A lecture about bats. Also Die Nibelungen

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Die Nibelungen, Fritz Lang

Earlier this evening, Debbie and I attended a Science Pub in Father Luke’s Room at McMenamins Old St. Francis School, Bend, Oregon. It was presented by a Ph.D. from the HERS Lab at OSU-Cascades in the field of bats, Tom Rodhouse, Courtesy Faculty, and Co-Director, HERS Lab. He is a lead architect of the North American Bat Monitoring Program.

There were about a hundred attendees who participated in the pre-test quiz on the subject of the night. I don’t know much about bats, and I did miss one multiple-choice question of the ten presented. It was one of those number questions of how many of this or that are living in the state where even the scientists who study the subject are estimating. Only one person of the hundred present got all ten right, but I did get the runner-up booty prize which included a useful usb battery backup for cellphones, etc. Debbie and I win the prize so consistently that I have been accused of cheating by one of my friends. I don’t cheat!

Anyway, you can cruise around the internet and discover all you need to know about bats, but you won’t get the enthusiasm for the subject that a person actually doing the fieldwork radiates.

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I’m now going to watch some more of Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen, 1923-24. We are into our third viewing and only up to 3 hours 04 minutes and 33 seconds of 4 hours 35 minutes and 8 seconds. I’m so precise because this is a struggle. Not a life and death existential struggle for me, as it is for Siegfried and the other characters, but it is a painful challenge.

…

Just finished! We got through it. But, I would suggest that if you choose to watch this movie that you read the original poem first, or a summary. There is far too much confusing material to make sense of it. The sets and battle scenes are incredibly dangerous for the astonishing number of background actors.

Die Nibelungen is amazing, boring, hypnotizing, wonderful, dreadful, and excruciating to watch. It could only have been created by a battered nation of beaten people seeking meaning in an absolutely grotesque nightmare fantasy. It’s an emotional foundation of World War II, along with the reality of the situation at that time.

 

 

Dr Mabuse

Tags

Dr Mabuse, Dr Mabuse the Gambler, Fritz Lang, Movie review, World War I aftermath

Debbie and I are well launched into our Fritz Lang film festival. Having watched The Spiders part 1 (1919), Destiny (1921), and just finished Dr Mabuse the Gambler (27 April 1922) (YouTube). These century-old black and white silent movies with German text and English subscript translations make modern movies seem like weak imitations of the ideas first explored in these pathological films.

How true are these film representations of Germany in the years shortly after these people’s loss of national dignity after World War 1; and the massive amount of dead young men and destroyed country? “A summary of World War I casualties, compiled by the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service, lists 1,773,700 German war dead, 4,216,058 wounded, 1,152,800 prisoners, for a total of 7,142,558 casualties, an amazing 54.6 percent of the 13,000,000 soldiers Germany mobilized for the war”

From the distributor’s hand-out for the film:

“The world which opens up before our eyes in this film is the world in which we all live. Only it is condensed, exaggerated in detail, concentrated into essentials, all its incidents throbbing with the feverish breath of those years, hovering between crisis and convalescence, leading somnambulistically just over the brink, in the search for a bridge that will lead over the abyss. This gambler, Dr Mabuse, was not yet possible in 1910; he will perhaps – one is tempted to say hopefully – no longer be possible in 1930 (sic!) But for the years around 1920 he represents a larger than life-size portrait, is almost a symbol, at least a symptom. Mankind, decimated and trampled under by war and revolution, takes its revenge for years of suffering and misery by eating its lusts and pursuing pleasure . . .” (Lotte H. Eisner, Fritz Lang, p. 57)

There wasn’t a trace of the recent horrific war directly mentioned or referenced, but the despair of the people was ubiquitous in the film’s over-acting, with its characters desperately seeking deeper meaning in their every action. This movie came out shortly before Hitler’s failed attempt to take over German politics with a putsch (a violent attempt to overthrow a government.) He succeeded in 1932. But the putsch of November 1923 was described in Mein Kampf. It was written while he was in prison for his crime. I make this comparison because Dr Mabuse said his goal was to take over the minds of people and the whole world through mind control.

