacks (iii/iii)

A final excerpt from A Guide to Library Research Methods by Thomas Mann --- Chapter 11, "Talking to People":
    So far we have examined six major avenues of access to information: controlled vocabulary searches, systematic browsing, key word searches, citation searches, searches through published bibliographies, and those done through computers. (Computer searches use elements of the other methods but add the possibility of post-coordinate Boolean combinations.) The seventh major avenue --- that of talking to people --- is the one most favored by journalists, but it is also valuable for anyone else.
    It is particularly important for academic researchers to be aware of this method, as most academics have an overly strong print bias, that is, they often unconsciously assume that if information cannot be found in print, then it cannot be found at all. This mental set is frequently complicated by two other assumptions, that calling people on the phone is "bothering" them, and that spending a few dollars on long-distance calls is totally beyond the pale of acceptable behavior.
...
    ... In obtaining information, the "secret" that is so hard for so many people to believe is this: There is no secret. Just make the call anyway and be perfectly honest about your reasons. It's O.K. to ask for help. The odds are that you'll succeed if you are simply persistent in developing a chain of referrals.
    Only a few things must be kept in mind to make your calls productive. First, if the nature of your inquiry is particularly complex, do a little homework first. ...
    Second, explain the purpose of your research --- that is, what your're ultimately trying to do, and what you will use the information for (e.g., personal curiosity, publication, broadcast, etc.). ...
    Third, respect the expert's intellectual property rights. Don't simply "milk" a person for information and then pass it off as your own --- be careful not to infringe on your source's own potential use of the information. ...
    Fourth, when you talk to people about a subject you're not familiar with, it is very important to ask for more contacts. Few researchers will rely exclusively on one printed source; it is similarly unwise to rely on only one spoken viewpoint. ...
    And fifth, after you have talked to someone who has been helpful --- especially if the person has gone out of his or her way for you --- it is very important to write a thank you note.
Thank you, Thomas! (Cf. ^zhurnal 30 June 2001 and 21 June 2001)


- Wednesday, July 11, 2001 at 20:23:57 (EDT)


Plasticity

Somehow the other day, in the context of human memory and how malleable it can be, the concepts of "memory plastic" and "memory metal" came to consciousness. These are real substances --- materials which can be molded into one shape, cooled, bent into another shape, and then when reheated revert to the "remembered" configuration. Nothing magical about them, just chemical bonds and solid-state physics, of which I know next to nothing.

But skipping along from that, I suddenly recalled a science-fiction story of the 1960's. It was a tale that involved some products of materials science as plot devices: a cliché-evil Earth government versus cliché-nice libertarian asteroid miners who were armed with strange and powerful artifacts, including supertough threads that could cut through metal like a wire cheeseslicer through cheddar. I reckoned that I had read it in an Analog anthology some time around 1967-69, based on a mental timestamp from associations that the memory had with an outside corner of my old public high school building, J. H. Reagan in northeast Austin Texas. I could almost see the cover of the book that I was carrying as I walked toward the school door....

Zwowza! After that decades-old subterranean vision blasted through the surface of my brain like a volcanic eruption, I simply had to check it out. A quick web search provided solid confirmation: Randall Garrett, writing under the pseudonym "Jonathan Blake McKensie" (or Mackenzie? --- Internet sources vary) published "Thin Edge" in Analog, December 1963, well before I began to read the 'zine. I must have seen it in the collection Analog 3 which came out in 1965 and reached my teenage hands a few years thereafter.

So even though I can't remember to take out the garbage some mornings, there are still a few functional neurons hiding out in the old ^z cranial crevasses! (But don't ask me to comment on the first issue of Playboy magazine that I ever saw --- May 1966, in my Uncle Lloyd's living-room magazine rack. Nowadays it would be rated a mild "PG = Parental Guidance Suggested"; back then, it was eye-opening. The centerfold's name was Dolly Read; she wore an electric purple sweater, pulled up a bit too high for comfort, and ... but I digress. Apparently certain images are etched rather deeply into an adolescent's mental substrate. Plasticity....)


