More here on that solitary whalesong and whether hybrid whales could actually sing hybrid songs (the answer is somewhat unexpected -- at least to me). As to whether he's lonely or a rugged individualist, I don't see why he can't be both -- in fact, don't these traits pretty much feed off one another?

UPDATE: Sudeep responds above, surgically extracting all the romance from this situation with Occam's Razor. Surely his plastic six pack loop really is the most likley explanation...

What really fascinated me though about Mark's post was the idea that the actual structure of whalesong could be simply a complex trait, amenable to genetic manipulation. Because of course Sudeep is right that accents -- and most other features of language, including the actual language spoken -- are developmentally determined, which puts human language in a completely different category than whalesong.

But the thing is, probably the biggest idea in linguistics over the past 50 years is that humans are born with a linguistic faculty that imposes certain linguistic features on their language learning. Does this linguistic structure correspond somehow to the contours of a whalesong, or the basic patterns of birdsong (over which greater complexities are layered developmentally)? Unfortunately, the idea that the underlying structures of human language, part of a built-in lanuguage faculty, is (or was) a complex trait seems pretty much untestable, unless we can find another species of humans somewhere with a different underlying structure (or none at all).

1. For some time I've been wondering: given the rather dark meaning of banana republic, why would anyone choose it as the name for a clothing store? In particular, referring to widespread political corruption and foreign meddling seems a little off.

2. And to what extent were Shakespeare's plays improvised by the players? A comment to this post piqued my interest about the possibility, but over the past week I've been completely unable to turn up any reference to this idea on the internet. I'm no Shakespeare scholar, but to me the whole thing seems pretty improbable, since there don't seem to be any of the telltale signs -- strict structures and licks, to start with -- that we see in other cases of improvised art. Still, the possibility is intriguing: could repeated improvised performance have achieved Shakespeare's depth of characterization?

The New York Times headline-writers claim that U.S. schools are having a harder and harder time attracting top foreign students. [Headline: "U.S. Slips in Attracting the World's Best Students."] Oddly, there is nothing that I can find in the story to support the headline-- plenty of evidence that fewer foreign students apply to U.S. schools, but no evidence that I can see (did I miss it?) that those students who have ceased applying are the "best" or the brightest, rather than the discarded and discouraged.

Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias, Will Wilkinson, and Jim Henley turn their attention to the question of a lack of blacks at The New Republic or The American Prospect in this comment thread. The thread is attached to a post by Will Wilkinson lamenting discrimination in favor of those from Ivy League schools. At Chicago, most people were convinced that all of those east-coast Harvard/Yale snobs wouldn't give anybody from the U of C a fair shake. In retrospect, I have begun to suspect this is less true than we thought. [UPDATE: Actually, Will's post is about how an Ivy League education gets you nothing but the benefits of the aforementioned discrimination (in journalism and academia). I'd be curious to see similar documentation about Chicago.]

Meanwhile, P.G. discusses the same elite/non-elite dichotomy in law schools. I'm not quite sure what her bottom line is-- I think it's that affirmative action is good because it gives different classes of people access to the elitist machinery. It would be interesting to see if there were any evidence of this.

I could be a good writer and attempt to tie these three paragraphs into a coherent narrative or theme. Or, I could go pack.

1: Terry Teachout has never asked a woman out simply because she was cute.

2: Heidi Bond thinks running Linux makes one sexy.

Q: Would Heidi Bond ever ask a man out simply because he ran Linux?

UPDATE:

1: Anthony Rickey doesn't understand why Linux is sexy.

2: Anthony Rickey doesn't understand why libertarians are sexy.

Q: Does anybody find libertarian Linux-users sexy?

(From the PC volunteer lounge in Almaty. . . sitting down with a cup of instant MacCoffee after my second hot shower in the last 48 hours, and grateful that traffic circles have not brought the feared death of pedestrian me.)

