Journal of No. 118

Behold the Ape by James Morrow

A bonkers short novel of early Hollywood monster movies and a brain-swapped Charles Darwin, placed in the body of a gorilla. What if a vamp found her muse in gorilla-Darwin and found a way to circumvent the benighted education laws of the Scopes Trial days by putting more accurate versions of natural selection into horror movies? Strange and silly and enjoyable, but its heart is obviously in the right place since the creationists are the villains.

Is Math Real? by Eugenia Cheng

I initially hoped (given the title) that this was about whether math is fictional. After reading a review, it's clear it wasn't, but she actually does touch on it a bit in the epilogue, and I think she would be amenable to the idea. But what is it actually? I think one of the goals of the book is to introduce math (like real math-y math) to people who may be math-phobes or 'not good at math'. The book does a great job explaining lots of things with copious analogies, some very clever, and some more strained. I think for people who are curious about math, but maybe imagine that professional mathematicians multiply REALLY BIG NUMBERS together or something like that, this would be a great introduction to what math is really about. The only drawback to the book is that there are some glaringly intrusive passages in the book that I can't help but call 'Woke'. I mean, woke is not a term I self-apply, but I'm about as liberal as they come, and these still stand out like a sore thumb. The author could have achieved a similar effect if there was a reminder to the reader every 25 pages to stare at a picture of Greta Thunberg's scowling face for 15 seconds.

 The Puzzle Universe purports to be a History of Mathematics in 315 puzzles. While that's not wholly inaccurate, it's more of an exercise in frustration. It is a beautiful book with bold, colorful illustrations. Alas, one or two of them are inaccurate and ruin the puzzles. A number of the puzzles suffer from setups that are not clear and unambiguous, and many of the answers are gnomic without any explanation or solution. While these are hideous flaws, there are many things to like about the book. Lots of clever visual proofs and little historical asides. I think my favorite was the Malfatti Marble Problem. In 1803, Malfatti declared that three tangent circles always provided the maximal area in a certain geometric problem. In 1930, it was shown that that's not always true. And in 1967, it was finally proven that Malfatti's solution is never optimal.

--

I can see why City of Stairs, by Robert Jackson Bennett, made several finalists lists for Best Fantasy Novel of the year. It's an engaging read, and the strange 'geopolitics' of its world are a big plus. The two main power-continents are an Indian-esque society and a Russian-oid society, at least so far as naming conventions and cultural touches are concerned. Oh, and there's a sort of barbaric Europe somewhere as well that doesn't come into the story much. There's something of a mystery of how some literal walking-the-earth gods have been slain, but echoes of the divine are still hidden here and there. The only drawback of the story is that our heroine and her burly companion are just too perfect. Too smart, too knowledgeable, too skilled, too fatally dangerous to be taken completely seriously. Or to fear for their safety at any point.

--

On the Playstation, been enjoying the fact that Katamari Damacy (Reroll) has been released for PS4. Still as delightful as ever.

Spirit of the North was a pleasant game, letting your little foxy dude run around and leaping about. While some instructions and guidance might have been useful at times, I like that they stuck to their guns and just let you experience it and figure it all out for the most part.

PSPlus freebies Concrete Genie and Control have also been fun. Control's delightfully loopy mind-bending story is a blast.

Birth of a Theorem - A Mathematical Adventure, by Cédric Villani, details the author's long struggle to prove (with a colleague) a theorem about Landau damping in the Vlasov equation.

I had read in reviews that many were dissatisfied in that they couldn't understand the mathematics. I arrogantly scoffed, thinking myself more mathematically sophisticated. However, the actual problem is that Villani makes virtually no effort to explain the mathematics (unlike a couple great popular books on the Riemann Hypothesis I've read over the past umpteen years). And yet, will subject the reader to contextless passages of dense LaTeX. These will alternate with musings about his favorite anime series, or a lengthy list of his favorite songs, or how nice it is to flirt with female mathematics students or sit next to an attractive female passenger on a plane (particularly when you leave your wife at home!).

