Joburg at 6000 euros, The God of Small Things

Changing the ticket to the flight from Johannesburg to Amsterdam was horribly expensive: 6000 euros (single economy ticket).

I went for it. If all’s well, the customer will pay.

The ride to JFK was very stressful. We underestimated the travel time during rush hour. So I rushed out of the car into the check-in, only to find out the flight to Johannesburg was cancelled. A large row of misinformed people was waiting.

A small, boyish girl eventually informed me.

 Then I discovered that the travel agency had made an error, changing my original return flight to Amsterdam to go through Joburg. I was not booked on the original flight, so I could not get a ticket for the alternative flight via Atlanta they offered.

In the very noisy departure hall, I called my travel agency. They could do nothing else but arrange a stay at the Marriott close to JFK while making arrangements for me.

In the Yellow Cab, we passed through a movie scene: a bunch of people gathered around a fire in an oil drum.

I contacted the agency in the hotel room. They arranged an alternative flight for the next day.

I checked out at about twelve and went back to the airport in the Yellow Cab.
 At JFK, the driver gave me a blank receipt. He grinned: ‘Now you expense a million dollars,’ put my suitcase on the pavement and jumped back in the car.

Version 1.0.0

At the Delta desk, the price for the new ticket had gone up from the 2900 euros the agency promised to 4200 euros. I did get a very helpful lady from Delta and a ticket in return. That totaled up the total flying cost for this trip at 6000 euros.

In the bookshop I bought The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy.

The flight was less difficult than expected, but I also slept less than expected. On the other hand, I watched three movies: Bewitched (crap), Batman Begins and Caché. Caché with the most beautiful woman on earth: Juliette Binoche. I finished The God of Small Things too. Wonderful, though in my mind, I associate it with the dreamy state of half-consciousness I was in while reading the book.

I checked in at the unavoidable Sandton Sun and Towers hotel. Villamoura, the hotel’s restaurant, is an absolute must. Their calamari is exquisite. I collapsed after that.

Dawkins’ embellished account

the selfish gene

In the 30th anniversary edition of ‘The Selfish Gene’ (2006) Richard Dawkins writes a vile but correct comment on Fred Hoyle‘s misrepresentation of Darwinism in an endnote (pp. 277-278). He ends his note:

‘Publishers should correct the misapprehension that a scholar’s distinction in one field implies authority in another. And as long as that misapprehension exists, distinguished scholars should resist the temptation to abuse it’.

Very true, though on the same page, in the note referenced on this page (page 59 of the 30th Anniversary edition), Dawkins almost falls into his own trap, saving himself with one little sentence.

richard dawkins
Richard Dawkins

The note’s text to the main text is so incredibly incorrect that it is quite funny, given he does this on the same page as his scolding on Hoyle.

In the note, Dawkins wants to explain Daniel Dennett‘s theory of consciousness. Although Dennett has tried to explain his ideas in several books, Dawkins wants to summarize Dennett’s work in this two-page note for unclear reasons.

daniet dennett
Daniel Dennett

Dawkins takes two technical ideas from the world of computers to illustrate his ideas: the concept of a virtual machine and the ‘the distinction between serial and parallel processors’. Dawkins starts out by explaining completely incorrectly what a virtual machine is. He mentions the Macintosh User Interface as an example of a virtual machine. The Mac is a great machine, but the Macintosh User Interface has very little to do with a virtual machine, and the connection with consciousness remains very unclear. Dawkins could have simply relied on the Wikipedia article for a correct description of virtual machines.

The story derails entirely when Dawkins turns to his description of ‘serial and parallel processors’. The piece is so incorrect that highlighting the individual errors here does not make sense. Since Dawkins fails to see the distinction between processors and processes, he starts wrong and worsens things in every sentence. And it’s not like this was rocket science at the time of writing. Parallel processing has been known and applied in computing since our own Edsger Dijkstra and others invented concepts like the semaphore and the indivisible instruction.

More linkages to Dennett’s work and that of his friend Douglas Hofstadter on page 59, where Dawkins discusses self-awareness and rejects ideas of self-awareness because

douglas r. hofstadter
Douglas R. Hofstadter
godel escher bach

‘it involves an infinite regress if there is a model of the model, why not a model of the model of the model …?’
‘The Mind’s I‘ and also ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach – An Eternal Golden Braid‘ deal exactly with these issues.

So, can we conclude that Dawkins has fallen into the trap of asserting that a scholar’s distinction in one field implies authority in another?

As I said, almost. On page 280 Dawkins saves himself, on the edge, with this little remark:

the minds eye

‘The reader is advised to consult Dennett’s own account when it is published, rather than rely on my doubtless imperfect and impressionistic – maybe even embellished – one.’
How true.

I have never had such fun with academic footnotes.