Sometimes you can have it all

Today's having-it-all exhibit: Alexander Borodin.

Borodin was both a chemist and a muician, two fields that would seem to demand total concentration for excellence, yet he refused to choose between them.

The leading chemist of Czarist Russia, Nikolai Zinin, an early mentor of Borodin, is supposed to have told him: "I have placed all my hopes in you to be my successor one day. You waste too much time thinking about music. A man cannot serve two masters."

See the book "The Imperial Laboratory" by Galina Kichigina for more on their relationship, and for late-Czarist chemistry in general.

Borodin served both masters pretty well. As a scientist he became one of the co-discoverers of what are called "aldol reactions." I'm  told (I am hardly qualified to judge such poiints) that aldol reactions are foundational to organic chemstry. As a musician, he attracted the favorable attention of such peers as Franz Liszt, Alexander Glazunov, and Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov.

Borodin composed durable chamber music, most famously his String Quartet 2 in D major, composed in 1881, featured more than seventy years later in a Broadway musical, and later in a Hollywood movie, Kismet.

So, yes: you can have it all. Ain't life grand?

Leon Gettler

A word of praise today for one of my facebook friends, Leon Gettler.

Gettler, BTW, is a freelance writer who lines in Melbourne, Australia.  Gettler's facebook profile includes the following quotation from Winston Churchill:

"Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public."

I've forgotten why I initially linked with Gettler, but we are both facebook friends with Sam Antar, and that is a story in itself.  (For another day.)

Anyway, I'm writing this because of one bit of Gettlerian phrase-making that I particularly admired,.  He wrote recently on FB of a conversation he had had with a management consultant who sells "benchmarking and best practice."  But ... this was Gettler's point ... you don't help anyone achieve excellence that way.  Steve Jobs didn't become Steve Jobs by learning to imitate Steve Jobs. 

All you are doing, Gettler reports himself saying, is "creating karaoke corporations."

Karaoke corporations.  I love it.

The Mirage Man

David Willman has written "The Mirage Man," a book about the anthrax scare of 2001.

I don't know anything about the book more than that, and what publisher's copy (and one review, to which I'll link you shortly)  says about it.

But I do know that Willman is a Pulitzer Prize winner.  Here is the citation.

And the subject of his new book is fascinating.  Here is something I wrote on the subject in this blog almost three years ago, during the insane autumn of 2008, one almost as wild in its ways as was the autumn of seven years before.

Here's a review of Willman's book that appeared this spring in the Los Angeles Times.

As the reviewer notes, the original "person of interest" was Steven Hatfill, a former Army weapons scientist. But as a district court judge eventually declared, there was "not a scintilla of evidence" that would have inculpated Hatfill, and the FBI eventually turned its feeble eye to Bruce Ivins.  Ivins committed suicide as investigators were closing in.

Given only that bare statement, you might well suspect that the FBI had the wrong man a second time, but this wrong man was more susceptible to psychological pressure tha Hatfill, took himself out of the picture, leaving the prosecution case from the threat of falsification.

You might suspect that but Willman would think you wrong.  He believes the case against Ivins is a strong one, and in lieu of any judicial forum for laying it out, he does so here.

I think I may actually have to read this book.

Schopenhauer on time

"Past and future (apart from the consequences of their content) are as empty and unreal as any dream; but present is only the boundary between the two, having neither extension nor duration. In just the same way, we shall also recognize the same emptiness in all the other forms of the principle of sufficient reason and shall see that, like time, space also, and like this, everything that exists simultaneously in space and time ... is only through and for another like itself, i.e. only just as enduring."

I understand the reasoning here in broad terms. Indeed, William James' notion of the 'specious present' was developed largely as a riposte to such reasoning.

Mutter mutter mutter

I've picked up a heck of a lot of crabapples in recent weeks. After Irene came by and knocked a lot of them off the tree at once, I went on a veritable jihad against grounded crabapples. They really create a nesting place for little flying things as well as becoming mussy and dangerously slippery underfoot if you aren't careful.

I've been using a neat little pooper scooper my father, may he rest in peace, designed in the '90s. So I rake them into big piles then 'scoop' them into the yardwaste bag. Unfortunately, I get too enthusiastic and end up with a bag that is overloaded, impossibly heavy. So I drag it along to where it is supposed to be for pickup.

The tree can be beautiful for a week or two in the spring, though. When it looks like this:

Quote from Vanderbilt

"It is said that I am always in opposition, and that the same spirit of resistance which has often hitherto governed my action has influenced it now ....I have only to say, that this is the same spirit which founded this great Republic, and which is now drawing the commerce of the world to our shores. It was the same spirit which unchained the fetters which legislation ... once fastened upon the Hudson. Repress it if you dare....The share of prosperity which has fallen to my lot is the direct result of unfettered trade and unrestrained competition."

NEW YORK TRIBUNE, March 8, 1855.

Vanderbilt, as a young man, had played a supporting role in the facts that led to the great Supreme Court decision as to steamboats on the Hudson, and the burdening of interstate commerce, GIBBONS v. OGDEN (1824), and that is one of his allusions above.

Saving Your Dog

In a libertarian website, I found the following description of a Dennis Prager column. I'm too lazy to check right now whether Dennis Prager actually wrote this, or who the heck he is anyway.

“For 30 years," Prager is supposed to have said, "I have asked high school seniors throughout America which they would save first, their dog or a stranger. In every instance (except some religious schools), one third have voted to save their dog, one third for the stranger, and one third just didn’t know.”

There are a couple of ways to take this story:

1. He might be trying to say that religious schools present superior religious/moral instruction.

2. He might be trying to say that religious schools drill their students to give the 'right' answer to such questions, whether they feel it or not, which would mean not necessarily superior instruction, but character-warping discipline.

One intriguing issue arises from the wording of the question: would the results be different if you asked who should you save first?

If I were running such a survey, anyway, I would want to allow for the possibility that some people would think that they should save the other human being, but they admit to themselves that they wouldn't live up to that Good-Samaritan standard, they would instead save the creature to which they had an existing sentimental attachment.

Just a thought.