Today is Guy Fawkes Day in Britain and allied places. There is a good bit of fireworks, parading, bonfires and general carrying-on, all to celebrate the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. Bonfires are big. In fact, the holiday is often referred to as Bonfire Night It seems a bunch of English Catholics got fed up with the rough deal they were having under the Reformed Church and decided to make England Catholic again. This required overcoming one or two obstacles. But these guys were motivated and they thought big. The king, James I, who succeeded Elizabeth I, was scheduled to open Parliament. The plotters had stashed barrels and barrels of gunpowder in the basement of the Parliament building and would set it off when the ceremonies were in progress. This would take out the King, most or all of the nobility and high clergy, opening the way, the plotters figured, for a Catholic counterstoke. Well, it didn’t go off….no pun. Somebody betrayed the plot and a letter warning of it prompted a search of the basement which turned up…. you guessed it. Some historians say it was all a set-up, designed to justify the more energetic persecution of Catholics, and it all does look a little tidy, especially the Eleventh Hour rescue. Religious people, God bless ‘em, often play very rough, and what’s the life of a King and a couple hundred other dorks, when you’re on a mission from God? Fawkes was caught in the building, in the very room where the powder was stashed. That must have been a very, very awkward interview, but was nothing to what he got later; “Mild” torture, on the King’s orders. The plotters were rounded up, tortured, tried and executed and the whole country was told to give thanks for this miraculous intervention. Which it has been doing ever since.
Guy Fawkes and His Day.
November 5th, 2009Claude Levi-Strauss Dead at Age 100.
November 4th, 2009One of the major figures in the intellectual history of the 20th century died last week at his home in the French countryside. Claude Levi-Strauss was an anthropologist and thinker, who became the father and guiding spirit of “structuralism”, a movement which asserted that seemingly disparate aspects of human life such as language, marriage customs, creation myths, ideas about property are actually shaped by deep and commonly shared “structures”. Levi-Strauss did his field work in Brazil and in other places in the Americas, and on the basis of his ruminations about the meaning of what he had found, he formed his theory. He rejected the notion of a ‘primitive mind’, since in the societies he studied, there was a continued search for meaning, and a sophisticated logic underlying beliefs and customs. His influence waned toward the end of the century, but for a while Structuralism was riding high. I don’t know how much anthropologists today are guided by his work, but I do think that everyone nowadays is pretty careful about using ‘primitive’ in the off-hand, and dismissive, way it was used before. There are many appreciations, too many to summarize or even link to here. Look at Arts and Letters Daily and then take your pick.
Wondering Romantics.
November 3rd, 2009Richard Homes has written several well-regarded biographies of figures in the English Romantic Movement. He has also written a couple of books about the craft of doing biography. It seems that The Romantic Generation, that group of poets, essayists, dreamers, spinners of fantasies and exquisite chroniclers of the subtlest emotions, were also very interested in Science. In fact, they were more than a little bit blown away by it all, especially by the fact that these advances were taking place in their lifetimes. The book is The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science , 576 p, Pantheon Press. It’s not Lit Crit, but pretty much what the subtitle says. These supersensitive and highly intelligent people were fascinated by the discoveries being made about the natural world, and Nature, after all, was one of the things that obsessed them. A look at the Table of Contents shows that all the Usual Suspects are on deck: Jospeh Banks, the Herschels, the Montgolfier brothers, Humphrey Davy (an amateur poet himself, and not a bad one) and, of course, the Shelleys. In many ways, things were just getting started. Only the overture was playing, but a lot of people guessed that the rest of the show would be terrific, in fact, it would be “awesome”. This is a good book; get hold of it and read it.
Retractions Up Ten-Fold.
November 3rd, 2009A item in the Times Higher Education Supplement reports on the work of a group in the UK, which states that the number of papers retracted by authors, or by journal editors, has increased a lot. Some of the papers are fakes, others are simple mistakes in which the authors realize an error and try to take back what they said, and others have largish portions borrowed from other workers. But the investigators say that even the increase is probably not truly reflective of the number of problem papers. A great deal of the problem comes down, they say, to the ‘publish or perish’ atmosphere that pervades much of the research environment. It’s vital to get into print, so corners get get.
Retractions
Christopher Lee, Knighted.
November 2nd, 2009Christopher Lee is probably the best actor in the whole tradition of bad film-dom. He is now 87, and a bit frail, recovering from a recent fall, and using a cane. In the past, he has used a rapier, a light-sabre, a Golden Gun and a magical staff or two. Lee acted in just about every major genre: westerns, costume dramas, war pictures, sci-fi and fantasy, horror and mystery/suspense. His Dracula was new, when the reigning interpretation was still that of Bela Lugosi, with slight incursions by John Carradine. Lee played a Bond villain, a Holmes, did Starwars, and also Lord of the Rings, as the Ultimate Bad Guy, Saruman. During WWI, Lee served in the Royal Air Force, in the Western Desert and also with the Special Operations Executive in Europe. The exact activities of SOE personnel are still classified Secret. Not just a pretty face, he is fluent in five languages, can get by in three more. And, get this: he’s done a fair number of singing gigs, straight vocal and rock. Is that wigged out or what? Dracula/Saruman as lead singer in a band. Oh, and he’s a pretty good with a sword, having done a lot of his own cut-and-thrust over the years, with doubles only for the more athletic parts as he got older. A great reader, he was the only member of the RINGS cast or crew who had actually met Tolkien. Lee enjoys playing bad guys because there is so much more to bring out than with heros. He may have been hopelessly typecast but he was never out of work. And he’s not done yet, since his project calendar has jobs througout 2010.
