Want to find a decent value for pi but all you've got are some toothpicks? Draw parallel lines as far apart as the length of the toothpicks, and then drop the toothpicks on them. The number that cross a line, divided by the number dropped, will give you an estimate for pi. This has been your '50's math moment.

I'm testing a theory that the ads are based on certain keywords mentioned in the blog. With that disclaimer:
Ninja Ninja Ninja Ninja Ninja Ninja Ninja Ninja Ninja Ninja Ninja Ninja Ninja Ninja

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Eigth Level of Hell - the Malebolge!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	High
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Very Low
Level 2 (Lustful)	Low
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Low
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Very Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Low
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Very Low
Level 7 (Violent)	High
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	High
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Low

Take the Dante's Inferno Hell Test
Eigth, eh?

Greetings fans! I am momentarily communicado, so I thought I'd assure you all of my continued existence. I've just been running the Illinois river in southwestern Oregon, and it is amazing. Remote; pristine; beautiful water; splendid, fun rapids, except for the Greenwall, which is scary as hell. There are carnivorous plants too! I'll try and get a better post up when computer access becomes more satisfactory; the Grant's Pass public library just isn't cutting it. "Til then, enjoy Odious, and try not to forget about me.

The most common injury during a fight is broken knuckles, from people who don't realize that their opponent's head is hard. The second most common is a sprained wrist, from people who don't realize that their opponent is not going to go flying backwards after impact. This is why videos like "Gun to the side of the head" make me wince.
On a similar topic, don't try to break a beer bottle if you're in a bar fight. I just did research on this subject, and of twenty-four bottles, not one ended up as a decent weapon. Mostly, I just had lots of glass going every-which-way, and a piece of the neck of the bottle left in my hand. Seven of twenty-four times the neck was long enough to be used to cut, while not adding to the range of attacks. The rest of the time it was useless, especially if one were not (as I was) wearing thick gloves. And eye protection. Safety first!
UPDATE: I should mention that I really like "Choke from the front".

The banner ads at the top of this page seem determined to irritate me. First I insult Bertrand Russell, and they try to sell his books, and now they're promoting Krav Maga. And while I don't have anything nasty to say about it off-hand, I'd certainly rather not have an ad for it at the top of the page. Maybe Mr. Ganz would like this ad; I'd just as soon go back to those which insinuated that my manhood was sub-par.

I was listening to Democracy Now!, which I sometimes do when I can't argue with an intelligent person, just as sometimes instead of sugar in my coffee I use low-calorie ground glass, and I overheard something strange. Ms. Goodman was quoting extensively from the Onion article, 137 More Oil Wells Liberated for Democracy. I imagine that she wasn't pulling a 'Beijing Evening News', so is this supposed to pass for rational argument?

Someday I'd like to be like Victor Davis Hanson, and start a paragraph with the sentence, "I thought immediately of the macabre aftermath to the battle of Arginusae in 406 B.C."

Anyone wishing to learn about self-defense techniques with a cane might wish to visit Cane Masters. They don't appear to have any books on the subjects, but there are videos and several excellent links.

An overly simplified but still accurate account of the decline in armor traces it to the invention of firearms. Although the heavy plate one thinks of knights wearing was by no means proof against damage before that time, the advent of cannon and musket was the first note of its deathknell. Weapons that had needed significant force to damage the occupant of such a suit, like the holy water sprinkler were replaced by slim swords designed to cut or puncture a lightly armored opponent. Combat had changed.

And as combat changed, the schools which taught it changed as well, although there were dissenters. Schools of the fence sprang up throughout major cities, to teach the bravos and ruffians to survive in this new arena. We like to think of the musketeers of Dumas, skilled swordsman meeting their opponents at a pre-arranged time and fighting with and for their honor. But swordsplay was just as commonly an assault, as most knife attacks are today (for an excellent overview of knife attacks, I recommend Marc MacYoung's videos on the subject). Schools taught the use of a bar mug in the off hand as a parrying tool, since bars were a common place for these brawls. Cloaks would be wrapped around the arm, bar stools used to disarm, and the tactical use of a kick to the groin or sand thrown in the eyes was often stressed.

