Remember the Miller Lite catfight ads? Two attractive and impossibly buxom young women are enjoying lunch and enter into the venerable “Tastes Great”/”Less Filling” argument. Except that, unlike John Madden and Bob Uecker, the women are soon tumbling into a fountain and ripping each others’ clothes off, as the camera scans over their bodies. We then cut to two guys inside a bar, saying stuff like “Yeah, that would be a great ad! I would definitely buy whatever they were selling!” We then pan to the two women sitting next to them, also very attractive but not artificially enhanced, who are looking at their companions with undisguised contempt.

I liked those ads. They were clever and funny, and succeeded in having it both ways — appealing to cheesecake instincts while parodying them at the same time. And unmistakably commenting on the cluelessness of guys in general, who would blithely ignore the gorgeous real women sitting next to them in order to indulge in an artificially-enhanced fantasy.

However, things aren’t so simple. The attitudes that the ads were parodying really do exist. We breathe a cultural atmosphere in which women are often put into the role of objects to be manipulated for the sexual gratification of men, to the detriment of their status as equal persons. The battle to overcome these attitudes has been fought by feminists for generations, but is a long way from being won. To a lot of people, this kind of “soft” issue is unimportant, and detracts from the “hard” issues (e.g. equal pay for equal work) that women should be fighting for. But this soft/hard distinction isn’t nearly so clear-cut as we might be tempted to believe. The reasons why women don’t get equal pay for equal work ultimately come down to how men and women are perceived by the people in power who set the salaries, and these perceptions are manifestly shaped by the cultural messages that are beamed at us from every direction. Fighting to spread women’s suffrage through the world and to preserve the right to an abortion is undoubtedly important, but so is the battle to use inclusive language or to allow women to keep their names when they get married. Ideas matter. Some of my friends have joked that the Larry Summers flap was the best thing that ever happened to women in science, since it jolted universities into taking the problem seriously, but that’s just wrong — thousands of female high-school and college students have now heard that the President of Harvard thinks they don’t have the mental capacities to be scientists, and it will take years to undo that damage. To change the world, you have to change how people think about it.

I don’t believe that the Miller Lite ads are the best target for a feminist critique; we are surrounded by images of objectified women’s sexuality being deployed to sell products or ideas, without any ironic intent whatsoever, and I don’t think that much damage is done by this kind of over-the-top parody. Nevertheless, I am certainly sympathetic to people who feel otherwise. I take very seriously the possibility that actual women might know better than I do how it feels to be bombarded by this kind of imagery on a daily basis. So, for example, if I started playing the ad on my website and I received complaints from people who were offended, I wouldn’t hesitate to take it down. It’s just not such a big deal, much more a matter of simple politeness than an esoteric point of feminist theory. If I’m serving lamb chops at a dinner party, and I learn that one my guests is a vegetarian, I would find something else to serve them, regardless of whether I agreed with their ethical reasons for not eating meat.

Fast-forward to the present day. To plug the reality TV series “The Real Gilligan’s Island,” TBS has made it’s own catfight ad, featuring impossibly buxom avatars of Mary Ann and Ginger engaging in a pie fight (left). On every level, this ad isn’t nearly as good as the Miller Lite ads; it’s not very well produced, nor is there any ironic framing story. Basically an uninspired effort.

But someone working for the ad agency had two strokes of genius — first, advertise for the ad itself, in a sort of meta-campaign (this is actually becoming pretty common, so not too much genius there). But second and more importantly, carry out the meta-campaign via blog ads on liberal websites like Daily Kos. I am presuming this was genius rather than just dumb luck, but it was startlingly effective in stirring up controversy, which undoubtedly got the ad much more attention than it would otherwise have received. Some people were amused by the ad, but others complained that it was demeaning to women. On a website purportedly devoted to championing liberal ideals of equality for all, perhaps it isn’t perfectly appropriate to feature an ad that treats women like objects.

