Lord of the Rings / Phases of the Moon II

In his fantasy masterpiece Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkein was in general consistent with real world astronomy when mentioning the phases of the moon. In a previous post A Peculiar Moon in Lord of the Rings I noted a couple of exceptions. Alas, I'm in the middle of rereading it for the zillionth time and found another glitch, this time in volume I, Fellowship of the Ring. This webpage Moon Phases in The Lord of the Rings kindly reproduces the offending passage and also sets out the relevant facts about the phases of the moon, but did not point out the inconsistency.

Above him was a black starry sky. Suddenly a pale light appeared over the crown of Weathertop behind him. The waxing moon was climbing slowly above the hill that overshadowed them, and the stars above the hill-top faded. ... ‘Look!’ said Merry. ‘The Moon is rising: it must be getting late.’

However, a waxing moon rises during the daylight hours, not at night!
Oddly enough, just a few pages earlier, while describing events taking place two nights previously, Tolkein mentioned the phase of moon accurately. “The moon was waxing, and in the early night-hours a cold grey light lay on the land.” That is correct: a waxing moon rises during the daylight hours and in the early night-hours it is still above the horizon.

Here's a speculative attempt to figure out in some detail the state of the moon the day of the incident at Weathertop - October 6 S.R. 1418. In appendix D, it says the our New Year's Day corresponds more or less to the Shire January 9. That means that the full moon - which they saw on January 8th S.R. 1419 when the Company reached Hollin - would correspond to our December 31st. There was a full moon in London on Dec 31, 1933, which can be used as a reference point. https://www.timeanddate.com/moon/phases/uk/london?year=1933

Also our 26th of September is probably a good approximation for October 6 S.R. - the date of the incident at Weathertop.

On September 26, 1933 the moon was half full and waxing https://www.timeanddate.com/moon/uk/london?month=9&year=1933.

6:52 sunrise 26th September
15:39 moonrise
18:51 sunset
22:25 moonset
6:54 sunrise 27th September, the next morning
16:23 moonrise the next afternoon

Daylight savings time was in effect during September in 1933 in England - not sure about Middle Earth on the corresponding date - but the intervals between sunrise/sunset/moonrise/moonset would not be effected.

So by that rationale, the moon would have never been above the horizon during the night of the incident at Weathertop.

Supernatural Horror in Literature by H. P. Lovecraft

Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) by H. P. Lovecraft is a fantastic review, both for its breadth of coverage and the creepy way in which it is written. Here's the first paragraph:

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naively insipid idealism which deprecates the aesthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to uplift the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. But in spite of all this opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness.

I've already acquired several of the classics he mentioned and will read them whenever I next feel the need to be weirded out. His only work of fiction that I recall reading was The Dunwhich Horror which was so creepy that I was never able to bring myself to read anything else by the author, despite my appreciation for the quality of his writing.

Lovecraft in 1934

Richard III

I just finished rereading Alison Weir's great book "The Wars of the Roses". Coincidentally, the article Perimortem trauma in King Richard III: a skeletal analysis recently appeared in the journal The Lancet. In 2012 a skeleton identified as Richard III's was discovered in Leicester, England and exhumed.  I also recommend a chilling 1995 film version of Shakespeare's play starring Ian McKellen set in an imaginary fascist 1930's Britain.

Digital photograph; arrow shows the penetrating injury to the maxilla

Richard III in Better Days

Movie Poster

Bunker Hill

Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution is a 2013 book by Nathaniel Philbrick. It focuses heavily on Joseph Warren, a physician, politician and patriot general killed during the 1775 battle of Bunker Hill. The detailed accounts of the years leading up to and following the battle were quite interesting, especially since I've been a resident of the Boston area for most of my life. The Bunker Hill monument is easily visible from my windows. My favorite quotes from the book were from the loyalist pastor Mather Byles. When asked how he could be a "brainless Tory", Byles replied, "Tell me, which is better, to be ruled by one tyrant 3,000 miles away, or by 3,000 tyrants not a mile away?" He called the sentry stationed outside his house his "Observe-a-Tory". The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker's Hill, June 17,1775 by John Trumbull

Religion and Analytic Thinking

I recently read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman.  He discusses evidence that we might have two quite different thinking mechanisms:  System 1 and System 2.  System 1, is fast, easy, intuitive - we are able to discover patterns and jump to certain conclusions nearly effortlessly.  However System 1 is somewhat error prone.  Consider the following puzzle:

The total cost of a bat and ball is $1.10; the bat costs a dollar more than the ball;  how much does the ball cost? 

 Most people answer this one quickly and alas, incorrectly.  Kahneman attributes this to using System 1.  The correct answer is at the bottom of this post.

System 2 is slower, more difficult, but much less error-prone - systematic, logical thinking as opposed to intuition.

