Scams (Lapham's Quarterly 8-02, Swindle & Fraud)

Lapham’s Quarterly 8-02: Swindle & Fraud (2015). An entertaining read, and for that reason

possibly a misleading one. It’s fun to read about how swindles and frauds work, about how greedy people fall for a con, how clever the swindlers have been. It may fool one into believing that these insights will make us immune. Which is of course not so.

Every successful swindle relies on our propensity to deceive ourselves. We want something for nothing, or as close as we can get to it. We want to be insiders, a member of that exclusive group that knows better than everybody else. We believe we are smarter than the average bear and can spot opportunities for profit that escape everyone else. We are sure that we can tell the truth from falsehood, that we know enough about the real world that we can tell when someone is blowing smoke in our ears. And we are wrong on all these counts.

I hope that reading this wonderful collection will continue to remind me that I’m as likely to fall for a scam as everyone else. It just takes someone to figure out what buttons to push.

Recommended. ****

Delusions of Perfection (Lapham's Quarterly 7-02: Revolutions)

 Lapham’s Quarterly 7-02: Revolution (2014) Like the collection on States of War, this one is tough reading. People have committed more atrocities in the pursuit of an imagined perfection than for any other purpose. Religious persecution is one example. Revolution is the other. We should perhaps be thankful there is no third.

     There are many noble phrases recorded here, but they all express the same delusionary superstition that some final, permanent solution the the problems of humankind will usher in a perfect way of life. Reading them was bad for my equanimity and blood pressure.

A necessary read. Recommended. ****

Oh, To Be Young Again! (Youth, Lapham's Quarterly 7-03)

Lapham’s Quarterly 7-03: Youth (2014). “Youth’s a stuff will not endure” sang Feste the Fool in Twelfth Night. But the response to that insight is mixed. Some mourn what they recall as a time of promise and energy and sweet, sweet love of the world and the people in it. Others are glad it’s over, and they can, at last, embark on a life planned and controlled by themselves. The evidence gathered here suggests that the latter attitude is the more common one.

Me, what I recall from my childhood and youth surprises me in two ways. One, I can’t actually imagine the Me that was six or twelve years old. The photos of me, the letters that my mother kept, the oddments that I know were once precious to me, none of them translate into Oh, now I know what it was like. And two, when I think of the dumb-ass things I did as a teenager, I’m surprised I’m still here to remember them. A fraction of a second one way or the other would have meant my death.

Nevertheless, reading other people’s thoughts and reminiscences does trigger a hint of a feeling of what childhood and youth was like. The imagination supplies what memory cannot.

Recommended ****

Medicine (Lapham's Quarterly 2-04, 2009)

 Lapham's’s Quarterly 2-04: Medicine (2009) Some random thoughts in response to this collection:

Archeologists and paleontologists have found evidence of care for the sick dating back millennia before the earliest medical texts. That care, and the signs of intentional burial, were both at one time believed to be species-specific behaviour. Observation of chimpanzees and elephants have blurred that picture, but there’s no doubt that humans have taken medicine very seriously. Every known society gives medical practitioners a special role and responsibility. The roles of physician and the priest are often combined. Cures are often understood as miracles: It’s not surprising that many of Jesus’s miracles were cures.

Through most of our history, what made us sick and what kept us well was summed up in precepts based on random observation. The history of medicine as a science is a nice example of how we humans strive to make sense of inadequate and often unreliable data. The first attempts to create a theoretical framework, the four humours, that might guide the practitioner to diagnose and treat unknown conditions we now know got it wrong. But based on the available data, it was reasonable. After all, whatever insight is claimed in one domain must match or at least not clash with whatever insights are claimed in another. The four humours of Greco-Roman medicine made sense, given what engineers and carpenters and farmers knew about how the material world worked, and what philosophers said about the four elements tied it all together..

Through most of history, medical practice dealt mostly with ameliorating symptoms. Sickness would strike without warning, and pandemics were common. I think it’s difficult for us to imagine the terror that sudden illness would provoke. The reactions to covid-19 show that nowadays we suffer not from the superstitious fear of plagues, but from the superstitious confidence that they won’t kill us.

Quacks have been with us from the beginning. Nowadays, many of them wear the mantel of wellness. I think quackery succeeds because science doesn’t provide the certainty people want from theories of Life, the Universe and Everything (TLUEs). The life sciences are especially prone to revise theories and replace them with more complicated ones. Quacks promise simplicity and certainty wrapped in pseudo-scientific jargon designed to create the illusion that here, at last, we have the Truth. “Natural” figures prominently in their claims. I guess most people just don’t know that the most lethal substances known are all natural. Mother Nature wins again. She always does.

