Jove

Sippican Cottage found a scientist who coined a very useful phrase describing air forces (and some of the space force partisans): "Jupiter Complex."

"the ease with which they could keep erring mankind in order by threatening them (as if they were Jove himself) with atomic thunderbolts."

The same sort of dream plagued WW-2 ("The bombers will always get through" -- except they didn't, and they generally couldn't hit the broadside of a factory within a half a mile.), and I hear people touting the "rods from god" as though that would solve everything. Or that bunkerbusters will solve the last problems in Iran, to be up-to-the-minute about it.

Read it

Pronouns

There's been a time or two when it would have been nice to know pronouns for someone. When you've never met the collaborator and the name is unfamiliar and their language isn't English -- you can chase the odds when you talk about them and say "he", but you'll be (I was) wrong sometimes.

A few years back I attended a conference, and the name badges had a "my pronouns are" section. I wasn't the only one who didn't bother filling it out. In practice, as you can imagine, they were irrelevant. When you're talking to someone, you address them by name or by "you" or just by looking at them when you speak. And nobody bothered to ask what my pronouns were.

Face to face, it's slightly insulting -- perhaps designed to be so -- to demand that a man tell what his pronoun is. "Am I so un-masculine that you can't tell?" I imagine it's just as much or more so for a woman.

Dad-bod, male pattern baldness, 5-oclock shadow -- you figure it out.

Motto

The informal motto of our IT group was "We do this, not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy."

Seriously, when it comes to maintenance, "easy" is very important. You don't want to spend days futzing around every time somebody needs a software version change.

Boat of a Million Years

by Poul Anderson.

The first part of the book introduces the main characters, taking quite a while to tell their adventures--which is appropriate since you quickly learn that the main characters are immortal, albeit killable. He researched this pretty heavily, and describes cultures from Rus to the Commanche.

The second part turns on the effect of long life and computerized entertainment on humans, and seems surprisingly timely.

He has his own theories about sexual fidelity and religions (for immortals both can be temporary, though he's a bit friendlier to Buddhism), but he's a good story-teller and his ideas about what an entertainment society does to people seem apropos.

Raised beds

Drone-mounted lidar found "raised bed" lines at The Sixty Islands site on the Menominee River that seem to date from about 1000 to 1600AD. That takes in the both Medieval Warm period and part of the Little Ice Age, and in soil that's generally pretty poor, and with a short growing season. An earlier study found maize phytoliths in one bed, so they were growing at least some corn in a region at the hairy edge of doing so. A different study found a bit of charred maize dated to about 1400--in between the high and low temperature periods.

The raised-bed ridges apparently were used and rebuilt repeatedly (sometimes mixing in soil from nearby wetlands). Composting from kitchen waste made them more fertile -- and harder to date. The novelty of this paper lies in using lidar to discover the true extent of the cultivated area--possibly 10 times bigger than expected.

The Science article notes the evidence of maize being grown, and presumes they grew other things. The Cosmos article assumes that the forest environment would make it hard to grow crops--which is silly; they'd deforested the area, as the Science article says, by 1000AD.

An earlier study found maize phytoliths, which being silica don't tell much about DNA. I wonder if they had different breeds more tolerant of the shorter growing season and unexpected frosts, and presumably lower yield, too.

Since wild rice was available, I wonder if corn was a luxury trading crop.

Just for fun: teaching into the gaps

Some time back I proposed that the University institute a mandatory "Fill in the Gaps General Studies" course for undergrads, consisting of an Oxford-model(*) tutor/student (open doors) meeting in which the tutor figures out what the student doesn't know and assigns readings/watchings to – not quite fill in the gaps, but learn the outline for things they ought to know about.

They could shanghai time from researchers and postdocs to help fill up the tutor count (they take overhead from the grant money already, which gives a precedent). It would need a full-time team to review the tutors, especially if they try to vet the tutor's proposed general readings. If they imposed a set of readings I think I'd be apt to ignore it. It's a pass/fail course, of course.

Imagine that I came out of retirement for a while (deeply unlikely in the near term for health reasons) and participated in such a program.

Suppose I had a student for my proposed "General Studies" course in my office twice a week. A semester is 15 weeks, so that's 30 sessions. Yes, I doubled the number for this exercise, to make it easier.

I figure the students will come in several types:

1. literate and relatively well read and grumpy about having to take the class
2. literate and interested
3. relatively illiterate and likely grumpy.

The second type sounds like a delight, and the first type one might be able to work with. I figure "tell me about the last book you read" will show me in less than two minutes which of the three types I have.

Unfortunately I cannot trust the student in the third category to read assignments outside the office, so for some of them I would have to rely on in-office readings (30 minutes). The illiterate (who nominally can read and write but rarely exercise the skills) can maybe do 20-40 pages an hour, which translates to only 10-20 pages in my office. If I ask, as I probably should, that they write down quick notes as they go about words or ideas they don't understand, that slows them down more.

What can I assign the third group?

I figure since this is the USA, part of the West, informed by Christendom, other cultures are important but have to be lower priority.

For reference, in the Bible on the desk the gospel of Mark is 21 pages—at the high end for a slow reader in half an hour. A short dialog by Plato is about 26 pages (in one edition). (A life of Buddha can be found in 100, and of Muhammad in double that—I'd have to find children's versions of those, and they're lower priority anyway.)

• Chapters of Morte D'Arthur are sometimes short, but those don't give much of the flavor.
• Lots of poems are short. I think I'd want those read aloud: one or two for each era.
• Thumbnail history of Europe—not sure where to find one—needs to have a map. Maybe a video instead of reading?
• Thumbnail history of the USA—probably a video. Careful, some are invidious and some not very clear.
• For the math-deprived: There are some good videos out there that could be useful. Animations help illustrate some concepts. It's not the same as learning and doing, but if it gives a feel…
• Music: I probably stand in need of a little background reinforcement here too. My music theory is … um, deficient, and history has a lot of gaps.
• Science: I'd be tempted to lecture, but there are some good videos out there too.

You may notice a tendency to rely on videos with the semi-literate.

Figuring a list for the type 2 students – curious and ready to read – seems like more fun. What would you pick to make sure your student had a rudimentary background of the important stuff?

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(*) I know, Oxford uses the American plan these days. Probably cheaper.

Taste

When taste goes almost entirely away (water tastes very odd now), you start to learn just how central taste and eating is to your day and to being social. When you share food you expect that it will please the other--it's disappointing to disappoint them. "Thank you, it seems very nutritous." 'But the food you hoped would be delicious tastes like nothing at all.' You feel like their effort was wasted on you.

(I shouldn't say nothing tastes of anything--an apple tastes like a cucumber that's gone bitter. No clue why.)

Anyway, I walk near the kitchen and think "I've got a taste for peanut butter." OK, I can have some (I need to push the proteins and fats), but the taste ... not happening. And the swallowing is harder now. "Would you like to share this banana with me?" "You're tired; shall we order something?" Courteous, and even loving, but something's missing.

I'd never given much thought to it before, but taste suffuses much of my day.

That, together with a patch of nerveless flesh, could be a more-than-daily reminder of how contingent and temporary I am, and a reminder to be grateful for even the simplest things--like touch. It could be a little like a fast. But, habits are strong, and I get distracted easily. I'll try to remember.

Safety vs conservation

What is a museum to do with the radioactive fingerprints of Marie Curie? Erase for safety, or preserve for the historical value?

Applied statistics

"It turns out that simultaneous chemo with the radiation makes the cancer more susceptible and has better outcomes."

The devil is in the details, of course--I can read studies too, and they are chasing a few percent change based on a low statistics study with a slightly different situation. I'm all for that, of course, but I sense greater confidence than the studies actually justify. I was told one thing, but when I looked it up I found yes and no studies and a meta-study that said "not a big effect."

But everybody is confident. I suspect that that's a statistics thing too: patients do better when the doctors and nurses are confident.

Me? The odds are in my favor, but it's in God's hands. I'll keep plugging. It's easy to say that right now; they warn that the hard part is still ahead--3 weeks to go and months to recover.

Plants can protect from fire too

California has a plan for firesafetythat involves banning plants within 5 feet of homes. The linked article says "Hey, wait, green plants can actually protect houses (they show a dramatic example). Especially if they're properly watered.

Properly watered. Um, the big fire was in the LA area. Maybe the regulators are right.

Academia

AVI linked to an essay on the perverse incentive in academia, pointing to systemic issues(*) surrounding a need for novelty and a lack of verification of claims, with a side order of nihilist "What is truth?"

Drag the camera back for a wider picture.

What's a university for; what does it do?

