Idiosophy

A physicist loose among the liberal arts

Author: Joe Page 6 of 31

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The secret of a strong field of research

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On August 6, 2022

In scholarship, Uncategorized

Boethius looks depressed about how much work writing a philosophical tract is turning out to be

Boethius is about to get schooled

Last year, Brenton Dickieson wrote a series of blog posts asking the question, “Why is Tolkien Scholarship Stronger than Lewis Scholarship?”  The third post gives a number of hypotheses that may answer the question, but no definite conclusion was reached. The discussion in those posts, and the comments that follow them, is much better informed than I can be. However, I can always contribute to the low end of a scholarly debate.

The Idiosopher’s Razor: When several hypotheses are consistent with the evidence, the least dignified one is to be preferred.1

I’ve recently been researching criticism of Poul Anderson’s science fiction. A lot of people named “Anderson” have written books,2 which means that the first step answering any question, at the moment, is making sure I’ve got the right Anderson. It’s the literary equivalent of the “data cleaning” problem in statistics. It’s a huge part of the work in studying anything, C.S. Lewis for example. That’s a trans-disciplinary fact. And don’t even get me started about “Charles Williams”!

This is a problem that Tolkien scholars never have. Anybody writing about anyone named “Tolkien” is certain to be relevant. Looking up Tolkien is a lot easier than looking up Anderson, Lewis, or whomever. Eliminating a laborious step in the research lowers one of the barriers to getting the paper written. Applying our Razor, we can slice away many hypotheses in favor of pure laziness. Tolkien papers are easier to research, so there will be more of them, and the best of a larger group will often be better than the best of a smaller group, such as the papers about Lewis.

I think I just understood Shakespeare scholarship, too.

 

Dominic Flandry and the Bechdel Test

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On July 21, 2022

In trivial

For my latest project, I’m re-reading Poul Anderson’s “Dominic Flandry” stories.  This observation is totally beside the point of the actual research, and what else is a blog for?

Imperfectly consistent with the feminist ideal

Ensign Flandry was published in 1966, when Alison Bechdel was in kindergarten. It’s an adventure story written for teenaged boys, so it’s no surprise that the book doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test.

But here’s the funny thing: if it were made into a movie, even in the 1960’s, the movie would have passed the test. The Tigeries of Starkad are ruled by females in a group they call “The Sisterhood”. The males are just foot soldiers and sailors. While Flandry is off on another planet, their military conflict with the sea people escalates to the point of full mobilization. Anderson describes the scene this way: “Banners snapped to the wind, shield bore monsters and thunderbolts luridly colored. It was no mob. It was the fighting force of Ujanka, summoned by the Sisterhood.”

The political machinations among the Sisterhood all take place off-screen in the novel, but a movie adaptation would unavoidably replace that exposition with a scene about the debate over wartime preparations in the Council, which would have featured a room full of women, several of whom are named, not talking about a man. Dominic Flandry is an outrageous womanizer (though he also has admirable qualities), so realizing this was quite a surprise.

Midsummer herbs

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On June 23, 2022

In squibs & crackers

It’s perfectly true that you should harvest herbs at this time of year. The various phytochemicals that give them flavor, nutritional value, and maybe (who knows?) healing powers are most concentrated just before they flower, according to the extension office.

I am now imagining an old English farmer (Gaffer Gamgee, perhaps) overhearing the monks giving credit to John the Baptist for stuff that everyone knows if they’ve been paying attention. The scene is exactly the sort of thing that monks don’t write in their manuscripts for us to consult a thousand years later.

Orpheus in the Underworld Revisited

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On May 8, 2022

In squibs & crackers

This tweet

the other day got me thinking about Jacques Offenbach. Long ago I heard a musicologist lamenting, not very seriously, that Offenbach didn’t know about the saxophone: what wonderful craziness might he have composed for it?  That lament, I now know, is historically incorrect. The saxophone was invented in the 1840s and Offenbach was still writing in the 1870s.  But the old man was kind of right. Why isn’t there a saxophone solo in, for example, the overture to Orpheus in the Underworld?

