Education in Liberia

"Dr. Benjamin Wehye, President of LICOSESS College of Education recently returned home from Zambia with his PhD earned in Education after five years of what he termed as “intensive online research based and solution development study,” accompanied by in-person seminars." What does he say about Liberia's well-known problems with education?

raised concerns about Liberia’s seriousness to break away from the 1860s educational philosophy which he said was centered around exclusively educating children of freed and repatriated slaves and neglecting back then, the native residents who laid the foundation for the country that is today known as Liberia. ...

Once a slave, the mindset becomes narrow and restricted to thinking that freedom is yet too far away. This is why they train their children in the same fashion, making them believe that a certain class of people does not deserve the opportunity to rise to certain levels.

Exactly what from the 1860's educational philosophy remains in the Liberian system today isn't specified. Nor is it clear what the limited educational opportunities a century ago (native tribes didn't get a lot of schools) has to do with all 25,000 applicants failing the entrance exam a few years ago: that's the descendants of the native tribes, of the "Congo" people, and of the Americos -- none passed.

If things are still pretty much as they were when I was there, problems include low salaries, unreliable payment of same, poor oversight, and low prestige for teachers--if you have an education, you want a better government job than mere teacher. There was also the problem of school fees that not all families could afford, though I gather there's been some effort to find the money in the budget to deal with that. (No doubt much will go astray.)

Rhetoric about historical offences seems unlikely to address those issues. For that matter, if this report about the LICOSESS Gbarnga school closing is a guide, the good Dr. Wehye has some housekeeping at home to take care of: "allegedly using course guides instead of a complete curriculum for its B-certificate program in Gbarnga".

If LICOSESS does what it's advertised to, that will help. They've graduated quite a few teachers already from several campuses--the important things are simple. Train teachers, and remember to pay them.

Throwing Away and Wasting

Jesus warned that we might have to throw some things away, in fact, give up everything. True, this can translate to treasure in heaven, but in the meantime things seem to be lost.

Though one hopes that gifts to the poor aren't lost, not infrequently they're squandered, and any value will have to be supernatural. Ordinary wealth can and does vanish and benefit nobody--and may be wasted.

But in a few passages something else seems to show up. After feeding the multitudes, Jesus says to gather up the leftovers so nothing will be lost. After the Resurrection, He asks seven of the disciples to haul in a load of fish, even though he already has fish and bread waiting for them.

He seems not to want things He provides wasted. Which is encouraging.

The internet

I wonder what Dr Boli has been reading lately. FWIW, some of my scratch paper notes have become blog posts. And other things.

Special Days

The city calendar hanging beside me has almost every day flagged as some "Day": Bison Day, World Freedom Day, Fast Food Day, Craft Jerky Day, Cake Day, and World Hello Day. "Cookie Cutter Day" has another, unmentioned, name this year: the start of Advent.

At least they got Christmas Eve et al on there.

Subverting the Patriarchy

The Catholics and Southern Baptists (I'm a bit more familiar with the latter) are held as exemplars of patriarchy, which is understood to be a bad thing™(*).

Catholic devotions are famously Mary-centric, even more so than the Orthodox. (Rosary, anyone?) The Southern Baptist liturgical year celebrates the lives of Annie Armstrong (Easter) and Lottie Moon (Christmas) and their determination to serve God no matter what ossified patriarchs got in their way. I see an interesting contrast between alleged "know your place" teaching, and teaching "be like these women who overcame the people who wanted them to stay in their place."

---

Any form of organization is subject to corruption and misuse, but why patriarchy should be uniquely bad isn't clear. If Darwin's rule is any guide, approximately patriarchal societies seem to be very successful. (Is it still a patriarchy if men run some aspects of society and women rule others?)

---

Dan McBride wrote

But when the church needs workers, they do not wrack their brains.
They go enlist a lady that the WMU has trained.
It surely is a good thing that the women enter in,
'Cause we'd all be in trouble if we left it to the men!

After 55 years, a different view

Early in high school I read the collection of Saki (Hector Hugh Munro). All at once, of course. He had wit and excellent twists in many of his short stories, some of which turn up in school readers. He was known for it.

I acquired a volume for our own kids later, and it gathered a bit of dust until recently. I found it on the coffee table, read here and there in it again, and concluded that one should limit his reading to one or two stories, and not try too many at once. In bulk (more than four or five), they depress. I got the impression that the author, or at least his favorite characters, didn't like women or children very much.

But in small doses:

A Poet praised the Evening Star,
Another praised the Parrot’s hue:
A Merchant praised his merchandise,
And he, at least, praised what he knew.

Conspiracy theories

They're all the rage, and I suppose they always have been. I run into claims about drug company this, or Monsanto that, or "October surprise" scheming -- and some of the old "Jews run the world" themes seem to be getting new life, and an ugly amount of influence.

I don't hear much chatter about QAnon anymore. The only place I heard much about it was media reports; outside of those I only know of one person who is/was into it, and I never met him. It never seemed to have any institutional support, unlike Kendi's conspiracy theory, which has a great deal. and is unusual, in that he posits an unconscious conspiracy

What gives a conspiracy theory cachet? Some critical mass of celebrities endorsing it? Tribal endorsement? Popularity great enough that nobody wants to say anything against it?

Unknown story of forgiveness

Judas wasn't going to explain his doings to anybody before the betrayal, and wasn't in a mood to afterwards, so from whence did the synoptic gospels get the information about the "chief priests and officers" and the silver?

Acts 6:7 says that "a great many of the priests were becoming obedient to the faith." If one of those chief priests was among the converted, what a story he must have had! Just like Paul, he was certain he was on the side of the angels, though using rather disreputable means, and then -- oh oh.

Maybe it was one of the officers. There probably weren't a lot of people in on the secret, though.

A reflection on the rhetoric before and after

"a curious disease which they have all caught--an inability to disbelieve advertisements"

C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress

Garden fork

I learned about this item rather late in life: shovels and spades and snow shovels I learned about quickly, but this one escaped my notice. It turns out to be very useful when you need to break up the soil, especially when your better half plants bulbs--a shovel's wide slice dissects more of them than the few spikes of the garden fork.

A shovel also tends to bring dirt up more as clods, and so requires a little more work to break it up so you can stir in the fertilizer or whatever. A fork is also handy when you're trying to trace grass/mint/bindweed roots traveling sideways--you can figure out which way they're going and pull more of the root out.

However

A word to the wise: the garden forks we have (garage sale specials) don't have tops as flat as a shovel's (or even the example above) for planting your foot on to ram it into hard or rooty soil. Look for flat tops when you get one.

If you try to push the more rounded models with your foot, you'll force your muscles and tendons to work harder to try to hold your foot straight and not turn sideways. You may not notice your mistake until the next day, but you'll notice. It's been a week, and whatever the tendon is attached to the tibia medial malleolus is still sore to the touch.

New World metallurgy

I'd heard it proposed that the presence of so much native copper in Michigan, and trading so widespread, meant that there was no great pressure to learn smelting. Tin ores are quite scarce, so bronze wasn't going to be made locally north of Mexico. Meteoric iron could be found, of course, and seems to have been used here and there.

South, though: Jonathan Hall's post is quite extensive, and if he's correct it looks like Peru had an impressive metallurgical culture, which spread north into Mesoamerica; but apparently the trade in metal goods didn't go further north into the modern USA. The absence of tin would explain why nobody bothered to try to smelt bronze, and the easy availability of native copper removes the need to smelt copper, but why wouldn't there be some trade? Did the North have nothing the Mesoamericans wanted, or were the desert stretches that great a trade barrier? There's always the coastlines and raft-boats -- unless there really was nothing they wanted.

Banality

Douglas Murray has at Hannah Arendt and her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, citing research that shows she was (at best) duped. He also argues that her cute slogan has contributed to our widespread inability to call evil evil.

I wonder if she read The Screwtape Letters' 1961 preface, "I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice."

Those quiet men sometimes harbor the wildest evils in their hearts and in their minutes.

Time

I'm helping beta-read a novel, and one aspect of it headed me down a rabbit hole about time, to a 31-year-old paper presented to the NCTE about "Indian time." "Indian time" is mythic, based on appropriateness of action ("I eat when I'm hungry, I drink when I'm dry, and if whiskey don't kill me I'll live til I die."), while "linear time" contributes to dislocation and illness. As is typical, the author cites special relativity without showing the remotest understanding of it.

The problems attributed to "linear time" and "technology" are curable with "mythic time" and simplicity, of course. Patton seems to be unacquainted with Christian traditions about materialism. And Mander's comparison tables, cited in the Appendix, are not just invidious but inaccurate. Some tribes did in fact work to produce surplus for trade, and trade networks could be extensive.

