Science in the Age of Feels

There are days when nothing satisfies me like watching a good Thunderf00t video on Youtube. He's definitely my favorite spoilsport. Although he and I don't see eye-to-eye on everything about the world, I respect him greatly as a scientific thinker who can use simple "back of the envelope" calculations to destroy unsound ideas.

What's amazing is that almost none of the calculations Thuderf00t does in any of his videos involves anything more than first-year physics. Most of them could be back-of-the-chapter exercises.

Yet these simple calculations can be used to destroy many phony ideas going around about new and exciting technologies, including ones being funded by government research grants and underwritten by renowned universities.

In physics, there is no penalty for using simple calculations to make big statements. In fact, if you can pull that off, so much the better.

All of this is quite disturbing to me, however. It tells me that we are truly living in Age of Bullshit, when the most "exciting" ideas in popular discourse cannot stand up to simple physics. Instead we are living in an age when science and technology seems to be based on how it all makes you feel.

If an idea makes you feel good and cozy about the future (the environment, social justice, climate, renewable energy, etc), then who cares if it doesn't stand up to basic physics? There has to be a way to make it a happen.

But no, sorry, we aren't going to have solar powered roads. Yes, I know you saw it on Facebook and shared it and liked it. So cool, right?. It's a great feeling idea.

No, sorry, we aren't going to have plastic roads, either.

No, sorry, we aren't going to have Thorium-powered cars.

No, sorry, we aren't going to have simple devices to allow poor mothers and kids in the Third World get drinking water for free from the atmosphere.

And, no, sorry, we aren't going to have the freaking Hyperloop. Elon Musk may or may not be a conman. Hard to tell, but the fact that the so-called Edison of our Era has yet to produce a single darn thing worth while for the masses should tell you everything you need to know about our current era.

All of this is probably heart-breaking for a lot of people. But that's the wonderful thing about physics is that it breaks your heart like that, and in that realization is freedom.

A Tourist in Twitterland

My short career on Twitter so far has convinced me of one thing, namely that I have no desire to be a "Twitter celebrity," one of the the folks with many thousands of followers who Tweet on a regular basis, and whose Tweets are retweeted by many other people.

I'm talking here about people who are not "media celebrities" in the traditional sense (most of those folks are worthless), but people who are only "Twitter famous." Some don't even use real names, but only personas. They are usual the best folks to follow, to get the real gist of what Twitter is about. But I don't want to be one.

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad such people exist. I'm glad they have taken upon themselves the burden of this kind of task. But a task it certainly is. It reminds of what it must be like being a television pundit, or a columnist. Not only must one opine, but one but do so on a regular schedule. Moreover in this day and age, there is duty to be interactive with people. On Twitter this means having conversations with people in your feed.

I'm much too reclusive for that. Moreover I don't have the chutzpah to put forth my opinions and observations as so authoritative on daily basis, about any subject under the sun. I'm not that clever, who is not that clever, all in all. I admire the people who can do that.

So much is my aversion to this kind of role that even my brief episode of having a mini-viral Tweet was exhausting. For a couple days running, people have been liking it. Finally the notifications have dropped off, and I'm glad for it. Yesterday, while perusing my feed, I found myself thinking of something slightly witty and interesting to say, that might have made a good re-Tweet. I hit the button to start typing a new post.

I felt an ego battle going on inside me. I imagined that my new post might become another mini-viral Tweet.  But what I had to say wasn't that important. I was posting it for gratification, as if my part of the conversation was someone important.

I had other things to do that day, than get distracted by the ding ding of the online social media casino machine. I hit the cancel button.

The same principle I described here applies to this blog, by the way. Somewhere along the line I realized that not only did I have no desire to be a popular well-read blog, but that I was actually averse to it. I don't make an effort to hide this blog, but to me this is an open invitation-only salon, where I can communicate to the small number of folks out there who actually know me (and to people in the distant future perhaps).

It almost feels like the lost art of letter-writing, one of those quaint 20th century things that no longer exists, but which I used to enjoy so much. It is something the kids of today will probably never know.

Twitter Delivers Me Cherries, Thanks to G.K. Chesterton

Today found me making another Tweet that went mini-viral, gaining over a dozen likes within an hour. It caught me somewhat off guard, as it was a spur of the moment issuance during a break from work in the mid-afternoon while I checked my Twitter feed.

Like my previous success, this was a Retweet of a popular account's Tweet. I added my own commentary, and originator like my Tweet enough to Retweet it back onto his feed, where it was seen my many folks.

Suddenly my notifications from these likes rolling in were blowing up on my iPad. Ding. Ding. Ding. It was the sound of the virtual currency of Twitter cred in the imaginary casino of online social media. It was no a mega jackpot, to be sure, but a mild flow of tokens that makes one want to play longer.

