Diva

Yesterday my brother referred to Sabrina Carpenter as a diva. I had no idea what he meant. It could have been one of several distinct things.

So I decided it was time to talk about the word "diva."

I first became aware of the term sometime around 1975. Maybe more like 1973. In any case, as far as I was aware, a diva was a star female opera singer. I didn't know much about opera -- I still don't -- but I heard Beverly Sills and Maria Callas referred to as divas.

Going back a bit further in time, the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary defines a diva as "a distinguished female singer." Etymological sources are given such as Italian meaning "goddess" or "lady-love" and Latin meaning "goddess," feminine of divius, "god."  

The 1933 also mentions the synonym "prima donna," which is Italian for "leading lady," "primary female singer," etc. Opera again. The earliest English usage cited is from Harper's in 1883. In the late 19th century in the English-speaking parts of the world, opera was considered to be something primarily Italian -- correctly? I don't know. I don't know much about opera.

When I first came across the term "diva," in connection with opera, I had heard the term "prima donna," but not in any sense which had to do with opera. A prima donna, as far as I knew, was a spoiled, difficult, unpleasantly egotistical person, gender not specified.

Eventually I learned that the two terms were synonymous, in opera, and in the wider world. Except that "diva," like "punk," was re-claimed by people at who the term was hurled. A diva became something positive, a proud, strong woman who didn't care if you found her difficult. The first non-operatic usage I noticed was it being applied to female pop music stars, like Diana Ross or Patti LaBelle. 

Simultaneously, I noticed that the usage of the term "diva" in opera could be positive or negative. It could denote that a star soprano was a great singer, or that she was an aggravating person. Then I noticed that in the case of Maria Callas, different people applied the term "diva" to her non-singing, offstage life, some positively, some negatively, although they were all referring to the same behavior. What struck some people as difficult and disgraceful, struck others as proud and glorious. 

Or perhaps it was more a case of some regarding a woman as proud and disgraceful, while others saw her as proud and glorious. Reclaiming the intended insult as a compliment. Saying that if you had a problem with this particular goddess, it was strictly your problem. 

I was already somewhat disturbed by people applying the term "diva" to non-operatic singers, when I became aware that it was being applied to people who didn't sing at all. Drag queens, for example. In To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, the regional-award-winning drag queens refer to themselves as "fierce, ruling divas."

Thinking that over, while getting ready to write this essay, I began to wonder whether the operatic connection might be all in my head, and whether ladies who refer to themselves as divas might not be going back directly to the Latin, skipping opera altogether. As in: opera? What opera? Honey, I'm talking about goddesses! 

Then I remembered that, in To Wong Foo, the book DV by Diana Vreeland is recommended to a young lady as the last word in getting a MAY-un, and of course, Diana Vreeland, whatever else she was or was not, and that's several more essays at least, was utterly incapable of going for an entire book without saying quite a bit about Maria Callas. Of course I've read DV. What, you haven't?! *faints*

So anyway, my point was that I'm going to have to ask my brother just exactly what he meant when he called Sabrina Carpenter a diva.

EV Public Charging

One evening over 20 years ago, I happened to surf onto "Nightly Business Report." Not the sort of thing which ordinarily held my interest for more than a few seconds, but this time I ended up watching an entire guest commentary or editorial by a columnist from Forbes, a crusty, white bearded curmudgeon who asked, "When are one of you billionaire geniuses going to design a computer I can turn on and off like a TV?"

A darn good question! And all these years later, it still is. The commentator went on to say that computer guys made computers for computer guys, and not for the public. Computers are inconvenient and difficult to use for the general public, because computer guys don't care.

I was reminded of this just a couple of days ago, reading a social media conversation about public EV charging. Someone had started a thread because they were new at using public chargers, and having some difficulty. 

Something lots and lots of people can relate to. And thankfully, they were getting lots of advice, and hopefully, enough of it helped and they can use public chargers now.

But one participant was not helpful, was not friendly. They called the original poster stupid, and had harsh words for people who were "too lazy to learn" how to operate public chargers. 

Personal computers all over again: tech guys know how to do things like public charging, and, basically, screw you if you don't.

I know there are reasons for everything. I know tech guys got wedgies growing up and it made them angry at the whole world.

But there's a difference this time around: computers have never had to compete with any older, more familiar technology. They were new and unique, and they remain unique. EV's are competing with ICE vehicles, and public charging is competing with gas stations. 

And so, many of you may be very relieved to learn, the days when you can just go up to a public charger and swipe a credit card as if you were at a gas station -- no apps -- are already here in parts of Europe and California, which means they will be everywhere soon.

Competition between merchants, between old and new ways of doing things, leading to innovation which directly benefits the consumer. I hate to say it, but maybe Adam Smith wasn't completely wrong about everything.

Dream Log: Selena Gomez

 

I know what some of you are thinking: another movie star?! Steve, you're delusional! To which I say, Not guilty. I know these are just dreams. I know, for example, that Ms Gomez and I have never met. 

