From the monthly archives: January 2012
You’re probably aware that as you drive through the city certain cameras, often mounted overhead at cross streets, record your car’s plate number and, in many instances, they record your face as well. And as you or park in a parking garage or enter a shop, security cameras continue to photograph you. And maybe you’re aware that if you walk with your cell phone on, your location is being pinpointed to within fifteen feet.
Maybe, like most people, you do feel a little uncomfortable about being kept under watch, but you shrug it off because you’re just one individual in a city of thousands or millions and they can’t keep track of every single one of us all the time. I mean, sure, they have the technology to listen to our phone conversations and the technology to photograph us as we move around, but how can they store that ocean of information? Besides, the cost of storing so much data would break the bank.
And you’re right. At least for three more years. But you do remember George Orwell’s 1984 and Big Brother. Back in 1984, it cost about $85,000 to store a gigabyte of data. Today it costs about five cents. That means it costs about 17 cents to store all the phone calls made by an individual over the course of a year. But the cost of storage is falling and by 2015 it will cost under 2 cents.
Cameras produce photos and photos have lots of pixels and that means a security camera generates a mountain of data. On the other hand, your phone, GPS and Wi-Fi connection give away your location but that information requires comparatively few ones and zeros. The data identifying the location of each of a million people every five minutes, 24 hours a day for a year, can be stored in 1,000 gigabytes. That would cost around $50 today.
It costs more to store all those pixels from all those cameras, but governments can afford it. In China, a government “safety” project will use around 500,000 video cameras to keep watch in the city of Chongqing which has a population of 12 million — that’s one video camera for every 24 people. Right now, it’s expensive to store that much high-quality video and they’ll have to use lower quality images. But in a few years, say by 2020, they’ll be able to store a year’s worth of high-quality video movies of every one of those 12 million people for about 25 cents per person.
These numbers come from a very interesting report produced by John Villasenor, a nonresident senior fellow in Governance Studies and in the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings. He is also professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. You may want to read the full report ; you’ll find it well documented. Professor Villasenor’s report is phrased in terms of how much it would cost a repressive regime, such as that in Iran, to keep a close watch on each of its citizens. Fortunately, we live in an open society where such issues as government surveillance and individual privacy are vigorously debated. Or, maybe we should say, ought to be vigorously debated.
Tom Brady, a football player
If you like to keep score, the weekend of January 21 and 22 was exciting. The New England Patriots defeated the Baltimore Ravens 23 to 20, the New York Giants defeated the San Francisco 49ers, 20 to 17, and Newt Gingrich defeated Mitt Romey, 40.4 to 27.8.
Eli Manning, another football player
The big difference between those hard-fought football games and our crappy political primary contests is that in a football game you’re not allowed to bamboozle and lie your way to victory or use wild money from in-your-pocket millionaire contributors to ambush your opponents. On the football field, when you’re seen breaking the rules, you’re penalized by referees who are as objective as God permits humans to be. In politics, anything less than a felony
Mitt Romney, another politician
is considered OK, so long as it hauls in voters.
Newt Gingrich, yet another politician
One of the nice things about football is that the actual running, blocking, grunting players are the winners and losers, depending on how well they do on the field. The spectators — that’s most of us — are on the sidelines, cheering. We get to go home in good health when it’s over. In politics, the politicians play the game but we’re the ones who get banged up, mangled, disabled and sometimes ruined by what they do.
We’ve damn well exhausted this sports/politics metaphor. We apologize and will leave it alone now.
Roger Greenblat’s The Swerve, won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 2011, and at the same time brought popoular attention to another book, the two-thousand-year-old On the Nature of Things by Lucretius. Greenblat’s book is an engaging account of a monk’s discovery the only surviving manuscript copy of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius’ philosophical poem which Greenblat believes altered the course of intellectual history in Europe and helped to make us what we are.
To the contemporary reader, the most astonishing thing about Lucretius’ philosophy is that it is based on an atomic theory of physics. Certainly it’s a marvel that a Roman poet writing around 50 B.C. should understand the natural physical world as being the result of atomic interactions, but Lucretius was a follower of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, himself an inheritor of the atomic theories of Leucippus and Democritus, all of them believers that the basic unit of the material world was the atom — meaning “un-cutable” in Greek.
Whereas our contemporary atomic theory is based on experimental evidence, the Greek and Roman philosophers arrived at their theories entirely through reason and speculation. Seeing the world as composed of complex structures built up by aggregates of simpler elements (look around you; you’ll see the same) those thinkers worked down to a theoretical solitary building block and down below that to nothingness. That’s where Lucretius begins: there’s the void and atoms falling endlessly through it, occasionally swerving to hit other atoms, and over time those atoms hook together to build up the material world we live in. Furthermore, says Lucretius, the void is so large and atoms so numerous that other worlds have also arisen, many other worlds, in addition to our own.
