@kontextmaschine is in a pretty bad way, I think. I'd only got to wondering but:
A certain amount of critical prudery, in which I once shared, has been aroused by the account of what More had called 'the amorous propension' of Milton's angels (P.L. VI, 618-29). The trouble is, I think, that since these exalted creatures are all spoken of by masculine pronouns, we tend, half consciously, to think that Milton is attributing to them a life of homosexual promiscuity. [...] An angel is, of course, always He (not She) in human language, because whether the male is, or is not, the superior sex, the masculine is certainly the superior gender. But there exists among these creatures, according to Milton, something that might be called trans-sexuality.
more broadly there's this culture war around "science" that is kind of maddening - on one side there are the people who noticed that the CDC flipped its stance on masks early on in the pandemic and have leapt full force into antivax nonsense, and then on the other side there are people who seem to blindly support an imagined scientific consensus without ever really bothering to check what that might be
and like, i get it, shits hard. you've got:
- scientific institutions like the CDC that are also political institutions that will lie to you sometimes for political reasons, like worrying about a mask shortage
- scientific grifters who will use credentials they've earned to push nonsense for their own financial benefit
- the impenetrability of a lot of published scientific studies to an average layman
- the abysmal state of journalistic writing on studies
- genuine disagreement within a scientific community
- the replication crisis looming in the background
- scientific fraud and even good old fashioned honest fuckups
so yeah, it's crazy out there as an individual trying to determine truth. i regularly find myself reading studies that i just don't have the context or background for, because i still think muddling through them myself is preferable to reading a journalist trying to do the same.
what's infuriating to me is the institutional failure all of this implies, i mean good science communication is possible! your local epidemiologist isn't perfect but she fucking laps the NYT.
I don't think the CDC deliberately lied because of mask shortage considerations, see e.g. here or section 7 here. There was a theory among lots of people on twitter that they did, and later there was a comment by Anthony Fauci that many people interpreted as a confirmation, although he did not in fact say that they had lied.
There probably is some example of government agencies misrepresenting science for political reasons (China complaining about the Fukushima water release?), but I don't think this is one.
There’s V-22 Ospreyposting on my dash rn so here’s a throwback to when I was working on a fusion reactor and there were constantly Ospreys flying overhead and I was low-key more worried about the things spontaneously falling out of the sky than the neutron radiation.
Quick question is it a bad sign if your aircraft has its own entire Wikipedia page about how often it crashes for no reason
Eh, I think it's pretty random.
According to the aviation-safety.net website, the V-22 has had 46 accidents with 53 deaths over 600,000 flight hours, so 13,000 hours/accident and 11,000 hours/death.
For comparison the UH-60 Black Hawk had 395 accidents with 967 deaths over 10 million flight hours, so 25,000 hours/accident and 10,000 hours/death. I don't think the V-22 is spontaneously falling out of the sky at an unusually high rate.
I suspect what happened was that the V-22 program was expensive and taking a long time, and two big crashes with many deaths happened during the development period (before it was in service), so those crashes got a lot of attention because people already doubted the program. Whereas if the plane had been flying for many years and then 19 people died in an accident, people would think it was a tragedy but they wouldn't necessarily think that it was due to the plane itself being unsafe.
One of the other six planes with dedicated Wikipedia accident articles had that story: the JAS 39 program was already controversial because it was expensive, and then two big crashes happened which were talked about a lot. But after various fixes had been applied and it started flying regularly it has not been particularly accident prone.
Some news from 2010 that I came across while poking around on wikipedia. The Christian Institute writes: Top doctor denounces calls for assisted suicide in UK.
But then you click through to the actual op-ed and the doctor is like, "In the good old days we would just kill patients without asking anybody, now they are trying to add all these rules and committees and protocols"...
CS Lewis says:
The actual operation of the Homeric diction is remarkable. The unchanging recurrence of his wine-dark sea, his rosy fingered dawn, his ships launched into the holy brine, his Poseidon shaker ofearth, produce an effect which modern poetry, except where it has learned from Homer himself, cannot attain.
I semi-like reading Homer for a variety of reasons but I've always felt put off by claims that these authors were really good, so good that they account for the success of future writers who emulated them. Probabilistically that makes no sense. The human population has grown so much, and so has the share of people who are literate, and the bank of thought they stand on. Aristotle is probably my favorite of the really old writers I've sampled – he feels clean and affable and smart – but it would be very surprising if I considered him remarkable for quality, and indeed he isn't.
