Touring ancient monuments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snakebites

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

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

Some of these work:

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

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

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

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

On page 401:

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

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

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

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

What doesn't get traded

Corn appears to have been bred about 7000BC, and spread south: Ecuador 6000BC ± N lower Central America 5600BC, Columbian Andes 4500BC ± N -- New Mexico and Arizona about 2500BC, and to reach beyond the desert took more than 2500 more years.

Seeds are easy to pack, and if you keep them dry they ought to keep a long while. But the "how to grow" them might be a little less portable, if traders weren't usually farmers.

Transfer of knowledge and plants is trivial if the farmers migrate or intermarry along the routes, straightforward if trading travel is part-time or everybody learns a bit of everything, and hard if trading is a specialization, or if the people you trade with aren't really into agriculture on a large scale.

I wonder what the barriers were that slowed corn reaching far into North America. Desert would be one, obviously. Were the deserts and jungles of those eras in the same places as now? I've done a little searching, and so far haven't found systematic climate studies that cover enough of the area to game out which way people might go. If somebody knows, I'm curious. Up and down the coast should be pretty straightforward.

Remote areas having nothing you cared to cart back is another barrier, as are hostiles. Great Lakes copper went east, south to Georgia, north to Alaska--but I don't see references to the SouthWest. Well after Great Lakes copper started being used, South American started smelting their own--and possibly that was easier to get than stuff from the north. But one map on that page shows marine shells being traded across the deserts, so trade wasn't impossible.

Of course, the trade routes may have developed later than the movement of corn growing, which happened pretty early in most places.

I got started down a rabbit hole trying to figure out how trade worked from the Pacific to the Amazon side of the Andes. Incas traded for feathers and skins, and even tried to invade--how old were the trade routes? Would they have been possible for the Caral-Supe, circa 3500BC, 3000 to 4700 years earlier?

Movies

One of the New Years challenges I got was to watch a couple of foreign language movies without subtitles and see if I could figure out what was going on. I picked The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and Yamato. True, the former did have slides, which are sort of like subtitles, but I don't read German. I got the gist.

Yamato was a bit harder--I mistook the sweatheart for a sister. The movie follows the lives of several crewmen, proud of their ship, subject to hideous discipline, and getting pounded by American planes.

Perhaps the speech and text told more of the story. IIRC, Yamato didn't run up against much in the way of American aircraft until Sibuyan Sea and Samar (and then Ten-Go, of course). The depiction of Samar (if such it was) leaves out the task force's retreat. Possibly they didn't want to dwell on that part.

Ten-Go was a kamikaze mission for the ship, and here my lack of Japanese hurt: they showed no kamikaze planes--did the characters discuss it? If not, that's a weird omission.

From the purely Japanese PoV, the Americans come across as impersonal and deadly--impersonal until they kill his sweetheart's mother and eventually his sweetheart at Hiroshima. A bit santized...

I suppose I could rewatch with subtitles on, but I won't spend the time. The visual story is one I wanted.

There's a framing story, and I eventually figured out the motives on that one too. Interesting challenge--not one I'd want to try with something like My Dinner With Andre, though.

Taking things for granted

In Zelazny's Lord of Light, Yama says "None sing hymns to breath... But oh to be without it!" I remember having had pneumonia a time or two.

Sometimes looking at a boring ECG can be a delight.

Treaties

It's strange how the debate about Ukraine plays out over at Althouse: so much apology for Putin and running down of Zelensky. The case seems straightforward enough. Russia may claim to have been provoked by threats of Ukraine joining NATO, but that's symmetric: Ukraine looked to join NATO because it was threatened by Russia. In any event, Russia did the invading. Cheer for David, hope Goliath gets his comeupance.

Except that Golaith, though getting badly battered, seems to be winning the slog. If they're willing to spend the men and materiel, it looks like Russia can win.

Ukraine seems to be losing, and there's not a whale of a lot more we can do about that without starting a war between us and Russia. Some of our wonderful tech is already looking a bit obsolete, too.

Can the Europeans save them? Unless they've been building up the armaments and armies while I wasn't looking, then no.

