At least not identified as such.
But he is there, buried inside a group shot.
Here are a few - quality varies from poor to acceptable, but "better than not"... so enjoy !
IMAGES OF MARTIN HENRY DAWSON
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Images of Martin Henry Dawson
There aren't any on the web.
At least not identified as such.
But he is there, buried inside a group shot.
Here are a few - quality varies from poor to acceptable, but "better than not"... so enjoy !
IMAGES OF MARTIN HENRY DAWSON
At least not identified as such.
But he is there, buried inside a group shot.
Here are a few - quality varies from poor to acceptable, but "better than not"... so enjoy !
IMAGES OF MARTIN HENRY DAWSON
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Healing the Heartless
Seventy Five Million people - at least - had their lives greatly shortened by the events of World War Two.
Died. Dead. If not during the war itself, then not long after.
Set against that toll (the worst ever disaster in human history) the act of extending, for a few years, the lives of about 25 civilians with a physical heart disease may not stack up for much.
Connecting the two - vast military forces raging overseas with a small quiet medical affair that could have just as easily happened in peacetime - may seem impossible.
But I think there is a strong connector and it is that the curing those physical heart cases was dependent on first healing some Home Front civilians of a metaphorical heart disease far more deadly than Endocarditis : Scientific Heartlessness/ Scientific SansCoeur.
Calling upon Science and Nature to justify a lack of compassion for those not among your own kind was Modernity's abiding moral failing.
It was displayed not just during modern warfare or in everything that Hitler ever did - it was habitual, in varying degrees, among most all of us back then.
Only Time will tell us what abiding moral failings of this postmodernist/quantum/commensal age will engender - I am sure that Heartlessness will be chief among them.
But hopefully we will no longer boast about our heartlessness as being based on the best scientific discoveries from Nature.
The decline of Modernity came not from any external assaults, rather it rotted from within, from among its strongest supporters, the Scientist.
This happened when a few, then some, and finally many, saw that Nature did not favour heartlessness at all but rather the opposite, and translated that new knowledge into concrete human behavior : they changed their day-to-day ethics accordingly.
It wasn't a rapid or smooth process nor has it ended yet but it had to start somewhere and Dawson's story is as close to the beginnings as I have been able to find AND it had consequences that we have all felt personally - so it it is an excellent place to start recalling when Mo went Po, if only because the first person cured of the metaphorical heart disease was Dr Dawson himself.
Not that he was heartless by any means anytime in his life, but he was a proud member of a relatively new profession, that of the Clinical Investigator, which had the potential for exposing all the ambiguities of Modernity's reforming spirit.
Only when Dawson started questioning the disinterested objectivity he always had upheld so strongly, was he himself on the road away from Mo and heading for Po.....
Died. Dead. If not during the war itself, then not long after.
Set against that toll (the worst ever disaster in human history) the act of extending, for a few years, the lives of about 25 civilians with a physical heart disease may not stack up for much.
Connecting the two - vast military forces raging overseas with a small quiet medical affair that could have just as easily happened in peacetime - may seem impossible.
But I think there is a strong connector and it is that the curing those physical heart cases was dependent on first healing some Home Front civilians of a metaphorical heart disease far more deadly than Endocarditis : Scientific Heartlessness/ Scientific SansCoeur.
Calling upon Science and Nature to justify a lack of compassion for those not among your own kind was Modernity's abiding moral failing.
It was displayed not just during modern warfare or in everything that Hitler ever did - it was habitual, in varying degrees, among most all of us back then.
Only Time will tell us what abiding moral failings of this postmodernist/quantum/commensal age will engender - I am sure that Heartlessness will be chief among them.
But hopefully we will no longer boast about our heartlessness as being based on the best scientific discoveries from Nature.
The decline of Modernity came not from any external assaults, rather it rotted from within, from among its strongest supporters, the Scientist.
This happened when a few, then some, and finally many, saw that Nature did not favour heartlessness at all but rather the opposite, and translated that new knowledge into concrete human behavior : they changed their day-to-day ethics accordingly.