One reason I think people say this is that they are mixing up gratitude with quality. Writers have gotten better and better over the years because of what came before, so they are naturally indebted to tradition. But it seems to me that the real reason is that socially agreeing that the olds were also the greats enables the class of people who do intellectuality as leisure and passion to play social games and word games. Let's look at how CS Lewis continues this:
...except where it has learned from Homer himself, cannot attain. They emphasize the unchanging human environment. They express a feeling very profound and very frequent in real life, but else where ill represented in literature. What is really in our minds when we first catch sight of the sea after a long absence, or look up, as watchers in a sickroom or as sentries, to see yet another daybreak ? Many things, no doubt-all manner of hopes and fears, pain or pleasure, and the beauty or grimness of that particular sea and that particular dawn. Yes; but under all these, like a base so deep as to be scarcely audible, there is something which we might very lamely express by muttering 'same old sea' or 'same old morning'. The permanence, the indifference, the heartrending or consoling fact that whether we laugh or weep the world is what it is, always enters into our experience and plays no small part in that pressure of reality which is one of the differences between life and imagined life.
This is not a good argument. It's a way you can see things. You could apply it to anything, and so it proves too much. It's a way CS Lewis feels, or has chosen to feel, about Homer, not a way in which Homer has Contributed To Literature.
Yet I found his argument so beautiful to read. I kind of want to believe it! And to write something this beautiful about Homer, CS Lewis and his audience had to buy that there was always more depth to Homer worth diving for. Something must be extractable that has not been noticed for thousands and thousands of years... the sheer gravity of the preexisting dialogue draws one to the work, and once drawn, one must believe there is more there.
And as long as people crave these beautiful, subtle, old games of analysis, they will not let what is very old be anything other than great.
I'm generally skeptical of claims that historical authors were particularly great, but I don't think you need to read Lewis as saying that in this passage—it's enough that Homer is different from modern poetry, and therefore will have a different effect unless the modern authors deliberately write in a similar style. Like, nobody else uses these repeated epithets, and they're surely doing something, so in order to figure out what effect they have we just have to read Homer and see. Or more realistically, ask somebody who read classics at Oxford what he thinks.
I think maybe the most convincing example of "except where it learned from X himself" is J.R.R. Tolkien, who deliberately tried to take inspiration from Old/Middle English "heroic" fiction, with great success. He sometimes went even further, e.g. writing a version of the The Children of Húrin in alliterative verse, and the effect definitely feels very different from other modern English poetry. (Not necessarily great, just different.)
This is basically why the idea of trying to read Paradise Lost appealed to me in the first place. I don't necessarily expect to like it very much, but it seems radically different from anything else I have read, so I'm curious what it is like.
Homeric formulas have a specific function in memorized epic poetry in the Greek style, right? Like the choice of epithet in some contexts depends on the metrical position where the term is being deployed, and it seems likely that they had a mnemonic function for what was essentially an oral poetic tradition. But I'm not sure that you can get that just by copying it; you can do a pastiche, maybe, but the environment for which these functions were designed does not really exist anymore.
If you try to draw out the part of this that Lewis is commenting on specifically, it's kind of in the large bucket of what we'd call motifs, right? We do still have motifs, after all, they just don't look like this because they're adapted to a different medium.
Lewis also mentions the mnemonic function, and doesn't like this explanation because he thinks we should consider the effect on the listener. Which is actually interesting because nowadays there is no listener, if people know Homer at all it's from reading, and who is to say that the effect is the same? Maybe it's like found art; like those white marble statues which sparked an entire aesthetic in the renaissance even though they were originally painted. But if Lewis said these repeated phrases made an impression on him, then I guess they did, if not he could have just ignored them and focused on something else in the poem.
Re: Homeric epithets in modern media, for some reason I think Stan Lee-era Marvel comics actually does something like it? The Amored Avenger, Iron Man; The Man Without Fear, Daredevil; Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts; etc. Not sure what specific function these fill, but the effect is probably not to highlight the indifference of unchanging nature..!
