Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

Just back from a slightly sadly but aptly named "Geek Dinner" in London. Thanks to Scoble for inspiring us, to all the attendees like Rachel, Keni, Barry and Theresa, special guest Frank, and most especially Lee for organizing the dinner despite all the uphevals in his life nowadays. Aside from the minor hiccup that the dinner was next door from the advertised location, the food was good, the wine and conversation flowed happily, and many amusing gadgets were dragged out for viewing.

Galaxie 500 (named after a car, I think) were a product of the hothouse late-80s US "College Rock" culture (they hailed from Harvard, I think); after On Fire and This is Our Music (title lifted from Ornette), they morphed into Damon and Naomi (occasional musicians and would-be publishing moguls, recently heard doing "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" on Coverville) and the only-recently defunct Luna, none achieving the superstar status they probably deserved but for which they probably knew they were never destined (on the other hand, R.E.M., without whom Galaxie 500 would be nearly unimaginable, did become superstars, certainly not lamentably so after the early-90s brilliance of "Out of Time" and its followups during their second decade, probably paving the way for Nirvana and, therefore, sadly, Blink 182 --and perhaps not quite so sadly, Green Day.) I listened to "On Fire" on the my hour-long train ride home from London tonight, slightly drunk after the Geek Dinner, marveling at the melancholy sound, feeling almost in a swoon from the wistfulness of the electric guitars and squeaky vocals, of the twinkies cropping up in the lyrics which don't sound strange to us American children of the late 60s, of the sweet slender-shouldered white-boy soulfulness of it all.

The inscription on this beautiful thousand-year old plate in the Louvre reads, "The taste of science is bitter at first, but in the end sweeter than honey."

My apologies for the bad translation -- I don't read Arabic so I had to translate from the French: "La science, son goût est amer au début, mais à la fin plus doux que le miel." Apologies also for the bad photograph, thanks to my camera-phone. Does anyone know of a better picture?

I've decide to change the name of this blog -- look up!

Also, for those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed, I'm now using Feedburner to publish them (see the little "XML" icon at right, and note that the name of the feed carries a remnant of this blog's old name...). For what it's worth, you can still access the feed directly through this web address as before.

For the uninitiated, I've talked about RSS here, and a short intro to RSS can be found here. Briefly, it's a way of subscribing to content from blogs, newspapers, and other organizations that may want to push announcements out semi-regularly; it's faster than checking all the web pages yourself and collects all the information in one place. You can read RSS with a standalone program like NetNewsWire for the Mac, as well as through online services like CNET's new Newsburst.

Comments welcome.

Jem Finer, aforementioned ringer, former Pogue, and artist-in-residence at the Oxford Astrophysics group, has created Landscope on the shores of Lough Neagh, near Belfast. Landscope is a radio telescope, a camera obscura, (neither of these are metaphors), and it is also the story of the residents of Lough Neagh: science, history, a work of art. I haven't seen it yet; it will be streamed on the internet this weekend, and then at Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast proper from 17th February through 25 March.

Meanwhile, over in New York, Christo and Jeanne-Claude are fulfilling their own strange but kind of wonderful dream of swathing Central Park in fluttering orange fabric, in their project called The Gates. We sometimes forget that one of the purposes of art (one purpose, not the only purpose, and indeed a purpose that isn't always necessary) is to create beauty; The Gates is not just beauty but public beauty: free for all (and indeed they are giving away one million swatches of the fabric they designed for the project -- first come, first served!).

Alas, I am unlikely to make it over to Northern Ireland for Landscope, and even less likely to make it to Manhattan during The Gates's short tenure (but still contemplating my long-term project of visiting Smithson's Spiral Jetty...).

Today, the Kyoto protocol on Climate Change comes into effect. It's a start, albeit a meager one. As George Monbiot points out in the Guardian

No one believes that this treaty alone - which commits 30 developed nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 4.8% - will solve the problem. It expires in 2012 and, thanks to US sabotage, there has so far been no progress towards a replacement. It paroles the worst offenders, the US and Australia, and imposes no limits on the gases produced by developing countries. The cuts it enforces are at least an order of magnitude too small to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations at anything approaching a safe level.

...[One reason we don't appreciate the problem] is that there is a well-funded industry whose purpose is to reassure us, and it is granted constant access to the media. We flatter its practitioners with the label "sceptics". If this is what they were, they would be welcome. Scepticism (the Latin word means "inquiring" or "reflective") is the means by which science advances. Without it we would still be rubbing sticks together. But most of those we call sceptics are nothing of the kind. They are PR people, the loyalists of Exxon Mobil (by whom most of them are paid), commissioned to begin with a conclusion and then devise arguments to justify it. Their presence on outlets such as the BBC's Today programme might be less objectionable if, every time Aids was discussed, someone was asked to argue that it is not caused by HIV, or, every time a rocket goes into orbit, the Flat Earth Society was invited to explain that it could not possibly have happened. As it is, our most respected media outlets give Exxon Mobil what it has paid for: they create the impression that a significant scientific debate exists when it does not. (Emphasis mine.)

Actually, this pernicious tactic is used in at least one other case in the public's eye: the discussion of evolution, and the impression of legitimacy given in most media about so-called alternatives such as the incontrovertibly wrong ideas of creation "science" and intelligent design.

He goes on to talk about the conflict between the requirements of dealing with climate change (curtailing growth and strong international regulations) and orthodox free-market economics. In fact, this is a similar tactic in the end, presenting a false opposition between the sciences of climatology and economics. The difference, of course, is that economic laws (if such there be) are laws about people and behavior, which we can hope to change:

The challenge of climate change is not, primarily, a technical one. It is possible greatly to reduce our environmental impact by investing in energy efficiency, though as the Exeter conference concluded, "energy efficiency improvements under the present market system are not enough to offset increases in demand caused by economic growth". It is possible to generate far more of the energy we consume by benign means. But if our political leaders are to save the people rather than the people's fantasies, then the way we see ourselves must begin to shift. We will succeed in tackling climate change only when we accept that we belong to the material world.

I pulled out my dog-eared early-80s paperbacks of the now-late Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Great Shark Hunt just before watching my downloaded versions of The West Wing (the current season showing in the US, not three seasons behind like here). Hunter Thompson was a politics junky (and memorably discussed football with '68 presidential candidate Richard Nixon in the back of a limo), but he probably hated the West Wing (although in terms of sheer self-destructive drug-induced behavior he was clearly a kindred spirit of WW creator Aaron Sorkin). It's ironic that it wasn't, in the end, that self-destructive drug-induced behavior that killed him, but a much sadder, quite literal, self-destruction (unsurprisingly, he did himself in with one of his own arsenal). Apparently, Thompson, no longer spry at 65, was hobbled by hip replacements and a recently broken ankle, unable to live up to his own swaggering vision of himself, immortalized as Doonesbury's amoral Uncle Duke and played by Johnny Depp. Still, it's often forgotten amid the talk of gonzo journalism, of drugs, drink and guns, that Thompson was in fact a keen and knowledgeable observer of American politics, and despite the famous cynicism, had a kernel of idealism deep down that, thirty years ago anyway, drove him. Writing about the 1972 presidential campaign, it's clear the world hasn't changed much. It may have even gotten worse:

The polls ... indicate that Nixon will get a comfortable majority of the youth vote. And that he might carry all fifty states.... This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves -- that we really are just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anyone else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

[Sounds familiar?]

The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes and his imprecise talk about "new politics" and "honesty in government," is one of the few men who've run for President of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.

McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.

Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

From Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail, reprinted in The Great Shark Hunt. (Illustration by Ralph Steadman.)