Review of The Gospel According to the Simpsons by Mark I. Pinsky

I've had to look up the word "virago" at least five times. The "bright" part I get, but a virago is a horrid old monster, and when I think of Bright, I come up with (a) a person who is a far cleverer Simpsons fan than I am (I wasted a big part of my life quoting this show, but still all the good profiles in that old post were hers) and probably a cleverer person in general, (b) someone almost congenitally nice (at least in my experience--I missed all those smackdowns of the stupid that switters likes to talk about), and (c) possibly the most non-annoying believing person that I have ever met. She's got a wit that doesn't rely on vulgarity and insults (unlike some ignorant asshole book reviewers I know) which I recall hearing is a mid-western thing. Maybe she (also) figures that decency aura she has to be perplexing, but still, virago? I just can't see it.

(I liked the way this icon came out better, but thought the character might be hard to place.)

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So with those tidbits of character, I actually sprung eleven bucks on the least likely book of this whole series so far, The Gospel According to the Simpsons. I've been exposed to a little of this sort of thing, as a young person still associated with a sort of liberal church. It was a little before the Simpsons came out, but there was other "cool" Christian literature we'd talk through in those days, looking for unceremonious expressions of faith to maybe stoke up the youth. They were something similar, but I don't remember if these books worked as badly as theological argument as Gospel does. In the opening sequence, Pinsky pretty well nails his case shut before he opens it. He brings up a scene from the series in which Homer Simpson throws up an intercessionary prayer:

"confirmation of the deal, he prays, will come in the form of 'absolutely no sign.' There is no sign." [God doesn't even mind if Homer eats the offering of cookies and milk himself] "Homer mutters the benediction, 'Thy will be done.'"

The ensuing discussion calls upon the Intelligent Design authority William Dembski (even barring what I think about ID, Dembski deserves ridicule for heading a chapter with 'Recognizing the Divine Finger' without irony), along with Biblical chapter and verse to overanalyze the theological argument, while committing the worst sin of all, completely failing to get the joke. (Hint: possibly something to do with the milk.) It's not all that bad, but it's a bad opener. Pinsky himself shows ample signs of equanimity, but he's far too credulous of his experts for my tastes. Reaching back to other religious "thinkers" like Jonah ('what should dismay liberals is that so many of today's pieties are constructs of the Left') Goldberg in the conclusion really doesn't do the cause any favors. The deep Godly content is already a stretch before the dimbulb scions of the moral majority get drug out to support it.

Pinsky commits a couple other notable failures in the getting-the-joke department. In a cartoon television series, God's occasional tendency to grant wishes through prayer doesn't actually affirm any real aspect of the universe's nature. I hate to remind the guy it's fiction, although it does fill the need for so many classic storytelling motifs. Likewise, the point about Ned Flanders, who gets a whole chapter to himself as the model Evangelical, is that he is indeed a nice man, but the joke very often is that his rigid Christianity can also make him inhuman (sometimes in a positive way, but hardly always). These tidbits grate, but on the whole, the middle part of this book is surprisingly readable and enjoyable. Or maybe not surprising: Pinsky basically runs down at length the favorable approaches the show has taken to religion, and the entire middle of it is more of a report than it is an argument, often summarizing entire episodes, pointing out the religious jokes that the writers threw in. They're still funny. Most of it has to do with a run-down on the mild-mannered Protestantism the family participates in, but there's the show's token Jewish entertainer, and the Hindu character gets a chapter, as did the one episode of Buddhism. (Oddly, Pinsky didn't mention Homer's native American vision quest brought on by a Guatemalan pepper.) As they get further from the Abrahamic faiths, the writers come off a little more shallow, and the parts they right or wrong was analyzed in a shallow way, but it was not unappreciated. I can't say I've read any interviews with the writers before, and Pinsky's discussion of their backgrounds and roles writing the show was the most interesting bit of original content.

But let's point out the obvious. Although there is faith depicted in the series, The Simpsons is not about religion. The writers of the show, to their credit, have complex enough viewpoints about Christianity and other religions to offer a spectrum of positions as they suit the story or, more importantly, the humor. Most people think about projection in psychological terms, extending ones viewpoint out onto others, but when I think of projection, I usually go back to my math classes, that is, representing a complex shape in less than its complete dimensions (a projection like a map, in other words), which necessarily loses information. The Simpsons has religious and other conservative elements, and is, in fact admirable about balancing their worth, but calling the show a religious experience is reducing it. What The Simpsons does have is damn good comedy writing, and after 15 years of watching the silly program, I thank Pinsky for reminding me of that.

Review of Mr. Pye by Mervyn Peake

Although it wasn't my first choice, I'm liking Michael Daunt (né Schadenfreude) as Mr. Pye. (This would have been my first choice, especially after thumbing through the index.) It's fun to picture the publisher of quiblit magazine as a moral shepherd, gently guiding a small flock to some ideal productive behavior that is liberated from our vices. There's good material at quiblit, excellent writers, a chance of an audience, and Mike does a great job of tying it all together. That our angel from heaven is as tempted by malicious glee as the rest of us makes the venture so much more delicious, but (mixing up my mythologies), surely in the celestial balance, his heart would be judged lighter than a little blue feather. Quiblit deserves its wings.

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In the novel Mr. Pye, You can see a little bit of Gormenghast, Peake's (deservedly) more famous and more popular brainchild. There is some of the the castle's oppressive stone landscape reflected in the sea-carved features of the island setting, and both places are populated with a similar set of grotesques. Mr. Pye is more human-scaled though, and anchored to known geography. It's also a great deal shorter, and more thematically driven, as if the author had a different mission than letting the great, looming masonry create a mood. Oddly, I don't think this served him all that well: at his best, Mervyn Peake created brilliant edifices of prose that I always want to call "painterly", luridly colored, overly shadowed, heavily textured, and in which the details of visual composition are conceived to the point that their relevance surpasses the dynamical stuff of plot. A good deal of that was lost with Pye's softened setting and constrained scope, and while I usually support excision of superfluous detail, Peake sacrificed what he was best at.

The story takes place on Sark, a small island in the English Channel. Peake actually spent a good deal of his life there, as an artist before the war and later with his family, and his characters of the painter Thorpe and the titular Pye, the two aliens in the island society, are almost surely depictions of the author himself. It's a fascinating viewpoint, because each are loaded up with profound measures of love and contempt, as if they're two little vehicles of intense self-deprecation, executed with enough social intelligence to loathe the self-absorption as much as anything. Thorpe, a minor character, is merely a dope, easily swayed but impervious to conversion, a man with an occasional eye but who is lacking either sufficient motivation or sufficient talent to turn those visions into anything like an artistic truth. Mr. Pye is ostensibly a man of all the right kinds of conviction, an earnest seeker who is punished for the effort. (It would be an interesting exercise to contrast Peake's conception of himself the artist to Franz Kafka's. Both suffer for their genius, but Kafka goes for martyrdom, the art ultimately understood only by the artist, and Peake finds only derision in that pose.)

In the novel, Harold Pye comes to Sark to gently proselytize a vague message of goodness, a church of God the great omnipresent Pal, winning the locals over by wit, respect, and example. Pye is so self-possessed, so pure, so sweet, and so right that he begins to transform the moral landscape of the island. He's so good that his Pal gives him wings, which, on real people, isn't precisely a blessing. To get rid of the horrifying things, he abandons his evangelism to try to work them off with sin, the results of which have their own unsettling supernatural manifestation. He's a weird character, and it's hard to judge what the author is trying to communicate about him. Until he gets the growths, Mr. Pye reads like some allegorical figure, too simplified to really be connected to this world, and his human reaction, when it comes, doesn't feel fitting. With that normal response interjected, the reader is left questioning how the man got his fortune, how he embraced that honesty, and what he sacrificed for it. Except for this sudden earthly motiviation (and a couple of briefly glimpsed Peake-ish attributes, a penchant for nonsense verse and doodles) Pye remains more cherub than man until the end.

I want to tell you that Peake doesn't play his spiritual dichotomies well either. Pye's goodness is of an ecumenical sort, pushing at ideas of spiritual harmony, forgiveness, and emotional moderation, and those wings, they make more sense as divine irony than as a vehicle for character study. At the climax of Pye's evangelism, the author throws the putrefying corpse of a whale onto the shore, and this feels allegorical too--it feels like celestial sabotage--but still, the authorial voice is not ironic, doesn't feel like deadpan. The evil that Pye undertakes to remove his wings isn't the naturally opposite antisocial sort, but instead tends more biblical. In an effort to make his wings shink, the character engages in some petty vandalism, which is funny, and yes, he corrupts one comically deserving member, but other than that, he refrains from actually hurting anyone or from going after the obvious avenues of emotional abuse (or gratification). Instead, he's diverted to some silly off-camera Satanism, something suggestively involving goats.

I want to tell you that these things don't balance at all, but the book feels subtler and more powerful in hindsight than it felt while I was reading. As constructed, it works a lot better as a backhanded condemnation of God. It would explain the charitable positivist religiosity, which only resulted in the well-timed punishment by a capricious deity. It would explain the goofy nature of evil, and the (uncondemned) sexual characters that came closer to naturalism than the Great Pal ever did. Does the author hate Pye for his self-satisfied benevolence? I can tell you that I didn't connect to it that much, but there's not enough to him to really annoy either. And in context, Pye's good works produce good humanist consequences, which makes it tough to paint subtle irony onto what's written. The bad deeds that follow (pitching the old bat down the stairs, say) are as intentionally nasty as the prior events were wholesome, and they don't really come out as unintended consequence of good effort. While subtlety and humor had their places in the novel, they didn't enter in here, and I can't decide whether these explanations are my own clever revisionism or if they were intentional. For me to buy into the deeper meaning of Mr. Pye, I'd have to believe that the author meant it. I could be convinced of that, I think.