0. Certify that degree-holders were able to show up on time for a few years and demonstrate a threshold level of intelligence. I will pass over this in silence.
1. Multiple departments will each teach a body of knowledge (or learning, or maybe even culture, you pick) to several different groups:
   • General students, who may or may not ever refer to it again but who are presumed to be better cultured and disciplined people for having learned it.
   • Scholar-specialists who will continue studying or practicing in the field: for example engineers and scientists, doctors, and perhaps writers.
   • Scholar-teachers who will go on to teach in the field, if not actually practice. (Scholars of 15'th century French literature tend not to write much 15'th century French literature.)
2. Provide an environment for scholarship or research, or sometimes even the survival of a discipline. This may be controversial, but it's the way they work now.
   • Survival of a discipline: Consider a rare specialty, such as Tibetan language literature. If the scholar of poetry is in one university and of novels is in another, pity the student who wants to study the language. It's better to consolidate and specialize, and have one university with two and the rest with none. This applies to research specialties as well. Once nuclear physics was extremely common, and a department could have a very lively and effective research team, but as many problems were solved and other fields became more popular, many teams dwindled to the point where they were not effective in transmitting knowledge nor attracting students. So, despite the name, universities have to specialize sometimes.
   • Research in STEM has been very fruitful, and very prestigious. I'll come back to that latter point later. This attracts money and talent, and grows the body of knowledge in those fields that practice it. And while it may not help as much as a winning football team, it reflects well on the university.

OK. That's a bit generic, of course, but it'll do.

What does a university have on offer?

Broadly, it has the humanities and the sciences and some specialized training programs (like law). The training programs themselves seem (from outside) to concentrate on imparting a "body of knowledge."

In mathematics and the hard sciences, you can discover new things. In fact, a master of the field is expected to be able to contribute something new to the body of knowledge. Whether he succeeds later may depend on how hard the problems he sets himself, but his "masterpiece"--a work done to prove his skill, was new work (The PhD dissertation marks the boundary between a journeyman and a master).

A science has a body of knowledge (more than a human can learn in a lifetime, typically), that the teachers pass along, but also a growing part. Maybe the university is involved in the growing, often not--they can't do everything.

At the other end of the spectrum you have a body of knowledge like "Ancient Greek Literature," which is complete and will not grow any more. Teachers transmit this body, and whatever assists (history, references to Persian literature, etc)--and there's not a lot to add. One can tweak a little at the fringes, but there aren't any breakthroughs available unless somebody finds substantial Vedic influence on Sophocles. It is what it is.

FWIW, I checked the UW library system a few years back and found 11,627 titles including the name Shakespeare. Some will be using the name for other purposes (Age of Shakespeare, etc), but a lot is (I looked at the shelves) writing about him--most of which is likely of little use in understanding or appreciating the bard. I mean the word "little" literaly; as in miniscule but not non-zero.

In between you have fields such as English literature, which is a huge and growing body of work. One might hope that scholars would be able to write literary masterworks of their own, but I haven't observed this to be a general rule. Which is a shame, but teaching how to appreciate great works is good.

You also have philosophy, which some have described as a long conversation where, while it may be tough to come up with something truly new, one can join in and make some part of the to and fro your own.

As the linked essay points out, in disciplines (Is that term even appropriate for a field whose research is so undisciplined?) like sociology you find a hunger for novelty that apes the "learning new things" in STEM, but applied to a field where most of the knowledge is ancient(**). Instead of trying to transmit their known bodies of knowledge, these fields imitate the fields where real and verifiable research is the norm.

Many don't seem to understand the purpose of their field.

"Physics envy" seems to underpin a fair bit of the problem. Conservator, curator, custodian: even "Ancient Master"--just don't have the same respect as discoverer. Few want to just say "For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance..."

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(*) I know, but here the "systemic" adjective really does apply.

(**) and widespread--so much that one wonders about the value-added of a degree

Oil

In Benedict XVI's book set on Jesus, he mentioned that though water, bread, and wine were mentioned in John's gospel, there didn't seem to be anything referencing oil.

That did seem curious: oil was used for anointing, right? I hadn't noticed that before. I used the Gutenberg KJV to look.

Genesis has oil put on pillars to mark a place of worship. 2 references.

There are 11 uses of the word "oil" in reference to the temple lamps, and 55 for putting on the offerings. Note: two explicitly don't involve oil—the sin offering and the jealousy investigation offering.

39 are for some kind of anointing, 14 have to do with food, and 29 are kind of generic (produce of the land, etc). Perfume shows up once, as does oil for the skin and for general health. 3 times for healing, 2 times for use in other lamps, and 3 times the oil of gladness appears.

The only things that stand out to me are the exceptions to the oil on the offering. I don't think the jealousy offering has any significance to Jesus' mission (did the spouse commit adultery?). The sin offering, though…

Grim

There's an interview with Grim about his Arthurian novel Arms & White Samite. Check it out. Read his book.

Sacred relics

We humans are more like waves than statues. They estimate that nearly 100% of our atoms are replaced within 5 years.

Suppose an adult is about 60 liters of atoms, and each liter is about $10^{26}$ atoms/liter (for water, which is most of us).

The biosphere is pretty big. Since most of it is ocean, if I assume that the ocean gets churned and mixed on the scale of centuries, I can take that as a conservative estimate of the biosphere: about $1.4 \times 10^{21}$ liters.

So, taking a single human from about 2000 years ago, and you today, then ${60 \times 60} \over {1.4 \times 10^{21}}$ liters ${\times 10^{26}}$ atoms/liter says that the overlap of atoms between a human then and now is 25 million.

In other words, there are north of 20 million atoms in your body now that were once in Jesus Christ. And likewise for your neighbor. First class.

St. Maximus wrote "Christ is baptized, not to be made holy by the water, but to make the water holy."

Tree frog bedding

One instance of laptops in the classroom

I've read complaints that students aren't attending to class lectures but to distractions on their laptops. I can believe it--the temptation to distraction is gigantic. For me, anyhow.

I used to go to collaboration meetings for CMS at CERN. The ages of the participants ranged from early 20's up into 70's. The first meeting was held in the main auditorium, and the first talk was the last quarter in review, plans, and status of the machine. Everybody went, and I invariably got there late enough to either have to stand or at best sit in the far back. (the morning after a long flight and time zone shift, of course)

This was followed by overview talks from the various detector groups and physics groups--no details, just the big pictures.

The hall was dark so you could see the slides displayed.

That is, it was dark in the room until the first talk ended. Then there came a brightening as hundreds of laptops opened.

From the back I could see a sampling of what people were doing. About half started finishing up their own powerpoint presentations, and most of the rest were answering emails or working on code: Slowly, because the WiFi wasn't quite up to handling a hundred laptops at once.

This anecdote is probably not applicable to your average college student.

MHD

From AVI's pointer to Construction Physics I wound up looking over Yamata-1, and then wondering about MHD electricity generation, since the initial article said 20T magnets were lighter and cheaper. Cool idea--propel your ship using electromagnetic forces on seawater. You can guess some of the problems easily.

Maybe that would make MHD generation more feasible too.

MHD electricity generation gives more bang at higher fluid speeds, so post-boiler exhaust isn't ideal. Using a "flame"(*) to put a plasma through a strong magnetic field would tend to push positive ions to one side and negative to the other, to be captured by respective sets of electrodes to produce DC current.

The devil is in the details, of course--said hot plasma is apt to be good at eroding the electrodes. I'm getting tired and going to call the research quits for tonight, but I wonder if injecting streams of cold gas to flow along the walls of the expansion MHD chamber would help protect the electrodes.

That would increase the resistance, of course, but might be worth it.

I don't doubt somebody else has tried this already.

(*) You can find youtube videos of people trying MHD with a small rocket motor.

Taste

Even distilled water tastes different--almost medicinal. Of course water is medicinal, in its way, if I drink 3 quarts a day.

Instead of competing with others' cookouts we served up a lunch-time "goopy board" such as Rosary College once served to students cramming for finals: DIY ice cream conconctions with selections of toppings. The sundae had a slight undertaste; a harbinger.

Spinach still tastes mostly like spinach, but Usinger's ham tastes flat. We'll see how this plays out.

Memorial Day

Memorial Day isn't a very personal day for us. While our families have had men serving in wars from WW-I through Vietnam, and some friends who served in more recent ones, all safely returned home -- for which we are grateful. (I turned 18 just as the draft was discontinued.)

To keep the day from being abstract I must put pictures of strangers in front of me and exercise my imagination: what if that were me, or my son?

I hope some such image as this is on the President's office wall. All too often there's no choice but war, but I pray that we never go into war just because some politician feels insulted. Nor fail to when we ought just because some politician fears not getting reelected. There's a truly bloody price for mistakes--the price for success is already high enough.

