Absent Dictators

I didn’t learn much about the history or composition of Libya until fairly recently. But its current anarchic state seems almost inevitable in retrospect. Fiercely tribal and inheriting a giant arsenal, with a central state damaged by civil war and the purges:

Mutinying security men have taken over oil ports on the Mediterranean and are seeking to sell crude oil on the black market. Ali Zeidan, Libya’s Prime Minister, has threatened to “bomb from the air and the sea” any oil tanker trying to pick up the illicit oil from the oil terminal guards, who are mostly former rebels who overthrew Muammar Gaddafi and have been on strike over low pay and alleged government corruption since July.

Remember the standard accusation that the US always sided with dictators? Proof positive that the US didn’t care about anything but its own interests, or so it was always taken. And I’ll grant that the powers-that-be don’t care about anything but their own short-term interests, but it seems ironic that supporting dictators might sometimes be humane. A cowed Gaddafi was fairly harmless—he didn’t go in for quite as many foreign adventures after Bush put the fear of the US into him, and seemed (wonder of wonders) willing to cooperate on some things. And life is certainly worse for Libyans with multiple tyrants quarreling instead of one.

Who knows about the long term--maybe the fighters will converge on a new system that everybody gets used to and keeps the place running smoothly with a little liberty and pursuit of happiness. Or maybe it will break up into groups that fight each other for centuries.

As I've said before, I hold no love for Gaddafi--I knew people who'd be alive today if not for his meddling. But the "progressive march of democracy" through the world so in vogue in my earlier years seems to over-reach a little now and then.

"You may not make an end of them at once, lest the wild beasts grow too numerous for you."

What do you do when your sensor is maxed out?

At Fukushima when their radiation detectors pegged at 100 mS/hour they kept on going.

From the BBC story

The Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) had originally said the radiation emitted by the leaking water was around 100 millisieverts an hour.

However, the company said the equipment used to make that recording could only read measurements of up to 100 millisieverts.

The new recording, using a more sensitive device, showed a level of 1,800 millisieverts an hour.

(BTW, that should read "less sensitive device", not "more." BBC science editor strikes again.)

To be fair, most of the readings were undoubtedly lower than 100 mS/hour, and unless they really are hiring "ne'er do wells and petty criminals" to do the cleanup the people should all be well versed in ALARA and the hot spots won't have seriously hurt anybody.

But seriously, if my radiation detector ever pegs, I'm out of there to look for something with a little more range. At Fermilab they had two sets of detectors for hoi polloi, and the simple scanner was switchable to different sensitivities. In theory, if something registered hot we could get a half-way decent estimate for how hot using just the equipment on hand. In practice we were told to just label it, toss it in the bin, and let the techs deal with it later--but at Fukushima the users are the radiation techs.

The hotspots they found may be new, and they may be transient. When you're dealing with reactor-waste levels of radiation, keeping track matters a lot. The 1.8S/hour hotspot would be lethal in about 4 hours, while 100mS for 4 hours would just increase your likelihood of cancer by a couple of percent. And if a crack opens in a tank, an area downstream that used to be tolerable might hit levels lethal in minutes.

Do I have to write about Miley?

I saw a link to this graph allegedly comparing searches for "Miley Cyrus" and "chemical attack Syria". As you probably expect, if you know Americans, the former is an order of magnitude higher than the second. We all know that the flailings of a starlet hoping for attention (that will mean new contracts) aren't life and death issues like poisonings and revolution in Syria. It is almost offensive to compare the two in terms of value or newsworthiness.

I had proposed to ignore the whole business, but it keeps nagging at me. Why make such a fool of yourself, and why that way?

OK, I get it that she was some kind of child star, playing a star with a secret identity as a normal wholesome girl, and she wanted to make it clear she wasn't a little girl anymore. Aren’t there other ways of being adult than stylized sex? (I didn’t see the show, but the inescapable stills are remarkably unattractive. (Is she in training to be a frog?) I don’t say un-sexy because that's not really the same thing: perhaps you had to be there to get it.)

It often seems as though the only distinctive we recognize for adulthood is sexual desire. Is that all there is?(*) Nothing of responsibility, wisdom, authority—nothing but sex? That may not be a surprising news story, but that’s a big deal—if that’s all we want from adults that’s all we’re going to get.

And it seems to be accepted wisdom that a desire is unworthy of the name unless it is overwhelming. If you have self-control, you must have wimpy desires—don’t humiliate yourself by mentioning them.

Self-mastery is tough enough already; if we disparage it what will we wind up with? You need a touch of self-denial to prepare for the future, not to mention to behave responsibly today. Again, not a surprising news item but a big deal—a bigger long term deal for the culture and country than a mindless flailing around with a country we don’t intend to go to war with.

So to prove she was an adult she had to act as though out of control sexually. But, of course, in a way that wouldn’t get her arrested—funny how self-control enters the picture anyway.

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(*)I wanted to play that song for a study on Ecclesiastes, but decided it would take too long and break the rhythm of the study time.

A professional writer's problems

John C Wright is a SF writer, and on his blog he describes a problem I hadn't heard about before:

It (word limit) is established by the bookstores, who limit the number of inches a binding can occupy on the shelf. Any author whose books do not sell through finds his name not on the list of books the stores are willing to buy from the publisher. Nowadays, now that bookstores are large conglomerates, the calculation is done by computer with no human judgment involved, so if a midlist author with a fine record of book sales suffers one book that was bought in too large a number or which made too small a sale, suddenly his books are not bought in as large of numbers by the distributors, and therefore his sales drop again, and therefore his books are bought in even fewer numbers, and therefore his career is over unless he changes his name and writes under a pan name. This has happened to a friend of mine, John Hemry/Jack Campbell who writes the LOST FLEET series.

What happened to me with THE HERMETIC MILLENNIA is that a staffer made a mistake and over-ordered the production — whether it was too many units or the manuscript was too long was not clear — and so I cannot make my numbers unless I sell out every single copy of the book. That is why I am pathetically begging my readers to go out and buy them all, because I have been informed the publisher will not buy the rest of the series. If the book sells through, I have some hope that they may reverse that decision.

Scott Adams wrote of "Powerpoint poisoning" and this smells like Excel bookstore management. Just plug in the numbers and you're guaranteed success.

I've read several of his books and enjoyed them, btw.

UPDATE: Changed the title. Professional as in makes money from it. I liked the ambiguity of real writer/real problem, but it doesn't work well.

Syria

On a grimmer note, I try to figure out what's going on in international affairs by looking at what people say and do and trying to estimate what's not getting reported. (Reporters, by and large, don't seem to be a very well-informed lot.)

Benghazi had some Syria connection, and maybe some Egypt connection as well, and the US administration has been lying like a rug since the get-go. Maybe they have some good reasons for that; trying to cover up weapons shipments to Syrian insurgents. Although some of them ask for US help, I'd suspect most wouldn't be eager to stain their good Islamic credentials by too much public fraternizing with the Great Satan. So to first order I conclude that we've been shipping arms and other goodies to one or more insurgent groups--and if prior experience is any guide we've sent stuff to enemy groups more than once.

So now there's another poison episode, that seems to kill 1/10 of the victims. Other attacks seem to have killed about 1/3, making this seem more like the Bhopal disaster (1/20 killed). Which suggests that the attack, if it was the government using chemical weapons, wasn't well executed. If rebel groups had the weapons they might not know how to use them effectively. Or somebody might be stirring the pot with something that wasn't completely weaponized. Or this was an accident with stolen weapons.

Although the foreign policy of this administration seems to be managed via Ouija board, I still try to see if there's any sense to this. As plenty of people have already pointed out, we're better off if both groups lose. So there's no sense to intervening unless there's some vital interest at stake. And there is one, that isn't talked about: seizing control of loose chemical weapons. "Punishing" or "sending a signal" makes no sense. We know he had weapons already, and we know he already used them. So where's the urgency? Is something slipping? (And do you trust ∅ to keep his eye on the ball?)

University of Liberia admissions

You may not have seen the BBC story reporting that all 25,000 students taking the entrance exam failed. "The students lacked enthusiasm and did not have a basic grasp of English, a university official told the BBC." For those interested, tuition seems minimal: about $1.27 per credit for undergraduates.

From BBC: University spokesman Momodu Getaweh told Focus on Africa that the university stood by its decision, and it would not be swayed by "emotion".

"In English, the mechanics of the language, they didn't know anything about it. So the government has to do something," he said.

"The war has ended 10 years ago now. We have to put that behind us and become realistic."

The school apparently was a bit embarrassed and changed their minds, admitting 1,626 after all, as the story below shows, and also the BBC followup.

Ms (President of Liberia) Sirleaf did not say why the university, based in the capital Monrovia, had agreed to admit 1,800 students after discussions with her.

What happened? I can't quite tell from the test numbers: 50% score in English and 40% in Math seems pretty low, but that's because I'm used to normalized tests. (Usually: Quantitative Chemistry back at SIU had passing set at 40%: it was the flunk-out course for chemistry students, and quite rough.)

