Chili powder or a history of Europe ?

I'm in the doghouse with the in-laws of a friend of mine, Ralf, because of their dope-crazed dog. Being pumped full of cortisone for an incurable skin disease, it rushes around like a mad thing, panting so fast you'd think it's about to hyperventilate, jumping up on things and down again, and generally making a nuisance of itself.

The in-laws brought it along to a barbecue dinner at Ralf's house. I was eating at a low table, fending off the dog who wanted to share the grilled goodies on my plate. I kept pushing it away with my foot, and several times asked the in-laws to restrain it. They refused because "it would make him unhappy". So I finally kicked the dog (not hard) away from my table. He got the message, but the in-laws didn't.

I recently gave Ralf a bag of chipotle powder (dried smoked jalapeños) to pass on as a gesture of appeasement to his stepfather-in-law, who comes from Rumania and appreciates chilis. The bag was from a precious consignment of Mexican chili powders that my sister sends me occasionally from Texas. She asked me yesterday by email what I needed, so I specified chipotle powder, telling her the dog story in explanation of my low stocks.

This was her reply:

What??!! Kicking dogs away from the table is a great tradition of millenia. The Romans, the Angles, the Saxons--I would venture to say all civilizations (and certainly man in pre-history)--have wisely participated. One can't pass on one's genes if one dies of starvation because the fucking dogs are getting all the best food. Better give the family a history of Europe than a bag of chili powder. It might do more good.

No more ugly makeup !

John Cowan has pointed out a "bookmark resource" for tarting down the websites I complained about in my last post. As he explains here:

The Readability bookmarklet helps a lot with pages like that. Go to this webpage and drag the "Read Now" button to your browser's bookmarks bar. Then click on it whenever you want to make a page more easily readable. It deals with bad colors, annoying formats, etc.

People should take a look at Readability's FAQ, which answers the questions "What is Readability?" and "What happened to the free version of Readability?".

In short: the bookmark resource is "still free", and this is what it's all about:

We’re turning Readability into a monthly subscription service with a unique twist: the great majority of your fees (70%) will go directly to the writers and publishers you enjoy. We’re tethering a small, passive transaction to the reading decisions you make through the platform. You can even publicly share the top domains you’re enjoying through Readability. It’s a new type of badge: “I support these writers & publishers.”

In other words, this is another scheme to keep track of where you go with your browser - but only when you actually use the bookmark. Clicking it merely takes you to another website (Readability), and there is not even a cookie involved. Exactly the same happens when you point to any link. You'll have to decide if you want to live with that. It seems reasonable enough to me.

The make-it-more-readable feature appears to work as follows (I've inspected the page sources, but am not a browser/javascript expert):

1. Let's say you are positioned on some web page "x.com" in your browser. That is, the "page frame" showing the contents of that page is in the foreground of your browser.

2. You click on the "Read now" bookmark. This is a "widget" containing javascript activated by your click.

3. The bookmark javascript is called with the "x.com" address as parameter, causing the browser to call another piece of javascript at blog.readability.com. This other javascript technically reads the HTML page at the parameter value "x.com" (the stuff which your browser had rendered in the original, hard-to-read form). It converts that original page into a "more readable" HTML page at blog.readability.com, which is then the final page that is actually rendered in your browser (no longer the one at "x.com").

The birth of bossiness

Experts, experts everywhere, and not a moment's rest. They tell us to speak one language instead of another, eat these substances instead of those, act this way instead of that ... A disposition to urge other people to change their behavior could be an Anthropological Constant. If this turns out to be a momentous discovery, remember to mention my name when you pass it along.

What can we imagine to be the evolutionary advantages of this imperious meliorism ? Perhaps there aren't any. The only offhand explanation I can think of for the phenomenon itself is longevity overhang. By that I mean this. We may assume that fathers and mothers have always told their kids how to behave. Over many millenia, the average lifespan was only 35 or so. By the time parents were no longer able to tell their kids what do to - when the kids became adolescent and would no longer listen - the parents just died. But as life expectancy increased, there were more and more parents left with time and wisdom on their hands, since the captive audience had flown the coop. This was the birth of bossiness.

Of course this tendency expresses itself in different ways. Some old people get a pet, others get a license to practice psychological counselling, still others learn Esperanto.

