biggest PowerPoint show

That one was so interesting that I didn’t even realize it was 1:20 AM on a teaching night (with a nearly one-hour commute to an 8:30 AM class!). More than 80 slides in this one, from Truman’s oath of office to the Trinity Site test.

Actually, I ended with the infamous shark attacks on the survivors of the torpedoed USS Indianapolis, which had carried the bomb from San Francisco to Tinian. It is said that this was the largest shark attack on humans in recorded history, and I can’t think of what the other candidates might be. Talk about a bad omen…

public apology to Michael Austin

Oh, sorry Michael… Until running across your blog post just now I had completely forgotten about the paper you sent me in early April!

A few explanations and comments, both to Michael and the public readership of this blog…

*HERE IS THE POST IN WHICH HE REFERS TO THE MATTER.

*I’m at the point in life now where I get lots and lots of e-mail. For the first time in my life, there is a genuine chance of simply forgetting even a very important and very exciting e-mail even from a close friend. The chances of this are magnified given my habit of reading the overnight e-mail first thing in the morning, while bleary-eyed and disoriented. Sometimes I go through a whole day feeling good for no evident reason, and then when I get home at night I realize it’s because of some e-mail I had read and then forgotten about.

*Lots of people send me essays to read now, even very long essays. I do what I can, but there’s no way to read it all, and I hope people will forgive me when I fall months behind, even infinite months. Maybe I’ll make it up to them on some other occasion.

*If you really want someone to read something you’ve written, the obvious way to do this is to write something about them. People are naturally fascinated to read anything about their own work, and of course this is how I was able to meet Latour back when I was just a newly minted Ph.D. People get surprisingly little intelligent feedback about their own work, even when they are ultra-celebrities. Bill Martin at DePaul once told me about the time he gave a paper at the APA (I believe during his student years) about Donald Davidson, and Davidson himself showed up– and liked the paper. You don’t have to suck up to the author in question, and neither do you have to try too hard to be “critical”. Both methods fail. Just describe what you see when you read that author’s work. Your vantage point will automatically be somewhat unique.

*Well, Michael did send me a paper at least partly about myself, and I still forgot it! How? Largely because I was travelling for several weeks.

*But… worse yet, I forgot it even though he surely became the first person ever to get an A+ grade for writing on object-oriented philosophy. And still worse, his blog politely states that he is waiting for feedback from me before making the paper available. I could hardly be more embarrassed.

Sorry Michael, so sorry… Sending me that paper in early April is the equivalent of having sent it to me just after I had woken up. Everything from early April has been washed from my brain by Dublin, Bristol, and Amsterdam.

I forgot, plain and simple.

But now I just need to get through Thursday and the week’s responsibilities. If you don’t hear from me by the end of the weekend, for God’s sake please give me a good shake via e-mail.

(ADDENDUM: just did a search, and my name appears *60* times in that paper. And still I neglected to read it. That’s professional malfeasance, as well as a missed opportunity for what is no doubt great fun.)

“a philosophy of bank shots”

I really enjoy the phrase “a physics of bank shots” as applied to Oppenheimer. I haven’t read any of his original physics papers, but I can sort of imagine what is meant.

I’ll need to think over what “a philosophy of bank shots” would be… Actually, I can think of a few good living examples (one especially, aging but still alive), but they might take it the wrong way if word got back to them that I said so. So it would be better to come up with a dead semi-classic figure as a good analogy: the Oppenheimer of philosophy, so to speak.

Oppenheimer essays

This evening’s activity is to enjoy some very fine student essay tests on Oppenheimer, who really must be one of the most complicated and fascinating human characters of the 20th century.

*A sickly and socially awkward adolescent/young adult, who later became possibly the greatest human project manager in world history, as well as the most suave ladies’ man imaginable.

*An advocate of “doing no harm to any living creature,” who not only built the atomic bomb (partly to stop Hitler, partly from ambition), but also vetoed the desperation idea of poisoning the German food supply with strontium “unless we are capable of causing at least 500,000 deaths”. (The desperation came from intelligence reports that Hitler was about to unleash “a secret weapon.” This turned out to be the V-1 and V-2 rockets, but fearing initially that it was an atomic bomb, the Los Alamos scientists lost their heads and began toying with anti-German genocide.)

*One of the most versatile intellects of the century, but perhaps with a slight touch of superficiality and showboating… An important contributor to quantum theory at a shockingly early date, he also shocked his Dutch hosts at a lecture once by unexpectedly showing up and giving the lecture in Dutch, without prior announcement… But also a devotee of what Rhodes amusingly calls “a physics of bank shots,” and according to Bethe too much of an extrovert to do Nobel-level work. (Alvarez disagreed, claiming that Oppenheimer would have received the Nobel for his theories about the sun, if only he had lived long enough.)

*(ADDENDUM: another of his apparent contradictions… Throughout his life he had an unnerving knack for what Rhodes calls “casual cruelty,” in the verbal sense. He had a rare genius for vicious putdowns of others. And yet, during his time as Director at Los Alamos, a warm and encouraging streak emerged from the man. His probing psychological insight, previously used to wound the weak points of others, took on a healing function when it was needed to get the job done. After the war, it is said, he reverted to his casual viciousness.)

I’ve read lengthier biographical works devoted solely to Oppenheimer, and my sense is that he was one of the most interesting people to have lived in the 20th century, and one of the most interesting and important figures of American history as a whole.

Best of all, my students in Cairo get it. They’re presenting the right nuanced view of the man.

Levi on Hegel and Indian cuisine

As a good vegetarian since early childhood I can’t bring myself to link to any post that’s about eating lamb. But the following words of Levi are worth citing:

“The cuisine of India is a bit like Hegel where philosophy is concerned: incredibly sophisticated, nuanced, and unfolding simultaneously on a variety of different levels.”

Agreed. I’ve been to India three times, and though the sheer adrenaline rush of the place was always the real motivation, I could easily imagine planning a return trip for the sole purpose of eating well for several weeks.

As I may have stated on the first incarnation of the blog, one of the owners of Moti Mahal on Belmont Ave in Chicago told me that there were some spices he simply wasn’t able to get in Chicago by any means of import. You can tell that’s probably right when you’re actually in India. A new and subtler spectrum of spices suddenly appears.

I suppose most Americans find they can often get a decent hamburger at some dumpy corner cafe in almost any American city. That’s sort of what it’s like with Indian food in India. Sometimes I would ask the advice of local residents on which places were the best, while other times I would just roll the dice based on the look of a place. But only rarely was I disappointed.

The luckiest jackpot I ever hit was a place in Panajim (Goa), just a random place that wasn’t even in the guidebooks. It was a strange place with a grungy local feel on the lower floor, feeding into a posh hotel dining room on the second floor, followed by corridors to the washroom that were as labyrinthine as normally only a serial killer wishes to build.

And that was right after visiting Old Goa, which in its heyday was considered a rival for Lisbon. It’s all deserted now. In fact, the name I came up with for Old Goa was “The Haunted Banana Plantation”. But the bones of St. Francis Xavier are there, and I sat through a rather unusual Catholic service there before visiting the bones. (Unusual partly because of the strange setting, and partly because despite expecting some sort of exotic Luso-Indo-Catholic church music, I heard mainstream Midwestern Protestant Sunday school music instead.)

Nornmally I like visiting new countries on trips, but India probably counts as about 10 different countries in cultural terms, so I’ve never regretted the repeat visits, and there is still plenty more I haven’t yet touched.