Maple tree sanitation

Apparently if maple tree tappers try to keep their equipment clean and avoid getting bacteria in the tree, the tree produces more sap.
Of course this remains to be verified over time. Producing too much sap might weaken the tree as much as bacteria does. Still...

I wonder if rubber trees behave similarly. IIRC they were good for about 10 years, with new sets of cuts each year, and that was about it. Maybe the tree was reacting to sap loss: the claim of 10 years suggests something like that. I
f it were disease you'd expect the failures to be a little more random. Wikipedia says 25 years, so either I misunderstood or the local conditions and trees were less productive. If the latter, there's room for improvement. I wonder how many free-lance tappers there still are.

Oxygen deficiency

The IBEX detector has been sampling the extra-solar wind, and finds that it doesn't have as much oxygen (atomic, that is) as the solar wind. They look at the oxygen/neon ratio, and find the solar wind has about 5.6 oxygen to each neon while the extra-solar wind has 3.7. So either the extra-solar wind comes from somewhere else than the sun did (not hard to accomplish in a rotating galaxy, BTW), or oxygen is tied up in dust outside the system. Or in the process of forming a star the magnetic fields somehow segregates heavier ions away from the star.

An old letter?

If this is a hoax, it's an old one (or else somebody is very good at Photoshopping old newspapers).

A slave freed after the Civil War replied to a request from his former master to come back and work for him, and his answering letter was printed in the paper.

It is worth reading as a grimly humorous reminder of what used to be.

But something about it doesn't read quite right to me, as though somebody else, without a strong personal involvement in the matter, either re-wrote it or composed it from scratch. I can't quite put my finger on all the reasons why, but one odd note is the worry he expresses about the safety of his daughters. It seems too light. And would any decent man of the era (or any era, for that matter), so readily tell the world about shameful injuries to his family?

This is cool

OK, relatively cool.

The idea is that a relatively cool spot can form molecular hydrogen on the Sun (most of it is atomic: not bound in a molecule). That reduces the pressure of the plasma locally, which pulls the magnetic fields tighter. It doesn't take much--they estimate only a few percent combining could cause significant intensification of the solar field in the vicinity of the sunspot.

They couldn't search directly for H2 ion spectral lines, so they used OH ions as a stand-in. If the model holds up and we can get some more experimental verification, that helps solve a long-standing mystery: why do these cool regions (only 5700 degrees K) have strong magnetic fields?

Visualizing a life

We love narratives. In the fairy stories, almost every incident along the way had a bearing on the climax. If the heroine shared her bread with an old woman the old woman later proves essential to solving some puzzle before the young lady. Good narratives are clean, if not always orderly.

That’s a useful way of looking at our lives. There’s a start, turning points, struggles and falls, and an every-day-moving-on until the end.

But I think it misses part of the big picture.

Think of every day as another scan line across the picture, building up an image. A big change in direction can change the image, but so can the thousand dots of daily little acts that nobody would put in the story.

So what picture have my habits and choices drawn? Is it clear or muddy, and what is missing? The narrative description won't tell me.

Exotic foods

We've a date night rule: don't eat what we already make at home.

So we tend to eat at at "ethnic" restaurants, and since we don't dine out often we don't get jaded.

But what do you do if last month you tried every variety of Indian regional cuisine and you're looking for something different? Molecular food? What a terribly silly name...

How about "ketchup caviar," where you make little balls of ketchup? It may not be worth the effort, opinions seem to vary (I think the wordpress site is run by an employee), but it certainly qualifies as "different." Although if I were making little condiment beads I think I'd want something just a little zingier for a base than ketchup. Maybe a drop or two of tabasco sauce?

In the exotic foods competition our turduckens are distant echos of the Roman versions, but I think we take the wreath in the liquid nitrogen division.

Listening to NPR

Earlier than usual this morning I tuned in the news, and caught a couple of stories that didn't quite say everything.

The first was an NPR piece on a public teaching hospital in Haiti, touted as a model for aid programs. My ears perked up and I listened carefully as they described the low cost ($16M+$4M+ in kind) and the facilities (fiber optic, 6 surgery theaters, etc) and how they hoped this would help keep Haitian doctors and nurses from decamping to the US. I'm still missing something here... Did they use local labor? The reporter compared other "less successful" projects (cholera treatment is still in tents, government palace is still waiting demolition, etc), and ended with a devastating stinger as a throw-away line: The Haitian government doesn't have a budget item for operating expenses.

So no, it is not a model for aid programs. We've seen this many times before, and it does not end well.

The next story was on student protests in Morocco. College graduates have organized daily demonstrations demanding government jobs. Morocco has the usual bloated and useless government bureaucracy, but faced with the protests officials often give in and create a few new positions. The leaders keep lists of who shows up to protest every day, and only the devoted regulars are on the list submitted to the government. Did I mention that nobody really wants to work in the private sector when government jobs are lifetime and perk-filled?

It sounds like a kind of extortion that rewards noisy jerks, but one thing the government gets out of it is a list of people who know how to show up for work every day...

The astute reader will notice that I have to rely on a modicum of integrity in reporting. Prior knowledge told me what to look for in the report on aid projects and left me with red flags when information was missing. Anyone with any experience with planning (even us peons) knows how to interpret the confession at the end. But suppose that last vital comment about the budget had been left off? This little story would have been added to my mosaic picture of the world with the little tag "not enough information". But that little tag isn't isn't easy to remember a year later, and I'd be left with a prettier image of Haiti than I ought to have. And news reports regularly lack those critical little details.

Quantum Theology by Diarmuid O’Murchu

Subtitle: "Spiritual Implications of the New Physics" (The back cover says he has "written extensively on new paradigms from a multi-disciplinary point of view.")

I was given this to find out what I thought of it. By page 11 he claims that for 30,000 years men worshiped the "Mother Goddess," apparently blissfully unaware that the story’s bogus; and that 8,000 years ago we invented agriculture and religion; and that before there was agriculture there were no wars.

By this point so many red flags were up that I was hard put to find a reason to read farther. But I promised to look at it, so I soldiered on. I skipped to chapter 3, What is the Quantum All About? On page 25 he screws up Einstein’s theory of special relativity, and claims that it undermined the "classical model", which if you use his definition it didn’t. On page 27 he cites Lazlo for the assertion that photons are nonlinear waves in a medium; which is pretty far from being an established theory, to put it mildly—the usual linear model is a lot simpler. On page 28 he says "we experience life not in isolated segments but in wholes (quanta)." Insofar as that means anything at all it misrepresents classical theory. On page 29 he misstates the definitions of wave function and superposition; on page 31 he claims that scientists are unwilling to admit that the human mind can be in error (conclusive proof that he’s never been at a science convention); on page 32 he emits gibberish about Bose-Einstein condensates "with the aid of which we can distinguish conscious from non-conscious systems," and I gave up. Sorry. The physics was wrong and so was the attempted use.

I picked a random chapter later to see if I could figure out what he’s driving at—it seems to be a kind of "we’re all part of the whole" pantheism. But I’m not going to bother to see how he gets there.

I spent 15 minutes so you don't have to. The book is a sad waste of innocent trees.

Red-Green show?

The human eye is not configured to see certain color mixtures because neurons excited by red light are suppressed by green photons, and so on. Red plus green equals a kind of brown, right?

But as the story describes, some researchers tried to fool the eye by narrowly striping red and green together, or blue and yellow together. Because of normal eye jitter, a cell that saw red a split second ago sees green the next, and the result looks brown or olive. But when they dynamically adjusted the image position using retinal tracking, to keep the same neurons stimulated by the same color stripes, the volunteers saw new colors for which they knew no names.

I wonder how expensive that rig is. I'd like to see it myself.

"Avoid ghetto" app

A proposed smart-phone program to guide travelers (drivers or pedestrians) to avoid dangerous routes is generating the expected controversy.

Microsoft says the app will use crime statistics to determine what parts of town are to be avoided. But it’s unclear where the data will come from and how it will be interpreted.

Microsoft has filed a patent for the app, but the actual product is unnamed and not available yet.

Opponents like Wallace fear it could hurt minority communities.

“It’s almost like gerrymandering,” she said. “It’s stereotyping for sure and without a doubt; I can’t emphasize enough, it’s discriminatory.”

A couple of things jump out at me here:

• As the story suggests, interpretation is critical. Consider Madison.
  
  • Most areas are reasonably safe during the daytime, but some get dicey in the evening and night. Does time of day figure in? How do you flag an area that is dangerous day or night?
    
  • Some areas have a high number of crimes because the population density is high; the rate is not out of line with other places. Do they use rates or raw numbers?
    
  • One area with high crime stats is State Street, which is also one of the attractions of the town. Drunks are easier targets, and some are aggressive; so you can avoid a lot of it if you choose the right time of day. Frat row (a block away from State Street) has high stats too; battery, sexual assault, and lesser offenses; though I can't imagine that area as a city attraction.
    
• This is exactly the opposite of stereotyping. Areas where strangers are apt to be attacked are also areas where locals die regularly. All this does is make local knowledge available to out-of-towners.
  