You can tell that the paper is old; it doesn't try to attribute wickedness to whites, just to "technology." It probably would run into a lot of flack today.

At any rate, I didn't find what I was hunting: anything like the (surprisingly late!) idea of returning to the past. Stories of one-way time travel to the future are very old.

Of course, after making a bit of fun of the paper, I need to give an example of what she means. When I lived in Liberia, people referred to Liberian Standard Time, which in practice meant "whenever:" Maybe half an hour after the hour specificed, maybe the next day. Things happened, and meetings ran long, and part of business was maintaining relationships. And land line telephones weren't that common. When I returned, cell phones were ubiquitous, and often interrupted things. It seemed that the rule that "a meeting lasts as long as it lasts" was now something of an exception. Was maintaining relations still such a large part of business? I wasn't there long enough to find out.

Internment

We're all told about the US interning Japanese. I hadn't heard that the Canadians did too, and that some of the Japanese-Canadians couldn't return home until 1949.

Incitatus

We vote for a president; we get a team.

BBC's famous "Yes Minister" comedy assumed that the existing bureaucracy defines most of policy (and tries to perpetuate and enlarge itself). I haven't seen much evidence that this is wrong.

There's no way any human being can know all the people in a single government agency, much less the whole government. To pick people to direct an agency you have to trust someone else's vetting of them – and trust the standards by which they were measured. The reports that cross your desk are distillations of distillations: how do you know if there was a pattern to what was omitted?

We hope that the president we vote for will pick a trustworthy team to farm out the other personnel selections to and give them the general policy directions for their various underlings to implement, and then listen to what we hope is their good advice. We hope we can trust the policy statements and party brand. We hope we're not buying a pig in a poke. That's a lot of hope.

Trump seemed to have some sensible advisors, but so many of his team rotated in and out that I figure continuity had to have suffered – and then bureaucratic momentum wins. "Personnel is policy:" and the bureaucracy has most of the personnel already – and offers a pool from which one may select directors.

Perhaps instead we vote for Incitatus, with religious faith in the party brand and trusting that the team that selected Incitatus is benign. That team, invisible to any ballot, will pick the cabinet, set the policies, and try to decide on the proper reactions to the crises that will arise. The president will sign bills like a living autopen, read from teleprompters, and smile or glower on cue.

It might seem as though either way the bureaucracy dominates, but it isn't entirely just a difference in degree. In the case of a compos mentis president, decisions in the various crises would be made by the same person; there's no guarantee that the same person each time would give Incitatus the lines to say. And a forceful president might have some impact in despite of the bureaucracy.

Post-liberalism

First Things has an essay by Nathan Pinkoski "Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed. It rested on an essential tenet of liberalism: the state-society, public-private distinction."

In 2006, then prime minister Blair said that the “traditional civil liberty arguments are not so much wrong, as just made for another age.” Soon after, his home secretary John Reid elaborated. The previous age—the postwar age—began in response to concerns about the threat the “fascist state” posed to individuals, Reid said. Today, the threat comes from “fascist individuals,” not fascist states.

This, after Pinkoski's description of the subsuming of private enterprises under government control in a way that is fascist in all but name, is telling.

Leaves

This time of year can be beautiful, with leaves changing yellow and orange and brown and red--highlighted by evergreens here and there. On the tree, with the sunlight shining through them, most dead leaves look at least great, and sometimes amazing. But dead oak leaves look so emphatically skeletal and withered and dead--they're ugly. I suppose they fit in with the ubiquitous Halloween themes, but I'm glad there aren't any oak trees in my window's view.

Mushroom song

The Internet is a wondrous thing sometimes. A fragment of a ditty about mushrooms stuck in my mind and surfaced today: I'd read it in a book about campers back in '66 or so. Searching about, there seem to be several variants, and one version claimed James Thurber as the author (?I didn't find evidence). I went to camp but once in my youth, and that camp was more about singing hymns than folk songs--not that I cared much for either--so I've no historical bias. Which, if any, of these 4 did you learn?

(The third seems slightly corrupted, but maybe the music was different.) archive.org is back.

The mushroom is a vegetable
To select it few are able
You won't know them when you meet them
You won't know them 'til you eat them
If in heaven you awaken
You will know you were mistaken
And the ones that you have eaten
Weren't the ones you should have et.

Mushrooms are a vegetable
which you eat when you are able
you will know one when you see one
you will know one when you eat one
if in Heaven you awaken
then you’ll know you were mistaken
Must have been a toadstool, tough luck!!!

Mushrooms are a veg-e-table
That you eat when you are able,
You will know when you eat them,
You will know them when you eat them.
If in heaven you awaken
And you find you were mistaken,
That the mushrooms you had eaten
Weren’t the ones you should have et.
Must have been toadstools -- tough luck!

“Mushrooms is a veg-e-table; 
to detect them few are able. 
If in Heaven you awaken 
then you’ll know you were mistaken, 
And the ones that you have eaten 
weren’t the ones you should have eat!”

Gleam again

We went to Gleam again this year. The "Star Stuff" exhibit needed to be dynamic, and with more lights shining on their metal stars, but the rest were good. The dragonflies glowed with colors as wild as real ones, the illuminated trees were beautiful, and the pond with the fluctuating strings of lights was great. My favorite was "Yield": a "corn maze" of glowing corn stalks, with colors changing in ways that seemed almost seasonal (and bright white flashes to go with the thunder sounds).

The only downsides were my forgetting a cap, and the mandatory word salad on the signage explaining why looking at this exhibit will make you a better person. Why can't an artist just say "I thought this would look pretty"?

There were interactive exhibits too, and foxglove blossoms 14" high, and they made sure the interactive things were kid accessible.

Simple cell-phone cameras do not do it justice--they haven't the dynamic range of the human eye. And anyway, it seems better to just stand and take it in.

Tired of only seeing some relatives at funerals,

we've planned some road trips. The south loop was earlier this year. We just finished the central-east trip. In retrospect, it was probably wise to not include Florida as part of the plan. Of course we dropped the North Carolina leg--I'm not in the finest shape to help out.

Gas mileage through West Virginia wasn't quite nice. Minivans... As we ate our snacks at a rest stop there, a young lady drove up in a car leaking some kind of fluid from the front, who promptly got on the phone. I asked if she was OK--she'd hit a deer, and apparently it went under her car. I'd not thought of that damage vector before. (We didn't see any deer.)

I listened a lot, and learned some things about building airports and dog training for deer hunting and building garden hardware, and about family I'd not been in close contact with for a while--some things joyful and some sad.

Allegheny cemetery

One feature not frequently remarked on is the groundhogs, who leave surprise holes here and there to twist the unwary ankle.

Many of the older stones were eroded by acid rain, and are difficult to make out, but there's a great deal of what is essentially public artwork honoring the memory of people you've never heard of (and some you have). I gather that the Winter mausoleum is the most famous. Winter copied the design of the Woolworth mausoleum: a pseudo-Egyptian temple with busty Greek-style sphynxes and heiroglyphs that mixed real phrases and gibberish, and doors showing the proprietor being aided by de-animal-headed Egyptian gods.

Many of the mausoleums have stained glass within, which you can view through the front door's grating--Winter's has 3 panels. Oddly, even the good Father Pitt/Dr Boli only mentioned one of them--which shows Winter as Pharoah enthroned. Modesty seems not to have been Emil Winter's most prominent virtue.

Yes, the noses of the bronze figures on the door show signs that visitors have been rubbing them, and the snooty sphynxes show similar signs, though not on the nose.

It isn't just rich businessmen who are buried in the cemetery, of course, a friend and confidant "of the illustrious Washington" is also buried there. Daniel O'Niell's statue shows him still at his editor's desk, and the (presumably recopied) stones for Ebenezer Denny and his wife Nany Denny ("Stop, Passenger! and here view whatever is admirable summed up in the character of Mrs. Nancy Denny...") tell of older ways of memorializing.

Many plots had a little walled flower garden above the grave--sometimes a painfully small grave with small numbers on the stone. Once there was a fashion for headstones shaped like scrolls, which, combined with the flower-garden cavity gives the impression of a giant sardine can being opened with a rolling key.

Karl Lennart Gronros from Finland had a stone paid for by his friends so that all would know that the 24-year-old was a mechanical engineer.

It is a bit disconcerting to see so many headstones for people younger than me.

