Dear Gorjus—Thank you for PARLIAMENT, which is, as it turns out, an incredibly fecund word anagrammatically speaking. I consider myself a PERT ANIMAL, but my MARTIAL PEN could never have found so many anagrams in such A PLAIN TERM. Perhaps it is because I’M PARENTAL, but I don’t think so. I am not one of those PARTIAL MEN, but on the whole I am rather ordinary. It is true that after a few beers I perhaps take a MALTIER NAP than most, and I prefer the PALMIER TAN of Florida to the white skin of my friend, poor PALE MARTIN. It is also true that I do bonsai (but only with one tree—I TRAIN MAPLE) and practice yoga, but I do not attend yoga studios, because the last time I did they forced us to write our own chants and then put them on the floor in a MANTRA PILE. In my defense, I have had to cut back because I keep knocking over the potted plants—my PLANTER AIM is off—and I have recently gone to a PLAINER MAT. (I’m sure you’re familiar with the yoga mat, that PLANAR ITEM on which one performs the asanas.)
Nevertheless, the flavor of my toothpaste is A PEARL MINT, and when I read a menu (A MEAL PRINT), I usually spread my napkin or other LAP RAIMENT first, just like most people. (I eat out a lot because my cookware doesn’t work—the local bigbox where I bought my pot made a false claim about it, just a MART PAN LIE.) I do play with my food sometimes—I PLAIT RAMEN, for example. I like to stop and smell the roses, particularly in California, where I have been known, on occasion to sniff a MARIN PETAL.
Aside from yoga, I am not terribly athletic. I have done enough running to hear A MILER PANT, but on our softball team, though I sometimes homer and knock in a few runs, I am not the MAIN PLATER. In golf, I LAMENT PAR as unattainable. I do backpack. (There’s a funny story here—warning my mother about where she put her foot once, I said TRAPLINE, MA—and then, somewhat rudely, I admit, admonished, TIP, MA: LEARN.) But I am less likely to scale the Matterhorn than to take an ALPINE TRAM. On the whole, if I were an ant, I am sure I would be A LIMPER ANT.
I’ve done a little acting, but I only had a MENIAL PART. My one line consisted of congratulating an actress on her figure (TRIM LAP, MAE, I said).
My abilities are more in the PAINT REALM. I’M PANEL ART mostly, though I do a bit of wood sculpture (I’m IN MAPLE ART too). My best known works are the illustrations I did for a chart of ancient Rome (RE LATIN MAP). I have always had an artistic nature. In Santa Fe, I fixed up the street we lived on, and when my daughter visited, she saw it and exclaimed, TRIM LANE, PA.
I travel, but am in no hurry to sign up with the local travel agency, or as I think of it, the MAPNET LAIR. I’m willing to let MALTA RIPEN before I visit. Nor do I like driving. Too often, turns on a superhighway ENTAIL RAMP.
If I may, a REAL TIP, MAN: Don’t worry about the ALIEN TRAMP unless she threatens Earth directly, saying something like I RAM PLANET.
I wouldn’t be so bold as to offer advice, except that your posting was like a birth for me, a PRIME NATAL. It convinced me we are a MENTAL PAIR. If your name were Al, I would say MEAN TRIP, AL, in which, by “mean,” I mean awesome, of course. Perhaps we should consider combining our efforts into one unsurpassable uber-anagram.
I would continue, but there is something wrong with the lighting here—a TEAR IN LAMP?—and I am feeling the call of biological necessity. Now if I can just find that LATRINE MAP . . .
Incidentally, I am now defining degree of difficulty reciprocally from the way I defined it in my first post. I define it now as number of anagrams divided by number of letters. This measure means degree of difficulty goes up as the number gets larger. The other way, it increased as the number got smaller.
But I’m throwing this game out there for others, so if you have more workable approaches, use them.
Wow wow wowowowow.
Seconded, beth. You can’t hear me applauding, but I am.
This may be my favorite new game, although there aren’t many I enjoy. When I said I liked role-playing games, i MEANT I LARP; I’ve never cared for the old pen-and-paper format.
