A Blog With No Name

THE APOLOGY

I know I promised to put summaries here of my new posts at Wordpress. Well it didn't work out that way, mainly because by the time I've done what I need to over there, in a library time slot, there's no time left! Anyway I've decided to try to do something about it today.

THE POSTS

Here, at least, are links to some of the posts over there:

A paradox: improving for the worse

A grumble about the fact that while mobile web access becomes more widespread, mobile web accessibility seems to be deteriorating.

Imagining the unimaginable

My attempt at imagining the amazing size of space, by using inch-to-the-mile maps.

Some thoughts on hearing

Rehearsing with a very blocked ear; thoughts on how one normally hears in an orchestra in order to blend and play in tune.

To unashamedly split infinitives

Why the grammar rules you learnt at school might not always apply.

Plutonymics

Having fun inventing words related to the planet, dwarf planet or ex-planet Pluto.

The impossibility of silence

There can be no such thing as silence. A quote from John Cage explaining why, and some brief thoughts about it.

An excellent find

A book that I've found in the library, about the evolution of language and music, but not yet read.

About page

Says that I've written on, and links to it. It's quite a long About page, so might be worth a look.

Another new experience

The experience of leading a concert while my ear was blocked. Educational but not one I want to repeat.

And the rest is...

Why counting rests in an orchestra is difficult, and some suggestions for making it easier.

A cold and a concert

The experience of playing a concert with a bad cold; thoughts on rationing concentration, saving energy, etc.

Fun with haiku

Why I like haiku, and a few haiku about the difficulty of reading .pdf files on the Web.

Playing with CSS

A discovery about the CSS editor in Wordpress.

Up to date!

Being pleased about having successfully transferred all my posts to the new blog.

THE INVITATION

Please visit, read, enjoy, comment...! Hope to see you there.

I enjoy blogging here, and I like the discussions that result from it. But I'm coming up against a recurring problem. If I write a post and tell friends from elsewhere about it--for example, people I know on Twitter--most of them then say they can't get the blog comments to work. Occasional ones manage, but most don't. So they want to start or join in with a discussion, but can't.

But the discussions and contacts are one of the main purposes of this blog, so I've decided I need to move it elsewhere. Probably that will be wordpress.com, but I'm open to other suggestions. (I've looked at LiveJournal and didn't like it much.)

What I'll probably do is post new articles on the new site, but put links to them here. It'll be a while before I move though; I've not had a chance to try Wordpress out properly yet.

It's a shame to move, but I do want my friends to be able to join in the discussion...! I'll tell you the link once there's something there to see.

Ursula le Guin, Changing Planes, Gollancz, 2004

This book describes itself as "armchair travel for the mind". It's a kind of travel guide, written by people who have visited interesting places. Only in this case, what's on offer isn't different parts of the country, or different countries, but a whole variety of different worlds and places. Imagine, for example

• a people whose experience of time is not sequential like ours
• a society based entirely on anger and ill temper
• a world in which people routinely overhear their neigbours' dreams at night
• a world where it is permanently the worst kind of commercialised Christmas
• an island population created to live without sleep as a scientific experiment
• a language too complex to be translated, based on words which individually have no meaning
• a world where some people grow wings and can fly, but are ostracized by the rest of society.

In my previous post I talked about the value of alternative worlds for thinking about ours. Here we have a whole host of them, described in a gentle and witty style: sometimes reflective, sometimes loaded with deadly satire, always beautifully written and very readable. People visit these worlds during tedious waits at airports, using "Sita Dulip's method", described in the first chapter. Sita Dulip discovered it while trapped "between planes" in the hell of waiting for an increasingly and horrendously delayed flight which was eventually

taken off the departures list. There was no one at the gate to answer questions. The lines at the desks were eight miles long, only slightly shorter than the lines at the toilets. Sita Dulip had eaten a nasty lunch standing up at a dirty plastic counter ... She had long ago read the editorials in the local newspaper, which ... applauded the recent tax break for citizens whose income surpassed that of Rumania. The airport bookstores did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction. She had been sitting for over an hour on a blue plastic chair with metal tubes for legs bolted to the floor facing a row of people sitting in blue plastic chairs with metal tubes for legs bolted to the floor, when (as she later said), 'It came to me.'
She had discovered that, by a mere kind of twist and a slipping bend, easier to do than to describe, she could go anywhere--be anywhere--because she was already between planes.
She found herself in Strupsirts...

