Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Bits and bobs

What possible use could I have for an online stop-watch? Try it when you start surfing. If you get the feeling you should be doing something else more useful, check time elapsed. Stop clock, select count down. Return to surfing allowing clock to return to zero. Guess when you think it has returned to zero. Check. If it gets there before you, it flashes. Why not try the record button in between webpages?


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George Monbiot is well known to British audiences as an environmentalist. In A Life with no purpose, a brief and pointed essay, he runs through some Bush and Intelligent Design, but side tracks into mentioning the language of the Piraha people of the Brazilian Amazon, which is fascinating of itself. He finishes with a short quote from Auden's The Dog Beneath the Skin, which doesn't seem to be online in full, which is pity because I would love to read it.


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Ian Peacock's BBC Radio 4 series on creativity sounds rather good from episode I.


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A list of fallacious arguments, from Don Lindsey, reminds me (and perhaps should be coupled with) Schopenhauer's 38 ways to win an argument {paraphrased} from The Art of Controversy.

Another 'translation' here which happens to mention Schopenhauer's father was a novelist.

Monday, August 29, 2005

Hiroshima / Nagasaki



A recent TV documentary on ch4, Hiroshima Pictures. And Nagasaki Journey, an online selection of photographs and one sketch.

.... the United States engaged in airtight suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings.

Editor and Publisher

6 August 2005

The Hiroshima drawings in essence are a memorial to memory. A mother trying to protect her young child by crouching over her was draw by several independent witnesses, which corroborated its veracity.






Sunday, August 28, 2005

Some even further kinds of understanding




Facetiously I had suggested atomic physics as a good starting point for someone trying science reading. This had come from seeing Richard Feynman's Auckland lecturers for the first time courtesy of the interweb. It seemed only sensible to find a genius who also happened to be be good at explaining his subject (mostly) in order to get a non-scientist hooked.

When you watch the lectures, or even just the first introductory one, it becomes apparent though you may take a shine to the man (and thus science as a vague intellectual persuit) you might not necessarily take to his message: this is impossible to understand because you are not a genius like me but its fun so try. A few novelists - and mountains of literary theorists - use the same tack, but in the main novels are more widely accessible than science. Lets leave poetry out of it for now.

The second stage of my idea that there must be some science that is as accessible as your average novel. To do this it is necessary to concentrate on 'soft science' such as psychology. An example which is both mostly understandable, and clearly of some use, is eye-witness testimony.

Where to start?

Why not Jean Charles de Menezes and from there Stephen Waldorf. { 2 }

Eye witness testimony is intrinsically interesting so good for basic science inculcation. A broad starting subject: from one's own experience right through to JFK assassination. There is even a whole book called "Eye Witness Testimony". I haven't read it. Have you? We know what's in it don't we? Masses of court cases and voluminous psychology research including on gorillas (not guerillas) playing volley ball and the other players not noticing; those neat experiments where the receptionist is replaced by someone else wearing the same clothes and no one notices.


This leads to the science of memory.

Sources:

Your lyin' Eyes
False eye-witness identification

The Problem with Eye-witness Testimony

Eye-witness testimony and the Paranornal

Psychology Project on Eye-witness testimony




Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Other blitts and Iraqi bits


Decided the other day to slowly order my blogroll blitts by frequency of use. Though it is going to be piece-meal and I have also decided you don't need many to get to all the one's you like - six degrees of separation.

Wood's Lot will always be at the top from now on. Anticipating a wonderful painting or photograph is a delicious pleasure. I need a picture like some people like a tonic. Today's Cartier-Bresson monochrome is so wonderful I feel 50% better already. That makes 125%.

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Though not really the place I have designated to discuss the Iraq war, Mark has put up several Cindy Sheehan links, which seem to need a rational response. I do not have any strong feelings about Anti-War protests, as long as no one gets trampled to death.

