I wonder who picked it

It wasn't yet 8 this morning. I needed a few small items and Walmart was close, with an almost-empty parking lot.

The speakers were not playing Christmas music. Yet. Possibly they have some choice what to play on the night shift, and in honor of Black Friday somebody wanted Ballroom Blitz. Or maybe it was coincidence.

Spikes

Spicomellus had quite the dinosaur armor suit, but it never had to face spears or even swords; just teeth and claws and horns. Which admittedly are bad enough.

A youtuber asked if spiked armor (as in the fantasy pictures) was really ever used. Real examples are scarce (pickelhaube spikes were decorative and as of 1915 they were removed in combat to reduce visibility), and usually not obviously useful. Spiked shields could be handy, to snag your opponent's weapon briefly and safely away from you. Snagging your enemy's sword against your arm transfers a lot of momentum to your arm--much nicer to have it skid off smooth armor than catch, and maybe dent your armor and bruise your arm or worse. And fantasy armor spikes get in the way of moving smoothly too. And your friends might have objections.

Remembering with gratitude

Habits of a lifetime are hard to change. I've taken health mostly for granted. As with us all, I've had some bad episodes over the years, including a few that might have turned lethal. But if I wake up and nothing hurts, I tend to forget. Even touching numb areas, or realizing that something doesn't taste right, tends to be filed automatically under "It is what it is," and without taking time to remember what might have been.

And sometimes, with so many resources, one takes time for granted too -- surely there'll be time to add this to the pile of things to read or do. After all, the resources are there. But the clock...

Count your blessings. It'll keep me busy for a while.

Black Friday

so soon after Thanksgiving, demonstrates that we are thankful but not content.

Hiding the key to knowledge

Following up on the thoughts about "explaining away" God's rules, it struck me that sometimes there isn't a really good alternative.

Take, for example, charging interest. Exodus and Deuteronomy forbid charging interest to one of your people, especially the poor.

On the other hand, in purely civil terms it makes good economic sense to allow the charging of rent for the use of your property -- you are deprived of the use of it for a while and ought to be compensated. And experience shows that if you forbid charging any interest, either the supply of loans dries up or people develop workarounds.

What kind of workarounds? Well, you can redefine usury to mean "extortionate charges." After all, Jesus' parable of the talents doesn't condemn earning interest, so maybe only excessive interest is meant, despite the Torah text.

Or you can get picky and say it only applies to insiders, but of outsiders you may exact what you choose. This doesn't seem just.

You can buy a nominal item from the lender for cash and arrange to sell it back later for more money. Legal fiction

You can pay a commission proportional to the amount borrowed that varies with the length of time you need the money. Legal fiction

Distinguish between loans for investment and loans for consumption: the former being activity which should bring a return that the borrower can easily pay the lender from--and therefore not predatory. Splitting hairs, but maybe supportable

And so on. Some of these are Muslim inventions, and some more universal. The point is that an activity which is apparently forbidden sometimes has to happen in some way whether forbidden or not--and not in order to break any other commandments, just to manage ordinary buying and selling. (If you are among those who believe ordinary buying and selling is evil, please remember that attempts to forbid this have been some of the most calamitous experiments in history. Whatever evil you hope to stop that way, starving people is worse.)

Killing people is bad, and murder is forbidden, but sometimes there's war, or self-defense, or just having to kill a fellow villager who has proved dangerous to the community and who won't stay away. I've known some thoroughgoing pacifists, and been very grateful that they were not in charge of anything. But what shall the church say? That war is good? (a lie) Or that because war is bad you must never kill? (not obviously true, and has very bad effects; scripture seems to show an implicit duty to defend) Or that war is bad but the church would exceed its mandate if it told you what to do? (you really don't want the state to be supreme). Or that it is only permissible when God's prophets endorse it? (which are which?)

Or perhaps that killing is bad and you'd better never get comfortable with it, even when it is necessary? And pray that God will understand. (My own view is that although Cortez will have a lot to answer for at the Judgment, he'll at least be able to say that he helped destroy the Aztec empire. However, I'm not God; weight my view accordingly.)

Consider the giving of alms. I know from observation that if I give cash to X, he'll use it to give grief later as a "drunk and disorderly." Do I follow the plain command and give when he asks, or assume some kindness to my neighbors, or perhaps even responsibility for X, and decline or perhaps just give on my terms (e.g. food)? The Didache (first century church document) says "Let your alms sweat in your hands, until you know to whom you should give." That seems to suggest a bit of discernment is advisable, though in context there's no other hint of it--though in any event it expects a generous spirit. (and warns of judgment on beggars who don't need the alms!)

Do I owe more to the immediate request of X for money, or to his wife and the likely (though never entirely certain) result of X's use of the money?

How much of this is muddying the waters? Is it a council of despair to say that sometimes there are no good choices and we will have to answer for whichever of them we choose? That's a dangerous claim, since there almost always are good choices, and we tend to jump at loopholes and excuses. Which makes "sometimes no good choices" an easy way to muddy the waters and hide the key to knowledge.

Music hath charms

When I saw the BBC article on music calming dogs (classical was better), I immediately thought of this: of course. That wouldn't count, though--"Slow tempo (50-60 beats per minute or less), simple compositions with low or no percussive elements are best."

Audiobooks might sound like they'd calm pets, especially with a soothing-voiced narrator, but the theory doesn't hold up in practice. A study Wells co-authored in 2022, which observed the reactions of 60 dogs to either classical music or audiobooks while their owners were briefly absent, found that audiobooks had little to no calming effect. Rather than sit or lie down as they did while listening to the music, most would just stare at the speaker emitting the audiobook recording.

They emphasized that there was a lot of variation, and your mileage with your pet might vary.

A rascal in the house

BBC ran a story suggesting that raccoons were, in trying to use human territory and human trash, at least partly domesticating themselves. I assume that this "self-domestication" wouldn't work quite the same way for prey animals like rats, but they report that urban raccoons have shorter snouts than wild ones, similar to changes in domesticated cats and dogs -- and foxes.

I read Rascal too (no, I haven't been to the museum), and I can imagine some of the issues that might arise with a housepet with curiosity and hands, but trying to breed a tame raccoon sounds like an interesting project. For somebody younger than me.

I wonder what besides tameness you might want to try to breed for.

For that matter, imagine breeding monkeys for tameness. And rather importantly, ability to be housebroken. How long before your indoor pet figured out how to feel his way to opening those cheap combination locks. I assume childproof latches would be a peice of cake.

You may say that I'm a dreamer... but maybe just bats.

Build their tombs

The sermon was on Luke 11's woes this morning. The preacher missed a bet and didn't explain what the lawyers were--expert theologians. I made a mental note to remind him of that for his second sermon.

I'd always found Jesus' comment to be a bit of a non-sequitur: "So you are witnesses and approve the deeds of your fathers; because it was they who killed them and you build their tombs."

Burying the dead was a mitzvah, an act of true kindness (unrepayable), that even the high priest was obligated to do if nobody else was around.

But thinking of the lawyers as professional theologians made it click. Their ancestors didn't care for the prophets' messages, so they killed them. The lawyers made sure to carefully reinterpret the messages to make them harmless--bottle them up. Burying the dead is not the same as building a big tomb to hide them behind. We've seen tombs and mausoleums impressive enough to make us forget who it was supposed to remind us of.

The last woe ties in with this interpretation: "you have taken away the key of knowledge." Obscuring the spirit of the law with details, or an "explanation" of why it doesn't mean what it says seems like a good way to do that. And Jesus called out an example of that elsewhere: something dedicated to God (corban), even if the actual gift was delayed and you still enjoyed beneficial use of it, could not be used to take care of your parents, despite the explicit command.

Of course a more usual take also works to explain the last woe: "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" = key of knowledge, and piling up a heap of human rules can obscure the "fear of the Lord."

Applications... It's no trouble at all to find theologians adept at justifying the unjustifiable. Are there hard passages I gloss over? Or at least don't think too much about? Um, yes. I'm guessing that those need more listening, even if my applications don't change.

A little lack of planning

A fire at Liberia pavilion at the COP30 meeting in Brazil may be due to a bit of confusion. Liberia uses both 110 and 220 systems, sometimes in the same building.(*)

The Liberian Pavilion had reportedly been dealing with electrical challenges since the opening of the conference due to a mismatch between the 220 volt wiring used in the pavilion and the 110 volt wiring standard across the broader facility, according to the source.

According to the source, several devices brought in by the Liberian delegation had burned out earlier in the week after being plugged in, prompting them to purchase step-down equipment to manage the voltage difference.

---

(*) Upstairs was 110, downstairs 220, and the exact same style of outlet (American 2-prong) was used in both. When the manager's son innocently loaned the downstairs tenants a replacement microwave, the magic smoke came out and they had to come borrow the use of ours (upstairs).