Perhaps Wallace fears that entrepreneurs visiting town would pass by the violent neighborhoods and miss the opportunity to look at a graffiti-ed building and have an epiphany: "That must be a crack-house; what a wonderful spot to base my order fulfillment team!" Or if there is a restaurant that manages to attract people into a dangerous zone anyway, it isn't likely to lose much business from passers-through who probably haven't heard of it in the first place. The only (honest) people likely to be harmed are those in intermediate crime areas, if prospective shoppers look them up and say "Well, this other place is only half a mile farther, and the crime rate is lower." In a medium sized city I'd not expect that to be an issue, and in a large city most people seem to deal with a medium-sized subset and can probably be trusted to interpret the numbers.

It seems unlikely that Wallace somehow profits from the fate of unsuspecting travelers, and she can't be so foolish as to imagine that the people living in the city don't know the shape of it, so I'm led to conclude that what she really objects to is calling things by their names.

Why fewer marriages?

Someone (*) wrote of impetuous love something like "Passion is a reliable old workhorse. Nine times out of ten it will pull a steady cart." Perhaps youthful enthusiasm did lead to steady marriages in his day, but things seem a little different now.

We’ve provided a zeitgeist that teaches us to call indecision freedom, to value entertainment and acquisition more than accomplishment, and to feel entitled to sexual pleasure. (Our ancestors warned that even food had to be earned; such a belief in sexual entitlements would have proved your madness.)

Does this contribute to an attitude to marriage that is hard to distinguish from cowardice?

True, our legal framework undercuts long-term commitments, and makes marriage a much riskier proposition, especially for men. And we’ve all read complaints about the "Peter Pans." But for slaves marriages were not officially recognized and could be broken at a master’s whim; but they still tried to marry. The right to bind themselves was a freedom

---

(*) Not sure who, and I can’t swear that the quote is exact...

When Helping Hurts

How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor … and Yourself by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert

The indigenous staff in my organization lead weekly Bible studies with the children in low income communities. These Bible studies are just one aspect of my organization’s overall attempts to bring long-lasting development in these broken communities. After a short-term team conducts a Bible study in one of these communities, the children stop attending the Bible studies of my organization. Our indigenous staff tell me that the children stop coming because we do not have all the fancy materials and crafts that the short-term teams have, and we do not give away things like these teams do. The children have also come to believe that our staff are not as interesting or as creative as the Americans that come on these teams.

The authors describe poverty in terms of material shortages, but also in terms of broken relationships with other humans, with themselves, and with God.

Material shortages are easy to understand and measure, and easy to relieve. But what happens when that’s just a symptom? And what are the side effects when free outside money pours in? Inflation= savers lose; local suppliers go broke; local banks fail; local leaders lose face; recipients’ self-worth is lost if a man can’t provide for his family, what use is he?; and so on. But wait, there’s more! What about the giver? He gets to be superior, a kind of god to the pitiful inferiors. Paternalism is poisonous. You don't want to become that kind of person.

There’s a vicious cycle in poverty where being poor makes you feel inferior and worthless, and feeling inferior discourages you from taking risks in education or work, or encourages you to drown your sorrows with chemicals—which keeps you poor. So your relationship with yourself matters.

Your relationships with others matter too; who will help you if you get sick? If you lose your apartment, will your cousin take you in?

And your relationship with God orders these and much more.

The first rule of relieving poverty is that you are dealing with peers, not inferiors. And they know a lot more about what works and what doesn’t than you do.

The authors say poverty generally lands in one of three stages: needing relief (just after a tsunami, for example), needing rehabilitation, and needing development. Relief needs to be immediate and short-term. The other stages demand the participation of the needy in their planning and the implementation. There may be very good reasons the farmers plant low-yield crops year after year.

Legal and social structures matter. The US welfare system punishes anyone who tries to save. Loan sharks (payday lenders, rent-to-own, and their third world brothers) are ubiquitous, and in theft-prone slums in Africa some people have to deposit their money with "savings sharks" who charge interest (up to 80%!) for keeping your money safe for you.

I’d never heard of Asset Based Community Development before, but it sounds like an excellent approach; and not just for poverty relief. It starts by finding out what skills and resources the people have, and tries to look for solutions to problems using community resources, building/rebuilding relationships between people and local institutions and being careful not to bring in outside resources unless absolutely needed. Often the local resources are far larger than even the local people realize.

One of the authors describes how he gave \$8 to buy penicillin to save the life of Grace, an ex-witch doctor in Uganda. And in Chapter 5 he explains why that was stupid and probably did more harm than good. A little bit of his mea culpa:

The truth is that there was more than enough time to walk back to the church, where the small-business class was still assembled, and ask the participants what they could do to help Grace. While the refugees were extremely poor, they could have mustered the eight cents per person to pay for the penicillin.

…

Why does all of this matter? Grace desperately needed relationships in the community in general and in St. Luke’s Church in particular. Her former way of life had created many enemies, and, being infected with HIV, Grace was going to need solid support structures as time wore on. In fact, Grace needed to have her poverty of community alleviated if she was going to have any chance for long-term survival.

What else? MicroLoan Institutions are nice, but not something that church missions should get involved in and not that useful in the countryside (they need a critical mass of customers). Financial education is often helpful. Hope and self-control are side-effects that are essential to climbing out of poverty.

When I went with a church group to help in New Orleans, we went under the auspices of a local church which gave us the assignments; and number one was "If someone wants to talk, drop the work and talk. You are here for relationships." We talked with the widow whose house we were rehabbing (she made us dinner), but there weren’t a lot of other people around most of the time—and the drug house lookout didn’t want to chat. A little, a little—who knows how useful it was.

The church has also sponsored wells in Liberia. The footage of people using the pumps is nice, but I never did get an answer to my question: Who has ownership, and how will they be repaired?

Read the book. And then ask some hard questions about how your aid money and effort gets used.

How to be a dictator

The Economist interviewed Alastair Smith about the book he co-authored The Dictator's Handbook: How Bad Behaviour is Almost Always Good Politics. What's the secret for staying in power?

Do they actually have to support me, or can I just terrify them into supporting me by threatening them with death?

No, they absolutely have to support you on some level. You can’t personally go around and terrorise everyone. Our poor old struggling Syrian president is not personally killing people on the streets. He needs the support of his family, senior generals who are willing to go out and kill people on his behalf. The common misconception is that you need support from the vast majority of the population, but that’s typically not true. There is all this protest on Wall Street, but CEOs are keeping the people they need to keep happy happy—the members of the board, senior management and a few key investors—because they are the people who can replace them. Protesters on Wall Street have no ability to remove the CEOs. So in a lot of countries the masses are terrified but the supporters are not.

or this

tax very highly. It’s much better to decide who gets to eat than to let the people feed themselves. If you lower taxes people will do more work, but then people will get rewards that aren’t coming through you. Everything good must come through you. Look at African farm subsidies. The government buys crops at below market price by force. This is a tax on farmers who then can’t make a profit. So, how do you reward people? The government subsidises fertilisers and hands it back that way. In Tanzania vouchers for fertilisers are handed out not to the most productive areas but to the party loyalist areas.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people happily call for more "public" control of our economies and lives without the faintest clue of what it really means behind the scenes; as though Lord Acton's Law is somehow abolished when you have elections. You'd think that the counterexamples like Chicago would be adequate refutation of that belief. And it never ceases to amaze me how many other people, reacting against the terrifying insanity of the first group, are persuaded that holy greed will always work for the public good.

I'll have to keep an eye out for the book.

Which books to read first?

At Christmas our families generally give each other books. Since we take home those we received, but won’t be seeing each others' books for a while, reading what the other person got is a higher priority than reading what was tagged with our own names. (We often have similar interests, though not similar tastes.) Logical, right? Forgiven?

Spellbound: Inside West Africa's Witch Camps by Karen Palmer

Ghana has witches, mostly women. It has witch finders. And it has some villages set aside for witches or suspected witches.

Sounds pretty horrible, and it sounded that way to Karen Palmer as well. The travel books for Ghana mention one such village, which she visited—and decided to study the situation in more detail. (She describes two villages, which have strikingly different problems.)

A chief was selected (by the ancestors, of course), for the post of witch seer. He doesn’t go out to find witches, suspected witches are brought to him for verification. The test (a fee is required) involves whether a sacrificed chicken dies on its back or its face—on its face means the woman is a witch who sucks the life out of people and kills neighbors and kin. A series of sacrifices and ceremonies can "de-fang" the witch, who will then allegedly be killed by angry spirits if she tries anything wicked again. But these are pricey, and even if they are carried out the woman is rarely welcome back in her village. Thus many women just stay in a village for witches attached to this chief’s domain and under his guard. They are farmed out to work for neighbors, or try to scrape together something to sell.

Sounds pretty abusive—the chief gets lots of benefit and the women lose everything.

But Karen studied the matter deeper, and found it not so easy to cure the problem as she’d hoped. For starters, laws aren’t very helpful. She described the history of the English attempts to deal with witchcraft, and found that it generally made no difference; depending on your point of view they may have sometimes made things worse. Second, the belief in witches is not something stirred up by witch finders, but endemic at all levels of society. True, men with "witch power" are almost admired, and there can be an arms race for jujus and counter-jujus, but everybody believes that some women are endowed with a special power, sometimes without their consent, that brings them into a sorority of night-traveling sort-of vampiric fireballs. (It can run in families, too.) Third, an accusation is deadly, even if you are vindicated. Some women, nominally cleansed, tried to go home and barely returned to the witch camp alive.