Mrs. Sheehan's son enlisted in the U.S. Army and was taught to kill and be killed. He got killed. So it goes. Her deep sorrow with which I fully sympathise and empathise - I have a son of my own, now a man, who I love and can easily imagine in the same situation - is perfectly o.k. channelled into hatred of her supreme leader. I would respect her more if she had started camping outside Bush's Texas retreat in 2002, or even 2001, when the talk of war started.

Seeing on t.v. footage Joan Bias singing under the Texas sun threw me back in a flash to my era - the 60s. Remember the one they said you knew you were in if you recalled nothing about it? Thought she was dead and buried, too.

Frank Rich's piece gets to many nubs. It was not the invasion of Iraq but the way they did that is the and will be the problem. The Stars and Stripes in Fidor Square? I have adumbrated thia many times in Baghdadskies and Badghdadskies2 .

Who was it who struggled inland across Panama during the Spanish conquests? I can't think of a name. Torquemada sounds right but was responsible for the Inquisition, I see here. His story is very interesting with the the concept of sangre limpa. Who ever it was, maybe Pizarro, inevitably his part played by a dishevalled Klaus Kinski. Herzog's Fritzcarraldo.....do you need a greater metaphor? Hacking through the jungle, which you have no knowledge of, carrying a bloody great boat.

I long for the news that someone has written a very good novel on this debacle (any offers of synonyms which could replace debacle - what else can you say? Mess? ) which both shows the nadir and nemesis of the U.S. and demonstrates the failure to understand, by the instigators of globalisation, exactly what the concept means. As well as trade it ultimately means people all round the world are perfectly capable of knowing what is going on, even Iraqis.

From old posts in Baghdadskies sites you will see I lived there, so couldn't possibly think the way Bush thinks about this benighted country (Iraq - but it could be America too couldn't it?).





Sunday, August 21, 2005

Le Grand Meaulnes

A radio adaption of Meaulnes at Radio 4 started on Sunday 22 August 2005. Catch it online. Vey good for Meaulnies like me who want to go back and back to sections!


Quotes



Compiling quotes seems to be quite common on the web. Not something I deliberately search for, but when they turn up, usually dispel any clouds of confusion or the rain of despair at

Mark Hughes


keep rolling there are some gems.....this one reminds me of Vonnegut:

A good half of the men you deal with in the Army are psychopaths. There's a pretty hefty overlap between the military population and the prison population, so I knew plenty of guys like Junior in Miami Blues and Troy in Sideswipe. Like, some of these other Tankers I knew used to swap bottles of liquor with infantrymen in exchange for prisoners, and then just shoot 'em for fun. I used to say, 'Goddamn it, will you stop shooting those prisoners!' And they would just shrug and say, 'Hell, they'd shoot us if they caught us!' Which was true, they used to shoot any Tankers they captured. So that sort of behavior became normal to them, and I used to wonder, 'What's gonna-happen to these guys when they go back into civilian life? How are they gonna act?' You can't just turn it off and go to work in a 7-11. If you're good with weapons or something in the Army, you're naturally gonna do something with weapons when you get out, whether it's being a cop or a criminal. These guys learned to do all sorts of things in the Army that just weren't considered normal by civilian standards.

-Charles Willeford


So does this.
Maybe I've got Vonnegutitis :
"Actually I always thought that programming was quite similar to sex. The first time you do it you have no idea what you're doing. It seems like men think about it more than women. Doing it in a large group makes things far too complicated, since no person will know exactly where their part is supposed to fit, though some people claim that it'll give you better results. Doing it by yourself is what most students end up doing. It will take a lifetime to master it. There's no one right way to do it, but a number of wrong ways. People who have never tried it think that those of us who practice it daily are deviants. It's fun. It takes a lot of energy. It can keep you up late at night. It can make you miss classes. Do it too long and you'll go blind. Finally, once you get it on your mind, it's hard to concentrate on anything else."

- Joseph Hewitt (pyrrho12#hotmail.com) in rec.games.roguelike.development

This :

Gardner has come across a good number of chewed and mutilated (but nonetheless living) opossums in his day, which he says suggests that playing possum really does work.

