Month: February 2013

by Doctor Science

I keep seeing references to how surprised Catholics, including those at the Vatican, are by Pope Benedict’s nigh-unprecedented abdication. I cannot figure out why anyone knowledgeable was surprised.

I am by no means a serious Vatican-watcher, but I knew that Benedict repeatedly said that he thought resignation should be an option for a Pope who’s no longer up to the physical and mental rigors of the role. I never thought he was just blowing smoke about this, because I believe he was particularly aware of what my family calls “the Grand Vizier Problem”.

You know how in stories, when the Emperor or other supreme ruler is getting old and maybe sick, the Grand Vizier is there to help the old guy out, take some of the burden of rulership off his weary shoulders, shield him from all those tedious decisions? Yeah. As Terry Pratchett says in Interesting Times:

Grand Viziers were always scheming megalomaniacs. It was probably in the job description: “Are you a devious, plotting, unreliable madman? Ah, good, then you can be my most trusted advisor.”

Absolutely no-one in the world knows better than Benedict how this works for a Pope, because when John Paul II was failing he was the Grand Vizier. And I think that from the start of Benedict’s papacy, one of his goals was to make sure no-one grand-viziers[1] *him*.

Read more

by Doctor Science

Via Slacktivist and Jessica at Friendly Atheist, I’ve learned that WORLD magazine editor and developer of “compassionate conservatism” Marvin Olasky has re-written the lyrics to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, the better to “take the music captive” for Christianity.

Now, I don’t agree with Jessica that “Hallelujah” is The Best Song Ever, but it’s certainly one of the best. Importantly, it’s one of the best and most popular religious songs written in the past several decades. “Religious” in the way Rufus Wainwright described it: “The music never pummels the words. The melody is almost liturgical and conjures up religious feelings.”

The trouble for a Christianist like Olasky is that the complex and poetic lyrics Cohen wrote for “Hallelujah” don’t lend themselves to a single, straightforward, doctrinally pure interpretation. That’s one reason I think they *work*, but it doesn’t make them comfortable in the way he prefers.

I’m cutting here because this somehow turned into 2000 words about “Hallelujah”, religion, the Silmarillion, and Stargate: Atlantis.

Read more

by liberal japonicus

Probably more of an open thread topic (but all my posts are basically open threads), but by way of introduction, I love the observation that zombies are a boy thing, vampires are a girl thing because, like every good joke, there is an uncomfortable observation at the heart of it. Boys like zombies because, when you are in a zombie apocalypse, questions of survival trump questions of committment. On the other hand, 'till death do us part' takes on a whole new level when you are part of the undead.

When we toss in the concept of free will, things get really interesting. While the etiology of zombies is a little more fluid than vampires, I think vampires have it all over zombies in terms of free will. Compelled by the blood lust but fighting it is a lot more appealing romantically than must eat brains, will eat brains.

That's a roundabout way to introduce cats and this article to the mix. 

Certainly Flegr’s thinking is jarringly unconventional. Starting in the early 1990s, he began to suspect that a single-celled parasite in the protozoan family was subtly manipulating his personality, causing him to behave in strange, often self-destructive ways. And if it was messing with his mind, he reasoned, it was probably doing the same to others.

The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes. Since the 1920s, doctors have recognized that a woman who becomes infected during pregnancy can transmit the disease to the fetus, in some cases resulting in severe brain damage or death. T. gondii is also a major threat to people with weakened immunity: in the early days of the AIDSepidemic, before good antiretroviral drugs were developed, it was to blame for the dementia that afflicted many patients at the disease’s end stage. Healthy children and adults, however, usually experience nothing worse than brief flu-like symptoms before quickly fighting off the protozoan, which thereafter lies dormant inside brain cells—or at least that’s the standard medical wisdom.

But if Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents. And that’s not all. He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia. When you add up all the different ways it can harm us, says Flegr, “Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year.”

a bit more below the fold, with an autoplay video.

Read more

by liberal japonicus

A bit early, but I have meetings all day tomorrow. My youngest daughter has started piano. The older daughter started at a Yamaha school and is now taking private lessons and the younger one had to have the same as her older sister is doing now, so she has started private lessons with the same teacher. With Yamaha, there were lesson books and homework, so there wasn't much of a chance for me to do anything, but the private teacher is starting with a 30 minute lesson a week and the youngest comes home and wants to do more. So I started having her write the solfege for the tunes in her piano book.

If you don't know about solfege, it's the system that is related to the syllables that Rodgers and Hammerstein used for the 'Do Re Mi' tune in The Sound of Music. Unfortunately, what I wanted her to learn was the movable do system, where do is the tonic, so that if the song was in the key of C, do would be C, but if it were in the key of F, do would be F. People who learn it this way learn the system as a set of relationships, so learning upon what do is, they can sing the melody and easily identify the intervals. I say unfortunately because the piano teacher said that she (and apparently most Japanese) learn the fixed do system, where the syllables are just names of different notes, so do is nothing more that C. Wikipedia on this point is a bit confusing, saying that Japan uses fixed do in one place, but movable do in another, but I think they correctly note that solfege with a movable do is a Germanic tradition. 

I never learned solfege, but the idea of learning a system where I could immediately place the intervals seems too cool for words. There is a lot of argument about which system is better and one of the arguments against a movable do is that music that does not have a clear tonality. On the other hand, the bulk of western music is tonal, with a clear and discerible tonal center. It's a bit strange, in terms of classical music, Japan had and continues to have a great affinity for Germanic music and Prussian education was the model on which Japan based its education system, but doesn't use the movable do. Since I've not done any musical education in Japan, I don't know if there are places that teach movable do solfege but it is not something that is in elementary school music. Anyway, helping my daughter now seems a bit more mundane. A related subject below the fold

Read more

by Doctor Science

James Fallows at the Atlantic has been covering the ongoing terrible pollution problems in China. I think of Kevin Drum’s discussion of lead and crime, and wonder if the high-crime American past is the Chinese future.

Read more