Reporting on Obama

When Obama first started to appear on the national radar, some of my kin were interested in him. I predicted to them that he would enjoy a lovefest from the media for a few months, and then muckrakers would look for, and magnify, flaws; and swarm around like sharks in a feeding frenzy. Little seems to give a reporter as big a rush as finding the clay feet on heroes.

I was wrong. You saw adulation, but hardly a breath of any dirt-digging; and what little there was never went far. I didn't understand why. Was group-think that entrenched among reporters, or were the big media editors nipping off potential stories? I thought reporters loved discovering things.

Now we're beginning to find out. Apparently the answer was both: groupthink and behind-the-scenes collusion to squelch embarrassing stories.

That's discouraging. Perhaps it is a side effect of the consolidation of media empires--a few people can wield startling control over what people hear, and they do.

Tribes

Assistant Village Idiot contemplated the role of tribes in American culture and politics in a number of posts, but he points his readers to an essay by Codevilla and tells that us Codevilla says it better. (Well, perhaps more thoroughly, though without AVI's personal anecdotes)

I don't know a great deal about Woodrow Wilson, and so had not heard of things like:

Woodrow Wilson began this double game in 1919, when he assured Europe's peoples that America had mandated him to demand their agreement to Article X of the peace treaty (the League of Nations) and then swore to the American people that Article X was the Europeans' non-negotiable demand. The fact that the U.S. government had seized control of transatlantic cable communications helped hide (for a while) that the League scheme was merely the American Progressives' private dream.

Codevilla neatly describes our ruling class (hint: elections don't matter nearly as much as they used to) and how it formed and is maintained, and then goes on to warn that merely organizing a political party to throw the bums out will not be an adequate solution: that tends to replace one corrupt party system with another machine, and the well-connected will still get the goodies. The only long term solution combines a pruning of government with a decentralization of power and a regrowth in initiative. If the public keeps growing dependent, we will be subjects of a ruling class, and not citizens. The first reform is of ourselves.

I think he has the diagnosis and the history down. How to get out of the hole is the question.

Teenagers

Our church's parking lot is terraced, with green slopes in between parking areas. One of the resident killdeer made a nest in a green space, and this morning was going slightly nuts. Her two 2 1/2 inch high chicks were racing around at not-quite-adult speeds; big enough to clamber over the curb into the pavement but not big enough to climb back over into the grass again. Momma was chirping to beat the band but not moving around much: the old broken wing trick wouldn't be much use here. And there were cars and huge two-legged strangers all around. One of the latter captured an escapees and brought it back to momma, to the tune of raucous abuse from momma. The escapee promptly headed back to the curb and toppled its way over into the parking lot again.

Vertigo(*)

Just a clarification: it was definitely NOT me standing on the Genie railing. I have a little trouble with heights. In fact, I can sometimes get vertigo looking at a picture of the view off cliffs.

It isn’t just me. When I see my wife or one of the children standing at the edge, I start sweating and my heart speeds up just as though it were me standing there.

Strange that I don’t get vertigo in airplanes, but fortunate, given the amount of traveling I have to do.

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(*) No, I never saw Hitchcock’s movie. Which perhaps explains why I gave up on High Anxiety halfway through.

Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy

On my thesis experiment at Fermilab, every now and then a channel in a NIM module would fail. If there were spare channels, we'd reroute cables and if not, we had to get the module replaced. Fermilab supplied these, and perhaps repaired some of them too, but that could take a few days and we were getting beam now, so several of us learned the art of “midnight acquisition.” Another experiment in the same area was in hiatus, awaiting funding for a new incarnation, and some of their apparatus was in storage. Somehow a key was acquired, and a swap made. Presumably when the other experiment was reassembled they found some defective modules, but they had plenty of time to get Fermilab to replace them.

I shudder to think what would happen these days.

About 15 years ago the national labs were told to address safety concerns, and told Tiger Teams would be visiting. Brookhaven blew them off, and wound up shut down for a while. Argonne got the message, but the teams still found lots of problems. Fermilab panicked. Lead bricks, those ubiquitous doorstops, had to go, even if wrapped in duct tape. Papers stacked 10 inches high on tops of filing cabinets—bad bad bad.

The big safety basics had always been in place—interlocks for the radiation areas, procedures for handling radioactive sources, mandatory OSHA training courses for university teams with members fond of standing on the railing of fully-extended Genies (That was a very dull week. I still have the book.) and so on. But that wasn't enough.

Years later, the Tiger Teams are gone, but the committees are going strong. There are safety courses for driving, recycling programs out the wazoo, and paperwork.

That paperwork is scary. It isn't enough to be a good carpenter or painter—you have to be skilled at filling out forms too.

Grand Tour Revisited

A few weeks ago I chanced on a blog post complaining about a politician I'd never heard of. Said pol had felt the need to claim that his many years in Europe had "made him more of an American," and the blogger was taking him to task for being disconnected. I think. I just glanced at the post, which was a tangent to a tangent to a tangent from my usual orbit

Certainly it is true that years away from your potential constituents tends to isolate you from their needs and their values. And, America being partly an ideological nation and partly tribal, it is possible to hold values that are antithetical to American ones. Unhappily for the blogger, one of those anti-American ideals is that someone should get the power to judge which ideals are American. I will cheerfully argue that sharia is utterly incompatible with American liberty and democracy, but so is a committee to officially say so.

It is also possible that the pol, spending so many years abroad, has become cosmopolitan; which is to say homeless.

Let me be a little contrarian here.

The Grand Tour of Europe that well-to-do Englishmen used to take was a many-months-long road trip. This had a number of beneficial effects

• It showed that you were fashionable and had adequate disposable income
• It gave you a working knowledge of several other languages
• It challenged you. If you could still convey an upper crust air of superiority when you couldn't speak as well as a toddler, you were set. If you couldn't, a little humility was good for the soul.
• It acquainted you with other laws, customs, and cultures. These were related closely enough to your own that you could understand them, and different enough to startle you.

Not that all cultures are equally good--God preserve us from such nonsense--but some are, and different people value different courtesies.

On the last trip to Switzerland we stayed at a hotel which served breakfast. I overheard one of the staff explaining to another guest that they had not brought out refills because a Japanese group (?) was there, and when they brought out refills they found that those groups would eat them all up. Dueling courtesies: in one case a guest feels he should eat what he needs and leave the rest for others, and in the other case a guest feels he should show enthusiasm for his host's hospitality by eating everything set before him.

That's a simple kind of issue, but think about this: if pretty much everyone valued the same courtesy at the table, the staff would know what to do and other guests would not go hungry. Without that shared courtesy, you need extra rules ("One plate only: no seconds"), and then little exceptions ("Can I take some rolls back to my sick wife?") and on and on.

This interplay of rules and courtesies is as invisible as the air to you when you grow up with nothing else. What you need is a new vantage point to view them. History is one such, but often a little attenuated because so many details never got recorded. Spending time (not just a few days, or just eating in ethnic restaurants and watching foreign films) in another culture is better.

Especially if you are going to be making laws, you need to intimately understand how the courtesies and values and laws interact. Sometimes you get a vicious cycle: eroding courtesies require more laws, and more laws leading to less sense of personal involvement and less courtesy. Sometimes it works like a champ as courtesies and laws mesh smoothly. Switzerland's traffic laws strongly restrict traffic when a pedestrian is in the walk, but the courtesy of pedestrians keeps them from tying up traffic excessively. "No traffic from either direction when someone is even stepping into any part of the walkway" wouldn't work in Madison. I know a few people who'd make a point of sauntering as slowly as they could.

So yes, spending time abroad could make you more aware of what goes into the American culture, and "more of an American." Assuming you haven't become disconnected from your constituents....

Mythic Image

Youngest Son is very interested in computer animation, and recently showed me a video made with open source animation software; called Elephants Dream. The animation is well made, but the movie is cruel and unpleasant—but there's one evocative scene in which Proog is dancing in the air. Wherever he swings his foot, a support rises to meet it, so that he never falls or misses a beat.

Years ago I had an image of a blind girl running through the woods—never knowing what lump or hole lay before her foot but always adjusting her stride to meet what she could not see. Stepping to the left without knowing of the tree, lengthening the step and meeting the only rock in the stream; running blind but protected.

That same kind of abandon—running into the unknown not knowing where the next meal will come from but certain that it will appear—I fear and long for, and see in men like Francis of Assisi.

Trust

I'm saving up larger denomination Swiss coins for use in the TPG machines. A stack of 2sf coins hefts a little, but they're just decorated disks of metal--plus something. In a sense I'm looking at little promises, and a kind of embodied trust. Not "in God we trust," but trust in the other Swiss; trust in their fellowman to trade effort for effort in an understandable way. Trust that you can wait until tomorrow before getting what you need: work now and be able to eat next year. Trust that someone else will tangibly value your effort.

Dante put forgers and coiners in the second-lowest circle of hell, next to the traitors; and they are a species of traitor too. Earlier, and perhaps not foolish, centuries put them in boiling oil. The forgers, whether amateur or official, destroy trust as they debase the money.

The official forgers rob from everyone at once on a huger scale, and history considers them villains--villains and traitors they surely are. But most of them went into the business with a "only a little bit won't cause problems" attitude: 4.5grams of silver or 4.4 grams--what can such a little difference do? It is only a little bit of robbery--but it is a lot of breaking trust.

