^zhurnal - v.0.14

Look for CornFloss in the clone section of your favorite grocery store. And wait until you hear what our agri-gene-splicers are working on next! We can't say much, but imagine the possibilities when kernels of corn, DNA fully under our control, get into your lower intestine. And remember our corporate slogan: It's not just the mind that boggles!

- Saturday, June 16, 2001 at 06:31:51 (EDT)

Some stories are more convincing than others; some have great popularity for a while, then are "seen through" and discarded in favor of other explanations; some never catch on. Factual accuracy is less important than coherence, style, and simplicity. It also helps to have strong individuals to focus emotion on: villains and heroes, knaves and knights, sinners and saints. A complex, open-ended, long-range, multidimensional, subtle-shades-of-gray explanation doesn't appeal, regardless of its objective truth. Give me a ripping yarn, to go, please!

- Friday, June 15, 2001 at 05:34:14 (EDT)

    "It is a general complaint among mankind, Paulinus, that Nature is niggardly: our alloted span is brief, and the term granted us flies by with such dizzy speed that all but a few exhaust it just when they are beginning to live. ... It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. Life is long enough and our allotted portion generous enough for our most ambitious projects if we invest it all carefully. But when it is squandered through luxury and indifference, and spent for no good end, we realize it has gone, under the pressure of the ultimate necessity, before we were aware it was going.
...
    "It is universally agreed, moreover, that no pursuit, neither eloquence nor the liberal arts, can be followed by a man preoccupied, for the mind can take nothing in deeply when its interests are fragmented, but spews back everything that is crammed into it. The least concern of the preoccupied man is life; it is the hardest science of all. Experts in other disciplines are numerous and common; some of them mere boys have been able to master so thoroughly that they could even play the teacher. But the science of life requires a whole lifetime, and the science of dying, which you may find more surprising, requires a whole lifetime. Many fine people have abandoned all their encumbrances, have renounced riches and business and pleasure, and have made it their one object, during the remainder of their span, to learn how to live. Even so, the greater number died confessing that they had not yet learned the art --- still less have those others learned it.
...
    "Life falls into three divisions --- past, present, and future. Of these, the present is transitory, the future uncertain, the past unalterable. This is the part over which Fortune has lost her power, which cannot be subjected to any man's control. But this part men preoccupied lose, for they have no leisure to look back on the past, and if they had there would be no pleasure in recollecting a regrettable episode. They are unwilling to call to mind time badly spent, therefore, and have no stomach for traversing again passages whose faults are obvious in retrospect though they were disguised at the time by the pander pleasure. No one willingly turns his mind back to the past unless his acts have all passed the censorship of his own conscience, which is never deceived; a man who has coveted much in his ambition, behaved arrogantly in his pride, used his victory without restraint, overreached by treachery, plundered out of avarice, squandered out of prodigality, must inevitably be afraid of his own memory. And yet that is the part of our time which is hallowed and sacrosanct, above the reach of human vicissitudes and beyond the sway of Fortune, impregnable to the vexations of want and fear and the assaults of disease; it is the part which is not subject to turmoil or looting; its possession is everlasting and free from anxiety. The days of our present come one by one, and each day minute by minute; but all the days of the past will appear at your bidding and allow you to examine them and linger over them at your will. Busy men have no time for this. Excursions into all the parts of its past are the privilege of a serene and untroubled mind; but the minds of the preoccupied cannot turn or look back, as if constricted by a yoke. And so their life vanishes into an abyss. However much water your pour on will do no good if there is no vessel ready to receive and hold it; and similarly it makes no difference how much time is given you if there is no place for it to settle and it passes through the cracks and holes of the mind. The present is fleeting, to the degree that to some it seems non-existent. It is always in motion, it flows on headlong; it ceases to be before it has come, and will no more brook delay than the firmament or the stars, whose incessant drive never allows them to remain stationary. It is only with the present that busy men are concerned, and the present is so transitory that it cannot be grasped; but because their attention is distracted in many directions they are deprived of even this little."

- Wednesday, June 13, 2001 at 21:55:17 (EDT)

I gathered my courage and asked what she needed, which turned out to be Milton's Paradise Lost for a high school assignment. (Judging from her tone of voice, this was a last-minute panic situation. Her mom was wise enough not to over-react.) We scanned the shelves around the area without luck. I checked the online catalog and found the precise Dewey Decimal System number; Milton wasn't there either. But hmmm ... given that this is for school, maybe it's in the separate "Reading List" area? Good guess: we went there and indeed discovered quite a number of Cliff Notes for the book, but no Paradise Lost itself. (R.I.P.: the eponymous Cliff died recently.)

Dead end? Not quite ... there's one last chance: the library charity used-book sale in the basement. We descended the stairs, looked in the "M" section of poets, and voila! --- two copies, one old hardback in a loose binding for 50 cents, the other a newer paperback priced $1. I left mother and daughter there to decide between then.

Moral of this miniature tale? Libraries are nice places; when faced with a problem, don't give up at the first failure, but pursue alternative paths; it's fun to help people; and don't get mad at your mother if you've waited until the day before your homework is due.

- Monday, June 11, 2001 at 05:45:30 (EDT)

Maybe not. Writing often pays for itself; the act of sorting out thoughts and putting them into words clarifies ideas immensely. And many members of the target audience can be your own future selves, especially when you're recording memories in a journal for later reverie and enjoyment. Finally, even if a note is only seen a handful of times, one of those viewings could be a crucial event that literally saves the world. (At least I can dream!) So perhaps it's OK not to demand throngs of readers for every product of one's pen.