His book provides numerous intriguing examples but is also a bit disheartening - even extremely well-trained people seem to have trouble solving many simple problems.

However, subjects that are prepared for an analytic task in various seemingly trivial ways - for example seeing certain words and pictures which prime them for reasoning systematically - go on to perform significantly better at certain simple but tricky tasks. 

There was a recent paper in Science Magazine, AnalyticThinking Promotes Religious Disbelief

by Will M. Gervais and Ara Norenzayan (April 2012), which applied the methodology discussed in Kahneman's book to see if that could be used to affect a subject's reported religions belief.  In particular, they found that subjects who were primed in ways that are known to promote System 2 thinking did subsequently report higher rates of religious disbelief.

Sample images of The Thinker (left) and Discobolus (right) used in study 2. The images shown here are similar to, but not the exact same ones used in the study. [Source: Wikimedia] 

In the study, subjects who were primed by seeing a picture of The Thinker were more likely to report religious disbelief than subjects that saw a picture of the discus thrower.  There were other experiments in the study which were also seemed to indicate that preparing subjects in ways that promoted System 2 type thinking also affected the rate at which the subjects then reported religious disbelief.

Religious belief is pervasive in human societies - which has always been quite mysterious to me.  Religion usually seems to involve 'faith' to a large degree (which I take to be the belief in something despite very little actual evidence.)  I, however, try to be cautious even when I have quite a lot of evidence.  I know from long and sad experience how easy it's been to fool myself!  It's always nice to have multiple ways to cross-check something, the more the better, and perhaps eventually the evidence gets to be so overwhelming, I might actually starting believing.  Religion doesn't seem to work that way, it's often reported to come upon people suddenly, they are "born-again", they have an ecstatic spiritual experience and a "conversion".

Even when I was very young, six or so,  religious belief didn't seem to make any obvious sense, yet it was very pervasive when I was growing up, so I was always quite curious as to what was actually going on.  The first thing I remember seriously reading on the subject was The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James.  It's been quite a while:  my impression was that while James was a very good writer, unfortunately I didn't really come away with much insight as to why religious belief was so common.

A few years ago there was a spate of books purporting to study religion "scientifically."  For example, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett  and The God Delusion  by biologist Richard Dawkins.  I had found other books by the same authors quite fascinating, but not these two.  They seemed to be mainly hatchet jobs on religion by committed atheists with little to no real scientific content.  

So this recent paper in Science was a pleasant surprise, it seems to be a serious attempt to study some aspects of religious belief experimentally.  


By the way, if you're interested in the subtleties of interpreting these types of experiments see this blog post by Samantha Bernecker about the paper.  

The correct answer to the bat and ball puzzle is 5 cents - however, the most common answer given is 10 cents. 

A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

A Labyrinth of Kingdoms: 10,000 Miles through Islamic Africa by Steve Kemper is a biography of the African explorer Heinrich Barth (1821–1865) one of the first Europeans to visit the fabled city Timbuktu in Mali. Though not completely free of the prejudices typical of his time, he treated the African people he encountered in his travels as individuals, recorded their names, their languages and histories and was fascinated by their cultures and way of life.  He respected and appreciated the highly developed civilizations he found in Africa - we should too.  They had their problems of course, but also impressive achievements.  A great adventure story!

Barth approaching Timbuktu

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Writing a satisfying sequel can't be easy. However George R. R. Martin managed to do it for me three times - the first three sequels to Game of Thrones were all excellent. But alas, the most recent installment in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, A Dance with Dragons, fell completely flat. Martin did have very plausible extenuating circumstances - he was involved with the production of the HBO series of Game of Thrones, which was very well received.
Wolf Hall was the prize winning historical novel by Hilary Mantel, a story set in the time of Henry VIII, which featured his very able functionary/henchman Thomas Cromwell. Wolf Hall brought us through the events of Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn, ending portentously just prior to Henry's arrival at Wolf Hall, the home of the Seymour family and Jane, the next "winner" in Henry's ongoing wedding lottery.

Her next book Bring Up the Bodies covers the rest of Henry's calamitous marriage to Anne and his growing infatuation with Jane Seymour. Despite the high drama of the actual historical events, fodder for innumerable retellings historical and dramatic (I remember enjoying the film Anne of a Thousand Days long, long ago - it was panned by the critics, but I was young then and probably easier pleased than I would be today) Bring Up the Bodies was surprisingly unengaging. Perhaps it was because the focal character - Thomas Cromwell - was himself in a reasonably secure position during that period, so it lacked the propulsive forces of vulnerability and peril that, though I probably should be ashamed to admit it, usually work well enough for me. To be fair, Mantel is a very witty writer and flashes of that do appear in this book, though not as often as in the first one. Mantel is projecting a trilogy, and if we cheat and look ahead in the history books, Thomas Cromwell's further career ends up parlous indeed - so I will definitely give the author another chance when it comes out!

