Heart disease and diabetes

The doc says that hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease are the deadly trifecta. So far I'm not in that league, but stories like this--New Evidence of a Possible Link Between Diabetes and the Hardening of Heart Valves--do tend to catch the eye, as having a little bit of a personal flavor.

The study used shrinking of the gel medium as a proxy for pig heart valve cell growth (the "valvular interstitial cell"), and used varying amounts of glucose in the medium. (And other things, see the abstract. The more the gel shrunk, the livelier the valve cells must have been growing.

The abstract suggests they only used 3 concentrations: 1g/L, 2g/L, and 4.5g/L. The 2g/L was the Goldilocks concentration; the others showed less growth.

And let's see: 1g/L is 100mg/dL--which is considered normal for humans, and 2g/L is 200mg/L which is bad. That made me go google for pig diabetes, and the first thing I found asked Why Don't Pigs Get Diabetes? ("we bred them not" to is the proposed answer). Another site discusses how to manage pig diabetes. "And even in a normal laboratory pig, blood sugar can vary from under 40 to over 100; their control is not as tight as healthy human beings have naturally." Sounds like pigs are OK for a comparison, so what's the difference?

Maybe the levels seen in vivo differ from those in the culture medium; the cells are organized in tissues in real life. In any event, this might be a mechanism for inducing the cascading problems that harass us.

Music notes

Last night we went to hear the Westminster Choir and organ concert. The big music folders had hand straps, but even so they were almost as big as the torso of some of the kids. During an organ interlude to give the singers a break, it seemed as though the organ piece was a little like jazz improvisation--much more complicated, but scripted.

Listen to the difference in aesthetic between the boy choir (w/ a few men) and the mixed choir (or the men's choir) and a praise band and a piece from an Aladura church. (OK, to be fair, I'm not sure you call the Church of the Lord Aladura orthodox, but the genre is typical of more orthodox churches too.)

The Orthodox claim that the liturgy embodies theology, and that conclusions can be drawn from the way things have always been done. Certainly the way we pray shapes the way we believe: though perhaps not to the full extent of "Lex orandi, lex credendi". How do each of these styles guide us in our emotions about God and our relationship to Him? (Our thoughts are another matter--sometimes they follow the emotions and sometimes live in tension with them.)

Graves again

I wrote earlier that graves and markers seemed like a minor detail compared to the death itself, but: Graves matter.

In March, the second Wednesday of the month is National Decoration Day, a public holiday during which people flock to cemeteries to clear brush from the graves of relatives, and scrub and decorate headstones.

Cremations in the capital, and burials of Ebola victims in body bags outside Monrovia without relatives present, means there won't be a place to honor deceased relatives. Decoration days will come with many people not knowing where the remains of their loved ones are, or knowing they were cremated and that their ashes were not recovered.

Many will find it hard to accept that they will never see the graves of those lost to the disease.
.....
Nyenswah said many people are remaining home to die instead of reporting for treatment.

"We understand that there are secret burials taking place in the communities," he said. "Let's stop that and report sick people and get them treated."
.....
A commentary on a website, Sierra Leone News Hunters, suggested that a memorial site be built to honor the dead who do not receive traditional burial rites, and to provide some comfort to their families.

It said: "The erection of a monument bearing the names of all Ebola victims would not take away the sad memories but it would at least pacify the broken heart somewhat."

Models

When you have a physics/edu email address you sometimes get odd messages, above and beyond the usual breast enlargement and import business proposals. Never mind the odd grammar (his English is far better than my 30C homeopathic Hungarian), but instead look at the shoehorning of all phenomena into his model.

If the speed of an elementary object not equal to the speed of light, then the elementary object is atom, which consists of many electromagnetic fields of photons, X-ray-photons and gamma-photons. The real "particles" of this world are the photon, X-ray-photon and gamma-photon particles. Other particles not exist.

and

Known that the several radioactive nucleuses emitt several energy gamma-photons. Speed of all gamma-photons is the speed of light. From this follows that the nucleuses consist of several mass gamma-photons.

Let's follow the logic. It is known that humans emit sweat, urine, and feces, which move at less than the speed of light. From this it follows that humans consist of sweat, urine, and feces.

Despite the claims of political partisans, I suspect this is not so.

Trolls and saints

Last night Middle Daughter and I were talking about trolls and real-life threats.

What did trolls do before the net? With the net they can be heard, and threaten, and stir up trouble to their slimy hearts’ delight. Without it...

I suppose some would have written poison pen letters, but I don’t think those were ever quite as common as trolls are now. You might find some snarlers in the background, but I don’t remember that many, and I suppose the risks of personal confrontation suppressed the urge.

Did that suppression, by the effect of habit, change the attitudes? And does today’s ease of expression, also by habit, ingrain more deeply the bitterness and venom?

If I’m to guess, I think the net both reveals the flaw and makes it grow. With it, what might have been a minor weed of grump blossoms to a titan arum. Anonymity and distance make it consequence-free, and it’s claimed you can tell a man’s character by what he does when he’s alone.

I’m a layman here, but the received wisdom is that the bulk of the trolls will threaten till dawn but never do anything about their threats. But the net lets them link up with really violent types and shape their vision remotely.

New technologies give us new (or expanded) vices.

Maybe some expanded virtues too. What would some of those be, I wonder? Greater scope for charitable giving, yes. At least the potential for greater knowledge and perhaps a trace of effect of the Grand Tour? True, most people head for the bubble gum instead, but then most aren't trolls either. Except maybe on Facebook

It gives the scope to develop plans more quickly and completely--efficiency and perfection are good things, though not quite fitting in the list of classical virtues.

Am I a better person because I use the web? (My family and I are eating because of it, but that's not the point.) In what ways better, in what ways worse?

Marshmallows

I'm on the wrong side of the paywall to read the original, but description of Mischel's experiments with kids and marshmallows was new to me.

By now you've probably heard the summary: At the Stanford University laboratory of a psychologist named Walter Mischel, preschool-age children were left alone in a room after having been told they could get a small treat (a marshmallow or pretzel) by ringing a bell at any time to summon the experimenter. But if they held out until he returned on his own, they could have a bigger treat (two marshmallows or pretzels). The outcome, as it's usually represented, is that the children who were able to wait for an extra treat scored better on measures of cognitive and social skills many years later and had higher SAT scores. Thus, if we teach kids to put off the payoff as long as possible, they'll be more successful.

But that simplistic conclusion misrepresents, in several ways, what the research actually found.

1. What mostly interested Mischel wasn't whether children could wait for a bigger treat—which, by the way, most of them could. It wasn't even whether those who waited fared better in life than those who didn't. Rather, the central question was how children go about trying to wait and which strategies help. It turned out that kids waited longer when they were distracted by a toy. What worked best wasn't (in Mischel's words) "self-denial and grim determination," but doing something enjoyable while waiting so that self-control wasn't needed at all.

If you, like me, got the standard line, go read the rest of the article. Or if you can get by the paywall, read the journal article.

Bucket list

I'm reading a book called Sabbath(*) in which at one point the hypothetical question is asked "What do you most want to be, to do, to know, and to give away in the last third of your life?"

Aside from the unwelcome thought that I've probably less than a third to go if family history is any guide, the question seems not quite right somehow. I know that "If you don't have a dream how you gonna have a dream come true?" but something's missing.

I think part of it is the "you ... want" bit. If you had told me before I walked into the church that I'd be up close and personal with autism spectrum, I'd have dropped the ring and run like a gazelle with its tail on fire. But in the end I don't think I'd trade my life with my kids for anything. (and with my wife, of course)

So what I want isn't always a good estimator of what will turn out to be good.

Without some kind of plan and structure, nothing happens, and that's not good at all (see what happens to the fellow with one talent). But the details of how it turns out aren't in our control, only how we respond to the surprises. So I don't think I should have a bucket list so much as bucket principles--that I will do things virtuously, gratefully and with intelligence, so long as that is given to me.

Although I would like a trip to the space station.

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(*) By Dan B. Allender. So far it reads like he was getting paid by the word, and I'm not sure he understands who his audience is. Most people I know aren't in danger of taking the Sabbath too strictly.

Simple explanations

I read an article about personal space today, that referenced a study about men and women in airplane seats. It found that men hogged the armrests 5 to 1 over women.

Perhaps this is sexist domineering. Or perhaps men have, on the average, wider shoulders than women. Airline seats are not notorious for roominess either at shoulder height or at the seat. I don't sit widely but some of my neighbors have.

Dieting

"Reach for your mate instead of a plate".

Though I don't think you can reliably extrapolate from C. elegans...

Missed the bulls-eye

The comet is going to miss Mars. I still wish it would have, though I grant that it would have made existence difficult for our probes (which will apparently be on the far side of Mars for about 20 minutes when the high-speed comet tail whips through, and thus be relatively shielded from sand-blasting).

