Samuel Johnson's A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland in Google Earth

Here it is, finally, after talking about it so much. I've mapped Samuel Johnson's A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland in Google Earth. You can download it either as a KMZ or as a KML file. The KML file is much smaller, but it will load more slowly since the images it uses are online rather than embedded in the file. I recommend using the KMZ file.

• Journey.kmz
• Journey.kml

I welcome corrections and additions, especially with regards to the identification of places and landmarks, so long as a rationale is given. I'm no historian, but I would like to make this thing accurate.

Chesterton in London

My wife and I recently had the pleasure of visiting London a couple months ago.  I am a huge G.K. Chesterton fan (note the title of my blog), who was a lifelong Londoner, so I thought it would be fun to see a few things around London mentioned in Chesterton's books.  I think the idea started with me wondering what Leicester Square looked like after reading The Man Who Was Thursday, in which a secret society of anarchists meets publicly on a balcony overlooking it.  I chose three things to find in London: balconies in Leicester Square, The Mask of Memnon and the top of St. Paul's Cathedral, and I happy to say that we managed to see and get pictures of all three in and amongst all the sights and locations we saw in London.

Chesterton, of course, loved paradox both as a rhetorical tool and a plot device, thus we read of Gregory, the anarchist explaining his society's actions as follows: 

I'd better tell you that he is carrying out his notion of concealing ourselves by not concealing ourselves to the most extraordinary lengths just now. Originally, of course, we met in a cell underground, just as your branch does. Then Sunday made us take a private room at an ordinary restaurant. He said that if you didn't seem to be hiding nobody hunted you out. Well, he is the only man on earth, I know; but sometimes I really think that his huge brain is going a little mad in its old age. For now we flaunt ourselves before the public. We have our breakfast on a balcony--on a balcony, if you please--overlooking Leicester Square."

"And what do the people say?" asked Syme.

"It's quite simple what they say," answered his guide.

"They say we are a lot of jolly gentlemen who pretend they are anarchists."

"It seems to me a very clever idea," said Syme.

"Clever! God blast your impudence! Clever!" cried out the other in a sudden, shrill voice which was as startling and discordant as his crooked smile. "When you've seen Sunday for a split second you'll leave off calling him clever."

With this they emerged out of a narrow street, and saw the early sunlight filling Leicester Square. It will never be known, I suppose, why this square itself should look so alien and in some ways so continental. It will never be known whether it was the foreign look that attracted the foreigners or the foreigners who gave it the foreign look. But on this particular morning the effect seemed singularly bright and clear. Between the open square and the sunlit leaves and the statue and the Saracenic outlines of the Alhambra, it looked the replica of some French or even Spanish public place. And this effect increased in Syme the sensation, which in many shapes he had had through the whole adventure, the eerie sensation of having strayed into a new world. As a fact, he had bought bad cigars round Leicester Square ever since he was a boy. But as he turned that corner, and saw the trees and the Moorish cupolas, he could have sworn that he was turning into an unknown Place de something or other in some foreign town.

At one corner of the square there projected a kind of angle of a prosperous but quiet hotel, the bulk of which belonged to a street behind. In the wall there was one large French window, probably the window of a large coffee-room; and outside this window, almost literally overhanging the square, was a formidably buttressed balcony, big enough to contain a dining-table. In fact, it did contain a dining-table, or more strictly a breakfast-table; and round the breakfast-table, glowing in the sunlight and evident to the street, were a group of noisy and talkative men, all dressed in the insolence of fashion, with white waistcoats and expensive button-holes. Some of their jokes could almost be heard across the square. Then the grave Secretary gave his unnatural smile, and Syme knew that this boisterous breakfast party was the secret conclave of the European Dynamiters.

We passed through Leicester Square in between our visit to Westerminster Abbey and the National Art Gallery.  It is indeed a very public place, now being the center of London's theatrical activity.  There we found a likely inspiration for the location of the anarchist's public meeting in The Queen's House.

It stands at the northeast corner of the square. Of several balconies overlooking the square, this is the only one old enough to be around at the turn of the century, large enough to hold a dining table for seven, and buttressed enough to be called "formidably buttressed". It also happens to face southward, so the morning sun does shine on it. It doesn't match Chesterton's description exactly, though, since there are four French doors rather than one. Perhaps the balcony on the first floor was a later edition. Or perhaps Chesterton didn't intend for his balcony to match any real location exactly.

The passage in The Man Who Was Thursday goes on to describe the horrifying presence of Sunday, ending with Syme seeing his face for the first time:

The form it took was a childish and yet hateful fancy. As he walked across the inner room towards the balcony, the large face of Sunday grew larger and larger; and Syme was gripped with a fear that when he was quite close the face would be too big to be possible, and that he would scream aloud. He remembered that as a child he would not look at the mask of Memnon in the British Museum, because it was a face, and so large.

