Wax Banks

Of late: chemical bonds.

[From the thing I've been working on all summer.]

The Nature of Chemical Bonds (they’re just like love)

Most atoms want to form compounds: atomic combinations. The forces that bind atoms into compounds are called chemical bonds, and can take many forms. Chemical bonds are like love: sometimes they're about sharing something important to both of you (covalent bonds – shared electrons), or changing each other for the better (ionic bonds – exchanged electrons). With some love-bonds, it's the amount of electricity flowing all around you that keeps you together (metallic bonds – crystals trapped by a sea of electrons).

Sometimes the course of love has more to do with circumstances than what's between you; the same goes for molecules. There are chemical forces that aren’t bonds, and aren’t as strong as chemical bonds, but which do alter atomic behavior.

A molecule is the smallest group of atoms that can take part in a chemical reaction; it’s a tightly-bonded group of two or more atoms in a fixed ratio.* H2O, for instance, is the chemical formula for a molecule called "water." A billion oxygen atoms and two billion hydrogen atoms might constitute a quantity of water,** the substance, but the units are two-to-one clusters. The chemical formula indicates the ratio, not the molecule count.

[*] I won’t speculate on whether the "love" metaphor holds up for giant polyatomic molecules and ions.

[**] This is actually a miniscule amount of water. A decent-sized spoonful of Jell-O contains a million billion billion molecules of H2O. And yet, paradoxically, there's always room for Jell-O. It's a miracle, I guess.

Easy pieces.

From a biggish thing about (among other things) Hamlet, proof-by-induction, fanfiction, the meaning of love, and the Eiffel Tower upside-down.

Now imagine (3,3) and (4,4) on the plane. Ya dig? OK: What's the next point?

Most people, I'm guessing, speculate that the 'next point' is (5,5). Linear progression. You don't even have to think of it as function input and output; you could just have a weird way of making two lists of integers that happen to proceed at equal pace from the same starting point. 'Sliding friction' is the force that resists you when you're sliding; 'static friction' is what fights against you starting. The latter is the greater force; as wacky Wernher von Braun said, 'Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation.' The world has tendencies: in motion, stay in motion; at rest, stay at rest. Reality is opinionated. So are we.

We're made to extrapolate, which is how we invented God; we need order to make sense of infinity, which is why we invented God; we tend to value and enshrine straight-line thinking, which is why God looks like a bearded white man (and there's no such thing as a 'liberal media').

Proof by induction works like this: if you can show that a proposition is true for one baseline element, and that if it's true for one element then it must be true for the next one in line, then the proposition must be true for all elements. Inductive reasoning frees you to run - once you've settled on your baseline, your (literal) starting point, then all you need is a logic of association to allow you to make a universal statement. Which feels, let me tell you, absolutely wonderful. That wind-in-your-hair feeling of encompassing all of what you see in a single expression or conception. A formula.

But.

That joy (of understanding) doesn't come from a point. Think of singular aesthetic (i.e. learning) experiences that have 'changed your life,' or just your mind: I remember for instance my first rock show, being dumped for the first time, 'losing' my virginity, realizing I was falling in love with my future wife. You go back later on and fill in relationships to what you know, or to later examples of the same general phenomenon, but in each instant what prevails is confusion, loss of center, prior understandings (a/k/a 'priorities,' right?) falling away. The word for this feeling is freedom. The feeling changes you, but you can't possibly understand or articulate each moment within itself. The limited relationship between your reptilian, emotional, and analytical minds precludes such understanding.

And from that point, where do you go?

What would Hamlet say if he were here with us right now?

fixing what's wrong with you.

[Another Fixing You excerpt. Still haven't figured out what to do with this stuff.]

here is a snap judgment for you, an example, along with the rest of this "carefully-crafted" prose assemblage, of the power of spontaneous decision-making (we've thought carefully about it to make sure this is correct, so who knows really, but...): think of a teddy bear. looks a lot like an actual bear, doesn't it? the resemblance is not a coincidence. both are adorable talking creatures with bellies full of delicious honey and severed human hands; both stick to their own deal, keep the woodland vibe mellow, and don't mess with everybody's shit; both crave knowledge above all things. and: each thinks of itself as a bear - but only one of them is correct. which one? well we're not scientists so we won't hazard a guess, but it's unnecessary in this case anyhow. each has it in itself to be...actually no, these aren't interchangeable personality-free little goddamn human infants we're talking about, these are living creatures with names and aspirations and clearly defined sex roles. each bear has it in HERSELF to live a full satisfying life, whether she's stuffed full of cotton fibers or made by the same divine hand that shaped the pyramids, montana, this charmingly retro-obsolete (but in a progressive way) old-media artifact you're reading.

each might find something like happiness, but either Bettina the Bear has her facts wrong, or Wu-Pen the Teddy Bear does. one of these ladies has a human/bear soul, one is just a homunculus. but in the grand scheme it doesn't matter which is which. in either's arms you might fall asleep dreaming about the candy planet, from either you might run screaming through the campsite all yelling and shit about "i'm being chased by an enormous killer animal/children's toy!" with either - maybe both - you might feel the kinship that all living creatures are afforded in moments of soul-extremity. you might also be eaten, whatever, the point is CLASSES DON'T MATTER, categories are largely nonsense. file that under "wisdom." sidebar: college classes don't matter either. no one ever got anywhere with a comparative literature degree from dartmouth anyhow. ever, like in history or anything.

feel that refreshing breeze wafting up your handcrafted designer pant leg? that's relief, the onset of something like wisdom, also climate change makes the air warm and/so it rises up the pant leg. we're someplace new now: stay focused.

Politics as art, art as politics.

Dungeon of genius: SECOND EXPEDITION.

Just...

...staggering.

Here is a drawing.

My wife says to preempt criticism by pointing out that this is 'not my best work.'

Isn't it obvious though?

Take this and you'll be happy. Really.

Of course the value of advice isn't its correctness but its usefulness. When it comes to happiness and how to attain it, the correct advice tends to be useless and the useful advice tends to be ignored. What produces lasting happiness? Exertion in the name of what we believe in, i.e. the world we imagine and the world we inhabit syncing up. How do we produce this state? With great difficulty. No one wants to hear advice like that, which is why we scoff or laugh to hear it: 'How do you get to Carnegie Hall?' 'Practice.' If you think the best possible life is idling on a beach and you find a way to idle on a beach all the time, you'll be happy - unless you were wrong about it being a good life. (The only way to know is to do it.) If you realize that your strength is in making music, commit yourself to improving your skills, and find a way to make a decent living playing for people, then you might not always be satisfied - that's the fast lane to producing bad music - and you might not always like where you are but you'll be happy with what you're doing. This is called 'fulfillment,' which is lasting happiness.

Everything always changes; pinning your happiness to your location (your state), rather than what you're doing with it, is a recipe for disillusionment.

Well if it's so simple, why are there so many self-help books? Shouldn't one be enough? Aah, but this is to misunderstand the purpose of the 'self-help' literature, which isn't to expand your capability or deepen your activity but to improve your mood. 'I saw results right away!' No. In the history of mankind that's never, ever been true. Meaningful change characterizes processes. When you quit smoking you have an easier time walking up stairs, sure, but the important thing isn't that symptom, it's the fact that your lungs are no longer being poisoned. The real growth and change occurs over time, a process you can't see.

Ever fall in love? Lemme guess: you realized one day you were in love, and if you can point to 'the moment it happened,' all you're doing is indicating a point in your personal narrative that has particular meaning or resonance for you now. This whole idea of 'love at first sight' is nonsense: we made it up so the inscrutable process of deepening interdependence could make sense to us. We see not essences but edges, contrasts.

We notice that we're happy and we weren't, so something must've changed, whatever could it be? But we're simply at another stage in each of a million ongoing processes.

There's no such thing as a 'nice personality' because personalities aren't real. We 'are' what we can see and sense, our actions aggregated and labeled at a given moment. Which is why it's always 'the quiet one' who shoots up the post office: there are no 'quiet ones,' only people keeping quiet. They always have their reasons.

Trying to identify a 'personality type' is like trying to dampen only part of a sponge: there's a process always underway, homeostasis, changing without moving. You can't see it but that doesn't unmake the change. Balance and stillness aren't the same thing. Self-help is about stopping, but happiness is balance. Ever ride a bicycle? Gear it too high and you'll find it hard to move the thing, too low and you'll pedal the chain right off the gears. Get good at it and your unconscious aim will be not fixed velocity but steady cadence, meaning you better figure out that gearshift, rookie. Same as in a car: if it shakes when you shift you're not smooth enough. 'Correct' and 'smooth' are different things and you'll figure out which one comes first.

We ask ourselves 'Am I happy?' but are just hiding from the real question, the only question: 'What the hell am I doing?' And don't lie, now. 'It's only a one-time thing' is a self-deceptive pep talk; 'I am cheating on my wife' is a statement of fact. 'Is this the right job?' can't be answered but 'Do I think this work is worthwhile?' sure can, and the answer points toward a course of action. You're hard-pressed to know whether you've written a worthwhile novel - but 'How can I make the next one better?' moves you forward, however painful it may be to contemplate. (Of course there's the danger of wanting to rush to the next project without completing this one - irresponsibility in a literal sense. Resist it.) The worth of the work doesn't inhere in you or it. Give it away and keep moving. We stop breathing otherwise.

Maybe you're scared to quit your job though you admit that you hate it; you don't know what life will be like without it. But ask yourself: is the important thing about this job having it or doing it? If the former, the job wastes your time, and you probably waste your employers'. The job you have should be the one you like to do, ideally the one you'd do for free. You don't find such positions, you make them.