The witch village, oppressive though it is, turned out to be better than alternatives.

The other village she saw was simply a safe area, and not run by a seer-chief. The women there were even worse off. She interpreted the difference as due to the fact that the women in the first camp were supposedly under control of the seer-chief, and therefore could be safely employed, while at the second village the neighbors didn’t perceive any oversight and feared to buy anything the witches had made. So the witches lived off what they could glean from the land and food other people dropped.

Karen describes a visit to a sacred cave complex (which she didn’t enter), where everyone comes to deal with the spirits, and describes rather vaguely how her own attitudes toward fortunetelling changed—with some examples she found right on the money and others that were way off target. (She also inserts a few pages dealing with European witchcraft, which are largely incorrect.)

Her translators taught her more than she expected about the pervasiveness of the beliefs, even among Christians who believed God to be superior to demons. One secular source decried the Ghanaian treatment of witches, and said they should be harnessed and trained to provide an African equivalent to Western technology.

The stories of the women she is able to interview will stay with you. Some were accused by jealous secondary wives, one by business rivals, and one believes herself to be a witch and wishes she could stop the deadly dreams she has.

She comes back repeatedly to one factor, but does not suggest dealing with it: polygamy. If her descriptions are representative, a large proportion of the accusations come from strife between multiple wives. (She says all children are assumed to be those of the first wife! And wives who give birth only to girls are not much use.)

Read it.

Changing churches

Several years ago I started worrying about the striking ignorance of the church youth, who seemed to be graduating and heading out into the world with only a superficial understanding of what the faith was about. (On closer inspection, it wasn’t just the youth.) So, finding nothing handy to address the issue, I started writing a book. I am not a theologian or historian, but I figured something was better than nothing—we could work out details later.

The church was going in for the current fads: small groups would handle teaching and pasturing and outreach, the service would be seeker-friendly and accessible, and the focus would be on addressing felt needs. The usual suspects.

It won’t surprise you to learn that the church started imploding: 2/3 left in a few years, and an intervention with the leadership didn’t seem to help. The last straw was when a friend with a wonderful servant attitude was told to keep his objections to himself or leave; he left. So did I. I’d stayed out of a quixotic idea that I could help, but forgot that I was obligated to try to give my children a worshipful place to meet God.

We found a new church, but I’d started asking questions about what had gone wrong. The old church wasn’t doing the right things, obviously; but what were the right things to be doing? Come to think of it, this church wasn’t all that much like the Baptist churches I’d grown up in, either in the US or in Africa. I’d not been a Christian in those early years, and so wasn’t tuned to the inwardness of what was going on there, but the external forms had certainly changed a lot over the years.

Questions have a way of ballooning into unexpected regions. Whether I took the humble approach of looking at what churches through the ages have done, or the ab initio analysis from the Bible myself, it was clear that a lot was missing, and some claims that at first seemed perfectly reasonable were flat wrong. The Lord’s Supper, the purposes of teaching in the church, the role of the congregation in worship, the structure of the service, the role of scripture in the service—quite a few things didn’t seem to line up.

Take teaching, for example. The mega-church wannabe didn’t want to spend resources on adult education, and not all that much on youth either. It is easy to see why: the adults were a mix of levels—some quite familiar with the Bible and the faith, and others not sure if Romans was a book or a TV show. One class doesn’t suit all, and we weren’t so huge to be able to have classes for all. So the compromise was to drop official church education and rely on small groups to handle it. Which they didn’t and don’t, of course; you need to plan that sort of thing. So the result was that the church’s intellectual depth was about an inch shallow. Never mind that their heritage was rich and deep—there was no contact with that, except for the few who took courses at Bible colleges.

But on reflection, on reading a bit in Paul’s letters, and on watching some of the people in our group, I realized that education was not only shallow, it was restricted. I said church education ought to cover the three T’s: charity, clarity, and purity. Being able to tell Azarias from Abednego didn’t seem to correlate with living a holy and loving life. Both ought to be teachable, though the latter might be better thought of as an apprenticeship than a classroom course.

So we were missing catechesis, missing connection with Christian history and thought, and missing apprenticeships in living well. (Remember that book I mentioned in the first paragraph? The chapters on history and different denominations just keep growing and growing.) And that’s just in the teaching ministry of the church.

Worshipers were supposed to be doing something besides sitting on their duffs listening to a sermon illustrated with pop movie clips, and trying to sing now and then in the teeth of an over-amplified band. But what? Either we needed a more liturgical format, with the service having a well-defined shape and roles, or else something Pentecostal and spontaneous (but even they have an implicit form to the service). And my experience with Pentecostal services was less than inspiring; they didn’t seem to have a lot of respect for clarity or connection to the main stream of Christianity. So structure is the way to go. Does a liturgy need a priest? So far I don’t see it—so I’m not converting to Eastern Orthodoxy anytime soon.

But about the time that I’m pretty sure I have a few good answers and am ready to make suggestions, I tend to run into one of those old saints and remember how much I have to learn about the things that matter most.

I’m still working on that book, and a couple of us are planning a short series on church history, with an emphasis on understanding why Christians did things they way they did. We’ll see what happens.

Christmas Eve

Tonight I remember something I wrote 5 years ago, about Joseph:

He took on the responsibilities of being the husband without being the husband yet. He took on the responsibilities of being the father, without being the father--yet. He unexpectedly took on the ludicrous role of protector of God.

In the great drama he was not going to be a central character, though he probably expected to be important, and didn't know he would completely vanish from the scene. Mary was to be the archetypal Christian. Joseph was more like John the Baptist: she must increase and I must decrease. Or perhaps like Martha, with the necessary lesser duties.

I imagine Joseph outside the stable with the livestock, keeping an eye on the displaced beasts that panic at the smell of blood, waiting and hearing the pain he cannot protect Mary from. Wondering how he's going to try to raise a prophet and Savior. And now and then wondering how he's going to pay the midwife. For he was a just man.

How would you try to raise a boy you'd been promised was going to "save his people from their sins" ? How do you teach him and what do you have him practice? And can you keep the vision alive through the ordinary years, or will you forget in the daily urgency of making a living, regretting that you had to spend that windfall on an unexpected trip to Egypt?

I was given no such promises about our children, and I'd do many things differently if I had the chance--those daily crises took front and center too often. (I don't know if it would turn out any better, though.) I imagine Joseph at night, remembering the angel and wishing he'd been more patient that afternoon--and wondering how just long it was going to be before his son began to save the people.

Imprecatory Psalms

CS Lewis confessed that he had some problems with the imprecatory Psalms. It was jarring to him (and to others like Kathleen Norris) to be asking God to destroy enemies instead of forgiving them. Lewis admitted, IIRC, that he was not one of the oppressed and that for them the matter might look different.

But horrors like this are right under the surface, and not just in distant dictatorships; the cannibal view of humans as useful meat appears in editorial pages and research labs in this land too, masquerading as medicine as easily here as there.

We’re told to pray for healing; disease wasn’t part of the plan. Jesus wept at the death of his friend; death wasn’t part of the plan. Cruelty wasn’t part of the plan either; may we pray for justice as freely as we pray for healing, so long as we understand that God may have a better idea and find a way to reconcile? Put down the mighty from their seat and send the rich empty away; but not my will but thine be done?

Of course it is very easy to conflate justice with "prosperity for us", and I hardly think God honors that.

Perhaps there is a balance, but I don't know how to define it. Jesus was quite clear about forgiving enemies (do it or you won't be forgiven yourself), but he was also quite clear about judgment and punishment; and we pray that he will return soon, bringing reward and punishment. Traditional worship keeps both in a kind of tension, regularly reminding ourselves to pray for our enemies, and now and then praying the psalms to remind us of justice; and that is probably wisest.

Iranian Schindler

If the news and pop "news" the past week has left a bad taste, refresh yourself with the BBC's story about Abdol-Hossein Sardari. A sample:

The story he spinned to the Nazis, in a series of letters and reports, was that the Persian Emperor Cyrus had freed Jewish exiles in Babylon in 538 BC and they had returned to their homes.

However, he told the Nazis, at some later point a small number of Iranians began to find the teachings of the Prophet Moses attractive - and these Mousaique, or Iranian Followers of Moses, which he dubbed "Djuguten," were not part of the Jewish race.

Using all of his lawyer's skill, he exploited the internal contradictions and idiocies of the Nazis' ideology to gain special treatment for the "Djuguten", as the archive material published in Mr Mokhtari's new book shows.

High-level investigations were launched in Berlin, with "experts" on racial purity drafted in to give an opinion on whether this Iranian sect - which the book suggests may well have been Sardari's own invention - were Jewish or not.

The experts were non-committal and suggested that more funding was needed for research.

I love that last sentence, btw.

The Animate and the Inanimate by William James Sidis

AVI asked me to have a look at this work by an alleged genius.

He starts by devising the thought experiment of a universe where time goes backwards. Naturally it follows the same sorts of rules as our own, modulo the sign change in time. If you imagine that it is an identical copy, even things like the forces will be the same (a little dimensional analysis: time appears squared in force, so the sign stays the same).