I'm not sure if liking explosions is a feature or a bug. I harbored a secret hope that the Scottish vote would be for independence, because of the chaos that would ensue--though if I were voting on the measure myself I'd have picked the less catastrophic option.

Epidemics

I thought one of the great benefits of literacy was that you could learn from the experience of people far away or long dead. You needn't live through a tornado yourself in order to learn how to prepare for one. Of course you can probably ask a friend who has sheltered when one went by--tornadoes are fairly common.

Stock market crashes happen too, but it seemed as though we had a generation of brokers who had not seen one in their working lives, and apparently (one may infer from their advice) believed that such things were now impossible.

The Spanish Flu was about a hundred years ago, and there aren't a lot of people left we can ask about it. But we can read about epidemics and quarantines, and figure out why people did things the way they did in the past.

But if each generation considers itself sui generis, I wonder what the point of writing is.

Graves in Liberia

One of the things that makes ebola hard in Liberia is that the dead cannot be honored. Granted, that seems like a minor detail compared to the death and fear, but people have risked death themselves to honor their dead.

There isn’t a lot we can do about this: those dead of ebola cannot be touched, and would most safely be cremated--not exactly a customary way of honoring the dead. But I wonder if we can do something. If the burial teams have the names (and parents) of the dead, could someone carve the names into a stones to stand by a mass grave? Quite a few would be "woman known only to God."

I don’t know if anybody there could do it, and the lag time in getting something made elsewhere and then shipped there is large, so this probably wouldn’t be much use anyway, but if people knew their family members were being commemorated, it might be a little comfort.

UPDATE: Maybe it would help with the problem of bribing of burial teams.

Astroguesser

My officemate, on hearing that he missed the eclipse this morning, mentioned a “Virtual Planetarium” called Stellarium, which is quite good. It even allows views from other planets. The stock background is rather amusing when the location is the South Pole (he suggested to the authors that they take some images from IceCube): trees and houses. You can pick a date, or do a Time Traveler scene with the months whipping by too.

We decided that a world with only Geoguesser is incomplete. What we need is a 3-D version, using the stars in our local area. If you need help, you can cheat by asking for the constellation lines to be drawn. When Orion looks like scrambled eggs, where in space are you? He suggested the name.

I’m not quite sure how the user picks a location in a sphere, though...

Stuff and Nonsense

Moseying through Wikiquotes after the Supreme's recent “non-decision…”

Nor do the gods appear in warrior's armour clad
To strike them down with sword and spear
Those whom they would destroy
They first make mad.

Bhartṛhari, 7th c. AD; as quoted in John Brough,Poems from the Sanskrit, (1968), p, 67

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If there are certain pages of Mr Bertrand Russell's book, Power, which seem rather empty, that is merely to say that we have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

George Orwell, Review of Power: A New Social Analysis by Bertrand Russell in The Adelphi (January 1939)

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At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

George Orwell, The Freedom of the Press", unused preface to Animal Farm

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. The highly socialised modern mind, which makes a kind of composite god out of the rich, the government, the police and the larger newspapers, has not been developed — at least not yet.

George Orwell, Review of The Civilization of France by Ernst Robert Curtius; translated by Olive Wyon, in The Adelphi (May 1932):

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If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be conducted successfully.

Confucius, Analects

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To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

George Orwell, "In Front of Your Nose," Tribune (22 March 1946)

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"One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."

George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism

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And don’t forget Kipling

This isn't just about the latest folly endorsing the contradiction "homosexual marriage"--there are plenty of wads of nonsense we solemnly tip the hat to.

Fermions and Bosons

It occurred to me that I should maybe define some terms, especially when they represent such curious features of the world.

It all goes back to the photoelectric effect. It turns out that light comes in little “chunks” (photons). These have different energies, which correspond to different frequencies. The higher the energy, the higher the frequency; they’re directly proportional. But there’s another little detail about them that emerges: they have angular momentum.

That’s kind of weird at first glance, but electromagnetic fields can have momentum and angular momentum, so we can live with that. It turns out that not just photons have angular momentum but also other elementary particles, including the electron. Since as far as we can measure it doesn’t seem to have any size, it is hard to imagine how an electron could have angular momentum, which is the product of the radius and the component of momentum perpendicular to the radius. Radius=0 means angular momentum is 0, right? Except that it isn’t, here. There’s some intrinsic angular momentum to the electron. And the proton. And the photon.

And that the angular momentum comes in units, it isn’t continuous. Each photon has the same total angular momentum. It can point in different directions, but it is always the same total. So if a particle emits a photon, that particle’s intrinsic angular momentum has to change by one unit.

That unit is, of course h, Planck’s Constant, the pivot of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. You might think that this just applied to photons, since that was where it was discovered, but it turns out to be more universal than that: gluons too, and the W/Z of the weak interaction--all have 1 unit of angular momentum.

So if something has an intrinsic angular momentum, what sizes can it be?

You can guess right off the bat: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 ... units of h. If these are elementary particles we call them bosons. If they are composite (like a Helium atom), we generally still call them bosons but with the caveat that they are complicated.

But, there’s another possibility. 1/2 h. If something with that angular momentum emits a photon, you get (1/2-1)=-1/2: the same size, just pointing in the opposite direction. Particles with spins 1/2, 3/2, 5/2 etc. we call fermions.

That different spin might not seem to matter much, but it turns out to be very important. Each electron is exactly like every other electron. If you have two, their joint wave function has to be anti-symmetric. In other words, if you swap their positions, directions and their spins, you get the opposite sign. So what happens if they’re both at the same place with the same spin? When a function is equal to its negative, it has to be 0. So you can’t have two fermions in exactly the same state. Which is fortunate, or else atoms would collapse as all the electrons emitted photons and fell into the nucleus.

So if angular momentum comes in discrete chunks, does that mean that the angular momentum of a spinning wheel is a finite (but large) number of those chunks instead of a continuum? Or that your angular momentum relative to the door knob as you walk down the hall is limited to particular values? Probably. And if you try to wrap your mind head around how that works, you begin to see why some researchers are working with models of spacetime/momentum space that use a grid rather than the old faithful number lines. In everyday life you can't tell the difference between a quadrillion h and a quadrillion and one, so it looks continuous to you. But things look different in the small world when the lumps become obvious.

Capital city problems

Fortunately I can do most of my work remotely. The First Lady is visiting the Overture Center tomorrow morning, which will tie up traffic abominably. The square is pretty sluggish at the best of times, and when security (the center is less than 500 feet away from my office) gets involved there's not much point in trying to come in. The airport is between my home and the square, so to go around I'd be circling half the city.

I just hope she doesn't go after my lunches.

Left off preaching and gone to meddling...

I hadn't noticed before, but the Bible addresses government deficit spending: "The wicked borrows and does not pay back." (Psalm 37:21)

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I noticed that while I was slogging through The Life and Death of Mr Badman, Bunyan's originally planned sequel to The Pilgrim's Progress. He wrote the book as a counterpoint to Pilgrim, but when someone published a fake sequel, Bunyan wrote a real Part II to the Pilgrim's Progress, concerning the adventures of Christiana, his wife. Part II isn't as dramatic a read as the more familiar Part I, since it is more of an allegory of the Christian life in community, but it is well worth reading. And some call The Holy War the second best allegory in English, with Pilgrim's Progress being the best.

Mr Badman, on the other hand, is a dialog between two people who pretty much entirely agree with each other, and consequently it lacks almost all dramatic interest. It includes thumbnails of real people's stories, which of course I've never heard of but were probably of lively interest to his readers. I'm about halfway through, and within an inch of just jumping to the end to see how Mr Badman meets his maker. It does provide an view of what life was like then, with Masters over apprentices rather than students in schools, and informers getting an extra revenue stream by spying on their neighbor's transgressions (especially the neighbors stepping out on their spouses).

I bought an inexpensive tablet to see how the pocket appliance world works, and loaded FBReader and some kindle-style books from Gutenberg on it. Works OK; I can read and listen to music easily enough, though a more expensive model would have better sound and wireless reception. Miserable for anything involving typing, though, and speech recognition is more amusing than useful. Oddly enough the Kindle app doesn't seem very useful.

No, please, read the paper!

"Meet the Majorana fermion", the particle predicted 80 years ago.

Except it isn't an elementary particle at all. If you take the trouble to read just the abstract of the article, it is clear enough that what was observed wasn't a Majorana neutrino, but a collective state in a superconductor. That's cool, and it was quite challenging to create such a composite system that models a Majorana fermion, and it probably satisfies the equations to first order, but it isn't a new particle in the standard sense. Not in the sense that a proton or a tau is a particle (and a fermion).

