Koyaanisqatsi

There has been a sudden influx of television shows about self-discovery -- but not in the old 1960s sense. Rather, the protagonist of these shows recognises that somehow life has not gone as expected, that the expectations and dreams and hopes of previous years have somehow been derailed. That insight is usually not a long time coming. The protagonist had already known they had become stuck in a hamster wheel. Sometimes they have known it for years. The ways of dealing are various: but the vast majority of them seem to involve disconnecting from societal expectations -- indeed, from any expectations, even of self. Life then may be monotonous or matter-of-fact or uncaring or even deeply unhappy, but it is no longer demanding of self.

And so it stays: until a force from beyond kicks them in the teeth. It may be a talking animal figurine which says what needs to be heard (Wonderfalls). It may be a therapist with the power to open doors to your own past (Being Erica). It may even be having died, and only then being forced to learn truly how to live (Dead Like Me). One way or another, the spin cycle is kicked off its axle, and these protagonists begin to face who they are, what made them who they are, and above all the fact that as of here and now, the responsibility for how they live their lives rests entirely upon their own willingness to face life.

In every one of these television shows, the protagonist is female.

So I started searching for a male equivalent to these shows -- and did not find one. The closest any show with a male protagonist came to these issues was the odd sitcom's half-mocking toe-test of "male bonding": and the attitudes in those were not close at all. Above all, the male protagonist shows -- and even many of the family sitcoms -- now suggest stasis in life as a simple matter of fact: this is what you do, this is who you are, this is who you will always be. Almost invariably, this approach made the male equivalent to any hint of self-examination and self-awareness into: "This is life, sucks to be you."

Which led me directly to such shows as Clerks, Office Space, and the earlier Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Here, the only answer to job stasis and life stasis is sarcasm, petty and not so petty theft, and low-grade, meaningless sabotage. Even the acclaimed and skillfully written Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is little more than a disguised "stoner comedy" (thanks for that term, Beth!): where one of the guys repeatedly finds things that look profound on the surface of it (but lacks any will to pursue the observation), and the other doesn't do too much more than go, "Woah." Above all, in a stoner comedy -- and increasingly in those tragicomedies which reflect life -- it seems easier to drift with fate than to buck the tide: and if you are male, that is also where it stops.

Thus where the female protagonist shows have been flashing a strong message of taking personal responsibility for one's own circumstances and one's own choices, even knowing that most things outside oneself and one's own attitude will always be outside one's control, the messages of the male protagonist shows are just the opposite: tiny boat, large ocean, why bother?

It would be easy to assume that these two sharply differing approaches are due simply to differing expectations made of the two genders. Yet closer examination of current shows reveals about the same percentage of male bachelors as female "bachelorettes", with similar job levels and similar environments -- with the single exception that the voice of the disappointed family is much stronger for the women than for the men. At the same time, we find a curious trend in real-life university admissions: whereby female applicants are now so much more qualified on average than male applicants that many universities (including all the Ivy League) have established different qualifying standards for men and women. These are necessary lest the university end up with more than 60% women, and thereby be labelled a "woman's university".

It makes an ironic and possibly relevant note that had Bart Simpson's "underachiever and proud of it" been allowed to grow up, he would now be almost exactly the same age as these "trapped" protagonists, both male and female.

We always knew that the brilliant satire of The Simpsons was becoming no such thing to its increasingly young audience. Now, it seems we are reaping the earliest fruits -- not of its satire, but of our own laziness in monitoring what our children watched and absorbed and took at face value, unquestioning.

Guidelines for psychological experimentation on human subjects have been significantly tightened since the 1970s.

Enter reality television: and once again all the stops are off. It may be television, it may be signed-consent-form entertainment; but the human interactions are real ... and so will be the consequences.

I have the feeling that most reading this blog expect me to comment in some way on Barack Obama's inauguration this day. Yet I have nothing to say. I have already written on how I feel about the historical aspect and its spin, I have already written on campaign dynamics. Beyond that I have nothing to say until I see substance, not rhetoric; and even then there will be nothing that is mine to say about domestic policy. Words are cheap, no matter who says them.

About myself, I have learned that apparently I have acquired an immunity to charisma. I don't know when, or how, or why.

So I end here by reposting the link to Wired's take on the Large Hadron Collider, to which I have added what might or might not be a last comment, on the off-chance that anyone is still reading that comment thread with an open mind.

In all that long, long thread of comments, the basic polarity has not changed in the slightest: maybe 50% blind, evangelical faith in science, maybe 40% equally blind, evangelical faith in the Bible (usually set in opposition), neither side willing to test its core assumptions, each side condemning the other as having no clue what they are talking about ... and the remaining 10% having nothing inherently against either science or religion, but wondering why any risk toward this end is necessary.