I think the 100% failure was due to two effects: one explicit and one that I'm just guessing at. They say they were trying to increase admissions standards. So they based the thresholds on the test averages from the previous year: 49% English and 33% Math. (i.e. 70% and 50% respectively). That should have cut the pool down by about a factor of 20, using WAG numbers for the standard deviation (10). But it cut it down to 0. And when they used 50% English (=last year's average) OR 40% Math (about last year's average), they only got 1600 passing--it should have been closer to 12,000 if students this year were like students last year.

My guess is that somebody took a little extra care about security of the exams this year, and a lot of students weren't able to cheat as usual. I can't prove that, but it seems likely.

HEADLINE: UL TO CONSIDER ONLY 1,626 CANDIDATES
DATE: 22 AUGUST 2013
SOURCE: All Africa
(c) 2013 AllAfrica

Aug 22, 2013 (The Inquirer) -- The University of Liberia (UL)
says it will enroll 1,626 candidates who took the university's
entrance barely a day following reports that all 25,000
candidates who sat the test failed massively.

However, at a news conference yesterday, the head of the UL Relations, Dr. S. Momolu Getaweh said the UL Senate reviewed several other scenarios below the benchmarks and thereupon recommended for admission 1,626 candidates who scored either at least 40% in Math or 50% in English in the Undergraduate Programs.

He also disclosed that those to be admitted include 25 for the College of General Studies (Continuing Education), 93 in the six (6) graduate programs, thirty seven (37) for the Law School and 24 for the School of Pharmacy for Academic 2013/2014.

Dr. Getaweh giving the official result of the recent UL Entrance Examinations which were administered in June and July 2013 said the results indicate that no candidate out-rightly earned the scores of 50% in Math and 70% in English previously set by the Faculty Senate of the University as the passing scores for the Undergraduate Examinations.

Dr. Getaweh said, "Similarly, no candidate who sat for the Graduate Programs, Law School and School of Pharmacy Exams earned the score of 70% also set by the UL Senate as passing."

The UL Relations head said holding these results constant, no candidate would have otherwise been admitted to the University for Academic 2013/2014 in the above programs.

However, he noted that in the case of the A. M Dogliotti College of Medicine, where the score of 70% is passing, 47 candidates made 70% and above.

Dr. Getaweh said in view of the above, the Faculty Senate of UL met in two separate and special sessions on Wednesday, August 14 and Tuesday, August 20, 2013, respectively, to deliberate on the outcome of the examinations, and as a result of the two meetings
and several hours of discussions, the UL Senate reviewed several other scenarios below the benchmarks.

He also disclosed that the recommendations of the Faculty Senate have been endorsed by the University as presented with the recommendations that candidates in the Undergraduate division will be required to take two transitional courses one in Mathematics and the other in English. He said both courses will be administered for six hours a week without academic credit.

Dr. Getaweh said, "Candidates admitted in this category will also be permitted to take an additional three (3) credit hour course which shall be determined by their respective Colleges. However, the total hours of academic work for the first semester of
2013/2014 shall not exceed 9 hours a week. The students MUST pass the transitional courses within two semesters, if they wish to continue at the University."

He also said upon admission to the University, the rules governing poor academic performance shall apply and these rules shall be provided the candidates during the matriculation exercises following registration for first semester 2013/2014.

Dr. Getaweh also said the final decision for admission to the Graduate Programs, Law School, School of Pharmacy and Medical School shall be made following the fulfillment of other criteria set out by the Admission Committees of the respective programs and colleges as indicated.

He disclosed that the names of the candidates in all programs will be published shortly in the UL Campus Review Newsletter.

Last academic year 2012/2013, the University of Liberia admitted nearly 7,500 candidates in the Undergraduate Programs because the criteria used for those admissions were quite different from this year. The average scores of 49% and 33% for English and Mathematics respectively were used as the basis for passing.

The university commended all those who participated in administering this year's Entrance Examinations and extended sincere apology to the candidates, parents and the general public
for any inconveniences they may have experienced during the administration of these examinations.

Asking for directions

When on the observation raft over the Kitch-iti-kipi (turn the wheel and it slowly rides back and forth along the cable) one vacationing teacher joked that men don't ask for directions. I suddenly realized that it was her fault. We're carefully taught to do the problems first before looking up the answers in the back of the book.

I don't understand beauty

One tree is symmetrical and beautiful, another twisted and ugly, and another twisted and beautiful. Beauty isn't invested in only the symmetric or the useful, it just is. Somehow.

Sometimes I don't appreciate it at first, but then when I look at it right I discover it was there all along. Like math--you don't invent math, you discover it.

Abstracting conversation

When we "chat" or blog we abstract our communication to just words, and I'll bet that there are a few formulaic aspects to the words that we aren't conscious of.

So when you meet the other face to face for the first time, I suppose you might recognize them, but there would be new channels open for the first time.

It couldn't be the same, unless the communication was one sided. Would it seem the same?

With Skype you hear the inflections and pauses that make up one of the missing channels, so it would be more nearly the same.

I've been in phone conferences with colleagues that I only met in person later. They sounded the same, and their gestures did not surprise me, but there was something more to being with them in person. Something that made it easier to interact, ask favors, make suggestions--much easier than by phone or by email.

Power in ordinary people

Youngest Daughter, having read a number of James Bond one-liners, decided to watch a few of the movies. All at once. (School starts tomorrow. No, I was at work and didn't watch any.)

One of the things that makes Bond interesting is watching a lone man run through a deadly puzzle, squeaking through where he must and turning his enemies' weapons against them where he can, and leaving destruction behind. The destruction is needed to stop worse destruction, so he's one of the good guys(*), but we're fascinated see how much influence a single man can have without being bitten by a radioactive spider or becoming a monster. (Wish fulfillment: I'm not Superman, but maybe I could be . . . well, with some training . . . )

There are other ways of having influence too, though I don't think they'll make a lucrative series of movies on her. I remember reading her song when I was young and thinking it too stupid for words. I read the whole poem as an adult and have liked it ever since. (**) In a world of disasters, just a distant touch-and-go and people changed.

Amelie was a little like that, but with Amelie planning her changes (not always with good results). Unfortunately most of the personal problems I know about aren't as easily tweaked--so much for wish fulfillment.

I wonder how extensive an ordinary person's influence actually runs. Maybe more than they expect, and less than they fantasize.

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(*) and Bond has good taste, which is a stand-in for being a "good guy."

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(**) You probably know a few people this describes:

"... 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 ! "

Cheer up and have a spot of tea

Baking helps treat depression? I like the idea of self-medicating with chocolate chip cookies or a hot buttered baguette.

We can appeal to some famous names to expand the idea even farther:

• "And, as there is nothing like housework for the troubled soul of a woman, so a general clean-up is good for sailors. I had this from a general petty officer who had also passed through deep waters" (Kipling, Sea Warfare)
• "There is nothing like housework for calming the nerves" (Miss Bianca in The Rescuers by Margary Sharp)

To be serious about the matter, I'm not a psychiatrist but I suspect that we slap clinical labels on things that don't deserve it. "Theodore Dalrymple" wrote that many people labeled "depressed" are merely unhappy and don't require sophisticated intervention. Not all; I know some who do need help. (I'm not talking about professional judgment but the common language.(*)) I think quite a few of us use medical paradigms, and seek medical help, when older and simpler rules will suffice. IIRC followup work with people who survived 9/11 found that catharsis didn't make for a healthier outcome, but denial and repression seemed to work OK. (There may have been a link to it here, but it is gone now, though Schneiderman discusses the matter. He's a life coach, not a therapist.)

Unfortunately too much sugar isn't good for me. Maybe I need to take up cabinetry.

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(*)The common language drives me nuts sometimes when people invoke "quantum leaps" or "energy flows" with no notion of what they're talking about.

Copper

"Copper linked to Alzheimer's disease" says the BBC headline. The story says that while one study suggests copper might contribute to Alzheimer's, others suggest that it might help protect the brain. The headline is a trifle misleading... Technically protecting the brain is a kind of link too, but it strains the usual use of words.

By the way, does anybody remember when aluminum was the culprit, and we were all supposed to worry about our cookware?

Aluminum isn't terribly good for you, and while we need some copper that can be bad too. And maybe Alzheimer's has more than one cause. The phrase "second childhood" is a lot older than aluminum pots.

Culture changing

An exhibit in the Museum of Ojibwa Culture said that one technology they rejected instead of adapting was the grain mill, which made flour too fine for traditional recipes. In Africa there were problems with famine relief Bulgar wheat--none of the traditional cooking methods gave a palatable result and many people wouldn't eat it. We're used to variety--we search for it--but I guess food is tradition, food is family, food is comfort.

And yet a cuisine can move to a new land and use new ingredients and still be recognizably the old cuisine. (One Korean restaurant served thinly sliced hot-dogs in sauce--not quite traditional but it fit anyway.) So what makes changing foods hard? Is there a difference between a traditional set of recipes and a cuisine?

