Sue Grafton. B is for Burglar (1985)

     Sue Grafton. Sue B is for Burglar (1985) I’ve been collecting the Kinsey Milhone tales for some time, after reading A is for Alibi, and J is for Judgment. Then I decided I would read them in order, so here goes.
     This time out, just two weeks after her first recorded adventure, Milhone is drawn into a missing person search that turns into a murder inquiry. A wife (psychopath) and her husband (obsessed by her) have murdered a friend with loadsadough, but made it seem the wife herself was done in by a burglar. Except that there’s no obvious motive, no clues, etc. Only the accident that the executor of a will needs a signature from a missing woman starts the unravelling of the case. Milhone is as obsessive as expected, but we don’t get much deepening of her character. On the other hand, a few unfinished plot lines in her personal life suggest To Be Continued in subsequent volumes.
     The writing is competent as ever (Grafton thinks in scenes), with believable dialogue and just enough quirkiness in the secondary characters to bring them to life as a competent character actor would. Occasionally, Grafton indulges in description of landscape and weather, and does so well enough that I suspect an unsatisfied urge to write more literary tales. **½ (2007)

Dorothy Sayers. Starkes Gift (tr. 1999)

     Dorothy Sayers. Starkes Gift (tr. 1999) A good translation of the story in which Wimsey first meets and falls in love with Harriet Vane. She stands accused of poisoning Philip Boyes, her erstwhile lover, with whom she broke up when he offered her marriage after having persuaded her, a vicar’s daughter, to live with him for several months. Wimsey finds out that Boyle’s cousin Norman Urquhart had been shortchanged in an aged relative’s will, which provides a motive; and then puzzles out the method, which involves arsenic eating.
     The beginnings of the love affair between Wimsey and Harriet is nicely handled. I don’t think Sayers knew exactly where to go with it, but she did not want Harriet to marry Peter out of gratitude, nor did she want Peter to accept Harriet’s offer of concubinage as any kind of payment for services rendered. By this time Wimsey had already morphed into a much more scholarly gentleman, with a sound grasp of moral philosophy, hence his admiration for Harriet’s refusal to marry the man who had seduced her. Her refusal of his offer of marriage is equally sound, so he does not pressure her, nor does he take up her offer to live with him, a good portent. But it does set Sayers an almost insoluble problem. If these two, destined for each other, are ever to marry, they must do so as equals, which they may be intellectually and before the law, but not morally, since there now exists an obligation between them. It will be Sayers’ task to remove that obligation, which she manages to do in Gaudy Night, but not without a deal more anguish than even fictional characters should have to endure.
Wimsey nags his good friend Insp. Charles Parker into marrying his sister Mary. Parker thinks he isn’t good enough to marry an Hon., an attitude that the Duke and Duchess of Denver approve of, but the Dowager Duchess does not. Sayers doesn’t show us Parker’s and Mary’s courting or married life, even though there is more than a hint that they were intended as a foil to  Pater and Harriet. Authors can be seduced by their creations, too.
     I like Sayers’ books, and have read several of them more than once. This German version is better than Keines Natürlichen Todes, perhaps because the style is less slangy. Slang is always a problem: what one culture finds worthy of slang another either ignores or can speak of only in hushed tones. Slang also dates quickly, so that it is difficult to recapture the intended tone when translating the text a couple of generations later. **½ for the translation. (2007)

Burger & Starbird. Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz (2005)

     Burger & Starbird. Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz (2005) The authors are profs, so the professorial tone and terrible puns should be no surprise. All in all, a nicely done tour of those parts of modern math that seem to the authors either most relevant to Real Life, or most interesting. They believe that math is fun, stimulates the imagination, and stretches one’s worldview. Correct on all counts. Recommended to mathophobes. **½ (2007)

Mike Bryant. The Ian Allan Book of Model Railways (1960)

     Mike Bryant. The Ian Allan Book of Model Railways (1960) Bryant writes in a chatty style clearly aimed at the younger modeller, whom he assumes to be a boy in middle school, or perhaps younger, with help from dad. He begins with references to adults, but quickly drops that. He produces a reasonable survey of model railway practice of the 1960s, with emphasis on the use of proprietary equipment. Here and there he gives clear enough instructions on scratch-building a few items, such as a country station, using card and printed brick sheet. The book would have been a good first book for a young modeller. Now, it gives us a glimpse of the way it was 50 years ago. Advertising litters the book, and no doubt made it profitable. Ian Allan also published several modelling magazines, and published books like this one as much to build his subscriber base as to help the readers. The photographs are small, and suffer from the limited technology of the time.** (2007)

Tony Koester. Realistic Model Railroad Design (2004)

     Tony Koester. Realistic Model Railroad Design (2004) Koester looks at just about everything. Since a lot of people freelance, he spends some time considering questions of believable graphics, logos, and such. He covers scenery, rosters, adaptation of prototype practices, and so on. The book is overwritten, partly because Koester tends to use three words where two will do, and partly because he belabours the obvious. He does help the reader consider the overall effect of the layout, and how various components and aspects contribute to or detract from it. In that sense, it’s a worthwhile book. ** (2007)

The argument from design

    Many people want to prove that God exists. A common argument (or proof) is to point to something designed and made by humans, such as a watch. These are obviously designed. So anything that looks like it's designed must have been designed, which means there's a designer. Natural objects such as flowers and bees, etc look like they've been designed, so there must be a designer. That designer is God.