Risks

I've heard the stories from North Carolina about officials blocking aid workers (though nothing so far on followup), and also people saying that the authorities have to manage who gets in so as to keep out looters and other predators. It hasn't been mentioned, but they need to keep out amateurs who'll get into trouble and need rescue themselves. (I've also read testimony that they haven't seen anything like that kind of friction with authorities--I'd bet it's more a function of who the folks on the ground are instead of policy.)

We need to balance risks. Predators flock to the scene--they already have. But the risks from them seem, so far, relatively low compared to the risks of locals running out of clean water and medicine. It isn't a nice way to think about things, but in an emergency you have to triage and spend your energies efficiently, and some people are going to get murdered who wouldn't have been if you spent the time to vet everybody every time, but more will live because they got uncontaminated water to drink in time, or got shelter when their home and roads washed away.

We're not always good at evaluating risks.

Grim says the Feds haven't shown up yet in his area, but local and private assistance are helping a lot.

Reminder

Their web site mentioned a 9am service, which was early enough for us to attend and still continue travelling. The service turned out to be a Sunday School, which turned out to be the pastor lecturing on background and interpretation of the passage in Revelation addressed to the church in Philadelphia.

I'm fairly bald, and couldn't tear out much hair--his background was amazingly confused. He mixed decades and centuries, put Nero in the 300's, explained that Catholic meant imperial (didn't seem to know about the Orthodox at all), explained to the assembled that Baptists maintained a parallel unbroken tradition back to the apostles and didn't break away from the Catholics, and when one woman asked him afterwards why he didn't end with prayer, asked that she show him in scripture where this was illustrated or commanded. (Acts 20:36)

I prayed I could find some way of contributing positively, and was granted such an opportunity. But the situation was also a good reminder--I know a fair bit about the Church's history, and the background for the faith, but the important parts lie elsewhere. His history was a garbled mess, but his talk about Jesus' message to the church was fine.

So far

Traveling has been calm, setting aside the occasional lunatic driver, and visits with kinfolk have been very pleasant. And the hotel stays were simple to cancel--though the Black Mountain one had to go through the national number, since the local phones were not up. See Grim for updates to the situation there--when he's able to.

Even as far away as Louisville and Cincinnati we saw trees and branches down.

Minor amusement

I know I should use the time walking laps more productively, but I find it hard to compose in my head: I start a scene, but keep circling back to the beginning. Praying gets distracted too. So. Factoring numbers, anybody?

Everybody knows how to check if (in base 10) a number is divisible by 3: just add the digits, and if the sum is divisible by 3, so is the original. 9 is easy too: just add the digits, and if the sum is divisible by 9, so is the original. 2 is easy: is the right-most digit even? 5 is easy: is the right-most digit 0 or 5? 4 and 8 are easy to do sequentially, or you can look at the last two digits: if divisible by 4, the whole number is. The last 3: if divisible by 8, the whole number is.

Ah, but 7? Hmm. (Spoiler; there's a simple way to check, but I didn't know it then.)

If we've a number k whose digits are $N_n N_{n-1}...N_2 N_1 N_0$, where $N_0$ is the units digit, $N_1$ the 10's, and so on, we can write this as $\sum_i N_i 10^i$. That's trivial. Suppose we divide by 3, but divide each of the $10^i$ terms. For $i=0$ (i.e. 1), we have 0 R1. For $i=1$ we have 3R1, then 33R1, 333R1, etc. Now we have two parts: $\sum_i N_i 33..3$ (a nice integer) and a remainder of $\sum_i N_i (1) / 3$. The leftover part, the sum over the digits, determines whether the number is divisible by 3. OK, that's pretty simple, and proves that the old rule, which we knew already.

Dividing by 9 works the same way, except that the integer part after dividing by 9 is $\sum_i N_i 11..1$ with 1's instead of 3's. The remainders are also 1, just as before and the remainder term is also a sum of the digits, divided by 9.

How about 7?

i	$10^i$	integer	remainder
0	1	0	1
1	10	1	3
2	100	14	2
3	1000	142	6
4	10000	1428	4
5	100000	14285	5
6	1000000	142857	1
	etc

So, If you create the sum $1 N_0 + 3 N_1 + 2 N_2 + 6 N_3 ...$, if the sum is divisible by 7, so is the original number.

Granted, it's not as nice as the simple digit sum, but it works.

Before you ask, no, I only worked out the sketch of this on the track. I need pen and paper as much as the next person.

For those who have been snickering, yes, I looked this up and found the easy way too.

One way to think about the problem is to note that if you think of dividing the number into all the digits except the units digit, and the units digit, there'll only be 1 or 2 possibilities for the units digit for which the whole is divisible by 7. So maybe breaking the number up that way would be productive; maybe there's a simple relationship.

$k = 10 \times A + B$, where $B$ is a single digit. Now noodle around a bit: multiply by $5$. $5 \times k = 50 \times A + 5 \times B = 49 \times A + A + 5 \times B$. Part of that is obviously divisible by 7, so if $A + 5 \times B$ is divisible by 7, the original number is also. E.g. 4627 $4627 = 10{\times}462 + 7$, so $A=462$ and $B=7$. The formula says $462 + 5 \times 7 = 497$. Inspection says that's divisible by 7, so the original was too. Obviously you can use the formula $A - 2B$ as well. You'll find both easily on search engines.

Suppose we wanted to find a similar formula to tell us about 11. We need 2 digits for $B$, so we rewrite our number $k$ as $100 \times A + B$. Looking closer we see $100 \times A + B = 99 \times A + A + B$. Since 99 is already divisible by 11, we immediately see that if $A + B$ is divisible by 11, so is the original number. Check 7271: $72 + 71 = 143$, which is $11 \times 13$.

For 13, it isn't hard to see that $A + 3 \times B$ works: try it with 8593.

No doubt there are tables of these simple tricks somewhere

Yes, the church nursery posts a number in the sanctuary if a parent needs to come see to their child. And yes, I try to factor it.

Thinking about Rome

Roman values at ACOUP, hat tip to AstralCodex

The guardroom was one rod long and one rod wide

I have always found the temple measurements in Ezekiel 40-42 to be rather obscure. Why are these measurements supposed to be important enough to keep track of? They are clearly for a future or a possible temple, not one that existed then or since.

Revelation echoes this, with a twist: "Get up and measure the temple of God and the altar, and those who worship in it. Leave out the court which is outside the temple and do not measure it, for it has been given to the nations". That's suggestive: measurement relates to possession or ownership, perhaps? God owns it in the ultimate sense, but the temple is for the worshippers.

In Genesis there's a different kind of "measurement"; a measurement by foot, and one that puts Abraham in the place he/his is to possess. "Arise, walk about the land through its length and breadth; for I will give it to you."

I have no clue what the measurement numbers are supposed to signify in Ezekiel (if it's a physical future temple, why? in light of Hebrews 10), but I like the idea that measurement might signify "we are there." Measuring is something people do, even if is only "how many of us fit."

Black Mountain, NC

What's interesting to see/do around there? The Biltmore doesn't sound like my cup of tea. I gather there are a number of scenic areas nearby. My wife has a conference at Ridgecrest.

Advice

A reader has asked whether she should return to college after dropping out several years ago. She’s still young, not yet thirty. Advice is dangerous stuff. If taken and the outcome is unhappy, the advice-giver has set himself up for resentment and blame. Rather, I urged my reader to examine her motives and expectations. She’s smart and better-read than most of her contemporaries, so a typical college curriculum could crush her.

Titan testimony

The BBC is reporting on Lochridge's testimony about the Titan's implosion. The pictures are hair-raising--but lack explanation. Delamination as dramatic as that in the picture on the left would almost certainly have been spotted when the submersible was checked after a dive--and why would it delaminate so deep in the structure? What was the test they used that created that split?

The places of greatest stress, and greatest likelihood of water infiltration, would be where the composite met the endcap (or a penetration, but you get extra longitudinal compression from the endcap). I'd expect microscopic water infiltration at an edge flaw to cause the outer layer to delaminate (maybe with a little crackling noise?). That makes the composite structure just a tiny bit thinner there, and exposes the next layer to the water. Maybe there's a flaw handy; maybe not. But I (and apparently quite a few others) would expect material fatigue after a while, and the next layer's boundary with the endcap to slowly fribble.

The picture on the right screams for context. Is that supposed to be a typical layer? Do they pull regular test samples? (If not, why not?)

FWIW, when the leak broke through, the water speed would have been about 270m/sec--end to end in 24msec. A blink is about 100msec. Leaks are bad things

Signs of the times

We'd been having the local paper delivered for over 30 years, and went to online-only a couple of months ago. Delivery was just too expensive to justify. I'd looked at the publishing company's financials a few years ago, and we're not the only ones--what's keeping revenues up for them is printing fliers and whatnot for a wider and wider range.