On the other hand, I am rather gorgeous, and I have actually, in real life, dated a couple of movie stars. There's nothing weird about that: I was a professional actor for a brief period of time -- "professional" in the sense of actually being paid to act. Not in the sense of having been paid enough to live on -- and actors and actresses do tend to date each other, just the same way people in other professions tend to see each other socially, and a couple of the actresses I dated were, or became since, movie stars. Names? Haha, Nope!

If all the women I ever snuggled with were somehow together in one place and you could see the whole group of them, you'd have a heart attack and die, that's how literally drop-dread gorgeous they have been. And some of them were also actresses.

So. Anyway. Selena. 

In the dream I was near Wakarusa, Indiana, the small town in cornfield-Indiana where I grew up. I didn't think of it as "cornfield-Indiana" when I lived there. I just thought it was weird when I went somewhere else and there were no cornfields, at all. Or only a few, here and there. I've been dreaming a lot about Wakarusa lately. 

In the dream, Selena Gomez and I actually didn't get to the first date: she asked me out, we made arrangements to meet at 8 that evening, and the rest of the dream was mostly me walking and driving between several small houses among the cornfields and looking forward to the date. It was winter, everything was covered with snow. In one front yard were the stumps of several trees which had been recently felled; in another, as if a series were being continued, several trees had been felled, and then the remaining stumps had been carved into the shapes of angels, not elaborate carving, but not what I would call crude either, rather nice. Rather abstract and merely suggestive of the shapes of angels

Then I was inside one of those houses, and there was a land-line phone with an answering machine next to it, and I was doing something involving a message to or from Selena. A small and nerdy-looking man observed what I was doing, shook his head and said I should just grab her already, or she was going to think I was a nerd and dump me. Actually, he worded it even a little bit more crudely than that. I wondered who he was and why he was giving me advice. Did he actually know Selena, or was his advice based on celebrity-gossip TV, or what? What did he care what went on between her and me?

Presumably, Selena was there filming something on location, but I didn't know exactly what. She showed up around 8, and now that I'm awake I realize that it was still daylight, whereas in reality at 8 in the evening in the winter in Wakarusa it would be night-time (you see? I'm able to discern differences between reality and dreams).

I mentioned to Selena that I had grown up in Wakarusa, and she said, "Oh yeah, that little town next to the county line," and I replied that it had been so long since I had been there that I couldn't remember where the county line was. Then I woke up and looked it up, and sure enough, the county line is just a little to the west of Wakarusa.

A Modest Proposal Concerning Manuscripts Shown in Historical Documentaries

I like some documentaries about archaeology. And I'm very, very much interested in ancient and Medieval texts. And so, when in a well-made film on an archaeological topic, the host takes a break from the digs to go to a library's special collection and show us some old manuscripts, I tend to like it very much indeed.

But still, I think it could be done better. Let's take, for example, one of my favorite archaeological series, In Search of the Dark Ages, written and hosted (or presented, as they say in British English) by Michael Wood and first broadcast on the BBC in the late 1970's and early 1980's. This series, for the most part, covers the Anglo-Saxon period in England and the adjoining Celtic part of Britain. One episode goes earlier, having to to do with the first-century revolt of the British queen Boudica against the Romans. 

Woods walks around historic sites, talking to archaeologists who are supervising digs, or led digs a a while ago, or want to get permission to begin digs, and asks them intelligent questions. Or he walks around historic sites by himself and speaks intelligently to the camera. Occasionally making allusions to current political events which sometimes make me wince with their conservative flavor, but no-one, not even Michael Wood, is perfect. He often quotes from Anglo-Saxon or Latin accounts of Medieval events -- he's a specialist in Anglo-Saxon -- and translates into modern English for the viewer. He seems quite fluent in both Anglo-Saxon and Latin. It's all quite wonderful.

Where I see room for improvement -- and not just in Michael Wood's shows, but in every show I can recall in the archaeological genre -- is in the way in which old manuscripts are presented to the viewer. The scene will shift from a dig to a library, while Wood says in voice over something like, "To find out more about, we must turn to a manuscript in" -- in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, or in the British Library, as the case may be, or somewhere else. 

Wood will walk into special-collections rooms and proceed to read from Latin or Anglo-Saxon precious rare manuscripts. Which is awesome, but -- it leaves out the scholars who are currently working with those manuscripts.

Why not talk to those textual scholars just as he's been talking to the archaeologists? Or at the very least, mention some of them? He reads, in the episode "In Search of Arthur," from the Welsh Annals, the Annales Cambriae, one of the earliest written mentions of King Arthur. He reads the passage about Arthur right from the Bodlian Library's manuscript of the annals, the best existing manuscript.

The thing is, most of us don't have as much access to special collections as Michael Wood does. We can't just drop in and consult the best manuscripts whenever we want to. Luckily for us, in 1860, the Rev John Williams, also well known by his Welsh bardic name Ab Ithel, published an edition of the Annales Canbriae based on the very same manuscript Woods reads from in the show, and two others. 