Early thoughts

from Romans 2

"Judgment" is a bit ambiguous. What's its purpose? Condemnation, or "Houston, we've had a problem"? It's a lot easier to notice a problem and take warning than to evaluate all the details. I have to apply some judgment, enough for my needs and responsibilities (Is that guy likely to prove a threat? Would she be a good teacher?), but more than that may be encroaching on God's turf.

Romans 2:7 and 2:8 both describe people who persevere--clear cut "trying to be good" and "trying to be bad". Judging the lazy is a bit messier. Though there's always Laodicea.

We don't go in a lot for gnostic "special knowledge needed for true salvation" explicitly, but we seem to emphasize classes more than practice. Of course it's easier to get people to show up for most sessions of a class than to scrape together a snow-shoveling crew of the able-bodied (who have to get to work or school too). But "render to each person according to his deeds" suggests that maybe taking class notes isn't quite all that's required.

Judgment for all, for the Jew first and then the Greek. The order seems to reflect who got the explicit revelations from God, and from whom more is expected. If so, Christians, following the revelation of the living Word, seem likely to be first in line now.

Orientation and surgery

Typically if someone touches me I can touch the same spot in the same way without looking.

But when the OT was showing me how to manipulate neck skin to try to mobilize scar tissue and get lymph moving, I found that I had to touch her fingers to find the spot. Something about some nerves gone, and some nerves not running in precisely the same locations, left me a bit offset.

Not serious or life-changing, just an oddity nobody mentioned.

UBC

I wonder what they teach reporters to do

University Baptist Church closed last month, and the Good Samaritan House declined the building. The Daily Egyptian's report, despite the headline, is mostly about the future use of the building, and includes several textual curiousities: "The sanctuary was filled with several emotional congregants", and the pastor is called "John Annabelle" while the sign outside says "John Annable."

I wonder where the plaque with the names of the founding members will end up.

When I was there, by and large professors went to UBC and students (or at least the cool kids) went to a different church. I don't know if that was to avoid the appearance of evil, or if mutual forgiveness might be an issue--or if it was just the fashion of the moment.

Potluck time

A business by any other name

"Killer Mane Salon"

No, Medusa is not on their web page.

Kingdom come

The sermon today was on Luke 11:1-13, which begins with a shorter version of the Lord's Prayer and ends with "If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?"

One obvious question is "Where in the Lord's Prayer does one ask for the gift of the Holy Spirit?"

I wonder if it comes from basileia: "bas-il-i'-ah; from G935; properly, royalty, i.e. (abstractly) rule, or (concretely) a realm (literally or figuratively):—kingdom, + reign." If the word means kingship, and the invitation is implicitly for that to come beginning with us, then perhaps that part of the request is for God's kingship to be in us. If so, thanks to God's simplicity, that's a request for God to be in us.

Yes, I know Matthew has something a bit different.

Side effects

One side effect of losing weight thanks to the problems of this past year is that one doesn't have as much personal insulation to face November with.

Thoughts on heroes

By Kurp and Samuel Johnson

Pinata

The kids across the street finally broke their pinata; a good time apparently had by all. One just now gave up on trying to see if he could shake any more candy from the broken green donkey.

But from my PoV, there was a great moment earlier when, after a few hard but ineffective bashes, a wind gust blew through the tree the pinata hung from, and hundreds of small yellow leaves showered everyone.

Graves

I was reading Ezekiel 43 this morning ("defile ... by the corpses of their kings") and what leapt to mind was Westminster Abbey. That's probably not a fair comparison, but...

Why Masoretic

I was chasing rabbits while learning about the Deuterocanonical books, and ran across something I'd not heard of before in the Dead Sea scrolls: most of the scrolls of scripture were "proto-masoretic" but some reflected the Septuagint. There seem to have been several variant textual traditions (not different in substance, but in details -- and generally not major details either), and the Alexandrian scholars seem to have picked one to translate into Greek. A few centuries later Jews converged on the Masoretic text as definitive. (With, germane to my interest here, the Deuterocanonicals omitted as not having been written in Hebrew but Greek. Which, for some of them at least, the Dead Sea scrolls show to be an incorrect assumption.)

Why the change in preferred texts? Some early Christian writers accused the Jews of removing books and concentrating on a variant that provided less support to Christianity. I can imagine them preferring "a young girl shall conceive" over "a virgin shall conceive" for that reason, but I don't see that Tobit is all that supportive of Christianity. In fact I've read that the Orthodox accept the Deuterocanonicals as canonical, but as "second-class" as far as supporting doctrine.

Wikipedia claims that "Very few manuscripts are said to have survived the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE." That's suggestive.

If the scholars in Alexandria decided on the "proto-septuagint" variant manuscripts as being the best, they'd have collected as many as possible to provide the translators with their material. In a land without printing presses, there might not have been a lot of them to begin with -- though synagogues should have had a copy of the Torah, so there should have been a lot of those.

Which manuscript tradition to pick might therefore have been based on geography -- what was available locally. Translators mentioned in the link above were in modern Turkey and Greece, not Egypt. If the Alexandrians snarfed up most of the proto-septuagint types for their translation project, that would leave the rest for everybody else. The Dead Sea scrolls were proto-masoretic over proto-septuagint by 12 to 1. (A looser version made up 20%, and others 15%.)

My own take on the Deuterocanonicals from years ago was that they were mostly harmless, and sometimes wise, though here and there (perhaps translation issues?) were some things that don't fit well with the gospel (a daughter is a loss?).

Don't ask questions

you don't want to know the answers to. "Liberia's Education Ministry has blocked controversial plans to introduce mandatory drug testing in all of the country's schools."

Liberia has a major problem with drug abuse among youth: UNFPA guessing 1 in 5 (maybe only 1 in 18, but that's still a lot). So, what do you do? Test, maybe?

Setting aside accuracy issues, and ignoring the cost of a testing program, what do they plan to do with the information? What can they do, if they identify someone as a drug abuser? Is what they're doing now working at all?

Someone described an expert as a person who can explain how bad your situation is, but not tell you how to get out of it.

AI

is treated as a cure-all and factotum, embedded in everything and trusted by the best minds. Or at least influential minds. Haven't we seen this movie before?

Creature Feature

Creature Feature is out!

The cover images must be for other people's stories. I wrote my story quite a while back--I haven't been able to write very much the last few months. It's encouraging to see this.

College shutdowns and warnings

"In a crackdown on substandard tertiary institutions, the National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE) has shut down 31 unauthorized colleges and suspended the licenses of 22 others for violating accreditation standards and regulatory requirements."

The list of the shutdown and suspended can be found in a Facebook post. I've never heard of them. A large fraction are religious institutions. I'm not sure what "Divine Airline School & Management Studies" is.

More interesting to me is the list of schools that got the "one-year compliance ultimatum" issued to them. Big names: "University of Liberia, Cuttington University, Bomi County Technical College, Adventist University of West Africa, Salvation Army Polytechnic University, Apex University of Liberia, and Nimba University. The full list is here. I taught the first (and AFAIK only) physics lecture at African Methodist Episcopal University (and exited the building through a mob of students on an unrelated strike), and my father was buried at Liberian Baptist Theological Seminary. The latter is pretty specialized, unlike University of Liberia--which I'm sad but not surprised to see on the list.

In a formal statement, the NCHE cited multiple risk factors threatening the viability of the affected institutions, including: Severe financial instability, declining student enrollment, insufficient qualified academic staff, substandard infrastructure, poor institutional governance and administrative inefficiencies.

That's for the ones they issued the warning to. The others were worse.

Natural

English infamously overloads the word "love" with a riot of different meanings.

We overload "nature" too. There's the physical universe, and also the local ecosystem; alternatively, it means the rules they operate by.

And there's "human nature", which can mean the ways we were designed to function (human nature to love your children), or the brokenness we suffer from (human nature to be selfish). For the Christian there's a new nature given as well.

And there's the "nature" of the expression of individual gifts and traits (a "natural-born storyteller") or expressions of training ("a natural-born killer").

So is a writer using "nature" to describe something common to all humans, or specific to this individual? Is it something built in, or thanks to training (marching towards the gunfire)? It makes a difference in what is changeable, or even what's good--and I see a lot of disagreement on that.

Until we learn to disaggregate these meanings, and quit playing motte and bailey with them, I guess we're stuck making sure we parse out how the writer is trying to use them.

FWIW, about 400 years ago a "natural" was an idiot.

The Ancient City

(La Cite Antique) by Fustel de Coulanges (1830-1889). The title could more appropriately be The Ancient Cities of Greece, Rome, and the Hindus, since he does not really deal with the constitution of the cities of Persia or Egypt--possibly because of a lack of information through translation issues and fewer sources. I suspect he would have found substantial points of difference with his thesis in those cities.

His thesis is that the family, with its attendant ancestor worship, was the foundation of the clan and eventually the city, and that what bound all of these together was the worship of their ancestors.

The priest was the father, his successor his son, and everything--all ancestral lands, rights, authority came though the rituals about the ancestral tomb and the sacred fire. When families clustered, they retained individual worships, though the city would develop its own sacred fire. The eldest son gets it all; the rest of the family are subsidiary branches.

