Author Archives: Craig

The Rosetta Stone Review

The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt, Ray. Non-fiction. This was a book club recommendation, and it was extremely informative. Pathetic fallacy (the stone having a sense of humor, the stone having made up its mind to be deciphered by a Frenchman) distracts badly when it appears. Fortunately, it does not appear all that frequently. The work naturally goes into far more detail than the corresponding section of The Codebreakers, and gives a substantially different view of the early work of the two folks who were key in arriving at a translation.

There is a section in which the author offers some awfully tortured rationalizations why keeping artifacts away from their countries of origin is okay (“where would it end?” “who’s to say where its home really is?” like that), and while I’m not passionate about returning the marbles or the stone to where they were fashioned, that’s mostly because I’m likely to get to London before Athens or Egypt, and I can’t pretend I have any justification for my selfish preference.

Are they sloppy or just crazy?

I’m a big fan of the BBC News website (and go to some trouble to get to the Domestic version—and not just because it doesn’t have ads), though every so often they run a piece that makes me (usually not literally) tilt my head and say “Huh?” With few exceptions, these stories are in the Health section. Here’s today’s example: the headline is “Humour ‘comes from Testosterone’”; a more accurate summary of the article would be “Men were ruder to unicyclist than women; researcher concludes hormones are the reason, and further fancies this has something to do with humour.”

“The idea that unicycling is intrinsically funny does not explain the findings,” said Professor Shuster.
The simplest explanation, he says, is the effect of male hormones such as testosterone.
“The difference between the men and women was absolutely remarkable and consistent,” said Professor Shuster.

Ah, the simplest explanation. The “study” appears so badly designed that I’m not convinced there are any findings, much less that hormones are the simplest explanation. Oy.

I Am a Strange Loop Review

I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter. Non-fiction. I am (it turns out, several months later) not going to be able to say in this review everything that I want to. IAaSL is at a first approximation a deeper exploration of some of the recurring themes in Hofstadter’s work: most notably, consciousness (which he asserts is equivalent to a “soul”, and I don’t see a lot of reason to differ on that point), how it arises, and what it means.
Hofstadter spends a lot of time in the book asserting that my model of you is an extension of your consciousness. For a number of reasons, I am unable to buy it: I’m fully prepared to accept that my consciousness is more or less an accident of the way my senses work, and, especially, how my sensory/processing system feeds back into itself. My model of me, though, is based on observations of my actions, not the same direct feedback that brought me to consciousness. Similarly, my model of you doesn’t have any direct feedback relationship with your senses. Yes, you can tell me what you know about why you do things, but 1) no one has perfect knowledge of why one does things, and 2) your reports are delayed by time and filtered by both your senses and your model of you. My model of you is never going to surprise me with some insight into itself.
The time-sensitivity in feedback is, I think, a vital element that I’m not sure Hofstadter sufficiently respects. I’m fascinated by the study that showed our inability to tickle ourselves is very tightly time-limited (if you delay the result of my action enough (and it doesn’t take much), I will find it more tickling than if you don’t).
One thought that keeps coming up for me goes something like this: I am (i.e., my consciousness is) the total of my memories and my sensory input. So, who am I when I’m amnesiac? And variations on that theme. I find that a much more interesting rat hole to climb down than debating whether a loved one lives on (in anything more than a metaphorical sense) in the memories of others.
Thought-provoking, as Hofstadter always is, but not his best-directed effort.

The power of a non-denominational hug

A hug from Amma:

Amma takes me in her arms and I melt naturally into her embrace. Everything goes black. There is noise out there, but it seems to just become an indecipherable hum. It’s just calm and comfortable in my head and heart.
Her robes are beautifully fragrant, and for the rest of the day I keep getting wafts of it, distracting me momentarily from whatever I’m doing.

Grocery shopping

Looks like somebody‘s finally (though I think it’s not the first such service) doing the obvious thing: putting grocery circulars on line. There are some cool-sounding auxiliary features, too. I don’t know how good its knowledge of where you are is; it was pretty close to correct from work.