We Are Stardust

On another wasted day spent not looking for a job, the pull of the two hundred plus channels of my parent’s digital television sucked away my forlorn efforts at productivity. How can a man resist Discovery Knowledge when the enticing title Horizon – Super Massive Black Holes hooks you like a trout? I did briefly wonder if there was a cooler arrangement of words in the English Language than Super Massive Black Holes, swiftly concluding in the negative. Having just watched Future Weapons, preceded by Battlefield, my war lust satiated, a journey to gargantuan cosmic majesty was just what the doctor ordered. At least I’m learning, I thought, having written off the day, knowing that a perfectly good job was not going to be applied for just yet.

Apparently, at the centre of every Galaxy is an aforementioned Super Massive Black Hole (great name for a band). These entities range from millions to billions of solar masses, and are instrumental in galaxy formation. An embryonic galaxy is a spinning disk of gas, largely hydrogen and helium. Like a figure skater pulling in their arms to increase their rate of spin, the cloud condenses and accelerates its rotation. The mass in the centre of the disk increases in density, until finally the voracious predator of matter that is the black hole bursts forth into existence to terrorise its locality. The glutinous singularity consumes its surroundings, gorging on primeval matter, mighty in girth and power. Then something remarkable happens. So voracious is its consumption that a quasar forms around it (I admit, the formation and behaviour of this mysterious body are lost on me). The energy of consumption is so great that the quasar pushes surrounding matter away, rather like the enormous outer pressure exerted by the nuclear furnace of a star that prevents a catastrophic collapse. Eventually, the Black hole, by its own voracity, pushes local matter beyond its reach, allowing surviving gas to orbit in what will become a new galaxy. The incomprehensible vigour of the quasar causes energy differentials to fan out in the gas cloud, ripples on a pond pushing gas into areas of increased local density. And thus the magic of galactic creation is realised; these areas of increased density coalesce and collapse, until the matter at the centre of each is under such pressure that spontaneous nuclear fusion gives rise to billions of stars. Through generations of stars, matter is cooked into different forms; oxygen, carbon and the heavy elements forged in the stellar furnace to be thrown out into space by the cataclysmic death of its creator, then to converge in the ancient and exceptionally slow game of planet building, from whence life arises to gaze upon the majesty of the heavens.

He giveth; He taketh away. In three billion years time, our galactic neighbour Andromeda will smash head on into our own dear Milky Way in two words that defy imaginative comprehension, a Galactic Collision. Assuming our planet has not already been consumed by the morbid obesity of our own sun, such a collision will send mighty shockwaves of radiation ripping through the galaxy, destroying suns and scouring the atmosphere and oceans from the Earth in a fraction of a second; vaporising the fragile solidity of our planet. The parent black holes of Andromeda and the Milky Way will coalesce into an almighty giant of a singularity, from which, eventually, a new, massive galaxy will form.

Sometimes, the sheer enormity of creation is so profoundly moving I feel like I’m going to cry.

Robert James Fischer 1943 – 2008

On Friday 18th January 2008, Robert James “Bobby” Fischer died in Iceland, his adopted home.

Chess has a unique air of exclusivity to it. The titanic wrestling match unfolding on sixty four squares is hidden from the non-player, in a way that, say, a football match is not. If a footballer scores a great goal, it has a physical grace that the non-player can appreciate, even admire. Likewise a fine passing stroke on the tennis court, or an exquisitely controlled long pot on the snooker table, extract gasps of wonder from the spectator, even though that spectator may not play the sport he so enjoys watching. Perhaps we intuitively understand the physical prowess it takes to play a sport so gracefully and so well, these titans of corporeal power evoking our primeval respect, spear subconsciously replacing racket. Or that could be bollocks. Regardless, chess is pleasingly off-limits to the layman. It takes a considerable amount of investment to start to peel back its skin; to such an extent that someone unfamiliar with its grace might not know the difference between a grandmaster’s masterpiece and one of my hapless blunderings.

The joy of chess therefore becomes the study of it. Of all the time I spend immersed in the game, perhaps only ten percent of it, maybe less, is actually spent playing. The rest is study; its history, its theory, its technique. I am acquainted with its heroes, the great players of history, defining their ages and moving the game forward. Each has his own style, his own footprint. A wonderful feature of chess is its comprehensive record. The fact that you can record a game using simple algebraic notation (indeed, in tournament play, it is an obligation) means that chess players have instant access to every single competitive game played by every master, international master and grandmaster since the beginning of organized tournaments, plus puzzles, exhibition and specialist games going back to the fifteenth century. The wealth of material is overwhelming; grandmasters and authors therefore publish game collections online and in books that trace the development of players, openings and styles. I can set up my board and the ghosts of Fischer, Capablanca and Morphy sit by my side, guiding my hand, posthumously imparting their wisdom.

