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Author: Anne Cassidy

Knowledge and Numbers

Knowledge and Numbers

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The Scientific Revolution began not in knowledge but in ignorance, writes Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens, which I’m more than halfway through now. (See last Friday’s entry.)

“The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions,” Harari says.

In the ancient or medieval world, the pre-16th-century world, there were two kinds of ignorance. An individual might not know something, in which case he or she would ask someone who did. (A peasant asks his local priest how the world begins; the priest will know the answer, which has been laid out for humankind in the Bible.)

The other kind of ignorance, says Harari, was that an entire tradition might be ignorant of unimportant things. How spiders spin their webs, for instance. The answer was not in the Bible, and there were few if any spider scholars back then. But it was not important to know the answer to this question. God knows everything, the world has its order, and homo sapiens took comfort in that.

“The willingness to admit ignorance has made modern science more dynamic, supple and inquisitive than any previous tradition of knowledge,” Harari writes. “This has hugely expanded our capacity to understand how the world works and our ability to invent new technologies.”

In his scientific manifesto, The New Instrument, published in 1620, Francis Bacon argued that knowledge is power and that the test of knowledge is not whether it is true, but whether it empowers us. Science and technology have been connected ever since.

This is very good for science, for unlocking the secrets of the universe, but not always good for social order — and certainly not good for people who aren’t good at math.

Because ever since the Scientific Revolution, darn it, the secrets of the universe seem to reveal themselves in equations. “Newton showed that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics,” Harari says. And this mathematifying (my word) of knowledge has moved from the hard sciences to the social sciences, even to fields like psychology.

“Confucius, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed would have been bewildered if you told them that in order to understand the human mind and cure its illnesses you must first study statistics.”

They aren’t the only ones.

Cloudy

Cloudy

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Cloudy, the sky is gray and white and cloudy
sometimes I think it’s hanging down on me.

So begins a Simon and Garfunkel tune that was one of my favorites back in the day. It was an upbeat accompaniment to teenage angst:

Cloudy, my thoughts are scattered and they’re cloudy.
They have no borders, no boundaries.
They echo and they swell
From Tolstoy to Tinkerbell,
Down from Berkeley to Carmel,
Got some pictures in my pocket and a lot of time to kill…

It wasn’t until I left home for college and work that I realized I’d grown up in one of the cloudier areas of the country — the Ohio River Valley. Then I moved to northern Virginia and realized how sunny one’s days could be.

That was, until this summer …

But … we just broke a 10-day cloudy streak that began to ease up the late Tuesday afternoon and came to full fruition yesterday.

How sweet it was to sit on the deck, to walk without the umbrella, to feel the warmth of the sun on my face. It was like a tonic.

Hey, sunshine, I haven’t seen you in a long time
Why don’t you show your face and bend my mind.

My mind has been properly bent.

Twilight’s End

Twilight’s End

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A walk yesterday that began in darkness ended in twilight, the kind that appears all at once, as if the earlier lack of visibility had been a mistake, something that a shake of the head could remedy.

I marveled at this, thinking it must have been my change of direction, even though I’d turned to the west. But going back, I had the light behind me, so what little there was of it lit my way.

I snapped off the flashlight; its pale yellow cone hadn’t helped much, but had at least illuminated the newly repaved street, the bumps and edges I’m just getting used to.

It’s about that time again now. The crickets are singing, the birds just beginning their chorus. Trees and leaves gaining definition, stepping out of the shadows.  I’m itching to be back outside.

Post Florence

Post Florence

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The hurricane we’d been hearing about for a week finally made its way to northern Virginia today. And from what I’ve seen of its tatters I’m thankful we were spared its brunt.

The rain fell with tropical fullness and vigor, thin, plentiful sheets of it. Rain that blew in from the south, gathered from a warm ocean and spewed back onto land. Rain that made puddles on the sidewalk and street, twin fins of water spraying up from the cars.

Has it rained every day for the last three months?  No, of course not.  It only seems like it has. Last weekend was actually drier than predicted. And our totals from Florence will be measured in inches not feet.

But a few days from now, when the Equinox happens , we’ll say goodbye to a summer that’s been the rainiest in memory. We met our yearly totals a month ago!

As I write these words the dehumidifier hums beside me. It’s on overdrive these days.

(Rain from Florence streams down a bus window.) 

A Dose of Common Sense

A Dose of Common Sense

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Walk as much as you like, the doctor said. Since he was a podiatrist, I took him at his word and did long loops through the neighborhood the last three days.

Turns out that the rowing I thought would be OK for plantar fasciitis actually is not, and the walking I thought would aggravate the condition actually doesn’t. Or at least it doesn’t while taking high doses of ibuprofen with a taped-up foot shot up with cortisone.

But 76 hours later, I’m walking better and in less pain. When you’re a walker in the suburbs, the temptation is to keep walking, even when it hurts. And when you’re me, the temptation is to try and remedy things on your own. Even when weeks turn into months.

What I learned on Thursday is … give the professionals a chance. They can do it in hours.


(Fun photo I took in Dublin that has absolutely nothing to do with podiatrists or walking.)

Sapiens

Sapiens

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I only started reading this book a few days ago, but I’m already marveling at the knowledge it holds and the broad sweep of history it’s providing. Sapiens is about Homo sapiens, our species, and the first chapter describes some of our earliest cousins:

There was Homo floresiensis, a dwarf species from the Indonesian island of Flores that grew to only three and a half feet tall; Homo denisova, a species just discovered eight years ago in Denisova Cave in Siberia;  Homo erectus, from East Asia, the most durable species ever, which survived for close to two million years. “It is doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now,” writes the author, Yuval Noah Harari, “so two million years is really out of our league.”