Another wonderfully diverse collection. **** 

States of War (Lapham's Quarterly 01-1, 2008)

Lapham’s Quarterly 01-1. States of War. (2008) (A re-read) The first issue of LQ, and an excellent collection of texts and images about war. But depressing.

     Part 1, “Calls to Arms”, shows that war has almost always been justified as a struggle against evil personified in the enemy, who worship different gods, and are therefore obviously the servants of whatever Satan the warmonger imagines. Looting and other entertainments may be offered as enticements, but the warmongers rarely acknowledge them as the prime goals of invading one’s neighbours.
     Part 2, “Rules of Engagement”, deals with lessons in strategy and tactics, based on experience. There’s advice about how to prepare for war, and advice about how to wage it. The recognition that ultimately all armed conflict tends towards total war comes early in history.
     Part 3, “Field Reports”, shows us the brutalities of war, both on the battlefield and off it. From the beginning, non-combatants have suffered as much as or more than the fighters. Prisoners were taken only if they had some value, such as possible ransoms for the self-styled nobles who led the slaughter, and sometimes as hostage status for other ranks, but usually as slaves, if they weren’t too badly damaged. Slavery was the usual fate of any surviving defeated civilians.
     The last section, “Postmortems”, offers some hope, if only in the reactions of the surviving conscripts who wanted nothing more to do with war. But as often, the survivors saw the peace as  merely a pause on the fighting, good for regrouping and preparation for the next engagement with the enemy.

     “Further Remarks” presents four essays about wars past, present, and probable future. They didn’t do much to improve my mood.
     Is war inevitable? Many people think it’s species-specific behaviour, part of our territoriality, which is also expressed in our tribalism. In evolutionary terms, war has weeded out the more pacific strains of our species, leaving the ones that are willing to use violence in control. In the short term, the quarter–million years of our species’s existence, that’s made for survival. But our technical ingenuity, and our inability to act collectively except when threatened by another collective, plus our unwillingness (or inability, you choose) to give up immediate reward for long-term survival, these traits taken together suggest that evolution has tossed up a species that is likely to destroy the ecosystem that sustains it. We may turn out to be one of Mother Nature’s failed experiments.
     Depressing. But recommended. ****

Death (Lapham's Quarterly 06-4, 2013)

  Lapham’s Quarterly 06-4: Death (2013) The many ways people have died and been done to death, musings about death, religious warnings and promises about life after death, the decay of the body and the waning of memories, the consolations and pain of grief.... Death is a large subject.
     Much of what we do is an attempt to either thwart death or to ignore it. A few minutes ago, I read an article reporting that cancer deaths in Canada are down overall while some cancers are increasing. More screening is one reason. The tone of the report suggests that somehow the defeat of cancer will prevent death. But of course it won’t. The odds of dying from cancer are about 1 in 7 or 14%, but the odds of dying from any one of the myriad causes are 1 in 1, or 100%.
     Meanwhile, we plan our lives as if they will continue at least until the next scheduled event. Life must go on.
     An excellent collection, as usual. ***

Fake News (Lapham's Quarterly special issue, 2018)

Lapham’s Quarterly: A History of Fake News (2018) As far back as we have writing, there’s been fake news. I suspect there was fake news well before any was recorded in writing. There’s also been pushback. Much of ancient fake news was merely exaggeration of the sponsor’s importance. Near eastern relics show that as often as not the new regime defaced their predecessor’s fake news and replaced it with their own.  Some of has this leaked into sacred texts: Ancient Israel was not as significant politically or economically as the Old Testament suggests.
     Quite early on, fake news has been both deliberate, and a mere side effect of more important objectives, such as attracting readers and advertisers in order to increase cash flow. The Hearst chain was notorious for starting the Spanish-American War for just this purpose. Electronic media have merely magnified these tendencies, as they have magnified all communications and accelerated their effects. This collection gives us mostly insider reports on how fake news was generated, with occasional confessions of unease or shame. It’s both entertaining and appalling. Like the news itself. ****

Drunk or High? (Lapham's Quarterly 06-1, Intoxication)

