"Give me back the Berlin Wall, Give me Stalin and St. Paul . . ."

Stalin in a 1932 Poster
Credit Collection of Merrill C. Berman
New York Times

In a recent New York Times article, Jennifer Siegel reviews the book "'Stalin,' by Stephen Kotkin" (November 26, 2014), and we receive a new, surprising view of the man:

Kotkin paints a portrait of an autodidact, an astute thinker, "a people person" with "surpassing organizational abilities; a mammoth appetite for work; a strategic mind and an unscrupulousness that recalled his master teacher, Lenin" . . . . Kotkin has given us a textured, gripping examination of the foundational years of the man most responsible for the construction of the Soviet state in all its brutal glory.

Kotkin was a colleague of mine at U. C. Berkeley when we were graduate students there, and though we weren't close enough to be friends, we were friendly, taking some history of science courses together and also working as teaching assistants for survey courses in history, which meant that we taught discussion seminars and graded papers and exams. He and I were just left of center in those days - a position that looked right-wing to Berkeley Leftists. We are probably just right of center these days. We have one other thing in common - we both married Korean women.

I can't say that I knew him well, but I'm glad for his success as a historian.

"Rum and Coca-Cola" and getting bombed with friends!

The Barberettes
Seoul Beats

Lately, I've been enjoying this group -- The Barberettes -- on YouTube. They do a wonderful cover of "Rum and Coca-Cola" -- from which performance is taken the above photo.

Listening to "Rum and Coca-Cola" reminded me of an old Berkeley friend because I first heard the song with her, albeit the Andrews Sisters version (not the more explicit Lord Invader version), so I sent her a link and reminded her:

First time I heard this, I was in your car. I think your friend from Hong Kong was also in the car . . .

She soon replied:

Funny how we remember things, isn't it? I have no memory of this, but you do (and I have a terrible memory!).

Speaking of memories (and booze!): was it you who introduced me to Wild Turkey Bourbon whiskey? I mentioned to Don (husband) the other day that I liked it, but I couldn't remember the first place I had tried it. Maybe in one of those slightly scary bars we used to hang out in?

I couldn't quite believe she had forgotten hearing that song with her Hong Kong friend and me, so I decided to jolt her memory:

I remember because I'd never before heard the song. I also recall you telling Annie (if that's her name) that you liked the song, and you joked that you weren't being politically correct or showing much solidarity with your third-world 'sisters.'

You then stopped the car in the middle of the road and gave a 30-minute lecture on the evils of capitalism and about how feminists should adopt Marxist views on the necessity of revolution for genuine equality. Other drivers were honking their horns and cursing you, but you didn't care! You shook your fist at them and called them running dogs of capitalism! Some of those enraged drivers jumped out and dashed over to your car and started pounding on it and shaking it. You screamed at them that you had wired a bomb to your engine and that it would be set off the next time you turned on the ignition. As the mob scattered, you rolled down your window and yelled, "That's right, run away, you running dogs, you metaphorical sons-of-bitches!"

The entire episode was quite exciting, and I'm surprised you don't remember . . . but as you say, you have a terrible memory . . .

Yes, I believe I was the one who introduced you to Wild Turkey, but that was probably my first time to drink it, too.

She quickly wrote back protesting -- a bit too much, I think -- that I was slightly exaggerating:

Harumph. Even *I* can recall that the car episode you describe didn't occur!

I'm glad we solved the Wild Turkey mystery, though . . .

Yes, my friend's name was (and is) Annie. At least that much is true!

Don't trust her on any of this, for I can trump her harumph! She claims to recall that something didn't occur! How can one recall that something did not take place? I think we can only recall what did happen!

But perhaps those with terrible memories can just make things up!

Deconstructing Paul de Man?

Paul de Man

Google Images

I had never heard of Paul de Man until 1987, when a French woman who frequented Stephens Lounge at UC Berkeley -- where I worked part-time as a barista before baristas were even called baristas (but what's in a name?), though the extent of my coffee-brewing was French Roast or more French Roast -- anyway, as I was saying, I only heard of de Man when a French woman introduced me to his deconstructionist teaching and fascist scandal simultaneously.

The thought therefore already had occurred to me that there might be a link between de Man's emphasis on the elusive meaning of words and the need to slip away from the meaning of his youthful fascist-linked writings.

I had, of course, already heard of deconstructionism, along with other literary theories borrowed from watered-down continental philosophy, and I wasn't the only one to wonder about de Man's theory in light of his past:

De Man's photograph appeared in Newsweek, juxtaposed with images of Nazis on the march. And critics of deconstruction, inside and outside the academy, pounced, arguing that a school of thought long dismissed as cultish "critical terrorism" was something even more sinister.

De Man as "critical theorist" does sound like "critical terrorist," doesn't it? Especially with the continental pronunciation of "th"! Anyway, Jennifer Schuessler reminds us:

Those battles may seem like a distant memory. But now, the first full-length biography of de Man threatens to reopen the debate over his legacy, weaving together old and new charges to paint him not just as a collaborator, but also as a swindler, forger, bigamist and deceiver whose philosophical ideas grew out of "lifelong habits of secrecy." (Jennifer Schuessler, "Revisiting a Scholar Unmasked by Scandal," NYT, March 9, 2014)

In The Double Life of Paul de Man, which Schuessler is reviewing, Evelyn Barish makes similar such accusations:

[H]er verdict on his philosophy -- "this idea that meaning cannot be pinned down," and that "clear-cut moral judgments are impossible," as she put it -- is unstinting. "To me," she said, "it's just a waste of time."

Clearly, she thinks that moral judgements can be made, and her book is an indictment of de Man, though the man has his defenders, as Schuessler goes on to show, but you can read the article on that.

Deconstructionism, incidentally, plays a role in my own story . . .

Robert Bellah's Critique of Sociobiology?

Bellah's Magnum Opus

Amazon

Although he mentions the word "sociobiology" only one time in 746 pages (page 261, to be specific), much of Bellah's book draws on paleontology and biology, both comparative and evolutionary, to refute sociobiological views by showing that culture extends far down the evolutionary tree and deep into evolutionary history, by which he implies the co-evolution of culture and biology, an antireductionist view in which each influences the other -- or so I thought the other night in an insomniac hour I lay upon my bed thinking about Bellah, his views, and his role as my adviser back when I was studying at Berkeley, with one thought leading to another, ending with this contra-sociobiological moment, which I might go into more deeply some day when I've finished reading the book.

Sorry to be so brief this morning, but I have final exams to administer and final papers to grade . . .

Berkeley Memories of Artschwager . . .

Richard Artschwager (2009)

Four Colors Four Words

Actually, Richard Artschwager isn't the one I principally mean, but rather his daughter, Eva, a friend of mine while I was pursuing my doctorate at Berkeley. She was an undergrad in history of science, which I was initially studying as a grad student, and that brought us together as friends.

I hadn't known her so long when, over a coffee, I happened to ask, "Eva, what does your father do?"

"He's a painter," she replied.

I thought for a moment, then asked, "A house painter?"

She gave me a searching look, and I realized I had made a slight misstep. "A real painter, you mean?"

She nodded.

I thought another moment, then asked, "Is he good?"

"They don't know," she admitted, but that very manner of admission clued me in that he must be important.

"What sort of style?" I inquired.

"He's into conceptual art these days."

"What's that?"

"It's sort of Platonic," she explained. "He also does sculptures, and he might sculpt a pyramid but stretch it to the very limits of its Platonic form. He wants to see how far an object can be distorted, yet retain its identity."

"Oh," I said, not knowing what else to say, and we talked of other things. Some time later, Eva moved away, off to the East Coast for her own graduate studies, and one day, I noticed that Richard Artschwager was giving a talk at an exhibition of his art in the University Museum, so I went. He was about 25 years younger than in the picture above and looked remarkably like Eva, though taller. The talk he gave was centered on a work that stood before us: a door, framed on one side by a single brace -- I mean a 'grammatical' or 'mathematical' brace. It has stuck in my mind because during the question-and-answer period, someone asked if he had noticed that the brace could look like a moustache if placed horizontally, so he rearranged his artwork there before us, hanging the 'moustache' to the doorknob, thereby changing the concept of his work entirely. I think he managed to go beyond the limits of its Platonic form . . .

I thought of all this the other day because I read a reference to Richard Artschwager in Newsweek, specifically, in an article by Blake Gopnik, "Warhol, Picasso? Yawn" (September 3, 2012), that praised the Whitney Museum for exhibiting not just the famous, big-name artists:

The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York is one of the few major players that rarely puts big names on its schedule: its main fall show is about the underrated pop artist Richard Artschwager.

That sent me to the Whitney website, where I found these words:

Richard Artschwager's first solo exhibition was in 1965 at the age of forty-two at Leo Castelli Gallery. Since then his work has been shown throughout the world, and his enigmatic and diverse oeuvre has been influential, yet not thoroughly understood. This exhibition is a comprehensive review of Artschwager's remarkable creative exploration of the mediums of sculpture, painting, and drawing and the first retrospective exhibition of Artschwager's work since one organized at the Whitney in 1988.

I see that they now know he's good -- and that's good to know now -- though I wonder what became of Eva and what she's doing. I promised to keep in touch, but I had some rather chaotic years after 1984, so I lost contact . . .

The Polyglot Alexander Arguelles: Living on "unemployment checks and Korean translation work"

Alexander Arguelles

Wikipedia

In a book review by Peter Constantine for the NYT, "The Art of Mastering Many Tongues" (January 20, 2012), we learn of Michael Erard's search for true language virtuosos, genuine polyglots who have mastered multiple languages, a quest that Erard writes about in Babel No More and that led him to Berkeley, as Constantine informs us:

One polyglot . . . [whom Erard] meets, Alexander Arguelles, who lives in Berkeley "on unemployment checks and Korean translation work," shows that anyone who hopes to achieve fluency in more than six languages must dedicate himself to the task rigorously -- in fact almost exclusively. Arguelles keeps his languages in shape by subjecting himself to an unforgiving schedule, keeping spreadsheets that record the hours and minutes he spends on each one. Arguelles "tracks his linguistic progress through the hours as saints once cataloged their physical self-sacrifices," Erard writes. Of 4,454 hours of language study Arguelles did over a period of 456 days, he spent 456 hours on his native language, English, and also 456 on Arabic, and then a descending number of hours on the remaining 50 languages on his spreadsheet. Though his learning techniques may seem strange, they also appear to be effective. In one, called "shadowing," students listen to language recordings on a portable player while briskly walking in a public place, gesticulating energetically as they shout out the foreign words and phrases they are listening to. Though one is bound to make a spectacle of oneself, this technique seems to help the beginner shed some of the self-consciousness connected with speaking a foreign language.

That's the very man in the photo above. Our globe-trekking paths have crossed, apparently, both of us having spent time in Berkeley. Arguelles is probably joking about the unemployment checks, for Wikipedia shows him more gainfully employed than that. He may have good advice for language learning, but I don't intend to take him up on shadowing. If I tried that technique here in Seoul to work on Korean -- "walking in a public place, gesticulating energetically . . . [and] shout[ing] out . . . [Korean] words and phrases" -- I'd be committed to an asylum . . . by my wife! Not that such a fate would necessarily be much different than the mad life I already lead, confined here in the bedlam called Seoul.

I wonder if Arguelles used his shadowing technique here in Korea. Wikipedia refers to his "his years of residence in South Korea," during which he studied "a wide range of languages." A citation is supplied that leads to a biographical entry by Dr. Arguelles in which Wikipedia's information is confirmed:

In order to live . . . [in Korea], I obtained a faculty position at Handong University on the eastern coast of the country. This university had only been founded the year before, and they needed somebody to develop and lead a foreign language program, so my initial duties were to teach French, Spanish, and German . . . . [To] get down to serious language study . . . . Handong . . . was exactly what I needed . . . , for the campus was on an isolated hill amidst pine and bamboo forests and rice fields with a view of the Pacific Ocean from my back porch. Furthermore, it soon became clear that, while the university was recruiting foreign faculty to give it international stature, we were viewed as outsiders and thus completely shut out of the administrative decision making process. Other people found this intolerable and soon left, but I turned the situation on its head by reasoning that as my sole duty was to teach languages, I could devote myself entirely to their study on my own . . . . Initially, of course, I focused on Korean and, after I got grounded, on Classical Chinese and Japanese in a comparative context. However, I also ranged very widely through the world of languages . . . . This period came to a close when I belatedly sat down with a calculator and did some serious time management projections. Developing structural knowledge and conversational ability in a language and refining and maintaining that ability can be achieved with just 15 or 20 minutes a day, each and every day, over a period of years. However, developing deeper knowledge and above all enjoying reading the literature of a language requires more like an hour a day, and there are all too few of these . . . . I . . . began to allow myself to simply enjoy reading in my more familiar ones. I also began to "get a life" by getting married, siring a son, and paying more attention to my career by writing and publishing more . . . . [I know many languages, but] in a class all by itself, there is Korean. I lived in its land for nine years, and when I left I took it with me personified in my wife. I have published numerous reference works about it and produced scholarly translations of it, and I have proven time and again that I can handle any situation life throws at me in it, and yet -- there is still so much I do not know.