I would like it if Wood, and other hosts of similar shows, would mention the printed editions that you and I can read. I don't know whether a new edition was being prepared while Wood was filming the show about Arthur. If so, Wood could have interviewed the new editor just as easily as he interviewed all those archaeologists. His interviews with the archaeologists have been wonderful. I see no reason to doubt that his interviews with textual editors would have been just as wonderful. If no new edition was underway at the time, Wood still could have interviewed a scholar and authority on the manuscript. 

In the episode on Boudica he reads from a manuscript of Tacitus' Annals, the primary written source for Boudica's rebellion. Why not also at least hold up to the camera CD Fisher's 1906 Oxford Classical Texts edition of Tacitus' Annals and mention that the viewer could easily get the original Latin text for themself if they so desired? Or, even better, he could have interviewed Heubner or Wellesley, who were working on new editions at the time. 

Being Michael Wood, I'm sure he could've come with far more intelligent questions for the new editors of Tacitus than I ever could, just as he came up with all of those great questions for the archaeologists. 

Let the viewers know, let them see and hear, that textual criticism is a living, ongoing, exciting thing, just like archaeology. It just needs the right host, the right presenter, to put it across. Michael Wood could definitely do it. Show the viewers that they can take part in the text in more ways than just seeing the host go into the library and look at a manuscript. Which is great! I don't want any of the producers to stop showing the manuscripts. I just want them to give the viewers a more solid connection to the manuscripts. And if it's not a famous text like the Welsh Annals or Tacitus, if it's actually still unpublished, then talk about how it isn't even published yet, and about the need for more students of Anglo-Saxon or Medieval Latin or what have you.

Mathematics, AI and Chess

Shannon's number is an estimate of the possible number of games of chess, arrived at by the mathematician and engineer Claude Shannon (1916-2001). Shannon postulated an average of 1000 possible moves for one move by White followed by one move for Black. Then he postulated a typical length of a chess game of 40 moves, and came up with his very famous number, his very famous estimate: there are at least 10 to the 120th power possible different chess games. 

I think Shannon's number is complete garbage. I think it tells us little beyond the fact that Shannon and other mathematicians didn't know much about chess, and that few chess players know much about math. Otherwise, Shannon's number would never have become famous to begin with, and, chastened by so much derisive laughter, he would've headed back to the drawing board to try again. 

In some positions on the chess board, there are many possible moves. For White's first move, there are 20 possible moves: 16 by the Pawns and 4 by the Knights. 20 choices also for Black's first move. There are other position in which a player would have far move than 20 possible moves. For example, if a player had 3 Queens, 2 Bishops, 2 pawns and a lot of space.  

In other positions, a player has only 1 possible move: if his King is under attack and there is one 1 possible way to defend it. Or if there is only 1 possible move which would not expose his King to attack. And there are positions where only 2 moves could defend the King against attack. Or 3, or 4, and so forth.

Or, instead of threats to the King, the number of moves could be limited by his pieces being blocked by his opponent's pieces, or by his own pieces. 

How would one get an average number of moves out of all of these different kinds of positions? How many different positions are there with just 1 possible move? How many positions yield 50 or more possible moves? I have no idea. Not the faintest idea. Furthermore, I have yet to see anyone even asking this very basic kind of question when trying to determine the number of possible chess games. I'm not saying I'm the only person who's asked these questions. I'm saying that not enough people have been asking them insistently enough for the evidence of their existence to have come to my attention.

Okay, now, the number of moves in a game. Average it out at 40, like Shannon? That's ridiculous. Checkmate can happen after 2 moves, or 4 moves. It's not unheard of for checkmate to happen after 10 or 15 moves, or 20 or 30. Conversely, some games have gone on for hundreds of moves. Has anyone even attempted to calculate the number of ways in which a game could last for over 100 moves? Or the number of different ways in which a game could go on, limited by the rule that one player can claim a draw if 50 moves go by during which neither player captures and piece or moves a Pawn? Did you notice that I said that a player CAN claim a draw under those conditions? We may have to make such draws mandatory and automatic if we wish to make the number of different games finite -- or perhaps not, I'm not competent to say.

These are just a few examples of the different numbers which would need to be calculated before one could attempt to combine them all and come up with any sort of reasonable estimate of the number of possible chess games.

I don't believe that AI is here. I haven't seen a product designed by AI which wasn't hideously ugly, haven't read a poem written by AI which wasn't ridiculous, haven't interacted with a search engine or automated call center which wasn't infuriatingly stupid. 

And I haven't seen an impressive attempt yet to estimate the number of possible games of chess, let alone solve the game by coming up with the moves which will always win, or always draw against perfect moves by the opponent, the way that checkers has just recently been solved. And when those things finally do happen, which they will if we don't kill ourselves off first, it being ultimately just a matter of crunching very, very big numbers, actual human-like communication and creativity will still be far off, or, perhaps, ultimately inaccessible to mathematics.