Who do I think I am?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, linguistics, pronouns, popular culture

Toddlers are addressed by everyone as "you" so frequently that they think their name is "You," and upon hearing others using "I" for themselves, the little ones think that "I" and "Me" refer exclusively to those others. Pronouns take a while to get used to. This kind of confusion underlies a bit of wordplay in a Looney Tunes cartoon in which Elmer Fudd is pursuing Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. As John McWhorter tells us in the Introduction to his new book, his title is found in this exchange:

BUGS (to Elmer): Would you like to shoot me now or wait till you get home?

DAFFY: Shoot him now, shoot him now.

BUGS: You keep out of this; he doesn't have to shoot you now.

DAFFY: Ha! Hold it right there! Pronoun trouble! It's not, "He doesn't have to shoot 'you' now," it's "He doesn't have to shoot 'me' now." Well, I say he does have to shoot me now! So shoot me now!

(BLAM!) [This being a cartoon, Daffy is now covered in soot]

The title of the book is Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words.

While the author points out the confusion of Daffy in mixing up "me" and "you", the reply of Bugs to Daffy in the third line shows that Bugs isn't so clear himself. The wordplay is reminiscent of the "Who's on First?" routines of the 1930's made famous by Abbott and Costello in the 1940's and later.

As the thread of the book winds along, we find that pronouns have been alternately steadfast and malleable. Each chapter traces the usage of a pronoun or a set of subject-object pronouns (such as "I" and "me" or "he" and "him"). A particularly long section traces the history of "me" as it switched between object-only, subject-only, and a little bit of both. For example, while I was taught that the "correct" way to refer to myself plus a friend doing something is, "Jerry and I went to a movie," for a century or so this has stood alongside "Me and Jerry went…" and almost as frequently, "Jerry and me went…"

Here are the rules I was taught, to which I habitually adhere, going on 70 years:

• When listing a group that includes you, out of modesty refer to yourself last.
• If the group is the subject of the sentence, refer to yourself as "I", as in "I went": "Jerry and I went."
• If the group is the object, refer to yourself as "me", as in "It made me happy": "It made Jerry and me happy."

Period. Those who used alternative constructions were considered ignorant or uneducated and, in a school setting, were firmly corrected. Again and again if necessary.

I admit to a bit of discomfort with accepting Dr. McWhorter's contention that "Me and Jerry went" is permissible due to historical English usage, and even the more, numerous languages that either have dual-use pronouns or don't have object-subject distinctions anyway. I don't really care what is acceptable in Tagalog or !Kung. I want to be clearly understood by Anglophones.

By the end of that first chapter I had a side thought, "I wonder if his goal is to support the singularizing of 'they'?" A quick look at the Table of Contents confirmed my suspicion: the last chapter's title is "They Was Plural." However, I didn't let that slow me down. I enjoyed the book, the linguistic histories and odd collections of pronouns that surround and underlie the ones with which we English speakers fill our prose. I didn't know before that in Old English, the male, female, and neuter third-person singular pronouns were "he", "heo", and "hit". "He" has stuck with us, while over time "hit" was de-aspirated to "it", but the path from "heo" to "she" (with a side jaunt to spit out "her") was more circuitous.

By the way, this puts paid to the contention that pronouns are so pervasive that making changes is arduous-to-impossible. All to support the tiny smattering of folks who don't like being either "he" or "she", and of course it is barbarous to call them "it", so of course "they" is called in to fill the gap. Behind all that is the delusion that "nonbinary" is a valid gender. In actuality, there is tremendous political force behind the delusion, for totalitarian reasons I'll defer for the nonce, such that a change has already been made, and is being forced on an unwilling public. For my part, if someone points to a individual person and says something like, "They are with me," I'm likely to respond, "Is there a mouse in his (or her) pocket?"—depending on the visible appearance of the person. And to close the loop, I have yet to hear someone say, "They is with me." I wonder if the "they" standing by even notices the gaffe.