Now there’s a line (the italics are mine) that caught my attention.  A thousand years is only 12 generations from now, give or take. And Harari, whose erudition is such that he doesn’t need fancy language, casually drops in the fact that he doesn’t think we’ll be around that long.

The most fascinating cousin is Homo neanderthalensis, aka Neanderthals. As you might notice, we are the only Homo species on the planet now. Which raises the question, what happened to the others?  At first, Harari explains, it was assumed Sapiens just killed everyone else off. But there was also the theory that some interbreeding went on, especially with Neanderthals.

And indeed, that seems to be the case. DNA research has shown that 1 to 4 percent of human DNA in the modern populations of the Middle East and Europe is Neanderthal DNA.

Still, we mostly killed off these and all our cousins. Tolerance is not one of Sapiens strong suits, Harari says, and Neanderthals were “too familiar to ignore, too difficult to tolerate.”

Tune in for later posts as my feeble Sapiens brain makes it way through this fascinating book.

Category 6?

Category 6?

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Hurricane Florence is so large and so strong and intensified so quickly that experts are wondering if ultimately there might need to be a Category 6 for hurricanes.

Apparently, other hurricanes have also been strengthening rapidly, and this has stimulated research that shows how fast they’ll blow up 50 or more years from now.

Not to take away an ounce of concern for the people of South Carolina and North Carolina and all the states (including Virginia) that will be affected by this monster storm. Weather patterns are changing.

But … it seems is that every storm is now the “Storm of the Century.” Which means that hurricane coverage has already jumped to a Category 6!

(Photo: NASA)

Educated

Educated

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When I picked up Tara Westover’s memoir Educated, I knew I was in for a good read. The book had been recommended by others I trust, so I bought it for my Kindle (a sure sign I want to read a book badly enough to pay for it).

I knew the basic story — a young woman raised in a strict Mormon family, not schooled at all until she got herself to university.

What I wasn’t expecting was the nuance, the side story, which maybe was the main story, and that is how her desire for education wars with her desire to belong, to be part of a family and a place.

“The hill is paved with wild wheat. If the conifers and sagebrush are soloists, the wheat field is a corps de ballet, each stem following all the rest in bursts of movement, a million ballerinas bending, one after the other, as great gales dent their golden heads. The shape of that dent lasts only a moment, and is close as anyone gets to seeing wind.”

This passage is from the beginning of the book, when Tara introduces her young self and her family: the unbending patriarchal father, the resourceful but ultimately weak mother, the seven children, Tara the youngest. She and the brothers and sister closest to her in age didn’t have birth certificates until they were half-grown.

As Tara teaches herself enough math, grammar, history and science to receive a high score on the ACT (which guarantees her admission to Brigham Young University), she begins to pull away from her family. She has to. And the more educated she becomes (ultimately receiving a Ph.D. from Cambridge), the more threatened her family is by her.

It’s one of the oldest and saddest stories, the need to choose between family and accomplishment. But it plays out in lesser forms all the time.

“All my studying, reading, traveling, had it transformed me into someone who no longer belonged anywhere?” she wonders.

What ultimately brings her back to family — not her parents or some of her siblings, who disowned her, but to aunts and uncles and cousins — is place. “I was of that mountain (she says of Buck’s Peak in Idaho, where she was raised), the mountain had made me.”

Before her formal education, there was education of another kind:

“I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning,  swept over the valley and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring. … I believed my family was a part of this immortal pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal. But eternity belonged only to the mountain.”

Seventeen Years

Seventeen Years

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I work in a neighborhood of Arlington called Crystal City, a strip of office buildings and restaurants 15 minutes walk from the Pentagon. My bus ride every morning takes me past the building where 17 years ago today a jetliner crashed killing 125 people on the ground and 64 on the plane.

I remember that day as if it was yesterday. Who my age does not? It was also a Tuesday, but the weather was perfect, one of those crystalline early fall mornings that we used to have around here before being enclosed in a big wet sock.

It was Mom who alerted me. She knew I didn’t often listen to the morning news. And then the other calls started. They came in all day. Rumors abounded, chief among them that the State Department was also under attack.

An editorial I read today made the argument that many of the problems that beset us now — high deficits, wars that kill our soldiers and drain our morale and coffers, loss of stature abroad, even the current administration — can be traced to the 9/11 attacks.

“The world will never be the same,” I remember telling the children, who had returned home early from school that day. But they will never understand that. The world they know is the world wrought by 9/11.

(The Pentagon, moments after the crash. Photo: Wikipedia.) 

ISO Blue Skies

ISO Blue Skies

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You know you’ve had a soggy summer when some of your best weather days have happened in Ireland! After a downpour Friday night, mist and spray Saturday and rain all day yesterday, I’m remembering the blue skies of the Emerald Isle.

As I walked into the office building this morning, I noticed the squeaking of my tennis shoes on the polished floor. That and “squish-squish” have become the soundtrack of our rainy days. The umbrella that I keep in my bag for emergency showers has been pressed into service more times than I can count.

And with a hurricane barreling toward the East Coast this may just the beginning of our wet weather woes.

For now, I’m going to think dry thoughts  — not sure exactly what those are … but I’ll come up with some.

(St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin. Not a cloud in the sky.)