As near as I can tell, the "mask of Memnon" to which Chesterton was referring is a colossal bust of Ramses II which was at one time named The Younger Memnon. Accoring to Greek myth, Memnon was a king of Ethiopia. The Greeks named quite a few things they around Thebes after him, including the Memnonium, two statues, and The Younger Memnon, which was one of the first colossal Egyptian artifacts taken to the British Museum, and apparently quite famous in its time. It wasn't the only colossal likeness of a pharaoh housed in the British Museum in Chesterton's time, but so long as Chesterton didn't confuse it with another similar statue, then this is the one.  Here's a picture I took:

It isn't difficult to imagine a child with Chesterton's active imagination being frightened by this face staring down at them.

Perhaps the most memorable of all of Chesterton's London references is at the opening of The Ball and The Cross, where the monk Michael is stranded on the cross at the top of St. Paul's Cathedral by a mad scientist suggestively named Lucifier after they argue about philosophy, as so many of Chesterton's characters do:

Father Michael in spite of his years, and in spite of his asceticism (or because of it, for all I know), was a very healthy and happy old gentleman. And as he swung on a bar above the sickening emptiness of air, he realized, with that sort of dead detachment which belongs to the brains of those in peril, the deathless and hopeless contradiction which is involved in the mere idea of courage. He was a happy and healthy old gentleman and therefore he was quite careless about it. And he felt as every man feels in the taut moment of such terror that his chief danger was terror itself; his only possible strength would be a coolness amounting to carelessness, a carelessness amounting almost to a suicidal swagger. His one wild chance of coming out safely would be in not too desperately desiring to be safe. There might be footholds down that awful facade, if only he could not care whether they were footholds or no. If he were foolhardy he might escape; if he were wise he would stop where he was till he dropped from the cross like a stone. And this antinomy kept on repeating itself in his mind, a contradiction as large and staring as the immense contradiction of the Cross; he remembered having often heard the words, "Whosoever shall lose his life the same shall save it." He remembered with a sort of strange pity that this had always been made to mean that whoever lost his physical life should save his spiritual life. Now he knew the truth that is known to all fighters, and hunters, and climbers of cliffs. He knew that even his animal life could only be saved by a considerable readiness to lose it.

Some will think it improbable that a human soul swinging desperately in mid-air should think about philosophical inconsistencies. But such extreme states are dangerous things to dogmatize about. Frequently they produce a certain useless and joyless activity of the mere intellect, thought not only divorced from hope but even from desire. And if it is impossible to dogmatize about such states, it is still more impossible to describe them. To this spasm of sanity and clarity in Michael's mind succeeded a spasm of the elemental terror; the terror of the animal in us which regards the whole universe as its enemy; which, when it is victorious, has no pity, and so, when it is defeated has no imaginable hope. Of that ten minutes of terror it is not possible to speak in human words. But then again in that damnable darkness there began to grow a strange dawn as of grey and pale silver. And of this ultimate resignation or certainty it is even less possible to write; it is something stranger
than hell itself; it is perhaps the last of the secrets of God. At the highest crisis of some incurable anguish there will suddenly fall upon the man the stillness of an insane contentment. It is not hope, for hope is broken and romantic and concerned
with the future; this is complete and of the present. It is not faith, for faith by its very nature is fierce, and as it were at once doubtful and defiant; but this is simply a satisfaction. It is not knowledge, for the intellect seems to have no particular part
in it. Nor is it (as the modern idiots would certainly say it is) a mere numbness or negative paralysis of the powers of grief. It is not negative in the least; it is as positive as good news. In some sense, indeed, it is good news. It seems almost as if there were some equality among things, some balance in all possible contingencies which we are not permitted to know lest we should learn indifference to good and evil, but which is sometimes shown to us for an instant as a last aid in our last agony.

Michael certainly could not have given any sort of rational account of this vast unmeaning satisfaction which soaked through him and filled him to the brim. He felt with a sort of half-witted lucidity that the cross was there, and the ball was there, and the dome was there, that he was going to climb down from them, and that he did not mind in the least whether he was killed or not. This mysterious mood lasted long enough to start him on his dreadful descent and to force him to continue it. But six times before he reached the highest of the outer galleries terror had returned on him like a flying storm of darkness and thunder. By the time he had reached that place of safety he almost felt (as in some impossible fit of drunkenness) that he had two heads; one was calm, careless, and efficient; the other saw the danger like a deadly map, was wise, careful, and useless. He had fancied that he would have to let himself vertically down the face of the whole building. When he dropped into the upper gallery he still felt as far from the terrestrial globe as if he had only dropped from the sun to the moon.