(Is China helping the Russians with materiel? Yes. Are they helping them with deniable harrassment of the European nations by cutting undersea cables? Sure looks like it. When they get their pound of flesh out of Russia for their assistance, will China be stronger?)

Even if we stipulate that Zelensky is on the side of the angels (he certainly has guts!), the Ukrainians are probably best served by cutting their losses. That doesn't mean we wish Putin any good, or Zelensky any bad. It's just bowing to the inevitable.

It doesn't mean a peace treaty would be just. I gather it's a bit clever, though, putting in a kind of indirect guarantee; though not a very firm one.

Perhaps it sticks in people's craws to try to force an unjust peace treaty on a nation, and so they come up with reasons to blame the victim. Or try to look the other way.

Not alone

From an essay by E.E. Doc Smith, found and posted by J.C. Wright

I have found motivation the hardest part of writing; and several good men have told me that I am not alone. It takes work—plenty of work—to arrange things so that even a really smart man will be forced by circumstances to get into situations that make stories possible. It takes time and thought; and many times it requires extra words and background material whose purpose is not immediately apparent. To refer to an example with which I am thoroughly familiar, what possible motive force would make Kimball Kinnison, an adult, brilliant, and highly valued officer of the Galactic Patrol, go willingly into a hyper-spatial tube which bore all the ear-marks of a trap set specifically for him? I could not throw this particular episode into the circular file, as I have done with so many easier ones, because it is the basis of the grand climax of the final Lensman story, “Children of the Lens.” Nor could I duck the issue or slide around it, since any weakness at that point would have made waste paper of the whole book. Kinnison had to go in. His going in had to be inevitable, with an inevitability apparent to his wife, his children, and—I hope and believe—even to the casual reader.

and

From the first quarter of the broad, general outline, only a few pages long, I made a more detailed outline of “Galactic Patrol;” laying out at the same time a graph of the structure, the progression of events, the alterations of characters, the peaks of emotional intensity and the valleys of characterization and background material. Each peak was a bit higher than the one before, as was each valley floor, until the climax was reached; after which the graph descended abruptly. My graphs are beautiful things. Unfortunately, however, while I can’t seem to work without something of the kind, I have never yet been able to follow one at all closely. My characters get away from me and do exactly as they damn please, which accounts for my laborious method of writing.

Poverty Point

Poverty Point was a bit too far out of the way for us last year, unfortunately. It's an ancient Indian earthwork site: built up between 1700 and 1100 BC. Much older than Cahokia, but younger than the pyramids of Egypt, and older than the MesoAmerican pyramids. One section dates back to 3900 to 3600 BC (beats the pyramids).

A TimeTeam video about a resistivity study came up in my wife's feed. There's speculation, and the study supplies some support for the idea, that the central plaza was built over a couple of (now extinct) mud volcanoes. Given the myths recorded later about people emerging from the earth--location, location, location: build something there.

One thing didn't make sense: a claim that the big mound (A) was built in 3 months. 238,000 cubic meters? I looked up the reference, and they concluded that the lack of obvious erosion or layering in the cores they took (in an area with plenty of rainfall), meant that "we cannot falsify the hypothesis the mound was built in less than three months."

Um. There seem to be other estimates. If you assume 50lb baskets, two per carrying pole (guessing that the locals invented them too), and that whether it was 1 digger and 1 porter or one doing both jobs and taking twice as long, that's about .05 m3 in maybe 40 minutes, and over 3 million man-trips. Give people a day off each week, and that's about 15,000 man-months. I've no intuition for how many people you could scrounge up to do that kind of work, but you'll need to feed them, so maybe double or triple the number to produce the food, and more to prepare it. Nominally this is before much agriculture (e.g. way before corn is found there), though I'll bet there was some, of quasi-wild varieties.

Not three months.

It looks like a very interesting site, and a long-lived one too. 2800 years of use. They estimate the last work was roughly about the same era is the famous collapses in the MidEast about 1200BC. China had some droughts about then, so maybe the Americas did too.

