Jimmy

Our little town seems to have gotten itself famous (albeit with a mis-spelled name), as even the BBC shows the nip by Jimmy XI.

The caretaker of the groundhog(s) is retiring from the job. He has a little farm with goats and chickens running around and a pen where the most recent Jimmy spends most of his time. There's a Gambian lady my Better Half is teaching to read, and she took her out there a time or two--the animals running around make it feel like home back in Africa to her.

The groundhogs are, I gather, mostly rescue beasts. They try to pick reasonably good-tempered ones to serve the office, but there's not always much choice. Jimmy IX could be safely put on a table--he’d been rescued after being run over, and still could only walk in circles. Apparently he was a very mellow critter.

We’ve been here a little over 20 years, and I’ve never gotten up to go watch Jimmy, nor have we tried to roust the kids for the “adventure”. (Although Jimmy IX visited their 4H club once.) I’m not sure if our absence represents a lack of civic enthusiasm or a dislike for getting up before dark in the cold.

Most of the time it's colder than hell or it's snowing or whatever. And the families bring their kids out. Everybody wants to see Jimmy and get a picture with Jimmy. It really brings the community together.

...

This is my fourth mayor now that I've worked with. I've told all of them don't get too darn close. You'll be able to understand him when he talks to you.

And they have their own language?
Groundhogese, yes. And the mayor of Sun Prairie is the only one that can really understand him.

...

What are Jimmy's living quarters like on your farm?

He's got it better than most of the animals here. In fact right now he's in the living room. And then as soon as it warms up enough he's got a big, 8-by-16 pen that he roams around in. And I go in and I'll spend a fair amount of time every day with him, trying to domesticate him, to be honest with you. I've done a pretty good job, but not necessarily this Jimmy the 11th. He's got a little bit of an attitude. Jimmy the 9th and 10th were absolutely amazing. But then I've had some that were more or less man eaters.

That last line was prophetic...

Advertising for next year?

Comic Con is scheduled for this weekend in Madison, and there are ads and billboards up in strategic places. I'm told it sold out long ago. Why are the ads still running? Were they scheduled so far in advance there's nothing to replace them with (not even a PSA), or are they trying to drum up interest for next year? Anybody know how this works?

Herbal supplements

I hold no brief for these things. The ratio of realistic to rubbish claims is too low; it discourages me from even bothering to look at them.

But my thoughts were the same as Dr. Cohen's: it can't be that bad: 4 of 5 supplements lacking the principle ingredient?

Then the agency analyzed the products using DNA bar coding, a type of genetic fingerprinting that the agency has used to root out labeling fraud in the seafood industry.

... The technology can single out which plants a supplement contains by identifying its unique DNA.

Dr. Cohen at Harvard said that the attorney general’s test results were so extreme that he found them hard to accept. He said it was possible that the tests had failed to detect some plants even when they were present because the manufacturing process had destroyed their DNA.

But that does not explain why the tests found so many supplements with no DNA from the herbs on their labels but plenty of DNA from unlisted ingredients, said Marty Mack,

Actually, maybe it does. There's been a fair bit of complaint that "herbal medicine" doses are relatively random since the potency of a herb will vary quite a bit. If they've starting using extracts to get a relatively uniform chemical and then bulking it up with fillers, there might not be much DNA from the original plant, which is consistent with the lab's findings. The story doesn't mention whether the lab looked for the chemical signature of active ingredients. (And, unlike science news reporting, I have no way to look up the lab's actual results or rationales.)

That doesn't excuse using fillers not mentioned on the label, of course.

This doesn't lower my confidence in herbal medicine pills because I don't have any. Maybe fresh herbs (chamomile or the like), but even there I've not found much requirement for them.

Measles

I'm a bit puzzled by numbers I'm seeing. Adult measles seem to have about 20% serious complications, and In populations with high levels of malnutrition and a lack of adequate health care, up to 10% of measles cases result in death. But the received wisdom has it that in Amerindian populations the fatality rate was higher, though perhaps this was an average over the trifecta (influenza, smallpox, measles) over a number of years, and not just a rate from one epidemic. Any ideas about resolving the apparent contradiction? Genetic susceptibility in a population not subject to many contagious diseases?

Something doesn't add up

Iceland still has worshipers of Thor, so I was a bit surprised to see a story saying they were building the first temple to the norse gods in 1000 years. I figured maybe the Icelandic Thor-ites didn't use temples as a rule, going for lares and penates sorts of private rituals instead. (which is probably all to the good. Notice that the three in the Uppsala temple are the same three mentioned below.)

Surprise. From the article:

Icelanders will soon be able to publicly worship at a shrine to Thor, Odin and Frigg with construction starting this month on the island’s first major temple to the Norse gods since the Viking age.
...

“I don’t believe anyone believes in a one-eyed man who is riding about on a horse with eight feet,” said Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, high priest of Ásatrúarfélagið, an association that promotes faith in the Norse gods.

“We see the stories as poetic metaphors and a manifestation of the forces of nature and human psychology.”

Then what exactly do the neopagans propose to worship in the temple? Human psychology?

I wonder what the real pagans make of the "do it yourself" crowd. "The duty to the Rishis can be discharged only by deep study. The duty to the Celestials can be discharged by oblations and offertories alone. And the duty to the ancestors can be discharged only by begetting children and bringing them up properly." Looks more like assigned duties than "following your inner light."

Ebola and culture in Sierra Leone

National Geographic has an interesting article on how indigenous funeral rituals were adapted to deal with the outbreak. Good work.

Science Fiction, after a few years

The Happy Bookers by Richard Armour (not his best, I'm afraid) is a 1976 history of libraries and librarians told with his usual mixture of fact, anachronism, and just making stuff up (with lots of puns). It ends with "future libraries" section which came mostly true. He predicted "micro-micro-microfilm" requiring the assistance of optometrists, or perhaps "there will be no libraries and no librarians, flesh-and-blood or otherwise. The onetime library patron will press a button and turn a dial on his TV, whereupon the requested book, in the desired language, will appear on the screen." I have several books in PDF on the miniscule chip in a thumb drive in my pocket, which is surely micro-micro-micro enough, and a laptop or tablet or kindle/nook takes the place of a TV. Not too shabby a guess.

And from even earlier, Dick Tracy's watch is available too. Not for me, though. I've been hard enough on watches that I considered using our project engineer's trick of wrapping rubber bands around the crystal. It was either that or give up and use the cell phone as a pocket watch. Now I just need to figure a way of attaching a chain to the phone.

Retrospectives and Memories

My youngest sister collected most of the family slides and scanned them, and gave them out for Christmas. I spent too much time last night looking them over, especially the Liberian ones.

I remembered more faces than I thought I would (per earlier post), and a lot of memories triggered. I'd forgotten that the garden edging brickwork was black with slime mold, and how ubiquitous and slippery that stuff was. (That's tropical rain forest for you.) I remembered the tour of the strip mine--or at least the part where Dad wanted to drive down into the pit and I got out of the car, but pretty much nothing of the rest, though there are pictures that say we saw a lot of things there.

And looking at the scenes now I see details that I missed completely when I was 10. I'd seen the people gathering, but had no sense of why the women dressed as they did--it was just the "done thing." I'd seen the high school boys playing soccer or basketball, and not noticed how the high school girls were "not quite" watching them. I hadn't realized how shabby the floor had been those first years, though I'd actually done my share of peeling up loose bits of tile. And the reason my friend's home felt so empty to me was that there weren't any bookcases.

And, of course, I'd not distinguished one flower from another (still don't, which drives my Better Half nuts when she tries to describe what part of the garden needs tending).

Looking back at pictures of a True Whig Party parade for Tubman and knowing now that a lot of the support was nominal (support the distributor of largesse and jobs) left me wondering: would I have noticed that if I had been present and adult? Or would I have taken it at face value? Knowing what would become of some of those well-dressed men on a beach a few years later makes some of the images unexpectedly grim, though the pictures were usually of celebrations.

I had no idea just how vicious the tribal divisions would later become, and I can't even see it in retrospect (squinting hard); probably because the areas we lived were either mono-tribal or urban. The Americo-vs-tribal division was easy to see: would I have guessed what was coming? Probably not--some things you don't confide in foreigners.

Publication bias

It is an open secret that research publication is biased in favor of favorable results. Suppose you spend a year and a hundred grand testing whether lidocaine helps relieve epilepsy. Journals aren't that interested in publishing "lidocaine didn't work" no matter how helpful it is to the field as a whole. Nor is the researcher that eager to trumpet the fact that he got it wrong.

This can be a serious problem with drug research. Suppose 5 researchers run 5 lidocaine tests and 1 finds that it makes epilepsy slightly worse, 3 find that it doesn't do much of anything, and 1 finds that it makes it slightly better. Guess which paper is more likely to get published?

In a study of whether bilingualism makes you smarter (it doesn't), Angela de Bruin came up with a clever way to get past part of the bias: look at conference proceedings instead.

The rationale was straightforward: conferences are places where people present in-progress research. They report on studies that they are running, initial results, initial thoughts. If there were a systematic bias in the field against reporting negative results—that is, results that show no effects of bilingualism—then there should be many more findings of that sort presented at conferences than actually become published.

That’s precisely what de Bruin found. At conferences, about half the presented results provided either complete or partial support for the bilingual advantage on certain tasks, while half provided partial or complete refutation. When it came to the publications that appeared after the preliminary presentation, though, the split was decidedly different. Sixty-eight per cent of the studies that demonstrated a bilingual advantage found a home in a scientific journal, compared to just twenty-nine per cent of those that found either no difference or a monolingual edge.

Kudos to Angela!

What gives with memories?

This morning at church we spoke briefly to the couple in front of us during the meet and greet. A few minutes later my better half turned and whispered in my ear "$5 says they were in Urbana" After service we discovered that we'd known them from 30 years before. Even with names and reminders I drew a complete blank, and still do. But she remembered them, their names, and the children they had at the time.

I don't do so well.

During my late brother-in-law's last illness, friends took a full size picture of him ("flat Chris") and photographed it in places he'd been or wanted to go and sent them to him. Some were posted on Facebook and I saw them too, in places I also used to visit. Even the places I'd been to many times I barely recognized.

The building with the physics and math offices at SIU-- still there, still the same--I didn't recognize the facade at all. Visual memories seem to go in a dust blender in my mind, and all that's left are fragments of a view here or there associated with some dramatic incident.

I would sometimes see a student walking down the street and think "That looks like X from my high school." When I last looked at a high school yearbook I didn't recognize half the faces anymore, even though I remember interactions with them, or the look in her eye, and sometimes even the conversation.

I must file all that sort of thing in medium term memory, and reuse the space when its been idle too long. Or something.

Williams transformed into other media?

Eldest son made a joke about a Dr Who actor playing in a movie of a Charles Williams book, and of course that got me wondering what of his work could be made into a movie without loss or major transformation. Some books just can't be "movied" without a lot of fiddling: Perelandra comes to mind. Clothes or lack thereof are a form of communication, and lack thereof doesn't convey Edenic innocence. Anymore. But there was a good dramatization of The Screwtape Letters and I gather of The Great Divorce also, so ...

• Shadows of Ecstasy: some critical moments (e.g. Roger Ingram trying to make sense of what he has seen in the inner room) are interior experiences that need a little verbalization. A few scenes need really good acting plus a little special effects goosing. The whole "dark continent" component wouldn't go over well; we know the rest of the world too well. I'm iffy about this one; the premise is hard to visualize and I didn't find the premise compelling.
• Many Dimensions: A few minor special effects for the Stone's properties, but some critical moments in Choe's transformation are interior experiences. I think this could work, but the ending might play as a huge downer--the plot might need tweaking.
• War in Heaven: With a few special tricks here and there for magical effects, and some explanation of what the Grail was, I think this one could make a good movie. You have to get an excellent John, though.
• The Place of the Lion: A few special effects, but you'd have to motivate the release of the Forms much more strongly, and be explicit about what Forms meant. ("It's all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them in these schools") I think it could be done--it might turn out better than the book (not my favorite).
• The Greater Trumps: It needs lots of special effects. A few critical moments are interior (you get different characters' points of view)--voice overs for Sybil? This could easily be a nice dramatic movie with plenty of action.
• All Hallows Eve: Straightforward special effects for wizardry and the city of the dead, but there are a lot of different characters' points of view--lots of extra dialog to be added. It would be worth trying. Unfortunately a completely unrelated movie exists by the same name.
• Descent into Hell: It has internal transformations that I think would be hard to portray, especially Wentworth's deepening rejections and the "bearing of burdens". I think it could be done, but I'd be nervous.

For some of these you'd probably only have Williams fans buying tickets, and the purists would gripe. I think The Greater Trumps would be the most likely to appeal to a broader market. I wonder how much you'd have to trim to make a screenplay of it.

If you are in the USA, where the copyright rules were adjusted by a Disney-rented legislature, you're not supposed to click the above book links.

Noticing things

It is obvious on second glance, but it needs somebody to notice it first.

Ignition

Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John D. Clark
The book, published in 1972, is out of print and extremely hard to find, and I only learned about it when reading about FOOF (and you should go read now that article now…and the comments).

The book is just what the subtitle says it is. The style is easy and informal, with real world details (such as noting that the discovery that a mixture is hyergolic usually entails somebody losing his eyebrows). The introduction is by Isaac Asimov.

Why was it written? From the Preface:

There are a few texts which describe the propellants currently in use , but nowhere can he learn why these and not something else fuel Saturn V or Titan II or SS-9. In this book I have tried to make that information available.

…

This book is written not only for the interested layman—and for him I have tried to make things as simple as possible—but also for the professional engineer in the rocket business. For I have discovered that he is frequently abysmally ignorant of the history of his own profession, and, unless forcibly restrained, is almost certain to do something which, as we learned fifteen years ago, is not only stupid but is likely to result in catastrophe…. So I have described not only the brilliantly conceived programs of research and development, but have given equal time to those which, to put it mildly, were not so well advised. And I have told the stories of the triumphs of propellant research; and I have described the numerous blind alleys up which, from time to time, the propellant community unanimously charged, yapping as they went.

For understanding this incident, note that the card-gap test was a test of how shock-sensitive a compound was. A sample of the compound was put in a heavy tube above a bit of high explosive, separated from it by a number of thin plastic cards. The high explosive was detonated and they checked to see if the compound blew too. The fewer cards that were needed to keep the compound from exploding, the less sensitive the compound was, and the happier the engineers were.

Two people can operate the card-gap apparatus, and three operators is optimum. But when LRPL did this particular job (the feather-bedding at Picatinny was outrageous) there were about seven people on the site—two or three engineers, and any number of rocket mechanics dressed (for no particular reason) in acid-proof safety garments. So there was a large audience for subsequent events. The old destroyer gun turret which housed our card-gap setup had become a bit frayed and tattered from the shrapnel it had contained. (The plating on a destroyer is usually thick enough to keep out the water and the smaller fish.) So we had installed an inner layer of armor plate, standing off about an inch and a half from the original plating. And, as the setup hadn’t been used for several months, a large colony of bats—yes, bats, little Dracula types—had moved into the gap to spend the winter. And when the first shot went off, they all came boiling out with their sonar gear fouled up, shaking their heads and pounding their ears. They chose one rocket mechanic—as it happens, a remarkably goosy character anyway—and decided it was all his fault. And if you, gentle reader, have never seen a nervous rocket mechanic, complete with monkey suit, being buzzed by nine thousand demented bats and trying to beat them off with a shovel, there is something missing from your experience.

You’re heard the phrase “This ain’t rocket science.” This was, and you start to get an appreciation for how tough it really was.

Me? I tried to make my own rocket fuel in high school—a black powder variant with some aluminum powder to overcome the problems caused by the potassium nitrate’s hygroscopic absorption from the tropical atmosphere. A security lapse resulting in too much powder being added to the mix, and I’d never seen a ring-stand rod bent like that before.

Do not attempt to buy this on Amazon. It is a good book, but not worth $3000.

UPDATE: See it at archive.org

The one of the ten

When Jesus healed the 10 lepers (healed as they went to the temple), one returned to thank him, and he was a Samaritan.

Jesus' answer equates thanks to Him with giving glory to God--something I hadn't noticed before.

But I have a little question about the Samaritan. The 10 were told to "Go and show yourselves to the priests." Would the Samaritan have been allowed to go to a Jewish priest, or been turned back? The Samaritan temple had been destroyed over a century before, and Jerusalem was quite some distance away, so I guess they were heading for local priests. Would they have been headed for the same village, or would the Jews have been headed for a village in Galilee and the Samaritan towards a village in Samaria? (Jesus was going "between" the two, so I guess that would be along the river)

Does anybody happen to know?

The Masques of Amen House by Charles Williams

The Masques of Amen House by Charles Williams was recently printed by Mythopoeic Press.

When I was in high school and had lots of time to read, a book arrived at our home comparing Lewis, Tolkien, and Charles Williams. I knew the first two, of course, but the third was new to me and his novels sounded wonderfully strange. I mentioned this to Tucker Callaway and he offered to lend me his copies, and said he envied me the joy of first reading them.

Since then I've read his poetry (of which he apparently was the most proud), plays (well, what was available anyway--I got permission to copy a book that is still out of print), theology, and history of witchcraft. Some of the work was only recently collected and printed.

Working at Oxford University Press when he was there must have been interesting. These "masques" were performances done by the staff (playing themselves, by and large), with Williams writing the script and the music written by the music editor. I have never been in a workplace that put on original opera for its own entertainment.

A masque in the sense Williams used the term seems to have been based on entertainments of song, drama, and dance performed by guests for a host--the host in this case being "Caesar", the publisher. The old masques were one-shot events, never repeated.

Williams wasn't being ironic when he called the publisher Caesar.

For Williams, as critics have stated, the supernatural was not a separate realm, but constantly around us. Analogies were not invented by the artist, but... discovered. In The Greater Trumps, William's novel about the Tarot, Nancy Coningsby experiences the correspondences, seeing a local policeman as the Tarot card that embodies authority and order, The Emperor.