View from the monkey tree #3,124,598

I found myself in a conversation about money this weekend with one of the Three Official Friends (there's nothing quite like a more successful person telling you it isn't important), which segued into a more general plaint about the top-heavy big-corporate bureaucracy he has to deal with. There's nothing like a marketing weasel complaining about corporate dross for that matter, but old friends talking here, and it's got to be a Herculean commitment to do what he does and keep his soul. In any case, they have a rotten chief to Indian ratio, and I tried to tell him it's not unique to the big boys. Everybody wants to manage other people and peddle the snake-oil, because the schmooze is what's ultimately remunerated.

I keep going back to this as I prep for tomorrow's presentation for high level customers. (I wonder if the big or the small bureaucracies are worse. There's nothing like working under the Napoleon complex of the small-time managerial set.) The truth is that I'm glad these guys are available to help me shovel the corporate lingo in a way that somehow satisfies the mutually exclusive demands of getting directly to the point and eliding every hint of technical information. Although I'm not sure why it takes quite so many of them. One would think that these trivial disputes in presentation style are still not so academic that they require a panel of four corporate elders to challenge the lone technical guy, especially considering I'm basically a bauble that can speak here, some token brain that can fake it long enough to lend this sales pitch credibility. These last couple of days have felt like a thesis defense that has leaked away anything to actually argue over, which, of course, stops no one from debating the quantity and depth of the bullet points--a lot of sage head-nodding about bottom-line this and what's-the-story-we're-communicating that. (There's nothing like Dilbert, or there was nothing like it ten years ago. Oxygen is good.) It's not that the technical component was all that great anyway (let me just say, thank god for competent subcontractors), because I'm not the sort of quality whore that they hire for a long slow romance, and because some portion of the fee has to go toward high-level communication too.

Anyway, this is all a complicated way of saying I'm still laying low, and it's taking a lot to keep my general pissiness in check anyway. Later in the week, I'll throw some book reviews up or something.

And if you've never heard the joke, it goes like this:

A corporation is like a tree full of monkeys. The CEO looks down from the top of the tree and sees nothing but smiling monkey faces, happily chattering swinging around from branch to branch. The board looks down and sees the same, middle management: nothing but smiling monkey faces all the way down. My bosses look down at me, and see my smiling monkey face. Looking up, I get a different view.

Be back soon.

UPDATE: Went swimmingly. Had my place in the American military-industrial machine highlighted and circled with a blue pen. Well, at least I've never made anything that enabled killing people. (And if I did, it probably didn't work.)

Dishonest Dissent (and Climate Change for Dummies)

Last December, a group of academics wrote an open letter to the United Nations, disputing the official findings of the International Panel for Climate Change. I nervously scanned it for alumni, and was disappointed to find one Howard C. Hayden, professor emeritus of physics from the University of Connecticut. Here he is again, a credentialed speaker classing up a legion of blowhards, think-tankers and non-scientists at the Heartland Institute. (Both of these were pointed out here). I should have at least heard his name before: he was winding up his professorial career at just about the same time I was underachieving my way through grad school at UConn, ten years or so ago. He worked in the field of atomic physics, and I assume that the lab in the basement with all the potential energy envelope functions taped to the wall was his. The physics building was adjacent to the one I worked in, and I walked by those posters almost every day.

Evidently, his contrarian hobby preceded his retirement. For some of the time he was professionally active, he ran a journal for a while dedicated to a dissent of general relativity. In and of itself, I wouldn't call this a bad thing. Stubbornness is a necessary part of any good researcher's constitution, and even the most cherished theories, especially the ones which are hard to verify experimentally, should be challenged regularly. Even if they don't result in a refutation of accepted belief, these exercises can still open up conceptual space (you'll need a good challenge to get through to people), and they can shore up any weak areas in the theory. One can defy convention and still be honest, and this is one reason that I find, say, Roger Penrose's unusual ideas about the intersection of AI and quantum mechanics to be worthy. On the other hand, one of the most annoying cultural developments in modern America has been to confuse contrarianism with truth, that is, to adopt all of the smug counterintuition without the inconvenience of actually having to be right about stuff (a tone which my inner Yankee correctly identifies as the oleaginous voice of Marketing). Any scientific opinion is ultimately judged on its utility. It really does have to match the available observations.

I made a point to watch An Inconvenient Truth before I read Howard Hayden's pamphlet, A Primer on CO₂ and Climate. I don't fault Al Gore for bringing the message to the public, but I do think he made some errors of judgement in the presentation: his graphs had illegible axes for the most part, and he relied too much on projections (isn't ten feet enough?), single plot points ("today's" CO₂), dramatic anecdotal evidence (Katrina and mosquito-borne disease), and false optimism. I furthermore found the whole Albert Agonistes business too goddamn self-indulgent by a mile, but I think he's on the right side of the debate, even if he's doing marketing too.

What separates Gore from Penrose from Hayden? One is where they fit in the hierarchy of political power. Hayden fashions himself a dissenter, but he's really arguing from a position of convenience, saying that nothing could possibly go wrong with our current consumption patterns. I think Al Gore also gets some thrill from defying convention as well, but the people who find his views useful aren't nearly so obvious or powerful (yes, he's stoking an electoral base, and yes, scientists are always greedy for funding, but to my knowledge, there is no Big Climate Science lobby pulling his strings), and conservation as a basic philosophical principal is certainly more defensible than a position that says we can return carbon to the atmosphere indefinitely, and without consequences. There are differences of style and credibility too. Unlike the charming Penrose, Hayden makes a habit of belittling his critics, and, also unlike the mathematician, he has published zero scientific research in the field in he most likes to moan about. For a guy who gets so much mileage dismissing Al Gore's non-scientific background (and others', inaccurately), Howard C. Hayden keeps some strange company on the lecture circuit, and while the position of scientists may tend toward some nuance vis a vis the IPCC's position, Hayden's presents a pile of skepticism that is more reactionary than it is rational. Hayden is a capable guy who's right about some things, who has been an interesting voice at times, but who is, by the available evidence, a professional dickhead.

His Primer is one of several micro-press publication he's put out on a similar theme. He also writes a monthly newsletter on energy, and milks organizations like Heartland for dodgy gravitas and speaking fees. It's about fifty pages long, fluffed with lots of figures, and it's not overly technical. The book is fashioned more as a refutation than as a coherent proposition, but I'm okay with the format. He opens it up with several reasonable-sounding questions (Is the earth warming? Is mankind responsible? Is it bad? Can we change it?) which are fair to ask, but they are light on the culpability. There's no question that we people have dug out and liberated some hundred or more gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere, carbon that had been sitting out of the climate game for a few hundred million years before the industrial revolution rolled around. I prefer to ask: What consequences are reasonable to expect from doing that?

The early pages of his pamphlet focus on the famous CO₂ data from the Mauna Loa observatory, shown here. He plots these data on an axis that starts from zero, trying to emphasize that this increase is negligible and warning the reader of the lies that statistics are capable of. But crying a lie is itself misleading: even counting for the viewpoint of the graph, we're still seeing a 15% increase in atmospheric CO₂ concentration at the observatory.

[img]http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.png[/img]

To decide whether that is a significant increase as far as global climate is concerned, we have to consider how the absorption of energy by CO₂ affects the heat balance of the earth. All objects emit energy as a function of their temperature, and hotter objects emit higher energy (shorter wavelength) radiation and more of it. The emission spectrum of the earth has a peak in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum, but it varies from that of a black body (that is, an ideal emitter) in several ways. Where the atmosphere is transparent to infrared, the emission is dominated by the earth's surface, which is hotter than the atmosphere. Most infrared is absorbed by atmospheric gases, however, (mostly by water vapor) and is re-emitted above the earth (all matter will emit energy as a function of temperature), but not all of it goes into space, some goes back down. The effect is reduce the rate of heat rejection to space. The system gets a little bit hotter and therefore more emissive until it gets to the point where it eliminates energy as fast as it takes it in.** A good analogy is a radiation shield (the heat shield under your muffler is one), which, unlike one dumb point by Howard Hayden, is in my fundamental (okay, introductory) heat transfer text. Still, if you're not careful with your vocabulary, you can get into traps that cranky deniers will dance over like goblins on a grave. (Heat is radiated back from the atmosphere to the hotter surface, at least mathematically, but net heat transfer still preserves the second law of thermodynamics. Good absorbers also, by definition, are good emitters, and most of the energy emitted to space is done by the greenhouse gases, but it's still true that they "block" or shield it by radiating in all directions, including down; don't call it reflection.)

Hayden is right that there's not a big spectral band where CO₂ can really play a role in the infrared. Only about 6% of the outgoing radiation is available to take part in this process (according to those hacks at NASA anyway). Most of the important radiative processes in the atmosphere involve water vapor, but at wavelengths from about 6 to 13 ?m, water is transparent, and that is where carbon dioxide absorption matters most. Here's a typical atmospheric absorption spectrum at infrared wavelengths (from astronomy sources, with no dog in this fight). Carbon dioxide has an absorption band in the middle of this spectral "window," nabbing about 40% of the radiant energy that has a wavelength near 12.5 ?m. Hayden makes a lot of noise about the saturation effect of CO₂, harping that at some point, only so much light can be absorbed by the stuff, but the band 12.5 ?m is definitely not swamped. In fact, the exponential behavior of light absorption means that at low starting concentrations, the effect of increasing the amount of absorber is very pronounced, but at relatively high concentrations, when most of the radiation has been scavenged already, adding more material doesn't do anything extra. The transmission given in the figure is at known CO₂ concentration (about 360 ppm, averaged roughly over MLO's sampling time), and it's easy to estimate what a 15% increase will get us, about 1-2% percent. A 30% increase would be about 5% more energy absorbed in that small portion of the spectrum.

[IMG]http://i219.photobucket.com/albums/cc74/Keifus/CO2absorption-1.jpg[/IMG]

At the poles, another 10% of incident solar radiation is reflected off the ice, and although this seems like another small number to work with, it also affects the surface temperature. When there is less ice, there is more solar absorption at the bare surface, increasing the surface temperature slightly, which melts the ice. Increasing temperature also causes enhances the CO₂ level in the atmosphere, since the solubility of the stuff in the oceans goes down (and more carbon in the atmosphere causes the temperature to further increase, etc.). When I look at the CO₂ and temperature data from ice cores, the salient feature I notice is that there are two relatively stable values near which the CO₂ concentration (and temperature) variation is usually restricted. On the earth, at least for the past 400,000 years, it's a good hypothesis that the limiting values correspond to the limiting values of those adjustable parameters, that is, there is only so much ice to melt or freeze, and the effect of carbon in the atmosphere can only be so big. The reason it pushes toward the extreme values may well be that they're stable compared to intermediates. (I tap vague memories of control theory, and think it looks like a two-state oscillator, an often-cited system which can switch suddenly between two (or many) different periodic behaviors. Follow the link at the end, and tell me if you agree.) The in-between points of systems like this are generally unstable, and the tendency to jump between one extreme or another is due to a sensitivity of the system to its various parameters. Plausibly, the subtle orbital mechanics of the Milankovitch cycles can nudge the climate behavior to one limit or the other--it doesn't seem to be an exact match (which bugs climatologists), but the periodicity looks right.

[IMG]http://i219.photobucket.com/albums/cc74/Keifus/doublewelloscillator.jpg[/IMG]

The upper limit of this cycle is probably not due to optical saturation of the 12.5 ?m band, but it may be a case of running out of carbon to spread around the system. Hayden makes a really annoying point that CO₂ levels in the Jurassic period were far higher than they are now, neglecting to mention that the temperatures were a whole lot higher then too. On a geological scale, the earth is now in a cold period, one of a few dips down from what has otherwise been a fairly steady average temperature through Deep Time. Atmospheric carbon, which is also at a low, influences this, and so does the position of the landmasses (continents at the poles to support glaciers matter), and, likely, the population and diversity of biota. (The relation between the CO₂ level (high) and temperature (low) way back in the late Ordovician is interesting and the explanations are shaky. It's a much better response to climate change arguments than anything Hayden actually bothered to look up.) To the extent that maximum optical absorption by atmospheric CO₂ can be taken to set the upper stable limit of earth's temperature, then we're still well short (ten average degrees) of it, and it'll take more than a few tens of percent concentration increase. I would be confident that we're only merely riding out a peak of the warming behavior that's been repeating for 400 kiloyears if it weren't for the fact that we've resurrected a good deal of carbon from previous geological eras and put it back into the climate system, and we will continue to do so until it's too hard to get. It's a pretty ballsy bet.

There are a number of sources and sinks for both carbon dioxide and energy that occur across the planet, and for sure, they vary with latitude and surface features. Pointing this out is not a refutation of climate models, but Hayden gives it a shot anyway. Correlation is certainly not the same as causation (and even Al Gore chose his words carefully there), but often in complicated systems, various parameters influence one another, and keeping track of them all to estimate where they balance out is not only the right way to defeat oversimplification, it's exactly what a climate model is. When you find yourself smugly pointing out the shortcomings of the simple explanations, and then complaining that the detailed explanations have too many parameters, then it's safe to say that you're just being an asshole. It's true that more adjustable parameters gives you more room to fake the results, but Jesus, they're putting in real data to the extent they can, and always using known physics. Picking on the vernacular and pointing out "many" minor errors in a popular field that generates hundreds of papers a year is pretty fucking annoying too. Not all of them make it into Science.

Near the end of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore hopefully suggested activities that might cut away at carbon emission: conservation, sequestration, renewable energy resources. (Oddly enough, he doesn't want to renege on the highway system or the other entitlements of the American dream.) And here I regrettably join company with Howard Hayden. I don't think we'll ever manage to replace the stuff, and barring scarcity or a dramatic reduction in the human population, the world will never curb its carbon emissions. Still, Hayden stoops to speciousness even to diss the more tenuous dreams. Maybe there's not an ideal storage mechanism for electricity right now ("no mechanism" is obviously untrue) but it's something that's within reasonable ambitions of engineering. I am not any more pro-hydrogen than he is, but that's one potential storage mechanism right there. It's not so much that Hayden is flat wrong, it's that his dissent to climate change is dishonest. You don't need to drop $13.95 and half an hour on a shitty pamphlet to realize that of course, but this time I felt obligated.


*Also writing outside my field, here. Although I am a minor author on a tiny paper out there about scrubbing aerosols from exhaust streams. I suppose that puts me one up on Hayden in terms of climatological cred.

**Presumably the flux of energy from the core to the surface is small, and presumably tidal effects and so forth don't amount to much (except maybe every 10,000 years or so).

Free Reading:

1. Good description and historical review of climate change from those godless hippies at the American Institute of Physics.


2. CO₂ and temperature in geological time. Really interesting stuff.


3. Do climate cycles over 4000,000 years look like the behavior of a double-well oscillator? Learn about them here.

A Candidate I Could Have a Beer With, Part III

It's been nice, in a way, to see the town so awake these past couple of weeks, responding to the presence of all these powerful strangers, but it's made for uneasy variations in the old routine, waking my mind up in ways that it's not really used to. Maybe one of these days I'll start to keep the same sort of cool that my wife manages. There is a woman who can make connections. On Friday, all three of us--Jane and I, with little Simon toddling along (he was an opinionated baby, and we named him after our favorite music critic)--over to Applebee's, which is something of a payday tradition. That place gave us the strangest run-in so far. Even at the entrance, you could tell something was off: there were these identical-looking guys in suits everywhere, and I had to push my way through them just to get over to the hostess and drop off our names.

Forcing my way back, I reported to the boss. "It looks like its going to be a wait, Hon. You want anything to drink for now?"

She shook her head, but since my teeth were already clenching, I decided to body surf my way over to the bar for an aperitif. I pushed my way through the clones, past some jokers setting up lights, and I squinted at the glare from those upside-down umbrellas. The very end of the bar had the only open space, and I wedged found myself there with my elbow between some cheesy decorations, a dusty football and a framed photo of a sunny family picnicking in Anywhereville, USA.

At Applebee's, I like to get a Yuengling or two, my weekly attempt at upscale beer-swilling. I drink 'em a little slower, and my wife doesn't give me as many funny looks as we get through our meal. I looked back over the crowd at her, and she was, to my surprise, looking right back at me, excited as hell.

I mouthed a brilliant response. "What?"

She waved her arms around, and made grimaces off to her left.

I smiled back and gave her a thumbs up.

She hitched her hands left again in an even more exaggerated fashion, almost pulling little Simon to the floor. I looked over, and under all the light--in the middle of the shoot I'd just bowled through--was this blonde woman in a pantsuit, looking right pissed off. I smiled dumbly at her and shrugged an idiot apology, and then looked back at my wife. Yeah, she looked familiar, I tried to say with my face, maybe she's on TV? I looked at the crew again to see if I could place her, and in her place was standing a long-haired hippie type (who reminded me of myself in college, before it all fell out) was looking at one of his colleagues. He pointed at me a couple times, turned and pointed to Jane and Simon, nodding so that his ponytail bobbed up and down. (Just you wait, pal.) I finally spotted Ms. Powersuit in that conferring as well, but she'd turned her back to me. She shook her head at some comment or other, and then nodded curtly. All at once, the three of them turned these steel gazes right at me. Ponytail whispered something to a guy behind him, and I could see, with growing apprehension, a ripple of gray twill moving through the crowd in two directions, one at my family, and the other straight at me. The last one, some unsmiling red-haired woman in a black business suit and wire glasses, who had until that moment been edging me into the wall-mounted Americana, turned her face right into my craw and said, "she wants you." I've never felt smaller. Weakly, I nodded.

The crew (I was thinking "press gang" by that point) somehow maneuvered me under the lights, which, I realized, were focused on a single table, which had chairs arranged on only one side of it. Jane and Simon were already sitting in two of them, she eager and he only a little bit terrified. Four plates were arranged in front of us, and as Red pushed me down into the chair, she said "eat some of it." I gave her a dumb look. "Don't worry, it's on the house," she said. Gingerly, I took a sip of my black and tan, thinking it would have to last.

"What's going on," I asked my wife.