A prophet because he is a prophet

He who receives a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet’s reward; and he who receives a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man’s reward.

This reminds one of 1 Samuel 30:24: that the soldiers given unglamorous assignments should be rewarded like the headliners.

There's a lot in that little sentence. The world is made with friction and disintegrating forces, so that a thing once made is not made forever; it must be maintained and sometimes even remade.

Those of us who merely maintain the garden are co-creators of the garden with the ones who made it in the first place. We have the honor of participating in its creation, through its maintenance: two sides of a coin.

OK, I'm not a prophet (though one never knows), but if I welcome a prophet and put the word given him into action, I join with him in his work and share in his reward.

Even if I didn't think of it myself, if I help that "righteous man", encourage and honor him (or her--I can think of many), I participate in their righteous work.

We're one body in the church in Christ. When one part hurts, all do; when one is honored, all are.

Jesus' statement is apparently even broader than just that. After all, not all who "receive a righteous man" are members of that body. But perhaps verse 40 gives encouraging context: "He who receives you receives Me, and he who receives Me receives Him who sent Me." If they receive His missionaries they receive Him, and even if they only receive a righteous man they are on the road to receiving Him.

But notice--the welcomer is not claiming equal honor with the prophet.

Perhaps Chesterton had an off day

Chesterton had ideas about Gilbert and Sullivan, which might interest someone curious about his ideas about satire. Somehow, though he calls their works masterpieces, he seems dubious somehow:

For instance, in some of his best operas, notably in H.M.S. Pinafore and The Gondoliers, he seems obsessed with the notion that there is something very funny about the idea of two babies being mixed up in their cradles, and the poorer infant being substituted for the richer. But there is nothing particularly odd or original, or even amusing, about the mere idea of a substituted baby. That baby has been a stock property of many tragedies and numberless melodramas. To blast it with a yet more withering bolt of criticism, it has even happened in real life.

I've read The Bab Ballads, and not found myself returning to it. Perhaps that's a defect in my appreciation, but I think Gilbert did better work with Sullivan than alone.

Traveling on the way

In The Great Divorce Lewis had a ghost say and be answered: "'to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.' 'If that were true, and known to be true, how could anyone travel hopefully? There would be nothing to hope for.'"

Which makes perfect sense.

And you know the way where I am going.” Thomas said to Him, “Lord, we do not know where You are going, how do we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.

A little different: here the Way is also the Destination; the Trinity.

An older man's take on the song

I heard "Castles in the Air" along with everybody else back in the day. It struck me at the time was that the singer was a coward. Aside from that, the notion that the "cocktail generation" lived in an emotional desert didn't seem odd--it was in the air, and perhaps even overkill. Nobody I knew was into that kind of social climbing. It wasn't fashionable; easy to disdain. Mountains and forests cool, big city yuck.

I ran across the song today and the cowardice of it fairly screams now, and ... wait a minute, can we hear her side of this? McLean had some issues with wives; maybe there's some connection.

Maybe the sensuous nature of music makes it easier to just take the singer's word for what's going on.

Rise and fall of the key ring

When I was quite young, I typically never even carried a key to the house. Either someone was home already, or I'd stop at a neighbor's house, or just play outside until somebody showed up.

In Africa, it was pretty much the same. Sometimes I'd have one of those old round keys, but usually not.

In the States I had a dorm room key that I just kept in my pocket. In grad school, that turned into keys for the office, car, and apartment, on a ring in my pocket.

That's not the best way to carry a key ring, and I found myself sewing up holes in the pocket. My usual warning was feeling something falling down inside my pants--usually dimes. Sometimes (confession here) if I was in a hurry, I just used a stapler to fix the pocket. Yeah--don't do that. It works for a week or two, and then the holes get bigger.

At work I needed building, office, library, lab room keys, as well as 2 locks for home, and car keys. And a few additionals--bike lock, etc. I got a belt clip and hung keys off that.

More responsibilities, more keys. Not so many as the janitor or our chief engineer/building manager, but heavy enough.

Then I learned that hanging that much weight on a car's ignition switch could, and in my case did, loosen something in the lock mechanism that would keep it from turning. Car keys went on a carabiner that hung from the main key ring.

When I started traveling overseas for work, I divided the keys into personal and work rings, and hung one from the other, taking off car and work rings when I traveled.

Yes, it was messy, but my fingers learned where to go. And I generally left the work key ring in the drawer at work.

Retirement removed the work keys.

Dropping to one car removed one key from the carabiner, though I still carried a lockout key for some of the son's and daughter's cars.

And now the carabiner and car keys go on the dresser top. The belt clip's ring feels a bit naked without the extra dangly part. But the chemo and associated meds leave me too drowsy to safely drive.

I can probably safely remove another 3 keys from the remaining ring too.

There's a history in the keys in the dish too, if I could remember which was which anymore.

Intelligence

Hiroo Onoda came to my attention again today. He was the Japanese soldier who held out for 29 years after the war's end. He was celebrated in Japan on his return, though not so much in the Philippines, where he may have killed 30 civilians over the years.

He and the others (who eventually died/surrendered) rejected the leaflets and even letters from the soldiers' families (!!) as tricks. A "Japanese adventurer" found him, and arranged for his former commander to order his surrender.

Onoda had been trained as an intelligence officer.

Go figure.

Live in Concert

The billboard advertised a performer I'd never heard of, but that headline brought something else to mind first.

"make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose."

Primitive or not?

Cisplatin uses a heavy metal (platinum) to differentially kill more cancer cells than normal ones. Even taking care with the dosage and ameliorations, the heavy metal poisoning inevitably does damage to the body (e.g. kidneys, nerves, etc).

That might sound familiar. Paracelsus proposed mercury to deal with syphilis, for humor theory (and magical) reasons. (Inducing diuresis and salivation would excrete whatever mis-humor was causing the disease.) Of course the treatment killed quite a few patients and crippled many more. They kept on using it, though. Why?

Some patients, would "spontaneously recover" from the primary and secondary lesions. This could be attributed to whatever treatment was used (yay mercury! yay guiac wood!). And mercury ointment could aid healing of lesions. And it turns out that mercury is "strongly spirilocidal," so it could cure--provided it didn't kill.

If bismuth hadn't been developed for use, and penicillin not found, I wonder if we'd still be using mercury for the disease--presumably much more carefully calibrated. Heavy metal chemotherapy for a deadly disease...

Trade-offs

On one of AVI's posts I commented: "How many IQ points are we willing to trade for a 30% better shot at getting rid of a cancer?"

I pulled the 30% number out of the air; for some cancers adding chemo to radiation gives a factor of 2 improvement.

Typically I've assumed my "value-added" to a conversation lay in "knowledge/analytical skill/sideways take/humor", but what if that's not always so?

I have it on good authority that other qualities are sometimes more valued.

Learn something new every day

I lived there for some time, but never realized(*) that Liberia grew its own coffee variety: "quite different (and somewhat superior) in every way compared to other species, including Arabica and Robusta". It's a bit rarer and pricier, and has a "more complex flavor profile with distinct fruity and floral notes."

The main growers are now Malaysia and the Philippines, not Liberia.

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(*)Of course I hadn't acquired a taste for coffee then. Nor have I now, though if there's nothing else to drink or I need to stay awake ...

Medical technology

They warn you that an MRI makes very strange and loud noises. That's ignorable.

Your body position is a bit cramped. For half an hour, that's OK.

They warn that it's a tight space, and not for claustrophobes. Close your eyes to keep the lasers out, and you won't notice a thing.

The personalized mask tries to clamp your head into position, pushing on the base of your nose. That gets old in seconds. I don't know about other people, but I felt like I had to be proactive about breathing through the thing; it didn't feel natural or easy.

No surprises, which was good.

At the end of the Exodus

At Bible study this morning, the teacher noted that during the exodus, the Israelites had been eating manna, and at the end they are starting to see fruit. Maybe not the first time, but they'd have had to trade for it before, and the description in Exodus doesn't describe a lot of opportunities for trade. What would the land's bounty have looked like to them?

Once they got into the land, what were they to do with it? Herding they knew. Planting and harvesting--more theory than practice. Whatever their grandparents may have taught them wouldn't be entirely relevant to the new environment, which had different landscapes, different watering, and different crops.

Though the book of Joshua talks of expelling all the existing inhabitants of the land, that's clearly not what happened, as seen in Joshua and Judges and Samuel. So it's a safe bet that the Israelites learned from the locals how to plant and harvest. And what sacrifices you needed to make.

Scarlet or white ribbon?