Two obvious signs of problems are the size of the paper itself (getting slimmer and slimmer) and the ratio of ads to copy (larger and larger)

One I hadn't thought of is the comics. They'd been going with a half-page, of which two were popular re-runs (Peanuts and For Better or Worse). The online edition had an additional page, with a mix of popular and less so--including (would Madison subscribe to a newspaper without it?) Doonesbury.

I hadn't bothered to ask how much these subscriptions cost the newspaper, but I assume that the more popular strips cost more, the reruns a bit less, and the less popular and the drama serials still less.

They just redid their amusements pages, and pretty much everything is new. I get the sense that the comics are a bundle, and not the top-tier bundle either. If my gut reaction that the mix isn't tailored to the community isn't enough evidence: they got rid of Doonesbury. Zippy may aim for a similar demographic, but I'm not familiar enough to say, nor do I care to do the research.

It's no skin off my nose, but that's another metric to watch.

I suppose I should start examining the sports section a bit more carefully. Local sports news is something that they can't acquire just by piggybacking on the national wire services. I figure that'll be the last thing to be cut, and when I see cuts or shortcuts there, the paper will be almost dead. Maybe counting bylines?

Tis the Gift to be Simple

"Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."

I'll not try to unpack all of that, but one thing little children are good at is "being in the moment." Not for long; steadfastness is not one of the frontline virtues in a child. But there's something admirable in the pure enjoyment of the taste of icecream. The flip side is the pure horror and rejection of the abomination of cottage cheese. Oh wait, that's me as an adult.

A rainbow to me as an adult isn't a "pure thing": it recalls the other rainbows I've seen and made, and who I was with, and other memories fun and sad. A bath is a simple sensual pleasure, and maybe it recalls other baths and other oceans. But it isn't perfected by having the radio play Carmen while I'm eating a fudge sundae. Adding too many other related pleasures can detract from fully enjoying any of them.

Our pocket shrines help keep us out of the moment, of course, but so (at least for me) does the "narrator", the "drunken monkey stung by a scorpion". And neither is good for steadfast concentration and enjoyment.

I need to work more on "doing one thing at a time."

Benghazi

I remember wondering what was going on in Benghazi--what was Stevens doing in this out of the way post? Somebody pointed out that some connected Saudis were in the area, getting out of Dodge as fast as they could, and that there was a rumor about weapons going to Syrian rebels. And what had just been opened up? Gaddaffi's arms stash--he had weapons to provide for one of the largest armies in the world at the time. (I didn't say one of the strongest, notice.) (I assume some of those arms wound up spread among Islamist groups in Africa.)

Hmm. Buying up loose gear and having Saudi's deniably ship it to Syrian rebels? It seemed plausible--the first part of it laudable.

Close but no cigar. Apparently they were trying to buy back weapons they'd given to Libyan rebels. Alarming stupidity at every turn...

Amusement for a little while

I'd never heard of BunaB before. The instruction sheet for the BunaB #7 is reproduced at SamuelJohnson's site, together with links for images for the board and instructions for the Zudirk game (BunaB#2). ("ZUDIRK is a modern adaptation of a game believed to have originated on the Scilly Islands, off the coast of Cornwall, England, centuries before the arrival of the Romans. A favorite sport of High Priests of the Druidic cult, it was originally played outdoors, the implements--burning tinder, heart-shaped boulders, stone adzes and condemned criminals.")

Well, over a million Pet Rocks sold--and apparently they're still selling. Why not BunaB?

Over the years I've bought a number of things that never were used--some substantially more expensive than these novelties.

over-wise

Grim cites the Havamal on one of AVI's posts:

54

It is best for man to be middle-wise,
Not over cunning and clever:
The learned man whose lore is deep
Is seldom happy at heart.

The usual way I've heard this described is that it's no joy to know the terrible things that you can't dodge, and also that knowing too many options causes paralysis by analysis, which is often worse than merely being wrong.

It reminds me of Ecclesiastes: "Do not be excessively righteous and do not be overly wise. Why should you ruin yourself?"

The first half of that verse is widely argued, of course. The second half in turn reminds me of Luke 12:47-48. "From everyone who has been given much, much will be required."

and also: "Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, knowing that as such we will incur a stricter judgment."

I'm already not wonderful at doing what I know I ought. What would it be like if instead of fuzzy generalities and "close enough" I knew with exquisite precision what I should be doing, and still didn't obey?

In any event, I suspect I'd be found innocent if charged with excessive wisdom.

Unfamiliar symbols

"Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!" I wonder if any of those silver images of the temple are still around. There are statues of Artemis still around; she seems to have canes in her hands (canes are also seen in a crude lead figure, so if it was a stability artifact it was in the original--it looks top heavy). No idea what that was taken to mean. The Artemis has a garment with lions and cows and antelopes and whatnot, and women on the sides--small breasted, possibly to avoid competition with the vast array of breasts the goddess sported. I assume the multitude of breasts has to do with fertility and providing for the world. The effect is remarkably ugly.

I haven't turned up any silver images of the temple. Probably all were melted long ago.

One of the images of Artemis' head has her eyes rolled up in an expression that seems almost Hindu--which wouldn't be terribly surprising. The city clerk spoke of an image fallen from heaven. Was that a special inner shrine with a meteorite, or had stories been told that this top-heavy thing had really fallen from the sky?

I’ve suggested before that polytheism is the compromise you get when different tribes with different gods met. I think it can work a bit the other way too. If you have a pile of gods you have to keep up with the appropriate seasonal rituals with each, but perhaps one takes your fancy--say Krishna. I suspect that the more people are devoted to a single god in the pantheon, the more that one will take on aspects that others are nominally the managers of. A fertility goddess could easily pick up aspects of wrath, and even of battle--if people cared about her enough. (Priests might have a little competition going here too--one stop shopping, get all your prayers done here...)

Be that as it may, I look at the statue and find it opaque. And this is the relic of a literate people, from whom we have many documents--there's some connection between us still. And then I look at the pictures at Göbekli Tepe. Wild guesses, all.

Great was Artemis of the Ephesians Wright's site has a picture of what's left: a mismatched column with a stork's nest on top. The ruins of the temple were scavenged to build a basillica, and eventually the ruins of that for a mosque, and the mosque isn't in great shape now either.

There's always somebody..

Via a comment at Sippican Cottage, behold The Christian Topography by Cosmas Indicopleustes ('India-voyager').

There can be few books which have attracted more derision, mixed with wonder, than the Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes. It advances the idea that the world is flat, and that the heavens form the shape of a box with a curved lid. The author cites passages of scripture which he distorts wildly in order to support his thesis, and attempts to argue down the idea of a spherical earth by stigmatizing it as 'pagan.' The approach to scripture is discreditable, and the conclusion made simply wrong.

The book is often cited as evidence that Christianity introduced the idea of the flat-earth into the world, and brought in the age of ignorance. This is hardly fair, since Cosmas does not represent a mainstream of any kind, personally or spiritually. The latter pages of his work are devoted to rebutting the criticism of his fellow-monks, that what he was saying was wrong.

It almost makes current political discourse look sensible. I almost made it through Book 1.

Using more of the fruit

The BBC reports that Swiss chocolate researchers have found a way to use the cocoa fruit and not just the cocoa seeds. The article drags in irrelevant self-flagellation about slavery, and somehow manages to miss the fly in the ointment--the cocoa fruit rots quickly. Harvesting that would demand refrigeration on site and in its delivery, and the concentration process would have to also be in-country. The latter industry would be a good thing for the producing country, but providing reliable electricity to the farms might be challenging.

Anyhow, kudos to the researchers!

Chickens of the world, keep warm!

The chicken bomb was supposedly not an April Fools joke. Blue Peacock was a serious proposal to put nuclear mines in Germany in case of Soviet invasion, and somebody (I have to believe the proposal was tongue in cheek), proposed that to keep the delicate nuclear mine working in the winter, it be kept warm with live chickens.

Raconteur Press

Raconteur Press is a new business whose current focus is science fiction and fantasy anthologies, rather like the pulp magazines of old. The term "pulp," derived from the inexpensive paper the old magazines used, now refers to a style of writing--fast paced and entertaining. The press has published two books a month for the past year, with anthology themes like space marines, goblin market, moggies in space, wyrd west, and The Super Generation. I need to read the other stories in that last book.

I find writing to spec difficult, but a useful discipline. I've tried several stories for them before--one story wound up so far out of spec that I threw more words at it and tried to make a novella out of it (it's currently being beta-read).

