Origin Stories

In my previous post, I briefly mused about ‘origin’ stories being more interesting when driving a narrative. There’s room for tension and creativity as the young protagonist makes a journey of self-discovery and finds strength in challenging situations. Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins, Eragon and Katniss Everdeen might be familiar examples from popular books also made into movies. Re-watching older movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (in preparation for Avengers: Infinity War), I’m reminded of how good some of the ‘origin’ movies were as characters were first introduced. We care about their story and humble or sometimes not-so-humble (in the case of Tony Stark and Thor) beginnings.

Sequels are correspondingly more difficult. In the Marvel movie sequels, spectacle seems to take precedence. The story is some variant of an old foe who has emerged to challenge the new superhero, but it’s now about a clash of power and ability. The situation must be more perilous to up the ante. More action. More explosions. More of a mess. Further down the road, there needs to be a bigger baddie to further up the ante. This requires an ensemble of superheroes. The increased complexity does not necessarily lead to better story-telling. Bigger action. Bigger explosions. Connections and interactions between different characters are explored, but sometimes they feel contrived and superficial; it feels like the narrator/director is trying to get you to care about the characters, but narrative development fights to share space with increasingly elaborate fight sequences.

The origin stories of many ancient cultures involve battle among powerful entities: gods, monsters, beasts, and supermen of old. For example, in the Babylonian creation story (Enuma Elish), the mighty sea goddess Tiamat is slain by one of her own descendants, the storm god Marduk. He divides her broken body and thereby creates the heavens and the earth. Warring gods and powerful beings, with humankind caught in the middle? Sounds like the makings of a movie. Wait a minute. This decade alone we’ve had Clash of the Titans, Immortals and Gods of Egypt. What a mess! (I admit I watched all three, but on DVDs borrowed from the library, since I wasn’t going to pay money to watch them.)

This is one reason the Bible’s creation story stands out. No warring gods. Instead you get orderly creation. However, we age-of-science modern readers inadvertently misread the story – thinking it’s about the physics, chemistry, geology and biology. John Walton however convincingly argues that ancient Near East stories should be read as pertaining to functional origins rather than material origins. I’ve briefly explored the philosophical argument about ontology in a previous post, but since I re-read Walton’s book recently while preparing for a science-and-religion talk, I was reminded of his analogy of the origin story of a college. His main point is that the college is more than a campus location and its physical buildings and landscaping. Walton writes:

What would a college be without students? Without administration and faculty? Without courses? We could talk about the origins of the college when it first opened its doors, enrolled students for the first time, hired faculty, designed courses and offered them and so on. In another sense this process is reenacted year by year as students return, faculty again inhabit their offices, courses are offered…  The course schedule brings order to time. Time had been there all along, but the schedule gives time a meaning to the college and the students. Even the course schedule had been there a long time (designed months earlier with students registering), but is has no existence until the semester begins. Dorms had existed filled with furniture. But now students inhabit the dorms and the furniture begins to function.

This passage particularly resonated with me as mid-April for me involves the craziness of course registration. As the number of students interested in taking chemistry courses has increased year-by-year, there is more stress for everyone involved. Some of my time is spent calming panicky students, afraid they can’t get into the classes they want and need. The students are not worried about the physical buildings, chairs, desks, or whiteboards. They’re there to support learning, but they are secondary to the function of the college, or its origin story. It’s not that the physical trappings are unimportant. It’s just that they are not of primary importance in the college’s story.

Here’s my tongue-in-cheek imagined conversation. Here’s a response to the request: “Tell me the origin story of your college.”

“The first solid brick was fired from clay and sand in an approximate 1:2 ratio by mass, and to this mixture was added small quantities of lime and iron oxide. It was placed twenty feet south of the great oak tree. Smeared over this first brick was a paste of lime and sand in a 2:1 ratio with small amounts of alumina, magnesia and iron oxide. This paste was named Portland cement. A solid brick of similar dimensions to the first was laid adjoining the first brick end-to-end. After also covering it with smear, the next brick was placed atop the previous two but only covering exactly half of each…”

This story is going to get very boring very quickly. “Stop! Stop! That’s not what I was asking…”

This made me think about origin-of-life research and how it has evolved since the famous experiments by Stanley Miller back in 1953. In the early days, chemists cared about which molecules relevant to life they could synthesize in a lab. Now we realize that the identity of a molecule isn’t as important as the functional relationships in a system of interacting molecules. A recent paper in Astrobiology by Westall and co-workers (“Hydrothermal-Sedimentary Context for the Origin of Life”, 2018, DOI: 10.1089/ast2017.1680) summarizes the situation:

Clearly, we still do not understand the fundamental mechanisms by which the first forms of biological life emerged. However, it is recognized that such emergence resulted from energy being transduced from one form to another and for some of that energy to have been used to drive spontaneous self-organization or complexity. In this context, ‘complexity’ refers to the mutual and integrated communication between chemical species rather than the variety of chemical species present per se. It is only through this connectivity that self-organization is revealed.

This makes the problem exponentially more difficult, because the tangled web of relationships between objects increases exponentially with the number of objects. This is even more pronounced when you have different types of objects. Perhaps we scientists should take a page out of the book of the story-tellers of old. Chemists have a long-standing assumption that structure tells us all we need to know about function. Perhaps for a single molecule or a pair of interacting molecules. Beyond that, things get more complicated. There has to be a better way to elucidate the threads of this complex tangled web of the story of the origin-of-life. We should also think about what the sequel might be.

Stones of Power

To gear up for Avengers: Infinity War, I am re-watching a selection of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. According to the Wikipedia page, I am in the midst of Phase Two, having just watched Guardians of the Galaxy (Vol. 1). I had forgotten it’s the first time all six infinity stones show up briefly as the Collector explains them briefly on his fancy screen.

Perhaps the only good thing about having a poorer memory in recent years is that I’ve forgotten most of the storyline in the older movies. So it’s a treat to watch them again, because while I know the good guys ‘win’ at the end, I don’t remember how. I’m also reminded how good some of the early movies were, especially the first Iron Man. Perhaps ‘origin’ stories are easier and more interesting to work with. (Bear witness to the popularity of prequels.) Making the sequel is much more difficult. Anyway, next on the docket is Avengers: Age of Ultron, which I vaguely remember is not as good as the first one, and then Ant-Man, which thanks to my poor memory I couldn’t tell you the storyline at all even though I watched it less than three years ago. At least Ant-Man has featured in my blog.

As Infinity War is about to be released in the U.S., I should now try to avoid spoilers. I did read some interesting articles leading up to the release. (I won’t actually go watch the movie for another two weeks because I don’t like crowds.) The best of these, in my opinion, is from the BBC on the “allure of mystic stones”. If like me you enjoy history, you’ll find the article quite interesting. The philosopher’s stone gets mentioned first and foremost; no surprise there. But there are quite a number of other fascinating tidbits and factoids.

The worship of holy stones, it is speculated, comes from the use of stone altars. The bigger and more interestingly shaped, the better. Meteorites – stones from the sky – would be of particular interest. In the cosmos of the ancient world, this would be a god-send – literally sent by the gods in the heavens. Wakanda’s vibranium is also discussed since it comes from a meteorite. Different stones have different powers. There are a number of interesting image summaries on the Internet. Here’s one of my favourites (from Comix Unlimited) that suggests a connection between the name of Thanos and the six stones. The soul stone, the only one unrevealed in a movie so far, is likely in an artifact starting with the letter H.

Two stones bookending the Harry Potter series possess immense power involving life and death. In Book 1, the philosopher’s (sorcerer’s in the U.S.) stone is the elixir of life, maintaining source youth and preventing aging and death. In Book 7, the resurrection stone makes its appearance. It can bring back the dead, a marvelous feat indeed, but not like Jesus of the Bible. The Christian view of bodily resurrection involves a ‘glorious’ new body (unclear exactly what it is). The resurrection stone on the other hand only brings back a shade or a wisp of the body, and even then it is unclear if the body can enjoy life in the same way or even last very long. That is as it should be. In fantasy games, resurrection is one of the most difficult magical spells. Only a mage or cleric of the highest order might be able to perform it, and possibly at great cost. Healing spells should be much more difficult than destructive spells. In many other stories, a death is the price of bringing back a life.

Why, though, are stones used to represent artifacts of power? The chemist in me suggests that from a molecular-electromagnetic point of view, the solid is the most stable form to carry energy (stored in chemical bonds perhaps). The solid is also the most dense state of matter (‘normal ice’ of H₂O being an exception in this regard). Maybe density lends an air of compressed power. Combustion of a solid typically leads to an overall increase in entropy, and thus the free energy released can actually be larger in magnitude than the reaction enthalpy, i.e., no entropic penalty is paid, rather there is an ‘entropy boost’. (Students attending my thermo lectures should find this familiar.) For story-telling purposes, solids can also be affixed to a variety of devices. Thus, you have tesseract cubes, orbs, scepters and a necklace. The liquid-gas-ish aether, on the other hand, seems unwieldy and is subsequently compacted into a stone of some sort.

While I’m looking forward to learning what the new stone might be, I will continue my memory-refreshing quest. Tomorrow night will be Age of Ultron which is the mind gem, and leads to the creation of Vision. I can’t remember how or why, but I’m reasonably sure it will be a glorious mess of cinematic action.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Television has changed a lot since 1985. Very few people today, especially the younger generation, watch TV in the same way it was watched in 1985. Netflix and Amazon, companies that started out as distributors, are now a hot ticket in creating TV content. Of course, unlike the old days, you can stream it on demand – whenever you like, and wherever you like.

You might wonder if Neil Postman’s 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, focusing on the pernicious effects of TV, would be relevant in the age of the Internet. I read the 20^th Anniversary edition (cover shown below). The 2005 edition includes a forward by the author’s son Andrew Postman, contextualizing the book for the new millenium A lot has changed since then. But the excellent summary on the back flap is still prescient, and that was 13 years ago.

“Television has habituated us to visual entertainment measured out in spoonfuls of time. But what happens when we come to expect the same things from our politics and public discourse? What happens to journalism, education, and religion when they too become forms of show business? Twenty years ago, Neil Postman’s lively polemic was the first book to consider the way that electronic media were reshaping our culture. Now, with TV joined by the internet, cell phones, cable, and DVDs, Amusing Ourselves to Death carries even greater significance. Elegant, incisive, and terrifically readable, it’s a compelling take on our addiction to entertainment.”

I agree with the summary. Not only is it eminently readable, you would benefit from reading it slowly and chewing over the arguments. Yes, Postman couches the book in terms of a particular technology in his day and age – television of the ‘80s. But he spends the first half of the book setting up the philosophical framework for tackling the issue (“public discourse in the age of show business” is the subtitle). He compares the habits of thought engendered by the written word (in its potential to promote longer, complex, arguments and discourse) to the bite-size, attention grabbing, simplifying medium of TV.  That early half sets the stage for his subsequent examples in entertainment TV, commercials, political programming, televangelism, and of course, education.

But the first comparison is with the telegraph – forerunner to the television. Postman writes: “Books are an excellent container for the accumulation, quiet scrutiny and organized analysis of information and ideas. It takes time … to read one; time to discuss its contents and to make judgments about their merit… A book is an attempt to make thought permanent and to contribute to the great conversation… Therefore, civilized people everywhere consider the burning of a book a vile form of anti-intellectualism.”

In contrast: “… the contribution of the telegraph was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence… [it] also made public discourse entirely incoherent. It brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention… [its capacity is] to move information, not collect it, explain it, or analyze it… suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation… To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing lots of things, not knowing about them.” (This reminds me of the ticker that is now ubiquitous at the bottom of your screen in news programs on TV.)

Postman differentiates between a technology and its medium. “… a technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind… the brain [is] a physical apparatus… like the mind, a medium is a use to which a physical apparatus is put…. A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates… [However] each technology has an agenda of its own.” Postman’s key assertion is that “entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television. No matter what is depicted… it is for our amusement and pleasure.” While I’m quoting bits and pieces from his book (and he would not be amused by this), Postman does provide excellent examples, and I recommend reading them in full.

I guess I’m doing what TV does. Giving you the highlights. Advertising. Maybe you’ll read the book. In the era of ‘fake news’, it is interesting to read that “… television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation… Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information – misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information – information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing… [not] that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world… [but] when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result.”

The examples Postman provides in politics are particularly striking given he was writing in the midst of the Reagan administration, with a country helmed by a president from the show-business world. Today, we have a different president from the news-cable-internet show-business world. The similarities of the underlying fundamentals are uncanny to say the least. (You’ll have to read the book.) Having recently thought about the relationship between science and religion and how the two groups communicate with each other, I found Postman’s analysis of televangelism both fascinating and sad. (I did not grow up in the U.S. and have seen very little televangelism myself.)

As an educator, the most striking chapter was Postman’s analysis of education – investigating Sesame Street, Nova, and other educational programming. I learned about The Voyage of the Mimi project, which I’d never heard of before. But thanks to the Internet, I can read all about it now in hindsight. Postman lists three ‘commandments’ for making education ‘televisible’.

·      Thou shalt have no prerequisites.

·      Thou shalt induce no perplexity.

·      Thou shat avoid exposition like the [plague].

Now, that’s entertainment.