Our paths truly have crossed! He seems to have been more successful, however, particularly in learning Korean. If he used his shadowing technique in Korea, I suppose Handong's isolation made that practice more comfortable.

But I'm almost motivated to again attempt learning Korean since Arguelles insists that mastering the tongue is mainly just a matter of hard work.

Almost . . .

"Conversation Galante"?

Ineffable Moon

Aris Messinis/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

(Image from New York Times)

Back in the early 1980s, when I was safely ensconced in history of science at UC Berkeley, I recall a conversation with Bruce Wheaton -- one of the instructors who worked with John Heilbron at the Office for the History of Science and Technology -- about why the moon looks larger on the horizon than at its zenith.

Now, Bruce was a smart guy, and he knew more about the history of technology than just about anyone I knew -- if, by "history of technology," one means an internalist history of the subject. In fact, I sat through his lectures on technology when I worked as one of his teaching assistants and learned a great deal about machines. He was quite gifted at making the technical details clear and excellent in demonstrating how one technical device led to another through improvement of some mechanical aspect or other, or through combining devices to form a new, more complex device -- almost as if the machines were evolving through alternately continuous and punctuated styles of evolution. I found myself unexpectedly fascinated, and I half-expected to finish the semester capable of building my own car!

But Bruce could at times be hermeneutically inaccessible.

To my question concerning why the moon looked larger at the horizon, he replied, "It doesn't. If you measure its diameter, you'll find that it's the same."

"I understand that," I assured him. "What I want to know is why the moon looks larger."

"It isn't larger," he countered.

"I know," I said, perhaps a bit more curt than necessary, "but why does it look larger?"

"It doesn't," he insisted.

After a couple more whirls on hermeneutic circles of this sort, I was ready to get off that conversational roller coaster. Bruce could keep his mathematically invariable moon, but I'd stick to my qualia-ridden impression and hope for an answer to my query someday.

The late 1960s band Creedence Clearwater Revival claimed that "Someday Never Comes", but someday came yesterday when I read Alison Gopnik's article "Consciousness: The Great Illusion?" (May 20, 2011), a New York Times review of a recent book by Nicholas Humphrey, Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. In her review, Ms. Gopnik speaks of consciousness and notes that some aspects of consciousness can be explained:

For example, why does the moon look so much larger when it's at the horizon than when it's overhead, at the zenith? This is a question about conscious experience -- about how the world looks to us -- not about behavior and brains. And there is a clear and convincing evolutionary explanation.

The visual system wasn't designed to deal with objects that are thousands of miles away. It was designed to accurately judge the size of close, evolutionarily relevant objects like apples. As an apple moves closer or farther away, it will project a larger or smaller image on my retina. But I don't see the apple expand and contract. I see an apple with a concrete, stable size. This is because my brain evolved to combine information about the size of the retinal image with information about distance to create a single, constant visual experience.

The retinal image of the moon is always about the same size. But the horizon looks farther away than the zenith, perhaps because we see that other objects are in front of the horizon while the zenith is unoccluded. The brain determines that the horizon moon must therefore actually be larger than the zenith moon. And, voilà, the rising moon looks much bigger.

Drawing upon Humphrey's ideas, Gopnik adds:

So we actually have a good and interesting naturalistic explanation for this particular feature of our conscious experience and many others like it. But it seems that we can't explain the most important thing: Why does the moon look like anything at all? What explains that ineffable je ne sais quoi, that irreducible magic of experience? That big, beautiful moon doesn't just feel like the outcome of a cool calculation. And it isn't looming up at just anyone, but at me, the equally ineffable and irreducible self.

That's more qualia, the utterly ineffable kind. I can just about almost nearly grasp what she's referring to, though not effing quite . . . so as for this nearly effable moon, "It may [as well] be Prester John’s balloon," after all, if anything specifically particular at all.

Now, why is that, Bruce? And where is your own ineffable self these days?

Texas Instruments TI-34: Its Number Finally Came Up . . .

Texas Instruments TI-34

(Image from Datamath Calculator Museum)

In the summer of 1987, the year that it went onto the market, I purchased a Texas Instruments TI-34, the solar powered calculator that you see above, and for the past 24 years, beginning when I was still a young man barely over 29 at Berkeley and continuing until this past week in Seoul, the device served me flawlessly in calculating student grades, among other simple mathematical operations, before finally breaking down and miscalculating simple addition problems only a few days ago.

The end of an era, of sorts -- a quarter-century, anyway -- and kind of sad.

This calculator accompanied me from North America to Europe, Australia, and Asia -- living out its life first in Berkeley (USA), then in Fribourg and Basel (Switzerland), Kiel and Tuebingen (Germany), Armidale (Australia), and Jerusalem (Israel), and finally in Daegu, Masan, Osan, and Seoul (South Korea) -- and it was, without a doubt, the 'smartest' purchase that I ever made, though I gave that economic matter little thought upon buying it other than appreciating the fact that I would never need to shell out money for batteries.

According to the Wikipedia entry on the TI-34, the 1987 version was manufactured for Texas Instruments by Inventec Corporation in Taiwan, so both Texas Instuments and Inventec Corporation deserve a deep bow of respectful appreciation for a product so dependable that it lasted 24 years without erring . . . at least until the AI equivalent of Alzheimer's finally struck it down just days ago.

I wonder if I should bury the old one? Today's Good Friday, but I don't imagine my TI-34 coming back to life on Easter morning.

I will simply have to find a replacement, but it won't be the same.

Sigh . . .

Just to throw everyone for a loop: Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson, 1986

On a 'bad hair' day . . .

(Image from Wikipedia)

We haven't listened to Laurie Anderson via this blog in a long time . . . like, um, forever. Technically, that means that we could never have reached this moment -- as in the Kalam Cosmological Argument -- but who's counting? So, let's listen to "O Superman" on You Tube, using a different browser (so, open one), as we follow along reading the lyrics below for about ten minutes of weird, uneasy dissociation of sensibility:

O Superman. O Judge. O Mom and Dad. Mom and Dad.
O Superman. O Judge. O Mom and Dad. Mom and Dad.
Hi. I'm not home right now. But if you want to leave a
message, just start talking at the sound of the tone.
Hello? This is your Mother. Are you there? Are you
coming home?
Hello? Is anybody home? Well, you don't know me,
but I know you.
And I've got a message to give to you.
Here come the planes.
So you better get ready. Ready to go. You can come
as you are, but pay as you go. Pay as you go.

And I said: OK. Who is this really? And the voice said:
This is the hand, the hand that takes. This is the
hand, the hand that takes.
This is the hand, the hand that takes.
Here come the planes.
They're American planes. Made in America.
Smoking or non-smoking?
And the voice said: Neither snow nor rain nor gloom
of night shall stay these couriers from the swift
completion of their appointed rounds.

'Cause when love is gone, there's always justice.
And when justive is gone, there's always force.
And when force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi Mom!

So hold me, Mom, in your long arms. So hold me,
Mom, in your long arms.
In your automatic arms. Your electronic arms.
In your arms.
So hold me, Mom, in your long arms.
Your petrochemical arms. Your military arms.
In your electronic arms.

I last listened to this song by Anderson back in the early eighties . . . in Berkeley, of course. My thoughts turned again to Ms. Anderson the other day when I read about her in a New York Times article by Will Hermes, "Electronic Expressions in the Service of the Soul" (June 22, 2010). Ah, that brings back memories of a misspent youth . . . but listening to "O Superman" now, post-9/11, makes for a rather eerie experience:

Here come the planes.
They're American planes. Made in America.
Smoking or non-smoking?
And the voice said: Neither snow nor rain nor gloom
of night shall stay these couriers from the swift
completion of their appointed rounds.

Smoking or non-smoking? The 9/11 passengers didn't ultimately have that choice, did they. The lyrics were written post-Vietnam, a very different time. I wonder what Ms. Anderson thinks about the post-9/11 landscape, which means that I wonder what her new album, Homeland, is about, given the title. Mr. Hermes links it thematically to "O Superman" -- and cites some of her musings from his interview with her:

"Homeland" similarly twists together ideas of the personal and political, beginning with the title, a word that has acquired ominous overtones in the shadow of Sept. 11.

"It’s a very cold, bureaucratic word," Ms. Anderson said. "No one I know would say 'my homeland.'" She notes its recent pairing with the word "security," which she contends "is not about security, really, but more about control. The phrase doesn't make anyone feel particularly safe, does it?"

She's got a point. Americans don't generally speak of America as their 'homeland', and the expression "Homeland Security" serves only to remind us of American insecurity. Still . . . where does she go with that point? Vaguely in an ambiguous direction? Mr. Hermes writes of a song and its lyrics on the Homeland album:

"Dark Time in the Revolution" tries to square modern-day America with the nation Tom Paine was defining when he wrote "Common Sense." "You thought there were things that had disappeared forever/Things from the Middle Ages/Beheadings and hangings and people in cages," Ms. Anderson intones over Joey Baron’s inexorable tom-tom rolls. "And suddenly they're alright welcome to the American night."

Odd way to put things. The 'Medieval' "Beheadings and hangings" certainly aren't "alright" . . . though I suppose that she's speaking in irony. But in what sense is this the "American night"? I get that "people in cages" likely alludes to Guantanamo, but beheadings are with us courtesy of a far darker force in the world.

I guess I'll just have to listen to the new album and judge for myself.

"Well, how did I get here?"

"Once in a Lifetime"

(Image from Wikipedia)

Midway through my Berkeley years, I encountered the 'Deutsch Elm Disease.' She was a young German scholar with a surname that sounded like "elm" who had completed her graduate studies at Cambridge or Oxford, if I recall -- so let's call it Oxbridge -- and was teaching the History of Christianity for the Religious Studies Department with a half-position in History.

As a textbook, she used Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, of all books! She would sometimes sit in front of class and -- eyes fixed upon that text -- read aloud passages from Russell's 'learned' views on such things as Gnosticism or the Arian heresy. Other times, she would 'lecture' on the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, drawing superficial distinctions or making strained analogies.

Once, she was uttering something about the apostle Peter and noted that he was also called "Kēphas," which she explained was short for the Greek term "kephalē," meaning "head" and thereby implying, she explained, that Peter was "head" of the Church.

Astonished at such ignorance from a Berkeley professor, I raised my hand and informed her that "Kēphas" was Aramaic, not Greek, and that it meant not "head" but "rock," i.e., "petra," and was thus a wordplay between the Aramaic "Kēphas" and the Greek "Petros", i.e., "Peter," and therefore implied that Peter signified the rock of faith upon which the church was to be built.

The 'Deutsch Elm Disease' grudgingly expressed something that resembled 'thanks' . . . but then went on to offer the same false etymology a week or two later in a course on the New Testament. Speechless at such incompetence, I said nothing that time. But other times, I raised more points and asked more questions, ever politely I thought, though she grew ever more annoyed. After one such question, she confronted me at the end of the class as I was about to step out the door:

"You are 'Jeff Hodges'?" she demanded.

"Yes," I replied.

"You will come to my office!"

That didn't set right by me. At the age of 32, I wasn't about to let myself be ordered to anybody's office. We had an argument, and I informed her that if I wasn't cowed by the crack dealers gunning down their rivals in front of my place on Alcatraz Avenue, then I wasn't about to be intimidated by the likes of her.

"I'm not coming to your office," I said. And I didn't.

But I found myself thinking, "If someone as incompetent as this 'Deutsch Elm Disease' can obtain a tenure-track position at U.C. Berkeley, then I will surely encounter no obstacles on my path to academic success.

How wrong I was . . .

John L. Heilbron: "Bancroft Centennial Symposium: Big Science and Big Bridges"

Ernest Orlando Lawrence

(Image from Lawrence and His Laboratory)

Here's a shorter lecture by John on the humble origins of big science: "Bancroft Centennial Symposium: Big Science and Big Bridges." As usual, he manages to make physics, its context, and its history intelligible, interesting, and humorous.

This story happens to be the tale of the Lawrence Berkeley Lab and its development of the cyclotron, which started in 1931 with Ernest Orlando Lawrence and the so-called 'Rad-Lab' ten years before government began funding scientific work on a large scale, so Lawrence had to collect 'junk' and turn to philanthropists and private investors to support the increasingly expensive experiments conducted with his found art of smashing atoms -- more of a perfomance art, actually, of which he was the due champ and received a Nobel Prize in 1939. I refer, of course, to his use of gigantic magnets thrown away by Federal Telegraph Company and scavanged by Lawrence to assist in accelerating atoms to the speeds requisite for the dirty job of obliterating fellow atoms . . . or at least smashing them to smithereens.

This lecture and the stuff dealt with bring back memories of my history-of-science years even though my forte was history of biology -- not that my own forte was especially fortified or particularly formidable -- but I was constantly hearing John and the others talk about the history of that lab. I suppose that I'm being somewhat self-indulgent these past few days, strolling down memory lane. Still, if you're interested in this sort of thing, i.e., physics and its history, give the video a look-see. It's only about 25 entertaining minutes, time well spent if you like likable lectures on technical stuff.

John, by the way, also has some intriguing things to say, in his conclusion, about big science's bureaucratic tendency to limit scientific discovery, given the risk-averse character of government-funded research.