By way of Slashdot, here is a paper from Newcastle University suggesting that big cash prizes can drive technological breakthroughs.  Among successful examples of cash prizes driving innovation are the X-Prize Foundation's fomenting of research into space rockets, space elevators, and moon landers.   Other competitions have driven innovations from breakthroughs in designing intelligent cars that navigate complex terrains to the successful construction of a half-scale model of an X-Wing that can actually take down a half-scale model of the Death Star.  In the same vein, the James Randy Educational Foundation has a standing one million dollar prize for anyone who can demonstrate, under "proper observing conditions", any paranormal or occult powers (restrictions may apply).

The notion that money can be a motivator is certainly an interesting one.   I myself once wrote an article on software interoperability in order to win an XBOX 360, and can testify to the power of electronics as a motivator for great endeavors.  Is it such a great leap from there to the idea that greenbacks can inspire similar feats of mental strength?

According to the synopsis for the article on cash prizes, the purpose of cash prizes is to drive "revolutionary" scientific breakthroughs, rather than typical scientific breakthroughs, for which the admiration of one's peers is often sufficient compensation:

Given that revolutionary science is a high risk endeavor which usually fails; it is likely to thrive only when the incentives rewarding the rare instances of success are greater than for normal science. Therefore we would argue that it is insufficient for successful revolutionary scientists merely to get the usual rewards of prestigious professorships, respect from within the scientific profession, and a modestly high level of reasonably secure income. Something more is needed: lots of money.

The pluripotent possibilities boggle the mind.  Here are some of my own humble suggestions for achievable scientific goals and the cash prizes, in today's dollars, that should be assigned to them.  Feel free to add your own prize suggestions in the comments.

• A mass-producible flying car -- $2 million
• Pills that have the taste and nutritional qualities of real food -- $3 million
• A rocket to Mars -- $5 million
• A rocket to Saturn -- $5.5 million
• A rocket to Pluto -- $1 million
• Trained apes who will take over our menial tasks, freeing humans to live the good life -- $5.5 million
• Flying monkeys -- $6 million
• Disposable rocket packs (for daily commutes) - $6.5 million
• Successful cloning of great thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Lincoln -- $7.5 million
• Successful cloning of B, C and D-list thinkers like Suetonius, Duns Scotus, and Ayn Rand -- $1.5 million
• Successful cloning of deceased pets -- $2.5 million
• Universal cure for cancer -- $10 million
• Teleportation devices -- $11 million
• Time Travel -- $13 million
• Worm Hole technology -- $15 million
• Hyperspace engines -- $25 million
• Mind-reading devices -- $15 million
• Robot sex-slaves -- YMMV
• Holodecks -- $25 million
• A computer that can defeat all chess grand masters -- $1 million
• Skynet -- YMMV
• A self-aware computer intelligence that will defend us against ape-slave uprisings -- $25 million
• Star Trek Replicators -- $26 million
• A working lightsaber -- $27 million

As the paper suggests, if we haven't achieved any of these goals so far, it may be because we have yet to offer the right incentives.

What does eighteenth century naval warfare have to do with life today?  Nothing, as far as I can tell, yet one of the pleasures of reading Patrick O'Brian's novels about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin -- one of the great portraits of male friendship in English literature -- is the anachronistic affinities one finds between the bygone world of wood and canvas and quotidian modern life, thanks to Mr. O'Brian's ingenuity.

Take, for instance, this passage from Master And Commander in which Jack, while at sea, is obliged to sign a legal document drafted by his predecessor, the previous captain of the sloop Sophie:

My Lord,

I am to beg you will be pleased to order a Court Martial to be held on Isaac Wilson (seaman) belonging to the Sloop I have the honour to Command for having committed the unnatural Crime of Sodomy on a Goat, in the Goathouse, on the evening of March 16th.  I have the Honour to remain, my Lord, Your Lordship's most obedient very humble servant ....

Like the modern reader, Jack is not pleased with the rules and procedures one must comply with in the course of fulfilling one's duties.  For his friend, Stephen, the matter is simply one that inspires perplexity.

'It is odd how the law always harps upon the unnaturalness of sodomy,' observed Stephen.  'Though I know at least two judges who are paederasts; and of course barristers ... What will happen to him?'

'Oh, he'll be hanged.  Run up at the yard-arm, and boats attending from every ship in the fleet.'

'That seems a little extreme.'

