Fred has moved

Having become much too accustomed to his perch on the book case, Fred moved over to the right hand speaker next to the TV screen. He can now watch us watching TV. He knows the TV shows pretty well, since he had a good view of them from his former vantage point. I suspect his purpose is to gather data about our reactiosn to TV, which will aid him in fathoming the mysteries of human nature. His own owly nature he will keep carefully hidden. All we know so far is that owls are curious, and patient.

A picture

This is a locomotive leased by the Huron Central Railway, which operates the CPR's Sudbury-Sault Ste Marie line. The line was built when the Liberals were in power during the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The Liberals didn't want to spend the money for an all-Canadian route. The line was to go south of Lake Superior via Sault Ste Marie. When MacDonald's Conservatives came back, they scotched that idea, and the north of Superior route was built. It's still one of the most spectacular railway lines in the world, but only freight trains use it now. The line through Blind River is in very bad shape, several levels of government are supposed to spend money to fix it up so that coiled steel can be shipped by rail rather than truck. The Feds are dragging their heels, perhaps because this part of Ontario is definitely not Conservative country.

Book Review: Mice in the Beer (Ward)

Ward, Norman Mice in the Beer (1960; reprint 1986) Western Producer of Regina, publisher of a magazine for farmers, occasionally reprints or publishes books of miscellaneous interest. Ward, a professor of political science, lived most of his working life in Saskatchewan, which I suspect is one reason this collection of occasional pieces was reprinted. He has a sly wit, very much like Leacock: he's a master of the offhand remark that contains a bomb. He won the Leacock Medal for Humour, and on the evidence here deserved it. His humour is gentler than Leacock's (whose reputation as a gentle satirist rests on superficial reading.) Ward's persona often plays straight man to "Uncle Bob", a surprisingly good-humoured curmudgeon whose musings often lead logically into absurdities. Like Davies' Marchbanks, there are few one-liners. The humour depends on the slow and careful construction of context. Here's an example:

A friend of mine who, more or less as a hobby, runs in elections as the standard-bearer for one of our more obscure political parties, confided in me recently that he was working on a new way to build up his party's fortunes. I'm not quite sure what his opinion is worth, for judging from the number of votes he polls on election day the post he holds in his organization can't be much higher than rank of corporal. But the years of wandering beyond the wilderness have given his views a twist not found among conventional politicians.

"Look," he said, "at Social Credit and all the other small parties. From the beginning they've been loaded to the gunwales with clergymen, school teachers, and other taxpayers of oppressive respectability. Their spokesmen are moral to point of morbidity, and nobody can guess how low they could sink if they got in power. And look at my outfit! How," he demanded, "can we expect to get our party off the ground if all the drinkers are Liberals and Conservatives?"

All in all, a good read. **-1/2

Book Review: The Loch Ness Story (Mitchell)

Mitchell, Nicholas The Loch Ness Story (1974) A “revised” edition published by Penguin, this book contains a typically credulous account of the creatures supposed to live in Loch Ness. In the 60s and 70s several people used the best available underwater technology they could afford in order to find Nessie, and of course came up empty. There’s no question IMO in that Nessie is a compound of hoax, wishful thinking, and carefully ambiguous publicity aimed at tourists. Tourist pamphlets from before the first world war do not mention Nessie, which I think is evidence enough that she’s a very recent “discovery”.

Mitchell’s tone is that of a believer: any possible fact turns into reality within a sentence or two. He makes snide remarks about the skeptics and critics, often identified with a shadowy scientific establishment of some sort, who have closed their minds against this most momentous discovery. I read about halfway through the book, by which time Mitchell is referring to Nessie as a prehistoric animal, possibly a saurian, that has somehow survived for millions of years. Notions such a minimum sustainable population, of geological and climatic changes that would reduce the odds of survival, etc, appear to be beyond him. Grainy photos, out of focus blobs in the middle of out of focus snapshots, eye-witness accounts of things seen in the gloaming or against a background of sun-glistering water (there’s a photo of one of these sightings) – all these are for him irrefutable evidence, not only that Nessie is real, but that (s)he’s a reptile of some sort.

A wonderful, often amusing, but finally tedious read, like so many of these books, it will merely confirm both the believer and the skeptic in their opposing beliefs. The pictures are the usual ones, often reprinted, and to my skeptical eye are utterly unconvincing. The fact that they are badly printed doesn’t help. **

Update 2020-03-03: The most recent research has found a great deal of eel DNA in the Loch. No trace of saurians. This BBC link is one of many you'll find if you search on "eel DNA on Loch Ness." The BBC uses the standard (faked) photos of Nessie.
 

Book Review: Remaking the World (Petroski)

Petroski, Henry Remaking the World (1999) Jon gave me this book for Christmas. Petroski wrote historical essays for American Scientist, a magazine that appears to carry on the original intent of Scientific American, which was much more focussed on technology (and even DIY) than the current version. His essays are very much like Gould’s, but the style is somewhat more neutral and pedestrian. I get little sense of Petroski’s personality, which is a pity, since his choice of subjects indicates a lively mind and wide range of interest.