Keep it clear

With a hat tip to Sippican Cottage, a story about how bad display design crashed a destroyer. Control of the engines and rudders can reside in several different machines on the bridge. Critical little bits of information are found in teeny tiny boxes -- the user interface is hair-raisingly bad. As for example, whether the propellers run at the same speed (you can turn if they don't; helpful if the rudder isn't turning you fast enough). As for example, whether your station has command and if so, of what (turns out that transfer of control goes one propeller at a time!). I'd want a big bright star, or sharply different color, to show what I've got control of, and something a bit more dramatic--like a big band connecting the thrust indicators--to tell whether the thrusters are in sync or not.

The ProPresenter our church uses for slides and videos puts a yellow rim around the image of whatever the current slide being projected is. I don't care for this; it should be as subtle as a brass band. (Maybe it's configurable--I need to complain.)

In the heat of the moment, you want your context switching to be as clear as possible. I know, I know--practice practice practice. The Navy has young sailors with a limited amount of practice time, the church has every-other-week volunteers, and whoever painted the traffic lines on the street forgot that you can't see over the hill and out-of-towners won't guess that there's a left turn on the other side.

Drone defense

Some of the video from Ukraine suggests that drones are getting to be quite effective weapons. If they were quieter, I suspect the criminal cartels would be using them for assassinations already--loiter and attack the witness/judge/competitor.

Some of the videos show them capable of entering shelters through windows or passages. And, of course, they're good at watching for things, whether they have offensive capacity or not.

OK, how do you stop them? You're with your buddies in a truck and hear/spot something headed your way. Shooting won't do much unless you're super-super-accurate. Net guns... they look nice, but I wonder how practical those are in the field. Hide behind trees...

Pros and amateurs try their hands at downing drones in this video (which has a very annoying long commercial in the middle). Some of the methods are more amusing than useful.

One of the methods tried is the vortex ring cannon, which can pack more of a punch than you might expect. For sufficiently large vortex cannons, of course. Of course, you could also try using guns adapted (with blanks) for the purpose. The article cited talks about "knock-down effect" on humans (mediocre), but it might be suitable for trying to knock down lighter flying objects.

Copter-type drones are somewhat at risk for vortex ring state, where instead of pushing the air down the propellers push air down and around and up and back through the blades again, in a "circle" that doesn't provide lift. The article explains how designers have been mitigating this. However, if a strong vortex ring hits a quadcopter, it should provide some impact, some twisting, and maybe cause one or more of the propellers to get into VortexRingState.

If the equipment is just an adapter on the end of your rifle (and maybe blank rounds, maybe not), it might be easy to carry, cheap(*), and relatively quick to field. The vortex ring is a lot bigger than a rifle bullet, so your chances of hitting are better.

There are obvious possible issues--would it destabilize the drone enough with an average hit? would the ring move fast enough to reliably hit a moving target (80 m/sec??? with my sloppy estimates for vorticity)? and can soldiers/civilians aim well enough, especially at night? Oh, and is the effective range good enough?

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(*) "Cheap" would probably be the kiss of death, unfortunately.

UPDATE: I found an Army report. The Wikipedia image of the vortex ring was out of a 40mm barrel, and they developed 100kpsi in their chamber, using a "rupture disk" to get the cleanest possible flow. They did not design the test system for rapid fire. So this probably wouldn't be a snap-on, but a separate (hopefully light) blunderbuss. They found that C4 wasn't great--the ring momentum was low--so they converged on "exotic" explosives like Red Dot and Bulls Eye (up to 30g). They were getting about 160'/sec.

Their aim, so to speak, was attacking humans, who are typically less fragile than drones in flight. The idea might work. I assume that with lower pressures the final velocity would be proportionately lower, but fluid dynamics is messy.

Windows experience

One of our machines is a Windows 10 machine, with a SSD system disk and a hard drive for everything else. After each reboot, it would quickly start slowing down. The task manager said the D: hard drive was getting 100% use, and click/click/click was heard in the land. I tried a bunch of recommended cures (balked at registry edits). The one that worked was chkdsk.exe D: /f /r , though it took a couple of hours.

So some kinds of disk problems can cause infinite loops? Interesting. (I'm using Ubuntu at the moment.)

Making air travel an adventure

Air Maroc damages runway at Roberts International Airport: "the plane landed on both rear wheels, but shortly after, the left wheel veered into a muddy grass patch adjacent to the runway. This caused damage to several runway lights, which are already sparse at RIA." ... "the pilot did not report the incident to the control tower or airport authorities" ... "passengers on board the aircraft were unaware of the incident" ... "before its scheduled departure, significant debris was found on the runway" ... "aircraft remain grounded until further notice."

The photo shows no obvious damage to the landing gear, but lots of grass and dirt in its mechanism. Something invisible is probably bent.

Yes, the pilot's failure to report is bad, but the passengers not noticing is also rather startling--the plane ran off the runway and destroyed some lights; is that just something you expect with Air Maroc?

Stars

The boys' room used to have a heavy bunk bed, and desk and cabinet (part of a set we were given) and a bookcase (everyplace has to have a bookcase). After we'd set it up, I bought some glow in the dark star stickers, made a list of the main stars in the southern sky, and got on a stepstool, tape measure in hand, to try to put the southern sky in place. Our eldest was fond of the southern constellations--my wife had made him a shirt with them painted on.

I got one quadrant of the ceiling done, and realized that my tape measure hadn't always been perfectly square. I wasn't about to try to take them all down to start over, and what with one thing and another they never did get more than one quadrant's worth of stars on the ceiling. (Once furniture was in the room, standing on a stool to measure got hazardous.)

They moved out years ago, and the room became my wife's office, with a big desk, lots of bookcases, and a small spare bed for just in case. Then came the covid and I snarfed the office to work from home in. (It has a nice view of the garden--well, not an exciting view in the winter or early spring.) Sometimes I move the sewing stuff to rest on the bed, and look at the ceiling. The glow in the dark aspect grew too feeble to see decades ago, and the stars were pretty much the same color as the ceiling when not glowing. The only way to excite them these days is with a UV flashlight. But I know they're there, and know that I never finished them.

There are a lot of unfinished things in my life. Some, like the stars, are moot now. Still.

No regrets

We drove past a pyramid-shaped restaurant (we guessed that was what it was) quite a few times, but it was too far from home to serve as a supper destination and inconvenient to our travel the rest of the times, so we never saw the inside of the place: " "Pyramid of the Nile - Egyptian Fine Dining Experience!" (the menu was American cuisine, such as Pharaoh's prime rib)."

It may still be for sale, though there's a huge pile of gravel on the site now.

I probably didn't miss much, though if it had been close by we might have given it a try just for fun. The lighting was probably terrible, though--those windows aren't big.

automatic dingus

In a Bill Nye story about a one room schoolhouse, the narrator refers to "a new self-cocking weepon that had an automatic dingus for throwing out the empty shells."(*)

I wondered at that a bit, but never looked up the details until now. The automatic pistol was invented in 1892, and Remarks was printed in 1887, which means the story itself was written well before the automatic was invented. However, something that wasn't quite "self-cocking" a double-action revolver(**) did have "an automatic dingus for throwing out the empty shells": the von Steiger auto-ejecting revolver. No, I'd never heard of it before. This was 1870's, so the dates work.

It used a little lever that, on cocking the hammer, slipped under the rim of the empty case just right of the live round, and as the hammer flew forward the lever snapped the empty case back out (originally right at the shooter :-( ). It worked, but was pretty complicated to make.

(*) A writer's group has been going over a story that includes a one-room schoolhouse scene, and that brought Nye's work back to mind.

(**) Brain freeze. Single actions had to be hand-cocked, of course.

Where did they sleep?

On the Yamato sailors slept in hammocks. The netting variety of hammock from the Caribbean became quite popular around the world, though canvas beds were apparently known in Europe for millenia, and possibly used in English ships before Columbus. How the Japanese sailors slept before Western contact didn't turn up on a quick search.

Bunks seem like the obvious way to store sleeping crewmen if the vessel is tall enough and you haven't developed hammocks, and even if you use them you'll need vertical space between them--not everybody can sleep at once.

Viking longboats had space on deck for the men if they took the sail down and tied it over them for a tent. Triremes, though--there wasn't a lot of room on those things. If they hauled in all the oars there might be room to lie down between benches, but probably this guy had the right idea: "Usually under blankets around their campfires on the beach." Non-warships would have more space--you could sleep lying on top of cargo, perhaps, and being taller in the water might make part of the deck available. Jonah was asleep in the hold. Coasters with short trips still have people crowding the decks to sleep however they can/dare.

