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Friday, May 02, 2008
Time to Make the Sausages
Some Friday links: Iron Man gets good reviews in NYTimes, Salon, and Slate, while Times readers talk about their favorite action heroes.
Over at Language Log we learn that “general abstract nonsense” and “logical abstract nonsense” are terms of art, with the latter a subfield of the former. Unlike “Theory,” as the term is sometimes used at The Valve, these are not terms of opprobrium; rather the opposite. Only the cool mathematical kids dabble in varieties of abstract nonsense.
Meanwhile Larval Subjects has hosted a long discussion on the subject of the difficult style, that style whose difficulty is offered up as a necessary means to the higher truth. Sinthome doesn’t buy it; Kotsko has coined a term, “Academic Stockholm Syndrome." A good time was had by all. (Think of it as counterpoint to Holbo on argument.)
For those interested in historicizing and culturally situating the neural sciences, Pink Tentacle has published pictures from an early 19th century Japanese anatomy treatise. Here’s the brain:
(Hat tip to Of Two Minds.)
Over at Scienceblogs, Jonah Lehrer (Proust Was a Neuroscientist) has a post about Literature, Psychology and the Elites. He’s bouncing off a post by Razib (of Gene Expression) that concludes:
Why does any of this matter? For one, I think that it is somewhat peculiar that many of us find fiction from the past more engaging than popular contemporary works. Aupelius’ Golden Ass gets my attention; most contemporary fiction does not. I am arguing here that this is partly due to the fact that in the past those who read copiously were, on average, much more like me than they were like the typical human. Not only were readers by and large men (usually of some means and comfort), but they were often also disproportionately eggheads who were eccentric by their nature. How many elite scholars were there such as Claudius who were not attracted to the public life of politics and do not appear in the annals of history? With the printing press, cheaper paper, and the rise of mass literacy, things changed, the distribution of taste shifted. And so did the distribution of genres.
So am I full of crap?
Well, is he? Enquiring minds want to know.
Comments
About two thirds full of crap, I’d say.
Iron Man deserves its reviews. Robert Downey, Jr. plays a nice variation on the playboy genius superhero. But, I spotted a tech-plausibility glitch in the last third. Thing is, technical plausibility is not a strong suit in movies like this. You just have to park your disbelief and let it the hell alone to get more than 10 minutes into such movies. And I did that, as I’ve been doing for half a century. Still, there were one or two little matters that gave me pause toward the end. But I’m not tellin’.
Adam, maybe you’re a bit generous, no?
"Abstract nonsense” is a standard slang term. I’ve never heard of “logical abstract nonsense”; I suspect that particular author invented it. The term is not an insult, but it is self-deprecating. The main objects of modern mathematics are already one level of abstraction away from the mathematics of Newton and Gauss. Category theory is a whole layer of abstraction above that. Knowledge of category theory is pretty much universal among pure mathematicians, but the area itself is not incredibly fashionable.
I saw Iron Man last night. Very enjoyable. It was over the top and understated at the same time. Much of the credit has got to go to Robert Downing, Jr. I wonder how many of his comments and observations were ad libbed.
Has any superhero had a milder internal conflict? How interesting to see a superhero resolve his conflict without undue whinging.
The movie also had the coolest Stan Lee cameo so far.
Bill, I think I know the tech plausibility glitch you’re referring to—and found myself not caring
Yeah I don’t know if “coolness” is right, but I’ve heard category theory described as “generalized abstract nonsense” in a sort of joking self-derogatory way.
And which tech plausibility glitch you guys are referring to? No aspect of that movie, or the whole Iron Man idea, is technically or physically plausible. I had to turn off my questionable physics detectors approximately 30 seconds after the first version of the suit was turned on. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it, because it was awesome.
BibliOdyssey posted the anatomical drawings.
Thanks for the link, Laura. Will Eisner fans might want to go here, and then here.
“When women stop reading, the novel will be dead,” declared Ian McEwan in the Guardian last year… Unscientific as McEwan’s experiment may be, its thesis is borne out by a number of surveys conducted in Britain, the United States and Canada, where men account for a paltry 20 percent of the market for fiction… A 2000 survey found that women comprised a greater percentage of readers than men across all genres: Espionage/thriller (69 percent); General (88 percent); Mystery/Detective (86 percent); and even Science Fiction (52 percent).
From this 2006 article: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2780/