Brave New World — In Our Time, Apr. 9, 2009
I think I have to read this book again. It’s been at least 15 years since I first read it, and I recall the general outline, but few of the specifics. I had forgotten entirely about the character Mustapha Mond until the guests began discussing him. The guests talk in depth about how the book is neither a dystopia nor a utopia and that the ambiguity is part of its lasting legacy. I think I have it on the shelf somewhere.
Guests:
H.L.
Baconian Science — In Our Time, Apr. 2, 2009 Guests:
The School of Athens — In Our Time, Mar. 26, 2009 There is, I think, at least one or two more shows that could be done on this fresco and its place in its own time and in the history of art. There is Plato and Aristotle in the painting, and there is Raphael (or Leonardo) and Michelangelo during the Renaissance. Guests:
The Boxer Rebellion — In Our Time, Mar. 19, 2009 Guests:
The Library of Alexandria — In Our Time, Mar. 12, 2009 After the show, it occurred to me that the nearest approximation in recent history would be the Royal Society, rather than the Library of Congress. The library and Mouseion that contained it were the world center of learning and discovery for centuries. Guests:
The Measurement Problem in Physics — In Our Time, Mar. 5, 2009 Guests:
The Waste Land — In Our Time, Feb. 26, 2009 Guests:
… Or at least, placing an order for one that would be filled at an unspecified future date. Pros:
Cons:
There is a good start here, but there are gaps. Will the gaps be filled? Does one adopt semi-early? A release schedule for Kindle editions would be most welcome. More Pros:
More Cons:
Frankly the Harry Potter omission is sticking in my craw a good deal. I’m just not sure I can plunk down the money. I’d buy a package deal of the 7 books plus the device. Frankly, this seems like an opportunity for Amazon. Bundle the device and books the way game systems bundle the device and games. The Observatory at Jaipur — In Our Time, Feb. 19, 2009 Guests:
The Destruction of Carthage — In Our Time, Feb. 12, 2009 Guests:
Ellen O’Gorman: Well it’s worth putting in context that in the very same year, the Romans also destroyed utterly the opulent and maritime city of Corinth in Greece. The Brothers Grimm — In Our Time, Feb. 5, 2009 Guests:
Bragg: So it’s perfectly possible that the stories she was telling were stories that she had read in French. Phelan: And she was retelling them in a German form. I think that’s part of the story, and this is still widely debated. A Modest Proposal Guests:
St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin Hawley: He could hug himself with glee at the thought of how miserable he was, and how rubbish the world was. Mullan [quoting Swift]: “I count no man truly unfortunate who has not been condemned to live in Ireland.” He’s full of these quotes, isn’t he? John Updike on the magic of the printed word. This is how I feel about the electronic word and (more recently) scripting languages. These are magical things. From today’s Times obituary of John Updike. A History of History — In Our Time :: This show moved at a brisk pace. It was clear from the outset that Bragg and his guests knew they had a lot of ground to cover, and yet they still could only barely get to Gibbon, and then only just barely. This show is the type I have in mind when I compile these links. The guests throw out names of significant people very quickly, and aren’t able to give much context to them. For me, there are many familiar names in the list, but I didn’t know of Polybius, Eusebius, Orosius, Gregory of Tours, Foxe, and finally the big one Christine de Pizan. Each one was a significant contributor to how we read and think about history. Still, this was a very fun show, the guests clearly enjoyed the topic and each others’ contributions. Guests:
Halicarnassus Thoreau — In Our Time :: Enjoyed this program quite a bit. I’m more of an Emerson fan than a Thoreau fan, but this show does a good job of situating Thoreau in his time and element. Growing up in Concord, I was particularly interested in Fender’s discussion of what Walden Pond actually is (a tourist trap) and what its surroundings looked like in Thoreau’s time. Not wholly unrelated is the book 1491 . Briefly, that the imagined past is quite a departure from the actual past. The imagined past is still very dense in Concord vis à vis Thoreau. Guests:
