Neanderthal pictures

A Neanderthal apparently fell down into a cave and died, and his remains are embedded in stalactite formation along the wall. That first image is good and creepy, and I expect there'll be Halloween masks of it this fall. Extraction would probably take years, but they got a chunk of shoulder blade loose and were even able to get mDNA from it: he's about 150,000 years old, or thereabouts. Linked mainly for the pictures.

FWIW, Haggard's Kukuana in King Solomon's Mines apparently wouldn't have actually been able to preserve their kings, just their bones. Pity, it made a nice detail in the story.

School Discipline

From Remarks by Bill Nye:

Woodtick William's Story.

We had about as ornery and triflin' a crop of kids in Calaveras county, thirty years ago, as you could gather in with a fine-tooth comb and a brass band in fourteen States. For ways that was kittensome they were moderately active and abnormally protuberant. That was the prevailing style of Calaveras kid, when Mr. George W. Mulqueen come there and wanted to engage the school at the old camp, where I hung up in the days when the country was new and the murmur of the six-shooter was heard in the land.

"George W. Mulqueen was a slender young party from the effete East, with conscientious scruples and a hectic flush. Both of these was agin him for a promoter of school discipline and square root. He had a heap of information and big sorrowful eyes.

"So fur as I was concerned, I didn't feel like swearing around George or using any language that would sound irrelevant in a ladies' boodore; but as for the kids of the school, they didn't care a blamed cent. They just hollered and whooped like a passle of Sioux.

"They didn't seem to respect literary attainments or expensive knowledge. They just simply seemed to respect the genius that come to that country to win their young love with a long-handled shovel and a blood-shot tone of voice. That's what seemed to catch the Calaveras kids in the early days.

"George had weak lungs, and they kept to work at him till they drove him into a mountain fever, and finally into a metallic sarcophagus.

"Along about the holidays the sun went down on George W. Mulqueen's life, just as the eternal sunlight lit up the dewy eyes. You will pardon my manner, Nye, but it seemed to me just as if George had climbed up to the top of Mount Cavalry, or wherever it was, with that whole school on his back, and had to give up at last.

"It seemed kind of tough to me, and I couldn't help blamin' it onto the school some, for there was a half a dozen big snoozers that didn't go to school to learn, but just to raise Ned and turn up Jack.

"Well, they killed him, anyhow, and that settled it."

"The school run kind of wild till Feboowary, and then a husky young tenderfoot, with a fist like a mule's foot in full bloom, made an application for the place, and allowed he thought he could maintain discipline if they'd give him a chance. Well, they ast him when he wanted to take his place as tutor, and he reckoned he could begin to tute about Monday follering.

"Sunday afternoon he went up to the school-house to look over the ground, and to arrange a plan for an active Injin campaign agin the hostile hoodlums of Calaveras.

"Monday he sailed in about 9 A.M. with his grip-sack, and begun the discharge of his juties.

"He brought in a bunch of mountain-willers, and, after driving a big railroad-spike into the door-casing, over the latch, he said the senate and house would sit with closed doors during the morning session. Several large, white-eyed holy terrors gazed at him in a kind of dumb, inquiring tone of voice, but he didn't say much. He seemed considerably reserved as to the plan of the campaign. The new teacher then unlocked his alligator-skin grip, and took out a Bible and a new self-cocking weepon that had an automatic dingus for throwing out the empty shells. It was one of the bull-dog variety, and had the laugh of a joyous child.

"He read a short passage from the Scriptures, and then pulled off his coat and hung it on a nail. Then he made a few extemporaneous remarks, after which he salivated the palm of his right hand, took the self-cocking songster in his left, and proceeded to wear out the gads over the varied protuberances of his pupils.

"People passing by thought they must be beating carpets in the school-house. He pointed the gun at his charge with his left and manipulated the gad with his right duke. One large, overgrown Missourian tried to crawl out of the winder, but, after he had looked down the barrel of the shooter a moment, he changed his mind. He seemed to realize that it would be a violation of the rules of the school, so he came back and sat down.

"After he wore out the foliage, Bill, he pulled the spike out of that door, put on his coat and went away. He never was seen there again. He didn't ask for any salary, but just walked off quietly, and that summer we accidently heard that he was George W. Mulqueen's brother."

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What brought this to mind was a 3'rd grader in the class my Better Half is assisting with, who's been in 3 other schools already this school year and who attacked another child the first day he arrived.

All Things Considered had a story about Crescent Leadership Academy in New Orleans, one of the places where the students who got expelled elsewhere wind up. "Students that came to us had serious criminal backgrounds. Fights, gangs. This is our third year and I think 14 of our students have been killed," she says. That number, she says, shows "just what our students are dealing with outside of school." Dealing with or doing? The metric a number of the people in the story were using was the number of expulsions--the lower the better. I'm not sure that's the best way to measure education.

Dickens took out the Yorkshire private schools (and I'm not trying to defend them), but I wonder what sort of environment their harsh discipline grew out of.

On the streets

From an Atlanta Magazine article on Freaknik: Ryan Cameron was a DJ at V-103 and now hosts a morning show on the station. "I would get into the metro helicopter and tell people where it was most crowded and where they should avoid. But instead of avoiding those areas, more people would come!"

And

Jermaine Dupri: I had a motorcycle just for Freaknik, just so I could ride around in the streets. You wanted to be in it. I had to have a convertible during Freaknik. I wanted to be seen, but I wanted to see everybody at the same time. It was the beginning of “flexing,” in every kind of way. The birth of riding around with your system blasting, with TVs in your car. All of that stuff came from people wanting to be seen at Freaknik.

And

Ayanna Brown: The highlight of Freaknik was getting stuck in traffic. It was in traffic that music got louder; people started talking to one another, asking, “Where are you from?”

And

Doug Monroe The city finally came up with a way to frustrate the students to the point where they did not want to come back. You can’t just shut down the city because of the need to get places. Once they started managing it the way they did, it took away a lot of the fun of when it was a big crowd. A lot of people came for the stopping in traffic, partying, meeting people in the street.

I leave out the music and dancing and sex aspects; what I find curious is the focus on the streets. When our team was helping with Katrina relief in New Orleans, I noticed that in our neighborhood the sidewalks weren't in great shape (OK, neither were the streets), and there typically wasn't a lot of traffic. There wasn't a lot of downside to walking in the street. I don't know about inner city Chicago (just north of Humbolt park for a couple of months 38 years ago), but most of the few vehicles that rolled the streets in N.O. were small trucks, a taxi or two, and the police--none of them probably felt as being part of the community.

On a smaller scale I see the same sort of thing around here (suburb-like): when the sidewalks are shoveled 9 times out of 10 any people walking in the streets are black. Do streets have some different cultural meaning?

Pop country followup

I looked at coarse patterns in subject of country and pop music, but these folks did a much more thorough study of "reproductive messages" in pop, country, and R&B for 2009. Figure 3 (page 11) is a longitudinal review; there's an interesting shift in the content of R&B. They even go back into classical music as well to see if the same patterns persist. (Found as a link from this article which says that popularity is partly driven by peer pressure. Not a huge surprise, of course...)

Smooshing

A mathematician tries to use fluid dynamics to study shuffling: go read it. He got into Harvard on the recommendation of Martin Gardner.

The Great Siege: Malta 1565 by Ernle Bradford

I was one of those who didn't know anything about this, and yet it was a critical few months when fighters of Suleiman the Magnificent almost established a base for re-invading southern Europe. (Luckily his forces were also stopped near Vienna a few years later--that was the other prong.)

The invading forces far outnumbered the defenders, with better weapons and more supplies and an armada to cut off communications. But the battle isn't always to the strong, especially when different branches of the military don't have the same goals (sound kind of familiar?) and the defenders are ready to keep fighting long past the point where it was hopeless to continue.

Bradford tries to explain what the environment would have been like given what the records (both sides kept journals) said, and remembers to praise the unrecorded and unknown Maltese without whom the Knights would have failed.

Read it.

Pop/country

In sort-of recent political news, Ted Cruz announced that he was running for president. I didn’t listen to or read his speech, but I gather that all the right-thinking people hated it, which is generally a good sign. Shortly afterwards he was quoted as having said that after 9/11 the pop music he used to love didn’t quite resonate for him, but country music did. The right-thinking reporter suggested that he was probably pandering to his crowd, and that wouldn’t be unexpected for a politician. But the notion that pop was more vapid matched my prejudices, and I decided to try to compare the genres.

I don’t listen to either much, and both genres cover a lot of territory. Rather than try an in-depth survey of both (months of work), I decided to scan through the lyrics of the top 20 in pop and country, as defined by Billboard. That’s not fair at all, since the tail of the distribution could be much vaster than the peak. One sub-genre could be small with a few performers and another have much larger total sales spread among an even larger number of singers. Result—the first winds up in the top list and the second is nowhere, even if the second provides the bulk of industry sales. But I really don’t have the time to do a thorough survey.