CS Lewis says:
The actual operation of the Homeric diction is remarkable. The unchanging recurrence of his wine-dark sea, his rosy fingered dawn, his ships launched into the holy brine, his Poseidon shaker ofearth, produce an effect which modern poetry, except where it has learned from Homer himself, cannot attain.
I semi-like reading Homer for a variety of reasons but I've always felt put off by claims that these authors were really good, so good that they account for the success of future writers who emulated them. Probabilistically that makes no sense. The human population has grown so much, and so has the share of people who are literate, and the bank of thought they stand on. Aristotle is probably my favorite of the really old writers I've sampled – he feels clean and affable and smart – but it would be very surprising if I considered him remarkable for quality, and indeed he isn't.
One reason I think people say this is that they are mixing up gratitude with quality. Writers have gotten better and better over the years because of what came before, so they are naturally indebted to tradition. But it seems to me that the real reason is that socially agreeing that the olds were also the greats enables the class of people who do intellectuality as leisure and passion to play social games and word games. Let's look at how CS Lewis continues this:
...except where it has learned from Homer himself, cannot attain. They emphasize the unchanging human environment. They express a feeling very profound and very frequent in real life, but else where ill represented in literature. What is really in our minds when we first catch sight of the sea after a long absence, or look up, as watchers in a sickroom or as sentries, to see yet another daybreak ? Many things, no doubt-all manner of hopes and fears, pain or pleasure, and the beauty or grimness of that particular sea and that particular dawn. Yes; but under all these, like a base so deep as to be scarcely audible, there is something which we might very lamely express by muttering 'same old sea' or 'same old morning'. The permanence, the indifference, the heartrending or consoling fact that whether we laugh or weep the world is what it is, always enters into our experience and plays no small part in that pressure of reality which is one of the differences between life and imagined life.
This is not a good argument. It's a way you can see things. You could apply it to anything, and so it proves too much. It's a way CS Lewis feels, or has chosen to feel, about Homer, not a way in which Homer has Contributed To Literature.
Yet I found his argument so beautiful to read. I kind of want to believe it! And to write something this beautiful about Homer, CS Lewis and his audience had to buy that there was always more depth to Homer worth diving for. Something must be extractable that has not been noticed for thousands and thousands of years... the sheer gravity of the preexisting dialogue draws one to the work, and once drawn, one must believe there is more there.
And as long as people crave these beautiful, subtle, old games of analysis, they will not let what is very old be anything other than great.
I'm generally skeptical of claims that historical authors were particularly great, but I don't think you need to read Lewis as saying that in this passage—it's enough that Homer is different from modern poetry, and therefore will have a different effect unless the modern authors deliberately write in a similar style. Like, nobody else uses these repeated epithets, and they're surely doing something, so in order to figure out what effect they have we just have to read Homer and see. Or more realistically, ask somebody who read classics at Oxford what he thinks.
I think maybe the most convincing example of "except where it learned from X himself" is J.R.R. Tolkien, who deliberately tried to take inspiration from Old/Middle English "heroic" fiction, with great success. He sometimes went even further, e.g. writing a version of The Children of Húrin in alliterative verse, and the effect definitely feels very different from other modern English poetry. (Not necessarily great, just different.)
This is basically why the idea of trying to read Paradise Lost appealed to me in the first place. I don't necessarily expect to like it very much, but it seems radically different from anything else I have read, so I'm curious what it is like.
The examples I have cited warn us that those Stock responses which we need in order to be even human are already in danger. In the light of that alarming discovery there is no need to apologize for Milton or for any other pre-Romantic poet. The older poetry, by continually insisting on certain Stock themes-as that love is sweet, death bitter, virtue lovely, and children or gardens delightful-was performing a service not only of moral and civil, but even of biological, importance. Once again, the old critics were quite right when they said that poetry 'instructed by delighting', for poetry was formerly one of the chief means whereby each new generation learned, not to copy, but by copying to make, the good Stock responses. Since poetry has abandoned that office the world has not bettered. While the moderns have been pressing forward to conquer new territories of consciousness, the old territory, in which alone man can live, has been left unguarded, and we are in danger of finding the enemy in our rear. We need most urgently to recover the lost poetic art of enriching a response without making it eccentric, and of being normal without being vulgar.
tragically C.S. Lewis was born a century too early to realize his true calling, marble-statue posting on twitter.