Is this why ‘active learning’ has increasingly gained in popularity in the educational consciousness? Students no longer read their textbooks ahead of time? Students can’t follow a lecture based on exposition? If the teacher or professor is not ‘interesting’ (i.e. entertaining), then it’s ‘hard’ to learn? In our rush as educators to embrace these ‘active learning’ pedagogies, have we declared ourselves defeated by students who grew up being constantly amused, they don’t know how to learn without amusement? I’m all in favor of engaging students using different pedagogies, but we (both teachers and students) need to acknowledge that learning is hard. Some things come naturally, but much of what is important to learn at school does not come so easily (it’s biologically secondary, to use Geary’s classification). That’s why we have school. That’s why a curriculum needs to be structured, layer by layer, because that’s how we learn skills and knowledge that are otherwise perplexing.

Fragmented reading and skimming have become part of my daily life. Amusing Ourselves to Death reminds me that it need not be so. I should be more selective in what I read, but also take the time to read and remember. Much of what I ‘read’ is fleeting, just like images on a screen that inexorably move from one to another. It’s worth slowing down to read, think and reflect.

P.S. For older books that have become even more relevant in the age of the Internet, here are my posts on Technological System (1980, English translation) and The Logic of Failure (1996, English translation).

Stars and Cherubim

Occasionally, I get invited to give a talk about the relationship(s) between science and religion, usually by a university student group or members of a local church. I try to keep my monologue talk short, and spend most of the time in dialogue responding to questions and comments. Unlike my tip-of-the-fingers knowledge of chemistry (in particular) and science (in general), I don’t always remember some of the finer points in theology, philosophy, literature and history. While I have a reasonable grasp of the overall issues from reading and discussion over the years, I need to read up to refresh myself on details.

In the U.S., the most familiar touchpoint between science and religion is the ‘conflict’ between creation and evolution. The conflict model isn’t the only one out there, but it is the most prominently known, fueled by mass media. The ‘conflict’ that you hear most about is creation versus evolution. I think it’s a false dichotomy from a purely scientific point of view. The two views aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive but it requires some wading into metaphysics. The conflict comes from different metaphysical presuppositions, and most folks who engage in arguing don’t notice when physics slides into metaphysics.

In the creation versus evolution story, the point-of-conflict often centers around how to interpret the book of Genesis in the Bible. There are historical and sociological reasons for why this came about, particularly in the U.S. However, part of the problem today is that the modern reader implicitly assumes a modern ‘scientific’ framework on to the text, and reads origin stories primarily as material origins in space and time, rather than about functional origins. I’ve discussed this briefly in a previous blog post about ontology, referring to John Walton’s book The Lost World of Genesis One. I recommend his book if you’re interested in comparative origins literature from the ancient Near East.

I re-read Walton’s book this past week in preparation for a talk I just gave at a local church. But I also re-read sections from other books, and the one I will discuss in today’s post is The Biblical Cosmos by Robin Parry. The book is subtitled A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Weird and Wonderful World of the Bible, and the front cover is just superb. The sea and a dragon-like chaos creature are prominent in the foreground, with sky and stars in the background. All very appropriate! I highly recommend reading the book in full. It gives you an overview of how ancient cultures conceived the cosmos. Similar to Walton, Parry draws from a range of ancient Near East sources, comparing and contrasting different ideas of creation and the observable cosmos.

Two things jumped out at me this past week reading The Biblical Cosmos. (Subconsciously, I was likely influenced by having recently seen the preview to the Fantastic Beasts movie sequel.) The first has to do with the nature of cherubim. These strange creatures are described as four-in-one chimeras. Their heads have four faces: lion, human, ox, and eagle. These four creatures correspond to “the four Babylonian seasonal constellations: Leo (the lion), Scorpio (who had a human face), Taurus (the bull), and Pegasus (the thunderbird/eagle). In Babylonian astrology these four constellations depict the four directions of the sky, being about 90 degrees from each other.” I discussed chimeras in conjunction with fantastic beasts in a previous blog post. They aren’t just imaginary unicorns or Potterverse hippogriffs. We are chimeras of a sort. Thank you, multitudes of bacteria.

In the Bible book of Ezekiel, when these four strange-looking chimera are mentioned, they are also described as being full of eyes. That sounds really creepy, and I have trouble imagining exactly what this looks like. Why “full of eyes”? That’s where Parry comes to the rescue. In the ancient Near East, stars were thought to be celestial beings and thus associated with eyes. (The subsection is Parry’s book is amusingly titled “The Eyes in their Stars”!) If the four creatures represent constellations, the allusion to eyes now makes sense. The cherubim then, like stars, represent the celestial host. The famous Assyrian guardian statues (Lamassu) are human-faced, bull-legged, winged creatures. The lion may be represented somewhere too, possibly the body and/or head, although I’m not sure. I suppose they are cherubim-like or cherubim-lite.

