A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds

I am off to the Artificial Life conference in Kyoto soon; I am filling in some online forms to save time in person later.  As is often the case, such forms want date of birth.  I am bemused by the day-of-month dropdown menu.

Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt?

I came across this recently: 

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?   

— Henry David Thoreau (1849) Civil Disobedience, p367

 

Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again

From BBC News:

Theresa May and her cabinet are looking for ways to bring her EU withdrawal agreement back to the Commons for a fourth attempt at winning MPs' backing.

From Quote Investigator:

Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.

bus stop time

There’s an old saying that:

time is a device to prevent everything happening at once,
space is a device to prevent it all happening in Cambridge

And now I have discovered that Cambridge Railway Station bus stops each have their own time zone!

I wonder what the time is at the other railway station stops?

I’m off to the Cambridge Philosophical Society’s one day meeting on What we don’t know about the Universe from the very small to the very big.  By this evening I hope to have better knowledge of my lack of knowledge.

another fine mess

“I got us into this mess and I will get us out” — Theresa May

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them” — Albert Einstein

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unreasonable ineffectiveness

Gelfand:

Eugene Wigner wrote a famous essay on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences. He meant physics, of course. There is only one thing which is more unreasonable than the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics, and this is the unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in biology.

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verbs, not nouns

Since becoming interested in “process oriented” models of the world, and liking Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s statement: “life is a verb, not a noun”, I’ve been on the lookout for examples.

This one meshes nicely with a current topic of discussion: praising learners for (actively) “working hard”, rather than for (passively) “being clever”.


[via Danny Yee's blog]

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smart phones and urban fantasy

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

— Clarke’s 3rd law

So what does this mean for SF?  Charlie Stross has an argument…

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my work here is overshadowed

I like to collect witty and apposite quotations. I also like to make sure that they are properly attributed.  There are many incorrect or apocryphal attributions around on the net of a million lies; anything unsourced should be treated with suspicion.  In my zeal to track things down, I have even been known to buy two different translations of a well known quotation in order to examine its meaning.

I've learned a lot hunting around for the correct attribution, such as the fact that Edmund Burke did not say

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

that Ralph Waldo Emerson did not say

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

and that Voltaire did not say

 I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Today I was hunting around for a source for the well known:

It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.

There appears to be an even split in opinion between Mark Twain and Lincoln, but they are all unsourced. Everything witty is eventually attributed to Twain, so these are always doubly suspicious, and if Lincoln had said it, surely there would be a source available somewhere?  More googling landed me at the Quote Investigator, a remarkably well-researched and well-referenced resource, putting my puny efforts to shame.  This will definitely be my first port of call from now on.

The correct attribution for the quotation?  Neither Twain not Lincoln, it seems.  It appears to have evolved over the years into its current form.

better use seaweed

As Neils Bohr is alleged to have said, “prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”.

My smartphone has a weather app on it that gives a forecast of the next six days. I glance at it occasionally, but in September, we had our annual “Away Day” at work, which has a significant outdoor component. So I was watching the forecast quite carefully. It said it was going to be sunny. Great! Next day it was predicting cloud, then it changed back to sun, then to rain. Umm. Well, on the day it was fine, fortunately.

But all that made me a bit suspicious of the app. I know longer range forecasts are essentially useless, with the weather being a chaotic system, but I thought 4 or 5 days out was now in the bounds of possibility. So I’ve been keeping data from my app for the last month or so.

click to see the icons

Each strip of 6 icons represents the forecast for a given day: the item near the top the forecast six days in the future, the one at the bottom from just the day before. There’s a lot of variation.

Here’s a graph summarising the data.

click to see the scales

 For each day I’ve summarised the six icon strip with three numbers

1. #symbols (light green): the number of different forecasts given over the six days: a consistent forecast would use one symbol, with more symbols showing greater indecision. Over the 32 days of data collection, it managed the perfect “one symbol” 4 times (12.5%). 
2. #changes (mid green): the number of times the forecast changed its mind. This minimum possible value is #symbols – 1; a higher figure indicates vacillation. 
3. end game (dark green): the number of days the final symbol stayed constant. The maximum possible is six: a perfect six day forecast (managed 12.5% of the time); the least reliable is one day (managed 15 times, or 47% of the time.) 

Not very impressive. The same app also gives minimum and maximum temperature estimates, with similar meanderings.