His emphasis on the non-technical aspects of engineering is important. Most people lack scientific and technical insight (we need a word like “illiteracy” for this), which means that the context of engineering works is often incomplete. The yearning for quick fixes prompts politicians and their constituents to trust the technocrats too much (see the “heightening” of “security measures” at airports recently). On the other hand, nimbyism and paranoid Ludditism result in know-nothing rejection of economically viable and ecologically effective solutions (see the resistance to H1N1 vaccination.)

All in all, a good book, with useful nuggets of information here and there. For example, “bug” as a glitch or unexpected flaw in design predates computers. Petroski quotes a note in Edison’s diary, in which Edison refers to “Bugs – as such little faults and difficulties are called –”. I’ve suspected that the “insect in the electronic works” was a story a little too pat to be true, and am happy to have my suspicion confirmed. ***

Book Review: Pohlstars (Frederik Pohl)

Pohl, Frederik Pohlstars (1984) Most of these stories are Pohl's darker visions, more like Harry Harrison or Roald Dahl. Pohl, like Poul Anderson, usually writes about swaggering, libertarian, free-enterprise types, often crossing the line between legal and illegal (sometimes venturing into crime), in order to succeed. But in the end, they not only do well, but good.

Unlike Anderson, Pohl has a strong tragic streak in his makeup, sometimes tending to elegiac sentimentality. The first tale is a novella, I sampled it but did not read it. The short stories range from the mildly funny (a driving instructor is unaware that one of his pupils is setting up an invasion of Terran territory) to the horrific (a convicted murderer is purchased by aliens to conduct their business; when they decide they want to know what human sex is about, they make him reenact the crime for which he was condemned, and he kills his lover.) All have a more or less obvious theme; Pohl is one of the most tendentious SF writers ever. In A Day at the Lottery Fair he attacks the "pro-life" movement. A Day in the Life of Able Charlie tells how an artificial intelligence program is used for market research. Second Coming sends up the literalists who expect Jesus to return from the sky - he does, but decides he wants to go back to the zoo where the space people have kept him, it's a nicer place than Earth. The book will be added to my collection of Pohls, but not because it's his best work. **

Book Review: Three Bags Full (Leonie Swann)

 

Swann, Leonie Three Bags Fulls (2005; transl. Anthea Bell 2006) A flock of sheep solve a murder mystery. Turns out their shepherd offed himself. A nice, quirky idea, but it goes on too long. The sheep’s eye/mind view is nicely done, and Swann uses it for (mostly) gentle satire. She has degrees in philosophy and psychology. The book is not only entertaining, it prompts questions. One of the perennial questions in philosophy and psychology is what it would feel like to be someone else, or another animal. I don’t think we can answer that.

Some years ago, a TV show purported to show what the world looked like to dogs and cats. The makers manipulated the colours of the image, based on what’s known about cats' and dogs' eyes: they don’t have the same colour receptors as we have (more evidence that the eye evolved, BTW.) Trouble is, the colour chemistry of the eye’s receptors doesn’t tell us much about what the animal perceives. We can tell that colour-blind people can’t differentiate between certain colours, and this correlates with deficiencies in their retinal chemistry, but it doesn’t tell us what colours they actually see. The perception of the world is subjective. It seems reasonable to suppose that the world looks pretty much the same to humans, and largely the same to cats and dogs, but that supposition is based entirely on our observations of how other humans and animals respond to visual cues. They respond pretty much the same way I do, so I infer that they perceive pretty much what I perceive. But that inference is not provable.

A related question is whether we can imagine a truly alien mind. The answer IMO is no. Our imagination is limited by our experience and knowledge, which is wholly human. “Imagination” is based on remembering, which we don’t do very well. That is, “remembering” is reconstruction, not replaying of a record. To remember something is to imagine what happened.

However, by “imagination” most people mean “creating or inventing something new”. But what actually happens is extrapolation and recombination. That’s why a good imaginer can make loadsadough presenting us with things we individually cannot easily imagine. Such people can extrapolate further and recombine more wildly than most people can. The attraction of a well-written story or well-made movie is precisely that: these works present us with images we ourselves could not imagine, or could not imagine as well as their creators.

In fact, imagined experience for most of us can never have the vividness of actual experience. What we remember of an experience is not its sensory content so much as its emotive impact. What it felt like has a stronger effect than what it was. Hence people’s difficulty in describing a movie that impressed them. We get surprisingly vague and incomplete accounts of what the movie was about, but emphatic claims to its greatness, impact, coolness, etc.

All that being said, Swann has managed to give us a plausible and amusing story as seen and heard by the sheep. The sheep often misunderstand and misinterpret what humans say and do, but their mistakes are as illuminating as their insights. Mostly, we get a sense that what we humans think is important really isn’t. A good read, but longer than necessary for both the plot and the creation of the sheep’s world. Or maybe not -- YMMV ***

Update 2026-05-24:  The book has been made into a movie, "The Sheep Detectives".