"This was the voice of moderation until 13 Sept, 2025"
Doctor Science by Doctor Science
Wednesday evening we did something I haven’t done for decades: listened to world-class live music with no electronic component, not even microphones. Music was in the air, and only in the air.
YouTube link.
The Hamburg Symphony Orchestra is touring the US, and the Sprogs and I went to see them at the NJ State Theatre. We only thought to go because one of our closest friends has a brother-in-law in the orchestra, so there was a group expedition.
by Doctor Science
Now *that*’s a phrase to strike fear into every heart. And that’s what I’ve been dealing with for much of the past week — a virus that even pros thought an “interesting case”. The lovely & talented people at geekstogo came to my rescue, and after about two and a half days of work I am finally clean. It was a lot of this:
only *much* less cool.
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Andrew Sullivan pointed to DJ Earworm’s year-end Mashup, United State of Pop 2011 (World Go Boom):
At YouTube
Now, I admit I am a fogey, and I don’t necessarily understand Kids These Days and Their Wacky Music on My Lawn. I watched the video — which I think is extremely cleverly edited — in part to see how many of the riffs and singers I would even recognize. Results: … some? I am not completely ignorant!
But since I am *substantially* ignorant, a number of things about the mashup — and thus about the most popular songs of the day — really jumped out at me.
The big thing is how many of the voices are very similar: they are women’s voices, or, if male, they are tenors. The two voices that really stick out as *different*, tonally, are Lady Gaga’s and Adele’s. It may be that what I’m hearing is really a sea of Autotune, out of which Adele’s voice naturally sticks out like a lighthouse. Gaga’s voice is gritty and naturalistic (if not natural) enough that it, too, sticks out of the humming uniformity.
The fact that so many of the voices are women’s was not what I was expecting, for two reasons. First, the “classic rock” and other music-of-my-youth stations I usually listen to definitely have more male voices than female ones. Second, I remembered a multi-part discussion from much more music-savvy people than I on TigerBeatDown, about how many (white) males — including critics — see nothing wrong with saying they “don’t like women’s singing.” (Also see TBB’s recent satire of how music critics write about male and female artists.)
So both my expectations and logic predicted that the voices of popular music would be male. And yet, that’s not how it seems from the mashup. My immediate reaction: It’s Time for SCIENCE! Or more specifically, data.
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Delaware license plates boast that DE is “The First State”, the first to ratify the Constitution.
But that’s not what I’m talking about. I think Delaware should be the first state on the Presidential primary calendar.
Juan Cole posted about the Iowa Caucuses as the Conservative White People’s Primary, because the population of Iowa is so much whiter than the national average. He is not the first to point out that Iowa (and New Hampshire) are not necessarily the best choices for lead-off Presidential Primaries, because they’re so demographically unlike most of the country.
So I started to wonder, what state(s) *would* be good choices? I collected data and analyzed it; you can follow along in the Googledocs spreadsheet I created. I tried to do it in Tableau, but I ended up in a maze of twisty passageways and eventually gave up. If any of you can show me how to use Tableau, please chime in.
by Doctor Science I am surrounded by incomplete posts, too many open tabs, and a couple of work projects, so I give you: tab dump! The Genuinely Difficult Cases — Hillary Bok, writing about the Institute of Medicine Report saying that chimpanzees should not be used for research except under exceptional circumstances. Guys Aren’t Always … Read more
by Doctor Science A German friend points out that English could really use: Verschlimmbesserung, noun [from Verbesserung (improvement) and Verschlimmerung (deterioration/worsening)]: intended improvements or upgrades that end up making everything worse. Verb form: verschlimmbessern kaputtreparieren, verb (“kaputt” + “repair”): repair or tinker with a thing to the point that it becomes broken. Warning sign for … Read more
by Doctor Science Thea Gilmore, at YouTube. Link from R.G. The Claw of the Conciliator is the second part of Gene Wolfe’s series The Book of the New Sun. It has the following epigraph, from Osip Mandelstam: In the distance disappear the mounds of human heads. I dwindle — go unnoticed now. But in affectionate … Read more
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I’ve been on a Dutch painting of the Golden Age kick recently, so I dug out Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches and was noodling around in it, looking especially at how women’s lives and work were portrayed.
