I have recently discontinued pursuit of my Masters in Business Administration. Accounting was fine, business law is fine, management science, IS for decision-making, and quantitative methods were all fine and dandy, but when I put all of these things together into the context of the modern business world, they suddenly stopped being fine.

The business sciences as we know them have only been around for a little over a century. In that time, we have already gone through six eras, the Industrial, Entrepreneurial, Production, Marketing, Global, and Information Eras. The market viewed in this short timeline seems in a perpetual state of revolution, and, as with all revolutions, there are big winners and endless losers.

This is not to say business has only been around 100 years, people have been buying, selling, and trading goods for millenia; however, the modern mass-market consumerism we have today is a novelty and, while we pretend it has always been thus, it is actually far to mercurial to predict its future trends.

In 1819 the U.S. Supreme Court defined a corporation as “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in the contemplation of the law.” A corporation is an invisible avatar, meant to protect the real people standing behind it from the financial and legal repurcussions of their actions.

The Corporation documentary asks the question: If a corporation is a legal person, then what kind of person is it? “It is required by law to put its self-interest above all else and to maximize wealth for its shareholders.”

The corporation is a psychopath.

It meets several criteria that define a psychopath: Callous unconcern for the feelings of others, incapacity to maintain enduring relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness through repeated lying and conning of others for profit, incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors. (source)

So we have an artificial social construct filled with imaginary people who are psychopaths.

This just doesn’t grok with my rational mind.

We can see the market’s chaotic nature in the Dow Industrial Average. Ask ten different economists or stock brokers why the DOW Industrial average dropped 500 points in late February, and you will get answers like “concerns that the U.S. and Chinese economies are cooling and that equities prices have become overinflated (source).” or “that selling has begotten selling (source).” or that it was an “overdue correction (source).” or even the “Drudge Report Help Tank the Stock Market” (source).”

Many of these highly-plausible hypotheses on the matter were delivered as solid fact, but with a system as subject to chaos theory as macroeconomics, it’s all just guess work. “Past performance is not indicative of future trends.” To play the prediction game in a system so inherently chaotic is gambling.

Consider the impact the Information age has on the material goods market. People have much less need for books, CDs, DVDs, televisions, stereo sytems, and all the cabinets and shelves used to house them when all of our entertainment needs are now compiled into a single computer system. Europeans are already into a post-modern market that views owning material goods as more of a burden than a benefit. “The things you own end up owning you,” as Tyler Dirden in Fight Club said.

In one sense, it’s hard not to see the market revolutions as a meme that has infected civilizaions on a global scale. When we consider the young age of the modern market system, the incredible natural resources it consumes, and massive quantities of waste it produces, it’s hard not to look at rampant consumerism as a form of mass psychosis infecting people around the world and convincing them to buy mass quantities of things they don’t need. When my brother asked one of his European friends why she had bought a bag of cheap useless trinkets at a Dollar Store, she replied that she wanted to show her friends back home the silly things Americans waste their money on.

I am now looking into a more stable field of knowledge for my masters, something where the rules don’t change on a day to day basis because of governmental regulatory or deregulatory whims, fickle consumerism, technological breakthroughs and obsolescence, cultural progress, and corporations that lie pathologically to keep their stock prices up.

Instead, I’m thinking biostatistics, computer modeling, microbiology, or organic chemistry… some branch of human knowledge that doesn’t change unless its proven wrong, where there exists a common ideal of cooperative competition that shares knowledge and encourages coordination among peers because everyone has the ultimate honest goal of finding out their common reality.

Note: The Corporation documentary is avaiable free online.

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
     – Isaac Asimov, Salvor Hardin in “Foundation”

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation

A scientist, Hari Seldon, is on trial for treason. His crime: Mathematically proving the Empire will collapse within five centuries. Nothing can avert this disaster, but the Seldon warns there can be either 30,000 years of anarchy and suffering across the galaxy, or the disaster can be limited to one millenia.

Thus opens Isaac Asimov’s epic Foundation series, a collection of novels that took him 49 years to write and eventually drew all of his science ficiton works into this single universe. The Empire at the book’s beginnning spans the entire galaxy. When it collapses, the millions of habitable worlds within its domain will become isolated as trade routes close. As the markets collapse and people become completely preoccupied with mere survival, technologies and other advances will fall to the wayside and be forgotten. Hari Seldon, using a mathematical science that only exists in fiction called psychohistory, has predicted the innevitability of this decline, similar to our fall of the Roman Empire.