I must finding my voice on Twitter, which is as as traditionalist. In fact the account I had retweeted in this case described himself in his sidebar simply as that in one word---"traditionalist." His original Tweet was quoting a passage from G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), whom I have seen described as "a contender for the most-quoted man on the Right."

Chesterton is certainly popular among the literary-minded figures in the Rightist Twitterati.
Before I joined Twitter, the most I'd ever read of Chesterton was a single quotation, which I had practically memorized in a paraphrase. The original is:

“Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”

Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Wikipedia: Chesterton is often referred to as the "prince of paradox".Time magazine has observed of his writing style: "Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out.

The original Tweeter, upon whose Tweet I commented, had posted one of Chesterton's quotes in regard to modern fear of one's neighbors, and by extension how travel is a form of escapism. I replied off-hand about how one of the most rewarding experiences of my life was the 2003 blackout in New York City. I didn't think anyone would even see my Tweet, but somehow people just got it.

An Icelandic woman in my feed posted this.

The Elusive Punchline

In reading Tristram Shandy, one is constantly looking for that self-referential punchline, in the way one would if one were reading a modern 20th Century author such as Nabokov or Borges. But this was written in the 18th century. The punchlines are much more inscrutable.

The book starts out with the narrator's attempt to document his life in extreme detail. He starts with his conception and gets to his birth at nearly the halfway mark, lamenting that day of his life is taking an entire year to document, and realizing that an infinity of time to catch up to the present.

Later, his father undertakes a project to provide an education of all necessary things to him, by writing a "Tristra-paedia" for his son. At this point, my 20th century-trained senses are looking for that punchline. In this passage, his father reads a section of the Tristra-paedia to the village parson, Yorick.

The Intricate Harmony of Overlapping Memories

What was I saying, about the effects of technology on small-town life?

So tonight I'm sitting in my living room in Fountain Hills with the iPad open next to me while I watch a Youtube livestream from my hometown in Colorado. The livestream is of the the district-wide Elementary School honor choir. My 10-year-old niece is singing in the ensemble, representing her school. They're performing in the same auditorium in downtown Fort Collins where my own high school choir once sang, along time ago.

The first piece they sing, "Possum Gonna Play", turns out to be have been arranged by this guy, who used to sing next to me in the bass section of the Willamette University Choir in 1985.*

Out of continuity, I hope my niece has similar pleasant experiences of intruded past experiences, many years from now.

*and who composed our class Glee song in the Great Fiasco of '88. Those who were there know what I mean.

The Disruptions of Social Media in Small Town Life

Another book I read recently based purely on a Kindle suggestion that kept popping up on my device's lock screen was All That is Lost Between Us by Sara Foster. After it came up for the tenth time, I figured I would give in and read in, again for "free" thanks to my Kindle Unlimited membership. One reason I don't mind detouring into these books is that compared to say, Tristram Shandy, I can rip through these stories very quickly usually over the course of a weekend.

Set in a small town northern England in the present day, the story takes us through the first person narrative of multiple characters, rotating through the chapters (a technique I have noticed has become a trend in contemporary popular fiction).

The story revolves a high school girl who has somehow fallen into mysterious trouble. She has a secret. She has withdrawn from her family and friends. Her mother is puzzled. We spend the most of the book trying to discover the secret.

As such the book had the feel of recent modern Gothic "Girl in Trouble" mystery stories like Gone Girl (which I have not yet read). Somehow these stories collectively tell us of the types of insecurities that many women feel in today's society, expressed through fantasies.

Very little in the story, including the revelation of the girl's "secret," surprised me. Nevertheless I found the book interesting in one key aspect, one that I often find fascinating: the degree to which technology drove the story. In this case, the technology was cell phones (specifically smart phones with cameras that can upload photos) in connection with social media. So much of the interaction between characters happens using these devices, and important plot points depending explicitly on their use. The story could not have played out in the same way at all before the invention of these technologies. That kind of observation can save an otherwise uninteresting story for me.

Outside of that aspect of the story, and how it affects life in a small rural town in England, there was little in the story that engaged me, outside of a few key passages, most of them (like the one below) expressed in the story by the girl's mother as observations about her relationship with her teenage children. In these cases, one felt what was no doubt a refreshing connection to author's own experience.

Discovering Gotham: One Chapter Can Make a Book

In my Kindle adventures over the last six months, I have sometimes detoured from classic literature into contemporary fiction for no other reason that to survey "what's out there." Last fall, purely on a whim from Kindle suggestions, I decided to download and read New York For Beginners, a translation of a German novel by Susann Remke. It came via my Kindle Unlimited membership, so it was free.

The novel is a third-person narrative of a young woman from Berlin who gets a job managing the digital media division of a fashion magazine in Manhattan. Of course she does, I thought to myself. I've seen this movie before.