Without a recognized sacred fire, you have no right to property. In fact, the family owns the land, and the family is governed by the patriarch. Foreigners are suspect, without religion or rights; laws don't really apply to them.

Of course this develops over time, and one winds up with a city with a tiny aristocracy of priest/proprieters, a large number of clients of the same, and of course slaves.

That can evolve further, as with Rome, to include a pleb population as well--not clients and not slaves.

Stability gets to be a problem here, and cities begin to undergo revolutions (the poor side with kings against the aristocrat/priests), and the old religion begins to matter less. He describes the rise of Rome, attributing part of it to Roman early efforts to appropriate the religions and ethnicities of their neighbors, making alliance (and eventual domination) easier, and describes the effects of the empire effectively removing the religious/political rites that held conquered ancient cities together. Eventually the only citizenship that mattered was Roman, which became easier and easier to acquire (up to Caracalla's decree that gave it to every free man).

He ends with the rise of Christianity and the replacement of local gods with a universal one. The gods of the city vanished.

I'll assume that his historical references are all correct. The thesis is interesting, and plausible--within some limits.

As he says himself, Spain and Gaul didn't have these kinds of cities, so Rome established them after the conquest. He doesn't mention Egypt at all.

Over and over he hammers home the point that without the sacred fire and ancestor worship, you had no religion. But I don't think that's true. It doesn't quite match human experience: there were other gods than those of the hearth, even in the same land, and worshippers of one would have had some kind of common bond. The Eleusinian Mysteries is well known. (not sure how old it is, though)

Without a better background in the field (and no way to read primary sources myself) I take this as a partial description of the formation of some of the cities of antiquity.

Have a look yourself.

The Kindle copy I have looks like somebody quit checking for OCR typos somewhere around part 3.

Library

An interesting question: what will become of the library? Kurp quotes Longgood's short poem about bees and bookshelves. "In sly self-portaiture, The colored spines in crates Depict his buzzing mind"

My shelves display some of my interests, some of my wife's, some things we thought (silly us) the kids would like, and some of my parents' interests--books we inherited. There's a lot of Africa, a lot of history, poetry, religion, teaching kids, and of course a lot of textbooks in science and math.

None of the youngsters have exactly this spectrum of interests, and most have a slight "but not that many books worth" interest in this topic or that.

Vanity of vanities, etc

Best Wrong Answer

I was pointed to a blog post by the now-dead D.G. Meyers (no, I'd never heard of him either, but his last post is worth reading), and browsed around a bit. Here he praises an influential teacher: "Cunningham read my pitiful effort aloud to the class and said, “In twenty-five years of teaching, this is the best wrong answer I have ever received.”"

Cartoon

An optical allusion?

AI and creativity

I've thought a bit about my attitudes towards it.

If I could get the stupid system to do what I want, I'd be seriously tempted to use it for making a book cover, even though I'm assured that this is a terribly foolish plan for someone with no layout or design training or skills. I can't draw very well and don't know what communicates genre best in Amazon thumbnail images.

But if you suggested that I use AI to write the story, I'd object that this is my story and I'll write it my way. Maybe there'd be fewer typos, but it wouldn't be my story anymore.

Maybe I'm acting like the toddler who insists that he's going to take off his (laced) boots all by himself. Perhaps, but I don't think so.

I've been working on a small problem in math for a few weeks; one that is probably understood already. Maybe AI could solve it for me (or halucinate something plausible). But this way I understand it better. If I can, I want to do it myself.

Phrases you never expected to say

At the teaching garden the pie pumpkins are ready. The Gambians in the neighborhood don't care about Halloween, but love large squash. Some teenagers, generally too cool to visit the garden, showed an interest this time and stopped by. One per family is the rule, and they left carefully bearing their treasures. Most parked them by their bicycles and returned to their play in the park, but one did not, and my wife went out and warned him "Don't bounce your pumpkin on the merry-go-round."

In his defence, this kind of pie pumpkin is sturdier than jack-o-lantern types, and it does look a little like a basketball.

For some reason, the Galeux D' Eysines pumpkins haven't been as popular as the others.

Sermons

A First Things article on beautiful sermons mentioned as an example Augustine's sermon on the woman washing Jesus' feet.

I like it. It's far from the N-point acronym-type sermons, and it isn't overly long either.

I was lucky

The mamba was three feet long, and coiled in a neat oval. As I trotted out on an errand I planted my foot on something soft and looked down. My left foot was squarely across the middle of the snake's coil, and about two inches back from its head.

I wasn't known for atheletic prowess, but I put in good speed as I yelled "Snake, snake!" Men congregated, bearing sticks and a shovel, and the snake soon came apart. At first the snake must have been surprised -- it didn't move much, but when the blows started landing it whipped around pretty fast, though fruitlessly.

I don't remember who got to take the meat home.

Mammoth hunting

How did the paleoIndians kill mammoths? Clearly they did--there are bones with spear points in them--and thoroughly enough that there aren't anymore mammoths. Elephant hide is almost half an inch thick, and mammoths corpses have twice that. Even with an atlatl you're not going to get a quick kill through that. You'd need lots of spears--and a wounded mammoth might have opinions about that--or lots of time for the critter to bleed out. And then you have to skin it pretty quickly, before the guts start to spoil the meat.

Frison published an article in American Antiquity (Vol 54) in 1989: "Experimental Use of Clovis Weaponry and Tools on African Elephants" based on work from a few years earlier. (Found via this post.)

The team took advantage of an elephant cull to have freshly dead and as yet unskinned elephants to test the tools on. Turns out Clovis points are kind of fragile (archaeologists knew this already), and getting the spear to hold together properly takes some care. You have to design it right, and even then you may have to rework the spear or the point after use. They did some slinging from 15 to 20 meters--two to three seconds away at elephant top speed.

"Proper use of the atlatl and dart requires considerable movement on the part of the hunter. ... In the case of actual hunting, this movement would very likely attract the attention of an animal whose subsequent reactions would not always be entirely predictable."

"Clovis weaponry cannot be depended on to drop quickly and reliably a charging matriarch or even younger and smaller elephants"

"Individual members of an elephant family continually wander away from the protection of the matriarch and the family. Careful stalking of such animals would put the hunter in a favorable spot to inflict crippling or lethal wounds that would eventually lead to the deaths without arousing the suspicion of the matriarch and bringing to bear the unbrella of protection offered by the family. This kind of procurement strategy involves careful stalking, a minimum of noise and excitement, and patience once a spear has inflicted a wound on the animal."

There's footage of an isolated elephant being brought down with spears by a group of Africans, without atlatls (there's no evidence they ever used them there). I can't swear to the provenance of that footage, though.

Frison tested butchering too. It was straightforward; even the legs came apart fairly easily. But you still need a lot of people, even if only to carry the meat away.

Yes, we went to Horicon today.

Bodyoids?

First Things has an article on zombies.

The MIT article Ethically sourced “spare” human bodies could revolutionize medicine proposes using lab-grown brainless human bodies for spare parts and testing.

One point jumped out at me:

Recently we have even begun using for experiments the “animated cadavers” of people who have been declared legally dead, who have lost all brain function but whose other organs continue to function with mechanical assistance.

Does that make your hair stand on end too?

Fan revisions

I've read LoTR several times, and watched the movies in theater and part of them at home again. It was fun. With a bit of trepidation I watched the first two Hobbit movies, and just the trailer for the last. It really doesn't work to try to mix the humor of the Hobbit with the darker and deeper themes of LoTR and pour CGI chase scenes on top. I felt no great loss at the omission of the last one.

Yesterday I recalled that the infamously bloated Star Wars Phantom Menace had at least two fan edits, one of which I spent the time to watch. (It had competent pacing, which the original didn't.) Hmm. Were there fan edits of the Hobbit?

Yes. Dozens. One highly regarded one is four hours long (like an extended edition LoTR reel), another apparently got it down to 2 hours.

Thus far curiosity. I didn't feel like watching any of them. I suspect I never will feel like it, though one day I might re-read the Hobbit.(*) (Just a heads-up--if you're reading a chapter a night to the kids, make sure you have plenty of hydration for the Mirkwood chapter.)

I wonder how many other movies have a sufficiently devoted fan base to do the work to fix them? Not many, I suppose--if the movie is sloppy enough to need substantial repair, it won't get fans on its own. There has to have been a precursor that was wildly popular--probably a book. And the fan base needs to skew geeky enough that some will have the technical chops to make it work. Harry Potter had a huge fan base, but the movies I saw didn't look sloppy or need fixing.

I've heard of some people who created their own animations from scratch for some books. Now that the tools are there and computer horsepower is relatively cheap, if technical skills collaborate with some good amateur artists and scriptwriters, we should see a lot more.

What would you be interested in seeing done?

