In command at twelve years of age . . .

In the December 2009 issue of Naval History is an article Confluence of Careers at Mobile Bay by Craig L. Symonds, charting the respective careers of "Southerner" David Glasgow Farragut who served as the admiral leading the Union forces at the Battle of Mobile Bay and "Northerner" Franklin Buchanan who commanded the Confederacy's defending forces.

Symonds recounts an incident early in Farragut's career that seems impossibly improbable to our modern mind and mores. Farragut joined the US Navy as a midshipman at age nine and was serving as such three years later at the commencement of the War of 1812 between the US and Great Britain. Farragut served under the command of David Porter, captain of the USS Essex tasked with harrassing British merchant shipping. Symonds takes up the story in his article:

The Essex, with young Faragutt on board, next headed for the Galapagos Islands. There, Porter savaged the British whaling fleet, taking a dozen prizes. They were then manned with prize crews, put under the command of a junior officer or midshipman, and sent into port to be condemned as prizes of war. One of the prizes was an American ship, the Barclay, which had been taken by a British privateer and then recaptured by the Essex. Having taken so many prizes, Porter was running out of junior officers to appoint as prize masters, and as a result this one went to Midshipman Farragut. The American skipper of the Barclay was almost as annoyed to find himself under the "command" of a 12 year old as he had been when his ship had first been captured by a British privateer. He declared that he would take no orders from such a stripling, and Farragut had to muster all the dignity and courage he could to face him down and assert his authority. Farragut later recalled that "This was an important event in my life, and . . . I felt no little pride at finding myself in command at 12 years of age.

His job depends on not understanding it

Upton Sinclair, in a comment that seems especially pertinent these days with what seems to be serial tsunami of revelations of analytical and research fraud:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.

Not even a theory to cover our nakedness . . .

From the September 19-25, 2009 edition of New Scientist. An interesting summary of the status of our theories (and lack thereof) to explain the fact that we are a naked ape compared to any of our distant relatives. I am glad that there remain fundamental mysteries before which we remain perplexed and puzzled.

But what little there is, is very important

Came across this comment in William James' essay, The Importance of Individuals, which is worth a read.

An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: "There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important." This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.

I attended a public lecture once by a primatologist, discussing chimpanzees in Africa. At some point in her presentation she commented on the unthinking nostrum often repeated that humans and chimpanzees share 99% of their genetic material in common. She then made the point that James' carpenter makes of the importance of that small difference by highlighting a number of life forms and the percentage of genetic material which we share. I believe she got down to dandelions, with which, if memory serves, we share 7% of our genetic material.

On Early Rising

An essay by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, On Early Rising, has this marvellously elliptical rail against early rising:

The intelligent reader, and no other is supposable, need not be told that the early bird aphorism is a warning and not an incentive. The fate of the worm refutes the pretended ethical teaching of the proverb, which assumes to illustrate the advantage of early rising and does so by showing how extremely dangerous it is. I have no patience with the worm, and when I rise with the lark I am always careful to select a lark that has overslept himself.

Interview - Terry Pratchett

An interview in the October 31, 2009 edition of New Scientist with popular sicence fiction writer Terry Pratchett.

The foundation of successful learning is improving executive function

From the September 19-25, 2009 edition of New Scientist.

One of the main themes emerging at the DOM meeting was that the foundation of successful learning is improving executive function - a collection of cognitive processes important for self-control and focusing on the task at hand.

Interesting. This is much as we have hypothesized in The Reading Hamburger. The article does not identify reading as a significant step towards improved executive function; but I bet it is.

The Winds of Fate

The Winds of Fate
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

One ship drives east and another drives west <
With the selfsame winds that blow.
'Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales
Which tells us the way to go.

Like the winds of the sea are the ways of fate,
As we voyage along through life:
'Tis the set of the soul
That decides its goal,
And not the calm or the strife.

A violent South Wind blew upon them

Herodotus relates a tale in his Histories, in which Cambyses, King of the Persians, sends an army of 50,000 to subjugate and punish the priests of Amun in the oasis of Siwa in Egypt for refusing to acknowledge his conquest of their land. Herodotus:

and those of the Persians who had been sent to march against the Ammonians set forth from Thebes and went on their way with guides; and it is known that they arrived at the city of Oasis, which is inhabited by Samians said to be of the Aischrionian tribe, and is distant seven days' journey from Thebes over sandy desert: now this place is called in the speech of the Hellenes the "Isle of the Blessed." It is said that the army reached this place, but from that point onwards, except the Ammonians themselves and those who have heard the account from them, no man is able to say anything about them; for they neither reached the Ammonians nor returned back. This however is added to the story by the Ammonians themselves: - they say that as the army was going from this Oasis through the sandy desert to attack them, and had got to a point about mid-way between them and the Oasis, while they were taking their morning meal a violent South Wind blew upon them, and bearing with it heaps of the desert sand it buried them under it, and so they disappeared and were seen no more. Thus the Ammonians say that it came to pass with regard to this army.

With another H/T to Megan McArdle at The Atlantic Monthly, it now appears that archaeologists may have discovered evidence of the fate of this missing Persian army. This would be awesome. Vanished Persian Army Said Found in Desert. This would be akin to the discovery of the battlefield of the Battle of Teutoberg Forest where Varus lost his three legions (see The Battle that Stopped Rome by Peter S. Wells) or the mystery of the disappearance of the Roman Ninth Legion (see Rosemary Sutcliff's Eagle of the Ninth for an independent reader historical fiction account.)

A commanding sense of duty

When in my early teens, I lived in Europe and was particularly fascinated with World War II with many people I knew having personal or familial stories to tell of a titanic event that was still within living memory. Because of that fascination, I remember the news reports from 1974 of the last Japanese soldiers of World War II surrendering from their hidden mountain outposts. Thomas Ayres' A Military Miscellany provides a little more detail.

Hiro Onoda became a Japanese soldier when he was eighteen. In 1945 he was on Lubang Island in the Philippines when United States troops overran it. Most of the Japanese there were captured or killed. Onoda was in a group that fled into the mountains and hid out.

When the war ended, the U.S. and Japanese governments knew that holdouts remained on the island. Expeditions were sent to find them; leaflets were dropped, urging them to surrender, without success.

For years the holdouts survived by raiding native villages, earning the nicknam "Mountain Devils." As years passed, Onoda's comrades died off from disease and exposure, until only he remained.

In 1974, a university student named Norio Suzuki spent months on Lubang Island looking for survivors. While Suzuki was drinking from a stream, Onoda approached him. Informed the war was long over, Onoda still refused to surrender unless ordered to do so by his commanding officer.

Suzuki returned to Japan, found the officer, and brought him back to the island. Twenty-nine years after hostilities ended, Onoda returned to Japan, at age fifty-two. He was greeted by a crowd of 4,000 at the airport. His memoirs became a bestselling book in Japan. He used the money to retire to Brazil, where he bought a 2,800 acre ranch and lived out his life in quiet solitude.

That thought of being the lone survivor is not dissimilar to the story of Ishi, told in the book, Ishi in Two Worlds. Ishi was the sole surviving member of the Yahi indian tribe in California and made contact with the outside world in 1911.