I think I’ll go back to the trusty classic “Seaweed dry, sunny sky. Seaweed wet, rain you'll get.” We can add more states, with the well-known joke: “Seaweed gone: wind so strong!” And to bring it fully up to date we simply add: “raining seaweed, weird indeed”. 

ratty book review

My favourite tongue-in-cheek film review, attributed to Rick Polito in the Marin Independent Journal, goes:

Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she encounters, then teams up with three total strangers and plots to kill again.

Now this is being challenged for brilliantly missing the point by an equally great book review. Reported by Laurie Taylor (back in 2005: never mistake this blog for being up-to-the-minute!), it's a review by the Vice Chancellor of that leading-edge educational establishment, the University of Poppleton. The VC's choice for Book of the Year is reported thus:

... it told the story of a middle-aged man who fails to recognise the benefits of the community in which he resides. Instead of identifying with its mission statement, he persists in pursuing a selfish, individualistic path and ends up having an illicit sexual relationship with a close organisational colleague.

Fortunately, there is a happy ending. Following an intervention from Human Resources and a slightly overdramatised episode involving large rats, he realises his mistakes and re-commits himself to the ongoing strategic plan.

I wouldn't have identified it without the rat reference.




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Congratulations if you recognised the film as The Wizard of Oz.

tracking down mad dancers, eventually

So, I was looking for the source of the quotation “Those who dance appear insane to those who cannot hear the music”. Googling, everyone says it's Nietzsche, but of course, hardly anyone gives a source. One suggestion I did find was that it comes from The Birth of Tragedy (originally written in 1872), and helpfully included a fairly substantial quotation.  I couldn’t find a source that exactly matched the provided snippet, but I did find one very close:

In the German Middle Ages under the same power of Dionysus constantly growing hordes waltzed from place to place, singing and dancing. In that St. John's and St. Vitus's dancing we recognize the Bacchic chorus of the Greeks once again, and its precursors in Asia Minor, right back to Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea.
     There are men who, from a lack of experience or out of apathy, turn mockingly away from such phenomena as from a "sickness of the people," with a sense of their own health and filled with pity. These poor people naturally do not have any sense of how deathly and ghost-like this very "Health" of theirs sounds, when the glowing life of the Dionysian throng roars past them.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, NuVision ebook, 2004

However, while tracking this down, I found a different translation:

So also in the German Middle Ages singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing in number, were whirled from place to place under this same Dionysian impulse. In these dancers of St. John and St. Vitus, we rediscover the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks, with their early history in Asia Minor, as far back as Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea. There are some, who, from obtuseness, or lack of experience, will deprecate such phenomena as "folk-diseases," with contempt or pity born of the consciousness of their own "healthy-mindedness." But, of course, such poor wretches can not imagine how anemic and ghastly their so-called "healthy-mindedness" seems in contrast to the glowing life of the Dionysian revellers rushing past them.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. In Albert Hofstadter, Richard Kuhns, Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger, University of Chicago Press, 1964 (p501) (translation, Clifton P. Fadiman, 1927)

And yet another one:

In the German Middle ages, too, ever-growing throngs roamed from place to place, impelled by the same Dionysiac power, singing and dancing as they went; in these St John's and St Vitus' dancers we recognize the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks, with their pre-history in Asia Minor, extending to Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea. There are those who, whether from lack of experience or from dullness of spirit, turn away in scorn or pity from such phenomena, regarding them as `popular diseases' while believing in their own good health; of course, these poor creatures have not the slightest inkling of how spectral and deathly pale their 'health' seems when the glowing life of Dionysiac enthusiasts storms past them.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, Cambridge University Press, 1999 (translation, Ronald Spiers), pp17-18 

One thing that struck me was the sheer variety in these translations. Just pulling our a single phrase (let's take one that has something to do with the original search), shows the great variety of translations possible:

1. under the same power of Dionysus constantly growing hordes waltzed from place to place, singing and dancing 
2. singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing in number, were whirled from place to place under this same Dionysian impulse 
3. ever-growing throngs roamed from place to place, impelled by the same Dionysiac power, singing and dancing as they went 

While we have hordes waltzing, crowds whirling, and throngs roaming, they are all nevertheless uniformly “singing and dancing”. Similarly with the final phrase:

1. when the glowing life of the Dionysian throng roars past them 
2. the glowing life of the Dionysian revellers rushing past them 
3. when the glowing life of Dionysiac enthusiasts storms past them 

Throngs roar, revellers rush, and enthusiasts storm, but all with “glowing life”. It makes one wonder – how much do translators read earlier translations, how much do they consciously decide to change certain phrases and orderings, and why they leave other phrases the same?

