I’m not sure what possessed the editors of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung to add Somerset Maugham’s The Magician to their list of 50 great novels of the twentieth century. In the preface to the edition that I have, the author admits that when it was republished, he had not read the book in nearly fifty years. “I had completely forgotten it,” he writes.
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Tag Archives: Culture
Singing is diplomacy by other means
Yes, I know sometimes it seems as though my job here at AFoE is to lower the high-minded tone with discussion of inanities, but there’s another interesting story about the Eurovision Song Contest today, namely that Lebanon – who were intending to make their first entry into the competition this year – have now withdrawn from it after being told by the EBU that they would not be allowed to avoid showing the Israeli entry. This report on the esctoday site gives more details, including some background of other problems with Arab countries around Israel’s entries over the years. For now, you can also see the gap between Latvia and Lithuania on the list of particpants on the official Eurovision site.
Obviously, there are far more important things going on in Lebanon right now, but it’s another interesting story to add to the file of the intersections between politics and culture at the Eurovision.
Echelon Back Story
The British edition of Body of Secrets, James Bamford’s second book about the US National Security Agency, gives equal billing to Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the subtitle, but that’s just marketing, making the home audience feel good. The same subtitle also alludes to Echelon, an eavesdropping program that was on its way to being notorious, particularly in Internet circles, when the book was first published in 2001.
Both get their due, of course, but the book is really a history of the NSA, the agency that does the lion’s share of America’s electronic intercepts, cryptology, cryptanalysis, signals intelligence and so forth.
I haven’t finished the book, but there’s a lot in it. Factually, it’s dense, with very precise details that show how thoroughly Bamford had done his homework.
Lessons abound. First, how little is new in the fraught world of spying and democratic decision-making. Korea and the early Cold War period produced examples of leaders who did not want to hear what people on the ground were reporting. Resources were allocated to the wrong places; the country was caught flat-footed by events that shouldn’t have been unexpected; there was a critical shortage of personnel who could speak crucial languages. In the early 1950s, it was Korean; half a century later it’s Urdu or Pashtu or various branches of Arabic.
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Not your average Boom-bang-a-bang
Two of the topics that produced some of the most posts on Fistful last year – the Eurovision Song Contest and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution – have come together. Of course, we already knew that this year’s contest would be in Kiev but now Ukraine has chosen ‘Razom nas bagato!’ (Together we are many!) by Greenjolly, an anthem of the Orange Revolution, as their entry for the final. It should help to contribute to what will no doubt be an interesting night.
For a more serious look at the Orange Revolution, Blood and Treasure has some thoughts on ‘freedom as a brand management strategy.’
If On a Winter’s Night a Publisher
Brings forth the fiftieth and last of its great novels of the twentieth century, a resolutely head-spinning inquisition of a book by Italo Calvino, one that keeps introducing a novel titled If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. In this, the coldest week in Munich in twenty years, the series not only takes notice of the weather, it refuses to end, spiraling instead into this ouroboros of a book.
Over the last four weeks, the editors have toyed with the readers and the season, jumping from Peter Hoeg’s tale of Greenlanders in Denmark, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, to the hothouse of colonial Vietnam in Margeurite Duras’ slender, tender The Lover, and now, of course, to Calvino’s winter night.
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Fermions
Heraclitis said that you can not step in the same river twice.
Wolfgang Pauli said that you can not be an identical fermion twice
that is that there can’t be two identical fermions.
Some Heraclitian said that you can’t step in the same river once.
This is clearly silly.
Similarly, I think that an honest application of the basic assumptions of quantum mechanics (as listed by Von Neuman) would imply that there can’t be one fermion.
A Fermion is a particle with spin + or minus hbar/2. For example, electrons are fermions. The word spin suggests that it refers to well spin as in the Earth spins around its axis and elementary particles spin around. Spin has the logical implication that charged particles with spin have magnetic fields. The magnetic properties of atoms are logically implied by the spin of their electrons, the orbital angular momentum of electrons and confusing stuff going on in the nucleus making extremely weak magnetic fields.
The spin of photons makes perfect sense if it is interpreted as an intrinsic angular momentum. I mean you know spinning. The strongest reason to interpret spin as angular momentum is that, if it is so interpreted, total momentum is conserved as particles are created and destroyed.
The Pauli exclusion principal (no two identical fermions) could have been accepted as a mere fact. However, physicists aim to explain results in terms of more fundamental principles. In this case, they note that if there are two identical fermions a and b and one switches a and b, then the wave form describing the system of particles is multiplied by -1 (I think the proof is hard in any case I never made head nor tail of it). Now clearly switching two identical particles changes nothing. That means the wave is equal to minus itself, which means it is zero. That means the probability of their being two identical fermions is zero.
OK back to spin and angular momentum. I argued at length that spin is, as the name suggests, a kind of angular momentum, because quantum mechanics has a clear interpretation of momentum and therefore angular momentum. The momentum operator is the gradient with respect to space of the wave form. Thus angular momentum is the derivative with respect to the angle.
Now what sort of wave form does a particle with angular momentum hbar/2 have ? well the derivative of the wave form with respect to the angle measured from a point is angular momentum around that point divided by h. That means that if one rotates the waveform of a fermion 360 degrees it is mulitplied by e to the power i times Pi which is equal to -1.
