Today the Hun School had its second annual Convocation to commence the year. As the current holder of the Distinguished Faculty Endowed Chair, it fell to me to present a speech. (I did this last year, too; you can find that speech online.) The text of this second speech can be found below the fold.

Good morning. Being offered a second opportunity to address the School community has been a great honor. I have to confess, it has also been a great challenge. For a while — longer, perhaps, than I should admit — I toyed with the idea of hedging my bets. The plan was to offer a searching analysis of the phenomenon of the “one-hit wonder” — the savant, found in science, in literature, in every human endeavor, who bursts onto the scene like a shooting star, shakes the foundations of a field, and then curiously vanishes back into obscurity, never to contribute again. I trust the parallel here is clear. Best of all, even if the speech fell flat, I would win: I could always claim that, rather than being a textual failure, it was a meta-textual success.

But on Sunday morning I woke up and realized that I was running away from what I needed to say. I had to abandon the whole thing and start over. I hope you’ll indulge me.

Today we meet as a School on a date both solemn and raw for the nation. It wasn’t planned that way; it’s just an accident of the calendar. But sometimes I wonder if history is anything more than accidents of the calendar. If it is, it is because we take those accidents and create meaning in them. As a native son of New York, my jaw still clenches and my eyes still tear whenever this day looms again. Six years later, there remains a hole in my city — a hole in my country — a hole in my heart. When I sat down to write, I thought that I was still not ready to speak about that day, to sift through the ashes for meaning. As I began to write, though, I made a shocking discovery.

It’s true — I am not ready.

But that doesn’t matter.

That is the first important lesson of the 21st century: We will face severe challenges for which we may not be ready. The challenges aren’t going to go away, though, so we have to get ready. Despite what the movies tell us, failure is an option — in fact, it’s the default option. We are going to have to choose success; we are going to have to work for it. Last year I laid out what I see as some of the dangers and pitfalls we might face and what might help us get past them. I remain proud of that speech, perhaps inordinately proud of it. But it didn’t take long to knock me down a peg. Within a few days of Convocation, several different people — students and faculty — had told me that they had appreciated the speech but that I had scared them sleepless. This disappointed me, because it meant that I had missed my mark. I had hoped to navigate the thin space between raising an alarm and causing a panic. Looking ahead, it’s a good thing to be a little alarmed. It’s a terrible thing to be panicked.

And this is the second lesson of the 21st century, as hard in its own way as the first: You cannot live in fear. You must not live in fear. Stimulate an animal’s fear centers continuously, and eventually it will die. Stimulate a free society’s fear centers continuously, and eventually it will wither.

We have spent the last six years cowering in a corner, huddling in our fear. It’s unhealthy for each and every one of us. It’s unbecoming of a great nation and a great people. It’s simply bad posture. Now, today, it is time to wake up. It is time to step up. It is time to grow up. My generation and the one preceding mine, we’re asking a lot of you. You’re being asked to grow up in the hardest century we’ve ever faced. You’re being asked to step up and shepherd this fractious and fearful world through fire and fury to a destination none can even imagine yet. It’s hard and it’s frightening and it is not fair. That doesn’t matter. It’s what is.

There will be those — there already are those — who will offer to take this burden from you. “Give yourself over to me”, they claim, “and I will tame the night for you. I will face down the bogeyman, I will guard you and keep you safe.” The best of these will be merely misguided. Most will be outright deceitful. No one can grow up for you. No one can live your life for you. That won’t stop them from trying to tempt you into surrender. They will bang the drum and rattle the saber and do everything in their power to convince you that your rightful place is prone on the ground, helpless and afraid. They will attempt to buy your birthright by selling you fear.

Fear of other people taking your things.

Fear of other people taking your job.

Fear of other people taking your life.

Fear of other people, period.

Fear of being different, of being outcast, of being alone.

Fear of other opinions and other beliefs and other faiths.

Fear of the different, of the alien, of the Other — of anything not them.

Simple fear.

They will tell you that there is only one path, that you must make yourself a smaller target by becoming less than yourself. We must, we are told, jettison the lessons of four hundred years of liberty. We must, we are told, give up our quaint notions of due process and restraint and fair play. We are told, “Dissent divides”. We are told that asking questions costs lives. We are told these things, and in our fear, we pretend that they are true. But in our hearts, we know that they are not.