Streamlining

Years ago I got a computing magazine, and on each issue's last page they ran a short column on some amusing anecdote. One was a repairman's observation: a computer at the point of sale got shaken up each time the cash door slammed shut, so he helpfully moved it--and the computer started hanging. Apparently the disk's bearings were starting to go, and the little shake it got helped it unstick. Anecdotes like that.

One column was a story of an intern at BigExpensiveComputer Company, which had million-dollar support contracts on mainframes and software. As our hero learned the ropes of his small piece of a large project, he shared an office with a fellow who didn't do anything but read the sports sections and fiddle with things on his desk. Hero speculated on how the officemate kept his job with such a lousy work ethic. Hero came in one morning to find the officemate on the phone -- all day long -- stepping a customer with a crashed database through picking up all the scattered bits and putting the software back together.

Turned out said officemate was the only one left who understood a ancient computer/software combination that BEC Co had sold, and still earned seven figures on the maintenance of. BEC Co was happy to pay the man big bucks to sit around and figure betting odds on horses, just so he'd be there on that one day every few years when something really bad happened. Insurance.

How many places in government are like that, where most years you don't need an expert on shield volcanos, but this month something started steaming in Lake Erie and people want answers now?

The military is one role where efficiency isn't top priority, of course -- coverage and robustness compete with it.

For what it's worth in medical care

I've noticed that getting a doctor's apointment is taking longer, both in call-back and scheduling. The ER doc yesterday said they'd seen a massive uptick in visitors, which he attributed to fewer medical professionals. The closest Walgreens pharmacy has apparently had to close some afternoons because of staffing issues.

The 10,000

I like reading original sources when I can, and Grim reminded me of a very old one, written about 400 BC. I'd read a condensed version (for children) of Xenophon's story back in 4'th grade or thereabouts, but not the original. Thanks for the suggestion, Grim! He already has much more extensive (and apropos, since he was there) comments than I.

Some things stood out for me. One is how important sacrifices and studying omens was in their activity. At one point they delay action for an almost disastrously long time because the omens weren't favorable. The recorded speeches emphasize how important it is to be honest, because the gods hated evil oathbreakers. I don't know how much to rely on that professed attitude, since it is all filtered through Xenophon--and also because one of the recurring themes of the book is betrayal. Nobody trusts the Hellenes--and not altogether without reason. They don't entirely trust each other either.

Of course the biggest problem they face is food(*), and having 10,000 hungry soldiers and associated slaves and whatnot show up in your valley is a disaster for the locals. The soldiers won't be happy paying the higher prices that supply and demand considerations require, so either you get shafted financially or physically as they just take the goods. Either way, your valley goes hungry.

And, the Hellenes are mercenaries. Except for a few of the leaders, who hope for a bit of glory or power, they're in it for money, and sooner or later there'd better be some. Or portable valuables, or slaves.

As they get closer to home, the prospect of stopping to found a city gets more attractive to those without a family at home. How would they acquire the women? Slaves, or by having enough money for local doweries?

When such a large army shows up, local militia don't quite suffice, though they have some use in slowing or discouraging too-distant foraging.

They adjust their fighting configuration as they go--Grim explains that well. Major decisions have to be voted on by the soldiers, not just the generals--who can be similarly gotten rid of. I don't mean to disparage Xenophon, but that brought to mind the not entirely dissimilar democracy on pirate ships. (I don't know if privateers, who'd be more like mercenaries, were run along lines similar to pirates.)

Another theme that jumps out at you is just how different the attitudes were compared to modern Western military ideals. If you weren't defending your home turf directly, you wanted loot. I'm not claiming that modern army rules inherit much from the Templar oaths, or their rules (some of those look like what you'd expect if you wanted to maintain discipline in a standing army), but there seem to be similarities.

Read it yourself, and follow along with Grim.

---

(*) If not for the lack of food along the way, they could have just retraced their steps and avoided almost all the fighting they had to do on the way back.

Renaming

Renaming things is pretty easy in google maps--just change a name or two in a database--but there are so many things to rewrite...

If only

I really want this to be true: it has been interpreted as suggesting that ice cream is good for type 2 diabetes and some heart issues (or at least for not getting them).

