Guest post by WUWT regular Caleb Shaw
I am always seizing upon things people tell me, parking the statements in my memory, and only years later learning they are untrue. It is not merely urban myths, (such as the myth about crocodiles living in the sewers of New York,) which I must discard, but all sorts of tidbits of history and quotes by famous people.
Of course, until I stand corrected, I am a purveyor of misinformation. I hate to admit it. After all, I love Truth, and do my best to be honest. However there is no filter you can clamp on your brain, as you wander through life, which automatically screens the false from the True. If you are eager to learn and ask many questions, your openness and honesty can also make you naïve and gullible, and you ingest all sorts of balderdash. After you have ingested this crud, the best (and sometimes only) way to be rid of it is through embarrassment. It is rough on the old ego, but, having something you honor as “fact” publically proven to be claptrap, and cringing in the consequential embarrassment, is a way to the beauty of Truth.
In my experience, (after roughly 56,257 of these embarrassments,) you eventually start to develop an ear for Truth, and also to recognize balderdash when you hear it. One thing that I often used to say is, “Harry Truman once said, ‘The only thing new under the sun is the history you haven’t read.’” Recently I had the sense this quote didn’t quite ring true. After all, the atomic bomb definitely was a new thing, when Harry Truman used it.
After searching, I found that Truman died in 1972, and the first reference to him saying that quote was in a book about him published in 1974. Not that the writer fabricated the statement, but Truman may have been quoting Mark Twain, for I found an even earlier reference attributed to Mark Twain. (As I recall, it was in a Washington financial journal from the 1940’s.) However, to further confuse matters, I could find no evidence Mark Twain himself had ever actually written what was attributed to him.
Mark Twain’s attitude towards history was more relaxed, and a little cynical, more along the lines of his famous quote, “Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.” He was well aware people bend the truth when telling a tale, and felt history was no different. In fact, if he had actually written the quote, it likely would have been, “The only new thing under the sun is the history you haven’t yet invented.”
We all like to be knowledgeable, and to strut with authority, even in situations when we perhaps should be more humble. Sometimes it simply fattens our already fat heads, to think we are smart and the other person is not so smart.
Mark Twain tells a tale of meeting a person on a steamboat who had no idea he had ever captained a steamboat, and instead mistook him, (due to his clothing,) as a rube from the east. This person then began explaining to Twain how a steamboat worked, making up absurd and outlandish facts, and Twain simply nodded, as if he was extremely gullible. After the fellow was done he walked down the deck, and Twain later saw him helplessly leaning on a rail, convulsed with laughter. The prankster felt it was the funniest thing that he was so smart, and the rube from the east was so stupid, or he felt that way until the actual captain of that steamboat came down the deck and loudly hailed Mark Twain, speaking to him as one steamboat captain to another steamboat captain. Then the joker abruptly didn’t feel so smart. He suddenly realized he’d been speaking absurd and outlandish untruths to a person who knew exactly how absurd and outlandish his statements were, and who was in fact smarter. The humor then escaped the prankster, and he stopped collapsing in laughter, and instead slouched about with a garlic face.
I know how that man felt. However it is not Mark Twain who puts me in my place. It is life. However I try not to wear the garlic face. Life is too short.
Recently life played one of its jokes on me, involving my skills as a forecaster.
I too like to be knowledgeable, and to strut with authority, and in this case I simply noted that the first half of our New Hampshire winter had been quite open, and the second half very snowy.
When the winter is open there is no blanket of snow to insulate our earth, and it can freeze as solid as permafrost down to a depth of five feet. (Such rock-like earth should have a name. It can’t be “permafrost” because it isn’t permanent. Perhaps it should be called “tempafrost?”)
In any case, this rock-like layer of earth keeps water from draining downwards, and being absorbed into the earth beneath, in the manner a summer rain is absorbed. The water instead pools atop the rock-like layer, turning the upper soil to mire, and making a messy situation called “Mud Season.”
During the time before the rock-like layer melts, and water can again drain downwards, we can have terrible floods in New Hampshire. A warm spring rain falling on, and melting, a deep snow cover can create a foot or two of water, which cannot drain down into the earth, (even if the water table is low in a drought,) and instead must run off into the brooks, steams and rivers.