- Tuesday, July 10, 2001 at 06:04:07 (EDT)


Religion & Reverence

In the 1850's John Stuart Mill wrote an essay titled "The Utility of Religion" --- marred in places by too-strident attacks on conventional systems of faith, but containing much positive and worthwhile thought. Along the way Mill grapples with life and the roots of its meaning. He observes rather poetically:
"Human existence is girt round with mystery: the narrow region of our experience is a small island in the midst of a boundless sea, which at once awes our feelings and stimulates our imagination by its vastness and its obscurity. To add to the mystery, the domain of our earthly existence is not only an island in infinite space, but also in infinite time. The past and the future are alike shrouded from us: we neither know the origin of anything which is, nor, its final destination."
As for the mystical dimensions of belief, and the possibility of religion without them, Mill then argues:
"The value, therefore, of religion to the individual, both in the past and present, as a source of personal satisfaction and of elevated feelings, is not to be disputed. But it has still to be considered, whether in order to obtain this good, it is necessary to travel beyond the boundaries of the world which we inhabit; or whether the idealization of our earthly life, the cultivation of a high conception of what it may be made, is not capable of supplying a poetry, and, in the best sense of the word, a religion, equally fitted to exalt the feelings, and (with the same aid from education) still better calculated to ennoble the conduct, than any belief respecting the unseen powers."
Mill postulates a system devoted to great and real things, such as humanity writ large. (Elements of his description perhaps echo in Larry Niven's science-fiction novel Protector.) Mill suggests that:
"The essence of religion is the strong and earnest direction of the emotions and desires towards an ideal object, recognized as of the highest excellence, and as rightfully paramount over all selfish objects of desire. This condition is fulfilled by the Religion of Humanity in as eminent a degree, and in as high a sense, as by the supernatural religions even in their best manifestations, and far more so than in any of their others."
In a discussion of the theory that the universe is a battleground between Good and Evil --- a belief which he finds intellectually and morally acceptable in spite of its mystical elements --- Mill's comments are reminiscent of George Eliot's stirring philosophy expressed in her novel Middlemarch. Mill writes:
"A virtuous human being assumes in this theory the exalted character of a fellow-laborer with the Highest, a fellow combatant in the great strife; contributing his little, which by the aggregation of many like himself becomes much, towards that progressive ascendancy, and ultimately complete triumph of good over evil, which history points to, and which this doctrine teaches us to regard as planned by the Being to whom we owe all the benevolent contrivance we behold in Nature."
As Mill says, a "... pleasing and encouraging thought ..."!

(Cf. Cardinal Newman's Definition of a Gentleman (1852), Samuel Johnson's Letter of Condolence (1750), and ^zhurnal notes re George Eliot 6 November 2000 and 21 May 1999, Albert Schweitzer 23 July 2000, and Mary Midgley 3 July 2001 and previous posts.)


- Sunday, July 08, 2001 at 19:44:58 (EDT)


PulpIt

The classic lists of Wedding Anniversary Gifts need updating. Herewith, some modest proposals from the Paper Products Industry Association:
   1 - clocks     - coffee filters
   2 - china      - disposable diapers
   3 - glass      - day-planner refills
   4 - appliances - napkins & tissues
   5 - silverware - paperback novels
   6 - wood       - cardboard boxes
   7 - desk sets  - local newspapers
   8 - linens     - sticky notepads
   9 - leather    - pogs & collectible trading cards
  10 - jewelry    - coffee-table books
  20 - platinum   - cute animal calendars
  25 - silver     - piñatas & party hats
  30 - diamond    - autographed photos of politicians
  40 - ruby       - excelsior, confetti, & streamers
  50 - gold       - disposable diapers
(thanks to Gray and other members of ^z's family for suggestions and advice!)


- Saturday, July 07, 2001 at 21:13:09 (EDT)


Cubism (Part 3)

To set the record straight: according to a newly-rediscovered ledger from 1980-83 (found by ^z's better half in an old desk) a comment in ^zhurnal 16 March 2001 is incorrect. Three months ago I wrote:
"On 20 September 1980 I took part in a Cube competition held by a local department store. The store had offered $100 gift certificates to anyone who could solve a Cube in under five minutes. I was the seventh to succeed that morning; there were a bunch of students from the University of Maryland there ahead of me. The store didn't keep its promise ... all I got was a T-shirt."
But my ledger indicates that the store did in fact (two weeks later) mail the gift certficate to me. Apparently the notes I relied on in March had been written before the reward arrived, and my memory was incomplete. (It still is; I have no recollection of the certificate and no idea what I bought with it. Clothes, or something equally ephemeral?) The ledger entry also records that it took me 4.5 minutes to do the job, and that my algorithm to attack the Rubik's Cube began with getting the edge cubelets into their correct places, bottom-to-top, followed by putting the corners into position, and finally working to orient the corners properly.

Nowadays I'm sadly out of practice on the Cube; I can recall the general principles but not enough of the specific moves to solve one efficiently. My time would probably be half an hour or so. Cubis fugit...


- Friday, July 06, 2001 at 04:57:23 (EDT)


4 July

Today is Independence Day in the United States of America. Many of the activities associated with this date (e.g., backyard barbecues and beer, outdoor concerts and fireworks, retail shopping and baseball) are tangential at best to its original meaning. But today some newspapers still sacrifice a page of advertising space to print the Declaration of Independence, some politicians still rise briefly to statesmanship as they speak of freedom, and some individuals still pause to think about Thomas Jefferson's words: "... We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness --- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed ...."

The American flag is a symbol of that founding philosophy. The flag is an overused cliché, but on occasion the underlying spirit manages to surface. For me a striking moment occurs in the movie Executive Decision, an action flick starring Kurt Russell. At one point the co-pilot of a hijacked US aircraft is sent by terrorists down into a cargo hold to investigate an electrical problem. Hiding there are a handful of soldiers and their consultant Kurt, smuggled aboard against all odds. The co-pilot startles; Kurt signals him to hush; a soldier quietly lifts a shoulder patch on his camo uniform and reveals a small American flag insignia. The message: "Courage --- we're here to help you." It's a minor scene in a minor motion picture, but whenever I see it, it moves me. It reminds me of what a flag can stand for.

The national reputation: military serving under civilian control; force working to ensure peace. The purpose of government: liberty and justice for all. Yes, the country falls short, sometimes radically so. Racism remains alive, big money corrupts politics, and short-sightedness leads to foolish decisions. Many branches are rotten and need to be trimmed --- but the tree is healthy, and over time there are more and more good trees growing in the forest, more nations which are living examples of law, democracy, human rights, equality, peace, and freedom. Progress toward universal flourishing ... worth celebrating this day.


- Wednesday, July 04, 2001 at 20:41:44 (EDT)


Parts & Wholes

Mary Midgley's recent Science and Poetry is, like her earlier writings, full of thoughtful and literate prose. But in some ways the new book feels sadly unsatisfying. Its chapters read like disjoint essays or speeches, which indeed the Acknowledgements suggest that they are. Worse, the overall tone is one of negativism and refutation, of smiting down those who disagree --- yet a close reading suggests that Midgley's arguments are themselves vulnerable to her own criticisms. Yes, the world is untidy and needs to be analyzed on multiple levels; yes, simplistic theories cannot explain all phenomena; yes, scientists are human (as are philosophers! - ^z) and often overreach themselves, especially when writing for lay audiences. But it's impolitic and unconvincing to pick phrases out of context and attack them for their techno-hubric vocabulary. It also weakens one's case to cite popularizers and fringe physicists as if they represent the core of the human scientific enterprise. And is the gender question, Sky God versus Earth Goddess, really all that relevant to the question at hand, or is it just another metaphorical debating trick?

Mary Midgley's bottom line is an important one and appears in its purest form near the end of Chapter 18: Wholes and parts are equally real. Absolutely. But (to quote a rock music band slogan), "So far, so what?" Granted, too much reductionism is bad --- as is too much wholism. But what comes next? As she aptly notes, "Clear expressions of important mistakes are very useful things, making it much easier to move on beyond those mistakes than it is when they are wrapped in confusion." (Chap. 3) Yes. And most welcome at this point would be a clear, compact, coherent expression of the key elements of Midgley's position(s). Total quantification isn't necessary --- equations aren't always appropriate! --- but a bit of sharpness could make her ideas more easily testable against human experience. That wouldn't be bad.

John Stuart Mill's essay "The Utility of Religion" wrestles with many of the same themes as does Mary Midgley --- the scientific v. the supernatural, and method v. mysticism. But Mill manages to paint a clearer picture, particularly with respect to the tension between reverence and religion. More on that another time!

(Cf. ^zhurnal 22 February 2001 and 17 January 2000 for comments by John Archibald Wheeler and Martin Gardner re unified theories of everything; cf. "Physics Envy", 11 April 2001 re (mis)use of technical metaphors; and cf. various thought-provoking excerpts from Midgley's prior books, 17 Sep 2000, 6 July 2000, 1 June 2000, etc.)