And that is all there is to life, to this world, to the cosmos, to anything. Lucretius’s materialistic vision was intended, he wrote, to rescue people from belief in the intervention of gods and the fear of death. Gods exist in De Rerum Natura, but they exist off at some distance, rather diaphanous beings, with no interest in the world they didn’t create and the humans who inhabit it. As for death, don’t fear an after life, says Lucretius; you are only your constituent atoms and death merely frees those atoms to regroup, perhaps, in some other form. Not everyone will find freedom from fear or any comfort in Lucretius.
De Rerum Natura is a long, long poem of some 7,400 lines. Even though it’s apparently unfinished, Lucretius gets around to explaining everything from how sound manages to get through walls to how it is that adolescent boys have wet dreams. Nothing is beyond his interest, from the grandest, such as the evolutions of human society, to the smallest, the infinitesimal wearing down of a statue by the touch of innumerable hands. Lucretius himself comes through the lines as a man interested in just about everything, a man who apparently loved the things of this world and loved writing about them. The work is, after all, a vivid digressive poem about this world.
Teachers of Latin and their more advanced students are well aware of Lucretius’s book – six books as Lucretius assembles it — and they’re also aware that much of it is difficult Latin. If you had Latin in high school only, you’ll find Lucretius somewhere between exceedingly difficult and impossible. Say Catullus is easy and Ovid is easy, admit Quintillian is not easy and Horace is hard. If so, Lucretius is hard. Happily, there are translations.
Unhappily, translations of Latin poems aren’t wonderful. Yes, Arthur Golding’s translation in 1567 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is admired and is probably the best translation of that work, even after four centuries, but we nowadays read it not to get a sense of Ovid but to relish the wonderful rush and verve of the brash translator’s Renaissance English, a marvelous vulgate.
The most recent translation of Lucretius’s hexameters is by A. E. Stallings and she, like Golding, uses “fourteeners” — lines of fourteen syllables, usually seven iambics — linked in couplets. Indeed, her translation gives De Rerum Natura a certain liveliness and bounce – and possibly a classicist finds the same spirited animation in the original. None of us here at Critical Pages can read Latin like a classicist, but maybe you guessed that already. We favor the Loeb edition of De Rerum Natura published by Harvard University Press with the Latin on the left-hand page and the plain English on the right. But we admire A. (Alicia) E. Stallings translation. She’s a remarkable poet all on her own, as her many prizes attest.
On January 18th Wikipedia blacked out its site to protest a couple of bills being debated in the House and Senate. The stated intent of the proposed legislation is to crack down on foreign internet piracy. Overseas pirates are stealing some of our intellectual property and selling back to us. Critical Pages is against piracy. Everyone’s against piracy. Yes, even Wikipedia’s against piracy. Unfortunately, the legislation currently in Congress is badly written and will inevitably damage free expression and free access to the Internet. The bills can be re-written to satisfy defenders of intellectual freedom and still crack down on foreigners stealing our stuff. By the way, the large media enterprises who advocate for these bills in their current form wildly overstate the financial loss associated with such piracy. There’s time to re-write and get it right. For more information, the two bills are the Stop Online Piracy Act currently being debated in the House, and the Protect IP (Intellectual Property) Act in the Senate. No need to take our word about these botched bills. Wikipedia is online again and the rest of the Web is still here for you to go freely and gather your own information. Let’s keep it that way.
Dr. Patrick Carnes, Ph.D.
If you crave relief from politics and would like something completely different, you might be interested in learning a little about sex addiction in women. We learned a lot from an interview in Canada’s National Post. Apparently, women are taking to sex in a big, big way. In fact, according to Dr. Patrick Carnes, “We are seeing the biggest change in human sexuality maybe in the history of our species.”
Wow! The biggest in the history of our species! Now that’s impressive. Dr. Carnes, Ph.D., ought to know what he’s talking about, because he’s a psychologist. He’s a specialist in sexual addiction and the executive director of the Gentle Path program at Pine Grove Behavioral Center in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
Certainly the Internet has made pornography available and private, which maybe one of the greatest changes in pornography in the history of the human species. So it shouldn’t surprise us that, as Dr. Carnes says, “We’re seeing women getting into pornography in a way we’ve never seen before.” But sex addiction goes beyond mere fantasy. “Women are engaging in affairs, they’re engaging in sado-masochistic behavior,” he said. They are? Again?
If you’re beginning to think that sexual addiction must be an epidemic, you’re right. For sure, Dr. Carnes thinks it is. “We’re now at a place where we have an epidemic. Two thirds of our kids are watching pornography while they’re doing their homework.” Good grief!Two thirds! Is that possible?
We were looking forward to Valentines Day. You know — love and the elective affinities and, well, maybe even sex. We’re sorry for people who are addicted to anything. But we intend to enjoy Valentines Day, no matter what.
The image below is taken from Nymphs and Satyrs, painted by William-Adolphe Bougereau and exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1873. You’d never guess from this painting that the following year saw the first exhibit of Impressionist painters. There’s not much available to illustrate a post about women and sex addiction, so this will have to do.
Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney has complained, rightly, about being quoted out of context, of having what he said twisted around so it comes out wholly different from what his words actually meant. Romney has forgotten that just a few weeks ago he quite carefully took Obama’s words out of context and twisted them around in order to misquote the President.
In this most recent incident, Romney’s Republican opponents jumped on him for having said, “I like being able to fire people.” What he said was in answer to a question on health care, and he replied that he liked the option of choosing among competing health insurance companies. “I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep you healthy. It also means that if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them,” Romney said. “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.
Of course, when Romeny distorted Obama’s words it was for the high-minded purpose of making a political point — at least that was the excuse offered by his campaign office. Romney’s ad uses an audio of Obama campaigning in New Hampshire in 2008, Obama’s voice saying, “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” In actual fact, in that 2008 speech it’s clear that Obama is quoting an aide to his opponent, Senator McCain. But in the 2011 ad, Romney makes the listener believe that it’s Obama who doesn’t want to discuss the economy. [Critical Pages has a post on that event.]
In a curiously base and twisted way, Romney struck back at his Republican opponents’ out-of-context attack by blaming President Obama. Complaining to reporters that his words had been taken out of context, Romney said, “Things can always be taken out of context, and I understand that’s what the Obama people will do.”
The image below is cropped from Death of the Miser by Hieronymus Bosch, a 15th century painter in the Netherlands. Little is known about Bosch, other than that he did rather well in life. His paintings are frequently religious in theme and often bizarre. He also had a way of populating his works with creepy demons from his imagination, and you’ll find some in the scene below. Clearly it’s a bad moment for the Miser — Death is coming in the door and though the Miser’s guardian angel is trying to direct his attention to the crucifix at the window, the Miser’s hand still grasps at the bag of gold offered him by a weird fish-faced demon. This is Avarice, one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Ever hear of the Seven Deadly Sins? Probably. Can you list them? Probably not. If you also asked Why should I care? you’re in grave danger of cultural ignorance, which isn’t a sin but merely a deep personal flaw. Here’s the list, starting with the worst: Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony, and Lust.
The concept of Seven Deadly Sins was popularized and woven into European culture in Medieval times and though its importance has certainly faded it’s still part of our European, and now Western, Christian cultural inheritance. There’s no absolutely authoritative list nor is there a wholly agreed upon order and, to be frank, the meaning of the words, what behaviors they embrace, has changed over time. But let’s do our best and not quibble.
The list we’re using is the one used by the 13th / 14th century poet Dante Alighieri in his great Divine Comedy. Dante’s amazing poem is a first-person account in which Dante himself, accompanied by the spirit of Virgil, walks down through Hell and up through Purgatory and, regretfully leaving the pagan Virgil behind, he eventually sails into Heaven and God’s presence. So this list must be as authoritative as any you’ll find.
The sins are deadly in the sense that they may kill the life of God in the soul and thereby threaten the sinner with eternal damnation. If eternal damnation isn’t one of your cool concepts, you can look at the list simply as a compilation of bad behavior. No one will love you if you’re a proud, envious, angry, lazy, greedy, gluttonous, lecher.
There’s always been disagreement about how to rank most of these seven sins, but Pride seems to top everyone’s list. Overwhelming Pride, you recall, was what drove Lucifer, the brightest of angels, to rebel against God. The 17th century Protestant poet, John Milton, wrote Paradise Lost, an epic that has some great scenes featuring the rebellion in Heaven. When your opponent is God, the odds are truly stacked against you and you may wonder if Lucifer really thought he had a chance of taking over Heaven. In any case, he was thrown from that high place, fell for three days and nights and landed in Hell where, in fact, he made himself at home. Both Dante and Milton are experts on the subject of God, sin and hell. Milton quotes the fallen angel Mammon as saying that it’s “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven”
And then there’s that episode in the Garden of Eden. The Serpent, you remember, ruined the famously weak-willed couple by telling Eve that if she and Adam ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge “your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” It sure is tempting to be like the gods. So again it was Pride, the desire to be higher up, even if it’s forbidden by God, that causes a catastrophe.
When Dante enters hell and starts his descent he finds that hell is constructed rather like a large sports stadium. No, Dante doesn’t use that comparison, but if haven’t gotten around to reading the poem, that image will give you a good sense of Hell’s geography. Hell has concentric circles that funnel downward; the least sinful souls are in the topmost circle, and as you descend from level to level you encounter worse and worse sinners. The lowest pit of hell is actually frozen over — the sinners down there committed sins of cold-blooded intellect. Up near the top, where the sinners are less sinful, Dante meets Paolo and Francesca, a hot-blooded couple who succumbed to Lust. As punishment, the errant lovers are blown this way and that by winds that mimic gusts of erotic passion. Pride, arrogant pride, is the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins and you can sometimes see it on grand display during campaigns for political office. Lust, on the other hand, is the least deadly. There may be some consolation in that.