'Of course it is.  Oh, what an infernal bore -- witnesses going over to the flagship by the dozen, days lost ... the Sophie a laughing-stock.  Why will they report these things?  The goat must be slaughtered -- that's but fair -- and it shall be served out to the mess that informed on him.'

'Could you not set them both ashore -- on separate shores, if you have strong feelings on the moral issue -- and sail quietly away?'

'Well,' said Jack, whose anger had died down.  'Perhaps there is something in what you propose.  A dish of tea?  You take milk, sir?'

'Goat's milk, sir?'

'Why, I suppose it is.'

'Perhaps without milk, then, if you please.'

The connection to be found between this passage and today's headlines is no doubt as obvious to you as it is to me, reader.  The notion of contamination which runs thematically through this brief anecdote is a clear analog for the theory of memes.   Terms such as "viral", often used to describe memes, reveal the epidemiological roots of memetic theory.  While the vectors are different, the notion that the sin of seaman Isaac Wilson has somehow been transmitted to the hapless goat, for which reason the goat "must be slaughtered," mirrors the theory that ideas such as "freedom", "God", and "revolution" can be transmitted from person to person, carrying with them certain properties that will affect the behavior of the infected.

At the same time, this anecdote reveals one of the chief problems with memetic theory.  The idea of memes depends on a peculiar notion about the identity of memes when they inhabit different hosts.  But is this identity really something we can take for granted?  Is the "freedom" meme really the same from person to person?  What is missing from the meme theory is an acknowledgement of the inherent ambiguity of all ideas.  One man's meat is another man's poison, after all.

For instance, what is the intent behind serving the slaughtered goat, the unwarranted victim of seaman Isaac Wilson's wantonness, to the seamen who informed on him?  Is it a reward for their dutifulness with regard to the Royal Navy or a punishment for their faithlessness with regard to their comrade?  Is the intent to let them taste a bit of Mr. Wilson's humiliation, or to fill their bellies with a rare treat?

Memetics seems to completely ignore the much more interesting phenomenon of the association of ideas -- perhaps necessarily so, since while the affinity between various notions and concepts, the way one idea leads to another, depends on the malleability of thought, memetics depends on its immutability.

The point is brought across in Stephen Maturin's aversion toward the goat's milk.  Why does he refuse the milk?  Because, in his mind, he associates it with Mr. Wilson's goat.  One idea leads naturally to the other and the properties of Mr. Wilson's crime are mysteriously transferred to the goat's milk -- an entirely different goat, certainly.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), normally thought of as a dour man though a great philosopher, is duly famous within certain disreputable circles for inserting the goat's milk meme into his seminal work, the Critique of Pure Reason, sometimes known as the First Critique.  In Section III of the Second Part of the Doctrine of Elements, after he has explained the meaning of the term transcendental logic,  and after he has assented to the traditional definition of truth as the agreement between knowledge and its object, Kant drops this witty passage:

To know what questions may reasonably be asked is already a great and necessary proof of sagacity and insight.  For if a question is absurd in itself and calls for an answer where none is required, it not only brings shame on the propounder of the question, but may betray an incautious listener into absurd answers, thus presenting, as the ancients said, the ludicrous spectacle of one man milking a he-goat and the other holding a sieve underneath.

Kant alludes to the fact that this particular meme has classical antecedents, and indeed one can find it in Lucian's (c. 125-180 AD) Life of Demonax (c. 70-170 AD).   That particular version of the meme was later replicated in Erasmus's (1466-1536) collection of Adages. 

When [Demonax] saw a pair of philosophers, each as ignorant as the other, disputing together, one propounding absurd questions and the other giving crazy answers, entirely off the point: 'Why friends,' said he, 'is not one of these fellows milking a he-goat and the other putting a sieve under it?' 

To Polybius (c. 203-120 BC), in turn, is ascribed the following version of the trope:

But I fear that the well-known adage may apply to me unknown to myself: "Which is the greater simpleton, the man who milks a he-goat or he who holds a sieve to catch the milk?" For it may be said of me that by confuting in detail what is confessed to be a lie, and doing so at great length, I am behaving in a very similar manner. So I shall be told I entirely waste my time in speaking of this matter, unless indeed I wish to record dreams and take into serious consideration the visions of a man with his eyes open.

Erasmus ascribes this same variation to Diogenes of Sinope (c. 404-323 BC) (aka Diogenes the Cynic).

Another variation can be found in Boswell's Life of Johnson, though in this case, we move from goats to bovines, and interestingly Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) is mocking the Scottish philosopher (1711-1776) whom Kant credited with waking him from his dogmatic slumber.

Hume, and other sceptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expence. Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow that will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.

(I recommend that the curious reader not attempt googling on the phrase "milk the bull", since this seems to have taken on a different meaning in recent times.  "Milk the he-goat", however, is quite safe for searching.)

An obvious question is raised by these variations on a meme.  While they are obviously dependent on one another, and perhaps some sort of history can be traced showing how the trope has been transmitted over time from this thinker to that one, are they in fact the same meme?  Do memes admit of variation, or must a meme always have the same form?  In the latter case, are we then dealing with two memes, for instance the Polybius version and the Demonax version, with the Demonax variation later mutating into the Samuel Johnson version, or is it the case that each host (Demonax, Diogenes, Polybius, Erasmus, Johnson, Kant, O'Brian [1914-2000]) actually possesses a different meme altogether?

The rules by which a meme is transmitted from host to host is a central concern for memetics, and the problem of identity will remain a problem for it.  More interesting, from my point of view, is the problem of similarity.  What are the rules by which we associate certain ideas with other ideas?  Why does Stephen Maturin associate goat's milk with a seaman's indiscretion, to the point that he will not drink the milk?  How are we able to find a resemblance between these different variations on the he-goat anecdote, derived from different sources, to the point that we associate them all together?

In the First Critique, Kant raises a similar question about the character of experience.  Why should it be that events happen in a certain sequence?  Why do causes always precede their effects, instead of the other way around?  For Kant -- and for you too, perhaps, if you have read the Critique -- this is a perplexing and ultimately uncanny feature of our experience of the external world.  That events should happen in a certain sequence, and not in another, Kant calls Affinity (in philosophical jargon, it is known as the transcendental affinity of the manifold of intuition).

While Kant would not -- for those interested, this is because according to Kant inner sense is not associated with a manifold --, we might ask the same question about the way in which one idea follows from another in the stream of consciousness.  What are the rules by which, say, the idea of a madeline leads a man to think back on his childhood and wonder about the nature of remembrance?  Like memes, the flow of ideas have a viral, irrational, and uncontrollable character to them.  It is something like the way in which you get on the Internet to look up how to throw a cocktail party and end up, hours later, reading about cooking with monkey.  Whereas memes are objects of a germinal science about how ideas are transmitted between people, shouldn't there also be a science concerned with the logic by which ideas are linked together within the same person?

But perhaps this is not possible, since a universal logic of how ideas follow upon one another depends on all people being basically the same, and this cannot be guaranteed.  Certain people find affinities and make connections that others simply do not.  The point is well illustrated in T. S. Elliot's (1888-1965) play The Cocktail Party -- again, contamination is a central theme, here.  The setting is simple enough.  Edward and Lavinia host a cocktail party, and Alex, a guest, explains current affairs in colonial Africa.

Edward: But how do monkeys cause unrest?

Alex: To begin with, the monkeys are very destructive ...

Julia: You don't need to tell me that monkeys are destructive.  I shall never forget Mary Mallington's monkey, The horrid little beast -- stole my ticket to mentone and I had to travel in a very slow train and in a couchette.  She was very angry when I told her the creature ought to be destroyed.

Lavinia: But can't they exterminate these monkeys if they are a pest?

Alex: Unfortunately, the majority of the natives are heathen: they hold these monkeys in particular veneration and do not want them killed.  So they blame the Government for the damage that the monkeys do.

Edward: That seems unreasonable.

Alex: it is unreasonable, but characteristic.  And that's not the worst of it.  Some of the tribes are Christian converts, and, naturally, take a different view.  They trap the monkeys.  And they eat them.  The young monkeys are extremely palatable: I've cooked them myself ...

Edward: And did anybody eat them when you cooked them?

Alex: Oh yes, indeed.  I invented for the natives several new recipes.  But you see, what with eating the monkeys and what with protecting their crops from the monkeys the Christian natives prosper exceedingly: and that creates friction between them and the others.  And that's the real problem.  I hope I'm not boring you?

Edward: No indeed: we are anxious to learn the solution.

Alex: I'm not sure that there is any solution.  But even this does not bring us to the heart of the matter.  There are also foreign agitators, stirring up trouble ...

Lavinia: Why don't you expel them?

Alex: They are citizens of a friendly neighboring state which we have just recognised.  You see, Lavinia, there are very deep waters.

Edward: And the agitators; how do they agitate?

Alex: By convincing the heathen that the slaughter of monkeys has put a curse on them which can only be removed by slaughtering the Christians.  They have even been persuading some of the converts -- who, after all, prefer not to be slaughtered -- to relapse into heathendom.  So, instead of eating monkeys they are eating Christians.

Julia: Who have eaten monkeys.

Alex: The native is not, I fear, very logical.

Perhaps it happened with the advent of sound in movies -- or perhaps with the mass reproduction of music -- but it is not uncommon for people to feel an attachment towards a certain piece of music which, over time, becomes the soundtrack for their lives.  In my case, the soundtrack is Curtis Mayfield's Superfly, though Isaac Hayes's Shaft will do in a pinch.  (I will defer the topic of my desire to be a powerful and confident black man for another post, but surely I am not the only one...) 

The pertinent point here is that music is one of the modern world's most prevalent therapeutic techniques for controlling and guiding emotions.  To use more archaic concepts, it is a modern tool for building character -- or even spirit.  In his second critique, Kant lauds the reading of Roman histories as a way to build the moral sensibilities of young boys.  And in later times poetry seems to have served the same purpose.  Perhaps it is revealing too much, but before every interview or important meeting, I like to recite to myself the immortal words of Wallace Stevens:

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Actually, what I recite to myself is "I am the emperor of ice-cream, I am the emperor of ice-cream ..." which after a few repetitions fills me to bloating with confidence.  Why this is, I cannot say.

The moon -- once worshipped by pagans across the world; to whom the ancient Egyptians are said to have offered human sacrifices -- provided a wonderful display this past Wednesday.  The last full lunar eclipse visible from Earth until 2010, it was the occasion for a party in our household.  We invited some friends from down the street to peer at the moon through our Edmund Scientific Astroscan Newtonian reflector telescope, for which we recently acquired a tripod and a 100X magnification lens.  This eclipse was noteworthy in that the moon was positioned in proximity to Saturn, whose rings we could finally see with the new lens. 

This recent party was not as formal an affair as the one we threw for the March 3rd, 2007 lunar eclipse.  That one involved many more guests, and moon inspired refreshments.  Moon pies, moon cakes, Blue Moon beer, naturally, and mojitos, a cocktail said to have been favored by the older Hemingway and, for our purposes, beginning with the same letters as "moon."  It was also a bit different from the way I saw a lunar eclipse as a child in the early seventies from Southeast Asia, where we placed a mirror in a shallow bowl of water in order to view the astronomical event. 

To this day I do not know whether this was meant to enhance the viewing in some way, or whether it was the result of some local superstition about not looking directly at the moon.  In Greek mythology, Actaeon was transformed into a stag and killed by his own hounds when he happened to espy Artemis, twin to Apollo and goddess of the moon, bathing in a pool.  As mentioned above, we used a reflector telescope rather than a refractor telescope to view the moon, and so are unlikely to suffer a similar fate.

If you've never seen a lunar eclipse, I encourage you to leave your houses in 2010 to see this strange phenomenon.  Over a period of about an hour, the moon is slowly consumed by a black shadow.  And as parts of it disappear the remaining part, shrinking like the evaporating smile of the Cheshire Cat, seems to shine even brighter.  Just as the moon looks like it will disappear completely, a sudden transformation occurs, and instead of looking at a dark sky, the shadow covering the moon becomes semi-transparent, and one instead sees a tinted moon.  In the most recent eclipse, the moon was tinged with a coppery hue for about half an hour.  Then slowly, a bright light proceeds across the moon's face, until she is restored to her original fullness.

Just as we might each have a personal soundtrack, the moon also deserves her own.  This is the music I compiled for the 2007 party, and brought out again for the 2008 affair (should you have any suggestions for enhancing this playlist, I would enjoy hearing from you):

