A Window To The Past

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

What do we want?  Time travel.  When do we want it?  Yesterday.

But until we get it, the past must remain not only another country, but one to which we lack passports. We get tales from it, of course, but the tales we get are frequently distorted and sideways, emphasize something far too much, and ignore the important things altogether.

This is particularly true of tales from our time written about the past.  These are often like the stories told about other lands by people who only heard about other lands without ever having visited.  So you get people who talk about the vegetable lamb, or the world of upside-down people.  Which, if we could only visit, would turn out not to be true.  (But of course we can’t visit because we didn’t, or does that mean that when we do, the past will change, like the future.  I think I’m getting a headache.)

So we have to get first-sources.  The problem with first sources was that nine times out of ten they weren’t writing for the future – not even those who made vague references to “you, my grandchild” – but to the people of their time.  Which means the things they focus on are not the things we really want to or need to know about.  It is as though we’d got a way of looking into the past but were utterly at the mercy of an errant, wandering camera lens.  (Can you imagine that?  Send a probe back to look at the crucifixion, and find yourself following an errant camel-merchant through the Syrian desert, while you scream in frustration.  Send a camera back to Lincoln’s inaugural, and find yourself watching wax flowers being made in a shop somewhere in Virginia.  Hit head on desk.)

Worse problem, though, is that often people don’t realize that primary sources are not in fact talking to them and weren’t rigorously designed to give them a clear view of the past.  So they’ll decide something is really, really, important and must have affected everyone at the time, because, duh, that’s what we read the most about now.  (Of course this fails to take into account that the things preserved were those that for some reason appealed to people of our time. This is how, say, a future historian might decide the most important thing about the nineties was unorthodox use of cigars.)

Most of the stuff I learn about the past, I learn when I’m not trying to learn it.  For instance, I found out about victory gardens – you’d think having read about the US in both wars, having read people’s bios of that time, having taken American history in college, this would have been mentioned sometime, right?  You’d be wrong. – from Disney comics I bought for my kids.  The company was going out of business and offered to sell one each of their print run from the beginning, so I ruined myself on Disney comics, because Marshall was at the point when his desire for story and plot outstripped his ability to read, and I wanted to bridge that gap.

So I found out about Victory Gardens while Mickey Mouse was traipsing around with a gun twice the size of his head (Mickey was way cooler then.  Now he’s rather effete and Minnie seems to be interested in museum galas and the like.)  Then there was the Great Depression.  I’ve read moving accounts and literary descriptions, but nothing brought it home to me so much as the thirties era Mickey Mouse Adventures in which the prize for a big contest is… “a good job.”  And the good job?  Bell hop.  Then there’s the forties? Fifties? Era Donald duck in which he puts uranium buttons on his nephews hats, so he can follow them with a Geiger counter.

Second to Disney books in teaching me stuff about daily life and the things people believed and how they lived are mystery books.

Oh, you can glean stuff about what people believed and what they expected from any book, including science fiction books.  But the problem is that you have to think about it.  Like I can deduce “good” clothes were far more important and expensive in Heinlein’s day, because his women wore aprons.  (Or I could view it as a sign of feminine oppression – but I’m not a bubblehead.)

And you can sort of figure what they expected of the “good” future and how they viewed government power.  BUT it takes effort.

Even in literary novels it takes effort.  I swear they’re all either concerned with the very rich or the very poor, neither of which has much to do with how the middle class lived.  (And neither of which might be accurate, since few writers were very rich or very poor.  They were mostly projecting.)

But mysteries are often concerned with the middle class, and the quotidian lives of the middle class at that.  From Agatha Christie you can learn an awful lot about England between and during the world wars, from ration cards, to how important nylon stockings were, from the difference between real butter and margarine, what was considered attractive, how people (still) lived in country districts, etc.

In the same way my recent tour of Rex Stout has made me aware of stuff like… how government was viewed.  You could have dropped my jaw with a feather when I found that the bureau of price control were the good guys in one book, while a group of industrial producers bent on evading some draconian controls were the “vultures.”

At least we have that.  At least it’s not that bad now.  Yes, I know Stout was “progressive” but that was still beyond and above.

It also makes me aware of stuff like what’s considered “living well” and such.  Eh.  I’ll take my current middle class conditions, thank you so much.

A moment of chortling delight was hearing a NYC location described in much the same way a friend who lives in the city described it just recently.  Apparently some things never change.  (This was a snobbish area.)

I don’t think it would be practical to research for say an historical mystery by reading mysteries of the time (not unless you’re trying to do say a Christie pastiche… which I might yet do.)

And yet the glimpses we can get are fascinating and not things you’d guess from the works about the past.  Two takeaways – P.J. O’Rourke is right.  The future, with some notably disgusting intervals, is usually better than the past.  And the romanticizing of the past can be fun and entertaining (Simak’s, Bradbury’s) but only because we see it through a softening lens.  Up close and personal some of the wrinkles would be horrifying to those of us alive today, even those who remember some of it.

If we’re very lucky, our descendants will say the same of our time.

362 thoughts on “A Window To The Past”

  1. (Or I could view it as a sign of feminine oppression – but I’m not a bubblehead.)

    I read that as “bobblehead” and formed the most interesting mental image: a set of bobbleheads of all Hoyt’s Huns, lined up on a shelf (or dashboard) somewhere…

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    2. “Hoyt’s Huns”? Makes us sound like mercenaries.

      Can I have a powergun and hovertank? ;-)

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          1. I’m guessing that with the powergun, you probably get nemourlon armor and possibly a powered exoskeleton to help carry all of your gear.

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              1. sigh. Twenty thousand words, kind sir, btw, apropos you comment on Kobo (I still haven’t put all my works there. Yes, I mean to. “Copious spare time” and all) if Peter doesn’t use DRM, you can transfer the novel. There are programs for that.

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                  1. Calibre is a good program for converting formats and transferring them. And free!

                    In order to gain marketing abilities / higher royalties, we signed an agreement to be Amazon-exclusive for 90 days per story. (Currently projecting we’ll stay in that through Christmas, because logistics and therefore my day job are nutball from Oct – Dec, but the New Year’s project will be converting formats & uploading to Kobo, ibooks, B&N, etc.)

                    However, Peter and I strongly agreed that DRM is both stupid and evil, and would only accomplish annoying our readers. So everything we publish will be DRM-free.

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                    1. Will you write /have you written about the pros and cons of DRM?
                      I’m looking at Amazon publishing for a couple of out-of-print local history books for an author, and the more information I have the happier I will be committing his babies to the Ether.

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                    2. 1. Ah. If Peter’s books in the other post are DRM-free, I’ll take a flyer. Three bucks is a price that attracts even a cheapskate like me.

                      2. I recently overpaid for a free Amazon ebook. I refer to the time wasted until I realized that the authors couldn’t write, plot, or create characters. Though tempted to nuke them via Amazon review, I refrained, which was probably the decent thing for a first novel.

                      3. I completely missed the promise of the Kindle and was surprised when a friend raved about it. If the economics work out so Amazon can give out free Kindles (the visual hardware, not the PC software), that could be the next step in the ebook’s march of conquest.

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                    3. At the moment, Barnes & Noble is selling their Nook HD and HD+ at a nice price. They are good e-readers but even better, Barnes & Noble recently opened them up such that you can get anything off of Google Play android apps. So they are good general purpose android tablets.

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                    4. Bob – I could probably do that as an article, if Sarah wanted a guest post. (looks at Gracious Hostess, with raised and inquiring eyebrows.)

                      GS – I was imprecise with my tense. Yes, all books Peter has published are DRM free, and will so remain. I also can assure you that I would not encourage him to publish were the story not up to a level where I would be interested as a stranger in reading it – I love him and want him to succeed, and would not allow him to release something that was unready or full of fail. Fortunately, there are free samples available to let you judge if it’s an interesting story to you. :-)

                      Furless Roman Dictator – If I had the time and energy for another techie toy, that sounds like a good time and place to get it. I was briefly tempted to jailbreak my kindle, but the want to use it to read outweighed the temptation to play with it.

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                    6. Dorothy, I recently got one of the B&N Nook HD’s and am enjoying it. I’m not a fan of much of B&N’s business practices, so I actually read my good hostess’ books on the Kindle reader downloaded from Google Play on it ;-)

                      The avatar is hairless. In person, my fur status is indeterminate.

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                    7. Whoaaaa, there, Vampire Cat! Back up and repeat: Did you just say I can haz Kindle software on my Nook? Would that work for my vintage Nook, or is it limited to recent models?

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                    10. RES – I am not sure, but I think Nook HD and HD+ are the ones that B&N added Google Play to recently. Maybe your older Nook (tablet and Color) but I think only if you root it with an Android port like Cyanomod or Honeycomb.

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                    14. Dorothy July 24, 2013 at 9:32 pm,

                      When I wrote that sometimes free stuff is overpriced, no aspersion was intended toward you or Peter. I hope and trust neither of you took offense.

                      However, I wonder if Amazon will try something like: This week only, the following bunches and bunches of insanely desirable books are free on Kindle. If a book is not deleted within ___ days, your credit card will be charged for it. Downloading the books means acceptance of these terms.

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                    15. gs – Oh, no offense! I know as well as you that Sturgeon’s Law applies there!

                      SPQR – wait, what was that about kindle app on a nook? Is that what RES said?

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                    16. Dorothy, if you have a Nook HD or Nook HD+, go to settings, Device Info and hit software version to check for an update. That update will give you Google Play among the apps. In Google Play, go find Amazon Kindle app and download it – viola. If you have a Nook Tablet or a Nook Color then the process is more involved. You have to flash your Nook to remove the Barnes & Noble proprietary operating system and make it into an Android tablet.

                      I’ll add a separate comment with the links since it will be moderated.

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                    17. The Daughtorial Unit advises me that this drains batteries, so when possible interested parties would probably prefer to use Calibre to convert material rather than read it in the Kindle app — but it is nice to have the option available.

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                  2. I have an Android netbook (I despise touch screens, and refuse to buy anything with one) and have the Kindle app on it. It has one annoying bug, which a lot of people were complaining about only showed up in the newest version, you can’t look at your whole library, you can only see the last fifteen or so (not sure of the exact number) books you have downloaded or viewed. You can still read any book you have in your Kindle library, but you must use the search function to find it, you can’t just browse through your library and pick out whatever looks good at the moment. Oh, and at least mine (haven’t seen anyone else complain about this, so maybe it is a personal quirk of my cheapo Chinese made netbook) occasionally decides to undownload a book I had previously downloaded, it will still be in cloud storage, but that doesn’t do me much good when I decide I want to read it and am two hours from the nearest wifi hotspot.

                    One other complaint about Android and Google Play, while you can connect to the internet with an Ethernet cable (if your tablet or netbook has an Ethernet port) but Google Play will not allow you to download apps through a cable, it will only download via wifi; I had to get a wireless router so I could download apps at home.

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                    1. That last is a weird bug, it is set up to avoid using mobile data charges but ought to be able to spot a wired connection. Hmmmm.

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                    3. That happened with the more recent version of the KindlePC, too, but I’m pretty sure there it was a setting. Is it possible that’s what it is on the actual device?

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      4. I use a sword somewhat better than I shoot. But I do know of several different uses for some plants. Lots of poisonous ones around.

        So, mushroom soup with a nice side salad, anyone?

        (and after this, I guess I better really, really hope nobody I know ever dies of accidentally ingesting something like Amanita virosa, because if anyone does and the investigators stumble on this comment… oops)

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        2. Why yes, thank you, I’ll have the soup and salad – would you like a nice basket of rolls I just baked, and some honey I got from the farmer down the road, to go with?

          Actually, I’ll feel more confident having a foraged-mushroom soup and wild-greens salad from someone who knows their stuff – because it means the chances of getting poisoned or parasites unintentionally are far, far lower.

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          1. Heh. I learned about the poisonous ones because I wanted to forage and was worried about them, so I studied what poisonous ones grow around here first. Now I think I can probably recognize most of the poisonous, but I’m still working on what can be eaten, and the medicinal ones.

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        1. We’re a division of Monster Hunters. Well… I think we should be. We should talk to Larry abt. it. “The best read Monster Hunter Regiment in the world.”

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          1. I’m going to have to go through his MHI Role Playing Game book for a type of monster that will succumb to a dramatic reading. ;-)

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            2. Vogons.

              Literary critics.

              Vampires. But you have to choose your reading carefully. They can’t kill you until you finish the reading.

              The Angel of Death. (According to Talmudic legend, he cannot take you while you are engaged in Torah study. King David employed this method to stave off Death indefinitely … only to have his study interrupted by some clown shouting out “Whoa! Check out the hooters on that chick skinny-dipping!”)

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              1. Heh. Funniest church bulletin typo I encountered was in college, when I visited a Presbyterian church. The text was supposed to be from the Song of Solomon 8: 6-7: “Set me as a seal upon your heart . . . Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.” The verses in the bulletin were Chapter 7: 2-3, which the lector duly read, after warning the congregation that this is not the usual lectionary text. [salacious eyebrow wiggle]

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                1. chuckle. I need to go get some of that pot of coffee I put on a little bit back, just so I can snort it through my nose and dun you for a new keyboard.

                  That story is why pastors should know the Book chapter & verse.

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                  1. Thankfully I had set my coffee cup down before reading this comment. BTW as a teenager I would read Songs of Solomon in church because I was sooooooooooooo bored. Parents didn’t think anything of it because it was the Bible open. lol

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  2. Journals can be quite interesting, but deceiving, many of the commonplace chores and such aren’t written in them, because they are something the writer never even thinks about. They may mention that today is washday, so they went to the creek to wash their clothes. But that is a somewhat special event (it doesn’t happen every day) on the other hand we may never know that after breakfast every morning they went and drew water from the well, because it is so commonplace the author never thinks about it. Until in the third journal we read, “when I went to draw water after breakfast this morning, I almost stepped on a rattlesnake sunning itself on the front steps.”

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    1. Yes, I can’t even imagine how someone would mention something that my father told me about his childhood (around the beginning of the Depression): When they had breakfast, they would leave the plate that had the meat on it on the table, and often there would be some biscuits left over. When someone walked by there later in the morning, they might pick up a biscuit and dredge it in the grease from the meat for flavoring, much like you might butter your biscuit today.

      Like I said, I can’t imagine how that would come up in a journal, but now, since he lived through that and sees how different it is today, he tells about such things.

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    2. For those of us who sometimes play in historical re-creation groups, some of whose members make a decent effort at research, this is shorthand-referred to as the “bread recipe problem” – it’s really hard to find much on, say, medieval bread recipes: everybody who needed to knew how to make bread, and nobody wrote them down.

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      1. At that, no one until Fanny Farmer wrote recipes under the assumption that the person might not know how to cook. Earlier ones are enough notes for a competent cook to figure out what to do for this dish.

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      2. When you do get a recipe, it usually fits one of two memory aid options– the basic recipe, which the person then knew “and then you make it look right,” or a straight up memory aid of what they did to make it really good, ie, “when it looks right, add another handful of flour and enough salt.”

        My grandma’s recipes are type one, so badly that mom thought she was deliberately sabotaging at first! (Until mom watched her writing down a recipe, and how she’d carefully measure all the stuff and write it down, and even time things…but not write down “looked like it needed flour, added some until it looked right” or “was bubbling too small, added some salt.”)

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        1. I was warned that following the recipes in the self-published church fundraising cookbooks were never right because the ladies didn’t want other people to cook as well as they did. I think your explanation is better.

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          1. It makes sense when you consider that they were often working with fresh, home grown produce– which is NOT of consistent quality! There’s a reason the “can of soup, X Y and Z” recipe is so popular…..

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          2. Quite a few recipes in non-amateur cookbooks don’t work. More often than is normally admitted, published cookbooks have recipes in them that are copied from someone else’s cookbook and not tested.

            Its one of those dirty secrets of traditional publishing.

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        2. My grandmother’s recipes always started with “Start with this pan.” “Use a pan of X x Y dimensions, grandma?”

          “No, you have to start with this pan …”

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        3. My grandmother made the best biscuits I’ve ever eaten, and NEVER used a recipe. She had a bowl of flour sitting on her counter-top, and would pour “so much” milk, toss in a little baking powder and some salt, kneed it with her hands until it was the “right” consistency, then bake them. I KNOW she taught me that recipe, but I cannot remember it for my life. Her biscuits would float on air: mine could be used as ship’s ballast.

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          1. Biscuits come up a lot on cooking shows, and that might give you a clue.

            One of the big principles is not to knead them too much, because then the gluten gets tough. (I think this is also why a lot of people like to cut biscuits with something round like a glass, because then they don’t touch it again.) When you’re working with baking powder, you also want to get it in the oven fast, before the leavening effect goes away. (And that’s why buttermilk is often used – more ferment means more potential leavening.)

            I think I’ve heard cooking show men say they have to knead a little lighter, because their hands are a little bigger and they have more oomph.

            But it could be that the kind of wheat used in your grandma’s flour wasn’t what you’re using. There was this big horrorstorm when one of the big Southern wheat flour companies changed to the kind of wheat that us Northerners get stuck with, because suddenly none of the grannies could get their biscuits right.

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            1. Buttermilk is acid and that also breaks up gluten strands. Potato starch also makes for a softer biscuits.
              I make bread so my instinct is to knead dough until it surrenders. This meansI take after my mom in that I make a pie crust that you can almost shave with. I tried adding lemon or vinegar since the acid breaks up the gluten strands, but I eventually I just used the tortilla press to avoid over-working the dough by rolling it.

              When you are good you can mix your dough by instinct. I’m not that good.

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              1. Use bear lard in your pie crusts, makes the flakiest, best pie crusts you’ve ever tasted. Unfortunately both my grandma and my mother cook by the, ‘add enough so it looks right’ method. I had to get my biscuit recipe out of a cookbook.

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                    3. Now, you know that Heinlein says that lard is fine, “as long as it’s not too rancid” (I Will Fear No Evil)

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  3. For times and places when there were newspapers, reading them can give you all sorts of ideas abotu what is important to everyday people. Not so much from the stories, although that is of course improtant, as from the adverts around the side and the letters to the editor and so on.

    For example http://www.samizdata.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/130627p2_WellingtonMills.png where (as the smaizadata writer notes you can see than in 1913 it was the done thing to highlight your new factory in and advert )

    Mind you quite a lot of the time you read the story and you thing – well nothign much has changed. Many of the other posts on Samizdata referring to the times of 100 years ago – varios of the articles in http://www.samizdata.net/category/historical-views/ – certainly imply that. E.g. too many lawyers in politics, not tough enough on criminals …

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    1. A friend of mine, who was doing some historical research many years ago, told me how terribly disappointed he was to find out that the newspaper he had gone to did not keep the Classified Ads in their archives, because those would certainly give you a lot of information you might not find otherwise.

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      1. Libraries that microfilmed newspapers (often in their Local History sections) usually did every single page. Including the comics. And I have to say, for a lot of the century, our local daily comics section has been awesome.

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        1. Newspaper comics are my downfall. I’m supposed to be zipping through microfilm looking for specific articles and *blam* I stop to read the funnies. I’ve wasted so much archive time that way . . . :)

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      2. I once read an 1800’s author that stated that in Colonial America, people didn’t wear cotton clothing. And then that story ended up being copied by later writers . . . and yet by looking at Colonial newspapers, the use of cotton cloth and clothing is quickly proven.

        If folks want to peruse old newspapers online, there are many free options. I won’t put links because I don’t want to be put in moderation, but:

        Google has some 1700’s and 1800’s newspapers (including ads) — I understand that the project is mostly dead now, due to howls of protest from the newspaper industry, but the issues that they did scan are still up.

        The Library of Congress has a free section called, I believe, Chronicling America. (Not to be confused with University of Michigan and Cornell’s Making of America sites, which mostly feature magazines and books from the 1700’s and 1800’s. Then there is Archive . org, which also has magazines and books and lots of other old stuff.)

        Colonial Williamsburg has Virginia newspapers online (with an index, but not searchable), the North Carolina Department of Historic Resources has a smattering of 1700’s and 1800’s NC newspapers, and a group in Maryland has quite a few 1700’s Maryland newspapers.

        And then there are groups in Colorado and California and New York and Pennsylvania that have put up online some of their state’s newspapers. I’m sure other states have similar projects.

        (If you do want to pay for access, the American Antiquarian Society is involved with GenealogyBank, which has gadzooks of papers — it costs about $70 per year. And I’ve read about a similar outfit that has European newspapers.)

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  4. I am asleep, the dog woke me before time and I had a late night, still working on first jolt of black goodness. Therefore when you said you took a tour of Rex Stout I 1 Got Rex Mason and 2 had serious worries about what you were doing inside J. Snover

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    1. If you want more on the topic, which can get complex, you can check out the posts tagged “primary source”.

      I’ve written — a few over the years.

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  6. I have a neat little autobiography written by a samurai in the 19th century; it’s called Musui’s Story. He often matter-of-factly mentions locations in his home town that no longer exist today, so maps are helpfully provided.

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  7. And another thing to remember is that people went out and about and actually talked to each other, instead of staring into their cellphones and twiddling their thumbs (guilty as charged.)

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    1. The great advantage above all others for primary source is that it teaches you to not assume that people in the past did the same as we do nowadays. So many people skip research because it never occurs to them that it’s need.

      OTOH, sometimes people also assume that people WERE different, without verifying that. There are plenty of things that will put you straight on that, too.

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        1. Well, the secondary sources are always writing for their own purposes too. Can’t avoid that. No one writes for no purpose. . . .

          To be sure, that means that secondary sources are primary sources for the era they are written in.

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      2. There was a book called _Selkirk’s Island_ and was about the sailor who was the prototype for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The author did look through old records but obviously had not processed them or taken the time to understand them. She obviously went through journals from sailors because she mentioned that the water onboard ships was often foul, but she claimed it was because of the water weeds in it, I believe she mentioned duck-weed, instead of digging to understand that “vegetative growth” mentioned in her sources meant the slimy bacterial growth fouling the water.
        O’Brien, in the Aubrey/Maturin series, on the other hand is fantastic about showing how life went on in the Georgian period, not so much as by explaining it, as by having the concepts and technology used in context, so as to be understandable in context.

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  8. You assume there are no time travelers. If they do come back I doubt they would skip such elementary precautions as removing late dated money from their pockets. Any advanced devices would be disguised as something else. If I had a fresh time traveler corpse that was freshly ran over by a bus I’d suspect it because he was TOO healthy in autopsy. No degenerative diseases at all.

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    1. Time travel to the past violates causality. You can’t make the bajillions of chemical reactions that happen every day unhappen.

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      1. Only if time travelers can change the past. If they were “already” there and did what they did, they actually produced the future, so it would violate causality for them not to exist.

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        1. But then the butterflies would cause them to not be born, so they wouldn’t be able to come back in time to make the changes, which mean the changes didn’t happen, which means that they’re born…see what I mean?

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          1. You assume that for any given point of time there was a “before” and “after” the time traveler’s visit. Fun for stories, but there’s no reason to believe any such thing, since it is entirely based on the belief that because things were before and after for you, they were for the timestream.

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              1. Sadly, one effect of SF has been to completely destroy the ability of otherwise-rational humans to understand “the Figure-8 Effect”, and why it renders time-travel which allows travelers to affect the past impossible.

                (See also previous remarks re the inability of people from Law-based societies to admit Being Wrong.)

                One of the many reasons I do not read stories which involve time-travel.

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                1. I generally avoid time-travel stories that involve going to the past as well. Too much violation of causality for me to deal with.

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        2. The problem with that is that it throws out free will, so that the fate of the Universe and everything in it is predetermined.

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          1. No, it doesn’t. You freely did whatever it was that you did. You might as well say that you have no free will because you posted what you did.

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            1. So, you’re saying that if, today, you meet yourself from a year in the future, and your future self tells you that going back in time is a really bad idea (and possibly gives you convincing evidence), then you can decide not to go back in time once that future time arrives? Then how could you have arrived back in time to experience whatever happened to make you find yourself and tell you NOT to go back in time? And if you DO go back in time, then how is that free will, if you had to go back in time to tell yourself NOT to go back in time, but you do it anyway?

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              1. Easy, he’s me from an alternate future! By travelling “back in time”, he’s actually traveled to (or created) an alternate timeline in which he appeared and told me not to go back in time. Hopefully he also brought along _Gray’s Sports Almanac_, or at least some winning lottery numbers…

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                1. And your non-time traveling self is essential in making the reality that made your time-travelling self possible by not traveling back in time to warn yourself (ahead of time). No need for alternate realities, merely sidetracks that resolve themselves after several loops.

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                2. Also, you could be ornery, or distrustful of Future You. Or Future You may be just as stupid/unwise as you yourself, and not good at understanding what happened.

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                  1. Or perhaps the future in which you do not travel back in time is even worse.

                    For example, struggling artist Adolph Schicklegruber is visited by his future self and told to give up the drawing, it will never find acceptance. Depressed, the war veteran goes to a Munich pub to drown his sorrows, where he hears a speaker …

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                  2. Tone often doesn’t translate well via text. Was the “stupid/unwise” statement intended as a joke?

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        3. Splitting timelines would get rid of that problem too, you’d just create some new timelines when you visit past, and your starting point is still there somewhere as it was. Only I’d imagine that might make navigating pretty hard. If everything is in flux, new branching lines being born every time somebody makes a decision how would you find the when you started from? Might need to settle for the closest approximation.

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      2. > Time travel to the past violates causality.

        Restated: time travel violates my model that there is no time travel.

        Now, personally, I don’t think that time travel is possible. But saying “it does not fit with our current model” isn’t exactly a mortal wound.

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        1. The Standard Model of Physics has withstood a lot, you know. Also, through time dilation, time travel to the future is possible, but not the past.

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          1. Indeed. This (http://ace.mu.nu/archives/341898.php) just flew past my radar screen and seemed sufficiently relevant.

            Here’s a bit:

            Einstein famously postulated that, as Dr. White put it, “thou shalt not exceed the speed of light,” essentially setting a galactic speed limit. But in 1994, a Mexican physicist, Miguel Alcubierre, theorized that faster-than-light speeds were possible in a way that did not contradict Einstein, though Dr. Alcubierre did not suggest anyone could actually construct the engine that could accomplish that.

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              1. Not for the Alcubierre method. In fact, someone recently reworked the calculations using a slightly different field configuration and was able to reduce the energy requirement to just a couple hundred kilos mass-energy. They’re still working on how to produce negative mass, but I’m betting they can find a way to simulate it that will work just as well as the real thing.

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                1. I’m doubtful they’ll figure out negative mass, and the Ace article mentions sending signals to the front of the ship. Wikipedia suggests that such a drive will thrust particles forward so fast that they’ll completely destroy the destination.

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                  1. Already worked that second problem out. Aim for point far enough to the side that destination is in no danger, and with everything past it far enough away that the wave front disperses before arrival. Once you have traveled to the interim destination, turn and repeat, but with a much closer interim destination. Unless you’re traveling a truly huge distance, the next step can take you close enough to use a normal drive for final approach.

                    As for the negative mass, I figure they’ll come up with a way to fake it. Sort of like how they have “materials” now with negative refractive indices. They aren’t materials in the classic sense, they are actually constructions which use combinations of solid portions and void spaces to trick the desired wavelengths to reacting backwards to what they normally would.

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                    2. Not sure what you mean. The solution I mentioned was for a problem that will only come up AFTER the drive is created, and I was expressing confidence that a workaround would be found, not claiming it was easy.

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                    4. “As for the negative mass, I figure they’ll come up with a way to fake it.”

                      Had a physics prof in college who believed negative mass was naturally occurring. Not antimatter, but regular matter that just happened to have a negative mass.

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                    5. Regular matter with negative mass? Hydrogen is lighter than air, but not lighter than vacuum, which is what I think something would have to be to have negative mass. So he is saying there is a whole class of elements we haven’t discovered? Of course if that is true they are probably not exactly common on Earth, so us not discovering them yet would be likely.

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          2. > The Standard Model of Physics has withstood a lot

            Again, I strongly suspect that time travel is impossible, for exactly the reason you’re implicitly suggesting: a Bayesian approach shows that the Standard Model is pretty good.

            That having been said, I stand by my assertion that your argument boils down to “time travel violates my model that there is no time travel”.

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        2. My understanding of the subject is as follows:

          Causality (as we instinctively understand it) itself is an epiphenomenon of a particular way in which physics works. (locally, without gross distortion via gravity (crossing the event horizon of a black hole for example violates this hyperbolic dependence) or other strong-field mechanisms) (Hyperbolic space-time dependence of whatever fundamental PDEs you are using).

          It might be more specific to say that time travel, within a deterministic framework, leads to elliptical time-dependence of events (as opposed to hyperbolic time-dependence). (Fancy way of saying that you can’t solve for what happens sequentially from what happened in the past, you need a simultaneous solution for all events in space and time)

          (Within a quantum many-worlds framework, things get even weirder, as you now have distributions of time a traveller travelling back to some distribution of alternate-pasts, then propagating forward to an even larger distribution of alternate futures)

          As for the second law – yes, any sort of backwards time travel allows you to (requires you to) do cruel and unusual things to the second law. But then again, the second law of thermodynamics isn’t really a law in the same sense as other laws of physics at all: Fundamental physics is time-symmetric. The second law is a statistical epiphenomenon of us starting with incomplete information about the universe, etc. So, while it appears to be universal, there may yet be ways around it.

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        3. Larry Niven had a essay in one of his collections that basically said that if time travel were possible, the Universe would work to ensure it never happened.

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            1. That’s a little inaccurate. His actual premise was that if Time Travel were possible, it would be invented, someone would change the past, then rinse and repeat until you got a universe where it simply never got invented.

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              1. This assumes the Universe _cares_ about an infinitesimal bit of matter briefly swapping time polarity, and the biological scum on a single planet getting all philosophical about the illogical results.

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                1. I was trying to clarify in a way that would show that it was NOT because the Universe cared, but that simple permutations of probability would eventually give rise to a Universe which never experienced Time travel.

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                  1. Regretably I am blanking on the author’s name — British, very influential in late 60’s, early 70’s … John Brunner!!! — who posited that a universe in which Time Travel was possible was inherently unstable, that eventually somebody would create an unresolvable paradox, such as murdering the device’s inventor.

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                  2. Random/wartime/altruistic changes in history until it naturally falls into a “never discovered” scenario and sticks? Possible.

                    I dunno that a time travel version of MAD would work, any more than we can say “nuclear war will _never happen_.” Yeah, fine so far, but look who’s getting into the game, now. And the trouble with changing the past is, you wouldn’t realize anything had happened.

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                    1. One thing Poul Anderson did with his Time Patrol stories was to stipulate that history could be changed *but* Time Travelers residing in the past before the change point would still exist.

                      Since the Time Patrol had bases in the far past, there were people who would know history had been changed and were able to “fix” the problem.

                      Note, I think it was also stated that minor changes likely wouldn’t change history in a major way.

                      Of course, IMO a minor change might not be so minor in retrospect.

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                    2. How true. The world was overturned by the death of two men, early in the Punic Wars.

                      Poul Anderson wrote some wonderful works, but man, can it be bleak.

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                2. This assumes the Universe _cares_ about an infinitesimal bit of matter briefly swapping time polarity, and the biological scum on a single planet getting all philosophical about the illogical results.

                  Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!

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        4. Time travel is not possible because Time is itself an illusion resulting from a consciousness incapable of perceiving more than five of the membranes of Reality(TM). At higher levels of perception it becomes clear that movement across time, like movement along a plane, is merely an issue of folding Space properly through one of the other dimensions.

          At least, according to our current level of understanding.

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          1. Time travel is not possible because Time is itself an illusion
            Lunchtime, doubly so.
            Thus, onward to the Pub. Don’t forget your towel.

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      3. It violates our understanding of causality, certainly.

        There ain’t nothing to say that we understand it properly, however.

        Given the track record we have at making these pronouncements of finality, and how often they’ve been wrong, I’m not going to pronounce on anything being impossible or possible. Likely? Yes, I’ll give long odds that time travel is actually impossible, but that’s an opinion arising out of the matrix of our currently fashionable understanding of things.

        Anyone foolish enough to voice certainty on a given subject is almost daring the forces of the universe to pop up and make them look bad.

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        2. We’re pretty solid on the second law of thermodynamics.

          And time travel to the future is possible through time dilation. Furthermore, we look into the past every time we gaze at the stars since the light takes millennia to reach Earth.

          Like I said, the Standard Model of Physics has a lot going for it. Its last significant challenge — the prospect of faster-than-light neutrinos — was proved to be caused by faulty wiring. They’re even confident they’ve found the theorized “Higgs Boson.”

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        3. This is why the phrase “according to our current understanding” is vital and should be used whenever appropriate.

          “Violation of the second law of thermodynamics, according to our current understanding, is not possible.”

          “Speeds exceeding the speed of light, according to our current understanding, are not possible.”

          “Integrity in a politician, according to our current understanding, is not possible.”

          “Straight answers from a physics geek SF fan, according to our current understanding, is not possible.”

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          1. “He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.”

            I just now realized :oops: that that quote says the same thing twice. It sounds better that way, though.

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        4. @Kirk:
          > It violates our understanding of causality, certainly. There ain’t nothing to say that we understand it properly, however.

          EXACTLY the point I’m making.

          Well said.

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    2. Stephen Hawking held a party for Time Travellers, and posted the announcement the next day, but no one showed up.

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      1. Sounds like a note I wrote to myself in elementary school:
        “Dear future me,
        1. Acquire or invent a time machine.
        2. Meet me at (date, time) with all required papers necessary to invent said time machine, and any other inventions that may be useful.
        3. I know you’re a future version of me (and not the time police) if you can answer the following question: (question that had nothing to do with the answer I was expecting).”

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      2. Would you? Also, this assumes that they’re paying attention to the next day at that level of granularity. Or that Stephen Hawking is that well known in the future. Maybe, in fact, he has illusions of grandeur. ;)

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        1. I remember a story where a guy was stranded by time travellers and saved himself by deciding that he was going to invent time travel and save himself.

          As for Hawking’s party, I figure it would be safe enough, since you could scope the place out both before and after the event, and spy on Hawking as well, to find out if he was planning any sort of funny business, and who’s really going to believe him afterward? He could have set it up. As for being well known – I’d say that he should be well known for the next 50 years, at least, so that would give a minimum time frame.

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          1. It depends on what the time traveler is interested in. I mean parties are grand, sure, but what if time travellers are more interested in collecting Enfields or antique cars than cosmology?
            “Ooh, Nice dip. Say, can you get me directions to Century International’s warehouse?” would be a disappointment.

            Time, after all, could very well be money!

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    3. Assume all the causality issues are solved; time travellers would likely be “caught” for reasons they were blind to. For instance, wouldn’t a 30+ year old in medieval europe with a full set of good teeth be automatically suspect – more likely as a witch than a time traveller, of course?

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      1. Not in dairy country, or in places with lots of calcium in the water, or in places where they ate little fishies and their little fishie bones. Also, there were quite a few ethnic groups which were notorious for good teeth, and of course various sorts of dentifrices and tooth care regimes, some better than others.

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        1. I suspect our traveller would more likely be found out because of not being a racist or sexist, or perhaps by failing to abuse servants.

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          1. @RES:
            > I suspect our traveller would more likely be found out because of not being a racist or sexist, or perhaps by failing to abuse servants.

            Who knows what the future holds? Maybe the extinction of racism…or maybe a resurgence (I’d prefer the former, for the record). The progressive narrative that
            1) all change is beneficial
            2) all beneficial changes are irreversible
            is false.

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            1. Beggin’ your pardon for not making myself clearer. I was postulating a traveler from our present to some prior time.

              Our present has a particular fetish against racism that would stand out markedly in most human history. This is not to say we are better about such things, of course, merely more discrete.

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              2. “discrete”
                I believe you meant discreet. Of course, racism does tend to encourage separation…

                /end anti-homophone rant

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                2. Discreet. Yes. Stupid kyeboard, thrownig letters pu in worng order. (Tha’s mah story an’ ah is sticking with it.)

                  How indiscreet of me to fail to keep the two spellings discrete. Thank-you for the corrective; not being Norm Crosby, I prefer my puns be intentional rather than typographical.

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          2. “I suspect our traveller would more likely be found out because of not being a racist or sexist, or perhaps by failing to abuse servants.”

            There have always been soft-hearted people, and respect and kindness towards “lower classes” will never get you in trouble. You’d be more likely to get in trouble by not bowing and scraping to the right people.

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            1. Good point – failure to tug the forelock to a minor lordling or not knowing to say “thank you, lord, may I have another?” when kicked aside would be a likely tell.

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              1. So the easiest way to find a time traveler is to look for the guy on the side of the road getting his ass kicked for lese majeste?

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              2. It might make the minor lordling assume he just met somebody his equal or even superior in rank, only perhaps from some foreign country. A pilgrim, maybe. Or a spy, or a refugee who had angered his own ruler or a more powerful lord for some reason.

                Might actually be a safer way to behave. Peasants didn’t have the money to travel much, and so it would have been harder to mix with them and be accepted, they would have known most of their own in the area, if not by face then by reputation, or by name or family associations. I’d guess a poor looking fellow about whom nobody had any idea whatsoever would have been more suspicious, at least when the area was not one with lots of pilgrim traffic, they had poor among them too, than a better dressed one behaving in an arrogant manner, even in a place where no such visitors normally passed through. Just make up some story about a feud in some far away country with funny manners.

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                1. Do not offer that you can work for your living.

                  Those of you who have read Poul Anderson’s “The Man Who Came Too Soon” know why that’s foolish. (The one and only Connecticut Yankee story where he effects nothing except his own death.)

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  9. Yes, and Bradbury himself was acutely aware that he wrote about the past in a much more idyllic way than it was. I heard him lecture once, and he gushed about the present where 30 million Americans have pilot’s licenses, which he saw as a celebration of our progress and freedom. He also reminisced that when he was young, Sundays were reserved for visiting your dead brothers and sisters in the cemetery.

    Godspeed Ray. I know you’re having a ball up there in heaven.

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    1. Life is full of trade-offs. There were losses as well as gains, and we do like to reminisce on the things we lost

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  10. I love to read old novels with a view to their understanding of medicine, and old mysteries with a view to their understanding of forensics. When people get sick in an old story, it’s often difficult to guess what we would call the ailment today, because of their unfamiliar ideas of how the body worked and what diseases were, and their completely different notions about measurements and numerical reporting. In really old mysteries, they don’t even have fingerprints. In mid-20th-century mysteries, lacking DNA, they may be able only to use the serum type of a sample of blood or semen. Before blood-types (let alone DNA), they had a heck of a time determining the paternity of babies.

    I also get a kick out of watching how plot gimmicks change in movies over the decades, as it becomes less and less difficult to get to a communications device. If the hero has to be “out of the loop” for a few hours, it’s necessary to dream up an elaborate reason. Ditto for research: the hero no longer has to find a super-duper library or look up an obscure scholar — he just hops on the Web and it’s all there.

    When I was a kid, pretty much everyone who got cancer died of it quickly. Same for heart disease. When my father was a kid, people routinely died of pneumonia; if you’d lived through it, that was kind of a big deal.

    Imagine life before dentistry, not to mention anesthesia.

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    1. In Andre Norton’s first published novel, producing a fingerprinting expert at a trial is its dramatic climax.

      Fortunately not the novel’s. The odd thing is that you could excise the trial without harming the story.

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    2. My maternal grandfather died of rheumatic heart disease.

      Nowadays, they send third-world patients to the United States for the necessary surgery, but while they may have performed open heart surgery at the time of his death, it was still really experimental and not more than a dozen cases if that.

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    3. At threescore years and five, I sometimes feel that it’s not just the past which is another country, but also the future in which I live.

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  11. Well– Sarah, this post turned my attention to my own past. I was given a diary when I was about nine or ten to write my innermost thoughts. The next day after I poured out feelings into the diary, my mother spanked me for that entry. I quit writing in the diary afterwards except to write bald-face lies… since I knew she would read it. When I was in South Africa, we were encouraged to write a daily entry… yep, my mother got that journal too and read them all.

    Anyway, my journals and diaries are on my list to burn when I am dead. I do remember the drudgery of living w/o running water and electricity. There were times when I wouldn’t have time to write because I was finishing up the last of the wash in the dark so that I could go to bed. I also didn’t write because I learned to keep my private thoughts private. I had no other privacy in a house with nine children and an extrovert mother.

    I can understand why a “primary source” would not want to write about the drudgery of every day living.

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    1. Your mom wasn’t very bright, was she? If the point was to know what you were thinking, she shouldn’t have punished you!
      I always assumed my parents read everything I wrote, until I learned to write in English which they don’t speak. I’d grown up watching them searching my brother’s room for his writings/contraband/anything.

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      1. No– she isn’t– She has a lot of charisma, but thankfully not the brains to go with it. I have always been grateful because she could have been the Supreme Ruler with a combination of charisma and brains. ;-)

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        1. “contraband” — I think mostly drugs, but also indications he was doing whatever he shouldn’t.
          I never have done “the search” because it would be futile. By the time I was ten I knew how to hide things so no one would find it, and they’re smarter than I.
          The weird thing is that I normally know what younger son is up to WITHOUT doing the search. I’m sure he thinks I spy.

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          1. You can’t fool us (or him): surveillance is all part of the contract with the feline members of the household. At least those capable of maintaining purpose for more than a Planck second.

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          2. LOL– thankfully I never had to do the search. My brothers though just blurt out what they are doing because they truly believe I can read their minds. I never tell them that I can read their expressions… they have tells.

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  12. Sarah,
    While born in 1951 I was raised most of my life by my maternal grandparents who were much the same age as Heinlein. Gave me a wonderful first hand perspective of both world wars and the depression between them.
    As for women’s clothes in Heinlein’s day, your deductions are partly correct, but you’re missing the primary driver. Yes they were more expensive, ordinary women might only own two or three day to day outfits and one “church dress.” But the real issue was the washing. Think wash tubs and wash boards and lye soap and drying the clothes on the line in the yard if the weather cooperated. We were well to do. Grandma had a washing machine she was right proud of. It even had a mangler. But in good weather the clean clothes all went out to dry in the yard. Usually took several hours. In winter or bad weather they were hung on lines in our basement and could take days to dry.
    As for the job of Bell Hop in the thirties, oh yeah. Any job in the thirties was precious and one where the main source of income was tips was especially prime. Hotel guests were by definition well to do since they had the funds to travel and stay in rented rooms. And then there is a slightly less savory aspect. If a traveling man was in need of something such as a refreshing pick me up or a bit of companionship who did he ask in a strange town new to him? I recall reading that in some places the Bell Captain and Bell Hops actually paid the hotel for the right to work there. And made out like the bandits that they were, or simply entrepreneurs taking advantage of the existing economy.

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    1. This discussion of Bell Hops points out another aspect of The Past. In any society there are two economies, the overt and the covert. Mysteries are especially good sources as their plots often hinge on an involvement in the covert economy.

      As Dangerfield’s comedy points out, the unseen economy often matters more.

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      1. I get the feeling that Mr. Mellon has “been there, done that.” Also that professor is an idiot. He should pull Mr. Mellon up to the front and start asking questions. That real world stuff is gold.

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    2. In one of the ex-slave interviews done in the Thirties, a man mentions that his sister-in-law washed laundry in a Louisiana bayou, and up came an alligator and took her arm off. — Wonder how clean the clothes got by washing in a bayou?

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      1. One of my aunts (by marriage) still rinsed clothes in the nearby lake during the 50’s. In winter they cut a hole on the ice for it. By then it was not common anymore, but they were poor, and their well was not good, it just didn’t have enough water for that part of the washing, and it was easier to take the clothes to the lake than haul the water from there to their sauna. That is a very muddy lake, with murky water, so I’d imagine at least sheets or anything else white might not have been very white after being rinsed there a few times.

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  13. Re. learning the unexpected. While doing research for my dissertation I read twenty years or so of a weekly livestock newspaper, based out of Ft. Worth (1880s-1905 IIRC). The livestock news (what I intended to find) was useful. But not the way I’d thought. Beef prices dove in August. Why? Because people ate more fruit and veggies, since they were in season, instead of beef. People ate older cattle – 4 years old was prime for market, and later there is much griping among ranchers because of the demand for “baby beef.” There were long articles about German politics and English economics because of tariff questions. And then there were the women’s pages, which had some heated discussions about suffrage and “the new woman” along with fashion stories and cooking tips. The paper even had what I called the social pages, lists of ranchers traveling to Ft. Worth, where they were going, who was with them, and how their families were doing. (People traveled a LOT more than I’d thought.)

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    1. Dad was born in ’50, and has worked on ranches basically his whole life.

      The leaps and bounds of improvement in the breeds is amazing— a modern angus steer is better at… I think it’s 18 months or so, we butcher the few we keep as unsaleable based largely on how much it’d cost to feed over the winter… has more and often better beef than those older cows did.

      Of course, we’ve also been selecting for more lean beef since the 80s, to the point that mom routinely adds grease/oil to the ground beef if she’s making patties.

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      1. Christmas hams used to have this thick, thick layer of fat on them when I was a child, now they have hardly anything.

        I miss those older hams, these modern versions are too lean, they dry in the oven.

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  14. I love university libraries–they can have the strangest stuff in their collections. UW Madison, for some reason, had a huge collection of ancient Baedeker guides for various countries that were quite useful, because they WERE describing a foreign country in the past, exactly as if everything needed to be explained. So, I know how to summon a hansom cab from the main Berlin train station in 1870. And restaurant customs. And where the good shops are. (Also, maps of Berlin before two world war’s worth of aerial bombardment rearranged things.)

    Sometimes you need to combine primary sources too. My great-uncle fought in the first World War and had some fun running around Berlin during the Weimar Armistice negotiations (and had smuggled a camera in, which he wasn’t supposed to do… I have his photo album!) He described to me a thing, but he hadn’t understood what it really was. Then I found another account (and a picture) that made it all clear. Fun stuff.

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    1. Travelers’ tales are quite useful, but have their limits. The guides would be more useful than most since they expected to be verified. Tales tend to suffer because the travelers may misunderstand, and certainly will enjoy advantages from exaggerating or making up especially when no one can verify his tale.

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    2. Ah, yes. One of the reasons I flunked out of Ga. Tech was that they had bound volumes of model airplane magazines going back to the thirties. I am one of those people who can’t study in a library, with all of those cool books which are more interesting than the one I’m studying.

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  15. I find that books are time machines for my life. Not only can I return to beloved characters and situations who remain just as they were, I can return in my mind to the first time I read them. I can go back to that time in school, or that long car trip, and feel the same thrill now that I did then.

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  16. This reminds me of how I figured out the difference between “thou” and “you” when both were in use. I was an English major in college, so you’d think that at some point this would have been addressed (during a course on Shakespeare, perhaps), but it never was. Instead it was reading a book written by William Penn, a Quaker, who insisted on using the older form that was going out of fashion, and explained why. But he was essentially talking about this for political reasons, not to explain etymology.

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    1. Apparently no one who hangs out at Renaissance Festivals has ever tried figuring any of this out! “Why doth thou goeth to the store where they selleth the other things, when thou should buyeth my goods?” Not enough time spent with Shakespeare or the King James Bible.

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      1. I’ve always used the KJV as my English bible, and I love Shakespeare, so while the dialect does not come as readily as I’d like, I know it well enough that improper usage makes me crazy. What’s worse, I have trouble explaining to someone why their usage is wrong, since I never studied the dialect systematically.

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        1. A handful of simple rules will eliminate most of the abuse. The ending “-est” or “-st” is for “thou,” which is the singular, famliar “you.” “Thou hast,” “thou goest,” “thou shouldst.” (“Thou art” is a special ending just for the verb “to be,” and only for “thou.” Otherwise it’s “I am,” “he is,” just like today.)

          The ending “-eth” is for the third-person singular: “He goeth,” “he doth.” No “they goeth” or “we goeth” or “I goeth.”

          In both cases, these endings are strictly for the present tense: no past tense, no infinitives. So no “He should goeth” or “he did goeth” or “I want you to goeth” or “he wenteth.”

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          1. In reviewing the Wiki, it occurs to me I’m full of it about the past tense. You do use these endings in the past tense: thou “hadst,” “wast,” “didst,” “knewest.” (But would you say “thou wentst”?) In the third-person singular, you would attach “-eth” to irregular past-tense roots like “he kneweth” (but not, for some reason, “he wenteth”), while you would not say “he carriedeth.”

            In Old English, it was a simple matter of “thou” being singular and “ye” plural. After the Norman Conquest, Middle English adopted the French style of using “thou” for familiar/condescending and “ye” for either plural or formal. But Wiki says the early-16th-century Tynsdale translation of the Bible used “thou” and “ye” strictly to differentiate between singular and plural, for the purpose of accurately rendering the original language, and this distinction, though it was already dropping out of the English language at that time, was preserved in the slightly later KJV.

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        2. One of usage that RenFair types mangle: the old style was to say “mine” instead of “my” (or “thine” instead of “thy”) when the next letter started with a vowel, just as we change “a” to “an” in that context. So “Mine eyes have seen the glory” but “My kingdom for a horse.”

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        3. Important point: Thou or Thee are second person singular, You is second person plural (like tu & vosotros, if you’re familiar with Spanish). The usage gradually changed to “you” being the formal, respectful address & thou being informal, friendly (or sometimes disparaging) address (like tu & usted in Spanish).

          When I figured this out for myself, it pissed me off that no teacher had ever thought to explain this to us (or possibly not understood it herself).

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    2. Do you recall which book it was? I’ve wondered about that issue myself. For example, the King James Version of the Bible uses both forms, and I still have not been able to pin down why a given form is used in a given context.

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      1. I heard once that it was related to levels of formality, “you” being more formal than “thou,” but I wouldn’t swear to the veracity of such. Now my mind itches, darnit.

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        1. It has been thirty years since my German language studies, but that language retains the formal and informal pronouns (or did, thirty years ago.) As English is descended in part from Deutsch it is likely the rules are similar.

          Much of it has to do with differences in status and familiarity. Children are almost always addressed with the informal pronoun (although I suspect a mother intent on admonishing a tongue lashing for misbehaving might employ the formal) and friends & family, of course, would address each other familiarly. I suspect an employer might use the informal while expecting the employee to remain formal. Young aspiring lovers probably develop elaborate rules over the usage: “That Gretchen is such a tramp!!! Did you know she let Hans switch from ‘thou’ to ‘you’ on the third date??”

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          1. An employer will keep the formal (Sie), 60% of the time. And the higher ranked person (older individual/manager/relative) must be the one to grant permission to use the informal (du.) I have very old-school friends who use “du” to address me, but have never (and will never) permit me to use “du” in return, even though I am allowed to use their first name. Students automatically use “du,” and some professors permit “du,” others don’t. Short form: when in doubt, use “Sie/Ihnen.”

            And if you think that can be complicated, ask me about forms of address in written communication!

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          2. Portugal also had formal and informal when I was growing up. It’s given them up in favor of the “du” — “Tu” — ie equals formula. It FEELS wrong to be addressed as “tu” by my nephews and hear them address their parents (and mine!) that way.

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            1. Oh, the look on my high school French language teacher (ex WWII 42nd Infantry Div scout who was first into Buchenwald) if I used “tu” at him was something to see.

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            2. Yah, even though English doesn’t have that construction, I found I had to train my nieces to not call me by my given name alone, but as “Aunt Matilda” … their parents were mystified and so was I … sigh …

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            3. Ah, another aspect I had in mind but failed to express: languages change. The rules for such usage are liable to drift so that even when the formal and informal are both used, the particular way they are used may be peculiar to only one era. Thus the KJV usage might be inappropriate a century earlier and a century later even though the formal/informal usage remains in effect.

              Looks at paragraph just completed, sniffs: now I know why I hadn’t tried to express that thought. Oh well, leave it for others to clear it up, you’ll just bugger it further.

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            4. Down south we generally used “você” for the informal and “O Senhor / A Senhora” for the formal – although there were always wags or uptight religious folks who’d correct you with “O Senhor está no céu!”
              But there are folks in Brasil who use a truly atrocious bastardization of the ‘tu’ form. They’re generally caipiras (hicks) from the far north with a really heavy accent, so it comes across as less “insulting” and more “ignorant”. I even used to imitate them sometimes, but it’s still odd having someone you barely know ask “Tu vai conosco?”
              Other than that, you’ll almost never hear the word outside of a rather traditionalist church. Or from me, because as I’ve explained to Vossas Senhorias before, I’m prone to terrible linguistic archaisms. :)

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              2. Tu vais — final s.

                BTW when I was growing up for whatever reason “dona” was the thing to call Senhoras. Senhora was for old women. So my mom and her entire generation were “Dona so and so” It’s gone back to senhora, though until five years ago they still called me “menina” unless I was with Dan or they looked at the hand with the ring. (Or I was nursing, way back.).

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                1. No, no, that’s the thing. They say “Tu vai.” It’s the same dialect that’s prone to saying (phonetically) “Nois vai lá.” I did mention it was a bastardization. *shakes head despondently* Caipiras…

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                  2. because you know the language you might find this funny. The way my brother says “vamos embora” — which is colloquial for “let go already” my husband thought FOR YEARS he was being called “Fuzz Butt”

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                    2. I’m having trouble hearing it, since I don’t know the continental accent well (I’ve met very few portugueses nativos ever), but I can kinda see it, especially for someone who doesn’t know the language and whose ear is scrambling for familiar phonemes and jamming them together. I pronounce that phrase oddly myself (it comes out “vamembóra”; I blame the caipiras as usual), but it doesn’t lend itself to amusing misunderstandings like that. Ah well.

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            1. That’s because insults usually stray into the personal and familiar. Thou-ing somebody who hasn’t granted you the privilege. You may as well add the outright insult, too. (And insults are normally informal and colloquial language, which you think about it.)

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              2. Yes, the incongruity between the respectfully formal and the disrespectful is what I was driving at. Something like saying You’re an idiot, sir.

                Come to think of it, there may be special occasions on which such incongruity is an effective rhetorical device.

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                2. I’ve got an example in French. In French, the phrase “ta gueule” is a slightly crude way of telling someone to shut up, with a rudeness level about equivalent to telling someone “that’s bullsh*t” in an argument. So what does someone do but use the formal address and pronoun with it: “Monsieur, votre gueule.” Very amusing to French-speaking ears.

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        2. Spanish class– teacher went over the familiar vs formal in whatever Spanish she was teaching, and mentioned that… Spain, I think?… had gotten rid of the intimate one except for in the Bible, because only God knew you that well.

          Grew up watching “Gentle Persuasion” and suddenly realized the “thee thy thine thou” folks were using the familiar form. And called folks “brother” and “sister.”

          Serious lightbulb moment.

          http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1393/what-do-thou-thee-and-thine-mean-and-why-dont-we-use-them-anymore
          history of it.

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          1. Spain still uses the intimate second person plural Vosotros, which has lapsed in S. America. Oddly, the Argentines still use the intimate second person singular Vos. The rest of the world gets by with just the Tu (common) or Usted (conjugated as 3rd person – like saying “if sir walks this way’).

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            1. From what I remember from high school Spanish (not much) Argentines barely speak Spanish anymore. Their pronounciation is enough different that normal Spanish speakers have problems understanding them, and they use not only antiquated words, but words that are not Spanish in origin.

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              1. That is not my experience. They do have a weird way of saying things and they like to use an odd word-order at times, but they are not hard to understand. My most recent contacts have been reading newspapers and listening to newscasts, but back when I knew some Argentine foreign students, I had no trouble.
                It is nothing like trying to understand pidgin from Sierra Leone

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      3. “Thou” was intimate, “You” was formal/distant (singular) or either (plural). Just like “tu” and “vous.” In the KJB, we refer to God in prayer as “Thou” because of the intimate relationship. You would address your lover as “thou” and your social superior, or a stranger, as “you.” If you were the sort of son who addressed his father only as “Sir,” you wouldn’t say “thou” to him.

        “Thee” is the objective, like “him.” So it would be “Thou art” but “I salute thee.” The Quakers did a strange thing and started to use “thee” as the subject, but that was their own peculiar usage: “Thee is a sinful creature.”

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        1. In the KJB, we refer to God in prayer as “Thou” because of the intimate relationship.

          I was just scrolling down to see if anyone had brought this point up, because I was about to if nobody else had yet. This is a really subversive concept in the King James Bible — that God, the Creator of the universe, could be called “Thou” by His creation* — and yet it’s totally lost on most people today, because they’ve never been taught the grammatical distinction.

          There’s a lot that’s subversive about Christian doctrine, when you stop and analyse it. Witness the G.K. Chesterton quote, which I’ve *almost* got memorized: “(name) held that men were mostly fools. Christianity … teaches that they are all fools. This is called the doctrine of original sin. It is also known as the doctrine of the equality of men.”

          * Not because we’re abrogating His authority, but because He chose to make Himself equal with us by becoming one of us. Yet another crucial distinction.

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          1. Actually, it was because Hebrew and Greek had the old system where it really meant singular and plural and they were trying to be as accurate as possible in translation.

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            1. Yeah, I’m with Mary on this one. To be a bit silly, I don’t think the “buddy Jesus” attitude was prevalent at the time.

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              1. I think Robin is pointing to the truth in John 15:15: Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.

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                1. Yes, there is that verse, but at the time, even acknowledging Christ’s words there, I don’t think anyone would have taken that as license to address God in the familiar mode.

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              2. And yet it was a common European linguistic theme at that time that the use of the plural was respectful (even when addressed to a single person) and the use of the singular somewhat intimate or informal. I don’t know if there was any similar trend in the original Hebrew or Greek. But Tynsdale (and the later KJV authors) would have been aware of this implication.

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        2. And now I want to know what would be an appropriate way to dress down some peasant who called his superior by the intimate form? Would the insulted noble have used you or thou?

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          5. Interesting expressions from the Wiki:

            A formerly common refrain in Yorkshire for admonishing children who misused the familiar form was:

            Don’t thee tha them as thas thee! (“Don’t thee thou them as thous thee”)

            And similar in Lancashire dialect:

            Don’t thee me, thee; I’s you to thee! (“Don’t thee me, thee [i.e., “you child”]; I’m you to thee!”)

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        1. Originally, the distinction was singular and plural. It shifted to formal and familiar.

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      5. Yes, the book was No Cross, No Crown, by William Penn. The distinction is this: originally, thou was singular, you plural (compare tu & vosotros in Spanish). However, gradually the usage shifted so that you was sometimes second person singular, respectful, formal address and thou was informal, friendly, or (if inappropriate) disparaging (compare tu and usted in Spanish). Eventually, politeness drove out “thou” altogether, and English lost the distinction between you (one person) and you (multiple people).

        This shift didn’t happen all at once, though, so in any given work (including Shakespeare’s) it may be inconsistent. That’s the basics, though.

        If I have this right, you should never see “thou” addressed to multiple people, but you will not uncommonly see “you” addressed to one.

        Make sense?

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        2. Actually, in Italian the formal second person singular was the third person — plural, I think. Mussolini tried to substitute the second person plural because the other was unFascist, lacked force and dynamism. . . .

          Didn’t last long.

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  17. I recall a short story I read years ago. A machine is invented that lets the user look back in time. At first they use it to watch dinosaurs and Caesar crossing the Rubicon. But then someone figures out 5 minutes ago is history too. The inventor is horrified because his device could end all privacy for everyone, forever. Not only would nations not be able to keep state secrets, they could also watch their people’s every move, and husbands and wives would spend most of the day spying on each other. Everyone’s lives would be laid bare to everyone, every government, and every corporation.

    He ends up destroying his invention,

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    1. Huh. I’m not sure that’s the best solution. The old, “once anybody’s done it, anybody can do it again,” issue. At that point, I’d do what Howard Tayler set up during the Teraport Wars in Schlock Mercenary: make the designs open-source and ubiquitous, so everybody can make one. Yes, privacy is gone, but as we’re discovering now, that may not be so very far off. And if everybody can look into anybody’s past – or at video of what they’ve done in the past – it may well curb large institutions’ tendency to exploit such things.

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      2. There was a Christopher Anvil short story similar to that, aliens released cameraless television to the world (the onsite manager had a breakdown), and the Russians and Americans could spy on each other, but unfortunately the populace in general were more interested in talking instead of stealing secrets, so the exclusivity of information that permitted the condition of cold war that was going on broke down.
        The structure was the aliens trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle, and then being dumbfounded that humans would rather argue and talk than fight.

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      2. But consider the implications if a private eye got ahold of one — much easier than peeping through windows to capture tawdry affairs.

        What if the local parish priest, a Father Brown type, had one? Or if people thought he did.

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    3. Hmm… I read one with a similar premise, but the inventor used it to make movies of actual historical events. He was muddling along until someone came in and found what he was doing, but this person was a business type, who helped the man vastly improve his production values, his editing, and brought in lip readers to do voiceovers (no sound in the viewer). This brought the invention enough attention that the government got wind of it, and it was taken from them. The ending was depressing, but I can’t remember the details well enough to give them here, but it involved the same thing: someone realized they could use it for 5 minutes ago just as well as 500 years ago, and they were using it to follow the inventor to make sure he didn’t tell anyone.

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    4. There was a short novel — “E for Effort” by T. L. Sherred — on that theme. The protagonists used the Time Machine to film the past and produce modern documentaries. When they got around to doing the events surrounding WWII, complete with using lip readers to provide dubbed-in dialogue …

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    5. _The Dead Past_. Isaac Asimov. The government agent trying to suppress the technology is the good guy, so as to preserve some shred of privacy. Unfortunately, the science-writer friend of the guy who designed the Chronoscope has already published the design…oops!

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  18. One of my favorites is “Tass is Authorized to Announce” – in which the heroic KGB agent thwarts the evil CIA.

    What I found particularly fascinating was the portrayal of the corrupt senator, who had fresh strawberries on his desk, their having been flown in from Israel on an Air Force jet.

    Now you’ll not find much resistance from me to the idea of a corrupt senator. In my mind, politics draws the corruptible the way outhouses draw flies.

    But no American would consider access to fresh produce to be an indicator of corruption.

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    2. I was thinking of something similar — the extraordinary emphasis in Jane Austen novels on the fancy tables set by very rich people, featuring piles of fresh fruit. The tables probably also were set with all kinds of handmade pastries that we would prize today, but it was the fruit that got her attention.

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      1. When this kind of thing was touched on the other day, I (mis)wrote:

        I have never seriously considered being a vegetarian, but probably I would seriously consider it if vat-grown meat were available.

        By vat-grown meat, I had in mind actual meat not connected to a rudimentary consciousness that could register pain. Of course the same considerations apply to vegetable-based substitutes.

        Running this up the flagpole and diving for cover: Most discussions of natural vs. artificial food may be beside the point as far as the long run goes. In a few decades or more, the debate may be about whether any natural food can compete on cost, taste or nutritional quality with an artificial counterpart. I can’t think of an example offhand, but artificial foods without natural counterparts might be created, even commonplace. Every kitchen may have a 3D food printer.

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        1. How could vat-grown or printed meat not be meat?
          I think you have pointed out something here: most people who are vegans do it for either philosophical reasons (meat is murder) or dietary reasons & philisophic reasons (complex amino acids are not worth the degradation of animals). Very few are on it because of basic belief that animal protein is harmful in and of itself.
          It may well turn out that vat-grown meat will be the death knell of broad vegetarianism since very few people don’t like meat.