(*) This year a number of things don't seem to have the attraction they used to, though it might be more accurate to say the past few years. There's plenty that's still satisfying; perhaps this is just a pruning to concentrate on those.

On the lighter side

I almost missed this: the IgNobel prizes for 2025. Example: the Pediatrics prize The present study investigated the effects of garlic ingestion by the mother on the odor of her breast milk and the suckling behavior of her infant. Evaluation of the milk samples by a sensory panel revealed garlic ingestion significantly and consistently increased the perceived intensity of the milk odor; ... That the nursling detected these changes in mother's milk is suggested by the finding that infants were attached to the breast for longer periods of time and sucked more when the milk smelled like garlic.

BBC spotted the Engineering prize: a study on using UVC in shoe racks to elminate odor. (It works, provided you don't run the light too long, at which point the shoes start to smell like burnt rubber.)

The Peace prize went to a study showing that "drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak in a foreign language". "Participants who consumed alcohol had significantly better observer-ratings for their Dutch language, specifically better pronunciation, compared with those who did not consume alcohol."

The dead and wounded

The Dallas shooter wanted to terrorice ICE, and shot detainees by accident -- at least I suppose he shot them by accident; maybe he didn't care just so he hit somebody and caused terror.

I don't know who those detainees were. As of this writing their names haven't been released. As far as I know they'd done nothing deserving death, and were in the custody and under the protection of our peace officers. We failed in that protection, and they were shot in the place of our people.

Maybe it's that failure that leaves me with the sense that the dead and wounded need--not honor, but some kind of official respect. I confess that the sense is enchoate and I can't pin down a good reason or appropriate response.

It may be that the dead was a vile criminal--or someone picked up by mistake. I can't shake the notion that we owe something, somehow, in either case.

Rapid humor

The other day in a conversation at Dr Boli about clever game shows, one commenter said of "8 out of 10 Cats" that it would "take people who are already known to be clever and humorous and put them into situations that encourage them to be humorous and clever."

Season 1/Ep 1 of "8 out of 10 Cats" was available, so I gave it a chance. The contestants were very fast with their quips, no question--faster than I generally am.

Unfortunately the fastest way to come up with quips is to use cheap shots; joking about sex, joking about the pope -- maybe some of the obscure references were too, but I've never been in close touch with UK pop culture.

Celebrity teams nominally competed to see who could best guess survey results, though the real contest was to see who could come up with the best quips. Which sounded better than it was. Maybe it got better in later seasons, but my curiosity doesn't reach that far.

Ideal choices

The Bible warns of judgment, from Psalm 62 through Revelation: reward each man according to his work. Jesus clarified a bit with the parable of the talents--the servant that was punished was the one that didn't even try. He didn't do outright evil, but he didn't even try to do good.

So, what happens if we, trying to do good, make the wrong choices? Not evil, not lazy, but not ideal?

The parables suggest that part of the rewards differ but the praise (also a reward) is the same.

I'm not sure there's a need for a detailed direction (Move to Cincinnati, rent the apartment on Jericho Lane, take the job with Campbells, and put your chips on Betty instead of Veronica). I should do the best I can with the information I have. Maybe I get special guidance--usually not. If God blesses the results of my choice, could any different choice of mine have done better than God?

Of course God's blessings aren't always immediately recognized as such: "You're doing well, so I'm going to give you some assignments that other people would not be able to handle." You understand the blessing part later.

Noble-minded

Acts 17:10-11: "The brethren immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea, and when they arrived, they went into the synagogue of the Jews. Now these were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so."

In an internet of "news" pass-alongs, I hunger for more noble-minded souls.

I'm not sure panic is necessary

"ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as Spouses Use AI to Attack Their Partners"

The story struck me as a bit odd--where did the author find so many couples using such an oddball approach to fighting with each other? I guess you could do it with a request on some website, though you'd get a serious sampling bias that way, and it would take a fair bit of work to make sure you had more or less the real scoop. Or maybe the author asked a bunch of divorce lawyers for people who'd talk to him.

I can't imagine going to the computer to try to come up with something to say to my wife. Partly that's because I don't find the systems all that intelligent, and partly because it seems too indirect. If I'm angry or happy, I want to just say so myself, not ask a ghost writer. (Think of Cyrano as a cautionary tale.)

But I can believe some people do it. That you can get yourself in an echo chamber with AI that reinforces all your opinions--that sounds easy. In fact, it sounds faster than the traditional approach, which is to gripe to your friends and rely on them to take your side, until you've worked yourself up into fury.

But stories about walking around just reading the ChatGPT responses out loud to the spouse sound like absolutely no one I know.

I don't live in the phone, though.

Unexpected hazards

"SEEKON – Two DayLight reporters narrowly escaped a masked dancer last Wednesday in the Seekon Pellokon Community Forest in Sinoe County."

The two were covering a story involving probable corruption surrounding a forestry contract, when a "country devil" showed up in town, looking for them. He was not reported as having any assistants with him, but the village people stood ready to assist him in whatever he wanted.

Enemies

From "Prayer for our enemies"

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.

They, rather than I, have confessed my sins before the world.

They have punished me, whenever I have hesitated to punish myself.

They have tormented me, whenever I have tried to flee torments.

They have scolded me, whenever I have flattered myself.

They have spat upon me, whenever I have filled myself with arrogance.

Systems

AVI linked to an essay Magical Systems Thinking about problems with complex systems, which in turn references the book Systemantics by John Gall.

"Systems in general work poorly or not at all."

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

"Great advances are not produced by systems designed to produce great advances."

"Efficiency Expert. Someone who thinks he knows what a system is or should be doing, and who therefore feels his is in a position to pass judgment on how well the system is doing it. At best a nuisance, at worst a menace."

I have claimed that in computer management, there is a "Conservation of Complexity": e.g. a tool that makes some things easier for 90% of your systems will demand horrible hacks to work with the rest. I've also spoken of myself as a political Godelian--any set of laws and regulations will have situations it does not justly address, and adding new rules creates a new set of failures in an infinite and increasingly unwieldy game of whac-a-mole. John Gall takes the analysis further, and amusingly.

No matter how you deny

We walked by a curious conversation at Horicon this morning. She was talking and he assenting: "He has his truth, and I have my truth, and we can have different truths. But somewhere there must be a truth that joins them."

I missed the rest, and it wasn't my circus, but I thought it telling that even though she believed in the relativity of truth, she hungered for a real truth, a true truth.

Defense

I was reading about Charlie Kirk over at Althouse (retired law professor specializing in "cruel neutrality"), and noticed that many of her commenters urged us all to "buy a gun."

Nothing wrong with that, but why? To defend yourself against the "Antifa" blackshirts? OK, fine, but who are they?

If I read the numbers right, there's more than enough firepower in honest hands to obliterate the Outfit, the Tren de Aragua, the Gangster Disciples, the Somali Outlaws, the Wah Ching, and all their related ilk (plausible candidates for "hostis humani generis" and outlawry)--in standup battles. But in practice, the gangs survive though secrecy and intimidation and connections with law enforcement.

Who's going to identify them for you? "I'm from Antifa and I'm here to kill you. Go get your gun." Sure. Or were you thinking of trying to track them to their lairs and attack them? You'll find them better defended than you hope. And where they are street enforcers for political groups, they will have some outside support as well. The bombers from the 70's were funded by rich lawyers (and occasional bank robbery). Remember the Klan.

And if you're worried about being surprised, some body armor might be handier than a rifle. (sniper?) And buddies with you could be even more useful--gangsters seem to prefer "defeat in detail."

I'm not talking about street crime here, or subway crime. That you can sometimes have an impact on, provided you're prepared and alert. I just don't see firearms as magical defenses against this kind of violence.

Talents

I remember sitting through one of those "spiritual gifts" lessons, filling out their questionaire, and thinking that some of what they were talking about (e.g. service) were universal requirements, not just for selected gifted ones.

Talents and gifts are context-dependent. Imagine if you will Albert Einstein and a little girl whose puppy is stuck just out of her reach in a storm drain. The talent she needs, and he has, is having an arm long enough to rescue her dog.

I have my own favorite talents, but often the situation calls for unspectacular ones.

The Face in the Frost

by John Bellairs.

A few days ago someone on a writers' group posted that they re-read this every year. That kind of endorsement gets my attention, especially when the subject sounded like something that might give me an idea or two to goose a stalled fantasy story into motion again. Two wizards, Prospero and Roger Bacon, try to survive and defeat a malicious evil force.

It didn't get into the mechanics, and the two wizards weren't different enough to give my story (about conflicting sources of magic) any useful ideas, but the book was OK. It keeps one reading, and the descriptions and scenery are quite good. I wasn't too thrilled with the ending, but it made sense.

Writing has been like pulling teeth the past few months. Not sure why, but I suspect it's due to energy being diverted to trivia like healing.

Shroud

The Shroud of Turin apparently has been controversial for quite a while. (My guess about how it might have formed was tested a few years after my post.)