Parry makes the case that just because scientists can describe a star materially, this does not necessarily discount interpretations of what stars represent. He quotes three excellent contemporary examples. The first is from The Lion King. Simba, Pumba and Timon, looking at the night sky, are speculating on the nature of “the sparkly dots up there”. Timon speculates they are “fireflies that got stuck on that big bluish-black thing.” Pumba says “I always thought they were balls of gas burning billions of miles away.” Timon and Pumba then needle Simba, who tries to hedge his answer, then finally admits: “Somebody once told me that the great kings of the past are up there watching over us.”

The second example comes from Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. A gap in the wall separates the realm of Stormborn from magical Faerie. The main protagonist Tristan travels between realms, and meets a star in the form of a beautiful maiden, Yvaine. In one of their meetings, Tristan apologizes for not bringing Yvaine back into the village in Stormborn. She replies that Tristan was right not to bring her because “I live as long as I am in Faerie. Were I to travel to your world, I would be nothing but a cold iron stone fallen from the heavens, pitted and pocked.” (I have not read Stardust. Maybe I should.)

The third example come from C.S. Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawn Treader when “the travelers encounter an old man with long silvery hair and a long silver beard.”

“I am Ramandu. But I see that you stare at one another and have not heard this name. And no wonder, for the days when I was a star had ceased long before any of you knew this world, and all the constellations have changed.”

“Golly,” said Edmund under this breath. “He’s a retired star.”

“Aren’t you a star any longer?” asked Lucy.

“I am a star at rest, my daughter,” answered Ramandu.

“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”

“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”

As a chemist, I’m immersed in the paradigm that (material) structure determines function. Our curriculum reinforces this paradigm. We first teach the students about molecular structure, and then discuss the properties that arise from structure. Function comes from structure. This reductionist approach has borne much fruit in science, although it is limiting when it comes to complex systems. Reductionism needs to be coupled to Emergence. In chemistry, the myriad relationships between molecules may give rise to new ‘functions’ that would have been nigh impossible to predict or imagine by just knowing molecular structure.

Perhaps that is why Life is difficult to define clearly in scientific terms. Our material structure-function language may be limiting. To our fancy models and theories in origin-of-life research, Ramandu might say: “Even in your world, my child, that is not what Life is but only what it is made of.” What about cosmic life? Life writ large? Centaurs of the Potterverse claim that the cosmic narrative is written in the stars. Are the stars cosmic beings? A celestial host? Are they god-like-beings that determine how things will proceed in large brushstrokes? If such a being came through the gap-in-the-wall into a realm that only conceives within a materialistic metaphysical framework, would it look like iron pitted and pocked? It may speak, but we do not listen.

I didn’t get asked any of these strange and interesting questions in my recent talk at the church. Then again, I did not talk about cherubim and stars. I was quite prepared to go into interpretative details of the Genesis text, biological evolution, the scientific age of the earth, and the Intelligence Design movement. These are topics I normally get asked about, but oddly enough I wasn’t asked about them. (I touched on the Genesis text in my talk.) I guess every group is different. I did get asked about bioethics, the Big Bang, consciousness, black holes, and the nature of energy, among other things. One person asked me about the details of my research so I had the pleasure of explaining some details albeit in simpler terms. Folks were interested to know about books or articles written by scientists who discuss issues of faith, so I provided some references. Quite a number of people thanked me after the discussion, which was very nice. I suspect science and religion is a topic they don't hear discussed very often in church, and apparently I made a good impression.

It’s refreshing to think about bigger and broader questions, and how science intersects with other disciplines – in this case, theology, philosophy, history and some sociology. As a teacher in a liberal arts institution, I hope my students do think about these broader connections in their classes. I try to sprinkle bits and pieces across the semester. Some students pick up on this, but many are focused on learning the chemistry content for the upcoming exams, and think of these connections as extraneous. So, without confusing students further, I need to do a better job weaving in the connections while ensuring the core chemical concepts remain clear.

Resizing Matter: Part 4

A living creature exchanges chemical matter with its surroundings. Two necessary input streams: oxygen and foodstuff (including water). You could go without food for some time, without water for less time, but you’d expire rather quickly without oxygen to inspire. If a resized creature has all atoms resized proportionally, this might cause a problem utilizing breathed-in oxygen.

Let’s assume you’ve engorgio-ed yourself into a giant, perhaps to intimidate a foe. You’d still need incoming oxygen to drive your body’s metabolism and keep you alive. Oxygen is carried through your bloodstream by hemoglobin. The key interaction is a chemical bond between the O₂ molecule and an iron center in a porphyrin ring. (See figure below from The Chemistry of Hemoglobin and Myoglobin.) 

