Calendars. Useful for predicting the seasons. Visibly less effective at predicting climate.
Great start. The first day of the year, and I didn’t post until well after midnight. This is mostly due to the fact that I was up until all hours last night celebrating. But if we took this nonsense seriously, wouldn’t we have an early night on New Year’s Eve and start the thing right? Because we don’t, each new year begins in failure.
I’ve made many successful resolutions. I’ve given up more vices than a lot of people ever manage to cultivate. But not one of these vows was made on a New Year. They were made when I actually had a real desire to change my life, and the inner strength to make it happen. Which, funnily enough, didn’t often¹ occur on a set calendar date during the coldest, darkest, wettest time of the year.
Calendars were our first real computational devices, and helped our ancient ancestors herd and farm successfully. (The illustration is from Nabta Playa in southern Egypt, though the similarity to stone circles dotted all over Ireland is obvious.) Naturally they became endowed with religious significance; the cycle of the year as metaphor for the cycle of life, death, and birth. But the thing is, it is just a metaphor. The calendar is a way to predict the seasons, no more. The arbitrary start of the year is not sacred or mystical, there is absolutely nothing special about this day.
That’s my excuse anyway.
Actually I did give up smoking in an early January, but that was pretty much a coincidence. Story for another day.
One day I’m going to take a stand against the division of time into arbitrary regular periods. It’s a delusion anyway. The periods aren’t regular – I’ve noticed throughout my life that they grow consistently shorter. A year is a trivial amount of time now. On current trends, by the time I’m 80 one will last about as long as a summer’s afternoon did when I was five. No doubt it’s healthy to stop and take mental stock every so often, but marking every single year that comes along feels like indulging them.
But then again, without this end-of-the-year show it could easily have escaped my ephemeral notice that 2011 was an extraordinary one. I doubt if we’ve had so much change – especially so much hopeful change – since at least 1989. In some ways we’ve seen the anti-2001; the greatest act of terrorism was carried out by a Christian extremist, the people fighting for democracy were Muslim. It went a long way towards repairing the damage perpetrated during the miserable presidency of George W. Bush.
Except of course that done to the world economy, which is still utterly buggered. At least people rioted in the UK. Yeah, I see that as a positive. If we create a society where the rich can blow it all gambling yet somehow still stay rich, meanwhile telling the poor that they have to be poorer now, then it is a good thing that some people say “OK, we’re not playing by these rules anymore”. This isn’t justifying theft, it’s pointing out that societies are made out of people and you can’t keep taking the piss.
Similarly I think the riots against austerity in the Eurozone were on balance a good thing. I’d sooner peaceful civil disobedience like the Occupy movements, but a riot is the next best thing. Certainly, either is better than the supine attitude we seem to have adopted in Ireland.
This then is my greatest hope and fear for 2012. How will we channel our anger? Here in Galway, city councillors are trying to close the little Occupy encampment that we have on the grounds that it’s bad for business. That is how much our politicians care for actual politics. Every challenge to the system in the last ten years, from organised terrorism to music downloading, has been used by the powerful as an excuse to give themselves yet more power over the individual. There are real threats in the world to democratic capitalism, it is true. The greatest is from undemocratic capitalism.
It’s fun to watch television news attempting to report on the Higgs boson. Never has there been such an important story that so entirely lacks, well, a story.
News is narrative, for we are narrative animals. While others can understand – or misconstrue – cause and effect to some extent, only we¹ can tell each other about it. “This thing happened because this other thing happened.” It’s what human culture – indeed, our very mental machinery – is built around. Everything we do is shaped into narrative. Look at mathematics. There is nothing innately narrative about mathematics, it concerns things that never change at all. Yet a mathematical proof is a sort of story.
And that is in some ways misleading, because though one can deduce from something being true that another thing must also be, that doesn’t mean the first thing caused the second. The narrative drive can be distorting. Whenever we find a correlation between two things, our first assumption is always that one caused the other – even though they may be coincidental, or might both be the result of a third thing. From fairy stories to Jane Austen, all we want to hear about is how one thing causes another, how actions have consequences. If it was just a succession of unconnected incidents it wouldn’t be a story. Except in fact it would, because our minds would fill in connections between the events.
