I find that when forced to wait out even a fast dial-up connection, it helps to have reading matter at hand of the kind that you should have read in any case. For instance, The Best American Essays of 1998, edited by Cynthia Ozick. It happens also to include, in Ozick's introduction, the best essay about the essay that I have come across in many years dedicated to learning what binds Montaigne to E.B. White, say. For me, bits of essays in this collection, Saul Bellow on graven images, for example, digested one or two paragraphs per session, feed my attentiveness (hence memory) better than, say, a poem a day -- unless, of course, it happens to be by Ogden Nash.

Another rumination on the virtue of technology.

I read an elegiac (need a less hackneyed adjective, but plow ahead) essay by Anwar K. Accawi who recounts what happened to a small Lebanese town when "The Telephone", the essay's title, entered the lives of it's inhabitants. . I came across it among the Cynthia Ozick--selected "The Best American Essays 1998." A few hours later I read of the adventures of a high technology writer (He edits The New York Times weekly section called Circuits) in getting to talk to his wife at home in the Eastern time zone from London, where he had business. With the help of some easily available computer stuff, and at no cost (except the short-term rental of a computer in a tea shop) he and his wife not only talked to, but saw, one another, on their respective computer screens, without fuzziness or stuttering images. Both essays are fascinating and slip in the question: Are we made better off by the new technology? The question flirts with inanity -- So what if we're not?-- but caused me to think about it anyway.

The pertinence of a BLOG.

What remains of your past if you didn't allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories. Procedural and depopulated. It's as if a neutron bomb went off and all you're left with are hospital corridors, where you're scanning the walls for familiar photographs.

Sometimes in the absence of emotion, your only recourse is to surround yourself with objects; assemble the relics about you. Wagner was wrong when he said, "Joy is not in things, it is in us." One can find joy in things, but it is a particular kind of joy--the joy of corroboration.

Rakoff, D. Fraud. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

This afternoon I did my Michael Moore impression: Oversized jeans from a recent weight loss, trucker’s cap, sweat shirt — in short Diogenes as a nebbish. Our Congresswoman, Lois Capps, yesterday resigned quite publicly from AARP over its endorsement of the Republican bill in Congress regarding Medicare. I hoped to get from our older neighbors a sense of how they felt about AARP generally after this endorsement and so as not to prejudice their replies asked them what they thought of the Medicare massacre bill and then if they intended to resign from AARP. “I suppose I should,” one Geezer reflected, suggesting that it might prove to be too much trouble. Another knew people who liked the local AARP meetings, never having attended one herself. For some reason this reminded her that she no longer thought Woody Allen was funny. In protest against the “Michael Jackson media circus” that played here yesterday including enough helicopters to have been the setting for yet another Vietnam movie, she had rented three “light comedy” videos and played them serially last night to shut out the world entirely, AARP and all. Without my Michael Moore outfit, I sent my brother-in-law in Chicago an e-mail link to Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times today in the hopes that it would shake him out of his usual complacency. It turns out that he had quit AARP sometime in the eighties because he had checked out its claim that it could cut the cost of his car insurance. In fact, he learned, the AARP insurance would have added $100 annually to his insurance cost. He was told that if he took the car insurance as a package, which included home insurance, he would realize the advertised savings. This claim, too, he found wanting by more than $100 annually. He wrote the AARP CEO for an explanation of this “false advertising” and never got an answer. Of course, he had never attended an AARP meeting.

Let's see if I got this right: a librarian (from Seattle, as I recall) has proposed a formula for dealing with the "so many books, so little time" problem. She says that until the age of fifty we are obligated to read the first fifty pages of a book that for one reason or another has grabbed our interest.; typically, from reading a review or at the strong recommendation of a friend. After fifty we are obligated to read only the number of pages corresponding to the years we have survived past that age, so that at 75, for example, we would owe only 25 pages to a book that has come to hand. I find the formula particularly helpful when confronted with a book that I have been led to believe will remake some part of my world, like "an alternative history of philosophy" proposed in the subtitle by "Evil in Modern Thought" by Susan Neiman (Princeton, 2002). I know that something important must be going on in these pages, but I also, after reading the requisite number of pages, know that it is to me incomprehensible, and likely to remain so. In these cases you are forced, as soon as the librarian's formula allows, to retreat to the comfort of the unaltered history of philosophy you know, and hope for the best.

