Ben and Alice

Learning to write all over again

2011-09-18T09:52:00.007-04:00

Every word hurts.

I have barely posted anything on this blog for three years, because I have been battling a condition which is undiagnosed and mystifying (the medical term is idiopathic), and which gives me pain in my arms and elsewhere.

I have sat down to write lots of times, but I seldom succeed. My problem is that my writing process developed at a time in my life when I could think with my fingers — revising sentences, toying with paragraph order, using asides and punctuation to signal to myself where I would need to come back and revisit a point or look up a source. Without forming conscious intentions, I would set my fingers free to monkey with the text, trying out ideas quickly and striking on serendipitous solutions. This worked great when my fingers worked great.

But now I can't use my fingers and arms to control a computer, except for the occasional minute or two of typing, for which I always end up paying dearly. Instead, I use voice recognition software and a mouse I control with my feet, both of which are sorry substitutes for the real thing. It takes me far longer to do things nowadays, and everything I do on a computer is painful and frustrating. The kind of fiddling with my writing I used to do on the computer is out of the question.

Imagine that your keyboard typed the wrong word once a sentence, and going back to fix it screwed things up further half the time. Now coat your mouse with cactus needles, and throw some on your chair seat for good measure. (Sitting down hurts, and toes were not meant to control mice.)

If I am to continue being a writer in any meaningful way, I need to rethink the mechanics of how I write.

Here are my new rules:

1. Write everything longhand

Dragon Naturally Speaking is the leading (and best) commercially available voice recognition software by far, but it is inexplicably overrated by otherwise sober reviewers like David Pogue of the New York Times. It's decent at transcribing text when you give it full sentences, because it uses grammatical context and statistics on word sequences to tell if you mean "dissent" or "descent". But even that is prone to error. When I told it "word sequences", it guessed I meant "Word seek through this" and proceeded on a whim to highlight the entire document. And it is horrible at understanding standalone words, commands and letters; trying to change a single letter in this sentence proved impossible, and I had to resort to typing. I can forget about using it for my livelihood, which, unfortunately, is computer programming.

2. Remember Jean-Dominique Bauby

… You know, the author of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Things could always be worse. That guy is one memoir up on almost all of us, and had twenty fewer fingers and toes to work with and no voice.

3. Be brief

My condition is a good excuse to take a machete to my writing, which is too verbose anyway. Cutting half out of anything I write improves it enormously. (E. B. White liked to cut two thirds.) Now, each keystroke I jettison has the added benefit of reducing the pain, as long as I do it in advance. So I need to do my editing down in longhand, before I touch the computer.

4. Be a worse writer

It goes against my nature to hit publish until I feel a post works in its entirety, from word choice to clarity of my overall points. But following my nature has meant I don't publish anything. That's got to give. As soon as the piece might possibly be ready, I will consider it done, starting right now –

E. B. White quote photo by Robin Riat; Bauby-inspired photo by Jessica Wissel

This just in: dinosaurs looked funky

2011-02-05T11:14:00.003-05:00

I had heard the news that scientists had discovered a way to reliably determine the color of dinosaur feathers–apparently, in 2008 it was determined that melanosomes, pigment-related cell organelles, had actually survived intact for tens of millions of years in fossils. But I didn't realize that there were already renderings being published based on this new research. It sounds like several teams have been racing to be the first to put out illustrations, so we shouldn't expect this first round to be that reliable.

But it's incredible that my daughter will grow up knowing what some dinosaurs actually look like, whereas when I grew up I didn't. I was a dinosaur enthusiast as a child, and I collected the 1:45 scale models sold through the British Museum (see below).These models started being sold in 1973, and the mainstream understanding of how dinosaurs appeared has changed immensely since then.

See a three-dimensional rendering on the National Geographic website, and the abstract of the first paper published in Science.

Renaming the Brooklyn Nets

2010-09-15T23:51:00.003-04:00

New New Jersey Nets owner ~~Yakov Smirnov~~ ~~Mutant Russian Marked Cuban~~ Mikhail Prokhorov says he is open to changing the name of the team when they move to Brooklyn in 2015 (which is what Google Translate says "2012" means when you go from developer-speak to English).

It's a brilliant idea. Since the team is not exactly going to win games anytime soon, and is already moving several physical miles and several hundred thousand cultural miles, you don't risk alienating faithful fans who are attached to the old name. And nothing sells merchandise like a completely new logo and color scheme, especially one associated with Brooklyn.

In the new economics of American sports, Brooklyn could be a lucrative place to base a team, because it has cachet all around the world. No one in Indonesia is going to buy a Miami Heat jersey unless three of the top ten players in the league, including the most famous working athlete in the world, join the team in a suspicious backroom deal. But people in Indonesia will buy a jersey for the Knicks, as they will for the new Brooklyn team, even if they suck.

When the Boston Red Sox paid $51 million just for the right to sign Daisuke Matzusaka, the move made little sense when considering how much more cheaply they could sign pitchers already proven in the major leagues. The next highest bid, by the filthy rich Yankees, wasn't even close. But consider the long-term value of millions of Japanese fans, who now might raise their children on Red Sox merchandise and pay to watch Red Sox games featuring Japanese language ads -- a formula the Yankees perfected with Hideki Matsui -- the deal makes much more sense, and has probably already proved worth the money.

But you don't need a big rebranding plan to know it's exciting to think of new names for a major sports team, especially one that will be in a place that conjures so many associations. I'm praying that the owners will see the folly of choosing a generic mascot like the pathetic Bobcats or (shudder) Raptors. Leave those names to cities where the movie shoots pretend they take place somewhere else.

Here are my proposals:

The Brooklyn Brownstowners -- evokes what is special about Brooklyn, its brownstone soul. One big problem, though: you pretty quickly start thinking about stoners, and stoners who are brown.

The Brooklyn Red Hooks -- connects clearly to Brooklyn by referring to a neighborhood not far from the arena (which I vehemently oppose building, though I will happily go to games once it's built), and sounds kind of cool to boot. But only kind of.

The Brooklyn Blues -- keeping with the alliteration theme. The "Blues" is a bit generic, and I don't think anyone would argue Brooklyn is especially connected to blues music or jazz, though it certainly is a capital for gospel in the North. But the name has a powerful ring to it. Say it to yourself a few times.

