Archive for August 2020
“Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”*
In “Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove,” Kristan Horton imitates the glorious satirical film Dr. Strangelove, using common household objects to re-create the world created by Kubrick—silverware become an airplane, plastic and coffee grounds become the sky…
The sublime, recreated with the mundane: “Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove,” via the ever-illuminating The Morning News.
See also the “3-D Rooms Project.”
* Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley, one of three roles he played in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, produced, directed, and co-written (with Terry Southern, very loosely based on a novel by Peter George) by Stanley Kubrick
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As we ride it down, we might recall that it was on this date in 1883 that the volcano at Krakatoa (Krakatau) erupted with full force. The sound was heard over 2,000 miles away (that’s over 7.5% of the earth’s surface– the equivalent of an explosion in New York City being heard in San Francisco); tsunamis caused by the great blast killed 36,000 people in Java and Sumatra.
But there was another sense in which Krakatoa was importantly “the sound heard ’round the world”: While news of Lincoln’s assassination (only 18 years earlier) had taken almost two weeks to reach London, Europe and the U.S. knew of Krakatoa in about four hours. In the years between 1865 and 1883, there had been three interrelated developments: the global spread of the telegraph, the invention of Morse Code, and the establishment of Reuter’s news agency… and the world had become much smaller. (C.F., Tom Standage’s marvelous The Victorian Internet for the details– both remarkable and altogether resonant with today.)
As big as the explosion was, it was not the biggest in history: experts suggest that Santorini’s eruption in 1628 BCE was three times as powerful.
“Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it… Geniuses remove it.”*…
World War II bomber planes returned from their missions riddled with bullet holes. The first response was, not surprisingly, to add armor to those areas most heavily damaged. However, the statistician Abraham Wald made what seemed like the counterintuitive recommendation to add armor to those parts with no damage. Wald had uniquely understood that the planes that had been shot where no bullet holes were seen were the planes that never made it back. That’s, of course, where the real problem was. Armor was added to the seemingly undamaged places, and losses decreased dramatically.
The visible bullet holes of this pandemic are the virus and its transmission. Understandably, a near-universal response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been to double down on those disciplines where we already possess deep and powerful knowledge: immunology and epidemiology. Massive resources have been directed at combating the virus by providing fast grants for disciplinary work on vaccines. Federal agencies have called for even more rapid response from the scientific community. This is a natural reaction to the immediate short-term crisis.
The damage we are not attending to is the deeper nature of the crisis—the collapse of multiple coupled complex systems.
Societies the world over are experiencing what might be called the first complexity crisis in history. We should not have been surprised that a random mutation of a virus in a far-off city in China could lead in just a few short months to the crash of financial markets worldwide, the end of football in Spain, a shortage of flour in the United Kingdom, the bankruptcy of Hertz and Niemann-Marcus in the United States, the collapse of travel, and to so much more.
As scientists who study complex systems, we conceive of a complexity crisis as a twofold event. First, it is the failure of multiple coupled systems—our physical bodies, cities, societies, economies, and ecosystems. Second, it involves solutions, such as social distancing, that involve unavoidable tradeoffs, some of which amplify the primary failures. In other words, the way we respond to failing systems can accelerate their decline.
We and our colleagues in the Santa Fe Institute Transmission Project believe there are some non-obvious insights and solutions to this crisis that can be gleaned from studying complex systems and their universal properties…
The more complicated and efficient a system gets, the more likely it is to collapse altogether. Scientists who study complex systems offer solutions to the pandemic: “The Damage We’re Not Attending To.”
See also: “Complex Systems Theory Explains Why Covid Crushed the World.”
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As we think systemically, we might recall that it was on this date in 1835 that the New York Sun began a series of six articles detailing the discovery of civilized life on the moon. Now known as “The Great Moon Hoax,” the articles attributed the “discovery” to Sir John Herschel, the greatest living astronmer of the day. Herschel was initially amused, wryly noting that his own real observations could never be as exciting. But ultimately he tired of having to answer questioners who believed the story. The series was not discovered to be a hoax for several weeks after its publication and, even then, the newspaper did not issue a retraction.
The “ruby amphitheater” on the Moon, per the New York Sun (source)
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do”*…
Wirecutter is best known for recommending things that are the best of the best. But on occasion, we discover the worst of the worst.
Sometimes this happens during testing (like when we had to force down countless cups of bad Keurig coffee), or when an entire category fails to deliver (like great-smelling but useless essential oil bug repellents), or just because a thing has no business even existing (we’re looking at you, air fryers)…
A list of products to which we should just say no: “Wirecutter’s Worst Things for Most People.”
* Steve Jobs
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As we resist the urge, we might recall that it was on this date in 1995 that (to the commercial accompaniment of The Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up”) Microsoft released Windows 95 to retail.
“Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast”*…
… or not.
Consider the Portsmouth Sinfonia…
an English orchestra founded by a group of students at the Portsmouth School of Art in 1970. The Sinfonia was generally open to anyone and ended up drawing players who were either people without musical training or, if they were musicians, ones that chose to play an instrument that was entirely new to them. Among the founding members was one of their teachers, English composer Gavin Bryars. The orchestra started as a one-off, tongue-in-cheek performance art ensemble but became a cultural phenomenon over the following 10 years, with concerts, record albums, a film and a hit single. [source]
For your corespondent’s money, the apex (nadir) of their work was their performance of “Also sprach Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss:
And then there’s the performance pictured above: “the Piano Concerto in A,” by Tchaikovsky, at Royal Albert Hall– a run to which thousands of tickets were sold:
The best of the worst: The Portsmouth Sinfonia.
* William Congreve, The Mourning Bride (often misquoted as “music hath charms to soothe the savage beast”). The same play gave us “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned / Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned,” often misquoted as “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
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As we embrace enthusiasm, we might send more melodic birthday greetings to Constant Lambert; he was born on this date in 1905. A composer, conductor, and author, he was the founding Music Director of the Royal Ballet, and (alongside Ninette de Valois and Frederick Ashton) he was a major figure in the establishment of the English ballet as a significant artistic movement.
Lambert is also remembered as the inspiration and model for the character Hugh Moreland in his close friend Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (especially in the fifth volume, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, in which Moreland is a central character). Lambert’s son, Kit Lambert, was one of the managers of The Who.
Christopher Wood‘s portrait of Lambert (1926)
“Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable”*…
Data visualizations that make no sense...
More at “WTF Visualizations.”
* Mark Twain
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As we celebrate clarity, we might spare a thought for the mathematician, biologist, historian of science, literary critic, poet, and inventor Jacob Bronowski; he died on this date in 1974. Bronowski is probably best remembered as the writer (and host) of the epochal 1973 BBC television documentary series (and accompanying book), The Ascent of Man (the title of which was a play on the title of Darwin’s second book on evolution, The Descent of Man)… the thirteen-part series, a survey of the history of science– from rock tools to relativity– and its place in civilizations, is still an extraordinary treat. It’s available at libraries, on DVD, or (occasionally) on streaming services.
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