"Can't you see the camera, Bob?"

"Holy shit."

Ponytail broke out of his endless conference and wormed his way over to the table. "Here's the deal," he said, "you need to act like your sharing some really interesting ideas with the candidate. Do you have family dinners?"

My wife interjected. "Is she--"

It got her a glare, shot her way over little round glasses. "She's going to sit and talk to you. Act like it's an fascinating family discussion." He looked at me and shook his head. "Okay, what I mean is, you can ask her a question if you like, but most of all, you need to look interested and engaged. You," he looked at me again, "just do your best to act like you're pretending to understand."

"I see..."

"Exactly."

My wife: "She's going to--"

"Yes. Quiet now."

He jerked his chin at an assistant, and a short man scampered up with a little plush animal to entertain Simon. The boy grinned, and soon he was happily chattering with a stuffed donkey. Of all of them, this assistant seemed nice: I considered asking him for a refill, but instead took another tiny sip. I took a bite of the hamburger they provided, which under the lights, tasted like something you'd get at a truck stop at 3 AM. The fourth plate, salmon and vegetables, had been carefully half-eaten, with bites strategically taken here and there.

Just as I dribbled a little mayonnaise (hate the stuff) down onto my chin, yet another assistant swung by. This one smiled at Simon (who was enjoying himself by now, with all the attention), and whispered to my wife in collaboration before dotting her forehead with a compact a couple of times. She turned and looked at me more critically. After she wiped the white goop off of my face with a napkin, she held me under her gaze, shaking her head but holding her powder puff at bay. "Authentic," she muttered. Some of us are perfect the way we are.

The ponytail came bobbing back. "Now, now!"

The crowd of bodies parted, and the woman in the pantsuit walked down the breach, framed by glaring light. Jane stood up, beaming, and I followed. The woman looked at me first. "Hi, I'm Bob," I said, and shook her hand, which she returned gently, but with authority. She was lovely for her age, but this close, I got a good look at all the makeup caked into years of stress lines. Damn, if she didn't look familiar. I tried to not let my eyes wander from the cracks around her eyes. "Hillary Clinton," she said, the very edge of wryness getting into her voice. Finally the recognition dawned, and I sat down fast. My wife squirmed a little as she introduced herself, but before she could speak anymore, the director started waving his arms, and babbled something about a strict timeline.

Jane and Mrs. Clinton both took their spots. Evidently, we were done eating, but I held onto my half beer, wishing I had a few full ones. The red-haired assistant was at my shoulder again, a constant hum of instructions directed right into my ear. I got the gist--act interested--and began practicing the art immediately on my temporary advisor. Clinton was looking away from us, listening to the last-minute directions from the ponytail man, and my wife nervously was nodding her own guide, no doubt listening for real. When someone yelled "go," Mrs. Clinton turned toward us again, and became effusive. Suddenly, Jane, Simon and I were not just at the center of her attention, but were the entirety of it. This calmed my wife down a lot.

"Is this a popular place in town?" Clinton asked. "How are the gas prices?" She went on with inconsequential small talk like that for a couple minutes, and as she went on, she patted the air authoritatively with her hands, making the most inane comments and questions seem deeply edifying. As Jane responded, the candidate would tilt her face toward the lights like a benevolent gibbous moon, and she laughed expansively or chuckled thoughtfully at my wife's most trite conversation.

She turned to me, "How are jobs here, Bob?"

I can't tell you how I replied, but it didn't seem to matter. She listened graciously, and when I was done gibbering, she grew serious without losing her appearance of camaraderie. She could communicate with her employees, but she was definitely in charge, the Cee-Eee-Friggin-Oh. "We have to keep industry in Pennsylvania," she said, "we can't let Republican outsourcing and mismanagement cripple the most vital sections of the economy." She made a fist for emphasis. She was tough. She cared.

Something occurred to me. "Mrs. Clinton?"

Perhaps taken aback at my interruption, she raised her eyebrows and smiled to wait for the question. It was a surprisingly disarming expression.

I stammered. "D-d-d..."

Pure patience from her, and I took the last swallow from my glass. "I, um, was talking to some guys at work last week. D-didn't you v-vote for--"

Ponytail snapped something. "That'll do it," he shouted.

The warmth instantly melted from Clinton's face, and I noticed the spackled crow's feet once more. She stood up, and thanked the crew. "I think we can use this," she said. Jane and I were dumbstruck (Simon was babbling sweetly), and as she got up to review the footage, the lights already began clicking off. Until then, I hadn't really appreciated how hot they had been. I looked helplessly at my wife, who didn't notice me, eyes glued to the candidate.

The red-haired woman was coming to the table with some papers for us to sign, but Mrs. Clinton strode our way for a last moment before joining her escorts, and the assistant dove out of the powerful woman's way. Clinton turned her camera smile on a last time for Jane, thanked her, and politely shook her hand. She clucked Simon under the chin, and then turned to me. "Please vote for me next week," she said politely, but the gaze she nailed me with could have frozen the sun.

A Candidate I Could Have a Beer With, Part II

I don't like to think of myself as a racist. I grew up without thinking ever about the subject, didn't need to, but the hateful crap that my in-laws shout about makes me feel guilty about all those times I ignorantly nodded along with someone's vague view of blacks and foreigners, always stealing someone's job or other. In college, I hung out with a few black guys, and didn't find them any more or less worthy than anybody else. Hell, one dude basically got me through P. Chem. But you know, that place was it's own expensive little world, and nowadays I hear my father-in-law's voice in a lot more white people, and it makes me uncomfortable. It's gotten to the point that when I do meet a black guy--pretty rare--I fall all over myself trying to treat him like a normal person, which you know, isn't normal at all. I don't like to think of myself as a racist, but I have to admit, that's kind of fucked up.

Anyway, it had to be this sort of thinking that got me talking to this Barry guy yesterday. Here he was standing outside of my lunch hangout, a gangly scarecrow of a man, talking to one guy with a camera, and another one with a handheld gizmo that he was taking notes on. I walked up to the door, and stumbled a little. There have been a lot of strangers around, but like I was saying, I didn't want this particular guy to think we aree all a bunch of backwards hicks over here. Like a moron, I hold the door open and asked if they're coming in for lunch.

It took Barry a second to really register what I was doing--the air felt heavy for a second there as his partners stared at me--but then he gathered himself and said, "sure, why not." Joining me at the counter, and after we introduced ourselves, he told me that he was visiting, doing some "politics work" he said, and maybe I could tell him a little bit about life around here.

"You want a beer," I asked?

"All right, Bob. Say, do you usually get a chance for a long lunch?" He was being diplomatic. No let's face it, he was being patronizing--he enunciated everything like a teacher trying to draw out a six-year-old, and when he wasn't speaking, he slowly rotated his head in a vaguely upward direction, to listen I guess, but seeing far, trying to fit the kindergartner's story into the scheme of his big grownup's world. But he had a smooth, deep voice, and to be honest, it's nice to have someone act like they give a damn for a change, even if they don't, and it did evaporate my nerves straight away.

I explained: "They give me Wednesdays off. Save's 'em a few bucks on benefits to keep me short of full time. I'm hired as a contractor, sort of."

He pursed his lips and nodded. "And what services do you contract, Bob?"

"Geology. I advise some different companies in the Westmoreland Group about mining operations." The guy with the Blackberry was taking notes. I was uncomfortable all over again.

Barry took the smallest sip from his glass. "This," he said, is really excellent beer," and then pushed it away, leaving it untouched for the rest of the conversation. (It's not excellent beer at all.) "Coal is a vital industry, you know. Domestic, plentiful, big donors, important lobby. I can see how skilled geologists are important to the industry. I believe Westmoreland is a member of the National Mining Association. Tell me, Bob, do you work with clean coal technologies?"

"Basically, my job is to keep track of runoff patterns that result from mining operations. Take some measurements and surveys, make some estimates, turn in a report every couple weeks. Clean? It's coal."

"And how does the runoff affect the local towns? The wildlife?"

"Most of the mass ends up in the back woods, really, so it doesn't get a lot of attention. And we try to keep existing waterways going, sort of. But there's a lot of shit--excuse me--that comes out of there."

The truth is, I hate my job. The towns don't go away, but there are valleys out there full of rubble, yellow streams running off of them that stink more or less, depending on how recently the mines dumped. I stopped looking at Barry and stared at my glass. The guy with the camera snapped my picture just at that moment. Thanks pal.

"Do you drive a lot, Bob?"

"You bet."

"How's gas prices?"

"Through the roof."

Barry, still holding that visionary stare, tapped his lips a couple of times. "Now Bob, you pay a lot for gas. The way I see it, we have a basic tradeoff here, wouldn't you say? We should clean up coal mining, and inspire the industry to abandon mountaintop projects." He was making connections. As Barry got animated, he started thumping his forefinger on the table with each point he made. "We should invest in clean coal technologies, technologies that require the industry to better study the runoff patterns and minimize environmental impact. We should look toward exploiting our fuel resources in a safe and friendly way! Wouldn't you agree?"

I nodded weakly, imagining how my bosses would buy this, but I had to admit that even if it didn't accomplish anything, they'd probably need me to take more measurements and file more paperwork. I nodded a little more certainly.

"What's more, if there were alternate technologies--and I'm not just talking coal here, Bob, not anymore, but wind and solar, and geothermal" he wiped his arm across the sky, "there would be jobs for not just geologists, but all kinds of technical people. Can you imagine it?"