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Another rabbit-hole: what became of Viking longships? The Mediterranean ships were taller and stronger, making it hard/impossible to assault them from a longship, and aspects of that design were quickly adapted, making the classic longship obsolete.

What If: Shakespeare

If you haven't read Simak's Goblin Reservation, do. It's a fun sci-fi book set in Madison in an era with interplanetary teleportation and also time travel--which sets the scene. The Time Department has brought William Shakespeare forward to give a lecture. (There's a saber-tooth and a ghost and a Neanderthal as well, but read the book for yourself.)

Take that notion as the what-if. You have Shakespeare available for a couple of weeks. He's an astute businessman, and will be happy to write whatever play you commission, and might be happy to write fewer than five acts. (Producers and directors would trample each other for the chance to produce/direct/film it. I suspect Shakespeare would love the "Take-2" capability of film--and also the ability to work with women instead of boys for the female parts.)

Would you risk a comedy? He might need a crash course in "what's funny this year"; as AVI noted, humor doesn't always age well. You might feel overawed and leave it up to him, but just for laughs, try to think of something--maybe a fairy story?

He did some historical plays. Their Finest Hour might be too huge a canvas even for him, but WWII seems like an inevitable choice. Unless you wanted him to try Apollo? Or if you wanted to keep it to things he knew about already, King Harold? Odyssus might not be a good fit, but Achilles might.

Or a tragedy. I brought the topic up at the table, and Youngest Daughter suggested Yamamoto: facing Fate in the form of the death cult militarists and the Emperor, and Nemesis in the form of the US Army Air Force. I don't think Nixon's story would be dramatic enough for Shakespeare. Maybe something classical?

Just for fun, what would you suggest?

Particle Fever

The documentary Particle Fever has a trailer out. The trailer telescopes events from several years into two minutes, for drama's sake. That's irritating by itself, but the repeated claims people make about how much this is going to change things is very offputting. Maybe it's a fine documentary, but hype makes me very itchy.

It quotes a man who spent most of his career on this single project.

After my degree, I spent mine on several different, mostly related, projects; experiments with hundreds and sometimes thousands of colleagues. There were a few whose contributions exceeded a percent. I was not one of those few.

I had other things that grew to higher priority--that's a good reason, but not the whole. But I can imagine--better than imagine, I saw it now and then--the "I've dedicated my life to this, so it better not fail" attitude. Surrounded by like-minded people, it can be hard to remember that the money to pay for all this is a "grant", not something earned. And when you're reminded of this (by editorials, budget cuts, and whatnot), it's tempting to exagerate the benefits. It's the center of your life, so it's obviously a big deal, right? And given two equally good projects, the best salesman wins.

Most of the scientists I knew had lives outside the lab; families (rarely large), hobbies (skiing is inexplicably popular), some were religious too. One also managed a farmette and owned some rental properties, another wrote an NYT bestselling novel. (I have a ways to go yet on that.)

Peter

In the garden Peter falls asleep. He's probably pretty ashamed of that--is that what Jesus was talking about?

Then the soldiers come, and Peter summons up his courage to show that he's willing to die with Jesus. He gets rebuked for his pains, and all his good work undone.

So after the arrest, he summons up his courage again, and becomes a spy, going with his friend John who has an in at the high priest's place. That doesn't work out very well either; it turns out that being a spy implies the exact denial that he swore he'd never do. And his merely human courage is probably running out about now too as he watches what happens to Jesus.

Peter got a one-on-one visit with Jesus after the Resurrection--mentioned but not described. I wonder if Jesus said anything to him then, or needed to.

Olympic tempest

Drag queens (those I've seen pictures of) create a caricature of femininity and mock it. The point of mockery is to offend. They were used in the Olympic tableau to mock and offend. So I conclude the the Olympic organizers' non-apology's claims that they regret that people were offended and that it was meant to be "inclusive" are both false. This would remain true whether or not the designers were as innocent of Western art as they imply they were.

Artemis project

Smarter Every Day's Dustin talked to the American Astronautical Society. I found it very interesting. He brings up some aspects of the Artemis project that I'd not heard about before. Yikes! I hadn't paid a lot of attention to their plans. The points he brings up sound crazy.

He recommends What Made Apollo a Success?; NASA document SP 287. I haven't read much of it yet.

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The rabbit hole that led me to that was this video he made about progress in learning how the flagellum motor works. It's pretty spectacular--a motor made out of proteins.

Maybe it makes sense

In an oldNFO video Ian suggests that a good gift for a fidgety person is a lock pick kit. A lock as a fidget toy...

Emulation

Years ago in grad school I was introduced to a display package called TopDrawer, which allowed you to take text columns of (usually) numbers and display them various ways. Most of the output devices were printers we didn't have, but the Tektronics option was quite useful, and later someone added a PostScript device option. It suited me down to the ground--it could handle fairly large tables, and because the input was text it wasn't hard to add more data or track down where the outliers came from. OTOH, it wasn't maintained.

I liked the idea well enough that when PAW came out I wrote a script to make it go read text files like those TopDraw had used. This way I could take advantage of PAW's better software portability and speed. PAW was intended to read binary data, but it used a Fortran variant as scripting language, so I could do what I wanted. And the text files were portable anywhere. True, text files aren't suitable for giant datasets, but I mostly didn't use huge ones for display--what's the point in plotting 5 million points on a picture? It looks like mud.

Even PAW dropped away (it never was very well supported) in favor of a kitchen-sink package called ROOT that used C++ as a scripting language. (I eventually had to manage the maintenance of packages that relied on low-level routines in ROOT, and developed a certain sourness about its support.) That was a bit messier to deal with, but I wanted something simple that let me visually inspect my raw data, and I wrote yet another script, with more of a TopDraw philosophy than actual emulation. I mostly used this for monitoring disk usage in a largish (several PB) set of file systems. (Users will use infinite space if available, and never clean up after themselves. I understand perfectly.)

Came the day when ROOT wasn't automatically supported in our configuration (I wasn't the only one who got grief from it), and I had to bite the bullet and use python like all the cool kids were doing--but still using text data as input. I wonder if Chaffee would approve.

How the mighty are fallen

Fermilab has had some issues with performance and meeting goals recently. Evaluations ranked it as the second worst in the country.

I recognize very few of the names. It has been quite a few years since I spent much time there, and even then I hung out with colleagues and not the administrators, or even the staff. I just didn't stay long enough each time. (and the names I recognize are some of the good guys)

Apparently they centralized Safety, which then lost close contact with the Divisions.

Fermilab's leadership is accused of cronyism and allowing a "toxic work environment." The incidents documented were certainly toxic; perhaps this was widespread, perhaps not.

Giorgio should have run the paper by a proofreader before submitting it; in one case the text reads the exact opposite of his obvious intent.

One of their problems is the ratio of administrators/auxilliary staff to actual workers and scientists. Part of what causes that imbalance is the regulations--even something like purchasing differs so much from ordinary business practice thanks to the many extra rules(*) that it constitutes a specialty of its own, and one scarce enough to demand high salaries that cause dissatisfaction among the already-working staff--assuming they are permitted to pay the high salaries. (If not, positions don't get filled.)

And they've made it harder and harder for the public to visit. The cited reason was security, but the lab does no secret research. Safety I could believe--you could kill yourself if you got into one of the labs and started monkeying with some high voltage or gas systems, and if you broke into a source cabinet you'd get the newspapers freaking out, though the danger was objectively less.

(*) When I was there, a colleague employed by Fermilab instead of a university had extra hoops to jump through in order to get travel approved; e.g. prove that American carriers didn't fly to the location, get extra layers of approval--starting long enough in advance that the conference date wasn't always fixed yet.

Gnostics

You may not thank me for reminding you of the Eurythmics most famous work: "Sweet dreams are made of this. Who am I to disagree? I travel the world and the seven seas. Everybody's looking for something. Some of them want to {use you/get used by you/abuse you/be abused}".

Yes, it's supposed to be a song expressing disillusion. The way it does is gnostic.

Those with the Knowledge know better than the rest of us, and are free from the demands of the world's illusions (like love). Check.

The original Gnostics thought material existence was flawed and even evil. Check.

The original Gnostics taught that there was a chain of creators and Aeons and whatnot. Doesn't quite match. Anyhow.

The song ties in to our strange reductionist belief that the meaning of things is always trivial; that the less beautiful/ thoughtful/ moral/ supernatural explanation is always the true one. There's no such thing as essence, only action, and only the actions that I care to monitor matter. Because I have the Knowledge.

The "operations-only" approach has its uses and strengths, but also unacknowledged limits.

