Headlines and particles

Headlines from the main page of CNN.com.

“Kitten’s head gets stuck in pipe”

“Madoff’s bling on auction block”

“Dolly Parton on her ‘double Ds’”

“Boss gives employee his kidney”

Is it just me, or are the headlines getting more and more vacuous each year?

And while there’s a headline about the LHC, it’s “Collider resumes ‘God particle’ hunt” — and oh, how I wish they’d nicknamed the fecking boson a Satan particle instead, or a Wotan splinter, or a Yahweh dongle; something with a little less woo in it. (Then again, the namers are the “black hole, dark matter” people — not that I, as one of the “complex number, simple group” people, can afford comments about the  subject.)

After that, the story begins with these words: “Excitement and mysticism are building around the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider” — and basically at the word “mysticism” a red veil of rage started to slide over my eyes.

Sure, this is an awesomely beautiful and grandiose experiment of curiosity and reason, carefully planned and meticulously constructed to uncover the least obvious and most profound secrets of nature; that’s what this is. So why not invoke some hokey “mysticism” to placate the moron hordes that gibber and sway outside and cannot understand the processes of coldly calculating reason, that cannot see that though there’s allure in knowledge and in mystery, mysticism is something different, and beside unthinking certainty maybe the worst mindborne disease to ever rise among and ravage the human race, and the thing that above all others has blocked clarity, retarded progress, and muted protest; the very thing that has turned unparalleled reasoners into stunted opiate-dream monks chasing vacuous dreams in ever-widening circles, and made men and women of good intentions into twisted horror cheerleaders willing to excuse any ill in the name of their tepid and empty intuitions and their meaningless and pareidolic personal experiences —

Sorry. Got carried away. Feck I hate mysticism. Not mysteries; mysticism. Can’t stand the thing.

The actual article is tolerably nice, though — it calls the black hole and future sabotage cranks “alarmists” and and proponents of “fringe theories”, which sounds about right in a publication that doesn’t tolerate four-letter ur-English expressions.

As I understand it, the whole “God particle” name comes from the atrocious groaner that, since the Higgs boson would be a reason for gravity, it and God both would be “the reason we have mass/Mass”. I have however this uneasy feeling that a whole lot of people read more into the name than a pun that was perpetrated, not spoken!

Ah well, maybe I can hope for a headline that says “No God particle found”; would make my black, stunted little atheist heart glow a little warmer. I’m not picky about my childish amusements. (Or maybe “There is (probably) no God particle. Now stop worrying and study pure mathematics instead.”)

Snowing

It’s a good evening round here; it’s dropping light, big snowflakes in great quantities, and thanks to shadows cast by the streetlights above it seems like an equal silent storm, though black and horizontal, not vertical, is sweeping under your wheels.

Don’t have the skill to capture that effect, though, so here’s just a snowy yard.

Also, NaNoWriMo is at 22 510/50 000 words after 9 out of 30 days of writing — all’s well, except for some reason half my cast suddenly decided that instead of “Grudge in a University” the novel should instead be about “Black-robed math professors chanting ‘Euler Euler Euler’” — oh dear. (Well, my protagonist isn’t very happy about it either. He didn’t take seeing his thesis advisor occupying one tip of a floor-drawn pentagram very well. I think the next chapter will have some gibbering in it.)

Mangled proverbs

Presented without comment or explanation, as I have none.

• What does not kill you, will make you hope you’d never been born.
• The only thing to fear is the sum of all our fears.
• Every cloud has a thunderbolt that never strikes twice in the same place.
• Once bitten, you can’t make him drink. (Rabies?)
• Every dog has its silver lining.
• You can’t teach new tricks to your inner child.
• You better not cry standing on the shoulders of giants.
• When the cat is away, it has nine lives.
• All is fair in love and its continuation by other means.
• A fool and his money sink ships.
• For want of a nail, for a sheep as for a lamb.
• The way to a man’s heart gathers no moss.
• Don’t bite the hand that burns your bridges.

Darkness builds up in her mind

And now, for some good Finnish heavy metal: Kiuas (strangely enough, that means “sauna stove”) with Warrior Soul:

Can’t say I don’t immensely adore the over-the-top romantic Finnish attitude to life in the lyrics —

But darkness builds up in her mind
As a cold breeze moves across the sky
In battle sworn to die
She unsheathes the blade with fire in her eyes

Warrior soul blazes through the land of frost and snow
Her pagan heart and flesh built to endure the cold
Warrior soul to the death against all foes she fights
She’s born under the northern lights

In the dark we must find our own way
Though we know the winding path leads to the grave
Still battles left to fight
We must keep our pride until the end of time

— and if you look at this while listening to the video above, please note this quotes the second iteration of a very similar passage.