A SciTechDaily post gleefully cites Nicole Oresme's claim that ‘I do not need to believe anyone who claims: “Someone performed such miracle for me,” because many clergy men thus deceive others, in order to elicit offerings for their churches. ‘This is clearly the case for a church in Champagne, where it was said that there was the shroud of the Lord Jesus Christ, and for the almost infinite number of those who have forged such things, and others.’

The article doesn't quote Oresme's reasons for holding the Shroud to be fake, just cites his conclusion. Maybe that's all we have, and if the item was fashioned about that era he might have had access to provenance information we don't.

I'm a bit dubious about attributing it to Jesus' burial, because it doesn't seem to match John's description. I could be wrong, of course.

Old encyclopedia

Growing up we had two encyclopedia sets: one the Britannica (14'th), and the other the Book of Knowledge, which aimed at a younger readership with a wildly different approach. The Britannica had all entries alphabetical, as you'd expect.

The older (not the New, which turned strictly alphabetical too) tried to entice the reader to read on into different topics. If you wanted all the articles on some topic (or summaries of all of the stories by e.g. Shakespeare) you looked in the index and perhaps had to get several volumes off the shelf. It was designed for browsing.

There was a Canadian version also, with some of the articles and stories in French.

On facing pages (5246 and 5247) of the 1912 edition linked above you find "Simple Simon Met a Pieman" and a philosophical essay "Must all Things End?" and a few pages later "The Marvels of Electricity and Magnetism." The latter article knows nothing of the nucleus, attempts to prove the existence of the ether, and includes a howler "Why the Earth's pull is believed to be caused by electricity."

I don't recall anything quite that egregious from the edition we had, which I think was from the late 50's. For me, their organization plan worked. I browsed, jumping around to things that seemed interesting at whatever age I was at the time. When I was too old for the little kid's summaries of great stories, I was old enough to read about rockets and explosives. And eventually I started browsing in the Britannica too.

My parents also got the Great Books set and its associated teaching guide, but never got around to actually trying to teach out of them, though we kids read here and there in the Great Books. (horrible font, btw) I inherited both, and we never got around to using the teaching guide with our kids either.

Cargo and kinetic interdiction

I wonder what would have been different with Trump's announcement if that Tren de Aragua fast boat had been carrying some Iraniam passengers.

It seems as though a major principle of international law is encapulation: The relevant entities are sovereign states responsible for the activities of the subjects in their physical domain, and to some extent those which travel as well. Nothing else has the firepower of the state, both to repel outsiders and control their own.

That latter is not universally true now, if it ever was. Bandits too powerful for kings to deal with crop up all through history. Sometimes they wind up setting up states of their own, or even overthrowing the king.

So how ought a nation deal with a hostile non-governmental power? Declare them terrorists/outlaw/enemies and kill them wherever you find them, just as you would with a traditional enemy state? -- no matter what state they are nominally subject to?

That sort of piggy-backs on the framework we use, though in the absence of a transparent hierarchy it's hard to know who to trust if you want to work out a peace deal. Is Jose or Abdul the one you should deal with, if either? What do you do if Hess drops in and offers a deal?

And turnabout is fair play--suppose Canada decided that the Gangster Disciples were a terrorist group and enemy of all mankind, and started to do something about it. The Chicago establishment would have a cow at the attacks on their people, and the Washington crowd would be deeply insulted and angry at the insinuation that they were incapable of dealing with crime and that they didn't properly appreciate its hazard to others.

Hash

We had meat pretty regularly in Liberia, though the ship didn't always replenish the Lebanese Abi Jaoudi grocery store on time and the shelves could get a little bare. I liked the canned hams we had a couple times a year, though I never quite managed the key manipulation that would keep the strip from thinning to a snap or widening to engulf the key. Either way somebody had to fetch the pliers.

Abi Jaoudi carried mostly American/European foods, with some local fruits. It had a slightly musty smell, but we didn't mind—past the ground level tank with the large goldfish, past the automatic doors (amazing there!), inside, the small store (large by Liberian standards) was air conditioned! In the tropics! Mom had her list, and our requests for additions went unheeded. Although, if a birthday was coming up, and if the store had been supplied with options, we got to choose what flavor of cake.

You could find lunch meat, chicken, ground beef and other things that could be frozen or kept very cold for shipment. Denmark was closer than the US. Mom made great meatloaf.

Every now and then we had canned corned beef hash—not nearly often enough. I loved the stuff, greasy though it could be—perhaps the grease was part of the joy of it.

When I went to college I ate what the dorm served, or what grandmother made when I stayed with her on break, or what my parents had when I spent the last undergraduate year with them. Grandmother Lorene made cooking look easy. She'd go in the kitchen for a few minutes, then come back and watch TV for half an hour, then go in again, and again, and then supper would appear, sometimes chicken and potatoes and beans and fresh bread.

In grad school I was on my own, with no roommate to help with cooking or rent. I found how expensive some of my favorite foods could be—expensive enough to put a serious crimp in my book habit. Hash was too dear. As was Underwood Deviled Ham, which Grandpa Nugent had taught me about. He called it bacon, and ate it for breakfast on crackers.

But food expense was a solvable problem, so I got a cookbook and a crock pot and some garage sale pots and pan, and started trying some cheap dishes—especially ones that didn't require many or complicated ingredients.

I set black-eyed peas with some bacon in the crook pot to cook one morning, mouth watering in anticipation of the evening. However, a group of us wound up having to go to Fermilab for something that afternoon, and I didn't get back into the kitchen until after 10. Most of the water had boiled away, and the recipe was scorched. It took months to get the burnt taste out of the crock.

I tried one of the Betty Crocker pancake recipes—except the idea of getting buttermilk just for one recipe didn't sit well with me, so I substituted ordinary milk from the second recipe, confusing the two recipes in the process. The hybrid tasted quite good, and has become a family staple since then.

I learned the hard way that orange juice may be acid, but not so acid that a little mold can't build up in the pitcher's lid. I located the culprit when I recovered.

I learned that an off-brand of OJ concentrate reliably gave me indigestion, and read in the news a couple of years later that the manufacturer was indicted for adulteration—their OJ was mostly citric acid and sugar.

One day I decided to make my own corned beef hash, since the canned stuff was unaffordable. I figured that corned beef was beef, and ground beef was beef—and conveniently already chopped up for me too.

So I froze a pound of ground beef (cheapest grade). I would cut off a chunk and dice it up, then dice up a potato and small onion, and fry them all together. The ground beef even provided the fat to cook it all in.

I'd start this frying, dump a can of green beans into a pot to simmer, and sit down to watch the news, getting up to stir during the commercials. Grandma had made it seem easy. Then I'd drain off the fat and plop it all on a plate, with OJ on the side.

It never did taste nearly as good as corned beef hash, but it was my own, and inexpensive. Presumably it was nutritious too, though I only weighed 135 lbs when I married. (When I called Grandpa to tell him of the engagement, he demanded to speak with her. "Can you cook?" "Well, I just helped prepare a feast for 200." "Hmf. Well, you put 30 pounds on that knucklehead by Christmas or I'm sending you home to your mother!") I called my culinary experiment a success. The matrimonial decision worked far better.

In the meantime, while still unmarried, I kept reading about how good for you fish were supposed to be.

The prospect of having raw fish in the fridge, and being on a deadline to cook it, was daunting. I'd not grown up eating any fish other than fish sticks (and sometimes tuna salad), and only those when Dad was out of town—the New Orleans man hated fish. And the Liberian markets selling fish smelled pretty strong. Mom never shopped at them (she was a nurse, and taught hygiene and sanitation). So I had no favorite recipes to look back to. I'd had fish with potatoes once, so I knew they went together sometimes.

But canned anchovies would keep until I had the energy and enthusiasm at the end of the day to work with them. The usual fish recipes in the cookbook looked complicated, and none of them involved anchovies, but I figured that fish is fish. Well, I'm an experimentalist, right? And, OK, maybe a bit lazy.

Thus, one evening I diced up the potatoes and onions per usual and tossed them into a little oil, on the way to making my new patented anchovy hash.

The fish can had that little key opening tool, but I was much better at getting the strip unwound now. Dexterity had been a little slow in coming, but it got to me eventually.

The smell was quite a bit stronger than I expected. But I figured, soldier on, and try breaking the slippery things up into hash-sized chunks.

I'd not realized there'd be all these little bones. I quickly gave up on the ribs, but tried to pry out the spines.

Into the pan went the resulting shreds, beside the already-cooking potatoes and onions. Frying filled my apartment with anchovy smell, and then with too-hot anchovy smell. The fan over the stove exhausted into the apartment, so I opened the madras-cloth "curtains" and the windows, and set up the floor fan for a cross-breeze.

A little noise told me the neighbor's cats had decided to hang out under my back window.

After some contemplation I figured tea would be a better compliment than juice for this confection.

I cleared the books off the little table and sat down and looked at the hash.

I tried a bite.

