When asked by a Canadian "what am I
working on, I explain, "its a sort of "Billy Bishop Goes To Manhattan".
" I mean a sort of 'Ten Lost Years' or 'Tighten the Traces, Haul in the Reins'".
They generally know what I mean, right away.
But would the rest of the world?
I doubt it.
However most educated Canadians already know how rurally-raised playright John Gray came to conceive of the format for his megahit "Billy Bishop Goes To War".
He did while touring rep theatre in rural southern Ontario.
He couldn't help noticing that most Canadians, deep down, think it is RUDE to spy on people up on stage, through a Fourth Wall Removed.
So he elected to have his actors pretend to be in a Christmas Concert -- and thus have an excuse to directly address the audience before they sing.
But his actors also pretend to be Billy Bishop, so I always felt John held back the full impact of his insight.
A better model might be those successful Canadian folksingers in coffeehouses or 'boite a chansons' who have learned to combine a bit of standup/ monologue cum performance art with their song.
They aren't an actor playing the role of a singer, they are a real life singer who tells stories and evokes the past ( rather than re-enacts it in character) with a few basic props, in both speech and song.
This isn't Fourth Wall Removed at all - it is 'Never Been A Fourth
Wall To Remove' .
A Three Waller - a concert.
But it can go too far.
When the performance only seems to be a concert - because the story telling and evoking is so extensive relative to the singing, and when it is also supported by too many and too obvious sound effects and props,(ie when it goes Broadway-wanna-be) it really is a concert manque, not a real concert, pure and simple.
Now, that's my objective: a Canadian-style talk 'n' sing three waller that doesn't degrade into a full blown concert manque ...
Monday, December 12, 2011
Thursday, October 20, 2011
the OTHER Manhattan Project
The problems of 'Doctor D', 'Miss H' and of Charlie don't seemed to have loomed up very large in the work of historians, novelists, composers or movie makers in the 75 years since those problems first began.
Set along the mean hospital corridors of an America almost as much at war with itself as it was with the Axis, these problems seemed then - and seem to most now - far too small to consider posing alongside the grander epic themes of WWII.
But one person's hill of beans is another's monumental ground changer and I guess I am just one of those guys.
The physical bullets may have stopped flying but I think World War Two's real battle - which I think was an intellectual battle - goes on as strong as ever.
Did I actually say 'intellectual battle' ?
Silly me - I of course meant a battle between scientists - with scientists like Heinrich Himmler on the much bigger side.
That battle was all about confronting the messy,untidy,unequal variety one finds in Nature and in human society: it was all about whether we should celebrate it or should we seek to eliminate it.
We all think we know the relatively few who sought to tame and eliminate variety and diversity during World War Two, but is this actually true - or is it simply the propaganda of the victors talking ?
The story of 'Doctor D' (Doctor Martin Henry Dawson) should make us question the easy division of the participants in World War Two into two neat piles of the good guys and the bad guys.
The world is still divided between those scientists (and citizens) who think reality is fundamentally, at its base, simple, predictable and hence perfectible - and those who see it as irreductibly unpredictable and hence endlessly variegated.
The big battle today is over humans' ability to change the climate for better or for worse .
Back then, the big battle was over whether we want to create, at the point of a syringe, a volk democracy of equally healthy and strong people or whether we can learn to accept a messy hierarchy of differing talents and healths among human kind.
I hope Dawson's story will not merely seem like ancient history but rather will move people to look again at our current environmental disputes in a different light....
Set along the mean hospital corridors of an America almost as much at war with itself as it was with the Axis, these problems seemed then - and seem to most now - far too small to consider posing alongside the grander epic themes of WWII.
But one person's hill of beans is another's monumental ground changer and I guess I am just one of those guys.
The physical bullets may have stopped flying but I think World War Two's real battle - which I think was an intellectual battle - goes on as strong as ever.
Did I actually say 'intellectual battle' ?
Silly me - I of course meant a battle between scientists - with scientists like Heinrich Himmler on the much bigger side.
That battle was all about confronting the messy,untidy,unequal variety one finds in Nature and in human society: it was all about whether we should celebrate it or should we seek to eliminate it.
We all think we know the relatively few who sought to tame and eliminate variety and diversity during World War Two, but is this actually true - or is it simply the propaganda of the victors talking ?
The story of 'Doctor D' (Doctor Martin Henry Dawson) should make us question the easy division of the participants in World War Two into two neat piles of the good guys and the bad guys.
The world is still divided between those scientists (and citizens) who think reality is fundamentally, at its base, simple, predictable and hence perfectible - and those who see it as irreductibly unpredictable and hence endlessly variegated.
