Author: Joe Page 5 of 31

Site manager

Information, Data, Information

On December 31, 2022

I’m catching up with A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry. They have a guest post from James Baillie about prosopography from a few weeks ago. I did not know that prosopography has expanded from family relationships to more general connections. In fact, it seems to have crossed over into graph analysis. I hope they have taken Frank Harary’s appeal to heart and aren’t just drawing pictures, but are also using the mathematical power of a graph.

There’s interesting stuff there about medieval Georgia¹, but the larger point Baillie gets across is about data-driven historical research: “a data structure or a block of code are things that make implicit and subjective arguments about how to see the world.” This is a good point, which I’ve lived in another context. In our modern world, data are everywhere. The job of combining data and synthesizing information from them employs a lot of people.

A historian has to do the reverse task as well, though. The evidence that we are given from the past is not data, pace² the dictionary, we aren’t given data; we’re given information. We have immensely-powerful tools for processing digital data, which everyone should apply wherever they can. In order to exploit the power of data processing, though, a lot of human thought has to go into creating the database.

This is the way it used to be. The word “analysis” referred to the step where observations of the real world were cut up into data, then “synthesis” was how we reassembled the data into a theoretical framework.³ Our world of ubiquitous surveillance has greatly reduced the first step, causing us to put the lion’s share of our effort into the second. If we’re not careful we can lose sight of all the thought that needs to go into observation and analysis, and misinterpret what we’re seeing when we look at the synthesis. Good job by Baillie putting out that reminder.

Who’s Smarter?

By Joe

On December 17, 2022

In Uncategorized

I have recently made the acquaintance of a Philological Crocodile, who raises an interesting question: Are scientists really smarter than scholars of the humanities? ⁴ And then the crocodile chomps it to bits. As it happens, I have an opinion on this question. Fortunately, I commit neither of the sins he excoriates.

I know a lot of really smart people on both sides of the divide. The humanities scholars are better at arguing. The scientists accomplish more, so we look smarter. This appearance can be traced to one underlying fact: in the sciences we have an objective standard for what is “true”. No theory ever completely passes that test, but a lot of ideas fail it. In the humanities, nothing seems ever to be completely decided. Any theory is as good as the person arguing for it.

This has an immediate practical consequence. Those who purport to study the humanities must learn centuries of earlier work and include it in their research. A dissertation in the humanities has hundreds of pages of description of earlier thoughts on the subject, accompanied by acknowledgements or refutations. The sciences carry little of that baggage. Because a scientist can be proven incorrect or irrelevant, all the previous thinkers and researchers who have turned out to be wrong can be ignored. Therefore, the sciences can progress faster.

My dissertation; banana for scale

A visit to our Physics Department library in the 1980s gave me a lasting impression of this phenomenon. One bookcase held printed copies of all the doctoral dissertations in the history of the department. Most were about a centimeter thick. These were written by people who had made a significant original contribution to our knowledge of the natural world. A couple were 7-10 cm thick. These were dissertations for degrees in education or philosophy of science.

Mine was 133 pages long, double-spaced, and that includes the ancient tradition that figures should be on their own page and the caption on the facing page. My references were numbered 1 through 64. Can you imagine anyone getting past a humanities review committee with 64 citations? Citations to the committee-members themselves probably have to be more than that.

So that’s my resolution of the whole argument. Scientists look smarter if we’re measuring achievement, but humanities scholars look smarter when we argue with them. If the humanities had a way to prove someone definitively wrong, future researchers could ignore anyone in that category and everyone could save a lot of time. It invites speculation — what would the humanities look like, if they advanced like the sciences do?

Surveying Twitter Replacements

By Joe

On November 25, 2022

In squibs & crackers

Twitter is going downhill. I’ll stay there as long as I can, but I’ve been looking for a new place. I’m back from safari. Here’s my report on a few alternatives. I’ve visited Reddit and Imgur as well, but they seem qualitatively different from an actual twitter successor.

