Reflections  

Eerie parallels — In 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife Sophie were assassinated by a Slavic terrorist named Gavrilo Princip who wished to liberate his nation from Austrian control. Serbia was justly accused of providing the equipment and training that facilitated the assassination. Austria's response: if you can't control your terrorists, we'll control them for you. This led immediately to the global cataclysm of World War I and the attendant loss of millions of lives. — Wendy McElroy

The measure of man — For those of us who respect spontaneous orders, the metric system has always rankled a bit. No one can deny the merits of an easy-to-calculate system of weights and measures. But this one usually arrives by government fiat.

Given this ambivalence, I was somewhat tickled to learn, from Invention & Technology (Fall 2002) that the meter is based on a mistake. In "The Mis-Measure of All Things," Ken Alder (author of a new book on the metric system) explains that the goal of the French revolutionaries was — as in everything else — utopian and grandly ambitious. They did not merely want to clean up the mess of varying weights and measures or to introduce a practical system, but rather to "measure the earth precisely." The foundation of the system would be a meter equaling "precisely one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator."

This precision was not realized.

The story is a sad one. Two skilled scientists spent seven years calculating the distance from the North Pole to the equator using the surveyor's technique of triangulation along the Paris meridian. Exactly how they used this to determine the circumference of the earth is beyond my understanding, but it involved creating a series of triangles from fixed, elevated points, measuring the distances of one side of each triangle to determine the lengths of the others, incorporating astronomy to determine the latitudes at the north and south point of the measured meridian, and extrapolating to obtain the earth's circumference.

But poor Pierre-Francois-André Méchain! He made the mistake of checking his findings. A year after he had calculated the latitude at Barcelona (and following a terrible accident and in the middle of war between France and Spain), he measured again from a spot a mile away. Although he corrected for the one mile distance, he came up with a different latitudinal figure and could not reconcile it with the first. He concluded that he had made a mess of things. Ashamed of the discrepancy, he kept it a secret, becoming increasingly morose until his death.

After Méchain's death, his colleague, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre, studied Méchain's notebooks. He saw the discrepancy but ultimately concluded that the differences were not due to human error. Rather, they were caused by what Alder calls "minute gravitational effects caused by the misshapenness of the earth"; in other words, each of the earth's meridians is slightly different in length. Thus, the meter can't be one ten-millionth of the circumference of the earth everywhere.

By that time, the meter had been adopted with great fanfare, on the wrong assumptions. But not to worry. A measure is a measure, and it doesn't really matter whether it is one ten-millionth of the earth's circumference or not. What does matter is that the populace disliked it. The new metric system was so hated that Napoleon repealed it, and France didn't completely accept it until after World War I.

Now, suppose that instead of trying to measure the circumference of the earth, the French utopians had backed off and decided to do something simple — such as build a base-10 measurement system on a familiar unit such as the yard (aune in French). Before Méchain and Delambre had returned to Paris, seamstresses would have been purchasing cloth by the aune-nouvelle, carpenters would be happily cutting boards into deci-aunes, and schoolchildren would be learning the new system along with their multiplication tables. Now, that would be a spontaneous order! — Jane S. Shaw

Rosie the Rubblesifter — One day last September I was standing in line at 7-11 and chuckled as I read the cover of TV Guide: "Fall Preview: Tough Women Rule." Funny that through the days of wall-to-wall coverage of the carnage at the World Trade Center that same week, very few women could be seen in the heart of the rescue effort — "in the shit" as they would say in Vietnam. Feminists around the country threw down their TV Guides in anger and went on the air almost immediately, complaining about the predominantly male images of heroism surrounding Sept. 11. Some were upset that President Bush and Mayor Giuliani spoke of the "brotherhood" of firefighters during the crisis. Well now they've gone and done something about it.

According to Kathy Rodgers of the National Organization for Women, "we knew we couldn't let women be erased from history — again — so we started gathering stories." I'll say. The result is a documentary film produced by the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund called "The Women of Ground Zero," featuring the sagas of six women from various professions serving there the day of the attack. (A separate, roughly parallel book of the same title has also just appeared.)