I curse Gorjus for the spell he has wrought on me. Verily he hath turned my own virus against me. I realized that although I had tried to be truthful, I had not, in the spirit of full disclosure, admitted that one of my well-known art pieces is one I do not like. It’s A LAME PRINT because they used LAMER PAINT. I plead forgiveness on the excuse of not having felt well lately, although my sickness is nothing to worry about, just the usual indisposition, a PAR AILMENT. I failed also to confess that I write about zen and yoga, so that I, as one might say, PEN RAMA LIT. I pretend not to care about appearances, but my first wife’s weding dress had an AMPLE TRAIN. I have an unfair advantage because, like you wanted me to, in high school I took PRE LATIN, MA. You see where this is headed, PA. TERMINAL.
Re Fury above: I agree about pen and paper though of course in this one I cheat. My favorite games are the ones that require no equipment but the mind itself. Precious few of those.
Suppose it is idealism or laziness. Such games are convenient any time, anywhere. I’ve loved anagrams for years, and wondered how the activity could be turned into a play-anywhere game. Finally dawned on me after SENATOR. I don’t know what it is about a game that sanctions and heightens, makes an activity seem fulfilling. Interesting that it works that way, though.
You have invented a variation, by the way—the comment which itself plays the game it is commenting on. A person can have the fun of turning the pun without the grief of no relief.
my favorite internet thread anagram game has always been You Ogre, Unhand That Hefty Seamstress!. It’s awlways fun to start in unsuspecting threads and comments, called “ogring” by the good folks at sensible erection.
Q: How come the AIRMAN LEPT when he could have taken the ALPINE TRAM?
A: He respected his father’s (always a timid man about heights) terminal wish that he REMAIN PLAT. His father was so greatly liked by his son’s flying friends that they renamed that particular stretch of land beneath the tram the AIRMEN PLAT.
Q: What does Fred Durst try to accomplish with his music ?
A: RAP IN METAL
well, enough of this. I’m off the the bar to find some ALE-PAN TRIM.
Your friend,
Patrick “MANLIER PAT” Taylor
Ok, Diplo, that’s a good game. I’m crap at anagrams, but the acronyms are just funny. Tell about your love of Reagan.
Diplomat, I don’t know the anagram thread game you mention. How is it played? Guess I should check the link.
I once sold Florida real estate, much of which was under water. The county survey for each piece of land was called a MARINE PLAT.
previous language anagram thread.
The highest reality equals arbitrary delights.
Good heavens.
I thought this was just going to be a harmless game, but you’re all running so wild with it now…I mean look at the state of this place!
Not that I’m, you know, trying to be all MR. NEAT PAIL about it…
I’m finally losing my man boobs. Pretty soon I’ll have a LEAN ARMPIT, maybe even two if I work out both arms…
A real man starves.
(mind = blown)
Well, my Parliament has been shattered! Seriously, though—it’s such a rich, rich word!
I just sent the Prof. a note that said “gone for 4 days, anything happening on the site?” Uh, YEAH!!
Sister TRAMP ALIEN retains virgins’ eggs stingily
SHIT GORJ! my comment is s’posed to be above yours!!
/I guess you can tell at least how long I was staring at the screen trying to put that together [16 min. at least]
oh, and you used alien tramp in your initial story. should have picked up on that, verily, before I even began the endeavor.
/hangs head in shame, like the INAPT LAMER I am
But you got to admit ALIEN TRAMP is just about the best. Until I can top it, I feel I will REMAIN PALTtry. Maybe in the morning. We’ll see how good I do RE MATIN, PAL. Meantime, I must say I am glad that there are at least a few women looking at the game. It’s okay that the players are IN PART MALE, but it would be sad if they all were. Well, must be off. Want to get some sun before my next test, A PRELIM TAN, as it were.
It is with great sorrow that I admit, upon checking, that TRIM LAP, MAE is a flawed anagram of PARLIAMENT, repeating the M and failing to use the N. As a Scot might express it, NAE, TRIM LAP be not a successful phrase.
I do not know whether this failure is attributable to my having stolen a bit of the sacramental wine at a recent church service (ME ALTAR NIP), or because I slept late, my large dog having eaten the clock I usually wake up to (ALARM IN PET). Speaking of domestic creatures, I have always wondered if, since it is mostly sheaths of muscle, a snake would be a LAMINAR PET?
Another reason for the oversight may be the depradations of local developers. They have bulldozed elm, maple, and pine, and the neighborhood is lucky to RETAIN PALM.
Sorry, I was interrupted by the fellow who came to work on my water filter, the PERLITA MAN. Where was I?