I supposed I could. Barry talked about jobs for a good while, moved into the cost of housing, and religion, feeling out the corners of my life with Oscar-worthy empathy, and pontificating out a grand story every time enough concepts had gelled together to make one. As he got going, his stature seemed to expand, his chest inflated and an imaginary wind lifted his brow. Every now and then, he decorated the perforamnce with a passable regular-guy laugh, and most of these landed in the right place, but I wasn't really adding much to the conversation by the time I got to the bottom of my glass. I thought again about how ridiculous I must have looked trying to act casual when we walked in. At the end of it all, Barry God-blessed me (an expression which always makes me uncomfortable), and the guy with the handheld asked me to sign something. Barry marched straight-backed and loose-limbed out of the restaurant as if he were performing a stage exit. I could practically hear the brass section crescendo and then fade with the closing of the door.

I stuck around for awhile after he left, thinking it all out. When I finally did get home, my wife was pissed at me for being so late. I told her about the conversation. "Did you say 'Barry?'"

"Yeah."

"Do you know who that was? Jesus Bob, you're probably going to end up in a political anecdote."

I don't really follow politics, and my wife knows this, but here was my rare spotlight. I did my best to grunt something confident but noncommittal.

"Well," she went on, "what do you imagine he'll do about all of those things?"

"Do? You know Hon, I think he's going to do pretty much the same old shit. But it sure sounds nicer coming out of his mouth."

She thought about this for a second or two. "Bob?"

"Yeah?

"Let's not tell my Dad about this."

Review of Slake's Limbo by Felice Holman

If the prolifertion of online opinion has had any result in the world at all, it has been to reduce the value of the written word. I don't mean to say that people are reading less, or even less thoroughly, or feeling weaker civic emotions, I mean that, giving a billion housebound geeks an unconstrained place where people might actually read their horrible manifestos, blogging has reduced the value of individual written words. In online travels, it's positively a delight to find the rare entity who has the power to say more with less. Daveto rarely over-stretches his points (and rarely understretches them, a nice contrast to the gang which speaks in hints as well), and he usually has an entertaining way of getting to them, a little bit like he's tossing out a casual thought, or better: revealing a bare thought without the forty pounds of prosaic folly or muddied rationalization that most of us use. It really drives some people (and mostly the right people) to frothing incoherence, which is one reason I like him. I also take it as a sincere posture, and I actually think he's among the most sincere of my various online acquaintances. Admittedly, this impression is enhanced by the fact that he's brought up daughters, evidently done it well, and he seems to be as bemused about it as I feel most of the time. So why is Slake's Limbo, a book I read to my girls, the choice for daveto? Because it's huge, that's why.

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With that introduction, it's an odd thing to put Felice Holman's prose against daveto's. Slake's Limbo is positively turgid with written curlicues and unannounced asides and flashbacks, and utterly shameless about piling on the gusty pathos. "Aremis Slake," the protagonist's name, almost encapsualtes the whole aesthetic. It's an interesting fictional name, but you can feel how hard she tried to get just the right one, one with the precise literary heft, exactly the right combination of dirt and dignity. Slapped with that moniker, the poor boy is destined for verbose melodrama. Slake's Limbo is written for young people, and I don't want to imply that the language is challenging exactly, but the form is a far cry from the approved, formulaic "chapter books" they get assigned from school to beginning readers. It comes from a 1970s school of children's vérité, where edgy urban reality (that is actually pretty well over the top) is presented unflinchingly. The boy is brought up utterly neglected, malnourished, suffering the indignities of bullying by drunk eighth graders, of his retarded companion hit by a bus, and, as we quickly learn, hiding out in a New York subway for four months straight.

It can be tough to tell if my kids enjoy the books I read to them. I think they like the experience more than the books themselves, which is fine. My older girl's tells were a little clearer with this one though, and the source of enthusiasm was, best I can tell, a strong desire to "know what happens to poor Slake." (I offered her a guest spot on the blog if she feels like writing down what she liked or didn't like about it. Stay tuned for that.) It's similar to how she talks about the cats, and Slake as a little lost animal is an appropriate interpretation. His worldview, at 13 years old, is strikingly primitive (for example, he makes a futile stand against the passing seasons, trying to tie leaves onto the trees) he's described in animal terms (his fear is a bird), with animal companions (gee, is that rat significant of the boy?), alarmed by positive human attention, and he's got a burrowing creature's obsessive habits. He can evidently read without trouble though, and he sat through a few years of school and learned stuff. If his weirdness got the attention of his classmates, somehow his autism was invisible to any adult. I think Holman means us to read that Slake is severely stunted in terms of imagination and emotion, and his time in the subway is spent taking those baby steps toward becoming human. I think this is a strong point of entry for young enough readers, for whom that same sort of maturation is close to them.

With a limbo in the title, you can bet that (barring any Jamaican dancing) the metaphysical imagery is going to get laid on pretty thick. Thankfully Holman doesn't detail the spiritual journey explicitly, which is a blessing of sorts, because I didn't care to delve into the religious concepts. It's more Dante and Virgil (or Jonah, or Jesus, or you know, take your pick of mystical underground ordeals that end in ascension) than Adam and Eve (or whoever). Hammering out the time-honored fictional devices is a fine analysis for a term paper, but at the blunt level they're used in this story, I'm happy enough just making the acknowledgement. When the kids get to the point when they're deconstructing catharsis and rebirth and all the associated literary mumbo-jumbo, they can do worse than to remember Aremis Slake.

A Candidate I Could Have a Beer With, Part I

I hoisted the pint glass up to my eyeball and scowled down the frothy sides. Time for another, I decided, and made a twirling motion with my hand. I knew that the gesture pissed Mabel off, but it always seems to get me another cup the fastest. Maybe she spits in it enthusiastically or something. I don't care. The days have been feeling so long lately.

I looked at the rows of hooch lined up like soldiers under the bar mirror. I have my system: when their labels become too blurry to read easily, that means it's time to get back to the family. The bottle of bitters is one of my favorites to stare at. Tall and tapered like the end of a trumpet, it has been there since I first hoisted a stool at the Homely Barrel, some twenty years ago. Now and then, some young novice might come in and order a mixed drink that Mabel has to look up in a book, but not even college kids find a reason to drink bitters. It's safe to say that anyone who comes to this place more than twice is an Iron City man like the rest of us. I squinted at the old bottle, and noticed that there were handprints drug across the dust on its surface. The cap was clean too, and a drop of liquid glistened at its edge. What the hell?

I sat up straight, thinking I'd had one too many. I looked frantically around, and noticed this older guy, swirling his glass around jovially, looking puzzled at the new MP3 jukebox here, at the stained wooden walls there, and then at me. I tried to look away, but it was too late, I was spotted.

"Say Mister, can I buy you one of those?"

Well, he couldn't be all bad. He had a round wispy head with a big elfin grin pasted on it. It was hard to tell if the smile was sincere. He bobbed jauntily as he covered the three paces to the bar, like he was enjoying the novelty of it all, like he was lost, but didn't care. "Whaddya got there, son," he said, but didn't look at me when he spoke, rather glanced all around, taking in what passed for ambience at the Barrel, or maybe he was checking to see if anyone was watching.

"Um, just a beer," I said.

"Just a beer!" He beamed at this announcement like he'd made an unexpectedly brilliant deduction. "Waitress, just a beer for me and my good friend here." And he patted me on the back and took up the stool next to me.

"So," he said, "nothing like a beer between friends, um…"

"Bob," I said.

"Just a beer, for me and my good man, Rob."

"What is that you're drinking? If you don't mind me asking."

"I asked for something old fashioned." He paused, and his eyes got dark. His voice became low and reedy. "It tastes like piss if you ask me, Ron. Piss. Do you know what piss tastes like? The things they made me do. I'd kill every last…" He trailed off into a confused, threatening mutter.

"Uh--"

"…wouldn't give in to the bastards--"

We both stopped awkwardly. Desperate to change the subject, I blurted out the first thing that came into my head. "What do you think of all the strangers in town, all the cameras and stuff?"

This perked him up. He lifted his head high and thrust out his jaw. I couldn't tell if the effect was more Uncle Sam rolling up his sleeve or Popeye elbowing his way across the deck. "My fellow Americans," he said, and winked at me.

"Yeah, it's an election I guess. Everybody's talking about it, but it's kind of hard to think about those things, with the wife and the kids to worry about, you know?"

"Yeah pal, you gotta pay attention to 'em. Or next thing you know, there's some hot young…"

"Well, it's not that. The gas prices and the health care are killing us, but we can't afford to move closer to work. Hell, I'm lucky that I got a decent job at all."

"Taxes, mate," he said solemnly. "The crisis government your investment housing money responsible subprime authority." He leered, and I noticed that the corner of his mouth was shiny. I hurriedly gulped at my beer. "I'm not really an expert on economics," he concluded. "Marry money, Tom, that's my advice, take the opportunities. Hire an accountant, and a lawyer." His laugh was as thin as his voice, and it didn't really seem to come very far out of his mouth, like most of it was directed inward. Hhnn, hhnnn, hhhhnnn.

I looked around, and twirled my hand desperately at Mabel.

"Heh, I don't know why they say you buy beer, more like renting it."

"Huh?"

"You like Arabs, Jim?"

"What?"