If neutrinos are Majorana particles, then they are their own anti-particles. Since they're so hard to detect, it hasn't been actually proven that the neutrino and the anti-neutrino are distinct, so Majorana's proposition is still an open question. Despite what Jessica Orwig at Business Insider implies in the rather muddled article.

To be fair, the experimenters probably made the comparison themselves, and expected that other people would know the difference.

The Secret Service

I know the rule: "never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity." But when the disastrous choice is made time after time, with virtually no intervening successes, even the most generous soul starts to wonder if there's malice behind the smiles.

The latest Secret Service fiascoes are reassuring. Despots are typically careful of their safety. Turning off alarms, dialing down the rules of engagement to gentle/delicate, and installing guards on the basis of political correctness rather than competence have predictable consequences—predictable to any but the terminally stupid. Even if someone besides the President is calling the shots, that person would have to be foolish to forget that their access to the throne depends on the safety of the king. So: stupidity.

Patient confidentiality

Patient X in Dallas went to a hospital on the 27'th with a fever and was sent home. He's back, with ebola. If I understand ebola correctly, he was contagious on the 27'th. I gather the authorities are trying to trace his contacts, but apparently the public isn't allowed to help. Remember the Boston bomber search, with the police wanting everybody behind doors to avoid danger? Eyes on the street was what spotted him, not door-to-door police.

I wonder how long it will be before parts of patient confidentiality get waived. We paid a pretty high price for not being more aggressive with quarantine (and closing the bathhouses) with AIDS. It wouldn't have solved the problem then, but it would have made it smaller.

I think the authorities are going to need help. At some point we're going to have to ditch confidentiality in favor of public health for some diseases--this would be a good time before things really get started.

How closely does the appearance of the virus correlate with fever? When exactly do you start to become contagious?

They can quarantine the family in the hospital and monitor them through all the stages of the disease. Maybe that's why the CDC team flew out there.

We talked about this at the table this evening, and it occurred to us that he might have picked it up riding in a taxi. Think sweaty seats--very sweaty seats.

Very different values

We generally try to make sure disagreements don't inflate into violent disputes (despite the revolutionary origin of the country). Editorials cluck-cluck about the partisan divide we have, though they celebrate it quietly: "our party is principled, theirs is obstructive." "Moderate" is a nice label to wear.

I started reading The Constitution of Athens, and in Chapter 8 find this about the rules confected by the famous Solon:

And seeing that the state was often torn by faction, and that some of the citizens from indifference stood aloof, of his own motion he passed a law specially directed against them as follows—that anyone who, when the state was divided into parties, did not take up arms and side with one or the other, should be deprived of his political rights, and have no part in the state.

Distributed doctoring

UPDATE: Prepositioning medicines won't work very well. They will deteriorate in the heat and humidity (want to bet the bottles won't be opened from time to time?). You would have to re-distribute regularly--possibly annually.

One of my favorite scenes in the movies is the engineers around the table in Apollo 13.

I wish I had a team of engineers and nurses.

Ebola is, of course, out of hand in Liberia/Guinea/Sierra Leone now. The centralized medical centers were overwhelmed and eviscerated. They are trying to open secondary centers. USAID is trying to bring in ebola management kits to distribute to the villages.(*) The kits aren’t quite complete enough but they have the right idea.

Treatment has to happen at the extremely local level: village or neighborhood. Without that presence people don’t buy into the system, and in any event there’s nowhere near enough beds even if you could transport everybody to the hospital without infecting another half dozen people on the way.

There are not enough doctors or nurses. There won’t be. All you have available is family members, with advice.

Cell phones are widely known and used, and though smart phones aren’t nearly as common as the candy-bar models this can help spread the word among the skeptical. But this is just the start.

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Here’s the challenge: given local resources (in the slum or in the village), how can we arrange for medical care while minimizing the risk of ebola infection to others?

A few features seem to be inevitable. Homes are crowded, so the patient needs to come out of the home and stay in a more isolated setting. One member of the family will be taking care of the patient—so the isolation area needs to have room for pairs. The caregiver has to assume that the patient has ebola, and so buckets of bleach water have to be available.

The patient probably doesn’t have ebola, so the kit is deficient. It should also have malaria suppressants and vermifuge and some anti-diarrhea tablets and some rehydration salts and maybe a few other things as well. The average caregiver will have no idea how to use these things. I’ll get back to that. (Tylenol might be more dangerous than it is worth unless the kit has only a little--that's a judgment call.)

The slums should have readier access to bleach, plastic bags, gasoline, cloth, and other useful items. The village will have more space to put an isolation building—the slums are horribly crowded—and better sewage disposal. Neither one has useful medical advice.

Engineers and Nurses:

Can one kludge procedures using cloth, plastic bags, and bleach that will let you clean a sick patient without exposing your own skin to ebola? How much bleach residue can someone with diarrhea stand, since you have to bleach the cup he drinks from? How can you use cloth and whatever to hold someone up enough to drink? What sorts of procedures can you use to wrap the dead (bearing in mind that whatever he was lying on is wet and contaminated) that won’t put you at excessive risk?

Can you make a decent mask with available cloth? How many do you need to have on hand if you have to keep soaking old ones in the bleach?

Can you make disposable bedding from leaves and branches (in season)?

What is bleach going to do to skin infections?

How much cloth is one person with the runs going to need?

If the patient is bed-ridden, what can one use for a bedpan?

If the patient is not bedridden, how can one kludge a latrine in the slum? Since the waste is potentially deadly (even without ebola), this isn’t a trivial problem.

Other ideas and questions--straw men and otherwise.

Beef up those medical kits. I’m assuming the information pamphlets are cartoons, since most people can’t read. The medicines need to be brightly and distinctly colored so they can tell them apart easily. Probably everybody has worms, so dosing everybody in the village on general principles is probably harmless and might increase overall health.

Create medical teams that just answer cell phone questions. You need a lot of them, because there will be a lot of questions and a lot of languages. Their job is not to provide care but to explain how to use the souped-up medical kits. They in turn will not be doctors or nurses; they’ll be working mostly from scripts. If they get stumped they call for advice from medical central (which might not even be in the country). Not all villages will have a cell phone to call with. Can't solve that problem here.

The circulating education teams have to demonstrate all the details of all the procedures. This means that it will take a long time to finish a circuit. Folding cloth to make a support or an impermeable mitten is something that needs to be practiced a little. So long as one person gets it, the team has to rely on that person to train the others as needed since they can't stay for too long. Cartoons are all very well, but there’s no substitute for trying procedures out yourself (even cartoons aren't as clear as their creators dream). The teams will have to resupply the medicines from time to time. Some villages can only be reached by a few day’s walk. Some slums are dangerous.

I'd thought that for somebody in a village with ebola a trench filled with leaf bedding would be useful, but since there won't be a diagnosis (probably ever) I don't know if this would be suitable. For a one-off treatment site it might be OK for easing cleanup.

If a man dies you need to bury or burn his contaminated clothing and bedding. This will be a bit of a sacrifice, and in the rainy season (like right now) difficult. How long can you soak a filthy shirt in bleach before it is safe enough for someone else to inherit?

If the people intensely dislike the smell of chlorine bleach on the departed one, maybe perfume would help mask the smell, and also mask the fact that the person hasn’t been bathed as thoroughly as custom demands.

Sometimes liquid latex is available from rubber trees—can that be used to make cloth less permeable?

In the slums, the city is going to have to clear some areas out to make room for isolation buildings and latrines. This will make people angry. If you compensate those whose houses were razed, the neighbors will be angry that they didn't get a share. Money allocated for compensation will leak away before it gets to the people. You just have to deal with the anger somehow.

This will need lots of volunteers with working knowledge of tribal languages. You can probably find some in churches.

The isolation buildings don’t have to be any fancier than anything else in the area—in fact it is probably a bad idea to have them be too good since there will be squatters in the slums. The shelters have to keep the rain off, fresh air in (insofar as there is any), and the patients out of the draft and separated from each other. Latrines outside, places for paraphernalia where the caregiver can keep an eye on them so they don’t get stolen (the slums are slums). There need to be a lot of these shelters, since a caregiver will likely have other obligations to other family members and can’t spend 24/7 at the isolation building—so these can’t be far from home.

What kind of landscape is needed for siting an isolation building?

Try to recruit burial team members from the slums. You may have to pay by the body or they might not show up.

Water is a problem--too big to solve on a useful timescale for stopping ebola.

UPDATE 27-Sep: See this story about makeshift protective gear.