(Cf. ^zhurnal 19 March 2001)

- Saturday, June 09, 2001 at 19:05:27 (EDT)

When a theory is good enough, in other words, for some purposes it takes over reality. We know that the theoretical situation is "wrong" in one sense --- but it's so convenient that we prefer to live with the error. Maybe it's like our system of justice. In order to have clean, consistent rules, we accept less-than-perfect fairness ... and then add further escape-clause inconsistencies (e.g., executive pardons) to break out of the troubles that result.

(Cf. Lewis Richardson's 1922 vision of a meteorological Forecast Factory, and ^zhurnal 12 October 1999 or 6 October 1999.)

- Friday, June 08, 2001 at 06:00:23 (EDT)

Single-threaded software crashes at the slightest error, as all of us have too-frequently experienced. Single-threaded stories unravel and lose credibility at every oversight. ("Didn't the author know that Mercury rotates?" ... "Why wouldn't the detective have smelled the decaying corpse after two weeks?" ... "Going back to him, after what he did to her, was totally outside her character!") Software and stories are fragile.

History isn't like that; there are always networks of forces that drive large-scale developments. Geography, technology, resources, demographics, economics, cultural factors --- all work together in feedback loops, constantly interacting and influencing one another. Push on one, and the others change to compensate. That's why embargos so rarely work; that's why price controls fail; and that's what dooms legislative attempts to change human nature.

Beware of attempts to explain world events in terms of simple stories. Beware of attempts to model complex systems via simple simulations. Instead, explore alternatives ... demand error estimates ... and maintain a strong skepticism, even (or especially!) when dealing with seemingly-well-validated predictions.

(Cf. ^zhurnal 8 May 1999)

- Wednesday, June 06, 2001 at 06:09:22 (EDT)

• his frequent resolutions to work on self-improvement --- stop drinking so much, stop going to plays, save more money, study mathematics (his multiplication tables!), practice on musical instruments (with side complaints about the high cost of lessons), relearn Latin ...
• his self-honesty --- e.g. in recording his weakness for "pretty wenches" and in ruefully admitting how much pride, on occasion, he feels in himself for his achievements ...
• his thankfulness for his good fortune --- for possessing good health, holding a good job, doing important work, learning new things in the arts and sciences, accumulating wealth from year to year ...
• his shameless celebrity-worship and name-dropping ...

- Tuesday, June 05, 2001 at 05:45:11 (EDT)

• "Excessive vibrato is like a highly emotional recitation of the alphabet --- and equally nauseating." (quoting from The Strad, 1916)
• "The instrument shouldn't dictate what the music says. You should dictate. And sometimes you have to fight against the instrument, and it doesn't feel good."
• "We modern players tend to make every note important. The Baroque ideal is to look for the important notes and then play them importantly."
• "There are many more notes that are humorous than are beautiful in this piece."
• "There's the temptation to show what a great flute player you are --- but in this part, it's the piano that should be in front."
• "If the word had been invented at that time, I would call it 'jazzy'."
• "He was one of the greatest cellists who ever walked the face of the planet ... and when he played that piece, every note of the first 16 was so beautiful that you would have paid the full price of admission to the concert just to hear it. But when all the notes are equally beautiful, you can't hear the tension that Bach wrote there."
• "I feel that we begin at sea level --- or "C" level (^_^) --- calm and smooth. Then we move up, add some sharps and flats, and it gets that first big explosion. Think of waves on the ocean."
• "That's a long note, and you played it vibrato. It's like, 'You can vibrate, so you should?' I don't think so! You see, that sounds like A Cello and A Piano. What if we were all part of a single sound?"
• "The nice thing about [deciding how to play] this is that you have about 70 more years to make up your mind."

And that was how he taught the class ... with humor and wit, that is. Masterfully.

- Monday, June 04, 2001 at 05:47:37 (EDT)

The local page that got by far the most visits was http://www.his.com/~z/gibbon.html with a count of several thousand. (I fear that most of these hits were by students seeking quick quotations for their term papers ... but perhaps a few came from more voluntary seekers of knowledge.) The late Eugene Ho's essay on Edward Gibbon (http://www.his.com/~z/gibho1.html) attracted many hundreds of looks, as did the HIS.COM Gibbonic quotation "Fortune Cookie" service http://www.his.com/cgi-bin/fortune.gibbon. The Montgomery County Coin Club (cf. http://www.money.org/club_mccc.html) has its monthly newsletter and other pages hosted at the American Numismatic Association, but since those pages load an image (typically one of my 1852 large cents) stored on HIS.COM, their hits also register on the web logs here; there were a few hundred of them. The next most popular pages were a set of favorite Gibbon quotes that Eugene Ho assembled (http://www.his.com/~z/passage.html) followed by the (in)famous ^zhurnal formerly in a "guestbook" directory, now at http://zhurnaly.com/ --- where this item itself appears.

