Baby-Face Nelson repartee

“Why… Jimmy Burnell!” Negri exclaimed, using Nelson’s old alias.  “Where’d you pop from?”
Nelson grinned.  “Oh, I just blew in from the east.”

-- Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies (2004), p. 175

(The noir aesthetic  meets a Mary Poppins meme.

 For a Carl-Sandburgian take on such lingo, try this:   Rootabaga.)

Hope-Springs-Eternal monostich

“Maybe a new deck    will change my luck”

-- William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley (1946)

monostich of preternatural detection

“Lately  I get the feeling

someone is messing

with my investigation.”

-- Laird Barron,  The Imago Sequence (2007), p. 134

~

For hard-noir detective stories,
try these:

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount

~

.

bug’s-eye view

the antenna-twitch of a bug

in the descending shadow

of some colossal hand

-- Laird Barron,  The Imago Sequence (2007), p. 189

Deserted-Landscape monostichs

The sea-gulls had gone,  all at once,

as if they had spotted a better place.

-- John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), p. 50

the sky was black   with waiting rain

-- John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), p. 246

Король, дама, валет tableaux

Caught by the corner of the eye:

sudden flashes of zigzag light   cast by passing windshields

-- Vladimir Nabokov, King, Queen, Knave (1968; originally published 1928, in Russian), p. 213

Contrast,  as seen full-on.

and lo -- through the crack of the door, one glimpses the long back of the cleric, representative of a boundlessly charitable Church, in the act of bending over the white, white bed.

-- Vladimir Nabokov, King, Queen, Knave (1968), p. 172

An audial analog of a tableau might be la petite phrase.   The following, more like an earworm:

She stared   with her fingers pressed to her temples 

at the white,  white,    intolerably white    tablecloth.

-- Vladimir Nabokov, King, Queen, Knave (1968), p. 160

Gedicht: Strengstens Verboten !!!

There is so much that our German cousins  are forbidden to view nowadays, beneath the glare of the PC Police (wie damals die Stasi).  Here is the latest, a 1951 poem that -- despite its Hispanic aspect -- proved too rich for thinning German blood:

Falls Sie Deutscher sind --

Augen gefälligst zumachen !!

Extensive further exemplification here.

[Note:  It's awfully minimalist, as poems go -- just a noun or two here and there. 
Imagine the wrath of the Politically Correct, if it had gone so far as an adjective or a verb!]

The Logic of Yea and Nay

The Senate has just shot itself in the foot;  with shrapnel ricocheting onto masses of bystanders.  The move might enter the annals as “Shumer’s Self-mate”.

In the face of such legislative absurdity, the Administration floated the idea of reducing the minimum to pass a Continuing Resolution  from 60%  to a bare majority.    Worth discussing;  but there is a more general logical point behind the whole debate, which seems to have garnered little or no notice in print.

The point is, across the board, the status quo is the default.   As the cock crows, the Senate (to take that as an example, but the point applies to any established body) begins its busy day with various activities.   Everyone shows up for work with teeth brushed and appropriately dressed (men as men, women as women);  there is some sort of opening ceremony (in my primary school, these were Flag Salute and Lord’s Prayer);  a roll-call is taken;  citizens are admitted to the visitors’ balcony; interviews are given to the press;  and so forth.   It would be legitimate to question any one of those activities:  require unisex attire; ban the prayer or the flag salute (some of this has already happened in this venue or that); skip the time-wasting roll-call; exclude spectators (for security, or whatever).  To do that, you introduce a bill, which for passage requires a majority of some weaker or stronger preponderance (say, 60%), depending on the nature of the proposed bill.   What is not required is that,  in order to continue to wear normal clothes, or salute the flag, or what have you, the body must, every morning as the cock crows, pass a brand-new bill (with the required 60%) to continue the status quo.   The burden is on those who would change or disrupt the status quo.

Now, allowing the government to continue putt-putting along, for better or worse, is simply the default, and should be so considered.  It’s the government’s job.   So it is truly not logical that Congress should be obliged to seek a super-majority, simply to keep the government open for business, fulfilling the promises made.    Anyone who would disrupt that scenario, at so fundamental a level, should be obliged to propose doing so, in a measure  -- say, the Government Shutdown Circular Firing-Squad bill -- that itself would require the supermajority.   Instead, the quite radical maneuvre of wrecking the government   is relieved of what should logically be its burden, as though that were the default.