All of this is foreign to fencing as the Olympic sport. Such techniques, while helpful for practice, are removed from the chaos and ferocity of a real fight. As an example, current foil fencer will 'flick' their opponent, bending the sword around in an arc (thus avoiding the parrying blade) to strike the tip against their opponent. While the tip is, at such a time, the second fastest moving object in the Olympics (the fastest is the biathlete's bullet), an attack like that is not designed to disable an opponent, but to win a point. Can such an attack have any practical value?

Enter the sjambok. I received one of these weapons for Christmas, and promptly fell in love with it. A flexible weapon, it can be used like a stick, but unlike the stick is almost completely non-lethal (although one might strangle the opponent with it). The weapon will cut through blue jeans, as I have found through painful experience, and is exceedingly effective when used along eight of the nine lines of attack (it is by no means a thrusting weapon) just as a stick may be.

But the flicks which I thought useless and confined to sport fencing are where the sjambok truly shines. A proper flick will put a hole in an aluminum can. The angle of attack is such that it is quite difficult to defend against, as the sjambok will bend around a block easily, only gaining force as the circle about which it is turning has its radius shortened. While the sjambok cannot be used to damage as a stick may, or to entangle as a whip, it is a self-defense weapon without parallel, giving painful wounds that are almost impossible to guard against.

Further ungulate news: a banteng has just been cloned. Now can I eat one?

Here in Santa Fe, it was the case that protestors both pro and con would stand on the corner of St. Francis and Cerrillos and demonstrate that they had an opinion. Now, since this activity proved rather awkward to coordinate with actually using the roads, there are far fewer of them, and I am surprised to find that I miss them. As usual, here's someone far wiser than I to speak for me:

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons of the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no grounds for preferring either opinion....Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations....He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them, who defend them in earnest and do their utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of, else he will never really possess himself of the portion of the truth which meets and removes that difficulty.

-John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

There's a need for intelligent dissent, if only to make right opinion into knowledge, and, frankly, Democracy Now! just isn't cutting it. Amy Goodman: get a job.

I saw a car today with a bumper sticker that read "SMASH CAPITALISM". In the back window was a sign: For Sale. Man, these guys aren't even phoning it in anymore.

In case you were wondering whose monkey would win: Peculiar.

(Link found via Joanne Jacobs)

Still on animals: Here are some Daghestani snake milkers, actually quite serious and enterprising chaps. And why do we so seldom get to enjoy photographs of or references to takins? But those who enjoyed The Cephalopod Page may appreciate The Ultimate Ungulate Page, which has takins as well.

More squid updates: Slightly more information on Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, cast in a more lurid light, may be found here and here. Anyone generally interested in this sort of thing (and only the truly benighted would not be) would do well to browse about The Cephalopod Page, which contains not only fascinating text, but also excellent photographs and a very cool squid icon which emits ink as it follows your mouse arrow around.

And speaking of squids, here's a very strange one.

Colossal squid, eh? I'd heard of their arms being found in a sperm whale's stomach before, which just proves how tough sperm whales are. Makes one respect Queequeg a bit more, doesn't it? The article doesn't answer the question I was most interested in: what was in the squid's stomach?

I've been reading Bertrand Russell's Problems of Philosophy. It's an excellent guide to other books one might wish to read, but has nothing else to recommend it. Here's his conclusion, after having talked of the great minds of philosophy:

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind is also rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

Hokum and hogwash. Put all that into less high-minded language, and we shall have: Philosophy is useless for any real endeavor, but studying it is important for the young, that they may believe nothing to be true and be proper little skeptics. We've seen this before. Great God! I'd rather be a materialist suckled at a creed outworn than listen to this nonsense, which went out of style with Hume, who is as far beyond Russell as the moon beyond a firefly.

I dislike 'Bulverism', as C.S. Lewis called it, a.k.a. the argumentum ad hominem. But Russell's willful misunderstanding and misstatement of the positions of the philosophers he discusses gives rise to a belief that he is far more comfortable without the truth than with it; that he distrusts any conclusion, although he is perfectly willing to use the fruits of science so long as it is refused the title of absolute truth; and that he wishes for nothing more than to abandon philosophy's great problems (which to him, rather than Kant's liberty, immortality, and god, are certainty and solipsism) as insoluble. His argument against Hegel, in particular, is poorly thought out and more poorly expressed.

I'm going to close with a passage from Galen, a genuine seeker of knowledge and one who understood the philosophy which was at the root of his work.