In your belief that there's some precious aspect of your Self that won't survive a change in action or situation - in your cowardice - you are the cause of your unhappiness. How does the song go? 'Whatever will be will be / the future's not ours to see.' Which is to say we're fools for thinking we choose anything but our actions. A liar said, 'That depends on what the definition of "is" is.' Let's help the man out: mostly, Bill, the word means nothing at all.

Scents and lies.

[Wrote this the other day.]

Italian fella and his girl just sat down next to me and - I swear I'm not just repeating a meanspirited commonplace here - the B.O. is overpowering. I mean I understand the appeal of not using deodorant, fine, back to the natural state and whatever but Jesus Christ!

But on the other hand.

On the other hand maybe there's something to the idea that it's precisely the sanitary nature of our public spaces that's robbed us of connections to things? The same way urban spaces give us too many right angles, too much visual information, not enough use of other sensory channels...maybe the loss of one another's smell is precisely the cause of some of our unhappiness, our inhumanity to one another? Maybe improvements in hygiene make it increasingly possible for us to abstract one another's humanity away entirely. We talk about the need for strong sensory connections, along with connections in channels we can't necessarily detect with the five canonical senses - you know I don't want to admit it but I do believe in something like extrasensory perception, not 'psychic' but basically augmented senses, a sensory gestalt, perhaps sensory processing we don't yet know about or can't conceive of.

In every culture there are myths and folk beliefs about additional senses - the root of religious belief, basically, is that alternate states are accessed through alternate sensory or cognitive channels, to which we get access only through disciplined action. But in the U.S. today we haven't integrated such beliefs into our actions; they come overdetermined by crazy religious riders, etc. Atop which we poison our olfactory sense with perfumes, artificial flavours at astonishing concentrations, the absence of traditional natural cues and clues about the identities of things, their trustworthiness, intentions, the olfactory history of skin and flesh...

We think of Italian culture as sensuous, and of course we need to include as part of that evaluation not the 'absence of deodorant' (which is a perspectival mistake) but the positive presence of strong human smells, a dataset we're biologically equipped to understand richly and directly. As the B.O. fades you get something like a strong olfactory identity. And after a while it's not unpleasant anymore. Like so many things. We get accustomed to what we initially think of as an imposition; we train ourselves to allow, forgive, welcome in. (Consider anal sex - possibly the most backward possible violation of the human body's intention, yet a fixture throughout human history, in some cultures considered a means of transmitting wisdom, for millions a source of pleasure - even extreme pleasure. And yet what blocks, exactly, do you have to overcome to experience anal sex as pleasure? Why is it worthwhile to overcome those blocks? You might answer, 'The pleasure itself is sufficient reason.' To which 'the very concept of "civilization" says otherwise' is perhaps an unfair answer?) Sometimes an act is enjoyable precisely because it's a forgiven imposition: 'I could be biting you, but we're kissing instead.'

Part of the appeal of heading out into the country for a while is the olfactory analogue to the visual shift from hard angles and bright lights to the sunlit day-rhythm and organic, chaotic variegation of leaves and stone and water. Topology rather than simple geometry. We've destroyed our minds slowly by overpowering them. And how do you write? Go alone to a cabin in the woods somewhere. The absence of noise and interruption, sure, but also the full presence of you, your own complex physical identity no longer drowned out by the multimodal distractions of the city. You can let part of your mind rest. A 'sensory deprivation tank' doesn't actually deprive your senses, it heightens them - by limiting what they have to deal with. Starting with: you smell yourself. You hear your breathing. You become hyperaware of the location of your hands, arms angled, legs touching at the knee, the hairs of your forearms standing up...In other words, you reawaken a proprioceptive faculty linked to your perceptual apparatus, supplementing and heightening both.

We forget ourselves, stop thinking of ourselves as linked by kind and intention and emplacement to the humans around us. We abstract - and we become capable of evil. (It was segmenting the world into 'good' and 'evil' that got Adam and Eve thrown out of the garden - and made possible the murder of Abel, the first abstract act, the beginning of civilization. Original sin was: taxonomy.)

One thing that soap and deodorant do is discretize our sensory experience of the world; they put a temporary stop to our olfactory history and impose a new, completely artificial olfactory texture upon us - and thereby upon our interactions with others.

We don't know what perfume means. The smell of perfume isn't natural; it's an imposition. We become accustomed to it but we never learn how to speak back to it. There's no appropriate response. In despair at our own inability to communicate we respond abstractly - isn't the perfumed, made-up whore a type throughout all time? Goddess and whore: either way not quite human. Because we have no behavioral language for responding to such olfactory and visual abstraction. What emotion is a clown depicting? Happiness, but fake. We react instinctively to its parodic reproduction: first with discomfort (laughter), then with horror.

Not to say cultures with less deodorant react more badly - Italy's gone through how many goddamn governments in the twentieth century? - but rather that sensory overload coupled with sensory deracination, a Culture of Plenty of Nothing, causes a certain form of despair. We talk about the sweatiness of sex as part of its appeal, recognize the importance of pheromones in dating, and then the very first thing we do before a date is: 'clean up,' removing not foul odors but all olfactory information, and then providing false information in its place. This creature at ten paces is: Old Spice, 'Swagger.' This human-shaped being has the smell of: Pantene Pro-V, 'Icy Clean,' with...is that a hint of Chanel? 'How a woman should smell,' the bastards have the temerity to claim.

I've argued in the past that the model and culture of French sensuality was tied in part to the comparative widespread French use of the bidet - which provided, if not necessarily total sanitation, a reprieve from the shame (if not the fact) of our defecatory orifices being stained with shit. (The idea of being fully cleaned by toilet paper is absolutely laughable - and yet it's a point of American pride. But then much of our pride is laughable.) But let's point out the obvious: our culture is preoccupied with masking smells, not with sanitation but its grotesque appearance, its simulation. What we take for cleanliness is only absence, sparseness. And so the most tasteful home interiors contain nearly no furniture, no accidents of human array, none of the consequences of human presence, no trace of our passage. The 'ideal' American home looks as if no one lives in it; luxury is to abstract and arrange away any hint of mere humanness. The Pharaohs' tombs were pyramids of straight lines, congruent angles, geometric array - but at least the Pharaohs had the sense not to entomb themselves until after they were dead. Wealthy and upwardly-mobile Americans, unmotivatedly industrious as we've always been, get a head start on our journey to the afterlife, stocked by Williams-Sonoma no doubt.

Refinement 'purifies,' but 'purity' is impossible in nature - good thing too, as it's not desirable anyhow. Our measure of civilization, of progress, is 'refinement.' Refinement gave us calculus, penicillin, the Sistine Chapel, the Manhattan Project, YouTube, the KGB, indoor plumbing, Joe the Plumber, a billion humans in poverty. 'Refinement' made all of this possible, and helps you figure out exactly how to feel about it. Civilization is the result of a process of abstraction which is - by definition - the sidelining or abandonment of natural impulses. Our justice system is a machine for getting past 'an eye for an eye,' and that's the genius of humanity, its ultimate value - but then we're arguably the only animal with a concept of 'revenge' either, the only creature twisted enough to derive satisfaction from retribution against proxies.

And we hide our smells - our names - to hide from one another. It's only a fig leaf: it covers a shame we didn't realize we felt until we covered it - because until then, it didn't exist. The secret is the betrayal, its existence, its idea. Not what's hidden but the very notion that there's something to hide. You didn't create sin, merely instantiated it. What's betrayed is the natural capacity of all human creatures, our need for one another. The way we know other humans - the way we recognize our needs - is via that rather tricky thing, our human sensorium, the extent of which we don't yet know, whose channels and modes we can't yet count. Wouldn't know how. Another thing we've hidden from one another, from ourselves.

Embryos?

If destroying a 5-day-old embryo or a thousand such embryos will save human lives, then any belief system that seeks to prohibit scientists from carrying out such procedures on 'moral' grounds is monstrous and should be fought. There is no argument for such restraint other than the religious claim (from what is most precisely and simply described as ignorant superstition) that blastocysts are 'human beings,' and the shabby 'slippery slope' half-argument.

The Cornerites are embarrassing themselves utterly today on this issue. It's charming, in a way.

Actually no, it's not.

So, so proud.

Damn it, we have a president who's heard of this 'science' thing and doesn't want to fuck it to death! It's almost like the State of Things doesn't get 'better' or 'worse' but goes on changing (you can believe in it).

Hopeful,
wa.

How the Mind Works, abridged edition.

Actual headline: 'GOP Sen. Graham Opens Door To Bank Nationalization'

What my wife saw: 'Senator Graham Opens Door for Notorious B.I.G.'

['What does it actually say? ... Oh, so I was pretty close.']

Fuck you, tree kangaroo.

TOO GOOD LOOKING TO SURVIVE

Planet burners.

When we do head out into space looking for new hangout spots, the role played by unskilled laborers and tradesmen in the 19th century will be played by...scientists and engineers. The story of the New Frontier will involve a realignment of class. Look at the Space Shuttle: they don't send up a handyman, they send up a trained engineer who's good with a wrench. (Same on Serenity, or the starship Enterprise, though not, I should note, on the Super Star Destroyer - nor the Nostromo). Someone really ought to put together a paper on sci-fi mechanics and the assumptions that sci-fi/space-fantasy creators have made, particularly since Sputnik, about the role of skilled tradesmen in space exploration. I'm guessing, in any case, that employees of the spacefaring state will need to have some programming knowledge (though what that'll look like even a half-century from now, when keyboards will be largely obsolete, I couldn't guess).