To reduce the period of barbarism from 30,000 years to 1,000, Hari Seldon has the Emperor establish two Foundations at opposite ends of the galaxy, where a community of scientists will preserve all of the human race’s knowledge about the physical world.

First let me address what’s wrong with these novels:

The books are flawed for being patriarchal, and I concur that, as someone who grew up with heros like Sigorny Weaver in Aliens and strong female roles in Star Trek (Science Fiction has always been so progressive), my enjoyment of the book suffers from these antiquated gender roles. There are two means of understanding why this mistake occurred. Firstly, the book was written in the 1950s, so of course it would carry the cultural morass of its society. Asimov was only human afterall, and we should forgive his lack of vision concerning differences between the sexes. He did consider himself a feminist long before the term was coined, and attributes his lack of strong female characters to inexperience.

The second explanation raises further problems, the societies in the trilogy are medeval in nature, monarchies with Kings, Queens, Barons, and other social parasites. This also hurts the believablity of Asimov’s universe. Just as many Astroanthropologists wonder, “Why would aliens travel X-Billion light years to probe our anuses?” readers may wonder how a species so flawed, ignorant, and self-destructive as those in Foundation’s universe could manage to populate the entire galaxy?

But the story is a fable. Space Opera, not Hard SF, and must be read as a fairy tale, where the fantasy serves as the vehicle for conveying the timelessness of the message.

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation

So now let me tell you what’s so right with these books to make them qualify as science literature:

Asivov predicts a future where psychology is a concrete mathematical science. We see this fiction becoming reality in our own lifetimes withe the emergence of Evolutionary Psychology and Neuroscience. The story’s timeline jumps in leaps and bounds. A few decades here, a century there, and although the story focuses more on individuals as it progresses, the focus is primarily on ideas

The heroes of the book are scientists… or more accurately, science is the book’s primary hero. The scientists start out as insulated from the rest of the world as they tended to be in our modern world for decades, only when circumstances force them to interact with the rest of the galaxy is the power of science illustrated. The scientists roaming the galaxy are like wizards or magicians, their technology a form of magic. They become legendary, and a mythos spreads concerning them wherever they make contact.

The book’s other hero is Capitalism, as the scientists lack the military strength of their barbarian neighbors, they must find nonviolent means of dominating them and restoring order to the galaxy. Just as America much more effectively uses its economic strength to persuade the world than its military, so do the scientists use market forces to influence and fend off the barbaric civilizations.

Nonviolence is a pervading theme throughout the books. The heros never resort to violence as a means because, as the character Salvor Hardin notes, it “is the last refuge of the incompetent.” Instead, the characters must use technology and persuation to overcome their obstacles.

Asimov has constructed a universe where the ultimate hero is the “roving mind,” and its lessons apply to our everyday lives.

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

It took me all of 2006 to read Jared Diamond’s novel, setting it down several times.

So informationally dense, such a delluge of data, an avalanche of not just facts, but where the facts came from, how layers of archeological discoveries translated into Diamond’s conclusions was too overwhelming for me to consume in one sitting. Like eating an elephant, I had to tackle Diamond’s book in small bites.

From geographic locations including Montana, Easter Island, Iceland, Greenland, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Chaco Canyon, Mesoamerica, Rwanda, New Guinea, Japan, China, Australia, India, North America, Europe, Norway, Cambodia, Canada, Hawaii, numerous Pacific Islands, New Zealand, New Guinea, Polynesia, Russia, Scandinavia, and Southern California; through civlizations and cultures such as Mayan, Dutch, Hatian, Feudal Japan, Modern China, Norse, Anasazi, Hutu, Tutsi, Aborigines, Kayenta, Arawak, barbarians, Maori, Ainu, Moche, Native Americans, and Zapotecs; covering issues and factors like Water quality, polution, forests, invasive species, climate change, political unrest, biodiversity, soil analysis, invasive species, irresponsible mining, deforestation, diseases, CFCs, exporting and importing imbalances, air quality, and overpopulation; Jared Diamond constructs an incredibly thorough and immensely complex web of things to consider on this topic.

Woof.