A good narrative is both exciting and enlightening. Exciting, because the best stories concern the biggest disasters. The worse the effects, the more we want to hear about the cause – so that we can avoid it. This is why we seem to like bad news so much. It also explains why we are more interested in news about people who are like us; it’s not so much that we care more about them as feel their disasters are more applicable. What makes a narrative enlightening is when it satisfactorily explains the relationship between cause and effect. “X leads to Z – and here’s why.” The better we understand the relationship, the better we can avoid Z when we see X happening. Or better bring about Z, in those rare cases of good news.
Which is why the Higgs boson fails as a story. Though it seems like it ought to be a great one, about fundamentals of the universe and the greatest depths of human knowledge, it lacks any real excitement because the vast majority of people simply lack any strong response to it at all. It could help complete or overthrow our understanding of physics. Which one of those was the good one again? Nor is it enlightening, because though we are assured by experts that it is important, even they cannot readily explain why.²
So news reports gussy it up; by using the deeply annoying nickname of “God particle”, suggesting that the Higgs is somehow much more important than all others (it’s not, it’s just harder to detect), or by hanging some other more speculative narrative on it. BBC News was guilty of that yesterday, wondering aloud if there might be some connection between the “absence” of the Higgs particle and the strange result found recently at CERN where neutrinos seemed to travel faster than light. What connection? Well none that anyone has actually thought of yet. Just, you know, some connection. (Imagine if they reported politics like that.) If the BBC’s graphics were anything to go by though, it might bring down the edifice of theoretical physics – which they illustrated with CGI Jenga blocks.³ The narrative we’re forced to take from this is that failure to find the Higgs would be some sort of disaster. And that could hardly be further from the truth.
It seems likely that the Higgs particle will be found within the next year. Physicists will be pleased if the ideas they most agree about are shown to be right, and will be glad to have a precise mass for the particle as that will help decide which version of the theory is best. But if they don’t find it, they’ll like that even more. Because it would mean they had something wrong – and that’s really much more interesting than being right.
And possibly bees.
Why does mass even need a particle? We think of mass as something an object just innately has, like length. There’s no length particle.
Such an ‘edifice” in itself is a wholly wrong narrative about how physics works, suggesting that each new stage is built on the foundation of the previous discovery being completely right. In fact, each new stage is built on the foundation of the previous discovery being a little wrong.
A friend alerted me to this via Facebook today – The famous “Easter Island heads” are not just heads. They were whole bodies, buried up to their necks. Previously thought to be merely enigmatic and mysterious, this discovery demonstrates them to be more accurately described as madder than a cat flap.
But I do you wrong. Among people who actually pay attention, it was always well-known that these figures were whole bodies. The ones that seemed to be only heads were the exception rather than the rule, but are better known to the rest of us for two reasons. Firstly, they are striking and fascinating just sticking out of the ground like that. It’s one of the great images.
Secondly though, by the time cameras got to Easter Island all the free-standing ones had been knocked over. This seems to have been caused by conflict among the islanders. You know how it goes. Someone pushes one of yours over, you push over one of theirs, before you know it the only statues left vertical on the whole island are the ones that were buried upright.
But why were they carved and erected in the first place – and why did they stop? No one really knows, but one popular explanation was given in the comments to the article linked above, by a person calling themselves “I am the Birdman”. Being lazy, I will quote it in its entirety here:
The most likely theory is that they were carved as “tombstones” of sorts, a memorial to the person. And of course, the next man’s idol must be bigger. They also wore hats and had bright white eyes with pupils adhered to them. And if I remember correctly, that still non-ciphered language is called Rongo-Dongo¹. Sadly, it was the construction of these statues that did in the civilization. In order to roll them into place they needed logs, and in doing so, they completely decimated every tree on the island. No trees, no wood, no fire, no shelter, havoc, and then no more people. It’s sad really. Watch the movie 180 degrees South for a better animation of this.
