Monthly Archives: October 2012

An extract from The Last Lost World

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As I’ve men­tioned, I’m read­ing and enjoy­ing Pyne & Pyne’s The Last Lost World, inso­far as it isn’t a “pop­u­lar­iza­tion” of Pleis­tocene pale­on­tol­ogy so much as it is a use­ful and well-​​built con­struc­tion com­bin­ing aspects of lit­er­ary crit­i­cism and sci­ence report­ing to that field. That is, in this book we’re actu­ally talk­ing about nar­ra­tives, and sur­fac­ing the ten­sion in sci­en­tific dis­course between the cre­ation of gen­eral robust facts and obser­va­tions as opposed to the con­tin­u­ously multi-​​scaled dynam­ics of the actual world: the ways in which a “species” becomes “real” for example.

Mid-​​book, I find the fol­low­ing lovely lit­tle pas­sage. In a sense it says: per­haps finally we can pro­ceed mind­fully. Maybe that’s what I’m ask­ing for when I harp so much and often about the lack of sci­ence (and please, some­day, engi­neer­ing) books like this one: that it is time now to be mind­ful of our roles in the world we cre­ate or discover.

It was how that trans­fig­u­ra­tion had hap­pened [from Dar­win to Neo­dar­win­ism] that per­haps holds the most inter­est. In con­clud­ing the Ori­gin of Species Dar­win imag­ined “a tan­gled bank” over­flow­ing with liv­ing forms yet orga­nized by dis­cernible laws, and while full of “grandeur,” a scene that did not result from a pre­formed pat­tern. Yet as Ernst Cas­sirer has argued, “Man can­not escape from his own achieve­ment.” Darwin’s tan­gled bank has been replaced by a “tan­gled web of human expe­ri­ence” that weaves together lan­guage, myth, art, reli­gion, and all the other strands of humanity’s “sym­bolic net.” That pecu­liar capac­ity of human thought remade Darwin’s tan­gled bank into a shelf of braided nar­ra­tives in which the entwin­ing of genomic and geo­graphic data had to play out over a cul­tural land­scape: that was where, to con­tinue the anal­ogy, the selec­tion would take place. The revival of neo-​​Darwinian con­cepts, how­ever, too often brought with it a neo-​​Darwinian sci­en­tism that failed to apply to its own inform­ing con­ceits the per­spec­tive it demanded of oth­ers. In par­tic­u­lar, it made Dar­win­ian evo­lu­tion an act of spe­cial creation.

It was a sim­plis­tic nar­ra­tive that assumed that ideas could be dis­cov­ered out of data the way bones could be found in sand­stone or tuff, and it viewed the progress of bio­log­i­cal sci­ence (and archae­ol­ogy) in a way par­ti­sans scorned when oth­ers applied it to their own fields. They did not appre­ci­ate the extent to which their explana­tory ideas, even the the­ory of organic evo­lu­tion, had a long his­tory, and that, like Equ­uus cabal­lus within the equids or Homo sapi­ens among the hominins, the idea was not the intended end prod­uct towards which all research had trended but the selected sur­vivor of ancient stock, a prod­uct of hap­pen­stance, his­tor­i­cal con­tin­gency, and use­ful­ness. Dis­ci­pli­nary his­to­ries tended to be tele­o­log­i­cal, as nar­ra­tive must be; the his­tory of the idea of evo­lu­tion was thus orth­o­genic in ways the theory’s advo­cates denounced when applied to nature.

Dar­win­ian evo­lu­tion was less a spe­cial cre­ation, the spark of a divine insight, than it was the rough, imper­fect, best adapted, use­ful, and can­tan­ker­ous out­come of a tedious and often errant chron­i­cle of obser­va­tions and imag­in­ings. It was a pow­er­ful idea, and once dis­cov­ered, des­tined (so it seemed to many) to ram­ify across whole con­ti­nents of learn­ing. It offered a promised con­silience, which could seem the apex to which all prior study had tended. But such appar­ent inevitabil­ity was an inher­ent con­struct of nar­ra­tive, and just as an organism’s traits are not intrin­si­cally bet­ter or worse but bet­ter or more poorly adapted to its set­ting, so it is with ideas. The evo­lu­tion­ary par­a­digm achieved much of its power and reach because it tapped into very old tra­di­tions of thought. Far from being a rad­i­cal inno­va­tion with­out prece­dent, Dar­win­ian evo­lu­tion had itself evolved by fits and starts out of one of the hoari­est con­cepts in West­ern civ­i­liza­tion, the Great Chain of Being.

The March of Revision

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A long time ago, sev­eral careers ago indeed, a bunch of us grad­u­ate stu­dents nabbed the Depart­ment van and drove from Oxford to Colum­bus to see Stephen Jay Gould speak at Ohio State Uni­ver­sity. For those of you too young or unfor­tu­nate to have heard Gould speak: he was good. Not merely TED-​​talk good, but a man who spoke as he wrote: with paren­the­ses and ellipses and em-​​dashes, long big-​​bite cogent thoughts, paragraph-​​structured. And musical.

So imag­ine him. Imag­ine him alive or as a ghost, and in par­tic­u­lar speak­ing about the Myth of Progress. I don’t hon­estly recall whether he talked about the Myth of Progress when he was speak­ing in Colum­bus that night; it might have been about Cre­ation­ism (which was hot in those days) or some other irra­tional­ity. But today you and I, we’re going to chat a bit about the Myth of Progress, and I’m invok­ing Gould as its stal­wart foe.

That said, this isn’t going to be about how Sci­ence (done right) can help peo­ple think in the world. Indeed, it’s about how Sci­ence (as she is done) is fuck­ing up how peo­ple think. Includ­ing, I should empha­size, the major­ity of Sci­ence. And Engi­neer­ing. And more or less all pub­lic pol­icy there­from derived.

