Reading Zero, the Biography of a Dangerous Idea, by Charles Seife

Charles Seife sets out to write a popular (that is, readable) book about mathematics – a challenging task. Mostly he succeeds, I think. That is, I mostly understood what he was talking about.

Zero turns out to be an interesting subject, and an idea that has challenged mathematicians and philosophers for a long time. Seife walks through how the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Mayans and others grappled with numbers and numbering systems. The Babylonians, for example, had a base-60 system. Oh boy.

The problem with zero, apparently, is that it represents nothing, a void, emptiness. Nothing, that is, the concept of a complete void, seems impossible. Likewise, if a void is impossible, infinity seems impossible. Now we’re getting into religion, sort of.

Seife has some fun with the concepts, titling some of his chapters “Nothing Comes From Nothing” , “Nothing Ventured”, and “Zero Hour at Ground Zero”. The first chapter of the book is chapter Zero “Null and Void”.

I’ll admit I got lost in the discussions about calculus and differential equations, but I was very interested in Seife’s analysis of Einstein’s General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. If I’ve got it right, both appear to be true and valid, but both can’t be true and valid at the same time. Thus along came String Theory, which attempts to resolve the problem. But, Seife says, “No instrument currently imaginable will give scientists the power to observe strings directly…. Because science is based upon observation and experiment, some critics argue that string theory is not science but philosophy.” (p.198)

One fascinating tale concerns Pythagoras. He was brilliant but eccentric. He believed he was the reincarnated soul of a Trojan hero. He was thus a vegetarian, except that beans were taboo. After his ideas brought controversy, he was attacked and fled from an angry mob, but ran up to a bean field, which he would not enter. The mob caught him and killed him.

At least, that’s the legend. I think it illustrates Seife’s general style. I’d call it bending details a bit to tell the most interesting version of events, which may or may not be the most verifiable. Considering he was writing a book about math, I think I’ll give him that.

Rated a B+, if you willing to skim over some of those “mathy” sections.

Reading Admiral of the Ocean Sea, by Samuel Eliot Morrison

 Christopher Columbus was a remarkably courageous man, thoroughly convinced he was on the right track – he could reach the Indies, but sailing west from Spain. He supposedly believed to his dying day that he had reached at least the outer edges of the land of spices and exotic treasures.
People of his day relied heavily on the stories of Marco Polo and his travels to India and China. Columbus’ compatriots and sponsors (Ferdinand and Isabella) were particularly interested in the very large island even further east – the place we now call Japan. The building there were said to have roofs of gold.
It’s hard to read Morrison’s history and not get the impression that Columbus was under the divine protection of God. They found the trade winds that no one before knew about that pushed them first west to the new country, then other winds that pushed them back home to Spain.
Columbus was certainly an excellent sailor, and his navigation skills, almost entirely by dead reckoning, saved his fleet many times.
Interesting to me was the fact that Columbus was the first (known) European to discover South America, then later Central America. His expedition to the east coast of Central America was searching for a passage through to the Indies they wanted, the ones with all the spices and gold. He actually sailed along the coast of Panama, near where the Panama Canal would later be built. If he’d gone ashore and walked west a few score miles he would have discovered the Pacific Ocean, but that was not to be.
Sadly, others claimed they were the first to discover what Columbus found, and the disputes hurt Columbus’ reputation, and his pride. He deserved better.

Treasure Hunting

 Watched a couple of treasure hunting movies recently: Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Bogart and "Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinkin' badges!"") and King Solomon's Mines (1937 edition).

King Solomon’s Mines – terrible, mostly because they had Paul Robeson sing several solos. Of course he has a great voice, but the songs barely fit in the story line (is that because it was made way back in 1937?), and way, way over the top for schmaltz. Hard to take. The plot wasn’t too bad, but there was a lot of tribal dancing and drumming that dragged on and on. Robeson was the long lost tribal prince, uh boy.

Rivalry, evil witch doctor witch, overwhelmed by a solar eclipse at just the right moment (uh boy). At one point, it looks like they’re done for and they philosophize “It’s not so bad…” (oy.)

They do say something like ‘only God can save us’. This shows how old this movie really is.

Bogart is terrific in Sierra Madre, as everyone has already said.  His character is despicable, paranoid, suspicious, shallow, not too bright. He says one thing one day and another thing the next day. His partners have a more balanced view of life and when they lose everything, are resolved to just make the best of it and keep going on.

A good lesson or two about greed. Every once in a while I need a reminder. 

Broadcast TV is Struggling

 Stumbled across this today. Amazing!

The NFL is basically the only institution keeping traditional broadcast TV alive. Of the top 100 highest-rated US TV broadcasts in 2023, a staggering 93 of them were NFL games.

From this article: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/first-streaming-only-nfl-playoff-game-breaks-records-with-23-million-viewers/

 Selected verses for today.

 Thy word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against thee.
(Psa. 119:11)

Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? by taking heed thereto according to thy word.
(Psa. 119:9)

Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee.
(Isa.26:3)

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
(Psa. 23:4)

 Reading - Age of Delirium

 David Satter's book, Age of Delirium, describes the fall of the Soviet Union from the viewpoint of the people inside - workers, doctors, politicians, dissidents, and many of the mainstream "common people".

It's not new news, of course, but I'd never followed the fall in much detail, and, of course, I'd never considered what it looked like from those who were living through it first-hand. It's revealing, and disturbing.

Having finished it, I came to realize there are multiple levels to consider here. First there's the view of the suffering of those enslaved in a corrupt, soul-crushing system, where there was ultimately no hope. It is little wonder that alcoholism was so rampant.

But what was even more disturbing to me was that the people absolutely accepted the corruption and hopelessness as completely normal. They fully expected their bosses to get all the privileges. They expected to have to wait years for bureaucratic wheels to turn so they could, maybe, get a tiny apartment. They found it normal to wait in cold, dead offices for days, weeks, months, to petition for the redress of some grievance - often with no real resolution even though one might have been promised. They absolutely bought the propaganda that their country was thriving, that America was a racist pit of hatred and want, that America wanted to murder them in their sleep, so they had to surrender everything to the state for defense.

It was only during glasnost that people were shocked to discover that just about everything they'd heard about the West was a lie. In fact, people in Europe and America were happy, cheerful, hopeful, generally kind and open. When the truth finally began to seep through the Iron Curtains, the people were amazed. And hope revived. They pushed for reform and freedom, and got some.

But then, looking beyond the blindness and corrupted thinking of the brainwashed people, I began to wonder - am I brainwashed, propagandized, led astray by corrupt manipulative leaders and by corrupt ways of thinking?

We are all so easily deceived. And sometimes the Liars we listen to are ourselves.

 Reading – Several Books

 Napoleon, A Life, by Andrew Roberts – An exhausting bio of the general and emperor, including analyses of various significant battles. It was staggering to me to learn that many of the two- or three-day battles were won at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. Battles in that day could be lost, and some of Napoleon’s were, because of a soggy battlefield on which cannon could not be advanced.

Napoleon was a very detail-oriented man, writing many instructional letters every day (no emails or tweets/phone calls were possible, of course). He would also write home dispatches describing the battles, but he often grossly exaggerated victories and grossly downplayed defeats. Fake News.

One annoying problem I had with the book was the maps of the battles, which not only made no sense by themselves, but which didn’t seem to match the textual description of what was going on. I believe war historians meticulously study these battles, but they will have a hard time following the action with these descriptions. Just as important, no battle has been fought like these for a very long time. Losses in the thousands are inconceivable nowadays.

Napoleon also seems to have been a real dog, sleeping around a lot. But then so did most of his generals and their wives. Josephine was no saint either.

Napoleon’s campaign in the middle east was interesting in that it seemed to be an enormous disaster, and in one instance, his troops’ decision to annihilate a rebellious city backfired when many soldiers came down with rampant diseases, caught from their defeated victims.

I was interested, as sort of a side note, that N would take along scientists on his campaigns. One of them famously discovered the Rosetta Stone.

Call Sign Chaos, by Jim Mattis and Bing West – a biography of Jim Mattis, explaining how he rose through the ranks to become a 4-Star. He is critical of several situations where political decisions crippled the fighting forces, often by simply not having the courage to risk global criticism and press an impending victory, finishing off an enemy that was on the verge of defeat. One of those enemies was Al Quaeda in the first Iraq War.

The Unsaved Christian, by Dean Inserra – Very disturbing, but Inserra makes a strong case for not imagining that a person is a Christian just because they are in a church. Inserra looks at several common types of professing Christians and shows how they are likely fooling themselves. He sees all of them as a mission field and suggests questions and approaches to challenging them to become actual believers.

The Logic of God, by Ravi Zacharias – The first sentence of the first paragraph caught me – “I implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God.” Shouldn’t we begging God to forgive us? No, Zacharias has it right – it’s Scripture – II Cor 5:20.

His book is divided into 52 chapters, one for each week of the year, and is intended to be a resource for a small group discussion. Some chapters are deeper than others.

God and the Astronomers, by William Ralph Inge – Clearly written in the last century as revealed by the fact that the author, a philosopher, believes in God! He also assumes his readers will be comfortable reading Latin and Greek, since he includes many such phrases, without translation. (Thankfully, there’s Google Translate for the Latin. I couldn’t figure out how to enter the Greek letters into the search box.)

I suspect some of his reasoning points may have been overcome by events, but some logic will still be valid, I believe.

Atonement, by Ian McEwan – Picked it up because of the title, but very well written. A single tale told from three different viewpoints, including that of a young girl who is very foolish and who ruins the lives of several people. But worth the read.

Reread/reskimmed – Beautiful Outlaw by John Eldridge – Eldridge tells his stories well and I wanted to remember that God loves us very much. He can’t love us more, because he loves us the most possible already. Especially encouraging to men, I think.

Started but not finished – The Iron Heel, by Jack London – London went weird on us, espousing communism or something. The hero starts to get preachy real quick, and I walked away. I won’t be back.

Laugh Again, by Chuck Swindoll – not getting traction, for some reason. I’ll try to get back to it, probably.

Reading The Death of the Gods, by Carl Miller

 Miller says his book is an account of power.

“Power these days rests on technical capabilities that are getting further away from public awareness and consciousness, not closer to it.

Weird and hidden, these new forms of power together have something in common which older, visible, more recognizable forms of power typically do not. They are far less constrained by rules. The forms of power are not only new; they are also wild.” (p.335)

Miller analyzes the shifting of power in the realms of People, Crime, Business, Media, Politics, Warfare and Technology.

Some fight against the power grab. Most are unaware of it. Some succumb. He mentions the hikikomori, the ‘departed’ – “who never leave their room and who exist almost entirely online.” (p.300,301)

I am reminded of the description of certain people in one of the Asimov follow-on books – I’ve forgotten which one. The author speaks of the ‘inerts’. These are people who have ordered robots to take care of their every need – food, water, sleep, the need to go to the bathroom - by unobtrusively supplying everything, and cleaning up everything, while their ‘master’ sits ‘inertly’ in a chair 24/7. The robots, programmed with Asimov’s Four Rules, must obey and will not interfere, but even they began to be troubled that their human seems to be decaying before their very eyes.

At a ‘hackers’ convention in Las Vegas, some hackers were attacking voting machines. But others were bored by the effort. They “probably stayed away, one hacker told me, because ‘hacking voting machines is technically too trivial to waste their time on.’” (p.19) One definition of Hack: an entropy booster. (p9)

This is scary: “In 2016, Google and Facebook captured 64 per cent of the global advertising market. Ninety percent of all the new spending on new digital ads goes to just those two companies. Some have even put it at 99 per cent.” (p.143)

On politics: “Protestors now have the power to organize without organizations. People can protest, mobilise, coordinate and act without needing to have institutions in place beforehand, and that has ripped politics wide open.” (p.191)

Information warfare has become warfare on information: destroy the public’s belief in truth itself, by flooding the info-sphere with hundreds of ‘versions’ of the truth – which one is real, or are they all corrupt and rotten? (p.254)

Artificial intelligence? “[A]t exactly the same moment that technology is becoming more sophisticated and unknowable to us, we are becoming more open and understandable to it.” (p.270)

“It’s possible to imagine a world where the state gives you a digital identifier at birth.” (p.291) [Easy to imagine this as ‘the mark of the beast’ from Revelation.]

…

Someone has said that since we already don’t understand how some algorithms work ‘for' us, we may already be at the mercy of AI. Skynet is here, but, so far, it’s still weak and hasn’t focused on a plan, like, say, wipe out humans.

Not sure computers, AI, will figure that out before we manage to do that to ourselves, but it’s a bad race to be in.

 Reading Teaching a Stone to Talk, by Annie Dillard

 Our pastor briefly mentioned this book in making a point, but unfortunately, I missed the point. Fortunately, I found the book.

Dillard is an extraordinary writer. I found myself feeling melancholy, sad, curious about the world, humbled by her words. I was drawn to the title by thinking it referred to Jesus statement that if the people did not sing his praises on one occasion, the stones would cry out. But this had nothing to do with that, except that I suspect Dillard wanted to evoke that thought.

Instead, a character, a person she is aware of who lives nearby, has, well, slipped a cog in his mental machine, maybe, and now spends some time each day trying to teach a stone to talk. An actual stone. Ms. Dillard confesses that maybe he is a she, that maybe this person has another idiosyncrasy, but no matter. We certainly get the picture. Someone is doing something absurd. Or is it? Isn’t a very great deal of what we do every day absurd?

Dillard describes vacations, trips, scenes, and I was drawn in to the powerful moods she describes. On one weekend trip to a summer cabin with “the child”, presumably her daughter, who is 9. The child puts playing cards in the spokes of a bicycle and mom hears the click, click, click go slowly as the girl rides up a hill, then a rapid crescendo of clicks as she comes racing down. And so, Dillard says, go our days. So slowly at first, then speeding, clicking. Only our memories can try to hold them.

“[M]omentum propels you over the crest. Imperceptibly, you start down. When do the days start to blur and then, breaking your heart, the seasons? The cards click faster in the spokes, you pitch forward. You roll headlong, out of control. The blur of cards makes one long sound like a bomb’s whine, the whine of many bombs, and you know your course is fatal.”

The book has fourteen… what…essays, stories? They are each marvelous.

 Watching "Silence" from Martin Scorsese

 Watched Silence – a Martin Scorsese film about Portuguese Jesuit priests trying to minister to Japanese people in the 1640’s. The film is a study in psychological torture of one priest, who is told he must apostatize to save the lives of Christians being physically tortured.

One observation: the mind of man can come up with some absolutely horrendous tortures, some of which were intended to inflict pain and cause people to convert/recant/apostatize, and some tortures were intended ‘merely’ to kill the victims through long slow pain.

Another observation: just about everyone can be tortured to say or do anything to stop pain, with the possible exception of the second type of torture- aimed at death. That kind of pain might be endured, as the person accepts their death.

Third: the movie, (and Scorsese) shows the weakness of Catholicism – the believers never feel forgiven or close to God without the intervention of the priest. They cannot directly cling to, or ask for and feel the forgiveness of God. And when a priest fails, they can feel weakened. And the priests therefore have an additional burden placed on them – if they fail, their congregation may ‘fail’. The Japanese go to great lengths to prevent the martyrs from receiving a ‘proper Christian burial’ – cremating them and scattering their ashes. Protestants don’t believe they need a ‘proper’ burial in order to get to heaven.

Fourth: the tortured priest only weakly identifies that it is the torturers who are the evil ones. They are in fact, dreaming up and performing the tortures. They are the ones killing innocent people, all for imagined injuries to their pride or threats to their power. The priest should have directly told them that they were killing people – assuming the Inquisitors would have put up with such an ‘insolent’ response. When the inquisitor says that because the priest does not apostatize, the parishioners must suffer and die, the priest should remember that that is a lie. The Japanese are torturing and killing people, not he. Blaming him is evidence of another evil, merely more torture, against the priest and his soul. Mind you, it is a strong pressure, ‘expertly’ applied. I fear I would not withstand it any better than he.