What doesn’t stay the same is entropy—the second law of thermodynamics. A famous illustration of this (not his) is of a movie of a man eating a steak. Run the movie backwards and the steak is un-swallowed, un-chewed, removed to the plate and assembled into a whole hunk of beef, un-cooked, un-butchered, and eventually un-slaughtered into a live cow. This is fairly old news, of course; people have been arguing about what makes time special for quite a while.

The author is a bit careless in his description of heat, but we understand what he means anyway. However, consider this section, which is the heart of his argument:

Tracing backwards, we find that, in the past, the farther back we go, the more we get a larger percentage of available energy in the universe, increasing at an ever greater rate. Therefore it follows that we must arrive at some definite time in the past—and that not at an infinite time back—when the available energy was 100% of the total energy of the universe. At a time probably not much farther back, all the motion in the universe must have consisted of molar motion of masses which, as we go back, must have increased in size till we arrive at a time when all the energy must have consisted of the energy of two halves of the universe moving together, each half of the universe being at a temperature of absolute zero and all its parts moving side by side at exactly the same velocity. This possibility, it is true, is somewhat corroborated by the fact that at present the stars are moving in two opposite directions, in two opposite currents, as it were, which may be supposed to be the remnants of the two original large groups of stars whose collision formed the present universe according to this hypothesis.

First, the stars don’t act like that today. Second, there is no reason to assume this sort of initial symmetry—there are other possibilities, with internal energy states. Kinetic energy isn't the only kind there is.

At the same time the two original halves of the universe cannot have been altogether mutually impenetrable, for in that case the result of the collision would but have made them rebound, though producing a great amount of internal heat-energy in each, and possibly breaking some small pieces off each. It would seem, then, as though the original halves of the universe must have consisted of separate dark stars, with a structure somewhat similar to the present universe. At the time of the collision, all the stars, even all the particles, in each semi-universe must all be moving together at the same speed and in the same direction.

He has to posit dark stars because emitting light is going to increase entropy. Once again he is assuming a symmetry that is one of many possibilities.

The second law of thermodynamics, then, must date from some sort of Great Collision out of which the present universe evolved. But what happened before this Great Collision? The answer would have to be, everything was at a temperature of absolute zero, there were two semi-universes which were moving towards each other, in each of which there was not even a trace of relative motion. Although each of the two semi-universes were in motion, yet within each there was no motion, no internal energy.

Once again, why this? Why not internal energy? It is reasonable to ask what happens before the "Big Bang," but not reasonable to demand an answer from physics.

But if such was the situation at the time of the Great Collision, it cannot have been so for an eternity past, unless we conceive of the law of gravitational attraction not to have been true in those times. Taking each semi-universe by itself, its reverse universe will also show the same conditions as we have already described, except that the semi-universes are moving away from each other, so that we can proceed in peace without danger from the impending Great Collision. Each semi-universe may, for the purpose of internal occurrences, be regarded as at rest. Gravitation will then draw all the stars of each semi-universe towards its center of gravity, till all of them fall in there. Reversing once more, so as to obtain the process as it must have been supposed to happen, we get the following result: Each semi-universe originally consisted of one great body; suddenly, somehow, that body exploded into pieces, which formed stars, each piece, though, remaining at a temperature of absolute zero. Finally, in each semi-universe. mutual gravitation of the stars slowed them down to relative rest. Just when this relative rest was reached, the two semi-universes collided, and out of this collision came our present universe. Thus we trace a little farther back to the Great Explosions; but these explosions cannot possibly be traced back any farther according to the known physical laws without violating the second law of thermodynamics. In consequence, if we wish to preserve the second law of thermodynamics, we must either dispense with some of the other physical laws, or as some physicists have done, intersperse a creation. In other words, the second law of thermodynamics cannot have been true for an eternity past, though it may be true for on eternity in the future. And even the assumption of a creation would be assuming a process different from the processes coming under the ordinary physical laws.

The model is goofy. The conclusion is fine. One way or another, the physical laws were different in the past. It is actually rather hard to avoid the conclusion that there was a creation—multiverses only shift the problem of where the rules of the game came from.

In other words, we come to the inevitable conclusion that the subsistence of the irreversible second law of thermodynamics in the same universe as the reversible laws concerning the motion of particles is a paradox, both from that point of view and from the fact that this second law, pushed to its logical conclusion, leads back to a mysterious creation which denies all physical laws whatever.

No. He did not show entropy to be a paradox "from that point of view," and pushed to its logical conclusion it shows not paradox but incompleteness.

You can think of entropy in terms of the number of possible states for a system of particles in a closed system. (The log of the number, if you want to get technical.) If you have many particle states with equivalent energy, a little interaction will share out the particles in lots of those different equivalent states. Why we experience time the way we do is not known, of course, but it agrees nicely with the "arrow of time" defined by increasing entropy, which has led some to speculate that this is the reason we see time happening as we do.

In Chapter V he asserts that

To help us towards a solution of this paradox, we must first find out what the probabilities actually lead us to conclude. We have already seen that, in a given case, the chances are even as to whether energy will run down or build up. There are also small chances of a neutral condition, in which energy remains, on the whole, at the same difference of concentration as before. But the probability of this neutrality is negligible, and we may say that the probabilities are, that in 50% of the cases the second law of thermodynamics will be obeyed, and in 50% of the cases it will be reversed. If such is the case, the universe as a whole will be neutral; that is, taking all the occurrences over all of time and space, there will be no tendency in one direction or the other.

We have not "seen that … the chances are even as to whether energy will run down or build up." On the contrary, we simply have a risible model and some bald assertions. He may claim this as a possible model, but he may not claim that he has proved that this is possible, or even likely.

In chapter VI he asks how we would observe pockets of 2nd Law reversal, and concludes there are two: regions where effects seem to precede causes in a teleological way (does he really mean that entropy is reversed if there seems to be purpose in events?!!) or if "small causes" produce big events (because energy would be gathered rather than dissipated).

In short, we may say that, in general, events in the reverse universe appear as though they were living phenomena; and the general events of the reverse universe may be taken as the type of negative phenomena, of the reversal of the second law of thermodynamics. … We may therefore conclude: first, that inanimate phenomena, when reversed, become animate: second, that animate phenomena, when reversed, lose the appearance of animation; and third, that animate phenomena, when reversed, lose this appearance because, when reversed, they tend to follow the second law of thermodynamics. The logical conclusion from these would be: that inanimate phenomena are positive tendencies, and follow the second law of thermodynamics, while animate phenomena, on the contrary, are negative tendencies and tend to reverse that law. Thus we have found where our part of the universe contains reversals, and come to a solution of our paradox.

OK, full stop. Sorry, but this is weirdo land.

UPDATE: I should be more specific. First, a "reversal of entropy" is perfectly possible if the system is not closed; and a living organism typically acquires energy from outside in the form of food. This is elementary, and has been understood for a long time. Second, he uses the completely undefined weasel word "tendency" which leaves you with no way to quantify what he is talking about, and therefore no way to physically test to see if what he is saying is true. If he were talking about love or philosophy I'd use different criteria for evaluating what he says, but he claims to be talking physics; and we're all about measuring physical things in this part of the campus.

Chapter 8 shows no particular understanding of nuclear fusion or nuclear stability. The date of the book being 1920, perhaps this is not so surprising.

Chapter 11 discusses theories of the origin of life on Earth, without a hint of a suspicion that both the theories he favors and those he doesn’t alike fail to explain the origin of the life ours is supposed to have come from. The panspermia="cosmozoa" is particularly silly in this respect: how is "life on Earth comes from meteors from Mars" an explanation?.

The online copy is defective: Chapter 12 points to Chapter 11.

Chapter 13 is about astronomy, and includes howlers such as that a nova comes from nowhere with no pre-existing star. He apparently knows better, as his description of a 1902 nova shows, but he concludes that the star "had all the necessary heat, but that, until that day, the second law of thermodynamics was, for some reason, not operative on it." To be fair, Eddington's work on stellar fusion wasn't until later that decade.

Later chapters are predicated on the assumption that life is a reversal of the 2nd law. How exactly this is to be arranged on a local scale he never explains.

In the Conclusion he admits that "I may also state that I cannot supply any satisfactory answer to most of the objections stated in Chapter XVIII." That is an understatement.

My conclusion is that he knows how to use big words and namedrop, but his arguments are lacking, there's no effort to translate generic concepts into testable math, and he gets into crank-land when he starts in on the nature of life. I'll forgive his not knowing future details about stars and quantum mechanics, since I suspect his memory, like mine, only works one way in time.

Alternative (s to) Medicine

Retriever has a daunting list of sites on her sidebar, and I cannot find time to follow them all. But there I found this article from the British Medical Journal on alternative medicine, which is definitely worth your time. It describes a novel but fundamental approach to reflexology.

Higgs or no?

Other people have already commented on yesterday's CERN announcement of Higgs exclusions, and argued about whether the look-elsewhere-effect is correctly applied.

If you have enough random distributions based on the same underlying probability distribution, you will find 3-σ "bumps" (or dips!) in one or more distributions--that is, a change big enough to make you think "There's something there!" So to understand the true significance of a "bump" in the (eg) mass distribution, you have to do some statistical analysis that takes into account how big the region is that might have a random bump, and de-weight the significance of your distribution accordingly. The broader the range, the more likely you are to find a meaningless statistical fluctuation that gives you a nice-looking peak, and therefore the less meaningful your bump is. This is the Look-Elsewhere-Effect.