Micro.blog

Been there: Since 2018. Cost: Everybody pays $5/mo. Activity level: Quiet.

The place’s affect is weirdly decaffeinated. The population trends younger X to Millenials. People here don’t like my jokes much.

This is the most interesting place from the social/software point of view. You’re not supposed to be a mere consumer of social media and clicker of hearts. Your posts to micro.blog are actually links to a real blog in an old-fashioned web-ring. Things you post here, i.e. to your micro-blog, will show up in a Google search. Every account has a built-in podcasting capability, too, though I’ve never used it. The site doesn’t have passwords; the server sends an e-mail with a link to click every time you log in. The iOS app is good (and you stay logged in). You can’t “like” a post; you have to say something nice instead. Nobody uses hashtags; they use emojis instead. Supports markdown for formatting posts.

I’ve only found one interesting professor to follow on this site. Lots of photographers.

Counter.social

Been there: Since April. Cost: Free, but I pay $5/mo for Pro membership. Activity level: Firehose

The friendliest social network. Everybody there seems cheerful and they’re promiscuous with upvotes and shares. It’s run by a famous hacker (all by himself). Counter.social is built on the Mastodon platform. When I joined I thought it was part of the Mastodon fediverse, but they’ve had a disagreement, so it went its own way. That means you can’t follow other Mastodonians from here. The Jester is so serious about keeping misogynists and fascists out that he’s blocked entire countries. I trust the security on this site. Somebody may try to get in, but I pity the fool. There are places for Virtual Reality chat rooms on the site. If anybody has ever used them, I haven’t seen it.

Update: you can get to CoSo from the web. Here I am, and here’s Corlin who clued me in.

No academics here. It’s mostly for everyday life and snarking about politics. A stranger once congratulated me for a “Tolkien deep cut” on this site. It was a quote from LotR.

Mastodon

Been there: 1 week. Cost: I’ll start chipping in if I like the place. Activity level: Firehose.

I’m on the universeodon server, which I can’t spell. I chose it because a couple of people from my Twitter feed are there. This site is the closest to reproducing my Twitter timeline. People I follow are here, as well as quite a few people I never followed because all their tweets got retweeted to me anyway. Old-timers use pseudonyms; twitter refugees use their real names. The program has gotten a bad rap on Twitter but I haven’t had any problems with it. I use the web interface because I haven’t heard enough good things about the app. Weirdly, “log out” is under the Preferences menu. Is that an omen?

The hard part is choosing a server, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t pick the ideal one. They’re interconnected really well. All the admins seem to be suffering a mild case of shock these days. If things coalesce in a few months, we can all get together somewhere.

I’ve found lots of interesting professors to follow. Humanities Commons runs its own Mastodon instance, invitation only, but they’ve had a really bad week for crashes.

Post.news

Been there: 1 day. Cost: complicated. Activity level: Garden hose.

Intended to be a place for grownups. You have to ask to join, but if they let me in they must not be too picky. (Write something interesting in the box where they ask you who you are; it helps.) People mostly use their real names. In terms of appearance, Post looks like Apple where Mastodon looks like Linux. It’s a private, for-profit company like Twitter that’s planning to make money off its users’ network.

The site is changing by the hour – things that were bugs this morning are fixed now. Supports markdown for formatting posts. The unique feature here is that you can tip the writer for a good post. 1 point is a US penny; everybody gets 50 of them to start with. This might be a good way to pay writers who only occasionally come into my sphere of interests. People here like my jokes. I had followers within a few hours of joining.

So far it’s mostly journalists, humorists, and people with cats and dogs. This might turn into my new “front page”.

Idiosophical Tag Cloud

By Joe

On November 25, 2022

In scholarship

I’ve just handed in my essay for Gardeners of the Galaxies. But before I did, I ran it through the JSTOR Text Analyzer to see if there was anything I’d missed. It found me a paper I’d never heard of that was relevant enough to include.