I think the dream that brought me to the Peace Corps may have begun with my great-uncle J.O., my grandfather’s oldest brother. Some years after WWII had ended and he had taken his ag science degree, he went to Pakistan to teach more efficient rice cultivation techniques. By the time I clearly remember meeting him, he was in his early nineties, but even after all those years, he still loved to talk about his time in Pakistan. He was a wonderful storyteller, and those were some memories for a lifetime. It’s an amazing decision to think of, the logistics of such a trip in the pre-Lonely Planet days. He packed up his family with him, his wife and his kids, and there they lived for several years. This was something and amazing indeed.

Back when my grandparents went to England and Scotland in the 1980s, this was considered a journey worthy of an elaborate send-off party from my grandfather’s colleagues and a trip diary to be shared with the many people who would never make such a trip. I can’t remember for sure anymore whether it made the town paper, though I do believe it did. (Granted, though, the Rice Capital of the World is a town of roughly 10,000 people and slow news. The last time I read the Stuttgart daily paper, the lead article was on a crime wave involving, among other things, the mysterious theft of a bucket of fried chicken from inside someone’s house.) By the time I went to London myself two years ago, it was a matter of my roommate and I chatting together about how it would be a nice thing to do, realizing that even poorly-paid student jobs gave us enough in our bank accounts, and quickly grabbing some tickets from the Internet.

As much as I appreciate the ease, the exotic grandness of the international trip has been lost. I remember sitting last winter at the Med in Chicago, talking with several friends about Harrod’s department store in London, and thinking to myself how very odd it was that we’d all been there. But when I decided to head off to Kazakhstan, it didn’t seem to be particularly odd thing to do, and the logistics of doing so were quite simple: a visa, an airline ticket, and a transfer in Frankfurt. It seems so easy now to tramp off to whatever section of the world strikes one’s fancy, or at least to get so far as the airport. How do you get to Tibet from here? Fly into Chengdou, China; arrange a visa in that airport; and fly out to Lhasa. It’s a common enough destination for volunteers on holiday.

And how do I get home? I called up Peace Corps, announced that I’d made my decision, booked myself a ride on the Spanish train, and waited for them to work the magic of finding me a last-minute ticket home in the midst of holiday travel. They did it, too, and even with a transfer in London, not Istanbul or Bishkek. To me this is simply logical. But to people in my village, my coming and my going are amazing. I have been asked many times if I took or will take an airplane. Yes, I’ve replied, there are no trains. It’s travel comfortably within my world of expectations, but far away from my students’ and colleagues’ worlds. International travel is something that happens, but not to the real people you see and talk to on a daily basis.

I’ve been in Almaty since Monday, filling out paperwork and waiting the 48 hours to test negative for TB. PC staff have been coming up to me to say they’re sorry that I’ll be gone, but gee, how happy I look. I try to blame it on the shower because I feel I’m very bad person to say farewell to, that I always give the impression of skipping out on town with no regrets and not a look back. I left Baton Rouge right when I was enjoying it the most; I left Chicago after the most delightful April of my life, one where I could barely hold myself from skipping down the sidewalks singing “‘tis is the truth/ it’s factual/ everything is satisfactual,” and the emotions instead leaked out into a silly grin over my face.

Leaving Kazakhstan was no different. For me, anticipated absences make the heart grow fonder, and I have had a fine farewell. My last trip was to Turkistan, the site of a mausoleum with Central Asia’s largest dome and largest man-made arch. Timur the Great built it, partially to honour Hodja Ahmet Yasaui and partially to attract the tourists such a place would bring. Yasaui was the first major Muslim prophet to speak a Turkish language, which counts for something around here. At the age of 63, he buried himself in a series of rooms, believing that he should not be so privileged to see more sunrises and moonrises than the Prophet did, and he lived eight or nine years underground. His writings are the first foundation of Suffism. There is a local belief that three pilgrimages to Yasaui’s mausoleum are the equivalent to one hajj to Mecca; that belief probably arose because of how nearly impossible it was for Central Asian Muslims to make it to Saudi Arabia. It is an absolutely beautiful place, and I had friends for tour guides and companions. My farewell dinner that night was with the host family of one of the Russian-speaking volunteers. I held a twenty-minute conversation in that language I don’t know, and dinner was in all three languages, helped by that family’s Tartar neighbor who spoke both Russian and Kazakh.

