Yoga

I gather that there was a little controversy in Baptist circles about some comments on yoga by somebody-or-other. I missed those. (Some of you are no doubt green with envy at this mark of a well-lived life.)

Apparently it is controversial from the other direction as well--the HUG apparently claims that American yoga instruction is a "rape" of Hindu spirituality. If this author is correct yoga has essentially nothing to do with the Vedas, being a 19'th century innovation based on 10'th century exercises devised by sadhus trying for magical powers, mixed together with European ideas about fitness.

Go back and click that link and see what you think. It sounds plausible, and if correct is a curious history. (Hat tip to Joe Carter)

IceCube

So as of Tuesday I’m half-time on the Ice Cube experiment. The first couple of weeks I’m devoting to getting up to speed on Ice Cube; and later weeks will be sorted out by project.

There wasn’t room in the Physics Department, so they rented a suite downtown; which puts me only a block from the protests (which seem to be a boon for the local restaurants). The undergrads are mostly gone from their IceCube offices right now, and many people are taking vacations after a strenuous (and successful, and enough under budget to leave some of the contingency available for other necessities) summer of installations at the South Pole. The floor is pretty quiet, except for the tape label printer (sounds like a coffee grinder) and the video conference room. And the Help Desk, which is the other side of the cabinet from me.

I’m trying hard to understand the workings of the FileTek storage system and work out a model for how to best store the data: 90GB/day coming in from the Pole. The original plan was simple, but not very convenient for long term data access, since it blended raw data and processed data in the same storage medium—which means you can’t easily archive the raw data to shelving to make room for new tapes. I think I’ve already solved one of the outstanding problems.

The StorHouse software was evidently written by VMS veterans (ask me how I can tell!), but it looks like their main platforms were Windows and MVS, with a smattering of SunOS and AIX. Linux seems rather an afterthought, and the documentation doesn’t always closely match the installed system.

Very high energy neutrinos can pass through the Earth and interact to produce upward-moving muons. In the very clear ice of Antarctica you can detect the shock-wave (Cerenkov) light with phototubes. Processing the results and making sure you understand the calibration and backgrounds is what takes the manpower and the computing power. They have to design a system that works robustly with as little attention as possible—there’s no way to bring spare parts down during the winter. Challenging engineering, challenging maintenance, challenging data management, and challenging analysis—sounds like a dream.

There are no penguins within hundreds of miles of the South Pole, but they’re all over the suite—in form if not in person. I’m using a MacBook, which is pretty confusing: window management icons on the other side, cut/paste using the wrong mouse buttons, ubiquitous apple-key shortcuts and such like things. But I manage. I learned those goofy Windows operating systems, I’ll learn this one.

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Winter and summer have different meanings around here...

Energy

The rehearsal kept going over and over one song, making more and more "energetic" a fairly pastoral song about "though I walk through valleys low I fear no evil" and quiet waters. The lead singer thought she should put a prayer in between the last verse and the chorus, and then have the drums really hammer the "Though I walk;" and so it was tried. The director said it didn't work--the contrast was too great. He suggested "an energetic prayer."

I stopped laughing long enough to come out and interject that the idea was more than a little weird--who was she supposed to be talking too, after all? (I held my tongue on comparisons with the prophets of Baal.) The suggestion was dropped; and the bass player started quietly chortling.

The director can sing and play and understands music better than I ever will. But he's young, and too focused on the mechanics.

I was too late to catch him afterwards.

Interpreting metaphors

While I was running monitors Saturday at the second rehearsal, the soprano turned to me and said "My voice sounds dry in the monitor. Can you add a little reverb or something?"

No can do for the reverb, but I said I'd try something.

"Dry?" Raspy? Maybe she's thinking of a hissing quality? It doesn't seem that way to me, but the "customer is king" here. I eq-ed down the high end and eq-ed up the low end of the spectrum on her channel and crossed my fingers that a lower pitched sound would do the job. It did, though I wonder if a water bottle would have helped even more.

Interesting interpretive challenges in this line of work. What's the weirdest instruction you've been given recently?

Mating dances

Go read The Village Idiot on the subject of adolescents and mating rituals--and how they seem so utterly unaware of what they are doing. Really, go read it.

Notes on the protests

Not all that glisters is gold… or something like that.

I heard that a prankster pretending to be a Koch called Walker and got him to discuss strategy—and that Walker had said they’d thought about bringing in troublemakers but decided that would not work well. My first reaction was that this was a despicable calculation. I mulled it over a while, and then spent the 20 minutes listening to the recording so I’d be armed with chapter and verse for my tirade. Oops.

Several things were quickly obvious: Walker didn’t know what this Koch sounded like—so much for being a Koch puppet. The harsh stuff and nasty language came entirely from the fake "Koch;" Walker’s language and descriptions were temperate. And the smoking gun turned into haze—"Koch" suggested bringing in outsiders to cause trouble and Walker said no. It wasn’t possible to tell whether Walker’s group had really contemplated agitators and Walker was giving an honest description, or if Walker was trying to politely decline without insulting a rich contributor. I like to think I’d have said "We don’t do that sort of thing," and not worried about insulting anybody, but I remember a time or three when I tried gentle contradiction to avoid making somebody feel despised. In the end I couldn’t convict Walker of anything more objectionable than failing to contradict a rich jerk.

FWIW, I haven’t found any convincing explanation of why the Koch brothers are an especially great threat to Wisconsin democracy, or unique candidates for becoming the "power behind the throne."

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I also watched the complaint after the Assembly Republicans rushed through a vote on the bill without warning at 1 in the morning. That kind of maneuver is dirty pool, and there’s no excuse for it. Although the fact that this was after a record-breaking 60 hours of continuous objections and proposed amendments might have had something to do with it. I supported some of those amendments, BTW.

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One thing is very clear—the bill is too large and too complex for proper debate, and I’m pretty sure it contains some very unfortunate clauses which remove oversight for Medicaid decision-making and sale of state power plants. At least the preamble says this (not in so many words), and the amendments to medical care rules seem to refer final decisions back to a single department. But I can’t be sure that the preamble is correct without reading the statutes these changes are embedded in. And knowing what the legal structures are. That needs some expert discussion which (for some unexplained reason) we’re not having.

In any event, there’s no logical reason to connect a radical (and probably necessary) change to public employees’ bargaining status to changing Badger Care rules under the direction of a new (?) "department." I predicted that Pelosi-Care would be a train wreck; inspected and far-reaching and kitchen sink as it is; and I likewise object to this sort of complicated nonsense.

Wisconsin sold off the tobacco revenue settlement for short-term cash; Chicago sold off parking meters for short-term cash and to help out political cronies. Even if we stipulate that Walker is as honest as the day is long, giving the governor the right to no-bid sales of state assets is begging for trouble. And are the power plants really a drag on the state? I haven’t heard word one about that issue. If it ain’t broke, why fix it? Where’s the fire?

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The Tilted Kilt became famous in column and jest as the haunt of the Democratic Senators, but I’ve not actually heard of any sightings in that establishment. (Which I’d not heard of before.) The Clock Tower Inn is a nice logical place to meet—just over the state line, close enough to keep in easy contact and with lodging and dining. I’d have picked it. I wonder how many of them knew of the other restaurant?

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I’ve not been out with sign in hand. I’m not a huge fan of crowds; I haven’t come up with a short enough statement of my judgments to fit on a little bitty sign; and it feels somewhat self-indulgent(*). The lawmakers won’t pay me any mind, and the only thing I can really hope for is that some cameraman will notice me and send my message around. But the cameras point at the noisy and the crazy and the stupid. No doubt I’m underestimating the effect of mutual encouragement—but then I think some provisions are useful and I’m not sure I want to encourage opposition to those.

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One other thing missing from the debates has been: What do we replace collective bargaining with? I wrote before that I thought the adversarial model was a poor one for public employees, but there needs to be some kind of just compensation. Tie it to Legislator’s salaries? Tie it to a bundle of non-government taxpayer salaries? Does somebody want to talk about this? Anybody?

Update (*) To be clear, I am not trying to impugn any of the protesters, merely explain why I'm not entirely comfortable.

Asthma and bacteria?

This study looks very interesting. If verified it suggests some possible new directions for asthma treatment or prevention.

I cannot think of any reason why people would have thought that bronchial airways would be sterile--given the amount of dust and whatnot that winds up in the lungs there have to be lots of foreign bacteria piggy-backing. And without a lot of white cells to eat up intruders, some will grow. I'd never thought about it--I guess most doctors didn't either.

The study claims that there are many bacteria in a normal windpipe, and many more varieties in some asthma sufferers who required corticosteroids. So they need to verify this, and test again with asthma sufferers who aren't under treatment, to see if perhaps the steroids make life easier for bacteria. If it turns out that some bacteria (or combinations of them) cause asthma, then maybe some misted antibiotics might be a cure. Spend a few hours a day breathing mist at the clinic for a month or so, and then breathe easy again?

Economic forecasts

Tracking down some info from a link I ran across some details about what was feeding into the high food prices in Tunisia--some of which I'd seen before but not all in one place. The post includes extraneous assertions about the President and you probably don't want to read the comments--so I'll give the gist of useful information. The great powers are printing money (the EU buying worthless Greek/Irish debt and the Treasury generating and buying empty US bonds), while in the meantime Russia's harvest is in trouble, Canada's weather means poor food exports, Australia's weather means poor food exports, China lost 1/3 of its winter wheat, and the US is turning a huge chunk of food into fuel. (And Mexico is having harvest problems) Inflation plus less food available means higher food prices--not a huge deal for us but disaster in poor countries. Bernanke's inflation isn't just robbing us; it is robbing the Egyptian poor too.

Long term things will probably adjust, next year's harvest be better, etc--but this year a lot of people are going to go hungry. Bad harvests are bad enough, but the inflation is making it worse.

Our own economic indicators aren't anything to smile about. See Kipling on the subject. We made some implicit promises to the world, and it looks like we're going to renege into inflation--and inflict misery on innocent bystanders as we go.

UPDATE: Not everybody agrees; some see bright spots. I still see inflation.

Legislature and Demonstrations

I don’t like the habit legislatures and cities have of giving tax breaks to try to entice businesses. Either the business climate is good and the prospects are good, or they aren’t—and if they aren’t the state should perhaps ask itself why. So I come down on the "firmly opposed" side of recent Wisconsin "job creation" legislation—I know of no reason to believe it to be anything other than extra goodies for companies.

The cuts in school funding are vociferously objected to. But come and let us reason together—the state spends most of its money on salaries, and if you want to cut expenses that means either lower salaries (like me) or cuts (like me). There isn’t any magic category called "waste" (with the exception noted in the previous paragraph). Of course you can always try to raise taxes, but that’s not so popular with some of the fixed income folks I know. If the pain is shared at least reasonably equitably I don’t see basis for complaint.

The proposal to remove collective bargaining rights from state employees is what is really getting the attention and pulling the attention-hungry celebrities from the woodwork. I will annoy some folks with this, but I think the move is inevitable.

A public workers’ union is inescapably political. Want a raise, bennies, different job conditions? Your employer is, in the end, the people, and uses tax money which they want a say in the use of.

A public workers’ union, as implemented, uses the adversarial model. Who are the union’s adversaries? Not private business owners—the state: us. It’s kind of rich to call for maintaining a "we’re all in this together solidarity" in that sort of situation.

A public workers’ union, as implemented, has a vested interest in expanding the public sector. Period. Private sector workers’ unions are limited by the economic health of their employers, but the temptation (often succumbed to) has been to regard the taxpayers as an infinitely elastic source of money.

In good times people may be willing to ignore the conflict, but when the budgets start to really get hurt, they’re more interested in examining structural problems. Like public workers’ unions.

I think the proposal should have had more public hearing. The demonstrations would be just as angry and intense, and they’d last even longer, but it would be the right thing to do. Just like teachers bringing kids from their classes to the protests is the wrong thing to do.

UPDATE: I read elsewhere that the bill doesn't disestablish the unions, but changes the subjects permitted for negotiation, requires that unions collect dues themselves, and requires that the union be recertified periodically.

Sheep and TNT

Did any players of Unexploded Cow dream that it might actually be possible for sheep to safely dispose of TNT by eating it? Stomach bacteria safely decompose it.

The Blogger's Psalm: 101

From BibleGateway, 1984 NIV:

I will sing of your love and justice; to you, O LORD, I will sing praise.

I will hunger to write of love and justice and praise.

I will be careful to lead a blameless life— when will you come to me? I will walk in my house with blameless heart.

We in the "pajamas legion" will be careful to be upright in our reporting, in our analysis, and in our comments.

I will set before my eyes no vile thing. The deeds of faithless men I hate; they will not cling to me.

Men of perverse heart shall be far from me; I will have nothing to do with evil.

We will not try to goose ratings with stories of horror or erotic pictures. Some things are too low to comment on, no matter how famous the perpetrator.

Whoever slanders his neighbor in secret, him will I put to silence; whoever has haughty eyes and a proud heart, him will I not endure.

Anonymous attacks are vile, and the know-it-all is a stench. The comment sections of many sites are too foul to look at.

My eyes will be on the faithful in the land, that they may dwell with me; he whose walk is blameless will minister to me.

I will seek out those I can learn from or rejoice with, and give full credit and honor to those who have enlightened me.

No one who practices deceit will dwell in my house; no one who speaks falsely will stand in my presence.

I will not repeat or applaud the lies either of the great in the world or of the trolls in the net, even if they are political kin to me.

Every morning I will put to silence all the wicked in the land; I will cut off every evildoer from the city of the LORD.

In my daily work here I will tell the truth no matter how many or dear are the liars; taking the stand against evil and applauding the good. I will not be ashamed to take note of even the smallest graces God gives us, or of moments of goodness even in enemies.

It is not an exactly parallel interpretation, and so perhaps a little presumptuous, but ...

Moral differences in sports

Go read Golf and the Metaphysics of Morals by David Hart. Really.

The Resurrection of the Son of God

by N.T.Wright

I couldn't finish this one. It is quite long and my free time was short and somebody else had it on reserve.

The part I finished (about halfway) is a thorough analysis of what Gentiles and Jews understood by resurrection in various eras before Jesus. The bottom line is that they did not use the word or concepts in anything like the senses the early Christians did.

I was not aware that academics had tried so hard and in so many different ways to try to prove that Jesus' resurrection was fictional, or understood as purely spiritual, or was a Platonic liberation from the evil body--an amazing number of subtle arguments to try to dodge around a plain story.

He was getting up into more interesting sections when I had to return the book.

I thought it was interesting, and was hoping to read more--but I may have a greater tolerance for academic details than most.

Dirty Little Secrets of the Vietnam War

by James Dunnigan and Albert Nofi

The subtitle is "Military Information You're Not Supposed to Know." I picked this up for 25cents at a library book sale; and I gather from the receipt within that this is a factor of a hundred less than the original price. The title is either ironic or intentionally misleading--I'm not sure which.

This is essentially a sourcebook of details about who was where and armed with what and why. Unless you actually believed that the North Vietnamese never had troops, let alone bases, in Laos and Cambodia, you're not likely to find any huge secrets revealed. But if you can look beyond the title it is a nice enough collection of short descriptions of what was going on, filling in a lot of little gaps in my knowledge and probably yours too. The pair don't seem to have any axe to grind, though they seem to think McNamara was an idiot. And are probably right.

Do you like history? Do you not care if there's no overall narrative? Go for it.

Sports Chatter

Ours has been mostly a baseball house, and when we take in football it is generally watching a neighbor's TV, so I'd not run into the auctioneer-style reporting for football before. Up till now the fastest sports chatter I'd heard was the analysis for World Cup matches on French TV--though their apparent speed may have been a function of my slowness in deciphering the language. Describing the scene split second by split second is almost hypnotically fast. "Off the fingertips of Bush, incomplete, incomplete, sold to the man in green and gold!"

I like a more relaxed take.

Go Pack

I don't complain about the overwhelming attention to sports. I've said before that there are already too few things in this country that different generations do together; we can't afford to lose more. I strongly object to the Super Bowel of trivia emptying itself over the front pages and radios (I don't know about TV--ours doesn't work).

I know that even the commercials are a big deal, as this is a mucho eyeballs event and the start of many ad campaigns; but do I really want to deliberate on which ones are rejected?

The Wisconsin State Journal ran a little story about the half-time entertainment, saying that there was now a chance for a "wardrobe malfunction(*)" this year since the group was pretty girls instead of creaky rockers. 2 column inches and a picture of a woman I didn't recognize. Let me channel my outer curmudgeon and claim that a LOLcats picture would have been just as newsworthy and of more enduring interest.

Most of the kids are going to Super Bowl parties--maybe we can find one for Youngest Son too, and we two can relax. And hope the Packers win.

Pregame update For the honor of truth I must admit that I'm the caliber of Packers fan who thought Aaron Rodgers had something to do with the Southern Baptist Convention.

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(*) There was no "malfunction"--the only thing unplanned in the stylized assault was the audience response.

Chernobyl Birds

This report from BBC says that birds in the hot area have 5% smaller brains, and that mammals are decreasing, and that insect diversity is less.

The insect diversity they claim to understand: "the same researchers found a way to predict which species there are likely to be most severely damaged by radioactive contamination, by evaluating how often they renew parts of their DNA." That surprised me a little--I'd previously surmised that the driving mechanism would be the rate of protein recycling. I don't think I explained my reasoning, so I'll do it here even if it is wrong: if radiation is applied uniformly, since there's more protein in a cell than DNA it will be damaged more often, and become unusable until it is recycled. Recycling proteins faster will require more food and implies a slower rate of growth. If renewing DNA and recycling proteins correlate, then I'll claim a partial verification, anyway. (They already thought of it, and call it "oxidative stress.") I still predict slower growth and overall smaller size. (Larger size would probably be better for them, but stress isn't conducive to growing big.)

But small brains... They're going to go back and look at other organs now. I wonder if there's some region that is smaller than normal, or if the shrinkage was uniform. Might be hard to tell--this is only a 5% effect, and bird brains are small, so dissection would be pretty time-consuming.

As to the fewer mammals--if I recall correctly there was a boom in population for some of the larger ones when people abandoned the area. Maybe the population wasn't at equilibrium, and they're looking at normal fluctuations. Time should tell.

Aura

Again. Luckily a semi-circular frame, so I could keep driving. For statistics.

Emerging Adults

Via RealClearReligion, the fascinating Slacking as Self-discovery. A quote:

Arnett argues forcefully that emerging adulthood is a positive development. Free from external constraints (and often supported financially by their parents), twentysomethings have the opportunity to try an array of temporary jobs, relationships, educational paths, and residences to find which of these are most to their preference. In winnowing down the options, they are also able to “find themselves,” a discovery that will serve them well as adults, assuming they ever decide to become adults.

and

Paying lip service to the disciplinary expectation in psychology that group behavior be universally observable to be classified as a developmental stage, Henig goes through some perfunctory hand-wringing over emerging adulthood’s narrow application to affluent Americans.

