Because of the Present Crisis
2025/03/08
There is piece in the March 3rd New Yorker The End of Children that discusses the pervasive global phenomenon of declining birthrates. Particular attention is given to South Korea, which is presented as the future we are all converging towards. Not just sparse of children, but actively intolerant of children when they are around.
The whole subject is fraught, for very good reasons. One paragraph contained the following sentences which aroused particular scorn from some.
For most of human history, having children was something the majority of people simply did without thinking too much about it. Now it is one competing alternative among many.
I think this is a good example of how an otherwise careful writer can suddenly commit an infelicity. I don’t think they actually mean to say that child bearing was done casually or thoughtlessly, or that the dangers of childbirth weren’t real and weighed on the minds of those involved. The more generous interpretation is that we weren’t so preoccupied with the meta-game of reproduction.
But I think even that is wrong. There is nothing unprecedented with a preoccupation with the question of our species reproducing. Take the following from Lucy Woodling’s review of Lower Than The Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity in the LRB.
St Jerome lambasted the young widow Furia, seemingly apoplectic at the thought she might remarry: she had, after all, already encountered ‘the miseries of marriage’, which he described as ‘unwholesome food’. ‘Perhaps you are afraid that your noble race will die out,’ he wrote, ‘and your father will not have a brat to crawl about his shoulders and smear his neck with filth.’ The family values of fourth-century Christianity were not all they might have been.
If you have spent any time with the New Testament you may remember the apostle Paul calling upon the unmarried to remain so.
Now about virgins: I have no command from the Lord, but I give a judgment as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy. Because of the present crisis, I think that it is good for a man to remain as he is. Are you pledged to a woman? Do not seek to be released. Are you free from such a commitment? Do not look for a wife. (1 Corinthians 7:25-27)
If the past 2000 years still feels a little recent, remember that in Exodus, Pharaoh became concerned that the Israelite slaves had become a little too numerous under Egyptian subjugation and decides to thin them out by slaughtering newborns. And if you want to look beyond the Bible, the general abundance of fertility gods and fertility cults suggest that we have always been a little nutty about the reproduction of our species.
What's The Time, Mr Wolf?
2025/01/22
I have only ever set my watch to the closest minute, never feeling the need to get those pesky seconds correct. The clock on my phone doesn’t even give seconds, so, without a watch, I’m not even losing any degree of accuracy. You don’t have to manually set a smart phone’s time, and I’ve always assumed that modern smartphone time was accurate.
My current wristwatch is the popular Casio W800HG, which promises a ten year battery life, a light up display, and water resistance up to 100m. Amazon reviewer “onwa” (verified purchase) reports that, on average, time on the watch drifts by a little more than a second each week. Is that good?
For most of my day to day activity this degree of accuracy is perfectly good. In my work, we deal with time to the tenth of a millisecond when looking at latency of an internet connection, so by this standard it would very poor. Looking back into history, for George Harrison – inventor of the first marine chronometer – and generations of seafarers, that difference is worth 0.25 degrees of longitude. A degree of longitude is the equivalent of sixty nautical miles at the equator, so after a months sailing you might be out by quite some distance in your tracking, and possibly out of pocket. Losing a degree of longitude would have put John Harrison you out of the running for even third place prize set in the Longitude Act (1714) by the British government.
Latitude, by Dava Sobel, is the story of the creation of accurate clocks. That is to say accurate in all possible conditions. A maritime chronometer, as they became known, needs to be accurate when exposed to changing temperatures, pressures, movement, and even variation in gravity itself that such a device can expect to be exposed to when sailing the globe. While latitude could be easily computed with a sextant and the sun at noon, longitude is far more difficult. There were essentially two candidate strategies. The first was to develop a more sophisticated system of astronomical observations. The second was to build the reliable maritime chronometer. The first option appealed to those who enjoyed astronomy (and there were many indeed in the 17th and 18th centuries), the second would be far simpler and appeal to the sailors who would use them.
John Harrison was the “Lone Genius” horologist who rose to the challenge. Most of Sobel’s books is devoted to his life, his clocks, his genius, and most of all his difficulty claiming the longitude prize, even as his clocks won over the sailors who navigated by them. In part, this was due to Harrison’s own perfectionism, and partly this was due to Big Astronomy’s certainty that clocks could not be the right solution when the stars were surely the most reliable guides.
Longitude seems to believe that the reader will be hooked on the injustices Harrison suffered in trying to claim the prize that was rightfully his. Who doesn’t enjoy a frustrated genius? But Longitude is at it’s best when it manages to get away from this tired narrative arc. I like personalities as much as the next man or woman, but the petty squabbles just read as tiresome. There is so much richer material here. The chapter devoted to describing the world before ready access to latitude alone is captivating. Then there are actual challenges involved in making a reliable chronometer, which I will generously assume involves so much of interest – history, science, and culture – that Sobel is simply preventing it taking over the book completely. Then there is the subsequent popularization of reliable pocketwatches as craftsmen developed the means to start producing them, if not in mass, at least in serious numbers. This discussion, which comes at the end, begs the question of how we get from there, to here, and the clock on my smart phone.
The state of the art in timekeeping is the atomic clock, which uses the quivering, shivering idiosyncrasies of physics at the molecular level to keep track of the seconds. International Atomic Time is kept by over 450 of these clocks distributed across 80 national laboratories. My phone plays its own version of What’s The Time, Mr Wolf with these atomic clocks, getting sporadic updates to maintain its own pizoelectric crystal. But while an atomic clock can be accurate to 10^-16 seconds, time.gov tells me that my phone is 1.889s out. In nautical terms, that could be a shipwreck.
Podsnappery
2024/10/18
If you spend long enough in academia and if you try hard enough, then you will get to taste the injustice of having your very good work rejected, out of hand, with inscrutable rational, by some fancy journal. The correct way to respond is not to respond at all. This is the professional response. But what would you have to say, if you really could respond without fear of professional consequences?
In the 1960s, the neurologist Oliver Sacks had success treating patients with encephalitis lethargica or “sleeping sickness” with a new drug, L-DOPA. Some of these patients had been in a coma-like state for over 40 years, and the treatment he was trying had a dramatic effect, awakening them from their dormancy. He wrote a book about it, and the book became a movie. The movie won an Oscar. His work was not well received by the Journal of the American Medical Association, however.
Last month the New Yorker printed a selection of Sacks’ letters from this period, including a response to the rejection of his manuscript.
I need scarcely say that I was at first distressed, and even shocked, that innumerable observations based on years of daily contact with patients . . . could be so ignorantly and wantonly dismissed, or “wished away”: the attitude immortalized in Dickens’ Mr. Podsnap (“I don’t want to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t admit it!” . . . ). Your consultant(s) do not make . . . any substantive criticisms of my work, and have therefore descended . . . into petty jibing, pomposity, vapid rhetoric—in a word, Podsnappery. Indeed, if I did not know it directly, I could infer the importance of my own work from the very intensity of this threatened, denying, and defensive reaction. . . .
Another thing we lost, perhaps, with the end of hand written correspondence.