Although, just maybe, I might finally have an answer to that. We are sentient beings, capable of learning about our world, capable also of determining how to interact with our world. In the course of our learning, we are presented with a series of choices, many of which involve different levels of risk, all of which set foundations and precedents for further choices. At any point we can choose to proceed on our current path, or we can choose to set different priorities.

The sum of how we choose is also the sum of who we are as a species. In every way we have chosen our own identity -- as we will have chosen our own future, whatever it should turn out to be. Let none speak of not having known, or of powerlessness. In this day and age, ignorance is willful ignorance; and powerlessness equally willful.

What we end up with, we deserve.

Daniel Paul Tammet, born Daniel Corney, has an extraordinary ability with languages and numbers. In independent testing, he has learned a basic fluency in the Icelandic language in a single week, a challenge which ended with a television interview on Icelandic television.

He has also been diagnosed autistic, specifically a high-functioning version of Asperger syndrome, accompanied by epilepsy and synaestesia. Like so many diagnoses in mental health, this one seems to have been an empirical fitting of symptom to syndrome: find a match which works well enough, and then don't look any further.

Synaestesia seems a useful catch-all, so far as it goes. We might want to remember that it describes the symptom of understanding one type of sensory perception as another, and not the reason. For example, a person with synaestesia might experience music as colour, as in the apocryphal drug-induced "I can see the music". In Daniel's case, this diagnosis is used to cover Daniel's perception of numbers as having tangible shape/form/feel/landscape and thus very different associative connotation from the standard teachings which assume that numbers are abstract symbology without emotive association. Conventional synaestesia does not act in such a fashion, although artistic and spiritual metaphor and symbolism often does.

Other things too do not fit. Asperger syndrome children tend to express earlier than Daniel did. They usually show a tightly focused interest to the exclusion of much else. Frustration is quickly expressed through whatever means the child has at hand, be it screaming or self-biting. Daniel is also part of a family of nine children, and autism is rare where there are more than two or three siblings.

I am not alone in seeing this. From the Wikipedia talk page:

I'm autistic and have autistic friends and he certainly doesn't exibit any symptoms that I've seen.

More and more, "high functioning" seems less like a diagnosis qualifier and more like an attempted wedging of a square peg into a round hole.

The key points of diagnosis seem to have been:

• a strong tendency toward being a loner
• an inability to recognise individual faces
• a single seizure when he was young
• a screaming fussiness as a baby, which could only be calmed by being swung in a blanket
• being male (most autistics and the vast majority of Asperger's children are male)
• and, of course, the ability with numbers (although not the way of perceiving them: that was not known at the time).

From what I have seen of him, he seems also to demonstrate a happiness which seems alien to most autistic children. (Even the higher-functioning autistic children and adults usually seem at best relieved rather than truly happy: when a long-delayed communicative success finally translates into agreement ... and how many of us would not agree with them?) He is extremely adept at translating not only languages we recognise as languages, but also his own personal mathematical landscape into language that can be recognised by the researchers. He might have been a loner as a child, but his ability to communicate strange concepts in terms another might understand is better than ours.

Yet it is communication -- inability to communicate, due to an inability to imagine the other person's perspective -- that is usually the clincher in any autistic diagnosis.

Let's revisit the other points:

• a strong tendency toward being a loner

He also describes a profound sense of loneliness during the same time. Yet neither of these is unique to autism, and both of these are commonly found within children considered "normal" (whatever that is). I was a loner myself, growing up and now: and if I was ever lonely, I don't remember it. I do know that I had become completely secure within my own company and my own decisions by kindergarten. (Bluntly, the other children's interests bored me. They were learning about the letter "a", I had been reading for nearly three years.) For that matter, I sometimes wonder whether autistic children really are truly lonely, or are simply taught through operant conditioning to associate their condition with the term called loneliness.

• an inability to recognise individual faces

Two of us together happened to hear this: and then we looked at each other, the other knowing me, and laughed. That other knows well to get my attention on the street by stepping directly into my path (and yet not absent-minded: strong environmental awareness, just not paying recognition-attention to individuals, don't ever ask me to give a description of a person). Our society sets much store by this, and I can say from experience that life can get very ... interesting ... when you don't recognise your chess partner of a year as your next neighbour during your physics lectures. I don't recognise faces without a great deal of effort and many work-around tricks. I think it is simply that I don't usually focus on people's faces. In fact I don't much look at things. But let the person speak: and I will know them at once.