Dr Mabuse was made in personally violent times that make our current national threats seem insipid and foolish.

The Perfect Weapon by David E. Sanger – comments

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David E. Sanger, The Perfect Weapon

The book The Perfect Weapon is misnamed because the use of cyberattacks can cause damage that is unrelated to the sender of the attack. Because the reason for a specific attack is unknown, and often unknowable, the effect is to worsen the lives of the people affected but without giving them any knowledge of how to respond to improve the relationship. The use of cyber techniques to attack countries’ basic infrastructure lowers the overall capacity of the victim nation to thrive, but it doesn’t help the aggressor nation to thrive any better than the other nations of the world. However, if it is clear that a particular group is a primary beneficiary of an attack, then those are the ones who will be counter-attacked by the victims if that is possible.

The Perfect Weapon is terribly inefficient for communicating with the other “peaceful” nations what is the action they desire. It would be hoped that everyone would benefit from cooperation, but creating anxiety between nations by using cyber weapons will lessen everyone’s willingness to cooperate. It is counterproductive and self-destructive.

I know it is naïve to expect contending nations to behave kindly toward one another, but to behave otherwise brings anxiety to the perpetrators of cybercrimes as well as to their intended victims. The whole game is counterproductive because the perpetrators expect counter-attacks, and by attacking they set themselves up to be attacked and thus to become miserable.

Sometimes spying on other people’s intentions can make sense, because if you know clearly what the other people need and want it is possible to give them greater cooperation and satisfaction that will rebound to yourself. But to use cyber technology to spy so there can be greater disruptions to the lives of those other people will ultimately just bring retaliation. It is a vicious feedback cycle that can easily get out of control and potentially last forever.

I’m totally opposed to those kinds of secret actions, and I don’t recommend reading The Perfect Weapon because all a private individual can do is to defend themselves with feeble internet filtering tools, and there isn’t much, if any, good advice in the book on how we might do whatever it is that we need to do to protect ourselves.

These days a private individual is vulnerable. Sad. Enjoy.

 

21 Lessons by Yuval Harari – Some thoughts

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Book review - 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Homo Deus, Meditation, Personal survival strategy, Sapiens, Yuval Harari

 

Like Harari’s other books, Sapiens and Homo Deus, this book 21 Lessons has the feeling of easy first draft writing, but the ideas are turtles all the way down into his depths. He claims he writes from his experiences developed from his two hours per day of meditation and that none of these three books would exist without his meditations.

The science of brain exploration is progressing well, that is, an understanding of chemistry, electricity, synapses and such, but that isn’t the mind; it is just mechanistic functioning of the brain. It is like examining the mechanical operation of a car and thinking you understand cars. Whereas, for a human, the mind is more like using the car and having living experiences that are created by that car and in combination with the car’s unique qualities. The mind is not chemistry, it is the felt emotion in response to something internal to the body. There may be an external input of some kind that goes through the mechanism of the body and into the brain, but it is the mind that is experiencing the emotions and mediating what is to be learned from the experience. Probably there is another level within the mind that should have a separately defined state within this hierarchy. That is, the mind performs its functions, but it isn’t until the individual attends to these available ideas as a conscious interaction with other things that they become available for useful action. There may be reflexive reactions that occur as brain responses instantly to a threat stimulus, and mental responses that are slower emotionally driven actions, but when there is an interplay of a few ideas that are conscious they can become new and useful ideas never before encountered by humanity.

21 Lessons is ultimately about self-observation and Harari’s form of it is called Vipassana meditation, which may go back to the Buddha. I’ve been meditating for twenty minutes per day, but my mind is still a wild thing. It’s like watching squirrels chasing one another in the spring mating season. Harari says there are many forms of meditation and he has explored many of them in an attempt to understand his mind.

Following that idea into deeper meditations seems like a good idea to me.

 

 

Finally an approximate return to my normal life.