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          1. Is it ethical to eat the flesh of butchered animals? Although I might listen to arguments pro and con, that is an abstract question at present. I have no intention of upheaving my eating practices.

            If a non-butchering alternative—either vegetable-based or vat-grown “real meat”—became progressively less disruptive, at some point presumably I’d consider changing my mind. If the non-butchering alternative became clearly more appealing than current practice, I might look askance at someone who insisted on eating what a (somewhat) conscious being was butchered to provide.

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            1. But if you don’t butcher them you have to spit out the bones and listen to them squeal while you chomp. ‘Tis unethical to cook them while kicking, you know.
              Cows are to be eaten. That is why we raise them. Butchering them, as humane and sterile as we can make the slaughter, is icky. But it is necessary to provide our families with the protein to make them strong, tall, and active. Icky is not a moral stance in the face of that.

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              1. To what degree is it ethical to kill a conscious entity when there are alternatives? The more I think about the issue, the more there is to it even though, as a practical matter, I don’t think about it much. Presumably consciousness will be much better understood, and perhaps humans will be more evolved, by the time alternatives to butchering become available.

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                1. Cows are for eating. That is why they are called cows.
                  Death comes to everyone, Man and Ungulate, whether it is from going over a cliff or getting a captured bolt device triggered on your forehead. I won’t argue like the Romans who favored arena blood sports, that slaughter makes the masses inured to death and so better able to be soldiers to defend the nation, but I will say that all life feeds on death. The cow on the death of plants, and us on the tasty, succulent steaks that the cow has surrendered to us. We have a choice to what level of the food chain we eat at, and some people feel that eating lower is better. It may be, but it sure isn’t as tasty as barbeque.

                  You trot out a hypothetical for me to agree with: if it is ethical to kill a conscious being. This is a logical trap that I can’t see a way to win, so I sidestep it: Interesting thought. Let’s review this when we can assign actual values, either to cows’ consciousness, or to the value and taste of man-made meat.
                  After all, we could be agreeing to solid actions now without knowing all the facts. We could be agreeing to future actions that: might make inevitable the extinction of the Angus; that might cause global ecological destruction for the placement of the SynMeat plants, or; might result in sudden drops in global temperatures by restricting the production of methane causing yet another dieback of genus Homo. And then instead of being the thoughtful guys who made the hard decisions for a reluctant world, we would be those: Monsters, Wreckers, or Selfish Genocidal Meddlers. And wouldn’t we feel silly then?

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          2. Oh, trust me on this: There will always be those who rationalize their way to a feeling of moral superiority by setting themselves apart. Dietary restrictions are just the most time-honored and easiest to accomplish. I dare say they’ll come up with moralizing to support not eating “animal-originated proteins”, while the rest of us just go on enjoying our hamburgers of whatever ilk.

            If you follow the rabbit of thought far enough, the only moral people on this planet are the Jains of India, who go so far as to wear masks to prevent harming to airborne bacteria (supposedly… Never met one, myself, just read the accounts of others.).

            There is no path to righteousness, in terms of diet. So long as we’re what we are, which is omnivorous animals, we’ll have to keep eating and taking other lives to support our own, whether you’re talking animal or vegetable. I don’t think there’s any real way to partake of merely minerals and chemicals–To get the proteins and amino acids we need, we have to kill something, whether it’s a blade of grass, or a cow.

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            1. One of my Mom’s coworkers is Jain, and he does not wear the mask, in part because they work in a hospital and he doesn’t want to scare patients. But yes, the priests wear the mask, and also sweep in front of them to brush bugs out of the way. Some avoid root veggies, so they don’t kill the bugs in the soil. Since Jains can’t farm or hunt, many are merchants (“the Jews of India” as Mom’s coworker puts it.)

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          3. One notices that the end of eating meat is going to be the butchery of vast numbers of animals, put down as not worth their feed.

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        2. I look forward to decent tasting, cheap vat-meat. :-P More power to people making the attempt.

          I’m finding myself less and less able to afford adequate protein (and noticing that the protein content even in overpriced fast food is taking a nose-dive. (Four bits of chicken in a stir-fry, really?). Pasta and rice are still relatively cheap. Meat is ridiculous here in cyberpunk Atlanta. Right now canned tuna is the densest, cheapest way I can manage to get it.

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          2. Protein powder. I use the store brand that just calls itself a protein supplement, not the brand names that brag of muscle building.

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        3. On the subject of vat-grown meat, I have a counter-prediction. If/when it becomes readily available, its practical production will depend on the availability of animal cells whose “die after X generations” gene has been turned off, otherwise you’d have to keep replenishing the vat with freshly-harvested cells. Thing is, we already have a name for those kinds of cells: cancer cells.

          Therefore, my prediction is this: the same genre of idiots who are against irradiated food because “radiation! Danger!” will also be against eating vat-grown meat because “you’re eating cancer!” Despite all the studies* showing that eating cancerous cells has no effect on your own cells turning cancerous. Of course, if the studies end up showing that there really is a connection and that “stay away from eating vat-grown meat because it will give you cancer” turns out to have real science behind it, my prediction becomes null and void.

          * Studies which don’t yet exist, but they will.

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          1. Thank you! That is a perfect answer to a problem I was having with a story. It is set in the near future, and I wanted to use a protest against vat-grown meat as an example of some of the silly controversy of the day, but I couldn’t think of what rationale they would use.

            As far as the real world goes, should we just call Jenny McCarthy now, and get it over with? :-P

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    3. I saw part of a rerun of seaQuest DSV a while back where the evil corruption of several high-ranking officials was revealed by them — gasp! — eating *real* meat (which is apparently banned in the future).

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      1. Widespread, enforced vegetarianism is one of the things that’s always felt unreal to me in scifi (I’m looking at you, Federated Sentient Planets). I mean, have you seen the vat meat that’s been produced? And TVP and such do not have the right texture. At the point where you can make vat meat that actually tastes right, you really might as well just be raising animals.

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        1. I have to wonder how the heck you’d enforce such a ban? I’m imagining illicit farms in the hinterlands and back-alley hamburger vendors. All of which is far more interesting than most of what happened on seaQuest.

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          1. Sorta like the “illicit” raw-milk Amish dairies in Wisconsin today? Overwhelming firepower.

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        2. There’s a lot more wrong with processed soy than its texture.

          There’s a reason there are no entirely vegetarian societies – the second generation is effectively sterile.

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        3. IEEE Spectrum ran an issue with the premise “The Age of Plenty”. (Most of which reads like Pournelle’s A Step Farther Out.)

          One article in the series is written from an odd moral perspective, but is still interesting for its technical content—and relevant to this thread: The Better Meat Substitute. Discusses how far vat meat is from being a viable substitute, and what progress is being made on that front. Try to skip past the lede and anywhere the author starts pontificating. And read the other articles; they’ll lessen the urge to through your computer across the room.

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      2. Read a story many years ago set in a future where all food was artificial. A young man was highly acclaimed for the flavor of his cooking, until it was revealed that he was using a gasp PLANT EXTRACT (garlic) in his cooking. Then everyone including his family turned on him. The story title was something like “In Bad Taste”.

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        1. Arthur C Clarke wrote a story set in a world where all food was “artificial”. One food company created a new food based on “long pork” (human meat). [Very Big Evil Grin]

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          1. Does anyone else remember a story from the 60s or so in which a young man deserts his luxurious, walled city in order to pursue adventure in the exciting countryside, where they still live in harmony with nature? The outsiders are impressed with the city-dweller’s fancy car until they learn that it can’t reproduce. They keep asking, “What’s its get?”–which he doesn’t understand. They turn out to be skilled genetic engineers, who can quickly gin up any device or food they need by fooling with DNA. There’s a scene in which our hero is overcome with revulsion when someone throws a soft, sticky fruit at him. He nearly dies of mortification when he has to touch insects.

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        2. I vaguely remember a short story from years back where an advanced alien race had shown up, and was teaching us to be much more uplifted beings. Among which was a long list of “you can’t eat that, think how upset this-or-that intelligent-species-who-looked-exactly-the-same would be.

          And we tried to cope. Until they told us about how upset certain intelligent yeast cultures would be. At which point we kicked them off the planet and passed a law declaring it a capital crime to tell someone he couldn’t eat something.

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          1. If it’s the story I remember, the humans said something about wine and the purple-skinned *roundish* alien shuddered. He started talking about “crushed babies”. That’s when humans kicked the aliens off Earth.

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        3. It was by Asimov. It was only his satellite that this was problematic — he had been very odd, to go on a tour, where he picked up the garlic — and he was exiled after it. Effectively if not legally.

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        4. Asimov again. “In bad taste” was a tag line but the title was different. Also read a different story where meat flavor was shockingly reintroduced in the future and then the newest popular flavor had to introduce a forgotten concept, speller for introduction: c-a-n-n-a-b-l-e.

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        1. “Tass is Authorized to Report” was a thriller written in Russian by an author popular with the authorities that got published here in an English translation. The title was the standard opening of any Tass news story. And yes, I think it says a lot about the Soviet Union. “We are AUTHORIZED to report this story, otherwise we would keep our terrified mouths shut.”

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          1. That sounds like SOP in an “anything not expressly permitted is forbidden” society….

            People *like* to stay out of prison, eh?

            Mew

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  19. Yes, except (not to contradict, just to clarify that your ordinary words like “expand” and “localize” carry some connotations which don’t necessarily apply) the collapse doesn’t necessarily have to do with localizing the wavefunction in any ordinary intuitive spatial tangible way. Depending on what is being measured the wavefunction can end up “localized” in any mathematically suitable abstract “space” (meaning something like mathematicians’ “vector space” or “Hilbert space”, not anything as specific as a space that aliens can sail their UFOs through when exfiltrating from their implantation runs). In particular, (1) “localization” in “momentum space” arises commonly in practice and turns out to be more or less the opposite of localization in ordinary position space and (2) smart people who know QM very well and are dissatisfied with it can construct impractical extreme situations like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox in which the collapse (of something subtle, like correlated spin states) is so nonlocal that it makes it tricky to reconcile the phenomenon with relativistic ideas about effects not zipping across long distances faster than the speed of light.

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    1. The previous comment was intended for another post on this site. Perhaps this error can serve as a brilliant illustration of another theme I have written about: how human error truly does tend to be messy and weird enough that it resists being captured in any elegant tractable mathematical formulation.

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  20. First thought. If, at the creation of the Universe, time was synchronous, then it proceeded both forwards and backwards in time. So the Universe is half the age we think it is. The other half is the negative time universe proceeding ever distant in to the past it creates as it goes.

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  21. Second thought.

