Eric The Blue

Trying to understand

An offhand comment from Amanda, possibly elicited by an opinion expressed by one of the big-titted blondes on "Housewives of Orange County," reminds me that I have a hard time comprehending the pro-life position.  They don't like abortion, I get that.  But have they really thought it through?  Many of them allow for some exceptions to a general abortion prohibition--sexual assault, for example, and health of the mother.  But the arguments they advance for prohibiting abortion in every other circumstance should apply to these as well.  If a fetus is a person as surely as anyone with a social security number, then killing it to preserve the mother's health should not be allowed.  Regarding abortion after a sexual assault: it's like capital punishment for someone whose only crime is having a sexual predator for a father. 

By being opposed to abortion, ever and always, in any imaginable circumstance, the elderly robed virgins of the Roman Catholic Church achieve a kind of consistency.  But this is where the bumper-sticker put-downs come into view.  Not every sperm deserves a name.  Unfair?  Well, the argument does seem to involve a regress that the pro-lifer simply terminates at a convenient point in order not to appear ridiculous.  That "life begins at conception" means there can be no compromise with the view that the claims of the fetus on our moral attention advance with the pregnancy.  But why is conception the magical moment?  By what logic might it be permissible to use contraceptives?  And, for those who are against contraception, on what principle can one ever decide not to have sex?  Doesn't the decision to use contraception, or to choose not to have sex, deny the gift of life to what otherwise could have been an adorable little Tommy or Sue?

Then there are the thought experiments involving pro-lifers at the fertility farm, where a sudden conflagration threatens the lives of all God's children in the building.  If his 3-year-old has wandered off somewhere, should he search for it, or grab a few dozen stored, frozen embryos?  (He knows he can save their precious lives before the burning roof falls.)

Yes, I am being facetious.  But how can they tell? I know why I'd look for the 3-year-old.  But why would they? 

Netflix: Into Temptation

It was the local angle that landed this independent film in our Netflix queue: it's set and filmed in Minneapolis, and the writer and director, Patrick Coyle, is a neighbor whose kids catch the school bus at the same corner as ours.  I've never met him, but he and Amanda have exchanged pleasantries, and she popped out of her seat on the sofa when, in one scene, she saw his girls in the background.

The story concerns a young priest who works crossword puzzles while hearing confessions.  You know he's cool because, in addition to being bored by the sins of his congregants, he rides a bicycle, drinks beer, is sympathetic toward homosexuals, and not real sure of his vocation.  When a hooker confesses that she is going to kill herself on her birthday, he puts down the puzzle and sets out to find her outside the booth--an exercise that involves, for example, a night-time bike ride to Minneapolis's famous red-light district.  (There isn't one, but Mr. Coyle does his best to make Our Fair City look sinister.)  If I told you the priest has a love interest, a former girlfriend who's back in town after a divorce, you'd probably underestimate this movie, which seems (if an outsider may claim to detect it) suffused with religious feeling.  Recommended.

Wherein I concur with the Power Line philosophers

Our governor, Tim Pawlenty, who is obviously running for president, travelled to Washington to address the crazies at CPAC.  How did he do?  Here's a clue: at Power Line, John Hinderaker gives him the thumbs down.

Just bury him, then.

The whole riff on Tiger Woods's wife, and the 9-iron--what was that about? It seems someone must have been persuaded that it would be clever to work in a pop culture topical allusion.  Embarrassing.  When asked about it Sunday on Meet the Press, Pawlenty replied that "people still enjoy a sense of humor."  But the reason he was asked about it, of course, is that everyone recognizes it wasn't funny--just dopey and odd.

If you wanted to give Pawlenty the benefit of the doubt--I don't, but if you did--you might say that he is not a lunatic like all these CPAC attendees who voted for Ron Paul (Ron Paul!) in their presidential straw poll, and, not being one of them, but trying to appeal to their sensibilities, he almost inevitably sounded like a moron. 

Pawlenty, in other words, was so bad that trying to defend him against the charge of being a dope you end up saying, no, he is only craven.  Everything Hinderaker says is true, except that he'd be better off with Hinderaker as his speech writer.

Believe it or not, I am also generally sympathetic with this post by Hinderaker's sidekick, Scott Johnson.  But I would not call CPAC a "disgrace."  It's a freak show. 