There are a few passages that give a hint of what it's like to be a working mathematician working closely with a colleague and more loosely with a community, but on the whole I found him insufferable.

--

Archivist Wasp, by Nicole Kornher-Stace, alternately intrigued and annoyed me. I think it needed one more go round or a bit more maturity, or something, so I'll keep an eye on her later works for sure. It starts off kind of post-Whoops Canticle of Liebowitz-y, but then no it's more like fantasy and can't be connected to an Earthlike technological past, oh wait but then maybe it is, but now we're in sort of a magic alternate universe, and o bugger it. There's a lot of extreme black and whiteness and Mary Sue-ism. And yet there's some touching stuff and a mystery of sorts. Acceptable for my plane ride to Pittcon.

--

Pittcon. Orlando. My lack of god I'm sick of this shit.

Tuesday

OldWiseGuy's link: whites are almost TWICE as likely to be killed by police officers.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control, between 1999 and 2011, 2,151 whites died as a result of being shot by police compared to 1,130 blacks.

essentialsaltes: The bolded text is a lie. An obvious lie. A childish lie. Only the innumerate would fall for such a transparent lie.

OldWiseGuy: 1.9 times is "almost twice" (unless my math is off).

Iluvatar: Do you know what percentage of the population is made up by blacks? Do you know why that's important to your argument?

OldWiseGuy: So what is the "truth of the matter"?

essentialsaltes: Iluvatar ... and I have been trying to help you find the truth for yourself. Start with iluvatar's questions

Wednesday

OldWiseGuy: I asked for your opinion, not help with mine.

essentialsaltes: Sorry, no. You asked for the truth. The truth is independent of opinion.

You can find it if you go about the process with an honest and unbiased mind. If I just give it to you, you'll just reject it. Go back and answer Iluvatar's questions. You'll find it for yourself.

[TL;DR]

essentialsaltes: Excellent. Do you agree then, that it is not a fact (or a statistic) that "whites are almost TWICE as likely to be killed by police officers."

Thursday

OldWiseGuy: I already conceded that point, in post 29. You're beating a dead horse here.

Saturday

2Timothy2:15: Here are some more stats. Stats clearly show that more white people are killed by police year over year than any other race. 

essentialsaltes: Yes, and more right handed people are on death row than left handers. That's not the relevant statistic.

Even our local curmudgeon OldWiseGuy conceded this point. Black people are more likely to be killed by police, year after year. That is the relevant statistic.

2Timothy2:15: If black people are more likely to be killed the numbers would match, which they don't.

Why Violence Has Declined takes a long, long, too-long look at rates of violence over the past umpty-thousand years from our hunter-gatherer forebears to today. Pinker has marshalled a shitload of facts and statistics, and though there may be some niggling details here and there, on the whole, he's pretty convincing that rates of murder, war, and violence have declined per capita. This does require an explanation, and I think Pinker certainly outlines many ideas that contribute, but he doesn't seem to present a very strong thesis for an explanation. Rather he takes us on a plodding journey through the museum of ideas that every political philosopher has considered. The book plods so much that I found much of it a chore to get through. Reading through the outline in Wikipedia is good enough -- just feel certain that each point is held up by a few hundred footnotes each.

One of the ideas that did stick with me was that many violent acts are considered acts of justice by their perpetrators. They are not doing wrong, they are taking justice into their own hands. That bitch stole my man -- smack. That driver cut me off -- blam. Obviously, these solutions are not terribly rational, and generally frowned upon by Leviathan. I think it could extend to larger actions -- riots in Watts and LA. It doesn't make any fucking sense, but there was some ache for a justice that was not going to come from traditional channels.

Now, I have plodded so slowly through the book that that idea lodged some time ago. And then as I mulled it over in my mind, I considered the Trump voters in the lead-up to the election. Can a vote be an act of violence? A stupid plea for justice when you're aching for a justice that was not going to come from traditional channels? Mmmmm... no, I can't quite bring myself to consider a vote for Trump to be an act of violence. And then the vote actually happened, and Trump won. I still can't quite elevate it to an act of violence. But I think a lot of my friends may consider it to have been an act of violence. And certainly we have seen (even given some level of pernicious fakes) that some Trump supporters have been emboldened to enact actual violence. And we've also seen protests of Trump that have also risen to the level of violence.

Now I have to tread carefully here, because I think there are significant differences between the two sides. It is not just that I am trapped in my bubble and not their bubble (and I'll get to the bubble later, especially since almost everyone who will read this is in my liberal bubble). At the same time, the people (considered as people) in the two camps. Are not all that different.

Now apparently the worst thing I could possibly do is to suggest that we should reach out and hug the other side and unite. Which is fine, because I'm not suggesting that. When Trump has rotten plans, they should be fought. And many of his plans are rotten.

But possibly I'm saying something even worse. That people are people. And people on both sides are not all that different. And to realize that, it definitely helps to spend time outside your bubble.

Many of you know of the long years I've spent in the mission fields of Christian websites, spreading the good news of rationality and fact-based argument. It is not easy work, because they are beset by demons that deceive them. And again, it's not about compromise -- I think the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and they think it's 6,000 years old. I'm not looking to compromise at 2,250,003,000 years old. Wait, I'm rambling a little too much, but maybe we'll come back to this.

Another bit of bubble escape was listening to the infuriating drive-time talk show on a Christian radio station, though I haven't in many years. Until election night. As I drove home, feeling pretty confident that it was going to be close (my prediction: Hillary 278 EV) but would go blue, I turned that station on hoping for election news and... delicious Christian tears. Because that's a thing now. Enjoying people's tears. And because I'm a bad person.



And I got those tears. But I did not find them enjoyable. pout

A young Latina called in to the show. Her voice shook with raw emotion, clearly crying. Hillary was going to win, and as everyone in the conservative Christian bubble knew (as did I since I'd been visiting), Hillary believed that "deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs have to be changed". And as it was being spun in the bubble, this young woman knew that President Hillary was going to forcibly change religious beliefs in America. She was genuinely, fearfully afraid that hers was the last generation that was going to hear the saving gospel of Jesus Christ.

All bullshit, of course. But the tears and pain in that bubble were real. Just like they were real when Obama was elected in 2008 and was going to take everyone's guns.

Anyway, fast-forward a few hours, and suddenly the tears were on the other foot. (Shut up.) There were organized cry-ins. And, and... the other side mocked it. They were enjoying those tears! How could they be so cruel?



Not all that different.

But they're all racists!

Yes, half of Trump voters hold implicit bias against POC. And only a third of Hillary voters do.

Not all that different.

But Trump's spouting ugly racism!

Well, yeah. Again, I don't want to rest on any false equivalencies. But if you want to characterize the GOP as full of racists, then you should step inside the other bubble and look at yourself.

You support murdering babies. You literally want doctors to crush the skulls of infants with forceps.
You want perverts to molest our delicate American girlhood in the bathroom at Target.
You want religious expression to be locked inside the walls of churches.
You let the biased(*) lame-stream media do your thinking for you.

[* I'm too tired, but to its credit, the media finally decided that he said/she said journalistic equivalency was no longer valid. Trump was lying. They called him on it. They endorsed Hillary. But... it does feed the narrative that the media is biased against Trump.]

You want them to stop being racist and join the correct party? Well, maybe you should stop killing babies, and join the correct party.

You scoff when people say they aren't racist, but voted for Trump? Well, what do you think of Tim Kaine, who personally opposes abortion, but stood for VP of the Democrat Party? And he's by no means alone. There are Democrats who think abortion is murder. If you can be against baby-murdering, and vote for a baby-murdering candidate, then surely you can be a non-racist and vote for a racist candidate. Sure, it must be a terrible internal conflict. Sucks to be them. But they got their racism/baby-killing just like the people-of-yesteryear got Skinemax with the package.