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Early in my UW career I carpooled for a while with a woman from our neighborhood. One week she picked up her daughter too, who was due to be married shortly. Naturally she sat in the front and chose her favorite station, which was playing Sweet Dreams. As she sat back, satisfied with her selection, I hoped it didn't reflect her attitude to the upcoming wedding. Never found out...

Trying to imagine

This time when I read Psalm 97:5 "The mountains melted like wax at the presence of the Lord, At the presence of the Lord of the whole earth," I looked at it differently.

From the point of view of the mountain, what's the presence of the Lord like?

This would differ a bit from what happens when a human encounters the Uncontingent, since there's no mental or moral component.

The verse speaks of melting, and the first thing you think of is heat, and energy--infinite energy here. If I'm a mountain, and face infinite energy, I suppose I'd melt. And boil. And...

But think about what being a liquid means. Each atom isn't just right there in some crystal, it moves--it can be here, then there, or somewhere else a fraction of a second later.

OK, suppose I am a mountain in the presence of Someone to whom all possibilities are known, and are present in some sense. I've got crystals here and there, but with a slightly different history they might have been in slightly different places. If "mountain me" partook, however slightly, in that knowledge of the possibilities of myself, I would know myself as "not quite fixed," with every part as unstable as water among all the "could-have-been"s. Sort of like melting.

Argentine Armadillo Abattoir Question

AVI found a report about what looks like 19,000BC butchery in far South America. Why, he asks, did such early humans not do in the megafauna, as later ones seem to have done (though there are claims for climate change and meteors, and possibly all-of-the-above)?

I've seen a few artists' reconstructions showing fur-clad proto-Indians doing in mammoths. The weapons are generally spears, and spear points show up in mammoth bones. I don't recall seeing any images that included another tool, developed about 21,000BC (perhaps not in time for the earliest waves into the Americas): dogs.

I'd think it would be much safer and more effective to go after a mega-critter with a spear after it has been nicely tired out by your own private wolf-pack, or while it is confused which foe to face first.

I wonder how you'd estimate the effectiveness of hunting a lone mammoth (not going to have much success attacking a herd) with and without dogs to chivvy it. Without practicing various tactics on elephants, of course.

UPDATE: Found a picture.

Joe Pye weed

A heads-up. To stabilize a slope with plants that wouldn't require much attention, we planted prairie natives and some native milkweed. It turns out that Joe Pye weed spreads easily, grows quite tall, and overtops things like the monarch-bait milkweed. Fortunately it's easy to pull, but we hoped for a little less maintenance than that. And getting it out of the roses is going to be fun. And it turns out that the fall die-back means a lot of stalks to clear out--so much for trivial maintenance.

I guess there are no shortcuts and no plant-and-forget plans.

Merlin

The Merlin app has become popular in our family, and sees quite a bit of use. It isn't infalible--on one outing a woman a hundred yards away shouted for her daughter to come back, and Merlin promptly said it heard a trumpeter swan.

We were in Door County, and my eldest wondered if Merlin could be fooled by mimics. Within the minute, a strange call was identified as a ruffed grouse. There was nothing in that tree but bluejays. Quick answer(*).

FWIW, the dawn chorus isn't all the birds all at once. They have their entrances and their exits, as it were. First up were the cardinals; though I'm not sure why. Maybe they roost higher in the trees (they like thick bushes and tall trees), in line with the suggestion that the higher birds see the sun first.

(*) FWIW, we had a bluejay land on the birdbath on the back deck, and give a redtail hawk call--presumably to ensure privacy.

Likely myths

" Fable is, generally speaking, far more accurate than fact, for fable describes a man as he was to his own age, fact describes him as he is to a handful of inconsiderable antiquarians many centuries after. ... Men may have told lies when they said that he (King Alfred) first entrapped the Danes with his song and then overcame them with his armies, but we know very well that it is not of us that such lies are told. There may be myths clustering about each of our personalities; local saga-men and chroniclers have very likely circulated the story that we are addicted to drink, or that we ferociously ill-use our wives. But they do not commonly lie to the effect that we have shed our blood to save all the inhabitants of the street."

When do you stop using a writing system?

A question implicit in a post from almost five years ago: when did people quit using cuneiform? If Augustine didn't know the histories of the "Assyrians," maybe the use had been lost by then. I tried a prediction: Alexander the Great would have introduced the alphabet in a great way, and the complicated cuneiform system would have dried up--maybe quickly if the new Greek masters wanted official records translated.

So, what says wikipedia? Oh. Which cuneiform? There seem to have been a lot of them, from about 2900BC to the most recent object known made in 75AD; with a major change when Old Persian became dominant (e.g. Darius I, about 525BC)--which made it into a simplified syllabary. I wonder what future archaeologists would make of our computer texts -- alphabet plus pictographs. Would they try to detect the derivation of our alphabet from the emojis?

Yes, people have been trying to use AI to do more rapid translations, though "Predictably, the AI had a higher level of accuracy for formulaic texts, such as royal decrees or divinations, which follow a certain pattern. More literary and poetic texts, such as letters from priests or treaties, had a higher incidence of “hallucinations,”"

If an empire begins to crumble and its cities are overrun, will the conqueror care about the old history? Probably not much. The old literature? Eh. Maybe, but not obviously enough to make an effort to preserve it. That burden would lie on the entertainers. How about the old religious ritual records? Not so much; that burden rests on the clergy of the defeated gods, to make the case for honoring the gods of the land. How about old title records? William the Conqueror said the land all belonged to him now, and he'd fief it out--that probably wasn't a novelty. Still, it might be handy to keep the local administration running, working for you, so that would keep the old systems going awhile.

So maybe there was no great reason for the records to survive. Things like astrological texts, math, etc, would be translated by the practitioners for the use of their new students.

The Seleucids and early Parthians were still using cuneiform in the hellenistic period up to April 69 BC, though it wasn't the same as the very oldest cuneiforms.

This rabbit hole looks deep.

Assassination try

I was afraid this would happen. (and glad Trump wasn't killed!) The relentless demonization of Trump, and other politicians as well, logically leads to this kind of action. You don't negotiate with demons.

I was expecting a leftist loon of the usual stripe, the kind nobody wants to be around, stimulated to save the world by killing the demon. I wasn't expecting one of the brownshirts to be the attempted assassin. I expect to hear of very careful failure to analyze the funding for Antifa.

UPDATE: To be clear: I suspect he acted alone without his colleagues knowing, but logically you should investigate his associates as well, and I think that investigation would reveal that prominent figures are associated with the organization--and that therefore an investigation of Antifa will not be thorough.

UPDATE: The initial ID seems to have been wrong, and loon is probably the correct category. Fortunately.

MAM

As you can probably could guess from the previous post, we went to the Milwaukee Art Museum yesterday. Other people with you notice different things.

Some pictures tell a story, such as Grutzner's The Catastrophe and Waldmuller's The Interruption.

Others illustrate a story, and need explanation, such as Brocas' The Death of Phocion. I didn't recognize the situation in the picture, had no idea who it was, and had to have the story explained (in the label at the side). We explained the Sacrifice of Isaac to a young woman.

Others do neither, like Jawlensky's Landscape. Sometimes the technical aspects of a modern work showed considerable skill and care, but often they didn't.

Many things, such as much of the glasswork, had no meaning and didn't need it--they were just fun to look at. Which is pretty much what I usually want.

Idris Khan

The Milwaukee Art Museum had a special exhibition of the works of Idris Khan, including some made for the exhibit.

Early on, he experimented with overlays of pictures or musical scores or book pages.

In a way the result was like a time projection, in which everything "happens at once", or at least all the pages do.

Later on he created pictures by overlaying stamped phrases in sunburst patterns--not readable except on the fringes. So long as you don't try to read or understand the patterns, it is reasonably abstract, but there's no communication involved.

My take-away was that art relies on what you choose, but also on what you reject. Lumping everything together loses intelligibility and beauty. It's not a mode humans are made to appreciate: God can see everything at once but we can't.

Some of his stamps:

When it rained

In Africa my parents bought a number of board games to keep us kids amused and instructed--the rainy season was about half the year. The latter game never caught anybody's fancy, though Equations was frequently played, with an adjustment to the rules about challenges.

One year they brought home Coup d'etat by Hasbro. The title was pleasingly edgy, but the complicated game play had no particular bearing on the game conceit, and I'm not sure we ever finished a game.

Tactics 2 was a wargame--one of the first modern ones--and it took so long to play that it only got exercised three times. I wasn't old enough to appreciate it, I suppose, and when I was old enough, nobody else was interested. The Technical Advisory Staff included names my father knew from WWII, but meant nothing to me.

Some of us liked trivia games--not I. Especially when somebody else had played often enough to have memorized all the cards.