Daß Narrenschyff ad Narragoniam

Liz Hartnett, in her blog on the BBC's open2.net site, reports on a recent edition of The Bottom Line devoted to aspiration, optimism and enthusiasm:

... that the IT customer needs to know what they want - and that their wants are, in many cases, “woolly and aspirational”.

Woolly and aspirational wants lead to over-ambitious and poorly defined systems that take longer to design and implement, and they go over budget.

But it’s not just the customer who’s aspirational. In one public sector IT project, optimistic and enthusiastic IT staff thought, “Yes, an online payment - that’s what they really need, surely.”

But when they engaged in discussion, they discovered that the client was less enthusiastic about the IT department’s suggestion, and didn’t expect much take up or benefit. But what the client thought would really be of benefit was a telephone payment service.

The system, consequentially implemented, brought in a significantly larger sum of money to the public organisation.

One of my recent IT projects overran its budget after only four months. Not only were the specifications overambitious, but there was also an assumption that the programming work did not need to be organized, nor the programmers to be directed. In theory all processes were documented and in line with company standards, and hardly any work got done.

There are at least three topics linked together here: capitalism, competition and waste. I don't see how effective competition is possible without a free-market base. But competition can be considered to be inherently wasteful, since it would be more effective to join forces.

These notions are so jumbled together in texts on political economy I have read, that I have concluded they are all useless. I suspect that wastefulness may not only be Not A Bad Thing, but also an essential ingredient in change, along with stabs at efficiency. Attempts to obtain complete control over a process are doomed to failure, just as are attempts to do without any kind of control or planning.

These are mushy conclusions to arrive at, but they seem to apply to the IT projects I have worked in. And yet I firmly believe the best way to measure progress is to measure it often, and shift elsewhere those who don't measure up. Theory cannot replace practice, especially not in a competitive and wasteful economy.

People are essential, but they must be directed. Heads must occasionally be shifted or chopped, especially those of management. At the company whose IT project I mentioned above, everyone had some kind of job title like "responsible for ...", but no brief to actually do anything they would have to answer for. I suspect this was a marine safety measure to prevent rocking the boat, so that no one could fall overboard.

The wagers of charity

Nosing about in various articles on the statistical notion of standard deviation, I happened on a "review" of the mid-16th century Liber de ludo aleae by Cardano (this is the dude who, among other things, invented the idea of imaginary number). It contains the following quotes from the book:

...in times of great anxiety and grief, [playing games of chance] is considered to be not only allowable, but even beneficial.

..in times of great fear or sorrow, when even the greatest minds are much disturbed, gambling is far more efficacious in counteracting anxiety than a game like chess, since there is the continual expectation of what fortune will bring.

In my own case, when it seemed to me after a long illness that death was close at hand, I found no little solace in playing constantly at dice.

Cardano's life-style throws some light on this:

Cardano was notoriously short of money and kept himself solvent by being an accomplished gambler and chess player.

I myself have never understood the interest so many people have in dice games and slot machines, for instance. Such things bore the pants off me. My attitude is: if good luck wants to come to me, I won't shut the door in its face, but nor do I want to spend time running back and forth in the road, trying to meet up with luck before the neighbors do.

Recently, Sloterdijk has been putting the idea about that possibly "greed" is not the most accurate description of what motivates bankers who blow away other people's money in speculation. He suggests that the motive may instead be "to get something for nothing". Greed, in contrast, is a drive to get more and more, and more than enough. To want to get something for nothing is more akin to gambling. I could add that Pascal, in proposing his wager, revealed himself to be both intellectually lazy and morally calculating - a gambler, in fact.

As I remember, the passage in which Sloterdijk mentions that idea is in Du mußt dein Leben ändern. Unfortunately, I made the mistake yesterday of lending my copy to someone over Easter - and of course one day later I need it in order to double-check a reference. Though I rarely lend out a book important to me, I usually regret it for the reason given. Curiously, this appears to be a case of getting nothing for something. The something is that I have introduced someone to Sloterdijk, the nothing is what I now have in place of the book.

I experience this kind of thing not infrequently, it seems to me - doing good, then regretting it. But then I don't really expect to do something for nothing. It just may be that the wages of charity is mutual resentment. A pari mutuel, where if anyone wins everyone wins, and contrariwise.