[Update 22 Jan 2018]  The Washington Post today has a good article on the logical/structural parameters of such situations.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/01/22/why-other-countries-dont-have-government-shutdowns-2/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_wv-shutdown-1105am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.a67ef5b32d8a

 

 

 

 

 

Furlough Reading

Many of you may know some poor unfortunate Federal worker who has been reduced to a piteous and meaningless existence by the furlough.   What (you ask yourself) can You do to help??

Wonder no longer!  Here is a list of perfect Furlough Gifts -- thrilling reading to keep your loved-one functionary from drifting into senility and despair:

.

.

All of them available -- with free excerpts -- here:
http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html



.

The Mystery of the Analytical Chemist (further updated)

Among the unpublished manuscripts of my late friend Dr. Watson … no, just kidding.

Our Mutual Friend, the last finished novel of Charles Dickens, does not lie at the center of most readers’ affections;  yet connoisseurs there are, who wóuld award the palm to that late work.   And one of the most memorable minor characters therein -- as minor as might be, since (if memory serves) he utters not a word at any time -- is the discreetly appearing and vanishing figure of the Analytical Chemist.  His denomination is never explained, and he is given no other name.  His ostensible function is to wait on the Veneering’s table, at that elegant or elegantesque or simili-elegant supper party which is to seal the coming-out of these arrivistes or nouvel-arrivés; his deeper purpose is … well, it must be guessed-at.   But whatever it was, Dickens was evidently quite satisfied with the results.

What does he mean, then -- and especially, why ever is he called that?

The proper approach, I now believe, is not to be overly … analytical about it (as I tried to be, upon first encountering the character, with wonder).  The phrase simply wandered into Dickens’ mind,  without any nicety of correspondence to the Dalton or Lavoisier theory of the day, and serves perfectly to suggest what needs suggesting:  neither fawning nor class resentment  on the part of the table-attendent, but cool detachment, and unwavering observation.  In this he is a forerunner of that other supranatural butler, Jeeves.

(There are differences, but these are subtle, and must await another time  for treatment, when Jeeves himself shall consent to appear at the center of our lens.  -- Compare further another Wodehouse character, Lord Emsworth's secretary, The Efficient Baxter.)

Compare:

If Hawthorne had not been a story-teller, he might have been a famous chemist, for he was a mental chemist in his method of handling emotions and passions.

-- Van Wyck Brooks,  New England:  Indian Summer (1940), p. 297

This what-if re Hawthorne is implausible;  but the citation has merit in displaying the contemporary connotations of chemist.

Bonus quote:

Hungarian goulash, always a dish to be avoided unless you had had the forethought to have it analysed by a competent analytical chemist.

-- P.G. Wodehouse, Ice in the Bedroom (1961)

Note: in a British context, the modifier analytical is necessary to distinguish what Americans call a chemist from what Americans call a pharmacist.


For further Dickensiana:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Charles%20Dickens

[Postscript May 2016] A foretaste of the denomination may be found in chapter 8 of Barnaby Rudge (1841).  Describing the farcical Tubby’s-Clubhouse-style subterranean meeting of the ‘Prentice Knights:

One of the conductors of this novice held a rusty blunderbuss pointed towards his ear, and the other, a very ancient sabre, with which he carved imaginary offenders as he came along  in a sanguinary and anatomical manner.

Savor the semantics of that “anatomical manner”, and you will be well on the way towards the Analytical Chemist.

Sunrise Monostich

cocks passing the reveille  from farm to farm

-- Washington Irving

[For a matching monostich about the dusk, try this.]

Twinned Witnesses

For Christmas, our son gave me a brace of books -- carefully boxed together, a kind of electron-positron pair.   He conceived them as forming, not a mere set-theoretic union, but a tensor product of two Hermitian conjugates, intricately linked.  These are:

J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016)

and

Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power:  An American Tragedy (2017).

BLUF:  both excellent, and “better together”.

To comment on their sociopolitical content  would be beyond our brief.  But a literary note on the structure of the latter.

An anthology of articles spanning years  is problematic.  At the worst, it can be a gaggle of op-ed pieces  that turn out to be less than the sum of their parts.   Eight Years is notably successful in this respect.  It reprints the original (memorable) pieces of essay-reportage, from The Atlantic (these have aged very well), and embeds them successively in the skeleton of a memoir of those very years.  The personal/reportorial dialectic proves energizing.