Read it.

As full-out as it can get

You've see what a rabbit looks like running full-out. Those hind legs are amazing.

Have you seen how a spooked rabbit runs in deep soft snow? Instead of getting solid propulsion out of those legs, it looks more like it is swimming along the snow. There's a wild thrash at the rear, and then surfing for a fraction of a second, and then thrashing again. If I'd been so inclined, I probably could have caught it.

Losing a country?

The headline said "Obama losing Egypt?"

Ideologues of both left and right hold a singular faith in the omnipotence of the USA. The left believes us to be the source of all the world's woes--but if we let them run the joint the oceans will stop rising and the prisons lie empty from lack of crime. The right believes that we've been the source of all nobility and freedom for the past few centuries, and that if our President speaks the right words the mobs in Egypt will go home satisfied. (Avant nous le deluge?)

So Israel is aghast at how we're treating a long-time ally? (So claimed one story out of Israel) Mubarak has known about these problems for a long time; if things have finally started blowing up there's no point in trying to play King Canute to save his sand castles for him. Nothing he can do to hold on to power now (use such of the army as will obey him, stir up counter-riots) will do more than postpone the inevitable, and will make the long term situation worse: for Egypt and for us. It is bad enough already.

Pastors' Limits

The father of a friend of Youngest Daughter burned out as a Pentecostal pastor. Everybody in the family had some role--the church was getting a lot of mileage out of hiring a single person...

So we argued use cases at supper. We didn't come to a conclusion, but I asserted, on the basis of observing how much time Better Half spends keeping up with friends, that 2 hours a month of interaction would seem the right order of magnitude for a pastor to be able to effectively guide and encourage one of his flock. If this is a full-time task, then we're talking 160 hours a month or 80 people; maybe less if you include travel time and other things. If this is part-time because the person has a full-time job already, we're talking about maybe 25. Tops.

The "pastor" of a really big church has no possible way of becoming friends in more than a superficial sense with most of the members--he's a preacher or administrator or a "bishop." (I used that word at the informational meeting about our church's proposed remote site--got a gratifying deer-in-the-headlights look from the "administrative pastor.")

Our church is trying to fill in the gap here with "small groups," but AFAICT they're not designing them as pastoral bodies. Small groups get freighted with too many expectations--they're also expected to be teaching, outreach, and fellowship. A good teacher isn't necessarily a good pastor. Some churches use deacons for this; and if you select and train them well that should work.

Chef Geek

Want some pea butter on that? Alas, our kitchen isn't very big, and I don't think our house is wired for enough amps to handle the gadgetry. My paycheck isn't wired for that many bucks either. I'm curious, though. Perhaps the price of sous vide (and the bag sealer) will drop.

You are what you eat

This report from the BBC puts a new face to that old expression. This in particular, about mice raised in a sterile environment with no gut bacteria compare to normal mice:

In studies of the animals' brains, they showed higher levels of a number of hormones, and even differences in the expression of over 170 genes.

So the gut bacteria effect hormones too. We've heard recently of fungi that infect ants and hotwire their brains to help spread the fungus, and suggestions that rats can be hotwired by Toxoplasma to let themselves be eaten by cats--and maybe the crazy cat ladies are infected too.

I wonder how much of the gut bacteria effect is simply reaction to irritation, and how much is from chemicals entering our systems directly. And there are bacteria in the nose, and ears... There's more to learn.

Whitman said "I am large, I contain multitudes."

Spartan Landscaping?

On the drive home this evening my better half noticed a truck labeled "Spartan Landscaping." We speculated what that spartan landscaping might be:

• Bare dirt?
• Zen garden?
• Fenced with spears?
• Minimal trimming?
• Maintained by helots?

The firm's owner might have picked a more auspicious name; this one makes me suspicious.

Not severable

The second judge was correct. The first judge ruled that making buying health insurance mandatory was unconstitutional (which it obviously was), but struck down only that provision, despite the lack of severability in the law. The second judge struck down the whole thing.

While I am strongly tempted to claim that nobody in the House and Senate read enough of it to notice the lack of the usual clause (and I still don't believe any human could master the complexities of the law plus regulations)--this time I think they left it out deliberately. The bill--any health care bill--has to balance changes, and if one leg got knocked out the result would be predictably unbalanced and disastrous. Best to can the whole thing if something goes wrong.

So kudos to Judge Vinson for doing the right thing, and a salute to Congress for leaving that potentially disastrous severability provision out.

Egypt

Nobody is asking my advice there, but if some of the police really joined the protesters as reported a few days ago, Mubarak should have read the handwriting on the wall and decamped. Of course he may not be very familiar with the Old Testament... He's long overdue to leave.

I hope the Egyptians can do better than a marriage between the Muslim Brotherhood (fountainhead of several flavors of Sunni extremists) and Mohammed ElBaradei (client of Shiite Iran). Even the army would probably be better than that.

I wonder what the MB would look like in power. Perhaps the day-to-day management duties would temper the rhetoric. I'm not sure how amenable Egyptians (the descendants of the founders of the world's oldest recorded civilization) would be to Bamyan Buddah activity, or even to making life hard for the infidel tourists that bring so much money to the country. I'm pretty sure the MB would declare the treaty with Israel to be a dead letter, but whether that would be rhetoric only or the start of trouble again I don't know. If they don't feel strong enough to harass Israel they'll take it out on more local targets.

Short term I'd say "trouble." Especially for Copts.

Hell

There are several ways to think about hell, and I've been puzzling through one approach. I'm not able to wrap my mind around the nature of God's knowledge--never will be--and that's pivotal to this approach. I'm not saying the juridical model of judgment is wrong--it may prove to be the best description our minds can handle. But there are a few details that have me looking at another view.

Works like this: Creation and maintenance are the same operation viewed different ways. I assume we have free will in some things, which means our decisions play a role in that maintenance--we are "co-creators." Some of our decisions have been evil--contrary to our nature and to the nature of God, whom we have thereby tried to involve in our crimes. The customary view is that these are redeemed in Christ for those willing to accept it. No problem there, but I wonder what happens with the evil that refuses to be reconciled. Is it endured, or is the new heaven and earth (and the destruction of death and hell) a remaking of the world with the old evil judged and in some sense stripped out? You see where understanding God's knowledge comes in here--understanding in what sense He can eternally know about and endure evil.

The view of judgment that God endures the wicked until the day of judgment at which time He will endure them no more is a view that is easy to understand, and useful enough for encouragement and warning; but it leaves the world as we have made it as something that He timelessly endures eternally. (Time-based language is hard to work with.) An eternal hell containing rebels is also maintained by God, and also in some sense endured by Him.

Our evil is such an integral part of history that the only way to get it out demands a complete remake of the world. If our lives are one of the things we "co-create" what then becomes of the actions and decisions that have made up our lives; our selves? There've been a few people, if you contemplated getting rid of what was evil and what was ignoble, would leave you wondering what was left. (When I think how many OK things I've done with mixed motives, I wonder what that rule would do with me.) In such a case hell is the judgment and destruction, and then the evil is not and never was. And then the evil one is not and never was?

I don't know. Maybe I should spend a little time with Psalm 131.

Aldercritters

Youngest Daughter asked me why I kept referring to "aldercritters." I told her it was historical: I lived through the days when we were introduced to the concept that words like "policeman" and "alderman" were sexist. Faced with that sort of lexical intrusion you can comply, keep to the traditional usage, or make fun. Anybody who knows me knows I'd pick door number 3. So, what to do with "alderman?" "Alder" sounds excessively botanical, and "alderthing" makes them sound like things instead of living creatures. "Aldercritter" makes it clear that we're talking about living breathing animals here, is gender-neutral, reasonably gentle, and carries the connotation of small rodents scampering around gnawing on the wiring.(*) Just what the doctor ordered.

To be fair, they do often deal with extremely hard and boring work. I suppose the occasional resolution to ban the use of nuclear weapons within the city limits or some such is a way of relaxing. At least I hope that's what those things are. Please? If not I'll have to come up with another word...

(*)Or eating through the veggie garden

Econ

Quantitative Easing(*) came up at the table, and the rest hadn't heard the explanation, so ...

Actually, I am starting to suspect that inflation is intentional--coining "solves" a lot of problems for the Fed and CA and IL.

(*) Not by that name

Kitten on the Keys

I heard the song on the radio, and decided to see what it would really sound like. Actually, we tried with several different cats over the years. The answer is: it is a very short composition. You get one chord, and then the cat jumps off.

I guess cats only want to make noise when they want to make noise.

Math Urban Legends

On the lighter side, via Not Even Wrong, look at some math oopsies.

Disrespecting Music

I read years ago (and cannot find the bookmark, will add later if I find it) how music was being "flattened," with the dynamic range taken out. Soft passages were made louder, really loud passages a little softer, so that the whole was of a very similar loudness.

I think I realized why this evening when driving. (Quiet driving is a really good time to think.)

We use music differently than a century ago. We don't go to a quiet hall to hear a concert, or a quiet room to hear a recording. We carry music with us, in the car or bus or down the street. That means ambient noise, and quite a lot of it. Quiet passages are lost in the road noise (as I found when we tried to listen to Beethoven when driving to Louisville) unless you turn the volume way up--which makes the forte parts problematic. So you do some flattening yourself with the volume knob. Sound engineers can do it better--they know what you need for your aural shield, and how to fiddle with the sound to make a passage sound sort of pianissimo when it is really loud enough to be heard over a garbage truck.

I wrote this in a waiting room, with soft voices behind the glass shields, a faint hiss of air handlers, and a not-so-dull roar from the highway nearby. The music playing was soft and slow--and I could hear the muted trumpet, but not the piano line or the rest of the horns. To flatten the piece would spoil the effect--so I lose either way, unless I can find it again and listen in quiet; giving the music the respect it deserves.

Ivory Coast

I haven't been hearing much about diplomacy and negotiations for the past few days. I think that's a good sign. The serious stuff is usually quiet. If the idiots at Wikileaks don't spill the beans, there's a chance that maybe Gbagbo will take a flight to one of his villas and let the country settle down.

Not this again

More Obama birth certificate noise? Crud.

Anybody remember what happened to the movie Bedtime for Bonzo when Reagan was president? You couldn't find it. After he left office, it surfaced again. The movie didn't make him ineligible for office, but scenes of him working with a chimp might have been a little undignified. Ditto the "missing" long form birth certificate; probably some dumb typo or says his race is "white" or such triviality.

I wonder if this nonsense will end when his term's up, or if it will linger on like a dead mouse in the wall or Kennedy conspiracy theories.

Baby Doc

Color me puzzled. (Not for the first time...)

Why would Baby Doc return to Haiti? I can only think of three reasons: he thought he had a base of support that would let him take a role again, even if only a token role as "big man bringing some aid"; he is dying and wanted to die there; or he was delusional about what the reaction would be. It didn't sound like the French were pushing him to leave, and I gather he still had a few francs in his pocket (Wikipedia says he had fallen on hard times, but I'd bet he's still richer than me.)

I wonder if he had voodoo advice before coming.

UPDATE: It was suggested that he might have hoped for enough disarray to be able to come in and leave unmolested after a few days. It seems the Swiss have a new law to prevent the release of disputed maybe-national funds to fugitive leaders. If Baby could persuade the Swiss that Haitian inaction meant they weren't serious about arresting him, then he wouldn't be a fugitive and he could lay hands on the money. Not a risk I'd care to take...

Word Processors with Attitude

My better half is struggling with automatic numbering in Word. She finally figured a way to turn off the unwanted tabbing/numbering: use a colon after the number.

The software obviously knows whats best for you and insists that you get it good and hard. She says it is a Madison liberal program.

I know there's a way to turn off that nonsense, and probably a way to make Word do something sensible, but it takes time to go look it up, time that we'd both rather use doing the real work we're sitting here to complete.

Sight of the evening

Middle Daughter brought by two youngsters she was babysitting, and we provided toys and dinner. The three-year-old was rocking in the rocking chair, and a sweater draped over the back would swing forward and tap his back on each forward swing. Each time it did he'd say "Stop that!"

Arizona vs Pakistan

Both places had murders of high officials in the past week. In Pakistan a bodyguard assigned to the Punjab governor by a political rival murdered him (while the rest of the bodyguard stood by and watched) and boasted of it, claiming divine sanction; and is widely cheered. In Arizona a leftish (but too weird for any party) nutcase with a violent past shot a Representative and killed a judge and a child and several elderly bystanders and others. Everybody condemns him, though I notice the usual suspects are trying to make political hay of it.

I'd rather live in Arizona. There will always be crazies, in all parts of the world; and they often hunger for notoriety instead of respect. But when murders are driven by political gangsters, the whole civil society is shot. And when the murder is done because the politician wasn't fascist enough; and people throw rose petals at the killer--stay far away; there's a generation of horror growing there.

Update: Rather than just accept my take on motives or follow partisan theorizing, check out some data on political violence. There are only 8 cases mentioned, but that beats 0 by a wide margin.

Tyranny of Good Intentions

The New York Times reports about the unintended consequences of declaring a site to be a "World Heritage Site."

In order for everybody else to enjoy the cultural history of Djenne, the inhabitants are asked to live with the same mud floors and tiny rooms their ancestors had. They get to be the inmates of the zoo. Quelle surprise--they're not thrilled with this sort of "some animals are more equal than others" attitude.

Old World Wisconsin is staffed with volunteers who get to go home to clean beds at the end of the day. If you're going to make a place a "World Heritage Site" to be preserved for all time, maybe you'd better admit that it is going to be a museum. Nobody lives in a museum: face the problems of what the current inhabitants want to do, and how you're going to fund and staff the place. Don't just demand that the people unlucky enough to have a great heritage become serfs to the tourist business.

The story says that St. Louis in Senegal has a similar problem. I wonder which section that was.

The Big Game

When I see Packer fans geared up (or hair-dyed!) for the game, or Brewers fans collecting their paraphernalia for the outing, or the cheering in the streets in videos after the game in New Orleans; I'm glad the USA has so many different types of ball game. Can you imagine the frenzy if all the enthusiasm now spread out among baseball and basketball and hockey and football were concentrated into soccer matches? We'd put British soccer fans to shame. And the stadiums would have to be perhaps four times bigger. Already they seat more people than live in my city.

The owners of the huge facilities wouldn't want them to stand idle the rest of the week--I wonder what they'd think of to entice people there with? Partitioning the place for music venues?

Incompetence

I thought an ad man's job was to understand the cultures, figure out what people valued, and try to make images that linked his client's products to things people valued; in the hope that they'd be moved to buy the stuff. OK. Somebody at Frito-Lay's ad group seems to have little more cultural insight than a baboon. Christians value communion, so the ad group decided to make a commercial replacing the Catholic wafers with Doritos.

You'd think somebody in the group would have run the idea past a few Catholics, or Lutherans, or Baptists. It is a bit worrisome to think that maybe they didn't know any. It'd be even more worrisome if they did, and had.

Ammonite teeth

This story from the BBC is cool: Xray studies of ammonite fossils reconstruct their teeth--and the last meal for one critter. The team says ammonites could not tear off large chunks of meat, but with so many 2-3mm teeth (and presumably tentacles to hang on with) I imagine they could gnaw into something shell-less fairly effectively. I'd not stick my finger in its mouth...

"Where your treasure is"

"there your heart will be also." It seems blindingly obvious now that he pointed it out.

We have other treasure than cash, most notably time. Some of us not overburdened with cash, or who are careful with money, spend time in (cheap) ways that exactly parallel how others spend money. Because I don't own a big screen TV and don't spend every weekend watching the big games, or because I don't drop benjamins at the theater or movies every other night doesn't mean that entertainment isn't a big part of my life. I read a lot, and a substantial portion of it can only be classed as entertainment. In other words, "me, me, me."

Some time I spend on necessities (like sleep and home maintenance), and some on work to earn the daily bread. About half a year ago I noticed that spending time on seemingly simple things like reading the comics or news blog sites engendered a sense of entitlement; so much that I'd get annoyed if interrupted. I backed off, and only read a handful of web sites (Internet Monk, Assistant Village Idiot, and a few others), and I think my attitudes have improved a little. Still, even the news sometimes seems to have a hold on me. Most of the time I can do nothing about the events of the day, and most of the time they have no effect on my life. (Obscure counterexamples include some stories about Liberia, Senegal, and Cote d'Ivoire.)

I can read about Sarkosy and the euro or...I have some writing to do.

What you use your time on shows where your heart is.

Bird calls

I gather that some categories of bird calls owe their complexity to some simple structures in the bird's throat. A simple muscle maneuver easily produces a variety of different frequencies.

The team were able to replicate a number of bird-songs, such as Bengalese finches and vireos, and were able to closely model the song of zebra finches.

This doesn't make the calls less remarkable or beautiful; it just means that the instrument is both simple and versatile. And I expect birders and proprietors of bird feeders will be buying versions of these within a few months.

Neanderthal diet?

The BBC reports that some researchers have found "cooked plant" residue stuck in Neanderthal teeth, suggesting a strikingly different diet than conventional wisdom help ("Meat, meat, meat for to eat!")

Chemical analysis of their bones suggested they ate little or no vegetables. This perceived reliance on meat had been put forward by some as one of the reasons these humans become extinct as large animals such as mammoths declined. But a new analysis of Neanderthal remains from across the world has found direct evidence that contradicts the chemical studies. Researchers found fossilised grains of vegetable material in their teeth and some of it was cooked.

I can't find details--such as how big the grains were. If they were very large then we have the interesting situation that Neanderthal knew how to harvest and cook but not brush their teeth.

Of course there's always the possibility that the grains were introduced post mortem--I've heard reports of cannibalism with Neanderthals. If they did eat veggies, somebody has some explaining to do with the chemical studies. Note to reader--beware of vast inferences drawn from a single result. Such as, for instance, descriptions of relationships between animals based on genetic analysis. You never see the assumptions that went into the analysis, so you and I aren't in a position to find possible problems. Only a cross-check with some other different kind of analysis can validate the results.

Frazier Museum

As we drove to the Louisville Science Center, there were grumblings that we always went to the same place and there was never anything different except the traveling exhibit. When we discovered that the traveling exhibit was "Sesame Street explains the body" and the place was chock-a-block with little kids, the grumblers won the day and we walked a block to the Frazier History Museum.