And yet, Diamond’s writing is completely accessible. He doesn’t assume any prior knowledge on his readers part, but remains interesting even when covering facts that many of us will already be familiar with. The book reads like the scientific process in many parts, as he takes us through carbon isotope tests, archeological digs of waste pits, and pollen studies to construct a narration of various civilizations’ final years.

Diamond wants his readers to know in detail how he knows the things he puts into this book. He doesn’t want to leave any doubt that he knows this subject, and doesn’t leave any doubt. Diamond is an expert on this topic, and anyone skeptical of his interpretation of the data will need to work through decades of research before they could assume to challenge him.

Beginning with his childhood home in Montana, Diamond catalogues the environmental damages the mining industry has wrought there. He takes us to Easter Island, whose inhabitants wrecked their environment by cutting down every last tree to build statues to their gods. We witness the final days of Norse Greenland, whose inhabitants must have starved to death one winter after eating the last of their livestock, while the Inuit inhabitants continued to feast on fish and seals. While Mel Gibson’s film Apocalyptico catalogues 101 ways Mayans may kill one another for entertainment purposes, Diamond explores the myriad reasons this civilization declined from their cultural accomplishments in agriculture, astronomy, and governance.

The success stories Diamond provides prove that collapse is not innevitable. The Japanese successfuly managed their forests so that they 80% of their country covered in forest. The Dominican Repbulic Dictatorship successfully implemented top-down environmental management, whose effect is starkly apparent when we look at the country’s border with Haiti, and the environmental collapse that neighbor has experienced because of its inability to manage its resources. The Dutch have implemented the most successful environmental policies, a direct result of the country’s precarious position of having so much land below sea level.

While Diamond focuses on countries and civilizations, we are now a world community and we must consider the emergent and very real possibility that we are now capable of experiencing collapse on a global scale. This is a frightening development when we look at the immensity of the catastrophes our race faces such as anthropogenic global warming, collapsing fish stocks in the Ocean, and unsustainable population growth. If the few thousand inhabitants of Easter Island couldn’t reign in their self-destructive tendencies, what hope does our global village have of managing the momentum of our 6.5 billion members?

Diamond’s tone is ultimately hopeful, mainly because we have ways of knowing the world around us that were not available to ancient peoples. We can learn from the mistakes of past civilizations. We have the benefit of being able to see the decades of changing factors that caused these societies to collapse. Factors that occurred so gradually that the people living in them could not recognize the changes themselves. We have the science to observe and document changes to our environment over time now, and we have the methods and models to project the trends we observe well into the future.

We just need to act on them.

Jared Diamond gave an excellent talk for Seminars About Long-Term Thinking.

The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins

On first read, Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene seems repetitive. Dawkins continually takes asides to remind the audience that his verbage, words like “compete,” “betray,” “steal,” etc, in describing animal behaviors are not meant to imply altruism or malevolence, but describe a behavior’s effect on a gene’s ability to propigate. Through chapter after chapter he exhaustively explores different situations in various scopes and the evolutionary dynamics at work within them.

Dawkins’ borderline excessive treatment of his subject is purposeful. For he is attempting to teach his readers how to think in evolutionary terms. He works, quite successfully, to change how we view the world around us, to see all existence from an evolutionary standpoint.

The opening chapter of Dawkins’ book explores evolution before the first single-celled organisms emerged. This is a time when molecules compete for atoms, with stronger molecules surviving to aquire more atoms. Eventually, a self-replicating molecule emerges, similar to the double-helix chains that comprise DNA.

When we get into animal behaviors, Dawkins frames everything in terms of energy. This is a fascinating way to look at the world. Stripping away all the extraneous information, all the social influences on why we do things, and seeing our world purely in terms of solar energy being consumed by plants in turn consumed my animals which are consumed by other animals, we can easily see the importance of aquiring energy, but we often overlook the importance of conserving energy as well.

So many behaviors in the animal kingdom are meant to conserve one animal’s energy by getting another animal to expend energy. The starkest example of this behavior is the cukoo, which lays its egg in the nest of another bird species. When the cukoo hatches early, it pushes the other eggs out of the nest and survives off of the care of its adopted mother. Thus, the cukoo mother tricks another species into raising its offspring, freeing it to expend her energy into producing more offspring.