I've read before that dark chocolate is good for blood pressure. Never mind the nuance right now: since it has milk, milk chocolate should be even better, right?

I'm just waiting to hear that sourdough baguettes are good for weight loss.

Unfortunately, where they're true (and other studies disagree), it's only with caveats and that critical word "moderation." Are you telling me 1/2 kilo isn't a single serving bread size?

Cuts

"Elon Musk’s DOGE Axes $17M USAID Project In Liberia"

It sounds dramatic.

cancellation of a $17 million USAID-sponsored project for Liberia—a project originally intended to provide tax policy advice to the Liberian government.

Oh.

I'm not an expert on tax policy, though I do know the first rule is to actually collect them. Figuring out how other countries have fared with different policies would take me a bit of research, and maybe some translation services. I think I'd have the basic grasp of it after a few months, and a few more for details (devil is in the details). Call it a year, just for round numbers, and maybe assume salary and services costs of $300K. OK, now I'm an expert, or probably no worse than the ones out there, and I write my report. Step 1: weed out as much corruption in the revenue department as you can, etc.

I'd bet my report wouldn't differ too much from what they already know to do; maybe a little futzing with the tax rates, but their economy can only stand so much. The US was going to spend over 50 times my estimate.

I can't tell why: "The details of the $17 million project had been sparse", so it could be just about anything.

Overhead

CharityWatch keeps track of the relative overhead of charities: how much of the money they get goes into salaries and advertising and whatnot. Low fractions are good, high fractions warn of scams. Something like UMCOR had 3%, while BLM Global Network had 53% overhead (and poor governance and transparency).

They don't rate USAID. I wonder how much money turns into actual assistance.

To be fair, it's not clear that was ever exactly USAID's purpose. Before the current revelations I assumed that part of its grants went into direct aid programs, and part to development infrastructure (physical and legal) schemes, from which the local elite skimmed what they pleased--an unofficial bribery. (Oh, and apparently trying to overthrow the occasional government. I'm not saying that is never in the US interest.) Evidently the administrators thought that the USA also needed aid in developing in their favorite directions. I suspect that the net overhead--combining that at USAID and at the NGOs they funded--was extremely high, but I haven't yet seen numbers.

Relatedly, I read a claim that north of 90% of money for aiding Haiti stayed in the USA. I don't know where they got that number, nor exactly what it means: Did it include buying products here and shipping them there? Just sending money to Haiti--you might as well make the process efficient and put it in Swiss bank accounts directly.

Even when the parties are honest and dedicated, the overhead involved in keeping track of how a grant's money is used and the associated paperwork for grants can be noticeable -- so there's going to be some waste. The more diverse the programs which the entity funds, the greater the waste must be, since you need administrators knowledgeable about and able to detect shenanigans with reports about a variety of different things: not just orphanages and well projects.

Pennies

Goodby to the penny? FWIW, the argument that it costs more to make it than it is denominated at isn't quite as compelling as it seems--the question isn't how much it is denominated at but how much value it provides to the people who use it. Is is worth more than 3 cents to be able to break prices down to the penny over the lifetime of the coin? If almost everything is going debit or credit, maybe not. OTOH there are good reasons for not wanting every transaction to be electronic: fragility and the risk of 3rd party control of transactions.

Althouse cited a NYT article that noted that although the Treasury is mandated by law to produce coins, the number is at the discretion of the Treasury Secretary, and the number could be 0.

How the mighty are fallen. A penny used to be about a day's wages. But 1600 years of Royal coining dropped the value by orders of magnitude.

I hadn't known that Isaac Newton floated the idea of copper pennies.

gluschdich

"which means 'I am not hungry but I feel like eating!'"

I should make a magnet of that word, maybe illustrated, for the fridge door.

Vitreous detachments

are annoying. That flicker at the periphery isn't real, and the cloud of tiny floaters isn't warning of a gnat attack.

Jazzing up the description

Use literary or allusive references to describe chess. Queen's Knight could be Lancelot (Mallory be the pawn?), Becket could be the King's Bishop (Eliot be the pawn?). Windsor could be the Queen's rook (Howard?). Ranks could be partridge, dove, hen -- or maybe that's not elegant enough.