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(*)

SIEGEL: That kind of gear and information is in kits that will soon be distributed by the U.S. government in Liberia. But as NPR's Nurith Aizenman reports, the home health care kits come with mixed messages.
NURITH AIZENMAN: Here's what's in these kits...
NANCY LINDBORG: It's a bucket that contains a sprayer, which is used for disinfectant, rolls of bags for capturing any infected garments or items, gloves, a gown, a mask, soap, chlorine.
AIZENMAN: Nancy Lindborg is a top official at USAID. She says the agency's plan is to distribute the kits to 400,000 households across Liberia. The first 50,000 kits are arriving next week. And here's the question - can these kits help slow this outbreak?
Kits like this have been distributed in previous Ebola outbreaks, but never on this scale. Dr. Daniel Bausch is an infectious disease expert with Tulane University and the U.S. Navy. He's advising the U.S. government on the current Ebola outbreak, though he's not working directly on the home kits.
DANIEL BAUSCH: In previous outbreaks, the question was is it better to try to take care of people at home with these sorts of kits or should we really focus on getting people into an Ebola treatment units? But that's not an option now.
AIZENMAN: There are very few treatment centers in Liberia. So people are taking care of their family members at home. They don't have a choice. President Obama is promising to build 17 new treatment centers with a total of 1,700 beds. But that's going to take time.
BAUSCH: Until we can do that, I think that we have to be honest. And we have to offer people what protections and what care we can even though it's far from ideal.
AIZENMAN: But USAID says that the kits are not meant to be used to provide treatment. For instance, they don't contain Tylenol for fevers or rehydration salts to help replace fluids lost through vomiting and diarrhea. Officials say the most important item in the kit is an information pamphlet telling people how to protect themselves. Dr. Bausch says that while using items in the kits like gloves or surgical gowns won't completely protect the family members and friends of someone with Ebola, every little bit helps.
BAUSCH: If we can cut down - rather than having five infected people from a sick person in a home, if we can cut down to three, obviously that's a good thing.

The director of the king

Solomon wrote "The king's heart is like channels of water in the hand of the LORD; He turns it wherever He wishes." Of course, he was the king at the time, and the book of Proverbs is well known to be a book of general rules of thumb rather than absolute promises. An even less reliable authority said in reference to the kingdoms of the world and their authority "To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will." You might be inclined to discount the word of the Father of Lies, but Jesus spoke of the hostile "prince of this world."

I've heard quite a few people opining that things would be better if some of Our Group could get elected and change the moral climate of the country. Sometimes their anointed one becomes the ruler (I have kin who campaigned for ∅bama), but for some reason it never quite works out to be as uplifting as they hoped. Do I hear someone laughing in the background?

---

FWIW, I've sometimes wondered what the conversation was about when Jesus told his disciples about the temptation in the wilderness.

Stroller changes?

Back in the days when we used a stroller, we made sure it collapsed. Even the twin stroller (a double-wide, to keep a todler and a baby more or less in one place) folded down fairly compactly, though with treacherous projections. I saw strollers on the bus, too--generally folded down when they were brought on.

These days I see a lot of strollers on the bus, and even on the sidewalks--double strollers (fore and aft, the double-wides are, thankfully, out of style) as often as not, and none of them apparently easy to fold up. The double strollers almost invariably have just one child aboard. The weight, volume and square footage per child is much larger than before.

Is that because strollers are so much cheaper, or because nobody worries about folding them up anymore?

My sampling may be biased, since most of the strollers on the bus are with women going to/from the homeless shelter (no car, no need to compress), and many of the rest are with people touring the square, who may not be representative.

Still, the new style seems much bigger and more padded, and I'll bet harder to clean.

Golf

Eldest Son had an intriguing idea: imagine playing golf on Perelandra.

I wonder if you can emulate that in a water park or a mostly enclosed bay...

The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto

Rudolph Otto’s The Idea of the Holy begins by suggesting that those who have never experienced anything like this will have no idea what he is writing about, and may as well just put the book down. That’s dramatic advice, but fair—especially since the choice of words that follow is apt to be extremely confusing.

He, or perhaps his translator, uses the term non-rational to describe the experience of the numinous. What he means is that you cannot model the numinous and wrap your mind around it. Encountering the numinous is encountering something “wholly other.” Terms like majestic, terrifying, powerful, and so on do not, at first apply. The experience goes the other direction, as we try to express what we have known in symbols other people (and we!) can understand.

Thomas Aquinas wrote massive and thoughtful analyses of the foundations and implications of the faith which generations have benefited from, but one day he had a vision, laid down his pen, and said that everything he had written before was so much “straw.”

This experience of the holy Otto sees (and I think correctly) as the origin and source of power of all religions. Even the purely artificial religions—burning incense to the spirit of the emperor or worship of the Communist Party Revolution are piggy-backing on more spontaneous religions (communism is often described as a Christian heresy).

Although he does not explicitly say so, Otto seems to be describing at least three kinds of interaction with the numinous, and possibly four.

1. The Isaiah or Job version, testified to by many prophets and mystics of many faiths—an overwhelming connection to something more real that you are: overwhelming and yet somehow desirable. The fate of Semele echoes the sense—you cannot look on God and live. Not because you are unclean or sinful (though that can play a role) but because you are finite. And if I may stoop to a mathematical analogy, not just finite in some dimension but finite in the number of dimensions.
   

   The people of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to go away—perhaps because they worried about future financial setbacks, but more likely because they were encountering something holy and were afraid.
   

2. Another form of encounter is like this, but less focused. It also is unsought. For example, in the forest there comes a sense of something numinous and awesome, and the forest seems to be a holy forest because of it. I’ll go into that a little more in a moment.
3. In yet another form the numinous encounter is sought after, and things of majesty or beauty or even asceticism are used to prepare the worshiper to encounter what, in the final analysis, can only be initiated from outside us. Our effort is not always successful, of course. But this isn’t obviously bad: I’ll discuss that briefly later too.
4. Another form is logically available, though Otto doesn’t address it. The encounter can be with something secondary but still superior and “other” though not with the ultimate reality of God. For example, encountering an angel could be a numinous encounter.

Otto’s history of religion stands Frazier on his head. The notion that religions develop when a chief tries to inspire awe in his tribe to solidify his control begs the question of what this awe is and where it comes from. It is much more probable that the kind of encounter of the second type is common, and that the religions often come from trying to figure out how to live in light of those experiences. Otto refers us to the testimony of missionaries who find ready acceptance and understanding of their very high understanding of God even among animist cultures seemingly utterly immersed in attempts to manipulate lesser spirits.

The type 2 experience would seem to lend itself to creating a local shrine to commemorate and to visit in hopes of retrieving a type 3 experience: in the forest, by the stream, to the sky--whatever seemed to be the trigger for the original experience. Of course the result is generally some kind of idol, which as a creation of man is less than man and far less than God.

I’ve suggested before that polytheism is the compromise you get when different tribes with different gods met. It is possible that this represents instead the different experiences of the numinous within a single tribe. In either case, I expect it to have arisen syncretically rather than organically, and that true devotion, as opposed to box checking, would be to just one god of the pantheon. (The devotees of Krishna come to mind here.) Polytheism would seem to lend itself to the same kind of superstitious box-checking you find in animism: wear blue, right foot out the door first, and don’t forget to dump a little wine by the lingam and you should be OK for the day.

Of course Christianity has suffered from the same box-checking problem, if the complaints of centuries of preachers and priests are any guide. And I gather from the history of Sufism that Muslims recognize the same problem. But when one welters among many gods, they all tend to become limited and small.

The tendency is almost always to degrade rather than elevate; I believe Otto is correct in locating the origin of religions in encounters with the numinous.

Otto distinguishes between these encounters in part by looking at the side effects. Does the experience communicate a clear message, as Isaiah’s did? Does it leave behind simply a “This place is sacred” or does it have moral implications? And he adds another condition—the more spiritual the better.

This last reflects a sad defect in the book. He seems to think that the “wholly other” can make an impression on a human spirit but not on matter. He doesn’t like the idea of miracles at all and isn’t shy about denigrating them.

He also illustrates his descriptions with quotes from Hindu scriptures, suggesting (I’m not expert enough) that nirvana’s negative description reflects the “wholly other” / no way to tag it with words aspect of the numinous.

One very interesting omission is “Are we made to encounter the holy in particular ways?” From the observation that the experience of the holy ends up being described in terms of majesty and beauty and (often) right living, the effort to represent and to appeal to God which is codified in those terms seems appropriate. A hymn describing God’s power does not have the same dramatic character as the overwhelmed cry of “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord,” but that doesn’t make it inappropriate, or even necessarily inferior if that is a mode of approach to God that we were made for. Would, for example, Aquinas have had the vision at the end of his life if he had not dedicated his work to God all those years?

Read it. Subject to his caveat.

And another caveat—avoid the Kindle version. It was taken from a scan, and the OCR imbeds footnotes without distinction from the text, often mistakes “n” for “w” and suchlike, and you don’t want to know what happens when it hits Greek or Hebrew terms. It was probably taken from the same source as this. Hard copy is a better bet.

I’m told C.S. Lewis considered this one the influential books in his life.

Chutzpah

was defined as the attitude of the man who, having murdered his parents, threw himself on the mercy of the court as an orphan.

It could also be the attitude of a man editorializing on how the appeals court was "asking for trouble" when it reinstated Wisconsin's voter ID law. Yep, there's not much time left. And remind me why there was a delay?

The old tradition holds that the dead vote in Chicago and the cows in Southern Illinois, and there were certainly some curious voter turnouts in several counties around the country in the last election. On the other hand we're assured that it is all smoke and mirrors--that true voter fraud is almost never proved, and therefore almost never happens. Though that syllogism seems to have a little gap or two in it somewhere...

Will such laws reduce fraud? I look forward to learning that.

Will they reduce turnout? They'll certainly reduce the derelict roundup vote, which probably isn't a significant factor in most races. The turn-out-the-vote machine works best in densely populated cities; making sure the people on your block have IDs is just one more step for the organizers--not even a speed bump, really, given the work involved in making sure everybody gets an absentee ballot and suggestions.

Now that I think of it, if there's a significant reduction in the absentee ballot turnout in certain districts that will probably answer the question about reducing vote fraud. You'll have to connect the dots yourself, though.

On reading a newspaper's science column...

"The child asks for information, and we satiate his curiosity with words. Who does not know how we satisfy ourselves with the name of some strange bird or plant, or the name of some new law in nature? It is a mystery perplexing us before. We get the name, and fancy we understand something more than we did before, but, in truth, we are more hopelessly ignorant; for before we felt there was a something we had not attained, and so we inquired and searched: now, we fancy we possess it, because we have got the name by which it is known, and the word covers over the abyss of our ignorance."

Frederick William Robertson

Small Small Thing

While at my sister's home we watched "Small Small Thing" about a rape of a little girl in Liberia. She isn't the only one.

In the movie one of the doctors explains how the war built up a culture of rape (wars tend to do that) and subsequent frustration when the now-disarmed fighters feel powerless and want the perks they used to have. That's nice and plausible, but I'd think the crimes would be concentrated where the ex-fighters wound up. There wasn't any hint that the uncle (or the other men in the stories mentioned) was anything but a long-time member of the village--and the village stuck together to protect him.

A driver, taking the team up-country to the girl's family (and the uncle who raped her), talked about rape of children, and said something that startled me: "It was worse before the war." He said a lot of men did it to get power and money--presumably magically.

In Southern Africa (Wikipedia says sub-Saharan Africa) there's an ugly belief that sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. That suggests that magic really is one of the motives there.

There's another possibility--that cultures turn nasty when faced with a superior culture. The Atlantic article on rape in Alaska wants to blame their sky-high incidence of rape in the tribal areas on colonial efforts to disrupt the native culture, but I wonder if this is part of a reaction against inferiority. I'm told that some guys (not all, or even a majority) get psyched up for battle and violent sex at the same time. (And that others regard women as a reward of conquest, which isn't the same thing. I've not been in the army, much less in combat, and have no first-hand observations.) If a similar reaction drives the rape of children in villages, then there should be a before and after, and maybe it would have been observed. Aborigines? Newly found South American tribes? It doesn't seem perfectly convincing to me, but maybe I just don't have a clear enough understanding of the dynamics.

They know it's wrong, or they'd not try to hide it as hard as they do. But there's always some excuse. The guy is the only able-bodied hunter, and they'll starve if he dies or is imprisoned--I get that one, though there still ought to be some way of shaming him. But blaming the teller rather than the do-er for shaming the family?

At this distance, as an outsider, I have no idea what to do. Pray, yes. In this country I can denounce the glorification of violent sex (a staple of some music genres) and other trends, but abroad?

My mother wrote an AIDS prevention pamphlet aimed at girls, warning of the dangers of taking up with sugar daddies. I tried to write something for men, but realized it relied too heavily on combating desperation with some notions of chivalry--which is a western concept we haven't tried to either cultivate or export lately. But if sex is tied in with magic--my concept was completely hopeless.

And it keeps happening.

Moses or Ipanema?

Her stride is cultivated grace, her hair elegantly coiffed, her skirt cut to swirl above her knees just so, her back slightly arched for best projection.

But she does not walk in joy, granting a Mona Lisa smile to her admirers. Her head is bowed as if rapt in prayer to the tablet in her hand.

It shines, but her face does not.

Deadly force and race

An interesting study on the use of deadly force by police found that participants (an earlier study used policemen) felt more threatened by black suspects but were slower to pull the trigger on them than they were on white or hispanic suspects. In consequence, the rate of one type of error (shooting at innocent suspects) was lower, and the rate of the other (failing to shoot in time at a baddie) was higher.

James’ study is a follow-up to one in which she found active police officers, military personnel and the general public took longer to shoot black suspects than white or Hispanic suspects. Participants were also more likely to shoot unarmed white suspects than black or Hispanic ones and more likely to fail to fire at armed black suspects.

"In other words," wrote James and her co-authors, "there was significant bias favoring blacks where decisions to shoot were concerned."

This seems to make sense if both the sense of threat and the delay in analyzing the situation both stem from unfamiliarity with the body language and clothing signals. I'd guess the more unfamiliarity, the more delay.

I'd like to see if this is symmetric; if blacks have a similar delay vis-a-vis hispanics, for instance. I'm not sure if "white culture" is ubiquitous enough to provide enough familiarity: quite a few people I've known have lived in relative bubbles. If it isn't symmetric, then I'd start looking at the effects of social expectations on behavior. But I guess there'd be a similar effect.

Statistics show that police shoot ethnic and racial minorities disproportionately to their population.

But the last comprehensive look at the racial makeup of justifiable and non-justifiable shootings was a 2001 study using more than two decades of U.S. Bureau of Justice data, said James. And while statistics show black suspects are shot at more frequently than white suspects, the 2001 study found black suspects were also as likely to shoot at police as be shot at.

Recall that this most recent study was not of law officers, but ordinary citizens.

When confronted by an armed white person, participants took an average of 1.37 seconds to fire back. Confronted by an armed black person, they took 1.61 seconds to fire and were less likely to fire in error. The 240-millisecond difference may seem small, but it’s enough to be fatal in a shooting.

I got to be in one of those situation simulators when I participated in the local "Citizen's Academy" program. We were informed that we novices were allowed to hold the "weapon" at ready, but the police had to keep it holstered and draw. We weren't all that fast. It turns out a lot of bad things can happen in a second--one way or another.

I wonder what the followups will show.

Magnetic field motions in the Sun

This article from NASA is worth reading. Our satellites can determine the polarization of light from different parts of the Sun and figure out what the overall magnetic field direction is in different places. And, over time, it changes. It looks like bands form at high latitudes and migrate to the equator in about a 19-year cycle. In addition they have a new aspect of the Sun to monitor: "They noticed that ubiquitous spots of extreme ultraviolet and X-ray light, known as brightpoints, prefer to hover around the vertices of these large areas, dubbed “g-nodes” because of their giant scale." Mapping the behavior of these and of the magnetic bands suggests that the 11-year sunspot cycle is a side effect of the larger cycles.

The exact mechanism isn't clear (at least to me, and I think to them also), but finding new patterns like this is what scientists dream about. The equator, when those vast bands cancel, just has to have some wild magnetohydrodynamics going on...

And no, I didn't know that sunspots migrated to the equator.

Screen insects

I don't know how many of you remember xroach: an X-windows game that would generate a lot of images of roaches which hid behind your terminal windows or browser or what have you. When you iconized a window the roaches revealed would scurry around the screen looking for a new place to hide. You could click on them to squish them. Minutes of fun--but much more amusing if you could distract some unsuspecting soul and invoke it on their machine.

The old flat-screen I'm using at work has several layers, and an ant got in between them somehow. All morning it wandered to and fro, looking at all the backwards text. (Not that unix commands are that much odder forward...)

Slowing down

My sister asked me to transfer to DVD a video her late husband made 29 years ago, of my eldest two children when we were visiting them in Louisville. (He was preparing a tape for my parents who were in Africa.)

There's no drama: the most exciting part is wondering if Eldest Daughter will hit anybody with the miniature baseball bat. There were many details I'd completely forgotten over the years: the ducks, the swan, the peacocks, the pillars, even the shirt I was wearing.

Ripping it last night was half an hour of watching them do the simple things: exploring and enjoying. My Better Half watched it this evening; just quiet fun remembering.

A narrative line is important, and dramatic tension too, but sometimes you can do without both.

Godelian

"The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

I think we can learn something by doing just that.

At its best the laws and regulations of a country represent machinery to provide justice in both positive and punitive ways. A man should be able to enjoy the fruit of honest labor, and be punished for injuring his neighbor. We all know of laws and rules designed to enrich the well-connected, but I’m going to ignore them for now.

Ideally the machinery should just work: given a set of input circumstances and events, then either do nothing, give a benefit, or inflict a punishment; and in each case this should be the right thing to do. The problem is that life is complicated, and little corner cases evolve from human ingenuity (How about selling options to trade bond futures?) or new technologies.

So, is this new corner case, selling options to trade bond futures, something that should be classified as a sale of a good or does it have such an attenuated connection to anything concrete that it is more like gambling—with a strong possibility of manipulation and fraud? Not sure? Does it seem important enough to merit a new law? OK. Now you have N+1 laws, and this new one will interact with some of the old ones—there’s no way of getting around that, even if you substitute one with another, since the new one has to cover more ground. The new machinery will have new corner cases.

We can often evaluate the corner cases as just or unjust dealings, but the machinery of the rules doesn’t let us solve them. Sometimes the machinery gets the wrong answer, because of some flaw in the laws (I’m not thinking of failures of juries, but of unexpected interactions of rules).

Holmes also said "This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice," and in that he was absolutely accurate. The machinery gives only a finite approximation to justice.

Any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. In particular, for any consistent, effectively generated formal theory that proves certain basic arithmetic truths, there is an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable in the theory. paraphrase of Godel’s first theorem

Laws and regulations are not an exact parallel to an “effectively generated theory”, but humor me. If they were, then the resulting machinery, by Godel’s theorem, would be either inconsistent or full of gaps and corner cases. (Yes, the real tax code is both.) Adding new laws will not change this problem, no matter how many you write or how carefully you write them.

Or to put it another way, you are never going to get the system to be perfect. It will always be incomplete or inconsistent (and usually both).

So are we doomed to merely converge on perfection, always bettering society but never getting it quite right?

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws. Tacitus

He meant the causality to go from corruption to multiplicity of laws, but it works the other way too. At some point the number of laws and rules exceeds human capacity to manage them, and you automatically get disregard for the law—and usually disrespect as a natural result. Enforcement of inconsistent laws tends to be capricious, so what tribe you’re in starts to matter a lot. It just gets worse from there.

So no, far from converging on perfection, trying to endlessly fix things starts to actively make society worse.

The obvious deduction is that at some point (which point will obviously be disputed) you need to stop making laws and rules to fix problems and suck it up.

That doesn’t work either.

The old order changes, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

Or for another take, look at Shaw’s

Hearken to me then, oh ye compulsorily educated ones. Know that even as there is an old England and a new, and ye stand perplexed between the twain; so in the days when I was worshipped was there an old Rome and a new, and men standing perplexed between them. And the old Rome was poor and little, and greedy and fierce, and evil in many ways; but because its mind was little and its work was simple, it knew its own mind and did its own work; and the gods pitied it and helped it and strengthened it and shielded it; for the gods are patient with littleness. Then the old Rome, like the beggar on horseback, presumed on the favor of the gods, and said, "Lo! there is neither riches nor greatness in our littleness: the road to riches and greatness is through robbery of the poor and slaughter of the weak." So they robbed their own poor until they became great masters of that art, and knew by what laws it could be made to appear seemly and honest. And when they had squeezed their own poor dry, they robbed the poor of other lands, and added those lands to Rome until there came a new Rome, rich and huge. And I, Ra, laughed; for the minds of the Romans remained the same size whilst their dominion spread over the earth.

Fallen humanity will take whatever virtues went into building the strength of a culture and a nation and eventually twist these. For example, what would Locke have made of the modern West’s elevation of individualism to the point where the received wisdom is now that you can choose your own nature? The unwritten part of the law, its cultural support, erodes over time.

And, of course, people exploit the loopholes, sometimes even in preference to the usual procedures.

The upshot is that trying to stay static doesn’t work either. IIRC the Chinese tried that, and wound up with cycles of good (well, OK) government, corrupt government, and civil war.

The answer is that there isn’t a good answer. But when someone implies that all our problems can be fixed with his rules, call him a liar. If he implies that his rules will get 100% compliance, call him a fool. He may have a good idea or two, but only by accident.

Putnam, trust, and flirting

Everybody else seems to have already read Putnam's paper showing that diversity reduces both out-group and in-group trust. I'm curious whether the startling part--the reduction in in-group trust--was replicated in other cultures as well.

Now that I think of it, does the increase in political activity in diverse cities reflect a loss of trust?

Someone noted that attitudes towards Indians in the US improved the farther away they were. I don't recall who noted this or on what basis, but I notice that Twain and Nye, though on occasion noting good qualities of an individual, tended to express less flattering views of Indians than Rousseau or Pope. The lack of trust of outsiders can be based on experience.

But, since Putnam tried to control for the crime rate, let's assume that this isn't the driving factor.

There were a couple of interesting features in the distributions Putnam showed. One is that the relationship between ethnic diversity and trust was linear. This seems a little surprising to me: insofar as it diminishes I expect it to diminish faster as the environment becomes more complicated. That we see the simpler relationship seems to suggest that the response isn't a matter of being overwhelmed, but is a rational response to some factor.

One simple model of what is going on with trust of other groups is that lack of trust varies with risk. The risk can be physical (see crime rate), but would more usually be "status risk."

For example, is the young lady with the tight blouse flirting with you? Maybe it's obvious, but maybe frequent eye contact just signified confidence back in her home town, and your response just earned you a snicker instead of a smile.

The neighbors in the green house are exceptionally loud. Are they having marital problems? Is he threatening violence? Or is this a benign case of "loudest wins?" This is a live issue in our household: a touch of Asperger's can make it hard to tell from the tone of voice (words are typically not very intelligible) whether the shouter across the street is seriously angry or not.

Risk is obviously proportional to the degree to which you cannot "read" the other person's signals. Only some of the signals are verbal denotation. We all know lots of non-verbal signals, and lots of idioms and local connotations, such as the Brit saying goodnight to an American lady with "I'll knock you up in the morning", or when Arthur Blessitt asked to hold a "rally" when he brought his cross to Liberia "rally" means a church fund raiser there.

We can sometimes tell when someone is a bit "off." (Generally they're harmless, but you have to learn more about them to tell for sure, and about 1-2% of the population will prey on you given the opportunity--more if their culture encourages predation on outsiders.) I'm guessing here, but I'd think it much easier to spot problematic deviations from the norm when you have a fairly mono-cultural norm. I'm not sure whether different races confuse, but I'm pretty sure different cultures do. (But maybe I was just a little dense as a youth.)

So I'm guessing that in a multi-ethnic community people will be slightly more likely to misidentify reliable people as unreliable, or at best of uncertain reliability.

There are also things that seem more like carrier waves or heartbeat signals. This can include what AVI calls tribal markers, but I think they don't just signal "I'm here" but also, from the non-verbal components, let your co-tribesmen know whether you're OK or having some problems. Small talk about the weather (or whatever is the thing for your tribe) allows the conversation to grow if needed. (Cold calls are hard for most of us to learn to do; so similarly is starting a heavy conversation cold.)

You know the frantic search to find something useful to answer when somebody opens the conversation with something completely alien, like BDS or the prospects of the Ukrainian rugby team. Having something to ease conversation into being is important.

Sometimes the tribal markers or tribal courtesies are experienced as micro-aggressions, and some of the unspoken courtesies (what volume you use when arguing in public, whether you nod or hail-fellow, what clothes you wear(*)), will rub you the wrong way by their absence.

So far so good. You clearly run a higher "status risk" when trying to deal with someone from an alien culture. But why should there be a difference in trust between having 10% of your neighbors be different vs having 20% of them?

It may have to do with risk estimate. Suppose the risk of misreading the intentions of a member of an "alien culture" is p, and the trust will be proportional to 1-p). And suppose the risk of misreading the intentions of someone of your own culture is q, smaller than p. If there are 100 in your neighborhood, the chances of misreading anybody is ((1-p)^N)((1-q)^(100-N)). Let q be .1% and p be 1%. For between 1 and 50 members of an "alien culture", the risk of misreading someone looks nearly linear, as shown below. (Sorry, my X-axis runs the other direction from Putnam's.) I pulled these numbers out of the air, of course, but I mostly expect people to be fairly good at figuring out who’s not trustworthy after a trial or two. Of course some of us make a good living off that failure rate.

But wait, why am I looking at the overall trust, and not trust in my group vs trust in the other group?

I have thought of only two simple models that explain the decline in both domains of trust as a rational reaction. This “calculation” is part of the first model—though it doesn’t deal with the reported offset (see Putnam’s Figure 6) between in-group and out-group trust.