But, first, a necessary digression. A recent remark of Mr. Eliot's poses for us at the outset the fundamental question whether we (mere critics) have any right to talk about Milton at all. Mr. Eliot says bluntly and frankly that the best contemporary practising poets are the only 'jury of judgement' whose verdict on his own views of Paradise Lost he will accept. […] The first result is that I, not being one of the best contemporary poets, cannot judge Mr. Eliot's criticism at all. […] Shall I go to the best contemporary poets, who can, and ask them whether Mr. Eliot is right? But in order to go to them I must first know who they are. […] the real result is that no such man can criticize poetry at all
This is really peak posting! I would submit that this 3-page digression was not, in fact, necessary and some touching of grass might have been beneficial.
What seems to me necessary is to assert at the same time [Milton's] greatness—in that what he could do well he did better than any one else has ever done it—and the serious charges to be made against him, in respect of the deterioration—the peculiar kind of deterioration—to which he subjected the language. […] There is a large class of persons, including some who appear in print as critics, who regard any censure upon a 'great' poet as a branch of the peace, as an act of wanton iconoclasm, or even hoodlumism. The kind of derogatory criticism that I have to make upon Milton is not intended for such persons […] and of what I have to say I consider that the only jury of judgement is that of the ablest poetical practitioners of my own time.
I think the point of the paragraph is precisely that anyone has the right to talk about Milton. But even if we're being literal about it, Eliot doesn't say that you need to be a good poet to identify good poets, and the article explicitly says it's not trying to "appraise the 'greatness' of Milton", so I don't think there is a vicious circle.
Interesting twitter thread about intercontinental missile warheads getting more aerodynamic. They enter the atmosphere at the same speed (since that's determined by the range), but the first generation Minuteman reentry vehicles slowed to subsonic (800 ft/s = 0.24 km/s = Mach 0.74) while the current ones hit at 9000 ft/s = 2.7 km/s = Mach 7.9.
i did read the first scene of Gravity's Rainbow and I didn't realize that's enough to see what the title is referring to! I only had it pointed out to me recently, it's the arc of the V2 rocket (to which i thought "but that's a parabola and a rainbow is a semicircle..."), which you see in the very first scene. NEver occurred tom etha tit was referring to the shape of a rainbow rather than the color .The closest thing i had thought of was gravitational redshift, that if you imagine varying the mass of a body, it'll go through a rainbow of colors
I guess with some more careful modeling it's not even a parabola, it goes in a straight line for the first 20% of the trip and then probably does something due to air resistance in the last 10%.
Railroad Crows (2015) by American artist, Joan Becker
Watercolour, 152 x 102 cm, 60 x 40 in approx
Emerald Spectacles from India, c. 1620-1660 CE: the lenses of these spectacles were cut from a single 300-carat emerald, and it was believed that they possessed mystical properties
These eyeglasses are also known by the name "Astaneh-e ferdaws," meaning "Gate of Paradise," based on the perception of the color green as a symbol for spiritual salvation/Paradise. This was a common belief in Mughal-era India, where the spectacles were made.
The lenses were crafted from two thin slices of the same emerald. Together, the lenses have a combined weight of about 27 carats, but given the precision, size, and shape of each lens, experts believe that the original emerald likely weighed in excess of 300 carats (more than sixty grams) before it was cleaved down in order to produce the lenses. The emerald was sourced from a mine in Muzo, Colombia, and it was then transported across the Atlantic by Spanish or Portuguese merchants.
Each lens is encircled by a series of rose-cut diamonds, which run along an ornate frame made of gold and silver. The diamond-studded frame was added in the 1890s, when the original prince-nez design was fitted with more modern frames.
The emerald eyeglasses have long been paired with a second set of spectacles, and they were almost certainly commissioned by the same patron. This second pair is known as Halqeh-e nur, or the "Halo of Light."
The Halo of Light features lenses that were made from slices of diamond. The diamond lenses were cleaved from a single stone, just like the emerald lenses, with the diamond itself being sourced from a mine in Southern India. It's estimated that the original, uncut diamond would have weighed about 200-300 carats, which would make it one of the largest uncut diamonds ever found.
