Worksheet 15
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W15WhiteNoise.docxWorksheet 15
Representing Uncertainty in White Noise
Please watch Monday’s lectures on White Noise before you attempt to complete this worksheet.
The chapter of White Noise that you read centers on what seems to be a major public health emergency: a phenomenon that is eventually termed an “airborne toxic event.” As I discuss in the lectures, the authorities go through a few different names for this phenomenon before they settle on the name “airborne toxic event.” But even when this becomes the official name for the phenomenon, the precise nature of this phenomenon remains somewhat murky and uncertain.
1. (108-9) “The smoke was plainly visible, a heavy black mass hanging in the air beyond the river, more or less shapeless…. An hour later…. It was still there, a slightly larger accumulation, a towering mass in fact, maybe a little blacker now.”
2. (124) “The enormous dark mass moved like some death ship in a Norse legend…. We weren’t sure how to react. It was a terrible thing to see, so close, so low, packed with chlorides, benzines, phenols, hydrocarbons, or whatever the precise toxic content. But it was also spectacular, part of the grandness of a sweeping event…. Our fear was accompanied by a sense of awe that bordered on the religious. It is surely possible to be awed by the thing that threatens your life, to see it as a cosmic force, so much larger than yourself, more powerful, created by elemental and willful rhythms. This was a death made in the laboratory, defined and measurable, but we thought of it at the same time in a simple and primitive way.”
3. (127) “What you’re probably all wondering is what exactly is this Nyodene D. we keep hearing about? A good question…. So, okay, it’s basically simple. Nyodene D. is a whole bunch of things thrown together that are byproducts of the manufacture of insecticide…. In powder form it’s colorless, odorless, and very dangerous, except no one seems to know exactly what it causes in humans orin the offspring of humans. They tested for years and either they don’t know for sure or they know and aren’t saying.”