The big battle today is over humans' ability to change the climate for better or for worse .
Back then, the big battle was over whether we want to create, at the point of a syringe, a volk democracy of equally healthy and strong people or whether we can learn to accept a messy hierarchy of differing talents and healths among human kind.
I hope Dawson's story will not merely seem like ancient history but rather will move people to look again at our current environmental disputes in a different light....
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
The problems of three little people ...
... at the height of WWII --- and how their solution changed our whole world for the better, forever.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Don't let my modest manner fool ya
Intellectually, I am damned immodest.
I don't think of us greens/ environmentalists as alternatives at all.
We hold the only accurate view of Reality -- it is our opponents that have a delusional scientific grasp on Reality.
This has been true since the 1920s, at least ; does it need a century to go by before they acknowledge this ?
We can only blame the teaching professions for the fact that kids in the 21st century still leave school stuffed full of the non-truths of the 19th century, by-passing the insights of 20th century science altogether.
If the human species is to survive, teachers must change - or go....
This post came from an old deleted blog called
I don't think of us greens/ environmentalists as alternatives at all.
We hold the only accurate view of Reality -- it is our opponents that have a delusional scientific grasp on Reality.
This has been true since the 1920s, at least ; does it need a century to go by before they acknowledge this ?
We can only blame the teaching professions for the fact that kids in the 21st century still leave school stuffed full of the non-truths of the 19th century, by-passing the insights of 20th century science altogether.
If the human species is to survive, teachers must change - or go....
This post came from an old deleted blog called
Friday, June 10, 2011
2011: creation of clash of 1840s darwin/dalton versus 1940s dirac/dawson
The "Four Ds" are not "The Four Divas" but two groups of conflicting scientists who laid the ground for the world most of us are destined to live , reproduce and die in - the 21st century.
John Dalton and Charles Darwin, scientists from the 19th century, still bulk out 21st science education for most of us, thanks to the ego issues of the teaching class, who can not accept that the world is not fully composed of definite answers to definite questions.
But our century is actually the dialectic result of the WWII clash between the scientific certitudes of Darwin and Dalton colliding with the scientific uncertitudes promoted by Paul Dirac and Henry Dawson, scientists definitely of the 20th century.
Plenty of irony in the latter pair.
Dirac's QUANTUM PHYSICS said the behavior of a billion radioactive atoms are predictable in true Daltonian fashion, but the activities of any one individual radioactive atom is not.
In contrast, Dawson's QUORUM BIOLOGY agreed that a single individual bacteria was as dumb as Darwin said all the"primitive races" were, but that collectively a billion bacteria were collectively (and unpredictably) smart in ways we are only beginning to comprehend.
Both agreed that the smallest entities of matter and life were not as stable and as dumbly inert as civilized man had assumed.
Conversely, WWII itself seemed proof enough that civilized man was not as smart as he had thought.
From above, such Phaetons as Albert Einstein fell back earthward, while from inside the ground itself, Penicillium rose up in our esteem to meet Einstein midway to dine with him at Life's commensal table...
John Dalton and Charles Darwin, scientists from the 19th century, still bulk out 21st science education for most of us, thanks to the ego issues of the teaching class, who can not accept that the world is not fully composed of definite answers to definite questions.
But our century is actually the dialectic result of the WWII clash between the scientific certitudes of Darwin and Dalton colliding with the scientific uncertitudes promoted by Paul Dirac and Henry Dawson, scientists definitely of the 20th century.
Plenty of irony in the latter pair.
Dirac's QUANTUM PHYSICS said the behavior of a billion radioactive atoms are predictable in true Daltonian fashion, but the activities of any one individual radioactive atom is not.
In contrast, Dawson's QUORUM BIOLOGY agreed that a single individual bacteria was as dumb as Darwin said all the"primitive races" were, but that collectively a billion bacteria were collectively (and unpredictably) smart in ways we are only beginning to comprehend.
Both agreed that the smallest entities of matter and life were not as stable and as dumbly inert as civilized man had assumed.
Conversely, WWII itself seemed proof enough that civilized man was not as smart as he had thought.
From above, such Phaetons as Albert Einstein fell back earthward, while from inside the ground itself, Penicillium rose up in our esteem to meet Einstein midway to dine with him at Life's commensal table...
Thursday, June 9, 2011
What this Blog is about
Henry Dawson's tiny AKTION 4F team and his research into QUORUM BIOLOGY were hopeful first steps towards restoring sanity amid the horrors that Phaetopia released during World War Two.
I want to salute and critique other such worthy efforts - usually in the form of recommendations of books (or book-like objects such
as online PDFs of thoughtful articles ) .
