While it's true that class difference and the labor conditions that go along with it have a strong effect on readership, the influence flows in the other direction as well (being able to read = better economic prospects, generally). Your post is polemical and personal, and I object to it being rated "insightful."
Part of the problem is presented by the class characterizations you make; in Europe (the home of the novel), there never really was a strict division between the "idle rich" and "the illiterate." When there were stark class differences like this (perhaps in medieval times), the idle rich were themselves largely illiterate, since mostly it was the monks who could read. In fact, reading publics have historically been underminers of class difference, rather than perpetuators. So there's that.
The other part of the problem is your misunderstanding of the material conditions of book publication and consumption. To stick to one example that runs sharply against what you say: most of the novels published in the 19th century, especially in England and France, were serialized in periodicals, and consumed bit by bit, like "The Sopranos." Serialized novels demand smaller incremental spending from consumers, both in time and in money.
So, while there surely were and are class differences that pervade consumption of all kinds, including intellectual, educational, and entertainment products, talking about it the way you have doesn't really add anything to the discussion -- is not, in fact, "insightful" -- since all it does is induce people to identify with one or another side of a false dichotomy. The future of literature, and reading of all kinds, is central to the future of democracy and justice in the world. Promote that, and serve your fellow humans, instead of defending your own personal preferences for how to spend your time.
Glad to see someone talking about McTaggart at Slashdot. Those interested in modern philosophical theories of time (particularly Prior's) which take into account the efforts of modern physics to define the physical concept of time (often referred to erroneously as "the" concept of time), could start here.
Those really interested in the possibility of non-physical concepts of time should read Husserl (The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness) and, most importantly, Heidegger (Being and Time).
The point of quantified science in general is to show that certain behaviors obey quantitatively expressible laws. Your objections to the article, on the other hand, display an ambivalence with regard to this point. On the one hand, you chastise the original data in Nature for diverging too much from the law it is supposed to fit; on the other hand, you chastise the graphs on style.org for diverging too little, in that you claim that they only express previously well-known laws. You add to the confusion with your misplaced concern that some values fall outside the expected range. In fact, such is typical in all statistical analysis (which is why it's statistical, and not determinate).
Your concluding accusation could possibly be interpreted as a resolution of this problem, as it impugns the graphs for failing to show that the data was inadequate. But since you earlier accused each of being inadequate to the other, this last accusation also ends up merely confused.
Very well: your original post was about the webpage, not the article in Nature. In that case, let's evaluate both postings not as claims about science (that is, not in terms of your "explicit" claim), but as a claim about the webpage in terms of its announced goals (your "implicit" claim). After all, we seem to agree on the importance of experiment.
Your claim in your original post was:
The author of the webpage uses far too much verbiage and pretty pictures and doesn't seem to understand what's happening
which breaks down into two points. They both share a common assumption: that the author is trying to explain the Strouhal number, and more specifically, trying to explain why it exhibits the narrow range it does in the organisms in question. But this assumption is incorrect. The author never attempts to answer the "why" question, and his exposition of the Strouhal number itself is short and comes in the first two sentences of the article:
For dolphins, sharks, and bony fish moving at their preferred cruising speed, the ratio of tail frequency and amplitude to forward speed is constrained to a narrow but efficient range of values. This dimensionless ratio is the Strouhal number, and evolution seems to favor efficient swimming motion with a Strouhal number in the range of 0.2-0.4.
Since this explanation is clearly over with early on in the article, it is gratuitous to assume that giving it is the entire project of the article. So, if he's not trying to explain the Strouhal number qua zoological measure of some kind, what is he trying to do? He himself makes it clear at the end of the introduction:
I wanted to see what ratios of amplitude, frequency, and speed actually look like in winged flight, what the Strouhal number actually represents, and why it is dimensionless.
Clearly the important phrases in this characterization of his goal are "look like" and "actually represents."
Now, what do these phrases mean or imply? The emphasis on the visual and the actual indicates that the author--a designer--is interested in connecting the mathematics of the Strouhal number with a picture of the organisms (in this case, birds) whose behavior it is said to describe. He then goes on to introduce aspects of that behavior (movement through space; flapping of wings) and of those organisms (relative size, primarily) that are key to visually picturing how the number relates to them. That done, he wanted to produce visual representations of how the narrow range of Strouhal numbers translates across a wide range of organisms. The overall point is to provide many and eloquent pictures of what is expressed tersely in the number itself and its associated equations.
Whether this goal is reached is a question one could ask, but it was nowhere present in either of your postings. Granted, in mathematics the era of picture-thinking is long over, brought to an end by Hilbert, if not before. But there's no reason to assume that "communication" is a univocal term whose meaning is best captured by the mode of communication and expression used in the sciences. Different goals, different means. His goal was to achieve a particular type of visualization. This is what I meant when I recommended that you try to figure out what people are doing before you try to figure out how to do it better.
Perhaps you are able to sit in your chair at home and, using purely a priori reasoning, arrive at conclusions that others must use empirical investigation to achieve. And perhaps, once the scientists have arrived at those answers through painstaking quantitative research (as in the case of the authors of the Nature article), you enjoy pointing out that you reasoned your way there without the messiness of actual research. Fair enough.
But even if the discovery made wasn't surprising to you, it was interesting enough to make it into Nature. And the author of the style.org article on Strouhal numbers was clearly concerned not so much with the discovery as with the graphical representation of the information discovered. He is, after all, a designer.
In other words, you may benefit from spending a little more time trying to figure out what people are doing, and a little less time trying to show everyone how far ahead of them you are.