(The kind person that uploaded it into Youtube also included the full lyrics there.)

Stuck with whatever sticks

It’s tempting to imagine the future being radically different and constructed in some logical fashion, the truth is that a lot of what will be around will be, like a lot is right now, just things that are not optimal but would be monstrously impractical to change.

Sometimes one gets the feeling that with the advent of our well-connected and niceness-preferring world it has become too late to change some things — you can’t gestate some project of your own in a land isolated from the rest of the world only to unleash it in rampaging hordes of idea-spreading morons that lay first claim on something that hasn’t been codified before, and you can’t sail forth anymore, tell people what their land’s called now, and shoot all that oppose you. (Well, some would disagree.)

The immediate example of something arbitrary that sticks would be the current universal count of years — but there are of course people that see something special in that guesstimate of the birth of a self-claimed messiah in Judea of old, or in some other more local date, and I myself can’t think of any particular year on our wiggly gradient to better days that would merit being year zero.

(Not that the current BCE/CE count has a year zero — another reason to cuss that 6th-century monk who devised it — which leads to certain problems with the counting of millennia, as you no doubt were reminded again and again some ten years ago, unless you were one of those accurate folks, bless you, that were doing the reminding.)

And switching the arbitrary start-point would play incredible havoc with all records and with all public life even if there weren’t such dedicated cross-eyed opponents to such a thing, so no go. (Besides: what to start with? Newton? Neil Armstrong? Or if you want to avoid the “minus years” confusion, put the startpoint to “earliest civilized essential X” — and witness the immediate discovery of something older.)

Nah, the best example of something (in my opinion) suboptimal that sticks is the decimal system. My matematical gripe with it (and as you know, mathematical types don’t deal with actual dirty numerals that much; it’s a this and b that all the way) is that ten is divisible with only 2 and 5; but (for example) 12 is divided by 2, 3, 4 and 6. The results of this are not intuitively obvious, but this means (as an example) that fractions in base ten are a horrible mess; those in base twelve are much nicer. Elementary mathematics (and that’s what’s really widely used by everyone, outside applications like computers and cellphones where the maths is “buried inside”) would be much easier in base twelve. As there is no magic or any special reason (except the accident of ten fingers) to keep the decimal system, we would be much better off with a dozenal one. And even ten fingers — well, you have ten fingers and two wrists, right? That’s twelve.

But base twelve in widespread use — never going to happen. The transition would be monstrous, the cost beyond all calculation, the confusion unspeakable and unthinkable, and the widespread lynchings of mathematicians on whom this all would be blamed would be rather distruptive to calm academic life. Not going to happen: we have something arbitrary and suboptimal, and we’re stuck with it, as with the current count of time, and the QWERTY keyboard, and the (to me anyway) unaesthetic Egypto-Babylonian mess of having the day arbitrarily divided into 24 units divided into 60 sub-units divided into 60 sub-sub-units, which then divide into decimal parts. It’s madness; but we’re stuck with it.

(Then again, the French Revolution tried to fix some of these things — but apart from all ethical concerns, force works only if you apply it long enough to make the changes stick, and then Napoleon came along and all the reforms fell apart. One wishes the Americans would have cried out “Decimal units of time! We support our French brethren! We shall adapt that and spread it around the world!” — but no, hours and feet and similar mad arbitrary things persist. And it’s not the arbitrariness that irritates — it’s the bother and inelegance of such a cobbled-together system. For further thought, see the British system of coins before 1971. It’s bad planning to make elementary units more complex than they need to be.)

(Well, base ten will stick, unless some bottleneck happens: We’d only need someone mathematically inclined as the supreme dictator of all mankind for a while — wait, that’s usually a bad idea. Strong leaders with Opinions tend to go all Saparmurat Niyazov, which is funny only from the outside. “Ha ha; our leader made a giant golden statue of himself and we have no food. Ha ha.”)

Quote for today 24

I’m only doing it to lull you all into a false sense of security. One minute you put your guard down in the presence of all the furry warm cuteness, then wham! Out comes the chitin and slime and the tentacles and the cold staring eyes oh god oh god the eyes the implacable glare. Then where will your puppies and kittens be, hey?

(PZ Myers, biologist)

And this is why I stay away from the biology building.

Well, this and the rumor that they’re assembling a collection of stuffed academic creatures, and they’re short a graduate student of mathematics.