The little program that I use to analyze HIS.COM web logs is an elementary example of Perl. The guts of it are three loops, which respectively use associative arrays to count hits by looker and by page looked at, to sort and print the lookers, and to sort and print the page hit counts. For the record:

# analyze HIS.COM web logs - ^z - 20010218
# assumes format:
# client_addr day month year time 0 /~z/page.html
# to run try:
# perl zweban <infile >results
# count lookers and mypages that they look at
while ($line = <STDIN>) {
  @fields = split(" ", $line);
  ++$looker{$fields[0]};
  ++$mypage{$fields[6]};
}
print " *** Lookers at web pages ***\n";
# sort into descending order and print lookers
foreach $key (sort { $looker{$b} <=> $looker{$a} } keys %looker) {
  print $looker{$key}, " ---- ", $key, "\n";
}
print "\n *** Mypages being looked at ***\n";
# sort into descending order and print mypages
foreach $key (sort { $mypage{$b} <=> $mypage{$a} } keys %mypage) {
  print $mypage{$key}, " ---- ", $key, "\n";
}

Straightforward stuff, which could be extended to do a more detailed analysis of who's looking at what and when. Maybe some day!

- Saturday, June 02, 2001 at 05:33:38 (EDT)

"In expressing my sympathy, I would like to leave you with three thoughts: a merciful fate spared Walter further suffering, your love and devotion made his last weeks bearable, and he made the most of the time he had left."

- Wednesday, May 30, 2001 at 08:09:58 (EDT)

"... Katherine Anne Porter spent a lifetime writing floods of letters on blue paper, to anyone who would listen, about the outrages visited upon her by visitors and interrupters. Nearly every letter complained that nobody would leave her alone to write. Once the letters were written, she would escape to the next party, the next interruption...."

Along similar lines, Thomas Jefferson complains in a note to Charles Thomson (9 January 1816):

" ... My greatest oppression is a correspondence afflictingly laborious, the extent of which I have been long endeavoring to curtail. This keeps me at the drudgery of the writing-table all the prime hours of the day, leaving for the gratification of my appetite for reading, only what I can steal from the hours of sleep. Could I reduce this epistolary corvée within the limits of my friends and affairs, and give the time redeemed from it to reading and reflection, to history, ethics, mathematics, my life would be as happy as the infirmities of age would admit ..."

Maybe the answer can be found in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, early in Chapter II when Bilbo suddenly discovers that he is late:

"That leaves you just ten minutes. You will have to run," said Gandalf.
"But ---," said Bilbo.
"No time for it," said the wizard.
"But ---," said Bilbo again.
"No time for that either! Off you go!"

(Davison's essay appears in the Phi Beta Kappa newsletter "The Key Reporter", Vol. 66, No. 3 (Spring 2001); cf. http://www.pbk.org. And cf. http://www.loc.gov for the collection of Thomas Jefferson's papers at the Library of Congress; this one is in Paul Leicester Ford's "Works of Thomas Jefferson". Also cf. ^zhurnal 12 March 2001, 3 March 2001, 6 Feb 2001, 8 Dec 2000, 30 Nov 2000, 5 May 2000, 23 Aug 1999, etc.)

- Tuesday, May 29, 2001 at 05:54:27 (EDT)

This is a community college. It's attended by folks who choose to come here and who study hard to improve themselves --- not to party, delay going to work, or make connections with other wealthy drones, and not because their parents forced them to go. Many of the students are already holding down one, maybe two jobs, plus taking care of a family. Some are kids with spikey hair dyed in streaks of red and blue; some are gray or balding; some are overweight, handicapped, or uncosmetic in appearance; some are nervous new immigrants. Some goofed off, weren't focused during high school, made stupid mistakes, got into trouble, and only belatedly have figured out what they want to learn.

But when they cross that stage! Their friends whistle and whoop, the crowd applauds, they shake the hand of a professor, grin, nod ... they've done a good job, and are being recognized for it. Phi Theta Kappa, the junior college scholastic society, inducts a block of kids with strong grades. Others get departmental awards for hard work in math, drama, chemistry, French, physics, sports, business, and a host of other subjects. Some say a few words; the philosophy honoree is told "Don't talk, or we'll be here all night!", so she refrains. Nevertheless, the conclave runs late.

Finally, two are called forward for highest honors. One is a whisp of an Asian girl, smile bigger than she is, who came to this country six years ago. In accented but excellent English she thanks her teachers and her new friends. The other is a tall young man with a shining scalp, totally hairless. He trembles a bit as he comes to the podium and tells his tale: had fun in high school, served in the Marine Corps, then was a lifeguard on the Chesapeake Bay at a state park ... saved some people from drowning but couldn't rescue one eight-year-old boy ... realized that he needed to get back to school ... did so a couple of years ago ... met a nice girl, was getting ready to marry ... and then was diagnosed with acute leukemia.

His cancer is in remission now but he's still hospitalized for more treatment. The doctors are letting him out for a few hours to attend this ceremony, but he can't hug anybody --- too much risk of infection. His voice catches; he seizes the lectern and gets a grip on his emotions, then goes on to finish his brief speech. He's still working on a degree in electronics. The marriage is rescheduled for September. He's confident that he'll make it there.

The audience rises to give him a genuine standing ovation --- proud of him, and of the hundreds of other real people who have been applauded this evening. What a wonderful investment of a community's resources. Bravo to all!

- Sunday, May 27, 2001 at 19:03:15 (EDT)

Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy. Perl is designed to make the easy jobs easy, without making the hard jobs impossible.

- Thursday, May 24, 2001 at 05:44:55 (EDT)

But as one matures and the clock of life ticks away, with major investments already made in learning one set of tricks, it becomes less appropriate to frisk about coltishly. Middle-age is a time to dig in, sharpen one's tools, build upon the foundations laid in earlier years, and deliver results: persistance & performance, one might say.