Some of these people [materialists] have even expressly declared that the soul possesses no reasoning faculty [indeed, earlier Galen states that atomism precludes a belief in the soul], but that we are led like cattle by the impression of our senses, and are unable to refuse or dissent from anything. In their view, obviously, courage, wisdom, temperance, and self-control are all mere nonsense, we do not love either each other or our offspring, nor does the god care anything for us.

Odell Shepard, author of The Lore of the Unicorn says something striking of medieval scientists, that they expected wonders of the world and were not surprised to find them. Those who get out in the world, instead of pontificating about it from London, might find the same.

I bet these creatures were really tasty. Science, how 'bout it? Bring back extinct creatures so we can eat them! Take that, you PETA scum!

This post is for the three Texan gentlemen last night. Listen, fellas, when everyone else has been gone for forty-five minutes and your waitstaff is sitting in the service bar and the ambient music gets louder and louder, guys, it's time to leave. Go home! Don't you have homes?

Let no one say that cookbooks are necessarily boring reading. The Georgian Feast by Darra Goldstein contains reams of the fascinating ethnographic tidbits with which the Caucasus seem so abundantly blessed. The following is a description of a very peculiar custom, both funerarily and culinarily, in seventeenth century Georgia, by the Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi (Efendi):

[They] have a strange mode of burying their Begs [lords]; they put the body into a wooden coffin, which they nail onto the branches of some high tree and make a hole in the coffin near the head, that the Beg, as they say, may look up to Heaven: bees enter the coffin and make honey, entirely wrapping the body up in it; when the season comes they open the coffin, take the honey and sell it, much caution, therefore is required to be used in purchasing the honey of [these people].
--From Narrative of Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa in the Seventeenth Century

With all that's going on in the world, let's not neglect to spare a thought for the Scourge of Piracy. The Weekly Piracy Report always makes for entertaining reading, and this week had a particularly juicy (i.e. violent) entry:

13.03.2003 at 1000 UTC in the vicinity of Socotra islands, Somalia.
Four speedboats with four pirates armed with high-powered guns in each boat chased a bulk carrier underway. Despite taking evasive measures, four pirates managed to board at forward and attempted to enter accommodation. Vessel contacted coastal authorities and owners for help. An hour later, a maritime aircraft arrived and assisted. Crewmembers using fire hoses, rocket flares, armed with some iron bars prevented the attackers from entering the accommodation. At 1200 UTC pirates disembarked into their boats and fled. Ship resumed her voyage.

Fortunately, piracy seems not to be a very prosperous sort of livelihood these days. In several months of following the Report I've yet to read of a successful ship takeover. All a modern pirate can reasonably hope for is to sneak on board and make off with an armload of goods. Still, last week (sorry, can't find an archive link) some Indonesian pirates attacked a ship with rocket launchers and other serious firepower. Don't ever think that the world's a safe place.

Anecdote of Idiocy

Peculiar's absence from the internet of late is ascribable mostly to fatigue. I work at a ski area, and our current plenitude of snow, and also management's penchant for hiring mostly drug addicts and sub-normal goat farmers, has left me working some very long, hard days recently. But the people-watching at ski areas is always world class, and yesterday one gentleman displayed idiocy to a degree actually sufficient to set him apart from the crowd.

One of my drearier duties is to scan lift tickets, using a standard hand-held barcode scanner. I go to scan one fellow, the sort of rum cully all too common in Santa Fe, whose disheveled hair, dull stare and three-day beard atop some quite pricey ski clothes imply that an abundance of unearned money was for him the deciding factor between a career as a sensitive new-age guy or as a street drunk. As I reach toward him, he lurches his torso as far from his ticket as possible (with limited success, the two being attached), and demands to me, "Don't point that thing at my body, man! Those things are dangerous!" "No they're not," I say, "I'd worry more about the sunlight than this light here." "Gimme a break man," he replies. "It's a LASER! You know... like laser guns." "They kill fish," his female companion chimes in helpfully.

I've already decided that talking to this guy is like delivering a speech to dryer lint, but my nearby colleague tries good-naturedly to explain to him the difference between Class A and other lasers. But our Idiot-Olympian cuts him off, without the slightest trace of banter or irony, yelling, "Hey man, you got your belief system, I got mine!"

