Tetherd Cow Ahead

From time to time I get to musing on all manner of things here on The Cow, and today I bring you some thoughts about nature and self-similarity.

This morning at dawn I was lying half-awake listening to the song of a chirpy early-rising Turdus merula, better known as the Common Blackbird. The Blackbird was introduced to Australia, in Melbourne where I am now living, in the 1850s as part of the regrettable We-Wish-It-Was-More-Like-England makeover that the colonists were hell-bent on giving this completely un-Englandlike continent.

The Blackbird’s song is very pretty and very recognizable – listen to the end part of this sample:*

What I realized as I was listening though, was that the little guy† wasn’t just doing the same exact phrase over and over – there were little variations each and every time – just like he was improvising on his little blackbirdy theme. No two riffs were exactly alike.

This got me to speculating about another well-known natural phenomenon in which no two elements are exactly alike, but are very similar in structure and beauty and precision: the snowflake.

And so I began to wonder if the song of the Common Blackbird might in fact be the aural equivalent of the crystalline structure of the snowflake.‡

I don’t really know why I should have made that connection, but there you go. Put it down to my hypnopompic state if you like. But I leave you with this thought: self-similarity is rife in nature. It is embedded everywhere from the mathematics of fractals to the formation of snow crystals and the songs of birds. Its presence is felt in almost every natural process somehow or other. Think about it: it really does not need to be this way. All things considered, the natural world could be completely random. And yet order arises spontaneously everywhere it can.

The reasons for this remain a beautiful mystery.

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*This recording by Fred Van Gessel. I pinched it, so for my atonement I urge you to go buy his recording Bird Calls of the Greater Sydney Region from the Australian Museum Shop.

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•2 oz rye whisky
•1 oz sweet red Vermouth
•A good dash of Angostura bitters

Stir or shake quickly ((Stirring is preferred)) over ice, pour off and garnish with a Maraschino cherry.

Some people prefer a twist of lemon instead of a cherry. Some people prefer bourbon instead of rye. Some people omit the bitters. All these things make for a lesser Manhattan.

Save the cherry until last and eat it, or give it to the sweetest girl in the room.

1 Corinthians 6:

‘Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God’

I guess that rules out Just. About. Everyone.

The news in Australia over the last few days has been headlined with the scandal of the findings handed down by the Cole Inquiry into the behaviour of the Australian Government and the Australian Wheat Board and their ethically despicable trading deals with the Iraqi Government just before the 2003 invasion.

At that time there were (in theory) severe sanctions placed by the world community upon trade with Iraq, an accord to which Australia was a signatory. However, for reasons that are still unclear, the AWB considered that these sanctions didn’t apply to them and they carried on business as usual, a situation that encompassed significant bribes to officials in the Iraqi Government in order to lubricate the machinery of commerce. This was, we are to understand from the AWB, normal business practice.

The Howard government in its typically weaselly manner has managed to slip like a greased pig from the grasp of the Cole Inquisitors, avoiding the allegations of Corruption directed toward it for its part in the debacle, and settling for the questionably safer judgement of Incompetence (with which it evidently feels quite comfortable). This is not a surprise for thinking Australians. We’ve become used to this over the last decade or so. This Government is not ‘responsible’ for anything except winning the cricket.

But the full force of the law has landed on the AWB, which has been found in Australian law to be about as rotten as any capitalist venture can be. The punitive effects of this are yet to be decided, but they are likely to be severe.

The extraordinary comment of the day, however, came from the former Managing Director of the AWB Andrew Lindberg, who made a philosophically booby-trapped statement to the effect that he did not believe that AWB acted with evil intent.

Aha. No, Mr Lindberg. Of course you didn’t. Very few people, except for psychopaths and Satanists actually set about acting with evil intent. That’s the really tricky thing about Evil, isn’t it? It kinda sneaks up on you when you thought that all you were doing was just fudging the truth. Just telling a little white lie. Just looking after the interests of your shareholders. Just giving a few mill to Saddam because, y’know, if we don’t, someone else will.

Evil isn’t a big cackling sulphur-smelling demon, Mr Lindberg. Evil is an obsequious little bespectacled man with a ledger, who keeps pointing at the bottom line and telling you your market index has dropped by half a percent. Evil is a little voice that whispers “Go on, just one little signature won’t hurt – they’re a backwards country run by towel-heads: no-one will care…” Evil is a lot of little moral compromises that really don’t matter all that much…

A deficit of evil intent does not mean a deficit of evil.

And you always know when you’re doing the wrong thing.

(It’s not like you were trying to cover your tracks or anything. Right?)

One of the reasons that I know Nurse Myra likes to hang out with me is that she gets to hear me expound my revolutionary schemes for World Political Reform, particularly my vision for Pete Worldâ„¢.

So, we’re off on a jaunt to the seaside, and whilst speculating on the directions for the US in the upcoming election for a new POTUS* my laser-beam gaze turns upon the possible candidates and the way in which a change of regime might be called on to provide effective modern leadership.

We agree that the field is pretty weak.

“Condoleeza Rice?” she suggests.

“They’ll never go for it,” I say. “She’s black, and a woman. She’d always lose to a man. They wouldn’t take the risk unless she was up against another woman”.

“What about if it was a contest between her and Hilary Clinton?”

“I suppose,” I say. “But there’d have to be a good media angle to it. I guess they could promote it as the World’s Most Significant Bitch Fight”.

And then I have one of those lightning flashes of genius that will come to be known as the defining signature of Pete Worldâ„¢.

“Either that, or they could replace the Presidential Debate with Nude Jelly Wrestling”†.

“That could be ugly,” she says.

“Not as ugly as what George Bush and his lackeys are doing to the world. And anyway, it would be at least entertaining and no-one would get hurt. In fact, thinking about it, in Pete Worldâ„¢ only women would be allowed to run countries, and the outcomes of all important world conflicts would be decided in the Televised Jelly Wrestling Arena. It just couldn’t be a worse state of affairs than we have at the moment”.

You all really want to come and live in Pete Worldâ„¢, don’t you? There’s one thing I can promise for certain: it would never be boring.

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*President of the United States. I learnt that from ‘The West Wing’. Up until then I’d been dropping the diminutives as custom allows, and (obviously foolishly) acronymizing it PUS.

†I don’t mean to suggest that Condy and Hils couldn’t have a meaningful intellectual tête-à-tête, but c’mon, truthfully, what are you more likely to watch on television…?