I need to think about move descriptions; "Howard showed Mallory eternity?"

Slickensided kettlebottoms

are a coal mine hazard. Coal mining is more complicated than it looks. Floors can heave too, though this is slower than having the cast of a carboniferous tree fall on you.

I love the word slickensided, and can't remember where I heard of it before. I didn't know what it meant then.

Interceeding

Watching a young mother corralling an energetic toddler at service this morning brought Romans 8:26 to mind: "In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; ... the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words". Who can concentrate on worship when "Mommy, mommy!"? but we have an intercessor.

China preparations

I read that the largest military command center in the world.

That's not encouraging--or on the other hand, perhaps it is after all. I hoped to get an idea of bloat by looking at the number of Chinese high naval officers divided by the number of ships, as a function of time, but apparently those numbers aren't easy to obtain (and therefore may be dubious). On the third hand, if you've got a facility, its denizens may want to justify their existence.

Piranesi

by Susanna Clarke. AVI recommended Piranesi. It sounded interesting, and our library system, with about 40 copies, had 51 holds. I got a call from the library about 3 days later -- the book must circulate quickly.

Long ago I read a short story about an infinite library full of books of random letters--probably Borges', but I don't recall the name, just the myth. The protagonist, called Piranesi (he's sure it isn't his name), lives in a statue-bedecked infinite house, with room after room, the bottom of the three stories washed by the sea.

Fortunately for the reader there's some meaning and discovery in the story, and struggles with memory and against madness.

As AVI notes, there are plenty of references to other writers, most of which I probably missed. I had to look up who Piranesi was, for exaample, and I didn't recognize most of the sculptures.

If you've a taste for mythic writing (like the infinite library story), or the patience for it while the mystery is solved, read it.

I'll probably never re-read it.

UPDATE: I probably should have waited a few hours before reviewing a work aimed at myth. There are a couple of other things: Although it was only touched on at the end, the other world seems to be a world of archetypes, but we only live as instances of ourselves; what happens if we try to live among the archetypes? (The Place of the Lion?) And of course, how much of us is our memory?

Hardball

and spitball too.

It's an old game--require a cut in an agency's budget, and they respond by curtailing the most popular services (close Yellowstone rather than Great Sand Dunes), to inflict maximum pain on the people to whom the executive is supposed to answer.

I'm hearing a few things already--whether true or not needs the 24-hour rule--that might be the result of sloppy directives from Trump or might be revenge from agency heads.

Interesting times.

Breaking

Drachinifel's youtube channel is popular in our household--about warships up to the end of WW-II (avoiding the still-secret stuff involved in modern ships). You learn how the ships were built, used, and lost -- and many single-ship episodes ended, as the ship outlived it usefulness, with "sent to the breakers."

"Breaking" -- how does that work; how did that work back before iron ships? Luckily there's a little history. "In the days of the "wooden walls," a ship condemned to destruction was often burned or even carefully "lost" in some convenient spot. To-day the shipbreaking industry is run on scientific lines, and nothing is wasted." (It makes me itchy when people misuse "scientific" like that...)

"Even naval ships were sometimes treated in that way and to the present day small vessels and barges which have no sale value will often be carefully “lost” in some out-of-the-way corner. Harbour masters and conservancy authorities are careful to check this practice wherever possible; but even the Port of London Authority, responsible for the best-controlled port, in the world, often has trouble in stopping it."

Looking for happiness

BBC has a story on a man's "searching for secret to happiness".

"Anyone that is fixated on making you feel happy all the time is selling you snake oil" ... "If I could pick one thing that made the greatest difference - after I had been stabilised with treatment - it was, and always will be, work." But not just workaholic type work...

Nobody will tell you what a brave, talented person you are for doing the work of real happiness. But you will feel it in the reactions of people you love, the gratitude of waking up without a sense of dread, the awareness of beauty around you. And knowing you will keep your commitments, and live as a person who doesn't just talk about caring for people but does their best to live that talk.