It is mostly an arms history museum, but much of it is very well done. My eyes glazed over at the displays of paraphernalia of Kentucky Civil War officers (on both sides of the war). But the dioramas and reconstructions of famous battles and how weapons and tactics changed were quite interesting. The top floor is British history, the second American, and the first floor has some lecture areas and hands-on spaces. They provide a long list of interpretations--you'd have to come rather often to see them all. We saw Annie Oakley and a demonstration of sword fighting with blade and buckler. The latter was taken from an illustrated manual from the 1200's in which a monk is teaching a scholar (and on the last page an 8'th century female saint) how to fight. A buckler is a metal shield about the size of a dinner plate with a large boss in the middle. You have to be fast with it...

Kliban cat

I used to think that Kliban's wild-eyed super-saggy cats were caricatures. Jezebel is my mother's calico cat. Aside from the coloration, and smaller paws, she could have been Kliban's model.

Pray the Devil Back to Hell

We saw the movie for the first time last night.

Charles Taylor was the successful warlord who overthrew Doe (who assassinated Tolbert), and got himself a nice veneer of respectability by getting elected President of Liberia. His involvement in Sierra Leone's "revolution" (diamond mine warlords) and general mischief in West Africa was well known. He maintained his own private army parallel to the national one, got rich, killed opponents, and attracted another revolutionary group: LURD, which banded to destroy him.

The "armies" were ill-disciplined, to put it mildly, and lived off the land; and civilians suffered, fled, died by the tens of thousands. To be of the wrong tribe in the wrong place was death. Rape and torture and useless murder and kidnapping were pervasive--even in the refugee camp in Monrovia, nominally protected from the fighting.

A group of women decided to protest for peace--both Christians and Muslims. They started a gathering dressed in white at the fish market which Taylor rode past every day. It grew, and grew, and as the battlefield reports got worse Taylor agreed to meet with them. They wanted him to join peace negotiations with the rebels. There is no great question of government legitimacy--although Taylor was elected there wasn't really a lot of choice, and it didn't make much difference which bloody warlords you wound up with. He agreed.

The women went to Sierra Leone where several of the rebel warlords were living, and swarmed them demanding that they too join peace talks. They thought this a good idea.

In Ghana, the warring parties met at a nice hotel for talks. They argued a lot, and talked a lot, and had lovely dinners, and urged their respective armies to fight harder. And with imbecilic timing the ICC decided to indict Taylor for war crimes. He left for Liberia, of course.

So nobody had any reason to hurry. Except the women of Liberia. Thousands were refugees in Ghana, so some of the organizers collected money to go to Acra, where they organized a sit-in blockading the conference. (The Nigerian president, exasperated with the Liberian negotiators arguing over who was to get which lucrative government post, was sympathetic.) When the police promised to arrest them, they threatened to strip naked--and it is a curse to see your mother (by extension other old women) naked. The police warned them to blockade the window, since some delegates were getting ready to jump out.

This protest got more media attention, and the international groups funding the conference threatened to cut off the gravy train. The negotiators got to work and hammered out a deal: cease fire, interim government, new elections, etc. Taylor agreed to step down to take refuge in Nigeria. UN troops came in to do peacekeeping. And in the subsequent elections, Ellen Sirleaf won instead of one of the warlords.

That is the bare bones of the movie, but it is told from the point of view of the women who organized to demand peace. Their stories make the movie what it is--which is a moving documentary of the pains of war and the prayers for and demands for peace. And their victory. And their promise to come back if it isn't satisfactory.

They are courageous women. The movie may give some people nightmares, though. See it.

I fear the movie was too upbeat. The women berated the UN for an idiotic disarmament plan (have armed men wait in line for hours with nothing to do but drink and do drugs?!?), but I think they praised the final plan too much. The UN claimed 100,000 citizens turned in weapons, but this (by another report) only represented about 30,000 actual weapons (some turned in ammo, etc), with no breakdown of how many of these were military and how many were civilian (shotguns, machetes). Since other estimates (also UN) were that 60,000 fighters might turn in weapons and that there were 3 weapons per fighter, you can easily see that most stuff was cached somewhere. And contrary to some opinions, the military weapons are not at all equivalent to civilian tools: the attackers' tactics and villagers' responses are different. A small boys unit armed with single-shot shotguns wouldn't have gotten far, but with AK47s or AK74s they terrorized.

Godwin's Law, A Corollary

Godwin's Law, A Corollary

Godwin's Law says that any internet discussion, if it lasts long enough, will eventually involve one party accusing another of being like Hitler. Almost always, at that point, intelligent discussion is no longer possible.

This is ironic, because the Nazis tactics were old familiar ones; used all over the world to this day in places like Azerbaijan and by people like Mugabe and Taylor. Arrest or kill anybody who objects; Build up race/class/religious hatreds; Censor or shout down your opponents: these are a tyrant's ABCs of holding power.

At public hearings for enlarging the access to a major road, an opponent called the project "environmental racism." No, the phrase does not seem to make any more sense in context, but the magic word "racism" appeared, and he somehow thought made his pronouncement important.

In general any discourse in which one side accuses the other of racism has likewise passed the point where intelligent discussion is possible. Since "racism" is now possible without your being aware of it, without actually disliking anybody of other races, and is proved by merely disagreeing with policies of a politician of some special ethnic group, it is clear that the word is used merely for abuse. Which is unfortunate, since race hatred is alive and well and is many demagogues' favorite tool.

Praise Choruses

Assistant Village Idiot hits in the bullseye again with a proposal that churches try singing choruses from Handel's Messiah.

"It sounds thrilling for a congregation. Handel’s choruses are what all praise choruses hope to grow up to be: single verses of scripture, repeated with variations, sung vigorously."

Humility and Infancy

Via The Anchoress, I found this Christmas article by Esolen. A fragment: "The stories of Bethlehem remind us not to put too much stock in the grimly serious business of being grownup and wise in the world."

Nature and disposition and character and action

I am weary of foggy meanings.

I am a scientist. For the honor of truth I must admit that most of what I’ve done for the past several years has been programming and code maintenance, but I’m a scientist still.

So, can you say that this is my nature?

I wouldn’t. I think this breakdown is clearer:

• Nature is those aspects of me that I share with other humans; the things that make me human and not (for example) feline. "Form," if you want to get all Greek about it. For example, I need to be with other people—humans are social. (True, I also need to be alone sometimes, but this is also part of human rhythms.)
• Disposition is the set of distinctive aspects I came with. I’m diffident. I’m a quick thinker; good at spotting key features in things. I was born with a strong and healthy body.
• Character is what I made of these: with training I became good at analysis, and at figuring out which things were measurable and running the numbers; cross checking with a disrespect for pronouncements. In other words I’m a scientist. I’m also the one standing at the side in the party. And because I liked reading more than active play, that "healthy body" is overweight and I’m no good at sports.
• I discovered over the years that people weren’t always interested in hearing someone run the numbers on their blue-sky ideas or point out the logical flaws underpinning their political fashions. So I don’t always apply my training and my characteristic inclinations. Sometimes I even strike up a conversation with a stranger at a party—if the %*# band isn’t overamped. So my actions don’t always represent my character.

So: sometimes I act like a scientist. My character and habits are those of a scientist. I am disposed for analytical thinking—but I could have been something else besides a scientist. And my nature is like yours.

An example?

Thinking over Jesus' miracles, I notice that, although He shows Himself perfectly capable of healing at a distance, He didn't do much of it. A crowd comes wanting healing for themselves or loved ones, and for some reason He doesn't just say "Be healed" to the lot of them as He did with the lepers. The healing is, as far as is recorded, requested one on one, and dealt with one on one. The feeding of the multitudes didn't involve bread landing in everyone's lap, but was handed out one on one via the proxy hands of the disciples and possibly others.

From one point of view it is important that people come to Jesus, and so being healed in bulk at a distance is the wrong parable. But if we are to be Jesus' body in the world and do His work, does Jesus' one on one approach constitute an example for us? Feeding the crowds was a corporate endeavor, but ... on the whole our primary focus should not be the charitable organizations but what we can do one on one.

Which gets complicated with beggars on State Street. Do you give cash to someone who will promptly spend it on drugs, or drop it in the Salvation Army kettle for better controlled charity? Or give out McDonalds coupons? Or (and I've only done this once, I fear), take the guy to lunch together?

Homeless shelters are going to concentrate folks with problems in one place for efficient service, but at the cost of losing one on one contact, and at the cost of increasing the fraction of people with mental or moral problems. That doesn't make a good environment for learning to do better for those very people with mental problems, and makes it fairly toxic for the merely out of luck. So, what would work better?

Aura Again

Just for keeping track.

TSA report

I said I'd report on my experience with TSA. In Madison there is no "naked scanner" and the personnel were, as usual, polite and efficient. The return trip had me go through Chicago, which does have them. I didn't go through one, and the personnel were polite and efficient.

Looming weather was a constant theme through the travels this time, and in the event actually made my trip easier. The snow in Madison was pretty trivial and I got to the airport OK, and Chicago was pretty clean. The snow in Geneva had mostly melted in the rain when we got there. Brussels got rain instead of snow. The flight from Brussels to Chicago left a bit late but arrived on time--but some other flights didn't, with the result that the Immigration line took less than 5 minutes and the security line about 6, which had me early enough in the concourse to observe that the 14:00 Madison flight hadn't left. I dashed over to L concourse, and got on standby for the flight where I discovered that half the passengers hadn't arrived in O'Hare thanks to bad weather elsewhere; so I got to Madison 3 hours earlier than planned, and was safe at home when the storm hit.