The Brooklyn Breakers -- alliteration plus a reference to Brooklyn's Atlantic coastline, famous thanks to Coney Island. The aerial shots before games begin could show the Coney Island beach, with its numerous lines of rock wave breakers. The name is tough without being overly violent; this is, after all, the league of the Wizards.

Eponymous -- That's right, just call the team Brooklyn. Not the Brooklyns, just Brooklyn. There is no law that says every team must have a mascot-type name; names like the Heat and the Fighting Irish already caused fans and announcers to refer to the team in a different way than they do most other teams. You can be sure the team name would be widely discussed and argued about, and you can also be sure they would sell a bajillion shirts and caps with the logo and the single word "Brooklyn". And they can always be called the "Brooks" as a nickname.

The Brooklyn Hoops -- generic, but playful, evocative of street ball, and provide some continuity to the Nets name. Good but not great, it would disappoint no one and look great on merchandise.

The Brooklyn Basketballers -- parallels the old-timey feel of the New York Knickerbockers, and could be shortened to just "ballers". It works because the formality of the name calls your attention Brooklyn's long history and deep roots, rather than to its more recent associations with crime and hipness. As American cities go, Brooklyn is ancient; but the fact that it is also known for being cool and culturally relevant means that highlighting its age works for Brooklyn in a way it doesn't quite for Boston and Washington. The only drawback is that "ballers" can be read sexually.

I'm ready to give these names away for the good of humanity. Call me, Mutant Mark!

"She stole my heart and my cat": great moments in syllepsis

2010-07-22T23:18:00.005-04:00

I was imagining highly specific and unlikely Scrabble games, anticipating some moment when I could modify a smug opponent's ZEUGMA into HYPOZEUGMA, PROZEUGMA, DIAZEUGMA, or MESOZEUGMA, or even make a HYPOZEUXMIS of my own--this is why I'm bad at Scrabble--and checked out the Wikipedia page for these rhetorical terms. The examples of syllepsis using idiomatic phrases are a motley crew, from Alanis Morrisette to Antonin Scalia. I want to see some tracked changes of the article to see how examples have been added because Eve 6 was certainly not among my first thoughts for how to illustrate the device:

* You held your breath and the door for me.
--Alanis Morissette, "Head over Feet"

* I got a part-time job at my father's carpet store, laying tackless stripping and housewives by the score.
--Warren Zevon, "Mr. Bad Example"

* I took her hand and then an aspirin in the morning,
--Eve 6, "Girl Eyes"

* "Oh, flowers are as common here, Miss Fairfax, as people are in London."
--Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (Cecily is making a catty remark to Miss Fairfax, a Londoner, by using "common" in two senses, namely "numerous" and "vulgar" as in the expression "common thief.")

* "The Russian grandees came to Elizabeth's court dropping pearls and vermin."
--Thomas Babington Macaulay

* "Are you getting fit or having one?"
--From the television program M*A*S*H

* "You are free to execute your laws, and your citizens, as you see fit."
--From the television program Star Trek: The Next Generation

* "I called her a whore and myself a cab."
--Michael Salinger, "Girl on Girl"

* "She was a thief, you got to believe: she stole my heart and my cat."
--From the film So I Married an Axe Murderer

* "[She] went straight home in a flood of tears, and a sedan chair."
--Charles Dickens

* "Just a dissipated creep who wears a Rolex on his wrist/On her nerves, too much cologne, and down her power to resist./ Did she turn down the wrong hallway, his advances, or the sheet?"
--Bob Kanefsky, "The Girl Who Had Never Been ..."

* "... and covered themselves with dust and glory."
--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

* "You can leave in a taxi. If you can't get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that's too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff."
--Groucho Marx, from Duck Soup

* Come the (computer) revolution, all persons found guilty of such criminal behavior will be summarily executed, and their programs won't be!
--Numerical Recipes

* My teeth and ambitions are bared; be prepared! - Scar, from The Lion King with lyrics by Tim Rice

* The levees were broken and so were the promises. - Anderson Cooper, Dispatches from the Edge

* The word “Arms” would have two different meanings at once: “weapons” (as the object of “keep”) and (as the object of “bear”) one-half of an idiom. It would be rather like saying “He filled and kicked the bucket” to mean “He filled the bucket and died.” Grotesque.
--Justice Scalia's majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, rejecting the notion that the phrase "bear arms" was used as an idiom in the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.554 U.S. ____ (2008), slip op. at 13.

Google voice gives great oral

2010-07-18T20:25:00.002-04:00

Google Voice is something I can't live without -- it's one of the few significant advantages an Android phone has over an iPhone. Thanks to its ability to transcribe my every phone message, I no longer even listen to half of my messages, since many are doctors' offices confirming appointments or other folks just leaving me a phone number to call back. Numbers are very easy for Google Voice to transcribe correctly.

Not so for everything else, especially the type of stop and go banter that fills most phone messages. Listening to my messages while following the Google algorithm's best guess at their content makes me realize how few complete sentences are spoken by callers.

Still, it's hard to believe you couldn't gin up an algorithm that could do better than Google Voice does on many of my calls. Of course, that would mean I'd lose Google Voice's unintentional comedy. Witness this surprisingly provocative message from the post office (my emphasis):

Voicemail from: Unknown Caller at 8:47 AM

Yes, Hi Good Morning. This is calling from the post office, the mailman will be. Yeah, Hello Baby. Ohh. Peggy shop on another 20 minutes. Thank you.

Or take this helpful update from my father, who is apparently on ecstasy:

I'm still kind of into the weather that has just come back this evening and and we might. She will want to get some of the like. Here at something like that. So, but I'm pretty well over the sky. I don't know. Spoke to sort of city. There's just a little bit tired fun it so I don't do anything right. Yeah. we should check in to the prices of storm door Of, snirtstorm security guards at Home Depot.

I had never even heard of the word "snirtstorm", which apparently is the combination of snow and a dirt storm, and seems to afflict the northern Midwest. (In fact, is such an unusual word that it is a great ingredient for Googlewhacking -- I found one with "snirtstorm parabola".)

But seriously, I'm no expert on voice recognition algorithms, but I think it's a pretty safe bet that if you think a human has said "snirtstorm", you had better go with your second best guess instead. Although I do appreciate the creative capitalization of words in mid-sentence.

UNIVERSE CLOSED PLEASE USE RAINBOW

2010-07-13T13:59:00.005-04:00

Albuquerque's West Side keeps sprawling beyond what street-namers can imagine. My mom was driving me out there a couple of years ago and I had a joke ready for every major street we crossed...

"This side of Paradise..."
"Somewhere over the Rainbow."
"The end of the Universe."
"At the edge of the Galaxy."

...until she told me to stop because all of the streets look the same when they've run out of names.

One of my high school classmates posted this sign of the apocalypse: "UNIVERSE CLOSED PLEASE USE RAINBOW."

Kasparov: the "strange sensation" of android chess

2010-07-11T13:16:00.000-04:00

I'm compelled to excerpt at length Garry Kasparov's recent essay in the New York Review of Books in which he surveys the state of chess computing, and its implications for artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction.

It's always dangerous to draw to confident a connection between a thinker's scientific works and her politics (though I detect a consistency of mantra and inflexibility in both versions of Noam Chomsky). But it can't be a coincidence that the most prominent intellectual in modern chess is also one of the greatest democratic dissidents in Russia, a place where it is even more dangerous and lonely to be a dissident then it was during much of Soviet times.

Kasparov touches on a common complaint about artificial intelligence: that it has fails to replicate the human way of thinking. He writes:

The AI crowd, too, was pleased with the result and the attention, but dismayed by the fact that Deep Blue was hardly what their predecessors had imagined decades earlier when they dreamed of creating a machine to defeat the world chess champion. Instead of a computer that thought and played chess like a human, with human creativity and intuition, they got one that played like a machine...

Eric Siegel, a brilliant lecturer who taught me AI at Columbia, used to explain that there were four kinds of artificial intelligence, which were usually conflated into one -- to great confusion. You could get a computer to produce results that seemed human, such as the Eliza psychologist chat bot; you could get it to produce valuable insights that would not be confused in all with human ones, such as an information kiosk that is helpful to humans but never pretends not to be a machine; you could get it to be human-like in its thinking, such as systems like Wolfram Alpha, which build up knowledge using logic and building blocks of information; or you can have it be specifically computer-like in its thinking, such as a weather predictor which uses Chaos theory to detect impossibly obscure patterns.The public expected that by developing a machine whose output -- grandmaster-level chess moves -- had a quality heretofore only known among humans, researchers would be forced to develop AI that was human-like in its thinking.

There are other forms of AI than those that Siegel listed, however, and Kasparov was drawn to use his role on the main stage of AI to define and explore these.

From the article:

It was my luck (perhaps my bad luck) to be the world chess champion during the critical years in which computers challenged, then surpassed, human chess players. Before 1994 and after 2004 these duels held little interest. The computers quickly went from too weak to too strong. But for a span of ten years these contests were fascinating clashes between the computational power of the machines (and, lest we forget, the human wisdom of their programmers) and the intuition and knowledge of the grandmaster.

...in chess, as in so many things, what computers are good at is where humans are weak, and vice versa. This gave me an idea for an experiment. What if instead of human versus machine we played as partners? My brainchild saw the light of day in a match in 1998 in León, Spain, and we called it “Advanced Chess.” Each player had a PC at hand running the chess software of his choice during the game. The idea was to create the highest level of chess ever played, a synthesis of the best of man and machine.

Although I had prepared for the unusual format, my match against the Bulgarian Veselin Topalov, until recently the world’s number one ranked player, was full of strange sensations. Having a computer program available during play was as disturbing as it was exciting. And being able to access a database of a few million games meant that we didn’t have to strain our memories nearly as much in the opening, whose possibilities have been thoroughly catalogued over the years. But since we both had equal access to the same database, the advantage still came down to creating a new idea at some point.

...A month earlier I had defeated the Bulgarian in a match of “regular” rapid chess 4–0. Our advanced chess match ended in a 3–3 draw. My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.

...Even more notable was how the advanced chess experiment continued. In 2005, the online chess-playing site Playchess.com hosted what it called a “freestyle” chess tournament in which anyone could compete in teams with other players or computers. Normally, “anti-cheating” algorithms are employed by online sites to prevent, or at least discourage, players from cheating with computer assistance. (I wonder if these detection algorithms, which employ diagnostic analysis of moves and calculate probabilities, are any less “intelligent” than the playing programs they detect.)

Lured by the substantial prize money, several groups of strong grandmasters working with several computers at the same time entered the competition. At first, the results seemed predictable. The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.

The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.

Most sci-fi set in the future features computer intelligences which completely trump humans at solving problems, at least ones that don't require emotion. But the experiment Kasparov inspired suggests that the pairing of humans and machines might be superior at certain types of problems for a very long time. We already have some computer algorithms that farm tasks out to human minds, such as Web scraping bots that need help to decode scrambled-text CAPTCHAS, and can get it quite cheaply in the Third World. The day may come when a programmer can make a function call and specify that it use human intelligence rather than machine intelligence, and trust a system like Amazon's Mechanical Turk to farm out the task and return a result.Interestingly, Star Trek is an exception to this sci-fi rule. The computer which manages the Enterprise is powerful, but the crew never asks that it suggest solutions to problems. (This has an obvious advantage from a plot standpoint.) The android Data is a computer intelligence which goes beyond the ship's computer's limitations; in fact, he is capable of all four forms of AI that Siegel described, and he is able to suggest a possible avenue of inquiry, then tap at a computer keyboard at an inhuman pace, announce that it has some particular probability of success, and then express doubt in an unmistakably human way -- going through all four forms of AI in a single scene. The Borg, on the other hand, are a Kasparovian intelligence: rather than simply construct machine agents, they use organic creatures and link their minds together in a decentralized network with no artificially intelligent core.

and then there is Isaac Asimov's classic short story "The Last Question", which introduces an entirely new possible form of AI, which I won't give away.

Technodeterminist NBA

2010-06-09T17:55:00.005-04:00

Tom Scocca's dissection of Bill Simmons' columns ("pregame analysis of the postgame analysis") is brilliant, and I really loved this piece by "The Machines" about the use of instant replay in two late-game decisions in Game 3 of the NBA finals last night:

The Machines perceived a tone of dissatisfaction, then, from the TELEVISION announcers. The correct call had been made, but the humans were not content with it.