Did you know that in the Bronze Age a tide of 'city burners' (maybe) destroyed many of the great civilizations in Eurasia?

Not to give away a goddamn wonderful idea for a novel here, but: it is speculated that the 'city burners' were servants, slaves, the disenfranchised and resentful, newly armed and equipped (an 'Army of Davids' if you will). If this is the case, what would a far-future analogue to that continent-wide catastrophe look like?

What if the 23rd century planet burners turn out to be...plumbers? Or coders?

From here we go sublime.

When you've had an experience that no one else seems to understand - or let's say you're preoccupied with the fact that understanding complexly personal experiences is very difficult for certain people, and you generalize this to everyone - or maybe you've simply been close to what you understand as 'death' that you feel you have to shy away from the daily pleasures and affirmations of mere human coexistence -

No, start over. When you can't reconcile your experiences with your beliefs, something's got to give. You can deny your experiences, or you can alter your beliefs. Neither is easy. One is reasonable.

'Spiritual' and religious beliefs address needs that simply don't square with any of our lived reality (I need meaning). They answer questions that we can't ask except in spiritual terms, not because religions and mystical belief systems offer the best ways to understand 'supernatural' occurrences, but because sophisticated vocabularies of e.g. altered consciousness and metaphysics are inaccessible to the average human. Or else no one's bothering to explain to them, which amounts to the same thing but can at least be remedied in theory.

The language of 'chakras,' for instance, doesn't actually seem to correspond to contemporary medical knowledge (mystical energy flow? Really?). But you don't have any contemporary medical knowledge, so what language is available to you when you become aware of the physicalization and localization of cognition? Or the idea of 'storing' a memory in a body part? What happens when you're sitting quietly and are struck with a total understanding of something - or rather, an experience of totality? The dispassionate observer might say that a switch has flipped in your head granting the experience, however unfounded, of 'totality,' analogous to deja vu. (Deja vu is trivially understood on the far side of a very, very convincing false perception compounded by superstition - no this hasn't happened to you before, that very feeling is incorrect. Can't trust your own head, and who wants to hear that?)

An ad hoc practitioner of meditation - someone who makes a habit of sitting quietly and emptying her head for a while, to aid focus - could go years without finding a description of what she's doing. Now, if she walks into the MIT Press bookstore and sees a copy of Zen and the Brain, and for no reason picks it up, she'll find scientific answers to some of her questions in there, questions that themselves pertain, it turns out, to neuroanatomy and cognition and the very shape of the brain, etc. If, on the other hand, she happens to go for a walk up Mass Ave and ends up in the Greater Boston Buddhist Cultural Center (for whatever reason), she'll find a set of spiritual practices, a set of ethical principles, a long cultural history, and a theory of the universe that is (alas) filled to the brim with reborn souls and enlightened leaders and an emphasis on simplicity, all of which feels good and coherent and complete somehow, the same way The Wire feels like Baltimore to a New Yorker. And if our heroine goes for it, if she decides to embrace Buddhist practice and faith and so forth (and please refrain from quibbling over the use of 'faith' with is descriptive but not meant to imply cosmology, though Jesus, just look at the stuff), and a year later she stumbles upon Zen and the Brain at the bookstore (or, hell, at the GBBCC), she'll instead most likely incorporate this more nuanced understanding of the neuroscience of meditation and altered consciousness into her practice and her spiritual beliefs. 'This,' she might say, 'is the physical analogue to what I know to be the Truth about our shared path,' etc., etc., etc.

Having 'grown up' within this language.

No, start over. It's the ubiquity of tortured metaphysics and fantasy that makes it so difficult to converse about simple things like altering your mode of perception. We do have a fallen version of such a discourse - the language of self-help - but it is on the one hand shot through with dime-store mysticism and the remnants of sickly New Age aesthetics, and on the other hand absolutely geared toward quick fixes and corporate head-cleaning, offering little inducement to alter behaviours in a considered, systemic way, meaning, if you can stand back and look at the whole 'Self-Help' shelf of this awful corporate-cosmic bookstore, that while there are simple ideas aplenty about how to 'fix what's wrong with you,' they offer none of the satisfaction of religious (totalizing) belief.

Like, say, the '9/11 Truth' kids. About whose particular beliefs let's not concern ourselves, same with 'UFOlogists' and so forth, but isn't it nice to hold a belief such that everything around you affirms that belief? Skepticism is hard work because being skeptical means constantly being buffeted by things crying out for investigation and consideration and (odds are) refutation. Whereas if God can do anything, or the government can cover up anything, or (e.g.) all things are somehow connected - and not just by physical coexistence and interdependence but in a kind of cosmic-literary register with all kinds of loopy ethical correlates like 'eat plants but not meat' and so forth, what? - then every possible experience has a slot to slip into, and an explanation readymade, and that's basically the most comfortable position you can possibly be in. Your preacher fucks his male meth dealer, which not only recalls but in fact confirms the doctrine that 'people sin, the elect can be saved through their repentance, if he'd only had an even closer personal relationship with The Man Jesus everything would have been alright,' which is nothing more than the metaphysical correlative to 'the problem with Nixon is that he wasn't conservative enough.'

Which isn't about 'authoritarianism,' it's about being taken care of by your own thoughts, by your head, by an imagined body of laws-makers and belief-limners, in the absence your mother and father. Kids don't need all that jarble because they have actual people there to help them through the world. Which is part of the reason why hyper-religious kids and Nazi kids and four-year-old 'virtuoso' musicians and middle-school-aged Goldwater Girls freak us out so goddamn much: why have these kids been forced to seek solace in systemic belief and practice, in constant affirmation most likely hollow, when they should have with them the constant affirmation and total comfort (in being loved) of, um, just their parents? Which maybe, just maybe, leads us to a Jazz Parenting insight, which might simply be that when the Baby arrives, you have a responsibility to loosen your hold on rigid ideas and plans and preoccupations, because they will stifle your Baby's ability to trust in love. If you show a system other than 'I am here for you and I will help you be safe and happy,' that system comes to stand in (maybe?) for love and fellowship and peaceful coexistence as an operating principle.

Which isn't the sales pitch for the Anarchist Mommy series of guidebooks, quite the opposite. Just asking en passant for a little more improv, a little less certainty. Which lets more experience in - without dictating in advance its meaning. Kids don't need that; they'll find their own way, so long as they have a chance to develop the tools for it. You can't change anyone's feelings, you can only offer them new experiences.

* * *

Not surprisingly, aesthetic/cultural criticism seems to work similarly to religious belief as I've waved at it above. Well you know this I imagine. So long as we have a theory (ahem - a Theory) that's affirmed by all 'experience' (and snarky scare quotes notwithstanding, let's swerve around the the gigantic 'literary theory isn't a real job you sissy nerds'-shaped pothole in the road, who put that there?), we can be happy all the time - only not really. Rather we can be occupied all the time, given a 'purpose' which is comforting but not fulfilling, which is why every day you hear a variation on 'he was always so quiet, I could never imagine him doing something like this.' We're absolutely fucking useless when it comes to distinguishing between forms of happiness, between satisfaction and fulfillment, between sustainable feelings and momentary impulses. Everyone has a kind of punishment he's eager to come back to. Everyone. But, criticism: an apparatus that allows you to analyze all things without fail wouldn't be a Theory at all, it would be The World. Which - asshole! - you already have, or at least have heard of. The desire for a scientific Theory of Everything is the desire to make a grander universe; its literary/cultural analogue is pure unmitigated laziness and fear. (Well laziness is fear, innit.) Guilty as charged!

PZ Myers: amateurish, juvenile, self-obsessed...bigot?

Myers - of Pharyngula - was indispensable when it came to anti-evolution textbooks and so forth. Now that he's got nothing to talk about he's...well, have a read.

Unfortunately for Myers, his Big Project - 'arguing' (roughly) that Religion Is Evil And Its Adherents Stupid - is a hell of a lot less interesting than he thinks it is; unfortunately for everyone, so is Myers himself. The big finish to his 'acquire and desecrate a (consecrated) Communion wafer': he put a rusty nail through it and dumped it in the garbage. How very angry-teenager of him. His rousing goodbye:

Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity's knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.

Since Myers doesn't seem to understand the concept of a 'provisional fiction,' since he doesn't seem interested in the psychology of fantasy (nor the transformative power of ritual [see below]), since he's high on his 15 minutes of low-grade Internet fame, there's little point in treating the stunt as anything more than it is - the acting-out of someone who's convinced he has nothing to learn about something, and loves attention. This seems to happen to professors who blog all the time: they taste a little online fame, they realize that blog comments are a lot more fun that seeing kids sleep through their college lectures, and out of enthusiasm (or more cynical fame-obsession) they get a little shrill (see also: John Quiggin, Ann Althouse).

Myers's 'history lesson' about Catholic anti-Semitism is typical of a certain contemporary intellectual set: he's obsessed with medieval Catholicism (though not learned) because it's a lot easier to snark about Dark Ages superstition than to empathetically discuss 21st-century religious ritual and culture.

Anyone who thinks that 'rituals...build only self-satisfied ignorance' is, I'm sorry to say, an imbecile: ignorant of history and basic psychology - or worse, a cynical liar happily misrepresenting his views to boost his hit count. Since the concept of 'sacred space' and the 'magic circle' informs everything from children's play to religious observance to the structure and function of narrative fiction and drama, if we take Myers's words at face value we can assume that he sees no value in human interaction or culture of any sort. Since he's asserted the opposite as well, we can conclude - again - that he's a fool or a liar. It's good to treat fools kindly; it's good to stamp liars out.

