While using the trappings of rationality, neo-liberalism’s “fundamentalist” denial of the utility of any government intervention is supported by increasingly ignorant individuals in a neat reversal of enlightenment, where “logic” means “believe me or else”.

Read the PDF and then my comments since my comments contain “spoilers”.

In this virtual history Western civilization collapses along with the seacoasts of Europe and the Americas: England becomes a rump state dominated by Scotland, probably a bit of luck: Canada and the USA merge so US citizens can escape killer heat. If I am still alive at this time (2030? 2020? 2015?) my lack of mobility and cancer will cause me, I hope, to simply sit still and pray, not only Catholic prayers but also Lakota death-songs: songs of gratitude. But if I can rescue my grand-daughters I should probably try.

At the worst of it The Second Black Death, with mortality levels of 50% plus, matching those of the Black Death of the 1340s, lays waste to Europe. Governance, scientific data-gathering, local authority, all collapse in a way that could only please dirtbags such as neo-liberals and “anarchists”. Dazed mothers carry babies dead for several weeks through howling storms…

China survives because it isn’t committed to neo-liberalism and (perhaps for the same reason I have not been allowed to die and rot of prostate cancer and its side effects in my apartment) Chinese authorities are able to vacate China’s coasts in a humane fashion.

This virtual history is quite factual up to 2012 and its drafting. It reports things not found in the media in the USA, whether liberal (MSNBC?) or conservative (Fox). Was 2012 in the USA the year without a winter as 1815 in Europe was the year without a summer? I do remember a series of balmy winters in the 1990s whereas back in the 1950s one could count on snowy winters, uncertain springs, hot summers and glorious “Indian summers” in each of the respective seasons. Today nobody knows what to expect.

These authors also wrote “Merchants of Doubt”, how the tobacco firms retained public relations firms and Mad Men to assert “doubt” about the health effects of smoking. Had they not been permitted to do this, my Mom, so easily frightened yet so paradoxically daring in her smoking, would probably have quit, there being NO voice whispering that maybe she’d get away with smoking; she did not, she died at the relatively young age of 72, whereas most well-to-do American and international women die in their eighties, their nineties, past 100: Mme Chiang Kai Shek died in 2003 at the age of 105.

“Truth is an absolute defense”: on behalf of our tobacco lords, the Mad Men spoke demonstrable truth. Many people do smoke and live until their nineties. The Mad Men never dared to contradict the testimony of data sets, such as the British data set that showed a spike in a disease previously rare in British WWI vets, the first British soldiers to smoke heavily: lung cancer. They simply said, with respect to the assertion “the association you show us is doubtful: perhaps the cancers were caused by another delayed reaction, to the conditions of the Front in the war, or those of the General Strike and depression”. This is to say of x, doubt(x), and this is always “analytically” true: true by virtue of its form and knowably never false when x is any meaningful scientific assertion.

It takes only a reading of Hume to understand this: but as the chair of my undergraduate philosophy department, E. D. Klemke, told me in the 1990s, increasingly students were being directed by “pastors” and homeschoolers to avoid philosophy and demand classes in comparative religion to satisfy accreditation requirements. Hume is considered perniciously skeptical whereas the taxonomy he introduced of statements is a form of knowledge and a highly useful tool.

Hume’s taxonomy should be identified here precisely because it will be unfamiliar to many educated people: analytic a priori, synthetic a priori (an empty class to Hume), analytic a posteriori (JS Mill’s mathematics, to some, although Mills may have not agreed) and synthetic a posteriori (scientific claims outside math).

Because “synthetic a posteriori” assertions such as “smoking causes lung cancer” and “mankind’s economic activity is producing greenhouse gas in the troposphere such that the planet is absorbing and retaining more of the sun’s energy, leading to runaway global warming, and, possibly, the ‘Sagan effect’ which would transform our climate to that of the unlivable climate of Venus in as short as a year or less” can be doubted as in “I rather doubt that smoking causes lung cancer” or “I doubt global warming” which statements are analytic apriori and as such true by virtue of their form.

Lawyers are trained to spot such assertions which must be admissible because true. The law bows to such assertions if made in a court of law by a lawyer in a nice suit, and while the PR men, the Mad Men, may not have majored in philosophy, they knew from the streets that doubt works.