Youtube tossed up at me a video claiming that the Talmud recorded a change in the scapegoat ritual at the Temple at about 30AD. I didn't watch the video; typically there's little addressing of ambiguities in such things.

The ritual of the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement is probably, if not familiar, at least known, to anybody who has read Leviticus. As part of it, the priest took two goats, cast lots for them. One was sacrificed, and the other driven into the wilderness.

The Talmud and Mishnah and Epistle of Barnabas and Tertullian mention a couple of modifications, not spelled out in Leviticus.

A red ribbon was divided, part tied around the scapegoat, and part {retained in the temple/tied to a rock near the cliff}. The scapegoat was then {driven out of the city/taken to a cliff and pushed off}. I suppose that as the area grew more populated, wilderness as such got to be harder to come by. Whichever, when the scapegoat died, the retained part turned white, presumably representing the purification of sins per Isaiah 1:18.

I hadn't run across that before. From the Palesinian Talmud:

During all those days that Shim‘on the righteous was alive, the scarlet ribbon would [always] turn white (malbin). After Shim‘on the Righteous died—at times it would turn white (malbin) and at times it would turn red (ma’adim).

Shim'on the Righteous was "a semi-mythical high priest whose period of activity is roughly dated to the third century BCE and who serves in rabbinic literature as the ultimate embodiment of a forlorn golden age"

The Babylonian Talmud is similar; except that instead of sometimes turning red it sometimes "did not turn white."

It should be noted that in another tractate of the Babylonian Talmud (Rosh HaShanah 31b) the same passage appears with somewhat different wording: “Forty years before the Temple was destroyed the scarlet ribbon would not turn white, but would turn red

A slightly different citation, from the Babylonian Talmud:

It was taught: Forty years before the Temple was destroyed the [flame] of the western candle would die down, and the scarlet ribbon would turn red (ma’adim), and the lot [with the Name] would come up in the left [hand], and they would lock the doors of the Temple hall in the evening and rise in the morning and find them open. Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai said to it: Temple, why are you frightening us? We know that you are destined to be destroyed,

Taken by itself the latter passage's symbolic connection to Jesus is obvious: temple isn't needed anymore. But the presence of the other references makes it ambiguous.

FWIW, The Torah.com notes a number of pagan uses of red thread and scapegoat-like ceremonies (e.g. "Now, any evil of this camp that has been found in person, cattle, sheep, horses, wild asses, or donkeys—right now, here, these rams and the woman have removed it from the camp. Whoever finds them, may that population take this evil plague for itself.")

I draw no conclusions from this, except that even things that seem to be clearly prescribed may have unexpected accretions.

A heads-up about Multi-Factor-Authentication

You can still be phished.

The malicious link leads to the attacker’s proxy server that, thanks to the phishing-as-a-service toolkit, looks identical to the real Google login site (except for the URL displayed in the address window). The user then enters their username and password.

The proxy then forwards the credentials to the real Google site. Google will then send the proxy server an MFA request, and the proxy server sends it back to the victim, who is expecting it since they believe they’re trying to log into the legitimate Google page. The victim then sends the MFA code to the proxy server, which sends it to the real Google site.

Studying war and learning?

Commander Salamander wrote about US fixations about how to fight wars; how the idea that "Both graduated pressure and rapid decisive operations promised efficiency in war" had tangled and crippled us both in Vietnam and in the later wars we're fought in. "The conviction that technology offered a panacea not only impeded U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to begin with but also slowed the ability to adapt once the true nature of those wars became apparent."

I've been somewhat immersed in WWII Pacific history recently, and see parallels with the Japanese decisive naval battle doctrine with which they hoped to beat the USA. One great victory cripples your enemy's fleet and leaves control of the seas to you. That Mahan's theory didn't quite apply in this case (the US could keep building ships even if the Japanese controlled the Pacific), and that technology changes rendered the doctrine much less relevant, didn't seem to ever sink in.

We field amazingly sophisticated technologies--but the weapon count is low. The Houthis have been exercising our ship defenses, forcing us to chew through expensive systems faster than we can replenish, using cheap stuff.

I wonder: What lessons have our war colleges learned from the Houthis, Afghanis, Ukranians and Russians? And what will those lessons translate into? Are procurements driven by projected needs or by politics and "ooh, shiney"?

I'm not looking forward to cartels (and then others) starting to use cheap drones to attack law enforcement and judges in this country. I suspect it won't be too long. Do we have countermeasures planned?

Specificity

I got to thinking about confessions this morning, recalling a little earlier mention of such things, when I ran across a post on Anecdotal Evidence about "kitch":

"This insulation of kitsch from experience," Kimball writes, "helps to explain its peculiar abstract quality: Kitsch is always ready to sacrifice the particular for the general, the specific for the universal, the concrete for the abstract."

...

"Instead of attempting to communicate individual beautiful, true, evil, human phenomena, kitsch strives to incarnate beauty, truth, evil, and humanity without loss. Art is more modest. It sees the universal in the particular, true, but it does not thereby dispense with the particular; its gaze remains focused on the particular because it realizes and accepts that, for man, the world speaks not abstractly or all at once but piecemeal, in fragments, through this tree, this landscape, this face, this web of relationships in which I find myself."

It's way easier to confess to the generic sin than the particular. The memory of a particular instance of (e.g.) rudeness still has the power to humiliate me in a way that no general admission that "I was rude to some people" can.

We don't live among Forms, but specific instances. Love is generic, yes, but it exists--is incarnated--in a particular smile, in setting out the needed item before the loved one needs it, the unseen works as well as the surprise cakes.

Likewise with the sins. Generic "Sin" afflicts us all, particular forms beset us differently, but what curses us most are the instances of it we put in our lives. Instances we don't like to think about; abstractions are easier.

Instances are life; abstractions are disembodied. Maybe angels have some kind of life of archetypes; not us.

Church Music

AVI relinked his Church Music post(*), the one that generated so much discussion. apparently not directly. Oh well, read it anyhow I had a few views; this is where they came from.

Years ago we joined a large church in the area. It had good preaching, teaching, opportunities to serve -- but the music hurt.

No, I don't mean it offended my aesthetic senses, though it wasn't my favorite style; I mean that the first song was set at roach-killer volume (to remind people to stop talking?), and it only improved slightly from there. It was just too loud. I not only couldn't hear myself (the way musicians who use monitors can hear themselves), it hurt my ears if I sat in the wrong row.

I started to get quietly grumpy about that.

One day I got sat down and inaudibly interrogated about that:

You've got a bad attitude here.

Yes.

You don't like the music. You're starting to spread that dislike out.

I guess so.

I don't guess. Are the band players your enemies?

Well, not exactly. But.

What did I tell you to do with your enemies?

Oh. Love them.

And here that means?

Serve them.

I volunteered to do the monitor board. I dressed in inconspicuous dark clothes and went behind the curtain to run the giant thing during rehearsals and services, and whatever mix they wanted, I tweaked for them. I changed batteries, adjusted the lectern...

After a few years they started up a new service, with more traditional music, and needed people to run that--which is where I am now.

Several years of serving the teams trying to praise God with loud music didn't give me a great love for the style, though I understand it better now. What it did give me was a love for them.

All kinds of plastics

I'd been intermittently looking at microplastics in the body and some of their sources.

Recent events led me to look up do microplastics come from dissolving sutures?

Yes, they can; though the plastic is different: polyglycolic acid. Apparently you can get tiny shards as it decomposes, and they worry about cells ingesting them, but that's not what the bulk of the paper above is about.

Microplastics seems a wider topic than I thought.

On a related note, I wonder about the safety of biodegradeable plastics in general. Something that is "starch-based" is partly plastics and partly starch, and it is designed to "break down", i.e., be at least partly digested. But is this a little like soap? Does the digestible part bring the indigestible along with it into the organism? "Here's a little starch to sweeten the taste of the propylene fragment."

RFK Jr

We wonders.

Are the proposed bans on dyes based on solid risk analysis that was just held up for some reason? If so, what caused the delay?

Or are they subject to discretion--in which case, why does one man have that kind of discretion? It seems a bit arbitrary.

Africa is a big place

and stories that lump it all together don't give a very enlightening picture of what diets are like in any one place. You're not likely to get local Fufu (from cassava) and Fura (fermented millet) in the same place.

This article is about fermenting for preservation, not alcohol. Preservation matters: "The climate makes the preservation of fresh farm products such as milk, fruits, and vegetables very challenging, resulting in reports of over 70% loss of some products yearly"

That 70% sounds a bit high.