Netflix: Funny People

Funny and sweet, some will say, and I will not contradict them, although those of a certain sensibility might say that all the penis jokes detract somewhat from the sweetness.  It's sort of long (almost 2.5 hours), and on some occasions, like the scenes involving speech acts by young children--the actual daughters of writer and director Judd Apatow and his wife, Leslie Mann, who plays Adam Sandler's love interest--you might feel a little too aware of the sweetness.  As long as I'm finding fault, let me add that, notwithstanding considerable raunchiness, the movie suffers from a conventional and sentimental conception of what makes a good life: it holds out as an ideal something more like a dyspeptic Hollywood billionaire's daydream of what he should have tried for than what he actually should have tried for. 

Nevertheless, nevertheless: highly recommended.

Wherein I prove I am a dweeb

Amanda's calculus course is progressing.  I am progressing, too--through Martin Gardner's update of Silvanus Thompson's Calculus Made Easy, and it's making me nostalgic.  I remember how, after first learning to differentiate functions, we had our first word problems, and how cool I thought it was to be able to solve, so easily, very practical problems that would be impossible were it not for the calculus. For example, I can still recall one of the problems from the second exam in Calculus I:

You want to build a storage shed that is to have a square base, a flat roof, and a volume of 1800 cubic feet.  Find the dimensions of the least expensive shed that can be built if material for the floor costs $1.20 per square foot, for the sides $3.00 per square foot, and for the roof $2.00 per square foot.

So there is a cost function, which we want to minimize.  The cost is the sum of certain areas multiplied by the cost of the material for that area, or

C = 1.2x² + (3.00)(4)xh + 2.00x²

The two variables are a potential road block but, as the shed is to have a volume of 1800 cubic feet, the height (h) can  be expressed in terms of the dimension of the square base (x), or 1800/x².  Now, combining like terms and substituting, we have

C = 3.2x² + (12x)(1800/x²) = 3.2x² + 21,600/x

This expression will have a minimum value when its derivative--here comes the calculus--is equal to zero.  So, differentiating, we get

dC/dx = 6.4x - 21,600/x²,

which is equal to zero when

6.4x = 21,600/x².

Doing the algebra, we get

6.4x³ = 21,600: x³ = 21,600/6.4:  x = 3375^1/3 = 15.

If the square base is 15 feet on a side, and the volume 1800 cubic feet, then the height has to be 1800/225, or 8.  The least expensive shed that can be built is 15 feet wide by 15 feet deep by 8 feet high.

Now calculus, like, say, "Shakespeare," has an undeserved mystical aura among subjects in the school curriculum.  We just got the right answer to what might have seemed to be quite a difficult problem.  All that was needed, besides a bit of algebra, was the power rule for derivatives--more like a straightforward technique than anything needing deep, mystic knowledge. 

If you are as big a dweeb as I you might enjoy this and this, among others.

Netflix: The Verdict

A redemption story concerning an alcholic, ambulance-chasing lawyer, played by Paul Newman, who, just when it looks as if he's mucked up his last chance, gets to the bottom of a medical malpractice case and produces a surprise witness whose testimony exposes the evil doctor.  The witness's testimony is thrown out, but the jury heard it, and returns the verdict the audience wants.  Wouldn't it be pretty if life were like that?

There are layers of implausibility.  For example, a doctor who will testify for Newman's side goes missing on the eve of the trial.  He had waxed eloquent on the incompetence of his colleagues before the defense paid him off.  That he is venal apparently is supposed to obscure the hole in David Mamet's script.  It's not till the end of the show, when Newman's witness gives dramatic testimony, that the truth comes out.  The disappearing expert witness is supposed to be a crushing blow to Newman's chances but there really was nothing for him to testify about.  The only person who could help Newman is the one he manages to turn out at the end.  Excepting the worldliness of Archdiocesan officials--it's a Catholic hospital that bungled the surgery--nothing about the movie makes much sense.  Sidney Lumet directs.

Language notes

This morning, on NPR, I heard the on-air personality refer to Lou Cannon as "Ronald Reagan's former biographer."  Are you only the author of a book while you are working on it?  "Philip Roth, former author of American Pastoral, is the current author of a work whose title is still unknown."  No, no, no, no.

At the store, express check-out lanes are reserved for those with "less than 10 items."  That sounds wrong, doesn't it?  To get in that line you should have in your basket fewer than ten items.  If you're talking about things you can count, fewer.  A smaller volume of something calls for less.  I think that's the rule.  Less water.  Fewer molecules.

On a graver note, Amy Davidson takes on "unprosecutable," as in, from the Washington Post, fifty of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay

are too dangerous to release but are unprosecutable and should be held under the laws of war, according to recommendations by a Justice Department-led review of all detainee cases.

