BtZ42 Section 6: Roger Mexico

[Joseph Tracy]

Good stuff.Statistics are weird in that they seem so scientific and are so easily ignored by just about everyone in favor of something like "gusts of emotion".
> On Apr 22, 2016, at 10:05 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Roger the statistician: "By the time one has pulled one’s nth victim or part of a victim free of one’s nth pile of rubble, he told her once, angry, weary, it has ceased to be that personal . . . the value of n may be different for each of us, but I’m sorry: sooner or later . . ." (p. 41).
> 
> Still in a Dylan Thomas mood, I'm hearing here "After the first death, there is no other."
> 
> https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/refusal-mourn-death-fire-child-london 
> 
> Seen from one angle (sometimes but not always Jessica's), Roger is almost as inhuman(e)ly odd and chill as his colleagues. Seen from another (sometimes but not always Pointsman's), he is a threatening wild card, given to probabilities and the acceptance of random fluctuations rather than on-off (flip-flop in V.?), mechanistic certainties and strict causality.
> 
> Statistics and probability theory themselves have Janus faces. Yes, they strip experience to bare chill manipulable numbers: that certainly seems bad. But yes, they *also* strip away preconception and anecdotal impression and bias to reveal what experience actually *is* over broader scales of time, space, and number than any one of us can grasp -- which is kinda good if you want to stop an epidemic (or a traditional but ineffective/harmful therapy), forestall a famine, anticipate global warming, etc.
> 
> CF. my earlier remarks on P.M.S. Blackett, "running a war on gusts of emotion," and both the V-weapons and Allied area bombing as examples of the latter. From one angle, we can see both programs as embodiments of implacable science / technology / industry... but had they really been evaluated by chill statistics, rather than as "oboy, here's a new way to hurt the enemy," neither would have been pursued.
> 
> On Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 6:33 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> Statistician. ( we will learn of his belief in the range between zero and one. Meanings here?)
> Works for The White Visitation. " The Dour Young Man of.."
> Doesn't get on with his colleagues
> Doesn't understand Pavlovians, but has to help Pointsman.
> Unappealing looks ( accepts jabs about) seemingly youthful looking.
> Pirate sez he's been euchred into a Byzantine exercise of psychological warfare conducted by The White Visitation. His " enthusiasm grows" with each film delivery from Bloat. (Section 5)
> 
> " Never a prophetic dream, no telepathic messages, never touched The Other World directly"
> YET, he tells us of his first experience of " magic" : " data he can't argue away" ...." The feeling of actually being joined" w Jessica. IN love.
> 
> Comments wanted.
> 
> 
> 
> Sent from my iPad-
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> 

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