The magically enlarged molecules and pathways in your body ‘see’ the incoming O₂ molecules as smaller than usual. Their lower mass (see Part 1 and Part 2 of this series) will result in speedier diffusion through the relevant channels. The O₂ would likely bind to hemoglobin, perhaps with a slightly stronger bond, that might result in slightly slower release. More of a problem, the O₂ might bind to other molecules it normally doesn’t interact with because its smaller relative size allows it to sneak into crevices and react chemically due to its biradical nature. But perhaps hemoglobin as a carrier is less important, if O₂ can diffuse its way through to its targets. Collateral damage is the bigger problem here.

If you’ve reducio-ed yourself for Ant-Man purposes, now the relatively larger O₂ might not be able to bind to hemoglobin at all. It’s diffusion capabilities are also probably reduced, although at least it might not cause as much collateral damage along the way.

The solution to this conundrum is for the O₂ molecules to resize as they enter your body. Perhaps the effect of a engorgio or reducio spell is to generate some sort of field where anything that enters the field (defined by the boundary of you?) resizes in the same way. Ant-Man’s suit might work this way. A breathing filter automatically resizes any molecule that enters. Exhaled molecules (e.g. CO₂) aren’t a concern although I would expect they would resize in the opposite way as they leave the filter out to the environment.

This complication of your body’s metabolism needing constant input streams suggests that engorgio and reducio are particularly difficult magical spells to cast, especially on living organisms if you don’t want them to die within minutes. Even if cast successfully, these spells are likely to be temporary. Even if the O₂ intake problem was ‘solved’, there are other interactions between the creature and its environment that are likely to be problematic. Biochemistry. It’s beautiful and complicated. All the more reason to learn its details if you wanted to be a magical practitioner of the highest order!

Kiki's Delivery Service: A Witch's Coming of Age

 A guest post today, from Japan, on a different kind of magic!

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Kiki's Delivery Service: A Witch's Coming of Age 

 

The Studio Ghibli movie

           

The Disney version DVD cover

If you've watched a Studio Ghibli movie and liked it -- for instance, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle or My Neighbor Totoro -- you might enjoy Kiki's Delivery Service, another of director Hayao Miyazaki's masterpiece animations. It's one of my favorite movies!

But for this post, I'd like to introduce the children's book series it was based on.

Japanese cover of Book 1 (2013 edition)

Introducing Kiki

Written by Eiko Kadono*, Kiki's Delivery Service is about a young witch whose only magical skill is flying (on her broom) and who runs a delivery service.

The original title in Japanese is "Witch Delivery Service" (Majo no takkyūbin). Or more literally, "Witch Express Home Delivery." I suppose the localized title replaced "witch" with "Kiki" to avoid turning off a segment of potential American viewers.

Though Kiki is a witch, she isn't a Harry Potter type of witch. In her world, witches have long lost most of their magical powers. Book 1 of the series, which I just finished reading, doesn't delve into the reasons why. The book merely mentions it as the backdrop. So, unlike Harry Potter, Kiki solves her problems without spells; the only magic she uses is flying. She relies on wits, courage, and the kindness of others.

Japanese cover of Book 1 (2002 edition, with illustrations by Akiko Hayashi)

Illustrations by Akiko Hayashi in the earliest book edition

Japanese cover of Book 1 (2015 edition)

Summary of the book

Here's the back-cover synopsis of Book 1 (my translation from the Japanese):

Kiki is the only daughter of a witch mother and a normal human father. In the world of witches, when one turns 13, she must learn to live on her own. On a full-moon night, Kiki takes to the skies on her broom with Jiji, her companion black cat. With much anxiety and anticipation, she starts a "Witch Delivery Service" in the seaside town of Koriko. As Kiki goes through ups and downs, she grows to become part of Koriko society.

Scene from the Ghibli movie

Book 1 covers the first year of Kiki's independent life, during which she tackles interesting requests from clients with her quick thinking.

The chapter titles reflect the book's origin: It was first published in 1982-83 as a series of short stories in a Japanese monthly magazine, Haha no tomo ("A Mother's Companion"). Here's my rough translation of the Japanese chapter titles and, for comparison, Lynne Riggs' English translation in brackets.