The most distinctive aspect of Dutch women’s work was the constant cleaning:
The spick-and-span towns shone from hours of tireless sweeping, scrubbing, scraping, burnishing, mapping, rubbing and washing. They made an embarrassing contrast to the porridge of filth and ordure that slopped over the cobbles of most other European cities in the seventeenth century. “The beauty and cleanliness of the streets are so extraordinary,” ran an English account, “that Persons of all ranks do not scruple, but even seem to take pleasure in walking them.” [p 375]
Streets so clean you’d want to walk there, wow.
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Sorry about the lack of posting, gang. In addition to doing a lot of that “work” thing, I’ve been shopping for a used car. I don’t know if anyone predicted, back in 1996 or so, how much that old-school business would change in the next ten years. Now, although buying a used car is still a pain in the butt, it’s not a *nightmarish* one.
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by Doctor Science It’s that time of year again — the one where I need to figure out gifts for various friends and relatives. Fortunately, it’s also the time of year when critics and reviewers put together “N Best Xs of the Year” lists. Even more fortunately, almost everyone on my list *loves* books. So: … Read more
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I first heard about SOPA (the Stop Internet Privacy Piracy Act, H.R.3261) and PIPA (the Protect Intellectual Property Act, S968) several weeks ago from Sprog the Younger, who said Tumblr was up in arms about it. I figured the kids were getting overexcited — no-one *really* could want to throttle the Internet like that.
But she was right. They really are that bad, and they really do have a good chance of being passed.
A Dew Drop Falling from a Bird’s Wing Wakes Rosalie, who Has Been Asleep in the Shadow of a Spider’s Web, by Joan Miro. Wake up!
When even A List Apart, a low-key, techie, web design industry site best-known for articles like CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death (it was a game-changer! really!) or Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design — made a political statement about it, I got scared and got real.
by Doctor Science — especially economic history of the 19th century and earlier. As I mentioned before, I’m currently reading Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom by Peter Kolchin. On pp334-35, he’s talking about market-oriented activities: of pomeshchiki (nobles, serf-owners), unfree serfs, and comparatively free “state peasants”: By the late eighteenth century serfs and … Read more
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William Holbrook Beard, The Bulls and Bears in the Market. I can’t figure out if the bears in this close-up:
are looking for more money inside the bull they’ve eviscerated, or are angry because it turned out to be a hollow, bubble-y sort of bull.
In July Bill Domhoff, sociologist at UC Santa Cruz, posted An Investment Manager’s View on the Top 1%, written by a long-time acquaintance who works in the business (and who wants to stay anonymous, not surprisingly). He emphasizes that there are two distinct sets in the “top 1%”:
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Still Life with Turkey Pie, by Pieter Claesz.
As far as I’m concerned, Thanksgiving is a harvest festival[1], where we acknowledge how grateful we are that there was enough to eat this year, and that we’ll have enough to eat this winter. We’ve been members of a CSA for almost 20 years now, and one of the things it’s done has been to give us an old-fashioned gut sense of how fragile food production is.
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I’ve been poking at a follow-up to my first post about Hamlet’s Father, Orson Scott Card, and child abuse for a while now, but the revelations out of Penn State last week make it all too hideously relevant.
Basically, I think Hamlet’s Father is about precisely the kind of abuse there was at Penn State. It’s not a very good story because OSC only put in the abuse, not the cover-up and complicity of people around the abuser. IMHO he left out the cover-up because he didn’t let himself explore the true nature of the situation he was describing, and he did *that* because he can’t let himself acknowledge the truth about the abuse that scarred his own life. But there *is* a really good story in there, asking to be told.
Stained glass from the Elsinore Theatre, Salem, Oregon.
I am cutting here for:
TRIGGER WARNING: discussion of fictional and real-life child abuse, emotional and sexual. Survivors take care.
SPOILER WARNING: post and comments may contain spoilers for any work by Orson Scott Card.
by Doctor Science
Apparently this is the year for TV shows based on fairy tales. I know a bunch of people who are following Once Upon a Time but only few who are following Grimm. Among the latter, though, are a number of German-speaking fans who are watching mostly to mock mercilessly.