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Bend Bulletin, Diet and BMI, Inguinal hernia, My normal life returns, Prostate cancer, Returning to Seneca, Snow and ice removal, Snowpocalypse

A year ago I had just reached my year-long diet goal for attaining my perfect Body Mass Index (BMI) and was feeling really healthy. I could climb the four levels of our local parking structure to the rooftop two steps at a time and then walk across the top level to my parked car in comfort. Breathing hard of course, but comfortable. Then came a diagnosis of prostate cancer and I participated in forty-four radiation treatments. Here is an article in the Bend Bulletin, with photos, about the very device I laid in and the nurse that controlled my treatments. It was actually a pleasant experience and while in the waiting room I had many wonderful conversations with people experiencing similar life-threatening situations. I survived very well, some didn’t!

In my follow-up visit with my radiation doctor a month later I mentioned a new lump in my lower right abdomen. He checked it and declared I had an advanced inguinal hernia. I then visited my VA personal doctor within the week, and he began the paperwork for me to get the appropriate operation. That was completed eight days ago, and I am on the mend and feeling good and doing heavy-duty things like shoveling a lot of snow off my house roof, and chopping with a pick-ax through six-inch thick ice to clear things like street drains with huge water puddles around them.

I make a point of doing those things in such a way that there isn’t the slightest strain on my hernia stitches. With the forty degrees weather, the snow is melting and the main streets are dry, and our residential street is clearing up nicely, but there are many eight-foot high piles of snow about the city, and lots of puddles. My house has five-foot piles of snow continuously around all four sides. That snow is mixed with slabs of inch-thick ice that I pried off the roof. That is necessary to prevent ice dams that force water through the roof into the house. There are many cases of that problem with people I know. I wouldn’t be surprised if as many as ten percent of homes here in Bend had water intrusions and roof collapses. But who’s counting? The insurance companies I suspect are being hit hard.

I have never missed any of my daily social meetings during these months of “trials and tribulations,” and if I hadn’t mentioned them I suspect that no one would have guessed I had the slightest problem. Hopefully, these potentially horrible things are in abeyance for a while and I can spend more time with my philosophers.

My problems are trivial compared to Seneca‘s and the more carefully I read his writings the more orderly and quiet my life becomes.

Fourth post-op day and my medical ducks are bored.

It is now the fourth day since I had inguinal hernia surgery. Since then I’ve talked to a couple of guys about my surgery and compared to theirs it was duck soup; that is, there was only a little pain and that was when I did something I could control and not do again. Except for when coughing or sneezing I had no pain events that were serious enough that I considered taking the Oxycodone-Acetaminophen that was prescribed to me. I would rather observe my pain and avoid doing what caused it than suppress it and be dulled to my world of experience.

I don’t like having these drugs around and will dispose of them tomorrow morning if I sleep well tonight. I am doing some experiments with making an anti-sneeze/anti-cough spray. My current experiment is to dissolve a cough drop in whiskey and then spray that into my mouth when there is a tickle in my throat. There is nothing to report yet. As previously reported, if I could get a cough drop chewed and dissolved in my mouth in fifteen seconds, it would suppress the cough. By making the spray I can get that solution into my throat in a second or two but like I said, I have nothing to report yet.

I attended my usual conversations with my friends and they were as exciting as ever, perhaps a little too exciting because I overstated my opinion on something and offended a dear friend. Sorry. Later, in the afternoon I attended a scheduled group discussion, where I showed off a photo of my recovering incision. I held it life-sized over the site. Several of the guys mentioned what appeared to me as nostalgic memories of similar experiences.

On to more serious things. Because of this assault on my life, a modest assault, I have been thinking about my eventual death and what I wish that I had done, but haven’t done yet.

I don’t have much ambition to make money; actually I’ve never had much of that, and I do have enough to get by. Thanks to my medical bills being covered by the Veterans Administration because of my two years of military service as a pilot in the USAF, I haven’t been driven into desperation by this hernia operation.