Emerson’s Divinity School Address “The other thing about Walden is that it has the highest concentration of urine of any pond in New England.” Bragg: “That’s a fact that we needed to know.” Fender: “But that doesn’t mean what you think it means. It hasn’t suddenly become degraded by the modern world. Ever since the railway came, Walden Pond was a resort. It’s still a resort. It’s a popular swimming hole; it has a path around it; it’s very beautiful, but it’s widely used by the populace, by Bostonians, by people from Cambridge, and so on.” A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Thoreau on the railroad: Thoreau: On Civil Disobedience To commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, In Our Time did a 4-part series on his life and work. Taken as a whole, the series is fascinating, as are its constituent parts. Darwin has, to a certain extent, become reduced to the human stand-in for the Science vs. God debate in the U.S. While it is appropriate that Darwin is placed in this position, since the opponents of evolution muster the same sad arguments they did in his time, it has the effect of narrowing the massive scope of his work to the word “evolution” rather than the massive effort of field research and study that led him to draw his conclusions. As becomes clear in this series, evolution did not come quickly or easily to Darwin, but it became undeniable to him the more he studied (among other things): beetles, birds, rocks (geology), plants, worms, barnacles, and mold. Guests:
39 Articles of the Church of England Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation Evolution of sexual reproduction A note to the myriad owners, presidents, and general managers of NFL teams that read this blog hourly. I realize you’re all enamored of the Patriots coaching staff since they won a superbowl in 2004 and tend to make the playoffs, but thus far the coordinators that have fled the nest haven’t performed particularly well. Not poorly, mind you, but they’re not setting the league on fire either. Weis is running on fumes at Notre Dame and both Crennell and Mangini were fired within hours of each other a couple of weeks ago. Now Denver decides it will elevate the Pats’ 32-year-old offensive coordinator to run its ship. Good luck with that guys. No offense to McDaniels, and I’d really rather he stayed with the team, but lighting up the league with Brady, Moss, and Welker isn’t the single most challenging job when one surveys the scope of NFL coaching assignments. Nor is it particularly impressive that the Pats went 11-5 this past season, they had one of the easiest schedules in living memory. The Dolphins went 11-5 this year too, in the same division, and beat out the Pats for a playoff spot with Pennington at the helm. No one appears to be seeking permission to speak with the ‘Fins coordinator, who has what some would call an attractive NFL resume. So while it’s clear you’re all looking to bottle some 2004 vintage Belichick (though perhaps that vintage is past its prime, sad as it is for me to say), it might make more sense to look at some of Bill Cowher’s assistants’ assistants. After all, Cowher’s team won the superbowl in 2005, and the two coordinators hired from his stable are both in next Sunday’s championship games. Isn’t that the kind of success you’d like to see? Update Feb. 6, 2009: Scott Pioli, late of the New England Patriots front office, thinks like I do. He’s hired the Cardinals OC as his head coach. Gravity’s Rainbow was a miss for me. This is a book that requires time, energy, and attention. I have lately been a bit low on all three, but ultimately I was too low on energy. Somewhere around page 350 I realized that what was needed was for me to leaf back through and make a list of all the characters and to some degree chart their appearances and progress. Some type of timeline would also have helped, though when things happen was less of a concern for me than what was happening. Most of all, I found that I simply didn’t care about any of the characters, and got annoyed when new ones appeared, as they did almost to the end. On the other hand, there are only about a half dozen that are leading characters and only a couple central ones. But if one lacks the energy to absorb new arrivals and pick up dropped threads, fatigue wins out. The ending of the book is so well written that I almost decided to plunge back in from the start. But no. In a year or so, there will be energy again to have another go. Picking this up so soon on the heels of Infinite Jest and with a number of other priorities was the mistake. On the other hand, the second time through, I’ll skip past the extensive descriptions of sexual deviancy. I’m not sure if this is Pynchon’s thing (I’ve only read this book) or if he was trying to reinforce the twisted nature of the world being explored in the book, but by the third or fourth long scene of statutory rape, one began to wish he’d give it a rest. One month ago: Total URLs in Sitemap: 1002 Indexed URLs in Sitemap: 59 (6%) Today’s report: Total URLs in Sitemap: 1010 Indexed URLs in Sitemap: 981 (97%) Index pages indexed: Total URLs in Sitemap: 799 Indexed URLs in Sitemap: 765 (96%) Verily I say Google’s sitemap service is extremely effective in getting your site indexed. Now getting it ranked, that’s another story. One month ago site:levingar.com yielded 47 pages (if I recall, didn’t take a screengrab). Today 2,590. Some of the default descriptions for the index pages predate the tweaks I made to the veryplaintxt theme to make it a bit more seo friendly, but the