Good to see all the “fuss and hype”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4683503.stm over the new Harry Potter. I wonder whether it’ll be better than the last one, which I thought was a “bit of a disaster”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/08/04/harry-potter-and-the-implausible-plot-device/. It’s a little shorter, which is a good sign. Like many people, I have my doubts that Potter will still be read by children a few generations down the line. He may end up a curio like Billy Bunter, or even the Oz books. The characters enter the culture but the novels hardly bear re-reading. But bugger posterity, to be honest: at some point you can’t argue with the huge queues of people waiting to buy the books. I’d happily settle for the gift of being able to write something that would be read by a hundreth as many people.
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Kieran Healy
London and many other places will “observe two minutes of silence”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4679681.stm at noon GMT today for the victims of last week’s bombings. The debate has already begun (“see below”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/14/battle-lines/) about the right political and legal response to the attacks. Besides policy and law, though, Britain and Ireland have suffered long enough from terrorism to have produced literature about it. Below the fold I reproduce a powerful poem from the late “James Simmons”:http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/20century/topic_4/simmons.htm. It commemorates one of the earliest, and worst, atrocities of the Northern Ireland conflict, the IRA bombing of Claudy town in July of 1972. The circumstances of that event were different from last week’s attacks, but some things were the same. I don’t know of anything else that conveys them nearly as well.
There are reports of a “series of explosions”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4659093.stm on the London Underground. It’s not clear what’s happening. Another Madrid? Or something else?
_Update_: The “eyewitness reports”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4659243.stm on the BBC make it clear that it’s a co-ordinated bombing of the tube and some buses. I hope they catch the bastards responsible.
_Update 2_: Reports are all over Australian TV now, and obviously this will be a major story across the media so I won’t make any more updates here. But I will keep comments open, of course. At this point the hope is for as few fatalities as possible.
Just back from a weekend in Sydney. The Australasian Association of Philosophy’s “annual conference”:http://www.rihss.usyd.edu.au/AAP2005.html started today. We went down a few days early and I fled back to Canberra this morning before the philosophers really got going. Laurie presents her paper later in the week, but this afternoon she was on a Career Workshop panel about balancing career and family. At _precisely_ the time she was doing this, I was back in Canberra, standing at the side of the road with a small baby, wondering what to do next. I had just locked myself out of our apartment. Apart from the baby — who responded to the crisis by repeatedly trying to walk out into the middle of the road — my inventory consisted of no car keys, no money, and only the vaguest notion of the first name of the agent for the property company who own a couple of units in this apartment complex, which doesn’t have a custodian. Cathy something? Or was that the name of the owner of the B&B in Sydney? The person who would assuredly have the relevant information to hand couldn’t be contacted, because she had her phone switched off, seeing as she was giving a talk about work/family responsibilities. Carolyn? Carmel? I’m pretty sure it’s a “C” name. Every other person in Canberra I’d be in a position to phone for assistance was out of town. They were all in Sydney, at the conference. Some of them were probably at the workshop.
Now that I’m back on the right side of the apartment door (the child is still alive, by the way), I can see just how this sequence will play out in the upcoming film version of my life. The director cuts back and forth. The baby has discovered where the dumpsters are and is making a beeline for the abandoned washing machine. The audience at the workshop chats sagely to one another about the domestic division of labor. The actor playing me picks an apartment door at random and knocks, hoping someone is at home. He gets ready to brandish the baby, in order to simultaneously signal his non-threatening nature and his desperate need for aid.
Brian Leiter “links”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/06/the_philosophic.html to some “philosophical genealogies”:http://webspace.utexas.edu/deverj/personal/philtree/philtree.html where Josh Dever tries to trace lineages back as far as possible through a sequence of advisers. As David Velleman points out, lineages in mathematics are “much better established”:http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/index.html because the tradition of formal training is much older. There are other limits to tracing lineages, too, notably the different evolutionary paths of academic institutions in various countries. In the philosophical genealogies compiled by Dever the longest chains are for logicians, and go back to Leibniz and beyond (which speaks to the point Velleman makes), but they’re also all German. Academics tracing themselves through English lines have a much harder time, because the “was the doctoral supervisor of” relation was much less institutionalized in that system. So, for instance, “my wife’s”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lapaul lineage goes back to “A.N. Whitehead”:http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Whitehead.html (via Lewis and Quine), but stops there because I don’t think Whitehead ever had a doctoral adviser in the sense demanded by the lineage-makers. The closest you get (I think) are the examiners of Whitehead’s dissertation (submitted in a successful effort to win a Cambridge Fellowship), one of whom was “Lord Kelvin”:http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Thomson.html, or William Thompson as he then was.
My usual few years behind the curve, I picked up Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060512806/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ yesterday. Right now I’m about a hundred pages in, and I’m wondering whether I should keep reading. The prose is flat. Stephenson keeps lathering-in in chunks of his background reading. Much of that material is interesting, but it’s applied with a trowel. Most of all, a strong whiff of “Mary-Sue”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004188.html wish-fulfillment pervades the whole thing. Here is the author/soldier in Shanghai on the eve of the second world war, earning the respect of Nipponese soldiers by composing haikus, eating sushi and learning judo. Here is the author/genius talking about computability and mathematics with Alan Turing, impressing the hell out of him with his raw, untutored brilliance. Here is the author/unix nerd putting down a bunch of cardboard-cutout cult-stud poseur academics about the _real_ meaning of the Internet. And so on. Does the book warm up at all, or are the next 800 pages more of the same? If the latter, I think I’d be better off finding some of the stuff Stephenson relies on for detail (like Andrew Hodges’ brilliant _Alan Turing: The Enigma_) and just reading that, instead.
“Teresa Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/ links to a “terrific paper”:http://brodylab.eng.uci.edu/~jpbrody/reynolds/lowpurcell.html by E.M. Purcell called “Life at Low Reynolds Number.” The Reynolds Number is, roughly, the ratio of intertia to viscosity in fluids, and if you want to learn more about it I strongly urge you to read the rest of the talk for yourself. I learned about the Reynolds Number in graduate school. It’s not something they teach sociologists, as a rule, but I discovered during my first year that Princeton University Press often had sales at the University Store. Because I am in inveterate dilettante — er, I mean, polymath — I picked up a great book by “Steven Vogel”:http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/Biology/faculty/svogel called “Life’s Devices”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691024189/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/.
What with Tom Cruise and his Scientology-driven antipathy to psychiatric medicine “in the news”:http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8344309/ recently, it might be worth revisiting an old post about the claims that Scientology makes for its founder, the appalling L. Ron Hubbard.
An anonymous correspondent (signing himself only as “The Moor”) sends me two snippets from what he assures me is a section of the majority opinion in “Kelo vs New London”:http://straylight.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-108.ZS.html that was cut at the last minute:
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society. In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend. From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes. You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.
And another:
bq. In fact, this proposition has at all times been made use of by the champions of the state of society prevailing at any given time. First comes the claims of the government and everything that sticks to it, since it is the social organ for the maintenance of the social order; then comes the claims of the various kinds of private property, for the various kinds of private property are the foundations of society, etc. One sees that such hollow phrases are the foundations of society, etc. One sees that such hollow phrases can be twisted and turned as desired.
Here I am in Brisbane airport, though at the moment the chance of sunburn is low (it’s raining) and only 50 percent of our luggage seems to have decided to come along with us. The fact that there was a giant roulette wheel on top of the luggage carousel (advertising the local casinos, I think) did not augur well. We’re en route to Canberra, where we’ll be at the “RSSS”:http://rsss.anu.edu.au/ for a couple of months. Despite the “social sciences” contained in that acronym, it looks as though I’ll be “surrounded by ontologists”:http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/ the whole time.
“Ted’s open letter”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/08/an-open-letter-to-the-new-republic/ and “this post from the Poor Man”:http://thepoorman.net/?p=162 make the point that outrage at Amnesty International’s use of the word “gulag” seems to have provoked more response from the Administration (and some parts of the media) than any amount of confirmed evidence or clear moral argument about the actual practice of torture and other human rights abuses by the U.S. government. A standard official response to the criticisms has been the “bad apple” defense that only a few low-ranking people were involved in isolated cases, and those individuals will be punished. Let’s leave aside the fact that, in Amnesty International’s words, “an archipelago of prisons, many of them secret prisons in which people are being … held in incommunicado detention without access to the judicial system” and where we know prisoners have been “mistreated, abused, and even killed” could hardly have been created by a few bad apples. While I share Ted’s and the Poor Man’s fear that U.S. public opinion — and especially Republican talking-heads — are still willing to swallow whole barrels of bad apples, I wonder how long this excuse can play within the military itself. I’m reminded of the discussion in chapter 9 of Victor Davis Hanson’s _The Western Way of War_ (an excellent book, by the way, despite the author’s recent output). Hanson opens the chapter (“A Soldier’s General”) with this epigraph from Gabriel and Savage’s _Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the Army_:
bq. In Vietnam the record is absolutely clear …: the officer corps simply did not die in sufficient numbers or in the presence of their men often enough to provide the kind of “martyrs” that all primary sociological units, especially those under stress, require if cohesion is to be maintained.