I have some personal friends who treat me well, and I attend the UU church every Sunday and do a few routine good works there, so there is a mild feeling of satisfaction from that. I have several other small social groups that I attend regularly, and even though I miss the exhilaration of living in Berkeley for fifty-one years, what I am doing is meaningful enough.

I have Debbie as a multi-decades-long life companion and we get along so well that people often mention that in passing by. We rarely argue about money, or politics, or religion, or anything else except for the meaning and pronunciation of words. Even though I have been crankier than usual because of my medical problems the last few months, she has been a constant and reliable companion.

In my discussion group with about eighteen guys this afternoon I said something that was a bit much for them. I said that I didn’t mind dying or being dead, and didn’t expect to have any personal afterlife to look forward to; that instead, I felt comfortable returning to the nonliving matter of the Universe. That the Universe is such a spectacular thing that I feel good about becoming once again an unthinking part of its grandeur. That little speech didn’t get any hurrahs from those people, most of whom said they were praying for an afterlife where they would be reunited with their loved ones, but I felt that it might give them a feeling that everything would be okay even if that afterlife is what not happens to them personally.

Clearing one’s own mind from unnecessary stresses and helping other people to live more abundantly is enough.

How America Went Haywire

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Falsehoods are unchallengable, Haywire thinking, Trustworthiness of information, Truth is open to challenge, TST~

I’ve been reading Fantasyland by Kurt Andersen for a couple of weeks and it is disturbing to my intellectual and emotional equanimity. It is an interesting book to read but generates annoyance sometimes because he refers to interesting research papers from some people at some university somewhere. There are frequent footnotes but even so there are serious gaps in his arguments caused by lacunae in the links going back to his information sources. See page 262-3 for some examples.

I very much like the book and it gives a good effort at answering questions that have bothered me for years. Such as, why are so many Americans living their lives based on assumptions that are not only untestable but unrealistic, insane and destructive to the health and wellbeing of their true believers?

On the next page, 264, there is a plausible answer given by Thomas Jefferson, one of the key creators of our nation. “Thomas Jefferson said he’d ‘rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it’—and it would all be okay because in the new United States ‘reason is left free to combat’ every sort of ‘error of opinion.'”

All of that made sense back in the 1700s, when a hand-driven printing press was high tech and a thousand copies of an article would be a good print run. Also, only a few had access to those presses. Nowadays, everyone has access to the internet and can publish anything they can think up. Unfortunately, the most exciting things get read and redistributed, and easily mentally accessed flagrant lies get vastly more readership than carefully thought out, and carefully researched and linked analysis and opinion. What the internet public thrives on is the basest sort of undocumented, even undocumentable, scary stuff. Below is the chart of Trustworthiness of Information that I created in 2007, which lays out standards for various levels of believability of information. Click here for a big and printable view, and drag to the side for easy reference.

Trustworthiness of Information

The materials that are having the most influence at present on the internet are at the top of the chart: TST~0, A glorious Hoax with an ultimate authority seeking your abject belief, Unverifiable source of data with clear problems in the historical record and with probable translation spins. Unfortunately, expert frauds carefully done are impossible to identify, and there is no way of verifying them.

A bit of information that is at the highest level of trustworthiness requires (at TST~14) Cross Accountability by Known and accountable people with the goal of clarifying reality; they have a keen desire for irrefutable proofs. The best information comes from groups of cross-purposed accountable viewers observing the same ongoing events and agreeing. This involves presently viewable processes which can be easily challenged at every moment by the accountable and well informed outside people. Complete clarity always leaves material open to questioning.

TST~0 is the stuff of excitement usually found on the internet, and TST~14 is usually challenged by TST~0 believers because it is designed in such a way as to be falsifiable. Because TST~0 is unchallengeable it isn’t challenged and therefore is accepted as true. Unfortunately, Andersen’s book Fantasyland, while exposing a lot of TST~0 thoughts in others, commits some of them himself.

Thus the greatest falsehoods are easily defended and believed and the greatest truths are constantly challenged and therefore disbelieved. 