He quotes Raymond Carver's tombstone inscription, the ideas of which should sound very familiar to many of us (funny how Wikipedia ignores the religious (even if not explicitly christian) aspects of his life):

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Bread

The supermarket or Joy Of Cooking baguettes never quite seemed as good as those in Geneva (or New Orleans) or the pricy bakery--and sometimes even the pricy bakery's wasn't quite right either. Searching around easily found other recipes, including one which explained that a slower rise/proofing developed the flavor better, and suggested half a day proofing in the fridge.

My experiment wasn't entirely satisfactory (room temperature is a bit low in winter), but the flavor does seem to be better.

I'm trying to imagine

what the rest of the teaching time was about the day Jesus told His disciples about His temptation in the wilderness.

Taylor Product?

We learned, so long ago we've probably forgotten when, about the Taylor Series. \begin{equation} f(x) = f(x_0) + (1/2)(x-x_0) f^{'}(x_0) + (1/6)(x-x_0)^2 f^{''}(x_0) + ... \end{equation} If the derivatives are large, this might not converge very quickly (if at all). If the function $f$ is reasonably well behaved, and positive, we can try looking at products instead. Never mind the complex logarithms for now. \begin{eqnarray} f(x) = e^{log(f(x))} \\ g(x) \equiv log(f(x)) \\ g(x) = g(x_0) + (x-x_0)g^{'}(x_0) + (1/2)(x-x_0)^2 g^{''}(x_0) + \dots \\ f(x) = f(x_0) e^{(x-x_0)g^{'}(x_0)} e^{(1/2)(x-x_0)^2 g^{''}(x_0)} \dots \end{eqnarray} Will this converge any faster? For a distance use the difference between the approximation so far and the true value, divided by the true value. Pick a couple of simple examples: $f(x)= e^{x}$ and $f(x) = x^2$. The first one converges much faster with a "Taylor Product" \begin{eqnarray} f(x) = e^x \\ g(x) = x \\ g(x) = x_0 + (x-x_0) 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 \dots \\ f(x) = f(x_0) e^{(x-x_0)} \times 1 \times 1 \dots \end{eqnarray} The "distances" for the approximations are \begin{eqnarray} (f(x)-f(x_0))/f(x) = 1 - e^{x-x0} \\ (f(x)-f(x_0) e^{(x-x_0)})/f(x) = 0 \\ 0 \\ \dots \end{eqnarray} The second function example is, of course, much easier to approximate with a Taylor Series; you only need three terms for it to be exact. \begin{equation} f(x) = x_0^2 + (x-x_0)\times 2x_0 + (1/2) (x-x_0)^2 \times 2 = x^2 \end{equation} But never mind that; let's use the "Taylor Product" anyway. Here $g(x) = 2\log(x)$ If we let $x=x_0+1/2$, and let $x_0 = 1$

order	g deriv	$g^{(n)}$ at $x_0=1$	scale term	f cumulative
		at $x_0=1$		error frac
0	$2\log(x)$	0	1	.555
1	$2/x$	2	2.718	-.208
2	$-2/x^2$	-2	.7788	.059
3	$4/x^3$	4	1.0869	-.023
4	$-12/x^4$	-12	.9692	.009
...	...	...	...	...

Suppose instead that $x=x_0 + 1/2$ but $x_0 = 1000$. It probably won't surprise you to see that it converges faster, using the given distance measure. \hline

order	g deriv	$g^{(n)}$ at $x_0=1$	scale term	f cumulative
		at $x_0=1$		error frac
0	$2\log(x)$	0	1000000	.001
1	$2/x$	.002	1.0010005	-2.5 E-7
2	$-2/x^2$	-.000002	.999999	8.3 E-11
3	$4/x^3$	$4\times 10^{-9}$	1.00000	-3.1 E-14
...	...	...	...	...

I don't know what this is actually called, and search engines turned up reams of irrelevancies. On a related note, MathJax in Blogger doesn't understand tabular mode.