Except sometimes--as Gardner recently learned when called to consult on a criminal case involving a restaurant worker who'd been arrested for torturing an opossum. The reporting police officers were sure that the creature's neck had been broken, since it just lay there with its eyes wide open, drooling. "When it woke up," Gardner. reports, "it looked at them and passed out again." A classic case, except for the ending: To put the animal out of its misery, the cops tenderly placed it beneath a tire of their patrol car and drove over it.

Which goes to show, I guess, that nature can arm you against your enemies, but when you come up against someone who wants to do you a favor, you're on your own.

-Patrick Clinton, Outside Magazine, April 1995


came from Outside Magazine under the byline:

The Wild File

("Your questions about the world, answered)


which makes three in a row......




Friday, August 19, 2005

Einstein's Big Idea



Spiked Magazine : scientists on science


Nova: The story behind the world's most famous equation

Facts about Einstein
from einsteinyear.org
  • Two short audio clips of Einstein




Wednesday, August 17, 2005

And don't forget nature






Nature writing, unlike science, is everywhere in fiction. Reminded that after an on off relationship with The Balkan Trilogy which ended a month or two ago - with me losing 100 pages or so from the end, while promising to finish it as a duty in order to follow the history through - I am left with the memory of what seemed at the times to be the author's own diary-like entries of the weather she actually experienced when living in the countries she describes in her novel and the state of the flowers and trees (falling leaves done quite well). Struck a tad formulaic by popping up so frequently and regularly.

I always hear the opening bars of the familiar, once popular song when notions of leaves goes through my mind.


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These are my peaches - nearly 30 this year. At one stage it looked as if they had stopped at walnut size, as hard as rocks. A few weeks ago, with a lot of rain and then in the last week some warmth, hey presto big fruits.

In the shadow of the tree the house wall is completely covered in shiny snail trails, criss-crossing across the bricks. The snails don't seem to eat the peaches. Maybe they are waiting till they are ripe.

Suday 21 August 2005. Decide to pluck first peach. Felt nearly ripe. Must record this in a notebook for furture reference. Wonder when the first ripe peach came last year. Why am I writing like Daniele Defoe?

This is continued in Norfolkskies


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I ought to re-write that to make it worth a novel. Who would say it to whom? I have it as someone in the UK writing a letter to a friend in a warm country where peaches grow better. For some reason it would also be do with a person recovering from a nervous breakdown. Now, AIATCWTWASE {as is always the case with the web and search engines} I feel obliged {'because it is there'} to look for nature/nervous breakdown/depression novels. Someone who has read many could reel off great lists: can't name a single one right now. Even better would be a novelist who suffered from depression, or even better manic-depression, who wrote a rather depressing novel which involved a "nature cure" (in latter case cycling between descriptions of the natural world then attempts to shut it out at any price..}




Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Even further kinds of understanding


Having shifted ground from an attempt to encourage reading science to questions about what exactly a novel was (partly in order to attempt to demonstrate science permeates literature mostly in the background) this paper popped up via who knows:

Grobstein, P. (2005). Revisiting science in culture: Science as story telling and story revising. Journal of Research Practice, 1(1), Article M1. Retrieved [Date of Access], from http://jrp.icaap.org/content/v1.1/grobstein.html



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Though I ought really to re-read this book, it seems The Magic Mountain could be considered to some degree a "science" book with Dr. Krokowski's x-rays and mumbo-jumbo about lungs. Various other descriptions such as Hans being particular with his thermometer.

And in looking up Mann, there seems to be away here of following through the various strands of science in fiction, comparing for example medical over the strictly scientific.

Saturday, August 13, 2005

It's all in the mind







Perhaps expecting the transfer from reading fiction to science is too much. If people's minds are not geared to doing so there is not much point in insisting there is something of value there.

I ought to admit that asking you to read about quantum mechanics was a tease - neither you nor I was the means to fully understand it - but one with a point: an enlightened reader recognising from popular explanations the strangeness of the quantum world cannot but turn fro this to philosophy, religion or spiritual matters in general. Into unknown territory. The modern consensus is that religion and science occupy different realms and are not essentially in conflict.