Francis

I'm an outsider in many ways here: not Catholic, not involved in Catholic disputations in the USA, and absolutely not involved in disputations within the Vatican. Quite a few things may have had a very different appearance when viewed from there. For example, I did not understand the why's that went into restricting the Tridentine Mass. I'm told there were worries about divisions, perhaps more visible in Rome than to me.

What the standard media reports about religion is generally ignorant down to the bone, and I gather that I cannot simply just trust Catholic social media either. I regarded some reported pronouncements askance (ignoring the political ones), but figured there was something I wasn't getting--sometimes the truth of what was actually said. I wished Francis well when he started, and wish him well as he goes before us--may the Lord have mercy on him and on us all. I gather he did a lot of good work, and that doesn't usually make news.

I am thankful that, despite the unhappy truth of Maxim 483 below, I don't recall ever joking about him being Catholic.

Maxims revisited

Going on from a maxim, I decided to have a look at the most famous: Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims by François duc de La Rochefoucauld

Most of the corpus is clever, though not always edifying or wise. A little acquaintance with The Four Loves clears out some confusion he suffers from. It took me quite a while to read through the work, not because I was slow, but because I found the cynicism (especially about love) a bit hard to take. ("63.—The aversion to lying is often a hidden ambition to render our words credible and weighty, and to attach a religious aspect to our conversation." Um. No.)

A few caught my eye.

• 8.—The passions are the only advocates which always persuade. They are a natural art, the rules of which are infallible; and the simplest man with passion will be more persuasive than the most eloquent without.
• 36.—It would seem that nature, which has so wisely ordered the organs of our body for our happiness, has also given us pride to spare us the mortification of knowing our imperfections.
• 127.—The true way to be deceived is to think oneself more knowing than others.
• 150.—The desire which urges us to deserve praise strengthens our good qualities, and praise given to wit, valour, and beauty, tends to increase them.
• 152.—If we never flattered ourselves the flattery of others would not hurt us.
• 159.—It is not enough to have great qualities, we should also have the management of them.
• 300.—There are follies as catching as infections.
• 313.—How is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?
• 318.—We may find means to cure a fool of his folly, but there are none to set straight a cross-grained spirit.
• 327.—We own to small faults to persuade others that we have not great ones.
• 372.—Most young people think they are natural when they are only boorish and rude.
• 423.—Few know how to be old.
• 432.—To praise good actions heartily is in some measure to take part in them.
• 437.—We should not judge of a man's merit by his great abilities, but by the use he makes of them.
• 439.—We should earnestly desire but few things if we clearly knew what we desired.
• 442.—We try to make a virtue of vices we are loth to correct.
• 462.—The same pride which makes us blame faults from which we believe ourselves free causes us to despise the good qualities we have not.
• 477.—The same firmness that enables us to resist love enables us to make our resistance durable and lasting. So weak persons who are always excited by passions are seldom really possessed of any.
• 481.—Nothing is rarer than true good nature, those who think they have it are generally only pliant or weak.
• 483.—Usually we are more satirical from vanity than malice.
• XXIV.—The most subtle folly grows out of the most subtle wisdom.
• LXXVI.—Many persons wish to be devout; but no one wishes to be humble.
• LXXXII.—It is more easy to extinguish the first desire than to satisfy those which follow.

Some of these are really good: "To praise good actions heartily is in some measure to take part in them." That may sound a hair familiar: "he who receives a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man’s reward."

Latest

At Amazon

Computer organization

I wonder if I should run longer power/HDMI cables up the bookcase, and try suspending the monitor from the ceiling--adjustable with a chain loop. Less desk clutter, better monitor height, and I could get it out of the way when I wanted to just look out the window or read.

Work

AVI has a useful post up on work. What's it good for?

There's a little paradox in life. Most of our greatest joys come from using our gifts to serve people we care about. And nobody likes being treated as a servant.

As a Christian, I suspect that the first part of that--the joys--come from being made in the image of God who is love. The second part I think we understand: we want to see love too.

I look a mess

and the incisions will need TLC, but the big tumor is gone, and I'm home. So I will rest "according to the Sabbath."

The weather usually doesn't cooperate

but the aurora page is nice to monitor -- just in case. The other day it reported a storm. A Kp of 7 meant it would be visible down into Illinois. There are a couple of places outside of town that have decent viewing possibilities.

Of course this was at 2 in the afternoon, so I decided not to drop everything and drive.

If you have clear nights, have a look at the page -- maybe there'll be a show. The first time I saw the aurora I was flying across the Atlantic, and the show was great, but distant. The second time they seemed to be almost straight up above us (about 43 degrees north). I haven't gotten bored yet.

Google AI answers

I don't like it. Its results seem plausible, but I caught it halucinating tonight. I was looking up "farebox recovery" for the Geneva public transportation system. The first query said (correctly), that there wasn't any information about this online. (There wasn't the last time I checked either, several years ago--the city budget info wasn't online.) The second time it claimed a record high farebox recovery of 185%. I tracked that number down to a PDF comparing different cities--that number (the world's highest) was Hong Kong's, though Geneva was listed among the cities.

A third time it claimed 10%, but I don't know where it got that number.

Beware of Artificial Imagination.

Lent-ish

This has been an interesting Lent. I gather (it wasn't part of my family's tradition) that Lent should be marked by fasting/abstaining on the one hand and good works on the other--though most depictions emphasize the fasting and using the times of "I miss that" as reminders to pray.

My Lent has been marked more with headache/neckache/earache/eyeache and impatience for Good Friday when the big tumor comes out. I find aches and pains distracting; not reminders of anything except ouch. At least they say the prognosis is good.

I wrote this "Lenten reflection" when the thing was about a third its present size.

        Do your own thing?

Forty grams of lawless death
  here masquerades as life.
Love and life know form and rule,
  But selfish strangling lumps
Formlessly invade the rest
  To doom themselves or more.
We, members of each other,
  Sate lawless lusts and lie,
Rogue cells disdaining order,
  Metastasized with pride.

Long for the new bodies
Long for the new Body

Wrong kind of bird

Roberts Field has had power outages, and sometimes planes have had to divert.

The Liberia Airport Authority (LAA) has informed the Senate Transport Committee that a group of birds, feeding from nearby dumpsites, has been causing significant disruptions to the airport’s power supply.

Initially, the LAA had attributed the disruption to an electrical issue stemming from the Liberia Electricity Corporation (LEC) power grid.

However, in a subsequent update, LAA officials revealed that the birds have been perching on the airport’s transformers, leading to frequent electricity problems. This unusual interference has resulted in intermittent power outages, significantly impacting operations at the airport.

Image taken from Knews Online.

Hiding from troubles

I think this story was in American Negro Folk Tales; I paraphrase somewhat.

There was a man who had a bad time with his wife, and got angry with all women. He had a little boy, so he took the boy way back in the hills with him and raised him there, where the boy never saw a woman or girl at all. When the boy was about 13, his father reckoned he couldn't keep him in the hills forever--he'd have to go to town sometime--so he brought the boy with him to town this time.

He explained the things the boy had never seen before--a cart, a store, and so on. Some girls came by.

"What are those, Daddy?"

"Those are ducks, son."

"I want one, Daddy."

His father sighed. "Which one, son?"

"I don't care, any one."

The tale ended with a "moral" that the father had planned poorly, so his son didn't know how to be appropriately picky when the time came.

I'm not a student of folklore like my Mother's aunt, but that didn't sound like any of the other tales I'd read before, or since. (I didn't see the motif in Thompson's list.)

For irrelevant reasons I was reading Barlaam and Ioasaph supposedly by St. John of Damascus (died 749AD): a fantasy based somewhat on the mythic(*) history of Gautama. Honestly, I skimmed a lot of it. It included this story, told by Theudas as part of his advice to Ioasaph's father.

"A certain king was grieved and exceeding sad at heart, because that he had no male issue, deeming this no small misfortune. While he was in this condition, there was born to him a son, and the king's soul was filled with joy thereat. Then they that were learned amongst his physicians told him that, if for the first twelve years the boy saw the sun or fire, he should entirely lose his sight, for this was proved by the condition of his eyes. Hearing this, the king, they say, caused a little house, full of dark chambers, to be hewn out of the rock, and therein enclosed his child together with the men that nursed him, and, until the twelve years were past, never suffered him to see the least ray of light. After the fulfilment of the twelve years, the king brought forth from his little house his son that had never seen a single object, and ordered his waiting men to show the boy everything after his kind; men in one place, women in another; elsewhere gold and silver; in another place, pearls and precious stones, fine and ornamental vestments, splendid chariots with horses from the royal stables, with golden bridles and purple caparisons, mounted by armed soldiers; also droves of oxen and flocks of sheep. In brief, row after row, they showed the boy everything. Now, as he asked what each ox these was called, the king's esquires and guards made known unto him each by name: but, when he desired to learn what women were called, the king's spearman, they say, wittily replied that they were called, "Devils that deceive men." But the boy's heart was smitten with the love of these above all the rest. So, when they had gone round everywhere and brought him again unto the king, the king asked, which of all these sights had pleased him most. "What," answered the boy, "but the Devils that deceive men? Nothing that I have seen to-day hath fired my heart with such love as these." The king was astonished at the saying of the boy, to think how masterful a thing the love of women is. Therefore think not to subdue thy son in any other way than this."