- Tuesday, July 03, 2001 at 08:10:12 (EDT)


Keys to the Kingdom

Minor league baseball is a great way to rediscover America --- the real country, not the bizarre pressure-cooker that dominates many people's daily experience. At a couple of recent weekday evening games in Frederick, Maryland, a few thousand fans gather to witness the Keys play. The Frederick Keys are a Class A club, three steps down the food chain from the major league Baltimore Orioles. They're named for local hero Francis Scott Key, author of the US national anthem ("The Star Spangled Banner"); he's buried in the cemetery next door to the ballpark.

Some sights and sounds:

The pace of the game is slow, the weather warm, the crowd friendly, and the tickets cheap. Stadium food is pricey, but not when you consider it as part of the entertainment. All the seats are close enough to the field to see faces --- unlike mega-ballparks where the upper decks are at nosebleed altitudes and the diamond is distant enough to turn players into ants. The baseball is good, if unpredictable: one night the Keys are behind 9-0 in the bottom of the ninth inning, with two outs, and rally to score three runs; the next night it's a slugfest of the opposite color and the Frederick boys win 15-6. Not many errors on either side, just good, solidly hit balls and aggressive play. A lucky few from the team may move up to the AA level or beyond. Meanwhile, they're not making much money but they're having fun. So are the people in their audience.


- Sunday, July 01, 2001 at 20:13:18 (EDT)


Digging the Stacks (ii/iii)

From Thomas Mann's book A Guide to Library Research Methods Chapter 9, "Computer Searches":
        Computer searches thus have both advantages and disadvantages. To use them intelligently you must recognize their limitations as well as their strengths. The important thing to remember is that they are only one weapon available to the researcher; they are not the whole arsenal. A thorough review of the literature of any subject requires a combination of the approaches discussed in this book.
...
        The versatility of computer searches is so dazzling that a large humber of researchers are failing to note or heed their limitations. And, contrary to the popular saying, what you don't know can hurt you. I have seen this problem repeatedly, particularly with graduate students who want to do a literature review in preparation for writing a dissertation. ...
        What is just as bad is that professors who direct doctoral dissertations allow computer searches to pass for complete literature reviews --- for the professors are usually just as naive about their limitations as the students are.
        What this amounts to can only be described as cultural lobotomy on a grand scale. When a significant percentage of our most educated people (prospective Ph.D.s) relies almost exclusively on computer searches for "in-depth" research, then we are fostering the growth of an intellectual system with very shallow roots. Since so much of the written memory of humanity before the 1970s is not in the computer in the first place --- or is only superficially indexed --- it is likely to be ignored by immature scholars if it isn't as easily retrievable as the more recent material. The older material --- especially the older journal articles --- "does not compute"; and to many graduate students this tends as a practical matter to mean "therefore it is not important." There tends to be a similar neglect of certain forms of literature, especially single-author books, because machines more readily retrieve journal articles and research reports. A moment's reflection will indicate that the computers are no better than the material that is loaded into them; and yet a surprising number of researchers expect them to be omniscient.
(Cf. ^zhurnal 21 June 2001)


- Saturday, June 30, 2001 at 06:34:10 (EDT)


DiffiCult

Some problems are easy; some problems are hard. To tell them apart is a hard problem!

(cf. ^zhurnal 25 May 1999)


- Thursday, June 28, 2001 at 08:06:43 (EDT)


Pregnant Sails

One of my favorite Shakespearian images occurs in MidSummer Night's Dream where (in Act II, Scene i) the Queen of the Fairies describes how she and a maiden worshiper used to hang out on the beach together:
Titania:
           Set your heart at rest:
The fairy land buys not the child of me.
His mother was a vot'ress of my order,
And in the spiced Indian air, by night,
Full often hath she gossip'd by my side,
And sat with me on Neptune's yellow sands,
Marking the embarked traders on the flood,
When we have laugh'd to see the sails conceive,
And grow big bellied with the wanton wind:
Which she with pretty and with swimming gait,
Following (her womb then rich with my young squire)
Would imitate, and sail upon the land,
To fetch me trifles, and return again,
As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.
But she being mortal, of that boy did die,
And for her sake I do rear up her boy,
And for her sake I will not part with him.