It wasn't a rapid or smooth process nor has it ended yet but it had to start somewhere and Dawson's story is as close to the beginnings as I have been able to find AND it had consequences that we have all felt personally - so it it is an excellent place to start recalling when Mo went Po, if only because the first person cured of the metaphorical heart disease was Dr Dawson himself.
Not that he was heartless by any means anytime in his life, but he was a proud member of a relatively new profession, that of the Clinical Investigator, which had the potential for exposing all the ambiguities of Modernity's reforming spirit.
Only when Dawson started questioning the disinterested objectivity he always had upheld so strongly, was he himself on the road away from Mo and heading for Po.....
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Skyscraper Genetics;Sidewalker Genetics
The age old story of the world , the insiders trying to keep the outsiders out, is brought to a permanent boil in New York City.
The verticality of the skyscraper is a truly fitting and 'deep' metaphor for Modernity : it represents Modernity's need to categorize everyone and everything into a vertical hierarchy of increasing (imagined) 'fitness' and worth.
The assumption is that your worth depends on your inherited genetics which are fixed and change only at the place of glaciers - genetics you inherit strictly from your parents - no miscegenation between species or races here !
By contrast the H in HGT (Horizontal Genetic Transfer), is a fitting symbol for this new, Quantum-Postmodern- Commensal Age.
It merely institutionalizes the reality of global commensality that since we have to exist together cheek to jowl on this Planet,diners at a common table, we might as well resolve to make the best of it and make use of the best of each other's ideas.
In fact, our lives probably depend on us doing so.
So the horizontality of a modern library with its branches stocks of books shared all over the city and all of it part of a continent or world wide system of inter-library loans best represents in human terms what HGT is to the microbe world.
Once named by very early explorers as a natural Arcadia, New York under Dewitt Clinton became the ultimate Synthetic Arcadia, with his rigid and orderly grid system of streets and avenues and buildings demanding that Nature yield to the Will of Man.
But the dirty, noisy,vibrant,disorderly, messy immigrant-burdened sidewalks -where two strangers' eyes can meet and romance bloom; those sidewalks,and those unruly sidewalkers, they,they are Nature's Revenge !
The verticality of the skyscraper is a truly fitting and 'deep' metaphor for Modernity : it represents Modernity's need to categorize everyone and everything into a vertical hierarchy of increasing (imagined) 'fitness' and worth.
The assumption is that your worth depends on your inherited genetics which are fixed and change only at the place of glaciers - genetics you inherit strictly from your parents - no miscegenation between species or races here !
By contrast the H in HGT (Horizontal Genetic Transfer), is a fitting symbol for this new, Quantum-Postmodern- Commensal Age.
It merely institutionalizes the reality of global commensality that since we have to exist together cheek to jowl on this Planet,diners at a common table, we might as well resolve to make the best of it and make use of the best of each other's ideas.
In fact, our lives probably depend on us doing so.
So the horizontality of a modern library with its branches stocks of books shared all over the city and all of it part of a continent or world wide system of inter-library loans best represents in human terms what HGT is to the microbe world.
Once named by very early explorers as a natural Arcadia, New York under Dewitt Clinton became the ultimate Synthetic Arcadia, with his rigid and orderly grid system of streets and avenues and buildings demanding that Nature yield to the Will of Man.
But the dirty, noisy,vibrant,disorderly, messy immigrant-burdened sidewalks -where two strangers' eyes can meet and romance bloom; those sidewalks,and those unruly sidewalkers, they,they are Nature's Revenge !
Monday, July 12, 2010
What's the worst possible heart disease?
Most would probably have an opinion as to the worst possible heart disease.
Maybe only a theologian would spontaneously say it was SANSCOEUR.
But that is what Mo goes Po suggests as the world's most potent heart condition....
(The image underneath the title in that blog by the way is of Martin Henry Dawson.... circa about 1938)
That lowdown achin' old heart disease
This is the story of a heart disease, a metaphorical heart disease, the worst disease our world has ever seen and - hopefully - will ever see ; but one where the nominal 'patients' ended up healing the doctors.
It is also part of the perennial story of New York City , the battle between the Skyscrapers and the Sidewalkers, as old as the city itself.
It is the story of a medical pariah, a promising doctor who to most of his colleagues seemed to have gone off the rails somewhere and done about the worst thing a medical scientist could ever do, which is to 'go native'.
A doctor who started thinking and acting less like a Disinterested Scientist and more like he was at one with his erstwhile 'clinicial material'...
Much of the climax of this story takes place in north western Harlem, over a small area of about eighty acres.
And like all the best eighty acres, it also had a mule. His name : Martin Henry Dawson.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Modernity: Last page in Long Book
Modernity was usually felt to be the first page in a book not yet fully written , the gateway to "The World of Tomorrow".
But it could be argued it better represents the very last page of a very, very long book more than 3000 years old.
Definition time: I consider Modernity to be a mode of thought, not a time period.
Yes, it predominated in the period 1880-1980, but it had strength before (1840-1880) and after (1980 - 2020 ??).
It shared the hundred years between 1880-1980 with Pre-Modernity and Post-Modernity but towered well over them in its undisputed hegemony.
It held, along with the ancient Greek scientists (& Newton) the idea that both macro and micro reality consisted of a solid, resilient material that acted and felt rather like metal or rock or wood or a living body.
In objects like the human body, it consisted of a constantly and smoothly curving unbroken structure - made up (perhaps) of tiny granular objects ( atoms) that were as solid and as resilient as the entire body itself and were packed so closely together as to appear and act as if they were all one big solid object.
Hardened cement, solid but yet visibly made of tiny grains all stuck together is as good a visual representative of this vision of ultimate reality as any we commonly see.
There was no "inside detailing" to these atoms and their outer edges were clearcut and definite.
Simple and unchanging (by no coincidence,rather like the definition Modernists held of bacteria), these micro objects were complied into sub-assemblies which became assemblies and then systems - from atoms to molecules to all the way up to human beings
or planets.
Macro Reality - when they thought it was working - was a vast Lego or Meccano Set, an additive form of complexity, in strict hierarchical order.
When it wasn't working, Macro Reality was disordered and "dirt" resulted : atoms out of place.
If you were born in 1880 and completed your education before Queen Victoria died you would only have read, later in life, in the newspapers about changes proposed by some scientists to this way of looking at the world but you won't have and couldn't have accepted those changes, deep down in your bones.
You were simply too old but unfortunately, not quite old enough:
you would have been 53 when Hitler came to power, 60 in 1940, 65 in 1945.
In whatever you did (as long as you were a professional class male) you would have been at the top of your profession (the boss) and would have run the world, along with other men roughly your same age and with roughly the same kind of scientific education, throughout World War Two and the ten year lead-up to it.
Quantum science was happening during the Modern Era but was not a part of it, in its day to day workings.
Newton still ruled all through the Modern Era.
Don't believe me?
Millions of parents and their kids believed in this view of ultimate Reality:
check out when the sales of Meccano sets,Erector kits,Tinkertoy and their ilk first became popular and when those sales suddenly died, and you can mark the timeline of Modernity at its peak and at its decline...
But it could be argued it better represents the very last page of a very, very long book more than 3000 years old.
Definition time: I consider Modernity to be a mode of thought, not a time period.
Yes, it predominated in the period 1880-1980, but it had strength before (1840-1880) and after (1980 - 2020 ??).
It shared the hundred years between 1880-1980 with Pre-Modernity and Post-Modernity but towered well over them in its undisputed hegemony.
It held, along with the ancient Greek scientists (& Newton) the idea that both macro and micro reality consisted of a solid, resilient material that acted and felt rather like metal or rock or wood or a living body.
In objects like the human body, it consisted of a constantly and smoothly curving unbroken structure - made up (perhaps) of tiny granular objects ( atoms) that were as solid and as resilient as the entire body itself and were packed so closely together as to appear and act as if they were all one big solid object.
Hardened cement, solid but yet visibly made of tiny grains all stuck together is as good a visual representative of this vision of ultimate reality as any we commonly see.
There was no "inside detailing" to these atoms and their outer edges were clearcut and definite.