Chapter 1: The Story Begins (Bells in the Treetops)

Chapter 2: Kiki Leaves Home (A New Witch's Broom)

Chapter 3: Kiki and Big-City Life (Kiki in the Big City)

Chapter 4: Kiki Starts a Business (Kiki Opens for Business)

Chapter 5: Kiki and the Big Incident (The Broom Thief)

Chapter 6: Kiki is Cranky (Kiki in the Doldrums)

Chapter 7: Kiki Noses into Somebody's Secret (Kiki Shares a Secret)

Chapter 8: Kiki Solves a Captain's Problem (Kiki to the Captain's Rescue)

Chapter 9: Kiki Delivers the New Year (Kiki Rings in the New Year)

Chapter 10: Kiki Delivers the Sound of Spring (Kiki Carries the Sounds of Spring)

Chapter 11: Kiki Goes Home (Kiki Goes Home)

Comparing book and movie

I enjoyed the book for the same reasons I enjoyed the movie: both were about an independent girl and the nice strangers she meets.

The book and movie are similar in tone and begin the same way -- with Kiki's preparations to leave home. In both, she meets Osono the baker, Tombo the boy, and the artist. In both, Jiji goes through a trial involving a toy cat.

As for differences: The movie's climax is not found in Book 1. And naturally, the movie covers only a small portion of the book's many events. I find the book version of Kiki slightly different too. She's more lively, a little more impulsive and gung-ho.

If Kiki's Delivery Service piques your interest I recommend watching the movie first, partly because the movie is easier to obtain and Hayao Miyazaki has adapted the book skillfully.

As for the book, Lynne Riggs' English translation is out of print. While you can find used copies on Amazon, the price is incredibly steep. If you're curious how it sounds, here's a sample from the first chapter.

*A couple of weeks ago, Eiko Kadono won the Hans Christian Andersen Award. (It’s like the Nobel Prize of children’s literature.)

Breeding Knowledge: It's like Gold

“If I need to learn something, I can just look it up on the Internet.”

Yes, you can look it up. But how much would you actually learn? That’s the subject of an American Educator article almost twenty years ago. In the Spring 2000 edition, E. D. Hirsch wrote an article titled ‘You can always look it up’… Or can you?

The premise of the article is that knowledge breeds new knowledge. Hirsch backs this up with multiple examples from cognitive psychology. But his main point can be summarized by one paragraph in the article.

Those who repudiate a fact-filled curriculum on the grounds that kids can always look things up miss the paradox that de-emphasizing factual knowledge actually disables children from looking things up effectively. To stress process at the expense of factual knowledge actually hinders children from learning to learn. Yes, the Internet has placed a wealth of information at our fingertips. But to be able to use that information – to absorb it, to add to our knowledge – we must already possess a storehouse of knowledge. That is the paradox disclosed by cognitive research.

It turns out that when I want to learn some chemistry, I (the professor) can do this very quickly and efficiently. Having knowledge in the field means that I can quickly absorb most of what I’m reading because I already know most of it, and I just need to pay attention to the small amount of new knowledge I’m trying to acquire. What I learn is effectively integrated into my existing scaffold of knowledge. My students, on the other hand, sometimes flail on an assignment that requires them to “look up stuff”. And I’ve noticed that the degree of flailing is dependent on the amount of background knowledge already present. The more you already know, the easier it is to zero in on the new information you looked up. One’s search strategy is also more efficient.

This is why, as an instructor, it is important to scaffold an open-ended assignment. I’ve learned this by trial and error. Even though I’ve been teaching for a long time, when I want students to try something novel and creative, gauging the degree of scaffolding can still be challenging. You don’t want it to be too easy nor too difficult. Hitting that ‘zone of proximal development’ can be tricky.

Breeding knowledge is like breeding gold. You need some ‘starter’ gold to build up your hoard, slowly but surely. Like sourdough bread. Or like when your father (Thror) gives you (Thrain) one of the seven, as in: Seven rings for the dwarf lords in their halls of stone. In the “Durin’s Folk” appendix in Lord of the Rings, Thror says to his son at their last parting. “This may prove the foundation of new fortune for you yet, though that seems unlikely. But it needs gold to breed gold.” Well, a golden hoard was built up. But then a greedy dragon named Smaug decided he wanted it. Oh, well.

Thankfully, knowledge isn’t subject to being stolen by a greedy dragon in the same way as gold. (We’ll skip over Glaurung the Golden and his dealings with the children of Turin.) But you have to work at building it up, brick by brick. This has to do with cognitive load and the limits of our memory and processing capabilities. In short, you cannot learn anything more complex if you haven’t mastered the basic steps. By mastered, I mean the knowledge is so ingrained that you no longer need to look up an external source. This year, I’ve been particularly trying to impress upon my G-Chem students the importance of knowing key definitions. Being able to recall the definition from memory is necessary before one can apply it to explain a concept in chemistry. Using it in context further strengthens the memory of the definition – a virtuous cycle.

