Poems

I see no one has visited the Poems page. I added several poems today. Go have a look. Comment if you like (or don't like) them.

2019-08-18: OK, I've added this collage (it's an ATC). Maybe it relates to one of my poems, maybe not. Check for yourself. 

 

Truth and Memory

"Truth" is a slippery concept. How do you know the photo you're looking at shows your Auntie in her wedding dress? Mostly because the face resembles the one you recall. IOW, your mental image of her matches the photo well enough that you are willing to accept the photo as described by your family. Your memories of her make the photo a true image.

Truth isn't "out there". It’s "in here". It's a property of representations of the world. Pictures, descriptions, theories, etc. How do you know one such is  true? Because it matches what you imagine to be reality. That image of reality is created from your memories of your experience.

Does that mean you can't rely on what you read and see in the media? No. It just means you need to think slow and analyse. That's a difficult habit to acquire.

2019-08-03

Climate is a chaotic system

     Climate is a chaotic system. It consists of a web of interconnected feedback loops. This makes it difficult to model precisely, since some feedback loops cancel the effects of other loops, and some feedback loops enhance the effects of other loops, and all of them are entangled with two or more other feedback loops. Chaotic system are characterised by non-linear relations between causes and effects. Small (sometimes very small) changes in some factor can become magnified into huge effects.

Some chaotic systems cycle through a series of states ("the seasons") that vary within some range but average out over time (number of cycles). This average is called the attractor. "Regression to the mean" is a common effect: Think of a baseball pitcher's performance over time. Pitching is the influenced by many factors, most of which affect each other. The pitcher's performance is a chaotic system: sometimes he's hot, sometimes he's not, most of the time he performs near his average level.

However, if some factor or factors exceed some limit (too much or too little) the whole system will shift into a new series of states, some or all of which are radically different from the previous ones.

There is no question that burning fossil fuels has increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, now approaching double the concentration of pre-Industrial Revolution levels. This is having an effect on climate (ie, on annual weather cycles). The important questions IMO are:
a) How fast is this happening?
b) Is it happening faster in some climate zones than others?
c) How far will it go?

Answer to a) Unknown, but climate models so far have understated the expected changes. This is shown in:

Answer to b) Yes. For example the Arctic: Predictions of the extent of summer seas ice (the extent of summer sea ice melting) have underestimated the melting. The general trend is faster melting than predicted by the models available at the time.

Answer to c) Nobody knows for sure how far climate change will go. Models are continually updated and tested with new data (both historical and current). Reserach uncovers new feedback loops. As these models get better they imply several (from my POV) important conclusions:

1) Climate can change very rapidly from one normal limit to the other (look up Little Ice Age).

2) Seasonal weather patterns can change in opposite directions;

3) Seasonal weather patterns can go from one extreme to the other within a year or two.

3) There's a lag between the warming effects of CO2 and climate change because of heat-sinks (chief of which is the ocean: over half of the recent rise in ocean levels is caused by the expansion of water as the oceans warmed up).

It's true that climate models aren't good enough to satisfy the popular yearning for "near certainty" in their predictions. But the certainty is higher than required in a civil law case ("balance of probabilities"), and IMO close to that required in a criminal case ("beyond reasonable doubt, emphasis on "reasonable").

Folly in high places: Lews Lapham's Age of Folly

     Lewis Lapham. Age of Folly: America Abandons its Democracy (2016) Lapham’s deep knowledge of literature and the Classics enable him to see below the surface of things as they seem. His writing informs, educates, delights, and annoys. Sometimes it infuriates, as when he recounts his interview with a CIA hiring board of three young Yale  men who asked him about tennis and a well-known debutante. These were the people who messed up the USA’s international politics in the last century, and their heirs are doing a fine job of emulating them in this one.
     Lapham was born into the American aristocracy, which has given him an intimate and personal knowledge of the oligarchy that has come to rule that unhappy land. For example, in chapter 22, Propaganda Mill, he outlines the history of the right-wing conspiracy to shift US politics away from its centre to the right. We live with the results. Will American democracy survive? Right now, I think the odds are against it.
   Much of the book is commentary on the Bush years. 15 to 20 years later, Lapham’s observations have the aura of prophecy.
     No matter what your politics, you will be offended. I think that’s the highest recommendation for a book about contemporary life. ****

Boris Johnson

Britain has becone a Monty Python skit.

Murder in the graveyard: Innocent Grave by Peter Robinson

     Peter Robinson. Innocent Graves (1997) The vicar’s wife, drunk on wine and guilt, talking to the angel on the mausoleum in the graveyard, discovers the body of 16-year-old Deborah Harrison. Owen Pierce, a stranger seen nearby, becomes the prime suspect. Banks’s work is complicated by class and privilege, a status-conscious Chief Constable, witnesses whose personal problems fracture their evidence, the arrival of a new Detective Inspector who has every qualification except a sense of what people are really like. A second murder complicates the case even more. The usual obstacles.
    
     Robinson handles the linked plots with his usual skill. This is a series I’ve been enjoying. I’ve found not quite half of the books here and there, and am reading them in writing order. Well done. ***

Eli Mandel on Literary Criticism

      Eli Mandel Criticism: the Silent Speaking Words (1966) A transcript of eight CBC talks given by Mandel (then a professor in the English Department, University of Alberta, Edmonton). He explores the central problem of literary and other arts criticism: What good is it? Does it have a legitimate purpose? His answer asserts that criticism is as legitimate an intellectual pursuit as any other

     This was a time when English Departments were attempting to reconstruct criticism as an objective analysis of literary works. In 1957 Northrop Frye had published his Anatomy of Criticism,  which argued that literature could be classified in terms of it content or “matter”, and its form or “plot”. Since these are objectively observable aspects of any work, Frye’s analysis liberated criticism from the subjective shackles of biography, sociology, psychology, and so on, which had dominated literary scholarship since the 18th century and had made criticism a matter of opinion and schools of thought.
     Mandel finally agrees with Frye, but takes a long and roundabout route to get there. His agreement is qualified by his admiration for Matthew Arnold and Alfred Tennyson, both of whom urged that literature is speech from one generation to another: that the “silent speaking words” on the page convey to us another mind, a person, and therefore create, preserve, and even enrich relationships with the dead.
     I think that Frye’s anatomy is accurate: it is a theory of literature that can be tested by examining and comparing different works. I think Mandel is also right: a piece of writing is made by a human, and to whatever extent the writer’s honesty and skill can do so, it records that person’s mind, that person’s experience. By reading their words, we encounter that person.
     Or as someone has said: The imagination is the only method we have to understand each other. I would add ... and the world in which we live.
     Eli Mandel was my teacher and then my colleague at U of A, Edmonton. He was man who never let a good idea stop him from exploring another one. I remember him with respect and affection. See the Wiki entry.
    On the Poetry page you’ll find a poem I wrote during and after listening to Eli at a workshop put on for high school teachers in Ontario.
    ***