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.