So, Arise, Sir Christopher, and very well done indeed.
A Twittering Brit Gets Hit Quite A Bit.
November 2nd, 2009Those who think that Twitter is a sure sign of our Civilization’s impending collapse got some extra support recently. First, a little background. Stephen Fry is an autor, actor, poet and all around clever guy. He’s quite well known across the water, less so here, unless you’re a fan of the BONES TV show, on which he did several spots as a psychiatrist assigned to check out the suddenly trigger-happy FBI guy. Fry tweets and has a lot of ‘followers’…. in the high hundred thousands if if read it right. One of the Tweetees commented that Mr. Fry’s tweets were, well, boring. Poor lad, he should have held his peace. Instantly, defenders were all over the guy, telling him what a jerk he was and that the Fry Tweets are pure poetry, awesome, huge and other encomia. Quite a number got really nasty. And then, soon after it all started, it was over. The twitterers had burned themselves out on this one and were now rushing off somewhere else, on news that Fry had made a cheese sandwich or something. There’s a lesson in here someplace, but I’m not sure what it is or where you can find it, other than what I said at the beginning. What’s that line?…”not with a Bang, but a whimper”. Or maybe a Tweet.
An “Integral” Holiday.
October 29th, 2009Those whose hearts beat a little faster at the sight of an equation have cause to celebrate today, because, on this day in 1675 Gottfried Leibnitz first wrote the squiggle that has become universally adopted as the integral sign in calculus. It seems he wrote it first in an unpublished manuscript, but, over time, that mark beat out competing notation for that important function, so what students learn in Calc. 101 is what Gottfried came up with. The matter of who invented the calculus, Newton or Leibnitz, has been the stuff of some considerable discussion. The two did exchange a lot of letters about it, so the question of who did what when may never be ironed out fully, but apportioning the credit by precise fractions in probably pointless. Lift a cup to Leibnitz in recognition of his priceless doodle.
Michael Dirda On Martin Gardner.
October 23rd, 2009Michael Dirda is the book critic of the Washington Post. Tha author of several books about, well, books, and authors and writing and things, Dirda has a smooth prose style, which distracts you from the very considerable difference between his level of erudtion and yours. But, I digress. The reason I’m bringing this up here and now is that I found something by him in praise of Martin Gardner. His story is pretty much the same as mine, and we both got hooked on the same Mg book: Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, but he makes the case for getting hold of, and reading, some of the numerous works this man has penned, and does it much better than I can. If you don’t believe me, and why should you, believe Michael Dirda:
Dirda
Martin Gardner at 95.
October 20th, 2009The crafty creator of mathematical puzzles, Martin Gardner, will celebrate his 95th birthday tomorrow. For many years, he ran a column in Scientific American magazine on recreational mathematics, but he retired from that post some years ago. Retiring and quitting are different things, and Gardner most definitely did not quit. He’s the author or editor of over 70 books, and publishers know that he is “box office” in that almost anything with his name on it will enjoy healthy sales. His undergraduate training was in philosophy, and he never considered himself a very good mathematician, but he wrestled with the ideas behind the puzzles he selected for publication in his SA column and in the numerous collections which appeared under his editorship. So, once he had the ideas clearly stated in his own mind, he could write about them for other people with insight and force.
Gardner was a fierce defender of science against nutsos, pseudos and fadists of all kinds. He had his facts in order and could punch, hard. I read Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science almost in one sitting. But he also has a whimsical side, as shown by his Annotated Alice in Wonderland, The Annotated Wizard of Oz and others. But, his mathematical puzzle collections form the bulk of his oeuvre, and are the basis of his reputation as an effective popularizer of difficult concepts. So, let’s hoist a cold one for Mr. G on his 95th. He’s still works, every day on his old style typewriter and still publishes. He’s an American original.
A Leaked Peek at the Barnes and Noble E-Book Reader.
October 20th, 2009In the beginning was the Kindle, and then, there were Kindle follow-ons. Amazon jump started the dormant e-book market with the launch of this product family, and for a while was king of the mountain. As we’ve reported in these lines, a number of other outfits think they can do the e-book thing better, since they think the Kindle is dorky piece of gear. These guys are headed for chapter 11, since it’s not about the gear. Amazon charged ahead because they had the reader, the inventory, an aggressive discount policy on digital versions of the books they sell, which are easy to get, wirelessly. Barnes and Noble sells a lot of books too, and they went after Amazon big time. Next week, B&N will launch their version of an ebook reader, and some leaked photos of the gadget, along with some specifications and description, have popped up in different places. We are going with the story on WIRED’s news site. B&N will allow users to share books, while Amazon does not, giving the new guys an extra advantage.
Reader
PS: I should have mentioned that the new item is called the “Nook”, for “N Book” maybe?