I sipped a lot of tea, and ate about half the green beans.

I tried another bite. I had perpetrated this; I owed it to myself to make a go of it. And I hated throwing food away.

Plainly I was going to have to make more tea.

I ate the rest of the green beans, and looked at the hash again.

I scraped the plate into the trash and shoved a couple of paper towels on top to try to keep the odor down. An hour later I gave up and carted the trash out to the dumpster.

At least the cats liked the smell.

Some experiments fail.

Teaching what you don't know

My father was an accountant--and missionary. It turns out that preachers may be good at saving souls, but aren't so hot at saving receipts, and somebody needs to check the books now and then. He also was business manager for a boarding school, and teacher there. Not a reverend, though, this was a "lay missions" program.

What he wasn't good at was fixing things. His motto was that it paid to pay to have somebody do the job right. As a result, I didn't realize the lack until he retired and I was helping him with a few things around the house. I guess shop wasn't a thing in his school.

It was in mine in Illinois, though I only got a semester's worth--and not all of that, thanks to malaria. But Dad wasn't satisfied with that. One summer he arranged for me to go work at the boarding school's maintenance shop. He paid my salary, and I worked as an assistant, learning some more-or-less safe ways to use the tools for woodworking. Making cabinets, repairing student chairs, laying bricks--I'd get laughed at in trade apprentice schools here, but stuff got built, and still does.

I emulated him in one thing--we made sure all our kids could play an instrument. I still can't. The piano should be easy; I tried. But one finger is lower than the rest and I get the equivalent of carpal tunnel. But the kids do well, and I'm proud they can do things I can't.

Library closing

UW is closing the Physics/Astronomy/Math library.

It seems a shame, but I see why. The frequently accessed stuff will go to the Engineering library, which is a bigger facilty. The less frequently will go to storage for retrieval on request.

There are aisles and aisles of journals--much of their content available online these days for those with a UW IP address or login. I suspect those won't be requested much. Even after the consolidation with the Math library a few years ago, I didn't generally see more than a dozen people in there.

I suspect they could have let go a few extra administrators and kept the library, but I don't have the numbers in front of me.

It sounded exciting

The headline read "Rare glimpse of exploding star." The AP story (Adithi Ramakrishnan penned it) was about supernova 2021yfj, whose spectra is dominated by silicon, sulphur, and argon (not hydrogen, helium, carbon, or oxygen). This seems to imply that the outer layers of the supernova had been stripped away before it blew--which is odd, but lets us know what was underneath them.

The AP story says it is "located in our Milky Way galaxy." That sounded very interesting--IceCube looks out for neutrinos from supernovas too. Most of a supernova's neutrinos aren't very energetic ones, but they make so many that the detector should see a significant diffuse glow in the ice--provided the supernova is close enough. At least within our galaxy close enough. Did they see it?

Wait, 2021yfj? 4 years ago? I'd have heard something about this years ago, whether yes or no.

Yes. AP/Ramakrishnan screwed up. Estimated distance over 600 mega parsecs. Not anywhere nearby--200 billion light years. Our galaxy is only 100,000 across.

?

Too bad. Still, and interesting observation.

AID reduction

AID cuts have downstream consequences that are easily foreseeable, and, as expected, reported on skew. "the cost of cancelled projects could be as high as \$US300 million, equal to a third of Liberia’s \$800 million yearly budget." Apples to oranges here: the government budget isn't the GDP.

The first story is about a nutrition project--one in which the object was to spur local intrepeneurs to market a local infant food. And then another anecdote:

For nearly a decade, Julie Sundaygar, 29, of the Bong Mines Bridge community on the outskirts of Monrovia, has sold bananas and shelled peanuts to workers who poured out from the Ministry of Finance’s Mechlin Street entrance. Sundaygar recalls almost doubling her sales when USAID-funded projects filled the ministry with USAID workers. “I could sell \$LD15,000 (about \$US75) first,” says Sundaygar who brings her fruit here from a twice weekly hour-long journey to Omega Market. Now her prices have halved. “Nobody here now gets their fruit.”

When I was last there, one of the popular job training choices the NGOs offered was furniture-making. There was quite a market for American/European style chairs, but if you looked closely the market was NGO workers and UN peacekeeping troops. The peacekeepers were never going to stay forever, and the NGOs come and go--and when they go they rarely pack furniture to go with them, so the market glutted.

An economic plan that's contingent on money coming for free forever is crazed. Tourism is challenging but they have people working on that. Infrastructure is a problem, of course, both the building of and the maintenance of.

The first link above tells of one aid project, but the first one they reported on I took note of: a 17M USAID project to advise the government on tax policy.

I was told the main purpose of USAID when founded was to funnel money to the right people to encourage good behavior and presumably wise choices; secondarily to help out the poorer populations (hopefully as a consequence of those wise choices). That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it lends itself to corruption and recently quite a bit of their money had been going to political influence buying in this country, which is way out of line. I'm not impressed by the motte-and-bailey defenses I've heard.

Coffee

I see coffee memes regularly. I never really acquired a taste for the stuff. I can drink it if there's nothing else available, and it's useful for the owl shift. Not essential, though for some people it seems to matter a great deal.

I'm old enough to remember a song touting an alternative:

Project Hail Mary

by Andy Weir

I didn't read his "The Martian," but I did see the movie at my sister's house. The framework is quite similar: alone (mostly) facing problem after problem, and building solutions. Once the premise is admitted, the book is hard sci-fi.

In The Andromeda Strain the virus-like thing is able to use extreme energy to reproduce (which drives the cliff-hanger ending). Here the premise is a bacteria-like thing that takes that to another level, able to draw enough energy from the Sun to significantly dim it--though reproduction requires CO2 from Venus--a space-traveling bacteria that is multiplying fast enough to result in disaster in a few decades.

Our hero wakes up with amnesia, and slowly learns about his spaceship and his memories, with parallel stories of his adventures on the ship and what led up to it on Earth. He's not left in the dark about "why" for long (the reader wouldn't stand it)--every nearby star system save one is clearly also infected and dimming badly. Their job--a "Hail Mary" desperate gamble--is to go find out why one of the stars stopped dimming and see if the information can save the Earth before everybody starves.

The strands are wrapped up, and the decisions are mostly plausible--though the final revelation of character isn't well motivated and didn't ring quite right.

The degree of cooperation among nations is a bit implausible, and the director, though a well-drawn character, isn't the most plausible choice for the project either. Perhaps the population of scientists willing to go on a one-way mission has different characteristics than the ordinary crowd, but the two that paired off didn't resemble anybody I knew.

Without giving away the ending, I see why Weir chose that option. It would have been much harder to write the complicated reactions and interactions the alternative would demand, and I think Weir wants to stick to what he does well.

A little axe-grinding, but on the whole a fun read.

Eye of Sauron

This is cool. A research team discovered that a blazar's jet cone is pointed almost directly at us--we can see inside. The image above is their calculation of the magnetic field direction based on the polarization of light. Different regions along the jet are thought responsible for producing all manner of radiation, from radio waves to neutrinos. When such an energetic (Doppler shift of 30?) beam strikes gas clouds, the collisions produce new particles (e.g. pions), which when they decay produce neutrinos--which IceCube has detected coming from this blazar.

On the cheerful side

After losing 25 pounds in a month, I stabilized, and am finally eating almost normally--though I still can't taste half the things (including salt and chocolate). And my walking speed is the same as before, despite several months of almost no exercise. And 15 minutes of trying to excavate day-lilies doesn't fatigue me.

Ironically, several people have said I'm looking better than before.

Ambitious plans for banking in Liberia

CBL Unveils National Electronic Payment Switch to Drive Cash-Light Economy and Financial Inclusion

The Central Bank of Liberia has officially announced the upcoming launch of a national electronic payment switch, a transformative initiative aimed at modernizing Liberia’s financial infrastructure, promoting financial inclusion, and reducing reliance on physical cash.

What's wrong with this picture?

Yep, electrical power is unreliable, even in Monrovia. And the climate isn't kind to electronics.

“If someone in Liberia can pay for goods in Ghana without U.S. dollars, that’s not just convenience—it’s transformation,” Ngafuan said.

OK, that seems like a nice ambition.

“Digitization helps fight corruption. You can trace every payment,” Balogun said. “We, the banks, are ready to support."

That, if true, sounds like a good reason for the system to never get implemented. Who in the government has an interest in fighting corruption?

Although it opens the door for spying on business rivals, so maybe... And it suggests ways of doing taxation or asset seizure conveniently.

Is it possible to de-Nazi-fy Gaza?

Nazi Germany worshipped the tribe and state, with Hitler as its prophet. The Japanese worshipped the tribe and the Emperor. Outsiders weren't entirely human.

The way the Nazis treated the Russians seems calculated to make any kind of compromise or forgiveness impossible; likewise the way the Japanese treated prisoners and most everybody else. Oct 7 seems intended the same way, to announce to the world (possibly especially Iran?) that there would never be any reconciliation.