Well, clearly. Now I must admit that this guy bothered me more than he should have, much more than the Mere-Mortal idiots of whom I spent the rest of the day in observation. But, aside from contemplating the pleasure of telling him on his next run that his innards had already been thoroughly cauterized and mutated by the laser controlling the automatic door of our rental shop, I contemplated as well the perniciousness of the Your-Belief-System-Versus-Mine response which one hears so often from people on the losing sides of arguments. The fact that his belief system is a caprice, whereas the logical implications of mine regularly square with reality in the observations of numerous independant observers, is not even what I find most troubling. To respond to another person in this way is deny any possiblity of agreement, or even communication, save perhaps by chance. If we hold beliefs in common, it is pure coincidence, and we cannot use these commonalities to reach agreement on anything else. We cannot learn and we cannot teach; we cannot even communicate an idea to another unless they have it already, in which case it's an empty communication. Human intellect, art, and empathy all cease to have any power, and every person is permanently, hopelessly alone, unable to influence anyone else or even to know if beliefs and perceptions which appear to be shared are truly the same beliefs and perceptions. Someone who determinedly holds such notions is a human being only in the most technical sense.

But I'm over it. My interlocuter of yesterday has doubtless already died of dyspepsia, and I am free to steal a barcode scanner and enjoy a tasty summer of laser-fishing.

Traffic reports indicate over 110 unique visitors last week. Since Peculiar and I only know about five, total, this statistic begs the question: Who are you people?

Speaking of artificial intelligence, this article on AI and Thomas Aquinas is pleasantly odd.

There are a lot of very intelligent people out there with the ability royally to piss me off. Richard Dawkins is one of them. Materialism leads directly to moral relativism--that should be obvious to anyone with enough brains to read books written before 1853 AD. Why anyone listens to him on any subject besides evolutionary biology is beyond me. Of course, Dawkins thinks that every subject comes down to evolutionary biology, so perhaps that's why he feels qualified to write on anything, no matter how uninformed he may be.

Nature is always tougher than we imagine. Any organism or group of organisms that has lasted this long tends to be, in the words of Neal Stephenson, "a stupendous bad-ass." Still, if the robot falcons had been a little less passive, this might have gone the other way. Come on, people, let's get those birds in the air. Hit somebody!
Link via the Belligerent Bunny Blog.

The best effort at Artificial Intelligence I've come across was one in which the computer was simply programmed with data as they were needed. I can't find the article, so good luck! The example given was that the computer realized that a person with claustrophobia would be uncomfortable travelling by train to Paris from London, based on the following: the Chunnel is an enclosed space; claustrophobes feel uncomfortable travelling in enclosed spaces for a long distance; the Chunnel is 163,680 feet long; this length is longer than fifty feet; fifty feet is a long distance. This induction is impressive, but I wouldn't call it intelligence.

Induction and deduction as methods have switched definitions on occasion. Here, I mean by induction the method of reaching a generally applicable conclusion from singular statements. Deduction, therefore, is the method of creating the general conclusion first, then testing it with singular statements. Deduction is now, more or less, the accepted scientific method. One creates an hypothesis which leads one to various falsifiable predictions, tests those predictions, and decides whether this theory is false, or unfalsified. Not true in the absolute sense, of course, since by this method no theory can ever be proven true. It remains only and for the moment unfalsified.

This method is so familiar that it's hard to remember how young it is; and it is so familiar because it's so useful. Karl Popper, an Austrian philosopher recently revitalized by the book Wittgenstein's Poker, was one of the most influential advocates of it. Indeed, in his Logic of Scientific Discovery, he demonstrates the impossibility of the inductive method reaching any new discoveries.

That inconsistencies may easily arise in connection with the principle of induction should have been clear from the work of Hume; also, that they can be avoided, if at all, only with difficulty. For the principle of induction [i.e. a statement which would allow us to put inductive inferences in an acceptable logical form; that is, move from the singular to the universal] must be a universal statement in its turn. Thus if we try to regard its truth as known from experience, then the very same problems which occasioned its introduction will arise all over again.

He goes on to disparage Kant's attempt to place the principle of induction in the realm of the a priori; I think he gives Kant short shrift, since this view requires more that a shrugging off, but the important thing is that Popper has an alternative. If we begin with our conclusion, we cannot prove it, but we can falsify it if a singular event does not fit. If I decide that 'All peace protesters are stupid', this hypothesis can be disproven when I meet a smart peace protester. All I need is one instance of this, and my hypothesis must be thrown out or modified. This insight of Popper's is what destroyed the then juggernautical Vienna Circle and its logical positivism, which demanded that a statement, to be meaningful, must be capable of proof.