 LQ 06-1: Intoxication (2013) Not only about alcohol and drugs (though they figure prominently) but also about poisons. For all of our known history, we humans have taken (usually mild) poisons in small doses because they messed up our brains, thus creating an “altered state of consciousness.”  We aren’t the only animals that seek this experience: not only mammals but insects and birds have been observed slurping fermented fruit.
     A wide-ranging selection of first-person reports on the joys of getting drunk or high, praises of the grape and other intoxicants, scoldings for over-indulgence, severe frowning on any kind of intoxicant, etc. But the one question that I would like to see some answer to is hardly touched on: Why do we do it? The evidence suggests that we mostly seek the pleasure drugs provide, and some seek what they believe are transcendental visions of ultimate reality. The hangover or withdrawal are accepted as a (relatively) small price to pay for these treasures.
     Intoxication I think touches on the question of consciousness. The drugs’ effects show that our experience of reality is constructed by the brain. Deflect the brain from normal functioning, and that experience changes. Drugs and alcohol aren’t the only means of doing this, but they are the most reliable. That’s why we seek them out. That’s also why moralists of all stripes condemn them: the easy alteration of the brain’s function shows that the sense of self, the “I”, is a construction of the brain. That implies no independent Self or Soul to transcend this mortal life. It also makes nonsense of the belief that the Self can be somehow “uploaded” into an abiological, possibly electronic, but potentially immortal body (as envisioned by Ray Kurzweil among others).
     The Matrix is real: it resides in three pounds of jelly encased in a bony shell that protects it, mostly. We can mess with the program, and we like doing that. That’s what this collection demonstrates. I’ve been drunk twice in my life, and don’t want to repeat the experience. It’s enough to get a mild buzz, which I can also get without ingesting chemicals. Knowing that my experience of the world around me is not an exact replica is strangely comforting.
     Recommended. ****

Magic Shows (Lapham's Quartely 05-3 2012)

 LQ 05-3: Magic Shows (2012) Magicians take advantage of the way the brain constructs a simulation of reality. The brain does a good enough job that most of us survive long enough to succeed at whatever ambitions we may have. But the simulation is flawed in fundamental ways, and the magicians know how to exploit those errors to make us believe we see what doesn’t happen while we miss what actually happens.
     There have always been people who believe that magic is real, that the illusions crafted by the magicians aren’t illusions at all. Some scallywags have exploited this desire to believe in mastery of supernatural powers, which has always damaged people’s wallets, and too often their health as well.
     Of course, “magic” has many senses. The common core means something like “actually or apparently breaking the laws that govern reality as we know it.” There’s always the whiff of the supernatural about magic. At one extreme, people may believe that evil entities use magic to mislead or harm. At the other extreme, all apparently inexplicable phenomena are dismissed as fraud or delusion. Superstition and cynicism are close cousins.
     Me, I enjoy a good magic show. I also have more or less serious doubts about the claims for sightings of the Loch Ness monster, or abductions by aliens arriving on Earth in flying saucers. As for spoon bending, while I don’t know how to do this trick, other people do, and psychic energy isn’t part of it.
     Magic is designed to elicit wonder, which makes it close cousin to science and art. It requires skills useful in both. As entertainment, it satisfies. As a reminder that the universe is largely inexplicable, it may rekindle wonder and gratitude at the gift of life, and a brain able to both explain the mystery at the heart of reality, and know where that explanation shades into confabulation.
     Recommended. ****

Work: Love it or hate it, you need it. (Lapham's Quarterly 04-2, Spring 2011)

 LQ 04-2: Lines of Work. (2011) “Work fascinates me. I could watch it for hours.” That’s one of the quotes scattered through this collection. It expresses one end of the range of attitudes to work, adumbrated in the curse laid on Adam after the Fall: In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread. At the other end we find St Benedict’s Ora et Labora, “Work and pray”, often rendered as Laborare est orare, “To work is to pray.”
     We humans need purpose and structure in our lives, and work provides that. The lucky ones have work that satisfies. Most have work that earns enough to survive, while providing much of the social life without which we cannot thrive. The unlucky ones toil at soul-crushing labour, which as often as not is neither valued nor rewarded as the necessary effort that enables our survival and keeps the rest of us in relative comfort.
     William Morris (not included, an instructive omission, I think) was one of many starry-eyed reformers who recognised the inhumane aspects of industrialised work, and wanted a return to what he believed was the golden age of craft. He thought of craft as work that not only earned a living but engaged the worker’s skill and imagination. Morris failed to see that even craft relies on the toil of labourers that relieves the crafter of the necessity of spending time in the work that sustains their life.
     There are many descriptions of actual work in this collection, most by people who found a way out of the labour that they describe. One is by Orwell. His account of how the workers at the grand hotels of Paris discharged their duties would have convinced me never to stay at anything above a one or two star establishment. Maybe things have changed since the 1930s. I would have included an excerpt from Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
     The other pieces describe or discuss the context of work, or of the relations that working with others makes possible. Work makes up the single largest part of our lives. Irksome or satisfying, necessary or optional, we can’t escape it. It’s the necessity that irks. When we choose how to occupy ourselves, that freedom erases the negatives.
     Most of my jobs have been more or less interesting, at least until I mastered the requisite skills. But usually, my co-workers were more important than the work. I worked most of my life as a teacher, work that was sometimes frustrating enough that I wondered whether I could continue. I did, and now I miss the classroom and the staff room.
     As always, recommended. ****