Some may offer hope by (A) presenting alternatives to Phaetopia and some may offer hope by (B) simply making us more aware of the salient elements of Phaetopia, as it existed at its height and that still exist 'among us' .
This is NOT a 'book review blog'.
Book reviews only review ( ie sometimes praise, sometimes pan, sometimes only summarize) new books ,that are currently
widely available, for sale, in commercial outlets.
Which is to say they are very much a part of the book marketing world and play by its rules.
My books might not even be books, they usually won't be new, and if out-of-print and only available in a library, may not even be for sale.
I won't recommend my own books on this blog, but I will say they will all fail the conventual book reviewers' sniff test in at least one vital area : they will be widely and permanently available, but will be available free , not sold !
They are also intended to offer hope, After Phaetopia, by method A or B, as cited above...
I want to salute and critique other such worthy efforts - usually in the form of recommendations of books (or book-like objects such
as online PDFs of thoughtful articles ) .
Some may offer hope by (A) presenting alternatives to Phaetopia and some may offer hope by (B) simply making us more aware of the salient elements of Phaetopia, as it existed at its height and that still exist 'among us' .
This is NOT a 'book review blog'.
Book reviews only review ( ie sometimes praise, sometimes pan, sometimes only summarize) new books ,that are currently
widely available, for sale, in commercial outlets.
Which is to say they are very much a part of the book marketing world and play by its rules.
My books might not even be books, they usually won't be new, and if out-of-print and only available in a library, may not even be for sale.
I won't recommend my own books on this blog, but I will say they will all fail the conventual book reviewers' sniff test in at least one vital area : they will be widely and permanently available, but will be available free , not sold !
They are also intended to offer hope, After Phaetopia, by method A or B, as cited above...
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Quantum Physics,Quorum Biology confound Phaetopia
Phaetopia seems a big word - its not.
I made it up recently - its a neologism - which is a big word that means a 'newly invented word or phrase.'
Neologisms is what writers do - or should do - expand the language with new vivid and useful words that describe new concepts that the writers hopefully also came up with.
Phaeton Man (aka Modernity Man) is exactly like his ancient counterpart.
Both, while messing about with the Earth when they were specifically told not to, end up making some parts of it too hot and dry and others too cold and wet.
World War Two was a chance for Phaeton Man to really feel his oats, strut on a world stage and throw his weight around.
At the macro level, he came apart at Stalingrad and Guadalcanal where frostbite or heat stroke mixed it up with starvation and led to cannibalism and defeat.
The whole world - even children - could see this smashup.
But in addition, during that same War and albeit at a micro level and virtually unseen except inside university classrooms and laboratories, Phaeton Man's grandest delusion --- that he could control the inert building blocks of mass/energy (the atom) and life (the cell) went totally and permanently west.
Quantum Physics said there was no stable reality inside the inside of the inside of an atom to control - heck there might not even be any reality there that we mere humans could ever understand.
People like Einstein, who sort of understood Quantum Physics didn't like this at all - famously called it "spooky action at a distance" and spent the rest of his life unsuccessfully trying to prove it wrong.
But quantum entanglement is still with us and has tended to clip the wings of the sort of physicist who is tempted to play God...
It is very well known but is very poorly understood - even by physicists who believe in it and spent their lifetimes studying it.
Henry Dawson's life work (Quorum Biology) - which was coming to a summing up point at his Fall of 1943 Columbia Genetics Department Seminar only because he knew he was dying, is much less known but ultimately is also much much easier to understand.
However easy it is to understand, it remains awfully hard for the Phaeton Men still among us to accept.
Think of it, pace Einstein, as "spooky action" right inside us, right beneath our noses, as opposed to happening off at the other side of the Universe.
Dawson's thesis, simply put was this:
that the biggest civilized nations of Man were less smart than Man thought they were and that the smallest, weakest, oldest bits of life, the bacteria, were a lot smarter than Man could imagine them to be in his worst nightmare.
He said he had shown that oral commensal strep bacteria ,living inside Man as their habitual home, acted collectively in a form of collective intelligence, to evade the fiercest blows of the human immune system by being the ultimate shape shifters.
A group of bacteria, after collectively polling each other and achieving a quorum of agreement (hence the name QUORUM BIOLOGY) could run the gambit from L,R,S,M and B forms.
L cells had no cell walls and evaded our immune system by being totally invisible in terms of having no known antigens.
R cells, the normal type of strep bacteria on our body (more or less living peacefully on our throat skin but not inside our throat skin) had a cell wall but no sugar capsule - our body thus recognized they were in a harmless ,non-invasive, phase.
The invasive S type had a cell wall and a medium thick sugar 'cap' and were the dreaded bacteria found deep in our internal organs.
The super invasive M type had a cell wall and a really thick cap and could really move through our skin defenses ---- but their cap consisted of a rare biological material normally only found in humans - our body thought they were us .
The B type had a cell wall but no individual cap - they had put sugar goo to work to create an entire house that didn't let big white cells and such in to hurt them, but let tiny food, water and water in and out along internal channels.
Think of it as a sort of tiny ant colony living on your teeth as plaque or as a endocarditis vegetation on your heart valves, as in SBE - Dawson's Bete Noire.
And Dawson had already shown, between 1928 and 1933, that strep bacteria had a quorum call at times of crisis and collectively agreed to toss all their genetic housekeys into a blanket and play house with each others' kin.
This was called by him, Transformative Horizontal DNA and it made a total mess of Darwin's prim and proper Vertical DNA inheritance.
I'll edit this lot later - off to work now !
The
I made it up recently - its a neologism - which is a big word that means a 'newly invented word or phrase.'
Neologisms is what writers do - or should do - expand the language with new vivid and useful words that describe new concepts that the writers hopefully also came up with.
Phaeton Man (aka Modernity Man) is exactly like his ancient counterpart.
Both, while messing about with the Earth when they were specifically told not to, end up making some parts of it too hot and dry and others too cold and wet.
World War Two was a chance for Phaeton Man to really feel his oats, strut on a world stage and throw his weight around.
At the macro level, he came apart at Stalingrad and Guadalcanal where frostbite or heat stroke mixed it up with starvation and led to cannibalism and defeat.
The whole world - even children - could see this smashup.
But in addition, during that same War and albeit at a micro level and virtually unseen except inside university classrooms and laboratories, Phaeton Man's grandest delusion --- that he could control the inert building blocks of mass/energy (the atom) and life (the cell) went totally and permanently west.
Quantum Physics said there was no stable reality inside the inside of the inside of an atom to control - heck there might not even be any reality there that we mere humans could ever understand.
People like Einstein, who sort of understood Quantum Physics didn't like this at all - famously called it "spooky action at a distance" and spent the rest of his life unsuccessfully trying to prove it wrong.
But quantum entanglement is still with us and has tended to clip the wings of the sort of physicist who is tempted to play God...
It is very well known but is very poorly understood - even by physicists who believe in it and spent their lifetimes studying it.
Henry Dawson's life work (Quorum Biology) - which was coming to a summing up point at his Fall of 1943 Columbia Genetics Department Seminar only because he knew he was dying, is much less known but ultimately is also much much easier to understand.
However easy it is to understand, it remains awfully hard for the Phaeton Men still among us to accept.
Think of it, pace Einstein, as "spooky action" right inside us, right beneath our noses, as opposed to happening off at the other side of the Universe.
Dawson's thesis, simply put was this:
that the biggest civilized nations of Man were less smart than Man thought they were and that the smallest, weakest, oldest bits of life, the bacteria, were a lot smarter than Man could imagine them to be in his worst nightmare.
He said he had shown that oral commensal strep bacteria ,living inside Man as their habitual home, acted collectively in a form of collective intelligence, to evade the fiercest blows of the human immune system by being the ultimate shape shifters.
A group of bacteria, after collectively polling each other and achieving a quorum of agreement (hence the name QUORUM BIOLOGY) could run the gambit from L,R,S,M and B forms.
L cells had no cell walls and evaded our immune system by being totally invisible in terms of having no known antigens.
R cells, the normal type of strep bacteria on our body (more or less living peacefully on our throat skin but not inside our throat skin) had a cell wall but no sugar capsule - our body thus recognized they were in a harmless ,non-invasive, phase.
The invasive S type had a cell wall and a medium thick sugar 'cap' and were the dreaded bacteria found deep in our internal organs.
The super invasive M type had a cell wall and a really thick cap and could really move through our skin defenses ---- but their cap consisted of a rare biological material normally only found in humans - our body thought they were us .
The B type had a cell wall but no individual cap - they had put sugar goo to work to create an entire house that didn't let big white cells and such in to hurt them, but let tiny food, water and water in and out along internal channels.
Think of it as a sort of tiny ant colony living on your teeth as plaque or as a endocarditis vegetation on your heart valves, as in SBE - Dawson's Bete Noire.
And Dawson had already shown, between 1928 and 1933, that strep bacteria had a quorum call at times of crisis and collectively agreed to toss all their genetic housekeys into a blanket and play house with each others' kin.
This was called by him, Transformative Horizontal DNA and it made a total mess of Darwin's prim and proper Vertical DNA inheritance.
I'll edit this lot later - off to work now !
The
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