After the war we and the Soviets both tried to de-Nazi-fy Germany. The Soviets were somewhat better at it, but in both cases we ran into a problem. Who is a devout Nazi? On one scale (are they willing to throw stones at Jews?), lots and lots—perhaps a majority of the population. They were raised to it, after all. Were they Party members? Since you pretty much had to be for lots of jobs, that also is quite a fraction. Do you want to dispose of all of them? "Stare into the abyss"--you start to sound like a Nazi too.

Instead, if you had control of the ground and the schools, and control of the religion that inspired them, you could simply make examples of the leaders, put temporary restrictions on the "Inner Party" members, and rely on control of education and the media to grow a new generation without the Nazi religion.

We weren't thorough in Germany, and even less so in Japan. But so long as the direction changed, and the worship of the state either went away or trended benign, we decided that was good enough, under the circumstances. Stalin and Mao were almost as vile, and as dangerous, as Hitler and Hirohito. And since the Nazi Werwolf project was never widely implemented (and I don't recall hearing of anything significant during the occupation of Japan), we could focus on trying to make the institutional changes we wanted.

After all, the German tribe was defeated and their demi-god Hitler was dead, and the Japanese tribe was defeated and their demi-god Hirohito told them to cooperate with the Americans. The locus of their religions was within the occupied states. There were no outside powers that still supported the Axis states.

Gaza differs. They do have something like Werwolf going, the ground is not occupied, the schools are not controlled, and the locus of the Hamas brand of the religion lies elsewhere. And Hamas has plenty of support around the world.

The cost of occupying the ground will be high, and it won't be over quickly. Control of the media is probably nearly impossible, and I suspect that controlling the schools will be undermined in every direction. And as for the religion—Islam doesn't have to be Jew-hating, but it frequently is, especially if the Jews are "uppity."

De-Nazi-fication of Gaza may not be possible at a price Israel is willing to pay.

Wasting time

Our sense of time can be manipulated. The essay uses "curvilinear" to describe media feeds that are active, without an end, and which include a mild variety--feeds that require no decision. Feeds with an end, feeds with nothing close to your interests--these evoke decisions. When we don't need to make decisions, time can slide by. And when there's no narrative, we tend tolose track of what has happened--forget the details, and how much time has passed.

Perhaps it isn't obvious, but links can eat time similarly to video feeds. The stories or essays may be longer and demand more of our minds, but you can binge anyway--and lose track of time. Been there.

Dish washing time

My wife was watching a Time Team episode in which the archaeologists were looking at pottery fragments--pottery that had been tempered with bits of crushed pottery, leaving a surface that looked pretty ugly. But I guess it held up to heat OK.

Anyhow, the first thing that came to my mind was: how do you clean that? No soap, though you could scrub with ash. Or sand, but that'd be pretty abrasive, the more so if the surface is already uneven. Frayed stick ends would scrub pretty well.

This Facebook conversation proposes some things I'd never heard of before--such as seasoning the inside with starch, and that they may have had partial survivor's immunity to some of the diseases and so cleaning wasn't so critical. (Dunno about that last--cleaning your pots would give you an edge over the tribe that didn't, and in South America they devised thorough ways of getting the last cyanide out of their cassava--that last little edge is important.)

Cleaning up doesn't seem to get quite the same attention as hunting or fighting or fabrication or cooking. But without it...

Following up on the topic of cleanliness, I tried googling for indian longhouse chamber pot, and Google's AI hallucinated at me. I figure there had to be something customary, especially in large settlements like Cahokia.

of Solomon

I was reading Psalms 72 today, and recalled the police blotter from yesterday. "He will have compassion on the poor and needy, And the lives of the needy he will save. He will rescue their life from oppression and violence, And their blood will be precious in his sight;"

The police tend to arrest more of the poor--because the other poor are the ones who need the help most often. The violent and the oppressors are often neighbors. The slaver is on the street corner.

Synthetics

I remember reading about krokodil some years ago--the writers were very worried about this synthetic morphine. It was a problem in Russia, but krokodil abuse in the US: urban legend or not? California poison control seems to take it seriously but says reports tapered off a decade ago. The first link cites cheap heroin (and presumably fentanyl) and difficulty getting codeine (to synthesize it) in the US as militating against its adaption here.

I don't hear much about bath salts (synthetic cathinones=khat), but I gather they're still a problem.

And for those watching West Africa, there's kush--a combination of synthetic opioid and synthetic cannabinoid (a combination which, despite media hype last year, doesn't have to use human bones in its synthesis). It's claimed to be particularly addictive, but I haven't found anything remotely like solid numbers on how many guys use it or what the mean expected lifetime is.

Fentanyl's a problem here, and a friend of a friend lost a kid to heroin. I wonder how elastic the demand is for euphoria. If we successfully suppress the current opioids significantly, will some of these others fill in?

There's more than one kind of slavery.

UPDATE: Wrt kush in Liberia: this story claims 100,000 addicts, which sounds like a nice round number from the air, and a UNFPA 2023 report estimating 1 in 5 use narcotics. Careless reporting is common; that may mean narcotics specifically or all drugs generically. Someone counted 866 "drug dens" in Monrovia, which is by far the largest city. If each serviced 20-50 addicts, the 100,000 doesn't sound too far out of line. If 32% of the 5.7 million are youth, that's about 1.8 million, and if UNFPA is right that's about 350,000 drug users.

As long as it wasn't buried too deeply

Apparently people came back to Pompeii after the Roman era eruption. Some buildings were taller than 20 feet, so a few things would stick out and mark the place clearly. Scavenging might be possible in somewhat sheltered areas, and I'd guess there would have been some rites possible for the already-buried dead family members.

And in a few years the land nearby would be fertile. Rain would tend to thicken and eventually harden the ash, so the window for digging might not be very long. But there'd be some worked stone handy.

Thoughts by others on AI

At Of Two Minds: where AI fails. "In other words, 90% is good enough, as who cares about the other 10% in a college paper, copycat song or cutesy video."

A conversation with ChatGPT: "Diabolus Ex Machina"

How Long Has This Been Going On?

Your preference? Ace, or Ella Fitzgerald, or Charlie Puth?

Sweeney

I don't know if it says more about how out-of-touch I am or how fast the Babylon Bee reacts, but I first heard of Sweeney via the Bee.

Grim posted an informative link. Apparently the usual suspects have their hair on fire, and the usual responders have replied in the expected ways, (and that's what the Bee responded to), and I have nothing to add to that discussion.

The woman is shapely and moves very well, but something seemed a little off. I think I pinned it down--she had a "generic gaze". Some models give the impression that they are looking at you, and not at the camera, but I didn't feel that way with her.

I gather she's successful at what she does, so I give no advice. Perhaps I'm just used to a different "personal gaze" from my wife.

Russia collusion

I gather that evidence is coming to light that the Russia Collusion claim was known to be a hoax even before the old FBI probe.

That surprises me--I'd have expected more thorough document destruction. That it was a hoax was a no-brainer.

Finding money spent by Russia to stir up mischief seems pretty trivial--on two fronts. Trying to make trouble for the US has been a foreign policy objective for the Russian/Soviets for a century. And the sums announced were trivial too, compared to the amount the parties and supporters were already putting in.

And the notion that the Russians would prefer Trump to Hillary didn't pass the smell test. Governments run on money, and the bulk of Russian hard currency money came and comes from hydrocarbon sales, with arms sales coming up distant second. Hillary was committed to ending and preventing fracking, which would have boosted hydrocarbon prices and Russian revenue and Putin's power. She was predictable.

Making up stories about political opponents has a long history, though getting government collusion in the project seems innovative. Though, on consideration, it sounds like some of what I've been listening to in Byzantine history.

Movies seem to be stylized sometimes

Someone pointed out the old training video Surviving Edged Weapons. It's almost an hour and a half long, and not pleasant viewing.

I hope I never have to find it useful

Tom Lehrer

My introduction to his work came during study hall in the English class back in '69 or '70. Somebody brought an album and persuaded the teacher to play it. The only song I'm sure was on it was "Be Prepared." We heard both sides, so I guess the teacher liked it too.

I liked it then, but over the years I've had less and less interest in revisiting his works. MLF Lullaby or Folk Song Army hold up pretty well, but I don't take much joy in the deliberately dark these days.

A very talented man. I'd no idea he'd written things for The Electric Company--I hope he had joy in that.

How trustworthy?

I'm not persuaded that Ghislaine Maxwell's testimony, whatever it may be, will be accurate or relevant. If files have been suppressed by both Dem and Rep governments for perhaps even legitimate "reasons of state," what is there to verify her named names (assuming she does)? Who's to contradict her if she has a vendetta or two, or if she's been given a list of safe targets?

"Name the other witches."

A better classification

If you're not reading Sippican Cottage, go enjoy "The Sixties Never Happened."