The worst-case scenario occurred in the spring of 1936, when two warm and drenching rains fell on a deep snow pack. The man-made flood control reservoirs had not been built yet, and the natural flood control reservoirs, (namely beaver dams,) were greatly reduced because beavers had not yet made their amazing come-back, (after their population was reduced to nearly zero by the fashion for beaver top-hats, such as the one Abraham Lincoln wore.) The tremendous 1936 spring freshet likely will never be matched.
Fortunately both natural and man-made flood control reservoirs were in place a decade ago, when a different worst-case scenario occurred. In this case the ground had frozen deeply, perhaps as deeply as five feet, and only the top four feet had thawed when the warm, drenching rains came. In this particular situation we had four feet of drenched earth on top of a sleek and slippery foot of frozen earth, and all of a sudden we were having California mudslides in New Hampshire. In Milford, New Hampshire an entire grove of sixty-foot-tall white pines slid down a hill and blocked Route 101, a major cross-New Hampshire highway. To this day one cannot drive to Greenville on “Greenville Road,” from New Ipswich, New Hampshire, because the southern shoulder of that road collapsed into the Greenville Millpond during those rains.
Knowing all this, I noted this winter that heavy snows followed our “open winter,” which had frozen our soil deeply. The snows included a couple of “NESIS” storms. Because our east-facing slopes do a very good job of gathering snow from east winds, we twice had more than three feet of snow laying on the level, and even as these depths shrank it made a gritty snowpack which contained a great deal of water. I knew what one drenching and warm spring southeaster might do.
I’m not exactly sure why I didn’t go into Alarmist mode. Knowing what I knew, I surely should have run about like Chicken Little. I didn’t. I would like to think I didn’t because I was old and wise, however it was likely due to the fact I was preoccupied by doing my taxes, and also had a bad case of the sniffles.
In any case what has happened is something I haven’t ever seen before. After a period where it seemed we got the worst of every storm, we have entered a period that is the opposite.
Every storm misses us.
I suppose you could call it a “drought,” but it’s hard to call it that, when the streams are brimming and there are no plants in my garden to wilt. The only thing that has shriveled is the snow.
Roughly a week ago, out on my pasture, the back of a plastic version of an “Adirondack Chair” was totally covered by snow, (and the top of that chair is over three feet tall.) Today I shifted that chair three feet to the left, in an inch of corn snow, and sat down on it, in glorious sunshine and amazingly dry air.
The air pouring over us had low humidity even when it was over Canadian snows and was ten degrees (F). Warm that air to near fifty, and it has Arizona dryness. What then happens is that our snowpack does not melt. It “sublimates.”
Sublimation is a mysterious process wherein a solid doesn’t need to melt before it evaporates. The only time you see sublimation, in ordinary life, is if you boyishly put a snowball in your freezer, (so you can throw a snowball in July,) but then see that snowball shrink in your freezer, despite the fact your freezer is never above freezing. It happens because you have a “frost-free” freezer, (old-fashioned freezers had a problem with frost,) and your freezer’s frost-free option utilizes sublimation.
I have just lived through roughly a week of a frost-free New Hampshire. I’ve headed out in the morning, planning to scrape the windshield of my car, but morning after morning there has been no frost on the windshield, despite the temperatures being down nearly 20 (F.)
Just as a snowball can shrink in your freezer, our snowpack is shrinking. It is also melting, and streams are brimming, but not to the degree I would expect. In fact my expectations, and predictions, are all wrong.
This is a spring I have never seen before. Over three feet of snow are quietly and all but apologetically vanishing before my eyes. There’s hardly even a mud season, and at times the dry wind whips up a cloud of dust from the drive, or litters a crisp shower of brown leaves from the snowless south-facing side of my farm’s pasture to the still-snowy north-facing side.
I often say, “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst,” but in this case my preparations make me look like a bit of a dope. However to become garlic faced about looking like a dope would be foolish. It would be like building a bomb shelter, and then being disappointed there wasn’t a nuclear war.
Sometimes it is good to be wrong. I gaze about at the golden sunshine, breath deeply the dry, Canadian air, and don’t feel all that bad that all my past experience hasn’t amounted to a hill of beans.
But isn’t that the definition of spring? Something you have never seen before?
I think so. Spring is never, “The same old spring.”
When you have been sick, and again become well, it is never “the same old wellness.”
Even in the case of a womanizing rake, who is forever ditching fine girls he should be loyal to for his next fling, what he is forever seeking (and never finding) is not “the same old lady.”
When a bitter and cold night ends with the dawn, it is not the “same old dawn.”
Every day holds the promise of something fresh and new. And, if we truly value what is fresh and new, what value has that which is tired and old? This brings me back to the fact we all like to be knowledgeable, and to strut with authority.
Think twice about it. Face to face with springtime, could anything be more stupid?
To be truly knowledgeable is to be omniscient. IE: God. God is the only one omniscient. He has nothing left to know.
However we mere mortals have lots to learn. We should leap from bed thirsty to learn more. As much as we like to share what we already know with others, we should never rest content with that little, fanning the feeble fire of our ego, when we could instead venture forward into the sunrises and healing and springtime and new love of Truth.
The alternative is stagnation. It is to pretend you know it all, when you don’t.
It is to say, “The science is settled.” Science is never settled, unless and until you are God.
re: DirkH says: April 6, 2013 at 7:36 am
Dirk, are you under the misapprehension that it was only or even primarily the Allied forces that firebombed? If so, you are forgetting the Blitz of London and so on – and that Japan apparently started the first firebombing in WWII. See the bit I copied below. As to who commits war crimes, unfortunately it has always been the nature of man such that the victor winds up trying the losers for various crimes – and typically the victor who writes history too. I’m not saying these practices are reasonable or right, just that it’s nothing new and has occurred probably as long as man has existed. Regardless, I don’t see how you get the vitriol against Brits and Americans exclusively on this issue, when pretty much every nation involved in war throughout much of history used incendiaries.
from the notoriously-incorrect-but-oh-so-convenient-wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebombing
Although simple incendiary bombs have been used to destroy buildings since the start of gunpowder warfare, World War II saw the first use of strategic bombing from the air to destroy the ability of the enemy to wage war. The Chinese wartime capital of Chongqing was firebombed by the Japanese starting in early 1939. London, Coventry and many other British cities were firebombed during the Blitz. Most large German cities were extensively firebombed starting in 1942 and almost all large Japanese cities were firebombed during the last six months of World War II.
This technique makes use of small incendiary bombs (possibly delivered by a cluster bomb such as the Molotov bread basket[1]). If a fire catches, it could spread, taking in adjacent buildings that would have been largely unaffected by a high explosive bomb. This is a more effective use of the payload that a bomber could carry.
The use of incendiaries alone does not generally start uncontrollable fires where the targets are roofed with nonflammable materials such as tiles or slates. The use of a mixture of bombers carrying high explosive bombs, such as the British blockbuster bombs, which blew out windows and roofs and exposed the interior of buildings to the incendiary bombs, are much more effective. Alternatively, a preliminary bombing with conventional bombs can be followed by subsequent attacks by incendiary carrying bombers.
and from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incendiary_device
Incendiary weapons, incendiary devices or incendiary bombs are bombs designed to start fires or destroy sensitive equipment using materials such as napalm, thermite, chlorine trifluoride, or white phosphorus.
Incendiary bombs have been used since ancient times. Greek fire, which was used by the Byzantine Empire, is a prime example; it was the cause of many naval victories….
Originally, incendiaries were developed in order to destroy the many small, decentralized war industries located (often intentionally) throughout vast tracts of city land in an effort to escape destruction by conventionally aimed high-explosive bombs. Nevertheless, the civilian destruction caused by such weapons quickly earned them a reputation as terror weapons with the targeted populations, and a number of shot-down aircrews (e.g., in German, Terrorflieger) were summarily executed by angry civilians upon capture.[citation needed] The Nazi regime began the campaign of incendiary bombings with the start of World War II with the bombing of Warsaw in World War II, and continued with the London Blitz and the bombing of Moscow, among other cities. Later, an extensive reprisal was exacted by the Allies in the strategic bombing campaign that lead to the annihilation of many German cities. In the Pacific War, during the last seven months of strategic bombing by B-29 Superfortresses in the airwar against Japan, a change to firebombing tactics resulted in some 500,000 Japanese deaths and 5 million more made homeless. Sixty-seven of Japan’s largest cities lost significant area to incendiary attacks. The most deadly single bombing raid in all history was Operation Meetinghouse, an incendiary attack that killed some 100,000 Tokyo residents in one night…. [note, as you can imagine the estimated deaths are quite controversial – I suspect, but may be wrong, that those listed here are high end estimates]
Incendiary weapons and laws of warfare
According to the Protocol III of the UN Convention on Conventional Weapons governing the use of incendiary weapons:
**prohibits the use of incendiary weapons against civilians (effectively a reaffirmation of the general prohibition on attacks against civilians in Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions)
**prohibits the use of air-delivered incendiary weapons against military targets located within concentrations of civilians and loosely regulates the use of other types of incendiary weapons in such circumstances.[6]
Protocol III states though that incendiary weapons do not include:
** Munitions which may have incidental incendiary effects, such as illuminates, tracers, smoke or signaling systems;
**Munitions designed to combine penetration, blast or fragmentation effects with an additional incendiary effect, such as armour-piercing projectiles, fragmentation shells, explosive bombs and similar combined-effects munitions in which the incendiary effect is not specifically designed to cause burn injury to persons, but to be used against military objectives, such as armoured vehicles, aircraft and installations or facilities.
ISuch rock-like earth should have a name.
It’s called Canada!
RE:Rational Db8 says:
April 6, 2013 at 11:57 am
I remember the “virga.” The Navajo word for it translated to “lady rain.” (The “man rain” was the rain that reached the ground.)
The late spring days would start cloud-free and cool and completely calm, and then, as the blazing sun heated the earth, beautiful cumulous would start puffing up, turn purple, and then those streamers of virga would fall. Lightning would often shoot down the edge, as if rain was some sort of leader. That was the sort of lightning that started forest fires up in the hills, because the lightning reached the ground and the rain didn’t. Also, though the rain evaporated before it reached the ground, the downdraft kept falling, and sometimes you could see a cloud of dust kicked up in the distance where the wind hit the ground.
I had to pay attention to that wind, because I was working on “The Great American Novel” at that time, and it involved being very poor, and living at Red Rock Campground east of Gallup, New Mexico. They hadn’t fixed the place up yet, and the good lady who ran the campground charged me $25.00 a week to pitch a pup tent and type all day at a picnic table. I had to watch for the wind, or my various papers would all be blown to kingdom come. I’d put everything away around ten in the morning, which was when the wind kicked up, and also when it was getting too hot to sit in the sun.
One time I became engrossed in my writing and didn’t pay attention to the sky. A shadow fell, and even before I could make a grab for my manuscript the blast of wind from the downdraft hit. I clutched the bulk of my manuscript and just about threw it in my car, and then turned to start chasing down the first fifty pages. I then saw a lovely sight.
A moment before the campground had seemed completely deserted, without a soul in sight, but now people had spilled out of every tent and camper, and they were all running around like crazy chasing down pages for me. They were all grinning, as they walked up and handed them back to me.
Whenever I feel my faith in human nature sink to a low ebb, I remember that bunch of complete strangers.
RE: Ric Werme says:
April 6, 2013 at 8:22 am
Joe D’Aleo wrote an interesting piece about Snow-eater fog on his Blog at WeatherBELL. I think it was just before, or while, New Hampshire had the warm storm at the very end of January. He talked about the exact thing you mentioned: Latent heat released when water condenses on snow, the same way water condenses on the side of a glass holding a cold drink in the summer.
It was a good thing that warm storm and its snow-eater fog wiped out so much of our snow-cover. Can you imagine what the rest of the winter would have been like, with an extra foot under the snow we eventually got?
I run a childcare at my farm, and the boys were gloomy about the snow all vanishing and the sledding being ruined. (They could not see in the future, to a blizzard ten days ahead.) While dealing with their complaints I wound up trying to explain latent heat being released, as water condenses on snow, to a six year old. It was interesting, (especially as I likely don’t fully understand the process myself.) I later described the experience in http://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2013/02/02/why-fog-hates-the-snow/
The essay is largely about childcare, but other topics leak in.
Some of the comments here take offense at the nature of this post.
In doing so, the commentators reveal their profound limitations.
“Old Fossil” declares he will not be preached to. Whether this refers to the substance of the content, which he is clearly incapable of absorbing, or to the use of “God” triggering some knee-jerk aversion, thus demonstrating a complete incomprehension of its meaning as a way of recognizing that absolute understanding is not possible to any human, which exists regardless of any religious connotations, this demonstrates an abysmally truncated relationship with existence which can only flow through to a limited capacity in any field – very particularly science.
Others have derided this as “literary”, and have equated it to anything that seems to be a “story”, including Willis’s recollections, and therefore dismiss it as merely personal and as having no place on this site. But although related as personal experience that is not the intent or the achievement: the personal element acts only to illustrate something of much wider and general significance. Failure to see this is a judgement on the viewer not the writer.
Yet others say simply it is not science. Insofar as it is not an example of the mechanics of scientific method this true. For anyone who actually understands the nature of scientific inquiry, or any inquiry, and its motivations and claims to legitimacy, it is not. To exclude such considerations renders anyone merely a functionary imprisoned in a system.
This post is about fallibility.
To illustrate it as it has been is a much more accurate and accessible depiction than will be achieved by placing it in a nominally philosophical or technical context utilizing analytical terms. It demonstrates a truth.
To those who might decry it on the basis that it is a homily, already understood and acted on, it is only necessary to survey the “Climate Change” landscape – and in fact many comments made on this site – to see that whatever its status historically might have been, or should be now, it is not a universally perceived truth. Precisely the opposite.
Rather than being irrelevant, or incidental to WUWT, “Climate Science”, or anything that claims a basis in science, it is fundamental.
The contemporary technocrat whether dressed as scientist or economist, or a multitude of other forms, can exist only because, in association with a primaevalism expressed as dishonesty and desire for structural ascendancy, an ultimate reference point such as this is ignored.
Thus everything about “Climate Science”: from assertions in 1988 by Hansen that the “science is in”, to the devotee who “knows” that it must be so.
When the history of AGW is written, if that is ever possible, the core, foundational points in understanding it will not relate to science as it has been practiced or abused in detail. It will distill down to this and similar issues.
Nothing could be relevant at any time. And from this point on, any discussion and analysis of AGW will increasingly be addressing these very issues.
On “uninvented” vs. ‘invented’ history:
Uninvented: the Hittite-Minoan-Mycenean Warm Period; the Roman Climate Optimum, the Medieval Warm Period (uninvented because they happened, no thanks to compromised scientific ethics).
Invented: No Hittite-Minoan-Mycenean Warm Period; the Roman Climate Optimum, the Medieval Warm Period (invented because they didn’t happen, all thanks to compromised scientific ethics).
Under the heading “oldfossil” should be the subheading, “Warning: old grouch.”
/Mr Lynn
re: Caleb says: April 6, 2013 at 4:02 pm
Caleb, LOVED reading these bits from you – particularly about the unsolicited help folks gave you. The Navajo translation bit was intriguing too. Anyhow, THANK YOU for that post.
It reminds me of something somewhat similar that happened to me a few years ago. I once sat in my car in a parking spot at a Costco, waiting for an elderly lady to work her way with her walker out of the car beside me. Once she was out from between our cars I got out of mine. Locking my keys in the car because I’d set them down beside me while waiting for her. I realized what I’d done almost immediately, and I think I dropped my forehead to the car or something. You know, I did the proverbial “face palm” utilizing the car instead of my palm. Her husband notice. He asked what was wrong. He then offered to drive me to my apartment so I could get spare keys! I told him it wasn’t at all necessary, I didn’t want to inconvenience him, and it was a good 10 miles or so away. The gentleman insisted, and I relented. His wife headed on in to start shopping. On the drive I discovered that he was 84, and as you’d expect, a very nice fellow and I thoroughly enjoyed chatting with him on the way. I had to pop into the complex office to get a key to my apartment (because of course, my own was locked in my car along with the car keys), then to my apartment, and then back to the store. He was never the least bit impatient, just a nice guy all the way around (and yes, even at 84 he was an excellent driver :0) ).
There are many very nice people out there, more than willing to help someone in need. Personally I think most people are good hearted. Regardless, as you said, it’s experiences like these that restore one’s faith in humanity. Your situation must have been particularly wonderful, with not one hero coming to the rescue, but many!
The meek shall inherit the earth – if that’s ok with you guys. 🙂
I think it is much easier to lie than tell the truth, the truth is often unattainable and illusive.
For instance language causes us to focus our attention on only one aspect of a thing that has many aspects. “This is a valuable book”, that is definitely the truth, it is full of useful knowledge and very well written, but “this is a pile of worthless paper between two pieces of cardboard” is equally true, no one in the house is interested in reading it, there are million other copies, the paper cannot be used for writing on because it is covered with print. True statements can mislead.
There is that famous pattern of a duck rabbit, when you see a duck you cannot see the rabbit, when you see the rabbit you cannot see the duck. Our minds make up their minds whether it is a duck or a rabbit, and none of us can see both simultaneously. And it neither a duck or a rabbit, because in truth it is a pattern on a piece of paper.
Sience is particularly subject to becoming misleading, because your use of words becomes atomised, and your conclusions are built on other narrowly defined discoveries, so what you have in the end is a very narrow aspect of the properties of the object you are discussing
Lying is easy – we can call a pile of paper a pile of plastic, and that is a straight lie.
<i?"…I have just lived through roughly a week of a frost-free New Hampshire… "
Your morning frost followed me down to North Carolina. (temp as low as 26F on March 28th & 29th)
If I walk down the street and meet a man of 94 I call him old, if I find a piece of rock which was formed a million years ago I call it very young rock. Old Fossil might think he is old, but quite probably he is under 100 years old and a very young fossil.
@ur momisugly Julian in Wales says:
April 7, 2013 at 3:57 am
It is accurate to say that truth is, at any one moment for any one person, in a perception. Or is the perception. So your above examples are not offenses to that nor do they, however numerous or complex, support any truth outside themselves. And they don’t have to. Because they have reality, and therefore utility and meaning, only to those that perceive them, with nothing else contingent on that. What you present as an intractable conundrum is not. You are transposing the significance of any perceived truth by an individual unchanged and therefore in conflict with anothers. This is not how existence is. In your above example describing a book, there is no confusion in incorporating both perceptions within an individual or between two or more parties.
It is in fact the recognition that this individual perception of a truth is contingent entirely on that limitation that requires the acknowledgement that any meaningful truth beyond that individual must incorporate other perspectives. This may be one, as in a pile of paper, or it may be an amalgam of many. in anything that has been called general truth, this is its character and it reflects this process. Where truth is considered to be general and also has practical utility that is in itself seen to be true because its immutability is generally agreed, this exists outside individuals, or any consensus between individuals. What you describe as a basis for considering that truth does not exist in effect, is firstly to qualify the nature of the individual perception as a truth because it cannot be precisely shared, and then to say adequate communicate cannot exist because of that. The communication required is not one which can capture the individuals perception in entirety because that individuals perception cannot exist in totality more generally. What is required is that which can establish a truth that can exist outside the individual. That will vary in expression and scope. It is however not just possible but routine. There can be no interaction between people without it. There may well be confusion as to what is being communicated through inadequate familiarity, and indeed what this actually means to any given individual when internalized will differ even if minutely. But this is because the manner in which it varies between individuals is in integration with other individual perceptions of truth, not, unless confused, in the general shared truth that is being apprehended by more than the individual. So in that, it does not matter for the general, and retains the full complexity of individual perceptions.
So to collapse in the face of apparently unknowable general truth as you seem in effect to advocate is not obligatory, and is itself at odds with existence as it actually occurs.
A rather rushed and despite its atypical length for this forum, obviously truncated note on a subject that requires rather more detail. Suffice to say in summary that I think your position reflects a collapse in belief in the legitimacy of any truth that can exist at a wider than individual level, and that I think this is both incorrect and ultimately wrong. Wrong in the true sense of the word as it pertains to morality which is itself an expression of the necessity to have shared truths between people in order to function as part of a wider group of individuals.
@ur momisugly Julian in Wales says:
April 7, 2013 at 3:57 am
I should just add, in relation specifically to this post, the knowledge that any one individual perception of truth cannot be complete as it relates to others as described above, let alone absolute, does not represent the extinction of truth itself. Quite the opposite.
Gail Combs says:
April 7, 2013 at 4:39 am
I think my wife and I deserve some credit. I drove her down to hike the Appalachian Trail and got to drive in a little Georgia snow. I left her March 11, but after more days avoid snow, ice, and cold than hiking, she’s back in NH.
She’ll try again in a week or two, a friend of hers has a car that needs a one-way trip to NC, so watch out!
http://paulaslongwalk.wordpress.com/
Truth is like a shining diamond and facts are mere facets of that diamond.
Steve T says:
April 7, 2013 at 2:17 am
The meek shall inherit the earth – if that’s ok with you guys. 🙂
____________________
Not so much in the US of A, not anymore. The tax-free power structures are inheriting the earth; the Mormon Church, as example, or the beneficiary inheritance trusts of Ted Turner, and on and on.
@ur momisugly jc:
I rather suspect that what Julian in Wales is leading us to is not that truth is subjective, but that our understanding of truth is individual, indistinct and subjective. To one person, a book could be a wonderful source of information. To another, it is a wonderful source for reflection. To another, it is worthless because it offers no blank pages to write upon.
Nature offers us many vantages to listen to its story. The trick is to learn the language. I think that Mr. Williams’ point is that our limited grasp of Nature’s vernacular is largely governed by our aims.
@JC Thank you for addressing my contribution so completely. I do not altogether understand your point, I lost track but I suspect we are coming towards the same conclusion from opposite directions.
I do not deny a book is truthfully a book, I am really saying that when we take something to be the truth we are usually handling an aspect of it, not the whole thing. I was very influenced by Daniel Dennett’s conception of multiple draft model of consciousness, which I have found useful in solving otherwise impossible to solve problems with drawings of movement which is my field of work. For years I have believed that there was a way that we conceive of seeing a ballet dancer move through the air, but I could not reconcile the bending of straight objects with the conception that dance is about straight lines which we apparently can see when the dancer is moving, and I used up many decades trying to catch that “truth” on paper. Then I understood that my mind actually held quite a few explanations of what it was seeing concurrently, and what I put on paper was always just one of the many concurrent goings on in my head. Once I understood that my drawing ability moved ahead very fast.
This may sound like a very long way from science, which actually has a scaffold of empirical data and proven hypotheses (plural?) on which more complex theories and hypotheses are hung and tested (please correct my amateur attempt at defining what you do). Science works really well, you have conquered the world with your inventions, we all love to use our motor cars and computer screens. But it is a very narrow way to look at the world, it is so successful that we end up believing that we understand things that are ultimately beyond our comprehension. And our hubris leads us to think we know what will happen to ice when the Spring comes, and we are surprised to be surprised.
I think there are scientists who close their minds, believe too implicitly in their cleverness and neatly perceived and calibrated view of the world. I could say they are not scientists, because the very closed-ness of their minds makes it impossible for them to really call themselves scientists.
RE jc says:
April 6, 2013 at 5:47 pm
Thanks. That was a very thoughtful bit of writing. And I think you understood what I was trying to say, in my homespun way.
Lastly, I would like to thank Al Gore for “creating the internet.” The only way anyone can understand the pleasure I get from the above 112 comments is to imagine going roughly 35 years, and getting nothing but lone rejection slip, as a comment after writing something.
Just imagine writing the above essay, and the lone comment would be, “We regret to inform you that your submission does not meet the requirements of our publication at this time.”