The premise of Grimm is that “a cop discovers he is descended from an elite line of criminal profilers known as “Grimms,” charged with keeping balance between humanity and the mythological creatures of the world”. The Brothers Grimm were of course the first (or best-known) of this line, so, very unusually (uniquely?) for American TV, the show uses German names for supernatural creatures and phenomena.
Gustaf Tenggren 1923 illustration for Grimm’s Fairy Tales. In the 1930’s Tenggren was one of Disney’s top illustrators, working on Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi. He knew it was important for fairy-tale heroes to be weak and desperate, not big and bad-ass.
Image via.
by Doctor Science I opened the polling place at 5:15am. We left at 8:30pm. I have now had a full bottle of ommegang[1] and am feeling pretty good, actually, though very much like this: Noontime rest by Van Gogh, after by Millet. John Singer Sargent also did a drawing after the Millet, which makes me … Read more
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I just finished reading Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America by David S. Reynolds. I highly recommend it for giving some real sense of how and why Uncle Tom’s Cabin became the most popular and influential American novel of the 19th century.
One point I hadn’t appreciated before is how huge “Uncle Tom plays” were for shaping American popular culture. I knew that Stowe’s novel had epic sales, though I hadn’t realized how important it was in Great Britain, where it sold a *million* copies in its first year (all without any money coming back to Stowe, as this was before international copyright). But it was the stage productions that really brought Uncle Tom’s Cabin to most Americans — they were the first true American mass culture performances.
Although the main roles were usually taken by white actors in blackface, Tom Shows were also the first opportunity for many African-American entertainers to perform for white audiences. This photo of a Tom Show performance is from the University of Virginia’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture archive, a fascinating and invaluable resource.
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As I hope you all know, Mississippians are going to be voting on a “Fetal Personhood Amendment” on Tuesday. The amendment states:
The term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.
Now, the American Family Association (among others) says
the inclusion of the word cloning in the proposed Amendment is designed to prevent cloning embryos for fetal experimentation and does not in any way condone cloning
I suspect that this is a lie. What they are *trying* to do is to get around the problems twins pose to the idea that human life begins at fertilization.
Twins Sarah and Ann with their mother, Elizabeth Gay Bolling, by Mathew Pratt, 1773. The objects the babies are holding are teething/pacifier/rattles of coral and gold. I don’t blame Mom for looking a bit staggered about the eyes.
by Doctor Science I’m not *completely* crazy, so I’m not doing NaNoWriMo, but I am going to try WriSoMiFu. The specific variant I am choosing: write a blog post per day, spending no more than one hour on the writing part. For me this will be practically Twitter-like, real high-speed stream-of-consciousness stuff. The first second[1] … Read more
by Doctor Science Herman Cain has lured all the flat-tax advocates out into the open again, and I’m trying to find a more effective way to reply to them than banging my head against the wall and chanting “regressive! regressive!” Here’s a typical specimen, taken from the comments to Paul Krugman’s blog: Why should taxes … Read more
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Last month there was quite a uproar in the sf/fantasy realm over Orson Scott Card’s novella Hamlet’s Father, a re-working of Hamlet in which Hamlet’s father turns out to have been a gay child molester. Rose Fox at Publisher’s Weekly has a good summary of the firestorm; as she says,
But this is the thing about offensiveness grenades: they may look entirely inert for so long that you forget they’re dangerous, but sooner or later, they explode.
One reason for the uproar is that OSC (as he’s often known) is outspokenly anti-homosexual — yonmei’s posts on Dissecting Orson Scott Card go into all the detail you can stomach.
“Hamlet’s Father” was originally published in The Ghost Quartet, four sf/horror novellas edited by Marvin Kaye, so I got it out of the library and read it to judge for myself. What I found was that the people objecting to the story (who actually read it, that is) were mostly IMHO reading it wrong. This is not surprising, because IMHO OSC *wrote* it wrong.
William Alexander at Rain Taxi is wrong when he describes the “punch line” as:
“Old King Hamlet was an inadequate king because he was gay, an evil person because he was gay, and, ultimately, a demonic and ghostly father of lies who convinces young Hamlet to exact imaginary revenge on innocent people.