vast majority are correct. That was a fun little experiment. As the NY Times slowly builds out its blogging features, it will come to see the need to provide bloggers with either the InSeries plugin, or something like it. For example, we have Uwe Reinhardt doing a multi-post series on the costs of US health care. As we roll towards another stab at reform, these posts are important reads. This sentiment is not surprising, because, from both the patient’s and the provider’s perspective, claims processing under Medicare is relatively simple in comparison with the complexity of private health insurance, although Medicare is much more administratively complex than are similar government-run, single-payer health insurance systems in other countries (e.g., Taiwan or Canada). Those who make such statements, of course, may not even think about real claims on real G.D.P. Instead they may have in mind two quite different propositions.Baconian Science — In Our Time, Apr. 2, 2009
Among the most informative shows I can remember. What I found most interesting was that idea best summed up at the end by one of the guests that the Baconian ideology was much more important than the actual Baconian method. The method itself was somewhat challenging in practice, though as the inspiration for the modern scientific method it was still important. The other interesting parallel thought is that had Bacon succeeded in getting funding for an academy as envisioned in Solomon’s House, it may have been far less effective than the Royal Society became. Again, Bacon as figurehead within a generation of his death is more significant than Bacon as practitioner.
Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last,
The barren wilderness he past,
Did on the very border stand
Of the blest promis’d land,
And from the mountain’s top of his exalted wit,
Saw it himself, and shew’d us it.The School of Athens — In Our Time, Mar. 26, 2009
This show touches on a number of different interesting points. It only briefly discusses the fresco itself as a fresco. The bulk of the show is focused on where and how pagan philosophy found itself inside the walls of the Vatican. It’s noted that while the other paintings in the room are not often discussed, they form a cohesive whole. Most importantly, directly opposite the School of Athens is the Disputation of the Holy Sacrament which is a representation of great religious thinking and sets the whole of ancient philosophy against the slightly more modern (at the time) school of Christian thought. The discussion stays focused on the pagans though and what about primarily Plato and Aristotle interested Julius II specifically and Renaissance thought more generally.
The Boxer Rebellion — In Our Time, Mar. 19, 2009
Very interesting show today (well, broadcast yesterday, but heard today). Listening to scholars of Chinese history discuss a topic, one becomes aware of how ill-served one is by the massive focus on the history of Western civilization during one’s education. The result being that major events and geography in China take longer to grasp than they should. Still, pushing through this, the show provides pathways into the history of China in the late 19th and early 20th century. Call it the period between the Opium Wars and World War 2. One piece that was lacking from the show was a straight timeline of the Boxer Rebellion. This would have been helpful since it was made clear in the show that there wasn’t a lot of coherence to the rebellion itself. No single leader, no single animating issue. And, as pointed out by one of the guests, it was a rebellion that would up being supported by the ruling dynasty.
The Library of Alexandria — In Our Time, Mar. 12, 2009
This wound up being a bit of a challenging show since it’s clear that the Library at Alexandria was an enormously influential institution for a very long time, but we don’t know a lot of the details that would make for interesting exploration. We know it held a huge volume of material, but we don’t know precisely how much. We know that it was a cultural center for Mediterranean world but we know little of the actual goings on from day to day. We know there was a hierarchy of scholars, but not what the hierarchy was, or many of the people who held positions. An enormous, empty edifice from a discussion standpoint. The guests still made great discussion out of what material we do have, but there was the feeling of working with table scraps.
The Measurement Problem in Physics — In Our Time, Mar. 5, 2009
This was a fascinating and challenging program. I like to collect links here of topics that are mentioned in the show so I can go back later a poke around the things I don’t know much about. The challenge with this program was that I couldn’t recognize things I didn’t know due to a lack of understanding of quantum mechanics. Hopefully poking around these links will give me some understanding so this will be less of an issue if they ever tackle quantum theory again.