Again, I don’t personally feel that an ad like this is the most effective target for our approbation. You don’t have to look very hard on conservative websites to find similar ads that use women’s bodies to sell stuff without any trace of irony, such as the ad on the right that you can find at Power Line. But once again, I’m also sympathetic. The standards are different, as they should be, for our rivals than they are for our friends. If a substantial fraction of the people I claim to be fighting for are made uncomfortable by an ad like that, it wouldn’t seem to be that hard a decision just to remove it, and perhaps begin a discussion about the principles involved. No matter how committed we may be, we always have something to learn.

This is not the course that Kos chose to take. Here is his response to the flap.

Whatever. Feel free to be offended. I find such humorless, knee-jerk reactions, to be tedious at best, sanctimonious and arrogant at worst. I don’t care for such sanctimony from Joe Lieberman, I don’t care for it from anyone else. Some people find such content offensive. Some people find it arousing. Some people find it funny. To each his or her own.

But I am not Lieberman. I won’t sit there and judge pop culture and act as gatekeeper to what I think is “appropriate”, and what isn’t.

And I certainly won’t let the sanctimonious women’s studies set play that role on this site. Feel free to be offended. Feel free to claim that I’m somehow abandoning “progressive principles” by running the ad. It’s a free country. Feel free to storm off in a huff. Other deserving bloggers could use the patronage.

Me, I’ll focus on the important shit.

This comment falls somewhat short of perfectly sympathetic and open-minded. Indeed, it seems really dumb, which is what I don’t get. Kos is a professional political consultant. Is this the kind of advice he gives his clients? That when some of their constituents complain about something that is important to them, they should be told to feel free to storm off?

The ad itself generated a tiny amount of grumbling, but Kos’s response set off a firestorm, as it should have. See comments at Shakespeare’s Sister (who has been singled out as the reason why Democrats can’t win), Feministe, Pandagon, Bitch, PhD, Echidne of the Snakes, Creek Running North, Big Brass Blog, and Media Girl, as well as about 10,000 other places. There is also an interesting analysis of the comments at Kos by Sarah at Sampo, and some folks have started an entire new blog, Women Kossaks, to discuss these issues.

There are two things going on in Kos’s response, both of which are unfortunate. One is that he obviously just doesn’t think that women’s feelings about these issues are all that important. It is always the case that sub-groups of large political movements will complain about being taken for granted, but this is a pretty clear example of where it’s really true. Kos himself would obviously disagree; his attitude is that women’s interests are best served by getting Democrats into power, and that goal is not helped by getting distracted by pie fights. He has a series of posts up (one, two, three) in which he tries to elaborate on the “core values” of the Democratic party — as distinguished from those single-issue “special interests” that threaten to obscure the more important goals. This is by no means a crazy attitude, in fact there is a lot of truth to it. But Kos’s stubborn tone-deafness about women’s issues reveals an underlying cluelessness — he doesn’t come close to appreciating how important some of these issues are to women (who comprise, after all, well over half of Democratic voters), and how important they should therefore be to Democrats.

In a perfect world, where men and women were actually treated equally, something like the TBS ad would be completely harmless. The non-perfect world in which we actually live is a different story. (One indication of the fact that the world has not achieved perfect gender equity is the paucity of ads featuring oil-wrestling matches between hunky men in Speedos. Not, I expect, that such imagery would be very attractive to many people of either sex.) We can argue about the particular details, but it is by no means crazy to suggest that overcoming images like those in the pie fight is a crucial step in leveling the playing field between men and women — which is, everyone would agree, the important shit.

The other unfortunate thing, which others have commented on, is the underlying anti-intellectual tone of the whole discussion, as exemplified by the “women’s studies set” crack (for which he later semi-apologized). There is some feeling of uneasy co-existence between the “activist” and “academic” branches of modern liberalism, and these “soft” feminist issues are one of the points of major discomfort. People who are in the trenches working hard to advance progressive causes don’t like to hear some intellectual telling them that even they are not quite as liberal and egalitarian as they would like to think. (It is left as an exercise for the reader to figure out how this kind of macho defensiveness aligns with stereotypical male/female attitudes.) And, goodness knows, people sitting in ivory towers thinking about cultural hegemony might not be the best guide to practical action.

But that’s exactly the point — both “sides” of the academic/activist split have a lot to learn from each other. I remember a lecture by Cornel West, where he chastised some of his liberal white friends who were convinced that they had personally overcome any hint of racism — “I still am discovering racist attitudes lurking in my own thoughts, so I know that my white brothers have a way to go themselves.” The problem was never really the stupid pie fight ad, it was the idea that complaining about the ad was somehow petty and illegitimate. It’s great when men are committed to greater equality for women, but frustrating when they are convinced that they know all the answers and end up sounding patronizing and clueless, rather than sincerely listening to what actual women have to say. (Okay, that’s a completely trite observation that applies to any group speaking about any other group. But “Patronizing and Clueless” would make a great name for a band.)

Thanks to Shakespeare’s Sister for nudging me and others to talk about this. Go wish her a happy anniversary!

We all know that Fafblog! is one of the funniest sites you can find on the internets, and in a somewhat darker vein Girls Are Pretty is extremely amusing. But if you’re looking for sure-fire guaranteed entertainment, it’s hard to beat Intelligent Design the Future, the new creationist website. It’s always good for a laugh, especially when they start talking about physics.

A recent post finds contributor Paul Nelson rubbing his hands together in undisguised glee — the physicists are talking about design!

Teapots today…cells tomorrow?
Paul Nelson

That sound you hear is Jerry Coyne’s head exploding. A few weeks after he organized an all-star team of evolutionary biologists and Nobel laureates to slap down design in Nature, that journal goes and publishes an essay by the cosmologist George Ellis, arguing the following:

I have to admit that I was a little worried upon reading this. George Ellis is a respected cosmologist, and co-author with Stephen Hawking of one of the best books on general relativity you can find, but he has been known to skate along the ragged edges of, shall we say, overly enthusiastic speculation. (Well, so have I.) And he is himself religious, indeed a Templeton Prize winner. (Well, so is Freeman Dyson — nobody’s perfect.)

Here is the quote from Ellis’s essay:

Our environment is dominated by objects that embody the outcomes of intentional design (buildings, books, computers, teaspoons). Today’s physics has nothing to say about the intentionality that has resulted in the existence of such objects, even though this intentionality is clearly causally effective.

A simple statement of fact: there is no physics theory that explains the nature of, or even the existence of, football matches, teapots, or jumbo-jet aircraft. The human mind is physically based, but there is no hope whatever of predicting the behavior it controls from the underlying physical laws. Even if we had a satisfactory fundamental physics ‘theory of everything’, this situation would remain unchanged: physics would still fail to explain the outcomes of human purpose, and so would provide an incomplete description of the real world around us.

Well, okay. Ellis is talking about design, but in the context of things that we know perfectly well are designed — football matches, teapots, or jumbo-jet aircraft. The fact that teapots are indeed designed is not worthy of media attention. Ellis’s point in the essay is simply the old chestnut that reductionistic laws of physics are of little help if we want to understand many of the complex phenomena that we see in the macroscopic world — even if every particle in your car is happily obeying the rules of the Standard Model, being a well-trained particle physicist won’t help you when you muffler dies (as mine did yesterday). Read the essay for yourself; there’s nothing in there about cells or higher purpose.

So how does Nelson take anything hopeful from Ellis? Let’s see what he says.

Irreducible higher-level causation? From there it’s a day’s walk down an English country lane to current hypotheses of intelligent design. More resources here for the hard work of assembling a robust theory of design.