And Publisher’s Weekly is wrong to say:
the focus is primarily on linking homosexuality with the life-destroying horrors of pedophilia
I disagree. The story is not in any developed way about homosexuality, it is about child abuse. In that respect, it’s very much like the rest of OSC’s fiction, which focuses on the figure of an abused child with a consistency I can only call compulsive.
So (IMHO, IMHO, it’s all just A Theory Which Is Mine) OSC wrote it wrong because he’s unable to look clearly at the pictures he himself paints. A basic rule of fiction writing is “Show, Don’t Tell” — and what OSC *shows* is the traditional, patriarchal family as a nightmare of abuse, while what he *tells* is that these are the only “real families” worthy of respect.
I am cutting here for:
TRIGGER WARNING: discussion of fictional and real-life child abuse, emotional and sexual. Survivors take care.
SPOILER WARNING: post and comments may contain spoilers for any work by Orson Scott Card.
PSYCHOBIOGRAPHY WARNING: includes analysis and speculation about the psychological makeup of a living person, verging on Real Person Fic. May contain trace Freudian concepts.
by Doctor Science
In recent months my primary fresh fandom has been Hawaii 5-0, but now that Season 2 has begun we’ve broken up. It’s not me, show, it’s you —
Steve McGarrett (back to camera) has a few questions for a witness. You can’t tell in this still from episode 2×03, but the guy’s arm is in a sling. Also, it turns out he hasn’t done anything wrong.
— but I’ll talk more about the militarization of American TV police in another post.
So being in the market for a new fandom, I decided to check out the Sprogs’ latest interest: Homestuck by Andrew Hussie (AH) at MS Paint Adventures. It started out as a webcomic about an interactive game, I guess, but by now I’d have to call it a web narrative, or indeed a web *epic*. I really hope to see it nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story next year; IMHO it certainly deserves to win, not least because it’s really science fictional.
A young lady stands in her bedroom. Due to a violent storm, her house has just lost power, along with her wireless internet connection. This has severed her link to a popular video game she was playing with a young man at a critical moment. That young man is relying on this young lady to reestablish a connection somehow. See full-sized at MS Paint Adventures.
by Doctor Science I just finished Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. He has some really good points to make and a number of very useful takes on some problems in world history, roller-skate division, but also a number of errors, lacunae, or real WTF moments. The … Read more
by Doctor Science As I write, there is a medical crisis at Antarctica’s South Pole Station. Raytheon (the contractor that runs the Station) and the National Science Foundation (which is responsible for it) are refusing to authorize a medevac. Desperate relatives of the patient have created a website to publicize the situation, and are petitioning … Read more
by Doctor Science What I’m reading now and hope to post about soon: Hamlet’s Father by Orson Scott Card. Available as a standalone or as first published, in a collection your library might have. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution By Francis Fukuyama. I may have to do a … Read more
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Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. Suffering leads to the Dark Side.
— Yoda
As I’ve said, my emotional reaction to September 11 was full of fear and grief. Now, it has often seemed to me — and to many others — that in the years after that day much of the American people went crazy with fear. In particular, this was how I felt about the push for the Iraq War.
But I opposed the war, from the start. Does that mean I was less frightened by 9/11 than the war’s supporters? Or that I was as frightened as they were, but braver?
The Charge of the Light Brigade, by Richard Caton Woodville.
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I’m gathering up a bunch of threads that came up in the Methos on September 11 post and answering them here.
The question, “Were New World populations significantly reduced by Old World diseases introduced after 1492?” is currently considered settled by historians, and the answer is “Yes”. If this startles you, it *is* a paradigm shift from what you probably grew up learning — but it’s a really solid shift with a huge weight of evidence behind it. The best popular account is 1491, by Charles Mann; I’m on the library waiting list for 1493 and will be sure to review it here when I’ve read it.
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The Tower, by Pamela Colman Smith, from the Rider-Waite Tarot deck. Unsourced description from Wikipedia:
Chaos —– Sudden change —– Impact —– Hard times
Crisis —– Revelation —– Disruption —– Realizing the truth
Disillusion —– Crash —– Burst —– Uncomfortable experience
Downfall —– Ruin —– Ego blow —– Explosive transformation
One of the most important parts of September 11, 2001 for me was a conversation with someone who doesn’t exist.
