Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Descartes

The Life and Times of a Genius

One of my favourite biographies is a life of Pepys by Claire Tomalin. Pepys lived in the 17th century and was a child during the English Civil War, of which Tomalin said something quite remarkable: the intellectual revolution accompanying it was so profound that it is difficult to understand how people thought before it occurred.

That remark was much in my mind as I read this new biography of Descartes, who also lived in the 17th century. It was a time when religion and science were closely linked, and science itself based upon the discoveries of the ancient Greeks, filtered through centuries of Scholastic thought.

People believed the sun revolved around the earth, and that angels, humans, and animals were linked in a “great chain of being.” There were four elements in the universe (earth, air, fire, and water), and four humours in the body (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile), the balancing of which was necessary to maintain good health. Vying with this traditional approach to knowledge was “a heady mixture of notions, beliefs and practices from cabalistic, occult, astrological, alchemical, hermetic and magical sources.”

Into this array of the hidebound and the bizarre stepped Descartes, whose great contribution to science was the assumption that "the natural world can be examined and understood as a system of matter in motion obeying natural laws, without the need for any invocation of supernatural forces or agencies."

He proposed to do this by jettisoning the past and starting anew, basing all science on what could be known for certain – hence his starting point, Cogito ergo sum. He promulgated this approach in his famous Discourse on Method, and applied it in his own investigation of the natural world, which included the grinding of his own lenses and the dissection of cadavers.

His Life

Descartes lived a rather adventurous life for an intellectual barely five feet tall. He spent several years wandering about the continent when it was embroiled in the Thirty Years War (1614-1648), which began as a religious conflict and devastated central Europe. He was, for a period, a mercenary, first joining the Protestant army of the Prince of Orange, and then the Catholic army of Maximilian of Bavaria. He was with the latter at the Battle of the White Mountain (near Prague) where the Protestant forces of Frederick of the Palatinate were routed. [Other sources have also placed him at the infamous siege of La Rochelle, where Cardinal Richelieu starved to death 20,000 Huguenots.]

The author of this bio, A.C. Grayling, has an interesting theory for why Descartes so often turned up in contentious areas in Europe. He may have been a Jesuit intelligence agent. Descartes was educated by Jesuits, who in turn encouraged the Habsburg rulers of the Holy Roman Empire to reclaim Catholic territories lost to Protestant forces during the Reformation.

If true, it may explain why Descartes spent the remaining portion of his life in the Protestant Netherlands. His pro-Habsburg Jesuit interests would not have endeared him to France, which had reasons of its own for opposing Habsburg ambitions. The need for caution was further underlined when in 1633 Galileo was tried for heresy by the Inquisition, and required to remain under house arrest for the remainder of his life. Descartes immediately abandoned plans to publish his masterwork, Le Monde, and changed residences frequently.

Whether or not Descartes was a spy, it was a good time to be in the Netherlands, which was not only wealthy and tolerant, but also enjoying the Dutch Golden Age. Descartes wrote all of his major works there, and shared with Rembrandt the patronage of Christiaan Huygens's father. It was there he met Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, with whom he struck up a close intellectual relationship.

When he finally did venture back to France, he supped with Thomas Hobbes and met Blaise Pascal, who showed him the calculating machine he had made (“the first ever computer, based on the technology of knitting machines”). Improbably his life came to an end in Sweden, where he was enticed by Queen Christina to serve as her personal tutor.

Grayling points out several ironies here. Princess Elizabeth was the daughter of Frederick, the Elector Palatine, whom Descartes helped to overthrow at the Battle of the White Mountain. Christina of Sweden was her cousin, and daughter of the great Gustavus Adolphus, who brought Sweden into the Thirty Years War on the Protestant side. Christina was instrumental in ending the war, and after Descartes died she abdicated and converted to Catholicism.

His Legacy

Many of Descartes’s scientific notions were wrong. Indeed, some of them sound as unlikely as other crackpot ideas of the time. He believed that the pineal gland was the seat of the soul, that the motion of the planets is explained by vortices in a universal fluid, and that vision results from "pressure on the eye" by that fluid.