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Robin at the counter said an interesting upcoming event was a women's drum circle. Up until quite recently they'd not been allowed to do that. I thought it a little odd that they should be working so hard to retain the old culture, complaining about Pere Marquette et al for "denouncing native spirituality and traditions" and trying to replace the old religious practices--and yet be willing to introduce innovations that flatly contradicted the old ways. No skin off my nose--I'm not Ojibwa and have no dog in this hunt.

But on consideration I think the only thing they're guilty of is hypocrisy, not of being unfaithful to their culture.

A culture comes from the religion a people share, the technologies and roles they share, the language they use to define their shared values, and a family history--and maybe something more.

The Jesuits tried to change the Ojibwa religion. That would have inevitably changed the culture. The shared values would also differ, and the language defining them would include new concepts. They would not change into Europeans, but many practices would change or vanish, and new ones take their place. The same thing is happening in this case--they have absorbed (from Christianity or the bastardized Christianity that is post-Enlightenment liberalism) a new value, and their culture changed accordingly.

I have no sense for what role drumming played in their culture, and so can't guess what "other things" will come along with the change or already happened behind the scenes. Presumably there's been some change in what it means to be an Ojibwa man or Ojibwa woman: a change in their place in the universe. Just as Christianity would do.

I remember reading an Indian legend in Twain. It was tightly compressed and obviously assumed a lot of cultural knowledge (a woman doing X is odd and means Y is likely). The same story was retold recently at 20 times the length with more explanation and using tropes from the Anglo understanding of Indian culture. I wonder how common it is for Indian story tellers to take the Anglo interpretation and use that in their own descriptions and self-understanding.

OK, an example: living in harmony with the world. Praying to the spirit of the deer for "forgiveness." The oldest stories I've read seem less like the Disney Pocahontas ("I know every rock and tree and creature") and more of a nervous animism. You never know what spirit you have disturbed; best to be on the safe side and placate them. Maybe I just read the wrong stories. I've been wrong before. But I notice that many of the descriptions of Indian spiritual life are recent and are not isolated from cultural interplay. It is much nicer to think that your ancestors lived in harmony with nature than to think that they were afraid of malign spirits and living on the hairy edge of disaster. The language to frame it is available, you'd be tempted to use the new narrative. (I do not question that philosophies of harmony existed, especially of harmony between people.)

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We seem to try to characterize Indian culture by their technologies. They are the weavers of baskets, bakers of pots, chippers of arrowheads, silent stalkers of deer: whatever. At camp Runamucka you got an Indian name, learned to weave beads, and learned somewhat garbled traditional greetings: "ozhaawashkonaagozi vai!" "miskonaagozi vai!"

Of course the real tribes adopted new technologies when they could. Some mastered the horse and proceeded to master and terrorize the other tribes. (Even horseless groups were perfectly capable of organizing empires and mounting 500-mile campaigns to chase down and annihilate their enemies.) That technology radically changed their culture. I don't know of any tribes that mastered the manufacture of guns or iron (maybe the Cherokee?) and were independent of Europeans for powder and iron stock. That doesn't seem intrinsically different from trading to distant tribes for flint or copper, but it changed the relative values of different jobs in a very short time. No more autarky--bit by bit you get integrated into a wide-flung market economy. When blankets from the trader are warmer, more durable, and easier to sew and repair than your old hide garments, how can you keep valuing the hide seamstress? Nice to be able to know how to do it in a pinch, but I'd rather use an iron axe than make my own stone axe. Now the fur trapper, he's important.

It seems to be received wisdom in some circles that when women's work was devalued, women's worth was devalued. I'm not acquainted with any examples of this theory, and in any event "mother" is an irreducibly valuable office, but the general idea has some plausibility. We do often have utilitarian attitudes towards each other. I'd expect the social order to change with new technologies.

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I wonder what is going to emerge from our chaos. Even setting the idol of multiculturalism to one side, we sling new technologies in the mix as fast as our wallets will stand (despite the complaints of our betters who want to be tribal elders able to forbid sweet sodas and other corrupting influences). Our elite have largely abandoned the traditional religion and acquired some new ones. The legal machinery seems designed to mangle families--not much way to convey tradition that way. The stories are shared, sometimes even between groups, but there have to be new stories every season. Even the shared values I'm not sure are shared that broadly anymore.

People and Peoples followup

I said I would check Psalms to see how it read from a peoples/family perspective, as opposed to an individual perspective. So here goes.

If I were repeating this exercise, I might come up with a slightly different partitioning--not everything is clear cut. But the first distinction is a grammatical one: is this an "I" or a "we" song or does it not appear in English (NASB) or obviously refer to the Messiah?

• I
  
  1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 69, 70, 71, 73, 77, 84, 86, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94, 101, 102, 108, 109, 111, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122, 130, 131, 135, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146

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• WE
  
  8, 12, 14, 20, 44, 47, 48, 60, 74, 75, 79, 80, 85, 90, 100, 103, 105, 106, 107, 123, 124, 126, 128, 129, 137

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• Neither or clearly messianic (not me)
  
  2, 8, 10, 19, 21, 24, 29, 33, 36, 37, 45, 46, 50, 53, 58, 65, 67, 68, 72, 76, 78, 81, 82, 83, 87, 93, 96, 97, 98, 99, 104, 110, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 125, 127, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 147, 148, 149, 150

The next question is whether the song is best understood as an individual talking to God, or it sort-of could-be a group, or it works both individual or group, or it is definitely "we", or not really applicable to this scheme.

• Individual
  
  18, 27, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 49, 51, 55, 62, 63, 88, 131, 139

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• Sort-of group but mostly individual
  
  16, 17, 22, 26, 35, 40, 52, 57, 69, 71, 86, 89, 91, 94, 101, 111, 112, 116, 119, 125, 131, 141, 144

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• Individual or Group both work
  
  1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 19, 23, 25, 28, 30, 31, 32, 54, 56, 59, 61, 64, 70, 73, 84, 90, 92, 100, 102, 107, 109, 121, 124, 126, 127, 128, 130, 138, 140, 142

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• Clearly Us
  
  12, 14, 15, 20, 33, 34, 37, 44, 47, 60, 65, 66, 68, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 85, 87, 95, 96, 97, 98, 103, 105, 106, 122, 123, 133, 137, 143, 147

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• Not applicable to this scheme
  
  2, 8, 21, 24, 29, 36, 45, 46, 48, 50, 53, 58, 67, 72, 75, 76, 82, 93, 99, 104, 108, 110, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120, 129, 132, 134, 135, 136, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150

Reviewing the Psalms this way suggests that this isn't as clear a study as I hoped. Though a great many psalms are (and of course have been) used by groups, the themes of group suffering, group longing, group repentance, and so on don't dominate. They're there if you want them.

And as AVI pointed out, identity was thought of differently then.

UPDATE: I left out one little detail: the church is the new Israel, and it could suffer in the same ways as the Jews did, for the same kinds of reasons.

Using money

I know that 19 times out of 20 money I give to one of the homeless guys (almost all men), will promptly be wasted on drugs, alcohol, smokes by the cigarette--wasted at best, harmful most of the time.

That by itself isn't obviously such a great reason not to give--if I don't, will I spend it on a fattening lunch or book I won't get around to reading? Wasted either way, possibly damaging either way.(*)

Encouraging the homeless to hang around and beg isn't good for them or the rest of us, and turning charity into an anonymous financial transaction shrivels it. So there's that. But there they are, and there's Jesus strong words...

I used to give McD tickets (they're not on the Square anymore)--still kind of anonymous, and maybe even a little insulting, but less harmful. Though McD's might have their own ideas about customers who sit in a booth all day.

The one thing I have trouble prying loose is time.

(*)Actually, reviewing the receipt ledger suggests that most of the cash goes to groceries and gasoline.

Expedition

"We get more done before breakfast than most people get done all day." (US Army ad)

It seemed as though Pere Marquette memorials were all over the place in the UP, though that's probably sampling bias: the crossroads are more interesting places. Reading about all the places he'd been, and missions he'd founded, and records he'd made, I noticed that the marker for his grave said he died at the age of 38. He asked for the assignment when he was 28.

When I was 38 I mumble mumble mumble

Another "why not"

The North American Indian tribes, with the possible exception of Calusa Indians of southwestern Florida, didn't use sails on their boats. Which seems a little odd; there are plenty of lakes which would be easier to get around on if you had a sail you could unfurl when the wind was right. The Egyptians used them to go up the Nile, and I presume sails would be equally useful going up the Mississippi or the Missouri. (You'd have to learn tacking, but that shouldn't take too long.) Maybe Superior isn't the best place to learn about sailing, but there are other lakes.

But the most famous Indian water vehicle (hardly the only one, though) was the birchbark canoe, which while nice and light for portaging isn't ideal for hooking a mast on. That would require a heavier frame, making the result a lake-only vehicle.