Myers is out of his depth; he's not arguing from a coherent worldview, he's going after something that bothers him. In my experience, the things that bother me most are the things I think I understand but turn out not to. My tech-school education taught me, in part, that everything can be broken down and analyzed and understood. Which is a limitation of tech school, sure, but also my own limitation: the need to believe such an obviously false notion, to cling to order - to hope. I've come to understand this limitation as the source of faith, and have come to understand my own (lapsed) faith, the Catholicism of my youth, as a way of integrating that coping mechanism productively into my social existence. I suspect Marx was right: the smallest unit of civilization is the pair, the electricity between two people, the contract, the shared interest and mutual recognition and trust. The word for this connection is 'covenant'; the means by which we remember it in one another's absence is called a 'sacrament.'

Insult.

This hurts to read:

Of all the ways to learn that your brain has suffered an "insult," as medical professionals like to call the effects of strokes, one of the oddest is to get up in the morning and discover your Toronto newspaper seemingly printed in a mix of Serbo-Croatian and Korean. When 70-year-old Howard Engel came back inside with his Globe and Mail that hot July day in 2001 and found he couldn't read his own books either, the bestselling mystery novelist headed for the hospital. Tests confirmed Engel's own assumption: stroke, left side, rear. His memory was shot -- still is, for that matter, especially for names -- and he had lost a quarter of his vision, on the upper right side. But the essence of the diagnosis was a rare and almost incomprehensible condition: alexia sine agraphia. The elegant combination of Greek and Latin words meant that while Engel could still write, he could no longer read.

I've often daydreamed about what I'd do with myself if I were confined to a wheelchair or struck blind. I imagine I'm not the only one. Today I think I would become sadness itself.

Ross Douthat grasps at straws; world unsurprised.

Here's Douthat reviewing Hitchens's God is Not Great:

There is the usual atheistic claptrap about how the "undreamed of vistas inside our own evolving cortex, in the farthest reaches of the known universe, and in the proteins and acids which constitute our nature" are a suitable replacement for the inspiration and consolation associated with religion.

Claptrap? I'm guessing our poor boy was a humanities major up at Harvard.

Never mind the hypocrisy on display (Douthat likes the transcendentalist syrup as much as any addict, just doesn't like his crew being dissed), what's galling is that Hitchens is merely correct: even a bare fraction of existing knowledge of biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, even computer science, is enough to occupy philosophical and artistic speculation for a lifetime or ten. If religion's main value is the monomaniacal brand of comfort it provides, the 'inspiration and consolation' of sustained reflection and confrontation of infinitude (real or imagined, of course), then Douthat should put down his pen (please!) and start studying for his GRE's; he'll find grad school a spiritual experience of its own. But he protest mainly out of pique, and his complaints are just bleats about offense rather than proper counterarguments. Douthat isn't able to disprove Hitchens's claims about religion so he dismissively calls them 'anecdotal' (my favourite books of fictional anecdotes begin with 'In the beginning,' in general); he calls Hitchens out for 'lack of rigour' while circling the wagons in the name of his own Christianity; he tries to make a hard distinction between tribalism and theology when both forms of parochialism share mythologies of transcendent connection - presumably he's playing dumb, and can you blame him? Then there's this:

But Science is not a moral teacher, and Hitchens is nothing if not a moralist, passionately invested in such notions as universal human rights, the wastefulness of violence, the particular inviolability of children, and so forth. Where he finds these principles, I am uncertain [...]

Lazy, lame, and insulting. If Douthat were equipped to review Hitchens's book he'd be more familiar with the long history of moral frameworks that have nothing to do with God's soft cradling hand, and he'd be (at the minimum) able to grasp the complex principles and communitarian best practices emerging from the interplay of amoral natural systems. But ultimately the grossness of his review is this: he seems incapable of acknowledging that given the totally awesome scope of religious claims to truth, when it comes to the nature of the universe believers bear the burden of proof - particularly since, to all appearances, religious belief is with nearly 100% likelihood merely incorrect. It better have tremendous value - and 'inspiration and comfort' aren't enough to carry the day (nor would Douthat have the better of the field if they were). This is lazy, resentful, insipid writing from a young man who's generally alright as a commentator; he can do better, but I'm not convinced it's in anyone's interest to wait for the day.

I used to enjoy blogging like this; now I find I have little taste for it. But to find a new way...not easy.

Fear causes safe sex?

From a HuffPo article entitled 'Andrew Sullivan declares the "End of AIDS" - again' by Gabriel Rotello:

As the meds [combo therapies for HIV] came into use, people began celebrating. Opinion leaders -- most notably Andrew Sullivan -- recklessly proclaimed the "end of AIDS" in major venues like The New York Times. Mainstream journalists took their cue and largely dropped the subject.

Healthy fear -- the primary motivator of safe sex -- swiftly declined. Unsafe sex -- a vital part of the 'infectivity' leg of the Triad -- swiftly rose. Sex with multiple partners -- the 'contact rate' leg of the triad -- also rose. [emphasis mine]

I don't want to dwell too much on the overt content of the column but a couple of observations are order. I think Rotello is right to call Sullivan out for his own personal (and let's say it: selfish, in its way) history-of-AIDS narrative, which does get a little starry-eyed where Big Pharma and the 'end of the plague years' are concerned. Sullivan's is, after all, a survivor narrative - he was diagnosed with HIV in the 90's.

It's also clear that Rotello is misunderstanding the point of Sullivan's 'end of AIDS' talk. Sullivan's hitting on what would seem to be a key transition in gay culture (from his perspective), a shift from 'AIDS as central metaphor, organizing principle, and major cultural determinant' - AIDS as death to all, in other words - to a culture (or rather a set of cultures) in which HIV is one of several diseases to be conscientious of, more dangerous than most perhaps but such that it's possible to imagine life without it. If you have AIDS your life changes of course, but Sullivan's point seems to be in part that something like 'AIDS exceptionalism' has deformed the self-conception of gay culture(s), and that healthier, more integrated culture is impossible until a shift in consciousness occurs. He's not saying it's just swell to get HIV, he's making cultural arguments about rhetorics of martyrdom, suffering, and exceptionalism. He loves such rhetoric - but not from that bogeyman 'the gay left,' which he (not unreasonably) puts on the frontlines of gay advocacy and identity-promulgation.

The argument isn't really my business; in the abstract, my sympathy is with the kind of argument Sullivan is making, but Rotello scores plenty of points in the exchange, and doesn't resort (in this salvo) to the drippy melodrama that weighs down Sullivan's column.

What caught my eye, rather, and which I want to briefly respond to, is the highlighted bit above:

Healthy fear -- the primary motivator of safe sex

Many, many, many people are asymptomatic for potentially dangerous venereal diseases (like HPV: frighteningly common, all but undetectable in men as I recall, and linked to cervical cancer). Isn't there something perverse about fear being the main reason people (want to) take measures to prevent the spread of disease? Isn't respect - for your partners' health, for your own, for the wider community at risk from the very viruses you might pass on - a finer motivator for safety? Wouldn't a communitarian attitude toward sex put this talk of 'plague' into persepctive, and help shift responsibility back to individuals in a way that encourages and socially rewards them for doing the right thing?

It seems to me that we know from other realms of human experience that scaring adults into doing the right thing is a dubious moral plan; it's one thing with kids, who need to learn a lot awfully fast, but aren't grownups equipped with finer moral metrics? Mightn't we put them to use even in the bedroom? Or is pure selfishness really the only appeal left to civilized women and men when the continued existence of a culture is at stake?

Lexical proposal.

I propose that the procedure for dealing with swamp ass - broadly defined, 'a sweaty ass' - be known as 'granting yourself a mulligan.'

ALL MY BEST COMEDY IS ON TWITTER.COM/WAXBANKS TEH COMEDY I SAY

PLEASE TRY AND EXPERIENCE, ALSO THERE is an rss feed.!

Survival.

Last year several housemates and I took regular trips - twice weekly for a while - to the MIT Climbing Wall for indoor rock climbing. A friend - artist/scientist/bon vivant Solar O., which by the way if I'm an exotic dancer on a moonbase in the future my stage name will be 'Solar O' - anyhow Solar's one of the keepers of the Wall. He's in freakishly good physical condition for an MIT graduate student, all biceps and posture and so forth; his condition is made all the stranger by the fact that the only exercise he gets, apparently, is rock climbing. No aerobics as I recall. (He used to row for MIT's Crew team, but those days are gone.)

So we climbed the Wall, and while suspended from a horizontal surface a couple feet off the ground, I mulled over this state of affairs.

I could do it, you know. I'm not much of a climber - my form was horrible - but after only a couple of trips to the Wall I had noticed a tremendous increase in strength and dexterity, and in calm. Solar recommended traversals - horizontal trips around the 3-sided Wall, rather than up it - and his advice paid enormous dividends right away. Rock climbing, it would seem, is an activity at which rapid meaningful improvement is the norm. I loved it but haven't been back since doing something nasty to my lumbar region one day and taking a couple weeks off to recuperate. It's fine now; I should return. God knows I need the exercise. (But don't go too often; the pads on your fingers will thank you.)

Hanging there, my back to the earth, straining muscles I didn't know I possessed to reach a 'rock' large enough to fit three fingers half-bent, part of my (too-great) weight held up by the curve of one foot, knee hypercompressed, akimbo, off to one or another side - like a monkey in fuzzy still-frame - I had a flash of insight, among other things.

Months later I've had another. It has to do with near-death experiences, and the possibility of Heaven; tangentially it concerns National Novel Writing Month, and video games. This is to say, it is about the value of terror.