As far as I can tell, the only natural quantum mechanical interpretation of spin implies that the wave form of a fermion is multiplied by -1 if it is rotated 360 degrees. Clearly nothing changes if it is rotated 360 degrees. That seems to me to mean that the wave form of a fermion must be equal to zero, that is, the probability that there is a fermion is zero.
So why is the same argument a proof of the true Pauli exclusion principle and not a proof of the false claim that electrons don’t exist ?
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The hills are just coming alive
This sounds like it should be one of Harry Hutton‘s Killer Facts but did you know that until tonight there’s never been a full stage production of The Sound Of Music performed in Austria? On top of that, the film has never been shown in Austrian cinemas (and only once on Austrian TV).
Which is a roundabout way of suggesting that you read this article from the Independent on that first production and what The Sound Of Music represents in Austria’s 20th century history.
fact and value, truth and knowledge
I would like to comment on an excerpt of a comment by Mike
“We might distinguish questions of fact (e.g. “which way will John vote at the next election?”) from questions of value (e.g. “is Blair’s outlook better than Brown’s?) by noting that the answers to factual questions may be true or false, but that the answers to value questions must always depend on and presuppose a point of view or value. Answers to factual questions do not presuppose a point of view or value – they presuppose the categories of true and false and must be framed in those terms (either we are correct in predicting that John will vote for X or, if he votes for Y we will have been shown to be incorrect).”
I think it will be important to define the word “knwledge” right now. I use “knowldge” to mean “justified true belief”. If we happen to guess right, we do not know. I will place great stress on the word “justified” in that definition.
OK back to the quote “answers to value questions must always depend on and presuppose a point of view or value” is implied by”answers to value questions must always depend on and presuppose a value”. In this post I will assume for the sake of argument that the stronger claim is true so answers to value questions must always depend on and presuppose a value. How does this make them different from claims of fact ?
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What is Cultural Relativism ?
First I should say, as always, that I use blogs to write about things I know nothing about. So let me try to understand what cultural relativism might be.
Basically it begijns with the idea that should not judge other cultures. I think the origen might be with Herder who I try to translate “There must be no comparison. Each nation contains within itself it own happiness” or something like that. Substitute culture for nation and try to understand what he might have meant.
1. According to cultural relativists disrupting a culture is the worst crime.
That is CR might be an absolute ethical doctrine in which the objective moral truth is that no choice within a culture is as bad as an outsider attempting to fight a culture.
This is coherant but it is not relativist and I doubt that anyone believes it.
2. Each of us belongs to a culture somehow and our duty is to act according to it’s mores.
This has the fault of 1 which is that it might be the sum total of objective moral truth but that is not relativism and why would anyone think such a thing. Finally my culture tells me to be open minded and think for myself exploring what I might gain from other traditions. That means I can’t be at type 2 CR without logical contradiction. Finally how are people assigned to cultures.
3. We should choose a culture to obey and obey it.
All the faults of 2 but the last plus how to choose.
4. We can’t prove that one cultures moral principals are better than anothers. Therefore they are all equally valid. This applies equally to all views of right and wrong not just those of a “culture”. It also applies to purely hypothetical moral beliefs that no one has ever held. It is, I think, a confusion of knowledge and truth. From the obvious fact that we can not prove something right or wrong, it is concluded that there is no fact of the matter no moral truth. This obviously doesn’t follow. There is an excluded middle “everything that is true can be proven”. This is definitely false as has been proven (Godel’s theorem). Who ever thought such a silly thing.
Sad to say this is the well known distinction between ontological objectivity and epistimelogica objectiviity.
5. In fact the cause of our beliefs about right and wrong is our upbringing in a culture not God speaking to us or our deducing the catagorical imperative using neutral logic or anything like that.
I certainly agree with this. However, my belief in certain moral principals survives the conviction that I believe them not because they are true and their truth was made manifest to me somehow but because my mother and father thought they were true and they well etc back a million years. So ?
It seems to me that cultural relativism is either a moral imperative like any other except that no one would accept it as the be all of right and wrong or it is a confusion of the concepts “proven” and “true”
The Eloquence of Trotsky and Macaulay
The comparison of these two historians and historical actors is interesting because they appear to have nothing in common except for their extraordinary eloquence. Macaulay has been accused of writing history as ratification of the present. Trotsky has been accused of roughly everything else.
Consider these examples of eloquence. Both are quoted from memory (I am the only person too lazy to respect the journalistic standards of blogging). Each is the principal example in two essays which praise the eloquence of Trotskey and Macaulay respectively. I think the essay on Trotsky is the introduction to a collection of writings of Trotsky (I think this because I can?t find it in ?To the Finland Station?). The essay on Macauley is an article in The New Republic circa 1995.
?The assembly passed a resolution that there would be no negotiation with the enemy while their armies were on French soil. Danton asked ?have you made an alliance with victory? the assembly replied ?we have made an alliance with death??
A stiring line which also shows how Trotsky?s history mysticism had, by that point, driven him completely insane. Solidarity can fuse a group of individuals into a mighty historical force, but it can not make them think of the same snappy line at the same moment..
Macaulay was, of course, much more reasonable. He argued against anti semitism when arguing against legal discrimination against Jews writing ?we close all honerable professions to them then denounce them for becoming money lenders.?
Again eloquent, but it seems that the two cases of eloquence have nothing else in common. One displays the beauty of reason and good sence, the other the beauty of madness.
it seems that the two cases of eloquence have nothing else in common, but they do share one other trait. They are both word for word translations of Maximilien Robespierre.