Both have thrown up ethical and moral dilemmas: now, in scientific-technological age we are constatly barraged both with the consequences of our over-consumption and its effects on the environment, but also with the belief that there will be a technological fix. This type of thinking is not dissimilar to religious thinking of a more fixed type.

In a collection of old cuttings I was sorting this one seemed somehow to help with the science vs. literature question. It is an extract from a book about the effects of brain damage in the same vein as Sack's, The Man who mistook his wife for a Hat. You might go one stage further to the autistic world. The autistic mind cannot leave out the details. Everything is seen or heard. This is very different from the normal mind which is more of a filter.

This in order to point towards psychology and neuroscience as more suitable areas of science to pair with why we prefer read fiction.


" Why does raw meat give me a hard on?" This is Michael, chopping sirloin ready for the stir-fry. Typically, he is going to the trouble of preparing a good lunch: beef in hoi-sin sausce. He's brought some beer, too. We're drinking straight from the can. Amy, his girlfriend, sits at the kitchen table, reading a magazine. "Michael!" she says, without looking up. Michael slides the diced beef into the wok where it sizzles in the hot oil. "Easy Amy. Only a twitch." He winks at me. Then he drops what he is doing and strides out of the room.

"Have a listen to this." he calls over his shoulder; and soon the place is awash with cascades of sound - brittle arpeggios, tumbling fragments of melody. He returns, head tilted back. "Koto," he says. "Japanese. Astonishing." From this angle the dent in his head , about three inches up from the right eyebrow, is now more noticeable.

Next day, I'm over at Stuart's. We sit in his stuffy front room. An ornate black clock - his early retirement present - clings to the way like a huge fly. Stuart locks me in his gaze. He is about to say something, but doesn't quite. It is a long pause.

Eventually he speaks. "I don't love you any more," he says, "Do I, love?" The words are intended for his wife, Helen, who sits beside him. "No, love," she replies. "So you say." There is silence again, except fro the tick of the insectoid clock. The dent in Stuart's head is above the left eyebrow.

Michael had climbed the tree to retrieve an entangled kite. He needn't have bothered, because the kite drifted down on its own accord. But he was high up by then. I her dreams Amy recalls how abruptly his voice was stifled by the creak and crack of a branch, and the wind-whipped silence of the fall as his body cleared the boughs. Hidden in the meadow grass was a spur of rock. The impact fracrured his skull and released a flash flood of bleeding into the right frontal lobe.

"I though his number was up," the surgeon told me. He had said as much to Amy as she kept vigil over the comatose body. "No point beating about the bush," he'd said. But after three days, Michael came back to life.

Stuart's twist of fate was a mororway pile-up. A bolt snapped and shot like a bullet from the vehicle in front. it came through the windscreen and through his forehead, and tore deep into his left frontal lobe. Despite the immediate dispacement of some brain matter, loss of consciousness was brief, as is sometimes the case with penetrating missile wounds. He told the paramedics he was fine and had better get home now. But they saw the brain stuff gelling his hair and put him in the ambulance.

Within an hour, surgeons were working to extract the foreign body from the interior of his head - a process also requiring the disposal of adjacent brain tissue. Part of Staurt went with it.

By these means, the Fates have neatly created mirror-image brain lesions. As a neuropsychologist, my role is to examine the consequences. Staurt now has trouble getting started. Helen encourages him out of bed in the morning, points him towards the bathroom, has his clothes ready, and gets him breakfast before she goes to work. She leaves him lists of things to do around the house and puzzle books to fill the hours. But when she returns, she often finds him where she left him, sitting in silence.

She'll go over and hug him and he'll return the embrace, but it's perfunctory. He doesn't love her any more. It's the plain truth. She accepts it. Stuart is not to blame. What he feels towards Helen is what he feels towards all other people, including himself: indifference. The absence of emotion frees him to declare the truth. He can reas people's moods and motivations, but lacks the emotional charge of empathy.