π = -π

I just got email from a grad student asking why two groups disagreed about the default angle for a chunk of hardware: One had π and the other used -π.

Cursed

Sometimes Afghanistan seems a cursed land. It is cursed with endemic tribal wars, cursed with manipulative neighbors, cursed to have boundaries not commensurate with the real tribes of the area, cursed with the presence of an especially malignant form of Muhammadanism, and now cursed with mineral wealth. Anyone watching the world knows mineral wealth by itself means more war, and more corruption, and more social chaos.

It doesn't matter if the ones controlling the mining are big business or government; they and their friends get the money and the "shortages are shared among the peasants." Unless the state doesn't actually need the windfall, the windfall is bad news. You need an existing social and economic infrastructure to manage these things. Some culpably naive folks claim that a democratic government(*) will use windfall mineral wealth fairly. Observation says otherwise--unless (as in Alaska) the money isn't actually essential or there's a very strong culture of all pulling together already in place.

It might almost be better for a business owned by a single person to exploit the resource, because there's a chance the owner might develop a conscience. A board of directors or government bureaucracy never will.

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(*) What stranger incantation is there than the phrase "democratic government?" It conflates a form of selecting particular government officials, the liberty of the people, and a constellation of sensed responsibilities. Just have right form of government, and everything happens by magic.

Sportscasters

The World Cup is on, and there's now a projection TV in the CERN cafeteria. At dinner time the games were over and the sports wrap-up was on.

If I ever flatter myself that I'm starting to hear french, all I need do is listen to a sports broadcast. They speak so rapidly, with jargon and metaphors--I can make out one word in 10, and that's usually something trivial. It wasn't until the replay that I understood that the Swiss team had won.

Traces

We bought our house 16 years ago, from a woman who no longer needed to fix it up since she was getting married. The previous tenants had been three early 20's guys who specialized in parties. Some earlier owner had been a contractor who'd tricked out the place using this and that (including a central AC unit that never worked, basement paneling and an out-of-square basement room). Somebody had done some motorcycle work and painting in the basement. The short wrought-iron railing along the basement stairs had bar spacing more than wide enough for small children to slip through, and it was low enough that inebriated guests of the party-ers had more than once taken tumbles. (We replaced that with a wall surmounted with a lattice.) On a 90 foot long lot there had been 8 trees--only two remain. None were suitable for tree-houses, least of all the Russian olive.

Repairs and gardening are archaeology. Traces of aluminum siding were buried in the window frame. In inaccessible corners drippings of the old bright yellow paint liven up pipes in a bathroom. Behind old molding was 80's era cereal box toy cards. As we've dug the gardens we've found a little metal car, toy soldier, and marbles. On Thursday we found an old torn tablecloth trimmed with lace holding the bones of a small dog.

Nowhere is there enough to tell what those who lived before us were really like--just traces.

Airport gods

The Denver airport now has a giant statue of Anubis to join the giant demon horse statue (that killed its creator). Anubis was the Egyptian god of mummification. Mummies don't seem terribly apropos for an airport, but presumably Anubis also oversaw the petrified food served to the dead--and to fliers.

Neutrino mixing

From a CERN press release today:

Geneva, 31 May 2010. Researchers on the OPERA experiment at the INFN[1]'s Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy today announced the first direct observation of a tau particle in a muon neutrino beam sent through the Earth from CERN[2], 730km away. This is a significant result, providing the final missing piece of a puzzle that has been challenging science since the 1960s, and giving tantalizing hints of new physics to come.

The neutrino puzzle began with a pioneering and ultimately Nobel Prize winning experiment conducted by US scientist Ray Davies beginning in the 1960s. He observed far fewer neutrinos arriving at the Earth from the Sun than solar models predicted: either solar models were wrong, or something was happening to the neutrinos on their way. A possible solution to the puzzle was provided in 1969 by the theorists Bruno Pontecorvo and Vladimir Gribov, who first suggested that chameleon-like oscillatory changes between different types of neutrinos could be responsible for the apparent neutrino deficit.

Several experiments since have observed the disappearance of muon-neutrinos, confirming the oscillation hypothesis, but until now no observations of the appearance of a tau-neutrino in a pure muon-neutrino beam have been observed: this is the first time that the neutrino chameleon has been caught in the act of changing from muon-type to tau-type.

Antonio Ereditato, Spokesperson of the OPERA collaboration described the development as: "an important result which rewards the entire OPERA collaboration for its years of commitment and which confirms that we have made sound experimental choices. We are confident that this first event will be followed by others that will fully demonstrate the appearance of neutrino oscillation".

"The OPERA experiment has reached its first goal: the detection of a tau neutrino obtained from the transformation of a muon neutrino, which occurred during the journey from Geneva to the Gran Sasso Laboratory," added Lucia Votano, Director Gran Sasso laboratories. "This important result comes after a decade of intense work performed by the Collaboration, with the support of the Laboratory, and it again confirms that LNGS is a leading laboratory in Astroparticle Physics".

This is good news, as it means they may be able in another year or so to collect enough data to measure the mixing between those two neutrino flavors.

You may wonder why one type of neutrino would change into another; and rightly so because this is certainly an odd sort of phenomenon.

First notice that, contrary to the accepted wisdom up until '69, neutrinos turn out to have a mass. If they had been truly massless particles, they would always move at the speed of light and never have the opportunity to turn into anything else.

Second: it isn't just neutrinos that can change type.

We find there are "families" of particles that have the same sort of arrangements. Within the "first generation" family you have the electron (charge=-1), electron neutrino (charge=0), up quark (charge=+2/3), and down quark (charge=-1/3); plus of course their antiparticles. The "second generation" family has the muon, muon neutrino, charm quark, and strange quark having the same relation; and the third has the tau, tau neutrino, top and bottom quarks respectively. These aren't the same particles, and nobody has succeeded in finding a structure to them that would make the electron a ground state, muon an excited state, and tau an even more excited state of some primal "preonic atom." People have tried (me too) and they seem to be fundamentally different.

So a meson made of a bottom quark and an anti-strange quark is different from one made of a strange quark and an anti-bottom quark, but it turns out that they can and do transform into each other at a measurable rate. The trick is that they can temporarily transform into an intermediate state, which can then transform into the other type. Notice that electric charge stays the same: 0=0. It also appears as though a particular type (flavor) of quark doesn't have a well-defined mass, and a quark with a well-defined mass doesn't have a clearly defined type. This "flavor mixing" is an area of active research, and you can easily imagine why.

Neutrinos can do the same kind of thing for apparently the same reason. The neutrino masses are small (though the tau neutrino mass isn't known well), and difference in masses between neutrino types are also very small, but the masses of their partner particles vary a lot. We don't have any neat way to make a beam of tau neutrinos, because tau's are so unstable and hard to work with. Beams of electron neutrinos from reactors (or the sun) are easy and intense and, unfortunately, of such low energy that you haven't a prayer of seeing one turn into a tau neutrino and generate a tau in a subsequent reaction. So you need beams of electron neutrinos from anti muon beams--which also give you anti muon neutrinos to contaminate the signal with. It takes some careful analysis to make sure you can tell one from the other, but muon neutrino and electron neutrino mixing has been seen.

You can pick up more details on how this is modeled, but it helps to know a little about matrices.

Advice

for the great

I cannot find the original, but I remember reading story this years ago. I will paraphrase.

It occurred one day to an avaricious and headstrong monarch that perhaps he should think about how posterity would see him, so he summoned a wise man of the kingdom and asked him: "What can I do to benefit the world?"

The wise man answered "The best single deed within your power is to sleep until noon, so that for that interval you will not afflict mankind."

Why Politics Is Unjust

Daniel Jackson at Sense of Events, a blog he shares with Donald Sensing, explains in two posts Bailey's Stratagems and Spoils and an example of how it plays out in the real world. Essentially, there are two kinds of rules: "normative rules" describing how things are supposed to be and "pragmatic rules" for how to win; honestly or not. (I'll have to read the book sometime.) To win requires knowing how to mix the two: playing to the house with the normative rules (make yourself sound good or victimized) and getting your licks in with something not quite ethical. He illustrates why having officers required to keep the peace tends to mean that the side that threatens more violence first tends to win: why having easily mobilized thugs is so useful in a peaceful society.

It isn't just limited to the ancient history of coal company goons: you can read about the same sort of tactics every other week in your local paper. Somebody "lacks advancement," and the threat of demonstrators looms.

Good News on Ebola

Researchers have a start on a monkey vaccine. This is all preliminary, but so far it seems to offer some protection to macaques. They were immunized and then exposed to a new strain that wasn't part of the vaccine preparation.

The fly in the ointment is the problem of human testing. There can't be a control group for a disease with 60% kill rate, and I'm not sure how many volunteers there would be for a test group.

Where the needs are

Germany has over 30 Autobahnkirche.

Wolfgang Fritz: "In my life I have to fight all day. In the construction business, we fight about everything. But I also have to fight to stay a human being."

One site is family-owned:

And at Exit 76 I find one of Germany's biggest motorway services. It is owned by Manuela Strohofer and her family.

"We have three gas stations, a garage, a hotel, a swimming pool, three restaurants - and our church, of course!" reveals Manuela.

The Strohofers decided to build their motorway church after Manuela's younger brother Anton was killed in a road accident.

"Our church has a motto," says Manuela. "It's from Matthew chapter 11; verse 28 where Jesus says 'Come to me, all of you. You're tired from carrying heavy loads and I will give you rest'."

R&R or R&W?

Tushnet

Eve Tushnet wrote how sin is like a child. She's an interesting and lively writer:

"I've done a lot of awful stuff in public, because I'm awesome like that, so if you know me just assume that this post is about something worse than the thing you're thinking of."

What do Zombies mean?

\I’m told that "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" drew on Cold War themes, in particular the fear of alien traitors among us who look just like friends. Or at any rate, this contributed to its popularity: it touched a nerve.

I’m not in close touch with pop culture, but it seems to me as though every few weeks there’s some new zombie-themed book or movie or game; and I frequently hear about "preparing for the zombie invasion."

We all know (I hope!) that zombies are fiction, but their popularity says something about what people are feeling. In this version zombies are living dead who reproduce by killing or infecting others. One zombie becomes many, and your only hope for survival is to physically isolate yourself, maybe with a few trusted allies, and kill everything outside that comes close, because they are probably zombies. All civilization disintegrates.

The coming of the zombies begins small, with only one or two, but avalanches into a complete breakdown of trust as those we thought were friends become poisoned and band together against us in mindless hatred. In some stories the zombie infection could have been contained at the start if the powers that be had acted wisely or decisively, but they never do.

I take it that zombies are a symbol of something many of us worry about. Not that we’re terrified, or we’d give over symbols and tell the stories straight out; but worried: something is happening, something is coming, and it is very bad. Perhaps the "end of civilization," just as in the stories, is what we see looming.

There seem to be a few parallels in modern society. I find less and less of a "we’re all in this together" feeling. Race relations are in some places better than ever with opportunities galore and a well-off black middle class; but with a third of blacks locked into a ghetto culture, and with demagogues hard at work, I can’t say that I find the black/white climate overall is very good. Hispanic/white and Hispanic/black relations are pretty uneven too.

But I don’t think race relations are the whole story, or even most of it. There’s a universality to the zombie invasion that doesn’t map onto "us vs them" racial splits. Even the intense political/philosophical divides don’t have that same universal threat. It doesn’t make artistic sense to equate them.

Despite the many electronic means of connecting with each other I see less interaction with neighbors than a few decades ago (I’m part of the problem myself here), and although we know more about people we don’t know them as well. By itself that’s hardly a thing to fear, but our inchoate sense of isolation magnifies other threats. Still, that doesn’t seem quite enough to justify the zombie myth.

But if we flip the order of events in the zombie story, the zombies start to make excellent sense. Suppose the economy collapses. Who can you trust? Nobody you don’t know (and in a city that is essentially everybody), and not even all of those you think you know. This isn’t an exaggeration: civilization can quickly break down: it did in Argentina.

Perhaps the zombie myth reflects the fear that we, already somewhat isolated, will be living in an "every man for himself" wilderness if the powers that be continue their feckless course.

Bon Mots

Youngest Son noted that up-to-date New Age types try to find a Spirit GPS instead of an old-fashioned Spirit Guide

Book of Days

by Gene Wolfe

This is a collection of short stories organized by holiday: Arbor Day has a story involving a tree, Lincoln's birthday is commemorated with a story called "How the Whip Came Back," and so on. The longest story is "Forlesen" (for Labor Day), a Kafka-esque piece about work in middle management with an acrid edge that suggests bitter experience with management fads. "St. Brandon" is a wonderful sendup of Irish folk tales.

You won't find many cheerful stories among them, but Wolfe is a skillful writer. I'd say "read it," but with the caveat that when I said that to my better half she found the stories she read depressing.

Double life

You should get to know the head of the Social Security Administration. Really. Go read it.

Morgan Hill

What in the world is going on in Morgan Hill High School? The administration claims they were trying to forestall possible violence, but if they were really that afraid of violence they should have cancelled Cinco de Mayo entirely (and if scuttlebutt is true, good riddance to a fake holiday).

I find no defensible reason for Mexican students at a US school to take umbrage at US students wearing US flags during an unofficial celebration of a foreign sort-of holiday. If they consider that to be "in your face" offensive, they’ve got a whole world of surprises waiting for them. I’ve seen substantially worse than that as an American visiting in Europe, and that’s a moderately friendly region.

Soldier of Arete

by Gene Wolfe

Years ago I read The Shadow of the Torturer and the three subsequent volumes (I hear there are more now), patiently waiting for the appropriate volumes to be returned to the library so I could read them in sequence. I thought it a very good series, and never got around to acquiring the set myself. (An odd contradiction, I know) His name came up recently and I figured I should see what he’d written recently.

Soldier of Arete turns out to have been the middle volume in a series—and it turns out not to matter much. Latro is a warrior, of hero caliber, who often sees the gods—but who cannot remember anything but the current day, and must rely on his papyrus diary as his memory when he has time to read it. The era is shortly after the defeat of the Great King by the Greek alliance. Wolfe has fun with the Greek names: which group is "Thought" and which is "Rope" and so on. Latro is traveling with his loyal slave girl, a mantis, a soiled dryad (shouldn’t have done that, Latro—now Artemis is mad at you), and "the black man" on what initially seems a simple but difficult mission, but gets deeply complicated by his new directive from Artemis. Gods and ghosts and magic are central to the book, and I suspect the confusing ending is related to the missing first volume.

Were it not for the ending I’d confidently say "read it," but I think I need to find the first volume before I can properly judge it. Wolfe is imaginative, has done his homework on ancient Greece and Thrace, and has the chutzpah and skill to pull off a prose passage by Pindar.

May and scrapings

I called Youngest Daughter to look at a bedraggled wet baby rabbit on our sidewalk at the garden border. It was no larger than my fist, and didn’t move a muscle. We’d had a steady light rain all day, and the temperature didn’t get above 46F all day. I set off on my errands, figuring that as soon as we were gone the rabbit would high-tail it for the burrow. I’d forgotten that most of the rabbits in the area seem to favor scrapings instead—and scrapings offer no shelter from rain and cold. It was fallen on its side when I came back with Youngest Son, and is now buried in the new garden I’m digging where the tree used to be. May in Wisconsin…

Bon Mots

Youngest Son noted that in contrast to books, you can tell a pop singer by her covers.

Sometimes by her physical covers too... she may even bald herself or streak if she's gaga for attention.

Worship Servants

The motto of a worship team needs to be "He must increase and I must decrease." The team stands before the congregation and plays and sings the songs they've practiced all week—and instead of looking for applause the way every other musician does they hope the congregation sings praises to the Lord and forgets about the team.

C.S. Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you may talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and corruption such as you now meet if at all only in a nightmare.

All day long we are in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in light of these overwhelming possibilities it is with awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never met a mere mortal, Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit -- immortal horrors or ever lasting splendours.

When we look out at the congregation we see saints: priests appointed by God to sing praises and authorized to bring petitions and thanks before His throne. He hears them when they call. There is not an "ordinary" human in the group, and they have assembled to worship God in a special way together; with songs and prayer and blessing and recitation and instruction and a holy meal.

Our job is to shape the service and sing and pray and play our instruments to make it easier for the congregation to pray and sing their worship together. Applause is not a reward but a defeat.

Our brothers and sisters don't always have musical training, so we guide them in songs so they can sing their best. Some are shy to speak out in service or have trouble pronouncing long words—no matter, they are priests and we their servants in worship. Perhaps some have never thought before to pronounce God's blessing on their neighbor—we can model it for them.

That worshiper whose voice drifts between keys is an exemplar of humble service to poor children, and whose holiness I do not come close to emulating. Dare I interpose announcements about potlucks in between his praise to God and the reading of God's word?

No matter whether the culture has the congregants dancing the aisles or kneeling at the mourner's bench—our task is just to make it easier. They do not need us: God hears them just as well when they pray without a leader, or sing a capella without a director.

As for me—I enjoy being the center of attention and praise. So my current job is nearly ideal—the more perfectly I anticipate needs and adjust the monitors, the more invisible I am.

Newspapers

I've said before that I've never seen a science report on a subject I was familiar with that didn't contain at least one misunderstanding--unless it was an entirely fluff piece like some of the recent LHC stories. I don't think I can describe this effects of this better than Michael Crichton. Go read his speech about speculations. The "Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" is just a side note, but a good one.

Dissing and Consequences

Everything old is new again. Cyrano’s extreme sensitivity to any hint of insult works well enough in literature, but it isn’t so pleasant to meet it on the street. Once again, reputation is everything on the street. This time around, instead of "honor and the duel" we have the drive-by shooting (another one yesterday). Although I wonder how different it really is: how often did the prickly dandies of old resort to surprise in the alley? Risking your skin for your honor can be a little costly, unless you’re up against a hapless civilian. Maybe part of the mechanical brutality we see is a function of the organization into gangs; but that can’t be the whole reason for the difference since the duelists of centuries past were often members of deadly groups too.

