Understanding the Middle East: Iran's 16th century Safavid Dynasty (IOT)

Around the time Spain and Portugal were swarming over the Americas and the European Renaissance was firing up, a semi-divine Sufi Ruler [2] created modern Shiism and reshaped Iran and its neighbors.

This was the time of the Safavid Dynasty (and empire).

I had no idea - until I listened to this excellent In Our Time podcast [1]:

BBC - BBC Radio 4 Programmes - In Our Time, The Safavid Dynasty 

... In 1501 Shah Ismail, a boy of fifteen, declared himself ruler of Azerbaijan. Within a year he had expanded his territory to include most of Persia, and founded a ruling dynasty which was to last for more than two hundred years. At the peak of their success the Safavids ruled over a vast territory which included all of modern-day Iran. They converted their subjects to Shi'a Islam, and so created the religious identity of modern Iran - although they were also often ruthless in their suppression of Sunni practices. They thrived on international trade, and their capital Isfahan, rebuilt by the visionary Shah Abbas, became one of the most magnificent cities in the world. Under Safavid rule Persia became a cultural centre, producing many great artists and thinkers...

The role of Armenian Christians in the dynasty puts the infamous Turkish genocide in a historical perspective. The Ottamans and Safavids were great rivals, and the Christian Armenians seem forever caught in the crossfire.

This history, and the myths that arose from it, explain a lot about modern Iran and the great Shia-Sunni struggles of the 21st century.

[1] This link is to the almost impossible to find archived podcast. Despite the BBC's stated podcast policy these are no longer discoverable from the primary In Our Time episode archives. You can find them on on the hidden BBC IOT Podcast archive. You may be able to also extract them from the iTunes archive or the BCC IOT Podcast feed. I blame it on Cameron.
[2] The last of the Iranian Shahs, prior to the latest revolution, was accused of favoring Zoroastrian ideas, including divine rule. The God-King is a worldwide tradition. (Aside, I met one on his sons when I was at Williams College in @ 1979/80.)

The BBC is making In Our Time archives available for download (!)

After years of making past IOT episodes available only for streaming, the BBC is making the archive of their History of Ideas program available for download.

In addition to the regular weekly In Our Time podcast, you can now download all previous editions of the series via the podcast genre pages listed below.

In Philosophy, for example, there are currently 62 programs available dating back to 1998. In early 2010 the BBC made back episodes available to stream, but now they've gone all in. My 2006 tech post on grabbing old episodes is now happily obsolete, my fears of 2008 have been refuted, and I don't need to covertly circulate DVDs of past programs.

These are not great times for the old world (US, Canada, Japan, Europe, UK), but there are still a few candles in the dark. This is one of them, there's more good news in efforts to freely distribute learning and education. Echoes of the Enlightenment as it were.

In honor of this happy event, I'm adding a "good news" tag to Gordon's Notes. A wee ray of sunshine in my daily gloom.

PS. It's not now documented, but little known, that Blooger has tag (label) feeds. For example, this is my "good news" feed (1 article at the moment, I don't want to overdo it) - http://notes.kateva.org/feeds/posts/default/-/good%20news. The label feeds get the main feed title, so you would want to rename them on subscription.

The Transparent Society - 1920 edition

I've mentioned David Brin's prescient 1999 book, The Transparent Society, a few times. In today's panopticon it's a premature cliche, but he deserves credit for working through so many of its implications.

Credit is also due a work I learned of through a throwaway comment of Melvyn Bragg in a 1999 (30 min!) program on Utopias (Anthony Grayling, John Carey). Lord Bragg mentioned a 1921 novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin called "We". The novel is described in an Amazon review by Leonard Fleisig ...

... WE takes place in the twenty-sixth century where a totalitarian regime has created an extremely regimented society where individual expression simply does not exist. All remnants of individuality have been stripped from its inhabitants including their names. Their names have been replaced with an alpha-numeric system. People are not coupled. Rather, each individual is assigned three friends with whom they can have intimate relations on a rigid schedule established by the state. Those scheduled assignations are the only times the shades in a citizen's glass houses can be closed. Apart from those hourly intervals everyone's life is monitored by the state. As in Orwell's 1984, language has been turned on its head. Freedom means unhappiness and conformity and the submission of individual will to the state means happiness...

Yes, rather like Huxley or Clockwork Orange or 1984. Orwell was a fan but Huxley denied having read We. 