I wonder if there's a connection.

The story of Ioasaph is freighted with emphasis on the monastic and austere life--explained that baptistm only works once, and you're liable for all the later sins, unless expiated with extreme penitence and austerity. Logical, but not attractive, and I think misses an aspect of incarnation.

(*) I mean "mythic" in a good way. The parable that however hard you try, you can't escape the limits of life is always useful--especially to those who think they can hide limits from themselves. "Tomorrow will be like today, but more so."

Attempting maxims

From Anecdotal Evidence, a citation of Hazlitt: "Here his maxim almost succeeds:"

The confession of our failings is a thankless office. It savours less of sincerity or modesty than of ostentation. It seems as if we thought our weaknesses as good as other people’s virtues.

"Provocatively true but too long, too blunted. One sentence is usually best. Two will work when the spring is wound sufficiently tight."

Let's sharpen that thing up a bit. We confess proudly, as though our offences were grander than others' virtues.

Give it a shot.

Transporting the tall

When I heard that our local zoo had moved its giraffes elsewhere to allow renovations of their habitat, the first thing that came to mind was: They're too big for a horse trailer. How do they move?

South Africa tried moving some in shipping containers: one hit its head on an overpass and died. They're too big to easily sedate and just tie down; it seems that you have to pack them up as best you can (I assume they use slings, maybe lifted from the floor so you don't have to have somebody walking between the giraffe's legs), and drive carefully. Going around overpasses, I hope.

Have you ever seen Arcanine or Charizard walking about?

One Japanese town created cards with the names, faces, and statistics of men in the town: firemen, community volunteers, and so on.

“We wanted to strengthen the connection between the children and the older generations in the community. There are so many amazing people here. I thought it was such a shame that no one knew about them,” she said in an interview with Fuji News Network (FNN). “Since the card game went viral, so many kids are starting to look up to these men as heroic figures.”

Monitors and resonances

While we tried to get the monitors adjusted this morning, I wondered how old the tool is: pretty recent, as this interesting story shows.

Vitruvius described how Greek and Roman theaters used pots to improve the sound. Generations since have wondered what he meant, since no examples survive, though there are some niches that might hold a bronze container. (Metal was valuable, and re-used elsewhere, while clay pots broke.)

If the resonators made an audible tone, could that confuse the singers and lyre/flute/drum players? The result would be slightly delayed, like reflections in a big hall can be.

Resonators can be used not just to amplify but to dampen inconvenient frequencies too. Reflections off long stone walls can really muddy the sound, making it hard to make out the speaker/singer's words. Some 10th to 16th century churches were built with pots stuffed with sound absorbing stuff built into the walls.

I get itchy when "it is likely" turns up in essays, such as this article:

It is likely that the function of the vases would have been to make some sounds louder than others by allowing them (or the air within them) to sympathetically vibrate when certain harmonics 'hit' them. So, when a singer performs a perfectly intune scale, a number of vases would ring creating a harmonic chord. An artificial reverberation (RT60 time estimated as 0.2-0.5 seconds, Landels) containing only those harmonics listed in the vases pitches would be produced in an open-air theatre that would otherwise have none. There may be another purpose for the vases other than those already mentioned. Some believe the acoustic jars helped singers and those relying on ear for maintaining pitch to keep to proper pitch. As indicated, the resonance of the vases would have given emphasis to important pitches leaving the others silent. If the artificial reverberation concept is difficult to accept, the assisted resonance idea is perhaps a little more attractive. No definitive answer has been found to the question of authenticity and intent with regards Vitruvian resonating vases.

Note that the hypothesis that the singers could hear them and use them to maintain pitch would imply that the singers would hear the slight delay that I mentioned above, which could confuse the timing. Maybe it's true and the drums helped keep the beat. And IIUC an RT60 of 0.5 seconds isn't bad.

So far I haven't found who may tried it out on a large scale: "Ideally, a complete set of vases needs to be made. However, the sheer cost of a minimum of ten bronze vases has presumably prevented most researchers from pursuing the project." Researchers have modeled them in software, and found some enhancement of male speaking voices (the Greeks didn't have actresses, apparently).

The last link lost all its formatting, making it hard to read. In discussing harpsichord resonances it cites Spiteri thus: "the sound of a harpsichord is like two skeletons making love on a corrugated iron roof".

Shattered Sword

The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway by John Parshall and Anthony Tully:

A lot of Japanese sources are now available in translation, and the authors took advantage of this. A number of stories about Midway (including some by a now-debunked (at least in Japan) Japanese) are myths, based on either posterior-preserving (as with the Japanese writer) or American misunderstandings and attempted propaganda.

A couple of things: the early attacks on the Japanese carriers were scattershot (the US had lousy command and control of its planes), and that kept the carriers dodging. Dodging meant they couldn't spot planes for an attack on the American carriers, though they could get a few fighters off. But even if they'd gotten an attack off, it was too late; the American planes headed their way had already taken off. If they'd used the American methods, they might have gotten enough planes up to take revenge, but their doctrine demanded a full attack group, and the way they spotted planes, though quite fast, wasn't fast enough under the circumstances.

The Japanese didn't store planes on the flight deck; they fueled and loaded them below and elevatored them up. That meant a bomb that penetrated the flight deck found a very rich environment, and since the lower decks were not open, the bombs' effects were contained and intense.

The story that the American torpedo bombers, though unsuccessful, had kept the defending Zero fighters low enough that they couldn't intercept the high-flying dive bombers that followed--it's a fable. The Zeros were perfectly capable of climbing back up in the minutes before the dive bombers' arrival. What seems to have been more of a problem is Japanese command and control of their own planes--the defending fighters, finding a problem in one sector, piled on, and left the other sectors less defended.

There's more of the backstory too--the surface fleet was kept far away to maintain secrecy, but that meant it was too far away to be of any support. The Attu invasion was not a feint, but part of their 3-pronged grand strategy. Their failed southern prong attack denied them the use of 2 carriers, so they only had 4 at Midway. Yamamoto's directions were ambiguous. And so on.

They write well. I met Parshall a few years ago--he's a nice guy and very knowledgeable. If you're interested in Pacific World War II, read the book.

That previous line reads a little strangely, doesn't it--a peaceful war?

Bookstores

From From Anecdotal Evidence: an essay on booksellers from 1963

My own relations with bookshops began more than forty years ago and they have extended into many countries and to all continents. I have gone to bookshops to buy and browse. I have gone to them to buy books I wanted, and because I just wanted to buy a book, and much of the time just because I wanted to be among books to inhale their presence. My case is an extreme one, and there are perhaps few people in my generation, more or less in their right minds and heavily engaged wvith all sorts of duties, who have spent so much time in bookshops as I have. I have talked with booksellers of every kind, angular Brahmins, mad Ostjuden, motherly widows, elegant patricians, sweet mice, and cagy and distrustful touts.

The retail book trade in new and second-hand books in the United States is in many important respects in an unsatisfactory condition throughout much of the country. There are some bright spots here and there, but on the whole the situation depresses, even appalls me. And it seems to be getting worse. It is not just because of my having less time now and so many books already that bookshops have become less attractive to me. My heart still pants for them "as the hart panteth after the water brook," but all too often it pants without satisfaction.

It's worse in many ways now--Barnes and Noble and Half Price Books are the only survivors within miles of here. Online stores help keep some places afloat, though. FWIW, in one Wyoming store I bought from, books had two prices listed. One was for in-person sales, the other for online.

AI and copyright

"Human authorship and creativity remain essential in the quest to obtain copyright protection"

The famous work "Notes towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare" is not copyrightable because the macaques were not human. (Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Part 2: Copyrightabbility (2025) (Part 2) at 7-8)

The work must contain "some degree of originality and cannot be merely the result of time and effort." Randomness isn't really originality, so I guess "Notes" fails on both counts.

And I suppose if the experiment had been "successful," copyright on the original expired long ago.

