Prospero's Books

Everyone knows it's Slinky

In the last few months, I've become fascinated by the helix. This geometric figure appears in poetry, in ritual, in nature, and, of course, in our very DNA. But the first helix many of us encounter in our lives is the Slinky.

The Slinky and I came into the world together, in 1945. Richard James, a naval engineer living in Pennsylvania, reportedly dropped a spring to the floor and noticed the interesting way it kept moving. He took it home to his wife, Betty, and together they invented the toy they named "Slinky." The Slinky is still manufactured by the company Betty and Richard founded, and in 2001 it was named the State Toy of Pennsylvania.

The Slinky has become a part of American popular culture. For example, a quip currently making the rounds notes, "Some people are like Slinkies—not really good for anything, but you still can't help but smile when you see one tumble down the stairs."

Over the next few weeks, I plan to do a little writing about the helix. But when I say "helix," think "Slinky." That's what I'm going to do, just to try to keep myself from getting too pompous.

(The illustration for this post, a photograph by Roger McLassus, is a "featured picture" at Wikipedia Commons. Be sure to look at the high resolution version on that site.)

Lynn, Lynn

Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, or monomyth, is a remarkably good way to describe the learning process. To learn, we must leave the comfort of the familiar, of what we think we know, and enter an unknown territory, a territory that can be frightening. There we are confronted with challenges, even dangers. If we overcome these challenges, we can return "home" with boons, in the form of new knowledge and skills, and apply them to our lives. The traveler who returns home is not the traveler who left it.

A friend and colleague from the Boston area has given me a piece of urban folklore that echoes this point. I report it here merely as a folklorist, with no wish to slander the good folks of Lynn, Massachusetts:

Lynn, Lynn, city of sin,
You never come out the way you went in.

(The illustration above, from Wikipedia, is a postcard from about 1910, showing Lynn's first school house.)

Without knowledge of good and evil

In The Hero's Journey (see What I've Been Reading), Brown and Moffett title a chapter, "Chaos and Complexity This Way Come." The chapter begins:

To walk the path of the hero's journey is to leave the state of unconscious innocence and move toward a conscious acceptance that we are living in times of chaos, discord, and disequilibrium. When we leave the stage of "innocence" (a word that literally means "without knowledge of good and evil"), we awaken to the reality of serpents infesting our Garden of Eden and fire-breathing dragons threatening to demolish the sanctity of our once-peaceable kingdom (58).

We know, of course, that the emergence of higher levels of complexity—perhaps in the form of learning—requires chaos and disequilibrium. But the reverse is not true; chaos and disequilibrium don't guarantee new complexity. Some days you eat the bear. Some days the bear eats you.

Two ways to be fooled

Courtesy of the Science is a Method, Not a Position blog, a nice quote attributed to Soren Kierkegaard:

There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.

Good advice when looking at whole systems.

One must have chaos in one

Chaos theory sites around the Web are celebrating the naming of the new "dwarf planet" whose discovery led to smaller Pluto's demotion to that same rank. The new body has been christened Eris, after the Greek goddess of chaos.

Leslie, at Karmic Knowledge, offers an appropriate quotation:

One must have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star. —Friedrich Nietzsche

Shakespeare's social networks

Paul Mutton, at jibble.org, offers a striking new way to see Shakespeare's plays. Using a tool originally designed to chart social networks on the Internet, he has created stills and animations of the social networks in Shakespeare's works.

The example on his site is an animation of the shifting relationships among characters in Antony and Cleopatra. The other plays have apparently been similarly mapped, though I have not yet viewed them.

13 billion light-years

From Reuters:

Scientists said on Wednesday that they have found the most distant galaxy yet, nearly 13 billion light-years away, in a discovery that could help explain how stars were formed at the dawn of time.

The galaxy, named IOK-1, is so far away that the light waves that reached Earth depict it as the system of stars existed shortly after the Big Bang created the universe 13.66 billion years ago.

The fractal rings of history

On the blog Chaotic Utopia (home of the fabulous Friday Fractals), Karmen is beginning a series on the physical and social history of her little piece of Colorado. She's off to a very promising start:

It seems like the deeper I look, the more stories there are to be found. The history of the area is, indeed, fractal in nature, as I described at the beginning of this post. What makes this one unique is the haunting feeling that I'm a part of the fractal. Some of the places in these stories are places that had a strong influence on me, growing up, or even today. Roads that I've literally traveled show up in old pictures, while names on maps or street signs become the names of 3-dimensional people, each with a legacy of their own.

Everyone is a part of the fractal rings of history.

Shakespeare Searched

Shakespeare Searched is an innovative and powerful tool for searching Shakespeare's work. It lets you perform not only simple word searches of the entire canon, but also searches by play and character. It also clusters its results by topic, based on nearby words. And it offers full citations for each result.

(Thanks to Lifehacker for the tip.)

We need a September 12 Day

Yesterday's memorials and TV documentaries made me remember—and doubtless made many people remember—the days and weeks after 9/11/2001: days and weeks when Americans were kind to each other, when people across the country stopped to thank random police officers and fire fighters and postal workers for doing their jobs, and when flying the Stars and Stripes was not seen as a partisan political statement.

For those few days and weeks, we could listen with no sense of irony to the David Wilcox lyrics I quoted yesterday—and to these, from James Taylor's "On the Fourth of July":

. . . fell into you at a quarter to two,
With a tear in your eye for the Fourth of July,
For the patriots, and the Minutemen,
And the things you believe they believed in then,

Such as freedom, and freedom's land,
And the kingdom of God, and the rights of man,
With the tiny tin voice of the radio band
Singing, "Love must stand,
Love forever and ever must stand."

Starting next year, we need a September 12 Day. We need to use that day to remember those amazing days and weeks in the autumn of 2001, and to figure out ways to recapture that spirit without towers having to fall.

("On the Fourth of July" is from the CD October Road, available from, among other places, James Taylor's Web site.)