We learn later that the method requires "a specific combination of tense misery, indigestion, and boredom" to work, making the airport an ideal place to use it. People relieve the agony by travelling to other "planes", and the book recounts some of their experiences. The stories are highly inventive, diverse, and wonderfully written. Some are reflective, some satirical, some challenging; all immensely readable. It's tempting to quote the whole book. I'll content myself with a few highlights. "Seasons of the Ansarac" describes a world where the "humans" are a migratory species, travelling north every twenty-four years (in our terms) to breed; on their planet this means they breed each spring. In their terms, it takes someone one year to reach adulthood from birth, and their lifespan is about three years (72 of ours). The story describes a typical cycle: people live in the cities during autumn and winter, getting on with their lives and feeling no sense of sexuality. Then comes the urge to migrate; everyone just feels like travelling north. There they form or renew partnerships, and have children; they then migrate back to the cities. By next spring, the children have grown up and it's time for the new generation to migrate north and repeat the cycle... It's hard to express the beauty and sensitivity of the way le Guin paints this unfolding picture. The Ansarac encounter a medically advanced people, who don't see the point of the lifestyle and want to "cure" them:

'They said, "All that will change. You will see. You cannot reason correctly. It is merely an effect of your hormones, yuour genetic programming, which we will correct. Then you will be free of your irrational and useless behaviour patterns."

The reply is telling:

'We answered, "But will we be free of your irrational and useless behaviour patterns?" '

Ouch! The most challenging story, "The Island of the Immortals", does not describe a place of eternal youth populated by people who live forever. The truth is far more disturbing. An extremely rare disease can be caught there, wjhich prevents the sufferer from dying, but doesn't prevent ageing--for hundreds of years. A truly horrifying picture. Real, alarming questions in our own world inevitably come to mind: this is a world we have already glimpsed. Suppose medicine could keep someone alive indefinitely, regardless of their condition... Suppose you could be kept alive forever. Would you want to be? The story doesn't explicitly mention these questions at all, yet we're brought powerfully face to face with them. In more humorous vein--but still with a serious point in the end--we hear "Woeful tales from Mahigul", relating a variety of historical incidents. One is of a highly pointless war over a tiny piece of land. A river boundary is involved. One side discovers how to make explosives. This does not, however, lead to the result you'd expect, but to something much more creative. Why not move the river, and hence the boundary?

Given the highly infectious nature of technologies of destruction, it was inevitable that Meyun should discover explosives as powerful as those of their rival. What was perhaps unusual was that neither city chose to use them as a weapon. As soon as Meyun had the explosives, their army, led by a man in the newly created rank of Sapper General, marched out and blew up the dam across the old bed of the Alon. The river rushed into its former course, and the army marched back to Meyun.

Under their new Supreme Engineer, appointed by the disapointed and vindictive Councilwomen of Huy, the guards marched out and did some sophisticated dynamiting, which, by blocking the old course and deepening access to the new course of the river, led the Alon to flow happily back into the latter.

Henceforth the territorialism of the two city-states was expressed almost entirely in explosions...

and the story continues to its logical conclusion... which I will not describe here. All of the stories are as inventive as these. Ursula le Guin's skill is in painting a full and believable picture of each society, or at least as much of it as a tourist might experience. If you liked the quotes, and would like to read something entertaining and inventive, I hope you will give the whole book a try.