In one scene, the Christians are asked to apostatize by stepping on a picture of Christ. But they are told it is a small thing, trivial. They can just tap the image lightly. No one cares. It’s not important. It’s only an image. The inquisitor doesn’t really care about it. Just do it and they can be released. One does and is immediately allowed to run away. But the others refuse.

In one scene one Christian hesitates in recanting his faith. But since he does recant, he and the others with him are freed. Except he is called back, made to stand alone, then quickly beheaded by a samurai sword.

The Japanese inquisitors insist that they have examined Christianity and found it worthless, or anyway, not worthy of the Japanese people. The soil in Japan will not grow Christianity, they say. The priest says thousands have already been converted. The Japanese says, only the [implied, stupid] peasants have believed. The truly wise in the country reject it as foolish. ‘You have poisoned the soil’ the priests say.

It is clear that the Japanese leaders’ pride has caused them to reject Christianity, and especially Christianity’s God. And they prove to themselves that they are right by getting the Christians, and especially the priests, to recant. See, they can then say, even your own people don’t really believe what you say you believe.

The recanting is at pain of torture or death, of course, except for one character who repeatedly betrays the priest to save himself. But each time he betrays the priest, he goes back to the priest to ask for his forgiveness (which is given, by the way). This shows both the forgiveness in the priest and the pain he must suffer as the ‘father’ of a frail flock.

Spoiler Alert:

The ending of the movie is troubling, and a little confusing. The “Silence” of the title is the silence of God to the questions of the priest as to why all these Christians are suffering so much, and dying. Only at the end, when the priest must apostatize to save the lives of five innocent people, does Christ speak to the priest, saying, ‘It’s okay. You can deny me now. I understand your pain’. Or some such.

I guess this raises the ethical question of whether such a demand for recanting is legitimate. If the demand is mere brute force, can a Christian pretend to recant to save their life? It seems similar to the question of whether Christians can lie to, and hide Jews from, the Nazis during the Second World War. The oppressors have little or no religious objection to people of faith, perhaps. Their objection is to the bully, the wicked psychopath. Can bullies and psychopaths be resisted by any means necessary, even lies or law-breaking? I think so, but I suspect the question is often muddied. I think Satan deliberately muddies it.

And at the very end, there is an implication that the priest recanted only because he saw there was no way to continue to practice Christianity openly and live. So he may believe only secretly, and God is okay with that. Maybe.

 Reading –  Mission at Nuremburg, by Tim Townsend

 Just Finished Reading Mission at Nuremburg, by Tim Townsend

The book is about Henry Gerecke, who served as pastor to the Nazi war criminals being tried at Nuremburg just after the war.

I had been trying to think of what evil looked like. Now that I’ve read about it, it seems absurdly unreal. As the author says, most of us can’t imagine such actions.  We think of the perpetrators as inhuman, subhuman, non-human. They aren’t like us.

But, the author says, they are. Or, rather, we should say that we could be like them.

I remember Tom Clancy’s words that the difference between reality and fiction is that fiction must make sense. The actions of these monsters do not make sense.

Some of these men took sadistic delight in seeing others die, or in seeing them murder someone else under threat of death. They laugh and revel in their ability to inflict pain, or to cause their prisoners (not quite the right word- victims?) to inflict pain on someone else.

Today, some people will pay bums to fight each other. Are there hints of that kind of cruelty in the fostering and promoting of Facebook and Twitter cruelty?

There are so many astonishing, gagging, examples of Nazi cruelty you wonder if there ever was a “kind” or “good” Nazi guard. How could there be, when the whole purpose for their situation was to inflict pain, and drive people to death?

The author mangles Christian theology into almost into stating absurdity – how could a righteous God allow these things to happen. At the same time, I get the sense that the pastors wanted to see some visible signs of repentance. The pastors had to show compassion – to work hard to protect the criminals’ innocent children, for example, from exploitation by reporters or others.

There is mention made that Gerecke planned to write a book about his experience. He asks his wife to save a letter the prisoners write to her, asking her to let her husband stay with them. The letter is extraordinary, but no collector would want it. Even a museum would have to keep it behind spit-proof glass.

But Gerecke’s desire to write a book drops an ever so subtle suggestions of ulterior motives. Wicked of the author to do that, but, on the other hand, that is what Gerecke did. Amazingly, as Gerecke is returning home, his belongings, including his notes during his time at the trial, were stolen by random hoodlums.

Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering comes across as an absolute arrogant ass. Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess is an unparalleled monster – a likely psychopath who says he was just obeying what his, what, beloved fuhrer was asking him. The Commandant at Auschwitz, Hess says he didn’t consider that his actions might be evil. They were just things he had to do, with efficiency. He notes, for example, the trouble they had with the incinerators not being able to keep up with the bodies the gas chambers were producing. He supervised the murder of two and half million people

Some of the Nazi POS committed suicide – Goebbels, for example, killed his wife and six children along with his own suicide, the day after Hitler’s suicide. In the earliest days of the prisoner’s confinement for trial, two managed to kill themselves before a suicide watch was set up. Prisoners were literally watched through a hole in their cell door 24 hours a day. They had to sleep facing the door, with their hands in full sight. Furniture in their room was too rickety to stand on (to try to hang themselves), and, at any rate, the chairs were removed from their rooms every night.

Still, at the last minute, on the eve of his execution, Goering commits suicide. Some of the others, just before the gallows, seemed to repent, some seemed defiant.

God only knows if they truly realized the enormity of their crimes, or were reacting to their impending executions. Pastor Gerecke believed some of their repentances and/or conversions were real.

I know now, this kind of evil is real. 

 The Problem(s) With Socialism

 From Richard Kimball's column, reviewing the work Friedrich Hayek did in pointing out the problem(s) with Socialism. 

Kimball's column here.

Excerpts: 

I forget what sage described hope as the last evil in Pandora’s box. Unfair to hope, perhaps, but not inapplicable to that adamantine “faith in a better world” that has always been at the heart of the socialist enterprise. Talk about a hardy perennial! The socialist experiment has never worked out as advertised. But it continually blooms afresh in the human heart—those portions of it, anyway, colonized by intellectuals, that palpitating tribe Julien Benda memorably denominated “clercs,” as in “trahison de.”

…

With the example of Nazi Germany before him, Hayek saw how naturally national socialism, leaching more and more initiative away from the individual in order to invest it in the state, shaded into totalitarianism.

…

The two great presiding influences on “The Road to Serfdom” were Alexis de Tocqueville and Adam Smith. From Tocqueville, Hayek took both his title and his sensitivity to what Tocqueville, in a famous section of “Democracy in America,” called “democratic despotism.” Hayek, like Tocqueville, saw that in modern bureaucratic societies threats to liberty often come disguised as humanitarian benefits.

If old-fashioned despotism tyrannizes, democratic despotism infantilizes.

…

The road away from serfdom was to be found by embracing what Hayek called “the extended order of cooperation,” a.k.a. capitalism. (Although Hayek uses the term “capitalism,” I prefer the term “free market,” which is innocent of Marxist overtones.) In “The Wealth of Nations,” Adam Smith noted the paradox, or seeming paradox, of the free market: that the more individuals were left free to follow their own ends, the more their activities were “led by an invisible hand to promote” ends that aided the common good. In other words, private pursuits advance public goods: that is the beneficent alchemy of the free market, of capitalism. Hayek’s fundamental insight, enlarging Smith’s thought, is that the spontaneous order created and maintained by competitive market forces leads to greater prosperity than a planned economy.

The sentimentalist cannot wrap his mind, or his heart, around that datum. He cannot understand why we shouldn’t favor “cooperation” (a pleasing-sounding arrangement) over “competition” (much harsher), since in any competition there are losers, which is bad, and winners, which may be even worse. It is at this juncture that advocates of a planned economy introduce the word “fairness” into the discussion: wouldn’t it be fairer if we took money from person “A,” who has a stack, and gave it to person “B,” whose stack is smaller? (“That is,” as W. S. Gilbert put it in “The Mikado,” “assuming I am ‘B’.” )

…

In the end, though, the really galling thing about the spontaneous order that free markets produce is not its imperfection but its spontaneity: the fact that it is a creation not our own. It transcends the conscious direction of human will and is therefore an affront to human pride.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/01/16/friedrich-hayeks-enduring-legacy/