The idea that generational shifts happen in neat, tectonic fashion, bang-on the first day of each decade, is useless for encapsulating eras. So I’m gonna fix it. Well, at least the years between 1952 and 1982. Those thirty years were split into two parts, not three: The Fixties, and The Endless Bummer. The thing everyone calls The Sixties never happened.

and

Now, the Fixties are often maligned as a cultural wasteland, mostly by people with rings in their intellectual noses. Well, the Fixties gave us Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, and the atypical Dave Brubeck’s Take Five in the same year. Wes Montgomery was inventing smooth jazz right in front of your eyes. There was the birth of bossa nova. Broadway theaters were heaving with musicals. And they didn’t call it the Golden Age of movies for nothing. The industry had to compete with the television all of a sudden, and managed it just fine by giving much more to look at.

I wish I could write as well.

If you want another sample, try Hostile Workplace

Improving the shining hour

I'm still spending a fair bit of time resting, so I decided to pick up some history I didn't have a good handle on, and have been listening to The History of Byzantium Podcast.

The Monophysite dispute was needlessly sad. I wish someone like Socrates had had a little talk with some of the people early on, before grievances grew: "What do you mean by 'Nature?' Can you even use the word 'nature' in the same way with both the Uncreated and the created?"

Two times

Just noodling for fun. This is speculative, not authoritative.

And, on inspection, I clearly have run Blogger's TeX interface way past its limits. I don't know if splitting this up will help--I doubt it. Ah well. Where you see boxes around things, just read the TeX inside, or skim over it. I may have to try to embed gifs, or maybe make a pdf. It's hard to see if I made a typo. And I don't know how to put large parentheses around the matrix--Blogger doesn't handle some of the TeX options.

What does a world look like if it has two dimensions for time instead of just one?

Your intuition undoubtedly says--"That's silly, it would have to look very different from ours, so why bother?"

• Because it is an amusing way to spend time on the bus
• Because some string theorists have come up with modest arguments that we do have two time dimensions. Bars, Vongehr, and Gogberashvili have been looking at systems with 2 time dimensions. I hold no brief for string theory, but hey, it's an excuse.
• In one of his speculative moods, Eddington wrote about interfaces between (3,1), (2,2), and (1,3) spaces, where the numbers in parenthesis are the number of space and time dimensions respectively. The notion fascinated me ever since.
• Because there are serious problems with invisible mass in cosmology, and visibility of matter on other timelines is probably going to be a problem—just as an intuitive guess.

I just want to take a preliminary look right now--not trying to figure out what quantum mechanics would look like, for instance. And by macroscopic time dimensions I mean large enough to use a wall clock or a calendar to measure.

---

There are a few questions about visibility, the speed of light, and causality that don't have obvious answers. I'll try to keep it logical. Assume that the speed of light always appears constant. I'll also assume that objects on different timelines can interact--at some point they had to, so why not now also? Also, if A measures B's relative timeline angle, it should be the same as B measuring A's.

Wait, what do I mean by a "timeline?"

Assume that the two time directions can be viewed as a Euclidean plane, with time-1 in one direction and time-2 at right angles. As an undisturbed object ages, it will assume time-1 and time-2 ($t_1$ and $t_2) values which lie along a line in the plane.

Here are two examples. In the left the upper line has the object moving more along $t_1$ than $t_2$, and the lower line tilts more along $t_2$. Where zero is is arbitrary, by the way.

The right-hand image shows a complication that we need to keep in mind. Timeline A is kind of banal. Timeline B, relative to A, also seems ordinary. It has positive components of its timeline direction both parallel to A and perpendicular to A. So from A's perspective B will not go backwards in time.

However, when B meets C, it will appear to be going backwards in at least one time component.

Should we allow that in our initial study? We can work non-causality in if we rely on small interaction rates, or demand that it only work on small distances, but that seems ad hoc. Let's pretend it isn't going to happen and plo

The obvious first approach is to modify the Einsteinian formalism. In some coordinate system, denote points by $(t_1, t_2; x, y, z)$, where I separate space and time components with a semicolon. Use the same convention for momentum: $(E_1, E_2; P_x, P_y, P_z)$. For two points $a$ and $b$, assume an analogous invariant to Einstein's: $(t_{1a} - t_{1b})^2 + (t_{2a} - t_{2b})^2 - (x_a - x_b)^2 - (y_a - y_b)^2 - (z_a - z_b)^2$. Assume that a transformation to a different frame of reference will be linear.

To keep things simple, just ignore $y$ and $z$ for now, and use $\delta {t_1}^2 + \delta {t_2}^2 - \delta x^2$ as the separation.

A linear (and symmetric) transform can be parameterized as

${x}^'$				1	$\alpha$	$\beta$		$x$
${t_1}^'$	=	$A$		$\alpha$	$\lambda$	$\epsilon$		$t_1$
${t_2}^'$				$\beta$	$\epsilon$	$\tau$		$t_2$

Invariance requires that ${{t_1}^'}^2 + {{t_2}^'}^2 - {x^'}^2 = {t_1}^2 + {t_2}^2 - x^2$, from which we can derive equations which specify $A$, $\tau$, $\epsilon$, and $\lambda$ in terms of $\alpha$ and $\beta$, where the latter act like the $\beta$ in the usual 1-time dimensional theory, just for the two different time axes. Think of them as $\beta_1$ and $\beta_2$. By looking at the limit $\alpha=0$ we can determine the right sign for the square root.

For ease in reading the result, define:

$\gamma \equiv {1 \over{ \sqrt{1 - \beta_1^2 - \beta_2^2}}}$

$A=\gamma$

$\epsilon = {{\beta_1 \beta_2} \over {\beta_1^2+ \beta_2^2}} (1 - {1 \over \gamma})$

$\lambda = 1 - {{\beta_2^2} \over {\beta_1^2+ \beta_2^2}} (1- {1 \over \gamma})$

$\tau = 1 - {{\beta_1^2} \over {\beta_1^2+ \beta_2^2}} (1- {1 \over \gamma})$

And of course $\beta_1$ and $\beta_2$ are the speeds as a fraction of c along the $t_1$ and $t_2$ axes respectively. Their squared sum will never exceed 1, and so $\gamma$ is always real. Yep, this assumes that nothing exceeds the speed of light in any frame. And if you define a rotation in the $t_1:t_2$ plane--a rotation to a different timeline--you can turn a simple boost with one time direction to one with a mix, and it matches the parameterization here ($R^{-1} B_{1,0} R = B_{\beta_1,\beta_2}$), where $\beta_1$ and $\beta_2$ are the original $\beta^'$ times the sine or cosine.

Recalling that energy is non-negative (skipping QM subtleties), an object with momentum $(E_1, 0, p_x, p_y, p_z)$ will not break into objects with non-negative $E_2$, since there's no existing energy in that "bin" to give them. It could break into $(E_1^', 0, p_x^', p_y^', p_z^') + (E_1-E_1^{'}, 0, p_x-p_x^{'}, p_y-p_y^{'}, p_z-p_z^{'})$, but not something with a positive $E_2$ component.

In practice that means that if you don't have any local $t_2$ activity, you won't get any. The situation is stable.

Is there any way to detect the other time dimension?

Typically you and everything about you is going along the same timeline--what is there to make it change? Your best bet would be something distant, or something from a great distance that comes to pay a visit.

Suppose that you always measure the speed of light as the same, no matter what timeline it is on or came from.

Suppose you have two objects, with the same timeline direction, but one starting from a different $t_2$ time, $T_2$. It is at some nearby position $x$.

Suppose the first object has interacted with something in its past so that it has a certain amount of $E_2$ energy available to emit a photon that can reach, and bounce off, that second object. Without that, you'll never emit anything with $t_2$ component non-zero, so you'll not hit the second object. OTOH, assume that the first object has enough $E_1$ that the total $E_2$ is negligable. That way the bulk of what you measure is along the $t_1$ line.

In this thought experiment, what you would measure is the time between the emission and absorption of the photon along the $t_1$ axis, since by assumption you're not measuring anything in $t_2$. That time will be twice the travel time $\tau$, as projected onto $t_1$ axis, or $2 \sqrt{x^2 - {T_2}^2}$. (Observe that if $T_2 = x$, the photon will only reach it going along $t_2$, without any $t_1$ component. It will go there and back again in $0$ $t_1$ time; not detectable. If larger, the separation is time-like, but in a time direction invisible to you; again it will seem dark.)

Since the speed of light is always measured as the same, you will predict $\tau^2 - {x^'}^2 = 0$; that the $x^'$ will appear to be closer to you.

OK, so far so curious.

If you receive a photon from a different timeline, and only measure the energy component parallel to your own, you will underestimate the photon's energy.

But if you measure a foreshortened distance, and can also measure how many wavelengths away the object is, you will predict the photon's wavelength to be less, and therefore its energy higher. If you know a priori what kind of photon you emitted, and measure the energy of the returning one, the energies won't match.

This little contradiction might offer a way to indirectly detect other timelines--one of the assumptions won't hold.