The PDF is a hell of a read, especially if you like science fiction and virtual history. The original 1960s concerns about the environment and overpopulation inspired a spate of scary novels including Phillip “Generation of Vipers” Wylie’s “The End of the Dream”. These books caused many frightened people to get active in environmental causes over the last fifty years which may have delayed our doom.

The common mind delights in fictions like these. I used to, wasting hours at the library reading virtual future histories of nuclear war and environmental crash but never becoming active as a result. Whereas a 1983 TV program about a nuclear war inspired Dad to join Physicians for Social Responsibility. Its far more graphic and frightening BBC counterpart was Threads, available on You Tube for the very, very brave and strong of stomach; please don’t watch it if you’re not.

But we refused to listen to VP Al Gore and his far more factual warning in 2000, preferring several years of dirtbag pseudo-prosperity.

Learn logic, math and rhetoric to avoid being manipulated. Demand that your child’s high school incorporate the International Baccalaureate’s tutelage in critical thinking in which logic and rhetorical studies are used to expose false claims such as are made by global warming denialists; Texas recently forbad such material in its schools which is probably a recommendation.

Only French high schools world-wide teach philosophy, with its strong demand for critical thinking, and when “critical thinking” is taught in American universities, it is taught too often in the outdated Modernist register where the student is assumed to be in need of tutelage in doubt. This is true, but having destroyed foundations, the class (in logic or philosophy) should demonstrate new paths to knowledge.

Students must be required to at a minimum be able to read, check and understand proofs in logic and geometry, but ideally, she’d construct such proofs. Along with the usual crop of true believers who believe positive nonsense based on faith, or an overdose of comic books (“graphic novels”, indeed) and counterfactual TV, we have only slightly less devolved individuals who regard themselves as “skeptics” because they literally don’t understand the mathematics of exponential or “hockey stick” curves. These people have never constructed a proof and as a result they are “skeptical” children, lost in the wood.

Reading Acts 1 & 2 of Richard II which include these marvelously creative lines:

HENRY BOLINGBROKE
My gracious uncle–
DUKE OF YORK
Tut, tut!
Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle:

The use of the nouns “grace” and “uncle” as verbs may be a Shakespearean innovation if I remember my Oxford History of English correctly but that book languishes in my deserted flat. It’s a strikingly modern retort to Bolingbroke here, the future Henry IV who’s broken his terms of banishment.

Richard II reads easily for it’s almost all in verse, typically elegant blank verse with couplets at the end of speeches but many internal and end-line rhymes in the speeches themselves. This reflects the historical and Holinshed Richard II who aspired to be an Italian, Renaissance prince who’d patronize the arts, in a cold and Philistine northern clime where everyone wanted him to be a stud like his grandfather Edward III, and never mind the arts. The unspoken fear of Richard’s actual magnates was the possibility that Richard might be queer as was his grandfather, unmentionably murdered with a lead enema.

This gives Shakespeare’s play resemblances to Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II. Indeed, the plot lines parallel in that the downfall of the queer, and that of the arts patron, is a “death foretold”: both know that they are doomed. The difference being that Edward II claims a right that overrides his behavior, to be king, whereas Shakespeare’s character, like Henry VI, seems all too anxious to abdicate in favor of Hereford/Bolingbroke/Henry IV.

Note that all of Shakespeare’s history plays accurately identify the speaker by his current title or Christian name. Here Shakespeare uses Bolingbroke’s Christian name: but in Henry VI parts 2 and 3, and Richard III, Richard “Crookback” is not identified as Richard York: he goes from plain Richard, to Gloucester when his father is restored to Duke of York by Henry VI, to King Richard III after being crowned.

I checked the folio text (in the eText at the University of Virginia) and Bolingbroke is identified consistently as Bolingbroke, albeit abbreviated based on a variant spelling as “Bul.”…Bullingbrook?

Hmm. Clearly I need all of Shakespeare’s plays in formal grammar format, divided into software objects such as “block of verse”, “block of prose”, “stage” direction and so on. To this end I am using my newly available time in in retirement to key in the 1608 History of King Lear, and the 1623 Tragedy. I shall also write a blog post describing this project in more detail.

Acts 2 and 3 of Titus Andronicus: I do not like this play at all because of the absurd spectacle de l’Abbatoir in which Shakespeare tried his hand at appealing to the coarsest sensitivities of his audience, never to return after finishing this turkey.