 This is the "argument from  design", and it doesn't work. Actually, there is no proof of God's existence. And there is no proof of God's non-existence, either.

If you want to prove God's existence, then the general form of the proof will be:
1) If some statement about XYZ is true, then God exists.
2) The statement about XYZ is true.
3) Therefore God exists.

   There are at least three problems with this.

   ONE. The premise "The statement about XYZ is true" is either an axiom (an assumption), or else it is a theorem (a statement proven by reason). Either way, the argument makes God's existence logically dependent on or derived from some statement about XYZ. But for a statement about XYZ to be true (or false), XYZ must exist. So God's existence logically depends on or derives from the existence of XYZ. But that's absurd, since by definition, God's existence cannot depend on or derive from the existence of anything else. Hence, you cannot prove God's existence. QED.

   TWO: If the premise is an assumption, then the argument from design is circular. It assumes what it is designed to prove.The assumption is: "If something looks like it's designed, then it is designed; and if it is designed, there must be a designer." But if there is a designer, then things will look like they're designed. Therefore there is a designer. Therefore things will look like they're designed. Therefore there is a designer. Therefore... See?

   THREE: So you've proved God is the Designer of the Universe. Now what? What kind of God is this Designer? Did he design parasites, which can cause their hosts to die horrible and painful deaths? What about diseases that have wiped out millions of people, like the bubonic plague? Where will the claim that only God can design living things go when humans design and make them? Actually, humans have already done that.

   In other words, conclusions raise as many questions as they answer. Once you've proven something or other, it becomes a premise for further proofs. It becomes a basis for further questions. Some of those questions will not be the kind you wanted when you set out to prove your point. That's the way logic works.

   A local pastor once asked me to participate in a "debate" about the existence of God. I refused. I said than any true Christian will not worry about such arguments, since for a Christian "God exists" is a given. It's an axiom. It's one of those statements you use to prove things you want to prove. The pastor understood my point, but I don't know what he told his youth group.

   Of course, you need other axioms in order to get anywhere. And that's where the trouble starts. You can prove anything you want if you select axioms that produce your conclusion. Religious people of a certain kind just love proofs. Proofs mean that they are right and everybody else is wrong. And once you've proved that to your satisfaction, you can do whatever you want to those evil people who disagree with what you have proved is God's will.

   You don't have to start this process with God. You can go with Historical Necessity. Or the Supremacy of the Aryan Race. Or that Capitalism equals Democracy. Or whatever.

   Ideology is simply a religion without a god.

   2013-08-08

R. Sekuler & R. Blake. Star Trek on the Brain: Alien Minds, Human Minds (1998)

     R. Sekuler & R. Blake. Star Trek on the Brain: Alien Minds, Human Minds (1998) I found a marginal note by me, so I have read this book before. Perhaps I can’t remember as well as I could, or perhaps the book is forgettable. I lean towards the latter, because yesterday I found I could remember most of a book that I’d read a couple of years ago, merely from reading the back cover blurb.
     This book ranks lowest of the Star Trek spinoffs that aped The Physics of Star Trek. Its authors are no doubt nice people and decent fellows, to judge from their jacket photos. Professors at a couple of minor liberal arts colleges, they no doubt enjoy a good reputation among students. If this book constitutes evidence, their courses don’t demand much, and offer a deal of mild entertainment. But as a discourse on the nature of mind and behaviour, this book falls short.
     The defects show up most strongly in the section on memory, in which the two authors waffle around the concepts of memory as storage and memory as a process, without ever making clear what either conceptualisation entails, and how, if at all, Star Trek illustrates or exemplifies them. In particular, they use the notion of “procedural memory” for what are clearly behaviours shaped by operant conditioning. That people can “learn new skills” supposedly shows that procedural memory can remain intact even while trauma has damaged or destroyed “declarative memory”. The authors imply that this is a mystery, which it isn’t. Our behaviours are shaped by operant conditioning, so it should be obvious that damage to one part of the brain shouldn’t affect the shaping of behaviours mediated by other parts of the brain. If it were otherwise, it would be a mystery that some strokes impair the ability to walk but not to talk, and vice versa. Actually, the fact that “procedural memory” can remain intact when other kinds of remembering are impaired supports the concept of memory as behaviour. Similar muddles show up in other sections.
     The authors are best when they deal with interactions between people, at which level questions of how to conceptualise the way the brain actually functions are irrelevant. Although they don’t use the word “conditioning”, much of their talk about phobias, for example, makes it clear that phobias are glitches in behaviour, and can be fixed by working with sufferers to change their responses to the triggers of phobic behaviours.
     The central question, whether we can in fact imagine truly alien minds, is dealt with briefly. We can to some extent imagine the sensorium of other creatures. Technical advances in making visible details that can be seen only in UV light show that we can get a vague sense of what it would be like to see like a bee. In some circumstances, a human can actually do so, sort of: the authors cite the experience of a man whose cataract operation permitted UV to enter his eyes, which resulted in unusual responses in the retina, and affected his sense of colour. But all aliens that we imagine will share human traits with us. Those are the only traits we can imagine. We can imagine aliens that resemble the more exotic terrestrial creatures in looks or actions (think of the alien in Alien, for example), but again, our imaginings are based on what we know. It cannot be otherwise. The truly alien is unimaginable by definition. Thus, the authors very sensibly draw attention to how both human and non-human characters in Star Trek exemplify human traits, and so help us understand ourselves.
     All in all, this is a lightweight and forgettable work. But I already said that, didn’t I? ** (2007)