But another thing struck me, which was more relevant to my original quest: although close, none of these passages seem to capture the full spirit of the original search topic: “Those who dance appear insane to those who cannot hear the music”.

A link from that original helpful site took me to a discussion about the source being Henri Bergson. The Bergson quote is given in the original French, and in translation, as

• Il suffit que nous bouchions nos oreilles au son de la musique, dans un salon où l'on danse pour que les danseurs nous paraissent aussitôt ridicules
• “It is enough for us to stop up our ears to the sound of music, in a room where people are dancing, in order for the dancers to at once appear ridiculous.” 

Henri Bergson, Le Rire. Essai sur la signification du comique, 1900
Henri Bergson, “Laughter, an essay on the meaning of the comic”, 1900 

Note Bergson says “ridicule” (ridiculous), not “fou” (mad, crazy, wild, foolish).   Nevertheless, this looks closer to the quote than the Nietzsche passage.  So I felt satisfied.

However, whilst searching around for an image of "mad dancers" to enliven this large wodge of text, I came across a website containing a copy of Meyer Levin’s The Golden Mountain (1932), which is “a collection of tales of the Eastern European Hassidic Jews”. It includes the tale of “The Mad Dancers”:

a deaf man passed outside the house; he looked in through the window and saw the people whirling about the room, leaping, and throwing about their arms. 'See how they fling themselves about!' he cried, 'it is a house filled with madmen!' For he could not hear the music to which they danced. 

Now, this seems much closer, and I suspect may be the "true" source. I wonder how much each might have been influenced, directly or indirectly, by the earlier publications?

search history

I was writing a paper, and as a conclusion to a short section, I wanted to put "Life is a verb, not a noun".  Now, that sounds like something someone has probably said before, so I thought I would check, in case I needed to reference it.  I found the source as follows:

• I Google “Life is a verb, not a noun”.
• Lots of entries say it's by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, but none give a source (as usual)
• I Google “Charlotte Perkins Gilman wikiquote”
• I follow the link to http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charlotte_Perkins_Gilman
• It’s not there
• I Google “Charlotte Perkins Gilman Life is a verb, not a noun”
• One of the entries this time looks more like like a source: I can see that it has a reference in it, to a (p. xv)
• I follow link to http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=33118
• It’s a review by Cara L. Burnidge, of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: a biography, by Cynthia J. Davis, with a link to the book itself at Amazon.com
• I follow link to http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0804738890
• The Amazon page has a “look inside” version of the book, so I look to see if p.xv is included. It is, and has the quote, but no source. However, the same paragraph has several other quotes, and then an endnote reference 10.
• I look to see if endnote 10 is included in the “look inside” version. It is, on p.409, where it says “she calls 'life' a verb in HW, 203”, which sounds like it could be the source.
• I assume 203 is a page reference, and that HW is an abbreviation for the source. What is HW?
• I look to see if the abbreviations are included in the “look inside” version. They are; HW = Human Work
• I Google “Charlotte Perkins Gilman Human Work”
• There's a Google books version at http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Human_work.html?id=IHoEAAAAYAAJ&redir_esc=y.
• I follow the link to the book; it’s not searchable.
• Back to Google Results page; there's another version at http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Human_Work.html?id=y8Gif_Ni0L0C&redir_esc=y
• I follow the link to the book; this one is searchable.
• I search for “verb”; there are many hits; one is on p.203. And there it is:

• I go to the beginning of the book, and get the rest of the bibliographic details.

"Life is a verb, not a noun."
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Human Work, p203. McClure, Philips and Co, 1904.

Elapsed time, less than 15 minutes.
Try that with a paper library!

Maybe I should add it to wikiquotes...

quote of the day

To all of you who don't realise we are already living in the future (albeit one without jet-packs), here's a thought from Charlie Stross:

"to the extent that mainstream literary fiction is about the perfect microscopic anatomization of everyday mundane life, a true and accurate mainstream literary novel today ought to read like a masterpiece of cyberpunk dystopian SF."

climbing up onto the shoulders of giants

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants – Isaac Newton 

Newton was not first to say this (and it may or may not have been a jab at Hooke), but the idea is sound: we can get further because we don’t have to invent everything from scratch; we can build on what others have done before. So, if we need to solve a particular problem that needs calculus, we don’t have to invent calculus from scratch to do so, we can use what Newton (and Leibniz, of course) invented. Standing on their shoulders, we can see further.