Fear lives in the oldest, darkest corners of the brain — parts far older than humanity. Like everything else, fear persists because it offered an evolutionary advantage. But it never evolved for creatures like us, who think and remember. Those who appeal to your fear are trying to short-circuit your brain. They don’t want you questioning, because questioning gives you context. They don’t want you learning, because learning gives you options. Above all, they don’t want you thinking, because thinking gives you freedom. They want you reacting, worrying, following, fearing. It is a blatant confession of a bankruptcy of solutions; it could not be more obvious or insulting; and yet, amazingly, every day we fall for it.

You cannot live in fear. You must not live in fear.

What is the alternative? Should you go through the day in an optimistic fog, counting on the world to be always sunshine and daisies? Of course not. We face the hardest century. The world is going to be sharp edges and deep chasms. But consider this: When suddenly dropped into a frightening situation, the most primal instinct is to close your eyes and hope it goes away. It’s a very natural, a very human reaction. But closing your eyes doesn’t make the danger go away. In fact, the only safe course is to open your eyes and face the frightening thing. Even if the smart move is to run, you’re going to want to run with your eyes open.

Your would-be guardians and rulers have always been here, since our species huddled in the darkness, vulnerable and afraid; and for a time, they served a role. They interposed themselves between the sleeping masses and the vast unknowable night. Now a bright bonfire called civilization blazes and pushes back the night. Yet the fearmongers persist, hovering at the edge of the light, on the shore of the shadows, unwilling to come closer. They fear the darkness but they hate the light, because it reveals that we don’t need them any longer. Seeing the fire hold back the night, they scream that it will attract monsters and must be extinguished — that we must go back to cowering in darkness and terror, trusting only in them. But the fire doesn’t attract danger. It allows us to see danger coming and to prepare for it and thus avoid it. Our system of justice and liberty doesn’t threaten our lives; it makes them possible. It lets us see what truly is.

Despite what you’ve been told, most people on this planet are not out to kill you. Most people on this planet don’t hate you for your freedoms, whatever that means. They don’t hate you for your wealth or even for your actions. They don’t hate you at all. Just like us, most people desire little more than the opportunity to create a better life and the peace to enjoy the fruits of that labor.

Be wary of those who tell you differently. Distrust those who ring the alarm bell so loudly that you cannot think. Ask yourself: What are they afraid of? What do they fear you will discover? Fear is a powerful and dangerous drug on the body politic. It can be used to strip people of their defenses, of their dignity, of their principles. Using fear to bludgeon you into assent, people will act in your name to do the most dreadful of deeds: To abrogate elections, to spy illegally, to detain indefinitely. To discriminate and intimidate, to torture and to execute. In pursuit of imaginary security, they will demand that you surrender your privacy, your identity, your opinions, your self. They will tell you, “We cannot afford outdated customs such as judicial oversight or checks and balances or free debate.” They will say to you, “To fight the monsters, we must become monsters ourselves.” Don’t let them fool you.

We are stronger than that.

We are smarter than that.

We are better than that.

And you cannot live in fear forever.

Anyone checking the frequency of blogging for this site need not be told that I am not a natural diarist. I keep trying to start a regular compilation of my thought but never quite get in the habit. I have a journal I’ve carted from DC to Stanford to Bensalem to Princeton. With my recent move still unfolding in slow motion in my new apartment, I came across that book, which I have not touched since (at latest) 1998.

Only two pages have any writing, dating from late 1992(!) with the interesting heading “Thoughts on Teaching”. Since that means that those two pages were, in some way, the progenitor of these blog entries — that this little blue notebook is the ur-Mongrel Dogs, I thought it appropriate to record them here, before ditching the book that’s been dogging me for fifteen years.

More below the fold.

I am currently in LAX International Airport. I’ve been here since 10:30 AM and it is currently 9:00 PM. If you knew my itinerary, you’d see that this is the time listed for boarding Continental Flight 1803, nonstop LAX to Newark/EWR. You can probably guess that I am not actually getting on that plane at this moment. You see, it’s raining in Houston.

Now, I am not in Houston. I am not going to Houston. As mentioned, my flight is nonstop and so is not stopping in Houston. Nonetheless, rain in Houston has added about half an hour to my departure time each hour since 4 PM.

