Philosophical Easter Egg

Today I found an Easter egg on the internet! (No, not the chocolate or candy-filled kind. That would be hard to download.) What I mean is, I found totally unlooked-for hidden treasure of a philosophical nature!

I was reading a science blog that mentioned science writing and linked to a writing blog that mentioned a writing epiphany had while watching OMG Alan Watts Philosophical Discourses on YouTube I Love You!!

Here it is: Part 7 - Recollection

(seriously I love you)

So have you watched it yet? I'm not gonna lay it all out for you, but it deals with the fundamental nature of existence and taxi cabs. Watch it. Watch all of them.

Transitory

Today Venus will transit the Sun (i.e. pass in front of it for our viewing pleasure). There are a lot of things that could be said about this event and it is certainly a great opportunity for astronomical public outreach. Locally we will have a bunch of telescopes for public viewing, starting with talks by both Nobel Laureates and scientists who actually study transiting planets.

But the Deep Thought I have been struck by is how a lot of the attention is focused on how this is the "Last Transit of Venus any of us will see in our lifetimes" (as the announcement e-mail of our own outreach event states). Where was all the hubbub during the 2004 transit? Obviously that wasn't as cool. Venus must always be transiting the Sun if there's another event in 8 years. But now, it's the Last Chance. If you don't see it now you won't have another chance because you will be dead!

I think this is an example of a common phenomenon. Things that happen all the time are boring. Things that happen rarely are much more interesting. Things that will only happen one more time before you die are even more awesome and I don't think it's because of a morbid fascination with our own mortality, but rather a life-affirming fascination with our own mortality.

Transitory events remind us of our own transitory-ness and that Hey, we better start paying attention to things while we still can! The universe is a fascinating place in which Cool Things Happen instead of a boring place in which nothing changes! Sweet!

So I hope you enjoy it along with all the other things happening in this transitory event called Life.

I just want to feel everything

When I need to sing, I listen to Fiona Apple. By now I have mostly memorized her first two albums (3rd was less impressive) - not only is she awesome, but she sings in my range and with such emotion, and when I need to sing, it is usually related to emotions. So I was excited to hear her new song, Every Single Night, which is particularly awesome and which prompted me to get tickets to her show (and I never go to shows). I like the sparsity of the instrumentation, the accents of percussion, and the sudden fullness of vocals when she sings "brain" in the chorus. This was a new Fiona Apple and I was very excited.

And then I read the lyrics! It turns out that this song expresses much of my life. From worrying way too much about what other people are thinking, to not being able to go to sleep unless I can distract myself from the constant barrage of my thoughts, to "I just want to feel everything."

In the song, this is first expressed in terms of a curse or a burden. "The pain comes in" and "I can't fit the feelings in. Every single night's alight with my brain." Then, "my breast's gonna bust open... I just made a meal for us both to choke on. Every single night's a fight with my brain." Opening yourself up to the multitude of feelings, the immensity, is a difficult and painful process. Most of the time when I realize what I'm doing (worrying) I wish it would stop, but it doesn't. So I fight with my brain and continue to worry, and try to go to sleep.

But after a while, "maybe I'd relax; let my breast just bust open. My heart's made of parts of all that surround me... Every single night's alright..." This acceptance of the abundance of feeling occurs much less often than the worrying. Even though I identify with the concept of opening the heart (chakra) and feeling everything, it is not a sustainable state of being. You can't experience the "pure being ball thing" all the time, and so you get swept back into the drama of human suffering - or what I like to call being alive.  So it is fitting that what the phrase "I just want to feel everything" reminds me of is when the souls in the Golden Compass trilogy finally die:

They... held out their arms as if they were embracing the whole universe; and then, as if they were made of mist or smoke, they simply drifted away, becoming part of the earth and the dew and the night breeze.

- Phillip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (emphasis mine)

What I wouldn't give to embrace the whole universe. If that only happens when you die, then that is my version of heaven. I just want to feel everything!

Elvish is Easy

The hardest part of writing something in Elvish is figuring out what to say.

Once you've done that, everything else just follows naturally. First, you have to see if there is a reasonable translation. (Remember, it's Elvish, there are no words for spaceship.) Obviously Sindarin is the specific language to go with, as it is the primary language of the elves in Middle-Earth (most of the high elves having gone over the sea into the West) - but if you are going to be particularly poetical or if you want to translate a wizard's spell, Quenya might be worth the effort. Either way, simply look up your words in an online dictionary (Sindarin or Quenya (pdf)) and write them down for later. This is your starting point, but if you simply string these words together you would sound like a crass dwarf. Elvish is anything but crass.