Reading the novel lived up to my expectations from almost the first page. Naturally it starts out the way every "young woman in the world" story starts namely with the protagonist, having just dumped her loser boyfriend, swearing off relationships and men in general. A couple chapters later, she's hopping into bed with her boss (without knowing yet who is).

The most disgusting but revealing aspect of the novel was the salivating fascination with American Pop Culture. The pages dripped with references to famous actors and politicians (including the ne plus ultra personalities Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton). Analogies are thrown out to television shows, including, brazenly, Sex in the City. 

Everything in the book seemed to prove the maxim that in this decadent age at the tail end of the Establishment Era, the empowerment of contemporary feminism is mostly about having a shot at being a prostitute for the elite.

After three chapters, I strongly considered abandoning the book as unreadable. Then I turned the page, and for one glorious chapter, I felt like I was reading a real novel.  It felt like a different book by a different author. We learn how the protagonist explores a new city. I found these pages actually moving, and readily identified with what she was describing about cities in general, and especially about lower Manhattan.

The chapter could have easily stood on its own as a short story, with hardly any addition. Unfortunately by the next chapter, the author had reverted to the style of chick-lit Millennial Gilded Age fanfic. Not surprisingly the protagonist abandons the urban exploratory mission she describes here, getting no further than Prince Street in Soho, at which point, using her smartphone, she ducks into a bar to meet a guy. It was perfect metaphor for the book as a whole (that, and the fact that she chose to skip going into the Staten Island Ferry Terminal).

(later)

SplinterItIntoAThousandPiecesAndScatterItIntoTheWinds

Amazing days we live in.  The Civil War of the Deep State is full swing now. The bad guys are losing. #Vault7

Yes, at last. We may have...

Mourning as Described by Sterne

It has taken me getting through half of the book to appreciate it, but I am finally beginning to think that Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) is, as Schopenhauer asserted, a masterpiece of fiction. It felt nearly unreadable and impossible to follow for the couple hundred pages, and at times I felt like I was just letting the words flow into my eyeballs. But my intuition to stick with it is finally paying off in a big way.

Screen shots of book passages one enjoys are how the cool kids do it on Twitter BTW

Robert Osborne Passed Away Today

I was feeling a great sadness today, a melancholy of undetermined origin, the kind of ennui I had not felt in a long time.

I was wondering what could be the cause when I sat down to watch Turner Classic Movies before dinner. An old Richard Burton movie was on. Burton is the Start of the Month for may I pulled up the schedule on line, to read the blurb about the movie that was showing.

When the page came up I immediately saw the graphic of Robert Osborne, the long time host of TCM, with vital dates (1932-2017). I knew immediately that he had passed away. He had been in ill health for several years, and had basically retired completely from hosting.

It's hard to imagine what my life might be without Osborne. He was tremendously influential in conveying to me a love of classic cinema, especially during the years 2006-2008 when I was living back in Colorado after leaving New York. It was during that time that I would later say that "I turned the television to TCM and left it on for two years straight."

That was the time immediately preceding the start of this blog, when I began to write about contemporary cinema for several years, before abandoning it. So maybe that's why I was feeling melancholy today.

Fortunately I got to meet Osborne before he passed away---three years ago in Hollywood during the TCM Classic Film Festival. He was interviewing the late Maureen O'Hara in the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel. I don't really care about meeting famous people. Those two folks count for all the Hollywood greatness I care about, in a nutshell.

March the Fourth Be With You

Keeping Up With the Zeitgeist is a Full-Time Job. No wonder they pay people to do it. In any case, it was an interesting weekend. Trump's "my campaign was bugged" Tweetstorm in the early morning hours of Saturday the 4th, a day already scheduled for nationwide pro-Trump demonstrations, seems to have been a watershed moment in this drama

Woman shows her displeasure at a speaker at pro-Trump rally in Portland, Oregon. March 4, 2017.  (cf. Autistic Screeching meme, regarding the title of the video)

Comment: the full-scale meltdowns are happening everywhere now. Loretta Lynch, the former Attorney General of the U.S. , just made a video in which she praised the "blood" and "death" of people in the streets in previous protests (see below). Her words were taken by some as indicating we need more of this. She spoke of  "our rights being trampled." What does she mean, exactly? As far as I can see, what she means by this is her right to exercise power, and her right to control the narrative. The Left sees these as "equal rights" because of their claim that "white males, etc." had these "rights" for so long, and now the principle of equality demands that they get to exercise these rights for the foreseeable future (i.e. equality via historical balance). 

Meanwhile the new hero on the Right is a guy known as "Based Stick Man", a newly minted meme referring to a pro-Trump demonstrator who was arrested following this incident in Berkeley, California on Saturday. He is shown in the video attacking an "Antifa" demonstrator who had shown up to disrupt the rally (and presumably cause mayhem).  The_Donald has a good send-up of this in the form of a Wikipedia article details box ("Third Battle of Berkeley", see below). As someone who does a lot of military history research on that site, I thought it was quite clever.