This is my favorite performance of that overture.  Apart from the musicianship, there are lots of reasons to love it.  One is the oboe player’s look of relief when she finishes her solo (1:40 in).3 Another is the manic grin on the violinist’s face at 7:42 when the galop starts. But the biggest reason is how the conductor carefully sets it all up, but once the galop gets going, he just lets the orchestra run wild. Exactly what old Jacques would have wanted.

Everyone thinks of the galop infernal as the “cancan music”.4 But any nerdy child also knew the story of Orpheus, and I couldn’t put them together. What the devil, I wondered, was supposed to be happening on stage while the orchestra was playing that?  No way to find out. Nobody I knew had ever seen a performance. The #1 reason to love the World Wide Web is that it can settle those questions I had in my childhood, which can lie dormant for half a century. Now I know:

High-dimensional space is weird

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On May 8, 2022

In Digital Humanities, Slow learner

There was a mathematically unsatisfactory bit in the last post about measuring the relationships among mentions of color in The Lord of the Rings. When I used the Euclidean distance between the 62-dimensional vectors to calculate the relationship between color mentions, the dendrogram had some connections in it that don’t make much sense visually or textually, e.g., brown was clustered with black and red. The connections with a linear “Manhattan” distance measure made much more sense.  I asked Digital Tolkien about it, as one does, and he assured me that the L1 metric was better. But why?

It turns out this is something that mathematicians know: in high-dimensional spaces, using the Pythagorean Theorem causes near neighbors and far-away neighbors to be all about the same distance apart! 5 In fact, the choice of which of your neighbors is nearest isn’t even stable. The unavoidable numerical errors that come from using digital computers can dominate the real differences in the input data.6

Effect measured by L1 distance is more detectable at high dimension

Relative effect as a function of measure dimension

Of course, now that I’ve read a couple of papers about it, it’s obvious. Simplest possible case: suppose a book mentions one word once per chapter, and another word twice in one chapter and once in all the others. The relative difference between those two vectors, as a function of the number of chapters, looks like this.

62 dimensions counts as “high-dimensional”. Both ways of measuring distance have dropped a lot from our 3-dimensional experience, but the effect in our test case is twice as easy to compare when we use the Manhattan distance measure.

Notes

The Colors of the Forests

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On April 16, 2022

In Digital Humanities, fantasy

As previously discussed, black is the color mentioned most often in The Lord of the Rings, and white is right behind it. But grey is #3. Take that, Edwin Muir!

I fed the list of X11 color names into a text-processing program and collected all the color mentions I could find. With one exception: “tan” is a part of so many English words that it would be unfair to expect a computer to pick out which words containing that trigram were colors and which were not, so I deleted it from the list. This is what came out.

Figure 1. Frequency of color mentions

There are ten colors mentioned more than ten times in the text. Their relative frequency is in the pie chart in Figure 1. Oddly, none of the top-notch Tolkien illustrators has used this palette. I wonder why.

The places colors are most-often found are sometimes surprising. The chapter in which black is mentioned most is “The Siege of Gondor”. White, “The King of the Golden Hall”. Grey, “The Great River”. Red, “The Tower of Cirith Ungol”. Green and brown are mentioned in “Treebeard” more than any other chapter. Blue, yellow, and gold are mentioned most in “In the House of Tom Bombadil”; sometimes the place is not surprising at all.

Silver is most mentioned in “Lothlorien”. That chapter is #3 for “gold” instead of #1, because when a character has a color in her name, that tends to skew the distribution. Gold and silver are strongly present in all three chapters involving Lorien, though.

