Degrees of freedom

more from Post Captain

A great joy in reading O’Brian is what he can create in a short narrative. Here  establishing another aspect of Maturin’s character, who has borrowed a beautiful set of pistols for a duel. He’s on a ‘mild horse’ moving towards dunes on a seashore. He’s reflecting on his experiencing. Aubrey does not reflect.  

“There are days - good evening to you, sir’ - a parson went by walking with his cat, the smoke from his pipe keeping him company as he walked - ‘there are days,’ he reflected, ‘when one sees as though one had been blind the rest of one’s life. Such clarity - perfection in everything, not merely in the extraordinary. One lives in the very present moment; lives intently. There is no urge to be doing; being is the highest good. However.’ he said, guiding the horse left-handed into the dunes, ‘doing of some kind there must be.’”

the parson walking by with his cat, ‘the smoke from his pipe keeping him company.’  

‘guiding his horse left-handed into the dunes’ If language is inadequate, it’s not the fault of O’Brian

...

     “‘I have never know such consistently accurate weapons.’ he said aloud. ‘I wonder, can I still do Dillon’s old trick?’ He took a coin from his pocket, tossed it high, and shot it fair and square on the the top of the rise, between climbing and falling. ‘Charming instruments indeed: I must cover them from the dew.’ The sun had set; the light had so far diminished that the red tongue of flame lit up the mist hollow at each discharge...”

He is about to go into a duel with his close friend over a woman Maturin loves. 

Maturin’s ability to go unnoticed and how he learns

       “In the far corner of the sick-bay the low murmur of conversation began again; the men were used to his presences and his absences - more than once a messmate had brought the forbidden grog, walking right past the Doctor without being noticed - and he did not disturb them. At present two Highlanders were talking slowly to an Irishman, slowly and repetitively in Gaelic, as he lay there on his stomach to ease his flayed back.

     ’I followed them best when I do not attend at all,’ observed Stephen. ’When I do not strain, or try to isolate any word. It is the child in long clothes that understands, myself in Cahirciveen. They are of the opinion that we shall anchor in the Downs before eight bells. I hope they are right; I hope I fund Dundas.’”

...

    “Stephan settled in...reflecting upon the nature of dunes; upon the extraordinary loneliness surrounding each man; and on the inadequacy of language...”

Frederick Wiseman, documentary filmmaker.

‘There is no contemporary art without African descent. Cubism is Picasso trying to understand African artifacts.” Africans brought music with them on the slave ships, he said, and the music changed and developed in response to the new context, and this led to “everything from Billie Holiday to Jimi Hendrix to Motown, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk—you can go on and on.”’

‘...a woman saying, “What would America be like if we loved Black people as much as we love Black culture?” ‘

I also keep a personal journal, separate from my scientific one. It is a daily record of impressions, ideas, concerns, and complaints... It is also a place for displaying emotions - the joy of discovery, the beauty of a giraffe at sunset, the deep pleasure of observing the rich life of another being.

“When I returned to camp, the rough field notes were soon transcribed legibly and in greater detail into a permanent notebook, a task that could take more than an hour. I used hardcover, sixty-page notebooks... as I still do today. The clarity of these notes was essential because they were later used as the basis for scientific papers, where the individual observations were summarized, quantified and interpreted.”

Then he talks about their importance, and some other things:

“These final notebooks on lions are permanent, indexed, bound records available to anyone. They now are part of my collection of about three hundred of these notebooks based on wildlife research in twenty-three countries. Some projects consist of surveys of a month or two, such as in the rain forest of Vietnam in search of the rare Javan rhinoceros, or in Sarawak on an orangutan census...”

On observing animals in the wild

simple sketches of postures helped me to visualize the animal later. ... but I generally do not like to abbreviate behavioral notes. An important detail may be ignored or considered irrelevant and discarded because it lacks at discrete category...

Binoculars, spotting scope, notebook, and a pen or pencil were my basic tools. I scribbled into a pocket notebook as an incident occurred or immediately afterward, often jotting down just a few key words without looking at the paper, especially at night. It was essential to write notes quickly because memory is notoriously imprecise. I made small maps of routes...

I don’t think about it [her activism and scholarship] as an experience that I’m having as an individual. I think about it as a collective experience, because I would not have made those arguments or engaged in those kinds of activisms if there were not other people doing it. One of the things that some of us said over and over again is that we’re doing this work. Don’t expect to receive public credit for it. It’s not to be acknowledged that we do this work. We do this work because we want to change the world. If we don’t do the work continuously and passionately, even as it appears as if no one is listening, if we don’t help to create the conditions of possibility for change, then a moment like this will arrive and we can do nothing about it.

Angela Davis

Roy Kevin Andrews Flight of Iskaros: Travels in Greece during the Civil War

“How is one of the country’s top research universities reduced, just a month after moving classes online, to freezing its employees’ retirement accounts?”

“For years, the AAUP and other faculty critics have wrung their hands as norms of shared and deliberative governance disappeared, replaced by the consolidation of administrative power in the hands of corporate executives. With little appreciation for transparency or inclusiveness, and little understanding of the academy’s mission, these managers increasingly make decisions behind closed doors and execute them from above. “

About Johns Hopkins, but it applies broadly

Good news in today’s world is like a fugitive, treated like a hoodlum and put on the run. Castigated. All we see is good-for-nothing news. And we have to thank the media industry for that. It stirs people up. Gossip and dirty laundry. Dark news that depresses and horrifies you.

on aging:

Your mind and body go hand in hand. There has to be some kind of agreement. I like to think of the mind as spirit and the body as substance. How you integrate those two things, I have no idea. I just try to go on a straight line and stay on it, stay on the level.

But she also noted: “I certainly very much felt I was a woman throughout my career. That is, I never felt like one of the guys.”

To find an influential woman, she looked to television.

“Like many people in my generation,” Dr. Uhlenbeck said, “my role model was Julia Child.”

Karen Uhlenbeck, 1st women to win Abel Prize in mathematics,