Maigret and the Black Sheep (Simenon, 1962)

 Simenon. Maigret and the Black Sheep. (1962) A respectable retired manufacturer dies of a gunshot from his own pistol while his wife and daughter are at the opera. It’s not suicide, but murder. But there seems to be no reason for anyone to want him dead. Maigret patiently digs up the facts that reveal the murderer’s reasons for wanting to kill. Family secrets and incomplete, misleading, or false answers to questions delay the resolution of the story in the satisfactory Simenon manner. Maigret wins again.

I confess that the TV versions of Maigret make the reading more pleasurable. Simenon is good with dialogue, but poor with visuals. If you like Maigret, this one will please you, perhaps even more than it pleased me. **½

Dumb Birds (Kracht, A Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America, 2019)

 

Matt Kracht. The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America (2019) Early in his life, Kracht suffered exposure to the mysteries of bird watching. It took, but it left some emotional scars. So he wrote this book, a nicely done satire on field guides, and a fairly gentle put-down of bird watchers. I enjoyed it. But some of the more tight-assed members of the tribe may take offense. It does get a bit repetitive.

 Recommended, but you have been warned. **½

165 years ago (Essays From The Times, 1860)

(The Times), Essays From the Times. (1860) I received this collection many decades ago while researching Swift’s literary reputation as part of my work on his satiric poems. Like most critics of his verse, the anonymous essayist reprinted in this collection fails to notice that Swift used impersonation in his verse as well as in his prose. Very few readers have believed that the supposed author of A Modest Proposal is Swift himself. The suggestion that the poor should raise their children to be tasty dishes for the rich is ascribed to the supposed author, a practical man of business suggesting a solution to poverty. But the uncritically accepted Romantic notion that a poet expresses his most authentic self in his verse prevented Victorian and later critics from realising that Swift used the same method in many of his satiric verses. The speakers of Swift's satires are not Swift, but various personages. Some are people of sense, others quite the opposite.

The Romantic poets were disingenuous in their claims. The speaker of a Wordsworth poem is an idealised version of himself. The Romantics would have you believe that this idealised version is the real thing. I don’t think so. In fact, I think all writing is a kind of impersonation.

This time round, I read all the essays. What struck me most was the writers’ blithe confidence in the correctness of their judgements and censures, especially of their subject’s morality. People of every age tend to believe that their judgements on their forebears are correct. But it seems that the Victorians were the first in many centuries to believe that their judgments were final. As such, they are a cautionary example: The current wave of belief that we have reached a pinnacle of moral and ethical righteousness is as misplaced as those of every earlier age. If anything, we repeat the errors of our ancestors, technologically enhanced. Human progress is a circle dance.

These essays are essential reading for any student of the 19th century. The essay on Swift’s life and works found its place in the bibliography of my thesis. ***

The Greatest Show on Earth (Dawkins, 2009)

 Richard Dawkins. The Greatest Show On Earth. (2009) Most of Dawkins’s work has been the attempt to convince people that Creation Science, aka Intelligent Design, is wrong. This book is his marshalling of the evidence that evolution is real, and that we have increasing knowledge and understanding of how it happens. The basic principle is random variation constrained by deterministic laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. It’s because most mutations do not improve the organism’s chances of surviving long enough to breed, or to outbreed siblings and cousins, that the few favourable mutations not only gain a foothold but spread. IOW, while mutations are random, their effects are not, and that is enough to guarantee that most beneficial mutations will usually spread while deleterious ones will not (if they haven’t killed their hosts). One consequence is that the best versions of essential genes are conserved across species. The preservation and spread of favourable genotypes is what “natural selection” actually means.

A well done book, which in the end is the best refutation to the pseudoscience peddled  by the creationists. Recommended. ****

Footnote: It seems to me that one of the motivations for Creationism is a misreading of the Bible. The assumption seems to be that the factual truth is primary. Or Fundamental. Or even the Only Truth. Therefore there is only one legitimate method of interpreting the biblical texts, namely to assume its factual truth. From this point of view, only factual truth can guarantee the truth of whatever moral or theological or other propositions the reader wishes to assert.