Perhaps my oversight was because I am so distracted by the contentious political news lately. I am, I must admit, an aging hippie, one who did not attend the 1968 attempt to levitate the Pentagon—that NAPALM RITE and MAILER PANTagraph—and never thought it would work, but was in sympathy nevertheless. I am upset about the release of the story on Joseph Wilson’s wife, because IT RAN PLAME out of her job. Nobody seems to have a good one, but truly the troubles of our nation MERIT A PLAN.
It may be because of my diet—the only cookware I have left is the TEAL RIM PAN, so I have been eating out, not with good results. I must warn you, do not, the next time you visit Brazil, try the PIRANA MELT. I have gone in for too much candy lately, too (I’m a messy eater—when I stop in at Stuckey’s and have that Southern favorite, I always ask for a PRALINE MAT).
Or perhaps my mathematical obsessions are to blame. I have become so fixated on calculating the ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference that people issue a PI MAN ALERT when they see me coming. Thales inspired me, a Greek from Miletus—we don’t know much about him, but are pretty sure he had children, which would make him a MILETAN PA.
There’s nothing wrong with my brain—when I lived in Santa Fe, I had it checked out at NM PARIETAL and other specialized medical groups, and I got advice on proper glandular nutrition from the nearby PINEAL MART.
It’s true I am somewhat distracted by thoughts of all the odd jobs I have held. I did visitors’ badges for a public relations convention once, and all I did all day long was issue one PR LAMINATE after another. In Chile, digging for silver ore, I was a repressed PLATA MINER. I was fired from the Post Office because the work made my breathing too rapid—I was a MAIL PANTER. I was an architect briefly, but nobody liked my archaic designs, for which they mockingly referred to me as MR. PALATINE. I was doing okay in California real estate until I carelessly boasted to the newspaper, as they headlined it, LA PART MINE. As one who filmed Italian locations for a travel agency, I was a MILAN TAPER (I also did charts, but usually after the video, telling the agency MAP IN LATER). I collected resin in softwood forests for a while, but left because I found PINE TAR MALodorous. In one job, my boss insisted on using only high rag content paper because it was more flexible. If we didn’t provide him with a PLIANT REAM, we were sure to hear a REAM PLAINT, and one wearied of that.
But that’s all in the past. It can’t be the reason. The only remaining explanation is phobia, but although I have had a bad reaction to such things as the mounted skin of a sea otter at the boat dock—the MARINA PELT —or the dropped rack of a deer in a Tucson country—PIMA ANTLER—on the whole I do not suffer unduly from fear. It is true I have been afraid of the water ever since the Crocodile Hunter—RIP, LATE MAN—was killed, but it is really only the MANTA PERIL that worries me.
In short, I have no excuse. It was, plain and simple, a mistake.
Oops. I was wrong about Thales’s children. He was a mathematician, though, which was, for a MILETAN, PAR
Am beginning to regret having foisted this game on you guys. Perhaps my MANIA LEPT Reasonable bounds.
Dear Intense Persona Loaning Out Major Anagram Threads—A radical murder scheme? Intent, purpose, reason, education frame existence realistically: You only get abler.
Actually, that’s just for fun. I get it now.
Starting to admire rebus vision’s essential secret.
Jack,
It’s going to be getting dark before too long. if I try to keep try to keep up with your anagramming skills I’ll definitely need to be using a RETINA LAMP.
Surely everyday continuances retard ephemeral thrills. That’s why I need to get my ass to Hawaii where I think I’d really enjoy being greeted at the airport by a beautiful girl with a giant, RAMPANT LEI..
Even worse than Mississippi, I hear that Hawaii has really awfully large rodents (of the two sexes, especially beware of the MALE RAT NIP) and ferocious wasps.
//
we all should play scrabble.
The hard reality—I lost lowly Scrabble-games. This is true. A friend, Kirsten Mustain, who probably would find jaxagrams too weird and obsessive, used to clobber me regularly at Scrabble.
The Hawaiian rat doesn’t scare me. If I went there, I would just use the local cure, which is a quick slug of dark beer, or as they call it, the ALE PINT RAM. Of course, they don’t give it to you free. You have to PLAN A REMIT of some sort.