I don't know why I am so non-visual. I am not even certain that I really am: according to others I notice small things in a given environment that pass completely unnoticed by them -- but I recognise famous actors and actresses not at all, until they speak, and then no costume can conceal them from me. I can identify facial features, but for the most part I don't find them relevant: only their expressions. Considering it now, I wonder if it is not a by-product of my having acquired and then forgotten my correctional lenses so often in Grade 2. I used to go up to the board, memorise one or more lines of whatever was written there, and then go back to my desk and write them down. I did notice that Daniel too wears correctional lenses, as do nearly 80% of modern western populations.

As I have described it, even clinical psychology would not name my inability to recognise faces a handicap, rather just a quirk, another on the wide range of normal ways to experience the physical and social world: unless I were to present it as a symptom, and perhaps one among many symptoms, and then it would be difficult indeed to see it otherwise. Once a label is applied, it is almost impossible to remove it. That subject was opened by psychologists who wanted to discover whether, having been voluntarily admitted into a psychiatric facility with a specific symptom (a voice saying "thud"), the staff would ever discover that they were not in fact mentally ill. After two weeks all but one of the researchers were released: all, without exception, with a diagnosis of "schizophrenia, in remission".

(Today, we know that 4% and perhaps as much as 10% of the population experiences hearing voices at some point in their lives, most commonly linked with a traumatic experience, without ever experiencing anything else that we would call schizophrenia. Most such experiences are startling, and some can turn out to become extremely positive. At least, we know this ... in theory.)

• a single seizure when he was young
• a screaming fussiness as a baby, which could only be calmed by being swung in a blanket

I combine these two for a reason. The context in which I learned about the existence of Daniel Tammet also included other cases where haemorrhagic strokes somehow triggered compulsive artistic expression, completely overturning the previous way of seeing the world. It even has a name ("artistic compulsive disorder"), although the only thing that name accomplishes is to give symptoms a name, similar to "irritable bowel syndrome". It does not in any way imply understanding.

One thing every person who had survived such a stroke mentioned in common: they were hideously painful. Additionally, in many cases, the stroke itself was preceded by bad and blinding headaches, weeks or months of them, in some cases. One thing every parent knows: a very young child in pain will scream and fuss. The child won't usually understand, or be able to express that pain in any other way. They only know pain, and maybe one thing that eases it a little.

My mother had smallpox as a child. (Yes, that smallpox.) I grew up knowing what smallpox scars looked like. I learned that the sores are very painful. She described to me how her parents had found only one way to ease the pain a little: by placing her into a blanket and swinging her gently back and forth.

• being male (most autistics and the vast majority of Asperger's children are male)

Slightly under 50% of the world's population is also male.

• and, of course, the ability with numbers (although not the way of perceiving them: that was not known at the time).

After many years of trying to figure out Daniel's odd abilities, researchers finally figured out that he somehow perceives what to the rest of us are abstract numbers (which happen to be symbolised by a particular shape and size) as distinct shapes, with distinct sizes and emotional connotations, each part of a flowing landscape. The visual world around him becomes a constant expression of these numbers. When Daniel came to New York City, he described how he perceived how he perceived the skyscrapers as looming 9's. In fact, researchers have been able to significantly disrupt his mathematical ability simply by presenting him with numbers that happen to be opposite in size to his template (and one of them comments on that Talk page about just that).

So let's try looking at it from the opposite direction. If his diagnosers had known first how Daniel has perceived numbers for as long as he can remember -- and then took into account the incapacitating schizophrenia suffered by his father, known to have genetic links: which diagnosis they would have come up with then?

And would even that one be accurate?

Daniel is said to have been born into an atheist family. However, as a teenager he began exploring Judaism, then converted to Islam at 15, then converted again to Buddhism at 21, and then to Taoism, and then (for now finally) to Christianity. These were not casual conversions. He actively pursued each belief structure, and often was also active within the local community of that belief structure. This is not just casual religious "shopping".

Science has given Daniel's condition a number of labels. At the same time, science has utterly failed to find a real explanation for Daniel's way of perceiving the world.

However, the Judaic and Arabic languages are cored in one possibility: the same letters which make up the linguistic symbols which describe the world are also numbers. In the mystic traditions, this truth is an expression of God: in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God. (And from this derives a large part of modern western numerology.) What normal teenager, knowing himself to see the world differently from those around him, would not seek for a reason?

From "Dead Like Me" -

Once upon a time, there was a traveller on horseback who finds himself facing a swamp, and he doesn't know whether to go around or try to wade through. The traveller asks a local boy: "Tell me, local boy. Does the swamp have a hard bottom?"