Changing and crossing

Would you want to read a book endorsed thusly?

"In this dazzling dialogue, Zizek and Milbank change words and cross swords, until the point where both recognize that Christ and Hegel, in their monstrosity, look very much alike. A phenomenal achievement!"
—Catherine Malabou, Maître de Conferences, Philosophy Department, Université Paris-X Nanterre

Of course you wouldn't. My pleasure. Don't mention it (the book, that is).

The book is entitled The Monstrosity of Christ. Paradox or Dialectic?. I don't know what it's called. The caterpillar would.

Partly-pooper

I recently discovered the 17th-century English writer and churchman Thomas Fuller (here are some of his witticisms and aphorisms).

The first collection of his sermons was published in 1640 under the title Joseph's Party-Coloured Coat, which I am now reading. In the Wikipedia article (from the EB 1911), the title was given as Joseph's Partly-Coloured Coat. I corrected it there as a "minor change", giving as reason "corrected partly-coloured to party-coloured in title of book by Fuller". Of course before doing this I had checked the title in an edition scanned into Google.

One Adam Bishop (user page) has now reverted my correction. I wonder why? Was it to restore the mistake from the original EB article (assuming it was there)? Was it because his intuitions about the correctness of a bit of old-timey English prevailed over knowledge of it?

An unread speaker of contemporary English might well think: "party-coloured doesn't make sense, a party doesn't have a colour, it must be 'partly-coloured'". This would reveal not only ignorance of the word parti-coloured (in today's spelling), but also of the biblical story of Joseph's coat, which in the KJV is a "coat of many colours". "Partly coloured" doesn't even make much sense, apart from being wrong in the context of Joseph's coat. If anything, the coat was "completely coloured". That would be true even if it had been of only one colour.

I added an external link to Joseph's Party-Coloured Coat in the Wikipedia article, undid Bishop's reversion, and am waiting for the next episode. Is it often this hard to correct such a simple mistake in a Wikipedia article, against the opposition of people who work by intuition? All Bishop would have had to do was to check a library, or find a scanned edition of the book, as I did. If he wasn't working by intuition, what was he working by?

I see that "partly-coloured" has started propagating in search results, sites that apparently contain cut-and-paste sections of the Wikipedia article with the typo. Compare the results of searching for "Thomas Fuller" and "partly-coloured", with those of searching for "Thomas Fuller" and "party-coloured".

One of the biggest problems with the Wikipedia approach is that mistakes spread before they can be corrected, if they ever are corrected.

Hostage to good breeding

I have sometimes had to deal with a certain type of person who can make me regret my good-naturedness, my willingness to give way, forgive and forget. A literary exemplar of this type is Mrs. Norris in Mansfield Park. Sweetly manipulative, smoothly offensive and so misunderstood when someone expects her to do what she had said she would.

By being associated with Mrs. Norris, you can be drawn into situations where you feel you're being taken advantage of. By association, you can get a bad reputation when she turns spiteful towards one of your friends. You don't know what to do or say, since for a while she's been all sweetness and light. But lower your guard, and suddenly the monkey's on your back again.

Mrs. Norris of course always thinks of herself as the little match girl, more to be pitied than despised. She will never admit she's stepped out of line. She would rather cut her throat than eat crow, and won't even acknowledge what's on the plate the waitress has just slammed down in front of her. Mrs. Norris is aggrieved, and refuses to see that what is coming to her is exactly what she ordered.

For several years there have been panhandlers in Cologne, young punk-like beggars, who sidle up to you and put on a display of hyperpoliteness and deference, talking on and on until they finally get to the pitch. Many people don't know what to do, because they're not accustomed to being taken hostage to their good breeding in this manner. They end up giving something, just to escape from themselves.

Me, the instant I recognize what's going on (which is almost immediately), I say "buzz off" (or something yet more disobliging, depending on the weather) and continue on my merry way. I'm not going to let some bozo turn my good-naturedness into a bear trap. And yet that is exactly what has happened. I feel forced to be nasty for an instant, in order to stay nice. I resent this very much. Mrs. Norris also presents a challenge to good-naturedness. I find that my own approach is a more flexible immune strategy than good breeding.