Simple and unchanging (by no coincidence,rather like the definition Modernists held of bacteria), these micro objects were complied into sub-assemblies which became assemblies and then systems - from atoms to molecules to all the way up to human beings
or planets.
Macro Reality - when they thought it was working - was a vast Lego or Meccano Set, an additive form of complexity, in strict hierarchical order.
When it wasn't working, Macro Reality was disordered and "dirt" resulted : atoms out of place.
If you were born in 1880 and completed your education before Queen Victoria died you would only have read, later in life, in the newspapers about changes proposed by some scientists to this way of looking at the world but you won't have and couldn't have accepted those changes, deep down in your bones.
You were simply too old but unfortunately, not quite old enough:
you would have been 53 when Hitler came to power, 60 in 1940, 65 in 1945.
In whatever you did (as long as you were a professional class male) you would have been at the top of your profession (the boss) and would have run the world, along with other men roughly your same age and with roughly the same kind of scientific education, throughout World War Two and the ten year lead-up to it.
Quantum science was happening during the Modern Era but was not a part of it, in its day to day workings.
Newton still ruled all through the Modern Era.
Don't believe me?
Millions of parents and their kids believed in this view of ultimate Reality:
check out when the sales of Meccano sets,Erector kits,Tinkertoy and their ilk first became popular and when those sales suddenly died, and you can mark the timeline of Modernity at its peak and at its decline...
"Teachable" doesn't always mean "Realistic"
"Publication Bias" is a common problem in Science.
It can take many forms and is generated by many people : so the guilt can be nicely spread about.
Peer Review is such an honored precept in Science, it must come as a shock to many laypeople to learn that almost nobody likes a scientist who actually re-runs the protocol reported in one lab's published paper, to see it the results stand up in their own lab - the supposed point of peer review.
In fact, a paper that merely confirms the earlier results is not welcomed by journal editors, journal readers or your fellow scientists on things like tenure committees.
"Perhaps.... if you could confirm it with some new additional research... it might be acceptable."
But, on the other hand, if you are well known and the lead author of the original lab is also well known and you fail to confirm their results and even become so bold as to hint it because their hypothesis is all wrong to begin with, you will likely get published.
Because in Science as elsewhere in life, controversy sells newspapers - and journals.
Even worse is for a scientist to come up with a hypothesis and then cheerfully report that it didn't pan out - don't expect a rush of editors eager to publish you.
You might think Science would welcome your honesty - no point in issuing grant money and wasting six months of ten people's lives, merely to re-discover what you already found out - "the idea is going no where - at least in the form my lab put upon it."
This changing a bit when it comes to drug trial results.
If false, and allowed to stand, they could cause many to die.
Editors are even more wary these days if the study is funded by drug companies.
Now medical journals want all results (good ,bad or inconclusive) placed in a public database created the moment the project is started - even if only the highlights are published.
No more cherry picking the best results for your hypothesis.
'TEACHING FOR EXAMS' BIAS
Now a similar sort of bias emerges whenever scientists must teach students (or politicians/generals/executives).
The paymasters (parents, taxpayers, prime ministers) want definite simple answers - results, in other words --- not real world scientific caution.
Scientists want to eat.
So one can just imagine Newton cheerfuly telling these various paymasters in his day that "my new theory can predict the path of the nearby planets highly accurately."
Wow, they say.
No point in telling the paymasters that high accuracy with regard to the paths of planets is a totally unnecessary luxury - the planets are not about to sneak up on us and crash into Earth.
And also no sense in admitting that your new laws won't do much for calculating the paths of asteroids, which have in the past and will against someday, crash into us with terrible results.
(They are too many,too small, too dark and too easily affected by larger objects passing through, to be easily tamed by the level of technology we had for the effort in Newton's day - or even today.)
This sort of thinking results in students from junior high to undergraduate level only being thoroughly taught those parts of Reality that science has managed to tame/explain/predict in nice simple clearcut patterns.
Useless it may be to predict the paths of planets, but Science can do it and so science teachers will teach it and expect students to replicate it.
