Stumbling Tongue

Over the last week or so, the local news has focused on the arrest of eight Britons of Pakistani descent who had stockpiled a half ton of explosives.

This takes place against a mood that is, in some ways, quite tense. Government security officials have commented that it is inevitable, and only a matter of time, until London is attacked, a warning that is repeated candidly by a small minority of politicians.

The London underground is plastered with notices not to leave bags unattended. One time, deep in the bowels of the Kings Cross station, I heard the usual drone of service announcements replaced with automated instructions to evacuate the station immediately. After I’d gone back up three escalators the instructions shut off and said we could return to our trains. It wasn’t a bomb. A woman had forgotten her backpack on a bench while she made a phone call.

But no one I’ve spoken to personally has seemed tense at all. On the news programs, the discussion of this recent arrest is largely in terms of the negative image it conveys about Muslims — that is, a discussion of the dangers of racism.

And the conversations I’ve had with men in my college have been pretty lighthearted. One friend of mine, Tim, joked about how paranoid the police had become, pointing out that the half ton of explosives was merely ammonium nitrate, a fetilizer, that it costs less than a hundred pounds to buy, and that it has valid uses in agriculture. He did mention it was odd that they were holding it in a city storage locker but this seemed mainly like a funny detail. As he put it, it just seemed fantastically unlikely that there was a real a threat there.

Another fellow, David, joked that it was reaching the point where people in Britain felt bad they hadn’t been attacked yet, as if they were being left out of a party. David also said that he thought Tony Blair hoped that England would be attacked because it would benefit him politically. This piece of cynicism genuinely shocked me, which may have been its point.

The worry over a terrorist attack is widely seen as a harmless quirk of the Blair government or else a deliberate pretense to advance ulterior motives.

Will Tim, David, and others be forced to see things differently within a few years? I think so. But my girlfriend takes the tube to work almost every day, at the rush hour peak, and I hope that I am wrong.

By the way, the web is full of lunatics.

In case you didn't know already.

Lust: The Seven Deadly Sins (The Seven Deadly Sins)
Simon Blackburn

I picked up the book last night at a talk by the author which was part of the Oxford Literary Festival. You could not imagine a more reasonable, down-to-earth, and entertaining philosopher.

His most surprising point was how hard it is to find depictions of lust in Western painting. There’s plenty of depictions of the aftermath of sin, of the bliss of spiritual communion, or of seductive women, but very little of people leering across rooms or manifestly imagining plans for each other’s bodies. Surveying many centuries of art history, the first thing he could find was a painting from Toulouse-Lautrec.

In the course of his talk he also mentioned that although the book had received mostly positive reviews, he also got some negative ones mainly from conservative Christians in America. They typically wanted to define lust only as disordered or excessive sexual desire, in order to defend Christianity against the charge of being pathologically prudish and conflicted about human sexuality.

Sure enough, at the end of the talk, one cleancut young man rose up and said, “I suppose I am one of these deluded American Christians…” He then baldly declared that lust is “really” only disordered sexual desire, and that this is all that Christianity opposes. But alas, his only correct statement was about being deluded.

But I do wish that this cleancut fellow had been able to state his case more intelligently, less smugly and complacently. I suppose there is a case to be made. But where do you find the person to make it?

This is the same problem that afflicts the creationists. If someone seriously aspires to become a sophisicated apologist for backwards views, that is probably because he grew up amid backwardness. Being the smartest kid in a neighorbood that didn’t specialize in smarts, he was comforted both by his superiority to his neighbors as well as by his agreement with them. Opiated by such comfort, how could you ever really doubt yourself? Why would you ever suppose that you are not the most intelligent person in the whole world or even — unimaginable! — that you are exactly as wrong-headed as the wicked outsiders say?

What do pin buttons, magic cards, cigarettes, and email all have in common? Mark Pilgrim knows.

If you tend to like what's on The Poor Man, you're sure to like this.

Even if it leaves Shakespeare scholars rolling in their graves, this is very cool:

PieSpy, the Java tool for inferring social networks from IRC (which we've written about before) has now been turned on a corpus of static text -- Shakespeare's plays. Here's a bit of Anthony and Cleopatra, with Cleopatra in the center

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Edward R. Tufte

“But why fly in the face of facts? Few people love the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, but those who do are of the salt of the Earth.” — Virginia Woolf

One could almost say the same of Edward Tufte, a man who has written a trio of remarkable books on, to quote the title of the first book, “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.” The books are original, concise, profound, and beautiful. If that strikes you as impossible for such a topic, then you are just not the salt of the Earth. Don’t feel bad. We can’t all be.

One could almost say that of Tufte, except for the fact that loving him has become a cliche in certain circles (although admittedly, rather salt-of-the-earthy circles), and also that he’s fallen from his own standard occasionally with cranky and sometimes out-of-touch rants against PowerPoint and the Internet as a whole.

So it is encouraging to learn that his upcoming book, Beautiful Evidence, seems to hit the old mark. He has pages of it up for review here, such as the following: