The Forgotten Revolution by Lucio Russo

The history of science in the West, as those few of us who remember it goes, has the ancient Egyptians inventing some primitive technology, the ancient Greeks inventing math and science but scorning technology as not fit for truly noble thinkers, Romans who developed civil engineering and sanitation, and then a lot of barbarians who wrecked everything until math started being rediscovered and science and technology re-invented and went on to exceed anything mankind had ever seen before.

Name an ancient Greek scientist? Archimedes, Aristarchus, Aristotle, Ptolemy? (Aristotle does not really count, btw) Check the dates. That's quite a range of time.

It turns out that there's quite a bit missing, and some of what we know isn't quite true.

We tend to telescope everything from 1000BC to 400AD as "ancient," giving the illusion that everything happened more or less at once.

The Forgotten Revolution goes in depth to try to find out what happened: how high the Greek science and math rose, and why things starting falling apart.

The answer is very high indeed. Pick those famous "epicycles" that Ptolemy introduced to explain the motion of planets in the sky.

• Ptolemy didn't invent them, some other Hellenists had done so centuries before. (He died in 168AD)
  
• Hellenist math was constructive, and required straight-edge and compass. For anything not perfectly circular, epicycles were inevitable.
  
• Look at this picture and tell me what you see. These are dates of astronomical measurements that went into the Almagest.
  
  

There's a nice spike at times close to Ptolemy, and a long list before--with a 2 century-long gap in the middle. Ptolemy wasn't developing something new, he was trying to retrieve something old. And since little details like known heliocentric theories were left out of the Almagest, it wasn't a thorough review.

Hint. Ptolemy was from the Imperial Roman era.

What sorts of things did the Hellenists have? Lenses, steam engines, gears and (one infers) metal screws, first principles shipbuilding design (so much for a disdain for technology), hydrostatics for pipe design, gigantic lighthouses (probably with a parabolic mirror--hard to be certain), timing of systolic and diastolic pulses of the blood, watermills, and of course differential gearing in the Antikythera mechanism. And mechanical puppets, and something that sounds like silent movies.

Astronomy

Russo is a physicist, and also versed in classical literature. This is rare. Most classicists don't know much math or science, and most scientists aren't familiar with old forms of Greek. So things like this slip by (p106)

The common idea is that Aristarchus was too far ahead of his time to have had a lasting influence on the course of science, and support for it is generally found in the accusation of impiety supposedly leveled against him because of his heliocentrism. The belief that Aristarchus was accused of impiety originates with the seventeen century philologist Gilles Menage who … changed a passage in Plutarch by amending an accusative into a nominative and vice versa.

Russo points out that planetaria were well known, and that Cicero's description of Archimedes' version is consistent with a heliocentric mechanism--not so much with a geocentric one. (Another advantage of having somebody with a technical background peering at the language details.)

More astronomy: Geminus (about 50BC) compiles a list of star positions and "warning the reader not to suppose it ("sphere of fixed stars") to have a physical existence, since the stars are at different distances from us." And "According to Pliny, Hipparchus (died 120BC) compiled his catalog of stars precisely so that later generations might deduce from it the displacements of stars and the possible existence of novae." (Talk about a long-term research program! Halley (1718 AD) recorded differences with Sirius, Arcturus, and Aldebaran.)

AristarchusEratosthenes famously measured the circumference of the Earth. From textual evidence and some references to the verticality of the sun in a band of about 200 miles, Russo strongly suspects that AristarchusEratosthenes (head of library of Alexandria too) had a team dig the famous well in a more accurate spot than merely a handy town, and went on to define his own version of the stadia, linked to the Earth's circumference. This suggests a little funding...

Technology, travel, engineering

How about military technology? The torsion catapult (about the middle of the 3rd century BC) was more powerful and faster to use than the trebuchet of western medieval times more than a millennium later. There's some evidence that a repeating catapult was used, and according to Philo of Byzantium, air piston catapults (thanks to Ctesibius, died 222BC).

Travel? Pytheas (late 4'th century BC) traveled direct to India from the Gulf of Aden--no sticking solely to the coastline; that's high seas navigation. He also got far enough north that the sun stayed up all summer, and even saw the polar pack ice. Herodotus preserves (and disdains) a report suggesting a circumnavigation of Africa.

Civil engineering? Canals, a blossoming of irrigation methods used from that day to this, aqueducts, and so on. Remember the Roman aqueduct system?

Vitruvius' regard for the role of applied science is the greatest of any Latin author. He enumerates the fields of knowledge required by a good architect … writing, drawing, geometry, arithmetic, history, philosophy, music, medicine, law, and astronomy. But consider the ensuing explanation of the uses of this knowledge: astronomy is regarded as necessary, in essence, for determining the four points of the compass, and geometry for understanding the uses of squares and levels….

Vitruvius' work represents the highest level achieved by a Roman technical treatise. As for the rest, Frontinus, the author of the main Latin work on aqueducts, systematically mixes up the flow rate of a pipe with its cross section, thus ignoring, in particular, the role of the slope. The high technological level of Roman aqueducts seems hard to reconcile with such incompetence, but we should not forget that Frontinus was not an engineer but the bureaucrat in charge of Rome's water supply, … whereas the actual designers, builders and maintainers of the aqueducts were slaves, who of course were not in a position to write books.

In the same way we find that, for all productive activities with technological content, Rome had to import either finished goods or workers from the East.

Lighthouses:

The installation of the Pharos was considered so useful that other pharoi were erected at every important port of the Hellenized Mediterranean. But Greek sources contain no overall description or a single technological detail relative to the Pharos, even though it was regarded in its own time as one of the seven wonders of the world. This confirms how reticent our sources are about technological products, in a case where the product itself is not in doubt. Because the only extant descriptions of the Pharos are by Arab historians, who visited it long after it had ceased to function, we know very little of its technology. Yet some conjectures can be made on the basis of its purpose and contemporary knowledge. First, we can imagine that the reflector consisted, as it would today, of a parabolic mirror, all the more so because the relevant theory arose precisely around the time of the construction of the Pharos.

At this point Russo starts to stretch things a bit for my tastes--but maybe he is right:

It should be stressed that modern steam engines are not at all, as is often implicitly assumed, an invention independent of the Hellenist engines; there is a continuous line of descent. Heron's expositions were studied carefully by Leonardo da Vinci, among others.

Apparently Leonardo drew pictures based on the old books, including a picture or so that aren't found in any of the known old books. Heron (1st century AD) seems to have been a compiler rather than a scientist or engineer himself. The dioptera Heron describes used small screws, but Heron's description of how to make screws only works well for big ones, and in his Automata he never uses gears in the descriptions at all, only friction devices. But gears would have worked better in some cases, and we know that centuries before there were precision gears.

This implies that by Heron's time there had been a significant technology loss. There was still a lot to see. Heron says that an early automatic play "merely showed, by way of motion, a face with blinking eyes. … Heron also says that with "still" automata, one can either show a character in motion, or a character appearing and disappearing."

There is some suggestion of the use of acids in mining, and we know they had pumps to raise water 30 meters out of an underground mine; some of the hardware is still there.

Medicine

Apparently Galen was not the pinnacle of "ancient" medicine. Herophilus, for example, had "a water "stopwatch" built that could be adjusted for the age of the patient." He described some mental illnesses, studied the circulatory system (with terms still used), studied the eye with great care, discovered the nerves (sensory and motor both!), and "For some diseases, such as the cholera, it is recorded that Herophilus handed down no treatment: this is perhaps the best proof of how serious he was in his medicine."

Science as such

Russo goes to considerable pains to define a scientific attitude as abstracting details from reality to create models of more or less validity--and making clear that the models are not the reality. It seems fairly clear that this attitude was gone by Imperial Roman times. He argues for its presence in Hellenist times. This is a little tricky, since most of the Hellenist scientist are known only by later references; not much is left.

Russo also complains that a reliance on "homogeneity" undermines science, but another word for that in context is "dimensional analysis." Things like x^2+x^3 were allegedly not dealt with by Greek mathematicians (not clear that this is true, BTW). If x is a distance, the expression as it stands does not seem to make any sense. Given how important constructive techniques were for the Greeks (They didn't have computers, OK? And you can try mapping the measurements from a small construction to a big one by hand, but I'll bet you make mistakes.), it isn't too surprising that these wouldn't have been high priority.

Did Newton base his work on gravitation on old Greek manuscripts? That seems likely to Russo and extremely unlikely to me. Some extraordinarily muddled Roman descriptions of Greek astronomy have triangles emanating from the Sun to move the planets. This, to Russo, looks a lot like Newton's geometric explanation of step-by-step motions of the planets under the Sun's gravitation, and Russo's explanation of how the language could have been garbled is quite plausible. However, untangling that rubbish is harder than figuring it out in the first place, and I think Newton's work was independent.

Newton acknowledges his debt in optics to the Archbishop de Dominis, who used Greek terminology and borrowed from Arabs.

It seems that the development of optics was plagued by amazing bad luck: The "Ancients" knew how to make good lenses but did not know what to make of them and kept them as baubles, later intellectuals--not just Leonardo and Fracastoro, but also Roger Bacon and Gosseteste centuries earlier--knew many uses for them, yet could not build them and had never seen such things. Some medieval manuscripts even show astronomers looking at the sky through long tubes; the incongruity has been addressed by postulating that these were empty sighting-tubes!

Consider that Bacon, in the fifth book of the Opus maius, waxed enthusiastic about the Ancient's ability to enlarge small objects and to bring faraway ones close, using appropriate configurations of lenses and mirrors

What happened?

Disasters piled on limited knowledge pools seems the likely culprit. Quite a bit of this is my interpretation of his data. He doesn't devote as much time as I'd like to seeing what went wrong.

Thebes had the death penalty for spying on their shipyards. No technology spread if they could help it. I don't know if I'm reading between the lines, but the complete absence of details about lighthouse construction sounds as though it was better for your health not to be too specific.

If you have many small pools of knowledge trading finished goods, if not the technology proper, with a big pool of talent at Alexandria, you can keep developing sciences and skills and reverse engineering things for quite a while provided there's peace.

There wasn't. Rome was expanding. Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier, and Syracuse wasn't the last place; the Romans kept on.

Euergetes II (Ptolemy VIII) perhaps decided that the Romans would like him better if he moved against Greeks, so he persecuted the Greek population of Alexandria--including the ones from the library. Almost nobody was left, and some of the survivors from the library seem to have headed East far out of Roman reach; some suggest all the way to India.

Do I need to say more? Even if the books survive, explaining what exactly what the most advanced treatises mean demands some humans who still understand. Lose continuity, and the most advanced material is now unreadable--or if readable, not understood. Tell me what the average news reporter would make of the phrase fiber bundle, and compare it to the link. And any complicated technology demands the work of different kinds of experts. Lose any of them, and you can't repair it anymore.

So the Roman predilection for encyclopedic works rather than deep analysis makes sense--they don't understand the hard stuff. Nobody did anymore. And you can only coast so long on an encyclopedia, especially when it get corrupted and larded with superstition.

Can it happen again?

Of course. The barbarians are always with us, both outside and inside. We spread our knowledge far more widely today, so the catastrophe would have to be much greater to hit it all, but the same problem of transmission of the hard details remains. Don't count on Wikipedia being there after a disaster; think in terms of what books the local library kept from the great starving seventy years ago when the burners went through.

Word problems

On another blog I mentioned a method of trying to parse word problems I'd used with several of our kids, and from the dead silence that ensued I conclude that people are too embarrassed to ask what it was. Or something.

Blogger is not terribly friendly when I want to use and re-use many small images, so I stashed the whole thing on another web site. The idea is quite simple: look for key words and keep careful track of your units.

Resisting "Columnist Disease"

'But I must think it one or the other.'

'By my father's soul, you must not--until you have some evidence. Can you not remain in doubt?'

'I don't know that I have ever tried.'

'You must learn to, if you are to come far with me. It is not hard to do it. In Eschropolis, indeed, it is impossible, for the people who live there have to give an opinion once a week or once per day, or else Mr. Mammon would soon cut off their food. But out here in the country you can walk all day and all the next day with an unanswered question in your head: you need never speak until you have made up your mind.'

The Pilgrim's Regress by C.S.Lewis, Book 4 Chapter 3

Reminders

AVI recently posted on the spiritual gift of "Reminding".

He noticed that he rarely learned anything new from Bible reading and studies, and thought it a good thing: reminders are not news but we need them, even when we're not enthusiastic about them. Someone learning new things may applaud the teacher; someone hearing the also-necessary reminders may just grump. The job of Reminder is definitely more like foot-washing...

I'm still learning aspects of the faith emphasized by other branches--finally getting around to it--which is very interesting and edifying and not always very attached to how I live. On the other hand, my familiar daily readings that cycle through the gospels bring me to Matthew 25 regularly. Every time it seems to dig a little deeper: "Pay attention, dummy!"

If we hunger and thirst after new things, the old familiar may seem, and perhaps eventually become, mere rote. (Merton said he knew monks dead from the neck up.) There must be a trick to being thankful for reminders. Maybe experience? The oil level in the van hasn't been a problem since we bought it, but we still need to check it--one day it won't be OK. Hone up the kitchen knives. Sweep the floors, call your mother, mow the grass (come Spring): do the ordinary maintenance that, if we keep it up, isn't so ordinary.

Sometimes I find myself so far afield that I wonder if I need a flapper. Now that I think of it, most of the prophets were doing reminders (linked to an "otherwise here's what's coming" or "this happened because"). And they were highly honored for it (usually after they were dead): I think AVI's right; "one of the higher gifts we should aspire to."

Catacombs

Going to Italy is not in our budget anytime soon. But Google Maps has gotten there already, and no stress on my knee!

Distributed detection of chemical weapons

Cell phones for chemical weapons detection?

The idea seems reasonable enough--if the technology is cheap enough and the drain on batteries low enough, you could put environmental testing into a cell phone and have it relay back the GPS coordinates when something untoward is detected.

One reading isn't any use. I doubt they can get the false positive rate down to anything near 0, and in a city with a hundred thousand cell phones somebody's phone will always be setting off a warning. So it isn't very good for detecting as-yet-unused munitions--they need to be leaking enough so that more than one phone in the area is effected.

That doesn't mean the technology is of no use. If you have a dozen flags up all at once, civil defense can send out warnings, try to isolate traffic, get people indoors--the usual stuff.

But a couple of questions come to mind.

1. Are there chemicals that will give false positives? If so, the usual suspects will make it happen.
   
2. Can the control be turned off by an app? A mole app, if popular enough, could generate false positive patterns, or disable the system entirely so civil defense has less active systems than they think. If their models lead them to expect 100 and they only have 30, what does that mean?
   

You could make a simple compromise radiation detector that just looks for gammas. Most alpha emitters will include beta and gamma in the decay chain somewhere (tritium is tough, though). Pity the poor guy who got radio-isotope therapy. He'd have to stay indoors for a week.

Be sure to wear your helmet when playing in the driveway

Son hit by meteorites?

It could be, though I'd want things checked a bit more closely. How hard did the objects hit the boy? We can estimate how fast rocks that size should be traveling at terminal velocity and see if the injury is consistent. Is it really airplane debris? If it turns out to be just bits from an old satellite that should stir a bit of a fuss.

If it is real, I wonder what the boy's life will be like? Everywhere he goes he'll be the meteorite boy. Sort of like being a celebrity's kid--you have to duck the fame or try something to be known on your own.

I wear hats to keep off the Sun's UV. I don't think I'll upgrade. If a meteorite wants to clobber me I guess I'll just have to worry along somehow.

Imagining a world without antibiotics

You've probably read it already; if not, do so.

I'd be long dead without antibiotics: several bouts of pneumonia plus other kid stuff I've forgotten about.

The drugs have been getting more and more resistant, as predicted. McKenna warns about regularly mixing antibiotics in animal feed--I gather it helps the critters grow more quickly. But it obviously speeds up the rate at which bacteria become immune. There are details..

However, the companies which sell antibiotics report that only 13 percent of all product sold were sold under the “performance enhancement,” or growth promotion, label. The rest is for animals who need medicine to prevent and treat illness! Therefore, looking at the total volume of product sold is not meaningful to this debate. Although everyone continues to harp on this 80 percent number, it is important to understand that there are many more livestock in the U.S. than there are people; most are larger and need a larger dose. Also critical to this discussion, the types of antibiotics used in humans are much different than those used in animals.

My main take-away from this (interested) party is the claim that the antibiotics used in humans aren't the same as in animals. It isn't clear if he means people get one penicillin derivative and animals get another: in fact one of the comments claims "In 2010, 70 percent of antibiotics sold for use in food animals were ionophores or tetracyclines."

Another says "Drug use is rarely effective to'compensate' for poor practices. A large percent of ontimicrobials, has been often stated, are ionophores. Ths effect of this class is to push the rumen microbial fermentation over to a more favorable volatile fatty acid ratio, improving the efficiency. Also, some work out of Minnesota suggests that the growth promotion effect in hogs with other antibiotics may be in fact a similar mode of action. Which seems to also be a common thread in the press lately about obseity and gut microbes in humans." Which is related to the "grow more quickly" that I thought common knowledge.

So things are a little more complicated than met the eye.

Butchering isn't a precision job, and some cross-contamination occurs with the gut bacteria. Even if the antibiotic residue is below the allowed value, the bacteria are still there and itching for a little sloppy meat handling. Or fertilizer handling--veggies fertilized with nice organic manure...

The companies' report of 13% may or may not be very useful. For oral antibiotics, what's to keep you from mixing an old batch into the big feed bin after the sick cow gets well? As long as the residues die away by the time you ship, who's to know?

I've thought that "provide for the common defence" applied just as well to epidemics as it does to merely human enemies. (No, the ordinary cold and flu season doesn't qualify; you're on your own. Think Spanish flu or bubonic plague.) Systematically building up antibiotic resistance seems like an activity designed to undermine the security of the state.

That said, I suspect that the next big plagues won't come out of American farms, but out of megacities. People share diseases pretty easily, and in a lot of the world the antibiotics can be a little old (I've heard of donated drugs arriving pre-expired), or will be taken only until the patient feels better. Another recipe for new plagues.

IceCube

No, my name is not on the paper.

Local paper report

Some other details, and an "interview" with Claudio and Naoko (she had a cute baby later) and Halzen.

Halzen and Karle and Yeck assembled a good team; sharp and pleasant to work with: people who like to solve problems and find things out. And there were a lot of problems. It turned out that the clearest ice in the world had a tilted dust layer in it thanks to some distant volcano, and studying the properties of that took man-years (and is using lots of GPUs even now). And the background rates from cosmic ray showers in our atmosphere depend on "forward-going" charm quark production rates that even the LHC has trouble measuring.

Congratulations to all.

Process theology

The subject came up recently, and I've been trying to learn a little about it.

If I understand process theology's principles correctly, one foundation is that existence means to be in relation. When this is applied to God, it seems to contradict classical theology with its "aseity" although (forgive the proverb) the devil is in the details. The Christian Trinity exists both in Himself and in relation with Himself, and the source of relationship is within the trinity, but you still have contradiction for simpler monotheisms. Some of the P.T. proponents seem to be claiming that God is compelled to create as a requirement of His own existence--in order to exist in relation.

In addition, some assert that God does not know the future. IIUC, this is not the common predestinarian confusions that mix human experience with eternal views of time. Instead they are asking what are the implications of co-creation. I think this simply shifts the paradox to a new corner--which of the infinite set of possible histories do we agree to make. Their pop expression "does not know the future" is not helpful.

Why would we want to try to redefine the ground of existence as relationship? The first thing that comes to mind is the amazing success this sort of thing has had in mathematics. Pick up any advanced math reference, and it starts out describing mappings (morphisms). Category Theory is a hot topic, and a very powerful tool. Spending the effort to make a description of a physics law independent of the coordinate system you pick makes some symmetries much clearer. Analyzing relationships is what much of modern math does.

Of course we exist in relation, but that's not the same as saying everything must. Which is why I thought of math first.

I think the Creator/creation divide is so great that the same terms in the language don't mean the same things when applied to each side (I notice that the Chalcedonian debates were followed by a rise in apophatic theology: it seems fitting that after arguments over fine distinctions there be an admission that sometimes words mislead.) So I'm wary, even though I've written about God as a suffering servant myself.

The process theology field spreads over a moderately wide range, and the theologians I ran into first may not be typical. They seem to elevate the human view of the relationship to be a peer to God's view, which of course makes the current political and social fashion the next step in the revelation of the relationship between God and man.

Typing one-handed

is very error-prone. I remember a suggestion that the superior quality of older letters was partly due to having extra time to think every time you re-dipped the quill. We all know there are several biases to the sampling involved in that evaluation, and if the principle is true my output should be of nearly Shakespearean quality for awhile.

Rotator cuffs are amazingly complex machines, but they have several unpleasant failure modes, and I gather they don't heal as well as simpler systems.

Oswald

In commemoration of the Kennedy assassination, BBC dug up stories of Oswald's life in Russia.

Oswald basked in the attention of being one of Minsk's few foreigners, and its only American. He regularly made social calls to a girls' dormitory, near his flat.

"He would come without warning and knock at someone's door and say, 'Hello, here I am,'" says Inna Markava, an English-language translator who was a student at the time. "And that's it - spend two or three hours.

He thought that he was the centre of the group," she says.

"I remember that we were in the room, sitting, and if he thought we had forgotten about him, he would immediately remind everybody, that he was there, that he should not be forgotten."

The article's author says:

Still it was somewhat unnerving to hear so many good things about a person whose name is associated with one of the most infamous acts of our era.

I think David Stern and I may have different ideas about what constitutes "good things" about a person. "Weird" is the word I'd choose.

---

I gather one is supposed to try to remember where you were that day. I'm afraid I don't remember much at all. Maybe I've forgotten, or maybe I just didn't pay a lot of attention at the time. A friend of mine was vexed that his favorite program (Fireball XL5) was preempted by funeral programming and for some reason blamed the Kennedys. (We didn't have a TV, and my oxen were ungored.)

Round world

When did people learn that the world was round? The Greeks figured it out and taught the West and the Arabs, and I presume the Indians as well. The Chinese seemed to consider it flat until Ricci et al, though perhaps that was due to the representation of the Earth (a grid) in the language, taken mystically (Yin/Yang) or at face value by the unlearned. Though apparently it took a while for Chinese astronomers to buy into Ricci's notions. The Chinese weren't lacking in good astronomers, but astronomical knowledge about the stars and planets doesn't demand that you understand the shape of the Earth.

I read claims that the Maya knew the world was round, but I haven't yet found an explanation, just bald assertions. Once again, astronomy doesn't have to tell you the shape of the Earth unless you ask the right question (Earth's shadow on the Moon).

The lies of Draper and White have been dreadfully long-lasting, and clutter up google search badly enough to make finding information tough.

Supertime speculation

I referred to the science fiction notion of humanity as a psychically linked collective organism in a previous post. If that were the case, we'd be one unhappy organism. When cells in your body decide to go "every man for himself" we call it cancer. And if the super-organism carried our individualist attitudes up to the next level... The world=The flesh=The devil and the church is emergency surgery.

Technological decline

Via Not Even Rocket Science: some interesting notes on Tasmanian technological decline.

Summary of the situation: after rising seas separated Tasmania from Australia, they lost, according to the archeological record, the skills required to make clothing, fire, composite weapons (i.e. putting a stone tip on a spear), fishing boats--in fact they stopped eating fish. Wrapped in a skin and smeared with grease to keep off the cold, they used clubs and sharp sticks. Yet their ancestors back in 6000BC knew better; even in 1000BC they still had bone tools.

The theory proposed is that the populations were small enough that there were not enough apt pupils to maintain the more complex technologies. Knapping takes either instruction or a lot of trial and error. In their models teaching is lossy, and only a few pupils better their master. I'm not sure there's always a best way to attach a spear-point--more likely several good ways that you adapt depending on details of the wood and the point.

Henrich explicitly assumes that human intelligence averages are universal, which is known not to be the case, but it may not matter much for this argument. The information loss model is easily illustrated in the loss of native technologies and stories when European technologies arrived in the Americas. The reason differed, but the operation was the same--not enough people to learn the old ways, and sometimes even the language dies out. The Forgotten Revolution (I'm still reading it) describes how the Hellenists reached heights of scientific understanding not regained for two thousand years--but when political purges scattered the Alexandrian Greeks the knowledge died out. Without a large enough pool of scholars the chances of getting someone with the intellectual horsepower to understand Eratosthenes, much less carry on his work, are poor. You're lucky to be able to teach a little pre-algebra. I assume everybody has read A Canticle for Leibowitz.

That may be the solution, but I wonder if that's all. You can imagine a Tasmanian PETA that persuades the rest that fish are bad. After a while you forget why--but in the meantime you don't need fish tridents or nets, and you forget how to make those too. Disease or poor nutrition (famine) will drop the average IQ of a cohort of youngsters. Their kids may be OK, but in the meantime information gets lost.

It isn't pleasant to think that the things I've worked with will evaporate without a trace--knowledge is supposed to be cumulative--but it has happened before, and can easily happen again. I suppose we need to be "Faithful in his generation", even if those who come after lose it all.

Pehn-Pehn Ban

Recently Liberia decided to ban the motorcycle taxis that have been serving Monrovia. They are cheap, often overloaded, and if you can believe it, even less careful of traffic rules than the taxis and money-buses. The last straw seems to have been when an accident ended with a bus being burned by motorcyclists in retaliation.

As you can guess, there is more than one side to the problem. (The official exchange rate is 85 LD to the USD, but I suspect the unofficial rate is twice that.)

Garloe, who claimed he has been operating motorcycle since 2012, said the leadership has always devised schemes to collect money from them. "We are often confronted by our leaders to purchase various items such as stickers, daily tickets, identification cards from the Union."

"Think about this, we pay L\$600 for stickers, L\$50 for daily tickets that are not even monitored along with L$\500 for
identification card which many of us have paid for and are yet to receive; we do not know where the money is going," the frustrated motorcyclist said.

Quizzed as to what was responsible for the latest restrictions coming from government, he said "maybe, the union's refusal to remit money and fines collected from motorcyclists and the inability of the union to adequately monitor and supervise the sector are some of the reasons they have been banned from plying the main streets."

Adding his voice, motorcyclist Samuel Zeiguah, mirrored the issue from a very different perspective, saying that the ban will not only affect them as riders but will also affect police officers and officials of the Union who are in the habit of clamping down on poor motorcyclists.

"Police officers along with the officers of the five different unions will find it increasingly hard to regularly pay their 'susu', because of the ban. Policeman is going to seriously and surely feel it," he asserted.

I like Samuel's little sarcastic touch.

Turns out there's even more at stake here:

Mr. Bernard feared that this policy could increase the high criminal rate in the country, as many of the 'pehn-pehn' riders may revert in their ugly past, stressing: "Some of these bike riders you see here today are former combatants, and some of them are former armed robbers, who saw bike riding as a means of making livelihood.

So, if you do something that will keep them less busy, you give room to rise in the criminal rate."

Unintended consequences all over the place.

(Source for the quotes is AllAfrica)

All Things Considered

The whole is here, but for your edification:

Real pain, as in the case of being burnt at Smithfield or having a toothache, is a positive thing; it can be supported, but scarcely enjoyed. But, after all, our toothaches are the exception, and as for being burnt at Smithfield, it only happens to us at the very longest intervals. And most of the inconveniences that make men swear or women cry are really sentimental or imaginative inconveniences—things altogether of the mind. For instance, we often hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train? No; for to him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures. Because to him the red light and the green light on the signal are like a new sun and a new moon. Because to him when the wooden arm of the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournament of trains. I myself am of little boys' habit in this matter. They also serve who only stand and wait for the two fifteen.

and

For instance, there is a current impression that it is unpleasant to have to run after one's hat. Why should it be unpleasant to the well-ordered and pious mind? Not merely because it is running, and running exhausts one. The same people run much faster in games and sports. The same people run much more eagerly after an uninteresting little leather ball than they will after a nice silk hat. There is an idea that it is humiliating to run after one's hat; and when people say it is humiliating they mean that it is comic. It certainly is comic; but man is a very comic creature, and most of the things he does are comic—eating, for instance. And the most comic things of all are exactly the things that are most worth doing—such as making love. A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a wife.

Now a man could, if he felt rightly in the matter, run after his hat with the manliest ardour and the most sacred joy. He might regard himself as a jolly huntsman pursuing a wild animal, for certainly no animal could be wilder. In fact, I am inclined to believe that hat-hunting on windy days will be the sport of the upper classes in the future. There will be a meet of ladies and gentlemen on some high ground on a gusty morning. They will be told that the professional attendants have started a hat in such-and-such a thicket, or whatever be the technical term. Notice that this employment will in the fullest degree combine sport with humanitarianism. The hunters would feel that they were not inflicting pain. Nay, they would feel that they were inflicting pleasure, rich, almost riotous pleasure, upon the people who were looking on. When last I saw an old gentleman running after his hat in Hyde Park, I told him that a heart so benevolent as his ought to be filled with peace and thanks at the thought of how much unaffected pleasure his every gesture and bodily attitude were at that moment giving to the crowd.

The same principle can be applied to every other typical domestic worry. A gentleman trying to get a fly out of the milk or a piece of cork out of his glass of wine often imagines himself to be irritated. Let him think for a moment of the patience of anglers sitting by dark pools, and let his soul be immediately irradiated with gratification and repose. Again, I have known some people of very modern views driven by their distress to the use of theological terms to which they attached no doctrinal significance, merely because a drawer was jammed tight and they could not pull it out.

I can testify to the elusiveness of the free-range hat.

OTC

I don't know why I'd have thought so, but I generally expect pain relievers to kick in as soon as the drug hits the bloodstream, or at least start trying. So ibuprofen seemed like so much candy: it never seemed to do anying at all.

I ran out of Aleve a few days ago, and since I have to stop taking it tomorrow anyway, I didn't bother getting more. The past five days have seen steadily increased shoulder pain. I wonder how much is inflammation and how much is the drug slowly leaving the system. And if it works like that as you stop, I wonder if it took several days to start working too--I just didn't notice because I don't usually stop to notice "no-pain."

Roaches

I'm trying to decide if I care about the robot roach kit. Backyard Brains offers a Bluetooth "backpack" kit you can attach to a roach (some dis-assembly required) and guide it remotely. Critics say it is inhumane and instrumentalist, which perhaps it is. On the other hand what I generally do with roaches is crush them to death. Or perhaps poison them, though I haven't had to do that in decades. Does the Giant Shoe Of Doom cause less stress than being run in circles by a 12-year-old? ...maybe...

"A company spokeswoman told the BBC that the backpack had been developed solely to encourage children to take an interest in neuroscience which, she said, needed to be better taught in American schools." Umm. I'm not sure I believe that. I'd bet they saw a possibility for a new kind of science kit, and didn't figure anybody would worry about experimenting on roaches. True, you have to replace its antennae, but you also have to handle it carefully and feed it and take care of it for a while, almost like a pet.

I don't like causing pain for the sake of pain. I burned ants with a magnifying glass in my youth(*), and tried to emulate the LaBrea tar pits when the ant crawled on a bit of tar filling cracks in the playground. I wouldn't do that today. I don't think the youthful exercise turned me into a psychopath, and I'd not worry unduly about kids trying it out once or twice. Making a habit of it is another matter. I wouldn't try to robot control a mouse just for my own entertainment, though I've no objection to studying mouse brain workings in general.

I'm not perfectly consistent, I suppose. It doesn't seem neatly black and white. I might, if I thought the kid was properly interested, give such a kit--though the $100 price tag is a little much for a one-shot kid's demonstration experiment.

---

(*) It is harder than it looks. Ants move quickly.

I did learn that it wasn't easy to set leaves on fire with the magnifier. It wasn't until many years later, when I was showing my own kids how, that I tried two at once and discovered the hard way that a nice hot fire got going in between the two layers.

Supertime for fun

I went off on a tangent on one of AVI’s posts and thought it might be amusing to pull it all together cleanly to describe a science fiction setting.

Instead of just traveling in time, suppose one also can travel in “supertime.”

You have undoubtedly heard of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, where each possible outcome appears in some “world.” This is a modified version of that. The full many-worlds setting isn’t restrictive enough to tell very satisfactory stories in (though see Amber, Flight of the Horse)—you can pull any rabbit you please out of the hat.

The universe has a history from beginning to end. Just before the end of time, a man decides to have scrambled eggs. In another history, just before it all ends he decides to have bacon and waffles. Those two universe histories are otherwise identical, and if they both exist they will be “close to” each other in the obvious sense. Suppose that instead of a landscape the set of universes is a subset of the full many-worlds set—a well-ordered set of histories that progress from one to the next in “supertime.”

Obviously the earlier a decision is made in a history, the larger the “supertime-duration” between the histories. One way to think of visiting the “next” history is to time-travel to the EOT, step to the next history and travel back in time.

Since an ordinary human only experiences one history, the question for the writer is “who is making the supertime choices that changes history to history, and why?” We can round up the usual suspects here: humans make up a collective being and this being is aware of supertime; supertime aliens try to maneuver to some goal; or (why not?) angels and demons nudge history this way and that to a different kind of apocalypse. You could combine the first and third, with the collective humanity being the devil. (You leave ordinary science fiction behind with this option, though).

The next question is “why is the hero interested in the outcome of other histories?” Presumably after he learns what’s going on, he must find or create a more congenial history, retrieve a loved one, stop a villain from fouling up the histories, or something like that. Maybe a villain wants to find a nicer history for himself and compel a swap with his other self, and things go south from there? Changing histories needs to be tricky because large changes mean big jumps which aren’t very close together, so maybe shortcuts cause big problems, and the hero has to help put things back. Maybe if you go far enough back in regular time you'd have trouble getting anything to notice you at all, so most of your work is done in the near future (no going back to prevent the crime). Plan a setting to trap the villain, until the "big boys" take exception?

I wouldn't want the story to go the way of Star Maker--kind of evolving to the Omega Point--it seems a waste of a decent setup.

Art cache

BBC reports about a cache of lost paintings seized by the Nazis.

Previously unknown artworks by masters are among more than 1,400 pieces found in a trove of Nazi-looted art

...

Previously unregistered works by Marc Chagall, Otto Dix, Max Liebermann and Henri Matisse were found. The paintings were found in March of last year after Mr Gurlitt was investigated for tax evasion.

The framed pictures were stacked on a shelf, like in a museum storeroom while the unframed works were piled up in drawers, said customs official Siegfried Kloeble.

According to a report by Germany's Focus magazine, Mr Gurlitt, the reclusive son of an art dealer in Munich, would occasionally sell a picture when he needed money.

Maybe I'm too suspicious, but could it be that some of these paintings were unknown because they are recent creations? 1400 is a lot of paintings to make and artists to fake, so they're probably real.

Philistine that I am, I have failed to covet the pictures published so far.

I want one

Laser cutter, that is. Not very portable, unfortunately.

Welcoming climate

My turn at the diversity fest. This was a small group session looking for input on how to improve the climate for diversity. There was just one man among the 9, and the majority of the participants headed small committees dealing with student life.

I asked if the UW had any studies available for why people might be leaving or who was at risk, and was told that we needed to do this, with an explanation flavored with a couple of unhappy anecdotes.

Discussion rapidly devolved from general discussion to suggestions for making diversity training mandatory for faculty (using a "stealth" program), and from that to complaining about their budgets and the evil fiscal conservative student government.

Despite the hints at the start by the facilitator's assistant (?) that voices could get overlooked if some people talked too much, two dominated--one an aggressively aggrieved administrative assistant who didn't like people ignoring her in favor of the degreed, and the other a month-new liason to Indians and Eskimos giving chapter and verse of how the student charged with running a pow-wow was disrespecting her. Neither the facilitator nor the assistant tried to steer the discussion back to something useful.

"Was there enough oversight of students running the student segregated fees?" was the question of the hour. I'm not sure what it had to do with how to make students feel welcome, but somehow it seems like a natural evolution of the project.

It would be a bit much to expect any careful thought about what "diversity" is or needs from such a group. And to be fair, the pettiness was driven by a few of our number (one lady barely said a word).

If I'd tried to redirect the meeting I'd have gotten flack about white male privilege, and I didn't think the chances of getting anything useful were worth the bother. But noblesse oblige, maybe I should have tried--it couldn't have been worse and the noisy ones would have had the joy of seeing their prejudices confirmed.

Words

While commenting on another site about types of useless books, it occurred to me that the language lacks a useful term for one genre, and so I offer autohagiography. Since ghostwriters allegedly do most of the heavy lifting for these works, probably "pseudo-auto"hagiography would be more accurate, but that's more Entish than English.

It is frustrating to try to debate anything important while using words which have more of a family of meanings than a single value. "God" is one obviously overloaded word, and so is "freedom." But I run into the same confusion when I want to know if something is a good movie or not. A lot of the discussion about the ACA is fuzzed because nobody knew what was in it to begin with, but the fact that the phrase "health care" isn't all that precise makes it even worse. (Does it include mental disorders? I gather the DSM-V really muddies the distinctions. Does it include prevention? Prevention of disorders stemming from lifestyle choices? Does health care mean insurance?)

The phrase "gender roles" is another muddy mess, conflating natural tendencies with caste-like rules.

I get it that sometimes word families are good--such as when writing poetry and you want to be allusive. And when I tell my wife "I love you" I mean it in a lot of different ways, and it isn't always convenient to parse them all out.

But the rest of the time discussion feels like trying to make marshmallow sculptures using rods of cooked spaghetti.

Pre funeral last blessing

A man in our Saturday Bible study spoke of a friend who decided to have his funeral before his death, so he could attend. This was taken as a bit odd. Did he want to attend to hear all the nice things about himself, or to let people say their thanks now before it was too late? I pointed out that there was precedent for something a little bit like that in Isaac's and Jacob's final blessings. It seems as though they assembled family together for a final meeting, and didn't necessarily die right afterwards.

I hesitate to recommend the revival of the custom, because I've known a few people who'd use the occasion for a final nasty jab. We don't have the infrastructure of expectations to curb abuses.

Nevertheless I like the idea of having a get-together for a final blessing. It could be a hard to muster the energy to say much, but that's one reason we have microphones. And it could take a long time, with plenty of rests, to talk to everyone. And there could be expectations that everybody get comparable amounts of face time, which isn't remotely reasonable but... And I can imagine expectations that everybody use insincere happy talk. And things get amusing if the dying person recovers to live a few more years (my late mother-in-law was very close to death several times in the years before she died).

Still, if the opportunity is there, it seems a shame not to try.

On a related note, I hope you read David Warren's column about his mother's death.

Thoughts on using metadata to detect conspiracies

The word for today is combinatorics.

When you are trying to track down spies and conspirators, it seems like an excellent idea to find out who they contact and look for the clusters of connections that suggest that "here be the leaders." If you can find strong connections between known enemies and Joe X, he becomes a person of interest.

The problem with this is that anybody with any tradecraft is going to use cutouts and dead drops, and generally make things as muddy as possible. The old hollow tree is pretty low tech, but it works. I suppose (not being in the business myself) that bulletin boards and comment sections would make very good sites for leaving coded messages.

But, says you, that's just what the metadata searching should help with. If NSA knows Muhammad Smith's favorite web sites, they can look at who else shares those and once had a history of going to jihadist web sites.

How many is that? Suppose Muhammad Bombmaster posts sporadically on 20 different web sites, including the Minneapolis Bayou. Jason Wannabe used to visit jihadist sites, but after a few long talks with his new partners he uses a different computers for different jobs. He visits 10 different web sites including the Bayou. Jackson Nobody visits 15, including the Bayou, as do about 5000 other people. Of that 5000, most live in Minneapolis and maybe 5% have wondered what the heck an al Qaeda web site looked like.

So Jason Wannabe is 1 out of 200. Presumably the non-Minneapolis sites have lower percentages of visitors who've seen a jihadist web site, so maybe the rates are 1 out of 10 instead. So you are watching about 400 different people. Not bad so far. But if each of them is in contact (Twitter, Facebook, etc) with 50 other people, you now have of the order of 20,000 people in the second level, and a million in the third level. OK, say a quarter million--there'll be overlap. In fact, overlaps are just the things you'll be looking for to locate conspirators. Most overlaps will be easy to understand, given time; accidental ones are harder to understand because there isn't a reason. (Put 30 random
people in a room. What are the odds that at least 2 share a birthday? Over 70%)

If your criteria for suspicion are loose, you have a lot of false positives on your hands. If they're tight a little tradecraft will flummox you. Trails peter out in a sea of noise.

I figured that if they're tracing phone calls, there are only 6, and maybe 5 links between me and the Boston bomber. I dunno whether he shared any plans with his imam: all the links may be innocent; I know they are from this end...

The initial claim was that this kind of tracking prevented several dozen terrorist attacks. Then the number was rounded down to 1 or 2. I don't expect to hear honest answers--it might give away useful secrets, or it might reveal that they can't do what they say. I'd not be surprised if the number was 0.

On the other hand it is very much easier to do ex post facto analyses and try to find co-conspirators. If A, B, and C are involved you can look at the sites they had in common and the links they shared and sort through only a few hundred people looking for suspicious activity. That's orders of magnitude easier. But it is also a little late.

It remains to be proven that this vast a tool can be used for the announced purpose.

We were told that some of the engineers used the system to "spy" on their spouses/live-ins. That seems like an obvious way to test the system; try to see if it works with someone you know. If you find that it misses calls you know about, you know the system isn't working. And if there are phone calls you didn't know about--you drill down a bit and find out if they're real, and if they are then there is domestic discord.

Of course there's more than just metadata--Snowden wasn't telling us anything particularly new. Nobody can handle all the raw data for everybody, but they can drill down for an individual suspect, and presumably get a lot of information--online purchases, emails, phone calls, and so on. From this raw material you can assemble the detailed links for a legal case, or for further monitoring.

This is also a useful tool if the individual is suspected of conspiring to be a Congressman of the wrong political party. Politics demands some deal making that constituents might not be happy to read a transcript of, and power attracts groupies--after a few years I'd guess that quite a few people would have some dirty laundry. Maybe not even anything illegal (like forgetting to pay sales tax on online purchases?), but enough to worry them into going along. It wouldn't take large numbers.

We just saw the Republicans go down to dramatic defeat and get nothing for their pains--a few got pork for the home district but there's no budget and no debt limit any more (unless there's a supermajority to vote against raising it), which used to mean that the king could do whatever he pleased. Probably still does.

If I'm right about the spy system we put together, we'll see more of this sort of curious business in years to come, because the system is much easier to use against individuals than in tracking spies. There will always be a temptation to use it against political foes "for the greater good" and we don't typically elect leaders on the basis of their integrity.

One-sidedness

I think the devil gets as much, or more, mileage out of simple imbalance as out of temptations to evil. Imbalance distorts our vision and leaves our hearts puzzled and dissatisfied. We're wrong-footed. It lies by what it omits, and lets hazards lurk unseen in the periphery.

Pop music (not including country) has had the focus on romantic love for as long as I can remember. That's nice, but there's rarely any hint of children, and usually not much about work or age. My Little Pony has a nice wholesome approach to friendship, but I don't get much sense of the necessity for judgment and for solitude, or that everything doesn't always end gleefully. Or that there can be plenty of good in less-than-deep friendships. The goth scene seems to focus on loss and pain, but the last time I checked sunrises and Fourier transform could be beautiful no matter which side of the bed I got up on.

Who cares? Everybody knows that romance is only a part of marriage, that friends are sometimes hard to find, and that life is worth living.

Except that what we immerse ourselves in effects us, and if unbalanced will leave us off balance too. If I cannot find deep friendships at work or school even after a few years, should I blame them or me or just call it the luck of the draw? MLP characters can find them in 25 minutes. I've heard people seriously suggesting terraforming Venus and using inertial damping. I'm tolerably sure they hadn't been overindulging in Bill Nye episodes. And plenty of other people have noticed the effects of excessive romantic expectations on the length of marriages.

So how do we defend against imbalance? That's easier in politics than this sort of thing, since we generally don't notice the culture we swim in, while there are political partisans eager to enlighten you. I haven't noticed any striking benefit from multiculturalism in this regard. Maybe there's a PC filter, or maybe we just don't empathize easily. Or both. It isn't always easy to see what's in front of you. It is possible to write a couple of books about the joy of sex and not report on the glaringly obvious--like reporting about the hotels along the Grand Canyon and never mentioning the feature in the landscape nearby.

Rawandan prison

Ex-Liberian President Charles Taylor has asked to serve his 50-year sentence for war crimes in Rwanda, rather than the UK.

In a letter sent to the court that convicted him, he says it would be easier - and less expensive - for his family to visit him in Africa.

He also said he feared being attacked in a British prison.

I don't think those are good enough reasons to want to stay in a Rwandan prison.

The key word I think is stay. Taylor still has plenty of supporters in Liberia, and undoubtedly both large caches of money and munitions at his direction. If sent to Rwanda, how long do you think he would remain in durance vile? Think he'd make it as far as prison before finding a new direction?

Incarnation and texting

I suspect we were put here originally to make love and beauty incarnate and to subdue the wild world into a wild garden. We aren't here just to think about things, noble an activity as that is.(*)

Charles Williams said that in the end, all loves must be physical. Screwtape was content if the patient's love was limited to fantasy--it didn't matter how glorious love was if it never made any difference. I find that my reaction to hearing of someone's illness is to pray for them briefly, think about whether there's anything that should be done, and then move on to other things--but Jesus didn't say "I was sick and you thought about me."

There is something important about investing not just my attention but my body in my works. A text or email message is good, a phone call has more presence, but being there in person means I'm putting my whole self in service to meeting you. (Assuming my mind isn't elsewhere--I remember my school days...) A Facebook "friend" may be the best connection possible between people too far apart, but it is a flimsy wraith compared to flesh and blood conversation. Face to face it isn't just my spirit that is with you, but all of me.

Maybe texting and Twitter are two of the nine rings: they give the illusion of stretching your life to more and more people, but at the price of stretching you thinner and thinner.

---

(*)Thinking of math is good, but putting pencil to paper to develop it is better.

Matthew 25 again

I think I need to revisit my thinking on Matthew 25. The story of the virgins in particular nags at me this time. Earlier, Jesus said "Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come." He earlier said "But when they arrest you, do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say," So the keeping alert does not have to do with preparing your testimony for trials or anything like that. Jesus said that his coming wouldn't be hidden, so watching the sky can't be what He meant.

The parable of sheep and goats says we meet Jesus before he returns, and our everyday reaction to our neighbors is therefore something we need to be careful about. To be alert about?

I notice that my default reaction to some news story depends on what I've been reading/thinking about the previous day. My interactions with people are a little more structured than is probably good for us all, and if they weren't they'd probably also vary. Perhaps the goal is to be alert to what my mind and heart are doing in relation to other people all the time. Put that way it sounds kind of ego-centric.

A friend and I are putting together a series on spiritual disciplines, and I think they play a role here. If we work to put to death the "flesh" and make room to practice the works of the spirit, we change what our reaction is likely to be when the test of the moment comes. We watch by first immersing ourselves in what is good so that we see more clearly what should happen when the test comes.

We cannot just sit back on His laurels and expect that we will be satisfactory servants. The astute reader will notice some overlap between the fruit of the Spirit and the qualities we have to add in order to keep from being ineffective and unproductive.

Gal 5:22-23	2Peter 1:5-11
God's fruit	We put on
Love	Goodness
Joy	Knowledge
Peace	Self-control
Patience	Perseverance
Kindness	Godliness
Goodness	Mutual affection
Faithfulness	Love
Gentleness
Self-Control

I'd read Whitney's book about 7 years ago, and the only change it induced in my life was to cultivate the habit of "never appearing before the Lord empty-handed" but always having something, however small, to give. I also got more systematic in Bible reading, though that wasn't actually related to Whitney's book: it was triggered by waking up too late to catch the bus. In preparation for the series I've been reading much more, old (Practice of the Presence of God) and new (Sacred Rhythms by Ruth Barton--I may report on that one--, Celebration of Discipline by Foster, and so on). I'm now thoroughly convinced that reading a dozen books is of less value than even halting attempts at practice.

"The important things are always simple. The simple things are always hard." Sometimes humiliatingly simple. I was all set to complain that I'd not heard much about spiritual disciplines in church, and then I remembered a little children's song "Read your Bible, pray every day... It will make you grow." Quiet time with God, time of service, simplicity; they were all there, if not fully articulated and explained.

I'll see how well "do as I say" works.

Fullfilling purpose

Imagine you are a car in winter. (Or in a pinch, imagine heavy rain, fog and mudholes.)

You alternately spin smoking wheels and idle as people push on your bumper to rock you out of a snow bank. You inch slowly up the hill, and then realize that you are sliding sideways. The freezing rain turned the unplowed drifts across the road into chunks as rugged as the furrows on a farm. And you realize there is no way you are going to stop this side of the stop light.

And when, after an interminable time, you reach the cleaned and dry highway and cruise into higher and higher gear, you'd feel that this is what you're made for.

Every now and then I know what that's like.

Chicago

The musical is coming to Madison, and the ads are all about. I gather it is about murderesses awaiting trial. The ladies in the ads are far more fetching than the ones whose pictures actually turn up on in the crime section.

I presume there's some selection bias at work in the newspaper photography: the rich and powerful can wiggle out (h.t. Steve Sailer), but there aren't that many of them. And maybe brighter folks can figure some way to dispose of the awkward corpse clandestinely, though I haven't come up with any reliably untraceable methods myself. (Detective stories, looked at closely, aren't always very realistic.) But neither category should contribute much to the numbers, which leads to the banal observation the bulk of the criminals look neither very bright nor very attractive.

Maybe police photography uses the same equipment as the DMV, which generally portrays me as a felonious stranger.

Arthur Machen note

From "The Terror", 1917

And how, asks Huvelius, are such wars to be waged? The wise prince, he replies, will begin by assuming the enemy to be infinitely corruptible and infinitely stupid, since stupidity and corruption are the chief characteristics of man. So the prince will make himself friends in the very councils of his enemy, and also amongst the populace, bribing the wealthy by proffering to them the opportunity of still greater wealth, and winning the poor by swelling words. "For, contrary to the common opinion, it is the wealthy who are greedy of wealth; while the populace are to be gained by talking to them about liberty, their unknown god. And so much are they enchanted by the words liberty, freedom, and such like, that the wise can go to the poor, rob them of what little they have, dismiss them with a hearty kick, and win their hearts and their votes for ever, if only they will assure them that the treatment which they have received is called liberty." Guided by these principles, says Huvelius, the wise prince will entrench himself in the country that he desires to conquer; "nay, with but little trouble, he may actually and literally throw his garrisons into the heart of the enemy country before war has begun."

Wedding

The day of the wedding was quite busy, and only mildly chaotic. The RSVP web site Middle Daughter used swallowed RSVPs without a trace, and we didn't know within a factor of 2 how many people would show up. She did the organizing and made the pulled pork and got most of the food; we supplied the cupcakes and some of the gruntwork and transport. (Youngest Daughter's practice for the cupcakes added a few pounds back on me.)

The "bridesmaid" and "best man" were his daughter and son (in dress and suit to match bride and groom), and they played their parts with a little improv. (He's 5) The flower girl walked carefully up to the front of the hall, and only then started throwing petals. The vows were capped with a session with a poster in which each circled the YES option under "Will you marry me?" (I saw the poster for the first time that morning, and objected that "Will" should have been "Do", but it was too late to change.)

My youngest sister and her husband brought my mother up with them. The trip was harder on her than we expected, but she recovered. Unfortunately my other sister and her husband were both far too ill to travel. I thought of using Skype, but there was no wireless access. Luckily Youngest Sister had brought an IPad, and so the ailing were able to see it live.(*)

I will need a chart to explain who's who among all the new relatives. I have trouble with names to begin with, and the problem gets worse with many people in quick succession met once.

His father died about two weeks ago: vacation time was already allotted and plane tickets to Florida weren't in the original budget. (Apparently there are ultra-cheap tickets where you are guaranteed a seat but you don't know until the last hour which flight.) They had a small poster in his memory there.

All in all a happy time, with not much in the way of speeches--raining drink and snowing food, and plenty of pleasant people. The van still has boxes that need to go back to the newlyweds when they dig out from the other remainders.

And now I'm a grandpa.

---

(*) Funny what technology makes possible. One of the men in our Wednesday Bible study is Air Force, and when deployed he attended from Afghanistan via Skype.

Pharaoh's teeth

I'd wondered why ancient Egyptian teeth were so badly worn--even the rulers'. The bread in tombs was pretty coarse, but that wasn't necessarily representative of what people actually ate. Like the Chinese paper offerings to the ancestors, it may have been only symbolic and slapdash.

Suggestions include sand in the mix to make it easy to grind, tiny bits of the querns grinding off, reed sieves that didn't get rid of the detritus--that sort of thing.

It turns out that some of their querns were granite or basalt (some were limestone) and should have been pretty durable--and I'd expect pharaoh to get the good stuff. But what was the good stuff? Maybe the abrasion was so slow that it just seemed like texture, maybe even comfort food texture. I was all set to try to figure out why they'd use such cruddy flour, but some other folk got there first.

Some archaeologists have been trying to reproduce ancient methods and figure out what ancient grains they used. There were a variety of possible strains of different hardness and variety of different coarsenesses of the flour, depending mostly on how many passes through the grinding it went through. All by hand, of course, since the circular quern wasn't invented until the fifth century BC and I don't know how long it took to reach Egypt.

Oddities abound: convex quern surfaces (transverse, that is), actually work pretty well if you use a rocking motion with the handstone to crack the grains first. Soft grains aren't quite as easy to grind since they moosh up into the grains of the stones and make it slippery. It shouldn't have been necessary to add grit to make the stones work if you use hard grains.

So. Maybe they added grit anyway. The linked article estimates 3 hours to prepare 2kg of grain. Shortcuts would have been attractive, and if you are going to sift the sand out afterwards anyway. (Or at least most of it...)

The Anasazi used sandstone tools and wore their teeth out pretty fast too.

Tooth enamel is about 2.5mm thick at the thickest. Say you wear all the way through that in 40 years, and then start wearing through the soft part quickly. That's less than 0.2 micron per day; not dramatic on a day-to-day basis, though I'd think you'd feel the grittiness. Maybe they didn't make the connection, and liked the texture? Even if someone did make the connection, proving that some other technique was better might take too long--Daniel et al's longitudinal study was only a few weeks, not 40 years.

Radio Yerevan

Anybody remember the Radio Yerevan stories?

BREAKING NEWS headlines (pick a news source, any news source) remind me of this story:

Announcer: We need to make a minor correction. Yesterday we reported that Comrade Dmitri won a blue Lada in Leningrad. It was actually Comrade Yuri; it was in Kiev, not Leningrad; the color was green; it happened last Thursday; it was not a Lada but a bicycle, and he did not win it but he stole it. Aside from that the story was substantially correct.

Kenyan mall

To forestall misunderstanding, let me emphasize that the Muhammedan terrorists are not a product of poverty or US policy toward Israel or US policy toward Canada. Infidels are not human and even lax Muslims are suspect. This tendancy in Muhammedanism goes back to its earliest days--rulers might tolerate infidels but popular movements often attacked them. They see Satan and his minions; they kill the minions.

I think Trent is wrong. This Kenya murder spree isn't a tipping point and is not going to cost them much. The Western media outlets are, by and large, frantic to hide away anything that suggests a real struggle. A real struggle puts life in perspective, and the big media make their livings purveying trivia. Even our wars were described as though they were far-off "incidental" actions that needn't involve anybody on the home front: war on the cheap. This won't change much in the West. (*)

In the rest: look at those pictures with other eyes for a while. The death and fear is in among toy cars that cost more than a year's wages; with other luxuries all around. You see the images on a small TV under a canopy, and wish that you could have a chance at some of those nearly unimaginable luxuries. The people you see aren't your tribe--neither the villains nor the victims. If you live near Muslim areas, you may be (quite rightly) worried by the implications of the Kenya attack. If you don't, it will probably seem like no skin off your nose. And "Westerners" were involved (**), to confuse things even more. If anything, you might think people wallowing in luxury deserve an occasional poke in the eye.

All in all, I don't think this will change the attitudes of our elites at all, and of our general population by much. Those in the rest of the world who have Muhammedans for neighbors are probably already worried anyway. A large number of their co-religionists will be impressed.

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There's something especially humiliating about being martyred in a mall. The trivial attachments to the world are all around you, and you chose the environment yourself. The last things you see aren't prison walls or howling mobs but a row of barbie dolls.

Granted, I may be biased. Malls are some of my least favorite places. During the great surge of mall building, I was in Africa, and when we came back to the States and went to one to buy clothes I was weirded out. I can't claim any sort of moral superiority--I can spend as long in a bookstore as a teenage girl in a mall; and we both wind up with "just stuff." But the garish wastefulness of it made me almost ill, and still bothers me.