In the process it produced a list of relevant tags. My first reaction to it was, “What in the world did I just write?” My second reaction was, “Mission Accomplished!”

Hobbits and their Soil

By Joe

On November 23, 2022

In squibs & crackers

Tom Hillman’s latest post cites C.S. Lewis citing Tolkien musing about the effect of living in one place and eating local produce for generations. Maybe, the musing goes, that is the source of hobbits’ apparent power to resist evil.

As it happens, I was just reading about the dangers of eating locally. William Albrecht wrote a famous paper⁵ about the sorry condition of the teeth of military recruits during World War 2. The men with the worst teeth were geographically concentrated in areas where the combination of soil mineralization and rainfall caused calcium deficiency. Eating locally was the source of the problem. In our modern food system, we eat food from all over, so this doesn’t happen so often.

But then it struck me: I’ve never heard of the Native Americans who originally lived in the Appalachians having dental problems. Google Scholar only finds a few skeletons, explicitly described as anomalous. Bad teeth are found in only the descendants of European colonists. Eliot’s line about how ‘We are synthetic men, uprooted’ seems to be applicable in more places than just the Shire.

Not today, Yoda

By Joe

On November 19, 2022

In Academy and Society

It’s really hard to address climate change because the bad effects take a generation to appear, but people value the here-and-now. I’m writing an essay about this for “Gardeners of the Galaxies“.

As much as I don’t like the idea of a discount rate when people are planning for the future, I’ve always had to admit that contradicting it makes matters worse. People who contradict it are the “longtermists” and “effective altruists” who somehow always turn out to be swindling people or smashing things without producing anything of value.

The language is full of exhortations about this, like “the beam in thine own eye” or “clean up your own backyard”. But I hope the editors appreciate my restraint in not citing Yoda:

All his life has he looked away to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph.

It amuses me that so many of the sites on line that offer quotations from Yoda also include his grunts. It reminds me of the Usenet FAQ that asserted when the Swedish Chef spoke, the words meant nothing. All the semantic content was in the “bork, bork, bork!” at the end.

Update

That feeling when you cite an article with a fairly harsh tone, and then two weeks later discover that the author was just getting started. Emile Torres, who wrote the article about longtermism, has two new articles out in the last couple of days. One in Salon, and another in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

The Old Ways Return

By Joe

On October 22, 2022

In trivial

In the newspaper the other day I read that we know we’re getting enough sleep “if we’re able to problem solve.” I’d never seen this particular locution written down before. Managers have been talking like that for years, though. They’ll open a meeting by saying, “we need to level set,” or “first it would be good to goal set,” or even “we have an opportunity to game change.”

As one is promoted high enough in an organization, one gains affinity for Bovine Spongiform English (as The Economist memorably called it), so this is natural. When a manager said something like that, I’ve always just snickered inaudibly and moved on, confident that an editor would remove any such abomination before it hit print. But there it is, in The Washington Post. It looks like this one might be sticking.

Let’s take it apart. The evolution goes like this:

A verb and a direct object go together so often that they become a single unit: It changed the game.
A gerundive form appears to describe whatever “it” was: A game-changing innovation.
The boss desires another such thing: Come up with a game-changer.
The belly-flop into neologism comes when the hyphen becomes a space: We need to game change.

Step 4 isn’t guaranteed. Sometimes the two words get fused into one, the process stops, and no one is harmed: homemaker, firefighter, windbreaker, …. Nobody objects to that. What’s going on with these new things?

I think it’s an ancient, hoary beast coming to life. Germanic languages like to have the verb at the end of a sentence. Not in the simple cases, of course. In simple sentences where it’s important to get to the point (A bear ate Uncle Olaf) verbs sensibly go next to subjects. But when matters get complicated, so complicated that we need managers and hierarchies and chains of command, the verb gets arrogant, making everybody wait upon it, until the last moment when it makes its appearance.