A cursory review says the subject matter differs quite a bit. There’s overlap in what you might term “Short-term” relationship, but... I did some relatively arbitrary categorization (some fit it a couple of categories). And by arbitrary I mean that when I went over a second time I got slightly different counts, so the error bars on these are ± 1.

Short answer: I can see why someone would, in time of stress, find country resonating with them better than pop. I’d rather listen to Johnny Cash than Britney Spears myself.

Type	Pop	Country
Sorrow: she left or I screwed up	2	5
Tribal and other	0	6
Long term relationship	2	2
Get to know me	0	2
Short term relations	9	3
Crass (sometimes tribal)	3	2
I’m/We’re crazy	2	0
Second chance please	2	0

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Billboard top 20 pop (10-Apr-2015)

Song	Performer	What is it about?
Sugar	Maroon 5	lovesick for you, heavy sexual theme
Style	Taylor Swift	You’re not good or faithful but let’s be wild together again anyway
Love Me Like You Do	Ellie Goulding	I’m crazy in love with you, love me back again
Uptown Funk!	Mark Ronson Featuring Bruno Mars	I’m sexy, come and get me girls
Thinking Out Loud	Ed Sheeran	Kiss me now, I’ll still love you when we’re old
Somebody	Natalie La Rose Featuring Jeremih	I want to party, I want to have sex
One Last Time	Ariana Grande	I screwed up with you, please give me another chance
Time Of Our Lives	Pitbull & Ne-Yo	I’d rather spend the rent on a party and chance of sex
Earned It (Fifty Shades Of Grey)	The Weeknd	Our relationship won’t turn out well but I don’t care
FourFiveSeconds	Rihanna & Kanye West & Paul McCartney	I’m going to go berserk
Want To Want Me	Jason Derulo	I want you to want to have sex with me
I Want You To Know	Zedd Featuring Selena Gomez	It’s time for us together
Chains	Nick Jonas	I love you, why do you do me wrong?
G.D.F.R.	Flo Rida Featuring Sage The Gemini & Lookas	I’m rich and sexy and if you are sex kinky enough I want you
Outside	Calvin Harris Featuring Ellie Goulding	We’re breaking up. Why?
Night Changes	One Direction	He: don’t worry, let’s do it. She: maybe
Nobody Love	Tori Kelly	We’re in love and I don’t want to be cynical about it like everybody else
Riptide	Vance Joy	I want to marry you, why won’t you come back
Shut Up And Dance	WALK THE MOON	We are bound to be together (but she’s holding something back)
Talking Body	Tove Lo	Sex with you is so great, let’s keep it up

Billboard Country Top 20 (10-Apr-2015)

Take Your Time	Sam Hunt	I want to get to know you
Homegrown	Zac Brown Band	I like my home, my wife, my friends
Ain't Worth The Whiskey	Cole Swindell	I don’t want you to think I’m sad about you breaking up with me
Lonely Eyes	Chris Young	If you’re lonely spend the night with me
Girl Crush	Little Big Town	I want to be like her, then maybe you’d want me back
Drinking Class	Lee Brice	I’m a hard worker, hard drinker, hard player
Say You Do	Dierks Bentley	Pretend you want me like you used to
Homegrown Honey	Darius Rucker	You’re exciting and familiar (first meeting)
A Guy Walks Into A Bar	Tyler Farr	I met her and loved her and she left. It’s a pattern. Everybody else knows it.
Raise 'Em Up	Keith Urban Featuring Eric Church	Live your life fully, family, home, marriage, children
This Is How We Roll	Florida Georgia Line Featuring Luke Bryan	Our tribe has fun our way
Don't It	Billy Currington	Give me a chance
Smoke	A Thousand Horses	I’m infatuated and she permeates my life
Sippin' On Fire	Florida Georgia Line	Ditch him and pick me instead of sneaking off with me
Little Red Wagon	Miranda Lambert	You may like me but I’m a rambler and won’t stick with you
Little Toy Guns	Carrie Underwood	I wish my parents wouldn’t fight, or people speak so cruelly
She Don't Love You	Eric Paslay	My ex doesn’t love you, or trust anybody anymore
Diamond Rings And Old Barstools	Tim McGraw With Catherine Dunn	I wrecked us with my drinking
Wild Child	Kenny Chesney With Grace Potter	I’m in love with her but she can’t commit
Love You Like That	Canaan Smith	Take a chance on me, I’ll be solid
Like A Wrecking Ball	Eric Church	I can’t wait to get home to make love to you

How fast we forget

The Wisconsin State Journal reported this afternoon that a woman had been threatened by two home invaders, one of whom pointed a gun at her head. They escaped but were caught a little later. One of the two was a 19-year old. When I "googled" him I discovered a report from January that he and a different man had been arrested as part of a burglary spree. Got out on the streets again pretty quickly, I guess. But don't ask for a link to the first story at the WSJ--it disappeared. A TV station has the recent story, and the second.

The top stories at the WSJ site this evening are stories of convictions, not crimes. We've had a little uptick in the violent crime rate the past few weeks, some of it clearly gang related. I'd like to try to connect the dots, if I can.

I remember visiting New Orleans some years back when the crime rate there was lower than it is now, and noticing the difference in reporting between Chicago and N.O. The Chicago TV allotted a couple of minutes to the highlights of about 8 murders, and the N.O. station gave 15 minutes to 3. (OK, commercials included)

It is easy to stretch out the coverage to make a few crimes seem like a lot, or have a couple of trashed buildings represent the whole tornado-hit town, or 30 marchers look like a vast parade--happens all the time. It is also easy to sweep problems under the rug. If it didn't happen on TV, it isn't quite real, no matter what your neighbor swears happened. And there's always the memory hole.

Gases

I speculated on odors, but didn't do a literature search. "What the gases you emit say about you" looks like an interesting starting point. And, of course, you don't have to use a whole room; you could seal something against the skin too.

Saving money on inessentials

My son-in-law's Kia needed new brakes (very badly, it turned out), and I went over to see how he did it.

The rotor was screwed to the wheel hub with a single large Phillips screw. It had stripped instantly when he tried to remove it. After fighting with it for over an hour, with drill and dremel and hammering the screwdriver into the soft screw to try to get it to bite, he finally got it out. The auto parts store informed him that they didn't have any in stock--because they weren't needed.

It turns out that the screw is a assembly-line-only part, holding the rotor in place while the car moves from one station to another. Once the rest of the parts are on, it isn't needed. If you are repairing the car in one place it isn't needed at all.

So: not an essential part. OK. No point in greasing the thing before you put it in--why waste a step on the assembly line? And no point in getting a real screw, just use one of the soft metal screws like those that you get with cheap curtain hardware. At 6 per car, say 100,000 cars--the factory might be able to save as much as $10,000!

Of course it costs you or me an additional 4 hours or so per car... I don't know how the pros deal with them, but they're probably exasperated too.

Incongruencies

I'm leading(*) a series of studies on spiritual disciplines for a men's Bible study which meets in a diner for breakfast. This past Saturday morning we discussed fasting.

In two weeks we will get together and talk about silence and solitude.

Go figure.

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(*) I used "leading" instead of "teaching" because some of the group are far better at some of these disciplines than I. I was willing, that is all.

Luxury

Middle Daughter told me the other day that George Takei had bought 4 tickets on SpaceX and was offering 2 for fans in a kind of lottery.

I didn’t think long about it before deciding not to bother looking into the matter.

But I always wanted to go to space; why not? On contemplation, I realized there were several reasons, but one ranked higher even than “can’t afford the taxes”. A flight like that is too much of a luxury for me.

I’m inconsistent at some level—there’s no clear boundary between a little luxury like a cheese I don’t need and a Mercedes I also don’t need; it is just a matter of scale. But as my Better Half says, I can’t enjoy a candy that costs $2 a bite—the sense of disproportion and waste spoils the enjoyment. Watch inflation make that sound silly in a few years.

I don’t think a little luxury now and then is a bad thing, though there are many good people who have disagreed. I can reply to them that it doesn’t deprive the bulk of the people around me and helps with jobs for others. They would, of course, reply that my circle of acquaintances is shamefully restricted and reiterate that I don’t actually own anything, but am simply the steward.

Sometimes I win the argument (especially if it is a luxury I share) and sometimes the saints do.

Does scale make all the difference?

UPDATE: I'd like to see space travel grow, and have no objections whatever to other people indulging in what for me would be excessive. This is only about me.

Memory

After contemplating nostalgia I’m trying to mock up some kind of mental model of how my memory works. Your mileage may vary.