We saw a "more significant" peak than this melt away already this year, and so aren't claiming anything yet. And the fact that both CMS and Atlas, after each excluding a large swath of possible masses, see a small bump in about the same spot lends a lot of weight to it--it reduces the look-elsewhere issue. But...

The only channel that shows it is the gamma-gamma decay mode--there's nothing much in b-bbar. That's not unexpected; the background is higher for b-bbar, making the signal muddier and harder to see. But there could be something else happening in gamma-gamma that we haven't accounted for correctly, that gives both groups a bump in the mass plot. Of course that would be something new also, and good to learn about; perhaps new physics and perhaps better models of the old. So we'll keep at it, waiting for both a better gamma-gamma peak and some verification in another channel.

Another one bites the dust

Oh well, so much for that idea.

Resizing a ring to be larger isn’t too hard—you’re basically stretching it, tapping it down over a long iron cone. Resizing it smaller is harder—they cut out a chunk and solder it back together. Why not squeeze it? Wild idea: use a hot mold with a hole for the ring; the cold ring snugly fit in the hole; the mold cools and squeezes the ring. Bingo, smaller ring. Except…

Unless the shape of the mold matched the shape of the outside of the ring, you’d tend to flatten it, which is probably not what you want. And it turns out that the squeezing is really rather small: you’d need about 10 differently sized molds to reduce a 20mm ring by 0.5mm.

So: this is doable with latch-able molds, provided you have a small furnace and that all the rings you deal with are the same shape; but it’s labor-intensive and you’d need a lot of molds.

Yes, I finally lost some of the weight. Why do you ask?

Atlanta 1

Traveling again, this time to the sunny South.

I found that a Kindle (el cheapo model with ads) in horizontal mode works very nicely in an airport if you can get away from the distractingly loud CNN semi-news loop. The cover is ugly as homemade sin (guilty—I’ve better ideas now, but no way was I going to fork over $40 for one) but I only look at the screen; other people have to look at the cover.

The Delta seat was somewhat less comfortable than some planks I’ve been on, but my luggage arrived with me, which is more than other airlines have accomplished. I was feeling under-exercised, so I walked instead of taking the train; and just barely caught my luggage as the assistant was wheeling it away from the carousel. They charged me for a full tank of gas the last time I used the pre-pay option, so I declined, but I hadn’t realized how awkward roads are near the airport. Saturday is going to be complicated.

25 miles to the hotel, and the training center is just walking distance away. Maybe I should have gone with a taxi instead. (Or MARTA? That’s pretty close too.)

The woman in the adjoining room is a bit vocal in her afternoon bedrocking. Absolutely quiet all night, though

I found where the center is, and padded about a little looking for restaurants. I get a better feel for where I am on foot than trying to watch cars and road and points of interest while driving an unfamiliar car. It isn’t even 7 my time, and I’m already beat.

But it’s nice to be above freezing for a change.

Hypocrisy and repentence

"Hypocrisy is an homage that vice renders to virtue." François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld

"If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read their autobiography" P. J. O'Rourke

From Pippa Passes by Browning:

Your friends, Natalia said they were your friends

And meant you well, because, I doubted it,

Observing (what was very strange to see)

On every face, so different in all else,

The same smile girls like us are used to bear,

But never men, men cannot stoop so low ;

Yet your friends, speaking of you, used that smile,

That hateful smirk of boundless self-conceit

Which seems to take possession of this world

And make of God their tame confederate,

Purveyor to their appetites . . . you know !

Can we long for a little hypocrisy? OWS incoherently protests the shameless greed and cronyism of the banks (and prescribes the hair of the dog, but that’s another issue). The paper carried an interview with John Waters today, in which he shamelessly calls himself a purveyor of filth. We seem to find no shame in abandoning family to "find yourself," or in any excess or perversion, or in drugging yourself into soggy rubble with chemicals or games. Call it "self medication" and people nod tolerantly, or say "it’s just the way I am" and they’ll indulge—unless you tromp on their toes. No shame means no blame, right? That hateful smirk of boundless self-conceit...

We all have our problems, and mine are as damaging to my soul as anybody else’s sins, but the special curse of the serpent in our time tries to barricade us from that morning when we look in the mirror at the wreckage that should have been a man and weep: and start to hunger to change.

Sometimes it is personal

At dinner I brought up the subject of the bomb in the Rhine because an amusing error found one US newspaper reporting it as a 1.8 ton bomb (clearly they'd just read the wire story and "corrected" the spelling). But my better half actually knew the place: her high school orchestra tour had boarded a Rhine tour boat there, and had unknowingly chugged over the old bomb on the trip. She remembered best from the excursion seeing a Japanese man in full kimono spending the entire boat ride with his camera at his face--always photographing and never watching. (So, of course, she took a picture of him.)

Happy New Year!

It is that time of year again.

Youngest Son made it quite clear that he didn't like reading the same sections every year, so I've shuffled things around a bit. Youngest Daughter tends to pick songs that are a little hard for un-voice-trained me. And the candles are always a bit of a distraction: the flickering, the "who gets to blow them out" and anticipating playing with the wax afterward--but that's all part of it, I suppose.

When you've lived in relative comfort and liberty all your life, and not seen oppression up close, it isn't easy to appreciate how people could look forward to an apocalyptic end to the world, as they do in the usual readings. I've tried to explain it the past few years, but the immediacy of the images of destruction weighs more heavily on some sensitive souls. Had I known they were going to show "end of the world" movies I'd not have let the kids go...

At any rate: Happy new year to all.

Somebody here has a tin ear, and I don't think it's me

What hath Lego wrought? And with an exclusive Yoda-dressed-as-Santa figure! (adding a little more confusion to the Advent theme)

It could be worse. Remember the year Walgreens carried those foot-tall angel-in-bikini figures? Or the Japanese toy engineer who couldn't understand why he was asked to suppress his designs for a new Transformer model (Jesus on the cross turns into killer robot)?

Of course this is just toys, and not life or death--but the song they sing is of a sad disconnect from what people cared, and still care, about.

"Is this a dagger that I see before me?"

BBC reports that researchers are making progress on "bionic contact lenses" which could, for example, float email or GPS directions right in front of your eyeballs. No doubt some people would find this useful, but think how inescapable advertisements would become. (There are also little power issues--it uses a wireless supply and although the power transmitted is low I'd get a little nervous about eye damage over time.)

If the European doomsayers are right

High officials have said that peace is not a foregone conclusion. I wonder what Europe will be doing 5 years from now. With armies drawn down so far, I don't see war--at least not right away. Certainly not full scale wars of the type we're used to seeing over there.

Assume the gloomy outlook is correct, and that sometime in the not-too-distant future there will be riots killing foreign nationals, and counter riots, and demands for revenge against the thieves and killers. (From over here I don't see that degree of demonization yet. But I have to rely on reporters who speak the local languages--I've no clue what the man in the coffee-shop thinks.)

Neighbors might go to war in the classical way again. But non-neighboring countries might go with different models--attacks in third countries or on the sea, rocket attacks from throw-aways, or borrow from the midEast model and use terror bombings.

What would we expect to see on the road to classical war, given that the armies aren't that large yet?

They'd be expanding the forces under cover, or arranging so they can expand quickly. Rifles and uniforms are cheap, experienced drill sergeants a little less so, trucks and depots and artillery and aircraft still less--is anybody trying to buy back stuff they sold to third world countries? They'd start collecting dual use vehicles, and rehabbing boats as mine sweepers, and hiring vets from other countries.

Governments might start trying to be best pals with Turkey and Russia. Greece vs Germany wouldn't be much of a contest unless Greece had a powerful ally. (Hmm. Probably wouldn't be Turkey...)

The shape of trade wars will depend on how things settle out from the breakdown, and I can't make a decent stab at guessing that, and suspect that very few could.

I'll keep my eyes peeled. We have enough of our own troubles here. Mexico is coming apart at the seams already. The breakdown will be demagogue fertilizer all over; I could easily foresee states offering to secede. Texas isn't Germany, nor California Greece, but there are enough parallels to shape the same kind of conflict.

Parkinson's and trichloroethylene

BBC reports on a report in Annals of Neurology claiming an estimated 6-fold increase in Parkinson's risk in those exposed to the chemical, albeit with a lag time of 40 years.

Two things jump out at me in this: the long lag time and the low statistics (99 twin pairs: 1 with Parkinson's, 1 without). Two others seemed to be associated with somewhat higher risk: perchloroethylene and carbon tetrachloride. They find "No statistical link was found with the other three solvents examined in the study - toluene, xylene and n-hexane."

I don't trust that 6x number. Some increase in risk is plausible, but ...

The sample size is small enough that the uncertainty on the ratio is going to be a substantial fraction of that number 6. I can't get at the original article, but be generous and assume that almost all the participants were able to accurately self-report (warning! uncertainties here!) exposure to the chemicals: 94; 12 with exposure and 82 without. An ordinary 1-sigma fluctuation reduces that to less than 5, or more than 10. The article undoubtedly reports the error estimates, but your typical reporter is statistic illiterate and omits them. Systematic errors add to the uncertainty--remember that this is self-reported exposure.