Similar relationships exist within species, and Dawkins spends a great deal of time exploring the different strategies infants may employ to consume as much of their mother’s energy as possible at the expense of their siblings. Relations between the sexes are also explained in terms of energy, with the male strategy of exploiting the female with sperm, which can impregnate many females, and the female evolving better eggs and fetal environments to entice males into staying to help provide for their offspring. There are even different strategies for males and females, with some males loyal and others deserters, while some females may demand more from males during the courtship phase as a test of loyalty or deserted females may try and trick another male into thinking the offspring is theirs.

There are innumerable strategies at work in the complex web of evolution, and Dawkins explores many of them with simplistic yet engaging detail. All of these strategies and biological innovations have one purpose: to propogate innanimate DNA sequences. Everything plants, animals, and humans do is to carry these combinations of molecules into the future. How successful these biological and behavioral strategies are has less to do with us than with the molecules themselves, which define almost everything we do.

Almost because Dawkins introduces a concept that has become a staple in our Information Age lexicon: the meme. Mammals, especially humans, are not born into this world pre-programmed with everything they need to know to survive. There is an extended childhood, where we learn from our parents how to interact with our environment. Not quite a tabula rosa or blank slate, but born with our heads empty enough that we can learn how to behave wherever we are born to maximally take advantage of that environment. The highly adaptive cerebral cortex, more than anything else, has allowed human beings to inhabit and adapt to every corner of the Earth.

As a result, evolving memes, not genes, have become our primary method of adaptation. Humans with good ideas will survive and the bad ones will quickly die out of the memepool. Examples of such bad ideas are winners of the (often ficticious) Darwin Awards. While examples of the good ideas surround our everday life in the form of technological, medical, and educational advances. As Janine Benyus wrote, “After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.”

The strength of Dawkins’ analysis of various evolutionary aspects is so convincing because of his ability to quantify seemingly unquantifiable variables. With simple mathematics he is able to establish the degree to which intra-species cooperation benefits its members. Dawkins uses game theory to evolution, specifically the “Prisoner’s Dilema,” to explain altruism in his now famous Nice Guys Finish First argument.

Dawkins was criticized early on for The Selfish Gene because many saw it as a possible defense for eugenics and rejected what they thought was a cold and inhumane representation of nature, but today it is widely accepted as one of the more important texts in modern thinking in existence. Dawkins’ thorough vision of a world completely defined in terms of evolution, deconstructed to just its basic elements of genes and energy will change its reader’s way of looking at the world, and in this sense, it is a very powerful collection of memes that will prove even more successful as human understanding catches up to it.

The Scientific Method (Bora Zivkovic has a Problem with this diagram)

Something I’m often complaining about is “common sense.” Lazy people are always just throwing up their hands and saying “Duh!” when you ask them to justify some statement that sounds right and is taken for granted. It’s always important to check and recheck our facts on a regular basis, either to reaffirm, refine, or discredit them. Remember, common sense is what tells you that the Earth is flat and the sun revolves around it.

One bit of common sense that drives me nuts is the “World’s going to hell in a hand basket meme.” Many of my own generation believe that things are progressively getting worse, their parents believed things were progressively getting worse, and their parents’ parents believed things were progressively getting worse. It seems like anyone over 30 looks at the youth of their age and sees them as less moral than they were themselves in their youth.

I mean, it makes sense right? Things must be getting worse. Every time we turn on the television, we’re assaulted with the incredible depravity of the world. Murders, rapes, terrorism, tortures–civilization must be in decline; I saw it on Faux News.

The Baby Boomers were so freaked out by what they perceived as the increased promiscuity, atheism, and rejection of traditional values in people like me, who were born between 1961 and 1981, that they labeled us Generation X. Once my generation got over the shock of being given a label with associations that evoked images of mad-scientists and freakish experiments, most of us learned to wear the label as a badge of honor; after all, my generation ushered in the Information Age, which has baffled and confused our elders to the point of making them mostly irrelevant.

Yet some members of my generation obviously hasn’t learned from this injustice visited upon us. Recently an acquaintance of mine said she was going to put her child in private school because schools today were much more dangerous than when she was a kid. Kids today have no morals, they don’t believe in god, and they have no respect for their elders. It should be noted that this person wasn’t some crotchety old lady, she was the same age as me.

I wanted to call “Bull$#!@” on her, but refrained because I didn’t have the data with me to do so properly. One should always have something empirical to fling like ninja stars painfully into the intestines of the self-righteous.