Historical footnote:  As most who have even heard of him  know, Mr Coates champions an old idea -- Reparations -- whose current status in the zeitgeist resembles that of a letter-bomb.   Some perspective, from a wide-ranging book of psychosocial history, which begins in Colonial times  and concludes with a chapter called “Native Sons”:

Faced with expanding black claims, resistance and repression may become more bitter, even, than in the past. … A more equalitarian ideology  might itself increase savagery if repression occurs, given the tricks guilt plays in the human mind.

-- Wilson McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America (1973), p. 613

Orthoepic footnote:  Mr Coates’ puzzling prénom put me in mind of Nefertiti; but adepts assure me that it rhymes with Tallahassee.   Thus, it is not exactly “pronounced the way it’s spelled”, but then neither is François.

Mirror Monostich

Words   form    in the eyes of the dwarf:
I too was made in His image!

[quarried from:  Jean Toomer, Cane (1923) ]

Recent sightings of giant penguins

This just in:

www.india.com/news/world/scientists-discover-fossils-of-man-sized-penguin-in-new-zealand-2751386

Figure shown 1/50 of actual size

For full  scientific background on these discoveries, google

   =>  Pinguinus ingens

Deep Dusk / Monostich

a mellow glow arose

and   spread   fan - wise

into the low-hanging heavens

[from:  Jean Toomer, Cane (1923) ]

Pucker Up

The world took notice when some old mathematical conjectures  were finally solved in our own lifetimes:  Fermat’s Last “Theorem”, and the Poincaré Conjecture.   To somewhat less fanfare, a conjecture concerning sphere packing, dating back to Johannes Kepler in the seventeenth century (yes, that Kepler -- the planet guy) was finally solved in the twenty-first.   A breakthrough came in 1998, but a formal proof was not recognized until this very year.

George Szpiro wrote an unusually readable account in his book Kepler’s Conjecture (2003).   It is an example of a sphere-packing problem,  which is a global problem, with applications stretching from the fruiterer’s tray to error-correcting codes. Among the related matters is the kissing number problem, which is a local problem:  how many spheres (or, in two dimensions, discs) can you pack around a given central sphere.  The answer is the Newton number or kissing number for that dimension.   

In two dimensions, the answer is six, as you can verify by ringing a penny with six of its fellows;  that no further coin could butt in, can be seen “by inspection”.  (That, incidentally, is the only known use for pennies, in our own day.)   For three dimensions (the everday space we live in), the answer turns out to be 12.  That is more difficult to see, though you can accomplish it using a baker’s dozen of beachballs and a dozen undergraduates.

Somewhat surprisingly, for dimensions four, five, six and seven, the answer is not known exactly, only upper limits.  Very surprisingly, we then suddenly get a break :

In eight dimensions, all of a sudden the Newton number is known exactly:  240 white balls can kiss the black ball in the center.  Why is that number known precisely?  In this case the upper bound came out to be 240;  but a certain well-known lattice arrangement, called E₈, also allows 240 balls to touch the central sphere.   Since the actual kissing number of E₈ coincides with the theoretical upper bound, 240 must be the highest kissing number. -- From dimensions nine to twenty-three, again, only bounds are known.   (p. 96)

What is so gratifying about this is that what is in essence a simply, concretely conceptualizable problem  should be solved by the testimony of so fiercely abstract an algebraic object as E_8.  (Szpiro calls it “well-known”;  depends what circles you move in.  I just asked the fellow next to me in the pub, and the poor fool confused it with the Leech lattice.)  I first learned about this enormous structure from a 2007 article in the New York Times.   Or rather, learned virtually nothing about it at all, beyond its mere name, since the journalist, and all hands asked, concurred that the thing is indescribable.  A sketch of that encounter, back from when we were shilling for Platonism, can be read here.

Language note:  This metaphor of ‘kissing’ (for tangency) is used elsewhere in mathematics: osculating plane, osculating circle.

The Double Truth

It is clear by now that the old Averroist doctrine of the “double truth” (veritas duplex)  must be revived:  this time, not along scientific-vs-theological lines, but political.  Radio talk-shows have long recognized the incommunicability of one set of truths, to partisans of the other, by offering separate Republican vs. Democrat call-in lines.

So, let us consider that simplest possible area of human belief and inquiry:  arithmetic, the discipline that offers up such hoary verities as “2 + 2 = 4”.  

