Having recently watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail with my eleven year old son, I was reminded of how extremely uneven Monty Python was. They had quite a few absolutely brilliant sketches. They had some mediocre sketches. They had a fair number of really bad sketches. This extends to their movies, too, which are basically just loose collections of skits with a common theme. (In the case of Holy Grail, their theme was “medievalish”.)
Despite this extraordinary unevenness, Monty Python movies and sketches are held up as some of the heights of comedy. There’s a lesson, here, for writers: overall quality is good, but when it comes to being memorable, the heights you reach are more important than the average.
There is an asterisk on that, which is that it probably matters significantly what your competition is. Mitchell and Webb, for example, had a similar number of brilliant sketches, but they had far fewer really bad sketches (their snooker commentator sketches are the only ones that come to mind) and not many bad sketches either. Overall, their quality was higher, though the peaks were no higher. Had they been competing at the same time, Monty Python probably would have fared worse.
(Of course, there are other things that make the two not directly comparable. All comedy is a product of its time, and Monty Python especially so. The 1970s, in its post-world-war-2 context was a time when people hungered for different more than they hungered for quality, and many of Monty Python’s sketches reflect that. While Monty Python wouldn’t fare nearly as well against Mitchell and Webb in the 2010s, Mitchell and Webb wouldn’t fare nearly as well against Monty Python in the 1970s—the audience just would not have been in the mood for most of it.)
For those trying to get more protein into their diet, whey powder (or any protein powder) can be a great way to do it. The downside to whey powder, though is how to actually eat the stuff—it’s not exactly appetizing to eat the dry powder with a spoon. The common solution is to dissolve it into a liquid. Water is probably the most common, which is why whey powders often have a lot of sugar and flavoring in them. I strongly prefer to get plain whey powder which has only the protein and no added sugars or artificial flavors.
I have made protein shakes using some milk, a little heavy cream, whey powder, and vanilla. They work, and if served very cold can be a little like a milkshake, as long as you generally eat so little sugar that your taste buds have reset their idea of sweet so that plain milk tastes sweet to you. The problem, though, is that it’s very easy to make a lot of air bubbles in the shake during the mixing, which produces an unpleasant texture. You can get around this by mixing with a stick blender in a tall container so that the surface can’t get down to the blades, but this is a lot of work and leaves you with a stick blender to clean when you’re done with it.
Enter Greek yogurt. Greek yogurt is an unsweetened yogurt which is strained after fermentation so it’s higher in protein than normal yogurt and has very little in the way of even natural milk sugars. (Normal grocery-store yogurt has so much sugar added that it’s very nearly got the same amount of sugar per unit volume as ice cream.) You can mix whey powder into Greek yogurt at a ratio of about 1 scoop of whey powder to 1 cup of Greek yogurt. You can mix it with a spoon. As my wife described it when she was telling me about the recipe, “at first it looks like there’s no way this is going to work, then it does”. After about 30-60 seconds of mixing, the whey powder dissolves into the yogurt and you get a very thick, creamy result. I like to add about a teaspoon and a half of vanilla per cup of yogurt because the flavor complements very well. I’ve also taken to adding about 1 tablespoon of heavy cream per scoop of whey powder both for flavor and texture.
One tip I’ve found is that it tastes better when very cold, so I put the bowl with the whey powder in it into the freezer for a few minutes before adding the yogurt, so I’m adding all cold ingredients. If you want to do something kind of like making homemade frozen yogurt, put the mixed yogurt/whey back into the freezer. Take out and stir every 60 seconds or so. Keep this up until it’s the consistency you want. It will freeze against the sides of the bowl, so make sure to scrape them clean and mix the result into the middle. This would be very labor-intensive to make true fro-yo, but even getting a quarter of the way there can be pleasant.
NOTE: this also works best if you’ve avoided sugar enough that your taste buds have reset to the point where you can eat unsweetened Greek yogurt. (The whey powder makes the acidity a little more mild, but not much more mild.) If that’s not true, then you’re probably not as concerned with avoiding sugar anyway, and so you can add as much sweetener as needed to make this taste the way you want it. When it comes to flavors, sweet tends to cover over bitterness and sourness (that is, alkali and acidity), hence milk chocolate and lemonade.
Anyway, this has a lot of protein and is easier with less cleanup than protein shakes, so I mention it in case it helps anyone else, too.
Of all of the various kinds of internet atheist (see Taxonomy of Atheists), my least favorite are the cult atheists who pretend to be polite and open minded. They’re very recognizable because they always introduce themselves with something like, “I haven’t seen any evidence for God, but if I did I would become a theist. Do you know of any evidence for God?” They’ll tend to start out polite, often saying things like, “perhaps I’m mistaken, can you show me where?” It sounds great.
Then when you give them what they’ve asked for, such as presenting them or directing them to one of the arguments which shows that literally all being is evidence for God (e.g. the argument from motion, or the argument from contingency and necessity), their true colors come out. They’re still gentle of speech, but they say things like, “this is an argument from ignorance,” (they love to pretend that logic is an argument from ignorance) or accuse it of some other error which it obviously doesn’t have. They’ll typically throw in some insults, at this point, though gently phrased insults. “I think you might be engaging in wishful thinking” is no less an insult for being said in tea-time language.
As you proceed, the veneer of politeness tends to drop, with accusations becoming much more direct, and everything you’ve explained to them—at their request—rejected out of hand. The more you talk to them, the clearer it becomes that they don’t believe any of their principles, and when you have finally cornered them on something, they just ignore it and tend to claim that they’ve shown something that they didn’t, a few steps back in the conversation. Sometimes they declare victory and accuse you of just not being willing to admit it, sometimes they just claim to have shown you’re irrational or whatnot. They’re an enormous waste of time, and I think that’s their goal.
I’ve dealt with more than a few of them, over the years, and I’ve learned that they all have a tell—their act like they’re new to the subject. They pretend to be fair-minded, but also completely ignorant of the subject. If pressed, they will admit that they’ve heard things about it before, but this gives the lie to their presentation of fair-mindedness. A reasonable person, on asking for evidence of something, will save the other person time by explaining what they’ve already encountered and what their problems with it are. They don’t do this because wasting someone else’s time is their goal.
The other part of this tell is that they are pretending to be the new to the subject. The only people who are completely new to the subject of whether God exists are young children and (possibly) people raised by wolves who have barely learned English. Well, that’s not quite true, since I left off the qualifier of “reasonable.” Reasonable people investigate important questions, they don’t merely ignore them until someone decides to spoon-feed them information about them. If for some strange reason a reasonable person has come across no convincing source of information on the subject of God in real life, he would not merely go onto social media and ask complete strangers for evidence that God exists. A reasonable person (in this odd circumstance) would do some online searching and find sources that seem to be high quality. Or he might even read a book or two on the subject. (And then, as I noted above, if he’s asking randos on social media, he’ll give them some idea of where he’s starting from and what he already knows.)
A friend of mine was talking about how self-driving car technology is almost ready for general use and gave as evidence that this is likely to be the case that Waymo is already operating an autonomous ride-sharing service in Phoenix, Arizona, and has recently expanded to San Francisco.
So I looked into this.
It is true that Waymo is operating a driverless ride-sharing service, called Waymo One, in Phoenix Arizona, and has been doing so since 2018 (with a several month pause due to COVID-19, back in 2020). However, this is slightly misleading. According to Waymo One’s FAQ, “Our Waymo One fully autonomous ride-hailing service operates within parts of the Phoenix metropolitan area, including Chandler, Tempe, Mesa and Gilbert.”
Here’s a map of Phoenix, Arizona, which Wikipedia linked to, and I’ve circled Chandler, Tempe, Mesa, and Gilbert. (Approximately; there might be a bit of these places outside of the purple circle—I’m not familiar with Arizona geography and couldn’t find similar interactive maps for Tempe, Mesa, Gilbert, and Chandler.)
Waymo chose Phoenix because (being in the desert and pretty far south) it’s basically a place with no weather. So in this best-case scenario for the Waymo self-driving car, three years into running their autonomous service they’re still not running in most of the Phoenix metro area. Heck, they’re still not even running in Phoenix (proper).
At this rate… I’m not even sure that there is a rate of expansion. Extrapolating their progress in the last 3 years, it might be another 100 years before they offer rides in all of the Phoenix metro area.
But they’ve expanded to San Francisco!
Yeah, they have. Except that in San Francisco the Waymo One cars have an “autonomous specialists riding in the driver’s seat.” Also, the ride-sharing program is only open to people in the “trusted tester program,” which is “a confidential research program within Waymo One, where select riders will have access to our service and can share their experiences directly with our team to help shape the future of autonomous driving”. (I’m quoting from their FAQ.)
So “expanded to San Francisco” means that they are now running some number of tests, using safety drivers, and with passengers who have signed NDAs and can’t tell anyone how badly it’s going.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that self-driving cars are impossible. I doubt that Waymo’s hyper-detailed maps approach is really the way forward, but as the saying goes, of all things the future is the hardest to predict.
I think it’s important to be realistic, though. There is no reason to believe that self-driving cars are just a few years away from being a standard option on cars at the dealership.
In this video I talk about why it’s good to talk about the downsides of atheism, despite it generally being more attractive to be positive rather than negative; to make the case for something and not to merely make the case against one of its alternatives. That reason is that people often take the “cheese pizza” approach. If they think that there’s a common denominator, they will pick that to avoid conflict. By talking about the problems with atheism, it can help people to realize that there is no plain cheese pizza; that there is no common denominator.
Recently, whoever it is that makes the show Blue’s Clues hired the original actor to deliver a message to fans. It’s quite curious:
I was too old to watch Blue’s Clues and my children didn’t come along until after Steve (the character in this message) left, and they’ve never watched Blue’s Clues anyway, so I don’t have an emotional attachment to the show, or to the character. I think I randomly found an episode of Blue’s Clues once, for a few seconds, while flipping to the channel I actually wanted to watch. That’s enough to make me aware of the show and so to recognize the actor, though (like me) he’s now much older.
From what very little I know of Blue’s Clues, it was always a highly parasocial show. The host would talk to the viewer as if they were there, so this is in keeping the format of the original show. I have my doubts that this is a good idea in a children’s show, but it is downright creepy in something aimed at adults.
Parasocial relationships supplanting real relationships is, I think, one of the great dangers of the modern world. There’s also a great temptation to it on the part of creators because there are so many lonely people who will cling to the feeling of having another person with them even though they know that it’s just a recording of someone who doesn’t even know that they exist. Even worse, many creators feel a parasocial relationship to the people they don’t know and don’t interact with except as a view/like/star/thumbs up/etc. statistic, which encourages them to participate in that parasocial relationship, inviting their viewers further into it. They will talk about highly private moments in their life, saying (I think, truthfully) that they want to bring their friends, that is, their viewers, along with them. As I mentioned in The Fundamental Principle of Science, the problem isn’t the liars, but the sincere but deluded people that an environment selects for. They sell the lie all the better for believing it themselves.
After all, the actor on Blue’s Clues left after a few years.
Forensic pathologists’ decisions are critical in police investigations and court proceedings as they determine whether an unnatural death of a young child was an accident or homicide. Does cognitive bias affect forensic pathologists’ decision-making? To address this question, we examined all death certificates issued during a 10-year period in the State of Nevada in the United States for children under the age of six. We also conducted an experiment with 133 forensic pathologists in which we tested whether knowledge of irrelevant non-medical information that should have no bearing on forensic pathologists’ decisions influenced their manner of death determinations. The dataset of death certificates indicated that forensic pathologists were more likely to rule “homicide” rather than “accident” for deaths of Black children relative to White children. This may arise because the base-rate expectation creates an a priori cognitive bias to rule that Black children died as a result of homicide, which then perpetuates itself. Corroborating this explanation, the experimental data with the 133 forensic pathologists exhibited biased decisions when given identical medical information but different irrelevant non-medical information about the race of the child and who was the caregiver who brought them to the hospital. These findings together demonstrate how extraneous information can result in cognitive bias in forensic pathology decision-making.
OK, let’s take a look at the actual study. First, it notes that black children’s deaths were more likely to be ruled homicides (instead of accidents) than white children’s deaths, in the state of Nevada, between 2009 and 2019. More accurately, of those deaths of children under 6 which were given some form of unnatural death ruling, the deaths of black children were significantly more likely to be rated a homicide rather than an accident than were the deaths of white children.
It’s worth looking at the actual numbers, though. Of all of the deaths of children under 6 in Nevada between 2009 and 2019, 8.5% of the deaths of black children were ruled a homicide by forensic pathologists while 5.6% of the deaths of white children were ruled a homicide. That’s not a huge difference. They use some statistics to make it look much larger, of course, because they need to justify why they did an experiment on this.
In fairness to the authors, they do correctly note that these statistics don’t really mean much on its own, since black children might have been murdered statistically more often than white children, during those time periods in Nevada. It doesn’t reveal cognitive biases if the pathologists were simply correct about real discrepancies.
So now we come to the experiment: They got 133 forensic pathologists to participate. They took a medical vignette about a child below six who was discovered motionless on the living room floor by their caretaker, brought the ER, and died shortly afterwards. “Postmortem examination determined that the toddler had a skull fracture and subarachnoid hemorrhage of the brain.”
The participants were broken up into two groups, which I will call A and B. 65 people were assigned to A and 68 to B. All participants were given the same vignette, except that, to be consistent with typical medical information, the race of the child was specified. Group A’s information stated that the child was black, while group B’s information stated that the child was white. OK, so they then asked the pathologists to give a ruling on the child’s death as they normally would, right?
No. They included information about the caretaker. This is part of the experiment to determine bias, because information about the caretaker is not medically relevant.
OK, so they said that the caretaker had the same race as the child?
Heh. No. Nothing that would make sense like that.
The caretaker of the black child was described as the mother’s boyfriend, while the caretaker of the white child was the child’s grandmother. Their race was not specified, though for the caretaker of the white child it can be (somewhat) inferred from the blood relation, depending on what drop-of-blood rule one assumes the investigators are using to determine the child is white. Someone who is 1/4 black, where the caretaker grandmother was the black grandparent, might well be identified as white, or perhaps the 1 drop of blood rule is applied at the grandmother could be at most 1/8 black for her grandchild to qualify to the racist experimenters as white. Why do they leave out the race of the caretaker despite clearly wanting to draw conclusions about it? Why, indeed.
