From An Empire Wilderness

…I saw how teh acceleration of technology is driving the wedge deeper between military and civilian societies, and bringing about, for the first time, a professional caste-elite… Soldiers are becoming like doctors and lawyers… “war has become so technological that it takes too long to train people who will serve only for a year or two”

Kaplan also points out the level of scholarship among the military. I encounter this often. No where else do you find people with blue-collar backgrounds so schooled in history. The density of jargon certainly rivals that in Law and Medicine.

It matters less what you read than where you live and where you come from, because that determines how you interpret knowledge. (p 11)

Reading: Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell, written by a Navy SEAL, principally about a misadventure in Afghanistan. A real conservative Texas cowboy. The story of his early life sure confirms Lakoff’s “strict father” interpretation. Generally a good read, but with some things like this:

For me, it began in Iraq, the first murmurings from the liberal part of the U.S.A. that we were somehow in the wrong, brutal killers, bullying other countries; that we who put our lives on the line for our nation at the behest of our government should somehow be charged with murder for shooting at our enemy… It’s been an insidious progression, the criticisms of the U.S. Armed Forces from politicians and from the liberal media, which knows nothing of combat…

Disappointing, but enlightening. I read liberal bloggers & watch the Daily Show all the time, and never have I seen so much as an insinuation that a soldier should be charged with murder for doing their job. I can hardly pay attention to politics at all anymore because it’s become professional wrestling: choose a side, and have a shouting match. Mr. Luttrell clearly only knows what “liberals” say by what talking heads on “his” side tell him. For the record, there is not much politics in the book, although there is some strange praise of W, noting his equally studly SEAL bother calls him a “real man.” It’s sad a real Texan can’t see past the veneer, to the prissy Maine Yale boy who spent most of his adult life getting drunk, snorting coke, avoiding military service, fucking up everything he touched, and having daddy’s Saudi friends bail him out. Why? Because he’s on “his” team. I’d be a little miffed if my commander-in-chief couldn’t look me in the eye and say, really, why he sent me and my comrades into harm’s way.

I’ve got tickets to see Henry Rollins in a few months. I love his attitude on America’s military misadventures. He always displays proper awe for people in uniform, while being very, very pissed off about the greedy old cowards who are so cavalier with their lives.

This time of year the house is never warm. Poor insulation, and a worse heating system.

Nothing like waking to a cold house, and following some groggy motions, slapping an icepack on your foot. It took several inspections to convince me it wasn’t broken.

Clutch foot disabled, I read some more Forgetfulness. It turned out to be the penultimate chapter, not the last, and…a huge blunder! The billiards table suddenly becomes a pocket billiards table. A monumental oversight. I wonder how it could have possibly slipped through.

I guess it doesn’t say definitively that it wasn’t a pocket billiards table before, but it is certainly intimated by previous references to three-cushion. I can’t see anyone familiar with the game seeing it any other way.

Some fiction.

I read Tree of Smoke over the course of fall. I remember looking for it in Chicago, at the Borders across from the Aragon, but I think my copy was ultimately mail-ordered. I loved Johnson’s spare, smooth style. I found the story of the grunt most compelling. The book lost momentum about 2/3 in, but I will definitely look to his other books when I have the chance.

Presently almost finished with Just’s Forgetfulness. I read An Unfinished Season a few summers ago, liking the writing but not being engrossed by the story. I am with this one. Forgetfulness is just about a perfect novel for my taste (with the last chapter to go). The first chapter had some rather contrived character development (picture a big flashing neon sign reading: insert childhood flashback here!), but since then has been an aesthetic bliss. And a perfect length. A short story stretched with perfect vivid detail into a Novel.

I’ve ordered Diaz’s novel for the next read.

Nonfiction: During one of my final exams, I perused by office bookshelf for something to skim during lulls in my proctoring duties, and picked up Prime Obsession. I ended up re-reading it over the next few days. I’ve read a few chapters into Ubiquity, which is a popularized account of a scientific field I work in. I skim and skip some paragraphs that go into details, but I like to see how the field is presented, and perhaps pick up some personal anecdotes. I’ve spent more time engrossed with Starr’s A History of the Ancient World (4th Ed.). There was a brief comment early on that made me wonder about his impartialities, but so far it’s been a smooth and informative read. This would be a follow up to Antiquity I read some months ago, when my reading was done outside.

I’ve also been reading some of Gauge Fields, Knots, and Gravity, and referring to some of my other differential geometry books, as I write about these topics myself. I try to write the tutorials I wished I has had as an upper level undergrad or green graduate student. We’ll see if they come to anything.

From this:

Soon after this study, Ong synthesized existing research into a vivid picture of the oral mind-set. Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,” whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

This helps me understand some of my students. Not that it was hard to understand… some people are clearly incapable of abstract thought. Which makes them incapable of anything I would call thought. There’s not much one can do about it in a single term, especially when basic literacy is not the subject of the course.

Basically, for Gen Ed courses, I have built-in a cushion that allows such students to pass the course, if they work hard, with basic recall only. A’s and B’s require demonstration of higher cognitive skills. But I question whether one should be able to obtain a college degree of any sort with a pre-literate, or as the article calls it, oral mindset. It’s clearly quite common.

From the prophet H. L. Mencken:

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost… All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.’ The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

After constant threatening for two years, today I tore the carpets out of the house. They were total crap to begin with, put in as the easiest way to cover everything, so no one will see what a shit heap it is. After many years of abuse, subjected to any manor of fluids that originate at canine orifices, it was time for them to go. It was time for them to go two years ago. But, I am slow.

The floor beneath is an immediate improvement. If it weren’t for all the corroded staple damage from the carpeting it would probably refurbish well. I will have to pull out some boards and see what I’m working with. But for a while, all I’ll be doing is removing staples and tackless strips. And aggravating my allergies enough to dehydrate from loss of snot.

Also, we will always assume that our manifolds are ‘Hausdorff’ and ‘paracompact’. These are topological properties that we prefer to avoid explaining here, which are satisfied by all but the most bizarre and useless examples.

From Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity by Baez & Muniain

Now that’s how a math book should be written.

William James, Habit:

The great thing, then, in education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day something for no reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need drawn nigh, it may find you not unnerved or untrained to stand the test.

If you can do nothing for half an hour, you might be able to do something for half an hour.

Reading:

Human Natures by Paul Ehrlich. Picked this up at Caveat Emptor some time ago, but it was put aside as I got into A History of Knowledge by Charles Van Doren. I really enjoyed that book, up until the modern era, when it started getting very questionable. I don’t remember if I actually finished it. I was also somewhat reticent about Ehrlich’s book. Something about the presentation, perhaps the title itself, was giving me the impression of an over-indulgent self-wanking book of quasi-scholarship. I’m happy to report its really pretty good. It reads to me like the Cliff notes for about twenty other books I’ve already read.

A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark. I’m piping in on a discussion of the book, including the author over at Marginal Revolution. It has many flaws, but I do think Clark is working with mostly valid ideas.

Gauge Fields, Knots, and Gravity by John Baez and Javier P. Muniain. Just for shits and giggles.

Journal reading: John G. Cramer’s work on the transaction interpretation of quantum mechanics, and some of the derivative work (I’m still looking for more). I have some ideas about this.

Read Bob Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians.