In Memoriam: Hitch

As I said on Friday, Christopher Hitchens will live for a long time in the memories of his many friends. The first remembrance I read was that of Sam Harris, titled simply "Hitch":

There was simply no one like him...Hitch produced more fine work, read more books, met more interesting people, and won more arguments than most of us could in several centuries. [–The Blog]

And, this morning, reprinted in a local newspaper from The Washington Post was Kathleen Parker's "There was just one Hitch":

To say I was a friend of Hitchens would be an exaggeration, though I did enjoy the pleasure of his company on several occasions. But one needn’t have known a writer to mourn his passing or to feel profound sadness about all the silent days to come. No matter what the topic, I always wanted to know what Hitchens thought about it, and, lucky for the world, he seemed always willing to end the suspense....
    Among the many things that made Hitchens unique was his precision of thought and expression. What made him rare were his courage and tenacity. He was fearless in the field and relentless in his defense of the defenseless with that mightiest of swords—his pen. Judging from his final essays, he was also fearless in the face of death. Terrified that he might lose his ability to write and therefore his being? Well, that was something else.

And Ms. Parker referred to yet another remembrance, that in The New Yorker by whom she calls "The Other Christopher" (Christopher Buckley), "Postscript: Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011. It begins thus:

We were friends for more than thirty years, which is a long time but, now that he is gone, seems not nearly long enough. I was rather nervous when I first met him, one night in London in 1977, along with his great friend Martin Amis. I had read his journalism and was already in awe of his brilliance and wit and couldn’t think what on earth I could bring to his table. I don’t know if he sensed the diffidence on my part—no, of course he did; he never missed anything—but he set me instantly at ease, and so began one of the great friendships and benisons of my life. It occurs to me that "benison" is a word I first learned from Christopher, along with so much else.

And, brought to my attention by an email just read from a friend, Robert Scheer's "Christopher Hitchens: Reason in Revolt," on Reader Supported News:

...This was a man unafraid of intellectual challenge and committed to pursuing the heart of the matter.
    That was his driving force, a seeker of truth to the end, and a deservedly legendary witness against the hypocrisy of the ever-sanctimonious establishment. What zeal this man had to eviscerate the conceits of the powerful, whether their authority derived from wealth, the state, or a claim to the ear of the divine.

Gentle creatures

Two doves in a tree

Before I read Andrew D. Bleckman's 2006 book, Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World's Most Revered and Reviled Bird, I would have called the gentle birds doves who frequently visit our back yard (usually ten or twelve at a time). I spotted two of them this morning in the trees behind our house (about seventy-five yards from my lens).

Although a pigeon and a dove are the same bird, the more delicate members of the family are called doves, while the seemingly less graceful members of Columbidae are also called pigeons..."Dove" has come to mean petite and pure. Colloquial usage of the word "pigeon," on the other hand, emphasizes the bird's docile nature and places it in a negative light. "Stool pigeon" is synonymous with stooge, and to be "pigeonholed" is to be arbitrarily stereotyped in a disparaging manner....
    Despite this linguistic bias, the unassuming pigeon is truly special. It doesn't live in trees but prefers nesting on rocky ledges (although a window ledge will do just fine)...It breeds enthusiastically in captivity and is naturally gregarious, enjoying the company of its own kind.... [pp. 7-8]

If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men. –St. Francis [ibid., p.i]

Direct focus

(original—click to enlarge)

Focusing the fieldscope after swinging the camera-mounting platform away 90° afforded better results this morning (than focusing through the camera monitor last Sunday). The trees were about a hundred yards from the setup (Nikon ED50 fieldscope, Nikon camera attachment FSB-U1, and Nikon Coolpix P300 camera).
 
 
    Limb density lent itself wonderfully to various filtering treatments in Photoshop:

(Filter: colored pencil)

(Filter: water color)

(Filter: cutout)

(Filter: fresco)

(Filter: poster edges)

(Filter: rough pastels)

    As did the photo of woodpecker holes:

(original)

(Filter: cutout)

(Filter: dry brush)

(Filter: smudge stick)

I also experimented with a magnification loupe, only to find that it offers me no advantage—especially after laser surgery yesterday on my right eye (the one I have to use with the camera swung away to the right). Sharp, sharp, sharp. (My doctor removed some occluding membrane from behind the lens he inserted two years ago by cataract surgery. The procedure is known to practitioners as "Nd:YAG laser posterior capsulotomy for cataracts.")

Here's the setup:

Wave clouds

Wave cloud
over Birmingham

Raleigh weather forecaster Mike Maze, who broadcasts on WRAL-TV, showed us some photographs of "wave clouds"^* yesterday evening.
    More photos on his Facebook page.
    And many more on the Internet at large.
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* A wave cloud is...created by atmospheric internal waves. [Wikipedia]

Christopher Hitchens is dead. Long live Christopher Hitchens*

Christopher Hitchens died yesterday, the day after I noted that he insisted he was living with cancer, not dying of it. Technically, he died of pneumonia, according to his obituary in The New York Times.
    His intellectual throne will not be empty. It will yet awhile be occupied by his published works and memories of him in the minds of his many friends and associates.
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* The King is dead. Long live the King is...a traditional proclamation made following the accession of a new monarch...The phrase arose from the law...that the transfer of sovereignty occurs instantaneously upon the moment of death of the previous monarch...The throne shall never be empty; the country shall never be without a monarch. [Wikipedia]

Christopher Hitchens's new commandments

Front of dust jacket

Standing at the counter in UNC's undergraduate library last week, waiting to pick up the book I was told was being held for me, I could see across the way the relatively few books there for pick-up. One stood out, its broad spine in bright yellow (as in most libraries, the dust jacket had been removed). Must be four inches wide, I said to myself. I hope that isn't it. I was already carrying the book I'd commuted with that day and I was hoping for this new book to be of normal size.
    But the yellow book it was: Christopher Hitchens's most recent collection of essays, Arguably, which was listed in Sunday's New York Times Book Review as one of the five best non-fiction books of 2011. Of the book the Times says:

Our intellectual omnivore's latest collection could be his last (he's dying of esophageal cancer [note: Hitchens has insisted that he's living with it, not dying of it]). The book is almost 800 pages, contains more than 100 essays, and addresses a ridiculously wide range of topics, including Afghanistan, Harry Potter, Thomas Jefferson, waterboarding, Henry VIII, Saul Bellow, and the Ten Commandments, which Hitchens helpfully revises.

"Ridiculously wide range" is admiringly ironic, of course. The first two essays I read were about Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ezra Pound.
    The third was about the Ten Commandments. Hitchens begins this essay by trying to identify just which commandments the Ten are, "since the giving of the divine Law by Moses appears in three or four wildly different scriptural versions." [p. 414] Having settled on the "first and most famous set...in Exodus 20," which "ends with Moses himself smashing the supposedly most sacred artifacts known to man," Hitchens proceeds to review each.
    For example, Commandment VI, Thou shalt not kill.

We can be fairly sure that the "original intent" is not in any way pacifistic, because immediately after he breaks the original tablets in a fit of rage, Moses summons the Levite faction and says (Exodus 32:27-28):

Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor. And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.

The whole book of Exodus is...littered with other fierce orders to slay people for numberless minor offenses (including violations of the Sabbath) and also includes the sinister, ominous verse "Thou shalt not suffer [permit] [Hitchens's comment] a witch to live," which was taken as a divine instruction by Christians until relatively recently in human history. Some work is obviously needed here: What is a first-degree or third-degree killing and what isn't? Distinguishing killing from murder is not a job easily left to mortals: What are we to do if God himself can't tell the difference? [p. 417]

Hitchens concludes the essay with a quiet statement of some ethical principles for today:

It's difficult to take oneself with sufficient seriousness to begin any sentence with the words "Thou shalt not." But who cannot summon the confidence to say: Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color. Do not ever use people as private property. Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature—why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them? Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly. Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife. Turn off that fucking cell phone—you have no idea how unimportant your call is to us. Denounce all jihad-ists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions. Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above. In short: Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form. [pp. 421-422]

    Here endeth the reading for today.
    And reading that concluding paragraph makes me wish that I could have written my own New Ten Commandments so flowingly well. Not even numbered! And I feel no compunction to count them.

Oh, one more thing. The book isn't four inches thick. It's only two and three-eighths. It must be that bright yellow spine.
    What essay shall I read next? Maybe the one in which Hitchens describes being waterboarded for the purpose of journalistic research.

Filthy bird feeder exposed through digiscoping

Today's bird picture is so much better than previous photos of backyard birds, I can clearly see now that we need to steam-clean the filthy feeder. Probably just replace it.
 

That photo and the photo below were taken with a Nikon Coolpix P300 mounted to a Nikon ED50 fieldscope. The tree was about seventy-five yards away.
    Neither photo is quite optimally sharp¹, because I focused the fieldscope looking at the camera's monitor rather than looking through the fieldscope's eyepiece (after swinging the camera platform away from it). I'll do it properly the next time I go digiscoping.

In the course of becoming more familiar with the P300, I discovered that it can also take panorama shots, either 180- or 360-degree. A fluid-motion video tripod lends itself well to this application. Set the vertical plane to stiff and slowly rotate the camera 180 or 360 degrees². The result is a very wide photo, which displays slowly in the camera monitor with photo height equal to monitor height—displayed from left to right, or right to left, depending on which direction the camera was rotated for the shot.
    Another thing I discovered is that it's easy to lay the P300 down someplace and not be able to find it quickly, it's so small.
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1. A photographer friend (who prefers to use a telephoto lens on his camera) points out how shallow a fieldscope's depth of field is. He thinks I did pretty well getting a focused photo, and suggests that the use of a magnifier loupe (held to the fieldscope's eyepiece) might facilitate the sharpest possible focus.
2. A vertical panorama shot is also possible, for a tall building or cliff, for example.

Getting in the car is the last thing you should do

The worst threat of personal violence I have experienced occurred in the eighth grade. It followed my grabbing back my baseball cap from classmate Barry Ballew, who had just lifted it off my head. Barry looked at me in a way that I still believe can be fairly described as malevolent (I can see his eyes yet in memory, after more than fifty-five years). After school, Barry charged at me and I tore off for home. I was clearly faster than Barry and he soon gave up and turned back to school.
    That was it. Next day Barry had cooled down, and I never heard any more about it. I've never been mugged, never had my house invaded. I've never been confronted by another driver in road rage, although I witnessed an incident once. After parking at work in California, I was surprised to see another employee who was driving in being followed at high speed by another car. The driver of the second car got out, ran to the employee's car, pulled open the door, dragged the driver out, and punched him a couple of times. I'm glad he then got back into his car and drove off, for I don't know what I would have done.
    But what if I were confronted by a mugger, or someone invaded my house while we were home?

What would you do? What would you do if you were accosted in a dark parking lot by someone who said, "Get in the car, and you won’t get hurt"?
    Well, getting in the car is the last thing you should do, according to author Sam Harris in his blog article, "The Truth about Violence: 3 Principles of Self-Defense." I highly recommend it to you; it could save your life. An excerpt:

However bad your options may appear in the moment, complying with the demands of a person who is seeking to control your movements is a terrible idea. Yes, there are criminals whose only goal is to steal your property. But anyone who attempts to control you—by moving you to another room, putting you in a car, tying you up—probably intends to kill you (or worse). And you must understand in advance that your natural reaction to this situation—to freeze, to comply with instructions—will be the wrong one.

Precocious shopper overheard

"And what are you buying," the store clerk said to the three-year-old girl whose mother had just paid cash for a couple of items.
    "I'm buying a bracelet," the girl said, flawlessly.
    "And how will you be paying for that?"
    "My charger count."
    The girl's mother laughed. "Now, honey, you know you don't have a 'charger count.'"
    "But, Mommie, you know we have your ready-card."

Think fast, or think slowly?

Daniel Kahneman (b. 1934)

Sometimes we know intuitively exactly the right thing to do.
    When a lot rides on our response, and we have time to reflect, we might be advised to examine more closely what our intuitions tell us. The statement below, from psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on decision-making with Amos Tversky (1937-1996), was elicited by the following question from Sam Harris (as reported on Harris's blog): "Much of your work focuses on the limitations of human intuition. Do you have any advice about when people should be especially hesitant to trust their intuitions?"
    Daniel Kahneman replied:

[People should be especially hesitant to trust their intuitions] when the stakes are high. We have no reason to expect the quality of intuition to improve with the importance of the problem. Perhaps the contrary: High-stake problems are likely to involve powerful emotions and strong impulses to action. If there is no time to reflect, then intuitively guided action may be better than freezing or paralysis, especially for the experienced decision maker. If there is time to reflect, slowing down is likely to be a good idea. The effort invested in “getting it right” should be commensurate with the importance of the decision.

    Failure to heed this advice (or failure to be hesitant without having heard it) led to the folk wisdom, "Act in haste, repent at leisure." There are, of course, a number of variations, to suit the purpose: "Sin in haste, repent at leisure," "Marry in haste, repent at leisure,"¹ even "Regulate in haste, repent at leisure"....
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1. 

   William Cowper
   by Lemuel Francis Abbott

   From William Congreve's comedy of manners, The Old Batchelour, 1693:

   Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure:
   Married in haste, we may repent at leisure.

Hope for sea animals' rights

Great to see a marine animal featured in this photograph of the latest Miss North Carolina, Sydney Perry, 21, a senior at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, who is reported to be majoring in marine biology. The Wilmington Star News Online reports that Ms. Perry won the Miss NC USA pageant in High Point on November 12 and will compete in the Miss USA pageant next year.

In the universe's own image

Lynn Margulis,
mother of her co-author,
science writer Dorion Sagan,
the son of Carl Sagan 

I've found reading harder and harder of late, not sure why.Visually, it's a bit challenging. I get fidgety trying to sit still. There's so much more I'd rather be doing, even trying to sit still enough at my computer to do my "daily blog."
    But what a difference to pick up a book that compels me to read it. Such is Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan's book Microcosmos, which I introduced yesterday. From Chapter 1, here's a paragraph that begins below a simplified table labeled "Geological Time Scale," which names the aeons, eras, periods and epochs from 4,500 millions of years ago (when Planet Earth was formed) to 0 millions of years ago (an interesting way to characterize "now"):

Over the first million years of expansion after the Big Bang, the universe cooled from 100 billion degrees Kelvin, as estimated by physicist Steven Weinberg, to about 3,000 degrees K, the point at which a single electron and proton could join to create hydrogen, the simplest and most abundant element in the universe. Hydrogen coalesced into supernovae—enormous clouds that over billions of years contracted from cosmic to submicrocosmic densities. Under the sheer force of gravity, the cores of the supernnovae became so hot that thermonuclear reactions were fired, creating from hydrogen and various disparate subatomic particles all the heavier elements in the universe that we know today. The richness of hydrogen is in our bodies still—we contain more hydrogen than any other kind—primarily in water. Our bodies of hydrogen mirror a universe of hydrogen. [emphasis mine; pp. 40-41]

That image reminds me of the haunting final paragraph of Lewis Thomas's foreword to Microcosmos, a meditation on language, with which his 1974 book, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, was well supplied:

Perhaps we have had a shared hunch about our real origin longer than we think. It is there like a linguistic fossil, buried in the ancient root from which we take our species' name. The word for earth, at the beginning of the Indoeuropean language thousands of years ago (no one knows for sure how long ago) was dhghem. From this word, meaning simply earth, came our word humus, the handiwork of soil bacteria. Also, to teach us a lesson, humble, human, and humane. There is the outline of a philosophical parable here; some of the details are filled in by this book. [p. 12]

    I would enjoy reading The Lives of a Cell again.

Waiting for the real human article

Lewis Thomas (1913-1993)

"We used to believe," wrote Lewis Thomas in 1986, in the foreword to Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors, by Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) and Dorion Sagan,

that we arrived de novo, set in place by the Management, maybe not yet dressed but ready anyway to name all the animals. Then, after Darwin, we had to face up to the embarrassment of having apes somewhere in the family tree, with chimps as cousins.
    ..."Man's Place in Nature"...[was to] fix Nature up, improving it so that the world's affairs might move along more agreeably; how to extract more of the earth's energy resources, how to preserve certain areas of wilderness for our pleasure [emphasis mine], how to avoid polluting the waterways, how to control the human population, things of that order. The general sense was that Nature is a piece of property, an inheritance, owned and operated by mankind, a sort of combination park, zoo, and kitchen garden.
    This is still the easy way to look at the world...now we seem to be everywhere, running everything, pole to pole, mountain peaks to deep sea trenches, colonizing the moon and eyeing the solar system. The very brains of the earth. The pinnacle of evolution, the most stunning of biological successes, here to stay forever.
    But there is another way to look at us, and this book is the guide for that look. In evolutionary terms, we have only just arrived. There may be a younger species than ours, here and there, but none on our scale, surely none so early on in their development. We cannot trace ourselves back more than a few thousand years before losing sight of what we think of as the real human article, language-speaking, song-singing, tool-making, fire-warming, comfortable, war-making mankind. As a species we are juvenile, perhaps just beginning to develop, still learning to be human, an immature child of the species. And vulnerable, error-prone still, at risk of leaving only a thin layer of radioactive fossils. [pp. 10-11]

"The real human article" is, for me, an evocative phrase. I don't think the real article has arrived yet. It would be much more advanced morally, however advanced technologically it thinks it already is.  It would have developed social and political contexts in which, more or less universally, individuals subscribed to something like the New Ten Commandments and A Declaration of Animal Rights.
    But I fear that the real article will never arrive, given mankind's brief but already evidently disastrous record of success in polluting the planet and of failure to control human population. Mankind seems not to be going to have sufficient time to grow up.
    No laughter attends today's reflection.
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Footnote: For additional quotations from Microcosmos, see the eleventh comment on "Don't forget that you are..." (February 24, 2011).