[Warning: uninformed airy speculation follows. Probably there's a 101-level CogSci textbook out there that'll clear all this up for me. But I like writing it and I have the time, so no matter.]

Here's some good news.

Plan B, over the counter.

My GF is so awesome.

She waves the science cock over at Pandagon.

Dylan has a blog.

I lived with this fool in college. Dylan was (if memory serves) one year my junior, and was good friends with a number of people in my house with whom I didn't do much consorting. For no good reason I never got very close to him as an undergrad, and then he pissed off to Stanford, where he's now a chemist, though apparently his day job is being the funniest person on California.

His nickname at tEp was 'Pfizer'. The reason for that is left as an exercise to the reader(s).

Discretized complexity and the ongoing learning process.

Tell me, have you had the following experience? Say, in grade school?

You're working on a set of problems in a drill-and-kill homework exercise (i.e. large batches of isomorphic problems differing only in, say, the value of a single variable). You accelerate through one batch of questions such that by the end you feel confident in your ability to zip through that kind of problem. Then you come to the next section. It might be a slightly different form, or a word problem concealing the original form (i.e. the layout of a park is described only in words, and once you've deduced that it's laid out in an isoceles triangle the problem reduces to something out of the drill-and-kill exercise). And you're pulled up short. Suddenly you can't do the thing. You think the problem is much harder than the drill-and-kill stuff, and can't get your head around it.

Or:

Have you had the following experience in, say, an introductory college physics class?

You work for hours and hours throughout the semester learning the mechanics (no pun intended) of solving equations and drawing force diagrams. And then on the day of the final exam you're faced with a half-dozen complex problems or so, none of which obviously break down into drillable subproblems. And though you're capable of solving the problems once you recognise them, you're unable to see the form of the questions you're really being asked.

Or more positively:

An English teacher sees the glimmer of sudden recognition and excitement on the face of a student when the student realizes that 'text' doesnt' just mean 'book taught in English class' or 'textbook,' but can be generalized to all kinds of artifacts-which-can-be-interpreted.

So.

My 8.012 final at MIT, first semester, completely threw me. No problem on it was familiar. This is to say, I was defeated by what I perceived - misunderstood - to be a discontinuity between my training and its application. Part of this was my own laziness: I didn't work hard enough. Part of my failure stemmed from the actual complexity of the questions on the final (I wasn't alone in finding it a bitch of a test!). But I'd argue that part of the difficulty of the final - I would say the unnecessary difficulty - lay in the perversely discretized approach to teaching complex material that characterized, to my eyes, so many of my technical classes there. The worst example was 6.003, Signals and Systems. This is an extraordinary class if you actually do the work - the most conceptually broad class I took in Course 6 (EE/CS). I bombed it. On the last day of lecture the professor threw up a series of Powerpoint slides demonstrating, as he put it, the many applications of the material we'd supposedly just learned. It was riveting, and I realized too late my error and his: instead of teaching purely abstract material divorced from its context in application, he should have been presenting that material as the year went on (as Prof. Sadoway did in 3.091, the introductory chem class, materials focus), to provide a kind of cognitive 'glue' for students like me who couldn't instantly grok the math. And I should have sought out such connections myself.

By way of comparison, my 21L.451 class (Literary Theory), taught by Shankar Raman, was ordered conceptually but also chronologically, so that Shankar was able to bring out the way a given literary-theoretic (and later -Theoretic, for good or ill) movement responded to the reductions and aporias of its precursors. Because it was a seminar rather than a lecture, the discourse by nature blended and smeared the topics into one another (two discussants working at different speeds, at different levels of understanding, will naturally have to work toward one another). My own predilection for material of that kind certainly affected the outcome of the class for me, but it was very effectively taught - because at all times during the class, the stakes were clear, the applicability of the material was clear (OK maybe Lacan seemed pointless) (well for that matter Derrida and all the rest seemed a bit recreational but I tell you we knew it damned well and so there), and the material was presented as a continuum of ideas rather than a discrete collection. David Thorburn, of all my professors at MIT the one I'd first call 'mentor,' has a way of presenting material so that the light theoretical grounding of early lectures frames the history, which allows him to elaborate and expand the theoretical material in parallel, along with the history of the theory itself. He has a storyteller's understanding of such construction.

Broadly, we might say that a major obstacle for teachers is the creative challenge, in Vygotsky's illustrative terms, of scaffolding, of maintaining student presence and activity in what's called the Zone of Proximal Development. Vygotsky's ZPD theory is, in a tiny nutshell, this: we learn most lastingly and functionally when we're operating, along with a mentor, in a realm beyond what we're capable of on our own, but where we can rely on the mentor's expertise in a collaborative, fast-feedback way. 'Scaffolding' is the assistance - social interaction, tools, teacherly feedback - that aids the learner in the ZPD. (You spend most of your time in something like the ZPD when playing, for instance, a game like Super Mario Bros. - a well-structured game with rich multimodal feedback servres quite ably as both motivation and mentor.) The relevance of these terms should be clear: what's missing in the examples that opened this post is a recognition that activities like homework and tests aren't just opportunities for evaluation - they're learning experiences, 'teachable moments' you might say. My failure on my 8.012 test was my own fault, but my performance in the class also had something to do with (1) the impoverished feedback between me and the professor/TA; (2) the step-function of complexity over time that yielded much-increased challenge without proportionally increased motivation or engagement; and (3) a general attitude toward tests that holds that, even though many classes feature tests that are a leap in complexity beyond the exercises, containing wholly new problem-structures, students are supposed to be on their own at those times, and the teaching/learning stops entirely during that crucial hour (or those crucial three hours, or in the case of my take-home 6.046 (Algorithm Design & Analysis) midterm, those crucial 20+).

The principle bubbling under these comments is straightforward: we learn by analogy, by step-by-step extrapolation, by self-motivated investigation, by visceral involvement. Therefore it is incumbent upon those who teach to strike a balance between in situ testing - a necessary pressure and useful mechanism for motivating, when handled correctly - and contiguous challenges, which with any luck and plenty of skill will themselves be sufficiently generative to allow self-motivated bursts of energy and exploration by the learner. Andrea DiSessa, in his superb little book Changing Minds, talks about learning as the traversal of hilly ground, with hills representing challenges that, once surmounted, provide kinetic energy - pleasure and rich feedback - on the way down the other side, making the next climb easier, imparting a sense of confidence. What underpins this metaphor is a simple thing: when you're rolling around like a mad thing, the ground better not have any holes in it. For too many students, tests are holes. They break up momentum and provide an excuse for the curriculum designer/teacher to discretize the material in conceptually broken, artificial ways. John Gardner speaks of novel-writing as the creation and maintenance of a 'vivid, continuous dream'; I'd like to take that as the description of an idealized classroom as well.

There is much to learn from the strangest places.

Two talks: Milch, Gelbspan.

In the last 36 hours or so we've seen two extraordinary talks at MIT: on Wednesday, journalist Ross Gelbspan spoke in 10-250 about climate change, and last night David Milch came to Bartos Theatre to talk about his show Deadwood and related matters.

Gelbspan

As Jonah Goldberg's latest imbecilic piece of punditry demonstrates, a large percentage of the U.S.'s population remains unwilling to believe in the dangers of climate change. Not surprising, really: long-term shifts in weather systems would be indistinguishable to human eyes from short-term anomalies, or in any case we think they would, because laypeople know no better. Ross Gelbspan's talk on Wednesday was a tour de force piece of rhetoric, in which he took a whirlwind tour through increasing signs of dangerous climate change (Goldberg talks about a 'one- or two-degree per century' average temperature change being a little good, a little bad; someone should mention that an Ice Age involves a global average temperature drop of about ten degrees) before outlining an ambitious economic plan geared toward slowing negative climate trends and encouraging sustainable energy use. Gelbspan read from a stack of paper for his speech, but when questions came around he spoke with remarkable fluency and vigour. His plan is more or less this: eliminate Federal oil and coal subsidies and instigate a national (and international) Marshall Plan for renewable energy development, calling on the private sector - even the old-guard energy companies themselves - to compete for dominance in what will surely be a cash cow of an industry. Tax international currency transactions - a tiny tax - and use the money to stimulate renewable energy development in the Third World. And enforce (however) a drop in emissions of 5% yearly for the next decade plus.

He spoke of democratizing and distributing energy production, avoiding nuclear (centralized) power in favour of local, site-specific energy - for various safety, command-and-control, and climate-friendly reasons. And his talk wrapped up with a surprising, moving discourse on long-term ethical shifts that might be brought about by a shared focus on sustainable development - an angle both more pragmatic and more poetic than I'd heard on the subject of earth's environment.

The upshot of the talk was straightforward: manmade climate change is real and practically irreversible, there's near scholarly consensus on the matter, and in order to address growing climatological problems an economic angle must be found to encourage involvement by all nations and peoples; Gelbspan's talk was a lucid, terrifying, optimistic exhortation to action (and he admitted, when pressed, that he's very pessimistic about people's willingness/ability to even care about such matters...but that simply not to think about these problems would be unacceptable and unforgivable).

I don't think about the built or natural environments much (though I do think the distinction is an artificial one, but whatever); I've long tended to see talk of global warming as fetishism and alarmism. I no longer do. Gelbspan's talk helped a number of realizations to sink in, not the least frightening of which is: the ecological comportment of the human race is much, much, much worse than we Americans are trained from birth to believe. Because ecological/economic sustainability is widely misunderstood (again I refer you to Goldberg's idiotic posturing) it is literally unbelievable, but that doesn't change its brute facts. The 'debate', like the 'debate' about the correctness of the (first-order) theory of evolution and natural selection, is illusory. Gelbspan sees the nature of this mass-media 'debate' as a huge failing on the news media's part, an abdication of journalistic responsibility, and because of the astonishing speed at which the earth and its atmosphere are said to be changing, the situation is one that must be fixed by a discontinuity - because a growing chorus of scientists argues that the window of opportunity for systemic change in energy use is shrinking quickly.