Predict the weather can't be done reliably and so it its rushed through, ignored, push aside.
Teachers always claim - but I don't believe them - that they only teach experiments that work because it is too hard to evaluate results from students working on experiments that we know will produce inconclusive ,rather than clearcut, results.
The pattern proceeds over hundreds of fronts over dozens of years - the average middle class person with a degree is subtly indoctrinated in the the idea that Science has ,or is soon about to, discover and explain just about everything.
In others words, they become imbibed with the tenets of Modernity from schoolteachers who would otherwise claim they couldn't ID Modernity in a lineup of cons.
But when that callow young science undergraduate is placed in the gunnery room of some World War II battleship (for whatever navy) during a real exchange of broadsides, he is likely to realize, far far too late, that Newton and Science never did solve the multi-body mechanics equations that govern most of the real world.
Imagine trying to fire a one ton shell at a 40,000 ton ship, a fifth of a mile long, that is twenty miles away in the dark, zigzagging through rough seas at 20 knots- and randomly pitching up and down as well as deliberately zigzagging from side to side.
Your ship is doing all this as well - trying just to avoid being hit.
Your only job is to aim that shell so when it arrives a minute or two later, it hits the other ship - and hits in a place where the armour isn't too thick .
The waves can't push the ship about so that its sides are too sharply angled at the moment of impact so the shell slides off it harmlessly - nor can the ship be so low in the water because of wave action that your shell sails harmlessly through the ship's crowsnest.
But you have no idea of what the wave action is twenty miles away and two minutes into the future.
You are too busy discovering that each shell is polished slightly differently and each propellant bag load has slightly different energy output.
The big gun barrel fires slightly different as it warms up and wears out gradually.
The rangefinder gives different results in cold versus hot weather as metal expands or contacts.
Each shell will have a different path as a result of all these variables.
And don't get me started on the effects on the shell's path caused by the varying wind and air temperature over a path through the atmosphere twenty miles long.
On and on and on it goes.
The highest tech aspect of World War Two was not the bombsights in bombers, code-breaking, nuclear fission - it was in the range-finding units of big battleships.
Despite all this scientific effort, training of crew, expensive state of the art computers, a ship's safest course when it came under fire was to deliberately steer towards the last shell splash - so inaccurate was long range gunnery, it was a given no shell fell in the same place twice, even when that was the gun crew's intention !
Day to day Newtonian/slide rule mechanics, the science that most people are still comfortably with, gives approximately accurate results under favourable conditions.
This comes as no surprise to scientists as experimenters , but as teachers, they lulled generations of citizens into thinking science could work as well with real world problems as it appeared to do in the undergraduate lab.
Science sang for its supper - and sang a false tune.
So be very suspicious of any school course where you come out of it 'knowing more' than you did coming in - for a good instructor teaches you humility, not hubris...
It can take many forms and is generated by many people : so the guilt can be nicely spread about.
Peer Review is such an honored precept in Science, it must come as a shock to many laypeople to learn that almost nobody likes a scientist who actually re-runs the protocol reported in one lab's published paper, to see it the results stand up in their own lab - the supposed point of peer review.
In fact, a paper that merely confirms the earlier results is not welcomed by journal editors, journal readers or your fellow scientists on things like tenure committees.
"Perhaps.... if you could confirm it with some new additional research... it might be acceptable."
But, on the other hand, if you are well known and the lead author of the original lab is also well known and you fail to confirm their results and even become so bold as to hint it because their hypothesis is all wrong to begin with, you will likely get published.
Because in Science as elsewhere in life, controversy sells newspapers - and journals.
Even worse is for a scientist to come up with a hypothesis and then cheerfully report that it didn't pan out - don't expect a rush of editors eager to publish you.
You might think Science would welcome your honesty - no point in issuing grant money and wasting six months of ten people's lives, merely to re-discover what you already found out - "the idea is going no where - at least in the form my lab put upon it."
This changing a bit when it comes to drug trial results.
If false, and allowed to stand, they could cause many to die.
Editors are even more wary these days if the study is funded by drug companies.