Furthermore, there are numerous instances of "they" as a nonspecific singular pronoun, such as, "When a newcomer arrives, they need to be greeted by an usher." However, these have arisen over the past 50-60 years primarily by folks who bend over backwards to cater to old-line feminism and its crusade to change "chairman" and "chairwoman" to "chair" or "chairperson", etc. Until I was in my twenties, the acceptable usage was, "When a newcomer arrives, he needs to be greeted by an usher," unless the newcomer is expected to be female, such as at a League of Women Voters event; then, "…she needs…" is preferred.

I would say it is a little early to take up the cudgels for settling on "they" where "it" will work. To the contention that "it" refers to inanimate things, just ask anyone with a pet, where "it" is frequently used to refer to one's furbaby, except by those who over-humanize their pets. So if a man or woman doesn't want to be referred to either by "he" or "she", I'd prefer to say "it". Of course, speaking to such a person, I'll use "you." Just like I would to any other human. Or even a pet.

Not to leave too sour a taste in your mouth, dear reader, I must say that Dr. McWhorter writes very well, the book is quite valuable, and if it proves to be a trend-setter, perhaps I'll have to bend to what then becomes truly common usage. I come from a long-lived family, so I say, time will tell. Who knows what another decade or two will bring.

As science fiction and science approach one another

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, popular culture, films, television, science fiction and science

For many of us, when we are not thinking about food, work, or sex, we're thinking about space. Those who are lucky enough to work in the field think about, in order, space (work), space (dreams), and then the others. One such is Ariel Waldman, who has gathered the content of conversations and interviews about her favorite subject into her new book Out There: The Science Behind Sci-fi Film and TV.

The book's 19 chapters introduce subjects ranging from escaping Earth gravity to loneliness, from spacesuit design to starship speculations, and from what alien creatures and their languages might be. I'll touch on a couple of items that I found interesting.

Chapter 5 is titled "Artificial Intelligence – Should spaceships be sentient?", and is headed by this evocative illustration. Some of us remember HAL, the conflicted, eventually homicidal shipmind in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In science fiction, intelligent machines are most frequently presented as risky or downright dangerous. Not all, though; at the end of Isaac Asimov's Foundation/I Robot series of intertwined stories, R Daneel Olivaw has attained near-deity and is quite benevolent, but such depictions are rare.

I've read stories in which the shipmind is a brain grafted to machinery (the best is "The Ship Who Sang" by Anne McCaffrey), others with human minds downloaded into computers, others with purpose-built AGI's, and many more with no technology indicated.

Here's my take on conferring all power upon a mechanism: If it is based on biological neuroanatomy, it will not be any more reliable than are we, or pigeons, or whatever bio-brain is modeled. If it is based on familiar multi-CPU/GPU-OS architecture, it has a better chance of being reliable, but it will be less relatable. I suggest that command-and-control be based on utterly reliable hardware, and that the "ship shrink" and other artificial companions be separate from it.

Chapter 9 is titled "Asteroids – What's so interesting about a bunch of space rocks?" So far, all the asteroids that have been visited by spacecraft are more akin to rubble piles. The idea of hollowing out an asteroid to make a habitat must await our finding some that are more solid. 

Metallic asteroids such as Psyche (the target of a spacecraft, also named Psyche, that will arrive in 2029) are thought to be quite solid, with little surface rubble. Others may have a large-ish solid core, with "shells" of rubble up to several or many meters thick. Psyche's size is about 278km×238km×171km; it is one of the largest asteroids. Good targets for mining or other uses will be less than a kilometer in size.

A quote by the author is apropos: "The idea of asteroids as human habitats might not be as alluring as the fantasy of living on the Moon or Mars, which would be unbelievably challenging environments to make a home out of, but they are an interesting option." I am not sure if the phrase "unbelievably challenging" was intended by the author to refer to the Moon and Mars, or to the asteroids. I'd put it this way, that if it is 100 times as hard to make a livable habitat in or on Mars or the Moon as on Earth, an asteroid habitat would be a further 100 times as hard as the Moon to live on or in.

Also, the people who advised the author put to rest the idea that the "asteroid belt" is awash with dangerous rocks that one must dodge when attempting to traverse it. Many spacecraft have zoomed through the whole depth of "the Belt" at speeds of thousands of km per hour, without mishap. Not so much as a grain of sand, so far as we know, has hit any of them. 