Walter Lewin at ESG

I had the pleasure of lunch today at MIT's Experimental Study Group (ESG). The special guest was Walter Lewin a retired MIT astrophysicist known for his popular online physics courses.
Professor Lewin is 76 but he still has a very sharp wit, however the MIT undergraduates were no slouches either.
He was asked, "What do you tell a student who doesn't like physics?"
"Well, I can tell you that they had a lousy teacher. That's the only possible reason. I can make anyone like physics. I can make a dog like physics."
Laughter from the students.
After being peppered with questions from the students for a half or hour or more, he was asked, "Do you have a favorite area of physics?"
"No."
"A least favorite area of physics?"
"Thermodynamics, I hate it"
"Did you have a lousy teacher?"
Everyone laughed including Professor Lewin.

Professor Lewin has a new book out For the Love of Physics.

Ben Franklin Biography

I just finished Walter Issacson's highly entertaining biography of Benjamin Franklin.

One month before his death at age 85, Franklin - who had suffered poor health for several years and knew he did not have long to live - wrote about his religious beliefs with his usual good humor:

As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw, or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes, and I have with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his Divinity: tho' it is a Question I do not dogmatise upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble

Hedy Lamarr - Screen Siren and Inventor

"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."

Hedy Lamarr was a glamorous Hollywood actress and the inventor of frequency hopping, the basic technique used in wireless communication. Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World is a new book by Richard Rhodes the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. The new book is reviewed in Slate: The Inventor in Hollywood; in Nature: Technology: Inventing beauty.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

At the moment I'm in Kota Kinabula, Malaysia on the island of Borneo.  Earlier this afternoon I wandered into a little bookstore near my hotel, browsed through the classics section and idly picked up a copy of  The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe, which is often credited as one of the earliest detective stories.  I just read it.  If you, dear detective, browse back a few posts in this blog, you may be able to perceive a tiny bit of a correlation between that story and my own recent activities.  The correlation was not premeditated:   I'm not sure if I've actually read Poe's story before, - but if I did, it was long ago and I definitely didn't remember the pertinent coincidence, because I was amusing myself by trying to figure out the mystery as the story went along. 

À rebours

I recently stumbled upon the "decadent" 1884 novel À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans - a character in the book collects Redon paintings (see also my previous post). 

The illustrations by Arthur Zaidenberg are scanned from the 1931 Illustrated Editions issue of A Rebours.

The protagonist has gemstones set in the back of a tortoise, which causes its death.

Shakespearean Titles

Many literary works derived their titles from passages in Shakespeare, e.g. Brave New World, The Sound and the Fury.
Another one of my favorites is the poem/novel Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov.

The moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.
       Timon of Athens

Once I got caught in a strange web created by Nabokov and another author which involved the following lines from Pale Fire:

Space is a swarming in the eyes,
and Time a singing in the ears

 I was reading the Nabokov novel Ada.  In Ada Nabokov mentioned the lines above as quoted by "the invented philosopher Martin Gardiner".  I thought I was hallucinating, since coincidentally I was also in the middle of reading a popular science book The Ambidextrous Universe with a nearly identical author -  Martin Gardner.  Fortunately it happened to be the second edition of the Ambidextrous Universe, which, when I read further, provided the explanation.  Nabokov's misspelling of Gardner's name was probably deliberate!

By the way, it probably wouldn't be too surprising if even a humble blog might have had the nerve to derive its title from a well-known passage in Shakespeare.

Two Plays by Tom Stoppard

I just reread The Real Inspector Hound and After Magritte, two plays by Tom Stoppard.  The Real Inspector Hound, a parody of the "murder at the stately English country home" genre, is much the better.  But my favorite exchange was in After Magritte:

THELMA:  ... All I can say is I'll be glad when it's all over and things are back to normal.  It's making you short-tempered and argumentative.  You contradict everything I say --
HARRIS: (heatedly)  That I deny --

What if, instead of contradicting her, Harris had agreed with Thelma and said "You're right"? 

Stoppard has worked on film scripts as well as theater.  The dystopian film Brazil, directed by Terry Gilliam, is one of my favorites.  I didn't realize that he also contributed much of the dialog for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, a Steven Spielberg film that I also enjoyed.

This (substantive) modification of Stoppard's dialog has bothered me:

ALICE:  You contradict everything I say.
BOB:  You're right.

I considered whether this might be some variant of the Liar Paradox similar to:

The next sentence is false.
The previous sentence is true.

That really is a logical paradox:  try to make the first sentence true - it doesn't work;  try to make the first sentence false - it doesn't work either.

