tales of copper city

Bravo, Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish in the NYT today on the Gates affair is simply wonderful.  Bravo.  

Kudos to the New York Times

I have written recently that no one can be sure what is emerging from the various plans Congress is considering.  That's overstated. If reform passes after the conference between the House and the Senate, we can't be sure what will emerge.  Still, the House is likely to pass a bill whose provisions are fairly well-known. And the New York Times had a long editorial  yesterday (Sunday) detailing the elements of that legislation and stressed that similar details are found in the Senate bills.   

From the uninsured poor to the middle class who already has insurance and to Medicare patients, the Times offers a thoughtful analysis of the key elements of the proposed legislation.

Kudos to the Times.

I thought the Obama's presser was good, too

I thought President Obama's press conference was very well-done, so much so that, like Paul Krugman, I'm a little worried that if I liked it maybe the public didn't. 

Okay, I'm not that out of sync with what the public thinks. I've been a member of the public for years now.

The president sounded like he knew what he was talking about and how long has it been since that has occurred?  About eight years. 

I'm more worried that I'm suddenly more optimistic than before. My optimism often betrays me.

What does the pubic know and when did they know it?

While I'm generally trying to stay away from the evening news about health care reform because it's so god-awful stupid and off the mark, I was listening to MSNBC a few nights ago, and caught Newsweek's  Jonathan Alter's thoughtful remarks on the prospects for passage of health care reform---he thinks it looks pretty good---when suddenly the MSNBC commentator shifted the subject to public opinion polls showing growing concern about health care reform.  

The MSNBC commentator (David Shuster) said, excitedly, "Everyone's talking about it!"

Exactly what is the "it" that everyone is talking about?  Is Washington excited that the public is now worried about reform and Obama's "plan"?  What Obama plan?  There are "plans" in Congress. The public hardly knows anything about what's happening in Congress and the experts don't know much more. But there is no Obama plan.

Roseanna, a novel

I have just finished reading Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's police novel, Roseanna, the first in a ten-book series of novels about members of the special homicide commission of the national police. According to Per Wahlöö, the novels were written to "use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly" of the Swedish body politic of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Many who write and or read "police procedurals"---I dislike the term---proclaim these to be the best of alI and I agree. There is a haunting, spare, plain-spoken quality in the writing of Sjöwall and Wahlöö as they tell the stories of the lives and work of  the national homicide squad and its head Martin Beck.  

I love a certain kind of mystery, a mystery rich in the story of a place or time, a story that often serves as an autopsy. I spent a week in Sweden a few years after the last novel appeared and found the novels helped me understand the rather stiff and standoffish manner of many of the health officials I encountered. My time in Sweden felt very different than Finland or Norway.

Our higher power is a lower power

I have finished The User Illusion, Cutting Consciousness Down to Size,  by Tor Norretranders and, as some of the reviewers said, it's a real tour-de-force of some of the major controversies in science of the past 150 years or more, especially biology and physics. 

The author, an internationally-known Danish science writer is trying to show why some of the basic conflicts in the history of science turn on what we mean by information, communication, entropy, and consciousness, and this in turn requires us to understand how our brains work in its transactions with the world.  

As it turns out, consciousness plays an almost negligible role in communication, understanding and learning.  Most of this work is accomplished by our vast unconscious.

Consciousness is something of a fraud, as Norretranders argues, largely a bystander to the work of our larger unconscious, our bodies and our brains as they conduct the huge bulk of our transactions with the world moment by moment.

What is consciousness? A preview of coming attractions

The below is a blurb about a book by Tor Norretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, on the Flipkart book mart website.  I don't know the outfit but I love the description of the book and I will be reading the book next week. I had already ordered my copy from Amazon before I found this wonderful description.

As John Casti wrote, "Finally, a book that really does explain consciousness." This groundbreaking work by Denmark's leading science writer [Tor Norretranders] draws on psychology, evolutionary biology, information theory, and other disciplines to argue its revolutionary point: that consciousness represents only an infinitesimal fraction of our ability to process information. Although we are unaware of it, our brains sift through and discard billions of pieces of data in order to allow us to understand the world around us. In fact, most of what we call thought is actually the unconscious discarding of information. What our consciousness rejects constitutes the most valuable part of ourselves, the "Me" that the "I" draws on for most of our actions -- fluent speech, riding a bicycle, anything involving expertise. No wonder that, in this age of information, so many of us feel empty and dissatisfied. As engaging as it is insightful, this important book encourages us to rely more on what our instincts and our senses tell us so that we can better appreciate the richness of human life.

Listening

Yesterday, on the Fourth here in Bisbee, we had a large crowd at our house, watching the parade, eating, and talking. It was a fun day all around and the fireworks last night were spectacular.  

Our house is on the parade route in Warren, one part of Bisbee.  When we lived here for 10 years before we lived in "Old Town" or old Bisbee up the road and on the canyon walls.

Part of the time during the parade  I spent some time talking with an old friend who has lived in Mexico for a long time and I was asking her about her thoughts on whether and how I should proceed with my Spanish.  

In the middle of this conversation two young people came in who were volunteering in the Bisbee area, gathering signatures for a single payer option and also working as volunteers on the border.  They had been invited in by some of our friends who knew them. They had recently come from Atlanta where she had earned a master's in nursing at Emory.

Of course when they mentioned health care reform, I was off to the races, bloviating about my own experiences and great wisdom in these matters.  It was quite a performance: me talk, you listen, and they were polite, pleasant and altogether too willing to let an old timer have his say.