Journal

A Tax on You is not Necessarily a Tax on Me

Tue, 21 May 2013 21:34:54 +0000

The game so far:

Apple is up before a Congressional committee for exploiting certain provisions in the U.S. tax code to avoid paying certain taxes. This is, in months without an "r," a bad thing and should be punished.

Meanwhile, some IRS employees are up before a Congressional committee for questioning the validity of efforts by certain organizations to avoid paying certain taxes on the grounds that they were not political in nature, despite the fact that their names included such phrases as “Tea Party” and “patriot.”

Pop quiz: Can you spot the one phrase common to each case?

Who, exactly, is supposed to be surprised by any of this? Discuss, using what you have learned in this course.

Bonus question: Speaking of Congressional committees, how is it that these various provisions, exceptions, and exceptions to the exceptions of tax law come into being?

On 3-D Printing

Tue, 21 May 2013 20:40:14 +0000

Call me when it produces "tea; Earl Grey; hot."

The World's Best Picture Caption

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:23:40 +0000

Many, many years ago -- I can’t recall the exact year, but it was in the late ‘60s, know what I mean, wink wink nudge nudge -- I happened upon an odd little book at a friend’s house. It was called The World’s Largest Cheese and it consisted of -- I’m guessing here -- whatever came up in one or more late evening, um, conferences between the authors (wink wink nudge nudge again). In other words, it had no overall theme or structure; it was a compilation of odd ideas taken to absurd extremes.

Some of the best bits were in the groups of photographs, such as a collection ostensibly representing the Hall of Fame of Athletes with no Vowels in their Names (to which ought to have been added parenthetically “if you don’t count “y” as a vowel”).

One of those photos hit home with me the instant I saw it. It was a picture of Stan Kann. If you didn’t spend part of your life in the general vicinity of St. Louis, you may never have heard of him. When I was a boy he had a ten or fifteen minute show every afternoon on KSD-TV, playing the organ in a small combo. They wore derby hats and sleeve garters, and I remember a little ditty called “Who Put the Devil in Evelyn’s Eyes?” Stan also helped out musically on the favorite local morning show with Charlotte Peters.

But Stan was best known for two things. Locally, and for decades, he became an institution playing the mighty Wurlitzer organ at the Fox Theatre. (For many years he also played at a restaurant owned by St. Louis’s other Stan, Musial.)

Nationally, however, he was one of Johnny Carson’s favorite and most frequent guests (77 appearances, reportedly) on “The Tonight Show.” But he didn’t play the organ for Johnny. Oh, no. He brought samples from his hobby, which was collecting vacuum cleaners.

That photo in The World’s Largest Cheese was accompanied by what I have ever and always since then asserted was an ultimate, a perfect caption. With thanks to Robin and Dick, here’s the pic:

And if you can’t read it, I’ll transcribe the caption:

Stan Kann relaxes with his collection of vacuum cleaners, the world’s largest.

Two things fly this little sentence to the very peak of Parnassus. Second is the comma. Yes, it’s required by the grammar of the sentence. But the sentence might have gone otherwise, as “Stan Kann relaxes with the world’s largest collection of vacuum cleaners.” Compare the two. The second one is flat to the point of tedium. Ho-hum, turn the page. By deferring the contextual information to a dependent adjectival phrase, set off by a comma, the writer has forced a brief pause, one just long enough for the reader of “collection of vacuum cleaners” to go “wait, what?” The pause, that is, that gives you pause.

But the real brilliance is in the verb. Stan “relaxes” with his collection. It might have read simply “Stan Kann with his collection...”, the omission of a verb being entirely acceptable in a caption. Or it might have been “Stan Kann shows off his collection...”, which would have risked irritating us because no one likes a showoff. But no; in a tiny stroke of genius, Stan “relaxes.”

Now note that no human being can possibly relax in that posture. So Stan is not truly relaxing. Yet we accept that, in this fugitive and only fortuitously caught moment, Stan is relaxing. And so we know, somehow, that Stan is a person like ourselves. He works and then he relaxes. But even in relaxation, his is an active mind. He is open to what the world around him offers. He marches to the beat of his own drummer. He is confident and kindly. He is happy to share his joy with us. And we are happy that he did.

Thank you, Stan.

There's Something About the Hair...

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:37:35 +0000

Yesterday I happened upon an old sci-fi movie I'd never seen: "Devil Girl from Mars," a British film from 1954 that is, I read, something of a cult item in certain circles. I can see that. It's also a bit of a ripoff from "The Day the Earth Stood Still," a classic of the genre. A lone spacefarer and his/her robot arrive on Earth; the traveler speaks in deadly serious tones; and the robot demonstrates vast destructive power. The noir-ish lighting of the interiors of the two spacecraft is similar as well. What distinguishes the two films is a great gap in production values. The Brit one was done on the cheap, and it shows in every scene. The gap is widest in the contrast of the two robots. Gort is immense, impassive, and rivetting; the Devil Girl's pal is badly designed, badly made, and so absurdly top-heavy and clumsy that it threatens to topple over with each step it takes.