Why would humans prefer ERROR? Was this a problem with MACHINE-MEDIATION PROCEDURE? Or was it a problem with the limited parameters under which MACHINE-MEDIATION PROCEDURE was allowed to correct for ERROR? The Machines strongly advise the further incorporation of MACHINE-MEDIATION PROCEDURE into the basketball process.
...
Eventually, for reduction of ERROR, humans may consider replacement of human basketball referees with MACHINE REFEREES. Consider also the possibility of MACHINE PLAYERS. Modern technology can produce an entertaining "natural"-appearing variation in mechanical-physical results, or something close to it. It is our understanding that the algorithms employed in prototype basketball-shooting unit RAY ALLEN may have in fact gone beyond plausible human variation. We intend to recalibrate RAY ALLEN unit shortly.

Joan Didion is cited on Thomas Kinkade's Wikipedia page

2010-06-01T16:26:00.004-04:00

The Thomas Kinkade takedown is an exercise like shooting fish in a barrel, but I was interested in A.S. Hamrah's essay from The Baffler about valuing Kinkade's art and the subprime mortgage crisis in California. The centerpiece of the essay is the Thomas Kinkade-themed homes outside of Vallejo, which are in various states of foreclosure and squatters' temporariness. Here's the thesis:

Whatever his value as an artist, he has used his own experience to create a business that predicted and in some ways replicates the current mortgage crisis. His paintings of quaint houses with burning interiors substitute nostalgia for values and hope for community. The idea that these reproductions, gobbed with points of light, are a good investment isn’t any different than the idea that flipping gated, golf- coursed mansions is the way to get rich. Kinkade is a living testament to how the triumph of kitsch values has repercussions in the marketplace, outside the world of taste.

In that italicized sentence, you can see how the piece works like a good Joan Didion essay, and Didion's Where I Was From shows up in the middle because she's turned to Kinkade and the interior of California before. Indeed, I learned from the essay that Didion is cited in Thomas Kinkade's Wikipedia article! From Wikipedia:

Essayist Joan Didion is a representative critic of Kinkade's style:

A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.

She goes on to compare the "Kinkade Glow" to the luminism of 19th-century painter Albert Bierstadt, who sentimentalized the infamous Donner Pass in his Donner Lake from the Summit. Didion sees "unsettling similarities" between the two painters, and worries that Kinkade's own treatment of the Sierra Nevada, The Mountains Declare His Glory, similarly ignores the tragedy of the forced dispersal of Yosemite's Sierra Miwok Indians during the Gold Rush, by including an imaginary Miwok camp as what he calls "an affirmation that man has his place, even in a setting touched by God's glory."

Hamrah earns the commentary on kitsch and overvalued property by turning to the financial troubles of the Thomas Kinkade company, which has relied on that connection all along:

Investors lost a lot of money, but now the business is owned solely by the Thomas Kinkade Company, an entity that has turned “light,” according to its company profile, into an acronym for “Loyalty-Integrity-Growth-Honoring God-Trust.” Like the acronym, it almost worked.

The FBI has reportedly been investigating Kinkade since 2006. According to news reports, the bureau’s probe began after “at least” six former Kinkade Signature Gallery owners sued the Kinkade Company for fraud. They claimed the company persuaded them to invest in galleries and then undercut them by selling Kinkade reproductions direct to consumers for less than the galleries charged.

The turns to Robert Frost and especially Eugene O'Neill are excellent in the essay, and I'm still wondering about this great sentence about visitors to the playwright's home in Danville: "Even the grave of O’Neill’s dog Blemie doesn’t move them very much, and they barely stop to look at themselves in the strange black mirror in the master bedroom."

Martin Gardner: skeptical inquirer

2010-05-27T07:25:00.002-04:00

When I discovered him as a teenager, Martin Gardner seemed magical. To this day, the red cover of his Annotated Alice, is a talisman for me. In the dark ages before the world wide web, I never encountered such a network of connections between ideas as his Alice held. In Gardner's world, concepts were like sparks in a roomful of firecrackers--each lit up several others, which in turn, lit up still more.

I found his "Mathematical Games" column a bit too mathematical--not in difficulty but in his tendency to catalogue the attributes of numbers and shapes. But his column was succeeded by Douglas Hofstadter's even more playful "Metamagical Themas" (an anagram homage), and Hofstadter is a hero of mine. Hofstadter's column was followed by A. K. Dewdney's "Computer Recreations" (later renamed "Mathematical Recreations") which was a huge influence on me; a babysitter who taught me how to program gave me a book of Dewdney's columns and I have been a recreational programmer ever since. I worked one of Dewdney's projects--an evolution simulation--into a high school science fair project that was over the head of all the judges. (I was beaten by my friend Leah's "Hot Pants?" in which she set her spandex on fire.)

These writers all treat knowledge as an irresistible fount of joy, and it is their excitement as much as anything that has made me love learning. And I think they had another type of influence on me, one much more unexpected: making me a skeptic.

Gardner's name immediately calls up Isaac Asimov, another absurdly prolific polymath. It makes perfect sense to me that the same mind that hatched the robot stories and was driven to write a guide to Shakespeare (and the overrated Foundation and so much else) would be an atheist humanist. Gardner was one, too, and Dewdney and Gardner both wrote books debunking pseudoscience-like homeopathy. (Dewdney is the only skeptic of the September 11th, 2001 attacks whom I can't dismiss--he couldn't understand how the cell phone calls on United 93 worked, so he chartered several planes and flew around testing dozens of cell phones and networks, with mixed results.)

Beliefs for these people are built carefully, on evidence not whim; they cannot conjure them whole cloth, which is why a belief holds any weight at all. They cannot hear of a theory, of consciousness for example (an obsession of Hofstadter's and of mine) without coming up with questions about it. Not everyone in science applies this questioning so broadly; it seems somehow connected to being a polymath.

To most religious people, it is the most sensible, livable parts of scripture that stand out: the forgiveness by Jesus, the wisdom of Mohammed, the patience of Moses. But to a skeptic it is the most absurd parts that jump out: the commandment to stone to death a disobedient child, the convoluted explanations for why God put fake dinosaur bones in the ground, the ridiculous origin of the book of Mormon. Perhaps this is a reflection a position on the mild end of the autism spectrum; it may be that, in a human world, strict consistency or coherence is a useless preoccupation. A skeptic runs afoul of the greater part of humanity, who do not lose sleep over a contradiction in their priest's sermon.

But this same skepticism can pierce the veil of dogma because logic on its own is a system of meaning independent from dogma. I imagine this is why repressive states so often arrest and suppress scientists; they are natural humanists, since nationalism and other supremacisms are so comparatively arbitrary.

All this is to say, that Gardner, who spent the later part of his life writing for the magazine Skeptical Inquirer is more than another example of a particularly smart man. A polymath is not just a novelty, whose death and decline reflects poorly on age of specialization. He represents a gregariousness of intellect that can transcend borders and boundaries.

Breaking down the Law & Order noise

2010-05-24T18:16:00.004-04:00

The last chung-chung from Law & Order (at least on NBC) rings tonight, although it will continue to sound in perpetuity of syndication. Here's how Mike Post made the noise:

"I think of it as the stylized sound of a jail cell locking," says the 48-year-old Emmy-winning composer, who also wrote the theme music for Crime & Punishment. "I wanted to add something that's very distinctive but not a literal sound. What I tried to do was jar a little bit." Instead of the electric piano, guitar, and clarinet for which he scored the opening theme, Post synthesized his chung CHUNG electronically, combining six or seven different sounds to get the right dead-bolt effect. One of the eeriest adds: the sound of 500 Japanese men stamping their feet on a wooden floor. "It was a sort of monstrous Kabuki event," he says. "Probably one of those large dance classes they hold. They did this whole big stamp. Somebody went out and sampled that."

The result — which lasts all of maybe a second and a half — does its dark work effectively. "There's very little music in Law & Order, and very little is needed," says Post. "It's odd, to be honest, when you've written a theme that you think is very musical and what everybody wants to talk about is The Clang."

Of course he also wrote the theme for Crime & Punishment!

Weather Channel protest idea

2010-05-24T17:57:00.003-04:00

The Weather Channel has made the head-scratching change to include more "weather-tainment" in the form of weather-themed movies to its regular programming, leading to this great lede and nutgraf about the failure of the plan:

The woes of the Weather Channel can be summed up in one movie title: “Misery.”

A decision to buy the Kathy Bates thriller — tangentially weather-related because it takes place during a snowstorm — has become a talking point as the Weather Channel renegotiates its contracts with cable and satellite companies.

How about showing Groundhog Day (also tangentially weather-related because it involves a weatherman) over and over again to protest the programming changes, only to stop when better changes are agreed to?

By the way, I am unashamed to admit that I've watched weather-tainment in the form of BIGGEST STORM COUNTDOWNS or whatever. I really like "When Weather Changed History"--not so much to tune in for the amount of time that would be important, but it's interesting to watch while I'm waiting on Local on the 8s.

Double-crossed

2010-05-17T23:43:00.003-04:00

Sunday's New York Times crossword puzzle needed lots of new coding to come into being--and to be solved by its online fans. Matt Ginsburg's explanation of how he devised the puzzle is fascinating, as is the reader commentary about not being able to solve the puzzle online because of its special theme answers which were arranged in mini-grids within grids:

Having had the idea, execution was a bit harder because it was difficult to find the theme entries. Two (hopefully fairly long) words that agree except for two letters, and for which the associated “phrase” makes sense. And to make it harder, you have to be able to switch the letters and get two other words that work as well. I eventually wrote a program that evaluated all combinations of four letters to predict how many possible “phrases” there might be for each, and looked at the combinations that seemed the most promising. Lots of the best letter combinations were like the ST-TH in faster father/stefan thefan, where the middle letter is duplicated so you have ST-TH in both word pairs. I thought that things like RS-NT (which turns into RN-ST in the other direction) were much more elegant, but I just couldn’t find enough of them that worked. Hopefully none of the selections I eventually made seem too forced! Jim, sorry I keep making you write special code. Hopefully you enjoyed solving the puzzle, at least!

Ripped from the headlines

2010-05-16T16:54:00.004-04:00

I have a self-serving way of justifying Law & Order marathons: it's called "watching in aggregate," in which I argue that you only understand Law & Order when you know the rules of the game (the wisecrack, the false lead, the changeover to Law from Order, the twist) and can be sensitive to how slight variations in the formula teach you something about narrative. As a show that was designed to be formulaic so it could be played out of order, Law & Order has never really been about Law or Order, but about television syndication itself.

So it's fitting, perhaps, that it ends before setting the record for longest-running television drama?

That claim for its self-reflexivity isn't a stretch: after the Jerry Orbach years, the show changed course slightly to really take seriously its role as mediating New York tabloid (and national) news stories. If it hadn't been one before, the show became a way to dramatize other stories and show how other forms of media (newspaper stories, tabloid scandals, Internet memes, reality television) can be formulaic and then remixed into the chung-chung formula.

Just tally up the episodes from recent seasons that were about some form of media: it increased dramatically over the past few years (where they were then rebroadcast on TNT because they know drama). The early and middle years have Orbach, but I'm struck by how the show became about how its characters consumed media and made sense of information on the Internet and in the tabloid news cycles. (There was a wry moment the other night when a vain Octomom duel couldn't be settled in court, so McCoy noted that it would instead mediated--in multiple senses--on a reality show, with former DA Arthur Branch "presiding" over the spectacle.)

The peak of that self-reflexivity (and perhaps self-seriousness) was the episode that started as a riff on the NY Times expose of teenage runaways who are exploited by magazine subscription sales scams and turned into ADA Jack McCoy's moment to expose the inhumanity of the Walter Reed veterans hospital tragedy, which was based on a Washington Post series of exposes.

In honor of the fallen show, here's a section of a great Harper's essay by Edward Conlon, "Flatfoot Agonistes: Inside the Police-Entertainment Complex", about his experience writing a crime novel based on his police work:

In non-fiction--for me at least--the more ridiculous the incident the better: outlandish characters, dubious coincidences, freaks of all kinds were welcome. Fact-checking wasn’t a problem: I’d been cross-examined in federal court about my book, on the page or so about a man I’d arrested for an armed robbery after his fingerprints were found on the cash box. I hadn’t called him by his real name, as the case was still open at the time, but cited it as a too-common circumstance in which tearful testimony trumped forensic science. I’d told the U.S. Attorney about the passage, and he felt we had to alert defense counsel. The question posed on the stand centered on motive--mine, not the robber’s--whether my primary concern was the pursuit of a good story or of a real crime. The metaphysical implications were intriguing what detective doesn’t strive for the jackpot payoff, the feel-better if not feel-good finale? Could I close cases, or refuse to take them, if they struck me as derivative or trite? At any rate, we won a conviction, and a sentence of twenty-five years. Better still, a sale: the defense lawyer asked me to sign his copy of the book.