Recently, while writing a letter to a friend I tried to find this passage to quote. Strangely enough, in the first copy of Shakespeare that came to hand --- a tiny 1924 volume "Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Clapp Noyes, A.M., Professor of English, Normal High School, Pittsburg, Penn." --- the words failed to resonate. I dug out a facsimile of the First Folio and found the problem: missing were the lines "When we have laugh'd to see the sails conceive, / And grow big bellied with the wanton wind:" and "Following (her womb then rich with my young squire)". These lacunæ seem more than coincidental. Were elements of Shakespeare's beautiful metaphor deemed too risqué? (But they're the best parts!) Also missing, perhaps for continuity's sake, was the later line "But she being mortal, of that boy did die".

On the positive side of the ledger, however, a "Critical Comment" from the Introduction of that same Noyes edition, attributed to Thomas Campbell: "I have never been so sacreligious as to envy Shakespeare in the bad sense of the word, but if there can be such an emotion as sinless envy, I feel it toward him .... Of all his works, the Midsummer Night's Dream leaves the strongest impression on my mind that this miserable world must have, for once at least, contained a happy man. This play is so purely delicious, so little intermixed with the painful passions from which Poetry distils her sterner sweets, so fragrant with hilarity, so bland and yet so bold, that I cannot imagine Shakespeare's mind to have been in any other frame than that of healthful ecstacy when the sparks of inspiration thrilled through his brain in composing it."

(cf. ^zhurnal 23 November 2000 for a similarly striking feminine sailing image by Herman Melville)


- Tuesday, June 26, 2001 at 10:14:31 (EDT)


Organ Lessons

Late afternoon, Wednesday 6 May 1998, Washington DC: wife and son and I fight our way through the dregs of rush-hour traffic into downtown Georgetown, center of congestion in the local cosmos. We find a parking space, weave our way on foot through a couple of blocks of students and shoppers, turn a corner, climb a short flight of stairs --- and step into an oasis of silence.

The little fenced yard in front of Grace Episcopal Church is cloaked in a mantle of peace. On the steps outside the main doors sits a young man, reading a book. We approach; he smiles, marks his place, and greets us. His name is Larry Molinaro, and he is simply enjoying the day while awaiting our arrival. His aura at that moment is the most serene of any human being I have ever witnessed. Is it the contrast with the hurly-burly metropolis surrounding us? Is it a deeper magic? No matter.

Larry is the organist at Grace Episcopal and has offered to give lessons to our 15-year-old son, Merle. We go inside and Merle plays for him on the church's harpsichord; Larry likes what he hears, and so do we. The acoustics are superb. We climb a narrow twisting stairway to the loft --- a passageway like those found in old observatories, snaking up from the foundation to the telescope. At the top, Larry shows us the hand-made church organ. It's a classical-style instrument with direct mechanical connections from keys and pedals to valves that send air through resonant pipes. The "Book of the Organ" depicts its construction: craftsman David Moore in Vermont smelted and cast the ingots of metal himself, hammered them out by hand into sheets, and formed them into pipes. The white keys are made of cow bones from his farm.

Cut to another Wednesday in Georgetown, 29 July 1998: in the Grace Episcopal Church organ loft Larry Molinaro is teaching, again within the great-spirited force field that seems to surround him and the church. During a break I tell him how memorable our first encounter was for me, two months earlier; he grins and says that the churchyard is just a marvelous place to sit and think. Larry and Merle and I joke about the stress associated with page-turning for a professional musician during a public performance, a job Merle occasionally takes on for friends of the family. Larry tells of toying with a nervous page-turner --- how sometimes Larry would tease his victim by planting small bright stick-on notes within the music, bearing little messages: Hi Bob! or Your Name Here --- and how when he knows a piece really well he can talk quietly to the page-turner while playing, thereby making his helper even more anxious. Larry describes the process of learning the organ pedals as "... like developing a second left hand ...", and then relates an anecdote of his catastrophic attempt to play while wearing new shoes --- which lead to some unexpectedly loud, dissonant chords and a sudden awakening for dozing members of the congregation below.

Jump finally to a Wednesday evening in Annapolis, Maryland, 28 October 1998: Larry shows us around the old St. Anne's Episcopal Church in the center of the city, next door to the state capitol. He tells us that, some years ago, the church tower bells were accidentally wired to the light switch in the men's room --- so that whenever a new parson went to use the facilities, the whole town knew it. Larry smiles, then moves to the organ to begin the lesson.