• Debussey's Clair de lune -- performed by Yakov Flier
• Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata -- performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy
• Rusalka: O Silver Moon -- performed by Renee Fleming
• That's Amore -- Dean Martin
• Shine On Harvest Moon -- Leon Redbone
• Mountains of the Moon -- Grateful Dead
• Catch the Moon -- Lisa Loeb and Elizabeth Mitchell
• Bad Moon Rising -- Creedence Clearwater Revival
• Shoot the Moon -- Nora Jones
• By the Light of the Silvery Moon -- Ray Noble
• Moon Over Bourbon Street -- Sting
• Harvest Moon -- Neil Young
• Fly Me to the Moon -- Astrud Gilberto
• Old Devil Moon -- Frank Sinatra
• Blue Moon -- Cowboy Junkies
• Pink Moon -- Nick Drake
• Moondance -- Van Morrison
• Reaching for the Moon -- Ella Fitzgerald
• Oh You Crazy Moon -- Chet Baker
• Moonage Daydream -- David Bowie
• It's Only a Paper Moon -- Benny Goodman and his Orchestra

The pictures above, by the way, were taken of the February 20th lunar eclipse from our backyard, somewhere in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia.  The third picture was taken by pressing the lens of a digital camera against the view lens of our telescope.  It was then photoshopped to correct for the inversion that the reflector telescope inevitably causes.

Following the recent release of Visual Studio 2008, I scribed a new tutorial on ASP.NET AJAX Custom Controls using the new IDE.  I originally estimated two weeks for the project, but in order to put in everything I thought needed to be said about writing AJAX-enabled .NET controls, the effort took over six weeks.  Should you have any inclination to see it, you can find it here at www.codeproject.com.

The tutorial is built around the session timeout monitor I originally described at the Imaginative Universal: http://www.imaginativeuniversal.com/SessionExpiredMonitorWithASPNETAJAX.aspx.  Since the code for the tutorial is intended primarily to be instructive, I still plan to write one more revision of the session timeout control, in order to streamline the functionality and try to incorporate the modal popup behavior from the AJAX Control Toolkit, which I will publish in the pages of this blog.

In Neil Gaiman's Stardust, the interlude with Captain Alberic of the sky ship Perdita, a period the narrator describes as "one of the happiest" of the hero Tristan's life, lasts a mere eight pages of the 300 odd page novel.  In the film adaptation, the passage is expanded to provide copious space for Robert De Niro's remarkable performance as a cross-dressing sky pirate.  Instead of Alberic, he becomes Captain Shakespeare, and instead of a secret member of the fellowship, an organization that aids and propels Tristan toward his destiny, De Niro is a ruthless pirate who rules his crew with an iron hand and tosses his captives over the sky ship's gunrails to their dooms.  At least on the surface.

The conceit of the Shakespeare character is that what he appears to be on the outside is the opposite of what he truly is inside.  In private, he is a caring, effeminate transvestite.  The inner man is revealed in a memorable scene, perhaps the most memorable of the movie, in which De Niro prances and preens with a feather boa in front of a mirror, an aria playing in the background.

The scene is a looking glass homage to De Niro's performance as Travis Bickle, taut with muscles, pistols ejecting from his homemade arm holsters, repeatedly asking of his reflection, "You talkin' to me?"  Bookends of an amazing career, the violent inner man of Taxi Driver, hinted at before the film's conclusion only by a frightening inner monologue,  becomes the public face of Captain Shakespeare, while Travis Bickle's shy and gentle public face inverts and blooms in Shakespeare's lace and taffeta dance routine.

Both roles play on the popular notion that there is an inner man, in each of us, who hides beneath a mask that conforms to society's expectations.  But is there really?  Contemporary cognitive philosophy suggests that the inner man is simply an illusion and vestige left over from folk-psychological notions of the soul.  It's incorrigible persistence is due, among other things, to the fact that we assume our public faces are false, and that consequently there must be something behind it.  Continental philosophers like Michel Foucault similarly reject the notion of a deep truth beneath our masks, and recommend, in its place, a shallow depth psychology that simply reveals more masks beneath the masks we commonly wear. 

Pascal, the pre-eminent philosopher of the personal, suggested that "the heart has its reasons, that reason does not know,"  to which the modern world might reply that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.  That obscure object of desire, the human heart, constantly escapes our epistemic grasp because, perhaps, it does not exist.  Perhaps.

The heart is a mystery and it is of the nature of mysteries that to reveal them is to destroy them.  We hide mysteries within puzzles and labyrinths, and in dark places, in order to preserve their character as mysteries.  What would we do if we actually captured the Loch Ness Monster, or the Yeti, or Bigfoot in a cage?  They would become mere objects of understanding, at that point, and ruin the aspect that makes them interesting -- that the blurry photos may be fake, that the convoluted theories my be pipe-dreams.  It is the gap between theory and understanding that gives each of these mysteries their power to fascinate.  Even more prosaic mysteries, such as the Giant Squid (of which we have captured film and tentacles) and the true identity of Shakespeare, share this peculiar quality.  Obscurity and doubt quicken the blood.

In Eric Rohmer's Claire's Knee, Jerome (who shares an amazing resemblance to Ron Silver, the liberal actor with a regular role on The West Wing who in 2004 became the spokesman for a movement called Democrats for Bush), the womanizing protagonist, passes time flirting with one sister by discussing his desire for the other, Claire.  He explains that it is not sexual gratification that he desires from Claire, which, as a man of the world, he has discovered serves only to destroy the desire he feels.  Instead, he has arrived at a new formula, a new object of the heart, that provides him a mystery which will not be destroyed once it is fulfilled.  He substitutes the natural object of male sexual attraction with another target.  Jerome maneuvers and positions himself throughout the film in order to achieve his ultimate desire, to place a hand on Claire's knee.

In 2001, President Bush made a remarkable statement about looking into Russian president Vladimir Putin's "heart and soul" and deciding that they could work together.  The statement was remarkable not only in how wrong it turned out to be, but also in how peculiarly it was formulated.  He used the metaphor of the heart in a somewhat archaic manner, or perhaps a folk-psychological manner, that seemed inappropriate to its context.  Is this what high-level politics is about?  We expect interrelations between world leaders to be Machiavellian affairs of manipulation and strategic interests, and President Bush suddenly proposed that this was the wrong model; that instead it was actually about getting to know each other, and coming to see the inner persons behind the political masks.

In 2008, however, the metaphor of the heart appears again as voters and pundits alike attempt to peer into the souls of the presidential candidates and attempt to evaluate their inner natures.  The main stumbling block to Hillary Clinton's campaign, it appears, is that people do not know who she really is, and in not knowing her, aren't sure that they can trust her.  Mitt Romney is currently going through the same doubts about his character, and the bugaboo of political character, flip-flopping, is beginning to be associated with his political pronouncements.  Can we vote for these people when we do not know their hearts?

Hillary's heart has become her Achilles heel -- but it is not clear to me that this is a legitimate basis for electing a presidential candidate.  As Gabriel Byrne observes in Miller's Crossing, "Nobody knows anybody.  Not that well."  Which returns us to the problem of the obscure nature of the human heart.

In Jean Cocteau's Thomas L'Imposteur, the hero in the end becomes the character he pretends to be.  This theme is repeated in Roberto Rossellini's Il Generale della Rovere and Akira Kurasawa's Kagemusha, in both of which lowly individuals, a thief in the first instance and a beggar in the second, are forced to impersonate important leaders, and in the process become those leaders, acting more heroically than the people they are pretending to be.  The masks, in each of these cases, become the reality.

It is the rare person who admires Ronald Reagan the man rather than the role he performed as president.  It was his ability to step into the role written for him and play it to the hilt that eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union -- not the man that is now being revealed in his published diaries.  Even in Stardust, the film, Captain Shakespeare's crew admit that they always knew that he was a "puff."  But they did not care what he did in his private life.  It was his ability to inspire fear in his crew and accomplish great deeds that they admired -- it was the mask, not the man, that they saluted.

The first test of our presidential candidates has become, "Does she look presidential?" (or, as it is phrased among our elites, "Does he have the gravitas to be president?").  There seems to be recognition, at some level, that we are dealing with appearances rather than essences when it comes to our political candidates.  Why, then, do we absurdly continue to inquire about a candidate's heart, that least knowable and most treacherous of human faculties?  It is the persistent illusion that we can know the hearts of these vaulted beings, or that they even have hearts, which dogs and confounds the American political process.  We should, instead, look to other ways to gratify ourselves with regard to a candidate's worthiness to be president, and her potential to play her role adequately should she assume the mantle of the presidency. 

I have a want, an uncommon want, and once you hear it, you may find it hard not to desire it, also.  I seek neither Hillary's heart -- a fool's errand -- nor her virtue -- a mirage at best --, but a substitute for these which is both more real and more tangible.  I desire an opportunity to know something which few men have known, to possess a secret that few men possess.  I seek not the populist chimera's of the politically naive, nor access to the ports of influence peddled by the politically corrupt.  I want, instead, merely to brush the knee of destiny, and the thought, once planted, will not be dislodged from my imagination.  I want to touch Hillary's knee.