Idiosophy

A physicist loose among the liberal arts

Hobbits and their Soil

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On November 23, 2022

In squibs & crackers

Tom Hillman’s latest post cites C.S. Lewis citing Tolkien musing about the effect of living in one place and eating local produce for generations. Maybe, the musing goes, that is the source of hobbits’ apparent power to resist evil.

As it happens, I was just reading about the dangers of eating locally. William Albrecht wrote a famous paper1 about the sorry condition of the teeth of military recruits during World War 2. The men with the worst teeth were geographically concentrated in areas where the combination of soil mineralization and rainfall caused calcium deficiency. Eating locally was the source of the problem. In our modern food system, we eat food from all over, so this doesn’t happen so often.Calcium shall be my shield

But then it struck me: I’ve never heard of the Native Americans who originally lived in the Appalachians having dental problems. Google Scholar only finds a few skeletons, explicitly described as anomalous. Bad teeth are found in only the descendants of European colonists. Eliot’s line about how ‘We are synthetic men, uprooted’ seems to be applicable in more places than just the Shire.

Not today, Yoda

By

On November 19, 2022

In Academy and Society

It’s really hard to address climate change because the bad effects take a generation to appear, but people value the here-and-now. I’m writing an essay about this for “Gardeners of the Galaxies“.

As much as I don’t like the idea of a discount rate when people are planning for the future, I’ve always had to admit that contradicting it makes matters worse. People who contradict it are the “longtermists” and “effective altruists” who somehow always turn out to be swindling people or smashing things without producing anything of value.

The language is full of exhortations about this, like “the beam in thine own eye” or “clean up your own backyard”. But I hope the editors appreciate my restraint in not citing Yoda:

All his life has he looked away to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph.

It amuses me that so many of the sites on line that offer quotations from Yoda also include his grunts. It reminds me of the Usenet FAQ that asserted when the Swedish Chef spoke, the words meant nothing. All the semantic content was in the “bork, bork, bork!” at the end.

Update

That feeling when you cite an article with a fairly harsh tone, and then two weeks later discover that the author was just getting started. Emile Torres, who wrote the article about longtermism, has two new articles out in the last couple of days. One in Salon, and another in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

The Old Ways Return

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On October 22, 2022

In trivial

In the newspaper the other day I read that we know we’re getting enough sleep “if we’re able to problem solve.” I’d never seen this particular locution written down before. Managers have been talking like that for years, though. They’ll open a meeting by saying, “we need to level set,” or “first it would be good to goal set,” or even “we have an opportunity to game change.”

As one is promoted high enough in an organization, one gains affinity for Bovine Spongiform English (as The Economist memorably called it), so this is natural. When a manager said something like that, I’ve always just snickered inaudibly and moved on, confident that an editor would remove any such abomination before it hit print. But there it is, in The Washington Post. It looks like this one might be sticking.

Let’s take it apart.  The evolution goes like this:

  1. A verb and a direct object go together so often that they become a single unit: It changed the game.
  2. A gerundive form appears to describe whatever “it” was: A game-changing innovation.
  3. The boss desires another such thing: Come up with a game-changer.
  4. The belly-flop into neologism comes when the hyphen becomes a space: We need to game change. 

Step 4 isn’t guaranteed. Sometimes the two words get fused into one, the process stops, and no one is harmed: homemaker, firefighter, windbreaker, …. Nobody objects to that. What’s going on with these new things?

A tail disappearing under the waterI think it’s an ancient, hoary beast coming to life. Germanic languages like to have the verb at the end of a sentence. Not in the simple cases, of course. In simple sentences where it’s important to get to the point (A bear ate Uncle Olaf) verbs sensibly go next to subjects.  But when matters get complicated, so complicated that we need managers and hierarchies and chains of command, the verb gets arrogant, making everybody wait upon it, until the last moment when it makes its appearance.

English dalliance with Romance languages has been a fact of life for a millenium, but the Old Ways are only sleeping, not dead. They could return at any time. I noticed a lot of modal auxiliary verbs in those examples. They’re the ones who give permission to the main verb to slouch off to the end.

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
– A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Is this really the future we want to leave to our children?

