Taste

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

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

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

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

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

Safety vs conservation

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

Applied statistics

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

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

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

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

Plants can protect from fire too

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

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

Academia

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

Drag the camera back for a wider picture.

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

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

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

What does a university have on offer?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oil

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grim

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

Sacred relics

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tree frog bedding

One instance of laptops in the classroom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MHD

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

Maybe that would make MHD generation more feasible too.

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

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

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

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

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

Taste

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

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

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

Memorial Day

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

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

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

A prophet because he is a prophet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps Chesterton had an off day

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

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

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