This has been bouncing around in my brain like a DVD screensaver for a while, and so is a non-sequitur, but:
I think we model knowledge on the society level wrong. I think we model knowledge like a library or a database, as a thing, a collection of Facts (or works containing Facts, or just works) that grows, and once a thing is added to the great collection of Knowledge, it hangs around, often conversant with other pieces of knowledge in the collection, and ready to be re-discovered by research; but it remains, in a general sense, “known.”
In this model, workers fields of knowledge have to continue to specialize because as the collection grows larger, the spaces in which it’s possible to usefully innovate grow smaller–I think in an old SSC essay Scott talks about how presumably future classicists will write their theses on, like, one particular Anatolian shepherd because every larger topic will have been exhausted.
In truth, however, this is not how knowledge operates. Just as with link rot, the loss of knowledge on how to build Apollo rockets (though, obviously, not the underlying principles), the decay of manuscripts that cease to be recopied, or the decay of any physical substrate on which information is recorded, and the loss of institutional knowledge generally, all bodies of knowledge are in a constant state of decay. Unless maintained, they vanish. There is a real risk that fields of knowledge that become unfashionable or underfunded become effectively lost–this is basically what happened with Sumerian and Babylonian literature!–and one reason why the teaching and research functions of scholarship remain closely linked IMO is because the existence of the latter naturally depends on the existence of the former.
It may seem that there are fields of knowledge so generally important and so generally known that they could never vanish, but living memory in humans maxes out at 100 years, and one lesson I have taken from history is that no matter how robust your society’s literary tradition, far less will survive in the long run than seems reasonable. Of the Anglo-Saxon poetic corpus (a society with a very rich literary tradition) we have only four books, thanks in large part to the brief-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things episode of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Of all of classical antiquity, the Greek and Latin works could fill a modest bookshelf. And many of those works are preserved in media meant to be durable over the very long term–vellum can survive centuries if kept in a cool, dry place. Much of our modern data storage, digital and analog, isn’t nearly so long-lived.
Anyway, in all fields, from the hardest science to the softest art, we should think of knowledge as a garden that has to be carefully tended. Like a garden, it will never be the same season to season or generation to generation, but that’s OK: we’re all about preserving the garden as a whole. Like a garden, is has to be protected, renewed; it can be neglected a little while, and allowed to run a bit wild, but if abandoned, it will disappear. And, like a garden, it doesn’t have to be foranything in particular: we can preserve it simply because it is beautiful, and we like to explore it from time to time.
throwback to that time in my existentialism class where the professor asked ‘who thinks hell is other people’ and half the class slowly and meekly put their hand up
then the prof was like ‘…i mean who originally said it’
there are some posts that sound utterly made up for the joke or for the notes, but this one I whole heartedly believe
Sounds right to me…
That quote is amazing to me in that it’s quoted completely accurately and yet in a way that means something completely different from what it meant in context.
(Sartre was claiming that Hell was other people. He was not claiming that other people were hell.)
…I can’t actually tell what distinction you’re drawing there. Can you expand?
The line comes from No Exit, which is set in Hell. Spoilers for No Exit follow
In particular, three people who have been condemned to hell are trapped eternally in a room together. And at first they think they got off easy without any pitchforks or fiery lakes or anything. But over the course of the play they discover that they have been chosen very specifically to have neuroses and character flaws that interact with and torment each other.
Each one needs the approval of a second in an unstable RPS cycle so that any time one of them might be satisfied by a second, the third swoops in and ruins it.
And when they figure this out, one of the characters expresses his understanding, that hell isn’t physical torture. “Hell is just—other people.”
So the point isn’t that other people, generically, are hellish; it’s rather that you can build a hell out of other people.
But when I hear people quote it, it’s usually sort of an introvert-pride thing. “Other people are hell; you should spend time alone.” And that’s not the point at all. It’s a statement about how bad unhealthy relationships can be, not a statement about how all relationships are unhealthy!
“hell is other people” has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell.
Reblogging for the original post which was hilarious and also for that explanation which is beautiful
Check out “Barry Lyndon”, a film whose period interiors were famously shot by period lamp-and-candle lighting (director Stanley Kubrick had to source special lenses with which to do it).
More recently, some scenes in “Wolf Hall” were also shot with period live-flame lighting and IIRC until they got used to it, actors had to be careful how they moved across the sets. However, it’s very atmospheric: there’s one scene where Cromwell is sitting by the fire, brooding about his association with Henry VIII while the candles in the room are put out around him. The effect is more than just visual.