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(*) I predict that there will be two major stories that will push this off the front page and the editorials by next Friday: one a moderately substantive DC political story, and the other a celebrity/politician scandal. I don't know what they will be; I'm just convinced they will be there.

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(**) At some point other countries are going to start trying to get the US and UK to pay damages for the people we take under our wing and then let loose on the world.

Stove technology

BBC reports on a low-smoke model of cookstove to replace the traditional mud stoves. The model (now open sourced) may well be as efficient as they claim, but 40 pounds is, according to my office mate, about 4000 rupees and a very significant expense. I looked at the website of the firm, and it seems to sell/resell a number of different stoves, including several that use dung. No solar, which probably says something.

Nice idea and all, though I get a faint whiff of press release/ad news story. Smoky stoves are a curse, causing millions of lung problems around the world. If new stoves are less smoky, we have a lot less lung disease.

I wonder what can be done with the traditional material--mud? If the combustion chamber and piping was molded to good tolerances, could the efficiency go up enough and the soot output go down enough to make it worthwhile?

If so, then how about designing pipe and chamber molds so that a village could make a lot of mud stoves off the same mold? Not as nice or easy to clean as steel, but more affordable out in the countryside.

Archaeology

This time I'm trying to resuscitate a VTrak E610f. Half the time our problems are common as dirt, and half the time they're unique.

Artistic table ware

I have long had an un-examined dislike for artistic cups and plates like the one below.

I will stipulate that these require skill to make, and that there is a pleasing randomness to them. I don't see the beauty in randomness of that kind, but I can see that the effect might be analogous to the random distortions in wood grain.

Still, the works annoy me. I should figure out why.

They are called cups, but they can't be easily used as cups. How do you know they're clean? When the first impression I have is of permanent uncleanliness the cups appear to have failed their function.(*)

The tree grew the grain as best it could for the environment it had. But I expect a little more precision from human art--this seems careless, not organic, as though the potter couldn't be bothered to use a ruler. I know that glazes are extremely hard to control, so I'm probably just displaying a sad ignorance of the art. But the deliberately coarse appearance annoys me. It doesn't have the excuse of primitive tools or having to make lots of pots in a hurry for the village.

There are bigger problems in the world. Or maybe this is a piece of a bigger one.

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(*) Look at the color of the upper glaze. Old milk?

Shepherd of Hermas by not sure

I finally got started in volume 2 of the AnteNicene Fathers (CCEL makes these available). Shepherd of Hermas was attributed to the early Hermas that Paul mentions and was read in many churches of east starting around the second century. The translator is pretty sure that the Hermas is actually the brother of Pius I and thinks it was written to help counter the Montanists. In other words, we're not sure. It was esteemed highly enough to be bound up in the same volume with the gospels and Paul's letters, but some were dubious and it seems to have vanished from use by the fifth century.

The translator is extremely eager to note the primacy of Grace in the parables--at least in chronological order--to defend the author against a charge of legalism. That's a hard defence to sustain.

The book is a set of visions and meetings with angels who explain the visions, over a period of what seems like several months. The theme is that one must do right, turn from wickedness and bear fruit. Wealth attaches you to the world and renders you unsuitable to be "built into the tower." Purity and more purity.

There are a few inconsistencies: he is told several times that there is no repentence possible after knowing and rejecting Jesus, and also told that the fallen-away may be able to repent unless they denied the faith.

Some things seem more than a little odd: grief grieves the Holy Spirit, and the nature of Jesus seems a little unorthodox. On the other hand, he's also told that he is going to have to suffer because his family (church) is sinful and needs disciplining, even though he himself is innocent--which is a wise observation.

His personal catalog of sins is a bit thin and jars somewhat with the claim of the angel of repentence that he has a lot to answer for.

The format of (vision+repeated questions for interpretation of the allegory)*N is a bit tiring to deal with when you read it in a couple of sittings, but since it was probably mostly read aloud in much smaller chunks the hearers might not have cared. Some of the allegories are fine and some are exceedingly uninspired.

I don't say "read it" unless you have some commitment to reading the early fathers.

On the other hand, I do say read some of it to get a feel for what the early church attitudes were like. It is about as far from Joel Osteen as you can get.

Gluten intolerance

We all see a lot more gluten-free options in the stores, and hear a lot more about it than we used to. This isn't because people used to die from it and not be noticed thereafter.

A close family member developed gluten intolerance recently, after several serious bouts over several years with GI infections. It isn't a matter of better diagnosis--the symptoms are pretty dramatic and we could not have missed that sort of thing.

With physical problems whose frequency grows that fast, we think of infections with an odd side effect. So I looked around.

From back in 2010, some of the genes linked to susceptibility turn out to be associated with the immune system, not the gut (that we know of), suggesting that something that exercises those genes (like an infection) turns on something it shouldn't. Some epidemiological studies suggest that celiac disease (not the same as gluten sensitivity or wheat allergy) has small epidemics and some seasonal variation, which may be linked to infections in early childhood.

And, as noted above, we have anecdotal evidence that sensitivity can be induced (we hope just temporarily).

Another thing to add to the list of topics to watch.

Deep waves

Decades ago when I first read of undersea currents I wondered if they had waves. The obvious answer is yes; presumably slow--but how do you see such things? The waters off Samoa have a narrow channel with a strong current of cold water from Antarctica flowing into warm water, and Matthew Alford's team towed sensors to watch it. Not for the joy of seeing waves--apparently there's been a water mixing problem where the estimated water mixing rates are far higher than anything actually measured in the deep sea.

The group saw waves 800 feet high, and all the turbulent mixing they needed, due to breaking waves if their calculations are correct.

The density differences between cold and warm water are small enough that waves don't break quickly--they say an hour. I love watching and hearing the waves breaking on the beach--a giant squid doing the same deep down would have to be very patient. Maybe life is slower in the abyss.

And what else is addictive?

A little late for inclusion in the previous post: Brain scans find porn addiction.

Compulsive users of pornography show the same signs of addiction in their brain activity as alcoholics or drug addicts, a study has revealed.

In the first research of its kind, scans showed that a central portion of the brain which is stimulated in drug or alcohol addicts also “lit up” when compulsive pornography users watched explicit material. There was no such effect in the brains of people who were not habitual users of porn.

I didn't bother registering to get the rest of the article. I'm trying to imagine the outcome of a study similar to Hart's. If anybody were able to know what they were doing, I think the subjects would show magnificent self-control. Even if matters were arranged so that no human would know, they'd probably still feel watched.

Addiction and self-control

The NYT reports on Carl Hart's work studying the self-control of crack and meth addicts. Maybe somebody can tell me how you get away with a study like this:

Dr. Hart recruited addicts by advertising in The Village Voice, offering them a chance to make $950 while smoking crack made from pharmaceutical-grade cocaine. Most of the respondents, like the addicts he knew growing up in Miami, were black men from low-income neighborhoods. To participate, they had to live in a hospital ward for several weeks during the experiment.

At the start of each day, as researchers watched behind a one-way mirror, a nurse would place a certain amount of crack in a pipe — the dose varied daily — and light it. While smoking, the participant was blindfolded so he couldn’t see the size of that day’s dose.

Then, after that sample of crack to start the day, each participant would be offered more opportunities during the day to smoke the same dose of crack. But each time the offer was made, the participants could also opt for a different reward that they could collect when they eventually left the hospital. Sometimes the reward was \$5 in cash, and sometimes it was a \$5 voucher for merchandise at a store.

When the dose of crack was fairly high, the subject would typically choose to keep smoking crack during the day. But when the dose was smaller, he was more likely to pass it up for the \$5 in cash or voucher.

How did that get approved? I'm not saying this was abusive, but it is a little startling.

At any rate:

He also found that when he raised the alternative reward to \$20, every single addict, of meth and crack alike, chose the cash. They knew they wouldn’t receive it until the experiment ended weeks later, but they were still willing to pass up an immediate high.

Dalrymple and others claimed that addicts generally had more self-control than most (including themselves) believe. This seems to validate their observations.

But you can conclude too much from Hart's studies. The population is self-selected, of course, biased in favor of people who have the confidence to deliberately leave their home environments. They are now in a completely new and controlled environment, without any of the normal influences that make up a lot of what we think of as natural choices. (To what extent that environment is a product of your own choices is a more complicated issue. I can't choose family or neighbors, but I chose friends and what I listened to and watched, and that history has to produce some feedback.) And the rewards offered in the hospital are more clear-cut and reliable than the longer-term and chancy rewards of self-control in the hood, where there's a lot of random danger and crab-bucket trouble.

Sex jihad?

"A number of Tunisian girls who had travelled to Syria to perform “sexual jihad” there have returned back home pregnant, Tunisian Interior Minister Lotfi Bin Jeddo said on Thursday." The former Mufti of Tunisia Sheikh Othman Battikh said: "For Jihad in Syria, they are now pushing girls to go there. 13 young girls have been sent for sexual jihad. What is this? This is called prostitution. It is moral educational corruption."

But jihad looks like a magical term, and magical terms trump any analysis. (Remember when the Taliban (then ruling Afghanistan) was trying to get land mines out, and declared a jihad against land mines?)

Prostitution doesn't have to be associated with jihad, of course.

UPDATE: The France24 version of the story doesn't mention prostitution at all. Curious.

Blogging oddities

This site doesn't get a huge amount of traffic, and so when a post jumps way up in the stats I wonder about bots.

And when a site jumps high in the referrers' list I wonder about that too.

Let the referrer site have an oddball name, maybe something associated with traffic statistics, to attract the eye of the sad soul wondering about his blog's place in the world.

Who wouldn't click on it, just to see who, for a change, is reading his deathless (undead?) prose? And promptly get inundated with ads and maybe a JavaScript virus or two.