The chapter argues that the best generals are battlefield generals who stand and often die with their men. Leadership from well behind the front lines is much less effective in this respect. Is it plausible to think a similar process might apply to repeated use of the bad apple defense by military officials? How long, in other words, can the officer corps and high command wash their hands on the shirts of their own enlisted soldiers before morale starts to suffer?
Summer Vertigo is the counterpart to Winter Regret, the Christmastime feeling that produces lists of “Books I Did Not Read This Year”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/12/16/books-i-did-not-read-this-year. At the beginning of the Summer break, teaching is done and it seems like there’s a bunch of free time open for you to tackle, oh, well just about any number of projects. Projects fall into three categories:
# Stuff you should be finished with already.
# Stuff that’s been on the back-burner for a while, but is doable now you have some time.
# Fantasy projects that share many of the characteristics of black holes.
Category (1) stuff is the most irritating, because it feels like a continuation of what you’ve been doing all year. This breeds resentment, which inhibits productivity. Category (2) stuff is the most promising, as the groundwork has already been laid some other time, and really it would just take a decent push to generate something tangible, like a couple of new papers. However, things in this category are never as attractive as things in Category (3). These are really easy to come up with, and are guaranteed to fail over the time you have available. Examples include: Learn French. Learn Bayesian statistics. (Presupposes learning matrix algebra properly.) Read Piero Sraffa’s early papers. (Implies reading lots of classical economics.) Reread (and this time _write notes_ about) Identity and Control and Markets from Networks. Read a lot of Bourdieu.
And that’s just a small sample of those Category 3 items that are related to my work. There’s also things like reading West-Eberhard’s Developmental Plasticity and Evolution or any number of other books. Let alone any _fiction_. That’s when I begin to think that what I _really_ need is a way to upload substantial parts of the brains of, say, Brad DeLong or “Cosma Shalizi”:http://www.cscs.umich.edu/%7Ecrshalizi/weblog/ into my own. None of this even broaches subjects like getting my “Ellsworth Truth”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/truth-1.jpg put back together and out on the trail. I feel ill.
“Orin Kerr says”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_06_05-2005_06_11.shtml#1118179393
bq. someone needs to come up with a name for discussions about the blogosphere’s gender/political/racial breakdown. These sorts of questions seem to pop up pretty frequently, and always lead to lots of discussion. Ideas, anyone?
Er, I guess if pushed I “could think of a word”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology. (Maybe this is a VC thing: I remember a while back one of the other conspirators came up with the phrase “Reverse Tinkerbell Effect” to describe self-defeating prophecies or self-undermining beliefs, a phenomenon he seemed to think no-one else had ever noticed.) If you wanted to get legalistic about it (this is the VC, etc) then you might say the request was for a name for the _discussions_ of the blogosphere’s sociology rather than the thing itself. But that would just be the amateur or folk sociology of the blogosphere. This might itself be the subject of study if, for instance, you were interested in explaining the typically depressing structure of discussions about women in blogging, or what have you. Alternatively, maybe Orin is looking for some well-established Usenet folk-concept like “flame war.”
Steve Jobs “announced this morning”:http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jun/06intel.html that Apple will ditch the IBM PowerPC processor and begin using Intel chips in its computers as of next year.
We pause for a moment to allow Mac users to digest that sentence.
“He says”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/opinion/05brooks.html?ex=1275624000&en=8d105859570ef902&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss:
Entering the world of the Higher Shamelessness, they begin networking like mad, cultivating the fine art of false modesty and calculated friendships. The most nakedly ambitious – the blogging Junior Lippmanns – rarely win in the long run, but that doesn’t mean you can’t mass e-mail your essays for obscure online sites with little ‘Thought you might be interested’ notes.
They create informal mutual promotion societies, weighing who will be the crucial members of their cohort, engaging in the dangerous game of lateral kissing up, hunting for the spouse who will look handsomely supportive during some future confirmation hearing, nurturing a dislike for the person who will be the chief rival when the New Yorker editing job opens up in 2027.
He concedes it’s a “normal stage of life,” which maybe shows that (like Gollum) some shred of his former self remains. But honestly: do we really need prim little essays on climbing the greasy pole from someone who’s worked his way on to the Op-Ed page of the _New York Times_? What next? Contempt for authors who undertake book tours? Sneers for those who finagle visiting fellowships at Yale? Scorn for people with little or no insight into themselves or their own career paths?