Think of it like this: The total mass of the main belt between Mars and Jupiter is about 3% of the mass of the Moon, which is 7.348 × 10²² kg (Wikipedia article is here), and the four largest asteroids make up about 60% of that. The next million known asteroids bring the total mass of "bigger pieces" up to about 99% of the expected total mass.

Suppose that all the rest of the total mass were grains of sand with a size of about 1mm, weighing 2.5 mg each. Divide that into 0.012% of the mass of the Moon; it comes to a lot of grains (it's a 25-digit number). Then, the belt itself can be treated as a torus with an inner radius of 290 million km and an outer radius of 500 million km, which is halfway to Jupiter from Mars, so its volume is, very roughly, a 9 followed by 24 digits, in kilometers...I'll forego putting the calculations here. Dividing the volume by the number of grains I find 24. Each virtual grain has 24 cubic kilometers to itself, on average. Calculating the "expected impact cross section", the number of grains a square meter of spacecraft is likely to encounter passing through the 310-million-km thickness of the belt, I find 0.32 expected impacts.

That is interesting. It is larger than I would expect, considering that no spacecraft have been damaged while traversing the asteroid belt. It also emphasizes that some of the estimates in the prior paragraph could be very far off. At any rate, it is unlikely that anyone aboard a spacecraft on its way through the belt will ever see anything, unless they purposely pass by a known asteroid.

The subjects are all interesting, and I could write about my reactions to all of them. But this is a review, not a synopsis! It is a small book, in its own way, but well worth reading. Small: the pages are large, but the paper is thick so there are only 134. Each chapter has a full-page illustration like those shown above, and a full-page title, plus a page of some halftone-dot pattern; all that subtracts 57 pages from the total. It is still worthwhile.

I must also applaud the artwork of Phil Wheeler (this is his agent's website). I've included just two of his illustrations for this book, but I was strongly tempted to provide thumbnails of them all.

What malls won't do for money

kw: popular culture, advertisements, shopping malls

Ever since about Halloween, a TV ad has been running, an anti-Mall spot with a very catchy song and dance (to the tune of "Up on the House Top"), by TJ Maxx and a couple of other retailers. I began to wonder, was this taped in a mall, or did they build a mock-up? If they used a mall, I suspect they paid them well!

I also considered: although we do, as the lyrics state, "pay through the nose", do we really? It costs between half a dollar and a dollar per mile to drive a car (more for luxury models); I am frugal, and it costs me about $0.70 per mile. You need to drive a real beater and do your own maintenance to get the costs down in the $0.50/mile range. How do the extra miles and costs add up if you need to drive from store to store?

I live a mile from one mall, a rather modest one, and twelve miles from a real mega-mall. The collection of retailers and retail outlets in this area is pretty well concentrated in several shopping areas (what we used to call outdoor malls), that are spaced about two miles apart in any direction. So if I want to go to four places, I'll drive a total of two miles if I can find everything at the mall, and about ten miles to visit four separate places and return home. The eight mile difference costs only $5.60. If I can save $1.40 per purchase at the separate stores, then the extra trips were worth it.

But then, what is the value of my time? Rather than use my own compensation, which is a bit on the high side, I'll use a more average figure of $20 per hour. Store-to-store time includes driving and walking, and comes to ten minutes for a 2-mile trip. This adds up to 40-50 minutes for the four-store visit. Can I do my shopping in the mall, at four stores, and spend less than a total 50 minutes going store-to-store? Let's assume I can, and that the total is half, or about 25 minutes. The mall trip then saves $8.30 or so in "opportunity cost".

Add this to the $5.60, and we have about $14 that needs to be made up, or $3.50 per purchase. It is worth checking into your purchases beforehand, and deciding if you can save $3.50 per purchase at the separate stores. For some items, particularly clothing, it's a no-brainer. But both the separate stores and the mall stores complicate matters by having specials and sales.

I think, for a lot of people, the time saving is worth more than the dollar amount, and the convenience of the mall simply outweighs everything else.