I don’t yearn for the days of duels. A well-trained tough guy could throw his weight around secure that the ordinary Joe would just have to bite his tongue: just like gangsters do today. And the excuse of duels could mask a lot of ordinary murder. But I wonder if duels helped buffer a deadly focus on reputation by requiring that the offendee meet the offender on terms of a kind of equality. There’s probably no way to tell, though.

GM Dissembling

If you just watch the evening news, you might think think this was wonderful news. GM paying back its debt is great, right? Except that it is all smoke and mirrors. It is ironic in a grim sort of way: the banks, ground zero for the collapse, seem to be on their way to getting their loans repaid, and some of them are in such very deep trouble that nobody will talk about it. GM is using borrowed money to pay their debts in order to borrow more.

Juggler of Worlds

by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner

200 Years Before the Discovery of the Ringworld

This is a sequel/parallel to Fleet of Worlds and to Neutron Star. The story touches on and slightly ties together many short stories, which starts to get slightly annoying.

The thesis is that civilizations have to use the insane to manage relations with other civilizations: relatively courageous Puppeteers (defined to be insane by the rest of the herd) and paranoid humans. And so we have the interwoven stories of Nessus the Puppeteer and Sigmund Ausfaller the human.

Since Ausfaller (in charge of anticipating and foiling nefarious maneuvers by various aliens) is seriously paranoid, it is hard to make him a sympathetic character, and the book relies heavily on Niven's trademark puzzles. For a change, a character shows some jealousy when his inamorata goes for someone else--Niven hasn't been very realistic at portraying human love lives in the past. This must be Lerner's influence.

The Puppeteers appear as less than super-intelligent, with emotion-driven politics and sometimes surprising carelessness.

I don't want to introduce spoilers, but since the action all happens before Ringworld you know in advance that there has to be some benign resolution to the plots and counterplots and growing threats. Let me just say that the denouement ties together so many threads and puzzles that I don't see much more room for new stories in Known Space, without introducing an entirely new cast of alien characters. The Ringworld series is tied up and early Known Space is now pretty much tied up: pre-Known Space might have a few stories in it, but probably not many puzzles.

I understand that other authors have written some Known Space works (some in the Man-Kzin War series, for example), but I have read none of them.

Not the best, but if you like Known Space you should read it.

Fleet of Worlds

by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner

200 Years Before the Discovery of the Ringworld

Niven's “Known Space” series seemed to be tapped out, but four years ago the authors found a section where some new problem could fit. As you can probably guess from the title, Puppeteers figure prominently here: most of the characters are Citizens (Puppeteers) or Colonists (hmm....) most of the latter of whom work on the farm planets. Nessus (remember him?) is one of the main characters, and much of the story comes from his perspective. The time is set a little after the Puppeteers disappeared, and Nessus and three Colonists are serving as scouts for the Fleet of Worlds.

One rather startling new feature of this entry—something I haven't seen in Niven's Known Space before—is the importance of moral concerns. Niven's stories always have some kind of puzzle, and this is no exception—though its setting seems a smidgeon contrived. The Puppeteers are generally believable and the culture seems to work OK. The Colonist's reaction seems a little premature, but justified in the end. Fitting a story into an existing framework and tying up loose ends from other stories is always tricky, but Niven seems to have learned how to do it.

On the whole a competent book, and if you like Known Space you'll probably like this.

Media Woes are Old

"If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed." Mark Twain

I'd love to read what that wonderful wordsmith would have made of the TV news and news channels...

An economic view of contraception

In an interesting exercise, Reichert looks at the effect of contraception on relations between the sexes using "microeconomic reasoning." He concludes that it has resulted in "a massive redistribution of wealth and power from women and children to men." Have a look and see what you think.

The Party of Death

by Ramesh Ponnuru

A wise man once said that the easiest way to learn to hate a man was to do him some injury. Because most of us aren’t eager to ask forgiveness, we try to justify ourselves—“he deserved it”—and grow to hate the man we hurt.

Ponnuru doesn’t deal with that aspect, but I think it is an important driver in the abortion wars. A person cannot “not know” that abortion kills humans, and the only way to keep from facing that knowledge is to deny the humanity of others, and begin clinging to a utilitarian view of people that measures value by what they can do. That view and its logic unites abortion, euthanasia, human cloning, eugenic policies, destructive embryonic research, and so on.

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Ponnuru tells the story of Roe vs Wade and its lesser-known sibling Bolton, which together make abortion legal through all 9 months for any or no reason whatever. This pair of decisions didn’t arise in a vacuum, but out of a population control campaign and mindset, and they have corrupted the political, legal, and ethical framework of the nation. More than that, once such things are defined as rights there rises a guilty compulsion to spread abortion around the world.

It is not exactly secret among lawyers, even the most staunchly pro-abortion ones, that Roe had no constitutional foundation. Nor is it secret that Roe is not limited, nor that “health” is not restricted to meaning physical or mental health. But these details are not widely known in the general public because of the campaign of lies clouding the issue. I use the word lies deliberately and justifiably.

Ponnuru systematically goes through the many aspects of the debate, from the Cuomo “my personal beliefs cannot drive my public policy” equivocations through the partial birth abortion lies, the obfuscation and illogic, the insane logic of Casey (“the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” was taken as a reason to support killing), and the corruption of history (historians subverted their own research to provide a pro-abortion brief for Webster). The first point he addresses is the silly claim that opposition to abortion is necessarily religious. You don't need to follow any religion whatever to notice that there is no demarcation between a baby with one foot out of the womb and one still inside, and none between either and an adult--all are on the same continuum of development.

Ponnuru shows the cultural and logical links to euthanasia and infanticide. Singer (the proponent of infanticide) is alleged by pro-abortion stalwarts to be beyond the pale, but he was hired by and works without complaint from colleagues who march railing against pro-life speakers at the drop of a hat. The Clintons get applause in the media for “recognizing the painful decisions in abortion” and wanting them to be “rare,” but the record of both is unremittingly and extremely pro-abortion, rejecting even such modest modifications as requiring parental consent for minors. NARAL has evan objected to maternal care programs on the basis that they would discourage abortions.

The abortion issue has almost completely corrupted the Democratic party—Ponnuru tells of of member after member who changed their minds when their ambitions turned national and they wanted the backing of the party masters. The Republican party is nominally opposed to abortion, but in practice not very interested in protecting the unborn. The mainstream media is thoroughly in the tank for abortion, carefully labeling any restrictions as extreme and all opponents as oppressive.

Ponnuru’s analysis of the political situation is excessively rosy, not at all anticipating the election of a President who supported killing infants who survived abortion and a Congress and Senate to go along with him.

The book is not pleasant reading; as it is an expose of the lies and corruption that support this culture of death. Read it anyway.

Did you read the online contract?

Did you buy from GameStation?

You might want to review the fine print. You'll be eternally grateful :-)

And let no-one ever say that computer game manufacturers are soul-less money-grubbers.

I wonder who's toes were trodden on?

I remember reading the Wisconsin story in the run-up to Easter, noting that the headline indicted Ratzinger. The time-line didn't agree with the headline, though—as a story about Ratzinger it was a non-story. About Weakland, maybe; but even that would be a little thin. The Munich story appeared at the same time—I saw that a couple days later—and again, the time-line was odd. The Munich bishop deserved a thrashing, but the outcome had nothing to to with Ratzinger.

The stories were scheduled for the usual Easter news slot for attacking orthodoxy, but the Irish story could still have had legs: it was big enough and dramatic enough. Why try to use such weak material to attack Benedict?

Two or three simultaneous stories focused on one individual. Simultaneity itself is trivial to arrange that close to Easter (or Christmas): newspapers seem to reserve non-breaking stories until an appropriate season. Give them a story a month in advance, and they'll write it up and sit on it until Holy Week. Giving them the story much before that and you run the risk of having somebody on staff actually read it and wonder about the headline.

So, who's toes were being trodden on? You'd think it might have something to do with the US bishop's opposition to the Reid/Pelosi health-care chaos-o-tron, but why would one of the stories originate in Germany? And if local politics were the issue you'd expect the focus to be on the local “pestilent priests.”

But from the beginning of his current tenure Benedict has been the target of an amazing animus. I can't tell if this is personal, or something he represents (that John Paul II didn't??), or if this is driven by some behind-the-scenes politics in the Vatican. Right now I'd pick one of “unreasoning personal hatred” (like that for Palin), or “Vatican politics.” Maybe both?

Hunting with a metal detector

Our neighbor across the street was packing up what looked like a sonar gizmo for fishing. I asked him if he was going fishing; he answered that he was going meteorite hunting on a friend's 50 acres out by the Mississippi where the fireball ended up a couple of days ago. I warned him that the fragment that was found on a guy's roof was stony, so the (now I understood) metal detector wasn't going to help.

Sounds like a fun afternoon. With a little more notice I'd have tried to see if I could invite myself and youngest son along :-)

While I was occupied

We seem to have wound up with a wealth of weirdnesses.

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We get so much information from the little flat panel on the desk that perhaps it is no surprise that telescreens work two ways. Though I thought schools were in loco parentis and not "in loco older sibling."