The Waste Land — In Our Time, Feb. 26, 2009
The show starts a bit slow in that the introductory piece is generally about the First World War and its aftermath, and about the rise of modenism. After that, however, particularly after the section on the starting of the BBC, they get into the meat of the text and the show becomes highly enjoyable from there out. They really hit their stride during and after the discussion of Music Halls and when Ezra Pound enters the fray editing portions of the poem. I’m not a poetry buff, but I may have to give this one a go.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain;The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
Unreal City,
…
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.Unreal City
…
Under the brown fog of a winter noonJerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
UnrealShe smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.Connor: Myths are translations without originals.
Rainey: When [Liveright] got the manuscript, he was very disappointed that [the poem] was as short as it was and asked could Eliot please add anything. The Notes are what Eliot added to pad out the poem. So one way one could talk about myth in the poem is to say that the myth is a myth. Which is to say that the notes are very unimportant, they were simply added on to add up some pages; and to give it some kind of bogus scholarship.
I Contemplate Acquiring a Kindle
The Observatory at Jaipur — In Our Time, Feb. 19, 2009
Fun show about an astronomical observatory in India that I’d never heard of. This show demonstrates another of the reasons I enjoy it so much; in depth discussion of topics that are totally unknown to me, but done in such a way that it’s informative even without a great deal of background. Today’s show covered the observatory, its builder, a bit of the end of the Mughal empire and (my favorite parts) Hindu astronomy.
The Destruction of Carthage — In Our Time, Feb. 12, 2009
This show was a lot of fun. I had been excited all week about it since it’s the kind of topic I enjoy most; one that historians themselves enjoy talking about. Additionally, Melvyn keeps the focus on the destruction of the city. The benefit of this is that the group skips over some quicksand (notably the Second Punic War) and stays focused on the city, its general rivalry with Rome, and its destruction. What we know about Carthage comes almost entirely from Rome, which causes Melvyn to continuously inquire whether certain information can be trusted. In the final third we get to the question of why the city was destroyed so utterly. Ellen O’Gorman makes the point that I’d never heard, that the Romans also razed Corinth in the same year. So in addition to ending this third war, the destruction of Carthage is part of a broader statement by the Romans to the rest of the Mediterranean that they have triumphed. Of course, the empire doesn’t reach its peak for several more centuries, but 146 seems to be the year that Rome breaks into the Alexandarian big time.
When Cato insisted “Carthago delenda est” (Carthage must be destroyed), Corculum responded that Carthage must be saved.
Bragg: Why did they [the Romans] want to destroy it utterly? Raze it to the ground. Kill everybody they could, and the rest enslave. Make it rubble. Why did they want to do that; to that extent?
The Brothers Grimm — In Our Time, Feb. 5, 2009
Fascinating program on both the stories themselves, and the project to create a German nation by in part using these stories as a common heritage shared by all German-speaking peoples. I also enjoyed the part of the show covering the violence in the stories, and how the stories were edited over time as it became more clear that children were the audience for the stories. And yet, it seems that children are able to understand the violence as localized to the narrative itself and contextualize it in that way. That’s not to say that the violence that was acceptable in the early 19th century is acceptable in storytelling today. Well worth a listen.
Bragg: The idea was, these were folk tales. These came out of the volk. These came out of the ground. These were spontaneous. These were the earth of Germany; reforming itself to be a nation to compete with France and Britain. And that was deceitful.
Tony Phelan: Who they describe as a peasant. In fact she was the daughter of an innkeeper, and she was married to a tailor, and she came from a French-speaking Huguenots family. So it’s perfectly possible that there is both an oral tradition and a printed tradition there that takes you back to France.
Marina Warner: Now when it was sent to the Grimm brothers by the painter Philipp Otto Runge in a nice beautifully written version. Brentano recognized it from a story his nanny had told him.
A Modest Proposal — In Our Time, Jan 29, 2009
A Modest Proposal is a work that I heard referenced many times, but I realize quickly into the program that I knew nothing of the actual text. The show’s conversation moved so smoothly that it felt over before its time. The full measure of the Swift’s satire didn’t hit home for me until late in the program when Judith Hawley noted that the Irish landlords were consuming the laborers. So much of our current society is concerned with consumption, that the double entendre gave me both a chuckle and a brief flash of the level of deprivation of the poor Irish of Swift’s time. It felt like there was another show lurking in the discussion of the Drapier’s Letters which in contrast to A Modest Proposal wound up changing official policy and, as the guests noted, became one inspiration for future Irish nationalists.