Brave old world note:
The Times of Lomdon reports that "All rail maintenance will be effectively re-nationalised after Network Rail found that using private contractors was wasting hundreds of millions of pounds of public money"

Schema vs. Stereotype

Q. A core thesis of your book is that we all have ideas of how men and women generally behave, and that these gender schemas can work against women's professional advancement. Why not just call these schemas stereotypes?

A. I prefer the term schema to stereotype because stereotype has such negative connotations, as though we shouldn't have these things In the first place. But we can't get along in the world without some conceptual framework, some generalizations about social groups and events. We need a way to predict what will happen, and to know how to behave appropriately in various situations. If you're a college student, you need a schema of what a professor is. A professor is supposed to show up for every class, be there on time, stay the whole period, be competent in the material, grade people fairly, and so forth. A student knows that you don't bribe your professor, that's not how things work. When we get to male and female schemas, well, then, we're all self-styled experts. You can take a person at random and list a bunch ,of adjectives "assertive," "has high leader ship ability," "is kind to children" and the person would have no trouble matching them up with one sex or the other.
SCIENCE DESK | August 25, 1998, Tuesday
A Conversation: With Virginia Valian; Exploring the Gender Gap and the Absence of Equality
By NATALIE ANGIER (NYT) Interview 2300 words
About: WHY SO SLOW? THE ADVANCEMENT OF WOMEN (BOOK)

(First published in 1963.)
0f what use is the stock market, and to whom? A mathematician or a physicist when seeking the essence of a thing or event, frequently finds the key in an analogy that to others seems merely frivolous. This may be one reason scientists are so widely mistrusted. For example, a "game theory" of anything so momentous as war and defense policy strikes the nonscientist as a bad joke in bad taste, and helps to explain why it has not received the public attention it deserves. We suspect of pulling our leg a social scientist who suggests that the essence of political practice may be discovered by considering it as a branch of show business. Perhaps a less alien, because more frequently advanced, parallel suggests itself as a means to recognizing the chief value of the stock market; that is, horse racing. The stock market's apologies for staying in business are two: It gives business firms, upon which our continued well-being is dependent, a place to raise money on which to start and grow. And it is the instrument by which ownership in, and income from, the means of production may be widely distributed in a manner consistent with beliefs which are the foundation of the existing social order. But as a capital market, and a means to distribute income within a free market economy, few devices can rival in efficiency a well run race track.
Race tracks are numerous and freely accessible to all, irrespective of race, creed or previous condition of servitude. People bring to the track such money as they have been able to set aside or come into, and invest, according to their best lights, on one of several factors in a competition unimpeded by conspiracy or Government intervention. The combined judgment of the auction market, the individual assessment of all players, determines the prize quickly and precisely (less taxes paid by the track and by the individual, plus overhead). Parimutuel tickets are freely negotiable during the race, or in the case of a Daily Double, between races. The player may bet on as many horses in a race as he wishes. Horse and man, the fittest in judgment, training and native capacity, take home the most money. Even the place and show horses and their backers receive enough to more than cover their investment. Information is freely and inexpensively available from the Racing Form, and tout sheets sold outside the stands by the equivalent of customers' men. Also, the track does its part for the Gross National Product. It employs a large work force, most of whom are well paid, or, like the concessionaires, are paid commissions on sales. About the only thing a race track lacks is a public welfare agency, where those who get cleaned out can pick up a free sandwich and train fare home,