Then, necessarily, comes old(er) age. The mainspring begins to wind down, and the gears start to get a bit rusty. Time to pull threads together, tie off loose ends, and prepare to hand the work over to another generation of hands: synthesis & sharing, perhaps.

(Cf. ^zhurnal 29 Dec 1999)

- Wednesday, May 23, 2001 at 05:44:04 (EDT)

- Tuesday, May 22, 2001 at 06:01:09 (EDT)

.... The moral is that no woman's property is safe, even in the hands of a saint, unless he is also careful and prudent; and no woman can ever form an opinion as to a man's care and prudence unless she herself cultivates common-sense, and takes pains to know something about business affairs.

This is needful for a woman of large property, and still more for one who has but a trifle. If it lies in real estate, she should know something about the value of real estate and its laws. If it lies in stocks of any kind, she should know what they represent, and watch for herself their rise and fall. It is not necessary that she should manage her property in person, any more than it is necessary that a man should build his own house; but as the wise man visits his house frequently while building, and does not leave all to even his treasure of a master-carpenter, so a woman at least needs to know how the house of her own fortunes is to be built and kept in order. Most fathers now recognize this in the abstract in the case of their own daughters; but when the daughter actually asks a question, it is much easier to reply, hurriedly, "Don't trouble your little head about that, dear," than to spare a moment to explain to her how a bank is carried on, or a joint-stock company organized. Years ago I read an admirable address by a Boston merchant, then eminent, in which he strongly urged the training of women in business habits, and the value to a husband of a wife who could understand his affairs. When I reminded his daughter the other day of this address of forty years ago, she said, with regret, "I wish he had given that instruction in his own family, but he never did."

The mysteries of the Stock Exchange may not be needful to master, but the general principles which govern investment and income are within the reach of all. The commonplaces of this knowledge --- that something can not usually be obtained for nothing --- that a low and certain income is better than one dangerously high --- that people can not afford to play a game they do not understand with opponents who know every move of it --- that the investment of even a small property should be made in a variety of directions, so as not to have all one's eggs in one basket, as the saying is --- these things are not so hard to learn. If those who yearn for a tempting speculation could once comprehend that if you lend a man $1000 at exorbitant interest, he can easily pay you that interest for a year or two out of your own money if he can then be allowed to abscond or go into bankruptcy with the rest of it, then it would not be so easy to allure women into worthless "Women's Banks." The folly is not confined to women, as the victims of Grant & Ward proved, but probably those sufferers were less innocent, and therefore less the subjects of pity.

In our public schools girls are, on the whole, the best mathematicians. They know the difference between principal and interest in the arithmetic-book, and can rattle off the problem on the blackboard very quickly. What they need is, whether they are supporting themselves or not, to be encouraged to keep their own accounts, and ....

(Cf. ^zhurnal 19 October 2000, 8 April 2000, and 19 May 1999)

- Sunday, May 20, 2001 at 06:19:39 (EDT)

HIPPOLYTA. This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.
THESEUS. The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.

- Friday, May 18, 2001 at 21:16:31 (EDT)

- Thursday, May 17, 2001 at 05:52:22 (EDT)

Sounds silly --- but is it any more silly than today's breathless fantasy essays on the wonders of nanotech/biotech? Will those writings seem as unreal, a few centuries from now, as fairy tales and medieval pseudoscience of past centuries seem to us now? (Cf. ^zhurnal 5 October 1999)

- Tuesday, May 15, 2001 at 18:36:45 (EDT)

- Sunday, May 13, 2001 at 16:00:46 (EDT)

Another lunch-table conversation that day was with a Caltech grad from half a century ago, Class of ~1950. He had been a member of Dabney House, one of the original four 'Tech undergraduate dorms, but somehow never ventured into the steam tunnels that penetrated the underside of campus. And back then, as far as he knew, the graffiti "DEI" (= "Dabney Eats It") and "FEIF" (= "Fleming Eats It Faster") weren't yet in use. Both are now ubiquitous, and have appeared as in-jokes in such movies as Real Genius.

- Friday, May 11, 2001 at 06:10:26 (EDT)

Those logs? The flood of 1996
Left them as driftwood way up on that cliff.
The valley was submerged. Just think,
When 30 inches of snow melted, all
Within a day or two, the runoff had
To make it through this gorge. The crest
Rose 70 feet or more and moved
Those meter-sized boulders. Amazing, yes?

And potholes! Let me show you how the stream
Made vortices against the side of this
Formation. Alcoves here were cut so fast ---
An inch a year --- that you could almost watch
Them form if you were patient. Fingernails
Grow just as rapidly. A big pothole
Develops in a human life. That's quick!

If you come back here in 10,000 years
You'll see something quite different. The land
Is lowering about a millimeter
Every century. This boulder that
We're standing on came down the river in
A flood about a quarter million years
Ago; it moved some fifty miles. And see
The patch of lichen here? It grows so slow
That by its size you know it's centuries
Old now. So we can tell this rock has not
Been much disturbed; beryllium that's formed
By cosmic rays which hit the surfaces
Provide us with a measure of its age.

And note this mica schist: it must have been
Pressed under 10 kilometers at most
Of overburden, 900 Centigrade,
To partly melt the crystals. That suggests
A geothermal gradient far more
Than anything that's normal nowadays
In Appalachian land. We're looking at
A half a billion years of history.