The newest evangelical religion

kw: religion, atheism, popular culture

It is all over the news today, locally at least, that the city authorities in West Chester, Pennsylvania are under pressure by atheists, nontheists and humanists to restore the display of a "Tree of Knowledge" along with other "holiday greetings" on city property. It seems the City had been allowing all faiths and non-faiths to put up displays on city property, but in 2010 banned them all in favor of a few banners with neutral slogans, such as "Happy Holidays", that had been deemed non-confrontational by the Supreme Court. Now the anti-religion folks plan a rally/protest in hopes of convincing the city otherwise.

Of course, they don't want "Merry Christmas" banners or nativity scenes restored, just their tree of knowledge display. This demonstrates they are not just pro-nontheism, but anti-theism. That is, evangelical atheists are actually anti-theist. They don't disbelieve in God, they hate God or any idea of any god.

There are two partially conflicting principles that underlie democratic institutions, at least in the US. One is to do the greatest good for the greatest number. The other is to protect the rights of minorities. On the first principle, the greatest number of Americans are either Christian or sympathetic to Christian principles, and the next largest group is Jewish or sympathetic to them. On the other principle, the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees us the right to practice our various religions according to our conscience. It does not guarantee the right of anybody to oppose another's religion, or the lack thereof.

The First Amendment actually contains the "Establishment Clause", which prohibits the Federal Government from establishing a religion to be the nationally practiced standard excluding all others. Thus the intimate relationship between the English government and the Anglican Church, or the German government and the Lutheran Church, are disallowed for the U.S. government. On this basis, I agree that specifically religious displays on government owned properties should not be allowed. If a business permits a religious display on its premises, that is OK, and the government has no right to an opinion about such things.

Is the "Tree of Knowledge" a specifically religious display? I say that it is. In particular, it is an anti-reaction to the story in Genesis in which God requires Adam and his wife to refrain from eating the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil". Note that the tree's designation is not pertaining to all knowledge, but to knowledge of moral issues. God wanted them to ask Him about moral issues instead; this is the basic Christian interpretation of this passage, and I think most Jews agree.

Let the City of West Chester regulate its own public spaces without regard to religion. If the atheists and their friends can persuade a business to display their Tree, fine and dandy. I wonder what the upshot will be…

The latest tear-jerker

kw: popular culture, tv shows, game shows

Last evening my wife and I watched ABC's new game show You Deserve It, mainly out of curiosity. My friends know I need three hankies at a two-hanky movie, so I kept a box of tissues handy in anticipation: the trailers showed plenty of tearful moments, and I figured I'd follow suit. I did. (My wife, on the other hand, is puzzled why I cry when I am happy or touched.)

A young woman won more than $110,000 on behalf of a friend, a young widow who has fallen on hard times. She had her own family there to support her, though they were not allowed to help her with the clues. It works like this: at each level you start with an amount of potential winnings, such as $50,000. You have to buy clues, and the amounts are random. You hope for low cost clues. If you buy every clue, you wind up with nothing. This contestant did pretty well. If you were to buy no clues, you could win more than $450,000. She did well to win about a quarter of that.

Because of the surprise factor involved, I reckon that all the episodes for this season have been taped already. ABC is trolling for more contestants, and I expect they'll get enough ratings for this show to continue for a few more seasons. Its first episode was warm-hearted enough, as we enter the holiday season, to keep plenty of viewers tearfully happy through the end of the year at least.

This fairy tale is rather short of fairies

kw: fairy tales, fantasy, popular culture

We watched the first episode of Once Upon a Time on ABC out of curiosity, my wife and I. We have become strangely enamored of the series. I won't belabor the plot here; if you haven't been watching and are curious, click on the link above, where you can watch past episodes.

The show is very well written, by the writers of Lost, in which you were never sure if the protagonists were even alive (spoiler: they weren't). This series presents a different take on favorite fairy tales of our childhood. As children, we loved it when Cinderella has her "happy ever after", and Snow White is awakened by a kiss (Sleeping Beauty, too, in a curious variant on Snow White). When we grew up, most of us never gave it another thought.