Here’s a question for any others who might be reading this: PARLIAMENT is indeed a rich word. I think between us we have created maybe 80 anagrams. However, since the possible arrangements of the letters in the word is 10 factorial (10×9 x8×7 x6×5 x4×3 x2×1), the ratio of our anagrams to the possible arrangements is 80 divided by 3,628,800, or 1 to 45,360. There are words with exactly as many anagrams as possible arrangements, such as NO or AM (in which cases the ratio is 2 divided by 2, or 1 to 1). Defining a ratio of 1 to 1 (1.0000) as perfection, what is the largest perfect word? Are there any 3-letter words that are perfect (that is, have 6 anagrams for their 6 possible arrangements)?
It seems unlikely there would be any perfect words larger than three letters, since factorials rise so rapidly. A four-letter word would require 24 anagrams.
the best I’ve done so far is EAT TEA ETA ATE
It’s fascinatingly difficult: almost seeming as though every three-letter word, to be a word, must have certain (it seems to me now, at least two) “forbidden” anagrammatic combinations. Right now I’m playing with three-letter words where two of the letters are the same—sometimes you get an extra word out of it, sometimes you lose a word instead. Of course if “EEE” was a word, there’d be no problem…but maybe that’s why it isn’t a word.
Anybody else having any luck?
How about the most imperfect three-letter word?
you want imperfect?
tax
Has no one yet pointed out what a bad PARENT LIAM is? He’s awful. He was funny on The Simpsons a few years back, though. I liked the scene where Bart has to tell him that Homer is having a crisis of faith: LIAM, PA RENT his garments, he says, or something to that effect.
Diplomat—
I axt a friend of mine if you were right about “tax.” He said yes. But shouldn’t there be a word which has NO meaningful arrangements? Or has that word already been invented as the name of the imp in the Superman comics, or the character in Dogpatch who goes around with a cloud over his head?
Plok’s observation is intriguing. Perhaps words must be restricted within their, ah, phase space in order to be recognized as words.
And I thought EEE was a word. I thought it was what you said when a mouse scared you.
That’s EEEK, surely?
I don’t know if I’m going to do any better than this, loose as it is:
APT
TAP
PAT
PTA
ATP
And unfortunately TPA, but then let’s face it, I’m already pushing out into acronym-space as it is, I should be happy to leave it there. Some things man wasn’t meant to know.
Also, as far as I can tell, “EEEK” is a singleton. Maybe you need four letters to get a singleton?
I can’t help but think we might get interesting infosystem power laws from this discussion…
plok, at this point I don’t think we can reasonably declare acronyms out of bounds. You have achieved .833 of a perfect 1, which I would not have thought was possible. Four for a singleton. Hmm. Anybody think of any 3-letter words that have only one anagram?
And as for your observation about shoe size—do you suppose that’s why they’ve been giving me the boot for so long?
What is an infosystem power law? It is almost self-explanatory, but in my case not quite.
holy shit, dude. the insane-o-meter split open and belched out a white flag. the level of insanity here would make susan powter blush. i tip my hat to you fakers…well done. any minute now i expect an interdimensional word-geek portal to be ripped through the fabric of the interwebs…and the seam splits right from this very thread. well played, clerks. well played indeed.
Ha! “Infosystem power law” does sound like something Warren Ellis might say, doesn’t it? I hang my head in shame…but I don’t have any proper words for what I was thinking about, so I just stitched some together.
I hesitate to describe the thought here, because the description could go pretty long. Short version: a power law is something that outlines an inherent limitation to some behaviour or other, that is itself described by the behaviour’s activity. My favourite example of this is the graph of robustness vs. sensitivity in organisms—an organism that is very robust in one area will be correspondingly more sensitive in other areas. Human beings are pretty robust: we can live on a lot of different foods, in a lot of different temperatures, altitudes, blah blah blah. Our robustness/sensitivity graph is pretty much a bell curve: we can’t stand up to absolutely anything, but we’re only really vulnerable to the stuff at either “tail” of the curve. That’s as it stands: however if we were extraordinarily robust in a single area, so the story goes, we would be correspondingly sensitive in all the others, and the curve would be a spike.
Power law: the robustness and the sensitivity are complementary.
There are more famous examples than this. The Uncertainty Principle could be looked on as a power law.
Also in chess…well, if you’ve ever played Reverse Chess, you know that even though you’re trying to lose all your pieces, and eventually your king, sacrificing the queen early is still usually a dumb idea. Because it still takes power to get into situations where power’s value is negated. If you’ve ever been stalemated by a guy with two queens, a rook, and a bishop, you know what I mean. Well, I like to play all kinds of crazy chess, I’m a nut that way. Anyway, power law: whether you’re trying to lose or win, it takes the same amount of power to do it either way. It takes power to limit your options.