Nightclubs

In the course of an essay on what use people would make of a new planet, Dalrymple includes this:

This is perfectly obvious when you look at pictures by artists of heaven and hell.

Hell, whatever else may be said about it, is always extremely interesting and lively.

It has the kind of monsters in it that would be endlessly fascinating to anyone with the slightest interest in his surroundings. There is always plenty going on in hell, as much going on in fact as on the multiple screens displayed in large pubs these days. Anyone who likes nightclubs will love hell. Moreover, hell is probably easier to get into.

Russia and the Cote d'Ivoire Elections

BBC reports that Russia is blocking a Security Council resolution asserting that Ouattara won the election last month. They say this exceeds the mandate of the UN in the matter.

The Election Commission says Ouattara won and the Constitutional Council says the incumbent Gbagbo won. Smell a rat or two?

Set aside the question of who fouled the results. Does Resolution 1528 actually give the UN the mandate to decide the winner in a contested situation? Clauses m and q-10 might be stretched to fit: "prepare for and assist in the conduct of ... elections", "demands that the parties fulfill their obligations under the Linas-Marcoussis agreement". But "assist in" doesn't mean oversee or certify.

So on the face of it, Russia is correct. The UN can (and probably should, though I don't know all the details yet) say that the election results are botched and urge CdI to figure it out themselves or submit to arbitration, but they have no mandate to decide the results.

Everything old is new again

From Tremendous Trifles in "Prehistoric Station" by that old newspaperman Chesterton

Modern writers have often made game of the old chronicles because they chiefly record accidents and prodigies; a church struck by lightning, or a calf with six legs. They do not seem to realize that this old barbaric history is the same as the new democratic journalism. It is not that the savage chronicle has disappeared. It is merely that the savage chronicle now appears every morning.

Or from "Birds who won't sing" in the same volume:

If reapers sing while reaping, why should not auditors sing while auditing and bankers while banking? If there are songs for all the separate things that have to be done in a boat, why are there not songs for all the separate things that have to be done in a bank? As the train flew through the Kentish gardens, I tried to write a few songs suitable for commercial gentlemen. Thus, the work of bank clerks when casting up columns might begin with a thundering chorus in praise of Simple Addition.

"Up my lads and lift the ledgers, sleep and ease are o'er.
Hear the Stars of Morning shouting: 'Two and Two are Four.'
Though the creeds and realms are reeling, though the sophists roar,
Though we weep and pawn our watches, Two and Two are Four."


"There's a run upon the Bank--
Stand away!
For the Manager's a crank and the Secretary drank
and the Upper Tooting Bank
Turns to bay!
Stand close: there is a run
On the Bank.
Of our ship, our royal one, let the ringing legend run,
that she fired with every gun
Ere she sank."

Or from "Glimpse of My Country"

If you have the good fortune to really talk with a statesman, you will be constantly startled with his saying quite intelligent things. It makes one nervous at first.

Although I'm not persuaded

Stonehenge

How did they build it? Dragging big stones around is hard and leaves traces, so there must have been an easier way to move them (sometimes 200 miles!). Two "new" ideas are that they created wicker cradles to roll them in, and that they used stone balls as ball bearings in wooden troughs to make it easier. The latter method has some obvious problems when dragging rocks uphill, but they don't seem insurmountable. It should be possible to try to verify the method. Some fraction of the stone balls should have spalled and become unusable, so they should look for marred balls in among the rest. Oak balls or roller dowels don't last so long, unfortunately.

TSA misapprehensions

I don't fly much: 4 times a year to Switzerland mostly, and my last encounter with TSA was before the more rigorous rules. I'll let you know if anything is odd with next month's trip.

But I think I've already spotted quite a few errors circulating.

1. There's radiation danger from "nude scanner." Not really, this isn't X-rays.
2. It won't find crotch bombs. True enough, but not relevant--it was supposed to be good at finding non-metallic weapons. Whether it really works or not is a different matter, and it might be worthwhile to figure out who benefited and find out if everything was on the up and up.
3. TSA are just doing their jobs. True enough, but I've already spotted several folks who enjoy the exercise of power a little too much. And, as I said, I don't fly much.
4. At least we'll be flying safely. Not really. Watch how the plane is loaded and how the scanning works. If you can't figure out at least three ways of circumventing the system you're not thinking.
5. If we profile like Israel does we'll be better off. True. But where on earth would we find that many trained screeners? We have several orders of magnitude more air traffic than Israel.
6. The searches are an excuse for groping. I don't know for sure, but it seems unlikely that there's a lot of that. Some, yes.

Lots of jokes suggest that soon we'll all be boarding the plane nude, but that's not happening. We'd be issued a thin disposable gown and a nice warm robe that they'd wash once a week (just like the blankets). And still nobody would be checking the food service for bombs.

Camping for God

Look at Leviticus 23:33-43, with special note of verse 42. The people are not to stay at home for the celebration, but spend 7 days "in booths:" in temporary shelters. They are to camp out.

This is, as the text says, a reminder of what God did for their forefathers as they escaped from Egypt.

But it has other effects as well.

They empty themselves of the bulk of their possessions for a season—they become poor. This reminds them of what is really needed for life. With a clearer picture of what's vital, they might be more ready to give; digging deeper into the pocket because they know what they can really get by on.

It reminds them of their equality before God. You find no huge house and tiny hovels—everybody is in a makeshift shelter.

It empties them so they can be filled again. Each new gift is a great joy for a few weeks, and then we get used to it and its only a minor joy, or part of the background. But if we leave it all behind, and then receive it again, a little of the original joy comes back too.

Though they could not know it yet, it empties them as an echo of how Jesus emptied himself for us.

Suffering together (even if only the mild suffering of camping), can bond people together, as soldiers and schoolchildren can testify.

Hell in Heaven

by Modou Gueye

A Senegalese man left behind his wives to come to the USA. When the US embassy asked him how long he would be staying, he said two weeks. This short volume is his observations and advice from his 19-year stay in the USA.

You should read the book to get a flavor of a different perspective. Unfortunately, he is not a very reliable observer:

"Certainly, we can see two major different groups of people: The first group includes the rich, politically called Republicans, and movie stars, athletes, and entertainers. Unfortunately they are the most exposed to the justice system, which treats them very harshly when they are found guilty of ...." What planet is he talking about? Three groups, not two; most of the famous rich are Democrats; and the justice system is almost always very tender with the rich and famous.

His understanding of Christianity is as poor as most Americans' understanding of Islam; he takes up the "America is racist to the core" line; and he follows the usual a-historical tropes about the source of all the woes in the Middle East. But, inaccurate though this is, it represents what a lot of the world thinks.

He is a Muslim of Sufi flavor, and though he doesn't go into a lot of detail he cites famous Senegalese Sheikhs--which most of us (myself included) have never heard of before--whose message isn't quite the same as the Saudi-based imams or the Egyptian schools.

I gather that he spent most of his time in New York, which may color his view of the US as being exceptionally violent. He is generous with advice; explaining why the African ways are better. Not infrequently, they are.

Hell in Heaven? The USA is the heaven, the promised land; with endless opportunity. Except when it isn't, and you have to sell fake watches on the streets of New York to make ends meet because you haven't a green card. (He never actually says what he was doing during those years...)

Magnet House?

We've always had rabbits running around outside, and two months ago a woodchuck decided the garden looked like a nice place to stay. Last night we found a young muskrat in a window well.

He is now in the tall weeds at Patrick Marsh. The plank that allowed him escape from the hole had a livetrap conveniently placed beside it--he could try to walk on the wobbly "trampoline" far end of the plank, fall back in the hole, or go in the trap. He chose wisely. You don't see how amazing their feet are unless you can get close enough to look--and he clung to the inside of the trap like a monkey when we tried to empty him out by the pond.

What next? And what is it about our house that attracts these critters?

Wandering Minds

New research claims that "A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind."

This has been noticed before:

"All man's miseries come from not being able to sit quietly in an empty room." --Blaise Pascal

Elections without TV

Funny how different elections look when you don't watch TV. The governor's race here was alleged to be vicious. (The incumbent, Doyle, wasn't running.) I read up on the candidates. Walker, the Republican (and eventual winner), was generally agreed to be easy to work with and a nice guy. The Democrat, Barrett, had his hand broken and head injured when he jumped to the defense of a woman being attacked last year. (Unfortunately he's pro-abortion down the line: a pity; a brave man deserves a better political party.) Without a TV it looked like a contest between two fellows of good character.

One issue in the election was the train: Doyle was pushing hard for it, trying to get all the contracts signed for the $810 million deal with the Feds before the election. Walker won, and one of his planks was that the railroad was a waste. The next day, instead of pushing to further lock in the deals, Doyle canceled the railroad plan. I don't know his motives, but I'll attribute it to courtesy: no point in wasting resources just for politics' sake.

The Wizard Knight

by Gene Wolfe

These two books: The Knight and The Wizard tell the story of Able of the High Heart. It is nominally a long letter to his brother Ben back in the USA, but that never interferes with the storytelling.

We open with his arrival in Mythgarthr—or at least the time he is first aware that he has arrived. (By the way, skip the introductory who’s who list and follow along with the hero as he discovers things—it is more fun that way.) He meets Parka (one of the Fates), and is given his new name and destiny—he’s to be a knight.

As usual in a Wolfe novel the setting is detailed and many threads weave in and out of the plot, and the narrator isn’t 100% accurate. His hierarchy of worlds brings in everything from dragons to the Fates to the Valfather (one eyed, goes around with ravens…) to the archangel Michael, and his re-imagining of elves is very good.