Writing these words I feel like the alarmists I've long caricatured and for whom I've long had juvenile, knee-jerk disdain. But the talk was extraordinary, and eye-opening. I haven't done its contents justice, but then I don't have to, no one should have to. Most of his claims were self-evident, merely factual. If you get a chance, if Gelbspan comes by your area, go see him. He's a pragmatist of an admirable, even heroic kind - imagine what an environmentalist Noam Chomsky would be like if he had a soul.

Milch

David Milch is, as I've written here on a number of occasions, one of my heroes. David Thorburn, my old mentor at MIT and one of two or three teachers who've had the greatest impact on me, held a public conversation with Milch at MIT's Bartos Theatre last night. They watched clips of Milch's work and discussed his creative process, talked about Milch's extraordinary, harrowing autobiography (and the way his relationship with his father directly informs the creation of his characters). They talked about the West and Westerns, and Milch gave his remarkable theory of the classical Western hero's origin: he's talked elsewhere about the language and myth-system of the Western as an outgrowth of the Hays production code, but he spoke last night concretely about the stoicism of the John Wayne cowboy type not as an expression of essential American toughness, but as a tool for avoiding the historical importance of obscenity and violence in the formation of the West as historical fact and myth. (The New Yorker piece on Milch covers that topic somewhat.)

Milch fielded questions from the audience for an hour or so, which ranged from a brief fannish question to moral inquiries, including the best question of the night, which (I know this is dorky but I can't help this stirring of pride) my girlfriend asked, and which was roughly: 'You're known and acclaimed for portraying monstrous characters in full, sympathetic humanity. But does empathy with some monsters reduce or endanger us in any way? Are (aren't) some people unforgivable?' Milch responded unequivocally: 'No.' And then launched into an astonishing disquisition about the Iraq War, and the need to stage a melodrama of retributive violence in a place sufficiently distant that its reality ('War is a terrible, terrible thing' - but people forget) could be ignored. He referred to it as the 'Iraq miniseries', a three-week production that has lost popular support because (a) its main character, its 'hero' George Bush, is a failed protagonist (we can posit disconnection from events and poverty of required nobility or learning as explanations for this failure, I think), and (b) once the immediate point had been made, the national trauma of 9/11 partially assuaged, the mere brutality and moral flimsiness of the war was all that remained - and viewers couldn't stomach anymore talk of roadside bombs. He said something that resonated with Gelbspan's talk the previous day: that supporting this narrative was a failure on the part of the national media to respond to factual imperatives even at the expense of inward, emotional continuity.

The politics of his answer seem in retrospect questionable - his spiritual belief in the interconnectedness of all consciousnesses, the status of humans as organs in a larger godly organism, has (I think) led him to discount the brutish pragmatism and selfish expedient greed (for money, for power) of small cabals of people. But the moral continuity of it, the emphasis on narrative satisfaction and the nature of readerly fantasies, appeals to me. His answer, several minutes long (as they all were), was stunning.

I felt like a goddamn schmuck asking the next and final question - in which I criticized his portrayals of women in comparison to his other work and wondered if, in 'going out to the consciousness of a character' and denying the ego in service of total empathy, he felt any kind of ineluctable distance between women's experiences and his own. He translated: 'Where are the women?' His answer didn't satisfy me exactly, but it satisfied me: he feels he has created a few complex women characters, but he tends to write about periods and milieus in which women's agency and totality of social consciousness are circumscribed, whether by bald subjugation or a protectiveness/worship that amounts to subjugation (to worship-object rather than governed-subject). I wanted to ask: what draws you to these milieus? What's your experience of writing these characters? But those are fannish questions too, and in any case we were out of time.

I loved every minute of it - I suppose that goes without saying.

Afterward I got to meet Milch and we talked for a little while about television and writing. It was terrifying; I'm a good speaker, articulate and confident off-the-cuff in most circumstances, but Milch has the rhetorical skills of an Oxbridge debater or porch-swing storyteller (delivering lines, however, with a weisenheimer style that instantly reminds you of Andy Sipowicz), a real scholarly pedigree, and a biography that reads like an intellectual version of a William S. Burroughs story crossed perhaps with the fanciful parts of A Million Little Pieces. I stammered and fawned too much, but I'm sure others have acquitted themselves even less admirably in conversation with people they idolize. I gave him a letter of thanks (with a not-terribly-sneaky request for an apprenticeship worked in there).

Equally importantly (for my mental wellbeing, perhaps moreso), I spoke at length to Thorburn, Jenkins, and Uricchio - three professors at MIT with whom I've not had contact in years. Checking in (hopefully for the first of many times) reminded me sharply of how little my life has changed since leaving grad school, but how much my personality has changed in that time; it also drove home how foolish I've been not to stay in touch. That'll change - it changed last night. As I walked out of Henry's apartment at Senior Haus I shook like a dead leaf in afternoon wind - and that close to breaking off and simply floating away, or crumbling into dust. Afterward Agi and I went for Tibetan dinner: lovely! I should never have resisted the suggestion, and know better for next time.

It was a good night. A good 36 hours in the main, the intervening filing-and-editing-and-typing that made up my bullshit workday notwithstanding. I wish I could tell you more what Milch said in his talk, or communicate in finger grain why Gelbspan's vision of sustainable ethics was so compelling. But chalk it up to the early hour (been up since before 6am, like some kind of fool!) and the difficulty of assessing a cathartic experience objectively.

Time to shower. The bath mat's clean and soft.

Rules for project management.

A PM from NASA shares wisdom:

Rule #28: People who monitor work and don't help get it done never seem to know exactly what is going on (being involved is the key to excellence).

[...]

Rule #32: People have reasons for doing things the way they do them. Most people want to do a good job and, if they don't, the problem is they probably don't know how or exactly what is expected.

[...]

Rule #46: Remember, it is often easier to do foolish paperwork that to fight the need for it. Fight only if it is a global issue which will save much future work.

The morning-after pill.

Find your local providers here.

Science wars, technolibertarianism, and Flack Central Station - and more!

[N.B. This post is loose-goose but in the middle there's a paragraph or so of interpretive meat, I think. The Faludi-Farrell connection seems like reasonable fodder for more detailed study. Then again I could be wrong. That's happened once or twice too.]

Crooked Timber is pound for pound the best website out there, hands down. Here's evidence: in a current seminar about the new book The Republican War on Science, Henry Farrell dives into libertarian psychology and science-fiction tech-determinism to strafe Glenn Reynolds on the way to lampooning Newt Gingrich:

[I]f you want to take seriously the threat posed by organizations such as Tech Central Station (which doesn’t seem to me to be sincerely committed to techno-libertarianism, but which is certainly willing to use techno-libertarian language to mask corporate interests), you have to recognize that part of their power to persuade is that they seem as though they’re committed to the development of exciting new technologies. When one wants to take on politicians like Newt who want to revive massively expensive programs for missile defense that don’t make sense in terms of basic science, one has to recognize that a large part of these programs’ appeal is that they sound scientific. Indeed, they appeal to a set of myths that American scientists themselves helped to build and propagate during the Cold War in order to win resources. They haven’t been successful only because they’ve taught the controversy but because they’ve also stolen some of the clothes of those they want to displace. Which makes the task of separating them out from genuine voices in the debate that much more complicated.

Weirdly, this passage made me think of Susan Faludi's Stiffed, and its riveting (brief) social/popular history of the American space program. What Faludi and Henry Farrell understand is the powerful draw of a certain myth of American ingenuity, the replaying of our old frontier myth coupled with the defensive assertion of technical superiority over...whomever. The 'Turner Thesis' talked about the frontier in part as a pressure-release valve for class anxiety - but with the closing of the frontier and the stratification of (sub)urban life, perhaps we can observe the integration of technolibertarian fantasies and the rhetoric of bottom-up class warfare (but gentle). Glenn Reynolds embodies this kind of goofy rhetorical school: longing for the frontier myth combined with a (male) Baby Boomer's pitiable fixation on the technological destiny of the United States, which find a weird rhetorical partnership in the rousing language of what Tom Frank calls 'market populism.'

Faludi talks, from a gender-relations standpoint, about 'ornamental masculinity' and the dangers it poses to men and women; you could make a related point, I think, about Reynolds and the school of hard sci-fi and pulp authors he clearly draws on (he's a big sci-fi buff, no surprise), in that their 'rugged' 'individualism' is bought and paid for aesthetically. They're entitled (in their minds) to be puffed up a bit because a thousand years from now their disembodied brains will be directing robot armies to distant nebulae. It's a kid's fantasy, specifically a boy's. And it's a way, not coincidentally, of dodging charges of 'partisanship' in political matters while making plenty of room for reactionary views, which will - again, after our thousand-year struggle to the stars - be made irrelevant, transcended, by technology.

(There are no hammers and one ape keeps beating the other apes, all of whom live in fear and near-starvation. Then the hammer is invented. 'Now it's all fair,' says the alpha male ape, as he now more efficiently bludgeons the other apes. The difference was never strength or rightness, only fear. In Reynolds's vision, the hammer is an equalizer. In the big ape's view it's just another thing to hit people with. 'That's why I and the other apes are sure to win someday!' cries Reynolds. And the big ape waits until everyone's asleep and takes their hammers away. Or something. I mean it's a confused metaphor. There was going to be a bit in there about the big ape gathering the materials to invent the hammer in the first place but whatever.)