    Is there an obscure office somewhere in the bowels of DC with a phone number that is never allowed to change? It is set up for arriving, official government time travelers. It is prepared to fund them, and provide them with ID. So, any future time travelers will be given that phone number, instructed on how an old phone is operated . . .

    Hopefully the most boring job in the universe.

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    1. Speaking of phone numbers not changing, have you read the story of how NORAD got involved with tracking Santa? As I recall, they *couldn’t* change the red emergency phone number, at least not at first, so kids who remembered from the first time called back the next year ;-)

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    2. There is a spy term for that sort of thing, like a reception point to get potential sleepers into the local economy/society. Maybe I’m thinking of the WWII exfiltration routes for downed pilots in France.

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      1. Being a writer is weird. I immediately think . . . some cabinet member put pressure on the NSA to employ his idiot nephew. NSA rolls eyes and, snicker, snort, chortle, “We’ll make him the contact for time travelers. Find him an office and a telephone and forget him . . . Oh, someone teach him how to work the coffee machine, tell him he _must_ come in early . . . “

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          2. The kid not being a complete idiot (Hey – it’s a job, the pay is good, the benefits is good, he’s working indoors and can spend all day using the NSA computers to surf porn sites) and having already been the butt of many practical jokes, refuses to blink an eye at the travelers’ appearance and goes along with the gag.

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              1. “You can’t shoot him, just because he’s sabotaging the nuclear plant next door to the CDC HQ! He say’s it the only way to stop the zombie plague before it’s invented!”

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    3. The implications of Dr. Who and Torchwood is that the UK has at least one of those set-ups.

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      1. Yeah, but, in the UK they got this fellow in a police box popping in and out all the time, not to mention the all the aliens who stop by to take over.

        In real life, it would be a little . . . odd, at the next meeting down at the NSA, to recommend they set up a contact point for future time travelers to check in. “Just in case we really do destroy ourselves, and someone comes back to prevent it.”

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        1. I can hear the Agency budget committee discussion on that: “OK, we’ve determined that item can come in as a valid need, shall we put it down as a single line item under forward planning, research and contingencies, or jut try to sneak it in with the Giant Robot Initiative?

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  22. And for a unique take on time travel, feel free to read my wife’s book: China Harbor: Out of Time. http://www.amazon.com/China-Harbor-Out-Time-ebook/dp/B003UBTOYO/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1374688844&sr=1-2.

    There are a number of variations on time travel in the literature.
    1. What I call the DC comics version. You can time travel, but no matter how you try you can’t change the past.
    2. What I call the R A Lafferty version. You can change the past all you want, but you can’t ever know it, because your history and knowledge changes when you do.
    3. The Doc Brown variation. You can change the past, but when you do, you create an alternate future that exists parallel to the present but inaccessible to you.
    Or you can read my wife’s version, written by a scientist. Let’s just say, she goes at it from a scientist’s standpoint, discovering the laws of time travel in fits and starts as she goes. Personally I think she does for time travel what Asimov did for robotics/artificial intelligence, but then I may be prejudiced.

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  23. The best source of info on the personal lives of US ground troops during WWII is “Up Front” by Bill Mauldin. A series of cartoons and the stories behind the creation of them.

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    1. The best on the American Civil War is Hardtack and Coffee. The author opens by explaining that the boys listened with eagerness to tales of the major battles he’d been in, but also to the accounts of camp life. Therefore, he’s preserving those for future generations.

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      2. Furthermore, Time-Life published a facsimile reproduction of the first edition, as part of their Civil War Classics series. Nice, leather-bound copies, probably not more than $6.

        I used to work for the phone sales arm of Time-Life.

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        1. Time-Life did some great stuff. I don’t have the Civil War books, but I have the seafarers series and its a good reference on maritime topics.
          I wish they still did stuff, but I guess time has passed them by.

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  24. Like I can deduce “good” clothes were far more important and expensive in Heinlein’s day, because his women wore aprons.

    Can’t remember if I said this before… it can also be linked to how laundry was done, and how effective it was at getting stains out. I know most of the stuff we own is stain resistant, and our soap is pretty dang effective!

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    1. That was what my mother told me–when you owned only a few dresses, and laundry was a tedious process of hauling water and scrubbing and wringing and ironing, you protected them with a pinafore.

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      1. My mom still wears those. She also sends them to me. They are technically really useful, so I hang them up in the basement. AND COMPLETELY FORGET TO WEAR THEM. Head>desk.

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        1. What you do is, you get a hook with a magnet and hang them on the frig. To remind yourself.

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    3. *grin* I’m still so well trained that when I come home from working in the archive or at the school, I promptly change out of my “good clothes” and put on “play clothes.”

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      1. And this explains my husband’s befuddlement that I don’t need to “get out of my work clothes” when I come home after a long day. To me, they’re just clothes. I’ll get out of them when I shower.

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  25. My favorite (sort of) unintentionally revealing moment came when I was reading the Martin Beck series by Sjöwall and Wahlöö (of “The Laughing Policeman” fame). I don’t recall which novel it was, but one of the Swedish detectives went on holiday, not to Greece, home of the repressive colonels, but to Romania (of the Ceaucescus) where he could breath the pure air of Socialism and felt free of “capitalist” Sweden!

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      1. I suspect that for a traveler with hard currency Ceaucescus’ Romania could be as refreshing then as Cuba is today (although I’ve no idea whether Ceaucescus endorsed renting his nubile girls to tourists.)

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  26. If you want a literary novel that looks at the middle class, try Gaskell’s North and South. The heroine is the daughter of a clergyman who decides he can no longer accept the Church of England’s requirements, and leaves his parish to become a private tutor in the industrial north of England. Her love interest is one of her father’s students, the owner of a cotton factory who has worked his way up from poverty and indebtedness. The story is as much The [Woman] Who Learned Better as Boy Meets Girl; there is a wonderful scene where she reproaches him with lack of ethics because he’s in trade, and he tells her that if he was dishonest in the way she imagines he wouldn’t have survived in business.

    Jane Austen’s Emma is mainly about the gentry, but there’s a subplot about the heroine’s protegée, a young woman from a poor family, who is attracted to a farm owner in the area. The feeling is mutual, and he’s actually a wonderful catch for her, and a decent man—but Emma is convinced that her friend is spiritually made for Finer Things, and that a man who spends most of his time working and reads little except agricultural journals can’t possibly be worthy of her, so she breaks them up. It would require only a little transposition to make it a 21st century story: a wealthy young woman with a degree in Women’s Studies or sociology, the poor girl she’s taken on, and a young businessman who never finished college, or went to some obscure state university, maybe.

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  27. For the record, I miss aprons. I think I shall bring them back.

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  29. My Father was a Professor of the History of Science and Technology; I grew up with dinner table conversation about the perceptions of the past. one of my Father’s big points was his Styles theory; the idea that styles permeate an entire culture, and that when you have Baroque music and Baroque painting you will also have Baroque politics and Baroque science. He also brought me up to think of not just the effect that science has on a society, but the effect that popular misperception of science might have. As an example; much of the Victorian era, and certainly the work of Karl Marx, was heavily influenced by a perception that Evolution was a force moving in one direction from primitive and simple to advanced and complex. Marx modeled his picture of the ‘evolution’ of social systems to echo this, and thus sound ‘scientific’. In practice, evolution frequently goes off into dead ends (such as the Giant Panda’s overspecialized diet). For that matter, so did Marx.

    I once got thrown out of a high school history class for asserting that Abraham Lincoln did not need to believe that Blacks were his equals to believe that they had a right to be free. Almost all historical fiction boils down to importing our modern concerns into a past setting and writing about the resulting conflict. Not that this is a bad thing; but genuine authenticity probably has a very small market; most would find it borderline unreadable.

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    1. “I once got thrown out of a high school history class for asserting that Abraham Lincoln did not need to believe that Blacks were his equals to believe that they had a right to be free.”

      Good for you for getting thrown out of class for stating the truth that any research would show. Even if Lincoln eventually came to believe Blacks were his equals, even when he didn’t believe that, he believed they were entitled to full human rights.

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      1. Well, not so much. My school usually had ulterior motives for any class, and one of the ones for Am. Civ 1 was to beat it into our pointy little heads that people in the past did not necessarily think like people in the present. I already knew this, and was spouting it to the Gods. But my class mates weren’t going to learn it in any serious sense if they were told, they needed to reason it out. So I was thrown out (and got a good grade) so that I wouldn’t short-circuit the rest.

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  30. This is one of my fascinations with ephemera. I love to get an original magazine if I can find it, because the versions they cobble for the general public are sanitized. I love how Google has all the old Life Magazines digitized and I just get lost in the Library of Congress and the digitized newspapers. (Time sink location: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/)

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  31. I’m suddenly reminded of a short story I read many years ago about a man who successfully built a time machine, but it would only go to a particular place and time: the local market in the middle of the Great Depression. He despaired, but his long-suffering wife had some very practical ideas. Does anyone recall that story? I can’t remember where I read it.

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    1. I do. Final line was the butcher saying “$.75 per pound and she didn’t flinch. I guess there’s still some money around somewhere.”
      That is where I got the idea to go back in time to buy used Enfields.

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  32. The Dean of the UNO History Department: “Use your Primary Sources — but *never* trust them” (you think MacArthur, or Custer, or Napoleon are going to give you the straight dope?).

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  34. Rudyard Kipling published a couple (numbers depend on editions) of interesting non-fiction books. THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT opens with a discussion of the Big Calcutta Stink and (in most editions) includes an account of some Indian coal fields. FROM SEA TO SEA is a journey from India, eastwards, and features several chapters in Japan (where Kipling becomes among the first westerners to take a close look at the Japanese Army and pronounce them “Bad little men who know too much”). Some editions carry on right across the United States and include an encounter with Mark Twain.

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    1. I have a version of _Dreadful Night_ that that I think was pirated, which I thought was hilarious since the San Francisco section is about his works being pirated in America. He also talked about fishing for salmon on the Clackamas River in Oregon and visiting the Yellowstone.

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      1. In most editions those scenes appear in FROM SEA TO SEA. But every edition of both books is a little different.

        His talk with Twain dealt with pirating too.

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  35. My need for time travel or remote viewing is to be able to research the Dutch warships and navy in the 17th Century. I have photographs of documents from 1613 onwards, but there are many missing pieces, perhaps from the fire at the Ministry of Marine in the 1800’s. I want to see photographs of ships, photographs of the men, and to be able to see the original documents, including what is lost to us now. Besides the Dutch, I would like to have photographs and data for the English from the early 16th Century up until at least 1700. My favorite period is 1648 until 1660 for both the Dutch and English. I have much more than I ever thought still existed, because the Dutch academics were not interested in ships and data and only wanted to look at politics and economics and didn’t bother to publish what exists.

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