Student of Trinity

Okay, congratulations: you have all gone from wuss to bad.

That sounds pretty reasonable. Well, fine, but: Marxism? Seriously? One dead white male's idiosyncratic rantings from the bleary dawn of industrial capitalism, as the basis of an entire academic discipline? That's almost as bad as generative linguistics. I mean, specializing in the history of industrial development, as something that Karl Marx happened also to have taken a stab at in his day, I can totally understand. And Marxism has certainly existed as a historical phenomenon, an ideology that influenced much of the world for several generations. The history of Marxism is a perfectly legitimate topic. But being a Marxist historian just strikes me as absurd, let alone having to choose Marxism first, before studying history.

Wow. Yikes. You have to first pick a particular doctrinaire squint, and lock yourself into it for good? That sounds pretty pointless, frankly. I'd be happier to hear that you need to specialize in methodology, or know relevant languages. Ideology first seems like a helluva a way to run an academic discipline.

Yeah, just the one written preliminary. I think it lasted about six hours, though. That's kind of the German model for the doctorate, which was the historical basis for the modern doctorate around the world. It assumes that you already know the past — that's what the previous degrees were about. The doctorate is all about research, on this model, so it really only consists of a dissertation. Adding any exams at all is a North American thing, I think. In Germany, doctoral students aren't officially students. Their official status is that of academic co-workers: qualified professional scientists or scholars, collaborating with a professor on research.

What was the history comp like? I'm really curious. In physics, things like this vary widely. Where I studied, there was a 'preliminary' exam rather than a comprehensive. You had to pass it within the first year of your PhD studies, or get kicked out of the program. Some people thought it was terrible, because the PhD was supposed to be about research, and yet there was this hoop to jump through, about having passable knowledge of standard undergraduate stuff. I thought it was a good idea just for that. It ensured that nobody got out of the school, with a PhD in physics, while being clueless about something basic and major in the subject. Where I teach now, in Germany, there's no such exam for the doctorate, but the undergrad degrees include fairly comprehensive oral exams. Physics is a mature natural science with a small and uncontroversial body of basic principles. Ask, What should every physicist know about physics? and you'll get very much the same answers from every physics professor in the world. So a preliminary exam like the one I wrote really makes sense in physics. I'm really curious what the analogous thing in history might be, though. Is it a test of factual knowledge, to make sure that every history PhD knows the gross outline of major world events for the past three millennia? I can see some point in that, but on the other hand I'm not sure it's so unambiguous to decide which events were 'major'. Or is it a test of basic historian skills? If so, what are those? Dissertations should actually be fun. I don't really know zip about a history dissertation. Physics dissertations today are basically just two or three short published papers, stapled together, with intro and connecting text typed out in a last-minute rush. For what it's worth, though, I think my advice would be to try to say something radical and dramatic. That's naive, undergraduate thinking, and most graduate school training is probably all about crushing down bold hypotheses into nice, smooth surfaces of subtle nuance. But my guess is that there's a subtle nuance about this itself: it's not that bold conclusions are all wrong, just that most of them are. So bread-and-butter work is pretty low key. It's still the few bold conclusions that really make the subject worthwhile, even when they do turn out to be wrong. So I think it's worth working extra hard, and enduring years of scorn from your advisor, to try to say something a little more "out there". The extra effort and embarrassment will be worth it, to be doing something that's actually interesting and significant, instead of something safe but who-even-cares.

Wasn't this originally a Japanese game? Until I see kanji here, you people are wusses.

The Glass Bead Game isn't exactly a plot-heavy book, either. It has one, but it feels a bit tacked on. Maybe it's just my taste, but I'm starting to think that "novel of ideas" is marketing spin for "novel of people standing around talking". The thing I don't really get about any of these books is that they all feature academic settings, in which no-one does research. That's just weird. It has nothing to do with any actual academic setting that has existed for, oh, two hundred years or so. The idea of adding to knowledge, and not just preserving and appreciating it, has been the principal meta-idea of the modern age. Okay, you could imagine that being abandoned. But it's so clearly just a boring step backwards, it's hard to see how that can be a good idea for a book.

Actually I kind of hated Anathem. It's a huge fat book that can almost be summarized surprisingly briefly: The Glass Bead Game meets A Canticle for Leibowitz. That would be great, actually, except for the almost. The thing that summary misses is that there isn't actually much of a plot to the book, and what there is unravels into arbitrary quantum mumbo-jumbo at the end. Stephenson should have waited with his setting and theme until he had a substantial enough idea for the plot. I was very disappointed.

In G4 you can get a heap of XP right in the first zone, if you get in the killing blow on this Battle Alpha (or something) that Greta fights. I thought this might be similar, but I guess the point is that Shanti isn't actually very tough.

