Hsin-Hao Yu's Personal Blog

SPOILERS WARNING! In Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, there is a story titled The Secret Miracle which I find particularly stimulating. The plot is centered on a writer who was sentenced to death. At the night before his execution, he begged God to grant him one more year of life so that he could finish writing an important piece of work. The next day, at the moment just before the bullet hit him, time suddenly stopped. From the writer’s point of view, all activities in the physical world had been frozen - the bullet remained stationary in the air, his body unmovable. However, his mind continued to function. The writer realized that he wish had been granted by God, and he was given a year to complete his unfinished masterpiece entirely in his head (Is the word “year” meaningful, you might ask, given that time had stopped? Well, the writer still experienced sleep, so there was still a mental measurement of time). The writer remained in this state for a year, in which he diligently wrote in his head. When his time was up, time resumed and the bullet hit his body and killed him. A true miracle had taken place, but it was a private miracle, because from the point of view of everybody else, nothing unusual happened. The story seems to argue that it was logically possible for certain types of miracle to happen without violations of physical laws being observed.

Today I visited the National Natural History Museum in Taichung, and I found the exact location where I was introduced to the music of the Beatles! It was a school excursion when I was a boy. In the anthropological hall of the museum, there was a display of the site in Ethiopia where Donald Johanson discovered Australopithecus. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was playing because that’s the music Johanson was listening to while his team dug up Lucy. I actually paid no attention to any of these facts, because I was listening to the music. After that excursion, I bought Beatles albums one by one until I found Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

In a previous blog post, I reviewed Ellery Queen’s classic detective novel The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932), which manages to involve color blindness in its puzzles. But I am not done yet! I have a couple more. On one hand, it feels to me that color blindness is gimmicky as a plot device. A mystery writer must be quite desperate for new ideas if she or he has to turn to perceptual psychology (or any branch of specialized knowledge, for that matter). But on the other hand, it’s not difficult to see the potential. Color blindness is an indisputable, objective personal trait that can be used to identify the criminal; and yet it is a subtle phenomenon that does not reveal itself easily to an observer. It is so subtle that many people with color vision deficiency don’t know they have it. In fact, John Dalton, the English scientist who published the first scientific study of color blindness in 1794, didn’t realize that his color perception was different until he was an adult. It seems to me that a good mystery involving color vision needs to do something interesting about the process by which the detective infers or demonstrates color blindness. If it is treated just like another physical attribute like a crooked nose, a head of fiery red hair, or left-handiness, it’s not very interesting.

I don’t think mystery novels by Ellery Queen are popular in western countries anymore, but they are still read in Asia. When I was a PhD student, every time I had to travel from my home country Taiwan to the USA, I would buy an Ellery Queen novel at the airport bookstore. This way, I could land in LAX with a solved mystery. Ellery Queen novels are substantial books with very complex plots - perfect for long flights because uninterrupted concentration is needed to tackle them. However, I gave up on the classic The Greek Coffin Mystery in the middle of the book, because even a transatlantic flight was not enough for me to follow the Byzantine plot (or maybe the Chinese translation was too bad). I recently decided to pick it up again - this time reading the original English text.

I’ve been reading two books about hacking. Interestingly, both books make references to the novel The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. The first book is Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley. In an interview of Ron Rosenbaum, whose article Secrets of the Little Blue Box (published in Esquire Magazine in 1971) brought phone phreaking into the awareness of the public, Rosenbaum said that his vision of the phone phreaks of the 60’s and the 70’s was influenced by the underground communication networks described in the novel. When I started to read the book, I didn’t associate phone phreaking with Pynchon. But of course, Pynchon loves secret communication. The second chapter of Lapsley’s book on the birth of Bell System and AT&T, he cited optical telegraphs of the 18th century as an early form of long-distance communication network. Incidentally, optical telegraphy is one of the main themes of Pynchon’s novel Mason & Dixon.