So I did some googling at my first available moment, and you know what I found? School Crime Statistics show that things have either gotten better or haven’t changed over the last few decades.

In fact, a table of overall crime statistics showed the numbers of most crimes have gone down significantly since 1985, and this despite a 55 million person increase in population.

Ninja Stars away!

Today’s America is significantly improved morally over the America of 20 years ago. So the next time some whiney-ass old foggy complains about the decline of American morals due to the dwindling belief in god or traditional values, point out that their America was a much more violent and immoral place. 50% more immoral in some cases.

But it’s not just America, overall human civilization has been improving for centuries. Consider this observation by Steven Pinker:

The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century. (source)

Cosmos help us if we ever experience a recidivism to the “Good Old Days,” the same days when women couldn’t vote, African-Americans had to drink at separate water fountains, and child abuse was the “common sense” solution to getting your son to eat his spinach.

Screw the “good old days.” It’s like Dr. David Brin once said:

Let me avow up-front that I share the more recent, upstart belief in universities, democratic accountability, science and human improvability — one that questions the fated persistence of “eternal” stupidities. Above all, any ‘golden age’ lies in our future. It has to. Or what are we striving for?

Paternal

Ryan Somma’s Paternal DNA Results

I participated in the Genographic Project last year, an ongoing effort to chart the migration of the human race across the earth using DNA testing. It was $110 for the kit, which is a bit pricey, but I was curious and glad I did it. After processing the results of my submitted DNA (Mailed-In Cheek Cells), they posted the results online.

I, and my siblings, belong to Haplogroup J2 (M172) surrounding the Mediterranean. As my father is purebred Italian, I assume we are descendent of the “20 percent of males in southern Italy that carry the marker.”

M168 > M89 > M304 > M172

These markers can be traced on National Geographic’s interactive atlas of human migrations.

Ryan Somma’s Paternal Genetic Journey

There’s a bit of poetic justice in this revelation. As my father used to tell us about how Italians joke Sicilians for their negro ancestry from when the Moors occupied southern Italy and called them “Eggplant” as a racist derogatory term. Now, thanks to the beauty of genetic testing, we know that we are Euron—-rs too!

The application then charts our your ancestors migrations into a storyline. Each haplogroup is described in terms of its age, location, number of homo sapiens in existence, tool use, archeological evidence, as well as what their existence was like.

The researchers trace mutations in the Y-chromosome, because it gives them one gene to trace and the rare mutations that occur in that gene provide markers in the migrational history of homo sapiens. At least, that’s how it was offered at first. You can now choose whether you want your paternal or maternal genetic history.

What this means is that I was only getting one-half of my genetic story. So the person who contributed the other half of my DNA ordered a kit online…

Maternal

In order to find out where the other half of my genes come from, my mother decided to take the test as well. I suspected our “West Virginia Mutt” genes would be met with “DOES NOT COMPUTE” by their testing equipment, but despite the familial legends of Native American, English, Irish, and African American ancestry, we got the following result:

Ryan Somma’s Maternal Genetic Journey

Ancestral Line: “Eve” > L1/L0 > L2 > L3 > N > R > pre-HV > HV > H

Hmmm… No evidence of a Native American ancestry that would require our ancestors’ migrations wrap around the entire Earth to end on the North American east coast. Because we are only tracing my mother’s maternal DNA, we were only getting half of my Mother’s genetic story, that of my grandmother’s.

With my first genetic test, I really only had one-fourth of the story, with my mother’s I now had one-half–but no, I don’t have anywhere near that much. Obtaining my paternal and maternal grandmother’s DNA would further clarify things, but then I would only have one-half of my both my grandmothers’ and grandfathers’ genetic story. I would need their mothers’ and fathers’ and their mothers’ mothers’ and fathers’ fathers’ and so on.

So there’s an exponentially increasing amount of DNA testing required to flesh out all of the nuances in my genetic ancestry–to a point. We know that humans must have engaged in a great deal of inbreeding over history as there aren’t enough ancestors to go around. According to the genographic project, there were only 10,000 homo sapiens starting out of Africa 50,000 years ago. There are 6.5 billion now on Earth. These historical facts cannot accommodate the exponential growth of ancestors for each of us without inbreeding.