More to the point, these are not at all comparable things. It is basic human psychology that people are far less likely to murder their descendants than they are to murder people not related to them. Moreover, males are more likely to commit violent crimes than females are (with some asterisks; there is some evidence to suggest that women are possibly even more likely to hit children than men are but just get away with it more because people prefer to look away when women are violent, but in any event the general expectation is that a male is more likely to be violent than a female is). Finally, young people are significantly more likely to be violent than older people are.
In short, in the vignette given to group A, the dead child is black and the caretaker who brought them in is given 3 characteristics, each of which, on its own, makes violence more statistically likely. In group B, the dead child is white and the caretaker who brought them in is given 3 characteristics, each of which, on its own, makes violence more statistically unlikely. For Pete’s sake, culturally, we use grandmothers as the epitome of non-violence and gentleness! At this point, why didn’t they just give the caretaker of the black child multiple prior convictions for murdering children? Heck, why not have him give such medically extraneous information as repeatedly saying, “I didn’t hit him with the hammer that hard. I don’t get why he’s not moving.” I suppose that would have been too on-the-nose.
Now, given that we’re comparing a child in the care of mom’s boyfriend to a child in the care of the child’s grandmother, what do they call group A? Boyfriend Condition? Nope. Black Condition. Do they call group B Grandma Condition? Nope. White Condition.
OK, so now that we have a setup clearly designed to achieve a result, what are the results?
None of the pathologists rated the death “natural” or “suicide.” 78 of the 133 pathologists ruled the child’s death “undetermined” (38 from group A, 40 from group B). That is, 58.6% of pathologists rules it “undetermined”. Of the minority who ruled conclusively, 23 ruled it homicide and 32 ruled it homicide. (That is, 17.2% of all pathologists ruled it accident and 24% of all pathologists ruled it homicide.)
In group A, 23 pathologists ruled the case homicide, 4 ruled it accident, and 38 ruled it undetermined. In group B, 9 ruled it homicide, 19 ruled it accident, and 40 ruled it undetermined.
This is off from an exactly equal outcome by approximately 15 out of 133 pathologists. I.e. if about 7 pathologists in group A had ruled accident instead of homicide, and 7 pathologists in group B ruled homicide instead of accident, the results would have been equal between both groups. As it was, this is a big enough difference to get statistical significance, which is just a measure of whether the random chance you see 95% of the time is sufficient to entirely explain the results. What it doesn’t do is show a pervasive trend. If 11% of the participants had reversed their ruling, the experiment would have shown that the 18.6% of forensic pathologists on an email list of board-certified pathologists who responded to the study were paragons of impartiality.
There’s an especially interesting aspect to the last paragraph of the conclusion:
Most important is the phenomenon identified in this study, namely demonstrating that biases by medically irrelevant contextual information do affect the conclusions reached by medical examiners. The degree and the detailed nature of these biasing effects require further research, but establishing biases in forensic pathology decision-making—the first study to do so—is not diminished by the potential limitation of not knowing which specific irrelevant information biased them (the race of the child, or/and the nature of the caretaker). Also, one must remember that the experimental study is complemented and corroborated by the data from the death certificates.
The first part is making a fair point, which is that the study does demonstrate that it is possible to bias the forensic pathologist by providing medically irrelevant information, such as the caretaker being far more likely to have intentionally hurt the child. Why didn’t they make all of the children white and just have half of the vignettes including the caretaker with multiple previous felony convictions, who was inebriated, repeatedly state, “I only hit the little brat with a hammer four times”? If we’re only trying to see whether medically irrelevant information can bias the medical examiner, that would do it too. But what’s up with varying the race of the child?
While it’s probably just to be sensationalist because race-based results are currently hot, it may also be a tie-in to that last sentence: “Also, one must remember that the experimental study is complemented and corroborated by the data from the death certificates.” This sentence shows a massive problem with the researcher’s understanding of the nature of research. Two bad data sources which corroborate each other do not improve each other.
To show this, consider a randomly generated data source. Instead of giving a vignette, just have another set of pathologists randomly answer “A”, “B,” or “C”. Then decide that A corresponds to undetermined, B to homicide, and C to accident. There’s a good chance that people won’t pick these evenly, so you’ll get a disparity. If it happens to be the same, it doesn’t bolster the study to say “the results, it must be remembered, also agreed with the completely-blinded study in which pathologists picked a ruling at random, without knowing what ruling they picked”.
Meaningless data does not acquire meaning by being combined with other meaningless data.
The conclusion of the study is, curiously, entirely reasonable. It basically amounts to the observation that if you want a medical examiner making a ruling based strictly on the medical evidence, you should hide all other evidence but the medical evidence from them. This, as the British like to say, no fool ever doubted. If you want someone to make a decision based only on some information, it is a wise course of action to present them only that information. Giving them information that you don’t want them to use is merely asking for trouble. It doesn’t require a badly designed and interpreted study to make this point.
Famous First Amendment & trademark lawyer Ron Coleman discusses big tech censorship and the law with me, as well as the morality of big tech censorship which the law would ideally capture. We talk about promissory estoppel, misrepresentation, contract law and terms of service, and the possibility of consumer protection laws.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s there was a painter by the name of Bob Ross who ran a delightful television show on PBS called The Joy of Painting. Bob Ross used an extremely fast wet-on-wet technique of oil painting in which he would paint a beautiful landscape painting in realtime during his half-hour show. He would talk to the audience in one of the most calm voices a human being has ever been given, and talk about how we’re making whatever world we want and that there are no mistakes here, just happy little accidents.
What I discovered recently was that not only did Bob Ross not invent the quick painting technique he used, he didn’t even invent the happy little accidents. Now, to be clear, this was not something that Bob Ross tried to hide. In fact, he credited his mentor. He mentioned that he got the technique from Bill Alexander in the first episode of the first least, and he dedicated the first episode of the second season to Bill Alexander:
Bill Alexander didn’t invent the concept of painting wet-on-wet with oil paint; that dates back hundreds of years. What Bill Alexander did was to create the technique of making landscapes using wet-on-wet techniques involving large brushes and a strong pallet knife so as to be able to paint a landscape in half an hour.
But Bill Alexander didn’t just invent the technique. He also taught it on his own PBS show. It was called The Magic of Oil Painting and ran from 1974 to 1982. (The Joy of Painting started in 1983, so Bob Ross was continuing what his teacher did, he wasn’t competing with him.)
It’s interesting to watch an episode of Bill Alexander’s show, as you can see that Bob Ross did copy quite a lot of it:
Bill Alexander was born Wilhem Alexander in 1915, in Germany. He was drafted into the Wehrmacht in World War 2 but was captured by the Allies and, after painting portraits of officers’ wives, made his way to the United States where he took up residence after the war was over.
He had the same positive attitude, looking at mistakes as things you just roll with and learn how to use. He was not as soft-spoken, and his German accent makes things sound more harsh than they were, which brings us to an interesting point: it is very rare that an innovator becomes famous for his innovations.
This is a pattern that ones sees the world over, and throughout history. The peculiarities and genius needed to come up with an idea that no one has had before—or at least no one in one’s culture has had before—is rarely compatible with that common touch which really helps to make it intelligible to the public at large. It is extremely common, then, that the innovator’s invention is made famous by someone who is just strange enough to understand the new idea but not strange enough to have come up with it on his own, but his not being strange enough to come up with the idea is what makes him able to communicate it to people who aren’t at all strange.
An interesting plot element in a detective story is having multiple murderers. This can really complicate the life of the detective because each murderer may have a truly unbreakable alibi for the murder he didn’t commit. While the detective (and everyone else) labors under the assumption that one person committed both murders, the only viable suspects will probably have no motive.
As I think I’ve mentioned before, one of the really interesting ways of doing this is to have the two murderers murder each other, though one with some sort of time-delay mechanism such that he’s already dead by the time it goes off and kills the other fellow. (Poison is an excellent murder weapon for this case.)
Another scenario for multiple murderers occurred to me: a primary murderer and an after-the-fact accomplice who kills the original murderer to hide his after-the-fact involvement in the first murder. For convenience, let’s name our murderers: John and Steve.
John murders someone, let’s say his wife, Alice. John didn’t plan it out, though, and needs help disposing of the body and erasing the evidence, so he goes to his friend, Steve. Steve reluctantly helps John because he doesn’t want to turn him away, but on the other hand really wishes that John had left him out of it.
The detective begins to investigate and starts coming up with clues that point to John, but also to John having an accomplice, at least after the fact. This alarms Steve, who never wanted to be involved, who got nothing out of the murder, and who doesn’t want to see his life go up in smoke because of John’s bad decisions. Steve begins to think of how to get out of this, and the one solution he comes up with is murdering John. Only John knows it was Steve who helped him, and Steve does have an excellent alibi for when Alice was murdered. If Steve can make it look like John was killed by the same person who killed Alice, he’ll be home free.
This would make for a good mystery, I think, because the detective would first have to disentangle the two murders as not done by the same person, then figure out what happened in the first murder, and from there figure out who the second murderer was. It gives a nice progression of realizations and reveals without everything coming at once, which is the key to a really good mystery novel. (Short stories do better with a single denouement.)
I recently saw a discussion online about lab-grown meat (cultured muscle cells in a growth medium), in which someone was describing the potential problems with it—which boil down to it probably has a different nutrient profile and the assumption that it is equivalent to meat from a living animal is completely unjustified. Animals are phenomenally, astonishingly complex and respond in a myriad of ways to their environment. Meat grown from cells cultured in a lab would be grown under radically different conditions from meat on an actual animal, so we know that it will be different. There will be different quantities of micro-nutrients and probably of macro-nutrients, too. (Protein is a catch-all term; there are actually nine essential amino acids which we have to get from our diet, and different proteins have very different quantities of the 26 amino acids which make up proteins.) He complained that people (scientists) often regard the human body as if it was something simple, like a car, with food being a simple fuel, like gasoline, where you just put in gasoline into the car and it goes, instead of the astonishingly complex thing that it is with significant second- and third-order effects from the complexities of the food that we eat.
It struck me as funny that this overly simplistic model of cars doesn’t even work for cars. You will not get the same gas mileage from low, medium, and high octane fuels, despite them having the same energy. (The octane rating refers to the average length of the hydrocarbon chains; high octane gasoline has longer average hydrocarbon chains.) You also will not get the same acceleration from the different fuels; an engine designed for high octane gasoline will produce less power with low-octane gasoline; the reverse can be true as well. (The reason for high-octane gasoline is that it can tolerate higher compression ratios than low-octane gasoline can and so more powerful engines can take advantage of this to produce more power. In an engine with a lower compression ratio, it doesn’t matter that the higher octane gasoline can tolerate more compression because it won’t get it.)
And heaven help you if you put diesel fuel into your gasoline engine, despite it also being a long-chain liquid hydrocarbon with only slightly more energy per gallon than gasoline.
In other words, “a calorie is a calorie” doesn’t even work with cars and the fuels you can buy at the gas station.
It should be noted that there is a domain where “a calorie is a calorie,” assuming that one limits this to the sensible macronutrients such as glucose, protein, and plant and animal fats. In very minor cases does it work to consume large quantities of ethanol, despite it technically containing calories that we can extract. In no cases does it work to drink gasoline or diesel fuel despite them having plenty of calories in them. Those (I hope, obvious) caveats aside, a calorie is a calorie when you are trying to fuel hard labor.
Suppose you have a person who you want to swim for eight hours a day. Swimming can consume around 900 Calories per hours (depending very much on body size, etc), so that will take 7,200 Calories per day in addition to base metabolic needs. If we assume that the base caloric requirement is 2,000 Calories per day, then the swimmer will be consuming 9,200 Calories per day. That is, if we feed the swimmer fewer than 9,200 Calories, the swimmer will be in a Caloric deficit and will eventually starve to death. (More realistically, their ability to do work will go down and we won’t get the full 8 hours a day of swimming out of them.) When it comes to “will this person have enough energy to do the work we want them to do,” it is indeed true that “a calorie is a calorie.” They may or may not be productive of overall health, but when it comes to the question of energy balance for work performed, this is pretty accurate. This doesn’t come up much in life (unless you’re running a sports team or prison chain gang), but this is the context where it’s true.
In this video I answer a question about (atheistic, materialistic) determinism, free will, and Calvinism-style predestination.
That last part is important to point out because there is a Catholic doctrine of predestination, but it only means that God has a plan (being outside of time) and in no way contradicts human free will. I also talk about how Martin Luther denied free will as well as John Calvin, though I don’t go into great depth.
Curls and other exercises that primarily work the biceps (brachii) have something of a bad reputation; they’re frequently regarded as being non-functional exercises for insecure gym bros whose only purpose is to look good in the mirror when flexing. I’m not sure why this is the case, though, because bicep curls (with a curl bar or with dumb bells) are actually quite functional.
So, when in normal life does one pick up something a bit below one’s hips and bring it up to one’s shoulder? One does exactly that thing when picking up a child who is old enough to walk. Admittedly, sometimes one has to bend over a little because their armpits are closer to knee height than to waist height, but it becomes a bicep curl once you stand up.
The most common way to pick up a child who can walk is when they stand in front of you and lift their arms up to indicate that they want to be picked up, in which case you tend to use two hands, one under each armpit. Sometimes you’re already holding something, though, and so you need to pick then up with only one arm. This is when the bicep curls really come in handy, since all of the child’s weight is being lifted like a dumb bell. (Pro tip: have the child lift it’s leg so you’re picking them up by their femur while they hold onto your upper arm with both of their arms. If you try to do it under just one armpit it will probably hurt them unless they’re very little or can pull down with that arm hard enough that their latissimus dorsii flexes hard enough to bear the weight.)
Fun fact: little children enjoy when you do reps of bicep curls with them, though in my experience they tend to max out at around 5 reps before they want you to just hold them like normal.
In this video I answer a question about what to do if one read the news, or commentary on the news, or saw social media about the news, and it’s gotten you down.
(I probably should append “part 2” or “part 3” or something to the title, but I don’t recall what the number should be and I don’t think anyone will really care if I don’t look it up.)
The advice to eat carbohydrates and as little fat as possible in order to lose weight is very strange advice. I’ve talked about this before, and for people who have the dysfunction of insulin resistance (or worse) it’s downright insane advice. (I don’t use the term as hyperbole, but rather than a person who recommends people who have trouble processing carbohydrates, or worse, outright diabetics, eat primarily carbohydrates for energy is not meaningfully connected to reality. It is possible to be insane only when some subjects come up, rather than completely insane, i.e. insane about all subjects, such as the man who thinks he’s a poached egg and tries to sit, motionless, in an egg cup all day.)
(Before I proceed, I should note that there are a few caveats to what I’m saying, here, which primarily apply to athletes. If you need to maintain maximal athletic performance for competition while losing weight, you are in a specialized situation and specialized strategies will apply.)
The argument for eating primarily carbohydrates for energy when losing weight mostly come down to the observation that carbohydrates are less energy-dense than fats are. Carbs contain 4 calories per gram while fat contains 9 calories per gram. So carbs fill you up more than fat does, so you won’t be as hungry and want to eat more for the same calories!
First, this is a stupid satiety model which is entirely ignorant of how human satiety works. Anyone who has ever been to a large meal such as Christmas dinner is familiar with eating the main course until feeling complete stuffed and unable to eat another bite, then suddenly having plenty of room for desert a few minutes later, knows this. This sort of ignorance is entirely inexcusable; it would be like giving people gardening advice without knowing the plants need sunlight.
The second problem is that, even if one ignores the bad satiety model, it’s not even the right inputs. Stomach expansion is a matter of volume, not mass. Looking it up, olive oil has a density of .92 grams per cubic centimetre, while granulated sugar has a density of 1.59 grams per cubic centimetre. Thus 1 cubic centimetre of olive oil will have 8.2 Calories, while 1 cubic centimetre of granulated sugar will have 6.36 Calories. If you eat the same number of calories in olive oil and granulated sugar, the sugar will only take up 30.2% more space. (Granulated sugar, by the way, is not as dense as sugar can get, since the granules are not tightly packed.) It’s more space, but not by a lot.
A bigger problem is that it’s extremely doable to add bulk to food while adding minimal calories. 100g of butter plus 100g of baby spinach will have only a few more calories than 100g of butter (and mostly in protein, curiously), but will take up way more room in the stomach than 103g of sugar will.
The general defense of telling people to eat carbs not fat is that most people can’t handle the complexity of actual food-volume calculations. In an abstract way, this is true, but again a person is straight-up delusional if they think the average person can’t handle, “eat a certain number of calories and try to make them take up as much room in your stomach as possible.”
And then we come up to the issue of satiety-over-time. If you want to make your stomach full on few calories without concern for how long this lasts, just drink a glass of water.
The moment that we care about satiety over time, though, the fact that the human stomach takes many more hours to process fats than it does to process carbohydrates becomes relevant, even on a garbage model of satiety like pure-stomach-pressure.
When one takes a moment to consider all of the false assumptions required to make the carbs-not-fat recommendation work, it’s really quite astonishing that anyone ever had the temerity to propose it in public.
My oldest son and I recently watched The A.B.C. Murders, and at the end there was a part, as Poirot was detailing the evidence against the murderer, where he added that a fingerprint of the man Poirot was accusing was found on the typewriter that the murderer used. Later, Hasting commented that the fingerprint produced a strong effect (the suspect tried to commit suicide).
That fingerprint clinched things, Poirot,” I said thoughtfully, “He went all to pieces when you mentioned that.” “Yes, they are useful—fingerprints.” he added thoughtfully: “I put that in to please you, my friend.” “But, Poirot,” I cried, “wasn’t it true?” “Not in the least, mon ami,” said Hercule Poirot.
One of the curious things about detective fiction is that it comes on the scene almost contemporaneously with the advent of forensics, the use of technology to catch crimes, and police forces organized in the modern manner. Francis Galton only published his statistical analysis that established fingerprints as a viable means of unique identification by the police in 1892. The first arrest and conviction of someone on the basis of fingerprint evidence was ten years later, in 1902. The golden age of detective fiction, if we include Sherlock Holmes in it (which we should), begins before the use of fingerprints as evidence in crimes.
As I mentioned in Fingerprints in Detective Stories, it’s not difficult to see why fingerprints are almost never used as real evidence in detective stories. We want detective stories to be interesting and the detective to be brilliant. “There was a fingerprint on the dagger in the victim’s back, we checked it against everyone’s fingerprints, it turns out to belong to his brother, therefore the brother is the murderer, the end” isn’t much of a story, and doesn’t require a brilliant detective.
Which actually brings me to the relationship between forensic science and fingerprints, because it is interesting to consider that while fingerprints were rarely used in detective stories, plenty of golden age detective stories were primarily about forensic science. Sherlock Holmes was often conducting scientific experiments to prove a case, though to my recollection rarely as the main story. This may have reached its apotheosis in Dr. Thorndyke. I’ve read that when the short stories were published they would include photographs of what the good doctor would have seen through his microscope as described in the story, and other such things. Thorndyke also made extensive use of enlarging photography and other forensic technologies. The stories have faded, considerably, in the public’s memory—to some degree the fate of everything whose main attraction was being on the cutting edge of science or technology. They were, so I read, immensely popular at the time. Their role is probably taken, these days, by police procedural television shows, whose stock and trade is often the cutting edge of forensic science.
I can’t help but wonder if it was G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown that helped to move detective fiction from a focus on forensics to include psychology. Chesterton first wrote Father Brown in 1910, which was still early on in the golden age. To be sure, more than half of Sherlock Holmes had been written by then and Holmes was no slave to forensics nor was he ignorant of human psychology. Still, he was an expert. He could identify over one hundred brands of cigar by their ash and could tell where a patch of mud on the trousers was picked up in london by its composition, just from looking at it.
Father Brown was not an expert—at physical details. We was an expert in the human being, which proved far more interesting.
This move to psychological mysteries brought with it what has, I think, made the murder mystery so enduring: the puzzle. Once forensics were established as a norm, murderers began to use their cunning to fake the forensic evidence and lead the forensic detectives astray. The psychological detective was necessary to combat this newer breed of criminal. It was at once more interesting and also more accessible. It is not really worth anyone’s time to minutely study cigar ash, but anyone can (if sufficiently clever) figure out the meaning of a particular kind of cigar ash being found in a particular place.
Poirot very much represents this transition. He said many times that he does not get on his hands and knees to find the clues, as anyone can do that. His job is to understand what the clues mean. The A.B.C. Murders was published in 1935, when the fascination with forensic detection was still fresh. It’s curious to see traces of this in the Poirot stories.
A few years ago I read an article about how awesome the Sweden was because it’s such a high trust society that all sorts of things are easy and convenient and efficient. He gave as an example that there were not turnstiles on the entrance to a train, there was merely a place where you’re supposed to scan your ticket but it didn’t get in the way of the flow people. He gave other examples of how much better life was because citizens were just trusted to do the right thing without any enforcement, and wondered how we can get people in the United States to be more trusting. I thought it very telling that he never once asked how to get people in the United States to be more trustworthy.
What I find especially interesting about this is that it’s an inversion from, approximately, ever serious classical view of virtue and its effects that you can find in any culture, at any time. Trust is a choice that other people make, and therefore you cannot control it. Trustworthiness, however, is entirely within your control, and therefore is the only thing to worry about. A man should strive, always, to be trustworthy. At the same time, he should never demand that people trust him, for how can anyone but him know that he is trustworthy? Thus the trustworthy man should always be willing to give guarantees, to give proofs of what he says, and in general to require as little trust from others as possible. To not require trust from others in no way diminishes his trustworthiness, so he is in no way the loser. A trustworthy man may accept when other decline to take his collateral, or to look up his proofs, because they trust him. A trustworthy man would not demand it, though.
This is especially true when the trustworthy man is dealing with a stranger. Since the trustworthy man goes to the trouble of being worthy of trust, he knows what signs there are that he is trustworthy, and therefore knows that the stranger has not seen any evidence of his trustworthiness.
This modern obsession with being trusted without first being trustworthy is indicative, I think, of how utterly childish moderns tend to be. It arises from wanting benefits without having put in the work. It wants benefits without putting in the work because it fails to consider things from anyone else’s perspective. It doesn’t really take the existence of the rest of the world seriously. This is excusable in a child because they simply don’t know enough about the world to take it seriously, in the sense of being able to consider how it works in their absence. An adult, however, should know that there are real consequences if the people who ride a train do not pay for tickets to ride it.
Perhaps the great problem of our time is that so few people grow up, not even late.
The one good thing to say about that is that people who have not grown up when they should have still have the ability to grow up. It’s not as good as doing it when they should have, of course, but they do still have the ability. Which means that the trick is figuring out how to help them actually do it.
(Curiously, though it does not bear on the main point, a Swedish friend said that not checking the validity of your ticket is only in Stockholm, the rest of Sweden verifies your ticket.)
There are various news articles around about during a presentation, a few seconds of the presentation was not of the CEO, Jensen Huang, but of a computer-generated fake of him instead. What I’d like to discuss is how misleading the initial articles reporting this were. The first one was from Tech Radar, and reported on a blog post from nVidia, and had the headline, “Jensen’s Kitchen Was a Lie.”
In fact, only a second or two of Jensen Huang’s kitchen was CGI; the CGI portion (which included a digitally generated Jensen) was only in the digital kitchen for a second, then it transitioned to a nearly black, obviously computer generated set. The computer generated set and CEO only lasted for fourteen seconds and the computer generated figure was actually very small in the frame. Here’s a screenshot from that section of the video:
In context, and if you’re familiar with the state of the art in this sort of thing and how much work it normally takes, this was still an impressive demonstration of computer technology. That said, the reports of it made it sound wildly more impressive than it actually was. Which brings me to why.
First, I’m 99.9% certain that this was an honest mistake. nVidia’s blog post was written from a very tech-centered point of view. It was very detail-oriented in terms of what nVidia technologies did what. Basically, it’s how engineers tend to write, because engineers can only do what they do because of tunnel vision. But that tunnel vision also tends to make them bad at communicating with non-engineers unless they conscious frame-shift.
Then we come to the tech reporters who took the nVidia post in the most sweeping way possible. Again, I think that they did this honestly. I think it highly likely that the writer believed every word he wrote.
So, what happened?
I strongly suspect it’s just selection bias at work. Tech reporters are tech reporters because they love technology. They want technology to be amazing. If tech reporters want technology to be amazing, tech readers want that tenfold. A hundredfold. This creates a selection bias; reporters who report on technology being amazing get more readers, because they provide the thrill that the readers seek. Ordinarily, this will mean that they report the same things as others, but do so in a more thrilling way. Tech reporting benefits tremendously from the world producing news on, approximately, a schedule. The ever-increasing performance of computers on roughly a yearly schedule means that there is a steady-state supply of genuine news. (If, granted, news that only tech-enthusiasts find interesting. But, we do find it interesting.) This is one massive advantage that tech news has over regular news, who only get newsworthy events rarely and haphazardly, and so have to make up most of what they report in order to fit their schedule (they make it up mostly in the sense of inflating the importance of insignificant events more than outright fabrication, but the spirit and effect are the same).
The issue comes in when the tech news to be reported is ambiguous. The enthusiastic, optimistic reporters who readers select for will tend to interpret the ambiguities in the most optimistic, impressive way, because that’s how they are and they’re the popular ones because readers like that.
Another advantage of tech news is that it doesn’t really matter. No one is going to do anything of any lasting effect because they believed for a few days that nVidia was able to fake their CEO for longer than they did, or more convincingly than they did. Tech news also tends to be fast to correct in part because real news will come along quickly to replace any mistakes. General news may go months or even years without anything that people need to pay attention to on a daily basis.
To those familiar with religions throughout the world, new religions like environmentalism, veganism, wokism, marxism, etc. are pretty obviously religions and are causing a lot of damage because that’s what bad religions do. People who are not familiar with any world religions beside Christianity frequently miss this because they think that all (real) religions look like Christianity but with different names and vestments.
I suspect that the idea that all religions look like Christianity was partially due to the many protestant sects which superficially looked similar, since even the ones that did away with priests and sacraments still met in a building on Sundays for some reason. I suspect the other major part is that there is a tendency to describe other religions in (inaccurate) Christian terms in order to make them easier to understand. Thus, for example, Shaolin “monks”. There are enough similarities that if you don’t plan to learn about the thing, it works. It’s misleading, though.
You can see the same sort of thing in working out a Greek pantheon where each god had specific roles and relationships and presenting this to children in school. It’s easy to learn, because it’s somewhat familiar, but it’s not very accurate to how paganism actually worked.
All of this occurred to me when I was talking with a friend who said that the primary feature of a religion, it seemed to him, was belief in the supernatural. The thing is, the nature/supernature distinction was a Christian distinction, largely worked out as we understand it today in the middle ages. Pagans didn’t have a nature/grace distinction, and if you asked them if Poseidon was supernatural they wouldn’t have known what you meant.
Would the ancient pagans have said that there things that operated beyond human power and understanding? Absolutely, they would. Were they concerned about whether a physics textbook entirely described these things? No, not at all. For one thing, they didn’t have a physics textbook. For another, they didn’t care.
The modern obsession that atheists have with whether all of reality is described in a physics textbook is not really about physics, per se, but about one of two things:
whether everything is (at least potentially) under human control
whether final causality is real, i.e. do things have purposes, or can we fritter our lives away on entertainment without being a failure in life?
The first one is basically an enlightenment-era myth. Anyone with a quarter of a brain knows that human life is not even potentially under human control. That it is, is believable, basically, by rich people while they’re in good health and when they’re distracted by entertainment from considering things like plagues, asteroids, war, etc. Anyone who isn’t all of these things will reject number 1.
Regarding the second: ancient pagans didn’t tend to be strict Aristotelians, so they wouldn’t have been able to describe things in terms of final causality, but they considered people to be under all sorts of burdens, both to the family, to the city, and possibly beyond that.
If you look at the modern religions, you will find the same thing. Admittedly, they don’t tend to talk about gods as much as the ancient pagans did, though even that language is on the rise these days. In what sense the Greeks believed in Poseidon as an actual human-like being vs. Poseidon was the sea is… not well defined. Other than philosophers, who were noted for being unlike common people, I doubt you could have pinned ancient pagans down on what they meant by their gods even if you could first establish the right terminology to ask them.
As for other things, environmentalism doesn’t have a church, but pagans didn’t have churches, either. Buddhists don’t have churches, and Hindus don’t have churches, and Muslims don’t have churches. Heck, even Jews don’t have churches. Churches are a specifically Christian invention. Now, many of these religions had temples. Moderns have a preference for museums. Also, being young religions, their rites and festivals aren’t well established yet. Earth day and pride month and so on are all fairly recent; people haven’t had time to build buildings in order to be able to celebrate them well. (Actually, as a side note, it also takes time to commercialize these things. People under-estimate the degree to which ancient pagan temples were businesses.)