HERE we come to the critical difference between the race track and the stock market, which is that the race track offers a player opportunities for the exercise of fewer kinds of desire and fewer of his faculties than does the stock market (or, for that matter, a poker game). The stock market is essentially an auction involving too many separate items and too many customers with too many objects in mind, and representing too many gradations of ambition and information, to be comprehended all at once by a single mind. To be successful, therefore, requires precise definition of aim (income, quick profit, growth, or some combination from among the three), plus a venturesome but prudent spirit attending to it. In return for an abundant assortment of opportunities, it exacts more than most players are able, or willing, to give to it. The successful investor must bring industry and diligence to the search for opportunities; attention to detail for a sound appraisal of them; discipline to avoid being swept away or distracted; boldness to back an unpopular conviction, and decisiveness. The investor should be grounded, at minimum, in science and medicine, trends in education, labor relations and the operations of Government. He should be a sound judge of popular psychology and a canny interpreter of events. For example, in order to have assessed the effect of a recently introduced birth control pill on the manufacturer's earnings, the investor should have been able not only to weigh its competitive advantages, and chances for acceptance by consumers, but also to anticipate a theological debate and its likely effect on Government policy. He must then have been able to guess what conclusion other investors would reach on the same set of facts. This is an indication of why the most efficient way to keep informed these days is by reading newspapers and magazines directed primarily at businessmen. The executive who keeps his nose in the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Business Week is likely to be better and more accurately informed - money being the unpolitical, unsentimental and cant free thing that it is - than the rest of us.
In short, legally gotten gain from the stock market requires better of a man than does legally-gotten gain from the race course, which is why brokers go to the races to relax. The question that is coming to be heard more frequently, however, is whether the stock market insures that capital will be channeled to uses which will create the most jobs, most efficiently advance technological progress, reward the deserving and the virtuous, increase the standard of living, or other, equally commendable, purpose. It is not a question the stock market should be called upon, or should attempt, to answer. Those who cherish the stock market also wish that its representatives at the New York Stock Exchange would not shill for it in the guise of being midwives to a new social order called People's Capitalism. The notion excites the unwary to expectations of the day in which everyone will be living off the fruits of invested capital, and latrine attendants will be the highest paid class in society as an inducement to keep them working. As reality begins to fall short of expectation, the critics will begin asking again whether some sort of mechanism is not possible that will make sure that the highest rewards go to those who most deserve it. We have been through that argument before, and it was nearly the undoing of the stock market.

Among the translators s Lancelot Andrewes hired on to help render the King James bible was Richard Clarke, a fellow of Christ's college, Cambridge, whose collected sermons were said to be a "continent of mud." This snapped into mind as I read David Brooks' second column for the New York Times op ed page. I suppose it takes awhile to find one's voice in essaying a new column, whatever finding one's voice means; finding one's footing is more like it. The quotation came, incidentally, from Adam Nicolson's splendid book God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. Of course, I have often seen my enthusiasms pushed off toward oblivion on a leaky raft under tattered sail by people who know the subject better than I do. But this one seems to me to be leak-proof.

I had hope to include in today's entry our adventure with the cricket(s) that got into the house, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. I might even have ready some thoughts on comparing the New York Stock Exchange with a racetrack.

Paragraph of the week:

From Paul Krugman's column of Aug. 29th (New York Times)

"Still, even the government of a superpower can't simultaneously offer tax cuts equal to 15 percent of revenue, provide all its retirees with prescription drugs and single-handedly take on the world's evildoers — single-handedly because we've alienated our allies. In fact, given the size of our budget deficit, it's not clear that we can afford to do even one of these things. Someday, when the grown-ups are back in charge, they'll have quite a mess to clean up. "

The paragraph of the week award is made to the paragraph that in the estimation of the editor says the most in the fewest number of words.

The importance of context in genetics.