Celebrities: A culural constant (LQ 04-1)

LQ 04-1: Celebrity (2011) There are times when our worship of celebrities seems like a

peculiarly 21st century aberration. This collection may cause a revision of that opinion, and perhaps a more sanguine attitude. It had that effect on me, and prompted a number of reflections. Herewith a small sampling.
     True, there are now probably more people famous for being famous than ever before, but such people have always existed, and humans have always paid them more attention than they merited. True, much celebrity is founded on genuine achievement, but even more genuine achievement has gone uncelebrated. Our century may be unusual only in the intensity of celebrity worship. But every historical era is an outlier in some aspect of human possibility; that’s how and why we mark them. Cultural expression varies over time and place, but the range of cultural options is remarkably small. One of them is celebrity, labelled fame in earlier times.
     The desire for fame was often considered a virtuous ambition, especially by the Greeks and Romans, for it prompted striving for excellence. The desire for notoriety has been seen as the corresponding vice. While the great religions have praised the one and condemned the other, they have also expressed some ambivalence. For glorying in fame, even that earned by virtue or excellence, is too close to pride, especially its pathetic variant, vanity.
     Celebrity belongs to the suite of social dimensions labelled “reputation.” Our public persona is our reputation. We know ourselves in the tension and contrast between that public persona and our self-perception. That makes reputation important: We want outer and inner self to be as closely aligned as possible. It may be that our focus on celebrity is in part an attempt to learn how to create a reputation that meets our expectations or fantasies about ourselves.
     There’s a lot to chew on in this collection. One is P T Barnum’s discussion of how to make celebrity pay: Manufacture it. Reading his comments, one sees that marketing is the commodification of celebrity, which in turn explains phenomena such as the Kardashians. That’s progress of a sort, perhaps.
    Recommended. ****

Communicate! (Laphma's Quarterly 05-2, Means of Communication)

     LQ 05-2 Means of Communication (2012) A nice compilation of what people have

thought, understood, or thought they understood, about human communication. It’s a mixed bag. To me, this compilation is marked more by what it leaves out than what it includes. Its focus is on what is communicated rather than how.
     There is inevitably an over-dependence on writing. Writing is a technology, and like any technology, it changes both perception and expression. What’s interesting to me is how writing changes how people construct their language. Writing fosters a preference not only for speaking in complete sentences, but also for argumentative and expository speech – such as I’m engaging in now. Narrative becomes a mode retained mostly for entertainment and art.
     The collection has no selections by Marshall McLuhan and George Steiner (except in memic quotes inserted at random in the text). It is I think somewhat less than complete.
     OK, you can see where my biases lie. I’ve come to realise that we communicate both consciously and unconsciously via more means than language. “Body language” (a term that betrays a bias) is as powerful as spoken language, and sometimes more so. Observation shows that gesture is an unavoidable concomitant of speech. Cultures differ in how much gesturing they accept and expect, but all human beings gesture when they speak, and not only with their hands. Some gestures are learned, hence of arbitrary significance, which causes problems when people from different cultures use gestures deliberately as an alternative to speech.
     The bias towards literacy has also caused a scant selection of pieces that attempt to understand how media have changed what we communicate. Print was the first mass medium, expanding the audience of any given book ten- and a hundredfold compared to manuscripts, but also splintering that audience into mutually uncomprehending groups. It also created a sharp division between literal and symbolic understanding of sacred texts, a division hardly ever recognised in orality. The problem of idolatry differs for people who have no written record of their ancestor’s thoughts about their gods, and so have no need to figure out exactly what they meant. A hymn is a performance, not a text to be analysed.
     Newspapers, cheap enough to throw away after reading, completed the transition from selective to mass media. Radio enabled large-scale exploitation of the audience. TV did the same, while shifting from the explicit politics of the radio personality to the implicit politics of the huckster. Now the internet has created both the largest audience for remote communication ever, but has also shattered that audience into more and smaller enclaves than any other. Control has shifted from the creator and broadcaster to the consumer: we choose the terms of engagement on the web. Every post has a potential audience of billions, but almost none reach more than a few hundred, with a select few reaching more, often amplified by the legacy media. A moderately successful influencer commands the attention of several thousand followers, the size of a small town. Some have followers in the hundreds of thousands, a handful in the millions. There are now many famous people that almost no one has heard of.
     I’d have liked to read seem comments on fashion. Clothes communicate everything from social status to mood, therefore clothing is regulated both by custom and law, and by personal preferences within what limits custom and law prescribe. Fashion now goes well beyond clothes. When goods become cheap enough to discard, they become expressions of passing fancies and tastes.
     Overall, the collection tells us more about what people thought worth communicating than how they did it. But within these limits, it is as good as any Lapham and his team have produced. I enjoyed reading it, especially the ancient, pre-electronic excerpts. ****