The upper gallery of which Chesterton writes is the Golden Gallery, which is behind the iron railing just above the dome, as can be seen in this picture:

Currently, anyone can climb the five hundred-odd stairs up to it on paying admission to St. Paul's. The view of London from the gallery is well worth the climb (and makes going to St. Paul's an excellent alternative to the painfully expensive London Eye), and the vertigo induced by looking up to the top from up close makes reading about Michael's descent even more exciting. After close inspection I'm not sure that Michael could have found a foothold between the rim immediately below the cupola and the gallery, since it overhangs the stonework beneath it so much, but if he didn't, he would have had to have made his finally drop about twenty feet directly onto the gallery floor, which would seem almost impossible for an old man to do without breaking something. Perhaps Chesterton was aware of this, or perhaps not. I wonder if he had even climbed to the top of St. Paul's when he wrote this. Chesterton was dangerously overweight for much of his life, so I wouldn't be surprised if he was not eager to climb such a large number of stairs. The picture below is of my wife standing on the Golden Gallery. It kind of almost shows what it's like to look upward to the top.

Judgments and Judgment

I often read Scott Adams blog. A lot of his ideas are just crazy, but every once in a while he makes an observation I totally agree with. In a recent post he mentions that kids decide what they want to be when they grow up based on the few careers they are aware of, without any knowledge of the thousands of occupations that are out there. It's so true, but it's so rarely mentioned by anyone. But I do take issue with Adams saying that a person must believe another person's judgment is inferior if they do not believe in the same religion. I would have posted a comment on his blog, but it already had over 200 comments by the time I read the post, so what's the point?

When Adams' uses the word "judgment", he isn't talking about a particular instance of a person making a judgment, rather a person's general ability to discern truth and falsehood. It might be called intelligence, reason or rationality as well. His concept of judgment is missing something important: the fact that rational judgments are made on the basis of the information a person has available to them. It may be rational for me to think that Christianity is true after reading the likes of C.S. Lewis and N.T. Wright. I can't avoid the conclusion that Christian morality works in practice, after seeing it practiced consistently by much of my friends and family. But I wouldn't expect a person whose only knowledge of Christianity comes from watching snippets of televangelists' preaching, and who has never seen anyone practice what Jesus or Paul taught, to believe Christianity any more than any other ideology they know practically nothing about.

Many of our judgments of fact are based on probability, inductive reasoning, memory, and testimony; none of which are infallible. So, in principle, any of these judgments may be nullified on the basis of new information. Only perfect deductive reasoning from absolutely sure premises avoids this possibility. By way of example, let's consider a person named Jay who is at work and ask ourselves whether a rational person should think Jay ate cereal for breakfast this morning. If all the rational person knows about Jay is that Jay is a live person who eats food, the rational person won't believe anything regarding Jay's current status a person who has eaten cereal for breakfast today. If the rational person knows that Jay is an American, and 49% of Americans eat cereal for breakfast on any given day, they will believe that Jay, as likely as not, ate cereal for breakfast. If the rational person learns from a reliable source that Jay eats cereal every morning for breakfast, they will believe Jay almost certainly ate cereal for breakfast this morning. But if they then find out that Jay is extremely allergic to wheat and the only cereal that Jay encountered this morning was bran flakes, they will believe he did not eat cereal for breakfast this morning, as evidenced by the fact that Jay is at work and not in the ER. Each step of the way, the rational opinion is superseded because of new information.

Good judgments are a function of both "how good [a person is] at determining truth from nonsense" and the information the person has. If it were otherwise, I would have to conclude that Isaac Newton was a crappy scientist for not believing in the Theory of General Relativity. If a politician, or anyone, disagrees with me on religious matters, I can't be obliged to think they are stupid, unless I know their reasoning is flawed. That's my judgment on the matter.

Why Not Adultery?

It occurs to me that each of the 10 commandments can be reformulated as rights, i.e.

1. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

God has the right to the Israelites' primary allegiance and loyalties.


2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God...

God has the exclusive right to be worshipped by the Israelites.


3. Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

God has the right to be treated as sacred; God has the right to his good reputation.


4. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates...

Everyone has the right to a day off, even foreigners. Surprising? I think there's enough material in the rest of the Torah about how workers should be treated that I can fairly believe that this isn't just an odd religious observance done for no practical purpose.


5. Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

Israelite parents have the right to be supported by their children in old age and respected by their children at any age.


6. Thou shalt not kill.

Israelites have the right to life.


7. Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Married Israelites have the right to a faithful spouse (or spouses, as the case may be).


8. Thou shalt not steal.

Israelites have the right to property.