Perfect blame

A recent news item from Finland: a girl of eight died of swine flu. Especially tragic as she had visited a hospital and they had sent her back home to get better.

The reaction of some people to this drives me up the wall: namely the reaction that the hospital staff is to blame, and should be blamed and should be punished.

That’s bonkers; bonkura-su in Japanese. Bonkers, unless the threshold for hospital workers is 100% perfect accuracy and foresight.

Even mathematicians can’t get that!

The same thing happened with one of those random and exceedingly rare school shootings* in 2008: the shooter had been talked to by the police before the tragedy, but had been dismissed as a harmless kid. And again the same cries: blame the police! Punish the police! They should have known! — and again the same madness, as if one is expected to be a perfect seer of all that is to come by the virtue of a blue uniform or a white one.

(Then again, to say that they should have done this or that just in case — well, that’s a valid point, but hospitalizing even the unlikelies in a time of already strained resources, or yoinking someone’s personal gun away on nothing more than a hunch, is costly and unfair.)

(Then again, a lot of things are done “just in case” because in every group of people there is a sizable minority of utter bastards; even among nuns I suppose though that’s hard to imagine.** That’s why there are locks and metal detectors and such: just in case the utter bastard should come by. But there always has to be a balance between bother and safety; if safety is all that matters then heigh-ho and to the cavity search we all go before getting on a plane.)

People aren’t perfect, and it’s a tad ridiculous to punish them afterwards for decisions that were reasonably justified when they were made; or for errors that are the inevitable result of any imperfect operation of imperfect hominids, no matter how diligent and dutiful they are. Being imperfect is not negligence, and it’s not a crime, no matter the results.

Not that this is in any way a profound idea, but just felt that I either had to write this, or go pound my head against a wall.

* * *

* : “random and exceedingly rare” — just so. There have been two in the past few years, but you have to go back in time to 1989 (I think) to find a third, which was also the first in Finnish history; and don’t go making too many inferences of increase from three points of data. Just because two instances of a very rare event happen close together doesn’t mean the society is rotten and the world is oh noes ending. There are people who win the lottery twice; and in a similarly probabilistic way there are consecutive years when something ugly and rare happens, usually utilizing the guns and scrawled notes (or Youtubes) du jour.

** : An utter bastard nun, imagined: “Your rosary? I shoved it up my ass, Theresa! Ke ke ke ke!”

Those interesting moments

I suppose being a judge is not entirely dull if you get to write sentences like this:

Among the terms or epithets that have been held (all in the cases we’ve cited) to be incapable of defaming because they are mere hyperbole rather than falsifiable assertions of discreditable fact are “scab,” “traitor,” “amoral,” “scam,” “fake,” “phony,” “a snake-oil job,” “he’s dealing with half a deck,” and “lazy, stupid, crap-shooting, chicken-stealing idiot.”

That’s from a judgment against a crank — in Wisconsin anyway — who sued Underwood Dudley for calling him that. Oh, and as a hint — Dudley’s books about eccentric mathematics are good reads; abominably expensive, but good reads. Consult your local university library.

Then again, doctors have interesting moments in the lives, too:

PURPOSE: The aim of this study is to describe 17 cases of colorectal foreign bodies introduced during sexual activity, gathered by the authors over the past twenty years (1980-2000), and to establish diagnostic and therapeutic guidelines for these situations.

And mathematics-people? Well, this very week I came across a mention of a neat little test for divisibility by seven that I hadn’t heard before, so there. (Namely, the -digit number is divisible by seven if and only if the difference is a number divisible by seven.)

Oh, NaNoWriMo at 8465/50 000 after 3/30 days. Not bad.

Lovecraft, for real

Mentioned Lord of A Visible World yesterday; and soon after came across a passage of so-Lovercraft-it’s-a-parody-of-Lovecraft in it, in a letter where L. is somewhat maniacally describing shopping for a suit, and not succeeding:

Well — having exhausted Brooklyn, I descended to the depths, and took the subway for the 14th St – 7th Ave. colony. Pegana, what a gauntlet to run! Indescribable scum pulling one into holes in the wall where flamboyant monstrosities ululate their impossibility beneath price-cards of $4.95, $7.50, $10.00, $12.50, $15.00, $17.00, $18.00… puffy rat-eyed vermin hurling taunts when one does not buy and airing spleen in dialects so mercifully broken that white men can’t understand them… crazinesses in cloth hanging in fantastic attitudes and displaying unheard-of anomalies — before Heaven I vow that despite the horrors I’ve seen on people, I never saw the like of these fungous freaks off people! Perhaps the human form inside a suit fills it out to some semblance of Nature — certainly these empty nightmares swinging in the winds like gallows-birds had nothing of Nature in them!

What I wouldn’t give for “Your Movie Sucks“, written by Lovecraft instead of Roger Ebert. (Oh, the quote is off p. 160 of the hardback edition.)

* * *

Meanwhile, NaNoWriMo 2009 is at 6025 words of the minimum of 50 000; not too shabby after 2 days of the 30 available. For some reason the anticipation seems to be getting worse, but the execution keeps getting easier. (And it’s in Finnish, so so much for samples.)

Well, the subject helps, too: it’s a tale of something creepy happening in a sprawling university, probably something involving things that go bump in the night and are worse than Prof. Hoary yet again failing to find the light switch.

Lovecraft the advertising man

Am reading Lord of A Visible World, a biography of Lovecraft that consists totally of his letters. (Which, you know, dwarf his other output.) Some insights are immediate — namely, he has a sense of humor, he has really weird affectations (I can understand him calling himself “Grandpa”, being all antiquarian and cranky, but going from that to calling his aunts “daughters” is a bit much!), he seems basically a nice cosmic atheist guy, except socially spineless and with a couple of really dumb opinions. (That being mostly a reference to his anti-modernism and his racism. And his futilism isn’t exactly my cup of tea either, but I can understand it.)

However, the point of this post is the fact I came across — namely, when finances went badly, he briefly tried a job as a door-to-door salesman (no sales), and tried to get one writing gushy ad copy; no success. Now, the man is not the image we have of him, but there’s something altogether too funny in the idea of H.P. Lovecraft writing advertisements.

* * *

Just think of it!

7 out of 11 Bobbed Heads want

the Bobbie Pin

Keeps Bobbed Hair Tidy

in the blind winds redolent of the fungi of accursed Yuggoth which sweep out of the uncaring skies to eradicate the frail citadels of Man!

The Fastest Seller ever known in the Beauty Shop

* * *

An entirely new and different SELF-SUPPORTING “INTERWOVEN” ANTEDILUVEAN SOCK

No Gadgets — No Garters — No Ghastliness

but they DO stay up

Styles illustrated

2 pairs $ 1

No other sock made like this by the blind hairless white apes of Africay

Patented and exclusively

“Inter-Woven”

THEY WEAR LONGER

THE SOCKS MY GOD CARTER THE SOCKS

* * *

NEW Kissproof

the waterproof rouge…

in a startling jade green case

Kissproof — the modern rouge — stays on no matter WHAT one does! A single application lasts all day! The youthful NATURAL Kissproof color will make your cheeks temptingly kissable — blushingly red — pulsating with the very blasphemous spirit of reckless, irrepressible youth as yet untouched by the paralyzing Knowledge of old age! Your first application of Kissproof will delight you! Whether you journey to the catacombs of Ptolemais for forbidden embraces, or to the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries to slither your lips over things that even the epicures of the terrible shudder to mention in their unspeakable lotus-dreams, you should heed the words of Abdul Al-Hazred, the Mad Arab of Damascus: CHOOSE KISSPROOF… as hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon!

“I would do anything to get KISSPROOF, in a stylish green case! Seizing the green jade object, we gave a last glance at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of its owner and closed up the grave as we found it.” —Mrs. St. J., genuine testimonial

* * *

What do the neighbors think of her children?

To every mother her own are the ideal children. But what do the neighbors think? Do they smile at happy, grimy faces acquited in wholesome play? For people have a way of associating unclean clothes and faces with other questionable characteristics. And yet they cannot even guess at the abysms rent open when these dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous! No human language has words for such a Thing!

Fortunately, however, there’s soap and water.

“Bright, shining faces” and freshly laundered clothes seem to make children welcome anywhere… and, in addition, to speak volumes concerning their parents’ personal habits as well. Ia-R’lyehl Cihuiha flgagnl id Ia! No, I shall not shoot myself — I cannot be made to shoot myself!

There’s CHARACTER — in SOAP & WATER

(Published by the Association of American Soap and Glycerine Producers, Inc., to aid the work of Cleanliness Institute.)

* * *

“Now, Howard… that’s not quite what we want. And what, that’s what the graphics department did based on your… My God! What’re those THINGS?”

“That’s the ‘before’ picture, Mr. Smith.”

(All based on actual advertisements of the 20s; such as the one for Kissproof here, the one for soap, plus lines cribbed from HPL’s stories, and a few words of interpolation from me.)