Gonna tie this all up in a minute…Christ, I’m sweating like a pig…but anyway here comes “EEEK!”, and it’s pretty clear that there’s not too many anagrams in there. Maybe because of a power law? In the “phase space” (ha!) of words, every extra letter represents an extra dimension of meaning (an extra potential for power) that might be brought to an utterance: if no word could be longer than five letters, we could have “heavy” but not “gravid”, and that would mean our descriptive powers would be poorer. But it takes power to get into trouble, too: the right combination of letters might very well be capable of contracting the number of available meanings in a word’s phase-space. If, you know, we’re thinking of it that way. I guess that’s kind of like alphabetical diffraction, really…
Okay, almost done. Whew. It’s hard not to ramble. Finally we get to this word “power”, let’s say that for the purposes of some imaginary super-abstract field of study called “infosystems” or something, we’re just thinking of “power” as the combinatory potential of the elements of a given system. Of any given system, from mathematics to, say, chemistry. The atoms on the Periodic Table, the molecules they make in the world around us, these would be primarily understood as schemes of combinatory potential to the ivory-tower-dwelling “infosystems” theorists of this fancy. The Standard Model of physics is based around a lot of goop like that already, of course, but consider that in chemistry there are also “forbidden” combinations all around…particularly if you’re talking about radioactive decay, sometimes a decaying isotope will have to “skip” a rung on the ladder leading down to iron’s stability, and then pop back up again, briefly, in order to hit it. These are just facts, chemical facts, see: there’s a physical reason why sometimes you can’t go from isotope 221 to 220, but have to go to 218 instead. Which doesn’t mean 218’s definitionally unreachable or anything, it just means…
Okay that was rambling, sorry. Anyway, to an “infosystems” guy, these physical limitations would likely find expression in a more abstract theory or principle—like Uncertainty does in physics. In fact to someone like this everything might appear to be combinatorial in nature, every activity part of a system whose potentials can be balanced or diffracted in a sort of “phase-space”...
Which finally brings us to Kurt Godel’s old thing about ineliminable Undecidability in formal systems like language and mathematics…perfectly valid statements that are nonetheless self-negating, incapable of being proven true or false (“I always lie” is a statement in English that is proved true only when false, and vice versa). But, the thing about this effect is that it doesn’t work in all systems, it only works in sufficiently powerful systems! Chess produces no un-moves, no matter how long it goes on (although, interestingly, Go does); you can’t be paradoxical in ASL. You need power to get into a limiting space.
I guess that’s where I was going with all that: even the humble alphabet, to such a person, could elucidate some power-law principles.
Sorry, quite long after all! If it’s too long, Prof, Gorj, or Jack, feel free to delete it. I don’t mean to be a thread-hijacker.
Also, I’m rather impressed by “TAX”.
TUX?
Two responses in one. Dr. Wagner, I had not thought our scheme was so transparent. That is exactly the plan of course, to rip open such a portal, through which the holy demons of logos will emerge howling to drag offenders to their just rewards—sorry if my politics is showing too much, but Shrub (is he channeling Dan Quayle, or what?) will be waterboarded for his linguistic butchery (there will be more serious recompense in other dimensions for his other actions).
plok, I don’t find your explication of infosystem power laws rambling or confusing. This is one of the sorts of things I love to think about, along with sex, the music of poetry, the infinities of paint, food, and so on. Took a degree in math in my youth (took being the operative word). Gorjus can testify to my interest, because I have inflicted some mathematical cogitation on him. Familiar with Goedel, Heisenberg, quantum mechanics, paradox in math and logic (Russell’s set of all sets paradox more or less led to Goedel’s theorem, and the liar paradox you refer to is like the “All Cretans are liars” paradox that is frequently referenced). I do not play chess (though I have invented a space-age board game I call Faster Than Light, which is a sort of 3-dimensional chess), but follow what you say. As I understand it, what you are calling a power law is a rule that links as complementaries at least two phenomena which most people consider opposites or contradictories. Especially like your observations on human adaptability.
