Cover-a-Week #29: "Greensleeves" (traditional)

A Tudor era piece:


http://youtu.be/dMS42q0wPF8

The original is very long (not to mention that there exist many versions of the song, which was often learned orally, in true balladeer fashion), so I took the liberty of cutting a few verses.

io9: The Downs-Thomson Paradox is the Bane of Commuters Everywhere

This io9 article reminded me quite a bit of public transit in California (one of the things I definitely don't miss about university). It's also interesting to consider given the recent spate of service disruptions on MetroNorth (I have a few coworkers who commute from suburbs north of Manhattan).

http://io9.com/how-the-downs-thomson-paradox-will-ruin-your-commute-1152573927

Vehicular traffic, especially of the diesel variety, a huge environmental and economic impact on urban centers. There's debilitating smog (Beijing) that contributes to global warming and respiratory problems, and hours-long traffic jams (Los Angeles) that seriously decreases productivity and happiness, among other problems. Most urban planners, I would imagine, give serious thought to methods of reducing the number of cars on the road. 

The optimization of the weekday commute in urban centers is one of those challenges that is more important than it seems at first blush, and is extremely difficult to implement. It's largely due to massive user inertia, and the difficulties of transition. One of the major issues with any major urban infrastructure project is that the construction required to overhaul the system affects the millions of people who need to use said system every day. In order to avoid such disruption, most updates simply involve adding to, rather than substantively changing, the existing system. That's how we get, for example, redundancies in subway lines, or routes and hubs that are sub-optimal because population densities and distribution change with time. Over the years, problems in transit systems tend to be compounded precisely because our networks are augmented rather than remade anew. And, as the article points out, these inefficiencies drive people (no pun intended) to use cars instead of public transit. Who knew there was a formal theory to describe it?

The Renaissance Faire!

Last weekend, some friends and I went to the Renaissance Faire!

I've been to a few Faires over the years, both in California and here in New York. They're great fun -- cheesy as all hell, and you'll certainly be disappointed if you're a hard-core re-enactor or history buff who expects most everything to be historically accurate (that got me the first time, but I've learned to ignore it). There're all sorts of things to see -- human chess, birds of prey, dancing, acrobats, and even jousting.

Here I am at the archery range. The target is rather low to the ground. Full disclosure: the bow I'm using has a draw weight of only twenty pounds or so, and the fletching on the arrow is rather bent out of shape (not to mention that the entire kit is made of plastic!). I did ask for the heaviest bow they had on loan. (photo by Irina)

Here I am being kidnapped (and my bag being ransacked) by pirates! We are all too amused to look properly frightened/menacing. (photo by Irina)

And here is the castle and tourney field (click to enlarge). You can see the lions of England hanging from the castle walls, and the unicorn of Scotland above the stable doors. There was also a knight from France, and one from the Holy Roman Empire, though you can't see their heraldry in this shot. (photo by Deb and Terence)

I'm already looking forward to next year's Faire! Can't wait to break out the corset and skirts again. :-P

Cover-a-Week #28: "Half Moon" by Blind Pilot

In celebration of the Mid-Autumn Festival:


http://youtu.be/91_ZVMVB-QM

It's such a wistful and oddly uplifting song. It reminds me of Thoreau and Emerson (in both the philosophy and the New England aspects), but also of cranes and kingfishers.

In related news, I notice that one of my Cover-a-Week videos, "Take Me Home, Country Roads," recently exceeded a thousand views!

Reality, Relativity, and Light

I read José Saramago's The History of the Siege of Lisbon last week -- in translation, of course, since I don't read Portuguese. It's excellent, and somewhat stylistically and structurally unusual. But I was struck, in particular, by this line, spoken to the protagonist by his lover (the relationship is rather more complicated than that, of course):

Switch on the light, she said, I want to know if this is real. (p264)

The relationship between any two people -- even within family, even between people who might have known each other their whole lives -- is a fragile thing. Within that relationship, there are layers of reality, of perception. It's a sort of relativity, even -- one that isn't governed by any laws of physics. His reality and hers could be completely different, and each moment's reality different from the next. It's odd to think that we can never know what another person's reality looks like; the closest we can come is to achieve an understanding of how our reality compares to what we perceive to be their reality, with full awareness that our vantage point colours our reading.

This is especially relevant to the subject matter because the 1147 Siege of Lisbon, about which the protagonist writes, was a manifestation of a centuries-old clash of cultures and religions, a battle between two peoples who understood the same God through different scriptures and different prophets. Elizabeth I once said, in another century about another religious conflict, "I would not open windows into men's souls." Such windows can only be approximated, even in the best of circumstances.

I'm also taken by the Saramago's use of light in this scene -- something one normally associates with visual art rather than with prose. It's ripe with symbolism; the notion of shedding light on something intangible, that our eyes can tell us about reality between two people, &c. I'm reminded of two things:

Perhaps we may frighten away the ghost of so many years ago with a little illumination...
~ "The Phantom of the Opera," Act I, Scene 1

So many years after the events of "The Phantom of the Opera," the very chandelier that was associated with the disaster perpetrated by the Phantom is now a source of illumination -- both as a refurbished light fixture, and as a window into the murky past, the audience's introduction to the story. Because it is an inanimate object with a lofty vantage point, it is, in a fashion, the impartial observer of the story. And yet, it is also a crucial "participant" in the story. Its impartiality is not so much due to its placement, a lamp hanging high above the human characters, but rather because it has no free will, no desires or motivations of its own.