These lenses are so clear and so smoothly cut that it sometimes looks like they're not even there
Both sets of spectacles date back to the mid-1600s, and it's generally believed that they were commissioned by a Mughal emperor or prince. The identity of that person is still a bit of a mystery, but it has been widely speculated that the patron was Shah Jahan -- the Mughal ruler who famously commissioned the Taj Mahal after the death of his wife, Mumtaz Mahal. Shah Jahan did rule as the Mughal emperor from about 1628 to 1658.
The emerald and diamond lenses may have been chosen for symbolic/cultural reasons, or they may have been chosen simply because they're pretty and extravagant; their meaning/purpose is unclear. Experts do believe that the eyeglasses were designed to be worn by someone, though.
It was believed that the spectacles had spiritual properties, like the ability to promote healing, ward off evil, impart wisdom, and bring the wearer closer to enlightenment. Those beliefs are often related to Indic and Islamic traditions, some of which ascribe spiritual and/or symbolic traits to emeralds and diamonds. Emeralds can be viewed as an emblem of Paradise, divine salvation, healing, cleansing, and eternal life; diamonds are similarly associated with enlightenment, wisdom, celestial light, and mysticism.
The Gate of Paradise and the Halo of Light were both kept in the collections of a wealthy Indian family until 1980, when they were sold to private collectors, before going on auction once again back in 2021. Together, they are currently valued at about $3.5 million.
Sources & More Info:
- Sotheby's: Mughal Spectacles
- Architectural Digest of India: At Sotheby's auction, Mughal-era eyeglasses made of diamond and emerald create a stir
- Only Natural Diamonds: Auspicious Sight & the Halqeh-e Nur Spectacles
- The Royal Society Publishing: Cleaving the Halqeh-Ye Nur Diamonds
- Gemological Institution of America: Two Antique Mughal Spectacles with Gemstone Lenses
- Manuscript: From Satan's Crown to the Holy Grail: emeralds in myth, magic, and history
- CNN: The $3.5 million Spectacles Said to Ward off Evil
- BBC: Rare Mughal Era Spectacles to be Auctioned by Sotheby's
i want diamond glasses. Unscratchable!
Also people buy high-index eyeglasses to have thinner lighter lenses, but the "high" index is like 1.74—diamond is 2.42!
It's late at night and I'm being paranoid, but guys, I'm starting to sense a vibe-shift away from the post-1950s consensus... Consider:
¶ Some recentish papers critical of split-brain patients, Libet experiment, which were approvingly cited by the usual free will/dualism mafia on rattumb. (I also think I saw someone quote this not-at-all recent deflationary account of blindsight?)
¶ This Tuesday someone called "a literal banana" posted a blogpost Against Automaticity which starts from the heuristics-and-biases field not replicating, says that we should instead think about "rational processes", and then jumps from there to saying that we should reject "the myth of the clockwork, the myth of mechanism ... the idea that you can explain every phenomenon causally", and instead turn to "Phenomenology" (which, banana assures us, "is not a woo model").
¶ But what is a rational process? I feel since Von Neumann and RAND the usual answer has been game theory, but that's also getting less popular? When Scott Alexander posted "Meditations on Moloch", Chris Hallquist wrote a reply saying that bad Nash equilibria is an excuse and the real problem is that the individual actors are bad people. And finally, both these strands join together neatly in this @raginrayguns post
I think the appeal of the cog sci heuristics and biases stuff, as well as the game theory stuff and “moloch”, is substantially that they provide explanations in which bad things are nobody’s fault.
I guess it's a bit risky to predict the course of intellectual history based on who I happen to follow on tumblr, but basically I foresee a return to Catholicism: an immaterial soul which can be good or bad and needs to individually cultivate virtue...
Anonymous asked:
oh my GOD shut up you tedious bitch
The best writing always provokes strong reactions among readers.
"Here are two things that can be true at the same time."
"But they aren't actually true."
"But they could be."
Asked about the Malcolm X/Martin Luther King Jr. parallels, Claremont also said "It was too close [in the 1970s]. It had only been a few years since the assassinations. In a way, it seemed like that would be too raw. My resonance to Magneto and Xavier was borne more out of the Holocaust."
So five years is too early, but 30 years is about right. Right now we're due for Marvel superheroes inspired by the Rwandan genocide.