Another factor to consider is the surprising result bias. Suppose for the sake of argument (PLEASE DON'T USE THESE NUMBERS! I JUST MADE THEM UP.) that half the solvents gave a 50% increase in risk of developing the disease. If the report had found that 50% increase in risk, that would have been an important finding, but it would not have gotten the attention of BBC. An accidental fluctuation that gives one of the ratios a value of 6 rather than 1.5 would be dramatic and make news. An accidental fluctuation that gives one of the ratios a value of 0.1 (reduces risk) would also make the news, and no doubt lead to people trying to drink xylene to treat Parkinson's. An accidental fluctuation of the 1.5 to 1 (no change in risk) would not get any attention at all, and might not even be published--which is pretty scary, when you think about it.

The thing to keep in mind here is that if there's a 5% chance that testing one chemical on a sample this small gives a crazy result, if you are looking at 6 different ones (and the reported exposures are not correlated), you've got about a 26% chance that at least one of the comparisons will be crazy. That's why you want large sample sizes, and to repeat experiments. And why scientists, as opposed to reporters and politicians, report not just the result, but what their uncertainty is.

Paterno and who else?

Plenty of others have already noted that college football is an ugly mess, with the joke (?) that some colleges can only field a team on parole. And that the culture of winning uber alles produces a demand for unquestioning loyalty only suitable for the heat of life or death battles, not the day to day management of a game. And that McQueary is going to have trouble living with himself. And that the Penn state students are insane (though somebody pointed out that riots are a dime a dozen there).

I’d heard the name Paterno somewhere before: I’m not tuned into college football. But given the way colleges try to sweep athlete crime under the rug, it is no huge surprise to find they do the same for coaches. A recent report had NY cops demonstrating against a prosecutor trying some others for fixing tickets; which they considered a perk of the job.

What else is going on? Chicago we know about; New Orleans and DC we know about. Where else is this happening?

A Short History of England by GK Chesterton

As you no doubt expect, this is not a list of names and dates and battles. In fact a number of references will be unintelligible without such preexisting knowledge. He would probably have enjoyed the irony.

Instead he wrote a thematic history, looking at the great movements and their consequences today. It is like pulling teeth to get him to admit that the Catholic Church had major problems, and his view of the guilds is more rosy-colored than dispassionate analysis allows. (I took the opportunity to try to learn about them—interesting constellation of institutions.)

One of his theses is that kings are often good.

It is "the little tyrant of the fields" that poisons human life. The thesis involved the truism that a good king is not only a good thing, but perhaps the best thing. But it also involved the paradox that even a bad king is a good king, for his oppression weakens the nobility and relieves the pressure on the populace. If he is a tyrant he chiefly tortures the torturers; and though Nero's murder of his own mother was hardly perhaps a gain to his soul, it was no great loss to his empire.

I should point out that Chesterton died before WWII, and this book was written before WWI was ended. He did not yet have a full picture of what a modern dictatorship was capable. He knew it was bad, but didn’t know how bad.

He spends much time on legends, on the perfectly legitimate grounds that these represent what people were thinking. But statements like "But the paradox remains that Arthur is more real than Alfred" are excessively post-modernist. Nevertheless:

The nineteenth-century historians went on the curious principle of dismissing all people of whom tales are told, and concentrating upon people of whom nothing is told. Thus, Arthur is made utterly impersonal because all legends are lies, but somebody of the type of Hengist is made quite an important personality, merely because nobody thought him important enough to lie about. Now this is to reverse all common sense. A great many witty sayings are attributed to Talleyrand which were really said by somebody else. But they would not be so attributed if Talleyrand had been a fool, still less if he had been a fable. That fictitious stories are told about a person is, nine times out of ten, extremely good evidence that there was somebody to tell them about.

The first great villain is Henry VIII, and quite reasonably so. His effort to make sure that there were no institutions not chartered by the state in some way--whether church or local government or guild--is mirrored in the great totalitarian states of today, and is explicit in the platform of many progressive parties (who actually go farther and presume to redefine family relations as well).

Chesterton excoriates the squires, and the poor laws, and capitalism in general, and argues that Edward I’s expulsion of the Jews was popular, if not justified. His ending, written in the middle of WWI, is worth contemplating, considering the history of the island after WWII:

At least, if there be anything valid in my own vision of these things, we have returned to an origin and we are back in the war with the barbarians. It falls as naturally for me that the Englishman and the Frenchman should be on the same side as that Alfred and Abbo should be on the same side, in that black century when the barbarians wasted Wessex and besieged Paris. But there are now, perhaps, less certain tests of the spiritual as distinct from the material victory of civilization. Ideas are more mixed, are complicated by fine shades or covered by fine names. And whether the retreating savage leaves behind him the soul of savagery, like a sickness in the air, I myself should judge primarily by one political and moral test. The soul of savagery is slavery. Under all its mask of machinery and instruction, the German regimentation of the poor was the relapse of barbarians into slavery. I can see no escape from it for ourselves in the ruts of our present reforms, but only by doing what the mediævals did after the other barbarian defeat: beginning, by guilds and small independent groups, gradually to restore the personal property of the poor and the personal freedom of the family. If the English really attempt that, the English have at least shown in the war, to any one who doubted it, that they have not lost the courage and capacity of their fathers, and can carry it through if they will. If they do not do so, if they continue to move only with the dead momentum of the social discipline which we learnt from Germany, there is nothing before us but what Mr. Belloc, the discoverer of this great sociological drift, has called the Servile State. And there are moods in which a man, considering that conclusion of our story, is half inclined to wish that the wave of Teutonic barbarism had washed out us and our armies together; and that the world should never know anything more of the last of the English, except that they died for liberty.

Read it. You won’t agree with all of it (I don’t: Edward was wrong), and it is not the best example of his wonderful style, but worth reading. With a reference to hand …

Crazy garden year

The front yard looked like mostly garden this year, with tomatoes and a beanpole and zucchini and squash that tried to take over, and sunflowers and waves of different kinds of flowers that despite the efforts of my better half I have never mastered the names of. OK, I can worry out which are the roses--and we still have some blossoms, frost-wilted though they are. And last weekend there was one last strawberry. The birds loved the sunflowers. And the rabbits weren't phased by the gladiolas (or whatever they were--the beasts allegedly don't like the smell).

Some things grew strong all the way into November, but we must have lost 20 pounds of cherry tomatoes that never ripened enough to pick--they stayed hard and green for months. (And for some reason some of the small tomatoes tasted vile; but others on the same plant were delicious. By their fruits you will ... um ...) The hot peppers finally made their red crown above the green, and those we didn't give away are now drying in the kitchen.

What can they do?

The Wisconsin State Journal reported that the city objected to bar owners demanding drivers' licenses for admission. State ID's were not allowed. Obviously the state loses face if the ID they tout as an alternative to a drivers' license isn't accepted, but that wasn't the complaint.

"It's been clearly documented who does and doesn't have driver's licenses in the state of Wisconsin," said Mark Woulf, alcohol policy coordinator for Madison, citing a vast divide between blacks and whites. "That alone raises eyebrows and could easily be determined to be discriminatory."

Bar owners were under pressure to come up with ways to reduce violence in their establishments, and apparently this has in fact worked:

Bouncer Glenn Galetka has mixed feelings about the policy. He called requiring a driver's license "bogus," as he doesn't have a license himself after accumulating too many speeding tickets. But he said he appreciated the policy's safety effect after a summer in which he was in the middle of frequent violence including two brawls.

"It was a way to get a certain crowd out," he said, describing that crowd as primarily young African-American men who mostly had state identification cards instead of driver's licenses. "It makes my job easier."

And there's the rub. Suppose one had a dowsing rod that could point out the people who would cause trouble if admitted that night, whether because the candidate had a violent character or because an ex's new beau was already there. It would disproportionately turn away young black males, who disproportionately caused fights in and outside the bars. Whatever you use as a proxy for violent propensity, the more accurate it is the more discriminatory it will be. (At least in this decade and this culture--the troublesome group isn't always the same.)

So what does the city value most? Public safety or guarantees of equality? Problem is, if a group feels discriminated against it may lash out and "degrade public safety," though one might legitimately ask how that would be worse that the existing level of violence. I don't think there's a simple "solution" but we might at least speak honestly about the problems.

Mysteries of Windows XP: user directory spontaneously renamed

In case somebody else has the problem:

I was silly enough to leave checked the "compress files" radio button when asking for a disk cleanup last night. I don't know if that was what did the damage, or if it was the system updates, but this morning when Youngest Son logged in all his files were gone, ditto his desktop, etc. Nobody else seems to have been bothered.

His login directory had apparently changed from his name to "TEMP".

A quick googling to learn why found nothing, but windowsxp.mvps.org told how to identify the account (which has a non-intuitive numeric string in the Registry), and how to rename directories. Ah...

Using regedit I discovered that YS now had 2 accounts: one with his old account_number and one with account_number.bak . The latter had the proper directory, and the former had a directory defined by his name with the name of the computer tacked on at the end!

This was in "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ ProfileList", but undoubtedly you Windows experts knew that already. I fixed the ProfileImagePath and rebooted and it seems OK now.