I ask what he feels about the little girl who was abducted and murdered last year. He knows it was a dreadful thing. They should hang the murderer or chop his balls off. But no, it doesn't make him "feel" anything very much.

Michael however, has trouble sleeping. Amy has to rein him in. He'll talk to strangers in the street: he'll tell them they're beuatiful or that their children are; or their pets. He wants to touch. He wants to celebrate. Beggars bring a tear to his eye. He once gave a man his coat and a £10 note. Empathy is hair-triggered - but more complex social calculations befuddle him.

When he first came home from the rehab centre, his tastes were palin. Amy said he lived on fish fingers and Led Zeppelin. He said it was like going back in time. He'd always liked these things, and now he didn't feel he should pretend otherwise. Fine, Amy said. But she wouldn't tolerate the porn videos. Like Stuart., Michael no longer feels the need to dissimulate.

"How do you feel in yourself, Stuart?" I ask. "All right." "Are you miserable?" "No." "Are you happy/" "I don't think so." He turns to Helen. "Am I happy?" Helen looks at me: I look at Stuart: the question goes round in a circle.

Michael saw me off at the front door. Amy gave me a wave from down the hall. Michael was close to tears. He pulled me to him and kissed me on the cheek. For an instant, I thought he wa going to say he loved me.


extract from The Sunday Telegraph 6 January 2002.

The article first appeared in Prospect Magazine.


Photograph by Larry Towell.

Into the Silent Land by Paul Broks longer extract

Paul Broks

Interview Paul Brok - American scientist Online

Daniel Dennett interviewed - American Scientist Online - books he recommends

N.B. Dennett suggests David Lodge's
Thinks... and Dan Lloyd's book, Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness, which is both a novel and, as he says, a novel theory of consciousness.



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Who's Telling This Story Anyhow? via wood's lot



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dialogue for one
Two, coffee to hand, sitting by broadband internet vying for the search engine, discussing the novel

colour = additions


Everything about the novel says control. Discuss.

In life we can't control most events.

A writer might discover a talent for words - artful linguistic expression.

Is this way with words merely a vehicle for a controlling voice? He can't control himself or the world around him but he can make a world in which both can be molded in any way possible to the extent of imagination.

The words come out on by one as if by magic and are formed into a whole...

Sometimes the author's voic is the thing that is offputting.

For so many novelists and writer in general it is the process of writing more than the final result?

Novels as an extension of our fantasies. Could be considered immature as an intellectual activity compared with say the rigors of science design or innovation.

Nothing to do with novels..This article about the young British Islamic fundamentalists comes to mind:

There is a hint at what it might be about....

This way of thinking is fictional?

The immaturity is alwys unreal and otherworldly....

We would hope the novelist is mostly not deluded.

Many are quite so in life but manage to write coherent stories.

What the vicariousness of fiction reading - the need in people to live more fully through it.

They can't through life itself?

Fiction is incorporated into life like a seamless coat - like films have come with all their reference points.

As are all the other arts. We constantly use them as markers as we do life events.

You mean we treat them as as being as real as life?

And as important, since they have come from real people's minds. When you visit an art gallery and are impressed by a painting, talking about it for weeks, maybe many years later, it not just a painting is it? I return again and again to The Magic Mountain, as an image rather than words, in a certain.... I suppose it might be called a contented limbo.

When we read Salman Rushdie's,
Midnight's Children, are we also considering the author himself and his life both as a fact and as a conjecture and how he has put the two - the work and the life - side by side for comparison?

When we rad one we think of the author's previous one.

An archipeligo of novels....

Have you seen this essay,
Who's Telling This Story Anyhow? by Margaret Greer, where she talks about frames..

What do you need a frame for when you have book covers?

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It is possible to make lists of everything that could possibly go into novels: cause and effect, consequences intended and unintended, the unexpected, dreams, death, life's stages, thought ("it's arising, its remembering, its diseases." : Kenneth Burke), emotions, lack of emotion, existential angst, God, psychology, pseudo-psychology, folk psychology, values, education, sociology, class, humour, lack of humour, nemesis, nadir, crimes, morality, ethics, ethos, bathos...