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There are many important, time-sensitive things going on in the world. This post is about language, art, and geography, and is not time-sensitive in any way.
I was recently linked to Derek Watkins’ map of generic terms for streams and other small watercourses:
by Doctor Science
If anyone tries to claim that Irene was “no big deal”, I plan to punch them in the neck. Here in NJ (within range of my fist) there are no such people, fortunately for us all.
Our house had very little trouble during Irene, only a little water in the basement. We’re plenty stressed, though, because the salle where my husband fences was very heavily damaged by flooding.
The door here was punched open from the *inside*, by floodwaters that had smashed a wall on their way in. Credit: BCAF.
Not from the Delaware River, which we’d been worrying about; instead, the creek next to the building overflowed in a surprising flash flood — probably from the reservoir on the hill.
Several days after the flood, no official explanation for the water surge has been given, though water company officials acknowledge that some water may have spilled from the reservoir as two days of steady rain filled it up.
Sounds to me as though the finger-pointing has barely begun.
by Doctor Science
Incoming Tide, Scarboro, Maine by Winslow Homer, IMHO the greatest painter of the ocean in the canon of Western art.
We’re finishing up our Irene prep, so I’ll keep this short. We’re 30 miles from the ocean, so we don’t have to worry about storm surges and such. Using Hurricane Floyd as our baseline, we expect a power outage, a couple inches of water in the basement, and possibly the water treatment plant will fail again and we don’t have potable water for a few days. We have a gas stove this time, so I’m not too worried about not having food.
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In Why We Eat What We Eat, Raymond Sokolov wrote:
Real (as I will call vine-ripened, soft-walled, acid-flavored, summer-grown) tomatoes are an article of faith, a rallying point for the morally serious, a grail. And the real tomato’s acolytes are not some ragged band of malcontents. They are us, brothers and sisters in tomato-mania, converts to the first Western religion since the Stone Age to worship a plant. [p. 112; emphasis mine]
Sokolov’s book was published 20 years ago, but his remarks about tomatoes have only become more accurate with time.
On the one hand, we have what you might call Tomato Satanism, described by Brian Estabrook in Tomatoland: winter tomatoes from Florida, hard and tasteless, raised on chemicals and picked by workers who may be out-and-out slaves.
On the other, there’s this:
by Doctor Science
Slacktivist Fred Clark talks about South Carolina Tea Partiers sneering at the idea of “government of the people, by the people and for the people”. I think this is another aspect of what Andrew Sullivan accurately calls America’s Cold Civil War, which is also what Dennis G. (dengre) means by the modern Republican Confederate Party and which digby talks about in a post that came up as I was writing this.
It’s no coincidence that “of the people, by the people, for the people” was a statement by the Union President, and that South Carolinians are the ones objecting. South Carolina was the spark plug for what James McPherson has accurately called The War of Southern Aggression. South Carolinians were most aggressive because they had the most to lose: SC had a black slave majority. Both democracy and the Golden Rule would have been deeply threatening to white South Carolinians.
But it wasn’t just SC. In What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War, Chandra Manning shows that Confederate and Union soldiers, especially enlisted men, had different attitudes toward government — and I see those differences still playing out today.
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… or this week, anyway. Chris Clarke and Abi Sutherland are having an old-fashioned jammin’ and stampin’ poetry SMACKdown.
It began thus:
Abi Sutherland – May I serve you a peach, sir? I do like the way you’re wearing those white flannel trousers; rolling them definitely suits you.
The beach? Why, it’s this way.
Chris Clarke – this is just to say
I have fenced
the lawn
that was in my yard
and which you were probably hoping to be on.
Abi Sutherland – “You are old, Mr Clarke,” the woman said, stunned,
“And your music has gone out of style;
Yet your circles are full and your comments +1’d
Have you been on the net a long while?”
“In my youth,” Mr. Clarke replied to the lass,
“Our flamewars used genuine fires.
I still carve my zeroes; my ones are hand-cast.
They barely fit through the wires.”
…and proceeded to riff on —
Four women composing poetry, possibly as a competition, by Eishi Hosoda. The Library of Congress notes say it’s from a series of Tale of Genji prints.