Education Usually Fails: Lapham's Quarterly 14-4.

 Lapham’s Quarterly 14-4: Education (2022) Every society ever known has some method of passing on its culture, its values, customs, knowledge etc to the next generation. All societies also mark the transition from childhood to adulthood, and well as other changes in status. However, the new generation doesn’t grow up in the same environment as their parents, and so the transfer of culture is always incomplete and variable. Stories and instructions will not have the same meaning and force for the children as they had for the parents. I take it as a given that raising one’s children is one of the main drivers of cultural change. For no matter how hard we try, something is always lost in translation.

     This collection focuses more on the process, and mostly on formalised institutional education, which began with literacy in Sumer. Literacy’s great advantage is that it enables people to record and reflect on their experience. That’s also its great disadvantage. People who feel it’s important to write about education, especially if it’s their own, usually have an axe to grind. In fact, literature generally is one long wail of complaints. Even fantasy, which implicitly complains that real life lacks its intensity. Much of the evidence in this collection explicitly or implicitly complains that education, especially formal education or schooling, not only fails to achieve its ostensible goals but is more or less actively hostile to them. 

     Depressing. 

     For the record, I often felt frustrated by my work as a teacher. When I reflect on my career, I have only one serious regret, that I didn’t agitate for the abolition of the grading system. We group students by age range, so that in a typical class there is about a one year range in chronological age, and as often as not more than that in developmental age. To expect them all to be capable of arriving at the same place after a course of study is a kind of delusion. That’s bad enough, but focusing on a good grade as the purpose of learning doesn’t encourage students to actually learn anything. What they actually learn is how to ace the test, not how to understand material they have studied. Worse, grades encourage invidious comparisons. 

     The above paragraph is not too far off the most common tone of the selections in this compilation. So I’ll try to strike a positive note: Students do want to have a pleasant experience of school, and any teacher who tries to provide it will be rewarded by seeing their charges grow and develop as persons, and achieve insights and accomplishments that delight them.

     The student-teacher nexus is one of the most intense personal relationships, which no doubt explains that everyone has strong feelings about their schooling. We use the verbs “teach” and “learn” as if they were transitive verbs denoting independent processes. As if teaching a student was like painting a wall. As if learning a subject was like eating a meal. In fact, teaching and learning denote the same reality. Neither can occur without the other. It’s a reciprocal process: the teacher and student both teach and both learn. Each changes the other. I’m grateful to the many students who taught me what I needed to learn.

     Another recommended compilation. ****

Wierd News: Fortean Times

 