Excessive pointless consumption leading to ecological devastation and thus the collapse of a civilization – a perfect parable for the errors of our times.
So perfect in fact that it couldn’t possibly be true. People do do entirely mad things occasionally of course, especially for religious purposes, but it seems more likely that deforestation was caused by rats and other species introduced by boats from other parts of Polynesia. (The coming of rats to Hawaii caused similar ecological upheaval.) The people and culture of the island was then upset even further by visits from various European explorers, missionaries, and finally slave traders, all bringing alien ideas and alien diseases with them.
So Easter Island is not a great metaphor for what happens to a planet when people consume excessively and without forethought. It’s a much better one though for what happens to a planet when it’s invaded by aliens. We’d better hope that doesn’t happen as well.
They didn’t remember correctly. It’s called Rongorongo. If it is a true written language rather than some simpler memory-aid or calendar system, and if it was not inspired by contact with another culture, it is one of perhaps only four instances of writing being invented independently.
Psychiatrist and – if you recall – former TDDr Moosajee Bhamjee has been doing some… I’ll call it lateral thinking about Ireland’s worryingly high suicide rate. While others wring their hands, he at least has suggested a solution: Medicating the water. He believes that a small dose of lithium salts would go unnoticed by most of us, while being effective enough as a mood stabiliser to lower the suicide rate.
I was going to go into a long tirade about the problems with this, but in the end I think I can boil it all down to a single question:
As Lithium is a highly toxic ion, safe and effective therapy requires monitoring of serum levels. Up to 75% of patients treated with lithium will experience some side effects.
And frankly, I would describe that as the least worrying aspect of introducing forced psychoactive medication to an entire population.
A couple of months back I was horrified by a coroner here in Galway describing a case of a body catching fire as “spontaneous human combustion”. Working on a comparable case, Professor Cassidy took the opportunity to call that description a myth. And as State Pathologist – and a professor of forensic medicine – she is perhaps better qualified on the subject than a GP.
To be as fair as possible to that coroner (Dr. Ciaran MacLoughlin), I’m sure he wasn’t envisioning the phenomenon as it appears in fiction: A person becoming so saturated with alcohol – and possibly sin – that one night they just burst into flames. But in finding spontaneous combustion to be the cause of death, he asserts that living people can ignite of their own accord. Which is… nuts.
What does seem to be a real – if rare – phenomenon is a person’s dead body catching fire and burning with no source of kindling other than their clothes or perhaps the chair they were in. The simple if somewhat disturbing fact is that we contain a lot of fuel. Human fat – which even the most svelte of us have – is basically oil after all.
What’s not real is the spontaneity bit; an external cause of ignition is sometimes hard to find, but it seems more than likely that there always is one. Nor is the entire body consumed as in a cremation – despite what some of the more sensationalist papers reported. And it was most certainly not, even in this case, the cause of death. There was good evidence that the ‘victim’ was already dead when their body caught fire.
So how did MacLoughlin conclude that this was spontaneous human combustion? By logical fallacy, apparently. Fire investigators had found no proof that any nearby source – including the open fire burning in the grate – had ignited the body. (One wonders how you could prove that.) He appears to have taken this lack of proof that it was the source as proof that it was not. In formal logic, this is a category of error known as being a dur-brain.
Well, Professor Cassidy can put down the myth of spontaneous human combustion. What she can’t do is quash the rumour that we have state-appointed medical professionals in this country who believe it.
A couple of months back I was horrified by a coroner here in Galway describing a case of a body catching fire as “spontaneous human combustion”. Working on a comparable case, Professor Cassidy took the opportunity to call that description a myth. And as State Pathologist – and a professor of forensic medicine – she is perhaps better qualified on the subject than a GP.
To be as fair as possible to that coroner (Dr. Ciaran MacLoughlin), I’m sure he wasn’t envisioning the phenomenon as it appears in fiction: A person becoming so saturated with alcohol – and possibly sin – that one night they just burst into flames. But in finding spontaneous combustion to be the cause of death, he asserts that living people can ignite of their own accord. Which is… nuts.