But apart from the movie's, er, qualities, what struck me was...well, look for yourself. Here is Nyah, the Devil Girl (played by Patricia Laffan):

Here is Flash Gordon's eternal foe Ming the Merciless (played by Charles Middleton):

And here is Count Dracula (played by Bela Lugosi):

There's probably a Ph.D. dissertation hiding here, something along the lines of "Transgressive Trope: Biliminal Hairlines in Late Capitalistic Imagination."

Oh, I almost forgot: Eddie Munster (played by Butch Patrick):

Now that's scary.

Science and that Other Stuff

Mon, 13 May 2013 14:15:23 +0000

I was once shown a beautifully bound book that was, I was told, an anthology of notable scholarly writings from various Arabic-speaking countries. I could read nothing of it, but flipping through the pages, I stopped at one article that included a great many elegant geometric diagrams based on representations of the Earth’s geography. It was explained to me that this article was a doctoral dissertation that demonstrated that the city of Mecca occupies the “center of the surface of the Earth.”

Euclidean geometry has for thousands of years been the model of deductive logic: Beginning from a set of axioms, prove a proposed theorem to be true. Prove, for example, that the three angles of a triangle sum to a straight angle. The method is powerful within its limited domain, but it is not foolproof. I recall when my high school geometry teacher filled two or three blackboards with the proof that all triangles are isosceles triangles. You may be familiar with the algebraic proof that 1 = 0. Such stunts tend to be long and complex. This lends a kind of credibility to them while distracting the student from the necessary violation of an axiom or a rule of inference somewhere in the chain.

Partly because of the rigor of Euclideanism, and partly because of the general fame of Greek philosophy, the deductive method has always enjoyed a stellar reputation. Indeed, in many places and ages it has been thought of as the single path to Truth, and its tool, Reason, as a unique endowment from God himself. “Reason is God’s crowning gift to man,” wrote Sophocles. (But then he was one of those Greeks.) “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason!” wrote Shakespeare. (But then wasn’t Hamlet a bit of a piece of work himself?)

The habit of holding up Reason as man’s distinguishing and almost divine characteristic makes it so much easier for ideologists, not to mention the inevitable rascals, to hide behind displays of reasonable-seeming but faulty argument. Hence the conspicuous complexity; hence the misleading diagrams.

The dissertation whose artwork so struck me needed all those elaborate and carefully executed diagrams because its job was to prove an absurdity. The dissertation was not a report of a discovery. It was a justification of a premise. In a way the author quite deserved his Ph.D., though it ought to have been for ingenuity rather than research.

With enough pomp and handwaving, the really clever chap can prove almost anything he likes, and when it suits him he can pretend to be doing science all the while. He does this because he has learned that the rubes will buy it.

This sort of thing is called non-science because so often it makes use of the tropes and trappings of genuine science but goes about its task exactly backwards from what science does. Notice that the Islamic scholar’s proposed task was not to find where, if anywhere, the “center of the surface of the Earth” might be, but to show that it is in a predetermined location. Similarly the Intelligent Design proponent sets out to construct a plausible argument supporting a particular thesis. The fact that the thesis is cloaked as a conclusion does not change the nature of the exercise.

If I reach out to flick off a light switch and get a tingle in my finger, my first reaction is purely reflex -- I recoil. Then I pause and, if I am like most men, I try it again. Just to make sure, you understand. If I am tingled again I am confident in concluding that there is something wrong with the switch. (Though if I am like most men, I decline to call the electrician.)

When first I reached out to the switch, I did so on the tacit assumption that all was well with my wiring.There was no need for me to express that assumption to myself before acting. But if I were a different sort of fellow I might have gone about the thing in a different way. I might have taken the trouble to develop a theory about my wiring. I might have said something to the effect that “The wiring in my house is excellent and without fault. No harm can come to anyone from it.” I might somehow have come to feel that this was neither a mere hypothesis nor even a simple statement of fact but a doctrine, a dogma, acceptance of which it was important that I and others both embody and enforce.

Given that commitment, I could not have viewed the first or second touch as a test. For there can be no test of a thesis that is not open to revision. Rather, I might well have kept touching the switch, denying that I felt anything. Or I might simply have walked away in order to give the world a little time to right itself. In the first case I might have killed myself; in the second, someone else. What I would not have done is learn from experience. Had our species acted like this back on the African veldt, there would be no such species. Survival required just the opposite response: taking experience seriously and seeking workable ideas to explain and predict it.