Explaining why Able isn’t an accurate narrator would give away parts of the story; suffice it to say that we discern very early on that he’s a man (OK, a boy for the first few pages) with a mission. He’s supplied with what he needs for the job, including a dog that can become a monster, special powers, and sidekicks, some poor and some magical. But what is that job? Is it enough that this landless commoner can become a knight and acquire a magic sword?

The second book finds him more powerful still, but unable to use most of his power—for honor’s sake. His squires and assistants become more prominent in the story, and his mission is finally revealed—and it feels slightly anticlimactic, though it shouldn’t. (Could have been just a little more carefully drawn there…) And it ends with him giving an implicit rebuke to Michael and the Valfather.

Not everybody likes Wolfe’s style, which can be complex and layered. Read it.

Volunteer

by Michael Ross How does a Canadian wind up working for Mossad?

Well, you start by traveling, and settling down in Israel for a while, and falling in love with an Israeli woman. If you convert and become a citizen to marry her, and distinguish yourself in the right ways during your stint in the army, you might get a phone call. And if you pass the battery of tests, you might become an apprentice. And then…

It turns out to be rather difficult to make a story about spying exciting. A successful spy gets information and nobody finds out. And even when he manages to arrange for some kind of violent action, sometimes the game gets called off for worries about political fallout.

I assume that Ross ran the book by his former employers before trying to publish it. It is therefore impossible to say whether the picture is quite accurate, and whether it was sanitized. I suspect it wasn’t sanitized very much. And he’s pretty hard on himself when describing his efforts to scare a couple of Iranian agents out of South Africa.

Iran is very much on the scene throughout the book, and you get an agent’s eye view of what they’ve been doing—not revelations to anybody who’s been paying attention, though.

For several years he was liaison to US intelligence agencies, and his assessment of the CIA and FBI is harsh. The CIA is solidly careerist, home-based, and insular, the FBI is worse than useless, and inter-service interference is scandalous and a national liability.

When I began work with the Mossad in 1988, my instructor Oren told me that each agent is like a box of matches. One by one, the matches are burned up, and there is nothing left but ash. Some of us have more matches than others. But we all have a finite number

And he retires. But..

Whatever they say, however, I believe that the world needs to hear these stories. A storm is coming, and it would appear that those of us who cherish life, liberty, and the goodness in our way of life will have no choice but to endure it.

I decided not to wait for the inevitable. I volunteered.

Read it. Especially read it if you’ve never heard a good word about the Mossad—you need the education.

God-Kings

When we read of the God-Kings of ancient civilizations we smile a bit at the thought that a commoner ought not look at the king, or that everything the king touched had to be special, or that he could not touch the ground.

I'm not snickering anymore. For his state visit to India, coconuts are being removed from the trees lest they should fall on him, a special tunnel will keep him from being seen, and the $200 million per day trip includes a flotilla of 34 warships to prevent attacks from the sea like the one last year. Closer to home, they advertised for actors to fill out the hall where he'd be meeting the public, and all questions are vetted in advance. Nothing is permitted to get close, or in any way defile the sacred image.

I suspect much of this would be the same for state visits by a Republican president too, although our previous president would sometimes make unannounced low-entourage visits to war zones. The President isn't yet an unapproachable divinity. But he's getting there.

The $200M/day apparently was sourced from an anonymous Indian official, and is denied. The 34 warships is also denied, but isn't so obviously out of line: warships can include very small vessels.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission

South Africa set up this after the power handover, and from all reports it has been largely successful in bringing a measure of closure to old injustices: sometimes by justice and sometimes by mercy but always with clarity about the nature of the old crimes.

Liberia put together such a thing too. I remember thinking: "OK, sounds like a fine idea" and not examining the issue much. Then I read some complaints from Liberians saying "don't muddy the waters, this is too close, this could be trouble." Perhaps it was reporting bias, but it seemed as though those in favor were often relatively mobile elites and those opposed were people on the ground in Liberia.

A little further thought reminded me that the situations weren't really all that parallel: in South Africa nobody seriously thought the old regime was at all likely to return in a coup, but in Liberia everybody believed that the warlords still had arsenals ready to hand and were able to start fighting again with little preparation. The legislature is alleged to be chock-a-block with partisans of the various warlords.

I didn't spend the time to do a detailed review of who was who on the commission and what their backgrounds were, but decided that the default position should be that alleged to be of the people in harm's way: don't push this. This isn't South Africa and another civil war is going to be worse than failure to bring justice. Or, to put it another way, criminals are going to get away with murder because there is no robust framework for bringing justice; and there's no use pretending otherwise.

Earlier this year the TRC announced a report calling for the President to resign, not because she had committed any crimes or because she was a warlord or even a current partisan of a warlord, but because she had supported one faction years ago. Red flags went up for me: this isn't about crime and justice, but about politics.

And so it seems to be. If Gbaba is speaking for them all, they are calling for disbanding the government and instituting an interim government. They don't specify who they think should be running it, but I think I could nail it in less than three guesses.

Wedding

I will not be posting details of the wedding until after I've circulated pictures and notes to family.

Genetics

I complained a while back that the simple model of DNA in popular thought ("Let's clone a mammoth!") wasn't good enough. It turns out I didn't know the half of it. The article is about what DNA looks like and how it actually works--as far as we know. Sections include: Genomic Perplexities, From Junk to Living Organism, The Dynamic Chromosome, The Dynamic Space of the Cell Nucleus, Metamorphosis of the Code, DNA’s Many Languages, Meaningful Form, The Sensitive Nucleosome, and The Nucleosome as Mediator.

I knew things had to be dynamic, but I had no idea how many different factors interplay in expressing a single gene. Go read it. Maybe you'll need more than one sitting, but go read it.

Caricature and Attraction

When I was young and wanted to be an archaeologist, I was fascinated at how ugly the Egyptian women’s stylized makeup was. How could anybody think it attractive?

Now I understand how it works. I’ve lived long enough to see it in action.

Apply just a little exaggeration to the features of beautiful women, and make them the standards to emulate. Advertising campaigns or being Pharaoh’s daughter both work fine.

Give people a few years to get used to it, and then, a few fashion cycles later, deepen the exaggeration just a hair’s breadth. If you can saturate the media you can make the look the new baseline. Children will pick up on the message: this is needed to make you attractive. After a few years the symbol will start to dominate. Look at some of the eye shadow used in recent ad campaigns. Just sharpen the boundaries slightly instead of feathering them out, and it’ll be almost Egyptian, although without the little tail.

Symbolism and stylization can go very far. Think of Indonesian dance, or a huge swath of Chinese painting genres. They’re unintelligible to outsiders, because they’re dominated by symbolic movements or shapes. One angry-looking Chinese mask is a monster, and the other is a beneficent defender against monsters, and the difference all comes from tiny symbols and color choices that I know nothing about.

Or, closer to home, consider the pole dance. We’ve all seen clips--one played in a show on the flight back the other day--a woman clinging to, rubbing against, and climbing around a pole on a stage. A scantily or un-clad woman is erotic, especially when in motion; but for the pole to add anything to the scene you the viewer have to come prepared to think of the pole as a stand in (symbol) for yourself, for her swinging her leg high to be a symbol of her offering herself, and so on. If you don't accept those symbols, her exaggerated motions look creepily unnatural, and for her to be wasting her caresses on a chunk of iron suggests an unattractive confusion. But the dances are popular enough to have "found their way" into other entertainment, like a TV medical show. A lot of people have been trained to accept the symbols.

I wonder how often we wind up preferring symbolic to realistic action. I know politicians rely on that, but those kind of odd choices show up in other areas of our lives too. Its not hard to notice other folk's strange decisions; I don't know a simple rule for identifying my own.

Marriage

This still says it well.

You might say sentimental, you might say sappy; but sap is what makes things live. God bless you, daughter, and new son far away.

Songs and Memories

Some music provokes a deep reaction from me. The strongest reactions are the oldest, from songs I must have heard on the radio in the kitchen in California. I hear one passage from one of Tchaikovsky’s works and I’m back sitting at the table while Dad listened to the radio. Serenata by Leroy Anderson sings of lost opportunities and a different, warmer path than the one I chose: a melancholy reaction to such a cheerful piece. The Route 66 theme evokes exactly what it is meant to: the rhythm of the wheels on the road and the turning off to the goal (not home). Long before I learned to drive it defined the experience for me. I only saw part of the show when the family visited friends once, but somewhere I heard the tune.

Sometimes just a fragment of a song is all that it takes: "Once there were valleys where rivers used to run" from Greenfields by the Brothers Four—not so much the rest of the song, but that line resonated with the "cat who walks by himself." Or "I hear the music from across the way, across the bridges of my mind" (not so much the rest of "Music from Across the Way") calls up the ghost of a dream of walking down 2am streets with the streetlights that shine like grubby winter, past the mansion of music to an alley of pointless errand.

The wedding march 30 years ago was the carillon from Bizet’s L’Arlesienne, but although the memory is fond the music isn’t visceral in the same way; perhaps because that day was supplemented by 30 years worth of other days with other incidental songs.

The Uses of the Trivial

John Reynolds wrote on looking for entertainment and the importance of trivial things. A sample:

Finally, the trivial engages one part of self and allows other parts to shine. Playing Risk is no great pursuit in itself, but it allows a social setting where fellowship can take place. Playing the card game "hearts" was one of the great learning times of Bible College, though "hearts" should never appear in any curriculum. While we were dealing the cards, we talked about everything and somehow achieved an honesty that would have escaped us if we had nothing to do but sit and talk.