My Better Half pointed out that the Indian fishing methods were shallow water technology, and so there'd be no great need to go out far and deep, where sails would be most helpful. While they made plenty of fishing nets, I don't find any reference to long and deep nets for deep water fishing. If the populations were low enough that shallow water fishing was adequate to provide the supply (but Cahokia or Aztalan?), then the additional effort wouldn't have been worth it. So why bother with sails.

We stalled there. Maybe somebody has more information?

Vacations and recreation

Driving through the Upper Peninsula drives home how central recreation is to the place. Without it most of the place would be subsistence hunting/fishing, since the ore and big trees are mostly gone and most of the soil is pretty lousy. Most boats aren't for professional fishing or transport, but for visitors.

So what do people go to do? Fish. Hunt. Travel around in boats. Walk long distances. Live in primitive conditions for a while.

Making a living by hunting or fishing isn't all that easy, as the older Yoopers and the Ojibwe before them could testify. It was hard work, and even with modern tools it takes time and effort (unless you bait the deer). So tens of thousands of us take a vacation from our hard jobs by doing a different hard job.

Not all our recreations are like that: some are "sit and watch" recreations (watching the boats roll in, watching the Brewers lose, watching reality shows or watching an opera), and others are contests (business league softball games and so on). But sometimes we try to relax by doing completely different work--as in the dude ranches.

Not just any kind of work, but either something exotic (cowboy or astronaut) or something that we can point to afterwards and say "I did that". Sweeping floors is not going to attract vacationers, nor the inhuman job of bolting the rear flange on pump after pump after pump.

But there's probably room (and maybe even a thriving market I haven't heard about) for people paying to spend a week in a woodshop or machinist shop with some pros helping them make something. I do kludge carpentry--better since I invested in a second-hand table saw, but nowhere near what I could do with the space and proper tools (and that wouldn't be as good as the pros). But I haven't the budget or space for a good setup. I don't think I'd shell out for a week with good advisers and use of a good rig, but then I'm not that interested in spending big bucks on a good fishing boat either--but somebody's buying them.

The Soo

"I love work. I can sit and watch it all day."

That came to mind while we watched a 1000-foot ship slowly slide into the Poe lock(*). The giant machine needs only a crew of 25 or so, according to the boat watcher and former ship engineer beside me (and the captain's job isn't all that well paid these days). Hard work, and dully unromantic for those who have to do it; but amazing to the rest of us. Watching it is even rather peaceful to those of us who don't have to worry about 2 1/2 foot clearances.
(*)

I heard the obvious joke a half a dozen times

People and Peoples

There are many things I don't quite understand about how God works. One is what was the meaning of the centuries spent as slaves in Egypt, or the centuries without prophets, or the decades of trouble without any sign.

Some saints experience a dark night of the soul, including such famous saints as Mother Theresa. They say the experience reshapes them and brings them closer to God.

But what about a "dark century of the soul" for a people? God can be interested in peoples as well as people; on the relationships among peers and along the generations. Without losing sight of people an infinite God can also care about tribes.

It is risky to try to explain what we call good and bad in a person's life (see Job), and it has to be even harder to understand God's purposes in something bigger than a single person. What would God be looking for?

I need to go through Psalms and see how it relates to "families:" I always read it from the point of view of individuals.

Not-quite universal hymns

We sang Immortal, Invisible this morning. Have you noticed that a Jew, or even a Muslim could sing it without qualms (provided they didn't know its provenance)? It sings about God's transcendence and power, which all three religions affirm. (Not so Rejoice, the Lord is King, of course.) I don't think a Hindu would, though; since it implicitly denies the existence of any other gods, and emphasizes His invisibility and inaccessibility. It would require some serious mental gymnastics about the atman or else a who-cares attitude.

Even the things we think we can all agree on, aren't always universal.

Amazing mosquitoes--but I still hate them

French researchers figured a way to get microscopic video(*) of mosquitoes biting mice. The mosquito probe wiggles around inside trying to stab a capillary. And the probe is quite complicated, including stabbing blades that latch on inside as anchors, and a dual pipe system with blood getting sucked one way and saliva going the other.

And it seems that people who are "immune" to mosquito bites really aren't. Their systems respond to the bite, trying to clog up the bite hole with white blood cells, but the mosquito just wiggled the probe around to hit a bigger blood vessel.

Go read the article, and watch a video or three.
Thanks to Texan99 "We had a rule for the kids: bugs in the house get stomped; bugs outside you leave alone." Mosquitoes were the exception.

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(*)They peeled up a thin flap of skin and took the video through it while the mosquito drank.

Lucky kids

Some 3rd year students at Niels Bohr got time on the Nordic Optical Telescope as part of their course, and the first night they saw emission lines from a quasar--gravitationally lensed in 3 other places. There's a picture here.

A good instructor can give his students a project that is both within their competence and still in undiscovered country, but this group lucked out with something nice and spectacular. The fellow who originally found that quasar, when he heard about the students' findings, got excited and went back and found 3 more images.

This is quite a rich find.

In addition to the quasar itself, you also get other interesting information. A quasar varies in brightness and you can measure that there is a different arrival time for the light from the different observations, because the light paths are not of equal length. In this way you can calculate the geometric model of the light’s path. You can also calculate the mass of the galaxy cluster and you can calculate what is called the Hubble parameter, which tells us about the expansion of the universe.

It has been an incredible experience for the students. “It is amazing to be allowed to participate in something that is relevant to research so early in our education,” says Thejs Brinckmann, whose appetite for a future as a researcher has been whetted even more.

I spent a couple of months on an undergrad project too, but only came up with some minor results in compartmental analysis.

EAA correction

I spoke to a pilot friend who helped with the pyrotechnics at EAA, and he said they used dynamite, detcord, and gasoline. Three gallons would make a good 2-story-house sized flame that we could feel from half a mile away.

I should have asked how to join the team. Although maybe it is better if I don't. The director is retiring this year--and that may be a good thing. My friend had to put out a few small fires that fell near the setup for the next blasts. A bit too close for comfort.

Mondegreen wisdom

When singers don't have good articulation or when the mix is too instrument-heavy I find when I reassemble the babble into something nearly intelligible it doesn't seem quite relevant to the rest of the song. (I often must look up lyrics online, and I find that songs that seemed muddy back in the 60-70's are still muddy today--it wasn't just the static-y radio.)

I did the same with speech when young and unfamiliar with exotic uses of words, and do the same now that I'm older and people mumble more.

Sometimes the revision is better than the original. A line from the religious controversies of a few centuries ago ran something like: "Confess a man against his will; he's of the same opinion still." Perfectly true; compelling somebody to recite a creed doesn't make him believe it. But when I was 10 I'd not heard the word confess used that way, and I reconstructed the lines as "Convince a man against his will; he's of the same opinion still." That is an unpleasant indictment--and every day we run across that kind of stubborn refusal to see.

A rattle of dishes disguised "self deluded" as "self diluted," which is a polite way to describe lives that should have overflowed with works of grace and kindness--but instead drip self-absorption.

Maybe there are advantages--but I wish people wouldn't mumble.

Courtesy as teacher

I've written at more length on the topic of courtesy before here and here and here.

I've heard it said that if you want to hate a man, do him an injury. Conversely, if you want to learn to love a man, do him a kindness.

If courtesy is a kind of attenuated love, then the everyday practice of it should train me to appreciate a bond, however faint, between me and my neighbor. The everyday absence of courtesy will also teach me something. Will it cultivate dislike for my neighbors, or merely callousness?

A "light" at the end of the tunnel

I looked in the windows of the new library this morning on the way to work. It isn't quite ready yet. There's something lonely and disquieting about looking through shelf after empty shelf after empty shelf. Where there should be thoughts and joys there's nothing.

But, 2/3 of the way across the building through a "tunnel" of empty shelves, a splash of different colors said a bridgehead was established.

Kidnapped

I don't remember how old I was when I read Treasure Island, but I remember enjoying it once I got past the obscure references in the first few chapters. I thought a squire worked for a knight, and I didn't understand the social structure the story was embedded in, but the book was fun. When I re-read it a few months ago, I noticed things I hadn't seen the first three times. Fortunately I've not had experiences with pirates, but I knew the environment much better than when a young boy.

My parents, presumably gratified by my interest in the story, bought Kidnapped. Screeching halt. I tried twice to get into the book, but the dialect was too alien and Stevenson assumed that the reader understood a wealth of different things about Scotland and its relations with England. (Only 1/4 Campbell: I don't keep track of clan leaders)

For an adult, the book is worth the time. David isn't the same kind of resourceful hero (as witness his time on the island), and is fairly prickly, but the story works.

I don't know if the picture of the Highlanders is true to life, but it is crisp and lively. If you haven't read it, you'll probably like it.

