Horatius at the Bridge in the Movie Darkest Hour

In the movie "Darkest Hour", Winston Churchill is depicted as reciting a part of the poem "Horatius at the Bridge", by Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay.  Here are the lines quoted in the movie (stanzas 217 to 224):

Then out spake brave Horatius,   
  The Captain of the gate:   
“To every man upon this earth   
  Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better   
  Than facing fearful odds   
For the ashes of his fathers   
  And the temples of his gods,

This is the spirit of heroism.

Robert

Science Fiction: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

I read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein when I was in middle-school or high school.  It won the Hugo Award for best science fiction novel in 1967.  I remembered it fondly so I decided to read it this summer.   It was a good story, well paced with good action.  What many people dislike about the book is the pidgin English used by the narrator, Manuel Garcia "Mannie" O'Kelly-Davis, a computer technician. 

Emergent Behavior
What is very timely about the book is the master computer for the lunar colony becoming sentient, self-aware.  The idea is that there were so many interconnected circuits that the massive main-frame computer became alive and conversed with the computer technician, who named it Mike.  This book came out in 1966, but emergent behavior, spontaneous order, and self-organization are contemporary topics.   The idea of computer networks becoming self-aware also appears in the works of Orson Scott Card as the character Jane, who emerged as a sentient creature from a vast communications network.  Complex communications systems today are all linked to computers, so again it is a vast computer network coming alive.  I wonder if The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is the first novel to develop a sentient computer network as a character.

Game Theory
When the people of the lunar colony start talking about revolution, the Prof (their old revolutionary) mentions "... classic authorities such as Clausewitz, Guevara, Morgenstern, Machiavelli ..." (page 88). I had to look up Morgenstern.  Here is what I found:  Oskar Morgenstern, who with John von Neumann wrote Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1943.  Yes, while the entire world was at war they wrote a book on game theory.  Wow.  I did not know that.  So I bought the book and started reading it.  I say that if you do not have a mathematics degree you might stay away from this particular book.  Nevertheless, I am pleased when I read a book that broadens my mind.

Liberty Caps
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress also mentions "liberty caps."  I had to look that up as well.  This is also called a Phrygian cap.   It was a soft cap given to a Roman slave upon emancipation.  The French used it in their Revolution.  It appears in the seal of the U.S. Senate.  I bought a red liberty cap from Amazon, but a friend ridiculed me saying it looked more pink than red.  Well, I checked the color and it does look like the photo in the Amazon product page, so I will ask other friends what they think.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress did make me think about liberty and the struggle for freedom. I am very glad I read this book again.

Norman Geisler on Logic

Here is a link to a very short video where Norman Geisler talks about logic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k06FoGmz8i4
The title of the video is "Why Is Logic So Important?"
I own a copy of Geisler's book, Come, Let Us Reason: An Introduction to Logical Thinking by Norman L. Geisler and Ronald M. Brooks.  It is a good book, a rigorous book.  I recommend it.

I read a book as a child on logical thinking and it changed my life.  I think I was still in elementary school when I read a book my father had that introduced me to syllogisms.  That brief study of logic has influenced my thinking to this day.

It amazes me how little things my parents did have made such  lasting impressions on me.

Robert

What knife does Reacher use in Gone Tomorrow?

The character Jack Reacher uses a knife in the book by Lee Child, "Gone Tomorrow."  So what knife did Reacher use in Gone Tomorrow?  He used a Benchmade 3300.  You can google it.  It looks like a very nice knife.  It is a double action, out-the-front (OTF) knife.  I did not know such knives existed.  A double action means there are two springs.  One spring will extend the blade, the other spring will retract the blade.  That looks very appealing.  Most assisted opening OTF knives require a manual retraction, where you yank some lever back to retract the blade.  The problem is that this knife sells for $400 to $500, which I think is prohibitively expensive for the average consumer.

At the time of this writing there are videos on YouTube that demonstrate this knife.

Robert

Evangelicals Support Israel

The Sunday May 20, 2018, issue of the New York Times had a front page article, "Israeli Appeal to Evangelicals Stirs Backlash" by David D. Kirkpatrick, et al.  The online edition has this title:  "Israel and Evangelicals: New U.S. Embassy Signals a Growing Alliance"
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/19/world/middleeast/netanyahu-evangelicals-embassy.html

These sentences caught my eye:

David M. Friedman, the American ambassador to Israel who presided over the embassy dedication, said evangelical Christians “support Israel with much greater fervor and devotion than many in the Jewish community.”

Anshel Pfeffer, author of a biography of Mr. Netanyahu, said in an interview. “...  he sees the Republicans and the Christian evangelicals as being the real base of support for Israel in the U.S., rather than American Jews.”
 
Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to Washington and a regular participant in events there to rally evangelical support, said that “devout Christians” were now the “backbone” of the United States support for Israel.

This is quite a difference from members of the American Jewish community who are anti-Israel, like the Jewish Voice for Peace that is pro-Palestinian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Voice_for_Peace

Book List from GQ

The editors of GQ made a splash by telling people the Bible is not worth reading.  Of course this gave them free publicity.  Hearing atheists say the Bible is not worth reading is trite, but I looked to see what else they had to say.  The article is 21 Books You Don’t Have to Read by the Editors of GQ, April 19, 2018.  https://www.gq.com/story/21-books-you-dont-have-to-read/amp

I've listed them below, and I offer a few comments now.  I think few people would say number 17, Life by Keith Richards is on their "must read" list.

Here is my story about number 19, Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.  I spent  some time reading it in college.  When I put it aside as a waste of time, one of my class mates asked my how the book ended.  He told me he loved the book, but got lost in it, and would start reading at the beginning  again.  I think you must love confusion to love  Gravity's Rainbow.  What the GQ list did for me was prod me to look over the list of Pynchon's books, investigate them, and decide not one of them looked like a promising read.

Thinking about number 11, The Ambassadors by Henry James had me review his works as well.  I think Portrait of a Lady is a fine book as an example of how a lady can lead herself astray, marry the wrong man, and live a miserable life.  That is also my recollection of Middlemarch by George Eliot.  This is a lesson everyone should read rather than experience.  But the rest of Henry James' work is unappealing, so I am finished with him

Finally, I will mention that I have ordered a copy of number 21, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift and a copy of number 15, Dracula by Bram Stoker.  I do not think they are passé.  I did try one of the editors suggestions:  A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin.  I found her writing uninspiring in the past, but I will give her another try.  Here is an example of well written science fiction:  Manifold: Space by Stephen Baxter.  Fantasy fiction is a step down from SciFi, in my opinion.  Manifold Space has Sheena 5, an intelligent squid, as a character.  I think Sheena 5 is a hoot. I also liked Manifold: Time by Stephen Baxter.  Skip, however, the 3rd book in the sequence: Manifold: Origin.  It is a loser.

I am keeping my comments minimal, so I am stopping now.

Here is the QG list, with their alternative suggestions

1. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Instead: The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford

2. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Instead: Olivia: A Novel by Dorothy Strachey

3. Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves
Instead: Dispatches by Michael Herr

4. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Instead: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

5. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Instead: Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector

6. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Instead: The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard

7. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Instead: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

8. John Adams by David McCullough
Instead: Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard

9 & 10. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Instead: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Fredrick Douglass
Instead: The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis

11. The Ambassadors by Henry James
Instead: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer

12. The Bible
Instead: The Notebook by Agota Kristof

13. Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
Instead: Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

14. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
Instead: Earthsea Series by Ursula K. Le Guin

15. Dracula by Bram Stoker
Instead: Angels by Denis Johnson

16. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Instead: The American Granddaughter by Inaam Kachachi

17. Life by Keith Richards
Instead: The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard

18. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Instead: Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal

19. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Instead: Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

20. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Instead: Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

21. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Instead: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

Sarah Canright, Artist at UT Austin

Sarah Canright is an artist at UT Austin.  Here is a link to her at UT:  https://art.utexas.edu/about/people/sarah-canright

Here is a water color by her on a UT website:  http://courtyardgallery.utexas.edu/sarah-canright-watercolors/

Here is a link to her work on her own website:  https://sarahcanright.com/
Here is a photo of her.  She looks like many of my cousins and reminds me of my aunts.

Her bio says she received a BFA in painting at the Art Institute of Chicago.  In 1972 she moved to New York and lived and worked there before moving to Austin.

Back in the 1990's I met Constance M. Canright, 1574 Sunset Dr., Winter Park, FL 32792.  Someone I knew had his child in her French class and said she was nice.  So I reached out to Mrs. Canright and she was very nice.  I lived in Winter Park and I actually drove by her house regularly.  Connie Canright told me she had a daughter who was an artist who had moved up to New York.  So I thought that this Sarah Canright at UT might be her daughter.  Sarah's FaceBook says she went to high school at Bishop Moore in Orlando.  Connie did have a daughter named Sarah.  So I might have met Sarah Canright's mother.

Mrs. Constance Canright passed away recently.  Here is her obituary:

Canright, Constance - age 102 of Winter Park, FL.; passed away Thursday, October 19, 2017. Connie was widowed at age 34, raised her children as a single parent and taught French at Winter Park High School. She remained an active member of her community after her retirement. She is survived by her children - Sarah, Peter, Catherine, Rachel and John and many friends and extended family.