A movie takes a lot of memory unless you can find some way to compress all those pixels. One way is to start with the initial frame. That’s a lot of bits, but when people move at normal speeds the image of the next frame is almost the same as the first one. All you really have to do is record the pixels that are different, which is usually a huge savings. The next frame you treat the same way, and so on, until the changes add up to enough where starting fresh with a complete new frame is reasonable. (There are other aspects and I omit a lot of details I didn’t bother to look up.)

The MIDI protocols for encoding music encode not the sounds but the characteristics of the note (and instrument): pitch, volume, duration, vibrato, etc. When you feed the info to the playback system you don’t so much reproduce the original sound as reconstruct it. You could send the note info to a different “instrument” if you cared to; irrelevant details would be ignored and missing characteristics replaced with defaults.

Another simplification that reduces storage is to filter out unimportant details, perhaps replacing them with a generic object or leaving them out entirely.

And when storing data you can keep track of the less frequently used stuff and put it in slower storage. I read somewhere that the ancient Chinese imperial records got so unwieldy that they condensed them. And a few centuries later, did it again. Early records got a bit sketchy in the process.

I think you see where this is leading. When I try to remember things from Liberia, where there are pictures to compare to my recollection, I find that I often have what amount to “stills” of a scene in mind as background to the action, and the rest goes on in front like Yogi Bear’s head. And the “still” doesn’t match the photograph very well. The tree branches that we climbed on are clear enough, but those we didn’t handle seem to have been mentally replaced with “more tree”. I abstract the bejabbers out of the scene—sometimes including the dialog too. Yet other dialogues I recall word for word.

There seems to be a differential discriminator at work for medium-term storage. A match flaring is a big change; that gets filed. The puffs of flame scurrying around the hot coals later—not such big changes, not filed. Even though the match was 3 seconds and the hot coals were an hour, I remember the match more easily.

But the things we don’t remember still have some effect on us. I’ve heard amnesiacs can have “muscle memory” for things they can’t recall or sometimes even name. There was a very interesting report on someone whose short-term memory wasn’t there anymore, but slowly learned some mental tricks anyway. I know no way of measuring this effect, but ... My father had dementia and lost a lot of his memories, but those who worked with him said he was always a gentleman. A lifetime of actions built something that wasn’t conscious.

It seems that we don’t think things are real unless we consciously remember them (do people think they’re more real if they’re on TV?). That skews our view of our lives to only the dramatic (and usually unpleasant) incidents. But there was more to our lives than the flickerings on the memory screen.

Misconceptions

This story about Special Forces concerns about bringing women into the teams is interesting.

As integration unfolds, the surveys have brought home the reality that there are "some reservations or misperceptions in the force in terms of why we're doing this," Bland said. Defense officials have stressed that they will not reduce standards in order to let in women.

And this:

Studies that surveyed personnel found "major misconceptions" within special operations about whether women should be brought into the male-only jobs. They also revealed concerns that department leaders would "capitulate to political pressure, allowing erosion of training standards," according to one document.

I wonder who has the misconceptions--the men who are actually doing the work and know what it is like or the desk jockeys who are doing the planning?

Nostalgia

AVI has a post on nostalgia and why it doesn't seem as common later in life. He suspects it might be because older events, often replayed in memory, have the sharp edges worn off and are more congenial.

Instead, maybe an event or a scene is a bigger fraction of our lives when our lives haven't been very long yet. Do I have an incurably mathematical view of life?

To have the same proportional effect when you've 40 years stretching your belt the events have to last quite a bit longer--but then they'll inevitably be much more mixed with other events and emotions. They won't be as "pure" and sharp. (That doesn't mean worse--an apple pie is less "pure" in this sense than an apple, but it's hardly inferior.) "Pure" and sharp events are easier to remember. I don't remember the emotions (I don't need to!) but I remember vividly the sensation of stepping on something yielding and looking down to see a mamba coiled beneath my foot.

A first kiss is a transition, and that helps make it more memorable. The 5117'th kiss is one of a lifetime of kisses and linked to so many other things that it doesn't stand out as much, even though it is richer. It links to a kiss on the balcony with the moon peeking from the clouds, and a kiss before surgery, and the last brownie, and myriads of other moments.

The things one misses

by not being Anglican: David Warren's Maundy Thursday column includes a liturgical detail I'd not heard of before:

In my old Anglican days, when I was a parishioner in an extremely High church, the Tenebrae was sung on Maundy Thursday. It was, for an unedifying reason, a liturgical event I looked forward to. The lights were extinguished one by one; and then the strepitus sounded in a tremendous clash, as the last candle in the sanctuary was extinguished. On this one day in the year, polite Anglican people — who queue so nicely for Communion row by row — were instructed to leave the church “in disorder.” In the darkness, the parishioners would collide, shove, step on each other’s toes — all in the proper liturgical spirit. One might wait all year for one’s opportunities.

(Most of the article is about education and the supremacy of theory, and is, as usual, worth reading.)

The end of an era

Fermilab tore down the old CDF trailers.

I remember being grumpy about having to move from the 15'th floor of the high rise where I shared half a desk. True, there was more room in the trailers and one could be much closer to the experiment, but all the meeting rooms were in the high rise, and so was the cafeteria and the main computing center (ie where you could pick up your printouts). I was doing software instead of hardware, so it didn't matter how close I was to the scopes. After a short while it didn't matter at all since I was transferred back to Madison and no longer had a permanent desk at Fermilab anyway.

The floors gave underfoot, and one window in the Wisconsin trailer (we had 2 rooms of about 6 in the trailer) never did work right, and the heat wasn't great in the winter and a couple of the grad students were less than neat. But what the heck, it was home away from home--if I could land an open desk. A couple of the students adopted some stray kittens for a couple of months--until they grew big enough to climb over the barricades.

People would tack up some memento of a party, or a cartoon that struck their fancy, and those would fade on the bulletin board years after the student graduated or the postdoc was teaching far away. Phone numbers decades out of date and a fortune cookie strip--we never got around to cleaning things up. When I emptied out my stuff (what little there was) a few years ago I took down the pictures of the older kids holding our new baby that I'd put up. Said baby was now 15.

The trailers were expanded, and then expanded again, and then a second row of trailers was added, and in the end somebody built a permanent building (you can see it at the bottom) with cubicles and a large meeting room. The trailers saw dumb terminals (with terminal servers down the hall), and then some printers, and then a few workstations, and one day flat screen monitors (awful resolution, but you could actually fit around a desk again!). And then the experiment was over, and I changed to IceCube, and I haven't been back to the trailers since. (The last things I was doing in the trailers had to do with corralling a grad student who'd failed but couldn't contemplate leaving--and somehow had managed to squirrel away quite a lot of personal property in odd corners. Wisconsin was dropping out and everything must go--and that meant him and his stuff too.)

I'm not sure who took the pictures.

Instead of a comb-over

Perhaps a "California lawn" approach to hair loss could be popular. Henna tattoo some curls in that empty patch!

Cultural continuity

Albion’s Seed (I may be digesting this for a bit) argues successfully for overall cultural continuity in groups that settled the USA. After all, why should a culture change in fundamental ways? Minor adaptations, sure, no problem. Major changes in outlook on life—there needs to be a reason.

You’ve maybe heard someone say "I opened my mouth and my mother spoke out of it." Home attitudes and young peer attitudes are the big forges.

But I wonder how much uniformity arises from popular amusements? Everybody has a TV and almost everybody has cable, and the kids grow up acquiring at least some common residuum of shared values. I’m not arguing that the shared values are noble or useful, or have redeeming qualities; but they’re shared and should to some extent dilute the folkways they were born to. Do we see this? Can we distinguish folk-way trends between those who spent a lot of boob-tube time before they were 7 and those who didn't (within the same area, of course)?

Lest Darkness Fall on a Connecticut Yankee

Stackexchange is a collection of different question/advice groups, some extremely technical and some speculative fandom. Lazy students sometimes try to get the pros to do their homework for them; they rarely succeed. (Pros can recognize homework-caliber problems.)

While trying to discover the source of an obscure mysql error(*), I looked at the sidebar on stackexchange and saw What could an average modern human achieve in medieval times? Those kinds of stories can be fun, but...

The advice was a crazy mixed bag. Your hero will probably die of dysentery within a month if he doesn’t starve (no immediate skills, foreigner w/out a family). Best bet is probably to get to a monastery where they are required to show some hospitality, and then try to show them something about printing or some such skill.

Quite a few commenters had very odd ideas about witches and heresy and technology, and a surprising number didn’t seem to realize that the natives would be quite skillful with their own technologies. You’re not going to make a better arrow or crossbow, or even a lighter, than they would. Given time and an adequate budget you could work up some improvements, but first you have to earn those.