But how do we get to stand on the giant’s shoulders? (I’ll keep the metaphor to a single giant, as standing on the shoulders of multiple giants sounds too much like a circus act. And I am focussing on the mathematical giant.) We aren’t born up there on the giant’s shoulders. While we don’t have to grow into the giant (invent calculus), we do have to climb up the giant (study calculus).

And the giant is getting ever bigger. On the one hand, this is good: being so much higher we can see so much further. On the other hand, what happens when we have to spend our entire lives climbing up the vast growing giant, and never reach the viewpoint on the ever-distant shoulders?

We need short cuts up the giant. Fortunately, other are building ropes and ladders and lifts: tools to climb the giant more easily. So, we now have computer algebra packages that can solve our differential and integral equations for us; we no long need to spend years studying and practising how to do this.

But wait! cry the purists. That is cheating.

there is no Royal Road to geometry – Euclid

Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about everything. – Greg Egan

There are no shortcuts, the purists insist. Mathematics is not a “spectator sport”. You have to do it, be immersed in it, internalise it, in order to really understand it.  The youth of today, with their fancy calculators and computers, they don’t really understand arithmetic and algebra and calculus.  Get off my lawn!

There is nothing new under the sun when it comes to criticism of youth, of course. Plato, in Phaedrus, has Socrates rail against this new-fangled literacy:

 [writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so. 

This sounds suspiciously similar to those modern complaints about using calculators rather than mental arithmetic, or using computer algebra programs rather than slogging through pages of pushing symbols around. These devices give only the “appearance of wisdom”.

I do have some sympathy with this view. There does seem to be a lot of blind trust in the output of calculators and computers. However, I’m not sure it is purely the fault of the calculators. There can be uncomprehending blind trust in symbol pushing, too. I remember, many years ago, being in a computer shop, buying four items. The shop assistant wrote down the prices, and laboriously added them up, with much crossing out. When they announced the total, I said “that’s wrong”. They got a bit huffy, but then I pointed out their total was too small: it was less than one of the items on the list! As well as their huffiness, I detected a faint feeling of puzzled wonder from the assistant: how had I known? Despite the hand calculation, the assistant had no feel for the numbers. Maybe Socrates would have said that they should have added the numbers in their head? (Notice here that I didn’t know what the right answer was, but I knew the suggested answer was wrong.)

Another example comes to mind, again from many years ago. We were buying some new pillows: four for £4.99 each. The shop assistant wrote down 4.99 four times in a list, and added them up. Meanwhile I was going “£4.99 is a penny less than £5, so that’s £20 minus 4p, or £19.96.” I had the right money ready by the time the assistant came up with the answer, and was again met with puzzled wonder. (I’m sure that’s the real reason supermarkets took the prices off their goods: to stop some customers freaking out the cashiers by having the right money ready!)

I recounted this pillow story to my mother, who, faster than I did my shortcut calculation, simply multiplied 4.99 by 4 in her head, and got the right answer. I was almost as much in awe of this feat as the shop assistant had been in mine. But which approach shows more understanding of numbers: my short cut or my mother’s brute force calculation? Is it possible that slogging through all those exercises merely enable us to do calculations quickly, without thinking? And if there is no thought, then what have we actually gained? After all, one can learn by rote and merely “parrot” remembered answers.

Back to climbing that giant. What we need is a way of taking short cuts up and of having the “feel” for the numbers. An approach that could work is critical thinking about the supplied results (whether supplied by computer, or by our own unthinking calculations). We can keep the feel by using even shorter short cuts and heuristics that give an approximate answer, as a sanity check. Those shorter cuts and heuristics supply the feel, and when they are done automatically, they are the feel.

So, education shouldn’t be focussed on getting students to wade through pages and pages of exercises, pushing symbols (be they numbers or letters) around (unless they enjoy that sort of thing, of course). It should be more focussed on training in the use of short-cut tools, education on where and how to apply the tools, and meta-training in critical thinking about the results those tools give. Then we can climb the ever-growing giant fast enough to get to the top in time to see something before we die, and confident that we’ll understand what we do see when we get there.

serial commas

Well, Scalzi's blog Whatever is providing a rich source of grammatical fodder. One post gave me a great example of it's v its, then soon after we have a mention of the serial comma (the one that some put before the final "and" in a list).