The courtroom experience of defending my non-fiction didn’t ready me for certain editorial questions, though, in the early drafts of the novel.

“Is this a character piece?”

“Yes,” I answered. In truth, I didn’t know what she meant. It had characters, didn’t it? Now, I understand the term better in comparison with “plot-driven”; my editor was asking whether interior attributes or exterior structures—relationships, narrative conventions—control the action. It was a miniature of the progressive-conservative debate on crime, individual choices versus societal forces, and it was no better resolved.

“How come so many characters have asthma?”

Air pollution? In subsequent drafts, certain asthmatics were wholly cured, others were given ulcers.

“You have a one character find a body in the park, and later on he finds something else there—there’s too much coincidence. It’s a little cute, a little neat.”

“I had a robbery where a woman was robbed on her way to pay the bondsman to bail out her boyfriend, who was in jail for robbery….We had a triple stabbing, with one guy killed. The two guys who survived ran away and grabbed a cab to the hospital. The cab driver was the dead man’s brother, who had no idea about the homicide until later on….”

Marital fidelity and other fictions

2010-05-08T11:09:00.006-04:00

The NY Times ran a profile this week of Carole Mallory, a longtime mistress of Norman Mailer who has just published a memoir. It is full of juicy quotes.

Mailer's seductive line was, according to her, "Take off your panties, I want to experience your soul." She compares herself to Françoise Gilot, the longtime mistress of Pablo Picasso, and argues that she was an artistic and professional force in Mailer's life. On the cheating, with her and plenty of others, she says "Love his acceptance, and I accepted him as a philanderer."

And on Mailer's widow, Ms. Mallory writes that he said "It's not hard to fool someone who loves you and trust you."

Another recent article, which ran on the cover of New York Magazine with the headline "The Half-Hooker Economy", dove deep into the topic of famous and powerful men and their infidelities. It follows a nightclub hostess who was so good at steering trustable women to Tiger Woods's table, probably including herself, that he wrote in an e-mail to her, “I finally found someone I connect with, someone I have never found like this. Not even at home... Fuck. Why didn’t we find each other years ago. We wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

A few more loosely connected points: for years, my wife Kate and I have been giving out copies of a favorite book, Advice To a Young Wife from an Old Mistress. And one of the greatest musical treatments of the topic, this from the wife's point of view, has to be Nina Simone's "The Other Woman".

Finally, not on the topic of infidelity but rather on what makes marriages -- including ones we deeply do not understand -- work, see this NY Times comparison of passages from Laura Bush's recent real memoir to Curtis Sittenfeld's fictional Laura Bush memoir, American Wife:

The psychic who negged me

2010-04-26T18:04:00.002-04:00

A psychic accosted me on the street yesterday, and wow was she persistent. The encounter was a textbook case of cold reading, but it took a weird turn toward Neil Strauss territory when she started negging me--complimenting me only to have those compliments reveal my psychic pain (or whatever):

Psychic: Excuse me, Anne?
AB: (I was about to have tea and figured I had met her having tea before.) No, it's Alice.
Psychic: Of course! Many wonderful things have happened to you lately, right?
AB: Yes?
Psychic: But you feel like every time you take a few steps forward, you take steps back. That always happens to you.
AB: (realizes what's going on) I guess so?
Psychic: It'll keep happening to you. You need to come and see me, here's a card. You're so beautiful, but I sense a darkness there. You wear bright colors to mask the depression, don't you?
AB: I just like red? Thanks, I'm on my way somewhere.
Psychic: When are you going to call me?
AB: I'll think about it.
Psychic: Listen, are you lying to me, or are you fucking lying to yourself?
AB: Thank you, I have to go now.
Psychic: Here, you need a more powerful service. Give me back that card and take this one (which advertises help with anxiety, depression, and "lonliness.")

Random house

2010-04-23T10:58:00.003-04:00

When I give tours of the Candide show, which closes this weekend, I love pointing out the hand-colored Rockwell Kent edition, the first book published by Random House in 1928. In an interview that plays in the gallery, NYPL president Paul LeClerc points out that the Random House icon of a cottage is the house where Candide and co. settle to cultivate their garden at the end of the book. It makes me laugh that this note on the show from the LA Times blog is most impressed with the trivia angle about the icon (thanks to Ross).

Is this, as the good Dr. Pangloss would posit, the best of all possible worlds?

No, perhaps not. But for an ardent fan of philosophy and tracker of trivia, for a few hours in Midtown Manhattan, it came awfully close.

Ashy!!! Wheezy, Sneezy, and Freezy; Slippy, Drippy, and Nippy; Showery, Flowery, and Bowery; Wheaty, Heaty, and Sweety

2010-04-19T23:27:00.004-04:00

In 1793, the Laki fissure in Iceland disrupted weather all over the globe, leading to crop shortages and flooding--some environmental historians have linked these disruptions to the onset of the French Revolution (thanks to Patrick for the link):

The British naturalist Gilbert White described that summer in his classic Natural History of Selborne as "an amazing and portentous one … the peculiar haze, or smokey fog, that prevailed for many weeks in this island, and in every part of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man.

"The sun, at noon, looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured ferruginous light on the ground, and floors of rooms; but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting. At the same time the heat was so intense that butchers' meat could hardly be eaten on the day after it was killed; and the flies swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that they rendered the horses half frantic … the country people began to look with a superstitious awe, at the red, louring aspect of the sun."

So how would such an eight-month weather disruption fit into the French Republican calendar, where the months were renamed for their weather? The Wikipedia page about the calendar is one of my favorites, and it provides some excellent grids for the months and days, plus Basque translations:

# Fall
* Vendémiaire in French (from Latin vindemia, "grape harvest") / Nabaxte in Basque. Starting 22, 23 or 24 September
* Brumaire (from French brume, "fog") / Lanhote. Starting 22, 23 or 24 October
* Frimaire (From French frimas, "frost") / Içotze. Starting 21, 22 or 23 November

# Winter:

* Nivôse (from Latin nivosus, "snowy") / Elhurcor. Starting 21, 22 or 23 December
* Pluviôse (from Latin pluvius, "rainy") / Eoüricor. Starting 20, 21 or 22 January
* Ventôse (from Latin ventosus, "windy") / Aycecor. Starting 19, 20 or 21 February

# Spring:

* Germinal (from Latin germen, "germination") / Sapadun. Starting 20 or 21 March
* Floréal (from Latin flos, "flower") / Lilidun. Starting 20 or 21 April
* Prairial (from French prairie, "pasture") / Belhardun. Starting 20 or 21 May

# Summer:

* Messidor (from Latin messis, "harvest") / Bihilis. Starting 19 or 20 June
* Thermidor (or Fervidor) (from Greek thermon, "summer heat") / Berolis. Starting 19 or 20 July
* Fructidor (from Latin fructus, "fruit") / Frutilis. Starting 18 or 19 August

Thomas Carlyle had a slightly less mocking English translation: Vintagearious, Fogarious, Frostarious, Snowous, Rainous, Windous, Buddal, Floweral, Meadowal, Reapidor, Heatidor, and Fruitidor.

