North Channel, Lake Huron, Blind River ON, 2025-04-29

 

I take a few photos of the North Channel about once a month. This a recent one. Windy, about 5C, looking south. Click on it to see it full-screen.

Fin de siècle fiction: Daughters of Decadence (Showalter 1993)

Elaine Showalter. Daughters of Decadence (1993) Showalter has selected a representative sample of short fiction written by women around 1890. These stories were published in women’s magazines and literary journals. The writers were at least semi-professional. Like their male counterparts, they wrote to satisfy the market, which at the time wanted moody pieces that suggested sensuality and luxurious indulgence in emotions, or melodramatic examinations of moral failure and just punishment.

The pieces that Showalter chose have an edge of defiance and rebellion. These writers knew their skills were equal to those of their male competitors, and naturally they did not like the lower pay and lack of recognition. They were  part of the second wave of feminism, which among other things gained the vote.

Given the heavy political freight these stories carry, are they worth reading? Yes, but like all fin-de-siècle art, they are as interesting for what they tell us of our ancestors’ taste and sentiments as for their artistic merit. As stories, they are well constructed. They cover a wide range of genres, from naturalistic fiction to romance to fantasy. I like the satire and social critique that most bring with them. They’re generally set in the upper middle and upper classes. The dialogue is artificial, but oddly enough it gives an impression of truth. I suspect that’s because men and women of those classes were always on their guard. They could not assume the language of intimacy among equals without also suggesting a sexual intimacy that could damage their reputations.

The stories are about personal and social relationships. Most tell of the emotional costs of presenting oneself as available, or withholding oneself because of some unsuitability. Women must play their roles, and so must men. It’s all very civilised in tone and style, but often viciously mean in substance. Many of the male characters display their prejudices and misogyny unwittingly. It’s no wonder that the critics objected, especially to the stories that suggested or showed that personal happiness requires the freedom to make moral choices for oneself.

The anthology apparently was assembled for use in a course on feminist literature, but the stories don’t need academic justification for reading them. If you like short stories, I think you will like these. If you also want to know something about the taste of your ancestors, I think they are good data. If you see popular literature as the mirror of the moral and ethical concerns of its times, these stories are essential reading.

Recommended. ***

What "100 year flood" really means

How likely is a "Hundred Year Flood" this year? Does the likelihood change when you've just had one?

I have a subscription to an online new source. Many of the stories it publishes are open for comment. One of the reports was about a Turkish geologist, Naci Gorur, who was trying to raise earthquake awareness. I saved the following comment because it makes a crucial point about what the probabilities of "rare" events actually mean. The highlighted sentence sums up the math. Percentage odds are not intuitive. I've added the calculation below Repetto's comment. I used my computer's calculator to do the arithmetic.

[ by R.C. Repetto, Amherst, MA]

People can't deal with probabilities, such as "a hundred-year flood". If there was one ten years ago, they think they're safe for another 90 years. No, they face a one percent probability there will be one next year and more than a ten percent chance* there will be one in the next decade. That misunderstanding and shortsightedness is why people still move into disastrous locales, such as Florida or Phoenix or the mountainous regions of the West. It makes a mockery of the claim that "we" can adapt to climate change. We haven't and won't, until it's too late.

* If the odds of some event is 1 percent (one per hundred) per year, then the odds that it will happen within the next 10 years are (1.01^10*100)-100, or 10.4%

Footnote: If you knew there was a one percent chance of having an accident every time you drove your car, would you drive it?

A ramble through Stuart MacLean's Mind (The Vinyl Café Notebooks, 2010)

Stuart MacLean. The Vinyl Café Notebooks (2010) Just what it says. McLean sorted them according to themes. The tone is a mix of Welcome Home and the Vinyl Café stories.

An enjoyable read, even, I think, for people who aren’t fans. As in the stories, McLean sometimes pounds home the themes, which to me feels like he doesn’t trust his readers. Then I see an online post of some supposedly true-life story whose lessons are explained at (usually sentimental) length. And I recall the student who had trouble understanding anything more than the literal content of the stories. Which means, among many other things, that we tend to think that’s what’s easy for us must be easy for everybody. And so we come to so-called common sense, which is neither, most of the time. It’s just the notions that seem obvious to us, limited by our experience, and our brain’s depressing tendency to take a single example as proof of a generalisation.

OK, looks like I’ve committed Mclean-like ramble of thoughts.

Recommended. ***

A Poker Hand's A Clue (Eric Wright, The Last Hand, 2001)

Eric Wright. The Last Hand (2001) Charlie Salter is approaching retirement, and has been assigned office duties.  An apparently simple murder case turns out not to be. Salter gets the case because one of the people close to the victim wants him to do it. He’s assigned Terry Smith, a brand new constable, an immigrant from Glasgow, to work with him. After a lot of palaver and fact checking, we find out what we probably inferred around the quarter mark: it was a passion-driven murder. A very large pile of misleading information and surmise has to be cleared away, mostly because a lot of it, if true, would implicate a lot of important legal people in corruption and scandal.