We've all heard the famous example of how a serial comma can help disambiguate a sentence:

This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.

Xopher's comment gives a a link to a great new example:

Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.

Language Log also has something to say about this new example.

Despite the fact that the serial comma is standard American usage, and its omission is standard British usage, I tend to use it anyway, simply because it provides less chance of an ambiguous parse (even in less hilarious cases than those above). However, I do follow the British usage that punctuation goes outside the quotation marks when it is part of the quoting text and not part of the quoted text. It's only logical.

a marvellous toy

I've been somewhat unproductive this last week, as I've been acquainting myself with my latest toy -- a Samsung Galaxy S II. I'm not an "early adopter" -- I waited a decade before getting a microwave oven, for example. I tend to follow the maxim

Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.
--- Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, 1711

However, I'm so dependent on email, and getting more dependent on a mobile calendar, that I decided the time had come to bite the bullet. I polled a few colleagues at work for their favourites, and ended up with the Galaxy (much to the disgust of the Apple brotherhood).

I've been playing with learning how to use it for the last week. First I had to get it talking to the home wifi. Which required getting the home wifi to advertise its presence a little more than it was doing. Work wifi connection required a quick trip to software support on my part, and for them to press two menu items on the phone (I think my mind "must be too highly trained" for that sort of thing). Now I've got my GMail, contacts, and Google calendar accounts synched. Bliss.

It seemed to take a while for the GPS to synch, so the weather map and other things thought I was in Waterbeach for a while. But after a few tries, it got my location correct, both at home and at work.

First peripheral: a slip case to carry it around in, so it doesn't get pocket-lintified. A quick Amazon search found something perfect. A subsequent search for a travel adaptor so that I can recharge the device in foreign parts, in order to use these facilities away from home/work, has opened up a whole new can of worms. I've ordered a couple of alternatives, and will test them out next week during my trip to France.

Then it was the apps. Google Sky Map, of course -- and MoonWidget.

Another colleague recommended Rail Planner Live, for all your UK rail trip needs. The download route I took for this required scanning a QR code, so I first downloaded QR Droid. The Rail planner app required actual money -- a whole £3.49! -- but it's definitely worth it.

Next, got my Dropbox account loaded -- piece of cake.

Then, I played around with the camera a bit more (more than merely scanning a barcode, that it). It's got autofocus (which I really need) and zoom, and auto-smile detect, and video, and ... more than I'll ever use, I suspect. The main reason for wanting a camera is as use as a "printing whiteboard" -- after a meeting, just snap the board, and email it to the participants -- a great productivity enhancer. (And I don't even need to photograph the board square on -- Paint Shop Pro has a nifty feature to square it up later.)

Of course, the first thing I wanted to photograph, so that I could blog about it, was the device itself. Ah, well, nothing's perfect! I suppose I could have employed a mirror, but I chose the route of using a separate camera.

I also want an simple sketching utility -- not some mini-CAD app that neatens up things into squared-off boxes and perfect circles -- and not something for the inner-artist (which I don't have) -- just something for simple line drawings that are part of the notes I take in meetings. I couldn't find anything -- but sketching on paper, then photographing, is a good substitute.

Games, of course -- Scrambled Net is frighteningly addictive. I also downloaded a few fractal and cellular automata apps, played with them for a few seconds, and then deleted them. I'm pretty sure I'll be writing the odd complex systems app at some point...

Oh, I believe the device also includes a phone. I haven't used that. Years ago I heard an advertising jingle: "You're never alone with a mobile phone" -- and interpreted it as a warning. Email is so much more civilised.

So, I'm not an early adopter, but after a week in its company, you'll get my new marvellous toy away from me when you prise it from my cold dead hands.

troll quotes

A Boing Boing post introduced me to the concept of a "troll quote": a well known quotation, misattributed to one person, along with a picture of yet another person.

Back in 1999, Michael F. Stemper contributed to the rec.arts.sf.written ultimate troll competition: "Does anybody know if Harlan Ellison will include Alexi Panshin's essay on Heinlein's views on gun control in The Last Dangerous Visions?" So when I was reading the Boing Boing comments, and came across Gulliver's suggestion at #33 --- "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. ~ Ray Kurzweil. I'd go with Harlan Ellison for sheer piss-off factor." --- I'm afraid I just couldn't help myself.