In modern mathematics, the study of such numbers (called integers)  has exfoliated quite a bit, and indeed has bifurcated into named subdisciplines.   Thus we have, on the one hand, analytic number-theory,  which deals with such things as the Riemann hypothesis and the Goldbach conjecture, using techniques from complex analysis, and on the other, algebraic number-theory, involving extensions of the integers such as algebraic number-fields.   Both subfields have developed to such an extent, that specialists in the one will be scarcely able to understand, let alone prove, theorems in the other;  thus reproducing, unintentionally, a simulacrum of the current partisan Dialogue of the Deaf.

And now we have two new entrants to the disciplinary matrix:   Democratic number-theory and Republican number-theory.

Democratic number-theory is characterized (up to isomorphism) by its claim that all numbers are equal.   The denial of that doctrine is termed ‘fascism’.

Republican number-theory, by contrast, generalizes the ancient concept of a perfect number (equal to its aliquot sum) to that of the awesome numbers, which are greater than the sum of everybody else.  The leftovers are called the  pathetic numbers (also termed ‘losers’).  This theory focuses exclusively on the former subset (although the membership in this set  can vary capriciously  from day to day).

So far, neither body of theory has produced interesting theorems.

[Update 8 Jan 2018]   No sooner had I posted that would-be satirical thought-dream, than I happened upon this,  by the philosopher Stewart Shapiro:

Hartry Field takes mathematical language at face value.  Since he holds that mathematical objects do not exist, mathematical propositions have objective but vacuous truth-values.  For example, he maintains that ‘all natural numbers are prime’ is true, since there are no natural numbers.

-- Thinking about Mathematics (2000), p. 226

So once again, reality beggars satire.  (Apparently this Field fellow is some sort of an academic, rather than an inmate or homeless-person.)

Note, a propos, that the Fieldian assertion “all natural numbers are prime”  is actually an axiom of Democratic number-theory.   (“Everybody gets a trophy.  Everyone is special.”)

[Historical footnote]    If satire is the production of humor by clever exaggeration of a real situation, then here again the satire lacks its bite:  for such ideologically infected strains of the hard sciences  are already exemplified in history -- not merely in the musings of philosophical fantasists, but under dictators with the power of life or death.   Thus Hitlerian notions of Aryan science vs. Jewish science, or the various scientific orthodoxies under Stalin.    Under those two regimes, mathematics, fortunately, was relatively spared distortions of actual content (so long as the formulaic obeissances to ideology were packed into the preface),  though  in human terms  there were profound and pernicious effects on who was allowed to be mathematical practitioners.   The neo-Stalinoid zealots of “anti-racist mathematics” go further, prescribing severe limits to content and presentation as well.

Welcome to Dr J’s “satire-free safe-space”

A senior Administration official (whose name, at present, escapes me -- senior moment), refuting innuendos to the contrary, has announced to the world that he is in fact  a “very stable genius”.  For the benefit of l’homme moyen sensuel  who may be unfamiliar with the arcana of Stability Theory and Stanford-Binet, he has kindly paraphrased this as “like, very smart”  (“like” is here evidently a vernacular equivalent of anglicè  -- itself a rare expression which means, in plain English, ‘in plain English’).

In line with our autumn-years vow of abjuring the high-jinx of satire, rather than make merry over that frank self-assessment (in either of its formulations)  we shall see what we can learn from the incident, as regards our own tardigrade character-development.   And indeed we find, after much self-searching, that we are what might be described as

“a metastable oligophreniac”

Definition and exemplification  here:

De Stultitiâ

Afterthought:  For those of you who might be saddened that we have donned the robes of penitence, and laid aside forever  the nib of wit,  you can here scroll through our earlier, pre-repentance efforts (which we now roundly renounce):

   http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/satire

What -- you call this *cold* ?!?

Media hysteria:

  Winter storm threatens East Coast, bringing temps colder than Mars

Frozen iguanas falling from trees during cold snap in Florida

  États-Unis : il fait si froid que les requins meurent congelés

You wanna know cold?  I’ll tell you co-ld …

On Saturn, where we penguins originated before planting an Earth-colony at Antarctica, it grows so cold, the oxygen freezes right out of the air…

You got to chip off a chunk with a chisel and chew it, even to breathe…

~

Want further truth-defying tales?  Try these:

Reports from Rootabaga Country

Perfect days

to catch some rays

.