I should clarify that I sincerely respect and admire any individual called to duty that day, male or female. But the clear implication from the sisters of NOW (and swallowed whole by the media), that the male-dominated rescue picture around Ground Zero somehow involved suppressing images of women, is just laughable — if not surprising. To whine about the coverage of women at the World Trade Center, where four out of five of all people killed were men (a rarely reported fact) — including 399 of the 410 rescue workers on the scene — reveals the pettiest chauvinism, i.e., exactly what we've come to expect from NOW and its ilk. It goes without saying that if the female victims outnumbered males by four to one and constituted over 97% of the rescuer fatalities, the media would have billed the event as "the women's tragedy," pure and simple.

The "Women of Ground Zero" phenomenon, complete with its own websites and fundraising efforts, perfectly captures our new "multicultural" ethos. If the view out there doesn't match your special group fantasy, go ahead and paint your own; you'll be amply praised in the process. How well your new picture corresponds to the larger reality is irrelevant, since the latter must be "wrong" if it doesn't prominently feature your group.

The truth is, the cameras didn't have time to create a distorted picture on Sept. 11. That always happens later. — Michael Drew

Time for a change — By the time most of you read this, you will have already paid into a nefarious government mandated pyramid scheme whether you wanted to or not. Not me, however. I am fortunate enough to live in a state that doesn't engage in such silly mathematical nonsense. No, I'm not talking about Social Security. I'm talking about that other pyramid scheme: Daylight Saving Time.

It clearly fits the definition of a pyramid scheme by taking time (or more precisely, light) from one area of the day and moving it to another area. Of course, like any pyramid scheme, in order to keep it running, it requires an infinite amount of time, constantly shifting one segment to another. Nothing is produced, just transferred.

Indiana (where I live) has some small portions of the state that practice Daylight Saving Time (DST), while the majority of the state doesn't practice it. I live in the saner part of the state. Unfortunately many of my fellow Hoosiers are clamoring to jump on the DST bandwagon of constantly resetting millions of clocks. This is similar to impetuous children giving in to peer pressure. Their main argument is, "Everybody else is doing it."

I've lived in other states that do practice DST. Thus I have personally witnessed the foolish ritual of eternally moving clock hands forwards and backwards like some perpetual and indecisive metronome. So I have seen and lived with both sides. Thus I can speak from experience about the DST nightmare.

If Indiana follows other states like lemmings over the DST cliff, it can look forward to the following "benefit" that most other DST states share: After each time change a person's sleep pattern will be thrown completely out of sync. This lasts about two weeks until the body gets accustomed to the new schedule. This will happen twice a year. That equals one month out of your life, each and every year, that your body is thrown exhaustively out of whack.

DST proponents ignore this fact (perhaps they're too tired to realize it?) and feel that their manipulation of clock hands somehow affects the independent structure and flow of time and light. This is similar to primitive people who believed only magic rituals during an eclipse could bring the sun back. In both cases, nature simply goes on despite man's futile attempt to influence it. Yet both groups will insist that their efforts must be invoked in order to make life better.

What neither the primitive savage nor the DST proponent understands is that their actions have no impact. Except in the case of DST, where it actually causes harm. The number of car accidents and deaths that inevitably occur during the weeks following every time change is anybody's guess. You don't steal an hour of a driver's sleep without consequences.

And, of course, by changing the time and giving more light to one group that stays up late, you are simply taking light away from another group that gets up early. Anyone who sleeps, anyone who drives, and anyone who recognizes the inherent flaw in all pyramid schemes should actively oppose Daylight Saving Time. But, unfortunately, most people will continue to move their clock hands twice a year, more people will lose light to others, more people will lose sleep, more people will fall asleep at the wheel, and more people will actually think DST is a good idea. You can count on it like clockwork. — Chris Henderson