The next step is to consult this guidebook to figure out how to pluralize your nouns, conjugate your verbs, and especially how each word might be changed based on what other word is before or after, known as lenition or soft mutation. This is all really quite simple. If you want to say "friends", change the "o" in mellon to "y" and there you have it: mellyn nin, "my friends". You don't have to change the "e" to "i" because it occurs in the first syllable. If you want to say something about Ents, both "o"'s in Onod get mutated, the first to "e" and the second to "y" to get Enyd (but sometimes the first "o" is not mutated, so you will just have to know when it is right to do it). However, if you are talking about the Ents as a people, instead of just two or more Ents, you don't pluralize any vowels but instead add -rim to get Onodrim. Similarly Amon for "hill" gets changed to Emyn for "hills" as in the Emyn Muil. You get the point. Quite easy.

Now if you want to say "my friends" in the middle of the sentence instead of the beginning - such as in the King's Letter: e aníra ennas suilannad mhellyn în, "he wishes there to greet his friends" - you must add a soft mutation to change the "m" to "mh" (or usually "v", of which "mh" is a nasal variant). Most other consonants are lenited when preceded by a vowel, such as the article i meaning "the": "the friend" becomes i vellon.* Also, p, t, and c become b, d, and g while b and d become v and dh (which is voiced th), and g drops altogether as in Galadriel's opening words in the FOTR movie: a han noston ned 'wilith, "and I can smell it in the air", where the word for "air" is gwilith. This is all very straightforward. Now your set of Sindarin words may bear only a vague resemblance to the initial Sindarin words you had from the dictionary. But you probably shouldn't have tried to mutate your nouns before dealing with the verbs.

* Of course "the friends" becomes i mellyn since the plural article in triggers the nasal mutation which changes in to i before an "m", since of course "m" is already nasal, whereas in + gelaidh becomes i ngelaidh ("the trees"). Obviously.

First figure out what kind of verb you have, whether it is a derived verb (called A-stem because they end in "a"), or the more complex basic verb (I-stem because their present tense ends in "i" though they usually have no suffix), and of course notice whether your A-stem verb has a mixed conjugation or whether it is irregular. As you can see, it should be quite obvious which type of verb you have. Then simply follow the rules and conjugate to your heart's content, paying attention to the pronoun you require. So for example, the present tense of nosta- above is identical to the word itself: nosta, "smell", but to say "I smell" you add the ending -n, which changes the "a" to "o": han noston, "I smell it". This should all go without saying.

I will of course assume that you have all read the pronunciation guide in the back of The Silmarillion and have not been butchering the language by saying mae govannen as "may" instead of the correct "mai". That means it will be quite easy to take your Sindarin sentence and transliterate to one of the runic alphabets, such as the blocky Cirth preferred for stone work, and by the dwarves, or the more elegant Tengwar such as appears on the One Ring. The tengwar are created by combining telcor (stems) and lúvar (bows) based on where the sound is spoken in the mouth and whether it is voiced or voiceless (see figure). Then of course there are additional letters, which can be written both normally or upside-down, but that should pose no difficulty.

Double letters (such as "nn" in govannen) aren't written twice but are instead denoted by adding a special symbol under the letter, and nasalized letters have a symbol over the top. The vowel sounds also have their symbols placed on top (or under) the consonant preceding (Quenya) or following (Sindarin) the vowel. When there is no available consonant carrier, a special short or long carrier is used, based on whether the vowel sound should be short or long. This is all so logical that you have probably derived it from first principles already, but I mention it here for clarity.

Now all you need to do is download some true type fonts for tengwar, of which there are many. If you are going to put your Elvish phrase into your Ph.D. thesis, for example, it will also help to have a LaTeX package that will place your choice of font neatly into your pdf, and all you have to do is type out the Quenya names for all of the letters and symbols that go into your words.

There you have it. Was that so hard?

The Face of Racism

The killing of Trayvon Martin has been on my mind all week. Monday I read the stories and listened to the 911 calls in shock and horror. How has his killer not yet been charged? How has such a thing happened? He was only a child in a hoodie wielding a bag of skittles, which has contributed to there being a national outcry over the incident. How many times has a similar thing happened to a grown man that we have not heard about?

The sad thing is, it is all too easy to understand. As many blog posts have explained, this is the cost of being a young black man in America today. Some people have questioned whether this is about race, perhaps because the killer was latino... but white people are not the only ones capable of racism. We as a people need to be aware that this is the face of racism in America today, both individually and on a systemic level: it is less often about outright discrimination and more often about subtle unconscious biases that are never examined.

George Zimmerman didn't think to himself, "I hate black people so I am going to kill this boy," though those crimes still happen; he saw a person he identified as suspicious, was angry that "These assholes always get away," and took it on himself to.... well, to commit violent murder! I am at my limit of trying to understand how people can do these things and convince themselves they were in the right; how people can blame the killing on a hoodie; how the police can "correct" a witness, take a killer at his word, and hold themselves blameless. I can no longer find it fascinating to try to understand their intentions. It is easy to understand. This is the face of racism, operating on a subconscious level, and we as a people need to grow up and deal with it.