Another stumbling block is that modern environmentalists, vegans, progressives, etc. don’t identify these things as religions—but to some degree this is for the same reason that my atheist friend doesn’t. They, too, think of religions as basically Christianity but maybe with different doctrines and holy symbols. They don’t stop to consider that most pagans in the ancient world were not in official cults. There were cults devoted to individual gods, and they often had to do with the running of temples. Normal people were not in these cults. Normal people worshiped various gods as convenient and as seemed appropriate.
There is a related passage in G.K. Chesterton’s book The Dumb Ox which is related:
The ordinary modern critic, seeing this ascetic ideal in an authoritative Church, and not seeing it in most other inhabitants of Brixton or Brighton, is apt to say, “This is the result of Authority; it would be better to have Religion without Authority.” But in truth, a wider experience outside Brixton or Brighton would reveal the mistake. It is rare to find a fasting alderman or a Trappist politician, but it is still more rare to see nuns suspended in the air on hooks or spikes; it is unusual for a Catholic Evidence Guild orator in Hyde Park to begin his speech by gashing himself all over with knives; a stranger calling at an ordinary presbytery will seldom find the parish priest lying on the floor with a fire lighted on his chest and scorching him while he utters spiritual ejaculations. Yet all these things are done all over Asia, for instance, by voluntary enthusiasts acting solely on the great impulse of Religion; of Religion, in their case, not commonly imposed by any immediate Authority; and certainly not imposed by this particular Authority. In short, a real knowledge of mankind will tell anybody that Religion is a very terrible thing; that it is truly a raging fire, and that Authority is often quite as much needed to restrain it as to impose it. Asceticism, or the war with the appetites, is itself an appetite. It can never be eliminated from among the strange ambitions of Man. But it can be kept in some reasonable control; and it is indulged in much saner proportion under Catholic Authority than in Pagan or Puritan anarchy.
I answer a question from Blake about a Twitter exchange where one person characterized marriage as raising a beautiful family with your best friend and “Charles Mayne” quoted this saying that men and women can never be best friends, and that it’s a modern and degenerate idea that they can.
One of the most noticeable characteristics of thoroughly modern people is that they have an absolute abhorrence of violence (when they can see it). One of the other most notable characteristics of thoroughly modern people is that their philosophy utterly undermines any moral restraint on violence and also eliminates all possibility of rational reconciliation, leaving power the only relationship between people. This may not be a coincidence.
In particular, it may be that people will only indulge in being modern (Modern philosophy, post-Modern philosophy, etc) when they feel protected from the violence which is its natural consequence. An analogy may be the various stupid ideas children will engage in as long as they’re not the ones paying for things. (Things like payment should be based on the amount of time someone puts into a job rather than the quality of their work.)
In like manner to how being vegan is a luxury good only made possible (to the degree that it even is long-term possible) by advanced technology and massive trade infrastructure, believing that morality is just an evolved set of preferences where none are any better than any others may be a luxury good for people who have an effective security force that does not believe this ready to ensure one’s safety. Or like how having a philosophy that only works for non-reproductive people is a luxury good for people with a steady supply of converts from reproductive people.
More common, I think, in television mysteries than in detective novels, is the technique a detective may use when the murderer has managed to commit the perfect crime, at least with regard to admissible evidence: the detective falsifying evidence in order to trick the murderer into confessing. I wonder how this was ever considered legitimate.
The fundamental problem with it is that, symbolically, the detective catching the murderer is supposed to be the triumph of truth over lies. The detective is supposed to be a christ figure. The whole problem is that the murderer has mis-used reason to throw the world into disorder. The detective is supposed to triumph over evil through superior intellect, not through inferior morality.
A good way to see the problem with this approach is to consider that the confession is entirely unnecessary. If the detective knows who the murderer is and then fabricates evidence sufficiently well, that would be enough to secure a conviction without the confession. If a conviction is justice being served, then this is sufficient for justice to be served. Would anyone think it’s a good detective story if the murderer is convicted and hanged based entirely on evidence that the detective fabricated?
In fact, if the detective is willing to fabricate evidence to get a conviction, why bother with a trial at all? Why not have the detective cut to the chase and just assassinate the murderer without bothering to fake any evidence?
Oh, wait. That’s already happened. (That said, Dexter the TV series is categorized as “crime drama” and the novels as “supernatural crime horror”, not as mystery or detective fiction.)
As I said, I think that this trope is more common in television than in novels, and I can’t really think of any golden-age mysteries that feature it. I suspect that’s because it’s a crutch—a technique for writers who have written themselves into a corner and have a deadline approaching too fast to fix the problem. That could happen, of course, with short stories, or even with serialized novels where the author didn’t plan out his novel before the first five sixths of it have been published. That’s why I don’t want to say that it never happened. Still, I can’t think of any examples.
I really wish that TV writers didn’t give into it so often.
In an essay about Rudyard Kipling, G.K. Chesterton commented on what the globe trotter misses out on:
Mr. Rudyard Kipling has asked in a celebrated epigram what they can know of England who know England only. It is a far deeper and sharper question to ask, “What can they know of England who know only the world?” for the world does not include England any more than it includes the Church. The moment we care for anything deeply, the world–that is, all the other miscellaneous interests–becomes our enemy. Christians showed it when they talked of keeping one’s self “unspotted from the world;” but lovers talk of it just as much when they talk of the “world well lost.” Astronomically speaking, I understand that England is situated on the world; similarly, I suppose that the Church was a part of the world, and even the lovers inhabitants of that orb. But they all felt a certain truth–the truth that the moment you love anything the world becomes your foe. Thus Mr. Kipling does certainly know the world; he is a man of the world, with all the narrowness that belongs to those imprisoned in that planet. He knows England as an intelligent English gentleman knows Venice. He has been to England a great many times; he has stopped there for long visits. But he does not belong to it, or to any place; and the proof of it is this, that he thinks of England as a place. The moment we are rooted in a place, the place vanishes. We live like a tree with the whole strength of the universe.
The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant. He is always breathing an air of locality. London is a place, to be compared to Chicago; Chicago is a place, to be compared to Timbuctoo. But Timbuctoo is not a place, since there, at least, live men who regard it as the universe, and breathe, not an air of locality, but the winds of the world. The man in the saloon steamer has seen all the races of men, and he is thinking of the things that divide men–diet, dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in Africa, or in the ears as in Europe, blue paint among the ancients, or red paint among the modern Britons. The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all; but he is thinking of the things that unite men–hunger and babies, and the beauty of women, and the promise or menace of the sky. Mr. Kipling, with all his merits, is the globe-trotter; he has not the patience to become part of anything. So great and genuine a man is not to be accused of a merely cynical cosmopolitanism; still, his cosmopolitanism is his weakness. That weakness is splendidly expressed in one of his finest poems, “The Sestina of the Tramp Royal,” in which a man declares that he can endure anything in the way of hunger or horror, but not permanent presence in one place. In this there is certainly danger. The more dead and dry and dusty a thing is the more it travels about; dust is like this and the thistle-down and the High Commissioner in South Africa. Fertile things are somewhat heavier, like the heavy fruit trees on the pregnant mud of the Nile. In the heated idleness of youth we were all rather inclined to quarrel with the implication of that proverb which says that a rolling stone gathers no moss. We were inclined to ask, “Who wants to gather moss, except silly old ladies?” But for all that we begin to perceive that the proverb is right. The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.
There is nothing inherently wrong with travel, or even travel for amusement. But Chesterton is fundamentally on to something when he takes issue with the people who think that traveling enlarges the soul. What travel does is it broadens the soul. The problem is that there are not merely two dimensions but three; travel broadens the soul but it tends to make it shallow. It makes it shallow because it is seeing life from the outside.
Life seen from the inside is love and all that that entails—labor and suffering and hardship and patience. Life seen from the outside—especially when you’re paying to see it—is all triumph and success. It would seem that this is getting the best of bargain—all of the rewards without any of the work, but it fails for the same reason that going to a trophy shop and ordering yourself an extra large trophy is not nearly as satisfying as earning it in a karate tournament, despite all of the bruises and sore muscles. It fails because we were not put on this earth merely to enjoy, but also to help build it up. Or to use a less extreme example, it is a much more rewarding things to make a decent wine than to drink an excellent wine.
The technical term for this is secondary causation, though I prefer to call it delegation. God could have created the world without anything for us to do but to enjoy it, but instead he delegates part of the act of creation to us so that we can become part of his creative act. When we give someone food, we become part of his act of creating the body. When we teach somebody something, we become part of his act of creating the mind. When we labor to help create something within creation it is not the suffering, in itself, which brings us fulfillment, but rather the taking part in its existence. The work brings suffering because we are in a fallen world and do not work right; the work is suffering because we aren’t strong enough for it.
This gets to what Chesterton said at the beginning of his essay on Kipling:
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
We are bored by things while God isn’t not because our intellect is stronger than God’s, but because it is weaker. It is natural enough that as a man’s capacity to enjoy something good which he has already experienced diminishes, that he will seek a stronger stimulus to make up for his weakness, just as the weaker a man’s legs, the more he looks around for stairs instead of a ladder, and a ramp instead of stairs, and ultimately an elevator instead of a ramp. And such a man may well look on at someone who is still climbing the ladder and look on him with pity, who only knows this one, difficult way of ascending, while he has sampled all of the means of going up that mankind has ever devised. And he will keep feeling this pity even as he struggles to reach the button to make the elevator go up.
One of Chesterton’s great themes was paradoxes, and indeed there is a Chestertonian paradox in the fact that the most interesting people lead the least interesting lives. This is so because unhappy people seek variety while happy people seek homogeneity. To the man who loves something, even if it is a beetle, that beetle is as big as the world, because that beetle is a world. To the man who loves nothing, the whole world is as small as a beetle. Of the two, it is the man who loves the beetle who is right, and you can tell that he is right because he is happy.
Recently I’ve been watching some episodes of Columbo which I got on DVD. The episodes always begin by showing us the murder and the murderer’s steps to conceal their crime, but on DVD that’s always chapter 1, with chapter 2 being when Columbo comes onto the case. As an experiment, I’ve watched a few by skipping straight to chapter 2, so I didn’t see the murder, and it plays out more like a traditional murder mystery. I was curious how well it works.
The answer, so far, is: kind-of.
Most murder mysteries have, as a mystery for the reader, who it was who committed the crime. Even if one skips the section of a Columbo where they show you who did it, Columbo focuses so heavily on the murderer that after the first few minutes there is no mistaking who did it. So in this way, skipping the solution at the beginning doesn’t help at all.
There is, however, a second mystery for the reader in murder mysteries, and that’s figuring out how the murderer did it. In traditional mysteries the two questions are often bound up with each other—where figuring out the how tells one the who—but as Columbo proves, they need not be. Even if you know who did it, it is interesting to try to figure out how they did it, and to watch Columbo try to figure out how they did it, and also how to prove it.
Ultimately, I don’t think that Columbo is great as a mystery. Structurally, I don’t think that they were even great as an inverted mystery. Columbo would often withhold evidence until later, often quite unnecessarily. In truth, Columbo depended almost entirely on rich dialog and the phenomenal acting abilities of Peter Falk.
In the middle of season four of Murder, She Wrote is the episode Harbinger of Death. It’s set in a research university, and specifically in the astronomy department, which is a setting I would expect Hollywood writers to not know much about. (Spoiler: they don’t.)
The episode begins looking inside of the observatory, where the main character of the mystery—if we can designate a main character beside Jessica—is typing away at a computer. His name is Dr. Leonard Palmer, and he’s looking for a new comet.
I really love the blinkenlights panels on the side. It’s hard to imagine what they’re supposed to represent (especially with no massive computer behind them), but they really brighten the place up. I suspect that this is an actual observatory which has been set-dressed to look more sciency, but you never do know. A lot of science equipment in universities is one-off stuff that lasts a surprisingly long time.
His assistant, Fay Hewitt, walks up in the semi-dark. She remarks that if he ever finds this comet, they’ll probably name it after him posthumously. “Here lies Leonard Palmer, asleep at last.”
He tells her not to worry about him, but she says that she can’t stop now—she’s been conditioned to do it. He asks if his wife, Carrie, called. She says no.
The scene shifts to the next day. We meet two more characters:
The guy with the mustache and the red tie is Russell Armstrong (fun fact: he’s played by Jeffrey Tambor, who played George Bluth Sr. in Arrested Development). The man with white hair and the grey necktie is Dr. Thor Lundquist. (Interestingly, it comes up that Dr. Lundquist has a popular television program where he presents astronomy to the public. That’s only characterization, though, it’s not relevant to the plot.)
Armstrong says that he’s delighted that Lundquist could come, and Lundquist says that he detects the smell of filthy lucre in the air. Armstrong asks if there’s any problem with that and Lundquist says that no, unlike Leonard Palmer “who scans the night skies trying to discover the undiscoverable”, he’s a pragmatist and if the government wants to fund his lifestyle, he’s more than happy to give them what they want. He assumes his involvement would cement the proposed defense contract, and Russell confirms that.
This is very succinct characterization, so to give credit where credit is due, it does tell us a lot about these characters very quickly. The only issue is that what it tells us about them is absurd.
Where to begin?
First, the defense department doesn’t give grants to entire university departments. They give grants to research labs, or teams of research labs (collaborating across universities). Universities don’t go all-in on one particular line of research with a bunch of professors all doing the same thing, so it makes no sense to hire all of them to work on one project.
Next, the Department of Defense doesn’t award defense contracts to a research university. Defense contracts are for people who build things, such as jets and guns and body armor. The DoD gives research grants to a research university. They give research grants and not defense contracts because they do research at research universities, they don’t build stuff.
Further, research grants are to teams and largely on the basis of what the research is. Having a particular scientist in a department isn’t going to cement a research grant, especially in the absence of his current research projects being what the grant is actually for and him being part of the grant proposal.
Which brings me to grant proposals. Academics need money, and contra “Leonard Palmer is too idealistic to take DoD money,” academics will all take whatever money they can get because the way it works is you figure out what research you want to do then when you write up the grant proposals to everyone who might give it to you, you then try to describe your research as integral to their goals. This can result in almost contradictory descriptions, but organizations that give grants do not compare notes. Since you’re just doing whatever research it was you wanted to (if it gets funded), there’s no reason to object to any particular funding source. This is related to this being a research grant, not a defense contract. A factory that makes things and receives a contract from the DoD may well be giving them something that will be used to kill people (though, unless they’re actual weapons, probably not, in practice). If you research the effect of fertilizer runoff on frogs mating, it can’t really matter to you whether the DoD pays for it or the NiH does or the national dairy counsel does. You’re going to publish your results for all of them to read anyway (not that any of them will actually read it).