Apparently, this play cannot be classed as a Roman play using a test that’s passed by the “real” Roman plays: the plots of Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus are derived from Plutarch whereas the idiotic story line of Titus Andronicus is found nowhere but in Titus Andronicus: Shakespeare invented the plot my guess in cahoots with Robert Greene, possibly his evil spirit before Greene got sick and turned on Shakespeare in Greene’s “upstart crow” rant.

In terms of my continued interest in using set theory and other tools to classify Shakespeare’s plays in multiple ways, Titus may be sui generis…unless, of course, I simply change the rule for “Roman Play” from “story line is in Plutarch” to “set in Rome or Greece or Egypt under Roman domination.”

[Look for two forthcoming essays/blog posts: On Classifying Shakespeare's Works, and On Comparing Literary Texts Especially Shakespeare's Plays.]

“So, the sons of Tamara, queen o’ the Goths, black bint, they cuts orf Lavinny’s tongue and hands…”

Titus Andronicus is a bit more than an Homeric Nod: a Homeric Fart more like which at best exhibits Shakespeare’s skill at blank verse with one thought per line, blank verse resembling that found in the Henrician trilogy. Its latter-day popularity is attributable to the coarseness of audiences in cities today who always must be pandered to if they go through the effort of watching Shakespeare.

Give me an ounce of civet good apothecary to sweeten my imagination, as King Lear says. I have some easy to love plays coming up (Winter’s Tale, Richard II) and one more stinker (Troilus and Cressida) to complete this Grand High Shakespeare Re-Read and Massacree.

Congee (fluffy and good), yegg and the beginning of Titus Andronicus wherein the noble Titus makes two enemies.

Dream: I was traveling with the kids up a highway much like the Northwest Highway northwest of Chicago, or el Camino Real in Silicon Valley: four lanes of heavy, slow traffic and many small shops. We shopped for a computer. I then was shirtless and alone a Costco or Tesco kind of shop, looking at DVDs but the shop clerk and I after some fireworks fell in love.

My Oxford Collected Works is a mess as a result of my Grand High Shakespeare ReRead and Massacree. The spine on one side separating from the pages, the pages stuck together and stained with congee. But that’s what books are for. Fortunately my edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a much better bound Cambridge University paperback, for the Critique is the next Grand High Reread and Massacree. My favorite commentary on the Crtique, Adorno’s lectures, are also published as a quality paperback with excellent binding, in identical formats by Polity internationally and Stanford in the USA.

Able to give a well-received if impromptu talk this morning in the common room to several medical students on the patient as doctor Zero and a number of other topics. I was asked why I seemed so cheerful; it is hard to explain my sang-froid. There’s no point in getting depressed, I said, because there simply is no way of telling how long an individual prostate cancer sufferer has on earth.

Living until you are ninety nine, I said, is probably nonsense. Instead of a kindly and active grandfather, you are the scary guy at the Chinese wedding who smells like pee.

The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was diagnosed circa the Chilean coup of 11 Sep 1973 with prostate cancer and died, some say of foul play, only 12 days after his friend Salvador Allende, the last truly constitutional leader of Chile, was probably assassinated. We never know when it’s time to go. We can take death seriously but with sang-froid.

Sen for the deid remeid is none,
Best is that we for dede dispone,
Eftir our deid that lif may we;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

William Dunbar

This play, not nearly as scintillating as the two “Falstaff” plays (Henry IV parts 1 and 2), contains my favorite Shakespearean lowlife, “Ancient Pistol”, where “Ancient” doesn’t mean “old”, rather the military rank of ensign (flag carrier?) roughly equivalent to today’s top sergeant, warrant officer, or second lieutenant.

Ancient Pistol appears only in Henry IV part 2 and Henry 5. He prides himself on being Falstaff’s friend but Falstaff and especially Mistress Quickly (Falstaff’s closest confidante) despise him as a blowhard. Whilst Falstaff thinks before he speaks (“what, is the old king dead?” when Pistol brings news, in H4 part 2, of the death of Henry IV) Pistol just runs his mouth (“A foutra for the world, and worldlings base/I speak of Africa and golden joys” at that same time).

Pistol is a miles gloriosus (braggart soldier) and he speaks “fustian”; Pistol is a crude caricature of Falstaff.

He is part of a four man group in Henry V and a three man group in Merry Wives.

In Henry V, after Falstaff dies, Pistol, the “thought leader” of Falstaff’s drunken followers, leads them into battle, or, more precisely, close, then away, to be beaten into the attack on Harfleur by Fluellen. The lads are: Pistol, Corporal Nym, Bardolph and Boy.