So as it exists in my head, the Myth of Progress lives some­where between being a folk heuris­tic, a bad habit of visu­al­iza­tion, and a for­mal­ized mis­un­der­stand­ing of how the bio­log­i­cal world actu­ally works. The Great Chain of Being is one facet: the notion, expanded and locked in since the Neo­pla­ton­ists, that the world is orga­nized along a lovely axis lead­ing (in some sta­tic sense) from imper­fectly prim­i­tive on up to per­fect and holy. The March of Progress illus­tra­tion you’ve seen par­o­died in so many adver­tise­ments is another facet: the gam­bol­ing mon­key, the crouch­ing ape, the slumped cave man, the dude strid­ing pur­pose­fully ahead, and so on. And so on.

Now Stephen Jay Gould, he wrote a lot on the sub­ject of the Myth of Progress. I am not him, and heaven for­fend I tread even near his emi­nent foot­steps, so I am going to sum­ma­rize what he said on the Myth of Progress for my own pur­poses here: It is not just bull­shit, it’s dan­ger­ous bullshit.

Evo­lu­tion doesn’t col­lapse down into a lin­ear any­thing, and it’s not just wrong but mis­lead­ing to take the branch­ing net­work of descent and cross-​​breeding and abuse it that way. Evo­lu­tion doesn’t pro­ceed by dis­crete steps, and it’s not only wrong but mis­lead­ing to imply that species replace one another. Evo­lu­tion doesn’t even pro­ceed when you get right down from it. It is always hap­pen­ing, every­where, all over: all the things that ever hap­pen among organ­isms and their envi­ron­ments are in a real sense “evo­lu­tion going on”.

There are sub­tleties in this, of course. A lot of the more insid­i­ous ones even biol­o­gists fall prey to. There’s the ten­dency towards call­ing bac­te­ria “prim­i­tive” because they were first. And don’t get me started on the swarm of philo­soph­i­cal traps that com­prise the ill-​​formed notions of begin­nings and end­ings, births and extinc­tions, even the nature and def­i­n­i­tions of “indi­vid­u­als” and “species”. Some day when we’ve both got more time, we’ll do a bunch of oner­ous myth­bust­ing on these themes.

Maybe. Who knows? But this morn­ing I’m here to talk about writing.

Ah, tra­di­tion. You start with an idea or two, and maybe you out­line or you blast out a tex­tual draft, and then maybe you print it or you step away and come back to the top of the file, and work through it all, and maybe restruc­ture it, and then there’s this phase where you see incon­sis­ten­cies on a num­ber of scales or notice short­com­ings in ref­er­ences or links or illus­tra­tions, and you con­verge and you refine and you stay up late and then you’re done.

You write a lit­tle gam­bol­ing mon­key of a draft, and you work your way up to the cocky dude with a spear on his shoul­der. You slap him into an email attach­ment or a manila enve­lope, drop a cover let­ter on him, and off he goes, done. In the Record. Your baby.

Your prop­erty, among other things. Your rep­u­ta­tion, your name, your ideas or at least your re-​​presentation of care­fully acknowl­edged other people’s ideas.

OK, maybe it’s not that sim­ple. Maybe you’ll get it back with some sug­gested cor­rec­tions, and you’ll do a cou­ple of fur­ther steps of the dance to move it to a more advanced state, and then that’s what’s done. Or maybe you real­ize later than is typ­i­cal that there’s a dif­fer­ent qual­i­ta­tive struc­ture of your writ­ten thing called for, per­haps some­thing that became appar­ent only after you’d mostly-​​completed an ear­lier ver­sion, and you revise, but then the refine­ment process starts again and… well, done is done.

You own that done thing. If you’re col­lab­o­rat­ing, maybe all of you own it. But it’s owned, right?

Now, some Unthink­able Things:

  1. You return to an ear­lier ver­sion of a writ­ten work in progress, and start refin­ing that—without aban­don­ing the other branch. In other words, you take a “writ­ten work” two dif­fer­ent direc­tions at once.
  2. You keep chang­ing a work after it has been deliv­ered with­out explic­itly indi­cat­ing that it has been changed.
  3. Some­body else takes an ear­lier (pri­vate) ver­sion of your work, and revises that in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion, with­out sup­plant­ing or replac­ing your com­pletely per­sonal one.
  4. You don’t give credit to other people’s ideas that appear in your work. No links, no cita­tions, not even any block quotes.
  5. Some­body else builds on a “final” ver­sion of your work, and doesn’t explic­itly acknowl­edge your contribution.

Bad, bad stuff. Icky squicky stuff for writ­ers and sci­en­tists and pho­tog­ra­phers and more or less any­body in the Life of the Mind.

And yet, and yet, and yet.

Stuff hap­pens, doesn’t it? All of them hap­pen. Stu­dents of course do this stuff, mere prim­i­tive Stu­dents who have not yet been cor­rected. And insid­i­ous scoundrels, who have not yet been brought to jus­tice. Oh, and the absent-​​minded some­times will do some of those, espe­cially the ones where they for­get to give credit where due. And there’s uncon­scious pla­gia­rism of course, and self-​​plagiarism, and there are some rit­u­al­ized ways one can (for exam­ple) take a prior work and bun­dle it up in a new work by expan­sion or repurposing.

So those happen.

And then there’s this odd thing about the Pub­lic Domain: It per­mits all those things. You could put zom­bies in Pride and Prej­u­dice if you wanted, with­out men­tion­ing the lady who wrote it, but it might not be as widely read with­out the invo­ca­tion of her rep­u­ta­tion. If instead you took an obscure magazine-​​serialized anti-​​Catholic novel of the 1850s and set it in space, and nobody had ever seen it besides maybe ever-​​watchful Miriam Burstein… but it might [well] end up being a bet­ter book.

