Software Musings

There are three threads coming together in this posting: two books and a lunchtime conversation. The two books are the ones I’m reading in parallel at the moment: Robert Fisk’s “The Age of the Warrior” and Alan Sokal’s “Beyond the Hoax”. Parenthetically, it is interesting (to me, anyway) to note that I was actually present when the photograph adorning Fisk’s Wikipedia page was taken.

I’m not going to write book reviews. I assume that everyone reading this knows of Fisk’s columns in The Independent, a British newspaper that started with such good intentions. But didn’t we all? I assume also that everyone knows about Sokal’s famous hoax: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”. What I’ve realised, perhaps ludicrously belatedly, through reading these two books in parallel is why Sokal’s hoax matters.

As one reads “Beyond the Hoax”, as everyone with any interest at all in science should, the overwhelming impression is that of observing someone demolishing an inadequate foe. The post-modernist interpretations of science that Sokal was hoaxing are so ludicrous as to be sitting targets. Why, one asks, would anyone take the trouble to attack the strong relativist argument? Given statements like the following (quoted from Katherine Hayles’ 1992 paper “Gender Encoding in Fluid Mechanics”):

Despite their name, conservation laws are not inevitable facts of nature but constructions that foreground some experiences and marginalise others…Almost without exception, conservation laws were formulated, developed and experimentally tested by men. If conservation laws represent particular emphases and not inevitable facts, then people living in different kinds of bodies and identifying with different gender constructions might well have arrived at different models for flow.

it could be thought that it is only necessary to publish these types of papers in order to discredit them (by the way, I think that “different gender constructions” means “of different sexes”—“gender” is a term used in grammar and, as far as I know, only words can have genders).

However, I haven’t yet introduced my third thread, arising from a lunchtime conversation with a staunch realist and someone with philosophical views as far from post-modernism as is possible while remaining on the planet. He casually asked the other day whether, were our senses different (if, for example, instead of being able to detect electro-magnetic radiation with frequencies between 400 and 790 THz, we could detect different forms of radiation), our physics would be different.

I suppose I must come clean here and declare an interest. If I’m anything in science, I’m an instrumentalist. Sokal makes short-shrift of people like me in his 2004 paper “Defence of a Modest Scientific Realism” which, by the way, is “defence” only in the sense that he spends 21 pages demolishing to his satisfaction alternative views and, in the remaining 5 pages describes realism as the only theory left standing. But his demolition of us instrumentatalists relates directly to the lunchtime conversation: if an instrumentalist relies on sense data then where does she stop? Must she rely on her unaided eyesight or is she allowed to augment it with spectacles? Or telescopes? Or microscopes?

This re-inforces the view that the physics we have is very dependent on the accident of which (augmented) senses we have. That is almost dangerously relativist.

And this brings me back to Fisk. Why is Sokal’s demolition work important? Because, if it’s not, the truth of the work of courageous journalists like Fisk and Patrick Cockburn becomes contingent on the sex, age, nationality and, for all I know, hair colour of the reader. Whether the Armenian Genocide took place becomes not a statement of history but a whim of the Turkish government.

Reading Sokal’s papers, one gets the impression that he has chosen a target that is too easy, albeit fun to shoot at. The overwhelming impression one gets is of shooting fish in a barrel (sometime I must find out the origin of that phrase—it sounds extremely difficult to shoot a fish). But, however easy the target is, it is a target that must be demolished.

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Post Scriptum: A colleague has referred me to this site regarding the practicality of shooting fish in a barrel. Apparently it is possible.

Yesterday evening I finished off (more-or-less) writing 71 pages on Aviation Human Factors and, believing that to be enough for anyone, cast around for something to read. Down here in the basement we have about 3500 books and I had the 1896 bound edition of Chums Magazine open on the floor where I had been depressing myself thinking about the degeneration in English since then. Take this “joke” for example:

A celebrated artist had that dislike to commonplace observations which might be expected in a man of ardent imagination and cultivated intellect. After sitting perfectly silent for some time during the empty, disjointed chat of some idle callers, talking with one another about the weather, etc., he suddenly exclaimed “We had pork for dinner to-day!” “Why, my dear Mr. —–, what an odd remark.” “Well,” replied he, “it is as good as anything you have been saying for the last half-hour.

