Two-ness

Image via WikipediaDear Readers,

   Time has been unkind to me lately, and so it is that I come back to you after nearly a month's hiatus.  Perhaps Time will be kinder in the future.  Perhaps you could write him a letter?  Sadly, I have lost the address.

   I've come to you today to discuss the idea of duality, aka "two-ness," in historical narrative.  In literature, there are a lot of manners of conflict that can bleed into narrative and provide something dramatic to latch upon.

   Take, for example, the your contemporaneous reinterpretation of Swan Lake depicted within the film Black Swan.  The major antagonist in Swan Lake is not a black swan!  The actuality of Swan Lake is much more complicated than that, but the film uses the construct of the Black Swan that is traditional in the ballet to approach the ideas of two-ness.  This duality and confusion of characters is the theme that the film seizes upon, and it might seem strange.

  In reality, though, humans seize on this kind of duality everywhere.  Consider the current turmoil in Egypt.  For the past three decades, Hosni Mubarak has maintained international support via a grip on Egypt maintained via the impression that there is a far worse antagonist to his power.  I speak of the much-maligned Muslim Brotherhood, the spectre of your international relations that no doubt has throngs of supporters ready to seize power and take over Egypt.  Correct?

  No.  They have 100,000 supporters in a country of 80 million.  Yet the human mind seeks duality, and seizes upon these narratives as if they are fact.  They play upon our fears and they lead us to identify with the apparently embattled.

   And in some cases, they provide an excuse for our behavior.  There are those who believe the world is against them because they struggle in so many ways, and who look to all corners to find their hidden antagonist.  They are trained to this, or perhaps predisposed to this.  I cannot be sure.

  The fact remains, however, that we like to view things as dichotomous, whether or not this construct is false.  Two-ness is in some ways a plague on our understanding of events, and it confuses the realities of a situation, at times.  Often, competing forces are better described as an equilibrium, a whole system in balance.  Alternately, sometimes the "opposition" that we add to something, for example the idea of "cold" being an antagonist of "hot," is in reality the mere absence of something.  In this case, energy.

  Sometimes this can be dangerous.  Did the Soviet Union fail because of the United States, or because of its own inherent flaws?  It seems that throughout the Cold War, the USSR struggled against itself from within just as it appeared to antagonize from without.  And yet, this was viewed as a US-mediated collapse.

   Did Rome fall to barbarian hordes?  Of course not.  Rome fell to economic drift and the gradual loss of standards throughout the empire.  The so-called "hordes" just looted a corpse.

  I can find you alternate time streams where these things are even more clear; instead of barbarians, it's Rome's own aristocracy that tears it apart, in one.  In another, the Russian people cut off communication throughout the USSR, and the Party is left marginalized and irrelevant.  In yet more, Hitler's paranoia causes him to win the wrath of the Wermacht, and his name is barely known.

  Don't be fooled by the false dichotomy.  Sometimes, the enemy from within, for better or worse, is the realer threat.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople

A Short Reminder

Dear Readers,

 My link to your world has been, as you no doubt have noticed, somewhat tenuous over the past two months.  Academics are always a little inconsistent, are we not?  I was attempting to finish a paper in time for the deadline of the journal Annals of Curiosity's Araḫ Samna 2011 BCE issue.

  At any rate, I'll remind you that my time-normal counterpart (a 'past' me, of sorts) maintains a blog over at johnskylar.tumblr.com, should you be unable to overcome your desire to hear from me.  I find the idea of that unlikely.

   I shall endeavor to return to regular posting soon.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople

Friday Seminar Series: Why I Teach

Image via WikipediaDear Readers,

   Teaching is important.
 

   It is so important, in fact, that I have given it its own line.  My need to say it was inspired by a time-normal blog post that came through the Augur Box this morning.  University teaching in your time stream, it seems, is a big problem.


   One of the great problems that I hear cited is the emphasis on research, grant money, and tenure.  These three things push professors in your time stream away from research and into working without their students.  In some ways, it forces them to be grant-writing drones who focus solely on the work their graduate students have done.

   Not so at the University of Constantinople, and not because we don't have to worry about tenure and our research.  We are focused on teaching because teaching leads to inspiration.

   Learning requires rehearsal, understanding, and questioning.  These are also things that are key to research, but in a way that requires far less awareness.  Though it is possible to do so, we cannot just scurry about moving through the motions of research without paying attention to the information that we're getting from it.  Research is a long crush that throws loads and loads of information into the human attic, the upper levels of the brain that we are so cruddy at accessing.

   Many researchers feel that it's a pain to communicate, to crack open that attic, wander up there, and start sorting things out.  It might mean digging through old love letters and prom dresses, rusty armor and rustier neurons, but it must be done.

  A professor must profess, it is not simply enough to investigate.

  Of course, one must ask, why do I say "must"?  Perhaps it's good for humanity, perhaps it will help others advance their science.  Perhaps, in the case of a class, it will help students learn.

  Those altruistic things are nice, but we all need our selfish reasons too.