One application in words, it seems to me, would certainly be a rule that the greater the productivity (anagrammatical speaking) of a set of letters, the lower the percentage of those arrangements which are meaningful. Long words would give you more anagrams, but the percentages of meaningful anagrams would be factorially lower. I was joking about the “phase space” of a word, and you caught the joke. Impressive. However, one could think of each letter as a dimension, and then each word (and all its anagrams) WOULD inhabit a sort of phase space. Degrees of freedom, that sort of thing . . .
I think I’d like to hear more about “Faster Than Light”...
And yes, it’s extremely tempting to run with the idea of lexical phase-space, isn’t it? And…hey, why not? After all, all the idea has to do is be useful, and then suddenly BLAMMO! Theory.
Must go get some coffee so I can think about this in a more frenzied way. One thing I should say before I forget, too (even though this would be the part of the FF comic where Dr. Doom gets expelled from the university) is that I think the queen’s unaltered power on the chessboard in REVERSE chess evokes the way black holes screw up ideas of reversible time on the big spacetime game-board of physics…the universe looks like it could simply be flipped forwards for backwards in every respect, all plusses turned to minuses without the symmetry of cause-and-effect (or effect-and-cause) being affected in any way…except black holes provide a compelling power-law type of counterfactual for this symmetrical dream. At least, I think so. And there you’ve got the chessboard, too, where the relative strengths of the pieces are what serve to make local chess “time” more of an arrow than a circle.
Oboy. Coffee might not be such a great idea after all..
Coffee has helped me see that that last bit may have been a bit of a stretch. I still like the idea: but it’s a stretch.
Must say, by the way, that it is a pleasure to be in touch with somebody else who knows of and admires that line from Thoreau (“Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”) It has been one of my favorites for years, but never met anyone else who remembered it.
I don’t think your notion on black holes was so strange. The scientists themselves, ever since Einstein, have said that the equations imply black holes, but that at the singularity all meaning breaks down. For me, this simply means that the equations no longer work.
I think of scientific theories as models of the way things work. They are infinitely preferable to most theological models, but they are not infinitely capable. For me, the universe is infinite. Few people grasp the implications. The infinite can never be contained or fully described. An intelligent scientist (there are plenty who are not) once pointed out, an observation I find extremely acute, that in order to be useful, a model must necessarily be less than the thing it models (if it isn’t, then we just have two of the same thing).
I do not believe that science is capable of describing the whole universe. Many scientists seem to feel they are engaged in discovering the true nature of existence. I feel that what we are doing instead is trying to make a more and more accurate model of the way things work. The current model(s) have a lot going for it (them), but as the discovery that we can account for less than ten percent of the total mass and energy of the universe shows, we are a long way from knowing everything. And, in my opinion, always will be. I love science for the adventure, the sense of scope, the wonder, the detail, the discipline, but not because I have the illusion it can answer all our questions.
So I would propose something like a power law for science itself: The more accurate our models are, the more there is that they fail to account for. To use your words, the more robust our science becomes, the more sensitive it becomes in ways that we are not aware of.
Example: the so-called Standard Model, despite its failure to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics, is becoming more and more accurate. I would call that, in your terms, robust. But as it does so, fewer and fewer people can comprehend it (try reading the articles in a mag like Physics Today—impossible to follow unless you are a specialist). Therefore, although an almost priestly caste of experts can develop astonishing technological marvels, science itself has become less available to most humans, and therefore of less use in thinking. I would call that, in your terms, sensitivity.
When I was younger, ideas used to drive me crazy. Insights would trigger insights so rapidly I felt I was going to explode. I could hardly bear the excitement. Now I find myself able to entertain 20 or 30 new notions a day without raising my pulse in the slightest. Have either become more peaceful or more phlegmatic.
I’ve long thought there’s something rotten in the state of quantum mechanics. As a Philosophy of Science guy, it’s all too apparent to me that most scientists have never really been told, or anyway have forgotten, what a “model” is: the story of the blind men and the elephant is lost on them, and they believe in total knowledge.
Oddly, though, I think this doesn’t make them realists, but romantics: their theories have turned from physics into semiotics, aurally-fixated instead of visually-fixated if you will. And perhaps there’s where your power law of science expresses itself most clearly: because if science gets its power from the consistency of its explanations, one can see how it might be tempting to make a fetish of that consistency, a fetish of the explanatory power, to the point where the mapping of the model onto reality is secondary. Reality becomes flexible, or at least capable of being deferred; M-theory now “only” needs to prove the existence of other universes in order to confirm itself. A trifling exercise, clearly.