Indeed somthing common to Emperor and Khalif, cadi and magitrator ... shone before her in those lights ... it was certainly true that for a moment she saw in that heavy official barring their way the Emperor of Trumps, helmed, in a white cloak, stretching out an arm, as if Charlemagne, or one like him, stretched out his controlling sword over the tribes of Europe... and bade them pause or march as he would.

These works are much more light-hearted than his novels, and much more specific than his usual poetry, since they were about the work of the firm. They are The Masque of the Manuscript, The Masque of Perusal, and The Masque of the Termination of Copyright (never actually performed). (plus some poetry written about the masques at the time)

Thumbnails: A manuscripts comes to the offices, the staff take pity on it and publish it. Someone actually buys it. And, as copyright expires and the fate of the book is uncertain, it is republished and the government needs 5000 copies. The title of the book? "I am called A Short Treatise on Syrian Nouns As used in the Northern and Sub-Northern Towns In Five Hundred B.C., with two maps and three charts: By Walter Lackpenny, poor Master of Arts."

The characters are themselves but also their roles and their "forms"--the principle of which the role is an instance.

Although they'd almost stand without the introduction and background material, it helps a lot to know in advance who is the publicity man and who the music editor. I'd not have realized that the changes in portrayal of Phyllis reflected a breakup--but I doubt that I needed to know that in any case.

If you're a Williams fan, I think you'll enjoy it. The poetry is much less dense than (say) Taliessin through Logres. Like this query about an editor's bete noir:

PHILLIDA [making the sign of the magical pentagram] Art though purged as by fire and by water made clean?
THE MANUSCRIPT I mean what I say and I say what I mean.

I wish we had a team like theirs at work.

Smart shoes vs TSA

Researchers have again found a way of generating electricity from walking (I've heard of this before). This won't quite power current cellphones, but might manage other things for you.

Try to describe to the nice man in the uniform at the airport why your shoes have funny electronics in them and your pants have wires.

Natural song lengths?

It seems that most songs on the radio wind up being about 3 minutes long in practice. The link says this was driven by the precedents set by old technology, but a lot of churches select verses from a longer set to keep hymns in that 3-5 minute range.

There are plenty of exceptions, there's really a distribution of times. How much does that distribution vary from one culture to another?

For example, I've been in churches where hymns are sung at half the speed they are in most white American churches, and heard singers go on for an hour (at least--I fell asleep).

I suppose with the appropriate use of keywords you might be able to use Youtube to get a distribution of the lengths of raga songs, but the numbers won't be quite clean (multiple covers, people yacking about songs, etc).

Has anybody looked at that? Is there some natural length for songs, or is it entirely cultural?

Battle cries

I don't think "Je suis Charlie" will be quite as inspiring as Roland's "Paiens ont tort!"

Beagle

I'm fond of The Last Unicorn, and one line comes to mind a lot these days:

"Ah, love may be strong, but a habit is stronger"

That seems true enough in the spiritual disciplines (it is a bit presumptuous of me to be leading the study), and in (as the poem) looking for the one and only, and even in trying to master some art. The habits of games or facebook or what have you drain away the time which is life from what what somebody really wanted to do.

I remember a short essay from a year or so ago of a child going with Grandma to pick out a vase, and finding it surprisingly hard to do. There were many fine vases, but that one didn't match the curtains, and the other would look strange on the end table, and the third didn't match the cabinet: Grandma's home was full of so many things which constrained the possibilities that almost nothing would fit. The essay likened this to trying to find a spouse after living alone for years, but the problem is more general--to add anything to an already full life requires cutting stuff out.

What are the best lenses to wear to see what is a tradition, what is faithfulness, and what is a habit?

Contradiction

The Roman Catholic Church has a dislike for capital punishment, an attitude with roots that go back to the early Church (which was in some ways more radical). Pope Francis said a few months ago that solitary confinement was cruel--and no doubt it is.

A state that accepts both rules quickly finds itself in an untenable position. Its first duty is to protect its citizens, even (at some level) its imprisoned citizens, and there are always some people who will viciously prey upon others--even in prison. If you aren't allowed to execute them, and you aren't allowed to isolate them, and you aren't allowed to exile them (nobody else wants them either), and you must protect everyone else from them--there's no solution.

So to do what it is appointed to do, a state has to do the presumptuous work of pronouncing judgment and using force against people in ways that are not obviously loving. Naturally this attracts undesireable applicants, and the power readily corrupts even the well-intentioned. So we have to try to keep an eye on the state (hence democracy), but even the mechanisms for doing that are corruptible.

But what do you do when the machinery of the state appears to start to take the injunctions against cruelty and violence too seriously, and begins to fail to protect its citizens? (I say "appears" because it usually looks as though cui bono finds a simple tribal answer--but God protect us from well-intentioned bureaucrats.)

It isn't exactly my ideal to have to say "Please get on the stick and start killing those people who are attacking us!" Yet that is the duty of the state's machinery, and often the way to minimize deaths. It isn't obviously charitable to say "Either cut benefits or cut immigration--the numbers do not work." But honesty demands these kinds of claims.

It is much more comfortable when the state is doing its job and we can deprecate the evils that flow from even the best government, and hold up high ideals for individuals. Maybe that's even the way it is supposed to work, given the fallen world we live in: prophets denouncing the evils and the state not-quite ignoring the prophets, and the rest of us at least trying to minimize the evils and keep an eagle eye on the state.

Derby

When our Eldest Son participated in a Pinewood Derby race, we went out together to buy the kit. I showed him how to clamp the block down, and started the saw cut for him. His enthusiasm waned as he rasped and sanded and painted. I insisted that the axle positions were critical, and showed him he could try to make sure they went in straight.

In the end, he seemed happy with it--after all, he'd done the work himself, albeit with some impatience. It didn't win, but it was well above most of the pack in speed--seemed to slow down a bit with time (Were the axle positions twisting? I never knew.). It was not a thing of beauty, nor lightning fast, but it was clearly made by the boy and not the father, and it was something any boy could make who could afford the $4.50 for the kit and had a few ordinary tools in the house.

I was browsing while waiting in Hobby Lobby last month, and happened upon the Pinewood Derby shelf. The kit itself is the least of it now: you can even buy a special jig to make sure the axle goes in at the right position and angle. Entry level seems to have gone up to about $50.

The playing field was never perfectly equal in the derby: setting aside the parents who did the work for the boy, those who didn't have a saw or rasp or hammer at home were never going to turn out a fast racer, and those who didn't take the instruction's advice and try to arrange their own axle jigs wouldn't either. And there's nothing one can reasonably do to take out the income advantage, unless everybody is making theirs in the same project room with the same gear. Still it seems like an unhappy additional bias.

Plus, of course, the kids don't get the experience of making their own tools.

What if: painting

On the way back from the Milwaukee Museum exhibit of Glasgow's Italian paintings we improved the shining hour with a what-if.

If you had a time machine (and an interpreter) and a supply of gold and silver, which ancient or modern painter would you commission, and what would you have him (or her) create?

Proposed answers:

• Titian, to paint some ordinary people that struck his eye (instead of the models and the rich patrons).
• Bosch, to paint Times Square (who else could do it justice?).
• Somebody like Zampieri Domenico (we couldn't remember the name of the one we really wanted) to do the Grand Canyon: give him a really wild landscape to paint.

The better ideas come when you're not on the spot, of course: how about one of the Lascaux cave painters painting the village and people in it? Dunno if they'd care for gold...

Or Bruegel painting a legislature? Or Titian to redo the woman taken in adultery without anachronisms. (Notice the prominent codpiece on her captor; a nice touch illustrating hypocrisy...)

I'm not skilled enough to appreciate the finer points distinguishing painters of the same genre and era, nor so fond of my own features as to be interested in a portrait of myself. But maybe you have other ideas?

Cross

Wouldn't it have been so much easier if Jesus had said "Take up your empty tomb every day and follow Me"? The "name it and claim it" crowd?

Firing at the enemy

Remember that statistic that only 15-25% of the soldiers in WWII fired at the enemy? Seems to be garbage. Funny, because the Army seemed to believe it, and that sort of question is the sort of life-or-death question they're supposed to try to get right. Supposed to, anyway.

The summary is that Marshall seems to have made up the statistics about the Malkin Island fight: he didn't have time to do the number of interviews he claimed, soldiers had to be told to hold their fire when they were blazing away at enemies that weren't there (rumor), and it isn't clear if he drew any distinction between soldiers in reserve and those at the point. It took delving into archives and a number of interviews to find this out--not the sort of thing an armchair analyst can take on.

What's really annoying is to find out that he'd been known to be full of it since 1989! But the numbers still circulate. I suppose that's nothing new for made-up numbers, but usually those keep zombie-ing around because somebody has a political agenda or iron rice bowl they need to protect.

Grossman relied on Marshall's numbers, but tried to supplement them with other estimates, so I'm not sure his conclusions are seriously undercut, such as "It is a lot easier to kill a fleeing enemy." Hat tip to West Hunter

Food stamp variation

Eldest Daughter suggested that surplus or in-season food could be made into 2-fer or discounted deals for food stamp use. It seemed to her a non-paternalist way to encourage healthier eating, since currently the cheapest calories per buck tend to be "junk food." "Junk food" isn't so great if you're susceptible to type 2 diabetes, as it turns out a surprising number of us are.

A quick survey didn't show that anybody tries this, which is a bit surprising. Maybe it's a problem of coordination between federal funding and the states: the state may have in-season foods that other states don't and the feds are one size fits all?

U-234

I ran across a little clarification tonight. On its trip from Nazi Germany to Imperial Japan U-234 was carrying technical drawings, templates and forms and a couple of engineers, not broken-down ME262 jets. It also had 560kg of uranium oxide, which no doubt the Japanese scientists were eager to get ahold of (when they heard of Hiroshima they knew exactly what had happened because they were trying to build the same kind of weapon).

It makes more sense to provide the drawings--though they'd have been unbeatable while they lasted the jets themselves wouldn't have lasted long before they needed maintenance. Of course the Japanese weren't going to have the time to tool up a new factory.

"We are able"

"James and John, the two sons of Zebedee, came up to Jesus, saying, "Teacher, we want You to do for us whatever we ask of You." ... "Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?" They said to Him, "We are able." And Jesus said to them, "The cup that I drink you shall drink; and you shall be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized."

James was the first to be martyred. John died last of all, of a natural death. So the "cup" wasn't martyrdom as we think of it, though that's the hymn suggests . I wonder which of the two had the harder row to hoe.

Christmas Day

From David Warren: "The city for its part remains unearthly quiet, the usual crash of traffic damped below nature’s breathing. It is the sound that cars make when they are parked; of a million cars not driving to church on Christmas Day." He's carelessly rough on the lonely in that essay: a rare misfire. But ...

Our church had 9 Christmas Eve services at 3 venues, including the 23:00 service that ends as Christmas Day begins. But they've nothing on Christmas Day. Which is kind of odd, given the day's name: the Christ Mass. I get it that lots of people want to stay home with their families. Still, an hour for a Christmas service seems like a small price for recognition of a holy day.

We end the Christmas Eve services with Silent Night and the shared candle-lighting (amazing how bright the place gets so quickly). It isn't easy to hold a candle in one hand and manage the phone to snap a picture of yourself and your husband with the other, but she managed. I don't think she was trying to show off; she was just uninhibitedly enthusiastic about lots of things--like the baby she carried after the service.

On the other hand, it's my job to manage my own attitude to the day.

Bones

Lizzie Wade looks at a couple of papers about spongy bone:

The hunter-gatherers’ hip joints were about as strong as those of the apes, whereas the ancient farmers’ hips showed a significant loss of spongy bone. The researchers conclude that a lack of rigorous exercise, rather than any evolutionary pressure toward lighter skeletons, is the reason for modern human’s weak bones. So if you want a stronger skeleton, start exercising like a hunter-gatherer.

Hmm. They looked at the hip joint, which you'd expect to get more of a workout in humans chasing after critters, though maybe not quite so much if the hunter-gatherer spends time setting traps or doing ambush hunting. I wonder how they distinguish those. A farmer probably gets more upper body exercise than a hunter--how do the arm bones compare? Or the hip joints of a racer? Or of a slave? (The "helmsman" found by the older! boat in Herculaneum had bone changes from his work.)

It is a bit surprising that some bones would be as strong as an ape's. How dense are the rest of an ape's bones? (quite a bit denser than human)

Gloria

I always loved the chorus to Angels We Have Heard On High: The syllables flow so perfectly in the music. "Gloria in excelsis Deo"

I remember hearing it, and thinking it magnificent, when I was young enough that I didn't understand why I didn't understand it. (When I heard the explanation I would have sympathized with Jim: "Is a Frenchman a man?" "Yes." "WELL, den! Dad blame it, why doan' he TALK like a man?") Even when I was an atheist I liked to listen to it (shades of Herod?). In church choir we were told to approximate it with "een eggshells ees," which provoked some snickers later when explained to someone who actually knew a little latin.

I ran the sound system tonight from the back of the chapel. It was glorious to hear the congregation gathering into that chorus; even facing away from me they drowned out all but a bit of the brass in joyful salute to God. It felt almost as though there were others singing along with us.

Hosen and shoon

I tend to find it a relief when the beggars aren't hanging around the Philosopher's Stones. That's not quite the right attitude. I should be unhappy that I can't help (which I mostly can't anyway, since handing out money isn't good for anybody).

Taking a few liberties:

Then He will also say to those on His left, ‘Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry, and you gave Me nothing to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me nothing to drink; I was a stranger, and you did not invite Me in; naked, and you did not clothe Me; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit Me.’

“Then they themselves also will answer, ‘Lord, but we voted for people who promised to take care of the poor and reduce recidivism. And we paid taxes too.’

And He will say to them, `You wanted other people to take care of the poor, but would not do it yourself.’

Well, Teddywedgers is open again; though that's probably everybody else's first idea too.

Vanity

We’re still going through his boxes of papers and tools and memorabilia. I found his notes for his first book, which was never completed. It is just as well--Blame it on Venus would have been a Velikovskian tract. I read over his page complaining about the foolishness of astronomers who claimed to have seen silicate dust around one star. I could have taken him to the physics museum and showed him emission spectra and explained absorption spectra, and I think he’d have gotten the picture—he used to look at electron scattering spectra to identify minerals. Never happened, though.

He praised Velikovsky a time or two to me, and I complained about orbital dynamics. I guess he decided I was one of the lock-step establishment and didn't want to waste time arguing.

As I filed the papers in a box, I wondered if my own efforts were just as ridiculous. I devised a preon model that didn’t work, though the symmetries were unexpected. A BFI approach to studying those symmetries ran aground on tensor transformations that I couldn’t solve. I played around with generalized lines in metric space—which is probably a special case of a much more general approach that I don’t know anything about. I tried to get limits on dark matter interactions with neutrinos, and they’re terribly loose—work from a half dozen other groups is orders of magnitude better. No breakthroughs here.

Oh well. Do what is in front of me faithfully...

He didn’t finish his second book either, but I think we can make it happen anyway.

Unsung heroes of faith

John Horden is in the calendar of saints of the Episcopal Church, as I found from Mission St. Clare's site. He was initially a missionary to Moose Factory, and from then on to preach to the Cree and translate the Bible and Book of Common Prayer into Cree and Ojibwe.

On May 10, 1851, Hordern received a letter from them, informing him that the Bishop of Rupert's Land had made a request for a schoolmaster at Moose Factory, Ontario and that he had been appointed to fill the position. They also told him to prepare to leave within a month and indicated that they desired that he marry and take his wife out to assist him in his missionary work. Although he was less than enthused about the appointment, he immediately prepared for his new position. He contacted the woman of his choice, a young woman who herself had missionary inclinations, and she agreed to marry him. On June 8, 1851, they set sail for Canada.

...

Then in 1865, Horden and his family, which now included five children that he and his wife had had in Canada, sailed back to England so that his children could be educated.

Yes, he was an obedient servant of the gospel. But I'm really impressed by the faith and dedication of someone not named in the article--his wife Elizabeth Oke mentioned but not described here.

"Hello. I'm going next month to be a missionary in the wilds of Canada. Want to get married and come along?"

OK, it wasn't quite like that. From a history

On May 24, Horden left his work at school ; on May 25, he was married ; on May 28, he left for London on the way to his post in the mission-field.

Horden had not to choose a wife with the haste which this statement might suggest. At the time
when he first offered himself to the Church Missionary Society he became engaged to Miss Elizabeth Oke, who was not only a member of the same congregation as himself, but was filled with the same desire to be a missionary. She, too, had prepared for the foreign field by working at home. When the call to Moosonee came, the decision rested with her. With out hesitation she resolved to go, and the hasty wedding began a married life of singular happiness and of long duration.

I'll be interested to hear her story.

Diet and health

Atherosclerosis seems to have been just as common (after accounting for age) in ancient Egypt as in modern Egypt. (HT to Archaeoblog) Lifestyles may be different (though I wonder if the expense of mummification would skew the distribution to the richer folks)--but certainly Osti wasn't leading a life of ease and he was getting calcification too. So maybe "lack of physical activity, an unhealthy diet, and smoking" really don't matter as much as choosing your ancestors correctly after all.

"Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside." Mark Twain

Looks longingly at the bread and wishes that heart disease were the only worry. . .

Behind the decline

I indulged in the usual kvetching about songs (at greater length here, with some rare comments by my Better Half).

But it's a good exercise to see where maybe I'm contributing to the problem.

I don't sing them myself. That follows immediately from the broader statement that I don't sing much at all, except in church or on the way, or sometimes during long distance driving. Nor do many people I know. In fact we have a rule: "no singing at the table." At this late date I don't remember why we instituted it, but it probably had to do with one or two dominating the table with irrelevancies.

Instead I generally listen to other people sing. Now though the tune does sometimes slosh out of the bucket when I hit the achievable note rather than the one the composer had in mind, I have a good time sense and keep the rhythm OK (can't manage the chorus of Grazing in the Grass, though). True, Youngest Daughter winces audibly.

I notice that if I pick a song to sing, I don't get bored with it and demand new variations. I may play with it a bit, but most of the time I sing it straight without irritability. Hearing the same Rudolph 4 times in a day became wearing, but singing Oh Come Oh Come Emmanuel 3 times was fine. OK, that's not a fair comparison: marshmallows and steak; but that's the freshest example in my mind. I seem to recall the same effect with standard carols in past years, though.

Is singing in public too intimate? (Whistling might be more acceptable, but I only have about 3 notes and they aren't consecutive.) Perhaps we're too crowded for it not to be invasive, though given how many people have their ears plugged perhaps we're more isolated than we appear.

Cleaning up

The apartment was his junk drawer.

He’d been through the Great Depression, and done all the usual things—hauled bottle caps for trade-in for metal value, fished for the family dinner, and on and on. He decided to try to live off as little as he could. Every year of the past dozen he gardened in a city plot, and canned the results. He hunted up remainder bargains, and canned or froze those. He had a freezer set to max in his apartment, and it was chock full of mostly unidentifiable plastic bags of food. (The only way to figure out what something is is to thaw it, and then you’re stuck with it. I used a rod and mallet to knock packages loose from the bed of frost.) Between the 600 odd cans of food he’d made and the contents of the freezers, he could have fed himself for a year given only water and electricity to run the freezer and his hot plate. Yes, he told other people he was expecting the food supply to collapse. He was generous with his produce, encouraging one neighbor with ankle pain to eat lots of pickled jalapenos to mitigate the pain (she liked jalapenos and thought he was funny), and handing out jars of other confections freely.

Some of the dates on the jars are from 2006, but mostly the things are fairly current, so I think he was eating his own preparations all these years. We’d never visited his apartment before, because he told us his enemies were watching him and he wanted to keep us safe.

We ate his cooking once at his sister’s home when she was out. I suppose it had nutrition. Even my weirdest bachelor culinary experiments tasted better. His version was kin to the Asterix the Legionary “legionary’s rations”: “Corn, cheese, and bacon, all cooked together to save time.”

He didn’t have enough shelving for the store-canned goods he bought, so he created a narrow shelving unit tied to the wall by picture hangers. The 7x3 unit used nails to hold the bottom together, but he wasted no nails in the rest—it was held together by the weight of the canned goods. When we disconnected it from the wall the shelves fell like dominoes. Jars held up shelves which held up other shelves. Ceiling tiles nailed to the walls became cork-boards, and in lieu of a queen-size mattress he used a twin mattress and strips of foam wrapped in a blanket. When we entered to begin the cleanup, there was a 1-foot wide path to the bedroom, bathroom, living room, and kitchen. Part of the bath stall was set up with plant lights for seed starting.

He was one of the quartermasters on the Finback, and was brilliant at squirreling away bits and pieces of things in original places and creating ways to house more. That carried over into civilian life (at least when I knew him), and his van and apartment were wondrous things. He bought gear he’d never use, but could trade for things he could use if things went south. But as he got older I think he started to lose track of what he’d hidden where.

He always laid down rolls of paper to protect the carpet or counter from his superstructures, and when these were removed the original surfaces were generally immaculate.

I found a children’s guide to a museum screwed up inside an otherwise empty spice jar. I suspect it was meant for a hide-and-seek game that never happened—he had just the offbeat sense of humor for that. He kept that sense of humor to the end.

Next to his Bible was his “second Bible”—the CRC handbook, worn to a frazzle.

Prospero trilogy by L. Jagi Lamplighter

The thesis of the trilogy (Prospero Lost, Prospero in Hell, Prospero Regained) is that Shakespeare’s Prospero from The Tempest was a real person, as was his daughter Miranda (the narrator) and other children Shakespeare didn’t know about. If there are in fact spirits of the air (and presumably other elements), what keeps them from making mischief? Prospero, Inc.

The title of the second volume gives away what has become of him, but Miranda isn’t sure of much of anything along the way. The environment is a blend of Greek mythology, Norse mythology, English legends, Christianity, and logical conclusions drawn therefrom, together with a dose of Dante and Niven/Pournelle. The history of who was moving behind the scenes over the centuries is fun. The plot and twists move rapidly.

It is a fun read, though I wasn’t so fond of the battles in Hell; and there were some inconsistencies in how the living manage there and how much the demons know. But all in all, fun.

The framework reminds me very strongly of John C Wright’s Chronicles of Chaos and War of the Dreaming series—almost as though they discussed ideas over the dinner table. Which they probably do.

Christmas songs

This is the time of year for kvetching about Christmas songs. In our errands today we heard a lot of songs--not so many of them carols, but a couple. Most were pretty heavy on the nostalgia, as in AVI's post about NPR Christmas. Some of the songs feel attenuated--a nostalgia for the old nostalgia for a time somebody used to know.

When the carols play, I'm reminded of:

They come to you as people come, and sit before you as My people and hear your words, but they do not do them, for they do the lustful desires expressed by their mouth, and their heart goes after their gain. Behold, you are to them like a sensual song by one who has a beautiful voice and plays well on an instrument; for they hear your words but they do not practice them.

Variants of autism

Some researchers are using genetic analysis to find out what the different kinds of autism come from. That there are different kinds seems almost obvious if you hang around with a number of them (e.g. the AUsome Social Group, though you could argue that the main effect is from one broken gene and the variations come from other broken genes. (Simplifying a bit) But their work suggests that there are different mutations, each of which can cause symptoms in the autism spectrum.

I hope the work pans out.

Corporate Conspiracies

It isn't a for-profit corporation, but ... draw your own conclusions about who is gaming science for political ends. The link has a copy of a plan in which "peer reviewed papers" are planned for highest impact, including an ideal author list count, before the paper even exists, much less has been "peer reviewed."

Submariner

My wife's father died this afternoon, listening to his youngest grand-daughter read the 23'rd Psalm while the hospice nurse made him comfortable. My wife and her cousin were called back in time to be with him.

He'd served as quartermaster on a submarine in World War II, sailed on the Great Lakes, been a wrestler in school, learned electron microscopy back in the day and worked as a geologist. And he ran a ceramics business, worked as maintenance everything for a youth campground, and gardened and canned at every opportunity. He turned his attitudes around after becoming a Christian, and the "scrimp and save" approach to life he learned from the Great Depression became a means to maximize what he could give.

He could be a little suspicious and a little Aspergery, but his neighbors said he was a sweet old guy.

Not ready for diagnostic prime time, but interesting.

Is autism diagnosable by fMRI? According to the headline, maybe...but there were 34 (17+17) participants, all adult, all willing to get inside a fMRI machine and be scanned while listening to various words: notably the word "hug".

Whereas the control subjects showed activity in the part of the brain associated with self-representation, the subjects with autism did not. This means that the autistic individuals envisioned the words and actions being told to them (actually they read the words on a screen) without themselves as a participant in defining the scenario, while the control group saw themselves being hugged, complimented, kicked, and insulted when thinking about these concepts.

The article itself is on PLOS.

That there are only 17 neurotypical participants means there is no good estimate for the number of false positives, since autism shows up at the 1% level. And quite a few participants had to be removed from the study:

The data from the 25 excluded participants (12 with autism and 13 controls) had been affected by either excessive (above 3.5 mm) head motion (6 with autism and 3 controls) or lack of attention to the stimulus in a substantial number of trials (6 with autism and 10 controls). Participants in such studies comment that occasionally their mind wanders when processing some items, and we have previously found such inattention to be characterized by an abnormal occipital activation time course.

The effect is certainly dramatic, and it may be real, but this needs a lot more study before we can talk about "diagnosis", especially diagnosis of children young enough that intervention might help. Can you imagine a 2-year old inside a noisy machine lying quietly and listening to Mommy say "hug!"?

The data they are dealing with is somewhat fuzzy, so they use what we call a "neural net" to try to analyze the results. It works something like this: for a given event (a particular patient i, for example), you have several different measurements on channels A, B, C: values A_i, B_i, C_i. If you know in advance that the first 10 events are from bald Martians and the rest are from hairy Venusians, and if you "notice" that in the first 10 cases A_i=B_i but in the rest of them A_i=-B_i, you can generate a "bald Martian" formula (A_i+B_i). When this is 0 you probably have a hairy Venusian, otherwise you have a bald Martian.

The "noticing" is the secret to making the process work. You can use algorithms to combine the data with weights based on the a priori known type of the event, and after a few iterations get a formula (generally linear in the variables) that gives you a kind of probability that a event is one type or the other. There's typically a spectrum, but everybody hopes there will be a nice sharp peak at 1 or 0.

With enough variables you can easily "over train", and the usual procedure is to train on either simulations (risky) or part of the dataset, and then apply the formula to the rest of the data. The experimenters here did something like the latter. If I read the article correctly, they did 34 different neural net training exercises, each time omitting one event and then trying out the resulting formula on the omitted event. They got accurate predictions 33 times out of 34--which is quite good.