Hirsch opens his article with an anecdote from his ninth-grade curriculum. Instead of the more traditional knowledge-brick-building approach, his cohort had two large projects that in today’s ‘progressive’ education terminology would be ‘integrated’ and ‘multidisciplinary’. Hirsch says: “I was excused from ordinary classes. It was great fun. Fortunately for my education, I just spent one year at that school.” I don’t think Hirsch is against projects or having integration among disciplines. But if these approaches detract from learning basic knowledge brick-by-brick, the students might ‘feel’ that they learned a lot, but in reality they have not. Yes, it’s possible to breed knowledge through projects and integration, but cognitive psychology has taught us that it needs to be carefully scaffolded. Chemistry is conceptually very challenging thanks to Johnstone’s Triangle. That doesn’t mean it cannot also be fun and interesting, but students must still do the work to master the basics. This includes memorizing definitions. Every year many students in my G-Chem classes will misuse electronegativity, even after multiple exhortations and examples.

Hirsch closes with another anecdote:

A few days ago, a student asked me to fill out a recommendation form for admission to my university’s school of education, where disparagement of “mere facts” may still be heard. Nonetheless, the very first item on the admissions form asked for an estimate of the candidate’s breadth of knowledge. This is standard practice on admissions forms, because studies have shown that general knowledge is the single most reliable index to a person’s ability to perform a variety of tasks. I wouldn’t have noticed this glaring inconsistency if I hadn’t been writing this piece…

How do you “learn to learn”? Hirsch would say that you build up the preparatory knowledge. Knowledge breeds knowledge; gold brick on top of gold brick. Perhaps a pyramid is an apt picture of a treasure hoard, be it gold or knowledge. The foundation needs to be wide to support its height (or depth). As a teacher, it’s important for me to keep learning new things. Sometimes I feel lazy and I think the Internet at my finger-tips will magically help me learn what I need or want – without systematically building the foundation. And when I flail, it’s a reminder that I should practice what I preach. And this means constantly figuring out where my students are, and how I can keep moving them forward. As they gain expertise and learn to learn, behold, they will find they can look things up profitably and effectively.

Spring Break

Spring Break. It’s over. I enjoyed my time off, but I’m also looking forward to being back in the classroom.

The highlight of the break was a quick trip to Nevada. The main purpose was to visit Hoover Dam. I’d recently read so much about this marvel of engineering (see here and here) that I had to see it for myself. We stayed in Henderson, avoiding the Las Vegas Strip, and arrived at Hoover Dam shortly before the Visitor Center opened. There was already a line, although not a very long one.

We took the Power Plant tour which with a short movie with historical footage. It’s amazing that such a project even got off the ground. I’m not sure that would have been possible in today’s political climate. I learned that they built in huge pipes as condensers to cool the millions of tons of concrete poured into the structure. Then we took an elevator ride down (> 500 feet) to see the large tunnels that were cut out to divert the might Colorado River prior to dam construction. We also saw the huge generators, each weighing over 500 tons.

The tour guide was very knowledgeable both in his explanations and answering questions. I’d always thought that Hoover Dam was about electricity, but that’s a side-product which they sell at cost. The main purpose was to control the flow of the river and provide water consistently to the southwest states. After the tour, we walked across the dam, and saw both sides of the Colorado river. There were tiny boats downstream (part of a river tour, I’m guessing). Just upstream of the dam were the large intake towers. Looking down at the water I could actually see fish near the towers.

Besides Hoover Dam, we also visited Red Rock Canyon northwest of Las Vegas. The driving area is a 13-mile one-way loop with spectacular views. There are also plenty of hiking trails. After stopping at the visitors center we took a slow drive with many scenic stops to admire the landscape and take pictures. Here are a couple of shots: One shows part of the red rock alongside sandstone. The other, I don’t quite remember the rock composition, but it reminded me of the Lord of the Rings movies. I was also reminded that I should get out of my urban settings more often and enjoy nature!

A vacation isn’t truly a vacation without tasty meals. I took advantage of having food I wouldn’t normally find in my local area. I managed to put on some weight even with all the walking, but I will likely lose it all now that I’m back to my normal routine. It’s also nice to be back eating my daily dose of lots of fruit and vegetables after lots of carbohydrates and other fried foods. I also didn’t check my e-mail for at least two days, which is 24 hours more than my usual one-day-a-week Internet-free days.

Vacations eventually come to an end, but I just have seven more weeks to the end of the semester. In the meantime, we can start planning summer travel!