What that requires is a lot of personal responsibility, even for those of us reading about this killing with disgust. We cannot respond by pointing the finger somewhere else: at the police; at those racists in Florida; at the culture of white privilege; at ignorance. We first have to look into ourselves and critically examine the attitudes that we have about groups of people different than us. We have to make a conscious effort to analyze our emotional reactions. We need to call out our friends and family when they make racially-charged remarks (or other stereotyping behavior).

In writing this I remembered Barack Obama's famous speech on race during his 2008 campaign and am listening to him now, as he talks about his own grandmother expressing racist attitudes and discusses the history of slavery. If we do not take Trayvon Martin's killing as an opportunity to learn more about ourselves and about the context of race in America then we have failed in our responsibility as human beings, as thinking and feeling creatures, as spiritual people, as rational individuals. We are the face of racism.

Immensity

Merry looked out in wonder upon this strange country, of which he had heard many tales upon their long road. It was a skyless world, in which his eye, through dim gulfs of shadowy air, saw only ever-mounting slopes, great walls of stone behind great walls, and frowning precipices wreathed with mist. He sat for a moment half dreaming, listening to the noise of the water, the whisper of dark trees, the crack of stone, and the vast waiting silence that brooded behind all sound. He loved mountains, or he had loved the thought of them marching on the edge of stories brought from far away; but now he was borne down by the insupportable weight of Middle-earth. He longed to shut out the immensity in a quiet room by a fire.

- J.R.R. Tolkien, "The Return of the King," p. 64

This is why I will always be reading and re-reading Tolkien. I may put LOTR away for a few months or more, but when I'm ready, I will find my bookmark and read something beautiful. I must have read this paragraph 10 times before, but this time it was new and powerful. I want to go to a mountain and listen to the whisper of dark trees! I want to listen to the vast waiting silence that broods behind all sound! And especially, I want to return from the mountains to shut out the immensity in a quiet room by a fire.

Experiences of awe such as Tolkien describes can be overwhelming; one can lose oneself in the vastness. At first this feeling can be exciting: sit on a mountain, or gaze at the stars, and you become small in relation to your experience, but at the same time you become part of the immensity itself. "Formless! Boundless!" (to roughly quote the Tao Te Ching...) You lose you to become the experience. This can be thrilling, but it can also be frightening. After all, we are used to thinking of ourselves as ourselves and not the entire universe. When Middle-earth gets too huge we look for a safe place to be ourselves again.

It takes courage to lose yourself in immensity. The deep ocean, the high mountain, the crowded city center, the vast waiting silence that broods behind all sound... Most of us don't have the time (or the will) to experience vast strangeness, like Merry on an epic journey he could not anticipate, finding himself bereft of his friends. We don't often willingly put ourselves into a situation where nothing is familiar, without guarantee of security or a safe way home again. Those who do are praised as heroes. But although we may think of a hero as an Aragorn figure with a destiny for greatness, clarity of purpose, strength and kindness and a long stride, most heroes (and most of us) are more like the hobbits, who dream of eggs and bacon and a seat by the fire, and for whom Middle-earth is best experienced through stories brought from far away; but the immensity is there for us all, waiting for us to enter.

Uncertainty Sucks. Happy Leap Day!

I'm taking this leap day opportunity to 1) fit in a post in February, and 2) veer from my usual Abandon Certainty mantra. It turns out that uncertainty sucks!

In some sense it is a luxury to abandon certainty, in terms of opening yourself up to the wonders of being alive, without assuming that you know the answers, and embracing change over stability. But there is little wonder in the uncertainty of not knowing where or whether you will be employed, when that next paycheck will come in, whether you will have enough food to feed your kids, and similar issues that too many people worry about every day. Perhaps the difference is in whether you are actively abandoning certainty or whether uncertainty has been thrust upon you.

Over the years I have interpreted this in terms of both Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and the Hindu Chakras. Before one can take an existential leap (pun intended!) into the unknown, one must first deal with the basic needs of nutrition, health, personal safety, etc. This is similar in spirit to the chakra hierarchy, where the three basal chakras dealing with survival, pleasure, and willpower must be opened before the heart chakra, which deals with openness and love. So perhaps the uncertainty that sucks is about basic needs which, if not met, become a barrier to experiencing the uncertainty that is awesome.

As this current and prolonged period of uncertainty about my future continues (seriously, this is a painfully slow metaphorical death), I am finding it quite hard to experience anything awesome about uncertainty. It sucks and I hate it and it is causing stress, anxiety, and depression. I'm losing sight of where I am and where I'm going as if my life is guided by some existential uncertainty principle. My existential wave function had better collapse soon. Is the existential cat metaphorically alive or dead??

OK, OK, enough with the quantum physics analogies. Happy leap day everybody. Today is a day to remember that the Earth takes 365.25 days to travel around the Sun. Enjoy the fact that this is yet another day where you can eat, sleep, and breathe, and worry about everything else another day.