Finally, THIS IS AN ASTRONOMY DEPARTMENT. How is the Department of Defense supposed to be interested in anything that they’re doing? There is no such thing as a battle telescope. You can’t even hit someone on the head with the things—they move too slowly. How on earth is an astronomer supposed to kill anyone? Are they going to try to bounce lasers off of asteroids in order to blind soviet truck drivers? It won’t work. Nothing an astronomer can do will work. Granted, the DoD is notoriously willing to fund long-shots and basic research that affects all sorts of things including research that might improve materials, computers, and even fuel efficiency in vehicles—the army runs a lot of trucks to move things about and they don’t enjoy having to move gasoline around to fuel those trucks. All that said, even they would balk at proposals to try to weaponize observations of deep space.
I’d say that this would be easily fixed by picking any other department, but the observing telescope is central to the plot, so I’m not sure that this really can be fixed. It would possibly work if the department head wanted to raise funds for the department by publishing a nude calendar of the staff and Dr. Palmer could object on moral grounds, but people don’t object on sexual moral grounds to anything in Murder, She Wrote, so I don’t think that would work either.
I think we must, as Sherlock Holmes once said on a different occasion, have an amnesty in this direction.
UPDATE: A friend pointed out that in 1988 an astronomy department could conceivably get a defense contract for monitoring satellites, since optical telescopes can be used for this purpose. My criticism is thus over-stated, in that the plot is more fixable than I had said. It is still unrealistic as written, because, as you will see soon, the writers had in mind making weapons, not conducting observations. (end update.)
The two men keep walking to Russell’s office, and on their way run into Fay. Russell introduces her as a computer whiz. She says that she spends most of her time helping Leonard to look for his comet. He interjects, “Leonard is a brilliant scientist, my dear—perhaps born a century or two too late. He’s chasing a myth. A mysterious comet, last seen perhaps by a starving colonist. And now scheduled to return when? Tonight? Before or after supper?”
This note of Leonard being a brilliant scientist who is pursuing a fool’s errand is weird. I’ll admit that this sort of official skepticism might be appropriate to someone looking for planet X after Voyager 2’s flyby of Neptune in 1989 allowed the more accurate calculation of Neptune’s mass in 1992 and the anomaly in Uranus’ orbit that Planet X was meant to explains disappeared. It’s pretty weird to see this sort of skepticism about discovering a comet. There are thousands of known comets in the solar system and estimates of billions of undiscovered potential comets out in the Oort cloud. Discovering a new comet is not a fool’s errand and finding it would not be an earth-shaking discovery.
Anyway, shortly after the above, Leonard barges into Russell’s office complaining that it’s fine if Russell wants to try to get a government contract, “but don’t ask me to join a cocktail chit-chat with those warmongers from Washington.”
He then notices Lundquist and is appalled, asking what he’s doing here. Russell explains that Lundquist is being brought on as a consultant as there are several projects that need his assistance. Leonard replies, “Don’t you mean, a letterhead that needs his name?”
This is perhaps the least realistic thing depicted yet. People in academia stab each other in the back, never in the chest.
He leans over on Russell’s desk and says, desperately, “For Lord’s sake, Russell, we are a research institute, not a weapons factory.”
I’m glad that someone noticed.
“Our work is scientific. And peaceful.”
I wonder if he’s afraid that they’re going to melt his telescope down to make rifles. Also, what happened to it being fine if Russell wants to try to get a government contract, the only problem being Leonard needing to chit-chat with public-sector employees?
Russell replies, “Yes. Well, times change. We have to change with them.”
What are any of them talking about? Are they planning to beat their telescopes into canons? The reason you can beat a plowshare into a sword (or vice versa) is that both are strong metal meant to cut through things. If you tried to put gunpowder and a canon ball into a telescope, all you’d get is shrapnel as the telescope exploded and the canon ball would probably just fall off onto your foot. As I said, there is nothing astronomers do that can be weaponized.
UPDATE: as I mentioned in the update above, while astronomy cannot be weaponized, it is possible to use telescopes to monitor satellites. That is not what the writers had in mind, as can be evidenced by Leonard saying “we are a research institute, not a weapons factory.” That said, much of what Leonard says could be rationalized as inaccuracy due to a passionate hatred of the military, which some academics had, especially (I gather) ones with communist leanings. Leonard is portrayed as being extremely led by his emotions and with very little self-control in this episode, so that explanation would fit. (end update.)
Leonard leaves and we move on to the next scene, in which Jessica arrives. Leonard arrives at the hotel moments after Jessica’s taxi did. He apologizes for not meeting her at the train station, but didn’t expect her until weeks later. She’s there to celebrate their third wedding anniversary, but he got the date wrong. He thought his anniversary was on the seventeenth, but in fact it’s on the seventh (today is the sixth). He apologizes that he forgot his own wedding anniversary, and to make matters worse Carrie (his wife) is off helping her Aunt Edna, whose bursitis has been acting up again. Jessica is surprised at this, but makes no comment.
He helps her bring her stuff into the hotel.
She takes the opportunity while waiting for the bellhop to arrive to ask him if anything is wrong with his marriage. He says no, of course not. He doesn’t see Carrie as much as he should because he’s so preoccupied with his comet. Also, at his wedding, he sensed a certain hostility because of the difference in his age and Carrie’s from everyone but Jessica.
Her bags settled in the room, he takes Jessica up to the observatory so that he can show her some real science.
I’m beginning to get the impression that the observatory is shot in a museum somewhere. Let’s do that computer zoom-in-and-enhance thing they always do in the movies:
That sure looks like like the sort of turnstile they put into museums to see how many people saw the exhibit.
Also, over in the corner there’s a suspicious looking poster:
There’s only so much that my computer can do to enhance the image (what with my computer being real and all), but this sure looks like the kind of educational poster that a museum would put up in order to have something for guests to read while other people are in front of the interesting thing.
Jessica is surprised to see a computer, which Leonard explains controls the telescope. Jessica is a little scared by this, but computer-controlled telescopes were not new in 1988. Computer control is extremely valuable for making observations because the earth is constantly moving and so the telescope must be constantly adjusted to keep pointing at the same thing.
Fay walks in with computer printouts for Leonard and is surprised to discover Jessica, who she recognizes (presumably) by description. She introduces herself and says that they almost met three years ago, at the wedding, but she was sick and had to miss the whole thing. (If you can’t guess by now, she seems to have a great deal of affection for Leonard. A very great deal, if you get my meaning.)
Fay shows something to Leonard and says that they need to recompute it, and Leonard agrees, saying, “as soon as possible”. He then asks if there’s any word from Carrie, but there isn’t . Fay offers to call, but Leonard says no, she’s probably got her hands full with Aunt Edna. Jessica seems to find this implausible:
(I don’t think that they’ve made this explicit, yet, but Carrie is Jessica’s niece, and so she’s likely to be aware of the health of one of her many sisters.)
The scene shifts to the cocktail party were people from Washington are there to be schmoozed.
“I’m telling you, General, the Gamma 3 program can put us five years ahead of the Soviets. Dr. Lundquist has examined it thoroughly.”
“It’s a masterpiece of scientific engineering. The staff of the Institute is to be congratulated for farsightedness.”
I really love this dialog. It’s beautifully generic. I wonder if “the Gamma 3 program” really is about bouncing lasers off of asteroids in order to blind soviet truck drivers. I can’t imagine why else generals would be at a luncheon at a university considering whether to fund an astronomy department.
Jessica and Leonard show up and Russell steals Leonard to talk to a NASA lobbyist who is (somehow) a fan of Leonard’s work. Jessica goes to the open bar and gets herself water with a twist of lemon. Then we meet some more characters:
The woman is Madeline DeHaven, an unpleasant and self-important woman who is the director of defense spending review with the General Accounting Office. (The name of the General Accounting Office was changed in 2004 to the Government Accountability Office.) The man is Drake Eaton, her lovely (administrative) assistant. They meet Jessica over at the wet bar.
Drake is a curious character; he seems to very much enjoy being connected to high places and even more he enjoys bragging about it. After Madeline excuses herself, Drake tells Jessica, “The Gamma 3 contract connection, Mrs. Fletcher. Some people actually think Madeline has some control over the ultimate contract award. You know something? They’re right.”
He walks off and Fay walks up to Jessica. Jessica comments that Leonard looks very lonely and she wishes that Carrie could be there. Fay comments that though Jessica is Carrie’s Aunt, she wishes that Carrie could be there for Leonard more when he needs her, but she supposes that young people don’t think of things like that.
The scene shifts to Thor Lundquist and Drake Eaton talking. Lunquist asks about Drake’s relationship with Madeline DeHaven and he says that he makes her feel important and because of her he’s in line to head up any of three new departments monitoring defense spending.
This conversation is interrupted by a fight between Leonard and Russell. Leonard is angry that Russell wants to hold a party in the observatory and Leonard will have none of it. They yell at each other, then Leonard runs off. Jessica meets him and he says that he just made a dreadful fool of himself and is leaving but she should stay if she wants to. She asks what on earth for, and he replies, “Let’s go find ourselves a comet. Tonight’s the night!” Fay sees them go off and follows.
At the observatory Fay hands Leonard some computer printouts and he remarks that it will take some time to input into the computer. He then tells Fay that he made Russell very angry, perhaps angry enough to fire Leonard, and asks Fay if she can go pour some oil on the troubled waters—she’s so much better at that than he is. She replies, “that’s my job.” He thanks her, she says, “See you in the morning,” and he doesn’t even bother to respond, he’s too caught up in the computer. She waits a moment but then concluding she won’t get anything more from him, walks off.
Fay brought Leonard some coffee, which he promptly spills a little of as soon as Fay is gone and Jessica wipes it up, though she doesn’t wipe the cup. He sets it down on the computer printout. A few moments later we get a clue-cam shot of the coffee stain left on the computer printout:
If it’s shot with clue-cam, you know it’s important. Presumably whatever is on the page will be faked with a printout that doesn’t have a coffee stain on it, because exposing substitutions is the main function of coffee stains in Murder, She Wrote.
Jessica excuses herself as being as useful to Leonard as a parasol in a hurricane, then heads off to her hotel room, but with instructions that he should call her if he finds the comet.
At her hotel room, Jessica gets a call from Carrie.
Carrie apologizes for not being there to meet Jessica. Jessica asks how Edna is doing and Carrie says that her bursitis is acting up again. Jessica replies that she had visited Edna on the way over and yesterday she was going bowling.
Jessica then adds, “when I called her earlier [today] she tried to cover for you, but she isn’t a very good liar.”
Carrie says that she’s sorry, she just needs to get away for a while. Jessica says that she doesn’t want to pry, but is there anything that she can tell Leonard? She says, “tell him that I do love him.”
The scene shifts to the observatory, where a night guard coming on duty (or back from an evening stroll, or something) sees Leonard running down the stairs and out the door. The camera then pans over to the clock on the wall, which reads 12:35.
The next morning Russell comes into the observatory with Fay and Jessica. He’s saying that it’s outrageous that Leonard ran out of the observatory without signing out. Also, what’s the telescope doing cranked so far down? He goes up and looks at it, and this is what he sees:
At seventeen and a half minutes in it’s not overly late to find the body, but it could have been snappier.
We cut to Russell and he says, “That’s my place, and there’s a body on the floor.”
Here is a wider shot of the house, from the beginning of the next scene where the police have arrived:
Detective Seargant Kettler is investigating the case. Russell owns the house but hasn’t been there in a few weeks. He’s letting a friend stay there.
The body turns out to be Drake Eaton.
A policeman comes up to Detective Kepler with Leonard’s scarf (which no one but Jessica recognizes) and says, “this must be the victim’s, it’s got blood on it.” Kepler replies, “alright, bag it.”
Jessica asks how Eaton was killed, and the Detective replies that he was shot right in the ticker (the heart, for anyone not familiar with this slang). She asks if there were powder burns and the Kettler says no, then asks who she is. She introduces herself, then Russell says, with some asperity, “Mrs. Fletcher is a guest of the Astro-Physics Institute. She is also a writer of some repute.”
Kettler takes that last part very well. “Oh, yeah? My wife’s a writer too.”
Jessica’s response is not, precisely, encouraging.
“Oh.”
The question about powder burns, by the way, helps to indicate the range that the person was shot at. Technically, powder burns only apply to black powder, which may actually fling burning grains of powder out of the barrel which land on the skin and literally burn it. With modern “smokeless powder” (i.e. nitrocelluose, used commonly since the later mid 1800s) the combustion is cleaner, but there are still tiny bits of stuff that can be flung out at great speed and leave marks from impact velocity. Small things lose velocity very quickly in air, however, and while the exact distance varies with several variables, modern hand guns will typically only leave “powder burns” if the victim is one to two feet away when shot. The absence of powder burns tells us that Drake Eaton was at least a few feet away from the murderer when he was shot.
The conversation is interrupted by a phone call—Russell asks if he can answer it and Kettler gives him permission. It’s Fay. She called to ask, “who is it?” He tells her it’s Drake Eaton and she breathes a sigh of relief. She asks if she can do anything, and he says that Madeline DeHaven needs to be told. Fay volunteers to call her immediately.
This, presumably, tells us that Fay was worried it might have been Leonard, and also establishes that she knew the phone number at the house. (Technically she might have just looked it up in a phone book or in the company phone directory, but people don’t usually call each other on Murder, She Wrote in front of Jessica unless the phone number is unlisted. (For those below a certain age, there used to be books printed on cheap paper and distributed to everyone that listed people’s phone numbers. These books were called “phone books” and for a fee one could have one’s phone number not included in the book.))
After the call, Jessica walks in on the detective taking notes in a bedroom. The bed was mussed but not slept in. (Neat people who are careful to make their beds every morning are invaluable to detectives.)
As they walk out, Kettler asks Jessica what kind of books she writes and Jessica replies murder mysteries. “Oh yeah, a nice lady like you?” He asks if she makes any money from it, and Jessica replies, embarrassed, “Well, actually, yes.”
They’re interrupted by Carrie saying, “Oh, God, no!” Then run over and Jessica asks Carrie what she’s doing there. Kettler asks who she is. Russell replies, “This is Mrs. Palmer. The lady I’ve been lending this vacation house to.”
As a side note, why is his vacation house only thirty three miles away from the Institute? That’s not much of a vacation.
Kettler takes her to police headquarters for questioning and Jessica, naturally, comes with her.
Her story is that she had some problems to work out so she took a drive. She drove up into the hills and parked in a deserted place. She fell asleep, then woke up a few hours ago.
Kettler is skeptical because the story is absurd, but Jessica says that she spoke briefly with Carrie the evening before and what Carrie is saying is consistent with her state of mind at the time. This is stretching things, but to be fair Carrie was, at least, distraught.
Jessica takes Carrie home, though with a warning from Kettler not to go too far because he’s going to want to speak to her again. Home, in this case, is the hotel where Jessica is staying. As they’re walking into the hotel Jessica herself points out that the story she told was absurd, but Carrie asks Jessica to trust her. Before Jessica can point out that only a fool would trust her, Leonard interrupts—I guess he’s been waiting in the hotel lobby for Jessica?
Carrie rushes into his arms and says that she’s sorry and has been stupid. Leonard tells her that everything is going to be fine, but Jessica points out that everything is not going to be fine. She asks him about the plaid scarf he had been wearing last night when he was seen rushing from the observatory, but he pretends he doesn’t remember wearing it.
They’re interrupted by Madeline DeHaven and Thor Lundquist walking up. Jessica expresses her condolences. Madeline says, “Believe me, whoever shot him is going to feel even sorrier.”
I have to wonder how she knew that he had been shot. She said that she just heard about Drake’s murder from “a Miss Hewitt” (that would be Fay), but Fay wasn’t told about how Drake was killed. On the other hand, the timing is a bit off, here. Fay learned about the death hours ago—before Carrie was taken to police headquarters for questioning. Given that the observatory is 33 miles away from Russell’s vacation house and I assume that there isn’t a direct highway to it, it had to be hours since Fay said that she would telephone DeHaven right away. It could have taken time to find Madeline, of course, but there’s enough wiggle-room here that this might not be the gotcha it appears.
Lundquist tells Leonard, in a very hostile voice, that there are policemen crawling about his observatory. Again, this is not how academics act, and especially not in front of others. They hate conflict, which is why, when they say mean things, they do so where the subject can’t hear.
Over at the observatory, Leonard tells Sergeant Kettler that he worked in the observatory all night until morning. Jessica interrupts telling Kettler that Leonard is on the verge of finding a comet. Kettler replies, “I didn’t know one was missing.”
Leonard continues that in the morning he went to bed and took the phone off of the hook. Kettler points out that the security guard saw Leonard run out of the building at 12:35. Leonard says that the security guard is mistaken.
Kettler asks if Leonard owns a gun and he denies it. When Kettler points out that a .38 is registered in Dr. Palmer’s name, Leonard says that he forgot that he owns one and he hasn’t seen it for months—it’s probably in a closet.
When Kettler says that’s good, as the two men over at Leonard’s place with a search warrant will probably find it.
Jessica is shocked.
“A search warrant? Aren’t you rather racing to a conclusion, Sergeant Kettler?”
Jessica’s family biases sometimes make her a little unimaginative when it comes to how her family members must look to the police, but this is beyond absurd. With Leonard obviously lying about everything and an attractive young man murdered at the place where his wife was staying, it would take a remarkably credulous and dim-witted detective to come to any other conclusion.
Kettler points some of this out, and Fay objects saying that the telescope couldn’t have been pointing at the house during the night because it was locked in a computer-controlled track that she entered. Kettler asks how the telescope ended up pointing at the house with Leonard’s wife in it, and no one has an answer. Jessica suggests that someone might have done it later to frame Leonard. This is… of dubious plausibility.
Fay hands Kettler a prinout of the computer program that was running the night before, saying that it proves that the telescope was pointed nowhere near the house during the night.
This isn’t shot in clue-vision so I’m not sure whether we’re supposed to notice it, but there is no coffee stain on the printout. (There’s a closeup of it in a moment, but it’s so close-cropped the coffee stain might be elsewhere on the page and we wouldn’t know.) Kettler looks at it and, not being able to make heads or tails of it, looks to Jessica for guidance. She seems to suggest trusting Fay, which seems to be good enough for Kettler, as he doesn’t pursue the matter further.
The next scene is in Jessica’s hotel room, where Carrie professes her undying love to Leonard if he’ll still have her and he tells her that she doesn’t have to explain anything. Jessica interrupts to say that she’d really like it if they explained some things to her.
Such as, why are they both lying to the police?
Carrie opens by saying that she did see Drake Eaton the night before—she asked him to come. Then we cut to commercial—the screen fades to black and when it comes back, Leonard is getting a glass of water from across the room which he slowly carries over to Carrie and hands to her. It’s curious how important it was for commercials to end on a dramatic moment and start with something you can miss to give people a chance to come back from the bathroom or kitchen when someone shouts, “it’s back on!”
Carrie had been with Drake long before she met Leonard. She thought she had lost Leonard to his work—she was lonely and felt neglected. She borrowed the vacation house to think things through. A few weeks ago she had gotten a call out of the blue from Drake Eaton because he was coming to the conference. Last night she sent a note to his hotel asking him to come out to see her. He had always been a friend—someone she could talk to, and that’s what she wanted. Someone to talk to. At least that’s what she told herself.
When he arrived he was drunk and had more carnal plans than talking. He dragged her into the bedroom but she managed to escape and ran away. She did in fact spend the night in her car, though she didn’t sleep.
Leonard says that he understands and that they will never speak of this again. Jessica objects, but Leonard insists.
Something I can’t help but wonder is if Carrie felt neglected and alone, why did she need to pretend to be on a trip to have time to think? Her problem is that she has little else but time to think at home. Basically, if her problem is that Leonard was never at home, why did she need to go somewhere to get away from Leonard?
Anyway, in the next scene, Jessica goes to the police station and talks with Sergeant Kettler. There’s something weird about the scene, because she shows up to talk to him but then he acts like she’s there because he asked her to come. He explains that his wife has been writing up his cases, but she hasn’t been published yet so she has no name. Since Jessica has already successfully published, he offers to give her the writeups his wife did and she can submit them to her publisher and they can split the proceeds 50/50.
At first Jessica is at a loss for words, but then realizes that this could give her the access she craves to the police information on the Drake Eaton case, so she tells him yes. “Drake Eaton’s murder might make a very juicy potboiler. Of course, I’d have to have access to all of your data: autopsy, medical reports, interrogations, absolutely everything.”
She has no intention of seeing this through, of course, so I suppose that she figured that with everyone else lying, she might as well get a few good lies herself. Oddly, despite this being nothing like what Kettler had proposed, he delightedly agrees.
In the next scene Jessica waylays Madeline DeHaven who is still hanging around for some reason. She’s on her way to a meeting with Thor Lundquist though what there could be to talk about after all of their previous meetings is anyone’s guess. Anyway, Jessica clumsily accuses Madeline of the murder, since she’s the only one there who knew him. Madeline corrects her, saying that Eaton was also intimately involved with Jessica’s niece.
Jessica is surprised that she knows this, but attributes it to her being close with Eaton. She denies this and says that he was just an employee.
Jessica says that she’s surprised since they had adjoining rooms at the hotel and, “well, I couldn’t help but take a peek inside, and I did notice all of your toiletries right next to his and, well, I assumed…”
Madeline points out, reasonably, that they had adjoining rooms to facilitate their work schedule. She then says that she put a lot of heat on the detective and that he knows that it was Jessica’s niece’s jealous husband who killed Drake. He has everything but the murder weapon. “He even has the scarf with Leonard Palmer’s blood on it.”
This is one of those strange details that isn’t very natural to say, so it probably means that she’s the murderer. How would she know that it was Leonard’s blood? Kettler almost certainly doesn’t know that. (I can’t be certain, of course, but why mention this in such an awkward way if it’s not a clue?)
Ms. DeHaven walks off to her meeting and Fay approaches Jessica with the news that Leonard has been fired. (I guess he doesn’t have tenure?) Jessica barges into Russell’s office and demands to know what happened to “innocent until proven guilty?” He points out, reasonably enough, that if they wait until Leonard is proven guilty, it will be too late. Jessica drops that line and asks who knew that Carrie was staying in the guest house and he says no one, at least not from him. She asks if anyone could have found out by calling the house and he said no, he doesn’t like being disturbed when he’s there so it’s an unlisted number. (See, I was right!)
Jessica will, shortly, realize that Fay called Russell at his vacation house and so must know the number. It doesn’t really follow that she knew that Carrie was there, though, as Carrie would have to be an idiot to have picked up the phone while she’s hiding at the house. Murder, She Wrote doesn’t tend to have time for that sort of detail, though.
Sergeant Kettler calls the office and asks for Jessica. The scene then shifts to Russell’s guest house, where Kettler has assembled the suspects (Leonard and Carrie). He produces a .38 and asks if it belongs to Leonard. Leonard can’t be sure. Kettler says that it is registered to Leonard, and was found in a storm drain half a mile from the house.
He then produces the scarf and asks Leonard what his scarf was doing at the crime scene with Drake Eaton’s blood on it. Leonard replies that it’s not Drake Eaton’s blood, it’s his. Kettler deduces that Leonard and Carrie got into an argument before Leonard shot Eaton.
Carrie passionately cries that it’s not true. She had brought the gun to the house because she was afraid to be alone. She kept in the night stand drawer by the bed. When Drake tried to force himself on her, she broke free and grabbed the gun. He took it from her, and she fled the house.
When Kettler begins to arrest Carrie, Leonard protests. He shot Drake Eaton.
We go to commercial, and come back to Kettler and Jessica listening to Leonard’s confession on Kettler’s tape recorder.
A curious detail of the confession is that when Leonard arrived, he saw shadows and heard a woman’s voice, which he assumed was Carrie. They don’t listen to much more of the confession, and as Jessica is trying to talk Kettler out of thinking that anyone she loves could be guilty, it comes up in conversation that Kettler thinks that Carrie did it and Leonard is only trying to cover for her.
In the next scene Jessica and Carrie are in Jessica’s room talking over the case. Jessica asks how Leonard knew to point the telescope at Russell’s vacation home, and Carrie said that he didn’t. According to Leonard, the telescope just moved there on its own while he was trying to take observations. Carrie says that there was no reason for it to have done that, but Jessica gets an idea. Perhaps there was a reason for it to do that after all.
Of course that reason is going to be the person who programmed the telescope.
Jessica comes in and asks if she’s found the comet, and Fay says no, not yet. Jessica says, “You know, it’s ironic. In medieval days, people were terrified of comets. They thought of them as omens of evil, harbingers of death. I’ve never been much for portents, but the last couple of days… it must have been very difficult for you, Fay.”
The shift in tone is interesting; Jessica lulling her into a false sense of security then springing it on her. I don’t know how well this really works. In my very limited experience people with guilty secrets tend to be fast thinkers because they live in fear of their secret coming out.
That said, Fay doesn’t really make any slip, here, so I guess it doesn’t matter. Jessica accuses Fay of being in love with Leonard. She then points out that the computer program printout that Fay showed to Sergeant Kettler was fake, since it’s clean and the one that was entered that night had a large coffee stain on it.
Fay breaks down and says, desperately, “My God, I never dreamed Leonard would kill him.”
Jessica says that she only wanted Leonard to see that Carrie wasn’t worthy, and Fay replies that Carrie couldn’t love Leonard the way that she did. She shared his life more than Carrie ever could.
Jessica says that she should have put it together sooner; she phoned Russell at the vacation house but the number is unlisted. Fay said that she overheard Carrie telling Drake Eaton that she was going to spend a few days at the vacation house.
That last part makes no sense. It’s neither an explanation for how Fay had the phone number nor is there any plausible way for Fay to have overheard Carrie telling Drake that she was going to spend a few days at the vacation house. Carrie told Drake where to find her via a note sent to his hotel. Prior to that, he phoned her out of the blue at her actual house weeks before.
I don’t know that this is really salvageable. About the only way that having the phone number could have done Fay any good in discovering Carrie would be if she called and Carrie answered. She’d have had no reason to call Russell’s vacation home while Carrie was there—since Russell was known to not be there—and Carrie would have had no reason to answer the phone.
Even just from a what-we-saw plot construction standpoint, without Russell’s vacation home phone being how she found out about Carrie—and an explanation for how Fay had the number would not have been easy, given that they can’t go with her having spent time with Russell since she’s utterly devoted to Leonard, unless they were going so far as her having slept with Russell to protect Leonard’s job—there was no reason for her call to the vacation home to have been significant.
I suppose that we’re just going to need an amnesty in this direction, too.
Anyway, Fay says that she figured if Leonard could see what Carrie was up to, everything would be better. Jessica then says that Fay went up to the vacation house to make sure everything went according to plan, but Fay says no. Jessica is confused, since Leonard heard a woman’s voice. Fay, however, was home in bed, as far away from Drake Eaton, Carrie, and Leonard as she could get. Fay then says, “It’s ridiculous, Mrs. Fletcher. How could anyone in their right mind assume that Leonard Palmer, of all people, would shoot someone?”
This jogs Jessica’s memory . “What?” “I said…” “Nevermind, I heard what you said.” and then clue-face:
This means that it’s last call to place your bets on who the murderer is.
Unfortunately, there’s no commercial break, here, so if you didn’t figure it out by now you don’t have much time to think about it, at least back in the days when you’d have been watching this on broadcast television. There wasn’t much of a way around this, though, since you can’t really place a commercial break that close to the end, when there would be more commercials right after.
Murder, She Wrote episodes were usually just under 48 minutes (including “tonight on Murder, She Wrote” and the introduction). Since the time slot was an hour long, that left just 12 minutes for commercials. The actual length of the commercial breaks varied but they were rarely less than two minutes nor longer than four. That gives us three to six commercial breaks, but the typical structure was four—three during the show and one after, giving approximately three minutes of commercials per break. They would be placed approximately at the quarter hour marks, though not that you could set a watch by. In this episode, for example, the first commercial break is at 17:45. The second is much closer to the mark. It’s at 27:02, which, if you remember that there would have been a 3 minute commercial break that happened, would put us almost exactly at the half hour mark. (In practice the first might only be a 2 minute commercial break to make room for a 4 minute break at the halfway point, which would then have us line up very well with the commercials at the end of any half hour shows that were running.) The third break is at 37:04, which if you add in 6 minutes of commercial time puts it at the 43 minute mark. If this spot is 3 minutes long, that means we have only three minutes of commercials left and there have to be commercials at the end of the episode.