1. The survey respondent feels the whole group to be a community, and is describing the sense of trust he feels with respect to the community as a whole, with an (unexplained) offset for trust in his own group. This is one reason I'd like to see whether this effect is reproducible outside the West, in more explicitly tribal environments. We try(ied) to cultivate a "you're responsible to the community" attitude, which might change how people answer.
2. The people in the community fall back to a kind of pidgin set of signals, and the probability that you use the pidgin within your group rather than the full set varies with the probability that you have to use it outside the group--which is proportional to the fraction of “alien culture” people in the community.

I’m not persuaded by either model. The first doesn’t explain the approximately constant offset in trust, and the second doesn’t motivate why you should use the pidgin in-group—it is just assumed easier. AVI suggested that the in-group distrust came from “activation” of distrust, but that’s not a rational reaction. Not that people are always rational, but this exercise was to look for a rational reason for the changes.

It is possible to take Putnam's Figure 6 too seriously. The statistics aren’t really good enough to accurately determine a second-order variation. There might be a slope hidden in the variation, or something non-linear—though not a big one. And the loss of trust in-group may not be a rational reaction after all.

---

(*) You don't need a degree in semiotics to notice that clothes or other adornments are always used for communication.

When you need a scoop

Dive right in.

Compare and contrast

Liberian govt vs ebola

They've established isolation centers and have retrieval squads working. This isn't pretty: the WSJ calls it "A Grim Picture", but it is a good start. What's needed is more of this, not less, and ways of doing it without government sponsorship.

THIS is the grim picture: isolation broken, patients brought out, and soiled blankets stolen. In the community preliminary estimates (reported last week, so probably based on 3-week-old info) claimed 1.8 new infections for each existing one.

Ebola without hope

People are taking the old traditional approach to epidemics: head for the hills and leave the sick to die. As long as this is true--"The villagers who abandoned Fatu and Barnie have meanwhile themselves been shunned by neighbouring towns also in fear of the spread of the virus, Wile said."--it will probably work. If they get to take refuge in other towns, it will backfire.

That doesn't make it any less heartbreaking to read about. Protocols and supplies to help family take care of their own might have meant that the sick didn't have to die alone, but there wasn't enough time once the scope of the problem was known.

If I were a villager without resources, would I be willing to stay and tend the sick knowing I'd probably die too? Christians used to.

What

The Skyla ad shows the power of imagery. They are able to accomplish instantly what Lovecraft required shovelfuls of adjectives to do.

I'm trying to imagine in what universe that ad would not be deeply creepy. Stepford Wives creepy. She lavishes human love on a hollow shell (like the Stepford husbands). Is she the duped or the duper, or both?

I like to hope that it is just a blunder on the part of the ad men. It is frightening to think there are people who'd think it normal or attractive. Did I miss something? Is Portland really full of pod people?

Hat tip to Donald Sensing

Why are doctors and nurses dying?

When dealing with Ebola, doctors and nurses in the city wear protective gear. Yet they fall sick too. Why? Can’t the layers of rubber or vinyl protect them?

Yes, but…

The first problem is diagnosis. Not everybody showing up has ebola, and you don’t ship people into the isolation ward for triage. That first step can be tricky.

Think about the body’s natural defense system. Never mind the inner ones for now. Most of the body is covered with skin, which isn’t very permeable to start with and which is covered with an armor of scales of dead skin cells. There are perforations—hair follicles, sweat glands, oil glands, and the occasional nick or scrape. The mucous membranes are much more vulnerable, but they cover a much smaller area and produce secretions that at least potentially can sweep out some of the detritus. Even the lungs, which have to be permeable to gas molecules, are only approached by channels lined with cilia and mucus to trap and eject foreign particles.

Any of these systems can be overwhelmed. Smokers overwhelm their lungs’ defenses with persistent smoke (not to mention the gases) and as we all know too well that viruses for cold and flu frequently succeed in arriving in our membranes and starting to work.

In addition, the systems can be compromised. In particular, one essential practice—hand washing—can reduce your dead skin layer and the more aggressive cleansers, accompanied by the scrubbing requited to clean out folds and pores, can inflame the skin over the course of a day—meaning, among other things, that the skin is more permeable.

I almost hesitate to mention this, because not washing is a terrible option. The health care workers are between a rock and a hard place. If they don’t wash, they risk infecting themselves and other people; if they do, they may still infect themselves. Wash. Scrub. Damn the torpedoes.

The calculus differs for somebody taking care of his cousin back in the village. There’s only one person to care for and then no more (one hopes), but any protective gear is entirely ad hoc (cloth dipped in bleach, perhaps?) Because the number of times he needs to wash is smaller, harsher chemicals are OK—in fact probably required since his gear will leak.

It differs again for someone just going about his business in the city. Unfortunately how much it differs depends on the local risk, and I don’t know the details—as fast as I can tell nobody does.

Look at that protective gear again. It should block fluids very effectively. But there’s a reason most good ideas never make it to commercial production: corner cases are common, and so are Murphy Conspiracies.

Look at the suits.

1. They are stored folded. Are the flexed folds as strong as the rest?
2. The suits are kept in high heat and humidity. How fast will that deteriorate the material?
3. Africa is home to many molds and mildews. Which infect the materials?
4. What will chlorine bleach do to the materials?

Any one of these insults is probably within engineering tolerances. But with 2 or 3 in combination, would you guarantee the integrity of the material?

Most of the time all is well. But a nurse makes dozens of contacts with patients in a day (cleaning the up is no small job!). The probability that her suit or glove leaks is small, and the probability that an exposed bit of skin will serve to infect is not 100% (but with everybody sweating so much I’d not bet the exposed area would stay small); call their product ε. In a simple statistical model the probability that she will be infected is 1-(1-ε)^N where N is the number of contacts. Suppose she has 50 contacts in a day, and each probability that something seeps through to infect her is only 0.1%. The chance that a single day’s work will infect her is about 4.9%. (Beats 100% without protection, though) Numbers are pulled out of the air for example's sake. DO NOT QUOTE THEM!

For comparison, suppose somebody has only one patient to deal with (5 contacts a day) but has cruddy gear with a 1% failure rate. The daily infection probability is the same. Since the patient will probably die in a day or two, the chance of getting infected himself is about 10%. On the other hand the nurse, working day after day after day, will almost certainly get it sooner or later.

Of course, back in the village, our caregiver probably doesn’t know how to disinfect, and was probably exposed already when the patient first got sick; so it isn’t a fair comparison—he’ll almost certainly catch it also. Best bet is to have the village scatter for a week or three and nobody be allowed into any other village. That’s easier to do in the tropics than in climates with winter.

In the “slums” of the city, everybody is cheek by jowl. Also, malaria is endemic, so feeling sick is nothing strange (more people have malaria than ebola—and quite a few die from it too), so rubbing up against somebody sick is likely to be an everyday event. Plenty of contacts can happen before the disease becomes dramatic.

I’m assuming that transmission is by contact. That isn’t guaranteed. There are several claims made about ebola that we need to revisit.

The first is that a person is not contagious before symptoms appear. How do we know that? Skin swabs? We need to know that a person has been infected, and be able to search the samples for presence of the virus. If monkeys could be infected you could try to infect them with human sweat taken at various times of the incubation period, but that’s a lot of monkeys to test if you want to be sure there’s less than even a 10% chance of infection. DNA testing of the swabs? It would be very nice if this was true, but there's not always a hard and fast boundary between symptoms and no symptoms.

Another is that it is not airborne. At the simplest level it certainly is: if a patient sneezes up your nose you’re hosed. So how far can the droplets go in tropical humidity without drying out enough to kill the virus? How long does the virus last when dried out? I assume it deteriorates over time, but it can survive for a couple of days on surfaces. And "In the laboratory, infection through small-particle aerosols has been demonstrated in primates, and airborne spread among humans is strongly suspected, although it has not yet been conclusively demonstrated"

I assume that they spray bug killer all over the hospitals and environs, but flies don’t die instantly. The hospitals try to bag up corpses quickly, but there’s a lot of mess to clean up still. The surface of the mess is probably covered with sprayed bleach, so a fly would probably have to swim to pick up live viruses, but there’s still a window of opportunity for fly-borne transmission—or is there? Most diseases haven’t figured out how to use mosquitoes for transmission yet, so that’s probably not an important vector—but it might be wise to check.

At this point quarantine is probably the best way to handle outbreaks, but what kind of quarantine may depend a bit on the answers to the questions I brought up. I have no good idea of how to do quarantine in one of the high-density slums.

I'm not an ebola researcher, and my knowledge of Liberian isolation wards is based on descriptions I've read. I assume the dedication to the protocols is being kept high.

War solving problems

The T-shirt read "Defeat is not an option." I understand the power of a positive attitude, but that still seems pretty silly.