That’s just to speak of inten­tion. There’s also just noise, isn’t there? What is “done”? You write until the writ­ing is done, but you don’t count type­set­ting: there are a dozen other peo­ple some­times between you ship­ping off your “fin­ished” dude with his spear and the dis­counted book on the remain­der shelf at the side of the book store. There are copy edi­tors (hope­fully), and copy-​​and-​​paste errors, and type­set­ting, and print­ing and impo­si­tion… all sorts of vari­a­tion can crop up from “the system”.

And a librar­ian or a book­seller or an Infor­ma­tion Sci­en­tist or maybe even just that rare Eng­lish stu­dent who pays atten­tion will spend as long as you like speak­ing on the sub­ject of “ver­sions” and “works” and “edi­tions” and “variants”.

So, then. What is a book or a paper or a blog post or an inven­tion, that a species is not? You can­not make the argu­ment that a species is “real” where a work is not, because of course the notion of species is just as fraught. Which is why Stephen Jay Gould is in the room, his ghost watch­ing and grin­ning (I hope), ready to jump in with a long well-​​formed sen­tence to remind you: None of these things is a thing. They can be use­ful. They can help us do work, and tell bet­ter sto­ries about the world. But “species” has a his­tory, and has bad edges; “indi­vid­ual” and “descent” even have bad edges, when you get right down to mater­nal effects on devel­op­ment and microflora and epi­ge­net­ics and all that other stuff that’s use­ful in speak­ing of excep­tions in biology.

Those excep­tions are evi­dent to any advanced prac­ti­tioner. They leave the biol­o­gist a choice: to either steer well clear of prob­lem­atic areas, or to jab a fin­ger down inside to see what happens.

jab

In soft­ware we have the begin­ning of a very dif­fer­ent notion of the bounds of things. There is col­lab­o­ra­tion, there are anas­to­moses in the “tree” of soft­ware, and a grow­ing cul­tural norm that reuse and reusabil­ity are not only per­mit­ted but rewarded. There are licenses, and there are rep­u­ta­tions and liveli­hoods made by shar­ing. Great Minds of our day, like Clay Shirky and Steve John­son, they’re pok­ing at these very holes in the con­text of prop­erty, progress, own­er­ship and col­lab­o­ra­tion. The law and the Inter­net, the social and the academic.

Me, I’m no Great Mind. I’ve got a monot­o­nous bor­ing old thing I always always do: I ask why? You might be tempted to spank a five-​​year-​​old who plays too often with the iter­ated “Why?” In my case… well, con­sider that astute obser­va­tion of George Bernard Shaw’s before you try that approach.

What might hap­pen if you let one of those Unthink­able Things hap­pen? Just let it go. What might happen?

Why?

I don’t know. That’s why I ask. But there’s one thing I learned a long time ago about life in the world: Even­tu­ally every­thing hap­pens. There is a niche, a con­text, a way of life in every approach.

Too long. Do not read.

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The other day I wrote a bit about remem­ber­ing, and things oth­er­wise unre­marked tied together to make the cloth of his­tory. This was framed a bit as a reac­tion to purg­ers, cleansers, sim­pli­fiers and the norm, but really? Really it was a circle’s line cross­ing sev­eral times (they can do that, you know).

I use that phrase “draw­ing a cir­cle” often. It’s Charles Fort’s, orig­i­nally. Go look it up if you need remind­ing. He was a crazy old crack­pot of a fel­low, Char­lie was. Amus­ing, though: he could after all tell an engag­ing story.

Any­way, a decade is a fool­ishly long time to draw a cir­cle; fif­teen years, twenty years, a life­time even cra­zier. You get wild some­times along the path, or jit­tery, or buf­feted off course, or just plain bored. Even­tu­ally you don’t end up with any­thing quite so pre­cise or Zen as a “cir­cle”. But you draw, and what you draw you call a cir­cle because that’s what the metaphor demands: it’s always a circle.

I think 1997 it was I had a chance to visit Trin­ity. The place with the bomb, and the place about which I wrote my first blog-​​ramble thing about my father’s sto­ries of work­ing on high-​​speed cam­eras capa­ble of tak­ing pho­tographs of nuclear explo­sions, and how (because surely the records are gone, or at least unre­marked) those pho­tos of the grow­ing blos­som of Trinity’s explo­sion must there­fore be his, mine, ours, that camera’s. I called it “nanohis­tory” back then; it was a bit of a gag on nan­otech­nol­ogy I thought, and the future, and also mul­ti­scaled phe­nom­ena which we were all doing back in the day, but that was the thing I saw and wrote.

By now some of the folks who ate Green Chili Cheese­burg­ers with me at the Owl (best in the world) and rode the Trin­ity bus that day have had strokes. Some Ph.D.s are granted; some wives are dead. They’ve moved out of their well-​​preserved Mod­erne homes along the Turquoise Trail, they’re still liv­ing in Santa Fe, they’re where they went. And so on. Years of lit­tle accu­mu­lated drifts have piled up around the line they drew col­lec­tively. Unre­marked (at least by me) since the day I filled a roll of 35mm film with their por­traits lit by White Sands sun.

And in that time I’ve emp­tied out the house where my father’s and mother’s mate­r­ial sto­ries, their “mem­o­ra­bilia”, was stock­piled, and picked up new habits and careers, had deaths and all kinds of wig­gles of my own. Even the ram­bling essay I wrote in Santa Fe is nearly gone from the world. Its ear­lier ver­sions are surely gone, as I never have been both­ered to keep older ver­sions, early edits, that sort of thing, and I just threw away the diskettes a week or two back. In the trash. There is no machine in my house that could read them, after all, so why bother with drafts of unread rambles?

This is nor­mal stuff. Mun­dane; entirely of the world. But it’s about remem­ber­ing. Being reminded.