Nym is sly and resentful thinking he might marry Mistress Quickly after Falstaff’s death, for Falstaff was betrothed to Mistress Quickly…she gives good evidence for this betrothal to the Lord Chief Justice in Henry IV Part 2 in this charming passage:

“Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Wheeson week, when the prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing-man of Windsor”

Falstaff, in the Henrician trilogy, schemes to inherit Mistress Quickly’s carefully cultivated estate (a tavern in London) but when he dies, Corporal Nym and Pistol compete for Mistress Quickly’s hand and property; Pistol is the victor. Nym is apt to say “and that’s the humor of it” and other words that affirm what he has said. He’s probably slain at Agincourt: that’s what Branagh would have us believe although there are no words to that effect in Henry V; Branagh’s film shows Nym slain while looting a corpse.

In the Folio text of Henry V, there is a large amount of play text in the middle which is almost never staged and was not filmed by Branagh despite Branagh’s reputation for avoiding cuts. It includes the resolution of the dispute between a disguised Henry and Wiliams when Williams, in the night before the battle, mocks “Henry Le Roy’s” pretensions to “never trust his word after”, speaking of the King and much material about the relationship of Henry V and Montjoy far more subtle and gentle than presented by Branagh.

This material may have been a set of spare tires or cannilizable parts to be used or not depending on the requirements of specific performances which would undercut my vision of Shakespeare as an Ur-artist of the Romantic era who wanted to create complete works of art.

We know Pistol survives to turn “cutpurse” in England.

“Boy” is a young kid probably adopted by Mistress Quickly off the streets of London. His death is implied but not confirmed when in Henry V the retreating French, in Fluellen’s words, “kill the poys and the luggage” and Captain Gower says “’tis certain there’s not a boy left alive”.

In Pistol’s final speech alone, there is some self-hating self-knowledge whereas before there was just fustian. Would Shakespeare had more opportunity to develop this character beyond Merry Wives of Windsor.

In the Grand High Shakespeare ReRead and Massacree, finished Love’s Labours Lost and Acts 1..3 of Measure for Measure. Once I finish M for M I shall have Richard II (good play), Titus Andronicus (sucks), Various Poems and The Winter’s Tale, I believe, to go to finish re-reading. I need not to race to the finish but to read slow, since this project is teaching me much about S and the language.

One reason I am engaging in this project is that while I say “I read the collected works of Shakespeare in 1962 except for the Merry Wives of Windsor” I did so callowly and inattentively, and may have skipped more than one. I did not read The Two Noble Kinsmen because it was considered apocrypha before modern text analyzers were developed. It wasn’t mentioned by my authority, one Marcette Chute of the Folger Shakespeare Library and author of “Stories from Shakespeare” and “Shakespeare of London”.

I may not have completed certain plays in the Chute canon out of boredom. I know I finished the great plays, Othello, Henry V and so on, especially where as in the case of Henry V and The Tempest I was able to see TV or live performances. But I may have bogged down in fHamlet.

For this reason, that my 1962 Grand High Read while real enough may have been a myth in part, today’s reread just serves to confirm that whatever else obtains, I’ve read the canon. Except for The Two Noble Kinsmen. I have a sort of Phobia about that play now that I shall shortly overcome my Merry Wives of Windsor phobia; I have seen the Merry Wives in performance (on a DVD on the 1980s canonical BBC videos) and it makes sense.

It is strange but bookish folk may develop phobias about reading or completing certain books. I wouldn’t read Jane Austen when younger since I figured at the time she was for girls.

Many people start *Voyna i Mir* (War and Peace, and yes, I use the Russian name first through utter pretension and also to show some goddamn fellow-feeling with Russia speakers). They enjoy its panoramic depictions of Russia and its wonderful abundance of characters such as the transcendent Natasha, the ever wiser Pierre and the noble Andrei.

But rather like a coach that’s part of the retreat by Napoleon’s Grand Army, carrying camp followers, the reader like me gets bogged down, often somewhere in Tolstoy’s description of the retreat. We have usually seen the Hollywood version of the tale starring Audrey Hepburn as Natasha and Henry Fonda as Pierre, and the much better Bondarchuk version, truer as it is to Tolstoy’s pacing. But you have to do the footwork, you must READ, to be an intelligent person. “Aliteracy” (trusting to electronic media for news and versions of Important Books) creates the man without bones.