Monopoly got used a lot, and chess. Somebody's family got Gettysburg, but we looked at the complicated rules and noped. 3M got into games, selling bookshelf games in shelvable boxes. Twixt was good; Stocks and Bonds had a bug in the playing odds that we found quickly.

I remember playing baseball with 5 players total, and trying to make touch football work with a 7-year span of ages, but not in the rain, and there was a lot of rain. (And static-y TV only from 17:30 to 22:30) Books and board games... and homework, but that usually didn't take too long.

Naval militia

A recent squirrel chase through the net found me looking up naval militia, and then the naval militia(*) in Wisconsin. Wisconsin had one up until a bit after WWI, and recently proposed reviving it with centers in Milwaukee and Madison. (The proposal failed.)

Milwaukee is logical, but Madison? It has some lakes and the little Yahara River.

New York has one, and they used to assist in cargo loading when retrieving Flight 800 bodies and wreckage, and after 9/11 helped with evacuations, did logistical/clerical work, security, and first aid support. Their SeaBees put up a tent city for the emergency workers--there are a couple pages of bullet points. Now we're all grown-ups, and know the need to maximize the number of categories in a report (Assisted the Security Chief in moving his desk), but clearly there were ways to help out in a disaster that don't require that you be in a boat.

OTOH, I'm not sure what this would bring to the table that the Army National Guard wouldn't, except in oddball situations where the Reserve is stripped of one kind of skills and the Guard of another.

But we might still yet have our own naval militia.

(*) Not the same as privateers.

Grim future

From Real Clear History, an essay on confronting another Axis, looking at historical parallels to the budding and active conflicts now, and possible directions. It isn't pretty. In WWII, none of the Axis powers (including USSR) had a reasonable hope of dealing serious damage to the US homeland. That's not so true anymore with our current set of adversaries, and we're badly exposed overseas as well.

He's pretty sure China will use air and sea border controls to try to control Taiwan--not a blockade or an invasion. That puts us over a barrel.

Viewing Supreme Court Decisions

The Wisconsin State Journal yesterday had as its top banner headline "Limit for Jan. 6 charge"--the US Supreme Court decision, of course. The bottom story was "Bans upheld on sleeping outside"--another USSC decision.

Both stories will be presumed bad decisions in this country, and stir strong emotions: Trump-hate/fear and concern for the idealized homeless.

But the more important decision didn't appear until page 8--overturning Chevron. At least I assume that how we use laws to regulate ourselves is more important than the rather obvious observation that forbidding campsites in city parks isn't equivalent to hang/draw/quartering someone.

I assume the Journal knows its audience, and how to tickle its ears. Still...

Meanderthal

They walk among us. The most famous is no doubt Jim Blaine, but there's a touch of the breed in all of us whose websearching guideline is "Squirrel!"

I wish I knew to whom to give credit for the term.

Performance art

A wax sculpture of Abraham Lincoln softened in DC's summer heat.

It was placed outside of Garrison Elementary School as part of The Wax Monument Series by Virginia-based artist Sandy Williams IV. The replica is more than just a wax statue - it is also a candle. And this is not the first time it had issues with melting. The statue was installed at the same location last September, but the first version of the wax monument included over 100 wicks that were prematurely lit, melting a significant portion of the art installation ahead of its dedication ceremony.

If you look up her website, she likes the concept of destroying art:

By circulating and melting these miniature wax versions of famous monuments, people are given agency over these forms that are normally (legally) untouchable.

I wonder if the BBC reporter was genuinely surprised. The concept seems to owe something to voodoo.

Never Mind, We'll Do It Ourselves

The Inside Story of How a Team of Renegades Broke Rules, Shattered Barriers, and Launched a Drone Warfare Revolution by Alec Bierbauer and Col. Mark Cooter, USAF (ret) with Michael Marks.

The subtitle is a bit misleading--they weren't renegades, and the only rules broken were bureaucratic ones, and they got top cover for that. It's the story of how the Predator was modified and implemented for use in Afghanistan, first for observation and then armed.

It's a pretty upbeat tale on the whole. Just having a drone with a camera is only the start--where do you base it, how do you control it, and how do you get information to and between mutually hostile departments of the government (CIA and DoD)? And what do you do when you've found your target, but nobody wants to take responsibility for pulling the trigger? And it sounds obvious and easy to stick a rocket on the drone--but it's harder than it seems. The book's a book of problem-solving.

Of course the technology and tactics are all quite obsolete by now--the Ukraine war is a drone/counter-drone control/jamming arms race. Trent Telenko has been complaining that the US isn't taking drones or communications warfare seriously. If the book's any hint, he's probably right.

UPDATE: A man in our Bible study flew fighters in Afghanistan. He said that the initial default for a Predator was that if it lost communications signal, it should fly higher. This caused some near misses when circling fighters found an unmanned drone suddenly start climbing in front of them. The default programming got addressed, but the details had to be reviewed for each mission. "Just keep going straight" is OK for some situations, but not if Iran is a few miles over the border.

Starlink

I plead as my excuse that I was quite busy, and not speaking Portuguese or Spanish makes checking sources hard. But the story about a remote tribe getting addicted to social media when Starlink arrived didn't pass the smell test, and I didn't get around to properly vetting it. Social media are text-based/driven; is a remote tribe going to have the literacy rate to get so many caught up in it?

Waugh

From Robbery Under Law: "In the sixteenth century human life was disordered and talent stultified by the obsession of theology; today we are plague-sticken by politics."

The parallel is closer than he suggests, for politics is a religion for many of us.

Commencement

Granddaughter high school graduation was crowded but went smoothly. A gymnast did a back flip before receiving his diploma cover, the class clown got a lot of attention, and one name got drowned out by the continued cheering/blatting for the previous recipient, but otherwise all was orderly.

The student speeches were short. As freshmen they'd had to study from home for Covid reasons, and as juniors the high school had split in two, so there was a lot of congratulation about resilience and forging new paths and whatnot, and lots of talk about potential.

"Infinite potential," according to one speaker. If any of the students think they have infinite potential, they didn't take any substantive courses. I didn't like to contemplate the matter, but high school made it pretty clear that I wasn't any good at PE or very quick at learning foreign languages—not exactly infinite potential there.

We're making graduation do duty as a coming-of-age ceremony. Close, but no cigar. The high school probably still has the short course in "on turning 18" about adult responsibilities, but getting recognized by the school board for having survived a 4-year course of miscellaneous studies isn't the same as getting recognized by the community as being an adult citizen. I wonder if we even agree on what it means to be an adult anymore—what do we expect of a man or a woman?

They probably shouldn't ask me to address the students at commencement. I'd probably annoy them by pointing out the difference, and suggesting that the graduates not try to follow their passions, but their vocations—and spend some time thinking about what sort of legacy they want to leave when they die.

Pray to Live

by Henri J.M. Nouwen Thomas Merton: Contemplative Critic

It's a short book. The first half is Nouwen's description of his life and ideas, and the second half is quotations from Merton's work that illustrate the description.

Merton could be contradictory--saying one thing one time and the apparent opposite another.

His personal journey looking for solitude left him with a more expansive idea of how to achieve it, and the conviction that solitude made him more part of the community.

He flirted with notions from Zen, noting commonalities in practice of meditation, but was alive to the radical difference between that and Christianity.

He held a "we're all sinners" approach. The quotations from My Argument with the Gestapo are less than compelling literature. I hate to say it, but Merton sounded holier-than-thou. He grew sorry for some of his earlier attitudes, perhaps this was among them.

His writing on the early civil rights movement dug in hard into the importance of white repentance and being taught and transformed by the prophetic vision of the oppressed blacks. Some of it sounds very weird over 60 years later. The intervening years haven't been kind to the nice binary he worked from.

Merton wanted to be a hermit; he sought a union with God he thought was only possible in solitude. His attitude towards solitude changed with time, but he always seemed to have the conviction that the contemplative life was superior.

I'm not sure that's quite accurate. It seems to prefer "dis-incarnation", looking behind everything in creation to find God in "pure" form. But although some contemplation seems important to keep us from getting distracted by the superficial, it isn't obvious that it is a good ultimate goal. If we were to empty ourselves of all acts and thoughts and try to apprend God in as unmediated a way as possible, we would still be as limited by our own nature as if we were singing hymns in the choir.

I've tried to puzzle through aspects of incarnation, although not to my complete satisfaction, and my tentative opinion is that God knew what He was doing when He gave us bodies and announced that it wasn't good for man to be alone. Not all the time, anyway--Jesus went off away from His friends to pray alone, so some alone time is important.