We were invent­ing Big Data back there in the late 1990s. Have I told you that? I think I’ve apol­o­gized for it already. But some of the very peo­ple at Trin­ity with me that first Sat­ur­day in Octo­ber fif­teen years back were the founders of bioin­for­mat­ics. Some of us are the data min­ers who wres­tle piles and reams of ASCII and pix­els into cobbled-​​together con­trap­tions we built from folk wis­dom and jury-​​rigged repur­posed com­po­nents we dragged out from the garage. We were dis­cov­er­ing how to ren­der data down into clar­i­fied, burn­ing util­ity: mod­els, pre­dic­tions, and above all con­trols.

Con­trol was a big one, and I think the most ironic. After all, we were com­plex­ol­o­gists: for fuck’s sake we were the End of Sci­ence, with our hand-​​waving anec­do­tal sub­jec­tive con­tin­gent agent-​​based mod­els. We were about emer­gence, the not just uncon­trolled but inexplicable.

Though it didn’t really work out that way some­how. Nowa­days not many of us are left here in the Prover­bial Woods. There’s a fad or a rev­o­lu­tion or a war or some­thing, or so I hear, and the vast major­ity have put on ill-​​fitting suits and gone down to the City to be hired up by Big Data Distilleries—Big Brother, Data Sci­ence, and even a few at the Tower of Words. Those folks stroll the aisles now under sus­pended ceil­ings of fluorescent-​​lit data cen­ters, pat­ting earnest work­ers in (prover­bial) white lab coats on their shoul­ders. Either that, or they fell to the ser­vice of cor­po­ra­tions, and their work became the jar­gon of the Street, which dearly loved our Edges of Chaos and Emer­gences and Non­lin­ear­i­ties as handy excuses for doing what had already been decided: mak­ing this world we live in.

Just a few of us left here End­ing Sci­ence these days. A lit­tle bit at a time, the work goes on until we’re all bought off or dead. We’re not a colony in any sense now of course; more in the role of folksy fogeys in the shad­ows of the diner down­town, talk­ing up con­tin­gency and nar­ra­tive, while cling­ing to an obso­lete human­is­tic def­i­n­i­tion of “emer­gence” and “path-​​dependence” nearly all worn to thread like a quilt in a barn.

Yeah, well. At least there’s coffee.

Hey, here’s a funny thing: Did you know it’s no longer obses­sive com­pul­sive dis­or­der when you col­lect a petabyte of data from a par­tic­u­lar rat neu­ron and absorb your months’ atten­tion focused on just the lovely pat­terns in the spike trains? Or that it’s no longer hoard­ing when you’re dri­ven to stock­pile every dig­i­tized book in the entire world? Or that even the old saw about try­ing the “same thing over and over and expect­ing dif­fer­ent out­comes” doesn’t really come into play nowa­days when the things you keep try­ing are the func­tional capac­i­ties of com­bi­na­to­r­ial vari­ants of pro­tein sequences? And! And! It isn’t eavesdropping—you are not a scary neigh­bor lady—when all the phone calls of a city are pressed into your ser­vice of know­ing what those damned kids are doing over there, with their par­ents away (it shouldn’t be allowed)!

That’s infer­ence now, not madness.

It’s the fron­tier we (and oth­ers not far out along our social net­works) opened up for you all, about the time we rode the dusty road into Trin­ity. All those things are now new kinds of ser­vice. Not a sad lone mad­ness left among them.

[“Isn’t that inter­est­ing, isn’t that inter­est­ing.” That’s what my sharp old friend Lew Tilney would have said, with­out a sin­gle ques­tion mark at all, when I was dazedly walk­ing the halls of Leidy Labs try­ing des­per­ately to dis­cover what was wanted of me by my supe­ri­ors. He’d walk up and slap his hand down on your shoul­der and say, “Tozier! You know about trees! I was just read­ing about trees! Did you know there’s absolutely no damned way water can get to the top of trees? Physics won’t han­dle it! Now isn’t that inter­est­ing.” And he’d stride down the hall in his red socks and I’d wish I could see what came of that thread, instead of hav­ing to jus­tify the count­ing of com­bi­na­to­r­ial pro­teins’ func­tions to peo­ple who found it mad. I learned years too late that Lew was always right every time he told you, “Now isn’t that inter­est­ing.” It was and is always inter­est­ing, salient, con­nected. There is never any ques­tion to mark.]

So a point is, that I wouldn’t be sur­prised if there was a time around 1900 when talk­ing into boxes and expect­ing an answer stopped being con­sid­ered mad­ness. Or a time when act­ing as though you knew what a per­son far away was doing that very day didn’t make folks laugh. And so on. You get that pic­ture? Now isn’t that interesting.

At any rate, some of the peo­ple on that bus to Trin­ity, and plenty more who didn’t make the trip that day, or who I met later or ear­lier in my life by a few years one way or the other—they made all these mad­nesses into stuff you see on mag­a­zine cov­ers and RSS feeds.

And I love that. I can’t tell you how lucky I’ve been to fall into this hobby of watch­ing smart peo­ple notic­ing things.

It feels like “mad­ness” peri­od­i­cally becomes the fab­ric of soci­eties, in turns, as new trans­for­ma­tive tech­nolo­gies come online and escape and spread and do their stuff. I could be more focused I’m sure, more jour­nal­is­tic. I could refer to one of those Philoso­phers of Sci­ence you only really see in epi­grams these days, Kuhn or Lakatos or some­body. But not this time; this is mere folksy ram­bling, not obser­va­tion of a sort that’s useful.

I just noticed, is all. Way I see it, this is me just hav­ing fun watch­ing smart peo­ple start­ing to try to real­ize they ought maybe to notice some­thing again. And undoubt­edly I’ll just sit here and watch for a while more, and when nothing’s forth­com­ing, maybe I’ll just change the subject.

Not worked it out? Well, that’s fine, that’s fine. No rea­son to stop chat­ting, is it?

