August 2024 – Into the Woods

The future of ancient places

On the island of Gometra, looking toward the island of Ulva. Photo from my visit to the islands in 2019. Click here for high resolution version.

The Scottish islands have been on my mind lately for a couple of reasons. The first is that Ken is working on an article for the New York Times on the community buyout of the island of Ulva, which he and I visited in 2019. The second reason is that I broke my vow not to buy any more Harris tweed jackets.

As part of his research for the article, Ken was reading a history of the community buyout of the island of Eigg, which was completed in 1997. The book is Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power, by Alastair McIntosh, published in 2004. McIntosh was born in 1955, and the book starts with his reflections on growing up on the island of Lewis and Harris. The book gives a complete history of the Eigg buyout. But it also describes how the island of Harris narrowly evaded the construction of an enormous and incredibly destructive “super quarry” in the 1990s.

Land reform in Scotland has a long and depressing history. Vast amounts of land in Scotland’s highlands and islands is still owned by rich absentee landlords, who continue to do everything they can to keep as much land as possible in the hands of as few (very rich) people as possible. See Absentee owners buying up Scottish estates in secret sales, in the Guardian, April 2022. The secret sales are intended to keep local people from bidding on the land.

McIntosh’s book has a good deal to say about Harris tweed, but much has changed since the book was published in 2004. Probably the best source on the economics of Harris tweed is the Stornaway Gazette. If you search the Gazette for the word “tweed” you’ll find that the island’s tweed industry was in a deep crisis in 2007, when a foolish Yorkshire entrepreneur bought a major mill in Stornaway and immediately set out to wreck the industry. See The tweed crisis that became an opportunity. A man named Ian Angus Mackenzie is credited with almost single-handedly stepping in to save the Harris tweed industry. According to Wikipedia, production of Harris tweed more than doubled between 2009 and 2012.

As for my new jacket, I violated my oath not to buy any more Harris tweed jackets because this one was a color I had never seen before — burgundy. There also is no pattern in the tweed. It’s a uniform burgundy. I ordered this jacket on eBay from the U.K. (as usual) and when it arrived was surprised to see that it’s almost certainly new old stock. The pockets were still stitched closed, and there was a packet of spare buttons in an inside pocket. Based on what appears to be a date on a hidden label (I’m not certain), I strongly suspect that the jacket was made in 2015, when tweed production was increasing. The jacket was made in Egypt for Marks & Spencer, a British retailer. The tailoring is excellent. In the U.K. — at least once upon a time — one could buy something off the rack and still have a tailored look. I have found, though, that any Harris tweed jacket is likely to be well made. To afford the handmade fabric is also to afford some good cutting and sewing.

I’m eager to see what Ken will have to say about the Ulva buyout. My impression is that things have not gone as well on Ulva as on Eigg. It’s always the economics, and in Scotland’s highlands and islands I think I can imagine how difficult it is to balance a remote and sustainable lifestyle with the necessity of tourism. The islands’ situation is a microcosm of the global conflict that is the story of our era: Is the world a playground for the super-rich who want to be lords of the earth? Or is the world for the rest of us?

Imagination, knowledge, and heathens

Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions. Sabine Hossenfelder, Viking, 2022. 248 pages.

Physicists, I suspect, come in two flavors.

The first flavor, lacking imagination, are a little too quick to tell us what is impossible. Maybe they are more interested in understanding what we confidently know than in bravely expanding the boundaries of what we confidently know. Sabine Hossenfelder, I suspect, is such a physicist. She is popular on YouTube. No doubt she has helped many non-physicists better understand physics. But it would be very surprising if she ever discovers, or even hypothesizes, anything new. She just doesn’t seem to be wired that way.

The second flavor of physicists are driven by a burning curiosity. They know what we confidently know just as well as the first flavor. But they apply their efforts to trying to penetrate the mysteries of what we don’t know. The big mysteries today are in theoretical physics, which has been stuck for a century, mainly because no one has yet figured out what gravity is and how gravity fits with the well-supported theory of quantum mechanics.

Albert Einstein famously said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” What he meant by that is frequently misunderstood. He is not belitting the importance of knowledge. He is talking about the process of how new knowledge is acquired. (I’m appending Einstein’s quote, in context, at the bottom of this post. It comes from an interview with the Saturday Evening Post in 1929.)

In science, the word speculative is not a dirty word as long as the speculation is consistent with what is confidently known, and as long as the speculation is testable. That’s pretty much the definition of hypothesis, after all. Some scientific discoveries may fall into our laps as accidents and serendipity. But other scientific discoveries start as speculation — a hypothesis — that, when tested, passes the test.

I was charmed by the two pages at the beginning of the book with the heading “A warning.” Hossenfelder writes: “I want you to know what you are getting yourself into, so let me put my cards on the table up front. I am both agnostic and a heathen. I have never been part of an organized religion and never felt the desire to join one.”

In that way, at least, she and I are kindred spirits. I often refer to myself as a heathen, though I avoid the word agnostic because of a certain freight it carries. The freight that goes with the word heathen, however, I very much embrace. The word refers, of course, to a heath — rough, uncultivated land, almost always associated with Britain, where heather and gorse grow. Heathen was an insult, like hayseed, or hick — ignorant people who lived in forsaken places and who stubbornly held out against imperial religions such as Christianity.

This book then, is devoted to telling us whether some popular beliefs are, or are not, consistent with physics as we currently understand it.

Her first question is about whether the past still exists. Someone asks her this question, actually, in a somewhat different way. He asks whether there is some reality in which his grandmother is still alive. This question is all tied up with something that is just as mysterious as gravity — time. Her answer here may be surprising to some people. But it’s important, because most of us underappreciate just how strange contemporary physics is. She concludes:

“According to the currently established laws of nature, the future, the present, and the past all exist in the same way…. There is nothing in these laws that distinguishes one moment of time from any other. The past, therefore, exists in just the same way as the present. While the situation is not entirely settled, it seems that the laws of nature preserve information entirely, so all the details that make up you and the story of your grandmother’s life are immortal.”

She takes on other questions, such as: Why does time move in only one direction? Are there “many worlds,” with copies of ourselves in those other worlds? Do we have free will? Is the universe conscious?

I have listened to smart people endlessly debating the matter of free will. Such discussions are almost as unbearable to me as discussions about religious doctrine. I am very much rooting for the case that we do have free will. That case, though, is strongly tied up in the question of what consciousness is, and whether consciousness has some mysterious relationship to the unpredictably of quantum mechanics — specifically, what physicists refer to as “the collapse of the wave function.” (Think Schrödinger’s cat.)

You knew I was going to mention Roger Penrose, didn’t you?

Hossenfelder of course describes Penrose’s ideas about consciousness and how consciousness arises from quantum activity inside the brain. She evens interviews Penrose at Oxford. Her conclusion about Penrose’s hypotheses: It is “highly speculative, … but at present it is compatible with what we know.”

Penrose’s hypotheses, by the way, closely relate to other ideas such as panpsychism and whether the universe is conscious. Hossenfelder’s conclusion about whether the universe is conscious: “It’s a speculative hypothesis, but if it’s correct, then the universe might have enough rapid-communication channels to be conscious.”

If Penrose is right about how consciousness arises in the brain, then it’s a very safe bet that the universe is conscious.

My guess is that many people who derive their existential comforts from religion would abandon religion and embrace physics, if they knew more about physics. As I see it, it is 100 percent guaranteed that religious doctrine about the nature of our being and the nature of the universe are completely wrong. Thus I am a heathen. Religion, though, provides susceptible people with the comfort of certainty, through a concept that I detest: faith. I’m sure I’m not the only person who finds religious faith horrifying, since I’m also a person who finds religion to be completely wrong.

With physics, there is no certainty. We must admit what we don’t know, that there are things we will certainly not know in our individual lifetimes, and probably even things that human beings will never know. If you can live with the uncertainty, and if you can appreciate hypotheses (such as Penrose’s) that would show the universe to be quite a magical place, then physics — not religion or agnosticism — is the way to go.

From Albert Einstein’s interview with the Saturday Evening Post in 1929:

Einstein: “I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am. When two expeditions of scientists, financed by the Royal Academy, went forth to test my theory of relativity, I was convinced that their conclusions would tally with my hypothesis. I was not surprised when the eclipse of May 29, 1919, confirmed my intuitions. I would have been surprised if I had been wrong.”

Post: “Then you trust more to your imagination than to your knowledge?”

Einstein: “I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

If I only had a field…

From my morning walk. Click here for high-resolution version.

There are many beautiful hayfields in this area. I covet them. I have only woods. I’ve often talked about how much I’d like to have a pasture, or a field. Then again, maybe not. A hayfield is not a hayfield unless there also is a tractor with a mower and a baling machine. I don’t have such things, nor do I have the farmerly skill to use them.

Hay is a major crop in this area. Sadly, though, most of the hay goes to feed beef cattle. This is not horse country, though there are some. Country people love their beef. I can say this for their local beef, though. It’s all grass fed. The beef cattle all live in excellent pastures, and they winter over with local hay.

The political situation

I haven’t posted lately about the political situation. The changes have been dramatic, but everything is going well, and I have little to add. I would like to mention a piece in The New Republic today that detests the political punditry as much as I do. It’s “Beware the Pundit-Brained Version of the Democratic Convention.”

When a political event is on live television — for example, a president’s state of the union speech before a joint session of Congress — the brainlessness of the punditry is on full display. C-SPAN, if you can get it, may televise such events with no pundit “analysis.” But if you watch it anywhere else, you’ll have to listen to the inane and endless yipyap from witless talking heads that passes as analysis. I have not been watching the Democratic convention live. I do watch some of the speeches the day after, and, if there is yipyap, I skip over it.

⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.

⬆︎ The road past my house. The house is hidden behind the trees on the lower right. Click here for high-resolution version.

This hayfield plant has remarkably beautiful powers, but I well remember it from my rural Southern childhood and what its briars can do to children’s bare feet. I believe this is Carolina horsenettle, Solanum carolinense. Click here for high-resolution version.

Low tech to the rescue

My heat pump (which also is a cooling system) had been working perfectly for fifteen years. It chose to stop running on a hot Saturday afternoon when the outdoor temperature was 88F. The temperature inside the house slowly rose to a miserable 89F.

When critical systems in a house fail, the perversity principle requires that they fail on a weekend, when the kind of businesses you need are closed (though they might make an emergency call for a hefty additional fee). Lucky for me, my nearest neighbor is retired from the heating and cooling business, and he came to take a look.

His diagnosis, in which he says he is 90 percent confident, is that an electrical relay on the air handler has failed. That’s a relatively minor thing, and if we can acquire a new relay on Monday then the fix won’t take long.

Two rooms in the house have ceiling fans, which help. But my upstairs office does not. I went up into the attic and fetched an oscillating fan that had been used in the downstairs bedroom before I had a ceiling fan installed in that room. I had forgotten how amazing fans can be!

I well remember what it was like growing up in the South in the 1950s, when some businesses had air conditioning but pretty much nobody had it in their homes or cars. It was fans that made life in the South bearable before the age of air conditioning. Architecture and landscaping were important, too. It’s why houses of that era had big front porches and shade trees.

Here in the American South, heat pumps have been common for decades. Almost everyone has a heat pump and has some understanding of how they work. In a climate that doesn’t get too cold, heat pumps are an efficient source of heat. The heat pump’s true magic, though, is that it’s reversible. It can pump heat into the house from outdoors, or it can pump heat out of the house. There is a limit to a heat pump’s efficiency, though. When heating, a heat pump can raise the temperature of the outside air only about 50 degrees F. So, if it’s 20F outdoors, a heat pump will have to rely on assistance from electrical heating coils, which are not efficient.

I have seen a good many stories lately about how efforts to introduce heat pumps in the U.K. aren’t going very well. A friend recently returned from a visit to a Scottish island, where a local had complained about the cost of operating a newly installed heat pump — £2,000 for one winter’s worth of heat. My guess would be that the problem is not so much the heat pump as a drafty and poorly insulated house. Here in American South, people who live in older houses often use heat pumps for cooling but still use gas or oil for heating.

The sound of the fan, and the start of the Democratic National Convention tomorrow, have stirred up clear memories of the summer of 1960, sitting in my grandmother’s living room with the sound of her large floor-model oscillating fan and watching the party conventions on television. In 1960, John F. Kennedy was running against Richard Nixon.