New York City policy of charging genetic material in lieu of a person raises technical and ethical concerns

Attorney General John Ashcroft is doing a road show for the Patriot Act.
Ashcroft kicked off a nationwide tour Wednesday in an attempt to garner
support for the widely unpopular Patriot Act. The act was passed only six
weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and gives police the ability to
monitor e-mail and Web activity without a judge's approval in some cases.
The ACLU's Laura Murphy questions the wisdom in Ashcroft's attempt to drum
up support: "Is the attorney general's road show political in nature,
designed to shore up flagging conservative support in swing states, and is
it prudent to have the attorney general give up his official duties to hit
the huskings for an unpopular piece of legislation? Safety and freedom
will both suffer if the answers are what some expect."
From Corante

"At a moment when we're all fretting about whether we'll be blown up tomorrow by nuclear terrorists, it may seem odd to worry instead that we'll someday survive forever. But just to give you something new to bite your lip about, let me tell you about roundworms."
Where Is Thy Sting?

Nifty phrase: :“continuous partial attention.” It comes from a piece by Henry Jenkins, Digital Renaissance, in Technology Review. Linda Stone, credited as a “digital community builder” coined the phrase to describe . . .“a growing tendency for people to move through life, scanning their environments for signals, and shifting their attention from one problem to another. This process has definite downsides – we never give ourselves over fully to any one interaction. It is like being at a cocktail party and constantly looking over the shoulders of the person you are talking with to see if anyone more interesting has arrived. Yet, it is also adaptive to the demands of the new information environment, allowing us to accomplish more, to sort through competing demands, and to interact with a much larger array of people.

". . .Our classic notions of literacy assume uninterrupted contemplation in relative social isolation, a single task at a time. Some have characterized the younger generation as having limited attention spans. But these young people have also developed new competencies at rapidly processing information, forming new connections between separate spheres of knowledge, and filtering a complex field to discern those elements that demand immediate attention. Stone argues that for better or worse, this is the way we are all currently living. Therefore, she claims, we had better design our technologies to accommodate continuous partial attention, and we had better evolve forms of etiquette that allow us to smooth over the social disruptions such behavior can cause."

Discovering a Medieval Louse

John Steinbeck's interest in science was stimulated by his long friendship with the marine biologist Ed Ricketts. Even more consuming was his interest in the Arthurian legends. This extract is from a letter written in September 1962.

The Morgan Library has a very fine 11th-century Launcelot in perfect condition. I was going over it one day and turned to the rubric of the first known owner dated 1221, the rubric a squiggle of very thick ink. I put a glass on it and there imbedded deep in the ink was the finest crab louse, pfithira pulus, I ever saw. He was perfectly preserved even to his little claws. I knew I would find him sooner or later because people of that period were deeply troubled with lice and other little beasties - hence the plagues. I called the curator over and showed him my find and he let out a cry of sorrow. `I've looked at that rubric a thousand times,' he said. `Why couldn't I have found him?'

Source: Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, ed. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, London, Heinemann, 1975.

One hundred and eighty one years ago today in the town of Heinzendorf, Austria Gregor Mendel came into his genetic inheritance. Mendel chose to use it as a monk in the service of botanical experimentation. Among other achievements he pioneered the mathematical foundation of the science of genetics. His legacy turned up ultimately in the “accidental discovery” — whatever that means — by Alec Jeffreys (now Sir Alec) of the “genetic ‘fingerprint’” (his coinage). Probably not as many people have heard of Sir Alec as have heard of Mendel or James Watson, although Anna Anderson would have had more reason to hear of Sir Alec than most had she lived longer. As it happened, she died in 1984, just as Jeffreys was forming the work that in the end undid her claim to have been the Anastasia missing from the grave pit in which lay the remains of Tsar Nicholas II and the royal family, all of whom had been brutally murdered in July, 1918. In 1920 Ms. Anderson began laying claim to her royal identity, and maintained it until her death. Her persistence caused a movie to be made. (It provided a star turn for Ingrid Bergman.) Unraveling Anderson’s claim was no simple matter as James Watson details in DNA: The Secret of Life (at your booksellers). Watson describes numerous cases, right up to the most recent melodramas. It also provides an exemplary exposition of how DNA sampling and comparison works and why it has come to replace that old repository of our need for certainty, the smudgeable fingerprint.