Victory is not always an option, but defeat always is.

I regularly hear "War never solves anything." (I work in Madison, what do you expect?) Sometimes it does, of course, but by and large it is true that war doesn't solve problems. But the slogan is an exercise in missing the point. So what if it doesn't solve problem X? That doesn't mean it isn't necessary sometimes. The lawn doesn't stay mowed, the flu isn't defeated forever, and in this fallen world there are people who now and then will try to kill you--and sweet persuasion doesn't work with all of them--or even most of them. And fighting back doesn't always come to any conclusion beyond "Not this time."

Pundits warn us that "Israel didn't win in Gaza(*)" and "Israel can't win in Gaza". I suppose pundits don't get paid if they don't say something everyday, but it isn't exactly a surprise that wars are generally inconclusive. (Maybe to those whose knowledge of history is from cartoon books...) If you succeed in exterminating your enemies, that's generally a complete win (except for the bit about losing your own soul), but generally sides are well enough matched that there's a return bout a few decades down the road. "We taught them a lesson in 1918, and they've hardly bothered us since then."

Of course the aftermath of a war is critical too. The US won the first and second Iraq campaigns, and then helped win the first revolt, but under Bush we bobbled the reconstruction and then we elected a president who gets bored quickly with responsibility and dropped the ball completely. And so we lose--and so do a lot of other people. It isn't fair to them, but a lot of things happen to us because of what other people decide--good and bad--no matter whether we deserve them or not.

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(*) What is it about Gaza and not Syria or the Assyrian Christians or Yazidis--no riots in the streets on their behalf and they're getting hit harder.

Sleep

"Nature requires five, Custom gives seven! Laziness takes nine, And Wickedness eleven."

Hours, that is. Every few years a new sleep study gets into the news and we're breathlessly informed about what we really need. Last time I looked at this segmented sleep was the topic, but there were plenty of "You need X hours" reports before that.

I think we all know that the total amount of sleep people need varies with age, and some people get by with dramatically less. The question isn't really "What's the mean of the distribution for my cohort?" but "What do I need?" And, of course, "When?" Siesta, anyone?

Camping is instructive. Unless there's some kind of get-together, I don't stay awake for long after the fire goes out, and I tend to wake up pretty early; at least relative to when you wake up for a 9 to 5 job.

My ancestors came from Europe, where they'd lived for thousands of years, with remarkably few electric lights. I'd think that would be long enough to get adjusted to the fact that nighttime isn't of fixed duration. Sometimes night is 8 hours, sometimes 16--or even worse. Segmented sleep aside, it isn't very plausible that people would sleep the same amount all through the year.

So why would there be an ideal amount of time for a block of sleep at night?

Phooey. I'm going to bed.

Differing dreams

I wondered this evening if music ever appeared in dreams, and looked it up: apparently so, especially among musicians.

I wonder if this is something "trainable" or reflects a personality trait. I never dream of math or physics (or discover a benzene ring in my sleep), so what's in the dream isn't just a matter of what the interests of the day were.

Vision, always. Speech, usually--but not other noises as a rule. Touch--in only one category. Taste--never.

We've heard aplenty about the meaning of the contents of dreams. Does what kinds of senses are involved in a person's dreams tell us anything about him? (I'm not looking for stresses or pathologies here.)

Virtuality

Virtual Data Centers are all the rage these days. Let somebody else handle the backup and migration and hardware management: all you have to see is what the machines do: appear to be your web server, etc (and see the check you write each month...). Sometimes that's handy: we use a lot of virtual machines to handle tasks that don't need a lot of horsepower (DNS service, DHCP service, etc). I'm supposed to be exploring the possibilities of virtualizing some heavy processing as well, for when somebody needs to run a version of their code that only runs on an OS we don't support anymore. Haven't started yet. Of course this is all in-house.

When something goes south, it is nice to be able to threaten the hardware yourself instead of sitting on a help-line to somewhere in California waiting your turn.

Think about it. Don't conservation laws require that for every virtual data center there must be a virtual anti-data center?

Imagine the possibilities in anti-data...

Interpretation

Some people like to take verses out of context as proof texts for this or that rule. Everybody either knows some of these folks, or thinks they know about them (lumping all "fundamentalists" into the same pot).

And so the mantra is "context." What does the context of the verses say? Read what comes before and after and see how that clarifies things.

It usually does. But some sections of scripture are a bit jumbled. Take Jeremiah. The history and the collected prophecies aren't in sync.

And Exodus. Exodus 20 is of utterly different tone from 21-23, though it is written as though it is all one continuous narrative. I think you have to look back to Exodus 19:16 and not just to Exodus 24:4 "Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord"

Distinguishing isn't always very obvious. Jesus was pretty clear that some of what Moses wrote wasn't quite Plan A. He was also clear that some other parts definitely were, including an expansive reading of Leviticus 19:18 about loving your neighbor ("Who is my neighbor?")

A huge problem is that if you claim to be able to distinguish Plan A from Plan B, you invite termites to stay; and according to their several besetting sins they'll imagine warrant to dispose of rules on money or sex or whatever. There's clear enough warrant for Christians to dispose of the Levitical rules for worship, and some rules are tied to the people and the land, and some are obviously simple sanitary rules, but without a deep understanding of the rest of scripture you won't be able to escape the temptation to de-weight the uncomfortable rules. And thinking you have such a deep understanding is probably the clearest sign that you don't.

One trivial example is the "We wear clothing of different kinds of fabric; why should rules about who we have sex with be any more binding?" That kind of sloppy analysis hardly requires refuting--and it is probably just a slogan in the mouth of someone who wouldn't be persuaded no matter what you replied. (Quick reply: the second ties in with the Big 10, the first does not and is fairly obviously related to ritual purity and a metaphor for being single-hearted. OT ritual purity is not an issue for Christians, the metaphor is fine but not critical, but human relationships are the same now as then.)

More sophisticated analyses explain why charging interest isn't really charging interest, or that it isn't really bad, or that we can't avoid it so may as well give up. Renting money has certainly been an extremely powerful tool and we've reaped substantial benefits, but although correlation isn't causation, it seems to have had some some less happy side effects on the value of money over time. I'm not an economic historian, and maybe the side effects are worth it. Still.

So what's the best approach? An official Magisterium? An open bazaar, trusting that the truth will eventually prevail? Strongly urging all would-be interpreters to humbly consider the wisdom of their ancestors? That last is not a popular attitude these days, but it seems like a promising approach, provided we explain what our ancestors actually thought and don't just filter the past through the fad du jour.

Motherless Monkeys

The Isthmus describes some of the controversy around proposed tests of macaque monkeys and infant stress, apparently with a focus on depression. I'm afraid I don't trust WisconsinWatch to accurately describe the purposes of animal research. Even non-ideological popularizers are less than fully reliable, and I've tried from time to time to re-analyze stories. Unfortunately I don't always have the time to devote to the exercise.

This is old ground, the detractors say. I'm not 100% sure about that.

On my thesis experiment, one of the researchers told us that one of his wife's college friends had a student job that among other duties involved cleaning up some of the labs where this kind of research went on. I gathered that he thought this was the cloth-vs-wire surrogate mother experiment, but I don't think the dates work for that--he was only about 10 years older than me. At any rate, the cleaning lady was softhearted, and would take baby monkeys out of their cages and cuddle them--and apparently never got caught at it.

Hmm. If the monkey was disturbed and would run or bite, I'd bet she wouldn't cuddle it much, but if it wasn't so bad off, I'd bet the contact would make it happier. I think I see a way results could be skewed with nobody having a clue.

Science behind the scenes

Correcting the quote:

'No one trusts a model except the man who wrote it; everyone trusts an observation, except the man who made it.' Harlow Shapley

I heard a variant of this saying (model=>theory, observation=>experiment) which was attributed to Einstein, but this one seems more common. I can't find the original source, though.

UPDATE:
"A hypothesis or theory is clear, decisive, and positive, but it is believed by no one but the person who created it. Experimental findings, on the other hand, are messy, inexact things, which are believed by everyone except the person who did that work."

Harlow Shapley Through Rugged Ways to the Stars

Ebola and the researchers

Tales new and old from the research front:

• There remains some residual reaction to the virus after 12 years, suggesting survivors might have something like antibodies
• Are there forms of the virus that offer partial immunity (like cowpox vs smallpox?)
• Can animal tests be used for faster approval for human tests? (2009)
• Animal tests of something similar (2012)
.
• One group claimed that ebola works so fast the immune system can’t always react in time (2003). I'm not sure that's quite the whole story.
• I get the sense this report was released a little early. It sounds like they weren't quite finished studying the protein, but since it is in the news...

I have a feeling we're going to discover more in a few months about immunity: do people who have recovered get the disease again?