2003-06-27 18:54

Victor "H�las" Hugo traduced.

A poetry translation contest, hoorah! I surprised myself by wanting to join in, and so here is my entry for posterity in a fetching bilingual edition. (Mr Hugo's piece is on the left.)

On doute La nuit ... J'�coute: Tout fuit, Tout passe; L'espace Efface Le bruit.

At night comes doubt... I listen out: Not a trace to be found; space swallows sound.

Wassat, Vick? Oh sorry, did I startle you? You didn't half jump!

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2003-06-27 16:19

Slow week.

At work and on the 'bladet. It's too sticky for much more. Next week will pick up, though, as persons return from holidays and stuff.

In the meantime, don't miss this Powerpoint Remix of Tufte's anti-Powerpoint essay, [via Mimi Smartypants]

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2003-06-27 10:55

Crazy persons, now also available in Italian

May I commend to the attention of my Varied Read the newsgroup europa.linguas? It is a polylingual group (the whole hierarchy is polylingual) dedicated to issues relating to languages in Europe. A finer collection of kooks of Esperantiste inclinations, kooks of "ha inventatio neo lingua, som es mycket megliore come Esperanto *spit*" inclinations, and anti-Engleesh-imperialiste whining one could hardly hope for. (I know I don't.)

Courtesy thereof, then, is this unusually lucid and closely argued case for appointing the Frenchy-French as The Official Language Of Europe, from an Italian newspaper for a change:

7) in qualche modo, a noi italiani converrebbe di pi� una certa �rilatinizzazione� della cultura europea, fatta per� con spirito razionalistico
8) il francese � l'unico accento straniero che in italiano suona gradevole
9) il francese � la lingua del razionalismo, dei lumi, vera prosecuzione del nostro umanesimo. L'inglese � empirismo, rifiuto di qualsiasi ideale universale che non sia di tipo mercantilistico

[7) in some ways, a certain "re-latinization" of the European culture would be suit we Italians better, but made with a rationalist spirit
8) the French is the only foreign accent that sounds pleasant in Italian
9) French is the language of rationalism, of the Enlightenment[?], the true continuation of our humanism. English is that of empiricism, a refusal of any universal ideal that is not of mercantilistico type ]

(Translated with a little help from the fish Mr Collins's Wordbookery.)

The True Heirs of the Roman Empire graciously passing the torch to the True Heirs of the Enlightenment is pretty much the whole story here. Absolutely marvellous. Gianluigi Mannucci (for it is he), Europe salutes you!

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2003-06-26 14:00 (UTC+1)

Activickanist

There has been a bit of a trend towards initiatives to promote a more equitable distribution of boardroom seats between the sexes in Scandiwegia lately. If I don't normally blog such stuff it's not so much from a lack of sympathy with the cause, so much as a lack of prinsesses on the campaign trail. Not anymore though, as Kronprinsess Vickan of Sweden takes up the cudgels (whatever they are) for the cause. Rejoice, wimmins of Scandiwegia, for Vickan is at hand!

Ministern kr�ver att minst 25 procent av styrelseplatserna ska innehas av kvinnor. Kronprinsessan g�r n�rmare en 50-50-f�rdelning.

- Det finns inga sk�l f�r att man inte noga ska unders�ka om det finns en kompetent kvinna. Alla kan vinna p� om det finns en n�gorlunda j�mn f�rdelning inom f�retag och styrelse, �ven kunderna, s�ger hon till tidningen Aff�rsv�rlden.

[The minister wants at least 25 percent of places on boards of directors to be filled by women. The kronprinsess would prefer a 50-50 split.

"There's no reason at all not to look for a competent woman. Everybody can win if there's a fairly even division within companies and boardrooms; customers as well," she said in an interview with the newspaper Aff�rsv�rlden ["The Business World"].]

Vickan of Sweden is of course set to be the first Person Of Gender to benefit from the rule-change that says first-born children can still be Kings even if they're girls (except that you have to call them "Queens" for some reason), so she knows what she's talking about, here. (We remind our Varied Reader that ex-prinsess M�rtha-Louise of Norway is the older sister of Kronprins Wassname, Mette-Marit's husband, for shame, for shame.)

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2003-06-26 10:21 (UTC+1)

Stands to reason, dunnit?

Or, the invention of ignorance in the age of science, being both notes towards a polemic and reflections preliminary to a study of the question of "artificial intelligence".

Perhaps the astonishing thing about the human mind not its ability to provide explanations of the world in which it finds itself, but rather its inability not to find explanations of the world around it.