Even printing. Yes, with a printer you can turn out books or pamphlets cheaper per unit, but the upfront cost is high, and they wouldn’t look as pretty—and the market you’d be starting with wanted good looking books. (Why else would monks spend so much time on fancy illustration?)

And as many noted, modern technology demands modern technological infrastructure too—you’re not going to build a useful steam engine. Toys engines you can make, if you can raise the money for them. Reliable motors, no. Remember the story about the pencil, which no single person knows how to make?

Somebody suggested "healer." Not hardly. In Africa even real doctors, who know how to set fractures and other little things our putative hero doesn’t, tend to get called on only after the local village healer fails.

If you knew how to grind smoothly you could try to make magnifiers—if you knew how to make clear glass. If you had some ham you could have some ham and eggs if you had some eggs. You could do a few interesting and useful things if you could demonstrate your bona fides and persuade them to follow you.

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(*) It turned out that a newly minted administrator had created a special job to kill off processes that were abusing the database, and his code mistook the nightly backup dump for a rogue user process.

Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer

One of the minor consolations of being sick is, once you have a little energy again, you have the time to catch up on reading.

Everybody seems to be saying of Albion's Seed: "You have to read this book." They're right.

He does a parallel analysis of 4 "folkways" in the US, explaining where they come from and how they changed from their origins (which he roughly traces--all were blends but with a dominant feature and region). These are the New England Puritan, Virginia Cavalier, Delaware Quaker, and "back country" Scots-Irish. I get the distinct impression that Fischer intensely disliked the Virginia environment--I would have probably hated it too.(*) The groups have, on balance, certain distinctive traits that still emerge in political and social conflicts in the country.

There was lots of history I wasn't aware of, and origins of ideas and words, and some corrections to things I'd been taught over the years. The American Revolution had arisen from a background of greatly increased royal meddling, for example. Histories that made it sound like a simple anti-"help pay for your defence"-tax are way too simple. From Quakers arguing over what to do about a river pirate to the backwoods pankration--lots of interesting background. I'll not hear the phrase "rough and ready" in quite the same way again.

The cultural distinctions survive into modern politics, and he tries to show how events and parties were driven by conflict and cooperation between the groups. I wonder what the cultural background of the Tea Party (our most recent populist social justice movement) has been. I know the usual suspects automatically despised it, which suggests the presence of one of the old tribal/cultural divisions Fischer wrote about.

When this was written in 1989 Fischer promised an upcoming book American Plantation to show how the Virginia culture demanded slavery; unfortunately that seems not to have materialized.

Yes, read it.

(*) I think, though my background is predominantly Scots-Irish, that on the whole I'd have preferred New England. They'd probably not have liked me much, though. The Virginia culture required too much kow-towing to rank and was rank with slavery (and malaria), the Delaware religion wasn't that congenial, they weren't that keen on higher learning, and at the time there was still slavery, and the back-country was way too violent for my liking (and with little respect for study). The Puritans were pretty restrictive, but mostly about things that don't skin my nose (unlike their descendants, who are just as far-reaching in their drive for control).

Neolithic Italians

A couple of things about this story seem odd.

The cave—sealed off until its discovery in 1931—was uniquely able to preserve the human remains, which were mixed randomly with animal bones, broken pottery, and stone tools.

The human bones weren't the whole set, and they'd been defleshed--easily, without heavy scraping. "Some of the bones had light cut marks, suggesting that only residual muscle tissue needed to be removed by the time of defleshing. That meant the remains were likely deposited as much as a year after death." Or maybe they'd been boiled?

But what was the significance of the cave? Robb and his team further hypothesize that due to the similarity in appearance, bones might have been regarded as equivalent to stalactites. Indeed, noticing the connection between water dripping from the cave ceiling and stalactite formation, the Neolithic Italians had placed vessels beneath the falling liquid to collect it; as the substance that created "stone bones," it likely had a spiritual power. It’s thus possible, the team says, that the cleaning process and deposition in the cave was a way for the living to return the bones to their stonelike origins, both in appearance and location, completing a cycle of incarnation.

But if the site was so powerful, why toss the broken pottery and leftover scraps there too? It's possible that broken pottery was special (maybe single-use stuff for a ritual), and maybe the (not described) animal bones were part of some sacrifice, but it still sounds as much like a midden as a burial. Though maybe Haggard knew of something I haven't heard of.

Ecclesiastes

When I was teaching Ecclesiastes some years ago I considered playing a little of Peggy Lee's Is That All There Is? as an illustration. Decided against it as taking too much time; referred to it instead. Her attitude isn't exactly the same as the Preacher's: she sees everything as futility but is both completely materialist and completely misses the joys of work and the possibility of gladness. She's desperate for something transcendental. But our culture is extremely reductionist; maybe that was part of the problem for her. It is hard to enjoy beauty and think about meaning when people keep nagging you that this is all merely chemical reactions. It short-circuits any search for transcendentals.

It feels like Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now is a reply to Peggy. Joni sings that what she thought she knew then wasn't the whole story, and each example ends in a kind of calm despair of knowledge--sort of like the Preacher's.

I've always been kind of fond of Ecclesiastes. I wonder how much overlap there is between fans of Is That All There Is, Both Sides Now, and Ecclesiastes?

Who titles these things?

For First Time, Researchers Demonstrate Heat and Sound Are Magnetic. No no no no no. I expected better from IEEE.

What the researchers actually showed was that heat transmission rates could be changed with a magnetic field. That manipulates the response of the material to vibrations--not the same thing at all as showing that vibrations are magnetic.

Incidentally, the article cites an earlier finding that in graphene (effectively a 2-D material) sound propagated as phonons instead of random vibrations. Of course phonons are a form of vibration, and you could at least theoretically decompose any vibration into a large enough collection of phonons going different directions with different amplitudes and phases. That in a highly structured 2-D material like graphene the vibrations of heat can show up in a more structured way is a nice result, but not exactly earth-shattering news.

Their result is actually kind of fun. At nearly absolute zero, and in extremely small and uniform materials, the size and shape of the materials matters more. And then turning a 7 tesla field on dropped heat flow rate by about 12%.

Why is Klondike solitaire so popular?

When I was in middle school I was trying to play Solitaire when Dad took the deck from me and showed me what the casinos did. You paid so many dollars for the deck, you got to play through just once, and they paid you a dollar for every exposed card. I looked at those numbers and figured I wanted no part of that game. I don't recall the initial cost anymore, and it doesn't matter for my life anyway.

I needed some practice with object-oriented aspects of python, so I set myself the task of writing that Klondike solitaire player I threatened. Some of what I found is about what you'd expect to see. I don't claim my algorithm is the best; one could be more strategic, especially as you learn what's in the deck. But it's an OK first approximation.

Yes, of course I wrote it so you can vary the number of ranks, number of piles, number of suits, and so on. Why bother otherwise?

I ran 10000 games with the different parameters. I kept 4 suits and 2 colors, but had 13 ranks and 7 piles (standard) and also 13 ranks with 6 piles, and 3 variants of 14 ranks (Tarot deck): 6, 7 and 8 piles. You expect that the more piles there are, the more cards are buried and the more will be left unplayed at the end of the game. And so it was.

With the usual game it looks like you win about 1 time in 20. (BTW, these are from random number generators, and are not exact.)

Type	Times you win	Time < 5 cards
Standard	485/10000	1681/10000
13ranks+6piles	792/10000	3210/10000
Tarot+6	516/10000	2702/10000
Tarot+7	247/10000	1319/10000
Tarot+8	136/10000	452/10000

That's the easy part. What's a bit harder is quantifying the "frustration factor": how close you feel you got to winning. I figure the oftener you feel like you almost won, the more likely you are to start a new game--provided you actually do win from time to time. And the game can't be too easy. I'm not sure how to quantify that either. But from the fact that the standard game uses 7 piles instead of 6, I suspect that 6 makes the game feel too easy.

Notice the spike near 0 for the standard game. Most of the time you lose by a significant amount, but you come close oftener. I list the numbers in the table above, but I show the plots below.

For what it's worth, even a game with 2 suits and 3 ranks (and 2 piles) doesn't always wind up with every card face up. And the game above goes through the deck repeatedly.

Details, details

My Better Half likes In My Life; I wasn't so fond of the song. It was one of the last set at the acapella fundraiser last week, and I decided to go look up the words. They're clear enough, so I'd never bothered before.

I should have. One slight issue with enunciation had changed the whole song for me: I heard "love you more" as "loved you more" and thought it was a goodbye song.

Eh youngster? Speak up!

Judas

"Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.’"

"And He called the twelve together, and gave them power and authority over all the demons and to heal diseases. And He sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to perform healing."

"Now after this the Lord appointed seventy others, and sent them in pairs ahead of Him to every city and place where He Himself was going to come. ... The seventy returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in Your name.”"

Miracles got to be an expectation among the disciples: "When He came into the house, His disciples began questioning Him privately, “Why could we not drive it out?”"