There have always been charlatans, of course, and since the rise of science as a powerful institution there have been charlatans who pretended to be doing science -- rainmakers, astrologers, sellers of tonics and magnetic bracelets and orgone boxes, Lysenkoists, Freudians, and so on. In our overly politicized world they now tend to be enlisted in ideological wars and to make their money less from direct sales to the rubery and more from constructing apologies for such causes as creationism, anti-vaccination, the precautionary principle, or climate-change denial.

On Mull

Tue, 07 May 2013 13:32:41 +0000

So I’m having a pint in this pub on the Isle of Mull the other day, watching two people set up their fairly elaborate stage equipment. It’s the last day of the Mull Music Festival and I’ve been hoping for an authentic ceilidh. I had, in fact, heard a distant bit of fiddle-and-accordion playing when I drove up, but what with the check-in process and biology, it was over before I was free to get closer.

This middle-age couple, quite ordinary in appearance except for something vaguely irritating about his hair, are hanging lights and plugging in big Bose speakers and whatnot. He makes two or three trips out to the van for more stuff. There must be thousands of pounds invested here. I keep waiting to see him bring in some musical instruments. From his last trip out he returns cradling what is evidently his prize item, a wireless mike.

They fire up the amps; still no instruments. He nods to her at the sound board, and she does something, and the speakers emit a fully instrumented rock soundtrack. A bar or so into the song, he starts singing. I don’t recognize it. He’s only warming up, but a few well-pinted dancers move onto the floor.

It takes two or three more songs and some intercalated commentary for me to realize that this is a Rod Stewart tribute act. Hence the hair.

He then takes a break at the bar, and his partner shoves in another cassette of, I don’t know, ‘80s or ‘90s or ‘00s stuff. When a hippity-hoppity-Euro-techno-poppity version of Barrett Strong’s “Money” comes on, I navigate over to him.

“Do you do any ‘50s or ‘60s stuff?” I inquire.

“Oh, sure. If Rod did it.”

I leave.

Marketing Plan

Fri, 03 May 2013 13:26:54 +0000

I'm just thinking about this, mind you.

How about retitling my book Fifty Shades of How to Know?

Would you run out and buy it?

Welcome Home, Weary Traveler

Fri, 03 May 2013 13:18:21 +0000

Yesterday afternoon it took me over an hour from the time my airplane landed to clear Passport Control at O'Hare. Yes, it was a big plane, and yes, I was sitting far back, so there were lots of people ahead of me. But 75 minutes?

Then came Customs, where the agent looked at my declaration form (total value of items brought into the country: under $40) and bade me affirm that none of those items was a vegetable, an animal, or a toxin.

Then came the guy who actually collects the declaration form, who directed me away from the exit right in front of me to another area around a corner, where I saw that people were having their luggage X-rayed. I assumed that he'd mistakenly thought I was transferring to an onward flight, so I turned back and headed for the exit. I was stopped. I explained that I was not traveling further, that I was now home. No dice.

So the TSA, in its infinite discretion, was scanning luggage leaving the airport. Luggage that had been scanned already, remember, in order to get on the plane. You tell me.

Scots-Mex

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 19:02:04 +0000

As I strolled along the Royal Mile today my eye fell upon a signboard outside a tiny restaurant (of which there seem to be about 17,000 in the immediate area) promoting their special delights. Chief among these was their New! Burritos for takeaway! Among the various combinations of fillings on offer was spinach-and-potato. A fusion cuisine I had never dreamed of.

The Impermeable Brain

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 20:51:29 +0000

It is widely acknowledged that "The Daily Show" is the only program on television that actually practices journalism. In the last few days we have seen, not for the first time but conveniently condensed into an intense time span, just how badly the likes of MSNBC, Fox, and their fellow cable denizens, do their "jobs." On these channels the rule is, Keep Talking, Eventually We May Arrive Somewhere Near the Actual Case. The requirements for appearing on one of these -- I don't even know what to call them -- are glibness, freedom from any sense of responsibility to the truth, and, for the women, blonde hair. It also helps if you bob your head up and down and sideways more or less in time with whatever blather you are mouthing.

To appreciate the contrast between what these folks pump out 24/7, I invite you to watch this episode of "The Daily Show," and in particular the middle segment, in which John Oliver discusses gun control with one Philip VanCleave of the Virginia Citizens Defense League. VanCleave is a gun-freedom maximalist. John Oliver, on the other hand, wonders about things. He brings to VanCleave's attention certain facts about Australia's experience in controlling the availability of guns. VanCleave responds as though he has suddenly been transported into another dimension.

VanCleave has no idea how stupid he is. If asked, he would doubtless deny being stupid. But see for yourself. Given facts not accounted for in his ideology, does he (a) ask for time to consider them; (b) incorporate them into a revised statement of his position: or (c) change his mind?

Answer: (d) None of the above. He restates his ideology. For him, the truth is something somebody tells you once and you memorize. End of mental life.