Kinda puts today's problems into a slightly larger perspective. (Many thanks also to Alumni Association Deputy Director Arlana Silver and to Dr. Dallas Peck, for organizing and running the expedition.)

- Wednesday, May 09, 2001 at 05:47:38 (EDT)

Similarly, a wealthy New Yorker calls his suburban mansion "a fine and private place" for when he feels the need to escape from town. The source of that phrase, Andrew Marvell's poem "To His Coy Mistress", reads:

...
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
...

- Tuesday, May 08, 2001 at 05:57:35 (EDT)

On long-term issues:

"This is cocktail-party culture. The resulting poetry does not reach and has no concern with ordinary readers. In this book I have tried to ignore all that, and I hope you have the strength to ignore it as a poet. Rather, I am concerned with durable goods, with the qualities that characterize the excellent poetry of the ancient Greeks as much as that of today. It wasn't until modern times that the word modern was used as a term of approval or praise. Its sense was closer to modish, implying merely fashionable, temporary, of no lasting interest or value, as when the 'Justice' is described in Shakespeare's As You Like It as being 'Full of wise saws and modern instances.' As a poet or a person, you can't help being modern. That is an accident of birth. The question is, can you be anything else? I hope this book helps you, as it has helped me, at least to aim at goals of more enduring value." (Chap. 14, "Into the Maelstrom")

On fame:

"Next to zucchini squash, poetry must be the most overproduced commodity in the world. ... There simply is no market to speak of. ... The currency of a poetic career is not cash but reputation --- and that, too, is a mixed bag in regard to its merits. At any given time in the United States there are about two hundred 'known' poets. (How many can you name?) These mostly know or know of one another. They show up on the committees to grant awards and prizes, give readings at colleges and elsewhere, appear regularly in the respectable literary journals .... Often they not only give but get the grants. ... Getting into that circle of two hundred requires a lot more politics and pull and personality than it does poetic talent. Given the whimsicality of taste in our culture, there is no way of saying which poets are actually 'best,' or even which are likely to be read twenty years from now. (A list from twenty years ago would be almost totally obscure to us today.) I am not sure I would recommend to any poet that he or she play the game of trying to become one of the 'known' poets under these circumstances. I played it for some twenty years, with some success, but I found it corrupting, and decided I had better things to do with my remaining years." (Chap. 15, "In and Out of the Closet")

On why to write poetry:

"Like virtue, poetry is its own reward. ... The immortality game, like that of getting into the circle of the two hundred, can be wicked and delusionary. ... That leaves you with perhaps the most important reward of all: personal satisfaction. ... You are more likely to succeed at poetry, as in love, if you get success out of your head. Concentrate on quality. Learn the joy of creating excellence --- whether or not anyone else recognizes it." (Chap. 15, "In and Out of the Closet")

- Sunday, May 06, 2001 at 05:43:58 (EDT)

Viktor and I went on some long car trips to Death Valley, Berkeley, and other western US sites. He was a fan of Tom Lehrer songs, so we sang our favorites a capella on the road. Most memorable was a 1976 junket to Las Vegas. We had studied Edward Thorp's book Beat the Dealer and were primed to play Blackjack ... or at least, knew enough not to lose too much. We went to some cheap casinos, rendezvoused with my brother Keith who had come from Texas, played many hundreds of hands of cards, and asked the pretty ladies who offered us drinks to bring us milk. To save money we slept in Viktor's car on the street --- in front of a building which, when the sun rose, we discovered was a police station. When the dust settled we were maybe $40 ahead, not counting the cost of gasoline or the value of our time. But we had fun. Thanks, Viktor!

- Friday, May 04, 2001 at 18:47:55 (EDT)

"... The social subordination of women thus stands out an isolated fact in modern social institutions; a solitary breach of what has become their fundamental law; a single relic of an old world of thought and practice exploded in everything else, but retained in the one thing of most universal interest; as if a gigantic dolmen, or a vast temple of Jupiter Olympius, occupied the site of St. Paul's and received daily worship, while the surrounding Christian churches were only resorted to on fasts and festivals. This entire discrepancy between one social fact and all those which accompany it, and the radical opposition between its nature and the progressive movement which is the boast of the modern world, and which has successively swept away everything else of an analogous character, surely affords, to a conscientious observer of human tendencies, serious matter for reflection. ..."

- Thursday, May 03, 2001 at 05:57:36 (EDT)

But on the other hand, that sort of quietly focused mental energy pays big dividends in ensuring that the visible parts of a building, or a piece of software, get designed and implemented properly, gracefully. And on the rare occasions when a hidden feature is needed, there it is --- like a reserve parachute, an emergency brake, a safety net ... or, in less critical circumstances, simply as a delightful signal that somebody cared enough to do the right thing without thinking of recognition or reward.

(cf. ^zhurnal 18 December 1999 and the early musing of 15 April 1999)

- Tuesday, May 01, 2001 at 20:32:13 (EDT)

See that picture of my grand-daughter?
And there, next to it, that's my son when he
Was just a baby. Yes, I sold the house,
Got rid of almost everything. These rooms
Hold all that's left. The management wants me
To move along so they can rent this suite
To someone weak who needs assisted care;
That way they'll make more money. Maybe
Chicago where my son and daughter-in-law live
Would be a place for me to settle down.