Updates

Since this post was published, I’ve been afflicted with

  • “We need you to role model,”
  • “At that point we will need to risk mitigate.”
  • “This is no time to hand wring.”

On March 13, 2024, in the Washington Post, “”Though only 12 bipartisan lawmakers signed onto the measure thus far, the group continues to temperature check with party leaders and colleagues.” We just need to move the party leaders and colleagues to follow continues.

Alliteration: not just for good guys anymore

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On September 30, 2022

In Alliterative Verse

Just watched “The Rings of Power” episode 6. About four minutes in, Adar is giving his troops an inspirational speech. Maybe I’m imagining it, but it sounds like he’s trying for alliterative verse. I was scribbling as fast as I can, but this is pretty close to what he said:

We cast off our shackles,  crossed mountain and field,
Frost and fallow, till   our feet bloodied the dirt.
From Ered Mithrin to the Ephel Arnen,  we have endured…

Oops — mistake there at the end. (“Overcome” would have worked.) I guess when you’ve been warped by the evils of Morgoth, one of the first things you lose is strict adherence to poetic form.

Dwarfsong

By

On September 4, 2022

In squibs & crackers

My favorite part of the Amazon “Rings of Power” series so far is when Disa is explaining how Dwarves understand the rocks around them. She sings to the rocks, and the way they resonate to her song tells her about the composition inside them, so she knows where to dig.

This resonates with me, too, because I worked in ultrasonic materials-characterization at NASA back in my salad days. That’s exactly how we did it. The speed of sound in rock is around 6,000 m/s and in gold it’s about 3,200 m/s, so this would definitely work. Wherever her song hit a vein of gold, the change in the speed of propagation means sound waves would refract and reflect back to the singer.

It also tells us something about Dwarves that we didn’t know before. Some background: The speed of a wave is equal to the wavelength times the frequency. The smallest feature you can identify with sound waves is about a wavelength in size. If Disa is a soprano, she can sing a note that’s about 1100 Hertz, which means she can’t hear anything in the rock smaller than 5.4 meters across, which is about 18 feet. That’s not very useful; she must be able to sing higher than that. You could do a lot with notes 10 times that high. A seam of ore is frequently a foot wide.  Maybe she can sing 10-20 kHz. That’s the top end of what humans can hear, but it’s well within a dog’s range. Dwarf women and dogs might get along well.

Bats are the secret

Domesticated animal

Real precision work will take more, though. The head of a rock-hammer is about 2 cm across. It would be more useful to find things that size. To hear something that small, she’ll need to sing about 300 kilohertz. That’s too high even for bats, who max out at 200 kHz, but there are clever things you can do to improve resolution if you have more than one transmitter. Disa is certainly doing something like that, since she’s talking about a song, not just a note. She could be accompanied by a bat chorus. Just like humans keep chickens in a coop near the house, Dwarves might keep a cave of bats near their own excavation to help with surveying.

Conclusions
  1. We don’t know anything about female Dwarves because not only are they rarely seen, they’re impossible to hear.
  2. People who compose film music for Dwarves that is dominated by bass notes have it all backwards.

The Long-Forgotten Physical Therapy Blues

By

On August 27, 2022

In trivial

One of the pleasures of old age and fading memory1 is that I can find new things to read that match my sense of humor perfectly.  I was cleaning up my disk today and came upon a file called “untitled.txt” dated 2013, which contained a short blues lyric:

I know a woman, she treats me so mean,
She’s the meanest damned woman that I’ve ever seen.

She’s bad to the bone, but she’s worse to the tendon.
Stay with this woman, the pain’s never endin’.

If I’d ever sung this song to my physical therapist, I’d have clear memories of the consequences, so I’m sure this is its first publication.

The secret of a strong field of research

By

On August 6, 2022

In scholarship, Uncategorized

Boethius looks depressed about how much work writing a philosophical tract is turning out to be

Boethius is about to get schooled

Last year, Brenton Dickieson wrote a series of blog posts asking the question, “Why is Tolkien Scholarship Stronger than Lewis Scholarship?”  The third post gives a number of hypotheses that may answer the question, but no definite conclusion was reached. The discussion in those posts, and the comments that follow them, is much better informed than I can be. However, I can always contribute to the low end of a scholarly debate.