Once I got past Margaret Wise Brown (I wish I had her wordsmith skills), there seemed to be three classes of books: Winnie-the-Pooh class, Green Smoke-class, and Gulliver's Travels class. (We tended to get more British children's book authors, possibly because it was easier to get them from James Thin than from New York.) For some reason I never was very enthusiastic about Winnie (and Paddington was only a little better) myself, and never read them with our kids. But Wind in the Willows I can still read for fun. Odd that the sophisticated stories and the ultra-simple ones are the ones with better staying power. (There was a bit of a furor when the library pitched Mary Poppins, but when I went back to read it as an adult I realized why nobody had taken it off the shelf in years--it isn't really very good.)

With no TV (only a few hours at night), and radio broadcasts more static-y than I cared to put up with, I browsed the eclectic mix lying around at home. I wasn't Christian and eschewed the obviously Christian books, but Gabriel and the Creatures was nicely offbeat and Manson's Tropical Diseases endlessly fascinating; there was Ayesha, Rabelais... but funny thing: when I started reading Ian Fleming all the James Bond books suddenly and permanently vanished.

EAA 2013

The Oshkosh EAA week is fun. We went today, with a couple of friends (thanks to the generous donation of someone with extra tickets). We stayed until after Yves Rossy flew.

My favorite part of the place was the innovation hall and environs. I wouldn't have thought that compressed natural gas would have enough power to compensate for the overhead of the heavy tank, but apparently at these pressures it has 38% higher octane than aviation fuel. And there was an ultra-high altitude glider, a display of heads-up display, the new Orion project exhibit (I wonder how often names are reused), and others. I spent quite a while talking with a fellow with a 40-pound electronics crate, used to plug in avionics modules for rocket guidance. That beast was solid. I'd seen how light everything had to be in a rocket, and hadn't realized how rugged some components had to be (outside of the nozzle).

True to its origins, the show offers a thousand ways to buy/build/rent and equip your own airplane. Proud owners show off their accomplishments, hobbyist groups maintain old military craft (including the only DC-3 to actually drop its men in the right spot at Ste Mere-Eglise). Larger tents hosted talks about safety, construction, regulatory nuances, and dozens of specialized topics as well. The big manufacturers were there, and so were a couple of mission groups looking for pilots. (Meanwhile back at the museum, a man who'd spent 13 years in prison after his spy plane was shot down over the USSR gave a talk on spying during the Cold War. I couldn't stay for it all, and English was not his first language so he was reading his PowerPoints. Did you know that spying is the second oldest profession, and the only one enjoined in the Bible? Actually farming is mandated too...)

The aviation show starts with the military bird show; a few overflights and then a re-enactment of Pearl Harbor (Zeros piloted by Americans, and dynamite/gasoline blasts or so we were told; the black smoke suggested heavier oil; maybe FAE). Later airplanes sometimes made "bomb" runs too, including (rather incongruously) a trainer with no bomb bay or weapon mounts.

The volunteer pilots practiced long and hard with their birds, and it showed in the tight formations they achieved. The announcer mentioned their long hours, and it occurred to me that these men had more flight time than the lads who flew them to war. Though of course the latter had to master the art of not getting killed by alert enemies, which is a whole different set of skills.

The acrobats did amazing things with their planes. Some snide cynic said that we go to auto races in hopes of seeing a crash, but that's not so. We want the acrobats to overcome the danger and do the apparently impossible. The danger has to be there, but we want the victory.

Yves rode the side of the helicopter to 6500 feet, and tried to get all the engine lights OK. They finally lit up and he fell off, and after enough of a dive he started his pulse jets. It took me a while to spot him, and I lost sight regularly. The jumbotrons showed the view from a camera on his wing, and when he reached his flight limit of 2000 feet he opened his chute. Which means we could hear the man flying his jets, and see the on-again/off-again contrails, but we couldn't get a good look at him until he reached the ground. He's not a daredevil--developing that kind of rig he'd have been dead already if he was.

Tomorrow the sunburns will be annoying, but today we had a good time.

St GKC?

A post on a tweet about an announcement that doesn't appear online: an interesting idea if true--opening the case for canonization for G.K.Chesterton.

IIRC candidates for sainthood are supposed to exemplify "heroic virtue." Working as a writer and exercising gifts in the life of the mind while enjoying marriage and the pleasures of the table isn't quite the image surrounding most saints of the calendar. Martyrdom, yes. Spending years trying to guide monks or nuns, yes. Fasts, working with the poor, becoming pope; those seem to be more traditional. But recently I gather they've been trying to include more married saints, to emphasize that marriage can be a sanctifying vocation too. (About time)

There's some dispute about the role of saints in the church, but all factions agree that saints can be examples for the rest of us. I could do worse than imitate GKC.

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Doing a little tracking: From Facebook

Here is the exact wording from Dale's announcement at the conference:

"Martin Thompson says that Bishop Peter Doyle 'has given me permission to report that the Bishop of Northampton is sympathetic to our wishes and is seeking a suitable cleric to begin an investigation into the potential for opening a cause for Chesterton.'"

World Without Wide Web

The DSL modem went south on us Friday afternoon, and we're not expecting a replacement until Tuesday. Naturally enough we don't have smart phones and so internet connection means going to the library or the coffeeshop.

It makes an interesting difference in the household rhythms. Going camping is different--that disrupts everything. Here we're living ordinary lives at home, but without the net.

We didn't get a lot of news. We get the paper, but that's mostly useful for local news. Not much else: the radio is very abbreviated and we don't get TV reception. Not that TV news is worth much anyhow.

My better half and I spent a fair bit of time on the computers anyway, but it was creating lesson plans and editing and doing long-overdue file cleanup. And it was maybe only half the time we normally do. And we couldn't keep up with email--a longtime friend is having marital difficulties and has needed some help. A lot of our planning happens with email.

When you finish one task, what do you do next? I carry a mental checklist; and various needs of the day, or the time of day, make one thing or another bubble up in the queue. It hadn't sunk in how often "check online" was bumped up in the queue.

The younger ones spent a lot of time with Spore and MineCraft and New Jedi Order (or something like that).

I was planning to monitor some projects at work and start up new job batches when the old passed my checks, but that waited until this morning: lost a few days processing time.

The garden fence is down and bundled for scrap; most of the panels for the new one are built, and a little of the garden edge cleanup is done.

Ancient autism

To a recent post AVI commented that autism didn't seem adaptive, and might be a recent development. I googled around, and in among the fever swamps of the vaccine-autism crowd are some suggestions: This paper suggests (cannot prove, of course) that folktales about changelings might refer to parents dealing with autistic children.

The new child—the changeling—is characterised by unresponsiveness, resistance to physical affection, obstreperousness, inability to express emotion, and unexplained crying and physical changes such as rigidity and deformity. Some are unable to speak.

Sometimes the fairies fancy mortals, and carry them away into their own country, leaving instead some sickly fairy child, or a log of wood so bewitched that it seems to be a mortal pining away, and dying, and being buried. Most commonly they steal children.

The parallels between changeling tales and autism, have been briefly noted by writers on the history of the disorder. Some of the features of these stories, including the initial health and beauty of the human child, the change after some period of “normalcy”, and the specific behaviours of the changeling (listed above) are well matched to symptoms in some presentations of autism.

This site also speculates:

Autism can be equated with the 'blessed Fools’ of old Russia, “who were revered for their unworldiness. The apparent insensitivity to pain, bizarre behaviour, innocence, and lack of social awareness that these “Blessed Fools” showed, suggest that they may have had autism. ” (Happe). Similarly in almost all cultures one can find anecdotes and folktales about foolish boys (note that it is a boy and not a girl as autism has always been more prevalent in boys) who take what their mother said too literally- word for word , rather than figuratively and metaphorically or idiomatically.

And quite a few people noted that in a small rule and role-bound village, Aspergers isn't a great handicap. Maybe things might get awkward at fairs, but most of the time you know your job and you just do it.

I can't see my way to the "autism advantage", but something like Aspergers might be advantageous in the right environment--some modern children with a bent for programming have proved to be quite focused and efficient programmers.

Ring tones

Ring tones are a wonderful invention. I use Morning (Peer Gynt) for calls from my better half, a bit of Carmen for my opera-fan Youngest Daughter, and so on. I need something appropriately ominous for calls from work. I wish it were possible to lump telemarketers together and assign 4'33".

I also wish it were straightforward to let some numbers assign a priority. When I'm driving it isn't easy to answer the phone (I tried a bluetooth headset but the battery didn't last long). Do I pull over to answer this, or can it wait? Suppose you had a system in which you dial the number and then #*#, and now the caller ID includes a "priority call" flag. If I opted in, so that my phone will accept priority calls from your number, now "The Hall of the Mountain King" is punctuated with whoops when you send a priority call.

Studying primitive tribes

A few years ago National Geographic carried an article about native American culture, lamenting the losses, especially of their religion. One of the letters they got in reply explained that while there had been many problems, the one thing he and his family were grateful for was that their family had been introduced to Jesus a century before.

It's a curious reversal of attitudes. There was a time when it was thought progress if aborigines picked up civilized paraphernalia and attitudes, but now there always seems to be a little groan in the reports about South American Indians explaining why the photos show t-shirts.