Happy

I follow Sippican Cottage who recently posted on "the happiest songs," with a sampling. The first thing that came to my mind was Apollo 100's Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring, and not just because of the title. I thought it a happy song (OK, instrumental) long before I knew the name. (True. Not sure why, maybe no DJ's to explain.) I've wondered if one could time a fireworks display to it...

Anyhow, what are your suggestions?

JFK files

So the JFK files will finally be completely visible. Some years ago I wondered why several different administrations kept part of the proceedings secret, even after everybody was dead and no careers could be ruined. I came up with a possible reason.

Given who Oswald was, and what kind of life he'd led, the obvious suspicion is that the Soviets had directed him. Maybe they did, maybe not -- it would be hard to prove, especially this late. But what should have been the US reaction if they had? Would we risk nuclear war for revenge (and some kind of retaliation would certainly have been on everybody's mind)?

The discussions of how much injury we'd be willing to take without pulling the trigger would be useful information for modern enemies, and I can see multiple presidents saying "Let's not talk about this," and keeping any historical conversations under wraps.

I wonder if I was right.

Feiffer

I remember mostly liking Jules Feiffer when I was adolescent. His "Marriage Manual" seemed, to an "outsider," cynical enough to be realistic.

But older me found him "OK in small doses," and his thoughts on marriage missing the points. His dancer might dance for hope, but in the end there never seemed to be any.

I read a collection of his work that covered several years, and some years were downright bitter. Every now and then he hit the nail exactly, and for those times I'll be grateful.

Do as we say, not as we do

Coneflower seed heads feed some birds during the winter, so we cut and stacked them. Cut stalks of various of the annuals in the garden are used as bee nests over the winter too, so they're lying loose also. We have some firewood stacked by the house, and several bushes of one type or another, on a pretty small lot. Though we no longer have any trees, neighbors do.

If we lived in the Altadena area, our house would have gone up in no time.

True, tornadoes are a more frequent threat around here...

Not quite the desired result

A CPAP helps you breathe by providing "continuous positive airway pressure" to help keep the airway open. Without it, if you're lying on your back (and sometimes if you aren't), your tongue and soft palate may relax too much and block breathing, resulting in sleep apnea.

With it, you can feel the air forcing in when you breathe, and exhaling. Well, you can feel those anytime, but it's more pronounced with the machine. Being aware of your breathing is one technique for Buddhist mindfulness meditation: which isn't quite what the doctor ordered. Un-mindfulness so you can get to sleep is the point.

I guess one just has to get used to it, at a time of day when it doesn't matter if you sleep or not: no pressure. So to speak. (That seems to be helping.)

BTW, the valve at the mask may deteriorate over time. Even if it seems to move when you blow on it, at night it might just offer to stay mostly closed on you, making you feel like your machine is trying to blow you up like a balloon. Replacement isn't pricy, and helps a lot.

Interplanetary infection

Some years ago I wondered if Mars could be infected from Earth and then revisited the question, with the likely answer being "no." Another group decided to investigate life traveling to Venus instead.

That's "downhill," so you don't need as much energy to launch the bits of bacteria-laden rock, so the odds of it being sterilized in the blast are minutely smaller. OTOH, Venus isn't exactly the easiest place to live. Maybe some extremophile bacteria could survive, if there was something to "eat." Some bacteria survive here by oxiding using sulfur, but something had to produce the available sulfur in the first place. (geological chemistry? I don't know the mechanism) A huge amount of what's around us is shaped by life: O2 in the atmosphere, for instance.

Venusian microscopic life doesn't seem impossible--high up. Given what we know now. Maybe something will change the picture later...

Across the street

The weather will reach a seemingly tropical 44F today, and be mostly sunny. The workmen are wearing heavy jackets and gloves. The old roof is coming off, including some decrepit 4x8's, and new one is going on. 17-January. Tomorrow night it's supposed to hit -3F.

It's a ranch-style duplex, so they needn't climb high. I wonder if there's a discount for the off season.

UPDATE: They only did part of the roof, so I guess they were working on storm damage.