Aha. Nelson turns Ellis’s essay to his advantage via the venerable technique of “making shit up.” The notion of “irreducible” complexity is much beloved by creationists; it’s an advanced version of the standard argumentative fallacy of “if I can’t see how it would happen, it must be impossible.” Michael Behe uses the example of a mousetrap to illustrate a mechanism that would be useless if you removed any one of its component parts, and is therefore irreducibly complex. One problem with this notion is that nobody knows what it means, since no sensible definition of “irreducible” has ever been given. And of course, you can patiently explain to the creationists how mousetraps are not irreducibly complex, but they are strangely unmoved.

So it would be strange to find a real scientist talk about “irreducible higher-level causation.” But then you look at Ellis’s essay and — he doesn’t! The word “irreducible” doesn’t appear anywhere in the article. Nelson kind of insinuated it into the text. And then it’s “a day’s walk down an English country lane to current hypotheses of intelligent design.” The day’s walk appears to take you from “teapots are clearly designed” to “cells are clearly designed.” That’s quite a long walk! I encourage Mr. Nelson and his colleagues to start walking, and report back to us when they reach their destination.

There was an excellent discussion about blogging on today’s edition of Odyssey, the daily talk show hosted by Gretchen Helfrich on Chicago Public Radio. (Audio of the program is here.) The guests were Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber and Eugene Volokh of the eponymous Conspiracy. Host and guests were all smart enough to cut quickly through the equally bad caricatures of blogging-as-personal-diary and blogging-as-replacement-for-journalism that seem to be so prevalent out there in the complement of the blogosphere. They spoke eruditely about the uses of distributed communication networks, and elucidated the really useful purposes to which blogs can be put, including as sources of specialized knowledge and as alternative filters to an overwhelming stream of news items. (See also Eszter’s comments.) Worth a listen.

What wasn’t mentioned was the hidden expertise of the Odyssey crew: senior producer Josh Andrews recently started his own blog, The American Sector, and Gretchen was briefly a guest-blogger right here at Preposterous. No wonder they were able to uncover the deep truths of blogging so expeditiously.

A nice article about dark energy by Rich Monastersky in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week, unfortunately only available to subscribers. But I think it falls under fair-use doctrine for me to quote this one paragraph:

In the space of seven years, the dark-energy revolution has rewritten textbook entries on how the universe operates and what will ultimately happen to the cosmos. Yet dark energy is a nebulous concept, one that has thus far flummoxed some of the smartest researchers on the planet. “The fundamental physics of dark energy is a complete mystery to us right now,” says Sean Carroll, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Chicago.

Now, strictly speaking, what the paragraph says is that the smartest researchers on the planet are flummoxed by this problem, and also that I am flummoxed by this problem. So we cannot conclude, using the rigorous dictates of logic, that I am one of the smartest researchers on the planet. But if we look beyond the surface to the subtle subtextual implications, I think the message is clear.

An interesting story from Killing the Buddha, linked yesterday at 3quarksdaily.

A famous Buddhist story tells of Kisa Gotami, a young mother from the Buddha’s clan whose baby boy died suddenly. Grief-stricken, she carried his corpse with her everywhere, wailing and wondering aloud why her child had left her. People pitied her, and eventually she was told to go to the Buddha for advice. When she reached his retreat, she demanded that the Buddha bring her boy back to life. Somewhat surprisingly, the Buddha agreed to do so, but first asked Gotami to do something. “Anything, anything,” she cried in desperate hope. The Buddha told her to go into the village and bring back a mustard seed from a house which had never known death.

Kisa Gotami went from house to house, still clutching the limp body of her child, asking for mustard seeds. People readily agreed to give her one, but when she asked if anyone had died in the house, every time the occupants nodded sadly. In each house there had been some sort of loss—a father, a sister, an aunt, a baby. As Gotami made her way through the village, she gradually began to understand that death was an absolute fact of existence, that no one escaped it, not in the meanest hut or in the palace itself. Finally, she took her child’s body to the charnel ground and left it, returning to the Buddha to be ordained as a nun. Realizing that the Buddha never meant to resurrect her boy but was teaching her a more important religious lesson, she released her attachment and with newfound wisdom, committed herself to a life of spiritual awakening.