He glowered at me. "America's got to stand tall, wouldn't you say? Isn't that what you people say?" His moods, I was realizing, were unpredictable. His bitters and his Iron City were sitting at the bar, untouched.

"I don't really know any Ar--"

He was speaking through clenched teeth. "Look, it's military tradition Ben, and it's an American tradition. America needs to be strong, needs a strong leader, and sometimes we have to kill a lot of people. These are important times."

I was taken aback. I couldn't tell if he was talking to me or to himself.

"I want your solemn oath Fred, that you will go out and vote in the primary next Tuesday."

"Um, sure, okay."

"Put her there, my friend."

I rose (with gratitude, truth be told), but as I stretched out my hand, he cleverly dodged it and leaned into an embrace, his puffy cheek pressed right against my chest. Haltingly, I patted his back a couple of times.

As he walked out the door, I considered telling my wife about the encounter with the strange old man. Or maybe I'd just have another beer. Surreptitiously, I grabbed his, but left the tumbler full of yellow liquid. It was much too early, I could still clearly see the handprints on the bottle.

The Holy House of Mouse

Religious training for me was an odd thing. We weren't a church family, but my parents pushed us kids toward some measure of Christian exposure, just on the off chance it might take. We went to Sunday school, to Jesus camp, got conscripted into inept musical performances at services, which my Mom and Dad would attend only under pressure to support the kids. (To this day, they'll neither confirm nor deny their agnosticism, which I suppose is how you do it.) The church was like someone else's house, that I visited frequently. The faith belonged in the building, but I somehow fit in there too, all its nooks I knew, all the places a kid could tear around and play or act serious when people were looking.

So there I'd find myself for a Sunday a month, accompanying the yearly murder of Bach, or otherwise taking my part in some divine pageant or other, trucking the blue vinyl robes off their shelves, and hanging the silly gold diamond from my neck so that it would fall down my back in the most dignified way. The choir robes, at least those for us irregulars, had all the grace and durability of a graduation gown, consciously designed for appearance and not wear. It conforms with my enduring impression of church: insufficiently vacuumed back rooms, sterile kitchens, rooms full of battered folding chairs, boxes of filthy waiting-room toys, ragged stages heading auditoria of linoleum tiles, institutional smells. It's not as though these places lacked love, but it is impossible to apply the same sort of attention to an official space as the rickety box you spend most of your days living in. And it's not merely a flaw of the easygoing Protestants. The Catholics in town have it even worse, married to larger notions of frugal grandeur: "stained glass" of peeling applique, threadbare pews and fraying carpets, grand entrances with atrocious drafts. On Sunday evening, whether following the Latin or otherwise, all of the sacred vestments must necessarily get stuffed into some closet or other, maybe next to the choir robes, forgotten between cigarettes, coffee, and whatever business the cloth undertakes until they're used again at the next service. These objects can't take the sort of beating, the sort of love of everyday use. We don't caring for them like we do our dishes or our jeans, it's more like the occasional attention we pay to our halloween costumes, ignored for 50 weeks a year.

These humble dioceses, they'll attract their aesthetes I suppose, and certainly their locals, but in the business of marketing salvation, you need to have the look of success. Once upon a time, maybe it was enough to wave damnation around and send the flagellants through the town square every once in a while, selling, you know, that pie in the sky. Life used to be cheap enough (and no doubt it'll eventually be cheap enough again) to pull off the soft sell. For the rest of the Thomases, there's always the might of Rome to pound in the nails. What draws the discriminating into the the house of Peter? The thought that there's some mere spirit floating through the collective unconscious isn't going to do it, you can find that blowsy poetic crap any time people are left alone long enough to dream. Something must convince our unseemly pragmatic minds away from the low and local versions of wonder, and into the official corporate mysteries. The doctrinaire are pulled to the trappings of wealth, no faith worth its divine endorsement can subsist on Wonder and Welch's. If you've ever wondered what draws the penitents and pilgrims to Rome, it ain't the purity, it's the idea there is, in fact, no salvation on a budget. I've never been to St. Peter's, but I assume it's spotless, opulent. The Pope either scrubs the grease off the chalices himself, or else wipes his bedazzled sleeve over them and declares the blemishes holy. Whichever, and whoever, and who gives a fuck, so long as it's made of gold.

When my children were young enough to be easily impressed, we toured our share of low-budget amusements. Mother Goose, bereft of copyright and bound to her stations of the cross--here imprisoned the Shoe, there in a treetop Cradle, there with One Shoe On--immortalized, at least for a while, in rotting plastic, gathering mold seven months of the year, and dusted off by lackluster teenagers for the adulation of the cheap summer rubes. Icons of glory, um, lapsed. As children grow, many develop higher expectations of their faith. There is the expensive honor due the institution, sacred obeiscances and glorious tithes available to only to those of appropriately molded imagination. You can buy a hundred cartoon knockoffs, but in its deepest mysteries, Disneyworld markets the whole-family Hajj with the full force of its copious shareholder accounts, cramming an unfunny cartoon mouse onto cruises, into plastic fairy castles and styrofoam mountains, onto roller coasters, reducing him to ears (a bifurcated and bulbous excuse for a cross), and replicating those dispensible icons in profusion and moving them through innumerable gift shops. Make no mistake, there is no ground-in grime on Goofy's nose, and at the first hint of wear, his rubber suit is rapidly recreated in the smoke-belching Imagineering foundries. I do my best to bring my children up decently heathen, but the Spirit calls to them, it calls.

Seth Stevenson made a good pass at the experience, noting the corporate horrors, the more seductive for the enormous endowment glimmering from every carefully arranged crack. The reactions of the comments section is telling: how dare he question the teachings of Mickey? The truth of any living God must be in the myriad interactions of His smallest elements, eye-motes and tumbling sparrows and all that, but the Mouse's epiphany is decidedly top-down. Yeah, there's quality in there sometimes, but quality is only a gateway. Even the most precious Disney Moments are cribbed from better written material, and any actual genius is thoroughly digested to pap in the corporate tract before it is finally shit out as canon. The immortal Sheherazade gets a shade of Robin Williams, does a stint with the Disney Princess, dancing on lunchboxes with the rest of the shamelessly co-opted fables, makes a brief stop at Burger King before finally nestling snug in the landfill, eternally staring at wishing stars along with a generation's worth of other plastic dreck.

I guess what really pisses me off about the Disney experience is that vaunted attention to detail. They lay claim to the wonder of the mind in carefully packaged detail, much like the church would corner our spiritual journeys and the less coherent political and commercial powers are well served by a country that sucks up the idea of the American dream, shoehorning us all into the suburbs, onto highways, married with kids, struggling with shifting minutae of planned moral behavior, crippled under eternal and massive debt. There's nothing wrong with these narratives in themselves, but it chafes my spirit to watch my life shuffling along according to the mapped outlines. Real imagination takes us beyond the obvious story, at least in our minds, and maybe even pulls us out of the patterns of fervent consumption. To angle a monopoly on the very process of dreaming, sucking dollars off of it as it tumbles down every step of the value chain--that's inhuman. It takes a mouse.

Review of Shadows of the Mind by Roger Penrose

Improbably, "Books for Buds" continues. This one is for TenaciousK, and evidently not a moment too soon. Evidence for TK can still be found here, and although he ventured into the Outland some months ago, you can still catch him around once in a while. The rationale for Shadows of the Mind is that it's about consciousness and the brain, which is something that TK writes about frequently and, evidently, is involved in professionally. Sounds good as far as it goes, but the author of Shadows of the Mind is a mathematician, and approaches the subject from the edges of math philosophy and quantum theory, whereas our subject would be better described as a behaviorist, looking at the various identified or speculated physical and chemical processes in the brain, and assessing how they affect people's actions and thoughts. Does this book really suit TenaciousK? Well, let's put it this way: Roger Penrose opens up with a fair-minded 3000-word discussion about gendered pronoun conventions--I think it works out just fine.

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I don't mean to imply that the author's verbosity (or TenaciousK's for that matter) is a handicap. For his abundance of words, Penrose reads is quite a pleasant read. (Careful observers may note that it took me the better part of a month to plow through this anyway. I blame free time.) He writes with an enthusiasm that can be charming in professors, an animated spasticity that translates, with a a lot of exclamatory asides and italicized profundity, to the written equivalent of popping out of his chair with and gesticulating excitedly when the ideas frequently take him. You get the feeling that here's a guy who'd miss meals in the throes of inspiration, and who'd whip about the front of a classroom like a sprite--four chalkboards filled with wild illegible scribbles--as he teaches students. It's infectious: I'd absolutely love to see one of this guy's lectures.

I do wonder who his purported students of Shadows of the Mind are supposed to be. I imagine them to be people like me, with an adequate technical education, but outside of the field. He writes generically to lay people, but without the various slapdash theoretical concepts I've gathered over the years (my quantum has always been pragmatic, and still inadequate for my job), I'm not sure I'd follow very well what the hell he was talking about at all. He does a good job of keeping the language easy to follow, but in the process, he necessarily obscures mathematical details. It's cutting right to the hanging philosophical questions, but glossing over how they arise, and while his practical examples are cute, they're a bit confusing. He doesn't leave the reader in a good situation: deferring the details of his ideas, as he must, it's not easy to challenge them, and well, they're the proverbial extraordinary claims. A lazy dolt like me is stuck going after his logic.