Word Watch "Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan" (Judges 12:6). Let that be a lesson to him. In your next life, learn something about pronunciation. Every group has its shibboleths — linguistic tests that indicate who belongs to that group, and who doesn't belong. It may not make sense, but the location of the epicenter of the strongest earthquake ever recorded in North America is pronounced New Madrid (Missouri), not New Madrid. If you're so ignorant as to pronounce it New Madrid, you're just proving that you're not a Missourian, or a geophysicist, either. It may not make sense, but the word "err" is pronounced like the name of the city in ancient Sumer, not like the name of the stuff you're breathing. It's ur, not air — and no, I'm sorry, the way one pronounces the first syllable of "error" is irrelevant to the case. Of course, only purists care about things like this; but that just means that purists are the only ones worth worrying about when you're pronouncing words. Would you rather identify yourself with them, or with the slouches who sound the last letter in "Mackinac"? I'm sure you see my point. The really important shibboleths, however, are tests of insight and knowledge, not of pronunciation. If you use "democracy" as a synonym for "republic," you betray yourself as one of those Americans who know precisely nothing about the nature and history of America's form of government or the problems that have perennially afflicted it. Most of these people are allowed to vote, I believe, but that's a pity, because they're on the wrong side of the intellectual Jordan. Does it matter? Not to them, of course. It's possible, though, that the decline of the American educational system can be measured in terms of the neglect of shibboleths. The thing about a shibboleth, after all, is that the people who fail the test don't even know that they're being tested. For a long time, we've witnessed commentators on the American judiciary, some of them jurists themselves, lamenting the fact that the Supreme Court seems "disinterested" when it comes to such and such an issue. These people are blissfully unaware that disinterestedness — i.e., a lack of "interest" in the sense of personal investment, involvement, concern, or bias — is exactly what judges are supposed to have. It's a hell of an intellectual who doesn't know that there's a distinction between "disinterested" and "uninterested." It's a hell of a school system that can let him escape without knowing it. About 20 years ago, Americans lost the verbal ability to distinguish bag "ladies" from real ladies, and the chronically "homeless" (i.e., bums) from the unfortunate people who are temporarily in need of housing. During the recent search for the guy who kidnapped two people from a lover's lane in Lancaster, Calif., a cop told national television that he didn't yet have a specific description of "this gentleman." Sure. Your grandfather and the president of the bank and the rabbi down the street and the guy lurking in the alley to hit you on the head and steal your money: they're all gentlemen, every one of them. And this is a policeman talking! Now let's think about profanity. Nothing wrong with it, so long as you put profane words in profane places. The problem starts when people don't even know that they're dealing with profane words. Is it a defect in sex education, or merely in manners, that "suck" and its derivatives now raise their heads unblushingly in every conceivable context? "Mommy! This porridge really sucks!" No, don't tell me it's the same thing that happened to "rock 'n' roll." Do I have to explain this to you? But more embarrassing events have been preparing. On July 29, Howard Fineman, one of the nation's preeminent political reporters, appeared on MSNBC's preeminent interview show, Hardball, and discussed the willingness of Democratic Sen. John Kerry to get "down to the shorthairs" with President Bush about his military policies. It was obvious that Mr. Fineman, albeit a grownup, had no idea what he was saying. Neither had the announcer for MSNBC's rival, Fox News — and her sin was even more serious than Fineman's assault on the barrier between the profane and the bland. But I have to lead up to this one. Here goes. You've noticed how many people have taken to using the derogatory term "infamous" to refer to something that they actually mean to praise. Today I overheard a fellow patron of my neighborhood coffeehouse directing an out-of-towner to "San Diego's infamous zoo." I'm sure he didn't mean that there was any infamy, any ill-fame or opprobrium, associated with the city's principal tourist attraction. (Old San Diego joke: "There are two things to do in this town: see the zoo and join the Navy." This notion of the city's character is confirmed by a newer saying, just as apt: "San Diego is as far west as the midwest goes.") I'm sure that the helpful citizen was simply and totally ignorant of the fact that "infamous" means something very different from "very famous." Indeed, this is knowledge that he could never have acquired in the course of 17 years of public education. He was not to blame — no more to blame than the unfortunate Israelite who was apprehended at the Jordan with the wrong word on his lips. But what, I've often wondered, do such people think when they are annually exposed to the news clip of Franklin D. Roosevelt addressing Congress on the subject of "Dec. 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy"? Do they think he meant "a date which will live in famousness"? On July 28, the Fox News announcer gave me my answer. Introducing a list of the nine stalwarts rescued from the mining disaster in western Pennsylvania, the newslady burbled joyously, "There are more names that will now live in infamy!" Oh, those evil miners! What next, I wonder. Will the NAACP start praising people for their magnificent intolerance? And if they do, will the recipients rejoice in their indignity? — Stephen Cox

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