Kasparov asserts that Bobby Fischer’s posturing and petulance helped bring a degree of professionalism to the game. It is an intriguing point, but I am skeptical of the benefits of professionalism to chess. Fischer’s demands of tournament organizers were immature and unreasonable. During the 1972 world championship, he complained about everything, from the board to the lighting to the sound the cameras made. His demands were fiscal, too; so much so that a British businessman had to stump up $250,000 in extra prize money just to allow the match to continue. Professional sport makes unreasonable demands on those who follow it. The price of a football shirt bears grim testimony to the nature of professional soccer.

It’s a strange thing, professional chess. British players lament the lack of quality coming from these isles, wishing to promote the game in the forlorn hope that a British player might one day conquer the world. It seems unlikely; the quality of the chess infrastructure in Eastern Europe is beyond anything we are likely to see in the UK. Promotion is lackluster. Only one monthly publication, and an amateurish one at that, is produced here (as far as I can tell). It does not bother me, though. The hidden exclusivity of the game is a part of its joy. Attempts to promote chess in a professional manner have had some unfortunate consequences. Most notably, a young crop of attractive Eastern Europeans have, in recent years, tried to impart a bit of glamour and sassiness to the ancient game.

This appalling image is of Alexandra Kosteniuk. Get some bloody clothes on love. Chess is not, nor should it ever be, sexy. It should be played in the company of pipes and plentiful tweed, which, if unavailable, should be replaced by a dignified sense of decorum.
Anyway, the chess world has lost one of its greats. One day, I will have a beard like Fischer’s. Look at its Darwinian majesty.

Rest in peace, you big, daft racist.

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=19233 (the greatest website in the world) for more info.

To Kill a Mocking Bird

Last night I watched a program presented by Michael Portillo about methods of execution and their relative humanity. Portillo’s premise was that, morally speaking, an execution needs to be as humane and painless as possible. He has, by his own admission, a chequered record on capital punishment, voting for it in the seventies and against it in the nineties, when he changed his position after noting a number of miscarriages of justice. We had to be 100% convinced of guilt, he said, before we sanction the ultimate deterrent. The implication here, of course, is that if guilt can be perfectly established, the death penalty is a viable judicial tool. Having utterly failed to convince me that this could ever be the case, he spent the rest of the program on a quest to find the perfect killing method. Using Crash Test Dummies and dead pigs, demonstrations were made of various grizzly terminal procedures, the conclusion being that they are all essentially torture. Indeed, Cruel and Unusual punishment. The effect on the human body of over two thousand volts is, I suggest, about as Cruel and Unusual as it gets. Portillo’s noble quest took him to The Netherlands, where the Dutch Air Force used an altitude simulation chamber for the purposes of pilot training. The effects of a decompression similar to what would be experienced at, say, sixty thousand feet, is a condition known as Hypoxia, where there is simply not enough oxygen in the air to sustain life. As the brain becomes starved of oxygen, the subject feels a sense of euphoria, and his powers of deduction and reason become so profoundly impaired that he simply does not care that he is about to die. Unconsciousness is swiftly followed by death. Upon his return to the UK, the intrepid Portillo discovered a scientist who was using Hypoxia, induced via immersion in an inert gas, as a humane method of slaughtering livestock. The method was so humane, in fact, that a pig would repeatedly return to a hopper of apples by choice, despite the fact that the hopper was encased in a sheath of pure nitrogen and the pig kept collapsing (as opposed to a hopper full of a noxious agent such as tear gas). Armed with his new progressive choice, Portillo crossed the Atlantic and proposed his idea to various terrifying neo-conservatives. To his surprise, they were less than enthusiastic. With fire in their eyes, proclamations of not caring about the suffering of a rapist or punishment being punishment were made. One of them took particular exception to a criminal dying in a state of euphoria, wondering if the murderer’s victims had been so fortunate. A bemused Portillo stuck to his guns, ending with a phrase that chilled and horrified me: “If a state is going to use the Death Penalty, then it should use a method that least resembles murder”. I’m fairly sure that if I was to take a life by nitrogen induced Hypoxia, the state would not hesitate in meting out a substantial sentence, as it is, Mr. Portillo, a method that more purely resembles murder than anything else. Murder, as defined by the dictionary, is “The premeditated killing of one human being by another”. You don’t get much more premeditated that going on a scientific quest to find the perfect killing method and then applying that to human beings. That’s the sort of premeditation it takes a hypocritical government to accomplish.