Related but not the same

Next to a car dealership on East Washington Avenue sits an enterprise whose sign sports scissors and the name "Lust BeautyWorks".

Am I alone in thinking this a trifle muddled?

There seem to be at least three attributes that get confused: sexy, attractive, beautiful. A few minutes thought should bring to mind women who are clearly more of one of the three but not so much of the other two. (I'm a man. Women can probably find men that fit similar categories, but I won't try to predict how that would work out.)

"What does he see in her?"

You know what I mean, I hope. A woman who doesn't seem to be particularly beautiful but people like to be around her--she's attractive. Another seems to radiate sex appeal, but seems unable to hold onto conquests reliably. And there's glamorous types who excite admiration and envy but aren't the first choice for dreams.

I'm thinking here of public attributes. Plenty of women and men who don't stop traffic are more than adequately sexy behind closed doors. If not there'd be many fewer children born. And the old husband who says his old wife is beautiful isn't kidding--he sees better than the simpleminded public eye does.

Maybe magazine covers(*) make it clearer. (Since Borders closed I don't see magazine stands so often, so I'm not up to date.) Playboy's covers, at least the ones I remember, featured beautiful women with an air of "You're here. Dinner can wait." The beauty was from a rather restricted palette, but was always beauty. It was always on the far side of the line, into erotica, but with enough plausible deniability that you could, for a moment, kid yourself that it was mostly about beauty. Other mags posed their models in postures designed to emphasize secondary sexual characteristics, regardless of whether this was a beautiful pose or not. Sex appeal was the goal, though it sometimes looked too silly to be appealing. But when Jackie Kennedy was on a cover, she was always made to look glamorous: beautiful but not sexy, and not very approachable either--except when the image made her seem helpless and in need of a defender.

If that's not clear, how about Ginger or Mary Ann? Mary Ann was played to appear approachable and attractive, not just beautiful; Ginger played to appear beautiful and slightly artificial, and not approachable and attractive. (And beside me is a Dominican University alumni magazine featuring an airbrushed young nurse with an attractive friendly smile.)

If you are young and healthy it is probably easier to take shortcuts with clothing and styles to appear sexy than it is to try to look beautiful. Teens in particular seem prone to taking these shortcuts. (Compare high school pictures today with those from 80 years ago.) But I suspect that the women who frequent Lust BeautyWorks would prefer to excite admiration for their beauty rather than lust, at least from the general population. Though I could be wrong again.

---

(*) "magazine covers" = superficiality squared

Showing my age

The pharmacy changed its hours last month. I couldn't remember whether it opened at 8:30 or 9:00, so I looked up its web page and was gratified that 8:30 fit my errand schedule so well.

When it finally opened at 9:00, I inquired about the web pages and was told that they still did not have control over those pages, but were trying to get them changed. "But our Facebook and Yelp pages are correct!" I told her I was "old school," the kind who looked for the business' web pages.

The attention track

An inescapable celebrity(*) apparently tried to "break the internet" recently by posting pictures of herself. The cropped thumbnails are ubiquitous. I understand this is not the first time bare buttocks have appeared on the net; that in fact the competition for attention is fairly intense in that genre. This approach seems a kind of dead end attempt for attention (what do you do for an encore? Get photographed having sex on the Capitol steps?). I suppose with a creative-enough team of consultants you can go on for several years Gaga-style wearing a chain mail veil this week and a feather duster up the rump the next.

It smells like desperation. The next step, IIRC, is either to go to Africa and adopt a child or else go the sex-tape/rehab–stay route.

Is this scripted, or should her family put her on suicide watch?

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(*) I still don’t have a good handle on why she or her kin are famous. Bread and circuses? Circuses being an endless parade of lunatic celebrities and movies and empty scandals and twits and cat videos... And bloggers, I suppose—mea culpa.

LED bulbs and unintended consequences

Part 1. When our camera decided to take time off during our vacation north a few years ago I bought a Fuji JZ100.

Part 2. We replaced the rather inadequate lights in the living room with track lighting. The regular bulbs burned out so fast that I decided to invest in LED bulbs instead. With my rock solid or rocky memory skills I wound up mixing both warm and cool light bulbs in the replacements. Of three bulbs in a row, the ones on the end are more yellow and the one in the middle is bluish (which I think is the one called "Natural daylight").

Part 3. Our "international student" guests wanted some pictures from our Thanksgiving dinner. I offered to use our camera; set it on a tripod and pushed the button.

The images were washed out in blue glare. Repeatedly, even with the flash going. Nothing worked until we turned out all the LED lights in the living room and used the flash.

I surmise that the Fuji uses one particular frequency to adjust its exposure setting and that the LED bulb's collection of frequencies omits that one. Result: the room is estimated to be much darker than it really is, the automated exposure is therefore too long, and everything gets washed out.

Maybe I was taking a nap when the memo about LED bulbs went around, but just in case it isn't widely known--watch out when taking pictures under LED lights.

Guess what this means

From the sys-ops chat this morning:

Joseph_Schlitz_rc1 has become a Jedi release that has killed sndaq Beer_Trooper ... The force is so strong that there is not even data showing up at 2ndbuild at all unfortunately that seems to be a more serious thing

Is there anyone in @channel that can look into this? Otherwise I would ask WO's for rollback

A clue:

XXX yes, but for some reason, there were no alerts

YYY run was taken as "TestData"

XXX ah, ok

YYY 8 doesn't that mean online alert systems ignore it?

XXX AM yes
this is a precaution
ok, so everything is fine

YYY well, outside the SNDaq mysteries

I'll look up the details and post the answers later.

---

Answers:

As I wrote earlier, IceCube found it useful to give each DOM a unique name; not just a number. Numbers are too easy to transpose. The DOMs are programmed with data acquisition software, which is rarely perfect, and updated from time to time. New software releases are also given names, and by tradition these are named after bars. SNDAQ stands for a special piece of software: SuperNova Data AcQuisition. It works by looking not for individual neutrinos, which from a supernova are plentiful but of too low an energy to stand out, but for a general brightening of all the DOMs by thousands and thousands of small interactions.

The "_rc1" means that this is test release 1.

"@channel" is, of course, the tag for the chat software being used for this conversation. "WO" stands for Winter Overs--a pair who work on our experiment during the antarctic winter (11 month tours--they get started now).

Not all data acquisition taking is for physics: some of the "runs" are tests; hence the TestData run.

A supernova is a very interesting thing to observe, and since SN1987A we now know that neutrinos escape the blast well before the visible light is finally generated. Therefore there is a communications network designed to alert all the participating systems to look out if one of them detects something that might be a supernova. Obviously you don't want the alert to go out if you're just running a test.

A "DOM" is a "Digital Optical Module" with a large phototube, a couple of small computers and a couple of fast signal converters (one less sensitive so it can see large signals), which transmits its measurement of light received to collection computers at the surface. These are all carefully coordinated so we can tell what time light arrived at a DOM on one "string" relative to the time it arrived on another, so we can tell what direction the original particle came from.

Manson

I've never quite understood the appeal of criminals, but I gather that there is a population of women who become their pen pals (so to speak) and even offer to marry them. I don't believe they really think they can reform them, but I've been wrong before.

Charles Manson can "marry" someone. The lady in question this time around seems assured but vacant to me, and her father suggests she is creative with history. Another article says prisoners have the constitutional right to marry (and tries to show what some of the motivations are(*)), but Manson is in for life and nobody is going to parole him--there is no question of making a life together. Even Manson admits this is a fake, and it is not the first prison pseudo marriage for him either. Why cooperate? A minister who thinks a couple isn't serious or isn't ready can refuse to conduct their ceremony. Make them rely on Flying Spaghetti Monster or Universal Light mail-order ministers.

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(*) Apparently different criminals attract different sorts of fans. And having a "wife"/"girlfriend" is a status thing inside.

Native ebola control

The conference call with Dr. Mosoka Fallah had a few enlightening notes. I've been deeply suspicious of the claim that ebola is declining in Liberia, but he said it was because local communities had finally gotten the picture, and were being proactive about control. They find a place to isolate the sick, bring food/water to the boundary, and let nobody in or out. Newcomers to a village have to stay in isolation (quarantine) for three weeks, since they are assumed to be infected.

In other words, the simple social tools work. Compare and contrast with Nurse Ebola and the federal refusal to use the same common sense. (Yes, I've heard the hyperbolic claims that quarantines would cripple provision of medical care to the afflicted areas. We can fast-track tests for medicals professionals on a new registry and reduce their quarantine time. Voila. In computer networking you put up a firewall and only punch holes for the protocols and systems you know you want to let through.)

Fidelio

Very good. The only misfire was Floristan's rather too well-fed appearance--in the story he had been on starvation rations for a couple of months.

A grand celebration of love, courage, and knowing which is the pointy end of a pistol. And some nice light bits as well. And the prisoners chorus, which I'd never heard before, believe it or not. It is easier for me to follow the sense of the music when I have the meaning of the words--probably a defect in my music appreciation department.