But there's really no logical problem with Alice and Bob.  Alice's statement is false and so is Bob's.  Bob's response falsifies Alice's previous statement.  Bob proves Alice wrong by agreeing with her.  However since Bob proved Alice wrong, in a certain sense he actually did contradict her.   Which would seem to make Alice's statement true (or at least it could be true - assuming all of Bob's other statements also contradicted her).  But didn't I just say it was false?  Still it isn't really a paradox in pure logic.  Is it?

While we're at it, let's take a look at this stripped-down version of Stoppard's original Thelma and Harris exchange:

THELMA: You contradict everything I say.
HARRIS: That I deny.

Thelma's statement could be true (at least when Harris contradicts her in all other cases - let's go ahead assume that).  The Harris statement denies what Thelma just said, that denial counts as a contradiction (I suppose) and so the Harris statement is consistent with the meaning of Thelma's assertion.  Hence, the Harris statement supports Thelma's assertion.  Then given that we're assuming Harris otherwise contradicts Thelma, Thelma's statement must be true.  On the other hand, Thelma asserts that Harris contradicts everything she says and Harris' subsequent statement supports that.  If Harris' statement supports Thelma's statement, it can hardly be contradicting her.  So Thelma's statment must be false.  But didn't I just say Thelma's statement must be true?  Oops. 

What do you think?  But please, don't contradict everything I say.

 
"if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."
--- Tweedledee in Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll.

A Peculiar Moon in Lord of the Rings

Lord of the Rings, the fantasy trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkein, takes place in Middle Earth, which has a different geography than our Earth, some different humanoids (Elves, Dwarfs, Hobbits) walking/talking trees (Ents) etc. But the weather, the vegetation and the animal life are mostly similar to ours. In particular, the sun, the moon and the stars seem pretty much the same. The characters are often out and about by night, so the phase and position of the moon is often mentioned. In one scene, however, the moon behaves a bit strangely.

In The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 4, Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbits, in the first page of that chapter, "The moon was now three nights from the full, but it did not climb over the mountains until nearly midnight, and the early night was very dark." The mountains are to the east of their location, which would block the early rising moon. Does "three nights from the full" mean the moon is waxing and it is three days before it will be full - or does it mean the moon is waning and it is three days after the full moon? I intuitively interpreted that as the first case: the moon is waxing, it's before the full moon. In Moon Phases in The Lord of the Rings there's an impressively detailed accounting which agrees with that interpretation. But when the moon is waxing, it will typically reach its highest point in the sky before midnight. This really only depends on the fact that the moon is illuminated by light reflected from the sun. In much of the rest of Tolkein, the moon does behave quite normally, for example: "If the Moon gave enough light, we would use it, but alas he sets early and is yet young and pale".

Here's another loony scene however. In the chapter In the house of tom bombadil: "In the dead night, Frodo lay in a dream without light. Then he saw the young moon rising;". Dreams are notoriously full of nonsense, so I guess we can't hold Tolkein responsible for unfortunate lunar behaviour in the bad dream of a little guy with hairy toes.

In societies without widespread artificial lighting, most people were very conscious of the phases of the moon. Today however, this is far from true. Mention the easily observed fact that the full moon typically rises around the same time as the sunset and then sets around sunrise and the expression on people's faces will all too often plainly reveal that this is news to them.

The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem

I'm in the middle of rereading one of my favorite collections of tales, "The Cyberiad" by Stanislaw Lem, translation by Michael Kandel. Originally in Polish, the English version is filled with delightful word play and whimsy.
"He who has had, has been, but he who hasn't been, has been had"

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is a paranoid science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick.

Scrutinizing him, she said, 'Maybe your're not a celebrity; maybe I've reverted back to my delusional period. They said I probably would, sometime. Sooner or later. Maybe it's later now.'
'That,' he pointed out, 'would make me a hallucination of yours. Try harder; I don't feel completely real.'
She laughed.

The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep is a detective novel by Raymond Chandler.

"You know what Canino will do? Beat my teeth out and kick me in the stomach for mumbling."

See The Simple of Art of Murder for a previous post about Raymond Chandler.

A Simple Heart

A Simple Heart is a story by Gustave Flaubert, it's one of my favorites. Sad, funny, droll - a person, place and time that has no particular intrinsic interest but despite that (or perhaps because of it) a great story.

Newton and the Counterfeiter

Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist a book by Thomas Levenson is about Isaac Newton and William Chaloner a notorious counterfeiter that Newton prosecuted when he was Warden of the Royal Mint.
While Newton was perhaps the greatest scientific genius of all time, and even a very competent functionary - as detailed in this book - he was strictly mortal in the realm of financial investments. He lost a fortune in the South Sea Bubble of 1720 which rankled him greatly, admitting "that he could not calculate the madness of the people."