A few quotes

from the past day's reading:

"Genius ought'n to be eccentric!" he cried in some excitement. "Genius ought to be centric. It ought to be in the core of the cosmos, not on the revolving edges."

or this, about Augustine, and millions of the rest of us

an idleness which was fatal to his virtue

LA thoughts

The fires are far from the places we used to live, before we left in '63. The closest I've been since then was at meetings at UCLA, which may be threatened in the next few days. (I was offered a post there once, with a raise--but when I looked at cost-of-living it would have been a disastrous pay cut.)

I remember very little of the town. Most of what I know about it has come through pop culture, which is why Sheryl Crow's "All I Wanna Do" keeps coming to mind when I hear reports mentioning Santa Monica.

The contrast of that song is a bit jarring; "have some fun" vs evacuations and loss. But looking over the lyrics it seems as though part of the "fun" is the (lesser) contrast between the revelers and the busy or sleeping mundanes. I wonder if they'd have as much fun if the revels were a community dance, with everybody participating, instead of just a select few at night while everybody else sleeps.

That's a rabbit trail; coming back to the main track:

What can we do to make houses more resistent to fires? Metal roofs would help (it was something like a factor of 5 more expensive than asphalt shingles when we checked; it may be less now. Still it represented an investment of something like 1/3 the nominal value of the house.) Window frames that don't melt in the heat. Siding that doesn't allow embers to get stuck in cracks, and resists burning.

And the painful parts: trees away from the house (no shade), bushes away from the house (gardening and flowers), and so on.

I suppose if we want to build in flood plains we have to build for floods, and if we want to build in chaparral that burns regularly we need to build to resist burning.

Fixing that will take a while, though. In the meantime, they'll have to build more of the same, assuming they can get permits (never a foregone conclusion in California).

Walking back down the highway

after your car ran out, carrying a gallon of electricity...

Suppose you bring back a half a gallon of gasoline: enough to take you 10 miles, maybe? How big a battery would you have to carry to power an electric car to go 10 miles? (10 miles/400 miles range) * (1200 pounds) = 30 pounds of battery. Maybe a little less, as not requiring all the infrastructure of the car's battery. Say 20 pounds, or maybe 10kg for the non-Imperialists out there. Maybe push the weight back up a bit for the charging interface.

Not impossible, especially if the makers designed it as a backpack, but not fun.

Lure of magic

Andy Crouch writes about modern magic, and the side effect of instant gratification on development. Some things demand time and discipline to develop.

Tangentially, some fantasy pays at least lip service to the notion that magic takes lots of preparation effort, and that once you've shot your bolt you have to figure something else out if it didn't work. A story about a magician spending hours prepping and practicing would be pretty boring, though. (Did it trace to Jack Vance?)

And while these stages of life are singular and essential, magic is equally disastrous at other formative moments. A friend of mine found himself seated on an airplane departing Los Angeles next to a couple en route to their honeymoon in Hawaii. He observed with growing horror as the newly-married young woman opened up TikTok on her phone, began scrolling and swiping through videos, and did not stop, even for a bathroom break let alone a word to her husband, until the plane landed five hours later. One can only wonder how the rest of the honeymoon unfolded. Even and especially when we face the defining seasons of our lives, the temptation to use magic to evade their demands as well as their gifts can be—as every one of us knows one way or another—overwhelming.

UPDATE:

Grim has a couple of essays about magic and alchemy (the essay I linked uses the word "magic", which isn't quite right), and about magic and chivalry and virtue.

Waiting

We had a sermon on waiting the other week. Simeon got to see Jesus, but only as a baby. The rest everybody had to wait for. We still have to wait for the completion of the salvation. Joshua had to wait -- several times, not just at Jericho. Often the waiting is for things we can't do ourselves, though sometimes it seems that maybe we could expedite matters a trifle, if only ...

Just keep going, just keep praying, just keep doing the apparently ordinary stuff in front of you, just keep hoping ... and waiting. Patience isn't one of my front line virtues, which makes perseverance a little weak too -- and God seems to value perseverance.

Since so many of the things we hope for aren't things we can assist with very much (e.g. A isn't open to listening to advice from you), maybe the waiting is God's way of giving us a role that we can handle. "Hold until relieved," perhaps. We can't see what good our waiting does; maybe we will one day.