Comment: March 4 was the day that the Trump supporters, and the Right in general, began to fight back in earnest. Trump's Tweetstorm was arguably taken by many as a signal that the "war" is on, and that it was time to go on offense. No more passive resistance. This is the way it will be from now on. Blood is going to be shed. We will find out whose will is stronger. Is this what you meant, Ms. Lynch?

Retweeted by a Catholic Priest

Over the weekend I passed a small milestone in my nascent career on Twitter by having what amounted to my first mini-viral Tweet.

I say "mini-viral" because my Tweet got "retweeted" (shared) by several dozen other people, which is an order of magnitude greater than any previous Tweet I had made. For someone like me who only joined last fall and who, at last count, has only 158 followers,  that's definitely an upgrade of achievemnt.

The reason my Tweet got so much traction is that it got retweeted initially by a Catholic priest who is popular among the Traditionalist community and who has many followers of his own. My Tweet was in fact a retweet and a restatement of something he himself had Tweeted. I provided a commentary on his Tweet by my own words. He liked my commentary and shared it on his feed with his followers. They saw his sharing as a sign of endorsement, and they echoed his approval with their own applause. So essentially I piggy-backed on his popularity.

What was my Tweet exactly? It was along the lines of how a church without a counter-narrative to Pop Culture has no appeal to youth, and thus has no future.

Among the other retweeters was another Catholic priest. I almost feel like I was in an Ecumenical Council.

You might notice that I haven't linked to my Twitter profile here. The reason for that is that I'm not yet ready to share my Twitter identity publicly. We live in strange times, after all, and there are often repercussions for sharing certain opinions. Moreover I use my Twitter account as much for research of others' opinons and sharing my own, so it may give the wrong impression.

Suffice it to say that my profile picture is that of a famous Twentieth Century physicist (whose name would not be readily known outside the physics community). Also I don't use my own name at all. Nobody would believe it anyway, as so many on Twitter have adopted a monicker with "Trump" in it as a kind of "I am Spartacus" phenomenon.

The only identifying thing in my profile for now is that my cover (background) photo is a scan of a page of my 1999 work on relativistic mechanics.

In any case, the priest whom I retweeted is now among my followers. I guess I gotta quit the clown act now and get serious.

If any of you out there want to follow me, and can't find me from the clues I've presented, you can DM me* and I'll share my handle with you. I'm vain, so I always want more followers.

*obviously not via Twitter, or else you would know my identity already.

The State of the Culture War: a Tweetstorm

We have reached the point where the interests of the Right and the Left now completely coincide, but for different reasons.

The Left, believing its Revolution is at hand, seeks to push rapid and shocking cultural change. The Right now seeks to encourage them and to accelerate.

Conservatism as we knew it---the effort to slow down the progress of Progressivism--is now utterly dead.

Most Leftists do not yet realize the extent to which the Right is happy to help them push their ideological to its logical, disastrous conclusions.

If they realized this, they might seek to slow down the pace, and thus become conservatives themselves, but most cannot help themselves.

The lure of achieving long-sought goals of overturning the "dominant" culture is too great a temptation. The Left is inherently self-destructive in this way.

The Left believes its ace-in-the-hole is the demographic replacement of white populations in America and Europe by peoples from the Third World.

The Right believes its ace-in-the-hole is the inevitable backlash of a young (mostly white) generation that will feel cheated out of its culture destroyed by the Left.

The Left has already opened the door in a big way to a return to traditionalism by its advocacy of the acceptance of regressive Islam in the West.

Their embrace of Islam even feels like the capitulation of little children to the need for a parental crackdown against their self-destructive rebellion.

e.g. the fantasy of The Handmaid's Tale, now back on television, has the air of secret Leftist longing for a return to an imagined past of hard and definite rules.

The Right is happy to be called Nazis. They are looking forward to the day when every single white person is slapped with this label.

Each call by a Leftist to "punch them out" is a small victory for the Right in the culture war. They are eager for the Left to implement actual violence.

They are gleeful at the takeover of universities by the thought police of the Left, knowing that incoming classes will become their new foot soldiers.

They savor reports of the latest Leftist campus outrages, such as the one at Georgetown declaring criticism of shariah law to be hate speech.

In an ideal situation, the Academia would go totally berserk and turn all universities in Leftist dystopias to the point of show trials like China in 1966.

The Right knows that middle schools across the U.S. and America are teeming with discontented young men being shamed for not wanting to date a transgender with a penis.

Ironically Trump is the middle ground, as close as possible to a center of politics. But the Left cannot abide him so they waste their energy on him while missing the greater fight.

They believe Alinsky tactics are their own property, and thus cannot fathom that the script has been flipped on them in a big way.