The arguments for and against capital punishment are well trodden. Everyone has an opinion, and, indeed, it is not really a political issue in this country any more. The Death Penalty has run out of steam as an issue, not because it is no longer viable, but because it is not seen as a part of the family it belongs to. There are three situations, beside war and extreme situations of internal security, where a state can, if it chooses, ‘legally’ sanction the termination of a human life. Capital Punishment, Euthanasia and Abortion. There are two positions that are generally taken on these issues. It is not a coincidence that these positions coincide. One is a position of hypocrisy; the other is a position of empathy. To explain, generally speaking, one would expect a right-wing neo-conservative, for example, to be Pro-Death Penalty, Anti-Euthanasia, and Anti-Abortion. A left wing Liberal would be the exact opposite, Anti-Death Penalty, Pro-Euthanasia, and Pro-Abortion (At this point, I’d like to add a caveat. Statements like ‘Pro-Euthanasia’ and ‘Pro-Abortion’ are gross simplicities; I am using them for the purposes of balance. My meaning will become clear).

First off, I’d like to discuss the conservative position. Many hundreds of millions of people, and their governing bodies, subscribe to the view that a human life is sacrosanct, and that to take a human life is a profound moral evil. Few would contest this position or its nobility; its Judaeo-Christian roots are the foundations of our ancient and venerable judiciaries. Applied to the terminal trinity outlined above, this would imply an Anti-Death Penalty, Anti-Euthanasia, and Anti-Abortion stance. Protesters in America have taken to the streets in their thousands to protest against possible relaxation of abortion laws, and whilst Euthanasia has not been anywhere near as contestable an issue, one could imagine the instinctive reaction of the conservative right. It is, therefore, a matter of surpassing hypocrisy that many of the most ardent supporters of capital punishment can be found in this movement. When a person commits a terrible crime, then it must be the case that they have renounced their humanity in order for the death penalty to be applied. Calling a child molester a monster makes it morally acceptable to take his life, as that person is no longer a human being. To take this stance is to ignore those things that make us all too human; it looks beyond human activity and motivation to a black-an-white moralism that singularly fails to come to terms with the complexities of human lives. It is, in effect, highly moralistic people interfering in an individuals’ life, because they refuse to attempt to understand the motivations and personal situations that have caused the individual to behave in the way they have. It is moralistic, hypocritical, and utterly devoid of empathy. It is also intellectually very easy.

The liberal position (which, as you may have guessed, I take. This may not be the most balanced rant in history, but fuck it, this is my blog) is a much harder cause to argue for and implement. The arguments against the death penalty are many and obvious, but perhaps it is not the moral argument that should take precedence. If it did, then to avoid hypocrisy, one must be equally against Euthanasia and Abortion. However, it is not only possible; it is rational and sensible to hold a strong position against capital punishment whilst advocating the legality of Euthanasia and Abortion. The salient feature of this position is Empathy. The world needs more of this mercurial quality; we must empathise with individual human cases, with the fact that people make mistakes, with suffering. Until one has thought about the nature of Euthanasia, and the suffering that leads to it, or Abortion, and the terrible decision it must be, or murder, and the impulses that lead to it, or sexual crimes and their tragic roots, one cannot have a humanistic moral position. It is not easy. Perhaps the hardest place to apply genuine empathy is paedophilia. To empathise with a paedophile means to understand that they cannot change their sexual inclination any more than I can change being heterosexual. Once this leap has been made, it is possible to begin to understand the relentless torment that existence would be if you were so unfortunate; a torment that could conceivably lead to madness. Only when we understand this, when it is no longer a taboo subject, can we make some sort of rational approach. If a paedophile believes that he lives in a society that will be sensitive to him, until that is, he commits a crime, then maybe science and medicine can do something to help, before something terrible and tragic happens.

So there are two positions. One is moralistic and hypocritical; the other is profoundly, and in the case of paedophilia, bravely empathetic. We must empathise why someone has murdered or raped, and not take his life in return; we must empathise with those who need abortions, and offer help and support; we must empathise with those in great pain who decide to take their own lives, and not interfere. Choose wisely.