Catherine Marie Canright of Wisconsin is a relative of Constance Canright. My father grew up in Wisconsin and graduated from the University of Wisconsin.

Robert

Dr. Shelley Canright

When I saw the movie Annihilation with my sister, she noticed a reference in the closing credits to a Dr. Shelley Canright at NASA.  I looked her up on Google and found this page:
https://www.nasa.gov/offices/education/leadership/bio_canrightOLD.html
I showed the web page to my friend over a cup of coffee and he said Dr. Shelley Canright looked like she could be my sister.  Well, she is a cousin.  Since the web is unstable, I am including her info here so it does not get lost.

Shelley Canright, Ph.D. Manager, STEM Education and Accountability Project
NASA

Dr. Shelley Canright taught elementary and middle school students prior to taking a position with NASA as precollege officer at the Langley Research Center, in Hampton, Virginia. Since 1999, she has provided program leadership and management to NASA’s Office of Education from NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. She has held several education positions with increasing responsibilities within the agency.

Canright led and managed NASA’s K-12 STEM education program across the agency’s 10 field centers. An educational technology and products office was established under her leadership to serve as a learning support system for NASA’s elementary and secondary, higher education, and informal divisions, including minority university programs.

She served three years as the Senior Advisor for NASA Education. In this role, she offered advice and assistance to the Associate and Deputy Associate Administrators for Education on investments in formal and informal STEM education. Her work included leading and coordinating NASA’s efforts in the STEM education priority areas within the Federal STEM Education 5-Year Strategic Plan.

Canright served in a one-year detail in the Administrator’s office supporting the Agency Council. She was the executive to the Administrator’s Executive Council and served as the team lead for the Office of Agency Council Staff. From October 2014-March 2015, Canright spent six months on an interagency assignment to the Performance Improvement Council where her focus was investigating analytic storytelling. Her work led to a federal wide summit on the topic.

In January 2016, Canright assumed duties as the STEM Education and Accountability program manager as well as the SEA project manager. She also has stepped into the role of managing the communication team in the HQ Education Office where a more intentional effort on success stories and power-of-story might be implemented.

Canright has a bachelor’s degree in early and middle childhood education and a master’s degree in educational policy and leadership from the Ohio State University. She earned a doctorate in instructional systems from the Pennsylvania State University.

The Right to Bear Arms is the Right to Be Free

When I say "The right to bear arms is the right to be free," I am paraphrasing a line from The Weapon Shops of Isher by Canadian science fiction writer A. E. van Vogt.  He wrote, "The right to buy weapons is the right to be free".   I think the Weapon Shops is the best book written by van Vogt.

This is a great story, but the line, "the right to buy weapons is the right to be free," is absolutely true.

I will also mention his science fiction novel Slan.  I enjoyed that when I was a kid, but it seemed juvenile when I read it as an adult.

Robert

Letters of Dr. Harry Lee Canright, China Missionary

Here are the letters of Dr. Harry Lee Canright, China missionary, as they appeared in The Medical Missionary, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, January 1914, a publication of the American Medical Missionary Association (115 Washington Ave., N. Battle Creek, Michigan).

I am not going to take the time now to transcribe the text.  Instead, I have 5 snapshots of the letters.
Here is snapshot 1.  Click on the image and it will become larger and more readable.

Here is snapshot 2. It has a photo of the rear of the hospital at Chengtu.

Here is snapshot 3.

 Here is snapshot 4.  It has a photo of the front of the hospital.

Here is snapshot 5.  The Canright letter is just the one paragraph at the top left.

Here is a snapshot of the publication cover page.

Notice the subscription in 1914 was 50 cents a year for a monthly periodical mailed to your home.  That is about the cost of a single stamp today.  A postage stamp back then was 2 cents. Here is  webpage showing the increasing cost of a 1st class stamp.  This is one measure of inflation:
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/other/postage.html

Robert Canright

PS: there are a number of Robert Canrights.  We are all related.

Remembering Drueke Company Chess Sets

Today I was thinking about how I learned chess by using a compact peg set from the Drueke Company (pronounced droo-key).  Here is a photo of my set.  I bought it in a Piggly Wiggly store on Canal Street in New Orleans.  What a surprise to find a nice chess set in a grocery store, but then Mr. Drueke was a salesman.

The chess set has a lid with a hinge and latch.  There are groves deep enough to store the captured pieces.  The set is 6" x 4.5" x 1.5".  The 6" dimension is the distance between the two players.  The 1.5" dimension is with the set closed.  I used my peg set mostly to study chess in conjunction with chess books.  Here is a photo of a Drueke peg set off the internet.

I also use a magnetic set to study chess because the pieces are bigger, yet the set is still small enough to use for study.  Here is a photo of the magnetic set:

You can still buy this fine magnetic set!
https://www.chesshouse.com/products/8-drueke-gift-magnetic-chess-set



Finally, I will mention the "Player's Choice" tournament chess set.  It is plastic, but very handsome and heavily weighted.  It is a pleasure to play with the "Player's Choice".  Here is a photo from the internet:

I found a nice video describing Drueke chess sets at this website:
http://blog.chesshouse.com/drueke-chess-games/
Here is a PDF of a very nice 12 page long history of the Drueke Company:
http://www.peterspioneers.com/druekepohlarticle.pdf

Drueke was a positive influence in my life.

Robert

Dr. Harry Canright, China Missionary

Dr. Harry Lee Canright, born 26 Oct 1864, died 29 May 1959, was a missionary to China.  He wrote a book titled Steps to the Kingdom.  I found this text in The Michigan Alumnus, Volume 45 (1938/1939):

Harry Lee Canright, 1889 m, A.M. (Hon.) 1921, was the only child whose parents gave up their farm in the sacrifice to aid in his education.  Years later their son handed them the money to buy back their home.  For thirty years a medical missionary in China, he had been mad a prisoner during the Cheng Tu Riots and the money was his indemnity paid by the Chinese government.  That time he saw the work o several years destroyed in a few hours but he saved his Bible and his medical diploma and retreated to Japan until the trouble was over.  It was only one of scores of exciting experiences in the land where Dr. Canright says he and his wife spent "the heart of a lifetime."  When they returned to Cheng Tu he developed a modern hospital.  There he treated an average of 125 patients a day for long years and gave a million treatments during this period.  Then he accepted an appointment to teach at the West China Union University.  He was there for five years and when he returned to the United States was Dean of the Medical Faculty and was teaching anatomy, physiology, hygiene, obstetrics and "a few minor subjects," all in Chinese.  During each of his furloughs Dr. Canright had taken postgraduate work at Michigan studying anatomy.  This was the year the University gave him his honorary degree.  Dr. Canright had intended to return to China. Instead he traveled for the Missionary Society for seven years, giving lectures, and after that he taught medical subjects for six years in Chicago.  Now retired, he spends his winters in Florida and his summers in Michigan.

Here is a photo from 1914 of Dr. Harry Lee Canright, M.D.

Here is a photo from 1938 of Dr. Harry Lee Canright, M.D.

What an inspiration.  I hope to publish more about him on another day.

Robert

Hegel in Winds of War

The historical novel Winds of War by Herman Wouk has a character named General von Roon.  The general is used to portray the German mentality of Nazi Germany.  In chapter 44, Barbarossa, the general makes some comments about Hegel.  I am going to recount the general's words about Hegel because I think Hegel is where the German Enlightenment went off the rails.  Each nation had its own manifestation of the Enlightenment.  There was an English Enlightenment, a Scottish Enlightenment, a French Enlightenment, and a German Enlightenment.  Each had slightly different traits.  But if we want to consider all factions as one conglomerate Enlightenment, it is my contention that the Enlightenment had a high point with the American Constitution and the Federalist Papers and a low point with Nietzsche and Marx.   I believe the Enlightenment became unstable with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it went off the road with Hegel, it crashed with Marx and Engels, and then Nietzsche blew it up.  Marx and Engels were students of Hegel.

The fictional character General von Roon said this on pages 601 and 602 (ISBN 0316955000).

Hitler's world view was Hegelian.  Nations, empires, cultures, all have their season in history, the great Hegel taught us.  They come, and they go.  Not one is permanent, but in each age one dominates and gives the theme.  In this succession of world dominions, we recognize the evolving will of the God of history, the World Spirit.  God therefore expresses and reveals himself in the will of those world-historical individuals like Caesar, Alexander, and Napoleon, who led their states to world empire.  Conventional morality cannot apply to the deeds of such men, for it is they who create the new modes and themes of morality in each age.

This Hegelian world view is, of course, at the other pole from the petit bourgeois morality which expects great nations to behave like well-brought-up young ladies in a finishing school and would hold a mighty armed people no different, in the rules applicable to its content, than some pale shoe clerk.

We could call this contempt for conventional morality Nietzschean.  Although Friedrich Nietzsche did not study under Hegel, he did read Hegel.  The enlightenment had a bright side and a dark side.  Alexander Hamilton and James Madison are in the bright side of the Enlightenment.  We need to recognize that Hitler, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin are the dark side of the Enlightenment, and Hegel was the starting point for Marx.

With General von Roon, Herman Wouk gave a voice to the worst of Hegel's legacy.

Robert