From La Pens�e sauvage (p.79), after a discussion of squirrels in les Asmat de Nouvelle-Guin�e:

Le m�me �cureuil est prohib� aux femmes encientes par les Fangs du Gabon en vertu de consid�rations d'un autre ordre : cet animal se r�fugie dans les cavit�s des troncs d'arbres et la future m�re, qui consommerait sa chair, risquerait que le foetus n'imite l'animal et refuse d'�vacuer l'ut�rus. Le m�me raisonnement s'appliquerait assez bien aux belettes et blaireaux, qui vivent dans des terriers ; [...]

[The same squirrel is prohibited to pregnant women by the Fangs of Gabon by virtue of considerations of a another order: this animal hides in cavities in tree trunks and the future mother who consumed its flesh would risk the foetus emulating the animal and refusing to leave the uterus. The same reasoning applies just as well to weasels and badgers, which live in burrows; [...]]

Don't throw out your stocks of badger meat just yet, though, pregnant New-Ageiste twits, the sentence isn't over yet:

[pourtant les Hopi suivent une ligne de r�flexion inverse : ils tiennent la viande de ces animaux pour favorisable � l'accouchement, � cause de leur aptitude � se creuser dans le sol une voie pour s'�chapper quand ils sont poursuivis par le chausser ; ils aident donc l'enfant � �descendre vite� ; en cons�quence de quoi on peut aussi les invoquer pour que la pluie tombe.

[however, the Hopi invert the chain of reasoning: they hold that the meat of these animals is favourable for childbirth, as a result of their aptitute for digging a tunnel into the ground to escape the hunter. They therefore help the baby to "come down quickly", in consequence of which they can also be invoked to encourage rain.]

Marvellous. Of course, the phenomenon of which I complain is not limited to "primitive" societies:

Denis Moreau's introduction to Descartes' Discourse de la m�thode Livre du Poche (2000) edition, p.29

Notre familiarit� avec les th�ses cart�siennes nous emp�che aujourd'hui d'apercevoir qu'elles repr�sentent en fait une consid�rable rupture avec les fa�ons de penser et de proc�der de la majorit� des savants de l'epoque. On s'en rendre compte de fa�on plaisante en ouvrant les Questions inou�es du P�re Marin Mersennes, l'ami de Descartes, qui �tait une personnalit� important et reconnue de l'Europe savante des ann�es 1630. La premi�re de cette serie de trente-sept questions auxquelles Mersennes r�pond a chaque fois en quelques pages est : �Si l'art de voler est possible, et si les hommes peuvent voler aussi haut, aussi loin et aussi vite que les oiseaux?�

[Our familiarity with Descartes' ideas prevents us from perceiving today that they actually represented a substantial break with the ways most of the scholars of his time thought and argued. This is made amusingly clear on opening the Extraordinary Questions of Father Marin Mersennes, a friend of Descartes, who was an important and well-known scholar in the Europe of the 1630s. The first of the sequence of thirty-seven questions to which Mersennes gave answers of several pages in each case, was "If the art of flight is possible, and if man can fly as high, as far and as fast as the birds."]

Unfortunately, his conclusions are not given, but as late as the 18th century we find the little-know philosopher William Bladetton weighing in on the issue:

Some people think it's the feathers, some the wings and still others put it down to the hatching from eggs, but I personally hold that these are merely the outward and tangible signs of the intrinsic supraterrestriosity inherent in the avian nature, and that this alone allows birds to fly, and that it is therefore preposterous to imagine that man might duplicate their feats.

The greatest achievement of modern (by which I mean post-medieval) science, I would claim, is not Darwin's theory of natural selection or Einstein's theory of gravity or any of the usual suspects, but rather that it has made it possible to say, at least under some circumstances, that, "We do not have a satisfactory explanation for this phenomenon".

The first sentence of Chapter One of Graham Priest's Logic: A Very Short Introduction claims that, "Most people like to think of themselves as logical". I haven't yet made it to the second sentence.

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2003-06-25 15:10

The guestbook isn't working.

I feel marooned. Melodramatic, perhaps, but that's the way it is. I'm going to cheer myself up with some geometry instead to - see you tomorrow.

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2003-06-25 10:45

Codes in their Gnosis

Nicholas L�zard of the Guardian recently reviewed Baudrillard's new (in paperback) volume of reflections Cool Memories IV and wondered why he had not written about The Matrix:

It is a world where the nature of reality has become contentious even to those Johnsonians who would refute it thus, where, as he points out, OJ Simpson very possibly actually believes he is innocent, and is therefore in a state where no lie detector can reach him. Or, to put it another way: it is amazing, given his awareness of pop culture, that he has not written here about The Matrix. Maybe he feels it is all too plausible an explanation for what has been bothering him all this time. "It would be interesting to verify the existence of reality with surveys, as has just been done for the existence of God: 'Do you believe in reality?' The results would be posted everywhere, providing a constant display of the rate of global reality as measured by public opinion (the way they post up the national debt figure on billboards in New York)."