Do it right!!!” Emptying your brain and refilling it with the right stuff

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Buddha, Ego is the Enemy, Jesus, Lao Tzu, Ryan Holiday, Seneca, Socrates Cafe discussion

In the post last week, “Do it right!!!” Overfilling your brain with the right stuff, I complained about the author of Ego is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday, falling into a simplistic reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act I, Scene 3, 564-567, where Polonius, the king’s chief counselor, gives these concluding lines of advice to his son Laertes who is sailing away to University:

This above all – to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell. My blessing season this in thee!

The problem is that these words sound great, and they may be good advice most of the time when dealing with honest people, but at critical times like when someone is trying to murder you, it is a better policy for your own self-survival to be infinitely subtle and false to the planners of your demise.

The title of the book, Ego is the Enemy, and the cover of the book, with a beautiful Roman-style portrait bust statue with its head knocked off, perfectly state Holiday’s developmental problem. He is like an amalgamation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Polonius and Ophelia trapped in shortsightedness of the real problems of survival. 

Some of the greatest heroes of history looked ahead, saw their own demise at the hands of treacherous intellectual opponents, and chose to pursue their cause and in some bizarre way enjoy their own well-staged deaths. Seneca, Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Socrates seem to have realized that their method of departure from public life would bring immortality to their words. They wouldn’t live forever, but their actions as described in the form of word images are immortal and alive today. Shakespeare stated this well in

Sonnet 74

But be contented when that fell arrest
Without all bail shall carry me away;
My life hath in this line some interest,
Which for memorial still with thee shall stay.

When thou reviewest this, thou dost review
The very part was consecrate to thee;
The earth can have but earth, which is his due,
My spirit is thine, the better part of me;

So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,
The prey of worms, my body being dead,
The coward conquest of a wretch’s knife,
Too base of thee to be remembered;

The worth of that, is that which it contains,
And that is this, and this with thee remains.

Every moment I must choose what is the most important thing I can do NOW.

 

 

What do you want? Truth or truth? Beauty or beauty?

Tags

Anavysos Kouros, Church ceilings of the world., Living a life of little b beauty., What is beauty?, What is big B Beauty?, What is little b beauty?

A couple of posts ago I came down firmly on the side of little t for scientific truth rather than big T revealed Truth. The reason is simple for me, in that I can go and bring little t truth into my reality with personal experience. Whereas revealed big T Truth is always and forever hidden from me and I am compelled if I am to accept its Truths, to swallow the whole Kool-Aid. I much prefer untainted lemonade, which if I don’t like it, I can spit it out.

Can I apply this same style of judgment to the concepts for beauty? Is there such a thing as big B Beauty and little b beauty? What would be the qualities of big B Beauty? Applying the method above, big B Beauty would be fixed and I would be forced to accept it whole or not at all, and furthermore, there would be some form of punishment for not accepting it exactly as it is presented.

A couple of months ago I Googled beautiful church interiors and (click images and also go to) beautiful church ceilings – and I spent an hour marveling at the beauty and variety of this art form. And yet, as I see it now, it is a “take it or leave it” kind of beauty. It was created as a big B Beauty. In our modern world, we can go visit these Beautiful places without the threat of punishment but it was probably not always so. In their original formal settings, we would be compelled to enter these sacred places with our personal traditions in their proper place and inspected, or we were asked forcefully to leave and be forbidden from participating in the rituals.

What would little b beauty be? The beauties provided by “Mother Nature” come to mind. Sunsets, blue sky transitions, clouds, forest walks, waterfalls, still ponds, and quiet swamps. These we can all view freely without any form of punishment, if there aren’t any mosquitoes. Having been a lifetime people watcher, I would consider the most beautiful things on this planet to be people. The great variety of them and every one of them beautiful when you view them in the environment they have chosen to adapt themselves to.