But I don't know. Can I give you a drink?
I think that there's some grape juice in the 'fridge.
Just help yourself. If you can take me out
Some time next week to go down to the bank
I'd really like it. Sorry if I repeat
Myself, but as my Mother told me, "Ask
A busy person, when you want a favor!"
And I know that you're busy. My dear friend
Is in her eighties now and she still drives,
But I don't think she's safe, and anyway
She doesn't want to help. And she's not busy.

Now let me find my teeth, and I'll come down
To the main door with you to see you out.
You have to walk home now before sunset?
How far? Two miles! I'm lucky if I can
Make it two hundred feet. I'm slowing down.
They don't want me to help them any more
At the Museum or the Library.
So now I'm starting up a reading group
With some of the old ladies in this house.
(Do you have any books to recommend?)
And thanks again for coming by to see
Me here. You know, you're very nice. Thank you!

- Sunday, April 29, 2001 at 18:11:27 (EDT)

"... I bless God I never have been in so good plight as to my health. But I am at a great losse to know whether it be my hare's foote, or taking every morning of a pill of turpentine, or my having left off the wearing of a gowne. This Christmas I judged it fit to look over all my papers and books; and to tear all that I found either boyish or not to be worth keeping, or fit to be seen, if it should please God to take me away suddenly. ..."

- Saturday, April 28, 2001 at 15:57:33 (EDT)

On rhyme and its risks:

"Much poor writing gets by as free verse. Ineptitudes or obscurities may be attributed to creativity by editors of generous mind. But sloppiness shows more quickly in rhymed verse. Some poets seem to think that if they can just get lines to rhyme, their job is done. The truth is quite the opposite. Rhyme has such a powerful effect in poetry that it immediately stands out when awkwardly used. Use it with caution and caring, toning it down, smoothing it over, keeping it from embarrassing you like a show-off child." (Chap. 8, "The Sculp of Rhyme")

On sonnets:

"The sonnet form has become so universal in European and American culture since its invention in thirteenth-century Italy that it seems almost to be some mysterious embodiment of the shape of human thought. Studying it will help you understand that writing poetry is not a matter of following rules, for the fascination of the sonnet, like the fascination of meter, results from the strain of content against the form. Nothing is fixed. There are no rules. Yet there is enough consistency in the way poets return and return to the form that one can discern beneath the infinite variation some inalterable essence, 'a something white, uncertain,' one might say. I will come back to that quotation." (Chap. 10, "The Shape of Human Thought")

On "sensationalism" in modern poetry:

"That is the cultural climate you must cope with as a poet. It is a cultural climate in which people grow accustomed to walking by examples of modern painting or sculpture, or to hearing modern music without looking for or expecting any human connection, any relevance to their lives. It is not polite to ask what art is about or to ask that it be melodic or moving or memorable. The same sophisticated indifference carries over to poetry. One simply accepts incomprehensibility as though it were an indication of quality. Art thus becomes decoration, a kind of screaming wallpaper. Music becomes blended into the background noise of industrial society. And poetry is, like particle physics, or graphs, or economic indices, a gray blur, intended, presumably, for specialists." (Chap. 14, "Into the Maelstrom")

- Friday, April 27, 2001 at 05:48:02 (EDT)

In 1951 when I was teaching at Harvard, a number of friends --- all of them valued poets --- organized a small group that met irregularly to talk about the poems each brought with him. That group continued to meet for two years or so through a number of memorable evenings. The regular core of that group consisted of Richard Eberhart, John Holmes, Archibald MacLeish, Richard Wilbur, and myself. I am indebted to those meetings for some of the happiest and best poet's talk I have ever heard. I have no doubt that I have worked into this book many ideas that were touched on in those meetings, but in expressing my gratitude to these good men, I must make it clear that they are in no way responsible for what I have said here. I simply confess that I have stolen from them, and that I wish I might have stolen more. Could I be sure of exactly what I have stolen, I would acknowledge my thefts in detail. My most gratitude to them is that they are rich enough to be worth stealing from.

- Wednesday, April 25, 2001 at 05:44:51 (EDT)

• GR4 --- bearing the logo of the 1977 General Relativity conference (#4) held at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada ... which four foolish physics grad students (Yekta Gürsel, Carl Caves, Rich Flammang, and I) trekked to and returned from via an irrationally long cross-country drive ... stopping along the way to see and hike in in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Zion and Arches National Monuments, Canyon de Chelley, and of course the Grand Canyon ... and bringing back photos showing me at Four Corners but not straddling four states, and at the Continental Divide but not astride the line
• Gravitational Radiation --- ripples in spacetime symbolic of the 1978 conference sponsored by Battelle Memorial Institute and held in Seattle, Washington ... bunk beds in the university dorm, reading Solzhinitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, breakfast with intense young astronomers, jogging around campus in the drizzle ... and where I first heard the metaphor "ideology of the cancer cell" in a commentary on senseless growth by a young German physicist whose name now escapes me (Peter? ... cf. ^zhurnal 19 May 1999)
• Bionic Toad --- a ~1979 Creative Computing line drawing in mechanimal style ... from one of the early (now defunct) computer hobbyist 'zines where I published a few articles (cf. ^zhurnal 23 May 2000)
• Penguin Love --- an inscrutable Japanese design ... from a ~1984 business trip, bringing back images of Tokyo subway crowds, the Akihabara, wonderful hole-in-the-wall noodle shops, and the verdant Imperial Palace grounds at a time when land prices made it in theory worth roughly as much as the entire state of California
• Sushi --- a cute Kliban cat graphic ... picked up in Hawaii ~1986 ... shave-ice stalls, comfortably warm drizzles during long walks, the Honolulu public library and university campus, wading in the warm Pacific, and US national defense as symbolized in the form of multiple military golf courses along Waikiki Beach