I'll quote Einstein, because I can, and it's his birthday, and I like him, in his address on the occasion of Max Planck's sixtieth birthday. "There is no logical path leading to these [highly universal] laws. They can only be reached by intuition, based on something like an intellectual love of the objects of experience." Popper himself thinks that every discovery has "'an irrational element'".

Until this "irrational element" (which I rather doubt is truly irrational) can be harnessed, computers will still be nothing more than excellent adding machines, a useful form of outside memory. They will be unable, to use a term of Kuhn's, to initiate or understand a "paradign shift"

P.S. Comparisons to Plato's Meno have been left as an exercise for the reader.

Haven't blogged lately: the Muse has been rather retiring lately, and, I might add, something of a surly drunk. But here's a jolly passage from The Floating Brothel by Sian Rees (the book is about the transportation of female convicts to Botany Bay):

Another East End twosome currently in Newgate under sentence of transportation were to Parts Beyond the Seas were Poll Randall and Mary Butler. These two had comitted an even more audacious raid on Joseph Clark at a lodging-house or brothel in Cable Street... On the night of 10 November 1787, Joseph Clark was strolling down Cable Street with the extraordinarily incautious sum of £40 in his pocket and half a cheese on his head[!]. When he found himself seized from behind by Poll Randall and Mary Butler and dragged into a house, it was, he explained to a bemused court, care for his cheese which prevented his putting up any resistance. Inside, his cheese was snatched and this, he went on, was why he could not leave...

Joseph Clark held out for his cheese during half a pint of gin, a game of cards, a further half of gin and supper, although he did object as supper as suggested that 'I only want my cheese and to go home'. But suddenly the mood changed. Poll and Mary hauled him upstairs- 'you could not resist at all?' asked an incredulous judge- and forcibly undressed him. 'She threw me on the bed!' he said in his defense. 'I cried out, for God's sake do not use me ill!' It was only when Poll demanded the banknotes in his pockets that Clark realized they were not just after his cheese. Even at this dramatic point, they all had another round of beef and gin, Clark still tucked up in bed. The girls were prepared to humour him for a while, but at a certain point Poll Randall ran out of patience- she wanted a drink: 'She took both my hands and put them behind me; I was afraid to make any resistance!' Both Poll Randall and Mary Butler were 13.

Comments fail me.

Oog. This morning is one on which I long for a gentleman's gentleman. Had a lovely time last night with my not-at-all-odious and middlingly peculiar parents and various avuncular relatives. Somehow, during all the talk (about Iraq! Who should have guessed?) alcohol was consumed, leading to my current headache and loss of subjects for my verbs. On the other hand, I did come away with the knowledge of an excellent margartia-good enough for me to drink, which is rare, ever since "Margaritennacht" several years ago. Silver tequila, cointreau, and fresh squeezed lime juice. More tequila than cointreau and lime juice combined, mix vigorously. Somehow, in the cold, wavery light of morning, it doesn't appeal the same way.

Mark your calenders!

March 15th is International Eat an Animal for PETA Day. I for one can't think of a group I'd rather offend, or a tastier way of doing so. PETA has just launched an ad campaign which compares eating animals to the Nazis' slaughter of the jews. Such a comparison frankly reeks of the 'pigs and monkeys' imagery popular with the worst breeds of anti-semites, and a response from sane and decent human beings is very much in order. The link above has mailing and e-mail addresses for PETA, as well as an apt letter which we are invited to cut and paste. Let's all do so.

The philosophical problem with animal rights is, of course, that rights are meaningless if those who have them can't or won't uphold them in others. Quite simply, I'll stop eating animals as soon as I can trust them not to eat me. Our odious and peculiar cats, Vermin and Horseflesh, show us occasional signs of affection, but I don't doubt that were we dead or immobile they'd be taking nibbles soon enough.

Soooo then... sausages for breakfast, maybe a Cornish game hen at lunch, shrimp with peanut sauce or calamari for an appetizer, then flank steaks for everyone!