These two sentences nicely point up the goofy pie-eyed optimism of the people Farrell is describing:

In short, the lesson of Lysenkoism is not to beware the politicisation of science, but to beware the authoritarian politicisation of science. The democratic politicisation of science - of precisely the sort encouraged by the federalist construction of the US Constitution – is fine.

Reynolds understands this - he's not stupid, though you can make a compelling case that he's a fool - but these technolibertarian fantasies of righteous force (military and engineering alike, in many of these texts) feed in quite neatly to submissive postures. After all, to reach the Horsehead Nebula we're gonna need some cast-iron balls, America - and when the ballsiest one comes along, someone crazy enough to point the gun at whomever he so chooses, fanboys like Reynolds will excitedly lie down for him. The geek messiah and the military messiah and the religious messiah all have the same problem. Only the justifications are different.

My wisdom teeth: I miss them so much.

Not the excruciating pain they caused.

Just the teeth. So nice to have so many teeth.

Like a shark.

What an extraordinary planet.

Look at this picture.

Those two tiny objects near the mouth of the cave?

Those are helicopters.

Joss and Warren Ellis, re: midget pimps.

U.
N.
F.
UCK.
IN.
G.
BEL.
I.
E.
V.
AB.
L.
E!!!!!

Good news bad news.

Congratulations to Katrina McCarty, Julia Battel, and Dr. Rebekah Gee for filing a lawsuit that has led to Wal-Mart stores in Massachusetts being forced, by legislative order, to stock Plan B [via Dr. B]:

A Wal-Mart spokesman said the company would comply with the directive by the Massachusetts Board of Pharmacy and is reviewing its nationwide policy on the drug.

"Clearly women's health is a high priority for Wal-Mart," spokesman Dan Fogleman said. "We are actively thinking through the issue."

Of course it is. Of course they are.

On the other hand, it looks like the White House's behind-the-scenes maneuvering might scuttle the Congressional investigation into the NSA wiretapping program:

Congress appeared ready to launch an investigation into the Bush administration's warrantless domestic surveillance program last week, but an all-out White House lobbying campaign has dramatically slowed the effort and may kill it, key Republican and Democratic sources said yesterday.

Who knows what that lobbying entails? I'm inclined to say the White House is pushing a variant of its usual bullshit, 'The terrorists watch CNN and shop at the Harvard Book Store and if we investigate they'll surely figure out how we managed to use our astonishing intelligence apparatus to stop 9/11 and...um, WE ARE AT WAR YOU HIPPIES.' Which is to say, there's no reason why an investigation shouldn't go forward, but the primarily-Republican committee will likely roll over as usual for the White House on this one, in the name of 'national security' and other such bullshit, and security clearances will keep us from finding out exactly what was said. How do I know such extraordinary things? Because the kneel-and-pucker vibe is already in force:

"The administration has obviously gotten the message that they need to be more forthcoming," [Senator, R-ME] Snowe said.

Sure it has. Sure they will.

Stupid, stupid rat creatures.

Lazy 'intellectuals'.

You know the world is in bad shape when curiosity shops like The Tipping Point pass for works of intellectual heft. Simple case in point: you know that old saw about how big would a piece of paper folded in half 50 times be? It's reach the sun. Malcolm Gladwell, in his Tipping Point book, talks about the fundamental reconsideration of the owlrd called for by his writing, and uses people's inability to grasp that measurement as an example.

Truth be told it's not that hard to grasp as just numbers: 2^10 is roughly 1,000; 1,000,000 is roughly 2^20, so a piece of paper folded over 20 times would be roughly 1,000,000 times its original thickness. There are about 60,000+ inches in a mile, and a piece of paper is more than 1/150th of an inch thick, so that many folds would be more than a mile high - see? 2^30 is about a billion - more than 10 times the distance to the sun, in miles. In other words, a piece of paper folded over 50 times is gonna get you pretty far.

But I think people's understanding of this stuff isn't quite so poor as Gladwell thinks. I think part of what's going on in this: in order to reach the sun, the paper would already have to be millions of miles long. I know it's a niggling detail, but people are possessed of a remarkable intuition for such things. Gladwell might be happy to have some college math under his belt, but the average schlemihl might not want to think on that example because it's not trivially linked to a concept from his working world. In other words: Gladwell's aim is to teach, but with this example at least, he's running into problems that are to him invisible.

Fortunately for his sales figures, though, his style of writing is so comforting and baby-step-taking that anyone who gets to the end is bound to feel pretty good about that contradiction anyhow. Hey, his article on Harvard admissions was outstanding and personal; he's good at rendering tiny pieces of history. But going ga-ga over his writing you've got to put aside your expectations of profundity or reach: his work is an intellectual self-esteem-boosting program that promises and delivers little, then takes credit for a bit more. It redounds to his credit that he's so good at this kind of writing. But his is a 'scholarly' program ideally suited to an Age of Low Expectations. He's the intellectual his readers deserve.

Cheney? Resign? Not while there's a galaxy to protect.

James Wolcott floated the idea but it strikes me as far-fetched; more likely they'll just ship in the 'contrite' Cheney clone/robot, #38, from Cheneybots' orbiting moonbase ('The Seraglio') and have him/it perform the Sunday-morning-talk-show ritual obeisance before replacing him again with #6, the 'stealth' model. The 'bellicose' #11 has been down for maintenance after several long years of service. The engineers at The Seraglio are working hard to restore him/it to full health before the next military action, several pilots for which are currently looking to be optioned by administration officials: North Korea, Iran, Massachusetts, Mars. In accordance with the last wishes of the human Dick Cheney, dead for nearly 15,000 years, the clone/robot army has kept one synthetic-hairy eyeball on Mars since the Dawn of Man; it is unlikely that they'll let pass an opportunity to even the score with the Red Planet after what happened last time they let down their guard.

I have signed up for a special subscription plan whereby Cheney clone/robot #beta55 - an unfinished experimental model, codename 'bunny' - regularly calls me to make coochy-coo noises into the telephone. It's better this way than in person: Cheney clone/robot #beta55 is nothing more than a head, torso, and single arm, and though he/it can dial phone numbers, he/it is unpleasant to look at.

And that is why 'bunny' Cheney, unlike his/its unholy clone/robot brethren, will never be Vice President of the United States.

Batting 1.000!!

From our boy Stephen Colbert, the new word for the year...

Cockthusiast.

The Colbert Report got off to a good start. BY GUM LET'S KEEP IT UP YO.

Shorter Sally Jenkins on Biblical Creationism 'Intelligent Design'.

'Intelligent Design is a real by golly science on account of those gosh wow athletes do things that only Created Intelligently Designed beings could do, like...run fast! Drive fast! Play good ball! No way is that shit accidental! Also I have this weird metaphor about how science is basically fakery but you'll have to take my word for it. Excelsior!'

A little bit of red hot direct quote action:

First, let's get rid of the idea that ID (intelligent design) is a form of sly creationism. It isn't. ID is unfairly confused with the movement to teach creationism in public schools. The most serious ID proponents are complexity theorists, legitimate scientists among them, who believe that strict Darwinism and especially neo-Darwinism (the notion that all of our qualities are the product of random mutation) is inadequate to explain the high level of organization at work in the world. Creationists are attracted to ID, and one of its founding fathers, University of California law professor Phillip Johnson, is a devout Presbyterian. But you don't have to be a creationist to think there might be something to it, or to agree with Johnson when he says, "The human body is packed with marvels, eyes and lungs and cells, and evolutionary gradualism can't account for that."

And now get ready for the astonishing part: this insipid, content-free, anti-intellectual bullshit, this collection of flat-out lies and gross distortions amid platitudes, ran in...

...your Washington Post.

Ladies and gentlemen, the So-Called Liberal Media! Another for good measure, all together now: EXGODDAMNCELSIOR!!

And try telling a baseball fan that pure Darwinism explains Joe DiMaggio. As Tommy Lasorda once said, "If you said to God, 'Create someone who was what a baseball player should be,' God would have created Joe DiMaggio -- and he did."

QED I suppose! Oh but you might want to check out the invaluable PZ Myers over at Pharyungula, who summarily dropkicks this Jenkins fool back to whatever planet she phoned this drivel in from. Georgia perhaps? Florida?

Easy.

I learned what bourbon was for in a strip club in New Orleans a handful of years ago, and I learned the phrase 'French tickler' from a wall-mounted dispenser in that city - maybe the same block - somewhere around age 7 or 8. I remember traveling across Lake Ponchartrain every year or couple of years and feeling small and scared and underneath it just absolute wonder, at both the awesome engineering feat of the causeway and the sheer size of the lake itself. When I was a kid in Texas, New Orleans was the sleazy neighbour city to the east, and I loved it, though I didn't really get it. I'm not sure I get it now, but it all makes perhaps a bit more sense. After JazzFest a couple of years ago I vowed to go back soon, but haven't had the chance - or rather, haven't made the chances.

God willing, there's still time.

Pray for New Orleans if prayers you know and have, and may a disinterested God cast a merciful eye on the Big Easy and its many inhabitants. They're fools for living in a goddamn bowl, but the rest of us are fools, maybe, for not joining in.

There's still time, God willing.

Pedantry and NOLA.

Different from. Different from! As in 'differs from _____.' At least I think that's how it goes. After elementary school we never learned any of that stuff, and the deepest my grammar skills ever went in school was 'this is the "subject," this is the "predicate," and no we can't tell you why this is important.'