- Sunday, June 24, 2001 at 09:37:56 (EDT)


Hopeful Rejoinders

After the "hard rain's a'gonna fall" Jeremiadic downer of ^zhurnal 19 June 2001, how's about some glimmers of moonlight peeping shyly through the clouds? Sure, the "dot-com bubble" economy has a massive deflation still to hit home. But bear also in mind:

The coming decade (or decades) may not be as rich in material goods as many fantasized last year, when techno-mania ruled minds, markets, and media. But progress in knowledge and, if we're fortunate, wisdom, will continue. Human beings around the world are, slowly and with plenty of tragic exceptions, freeing themselves from oppressive governments. There's more sharing of technology, food, and other resources. Perhaps we'll do better now, together and overall, than we would have under a booming economy of distracting toys. Let's hope so.


- Saturday, June 23, 2001 at 06:44:26 (EDT)


Why

What's the point of all this? Perhaps "... to create moments of philosophy --- that is, to pass from opinion to thought ...."

(a quote from Philos magazine, via the 2 May 1999 New York Times article "Thought for Food: Cafés Offer Philosophy in France" by Marlise Simons; cf. ^zhurnal 18 Sep 1999 plus 9 April 2001 and other Philo B'fast notes.)


- Friday, June 22, 2001 at 05:41:06 (EDT)


Digging the Stacks (i/iii)

Thomas Mann's book A Guide to Library Research Methods (1986) is entertaining and remains valid --- nay, essential --- reading in the Web era. From Chapter 3, "Systematic Browsing and Use of the Classification Scheme":
    Librarians sometimes meet with resistance when they suggest that if readers want certain information they shold browse the library's bookshelves in a particular area. Evidently, some people assume --- if it occurs to them at all --- that browsing is at best a haphazard and inefficient way to do research.
    Just the opposite is true. Systematically browsing the shelves is a very useful method of subject retrieval, and in some cases it is the most efficient method of all. ...
...
    ... Many collections of primary manuscripts or "raw materials" exist on an incredible array of subjects, and can be identified through the sources discussed in Chapter 10 and in the Appendix. However, such collections are more often than not poorly indexed, or not indexed at all, so researchers usually must simply browse through them. The principle is the same, though: first put yourself in a situation where the information you want is likely to exist, and then look around so that you can recognize valuable things when you see them.
    One of the major themes of the present book is that a variety of techniques can be used to find information, that each of them has both advantages and disadvantages, and that no one of them can be counted on to do the entire job of in-depth research. What is required is always a mixture of approaches, so that the various trade-offs can balance each other. My observation, however, is that in this age of proliferating indexes, abstracts, catalogs, and databases, the research technique of systematic browsing tends to be overlooked by researchers who are infatuated with the flashier electronic approaches. The fact remains, however, that the vast bulk of humanity's written memory contained in books is not in the indexes and databases in the first place; and researchers who neglect systematic browsing of the texts of books are missing a vast store of material that cannot be efficiently retrieved in any other way.


- Thursday, June 21, 2001 at 06:10:49 (EDT)


Pop Goes ...

"Now that the dot-com bubble has burst" is a phrase that appears frequently in newspaper articles nowadays. Sorry, dear columnist --- you're wrong (again!). The bubble is much, much larger than you imagine, and it will take longer to deflate than a mere year or two. Misallocation of resources has gone far beyond nouveaux-millionaire mansions, dark fiber in the ground, idle server farms, and unrentable office space. People have been wasted. They've made foolish career choices, thrown away retirement savings, driven down dead-end educational paths ... and in general, have been seduced by the gleam of quick, effortless wealth. A mountain of horribly bad investment has to be unwound and then repaired, if possible, or written off if not. That will probably take about a decade, perhaps longer in many cases.

Prepare for a rough landing. Prepare for hard times. Tighten your belts, please, in more ways than one.

(Cf. ^zhurnal 20 May 2001, 24 February 2001, 3 January 2001, 19 October 2000, 29 April 2000, 8 April 2000, 19 May 1999, etc.)