- Tuesday, April 24, 2001 at 05:47:51 (EDT)

On poetry as metrical writing:

"Metrical means measured. A measure, or predetermined form, forces a poet to pick and choose, polish, twist, to manage these contortions with grace. It is the tug-of-war between form and content that makes the art of the poem. Prose lies flat on the page. Poetry (good poetry, that is) stands up off it, rounded like a piece of sculpture, because of its imposed form." (Introduction, "How to Use This Book")

On who is a poet:

"It helps to stop worrying about what you are and concentrate on what you do. If you think of a poet as a person with some special qualifications that come by nature (or divine favor), you are likely to make one of two mistakes about yourself. If you think you've got what it takes, you may fail to learn what you need to know in order to use whatever qualities you may have. On the other hand, if you think you do not have what it takes, you may give up too easily, thinking it is useless to try. A poet is someone --- you, me, anyone --- who writes poems. That question out of the way, now we can learn to write poems better." (Chap. 1, "From Sighs and Groans to Art")

On accentual syllabic meter:

"This book cannot teach you how to write great poetry: that's up to you. But it can help you write competent poetry, and there is no greatness without at least minimal competence. Shakespeare's contemporaries, many of them excellent dramatists and moving poets, lacked his greatness. But perhaps even more critically, they lacked his competence --- precisely in such relatively neutral passages as the one quoted above. They did not have the mastery of meter to get through such necessary material with sustained dramatic power and music. Ponder those pyrrhics, those theoretical accents. They may liberate your tongue." (Chap. 5, "Lisping in Numbers")

On stylistic freedom versus anarchy:

"Our problem as poets is to reawaken a sensitivity to the forms of poetry, and this may require a more conservative practice than that of the great poets who broke new metrical ground in our century. For readers to catch subtleties, they first have to hear the obvious. We have to find a compromise between stiff artificiality and careless conversational ease. ... Freedom itself is a meaningless and empty concept. ... Modernist poets, for all their freedom, no longer speak to a wide audience; they seem to have drifted away from the music of language and not to have developed modes that can sustain narrative and dramatic poetry or deal comprehensibly and effectively with major themes. It is a challenge I hope you will respond to with creative force." (Chap. 6, "Getting the Beat")

Happy Shakespeare's Birthday today!

- Monday, April 23, 2001 at 05:59:19 (EDT)

See http://www.his.com/~z/images/citcalendar.jpg for a scanned image, courtesy Cosmas Zachos, a grad student who may or may not have been involved. Carl Caves and Sandor Kovacs similarly may or may not have led the conspiracy to compose, copy, and distribute the spurious calendar. Among the presentations ostensibly scheduled for the week of 20-24 October 1975 were several that perhaps could use explanation to those more distant in space and time from the event:

• ... a riff on John Archibald Wheeler's penchant for paradoxical aphorisms ...
• ... a salute to Richard Feynman's image of physical fitness ...
• ... a recognition of Murray Gell-Mann's pleasure in pronouncing words and names correctly and in their original language ...
• ... a nod in the direction of Kellogg Corporation, the cereal company whose founder's name graced the nuclear physics building ...

- Saturday, April 21, 2001 at 08:44:00 (EDT)

• small quibble --- I remain skeptical of nanotechnology as a deus ex machina solution to the world's problems. It seems likely to me that the parts of nanotech which might be really useful will turn out to be equivalent to software engineering --- designing & debugging hugely complex large-scale (!) systems --- and that may be exceedingly tough to do, for fundamental (mathematical) reasons. See for example Fred Brooks's writings (e.g., "No Silver Bullets") on the difficulties of doing such tasks. I wonder why more business-world and philosopher-types don't write about complexity management and its challenges? There are fascinating, and I think relevant, results in computational theory ... suggesting to me the negative conclusion that provably hard problems exist and may not be solvable, ever. (But perhaps writing about what can't be done won't get one on the best-seller list?!)
• more significant --- It's really difficult to quantify and evaluate risk for complex systems. For some things (like bridges, houses, etc.) we have a lot of good theoretical models and engineering experience, and so we don't get surprised very often. But for other more-complicated systems (such as power grids, financial transaction networks, moderately big software applications) "bugs" surface almost constantly. Nobody sensible would want to bet a life on the continuous smooth functioning of them. We learn how to limit damage (e.g., run off batteries during an outage, diversify investments, back up files frequently) and provide fallbacks, safety nets, etc. I am not yet convinced that our social sysems will continue forever to increase in complexity. Some elements may, yes, but others are likely to branch off in directions that appear low-tech but will provide insurance against the breakdown of the big efficient 99.99...% reliable machinery (at least for thoughtful folks who don't want to put all their huevos in one basket!). Bottom line: I wouldn't count on big governments going away any time soon. But there may well be invisible, flexible mechanisms functioning behind the scenes, mechanisms of which governments will scarcely be aware.