Despite these missteps, Descartes is today considered the “Father of Modern Philosophy.” Among other achievements he discovered the law of refraction and created analytic geometry, which is taught in high schools today. His Discourse on Method is one of the seminal texts of the modern world. After four centuries the book is still in print and taught in universities around the world.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

King of Russia

A Year in the Russian Super League

Dave King coached Canada’s national team for nine years, followed by stints with Calgary, Columbus and Montreal in the NHL. Later while coaching in Europe he was courted by Metallurg Magnitogorsk of the Russian Super League, which includes such fabled teams as Central Red Army and Moscow Dynamo.

In taking the job King became the first Canadian to coach in the league, and led Metallurg to their most successful season ever. They finished first overall with only five regular season losses in 51 games. They also won the Spengler Cup, a five-team mid-season tournament played in Davos, Switzerland. However, they fared less well in the league playoffs. They were hit with a lot of injuries and went out in the semi-finals, losing 3 games to 1, all their losses being in overtime.

Nineteen-year-old Evgeny Malkin was the star of the team, and King has a lot of good things to say about him. When the team played in Finland for the Tampere Cup, Malkin did “such dazzling things with the puck that the fans just stood up and applauded.” But it’s not just his natural skills that make him a great player. “Sometimes Russian players can be extremely dour. Malkin smiles all the time. He seems to enjoy practice. He loves to compete. He plays the game with tempo. He’s unselfish.” Eric Lindros played for King as a nineteen-year-old, and King ranks Malkin ahead of Lindros at that age.

At the start of the season King thinks the team needs more grit, and convinces the management to bring in a couple of warhorses, ex-Leafs Dmitri Yushkevich and Igor Korolev. It was a smart move, as both players made major contributions to the team. King is particularly complimentary about Yushkevich, who with a bad knee is “as close to a one-legged player as you can get.” His great heart makes up for this deficiency. During one game he's hit in the face with a puck. King says:


I didn’t think I’d see him for a while, but the next day, who’s there at practice? It’s Yushkevich -– and he looked like hell. If little kids on the street had seen him they would have run the other way. He looked like a character in a horror movie, with all those scars of his and now his face all lopsided.


Likewise Korolev. In the playoffs he’s cut by a skate and receives 23 stitches. “It was so bad that our doctor was practically throwing up.” Korolev refuses to stay out of the game and comes back “with a great big patch over his eye, blood all over his sweater and his face.”

Observations about Russian Hockey


Before the season begins a Russian Orthodox priest enters the dressing room and sprinkles the players with holy water.

Not only must teams travel vast distances for league play, but Metallurg's pre-season training took place in the Swiss Alps, and included an exhibition tournament in Finland, while mid-season dry-land training was located in Dubai.

For top-level players the Russian Super League is as lucrative as the NHL. Yet on some teams players went unpaid for months.

The amount of physical training is phenomenal. King says:


I’m no doctor, but we don’t have nearly as many groin strains here [as in the NHL] and I’m wondering if that has something to do with the tremendous strength the Russian players develop in their quadriceps... To a man, the leg strength of a Russian player will amaze you. The quadriceps muscles, which deliver so much power to the stride, are huge on virtually every one of them. Right from the time they turn eight or nine years old, they do an immense amount of work to build up their leg strength.


Also the whole approach to coaching is different:


The players rarely complain or give you any emotional reaction... I blame it on the fact that, starting at young age, coaches confront players one-on-one on the bench, in the dressing-room, or on the ice, scolding them harshly for mistakes. They rarely do it privately, so in order to cope the players simply don’t react. They absorb the comments and show their strength to their teammates by wearing a blank expression. I’ve seen grown men coaching young ten- or eleven-year-olds go nose-to-nose with a youngster, ranting and raving almost incoherently -– and the young player simply takes the medicine...