English dalliance with Romance languages has been a fact of life for a millenium, but the Old Ways are only sleeping, not dead. They could return at any time. I noticed a lot of modal auxiliary verbs in those examples. They’re the ones who give permission to the main verb to slouch off to the end.

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
– A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Is this really the future we want to leave to our children?

Updates

Since this post was published, I’ve been afflicted with

“We need you to role model,”
“At that point we will need to risk mitigate.”
“This is no time to hand wring.”

On March 13, 2024, in the Washington Post, “”Though only 12 bipartisan lawmakers signed onto the measure thus far, the group continues to temperature check with party leaders and colleagues.” We just need to move the party leaders and colleagues to follow continues.

Alliteration: not just for good guys anymore

By Joe

On September 30, 2022

In Alliterative Verse

Just watched “The Rings of Power” episode 6. About four minutes in, Adar is giving his troops an inspirational speech. Maybe I’m imagining it, but it sounds like he’s trying for alliterative verse. I was scribbling as fast as I can, but this is pretty close to what he said:

We cast off our shackles, crossed mountain and field,
Frost and fallow, till our feet bloodied the dirt.
From Ered Mithrin to the Ephel Arnen, we have endured…

Oops — mistake there at the end. (“Overcome” would have worked.) I guess when you’ve been warped by the evils of Morgoth, one of the first things you lose is strict adherence to poetic form.

Dwarfsong

By Joe

On September 4, 2022

In squibs & crackers

My favorite part of the Amazon “Rings of Power” series so far is when Disa is explaining how Dwarves understand the rocks around them. She sings to the rocks, and the way they resonate to her song tells her about the composition inside them, so she knows where to dig.

This resonates with me, too, because I worked in ultrasonic materials-characterization at NASA back in my salad days. That’s exactly how we did it. The speed of sound in rock is around 6,000 m/s and in gold it’s about 3,200 m/s, so this would definitely work. Wherever her song hit a vein of gold, the change in the speed of propagation means sound waves would refract and reflect back to the singer.

It also tells us something about Dwarves that we didn’t know before. Some background: The speed of a wave is equal to the wavelength times the frequency. The smallest feature you can identify with sound waves is about a wavelength in size. If Disa is a soprano, she can sing a note that’s about 1100 Hertz, which means she can’t hear anything in the rock smaller than 5.4 meters across, which is about 18 feet. That’s not very useful; she must be able to sing higher than that. You could do a lot with notes 10 times that high. A seam of ore is frequently a foot wide. Maybe she can sing 10-20 kHz. That’s the top end of what humans can hear, but it’s well within a dog’s range. Dwarf women and dogs might get along well.

Domesticated animal

Real precision work will take more, though. The head of a rock-hammer is about 2 cm across. It would be more useful to find things that size. To hear something that small, she’ll need to sing about 300 kilohertz. That’s too high even for bats, who max out at 200 kHz, but there are clever things you can do to improve resolution if you have more than one transmitter. Disa is certainly doing something like that, since she’s talking about a song, not just a note. She could be accompanied by a bat chorus. Just like humans keep chickens in a coop near the house, Dwarves might keep a cave of bats near their own excavation to help with surveying.

Conclusions

We don’t know anything about female Dwarves because not only are they rarely seen, they’re impossible to hear.
People who compose film music for Dwarves that is dominated by bass notes have it all backwards.

The Long-Forgotten Physical Therapy Blues

By Joe

On August 27, 2022

In trivial

One of the pleasures of old age and fading memory⁶ is that I can find new things to read that match my sense of humor perfectly. I was cleaning up my disk today and came upon a file called “untitled.txt” dated 2013, which contained a short blues lyric:

I know a woman, she treats me so mean,
She’s the meanest damned woman that I’ve ever seen.

She’s bad to the bone, but she’s worse to the tendon.
Stay with this woman, the pain’s never endin’.

If I’d ever sung this song to my physical therapist, I’d have clear memories of the consequences, so I’m sure this is its first publication.