Order, disorder, character, personality, guilt, embarassment, mystery...

Art is life...

An excuse to tell stories!

Even films use this. A meeting - possibly slightly unlikely in real life - a Chaucerian meeting, shall we say? - is the excuse to to settle down for a story within a story. The characters who listen to the story might not be, or seem, or have been designed by the writer, to appear as real as the characters in the story.

Could we find a handful of characteristics which we could say makes a novel not life?

Ending up? Final words?

Modalities..

We tend to think of the novel at its best in the same way we think of the best art or music, as a working though what we cannot do in life - such as carrying on where life left off (extension) or bringing someone or an idea back to life (resurrection) - and is therefore fantasy in its truest sense.

There might not be a circumstance in life in which to bring the idea up...

What would it be like without novels or written stories of any kind?

We would be forced to write our own if they were forbidden.

We could say fiction - the novel - is a way of working through scenarios we can't act out in life - if we took away the art and the craft of it.

[taking on stentorian tones of of a Naptha/Settembrini argument]

But of course we can't do that can we? We don't want to. They are bound in like everything in life is interconnected, an ecology. Our own personal lives are affected by a long distance event such as war or natural disaster, even if read in Tolstoy. Some things become life-changing though we don't experience them at first hand.

Novels are often used in a quite artifical way to link the characters to similar life events.

The novel as dream...


The wierdness of life might be associated in a fictional narrative with the wierdness of quantum mechanics. Interraction at a distance in sub-atomic particles might be used to hint at the effect
of political ideas.

But sometimes we get a simile or metaphor too far in novels or poems!

We have to - this is the only place we can do this.

Margaret Greer talks about the 'physical separation from the world in which storytelling can take place'.

The story has to end but life is continuous. One life transposes into another across death. Family histories are bound in with personal histories.

Memoires as lazy fictions.. or fictions as lazy memoires?





Saturday, August 06, 2005

Further kinds of understanding



To be able to write it is necessary to create - that is see - an audience. Many writers say they just write. I don't believe this to be true in most cases. Here attempting a persuasion on why literary types ought to spend more time on the scientific, I see clearly a myriad of types in weblogs reporting on their latest reading. Never science.

The sort of person I am trying to get to read science tends to value literature or philosophy, or both, over science in any form, whether knowledge or praxis. It is my job to convince this well educated person that science and the lives of scientists are just a valuable and interesting as the canon and the lives of great writers {and artists}. Though, in the process of doing so, I may come to a firmer decision about whether my belief is true.

How am I to persuade a novel reader to read science? A long list of the best popular science writing might work, but to present a single case might work better: offering a particular scientist and his work. I chose the late Richard Feynman, Noble Prize winning physicist. Why not try the first Douglas Robb Memorial Lecture before reading on.


You watch tv science documentary programmes and listen to the occasional In Our Time on BBC Radio 4. But you would not chose to read a popular science book, say by John Gribbon or Matt Ridley over a recently written well reviewed novel or a recently discovered small book of poetry. Why?

Reasons. One is background: you were not educated as a scientist therefore feel you will have too much ground to make up in order to make any headway. Another is that they are writing about subjects you feel you do not need to know or understand, though you are perfectly well aware of the contribution science made/makes to society. Lastly, you find science quite boring.

So, having read hundreds of novels of varied quality and style, you want to read one more. What are you hoping to achieve by chosing this new novel over a science book or article in New Scientist or Scientific American. Overall, you say for starters, a novel gives more pleasure than science reading. Then you will argue there is infinite variety in fiction both in content and style: science can only be the method and its results. Though actually, from the few well know examples you already know such as Pasteur and penicillin, Watson and Crick and DNA, it can be quite exciting and sometimes not unlike a good detective story.

The life and times of scientists are not uninteresting either: most non-scientists tend to plump for science biographies over a work of science proper. Biographies of Darwin or Einstein are tolerable because in the main they do not involve much actual science.

All this is perfectly understandable because of where you are coming from: a tertiary education in English, languages, history, sociology or philosophy.

Surely, having just spent an hour in the company of Prof. Feynman (haven't you watched it yet?) you will have revised your mindset somewhat? Try going back with Feynman to a talk given to the National Science Teachers Association, 1966 in New York City.

Perhaps now is the time to check the man out : wikipedia - Richard Feynman

One of the things he is famous for is Feynman diagrams. The physics is hard even with these, but this is not the point. There are scientists like Feynman who make an effort to interpret. In a sense it is a bit like computer programming. They used to write in code but now you can write software in Visual Basic or some equivalent without knowing anything about how you did it. It is possible to find an interpretation which will bring you closer to what the scientist is talking about and so grasp how incredible some of this stuff is: as exciting as anything you read in a novel.

Pleading my case here, I must stipulate you need to read something, not just say you saw the tv programme, fine as it might have been. I am asking you to try to grasp QED as part of this task of getting into science through one man (and his work) which is just a part of quantum physics.

Stephanie has pointed me from her 8 Aug post to W. Caleb McDaniel's, Blogging in the Early Republic: Why bloggers belong in the history of reading
which I predicted would happen at the top - a side debate. Here, fiction vs. non-fiction. It is clear she is saying people are tending to non-fiction. I wouldn't know excpet in what I read in literary websites, reviews and amongs blitteurs.

Good writing is good writing whether it is fiction of non-fiction. Much travel writing has become almost like fiction (who could trust what Chatwin wrote for example). Reading a review of Passage to Torres Strait by Miles Horden in The Sunday Times review mades it obvious why these books are read: the journey from New zealand to Northern Australia is just a starting point for a dissertation on the maritime history of the region.

The great novelist as well as doing something the ordinary person can only marvel at - bringing to life time and place and character in the written word - is usually also introducing a wealth of mesmerising detail which the great modern travel writers have learnt to mimic in their writing. Mark Twain did both. Read The Innocents Abroad. You cannot beat the bit where he talks about the buying of the kid gloves. Which part was real, which imagined? When I think of it quite a few travel writers are also novelists. At my stage of development (trying to write) the novel is stuck in my mind as story as journey. In fact the overriding metaphor in the best novels is always a sort of road movie.

Who has read Gillian Tindall's Celestine, but who has cannot have been led on the best of all types of journey in her prose which leads into the world of Nohant?

But this is not getting the baby bathed. I need to convince you that the excitement of actually seeing a great scientist demonstrate a scientific journey taken (or re-taken) is just as impressive as any fiction or non-science non-fiction. Feynman's first lexture in the Auckland series is a real journey. He knows his audience is not going o follw everyhting he is going to tell them. He tells them his students don't even understnad quantum theory!

Feeling I was fulfilling Blogging in the Early Republic: Why bloggers belong in the history of reading I went around a few blitteurs, find quite a few running on similar themes (fiction vs. non-fiction)
ending up with Mary Gordon' essay Moral Fiction.

.........

Sylvia in a comment below writes:

...According to Myers-Briggs personality typology, a minority of people are of the "thinking" (curious, rational) type, including only 25% of women, who I think do most of the reading out there.

....asking why more people don't read science is akin to asking why they don't read Aristotle and Plato... in Greek. The vocabulary and underlying assumptions of science are just so different from common culture that it is like travelling in a foreign country (interesting that you brought up travel writing). People might know enough to 'get by' in Scienceland but they can't have a real exchange with it if they don't know the language and the culture. Maybe watching a nature show is the equivalent of lying on a beach at the all-inclusive resort, and we can't expect much more with our current standards of education.



So most don't have it in them ? There must be some link between curiosity (scientific or not), inventiveness and imagination.

Suggesting physics as a starter is a big hill to climb, true, but the counter-intuitiveness of it makes it so wierd one would imagine readers of novels with a lot of wierdness in them might be attracted to the sub-atomic world too. Draw a discreet veil over sci-fi readers....