Maybe we ought to shift gears, talk about the human­i­ties for a while. Wikipedia (I smile for some rea­son when­ever I link there these days) says the human­i­ties are dis­ci­plines that study the human con­di­tion. “Dis­ci­plines” is another word that makes me smile nowa­days, too, thank Abbott.

You know, I have a fond respect for those poor folks in the human­i­ties. Per­sonal fond­ness even. When I was a kid, it was decided I was either going to go to Case and be a biol­o­gist, or go to Ober­lin or what’s that other place’s name that begins with a D—I can’t recall—and be an Eng­lish major. A writer sort. Senior year it was old Bill Caw­ley, my high school Eng­lish teacher (so hard not to say “pro­fes­sor”, isn’t it?) who slapped a hand down on my shoul­der and told me peo­ple actu­ally still could make a liv­ing, if a hard one, writ­ing. But I picked the other, and luck­ily too because I met my beloved wife of twenty-​​five years (amus­ingly enough in a His­tory of Sci­ence course, about sto­ries, words, though we barely paid atten­tion at the time for love), and as a pretty good sci­ence sort I got even­tu­ally to that bus in Trin­ity, and learned or to some extent made up the skills of Big Data. And here I am. A folk­ways prac­ti­tioner of complexology.

Along the way I spent time in var­i­ous acad­e­mies and such. Over there sat the archae­ol­o­gists, writ­ers, the his­to­ri­ans and all those other human­i­ties folks (who I swear actu­ally wear tweed some­times), cling­ing to shrink­ing islands of depart­ments in the context-​​focused Trans­formed Uni­ver­si­ties of the Aus­tere Era. Try­ing dili­gently to instill a love of let­ters, or story, or mem­ory or some­thing in the thou­sands of kids who trooped through the lec­ture halls.

Kids are still, at least for the moment, expected to get an embed­ding cul­tural frame­work slapped around them, if only to keep them good cit­i­zens and informed vot­ers and able to see per­spec­tive on the human con­di­tion. Though not too much.

What­ever is the “human con­di­tion” these days? Surely it’s 2.0 by now. It’s a kind of mad­ness to think it hasn’t changed, that peo­ple haven’t been trans­formed utterly by all this net­work­ing and hav­ing machine intel­li­gences at hand with which they can sift the raw data of the rev­o­lu­tion to pro­duce infor­ma­tion, util­ity, weal and woe of var­i­ous sorts. I mean: we have a new ubiq­ui­tous sen­so­rium! A dif­fer­ent world, in which Sci­ence didn’t End at all.

And see all of pub­lic pol­icy seems now to want to do away with the waste Great Works entail, the dis­trac­tion from what kids want and what’s best for them. Ide­ally they should be get­ting jobs, and learn­ing skills, and prepar­ing for what­ever it is Big Data uncov­ers “auto­mat­i­cally”. That’s what I seem to hear. Polit­i­cally con­ser­v­a­tive folks want to do away with the thoughts that the human­i­ties pro­voke; polit­i­cally lib­eral folks want to do away with the ties to benighted and inhu­man Bad Old Hege­monic Times the human­i­ties rehu­man­ize. In both cases I think it’s maybe the sense of incon­sis­tency you get from read lit­er­a­ture and dis­cussed his­tory that’s the biggest threat. We talk of the human­i­ties in terms of waste and inutil­ity, but really they’re seen as a threat.

They’re con­fus­ing. They dilute the story of the present and the future.

Let­ters, you see, are com­plex. His­tory isn’t glib, it’s really never glib: it’s got folds tucked into its folds, and every­thing seems to mean some­thing else to some­body else. The human­i­ties are oner­ous because they’re all so tied together by these con­fus­ing per­sonal sub­jec­tive acci­den­tal ram­i­fied net­works that reach back down into the stacks of libraries we’re emp­ty­ing, and mean­ings and usage we’re gloss­ing over these days.

And so they’re dan­ger­ous. Lean times call for lean­ness; what’s needed now is an effi­cient abil­ity to frame every action­able item and sort it on the basis of deliv­ered value. His­tory doesn’t have a lane on the kanban.

It’s a waste­ful kind of mad­ness to dive down too far into old books. And a dan­ger­ous kind of mad­ness to force kids who might bet­ter be work­ing in the present and build­ing our future to sit quiet and look instead into the past. What could they pos­si­bly gather up from that well-​​trod ceme­tery soil? Things are dif­fer­ent now.

By now you’re think­ing I’m bemoan­ing the end of the human­i­ties depart­ments and the clo­sure of libraries and the loss of all that tweed. Really? You know, that would be a nice sim­ple story you could dis­till out of this path if you like: “Dagnab­bit, wouldn’t it be bet­ter if we taught kids Greek again? Why not add Let­ters and His­tory to STEM, and make it… STEMLH. Crap. We’re going to need more vow­els. Get Art on the phone, stat.”

But no, that’s not what I’m encir­cling. That’s been done, and besides I’m sup­posed to be End­ing Science.

The trick is, Sci­ence is all tied and twisted up in the Human­i­ties, Snow notwith­stand­ing. They’re jeal­ous sib­lings, copy­ing one another in turn. Now isn’t that interesting.

Here’s what I love about the human­i­ties, at this junc­ture: Just as every fam­ily gath­er­ing has that mem­o­rable crazy Aunt or Uncle, the human­i­ties still insist on com­ing to our metaphoric Thanks­giv­ings and ram­bling on about their per­sonal hobby horses.

Bru­tal frank­ness: I like them human­i­ties folks much bet­ter these days than I like most of my Sci­encey Engi­neery cohort, or most any of the folks who sit with me at con­fer­ences of learned soci­eties nowa­days when I deign to drag myself down to the City and attend. They’re all good peo­ple who com­pute and sift and train up the Future, but they are nonethe­less a bor­ing old bunch. That stereo­type is still just as true as the tweed human­ists’ trope.

