The Illusion of Progress

That's the title of an article in a recent New Scientist. Thesis: that we have lost more technologies than we currently have. Good point, and illustrated in a variety of ways. For example, the ballpoint pen has nearly eliminated the fountain pen. But what if a crash of some kind eliminated the factories that make pens? We know, in a fuzzy historical-fiction kind of way, that goose quills and other feathers were used for writing. I don't think we'd have much trouble reinventing that technology. But what about the ink? Who knows how to use oak galls to make ink? Or soot and, well, what exactly?. Could one use other dark, brownish liquids, such as coffee? I've occasionally tried tinting paper with tea or coffee, and believe me, they don't work every well.

The rule is: new technologies displace old ones. Our cumulative knowledge doesn't include obsolete technologies. At any rate, most of us don't. Specialists in certain histories may have the book knowledge, but very, very few have any kind of hands-on skills. Curiously, archaeologists are the most likely to have such skills. They've learned them in order to understand the tools they find, and sort them from bits of naturally fractured rock that aren't tools.

Turn on the Heat (Book review)

A. A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner) Turn on the Heat Another Bertha Cool - Donald Lam tale. In mood a noirish version of the Thin Man stories plus a mild satire on the Nero Wolfe-Archie Goodwin genre. Pure pulp fiction. Lam tells the story, and does most of the legwork. Unlike Wolfe, agency head Bertha Cool doesn’t solve the case. As in the Wolfe novels, the plot is incredibly convoluted; but Fair plays fair with the clues, if you want to keep score. Unlike the Wolfe novels, the solution hides a good deal of the truth from the police. A pleasant enough entertainment, if you don’t read too critically. One oddity: the cover shows an electric typewriter, but the story is set ca. 1940, when it was written. **

There's No History Here (Poem)

There’s No History Here

This country has no history,
they say.

Then what’s that breathing there?

There are no stories told
more than a generation old.

Musty papers in old libraries,
read by odd fellows who believe they can rebuild the past.
Frail quilts stored on high dusty shelves,
brought out into bright air
and fingered by old women,
as they tell who pieced the patchwork,
ran the needle through the batt,
made arcs and whorls that held
the coverlet together; these tales made up
of memories, misremembered names
and half remembered facts
don’t make a history.

Nor do those fragments
of a myth the elders tell.

Oral history’s not history,
they say.
Each teller adds his notions
of what was truly done.
Each teller makes a tale
of what she knows must,
not might, have been.

And if these tales are true enough
(for truth in history’s a guess,
a fiction built on facts),
if then these tales are true as any history may be,
that doesn’t signify –
a generation or two back’s as far as memory
and memory of memories reach.

The land seems empty,
the sound of the truck
working up the hill remote and muted
by the space enfolding it.
The ghosts of those who came before us
don’t speak in the wind,
their language doesn’t
echo in the water filled canyons,
their songs have long since faded
into silent distances.

And yet –
        and yet.

Something moves behind me,
touches my neck,
something like a word,
half heard,
catches my ears.

I stop and listen.

The heat seems loud as a shout,
the pines’ sweetness hangs
in the sun-stilled air –

There is history here.

There was history here.

What’s left of it –
a few flakes struck from stone
the rusty stain of blood
bleached
by indifferent rain and sun.

Copyright 2012 W Kirchmeir

The Ferryman Will Be There (Book review)

Rosemary Aubert The Ferryman Will Be There (2001) “An Ellis Portal Mystery”. This is the third in the series. Portal was a judge, but alcohol and adultery led to homelessness. For a while, he lived in a cave in the Don Valley. He has succeeded in climbing out of the valley, literally and figuratively.
    Now Det. Sgt. Matt West  enlists his help in finding a girl whose father was murdered while stepping out of a limousine on his way to a film festival bash. The girl has gone back onto the streets. Portal’s curiosity and orneriness entangle him in the murder investigation, too. His  journey takes him through derelict buildings, fancy offices, and of course the streets and valleys of Toronto. Like any hero of a quest, he has companions on the way, but here they travel mostly in the background; half the time Portal doesn’t even know they’re there. The monsters he must defeat are drug dealers, traffickers in women, and his own memories. Several inconclusive plot-lines from the earlier books move a few steps towards resolution.
     The mystery, such as it is, resolves plausibly enough, but Aubert’s focus is on street life, the homeless, and Portal’s haphazard approach to redemption. Though the book isn’t a page-turner, it sticks with you. I want to know the details of the back story, told in the first two books, so I’ll look out for them. Above average entertainment. I can see it as a moody, bleak TV series, set in the ramshackle and grungy buildings and streets where the homeless scrabble for a living, contrasting with elegant, expensive spaces in which the mysteries of finance are performed. **-½

King Street at night

We were walking back to the hotel after a pretty good meal of Indian food at the Aroma (recommended) when I took this photo. I like Toronto at night, the mix of coloured lights, the reflections in the windows, the people on the sidewalks, the traffic, and of course the streetcars. Anything that runs on rails is worth watching. I know the photo is blurred, but I like the effect anyhow.