It’s a good story, although not without the usual shortcomings of the Buddhist-parable genre. For one thing, the protagonist is rather literal-minded; how many homes did she really have to visit before figuring out that death was universal? Also, “kill-the-Buddha” exhortations notwithstanding, these stories inevitably end up portraying the Buddha as a smugly wise man surrounded by rather simple folk (much like physicists’s stories about Feynman).

Still, I like the story and its moral. But then, a little twist:

I’ve read or been told this story dozens of times. Before, I always marveled at the truth of this tale, its brave acceptance of the way of things, the contrast between Jesus’ improbable miracles and the Buddha’s humble demonstration of a spiritual fact more important than the healing of flesh. I’ve told this story more times that I can recall, confident in its correctness and value. But then Grandmother died, and without my knowing it, the story completely changed. The first time I read about Kisa Gotami again after Grandmother’s death, I immediately thought, “If Buddha had played a trick like that on me, I would’ve torn his goddamn head off.”

The truth is, I’d much rather have Grandmother back than to acquire some sort of spiritual insight. I’d eagerly trade in all my books and statues, my altar, and all the teachings I’ve attended and blessings I’ve received. If Jesus had been around handing out resurrections, I would’ve surely picked him over do-nothing, it’s-a-learning-experience Buddha. Hard-won religious understanding is a very poor substitute for the love and support of someone close to you. But whether or not it takes second place, it’s all you end up with. Everyone is going to die on you, until the day that you die on whoever is left. So learning from the worst, immutable parts of life, or just continuing to revolve in painful ignorance, is the only choice we get. Buddha’s story may have a disappointing punch-line, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t right.

That’s exactly right, isn’t it? In the midst of great grief, the overpowering sorrow that comes with an unexpected loss, you aren’t in any mood for pious teachings about inevitability and acceptance — you want a miraculous escape, a for-real deus ex machina. Nevertheless, the miracles aren’t forthcoming. Wishing for them is both perfectly understandable, and ultimately fruitless.

Speaking of massive technological undertakings to explore high-energy particles, the Pierre Auger Observatory has announced that they’ve chosen the site of their northern-hemisphere location, which will be in Colorado. Auger uses a multi-technique approach to detect ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. There is a mystery about these UHECR’s, namely that one experiment (AGASA) claims to observe them at higher energies (> 10²⁰ electron volts) than should be possible. That’s because the distribution in the sky looks the same in all directions, which seems to indicate that they are coming from far outside our galaxy (since galactic events should be concentrated in the plane of the Milky Way). But the universe is somewhat opaque to very high-energy cosmic rays; they tend to bump into the low-energy photons of the Cosmic Microwave Background and lose energy themselves. This should put an upper limit on the energy, known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin cutoff. If AGASA is right that they have detected events above the GZK limit (and maybe they’re simply mistaken), then something funny is going on, either in the origin of cosmic rays or in the way they interact with ordinary photons.

The southern site for Auger is well underway in Argentina (as shown in the picture). They are presently collecting data, but with the first science results yet to come. Perhaps the northern counterpart will also have cows.

I’ve been meaning to write a little about my tour of the experiments when I visited CERN a few weeks ago. Sadly (or perhaps happily) I realize now that everything I was hoping to say was already said, at a level of precision I wasn’t intending to reach, by Jacques in a report of his own visit to CERN. I’ll say it anyway, but read his post for more details.

CERN, nestled in the Alps on the Swiss/French border by Geneva, is going all-out to complete the Large Hadron Collider by the target date of 2007. This is a giant ring that will accelerate protons in opposite directions, ultimately to smash into each other and (hopefully) create a bunch of new particles for us to explore. The energy of the collisions will be 14 TeV, where one TeV is about one thousand times the rest energy of a single proton; so there is more than enough energy available to see all sorts of fun things.