(Aside: I’ve received no fewer than six email alerts warning me that the flight will be delayed — although I was also warned that I had to show up at the airport at the printed time, since the airline reserved the right to leave then after all. I’m not exactly what the point of the alerts are, to tell you the truth. I mean, if I can’t leave for the airport any later, than why do I need to know that the plane is going to be held? It’s some sort of weird Calvinist thing: I’m delayed if I do and delayed if I don’t. I can know my fate but I cannot do anything about it. [And if that's not a true metaphor for a citizen in the hands of corporations, I don't know what is.] )

Back to my delayed flight. Despite the frenzied pace of email alerts, actually very little information has been shared about why. Apparently, even though — as I said — my flight neither originates in, terminates in, or passes through Houston, I have been bolluxed by the remnants of the tropical storm Erin, which has delayed the plane I’ll be taking, which is for reasons unknown to anyone but God, flying out of Houston.

Now… The people of Houston have known, of course, that there’d be rain in Houston. The people at CNN and Weather Channel and every podunk news outlet in all the land knew that there’d be rain in Houston. Heck, I’ve just spent the past fifteen days at sea and even I knew that there would be rain in Houston. But somehow the airliines, with state of the art equipment and a literally million-dollar information infrastructure, somehow did not know that it would be raining in Houston.

More below the fold.

Of course, they did know that it would be raining in Houston. They knew probably a day or two earlier than today. The issue of course is that they did not care. Their business model depends on cramming every last person into every last seat. They don’t allocate any resources for “unexpected” contingencies — like, say, rain. There should be enough give in the system that when something like this develops, equipment can be routed from other places to cover. But in fact, all the eggs are allowed to drop. Somehow, this does not constitute breach of service.

It’s almost amusing, because I am writing this standing at the counter (which is just about the only horizontal surface available for my laptop). So I get to hear everyone come and kvetch at the harried counter attendant. I’m continually amazed that each and every person is shocked that this has happened — even though studies show that one out of every four flights suffer noticeable delays. Instead everyone asks to be scheduled to the now-earlier flight to Newark. (I’ll leave aside my burning rage that a later-scheduled flight will depart an hour or more before my flight — I am so glad I paid premium price for a first-class seat.)

It’s almost heartening, the unending stream of slightly-forlorn travelers ever-hopeful that the attendant will magically conjure a new flight for them. At the moment, the stand-by list is at 18 people, but newcomers keep adding themselves to the list. God bless American optimism, I suppose. (I cannot imagine the scale of the disaster now necessary to get some of these people on the plane. I mean, eighteen independent reasons for eighteen separate people to miss a flight? What are the odds?)

On the other hand, I am undergoing a slow burn every time I hear the attendant explain that the plane is not here because “sometimes there’s a thunderstorm in Houston”. Again, as if the tropical storm that’s been tracked across CNN for over a week could not have been foreseen. It’s that fundamental disingenuousness that ticks me off the most — the unwillingness of the airlines to come clean and admit that such delays are not unpredictable, unforeseeable acts-of-God. Their business model is predicated on frustrating and misleading thousands of people each day. They hide the true cost of the ticket from the piurchaser and so can claim “low fares” — as if my time had no value.

But there are two things that really piss me off. First, the attendant just got on the mic and told us that the plane “looks good for the 12:10 departure”. I know it’s all weasel-words and I know she’s under pressure. But the fact of the matter is, that’s an hour and a half after the printed departure time. It is now no longer possible for this to “look good”. The best they can hope for is, “This has stopped looking like crap.”

Second, the sign to my right now shows the updated information: “Flight 1803. Departs 12:10 New York / Newark. Ticketed passengers must be onboard 20 mins before departure“. Take a moment to grasp that. The airline can arbitrarily delay my flight by 90 minutes and all I can do is suck it up. But if I should be 21 minutes late, oh my God, no force on Earth is going to get them to hold that plane for me.

It is that fundamental asymmetry — that inability of the airlines to even pretend to play fair — that sours me on air travel, to the extent that I just might not ever do it again.

Last note: As I send this, it is 9:45 — exactly the originally-scheduled departure time for Continental Flight 1803.