Tough Politicians (2)

Mr Harper’s government has taken on the fishes and the water birds and the frogs. His omnibus budget bill includes a change to the Navigable Waters Act. This change removes a large number of navigable waters from federal protection. Oddly enough, a large batch of these no longer protected waters are in Northern Ontario, in NDP ridings, while all the ones in the Parry Sound - Muskoka area continue to be protected. That’s the riding of Mr Clement, the Minister for the Federal Economic Development Initiative for Northern Ontario and President of the Treasury Board.

Removing navigable waters from the protection of the Act will make it easier and cheaper for resource extraction companies to acquire permits for mining, lumbering, quarrying, and so on. It will also make it cheaper and easier for paper mills and ore refining enterprises to acquire permits for dumping wastes into rivers and lakes. No doubt they will share thier increased profits with the communities affected by poisoned waters.

I feel sorry for Mr Harper and his friends in cabinet. It must have been very difficult for them to agree to these changes. It’s not easy to contemplate poisoning fish and water birds and frogs. It’s not easy to contemplate the effect of poisoned water on humans. But these are tough times, and politicians must be tough. It's good to know Mr Harper is up to the challenge.

Sandy (2)

Looking at the photos and videos of the destruction done by Sandy, it’s clear that it will take months to fix the physical damage, and years to fix the psychological damage. The stories of rescues and help are moving; the expressions of hope for the future in the face of such massive disaster are touching. The sadness I feel when reading of the deaths, so impersonally random, is hard to express.

Sandy, losses, and GDP

From a story in the New York Times, 31 October 2012:
“Even as businesses struggled on Monday to gauge and contain the damage from Hurricane Sandy’s slow move up the East Coast, economists played down the likely long-term effects. The recovery after the storm, they said, could actually pump up growth temporarily in a few sectors, like construction and retail sales, when cleanup begins in earnest in a few days.”

The last sentence of the story:
“It’s a problematic aspect of how we account for economic output,” said Mr. Carroll. “Of course, it’s terrible when something is destroyed. That doesn’t show up in the calculation of gross domestic product. However, the rebuilt house does.”

The above illustrates the craziness of economic “theory” these days. There’s no reason that the loss of the house should not be included in the GDP calculation: just include the cost of rebuilding it as a debit. This would show the loss of the house as net decrease in GDP, which it surely is. That is if we want to think of GDP as a measure of wealth-creation, as most people seem to do.

In fact, as shown by the above comments, GDP is the aggregate value of money transactions. It tells us nothing about the net increase in wealth. The $20 billion or more in storm damage will be shown as a $20 billion increase in GDP, but I don’t think wealth will increase by 20 billion dollars. Most people I think would see those losses as exactly what they are: a reduction wealth. We can reasonably expect to replace those losses. If we are cunning, politically savvy, and lucky, we may be able to replace those losses with more wealth at the same or even less cost: technology does offer that possibility.

Some transactions obviously increase wealth, such as building a house or educating a child. Others just as obviously decrease wealth, such as tearing down a block of derelict buildings, or shutting down a research project. If the buildings are replaced, there may be a net increase in wealth, but that doesn’t always happen. Some transactions are iffy: does a loan to a business build wealth, or not? Depends on how well the business does, I suppose. Some do both: a fighter plane is a waste of resources, thus a reduction in wealth; but the people who build it spend their wages on wealth that other people produce. There may or may not be a net increase in wealth.
           
In short, many transactions that the GDP calculation shows as increasing the GDP ought to show as debits. In general, it’s obvious what the debits are. When it’s not obvious, more careful analysis is needed, beginning with a clear definition of wealth. Too many people think of money as wealth. It’s not. What you get in exchange for money is wealth. But not everything you can buy is wealth: cigarettes destroy your health, so they are a debit.

All that being said, there’s a lot more to wealth-creation and sharing than is captured by GDP. Last night, one of the CBC reporters in Atlantic City told how they had helped rescue a few people, because their SUV had high enough ground clearance to get through the flood at that time. This will not show in the costs of the storm. But that CBC crew may have saved those people’s lives. Great wealth, given in exchange for nothing at all

Miss Pym Disposes (Book review)

     