Not all that different.

But they are so very fact-challenged!

Well yes. That's what I combat the most. You give them a snopes link, and they don't believe snopes. You provide the links on the snopes page to the NYT, and they don't believe the NYT. There are some people there whose solitary (it appears) information source is infowars(*). They were primed and ready to believe crap like a Kenyan born Obama, or a Jade Helm takeover of Texas. Because it fits their narrative.

(* I'm too tired, but if you're getting info from occupydemocrats or Huffpo... Not all that different.)

In our bubble, the narrative is that Trump is a sexual predator. And I'm morally certain that Trump has grabbed more unwilling pussies than trans people have assaulted anybody in a bathroom. So the woman who accused Trump of raping her when she was a teenager fits the narrative. But when the press conference was announced, my baloney detector started beeping. Because (for better or worse) before I am a Democrat or a liberal, I am a skeptic. A court of law is where these things are decided, not at press conferences or FBI memos. And when the press conference was cancelled due to 'threats', my suspicion grew. It was not impossible that threats had deterred some poor woman, but I was not buying it at this point. But a lot of other people were. They railed against the Trumpeters who had cowed this woman. Maybe Trump had bought her off. How many millions did it take him? And then two days later, she dropped the suit. No cause given. Bought off? Full of shit? We may never know. But a retracted anonymous accusation is not much to hang something on, unless the narrative is more important than evidence.

And if you point to snopes articles showing that some cases of 'postelection Trump supporter racism' are imaginary... some people don't want to hear that shit. It doesn't fit the narrative.

I've showed dozens of snopes articles to conservatives, and know what it feels like to be ignored. So when it comes from the other side, it just shows that...

Not all that different.

We all laughed (I did, I'm a bad person) at that stupid bint who cut a backwards B on her face.



But we were also mad. She perpetrated a pernicious lie to denigrate a particular political candidate.

We were furious. She lied to say a black man did this. I hate her.

And now Trump supporters tore the hijab off a woman. Stole her wallet. That feeds the narrative.
But it's bullshit. All a lie.

C'mon now, everyone. Let's laugh at her. And hate her. C'mon. She made a pernicious lie to denigrate a particular political candidate. She lied to say white men did this to her. I hate her. I really do. But more importantly...

Not all that different.

As promised, this book review has devolved. Let me pull it back, at least briefly.

"According to Hofstede's data, countries differ along six dimensions. One of them is Long-Term versus Short-Term Orientation: 'Long-term oriented societies foster pragmatic virtues oriented towards future rewards, in particular saving, persistence, and adapting to changing circumstances. Short-term oriented societies foster virtues related to the past and present such as national pride, respect for tradition, preservation of 'face' and fulfilling social obligations.'"

Those are not bad descriptors of the two societies living in their bubbles that exist within America. The liberal and the conservative.

One of my regrets about the election is that so much was about the personalities and less about the issues. I have read that the Clinton campaign gamely released insightful policy statements to the media, but they never reached me. Since the Donald sucked all the oxygen in the primary fight, one would have thought that the Clinton team would strive harder in the general to make sure its message got out, but it didn't. Honestly, perhaps I'm giving them credit for having a message, because from my standpoint, most of what I heard from the Hillary campaign was...

It's her fucking turn. She cashed in her chips to keep the competition away. Only that asshole Sanders and McWhatever didn't get the memo. "Trump is awful. I'm not Trump."

Though true, this is not compelling. She could've done better with "I will be the third Obama term."

Anyway, one of the few policy things that did come out (because I watch closely) is for the coal miners of America.

HuffPo:

"Hillary Clinton has a $30 billion, 4,300-word plan to retrain coal workers that covers everything from education and infrastructure to tax credits and school funding.

Donald Trump’s coal plan is a duckface thumbs-up in a miner’s hard hat and a rant about hair spray, President Barack Obama and China."

Retrain coal workers? That's "adapting to changing circumstances". That's a Long-Term society strategy. And it's right.

