En de nyx. // And it was night.

Chapel by Rothko. Title by John 13:30.

Q: How is a Newborn Baby like the Color Red?

A: Both of them are philosophically transformative (in the proper context).

Let me explain: There's an old philosophical story about how experience differs from knowledge. It's about a color researcher who happens to be color blind. She has studied wavelengths and spectra and knows all about the color red, but has never truly seen it. She may even be considered the world's expert on knowledge about the color red. She knows how the brain fires when it sees red and has read about how it's a different color from green. But does she truly know what "red" is?

Then one day she gets gene therapy and receives properly working opsins in her retina which allow her to see the color red. She turns to a red Rothko painting (hey, this is my story, I can tell it how I like) and sees a brilliant wash of crimson for the first time. She has gained something from the operation. But what is it exactly that she has gained? Not knowledge but a new experience. She sees red for the first time. This subjective experience is what philosophers call qualia.

Now comes along an argument from a philosopher that puts this into a new context. According to this argument, before you have a baby, you know all about it (including your own experience of being a baby). Maybe you can even test its DNA to find out about the baby. But you have never experienced being a parent. When you hold that baby for the first time, you're like the color researcher seeing red for the first time. This is a totally new, subjective experience, and this is so uniquely valuable that (philosophically speaking) it outweighs all the inconveniences and stress that result from that tiny squalling mass. The baby is a new color, a color no one in the world has even seen before, and (for the biological parents) a color literally mixed from the two parents' colors.

All this and more is summarized in the Percolator blog post "Maybe You Should Have a Baby". Including this quote:

Moreover, since having one’s own child is unlike any other human experience, before she has had the experience of seeing and touching her newborn child, not only does she not know what it is like to have a child, she cannot know. Without having the experience itself, she cannot even have an approximate idea as to what it is like to have that experience. Like the experience of seeing color for the first time, the experience of having a child is not projectable. All of this results from the fact that having one’s own child is transformative—and far more so than the experience of seeing color for the first time.

I would only add that, being the parent of four boys, I can attest that each of their "colors" is a brand-new gift to the world, unlike the others yet equally beautiful. One of the joys of parenting is finding out just how different your children are from eachother, and from you. It's also one of the greatest difficulties. Yet each child is indeed a work of art, and I'm grateful for each one.

Tolkien Redesigned



Sometimes less is more, no? I have to say The Hobbit is my favorite, although the elegance of The Return of the King and its multiple layers of evocative resonance makes it a close runner-up.

I'm going to return to this link which has many ways to print out these pics very soon ...

The Mechanical Philologist

I'm surprised it took this long.

Finally, the principles of bioinformatics have been applied to philology (the study of/love of words). The software used to make gene trees can be applied to word trees. Here's a news article on it and here is the original Proceedings of the NAS article.

This makes perfect sense because both words and genes are "made of letters." Words are like genes, and genes are like words. There is a deep poetry at the heart of life. Computers are good at analyzing genes, so (with the help of an ear or two) they should also be good at analyzing words.

Once again my mind turns to the anti-mechanism philologist, Owen Barfield. What would he say to this? Would he welcome this pattern-finding algorithm? Or would he insist that, rather than gathering a little more hidden info, this overlooks the most important part of words, the inner revelation and subjective experience?

Not being able to ask him right now, I can only look at the results with a Barfieldian eye, asking, how does the development of genes parallel the development of words? I think he'd at least welcome the idea that there are significant parallels between the two evolutions, and here's a program that may be able to capture them.

Book Review: The Pastor by Eugene Peterson

In a way, Eugene Peterson has been a pastor to me. I first read his books (and "The Message," his translation of the Bible) when I came to Seattle and joined my church 16, 17 years ago now. Peterson's words are tangled up with my own pastor's words and I'm sure mixed up at some point. I used to seek out "The Message" to use in Bible readings for the congregation or Sunday School. Because I associate Peterson's writing with my own translocation to the Northwest, I found it particularly fitting that in this, his memoir, he starts by drawing strong lines of attachment to his own place, western Montana (which I certainly count as Northwest enough to be "Northwest"). Peterson's words have always been part of the mental map of the Northwest for me, and now I find out that's because he is indeed part of the Northwest. I can't claim to have known this long ago, but I'd like to think that I may have felt it on an unconscious level.