Still topical

    And they, sweet soul, that most impute a crime
    Are pronest to it, and impute themselves,
    Wanting the mental range; or low desire
    Not to feel lowest makes them level all;
    Yea, they would pare the mountain to the plain,
    To leave an equal baseness; and in this
    Are harlots like the crowd, that if they find
    Some stain or blemish in a name of note,
    Not grieving that their greatest are so small,
    Inflate themselves with some insane delight,
    And judge all nature from her feet of clay,
    Without the will to lift their eyes, and see
    Her godlike head crowned with spiritual fire,
    And touching other worlds.

Idylls of the King, Tennyson

A Western Paradigm

South Africa's President Zuma's take on corruption allegations is fascinating.

Ancient Practices Series

I read a set of books entitled “The Ancient Practices Series”—well, a fair chunk of them. I don’t have The Pilgrimage or Tithing available and. . . I’ll explain.

Brian McLaren wrote the intro: Finding Our Way Again. He has some annoying bees in his bonnet. Careful analysis is not his strong suit, and phrases like “the Abrahamic faiths” do not inspire confidence in his powers of observation. Nevertheless this is the best written of the set, and has some worthwhile material: such as the breakdown of the purposes of disciplines into katharsis/via purgative (purification from evil), fotosis/via illuminativa (receiving God’s truth and light), and theosis/via unitiva (unification with God). The three themes sometimes go together, but often one prepares the way for others.

Scott McKnight wrote Fasting, in which he says “Fasting is the natural, inevitable response of a person to a grievous sacred moment in life.” He’s not so keen on instrumental fasting, except when he is. It turns out that instrumental fasting (to seek more intense prayer, discipline the body, etc) has long roots in tradition. Chapters are “Fasting as” “Body Talk”, “Body Turning”, “Body Grief”, etc; but these metaphors didn’t seem all that useful. He distinguishes between fasting (food/water) and abstinence (everything else). Important point: don’t be an idiot about fasting.

Dan B Allender wrote Sabbath. Feast day, day of delight, but not a day of amusement. This is an impressionist-style book, and I think he was paid by the word.

Joan Chittister wrote The Liturgical Year. Short version: it’s a good thing, and the calendar isn’t about us but about worship and growing in worship. (Another paid by the word.)

Robert Benson wrote In Constant Prayer. Short version: Praying the Office is good prayer in itself, good for corporate worship, and also good training in prayer. My late brother-in-law recommended that decades ago; I’ve been kind of spotty in practicing it. Making sure there’s time is the hard part of any discipline.

Nora Gallagher wrote The Sacred Meal. I randomly opened to a page where she equated the Eucharist and feeding the homeless. I checked another and she was approvingly citing Bishop Spong. I didn’t think I’d learn much about orthodox tradition from Spong, and set the book aside.

I should see if the book about pilgrimage is handy somewhere--that's one discipline I haven't learned much about.

Getting in the way of celebration

In Victor Hugo's book 93 is a scene in which a warship is in deadly danger from a loose cannon. It has come free, and the half ton of iron slides back and forth with each wave, breaking bulkheads and crushing everything in its path and threatening to breach the hull and sink the ship. One man risks his life to jump in its path to ram wedges in place to stop it--and succeeds. The commander rewards such bravery with a medal--and then has the man shot because he was the one whose carelessness let the cannon come loose.

Perhaps that is logical, but it seems less than justice.

A few real-life people with accomplishments:

Alexander Grothendieck died quite recently. He was one of the top mathematicians of the 20'th century, ground-breaking in several fields. The link is a bio of him with thumbnail descriptions of his work (and I need to look up some terms before I will understand the thumbnails). He assembled and inspired a wonderful team, and then his own inner struggles led him to tear the group apart and hide as an unpleasant hermit for the rest of his life.

Feynman was a ground-breaking physicist. He had such an appetite for the ladies that the story goes that undergraduate girls found they could get easy money by telling him that they were pregnant by him and needed to get an abortion. (He apparently stood up for a woman physicist who was being belittled for her sex, so his attitude wasn't purely utilitilitarian.) Martin Luther King Jr. allegedly had an eye for the ladies too. Nelson Mandela started off as a hard-line Marxist, and never quite abjured that murderous faith, though his later words and deeds were more peaceful.

Paladins are a little thin on the ground, and even though the US tries to hold its military men to Knights Templar-like vows of poverty, chastity(*) and obedience, they often seem to have the usual collection of vices--though with fewer cowards than the rest of us.

We celebrate what we can. And try to let the accomplishment atone for the failures, when we can.

And then...

A project director celebrating landing a probe on a comet (a huge accomplishment for European Space Agency) wore a tacky Hawaiian shirt, and several ladies got a case of the vapors. (The response of Nancy Hopkins is beyond parody.) Ho hum. Except that shortly thereafter the accused director apologized in tears. Wait, what? That doesn't happen, even with Aspie folks, unless somebody has taken them out back and threatened them.

Who are these people in the back room who have given the professionally aggrieved the power to become harpies and defecate all over the feast?

I think I understand why they enable the harpies--keeping people worried and off-balance helps keep them in line. But who are they, and how do we depose them?

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(*) According to my dictionary that includes fidelity in marriage.

Dental plans

I asked an insurance man why dental plans weren't integrated into general medical plans. He said that most dental costs were predictable--there wasn't much difference between paying premiums and paying cash--unless you had soft teeth and had to have lots of crowns and whatnot. If you were normal it was a wash.

My experience has been a little different--but I have enough crowns to suggest that my experience isn't average. I wonder what the distribution of costs looks like. Anybody know, or is that proprietary information?

Dueling hymn versions

Though perhaps that's too violent a description ...

We attended a hymn sing with organ at Overture Center. One of the pieces was "We praise you O God." Deborah Smith said this was composed as a replacement for a militaristic version. The only other version I know is "We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing." Hmm. It would seem a trifle hypersensitive to object to this:

We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing;
He chastens and hastens his will to make known;
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing.
Sing praises to his name; he forgets not his own.

Beside us to guide us, our God with us joining,
Ordaining, maintaining his kingdom divine;
So from the beginning the fight we were winning;
Thou, Lord, wast at our side; all glory be thine!

We all do extol thee, thou leader triumphant,
And pray that thou still our defender wilt be.
Let thy congregation escape tribulation;
Thy name be ever praised! O Lord, make us free!

"We praise thee O God" goes like this:

We praise thee, O God, our Redeemer, Creator;
In grateful devotion our tribute we bring;
We lay it before you; we kneel and adore you;
We bless your holy name: glad praises we sing.

We worship thee, God of our fathers, we bless thee;
Through life's storm and tempest our guide hast thou been;
When perils o'ertake us, escape thou wilt make us,
And with thy help, O Lord, our battles we win.

With voices united our praises we offer,
To thee, great Jehovah, glad anthems we raise;
Your strong arm will guide us, our God is beside us,
To you, our great Redeemer, forever be praise!

A little misunderstanding, perhaps: Hymn Lore suggests that "We Praise Thee" was an independent replacement for the Dutch original:

The hymn is a truly noble utterance of praise. Its dominant note is joy, and this is expressed in a quick-moving meter that makes the singing of it worshipful and jubilant. Because the life of young people is usually joyous, the hymn appeals to them. They respond to it with enthusiasm.

That this should be the character of the text can be partly accounted for by the fact that the author, Mrs. Julia Cady Cory, was born and reared in one of the happiest Christian homes in New York City. Her father, J. Cleveland Cady, an architect of national reputation, is remembered for his devotion to boys and girls, and as the one man in the city who was superintendent of the same Sunday School for fifty-five years.

As for the genesis of the hymn, the author writes as follows : "Years before I was married (in 1902), the organist of the Brick Presbyterian Church of New York City, knowing of my interest in hymnology, came to me and told me that he had a very fine Netherlands melody associated with most militaristic and unchristian words. He lamented the fact, and requested me to write more suitable words, which could be used for the Thanksgiving Day service at the Brick Church. The hymn, as you see it to-day, was the result.

OK, fair enough. Wikipedia carries the original dutch song, but google-translate throws up its bits in despair trying to translate it--the Dutch must be way too old. Someone who knows the language (Mysha) rendered a few verses without rhyme:

Let us now come forward for God, our Lord
Praise him above all, with all of our heart
And exult everywhere the honour of his name,
Who there now beats down our enemy.

For the honour of our Lord, in all your days
Commemorate especially this miracle
For God, oh human, make you well behaved,
Do justice to all, and heed treachery!

Pray, wake and make, that to temptation
And evil with downfall, you will not yield.
Your piety will disturb the enemy,
However strong the walls of his realm might be!

OK, I gather this was written (on an older tune) to commemorate a victory, but what’s translated here still doesn’t seem very harsh. When separated from the incident, the sense is much more generic. Maybe the other verses matter... (The German version, as run through google-translate, is also pretty mild.)

I tell you once, I tell you twice.

The gospels emphasize different things about Jesus' life on earth. One day I wondered what their overlap looked like, and decided this morning to try to piece it out. Of course the synoptics overlap a lot, but John's is different enough that the overall overlap isn't quite as huge as you might expect.

I did a quick-and-dirty review and got this list, though I probably missed a detail or three.