A duckface thumbs-up? Well, if you can see through the HuffPo bias, that's a strategy oriented on today. Short-term. For the white working class families that are struggling.

And now, for you in my liberal well-informed bubble. Surely you are cognizant of the current spot price for coal.

No? Well, there are lots of reasons for it, but coal prices have tripled recently. And although US miners have not (yet) seen much of a boon, due to the horrible EPA, and Obama rules about coal-fueled power plants, a Trump presidency is clearly going to change that. Yes, there are certainly problems with burning coal like there is no tomorrow, but... if you are a part of an unemployed coal-mining family in Pennsylvania or Ohio focused on today... then you are part of the Short-Term Society, and I can see reasons other than racism to vote for Trump. And they did. And they are legitimately mad when we say their votes were racist.

In conclusion:

WE'RE ALL A BUNCH OF APES WHO ONLY RELATIVELY RECENTLY LEARNED TO WEAR CLOTHES AND NOT KILL EACH OTHER SO MUCH.

Swann's auction catalog of Art, Press, & Illustrated books has some pretty unique things.

A curious edition of Flatland, published by the Arion Press, with an introduction by Ray Bradbury. It's printed on 56 accordion folded pages (so you can lay out the whole text... flat) and housed in an aluminum case.



If that's not wacky enough... The Robin Book:



If that's not pretty enough, then how about the Kelmscott Press (William Morris) Works of Chaucer:



If that's not racy enough, imagine having to compose a properly dry auction catalog entry for this:

"An unusual, unexpected, and very erotically graphic publication that touches on all manner of taboos and the employment of otherwise innocent items like pickles."

I am not a geologist, and I can see how some actual knowledge of the different local conditions and geology would be important, but allow me to bloviate.

There have been some recent earthquakes in and around the Inglewood Oil Field, but we have been assured that they are not linked to drilling, fracking, water-injection or any other thing that the operator might have done or is doing. This is, probably, the case. I mean, it's not like earthquakes are unknown in Southern California. My gut tells me it's something like climate change. You can't blame climate change for *that* hot day, but climate change is making hot days occur more frequently. You can't blame water injection for *that* earthquake, but it has made earthquakes in general more frequent. And it might be that it actually hasn't changed the frequency at all. But let's look at the reasoning given in the article:

Hypothesis: "A typical human induced earthquake is shallow -- about a mile below the surface," but the recent quakes have been deeper than that, and therefore cannot be human induced.

Now, Oklahoma has seen a 60,000% increase in earthquakes, and has stated that this "cannot be entirely attributed to natural causes" and is "very likely triggered by the injection of produced water in disposal wells."

Prediction: Now, if typical human-induced earthquakes are shallow (about a mile) then most Oklahoma earthquakes should be only 1 or 2 kilometers deep.

Data: Today's Earthquakes for Oklahoma.

Analysis: Hardly any of them are only as shallow as 'a mile'. And if you scroll back, there are few that break 10 km, on par with the 6 or 7 mile depth of the Baldwin Hills quakes.

Conclusion: The unnamed seismologists who say typical human induced quakes are only a mile deep are full of shit. (or my geological ignorance has made me the shit-filled one)

[I considered that one difference might be, maybe Oklahoma wells inject deeper, and that's why the earthquakes are deeper, but figure 13 of this report (p.24) shows that the median well depth is "about a mile", and the deepest injection well in the state is 18,886 ft (5.75 km) (p.7). Median earthquake depth (p.9) was 3.75 km. Fracking in the Inglewood Oil Field apparently reached "a depth of about one and half miles".]

Published in English as The Three-Body Problem (<---spoiler-laden wiki entry), translated by Ken Liu, not to be confused with the author, Liu Cixin.