People just don't want to sit still for us to study them. Some little prejudice about having their own lives to lead...

The ordinary anthropologist is one who spends six weeks or six months (or even sometimes six years) among, say, the Boreyu tribe at their settlement on the Upper Teedyas River, Darndreeryland. He then returns to civilization with his photographs, tape recorders, and notebooks, eager to write his book about sex life and superstition. For tribes such as the Boreyu, life is made intolerable by all this peering and prying. They often become converts to Presbyterianism in the belief that they will thereupon cease to be of interest to anthropologists; nor in fact has this device been known to fail.

AVI noted the bitterness of disputes in anthropology. The only one I heard much about was the Margaret Mead vs Freeman feud: were Mead's informants pulling her leg? Or was Freeman following the lead of his mentor's mentor who was Mead's rejected lover? I thought I knew a little about it--when I looked it up for this post I found it was weirder than I suspected.

Maybe somebody should study the behavior of this strange tribe called anthropologists. They have taboos, rites of passage, totems and feuds--should be lots of material.

Strike the set

Ray Bradbury wrote a short piece about the fate of a movie set about to be destroyed in which the caretaker tries to show the company boss how much of their movies' wonderful illusion remains in the tools they used to make them.

Watching Pac-Man eat Mos Eisley brought that to mind.

The sense of loss isn't from remembering the money and effort that went into a one-time tool--we weren't involved in that. Is it because the illusion seems more full and real in the place it was made, and we want it to be as real as possible? Or because losing it means there's no new illusions to be made there? Or because it undermines the illusion? We've seen the place, is part of our world vanishing?

No, it isn't that big a deal to me--other people feel the loss much more strongly--but I do feel it a little, and wonder why. The Phantom Edit was competent. Lucas shouldn't direct his own movies.

In any event, something seems wrong when significant fractions of our shared experience are illusions.

Antibodies and autism

The report studied the possibility that there might be maternal antibodies to brain proteins in the developing baby. (Followed from SciTechDaily) I'm not familiar enough with the methods to decide if their approach is solid, but they do find indications that mothers with certain antibodies mostly have an autistic child. At this point there's not enough known to decide if the antibody reaction causes problems or merely indicates them, nor is this a source of all kinds of autism, but it looks like another part of the puzzle.

Magnetic reconnection

I've mentioned magnetic reconnection before: how twisted magnetic fields can "short circuit" and throw ions and electrons and x-rays around. A couple of NASA sun observers caught such a thing in action. Go watch.

After pregnancy

BBC posted a story asking Are women's bodies still beautiful after pregnancy?. I'm a little puzzled why anybody would think this a live issue. Even if you don't trust the evidence of your eyes, consider that most women who have one child have more than one.

Puff piece for a new book...

Number worship

David Warren has at the worship of numbers. It is all too easy to believe that if we have a number for a thing we must know it in a more fundamental way. Even if we assume the number is well-measured (usually it isn't), then you have to ask what it means. Just having an equation doesn't make your social theory right; as Pauli said, it may be "not even wrong."

And when a government or quango collects numbers about people, they get delusions of grandeur.

How we live our lives is God’s business, & none of the government’s until we are reasonably suspected of a crime. Their job is to provide for our defence against rapine & massacre by foreign powers & domestic criminals, in return for modest taxes. It is an important job, from which they should not be distracted by their own alien & criminal propensities.

Burning time

We took a couple of youngsters to Indian Lake Park this afternoon. They liked the trail and the views, and discovering new things. One of the signs explained that in Indian times the whole area was prairie, preserved as such by fires. When German settlers started living there they suppressed (or did not set) fires, and trees began to take over the hill--they dominate today.

We've been through a few years of drought, and though there were sporadic fires they weren't widespread. Assuming the climate was the same 200 years ago as now (not always a safe assumption), I estimate that fires would have been more than 20 years apart, which would be plenty of time to get some trees started. (Googling suggests that's a good estimate) So I'm WAG'ing that fires would have been set.

So what was their cue to toss the coals into the brush and take to the lake? Given that some of the plants could grow over 2m tall in a year, maybe it was when the grass got too high; which might be every year or every other year. It seems a drastic way to mow the lawn, but in the event it seemed to work.

We need some new slogans

"No taxation without representation" is still, unfortunately, a useful rallying cry. Quite a few government bodies can fiddle with fees and taxes without anybody voting on the result.

But more recent events demand new battle cries.

I cannot think of any reason why a citizen (or even a subject, or a corporation) should be compelled to submit to secret rulings made by a secret court. And when a judge can take control of the entire school system of a state and revise it to suit his fancy (including demanding huge increases in funding), there's no longer any pretense that the government serves the people. No legislation without representation!

There are not enough hours in the day to read and understand the Niagara of rules promulgated by agencies given authority by enabling legislation. If it is impossible to understand, it is unjust to demand obedience. No regulation without legislation!

What else do we need?

Tribal sacrifices

AVI notes that "climate change" is a "social truth:" something one is required to believe to be part of the tribe, even if it is not obviously connected to the definition of the tribe.

Youngest Daughter noticed that "climate change" demands sacrifices to make sure the sun comes up correctly. The Aztecs ripped out hearts: we're more benign (I think), war on coal suffices. Freezing is much gentler, I suppose.

The Mayans were more honorable. Most of the time they had to provide their own blood, and only occasionally sacrifice some neighbors.

Recipes

From time to time I wonder if the writers laboring in the "Taste" section of the newspaper feel pressure to come up with novel combinations.  This morning's tome included a report explaining how watermelon and feta cheese taste wonderful together.

I think Bolcom described it well.

Language of smells

I'd been musing on the question of whether we could more easily distinguish smells if we developed a language for them: that having words for a scent might make it easier to identify. I see a bird and think "bird" but Eldest Son notices details of plumage because he likes to identify the kinds--so he registers things I don't.

I vaguely remembered an experiment in which people were asked to track the scent of some target object dragged across a field, and were remarkably successful (though they had to go on hands and knees to do it).

So I googled for it, and as usual other things turned up. It turns out we do seem to have a good sense of smell after all, and Shepherd beat me to the speculation that we need a vocabulary: "In the enlarged processing capacity for perceiving and discriminating odors, language plays a critical role. This seems paradoxical, for we have great difficulty describing a smell in words."

I wonder how you'd go about such a thing. I guess the first step is to try to collect the work perfumers and wine tasters have done along the way and try to test some "standard scents" (concocting brand new names with minimal associations), and see how far one can get with combinations and how far one has to expand the set of "standard scents". If the set numbers more than a few hundred, only children are likely to be able to learn the new language. Which also might be interesting to look into--can children easily learn scent language?

UPDATE: 8-July-2013: See the New Yorker article about wine tasters. There's a lot of expectation in the evaluation, but we can do fairly well...

Hernandez test

Aaron Hernandez: An Early Warning in 2010 NFL Draft Profile Before the NFL Draft, a Personality Test Raised a Flag; Lowest Possible Score for 'Social Maturity'.

I hope I may be forgiven for wondering why anybody would bother paying Human Resource Tactics for this kind of thing. "While psychological profiles can be subjective and far from foolproof, NFL experts say the majority of teams use them to guide their draft choices." The report said he was 10 out of 10 for focus and for mental quickness, and 9 for receptivity to coaching--which seems nice and clear--but "he enjoys living on the edge of acceptable behavior and that he may be prone to partying too much and doing questionable things that could be seen as a problem for him and his team" That's pretty weaselly. What did they know that they based the evaluation on?

Wisdom and the Will of the People

Some things don't seem to change: H.H. Munro wrote this short story in 1929. "Moung Thwa nodded his head gravely, with the air of one who reverenced and distrusted all Governments."

Ducking problems

We all know about "Greyhound therapy," where a troublesome patient or homeless guy is given a ticket to some other town. Now he's somebody else's problem, and we can breathe easy.

Right. Sure.

I've heard explanations for the pederast priest coverup that range among "protecting reputation at all costs", "lavender mafia coverup", and "applying then-current psychiatric models." I can't guess what the real mix of reasons was, but the effect was the same: shift the problem someplace else.

Last week Middle Daughter was threatened by part of a crew that is due to be evicted in a couple of months--I gather that Section 8 beneficiaries are harder to evict (the father conducts strong-arm extortion, apparently has been teaching the wee ones how to steal jewelry, etc.).

So if the neighborhood can survive until the end of August, all is solved, right?

Who gets them next? Maybe us? Maybe you?

Instead of deciding what we will do with this violent team, we're shuffling them around.

You may say that nobody is irredeemable. Maybe the Greyhound will take the schizophrenic to a place where he will want to take his meds. Maybe the pederast priest will repent. Maybe this neighbor will find honest work.

I believe in miracles, and that anyone can be redeemed. Making that the foundation of policy is presumptuous.

Changing NewSpeak

A few days ago AVI pointed to an article about Europe and noted that the way people thought even 50 years ago isn't the same as the way we think today, even when the words are the same.