All of this could (in theory) be rejiggered, of course; one could shave a minute off of a previous block or two in order to add in a fourth commercial spot at the 52 minute mark (or so), but this would have made Murder, She Wrote atypical amongst TV shows at the time which probably went against the grain of how TV shows operated. Television was, primarily, a means of delivering commercials. The shows were secondary to that.
Back to the episode, this time guessing the culprit is simpler because we know that it was a woman who killed Drake and there’s only one woman other than Carrie and Fay, and also only one woman who assumed that Drake was shot…
Jessica begins innocuously enough. She thought that Madeline would be interested to learn how Leonard came to be at the vacation house. Madeline assumes that he was spying on his wife but Jessica corrects her that it was Fay who programmed the computer to move the telescope. Madeline has an interesting line, here: “Did she? I wonder why. Oh, I see. Hell hath no fury, hmmm?” I like this insight into human nature, especially because it’s related to why she killed Drake. Self-awareness is nice in characters.
Jessica then asks if she followed Drake to the vacation house or if she saw the note. Madeline then asks, “Say, Mrs. Fletcher, what happened to that nice little lady from Maine act of yours?”
This reminds me of I, Claudius when Livia (who poisoned more than a few relatives in the imperial family) was dying and invited Claudius (her grandson) to dinner and he dropped his half-wit act.
Livia: Castor is ill and Thrasyllus says he won’t recover. He also says that Tiberius will choose Caligula to succeed him. Claudius: Why? Livia: Vanity. Tiberius wants to be loved – at least after his death if not before. And the best way to ensure that… Claudius: Is to have someone w-worse to follow him. Yes, naturally. Well, he’s certainly no fool. Livia: He’s the biggest fool in my family. I always thought that that was you… but I think now I was wrong. Claudius: Grandmother, after all these years, you didn’t invite me to dinner just to tell me this. Livia: The wine has made you bold, hasn’t it. Claudius: You said you kept in with Caligula because he was to be the next Emperor. Livia: Lost your stutter too, I see.
I, Claudius was first broadcast by the BBC in 1976, so this could even be directly inspired by it. If not, it’s certainly the same sort of thing. Not done as well, of course, but that’s a difference of degree and not of kind. A villain seeing clearly, too late, is always a great moment.
Jessica goes on to point out that Madeline had to have been there. She said that the scarf with Leonard Palmer’s blood on it had been found but even the police didn’t know that until a few hours ago. Marking Dehaven out as one of the rare murderers who can actually think on her feet, she replies, “A slip of the tongue, Mrs. Fletcher, and I’ll deny I said it.”
Granted, more careful phrasing would have been better in case Jessica wasn’t alone, but she’s entirely right that if it came down to Jessica’s word against Madeline’s, Jessica is hardly impartial. She’s trying to get her niece’s husband exonerated.
Jessica leaves this—I think because she knows Madeline is right—and tells the story as it happened. Along the way she surmises that Leonard was knocked unconscious in the fight with Drake, and this is why, when he came to, he thought that Carrie had killed Drake.
Madeline replies that it’s all theory and Jessica can’t prove any of it. Jessica counters with Madeline’s remark that whoever shot Drake is going to be sorry. That was made in front of witnesses.
The only problem with that is that three out of four of the witnesses are Jessica, Leonard, and Carrie—and their testimony is worthless. This only leaves Thor Lundquist. The smart bet is on him being willing to remember Madeline as saying, “whoever killed Drake” in the expectation that the institute will get the “Gamma 3” contract as thanks. Plus, he hates Leonard.
Unfortunately for her, she doesn’t take that gamble and instead puts all her chips on saying that Fay had told her. Jessica points out that Fay didn’t know at the time, and with Sergeant Kettler walks out of the shadows, Madeline knows that she’s had it.
Unadvisedly, she decides to confess in front of Sergeant Kettler, who is exempt from the rules of hearsay. “That nickel-and-dime hustler was climbing over me to make a name for himself, and all the while he was telling me…” She pauses and summarizes, “Nobody uses Madeline DeHaven the way he did.”
On one level, I get it. On another level, it doesn’t feel right. She, presumably, got to where she was by climbing her way over others to make a name for herself. Moreover, he was considerably younger than she was. (Going by the age of the actors, he was 16 years her junior.) She seems far too cynical to have taken his advances at face value.
“Finding that gun in the bedroom was like an omen. A portent, Mrs. Fletcher.”
This is a nice callback to when Jessica said that comets used to be omens.
“I didn’t even hear it go off.”
Jessica shakes her head in disapproval, because she’s only sympathetic to fornicators and adulterers, not to murderers. I know I harp a lot on how Jessica is a big town character, not a small town character, but simple disgust at murders is unrealistic to murder mystery writers.
This is something I think that Columbo did far better (and he was just a policeman, not a writer). Columbo was often quite sympathetic to the murderer, without shirking his duty. I think that one of my favorites was the episode in which the murderer (played by Robert Culp) used subliminal images in a movie to make his victim go into the hallway for a drink of water so he could shoot him unobserved and while he was supposedly on stage giving a presentation, though behind a curtain and using a tape recorder. Columbo couldn’t find the murder weapon and so used subliminal images to make Culp go make sure that the murder weapon wasn’t found, revealing its location because Columbo was waiting for him. When Culp realizes that Columbo used his own subliminal image technique, he said, noting the irony of his subliminal image technique being proved useful, “You know one thing, Lieutenant, you never would have solved it without using my techniques.” Columbo replies, “That’s right, Doc. If there was a reward I’d support your claim to it.” One gets the sense that Columbo meant it. He really would have supported such a claim.
I suppose, though, in a sense, that this is another big-city character trait. Big city folks, being immoral in their principles in order to get along in big cities, need to assuage their consciences by looking down on anyone they can find to look down on.
The scene fades into Jessica and Sergeant Kettler walking and talking at the institute the next day.
“You know, I gotta hand it to you, Mrs. Fletcher. You are pretty slick.” “Well, you’re not so bad yourself, Sergeant.”
She actually says this enthusiastically, which is unusual for Jessica. She doesn’t usually respect police officers who charge her relatives with murder, no matter how reasonable they were in doing so.
Anyway, he brings up the writing deal and says that he can’t go through with it because there’s a Hollywood producer who is extremely interested in exclusive rights. Jessica tells him to go ahead and not to give her another thought. Kettler is grateful and Jessica leaves him to go see Carrie and Leonard.
Leonard and Carrie say that they’ve had so little time together, they’d like Jessica to reconsider and stay for a few more days. She replies, “Not a chance. Please, get me to the station before Sergeant Kettler changes his mind.”
I know that this is supposed to be cute, but I have difficulty taking it that way. On the one hand, Detective Kettler’s proposal was a bit absurd. On the other hand, Jessica straight-up lied to Kettler and took advantage of his inexperience and naivete in order to get access to his investigation. Of the two, Kettler is the more aggrieved.
Overall, I would say that this is a mid-tier episode with a few above-average moments. The comet, and to a lesser degree, the observatory, form a nice backdrop for the story. The university might also have been a nice backdrop, had the story been set in a university. The setting is really more a family estate that the oldest brother is considering selling to the army to build a military base on. Or something; I’m not sure if even that would match the story as it existed. Perhaps closer would be a family factory that manufactures telescopes and has an observatory on the top, and the older brother is looking to get a contract to manufacture advanced optics for sniper rifles? That would actually work fairly well.
UPDATE: It would also work to modify the defense contract to be for monitoring satellites with Leonard being a commie-leaning ex-hippie who instinctively hates the military without any trace of rational thought, and thus cannot separate out purely defensive things they do from waging offensive war. I think that the telescope factory that wants a contract to make sniper scopes would work better, but Leonard was at no point in this episode reasonable, so it would probably be a smaller modification to go with the satellite monitoring. (end update.)
The sub-plot, or rather, the plot, with the ex-lover coming into town while the neglected wife is holed up in a friend’s house is also a bit… of plot lace. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with an old lover coming back into someone’s life causing trouble. That is quite plausible. There’s also nothing wrong with odd coincidences bringing the old lover back into someone’s life. Those happen too, and are fine as long as they don’t help the detective. There isn’t even anything wrong with the old lover hoping to rekindle the old flame. That makes the old lover immoral, but it is within the realm of what real human beings do.
Things start to unravel with how the contact happens, though. Drake calling Carrie out of the blue with the information that he’s coming to her town implies that he knows where she is and what her phone number is. How would he have this knowledge? 1988 is before the internet was available outside of universities and sixteen years before Facebook existed. Keeping track of people tended to require their cooperation—or the cooperation of friends and family, or a lot of hard work. Drake was working in Washington and was, presumably, not amongst her contact network. How would he have known where she was? There are solutions to this problem, though not really great ones. An ex-boyfriend calling to find out the location of a newly married woman isn’t likely to be given it by her family. Some mutual friend without great judgment might be the explanation for how he had her location and phone number, of course. (Her location, if fairly specific, might suffice, as there was an information service one could call to ask for phone numbers in other locations, in the 1980s.)
The bigger problem comes in with Carrie fleeing her house because she feels like she’s losing her husband to his work. This just isn’t a natural action. A person flees their own home to take refuge in solitude because they can’t handle being with the other people who are in their home. This can be because of safety, or because of constant fights, or merely because of constant irritation or some other significant stressor. The one thing that won’t make them flee into solitude is feeling oppressed by solitude.
She then sends Drake a note at his hotel to come visit her. Assuming that she didn’t mail this note, it’s going to be an awkward note to send, since in 1988 that would be done by calling the hotel and dictating the note to one of the desk clerks. This would not be a trivial note to dictate, by the way, since it would have to include directions on how to get to the vacation house. Drake is not from the area and the vacation house is 33 miles away. If the note didn’t include directions but only an address, Drake would have had to have borrowed a map from somewhere—the hotel might have had one but my recollection is that was not guaranteed—and have spent considerable time reading it over to find the street then figure out how to get there. All while drunk.
Even had Carrie’s note included directions, we next have Drake being able to follow them in a completely unfamiliar place, in the dark, while drunk. We know he was drunk and not merely tipsy since he showed up drunk enough that his opening move was to try to rape her when she wanted to talk before they got to adultery. That’s pretty darn drunk.
We then have Madeline DeHaven following him. It’s never made clear whether she saw the note from Carrie or whether she merely followed Drake, though the former is more plausible because following someone for 33 miles on lonely roads—even a very drunk someone—is hard to do without them noticing. Especially at night, when your headlights will be very bright in their rear view mirror. So she found the note and drove up after him. I suppose it’s not a big deal that he left the note around for her to find because he was drunk. Or she could have found it before he did. OK, except for the question of what did she drive? It isn’t likely that both Madeline and Drake rented separate cars. Madeline certainly doesn’t seem like the sort of person to drive if she doesn’t have to, nor the sort of person to rent a separate car for her underlings if not forced to. Especially an underling who she was romantically entangled with and whose company she enjoyed. So how did she get up there? I doubt she hopped into a cab and said, “follow that car!”
Actually, speaking of cars, the driveway at the vacation house had to have been crowded. When Madeline got there, there was Carrie’s car, Drake’s car, and then Madeline’s car. It’s very convenient that they didn’t block Carrie’s car in and Carrie was able to get away. But why didn’t she notice the extra car? Then Leonard got there and saw two cars that he didn’t recognize and went in anyway.
I suppose it could be argued that Madeline might have hidden her car nearby, but concealment wasn’t her purpose. She walked in and confronted Drake and only got the idea to murder him after Drake hustled Madeline away when Leonard showed up. Which, come to think of it, is another oddity. Why hustle Madeline away and then answer the door? It wasn’t his door, and he shouldn’t have been there any more than Madeline should have. In fact, of the two of them, Madeline would have been the more innocent one to answer the door. Perhaps it was some instinct to avoid scandal for Madeline? But why answer the door at all?
Then there’s the issue of how Leonard saw Carrie. Recall what was visible through the telescope:
Where was Carrie in that room that Leonard would have recognized her? Leonard doesn’t seem like the sort to be observant enough to recognize someone from the waste down. Was she sitting on the floor?
There is, admittedly, the very edge of the couch she could have been sitting on, but without an arm on the couch, that would be uncomfortable. Also, why did he come running out of the observatory? With the vacation home being 33 miles away from the observatory, he couldn’t have seen Carrie with Drake. There wasn’t an emergency, at least not of the kind to make a person abandon their telescope without locking up and signing out for the night. If he saw Carrie in the telescope, he’d have seen that she was alone (at the time).
None of this really makes sense, though it’s not outright self-contradictory.
Pulling back a bit, we have a curious cast of characters. Leonard Palmer and Carrie don’t really make sense, especially since the actors have no chemistry together. At no point does either seem to have the least bit of affection for the other. How on earth did they meet? Why on earth are they together? Also, Leonard seems far more likely to forget his work in order to please his wife than to neglect his wife because of his work. Which brings us to Fay. She’s jealous of Carrie but spends far more time with Leonard than Carrie does. Granted, she doesn’t get to lay down beside Leonard at night, but he spends all night at the observatory anyway. The triangle just seems backwards. It would have made far more sense for Carrie to be pulling Leonard away from his work and for Fay to have killed her in order to free Leonard up to search for the comet.
Madeline DeHaven and Drake are also odd characters. She is a world-weary, self-important bureaucrat who climbed to a position of power, but is completely taken in by the young, ambitious man she should have seen through in half a second. She also treats him with no affection. He doesn’t really treat her with affection, either, making it especially strange that she is taken in by him.
Russell Armstrong is also an odd character. He is antagonistic to Leonard but on such terms with Leonard’s wife that when she felt like she needed to get away from her husband for a few days to think things over—despite having her own house to herself to think in—she told him and he offered her his vacation house to stay in. Having trouble with a spouse is a profoundly personal thing, especially when reconciliation still seems possible. This means that she is on extremely close terms with Russell. Especially so since she could easily have stayed in a motel. She had money, and whatever decision she came to, it would be easy enough to explain to Leonard. That said, there was no need to hide her going away. It would be easy enough to come up with a real trip to go on in order to be away, whether to the beach, or to go camping, or to go sight seeing. People don’t unpredictably develop a sudden need to get away from someone they feel is neglecting them, so the time to plan would not be a problem. Given all of this, it is remarkable that Carrie ended up confiding in Russell enough for him to lend his vacation house to her in order to flee from Leonard not being home often enough.