If we make a vector out of the fraction of each color’s mentions that happen in each chapter, we can test which colors tend to form clusters in the narrative. The dendrogram is in Figure 2. (I’ve inflicted dendrograms on you before.) As we trace a line from one color to another, the further left we have to go, the less-related the colors are in their occurrence in the text.

dendrogram of color relationships

Figure 2. Which colors go together in the text

But what do we do with all these measurements? With an Idiosopher’s well-trained eye for the most significant thematic content of a work, I zeroed in on the disagreement between Celeborn and Treebeard. “Yet they should not go too far up that stream, nor risk becoming entangled in the Forest of Fangorn,” said Celeborn. “Do not risk getting entangled in the woods of Laurelindorinan!” said Treebeard. What’s the subject of their disagreement?

Figure 2 gives us an insight: brown is used to describe Fangorn more than any other place. Gold and silver are dominant in Lothlorien.  The two forests agree on green, but to get from brown to gold and silver, we have to go all the way to the left edge of the diagram. These are the furthest-apart pair of colors in the text. So here is our answer: the source of the ancient enmity between the two forests is interior decorating. When Galadriel sang the woods of Lothlorien into existence7, she may have had an idea of the kind of forest she didn’t want, and Fangorn may have been it.

Coda: Boring Details

Sometimes a color word is also a noun. Olive dropped out of the analysis because it’s only mentioned twice, one of each. That was an easy one. I tried to separate mentions of gold and silver into the color and the metal, but quickly discovered any partition I could make would be arbitrary. Tolkien doesn’t clearly separate them. He rarely mentions the metals without the colors being important, so I left them all in.

The method: First, all the color words were pulled from the text. Then they were classified into a standard color-word. Usually that was straightforward. The exception was “scarlet”, which got absorbed into “red”. Then each instance of a color was collected into a histogram by chapter or whatever.

Instances of a color by chapter form a vector in a 62-dimensional space. Vectors were normalized so the elements of each color’s vector were the fraction of mentions that were in that chapter. The distance between two vectors was computed using the linear distance between elements.  (This is not the Euclidean distance between unit vectors; I re-did the analysis with those and got similar results, but not as easy to interpret them in a way that made sense with respect to the text. Linear differences seem more relevant to text analysis, but it’s always good to check.) The vectors were clustered using the R hclust function with complete linkage.

Environmentalism from Fiction

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On April 2, 2022

In Academy and Society, literature

The paper I didn’t present at TexMoot

The theme of this year’s TexMoot was “how fictional worlds teach us to care for this one”. For once, I was not the designated curmudgeon. That honor went to Joe Ricke, who started off the first talk by expressing uncertainty that the theme of the conference was something that even existed. He was referring to an immediate connection: that a reader would read a work of speculative fiction and come away with ideas about what to do the next day (month, year…) to save the planet. And he’s certainly right.

It’s always nice to hear about an intellectual error of which I’m not guilty. That’s not at all the way I interpreted the theme. A more likely effect that speculative fiction has on the reader is to get us used to thinking on a scale of parsecs of distance and centuries of time.

Such an attitude is in direct opposition to the demands of everyday economics. Most people are trying to make a living8, which leads to a short-term focus. The value of gains and losses is time-dependent — money now is worth more than money some time in the future. If you don’t exploit all the things you have for profit right now, they’ll be taken over by someone who will. That impulse in the market economy caused most of the environmental destruction we’ve perpetrated in the modern era.

tree/heart logoSpeculative fiction can turn the reader’s relative valuation of possibilities away from the short-term, market-driven default. When we look at a tree, we’re not seeing just the fruit it produces, or its lumber value, but also Ents, and Yggdrasil, and all the other trees we know from literature. We see with different values. When I mentioned a half-baked version of this idea in class, Sørina expanded it with, “because we’re adding love to the calculation.” Which is an extraordinary thought. Apparently, among the powers of literature is to catalyze the reaction of love and mathematics.

As it turns out, the source of this idea is something I read long ago and forgot about. There’s a very similar thought from E.T. Jaynes, in his book 9 that launched Bayesian statistics to its current prominence. Jaynes is talking about the concept from decision theory of the “loss function” — a way to quantify what we stand to gain or lose from each possible choice we can make.