Do you get a huge pile of exp for this, or is it just silliness? If you do get exp, can you find a way to farm her?

I'm a little curious how much one can get out of a 'civilian' biography of Einstein. The scientific one was pretty much nailed years ago by Abraham Pais, who both knew Einstein personally and was a theoretical physicist himself. Pais's Subtle Is the Lord focuses mostly on Einstein's physics, to the point of including lots of equations. But this seems to have been Einstein's own idea of what his life was really about. It's actually a rather sad story, that way, because there was this tremendous burst of creativity at age 26, and then a tremendous ten-year struggle to re-imagine gravity, ending with Einstein's greatest success. For the entire second half of his life, though — he died in 1955 at age 75 — Einstein mainly failed. He certainly failed by his own standards. And he doesn't seem to have had much of a social or family life. He lived for physics, and physics basically dried up on him. I'm curious how much of this comes through in a less technical biography.

I suppose that a random question has to be one that cannot be expressed by any algorithm shorter than the question itself as a simple statement. In this sense it is probably rather difficult to pose a truly random question in any natural language. But we can try to get as close as we can.

I know that topic drift just happens, but really, people, this is a bit extreme. We've had several posts in a row about custom titles. The thread is clearly marked as being about 'random questions'. Please show a little respect, and stop introducing arbitrary tangents of logical coherence. Let's try getting back on track. Où sont les neiges d'antan?

So? So?

I had a custom title from before I was a mod, but I didn't like it that much. I had always wanted to be an Interloper, so I made myself one.

Some countries could observe Pi Day on 22/7.

The Bechdel test is named after Alison Bechdel, who introduced it in a comic strip in 1985, but Bechdel herself attributes the idea to her friend Liz Wallace. A work of fiction passes the test if it contains two female characters who have a conversation about something other than a man. It sounds like a pretty low bar to jump over, but apparently it's alarming how few books or movies pass this minimal test. (I'm reluctant to start checking through my favorite sci-fi and fantasy books — and the majority of my favorite authors are women.) This should be surprising. It's not asking the moon in political correctness. Have a couple of female characters talk about something other than a man, even very briefly, once in three hundred pages of novel or two hours of movie. How hard can that be? Well, it's not actually quite so minimal a test as it may at first sound. If there are equal numbers of male and female characters, and they pair off at random to talk, then only about one in four conversations should be between two females. And then a fair amount of any story's dialog is likely to be about other characters in the story, so even without any gender bias at all, there would be a a fair number of conversations between female characters that did at least mention some man. Some stories may not have so much dialog in the first place. It doesn't take an absurd amount of bias to fail the Wallace-Bechdel test. It's easy to not notice that it's being failed. And that is really the point. Finding books and movies in which no two men ever discuss anything besides women is hard. A book that failed that test would stick out like a sore thumb, for having either very little dialog or unbelievable characters. Even if it weren't necessarily unbelievable that the men were constantly thinking about women, men only talking about women really is unbelievable. Even soldiers and convicts in prison talk about lots of other things. Men in fiction always talk about other things. A book or movie that failed the sex-reversed Wallace-Bechdel test would be ridiculous. Yet it's easy to get through a book or movie that fails the Wallace-Bechdel test, and not realize anything amiss. This is the point. I stopped posting installments of my story here, but I have kept on writing it, and I recently finished a major section of it, comprising what should be at least a third of the total text. It's just over 70 000 words. I only considered it a first draft of that initial section, and expected to revise it a fair amount. Well, I happened to read about the Wallace-Bechdel test. My story passed, but only just, with squinting. So I fixed it and now it passes quite fair and square. It didn't actually take much re-writing at all, but it made the story much better. The problem was that my story had far too little dialog. It has plenty of female characters. The protagonist-narrator is female, and I have carefully balanced genders among all the other characters, including roughly balancing for prominence in the story and coolness. The break in the story I've reached now is to switch to a male narrator. I don't think this comes off as fussily PC. There's no mirror symmetry, but there are lots of rough parallels, and I don't think you can avoid that if you have even rough gender balance in a story. Anyway, I didn't have trouble with Wallace-Bechdel for lack of women. But the story has first-person narration, and I had far too many passages in which the narrator just told the reader things. Several of these had some character saying something to the narrator, and the narrator telling the reader what she thought about it. (The squinting that made my first version pass was to call a two-sentence response to a long monologue a conversation, and to note that the response was to the short last part of the monologue, the bulk of which had been about the narrator's father. All the ingredients for a much better conversation were being wasted in asides to the reader.) By just re-writing a few of these scenes into dialog, though, I had three quite substantial female-female conversations in just the first few chapters. One of these does mention a man, but is not mainly about him, and the others have nothing to do with any male. (Well, they do mention people in general, but this is a very gender-balanced setting — people in general clearly does not mean men in particular, either to the characters or, at this point, to the reader. To me this meets the W-B criterion. And just to be sure, there are two more passages I still have to dialogue-ify that will be about strictly inanimate subjects.) I'm not completely off the hook for gender bias, because my first draft did pass the sex-reversed version of Wallace-Bechdel quite straightforwardly, if still only minimally. It had one brief conversation between two male characters, entirely about something other than a woman. It had two conversations between males about the female protagonist. All the remaining conversations were male-with-female, some of them with several of each talking together. With the narrator being female, though, the number of female-female conversations should have been closer to half, and there are plenty of things for these women to talk about besides men. My problem was that I just didn't turn all these opportunities into interesting dialogue. I left them as monologues of one kind or another. Now I'm thinking that I need to add more conversations among my male characters. It really livens up the story, and makes characters other than the narrator seem a lot more real. Dialogue is also fun to write. I have a thing for stories with multiple narrators. This one has two, and most of the other stories I've started over the years have had at least two. Well, even with only one actual narrator, a dialogue is a bit like having two narrators. You get to juxtapose two points of view. It's fun to shift back and forth. Wallace-Bechdel is a good tool for revealing gender bias, just because it is such a minimal test. And yet I think that a work that passes W-B is probably not going to do too badly for gender bias. One conversation isn't much in itself, but if you write even one conversation between two characters, other than as a way of writing about a third character, then you're likely to write more than one conversation between those two, and you might even want to see what a third would have to say to them. There is no reason to be afraid of the Wallace-Bechdel test as a PC shibboleth. If you're willing to have even just two female characters in your story, then all it asks you to do is to give them something to talk about, and write it as dialogue. The way I'm thinking now, that's never a bad idea for any two characters in any story. The middle section of my story, with the male narrator, will not be scrupulously gender-balanced. It's set in a pre-modern society, and its narrator is an amateur actor-playwright, on the side from other things, to whom the Wallace-Bechdel test would never occur. This section may not pass it, but we'll see.