1. This is about Jesus
2. John says someone more important is coming
3. John baptizes Jesus (implicit in John's)
4. The Spirit descends like a dove on Jesus
5. Some of the apostles are named
6. Jesus cleanses the temple (non-linear narrative in John's?)
7. 5000 are fed from a small lunch
8. Jesus walks on water
9. Jesus heals people (not the same list in each)
10. Jesus teaches (not quite the same material quoted in each)
11. Jesus says he's going to die
12. Leaders plot against him
13. Jesus and his disciples have a meal together with last instructions
14. Peter boasts of loyalty, but then denies Jesus
15. Judas betrays Jesus
16. Jesus is tried before a Jewish assembly
17. Jesus is tried before Pilate
18. Pilate doesn't want to kill him
19. Barabbas is released instead by popular acclaim
20. Jesus is crucified along with a couple of criminals
21. Women are present (Mary of Magdala, another Mary, others(*))
22. Jesus quotes scripture on the cross
23. Jesus dies
24. Joseph of Arimathea takes custody of the body and buries it in his own tomb
25. There is a stone in front of the tomb
26. On Sunday the women (Mary of Magdala and others) find the empty tomb
27. Jesus appears alive to the disciples

If overlap is there for emphasis, then what is emphasized?

1,2,3,4 testify that Jesus is going to be the one from God. 6 say he cleanses worship; 7,8,9 say he can control the world; 10 shows that he wants to teach us, 11 says he knows what’s about to happen.

The rest of the later ones are the outline of the plot to destroy him and its unexpected result.

The Jewish leaders plot against him and try him in their own court (his own people). The Roman leader can't be bothered to administer justice (their claim to fame). A criminal goes free (like us).

Jesus is crucified. (This is a curse for both Jews and Romans.)

Judas is a traitor (like plenty of others ever since). Peter is a failure (the only good argument I know for assigning him a "first among equals" position).

Women are essential witnesses (seriously counter cultural).

A rich man you never heard of before (or afterwards) takes the risk of burying Jesus--and in his own tomb at that.

After the Sabbath the tomb is empty, and Jesus shows himself alive.

For full instruction you want the union of the gospels, but I think I like the intersection too. Some things to meditate on.

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(*) When I was little I was terribly confused by all the different Marys, Herods, and Johns. It still doesn't help that "Mary the mother of Joses" / "Mary the mother of James and Joseph" and Mary the mother of Jesus may or may not be the same person.

Wild-eyed conspiracy theory

You have probably heard of the Lone Star tick whose bite makes you allergic to red meat.

Last Friday somebody brought up the subject at our team lunch, and the Ukrainian groaned that that would be a fate worse than death. I noticed that it seemed to be a new problem, and asked what PETA's genetic research budget was. My office mate pointed out that India's budget was much bigger. It is a land where people regularly refuse to rent to non-vegetarians (sometimes refusing Americans sight unseen on the expectation that they won't be vegetarians). He used to live there.

No, we were not serious. But I had a little sinking feeling when I remembered the BJP. Were we giving them ideas?

The will of the people

The BBC reports about the Pakistani couple (and unborn child) martyred by a mob. It ends with this:

Pakistan is a long way from changing or repealing its notorious blasphemy laws.

At best, the only thing the country's vulnerable and at risk communities can really hope for now is that the authorities will treat this case seriously and possibly deter similar gruesome crimes from happening again.

What this conclusion skims over is the implications of this:

Clerics from local mosques used loud speakers to incite violence. Soon, hundreds of angry people converged on the brick kiln looking for the Christian couple.

This didn't happen because of blasphemy laws in Pakistan. The blasphemy laws happened because this is the attitude of the people. You know and I know that burning harmless people alive is unjust and vile. But it is also perfectly democratic--this is what they want; or at least what a large number want while the rest are willing to go along with it.

Is "free and fair elections" a sufficiently powerful incantation to purify the vices of a people and automatically produce good government?

Most important

A colleague told me this week of a Psych professor he had who told the class that self-justification was more important than sex. The class of college students was duly startled, and he followed it with "Try to go a day without self-justification."

Trying to do without self-justification seems like a mandatory discipline for a Christian, but I'm still not very good at it.

It isn't just ebola

Malaria is still a killer. The news story reported that MSF was distributing malaria meds in some of the poor neighborhoods. That's not quite right: they're distributing tickets to be used to get the meds, and doing followup to make sure the households use them properly. In town, that's the right way to do it. Out in the field, where you don't have the staff to go door to door, I still think trusting people with meds is the way to go--with a phone bank to help them with diagnoses.

Timing is all

A man got on the bus today wearing a coat sporting a sticker that read "I voted today."

How the mighty have fallen

Within living memory a murder was a newspaper story, but a suicide wasn't. Even today, the Surgeon General urges that reporters avoid glamorizing suicides. But one suicide over the weekend, who I leave nameless and unlinked-to, is being widely hyped as saintly. From the similarity of statements on Facebook I gather people are quoting approved talking points: "a moral choice", "a good person", "brave". Other people with cancer aren't so happy about it: it devalues their lives in others' eyes.

It is hard to avoid the suspicion that the hype is powered by a blend of "Please don't be a bother to us" and "I can't conceive of anything more to life than experience", with maybe more than just a touch of "Don't be an expense to us." Not that this is the attitude of the people commenting on Facebook, but . . .

“Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.”
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

Ancient mathematics

I was pointed to David Mumford, who reviewed a book about the history of mathematics in "India". They got pretty far along, though the paradigm was different and the exposition is tough to follow. By that I mean that they were much more strongly application-oriented (not proof-based) and a lot of the literature was written in terse verse to make it easier for students to memorize. Have a look. He also has a history of What's so Baffling About Negative Numbers--why did it take so long for the West to pick up on them when the Chinese and Indians had a handle on them long before.

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I've said before that math isn't actually done in the abstract formal proofs you find in papers. A mathematician will noodle around with some models (often inspired by some application!) until some problem finally yields, and then he rewrites the result in a formal style that makes it sound like he was following a straight logical path to the answer all along. There's probably no help for that, but filling out papers with some more examples would help understanding. Certainly help me, anyway.

If his posts are any guide, Mumford seems to like examples. The most recent (as of today) is "An Easy Case of Feynman's Path Integrals." "Easy" is perhaps a bit relative, but I like the step-by-step way he evolved his model. Good writer.

Bad science reporting

You may have noticed that I indulge a hobby of looking up the actual journal articles behind some science headlines to see what's really happening. This tends to leave one frustrated with the "oh look a squirrel" reporting culture, and with a strong suspicion that most reporters not only don't know anything, but they don't have a clue how to investigate a story either. On the other hand, the net makes it relatively easy to discover the truth about claims that in earlier decades would have simply gone unchallenged: "Cronkite said it so it must be gospel."

A Czech named Lubos Motl does the same in a much more dramatic way from time to time: here he takes apart sloppy reports about an experiment in quantum mechanical effects in helium bubbles. Motl is a colorful (some say infamous) string theorist with strong opinions about Russia (he likes it), climate change (the current fashion is a con), political correctness (hates it), and string theory (only fools doubt it). Since academia tends to be leftist, he rubs some people the wrong way.

I'm an experimentalist, btw, and I think a reasonable test of the string theory paradigm is to let a bunch of very smart people have at it for about 20 years and see if they come up with any predictions. So far, zip--so I respectfully suggest that the test has failed, though it has resulted in some great advances in math that I don't understand. Yes, I understand that it predicts supersymmetry, which gets rid of some nasty theoretical issues in a very simple way--but decades of searching for SUSY particles only found limits. That's nice for giving grad students a thesis, but after a while you start to wonder if there's really a pony in there.

Ebola vs excellent medical care

Mark Reiff sent me a couple of ebola-links, and the New England Journal of Medicine report was particularly interesting. The patient described isn’t exactly typical: he nearly died of a secondary infection as well, but he had top of the line medical care all along the way after he arrived in Hamburg. Among other things he got about 10 liters of plasma every day for a while (8-13) since he was losing 8 via diarrhea! There was no way he’d have survived without heroic treatment.

Grab a dictionary and have a look at the article.

One thing that was pretty startling is Figure 2, showing the levels of viral RNA detected in various body fluids. The blood levels decrease for a while and then drop like a stone—maybe the result of flushing by the plasma? The levels in urine track the projected decline in blood levels A report from the earlier outbreak in Congo found nothing in urine, but evidently their tests weren’t sensitive enough yet. Sweat levels drop too—and then rise with the onset of the secondary infection and then decline more slowly! At day 63 when the report was written the levels had dropped to undetectability. And of course we’ve heard the reports that viral RNA was found in semen 60 days after infection.

I take this to mean that the virus is holed up in some tissues: skin for one. And that someone can be infectious to touch for a while after they’ve recovered from the disease. The latter seems to conflict with earlier work, but the patient was atypical. Without the heroic treatment he wouldn’t have survived to touch people; maybe the typical survivor isn’t hit as hard. Or maybe not.

Still, something to keep in mind. (Texan99 seems to have been right about high performance medical treatment.)