"And he threw the pieces of silver into the temple sanctuary and departed; and he went away and hanged himself."

I wonder what miracles Judas did, and who he paired with for the journey (maybe Matthew?). When you can heal the sick, what's 30 peices of silver more or less? You could get those easily enough (maybe). What would turn you from healer to betrayer?

Nigeria

Nice to see Nigeria's finally taking Boko Haram seriously. No doubt there's a lot of pride-swallowing involved. I don't entirely believe the disclaimer about no contacts between them and Nigeria security officials--there have to be some if only so they don't shoot each other. But EO has done some good work in the past. Until the government was pressured to fire them, they were keeping things quiet in Sierra Leone. Bad mistake.

Acapella

We went to a fundraiser at Cave of the Mounds this evening. A woman with huge chemo bills is part of a women's acapella group (greenTones). That group, and a girl's high school group, and the men's acapella group from Oberlin (obertones?) sang standing on steps out of the main cavern to an audience assembled tightly below.

They were all skillful, though I think the acoustics were better suited to the men's group.

The fact that they assembled on steps, with each song's soloist on the walk in front, meant that each of the chorus members was heard at full power instead of partly blocked by the singers in front. The soloists usually wound up overpowered--especially the high school girls. A little detail they should bear in mind for the future...

We had a good time.

The ceiling drips, of course, and I was strongly reminded of the scene from King Solomon's Mines where the heroes are shown where the dead kings of the Kukuana reside.

Nova sweeping clean

Over 13 years the blast from GK Persei shows an oddity or two. And "As the shock wave expanded and heated an increasing amount of matter, the temperature behind the wave of energy should have decreased. The observed fading and constant temperature suggests that the wave of energy has swept up a negligible amount of gas in the environment around the star over the past 13 years. This suggests that the wave must currently be expanding into a region of much lower density than before, giving clues to stellar neighborhood in which GK Persei resides."

Maybe that's not so surprising. The current model for novas is that one of a binary star pair becomes a neutron star, and slowly accumulates matter from its companion until enough collects to spark a humongous nuclear explosion. I don't know how long this process would take--that would depend on how close the companion was, among other things. If the cycle is only a few million years, we'd not see the repetition rate (yet), but the blasts would come frequently enough to sweep out a lot of local gas. I think. If the pair is "swimming upstream" in the local galactic gas fresh stuff would blow in pretty quickly. "Quickly" being a relative term...

carnufex

I gather that they can figure out from the spine and the front legs (too weak) that carnufex walked on two legs. They don't have the whole skeleton. I wonder how the thing would have run. I wonder if Kelly's image of carrying the tail high might give a faster gait.

In the Shadow of the Sword by Tom Holland

It was a matter of opinion whether Yusuf was on the side of the angels or the demons; but neither Jews nor Christians had any doubt that what had happened had derived ultimately from God. This was the core presumption of the age; and a history of late antiquity that neglects to pay due acknowledgement to it is a history that has failed.

And so Holland does. In order to tell his story of Islam he begins with the history of its environment; so I learned some of Persian history and culture of the era (I didn’t know all that much about Zoroastrianism, for instance). He also introduces Eastern Roman history and a description of what was happening with Jews (e.g. compiling the Talmud—most Jews hadn’t returned to Israel but had stayed in Persia), and Jewish-Christian relations. Then the role of the Arabs (hired gun clients for both Romans and Persians) becomes clearer, and why they were able to roll over their enemies so easily. (Plague took out O(1/3) of the city-dwelling Romans and Persians, but left semi-nomadic Arabs mostly alone; also the Romans and Persians had fought each other to a standstill and were pretty depleted.)

Arabs weren’t just found in the desert.

…Arab tribes eager to set their fortunes on a firmer footing. Some, like the Nabateans… had exploited their position between the trade routes of the desert and Mediterranean to create a fabulously wealthy commercial hub, centred on their pink-hued capital of Petra. Others, looking to take a short cut to power, had aimed to infiltrate the cities of other people and then seize their commanding heights: a policy of playing cuckoo in the nest that explained why the kings of Edessa had been of Arab descent.

And the Roman clients and the Persian clients had their own territories handy to the larger struggles (and sometimes fought each other even when the Romans and Persians were at peace).

Confession time: I’ve never succeeded in plowing through the Koran, and I’m informed that large chunks are not really decipherable anyway. So I was not aware that the Koran had essentially no datable references, though Holland points to one reference to current Roman events that would have happened during Muhammad’s lifetime. I also wasn’t aware that the Koran specified 3 prayers and not 5, only mentioned hell as the punishment for apostates, and said 100 lashes (and not execution) was correct punishment for adultery.

The Kharijites sound quite familiar, by the way: this pure sect of Islam might “go out with their swords into the markets while people would stand around not realizing what was happening; they would shout ‘no judgment except God!’ and plunge their blades into whomever they could reach, and go on killing until they themselves were killed.” Their heirs are still about this work, though with Western-invented tools instead of simple swords.

The Koran tells of Christians that they worship three gods, a father, son, and mother. Orthodox Christianity doesn’t resemble this at all, of course, but Nazoreans believed the Holy Spirit to be female, and apparently so did Mani and the Manicheans. These were made seriously unwelcome in the Roman and Persian empires, and the survivors tended to make their way to the fringes. Like the edges of Arabia.

Maybe even deep into Arabia (there were monks), but maybe they didn’t need to be.

Holland tries to advance two theses:

• Mecca was not Muhammad’s center for worship; he lived and worked much further north; he dealt not with pagans (who hardly get a mention in the Koran) but with other monotheists.
• Many of the hadith (known even by Muslims to be almost entirely bunk, created to support some political view or another) were created by former Zoroastrian scholars who were trying to modify doctrine so that they would not be second-class Moslems. The Arabs at first tended to put obstacles in their path: non-Muslims had to pay extra taxes and the Arabs naturally enough didn’t want to have to treat other tribes as their equals.

To address these points he considers internal evidence in the Koran and in descriptions of what some of his allies did (like buy land in the area now part of Israel). That would be extremely speculative for someone living in Mecca, but reasonable enough if they lived in the north not far away. Mecca gets hardly any mention in the Koran, and at least one Muslim worship center shows reorientation from one direction to another further south at Mecca. And during a civil war one of the Companions holed up in a shrine somewhere obscure (but in the northern regions) which Muslims valued but which was utterly destroyed in the siege. Shortly thereafter the victorious Abd al-Malik made a pilgrimage to Arabia and ordered “renovations” in Mecca. Some writers called him the man who had “destroyed the sacred House of God”, and another wrote “At the time of the Prophet, may God save him and give him peace, our faces were all turned in one direction—but after the death of the Prophet, we turned ourselves hither and thither.” And Holland notes that there were plenty of “ka’ba” in Arabia—lots of sacred cubes.

As to the hadith, Holland notes the region where many were “discovered”, notes that the political conditions there would favor making changes, and notes further that some of the differences (praying 5 times a day, death for apostasy, stoning for adultery) were long-standing tenets of Zoroastrians. Zoroastrian priests were supposed to brush their teeth every day too, and lo and behold a hadith was found announcing that Muhammad did too. The rulers of the Muslims started concentrating on the unifying nature of the religion, and discovered that this meant that the religious scholars necessarily assumed a much greater prominence than before—sharing power.

Proof of anything like this is quite hard to come by, especially where someone had things to hide. Surviving biographies of Muhammad are more than 200 years later than his death, and the earliest known was written in the same era as a flourishing hadith creation industry.

Certain of the details he brings up are certainly suspicious, but I’m not quite convinced that such large changes in practice could be made undetected. Perhaps they were, and the chaos of civil war and widespread illiteracy among the Arabs made it easier to carry off. If you only have word-of-mouth about what the Koran and Muhammad said, and you were told by powerful scholars that Muhammad had actually said something different, I suppose you’d go along and not talk about it too much.

Holland tells the upshot of the investigations into those ancient Koranic fragments found in a Yemeni mosque. One of the two researchers said that the verses had changed over time: as Holland puts it “words, spellings, and even the order of verses in the Qur’an were perfectly capable of being misread and miscopied, it is apparent as well that these were only ever involuntary errors. There is not a hint of deliberate fabrication”. Naturally the Yemeni leaders went wild and forbade further access.

An interesting book, though I am nowhere near expert enough to tell whether the theses are supportable. Worth reading for the background even if they aren't.

Pi

If you get tired of memorizing digits, just remember:

π=10_π

Just don't try to calculate 4₁₀ in base π

Drug question

The other day a fellow I know had a life-threatening psychotic episode when what he thought was simple marijuana turned out to have been souped up with PCP, which interacted very badly with the meds he was taking. His family restrained him and got him to ER, and he recovered OK. You might build that into a case for legalization, on the grounds that it would allow quality control regulation, but I have an ugly suspicion that there'd still be a black market in the "wild" stuff.

