Ewe Fetish

Fetish (magical idol) from the Ewe people of central Africa, from the Cavin Morris Gallery. One shudders to think what sort of spell this was used to cast.

Happy Halloween.

The Thrill of Being Right

The Aspen Ideas Festival asked a bunch of famous intellectuals, "What Insight or Idea has Thrilled You?" Mathematician John Allen Paulos answered with this story:

I could mention my first introduction to Godel’s theorem about the essential incompleteness of mathematics; or my first encounter with the Banach-Tarski theorem in topology showing that a sphere the size of a pea can be decomposed into a finite number of pieces and put back together to get a sphere the size of a basketball; or Russell’s paradox about the set of all sets that do not belong to themselves; or any number of counterintuitive results in probability theory. All of these mathematical ideas excited me in high school and college, but I will concentrate instead on the thrill I felt in elementary school when I saw that the power of simple arithmetic was sufficient to vanquish a bully, my fifth-grade teacher. It still evokes the same emotions in me that it did decades ago.

I was about 10 years old and enthralled with baseball. I loved playing the game and aspired to be a major league shortstop. (My father played in college and professionally in the minor leagues.) I also became obsessed with baseball statistics and noted that a relief pitcher for the then Milwaukee Braves had an earned run average (ERA) of 135. (The arithmetic details are less important than the psychology of the story, but as I dimly recall, the pitcher had allowed the opposing team to score five runs and had got only one batter out. Getting one batter out is equivalent to pitching one-third of an inning, one-27th of a complete nine-inning game––and allowing five runs in one-27th of an inning translates into an ERA of 5/(1/27) or 135.)

Impressed by this extraordinarily bad ERA, I mentioned it diffidently to my teacher during a class discussion of sports. He looked pained and annoyed and sarcastically asked me to explain the fact to my class. Being quite shy, I did so with a quavering voice, a shaking hand, and a reddened face. (A strikeout in self-confidence.) When I finished, he almost bellowed that I was confused and wrong and that I should sit down.

An overweight coach and gym teacher with a bulbous nose, he asserted that ERA’s could never be higher than 27, the number of outs in a complete game.

For good measure he cackled derisively.

Later that season, The Milwaukee Journal published the averages of all the Braves players. Since this pitcher hadn't pitched again, his ERA was 135, as I had calculated. I remember thinking then of mathematics as a kind of omnipotent protector. I was small and quiet and he was large and loud. But I was right and I could show him. This thought and the sense of power it instilled in me was exciting. So, still smarting from my earlier humiliation, I brought in the newspaper and showed it to him. He gave me a threatening look and again told me to sit down. His idea of good education apparently was to make sure everyone remained seated. I did sit down but this time with a slight smile on my face.

We both knew I was right and he was wrong.

Indeed being proved right is one of the most seductive possible experiences, luring many of us to pursue knowledge as a calling. Unfortunately it also lures many of us into arrogance, or at least it did me. Full of my own intellectual victories over teachers, textbooks and peers, I was at 19 a pompous, insufferable jerk. But I have mostly gotten over it, and I learned a huge amount along the way.

Gray

Yesterday I will filling out yet another form to get access to a government facility and when it came to "hair color" I unthinkingly checked the box for "Brown," as I have for my whole life. About a minute later it occurred to me that I should have checked the box for "Gray."

The Sad Truth about Our Species

It’s very hard to find any examples of people who have changed their minds.

--Paul Krugman (He's writing about deficit/inflation scolds, who have been forecasting higher interest rates for 5 years now, but the statement has universal applicability.)

Meanwhile in Galt's Gulch

The proposed Libertarian utopia of Galt's Gulch in Chile, imagined by investors as a refuge from the coming implosion of the socialist United States, has collapsed into lawsuits and recriminations and may have been nothing more than a scam.

Losses

Of Aeschylus' eighty or ninety plays and the roughly one hundred twenty by Sophocles, only seven each have survived; Euripides and Aristophanes did slightly better: eighteen of ninety-two play by the former have come down to us; eleven of forty-three by the latter.