It seems clear that what the Post, by way of the Justice Department, means by "unprosecutable" is "unconvictable."  For these prisoners could be prosecuted.  But that isn't going to happen, because if it did, they would likely be acquitted.  How is it that "unprosecutable" applies to these circumstances?  It doesn't. But it makes it easier for the mind to glide over some rough spots.

 

Three Newtons, all off the charts

Back in December, reviewing a review of a biography of Arthur Koestler, I noted, in connection with Koestler's interest in paranormal phenomena, that the blind spots of geniuses is an interesting topic.  Koestler's is actually a fairly pale case compared, say, to Isaac Newton.  Martin Gardner's essay on Newton in Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?--I recommend the whole thing--begins with the observation that there are three Newtons.  The first is the one most of us know about, the genius who "invented calculus, discovered the binomial theorem, introduced polar coordinates, proved that white light was a mixture of colors, explained the rainbow, built the first reflecting telescope, and showed that the force causing apples to fall is the same as the force that guides the planets, moons, and comets and produces tides." 

The second Newton was an alchemist and the third a Protestant fundamentalist.  The alchemist "struggled for decades to turn base metals into gold."  The fundamentalist was obsessed with biblical prophecies and left behind a million words on the Book of Revelation and the dream visions of the Old Testament's Daniel.  What a lot of intellectual energy he devoted to these topics! Had he been otherwise a miscreant I'd say it is good he had amusements to keep him off the street.  But for Isaac Newton--what a waste!

If Newton was prone to large errors, you should probably consider the possibility that your most cherished belief is bunk--even if you are a genius.

Packer versus the Tweeters

Over at the New Yorker site, staff writer and Interesting Times blogger George Packer trains a skeptical eye on Twitter, BlackBerries, and all their cousins.  Somewhere some user of a hand-held communication device must have been killed after stepping out into the street in front of a moving vehicle.  Perhaps the driver who ran over him was sending him a text.

Packer's piece has elicited a lot of discussion around the Web.  I'm on his side, and there's evidence.  More. But the debate is not new.  In Walden, for example, which was published in 1854, Thoreau offered the following assessment of the day's technological innovations:

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

He got a lot of things right.

Eric the Blue gets mail

Unsigned.  Various pictures of Obama dressed up as African shaman, et cetera.  And a picture of a black lab over text: "I signed my dog up for welfare.  Do you think he's eligible?  He's black, lazy & has no frigging idea who his daddy is. . . ."

If you're vile enough maybe people won't notice that you're an idiot, too.  I think that's the strategy.

Humor in a calculus text

Amanda is enrolled in a calculus course.  In order to brush up and be of occasional use to her, I've pulled from the shelf Martin Gardner's update of Silvanus Thompson's Calculus Made Easy.  I laughed out loud this morning when, reading along in chapter two, on limits, Gardner elucidates with a joke Zeno's paradox.  You know Zeno's paradox.  To complete a race, the runner must first get half way to the finish line, then must cover half of the remaining distance, and then half of that, and on and on. . . he can't ever make it to the finish, because it is guarded by an infinite number of "half ways."  The elucidation concerns a teacher who, to make the paradox vivid, told the prettiest girl in class to stand against one wall and one of the boys against the opposite wall.  The boy then advances across the room till he is half way to the girl.  After a pause, he advances again, covering half the remaining distance.  After another couple advances, the girl teases, "You'll never get here!" 

"True," answers the boy, "but I'll get close enough for all practical purposes."

No, we can't

In a post from last November, I noted that Obama had so far not repealed the postlapsarian state, but I gave his Administration credit for the decision to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a courthouse in Lower Manhattan.  "That is how we used to do it in this country," I soaringly concluded, "and we can do it again."

No, we can't.  Very disappointing.

On the other hand, it was a compensation to watch Obama's performance in Baltimore, where he confronted the House Republicans and, blending politeness with thinly veiled irritation at their ignorance, brushed aside lame talking points by introducing into evidence the facts of this case and that one.  Eric the Blue could not vote for a Republican but politics is more fun when there is someone to cheer for--and when there is some prospect of advancing the cause of decency.

If you do not watch the video you can still get some idea of how impressive the president looked, especially in comparison to his Republican interlocutors, who all appeared determined to do their best Polonius imitation ("The bow is bent, let loose the arrow"), by reading Power Line.  Mirengoff, the only one of the trio who sometimes visits Planet Earth, offers grudging, tardy admiration.  The silence of the other two yapping dogs is even more telling.