Fortean Times (1990s) Back in the days when drugstores still had magazine racks, the regional distributor placed Fortean Times on ours. I bought every copy I found, accumulating about two dozen issues. The magazine, published in England (where else?), printed a mix of strange news, commentary ranging from the simplistically credulous to the shrewdly analytical, and reviews of books and other media dealing with UFOs, lake monsters, ghosts, and other such phenomena that people wish were facts but almost never are. The editors took a determinedly anti-debunking stand, which led them to accept eyewitness reports as evidence. A more sceptical stance would have served them better, but  I suspect that then the circulation among the credulous would have suffered.
     We see what we expect to see, which includes not seeing what we don’t expect to see. We identify objects based on past experience and current expectations, which means that the unexpected and unfamiliar are usually misidentified. Even trained observers suffer from this failing, and perhaps more so, because they are, after all, trained to identify certain objects. The misidentification becomes seriously problematic when we mistake people’s intentions and attitudes because we are unfamiliar with their idiosyncrasies, or psychological differences, or culturally shaped behaviours.
     The attached cover image of issue 100 accurately represents the style, tone and stance of the magazine in its artwork, typefaces, and headlines. It tried to emulate Charles Fort’s attitude to science, which was generally dismissive, on the grounds that scientists too often refused to acknowledge the existence of phenomena they couldn’t classify, and that therefore their explanations were generally bunkum.
     Yet most of Fort’s objections were the result of his ignorance or misunderstanding of basic science. If he didn’t understand some scientific explanation, it must be nonsense. Unfortunately, this attitude is shared by too many of the contributors to this magazine. Their naive acceptance of eye-witness accounts and memory as reliable data is especially sad. A more accurate knowledge of how our perceptions and memories fail to report reality accurately would have made many of their articles better. They would also have lacked anything resembling solutions to the puzzles, and it was those solutions that the magazine often purported to offer. The fact is that most of the evidence that isn’t fraud is evidence only of someone’s experience of something they did not or could not understand. The proper response in most of these cases is, “There’s not enough factual detail, so we will never know.”
     Still, an entertaining read every time. It’s still available. I visited their website, and on the blog found the same mix of fascination with weirdness and credulous acceptance of the standard explanations. To subscribers it promises a menu of “the most fantastic phenomena on earth”. No hint that many of these phenomena exist only in the minds and imaginations of the witnesses who didn’t (and often couldn’t) know what they were looking at. But there is the occasional more common sense attitude to “reports” of what “seems to have happened”, which I guess is an improvement. **

Building an HO scale Locomotive from Wood

Building an HO scale Locomotive from Wood and Card

(Model Railroader, May 1972)

Back in the days before CAD/CAM and cheap injection molding, model locomotives of specific prototypes were rare. The makers in Japan and Korea supplied limited numbers made with brass. The first examples in the late 1940s and early 1950s were cheap, but by 1972 quality had improved and prices had risen to two to four weeks average pay. Most modellers made do with repainted cheaper mass-market models that were “close enough”. These cost a couple of days pay. Adding details representing a particular railway’s house style helped the illusion. But if you wanted something as close as possible to your favourite road’s engines, you had to scratchbuild.

Culling masses of obsolete paper recently, I came across an article by A. E. Sima Jr (aka Bud Sima). He described how his poor soldering skills prompted him to try his hand using wood and card for building a locomotive. He wanted a model of the Maryland & Pennsylvania’s heavy Consolidation (2-8-0) steam engine. He bought a Varney 2-8-0 to adapt, but when he took it apart in preparation for repainting, the boiler casting encountered the basement floor at a high speed and broke. Bud was left with a mechanism. He decided to make a locomotive body to fit.

The article describes how he did it. He drilled out a suitable piece of wood dowel (to make space for the weight), and cut out a space at one end so it would fit over the motor. He cut cab sides from sheetwood, but did use sheet brass for the cab roof. He made some details with wood, card, wire, and sheet brass, and bought others. In those days, several manufacturers offered dozens of details such as bells, smokestacks, feedwater heaters, steps, brake cylinders, and so on. The tender body was cut from a block of wood and wrapped in card. A dress snap made the electrical connection between tender and locomotive. So “for a surprisingly small outlay of cash”, Bud got what he wanted. I’m sure he inspired others to try their hand at scratchbuilding too. Model Railroader helpfully reprinted its plans and photos of the Ma & Pa locomotive.

Bud writes in a friendly conversational style. The photos and diagrams are adequate for the purpose. Nowadays, we would see a bulleted step by step description, with more photos. Anyone who’s put together a handful of kits would have little trouble emulating Bud’s project. The modern builder would use plastic tube and sheet material instead of wood. There are far fewer details parts available, so fabricating them might be a major challenge. Even so, Bud’s article could be just the inspiration needed. It’s available online for any subscriber to Model Railroader’s online services.