- Tuesday, June 19, 2001 at 06:16:24 (EDT)


Life/Time Management (ii/ii)

From Seneca's "On the Shortness of Life":
    "The only people really at leisure are those who take time for philosophy. They alone really live. It is not their lifetime alone of which they are careful stewards: they annex every age to their own and exploit all the years that have gone before. Unless we prove ingrate, it was for us that the illustrious founders of divine schools of thought came into being, for us they prepared a way of life. By the exertions of others we are led to the fairest treasures, raised to the light out of the darkness in which they were mired. No age is forbidden to us, we have admittance to all, and if we choose to transcend the narrow bounds of human frailty by loftiness of mind, there is a vast stretch of time for us to roam. We may dispute with Socrates, doubt with Carneades, repose with Epicurus, transcend human nature with the Stoics, defy it with the Cynics. Since Nature allows us to participate in any age, why should we not betake ourselves in mind from this petty and ephemeral span to the boundless and timeless region we can share with our betters?
...
    "Only men who make Zeno and Pythagoras and Democritus and the other high priests of liberal studies their daily familiars, who cultivate Aristotle and Theophrastus, can properly be said to be engaged in the duties of life. None of these will be "not at home," none will send his visitor away without making him happier and better contented with himself, none will allow a visitor to leave him empty-handed, and they are accessible to all comers, night and day.
    "None of these will force you to die, but all will teach you how. None of these will wear your years away, but rather add his own to yours. Conversation with them is not subversive, association not a capital offense, and no great expense is involved in cultivating them. You can carry home whatever you like: it will not be their fault if you do not draw as deeply as you like from their wellsprings. What felicity awaits the man who has enrolled as their client, what a fair old age! He will have friends with whom he can deliberate on matters great and small, whom he may consult about his problems every day, from whom he can hear truth without offense and praise without flattery, after whose likeness he may mold himself.
    "It is a common saying that a man's parents are not of his own choosing but allotted to him by chance. But we can choose our genealogy. Here are families with noble endowments: choose whichever you wish to belong to. Your adoption will give you not only the name but actually the property, and this you need not guard in a mean or niggardly spirit: the more people you share it with, the greater will it become. These will open the path to eternity for you and will raise you to a height from which none can be cast down. This is the sole means of prolonging your mortality, rather of transforming it into immortality. Honors, monuments, all that ambition has blazoned in inscriptions or piled high in stone will speedily sink to ruin; there is nothing that the lapse of time does not dilapidate and exterminate. But the dedications of philosophy are impregnable; age cannot erase their memory or diminish their force. Each succeeding generation will hold them in ever higher reverence; what is close at hand is subject to envy, whereas the distant we can admire without prejudice. The philosopher's life is therefore spacious: he is not hemmed in and constricted like others. He alone is exempt from the limitations of humanity; all ages are at his service as at a god's. Has time gone by? He holds it fast in recollection. Is time now present? He utilizes it. Is it still to come? He anticipates it. The amalgamation of all time into one makes his life long."

(From The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca, translated by Moses Hadas (1900-1966), W. W. Norton & Company, 1958. Cf. ^zhurnal 30 May 2000 and 13 June 2001.)


- Sunday, June 17, 2001 at 18:24:05 (EDT)



This is Volume 0.15 of the journal of ^z = Mark Zimmermann ... musings on mind, matter, method, and metaphor ... new posts every few days, since April 1999. See ZhurnalyWiki on zhurnaly.com for a parallel "live" Wiki experiment in shared thought. For back issues of the ^zhurnal see Volumes v.01 (April-May 1999), v.02 (May-July 1999), v.03 (July-September 1999), v.04 (September-November 1999), v.05 (November 1999 - January 2000), v.06 (January-March 2000), v.07 (March-May 2000), v.08 (May-June 2000), v.09 (June-July 2000), v.10 (August-October 2000), v.11 (October-December 2000), v.12 (December 2000 - February 2001), v.13 (February-April 2001), v.14 (April-June 2001), 0.15 (June-August 2001), 0.16 (August-September 2001), 0.17 (September-November 2001), 0.18 (November-December 2001), 0.19 (December 2001 - February 2002), 0.20 (February-April 2002), 0.21 (April-May 2002), 0.22 (May-July 2002), 0.23 (July-September 2002), 0.24 (September-October 2002), 0.25 (October-November 2002), 0.26 (November 2002 - January 2003), 0.27 (January-February 2003), 0.28 (February-April 2003), 0.29 (April-June 2003), 0.30 (June-July 2003), 0.31 (July-September 2003), 0.32 (September-October 2003), 0.33 (October-November 2003), 0.34 (November 2003 - January 2004), 0.35 (January-February 2004), 0.36 (February-March 2004), 0.37 (March-April 2004), 0.38 (April-June 2004), 0.39 (June-July 2004), 0.40 (July-August 2004), 0.41 (August-September 2004), 0.42 (September-November 2004), ... Current Volume. Send comments and suggestions to z (at) his.com. Thank you!