Update: Or, if you'd like to get as many animals as possible into every mouthful, I suggest the following, courtesy of the Two Fat Ladies:

1/2 pound good mushrooms, sliced
butter
salt and freshly ground pepper
grated nutmeg
1/2 pound chicken or turkey livers
1 pound each ground beef, ground pork, and ground veal or turkey
1 pound pork sausage meat
1 large onion, grated
3 fat garlic cloves, minced to a paste
10 juniper berries, crushed
1 heaping teaspoon ground allspice
sprigs of fresh thyme
1-2 eggs
1/2 pound sliced bacon
bayleaves
branches of fresh rosemary

Sauté the mushrooms in butter until the juices run, then season with salt and pepper plus a good grating of nutmeg. Reserve. Remove the sinews from the livers and slice. In a large bowl, combine all the ground meats, the sausage meat, the livers, the onion, garlic and juniper berries. Add the allspice and some thyme leaves. Season with salt and about 20 turns of the pepper mill. Beat the egg(s) and add to the mixture along with the sautéed mushrooms. Use your spotless hands to mix this whole lot together most thoroughly.

Oil a roasting pan and place all the mixture in it, molding it into an oval shape. Adorn with the slices of bacon, criss-crossed Union Jack style, tucking the ends under the meat loaf. Strew some bay leaves and branches of rosemary on the top and sides. Cook in a pre-heated oven at 450ºF for 15 minutes, then lower the heat to 350ºF and cook for a further 1 1/2 hours.

One of the more beautiful methods of space transportation seems to be gaining some suppport. It's also nice to see that the company plans to make money off this venture. For too long space travel has been the realm of governments, with all others restricted to orbit. I know I'm saving my money for an affordable space-ship for the working man.

Physicality and Music

Patrick Kavanaugh has an interesting article up at NRO, in which he contemplates the current trend towards semi-nudity and sexual suggestion on classical album covers. Neither Kavanaugh nor I disapprove of any specific instance of this per se. She's hot, she's scantily clad, and her Beethoven will blow your socks off? What's not to like? It's the trend which disturbs us, not its lovely incarnations.

Artists' looks have always been an issue in opera, where audiences are generally encouraged to look at the performers rather than close their eyes and contemplate the music's abstract structures. The putative public, with unfeeling heart and shriveled imagination, is commonly perplexed by operatic heroes' love for their expansive sopranos. But with the help of costume, lighting, and some distance between the viewer and the stage, a good singer can easily hide her physical form behind the power of her vocal characterization*. In instrumental music, the problem should theoretically be nonexistent. Who cares if the soloist has a hump and a horn, if her playing brings tears to our eyes?

I do not wish to imply that only the imbecilic, Philistine masses have these sorts of issues, while I, the educated connoisseur, am quite beyond them. I must admit, in good candour with myself, that I too am somewhat distracted by the girths of (for example) Jessye Norman and Gary Lakes in my DVD performance of Die Walküre. But this distraction would be negligable in a live performance, where ample singers do not fill my television screen, but are instead dwarfed by the scenery. I place the blame here on the zoom lenses at live performances, and on the boudoir photographers employed by the record companies. We the audience were never meant to see the sweat on a violinist's grimacing brow as she plays a serene but difficult passage, and only the most narcissistic of artists would rob us of the serenity which the composer intended in order to spotlight her own exertions. Such focus on the physical act of music making, and the physical stuff of the music makers, exacerbates this tension between technical process and emotional product, and forces our eyes towards performers' bodies in a manner unprecedented throughout classical music's history.

The matter of sexy album covers is, of course, fundamentally a marketing issue, both for artists and record companies. As Kavanaugh points out, the world of classical performance is so fiercely competitive at present that even quite talented and generally respectable female performers can hardly afford not to take advantage of whatever fleshly beauty they are lucky enough to possess. As for the record companies, they are desperate for any marketing advantage which can justify charging eighteen dollars for a recital CD. All of the standard repetoire has been recorded, often in dozens of excellent competing versions. Modern digital recordings do not, in the ears of most listeners, sound consistantly better than remastered analogue performances, and one is not hard pressed to think of numerous records from the late fifties and early sixties which are still considered the benchmark recordings of indispensible works. With so many stunningly good old performances available for a fraction of the price of the renditions du jour, it's little wonder if the marketing executives are not particularly scrupulous as they try to draw our attention to new releases. Playing up the artists' 'personalities' and physical attributes is just an obvious means of boosting sales.

