Ntuple Indemnity

In the Land of Stuff Nick Cares About (More or Less), the top story of the hour is J.K. Rowling’s Q&A session at Carnegie Hall, where she declared that one of her central characters is gay. I’m not going to say who until further down, because I think this is the sort of thing that is best discovered after you’ve already read the books; and if you haven’t read the books, you need to reorganize your life’s priorities. I’m somewhat ashamed of myself for not even remotely picking up on this before, even after several years of unwittingly conditioning myself to detect patterns of repressed homosexuality through the novels of Michael Chabon (whom you should also read, and immediately).

There’s a provisional transcription of the Q&A, and I say “provisional”, because at the time of this writing the transcription is riddled with typos up to and including misplaced negations. It’s a valuable document nonetheless, as Rowling discusses some things we all wondered about, like Aberforth Dumbledore and his goats.

As one might expect, the global juggernaut of the Harry Potter fan base has reacted almost schismatically (to the matter of sexual orientation, not the goats), and their responses fall into several camps. Here’s why all of them are wrong.

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One day, I’ll make it big as a travelling salesman of amazing k-coloured dreamcoats, and some biographer will dive into this weblog fathom by fathom looking for dirt. Let the hypothetical biographer know this: the most singly monumental cultural influence on my childhood was Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. It’s not even a contest.

It is naturally with great amusement that I discovered this video of a radical Islamist Charlie Brown Christmas, and with even greater interest that I received news of a reportedly scintillating Schulz biography by David Michaelis, released this week. Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Watterson wrote an eloquent review for The Wall Street Journal, which is, to the comic-strip enthusiast, like Beethoven writing about Bach. Some of Watterson’s subtler remarks on the connection between the art and the artist are important, and I’ll return to them further down.

As with any biography that begs to scintillate, Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography has generated a storm of controversy: the Schulz family, none too pleased with what they allege to be Michaelis’s selective fudging of the evidence, has openly responded with their grievances at one of my daily stops, Cartoon Brew—instantly transforming the thread into a thought-provoking debate on the ethics of biographical writing.

I haven’t read the book, but I’ve been given this impression: great biographical narrative, poor historical scholarship. I’m not a reader of biographies in general, so I have to wonder: is this the industry norm?

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9-8 (+512). This is the third consecutive time I’ve finished the 17-round Western Canadian Scrabble Championship with a 9-8 record in Division 2—an indication of a personal plateau if I’ve ever seen one. Here’s the photographic evidence for your inspiration or mocking amusement, depending on how good you are.

Every year, the month of October hits me upside the head and I come to the sudden and unwelcome realization that I haven’t studied or practised in months. The fact that I’ve been letting my word knowledge atrophy is probably the biggest reason my rating has been hovering around the 1300 zone for years now, and cramming the week or the night or the morning before the tournament doesn’t tend to help—because after all, what should you cram? With this in mind, the preparation I did for the tournament amounted to a lot of sleep, a lot of tea, and several hours at a Yamaha grand.

Did it help?

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In the absence of any time to write about anything that has occupied my thoughts and adventures over the past fortnight (including but not limited to an afternoon with Derek Walcott, the Edmonton Journal Saturday Serial Thriller, a legendary absorption of the nuances in “Princess Leia’s Theme” one night at the Winspear, the tenuous balance of free exploration and story elements in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and Phantom Hourglass, the problem of typographical representation in a harmonic approach to poetry, “Revolution 9” from the White Album, the animated shorts at the Edmonton International Film Festival, Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, and much ado about Michael Chabon—the usual, in short) I place this temporary offering on the sacrificial altar: an ed article by François Marchand on the University of Alberta Debate Society (“Verbal combat”, 5 October 2007).

The article is part of a series on ostensibly nerdy student groups—there’s one about the Comic Book Appreciation Society and Subspace 6-20 (“The nerds’ revenge”, 7 October 2007)—and is at least personally notable for being the second time I’ve been mentioned in ed in conjunction with the great pastime of Scrabble, which is something that interviewers consistently seem to know about me without my having told them beforehand. I recommend the accompanying video under “Related Links”, in which Sharon and Noah engage in a sporting repartee about all the tail debaters aren’t getting in spite of their super-cool sweatpants.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the University of Alberta’s Space Exploration Symposium (ExpressNews article here). I’ve been away from physics for a few years now, so the minutiae of the graduate research on display sailed over my head, but I managed to attend the two keynotes.

The first was a presentation by Dr. Jaymie Matthews (UBC) on the MOST space telescope and its involvement in the search for and study of exoplanets like the potentially habitable Gliese 581 c, as well as its striking resemblance to SpongeBob SquarePants. The second talk, delivered by Dr. Mark Lemmon (Texas A&M), concerned the Phoenix Mars Mission and how they plan to study the permafrost subsurface of the Martian Arctic.

The symposium was, on the whole, a stellar reminder of just how advanced we are as a society and a species when we let the scientists do their job, so long as they aren’t being silly.

Unfortunately, there is a massive chasm between scientists and policy-makers in every discipline and every stratum of society, in part because of the divergence between their educational paths. As Carl Sagan remarked in The Demon-Haunted World, there hasn’t been a scientifically literate U.S. President since Thomas Jefferson. And when it comes to space exploration, the political absurdities boggle the mind.

The star of the space policy circus is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. As John Hickman explains in today’s edition of The Space Review, it’s high time for states to withdraw from the treaty and lay it to rest.

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