A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.
Updike on the Printed Word
From earliest childhood I was charmed by the materials of my craft, by pencils and paper and, later, by the typewriter and the entire apparatus of printing. To condense from one’s memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me, after nearly 30 years concerned with the making of books, a magical act, and a delightful technical process. To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another.
A History of History — In Our Time, Jan 22, 2009
today’s BodrumBragg: Are we going to abandon all attempt to get to the 20th century? I’m looking at the clock. 21st. I keep forgetting.
Thoreau — In Our Time, Jan 15, 2009
Fender: “What we, the modern Americans, forget is that Walden was less wooded and less country-like in Thoreau’s time than in any time before or after. It had been largely denuded by the charcoal baking industry. The tall pines had been cut down to make railroad ties … and Emerson’s purpose in sending Thoreau there, or granting him squatter’s rights on the woodlot that he owned, was to get Thoreau to plant some trees.
What’s the railroad to me?
I never go to see
Where it ends.
It fills a few hollows,
And makes banks for the swallows,
It sets the sand a-blowing,
And the blackberries a-growing.
From On Civil Disobedience: Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may. I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.
Darwin 4-part Series — In Our Time, Jan. 5-8, 2009
Part 1
Darwin
Jones: “The well known quote from J.B.S. Haldane, what could he work out of the nature of God from the creation, ‘God has and inordinate fondness for beetles.’”
Jones: “Like most students, he [Darwin] took no account whatever of what was going on in the lecture theater, and was probably right to do so.”
Jones: “There’s a whole community of scholars that spends their entire lives picking the lint out of Darwin’s navel”
Part 2
Charles Lyell
Part 3
Part 4
Steve Jones: (on Darwin’s greenhouse) “I think it proves that ideas are more important than equipment.”
On NFL Coaching Talent
The End of Gravity’s Rainbow
Blog Indexing Win
Blog Indexing Fail
Posts Indexed:
The Cost of U.S. Health Care
An additional insight from the graph, however, is that even after adjustment for differences in G.D.P. per capita, the United States in 2006 spent $1,895 more on health care than would have been predicted after such an adjustment. If G.D.P. per capita were the only factor driving the difference between United States health spending and that of other nations, the United States would be expected to have spent an average of only $4,819 per capita on health care rather than the $6,714 it actually spent.
The McKinsey team estimated that about 85 percent of this excess administrative overhead can be attributed to the highly complex private health insurance system in the United States. Product design, underwriting and marketing account for about two-thirds of that total. The remaining 15 percent was attributed to public payers that are not saddled with the high cost of product design, medical underwriting and marketing, and that therefore spend a far smaller fraction of their total spending on administration.
Furthermore, current population projections have the fraction of elderly in the United States population peak at around 20 percent. Along with Canada and Australia, we shall be for a very long time the youngest nation in the O.E.C.D. Only in 2025 will the American population be as “old” as many European populations are already today.
Although often decried by its critics as “socialized medicine,” Medicare remains a highly popular health-insurance product among the elderly, who rate the quality of care they receive under it higher than younger, privately insured Americans rate their health care (see, for example, this and also this, Charts 4:1 to 4:3).
So what do we mean when we lament that Medicare will not be “affordable” in the future? Do we assume that G.D.P. will be stagnant for the next 40 years?
According to the Dartmouth researchers, if physicians with relatively higher cost preferred practice styles could be induced to embrace the preferred practice styles of their equally effective but lower-cost colleagues, overall per-capita Medicare spending probably could be reduced by at least 30 percent without harming patients, and similarly for commercially insured younger Americans. How can a nation that routinely wails over its high cost of health care ignore such important research?
Combined, these two databases can be reorganized to produce cost-effectiveness profiles for every physician affiliated with a hospital, adjusted for the health status of their patients (in technical jargon, “risk adjusted”). Equipped with such risk-adjusted profiles, hospital administrators could periodically gather all affiliated physicians performing a particular procedure — e.g., coronary artery bypass grafts or knee replacements — into one room and ask those physicians who on average trigger high (risk-adjusted) costs for such procedures to justify these higher costs to their colleagues with lower costs.
(Further note, as a society we need to wean our intelligentsia off the concept of the great and powerful database. Not everything can be solved with a database.)