More seriously, the office's conclusions seem pretty straightforward: AI-generated stuff (pictures or text or music or whatever) isn't copyrightable. A human has to make substantive contributions. Likely we'll require some case law to square away what "substantive" means, and case-by-case reviews are probably in the future--but we have some of that already. Taking an AI-generated image and redoing it, or moving sections around and changing size--that should probably be copyrightable. However, I'm told that making a good picture still requires artistic skill--the AI, for that artist, merely makes gives her the raw materials to organize and modify.

Dripping

The headline at SciTech is evocative: Scientists Discover That North America Is “Dripping” Down Into Earth’s Mantle.

Although the dripping is concentrated in one area of the craton, Hua said that the plate appears to be interacting with material from across the entire craton, which covers most of the United States and Canada.

“A very broad range is experiencing some thinning,” Hua said.

The image that comes to mind is water dripping from a faucet, which on the small scale is pretty dramatic, with a lot of shake-up. If you scaled that up, you could imagine a blob pinching off under the continent (e.g. New Madrid) with a resulting big up-bounce afterwards.

(Bigger image here)

But the "drip" is into a medium not much less dense than the dip itself, and the sizes involved suggest a much slower and wider "bounce". A simulation suggests "drips" of order 50km and timescales of order millions of years, not seconds.

Stresses and stress relief might trigger some other fault into action, of course.

Signal reaction

The first thing that came to my mind was an alleged Bismarck anecdote, though I haven't found a source.

Bismarck was commenting on the poor ethics of journalists, when a reporter pled "But haven't I always kept secret those things you told me in confidence?" Bismarck barked back, "The more fool you! Do you think I'd say anything to someone in your profession that I didn't want to see in print?"

The complaint about Europe seemed like a carom shot, but details about timing suggest that the incident really was a screw-up--unless they really trusted the recipient's reaction.

Politics and religion in other climes

I was chasing down a familiar name (my mother had worked with the man) in the news, and a rabbit trail brought me to an interesting election dispute:

NEC rejects Justin Oldpa Yeazeahn CKA New Zoe Prophetkey application to contest for the bi-election for Senate seat in Nimba. It is reported that he fraudenly inserted voter registration number on his application form, where as he didn't register to vote during the last election.

Mr. Yeazeahn who has asked young people in Nimba to have plenty children by impregnating their girlfriends and wives, and he will pay the hospital bills has responded to NEC communication to him as attached.

He said the National Elections Commission didn't send the communication in time , to allow him use the 48 hours appeal period to file an appeal. He indicated that the commission refused to use his email to address the communication which would have given him opportunity to immediately respond.

Mr. Yeazeahn also accused the NEC of not giving the signed copy of his rejection communication to the person he sent to receive it

Many who think that Prophetkey shouldn't run for public office because of his unruly behavior , noted for abusing women will be happy if NEC decision stands.

The public is watching to see what happens next!!!!

Thanks to HOTT FM 107.9 and Super Bongese TV.

Raised beds

I built short raised beds of wood shortly after we moved here, and though the wood is largely gone the piles of soil aren't that tough to keep more or less corralled. Since bending over is getting a smidgeon harder, I built a trial "higher" raised bed, so that the soil is about 20" above the yard. This also let us grow things that want deeper roots--the yard's "topsoil" is about 5" deep and then hits glacial till. Carrots bifurcate or go sideways.

Anyhow, I wondered how long the high raised bed would last and now I know--about 5-6 years. I'm thinking of replacing the useless wood with cement blocks--the 4x8x16 variety, in hopes that the 4" thickness and construction adhesive would be enough to anchor one side wall to the next. I'd dig a little foundation, and then use 3 courses of bricks glued together.

Does anybody have any experience with this? Alternatives? Suggestions? "Round" off the corners?

Real Education

I hadn't heard of Real Education by Charles Murray, published in 2008. He divides the book according to four claims

1. Ability Varies
2. Half of the Children Are Below Average
3. Too Many People Are Going to College
4. America's Future Depends on How We Educate the Academically Gifted

The lie is that every child can be anything he or she wants to be. No one really believes it, but we approach education’s problems as if we did.

It isn't a secret that things like Head Start can create a bump in achievement, but that it lasts less than a handful of years, at which point there's little to no difference in academic skills compared to the control sample. He suggests there can be in some interpersonal abilities.

I wasn't aware of how things like the NAEP math tests worked, and found his numbers on how many students couldn't solve the "8'th grade" problems horrifying.

He proposes cerfifications to undermine the BA fetish, hoping that a need for certifications would create a supply for them. Let employers who don't know what a school's BA is worth (or whether the fellow without a BA is good) have a way of measuring skill.

For those who go to college for STEM, he has little to say: The demands of STEM weed out those not apt; there aren't "too many" after a while. But many are encouraged to go to college who don't benefit.

For those who don't "live in Lake Woebegon," he points to existing and underutilized and underadmired career and technical education. He wants tracking--though I'm not sure he understands how big a staff increase this might require.

For the gifted he hopes to teach wisdom:

A wonderful maxim is attributed to George Christian, one of Lyndon Johnson’s press secretaries: “No one should be allowed to work in the West Wing of the White House who has not suffered a major disappointment in life.” The responsibility of working there was too great, Christian thought, to be entrusted to people who weren’t painfully aware how badly things can go wrong. The same principle applies to those who will become members of America’s elite. No one among the gifted should be allowed to rise to a position of influence without knowing what it feels like to fail. The experience of internalized humiliation is a prerequisite for humility.

At all levels, he wants to teach basic Western culture and the principles of virtue. Those aren't exactly popular, at least in public.

As a sympathetic onlooker, I offer one piece of advice to advocates on the front lines: Stop focusing on math and reading test scores to make your case. They are the measures of educational achievement most closely tied to the child’s underlying academic ability. The limits that public schools face in raising those scores also bedevil private schools, charter schools, and home-schoolers. The reason private schools, charter schools, and home-schooling are desirable is their ability to create a better education in ways that do not show up in reading and math scores.

What can push change? School choice (including homeschool) and certification can help address the first few problems. For the liberal education he hopes in four things: "The stuff of a liberal education is truly wonderful," professors trying to look smart with "impenetrable vocabulary" can't get away with that forever (may not be a safe prediction, it's an old problem), students already ask themselves the questions a liberal education addresses, and using your capacities to the utmost is fun.

Don't look for top-down solutions:

If there is to be a return to reality, it will not come from government. Of all the people hooked on wishful thinking, politicians have the most untreatable habit.

It's about 168 pages, with the rest being notes. Some of his ideas parallel things I've been thinking about education. Give it a read.

Cutting board data point

We've a small plastic cutting board that sees a lot of use because of its convenience. I had a look at it yesterday, and then had a feel of it. The edges had the original smooth corrugated surface. The middle felt fuzzy to the touch. I had a closeup look at it (*), and the surface looked like a sea of floppy snouts pointing up. A lot of plastic had been carved away, and in between where cuts had been the ridges had been re-scored in random directions -- everywhere I looked were bits of plastic begging to be cut or twisted free. I can see why the researchers found that cutting carrots on a board generated more fragments than cutting the board directly -- you'd also get the sideways motion of the cut vegetable to push on those little nubs of plastic. (This was on boards that had already seen a lot of testing.)

I think we're going to retire that board, and use it for craft work instead.

In answer to a question: The best case is that the plastic consumption is harmless, and given that we haven't all keeled over, that's a good approximation. There are lots of other things in our food environment that are "mostly harmless."

WA Guess--these things are a little like mercury: where the inorganic version is somewhat harmful but the organic compounds are deadly. The plastic bits may not cause much problem, but if (e.g.) our gut flora mutate to devour plastic on our behalf, the resulting waste chemicals might be harsh on the body.

At any rate, I prefer not to eat dirt or soap or other "mostly harmless" stuff, so I'll be trying to minimize my plastic consumption too. I won't be losing sleep, though.

(*) MicroBrite Plus pocket microscope--I bought it for science demonstrations in the park. The kids were too young and fumble-fingered to get much benefit from it.

UPDATE: Crummy picture, but you can see a couple of the "snouts."

Plastic dust

Researchers studied Plastic particles in bottled water, using Stimulated Raman Scattering:

The researchers found that, on average, a liter of bottled water included about 240,000 tiny pieces of plastic. About 90% of these plastic fragments were nanoplastics. This total was 10 to 100 times more plastic particles than seen in earlier studies, which mostly focused on larger microplastics.

and

The method identified millions of additional particles that did not match the seven categories of plastic. It’s not yet clear if these tiny particles are nanoplastics or other substances.

Why would there be plastic "dust" inside a water bottle?

So far I haven't found any definitive answer to that. However, water does do some damage even to PET (polyethylene terephthalate), which is quite stable in water. Possibly stress points in the plastic bottles are more liable to "corrosion." Possibly the manufacturing process liberates some microstrands of plastic as it blows up the plastic. UV can accelerate degradation. I haven't thought of everything. (Different manufacturers had different quantities: maybe their processes differed or their water sources differed.)