King decided to stay for the 2006-2007 season, but many of his top players had moved on, including Yushkevich and Malkin, who is now with the Pittsburgh Penguins. After just eight games King was fired. His record was 3-4-1.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Anti-Matter Cookies

Whenever my home is invaded by hungry space mutants, I'm ready at the door with a plate of freshly baked quantum snacks. Otherwise they'd start disintegrating the furniture! How do I manage it? Here's what to do.

1. As soon as the little darlings arrive, lock yourself into the kitchen, gather together any radioactive scraps you have on hand, and collide them in a blender until you've produced one cupful of assorted glueballs, semi-sweet quarks, and weak-vector bosons. Add nine cups of dark matter and half-a-teaspoon of Big Bang baking soda.


2. Mix all the ingredients together, form into vibrating strings, and place on a cookie sheet. Set your microwave at 10(12)K and cook for a fraction of a second, then let cool for 10-20 thousand million years.


3. Next, using N-dimensional space, loop back in time so you are waiting at the door with cookies in hand. When the kiddies show up -- their noses runny, their pockets bulging with wormholes and strange attractors -- you'll be rewarded by shrieks of delight.


4. Once the little tykes have gorged themselves, you can send them waddling back out into phase space where they can happily wreck the cosmos and rebuild it as many times as they want before bedtime.

Fatal Passage

The Untold Story of John Rae, the Arctic Adventurer Who Discovered the Fate of Franklin

Author Ken McGoogan claims that John Rae solved the two most celebrated Arctic mysteries of the 19th century – the fate of Franklin and the discovery of the Northwest Passage. Yet he was deprived of those distinctions by the conniving of Lady Franklin and the short-sightedness of historians.

Rae was awarded the prize for being the first to bring back news of the Franklin expedition’s fate, yet historians have generally credited Leopold McClintock with that discovery. They also have agreed that Franklin and his men found the Northwest Passage -– “forging the last link with their lives,” as Franklin’s old friend and travelling companion, Sir John Richardson, put it. The problem is, that passage is not navigable. It was Rae who discovered that King William Land is not joined to Boothia Peninsula. The strait that separates them, and which now bears his name, was used by the first ships to navigate the Northwest Passage, Roald Amundsen’s Gjoa, and the RCMP's St. Roch.

Rae was, says McGoogan, “a post-colonial figure in a colonial age,” a person that we in the 21st century find more palatable than Franklin and his ilk. Not only was Rae endowed with almost superhuman endurance (he once snowshoed 75 miles in a single day), but he favoured living off the land, and employed native clothing and survival techniques. This was in direct opposition to the methods employed by the British Admiralty, which sent out expensive unwieldy expeditions, and frowned upon “going native.” Furthermore, Rae was a superb hunter who supplied the majority of the meat for his men on all his expeditions. He also esteemed the native men he travelled with, and defended them against English prejudice, as typified by Charles Dickens, who savaged the Inuit in Household Words.

Fatal Passage also upsets another cherished apple cart in portraying Lady Franklin as spiteful and manipulative. She “orchestrated the beatification of her dead husband,” which McGoogan terms an “historic fraud." He is the first, I believe, to describe Lady Franklin in such unflattering terms. Before then she had been portrayed as a saintly figure -- a model of wifely devotion, indomitable in her crusade to coerce the British Admiralty in not abandoning the search for Franklin.

Fatal Passage, then, is an ably written and well researched page-turner about a remarkable man. My only complaint is the Epilogue, in which the author inserts himself into the story by describing his own voyage to Boothia Peninsula to place a plaque in honour of John Rae. Rudy Wiebe did something similar in his Franklin-inspired novel, A Discovery of Strangers, when in the Acknowledgments he described building a cairn to house a record of his own canoe trip in the NWT.

While I find such actions self-aggrandizing, they do attest to the never-waning appeal of the Franklin mythos. Today, 150 years after Franklin disappeared, people are still looking for him. New books appear every year about Franklin or some of his buddies. Here are a representative few that have appeared since the turn of the century.