Yesterday on the calendar was apparently Myrtille, blueberry day; today is Greffoir, knife day.

Cyanide in strawberry

2010-04-12T23:42:00.005-04:00

An unlikely line of questioning in Christine Kenneally's review of Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks, in which her non-methodical method of distributing ideas, lists, and half-formed thoughts in multiple notebooks:

How on earth did Christie draw her perfectly tensioned structures from this formless mess? Did she manage it because, as the notebooks show, she was initially open to everything and considered the situation from every angle? Evidence of the breadth of Christie's imagination can also be found in the tantalizing trails she left that never went anywhere. Curran tracks motifs and ideas that crop up again and again over many years but that were never realized in her published books. Imagine what Christie would have done with a legless man, infrared photography, identical and nonidentical twins, and a chambermaid? Curran also carefully excavates ingenuous but unused ideas, "Nitro-benzene—point is—it sinks to bottom of glass—woman takes sip from it—then gives it to husband." He unearths diverse fragments, such as the mercifully killed title, "Fiddle de Death," the unpublished play Butter from a Lordly Dish, and the otherwise blank page with the excruciatingly unfinished sentence, "A good idea would be ..."
...
But in this one thing, it seems the Queen of Crime was wrong. Still, if Christie's natural method was to be disorganized, I wish I knew why it troubled her and why she ever thought it could have been different. Why was her prep work so profoundly nonlinear? She distributed thoughts literally all over the place. Is this what it looks like when you wrestle something down that is actually bigger than your own head? Christie's half-dozen active notebooks evoke the modern computer desktop. What would she have made of a Mac, apart from killing someone with it?

This is a comforting, dangerous justification of my own work habits (I know exactly what she'd do with a Mac: she'd rely on the Search function for figuring out what's where in x, y, z false starts that maybe contained something salvageable...).

Ken Follett novel snob

2010-03-29T18:33:00.004-04:00

If you were reading Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth, wouldn't you like to know that there's an incredibly geeky board game based on the book, in which you're responsible for building a cathedral and have to assign your workers to carpentry, masonry, glass-blowing, organ construction, toadying up to tax collectors, seeking favors with the king, and more? And that the characters show up to help or hinder you in your task?

I was very excited to enhance someone's reading experience with this piece of board game knowledge... but she actually sneered at me and said, "I'll take your word for it." OK! It was the exact opposite reaction I'd expect to get from someone reading a Ken Follett novel; it's not like I recommended The Eye of the Needle board game, amazing as that could potentially be. Actually, Pillars of the Earth is possibly a little too involved for me, although perhaps it may take me a few more rounds of play to get a sense of strategy.

Lobo of London

2010-02-28T21:13:00.004-05:00

My hometown team, the New Mexico Lobos, beat Brigham Young on Saturday night 83-81 for their 27th win (6-0 against ranked teams). Reading the recap of the game, I learned that there's an ESPN commenter named LoboofLondon. Fantastic.

Is that a luge sled or a giant squid?

2010-02-25T15:40:00.004-05:00

A stunning animation of the history of Olympics pictograms (thanks to Alicia, who worked on the project at the NY Times).

The 1968 Mexico City Olympics psychedelia is intense; its more enduring symbol is intense in a very different way.

Remembering George Leonard

2010-02-23T20:05:00.000-05:00

My father remembers a good friend and colleague, who, like him, identified strongly with the Southern liberal tradition:

George Leonard -- 1923-2010

Just after New Year's last month, Esalen lost one of the giants of our first 50 years as a catalyst for transformation in American and world culture. George Leonard first met Michael Murphy in 1965, an encounter he often said “changed his life.”...

That change came at the exact midpoint of George's long life: he was 43 in 1965; 86 when he died last month, surrounded by a whole pilgrimage of family and friends... Naturally much of the focus has been on the second half of George's eventful life -- “our” half. But the first half, what we might call the “pre-Esalen days,” is very much worth attention too. As a fellow Southerner, I've always been attuned to George's roots and core influences, which I share, deep in what we might call the “Southern dissident tradition” -- a rich if lesser-known legacy of liberal progressive humanism which was always there, running under and alongside the dominant strains of White Southern culture, at times bursting into the light and sending many key transformational leaders, Black and White, into the larger cultural stream.

George and I often spoke of this shared legacy, which ranged from some of the founders of the nation down through the Southern Abolitionists, into the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th Century and on to today. George Washington was an ambivalent figure in this tradition, selling property toward the end of his life in order to fund the terms of a last, secret will, under which all his slaves were to be emancipated. Jefferson's discomfort and contradictions and open family entanglements with slavery are now well-known. Andrew Johnson was another -- Lincoln's hapless Southern Vice-President who struggled to carry out Lincoln's intended legacy of both healing and Reconstruction (and was rewarded for his efforts with the nation's first impeachment trial of a sitting President, which he survived by one vote). Moving to the 20th Century, we spoke of Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson, both of them white Southern farm boys, with roots in the great economically disenfranchised class -- black and white -- that they grew up seeing all around them, and never lost sight of as the united beneficiaries of progressive reform. Together they then led the most sweeping Civil Rights legislation since Emancipation.