And then this week's Nouvel Obs he does just that, and it turns out that he isn't impressed:

[I]l y a d�j� eu d'autres films qui traitaient de cette indistinction croissante entre le r�el et le virtuel: �The Truman Show�, �Minority Report� ou m�me �Mulholland Drive�, le chef-d'oeuvre de David Lynch. �Matrix� vaut surtout comme synth�se paroxystique de tout �a. Mais le dispositif y est plus grossier et ne suscite pas vraiment le trouble. Ou les personnages sont dans la Matrice, c'est-�-dire dans la num�risation des choses. Ou ils sont radicalement en dehors, en l'occurrence � Zion, la cit� des r�sistants. Or ce qui serait int�ressant, c'est de montrer ce qui se passe � la jointure des deux mondes. Mais ce qui est avant tout g�nant dans ce film, c'est que le probl�me nouveau pos� par la simulation y est confondu avec celui, tr�s classique, de l'illusion, qu'on trouvait d�j� chez Platon. L�, il y a un vrai malentendu.

[There have already been other films which treat this growing between the real and the virtual: The Truman Show, Minority Report or even Mulholland Drive, David Lynch's masterpiece. The Matrix really amounts to a frenzied synthesis of all that. But the treatment is coarser and doesn't really cause any problems. Either the characters are in the Matrix, that's to say the digitisation of things, or they are radically outside, in the case of Zion, the city of the resistance. Now what would be interesting would be to show what goes on at the junction of the two worlds. But what's most annoying about the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is confused with the classic problem of illusion that is already found in Plato. That's a real misunderstanding.]

There's more where that came from, but I'll just excerpt a couple of teaser aphorisms:

�Matrix�, c'est un peu le film sur la Matrice qu'aurait pu fabriquer la Matrice. [...]
Au fond, sa diss�mination � l'�chelle mondiale fait partie du film lui-m�me. L�, il faut reprendre McLuhan: le message, c'est le m�dium. Le message de �Matrix�, c'est sa diffusion elle-m�me, par contamination prolif�rante et incontr�lable.

[The Matrix is rather like the film the Matrix would make about the Matrix. [...]
At bottom its world-wide distribution is itself part of the film. There we have to recall McLuhan: The medium is the message. The message of the Matrix is precisely its diffusion by proliferating and uncontrollable contamination.

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2003-06-24 14:33 (Sleepy-byes time)

Today I shall be mostly half-asleep

It's too warm here, and I'm too tired. I just spent 10 enthralling minutes picking up after the Big Computer's latest hissy fit. (See puny human work! Boring clerical work! Ha ha ha!)

I am given to understand that next week I shall be entertaining a young naval gentleman. ("Big computer, meet young naval gentleman." Ha, I break again! Eat flaming bits, baby-killing boat-driver! Mayday, mayday, ha ha ha!)

Tomorrow, though, I will discuss a philosopher I haven't really read discussing a film I haven't seen, and you really can't ask for more than that. Not here, at least.

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2003-06-24 09:11 (UTC+1)

[Book Review] Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

The most impressive thing about this installment is just how disagreeable Rowling is willing to let her hero appear. He spends most of the 760-something pages variously sulking, seething and stropping, and without a privileged view of the contents of his head he would probably be very tiresome indeed.

As for the rest, it's business as usual: Voldemort has a wicked scheme, which is thwarted at the last minute; death is centre stage; the unreliability and downright unfairness of the grown-up world obliges our young friends to take matters into their own hands.

Harry gets a snog, but so far as I could see Hermione (who is involved in an epistolatory romance with last book's Victor Krum, however) and Ron both don't.

This is the last time I read one of these things after work on a schoolnight, though. I am not so young as I was, and I need my sleep. (I finished at 0200, since you ask.)

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2003-06-23 15:26 (UTC+1)

I've got the slightly-after-midsummer blues

And a big wodge of galley proofs to read. Help me, Smale-Birkhoff homoclinic theorem, you're my only hope!

The galley proofs in question were produced in India and posted here in an envelope that nearly disintegrated in transit. How very global the wanderings of our wood pulps are in this not very paperless age.

I'm always suprised at how much better things look at this stage than the last one typeset by the authors. (Personally I cherish and jealously guard my inexpertise at typesetting. Life is short, and I am very lazy.) It's like a painting after framing; it just somehow suddenly looks complete and finished.

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2003-06-23 11:07 (UTC+1)

HP5 o'clock.

My copy of the new Harry Potter has just been delivered. This is a downside of getting Amazon to send it to my work address. I now have to try to read this whole 700 page lump of tree on a school night, since ancient tradition dictates that I read such things within a day.

Expect a review tomorrow, then, or a good excuse...

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