Somebody gets it

About fear of heights: the void reaches out for you, and your muscles rehearse every possible way you could fall.

Communications in wartime

From an interrogation of Commander Nishino about the battle of Surigao Strait. His ship (the Shigure) was in the Second Squadron, and was the only survivor of that encounter with American forces. Apparently the overall commanders weren't talking to each other very clearly, and even after Kurita had been chased off and their overall time-table screwed up, everybody was instructed to go on as planned. Second Squadron got there four hours early and went in, and got mauled. Second Squadron's flagship blew up and Nishino couldn't figure out who was supposed to be in charge. Eventually he figured everybody was done for and headed out--the Shigure was just a destroyer.

On the way out he spotted Admiral Shima's force advancing in. From the interrogation:

A. About 0350 I sighted Admiral SHIMA's force advancing northward, while we were repairing the rudder.

Q. Did you communicate with Admiral SHIMA's force to tell him what damage had occurred?

A. I signaled to Admiral SHIMA by blinker because the telephone was broken.

Q. What did you tell Admiral SHIMA?

A. I signalled to the approaching force requesting them to identify themselves, as I was not sure but that they might be American surface units. The answer received was "I am the NACHI". I answered "I am the SHIGURE, I have rudder difficulties." There was no communication after this message.

Q. Why did you not inform Admiral SHIMA of the course of the battle?

A. At 1200 hours of the 25th I sent the following dispatch to Admirals TOYODA and KURITA, "The Third or 'C' Force has been annihilated, location of enemy unknown, please send me your instructions. I have trouble with my rudder, my wireless, my radar, and my gyro, and I received one hit." The reason I did not communicate directly with Admiral SHIMA and inform him of the situation was that I had no connection with him and was not under his command.

Q. Under such circumstances as you mention, was that the usual procedure? Was it not Japanese practice to exchange useful information between separate forces?

A. I assumed that SHIMA knew conditions of the battle and that he would get his instructions from his Commanding Officer, Admiral KURITA or from TOYODA.

Q. How did you assume he had learned of the battle in the entrance to the Gulf?

A. In my opinion Admiral SHIMA would know the situation by sighting the burning ships FUSO and MOGAMI, and by seeing me on a retiring course.

Q. That being the case, it was not considered necessary to give any other further information?

A. Yes, that is correct.

Q. Why was it necessary to wait until 1200 to send the message to KURITA and TOYODA?

A. Because my wireless was not functioning, and secondly I was busy with the air attack.

Q. At what time approximately did you complete repairs to your wireless?

A. I used my auxiliary wireless set, the "TM" set. This set had been in commission all the time. I probably could have used it earlier to send the message. When I sent the message I relayed it through Admiral SHIMA because of the short range of the TM set. Its range is about 150 miles.

Drone weapon market

Trent Telenko's latest thread about drones and snipers suggested a million drones minimum would be required for training our own forces. The numbers don't seem crazy. We train snipers with optics and rifles now while the next battlefields will be using drones for both spotting and shooting.

The first thing that came to my mind was "How many will fall off the back of a truck?" A few years ago AP did some research on how many weapons the US military, and came up with 1900 over 10 years (2010's). 190/year doesn't sound too terrible. FWIW, the AP article is pretty crappy: it only gave numbers for a single burglary (6 M4's and 10 pistols). I'd bet that quite a few of those counted were explosives, e.g. grenades, which are a bit hard to track after use.

I suspect that the presence of a gigantic market for civilian arms depresses the market for stolen military ones in this country. Of course, if our military were as corrupt as Mexico's, economies of scale might enter. But aside from homemade automatic weapons like the Glocks modified with the switch, I hear more about truly automatic weapons (instead of "newspaper automatics") from instances in Europe. Maybe that's some kind of sampling bias in favor of the dramatic, or maybe stricter rules for civilian weapons make military ones a larger share of the market. (And there've been some serious civil wars on that landmass with plenty of room for tools to go missing and no big oceans to cross to get them to market.)

At any rate, I suspect the Mexican cartels will get a lot of their military-use drones from their military, and our local gangsters buy from them or from China, and not bother with US military stuff.

Valse Triste

I loved Fantasia, and when Allegro Non Troppo came out we made sure to go see it.

Unfortunately...

Most of the episodes left a sour taste or felt too "message-y". However, one stuck with me as matching the music to the animation and theme very well: Sibelius' Valse Triste. Well, yes, it is sad; that's in the title.

L'apres-midi d'un faun got a little tiresome, but its interpretation of a faun's "after noon" was good.

Is a movie worthwhile if all you get out of it is one memorable scene?

Iran

IIRC the Iranian Revolutionary Guard were involved in a lot of sections of the economy. I suspect that it won't be as easy as we hope for the Iranians to chuck the mullahs--a lot of Iranians are invested in the way things are.

I'm not keen on our default system of allowing a president to start a war without Congress, though I understand there can be a need for speed. In this case, there've been hostilities for years without official declarations, with a bit of plausible deniability. There's never been doubt about their ultimate goal, though. I wonder how the powers-that-be classify that kind of war-without-declaration. Words matter less than actions, and they figure that going head to head with armies isn't going to work, but having puppets lob stuff at us saves their forces. It still seems like war.

I'm guessing dirty bomb at some point. That was probably in the cards anyhow.

Hair closer to home

After my surgery, I noted the thick lumpy scar on my neck and decided I didn't want to try to run a razor blade over that, so I invested in a new electric shaver(*). It hasn't been as necessary as I expected: my beard isn't growing on my neck anyway, thanks to the radiation.

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(*) It's a chore to find a corded electric these days. It's nice to have the option able run the shaver off the wall when the batteries eventually wear out.

Hair

A skull from China has been tentatively identified as Denisovan thanks to DNA and protein fragments. So, given the skull, they have a reconstructed face.

Hairy.

Humans grow head hair continuously (modulo a spot of baldness: In this world of toil and sin, your head grows bald but not your chin. Burma-Shave). If you don't keep your hair clean you're apt to get vermin, and if you don't keep it trimmed it is apt to get in the way. How do you do those things without tools? Gnaw on it? And perhaps Gary Larson (Far Side) could do justice to stone scissors, but I can't. Lay the hair across one rock and drag another back and forth until the hairs are ground in two?

Perhaps it was curly like sub-Saharan African hair. It can grow quite a bit longer that way without getting in the way (hair tends to break after a while). That doesn't explain why would it grow as fast as it does, though it's another option for the reconstruction people to consider.

I don't think we started growing straight hair like mad until we'd already developed tools for dealing with it. Some suggest singeing or flint scrapers (ouch, ouch). And you can groom with mud, which would help keep the vermin down, and maybe do a bit of automatic hair breaking (effectively trimming) when the mud cracked.

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."