I experienced something today that I’ve heard a lot about but never quite believed in: the infamous green flash. I’d read that, sometimes, during sunsets, just at the moment the Sun sinks below the horizon, it flashes green. However, the conditions are hard to meet and the occurrence somewhat rare. Tonight as the Regal Princess continued steaming east-northeast, I happened to be out on deck during sunset. (I’ve been missing these because I’m slated for “first sitting” dinner and usually it wraps up just a few minutes too late. But today for whatever reason we were done and gone five minutes before rather than after sunset.) The sky was crystal-clear and, though there were some low-lying clouds, they hovered a bit above the horizon. Knowing these were the conditions for the semi-mythical flash, I dug out my camera and took continuous shots of the sunset.

Much to my amazement, I did in fact see the green flash.

It’s not so much a “flash”, really. The sky doesn’t light up green or anything. Rather, the Sun momentarily turns green. The change, from the usual red of sunset, is unmistakable, although the transformation lasts only a moment. Now I’m really interested in what causes this. I suspect it’s a refractory phenomenon having to do with the atmosphere – perhaps something about the color of the Sun’s limb compared to the bulk. I really did not think the story was true; now I have to understand it. It goes to show you that the world is always ready to throw a surprise at you when you think you know what’s going on.

Sadly, I didn’t get a picture of it. I had to choose between watching it on camera and watching it by eye. I was pretty sure that, if the effect was real, I’d still end up missing it in the camera. My camera is just too slow and awkward to capture an instantaneous elusive optical sprite. Also, although I love my digital camera, I’m beginning to worry that I am experience too many things through its mediation and missing out on the real events – as if preserving the memory of a thing was more important than actually experiencing it. If conditions are good again tomorrow or Wednesday, I’ll try to capture the flash, though I don’t have high hopes.

Seeing the flash speaks to me, though I’m not sure what it’s saying. It’s another chunk of life to throw in the broth that is my Convocation speech.

There are so many different worlds

So many different suns

And we have just one world

But we live in different ones…

This is a haunting melody that I can’t hear without thinking of the second-season finale of The West Wing (“Two Cathedrals”), where it was used to tremendous effect.

Today, there’s a piece by Maya Jasonoff in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times on the Americans loyal to Britain during the Revolution, and it has me irked. It’s not the thesis, which I agree with, that we should be more aware that the “self-evident” truths were anything but, to about 20% of the population. It’s not the timing, the seemingly-obligatory article near July 4 warning us that it wasn’t all fireworks and oratory. That’s a useful exercise, too, especially in an age of unquestionable jingoism. No, what has me irked is the following statement:

Yet in all, more than 700 people put their names to the parchment — 12 times the number who signed the Declaration of Independence.

“The parchment” referenced here was a petition by the royalist Americans to their king, declaring their loyalty and dismay at the Revolution. Despite the inherent strength of her arguments, Ms. Jasonoff appears compelled (by insecurity?) to puff up the popularity of the Tory case by a specious popularity contest. She must know better: The Declaration was signed by members “in Congress assembled”; it was not an invitational and the grouping was by design small in number. To compare it to an open petition left out in a New York tavern for three days, is simply absurd. How many roaring patriots would have signed the Declaration (had it be a petition) is unknowable but certainly vast… more vast than 700, if one can judge by how rapidly and how widely it was reproduced.

Ms. Jasonoff’s editorial choice doesn’t really undercut the article and in some ways it’s a tiny thing. But it’s another example of a growing carelessness we display with our rhetoric, a growing willingness to compare apples to oranges and act as if the comparison meant anything. It’s intellectually sloppy.

Yet another in the series of posters for the newly-rechristened Second Interworld War. This one is inspired by the many different posters that had streams of planes passing overhead in a not-too-subtle V formation. The purpose was to impress with the sheer excess of Allied production. And of course, the exhortation to work hard and to invest in war bonds. My poster reads “Give them the Tools of Victory: Work to Win”.

Executing this poster took quite a bit more work than the others; the gruesome details appear below the fold.

The key bit to understand is, Poser is an excellent program for, well, posing stuff. But as a full 3D rendering program, it’s simply not ready for prime time. As a user, I’m becoming aware that it simply gobbles memory and uses it not terribly efficiently. This will be important in just a little bit.