That's why monasteries are built strong, so they can serve as fortresses in time of mead.

Mead is not bad at all, but nothing so fantastic. A bit sweet, though only a bit.

I had a similar idea once, and called the place Innfinity. Ba dum bum. What I mainly remember now was that my mom had picked up an enormous IBM electric typewriter that didn't work, and I got it working by opening it up and poking at it inside. So I typed up a bunch of notes, for the first time in my life, about my Innfinity idea. The typewriter was a bizarre device. It was huge, huge enough that its case deserved to be called a chassis. Its chassis was made of cast iron. Really, as far as I could tell. It wasn't so obviously a step up from a manual typewriter, really. All the electricity did was drive the printing strokes, so that the letters were all equally dark no matter how hard you hit the keys. In principle it would let you type fast without getting your fingers all tired out. That was it. Here my memory is fuzzy, but I think it might have been a printing ball typewriter. If it was, then instead of having the characters on little levers that flipped up and hit the page, it had a sort of metal d20, except it was really about a d60, covered with all the characters it could type. This ball would rotate and tilt to present whatever character you had typed, and come up and smack the page through the ink ribbon. It definitely had an ink ribbon. A pair of spools with a wet tape wound between them. The tape was wet with ink. With each stroke, the spools wound a bit, so that you always hit fresh ink. Once the spool was all wound up you had to replace it. It was all kind of clever in a way. It just seems closer to a quill and inkwell than to what we use today. It was vintage 1970 or something. I was playing around with it in the early 1980s. That was a time when word processing on the desktop changed about as fast as mobile phones have changed in the past ten years.

If Sylae gets grumpy, she will simply find our Gödel statements and kill us by PM.

Not only that, but nobody gets everything right even after years of experience. If it were totally easy, we would train an animal or robot to do it, and it wouldn't be a job for a human. People that are excessively hard on co-workers for occasional mistakes aren't experts. They are themselves screwing up more seriously, like a part that overheats from a little friction. Good plan. For your own sake, which is more important than the job even if you're a surgeon because another surgeon can always step in for a day or two, but also for the job. It's just the responsible thing to do. You've got to look after yourself just as you've got to look after your tools.

Have you talked to your psychiatrist about this? If it's stress-related, which it sounds as though it might well be, then a psychiatrist ought to be able to help. Can you make an appointment soon? The day off might really help, too. If you're under a lot of stress, a break is supposed to be really good, if you really take a break from whatever's bothering you. So getting right away from it for a whole day might help you make it through until you can get some real help.

Hey, go see a doctor. Seriously. This doesn't sound like one of those random aches and pains that goes away with two aspirins. Most likely there's something that can be done. Why waste any more time?