Now medical journals want all results (good ,bad or inconclusive) placed in a public database created the moment the project is started - even if only the highlights are published.
No more cherry picking the best results for your hypothesis.
'TEACHING FOR EXAMS' BIAS
Now a similar sort of bias emerges whenever scientists must teach students (or politicians/generals/executives).
The paymasters (parents, taxpayers, prime ministers) want definite simple answers - results, in other words --- not real world scientific caution.
Scientists want to eat.
So one can just imagine Newton cheerfuly telling these various paymasters in his day that "my new theory can predict the path of the nearby planets highly accurately."
Wow, they say.
No point in telling the paymasters that high accuracy with regard to the paths of planets is a totally unnecessary luxury - the planets are not about to sneak up on us and crash into Earth.
And also no sense in admitting that your new laws won't do much for calculating the paths of asteroids, which have in the past and will against someday, crash into us with terrible results.
(They are too many,too small, too dark and too easily affected by larger objects passing through, to be easily tamed by the level of technology we had for the effort in Newton's day - or even today.)
This sort of thinking results in students from junior high to undergraduate level only being thoroughly taught those parts of Reality that science has managed to tame/explain/predict in nice simple clearcut patterns.
Useless it may be to predict the paths of planets, but Science can do it and so science teachers will teach it and expect students to replicate it.
Predict the weather can't be done reliably and so it its rushed through, ignored, push aside.
Teachers always claim - but I don't believe them - that they only teach experiments that work because it is too hard to evaluate results from students working on experiments that we know will produce inconclusive ,rather than clearcut, results.
The pattern proceeds over hundreds of fronts over dozens of years - the average middle class person with a degree is subtly indoctrinated in the the idea that Science has ,or is soon about to, discover and explain just about everything.
In others words, they become imbibed with the tenets of Modernity from schoolteachers who would otherwise claim they couldn't ID Modernity in a lineup of cons.
But when that callow young science undergraduate is placed in the gunnery room of some World War II battleship (for whatever navy) during a real exchange of broadsides, he is likely to realize, far far too late, that Newton and Science never did solve the multi-body mechanics equations that govern most of the real world.
Imagine trying to fire a one ton shell at a 40,000 ton ship, a fifth of a mile long, that is twenty miles away in the dark, zigzagging through rough seas at 20 knots- and randomly pitching up and down as well as deliberately zigzagging from side to side.
Your ship is doing all this as well - trying just to avoid being hit.
Your only job is to aim that shell so when it arrives a minute or two later, it hits the other ship - and hits in a place where the armour isn't too thick .
The waves can't push the ship about so that its sides are too sharply angled at the moment of impact so the shell slides off it harmlessly - nor can the ship be so low in the water because of wave action that your shell sails harmlessly through the ship's crowsnest.
But you have no idea of what the wave action is twenty miles away and two minutes into the future.
You are too busy discovering that each shell is polished slightly differently and each propellant bag load has slightly different energy output.
The big gun barrel fires slightly different as it warms up and wears out gradually.
The rangefinder gives different results in cold versus hot weather as metal expands or contacts.
Each shell will have a different path as a result of all these variables.
And don't get me started on the effects on the shell's path caused by the varying wind and air temperature over a path through the atmosphere twenty miles long.
On and on and on it goes.
The highest tech aspect of World War Two was not the bombsights in bombers, code-breaking, nuclear fission - it was in the range-finding units of big battleships.
Despite all this scientific effort, training of crew, expensive state of the art computers, a ship's safest course when it came under fire was to deliberately steer towards the last shell splash - so inaccurate was long range gunnery, it was a given no shell fell in the same place twice, even when that was the gun crew's intention !
Day to day Newtonian/slide rule mechanics, the science that most people are still comfortably with, gives approximately accurate results under favourable conditions.
This comes as no surprise to scientists as experimenters , but as teachers, they lulled generations of citizens into thinking science could work as well with real world problems as it appeared to do in the undergraduate lab.
Science sang for its supper - and sang a false tune.
So be very suspicious of any school course where you come out of it 'knowing more' than you did coming in - for a good instructor teaches you humility, not hubris...
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