For this design, I had to replace the ubiquitous WWII bomber with my workhorse, the retro rocketship. I decided to cheat a little and have one leg of the V come from the Zharkov type and one from the Mongo type, though in the end product the distinction is hard to spot. Placing them was simplicity: I put one up in the sky, then duplicated it and translated it in the -z direction, Repeat that ten or so times, and you have a line of rocketships stretching back toward the vanishing point. Yay.

To get even more flashy, I decided to add some steam flying machines, which I envision as the gunboats of the campaign. This added some complication, because the SFM is a complex mesh itself plus it needed two or three crew to make it work. Otherwise it looks ghostly. I added Ava and Gene, specialized versions of Victoria 3 and Michael 3, and posed them carefully. Then I began the replication …

… and ran into that memory thing. Five gunboats, on top of the rest of the scene, killed my computer. I mean, the render really drove a stake through its heart — it was everything short of a Blue Screen of Death. I started removing objects from the figures far enough away to tolerate th e loss of detail. Not good enough: the renderer just wouldn’t take it.

I sat back and regrouped. I know of, but not how to use, a program called PoseRay, which I knew converted Poser objects to POV-Ray meshes. POV-Ray is a kick-butt free renderer that’s been the standard for something like a decade. I have lots of experience with POV-Ray, dating all the way back to version 2.1 (it’s at 3.7 now) and Ion Yadigariglou trying to render relativistic retarded-potential electromagnetic potentials around neutron stars. Poser is new to me, but POV-Ray — for POV-Ray, I know some real tricks.

So I grabbed a copy of PoseRay, read a quick tutorial, and converted my scene object-by-object. I lost the interactivity of Poser; POV-Ray is a scripted language, lacking direct manipulation. But in return I gained numerical precision and ease of adjustment. Most importantly, I gained the POV-Ray advantage: While meshes are not particularly efficient, the second copy of a mesh costs almost no memory. In other words, replicating the Mongo rocketship a thousand times took almost the same amount of memory as rendering it once. Suddenly, I could have entire air fleets and it would hardly impact the render time.

I didn’t go quite that crazy but I included, easily, twenty or more. Something about the textures didn’t quite take and things look a little plastic-y. But for the most part I am quite satisfied with this effort. As much as possible, I want to stay in Poser, but it’s good to know that POV-Ray is there when I need the big guns.

One of the things that goes along with advising Student Council at my school is orchestrating the annual Talent Show. For the past four years, that’s included performing as the first act — largely because I badger my fellow faculty into performing, and I feel I should ask them to do something I’m not willing. Also, because secretly I am a ham. The song is always something of my own writing and always a capella, because I don’t know anything about playing instruments or writing music for them. I like this because it gives me a chance to demonstrate that I am every bit not a singer as I am not a songwriter. This year’s offering was called “Nothing But a Dream”. Because I have no shame I’m including a Quicktime movie of it as well.

Life is nothing but a dream
I drift along the stream
And never make it back to your shore.
I wait, lying by the track
That train’s never coming back
You’re never coming round any more.

Now the calendar sheds another page
And this weary world sheds another age
And if it’s better off, well it’s hard to gauge
But from where I stand, it doesn’t feel it
I’m older now but I’m not so wise
I don’t want to see but can’t close my eyes
I’ve lost the truth behind the lies
And I always needed you to reveal it

Life is nothing but a dream
I drift along the stream
And never make it back to your shore.
I wait, lying by the track
That train’s never coming back
You’re never coming round any more.

It was over long before it had begun
I’m standing still but I’m on the run
I can’t escape what I haven’t done
But I still needed you to forgive it
Where I head is not where I go
What I reap is not what I sow
The live I lead is not one I know
There’s nothing left for me but to live it.

In my never-ending quest to overload my WordPress installation with a billion gadgets, today I’m adding Fancy Pull Quote. Fancy pull quotes make any dumb monkey look like a Pulitzer Prize winner! But I’ve decided to run it head-to-head with JSPullQuotes, a javascript implementation, to see which I like more (= is more easily customized). Currently I like JSPullQuotes a teeny bit more because it doesn’t require HTML commenting. On the other hand, it’s harder to use for pulling “quotes” that don’t appear in the main text.

Let’s see what this does.