I enjoyed re-reading Bud’s story. ***

Thee More by Lapham: Migration, Home, and Discovery

  Lapham’s Quarterly 14-3: Migration (April-May 2022). A very timely collection, now that migrations will become the new normal. Not that they’re really new: One could label our species homo peregrinus, since wandering has been hominid behaviour as far back as archeology and paleontology can tell. For us modern hominids it’s species-specific behaviour. But so is territoriality, hence the conflicts caused when we wander into land already claimed by other humans. That’s why writing about it is very ancient.
     Migration may be freely chosen or forced. Either way, it causes home-sickness. We mourn the place we came from. But we can’t go home again, because the time we’ve spent elsewhere ensures that we and home have changed. Return is usually impossible for the exile. The excerpts from migrants’ and exiles’ writings range from melancholic nostalgia to optimistic hope for a better or at least tolerable future. The urge to explore prompts much individual and some group migration. People who do this write high-spirited and often self-aggrandising accounts.
     The accounts of flight from war, natural disaster, and political oppression are harrowing. The German word for those who flee their homelands is Flüchtling, “flightling”, which could be a good Anglo-Saxon word. Instead we use the French “refugee”. So German speakers are reminded that such migrants flee from peril, while English speakers think of them as seeking safety. Language has subtle effects.
     Recommended. Subscriptions to Lapham’s Quarterly are available on their website. ****

Lapham’s Quarterly 10-1: Home (2017) The human homing instinct is as strong as the urge to wander. In the end, we wander until we come home. Home may be what we left or what we find. It signifies safety and comfort. “Home is where they have to take you in,” Robert Frost wrote. Home is where we have family and the extended family we call our tribe. “A house is not a home,” says anonymous, that composer of random wisdom.  “Home is where the heart is,” anonymous says again.
     Yes, home is defined by our feelings. It’s not a place, but a deep attachment to a place. Happy are they who can carry their homes with them, for they will never be strangers in a strange land. But most of us leave home one way or another, and thus home is inextricably tied to wandering. Life is a journey, we say. Away from home and back again.
     Another fine anthology. ****

 Lapham’s Quarterly 10-2: Discovery (2017) Not as focussed as the other collections, because “discovery” is a rather nebulous concept. Or rather, a very wide-ranging one. It covers everything from what explorers discover to what each of us finds out about oneself. Besides, what’s a discovery for some is ancient knowledge for others. For the child, every day brings new discoveries. For the elder, every day confirms what’s been discovered long ago.
     Nevertheless, some interesting bits about what drives the search, and of the difficulties and delights of finding things out, especially the unexpected. I think that as long as we can experience the curiosity of the child, life will be a pleasure, despite the annoying pains and creaky joints of old age. ****

Three more by Lapham: Philanthropy, Spies, and Disaster.

Lapham’s Quarterly VIII-3: Philanthropy (2015) There are two main themes: you should give alms or other assistance to those who need it; and you should give alms or other assistance to those who deserve it. This collection offers argument to support both principles, but on the whole, those who wish to limit their philanthropy to the deserving tend to concoct self-serving rationalisations to avoid giving anything. There are also accounts showing us what it’s like to be at the giving or receiving end, which range from the amusing to the harrowing.
     Anthropologically speaking, humans have survived and thrived best when they collaborated, and have kept accounts more in terms of ability than performance. The golden rule applies as much to sharing one’s wealth as to any other aspect of our lives. ****

 Lapham’s Quarterly IX-1: Spies (2016) Spying is as old as human conflict. “Intel” has determined the outcome of battles and wars. But success in spycraft appears to be random. Too many things can change between acquisition and delivery, quite apart from the inevitable defects of error, lack of context, and limited scope. Spies are traitors, hence we despise them even as we use thme. And reliance on spycraft as a tool of government fosters paranoia, which renders rational calculation difficult. For paranoia suffers from the prime weakness of all logic-based attitudes: logic is no better than the premises on which we use it. It’s garbage in, garbage out.

     These, and other like ruminations, were prompted by this collection, which has the rather sad effect of melancholy. For if we cannot trust each other, we cannot live together. ****

Lapham’s Quarterly IX-2: Disaster (2016) Whether caused by human error or malice, or by natural accidents, disasters shift our common enterprises into new directions, and sometimes completely change them. Soon after their effects have subsided to a pre-catastrophic level, we forget the perils that threatened our existence. Our preparations for the next disaster diminish as the memories of the last one fade. Eventually, we resent the cost of maintaining the defenses, and the next disaster’s destruction is, once again, greater than it could have been. – That’s the general thesis that emerges from these accounts of the sometimes unspeakable horrors we visit on each other or that are visited upon us.