But the assumption that factual truth proves moral, theological, and other abstract truths has a fundamental problem for the believer: By making factual truth primary, religious truths are logically contingent. That means that any changes in factual truths may change religious truths. At some level, fundamentalists seem to understand this, hence their insistence that the factual truths they read into the biblical narratives cannot be contradicted. It also means they must find ways of proving the truth of the facts as stated in the Bible.

Why the Toast Always Lands Buttered Side Down (Yes, there's an explanation).

 

Richard Robinson. Why the Toast Always Lands Butter Side Down: The Science of Murphy’s Law. (2005) Just what the title says – an investigation into failure, and our propensity to underestimate the probability that something will go wrong. We evaluate the odds as high or low in terms of our desired outcomes. So we buy lottery tickets. We evaluate risk in terms of our fears. So many people would rather drive than fly. Selective memory supplies the misleading data that confirms our fears or supports our desires. So we see coincidence as proof of some rule or of divine protection.

And so on.

Many of these mistakes in parsing the universe are summed up in proverbs. A watched pot never boils. Oh yes it does, but the few times you watch it, it seems to take forever. The extended version is the apparently universal experience that something works perfectly well until you show it off to someone. It’s especially embarrassing when that something is you playing the piano.

All in all, a nicely done, often amusing, and mostly painless reminder of the science that explains why the world often doesn’t work the way we want it to. By the way, toast does land buttered side down more often than not. That’s because it usually drops from about table height, and thus has just enough time to turn over so it’s buttered side down just before hits the floor.

Recommended. ***

What's the Economy For? (Patel, The Value of Nothing, 2009)

Raj Patel. The Value of Nothing. (2009) Modern economic theory ascribes a value of $0 to externals. For example, treating effluent before discharging it into the nearest watercourse costs money, but untreated effluent costs nothing. More precisely, leaving the purification of effluent to natural processes costs nothing. 

Since we believe the aim of our economy is to maximise profit, we believe that the aim of our producers is to minimise cost, which in turn means to maximise externals. It also means minimising the provision of social goods, which cost money. Thus the drive to minimise taxes, which pay not only for necessities but also for amenities. Finally, the drive to maximise profits spurs the quest to privatise public goods such as education and parks, and to oppose the transfer of necessary services such as healthcare from private to public organisations.

Patel’s book is an extended discussion on the value of those external processes that suppsedly cost nothing. Hence the title. He begins by estimating the full cost of those zero-cost externals. An example is the $3.95 hamburger whose true cost is about $200.

Like many others who have meditated on the costs of using nature to do our dirty work, he concludes that these externals provide services of value, if only the monetary cost avoided by using them. From that starting point, he widens his discussion. The book is an argument for an economy that recognises that ecosystems are fundamental, and instead of treating them as zero-cost, treats them as the essential and hence most valuable part of the economy. He understands that any change to our economic systems entails changes to our politics, and discusses those as well, adducing examples of successful local, communal control.

Well, that’s a simplification of this book, which touches on everything that’s implied by the question What is the economy for? 

Recommended. ****

Ig Nobel Prizes: Laugh, then Think.

Marc Abrahams. The Ig Nobel Prizes 2 (2004) The Ig Nobel Prizes were devised at Harvard. They’ve grown in size and prestige. Many Nobel winners have happily participated in awarding them, and most winners of the Ig Nobels have felt honoured by the recognition of their research, which First makes you laugh, then makes you think. Traditions such as folding the event program into paper airplanes to be launched at the stage, and a rigidly enforced time limit on the acceptance speech, maintain the Goonish ambience.

Anyone can nominate anyone for an Ig Nobel. Some of the prizes are not so subtle satiric critiques of pseudoscience and other nonsense, but most are awarded for valid scientific discoveries, and many are more significant than a quick read my suggest. Like anecdotes, they may prompt deeper questions than the one they answered.

This collection is well worth whatever you pay for it. I found my copy at a yard sale, hence wildly under-priced compared to its value. A few examples:

2001 Ig Nobel for Astrophysics, to Rex and Rexella Van Impe, evangelists, for their discovery that black holes meet all the criteria for Hell.

2004 Ig Nobel for Public Health, to Jillian Clarke, high school student, for her investigation of the 5-Second Rule for food that falls on the floor. (It fails, but by how much depends on the floor covering).

2024 winners here: https://improbable.com/ig/winners/

A valuable reference work. Recommended ****