As I see it: quantum mechanics, essentially (if I may use a little license here) the study of interference patterns, has reached the point where even the most outre theories are being proven faster and faster every day. It’s all spinning apart: everything is true, suddenly, and consequently the connective tissue between theories is being stretched out to ridiculous lengths. “All we have to do to prove the theory right, is prove it right!”
I think QM’s interfering with itself. Don’t know how, or how that would even be possible. But it’s hard to argue with results! The machines all work, but one suspects even the scientists are kidding themselves when they say they can explain it; this train left Explanation a long time ago.
My two cents.
Also, you know, apparently that Thoreau quotation enjoys some currency in medicine and law: “I think we’ve found our trout in the milk, Doc”, etc. This came as a surprise to me…I’d never heard it until I heard it, and since then I haven’t heard it.
My father explains the phrase’s likely origins this way, with the delivery of a milk can to a customer, who asks:
“Hey, have you been watering my milk?”
“Nossir, that’s 100% premium milk right there! Water it? Why that’d be a sin: look at that fresh, lovely milk, food of the gods themselves! Who would ever dare sully its purity? How could you think such a thing?”
“Well…there’s a trout in it.”
Hilarious stuff. I wonder if the doctors and the lawyers know it.
I firmly believe that this post and its comment thread should be preserved forever in a museum exhibit devoted to understanding the greatness of the internet.
I firmly believe that Professor Fury and Gorjus deserve accolade and encomium for having perpetrated this noble association of like-minded individuals in the first place.
Hear, hear!
Aw, thanks. And I should say, my comment above wasn’t posted to shut down conversation—keep it going! More anagrams! More theoretical physics! Maybe some theology!
Theology, Prof?
I would LOVE to unload some critical remarks about Dawkins and Dennett and their “brights” movement, which I think is just about the most asinine thing…!
Full disclosure: I’m incredibly unreligious. But these guys absolutely bug the SHIT out of me. And Dennett, at least, is a philosopher! He should know better! For Christ’s sake (and I am not taking His name in vain, I am in fact calling on Him to witness the extent of human stupidity), when did we nominate old Robert Heinlein characters from the Fifties to defend the teaching of Arthur Miller plays in high-school drama classes?
It’s just…
I mean, it beggars irony.
Dennett bugged me once. Dawkins bugs me all the time. Full disclosure: Most people would consider me very religious though it is a long way from the Southern Baptist doctrine I grew up with. Increasingly I don’t care about how I’m considered. My problem with both these guys is not their anti-religious stance—we object to the behavior of the same groups of people—but the parading of concept and metaphor as science. Dennett has done a “thought experiment” in which the contents of the brain, which are assumed to be the contents of consciousness, are electronically recorded, and then goes into a tizzy about the implications. What makes this an experiment? I call it bad, outdated science fiction. We have, first of all, no evidence that consciousness is a recordable manifestation. Even if we were to assume it is, for very good reasons any physicist should confirm, copying of consciousness would not be possible. To take only one simple problem. Copying takes time. The state of the circuits at the moment copying is begun is not the state at the end. We may assume we can run entire scans almost instantaneously, but then we fancy we are slicing consciousness to thin still pictures because some trick of perception will reconstitute motion as it does in the movies.
Can consciousness be partitioned? Is a partitioned representation of it the same as the thing itself? Why is this an experiment of any sort?
There is a guy invented a helmet. Supposedly stimulates activity in the “religious center” of the brain. Dawkins tries the helmet on, guy juices him. No aura, no holy daze, as many have reported (but only forty percent or so). Dawkins concludes this proves God doesn’t exist. Let us say I see another possible conclusion.
Respect the ideas of the selfish gene and meme, which I have found very useful, especially the latter. Think of them as ideas, though, metaphors, not science. Very hard to prove.
My questions for plok, in hopes he will respond here:
How does space expand when our measuring units don’t? Don’t we describe space in terms of measure? Isn’t there something screwy here? Are we maybe really shrinking? Is all matter shrinking? How could we tell the difference?
If space is expanding how come it stops at our bodies? Im not expanding. Neither is the planet Earth nearly as I can tell or for that matter galaxies. Do we have to devise a rule wherein space expands except in the vicinity of matter? Then aren’t we defining matter as not-space? And if space does refuse to expand in the vicinity of matter why do the other laws of physics work?