Hat Audio: Barchester Towers

Not caring to be outdone by "Language Hat: the Movie", I wondered which Hatticker personae would be suited to read which roles in the audiobook of a novel or play. (Unfortunately, the film will be delayed because the casting studios had to be shut down by the riot police.)

I first tried casting for several novels at once, so that as many people as possible would get a slot. But I quickly ran out of diplomatic choices for "problematic" characters, since there are too many agreeable Hattickers.

Also, I was annoyed to find there's no way around Noetica for the really heavy roles, some of which I would have liked for myself. For instance Lady Bracknell. But few Americans are seriously up to that mark of verbal delivery, certainly not me. Mr. N., being commonwealthy, has a more precise sense of the required intonation patterns, I don't doubt.

So I restricted myself to Barchester Towers, which I think turned out plausible enough if you remember the characters. Still, I couldn't find anyone for poor old Dr. Proudie.

Mrs. Proudie____________Noetica
Dr. Proudie_____________A. N. Other
Mr. Slope_______________Grumbly

Mr. Harding_____________Crown
His daughter Eleanor______Codfish
Archdeacon Grantly_______Hat
His wife Susan___________marie-lucie
John Bold_______________jamessal

Mr. Popular Sentiment______Nijma
Mr. Pessimist Anticant______John Emerson
The Jupiter_______________David Marjanovic

Noetica is assumed capable of masterful intonation, Grumbly definitely can muster smoldering resentment. Crown is fair to a fault, like Mr. Harding. Hat occasionally politicks to set things straight, while m-l calmly and reasonably subdues the storms of opinion. jamessal is a bit hot-headed, but gets the girl Eleanor in the end. Nijma is against Too Much Information, while John reviles fatuousness. David's views often seem to be set in booming type.

Boring and icky

In "Start the week" on Radio 4 last night, there was discussion about a modern opera called L'amour de loin, by a Finnish composer but translated into English for this new production, and about Justin Cartwright's new novel. The name of the opera struck me as icky, the plot as boring, and the musical excerpt made me fidget (Henze with harps in the background). Some prince "transcendently" in love with a princess sails across a sea to meet up with her, moaning the while in twelve tones or more (a synthesizer is in there to "provide sheen"). When the prince reaches his destination, he dies before cashing in.

Because Andrew Marr and guests were interrupting each other so much, I got the impression that the translated title was "To Heaven By Water", which I thought fabulously superior to L'amour de loin. Checking my facts to write this post, I discovered that it's the title of Cartwright's novel, a phrase from the Hades episode of Ulysses.

What a pity. But it gives me the idea of posting (later) a rant about the excruciatingly flatfooted titles that Germans dream up when they translate English-language books and films. Take the animated film "Spirited Away", which is here "Chihiros Reise ins Wunderland" (Chihiro's Journey to Wonderland). Admittedly, the English title is too clever to be easily rendered, but the German one doesn't even attempt to be more than a prosaic description.

I can't remember more examples just now - they were so stupid that I forgot them. The general tendency is to things like "Death and Violence", or "The Green Banks of Love" - glaring or gushing phrases you expect to find in a blurb, but not amounting to snappy titles. It seems to me that, as time goes on, titles are just being left in English. "Blade Runner", "Misery" and "L.A. Crash" already ran as themselves, years ago.

Topsy

The expression "grows like Topsy" is apparently from Uncle Tom's Cabin, which I read long ago. Like so many books written prior to 1984 or thereabouts, it doubtless gives the inmates of political correction institutions many an opportunity to fume and froth.

I wonder how these people could ever achieve a sense of the past as something other than "it's not my thing". Perhaps they might meditate on a thing they do have in common with folks dead and gone - outrage, that combination of the two traditional sins of wrath and pride. We have never been modern, as Bruno Latour wrote.