Is that the core of beauty? Is any being located in an environment where it can thrive – just as it is – the key to its beauty? An hour ago I was looking at “The Anavyssos Kouros” on page 31 of “The Art Book” (which we got on a New Year’s deal for $10). What struck me first about this 530 BCE Greek sculpture was its obvious derivative qualities from classic Egyptian art forms, but when reading the caption it became apparent that this was a grave goods icon sculpture that accompanied a young soldier who died in battle. Is this sculpture’s perfect place for its existence accompanying a dead body of a beautiful young man?

I am presently living in a world of little b beauty and enjoying it very much.

The Origins of Creativity by Edward O. Wilson – review

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Edward O. Wilson, Eveish Selection, John Shelby Spong, Science combining with Religion, Science versus religion, The measure of man, Women choosing mates

The measure of man and everything else.

As always, a book by E. O. Wilson is a pleasant experience because he has a deep kindly wisdom of his subjects based upon a lifetime of being in the center of his scientifically inclined intellectual world. The goal of his creative instinct is to “translate the previously unperceived into the limited audiovisual world of human consciousness. … the advance will come with understanding the evolutionary forge in which culture was shaped, slowly and often painfully, from animal instinct.” … “The study of religion is an essential part of the humanities. It should nonetheless be studied as an element of human nature, and the evolution thereof, and not, in the manner of Christian bible colleges and Islamic madrassas, a manual for the promotion of a faith defined by a particular creation story.” (p. 194-95) This way of approaching religion is similar to 1st Presbyterian Bishop John Shelby Spong‘s approach which I discussed in several posts. Both of these scholars have had a life-long pursuit of truth from very different perspectives but have come close to a common worldview.

In Wilson’s concluding pages, he writes, “The real limitation of present-day philosophy is not clashes of authorial logic but incoherence, due chiefly to inattention to science. This is curious, since we are in what can reasonably be called the Age of Science, and science is positioned to combine with the humanities to rekindle the spirit of the earlier Enlightenments. I believe that the two, meeting in common inquiry, can at last solve the great questions of philosophy. … At the base, we need to explore ever more deeply the meaning of humanity, why we exist as opposed to having never existed. And further, why nothing even remotely like us existed on Earth before. The grail to be sought is the nature of consciousness, and how it originated. Equally fundamental is the origin and proliferation of life as a whole.” (p. 196-97) These two longish quotes illustrate the coming together of Bishop Spong and Harvard Professor Wilson.

What caught my eye was the sentence bolded by me but emphasized by Wilson with the words “The grail to be sought, … and how it originated.” That is precisely what was discussed in Selection – Natural, Sexual, Artificial and Eveish. Below is a quote from that post.

“Eveish selection is a new term delineating what we humans have been doing to other humans for over 50,000 years. It is a form of sexual selection but with a human difference. The older sexual selection tends to choose a single quality as a marker for genetic health and thus environmental adaptedness but Eveish selection chooses a composite of many, many qualities. Human women make their selection of mates based not only on animal vigor but on all of the qualities in a mate including those which distinguish humans from other animals. It is a very complex decision process because the environment is very complex and the qualities being valued are difficult to assess, even for humans. Women converse at great length with each other about humans the various human qualities and it is generally given the derogatory name of gossip. But, it is this measuring of humans against some infinitely variable complex of qualities which is what gossip is about and it is what ultimately improves the quality of the human species from one generation to the next.

Eve chooses Adam with a little help from her friends.

I made this composite picture, derived from Michelangelo’s “God creating Adam” and Goya’s “Naked Maja” to illustrate my theory of human-style selection in action. The picture shows Adam having ascended some difficulty, showing his prowess over another man and Eve choosing him as her mate but with the advice and counsel of a group of angelic friends whispering in her ear.

Males are still choosing females based on their physical attractiveness, health and vigor but females have been choosing males since the beginning of modern humans and of speech for all of those qualities which make us human. It is reasonable in this view to replace Michelangelo’s God as the creator of the human species with Eve and her talkative companions.”

It is women who are measuring man and breeding with the best available one.

The big problems for Wilson and Spong are answered by observing human women and who they choose to mate with.