2000 - Ice Blink: The Tragic Fate of Sir John Franklin’s Lost Polar Expedition by Scott Cookson (botulism blamed for the expedition's failure)

2001 - The Franklin Conspiracy: Coverup, Betrayal, and the Astonishing Secret Behind the Lost Arctic Expedition by Jeffrey Blair Latta (weird history)

2002 - Deadly Winter: The Life of Sir John Franklin by Martyn Beardsley (biography)

2003 - Franklin’s Passage by David Solway (poetry)

2004 - The Arctic Fox: Francis Leopold McClintock, Discoverer of the Fate of Franklin by David Murphy (biography)

2005 - Lady Franklin’s Revenge: A True Story of Ambition, Obsession and the Remaking of Arctic History by Ken McGoogan (biography)

2006 - Captain Francis Crozier: Last Man Standing? by Michael Smith (biography)

2007 - The Terror by Dan Simmons (horror)

2008 - Tracing the Connected Narrative: Arctic Exploration in British Print Culture, 1818-1860 by Janice Cavell (history)

Rae's Arctic Journeys

1846-47 – Rae and 10 men left York Factory and travelled by boat to Repulse Bay, then explored the base of the Gulf of Boothia from Fury and Hecla Strait to the east shore of Boothia Peninsula. Unknown to anyone at the time, Franklin’s ships were beset on the other side of Boothia.

1848 – Rae and Richardson formed one of the search parties sent out to search for Franklin. They travelled down the Mackenzie River, then east along the Arctic coast to the Coppermine River, and wintered at Fort Confidence on Great Bear Lake. Rae spent 1849 in Fort Simpson, then returned to Fort Confidence in 1850 in preparation for another search for Franklin.

1851 – Rae left Fort Confidence and travelled the southern expanse of Victoria Island, and the bottom of Coronation Gulf as far as the Kent Peninsula. On the east shore of Victoria, he found a few pieces of wood that likely came from Franklin’s ships. Once again he was maddeningly close to Franklin. Three times he attempted to cross Victoria Strait to King William Island, but was prevented by the same ice jam that had beset Franklin’s ships.

1853-54 – Rae retraced much of his first expedition on behalf of the HBC, in an attempt to discover the final link in the Northwest Passage. This time he travelled to the west side of Boothia Peninsula, meeting Inuit from whom he purchased artifacts belonging to Franklin and his men, and recording stories about their demise.

Websites: Ken McGoogan, The Fate of Franklin

Monday, January 7, 2008

Masters of Atlantis

This is a comic novel about some loopy characters who create a secret society based upon a document obtained from a con man. In a typical passage, a chap named Golescu (his name supposedly means "not many camels") demonstrates his skills:


See, not only is Golescu writing with both hands but he is also looking at you and conversing with you at the same time in a most natural way. Hello, good morning, how are you? Good morning, Captain, how are you today, very fine, thank you.

And here is Golescu still writing and at the same time having his joke on the telephone. Hello, yes, good morning, this is the Naval Observatory but no, I am very sorry, I do not know the time. Nine-thirty, ten, who knows? Good morning, that is a beautiful dog, sir, can I know his name, please?



My only reservation is that the characters are so completely batty that after a while they seem no more real than a Saturday morning cartoon. More moments like the one in which a member of the Gnomon Society is grilled by a Senate Committee, and appears more level-headed than his questioners, could have lifted the book to the level of greatness.

Another snippet:


"Tell me, how is Mr. Bates?"
"He's in a nursing home."
"You're not serious."
"His back was hurting and so they pulled all his teeth."
"Doing fairly well now?"
"His back still hurts. He can't eat anything."
"But coming around nicely? Getting proper care?"
"They don't turn him over often enough."
"He's bedfast?"
"Not exactly."
"Gets up every day and puts on his clothes?"
"Not altogether, no. Not every day."
"Off his feed, you say."
"No, he stays hungry. He just can't chew anything."
"But his color's good?"
"Not real good."
"But otherwise fit? Has all his faculties? Takes an interest in community affairs?"
"Not much, no."



Will I read more Charles Portis? Absolutely.