• pursue diversity --- a "mixed strategy" (in Game Theory parlance) ... combining short- & long-term projects ... promoting both specialist/in-depth and generalist/broad-based expertise ... serving many different types of customers ... and preparing people to shift to new posts quickly when needed --- rather than identifying one or a few narrow top-priority areas and focusing everybody on them
• evolve the organization (but at a faster pace than historically we've done) ... to adapt to the changing (technical, social, political, ...) environment & meet new challenges --- rather than hazarding everything an abrupt "revolution" or "Great Leap Forward"
• promote robustness, with conscious attention to risk management in many dimensions --- rather than gambling that the unanticipated one-point failure won't happen at a critical moment (oops! ... the computer went down, and now we can't make a phone call, run the air conditioning, open the door, pay the bills, ...)
• practice optimism about our future ... esp. given the people we've got and the thoughtful discussions going on now! --- rather than drifting into rending-of-garments and negative self-criticism

(slightly edited from the original; cf. ^zhurnal 15 April 2000)

- Thursday, April 19, 2001 at 20:28:48 (EDT)

- Wednesday, April 18, 2001 at 05:34:02 (EDT)

"Most of the promising db (sorry, I can't say "knowledgebase" today!) projects I've seen have run aground on several shoals:

• Procrustian structures for the db contents --- e.g., one or a few hierarchies, maybe based on people, places, projects, and various topical keywords --- so when new, unanticipated questions come along which cut across the categories, the database reverts to being (at best) a flat file. The dearly departed R--- S--------, D---- W---, and others had some ideas on how to attack this problem; seems to me to be nontrivial (to put it mildly!).
• Lack of time --- insufficient investment by the substantive db builders and maintainers, who are going to have to spend at least a few (10? 100? 1000?) seconds per input item, in order to flag terms and add value (links, identifiers, descriptors, key words, commentary, etc.) beyond the raw text.
• Noise --- the bane of the current WWW, the lack of quality control and accountability and stability of db contents ... difficulty of separating wheat from chaff, of tracking information back to its ultimate source, etc.
• Non-Scalability & Hubris --- plans to revolutionize life, based on clever/promising AI approaches that worked great for narrow 'toy' problem areas, but don't scale up to big, complex, heterogeneous, redundant, messy data streams such as those we have to wrestle with in reality."

(slightly edited from the original; cf. ^zhurnal 11 February 2000)

- Tuesday, April 17, 2001 at 05:58:57 (EDT)

The idea of "comparative advantage" extends to larger situations involving whole nations --- again, as long as trade between participants is allowed. And as I recently advised a young neighbor who's a college freshman, it's also a good thing to think about when choosing your Major. Other things being equal, pick the area where you have the greatest relative edge (or the least disadvantage) --- even if it's hard for you. You'll do better in the long run, and (via higher global productivity) so will Society writ large.

- Sunday, April 15, 2001 at 15:10:10 (EDT)

But of course, that's precisely what has already happened to us --- yes, our very own cosmos --- and more than once. Early on in the Big Bang, temperatures and densities were so high that all matter was a sea of quarks and gluons and photons (oh my!). As the expansion proceeded and things began to cool, protons and neutrons began to form and then coagulate into nuclei. An æon later, when the thermometer fell below 10,000 degrees, electrons at last were able to stick to the nuclei --- and so atoms took shape. Still later and cooler, those atoms began to stick together to form molecules ... dust ... planets ... stars ... galaxies ....

Each of those transitions was a cosmological change of state --- far more radical than a mere freezing of the oceans or other terrestrial shift. Without them, we wouldn't be here; with them, countless other possibilities never happened.

- Saturday, April 14, 2001 at 13:34:14 (EDT)

• Cultural change in his outfit really began about 1984, when they consciously started to focus on sharing best practices, sharing knowledge, creating a true learning organization, and giving unlimited opportunity to individuals. Currently (1998) they have over a thousand "associates" around the world, 72% of whom have college degrees (up from 39% in 1979); they speak over 15 languages and operate in 90 countries. Investments in technology let people work remotely and still form a single virtual organization. Only ~14% of personnel are in fixed locations; the rest roam, using dial-in access to shared discussion spaces and databases. The company leases laptops and turns over its entire equipment stock every 2-3 years. The technology cost is ~$7.5k per person per year, ~4% of revenues.
• Key corporate goals:
  • "Build relationships of continuity and trust with the customer."
  • "Have everybody effectively engaged on the front line with the customer."
  • "Change from hoarding knowledge to gain power, to sharing knowledge to gain power."
• "Explicit knowledge" (documents, databases, artifacts, etc.) forms only ~10% of the company's base; "tacit knowledge" (people, relationships, networks, etc.) is ~90%. (Cf. ^zhurnal 23 October 2000)
• An ideal knowledge system has direct connections between many individuals --- to reduce the number of links in the chain --- so that anyone has access to all corporate knowledge at any time, and anyone can enter knowledge into the system. The company runs 24 hours/day, and every individual can work at the best time and in whatever language is best for the local customer.
• As the span of influence of an individual expands, the power of the individual expands, and that increases the value of the individual --- and thereby helps the organization as a whole.
• The company's Code of Ethics is basically a common value system that helps everyone treat each other with dignity and respect, so that mutual trust can develop. People have to be "proven proactive knowledge sharers" to get promoted. Open communications make entrepreneurs (and "smoke-blowers") obvious to all. (Re anonymity in corporate shared fora, "We don't encourage that. ... If you can't see the source, [it] doesn't permit receivers to develop trust in the source.")
• The technology that you need to do all this is simple. Start with basic old email; give everybody a home page; build threaded discussions around important questions and organize them into shared corporate knowledge. Focus on helping the person at the front line help the customer.

His final advice: "Start simply!"

- Friday, April 13, 2001 at 05:51:33 (EDT)