Here's what he's basically done: he has taken the weird mysteries of cognitive science (where does consciousness come from?), and looked for the answers in the difficult fringes of mathematical philosophy (a sound algorithmic system can not observe certain mathematical facts about itself), quantum theory (at what point does quantum superposition give rise to classical observation, and for that matter, how the hell does gravity fit in?), and cellular biology (is the cytoskeleton involved in information processing?). When he finally gets to them, his propositions are pretty wild, but Penrose is too smart and too honest not to recognize counterarguments, and the problem is that they sound more convincing (to me), and no less weird, than what he's advocating. Why must we insist, for example, that human thought is a sound algorithm? That it is algorithmic (that is, it follows rules to change its internal state and output, which in this case would be physical rules), certainly appears to be the physical case, and considering the mathematics, a quote from Alan Turing claiming that some level of fallibility is (perhaps) a necessary condition for intelligence resonated better than a chapter's worth of disclaiming that very thing. He needed to ride on a sophisticated appeal to incredulity that such a machine as ours cannot contradict itself internally. The other issue is that for his pondering on quantum mechanics, I have difficulty accepting that brain physics are special in any way that device physics aren't. Yes, there are quantum state reductions that must occur for information to propagate in neurons, but this is also true for electrons in transistors (or you know, in almost every physics we exploit for anything), and, for that matter, more obviously the case.

I don't want to sell his speculations short--they're fascinating hypotheses--and it would be thrilling to have them proven right. But Penrose is also interesting as hell, and expertly grounded, as he points out the disconnects in the theories of AI and quantum mechanics. These discussions make up (perhaps tellingly) the bulk of the book, and I'd probably recommend it for the background more than for his particular conclusions.

It was a slow day

It was a slow day

…and the sun might have been shining somewhere in another hemisphere. Icy New England winds whipped grit around under the sidewalk lights, which, if I turned around, I'd be able to see through the big windows. I thought about it--turning around that is--but the chilly outdoors didn't hold a lot of allure either.

"Tedious? Could you say it again?"

"Tedious."

"T-E-D-E--" Ooh. Evidently there are no take-backs in official, certified spelling bees. She sighed and continued, eyes drifting floorward and shoulders slackening. "…I-O-U-S."

The panel had been as hopeful as I had been (probably for different reasons), although they tried to keep any feelings under their black suit jackets. I could see it in the slight tilt forward, and hear it in a brief indrawn breath on the microphone. From the back row of the audience, I could only see the backs of the panel members, dark business-wear to a woman, heads varying from black to gray and cropped in severe educator fashions.

"That is" [pause] "incorrect."

I guess they can't point out how close they got either, but everyone knew.

The speaker's hair was dark, cut in a horizontal line just above her shoulders, and it rippled a little bit every time she moved. When she looked down at her sheet, a cheek or jaw sometimes flashed, and I found myself wondering, without much interest, what she might look like, if she had bangs, maybe if she had wrinkles. Evidently she took this thing seriously--moreso than anyone else--so maybe she was there in some official lexicographic capacity. But that wouldn't describe the disappointed pause. Did it come from a freshly minted naiveté, still young enough to hope? Maybe it came from a bureaucratic frisson of seeing someone (almost) succeed within the rules. Her voice had neither the piping lightness of a young woman nor the breathy warble of an older one. "Is that person a teacher?" I stage-whispered to my younger daughter, who looked me in the eye for a second before scooting even further out of reach and deeper into her own fantasies, chattering softly. I myself daydreamed about a soft-eyed spinster handing me a form at the DMV.

"Your word is: 'Soldier.'"

Here's a kid with a lot of tells. The odds were bad just by the way he was standing, kind of shambling in place, not suggestive a lengthy attention span by any means. But in his defense, it's 6:30, he's still at school, and at three times his age, I was also fidgeting. He raced into a reply, without confidence or concern.

"S-O-L-J-U-R"

"That is incorrect."

He grinned his way to the losers' bench. The children who had had their turn were a badly organized row of disconsolate wrecks and, like the last contestant, overanimated goobers. The only thing that kept them from bolting was the glare of the principal. The ones who hadn't yet had their turn remained orderly and attentive.

"M-E-D-I-C-I-N-E"

Score, and about damn time. This is shaping up to be the shortest spelling bee in history, which is good, but there has to be some dignity salvagable from this sham. I mean, there were two hundred people and change stuck in there. Out of the first thirty or so contestants, "medicine" was the third correct answer. What are the odds they could spell 'decimate?' (Actually, decimate wasn't right--what's the word for one in ten left alive? For that matter, does 'medicine' come from the famous Florentine family? Nah, probably not. What's going on up there?)

"Um, could you use define that, please?"

Ha, someone had seen this done. Maybe there would be a competition after all.

"A musical term describing the perfunctory application of a musical note, usually with upbeat rhythmic phrasing."

Somehow, I don't think that helped.

"Um…S-T-A-C-C--"

Yes, yes…

"Um…E-D-D-O"

Jesus.

"That is incorrect."

Staccato signals of constant information… The bastards put those three words together on purpose, didn't they? A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires, and… "Daddy, stop singing!" (The nerve of that kid. Well, what could I say?) "Don't cry baby, don't cry."

The little one has been working for months to perfect a withering stare, and I got one of her best. I glanced around at the crowd, and there was no evidence that anyone had made a similar connection. Just what the hell is wrong with these people? I hate this town.

"Your word is: 'Distraction.'"

The colons were all audible.

"D-I-S-C-H-R…"

One game you can play while feigning interest at this sort of thing is to watch the kids, and try to surreptitiously guess which parents are theirs, based on how they dress and how they sit, what they seem to think of all this. The fat kid's parents are garrulous and large, the sorts of people that take up twice their allotted space, figuratively and physically. A few cute kids have ugly parents (and vice versa), but mostly it looks like the same crowd regarding itself through slow glass. The poor girl who flailed on "staccato," her parents appeared confident and caring, and not particularly concerned about this ridiculous event, a smile at the earnest attempt, a sympathetic eye-roll at the missed ending. I liked them on sight, but not so much that I wouldn't avoid a chat if it got me out of there thirty seconds sooner.

"Your word is: 'Chagrin.'"

The only parents that I already know were already sitting at the other side of the room when I walked in, which was just as well. Their daughter didn't come close to getting her word right, tacking on a string of nonsense letters at the end to fill up the space. My own little girl whiffed too, but made a passable guess at a word she'd never seen. She so much like me it's scary sometimes, but in fifth grade, I was always reading. This one, you have to twist her arm.

In that year, I came in a tightly contested second place in my own school spelling bee, ultimately missing on "freckle," which I spelled, like a dolt, with an "el." I remembered to share the story with Junior on the ride home, and performed my best fatherly scowl when I mentioned reading habits. I felt like a tool, and probably looked like one too.

"Your word is: 'Plebian.'"

"Can you use that in a sentence, please?"

The only thing that was keeping the curtain from falling was that a child, for the victory, also had to correctly spell a bonus word. This was a tough order, under the circumstances. Only one girl made it through the first three rounds, but she missed her game-winner. As a consequence, all eight survivors from the previous round had to be called back up for a replay. I felt bad: some other little kid ended up on the stage after that spelling for the victory, a little boy whose best effort that day would only get him shamed in the state competition and waste his whole family's day. Well, there was a trophy. The principal was looking uncomfortable on the side of the stage, and if I wasn't imagining it, the spinster's movements were getting just a little bit more stiff as she called off the final word. Could this be it?

"Condescension."

"Okay, C-O-N-D-E-S-" [come on…] -"C-E-N-S-C-I-O-N"

But you know, these people are all right. What's more annoying than a spelling Nazi anyway? There can't be a more useless measure of intelligence than spelling prowess: it's no substitute for actually using the vocabulary, for effective language. The most valid reason to aspire to good spelling is to insulate yourself from looking stupid, but really, at the point you might actually consider using some non-Latinate, multisyllabic string of gibberish, you shouldn't anyway, and even when you insist, no one will get upset if you look it up first. Competitive spelling is the celebration of rote over critical thinking, of memorization over imagination. Maybe it works as a sport? Maybe the inspiring moments come from mining the improbable depths of the brain's resources, making the most tenuous inner connections and coming up right. My early vision of overeducated and underfulfilled parents slavering at the sideline as their diminutive homeschooled twerp morosely prattled out "phlegmatic" or "magniloquent" or whatever in front of a crowd of hundreds at some drab heartland community college theater turned into something more pleasant, the thrill of victory, or better, since it's not the sport that usually gets positive attention, a subplot of secretly held hands and unexpected kisses stolen from other little helicoptered kids, alone backstage for a few minutes, cornered, for once, with someone else's sympathetic fears and passions.

I also can't avoid noticing that I take some pride in being a fairly good, if utilitarian, speller myself, and all of these life prescriptions I'd been spouting looked, just a little uncomfortably, more like projections than anything. It's something that might really have sunk in if I gave it time, but the kids were pouring off the stage by then, and the little one was tugging at my sleeve and the older one needed a hug. The crowd of mostly strangers pushed through the door together tightly for a moment and then spread into the cold evening. The way we look to us all, oh yeah, oh yeah.

Random Roundup II

1. Uh Oh, This Means--
I blather on a lot about overpopulation, unsustainable development, crop monoculture, and limited oil resources. A whole lot of end-of-the-world this and crapping-up-the-linens that really, blah friggin' blah blah blah.