Here is what I found on Topsy:

St. Clare's daughter Eva becomes friends with the young slave girl Topsy, and the novel recounts a conversation between Topsy and St. Clare's cousin Ophelia:

"Have you ever heard anything about God, Topsy?" The child looked bewildered, but grinned as usual. "Do you know who made you?" "Nobody, as I knows on," said the child, with a short laugh. The idea appeared to amuse her considerably; for her eyes twinkled, and she added, "I spect I grow'd. Don't think nobody never made me." [Chapter XX]

Given the astounding popularity of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (at the time of its publication it outsold every book previously published in the U.S. except the Bible), legions of readers were charmed by Topsy's declaration that she just "growed." Soon "it growed like Topsy" had become a popular figure of speech to describe something that grew or increased by itself, without apparent design or intention, and by 1885 Rudyard Kipling was explaining to a correspondent that "I have really embarked ... on my novel.. Like Topsy 'it growed' while I wrote." Today "grow like Topsy" is most often heard in criticism of bureaucratic institutions or government budgets, for whose bloated sprawl and inefficiency no one is eager to take credit.

From "The Word Detective" (April 27, 2002)

Incivil servant

I have a broadband contract with T-Mobile, the severed arm of the former German communications monopoly, das Deutsche Fernmeldeamt. Their employees still have a tendency to bureaucratic give-a-damnedness, as the following example shows.

T-Mobile provides wireless services. I pay a flat monthly rate for a high-speed connection. As I reported recently, it turns out that the fine print in the contract allows T-Mobile to degrade my service for the remainder of any month in which I download a total of 5 gigabytes. I hit that limit again today around 18:00, and then it took over 5 minutes to load Crown's home page. There is probably high traffic around this time, but still, this is more like termination than degradation.

My father always told me to "go to the top" with complaints, and take a wad of bills with me. So I called the service line, but couldn't get past the first call center smoothie who took my call. I asked how much would I have to pay to upgrade my service to avoid this volume restriction, but was told that it was impossible to do that. The schmuck didn't even suggest an alternative. He seemed offended by my question, as if I had tendered a bribe.

Spooky moola

I will now show how God helps those who help themselves to what's on offer.

A few years back I read about the 2004 experiments in Vienna demonstrating quantum entanglement. This is explained in a 2005 article in the publication LaserFocusWorld:

One of the most bizarre predictions of quantum mechanics is that a pair of particles can become entangled, which means that measuring the properties of one particle instantly determines the state of the second no matter how far apart the two are.

For the layman like myself, this seems to mean that information, such as the results of measurements made on a photon, say, in one place, "is transmitted instantaneously" to another photon in another place. That is, when similar measurements are made at the second place at the same time, the same results turn up. And all this without the hindrance that the speed of light represents for any kind of movement. To make sense of "immediately", imagine that the two sites are equidistant from a third site with a clock, with which each site synchronizes its local clock.

Einstein called this "spooky action at a distance". In their famous 1935 EPR paper (Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen), the fact that such a result was predicted by quantum mechanics was presented as a fatal flaw in the theory. Einstein fought quantum mechanics all his life.

It occurred to me, considering the Vienna experiments, that what appears to be two particles, say two photons, might be imagined as being two distensions in space-time created by one "object" - such as what happens when you inflate a balloon, then separate two fingers of one hand and stick these into the balloon. A two-dimensional observer on the surface of the balloon would see two apparently independent distensions in his world. One movement of the hand, the fingers held rigid, would seem to that observer as oddly synchronized movements of two things with no physical connection between them.

This is a fairly obvious idea to come up with, if you've ever dabbled in algebraic topology, as I have. That kind of imagery is used everywhere in Brian Greene's popularizing works on string theory. I imagined some physicist must have already tried to make mathematical sense out of this quantum phenomenon on these lines. Sure enough, I just now read, in a footnote to Morin's La méthode from 1977, that the theoretical physicist Bernard d'Espagnat had proposed such an interpretation in 1972. He later wrote a book about "veiled reality".

We're now close to the payoff. The Vienna team had only the courage to top up their pocket money:

In 2004, a team from the University of Vienna (Austria) used polarization-entangled photons to send a secure quantum key between the Vienna City Hall and a large bank through 1.45 km of fiberoptic cable laid through the city’s sewer system.7 They tested the arrangement by using it to transfer a €3000 donation to the lab’s bank account (see Fig. 2).

But d'Espagnat has been investing in ideas for a long time. Just last month he cashed in, winning $1.4 million from a religious foundation for "work which acknowledges that science cannot fully explain the 'nature of being'".

I used to think I would have made a good Evangelical preacher. Pity I didn't go on with mathematics either, since there seem to be lots of dollars-for-jesus floating around.