And the boy tells him that it does.

So the traveller guides his horse into the swamp, and they begin to sink deeper and deeper into the muck. He shouts to the boy: "I thought you said it has a hard bottom!"

And the boy says: "It does, Mr. Traveller. You're just not there yet."

We are seeing a nice recovery in commodity prices, specifically crude oil which has bounced nicely over the past week or so due to the turmoil in Gaza, so the commodity backdrop has been a bit of a positive.
- George Davis, chief technical analyst, RBC Capital Markets

Markets care not. To them, the only relevance of human suffering is its effect on the perception of scarcity.

Hamas has been democratically elected to lead the government of Gaza; but from day 1 its reputation has been against it, and every sign of compromise has gone unseen. Instead, the western world shut its doors to credit and even to common diplomacy, and turned a blind eye when Israel stopped the transfer payments from the ports. The high concrete wall has been called protection by one side and jail by the other. Its success in providing increased protection is debatable. It seems to have somewhat more success at concentrating and shutting away the people of the territory from their livelihoods, their rightful income, and from any semblance of a normal life.

Barred from a major source of the Palestinian Territory's income, it did not take long for the Hamas government to run out of money. For a brief time, Palestinian government officials were carrying cash funds across the border in briefcases, donated by Arab neighbours. These few cash transfers seemed like a lot of money, but even these millions were barely enough to keep the territory functioning.

As in so many other countries where the normal functioning of government is hobbled by outside interests, it was not enough to curb those elements within Hamas which still sought military demonstrations and violent solutions. How could it be? Even in the most stable and best-functioning governments, a few extremists will always find cause to resort to violent methods: and the Palestinian Territory has never had that kind of stability.

So violent incidents continued -- by both sides, for extremists exist among the ultra-conservatives of Israel as well, and the forced evacuation from Gaza has never sat well. Personal harassment and worse than harassment was just common enough to continue to be continually feared. The occasional bombs exploded. The occasional rockets landed. Families were disrupted, people were injured and some died on both sides, although never at the levels of the previous intifadas.

Embroiled in their own political battles and economic crisis, the western media never noticed.

Maybe that was why Israel chose this time to act. There was no question that Israel would take action. Israel has always taken action, even where such action has required the invasion and occupation of a neighbouring country: and whether acknowledged or not, the accepted ratio of retribution is 10+ Palestinian deaths per every Israeli death. (Both sides having engaged in guerrilla tactics at different times, neither side places much value in the civilian/military distinction.) At the same time, Israel's domestic window of opportunity had been rapidly narrowing before the February 10 election, and a likely change of leadership sharply away from compromise and coexistence.

In addition, for some time the tide of world opinion had been gradually tilting against Israeli policy, and with Barack Obama's election the country stood in danger of losing their only steadfast international ally. As the inauguration date neared, the window of opportunity was rapidly narrowing. Still, Israeli military response had not been in the world headlines for months, even years in some places: and out of sight is out of mind.

Yet Hamas began as a guerrilla organisation, and it has never forgotten those roots. If its central structure is forced against the wall, even those elements which had sought compromise and stable government remember how to fight back.

The markets note only that the turmoil has restored the price of oil from a sickly $39 USD a barrel to a nice recovery of over $48; and petrocurrencies around the world are breathing a collective sigh of relief.

Rabbi Eliezer argued with his fellow sages over a point of law. He knew he was right, but his fellow sages refused to accept it. He brought forward all the proof he could find, but they would not accept it from him.

Then he said to them, "If the law agree with me, let this carob tree prove it." At once the carob tree was torn one hundred cubits from its place. Yet his fellow sages said to him, "No proof can be brought from a carob tree."

Then he said to them, "If the law agree with me, let this stream of water prove it." At once the stream began to flow backward. Yet his fellow sages said to him, "No proof can be brought from water."

Then he said to them, "If the law agree with me, let the walls of this house of study prove it." At once the walls of the house of study leaned over, as though they were about to fall; but Rabbi Joshua cried out, saying, "Is it a concern of yours if learned men argue with one another about the law?" So out of respect for him the walls did not fall, but neither did they straighten, and to this day they stand leaning over.

Rabbi Eliezer still knew he was right, so he said to his fellow sages, "If the law agree with me, let heaven itself prove it." At once a Divine Voice spoke:

Why do you argue with Rabbi Eliezer? In all matters the law agrees with him.

But Rabbi Joshua stood up and said, "It is not in heaven." The Torah has been given to mankind, and now it lives and must be interpreted in the hearts of men.

And God laughed: "My children have defeated Me!" My children have taken responsibility for their own interpretations. My children have grown up.