The Pastor is not really about being a pastor; it's more about being part of a church. Peterson strikes an uncommon balance in that it's always clear that the church is distinct -- the church is The Church as opposed to the world -- but the church is not sealed off or even "above" the world it is called out from. Rather, the church is "for" the world it is called out from. Peterson may express this paradox better than any other current writer, to me at least.

So to learn about how the church should be the church, I suggest reading this man's memoir. It's not perfect, it could use some editing, but then again, so could this review. Another benefit is that you get some glimpses into what really matters for a writer writing -- and I even copied a page to put up on my bulletin board to glance over as I embark on this summer's writing project, high praise indeed because there's only so much room on that board. This book is worth the space on that board, and it's worth the time it took to read.

I may have never read a memoir that left the indelible impression, not so much of the author, but of the people and the God that he spent his life with. It's hard to call it a memoir because it is so other-focused in effect. A remarkable, quiet, and moving book.

Book Review: Reamde

This book is so thick that finishing it makes you feel like you've been through what the characters go through: a multi-country chase back and forth around the world, with lots of guns, boats, terrorists, and computer programs. Neal Stephenson is the Gen-X Tom Clancy. Don't get me wrong, Stephenson can write circles around Clancy, but both have the same loving attention to physical detail and intricate plots, always involving how things really work rather than how they seem to work in movies and TV. I liked Clancy's novels, so take that as a complement.

Reamde is an entertaining mashup of spycraft, woodscraft, and computercraft (or whatever you would call the heavy involvement of a World-of-Warcraft style game called T'Rain in the proceedings). But ultimately it's no more than beach reading: it's a diverting novel with one huge coincidence propelling the whole thing and lots of clever touches. Often clever, but I'm not sure if any rise to the level of ingenious. Thrilling as a rollercoaster, a few orders of magnitude longer, and in the end, about as deep and lasting an impact on the soul. Sometimes you need that, but actually, I prefer Stephen King in the end because King seems to be more "about something," and has characters with more heart. Lest I keep sounding like I didn't enjoy this novel, I affirm that I really did -- it's just that the experience (a month or so listening on audiobook) is already fading from mind, like a long, pleasent daydream.

A Map of Physics-Land, Circa 1939

Three-quarters of a century ago, this map of physics was published, its "rivers" leading from ancient Greek philosophers through to nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientists. You can find Faraday where the Electricity river joins with the Magnetism river to become Electomagnetic, because he's the prime figure in realizing those two forces are actually one and the same. Maxwell is at the junction of Light, Electromagnetic, and Mechanical into a sound labeled "Energy." Out there at the edge, Einstein and Dirac gaze out into the past future of physics.

Standing now this much farther down the river, we can see that the "Weak Force" river must have joined with "Electromagnetic" in the 70's to form the "Electroweak" river, with Salam, Glashow and Weinberg nearby.

Past that it's hard to plot history on the map. Grand unification of strong with electroweak, and of gravity with the other three, is somewhere out there, if theories check out. But they haven't, not yet.

How do we tell when we've passed from a river into a directionless swamp? Is that what String Theory is? All we have is a very nice map, but I haven't heard of any experiments yet that would confirm the reality of String Theory's extreme elegance. Multiverse theory seems to have broadened into more of a sea without direction than a river.

Apparently we found the Higgs, right where it should be. Because it was where it should be it looks like our maps have no problems with them. I can see why many physicists seem slightly disappointed with this. Where do we go next? Onward and upward to higher energies. What do we do with ourselves if our theories are perfectly right?

It's fascinating how different the physics world looks in 2013 as opposed to 1939. The first half of the twentieth century may end up being a time of discovery like no other, with a discoverer (Einstein) like no other.