More serious note: New Orleans may be in some trouble. If you're so inclined, drop a prayer for the Big Easy and its residents (Bufu, is your family OK?). They have to deal, after all, with goddamn balls of fire ants.

Stuff!

This is inspiring, this is depressing, this is inspiring, this is depressing, and this is Camille Paglia in all her terrible glory.

Excelsior!

'Intelligent design': say it with a straight face!

Over at Crooked Timber, some Cosma Shalizi text leads to some snarking, a bit of pro-Intelligent-Design carrying-on by a chap named Breaker, and some truly priceless righteous smackdowns:

To begin: "Darwinism" is the strawman of idiots like Breaker. Darwin’s questions led modern biology to discard much of Darwin’s original guesswork.

Outside your fevered delusions of having made a case: There. Is. No. More. Darwinism.

Write that down, you’ll need it.

Intelligent Design is not science, does no science, and consistently misquotes existing science. Therefore, to say that "Darwinism provides no better answer to explain the creation of life based on the available science than intelligent design" is a statement meaningless both in its terms and its reasoning. It is an artifact of pure comedy.

CT has the blogosphere's best commenters, I think. While you're there, check out the comments on chlorofluorocarbons, a fascinating book suggestion for someone called Shadia Drury, and...a link from our boy Saurabh!! Go get 'em, tiger!

First among nations.

Today is the 60th anniversary of the birth of our world order.

Sometimes I think the A-bomb is the worst thing I can imagine. Reading A Problem From Hell I think otherwise: men are too industrious, too devoted to killing and hating one another, and the bomb is just a means to that end, not the End of Innocence as I sometimes think. It's only a weapon.

Still, it's as if it signifies a break: a period of war and calamity lasting more than a quarter-century was brought to an end when two pilots pushed two buttons and simply made a quarter-million people die, thousands of whom just disappeared into thin air. (It's easier for the bomb-throwers that they did: look at how we treat or refuse to treat those who've survived such events.)

Certainly it marks a break in what I can imagine. I can picture the world before the bomb and the world after it, but in my imagination they're two different worlds.

Theodor Adorno said that 'to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric' (and he was wrong, as about many things, though I understand the sentiment). Reading about Hiroshima and Nagasaki I feel something of that anger, but mainly sadness.

Ours has long been (it seems) a culture obsessed with visions of Heaven and Hell, and this obsession has spurred on some of our greatest creative minds and most expansive hearts to great work, gifts of art, humanity, community, invention. But those terrible and beautiful dreams have to be unattainable to sustain us. When I read about the Bomb, I read a documentary account of Hell. It's not a kingdom or an endless dark plain. Only pain and death, and an end to hope, and as close as the press of a button. That's what makes me sad: one by one, our dreams become real (isn't that the marketing slogan?), and the end result isn't more real or more life, it's fewer dreams.

In praise of the ad hoc.

I found myself, in conversation with a coworker (one of the more pleasant and reasonable yet somehow no more intellectually substantive minions of my complete wanker of a boss's-boss's-boss) today, uttering the following line: 'An ad hoc solution that always just works is always preferable, is it not?, to a systematic, formalized solution that can't be counted on.' He seemed to agree in one of the more dimly-lit recesses of his brain.

Needless to say, it didn't seem to matter at all.

At issue was whether part of our daily workflow should switch from a strung-together collection of individual apps - each of which does one thing competently, if not always that efficiently - to an expensive, commercially developed single-vendor 'solution' that's been in the pipeline for 13 months, licensed for in-house modification at a cost of literally millions of dollars, and as yet has not been beta tested. You can guess how I feel about it, particularly since I won't see a lick of productivity or ease-of-use improvement from the product. There are several things about the forthcoming system that are obviously much preferable to the current one - but what startles me is, they've been problems for literally years, yet no one has thought to address them until now, with this all-or-nothing approach.

'We have to get away from' this one old app, he said. 'It's unsupported. What'll you do if it breaks? Who'll you talk to?'

'Does it ever break?' I responded. I was the picture of strategic naivete - my mother would've been proud.

'No, but what if it does?'

I conceded that he had a point. Inside, I was by this point resigned to not really giving a shit about the conversation, and already 24 hours into the fun process of learning not to give a shit about our product. (Thank you, Big Publishing House, for this gift of life and love.)

What troubles me is this: at MIT, we learned to have an appreciation for ad hoc, limited-scope solutions - which combine on-the-spot thinking with a certain elegance. I like machines - physical, digital, whatever kind - that do a small number of things incredibly well. Alarm clocks are this way. Clock radios are generally lame radios attached to clocks. Wind-up alarm clocks do one thing, pleasantly (I love the ticking of a clock as I fall asleep), and then another (namely scare the hell out of you in the morning). Pens too. I didn't think about pens until I owned one that's (still) a great pleasure to use. There's no reason pens should be rubbish, when they can easily be both cheap and not-rubbish.

Maybe these are bad examples, I don't know.

My point is, there seems to be a system-wide hostility in Corporate America to a certain engineer-ish mentality - or more specifically, a fear of ad hoc solutions. It's not enough, in some circles, that things Just Work(tm). They have to 'work' in a way that reflects well on the corporate yes-men not actually capable of implementing them themselves. So informal solutions in-house are fine, so long as they get none of the credit for the achievements of the corporate machine.

This is, in every way, the diametric opposite of the attitude that pervades MIT culture. I'm hardly an engineer - the Computer Science part of my bachelors degree definitely wasn't the focus, though I am allowed to puff up a bit at its presence, I think - but the fact is, as important as facility with soldering irons, differential equations, and the lambda calculus is a cultural indoctrination or appreciation, by which one learns to value (to coin or perhaps reproduce a phrase) the Aesthetics of Problem-Solving.

Among many others I know, this guy has it in spades, for instance. As do these fools, though in a different way (the social-engineering analogue, though they are indeed mostly engineer-types). By rather complex analogy, these kids seem to get it too.

You might say it's about an appreciation of Mechanism - what it is that makes the kid open up the box. Sometimes it exposes the most extraordinary turningwheels and windingsprings and graspingteeth within, and sometimes, I readily admit, it just fucks up the whole cat-experiment thing. It's Wonder, maybe.

At my job I feel a certain cold that comes from the absence of Wonder.

It returns when I write.

Dream good dreams tonight, and call your parents! They miss you.

'Intelligent design': riiiiiiiight.

Aren't chaos theory and the startling behaviour of complex systems direct challenges to - if not outright disproof of - so-called 'intelligent design theory', the central notion of which is that Life is too complicated to have evolved? That is to say: we can evolve some pretty ridiculously complex things even within tightly circumscribed simulation space; imagine what we could do with real primordial soup! Creationists now claim that their beliefs amount to an alternative science, in which case it behooves some extremely patient and generous scientist(s) to throw away some time simply debunking their claims as if they had any scientific validity whatsoever.

That should be enough in the legal forum, anyhow. Creationists will still rant and rave, of course, but it should be fairly easy to embarrass them out of our schools.

I'm sure this has already been done. But it occurs to me that the complexity theory angle might be something people just don't bother with...

NYC kid AIDS malfeasance, sez BBC. Bollocks! cries otter man. '...' says world.

Supposedly, the BBC recently aired a special claiming that children were being taken away from foster parents who refused to allow them to enter potentially dangerous clinical trials. Turns out, according to the chap at Respectful of Otters, that's bollocks: the special demonstrates nothing of the kind, it's fraudulent, people are idiots, &c.

The story is found here. Scroll on up from the linked post to get the second half of his rebuttal. RoOtters isn't just a polite animal lover; he's 'a psychologist working in HIV research and treatment in the inner city' (I believe that's inner-city New York).

This brings up the question for me: what happens when a certain kind of rebuttal or clarification becomes common currency among bloggers - whose sole advantage over the more, um, outdoorsy is their willingness and ability to pool intellectual resources with startling rapidity and generosity - but outlets from the blogosphere to the wider media audience garner no attention? The blogging echo chamber is obviously opening up, but hasn't the BBC documentary (in this case, for instance) had an effect much greater than RoOtters's rebuttal ever will, simply by virtue of reaching a larger audience?

Or to phrase my implied point more positively: it's not enough for knowledge to disseminate throughout one tiny portion of the blogosphere (there are seven Trackbacks to RoO's story, counting mine - that's not a lot). Bloggers expect certain kinds of writing, certain kinds of debate, but those are the discursive low-hanging fruit. The hard stuff is generating writing and debate that can resonate beyond the echo chamber. (It's for this reason that I don't believe blogging does all that much for people's actual writing ability.)

Anyhow: kudos to RoOtters, but has someone sent his stuff to the BBC? Please?

How we will prevent a draft.

The future, ladies and gentlemen.

My housemate is a mad scientist.

From an online conversation today:

i ordered some super freaky mice (glow-in the dark, something else) and one is available right away and one is on back-order, which is better than both being on back-order...

Something about the casualness of it kills me. 'Oh, my glow-in-the-dark animals are on backorder, it's no problem. Fortunately we have the nuclear rocket sharks across the hall to get started on.' Man, sometimes I love MIT. Of course then there's this follow-up, the traditional science/humanities antipathy manifesting:

it's kind of a lie cause we don't have them yet except in the abstract

[...]

but i'm sure that won't bother you. you are probably not into literal truth
mister media scholar cultural studies literature CRAP

At least she called me 'mister' for a change. As opposed to 'Sally', which is what we humanists get used to. Oh, inverted world.

Stupid, stupid Internet joke sites!

"I've got very bad news - you've got cancer and Alzheimer's."

"Well, at least I don't have cancer."