The most prominent victims of all this are the many talented young performers whose faces and other bits are not alone capable of selling records. But I fear that televised performances and close-up shots are also pushing rising stars into tackling difficult repetoire too early, while their youthful bloom yet lingers, and robbing older artists of the rewards for their years of effort (Convent Garden recently rejected Deborah Voigt as Ariadne, on the grounds that she was too fat). Life experience and maturity make a great deal of difference in interpretations of complex and subtle material. It's pleasant enough to look at a nubile twenty-two-year-old pretending to be Fiordiligi, Eva, Desdemona, or Arabella; but it's years of performance experience, of interpetation and re-interpretation which brings the greatness of these roles to life**. The same applies to the great instrumental repetoire, which is so often personal and painful at it's heart.

One of the great benefits of recorded music, in my mind, is that it saves us from the problems of physicality which plague live performances. I can listen at home to hours of Wagner in such comfort as is inconceivable in the opera house, stretched out on the sofa, refreshments at hand. I can imagine a Sieglinde who appears every bit as beautiful, as dignified in humiliation, as hopeful in sorrow, as a good soprano can sound but can hardly hope to look. And I can be spared nitwit post-modern directors' sophomoric production concepts (like Francesca Zambello's Les Troyens recently at the Met, in which Berlioz' Trojans are depicted as "Post-9/11, Pre-Gulf 2" American imperialists), which reduce timeless artistic grandeur to shallow and fleeting propoganda. But by emphasizing and exploiting performers' bodies and non-musical personalities the marketers are subtly robbing us listeners of these delights, robbing us of the joy of hearing a mature, seasoned artist set her ageing body aside and bring the conceptions of a long dead genius magically and sensuously to life.

*These vocal swords can cut many ways. It is absolutely a myth that all opera singers are fat. Take, for instance, Christa Ludwig as Fricka. It never ceases to amaze me how so tiny a woman can transform herself through singing into a terrifyingly imposing goddess, who quite believably demolishes Wotan's mighty will and reduces the chief of the gods to a despondent heap. And let's not forget the delicious irony in the anecdote (found here) about the tenor singing Don José in a modern dress Carmen in Mexico City, who went out for a beer during intermission and was arrested as a deserter from the army; only by singing Cette fleur que tu m'avais jetée could he convince the police that he was not in fact the character he was portraying.

**The role of the Feldmarschallin in Der Rosenkavalier embodies these questions. She is a woman who is only just passing her physical prime, who is coming to realize that flesh and beauty are fleeting, and therefore cannot define a person. Her Act I monologue on time would alone suffice to prove that opera can have great depth, and is not mere vocal showmanship. "One must take it lightly, with light heart and light hands hold and take, hold and relinquish... Those who are not like that will be punished by life" [trans. Walter Legge]. Obviously, older sopranos will bring greater depth and poignancy to such a role than younger ones, and audiences very often assume based on the performer's age that the character Marie Thérèse is much older than the libretto in fact indicates.

I used to joke that, because I was born three days earlier than expected, I would someday take those days off and laze about.

I am now roughly two years behind.

Sadly, I can't even hope for an enormous contraction of the Universe to destroy all evidence of my indolence. On the plus side, things will slow down as the Universe expands, so I may have a chance to catch up (God and thermodynamics willing).

As we continue to be plagued by sand-poundingly stupid whining about the blatantly imaginary "moratorium on dissent" since September 11th, here is a genuine dissenter, a poet in favour of the war. Frederick Turner is the author of, among other things, The New World and Genesis, two very fun and intelligent science fiction novels cast as epic poems (the first has an almost mythological feel, and a neo-classicist, post-apocalyptic setting; the second is set in the near future and concerned with the colonization of Mars). Mr. Turner is a poet of a regrettably rare sort, one who can make scientific subject matter strikingly beautiful without transforming it into sentimental nature mysticism. Goethe and Ted Hughes (scroll down to 'Pike') also possessed such talents. I personally find that such poetry can be eerily evocative even when it is undoubtably risible, as with Erasmus Darwin or James Grainger:

Tell me what viands land or streams produce
The large, black, female, moulting crab excel?

When it's acceptable to eat someone IX: You are a giant hyena.