As interesting as it would be to go one level further in discovering my ancestors’ migrations, the task of exhuming my four grandparents to obtain their DNA seems cost prohibitive, and really it would only make me even more curious. So that I might start entertaining the possibility of exhuming my eight great-grandparents… 16 great-great-grandparents… 32 great-great-great-grandparents… etc. etc.

I think I’ll try to be content with what I’ve got, and maybe take up the hobby of genealogy if I can’t settle down my mind.

See also Family Tree DNA and mitosearch for using your Genographic DNA results to enhance your Genealogical research. I haven’t explored this yet, so maybe in a future post I’ll cover it.

Flatland, A Romance of Many Dimensions

Square is a lawyer living in Flatland, a two-dimensional world that has height and width, but not length. In Edwin Abbott’s book Flatland, Square serves as our tour guide, describing both the physical and social characteristics of living in a world without depth. Flatland works on two levels: as an effective portrayal of an alien civilization living in two dimensions and as an elegant, subtle social commentary on our own society.

The number of angles and regularity of shape a Flatland inhabitant has determines their social status. Servant classes are isoceles triangles, the middle class are equilateral triangles, gentlemen are squares and pentagons, nobility are polygonals, and the priestly class are circles. Women are straight lines, and in a world where every angle a person has increases their intelligence, this makes women the lowliest of Flatland’s inhabitants.

Is this sexist? It’s hard to say. We are talking about alien beings here. Is it sexist for the male angler fish to become a parasitic attachment on the female of the species? The narrator acknowledges the deplorable state of existence for women in Flatland, but then he also acknowledges the deplorable state of existence for all of Flatland in comparison with the fantastic Spaceland.

In Square’s community triangular houses are forbidden because of their pointy angles, which are hazardous to Flatlanders, as are all sharp points. With their pointy single angle, the isoceles worker classmembers are dangerous to the blunt circles. Women are the most dangerous of all, having the sharpest point of all flatlanders.

Isoceles of less than 10 degrees are used for experimentation in schools, and Square defends this Flatlander eugenics policy toward the lowest classes. He applies double standards to different shapes in his law practice. An isoceles criminal cannot help being a criminal because of their irregularity. Therefore their irregularity must be punished and the isoceles executed for the betterment of society. However, when a polygonal commits a crime, and blames it on temorary irregularity, Square cannot bring himself “logically to reject, nor practically to accept, his conclusions (Abbot, 41).”

Square is a bigot. He believes irregular figures are naturally born burdens on society, rejecting the idea that societal expectations make their lives difficult. Square is anti-democracy, and rejects the idea of freewill, believing instead that people are born with certain proclivities for behaviors. Square believes in the class heirarchy because he was born into it and it is the natural state of things for him.

Square’s bigotry, anti-democratic beliefs, and chauvanism are made all the more infuriating by his intelligent and often logical defense of his opinions. Abbott’s narrator is not a dunce, he is a lawyer, and as such he aptly defends positions we know are wrong with our Spaceland view of things, but encounter difficulty refuting within the context of Flatland’s alien dynamics.

Square’s narrowmindedness and the narrowmindedness of his society reflect the narrow perspective of their world. When he meets the Sphere, who takes him to Spaceland, a reality with three dimensions.

Spoiler Warnings! Abandon Ye All Hope Who Read on From Here!

I kept looking for Edwin Abbot to give the reader some little knowing wink to show that he recognizes Square’s profound ignorance, something to show us that he disavows Square’s racist and anti-democratic stances, but there was none forethcoming. At least, nothing obvious.

Instead we are left to our own enlightened perspective on Flatland’s social ills. At one point, Square tells the story of the “Color Revolution,” a time in Flatland history when the inhabitants painted themselves different colors. The majority of Flatlanders identify the shapes of others by feeling them, but the upper classes are educated in the art of identifying shapes using sight (How they do this, Abott explains in detail). By painting themselves with identifying colors, sight-derived knowledge became available to all citizens.

This threatened the social heirarchy dominated by the Circles, who’s priesthood formerly held a monopoly on knowing the world by sight. It reminds the reader of how literacy stripped Church leaders of their power, as people could read and interpret the Bible for themselves.

In Flatland, as in our own world, the solution was for the political power to stir up infighting among members of the lower class. Circles play the isoceles against one another, instilling them to fight and cull their populations to prevent them from organizing to overthrow the higher classes with their dangerously sharp angles.