Ah but see, those human­i­ties folks, they can tell a story. And they remem­ber stuff. Crazy stuff, like how to read the ship­ping man­i­fests of third cen­tury Asia Minor, or how some ellip­tic ref­er­ences to “death” are really horny poet-​​talk while oth­ers are about tuber­cu­lo­sis. And this one is best, as I see it: They’re will­ing to use the word “remem­ber” to refer to acts of con­struc­tion.

They apol­o­gize a lit­tle bit to the rest of us when they “remem­ber”, just to explain the weird affec­ta­tion they have that telling a story is build­ing a thing. The mode in sci­ence these days, and also engi­neer­ing, is that remem­ber­ing is par­ing away mis­takes, and dis­clos­ing the real truth of the world so it can be shared and con­sis­tency may reign on Earth as it does… (well you know the rest of that one). Among them­selves the human­i­ties folks all know remem­ber­ing is a spe­cial kind of mak­ing, that recall­ing and record­ing is con­struct­ing nov­elty, that it’s not com­pu­ta­tion or reduc­tion or scour­ing away matrix. And even bet­ter: they know how to make this spe­cial mad kind of mak­ing use­ful, or at least engag­ing and enter­tain­ing. Often as not they spend most of their time enter­tain­ing one another, read­ing their papers aloud at con­fer­ences and such, but some­times one will be lifted up from their shrink­ing island pre­serve and be pre­sented in the pop­u­lar press, as a kind of Out­sider Artist or something.

That thing they do, I like that. I like their mind­ful­ness, that they act as if know­ing were making.

Not many of us like it so much any more, though. It’s a mad notion when you look at it from a mod­ern per­spec­tive: his­tory and lit­er­a­ture, poetry and clas­sics, archae­ol­ogy and danc­ing about archi­tec­ture. “Mad” for the same rea­sons you’d be put away in a rest home for stand­ing up in a busy pub­lic place where peo­ple are try­ing to go off and get their proper work done, yelling and rant­ing and invok­ing archaic names in cease­less demands that they slow down and notice, see what’s there—or more likely what isn’t there.

Crazy peo­ple tell folks to slow down in lean times. They ques­tion what’s real and known and true all over again, stuff we’ve shipped, the truth we’ve accu­mu­lated. As if when you exam­ined it again for the hun­dredth time, the old pho­to­graph of a bomb explod­ing would this time be more than an image of real­ity hang­ing on a fence in a desert. Some kind of story you made up on the spot, dif­fer­ent next time.

But of course you and I know remem­ber­ing is sim­ply look­ing stuff up.

It’s not mak­ing things up. Data access, which is why we’re all so earnest in our record­ing and cura­tion of the facts. Data access is what dri­ves Big Sci­ence now, and mar­ket­ing and all sta­tis­ti­cal mir­a­cles that have come to pass and are nascent in the world. It’s the real world, the world of data that’s impor­tant, not the made-​​up world of fic­tion and his­tory. A can­cer cure is not a story, nor is the money in the bank you made from high-​​speed trad­ing, nor even the counts of the num­ber of times the gen­dered pro­nouns appeared in our dig­i­tized Early Mod­ern books. Those are facts, writ­ten down right there on in public.

And yet there are still a few of these other poor folks, sit­ting down and qui­etly read­ing old stuff and act­ing as if mod­ern sta­tis­tics and data-​​driven expla­na­tions were any­thing at all like story-​​telling. Mad folk. Fid­dling in back-​​country hollers of the acad­emy, lit­tle ivy-​​covered muse­ums and even lone shacks off the beaten track, refus­ing for what­ever rea­son to move down to the City and get them­selves a proper job adjunct­ing or something.

Ayup.

No, that was it. I was just think­ing out loud about the human­i­ties, is all. Sad to see them go, you know. But it’s for the best.

Say, I bet you know about data! I’ve been think­ing a lit­tle about data lately. Did you know that there’s so much data now that there’s no damned way to con­sider every model, pre­dic­tion, or con­trol mechanism—even for one given data stream? Let alone all of them! It makes no sense. Data’s all there, mod­els are sim­ple to build, and so now all the work is boiled down to argu­ments over tech­nique, con­coct­ing var­i­ous approaches and invok­ing con­flict­ing proofs, and wor­ry­ing about util­ity func­tions and con­straints and con­tin­gen­cies. Hell, it’s like now we have the data, only the hard part is left: fig­ur­ing out what ques­tions to ask first.

Now isn’t that interesting.

Some books I’ve been reading

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Herein are described suc­cinctly, and with affil­i­ate links, some things I’ve got­ten recently to read. Said links are there, you know, in case you want them (because they’re good). Or in case you want any­thing else of the sort one gets from this large online retailer.

Just sayin’.

A per­sonal his­tory of OuLiPo, from a recent mem­ber. The result­ing first-​​person asyn­chro­nous faceted work is an hon­est biog­ra­phy and expla­na­tion of the constraint-​​players’ club, rang­ing from its pre­his­tory to future. Too many folks con­fus­edly con­sider OuLiPo to be a rather mathematically-​​tinted but oth­er­wise mun­dane facet of Sur­re­al­ism, or a more reasonable-​​seeming and obses­sively con­sis­tent ‘Pat­a­physics, but as Becker makes clear: it ain’t. And rightly not. A pleas­ant read, and to be frank a game-​​changer for the man­ner of read­ing among the sus­cep­ti­ble: Even now I think back and search for the oulip­ian con­straint Becker must have used in fram­ing the book….

