Is nothing constant?

Themes: Enjoyable Reading

Have you heard of the ‘fine-tuning constant’?
It’s the thing that makes suns possible…

It characterises the strength of the force between electrically charged particles. As such, it governs—among other things—the energy levels of an atom formed from negatively charged electrons and a positive nucleus.

If it were a mere 4% bigger or smaller than it is, stars would not be able to sustain the nuclear reactions that synthesise carbon and oxygen. One consequence would be that squishy, carbon-based life would not exist.

“Suspiciously convenient?” I hear you think. (yes, I can hear you think…)
Well, you wouldn’t be the first, Very Respectable Christian Scientists have pointed to the fine-tuning constant as evidence for an intelligent designer. But now, Other Scientists, who also happen to be working in Australia, aren’t sure that the fine-tuning constant is really all that constant.

Good grief! We can’t even rely on the laws of physics anymore. It was bad enough when Pluto stopped being a planet. A body could be excused for laying abed of the morning paralysed with anxiety about the future (except that we can’t even rely on the coupling constant to stop us spinning off into space).

What will keep us together?
Where will we find our constancy?

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Hair

Themes: Enjoyable Reading

Seated at the mirror a woman puts herself in the hands of the hairdresser; very often a male. It is an occasion, almost ceremonial; it is concentrated, partly sombre. The woman is robed. Hair is the only changeable part of the face. And it is hair that frames – and makes distinctive – the various concepts of feminine beauty. Shorn of hair a woman is reduced to essentials: hence, the all-to-appropriate symbolism of a woman having her head shorn before being paraded for sleeping with the enemy.

At the hairdresser a woman sees herself in the mirror at different stages of exposure. Behind her, at each stage, remains the hairdresser: First, the woman is washed and rinsed back to plainness; it is what she all along suspected. From there she follows with a critical-hopeful eye her transformation. The hairdresser becomes accustomed to tears. Even when the woman is satisfied with the result, she is also dissatisfied knowing her new appearance has been acquired, based as it is on illusion, an artful adjustment in the cutting, or an expansion in mid-air, as it were. Every woman has a firm opinion on the hair of others. Hair is power. In history as certain women gain in ascendency, so too their hairdressers.
Murray Bail, Eucalyptus, 168

Admittedly, I have a fairly elastic definition of ‘Top 5′ when it comes to including books in my ‘Top 5 of All Time’, however, Eucalyptus unquestionably belongs. Even just typing out the quote above has made me fall in love with it all over again. I think I have a man-crush on Murray Bail…
Look at those sentence, look at that punctuation!
Glorious.
There are so many hard surfaces, it is though the air was writing what it is like to be lived in. Everything is from no particular point. And yet it is the most intimate book I’ve read in forever. It is the country I grew up in, I can see the town, the people, smell the dirt. He has loved the land into a book. Eucalyptus feels like a conversation between two old men. Not endlessly self-referential, that would be an old woman’s book, outward looking but in a half private language built out of shared memories and experience.

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Real Velvet and The Turkey

Themes: Enjoyable Reading

We were walking home from dinner with some friends last night and somehow got distracted by Elizabeth’s Bookshop on Pitt St. That place never seems to close. Right out the front they were selling some cheap second-hand copies of The Velveteen Rabbit – a very special little children’s story. There is a passage in the book – a discussion between Rabbit and Skin Horse over the nature of reality – which is a priceless gem of philosophical ontology.
All our best thinking happens in stories.
Sadly, The Velveteen Rabbit is also a particular favourite of Self-Help Gurus trying to give their readers a little feel-good buzz so that the spoonful of pure, distilled, twollop will go down easier. I was googling The Velveteen Rabbit this morning and came across Jeff’s Life Coach Blog. Jeff helpfully outlines 12 principles for Being Real, which are an enumerated demonstration of complete failure to understand the story, followed by this from the conclusion

“The story of the Velveteen Rabbit is a terrific example of why we should all live an authentic life, based on our own self worth.”

Good grief.
No, Jeff. The Rabbit became REAL because the Boy loved him, not because of his own self-worth. What made the Rabbit real was the relationship of grace in which he was placed through no activity or value of his own. He was loved. That’s the only kind of REAL that lasts for always.

I refuse to link to Jeff’s Blog because he is a turkey.

For your reading pleasure, here’s the famous excerpt from the Velveteen Rabbit:

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
“I suppose you are real?” said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.
“The Boy’s Uncle made me Real,” he said. “That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”

photo by aphasiafilms

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The other Plumber

Themes: Enjoyable Reading

Max the Plumber – Stanley Fish Blog – NYTimes.com

I do like Stanley Fish. He writes here about his father Max.

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