Stage IV as a Turing Machine??

This is interesting, for when I was diagnosed Stage IV, the writers on Stage IV cancers stressed that “there is no Stage V” which could be the voice of Doom. The only mitigation being that I don’t seem at this time to have metastasis other than to lymph nodes which makes me a IV-D1, and there is a D2.

I imaged this as the squares of a Turing machine (a mathematical abstraction defining the limits of computation as what an easily described, easily understood mechanical automaton could execute given enough time and memory “squares”) receding not to a known finish but into darkness.

The darkness over the distant Turing Machine squares represented my subconscious absorption of the Bible teaching, to which I’ve always subscribed, “behold, I come as a thief”: we can never know in the theological sense, that is with certainty, if the “signs and wonders” we see (plagues, earthquakes, comets) are end times and each time they have been witnessed (from the Plague of Justinian in the 600s, to the Black Death in the 1340s, the Holocaust, the world did NOT come to an end, and the Messiah did not come back.

Most *parousia* talk, as far as I’m concerned, is piffle, and blasphemous piffle, meant to frighten people into joining your damn storefront profit seeking church. We should always been doing good works or at a bare minimum not whack each other no matter when the Apocalypse returns.

We do not know when we’ll die. Jorge Luis Borges’ magnificent short story “The Library of Babel” says that given that the Library contains all possible combinations of letters “the true story of our deaths” will surely occur…as will countless incorrect reports. So in my imagination the squares, the days, recede into unknowability. The great Mystics made God’s unknowability a Perfection of Gods. The money-seeking Preachers who can rot in Hell for all I care claim to know things they should not.

In today’s Grand High Shakespeare Re-Read and Massacree, I completed Love’s Labour’s Lost where some of the most spectacular poetic fireworks occur…this is the only play in which Shakespeare neglected the needs of the entire audience (to see a Show) in favor of showing off his learning and vocabulary in a Ben Jonson style. I’ve started on Measure for Measure and have only a few plays to go, perhaps to my regret: Troilus, Titus, Winter’s, Richard II, “Various Poems” and, I think, I’ll be done. Trying to discover new things and a feel for the language in each play although I am not looking forward to Titus Andronicus. It was a horrible experience to read this at 12 years and I don’t think it’s improved.

Physio workout in the afternoon: 20 minute goal achieved, but I was exhausted and could not make normal goal of about 700 rowing strokes.

In Shakespeare’s Loves Labours Lost, perhaps it was necessary to show the University Shits oops Wits that a little grammar school in a rural town could use the magic of printed books, brought to England 100 years before by Caxton, to give 15 year old teens the equivalent of a university classical education including practicing 100+ figures of Rhetoric and writing sonnets. As an A level tutor I could probably do better than a tenured professor in teaching a Shakespeare play, and I understand that real “professors” may not be able to teach…whence the phenomenon of studentless universities for pure research including the Institute for Advanced Study adjacent to Princeton and the Rockefeller Institute up in Manhattan.

Smashed my one remaining Netvigator-proprietary dongle by putting it on my bed adjacent to the blanket such that an unknowing maid tossed the blanket on it thereby bending and snapping the dongle at an angle greater than 90 degrees.

This means I only have access to the Internet from the wireless in the Grantham common room, and this will be mostly in the morning for I must do physio in the afternoon. But I can batch up tasks for the afternoon and evening and download interesting content. I also need to catch up with pencil and paper tasks such as indexing my medical paperwork and using Erica’s kind gift of drawing paper.

That dongle, as I said, is a uniquely stupid design: unconsciously phallic in that the dork who designed the dongle actually LIKES an ugly thing sticking out in the computer from a USB. This hypothetical bird-brain never realized that the dongle is a sitting duck for being bent at any time. It’s one thing to stick in a (much smaller) memory stick. But for continuous Internet access this is absurd.

While we’re at it in this Massacree, not of Love’s Labours Lost to be sure, but of the defects of Macs…the dongle problem is not unique, of course, to the Mac. However, that power interface so trumpeted by Steve Jobs’ recent biographer, Walter Isaacson, as a work of demotic, American, middle class genius is anything but.

It’s an easily detached magnet rather than a solid connection. The reasoning? A solid connection would cause the Mac to slide off the “desk” when the power cord got entangled. Therefore the connection is loose, a shallow slot with a weak magnet.