The book opens with some pretty brutal scenes from the Cultural Revolution, such as a physicist undergoing a fatal struggle session for teaching 'imperialist' physics. The historical milieu was interesting in its own right, especially from a writer inside China. But obviously, there's more to it than historical fiction. It's a novel of First Contact, and it's hard to talk about it in much detail without getting too spoilery. There are a lot of really inventive ideas in here, but also some things that stretched my disbelief suspenders past their breaking point, on both science-y stuff and character motivation. But I confess to being a little curious to see how things turn out (alas, the remaining books in the trilogy have not yet been published in English).

The Three-Body Problem of the title refers to the problem of characterizing the motion of three bodies interacting via gravity. Turns out it's incredibly complex. But Cixin mentions something I hadn't heard of. A funky figure eight pattern was discovered a while back, and even more recently (after the publication of this book) 13 more families of repeating solutions were discovered.

New Bookchallenge categories:
✓with a number in the title
✓'based entirely on its cover' (On a rare visit to a real live dead tree bookstore, it caught my eye. More because #1 the title caught my physics brain, and #2 on closer inspection it was a Chinese author, rather than 'the cover' but still.)
✓originally written in another language

You may remember [haha, no, of course not] when I dispensed with math as fictional [somewhere near the end of that rambling entry].

I had a similar epiphany about space and time. As one does. I mean I've known for a long time that space and time aren't what people naively assume they are, or even perceive they are. But it took some poking and prodding and internet tough guy arguing to really get a handle on it.

While conceding that space itself is not made of matter, someone was asking whether it was, nevertheless, a 'thing'. I was immediately leery of calling it a thing, but pressed on the issue ('how can nothing expand?') led to some deeper thinking.

Now the expansion of space is fraught with misunderstanding. All our standard analogies are really misleading: pennies taped to balloons, raisins in raisinbread dough. These treat space as though it really were a thing that stretched and expanded, carrying other things with it.

If you think that 'space streams' carry galaxies away on it, you're thinking of it wrong. If you think galaxies are pinned to space like they've been nailed into some stretchy jello, you're thinking of it wrong.

So what's right? What is space? What I ultimately came up with was:

"Space is, perhaps, our mental model of the world. We are betrayed by our senses into mapping objects into a three dimensional Euclidean space, and then implicitly reifying that model."

Temperature is modeled by a number that fits on a number line, but we are not tempted to reify that as a real physical dimension. It is only because distance behaves more or less like distance in Euclidean geometry that we assume that space is 'out there' for real, rather than just distance being a property shared between two objects, like the temperature difference between two objects. Well, not just that, it also seems to us in our perceptual visual field (or at least it does to me) like there's a three dimensional more-or-less-Euclidean space out there. Of course, all we really perceive are objects. We have no way of putting space-itself under the microscope, or look at it.

Anyway, so space is just a mental model and it isn't real. You all think I'm crazy. I think I'm crazy. My interlocutor thinks I'm crazy, and asks: "Would you say [space] has always been just a mental model? i.e. when Einstein first presented [GR], he had no intention of implying that space is a thing that actually bends and stretches?"

Oh crap, I'm in for it now. I'm a humble Physics lieutenant, and he's going over my head to the general.

Einstein thought a lot about the Problem of Space:

"It is characteristic of Newtonian physics that it has to ascribe independent and real existence to space and time ...

Newton himself and his most critical contemporaries felt it to be disturbing that one had to ascribe physical reality both to space itself as well as to its state of motion; but there was at that time no other alternative, if one wished to ascribe to mechanics a clear meaning.

It is indeed an exacting requirement to have to ascribe physical reality to space in general, and especially to empty space. ...

The psychological origin of the idea of space, or of the necessity for it, is far from being so obvious as it may appear to be on the basis of our customary habit of thought."

.......

On the basis of the general theory of relativity, on the other hand, space as opposed to "what fills space", which is dependent on the co-ordinates, has no separate existence. ...

Space-time does not claim existence on its own, but only as a structural quality of the field [i.e. the metric].

I honestly did not expect to find Al stating it so unambiguously. I'm not sure why it was so surprising to share the same view, since I had the advantage of standing on his shoulders, but it was still thrilling.