     This collection was assembled four years before the covid pandemic upset all our plans. The records of past disasters show that our responses to covid-19 are simply the human responses to any disasters. Pity for the victims, help offered, sometimes heroic sacrifice, as well as denial, suspicion of conspiracies, blaming of the outsiders, rage at the authorities who must do the unwelcome work of constraining our choices, we find all these in the record. When it comes to disasters, only the details differ. Our behaviour repeats. Which is, I suppose, one reason that we wisely nod our heads and mumble cliches about not learning from experience. ****

Food and Human Behaviour

 

  Lapham’s Quarterly IV-3: Food (2011) All human societies have devised rules, customs, conventions, and moral judgements about food. There some constants: One must compliment the host on their generosity in sharing food, and their skill in its preparation. One must demonstrate that one knows the best table manners. One must show appropriate restraint in eating. One is permitted or required to display good taste in the table settings. One must be on one’s best behaviour either as host or as guest.
    Just how these requirements defined and met in different times and places makes for entertaining and instructive reading. There also some recipes. Here and there, the selections hint at what underlies our species-specific elaboration of food-related behaviours: we’re an omnivorous social species, who would fight over our food without these restraints on our behaviour. ****

The Sea

  Lapham’s Quarterly VI-3: The Sea (2013) Lapham’s family operated a shipping company in California. One of his earliest memories is of watching one of the family-owned ships breaking up on the rocky California coast. Most of the people in it survived, but Lapham was duly impressed by what he saw. His introductory essay-cum-memoir to this collection is alone worth the price of the magazine. The rest reminds us that we humans have at best merely survived on the seas, which we know we have never subdued as we believe we have subdued the land.
     The collection tells a great deal of first hand experience. Recommended for any landlubber who wants to know why they don’t want to sail the seas, and for any seafarer who wants to relive the exhilaration and terrors of sailing. ****

Money: its invention and history

 

 Lapham’s Quarterly I-2: About Money (2008) Compiled just before the financial collapse of 2008, this collection nevertheless covers all the main points, both as theoretical discussion and as evidence for the theories. Herewith a few stray thoughts prompted by this collection.
     Money is said to be a means of exchange, a measure of value, a standard of deferred payment, and a store of value. Historically, the means of exchange came first, approximately 6000 years ago in Mesopotamia. But a means of exchange is possible only if there is also an agreed measure of value, so those two aspects of money are fundamentally the same. The transition of material specie to abstract money happened via letters of credit and bank notes. Both of these were written promises to pay specie “on presentation” of the letter or note.
     In short, the value of money is what we (more or less unanimously) agree it is. That value is basically what we can buy with it. Unfortunately, money has also been treated as a commodity. In fact, a web search on “money” tosses up several sites that state that money is a commodity.
     The “labour theory of value” claims that money  measures the amount of labour needed to provide some good or service. The problem with that notion is that the price of some types of labour may be well below their value as measured in comparison with other types of labour. What’s more, pretty well everybody believes they are underpaid compared to what many, perhaps most, other people are paid for their labour.
     None of the common definitions of money get to the heart of the matter: Money is a system of universally accepted IOUs. A $10 bill shows that you provided $10 worth of goods or services, and hence are owed $10 worth of goods and services in exchange.
     There is fundamental confusion around the notions of value, cost, and price, terms which are often used interchangeably, and (worse) any one of which is often used to express different meanings in the same discussion. If economists could agree on fixed definitions of these terms, economics might actually become the science it aspires to be. As it is, much economic theory consists of ad hoc formulas used to “prove” that some political notion or other is an objective truth. Thus the claim that prices rise and fall according to “market forces”, while in fact some people ask for more money, and other people agree or refuse to pay more. The Law of Supply and Demand is supposed to explain how this works, but in fact the rise and fall in prices has to do with the psychology of the buyer and seller, which includes many more factors than the awareness of scarcity and abundance. It also has to do with market dominance, a polite phrase for monopoly. It is a commonly overlooked irony of “free market competition” that its aim is to eliminate competitors.
     My working definitions are:
Cost: the sum of materials, energy, and human labour required to produce some good or provide some service.
Price: The amount of money the vendor is willing to sell for.
Value: The amount of money the buyer is willing to pay.
     Cost is objective: it can be measured. Price and value are subjective: they exist only in the minds of seller and buyer. The so-called law of supply and demand begins there.
     One of the first of Lapham’s collections, but already excellent. ****