Have you seen anything like this before? I thought not. How about this? These are the work of Bathsheba Grossman, who describes herself as "an artist exploring math and science in sculpture". My first reaction to seeing these and her other handheld sculptures was to want them. All of them. They are beautiful, sometimes complex, and very satisfying. They seem to me to be what the artists who did Celtic knowtwork designs would have produced if they'd had three dimensions to work in and had seen M. C. Escher's more geometrical drawings. My second thought was that these shapes are impossible to make: imagine trying to carve one, or to produce a mould to cast one... My third thought was that she had, however, made them. Otherwise she wouldn't be offering them for sale. So off I went to her technique page to find out how on earth they're done. They are indeed impossible to make by traditional processes. Although Bathsheba will typically make a plasticine model as a starting point, the actual sculpture is produced by first using CAD software to define its precise shape, and then using 3-D printing process to make the actual object. This involves building the sculpture up layer by layer from powdered metal. A few more stages turn this into a solid metal sculpture. To find out more about these and other works of hers, visit her website. Then buy one of each and send them to me for Christmas... You'll also find some remarkable internally-etched blocks of glass, containing such things as a genuinely 3-D map of our nearby stars... Beautiful stuff.

Notes

• Photos used by permission. Do not re-use without linking to http://www.bathsheba.com and crediting the artist.
• Bathsheba describes her glass pieces as "modelling three-dimensional data" and mentions here that she's interested in suggestions for further such pieces--see her site for details.

I was asked a while back to say something about my religious beliefs. It's hard to know where to start, so I thought I'd start somewhere that's particularly important to me and which relates to things I've already been blogging about... A lot of people believe there's a fundamental incompatibility between science and religious belief. I believe that they're fundamentally wrong

Is there a conflict?

There are scientists who reject religion. I suppose the most famous of these is Richard Dawkins, who has almost made attacking religion into a religion of his own. And there are religious people who reject science: for example those who treat the Bible utterly literally and insist that the world was created in six days as (supposedly) described in Genesis 1. Cleearly there can be a genuine conflict. Someone who believes God does not exist, and someone who believes God created the world in six days, will never agree with each other. There is a fundamental disagreement between them. But is that the only kind of believer and the only kind of scientist? No--it's an extreme variety of religion and only one kind of scientist. In fact there is no reason why scientific thinking has to reject God, or why religious belief has to reject the scientific understanding the earth's history and of our origins. I think the debate typically takes place between people one of whom understands science but not religion, and the other understands religion but not science. And sometimes, I fear, there are religious people who don't understand religion... though that might be a bit more contentious.

My starting point

In my first year at university, startled by my first encounter with biblical literalists, I made a conscious decision which I've followed ever since: anything which I believe as a consequence of my religion must be compatible with what I believe as a consequence of science. There is only one reality, whether you're looking at it through religious or scientific eyes. Science and religion both try to discover some truths about it. Truth can't contradict itself; so if they do discover truth, it must be consistent. It's no good to believe during the week that we eveolved by natural selection, only to believe on Sundays that we were specially created out of the blue 6,000 years ago. Science and religion must both live in the same real world. Theology and science must both adapt in response to known evidence, as we make more sense of the world we are in. Otherwise we're disconnecting ourselves from the world and our beliefs are simply attractive ideas which have nothing to do with reality. Do we want reality, or fantasy? I think that if we're basing our lives on it, we should go for reality. Or at least, the closest we can get to reality.

Some misconceptions...

A number of misconceptions seem to be lurking in the background whenever science and religion come into conflict. So here are some things I don'tbelieve: ... about religion

• Religion claims infallible truth
• Religion is a set of beliefs
• Scripture is an infallible, divinely dictated book containing those beliefs
• All religious people see it that way, or should do
• All religious people reject science and rational thinking
• Faith is intellectual acceptance of [impossible] ideas despite evidence
• Religious ideas are arbitrary.

... about science

• Science claims infallible truth
• Science works by proving things true
• All true scientists are atheists and reject religion
• Science is merely opinion
• Scientists seek to control the world
• Science starts out with a particular view of things, which it then seeks to justify in a biased way.

... about both

• Religion and science are based on conflicting "facts" (e.g. the claim that the world was made 6,000 years ago, versus the scientific evidence that it is much older).

Sometimes some of the misconceptions are agreed on by both sides, and then the trouble starts. Copnsider a scientist and a Christian fundamentalist who both think it's essential for a Christian to believe in six-day creation. They will argue forever over whether the world was created in six days. They'll almost certainly never question the assumption that it's an essential part of religion. So they're doomed never to get anywhere...

Some definitions of my own

To answer all those misconceptions properly would turn this blog post into quite a long book chapter (last time I checked it was over 1500 words long as it is), so forgive me if I don't do that in detail just yet. Instead, here are some attempted definitions which reflect my approach to it all: RELIGION: Religion is the response of human beings to the divine. THEOLOGY: Theology is the attempt to make sense of that response and produce a logically consistent set of ideas: about the encounter, and about what we're encountering. SCIENCE: Science is the attempt to make sense of the physical world by testing ideas against careful (ideally repeatable) observation. THE BIBLE: The Bible is a set of writings, accumulated over many centuries, providing a record of around two thousand years of religious experience and reflection on it. The experience was that of human nature encountering God and the world; the reflection is influenced by how writers at the time saw the world, and is expressed in many different genres. It should be fairly obvious that the things on my Misconceptions List are incompatible with those ideas. I'm worried about the length of this post so I won't go into that in detail now--maybe in another post if needed. Instead, here are

Some consequences

Religion as a response What is a reasonable response to being loved by someone, or falling in love with them? Is it to come up with a set of rigid beliefs and theories about them, and put all your effort into intellectually accepting those theories? No--your response is "Wow!" or "I want to be with this person" or to love them back or to want to join in with their activities. Similarly with our response to God: it's not a set of ideas, and it probably can't even be put into words because God is so far beyond what our language can describe. But after a while we feel the need to understand what's going on, and that's where theology comes in, so we try to describe it anyway. The beliefs aren't the starting point. Similar and different Theology and scientific theorising are in some ways very similar activities. Both try to make sense of human experience. In the case of science, this is the experience of doing certain experiments and getting certain results; in the case of religion, it's our subjective, yet shared, experience of being conscious beings, of relating to the world, and of relating to what we perceive to be its creator. Science has a distinct advantage in its area, because it deals as much as it can with things which can be made objective and measurable and repeatable. Yet science can't handle God at all, for a very good reason. The only way we can experience God is subjectively, in our consciousness, within ourselves. Yet the whole idea of science is to remove everything subjective and personal as far as we can, in order to be objective and repeatable. It works by letting us stand back from what we are studying. (The physicist Schroedinger expressed this well; I'll try to find the quote.) I believe that good theology must behave in a similar way to good science. It must take account of the real world we live in, and the real evidence we see. Its job is to make sense of the world and our religious experience as they are, not as we say they should be. It's not a matter of taking some pre-existing belief in, say, the infallibility of the Bible and forcing ourselves to believe all the consequences; it's about taking what we see and experience and trying to fit it all together. Also it seems clear to me that neither theology nor science is in a position to claim absolute knowledge of the truth. They're each a search, hoping to get nearer to the truth as they progress. Both need humility and the willingness to change if a new piece of evidence comes in. Their "truths" are always provisional: the best we can come up with so far, but open to change and refinement. The Bible OK, this is the bit which you won't like if you're a fundamentalist... What's special about the Bible is not that "God wrote it", but that it contains all those centuries of experience and reflection. Human nature is universal. God is universal. So, if the biblical writers encountered God, they encountered the same God we do. They sometimes interpreted the encounter differently from us; and sometimes had some odd ideas. For example a lot of the Old Testament assumes that God's love for us must mean God hates our enemies and wants to wipe them out. The idea of God loving them too didn't seem to occur to the writers. Yet even that horrible and blatantly unchristian idea came from the belief that the God they had encountered was a loving one. Just not one whose love extended to other people too... And certain aspects of the encounter are consistent through all those centuries of experience; we connect with them in our experience too. This is all scene-setting, really. I've not even started on basic things like what sort of God I believe in! But I hope it helps you to see my starting point.

A plea

I know that if you're a particular kind of atheist, or a fundamentalist Christian, you'll disagree strongly with what I've written. That's fine--but please respect what I'm doing here: I'm simply setting out my beliefs for some people who've asked about them, and I haven't the energy to launch into heated debate. Gentle disagreement is OK though