I still have no idea how things went wrong. I've been responsible for managing computers at work for over 26 years (mostly Unix/Linux and VMS), and I've not seen anything quite like this before. I won't delete the .bak account if I can help it--I should change its Path to point at something harmless just in case the system decided to clean things up behind my back.

Happy Reformation Day

The sound of a seminar notice
Tacked onto the Wittenberg door
Was the hammer of God for repentance,
And the hammer of Hell into war.

One like a prophet decrying
Truths barnacled into lies
Spoke into a land of oppression
Echoing unforeseen cries.

Some men worshiped their models
And others scrambled for sway
As old light again cut through smother
And men searched about for God’s way.

With Orthodox chained to their countries,
And Church of the East beyond ken:
Divisions were old in the body
And here rode division again

Are there things worse than disunion
With brotherly quarrel and hate?
Was this merely permitted, or needed
To wake us to our dying state?

"The church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord … mid toil and tribulation and tumult of her war, she waits the consummation of peace forevermore"

Ponzi Suburbs?

The article linked here from Business Insider reports on a report by "Strong Towns" claiming that suburban growth has the marks of a Ponzi scheme. Why? Maintenance is only affordable if there is growth in the tax base. They illustrate with a simple model and a number of case studies.

Case Study: Minnesota property taxes are not remotely sufficient to pay for road maintenance

A small, rural Minnesota road is paved, with the costs of the surfacing project split evenly between the property owners and the city.

Strong Towns asked: Based on the taxes being paid by the property owners along this road, how long will it take the city to recoup its 50% contribution.

The answer: 37 years. The road is only expected to last 20 to 25 years.

Or, in another town:

Because of this, over the estimated life of the new street, the City expects to collect a total of \$27/foot for road repairs. The cost for repairs will run between \$80 and \$100 per foot.

(Repair or replacement of a sewer is more expensive than laying one in when a subdivision is built.)

As long as the town keeps growing, you can pay for repair of old roads with property taxes from new homes, and kick the can down the road awhile. But if you have to are going to properly include maintenance and replacement costs you have a few choices:

1. Crank up property taxes by a large factor. This would make a number of people I know homeless: low income and fixed income. Don't bother talking about renting instead of owning: rents will have to rise too.
   
2. Let roads deteriorate a lot farther before repairing them. There are secondary costs in damage to city vehicles, etc with this.
   
3. Focus on only a core of the city for maintenance and repair, and let the rest go to hell. There won't be a lot a lot of happy campers in this case, except for the lucky cronies who own rental property in the center.
   
4. Change the methods and standards for road building and construction to use cheaper or longer-lived materials. There's a huge investment in research and new machines here, and it may not actually work.
   

Having the state or feds take over merely moves the taxes to a different category, but doesn't decrease the cost. (In fact having the feds fund it is probably more costly, when you take administrative overhead and long term money costs into account.)

I'd vote for investing in #4 ... I can point to some Madisonians who love the idea of option 3.

Of course, this assumes "Strong Towns" is telling the truth.

---

One of the comments described a city's offer of land and a tax-free decade to a business, which promptly relocated at the end of ten years. I've never heard of an offer like this that turned out well. I'm speaking as one on the pointy end of the taxes--it may turn out ok for the business or for somebody who got a tax-subsidized job for those few years, but not for the rest of us. (I'd be glad to hear of examples where it worked)

Dark matter in dwarf galaxies

Now we find that the dark matter in dwarf galaxies aound the Milky Way seem to have distributions inconsistent with dark matter being cold. Cold dark matter,
if it doesn't interact with normal matter much, would tend to cluster near the center of a star cluster. OK, maybe not cluster as much as the normal matter does, but you don't expect a uniform distribution.

I didn't read the paper, and would have to read several to make sure I understood the details well enough. So I'm going by what the reporters at Space say. But...

"Either normal matter affects dark matter more than scientists thought, or it isn't cold and slow-moving, the researchers said.

Or the dwarf galaxies get churned up from time to time, and the relaxation time for normal matter is shorter than for dark matter.

So far we know very little about dark matter, including how many different kinds there are or how it interacts with itself. It might prove to have interactions as complicated as normal matter, with its atoms and molecules and structures.

Paging science fiction writers, your premise is calling...

Trying to figure out events

Recently I haven't had much to say that I thought the world was entitled to know, and less that seemed to merit a full posting.

But from the swirl of events:

I was not a Jobs devotee. His devotion to his aesthetic and view of how things should work (inconsistent though it might be: think of the NeXT!) certainly changed the world. But one size doesn't fit all and "God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." Those who knew him better should write the eulogies.

I still do not understand exactly what we were doing in Libya. Tiny hints poped up along the way suggesting that something was afoot in the nuclear supplies line, but nothing solid enough to conclude that the powers that be had serious issues on their minds. The official line was nonsense; and were they kidding themselves about what the likely heirs of Gadhafi would be like? Not that Gadhafi didn't richly deserve toppling--the world would be a happier place if he'd gone years ago. I'm surprised he didn't flee. I guess he had succeeded in fooling himself too about how much his subjects loved him.

I confess that sending troops to help find/destroy the LRA puzzled me: why? Obvious after someone pointed it out: it's a quid pro quo for permission to establish bases in Uganda. I suspect the troops won't do much good, though. If Ugandan troops and government officials are like those elsewhere on the continent, their main objectives have little to do with engaging the enemy.

I gather today is UN Day. It has some notable victories to its credit: standardizing air traffic control, control of some diseases, and so on. And it has some truly foul corruption and offenses to its discredit, which I won't darken the day with. And it is a wonderful place to find sinecures for cousins. And from time to time the peacekeeping troops do something useful--such as in Liberia. In Lebanon they were merely targets who had to pretend Hezbullah wasn't installing missile launchers; worse than useless. "Shake Hands with the Devil" anyone?

Is the UW discriminating on the basis of race? I don't know. Probably, but from looking at the student body it would be hard to tell: Wisconsin is very much a white state (Milwaukee excepted), and the University, as a state school, has an obligation to provide for the residents of the state. I wish the various parties would use the word "diversity" honestly and consistently. Sometimes it means something the dictionary would recognize: a mix of students from different backgrounds and with different perspectives (such as from China, India, Korea, Japan, Canada, Germany, etc); and sometimes it means with a proportionate mix of students from disadvantaged groups. (Bureaucrats like things they can count, never mind whether the program targets the right subgroup or not.)

Answers

“Hiphil –[deleted]—Beelzebub!” The book warned you could only do this once, and I hoped I had it right.

The pentagram at my feet glowed orange through the smoke, and slowly the view of an ordinary office desk appeared—a desk with a computer monitor on it and a figure seated behind it. I didn’t like to look at the figure’s face. The alien room appeared at right angles to the floor, and it felt like I was supine at the feet of the creature rather than it resting in the pentagram at my feet.

“Baalzebub’s office. He is not in the office today.”

“I thought the summons brought Beelzebub here to do my will, like it says in the grimoire!” I blurted.

“Hardly,” laughed the figure. “For that you have to have the sacrifice and the standard contract on your part, and in any event the proposal has to be reviewed. The likes of you don’t get to tell him what to do. Your incantation just entitles you to 7 answers, one of which, at our discretion, can be a lie.”

I thought that over for a minute. At least the failure wasn’t going to cost anything irrevocable. I’d have to think fast—the incense would dissipate soon. But how could I be sure of the answer?

“What I tell you three times is true,” I ventured.

“That is your call. You only get 7 answers. If you want to spend 3 on the same question, feel free to do so.”

His chuckle was fingernails on a blackboard, and the look on his face—or whatever it was—showed he knew it. I collected myself.

“OK, I want to be rich … umm … to have available a million dollars a year.”

“OK,” he started—too quickly.

“That’s 1950 constant dollar equivalent,” I interrupted.

“Ah.” The demon clicked on the keys for a while, stared at the screen, typed some more, and then looked at me again. “That cannot happen. You could try upgrading to the full contract,” he added.

“What? You mean there’s no way I can get rich? Why not?”

“That is question 2. The future holds a severe collapse, and the only ones to be rich are already in the oligarchic circle—and it is too late for you to insinuate yourself. That’s why I suggest the upgrade, which makes some supernatural interventions possible.”

“I’m starting to wonder how useful your answers are going to be.”

“That depends on your questions.”

I glanced at the incense burner—still going. “OK, how about power? How can I become powerful?”

“Do you mean political power?”

“Yes, I’d like that.”

More typing ensued, and then: “This one you can achieve. Go to Chicago and find –[deleted]—. Butter him up, be his goto man. Cover for him—he has a taste for young ones—and become good at watching poll numbers and tailoring his speeches for audiences. Backstab as needed to keep anybody else from taking your place. You will be gatekeeper for access to –[deleted]— and thus the power behind the throne—and there will be a lot of power, with people lining up to get the chance to meet you. Do not take a wife or girlfriend—that will distract you and he will drop you from the inner circle. He will have about an 18-year run, and if you time it right you can expose him yourself and get clear before it all hits the fan. Paraguay would be a good choice.”

“That sounds like a lot of pressure for not much fun.”

“That is up to you. You ask me and I answer.”

“I see. Maybe I’m mixing up means and ends.”

He sat there waiting.