As someone (I think it was Terry Pratchett) once said: “You always need enough light to see how dark it is.”
A demonstration of getting that out of balance happened in later seasons of “Game of Thrones”, most infamously in the complaint-heavy “Battle of Winterfell” episode, whose cinematographer claimed the poor visibility was because “a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly”.
So it was nothing to do with him at all, oh dear me no. Wottapillock. Needing to retune a TV to watch one programme but not others shows where the fault lies, and it’s not in the TV.
*****
We live in rural West Wicklow, Ireland, and it’s 80% certain that when we have a storm, a branch or even an entire tree will fall onto a power line and our lights will go out.
Usually the engineers have things fixed in an hour or two, but that can be a long dark time in the evenings or nights of October through February, so we always know where the candles and matches are and the oil lamp is always full.
We also know from experience how much reading can be done by candle-light, and it’s more than you’d think, once there’s a candle right behind you with its light falling on the pages.
You get more light than you’d expect from both candles and lamps, because for one thing, eyes adapt to dim light. @dduane says she can sometimes hear my irises dilating. Yeah, sure…
For another thing lamps can have accessories. Here’s an example: reflectors to direct light out from the wall into the room. I’ve tried this with a shiny foil pie-dish behind our own Very Modern Swedish Design oil lamp, and it works.
Smooth or parabolic reflectors concentrate their light (for a given value of concentrate, which is a pretty low value at that) while flatter fluted ones like these scatter the light over a wider area, though it’s less bright as a result:
This candle-holder has both a reflector and a magnifying lens, almost certainly to illuminate close or even medical work of some sort rather than light a room.
And then there’s this, which a lot of people saw and didn’t recognise, because it’s often described in tones of librarian horror as a beverage in the rare documents collection.
There IS a beverage, that’s in the beaker, but the spherical bottle is a light magnifier, and Gandalf would arrange a candle behind it for close study.
Here’s one being used - with a lightbulb - by a woodblock carver.
And here’s the effect it produces.
Here’s a four-sphere version used with a candle (all the fittings can be screwed up and down to get the candle and magnifiers properly lined up) and another one in use by a lacemaker.
Finally, here’s something I tried last night in our own kitchen, using a water-filled decanter. It’s not perfectly spherical so didn’t create the full effect, but it certainly impressed me, especially since I’d locked the camera so its automatic settings didn’t change to match light levels.
This is the effect with candles placed “normally”.
But when one candle is behind the sphere, this happens.
It also threw a long teardrop of concentrated light across the worktop; the photos of the woodcarver show that much better.
Poor-people lighting involved things like rushlights or tallow dips. They were awkward things, because they didn’t last long, needed constant adjustment, didn’t give much light and were smelly. But they were cheap, and that’s what mattered most.
They’re often mentioned in historical and fantasy fiction but seldom explained: a rushlight is a length of spongy pith from inside a rush plant, dried then dipped in tallow (or lard, or mutton-fat), hence both its names.
Here’s Jason Kingsley making one.
A Roman style oil lamp puts out a surprising amount of light, can last for days, and is refillable, but it’s REALLY Annoying when someone gives you a cheap one that’s not properly glazed, because the oil will eventually seep through the clay and onto whatever it’s sitting on. Having grown up in the country, I have made my own candles (it’s really not that hard, just time consuming, especially the old fashioned dipped variety) and read by oil lamp during a blizzard. It brings me up short realizing that this is no longer part of peoples experience in the US for the most part.
Since most of my timeline is currently obsessed with gay pirates, I’ll add deck prisms to this post, since they’re related to the light magnifiers.
A deck prism is a prism inserted into the deck of a ship to provide light down below.
For centuries, sailing ships used deck prisms to provide a safe source of natural sunlight to illuminate areas below decks. Before electricity, light below a vessel’s deck was provided by candles, oil and kerosene lamps—all dangerous aboard a wooden ship. The deck prism laid flush into the deck, the glass prism refracted and dispersed natural light into the space below from a small deck opening without weakening the planks or becoming a fire hazard.
In normal usage, the prism hangs below the overhead and disperses the light sideways; the top is flat and installed flush with the deck, becoming part of the deck. The lens shapes were naturally derived from the process of handmaking the glass on an ‘iron’ and would have predated the ability to manufacture flat glass. (A plain flat glass window would just form a single bright spot below—not very useful for general illumination—hence the prismatic shape.)