We certainly belongs in a "panopticon" reading list. Glass houses are the ultimate transparent society.

See also:

• We - full text pdf

Archives of In Our Time: Smolin, Gribbin and Greene

Every physics hobbyist should be familiar with the names of Smolin, Gribbin and Greene. All are literate physicists who've written excellent books and essays on tough topics, while still doing exciting research. If you're in this club, you'll love these superb In Our Time programs from the archives.

• Grand Unified Theory - 2000 - Brian Greene and Martin Rees
• Time - 1999 - Lee Smolin and Neill Johnson
• Quantum Gravity - 2001 - John Gribbin, Lee Smolin and Janna Levin

I'm a fan of Gribbin and Greene in particular. I tagged several Gribbin posts back when I was catching up with modern interpretations of Quantum Mechanics - before we started doing entanglement experiments with grossly macroscopic entities. Greene wrote the best modern physics book of the past decade (the non-string bits are the best), I'm way late to give it a review.

These gentleman turn out to be verbal gymnasts as well as physicists and writers. Really, it's not fair - but at least they share.

See also:

• Putting 'In Our Time' on your iPod (2006) - turn Real Audio stream into MP3
• In Our Time archives - EVERY EPISODE from Oct 15 1998 onwards
• Our Time: Symmetry, Moonshine, String Theory and E8
• Gordon's Notes: In Our Time (tag)

Pole of inaccessibility

This morning I listened to the excellent IOT program on Antarctica. I didn't know ice flowed like molten meta.

Because of that, for the first time, I noticed "Pole of Inaccessibility" on a world map that included the Antarctic ...

Pole of inaccessibility - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

... The Southern Pole of Inaccessibility is far more remote and difficult to reach than the Geographic South Pole. On 14 December 1958, the 3rd Soviet Antarctic Expedition for International Geophysical Year research work, led by Yevgeny Tolstikov, established the temporary Pole of Inaccessibility Station (Polyus Nedostupnosti) at 82deg 06′S 54deg 58′E. A second Russian team returned there in 1967. Today a building still remains at this location, marked by a bust of Vladimir Lenin that faces towards Moscow, and it is protected as a historical site. Inside the building there is a golden visitors' book for those who make it to the site to sign.

Wouldn't you love to be able to sign that book? I mean, really.

History is fractal - IOT the Zulu nation

Melvyn and Shula do not have the best chemistry in during the In Our Time program The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation. I can see why Melvyn was peevish, but it's a bit of a shame. I'm sympathetic to Marks' notion that the emergence of Shaka Zulu was more chance than destiny; a contingent result of swirling change and disruption driven, fundamentally, by the technologies of innovative agriculture and consequent rapid population growth and Malthusian collapse.

That, however, was too much subtlety for 15 minutes of Shaka, for there was a lot of ground to cover in one 48 minute program. Even in this quick overview it's clear the history of the consequent fallings and risings of the Boer, Zulu, and British is immensely complex, full of chance and personality and mostly unknown.

So it is with history. Endless stories, of which we know only a tiny number. There must be many more, perhaps more grand and sad than any we know, lost in deep time.

Lost, but, in a sense, not unknown. History is fractal. The stories we know in detail are similar to those we know in outline are similar to those we know in myth, and are very likely similar to those we don't know at all. If we are wise enough to realize that history is fractal, we can study closely the history we know and learn universal truths. If we are foolish enough to believe our stories are unique, we walk the path of willful ignorance.

The new history is deep history

When we think about science, most of us think of dramatic breakthroughs. We think Darwin and Wallace, Einstein and Bohr, Copernicus and Curie and we imagine everything changed overnight.

Most science, however, develops in bits and pieces, twisting and turning, waxing and waning, until, after thirty years, things are new. Even the dramatic shifts, like natural selection, took decades to get from radical to mainstream.

If you’re at all curious about things, you notice this in a single lifespan. Consider deep history; the story of humans from 150K to 3K years ago. In the past 30 years discoveries from genomics, climate research, linguistics, plant research, translation, anthropology and archaeology, combined with the revision of old biases, have dramatically changed our understanding of deep history. In each case, of course, computation has been a fundamental driver. That’s how it works – new instruments make new science.

It’s been growing slowly from all directions, but the sum is a very different world from what some of us learned in the 1970s. The human brain is evolving and changing far more dramatically than we imagined, and that evolution has not slowed with modernity. Our concepts of human speciation are being transformed; there were many “species” of human coexisting into deep history – and, like dogs and wolves, they probably crossed often.

Pre-agricultural humans were far more populous and widespread than we once imagined; the large populations of pre-invasion (early agricultural and hunter-gatherer) North America probably reflect worldwide pre-agricultural patterns.

Even after the development of agriculture and writing we see thousand year intervals of relative stasis in China, Egypt and Mesopotamia. How could this be when our fundamental technologies change in decades. Are the minds of modern Egyptians radically different from the minds of only 6,000 years ago? Why? Why do we see this graph at this time in human history?

What did humans do in Georgian caves for 30,000 years? Thirty thousand years of waving and sewing and nothing changes?! They could not have had the same brains we have. They seem more … Neandertal.

Fascinating times, and there’s much more here than I can address in one post. That’s why I’m adding a new tag (label) for this blog -- “deep history” in anticipation of much more to come.

For now see also:

• Dienekes' Anthropology Blog- Paleolithic flax fibres from Georgia (Kvavadze et al. 2009)
• Multiregional evolution lives! - john hawks weblog
• Why Humanity Loves, and Needs, Cities - Economix Blog - NYTimes.
• In Our Time, Babylon
• In Our Time, Akhenaten (He reminds me of Kim Jong-il)
• In Our Time, The Library at Nineveh
  

Update: What does the Antikythera mechanism teach us about deep history? It cannot be the only anomaly of its kind in all time.

Update 8/21/2010: Brad DeLong says I don't pay enough attention to the fragility of culture and technology without writing and location persistence.

IOT Radiation: Gamma and X-rays

In Our Time, Radiation is a superb 50 minute review of 19th century physics -- with bits before and beyond. This is the physics that brought us much of the modern world - though for GPS we needed Einstein.

Listening again to how physics became ether-free I couldn't help but recall the old McCluhan meme --"The medium is the message". Deep, man.

I also finally learned the relationship between Gamma Rays (Hulk) and X-Rays (Superman). In retrospect, I've been forever confused by the alpha, beta, gamma particle nomenclature.

For the few who might be as unknowingly confused as I've been all my life, X-rays are forms of light (EM radiation) associated with electron transitions. Gamma rays are forms of light (EM radiation) associated with processes in the atomic nucleus. (A wikipedia article on Gamma Rays suggests my confusion arose in part due to the redefinition of Gamma and X-rays over the past thirty years.)

Alpha and beta "radiation", on the other hand, isn't electromagnetic (light) radiation -- it's particle emission. The confusion between alpha, beta and gamma "radiation" arose when they were discovered and named together.

Of course I'm sure I've got something wrong in this summary, but it does feel like progress.
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In Our Time archives - EVERY EPISODE from Oct 15 1998 onwards

Wow.

You know, this really did deserve more than just a small aside on the recently redesigned IOT web site...

BBC - Radio 4 Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time

...For the first time, listen online to every episode ever broadcast, from Aristotle to the History of Zero...

The list includes many, perhaps all, of the legendary lost episodes...

... These ‘lost editions’ include topics such as Science and Religion, Childhood, Consciousness, The End of History and Quantum Gravity, and they’re discussed by guests including Nobel prizewinner Amartya Sen and the sadly deceased Stephen Jay Gould. The term ‘treasure trove’ is bandied around quite casually these days, but for anyone who enjoys In Our Time, these transcripts are very valuable...

I found Quantum Gravity (RealMedia only) from Feb 22, 2001 - but they "by year" list currently only goes back to 2004. So they've got some bugs to work out.

By walking backwards from Quantum Gravity, however, I was able to locate Evolutionary Psychology (Nov 2000), Imagination and Consciousness June 2000, The Renaissance (June 2000), Death (May 2000), Grand Unified Theory (incl Brian Greene and Martin Rees, Feb 2000), Climate Change Jan 2000 w/ George Monbiot), Time w/ Lee Smolin Dec 1999, Consciousness w/ Roger Penrose (Nov 1999), Utopia (first one not available to play - Oct 1999 - so it's not every episode) ...

Sometime around 1999 the format drops to 30 minutes and the theme becomes "the 20th century". Then we come to the very first episode (Oct 15, 1998):

WAR IN THE 20TH CENTURY

... In the first programme of a new series examining ideas and events which have shaped thinking in philosophy, religion, science and the arts, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss warfare and human rights in the 20th century. He talks to Michael Ignatieff about the life of one of the 20th century’s leading philosophers, Isaiah Berlin, and to Sir Michael Howard about the 20th century will be remembered; as a century of progress or as one of the most murderous in history.

When we see pictures on television of starving people in war torn areas most of us feel we must ‘do’ something. Where does the feeling that we are in some way responsible for our fellow human beings originate historically? How has technology affected the concept of the Just War? And what are the prospects for world peace as we enter the next century?

With Michael Ignatieff, writer, broadcaster and biographer of Isaiah Berlin; Sir Michael Howard, formerly Regius Professor of History, Oxford University and joint editor of the new Oxford History of the Twentieth Century.

Ignatieff now leads the Liberal Party of Canada.

I have my work cut out for me.

Thank you BBC and thank you Lord Bragg and brave guests. There is still hope for humanity.

Update: ok, so go easy on the hope bit.

Update 3/4/2010: The handful that weren't online have since been added. It appears to now be complete!

Update 3/17/2010: The older material mostly uses RealAudio. That's easy to capture using AudioHijack Pro (you do need to read the manual, see also my old directions). Some of the very oldest material, however, is now rendered with the newish BBC iPlayer. To capture that I had to change the AudioHijack source to "Safari"; AHP switches Safari to 32 bit mode to Hijack the stream. I think I would have to change it back to 64bit myself, but I'm inclined to leave it in 32 bit mode for a while. Quite a bit of software doesn't like 64bit.

Update 5/21/2010: I gave up half way through the 30 minute 1999 (year two) Utopia program. It wasn't exactly bad, but the newer material is much better. I suspect today's guests rise to greater expectations than those of early days, and Melvyn is better at keeping people, including Melvyn, on track. It's also likely that ten years of intense study have moved Melvyn into a different world of background expertise. Incidentally, there's a painful point in the Utopia program where the guests expound on a cheesy essay about a posthuman utopia of the genetically enhanced. Melvyn's guests have almost no science fiction background; their futurist dialogs are pathetically naive. We ought to make post-1980 science fiction reading a requirement for a liberal arts degree.

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IOT: Samarkand, the Sogdians and the Silk Road

Once it was Maracanda, ruled by Alexandere. Centuries later, before Rome fell, the Persian speaking Sogdians flourished there, at the heart of the a historically trading empire that lasted from before 300 CE until after 700 CE. They were the traders of the Silk Road, and the conduits for Buddhism and much knowledge of China, India, Asia and places West.

Later their city became a place of Arab history - Samarkand.

Today Samarkand is in Uzbekistan ...

It's a hike, but it's a city of about 400,000 and it's open for tourism. In Google earth you can see their photos.

You can learn the story of the Sogdians, and a surprising amount of China's endless story by listening to ...

BBC - Radio 4 - In Our Time - The Silk Road

In 1900, a Taoist monk came upon a cave near the Chinese town of Dunhuang. Inside, he found thousands of ancient manuscripts. They revealed a vast amount of evidence about the so-called ‘Silk Road’: the great trade routes which had stretched from Central Asia, through desert oases, to China, throughout the first millennium....

Most of what we know of this people comes from a small cache of lost Sogdian mail, and the stories the Chinese told of the them. If not for that accident, we'd know almost nothing.

And yet, they changed the course of history.

Boethius – the most important philosopher you’ve probably never heard of

The first I remember hearing of Boethius was this In Our Time programme on The Consolation of Philosophy…

In the 6th century AD, a successful and intelligent Roman politician called Boethius found himself unjustly accused of treason. Trapped in his prison cell, awaiting a brutal execution, he found solace in philosophical ideas - about the true nature of reality, about injustice and evil and the meaning of living a moral life. His thoughts did not save him from death, but his ideas lived on because he wrote them into a book. He called it The Consolation of Philosophy…

Boethius, I learned, was a Christian influenced neo-Platonist scholar and man of the world who lived in the waning years of the Roman empire. Wikipedia has more …

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius^[1] (ca. 480–524 or 525) … was born in Rome to an ancient and important family which included emperors Petronius Maximus and Olybrius and many consuls. His father, Flavius Manlius Boethius, was consul in 487 after Odoacer deposed the last Western Roman Emperor. Boethius himself was consul in 510 in the kingdom of the Ostrogoths. In 522 he saw his two sons become consuls. Boethius was executed by King Theodoric the Great…

It is unknown where Boethius received his formidable education in Greek. Historical documents are ambiguous on the subject, but Boethius may have studied in Athens, and perhaps Alexandria…

As a result of his education and experience, Boethius entered the service of Theodoric the Great, who in 506 had written him a graceful and complimentary letter about his studies…

…By 520, at the age of about forty, Boethius had risen to the position of magister officiorum, the head of all the government and court services…

… Boethius's best known work is the Consolation of Philosophy, which he wrote most likely while in exile under house arrest or in prison while awaiting his execution, but his lifelong project was a deliberate attempt to preserve ancient classical knowledge, particularly philosophy. He intended to translate all the works of Aristotle and Plato from the original Greek into Latin…

…it is his final work, the Consolation of Philosophy, that assured his legacy… the work was translated into Old English by King Alfred, and into later English byChaucer and Queen Elizabeth; many manuscripts survive and it was extensively edited, translated and printed throughout Europe from the 14th century onwards.^[5] Many commentaries on it were compiled and it has been one of the most influential books in European culture…

From our perspective it’s not clear how Christian Boethius was by the time he died, but he’s a Catholic saint anyway, and supposedly a favorite of Benedict. He was immensely influential in many ways, but I suspect most of us have never come across his name.

I do like In Our Time, it’s so sad that the BBC doesn’t sell past programmes on iTunes. (You can subscribe easily to the podcasts, but you can’t turn the available streaming archives into mp3/aac unless you’re a serious geek.)

See also:

• Danger- Addictive temptations from the BBC
• Gordon's Notes- In Our Time
• Gordon's Notes- In Our Time threatens to go mainstream

Update 11/5/09: When I listen to the best of IOT I take it in sips. A bit of listening, a bit of contemplation. The very best I'll do twice. Since I first wrote this I'm about three quarters done with the Consolation of Philosophy, and it is among the best. Great guests, and for once Melvyn didn't run out of time. They fit Boethius into the chain from the Stoics through Schopenhauer to Camus and Nietzsche (but not Hume and they didn't trace back to the Greek religious tradition of the futile but heroic response to inevitable tragedy).

I'm going to have to go back to past discussions of the Stoics, and I'm looking forward to the new episode on Schopenhauer.

In Our Time - The Weak Shall Inherit the Earth

In the 2003 In Our Time explored the cultural history of war: BBC - Radio 4 - The Art of War.

During the programme, one of the guests mentions Karl Pearson an early 20th century social Darwinist and "Professor of Eugenics" [1]. Pearson praised war as the engine of racial fitness and national progress. If not for war, it was said in Pearson's time, "the weak shall inherit the earth" [2].

These memes are with us still, though in the west they are rarely explicit.

[1] Those of us who did med school stats may remember the "Pearson distribution". Same guy.

[2] It's not clear from the discussion if the phrase came from Pearson, but I suspect it was a common usage of the time. Not for the first time I wish there were more IOT transcripts. The "After Our Time" wiki has @50 IOT transcripts, but the blog and wiki was only active for a few months in 2007. Among those few transcripts, incidentally, are early programmes that have been lost, including one featuring Stephen Jay Gould.

Update Feb 17, 2010: The Lost Episodes are now online.

In Our Time - The Sunni-Shia Split

This IOT Program starts slowly ...

BBC - Radio 4 In Our Time - The Sunni-Shia Split

... In 680, near Karbala in Iraq, a man was killed in the desert. His name was Husayn, and he was the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. His death was a crucial episode in the growing split between two groups of Muslims - who would come to be known as the Sunni and the Shia...

... but it picks up speed after the first ten minutes or so when Melvyn Bragg takes control. I knew only the broadest outlines of the story, and the details are amazing. For an outsider it does add some context to the relations between Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

The early (and later) days of the Catholic papacy were pretty rough, but the assassinations and wars of early Islam are right up there. It reminds me also of the assassination eras of the American presidency. The conflicts occur on so many dizzying levels -- personal, family, tribe, relation to the Prophet, and proto-nation (but not, interestingly, theological except in the sense of who rules a theocracy).

The real mystery, which this one programme can't address, is how these squabbling tribes seized and held a vast empire -- before it became a vast and coherent civilization.

It's well worth a listen for anyone with an interest or stake in the Middle East. I do hope Obama gets some moments with IOT.

This is the third from last episode of what must be at least the sixth season (it's curiously hard to find out from the site how many seasons there have been.) Melvyn says he'll be back next year. It's been a great season as always, but listening to this episode I recognize that the past season has felt relatively sluggish.

In retrospect I think Melvyn has mellowed too much. He needs to get a bit tougher on his academics, who are prone to wander and miss the fundamentals. It's a fine road to travel -- some of them are rather nervous and might break down under harder handling, but the show works best when he's riding herd with the occasional flick of the whip.

Writing this post I noticed something new. There's a blog called "After Our Time". Unfortunately it appears to have expired in October 2007. It would be nice to see a revival of that.

Jon Udell's 21st century radio: SpokenWord.org

Jon Udell, one of my favorite deep thinkers, is championing community collaborated audio sources, a kind of 21st century radio service ...

Introducing SpokenWord.org - Jon Udell:

...Back in the good old days, circa 2006 or so, I was a happy podcast listener. During my many long periods of outdoor activity — running, hiking, biking, leaf-raking, snow-shoveling — I sometimes listened to music, but more often absorbed a seemingly endless stream of spoken-word lectures, conversations, and entertainment. Some of my sources were conventional: NPR (CarTalk, FreshAir), PRI (This American Life), BBC (In Our Time), WNYC (Radio Lab). Others were unconventional: Pop!Tech, The Long Now Foundation, TED, ITConversations, Social Innovation Conversations, Radio Open Source....

... From the FAQ:

Think of SpokenWord.org as a funnel. You collect streams (RSS feeds) of programs from all over the Web, then combine them into a singe collection on SpokenWord.org. Then in iTunes you subscribe to just one feed: the feed from your SpokenWord.org collection.

Managing feeds, in addition to (or instead of) managing items, is an aspect of digital literacy that’s only just emerging. I think it’s critical, so I’m a keen observer/participant in various domains: blogging, microblogging, calendaring, or — in this case — audio curation...

... I’m hoping that SpokenWord will become a place where curators emerge who lead me to places I wouldn’t have gone...

That hasn’t happened yet, of course, since SpokenWord.org just launched in beta this week. Meanwhile, the site offers a variety of lenses through which to view its growing collection of feeds and programs: tags, categories, ratings, user activity... the Active Collectors bucket on the home page has alerted me to a couple of feeds I hadn’t known about, notably BBC World’s DocArchive...

I can't believe Jon ran out of In Our Time podcasts. My personal collection goes back about five years, and it offers a lot of listening and re-listening.

Then there are the Teaching Company's lectures. Not free of course, but you can by a lot from the backlist for a bit of money.

Still, if Jon's into it then it's worth examining. I've signed up.

Was Babbage's computer truly forgotten?

In Our Time 's Ada Lovelace program, by necessity, involved quite a bit of discussion of Charles Babbage. Babbage, with some help from Lovelace, imagined a good portion of the computing machine that Turing and others would later build.

Melvyn's guests felt that there wasn't a direct connection between Babbage (1830)  and Turing (1945), that Babbage's contributions were essentially lost to science.

This seems a bit odd, as the Wikipedia article on Babbage mentions that his son created six difference engines. To this I can add an additional note from my library. I have a copy of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica (11th ed), which includes an article on Babbage and one on Calculating Machines. I've scanned all of the former and portions of the latter (PDF 8MB [1]). (See also the "love to know" 1911 project , but their article doesn't match my copy. Microsoft apparently republished the encyclopedia in 1995.)

Briefly, the article on Babbage focuses on his mathematical pursuits, including an essay deploring the decline of science in 19th century England (some things never change). The article describes both the Difference and Analytic engines much as we understand them now, though it misses the significance of the programming design. The article on Calculating Machines praises the Difference Engine as a real device with well understood principles, but states that the Analytical Engine did not progress beyond sketches. It does, however, refer interested readers to a comprehensive book by Babbage's son.

I'm left with the impression that Melvyn's guests understated the extent to which portions of Babbage's work survived into the 20th century.

[1] OS X Black and White PDFs are vastly larger than Adobe's B&W PDFs.

In Our Time - Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems

The first two programmes of the 2008 season were a bit dull, but Melvyn has picked up the pace nicely with a piece on Godel’s incompleteness theorem …

BBC - Radio 4 In Our Time - Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems
…Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at Wadham College, University of Oxford
John Barrow, Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge and Gresham Professor of Geometry
Philip Welch, Professor of Mathematical Logic at the University of Bristol..

Terrific guests and Melvyn was in good form. He seemed genuinely interested, whereas in the prior two I thought he was pushing the topic along. He does very well with math and physics, perhaps because they aren’t his primary study.

I was a bit disappointed they never mentioned Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach, but it has been about 30 years (!) since that was a best-seller. Yes, I not only read the entire thing thoroughly, I also took copious notes (since lost). I was one of four people who actually read it.

Towards the end of the show one of the guests mentions that geometry was not complex enough to trigger the incompleteness clause that one can state true things that cannot be proven true. Number systems of course are incomplete in the Godelian sense, and he thought that was somehow (lost me here) related to the role of prime numbers arising from arithmetic systems. In the same context he mentioned that Turing’s proof of the Halting Problem was equivalent to the incompleteness theorem.[1]

Naturally I immediately leapt to wondering if someday someone will prove that the relationship between the primes and Godel’s theorem means the unpredictability of prime numbers is a likewise provable. That would be reassuring to users of encryption systems!

[1] Everyone’s heard of Wikipedia, so why doesn’t h2g2 get more credit? Their discussion of the Halting Problem is much more sophisticated than the Wikipedia article.

In praise of David Hume

Towards the end of The Social Contract, after discussing the continuity between Rousseau and the The Terror, David Hume appears and we leap 250 years into an essentially modern perspective.

It’s not the first time in years of listening to In Our Time that Hume comes in to deliver the final word. So why is it that we hear of Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Sartre, Popper, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and other, lesser, philosophers and not of Hume? Is it that Hume takes all the fun out of philosophy by drilling directly to the 21st century? (More like, from what I can tell of Melvynn Bragg, that he’s looking for a team who can do justice to the Great One.)

Who the heck ways this guy, anyway (emphases mine):

David Hume (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The most important philosopher ever to write in English, David Hume (1711-1776) — the last of the great triumvirate of “British empiricists” — was also well-known in his own time as an historian and essayist. A master stylist in any genre, Hume's major philosophical works — A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), the Enquiries concerning Human Understanding (1748) and concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), as well as the posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779) — remain widely and deeply influential. Although many of Hume's contemporaries denounced his writings as works of scepticism and atheism, his influence is evident in the moral philosophy and economic writings of his close friend Adam Smith. Hume also awakened Immanuel Kant from his “dogmatic slumbers” and “caused the scales to fall” from Jeremy Bentham's eyes. Charles Darwin counted Hume as a central influence, as did “Darwin's bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley. The diverse directions in which these writers took what they gleaned from reading Hume reflect not only the richness of their sources but also the wide range of his empiricism. Today, philosophers recognize Hume as a precursor of contemporary cognitive science, as well as one of the most thoroughgoing exponents of philosophical naturalism….

…Born in Edinburgh, Hume spent his childhood at Ninewells, the family's modest estate on the Whitadder River in the border lowlands near Berwick. His father died just after David's second birthday, “leaving me, with an elder brother and a sister under the care of our Mother, a woman of singular Merit, who, though young and handsome, devoted herself to the rearing and educating of her Children.” (All quotations in this section are from Hume's autobiographical essay, “My Own life”, reprinted in HL.)

From what I can gather he was probably also the first modern psychologist and the first cultural anthropologist.

Of course he’s not a perfect modernist. His opinions on IQ and race are pretty much in line with his times (and today’s Bell Curve gang). So he’s only 200 years ahead of his time.

Incidentally, the 2008-2009 IOT season has begun. Podcasts are only available for a week, so I suggest subscribing to the IOT feed in addition to iTunes subscription (though now that I have an iPhone with Remote 1.1 I do leave iTunes running all the time).

Reason without science - the music of the spheres

Fifteen hundred years of fascinating nonsense. That's what I think as I listen to In Our Time's "The Music of the Spheres".

It's all rather like Freudianism - but he only lasted about 70 years.

What drives these examples of unreal reason?

I think of the underlying memes as attractive antigens that bind to our cultural and biological "memetic receptors" (it's hard to escape those immunology lectures). They're hypnotically interesting, and in age of scholarship without science they flourish like metastatic weeds.