Words are slippery things. I think Confucius was right: you have to get the names of things right if you propose to accomplish anything important. "Freedom from want" is security, which is in tension with liberty, but the phrase has the word "freedom" in there, so it must be about liberty, right? Sort of, in some situations. But not in general.

Artists like to think they set the direction of the culture; that they can change the world. This kind of hubris is irritating, all the more so since it is often true, and still more so when the changes they invoke are for the worse. Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence description of the last century (1890's to 1990's) included familiar and (to me) unfamiliar names who aimed to overthrow Western culture and replace it with solipsism or nihilism. And, as Francis Schaeffer also described, they did. He attributed the initial change to philosophers and Barzun does not, but aside from that the progress of the ideas from the ambitions of a few artists to filling pop culture looks the same in both.

In the process a lot of words changed meaning. The denotation of "respectability" is still mostly there, but the connotation is now one of hypocrisy. We still have the fact: we respect some people because they live out good character and others because they do the fashionably respectable (usually "green") sorts of things--no change there. But we wouldn't call them respectable, because that's rather insulting.

We had one word "respectability" doing duty for several meanings: "worthy of respect" and "appearing worthy of respect". A little concentrated focus on the latter colors the meaning of the first. Combine this with claims that "authenticity" matters more than rules of behavior (Does exercising self control make you a hypocrite?) and efforts to improve yourself start to sound unhealthy.

Picking out imprecise language is an easy game: politics relies on it, so does seduction, and other forms of advertising. It turns up in church too: I hate the loose description of an emotional high as a "spiritual experience", and similar shortcuts.

When the fuzzy terms are magical ("rights", "love", "democracy", "fairness") slight of hand makes it impossible to withhold support or enthusiasm. The "Arab Spring" was democratic, so it had to be good and you were bad if you expressed doubts.

Of course trying to translate your real meaning into the current vocabulary is fraught with problems. You're apt to find that the way the terms of the debate are framed leaves no room for any novelty, and your attempt at precision gets plugged into irrelevant categories. Ruggieri and Ricci had a hard time trying to translate Christian concepts into Chinese, because the philosophical and theological language didn't fit.

Jesus used parables that both illustrated his points and helped define his terms, as in the story of the good Samaritan. It isn't that hard to similarly illustrate and define precise language, but it has to be imbedded in something people will listen to. I wonder if there's a handy set of short illustrations that show the distinctions in the magic words. They probably take too long to use in any debate--I see instantaneous reaction to any questioning of magic words.

Clarification

I should not post late at night.

A few things might make the 4-quark post a little clearer.

Quantum mechanics assumes that an object can be described by a linear combination of states, where a state can be such things as:

• an electron and a positron orbiting each other with a specific angular momentum
  
• an up quark and an anti-up quark orbiting each other with that specific angular momentum
  
• a neutrino and an anti-neutrino orbiting each other with that specific angular momentum
  
• an electron and a positron and a photon, with the photon going between the two
  
• a top quark and an anti-top quark orbiting each other with that specific angular momentum
  
• a neutron and an anti-neutron orbiting each other ditto
  
• other combinations that have the same quantum numbers (charge, angular momentum, etc)
  

The experienced reader will have noticed that the masses of these combinations seem a little disproportionate: the top quark is perhaps a hundred billion times heavier than a neutrino. Can it be in the same mix? Yes: but its contribution will be correspondingly tiny. Or if you want to try to interpret that statement, you might say something like: "It only exists a little bit there, or it only exists for a tiny amount of time."

Interpretations are controversial, and these are no exception. But one way to understand it goes like this. Particles that only exist for a small amount of time have (thanks to the Uncertainty Principle) some fuzziness in their energy. For a big fuzziness in energy/mass (being "off the mass shell"(*)) the particle can only exist for a proportionately tiny amount of time. (δE δT > h).

If a particle is unstable, it typically winds up in a final state based on one of those component states. If possible. One way to think of a positive pion (mass 140 MeV/c^2) is as a combination of a proton (mass 938 MeV/c^2) and an anti-neutron (mass 940 MeV/c^2). That is handy for describing some of its interactions, but you'll notice the mass numbers don't add up--it is the proverbial gallon of frogs in a pint jar--so it never decays into a proton and neutron. It doesn't decay into a positron and electron neutrino either, but instead into a positive muon and muon neutrino, but that's a topic for another day.

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(*) The term "mass shell" comes from the description of the possible particle momenta in momentum 4-space (Px,Py,Pz,Energy). For a particle of known mass, the possible momenta are restricted to a 3-dimensional "cone" or shell in the 4-space. If there's fuzziness in the mass because of the Uncertainty Principle, the momentum can be away from that cone/shell: "off the mass shell."

4 quarks?

The description over at SciTech Daily of the new particle is pretty good. Go read it. The upshot is that it looks like there's a particle that is made of 4 quarks instead of 2 or 3. It isn't stable, of course, and its most striking decay mode (the one they detected) is to a charged pion and a J/psi particle. To reconstruct the mother particle mass you need the momenta of the daughters, and their identities. A J/psi decaying to two muons or two electrons is pretty easy to identify. The pion--well, it might be a kaon or a proton. So if they do the same as other groups do they tried all the different possibilities, and it turns out (in this case) that the pion hypothesis gives a clean mass peak and the others are washed out. The mass peak shown in the article is pretty tight, so there's not much wiggle room for a third undetected daughter particle.

In fact since the events occur at a known energy (they used a tuned e+e- collider) they can also look at the "Dalitz plot" which shows the mass-squared combinations of two pions and a J/psi. That's a handy way to look for structure, and they find it.

So what would 4 quarks (actually 2 quarks and 2 anti-quarks) look like? That's hard to say for sure. From the speed with which the pion and J/psi separate we know it isn't from a loosely bound system with the pion sort of orbiting the c/c-bar pair (charm and anti-charm).

As the article above says, low energy is harder to understand than high energy. That might seem odd, but imagine wooden blocks covered in velcro. At low speeds they may stick together in ways that are hard to describe, but at high speeds they bounce off each other, and at very high speeds they shatter in ways that are easily described.

The thing is too far off the mass shell to include a b-quark, since the lightest known b-meson is much heavier than the available energy. I have to run a few numbers, but this looks interesting. People have been looking for 4-quark states for quite a while.

Risks and rewards

We call it foolish when a man undertakes a project where the risks outweigh the rewards. Sometimes we don't value the rewards he is striving for; such as when a boy takes a dare to climb the quarry wall. He is looking for peer approval and to prove that he can do it; but I don't look for affirmation from teenagers and I suspect that I can't climb anymore (and hope I never have to try).

Russian roulette is a fool's game: there's no reward at all and the risk is utter loss. Regular roulette more nearly balances risk and reward (but the house gets the edge). The risks of driving to work every day we call negligible (weather permitting) compared to the rewards of the work.

Let's look a bit closer at one aspect of that last case. There are two types of driving risk: those where someone or something else fails, and those where we break the rules ourselves, such as by being inattentive. The consequences of breaking the rules--trying to change lanes without checking all the mirrors or looking to see what's wrong with the radio instead of watching to road--are spectacular, and seem disproportionate to the apparently minor reward of arriving at work.

But without the potentially deadly speed of cars you likely wouldn't have the job at all. The speed and power of our transportation grid lets us employ and feed far more people than we could otherwise--you might not be alive at all without cars. We forget the real reward: you get to live. The risk is that you may suffer or die in an accident; the reward is commensurate with the risk.

There are major risks to breaking the 10 Commandments. Even neglecting eternity, murder is likely to get you dead too, and coveting tends to poison your enjoyment of what you have. God, being love, designed a system that will be better than fair. What are the rewards for following the rules that the stand against the punishments for breaking the rules? What happens when we recast these not in terms of the consequences, but (as with "honor your father and mother") in terms of the benefits?

Stealing destroys the time and effort of someone else. Every thing we have represents the time God gave us that we traded to get the thing. Giving, which I suppose we may take as the opposite of stealing, trades part of our lives to benefit someone else. It sounds like something you don't want to take lightly. If I'm going to trade a day of my all-too-short life to benefit someone else, I want that to be a serious benefit and not some cluttering knick-knack.

In 1Cor11:23-30 Paul wrote that eating the bread or drinking the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner had terrible consequences. Since a loving God instituted the observance, we should expect that participating has benefits at least commensurate with the consequences. That means it isn't a purely symbolic observance, though we don't see visible effects. I'll let theologians describe how it works, if they can.

Sex participates in the creation of human beings, and that alone is a grand adventure. Raising them adds even more responsibility and glory. The rewards of obeying the rules here are also dramatic.

Paul urged the Thessalonians to try to live quiet lives. We make that sound dull, but it should be rich.

Use Cases

The library remodeling seems nearly done. (The sidewalk is almost open again.)

It looks like they plan to mount the sign at ground level. Visibility isn't such a huge issue, since the hills and sharp bends mean that you can't even see the building from more than about a block away.

But have they thought about how people will use the sign?

At night homeless guys who were kicked out of the shelter will sleep behind the letters, and trash will accumulate under them.

In the day children will climb on them and jump from one to the next. They don't look sturdy enough for the purpose.

Squeezing harder makes it bigger

That sounds like trying to squash political dissent, but it is how some materials tested at Argonne behave. The article is here. They squeezed (at 9,000 - 18,000 times atmospheric pressure) zinc cyanide in the presence of various fluids (e.g. water and methanol), and some combinations doubled the original material volume. Somehow the force rearranged the bonds to force fluid into the lattice, and in some cases the new lattice structure stayed the same size even after the pressure was removed. Compare with wet crepe paper, which gets a lot smaller when squeezed.

In one case (isopropanol was the fluid) the product was amorphous rather than crystalline, and shining X-rays on it caused it to shrink somewhat. This has to make X-ray crystallographic analysis complicated.

Although ScitechDaily suggests that this might have application in health care, zinc cyanide is not ideal, being poisonous and explosively reactive. But maybe there are some other substances that will do this too.

The 2-fold pressure-induced percentage volume expansion is 50–100 times larger than that previously observed in zeolites due to superhydration or cation migration (100% cf. 0.8–2.5% volume expansion).(35) While the increase in volume may seem surprisingly large, the resulting new phases contain guest-filled pores, such that the overall system volume (solid sample and fluid medium) is reduced. This eliminates inefficiencies in space filling associated with the interpenetrated structure (Zn(CN)2-I).

So it makes sense, but it isn't ordinary.

Clarity

If you get rid of the fat in a brain, you can see through it. Literally. Go watch the video.

No, it can't be done with living tissue...

Another breastfeeding benefit?

Study shows breastfeeding improves brain development in infants.

The prevailing consensus from large-scale epidemiological studies is that children who were breastfed perform, on average, higher on tests of IQ and cognitive functioning than do children who were exclusively formula-fed, even when factors such as birth-weight, gestation duration, and maternal education and socioeconomic status (SES) are accounted for.

...

The primary hypothesized substrate for these developmental advantages is the rich compliment of long-chain fatty acids found in breast milk, specifically docosahexaenoic (DHA) and arachidonic (AA) acids. Together, DHA and AA comprise approximately 20% of the fatty acid content of the brain and are involved in early neurodevelopment by promoting healthy neuronal growth, repair, and myelination.

... and from the abstract

Positive relationships between white matter microstructure and breastfeeding duration are also exhibited in several brain regions, that are anatomically consistent with observed improvements in cognitive and behavioral performance measures.

They had 3 groups: exclusively breastfed, exclusively formula, and some of both. There are a few minor oddities with the exclusively formula group: a tighter distribution of gestation times (rms of 12 rather than 34 or 40--is this enriched in c-sections?),slightly lower birth weight with a bigger rms, and what has to be a typo on the Mullen visual reception score (rms of 1 rather than 10-12). But nothing really jumps out at me.

They looked at the infants while they slept in a quiet MRI. I didn't know such a thing existed.

The raw curves for the amount of white matter vs age for the different groups look quite similar. The plot of difference vs mean is clear enough, but the individual variation is huge. It looks like a real effect.

The "receptive language" score differences (Receptive language: breastfed=41.1 ± 3.3, formula-fed=34.5 ± 5.6, p-value that these are the same distribution=0.0019) look rather different (most of the rest are not so dramatic, but overall breast-fed score higher).

I wonder about that "receptive language" difference. Do nursing mothers sing more to their babies?

I also wonder if the nutrition is the entire story. Being in such close contact with the mother for long periods should have some effect too. It might be interesting to look at whether there are brain changes (well before and after) when someone gets married and starts to spend more time touching someone else: Most of us don't do a lot of touching outside the immediate family. POSSLQ's probably muddy the possible change. Longitudinal study is the ticket here.

Color detection

Einstein got his Nobel for explaining the photoelectric effect (not for relativity). The photoelectric effect was a little bit of a puzzle. Put a cesium electrode in a vaccuum, and shine light on it. You get a small current flow to a nearby electrode. If you make the light more intense, proportionately more current flows. If you put a slightly negative relative voltage on the nearby electrode, you get a little less current, but it still flows until you reach a critical voltage. So far so good: electrons are getting knocked off with some maximum energy.

If you change the frequency of the light but keep the intensity the same, the current stays the same too--until the frequency drops too low, and then you don't get any current anymore. And if you check that voltage difference that stops the current, that rises and falls linearly with frequency. V ∝ (f-f_crit).

Einstein explained it: light comes in units, in which the energy is proportional to the frequency, and electrons are bound to atoms with well-defined energies. If the light particle has less energy than that binding energy, the electron stays put. If more, it kicks the electron loose, and gives it a little extra energy, up to as much as the whole leftover energy (usually less, though).

So if you don't know the photon energy you can figure it out from how much energy electrons get kicked out with. (provided the photon energy isn't too low)

It is kind of hard to see this effect in air, because the electrons collide with air molecules and lose energy. It would be even harder to see it in a solid, unless the solid layers were ultra-thin: say 50 nanometers or so. The more energetic electrons (from higher-frequency light: e.g. blue) travel farther through the thin layers than those from lower-frequency light (e.g. red). In the same way as with the traditional experiment, you can add a negative voltage to the deeper layers: the more energetic electrons will still get through but the lower energy (from red light) won't. Varying the voltage lets you determine what the energy was.

So you can have solid-state frequency detection in a tiny (they estimate 100 nanometer square pixels are possible) device. If you use several readout layers you could get "instantaneous" estimates, which would be good for multi-frequency fiber devices.

The CPU of the machine you read this on uses layers that can be as thin as 0.5nm, so this looks doable. This falls in the category of "I should have thought of that," but I wasn't paying attention to how thin micro devices were getting.

Wasting time learning

You can start with his collection of "How not to do it" posts. Watch how to dispose of 10 tons of sodium. Or

Diazomethane’s a very useful reagent, but it has to be treated the right way. You can’t buy it – no one will ship the stuff – so you have to make it fresh. (There are several such reagents). For many years there have been chemicals in the catalogs whose only real use has been to generate diazomethane when needed. Generally this involves treating some nasty N-nitroso compound with base in ether, then distilling over the ether solution of the reagent, which is a distinctive bright yellow.

There’s where some of the trickiness comes in. That diazo group is looking for an excuse to revert back to nitrogen gas, which process comes with an inevitable no-substitutions side order of kaboom. The chemist’s job is to not give it that excuse.

Philosophy class

I've wondered what our civil discourse would be like if high schoolers were given a little course in philosophy. Would people still use words like democracy and diversity as incantations or argument-stoppers, never asking whether they have anything to do with the topic at hand?

I wish we had something like the French have: the requirement of philosophy for a degree. OK, this is the "Bac Litteraire" which I gather is like high school plus a couple of years of college, so it isn't quite comparable to a high-school course. But suppose a largish fraction of the voting population was at least exposed to the notion that it helps to understand what you are talking about. Would it make a difference in our culture or our politics--or perhaps even the advertisements?

Three things come to mind.

I know several people who tell me C.S. Lewis was hard to understand. When I was young I thought that with patience you could teach just about anybody anything, but I'm not so sanguine these days.

Maybe the AP courses would be thorough, but if the required psychology and sociology courses are any guide the result would probably be jargon heavy and biased.

The French have had this since Napoleon, and they seem to chase the banners of "god words" just as eagerly as Americans.

Gut feelings

It is a bit over-the-top to refer to "The second brain in our stomachs" as the BBC article titles the "network of neurons that line your stomach and your gut". I suppose you could call the network a "dedicated I/O processor" since it is ultimately responsible for deciding what to digest and what to hurl. Different parts of the network watch for different things.

It wouldn't do to have just one or two neurons monitoring "stretch", you need them all over the place and their output needs to be coordinated to give a final value of "I'm empty", "I'm a little full", "I'm very full", or "I've got an odd lump of something in here."

In addition, different parts of the gut produce different hormones. That sort of communication might as well be done locally, and the results sent to the brain; so in that sense there is some local "intelligence" in the network.

And we've been learning that intestinal flora either directly secrete hormones that effect us or that stimulate the gut to secrete them (I'm not sure if they have been able to distinguish the two possibilities), and at UCLA researchers say that consuming probiotics changed brain activity. It isn't clear what the significance of that was.

During the resting brain scan, the women consuming probiotics showed greater connectivity between a key brainstem region known as the periaqueductal grey and cognition-associated areas of the prefrontal cortex. The women who ate no product at all, on the other hand, showed greater connectivity of the periaqueductal grey to emotion- and sensation-related regions, while the group consuming the non-probiotic dairy product showed results in between.

Unfortunately I don't have access to the GastroJournal report, so I can't get a sense of how good their results were. There were only 12 women in each group, and reading brain scans without knowing what you are looking for sounds like a fruitful source of false positives. So I'm dubious, but willing to be convinced: We're full of surprises. But even if there are changes, it would still have to be proven that they are due to the bacteria.