A friend called the police about Tony Robinson because he was worried about Tony; another said he wasn't acting like himself.

I haven't heard any toxicology reports yet, but I wonder.

I gather the "bath salts" are designer drugs, though I've no good idea who designed them. I presume they were designed to create a powerful or long-lasting "high." If I were the chemist I'd be pretty nervous about using trial and error on myself with such things, so probably the alpha testers are unsuspecting addicts.

There've been some odd deaths popping up in the news, some suicides, some unexpectedly crazy behavior, and a convenient murder now and then.

I started wondering if somebody had designed drugs to induce overwhelming depression.

There will always be hidden suicidal problems in some percentage of the population, and it is possible--arguably likely--that the semi-prominent include a higher percentage. And, to complicate matters, cultural pressures aren't the same now as 30 years ago, so it isn't easy to compare statistics from different eras. I conclude that it wouldn't be easy to figure out if someone was weaponizing such drugs.

Where would you look to find out? Russia might be a good place to start. They've the resources to develop the tools, and an adequate supply of ruthlessness. I don't know if the extra level of deniability outweighs the salutary terrorizing effect for Putin, though, so maybe for domestic dissidents he'd still use thugs. But overseas would be a different matter. If Russian opponents overseas started killing themselves at a surprising rate that might be a clue. Or high suicide rates in Chechnya.

Pratchett

I hope this story is true, though I'd think the effort involved in making the smelter would take quite a chunk out of his writing time. It is the sort of thing he'd think of--making his own sword with meteorite iron. (And then having to hide it from the authorities...)

From the BBC (you have to click the picture to see it; it is too small for the page):

Hillary and the private server

So Hillary Clinton had her own private email server set up. As plenty of others already noticed, to run a hardened server takes expertise and maintenance, and this little box would have been easy pickings for the Russians.

However, the State Department networks are such an obvious target that I would be shocked to find that their IT groups were completely free of Chinese/Russian/Israeli agents. Would you be willing to bet that the Italians didn't have somebody snooping on SoS messages too?

Security by obscurity: set up your own server that they don't know about. (Although after the first few messages somebody will figure it out...) It is just lagniappe that the records are under your control and any dicey quid pro quo agreements can be kept out of the public eye.

I wonder how many others do the same.

Robinson

There were two very similar stories in the newspaper Saturday morning.

Nobody was hurt

A man was killed. (not, despite what some of the protesters said, a "boy")

A trifle of perspective: Madison police aren't racists, or the stats would look quite different. But: "While whites seem to await the emerging facts, the first thing African-Americans see is an unarmed black youth killed by a white cop." That's the editor's summary of a more nuanced column--but did the editor have any notion what he was implying?

I can't say the usual suspects were out: you've probably never heard of the Young Gifted And Black group in Madison before. I last heard from them a few weeks ago bitterly complaining about the police presence in black neighborhoods (which, if I recall my oh-so-ancient history correctly, was in response to complaints about crime by the residents a few years back). And at least a third of the people marching down the street past my window were high-school kids, backpacks and all. We'll see if that changes.

Warm enough for yard work.

When young and naive we planted a winter-hardy grootendorst rose. We were unaware of its affectionate nature, and set it about a meter from the sidewalk.

Since today the weather is sunny and pleasant (about 45F) I decided to dispose of it before it succeeded in snaring unsuspecting school children.

One youngster came up to ask if he could help, and was disappointed when I explained that gloves were not much use with this beast--I had to grasp the branches with the clippers. You can't find a square cm without a couple/ten inward-pointing thorns, and some are nearly 2cm long.

The roses were pretty, the scent was nice, it bloomed half the year long, and robins could nest inside safely. But I shudder to think what would have happened if a cyclist took a spill there.

It was taller than I, and quite a bit wider, with the longest branches looming towards the sidewalk. When you clip a stem it typically clings in place, entangled to the rest, and must be dragged out to its destiny in the trash barrel. To keep from having lancets climb out of the barrel, I clip and reclip until the chunks are less than a foot long, then lop the next stem. That took a bit over an hour; next comes the hard part. Last time I dug up a rose root I nearly broke the shovel.

1177 B.C.

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Turning Points in Ancient History) by Eric H Cline advances the thesis that the roughly simultaneous collapse of the Assyrian, Hittite, Mycenaean, Minoan, and even the Egyptian empires wasn’t due to invasions by the Sea Peoples after all, but to systemic failure of their complex trade networks.

Good points: I learned a lot about what people have learned about these groups; my knowledge of the era was over 50 years out of date. I had no idea so many letters had been found, or how far afield various goods were traded. I had no notion that everything went to pot within less than a few decades. It does sound like the Sea Peoples can’t be blamed for the whole mess.

Bad points: He doesn’t actually demonstrate his thesis. In fact, he admits there’s some evidence against it: evidence of active interaction all the way up to the end in some places. (One letter wrote for help against invaders approaching the harbor but was never sent because the city was sacked and burnt first.)

Within a few decades civil war, Sea Peoples, massive earthquakes and a major drought hit the region. Empires can survive any one of these, but the whole lot? Cline admits that it could be cumulative damage that did everybody in.

The problem is that very little is known in sufficient detail to be certain of what happened where.

The book is advertised as having relevance to our interconnected world today and what might happen to it. That our current system is rather brittle I take to be fairly obvious. One can guess that the ancient systems were too.

I found it interesting, though I didn’t find the style quite as “gripping” as the Amazon review says, and “Bringing to life the vibrant multicultural world of these great civilizations, he draws a sweeping panorama of the empires and globalized peoples of the Late Bronze Age and shows that it was their very interdependence that hastened their dramatic collapse and ushered in a dark age that lasted centuries.” overstates the drama quite a bit. Worth reading, though.

I'll look about for other books in the series.

Unexpected Enlightenment, and The Raven, the Elf

The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin and The Raven, the Elf, and Rachel by L. Jagi Lamplighter are the first two books of a series. The rest haven’t been published yet. They’re aimed at youth--the Harry Potter market, if you like. Instead of a boy you have a girl, instead of a well-defined enemy with many allies you have unknown enemies with possibly very extensive backing, and there are hints (so far) at mysteries behind mysteries. The adults she expects to be allies prove singularly uninterested and useless, even friends can be sometimes geas-ed--can she have been wrong in trusting her father? Chaos erupts in the wizarding school.

So far so good. The characters have nice balances of strengths and weaknesses.

I found Rachel’s confusion about her love life to be off-putting, but the rest was interesting enough to carry the story. If you liked the Harry Potter books (I did, but am unlikely to ever re-read them) and can put up with occasional “do I love him or not” passages, you'll probably like this too.

What odors do we have?

I keep reading stories of dogs being trained to try to sniff out different cancers. That’s pretty dramatic. (Though the fact that I keep hearing stories about how they're trying suggests that it isn't reliable yet.)

What gases do humans emit? Yes, I know about H2O and CO2 and methane, I want to know what else is in the mix.

Suppose you made a bare room with nothing but a metal chair in it; sealed so that you control what gas goes in and you control where the gas goes afterwards. Douse the place with 30% peroxide, bake the whole thing for a few hours--make sure anything that could outgas already has. Use an airlock to get in and out.

The gas that goes in is as pure a mix of O2 and N2 as you can manage. Chill the gas down until nearly liquefied to fractionate all impurities, and then warm up what’s left so you don’t freeze the volunteers; adding a little pure H2O so they don’t dry out. Gas flowing out of the room is also chilled to nearly the boiling point, except that you try to capture all the stuff that condenses out.

Put a man in there for a few hours. What will turn up in the pool of condensate? Whatever it is (aside from the obvious), there won’t be much and so studying it will be tricky.

Cleaning up after a volunteer wouldn’t be trivial--we shed skin, which will presumably continue to outgas long after we’ve left the area. (Who knows what the mites will do.) That’s why I suggested making the chamber a bake-able facility.

I could tell pretty easily on Monday when Richard had made himself a garlic pizza on Saturday. If I use a volume of air 2mx2mx2m, and the garlic smell chemical was 1ppm, then there’s about .03% of a mole of the stuff. If the molecular weight is O(100g/mole), and the density of the liquid is about 1g/cm^3, then I expect about .03cc of the goo to condense on the chilling system. That’s going to be hard to scrape together, but I don’t think it would be impossible.

Things that show up at the ppb level or smaller (still sometimes detectable by dogs, I’m told) are obviously going to require heroic collection measures. (I'm thinking of a cyclonic gas flow inside a super-chilled pipe--have to worry about lubricant contamination too.)

Do people outgas differently when sick or when well? Does a woman have a different chemical mix at different points in her period? Is a baby’s scent the same as an adults?