At any rate, using their estimates I get something like a tenth of a part per billion mass of known plastic bits. And probably a hundred times that of unknown stuff--maybe other plastics, maybe bacteria; not known yet.

Influencers

Encouraging people to do stupid things isn't new with TikTok/YouTube/etc. Back when the Stegosaurus flailed his tail and I was an undergrad, a radio call-in invited people to tell their Thanksgiving recipes. In amongst the desserts, one called offered his turkey recipe--the core of which was to cook the bird at 180F for 7 hours. The host didn't spot the problem, but the very next caller did. At least with the Tide pod craze, you were only going to sicken yourself, and not the whole family.

Memories don't work the same

We went to an exhibit on Egypt almost exactly 21 years ago. The subject of the Book of the Dead came up, and as a result also the exhibit. I had forgotten some things that impressed me about the exhibits, but Youngest Daughter not only remembered them, she remembered exactly what dress she had worn.

Progression

"we also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance; and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope; and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us."

One of the men in our Bible study this morning compared that to a toddler trying to walk and falling on his rump. It's trouble, but he perseveres and gains strength, and with strength skill, and gains the skill in the hope of walking just like Mommy and Daddy.

Some of those tribulations hurt a lot more and longer than a flop on the rump, though.

Monotheism

It's popular to say that Moses learned from Akhenaten (one of his poems resembles a psalm), and I've heard the reverse--that Akhenaten learned from the Jews. Given the difficulty with dating anything, I don't think that line of inquiry is very fruitful.

I like another approach. As I've read elsewhere, and Rodney Start reminded us, a "High God" tradition is pretty universal among "primitive" groups. In The Idea of the Holy Otto describes an "encouter with the numinous" that he, I think properly, regards as the source of religious feeling. Depending on when and where this encounter happened, you might attach the sense of awe with the ocean, or the stars, or the forest, and come to think of that as the god. The default numinous experience would be monotheist.

Polytheism comes in when the original experience fades, or you have to get along with (swear oaths for) neighbors who either had a different experience or inherited the rituals from someone who had a different experience. And henotheism devolves to polytheism (by the next generation, if not sooner) which will dilute devotion.

If this approach applies, then Akhenaten had such an experience, and was in a position to (at least for a while) defy politics and tradition and try to inspire everyone to give up the corrupt rituals of non-worship in favor of a truer devotion.

In other words, the two could have been independent.

Phytoremediation

A study using plants to pull lead from slag-contaminated soil in Atlanta found that in their pots, 10% of the lead could wind up in the plants. The soil had over 500mg/kg of lead. The paper deals with a number of the technical details, but for now just assume that the whole plant is removed and processed (maybe oxidizing it with H2O2 instead of burning) to retrieve the lead someplace either safe or usable.

If one harvest gets rid of 10%, and you want the concentration to be below 5mg/kg, that's about 44 harvests to clean up that dirt. 37 if you're OK with 10mg/kg, 22 if you're OK with 50mg/kg (and you probably shouldn't be).

The urgency of the problem is because people live there now. Some garden, and some of those eat what's in the garden. 40 years is a long time to maintain a program as people come and go, buildings wear out and get replaced, and political priorities churn.

You'd think that something like this would remain a priority, but experience of fighting wars, especially existential ones, says that even important projects get back-burnered or canned. Losing them is even more disruptive. And 44 years is a long time.

Chewing sticks

Some trees are preferred (arak?) for this dental hygiene product.

It's popular enough that the FDA (Forestry Development) had to ban their harvest for a while to keep down the clear-cutting of trees, although permits are available after sub rosa payments.

I've seen them in use, but never realized that the resource was limited.

Touring ancient monuments

We like to tour castles, and try to imagine what life in them was like. We don't tour the peasant huts; there aren't any left. They'd have been pretty cramped too. Of course, castles might have gotten pretty cramped for space; you don't waste time and stone building fortifications to enclose parks (unless you're building Constantinople). Although maybe you only get crowded when everybody is taking shelter..

Imagine tourists a thousand years from now wandering about what used to be the USA. What would be left that they could tour?

Skyscrapers don't last. Everyday homes would survive as foundations. Metal, pipes, bricks--all gets scavenged and reused. Some of the public buildings, if not stripped for construction material, might have parts of walls and pillars left. And dams. Even if a dam is broken, that's a lot of concrete, and would stay impressive for a long time.

Runways would look pretty ratty, with lots of crumbled stuff and plants growing through it, but should still be mostly visible. Likewise the highways--though I assume a lot of that would be redone and the concrete repurposed. Bridge remnants, where there wasn't a replacement.

Near towns, I'd guess that concrete would get scavenged for coarse building fill, maybe to build town walls.

Some of the stories of our era would survive. Would Cape Canaveral be famous for the legends about space travel or the battle fought there in 2876?

Snakebites

I see that sucking venom out of a snakebite is discouraged (absolutely if you have an injury in your own mouth). This attempt at mitigation is ancient and very widespread, so at a wild guess it helps, despite some of the modern advice. (Sometimes hospitals can ID the snake from venom residue.)

Snake venom varies dramatically. In Africa some herbal treatments seem to be helpful, likewise in Bangladesh, among Amerindians, and so on.

Some of these work:

Ten studies reported statistically significant percentage protection (40-100%) of animals against venom-induced lethality compared with control groups that received no medicinal plant intervention. Sixteen studies reported significant effects (p ≤ 0.05) against venom-induced pathologies compared with the control group; these include hemolytic, histopathologic, necrotic, and anti-enzymatic effects. The plant family Fabaceae has the highest number of studies reporting its efficacy, followed by Annonaceae, Malvaceae, Combretaceae, Sterculiaceae, and Olacaceae. Some African medicinal plants are preclinically effective against venom-induced lethality, hematoxicity, and cytotoxicity. The evidence is extracted from three in vitro studies, nine in vivo studies, and five studies that combined both in vivo and in vitro models. The effective plants belong to the Fabaceae family, followed by Malvaceae, and Annonaceae.

Which is best for what snake might vary considerably. One wonders how this was decided on.

In Tribes of the Liberian Hinterland is a description of how the Snake Society was formed:

It is told that a hunter came upon two snakes fighting each other, and one was swallowing a leaf as an antidote for the bites of the other. The hunter then prepared medicine of the same kind of leaves, which he used with success in treating cases of snakebite. This incident led to the forming of the association.

On page 401:

A practice was found among the Loma similar to that described by practitioners of the snake cult in East Africa. A fine triturated black powder is prepared from the heads of poisonous snakes, charred, with certain herbs, in an iron pot. This contains the snake's venom, undoubtedly modified by the heating and certainly diluted by the charcoal with which it is mixed. Its action is further controlled by the herbs mixed into the compound. These are the same herbs which the leech uses in treating snake bite. This black powder is rubbed into tiny cuts in the skin of a person who wishes to be immunized against snake bite. The first immunizing dose is a small one, the next two are larger; a definite reaction is produced. The leech recognizes that this protection is temporary and that it must be repeated every two or three years. As the heads of several different varieties of snakes are used in the preparation of this powder, the immunizing effect is that of polyvalent vaccination.

This native practice even parallels our toxin-antitoxin immunizations, because he mixes with his toxin the remedy he would use in treating snake bite. The details of this treatment are guarded with great secrecy. Mr. Embree of the Methodist Mission in Monrovia once saw a boy bitten by a very poisonous snake. His comrades expected him to die. He asked them to wait while he went into the bush to get some medicine. They were surprised to see him return, as the medicine for that particular snake bite is known only bv certain big doctors. He admitted that he knew the medicine and begged the others not to tell anyone that he knew the secret, fearing the jealousy of those who were supposed to have a monopoly on the information.

Interesting. I don't know how fresh the plants have to be, and whether one could put together a "spectrum" treatment or whether it ought to be species-specific. As for immunity to snakebite: there are reports of it; species-specific. And reports of snake bite centers:

there are different dens in different cities wherein people who want to have snake bite are allowed to sit in chairs. The person in charge of snakes holds the snake near the head end of snake just distal to lip margin. Initially, he makes the snake to inject minimal bite in little toe or index finger for minimal envenomation, and then, he makes the snake to bite in lip or tongue of individuals according to their wish. The most commonly used snakes were krait, cobra, and green snake. Persons who were bitten, showed jerky movement and left the room within few minutes. From the reports provided orally, six persons lost their life due to such procedure. Many people who use such dens were from high socioeconomic status and well educated. Some of them were youth and college students.