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What in the name of the Constitution of the United States is Obama thinking of? Publicly ordering the extra-judicial execution of an American citizen is so far off base I don't know where to start. Granted, this is wartime and the guy is reputed to be working with the enemy. But if necessity requires you to resort to such underhanded actions you don't brag about violating the law; you arrange it quietly and pray nobody ever finds out. And if caught, then you can fall back on the Texas "He wanted killin'" defense and hope the jury agrees. But you never, ever pretend that this is legal.

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Tommy Thompson (former governor, pretty popular) was smart. At a Tea Party rally he said that new blood was needed, and that he wasn't going to run for Senate. As far as I can tell (I have only heard reports--been too busy to go to one) the Tea Party folks object bitterly to the insane deficits and arrogance of our "public servants." The Republican rulers by and large are OK with larger and more intrusive government, while the Democrats are enthusiastic about it: neither matches the Tea Party intent. And Thompson, for all his popularity, was one of those status quo Republicans; not likely to ride a Tea Party wave to success.

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It is amusing how much of our amazing technology can be sidelined by a minor volcano. Gervasio warned us today that he was stuck in Spain and not able to attend the big alignment meeting--probably all otherwise open seats on the trains are full with would-be air travelers. I'm supposed to head over in June, joined later by my better half for a 30'th anniversary trip. I wonder if we'll make it. If the volcano keeps burping I foresee a rise in Atlanta-Spain+railroad trips to Europe.

Michael Spencer

A HREF="http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/michael-spencer-1956-2010"> Farewell to the Internet Monk and may God bless his family and rest his soul.

Aura

15:00. Another for the running log.

Good Friday

It wasn't clear until Jesus that Isaiah's suffering servant was the Messiah. I suppose it is often that way—an answer sits unrecognized right before us. Yet it should have been clear.

God who in his unimaginable Now created the world, also sustains it. His will and ours combine to shape this world, and no home is built or threat sounded or murder done without His power sustaining both the builder and the robber. In giving us our freedom He has deigned to be our servant—and because our hearts have turned wicked, a suffering servant.

And so, in retrospect, it seems fitting that to redeem us ungrateful wretches who are ever trying to implicate God in our wickedness, He should join us more fully—take on our sin and implicate Himself. He who knew no sin became sin for us, and having atoned, made us clean. He redeemed us and this war zone of a world, joining us to God.

Here within time the war is still going on and we face wicked hearts and wicked problems, and Jesus said it would get worse. But death could not hold Him and it will not hold the world He joined and won.

Maranatha.

The Narcissism Epidemic

Living in the Age of Entitlement by Jean Twenge and W.Keith Campbell

About twenty years ago in the Chicago suburbs I saw a bumper-sticker that read “Prosperity is My Birthright” and I shuddered. Attitudes have gotten worse since then.

The authors see the same thing, and give it a name: narcissism. They trace its growth and show what has been driving it. They show how it manifests in things I haven’t had the time or the stomach to attend to: “Sweet Sixteen” or “My Beautiful Mommy.” They provide solutions that are of no use whatever unless and until we take a good hard look at ourselves.

Classic narcissism is a mental disorder, of course. The authors describe a kind of “acquired narcissism” (my term, not theirs), which in extreme cases is indistinguishable from the old kind. Unfortunately extreme cases are not hard to find, and they suggest that the machinery of entertainment and education is set to magnify and glamorize narcissism, resulting in even more cases. Even moderate narcissism hurts relationships.

Do narcissists (always about me me me) suffer from low self-esteem? No way: “down deep, narcissists think they are awesome.” So does training in self-esteem help or hurt? It makes things worse.

The authors do not inflict a lot of statistics on the reader, which is in one way unfortunate. The bell curve diagram helps show why shifting the mean can deeply magnify problems on the fringes. And if the problematic extremes are glorified and held up as role models, the feedback shifts the mean more and more.

The authors show connections between inordinate self-regard and the “I want it now” culture of debt, the more and more extreme exhibitionism on Facebook and sexting, and the increasing materialism and superficiality of our culture. I’m not sure the relationships are always directly causal, but they are clearly related.

They studiously avoid commenting on current politicians. I don’t know how they resisted.

Not that long ago, self-admiration was not a core cultural value in the United States. If the 2007 NBC public service announcement saying “everyone is born with their one true love . . . themselves” had been broadcast during an episode of Leave It to Beaver in the 1950’s, viewers would have been baffled and perhaps even disturbed.

Bad philosophy has consequences. Nathaniel Brandon was the prime mover—one might call him the founder—of the self-esteem movement. His mentor and “lover” was Ayn Rand of Objectivism fame.

Myths:

• Narcissism is “really high” self esteem. They’re related, but narcissists “don’t brag about how they are the nicest, most thoughtful people in the world, but they do like to point out that they’re winners or they’re hot.”
• Narcissists are insecure and have low self-esteem. Not close.
• Narcissists really are great/better looking/smarter. They just think they are, and sometimes they snow others.
• Some narcissism is healthy. Nope.
• Narcissism is just physical vanity. No, it is also feeling entitled, getting excessively aggressive when insulted, uninterested in emotional closeness, and so on.
• Narcissism is beneficial in a competitive world. Sometimes in the short term it seems like it, but long term nobody wants to work with you.

Read it.

Science Fiction vs Sleep

The better half went to the sleep clinic for a minor apnea problem, and they suggested she try a machine for a month. It consists of an air pump, humidifier, very long hose, and a face mask contraption. If the mask slips at night it makes quite the whistling noise. The long hose alone would tell me that this is at least a second generation machine: it is long enough to fit the mask and let you get up to turn the light out. This Junior Vader kit is transparent instead of black, and unfortunately does not yet come with a light saber. In a few more weeks we find out if it has been helping.

What’s a video game for?

If the game is single-player, the object is to master all the levels until you have reached the goal, right? Of course, each level is supposed to be fun to play, but you finish them and press on.

But suppose you really like the game at one level, or in one section of Myst.

Both sons like particular regions of Myst-land, and youngest son likes to replay one level in a game he mastered long ago, because he enjoys the scenery and the particular challenges in that section. Is that a little like re-reading a favorite book? A very short book . . .

Count Belisarius

by Robert Graves

I enjoyed his I, Claudius and Claudius the God, set in first century Rome. I have very little feel for what Byzantium was like, and figured that this would give a flavor of that world, assuming Graves did his homework correctly.

Naturally I can’t swear that Graves’ portrayal of Justinian’s era is accurate—in fact I get the impression that some of Graves’ own skepticism infuses attitudes in the book. But the characters and attitudes are suitably alien, and generally drawn with skill. The usual thumbnail description of the Blues and Greens of Constantinople as chariot team fans brings to mind British soccer hooligans, but the ancient groups as Graves shows them were amalgams of many different divisions: not just sporting. The sporting divisions, in a land without our freedom of speech, gave cover to political and religious partisans as well.

The title character suffers somewhat from his success: he was apparently such a dedicated and able general that not much of his personal life shows—quite possibly because the dedication that made him great demanded so much of it. And had he been less devoted to Rome and his duty he’d undoubtedly have become emperor himself, and not achieved so much on the battlefield—expanding Byzantium’s empire by almost half. The unfortunate side effect of this is to make the character less engrossing than he might otherwise have been—though Graves tries.

Much of the book is set on the field in wartime, and although the ways of ancient armies are sometimes odd—army groups change sides, and the rivalries of other generals sabotage the campaign common to them all(*)—some things are very similar: armies run on money, and training beats numbers.

Justinian is described alternately as nearly a demon and as a superstitious and irresolute man who cannot abide owing favors to anyone. If the details of his handling of the wars and the generals are accurate (and I assume a lot of that info is still available), he was a disastrously bad leader.

If you’re interested in the era, read the book.

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(*) OK, maybe that’s not so alien, with the State Department against the CIA against the Army against the White House sorts of things we’ve seen in the past few decades.

Internet Monk

Pray for Michael Spencer and his family. He has entered hospice with terminal cancer. He was for years a pastor and a wise and open blogger writing about the faith and keeping your eyes on Jesus. I never met the man and he doesn't know me from Adam's off ox, but I've learned from him and will miss him.

The Lies Have It

Of what possible use is an ephemeral executive order as a guarantee?

Cell phone curiosities

We all know that cell phones run down their batteries in a hurry if you're in a no-signal zone, as they vainly search for signal over and over again.

I recently replaced my failing phone with a new Samsung Propel. I've noticed that it is down to about 2/3 charge in 2 days, and less than half charge in 3.

I took it with me to Switzerland and used a Lebara SIM chip to give me a local phone number. That's a pretty generic setup, for a pre-paid cell plan that doesn't provide a lot of features. It took 4 days to drop to 3/4 charge. I guess all the extra features in the ATT programs eat up CPU even when you're not actively using them.

Travel Trivia

Apparently some other people have had trouble understanding how to use the laundry cards at CERN. You insert the card and an initial charge is withdrawn. After a use you reinsert the card and press R for recuperation ("R" does not mean Run) to retrieve the unused balance from your wash or dry cycle. To wash is about 3.6sf and to dry about 3.6sf, so a load of laundry is apt to run you over $7. I had 10 sf balance on the card when I started, and 8.4 when I was done—so I must have picked up several people's un-recuperated balances. Curious. The balances must have accumulated over several users, since I generally don't get reimbursed more than a franc.

The deicer fluid sprayed out of those phallic hoses at O'Hare airport is pale green. Coming so soon after St Patrick's day I wondered if it was leftover beer.

Everybody (except the business class fliers) was being patted down and had their hand luggage searched before boarding the flight to Chicago from Brussels. Boarding has to start very early...

One of the shows on the in-flight entertainment was something called “Millionaire's Club” about a matchmaking service for the rich—or at any rate an attempt to find compatible ladies for the rich men. The proprietor is a fake tanned, puffed lips and inflated bosom type, which wouldn't inspire me to wonderful confidence in her taste or selection. The show features several rich men and a set of young ladies and follows their selection and interaction. Without sound (I use earplugs—very much cheaper and easier to carry than sound-canceling headphones), I couldn't make out the nuances, but the young ladies all struck me as off somehow—they set off the old bogosity alarm. Sometimes they were overinflated and miniskirted to the current style, and sometimes looked more normal—but none of them acted normally, and all would have left me hunting for the exit. The “Aha” moment came when I remembered that there was a camera crew with the couple—nobody is going to act naturally in that situation. Let's hear it for “reality” on TV.

You get out what you put in

When landing in Geneva, tired and annoyed and stressed with unmeetable deadlines, I saw the Alps stretching up through the clouds, and they looked like broken teeth gnashing vainly at the sky.

After a minor breakthrough, on a walk alone by a park, Mont Blanc in the haze looked like it was relaxing back into a recliner.

Compare and Contrast

From last year:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President-elect Barack Obama's choice to run the Treasury Department and lead the nation's economic rescue failed to pay $34,000 in taxes from 2001 to 2004, but the last-minute disclosure didn't stop Senate Democrats from moving forward with his nomination.

Timothy Geithner had paid some of the back taxes in 2006 after the IRS sent him a bill. When the Obama transition team discovered he owed even more back taxes, Geithner paid those additional taxes days before Obama announced his choice in November, according to materials released by the Senate Finance Committee considering his nomination.

From this year:

Sacramento Bee, IRS Visits Sacramento Carwash in Pursuit of 4 Cents:

It was every businessperson's nightmare. Arriving at Harv's Metro Car Wash in midtown Wednesday afternoon were two dark-suited IRS agents demanding payment of delinquent taxes. "They were deadly serious, very aggressive, very condescending," says Harv's owner, Aaron Zeff.

The really odd part of this: The letter that was hand-delivered to Zeff's on-site manager showed the amount of money owed to the feds was ... 4 cents. Inexplicably, penalties and taxes accruing on the debt – stemming from the 2006 tax year – were listed as \$202.31, leaving Harv's with an obligation of \$202.35.

Zeff, who also owns local parking lots and is the president of the Midtown Business Association, finds the situation a bit comical. "It's hilarious," he says, "that two people hopped in a car and came down here for just 4 cents. I think (the IRS) may have a problem with priorities."

You may have heard about this sort of thing before

Icons

Someone at the Times is generating curious iconography for Obama. Halos have been popular for a while, but this is new to me. From the New York Times: is the White House at the foot of the cross or of Obama? His gesture is of a preacher bringing the word of the Lord, though the location and lighting makes him more prominent than the cross.

So far

To build new CSC and RPC chambers for the upgrade, we need a place to build them, and CERN will remodel 904 to handle the two factories. The plan is accused of being gold-plated, though perhaps this is merely the result of a longer-term view that wants the facility to be robust for future use. The remodeling project has had a full boxology for several weeks, and a target completion date said (but not written) to be the end of summer 2010—but no schedule. Fair is fair, I suppose—DOE hasn’t committed to the upgrade, so we have little budget, and there’s a long lead time on getting parts from commercial vendors—so we don’t know when we’ll be building.

The alignment talk did not describe the hardware system use as precisely as I would have wished—left some things out. I’m not sure if this is because I was unclear in my explanation beforehand or if this was his evaluation of the prospects of the system. We missed one deadline already, so maybe, if it was an evaluation, it has some support.

There are 4 event displays: fireworks (new), Iguana (in progress from 98), iSpy, and FROG. The latter has no support, was created by one person and used by a second, and sounds familiar. Foster’s DF display for CDF was originally a one-man project, used simple methods and avoided carrying around a lot of event information. Iguana and iSpy are integrated into the CMS framework, and there are calls to integrate Fireworks too. I tried Iguana, though it was probably not a fair test since I was running it on another system to display on my workstation—it was a dog, with response time in the dirt.

The magnetic field is not simple (not as bad as Atlas’, though), and it would be nice to be able to pick a particle track and follow it. What did the particle see as it moved? This wouldn’t help analysis much, but it would be a good thing to show students. Maybe we could fiddle with Fireworks to do it.

Ah, the things you discover at the plenary meeting. We hit the beampipe, and shoved it up by 60mm! Nothing broke, but the checking that followed messed up the Link alignment disk. There were also some large movements in the last few amps of the magnet ramp—the HF jumped. Also a vacuum pump broke apart at some point, luckily not breaking the vacuum—possibly a fringe magnetic field is making the turbo-pumps fail. I am, of course, asleep on my feet, and haven’t had lunch yet. So is it better to snore with your head on a pillow or fallen forward in a plate?

Crosseyes

Ok, that was truly weird. Eyestrain from staring at a monitor all day is one thing, but when I got up and walked down the hall suddenly my eyes "crossed" for double vision. Dizziness, yes. Numbness or paralysis, no. Lasted less than 2 minutes, and only with both eyes.

Google is not very helpful. Alternately TIA and see to it, a migraine symptom, not a migraine symptom, and only worry if it recurs. Merck has fatigue way up there on the list.

Worship Team Training

For those not aware, a lot of Protestant churches chucked choirs in favor of bands called “worship teams,” consisting of a few vocalists, guitar players, bass players, piano player and drum man—and a sound system. The performers vary somewhat, of course, and there are generally several teams that rotate every few weeks.

At the church we used to go to one of the teams had a leader who'd had extensive musical training, including a class on conducting. He was good—his only flaw being a tendency to sing some passages very loud. I had to keep a finger on the fader for his mike. Luckily his conducting habits signaled what he was about to do, so I could make the adjustment seem natural. He made “body conducting” seem so natural that I came to take it for granted—everybody on his team got their cues just as though there'd been somebody with a baton out front.

Working with a different team at a new church leaves me missing that caliber of training. The lead singers tend not to move around much, so the bass player has to swing around and give the drummer his cues (sort of like marching band practices with conductors at each end of the field?). Recently we had a lead singer who (though she sings far better than I!) tends to drop the final consonants of syllables. That kind of muddiness in direction isn't disastrous if the congregation knows the songs well, but they introduced a new one that week.

The folks are dedicated, practice hard, and worry about details that I cannot distinguish. Rendition A sounded a lot like rendition B—maybe a hair faster, maybe not. Is is reasonable to suggest additional work? Probably. Is it chutzpah to have the suggestion come from somebody who can't tell C-sharp from J-flat?

I have my own ideas how bands are used, but they let me work there anyway...working within the system, so to speak.

Warning or Threat?

The Daily Mail (ht Drudge) claims that Soros, who made a billion speculating the pound 9 years ago, is planning to do the same with the euro. He has a record of profiting on currency collapses, and his shorting is thought to have accelerated the collapse of several. But when you look at the story, you wonder who is doing the threatening here:

He believes that unless the European Commission is given sweeping powers over taxation and spending, the single currency will always be vulnerable to financial turbulence in individual states.

'If member countries cannot take the next steps forward, the euro may fall apart,' he added.

Somehow I doubt that the warning arises from his natural altruism. Qui bono? He sounds like a conduit here from another group, saying “OK, we screwed things up so you'd be better off giving us even greater control.”

The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes

This is a history of the Great Depression until 1940. The “forgotten man” of the title is the man whose pocket gets raided when A decides B is in need. The term was rebranded by Roosevelt, of course.

This is not a polemical book, despite what you may have heard. It does not attribute malevolence to Roosevelt or even to his advisers. It simply tells the story of what happened, highlighted by some of the less well-remembered characters: Tugwell, Wilke, Father Divine, and so on.

However, because the textbooks do have it wrong, I'm going to grouse a little.

The textbooks claim that Roosevelt steered the country out of the Great Depression, but the timeline says otherwise. He and his advisers liked tinkering, and some of their policies (demanding that wages not be lowered, for example) had predictably problematic results. Other nations had gotten out of the slump well before, and the US still hadn't recovered as of the start of the war.

Roosevelt was a great leader during the war, and a skillful politician before it. He created the special interest group paradigm that marks the Democratic party to this day. His notion of what the proper role of government should be was a function of his time, perhaps. Unfortunately many people of that era longed for governments to do everything and give men pride again; and we know where that led.

What did he do wrong? He fell for the “laws will make it so” line with things like the wage freeze. He played inconsistent games with the money and gold supply, ending up taking the country off the gold standard altogether; which had ripple effects. He played up class warfare, blaming the rich for being rich, demanding “undistributed profits” taxes, and then blamed them again for not investing. He was willing to pack the Supreme Court to back up his wide-ranging and unconstitutional control of the economy. He'd overlook inconsistent enforcement of the laws if he could attack his targets. He spent money like water. He spoke in private as though he was happy to let the economy fall in disorder for a few months if it meant getting additional authority.