The greatest cultural invention of the 2nd millennium, science, pulled the weeds. The Music of the Spheres became astronomy, mathematics, physics, neuropsychology, literature and art.

Science deserves more gratitude.

Mega drive 2008: the newest innovations

We're doing one of our family mega-drives. Thousands of miles with 1 dog, 3 children, 2 adults, one van.

It works. Better than a reasonable person would expect.

Each time we do this there's some technology variation. This year we had two.

First of all, we got the video iPod to output video to our shockingly reliable $200 car video "system". This would have worked years ago if I'd tried harder (or bought a custom video iPod cable), but Apple didn't distribute much kid vid. I would have had to rip my own video. Too much trouble!

Now Apple sells "Ben 10" and similar TV for $2 an episode, a small price for auto peace. We put Tom and Diane's iTune's gifts to good use.

Three year old technology, so this one was about the content.

Our second innovation was 3G Net Access with Emily's Blackberry browser. Between Saint Paul Minnesota and Escanaba Michigan Emily asked Google (I drove) about the location of Liverpool and three other topics:

• Rib Mountain, Wausau, Wisconsin: The mountain/hill rises mysteriously from flat land. It's a final remnant of the 1.9 billion year old Penokean mountains, and the 2nd downhill ski resort in America. When I see it I imagine a colossus of the new earth, a tower far greater than Everest. Now all that remains is this rock, the broken heart of the ancient mountain. Once a century it beats "I was".
  
  
• Chippewa Falls and Seymour Cray: How the heck did Cray, a certified eccentric genius, persuade a team to follow him from Minneapolis to Chippewa Falls? How good was Cray that Control Data built a lab for him on land he owned? (Very good, of course.)
  
  
• The Yellowstone Trail: America's first northern coast-to-coast motoring road, the fruit of a small group of South Dakota entrepreneurs. I can't tell from the web site how much of this trail can be followed today.

We couldn't continue our data tourism into Canada, the long distance data costs are prohibitive. So all of this was from a few chance encounters in a single day's drive.

My iPhone to come will have a GPS. It will learn what I am interested in. Soon, when I travel, it will strike a bell each time I pass near these sorts of things.

Our next car trip will be even more novel.

PS. Another drive related observation. The UK academics that grace Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time program don't know squat about economics. What gives? Is it forbidden knowledge over there?

In Our Time threatens to go mainstream

This is a bit scary. The NYT has noticed In Our Time. Is this an ominous step towards the mainstream?

Worth Listening to: Obscure BBC Radio Podcasts - The Board - Editorials - Opinion - New York Times Blog:

.... One, called “In Our Time,” with host Melvyn Bragg, bills itself as a show that “investigates the history of ideas.” That doesn’t quite do it justice.

Mr. Bragg assembles a panel of British academics, and lets them loose on topics like The Multiverse — the idea that there is not one universe, but many. The topics can get a little obscure. There was a whole show recently on the Enclosure Laws, the British laws of the late 1700s and early 1800s that cut off peasants’ access to public lands — and, the Marxists say, drove them into oppressive factory jobs in the cities.

Most of the shows are accessible to Americans, but sometimes the Britspeak becomes so over-the-top, and the subjects so arcane, that the shows can sound like Monty Python.

A recent discussion of the “Norman Yoke” — the idea that when the Normans invaded England after 1066 they imposed French ideas on the Anglo-Saxons — seemed like it was a segment from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” — sadly, without the Knights Who Say Ni.

Then Mr. Bragg will do a show on “The Four Humours — yellow bile, blood, choler, and phlegm, and the original theory of everything” — and you’ll remember why you’re listening....

I haven't heard the Norman Yoke yet, but I rarely find IOT obscure or arcane. I was a bit disappointed in the Enclosure programme, but that was because the academic historians never connected the historic enclosures act to the key role land title is thought to play in modern agricultural reform. Instead they tended to skate around obsolete arguments about Marx and the emergence of the proletariat.

Setting aside the defense of IOT, this attention from the NYT is a bit worrisome. Anything that reaches NYT editorial staff is awfully close to being ... popular.

I remember when The Economist became popular. Brrrr. That was an awfully quick fall. Today only the obituary is consistently worth reading.

On the other hand, I'm worried about the iPlayer migration and continued access to past episodes. Perhaps a bit of a larger audience isn't entirely a bad thing. Lord Bragg seems cranky enough to keep the Americans at bay, even if more of us tune in.