But this is absurd. The default usage for laptops is no longer at an office or home office desk with a permanent power outlet. Instead, it’s a variety of locales and positions. It might be a Starbuck’s table. In my case it’s my hospital bed entangled with the covers such that the magnetized connection is frequently lost.

The Steve Jobs “reality distortion zone” was meant to mean just that by Steve’s associates. His demands in the early Apple days such as “no fans on the Mac” were psycho-neuroses in old-fashioned terms and autistic in modern terms, just as some of my programming ideas were applied autism. The inflexibility helped both Jobs and me get work done, where actually “shipping” a bug-free product is hard for idealists and techies (“real artists ship” was a Jobs saying). But it also fails to serve the end user such as the Mac user in a hospital room.

The real software pioneers were people like Edsger Dijkstra (original developer of Algol, inventor of practical and safe concepts for parallel computing), Bjarne Sroustrup (invented C++), Dennis Ritchie (invented with others the C programming language) and many other people who aren’t billionaires.

These men would never have gone to work for Jobs. Dijkstra fled the corporate world of Burroughs for academia (U of T Austin) while Stroustrup and Ritchie spent most of their working lives at the old and now defunct Bell Labs which provided hero engineers with safe and unsupervised jobs and a form of tenure…my experience, and theirs, being contrary to neoclassical economics and its idiot prediction that giving this to a man like Dijkstra will make us less “productive”.

Jobs got at best inferior versions of these men, flawed developers with personality problems whom he’d browbeat day after day to “ship”. These developers got and accepted “the Talk” in which they learned that Apple’s bottom line was what mattered even as Cenk Uigur of The Young Turks learned that management and not the listener was in control at MSNBC.

Until the dongle is replaced I will probably be online in the morning and offline thereafter.

King John is a 12th century panorama with the best scenes being the piteous way in which Prince Arthur (the rightful but damned inconvenient heir to the throne) pleads with the common but naturally and ultimately noble Hubert for his eyes (Hubert having been dispatched by John to roast Arthur’s eyes in the charming High Mediaeval Era way). Then, perhaps unintentionally, Arthur commits suicide by leaping from the tower in which he’s immured.

And of course the Bastard, an illegitimate son of Richard Coeur de Lion, is the best-drafted character in the play, a sardonic but highly intelligent commentator or super-Chorus who often speaks in “aside” to the audience.

For John’s is a world haunted by the chivalrous Lionheart, who is to the 12th century world of King John as Edward III is to the 15th century: both are dead paragons besides which all are found wanting including King John in his eponymous play and Henry in in Henry VI 1/2.

Richard Lionheart and Edward III represent an ideal of masculinity innocently celebrated by lesser intellects than Shakespeare…who knew that such forms of masculinity, by necessarily creating resistance, are not the solution to governance. Shakespeare’s King John may be “ineffectual” if we compare him to some silly paragon (Edward I, Richard Lionheart, Edward III, Henry V) but his reign wasn’t the worst either.

Shakespeare clearly thinks highly of Falconbridge, the Bastard, an intellectual who would make the best king but is completely checked by his bastardy. The Bastard’s speeches are the best in the play: “sweet, sweet poison for the age’s tooth” to mean flattery, “commodity” (self-interest) and other lines that integrate didactic purpose with entertainment when the Bastard speaks “aside” to the audience with perfect form.

This Grand High Re-Read continues to profit because it’s like swimming with open eyes under the sea, or Clarence’s drowning dream in Richard III, witnessing “great anchors, heaps of pearl…a thousand men that fishes gnawed upon”: you notice things missing in performance, whether they be lines unduly cut or spoken by an actor who doesn’t know what they mean. I could never figure out the significance of Titania’s friendship with the changeling’s mother nor why the sails of merchant ships grew “big bellied” in watching a performance.

Turning to the project in which I use literary insights with insights from “object oriented programming”: I am writing an essay to document the project and ensure I know what I mean, and simultaneously trying to fit some sort of programming support, whether c++, Java or even Fortran, on a small hard drive on the MacBook Air.

I’ve installed Java. But will the sdk fit? I worry that no actual software development can be done on an Air and that I’ll have to do it on my Powerbook with the cracked screen. The Air’s hard disk is too small to hold xCode or even just the command line tools…unless perhaps I erase files like crazy, and am left with little file space.