The LHC will have two large general-purpose experiments, ATLAS and CMS, and I had a chance to see each of them. (There will also be a nuclear-physics experiment, ALICE, and a B-physics experiment, LHC-b.) Both are truly amazing feats of engineering and physics. For one thing, they are big; each is of order 10,000 tons, and fits into a room the size of a large cathedral.

Here is a picture of ATLAS at the early stages of construction; to see its current state, check out the mandatory webcam.

CMS (which also has a webcam) is actually more impressive to see up close, as it is being put together as a series of slices, while ATLAS is being constructed more as concentric layers.

Interestingly, the reason why the experiments have to be so big is simply because of quantum mechanics. What we are really interested in is what is happening at extremely tiny distances. But the uncertainty principle tells us that we can’t probe small distances without reaching very large momenta, or equivalently ultra-high energies. At the energies probed by the LHC, the particles produced in each collision come zooming out at tremendous speeds, and the extraordinary sizes of CMS and ATLAS are necessary to capture and analyze all of these many energetic particles. Each detector is a series of concentric layers that serve to measure the properties of different kinds of particles — electrons and photons are easy, strongly-interacting particles (quarks and gluons) create elaborate jets, and muons require special treatment so that they don’t just punch right through the detector. Other particles (W and Z bosons, tau leptons) decay rapidly and are diagnosed by what they decay into. Still others (neutrinos, not to mention various hypothetical new species) zip right out of the detector completely unseen, but their presence can be inferred from “missing energy,” if the total energy of the reconstructed event is less than that of the initial collision.

As a theorist (and one who grew up in astronomy departments), one of the most fascinating concepts in high-energy experiments is that of a trigger. Each detector will witness approximately one billion collisions per second, which is a lot. You might imagine that you’re faced with two problems: simply recording all the data from each event, and then sifting through them for the interesting bits. You’re right, but it’s much worse than you think. That’s because each event isn’t just a few bytes if data; it’s of order one megabyte per event. There’s simply no way you could record all of the data.

Instead, you try to figure out which events are “interesting,” and record those — perhaps 100 events per second. That’s where the trigger comes in. While the data from each event are still streaming through the hardware, they are rapidly analyzed to see if they are worth keeping. This happens in levels; you do an ultra-rapid scan at the hardware level to see if anything potentially interesting is going on, and are able to cut down a billion events to about ten thousand. That’s the level-1 trigger; the level-2 trigger is a sophisticated piece of software that looks at more precise characterizations of the events (much like an ER doctor making a preliminary rapid diagnosis, then homing in with more delicate tests) to get you down to the one hundred events that are actually recorded for later analysis. (This is all part of the great computing challenge that Mark discussed a while back.)

Why are some events more interesting than others? Quantum mechanics again. Particle physics doesn’t predict what will happen at each event, only the probability that certain things will happen. The interesting bits (new physics, or events that help improve our understanding of established physics) will be swamped by well-understood processes, known affectionately as the “background.” (A generation or two of physicists worked tirelessly to establish the gleaming edifice we know as the Standard Model, and now we think of it as simply “background.”) As you might guess, a lot of hard thought (and spirited, collegial disagreement) goes into deciding which events to keep and which to toss away!

During my visit, the LHC folks seemed cautiously optimistic that they would really turn on the accelerator in 2007, and start taking useful physics data in 2008. All that will be necessary is the superhuman efforts of an army of physicists and engineers working twenty hours a day. But it will be worth it, as the LHC should revolutionize our understanding of the subatomic world. For the last 25 years or so, particle physics has been in an extremely unusual position — the theory just worked so well that all the new experiments kept finding particles that had already been predicted. This is the opposite of the historically common state of affairs, in which experimenters keep coming up with unexpected new phenomena that the theorists have to scramble to understand (as we’ve seen in cosmology in the last decade). I fully expect the tables to turn once again when CMS and ATLAS start releasing new results. We have lots of ideas about what might be around the corner — one or more Higgs bosons, supersymmetry, extra dimensions, various forms of strong dynamics — but my suspicion is that what we see won’t fit perfectly well into any pre-existing framework, at least not at first. That’s when we theorists will really have to earn our salaries, and physics at the high-energy frontier will be as exciting as it ever was.