A good read, but not a great one. Salter goes off into the sunset of retirement happy that he’s played one last hand. A poker game figures in the solution by providing the clue that unravels the knot.

OK, that’s enough cliches. I enjoyed the book because I like the Salter series. The book could have stood a lot more story about Salter and Smith.  **½

Nasturtium

 

September 2009. This was a test of the close-up capability of my then-new Canon SX-20 digital camera.

The Library of Babel (The Universal Library) (long read)

Some thoughts on the Universal Library problem

The problem was fictionalised by Luis Borges. It may be stated thus: Can we specify a procedure for writing a Universal Library? A universal library contains all texts ever written and ever to be written, in all the languages that have ever and will ever be spoken, and many more that will never be spoken by anyone. The paradoxical answer to this question is yes, and several proofs exist that such a library is not only possible, but is of a finite size, albeit a very large one. One such procedure (adapted from one described by Martin Gardner) is the following:

Suppose a book of 100 pages of 100 lines of 100 characters each. Each such book contains a total of 10^6 characters, including the space. Using the Latin alphabet in upper and lower case (52 characters), 7 punctuation marks and the space, and 10 numerals bring the total to 70 characters. The total number of books, if each contains exactly one permutation will be 70^(10^6), a very large number. It is so large that if every atom in the universe were a printing machine printing at the rate of one character per second, it would take many lifetimes of our universe to print all the books.

Clearly, very, very large library. Does this library in fact contain all possible books?

Each book in the library is a specific combination of characters. Each such combination is 10^6 characters long. Given that any printed book is a combination of characters, that combination will occur at least once somewhere in the library. A book shorter than 10^6 characters will occur many times, since there will be (100-n)^(10^6) permutations of the characters filling out the book to 10^6 characters.

The same consideration applies to books not yet written, for each such book is a combination of characters. Books that will never be written by anyone will also occur in this library. And since all spoken languages can be represented by some scheme of matching characters to sounds, books written in all possible spoken languages will occur in this library.

This summary proof shows that all books ever written, ever to be written, and never to be written occur in this library, many of them more than once. Since every book can be printed with typographical errors, all possible combinations of typographical errors will also occur. In short, not only will all possible books occur, all possible variations on each book will occur. What’s more, a very large proportion of the books will be nonsense in any language, including languages not spoken on Earth (if there are such.) That includes Klingon, and any other fictional language.

This Universal Library is too large. It’s clear that “too large” means not only “utterly infeasible”, it also means “containing too much nonsense.” But mulling over the consequences of the procedure for constructing the library is a useful exercise in handling very large numbers, numbers that are unimaginably large. The Universal Library problem shows that we can conceive of entities that we cannot imagine, and that we can reason accurately about them.

Can the Library be made smaller? Yes, by using an encoding scheme that compresses the data. One might work as follows.

Suppose we use binary code. The we use only 2 characters, and the size of the library will be 2^(10^6), still a very large number. Is it smaller than the library using 60 characters? Yes. The fraction is [2^(10^6) / 70^(10^6)], a very small fraction. 

That’s still enormous, though. Is it enormous enough to contain all possible books? Paradoxically, yes. Every character will be encoded in binary, and hence every combination of characters will occur as a combination of binary characters. What’s more, since binary code can be represented by some combination of alphabetic characters (e.g, a for 1, b for 0), this binary-coded Universal Library will be included in the alphabetic one, once for every encoding of the binary characters. For example, (a,b), or (one, zero) and their equivalent in every possible, known, and unknown language. No wonder encoding the universal library using the alphabet is so inefficient.

Hence the supposedly larger set of books containing every possible combination of 70 characters will be contained in the smaller set of books containing every possible combination of only two characters. Thus, the library utilising 70 characters encodes its information very inefficiently. Can we improve that efficiency?

Suppose we limit ourselves to English books. Since any conceivable language should be translatable into English, surely we can reduce the size of the library? Yes, we can. We need only ensure the inclusion of every combination of characters that represents an English translation of a book written in some other language. But our multilingual library would include all translations of all books into every language. Limiting ourselves to one language to represent all possible books omits those multiple translations. If there are L possible languages, then there are L! translations of all books into all languages. Thus limiting ourselves to one language, the library’s size will be  {[2^6(10^6)]/L!}. This will be a fraction of the multilingual library. But it will still be enormous.

Nevertheless, we can estimate its size. Suppose there are 500,000 English words. Suppose the average length of an English word is 10 characters, including one space. Then each of our English books of 10^6 characters will have an average of (10^6)/10 or 10^5 English words. The size of this library (in binary characters) will be 2^(10^5) books. This is still very large: it’s [2^(10^6)]/[2^(10^5)], which is 10% smaller than the complete library. Not much of a saving. What’s more, it will be this size regardless of the total number of languages.