Josephine Tey Miss Pym Disposes (1947) Miss Lucy Pym, suddenly famous for her book on psychology, has been invited to her friend Henrietta’s Leys Physical Training College as a Friday lecturer. Despite herself, she agrees to stay on, initially to help  out as a substitute teacher. When Henrietta chooses Rouse, the least popular student (and exam cheat), for a post at a prestigious girls’s prep school, the whole College is seriously annoyed, and Lucy too. Rouse is  hurt when a boom falls on her when she starts an early morning solo practice; she later dies. Lucy Pym has a crucial clue, which points towards Innes, the girl who should have had the post, and is awarded it in place of Rouse. Instead of giving the clue to the police, Lucy confronts Innes, who promises to atone for the crime by burying herself in the West Country, which she had worked all her life to escape. But on the second last page of the book we find out that another student is the culprit.
     On this bare bones of a plot, Tey has constructed an astonishingly engaging book. Wikipedia informs us that Tey loved gymnastics, and trained at Anstey Physical Training College near Birmingham (more here). This experience no doubt informs the portrait of the college and its students. I have no doubt that the characters are based on Tey’s recollections of her fellow students and the Staff. I thoroughly enjoyed these portraits, and the reminders of what communal life in a boarding school is like. I think the plot is merely an excuse for Tey to write a semi-fictitious reminiscence of her school days. It’s also an opportunity to examine the ethical issues surrounding the death penalty.
     The style is somewhat breathless, with italics scattered here and there. We experience the whole story from Lucy Pym’s point of view. She thinks of herself as a very ordinary person, at least in comparison to the intellectuals whom she has criticised in her book (a rebuttal of current Psychology as understood from reading 37 books on the subject). But that very ordinariness makes her extraordinary. She is an essentially and instinctively good person. She has an acute sense of other people’s personality and character, even though she cannot always put her intuitions into words. But the dialogue, the little asides, the girls’ comments on each other, Lucy’s sensitivity to mood and atmosphere, all combine to give us a lively sense of being present in her world. One cannot ask more than that from any story teller.
     I’ve read Tey’s The Daughter of Time, a much more carefully plotted tale of detection, in which  Inspector Grant, convalescing, reads up on Richard III and the Princes in the Tower, and solves that mystery, at least to my satisfaction. It’s a very, very good detective yarn. But Miss Pym Disposes is the better work of art. ****

Julia Potts (Link)

Courtesy of one my RSS feeds, I came across Julia Potts. Here's a link to her Vimeo site. Check out the other videos. They're charmingly oddball.

Tough Politicians (1)

“In These Tough Economic Times,” politicians claim, “We Have to Make Tough Decisions.”

Funny how tough it is to reduce unemployment benefits, assistance for poor families, disability pensions, housing subsidies, programs for homeless, and so on. Tough to cut staff for parks, environmental monitoring, basic research, community recreation programs, food inspection, drug testing, and so on.

I guess it must really hurt those politicians to make these tough decisions. I mean, the pain of having to say no to people who need help. The ghastliness of having to deny essential services. Doesn’t bear thinking about. The poor devils must be lining up for treatment for PTSD - Post Tough-decision Stress Disorder. We really should be feel more kindly towards these politicians.

After all, they do our dirty work.

The really tough decision would be to raise taxes, of course. Especially at the top end of the income pyramid.

If Ever I Return, Peggy-O (Book Review)

Sharyn McCrumb If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O (1990) I bought this for 25 cents as a time-filler. It’s a bit better than that. McCrumb interleaves several stories, all of which at least illuminate the main plot: an ex-hippie folk singer trying to rebuild her career buys a house in Hamelin. She receives a postcard with a veiled threat, then her dog is killed and mutilated. A high school girl who looks like her younger self disappears and turns up murdered like the dog. Eventually she confronts the murderer, and shoots him.
     McCrumb is good at relationships and the reach of personal history. The story is set in the post-Vietnam era, and the effects of Vietnam on the soldiers sent to fight (and die) there figure in the plot. A high-school reunion feels like a bass-line under the main melody: these people grew up during ‘Nam, and many were drafted. McCrumb is also good at mood and ambiance, and social satire. The whole thing is more than the sum of its parts. The leisurely pace of story telling hints at The Andy Griffiths Show (alluded to a couple of times), but it has darker shadows than that sunny world. A better than average read. **-½

Outliers (Book review)

Malcolm Gladwell Outliers (2008) This is an important book. It demonstrates that individual success depends on many factors beyond the individual’s control. They all come down to the same thing: you have to be in the right place at the right time, with the right personal and material resources. If you can then exploit the opportunity presented to you, you will be successful.
     One example of a factor that you can’t control is your birth date. The selection rules for players in amateur hockey leagues specify birth dates. If you are born near the beginning of the range of dates valid for you, you will be about one year older than your team mates born near the end of that range. That makes a lot of difference for young players: for 8-year-olds it’s a difference of about 12% in physical maturity, and sometimes more, given different rates of maturation. On average, the boys born in January will be taller, heavier, stronger, and more agile than those born in December. They will outshine their younger team mates, and will be more likely to advance to the next level of play.
     The same consideration applies to children’s school experience. It applies to whole generations: the people who were born in the 1940s grew to working age just as the baby boom got under way, and a huge demand for work ensued. I belong to that generation. It was easy for us to find work because there was huge and expanding demand for it.
     I’ve recently come across a snide remark about Gladwell’s method of framing a thesis, telling an illustrative story, then drawing wide-ranging conclusions. This is certainly a danger in inherent in Gladwell’s method. However, this book includes a lot of data, too, data that support Gladwell’s conclusions.
     In any case, anyone who insists that his or her success is entirely due their own efforts has a rather limited experience of life. There are undoubtedly many other people with the same talents and skills, and the same willingness to work hard, who did not succeed, simply because at some crucial point on their career path the opportunity they needed was not available. This is not to downplay the importance of hard work: there also people of similar skill and talent who did not take advantage of similar opportunities. But all of us have had success in large part because of things we could not have foreseen, people who offered us chances simply because we were there, and factors over which we had no control whatsoever.
     A book worth reading, especially since it prompts questions about how to adjust systemic factors which penalise so many talented people. ***