Sure, Byron was weird. But the thing I’ve been learn­ing belat­edly about his­tory and the lives of all those old-​​timey writin’ lit­er­ary folks is how much of their lives is spelled out and yet remains opaque. I mean, I scan old mag­a­zines and as a result end up read­ing a goodly num­ber of them, and yet that sense of, “WTF?!” as an oblique satire or anony­mous homage rolls by remains a con­stant part of my expe­ri­ence. This book, a focused slice of pol­ished the­sis no doubt, clears at least a few cob­webs I’d stum­bled into through the years: sure Byron got around. But Cather­ine Lamb, the crazy minx, comes off in this detailed analy­sis an awful lot like Sher­lock’s Irene Adler: the one from the TV show, I mean, with the naked­ness and the extreme smarts and the gift of pubic hairs in blood and all. And then there’s occultists chan­nel­ing posthu­mous Byronic verse, and the pas­tiches that were ragged satire, and… it gets a bit thick, a bit too schol­arly now and then. But there’s a cos­tume drama or two tucked in here, with naughty bits and verse and all that good stuff.

I’m a sucker for Delany’s prose. I grabbed this as a “sim­i­lar work” from some­thing else I haven’t yet read, and am lik­ing it quite a bit (not least because it helps me under­stand a bit more of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, which even a col­lege junior (as I was when it first came out) couldn’t hope to really ever fathom. (And yes, I’ve nested paren­the­ses three deep. (We’re talk­ing about Delany!) Four.)).

Amus­ingly enough, I’m read­ing Mina Loy because the edi­tor bought a mag­a­zine from me on eBay. What? You didn’t think I Googled the buy­ers of my per­sonal col­lec­tion of zines? Feh; fat lot you know. Hav­ing spent way too much time lately among the orig­i­nal works of the Pro­gres­sive Era, I now want to stage an anar­chis­tic shuffle-​​up: Woolf, Loy, and Voltairine.

Some­where between Zinn and Holton on a scale of History-isn’t-quite-what-you-were-taught (and Wouldn’t It Be Funny if the Con­ser­v­a­tives Actu­ally Knew What They Were Defend­ing), Levin­son is about the prospect of reform. Which is to say: Con­sti­tu­tional Con­ven­tion, to clear up some of those long-​​standing “dif­fi­cul­ties” that remain to date among our hal­lowed fore­fa­thers’ argu­ments, mis­un­der­stand­ings, and crappy opaque com­pro­mises. Yeah, that’ll happen.

I am in love, frankly. Sci­ence books that are self-​​consciously about nar­ra­tive: not rehashes of the god­damned Great Men in Lab­coats trope, but nar­ra­tives that explain the sci­ence itself. How is it we came to be allowed to think of an Ice Age? How is it we came to con­sider that there could be other “men”, miss­ing links, pro­to­hu­mans, and ulti­mately the actual hob­bits and giants we now accept? And (per­haps most inter­est­ingly so far) how is it we’re allowed to call the Pleis­tocene any­thing at all, to shift its mode of def­i­n­i­tion away from the habits and norms of ear­lier con­ven­tions to the point where it’s defined com­pletely dif­fer­ently from other epochs: by ice, and Man. Sci­ence books should be more about sci­ence, like this one is. Not a pop­u­lar­iza­tion so much as well-​​written lit­er­ary crit­i­cism Of Sci­ence!

It’s that time of year. O what might she have wrought, had she sur­vived? Read every­thing she ever wrote, I’m telling you. I’m re-​​reading this, and then her short sto­ries, which I have here by my hand, complete.

I’m mak­ing books. You’ll see. Hendel’s book comes highly rec­om­mended, and I sec­ond that height: It’s not advice, nor crafts­man­ship, but rather a col­lec­tion of thoughts from many hands on how the text block works (and is worked). Inter­views with design­ers from many places, clas­si­cists and out­ra­geous tweak­ers, with an empha­sis on how and why any book looks like it does. And what that look means.

I remem­ber the cud­geling I got years ago when Cliff Pick­over asked on a fan list whether he should use Palatino or Times New Roman for his “new book”, and I said he should actu­ally use a real font, and design the pages, and make it nice. I don’t know what Sec­ond Cul­ture those folks came from, but they really abhorred the notion that font choice and design was as impor­tant as the damned words on the page. I’d post a link, but I can’t recall the names of the books he finally printed in Palatino, alas.

And there you have it.

Every­body Says I Should Read This. And I’m read­ing it. Slowly, actu­ally, not least because I see, then think. Back up and see, then think. Too easy to have all one’s assump­tions and obser­va­tions brought together and miss the points of fail­ure. So far, I haven’t found those points of fail­ure, so I’m read­ing slowly, think­ing, and read­ing more. But I knew imme­di­ately he was right.

Imag­ine a manic twelve-​​year-​​old Eng­lish [sic] boy was allowed to out­line a novel pub­lished in install­ments in the Boy’s Own Adven­ture Mag­a­zine. Lovely fluff, with meta­tex­tual stuff sprin­kled lightly through­out. Is it sus­tain­able? I’m told it may well be.

“& archaeology up to here”

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For more than a decade I’ve been left in the posi­tion of clean­ing up after dying cura­tors and col­lec­tors. It’s an object les­son in where col­lec­tion actu­ally exists: surely the boxes of pyrog­ra­phy or ele­phants or first edi­tions that waited for your atten­tion are no longer your col­lec­tion, now you’re dead. The record is gone, the record you bore in your mem­ory, the sparks of recog­ni­tion and anec­dotes that you car­ried in response are unreach­able now.