The Idiosopher’s Razor: When several hypotheses are consistent with the evidence, the least dignified one is to be preferred.1

I’ve recently been researching criticism of Poul Anderson’s science fiction. A lot of people named “Anderson” have written books,2 which means that the first step answering any question, at the moment, is making sure I’ve got the right Anderson. It’s the literary equivalent of the “data cleaning” problem in statistics. It’s a huge part of the work in studying anything, C.S. Lewis for example. That’s a trans-disciplinary fact. And don’t even get me started about “Charles Williams”!

This is a problem that Tolkien scholars never have. Anybody writing about anyone named “Tolkien” is certain to be relevant. Looking up Tolkien is a lot easier than looking up Anderson, Lewis, or whomever. Eliminating a laborious step in the research lowers one of the barriers to getting the paper written. Applying our Razor, we can slice away many hypotheses in favor of pure laziness. Tolkien papers are easier to research, so there will be more of them, and the best of a larger group will often be better than the best of a smaller group, such as the papers about Lewis.

I think I just understood Shakespeare scholarship, too.

 

Dominic Flandry and the Bechdel Test

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On July 21, 2022

In trivial

For my latest project, I’m re-reading Poul Anderson’s “Dominic Flandry” stories.  This observation is totally beside the point of the actual research, and what else is a blog for?

Imperfectly consistent with the feminist ideal

Ensign Flandry was published in 1966, when Alison Bechdel was in kindergarten. It’s an adventure story written for teenaged boys, so it’s no surprise that the book doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test.

But here’s the funny thing: if it were made into a movie, even in the 1960’s, the movie would have passed the test. The Tigeries of Starkad are ruled by females in a group they call “The Sisterhood”. The males are just foot soldiers and sailors. While Flandry is off on another planet, their military conflict with the sea people escalates to the point of full mobilization. Anderson describes the scene this way: “Banners snapped to the wind, shield bore monsters and thunderbolts luridly colored. It was no mob. It was the fighting force of Ujanka, summoned by the Sisterhood.”

The political machinations among the Sisterhood all take place off-screen in the novel, but a movie adaptation would unavoidably replace that exposition with a scene about the debate over wartime preparations in the Council, which would have featured a room full of women, several of whom are named, not talking about a man. Dominic Flandry is an outrageous womanizer (though he also has admirable qualities), so realizing this was quite a surprise.

Midsummer herbs

By

On June 23, 2022

In squibs & crackers

It’s perfectly true that you should harvest herbs at this time of year. The various phytochemicals that give them flavor, nutritional value, and maybe (who knows?) healing powers are most concentrated just before they flower, according to the extension office.

I am now imagining an old English farmer (Gaffer Gamgee, perhaps) overhearing the monks giving credit to John the Baptist for stuff that everyone knows if they’ve been paying attention. The scene is exactly the sort of thing that monks don’t write in their manuscripts for us to consult a thousand years later.

Orpheus in the Underworld Revisited

By

On May 8, 2022

In squibs & crackers

This tweet

the other day got me thinking about Jacques Offenbach. Long ago I heard a musicologist lamenting, not very seriously, that Offenbach didn’t know about the saxophone: what wonderful craziness might he have composed for it?  That lament, I now know, is historically incorrect. The saxophone was invented in the 1840s and Offenbach was still writing in the 1870s.  But the old man was kind of right. Why isn’t there a saxophone solo in, for example, the overture to Orpheus in the Underworld?

This is my favorite performance of that overture.  Apart from the musicianship, there are lots of reasons to love it.  One is the oboe player’s look of relief when she finishes her solo (1:40 in).1 Another is the manic grin on the violinist’s face at 7:42 when the galop starts. But the biggest reason is how the conductor carefully sets it all up, but once the galop gets going, he just lets the orchestra run wild. Exactly what old Jacques would have wanted.

Everyone thinks of the galop infernal as the “cancan music”.2 But any nerdy child also knew the story of Orpheus, and I couldn’t put them together. What the devil, I wondered, was supposed to be happening on stage while the orchestra was playing that?  No way to find out. Nobody I knew had ever seen a performance. The #1 reason to love the World Wide Web is that it can settle those questions I had in my childhood, which can lie dormant for half a century. Now I know:

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