Laughter, too, as well as love and learning

Story behind photo

As a result of writing yesterday's post—or rather of dislodging its concluding joke ("It's probably because of all the meat they eat")—I have added "laughter" to Moristotle's masthead. Its tag used to read, "An ironic celebration of evolved life, love, and learning on Earth."
    Now the masthead says, "An ironic celebration of evolved life, love, laughter, and learning on Earth."

And how do we celebrate laughter?
    By more laughing, of course.
    Same as we properly celebrate love by loving, life by living, and learning by continuing to learn.
    Fortunately, the best learning comes from loving and living, especially when we can laugh about it.
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Footnote: The photo initially published with this post came from a quick google, which netted a group of anonymous, mixed-race, but all young people. To me, at the time, it was a photo of laughing people. Nevertheless, I decided to replace the photo with my favorite one of myself laughing. I guess it could be titled, "Laughing Oldster."

    Here's the first photo I considered using. I didn't decide against it because the individual laughing isn't human. He (she?) is higher-animal enough for me. But somehow we can't be entirely sure that that is a laugh, we are that different from chimpanzees.

Lost in the numbers

About for days ago (maybe it was five), I noticed that one of our coffee cups was missing, and I mentioned it to my wife this morning as I was putting some dishes into the washer after breakfast.
    She started to count the cups in that pattern, but I said she needn't bother, I was sure that there were only five in the kitchen now.
    She wondered what had happened to the sixth cup, then? Had she set it down some place? She went to look in the spots where she might have done that.
    While she was out of the kitchen, I looked again in the refrigerator—sometimes we set a cup in there.
    Still not there.
    I looked in the free-standing cupboard. Still not there either. (At least, I think I'd already looked there, too—at least once.)
    She returned and said she didn't seem to have set it down anywhere. Had I set it down? How about upstairs (in the "loft" above the garage where my computer is), or out in the shed (where I had recently installed some electrical wiring)?
    I'd looked in these places already also, and the cup was still in neither place.

Okay, then, she said, if we hadn't set it down someplace, what about Joaquin¹? He's the man who cleans our house once a week. He may be the best, most reliable cleaner my wife has ever engaged, but he has nevertheless broken a number of items, including, she says, all of her little ceramic "California Missions" coaster tiles.
    Well, it was possible, of course, that Joaquin had broken it. If so, it would be characteristic of him not to mention it. If it had been broken into smithereens, he might simply have discarded it.
    Still, surely not. We didn't want to believe it.

But if not Joaquin, then, what about André? He'd come over to help us get Thanksgiving over with for another year.
    Could André have taken it when he left?
    No, André could never have done that. Anyway, he left on Friday, and I was pretty sure there had been six cups on Saturday and Sunday. Nevertheless, I went into the guestroom to check whether he might have left it sitting on the nightstand.
    No, not there either.
    I went back into the kitchen to finish loading the dishwasher. Why not count one more time? I asked myself.
    Okay, there are two in the cupboard to the right of the stove. And, in the dishwasher, one, two, three,...four!?

I told my wife the sixth cup had just turned up. "It had just gotten lost temporarily in the numbers," I said.
    "You're probably not getting enough Vitamin B-12," she said. "The vegetarian kick...."
    I thought, but didn't say it, that I was probably eating enough meat. When André was here, she told me that if I didn't eat any turkey, I couldn't have anything else either. No sweet potatoes, no Brussels sprouts and tomatoes, no.... And no pumpkin pie.
    Of course I ate some turkey. Besides, as I've told my readers, I routinely compromise the moral principle of respecting other animals' right to life for the sake of the moral principle of not dishonoring my meal provider by refusing her offerings. (But, as I've also told my readers, I sometimes doubt whether I can honorably justify that compromise. I continue in a quandary over this.)

Things often get lost, or found, in the numbers—the loss or the finding conjured from the whole cloth of imperfect thought.
    When I believed in God, I was but finding him in the numbers. He was nowhere to be found in extra-mental reality.
    Just as I finally discovered that the cup was only missing in the numbers, so did I finally realize that God was only to be found there too, and not worth such finding.
    Most people (a majority of Americans, anyway) are patently more successful in performing that conjuring trick than I was.
    It's probably because of all the meat they eat.
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1. Not his real name