These are the great success stories. Virtually the entire output of many other writers, famous in antiquity, has disappeared without a trace. Scientists, historians, mathematicians, philosophers, and statesmen have left behind some of their achievements -- the invention of trigonometry, for example, or the calculation of position by reference to latitude and longitude, or the rational analysis of political power -- but their books are gone. The indefatigable scholar Didymus of Alexandria earned the nickname Bronze-Ass for having what it took to write more than 3,500 books; apart from a few fragments, all have vanished. At the end of the fifth century CE an ambitious literary editor known as Stobaeus compiled an anthology of prose and poetry by the ancient world's best authors: out of 1,430 quotations, 1,115 are from works are now lost.

In this general vanishing, all the works of the brilliant founders of atomism, Leucippus and Democritus, and most of the works of their intellectual heir Epicurus, disappeared. Epicurus had been extraordinarily prolific. He and his principal philosophical opponent, the Stoic Chrysippus, wrote between them, it was said, more than a thousand books. Even if the figure is exaggerated or if it counts as books what we would regard as essays and letters, the written record was clearly massive. That record no longer exists. . . .

There was a time in the ancient world -- a very long time -- in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of knowledge in one's head? The loss of this plenitude would have been virtually inconceivable to anyone living in its midst.

--Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve

The Pope's Doves, or, Hopes for Peace in a Savage World

So the pope and two schoolchildren released two "peace doves" from the Vatican balcony.

But Rome is a tough place for tame doves. The first was promptly attacked and bloodied by a gull.

The second suffered the same fate at the hands of a crow. More pictures and video here.

Sometimes Everyday Life is the Hardest Thing

Everydayness is my problem. It’s easy to think about what you would do in wartime, or if a hurricane blows through, or if you spent a month in Paris, or if your guy wins the election, or if you won the lottery or bought that thing you really wanted. It’s a lot more difficult to figure out how you’re going to get through today without despair.

--Rod Dreher

I spent a little while in two different intentional Christian communities, hanging out with homeless teenagers, and going to a church called “Scum of the Earth” (really). I gave away a bunch of clothes, went barefoot, and wanted to be among the “least of these.” At a gathering of Christian communities, I slept in a cornfield and spent a week using composting toilets, learning to make my own cleaning supplies, and discussing Christian anarchy while listening to mewithoutyou. I went to Christian Community Development Association conferences, headed up a tutoring program for impoverished, immigrant children, and interned at some churches trying to bridge the gap between wealthier evangelicals and the poor. . . .

Now, I’m a thirty-something with two kids living a more or less ordinary life. And what I’m slowly realizing is that, for me, being in the house all day with a baby and a two-year-old is a lot more scary and a lot harder than being in a war-torn African village. What I need courage for is the ordinary, the daily every-dayness of life. Caring for a homeless kid is a lot more thrilling to me than listening well to the people in my home. Giving away clothes and seeking out edgy Christian communities requires less of me than being kind to my husband on an average Wednesday morning or calling my mother back when I don’t feel like it.

--Trish Harrison Warren

The Pursuit of a Boring Lifestyle

Timothy Noah:

In essence, U.S. vs. Windsor is about being allowed to lead a respectable bourgeois existence married to and eventually widowed by the person you love, even if that person happens to be the same sex as you. . . . When the history books are written, one likely conclusion will be that the swift ascendancy of gay rights in the second decade of the 21st century was largely attributable to gay people’s relentless pursuit of a boring lifestyle.

Learning and Longing

"There are some who call my order the knights of the mind," Luwin replied. "You are a surpassing clever boy when you work at it, Bran. Have you ever thought that you might wear a maester's chain? There is no limit to what you might learn."

"I want to learn magic," Bran told him. "The crow promised me I would fly."

Maester Luwin sighed. "I can teach you history, healing, herblore. I can teach you the speech of ravens, and how to build a castle, and the way a sailor steers his ship by the stars. I can teach you to measure the days and mark the seasons, and a thousand things more. But, Bran, no man can teach you magic."

--George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones