Happiness? Maybe.

     Lapham’s Quarterly XII/3: Happiness. ... is over-rated, makes life worth living, is a side effect, can’t be caught when you pursue it, surprises you, and requires sorrow.
As always, a good collection. ****

Sending Children into Safety? Maybe not. Evacuees during World War 2

     Ben Wicks.  No Time to Say Goodbye (1988) In 1939, Ben Wicks was sent into the country when the UK authorities worried about the expected bombing of London and other major cities. Reading about WW2, he noticed that there was little available about his and other children’s experience. So he put out a few adverts asking for reports of personal experience. He received hundreds of letters. This book is the result of sorting, editing, and selecting from them. Many people welcomed the chance to tell their stories, many told those stories for the first time ever, all were changed, for better or for worse, by being uprooted and having to cope with being strangers among strangers. Most had a relatively good experience, but some suffered physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. One referred to a sister whom she never saw again after being separated from her.
      Read the book. If you’re of a certain age, you will be reminded of your own experiences, whether or not you were an evacuee. If you didn’t live through that time, the book may help you understand why your parents and other older relatives are the way they are. The war changed us all, one way or another. ****

Canadian Quotes

Lisa Wojna. Bathroom Book of Canadian Quotes. (2005) Well done collection of quotes, organised by theme and subject. An author index would have been helpful. A few samples:
     Speak up, gentlemen. I’m not opposed to male participants in government. (Charlotte Whitton, mayor of Ottawa)
     Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you a car. (Laurence J. Peter, educator)
     Why don’t you all go back where you came from? We own this land; we’re your landlords. And the rent is due. (Kahn-Tineta Horn, Mohawk)
     We need spring. We need it desperately, and, usually, we need it before God is willing to give it to us. (Peter Gzowski, radio host)
     A proof is a proof. What kind of a proof? It’s a proof. And when you have a good proof, it’s because it’s proven. (Jean Chretien, Prime Minister)
     Diaper spelled backwards spells repaid. Think about it. (Marshall McLuhan, Professor of English)
    A keeper. ****
   

Murderous Christmases

Cynthia Manson, ed. Merry Murder (1994) A collection of crime fictions set in Christmastime, an example of a book constructed for a specified market. I enjoyed it. Several selections are classics worth re-reading (eg, Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”), but most were new to me (e.g., Boucher’s “Mystery for Christmas”). I bought the book many years ago as a possible Christmas gift, and finally arranged to receive it myself. Worth the wait. **½ to ****

A rational Faith: Tom Harpur's Would You Believe?

     Tom Harpur. Would You Believe? “Finding God without Losing Your Mind” (1996) Harpur suffered a crisis of faith when he realised that a literalist theology doesn’t work. He eventually developed a mystical belief in a loving God that created this universe and has used evolution to create humankind, which will evolve a cosmic consciousness of some kind. That is the best I can do in interpreting this wide-ranging and frequently muddled account of Harpur’s journey towards and justification for a rational faith.
     Like many theists who harbour or began with a literalist theology, he wants scientific support for his beliefs. This desire in part explains his misunderstanding of evolution and other sciences. He refers to the symbolisms and metaphors of the sacred texts, but he stops short of asserting that symbolism and metaphor is the only possible language for the kinds of meaning that religions provide. “Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent”, said Wittgenstein. Metaphor is an attempt to break the silence. It will always be personal and limited. But it’s all we have to assuage our hunger for meaning and purpose.
    Harpur’s intends his book to help those who’ve jettisoned religionism and literalism. It’s easy to read. But for many readers, it will be a temporary resting place on the journey. I suspect that Harpur saw it that way himself, but the tone of certainty bothers me. **½

Consciouness as the Story the Self Tells Itself

Israel Rosenfield. The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten (1992) An attempt to account for the consciousness as a construct built of memory and body-image. Rosenfield points out that damaged brains result in damaged self-perception. His careful analysis of these limited self-images persuades him that perception and memory are fundamentally the same process. “I” is a narrative the brain constantly updates. Memory makes “I” feel like a continuous persistent entity, even as memory also tells “I” that it has changed over time.
     I think Rosenfield’s insights will be rediscovered as the current attempts to understand consciousness as a brain-process at the neural level fail. I would go a step further than Rosenfield: “I” is the interface between the brain and the rest of the world. That interface is all there is to know. Reality is the trace of the external world. “I” is the trace of the internal world. “Knowing” is consciousness.
     And that’s as far as I’ve come in my quest to understand what “I” am.
     A book worth re-reading. ***½

A comment on anti-vaxxers

I posted the following comment in response to a NYT times piece about a measles outbreak in Samoa [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/world/asia/samoa-measles.html]

The Boomer and younger generations in the West have grown up with close to zero experience of infectious diseases. Not their parents (I'm one): pretty well all of us knew friends and neighbours killed by measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, smallpox, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, polio, .... And many of us lost family to infectious diseases. We learned to fear the silent killers, who took one unawares.

But we failed to pass on that fear, because we figured that vaccinations would limit or even eliminate these diseases. We took the new-found safety for granted, not realising that what's taken for granted is simply ignored.

That's what has left an opening for the resurgence of the anti-vaxxers, who have a 200-year long history of denying the science.

It's grim, but we have to teach people to be afraid. Not a happy prospect, but I think a necessary one.

2020-01-05: Recently, I came across the phrase “shifting expectation base-line”. It referred to the fact that we tend to assume that the world has always been as it is when we experience it as children. We are unaware of how much it has changed since our parents and grandparents were children. That concept applies to the perception of infectious diseases. Our children and grandchildren live in a world with almost zero infectious disease, so they assume that’s the norm.

2020-01-15: For the record, we had our flu shots as soon as they became available this season. So far, these annual vaccinations have proteced us.

Update 2020 11 14 The covid-19 pandemic has begun to change people's perceptions. For the oldest generation it's largely deja vu, I think. It's like that for me, anyhow, but I'm not as terrified as I was of polio when I was 10 years old. For the younger generations, it's stunning. The reactions range from enraged denial to apathy. Most people accept that intense anti-infection measures are now necessary, and compliance ranges from grudging to paranoid. The 3rd wave is inundating Canada, and continues to rise in the rest of the world. The yearning for a vaccine creates false hopes: the announcement that Pfizer and BioNTech have created one that's 90% effective has prompted reactions from a sigh of relief to suspicious skepticism. The logistics of distributing a vaccine to some 7 billion people no doubt are prompting nightmares. But the ethics are worse: who should get it first, and why?

 

Perception: Colours

This is a fragment of a conversation in a newsgroup some years ago. I included parts of three prior posts (in chronological order) in the thread to show the concepts I commented on.

[A]
I was once asked "How many colors are there?". A difficult question, which many people can't answer, they've confused "how many colors" with "how many WORDS for colors". 2^24 (16,777,216) is a better answer than that.

[B]
I agree with 2^24, that seems to be as much as the eye can distinguish.

[C]
Which doesn't mean that reality is so limited. Note that some animals see better than humans, which isn't relevant either.

[Me]
There's a difference between colours as measured by a spectrometer and colours as perceived by a human. Eg, there is no such colour as "brown" in the spectrum. Or "pink". Or "grey". Or etc.

The 2^24 number of colours are the combinations of colour data used to display colours on a screen. Whether there are actually that many colours displayable on a given screen is another issue: screens vary quite a bit in quality, though much less nowadays than they did in the Olden Days. And whether a human can distinguish them all is another issue. And whether they can replicate natural colours in all weathers is another issue again. As anyone who's tried to make a photo "look right" knows.

As for "see better", that's not a clear concept either.

When it comes to perception, the only thing we can objectively measure or observe is what colour (or other sensory) differences the animal can distinguish. While it's true that bees can distinguish ultraviolet wavelengths, that doesn't mean they "see better". They see well enough for their survival, and that's what counts.

Or take frogs. Judging by their behaviour, they can't see fly-sized blobs unless those blobs move. I surmise that's similar to human peripheral vision, which is much better at distinguishing moving blobs of light than still ones.

Bottom line: what's "out there" isn't what we think it is.