Did you read the article? The Nature graph you link to is precisely what is expanded on and given a more informative presentation in the Strouhal numbers article.
Slashdot Mirror
Part of the problem is presented by the class characterizations you make; in Europe (the home of the novel), there never really was a strict division between the "idle rich" and "the illiterate." When there were stark class differences like this (perhaps in medieval times), the idle rich were themselves largely illiterate, since mostly it was the monks who could read. In fact, reading publics have historically been underminers of class difference, rather than perpetuators. So there's that.
The other part of the problem is your misunderstanding of the material conditions of book publication and consumption. To stick to one example that runs sharply against what you say: most of the novels published in the 19th century, especially in England and France, were serialized in periodicals, and consumed bit by bit, like "The Sopranos." Serialized novels demand smaller incremental spending from consumers, both in time and in money.
So, while there surely were and are class differences that pervade consumption of all kinds, including intellectual, educational, and entertainment products, talking about it the way you have doesn't really add anything to the discussion -- is not, in fact, "insightful" -- since all it does is induce people to identify with one or another side of a false dichotomy. The future of literature, and reading of all kinds, is central to the future of democracy and justice in the world. Promote that, and serve your fellow humans, instead of defending your own personal preferences for how to spend your time.
Glad to see someone talking about McTaggart at Slashdot. Those interested in modern philosophical theories of time (particularly Prior's) which take into account the efforts of modern physics to define the physical concept of time (often referred to erroneously as "the" concept of time), could start here.
Those really interested in the possibility of non-physical concepts of time should read Husserl (The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness) and, most importantly, Heidegger (Being and Time).
But only after you've done your physics homework.
The point of quantified science in general is to show that certain behaviors obey quantitatively expressible laws. Your objections to the article, on the other hand, display an ambivalence with regard to this point. On the one hand, you chastise the original data in Nature for diverging too much from the law it is supposed to fit; on the other hand, you chastise the graphs on style.org for diverging too little, in that you claim that they only express previously well-known laws. You add to the confusion with your misplaced concern that some values fall outside the expected range. In fact, such is typical in all statistical analysis (which is why it's statistical, and not determinate).
Your concluding accusation could possibly be interpreted as a resolution of this problem, as it impugns the graphs for failing to show that the data was inadequate. But since you earlier accused each of being inadequate to the other, this last accusation also ends up merely confused.
Very well: your original post was about the webpage, not the article in Nature. In that case, let's evaluate both postings not as claims about science (that is, not in terms of your "explicit" claim), but as a claim about the webpage in terms of its announced goals (your "implicit" claim). After all, we seem to agree on the importance of experiment.
Your claim in your original post was:
The author of the webpage uses far too much verbiage and pretty pictures and doesn't seem to understand what's happening
which breaks down into two points. They both share a common assumption: that the author is trying to explain the Strouhal number, and more specifically, trying to explain why it exhibits the narrow range it does in the organisms in question. But this assumption is incorrect. The author never attempts to answer the "why" question, and his exposition of the Strouhal number itself is short and comes in the first two sentences of the article:
For dolphins, sharks, and bony fish moving at their preferred cruising speed, the ratio of tail frequency and amplitude to forward speed is constrained to a narrow but efficient range of values. This dimensionless ratio is the Strouhal number, and evolution seems to favor efficient swimming motion with a Strouhal number in the range of 0.2-0.4.
Since this explanation is clearly over with early on in the article, it is gratuitous to assume that giving it is the entire project of the article. So, if he's not trying to explain the Strouhal number qua zoological measure of some kind, what is he trying to do? He himself makes it clear at the end of the introduction:
I wanted to see what ratios of amplitude, frequency, and speed actually look like in winged flight, what the Strouhal number actually represents, and why it is dimensionless.
Clearly the important phrases in this characterization of his goal are "look like" and "actually represents."
Now, what do these phrases mean or imply? The emphasis on the visual and the actual indicates that the author--a designer--is interested in connecting the mathematics of the Strouhal number with a picture of the organisms (in this case, birds) whose behavior it is said to describe. He then goes on to introduce aspects of that behavior (movement through space; flapping of wings) and of those organisms (relative size, primarily) that are key to visually picturing how the number relates to them. That done, he wanted to produce visual representations of how the narrow range of Strouhal numbers translates across a wide range of organisms. The overall point is to provide many and eloquent pictures of what is expressed tersely in the number itself and its associated equations.
Whether this goal is reached is a question one could ask, but it was nowhere present in either of your postings. Granted, in mathematics the era of picture-thinking is long over, brought to an end by Hilbert, if not before. But there's no reason to assume that "communication" is a univocal term whose meaning is best captured by the mode of communication and expression used in the sciences. Different goals, different means. His goal was to achieve a particular type of visualization. This is what I meant when I recommended that you try to figure out what people are doing before you try to figure out how to do it better.
Perhaps you are able to sit in your chair at home and, using purely a priori reasoning, arrive at conclusions that others must use empirical investigation to achieve. And perhaps, once the scientists have arrived at those answers through painstaking quantitative research (as in the case of the authors of the Nature article), you enjoy pointing out that you reasoned your way there without the messiness of actual research. Fair enough.
But even if the discovery made wasn't surprising to you, it was interesting enough to make it into Nature. And the author of the style.org article on Strouhal numbers was clearly concerned not so much with the discovery as with the graphical representation of the information discovered. He is, after all, a designer.
In other words, you may benefit from spending a little more time trying to figure out what people are doing, and a little less time trying to show everyone how far ahead of them you are.
Did you read the article? The Nature graph you link to is precisely what is expanded on and given a more informative presentation in the Strouhal numbers article.