Our world

There's a tone many adults use when praising a child (or someone handicapped) for something they find noteworthy. Vowels are exaggerated and words stretched out, pitch rises; and behind what's often a genuine attempt to make the recipient feel good is a sense of, how great am I for noticing something others are ignorant of.

You see this tone pop up all the time in articles about the achievements of African Americans, or women. It's often ludicrous, as the writer bends over backwards to say positive things, to the point you wonder why they don't just tell it straight, we'll get it.

Sometimes, though, I sympathize with the reporter and shake my head at how screwed up our society is that Times readers need the reassuring superlatives to paper over their engrained bias.

John Noble Wilford has an interesting article in the Times,
In Medieval Architecture, Signs of Advanced Math. Comments in [brackets] are mine.

In the beauty and geometric complexity of tile mosaics on walls of medieval Islamic buildings, scientists have recognized patterns suggesting that the designers had made a conceptual breakthrough in mathematics beginning as early as the 13th century.

A new study shows that the Islamic pattern-making process, far more intricate than the laying of one’s bathroom floor, appears to have involved an advanced math of quasi crystals, which was not understood by modern scientists until three decades ago. [I wonder if the Times would've raised installing double panes in your kitchen in an article about the creation of stained glass windows in churches?]

The findings, reported in the current issue of the journal Science, are a reminder of the sophistication of art, architecture and science long ago in the Islamic culture. They also challenge the assumption that the designers somehow created these elaborate patterns with only a ruler and a compass. Instead, experts say, they may have had other tools and concepts. ['Sophistication' reads nicely on the surface, but underneath is the same feeling you get when Senator Biden calls Barack Obama 'articulate'.]

Two years ago, Peter J. Lu, a doctoral student in physics at Harvard University, was transfixed by the geometric pattern on a wall in Uzbekistan. It reminded him of what mathematicians call quasi-crystalline designs. These were demonstrated in the early 1970s by Roger Penrose, a mathematician and cosmologist at the University of Oxford.

Mr. Lu set about examining pictures of other tile mosaics from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Turkey, working with Paul J. Steinhardt, a Princeton cosmologist who is an authority on quasi crystals and had been Mr. Lu’s undergraduate adviser. The research was a bit like trying to figure out the design principle of a jigsaw puzzle, Mr. Lu said in an interview.

In their journal report, Mr. Lu and Dr. Steinhardt concluded that by the 15th century, Islamic designers and artisans had developed techniques “to construct nearly perfect quasi-crystalline Penrose patterns, five centuries before discovery in the West.”

Some of the most complex patterns, called “girih” in Persian, consist of sets of contiguous polygons fitted together with little distortion and no gaps. Running through each polygon (a decagon, pentagon, diamond, bowtie or hexagon) is a decorative line. Mr. Lu found that the interlocking tiles were arranged in predictable ways to create a pattern that never repeats — that is, quasi crystals.

“Again and again, girih tiles provide logical explanations for complicated designs,” Mr. Lu said in a news release from Harvard.

He and Dr. Steinhardt recognized that the artisans in the 13th century had begun creating mosaic patterns in this way. The geometric star-and-polygon girihs, as quasi crystals, can be rotated a certain number of degrees, say one-fifth of a circle, to positions from which other tiles are fitted. As such, this makes possible a pattern that is infinitely big and yet the pattern never repeats itself, unlike the tiles on the typical floor.

This was, the scientists wrote, “an important breakthrough in Islamic mathematics and design.”

Dr. Steinhardt said in an interview that it was not clear how well the Islamic designers understood all the elements they were applying to the construction of these patterns. “I can just say what’s on the walls,” he said.

Mr. Lu said that it would be “incredible if it were all coincidence.”

“At the very least,” he said, “it shows us a culture that we often don’t credit enough was far more advanced than we ever thought before.”

Ah, the great we/them dichotomy, which the Times often uses without qualifying only when it relates to the non-Western world.

Let's say Mr. Lu was talking about recent American discoveries that point to the greatness of French culture; the Times would've run his quote as 'we [in the U.S.] often don't credit enough'--it'd have been ludicrous to run it straight.

So why don't they insert here 'we [in the West]', instead of using the universal 'we'? I mean, in the Middle East, if anything, they credit too much their past culture.

If the Times is gonna insist on using the universal 'we' when they really mean we in the West, they should at least stop pretending to be a universal source of news.

Maybe a disclaimer on their website?

Photo of a quasi-crystalline Penrose pattern at the Darb-i Imam shrine in Isfahan, Iran by K. Dudley and M. Elliff for the Times.