I went out in a blaze of teaching glory. My students got hand-drawn enlargements of New Yorker cartoons as warm-up activities and I got a day-by-day lesson on what humor translates and what doesn’t. They created some of the funniest personal advertisements I have seen, even if I couldn’t convince my 8th form boys that no woman I created would have the “DM, 56, seeks woman to cook and clean for him. Enjoys watching football, drinking beer, and eating meat. Conversations and intelligent women not wanted.” The girls understood, though, and all the students laughed at that ad. I met interesting people, like the proprietor of the local disco, a fellow who’d specialized at university in teaching English; and an English teacher from the Russian school, an ethnic Kazakh from Turkmenistan who did not speak Kazakh but who did pay out of her own shallow pocket for Macmillian-published textbooks. And at the end of it all, my 9th form students told me that they regretted my decision, but they also understood it. For a farewell, they surprised me with disco after school in our English classroom, and I dropped my inhibitions about looking like an authority figure and instead felt like the chaperone proving that a few gray hairs do not a fuddy-duddy make (not that they thought that: anything more than two is a locally scandalous number of ex’s, and I finally answered both that question and my age).

I took the Spanish train to Almaty. I waited six hours in the Shymkent train station for it, improperly clad for the cold. Silk long underwear covering everything below the neck, hands and feet and all in between; jeans; a t-shirt, sweater, and hooded sweatshirt; wool socks and high boots and leather gloves; a maroon jacket to my hips and a larger navy coat to mid-thigh; six-foot long crocheted scarf and knit stocking cap. In Mongolia, PC volunteers sleep with their toothpaste so it doesn’t freeze. The PC was probably right not to send me there. But when it did come, a friendly gentleman grabbed my bags and carried for me them down the flight of thirty stairs and across the ice-field to the waiting train, and would not wait for me to find anything with which to thank him. And when I boarded the train, it was proven once again that four Chicago winters did not teach me to walk on ice, for as I swung my heaviest bag higher than my waist to get it in the train, the bag landed where I wanted it to but I slipped and fell halfway under the train, with only my stuffed backpack making me too bulky to fall the full way through.

Once on the train, though, I found myself on a nicer train than anything Amtrak offers. This is the more expensive train, traveling between Shymkent and Almaty with only two stops in between. It cuts the journey from 23 hours to 13, and saved me from spending an extra night in an apartment and that extra time traveling. I met a friendly group of students from the arts university in Almaty, returning from a concert they’d just given in Shymkent. One girl loved American jazz, and was glad to finally know what the Chattanooga Choo-Choo. Their director gave me his business card and offered me the position of being his fourth wife: he has a son by his first, two daughters by the second, and an unborn child by the third. His card’s in the trash.

Seeing Almaty in the winter has brought me to realize how few trees we have in downtown Chicago, and how wet our snow is. In the mountains outside of Almaty is a place called Medeo, supposed to have great skiing for those who can afford it. Almaty is covered at least half a foot deep with powdery snow. It collects on the trees in narrow stacks twice and thrice as high as the branches are thick, and it melts off the roofs in elegant icicles. I spent a beautiful Monday night walking the almost deserted sidewalks, a beautiful black-and-white world in the reflected light of the moon and streetlights as fresh snow gently fell in the windless cold. I love walking cities at night. One of my favorite memories of New Orleans is a ramble through the Garden District until almost dawn, and this is how I shall remember Almaty, a city where the wrought iron does not frame azaleas and crape myrtles, but instead holds in contrast the curves of gentle snow.