Cynical and suspicious sorts will look the site up first. I guess I'm not very trusting.

But those referrer sites can be a nuisance until "your blog becomes mature and it starts getting real traffic." Or until "you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same."

I get the occasional email saying that on the basis of such-and-such a post I ought to be interested in reading and publicizing their site. The most recent one was for an online math course aggregator; something I'm actually interested in and which looks real--but the "post" they selected as their inspiration for contacting me had zero to do with their topic. Bots again, probably--or else an unlucky typo.

Judgment of Judas

Jesus told the 12 in the upper room (or after the Rich Young Ruler: Matt 19:28) that they would sit on twelve thrones judging the tribes of Israel. A number of people have noticed that Judas was present. Was this promise conditional or not? You could argue that Judas abandoned that promise, and that's probably the right answer. Or you can wallow off into the fever swamps where Judas is really the good guy doing his Master's will.

Or we could follow Williams (Terror of Light) and wonder what an apostle in hell would be doing. Judgment without mercy waits for those who have not shown mercy? He had no mercy on himself--he'd be an unpleasant judge to end up facing.

If you wanted to tell a story centered around this, you have several problems. One is simply plotting: who has to face Judas? The obvious approach would have people select him themselves, unexpectedly but appropriately. But then you run into the characterization problem. It isn't easy to assign the "tribes of Israel" distinctive personal or symbolic attributes (Meyers-Briggs?) and correlate them with the 12 apostles. For that matter, we don't have clear character sketches of most of the apostles, at least in modern literature. I don't doubt you could borrow lots of material from Origen, but he isn't part of our background culture and so the story would read as though you were making it up arbitrarily.

So, while (I think) it would be an interesting concept for a story, I can't think of many authors who could make it go. Maybe Gene Wolfe?

I'd give my left flipper for a Q-tip

Apparently blue whales's ear wax keeps building up all life long. Light wax during feeding season, dark when migrating. But Trumble and Usenko realized that the oils might preserve oil-soluble hormones--like testosterone--and a detailed analysis could tell how long it took the whale to reach sexual maturity. And what sorts of pollutants were in the water.

I wonder how far back these things have been preserved. Whales sample a fair bit of ocean, and you could get a little pollution history if you could link samples together and go back far enough. Cool.

I'd never given whale earwax any thought at all--just assumed that the eardrum was protected and that was that. That it build up instead of migrating out seems odd, but I guess it works OK.

Feynman lectures

Volume 1 of the Feynman Lectures on Physics is online now.

Physicists widely admire them, and some teachers re-read sections because his exposition is so clear and clean: especially the first volume. It can help you keep your teaching focused on the main line and not distracted by details.

But I gather it doesn't seem to work so well as a first-year textbook. It is excellent for teaching you what you know, but is hard to climb into when you don't know much about the material.

I remember sitting through Statistical Mechanics, and everything seemed so clear and simple. Then I sat down for the exam: "Calculate the specific heat of copper." Brain freeze.

I think the textbooks that work for new learners stop frequently and make the student exercise what he's learning. You have to keep your eyes on the prize, and Feynman was very good at that, but I have to step through some of those details myself to anchor them--the lucid A through Z lecture doesn't seem to find a resting place.

Unexpected weakness

I've had the usual set of diseases, including pneumonia and malaria, and I'm quite familiar with "weak as a kitten." It is sometimes hard to remember that someone else is too weak for a job, but once I remember I empathize fine.

I signed up for weekend coverage for this weekend sometime back, and I wasn't planning on a nasty cold.

Most of the weekend work is pretty straightforward: if A then B, and pray I don't have to go in to get systems restarted. Users who are way over quota get email (forgot to cc though...). Restart server X remotely if that $$$ software wedges again. Easy provided nothing goes badly wrong.

One production project stalled, and while trying to keep my eyes open long enough to debug the script, I realized that I couldn't focus on more than one line at a time. If A and B then--wait, was A true or not?

I realized I was mentally weak as a kitten. No doubt that's been the case many times before (see pneumonia, above), but it was the first time I realized "This is what it's like not to be able to do math." I hope that can translate into a little more empathy.

I also hope I can clear up enough to replace the stupid code. (I wrote it; it was always just interim code to test the machinery.)

Holidays

I caught the tail end of a piece on the radio describing an effort (or a trial balloon) to get 9/11 declared a national day of remembrance. I gather the idea was that it be something like Memorial Day.

I don't know exactly how they meant this. A day to memorialize the civilians who were killed by our enemies might work, as a parallel to the day to memorialize the soldiers who were killed fighting our enemies.

But the shape of our language suggests why this might not work very well. We talk about "celebrating" a holiday: we "celebrate" Memorial Day on Monday. Some people say "observe Memorial Day", just as they "observe Lent", but most of us "celebrate" the time off for official holidays.

If we're going to "celebrate" a day, let's not celebrate Pearl Harbor day but VE day or VJ day. Not 9/11 but 9/12; not disaster but hope.

Granted, we would benefit from a little corporate fasting and prayer and a day of mourning now and then--we've festivals enough and it is good to recognize the other aspects of life. But days of mourning (*) appointed by the government don't nourish the soul very much. Which is not surprising: It's absurd to expect to be spiritually uplifted and inspired by our own machinery.

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(*) Such as everyone's favorite?

Spontaneous generation

Have you ever noticed that no matter how many flies you swat, there are always more? Similarly with mosquitoes. The doors and windows are shut, so they're not sneaking in. But when I swat one, hydra-like, 3 more leap startled into the air--from somewhere. Wormholes? Spontaneous generation? Some strange conservation law?

Genesis vs Egypt

In the sermon this morning the pastor pointed out that Genesis was compiled for the benefit of Israelites coming out of slavery in Egypt.

It doesn't tell the stories of the different tribes--those they probably already knew (within their own tribes), but it does tell the stories of how the tribes came to be--the uniting story that they may or may not have considered more important than their own separate tribal stories.

The pastor focused on Genesis 1, and how that would be viewed. An aspect of that occurred to me that I hadn't thought of before. There's quite a contrast between one God and the sea of gods in Egypt. (Their natures and roles seem to blur together at this distance, but it may be that at any given time the distinctions were clear and the blurring comes from seeing an overlay of many different snapshots.)

In Genesis chapter 1 one god creates the heavens and the earth. Then:

Second day	sky (Nut), waters (Tefnut)
Third day	water (Nile: Hapi) and land (Geb)
Fourth day	day/night, stars: Ra (sun), Nut again, Chons and Jah and Thoth (moon)
Fifth day	fish (Hatmehyt; also Ipet for hippos, etc), Horus etc (bird-headed)
Sixth day	animals (Bastet, Apis, and a whole raft of half-animals: Ra, Hathor, Sekhmet, Horus, Thoth, Anubis, Amun...) Chepre (beetle)

And of course God creates man at the end, and gives him dominion over the rest. So instead of Apis having dominion over man, man has dominion over cows. Everything, even what were in Egypt called gods, are made by one God. (A not entirely alien concept to the Egyptians, but I can't date the story.)

The only thing in the world described as being in the image of God is man. Goodbye hawk-heads.

All of which is familiar to us, but it would be dramatic to people who grew up in such as thoroughly polytheistic world as ancient Egypt. (I gather Akhenaten was some years after Moses, though I hear there's lots of argument.)

I wonder what it would look like

The other night Eldest Daughter mentioned a fantasy football league some friends were involved in. I asked her if there would be a LARP version of fantasy football.

Using stories

Over at Necat Draco Dubbahdee explores how words and phrases that describe things we haven’t experienced yet can be given content by the vicarious experience of a story.

Jesus told of us things we don’t see every day, and His parables help define His terms, no matter what language we translate them into. The Muslims say the Koran cannot be translated; Jesus’ parables help translate themselves. I know which I judge more universal.

Interceding

Bob couldn’t feel the pain eating away his spine any longer, but neither could his hand touch his body in the vacant dark.

“Where am I?” he begged.

“Waiting for judgment,” came the kindly reply.

“So I’m dead?” No answer was needed and none came. “What are my chances?”

“Why don’t you tell me? What did you do with the days you were trusted with?”

He wandered through memories and balanced a sea of good done for him against very little done by him.

“I think I’m going to have to rely on Divine mercy.”

“True,” replied the gentle voice. “But that won’t bypass the question.”

“I was never any good at telling people about Jesus; though that’s maybe just an excuse. I only worked in the nursery once. I didn’t like it—I guess that means I didn’t do any foot-washing. And ... Brother Harold always managed to make people welcome: I never tried.”

“Tell me about Brother Harold.”

“I wish I’d been more like him. He had a good word for everybody, and a smile, and had enough people over to his backyard picnics over the summers to fill a small town. His name wasn’t on the sign outside, but without him there’d have been no church to speak of. It was like Jesus was welcoming everybody; both old friends and strangers.”

“I’ll bear that in mind.”

“Or Janet. She could be hard to get along with sometimes, but nobody worked harder for the kids in her neighborhood. And Tom. Just a hint and he’d be there with a van full of tools, and the latest teenager he was teaching the trade to, and they’d work for hours on a car or a roof.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“And through the years there were the preachers and deacons too, but not me. It seems all I did was complain about the budget shortfall and discourage people. But Sister Ellen was always so encouraging—she’ll pass the test OK, won’t she?”

“You can be confident in the judge.”

“Promise me she’ll make it? She was so good to everybody.”

“Rest easy.”

And faintly in the distance he heard a woman’s voice saying “I never really thought things out; I just jumped in without thinking and made a muddle. It’s a good thing we had Brother Bob to keep us real. He’ll be there, won’t he?”