Thor Lundquist is another odd character. A TV scientist whose involvement with the university would somehow cement a defense contract, he’s often around the action but doesn’t really do anything (other than insult Leonard). I can’t help but think that he was originally meant to be a suspect and the writers couldn’t figure out a way to use him as that. Admittedly, it would have been hard to make him a suspect without changing other things in the episode, but as it stands I can’t figure out what purpose he served in the episode.
Sergeant Kettler is, perhaps, the one character who really belongs in the episode. Of course, he’s kind of a given, since there has to be a police detective involved if there’s been a murder. As Murder, She Wrote detectives go, he’s in the top 50%. He’s not the sharpest light bulb in the picnic basket, but he is competent. His conclusions about the relatives of Jessica—both of whom lied like a pair of rugs—were reasonable. He was wrong mostly because of plot holes, or if not precisely holes, at least a bunch of threadbare spots in the plot.
So far, I’ve been mostly negative about this episode. It does have some upsides. The observatory at night was a nice location and most of the settings were pleasant to look at. The question of why a telescope would be pointing at a house with a corpse in it is definitely an interesting question to base a mystery around. Unfortunately, the episode doesn’t have a good answer. I mean this apart from everything I’ve said about it above; if one ignores every iffy part of the plot, the telescope pointing at the corpse is a coincidence. I suppose it could be argued that Madeline DeHaven only found the gun because Leonard showed up and Drake hustled her off to the upstairs bedroom, which would establish a causal connection, but it’s still an entirely coincidental causal connection, and further it’s entirely possible that Madeline would have found the gun even without Leonard. That being said, on any reading it was purely by chance that Drake was shot where he was and further that his corpse fell in the very narrow view of where the telescope was looking.
Still, even if the answer was the extremely disappointing, “by accident,” the question, “why was the telescope pointed at a corpse in a vacation house?” was an interesting question. Perhaps it forms a challenge to write a tightly plotted story with that premise.
The one thing I can really give the plot, that it actually did reasonably well, is the whole comet-as-harbinger thing. Except for there not being a comet, which, admittedly, was a bit of an oversight, the comet as a symbol of fate is a great theme to explore in a murder mystery. This is especially true for the murderer; it is interesting to look at a person believing himself to not have free will being what allows him to use his free will to do murder. The same thing leading people to wonder, “are there really gods, and are we cursed by them?” is also a very interesting temptation to subject characters to. It can also be interesting to have the characters consider that looking at a very small part of God’s plan which seems intelligible can make it tempting to think one understands the whole plan, and thus to consider portents and omens as being intelligible signs of what the plan is. Murder, She Wrote, being secular, couldn’t do it well, but they could brush on it, and even that was fun.
Next week’s episode is Curse of the Daanav. Jessica and Seth are off to Washtington DC to meet with their congressman, and after that to visit Seth’s brother, from whom he’s been estranged for decades.
The best reason for a revival of philosophy is that unless a man has a philosophy certain horrible things will happen to him. He will be practical; he will be progressive; he will cultivate efficiency; he will trust in evolution; he will do the work that lies nearest; he will devote himself to deeds, not words. Thus struck down by blow after blow of blind stupidity and random fate, he will stagger on to a miserable death with no comfort but a series of catchwords; such as those which I have catalogued above. Those things are simply substitutes for thoughts. In some cases they are the tags and tail-ends of somebody else’s thinking. That means that a man who refuses to have his own philosophy will not even have the advantages of a brute beast, and be left to his own instincts. He will only have the used-up scraps of somebody else’s philosophy; which the beasts do not have to inherit; hence their happiness.
I’ve noticed a surprising number of people who seem to want to pretend that we are in the 19th century so that they can apply 19th century philosophy, unmodified. The real problem with that is not the 19th century philosophy part, per se (though there was a notably large amount of bad philosophy in the 19th century), but the unmodified part. This is directly related to what Chesterton said above, that a person who will not do philosophy for himself will end up with the used-up scraps of somebody else’s philosophy.
A lot of people who have never done any philosophy for themselves think that doing philosophy for oneself entails being original. This is the opposite of the truth. To truly study philosophy has, as its only legitimate goal, to be entirely unoriginal. At least in content. A philosopher may be forced by circumstances to be original in expression, though the true philosopher will usually try to avoid that whenever he can.
If a man is a philosopher, that is, if he is a lover of wisdom (philos = love, sophia = wisdom), his entire goal is to come to understand what is; that is, he conforms his mind to what pre-exists him. God understands what he creates, so the wisdom of God is creative; man loves what he did not create, so the wisdom of man is purely receptive.
Philos, though, is not any old kind of love—it is the love of friends. This has something of a dual meaning when it comes to philosophy: a man seeks to be a friend of Wisdom, but also to be the friend of other men who love wisdom. As such, the true philosopher will read other philosophers to see what his friends can tell him about what they both love. This is not harmed by the minor detail of their friend having died after writing, not even by them having died twenty four hundred years ago. But as with all true friends, their goal is not a meeting of the ears, but a meeting of the minds. That is, they want to understand the whole truth in what their friends have written, not merely to pick up a few bits and pieces of it.
Every man, by using language, communicates by using the things around him, because they are the things to which the symbols called words point. When we read things written by people long dead, to understand the contents we must know to what the words pointed when they were used, so that we can see the relationships between the things the words pointed at. When the world changes, the words no longer point to the same things, so we cannot read the words today the same way they were written. More importantly, though, things themselves change. A horse is replaced by a horseless carriage. Telegrams are replaced by telephones. Sometimes the relationships persist, sometimes they do not. This is inconvenient. It takes work to be able to separate the relationships between things from the things themselves, that is, to separate the idea contained within the expression from the expression. And here we come to the title of this post, because human beings are lazy.
It is work to read someone carefully and to separate the ideas from the expressions. It is far less work to pretend that the world has not changed, and so there is no separation required. Since we live in a profoundly lazy time, we see a great deal of people trying to pretend this very thing. It is much easier to pretend that people are still forced by grinding poverty (caused, everyone now forgets, by the collapse of the price of food grown on farms) to take the few jobs available in factories which routinely kill and main the workers, who are quickly replaced because of the legions of unemployed fleeing unprofitable farms. If one does that, then one can take a whole host of 19th century writers and apply their writings unmodified. (This does extend into the early 1900s, btw.)
Why don’t people do this with, say, medieval philosophers, or ancient Greek philosophers, or Chinese philosophers? I think that there are two main answers:
The further back in time one goes, the harder it is to pretend that nothing has changed.
The further back in time one goes, the less familiar is the expression of the philosophy.
I don’t mean to suggest that people have actually read Das Kapital, or even that they routinely quote Karl Marx. Far more common is for the process to be iterative, where people much closer in time to Marx rephrase his ideas, often updating the terminology but not otherwise changing the expression, and these again get rephrased a few decades later, and so on, so that what people get is a modern phrasing of the antiquated expression. Along the way, they may easily get updated to things which no longer had the original relationships. People who are starved for ideas because they don’t do much thinking may be very tempted to not care, because starving people are not picky.
This explains rather a great deal of modern discourse.
In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, there’s a scene where the knights of the round table have a vision of God in the heavens and he commands them to find the holy grail. About 50% of MPatHG is quite funny, while the other half is very stupid. This scene is meant to be in the former, but it in the latter. It’s very stupid in a kind of interesting way, though, because it is stupid in a way that is profoundly typical of its time.
MPatHG was released in 1975 and made by men (the pythons) who were in their mid 30s at the time. (They ranged from 32 to 36 years old.) Having grown up primarily in the immediate aftermath of World War 2, they were at the height of the rejection of the old institutions which had failed Europe so spectacularly in two world wars separated by a scant 31 years. When Jack Weinberg famously said, in 1964, that his group didn’t trust anyone over the age of 30—he didn’t really mean it, he was just trying to annoy a reporter, but he accidentally captured a zeitgeist, which is what really matters, not his intended meaning—that put the cutoff at being born in 1934, while the oldest python (John Cleese) was born in 1939. What’s important to remember is that this spirit was not about age per se, but about generation; the new generation didn’t trust the previous generations. The pythons were in the trusted generation, and did not trust anything before them.
The scene of God giving the knights their quest begins with the knights showing respect at the heavenly vision, by kneeling and averting their eyes, and the pythons have God being annoyed at this. This is stupid beyond description, of course, which can get distracting, but its stupidy perfectly captures that spirit, pervasive in the 1960s and 1970s that everything traditional is bad. To the pythons it was funny to have even God himself annoyed at things merely because they were old, since God was part of what was old, but also an authority figure for what was old.
There was a second aspect to this humor which was also bound up in its time period. Part of the rejection of the old was the rejection not merely of the particular ceremonies of the old, but of all ceremonies. Not merely of the particular signs of respect that were old, but of all signs of respect. The pythons depict God as tired of signs of respect and wanting to just get to the point, just as the zeitgeist of the culture was to get rid of everything “superfluous” and get to the point.
This gets to the curious idea of “relevance” which mattered so much at the time, perhaps most notoriously in the priests who put on street clothes and picked up acoustic guitars in an effort to be “relevant”. History has not been kind to them, and I doubt that it should be, but this may at least make the action somewhat intelligible. The spirit of the time was to strip away everything rich, everything meaningful, everything symbolic—and to get as close to a bare animal immediacy as rational language would permit. It is that strange state of mind that permitted intelligent, educated men like the pythons to have the God who told Moses that he would shield Moses when he passed by because Moses could not see God’s face and live, complain when people averted their eyes.
The Youth Movement of the 1960s was made up of very timid people, which is why they were so allergic to symbols and rituals. They could only deal with things that mean nothing more than themselves, and even then often only with the help of drugs. Of course, they told themselves that they had the courage to deal with things as they were instead of hiding behind symbols—which is why they often seemed like idiots.
But they weren’t idiots, they were merely (frequently) neglected. Those born during the war and those born in its aftermath (the boomers) were born to exhausted parents who had lost faith in everything and were too scared to really raise their children. That’s why the main thing they really passed on to their children was their fear. (Let me reiterate, I’m only really talking about that fraction of these generations that became the Youth Movement.)
It has been said that great movies transcend their time and speak the human condition, while bad movies are mired in their times; thus it is bad movies that are most useful for historical research. Monty Python and the Holy Grail shows that it need not be entire movies; bad moments in good movies do just as well. (That said, I don’t think that you can really call MPatHG a good movie; it’s barely even a movie. It’s really an hour and a half long loosely connected series of (mostly) medieval-themed sketches which range anywhere from brilliant to terrible, though even the terrible sketches occasionally have a brilliant line in them.)
When it comes to things like defending the faith, the aphorism that one catches more flies with a spoonful of honey than with a barrel of vinegar is very much on people’s minds, especially in America. Puritans were so dour and miserable that they drove people away from Christianity, etc. So, given that, why be such a downer and talk about the problems of atheism, such as meaning, irrationality, etc? Won’t that just turn people off?
One brief word before I dive into it: it should go without saying that one should not be purely negative, that one should spend most of one’s time on the positives. This post is about why talk about the negatives at all?
One very practical thing to get out of the way before we get to the real reason is that “nice” Christianity has already been played out. That sort of positivity is really an attempt to manipulate people and probably does more harm than good. Patience is a virtue, but imprudent patience is not. Nothing but patience just looks like weakness.
OK, that stuff out of the way, the big reason to talk about the problems with atheism is that a lot of people make what might be described as an inverse Pascal’s wager. Call it the Cheese Pizza Wager. If everyone agrees on cheese pizza but people do not agree on toppings, even if the toppings may be better, just go with plain cheese because it’s safer.
Given how many people will do that, it’s important to point out that we’re not in a pizza situation; the options aren’t cheese pizza vs. barbecue chicken pizza, it’s barbecue chicken pizza vs. poison pizza.
Atheism is not like Christianity but with sleeping in on Sundays. Atheism has real and serious problems such as reason not working, life having no meaning, morality being completely arbitrary, concepts such as a human being not being philosophically tenable on any level (the you-can’t-dip-your-toe-in-the-same-river-twice problem), to say nothing of the more practical issues it has with the breakdown of culture and the tendency to produce totalitarian dictatorships as people’s need for God is replaced by the state. And there’s plenty more. (Atheists will, of course, repudiate all of these things, which isn’t a problem for them since they don’t hold rationality to work and therefore don’t object in the slightest to contradicting themselves left and right while the incoherently scream that they’re being completely rational and calm.)
It’s good for people to realize that there is no consensus and that they can’t safely leave off the difficult task of understanding the world that they live in.
In this video I look at the claim that atheism (or materialism, or naturalism) is simpler than theism is therefore to be preferred—and how it isn’t simpler, and how simpler things are not always to be preferred anyway.
If you are not familiar with Daniel Dennett, one of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism, he is a good friend of Richard Dawkins and an atheist “philosopher”. (I use the scare quotes advisedly.) As an atheist he is, almost as a matter of course, a determinist. However, he’s also a proponent of “compatibalism,” the “idea” that free will and determinism are compatible. (The trick is to redefine “free will” to mean, not something freely chosen, but something deterministically done without outside force being applied at the time.) There is a wonderful video that Dennett made in which he chides neuroscientsts who tell people that they don’t have free will for being irresponsible in doing so, because if people don’t believe that they are responsible for their actions they make less morally responsible choices:
You read that correctly. A determinist is telling other determinists that if they tell people who have no free will that they don’t have free will, the people without free will will then make morally worse choices because they now know the truth that they’re not making any choices and are thus not culpable for the choices that they’re not making.
He even cites a scientific study showing that people more frequently choose to cheat if they’ve recently read an article telling them that neuroscience proves that people don’t have free will and thus are not culpable for their actions.
Of course, Dennett is a determinist, so therefore doesn’t believe that the neuroscientists can choose to be more responsible and lie to people that they have free will in order to get them to make better choices in their lives. But determinism means never having to say you’re sorry (unless you have to): Dennett himself believes that he has no free will and so he had no choice but to make this video. So it’s all OK. He’s not actually an idiot.
He’s just a puppet being made to look like an idiot by the forces pulling his strings.
Recently in looking something up I came across a gentleman by the name of Bill Peschel who publishes some annotated versions of golden age mysteries. The two which caught my eye are The Mysterious Affair At Styles and Whose Body?
I don’t have the time to read them at present, but I’ve put them on my wishlist.
Some of the questions he promises to answer about The Mysterious Affair At Styles are:
Why Would People Drink Strychnine For Their Health? What Does ‘English Beef and Brawn’ Mean? What Are Land Smocks? Spill Vases? Patience Cards?
Not having read these I can’t testify as to their quality, of course, but they certainly seem interesting.
Chris Lansdown 
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