What comes out through the breath, what through the skin? And how much of it depends on the bacteria on the skin?

Blogging and news sites

Now all the Athenians and the strangers visiting there used to spend their time in nothing other than telling or hearing something new. Acts 17:21

Scott Walker and evolution

Some British reporters asked our governor whether he believed in evolution, and he punted the question. Since this isn’t, as far as I know, relevant to British politics, it must be part of their suite of tribal-identification questions for Americans.

The problem is that the term “evolution” is overloaded--it includes several meanings, only one of which is ever talked about. Everybody knows the young earth vs old earth faceoff, but the other divide is the important one. (A claim which will no doubt catch me the usual flak from the “don’t undermine the Bible’s accuracy” crew)

That divide is between those who believe things like love, justice, beauty, and so on are built into the nature of the universe, and those who think they are “emergent” qualities. The first camp holds a motley crew: Christians, Muslims, Confucians, Hindus (think of karma), and so on.

The second camp holds figures like Kant (Always act according to that maxim whose universality as a law you can at the same time will) and Bentham (greatest aggregate happiness principle) who appeared well before Darwin (“I have so lately endeavoured to shew that the social instincts,--the prime principle of man’s moral constitution-with the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habit, naturally lead to the golden rule”) and the Just-So stories of evolutionary sociology. The problem is the arbitrariness in these formulations—justice could have been something different, love is a chemical illusion, and so on. It isn’t easy to live that way consistently, and it is odd to read someone claiming that his argument is a transcendent truth and an emergent effect at the same time. (Not in so many words, of course)

Trying to explain with as few principles as possible has been extremely fruitful in natural philosophy, with things that can be measured. Thales tried to make water the origin of everything--a bit too simple, but you can see that the drive to have a single equation for it all is old. But there’s that caveat: “things that can be measured.” When a field of ripe wheat and a battered branch of driftwood are both beautiful, we’re not talking about something measured in terms of utility.

Granted, you can go too far the other direction and inshallah everything. Some say Muslim science went to dust after the victory of the philosophers who held that nothing, not even reason, constrained God. Probably an oversimplification, but probably contributing.

The reporter’s question was really “Are you a member of a tribe we despise?” What they said confused the two questions “Do you believe species changed over time?” and “Do you believe in a moral universe?” I wonder how those reporters would have answered. Probably punted the question—they’re busy people, with deadlines to meet, and no time to talk with Socrates.

Intellect and Spock

Leonard Nimoy wasn’t Spock, though I gather from the title of the second autobiography that he got used to the idea of the association after a while. We had a record of him singing and reciting (oddly enough the things I recall don’t match the Wikipedia discography listings). I intensely disliked the Bilbo Baggins ballad, which at the time seemed almost shameful.

Spock was our icon of unemotional rationality, who followed the facts wherever they led and was perfectly willing to admit ignorance. Unemotional intelligence in the form of giant brains were all over science fiction—not the only theme by any means, but very common, and almost always it represented a higher form of existence. The highest life forms were to be bodiless pure minds. Sometimes they were villains and David had to beat Goliath, but even there you found the equation unemotional = powerful.

The theme isn’t limited to science fiction. When was the last time you heard the phrase "knowledge-based economy?" Notice the implicit assumption that only intellectual work should matter? How Greek! Of course we’re more benign than the Greeks, in that we assume the grubby work will be done by machines instead of slaves, but the useless idleness envisioned for hoi polloi isn’t a gift.

I think I get what Nimoy was driving at now. I know I’ve (eventually) learned better--intelligence is good, but not the only value.

Intelligence is a kind of wealth, and that needle’s eye is a bit of a squeeze. One day we return the talents and deliver an account. Other things matter more then--the widow's mite weighs more than a bag of silver.

Rest in peace Leonard Nimoy, and may the Lord receive you. You were not Spock, and neither (despite youthful aspiration) was I. I think I'll listen to that ballad tomorrow.

Update: Sunday, actually. The version on the LP didn't have the backup singers...

Kharijites

Are the Daesh neo-Kharijites or is this a legitimate expression of Islam? There are multiple schools in Islam, and at least theoretically they are supposed to recognize each other as True Muslims. ∅bama and other Western pundits have no standing to say what is legitimate and what isn't. The Daesh talk the talk.

If these are truly illegitimate, there's only one way under the circumstances (and given Islam's union of church and state) to prove it--the other Muslims have to wipe them out, as they almost succeeded in doing with the original Kharijites.

Unfortunately what would seem likely to make them Not True Muslims isn't trivialities like enslaving and killing Christians--historically that's perfectly OK. And not ancient history, either. Where they go over the top is where they takfir-ize other Muslims at the flash of a CD.

So where do we fit into this picture?

Or, more accurately, where do American Muslims fit into this picture? Especially if the Daesh are, by default, legitimate interpreters of Islam?

We'll have to start distinguishing between religions one way or another...

NOT(Both/And)

A report on kwashiorkor has early suggestions that it might be caused not just by poor diet but poor diet plus an unfortunate gut bacteria mix. Another reports on how mouse gut bacteria can go nuts when the diet includes lots of emulsifiers. Very interesting articles. Go read them.

Then Ed Yong writes something very relevant when reading all science research reports:

PS: I’ve written two pieces today about the microbiome. In this one, Akkermansia protected mice from malnutrition caused by other microbes and a poor diet. In the other, Akkermansia was associated with inflammatory disease, in mice that ate a diet rich in food additives. In other rodent studies, it stops mice from getting fat, but is more common in cases of bowel cancer. All of this illustrates a point I’ve made before: any one microbe can have very different effects in different contexts and circumstances. There is no universally “good” bacterium, no universally “healthy” microbiome.

A fix for X can worsen Y, in engineering as well as biology. And in economics, too. It's a simple rule, borne out by everyday observation if you care to look, but it's hard to get people to credit it. They want a silver bullet; they've been promised silver bullets, and if the silver didn't work somebody must be hiding something.

Easy to fool

The story about fooling conspiracy fans is circulating. It's hard not to marvel when the story they shared most enthusiastically claimed that "chemical analysis revealed that chem-trails contains sildenafil citratum (the active ingredient of Viagra)" Those wacky "alternative news" devotees--what won't they fall for?

As AVI pointed out, one reason conspiracy theories are popular is because conspiracies are common--but most conspiracies conflict and fail. And as Twain pointed out, “If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.” A friend of mine told me this morning that yesterday he'd been flying spotter for a large multi-site drug ring bust, of which not a word has hit the news. Maybe there are good reasons, but after a moment's thought we find that the newspaper/radio/TV fails to mention many other things we know about and think significant (what was that fire I saw on the way back from work?).

The fact that the newspaper can only print a finite number of articles (and can't hire enough reporters to report even on all the fires) must always be a little more abstract than the easily visible: "there was blood all over the road and not a peep in the paper." Plus, though it is always easier to see when you don't entirely share the political philosophy of the news source, quite a few of them seem to have unashamedly reverted to the old model of newspaper as political party organ. (What I've seen of TV news is worse; radio news is generally severely truncated.)

It's no wonder that there's a huge appetite for "alternative news." Some of the "alternative news" sources are aggregators with clear links to where the stories are from: Drudge Report is probably the most famous, with nothing but headlines and links and a picture or three. Even those headlines and pictures tell stories sometimes, and some things get left out--and you can infer some things about Drudge from that. Aside from the obvious fact that he likes a zingy headline better than a perfectly accurate one. Rantburg is a much more specialized aggregator, and includes a lot more commentary. It has a point of view too, but like Drudge you can follow the links to the Iranian or New Delhi newspapers and evaluate their credibility yourself.

There's the rub, I suppose. Even if you are of a disposition to learn more and try to understand, and not just to circulate "Oh wow that's deep" quotes allegedly from Neil Tyson, what do you bring to the task of evaluation?

To questions about "chem trails" I bring an education that tells me jet fuel, like gasoline, is a hydrocarbon and will produce water vapor that condenses in the cold just like my breath. I know it is mighty cold up there because I've been up there too, and I know gasoline burns hot enough to destroy simple additives. My understanding of human nature tells me that if 20,000 airplane mechanics have had their hands on the engines at least one of them would have betrayed the secret. When I put it all together it seems pretty airtight.

But suppose someone comes to the issue with one or more of those links missing, and in its place a rock-solid understanding that the birth rate is down and that high officials for years have warned of overpopulation, and that there are chemicals that prevent or abort pregnancy, and that organizations will buy what good publicity they can. In his analysis someone is obviously spraying birth control drugs all over the county, and since some people will object the perps must keep it secret and hire others to defend them. Since I would be defending the un-named perps, I must be one of the employees, and therefore I have no credibility.