Correction: Upon reflection, I realized that my summer memory had to have been from 1960 rather than 1956, and I have edited the paragraph above accordingly.

I’m also remembering the importance of ice for living in the South before the days of air conditioning. My grandmother was fond of Pepsi. Pepsi over ice was regular thing with my grandmother, especially in summer. At home we drank far less Pepsi and far more iced tea. There was always iced tea in the refrigerator, and there was always ice in the freezer.

Normally, now, I don’t use much ice, even in the summer. But one of the first things I did after the air conditioning stopped yesterday was to turn on the icemaker.

The same way they treat San Francisco

Anne Hidalgo, the socialist mayor of Paris

Apologies… This post contains some coarse language.

The Paris Olympics went just fine. Right-wingers had predicted that it would go very badly. They said that Paris was a cesspool, and that the level of crime would be terrible. According to the Associated Press, 30,000 social media bots in 13 languages were spreading ugly memes about Paris. For example: “Paris, Paris, 1-2-3, go to Seine and make a pee.”

What the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, said about this won’t be distributed by 30,000 bots on social media. But you can read about it in Le Monde (though the full text of the article is available only to subscribers).

The Times of London (behind a paywall) also wrote about Hidalgo’s interview with Le Monde:

“Fuck reactionaries, fuck the extreme right, fuck all those who want to shut us in a war with everyone against everyone.”

To quote from the Times of London:

Hidalgo told Le Monde that criticism of her was orchestrated by “a reactionary and extreme-right planet” which nourished a “hatred” for Paris because it was the city “of all freedoms, the refuge for LGBTQI+, … a city that has a left-wing woman mayor, and what is more of foreign origin and with dual nationality and an ecologist and feminist to boot.” (Hidalgo was born in Spain.)

This is the same treatment that San Francisco, where I lived for 18 years, has always gotten from right-wingers. Let them say what they want. Let them eat cake, and let them live in Texas.

Berlin Philharmonic 2024-2025 season

Last concert of the 2023-2024 season, outdoors at the Waldbühne in Berlin. Click here for high-resolution version.

I’ve mentioned before how a subscription to the Berlin Philharmonic’s streaming service is such good medicine for the cultural isolation of the woods here in the Blue Ridge foothills. A few days ago I received a brochure for the season that begins on August 23. As usual, it’s brilliant programming. September 24 will be the 200th anniversary of the birth of Anton Bruckner, so the orchestra will be doing six of Bruckner’s symphonies. Other symphonies include Charles Ives’ 4th, Brahms’ 4th, Haydn’s 44th and 54th, Dvořák’s 7th, Mozart’s 20th, Mahler’s 1st and 9th, Beethoven’s 6th, Schubert’s 8th and Tchaikovsky’s 5th. On June 14, Saint-Saëns’ organ symphony is on the program. If you’ve seen the movie Babe, then the organ symphony will be familiar. In the concerto category are piano (Shostakovich, Busoni, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Rachmaninov) as well as violin concertos and a cello concerto. Choral music includes a concert performance of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. John Williams will return to conduct his movie music! The final concert, outdoors at the Waldbühne, will be a Leonard Bernstein concert, including music from West Side Story.

You can download the program here.

A season subscription to the streaming service is not exactly cheap — €169, on sale until August 23 for €152.10. It is, however, some of the best-produced television I’ve ever seen. The video and audio are perfect. Even when recording under a shell at the Waldbühne, the quality of the video and audio are just as good. By the way, those outdoors concerts sell out. The Waldbühne, which can seat 22,000 people, is packed. This year’s end-of-season concert ended with a performance of Berlioz’s “Bolero,” a piece that we’re all familiar with but which I have never heard played quite so brilliantly. The camera zooms in on the faces of the musicians, as always. They kept throwing little smiles at each other, unaware, of course, that the camera caught it. Was it an inside joke of some sort? It’s impossible to know, but I suspect it’s just that they were having such a good time.

All the concerts can be streamed live. They usually start at 7 p.m. Berlin time. You can watch them live, of course. A couple of weeks after each concert, it’s added to the archive. The archive is included with subscriptions. The archive, some of which goes back for 60 years with more than 800 concerts, is an incredible resource.

These concerts are best watched on a big television screen, either with good headphones or a good sound system.