This, on the other hand, is fucking serious!

2. In Geeky, Condescending Memoriam
98% of the internet is aware that we lost Gary Gygax, the father of Dungeons and Dragons last week. I'm sorry to see anyone go that made nerds so happy, and I remember a D&D "monster manual" sifting through the kids at Sunday School (of all places) when I was eleven or so, and thinking the pictures were pretty cool.

Still, I've got my credibility to maintain here:

Just sayin.

3. The view from the monkey tree
Should prostitution be illegal? Answers range from the patronizing to the defiantly liberal to the um, anti-patriarchy-patronizing (matronizing?). Much like my opinions on casino gambling, I don't regard the oldest profession highly, thinking, at the very least, that it can't be good for the character, but the black market (for prostitutes) and the state monopoly (for gambling) probably don't make things better. (And for what it's worth, I more or less agree with Roy Edroso and John Cole on Eliot Spitzer, as well as with others buried in places more difficult to link: even if he went after deserving targets as the AG, his means were unsettling. [Edit: I'm actually going to have to think about this some more, not that anyone's reading, or otherwise cares. But I still assert:] What an asshole.)

In any case, it's a difficult issue, and I'm going to be pondering it all day as I go about my regular employment. Because you know, they can pay me to put out, but as hard as I fake it, they can't make me really love them.

Matters of Thought, Part 2

"To put it simply, then, all we have to do is construct a digital device, a computer capable of producing an informational model of absolutely anything in existence. Properly programmed, it will provide us with an exact simulation of the Highest Possible Level of Development, which we can then question, and obtain the Ultimate Answers!" --Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad

Witness the lowly field effect transistor as it's used for logic: a source struggling to push electrical current over a parched channel, waiting for the gate awaken and conjure electrons from deep in the silicon, that they may then flow to the drain, and gratify the devices voltaic urges. A transistor has two inputs, (a gate and a source), and one output (the drain), which will produce a signal that depends on the state of the first two terminals. In computers, these inputs and outputs are wired to one another so as to create basic logic structures, whose function is to convert a pair of binary signals (1s or 0s, high or low voltage) into a single output signal according to one of sixteen possible operations in boolean arithmetic. It seems ham-handed to use half a dozen of these little machines to run an elementary logical step (you actually need a fair amount of redundancy to guarantee that transistor logic structures are perfectly predictable) but thus are the rules of a Turing machine written into a real device. The practical and theoretical limits of transistor operation are an important concern as computer applications keep screaming for more, faster. The sheer number of devices in a processor implies a heating issue--enough current must be provided to power the next transistor down the line--and as devices get small and tightly packed, leakage currents and crosstalk becomes a problem, and dissipation of signal at interconnects becomes non-trivial. Even as engineers keep managing to out-think the lower size limits of fabrication, there may be a bottom on the performance. The price of fabrication increases as transistor sizes shrink too, and Moore's law may ultimately fail based on what outlandish fab people are actually willing to develop and pay for.

For all I know, engineers will get single-molecule transistors into computers in my lifetime, but to keep the prophecy (self-) fulfilled, reearchers are also looking for alternate computing schemes that can get around using transistors altogether, maybe something more naturally small. One group at Notre Dame has proposed equivalent logic structures using quantum dots.¹ These are solid crystals that are small enough (several millionths of a millimeter) that the electrons that normally spread across the whole crystal start to behave more like the electrons in atoms, confined to quantum states as defined by a "particle in a box," where the box is the crystal itself. A quantum dot could accommodate an extra electron, and it would tend to be localized on the crystal in a predictable energy state, but it would also allowed to move to an empty equivalent state another dot by by tunneling if it was both energetically favorable and close enough. When a cell of four equally spaced dots had two electrons to distribute between them, the charges would arrange so that they stayed as far apart as possible, that is, at either pair of corners (dots shaded black in Figure 1). Another cell could be placed nearby so that it was close enough to feel that charge repulsion, and arrange its own two electrons according to what its neighbor is doing, but just far enough away that tunneling would be prohibited.

With two distinguishable cell configurations, and a means to arrange them in 2-D space, then it's possible to begin building logic structures. Two simple ones are shown in Figure 1: a wire which can transfer the information imposed by its first cell all the way to the last cell in the chain, and an inverter, which will transfer the opposite information to its destination. In their paper, Porod et al. demonstrate how from there, standard logic gates can be constructed from these sorts of devices, and suggest several ways to go about building them in real materials (quantum dots are real enough), all possible in principle.

[IMG]http://i219.photobucket.com/albums/cc74/Keifus/Slide1.jpg[/IMG]

These quantum dot devices resemble cellular automata (CA). Strictly speaking, CA are computer models, simulations in which the state of individual squares on a grid change based on the states of their nearest neighbors according to a simple set of rules. The quantum dot array is an obvious analog (a CA processor), where the rules happen to be governed by physics (like charges repel, and tunneling is highly distance dependent). CA are like mathemeticians' drug philosophies, producing an acid haze of states that are deterministic but sometimes hard to predict, posessing, it sometimes seems, lives of their own. The Game of Life is a cellular automoton that was famous enough in the eighties to sneak into a science ficiton novel or two. Go ahead and click the link to the game: it's pretty fun to play with for a few minutes.

More complicated cellular automata than Life allow more states, and allow different rules. Stephen Wolfram (the guy who developed Mathematica) published a doorstop a couple of years ago proclaiming CA computing as A New Kind of Science. (This was controversial, evidently because however amazing it may be, it was light on citing others' work, and thin on peer review.) Even CA with two states and one dimension are weird, it turns out, and several of these appear able to generate random numbers from non-random input. One thing that's interesting about studying cellular automata is that the emphasis is empirical. Even for stuff that's run with computer software, the approach is slanted toward understanding the "behavior" that the simple rules evolve, more than knowing the behavior and using it to predict outcome. It's not the same animal as, say, differential equations, where even when the solution is broken up into cells for the purposes of computing (talking your standard numerical integration here), the rules are expected to correspond to something. CA may end up behaving like physical things, but the rules aren't necessarily little chunks of continuum mechanics.

Porod's group envisioned predictable logic structures with their CA processors, but they didn't have to. The could have laid out a large grid of cells, more like the Game of Life, and, for a given set of "input" values imposed on one bunch of squares, proposed to monitor the "output" for another group after the system would achieved a static point or limit cycle. It's turning one binary string of numbers into another one in other words, even if the means from getting from here to there is not always obvious. This sort of computation could be used for pattern recognition: for example, an image could be projected onto the surface, and a characteristic number generated that corresponded to the image, matched, ultimately, with the appropriate learning routine. It could be used for cryptography if any of those steps proved irreversible, as some of Wolfram's CA appear to be.

[IMG]http://i219.photobucket.com/albums/cc74/Keifus/Slide2.jpg[/IMG]

What's more, there's no reason for it to be made up of little binary dot structures, and the nodes don't really even have to have finite states either, but can instead go analog. Researchers have put together or proposed this sort of thing using regular circuit elements as the nodes, liquid crystals, magnetic quantum dots, or acoustic pulses.² [Disclosure: I worked with one of these guys, and a lot of these points came up in his conversations a few years ago.] Almost any physics will do, provided the nodes are isolated, and there is some basic means of exchanging selected information with the nearest neighbors. For a given input, the system may rearrange itself to find the "solution" in response. Computing with neurons is like this too, the frequency states of quasi-periodic electrical oscillations⁵ (or whatever, depending on the model) are updated based on disturbances from other nodes, or from the outside world. The DNA computation that I talked about before also strongly resembles processing with cellular automata, where the selection rules for neighbor interactions are highly specific. In a sense, this brand of computation is letting the real world act more like itself, and avoiding the imposition of binary (or other mathematical) logic on it may lead to better models (or at least faster approximate ones). One may notice that the universe itself is a great big tangle of interactions, gradually approaching some limiting cycle (or not): is the universe the ultimate model of itself? Is it doing computations? Yeah sure, why not.

Of course, just because you're in the business of turning numbers into other numbers doesn't mean that you're doing anything useful, and given a system whose innards aren't necessarily worth knowing in mathematical detail, it remains to look at your inputs, and judge the fitness of the outputs. This can be automated as well, and these sorts of processes often use an evolutionary model, in which the best matches of one generation of inputs is selected, and then "mutated" to provide another generation to test against whatever real-world process, activity, or data you're trying to approximate. Simple rules (that is, non-evolutionary) for reacting to external data can be engineered as well, and if you've seen those walking robots, they're very cool. Of course, it's a big step up from here to take machine learning to include models that are self-aware. I don't think this says what consciousness is (for all the mess, it's still looking like a set of instructions under the hood, and it's as hard as ever to say how the gods or ghosts finally come out of the machine) but maybe it's getting a better handle on the fuzzy, approximate way that gray matter--or any matter at all--may actually processes information.

"[The computer] set forth the general theory of a posteriori deities, deities which had to be added to the Universe later by advanced civilizations, since, as everyone knows, Matter always comes first and no one, consequently, could have possibly thought in the very beginning."

[1] Porod et al., Int. J. Electronics, 86, 549, 1999. (Score! There's a copy online.)
[2] Harding et al., arXiv:cond-mat/0611462v1 [cond-mat.other], 2006
[3] Rietman and Hillis, arXiv:cs/0611136v1 [cs.RO] (I only read half of this one. Already past deadline, you know.)