[Priests] “doing nothing themselves, they are the Causes of everything worth doing that is done by others,” Square tells us. There are too many obvious correlations to some of our own histories of the relationships between classes in our own world to think the Flatlanders’ ignorance irrelevant to our own experiences.

Square experiences an iconoclasm when a being known as the Sphere visits him. Sphere pulls Square out of Flatland and into Spaceland, from two dimensions to three. Sphere takes Square to see Lineland, a world consisting of two points, whose inhabitants rely entirely on their hearing to interact with their world and can only see the citizens immediately neighboring them. Square challenges the Linelanders, tries to broaden their horizons, but they dismiss him, unable to see what he sees.

Then Sphere takes Square to see the Point, living in Pointland. Sphere describes the miserable existence this being, a misery of which the Point is incapable of being aware:

Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experience of them; he has no cognizance even of the number Two; nor has he a thought of Plurality; for he is himself his One and All, being really Nothing. Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn his lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy.

When Square wonders what dimensions exists beyond Spaceland, Sphere laughs at the idea. How could there be dimensions beyond three?

What about different combinations of dimensions? Flatlanders experience a pull towards the South in their world because one of their two dimensions is oriented along a verticle axis (height), giving them a sense of direction. This implies their world exists within our own and is subject to our gravity (there are all sorts of logical problems with this (Does Flatland orbit the Sun with our Earth? How far into our sky does Flatland go?);yet, their world could just as easily only have length and width. How would that orient their world differently, but with the same number of dimensions?

From Spaceland, Square is able to look down at Flatland and see inside every house and the internal organs of every citizen. A human pulled into four dimensions would have the same viewpoint, seeing inside everything we don’t see in our three-dimensional space, impossible to imagine.

Square cannot communicate his experiences in Spaceland when he returns to Flatland, because he has returned to a reality that lacks the dimension of depth. His experience is one of personal revelation, and he has no means to prove what he has seen, which amounts to heresy, to a skeptical audience. The reader believes Square only because we are Spacelanders ourselves.

Flatland is an imperfect book, but its imperfections endear it to me over the attempts of many other authors to replicate and improve upon it. There are hard-SF problems with the dynamics of Flatland, such as the Flatlanders being able to see, even though their perspective, lacking a third dimension, would not even be a line. Despite his incredible experiences in Spaceland, Square remains unapologetically and profoundly ignorant in all respects that offend the reader.

It’s the exersize of picking apart these logical and moral issues that give make this book a classic. Solving these problems from our enlightened perspective here in Spaceland make reading the book a joy, and make us question our own reality and what dimensions might we be missing in it.

Further Browsing

Flatland the Movie

Imagining the Tenth Dimension (Check out the awesome flash demo at this site)

This is a letter to the editor I published at the Daily Advance. Posted here for posterity, since they have no online archive:

I applaud The Daily Advance’s new “Green Living” section on your Web site and Robert Kelly-Goss’s recent highly-informative article on global warming. However, the article did contain one factual error that needs correcting: there is no debate on global warming’s cause —2,000 economists, 110 Nobel laureates, and more than 300,000 people petitioning Congress have all signed statements affirming that global warming is being caused by humans and that we need to take immediate action to curb its effects.

Of the more than 928 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles published on the subject, not a single one disagrees with the consensus position that global warming is real and our carbon-emissions are behind it. The scientists at the Union of Concerned Scientists, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the 2,500 scientists behind the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report all agree that we are causing this climate crisis. This is why Republicans brought Michael Crichton, a science-fiction author, before Congress to refute climatologists on the subject; why the Bush administration closed EPA libraries last October; why an oil lobbyist was allowed to remove all scientific conclusions from U.S. Climate Change Science Program reports; and why ExxonMobil even went so far as to recently offer $10,000 to any scientist who would dispute the scientific consensus. So long as they can keep us uncertain, we won’t take action, which means they win.

We have a right to nuclear, solar, and wind energy. We have a right to improved gas-mileage in our cars. Most of all, we have a right for our children (who) live in Elizabeth City, as rising sea levels will turn them into refugees over the next century just so that oil companies can continue to rake in record profits.

And if logical conjecture based on overwhelming evidence isn’t enough, then we ought to take action simply to end the insanity of Americans borrowing trillions of dollars from communist China to give to totalitarian regimes in the Middle East.