Three-Toed Sloth

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, January 2023

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on comparative mythology, survey research, or democratic theory. Also, most of my reading this month was done at odd hours and/or while bottle-feeding a baby, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.

(Left incomplete in 2023, because I got interrupted, and finally posted in 2026, because I wanted to procrastinate about half-a-dozen research projects.)

Joseph Fontenrose, Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and Its Origins (1959) [doi:10.1525/9780520312760]

Fontenrose is interested in the Greek myth, associated with the Oracle of Delphi, in which the god Apollo slays the serpentine monster Python and takes over the latter's lair as the site of his oracle. He collects a huge set of re-tellings of this myth from Greek and Roman sources, and then broadens his view to seemingly-related myths from Anatolia (Hittite, etc.), the Levant (Ugaritic, etc.), Egypt, India, etc. On this basis he tries to induce a very detailed outline of a primordial-combat-myth where a solar hero overthrows a monster of chaos and darkness, aided by sexytimes with one of the monster's female relatives. (Unlike some mythologists one could name, he is very clear that he does not think every myth is an example of this scheme.)

While I found a lot of the material fascinating, I was frustrated by this as an exercise in "inference to latent objects". I think he regards his complete scheme as something very old which did not survive into the written record, leaving only descendants, but I found it frustratingly hard to pin the text down on this point. Certainly he never alleges that any story we actually have hits every point in his outline. Many of the details in that outline are only attested in very late re-tellings of the Delphic story; now they might be parts of an ancient oral tradition that never made it into writing before, but they might also be later innovations, or borrowings from other traditions, and he never wrestles with why one explanation should be favored over another.

More broadly, I think that Fontenrose was, implicitly, prisoner to the vision of something like historical linguistics in its Indo-Europeanist mode, where finding all sorts of manifestly-similar things (languages, myths) hanging around now prompts one to try to recover the single common ancestor. (No attested Indo-European language has all the features the linguists attribute to Proto-Indo-European.) If one had a family tree for the stories, one could try to apply the comparative method (in its linguistic or biological guises) to recover the likely state of the ancestor, but unfortunately the myths don't come to us with phylogenies (even when they contain their own). In their absence, there would have been alternative ways of working with this material, e.g., someone like Propp might have worked out the regular expression generating all these combat myths. That would not have committed us to the existence of an ancestral single myth, but would have shown what was common and what was variable across the corpus. --- I realize that I am asking for a mid-century American classicist to have anticipated Levi-Strauss, and that this absurd, but here I am. §

(I got interested in this book as an undergrad at Cal in the early 1990s --- hello, Classics 28, somehow still being taught! --- but never got around to actually reading it until now...)

Paul M. Sniderman, The Democratic Faith: Essays on Democratic Citizenship [doi:10.12987/9780300231915]

Sniderman is a political scientist whose work focuses on American public opnion, as assessed through surveys. While this is nominally about, precisely, democratic citizenship, and whether ordinary people have what it takes to be good citizens, it contains a lot of survey research about American politics. The part I found most interesting was assessing, very critically, claims that most Americans do not in fact have any sort of coherent political opinions. Those claims largely rest on survey research done by other people. Sniderman is persuasive that the way the survey questions were phrased, and even more the way the answers were scored and analyzed, makes it very hard to actually draw those conclusions about voters being incoherent numbskulls. Since Sniderman's own ideas about social measurement drive me up the wall, I am left muttering stuff like "takes one to know one". That said, Sniderman's heart is transparently in the right place. §

Jim Zub et al., Dungeons and Dragons: Days of Endless Adventure, Infernal Tides, Mindbreaker

Comic-book mind-candy, of a particularly fluffy sort that does a good job of capturing the feel of a mostly-light-hearted long-running campaign. §

Britt Ringel, This Corner of the Universe

Mind candy: Military SF by someone who must've spent a big chunk of time in the (US?) military. The novel is good on the inter-personal dynamics of the service and especially of the small ship. The insistence on giving actual numbers for relativistic combat, however, makes it obvious how absurd it is to imagine there'd be any role for human gunners in such a situation. * (The Lost Fleet books are much superior in this regard.) I'd probably read more by Ringel if I ran across it, but wish he'd write more about people and less about numbers. §

*: Because I am a huge nerd, I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations. Rounding off some numbers from the book, and working only to one significant digit, consider aiming a laser at a ship with a proper length of 1 km, which is 1 light-second away, moving with a (perpendicular) velocity of \( 0.1 c \approx 3 \times {10}^4 \mathrm{km\ s}^{-1} \). (This is slow enough that I can neglect relativistic length contraction.) The target thus moves through its length in \( 3 \times {10}^{-5} \mathrm{s} \). This means that the laser must be fired within a time window of about 30 microseconds if it's to hit any part of the target. For comparison, a skeet target travels at about 25 m/s and is about 0.1 m on its longest dimension, so it travels its own length in 0.004 s, and even then we use shotguns and not rifles. Said another way, to hit the target, the laser (which travels in a straight line**) must be aimed at where it will be in \( \approx 1 \) second. The angular velocity of the target w.r.t. the attacker is about \( 6 \) degrees per second. But if the target is \( 1 \) km long, at that distance it subtends an angle of about \( 2 \times {10}^{-4} \) degrees. So we need precision of parts per ten thousand, and that's assuming the target moves at constant velocity, rather than also varying its speed randomly by parts per ten thousand over 1 s. (Deliberately, or because it can't avoid doing so.) More reasonably, one wouldn't shoot one laser (as in the book), but aim multiple lasers randomly over a region of space the target is predicted to be in. (That is, shotguns again.) But even so, this simply must be done at faster-than-human reaction times and precisions. Now, I am not saying that including "As you know, Bob" exposition of Norbert Wiener's 1942 report on automatic targeting would improve any novel, but this one didn't need to add these obviously-bad details. ^

**: I am resisting the urge to calculate the dispersion of said laser beam, general-relativistic corrections to the path, etc. ^

Elizabeth Hand, Hokuloa Road

Mind candy horror, continuing Hand's interest in beautiful places where people just go missing (and come to bad ends). It's exciting and creepy, and also one of the better fictional depictions I've found of the strangeness of 2020. §

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; Scientifiction and Fantastica; Writing for Antiquity; Commit a Social Science