So my father’s mem­o­ra­bilia from NACA and the first days of NASA Lewis Research are now bare pho­tographs, snips of glass­ware blown by the mas­ters in the instru­ments lab, parts of plaques and trin­kets received to honor unknown anniver­saries and projects. My mother’s gar­den­ing books are reduced to a mere pend­ing book sale, her cards iden­ti­fy­ing the jum­bled gar­den she kept as use­less as the plowed-​​over drought-​​purged gar­den itself. My wife’s par­ents, with their own accu­mu­lated and uncu­rated prece­dents, are a genealog­i­cal mys­tery story too baroque for pub­li­ca­tion: Wait, I thought she was mar­ried to him—who’s this? My lost friend Nancy, her­self a col­lec­tor of col­lec­tions, can no longer tell me the dif­fer­ence between the fancy milk glass and the cheap junk, or help me split the Vic­to­rian pyrog­ra­phy from the 1930s kit-​​work she accu­mu­lated in her over-​​small house. My god­fa­ther, who came to this coun­try as if to a fron­tier, with a patent in hand that made a (small) for­tune by stuff­ing your attics full of pink floss, his few passed-​​along bits and bobs sal­vaged from a 1900s Wiener Wek­stätte youth adorn our shelves and con­found vis­i­tors by being so out of place.

There’s a swirl of pop-​​cultural pop-​​psychology float­ing in and around col­lect­ing these days, focused on throw­ing “hoard­ing” glibly down in front of any cul­tural vari­a­tion that shows respect for mem­ory and mate­r­ial cul­ture at the expense of geo­met­ric aus­ter­ity. Yet at the same time we love love love our tum­blrs full of scanned ephemera, the RSS feeds filled with snap­shots snipped from 1940s girlie rags and punk zines, the free (as in what? “beer”?) books scanned up to the cease-​​and-​​desist line of 1923. The past is all the more a for­eign coun­try because it’s kept in other people’s houses, in muse­ums and libraries and pri­vate col­lec­tions we not only never visit but we alien­ate by call­ing “pathological”.

If the autis­tic or the over-​​social, the reli­gious or the ruth­less athe­ist, the cap­i­tal­ist or the vol­un­teer can all make their valid claims for respect in our soci­ety, let this be a claim on behalf of remem­ber­ers. Not those pun­dits who resort to big-​​story macro­scopic remem­ber­ing: where were you when Large Things Hap­pened that Tie Us Together? But the sup­pos­edly triv­ial mem­o­ries, a.k.a. “the fab­ric of his­tory”. The baby thrown out with the bath­wa­ter of hoarding-​​abhorrence is the baby of our ori­gins in fam­ily and cul­ture, the fine wires that con­nect the stuff we read in his­tory text­books to our selves.

Know­ing about all this junk is the only way I know to own your own his­tory, the his­tory of your place and your peo­ple. Oth­er­wise, any­thing not in your head is reduced to a cun­ning sci­ence fic­tion story. When we who breathed leaded gaso­line fumes are all dead, it’ll only be the key fobs for lost man­u­fac­tur­ers, the unin­sta­grammed images of gas sta­tions with uni­forms, the mis­folded road maps and quaint mag­a­zine ads that reminds us what that thing meant to the world.

I’m sit­ting within a few inches of a Chi­nese check­ers board (of Nancy’s, since hers is the stra­tum we’ve recently uncov­ered after the purge of a decade’s deaths) and sit­ting next to it is a lit­tle wooden con­trap­tion: a block of mahogany-​​stained oak carved cun­ningly with chan­nels, dec­o­rated with rotat­ing screw-​​hinged caps, hold­ing mar­bles for the game. It’s a purpose-​​built wooden Chi­nese Check­ers marble-​​holder, man­u­fac­tured by the Van Raden Prod­uct Com­pany of Alter Road, in Detroit. Not by Mil­ton Bradley, but rather by… some dude. You Google it, you’ll find this men­tion, and some forums some­where on some wood­work­ing topic where a fel­low found another and doesn’t know what to make of it.

20120930-DSC_9364.jpg

The address was 3136 Alter Road, Detroit. Go look it up on Google Maps. Zoom right on in there. Look real close at the house where this man lived. What you see? Zoom out a cou­ple blocks. Look at those blocks, that wide-​​ranging per­fu­sion of lawn they seem to have. Spa­cious, yes? Gone. Zoom out a bit more, look at that den­sity. The voids. The holes.

Gone. Gone. Gone.

Tell me the story of the man who made the mar­ble hold­ers, back in the Chi­nese Check­ers craze of the late Depres­sion, in that vacant lot in Detroit. The neigh­bor­hood in which he arose is filled with empty blocks, five or six houses left stand­ing on entire city blocks. Res­i­den­tial blocks. Each miss­ing house once filled with things that ended up dead stuff, the chaff of history.

I don’t know what to do about this. It’s no eas­ier to fix than the death of peo­ple is, and some days it seems there’s no more point in attribut­ing “his­tory” to key fobs from dis­ap­peared car deal­er­ships and framed prints on the wall behind the pho­tographed dead than there is to sav­ing emp­tied milk con­tain­ers and screws in a baby food jar. And yet there is in fact some­thing hap­pen­ing, some­thing odd and inter­est­ing. I can find my godfather’s name here and there in the grow­ing mem­ory of the world and some­how draw the flimsy links through pub­lic records to the point where we can drive up to his Ross­ford neigh­bor­hood and rec­og­nize things from pho­tographs he took the day the house was new, in 1927. I see my father’s tiny image stand­ing at the side of pho­tos in the NACA Lan­g­ley his­tory archives, and that same day he clearly took a pic­ture for him­self, stand­ing look­ing back the other way. And I go to see Van Raden’s street, now, after wars and more wars and aban­don­ment and scour­ing, and if I want take back his hand­i­work and make a new (though flimsy) link of sorts.

Not every thing’s a reminder, nor of his­tor­i­cal import. But the abil­ity to tell mean­ing­ful sto­ries about those things is as far as I know the only way we have to explain them and ourselves—the sort of expla­na­tion that’s not merely our strength but also our responsibility.

This just to say that as I sell things off, and purge and lighten and dis­card, I’m doing all I can to weave as well. Be reminded; that’s all I ask. Be reminded.