For those of you still looking for the perfect Father’s Day or graduation gift, your prayers have been answered. Amazon.co.uk has wisely decided to offer my book in a special deal along with Lisa Randall’s new book, Warped Passages (as noticed by Lubos).

To be honest, one book doesn’t lead naturally into the other; Lisa’s is a popular-level exposition of branes and extra dimensions, while mine is a graduate-level text in general relativity. But hey, you could do worse.

What I want to know is: who are John Neely and Richard Kibbe, and why does amazon.co.uk think they are co-authors of my book? I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard of these guys. Hope they’re not cutting in on my substantial royalties.

I can’t say it much better than Sisyphus Shrugged.

You know, frequently I think I’ve come to the point where the rotting undead corpse of irony will no longer stalk through my newsreading experience, shedding body parts and looking for sexually indelicate teenagers to eat, but somehow I always find that I’m wrong.

The government has been arguing that we shouldn’t release the videotapes of prisoners being tortured in Abu Ghraib because

wait for it

it would violate the prisoners’ rights under the Geneva Convention.

Those would be the prisoners who are languishing without representation in Abu Ghraib because it is the official position of the american government that they aren’t covered by the Geneva Convention.

The Friday Random Ten idea needs some spicing up. Since nobody else runs with my ideas, let’s follow up on the suggestion that we can use the iPod as a divination device. Simple enough — just use the first ten songs that show up randomly exactly as you would use Tarot cards, and peek fearlessly into the future.

Here is the most common Tarot Spread, the Celtic Cross, as explained by Byzant Mystical. Each position plays a role in elucidating the larger story.

1. The Covering: The important events, issues, attitudes or influences around the question or current situation
2. The Crossing: Current obstacles, problems, conflicts and opposition that the questioner must deal with
3. The Crown: The best that can be achieved or attained from current circumstances
4. The Root: Past events or influences that have played an important part in bringing about the current situation
5. The Past: Events or influences from the more recent past that have influenced the present but are now passing away
6. The Future: Future events and fresh influences about to come into play that will operate in the near future
7. The Questioner: The questioner’s attitude and how they relate to the current situation
8. The House: How other people around the questioner affect and view matters in hand
9. The Inside: The questioner’s hopes, fears and expectations with regard to the question or the current situation
10. The Outcome: The eventual outcome of events shown by the other cards

Okay, so let’s consult the iPod oracle and see what we get. (Really it’s better to ask a specific question, but this is just a proof-of-concept.)

1. The Covering: Pretenders, Back on the Chain Gang
2. The Crossing: Isaac Hayes, Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic
3. The Crown: Cream, Toad
4. The Root: Von Freeman, Blues for Sunnyland
5. The Past: Either/Orchestra, Born in a Suitcase
6. The Future: Howlin’ Wolf, Built for Comfort
7. The Questioner: Led Zeppelin, The Wanton Song
8. The House: Dexter Gordon, Our Love is Here to Stay
9. The Inside: Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington, Cottontail
10. The Outcome: Living Colour, Elvis is Dead

Well. Of course we skip right to the Outcome, which is kind of ambiguous. Although Elvis is Dead doesn’t seem like a cheery title, the point of the song is to get over it and move on, which doesn’t sound like such a bad point of view. The Future, Built for Comfort, can’t argue with that. I will choose to overlook the implications of The Wanton Song popping up in the Questioner slot. Overall, I think the oracle paints an interesting if somewhat tentative picture of a hedonistic individual, facing some constraints from events of both the recent and distant past, but striving gamely to overcome them, even if the energetic-but-nonsensical scat of Cottontail indicates a certain confusion about current priorities.

What really worries me is The Crown. If the best I can hope for is the allegorical equivalent of a minutes-long Ginger Baker drum solo, I’m in trouble.