I need to focus on the essay about what it really is to compare two texts: insights from object-oriented development show that it is not what we think. The difference file is probably a minimal set of changes needed to transform one text to the other, so discovering this set can be tricky.

At the Queen Mary cancer status meeting the doctor has confirmed that PSA (Protein Specific Antigen) level down to 6.5 although expressed in China as 65 without the decimal (need to check this).

Finished Julius Caesar: started King John, in the Grand High Shakespeare Re-Read and Massacree.

But HG Wells’ Outline of History is also good despite the way in which chap insists on calling Muslims “Moslems”, for his insights on Muslims-Moslems are fresh after 75 years and first rate. I read of the explosion of Islam and the overthrow of the Persians, chap named Rustum, end of Manicheanism, end of worship of Mazda.

Good, rousing, first-rate stuff as was Julius Caesar, which I’ve read several times after my seventh grade read-through of all of Shakespeare, for school and for pleasure.

Dozing, this Saturday afternoon, over this BBC program about the discovery of a proof for “Fermat’s Last Theorem”. I was a fly on the wall from 1987 through 1992 as regards Princeton maths.

It won’t help you to understand the math beyond the broad implication structure: “if we solve Taniyama-Shimura then for no x>2 does m**x + n**x = p**x (Fermat)” but it shows the astounding geek (Andrew Wiles) who proved this and the affable bearded John Horton Conway, the inventor of cellular automata and the Game of Life which I discovered in 1970 in Scientific American and programmed on an old IBM mainframe.

That beautiful river and towpath that you’ll see in the program is Princeton’s answer to the Cam in Cambridge: the Delaware-Raritan Canal, constructed in the early 19th century before railways to expedite passenger travel and shipping in New Jersey.

At Princeton, that canal expands into “Lake Carnegie”. In the late 19th century a Princeton man met Andrew Carnegie on the Dinky, a small passenger train operated ONLY for the convenience of Princeton students to hook them up with the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad at Princeton Junction…I was struck how traditionally Princeton “men” were given all sorts of perks, but this is changing: more than 50% of Princeton’s student body is female today. Princeton men could get a Gentleman’s C as I could at uni: not so any more.

Any roads, the Princeton boy complained to the steel magnate that Princeton could not beat Harvard at rowing since the canal was so shallow, affording insufficient space for rowers to train for their meets, so Carnegie had a lake dug at his expense. Andrew Wiles sought peace through long walks down the towpath as I did by running it, for people who work with math and numbers are often subject to fits of mental anguish.

I could not help but notice that on Princeton’s rowing teams, the coxswains, who shouted both the time and encouragement, were highly fit women (underweight and under-muscled so as not to burden the boat) whereas the actual hard work of rowing was male. Hmm.

I would see John Horton Conway in the WaWa (convenience store), poking through logic and Sodoku magazines for the 1980s were the zenith of Conway’s interest in recreational math, where he made several important discoveries. And, of course, I’d see John Nash because Nash, unlike many mathematicians including Wiles, didn’t hate and mistrust computers.

Wiles would never have used a computer for his proof although a team at the University of Illinois did so to check millions of cases to prove that “for any map, at most four colors suffice to color countries and the ocean such that all adjacent countries including the “country” of the ocean will be of different colors”. Mathematicians objected saying that the computer hardware, or software supporting the program checking the cases, or the program itself may have had a bug and after some to and fro, a non-computer proof was found.

You see, there are three major philosophies of mathematics: logicism or Platonism, which believes that mathematical objects are real if perhaps resident in a higher world: formalism, which denies this and declares that math is just a game with meaningless symbols (and that mathematicians are paid an unholy amount of money for essentially playing Sodoku): and strangest of all, intuitionism, the belief that math is about the Kantian apparatus of our perception and that oh by the way thou shouldn’t reason based on p or ~p (any proposition is true or false) for some propositions (consider the antinomies of Kant, such as “time is infinite”) are neither true nor false.

Real mathematicians are mostly “logicists” aka “Platonists”. Wiles certainly was, as was Nash, for both were seduced and held in awe by the idea that they could “voyage strange seas of thought” and discover new worlds, “and the Anthropophagi, whose heads/Do grow beneath their shoulders”, as Othello discovered. They didn’t want the trustees of Princeton to think they were playing Sodoku on company time, and Kant, and consequently intuitionism, is little understood in England or America.

Change Record

13 May 2013 Added this change record: minor corrections