This article packs an astonishing number of fascinating things into a very small space. In short, anthropologist Christy Turner suspects that the human colonization of North America may have been delayed by giant man-eating hyenas in Siberia, and that our ancestors may have domesicated dogs as hyena alarms. Turner's career seems largely to revolve around anthropophagy; it was he who revealed evidence of Anasazi cannibalism. All rather grim stuff; but readers sufficiently perverse to have read George Leonard Herter will take comfort in that man's confident assurance (in George the Housewife, I believe) that "Being eaten by hyenas is not as bad as it sounds."

Speaking of archeology, here is a researcher who believes that rock art sites may have been chosen for their acoustic properties. I will certainly be keeping the idea in mind come summer, when I resume my amateur field research in the subject.

Here's something quite clever, an apparently psychic website, and the fact that it's a cheap trick doesn't make it any less clever. Odious is a little faster with this sort of thing, and had the key before Peculiar's train of thought was too far out of the station. Here are some clues.
Hint #1 (stimulus): Think about the presence on the chart of numbers like 1 and 99 as solutions to the math. What are they doing there?
Hint #2 (really should be sufficient): Try doing it with a few consecutive numbers.
Hint #3 (insults your intelligence): do the same number a few times in a row.

I am reading Montaigne's Essays at the moment, and was struck by the timelessness of certain sentiments. The consolation of philosophy, the desire to remove oneself from lazy acceptance of popular thought into the realm of truth ("a fair, lush plateau from which one may gaze unhindered on all below"--On the Education of Children). Moreover, certain truths are both timeless and timely. In his essay On Presumption, Montaigne quotes the late Chancellor Olivier as saying, "The French are like monkeys which clamber up a tree and there show their arse." Given their recent monarchical behavior in politics, the truth of this sixteenth century statement is more evident than ever.

I recently got into a shouting match (in which I did all the shouting) with a good, reasonable, decent friend of mine who is absolutely blinkered on the coming war with Iraq. When I talk about the situation and reasonable responses to it, she talks about the United States' past iniquities. And while I don't think that they are as great as she does, I do accept some of them. We have done wrong. We will most likely do wrong again.

But this is not a reason to abandon our role as an agent of change. We have done wrong in my lifetime; we've been mistaken and nasty and even evil. But we cannot therefore abandon any future enterprise as tainted. We are not victims of the past.

The assumption is that the chance of doing wrong overwhelms all others. After all, once we've done wrong, there's no undoing it. And we are tainted by all the wickedness of the past; how could we, horrible foul we, hope to help anyone?

This state is a subtle and enervating form of victim mind. It leads to a comfortable state in which we do nothing but lament and bewail our manifold sins. After all, if we do not act, we cannot act on wrong motives. And who can truly say that they are acting out of pure goodness?

And this question leads us to the other prong of her argument: that the United States' are acting out of self-interest. Randians out there will say, "So what?" This is why no one listens to them. Motive is an important part of our actions. It is in motive that the morality of our actions lies. This is not to say that we can ignore the probable consequence; after all, if we act without regard to that we are not truly acting in the hope of doing good, but merely in the hope of avoiding iniquity. Moral action tries to bring about moral consequences. This difference is what Kant is talking about when he writes of an effort of will, as opposed to mere hoping. The peace protestors I've seen (and given the finger) fall into this trap. "Believe Peace" read their signs. "Let's all send out peaceful thoughts," one speaker urged. This is not will; will leads to action. This is useless, will-less hoping.

But hope never harmed anyone, and so the protestors embrace it. It is purely negative, in a moral sphere; it avoids wickedness while producing nothing. This inaction is the true council of the peace protestors. For this reason they view the downtrodden and poor peoples of the earth as purer than us. A people who has never had the power to act is the only people who can be free from wickedness.

The United States, as the most influential country in the world, are the target for all their spleen. Any action, if one traces the consequences far enough, will bring about iniquity, no matter how slight, and therefore all action is wrong in some degree.

This careful removal of motes, while being equally careful to ignore beams, characterizes a certain type of thought. The possible consequences of action are one's own fault; the consequences of inaction are not. After all, one has done nothing. This train of thought is merely victim mind, disguising itself as morality.

The fundamental belief of the peace protestors is therefore one of unexpungeable sin. They do not believe in redemption; they do not believe in free will. At bottom they believe that sins of the past taint all actions, that no action is pure, that self-interest guides all. And they believe this because they are in victim mind. A person in action mind uses the past for lessons on how to act in the present; they are too busy considering the present and its opportunities for moral action to engage in circle-flagellation.

Attack Iraq? NOW!