I’m not saying that the standard of humour hasn’t improved since 1896, simply that the use of English for 12 year old boys seems to have declined. Anyway, putting that aside I cast around, more-or-less at random, for something to read and came across A.P.Herbert’s Uncommon Law. I used to read Herbert’s Misleading Cases all the time but, for some reason, haven’t opened them for at least 15 years. I find from the flyleaf that I purchased my volume of Uncommon Law in Reading on 19th July 1984 while attending a meeting with the Department of Health and Social Securities on their Unemployment Benefit System (NUBS).

The book opened at the case of Chicken .v. Ham wherein readers will remember that Mr Ham made a gramophone record containing uncomplimentary statements about Mr Chicken. The issue that had turned this into a lawyers’ dream was not whether the statements were defamatory (that was agreed) but whether a gramophone record constituted libel or slander. As the law stood at the time, actual damage had to be proved in a case of slander (defamation by word of mouth) but not in a case of libel (defamation in writing). I do not want to labour here the crucial and subtle points of law expounded in the trial but I do, for a reason that will become clear in a moment, want to bring one sentence to your attention. In explaining the importance of the case, the Lord Chancellor says, ‘”It is something,” as Lord Mildew said in Rex .v. Badger, “to dot an i in perpetuity”.’

That this is true is unanswerable.

Putting down my A.P.Herbert I cast around again and came across Bernard Levin’s second book of extracted journalism, Speaking Up. When speaking of Bernard Levin it is almost obligatory to say how much you disagree with his views but how much you admire his style. I do. I had not opened this book for some 12 years either and I decided to read through his introduction. The last paragraph contains the following sentence: “‘It is something’, says the judge in one of A.P.Herbert’s Misleading Cases, ‘to dot an i in perpetuity.'”

I felt a cold shiver running down my spine. One day I must work out how long it is likely to be until such a coincidence occurs again.

There was a remarkably precise headline on a news item on the BBC website a couple of days ago. It said “Scores of people killed in Lebanon”. The first line of the story said that 40 people had been killed so the headline was accurate. Some months ago the company I work for, which employs about 30’000 people, announced that it was laying off 3’000 of us. I mentioned to someone that we were being decimated only to be told that it wasn’t as bad as that—it was only one in ten.

Although it may seem to be a digression, I would also like to comment on the Ottawa Ice Hockey team. This team has recently found its way into the North American Ice Hockey’s equivalent of the FA Cup Final—the Stanley Cup, named after Frederick Stanley, the Governor General of Canada from 1888. Ice Hockey is portrayed over here as a very masculine pursuit (although the Canadian women’s team seems somewhat more successful than the men’s team) based around fitness, speed and strength. Ottawa’s team is called “The Senators” and it will be playing a team from Anaheim called the “Mighty Ducks”. To reach the final, Ottawa beat a team called “The Penguins”.

In 389BC as the Gauls entered Rome, the Senators were certainly courageous. Sitting motionless in the council chamber in their finest robes they awaited the Gauls and death. As Livy reports:

…when [the Gauls] reached the Forum there they found the aged senators of the city, who had elected to remain behind when everyone else fled to the Capitoline, clad in their official robes and waiting calmly and gravely for their certain deaths. “They might have been statues in some holy place, and for a while the Gallic warriors stood entranced; then on an impulse one of them touched the beard of a certain Marcus Papirus, and the Roman struck him on the head with his ivory staff.” Naturally, the outraged Gaul promptly killed him, and all the senators were massacred before the barbarians recommenced their looting and burning, and laid siege to the Capitoline Hill.

While this illustrates the courage of ancient senators (incidentally far beyond that required of today’s senators on Parliament Hill), I would argue that old men with white beards, whatever their courage, is still not the type of model that one would wish for an ice hockey team. And then, what can we say about the courage, fitness, speed and strength of ducks and penguins?

On another tack, my daughter reports that the mild medicine she bought to help my 5 month old grandson with his teething said that he was neither to work heavy machinery nor to drive a car while using it. And to date she has prevented him from doing either.

And a final tack. Every morning I look for inspiration at a toothpaste tube that says, in French, “Protection contre la carie” and, in English, “Cavity Protection”. It is not clear to me how an inanimate substance such as toothpaste can know whether I am a French speaker (and it is therefore to protect me against cavities) or an English speaker (and therefore it is to protect my cavities).

Sometimes the world and I don’t seem to be as one.