What does seem to be a real – if rare – phenomenon is a person’s dead body catching fire and burning with no source of kindling other than their clothes or perhaps the chair they were in. The simple if somewhat disturbing fact is that we contain a lot of fuel. Human fat – which even the most svelte of us have – is basically oil after all.
What’s not real is the spontaneity bit; an external cause of ignition is sometimes hard to find, but it seems more than likely that there always is one. Nor is the entire body consumed as in a cremation – despite what some of the more sensationalist papers reported. And it was most certainly not, even in this case, the cause of death. There was good evidence that the ‘victim’ was already dead when their body caught fire.
So how did MacLoughlin conclude that this was spontaneous human combustion? By logical fallacy, apparently. Fire investigators had found no proof that any nearby source – including the open fire burning in the grate – had ignited the body. (One wonders how you could prove that.) He appears to have taken this lack of proof that it was the source as proof that it was not. In formal logic, this is a category of error known as being a dur-brain.
Well, Professor Cassidy can put down the myth of spontaneous human combustion. What she can’t do is quash the rumour that we have state-appointed medical professionals in this country who believe it.
Today was spent at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, a curious seat of learning I have written of before. I was there for Tionól, a symposium on Celtic Studies. Not my usual stomping ground, but it’s good to go off and explore sometimes.
Ireland is fascinating because so much of what seems like the distant past happened so recently. (And vice versa.) The coming of Christianity didn’t overwrite pagan social structures. Much of their law and their system of values continued alongside the new religion. Nor did Viking settlement or Norman invasion destroy that cuture; it was only in Elizabethan times that real efforts to replace it began. So it’s almost as though we moved from the pre-Roman era directly to the early modern.
Yet there is so much we don’t understand about that past. When the change came it came fast, and though it left us a rich supply of written records, we do not always understand them.
For example, there is a word findruine that means…. Well, from its context it appears to be a precious metal. Stories speak of valuable objects of “gold, silver, findruine and bronze’ – in some it even outranks silver to become the most precious substance after gold. Yet we don’t know what it was.
Theories abound of course. My own first thought was that it might be a special version of bronze, with more copper in the mix. Or perhaps one that substituted zinc for the tin to make gold-coloured brass. But all these have been suggested over the years. Our speaker argued that none of them were right, and that the material was bronze (and perhaps other metals) that had been ‘tinned‘.
Which is not to say it had been put into cans. Tinning is the art of heating metal and then introducing solid tin to it. Tin melts at a relatively low temperature, so it spreads out on the hot surface, bonds with it, and forms a bright silver-coloured coating that resists corrosion and tarnish. The art was widely practiced until quite recent times – it gives its name to the trade of ‘tinker’ – and we know it was done by the ancients because, though it’s less robust than a pure metal, some beautiful articles of tinned work still exist.
So perhaps an ancient riddle has been solved. In the scheme of things though, it’s a relatively minor one. For example one of the most important roles in traditional Irish society was that of file. The word is usually translated as ‘poet’, yet fully qualified members of the file class were social equals to kings. And we still don’t know exactly what it was they did.
The British seem to be going particularly overboard for poppies this year, presumably inspired by the calendrical happenstance of all those ones lining up in a row. But unthinkingly, they only emphasize the tragic aspect of this occasion.
Why eleven? The agreement to end hostilities had been signed more than five hours earlier. The war officially ceased only at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month because that seemed a suitably grand and historic way to end a ‘Great War’. So they kept on fighting, and they kept on killing, until that eleventh hour came.
How can one feel anything but contempt for that?
But this act of inhumanity was just the start. The victorious powers chose to accept no portion of blame for the hostilities. On the contrary, and despite the fact that a great deal of the credit for the war’s end belonged to the German people for rising up against their leaders, despite the fact that the Kaiser had abdicated and the empire been abolished, they chose to heap all blame – and punishment – onto the people of the new German democracy. The terms of this ‘armistice’ would lead directly to disaster on a previously unimagined scale.
This hour marks not the end of war, but the beginning of revenge.