"Let’s talk" shuts many of us up, but "let’s play cards" opens up many a mouth.

Stuxnet

The Ancient and Noble Order of the Masters of IT works an esoteric ritual known as "backup." I do not doubt that the Iranian branch still performs this traditional rite.

Granted, the government's interest in secrecy may keep the number of backups small, but I'd guess that restoring the main systems is no more than a few days, and restoring the auxilliary systems no more than a couple of weeks. All the PCs with important information will have to have their disks combed in a clean environment, and that demands some expert time (and user time) to retrieve the vital stuff, but all is quite doable.

Work will have been lost, but it isn't a catastrophe or a showstopper. Probably pretty much everything the media has said about it is either a mistake or a lie.

What is going on?

• It could be a coincidence. Stranger things have happened.
• It could be a test weapon that got away before it was ready to be used.
• It could be a feint: for example to focus Iranian intelligence on computing at the nuclear plants rather than personnel at the airports. Anybody else notice that several high ranking Iranians died in air crashes in the last few years?
• It could be meant to panic them into buying new network gear to isolate the control systems, gear that somebody has put backdoors into.
• It could be a coverup to keep attention away from real spies in their nuclear facilities.
• It could be meant to panic them into a spy-hunt in their facilities, which could tie things up worse than a worm.
• It could be a probe to find out who's really in charge of some division.

One thing I'm pretty sure of: the announcement of a name in the code that might link to the book of Esther was meant to mislead. That's a pretty far-fetched link, and did you see the code? Me neither.

"God's Perfect Plan for Your Life"

I've always had a contrary streak. Even after I became a Christian I didn't think much of this phrase. "Plan?" Does God have a minute by minute checklist? Does anything in the heavens above or the earth below or the waters under the earth care which shoe I put on first in the morning? Do I have to pray to ask whether I should go to work again today?

And if you admit the possibility that there can be a variety of freely chosen actions that are all perfectly acceptable in the plan, then the Plan begins to assume a very different form. Not a checklist or a schedule, but a form and a framework.

Perhaps you have a special calling: you must be a missionary; and perhaps you've been given a special message: "Come to Macedonia and help us." Perhaps you've been told to run alongside a chariot and eavesdrop. These tie in very nicely to the model of a Plan as a schedule. But what about deciding that you will work nights as a tent maker rather than ask for support? Paul testified that he had flexibility in carrying out his orders. For him the Plan was a set of objectives, and not a detailed daily list.

WWII Officer Candidates' School: The officer in charge of a bunch of candidates gave them a test. The question was how to raise a 20-foot flagpole. In the scenario they were given a block-and-tackle, a sergeant and six men and asked how to get it done. Each man came up with a set of diagrams, math formulas and various theories. The officer then said, "Gentlemen, you are all wrong. The correct procedure is to turn to the NCO and say, "Sergeant, get that flagpole up."

"Paul, get the gospel preached in Macedonia"

"The Best of All Possible Worlds" is the same confusion in a different form. Who said that universes had to be orderable in that kind of way? You can easily conceive of less-good universes, but also of classes of universes which are equally good.

Within that kind of flexibility, I suspect that it often doesn't even matter who you marry—within some general guidelines, of course. You don't need to be a prophet to predict that certain personalities are going to conflict more often than necessary...

Jesus' life seems to show this flexibility. I've heard the miracle at Cana taken to prove that Jesus was willing to modify his schedule to suit his mother, and that therefore we should ask her to twist his arm for us (never mind John 16:26-27). But look again. Over and over we read something like "He had compassion on them and..," and over and over He told the healed to not tell anyone about what He'd done. If that isn't showing flexibility in the schedule, it sure looks like it.

Of course He didn't lose sight of the main objective. And we (OK, I) have a tendency to be flexible in the direction of maximum personal comfort, which doesn't follow Jesus' example very closely.

Wet Wedding

After I got a clear schedule for when the repairman would arrive to fix the water heater, I went over to the atheletic club for a soak. From one urgency to another I hadn't gotten to it since the water heater croaked, and I was kind of achy.

The therapy pool had a photographer (one of the lifeguards), a boombox playing Mendelssohn's famous march, and about twenty elderly folks standing in it holding large balloons and making arches with fanoodles, under which the curves of which the bride and groom walked to the front. The bride wore a kind of lace half veil, and everyone was in swimsuits.

I did not intrude or gawk, but as I walked away one person seemed to be asking them questions, and a few minutes later there was cheering. Perhaps they met in a therapy class, and thought this would be a cute way to involve everybody.

Political Crowds and Me

President Obama will be visiting UW Madison this afternoon--the first president since Truman to visit. That makes it "historic" in the loose sense newspapers use the term.

I'm not bothering to go.

It would be inconvenient, though not overwhelmingly so, but even if it was a snap to show up and get a reserved front row spot, the spot would stand empty.

It's not just because I consider the man a misguided empty suit. I'd offer the same somnolent enthusiasm to a similar visit by President Bush, a man I came to respect.

Does anybody remember John Anderson? Back in 1980 he came to the University of Illinois as part of his presidential campaign. I'd heard the buzz about him, and I went to hear him. He unburdened himself of his standard stump speech, tailored for UI, and left.

If the purpose of the effort was communication, it utterly failed. I'd heard it all before. I concluded that day that if I wanted to find out what a candidate thought, going to campaign rallies was inefficient, and also probably the most boring method available. The script was going to always be the same, with fill-in-the-blanks for the football team and the local pols. There'd be no "Churchill at Westminster College" moments.

I've not attended a campaign rally since. I've talked with a candidate or two running for local office--that's much more interesting and perhaps even useful. But for President, or Senator, or Congresscritter? The speech has nothing much to do with the candidate's real goals--it's been polished by spin doctors and PR people to sound as nice as possible without saying anything substantive. Possible dissenters in the crowd are cordoned far away so that no hint of disagreement taints the love fest. What's there to learn?

But of course that's just me. I'm an Apollonian sort in a rather Dionysian culture; one who just gets a headache from football cheers and just can't seem to care much whether the Cubs win the championship this year. I assume they will sooner or later--Dante told us the lowest circle of Hell was frozen over.

Which leads me to wonder what purposes rallies have. Maybe there's something I'm leaving out.

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First and foremost, the rally is an opportunity for the faithful to commit darsan with the illustrious visitor. Laugh, but we all do it--I'd go see Neil Armstrong, even if I knew I'd not get to meet him.

Second, the rally gets everyone together to hear the message. As I said this is terribly inefficient, which makes me think this really isn't a major function anymore.

Third, it is an opportunity to be part of a community enthusiastic about a cause. You come blase, and leave excited ("Oh whip me, whip me into a frenzy with your cries and cheers and freighted words!"). I'm not a huge fan of manufactured enthusiasm, but I can imagine that connecting with other people is good even when shaped like this. The key for me is not the community, but the cause. Is it worthy of my enthusiasm and devotion? Getting pol A elected instead of pol B generally isn't. Defeating slavery or abortion, or championing safe working conditions--yes.

Fourth, it is an opportunity to encourage others in the cause--to make them feel as though the support is great and the victory inevitable. Once again, the cause makes it or breaks it for me.

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Now meeting somebody in person; sitting down for an hour or two over dinner--that's a whole other ball game. I'd be happy for the chance to have an unscripted chat with any of the presidents, provided the talk wasn't about politics. (I really don't want to hear kvetching about how X couldn't get along with Tip O'Neill, who famously got along great with political opponents) For most of them I think we'd find something to talk about.

But "historic" visits? Eh. The tea party rallies are a historic movement also, and I've not been to any of those either--and they, being more local, would be more interesting.

Knock Knock!

Sight of the day: a downy woodpecker hammering away at the entrance to a birdhouse in the backyard. There are no chickadees this time of year, so nobody's being disturbed, but I've no idea what he thought he was going to find there.

Yesterday we had a young woodchuck in the front garden; probably told to leave the nest a few blocks away. When he showed signs of wanting to take up residence we shooed him out of the foliage, tossed a basket over him, and guided him into a live trap. I don't want any unscheduled excavations.

Sports

"If ever it should happen that the system of English athletics should vanish from the public schools and the universities, if science should supply some new and non-competitive manner of perfecting the physique, if public ethics swung round to an attitude of absolute contempt and indifference towards the feeling called sport, then it is easy to see what would happen. Future historians would simply state that in the dark days of Queen Victoria young men at Oxford and Cambridge were subjected to a horrible sort of religious torture. They were forbidden, by fantastic monastic rules, to indulge in wine or tobacco during certain arbitrarily fixed periods of time, before certain brutal fights and festivals. Bigots insisted on their rising at unearthly hours and running violently around fields for no object. Many men ruined their health in these dens of superstition, many died there. All this is perfectly true and irrefutable. Athleticism in England is an asceticism, as much as the monastic rules. Men have over-strained themselves and killed themselves through English athleticism. There is one difference and one only: we do feel the love of sport; we do not feel the love of religious offices. We see only the price in the one case and only the purchase in the other."

From Twelve Types by GK Chesterton.

"I say its spinnage, and I say the hell with it."

A headline on a newspaper this evening said: "Gender pay gap smallest on record."

Somebody tried to find a nice way to say: "a lot of good jobs went away leaving a lot of men unemployed." Trying to put a happy face on news like that edges some distance into dishonesty.