Some years ago, I realized that fairy tales and ghost stories and other fantastical childhood tales are really about coming to terms with the world as we find it. Giant-killer stories are about coping with adults when we were tiny; Cinderella and similar stories are about overcoming early handicaps (sometimes with magical help, sometimes not); dragon stories are about learning to control our inner dragons; and tales of defeating trolls and ogres are mostly wish-fulfillment, as they seldom give us genuine skills needed to deal with schoolyard bullies.

The writers of Once have taken a different tack. Their version of childhood classics is edgier, darker. Snow White, a fugitive from the Queen, is a highway robber. Cinderella makes a deal with Rumpelstiltskin, who is surprisingly willing to tell his name (will they bring in the spinning-straw-into-gold story?), after he disposes of her fairy Godmother.

What is really going on here? It seems most of the conventional fairy tales lacked a Trickster, a figure such as Loki (of Norse mythology). Even when one appeared (Rumpelstiltskin), he was tricked in the end and overcome. But we all grew up and found out that happy endings are hard to come by. We don't kill any giants, we become giants and learn the reasons why our parents were so unreasonable, as seen by tiny minds. The trolls and ogres win all the fights, and in the world of work, we find they all have become middle managers who control our yearly progress reviews. And the dragon? Our personal dragon has lost the power to breathe fire, and had its wings clipped. When we do breathe a little fire, we get a stern e-mail from HR demanding we attend "sensitivity training" courses.

In Norse mythology, Loki wins, though at the end, even he is defeated by the Frost Giants. I do anticipate this element informs the ABC series. The strongest wizard, even stronger than the Queen, is Rumpelstiltskin. His mantra matches our experience: There is a price to be paid. Magic doesn't come free.

Let's see, the next episode is scheduled for Nov 27 – ABC will set it aside on the 20^th in favor of the Music Awards. That gives us time for just four episodes before Christmas, and since the following Sunday is New Years' day, I reckon four is all that there are. Four episodes to wrap up the tales, defeat the Queen, and – you can bet on it – throw in a twist at the end, such as the Trickster getting away, to set things up for a follow-on season.

Watching Watson win

kw: artificial intelligence, supercomputers, popular culture

I missed the original showing of the Jeopardy shows featuring the Watson supercomputer. Now it is rerun season, so last evening I got to see the first round in which Watson fought to a draw with one of the trivia champs. I'll have to miss tonight's finale, but I know the outcome.

I hope the two gentlemen who lost to Watson don't feel too bad. They were beaten not just by a fast computer, but by a huge team of programmers and experts who had pre-loaded Watson's data banks with things like whole encyclopedias, all of Bartlett's Quotations, and the like. Were Watson's lookup and correlation routines even faster, the men would have been outgunned in every instance except the two for which Watson answered incorrectly.

I'm glad they started the show with a small tour of the hardware behind the avatar. Watson is physically just as large as the mainframe computers I was using in the 1960s, and is accompanied by enough air conditioning equipment to keep a whole block of houses cool. Now let's speculate a little. In the 1960s, the current "supercomputer" was a CDC 6600; ten years later (1976), the first Cray-1 ran the first 100-MFlop calculation. A desktop computer my son and I built last year coasts along in the 100-300 MFlop range. So, thirty-four or -five years in the future, assuming the databases and algorithms are available economically, can we expect a desktop Watson? Possibly.

I have two questions: (1) When will a machine be able to appreciate a subtle joke? and (2) When will a machine no larger than a grapefruit be able to navigate the world with the ease of a typical house cat? A partial answer to both requires us to imagine that a true artificial intelligence needs a body with a density of sensors equivalent to the endowment of a natural animal. A machine that can not just see and hear but smell, taste, feel the breeze in its hair, and that has senses of balance, proprioception and at least the 20+ other senses Aristotle didn't include among the Big Five.

Lovin' that Shaq

kw: popular culture

I had the chance this Summer to watch all the episodes of Shaq Versus. Great fun! Just more silliness therapy for me. Tonight was more about heartwarming than about serious competition. The "victims" were Jimmy Kimmel and Justin Bieber. With Kimmel, the Diesel traded 5-minute trash-talk monologues. Both were hilarious. Then with Bieber, it was a collaboration rather than a competition. I am not much of a fan of pop, but it is clear why Justin Bieber is so popular. He is a great performer, and Shaq showed he could keep up as well as any man who is pushing fifty. So what if everything is over-hyped? It was plenty of fun, all season, but particularly tonight.