* * *

And yes Ryan, we will meet again in Chicago in two years’ time, and perhaps we’ll also find your friend, the Swing Dance King of Chicago, and he’ll open his conversation with me as he always does, with the greeting “You’re not her!” (I run into my sister’s friends; she doesn’t run into people who know me.) And until then, on my first drink of good wine again, I’ll pour some out for you. I’m sorry you thought you couldn’t link me. I must have accidentally carried over the Kazakh double-negatives into my reply to you. As the carefully-painted quote from Byron in my classroom says, “He who cannot loves his country cannot loves nothing.” I should have snuck in and repainted that. Regrets.

Ryan is another volunteer who has been woefully (but humorously) misquoted and misinterpreted in this highly inaccurate local newspaper article. Ryan’s Russian is quite good: the quotes he footnotes aren’t language mistakes on his part. “Horrified, the volunteers saw him eat with his hands”? We would have been doing the same, and talking about how glad we were that, with apricot and raspberry jams as delicious as his host mother’s, etiquette permitted us to repeatedly spoon it from the serving dishes.

Update:

Sigh, URL frustrations. Anyway, the first link to Ryan is at: http://www.thegio.net/kazakhstan/kazakhstan.blog.php?041217

The download for the newspaper article is at the end of this entry: http://www.thegio.net/kazakhstan/kazakhstan.blog.php?041123

Update from Will: The links above are fixed.

One of the things I've been mulling back and forth throughout Judith Resnik's procedure class is the dilemma of aggregation and class actions. On one hand, aggregation both speeds up justice for both parties, and makes it possible to claim legal rights that would otherwise be devoured by transaction costs. On the other, aggregation can frequently violate the autonomy of the plaintiffs concerned, as they find their claims being pursue, won, lost, or settled, sometimes in ways they do not want and at prices they would not accept-- often without giving them a chance to opt out, and sometimes without even giving them notice that their claims are being disposed of. [N.B.: There is more on this in Professor Solum's recent paper.]

Now, even a radical individualist like me recognizes that not everything in the world can be done by mutual consent and notice. But I am unconvinced that the class action's pseudo-private enforcement (by "named plaintiffs" and their court-appointed lawyers) fares better than direct public enforcement, where law enforcement officials enforce official laws.

Since the FRCP provide other methods of aggregation, I would like to see more use of those, and a move to a system of liberal but opt-in aggregation (with waivable or unwaivable opt-out rights) combined with governmental enforcement of some rules that are otherwise inefficient for an individual to enforce.

Which means that I was saddened to learn that opt-in class actions are actually forbidden by the FRCP, at least in the Second Circuit. (Via How Appealing). Hopefully there are legal ways around this. If not, maybe the rules will change.

A friend of Crescat sends along this New York Times story, about the 52-Hertz whale.

Roughly, the whale is calling out at a frequency that no other whale uses, and seems completely oblivious to or uninterested in any other whale. Is he deaf, unaware what he is calling out? Simply a new or old species of whale unable to find a like mind? Is he a rugged individualist insistenting on his own pronunciations? Some speculate he is a blue; you can hear the call here.

My girlfriend and I had a long argument last night about 52H. I portrayed him as lonely and lost, a whale unable to find anybody else he could really talk to. She cast him as an arrogant ass, headstrong and sure of himself, the equivalent of the sandwichboard-nutcase who proclaims that the "End is near", and is so sure he's got it all figured out. (Oddly enough, she found her portrayal a sympathetic one.)

I would suggest him to be the reincarnation of Douglas Adams, but the whale has been spotted on and off since 1992, before DA died.

There are many things that potentially make many people very, very disappointed in me:

1) I enjoy Ramen noodles, particularly with an egg broken over the beef-flavored type right after it's done cooking. On occasion (oh, the luxuriant occasion), with a dribble of sesame oil and chopped green onion also.
2) I insist my infinites un-split.
3) I prefer tea with cream and sugar.
4) I hate recordings of Callas and present-day Pavarotti.