Or on a less obviously crazy subject, Albert will find a story mentioning Palestinian suffering not very credible because "They brought it on themselves", while Bert will find a story mentioning Israeli suffering not credible for the same reason.

Or again: BenLaden supposedly had some erotic videos in his quarters. Do you find that story credible? I don't: even in hiding he was too exposed to risk that kind of embarrassment. It wouldn't be the first time someone was attracted and repelled by the same thing, but if he cheesed off one wife she could wreck his standing in minutes.

Of course most of the people who circulate nonsense never bother to go back to sources, and rely entirely on the credibility of their friends (who they know are credible because they agree with them) and the obvious fact that the story must be accurate because somebody made a nice-looking JPEG summarizing it.

Fly by nights

Mamajek et al say a small binary passed close to the Sun about 70,000 years ago (85,000 to 60,000 years). Stars are relatively small compared to the rest of space (you can see through the galaxy between its stars--where there isn't obscuring dust, that is), but from time to time they come "close" to each other. If their extrapolations are correct, this pair got to something like 52,000 AU (75,000AU to 33,000AU) away, which would put it in the Sun's outer Oort cloud. 1 AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

Even if the binary were as luminous as the Sun, it would have been 6000 times dimmer than the full Moon, so our nights would have looked about the same.

They say the intruders were fast and lightweight, and so wouldn't be expected to perturb the cloud much--so we shouldn't expect a rain of comets in the next few centuries from the encounter. And that near-misses at this range are expected to be every 10,000,000 years or so. Which means either this is a rare sighting, or else the estimate is off.

By symmetry, I guess the Sun went through their "Oort" cloud--and so did we. Not very dense, was it? Saturn's rings aren't anything like The Empire Strikes Back and the outer clouds are even sparser.

UPDATE: Per Texan99's comments, I figure the thing would have swept across 90 degrees of the sky in about 6 years. 83km/sec is fast up close, but at a distance it is less dramatic.

Just for fun

Youngest Son wanted me to collaborate with him on a story. Just for fun here's one character sketch:

The wild ferment inside has to come out as fire now and then. Nothing personal.

Well, sometimes it is. There are people who need a good thorough toasting—you know the sort I mean. And I hate wasps. It's so gratifying to watch their cinders fall. And when I was little my hatchmates and I would go out toad popping. You have to blast them fast enough to pop instead of charring. Don't look so shocked—you and your buddies used sharp sticks: what's the difference?

I'm no magpie. I go for quality, not quantity. My great-uncle, on the other claw—he collected coins, and it didn't matter what kind or condition. They're all over his floor in a brassy mess.

But I keep my helmets neatly racked. Some mediocre ones I kept as trophies—there's always somebody looking for trouble. If they insist, I oblige. I'm glad there have been changes in gear—mail gets stuck in your teeth.

I remember the days when I could fly, catching updrafts and soaring for hours and hours, diving for birds. When I was little I chased bats, but they dodge too fast to catch, and almost always too fast to singe. Now: too big, too long—not enough running space to get airborne. The last time I landed I felt like one of those clumsy geese racing to slow down, and swore I'd never do that again. Bruised up a leg pretty badly, too.

I may not fly, but I can out speed any horse or boar. I prefer goat, though after three or four I generally need to munch a little pyrite to keep the fire smooth. When I visited family in Wales they introduced me to coal. That was wild. I probably overindulged; I don’t remember much. Three of us making a whirling tower of fire; the smell of roast pork and burning leather; contests to see who could roar the longest… I won, but it took a couple of days.

I get the rock from a tunnel spur off my home, of course. I picked the site partly for the variety—sometimes I just have a taste for a little chalcocite to flavor the meat. As to where it is—that’s a delicate question to ask a collector, isn’t it?

By the way, did you know there’s a wasp by your head?

Solitaire

Have you noticed that kibitzers of a solitaire game seem as engrossed as the player? As my officemate noted, suggestions from the crowd are unwelcome, so the kibitzer isn't really interacting. Perhaps a second-order kind of interaction; interaction by proxy?

There's a way to check. Create a computer solitaire game that plays itself while you watch. If it is popular, then just watching is good enough for involvement. If not, then you have to identify somehow with the player. I'm pretty sure some percentage of people who hear about it will just watch: as said officemate noted there are people who pay to watch other people play video games--there are channels devoted to this.

I thought about it for a few minutes and figured I could code and test the Klondike play logic in about a day (with variants for number of cards in a suit--use a Tarot deck, for example), but the graphics to go with it would be much more time-consuming. Maybe I could piggy-back on pysol and shorten the development time. Counting the downloads from sourceforge would be a proxy for measuring popularity. A web page with a java or javascript app would be better (count the connections and connection time), but I don't control my own server and I don't think it quite appropriate to host a game on the experiment's machines. One factor that's hard to control is publicity.

Too much work, too many uncertainties. Though I'd like to see people's reactions :-)

One way to think it through

"How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?" And yet it's true

Many times I sit down at the computer with a gleam of a plan and a few sentences, but by the time I'm done looking up the details and working through the logic, the original plan is perhaps a little corner of something I hadn't thought of doing. Sometimes I wind up chucking the original notion because it turned out to be wrong.

Update: It works the same way with poems. I start out trying to write something romantic for my wife, and it winds up about God or the kids or who knows what.

Madison winter

Dashing through the snow
For the bus is on its way
In the slush I go
And my briefcase flies away.
Children shake with glee
My pants are cold and damp
What fun it is to finally see
The "Not in Service" lamp.

Art question

I notice that, Amarna period to one side, I can't tell Egyptian tomb art from one era from that of another--it all seems to reflect the same forms and ideals. Although my Better Half can testify that my color sense is idiosyncratic and I presume my artistic judgment is therefore somewhat suspect, I'll assume that their art styles really did stay the same.

That would imply one of two cases: the styles didn't change substantially over 2000 years, or the tomb art, representing an ideal world, no longer reflected what people actually wore or used.

Unfortunately I'm having trouble finding representations of Egyptians from other cultures, except as captives (who aren't usually dressed in their finest). Roman era Egyptians dressed differently than the Egyptians in the tomb art.

Does anybody with a little more familiarity with ancient Egypt know about this?

The Culture of Narcissicm by Christopher Lasch

This is a little frustrating to review, because there are so many parts one wants to quote.

Far from preparing students to live "authentically," the higher learning in America leaves them unable to perform the simplest task--to prepare a meal or go to a party or get into bed with a member of the opposite sex--without elaborate academic instruction. The only thing it leaves to chance is higher learning. (from the chapter "Schooling and the New Illiteracy")

Or from "The Degradation of Sport"

The uselessness of games makes them offensive to social reformers, improvers of public morals, or functionalist critics of society like Veblen, who saw in the futility of upper class sports anachronistic survivals of militarism and prowess. Yet the "futility" of play, and nothing else, explains its appeal--its artificiality, the arbitrary obstacles it sets up for no other purpose than to challenge the players to surmount them, the absence of any utilitarian or uplifting object. ... What corrupts an athletic performance, as it does any other performance, is not professionalism or competition but a breakdown of the conventions surrounding the game.

You can guess the subject of "The Banality of Pseudo-Awareness: Theatrics of Politics and Everyday Existence." And he even notices that the apotheosis of sex resulted in not just physical but emotional barrenness. (I paraphrase)

His fallbacks are the corrupting power of capitalism and Freudian analytical framework; the latter I can't always make head or tail of. That's probably because I find Freud's infantile/oral/etc framework too giggle-worthy to study seriously. But non-capitalist reformers and theorists come in for their share of blame. And the trends he describes are just as entrenched, if not more so, than when he first wrote it.

Any prescriptions are implicit: "don't do it this way, de-bureaucratize and devolve authority back." There's no recipe. Which shows appropriate humility, since following recipes got us into some of the trouble.

Some things don't change

"No, you'll meet with some so preposterously religious that they will sooner endure the broadest scoffs even against Christ himself than hear the Pope or a prince be touched in the least, especially if it be anything that concerns their profit;" From the preface to The Praise of Folly, written over 500 years ago. (For the honor of truth, I must admit that a different edition at Project Gutenberg translates the sentence in a way less obviously tribal.)

While we're on the subject of Facebook, I notice that movies of cute dogs are actually more common on my feed than pictures of cute cats.

From The Medical Muse

by Richard Armour (1963). A sample--brought to mind in too many meetings:

One Who Needs No Introduction

Dr. X.
 A splendid surgeon,
At banquets speaks
 Without much urgin'.

He takes the floor,
 Alas, alack,
And some hours later
 Gives it back.

He clears his throat,
 He sips his drink,
He hems and haws
 And stops to think.

In surgery
 He's sure and swift,
His way with scalpels
 Is a gift.

He can trepan
 The thickest skull....
His knife is sharp--
 His tongue is dull.