   So what is the selfish reason to teach?  It's simple.  You clear off the cobwebs.  Each lecture, each moment spent in preparation, and most importantly each instant you are talking to your students is full of reassessment, rethinking, and processing.  Processing is that "rehearsal, understanding," etc. thing I referred to above.  Without it, we do not know where we came from, and if we do not know where we came from, we do not know which questions to ask.

  Research is about questions.  Teaching makes you think of questions.  It allows your students to think of questions.  It presents you with questions to ask and questions to answer, in these routes.

  It should be clear by now that there's no excuse for not teaching.  It makes me a better researcher, I know that.  If you're a professor, it will make you a better researcher.  If you are a student, even, it will make you better.  Teach your peers, and furthermore, teach them to teach others.  You can change the distressing trend to under-teach by injecting teaching into the social network of your Universities.

  And when you encounter a professor who doesn't do his homework, don't whinge and moan.  Don't complain on forms and wait for the University to make it all better.  Go to his or her office hours and badger that professor with questions until they themselves get curious, get out into the literature, and start searching.  When they start searching because of you, you haven't just noticed a bad teacher: you've made them a better one!

  Always,

   Dr. John Skylar
   Chairman
   Department of Anachronism
   University of Constantinople

Particles are Two-Faced Liars, the Lot of Them

Image via Wikipedia
Dear Readers,
   I admit, I've been on kind of a quantum time kick lately.  I like time, I like quantum mechanics.  Sometimes.

   Sometimes I like cheap puns too, so I hope you can look past that.

   There is rather a serious issue about the interaction of quantum mechanics and time, though.  In my post about WD-36, I talked about the idea of "spooky action at a distance" taking place within a time dimension.  Aka, the future affecting the past via quantum science.

  If you start adding length, width, and depth into the mix you get some damned strange ideas.  Things from one part of our four dimensional space (one's a time dimension, so don't get too bent out of shape, ladies and gents) can pop into other parts of it with some kind of probability.  Bit wacky, but it presents the idea that there's no reality of time, just a continuity of it with particles buzzing about every which way while we try and think that our actions are somehow happening in a straight line.

  It's sort of like the straight line where you're going to the store to buy milk, but you forget your keys and you have to go back down the line to the keys, which were perfectly content to stay where they were.  I'm sure from the keys' perspective, getting picked up and taken about is rather surprising.

   Now imagine, for a minute, that you've gone and done something rather silly, like say, starting in a faculty position at a University that happens to run parallel to every other time ever.  Suddenly you've got all kinds of particles that are buzzing through your brain, entangled partners to the particles in all the brains you've ever had in all the lives you've ever lived in all the places you've ever lived them.  Half the particles tell the truth about where they came from, half don't.  Your brain is half your evil twin, half a nest of vile wasps, and there's a couple more halves in there that I can't even think of.  It's the best high you've ever had with the worst downer stuck on the side, and a whole lot of trivia.



   Some days, that idiotic decision makes you into a brilliant researcher, fighter, leader, whatever, amongst a whole host of other people who are resurrected renaissance men and women by virtue of the grand quantum composite personality they get to have.

   Other days, it gives you one hell of a headache, leaves you confused, and you forget your keys in every house you ever owned.
  I need a pint.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople

The Night Faculty: WD-36

Image via Wikipedia
Dear Readers,
  You might have heard of WD-40, a "water-removing" chemical with hundreds of strange household uses.  It means "water displacement - 40th attempt."
 
    In your time stream, attempts 1-39 failed.  In many, however, there were unintended products of the Rocket Chemical Company's research into water displacement.
  One of our Night Faculty is the product of just such an attempt.  We call it Woody, though its proper name is WD-36.
   WD-36 is a literal sponge.  It can absorb almost anything, and devour it in its entirety.  When it does this with information storage media, it can almost internalize the information.  WD-36 was a most efficient graduate student.  It's also, as you might imagine, quite formidable in combat.
  Unfortunately, WD-36 also has a rather volatile freezing/melting point.  It needs to be somewhat solid in order to function, and the daytime temperature at the University is just slightly too high for it to maintain coherence.  Therefore, we had to place WD-36 on the Night Faculty.

  Now, WD-36 may sound something like a B-movie villain to you.  Fiction is often inadvertently inspired by something like what your time stream's Albert Einstein used to call "spooky action at a distance."  The existence of an all-devouring monster that resulted from industrial accident in one time stream leads to thought patterns in the people who react to that monster.  We can use augury to read those thought patterns, but the human brain itself can pick up on that.  People in other time streams can learn about what's going on, whether they mean to or not.  And then, they can make horror movies.
   So next time you're watching something scary, consider that somewhere, somewhen, somehow, that thing is happening.  And if it ever gets the chance to break down the barriers between worlds, you might just find it's coming to eat you.
   Then you'll have to turn to a friendly professor who's been watching all along, a friendly professor who knows how to frighten the monster.  And I and my Night Faculty will be here for you.
   Happy Hallowe'en.
   Always,
   John Skylar
   Chairman
   Department of Anachronism
   University of Constantinople