A hidden agenda exposed by thinking about this: I have found progressively over the years I can't sustain many novels, though happy to learn the stories, dip into interesting passages, to read commentaries and critiques. To know they are good is not necessarily to spend half a life reading them. I can accept a good opinion. This is probably connected with a increasing desire to write myself. I've read that some writers feel they will pollute their work if they read too many other authors. There is probably a lot of truth in it.

Being curious about the world of creative writing and not about something equally wonderful (life itself...) seems strange to me. The word vicarious comes to mind.

A question of curiousity. {Good title for a book...} If you yourself are incredibly curious about almost everything, it is hard to see others are not so curious. Brings to mind the old saw attributed to Sir Thomas More, paraphrased roughly as:

To each man his own fart smells sweet.

I don't know if one might call this the naturalistic view of science: people who might be interested in the sort of plants growing on limestone (they notice how different they are from the local flora on a hillwalking holiday) don't follow the thing through to the scientific conclusion - such as why it is that some plants should prefer or only grow in limestone areas. The question has been asked (the difference has been noted) but the next stage is not considered: what is is about limestone? And: how can I find out?

The general methodolgy of science is pretty basic so anyone can do some experiments: such as the great little ones I remember from a book called Science Experiments You Can Eat - lot to do with yeast there! And it is all about that isn't it ? If you encourage the kids young it becomes part of their nature to be scientifically minded.

A dead leaf from a rather nice Oxalis in my kitchen left a wonderful blue colour on my fingers. I immediately squeezed the leaf in a glass of water to create a beautiful blue. I want to know what the dye is and if is it poisonous. Don't all people in a similar position want to know what the dye is and what it could be used for ? { ;) } And can't you imagine this in some fine novel where the heroine who is turning slowly mad manifests her madness through carrying a little glass bottle with blue fluid in it? We now know she is mad. Everyone stars looking back to see when she first started with this blue fluid business....

I think I'll put a plea here for scientific/technlogical descriptions in novels (reminds me of Electricity by Victoria Glendinning: a strange, annoying, yet wonderful little novel. To be fair Charlotte's husband is a technician not a scientist, though I think he attends lecturers at the Royal Society. The book cleverly brings in, if my memory serves at all, some of the most satisfying experimental science : that of Michael Faraday.



The pellet with the poison's in the flagon with the dragon



How is it possible to start an insane writing exercise dialogue which begins with a pastiche on Hamlet's soliloque and ends up with a desperate wine fuelled Google search for the title of the Danny Kaye film The Court Jester (1956) ?
The pellet with the poison's in the flagon with the dragon. The vessel with the pestle has the brew that's true.
And on the way come across this gem....

Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do




kinds of understanding



Pehaps a bit glib and also maybe pointless - certainly quite old-fashioned - to talk about the artistic mind vs. the scientific mind. Been done a thousand times, though often very eloquently such as from the pen of Jacob Bronowski, but this series of 4 lecturers by one of the greatest scientists, Richard Feynman, ought to be watched by those with a literary or philosophical bent who are yet to to be persuaded by science.

There is also a talk he gave to the National Science Teachers Association in New York in 1966 on science : What is science?

Richard Feynman : The Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures

were delivered in 1979 at the University of Auckland and later formered the basis of
"QED - The Strange Theory of Light and Matter" {1985}. Quantumelectrodynamics .

The sound quality is often poor. Lecturer 1 breaks towards the end leaving the sound to carry on while the picture remains static, but it is possible to move the pointer along to get over this. Best to watch in "theatre mode" which involves clicking on the four-arrowed icon then on x1 at the top left of the player.

Each film is just over 1 hour long and includes a Q&A at the end.

richardfeynmanonline

wiki: Richard Feynman

links to wiki : Murray Gell-Mann (another great) -

both worked on wiki : weak nuclear force






Thursday, August 04, 2005

E-books from Classic Literature Library



classic literature library by author

side link under resources



Monday, August 01, 2005

are screenplays literature and other essays on film




cyberfilmschool

has a set of short articles on film including a series on Are Screenplays literature? {1} {2} {3}

and a variety of other pieces.



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