9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

Israelites have the right to a fair trial.


10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.

Once again, Israelites have the right to property, but this right isn't limited to keeping property; a person shouldn't be adversely treated in other ways for owning property. Maybe I'm stretching on this one.

It also occurs to me that we enjoy many of these rights in our own country, today (God enjoys none of his, but that's a natural consequence of freedom of religion). One right that is noticeably absent, at least to me, is the right to a faithful spouse. Adultery is not a crime in the US. Adultery is grounds for divorce, and therefore can be used to establish fault in a divorce, but this results in no penalties if the injured spouse doesn't want a divorce or was married in one of the 15 states where no-fault divorce is the only option. I suppose I can see the practical difficulties in punishing people for adultery, but still, it does give marriage, as a legal institution, a bit of a farcical quality. Think of it: two people get up in front of commonly dozens, if not hundreds of witnesses and swear before God to love each other for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others, and then a legal document is signed by several of the witnesses afterward to attest to this fact. Breaking an oath taken in a court of law will get you jail time. Breaking a cell phone contract can get you a couple hundred dollars in penalties. But breaking this vow, which was made much more ceremoniously, isn't necessarily such a big deal.

I like having a faithful spouse, and I'd like to have a right to her faithfulness. I'm perfectly willing to grant her the right to mine. I expect that most couples are the same way. Really, my wife and I both have a right to each others' faithfulness, just not a legal one. So why is there this particular gap between legal rights and social rights? Why can't a society's laws reflect a society's mores? Maybe they do. Maybe there are enough people out there who are in love with the idea of dressing up in white dresses and tuxedos and spouting romantic-sounding oaths solely as hyperbolic expressions of their warm feelings for each other that the laws really do reflect the mores of a significant portion of society. The question is: how did their mores come out on top?

The Problem of Who Lois Loves

The other day, I got to thinking about one of the discussion topics in from Intro to Philosophy class I took seven years ago. I don't know why. It's a philosophical problem that goes as follows: If two things are the same, then everything that is true of one of them is true of the other. Clark Kent and Superman are the same person, but Lois Lane loves Superman and Lois Lane doesn't love Clark Kent. What's up with that? This problem seems to belong in the same league as Socrates' House (or is it Plato's Boat?), the omnipotence of God and such, but unlike some of these other introductory-level philosophical problems, I think I actually have an answer to it. Here it is; sorry to bore you if you've already got it figured out.

The concepts of Superman and Clark Kent (especially Lois Lane's concepts) are different, but they both are attached to the same real-world entity. Thus, what is true of Lois Lane's concept of Superman is not always true of her concept of Superman (in fact, they are quite distinct), but they do have one thing in common: Lois connects both of them to the same thing in reality (though she does not know it).

This implies something interesting about love: The act of loving someone - or at least of loving someone in the romantic sense of the word "love" - requires having a particular concept of who that person is. If it didn't, Lois would feel the same way when thinking of Clark Kent as she would Superman.

Lois' love for Superman is ultimately directed at the same object as her indifference to Clark Kent, but since this sort of loving implies conceptualizing its object, and Lois' concepts of Clark Kent and Superman are distinct, it is possible for Lois not to love Clark Kent.

By the way, I found out that the creators of Superman first conceived of him as a human villain. Far out.

A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing

An Ig Nobel-winning study showed that, on average, people overestimate their ability, and the most incompetent people overestimate their ability the most, both in absolute terms and relative to their peers. I dabble a lot in subjects I don't know much about. I even read the aforementioned study and thought it was very well-presented, and its arguments in favor of the hypotheses were well-formed, even though I am not a psychologist and my knowledge of statistics is vague. Which makes me wonder just how competent I really am. According to the study results, if I believe I'm in the 3rd quartile of competence, I'm probably right, so maybe I'll say I think I am in the 3rd quartile just so people will have to assume I'm better than average.

Dabbling a lot in subjects I'm no expert in and reading lots of Wikipedia articles probably makes me broadly informed but rather fallible, which I don't like so much; I'd rather be narrow-minded but always acutally right. Even so, I'm too curious not to try to figure stuff out on my own. So discovering a website that displays the Greek New Testament with a pop-up window for every word which lists translations, a definition and (best of all!) the word's grammatical attributes, opens up a whole new world of trouble for me to get into. I don't know ancient Greek nor any accepted methods for translating Biblical texts, but I'm definitely going to have to fool with this a bit. I promise not to publish my own version of the Bible or propagate any heretical readings of The Gospel of John, if that makes things any better.

Distinguishing Working Class from Middle Class in America

I propose that we can determine whether an American is working-class or middle-class simply by their answer to the following question: Are public school teachers well-paid?