After 35 years of treatment like that, even “oldfossil’s” comment was a wonderful breath of fresh air. It was honest, true-to-his-heart, and man-to-man. I wish the gate-keeper editors of old-fashioned magazines the class of “oldfossil,” when they rejected, but they had no class, which may explain why they are going out of business.
The conversations that get going on WUWT are wonderful, instructive, sometimes amazing, and I feel thankful to be part of them. May God bless this site, and everyone who contributes.
Hi man,
I love your style…keep it up!
That quote from Mark Twain made me smile 🙂 It’s refreshing to see people like you out there…
Thanks for this post.
Cris (the light warrior) 🙂
@ur momisugly Julian in Wales says:
April 7, 2013 at 1:16 pm
“…I am really saying that when we take something to be the truth we are usually handling an aspect of it, not the whole thing.”
I agree, with the proviso that we are always handling an aspect of it. Thus a degree of what can only be called humility must be part of all this. We can’t really have that in our minds at the time of actually fully addressing something, or being fully involved, or we would be made non-functional by it.
Your description of the impact of pre-conception, or maybe of pre-formating, on your drawing is interesting. In such things most people would assume that your “seeing” must be direct and absolute, but as you say, it must be translated. So I guess it could be said that what was to you one truth – or maybe something you thought should be a truth – has now been either subsumed or incorporated in a wider view of what is true.
The proposition that what is classified as science – even with the inclusion of the bogus “sciences” – does not constitute the only way to comprehend existence will get no argument from me. Objectively, if not scientifically (!), that is observably untrue.
To me, science is just the formalization of a curiosity about the material world. Such things as scientific method and empirical experiment are structures to ensure that potential confusions in intent, actual occurrences, meaning, and communication are removed or minimized. It has (or should have) that clarity or precision.
I think this is and should be part of any human, not as scientific process in itself, but as a basic reconciliation of experience, but it is not human experience in entirety simply because not all things can be known, as Caleb’s post illustrates, or known in that way. Some things, as shown in art, are more fully expressed in other ways, even if any truth in them, again incomplete, cannot be reduced to the empirical.
When “scientists” are created by accreditation and ratification rather than by demonstrated vocation to reconciling curiosity and the material experience, the result is functionaries within a system applying a process who lack the core requirements for the task. This is, in and beyond science, rampant. These are not “scientists” in the true sense, since, as you said, minds are enclosed by this. No doubt a perennial issue, and a perennial risk for anyone, but now unrestrained and fully alive in the “Climate Scientist”!
@ur momisugly Pluck says:
April 7, 2013 at 11:08 am
“…our limited grasp of Nature’s vernacular is largely governed by our aims.”
True enough. And for a pragmatic relationship with nature or the material world, that is to a large degree not only needed but is enough. If we want to extend that in any way at all though, we must not become prisoners of prior, assumed, or in the case of “Climate Science”, demanded, knowledge. The first is stagnation, the second brings mistakes, the third brings all the disaster of arrogance.
@Caleb says:
April 7, 2013 at 9:53 pm
For what its worth, I’d like to express appreciation of your post. Not just the post itself, which I think is well structured, thought through, and written – and I think you underrate by calling homespun in a deprecatory way: the stylized and elaborate often add up to little after the initial sensation passes – but for the idea of the post itself.
As I said earlier, I think “Climate Change” would have never have got off the ground if such “homespun” wisdom had been applied. Hopefully, even now, it will be given its proper place, and it will take efforts such as yours to do that.
As to the frustrations of a writer, it is a truism that what is open to being received, not just by any system but by people or society generally, is out of a writers control, and it can only be hoped that what someone wants to say will, if things change, find interest. At least you have something to say and the capacity to say it. Many don’t.
@ur momisugly Luther Wu says:
April 7, 2013 at 8:57 am
“Truth is like a shining diamond and facts are mere facets of that diamond.”
Well put. And a hell of a lot more succinct than my ramblings. The problem in contemporary life is that the cultural norm is now to be transfixed by the light of whatever facet is visible, and an unwillingness to shift the gaze to take in the whole in case the simplicity of gratification is fractured, even if only for awhile. Also, the reflections of any facet become a mirror and are an excuse to indulge in the pleasures of self-appreciation.