The second thing is Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Our understanding of what goes on inside another person's mind is rather like to the prisoners' understanding of the shadows on the wall. Another person's reality undergoes several layers of translation before it becomes comprehensible to us; the "truth" is distorted by their perception, interpreted by their mind, conveyed by their words, filtered by our ears, and only then is it analyzed by our minds. Plato's prisoners are eventually unchained, but there is no way for any of us to overcome this process of interpretation. The amount that must get lost in translation is mind-boggling. It makes me wonder what a society of perfect communication (of telepathy, essentially) would look like.

Edit: Soon after writing this post, I chanced upon an io9 article about philosophical thought experiments: http://io9.com/9-philosophical-thought-experiments-that-will-keep-you-1340952809@AnnaleeNewitz. The third entry therein, "The Beetle in the Box" (aka the Private Language Argument), is very much like what I discuss above. The second entry, "Mary the Colorblind Neuroscientist" (aka the Inverted Spectrum Problem), is also quite similar to the Allegory of the Cave. It's well worth reading.

BuzzFeed: Schrodinger and Heisenberg Walk into a Bar...

Because we need more quantum mechanics jokes in the world, even if they're really corny:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/billypeltzer/20-jokes-only-a-physics-nerd-will-appreciate-ecuv

That is all. (I am such a magpie, I know!)

io9: Why Eugenics is a Bad Idea (aside from all the obvious moral reasons)

I recently read Paolo Bacigalupi's short story collection Pump Six and Other Stories, which is deliciously creepy and dystopian. That anthology, and this io9 article (which I read at around the same time), got me thinking about human genetic engineering on a macroscopic scale:
http://io9.com/5925024/why-eugenics-will-always-fail

Our notions of eugenics can be roughly sorted into two categories: ways to optimize our species (for some agreed-upon and likely artificial optimal characteristics), and ways to eliminate genetic weaknesses (an extremely aggressive, sentient form of Darwinism). The former option represents selecting for a hypothetical upper bound, and the latter would be selecting against a lower bound.

When we talk about eugenics, most of us imagine the first option. The cultural connotation of the term "eugenics" includes the Holocaust, the book Brave New World, and the film "Gattaca" -- all of which involve human rights violations. In selecting for a certain ideal, a society makes mincemeat of the rights of those who fall below the arbitrary cut-off. Because eugenics usually comes with gross restrictions of free will -- and in many cases, murder -- we tend to see it as a purely moral evil. This usually brings about international intervention (the timeliness and effectiveness of said interventions being a different matter entirely), or at least the common recognition that such atrocities ought to be prevented.

The above io9 article lays out a few intuitive arguments against eugenics from a practical perspective, contending that -- morality aside -- it simply wouldn't be effective. They boil down to: imprecision, biodiversity, and the limitations of human foresight. (In essence, the short-term microscopic, the middle-term macroscopic, and the long-term in both. The article explains in further detail.) We don't know enough (and likely will never know enough) to get away with attempting to fashion our species in the image of some ideal -- not to mention that it would be impossible to get all seven billion of us to agree on said ideal in the first place. These are all, however, problems that arise when selecting for an upper bound, a hypothetical ideal specimen of humanity.

A (very) soft version of a scenario where we select against a lower bound is already in place, given amniocentesis and women's right to abort. Many women choose to abort after they receive an abnormal genetic diagnosis -- when the fetus has a genetic or congenital defect that would severely diminish the hypothetical child's lifespan or quality of life. The logic is that never existing -- which, for the record, is distinct from ceasing to exist after a period of existence -- is preferable to a life of pain and suffering with little ability to self-actualize. Self-actualization is incredibly important -- it's what makes us human and distinguishes us from other animals. This form of selection, which can be considered a mild and diffuse form of eugenics, increases the average human being's ability to self-actualize, thereby increasing (in a thought experiment where sentience is quantifiable on a scale) our species's average sentience through conscious choice by prospective parents -- a rough extension of natural sexual selection, in the way that most technologies exacerbate existing dilemmas and play upon existing quirks of human nature, rather than creating new ones where they didn't exist before. (To be clear, I recognize that I just exploded a can of worms -- that humans aren't generally more or less sentient than other humans, and that legally, ethically, metaphysically, &c. we all ought to be considered equally sentient, except in cases of limited ability to consent (i.e. children, mentally disabled persons), in which case laws are made to protect said people.)

The danger, then, is where the upper and lower bound options meet in the middle. (I'm resisting the obvious temptation to make some horrible joke about quantum mechanics and relativity here.) It's significant, therefore, that the former option is mandated by an external force and doesn't allow parents to meaningfully consent; the latter option is voluntarily initiated by the potential parents. The lower bound scenario never turns into the problematic upper bound scenario precisely because of this element of free will. The moment it moves from a bottom-up to a top-down approach -- when it veers too close to selection for an ideal, thereby impinging upon the rights of the sentient but non-ideal population -- it becomes the morally degenerate form of eugenics of genocide and dystopian science fiction. There lies the bright-line we should be aware of.

And that's all for now. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Cover-a-Week #27: "May It Be" by Enya, from The Lord of the Rings soundtrack

It's a week for mourning writers, so in honor of Tolkien's fortieth death-day, here's Enya's "May It Be" from the soundtrack of The Lord of the Rings:


http://youtu.be/juwu5tTC0hc

I maxed out the new microphone... again. (It's clearly the deadly combination of high notes, vibrato, and volume.) I tried putting a sweater over the mic -- perhaps next time, I should try sitting a bit farther back?