To be honest (and really, why not be?), the first three, albeit very true, and, I feel, very necessarily exposed before any sort of relationship with me proceede, are really subordinate to the fourth point.

This has really become a sticking point in my most recent quest (at the suggestion -- perhaps he will provide a better word -- of Co-Crescatter Will Baude) to educate myself in late-Romantic opera (Baroque and Classical opera being my current interests).

It's a field of music I've been avoiding for quite some time for quite a few reasons -- first, learning about modern Romantic opera begs the question of what to do with Wagner, and although I'm certainly adamant that it's ridiculous not to perform him in Israel because of his philosophical/social preferences, I certainly don't like his music enough to understand why people might walk out in the middle of the performance, and am curious, yea, shocked that people don't walk out on the wretched stuff more often.

More than that, (for those counting, this would be second), Romantic opera, by some sense, breaks all the rules: Phillip Gossett, in what I imagine to be a number of his undergrad classes, tells a great story about Rossini, dirty words, parallel fifths, and how he got in a lot of trouble live on radio. Puccini doesn't have an overture to La Boheme! And Verdi -- Verdi puts Shakespeare 1) into Italian 2) to music (I am told, all by himself i.e., sans librettist -- correct me if I'm wrong).

Third, and closest to home, the voices leave something to be desired -- I should be careful here, because it's not always true...but honestly, it is for a lot of performances. To explain: Romantic opera generally requires a fairly large voice -- Tenors that float easily up to C's, C#'s, even all the while maintaining a virile persona, or ravishing, voluptuous Sopranos that can shake not only the entire theater, but the chandeliers too. But, and especially in old recordings, this is generally not what I hear.

Take Callas -- I can believe that she was an amazing actress in her day, and that she had the voice worth the renown. But take a classic recording of hers -- whereas it may invoke some memory of a prima donna worth the prima, it is, high-pitched screeching to modern standards (to reveal the emperor for his clothes). Compare this to someone like Renee Fleming, and I think the difference is quite clear....

But there's more -- many voices just aren't able to perform opera: the modern Pavarotti, for example. I've got to be careful here, because Pavarotti in his prime was, in my opinion, THE best tenor I've heard recording the late Romantic Italian opera. But now, something's changed in his voice -- there's something less than desirable, perhaps a reason that he's finally (for the second time?) left the stage. Then, of course, there's the flat-toned Andrea Bocelli...good for pop, and not much else... Some male singers know what they're good for: take for instance, the more Baroque Ian Bostridge, or the modern countertenors David Daniels, or Andreas Scholl who know their place in the classical/baroque/renaissance opera, and don't make any weird claims...

And fourth -- I think most importantly -- the music is much more complex than is reasonable for an audience to understant, especially with the late Romantic German opera (viz., Wagner's work with leifmotif). Harmonically or even in terms of plot, something like La Boheme, or Madama Butterfly is far more unaccessible to the casual listener than something like Serse, or Parthenope...and although I can understand why there might be complexity involved in this sort of entertainment, it's not clear to me that the general listener of this music is aware of the difference in complexity, nor even the nature of the difference.

The payoff, of course, must be something greater -- it's hard to believe that hundreds of the most educated would pay thousands of dollars to sit through performances to look erudite (well, maybe not all that hard). But the truth of the matter is, even my dad, a dyed-in-the-wool Bollywood fan with limited experience in these genres perks up when Bjorling hits and sustains the high C in Che Gelida Manina, or Pavarotti sings Lunge da lei. And although I have some sort of fear or resentment against these classics (these leggy blonds that obfiscate the limelight from my Baroque favorites), it's impossible to deny that when done correctly, even the most mundane of these operas are able to move the most stoic.

Many opera lovers will, no doubt, be mourning the loss of the singular Renata Tebaldi, as of this past Sunday, 19 December 2004, at the age of 82.