What did he do right? He meant well. Some of the regulations were badly needed. Some of the make-work projects filled genuine needs. For a while, at least, it was encouraging to think that somebody was doing something. And he had clear sight about the dangers of the national socialists. For that he must be forgiven a great deal. (Until the dangers started to come very near the Republicans were isolationists)

There was yet a second contest among Roosevelt's men. It was between those who sought the cooperation of larger businesses and those who wanted to attack them. In New York, Berle considered that a solution might be guaranteeing wages in certain industries, “beginning with housing.” Such a plan, Berle reflected in his diary, “probably also means taking over the railroads,” was well as, perhaps, government “taking over both housing and construction.” He realized that would be an unparalleled infringement on private property. “But,” he wrote with a diarist's sigh, “I do not see that it can be helped.” Balancing the budget would likewise have to go out the window.

That probably sounds familiar. Just change the industry names...

What saved the US economy was the war, followed by the reconstruction when the only undamaged industrial power left had the whole world for a market.

I emphasize the “didn't fix the Depression” theme here because the received wisdom is carelessly wrong; but that's not the way the book reads. Do you want to know how a couple of kosher chicken distributors met the NRA in the Supreme Court? It was also the era that saw Gone With the Wind and Alcoholics Anonymous appear, and sulanilamide.

Read it.

Cult of Celebrity

I wonder if the celebrity worship we find ourselves with is inevitable.

I do not live in the same neighborhood as my co-workers; not even the same continent as some of them. We know each other at work, but we have no neighbors in common.

We are made for community, but the only people we know in common are those advertised by the media--the celebrities. I can connect better with you if I can make a stronger connection with the people we both know. So if I can say I met a singer you enjoy, I am more closely connected with you.

Therefore to stay connected with the people I meet I ought to pay close attention to the lives and doings of sports figures and actors and whoever is being served up as famous. Their doings need to become important to me--because you and I have no other neighbors. Voila: a cult of celebrity.

It is disturbing to have our interpersonal relations mediated by media tycoons.

Other writers

For those not familiar with Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple), he's a retired doctor with an excellent writing style and a sideways eye on society. He takes a clear-eyed look at a writer more popular in the US than in Britain: Ayn Rand. I think she stunk as a writer and as a philosopher; though she had a clear vision--almost prescient--of the motives and methods of the leaders of the progressive movement. She'd seen them up close in Russia already.

And Mark Steyn has an interesting (not quite complete, but interesting) take on trends in Western culture and a wonderfully lively style: read an example on decline of nations. Of course you may not see declines in the West, but check what he has to say anyway--you might end up quoting him.

Near Death

The stories of people who have survived a deadly disease or disaster often tell that their attitude toward life changed: that they are now more happy with living, less interested in things and more interested in people, sometimes more courageous, and so on. For them, something about the nearness of death gave them a better outlook on life. You might expect the contrary--that they'd be more fearful--and some do react that way. Thinking about death doesn't seem the most intuitive approach to enjoying life, but perhaps the old teacher was telling us that that's the way we work.

Improper Investigation

The Middleton police requested a report from Homeland Security on a possible terrorist threat: pro and anti-abortion groups. They got the report they wanted, but eventually somebody higher up in DHS figured out that this was improper and "the analyst ... received improper guidance" and "was given remedial training." That this could have gotten so far is disquieting, and not unanticipated. Somebody in the organization seems to have gotten the vision from Napolitano that political opponents were the real threat.

The power DHS has is too large to let this sort of thing go unrebuked. And Capt. Noel Kakuske should be out on his ear for stupidity and abuse of power. "Potential for violence?" Pitiful excuse...

Polygamists in America

The current National Geographic has a feature on a Mormon group: the FLDS that practices polygamy. Even more dramatically, their prophet can reassign wives and children. As you can easily predict, they tend to expel young men--there aren't enough women to go around anymore.

My better half called their "reassignment" of wives creepy. But reassigning wives is a very old custom. When a conqueror comes through, he collars all the women and assigns them to his followers. Their "prophet" is a kind of warlord and the followers are the vanquished.

New Orleans 31

Its nice to see a little good news for New Orleans, if only by proxy.

No, I didn't watch the game. Our TV doesn't receive the new broadcast format and we haven't bothered to replace it

Plasma Physics

Prospective student tours all have a stop in Chamberlin Hall to look at the Madison Symmetric Torus, used by the plasma physics group here for a number of different experiments studying the properties of plasma. It is sometimes painful to hear the tour guides descriptions of what is going on, but one scientist overheard what is probably the worst: "That is a giant centrifuge for separating the plasma." Possibly this tour guide was studying for medical technician and got confused; but you'd hope they'd look at their scripts once in a while.

Who Can Resist

Part of the little-known back story for Yoda is that in his youth he was shy, lazy, and clumsy--unable even to tie his own shoes (and so ashamed that he hated to be reminded of it). He shared the cottage for a while with Snow White and the other seven, but was reluctant to do his share of digging until White took him aside and whispered fiercely in his hear "Mine! Mine! Or I help you knot!"

Fitful Sleep

Usually waking for no reason at 2 in the morning is a trial, but sometimes there comes a pang of grateful delight when I look over and see her sleeping beside me.

Ready to talk to anybody except..

Jesus talked to everybody. Crowds, fishermen, disciples, Samaritans, Syrians, whores, tax collectors, Roman procurators, the High Priest--Jesus spoke to them and answered questions. Except for his tormentors, who had no interest in hearing him anyway, there was only one man I can think of who Jesus refused to talk to: Herod.

Herod wanted to be entertained. Jesus refused to be part of it.

That's not a comfortable fact for us in our entertainment culture--we have entertaining movies, entertaining games, entertaining "news," entertaining ways to exercise: do we have entertaining church too? And is Jesus a part of it?

Aura

Aura again.

Libertarianism meets policing needs

John C Wright, a science fiction author, penned a beautiful description of how a "libertarian" society with competing police forces might work. His legal training shows up at the end.

SOTU

I once read a story by Ray Bradbury about an American couple driving through Central America trying to get back to what remained of the USA after the big one went down. One of the men they meet told them of his life. When young and living in the city he read the newspaper every day, and was always worried and angry. When he lived in the countryside, the newspapers he got were a week, two weeks old; and now he read them much more calmly. He urged the couple to let news age to rid it of useless urgency.

I've been trying to remember the last State of the Union address I listened to--and I can't. All I can recall is how often it was interrupted for applause. I'm content to read it in the paper the next day--if I even bother to read the whole thing. I already have a pretty fair notion of what's going on in the country: things that make the news and trends that don't get reported. The president's proposals are going to be elaborated elsewhere, and since the devil is in the details those are the descriptions that matter. And when experience shows that the speech is likely to invoke fraudulent statistics like the "number of jobs saved" I feel even less need to pay attention.

Let it age--a cabinet needs mending and the laundry needs sorting.

Strong Horse

Michael Totten interviews Lee Smith "Al Qaeda, Islamist terrorism, is a function of states." Smith has lived in the Middle East for almost a decade now, and seems to understand things better than most state-side commentators and politicians.

Indie films

Back in the 60's someone gave chimps paint, brushes, and some kind of canvas and found that they sometimes liked making "paintings," and more recently Congo the chimp's daubs outsold Warhol (no grave injustice there).

The next step had to be simian producers and directors. The chimps weren't entirely clear on the concept, and used the chimp-proof cameras/playbacks more to amuse themselves looking through the viewfinder than to actually make a movie or tell a coherent story. That won't disqualify them from winning Emmy Awards, of course.

I'd love to watch Kanye West try to grab a trophy from a chimp.

Interesting sidelight on bank failures

Denninger was referred to me as someone who knows what he is talking about. Unfortunately this is a field where I have virtually no expertise beyond the fairly elementary. Of course, some things are fairly elementary, and if he is correct then the fairly elementary rule that you don't count unhatched chickens was violated, in order to sell worthless financial instruments.

There seems to be an unspoken agreement not to talk about certain things like how much overpriced holdings banks are relying on. I understand some of the reasons why--a panic would make things even more worthless than before. But it certainly looks like the powers-that-be want to just keep doing whatever they did before.

This isn't to say that I'd trust Obama to come up with any sensible economic proposals, except by accident; and I fear what the Congress and Senate would do: "Gospel in, Garbage out."

Theory must satisfy experiment

No doubt it is rude and old-fashioned, but I require political theories to come within shouting distance of human reality. This rules out a number of popular philosophies that don't match simple experimental data points.

We observe a few simple facts about human behavior, and can easily see implications for government.

Observation 1

Anarchy is the worst known political system.

Sorry, circle-A devotees, but if you bother to look you'll notice that people spontaneously organize to avoid anarchy, and in practice will put up with a lot of injustice to avoid the chaos attending anarchy.

That organization doesn't have to take the form of laws—an unspoken agreement that Joe handles defense and you do what he says is an appointment of a ruler. When there aren't a lot of people or a lot of threats the organization can start out simple, but any old society is complex. You just imagine that the Bushman society is simple, but the social rules are there.