“I like women. How can I sleep with lots and lots of willing women?”

Tap tap tap. “There are several ways. One simple way is to take your money and move to Sierra Leone. You can rent women very inexpensively, and your money will last for quite a few years. Make a deal with Saad in three years to be liaison for supplying visiting Europeans and it will last even longer. Take lots of penicillin and learn about the AIDS cocktail.

Or if that is not quite what you had in mind, up until you are about 35 you can use the How to Get Laid book’s techniques. At almost any medium sized gathering there is at least one needy girl, and when you learn how to identify her and manipulate her you can reliably bed her. Keep current with penicillin and you will need the AIDS cocktail too. Go easy on the scotch.”

“Wow. Are those my only options?” Supernatural information sources weren’t turning out to be what they were cracked up to be.

“Without a lot more money, yes. Or you can get an upgrade.”

“I’m not sure I can afford the upgrade. How can I have a long and healthy life?”

“What do you mean by healthy? Not growing old is an upgrade-only option,” he countered.

“Umm. Live to at least 90, always be able to walk and talk and hear and taste. Eat whatever I like, no cancer. Ah... No broken bones, no other big diseases.”

“This is question 5.” Tap tap click click tap tap tap click. “Odd. You are already sicker than you think. Your gut flora are all wrong and there’s considerable chemical damage already. Age 90 is a few years longer than you have. Your basic rules are: exercise every other day for 20 minutes, never eat broccoli or chocolate, stay away from the beach, do not take the hiking trails in Yellowstone next year, never drive on January 18, stay away from alleys, see a doctor every 6 months—but never see a Dr. Wesley. Wash your hands after touching public objects. To get your gut flora straightened out—in three months take a course of 13 days of amoxicillin, and two days later eat a quart of fresh yogurt from the Whole Foods market and one tablespoon of the feces of Jason Smiley on Simpson Street. That should re-inoculate you with a better colony.”

The book had intimated something magical; not at all like this. Wash my hands and eat what?! This had to be the lie he warned about. Didn’t it?

“I think I got that.” The incense burner was about done. Think quickly! “How about a good wife? Where can I find a good wife?”

“What were you looking for? There are lots of women in the world. Sexy, obedient, good cook—what do you want?”

“How about somebody who’d be a heavenly match for me? My one and only?”

“That is not exactly our office’s job, you understand. We are a little more specific and practical down here.”

“So you can’t answer the question?” I was starting to feel good about this for the first time.

“If you insist. Question 6 I will forward to another office. This may take a few minutes, though.” He tapped away and then sat back twiddling his claws. I started to get nervous again.

After about 3 minutes the machine beeped. “They sent us a list of 6 top candidates, all equally good. There is Panesh Mura, studying French literature in New Delhi. Bessy Kaunda in Nairobi. Manu Pau in southern Rengat in Sumatra. Maria Calla in San Ignacio in Bolivia—but you will have to move quickly, since she is thinking of becoming a nun. Jing Pao in Ertong Park in Shanghai. And another Maria, Fuentes, this time, in the Bario Santa Anita in San Salvador.”

I scribbled furiously. “Fuentes in San Salvador. Got it.” The incense was starting to dissipate. “OK, let’s try fame. What is dark matter?”

The demon clicked his claws against the keyboard for a few strokes and spun the monitor around. I bent down to read it. Underneath “Powered by Google” was a table of ordinary and Greek letters in different colors; and a diagram with some squiggly lines, and an equation with symbols they didn’t tell us about in Algebra II. I started to scribble but the vista vanished with the incense. I tried to finish it from memory, but I didn’t think I’d gotten it all and I’d no idea what any of it meant.

A new pagelet sat in the open grimoire on the floor beside me, bearing the bold title “UPGRADE NOW!”

Nobel and President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

She can talk nonsense like any other politician. “President Johnson Sirleaf, who read the platform, said her administration will build structures to host government ministries currently housed in private buildings, and relocate the political capital from Monrovia to Zekapa, a town situated at the border with three counties.” and “Speaking in the two counties when the governing Unity Party unveiled its Platform for the country, President Sirleaf promised that the government would create no fewer than 20,000 jobs annually, on a short- and long-term basis for the next six years.”

But she's been worth a billion dollars to Liberia, and I mean that literally: She wangled debt relief to the tune of about a billion dollars. And because she isn't a warlord, she's gotten a lot of independent support. When she started out, I was worried that the situation needed somebody to keep a lid on the unrepentant warlords, and she had nobody. I'd not thought the UN troops would still be there. There will be problems when they leave. Guaranteed. They're spending money, and when that dries up there'll be an economic downturn at minimum; and I have no faith whatever in the patriotism of the warlords. But because they've been there, and because she's charted an impartial course, and because she canned the Truth and Reconciliation committee's proposals, it has been quiet. And if it is quiet long enough, there may be peace.

She has done well. I congratulate President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf on her Nobel prize. The peace prize has been a bad joke as often as not, but they did it right for her.

UPDATE: More recent numbers suggest something between 4 and 5 billion dollars in debt relief. Even better. And of course there's the money flow from the UN troops in the country, though relying on that is dangerous.

And for Leymah Gbowee. She worked hard to try to bring peace in Liberia. I wasn't on the ground there so I can't say how much depended on her, but every bit helped, and she was a symbol to a lot of people. Congratulations.

Tawakul Karman won too. I wonder. Within my memory Yemen was more than one country, with warring tribes, and I wonder if it is in the process of returning to that condition. I hope not. Good luck, and I hope they haven't painted a target on your back with this prize.

Mexican Marriage?

Leonel Luna either doesn't have a clue about marriage, or doesn't want to know. Mandatory pre-nup with a 2-year renewable term? That's not a marriage, that's prostitution; for a longer term than a night, true, but it will be a financial quid-pro-quo within months. Call it concubinage if you want a milder term, but it is not a marriage.

It is hard to make things better, but easy to make them worse, and this “solution” to unstable marriages cannot help but make the ones that still actually occur less stable, and discourage people from actually marrying. Think “the marginal case.” What has this sort of scheme to do with loving union and commitment, with children, with fidelity?

Self Help

From an email circulated today to UW-Madison employees:

Although UW-Madison faces stiff budgetary challenges, Interim Chancellor
David Ward told the Faculty Senate Monday that avenues of "self-help"
can lighten their impact.

*Related*: Employees would be barred from carrying concealed weapons
while in the course or scope of their employment, under a policy
approved by the Senate

UPDATE: Yes, this is an unedited quote from the email. I put a paragraph marker in to make sure the formatting would stay the same.

Urban OS?

Somebody has delusions of grandeur. McLaren Electronic Systems is dreaming of automated cities, where an overarching OS handles I/O and cities can plan resource use and messaging to have warnings and activities coordinated.

What are the problems with this? First, the model of the city and its functions is necessarily schematic, and hasn't the details or the friction of real life. The sensors measuring traffic flow will read differently after a snowfall, the fire sensor in building X will be vandalized, the email server will be clogged with spam--you name it. Simple management programs will give results as blithely out of touch with reality as any Soviet 5-year plan.

So the beautiful monitoring program will have to include crosschecks and validations and authentications until it is bloated and untestable. The system will have a "HACK ME" sign pasted on it the size of the moon.

Need firemen? Think "Blue screen of death." Or that OS stands for "Oh &%$!"

Archaeology and children

Pyramids and such are obviously adult work, but there are a lot of small relics that I've wondered about over the years. That reputed "mother goddess" the Willendorf Venus always looked a little more like a doll to me.

Do you remember your childhood? If you had any access to the outdoors at all, chances are you collected some interesting items on your adventures and maybe made a secret cache with your friends. Why a broken doll and an old bottle needed to be cached behind a rock wall is a mystery you probably can't fathom today, but it made sense at the time.

The BBC reports that at least some of the cave paintings in Rouffignac were made by children's hands. Makes sense to me--if we'd had access to caves in my youth I'm pretty sure we'd have left many markings suitable for confusing future archaeologists. I know in Africa I left behind a few things inside a wall, or buried as a geological erratic.

Of course, some voodoo/Mami Wata shrines look very much like the things children sometimes accumulate, only larger and more extensive. Life isn't easy for archaeologists...

Outwitting the "crazy hairy ants"

The AP reported on a plague of fast-moving ants that were starting to infest the south. They short out wires, kill bees, and leave no room for fire ants (so they're not all bad). Kill one and chemical cues quickly bring the others in swarms.

If one gets electrocuted, its death releases a chemical cue to attack a threat to the colony, said Roger Gold, an entomology professor at Texas A&M.

"The other ants rush in. Before long, you have a ball of ants," he said.

.........

"I did a test site with a product early on and applied the product to a half-acre ... In 30 days I had two inches of dead ants covering the entire half-acre," Rasberry said. "It looked like the top of the dead ants was just total movement from all the live ants on top of the dead ants."

Perhaps we can finesse this defense so that it turns into a weakness.

Study the critters until you find out what that chemical cue is. Synthesize it.

Now dig a ditch near the infested area and spray it with this stuff and kerosene. After a few hours, ignite. Lather, rinse, repeat. I'd think that after maybe a week or so you'd start to exhaust the number of ants who respond to the cues. From the description above it sounds like they'll come from a couple hundred yards away.