As one of the pioneering journalists of the Civil Rights Movement of the 50's and 60's, George was very mindful of the reach and influence of Southern progressives through journalism into the hearts and consciousness of Americans. Hodding Carter and his opposition to Japanese internment in WWII as well as the outrageous racial injustice all around him, Ralph McGill and the Atlanta Constitution, Ronnie Dugger and the Texas Observer, Willie Morris and others, right down to one of our personal favorites, the late lamented Molly Ivins, who we agreed made “bush-whacking” into an art form. George was a proud player on this Southern team, with his early feature coverage of the renascent Civil Rights Movement for Look (the largest of the photojournalism magazines, in an era when the rich documentary text and imagery on current events affected the national consciousness, often in a deeper, more thoughtful way than some of today's fleeting bombardment of web and tv coverage). And of course along the way he was also the first to take an early pulse of the 60's generation and find that it was very different indeed from “PTSD” trance of the post-War, Eisenhower, red-menace years. Which is what led him to Esalen, where, as they say, the rest is history.
...
A treasured memory of mine is a conversation with him about the figure of Atticus Finch, anti-racist hero of Harper Lee's (and Truman Capote's) To Kill a Mockingbird, and George's interest in my Texas small-town liberal lawyer grandfather and the crusade against the resurgent Ku Klux Klan in the South of the 1920's, which George remembered from his own childhood.

If you grew up in the apartheid South of the Jim Crow era, as George and I both did, 20 years apart, then you grew up in a world of separate drinking fountains, separate restrooms (if there were any restrooms for “Colored”), a world where your relations with Black people were intimate, if stratified by a feudal class system. A world where as a child you could see a man you knew well personally, knew to be kind and honorable and intelligent, be humiliated (or worse) publicly with impugnity by any White citizen who happened to be a bad man, or even just in a bad mood. A world where a woman you knew personally to be the absolute backbone of several extended families, Black and White, could be worked into her 70's or 80's and then simply left to fend for herself, in illness or poverty. A world where your Sunday School teacher might go out of his way to impress racist doctrine on you; and yet some other family, not notably politically conscious or activist, might reach out across and against all this, to act like -- well, like real Christians, in the best, truest sense.

And you couldn't -- at least some of us couldn't -- then forget this, any of it. Not the amazing human capacity for blindness, injustice, dissociation of one part of ourselves from another, and cruelty based on greed and fear; and not the equally amazing human capacity for love, for new beginnings, for creative invention and progress.
...
This was an after-dinner wedding toast, the lead toast since he'd “given away the bride” -- but George delivered it in what first mocked, then played off, and then was an all-fire southern sermon (a form that crosses the Black-White cultural divide in the South). Soon other guests, especially the Southerners, were calling out “A-men, brother,” to great applause, and the toasts were off to a rousing start. So fervid did the praises of love and marriage grow after that that Jungian writer James Hillman felt impelled to rise, with mock severity, and start by chiding, to great laughter, “As an elderly psychoanalyst, I feel that a voice must be raised here for the Reality Principle…” and went on to detail what marriage really means (commitment -- as in “one person stays with the luggage at the airport, so the other person can go to the toilet.” Or “One person unloads the dishwasher, and the other person loads it -- and they always do it wrong…” and more in that deadpan vein. It was a great evening, and as I remember it now, and remember George's vivid, one-of-a-kind presence and spirit, the screen goes blurry, and I have to take off my glasses and wipe my eyes.
...
Rest in Peace, George. Or rather, relax into that special creative restlessness that characterized your whole life, and keep sending us the fruits and sparks of your transformational vision, from wherever you roam. As the Bard put in the mouth of his fullest, most self-identified character: “We shall not see his like again.”

I second all of this -- George had the rare ability to remind everyone around him of what was important in life.

Vertiginous, haunting

2010-02-23T16:20:00.005-05:00

On the day after Thanksgiving I listened to Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" over and over and over again, until I couldn't hear. Can't really say why. There was some scarf-tossing and -swirling involved.

"The Only Three Female Musicians, According to Many Male Music Critics" (from The Awl) is a very funny pastiche of rock music criticism in which any lady singer gets compared to Kate Bush, Bjork, or Tori Amos:

I can only base my review on the handful of visual and sonic reveries I’ve had of it, including a long stare at its cover and other related photos of Newsom. On the cover, Newsom is accompanied by objects that Björk’s husband Matthew Barney might have considered using in an art installation when he was in college, except imagine if Tori Amos was the curator of that exhibit and insisted that things be a little more motherly and a little less terrifying than Barney wanted them to be. Newsom is situated at the center of this veritable props room, ready to draw inspiration from a taxidermied deer the way Barney drew inspiration from je ne sais quoi enough to release five films and a 500-page exhibition catalogue of said quoi. For those unfamiliar with Barney’s work, I will deign to hazard this approximate description of the cover of Have One On Me: Björkesque.

We stick to our thirteens, thanks to the shadow pope

2010-02-19T07:52:00.000-05:00

Dictionary.com offers a Spanish word of the day via e-mail -- you can sign up on their website. It is unusually well-written and -researched.

A recent favorite, explaining an alternative meaning of trece, which normally just means "thirteen":

trece, adjective, noun
not to budge, to stick to your guns

Seguir or mantenerse en sus trece is an idiomatic phrase which means to refuse to change your position on something, for example:
Los dos líderes se mantienen en sus trece
The two leaders are refusing to budge
But why does thirteen come into this expression? The explanation goes back a long way. For a short period in the fourteenth century there were two Popes, one based in Rome and the other in Avignon, in the South of France. Pedro de Luna, a Spaniard from a noble family, was elected Clement XIII, based in Avignon. However, he later lost support, but despite attempts to negotiate by the rival Pope, based in Rome, Clement XIII refused to stand down, and was eventually excommunicated. He insisted to the end of his life that he was the only true Pope, hence the expression.

I love how history gets mixed in when you learn a language; Spain had one of the longest lasting Roman colonies, and it's very Catholic, so its languages have an especially large number of echoes of Latin, Rome and the Vatican. And then there are words like ojala, an exclamation that descends from Moorish culture and its cries to Allah.

(Side note --I am glad to see that the press has almost completely adopted the practice of calling the Muslim God just "God" and not "Allah". "Allah" is no different then "Jehovah" or "Yahweh".)

Surprisingly, I can't find an entry that addresses this papal controversy on Wikipedia.

I also like this phrase:

If you’re suspicious about a situation, you might say:

Aquí hay gato encerrado.
There’s something fishy going on (word for word, there’s a cat cooped up in here).

But my favorite foreign saying remains the French:

Tu veux la creme, l'argent de la creme, et la cremiere.
You want to have your cake and eat it too (literally, you want the cream, the money for the cream, and the woman that churns the cream!).