Failure to judge one’s own loss function correctly is one of the major dangers that humans face. Having a little intelligence, one can invent myths out of his own imagination, and come to believe them. Worse, one person may persuade thousands of others to believe his private myths, as the sordid history of religious, political, and military disasters shows.

As the near-solecism “private myth” indicates, Jaynes is using the word to mean “falsehood”. Writing in the mid twentieth century, his thoughts were naturally going to be dominated by the negative implications of acting on fictional grounds, but “myth” has more meanings than that one. We now know that our standard way of thinking about nature is leading to disaster, so now myths can also be an opportunity to improve outcomes by changing our loss function. Expanding the elements of the computation to include all the lives involved, and the billions of years it took to bring them about, and the global (at least) results of our actions, are exactly the way speculative fiction has brought about its share of the change in attitudes to the environment that we’ve seen in the past 50 years.

Writers of both science fiction and fantasy know they’re doing this. Arthur C. Clarke said (several times), “If you take me too seriously, you’ll go broke. But if your children don’t take me seriously enough, they’ll go broke.”10  Those children are whom we call Generation X; the richest of us seem to have taken Clarke very seriously indeed.

Notes

Religious Tolerance

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On February 19, 2022

In Vive la France

It’s frustrating how poorly served Voltaire is by the World Wide Web. I needed the citation for one of his epigrams. It was actually faster to go down to the basement, get the two books it could have come from off the shelf, and leaf through them to find it.

It turns out that the reason I couldn’t remember which book it was from is that it’s in both the Lettres Philosophiques (1734) and in the Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764), prefaced in the latter by “it’s been said before, and I can’t say it better, …”

Once I had the right book, the Gallica app from the National Library of France was able to point me to the actual text.

Modern Transcription11

S’il n’y avait en Angleterre qu’une Religion, le despotisme serait à craindre, s’il y en avait deux, elles se couperaient la gorge ; mais il y en a trente, & elles vivent en paix heureuses.

Translation

If there were only one religion in England, they should fear tyranny. If there were two, they’d slit each others’ throats. But there are thirty, and they live happily in peace.

Noted in Passing

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On February 18, 2022

In fantasy, squibs & crackers

Tom Hillman has a wonderful meditation on The Passing of Arwen Evenstar at “Alas, not me”.

One tangential thought struck me at the end. Bilbo also wrote, “I sit beside the fire and think of how the world will be / When winter comes without a spring that I shall ever see.” Which didn’t come true — Bilbo passed over the Sea in the autumn.  But that couplet matches perfectly with Arwen’s death “when the mallorn-leaves were falling, but spring had not yet come”.

Arwen must have heard Bilbo sing that song. Using a good poem only once is not how Bilbo does things. Perhaps she was struck by the poignancy of that line, just as I was. Maybe Bilbo was one of the people from whom Arwen learned how to be mortal.

Old English in Modern

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On January 15, 2022

In trivial

Another line from Puck of Pook’s Hill that has no relevance to literary influence so it gets its own post:

“He sent for my second son, whom being unmarried he had ever looked upon as his own child…”

The speaker is Sir Richard Dalyngridge, a Norman knight who came over with William the Conqueror. He had become fond of the English and adopted their ways. I love that sentence for the way the reader grinds to a crawl on the eighth word. Word order won’t help us now; time for the Great English Verb Hunt we learned as the way to decipher what those old guys meant.

Kipling has done a beautiful job of recreating the feel of a modern English speaker trying to read Old English. There aren’t many inflections left these days, but the one we’ve got is effective.  That sentence might easily have come from someone who’s thinking in Old English, and therefore doesn’t think of word order as an important part of grammar.

And yes, it’s intentional. Later in the book, we’re told a character is educated because he knows “the Leech-Book of Bald”.

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