Observation 2

An irreducible percentage of your neighbors are criminals.

It may be only a few percent (something like 2% in the USA), but you will always find someone who steals, or likes to abuse, or kills—who is content to treat you as a useless thing. Within your clan, and even within your family you'll find bad actors.

It can get a lot worse. If your neighbors are another tribe, the fraction who'll steal from or hurt you if they can get away with it can rise to a majority.

Millennia of experience tells us you can't reform/redeem all of these—some few yes, most no. Stories of penitent criminals make for good theater but they represent only a small minority. The only thing that helps is to try to punish the criminals. That doesn't solve the problem—that percentage is irreducible—but in practice it keeps it from growing too big.

Observation 3

Nearby tribes are even more likely than your neighbors to be ready to steal or kill if they can get away with it.

You can come up with all sorts of arguments why—“dehumanizing the other” and so on—but the fact is that most neighboring countries have been at war with each other within the past couple of centuries. The USA is at peace with Canada and has been for a long time—but there have been times invasion was a live issue. Our relations with Mexico have been rather more fraught. Switzerland hasn't been at war with anyone for a long time—mostly because they've combined vigorous neutrality with militant preparations for war. Nobody wanted to monkey with them.

A theory of government is going to have to be able to explain how to deal with wars.

Observation 4

”Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Lord Acton's Law is observation, not theory.

You can find a few exceptions. They are rare. I gather that it is possible to try to teach children virtue and cultivate a slightly larger fraction who can resist the temptations attending the exercise of power, but that isn't a very popular program these days.

Power attracts people who love power, and these are the least likely to emphasize the “service” part of “public service.” They quickly believe themselves better than you, and entitled to control you. Just watch.

If your theory of government centers a radical degree of power in the government, it had better have some radical methods for dealing with the attendant corruption. What's that? You just assume that since they're your kind of folks they'll be righteous? See Point 2 above.

Observation 5

Laws and regulations multiply

It is very easy to pass a new law and worry about the side effects later. That may be an adequate explanation for the phenomena, but the observation stands: it takes huge effort to cut down the number of rules, and it is rarely done; but little effort to add to them.

There are side effects of this multiplication of regulations. Two of the most obvious are that

1. Businesses cannot be sure if new regulations will inadvertently wreck their plans. They can respond by either doing the same old things or by investing in legislators and regulators (see Point 4 above).
2. The web of regulations means that an individual can never be sure that he is not running afoul of some prohibition (Am I allowed to trim my own trees? Can I watch my neighbor's kids for her while they wait for the school bus? Not in England), and gives him a strong incentive to keep his head down and not make waves for fear of attracting the attention of inspectors.

Observation 6

You can always make things worse.

Maybe a new law will help. Maybe not—especially if it is careless or based on “let's pretend” instead of observation. Even when things get so bad that you need a revolution, the new masters can wind up as bad as the old, and on top of a war-torn country to boot.

Observation 7

”You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time”. Lincoln went on to say that you couldn't fool all the people all the time, but sometimes you come close enough. Hitler did.

Observation 8

Everything needs maintenance or it won't last

While not strictly a political concept, the analogy seems to describe what happens with governments—they grow layers of cruft and corrode their important workings. The military becomes more focused on ticket punching and internal politics than guarding the nation, agencies more interested in empire-building and turf wars than actually keeping the land clean or well-regulated. These are invitations to trouble, which rarely needs much invitation. Sometimes the resulting war or disaster can shake things up, but more often a nation seems to acquire dictators.

Observation 9

People forget benefits and remember injuries

If you give a man a free newspaper every day he'll come to expect it, feel entitled to it, and feel it an injury if you stop. That may not seem rational, but that's human nature. If a government gives out goodies the recipients will learn to expect them, and get angry if they stop.

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If a political program doesn't take these into account, I think I'm safe in claiming that it won't work, or not for very long.

Harlequin Trees

Along the back roads the evergreens are green in the lee of the wind, but on the upwind half of the tree feathery frost surrounds and hangs down from every twig.

Massachusetts Vote

Apparently the anointing went a little askew in Massachusetts. From the flurry of posts on various sites I gather that a lot of Republicans are excited about the chances of Brown's winning Kennedy's old seat. I'd not get too excited if I were in their shoes. The only poll that matters is tomorrow's, and a Democratic party spokesman (albeit an unofficial one) has already given a hint about their winning strategy. They'll find the votes.

UPDATE

I was wrong. The margin was too large for finagling—and too many people were watching.

I don't know if this is a repudiation of Coakley alone or a complaint about the government's direction. It wasn't overwhelming, though: there must be a lot of yellow-dog Democrats in Massachusetts for such a miserable candidate to have made such a good showing.

Recipe Reverse Engineering

My Better Half liked the gravy at the church dinner tonight. A little dripped on her shirt, which I said gave her an opportunity to try "shirt chromatography" to see what the gravy was made of. She didn't think much of my suggestion.

Is he trying to restart the civil war?

The BBC reports that Senegalese president Wade is offering fertile land to "sons and daughters of Africa" in Haiti. The most fertile region is the Casamance, which has been fighting an on-again off-again civil war for independence. I suspect they'll take an offer of land in "their territory" as an imposition, and fear this might spark new fighting.

The offer might be moot, of course: I'm not sure how welcome Haitians ("90% Catholic and 100% Voodoo") would be in a predominantly Muslim country. But just the offer might be enough to restart the war.

Haiti Future

The politics and economy of Haiti remind me of the Sicilian 4-way deadlock, in which everyone moves into the intersection at the same time and everybody winds up blocked by the side of someone else’s car. An aid group planted mango trees so farmers could have a steady income from selling mangos, but they returned to find that he needed money this year and chopped them down for charcoal.

In one sense Haiti is a land begging for colonialism/protectorate—some outsiders who can cut the Gordian knots and make the necessary but unpopular reforms.

Yet Haiti is a poster-child for what a mess colonialism can leave behind. For some reason figuring out what’s best for somebody else doesn’t work too terribly well. Even if you’re right.

German Language

My Better Half is practicing German in preparation for a trip we intend to take this summer. She just complained that "German genders make no sense."

Haiti

The juxtaposition of internal ad for "Lady Gaga's stylist" and the headlines about the disaster at the NYTimes home page is disturbing: Real pain on one side of the page and nihilist nonsense on the other.

I feel helpless here, because I am. The airport is closed for lack of fuel and places to park planes--and airplanes, for all their speed, can't bring as much as ships can. And the ships take time to get there.

They need bulldozers and trucks and water tankers and somebody to put down the armed gangs looting, and they need medics and somebody to organize helpers. There are plenty of Haitians to dig and care for the wounded, they just need supplies and organization and someplace to do the jobs. And nobody in our family speaks the language (just some French--nobody knows Creole). If I were there I'd just be in the way.

It didn't occur to me until I was talking this over with a fellow down the hall that because Haiti has no trees left, the shanty-towns are made of cement blocks. I'm surprised, because cement blocks cost money. Could it be that using concrete block was part of a plan to improve the housing? The bigger buildings were hard hit: schools, hospitals, churches, government, aid groups--Doctors Without Borders lost all three hospitals.

Haiti gets a big quake about every hundred years--I wonder where else in the Caribbean is at risk. Quakes and volcanoes seem to be related in the region, coming in clusters even when the sites are hundreds of miles apart. I suppose somewhere one could find the data to assemble a map of historical earthquakes in the region and try to guess where's the highest risk areas--and then see how quake-resistant the buildings are (probably about the same as Haiti's).

(I wish Deuteronomy 18:20 didn't have to be relevant to the topic today. I don't think God is pleased with self-appointed prophets.) This earthquake was forseeable, as are others: Puerto Rico is overdue for a big one, probably with a tsunami to go with it. Are they ready? Maybe that's a way to help...

Rabbit Habit

A few minutes ago my better half went down to put hay cubes in each of the rabbit cages. Rather than rush to the hay, each of the rabbits ran to its treat ball, even though she had not taken them out to refill them. Rabbit wisdom means: big person opened cage to put something in--must be a refilled treat ball. They eventually figured it out, though.

Random

thoughts of an old song evoked by my Youngest Daughter's choice of headgear tonight

Did nobody else ever wonder what a minuscule elf it would have to be to wear a raspberry beret?

Audacity

Douglas Farrow wrote an interesting essay on the savior state and the state-centered presuppositions behind the "culture of individualism." Does the latter clause seem contradictory? It isn't--who adjudicates, who sets the ground rules? What the state defines it controls. Go read it.

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie

or is it bold?

Creeping along East Washington at about 5mph this morning I noticed something moving in the slush rut in front of my right wheels. Racing along in the tire path between ridges of snow, going a little faster than the cars, was a mouse. When the cars picked up a little speed it darted off to the side. No policeman was on hand to cite it for failure to signal a turn.

Mashed Potatoes a le Me

Lunch today included beef and mashed potatoes, and a bowl of pickled jalopenos. I don't eat those straight, so I looked around for something to eat one with. I recalled the garlic potatoes we ate at some forgotten steakhouse.

About 1 tsp of minced pickled jalopenos mixed with about a half a cup of mashed potatoes gives them a sweet and mild zing.