Some say, If only

kw: opinion, popular culture

Some say, "If only..." but I say it is too silly for words. As I write this The Bachelorette 6 is showing on the local ABC affiliate, and my wife has been watching on and off. I looked in about an hour ago, for five minutes, which just about doubled the total amount of time I've watched either The Bachelor or The Bachelorette.

With a bit of Googling, I determined that one couple of seventeen has actually married and stayed together long enough to produce a couple of children. They say they are happy. I wish them well. For most of the rest, the TV exposure helped them land hot jobs, so they got some benefit from the experience, not just what they expected going in.

The fact is, folks, building a relationship is hard work. Building one that will last a lifetime of sharing child-rearing, juggling jobs and trying to snatch some leisure time now and again, and aging together, takes the most work of all, and guess what? The work doesn't half begin until after the wedding. For those who don't bother with a wedding, face it, you're doomed. You've already failed the first important test of lifetime compatibility: trusting another person enough to commit the rest of your life to him or her.

Building that kind of trust takes time. I like long courtships. Six months or a year just starts to scratch the surface. And the other secret is this: the real courtship begins after the wedding also. You will spend the rest of your life courting each other, if you're smart!

The overheated, camera-laden atmosphere of the TV shows makes any semblance of real courtship impossible. The ordinary course of dating is bad enough, but ABC has managed to produce something even worse. All the stage-managing and coaching that go into making the show work as a show simply ensure that, if it results in a newly-engaged couple, the two of them are in for some shocks as they find out just how their new love interest actually operates without all the interference. Sixteen out of seventeen found the differences were too great.

Y'know, thinking about it, spending time with a dozen or more beauties in exotic locales would be a lot of fun. Choosing whom to send home wouldn't even be too hard at first. Even with everyone on their best behavior, someone will slip up, and Boom! out they go. Being a control freak, though, I'd be sure to send away anyone who had any gumption, any girl with the temerity to challenge a whim of mine. I am soon to celebrate 35 years of marriage to a woman who stands up to me a lot. And I need it. I even (this takes time) thank her for her help; she has helped me avoid a number of bad decisions. I'm sure glad I found her. She'd never have survived in a Bachelor setting.

The popularity of big reptiles

kw: observations, popular culture, dinosaurs, lists

I'm reading yet another book based on a spin-off of Jurassic Park, which I'll be reviewing in a day or two. It got me thinking about the staying power of the human-dinosaur connection.

I did a little searching on the web, and herewith, some of the most popular J.P. spin-offs:

1. Veloci-Mates on YouTube
2. Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis for Xbox
3. Warpath: Jurassic Park
4. Primeval TV series (which has spin-offs of its own)
5. Primeval film, which is about a crocodile, not a dinosaur
6. King Kong (2005), with its extended sequences of dinosaur stampedes and fights
7. Dinotopia books and films

Dancing with the Woz

kw: observations, popular culture, dancing

A couple years ago our old 19-inch TV died. Warned of the impending digital switchover (we use an antenna, only), we got a set that can tune in anything, analog or digital. I think it has four kinds of tuners in it. It is not that much bigger at 26 inches, but it does excellent HD at 1080i. I guess I could have predicted that, once we could watch better-looking TV we would watch more.

Last evening my wife just had to see Shawn Johnson dance (with partner Mark Ballas) on Dancing with the Stars, so we watched the second half. An unexpected treat was seeing Steve Wozniak dance, shown here with partner Karina Smirnoff. They did the Cha-Cha. I didn't realize that the Cha-Cha is considered a ballroom dance, or that it's done with a partner!

The Woz did a creditable job, though he got the lowest score of the night. It was amusing to see his banter with the judges; nobody else said nearly as much. I suspect his popularity will push him onward for another round or two, but I'm rooting for Shawn to win it all.